Some younger players felt that many BBC SO principals were past their best. Steuart Wilson, the new Director of Music who had previously been married to Boult's wife Ann, engineered Boult's retirement in 1950, Wilson had neglected to secure a successor of similar eminence to take over the orchestra. His efforts to recruit Sir John Barbirolli and Rafael Kubelík were unsuccessful, and he was obliged to offer the post to his third choice, Sir Malcolm Sargent, on whatever terms Sargent demanded. Sargent, an immensely popular figure with the public, was not at all popular with orchestral players, because of what a historian of the Proms has called his "autocratic and "prima-donna" attitude towards orchestral players". He offended the BBC SO players by demanding that they all stand up when he came on to the platform – which they firmly declined to do. He rapidly became equally unpopular with the BBC music department, ignoring its agenda and pursuing his own. He refused to join the staff of the BBC, and insisted on remaining a freelance, taking numerous external engagements to the detriment of his work with the BBC SO. A senior BBC manager wrote : Except when a Barbirolli or a Kletzki has been in charge for a few days, the Orchestra is inferior, as an artistic instrument, to the Hallé or Philharmonia... [Sargent] is indifferent to the morale and welfare of the Orchestra and to the individual temperaments of his players as artists or as human beings. It did not help that Sargent was universally acknowledged to be at his finest in choral music. His reputation in big works for chorus and orchestra such as "The Dream of Gerontius", "Hiawatha's Wedding Feast" and "Belshazzar's Feast" was unrivalled, and his large-scale performances of Handel oratorios were assured packed houses. However, his regular programming of such works did nothing to lift the spirits of the BBC SO: orchestral musicians regarded playing the instrumental accompaniment for large choirs as drudgery. In the 1950s, the BBC SO, in common with the rest of the BBC's musical organisation, suffered from stagnation. In the words of the critic Peter Heyworth, "the Corporation's music department had become a byword for its narrow-mindedness and lassitude". Boult had been followed as director of music by a series of successors between 1944 and 1959 who either lacked his commitment to modern music or were actively hostile to it.