rehearsal schedule; when the women of the choir failed to turn up ‘Schoenberg apparently blasphemed’. But it is thanks to Clark that the great flowerings of modernism from Europe – what Boult’s predecessor Percy Pitt dismissively called ‘certain foreign novelties’ – were introduced to British homes for the first time. As the 1930s wore on, this disorganised, rule-breaking man could no longer fit in, and, after a series of rows, resigned on 16 March 1936. Lutyens summed up his contribution: ‘Edward was first and foremost European-minded, with an equal interest in all the arts and creative phenomena of all the countries in Europe, not just the small parish of British music … He had a mind and outlook that expanded the narrow confines of music in England at that time.’
This expansion of the parochial horizons of British culture was also aided by a steady stream into the country, before the Second World War, of Jewish and anti-Nazi exiles, a number of whom joined the BBC. Among them was Martin Esslin (born Pereszlényi Gyula Márton in Budapest) who worked for the External Services and ran radio drama in the 1960s and 1970s, and Stephen Hearst (born Stephen Hirshtritt in Vienna) who was head of BBC TV arts features in the 1960s and ran Radio 3 in the 1970s. Another was the Frankfurt-born Ludwig Koch. As a child violinist he had been part of Clara Schumann’s circle; his earliest memory was of being kissed by Liszt; and he had been advised to take singing lessons by Giuseppe Verdi. In adulthood Koch became an important sound recordist of the natural world, in his time as familiar a name to BBC audiences as David Attenborough is today.
In Penelope Fitzgerald’s wartime BBC novel Human Voices Koch is given fictional life as Dr Vogel, an émigré who, in pursuit of a programme called Lest We Forget Our Englishry , travels round the country recording people’s wheezy breathing and endless creaking church doors. The name Vogel is a pun on the title of Koch’s autobiography, Memoirs of a Birdman , Vogel being the German for ‘bird’. At the start of that book, Koch describes being given an Edison phonograph and a box of wax cylinders by his father in 1889, when he was eight. ‘I had the original idea of using my phonograph to record human voices,’ he remembered, in a pre-echo of the title of Fitzgerald’s novel.
As a child he collected ‘audio autographs’ – Kaiser Wilhelm’s curiously high-pitched voice among them – as wellas ‘the voices of all the Bayreuth Wagner singers of the late-90s’ and birdsong, including ‘the raucous call of the great bustard’. All these early recordings were lost during the war. ‘All gone with the Nazis. Well, it can’t be helped,’ he once told an interviewer. When coaching singers at Bayreuth he discussed The Ride of the Valkyries with Cosima Wagner: her husband had been inspired by the throbbing, panting sound of the mute swan’s wingbeat, she told him. With his wife Nellie in Frankfurt, Koch kept a bewildering menagerie at home of 68 creatures. Nellie remembered the surprising morning when ‘there were suddenly two alligators on the breakfast table in cardboard boxes!’
Koch pioneered an early version of the multimedia text: what he called the ‘soundbook’, which combined recorded sounds with a written commentary, an especially useful tool in the field of ornithology. But working in Germany became increasingly dicey in the 1930s, and during a trip to Switzerland, where he had been seen talking to a Nazi official who was shortly afterwards assassinated, he was warned not to return. ‘I landed at Dover on 17 February 1936, and arrived in London alone and almost penniless, at 5 p.m., welcomed by mist and drizzling rain,’ he recalled in his autobiography. (Cold and damp was to be a recurring theme: ‘As I write this I have been here 18 years and yet I still cannot understand the average British person’s love of draughts and cold rooms.’)
Only a
This expansion of the parochial horizons of British culture was also aided by a steady stream into the country, before the Second World War, of Jewish and anti-Nazi exiles, a number of whom joined the BBC. Among them was Martin Esslin (born Pereszlényi Gyula Márton in Budapest) who worked for the External Services and ran radio drama in the 1960s and 1970s, and Stephen Hearst (born Stephen Hirshtritt in Vienna) who was head of BBC TV arts features in the 1960s and ran Radio 3 in the 1970s. Another was the Frankfurt-born Ludwig Koch. As a child violinist he had been part of Clara Schumann’s circle; his earliest memory was of being kissed by Liszt; and he had been advised to take singing lessons by Giuseppe Verdi. In adulthood Koch became an important sound recordist of the natural world, in his time as familiar a name to BBC audiences as David Attenborough is today.
In Penelope Fitzgerald’s wartime BBC novel Human Voices Koch is given fictional life as Dr Vogel, an émigré who, in pursuit of a programme called Lest We Forget Our Englishry , travels round the country recording people’s wheezy breathing and endless creaking church doors. The name Vogel is a pun on the title of Koch’s autobiography, Memoirs of a Birdman , Vogel being the German for ‘bird’. At the start of that book, Koch describes being given an Edison phonograph and a box of wax cylinders by his father in 1889, when he was eight. ‘I had the original idea of using my phonograph to record human voices,’ he remembered, in a pre-echo of the title of Fitzgerald’s novel.
As a child he collected ‘audio autographs’ – Kaiser Wilhelm’s curiously high-pitched voice among them – as wellas ‘the voices of all the Bayreuth Wagner singers of the late-90s’ and birdsong, including ‘the raucous call of the great bustard’. All these early recordings were lost during the war. ‘All gone with the Nazis. Well, it can’t be helped,’ he once told an interviewer. When coaching singers at Bayreuth he discussed The Ride of the Valkyries with Cosima Wagner: her husband had been inspired by the throbbing, panting sound of the mute swan’s wingbeat, she told him. With his wife Nellie in Frankfurt, Koch kept a bewildering menagerie at home of 68 creatures. Nellie remembered the surprising morning when ‘there were suddenly two alligators on the breakfast table in cardboard boxes!’
Koch pioneered an early version of the multimedia text: what he called the ‘soundbook’, which combined recorded sounds with a written commentary, an especially useful tool in the field of ornithology. But working in Germany became increasingly dicey in the 1930s, and during a trip to Switzerland, where he had been seen talking to a Nazi official who was shortly afterwards assassinated, he was warned not to return. ‘I landed at Dover on 17 February 1936, and arrived in London alone and almost penniless, at 5 p.m., welcomed by mist and drizzling rain,’ he recalled in his autobiography. (Cold and damp was to be a recurring theme: ‘As I write this I have been here 18 years and yet I still cannot understand the average British person’s love of draughts and cold rooms.’)
Only a
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