Steuart Wilson - Life and Career - Musical Administrator

Musical Administrator

Wilson joined the BBC in 1942 "in a minor capacity with hopes of preferment". In 1943 he was appointed music director for the BBC Overseas Service. After the war, in 1945 he was appointed music director of the Arts Council of Great Britain, newly formed from the wartime Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts (CEMA), and he helped reorganise the music department for peacetime work.

In 1948, the year in which he was knighted, he became director of music for the BBC following the sudden death of Victor Hely-Hutchinson. The Times described this appointment as "not a success", and it is chiefly remembered for the controversy Wilson provoked by engineering the forced retirement of Boult as chief conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra. When Boult had been appointed director of music at the BBC in 1930, the Corporation's director-general Sir John Reith had informally promised him that would be exempt from the BBC's rule that staff must retire at age 60. However, Reith left the BBC in 1938 and his promise carried no weight with his successors. In 1948, when Wilson was appointed head of music at the BBC, he made clear from the outset his intention to see Boult replaced as chief conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra, and he used his authority to insist on Boult's enforced retirement. The director-general of the BBC at the time, Sir William Haley, was unaware of Wilson's personal animus against Boult and later acknowledged, in a broadcast tribute to Boult, that he "had listened to ill-judged advice in retiring him."

In 1949 Wilson moved to Covent Garden to take the post of deputy general administrator of the Royal Opera House. While in that position he gave support to the Polish composer Andrzej Panufnik, who had recently defected from communist Poland, by introducing him to the concert agent Harold Holt. Wilson was responsible for securing the premiere of Vaughan Williams's The Pilgrim's Progress at the Royal Opera House in 1951. Wilson resented being subordinate to the general administrator, David Webster, and he resigned from his Royal Opera House post in June 1955. The following month it was announced that he was launching "a campaign against homosexuality in British music" and was quoted as saying: "The influence of perverts in the world of music has grown beyond all measure. If it is not curbed soon, Covent Garden and other precious musical heritages could suffer irreparable harm."

Wilson's last major appointment was as principal of the Birmingham School of Music, 1957–1960, but this is described by Grove as "an unhappy episode". The Gramophone critic Roger Fiske commented that Wilson "'administered' with an aggressive sensitivity and wit that veered between the inspired and the impossible".

Wilson died in 1966 in Petersfield, Hampshire, aged 77.