Sir Reginald Goodall; Noted Wagner Conductor

Sir Reginald Goodall, the frail, modest conductor little known outside his native England but considered one of the greatest interpreters of the works of Richard Wagner, has died.

His death Saturday at 88 was announced by a nursing home at Bridge near Canterbury,where he died of undisclosed causes.

Despite his reputation among musicians and musicologists and even Wagner’s descendants, Goodall was never principal conductor of a leading orchestra or opera company.

Yet he worked regularly with the leading opera companies of the world at Covent Garden, Glyndebourne, Sadler’s Wells and the English and Welsh national companies.

He also worked abroad as an assistant to some of the century’s greatest conductors, including Wilhelm Furtwangler, Otto Klemperer, Clemens Krauss and Hans Knappertsbusch, and coached some of Britain’s finest Wagnerian singers--Gwyneth Jones, Donald McIntyre and David Ward.

Goodall was reclusive--his Who’s Who entry occupied only four lines--and after a performance he would leave the podium quickly as musicians and singers received applause without him.

He rarely used a baton, preferring to conduct with half-clenched fists, his body swaying with the music.

British critics called him the greatest living Wagnerian in 1979, after performances of “Tristan und Isolde” with the Welsh National Opera Company.

By then he was a widower in poor health, living alone in the Kent countryside. He was knighted in 1985.

Members of the Wagner family had visited Britain to hear Goodall and called him the greatest conductor of Wagner’s music.

Rodney Milnes, among England’s leading opera critics, wrote: “It says a lot about England that this towering genius should have been on the music staff at Covent Garden for two decades and more, serving under notably inferior musical directors and being given virtually nothing to do. All the conductors with whom he is to be compared are dead.”