attended a festival concert and heard Nicholas Rubinstein play the Tschaikowsky B flat minor piano Concerto. His performance was a revelation. “I can never learn to play the piano like that if I stay here,” exclaimed Edward, as they left the hall.
They began to consider the merits of the different European schools of music, and finally chose Stuttgart. Mrs. MacDowell and her son went there in November hoping that in this famous Conservatory could be found the right kind of instruction.
But alas, MacDowell soon found out his mistake. He discovered that he would have to unlearn all he had acquired and begin from the beginning. And even then the instruction was not very thorough.
They now thought of Frankfort, where the composer Joachim Raff was the director and Carl Heymann, a very brilliant pianist, was one of the instructors.
After months of delay, during which young MacDowell worked under the guidance of Ehlert, he at last entered the Frankfort Conservatory, studying composition with Raff, and piano with Heymann. Both proved very inspiring teachers. For Heymann he had the greatest admiration, calling him a marvel, whose technic was equal to anything. “In hearing him practise and play, I learned more in a week than I ever knew before.”
Edward MacDowell remained in close study at the Frankfort Conservatory for two years, his mother having in the meantime returned to America. He had hoped to obtain a place as professor on the teaching staff of the institution. Failing to do this he took private pupils. One of these, Miss Marian Nevins, he afterwards married. He must have been a rather striking looking youth at this time. He was nineteen. Tall and vigorous, with blue eyes, fair skin, rosy cheeks, very dark hair and reddish mustache, he was called “the handsome American.” He seemed from the start, to have success in teaching, though he was painfully shy, and always remained so.
In 1881, when he was twenty, he applied for the position of head piano teacher in the Darmstadt Conservatory, and was accepted. It meant forty hours a week of drudgery, and as he preferred to live in Frankfort, he made the trip each day between the two towns. Besides this he went once a week to a castle about three hours away, and taught some little counts and countesses, really dull and sleepy children, who cared but little if anything for music. However the twelve hours spent in the train each week, were not lost, as he composed the greater part of his Second Modern Suite for piano, Op. 14; the First Modern Suite had been written in Frankfort the year before. He was reading at this period a great deal of poetry, both German and English, and delving into the folk and fairy lore of romantic Germany. All these imaginative studies exerted great influence on his subsequent compositions, both as to subject and content.
MacDowell found that the confining labors at Darmstadt were telling on his strength, so he gave up the position and remained in Frankfort, dividing his time between private teaching and composing. He hoped to secure a few paying concert engagements, as those he had already filled had brought in no money.
One day, as he sat dreaming before his piano, some one knocked at the door, and the next instant in walked his master Raff, of whom the young American stood in great awe. In the course of a few moments, Raff suddenly asked what he had been writing. In his confusion the boy stammered he had been working on a concerto. When Raff started to go, he turned back and told the boy to bring the concerto to him the next Sunday. As even the first movement was not finished, its author set to work with vigor. When Sunday came only the first movement was ready. Postponing the visit a week or two, he had time to complete the work, which stands today, as he wrote it then, with scarcely a correction.
At Raff’s suggestion, MacDowell visited Liszt in the spring of 1882. The dreaded encounter with the master proved to be a delightful surprise, as Liszt treated him with much kindness and courtesy. Eugen D’Albert, who was present, was asked to accompany the orchestral part of the concerto on a second piano. Liszt commended the work in warm terms: “You must bestir yourself,” he warned D’Albert, “if you do not wish to be outdone by our young American.” Liszt praised his piano playing too, and MacDowell returned to Frankfort in a happy frame of mind.
At a music Convention, held that year in Zurich, in July, MacDowell played his First Piano Suite, and won a good success. The following year, upon Liszt’s recommendation, both the First and Second Modern Suites were brought out by Breitkopf and Haertel. “Your two Piano Suites are admirable,” wrote Liszt from Budapest, in February, 1883, “and I accept with sincere pleasure and thanks the dedication of your piano Concerto.”
The passing of Raff, on June 25, 1882, was a severe blow to MacDowell. It was in memory of his revered teacher that he composed the “Sonata Tragica,” the first of the four great sonatas he has left us. The slow movement of this Sonata especially embodies his sorrow at the loss of the teacher who once said to him: “Your music will be played when mine is forgotten.”
For the next two years MacDowell did much composing. Then in June 1884 he returned to America, and in July was married to his former pupil, Miss Marian Nevins, a union which proved to be ideal for both. Shortly after this event the young couple returned to Europe.
The next winter was spent in Frankfort, instructing a few private pupils, but mostly in composing, with much reading of the literature of various countries, and, in the spring, with long walks in the beautiful woods about Frankfort. Wiesbaden became their home during the winter of 1885-6. The same year saw the completion of the second. Piano Concerto, in D minor.
In the spring of 1887, MacDowell, in one of his walks about the town, discovered a deserted cottage on the edge of the woods. It overlooked the town, with the Rhine beyond, and woods on the other side of the river. Templeton Strong, an American composer, was with him at the time, and both thought the little cottage an ideal spot for a home. It was soon purchased, and the young husband and wife lived an idyllic life for the next year. A small garden gave them exercise out of doors, the woods were always enticing and best of all, MacDowell was able to give his entire time to composition. Many beautiful songs and piano pieces were the result, besides the symphonic poem “Lamia,” “Hamlet and Ophelia,” the “Lovely Aida,” “Lancelot and Elaine,” and other orchestral works.
In September, 1888, the MacDowells sold their Wiesbaden cottage and returned to America, settling in Boston. Here MacDowell made himself felt as a pianist and teacher. He took many pupils, and made a conspicuous number of public appearances. He also created some of his best work, among which were the two great Sonatas, the “Tragica” and “Eroica.” One of the important appearances was his playing of the Second Concerto with the Philharmonic Orchestra of New York, under Anton Seidl, in December, 1894.
In the spring of 1896 a Department of Music was founded at Columbia University, of New York, the professorship of which was offered to MacDowell. He had now been living eight years in Boston; his fame as a pianist and teacher was constantly growing; indeed more pupils came to him than he could accept. The prospect of organizing a new department from the very beginning was a difficult task to undertake. At first he hesitated; he was in truth in no hurry to accept the offer, and wished to weigh both sides carefully. But the idea of having an assured income finally caused him to decide in favor of Columbia, and he moved from Boston to New York the following autumn.
He threw himself into this new work with great ardor and entire devotion. With the founding of the department there were two distinct ideas to be carried out. First, to train musicians who would be able to teach and compose. Second, to teach musical history and aesthetics.
All this involved five courses, with many lectures each week, taking up form, harmony, counterpoint, fugue, composition, vocal and instrumental music, both from the technical and interpretative side. It was a tremendous labor to organize and keep all this going, unaided. After two years he was granted an assistant, who took over the elementary classes. But even with this help, MacDowell’s labors were increasingly arduous. He now had six courses instead of five, which meant more classes and lectures each week. Perhaps the most severe drain on his time and strength was the continual correction of exercise books and examination papers, a task which he performed with great patience and thoroughness. Added to all this, he devoted every Sunday morning to his advanced students, giving them help and advice in their piano work and in composition.
Amid all this labor his public playing had to be given up, but composition went steadily on. During the eight years of the Columbia professorship, some of the most important works of his life were produced; among them were, Sea Pieces the two later Sonatas, the Norse and the Keltic, Fireside Tales, and New England Idyls. The Woodland Sketches had already been published and some of his finest songs. Indeed nearly one quarter of all his compositions were the fruit of those eight years while he held the post at Columbia.
In 1896 he bought some property near Peterboro, New Hampshire–fifteen acres with a small farmhouse and other buildings, and fifty acres of forest. The buildings were remodeled into a rambling but comfortable dwelling, and here, amid woods and hills he loved, he spent the summer of each year. He built a little log cabin in the woods near by, and here he wrote some of his best music.
In 1904 MacDowell left Columbia, but continued his private piano classes, and sometimes admitted free such students as were unable to pay. After his arduous labors at Columbia, which had been a great drain on his vitality, he should have had a complete rest and change. Had he done so, the collapse which was imminent might have been averted. But he took no rest though in the spring of 1905 he began to show signs of nervous breakdown. The following summer was spent, as usual, in Peterboro but it seemed to bring no relief to the exhausted composer. In the fall of that year his ailment appeared worse. Although he seemed perfectly well in body, his mind gradually became like that of a child. The writer was privileged to see him on one occasion, and retains an ineffaceable memory of the composer in his white flannels, seated in a large easy chair, taking little notice of what was passing about him, seldom recognizing his friends or visitors, but giving the hand of his devoted wife a devoted squeeze when she moved to his side to speak to him.
This state continued for over two years, until his final release, January 23, 1908, as he had just entered his forty-seventh year. The old Westminster Hotel had been the MacDowell home through the long illness. From here is but a step to St. George’s Episcopal Church, where a simple service was held. On the following day the composer was taken to Peterboro, his summer home, a spot destined to play its part, due to the untiring efforts of Mrs. MacDowell, in the development of music in America.
Mr. Gilman tells us:
“His grave is on an open hill-top, commanding one of the spacious and beautiful views he had loved. On a bronze tablet are these lines of his own, used as a motto for his ‘From a Log Cabin,’ the last music he ever wrote:
‘A house of dreams untold
It looks out over the whispering tree-tops And faces the setting sun.'”
XXII
CLAUDE ACHILLE DEBUSSY
“_I love music too much to speak of it otherwise than passionately_.”
DEBUSSY
“_Art is always progressive; it cannot return to the past, which is definitely dead. Only imbeciles and cowards look backward. Then–Let us work_!”
DEBUSSY
It is difficult to learn anything of the boyhood and youth of this rare French composer. Even his young manhood and later life were so guarded and secluded that few outside his intimate circle knew much of the man, except as mirrored in his music. After all that is just as the composer wished, to be known through his compositions, for in them he revealed himself. They are transparent reflections of his character, his aims and ideals.
Only the barest facts of his early life can be told. We know that he was born at Saint Germain-en-Laye, France, August 22, 1862. From the very beginning he seemed precociously gifted in music, and began at a very early age to study the piano. His first lessons on the instrument were received from Mme. de Sivry, a former pupil of Chopin. At ten he entered the Paris Conservatoire, obtaining his Solfege medals in 1874, ’75, and ’76, under Lavignac; a second prize for piano playing from Marmontel in 1877, a first prize for accompanying in 1880; an accessory prize for counterpoint and fugue in 1882, and finally the Grande Prix de Rome, with his cantata, “L’Enfant Prodigue,” in 1884, as a pupil of Guirand.
Thus in twelve years, or at the age of twenty-two, the young musician was thoroughly furnished for a career. He had worked through carefully, from the beginning to the top, with thoroughness and completeness, gaining his honors, slowly, step by step. All this painstaking care, this overcoming of the technical difficulties of his art, is what gave him such complete command and freedom in using the medium of tone and harmony, in his unique manner.
While at work in Paris, young Debussy made an occasional side trip to another country. In 1879 he visited Russia, where he learned to know the music of that land, yet undreamed of by the western artists. When his turn came to go to Rome, for which honor he secured the prize, he sent home the required compositions, a Symphonic Suite “Spring,” and a lyric poem for a woman’s voice, with chorus and orchestra, entitled “La Demoiselle Elue.”
From the first Claude Debussy showed himself a rare spirit, who looked at the subject of musical art from a different angle than others had done. For one thing he must have loved nature with whole souled devotion, for he sought to reflect her moods and inspirations in his compositions. Once he said: “I prefer to hear a few notes from an Egyptian shepherd’s flute, for he is in accord with his scenery and hears harmonies unknown to your treatises. Musicians too seldom turn to the music inscribed in nature. It would benefit them more to watch a sunrise than to listen to a performance of the Pastorale Symphony. Go not to others for advice but take counsel of the passing breezes, which relate the history of the world to those who can listen.”
Again he says, in a way that shows what delight he feels in beauty that is spontaneous and natural:
“I lingered late one autumn evening in the country, irresistibly fascinated by the magic of old world forests. From yellowing leaves, fluttering earthward, celebrating the glorious agony of the trees, from the clangorous angelus bidding the fields to slumber, rose a sweet persuasive voice, counseling perfect oblivion. The sun was setting solitary. Beasts and men turned peacefully homeward, having accomplished their impersonal tasks.”
When as a youth Debussy was serving with his regiment in France, he relates of the delight he experienced in listening to the tones of the bugles and bells. The former sounded over the camp for the various military duties; the latter belonged to a neighboring convent and rang out daily for services. The resonance of the bugles and the far-reaching vibrations of the bells, with their overtones and harmonics, were specially noted by the young musician, and used by him later in his music. It is a well-known fact that every tone or sound is accompanied by a whole series of other sounds; they are the vibrations resulting from the fundamental tone. If the tone C is played in the lower octave of the piano, no less than sixteen overtones vibrate with it. A few of these are audible to the ordinary listener, but very keen ears will hear more of them. In Claude Debussy’s compositions, his system of harmony and tonality is intimately connected with these laws of natural harmonics. His chords, for instance, are remarkable for their shifting, vapory quality; they seem to be on the border land between major and minor–consonance and dissonance; again they often appear to float in the air, without any resolution whatever. It was a new aspect of music, a new style of chord progression. At the same time the young composer was well versed in old and ancient music; he knew all the old scales, eight in number, and used them in his compositions with compelling charm. The influence of the old Gregorian chant has given his music a certain fluidity, free rhythm, a refinement, richness and variety peculiarly its own.
We can trace impressions of early life in Debussy’s music, through his employment of the old modes, the bell sounds which were familiar to his boyhood, and also circumstances connected with his later life. As a student in Rome, he threw himself into the study of the music of Russian composers, especially that of Moussorgsky; marks of the Oriental coloring derived from these masters appear in his own later music. When he returned to Paris for good, he reflected in music the atmosphere of his environment. By interest and temperament he was in sympathy with the impressionistic school in art, whether it be in painting, literature or in music. In Debussy’s music the qualities of impressionism and symbolism are very prominent. He employs sounds as though they were colors, and blends them in such a way as literally to paint a picture in tones, through a series of shaded, many-hued chord progressions. Fluid, flexible, vivid, these beautiful harmonies, seemingly woven of refracted rays of light, merge into shadowy melody, and free, flowing rhythm.
What we first hear in Debussy’s music, is the strangeness of the harmony, the use of certain scales, not so much new as unfamiliar. Also the employment of sequences of fifths or seconds. He often takes his subjects from nature, but in this case seems to prefer a sky less blue and a landscape more atmospheric than those of Italy, more like his native France. His music, when known sufficiently, will reveal a sense of proportion, balance and the most exquisite taste. It may lack strength at times, it may lack outbursts of passion and intensity, but it is the perfection of refinement.
Mr. Ernest Newman, in writing of Debussy, warmly praises the delightful naturalness of his early compositions. “One would feel justified in building the highest hopes on the young genius who can manipulate so easily the beautiful shapes his imagination conjures up.”
The work of the early period shows Debussy developing freely and naturally. The independence of his thinking is unmistakable, but it does not run into wilfulness. There is no violent break with the past, but simply the quickening of certain French qualities by the infusion of a new personality. It seemed as if a new and charming miniaturist had appeared, who was doing both for piano and song what had never been done before. The style of the two Arabesques and the more successful of the Ariettes oubliees is perfect. A liberator seemed to have come into music, to take up, half a century later, the work of Chopin–the work of redeeming the art from the excessive objectivity of German thought, of giving it not only a new soul but a new body, swift, lithe and graceful. And that this exquisitely clear, pellucid style could be made to carry out not only gaiety and whimsicality but emotion of a deeper sort, is proved by the lovely “Clair de Lune.”
Among Debussy’s best known compositions are “The Afternoon of a Faun,” composed in 1894 and called his most perfect piece for orchestra, which he never afterward surpassed. There are also Three Nocturnes for orchestra. In piano music, as we have briefly shown, he created a new school for the player. All the way from the two Arabesques just mentioned, through “Gardens in the Rain,” “The Shadowy Cathedral,” “A Night in Granada,” “The Girl with Blond Hair,” up to the two books of remarkable Preludes, it is a new world of exotic melody and harmony to which he leads the way. “Art must be hidden by art,” said Rameau, long ago, and this is eminently true in Debussy’s music.
Debussy composed several works for the stage, one of which was “Martyrdom of Saint Sebastien,” but his “Pelleas and Melisande” is the one supreme achievement in the lyric drama. As one of his critics writes: “The reading of the score of ‘Pelleas and Melisande’ remains for me one of the most marvelous lessons in French art: it would be impossible for him to express more with greater restraint of means.” The music, which seems so complicated, is in reality very simple. It sounds so shadowy and impalpable, but it is really built up with as sure control as the most classic work. It is indeed music which appeals to refined and sensitive temperaments.
This mystical opera was produced in Paris, at the Opera Comique, in April, 1902, and at once made a sensation. It had any number of performances and still continues as one of the high lights of the French stage. Its fame soon reached America, and the first performance was given in New York in 1907, with a notable cast of singing actors, among whom Mary Garden, as the heroine gave an unforgettable, poetic interpretation.
Many songs have been left us by this unique composer. He was especially fond of poetry and steeped himself in the verse of Verlaine, Villon, Baudelaire and Mallarme. He chose the most unexpected, the most subtle, and wedded it to sounds which invariably expressed the full meaning. He breathed the breath of life into these vague, shadowy poems, just as he made Maeterlinck’s “Pelleas” live again.
As the years passed, Claude Debussy won more and more distinction as a unique composer, but also gained the reputation of being a very unsociable man. Physically it has been said that in his youth he seemed like an Assyrian Prince; through life he retained his somewhat Asiatic appearance. His eyes were slightly narrowed, his black hair curled lightly over an extremely broad forehead. He spoke little and often in brusque phrase. For this reason he was frequently misunderstood, as the irony and sarcasm with which he sometimes spoke did not tend to make friends. But this attitude was only turned toward those who did not comprehend him and his ideals, or who endeavored to falsify what he believed in and esteemed.
A friend of the artist writes:
“I met Claude Debussy for the first time in 1906. Living myself in a provincial town, I had for several years known and greatly admired some of the songs and the opera, ‘Pelleas and Melisande,’ and I made each of my short visits to Paris an opportunity of improving my acquaintance with these works. A young composer, Andre Caplet, with whom I had long been intimate, proposed to introduce me to Debussy; but the rumors I had heard about the composer’s preferred seclusion always made me refuse in spite of my great desire to know him. I now had a desire to express the feelings awakened in me, and to communicate to others, by means of articles and lectures, my admiration for, and my belief in, the composer and his work. The result was that one day, in 1906, Debussy let me know through a friend, that he would like to see me. From that day began our friendship.”
Later the same friend wrote:
“Debussy was invited to appear at Queen’s Hall with the London Symphony Orchestra, on February 1, 1908, to conduct his ‘Afternoon of a Faun,’ and ‘The Sea.’ The ovation he received from the English public was exceptional. I can still see him in the lobby, shaking hands with friends after the concert, trying to hide his emotion, and saying repeatedly: ‘How nice they are–how nice they are!'”
He went again the next year to London, but the state of his health prevented his going anywhere else. For a malady, which finally proved fatal, seemed to attack the composer when in his prime, and eventually put an end to his work. We cannot guess what other art works he might have created. But there must be some that have not yet seen the light. It is known that he was wont to keep a composition for some time in his desk, correcting and letting it ripen, until he felt it was ready to be brought out.
One of his cherished dreams had been to compose a “Tristan.”
The characters of Tristan and Iseult are primarily taken from a French legend. Debussy felt the story was a French heritage and should be restored to its original atmosphere and idea. This it was his ardent desire to accomplish.
Debussy passed away March 26, 1918.
Since his desire to create a Tristan has been made impossible, let us cherish the rich heritage of piano, song and orchestral works, which this original French artist and thinker has left behind, to benefit art and his fellow man.
XXIII
ARTURO TOSCANINI
The sharp rap of Arturo Toscanini’s baton that cuts the ear like a whiplash brought the rehearsal of the NBC Symphony Orchestra to a sudden, shocking stop. Overtones from chords of Wagner’s “Faust Overture,” killed in mid-career, vibrated through the throat-gripping silence.
The men stared at their music, bowed their heads a little in anticipation of the storm. “Play that again,” the Maestro commanded William Bell, the bass tuba player, who had just finished a solo. On Mr. Bell’s face there was an expression of mixed worry and wonderment. Mr. Toscanini noticed the troubled anxious look.
“No, no, no,” he said, with that childlike smile of his that suffuses his whole face with an irresistible light. “There is nothing wrong. Play it again; please, play it again, just for me. It is so beautiful. I have never heard these solo passages played with such a lovely tone.”
There you have a side of Mr. Toscanini that the boys have forgotten to tell you about. For years newspaper and magazine writers (in the last couple of seasons the Maestro has even “made” the Broadway columns!) have doled out anecdotes concerning his terrible temper.
From these stories there emerged a demoniacal little man with the tantrums of a dozen prima donnas, a temperamental tyrant who, at the dropping of a stitch in the orchestral knitting, tore his hair, screamed at the top of his inexhaustible Latin lungs, doused his trembling players with streams of blistering invective.
That’s how you learned that, to the king of conductors, a musician playing an acid note is a “shoemaker,” a “swine,” an “assassin” or even something completely unprintable.
So far as they went the stories were true. Mr. Toscanini, as all the world knows by now, is the world’s No. 1 musical purist. Nothing but perfection satisfies him. He hates compromise, loathes the half-baked and mediocre, refuses to put up with “something almost as good.”
As Stefan Zweig puts it: “In vain will you remind him that the perfect, the absolute, are rarely attainable in this world; that, even to the sublimest will, no more is possible than an approach to perfection…. His glorious unwisdom makes it impossible to recognize this wise dispensation.”
His rages, then, are the spasms of pain of a perfectionist wounded by imperfection. It was his glorious unwisdom that caused him, at a rehearsal not long ago, to fling a platinum watch to the floor, where, of course, it was smashed into fragments.
In the shadows of the studio that afternoon lurked John F. Royal, program director of NBC. Next day he presented the Maestro with two $1 watches, both inscribed, “For Rehearsals Only.” Mr. Toscanini was so amused that he forgot to get angry with Mr. Royal for breaking the grimly enforced rule barring all but orchestra members from rehearsals.
The sympathetic program director also had the shattered platinum watch put together by what must have been a Toscanini among watchmakers. By that time the incident had become such a joke that the orchestra men dared to give the Maestro a chain, of material and construction guaranteed to be unbreakable, to attach the brace of Ingersolls to the dark, roomy jacket which for years he has worn at rehearsals.
Less than a week later that same choleric director, with the burning deep-set black eyes, the finely chiseled features and the halo of silver hair surrounding a bald spot that turns purple in his passions, walked into a room where a girl of this reporter’s acquaintance stood beside a canary cage, making a rather successful attempt at whistling, in time and tune with the bird.
For a moment the man who can make music like no one else on earth listened to the girl and her pet. Then he sighed and said:
“Oh, if I could only whistle!”
Those who know Mr. Toscanini intimately find in those six simple words the key to his character. He is, they say, the most modest man who ever lived, a man sincerely at a loss to understand the endless fuss that is made about him.
Time and again he has told his friends that he has no fonder desire than to be able to walk about undisturbed, to saunter along the avenue, look into shop-windows, do the thousand-and-one common little things that are permitted other human beings.
That same humility, that same incurable bewilderment at public acclaim must have been apparent to all who ever attended a Toscanini concert, saw him at the close of a superb interpretation bowing as one of the group of players and making deprecating gestures that seemed to say: “What you have heard was a great score brought to life by these excellent musicians–why applaud me?”
At rehearsals he is the strictest of disciplinarians but not a prima donna conductor. He demands the utmost attention and concentration from his men, brooks no disturbance or interruption. On the other hand, he is punctual to a fault, arrives fifteen minutes ahead of time, never asks for special privileges of any kind.
He has been described as the world’s most patient and impatient orchestral director. In rehearsal he will take the men through a passage, a mere phrase, innumerable times to achieve a certain tonal or dynamic effect. But he explodes when he feels that he is faced with stupidity or stubbornness.
Some famous conductors have added the B of Barnum to the three immortal B’s of music–Bach, Beethoven and Brahms. Those wielders of the stick are great showmen as well as great musicians.
Not so Mr. Toscanini. In his platform manner there is nothing calculated for theatrical effect. He doesn’t care in the least what he looks like “from out front.” His gestures are designed not to impress, enrapture or englamour the musical groundlings, but to convey his sharply defined wishes to his men and transmit to them the flaming enthusiasm that consumes him.
His motions are patiently sincere, almost unconscious. He enters carrying his baton under his right arm, like a riding crop. Orchestra and audience rise. He acknowledges this mark of respect and the tumultuous applause with a quick bow, an indulgent smile and a gesture that plainly say: “Thanks, thanks, all this is very nice, you’re a lot of kind, good children, but for heaven’s sake let’s get down to business.”
While waiting a few seconds for listeners and players to settle themselves he rests his baton against his right shoulder, like a sword. Then the sharp rap. The Maestro closes his eyes. Another rap, sharper than the first. Oppressive, electrical silence. He lifts the baton as if saluting the orchestra. The concert begins.
As a rule the right hand gives the tempo and tracks down every smallest melody, wherever it may hide in the score. In passages for the strings, the baton indicates the type of bowing the conductor wants from the violins, violas or cellos.
The left hand, with the long thumb separate from the other fingers, is the orchestra’s guide to the Maestro’s interpretative desires. It wheedles the tone from the men. It coaxes, hushes, demands increased volume. It moves, trembling, to the heart to ask for feeling, closes into a fist to get sound and fury from the brasses, thunder from the drums. Through it all, the Maestro talks, sings, whistles and blows out his cheeks for the benefit of trumpeters and trombonists.
After a concert, keyed to feverish excitement, he often plays over piano scores of every number that appeared on the program. Then he may lie awake all night, worrying over two possible tempi in which he might have taken some passage–shadings in rhythm that the average listener would not, could not discern.
He is never satisfied with himself. Some years ago, when he was still conducting at the Scala in Milan, he came home one night after the opera. Mr. Toscanini does not eat before a performance, and his family wait with the evening meal until he joins them.
As he stepped into the hall he saw his wife and daughters walking into the dining room. “Where are you going?” he asks them. “In to supper, of course,” one of them told him. The Maestro exploded: “What? After THAT performance? Oh, no, you’re not. It shall never be said of my family that they could eat after such a horrible show!” All of them, including the great man himself, went to bed without supper that night.
It stands to reason that a man of this type detests personal publicity. The interviews he has granted in the fifty-six years of his career–Mr. Toscanini, who is seventy-five, began conducting at nineteen–can be counted on the fingers of one hand. He feels and has often told friends that all he has to say he can say in musical terms; that he gladly leaves to others what satisfaction they may derive from publicly bandying words.
But his frequent brushes with news photographers don’t come under this head. The existence of numerous fine camera studies of the Maestro proves that he doesn’t dislike being photographed. Nor does he dislike photographers. But he hates flashlights because they hurt his eyes.
This has bolstered the popular notion–based on the fact that he conducts from memory–that his sight is so poor as to amount almost to blindness.
Mr. Toscanini is neither blind nor half-blind. He does not use a strong magnifying glass to study his scores, note by note. He is near-sighted, but not more so than millions of others, and reads with the aid of ordinary spectacles.
He has always conducted from memory because he believes that having the score in his head gives a conductor greater freedom and authority to impose his musical will upon his men. At rehearsals the score is kept on a stand a few feet from the Maestro. From time to time he consults it to verify a point at dispute. He has never been known to be wrong.
His memory is, of course, phenomenal. Anything he has once seen, read and particularly, heard, he not only remembers but is unable to forget. The other day he and a friend were discussing the concerto played by a certain pianist on his American debut in 1911. Mr. Toscanini remembered it as Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto; the friend maintained it was the Second.
The Maestro said: “I recall the concert very well. He was soloist with the Philharmonic.” And he reeled off all the other compositions on that program of twenty-seven years ago.
To settle the argument the skeptical friend called the office of the Philharmonic. Mr. Toscanini had been right about the Beethoven Concerto and had correctly remembered the purely orchestral numbers as well.
He is a profound student, not only of music but of all available literature bearing upon it. A music critic who visited him in Salzburg a few years ago, just before he was to conduct Wagner’s “Die Meistersinger,” found him in a room littered with books on the opera, books on Wagner, volumes of the composer’s correspondence.
The Maestro, who has been coming to this country since 1908, speaks better English than most of us. He knows his English literature and is in the sometimes disconcerting habit of quoting by the yard from the works of Shakespeare, Keats, Shelley and Swinburne.
Almost as great a linguist as he is a musician, he coaxes and curses his men in perfect, idiomatic French, German and Spanish as well as English and Italian.
He likes reading, listening to the radio–he is fond of good jazz–and driving out in the country. He loves speed. An American friend who some years ago accompanied him on a motor trip from Milan to Venice groaned when the speedometer began hovering around 78. “What’s the matter with you?” the Maestro wanted to know. “We’re only jogging along.” Whenever possible he flies.
Since 1926 he and Mrs. Toscanini have occupied an apartment in the Astor–the same suite of four smallish rooms. The place is furnished by the hotel, but the Maestro always brings his beloved knickknacks–his miniature of Beethoven, his Wagner and Verdi manuscripts, his family photographs.
He has no valet and dislikes being pawed by barbers. He shaves himself, and Mrs. Toscanini or one of the daughters cuts his hair. He eats very little–two plates of soup (preferably minestrone), a piece of bread and a glass of chianti do him nicely for dinner.
He begrudges the time spent in eating and sleeping. Like the child he is at heart, he loves staying up late. Occasionally he takes a nocturnal prowl.
The other night, after a concert, he asked a friend to take him somewhere–“some place where they won’t know me and make a fuss over me.”
The friend took him to a little place in the Village. The moment Mr. Toscanini entered, the proprietor dashed forward, bowed almost to the ground and said: “Maestro, I am greatly honored … I’ll never forget this hour …” Then he led the party to the most conspicuous spot in the room.
Mr. Toscanini wanted a nip of brandy, but the innkeeper insisted that he try some very special wine of the house’s own making. From a huge jug he poured a brownish-red, viscous liquid into a couple of tumblers. The Maestro’s companion says it tasted like a mixture of castor oil, hair tonic and pitch.
Turning white at the first sip, Mr. Toscanini drained his glass at a gulp. Outside, his friend asked him: “Why did you drink that vile stuff?”
The Maestro said: “The poor fellow meant well, and I didn’t want to refuse. A man can do anything.”
XXIV
LEOPOLD STOKOWSKI
Many years ago this reporter was traveling, as a non-fiddling, non-tooting member of the Philadelphia Orchestra, on a train that carried the organization on one of its Pennsylvania-Maryland-Ohio tours.
It was 2 o’clock in the morning, Mr. Stokowski, the conductor, was secluded in his drawing room, perhaps asleep, but more likely trying to digest three helpings of creamed oysters in which he had indulged at the home of an effusive Harrisburg hostess. Mr. Stokowski in those days couldn’t let creamed oysters alone, but neither could he take them.
In the Pullman smoker sat the handsome gentleman who was then manager of the orchestra and your correspondent. “Tell me,” said the reporter, “just between you and me–where did Stoky get that juicy accent?”
The manager removed his cigar to reply:
“God alone knows.”
Mr. Stokowski then had been in this country nearly twenty years. He has been here now more than thirty years, and still no one on earth, with the possible exception of Mr. Stokowski himself, can tell you where he dug up his rich luscious accent that trickles down the portals of the ear as the sauce of creamed oysters trickles down the gullet.
Surely he didn’t get it in London where, on April 18, 1882, he was born. Nor did he learn it in Queens College, Oxford, where he was considered a bright student, or on Park Avenue, New York, where he landed in 1905 to play the organ at St. Bartholomew’s.
Mr. Stokowski’s dialectic vagaries are among the mysteries in which, for his own good reasons, he has chosen to wrap himself. Another one concerns his name and origin. Is he really Leopold Antoni Stanislaw Stokowski? Was his father one Joseph Boleslaw Kopernicus Stokowski, a Polish emigre who became a London stockbroker? Was his mother an Irish colleen and the granddaughter of Tom Moore, who wrote “Believe Me If All Those Endearing Young Charms”? Or is Stoky just plain Lionel Stokes, the sprout of a humble cockney family?
Nobody knows. But everybody knows that Leopold Stokowski is one of the world’s really great orchestra conductors, a true poet of the stick (though he has dispensed with the baton in recent years), and that he has made the name of the Philadelphia Orchestra synonymous with superb singing, beauty of tone and dazzling brilliance.
Everybody knows, too, that he has few peers as an interpreter of Bach, many of whose compositions he unearthed from the organ repertoire and gave to the general public in shimmering orchestral arrangements, and that critics trot out their choicest adjectives to praise his playing of Brahms and all Russian composers.
Everybody knows, further, that he and his orchestra have made a larger number of phonograph recordings of symphonic music than any other conductor and band, and that the Philadelphia organization was the first of its kind to dare the raised eyebrows of the musical tories by going on the air as a commercially sponsored attraction.
The list, here necessarily condensed, is one of impressive musical achievements, which many an artist of a more placid temperament than Mr. Stokowski’s would have considered ample to insure his fame.
But the slender, once golden-locked, now white-thatched Leopold is and always was a restless fellow, a bundle of nervous energy, an insatiable lover of experiment, innovation and–the limelight.
Those traits began to come to the surface in 1922, when he had been bossing the Philadelphia band for ten years. About that time he seemed no longer satisfied with merely playing to his audiences–he started talking to them.
There were (and still are) two groups of Philadelphia Orchestra subscribers–the Friday afternoon crowd, consisting largely of stuffy dowagers, and the Saturday night clientele, composed mostly of persons genuinely interested in music.
The old society gals went to the Friday matinees because it was the thing to do. While “that dear, handsome boy” and his men on the platform were discoursing Beethoven, Schubert and Wagner, the ladies swapped gossip, recipes and lamented the scarcity of skillful, loyal but inexpensive domestics.
It was at one of those whispering bees (your reporter, who was there, swears it really happened) that, during the playing of a gossamer pianissimo passage, a subscriber informed her neighbor in a resonant contralto:
“I always mix butter with MINE!” Mr. Stokowski did not address the audience on that occasion. He gave his first lecture at another concert, and then he scolded the women not for talking but for applauding.
Many of the Friday afternoon customers were in such a rush to catch trains for their Main Line suburbs that they seldom remained long enough to give conductor and orchestra a well-deserved ovation. So nobody ever quite knew whether the dead-pan Stoky was in earnest or moved by an impish sense of humor when, following the usual thin smattering of applause, he said:
“This strange beating together of hands has no meaning, and to me it is very disturbing. I do not like it. It destroys the mood my colleagues and I have been trying to create with our music.”
Shortly afterward, the Philadelphia Orchestra and its blond, romantic conductor invaded New York. Their Tuesday night concerts at Carnegie Hall became the rage. The uninhibited music lovers of this town not only applauded Stoky but cheered, yelled and stamped to express their frenzied approval. He never lectured THEM.
But in Philadelphia he continued his extra-conductorial antics. When the audience hissed an ultra-modern composition, he told them: “I am glad you are hissing. It is so much better than apathy.” Another time, when they booed an atonal piece, he repeated it immediately.
He scolded the audience for coming late. He scolded them for leaving early. Once he scolded them for coughing. They continued the rasping noise. After the intermission, on Stoky’s orders, the 100-odd men of the orchestra walked out on the stage barking as if in the last stages of an epidemic bronchial disease.
All those didoes promptly made the front page. Thereafter Mr. Stokowski, who had tasted blood, or rather, printer’s ink, came out on the average of once a month with a new notion to astound the Quakers.
He shocked them with a demand for Sunday concerts–then a heresy in Philadelphia. He changed the seating arrangement of the orchestra. He discarded the wooden amphitheatre on which, since the dark symphonic ages, the players had sat in tiers, and put them on chairs directly on the stage. Then he shuffled the men, making the cellos change places with the second violins, the battery with the basses. There must have been some merit in all this switching, for several conductors copied it.
Next he announced that light was a distraction at a concert. Henceforth, the Philadelphia Orchestra would play in darkness. Wails of dismay from the Friday afternoon dowagers. How on earth was any one going to see what her friends were wearing?
At the next matinee the Academy of Music was black as a crypt. On the stage, at each of the players’ desks, hung a small, green-shaded light. Then Mr. Stokowski walked out on the podium. The moment he had mounted the dais, a spotlight was trained on his head, turning his hair into a glittering golden halo. The ladies forgot all about their friends’ dresses. Why, the darling boy looked like an angel descended into a tomb to waken the dead!
Stoky explained to the press that the spot was necessary to enable his men to follow the play of his facial expressions.
Most conductors make their appearance in a leisurely manner. Carrying the stick, they stride out on the platform, acknowledge the audience’s reception with a courtly bow, say a few kind words to the men, and when musicians and listeners have composed themselves, begin the concert.
Leopold changed all that. Leander-like, he leaped from the wings, dashed to the center of the stage, nodded curtly to the customers, then accepted the baton which was handed to him, with a flourish, by one of the viola players, and, before you could say “Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart,” plunged into the opening number.
His audiences, particularly the ladies, doted on his conducting technique. His slim, youthful, virile figure was held erect, his feet remained still as if nailed to the floor, while his arms went through a series of sensuously compelling, always graceful motions. The view from the back was enhanced by the fact that the tailor who cut his morning and evening coats was almost as great as Stoky himself. And his hands! Ah, my dear, those hands—-!
There was so much ecstatic comment on those slender, nervous, expressive hands that Mr. Stokowski decided to give the gals a full, unhampered view. He did away with the baton.
About the same time he invented a new way of rehearsing the orchestra–the remote-control method. An assistant conductor wielded the stick while Stoky sat in the rear of the dark hall manipulating an intricate system of colored lights that made known his wishes to his understudy on the platform.
Mr. Stokowski is inordinately fond of gadgets and fancies himself as quite a technical expert. When he first conducted for the radio he strenuously objected to the arrangement whereby the engineers in the control room had the last word as to the volume of sound that was to go out on the air.
Radio executives pacified him by rigging up an elaborate set of dials on his desk. These he happily twirled, completely unaware that the doodads were dead.
Meanwhile–and please don’t lose sight of this cardinal fact–he made transcendently beautiful music. His stature as a conductor grew with the years and so did the repertoire of scores he conducted from memory. This feat involved heartbreaking work, for his memory, while good, is not unusually retentive. In the middle years of his career, he devoted from ten to twelve hours a day to studying scores.
In periods when the Stokowski brain was unproductive of new stunts, his private life and his recurrent rows with the directors of the orchestra about matters of salary and control kept him in the papers.
His divorce from Mme. Olga Samaroff, the pianist, a Texan born as Lucy Hickenlooper, whom he married in the dim days when he conducted in Cincinnati, provided Rittenhouse Square with chit-chat for a whole winter. So did his marriage to Evangeline Brewster Johnson, an extremely wealthy, eccentric and independent young woman, who later divorced him.
Mr. Stokowski’s doings of the last few years can no longer be classed as minor-league musical sensations. They have become Hot Hollywood Stuff. First, there was his appearance in films. Then his collaboration with Mickey Mouse. Then his friendship with Greta Garbo. Then his five-month sentimental journey over half of Europe with the Duse of the screen. Today he is as big a feature of the fan magazines as Clark Gable and Robert Taylor.
Upon his return from Europe in August, Stoky made the most amusing remark of a long amusing career. He told this reporter:
“I am not interested in publicity.”
XXV
SERGE KOUSSEVITZKY
In the official biographies of Serge Alexandrovitch Koussevitzky you will find that the boss of the Boston Symphony learned the art and mystery of conducting at the Royal Hochschule in Berlin under the great Artur Nikisch, but in this town there lives and breathes a rather well-known Russian pianist who tells a different story.
Long ago, says this key-tickler, when he was a youth, he was hired by Koussevitzky, then also a young fellow, to play the piano scores of the entire standard symphony repertoire.
He pounded away by the hour, the day and the week, while Koussevitzky conducted, watching himself in a set of three tall mirrors in a corner of the drawing room of his Moscow home.
The job lasted just about a year, and our pianist has never looked at a conductor since.
There’s also an anecdote to the effect that, much earlier, when Serge was still a little boy in his small native town in the province of Tver, in northern Russia, he would arrange the parlor chairs in rows and, with some score open in front of him, conduct them. Once in a while he’d stop short and berate the chairs. Then little Serge’s language was something awful.
Whether these stories are true or not, the fact remains that Mr. Koussevitzky became a conductor and a great one–one of the greatest. The yarn of the mirrors is the most credible of the lot, for the Russian batonist’s platform appearance is so meticulous and his movements are so obviously studied to produce the desired effects that he seems to conduct before an imaginary pier glass.
For elegant tailoring he has no peer among orchestral chiefs, except, perhaps, Mr. Stokowski. It’s a toss-up between the two. Both are as sleek as chromium statues. Mr. Stokowski, slim, lithe, romantic in a virile way, looks as a poet should look, but never does. Mr. Koussevitzky, broad-shouldered, narrow-waisted, extremely military and virile in a dramatic way, looks as a captain of dragoons in civvies should have looked but never did.
Mr. Koussevitzy’s conductorial gestures are literally high, wide and handsome. His wing-spread, so to speak, is much larger than that of either Mr. Stokowski or Mr. Toscanini, and he has a greater repertoire of unpredictable motions than both of them put together. Time cannot wither, nor custom stale, the infinite variety of his shadow boxing.
Those who knew his history look upon Mr. Koussevitzky’s joyous, unrestrained gymnastics with tolerant eyes. They realize that, for years, he was forced to hide his fine figure and athletic prowess from thousands of potential admirers.
For Mr. Koussevitzky, before he became a conductor, was a world-famous performer on the double bass, that big growling brute of an instrument popularly known as the bull fiddle. In those days all that was visible of his impressive person was his head, one of his shoulders and his arms.
He didn’t want to be a bull fiddler any more than you or you or you, and it’s greatly to his credit and indicative of his iron will, consuming ambition and extraordinary musicianship that he developed, according to authoritative opinion, into the best bull fiddler of his time.
Here’s what happened:
Serge was the son of a violinist who scratched away for a meager living in a third-rate theatre orchestra. The boy, intensely musical, wished to be a fiddler like his father. When he was fourteen, his family gave him their blessing, which was all they had to give, and sent him to Moscow to try for a scholarship at the Philharmonic School.
He arrived with three rubles in his pocket. At the school he was told that the only available scholarship was one in bull fiddling. Serge tried for it and won. He was, so far as is known, the first musician to make the barking monster into a solo instrument.
An overburdened troubadour, he dragged the cumbersome thing all over Russia and played it in recitals with amazing success. In 1903, when Mr. Koussevitzky was twenty-nine (he’s sixty-eight now but looks a mettlesome fifty), the Czar decorated him–the only instance in history of a decoration bestowed for bull fiddling.
That same year, while giving a concert in Moscow, the virtuoso happened to look into the audience and his eyes met those of a stunning brunette in the front row. The owner of the lovely eyes, Natalya Konstantinova Ushkova, became his wife two years later.
Natalya, the daughter of a wealthy merchant and a rich girl in her own right, promised him anything he wanted for a wedding gift. “Give me a symphony orchestra.” was Koussevitzky’s startling request. The bride was taken aback, for it was with the bull fiddle that he had wooed and won her and she hated to see him give it up, but she kept her word.
Now here is where our old pianist comes in. It was at that time, he says, that Mr. Koussevitzky sent for him and began an intensive course of study before the triple mirror.
A year or so later Natalya hired eighty-five of the best musicians in Moscow. After a season of rehearsals Mr. Koussevitzky took his band on tour aboard a steamer–a little gift from his father-in-law.
They rode up and down the Volga. Every evening the vessel–a sort of musical showboat–tied up at a different city, town or village and the orchestra gave a concert, often before peasants and small-town folk who had never heard symphony music before. In seven years Mr. Koussevitzky and his men traveled some 3,000 miles.
Came the revolution. Kerensky ordered Koussevitzy and his men: “Keep up with your music.” They did, but it wasn’t easy. It was a terribly severe winter; the country was in the killing grip of cold and famine.
Koussevitzky and his players starved for weeks on end. The boss conducted in mittens. The men wore mittens, too, but they had holes in them, so they could finger the strings and keys of their instruments.
The Bolsheviks made Mr. Koussevitzky director of the state orchestras which, in those early Soviet days, were at low musical ebb. He labored in that job for three years, from 1917 to 1920, but he was out of sympathy with the Lenin-Trotzky regime and asked permission to leave the country. It was refused because officials said, “Russia needs your music.”
The fiery Koussevitzky told the Government that, unless he were allowed to travel abroad, he’d never play or conduct another note in Russia. They let him go.
Mr. Koussevitzky says that the Bolsheviks robbed him of about a million in money, land and other property. In illustration of the state of things that impelled him to leave his native land, he likes to tell this story:
A minor Bolshevik official came in one day to check up on the affairs of the orchestra. “Who are those people?” he asked, pointing to a group of players at the conductor’s left. “Those,” said Koussevitzky, “are the first violins.”
“And those over there?” asked the inspector, indicating a group at the conductor’s right. “The second violins,” was the reply.
“What!” yelled the official. “Second violins in a Soviet state orchestra? Clear them out!”
Mr. Koussevitzky went to Paris, where he conducted a series of orchestral concerts and performances of Moussorgsky’s “Boris Godounoff” and Tschaikowsky’s “Pique Dame” at the Opera. Between 1921 and 1924 he also appeared in Barcelona, Rome and Berlin. In Paris he established a music publishing house (still in existence), which issued the works of such modern Russian composers as Stravinsky, Scriabine, Medtner, Prokofieff and Rachmaninoff.
In 1924, the offer of a $50,000 salary and the opportunity of rebuilding the Boston Symphony Orchestra, which had sadly deteriorated since the days of Dr. Karl Muck, lured him to this country.
American customs, he now admits, at first appalled him. He was amazed to find musicians smoking in intermissions at rehearsals and concert. This he called “an insult to art.” He forbade smoking. The players raised an unholy rumpus, but Koussevitzky persisted. The men haven’t taken a puff in Symphony Hall since that time.
The next unpopular move he made was to fire a number of the old standbys who had sat in the orchestra for most of its forty-four-year history. “I vant yongk blott!” he cried in his then still very thick accent. “If dose old chentlemen vant to sleep, let dem sleep in deir houses!”
The Boston music lovers didn’t like it. To them the Symphony is a sacred cow and they regarded the older members in the light of special pets. But when, at the opening of the new season, they heard a brilliant, completely rejuvenated orchestra, they forgave the new conductor. Since then, he has restored the Symphony to its old-time glory. Today Beacon Hill has no greater favorite than Serge Alexandrovitch Koussevitzky.
The orchestra men, too, learned to like him. They discovered that, with all his public histrionics, he was on the level as a musician. He is a merciless task master, but in rehearsals he gives himself no airs. Dressed in an old pair of pants and a disreputable brown woolen sweater, which he has worn in private since the day he landed in Boston, he works like a stevedore. When he, the pants and the sweater had been with the Symphony ten years, the men gave him a testimonial dinner.
Next to Mr. Toscanini he’s the world’s most temperamental conductor, but he has the ability to keep himself in check–when he wants to. “Koussevitzky,” says Ernest Newman, the eminent English music critic, “has a volcanic temperament, yet never have I known it to run away with him. It is precisely when his temperament is at the boiling point that his hand on the regulator is steadiest.”
At a concert in Carnegie Hall four years ago he gave a dramatic demonstration of self-control. He was conducting Debussy’s “Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun,” when smoke from an incinerator fire in a neighboring building penetrated the hall. The smoke grew dense. People rose, rushed for the exits in near-panic. Women screamed.
He stopped the orchestra, turned to the audience, held up his hand and shouted:
“Come back! Sit down! Sit down–all of you! Everything is all right!”
The customers meekly resumed their seats. Mr. Koussevitzky swung ’round and continued playing Debussy’s brooding, sensuous dreampiece as if nothing had happened.
Because he has done so much, both as conductor and publisher, for living composers (he is the high priest of the Sibelius cult), he has been called a modernist. The label infuriates him.
“Nonsense!” he snarls. “I’m not a modernist and I’m not a classicist. I’m a musician! The first movement of the Ninth Symphony of Beethoven is the greatest music ever written and George Gershwin’s ‘Rhapsody in Blue’ is a masterpiece.”
“There you are! Make the best of it!”
[Transcriber’s Notes:
a. The spelling of names and places are noted as having changed between the publication of this book and the year 2004: Chapter I (Palestrina):
‘Michael Angelo’ vs. ‘Michaelangelo’ (also in Chapter VI) Chapter II (Bach):
Leipsic vs. Leipzig (repeated in following chapters) Lueneberg vs. Lueneburg
Chapter X (Mendelssohn):
‘Dreifaltigkeit Kirch-hof’ vs. ‘Dreifaltigkeit Kirchhof’ ‘Wiemar’ vs. ‘Weimar’
Chapter XIII (Berlioz):
Academie vs. Academie
Chapter XIV (Verdi):
‘Sant’ Agata’ vs. ‘Sant’Agata’
‘Apeninnes’ vs. ‘Apennines’
‘Corsia di Servi’ vs. ‘Corsia dei Servi’ Chpater XXI (McDowell):
Frankfort vs. Frankfurt (Germany)
Peterboro vs. Peterborough (New Hampshire) * * * * *
b. Spelling errors found, not corrected: beseiged (besieged);
Esterhazy (spelled unaccented twice) vs. Esterhazy (spelled with accent 6 times)
Carreno vs. Carreno (Teresa; each spelling used once.) Academie (Academie)
Scandanavia (Scandinavia)
* * * * *
c. Obvious spelling errors corrected: Lueneberg (in 1 place) to Lueneburg (this spelling found in 3 places) Febuary to February (One day in February …); obsorbed to absorbed (… soon became so absorbed …); polish to Polish (… a Polish emigre …); Intrumental to Instrumental (Instrumental music no longer satisfied …); Opportunties to opportunities (… greater opportunties for an ambitious …);
financee to fiancee (… assisted by his financee …);
turing to turning (… turing his hair …) * * * * *
d. Chapter numbers (Roman numerals) omitted for start of chapters on Toscanini, Stokowski and Koussevitzky, but were present in the Table of Contents; so the proper numbers (XXIII, XXIV, XXV) were entered in the proper places.]