Sir James Steuart Wilson (21 July 1889 – 18 December 1966) was an English singer, known for tenor roles in oratorios and concerts in the first half of the 20th century. After the Second World War he was an administrator for several organisations including the Arts Council of Great Britain, the BBC and the Royal Opera House.
Following service in the First World War, Wilson became known for singing tenor roles in oratorios by composers from Bach to Elgar, and was particularly admired both as the Evangelist in Bach's St Matthew Passion and in the title role of Elgar's The Dream of Gerontius. He was a champion of music by English composers of his generation, notably Ralph Vaughan Williams, Gustav Holst and Rutland Boughton. He also appeared from time to time in operatic tenor roles, including Satyavan in the first professional performance of Holst's Savitri. The quality of his voice and his technique were not universally admired. In a high-profile libel case Wilson sued a member of the public who had criticised one of his performances in a letter, and the BBC for publishing it: he won £2,000 in damages.
In 1937 Wilson settled for a while in the United States, teaching at the Curtis Institute of Music. He retired from singing and returned to the United Kingdom in 1942 where he began a second career as an administrator. He initially worked for the BBC, then after the war was appointed music director of the newly created Arts Council of Great Britain; in 1948 he was knighted for his services in that post. That same year he became the BBC's director of music, and engineered the enforced retirement of the BBC Symphony Orchestra's chief conductor, Sir Adrian Boult. The following year he became deputy general administrator of the Royal Opera House, in which post he secured the premiere staging of Vaughan Williams's The Pilgrim's Progress in 1951. Unhappy with being subordinate to the Royal Opera's general administrator, David Webster, Wilson resigned from his post in June 1955 and started a campaign against homosexuals in the musical profession. Wilson ended his career as principal of the Birmingham School of Music, 1957–1960.
Life and career
Early years Wilson was born in Bristol, the youngest child of James Wilson, headmaster of Clifton College who was once described as "something of a theological firebrand". He was named James after his father and Steuart in honour of his great-uncle Steuart Pears Howes, Frank. "Sir Steuart Wilson", The Musical Times, March 1951, p. 110 Steuart's elder half-sister was the leading civil servant Mona Wilson and his elder brother was Arnold Talbot Wilson,Elaine Harrison, "Wilson, Mona (1872–1954)", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, January 2008 later the colonial administrator of Mesopotamia. Wilson was educated at Winchester College and King's College, Cambridge, where he read classics but developed a strong interest in music. During that time he formed friendships with Clive Carey, Edward J. Dent and Ralph Vaughan Williams.Banfield, p. 153 Wilson's first public appearance as a singer was in Vaughan Williams's incidental music for Aristophanes' The Wasps in 1909, and he made his first appearance in opera as Tamino in Mozart's The Magic Flute in 1911.Glasgow, Mary and Ian MacPhail, "Wilson, Sir (James) Steuart (1889–1966)", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edition, May 2006, accessed 2 July 2007
At the outbreak of the First World War Wilson volunteered for service and was commissioned in the army. He served in the King's Royal Rifle Corps in France and was twice severely wounded – at Ypres in 1914 and on the Somme near High Wood in 1916; the first, in the lungs, seriously threatened his potential singing career but he worked hard to overcome the injury. He then worked in the Intelligence Bureau of the General Staff at the War Office and General Headquarters in France.Overtones, The Curtis Institute of Music, November 1937 Authorities differ on whether the wounds, which resulted in the loss of a lung and a kidney, affected his singing voice. The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography states that they did not; Frank Howes, writing in 1951, and The Times in its obituary, both state that they did. According to his biographer and third wife, Margaret Stewart, those who had heard Wilson sing before the war "agreed that his voice did not have quite the same carrying-power after the wound". Arthur Bliss, who had known Wilson at Cambridge, told Stewart that when the tenor "got tired he was sometimes inclined to sing a little flat, as he had never done before the war".Stewart, p. 64
Singing career After the war, Wilson developed an interest in early English music and was instrumental in founding the London-based sextet, the English Singers, in 1920. The following year he sang the role of Satyavan in the first professional performance of Gustav Holst's Savitri, at the Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith.Holst, p. 86
In 1921, Wilson met A. H. Fox Strangways, editor of the newly founded journal Music and Letters; they discovered a shared interest in making practical translations of Lieder texts, Wilson having only recently encountered Schubert Lieder,Tunbridge, p. 60 and collaborated on and published volumes of Schubert, Schumann and Brahms translated into English. Wilson later made an English translation of the texts set in Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde.
From 1921 to 1923, Wilson taught music at Bedales School, an appointment that left him time to take singing engagements all over the United Kingdom. In 1924 he left the English Singers and furthered his singing studies abroad, first in Nice with Jean de Reszke (1924–25), with whom he learned the roles of Otello, Parsifal and Tristan; he then took lessons with Sir George Henschel (1925–28),The Times, 19 December 1966 and studied 17th- and 18th-century music with Wanda Landowska in Paris.
For a while Wilson sang with the Bristol Opera Company, which toured in London to perform at the Royal Court Theatre in 1927 and 1928, conducted by Adrian Boult and Malcolm Sargent. Productions mounted included Ralph Vaughan Williams's The Shepherds of the Delectable Mountains, and Charles Villiers Stanford's The Travelling Companion.
Wilson became a leading interpreter of the Evangelist in JS Bach's Passions, and of the title part in Edward Elgar's The Dream of Gerontius, which he sang under the baton of the composer and other conductors including Hamilton Harty,The Times, 19 February 1926, p. 12 Malcolm Sargent,The Times, 28 March 1930, p. 12 Albert Coates,The Times, 23 March 1933, p. 12 and Adrian Boult."Elgar memorial concert", The Times, 15 March 1934, p. 12 The Times called him "the best exponent of [Gerontius] at the present time".The Times, 13 September 1930, p. 8 The tenor Peter Pears said that it was hearing Wilson singing as Evangelist in Bach's St Matthew Passion that "started me off".Pears, p. 225
Mozart remained part of Wilson's repertoire at the Old Vic (though Howard Ferguson complained "Steuart Wilson would sing out of tune"),Letter to Gerald Finzi, 14 June 1928, in Hurd (2001), p. 39 and he regularly championed English music, making regular appearances at Rutland Boughton's festival in Glastonbury and on occasion at Napier Miles's festivals in Bristol. He was praised by Holst, who credited him with rescuing the British National Opera Company production which had previously "ruined" his opera At the Boar's Head.Short, p. 233
Writing in 1968, The Gramophone critic Roger Fiske recalled that Wilson "stood out above other tenors both for high intelligence and for clarity of words, though his voice was not by nature of especial beauty; also he never sang quite as well in performance as at rehearsal, his tone tightening under stress."The Gramophone, October 1968, p. 128 Frank Howes made similar observations in an article published in 1951, though noting that "intelligence" was a recognised euphemism for "indifferent vocal equipment".Frank Howes, "Sir Steuart Wilson", The Musical Times 92 (1951): 110–112; quoted in Tunbridge, p. 64 A more recent judgement, based on recordings of Schubert Lieder, describes "Wilson's stentorian and rather stiff delivery—the fast vibrato, his tendency to rush (slower songs sound better) and the impression that he is distinctly overparted in the higher register", all of which "does not make for a satisfactory performance according to today's standards."Tunbridge, p. 64
For many years, Adrian Boult had been a close friend of Wilson and his first wife Ann, née Bowles. When, in the late 1920s, Wilson began to mistreat his wife, Boult took her side.Kennedy, pp. 161–163 She divorced Wilson on grounds of cruelty in 1931, and married Boult two years later. The enmity provoked in Wilson was to have lasting repercussions.Kennedy, p. 215, et seq. The stigma attached to divorce in Britain in the 1930s affected Wilson's career: he was barred from performing in English cathedrals at the Three Choirs Festival for 25 years until 1957, when he narrated Honegger's King David in Worcester, by which time his singing career had ended.
Writing for Holst
Wilson provided the words for Gustav Holst's choral ballet The Morning of the Year, the first composition ever commissioned by the BBC. Holst conducted the world premier for the live broadcast on 17 March 1927 and, a few weeks later, the first performance with dancers.
BBC libel case Wilson achieved a wider fame for his successful libel action against the BBC in what became known as "the case of the intrusive H". In 1933, the BBC had printed in the 14 April edition of its magazine The Radio Times a letter"Vocal Sins", 14 April, 1933, p. 14, Radio Times from a retired schoolmaster who, having heard a broadcast of the St Matthew Passion, accused Wilson of the technical fault of aspirating his runs in decorated music: "I am amazed that the BBC could engage anyone quite so incompetent in his breath control. ... 'Pilate's wife' became 'Pigh-highlet's wigh-highf'; 'High Priest' was turned into 'High-high Pree-heest'; 'Purple robe' into 'Purple ro-hobe'; 'to' into 'too-hoo', and so on throughout the entire performance. It was simply ghastly.""Law Report, June 19. High Court of Justice, King's Bench Division. Singer's Libel Against the BBC. Wilson vs. British Broadcasting Corporation and Another", The Times (London), 20 June 1934, p. 4 When Wilson complained, the BBC initially offered to publish an apology in The Radio Times, but then took exception when Wilson demanded £5,000 in damages.Tunbridge, note 65 p. 81