Eugene Aynsley Goossens - Legacy

Legacy

Among his works as a composer are two symphonies (1940, 1945), two string quartets, two violin sonatas and a concertino for octet among other chamber music. He wrote two operas. Don Juan de Manara was broadcast by the BBC on 11 April 1959 with Monica Sinclair, Marie Collier, Helen Watts, Marion Lowe, Bruce Boyce, Robert Thomas and Andrei McPherson. The performance was conducted by Goossens himself. He wrote an oratorio, The Apocalypse, after the Revelation of St. John, and a concerto for oboe (1927), written for his brother, Léon Goossens. The concertino, from 1928, also exists in a later arrangement for string orchestra which is sometimes played.

In 1942 Goossens wrote to several composers, including Aaron Copland, to request patriotic fanfares as "stirring and significant contributions to the war effort..." Copland responded to the request with his famous Fanfare for the Common Man. Eighteen fanfares were written by the different composers and performed during the 1942/43 season of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra.

In 1941 he made the first recording of the Symphony No. 2 by Tchaikovsky, with the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra. Goossens' recording ignored the cuts that were popular with conductors at that time.

For Kapp Records, he recorded a bilingual version of Peter and the Wolf in 1959, featuring the actor José Ferrer narrating the story in both English and Spanish. The music was played by the Vienna State Opera Orchestra. The performance was later released on CD by MCA Records.

Goossens is credited for much of the lobbying to the NSW Government to build a music performance venue, a process that led to the construction of the Sydney Opera House. Having agreed to go ahead with the project, the New South Wales Premier Joseph Cahill had wanted it to be on or near Wynyard Railway Station in the north-west of the CBD, but Goossens insisted that it be built at Bennelong Point overlooking Sydney Harbour. The site of Bennelong Point was confirmed in 1957, after he had left Australia.

He is commemorated in the Eugene Goossens Hall, a small concert and recording facility that is part of the broadcasting complex of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation in Harris Street, Ultimo, in Sydney.

Goossens was mentioned in an episode of the British radio comedy program The Goon Show.