Isidore Godfrey - Reputation

Reputation

Godfrey was widely admired for his consistent skill in giving Arthur Sullivan's scores their essential joie de vivre. As early as 1926, Malcolm Sargent joining the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company found "a brilliant young assistant named Isidore Godfrey whom I realised at once was made of the right stuff for Sullivan". In the 1930s, Neville Cardus praised Godfrey's musicianship and commanding presence, adding, "Mr Godfrey deserves a bigger band":

Mr Isidore Godfrey approaches his evening's labours with an imperious gesture; he swings round, and with a comprehensive eye reduces even a Gilbert and Sullivan audience to silence for an overture – a very remarkable feat of hypnotism. And then Mr Godfrey's baton attacks the score, as though about to plunge us into Götterdämmerung with his thin Falstaff's army of an orchestra.... Mr Godfrey by sheer force seems to draw some sonority out of his pitifully inadequate instrumental forces; Toscanini could do no more.

In the 1960s, Philip Hope-Wallace of The Guardian spoke of "the animation, command and sheer genius for keeping things up to the mark of this most devoted servant of the tradition." Of a 1964 production of Iolanthe at New York City Center, the New York Herald Tribune reported, "The carrot thatch we have loved all these years has now burnished to a silver gold alloy but it could have been dark green for all we cared. What really mattered was that was there... and that the Company was in superb condition, the best that it has been in for years." The New York Times concurred, "Isidore Godfrey, happily a fixture in the pit, leads the overture with a respect and affection for its delicacies and that is the fashion in which he orders the musical side of the entire performance." "If ever a knighthood were deserved in the cause of true musical devotion, it is here," wrote the critic Ivan March in The Great Records. In 2007 The Penguin Guide to Recorded Classical Music praised him as "inimitable".

A dissenting voice was the critic Rodney Milnes, who spoke of Godfrey’s recordings as "leaden, lumpen and dull", but his fellow critic Hugo Cole, who had been a D'Oyly Carte orchestra player under Godfrey, wrote admiringly, "he was like Henry Wood in that if you watched him you couldn't come in wrong." Members of the company from Leslie Rands in the 1920s to John Reed in the 1960s praised Godfrey – known to company members as "Goddie" – for his musicianship and friendliness.