Born in Chester on April 8, 1889, Adrian Cedric Boult was the second son of Cedric Randal Boult (1853-1950) and Katherine Florence, née Barman, and grew up as part of a prosperous mercantile family, his father, a JP and businessman dealing in the Liverpool shipping and oil trade. Young Boult was raised musically, attending concerts from an early age, and with money no object was permitted to attend Westminster School, Christ Church, Oxford (1908-12), from where he graduated in 1912, and Leipzig Conservatory (1912-13) after which he joined the staff at Covent Garden Opera.
Boult’s professional conducting debut would come close to home at West Kirby Public Hall, Wirral on February 27, 1914, when he was aged 24. He conducted members of the Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra. He had been declared medically unfit for active service in WW1 so served as an orderly officer in a reserve unit. The War Office also took him on as a translator due to his fluency in French, German and Italian. Boult would be on the staff at the Royal College of Music from 1919 until 1930 and would teach there later in his career (1962-66).
After various conducting jobs Boult achieved his first prominent role conducting the City of Birmingham Orchestra (1924-30). After Birmingham, he was appointed musical director of the BBC and chief conductor of the fledgling BBC Symphony Orchestra, which he had founded. It was in this capacity that Boult became world-famous as his orchestra travelled extensively. Boult, to the surprise of those who knew him well, married in 1933. Apparently, he was notoriously shy where the opposite sex was concerned. The object of his affection was Ann Wilson, née Bowles, who had divorced from the tenor Steuart Wilson (1889-1966) two years earlier. Adrian became a stepfather to four and the marriage lasted for the remainder of his long life. In 1937 Boult conducted during the Coronation of King George VI and was knighted the same year. He had already established his conducting style of stoical insouciance. Once, when Boult spoke post-concert to the young conductor Mark Elder (1947-), he reputedly said: ‘I see you’re one of the sweaty ones’. Boult’s style has also been described as ‘economic’, with the left hand being used so little he could easily have been a one-armed conductor. He would repeat his Coronation conducting for Queen Elizabeth II, in 1953.
Extensive tours of Europe and America saw Boult achieve a reputation for his championship of English music, both at home and abroad, as well as his broad musical sympathies, which had a keen influence on the development of music at the BBC. It was Boult who gave the first performance of his friend Gustav Holst's magnum opus, The Planets. The complete Planets suite would become Boult’s signature dish over the years with no fewer than five different recordings. He would also introduce works by other British composers including Edward Elgar; Benjamin Britten who was one of the founders of the Aldeburgh Festival; Frederick Delius, son of the Cotswolds Ralph Vaughan-Williams; Sir Malcolm Arnold and William Walton, who wrote the scores for Laurence Olivier films including Henry V. Boult wasn’t a total Anglophile though and during his BBC career also premiered works by foreign composers including Hungarian Béla Bartók and Russian Igor Stravinsky.
Retiring from the BBC, in 1950, with more than 1,500 broadcasts under his belt, Boult was conductor-in-chief of the London Philharmonic Orchestra until 1957 and its president from 1965. Founded just two years after Boult’s BBC Symphony Orchestra, the London Philharmonic had rivalled his creation in terms of excellence but by the time Boult himself came to pick up the baton it had fallen from its 1930s apex. Boult set about rebuilding its fortunes to the extent that he is most associated with this orchestra rather than any of the others he conducted with such distinction. One famous movie that Boult was involved in was Lawrence of Arabia (1962) for which he is listed among the Music Department, as ‘Conductor: London Philharmonic Orchestra’.
Boult was made a C.H. (Companion of Honour) in 1969. He was just at home in the recording studio as in the concert hall. From the mid-1960s until his effective retirement at the end of 1978, he made many recordings for EMI. His final public performance was in June 1978, performing Elgar, and his final recording came six months later (in December 1978), of music by Bournemouth-born Hubert Parry, the composer of the music to Jerusalem.
His handbook on conducting, The Point of the Stick, was published in 1921: Thoughts on Conducting (1963) followed as did his autobiography My Own Trumpet (1973). The Point of the Stick was turned into a film half a century after its publication.
Sir Adrian Boult died on February 22, 1983, at the age of 93. Another great knighted British composer, Sir William Walton (1902-83), whose work Boult had introduced, passed away just a fortnight later. The year after his death Boult was commemorated in Westminster Abbey; a memorial stone unveiled in the north choir aisle says simply: ‘1889 Adrian Cedric Boult CH Conductor 1993’. Sir Adrian Boult’s influence would persist posthumously as his recordings continued to be used for movie soundtracks, for example, Scoop (2006) and Mowgli: Legend of the Jungle (2018).
