Destined to become one of the most colourful and  controversial of all 20th-century British conductors,  Sir Thomas Beecham (1879-1961) was born in the  north-west of England, the son of a successful  manufacturing chemist. After a spell at Wadham College,  Oxford, he studied privately with Charles Wood in  London and Moritz Moszkowski in Paris with the express  intention of becoming a composer.However, his comfortable background had enabled him  to experience concerts and opera performances from a  young age and also to dabble in conducting, a  discipline in which he was self-taught. By his early  twenties he was conducting professionally and in 1906  was appointed conductor of the New Symphony Orchestra.  Three years later, backed by his father, he founded the  first of several orchestras, the Beecham Symphony. From  1910 to 1915 the family's money also enabled him to  mount impressive seasons of opera and ballet, including  the British premieres of Russian operas and many by  Richard Strauss, and the first visits to London by  Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. In 1915 he created the  Beecham Opera Company, which performed in London and  around the country.After the Great War Beecham suffered financial  setbacks, which curtailed his own ability to back  artistic ventures, but his drive and vision were  unaffected. He was quite capable of persuading others  to support his schemes and on his own he was able, in  just a few years, to consolidate his international  reputation as a conductor by visiting the major  orchestras in North America, Paris, Vienna and Berlin.  Back in London he achieved further success by founding  another first-class orchestra, the London Philharmonic  (in 1932), and becoming artistic director of Covent  Garden (1932-39).After the Second World War (which he spent mostly in  America, conducting the Seattle Symphony [1941-43] and  the New York Metropolitan Opera [1942-44]), he returned  to London to find that the LPO had become a  self-governing organisation, so he founded another  superb orchestra, the Royal Philharmonic (in 1946),  over which he could exercise full control. Visits to  foreign orchestras (particularly in America), a profuse  recording schedule and regular appearances in the opera  house, kept Beecham active to the end of his long  life.His repertory was wide and varied, but he is  remembered particularly for his championship of the  music of his friend Frederick Delius, for his loving  interpretations of 19th-century French music  (particularly Berlioz and Bizet), and for his devotion  to the music of Mozart, Haydn, Puccini, Sibelius and  Richard Strauss. Many of his most famous recordings are  reissued in the EMI Classics series Great Recordings of  The Century.