Samuel Langford (1863 - 8 May 1927) was an influential English music critic of the early twentieth century.
Trained as a pianist, Langford became chief music critic of The Manchester Guardian in 1906, serving in that post until his death. As chief critic, he succeeded Ernest Newman and preceded Neville Cardus.
Langford was born to an old Lancashire family in Withington, near Manchester, where his father was a market gardener. [1] By the age of twenty Langford was an accomplished pianist and church organist, and was sent to study in Leipzig with Carl Reinecke. [1] Recognising that his short hands were unsuited to virtuoso pianism, Langford returned to Manchester, where he was engaged by The Manchester Guardian as deputy to Ernest Newman, whom he succeeded as chief music critic in 1906. [2]
The rest of Langford's career was spent in this post, based in Manchester, although he sometimes travelled to London to hear a new work in which he was interested, and he never missed the big music festivals. Manchester was, in the early years of the twentieth century, an important musical city, with Hans Richter and the Hallé Orchestra at its centre. [1] [3] Neville Cardus said of him:
Langford reigned supreme in the music of the North of England.... Everybody knew him; Richter himself was not a more familiar and symbolical figure in Manchester.... Langford was a great man and a writer on music without parallel. [4]
The critic C. A. Lejeune wrote of him, "He was a musical perfectionist and great local character. His hobby was the cultivation of delphiniums ... His Lancashire accent was as rich as a fine, fruity Eccles cake. His formal clothes were very dark, and his aggressive beard was very white." [5]
As a trained concert pianist Langford retained a special fondness for the music of Chopin, he particularly enjoyed Lieder by Schubert, Brahms and Wolf, and among his other loves were Mozart and Wagner. [6] The Musical Times quoted with approval the comment of an obituarist:
In everything he did he was original: in his thought, his speech, his writing. … Even good critics of music are apt at times to descend to the trite and conventional phrase, and, wearied by the frequent repetition of familiar works, to indulge in repetition themselves. Langford never did this, and the reason was that he was never bored by listening to good music. The music might be familiar to him, but it was never stale. [7]
Langford's music sympathies were broad. His colleagues observed, "A Gilbert and Sullivan opera, a newcomer making his first appearance … or an open rehearsal by students would set his musical imagination going … and he would clothe his thoughts about them in phrases so apt and spontaneous that sometimes it gave one a thrill to read them." [7] Newman offended some of Langford's admirers by expressing the view that Langford was not really a music critic but rather "an unusually attractive writer whose chief concern happened to be music", but Newman nevertheless considered that at his best Langford "wrote in a way that is without parallel in the criticism of this or any other time". [8]
Like his editor, C. P. Scott, Langford encouraged the young Cardus, who succeeded him as chief music critic. One of Cardus's first acts in his new post was to edit a collection of his predecessor's writings, published in 1929. [9]
Langford married Leslie Doig in 1913. There was one daughter of the marriage, Brenda, born in 1918, later, as Brenda Milner, professor of neuropsychology at the Montreal Neurological Institute. Langford died after a serious illness at the family home in Withington, aged 65. [1]
Sviatoslav Teofilovich Richter was a Soviet pianist who is frequently regarded as one of the greatest pianists of all time. He is known for the "depth of his interpretations, his virtuoso technique, and his vast repertoire."
Sir Arnold Edward Trevor Bax, KCVO was an English composer, poet, and author. His prolific output includes songs, choral music, chamber pieces, and solo piano works, but he is best known for his orchestral music. In addition to a series of symphonic poems he wrote seven symphonies and was for a time widely regarded as the leading British symphonist.
Sir John Barbirolli was a British conductor and cellist. He is remembered above all as conductor of the Hallé Orchestra in Manchester, which he helped save from dissolution in 1943 and conducted for the rest of his life. Earlier in his career he was Arturo Toscanini's successor as music director of the New York Philharmonic, serving from 1936 to 1943. He was also chief conductor of the Houston Symphony from 1961 to 1967, and was a guest conductor of many other orchestras, including the BBC Symphony Orchestra, London Symphony Orchestra, the Philharmonia, the Berlin Philharmonic and the Vienna Philharmonic, with all of which he made recordings.
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Sir Arthur Edward Drummond Bliss was an English composer and conductor.
The London Symphony Orchestra (LSO) is a British symphony orchestra based in London. Founded in 1904, the LSO is the oldest of London's symphony orchestras. The LSO was created by a group of players who left Henry Wood's Queen's Hall Orchestra because of a new rule requiring players to give the orchestra their exclusive services. The LSO itself later introduced a similar rule for its members. From the outset the LSO was organised on co-operative lines, with all players sharing the profits at the end of each season. This practice continued for the orchestra's first four decades.
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Sir Clifford Michael Curzon CBE was an English classical pianist.
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Sir John Frederick Neville Cardus, CBE was an English writer and critic. From an impoverished home background, and mainly self-educated, he became The Manchester Guardian's cricket correspondent in 1919 and its chief music critic in 1927, holding the two posts simultaneously until 1940. His contributions to these two distinct fields in the years before the Second World War established his reputation as one of the foremost critics of his generation.
Ernest Newman was an English music critic and musicologist. Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians describes him as "the most celebrated British music critic in the first half of the 20th century." His style of criticism, aiming at intellectual objectivity in contrast to the more subjective approach of other critics, such as Neville Cardus, was reflected in his books on Richard Wagner, Hugo Wolf, Richard Strauss and others. He was music critic of The Sunday Times from 1920 until his death nearly forty years later. His other positions included chief music critic of The Birmingham Post from 1906 to 1919, as well as brief stints as the chief music critic for The Guardian (1905–1906) and The Observer (1919).
William Heddle Nash was an English lyric tenor who appeared in opera and oratorio. He made numerous recordings that are still available on CD reissues.
Karl Rankl was a British conductor and composer who was of Austrian birth. A pupil of the composers Schoenberg and Webern, he conducted at opera houses in Austria, Germany and Czechoslovakia until fleeing from the Nazis and taking refuge in England in 1939.
Sydney Granville was an English singer and actor, best known for his performances in the Savoy Operas with the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company.
Caroline Alice Lejeune was a British writer, best known for serving as the film critic for The Observer from 1928 to 1960. She was among the earliest newspaper film critics in Britain, and one of the first British women in the profession. She formed an enduring friendship early in her career with Alfred Hitchcock, “when he was writing and ornamenting sub-titles for silent pictures,” as she later wrote.
The Symphony No. 1 in B♭ minor is one of two symphonies by the English composer William Walton. The composer had difficulty in completing the work, and its first public performance was given without the finale, in 1934. The complete four-movement work was premiered the following year.
Roy Ewing "Robert" Agnew was an Australian composer, pianist, teacher and radio announcer. He was described as "the most outstanding of the early twentieth century Australian composers" by Morris Hinson.
Frank Mullings was a leading English tenor with Sir Thomas Beecham's Beecham Opera Company and its successor, the British National Opera Company, during the 1910s and 1920s. Blessed with a strong stage presence and a voice that provoked varying reactions from critics, his repertoire included such taxing dramatic parts as Tristan in Tristan und Isolde, Radames in Aida, the title role in Otello, and Canio in Pagliacci. The limitations of early microphones meant that his voice was not always recorded successfully, although the British National Opera Company website notes that playing the recordings at 80 rpm produces a more reliable result.
Jascha Spivakovsky was a Russian Empire-born Australian piano virtuoso of the 20th century. He was hailed as a child prodigy in Odessa but almost murdered by Imperial Guards during the 1905 Pogrom. He fled to Berlin and was declared the heir of Anton Rubinstein and likened to Ignacy Paderewski and Teresa Carreño before being imprisoned as an Imperial Russian enemy alien during World War I. In the interwar period he became internationally recognized as one of the greatest pianists in the world and regarded in Europe as the finest living interpreter of Brahms. He also formed a trio which toured Europe with phenomenal success and was declared the finest in the world. Towards the beginning of 1933 he was warned by Richard Strauss in a musically-coded secret message that he had become a Nazi target due to his Jewish heritage. He fled to Australia a few days before the Nazi seizure of power and put his musical career on hold to help people escape the Third Reich. After World War II he returned to the stage and astounded the toughest of critics with the power, depth and maturity of his interpretations. Although his fame dimmed after he ceased touring because he had made no commercial (solo) studio recordings, his rediscovery was sparked in 2015 by the first releases of his live performances. These have caused considerable excitement among music lovers and prompted some experts to declare Spivakovsky one of the greatest pianists they have ever heard.
