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The classical music community was rather endearingly shocked earlier this past autumn to learn that a man who has at least twice been known to allegedly assault colleagues may not be a very nice person.

[NB. I’ve never met Maestro Gardiner and, like many, I admire a lot of his recordings. What follows is my take on a set of situations, not on the man himself]

For those who missed it, conductor John Eliot Gardiner recently announced his return to the podium with a programme in which his new orchestra and chorus would perform exactly the same pieces in exactly the same venue that his former orchestra and chorus would a few days later.

Sat, 7 December 2024, Elbphilharmonie, Grand Hall
The Constellation Choir & Orchestra

Marie Luise Werneburg soprano
Eline Welle mezzo-soprano
Peter Davoren tenor
Alex Ashworth bass
conductor Sir John Eliot Gardiner

Marc-Antoine Charpentier: Messe de minuit à 4 voix, flûtes et violons, pour Noël
Johann Sebastian Bach: Schwingt freudig euch empor, BWV 36c
Johann Sebastian Bach: Unser Mund sei voll Lachens, BWV 110

Sat, 14 December 2024, Elbphilharmonie, Grand Hall
English Baroque Soloists / Monteverdi Choir

Hilary Cronin soprano
Bethany Horak-Hallett mezzo-soprano
Florian Sievers tenor
Florian Störtz bass
conductor Christophe Rousset

Marc-Antoine Charpentier: Messe de minuit à 4 voix, flûtes et violons, pour Noël
Johann Sebastian Bach: Schwingt freudig euch empor, BWV 36c
Johann Sebastian Bach: Unser Mund sei voll Lachens, BWV 110
 

The venue press release did an amusing job of trying apply a whole tube of lipstick to this particular pig by noting that “The Elbphilharmonie Hamburg is the only place in the world where this special programme can be heard in both first-class interpretations within a very short space of time.”  But this is not an exercise in comparative listening – it is a calculated act of Trumpian belligerence. That said, this looks like a programme which was very carefully and lovingly assembled. Presumably by Gardiner. Having had way too many programmes and projects poached over the years, I actually totally get why JEG might have decided to make a stand on this issue. Surely Monteverdi and Co. could have changed the programme to something without their former AD’s fingerprints all over it?

“Shocked but not surprised” could well be the defining expression of our time. In the course of one of the most successful and enduring conducting careers of the last 50 years, JEG has always been, both literally and metaphorically, a pugilist. In many respects, it’s an approach that has served him well.

JEG’s instinct to fight back was key in one of the defining achievements of his professional career – the founding of his own record label after he was dumped by Deutsche Grammophon/Arkiv. Together with his wife, Isabella de Sabata, the Gardiner’s founded Soli Deo Gloria, or S.D.G., Records to continue and complete JEG’s vision of a complete recording of all the Bach cantatas. The project was, by most critical reckonings, a triumph. Gardiner has explained that the name of the record label was chosen as an homage to J.S. Bach, who often made the notation S.D.G. at the end of his compositions (as did a number of other composers). However, widely accepted classical urban legend has it that, in this case, S.D.G stood for “Sod [=Fuck] Deutsche Grammophon”.

Everybody does it?

So, JEG, who made it clear in previous statements that he wasn’t done with conducting, has gone and started a new orchestra. That, in itself, is a tale as old as time.

In America, folks used to say that if you got 25 well-to-do women together with coffee and nibbles, they would start a symphony orchestra, and it’s true that the vast majority of American orchestras were founded not by musicians but by music lovers and social leaders.

Not so in the United Kingdom. Manchester’s Hallé Orchestra bears the name of its founding conductor, Charles Hallé. Today’s City of London Sinfonia was originally the Richard Hickox Orchestra. Sir Henry Wood, of course, founded the Queens Hall Orchestra, as well as the Proms. Though both the Queens Hall and its orchestra have since been lost to time and bombs, the musical progeny of Sir Thomas Beecham live on. Beecham, whose family was so rich they actually owned Covent Garden as well as one of the world’s biggest pharmaceutical companies, founded both the London Philharmonic (he actually co-founded it with Malcolm Sargent so as to share the financial burden with Sargent’s patron, Elizabeth Courtauld) and the Royal Philharmonic. The list goes on and the phenomenon continues to this day. Perhaps the most-talked-about orchestra in the UK right now is the Sinfonia of London, which is not a charity but, according to their Companies House filings, a private company owned entirely by its conductor John Wilson, although their website makes clear they are supported by a number of trusts and sponsors and maintain an administrative staff.

There are also the player-founded orchestras, most famously the London Symphony and the English Chamber Orchestra. There’s the Philharmonia, now also player-run, but which was originally founded by a record company. And there are the BBC orchestras. But musical life in the UK would be, and would have been, infinitely duller without the orchestras which were born of their conductors’ ambition.

And, coming back to JEG – there would really be no Early Music movement at all if it were not for ambitious conductors. After all, the “big three” of period performance in the UK were Roger Norrington’s London Classical Players, Christopher Hogwood’s Academy of Ancient Music and Gardiner’s Monteverdi Choir and Orchestras. Without their initiative, and the money they brought into the field of historically informed performance, musical life here would be much poorer.

Is this a good thing or a bad thing?

I remember being incredibly impressed many years ago when I heard South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu say (I’m paraphrasing) religion is not a good thing or a bad thing. It’s a human institution, and just as capable of being a good or bad thing as any other human institution. Sometimes it’s one, sometimes it’s the other. Most of the time, it’s both.

I can certainly see why the idea of conductors setting up their own orchestras where they can pretty much do whatever they want might make many a musician a little uneasy. But history shows that often the most interesting and influential work has come out of orchestras where the leader has incredible artistic autonomy. In addition to the examples above, one can look at groups as varied as Toscanini’s NBC Symphony, Ivan Fischer’s Budapest Festival Orchestra and Haydn’s own hand-picked orchestra at the Esterhazy court. Outside of the classical music bubble, just think of the Count Basie Orchestra, Glenn Miller Orchestra, etc. etc. There’s the famous story about when Duke Ellington was asked what the secret was to keeping the world’s greatest band together that he answered “I pay them money.” Frank Zappa was one of music’s great control freaks, but he also took all the financial risk. When his band cracked up midway through his last tour, he lost a fortune, having paid for months of rehearsal. I’ve toyed for years with writing a blog post that explores the thought experiment “should orchestras survive their founders?” The NBC Symphony tried to carry on after Toscanini’s retirement under Stokowski, but that didn’t work. The Queens Hall orchestra lives on only in memory. But the City of London Sinfonia, Royal Philharmonic and London Philharmonic are treasured and vibrant organisations, and the Hallé goes from strength to strength, even though I would suspect almost nobody who attends their concerts these days knows the origin of their unique name.

“If my baby don’t love me no more… I know her sister will.”
From “Red House” by Jimi Hendrix

Conductors are as susceptible, if not more, to ‘founder’s syndrome’ as anyone else. At what point does an orchestra decide they want a future without their founder? At what point does a conductor feel the need to hand over the orchestra she or he founded to new leadership? If I had one piece of advice for every musician, it’s that the day you win that dream job or create your perfect artistic vessel, whether you’re a player, conductor or administrator, start coming up with a few exit strategies you can live with. There is nothing uglier, more unbecoming or more toxic than someone fighting to hold on to their bit of glory at the expense of their colleagues artistic wellbeing.

Of course, if you’re Frank Zappa, you can’t very well turn your band over to a new conductor just because the winds of change are starting to blow. In his case, he always made it clear that nobody in his bands had a job for life, and that change was both inevitable and beneficial.

Things get murkier when you start to try make the group you setup look like, and function like, something bigger than the artistic leader’s personality. The pressures to do so are driven by a variety of factors: artistic credibility, fundraising and financial sustainability, musician satisfaction and the desire to leave a legacy. Beecham’s London Philharmonic was not the first group he founded – like the John Wilson Orchestra, the Richard Hickox Orchestra and the Boyd Neel Orchestra, there was once a Beecham Orchestra. By founding his next group as the London Philharmonic he was able to share the funding burden with Malcolm Sargent’s patrons. In 1939, when he was preparing to leave the UK (he would eventually land at the Seattle Symphony) he worked tirelessly according to Wikipedia “to secure the future of the London Philharmonic, whose financial guarantees had been withdrawn by its backers when war was declared. Before leaving, Beecham raised large sums of money for the orchestra and helped its members to form themselves into a self-governing company.”  His Wiki entry continues the narrative as follows: “In 1944, Beecham returned to Britain. Musically his reunion with the London Philharmonic was triumphant, but the orchestra, now, after his help in 1939, a self-governing co-operative, attempted to hire him on its own terms as its salaried artistic director.^[82] “I emphatically refuse”, concluded Beecham, “to be wagged by any orchestra … I am going to found one more great orchestra to round off my career.” Sound familiar?

Rich beyond consequence?

Beecham was as good as his word. His musical legacy is vast and goes far beyond the two thriving and virtuosic orchestras that are still with us today. He was widely loved by the musicians he worked with. (His erstwhile business partner, Malcolm Sargent, on the other hand, while beloved by Proms audiences, is reputed to have been almost universally loathed by orchestral players). My own teacher, Gerhard Samuel, played under his baton many times at the Minneapolis Symphony (now the Minnesota Orchestra) and had many stories about Beecham’s musical brilliance and his incredible sense of humour. Beecham was phenomenally rich – the family fortune that came from the sale of Beecham’s laxative pills meant that the money came with great regularity (sorry, I couldn’t resist). But he was also a smart businessman and a tireless fundraiser. His family also knew his artistic ambition posed a threat to the whole family fortune, so there were limits on his use of the inheritance. What great wealth did afford him was both the start-up capital needed to get projects off the ground, and the financial resilience to programme unknown and unpopular works that he wanted to conduct. Those little pills paid for a lot of Delius concerts. Yes, he emphatically refused to be ‘wagged by any orchestra’, especially the one he founded, but he was pretty pragmatic about working with collaborators and partners to share and limit financial risk, and to increase capacity far beyond what even his inherited wealth would support. He was rich enough to shape his destiny in a way most of us can’t imagine, but he wasn’t rich beyond consequence.

John Eliot Gardiner also comes from fantastic wealth. His great-grandfather, Henry John Gardiner, (born 1843, died 2 February 1940) was a businessman and Freemason who, according to Wikipedia, amassed “an immense fortune in the clothing industry.” He passed his ‘enormous wealth” on to his sons, H. Balfour Gardiner, composer and patron of British classical music, and Sir Alan H. Gardiner, JEG’s grandfather, and then on to John Eliot Gardiner’s father, Rolf Gardiner.

It is widely believed that no less a conductor than Beecham himself once admonished that “you should try everything in life once, except incest and Morris Dancing.” How apt then, that Rolf Gardiner was at the forefront of the movement to bring Morris Dancing back to life. His Wikipedia article starts with the following paragraph:

“Henry Rolf Gardiner (5 November 1902 – 26 November 1971) was an English rural revivalist who helped to bring back folk dance styles including Morris dancing and sword dancing. He also founded groups significant in the British history of organic farming; his forestry methods were far ahead of their time and he was a founder member of the Soil Association. He sympathised with Nazism and participated in inter-war far right politics. He organised summer camps with music, dance and community aims across class and cultures.”

Don’t you love how the authors fit the bit about how “He sympathised with Nazism and participated in inter-war far right politics” in the penultimate sentence, just after organic farming and before the innocuous bit about “summer camps with music, dance and community aims across class and cultures”?

Rolf Gardiner first began publishing Nazi-inspired writings around 1928 bemoaning the “impoverishment” of Northern European racial stock, and supporting Nazi pro-ruralist policies. Contrary to the “inter-war” disclaimer above, he retained close ties after WWII with Richard Walther Darré, one of the ‘ideologists’ behind the Nazi’s “Blood and Soil” movement, which bore an obvious similarity to Rolf Gardiner’s views about ruralism, with its emphasis on the ideal of a monocultural rural, agricultural way of life in opposition to the integrated, cosmopolitan and multi-racial life of the cities. Darré’s ideas about racial aristocracy based on selective breeding had a major impact on the genocidal policies designed by Himmler. Darré was a senior member of the Nazi Party and sixth in command of the SS during the war. And remained a correspondent with RG after the war.

And, just because it’s fun to mention it, Rolf Gardiner was also an early advocate for German-style nudism in the UK. How big an influence Rolf’s thinking had on his son is impossible to know.  According to researcher and author Patrick Wright, John Eliot “had  fought  his  own  battles  with  his  father  –  and  not  just  about  his  decision  to  perform  music  within  the  professional  domain  that  his  father,  who thought music  should be  connected to the  soil  and performed within  the  agricultural  setting,  disdained  as  the  ‘discarnate’  bourgeois  concert  hall.  John  Eliot  may  farm  organically  on  many  of  the  same  acres,  and his  ideas  on  polyphony and rhythm  may  in  some  way  still be connected to  the  musical outlook of his  father,  but  he  long  ago  took  his  distance  from  the  dodgy  organicism  of his  father’s  political  vision.”

Just how much of the family fortune (if any) went in to the founding and building of the Monteverdi Choir, English Baroque Soloists and Orchestre Revolutionnaire et Romantique is probably known only to him and his family, which is absolutely fine. Today those groups exist as a single registered charity, The Monteverdi Choir and Orchestras LTD and a tied limited company. The foundation raised between £573k and £850k each year since 2018, on a fundraising budget between £67k and £105k. The only government funding the charity received was in the Covid years of 2020-2021 (£78k and £39k respectively).

So, unlike, for instance the Sinfonia of London, the Monteverdi organisation has a group of trustees who must operate under pretty stringent legal obligations and responsibilities. While its status as a limited company protects trustees from most individual financial risk, if they are found to have been negligent in their governance of the organisation, they could face a number of significant personal and professional sanctions. Members of certain professions, such as lawyers and accountant, can lose their license if they are found to be negligent in their service on a board of trustees. Given that the punch heard round the world was at least the second time that Gardiner had physically assaulted a colleague, they were probably advised that they had absolutely no legal recourse but to sack him, lest they be sued by his next victim and/or lose their own livelihood. They literally had no choice.

So now it’s on to Springhead Constellation Ltd. for JEG. The entity takes its name from the trust and the estate left by Rolf Gardiner. This one is JEG’s baby entirely – Companies House lists only him as a director (at the time of writing). Without trustees to answer to, we’ll soon find out just how far the family fortune will stretch. There’s nothing to say a company like this or the Sinfonia of London can’t also raise funds even if they’re not a charity, but will the price of outside funding be that JEG has to accept being ‘wagged’ again? So far, they’ve got one controversial concert in the diary. I’m reminded of another British orchestra who fired their conductor in the middle of a board meeting a few years ago – he was shown out of the building at the end of the meeting never to return. Within a couple of weeks he’d announced a new orchestra in the same town playing the same venues. The venture produced one recording and a handful of events, but seems now to have been dormant for some years. If you’re really going to play the Game of Classical Thrones to its bitter end, you need deep pockets or the support of those who possess them. The Monteverdi organisation was a big machine. A Dorset farmer is going to have to sell a lot of cattle to make up for the loss of £800k/year in donations. Actions have consequences. JEG punched a fellow musician at a concert, now he’s lost his job. We’ll now find out if he’s rich enough to avoid consequences.

(As an aside, it still sickens me that nobody at the Met or the BSO who facilitated James Levine’s many crimes against children has ever been held to account for their complicity. They really do seem to be rich beyond consequence.)

Neither shocked nor surprised

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The thing about the Game of Classical Thrones is that it’s played at every level of the business – universities, amateur orchestras, youth orchestras. There are seemingly no artistic stakes too low to justify behaviour that is so manipulative, duplicitous and cruel that it would make Iago blush in our field. The arts have always been completive, and where there is competition, there is going to be playing hard, playing dirty and outright cheating. Where there is ego, ambition, scarcity and complex power relationships, the game is played ruthlessly, and it’s played to win. I have many, many, many stories to tell about my own experiences…. But those, as I always say about the juicy stuff, are for the memoir. Nope, I’m neither shocked, nor surprised.

Ours is a messy world, and our artistic community can only be a reflection of the chaos that surrounds us, whether as an embodiment of it or a reaction against it…. Or, most likely, both. I would never have imagined that there was a direct connection between organic agriculture and Nazism. Even the most complex persons will have some good and some bad in both who they are and what they do. This is why it is so important to judge each other on actions and to establish in law and social norms what are the lines that cannot be crossed without consequence. In our new gilded age, however, many are rich beyond consequence and so the keep crossing lines because it reassures them of their importance and exceptionalism. Transgression has become the new sport of kings.

A healthy sense of perspective is probably the best way to protect oneself from being collateral damage in the Game of Classical Thrones. You may be averse to playing the game, but others will surely challenge you. Do you take up the challenge and play? Do you defend what you believe is yours or walk away? Most of us do stand our ground to some extent, but a smart player knows that the rewards in our world are ephemeral, and the damage to well-being, reputation and artistry that come an all-out fight are simply not enough to justify what we lose in pursuing a battle to the death against our perceived enemies and rivals. It can be frustrating to watch the powerful seem to ‘get away with it,’ and one of the appeals of religion is to reassure believers that nobody really gets away with it in the end. To me, Hell is the disgust the future regards one with. Better to concede defeat and preserve a legacy, even a mixed one, than die in disgrace. The lesson of the JEG saga, as with so many of these scorched earth sagas, is that the real losers in the game of thrones are those who refuse to stop playing long after the game is lost. The wise player walks away from the Game not to let their adversary win, but to salvage some dignity as victory for oneself.