4. RETROSPECTIVE
16. Backstage at the Opera
Opera, as everyone knows, is a colossal undertaking with activity in itspreparation on many levels. Reporters do well to keep alert for any wisp ofscandal, which is as likely as anything else to be a case of the acting up of adiva or world-class tenor declaring her or his privileges. I seem to have accumulated some memorable experiences that have little or nothing to dowith the music or anything else essential that goes on during performance.(Opera by virtue of its libretto and stage business can be involved withworldly events and come into conflict with them, for example, Shostakovich's Lady Macbeth and the attack on it by the powers that be which Imentioned in chapter 1.) I had intended writing them up as unconnected paragraphs, each devoted to a given work, person, or subject, but I was surprised at the number of instances in which two or more successive ones actually connected with one another.
My most vivid recollection from my earliest experiences as an opera-viewer is that of attending my first contemporary opera, which happenedto have been nothing less than Alban Berg's Wozzeck at the old Metropolitan Opera House in New York in 1931, presented not by the Met, butby the Philadelphia Orchestra under Leopold Stokowski, who had also conducted the League of Composers' Rite of Spring the previous year in the same place. (The opera was not done in England until 1952!) The story I have to tell (a very inconsequential aside) concerns the soprano Anne Roselle, who sang the leading female role of Marie. It seems my rich auntand uncle (those who had given me, when I was eleven, their upright pianowhen they acquired a grand and had there by made my musical career possible) had on several occasions invited me to occupy a seat in their box at Carnegie Hall at Roselle's recitals or to meet her socially at their home. Shewas among several important musicians they knew, and my aunt thought
Another occasion involving Wozzeck had to do with a Columbia Records LP of Marie's long solo in the form of variations conducted by Eugene Ormandy with his Philadelphia Orchestra. I do not know how many of mycolleagues in the critical fraternity owned the score, pretty difficult to readin the late forties when the record came out. But I was proud owner of boththe piano version and the orchestra score. Listening with a score I was suddenly perplexed; surely I was not listening to Elgar's Enigma Variations. Was I being confronted with another set of variations which, like his, hada trick to it? The enigma here was how to find the theme. Where was the missing theme? This somewhat smart-alecky approach on my part was the burden of my review in Saturday Review—I was eager to display my one-upmanship by pointing out the mistake.[1] Not unexpectedly, all hell brokeloose, as the saying goes. The A and R man at Columbia, David Oppen-heim, was someone with whom I had enjoyed a long and warm friendship, dating from well before his accession to such a powerful job. “Why didn'tyou call me before you spilled the beans?” he remonstrated on the phone. Columbia naturally had to withdraw the LP. If they could find the missingpiece of tape to splice in, it would be no more than a relatively straightforward matter of transferring the corrected tape to disks. But if they couldnot find it, they would be obliged to have the whole thing played and recorded all over again. (I was never privy to the information of what they did, they were too angry at me.) To this day I still wonder whether I shouldhave done precisely what I did. What is the place of the moral obligation infriendship when duty dictates otherwise? Should I have called David firstso that he could quietly withdraw the recording?
A brief work—fifteen minutes in duration—of quite another kind, sometimes referred to as an opera, was staged along with the Rite of Spring at the latter's 1930 American premiere, also at the Metropolitan Opera House. It was Schoenberg's Die gliickliche Hand. (I suppose it translates “lucky hand,” but that sounds so trivial.) It is his Opus 18, and though it is
It is a long way from Wozzeck to Stravinsky's Rake's Progress. Whatthey have in common is their status in the repertory as surely two of the greatest operas of the twentieth century. I was in touch with Stravinskyduring the gestation period of the Rake and also during the preparationsfor the American premiere at the old Metropolitan Opera House on 14 February 1953.1 had met Stravinsky in Paris just before World War II, and by September 1939 when he fled Europe things were such that he had to travellight. Consequently there were old records and some publications difficultto find here that he did not have, and I was happy to be able to provide himwith copies. The first thing I heard about the libretto of the Rake while itwas still being written took the form of a rumor that was circulating withinthe “inner circle” to the effect that the librettists, W. H. Auden and Chester Kallman, had implicated the unaware Stravinsky in a homosexual in-joke. It was said that Hogarth's bearded lady would be laughed off the stage. Infact, the costume department made her look quite fetching with her shortmarcelled beard, and she turned out to be a most sympathetic character, especially in Act 3 at the end of the auction scene, when she renounces Tom Rakewell and bids Anne Truelove to return to him.
Naturally there was much interest among Stravinsky's acolytes and fellow musicians in the progress of the Rake, his first large-scale opera. Itmust have been about 1948 when he agreed to an evening at our apartmenton East Twenty-eighth Street in New York where he would read at the piano the first act and barely completed second with the aid of Nicolas Nabokov. The audience was to be a small and, of course, chosen group fromthe circle of his closest friends and admirers. Since it was a warm spring day
Stravinsky had a successful visit to Germany around the time of theRake and people there were talking of “Oedipus Rake's Progress.” Perhapshis stay in middle Europe left its mark on him, for in casting about for a soprano to sing the role of Anne in his new opera he was impressed by a performance of Hilda Gueden at the Metropolitan in Strauss's Fledermaus. Ihappened to be reviewing the performance for the New York Herald Tribune, and during the intermission he asked me whether I thought shewould be a good choice for Anne Truelove and wasn't her high C great? (Hewas thinking evidently of the big Cabaletta.) She did not seem to me quiteright for the part to the extent that I knew it. (Perhaps it was her accent—something which in view of his own he was not sensitive to.) But I had toagree about the high C and that she was turning in quite a good performance. She did sing the role of Anne at the Met. I myself did not change mymind about her suitability for the role, but I have to admit she sang well.
Sir Rudolf Bing was the company's director when the Rake was given. He was quite outspoken and could be nasty at times. When he had the occasion to talk informally to the critics, which was quite often, he would letslip some hints with regard to what displeased him in the running of the opera house in the hopes they would get into the papers without his beingofficially responsible. In those days contemporary operas were very muchtoken affairs, something the Met had to do to retain its prestige, and in the case of Stravinsky's opera, as with others, Bing would have welcomed unfavorable comments in the press so as to have some support for doing evenfewer of them. (Things are very different now with James Levine as musicdirector.) It was not beyond Bing, moreover, to bad-mouth some of his topflight singers, especially the world-class prima donnas and celebrated tenors, in the hope that our reports would help bring them down a peg or two. He was very strict about having the regular Met singers available evenduring an entire extra-long season. In 1951, for example, one of the Met's
In the forties and fifties the Juilliard School of Music had an active Opera Theater under the direction of Frederick Cohen which did operas notin the usual repertory and experimented with staging. We exchangedwords in the Tribune over his direction of Verdi's Falstaff. I could understand that Cohen must have been discouraged by the way in which operasingers assumed a statuesque stance in those days, conveying visually nosense of the action and feeling about which they were singing. But he wentto an extreme, maintaining that since he was employing the empty stage characteristic of Shakespeare's day, the singers, as he put it, “had to createthe illusions with their acting alone.” “Accordingly,” to quote my own reaction from the Tribune article the Sunday following the first performance, “the participants were required to provide a visual continuity of constant gesturing, lurching, flopping, jumping, and parading. Up to Falstaff's soliloquy opening Act in, there was scarcely a moment when anyone sat orstood still.” It was my opinion as expressed in my report that the authentic “empty stage” did not warrant the rationalization that it had to be compensated for by such antics.
Shortly after World War II there was also an attempt at the Metropolitan Opera to put some zing into the stage action and get rid of the drab, ancient sets. One of the first operas to undergo the new treatment was Mozart's Cosi fan tutte with pink sets to italicize the opera's sexy content. Reviewing it in the Tribune I found it entirely too cute and too much likea Broadway musical. The decor reminded me of a chain of restaurants called “Longchamps,” which was dedicated to dainty repasts. Not long afterwardsmy wife and I were invited to dinner at the home of a fairly well known traditional poet, Jeanne Starr Untermeyer, with whom I had struck up afriendship when we were both guests at the MacDowell Colony. Lo and behold, the other dinner guest turned out to be the very same Fritz Stiedrywho had conducted the Met performance of the Mozart. Obviously, the whole point of the occasion was for him to try to convince me that Mozartoperas in the composer's own day were regarded in the same way that weregard Broadway shows. He failed to do so.
Paul Hindemith extracted a very fine symphony from his opera Mathisder Maler consisting of the music for the Isenheim triptych of Alsace. Itwas played with a certain success in Nazi Germany in 1934. Around the same time, however, the government was coming around to the view that
The Boston Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Richard Burgin gave the first American performance of the Symphony Mathis der Maler, consisting of excerpts from the opera, about the same time as the crisis over Hindemith's music was unfolding in Germany. The opera itselfwas not done in America until 1956 in a nonprofessional performance bystudents of Boston University, which was surprisingly good since it was directed by the indefatigable Sarah Caldwell. It was truly amazing how muchcame through despite all the handicaps. Economically staged against an all-purpose backdrop, with movable props for scenic changes, the productioncould no more than suggest the rich tableaux vivants. Moreover, the pitcould only hold an orchestra half the size of the minimum requirement, and so the resourceful Caldwell conceived of the idea of putting herselfand the full orchestra backstage, while the singing was piped back to herpodium. Invisible to the singers she could not propel them forward at intense moments, and the muffled orchestra, a product of the relatively primitive electronics of those days, was delinquent in the highs and generally incapable of the necessary weight. But with some imagination one couldget a pretty good idea of the opera, and the impression I carried away was that it is one of a handful of the great twentieth-century operas. I find ithard to understand why it is not in the active repertory. It moves swiftlyand has the story and visual appurtenances of successful grand opera: astreet fight between Lutherans and Catholics; a real battle (the Peasant War); church pageantry; the burning of Lutheran books; and an allegorical vision. Part of the reason may be that Hindemith is out of fashion. He didhimself great harm when he became involved, later in his career, in apedantry that led him to make a catalog of what he did right and what he
Mishaps are naturally legion in opera performances since so many different departments are involved, but the public is unaware of most of them. Occasionally, however, it does notice them. Earlier I mentioned the singerwho was trapped on the stalled Long Island Railroad during the first act ofLucia di Lammermoor when he should have been onstage singing. The Met management has to be prepared for things going awry. On quite another wavelength there was the pristine white horse on which Lohengrinwas mounted that decided to empty its bladder in full view of the audienceat an instance of high drama. In a crowd scene in Aida I saw a chorister faintand other members of the chorus precipitously change their formation tocreate a screen so she could be carried out with as little notice as possible, while the performance continued without a hitch. Then there was the custom of the house to create the illusion of the magic fire at the end of Wagner's Die Walkure by having steam highlighted with red lighting so thatspectators in the first few rows would feel as if it were drizzling.
Schoenberg worked on Moses and Aaron for two years ending in 1932and returned to it in 1950, completing the music for only two of the threeacts before his death in 1951. He was quoted as saying fifty years wouldpass before it would be staged. Surprisingly, it had a concert performancein 1954 by the Northwestern German Radio Orchestra under the directionof Hans Rosbaud, who also conducted the first stage performance in 1957 in Zurich. This performance was recorded by Columbia Masterworks, which sent out a news release with a diagram of the twelve-tone set of the opera and its transpositions from “the album notes” of Milton Babbitt. The Twelve transpositions were listed in the customary rectangular box byletter-name. Incidentally, Babbitt was still in those days using a numbering from one to twelve, and had not yet instituted the convention of labeling the first note zero. Analytic information of this caliber was altogether unusual for a press release from a commercial establishment. Perhaps Columbia realized that an album of this sort was for connoisseurs. In general, while it cannot be said the opera has been a roaring success I have found the degree of tolerance and interest unexpected, especially in the recent performances at the Met. Perhaps the newly installed surtitles help, because Schoenberg's libretto, which he himself wrote, is absorbing and thought-provoking.
Some of us may have a special place in our memory for Margaret Har-shaw's Isolde because she usually sang alto roles. It seems the first time she
17. A Tale of Two Conductors
Koussevitzky and Mitropoulos
During Serge Koussevitzky's lifetime I would find fault from time to timewith the freedom he would take with the scores he conducted, but as I lookback I think those transgressions were immaterial relative to his essential contribution and I find I appreciate him more. As a newspaper reviewer Iwas in a position to make my feelings known, and I became aware of his absolute intolerance of criticism of any kind. But as a composer I now amconvinced that he was a big man, and it is difficult to find anyone of his stature and influence who is currently dedicated as he was to the cause, to the sheer crisis of survival, of the American composer. He was not the first Boston Symphony Orchestra (BSO) conductor to promote the avant-garde. Even before 1920 the conductor Max Fiedler terrified New Yorkerswhen he descended upon them for the orchestra's regular visits. As Paul Rosenfeld reported somewhere they “woke critical agonies” with Vincentd'Indy. The orchestra's programming was the subject of many “sarcasmsover the ‘rarefied taste’ of the cultivated city opposite Cape Cod.”
Koussevitzky paid some obeisance to the new music from Europe, butthis did not keep him from his dedication to American music. He made Boston a tremendously exciting place musically, aligning himself with the creative talents of the region and actually making the city his home. Hisstyle as a citizen of Boston offers quite a contrast to the recent maestro Seiji Ozawa, at the time of this writing on the way to retirement from the BSO. Ozawa's primary commitment has remained to Japan. When once requiredto mention the name of a prominent young Boston composer in a radio interview, in connection with the fact that the orchestra would later play hiswork, he had to be prompted before he could come up with it, though hewas scarcely old enough at the time to be pardoned on the basis of old-agememory loss. But Ozawa's record as a Boston citizen is on the high side
However much Koussevitzky became part of the Boston scene, after aquarter of a century in the area his speech still sounded as if he had migrated there recently. His malapropisms provided a rich store of conversational material for the orchestral musicians whose normal dialogue leanedheavily, as it still does, on the supply of jokes. One of Koussie's pronouncements that I particularly like was delivered at the Berkshire Music Center, the orchestra's summer school at Tanglewood, during the meeting of a conducting class he was presenting. Listening to students demonstrating their conducting skills in turn, he was particularly incensed by one of them Ishall call Johnny. He stopped him in midstream and with a red face thatmade him appear on the verge of apoplexy, he shouted, “Johnny, took it atempo and kept it.” (In case you need a translation—some people do— “take a tempo and keep it.”)
Conductors need charisma, as everyone knows, and they have to developsome semblance of it if they have none to start with. Koussevitzky was anindividual who had somewhat more than average. This enabled him toforestall the disapproval that would normally emanate from the conservative wing in reaction to his programming. It also helped him to get extrarehearsals when he needed them to cope with the demands of new music. Despite receiving the added time for preparing new works he had troublewith difficult passages because his technique was limited. Toscanini alsohad the charisma to get extra rehearsals. But he used them to worry the same limited number of traditional pieces to such an extent that Thomsonfound himself “lulled to sleep by the perfection of the machine.” Kousse-vitzky's distortions, one may be surprised to hear a composer like myselfsay, could be endearing.
Once, for a review I was writing, I compared several LP versions of Copland's Appalachian Spring and found Koussevitzky annoyingly slowing upin certain spots because he was evidently having difficulty negotiating measures of seven beats. But despite this I thought his the best, even though itwas a reissue of an old seventy-eight rpm. What redeemed him was notonly the sound he got from the orchestra but the conviction that somehow communicated itself over the loudspeaker. His dedication to new music wasnot just a token gesture; one had the feeling he believed in it. He also be
Koussevitzky was prone to exaggerate. He thought nothing of saying oneweek that he would play “die grea-eatest” symphony of our time, Copland's third, and the next week saying exactly the same thing of the latest Shostakovich essay in the genre. And there are some estimable individualsin the contemporary music world who believe “exaggeration” is an epithet that may also be assigned to the whole reputation of Koussevitzky as savior of the American composer. It is argued that the insistence on the Boston maestro in this role occludes the remarkable contribution of someonelike Dimitri Mitropoulos. The year that Koussevitzky retired from the BSO Mitropoulos acceded in New York to the conductor's chair of the Philharmonic. Koussevitzky regarded Mitropoulos as a kindred spirit and whilehe (Koussevitzky) was still in Boston invited the still young Greek musician as guest conductor. Mitropoulos admittedly played a lesser role than Koussie in advancing new music. Better public relations would not onlyhave enabled Mitropoulos to give his support to new music on a scale comparable to that maintained by Koussevitzky, but would have enabled him to
Whenever Koussevitzky is lauded to the skies for his contribution, someof us think of Mitropoulos, whose name is scarcely recalled. I am, of course, biased since Mitropoulos was one of my benefactors. But this gave me the opportunity to watch him from up close and to reinforce my admiration forhim. The circumstances of a commission he gave me are revealing. In 1950he was present at a chamber music concert the program for which includedmy early Quartet in C Major for woodwinds—a typical “neoclassic” workif you used the expression. It was undoubtedly the first work of mine hehad ever heard, and at the intermission he asked me right then and there to write a piece for him to conduct at the Philharmonic—stipulating substantial terms. Now it is well known that Mitropoulos's leanings were inthe direction of the products of the Second Viennese School, so my immediate response was, “You can't mean it, my quartet is in C major.” He assured me he recognized quality and craftsmanship in whatever idiom they manifest themselves and since Milton Babbitt was present and conversingwith us and I still looked skeptical at such an impromptu decision, he said that Babbitt would be our witness. I had had so many empty promises from instrumentalists and conductors in intermission exchanges like this that I did not really believe him until the confirming letter that soon arrived. Iunderstand he took the money for such commissions out of his own salary. A new work would give him some publicity in return, but this was not hisgoal, since the serial works he habitually programmed were what contributed to the unpopularity that led ultimately to the termination of hiscontract. He did not have Koussevitzky's PR skills for dramatizing the adventurous components of his programs.
Some readers may wonder why I have not brought up the name of Pierre Boulez sooner in the present context. Quite properly he declared that symphony audiences should be introduced to the traditional twentieth-century repertory before being exposed to the newest music. I was nonetheless notaltogether happy with the way he implemented this objective. There wascondescension in his remarks (he did do a lot of talking to the audience) when he conducted Berg's Three Pieces Op. 6 for orchestra (1914) in the
Like other foreign conductors in America, Boulez spent too much timeabroad to have the kind of close relation with young local composers that Koussevitzky and Mitropoulos had. Neither of them was a world-class composer but they did, as part of their music education, compose—Koussevitzky light-weight pieces for his instrument, contrabass, Mitropoulosmore serious pieces, I am told, though I never saw any. This accounted fora certain sympathy with composers and the ability of both conductors toidentify with them in the United States. Both conductors were available tonurture composers who were writing pieces for them.
I took my unfinished commission Ideas of Order to Mitropoulos fromtime to time in his modest room in the Great Northern Hotel a few doorsdown from Carnegie Hall where he purposely chose an austere lifestyle. His suggestions were useful. He was still making suggestions when the piece was in rehearsal, and at lunch after the first rehearsal, which was tobe followed by the second rehearsal in the afternoon, he made a proposal that was unheard of then and would be even more amazing today: namely, to take some precious and costly rehearsal time to try a little revision thathe thought would improve the music's flow. It seems there was a string line that was interrupted by a widely spaced wind chord before continuing. Mitropoulos wanted to try leaving out the wind chord, so that the linewould not be interrupted. I explained that I did not consider it an interruption but a means of siphoning out a salient sonority at which the string counterpoint had arrived in order to dwell on it briefly, just as one mightitalicize or otherwise draw out an important and striking phrase in a sentence. Well, he would try cutting the chord out and see how we liked it.(Another conductor might have just peremptorily made the change without consulting the composer and over all his objections, rather than useprecious rehearsal time to try it.) But at the rehearsal nothing of the sorttook place, and when I asked him afterwards why not, he said that in termsof his own indoctrination this type of music was something in which hewas not well informed. It was not his forte. He was a stranger to it. However, with the aid of my explanation he had been able to understand the reason for the chord. On another occasion he spent over an hour of rehearsal time reorchestrating a passage to achieve a more convincing endingin a score of one of my fellow composers with the collaboration of the composer. I was equally struck by how much Koussevitzky was involved withthe young composers he commissioned when I heard from Copland how
Koussevitzky and Mitropoulos were both approachable human beingsfor a young composer whereas the average conductor with an international reputation was like royalty who could be approached only through his (orher) vassals. My experience with Erich Leinsdorf was particularly frustrating in this regard, though I must admit that in the end his performance ofmy Polyphony with the BSO was quite creditable. When he was rehearsing a new piece with the composer present he always consigned the latterto silence during the entire proceeding. I could not make any suggestionsto the conductor or players, which is what a composer usually does at a rehearsal. Leinsdorf asked me to save my comments and after the rehearsalwe would have a conference. (I suppose with the limited rehearsal time aconductor usually gets there is a perfectly good rationale behind the practice.) The conference was very businesslike with a recording secretary, the assistant conductor, the orchestra librarian, and of course myself. If I saida given passage or instrument marked / (forte) was too loud he would instruct the librarian to revise the parts to read mf (mezzo-forte). The secretary also kept a record of any of my comments Leinsdorf thought shouldbe conveyed to the orchestra. If it was after the last rehearsal he would havethe secretary put notes on the stands conveying my remarks and anythinghe thought of. This was not surprisingly the subject of many barbs on the part of the musicians.
Boulez conveniently disengaged himself from his obligation to new American music early in his Philharmonic conductorship by denouncing whatwas currently being written by American composers. He still programmed American chamber works at what were called, with a nod perhaps to the avant-garde periodical in Princeton, Perspective Encounters. (They becameknown as “Rug Concerts” because with the limited number of seats the overflow was provided with rugs to sit on the floor.) At these concerts Boulez could take advantage of the public relations device of having the composers present to discuss their work.
One of the most disastrous blows to American music's support in the second half of the twentieth century was Leonard Bernstein's decisionto devote his not inconsiderable musicianship and conducting prowess to Mahler. Like Koussevitzky he had clout, he could win the public over toany cause he desired, and most of all, twentieth-century American music
Among Stravinsky's last pronouncements was advice to today's composers that in view of the public situation in music they would do well to “go underground,” and many of us have. Such being the case, I wonderhow Boulez could have known enough to make such a blanket condemnation of our music. But even if he was right, not performing the music wasnot the proper response. Good or bad, the music must be played to keep the tradition alive. Any improvement would have had to come from performers and critics ferreting out the most promising manifestations and encouraging them, in the hope that composers would use them as a startingpoint for improvement. Not performing the music at all is the best way ofallowing the tradition to die. That tradition is kept alive even in the mostmediocre creations.
I can very well understand that there should be those who will want todeflate Koussevitzky's image because of the more inaccessible and difficultmusic that he neglected. We should be grateful that there was at least Mitropoulos who favored the composers that Koussevitzky failed to do justice
With regard to Koussevitzky's omissions, it is difficult to forgive him forthe fact that in the total of one hundred eighty-one American works presented by the BSO from 1924 to 1946—some of them conducted by Richard Burgin or the composers themselves—there is only one work by Roger Sessions, and by no means a representative one: his early Symphony in Eminor. Sessions was not a serial composer but he could be mistaken for one. His music is demanding and has a certain unyielding seriousness in amiddle European way. Moses Smith, in his book on Koussevitzky, explains that the conductor's attitude toward the music of the Second Viennese School was that “it was more difficult than any with which Koussevitzkyhad had to do,” but Smith quickly adds that the necessary pains he wouldhave had to take “must have seemed especially unrewarding because heprobably found most of the music unsympathetic to his temperament.”[3]
While I was at Harvard in the thirties I witnessed two rare occasions onwhich Koussevitzky did performances of works from the Second Viennese School. Not surprisingly they were both by Berg, the least severe of the Viennese triumvirate: the violin concerto and music from the opera Lulu. The soprano in the opera excerpt was a fine Russian singer, Olga Averino, whohad settled in the Boston region. I would meet her socially from time totime. On one occasion I brought up the subject of her Berg performance, but she shushed me and said she wanted to forget it ever happened. Neither the maestro nor the players, she said, knew what they were doing and she simply had to improvise. But this was not unusual for atonal and serialmusic in those days. Even knowledgeable musicians associated with the founding of the movement had trouble. The late Eugene Lehner, former violist of the BSO, told me that as a member of the celebrated Kolish Quartet he had played in the premiere of Berg's Lyric Suite in Vienna. Given nodoubt to exaggeration in his agitation at recalling the event, he shouted, “Not a note was right!” But it was a huge success and Koussevitzky, whohappened to have been in the audience, invited him on the spot to becomea member of the BSO.
A curious corollary to the position of conductors as dictators on the contemporary music scene is that although they are obliged to make their programs catholic as to taste, it is perfectly clear what music they prefer, and their preference is likely to influence the quality of sound they elicit fromtheir orchestras. This, in turn, may very well have an effect on composerswho want their music played by a given conductor and orchestra, and it isalso in this way that conductors will dictate the direction in which musicprogresses. Koussevitzky set before composers as a persuasive model the gorgeous tone he elicited from his Boston ensemble as well as his own leanings toward the broad Romantic symphonic style. I wonder if Coplanddid not tailor his Third Symphony to Koussevitzky's BSO manner, sincea sinewy leanness is more common to the character we had come to admire so much as defining that composer's individuality. (But of course, there was also Copland's long-standing regard for Mahler.) As for otherprominent figures in Koussevitzky's stable—Walter Piston, Roy Harris, William Schuman, and David Diamond, for instance—the imprint of Koussevitzky and the BSO on their music seems very apparent to me. There is nothing unprecedented about composers tailoring their music toperformers for whom they write. I recall one composer who was quiteelated by the Koussevitzky rendition he received, even though it imposeda Romanticism on his music that he had not intended and it was doubtfulwhether it was apposite. He commented “the air was so thick you could cutit with a knife,” and it turned out he found this was something he actuallyrelished. It was not surprising that the next time he wrote a piece for orchestra he bore this rich, full sonority in mind and indulged in it.
If there were no pressure on conductors to present programs representative of all tendencies, calamities would be less likely. They wouldeach specialize in their chosen domain and know thoroughly the portion of the repertory in which they specialized. Ideally, taste should not be arbitrated by the conductor in power; there should be music of different tendencies with sympathetic interpreters being found in each given instance. (It would mean orchestras would have to alternate conductors evenmore frequently than they do now.)
That composers are not on symphony boards is deplorable. No composer relishes the fact that conductors have so much power to arbitratetaste and that they play such an important role as disseminators of anygiven musical style they fancy. In their dealings with the typical conductor, composers also find themselves intimidated by the personality and the imperiousness even if their music has been selected by him or her for performance; they may find themselves during rehearsals tongue-tied when they
It would be hard to find a personality who better fits the description of the antithesis of Koussevitzky than Mitropoulos who was monklike, almost shy, retiring. He gave his money away to needy composers, lived verymodestly, as I have said, and seemed completely bereft of the capacity forpublic relations. Nevertheless he decided to do everything he conductedwithout the score in front of him. It was not a matter of poor eyesight as ithas been for other conductors as they get older. It was just some extra trick, as he once confided in me, to give the audience an additional show of virtuosity in order to raise its confidence, and also to enhance its image of the conductor as trapeze artist. He would even memorize if it was a contemporary work that he was never to conduct again. At rehearsal he might veryoccasionally have recourse to the miniature score for rehearsal numbers, but often he even memorized these.
I remember consulting with the Philharmonic's first violist after a rehearsal of my piece and telling him a certain line he played did not comeout sufficiently. He suggested that if it were an octave higher it would beheard better, and he said he would transpose it at the next rehearsal so Icould see how I liked it. I answered that I better tell the maestro to change it in the score. The violist assured me the way Mitropoulos memorized ascore did not take octave position into account, and sure enough in the nextrehearsal the maestro did not stop to correct the violist. His memory wasperfectly satisfied to accept it in its admittedly insignificant revision. (I donot wish to convey the impression that all octave transpositions would be
18. From My Diary
Brief Encounters
IGOR STRAVINSKY
The harpsichordist Sylvia Marlowe invited Esther and me to dinner withthe Stravinskys (Vera and Igor). Many were the travails associated with the occasion. He had called earlier to ask what kind of wine there would be, and she told him there would be a very fine Chianti. “I will bring my ownwine.” He carried his bottle of Burgundy (his favorite type of wine) withhim when he was not at the table. Sylvia served a leg of lamb of superbquality and cooked to the proper shade of pink-red, but he pushed it away, “Je mange pas d'ail” (I don't eat garlic). Ditto with the fine salad of endives. When the dessert came on, a delicious mousse au chocolat, and the maestro came up with “Je mange pas de chocolat,” it was just amazing that ourhostess was able to maintain her composure and not burst out in tears ordevelop a temper tantrum, which she later told us she felt on the verge of.
Stravinsky once confided in me that when he was orchestrating and hecame across a musical line that would traditionally be scored for violin(s) he would very likely put it into the trumpet or some other wind instrument. This must surely be one of the things that give so unique a qualityto his orchestration.
Around 1940 when Stravinsky arrived in America from France, at a timewhen he was still speaking French, he was addressing a small group of nunsand I was present. When he asked for questions from the floor it was notsurprising that the first one was about Shostakovich, whose star at that
A group of us, part of Stravinsky's entourage, were leaving a Columbia Recordings studio in New York in the West Fifties with him just after hehad conducted a piece of his for a taping, and we emerged into a bright, clear day with the temperature unusually low, perhaps around fifteen degrees Fahrenheit. It was lunchtime and the maestro, who had a passion forlobster, said he knew an excellent place for it over on the East Side. We suggested getting a taxi, saying it was a pretty long walk for him to take insuch cold weather. He said not at all. He breathed deeply to fully savor the cold clear air, and declared nostalgically, this was just the way it would bein St. Petersburg.
I was sitting with Stravinsky at a rehearsal of his Requiem Canticles in Princeton where it was to have its premiere. In the “Libera me,” where the chorus recites freely what the quartet is singing to convey the impressionof an actual noisy church situation, he nudged me with his elbow and witha very broad smile said, “People should not talk while music is being played.” Making fun of his own work was part of a larger syndrome: hisambivalence toward the speaking voice with music. He was never happywith the Gide words recited in Persephone though I myself think they arequite wonderful—superbly integrated with the music. He contrives musicand words so that they never interfere with one another.
Stravinsky was having a conversation with some young people about his Mass and the subject of the disproportionate length of the Credo arose. “There is much to believe,” volunteered the maestro in a very solemnvoice.
An old friend of mine, the pianist Elly Kassman Meyer, also, incidentally, a friend of Robert Craft, decided to play Stravinsky's piano concerto at her Town Hall recital in the forties. Since the orchestra was made up only ofwinds there was no problem of fitting it onto the platform. And though itinvolved an expense that her husband, a successful psychoanalyst, could
NADIA BOULANGER
In 1937 with the John Knowles Paine traveling fellowship from Harvardunder my belt I married and my wife and I sailed to France for what was tobe the first part of my two years of study (the other part of it to be later in London). At the beginning of September it must have been, I made my wayto Montparnasse, to the establishment of Nadia Boulanger at 36 Rue Ballu. There was a bell to buzz in a rather small vestibule, and after several attempts with no answer I gave up and decided to wait. I became aware thatquite a large number of people my age were gathered outside, obviouslydoing the same thing, and they were talking to one another in English, so I joined them. Soon a car arrived and Boulanger emerged majestically, indicating endless bundles of music which she expected us all to carry to herapartment (she was just returning from her summer place). We were putinto a stuffy little room with walls every inch of which were covered withdusty framed photographs—relatives, celebrities. After about an hour Iwas summoned into the studio and “Mademoiselle,” which was what wecalled her (perhaps to emphasize that she never was nor would be married) declared, in excellent English with a marked but charming accent, “I shouldhave been a man. A woman cannot have a career.” (She did have one, ofcourse, and a brilliant one.)
In 1938 while I was studying with Boulanger in Paris we had a visit fromone of my closest Harvard classmates, Oscar Handlin, later the well known Pulitzer Prize-winning American historian. He was accompanied by hiswife and they were on their way to a winter vacation in the Alps. They triedto persuade us to come along with them but I told them I had a Monday lesson with Mademoiselle (it must have been a Thursday or Friday). After weall had a good deal of wine they broached the subject again, promising us
DARIUS MILHAUD
As a visiting alien during World War II, Darius Milhaud while teaching at Mills College had to go to the courthouse in Oakland to sign papers orsomething on more than one occasion, and there would be a long wait—anhour or two—which he would spend in his wheelchair. None of the waiting fazed him. On each occasion he would take along one of his elegant old French small pocket-sized music-writing notebooks, and by the time he returned home it would be filled with some little newly composed chamberpiece, usually for a combination of two or three strings.
When I arrived at Mills College in 1939 to assume the duties of composition teacher, it was at the end of a period during which I had taken a furlough from composing for a number of reasons, including an indecision asto the proper direction to take and self-doubts as to what kind of contribution I could make. I still had those doubts but I had resumed composing ona modest scale. During my second year Darius Milhaud joined the facultyand my fellow composition teacher Charles Jones started to show our celebrated colleague his compositions on a regular weekly basis. So I followedhis example. When I brought Milhaud the music I was writing for a Millsdance group he threw up his hands, shouted “merveilleux,” and embracedme. To have such a reaction from a world-class musician was all I needed to
Milhaud traces his lineage back many centuries to French ancestors of Jewish persuasion who inhabited Provence, especially the area around Carpentras where a lovely old synagogue still exists. So when I was teachingat Mills College and the Milhauds invited my wife and me to Passover dinner we were quite curious. The Passover story was read in what Milhaudhas described as a “jargon consisting of Hebrew and Provenζal” but it didnot sound to me at all like Hebrew. It sounded like nothing I had heard before and the ritual was quite different. As on other occasions when I hadvisited, little Daniel, who was under ten, was noisy and unruly and not atall the disciplined youngster I had expected a “bien eleve” French boy to be.
AARON COPLAND
In March 1950 Copland and I were invited to participate in an annual Festival of Contemporary Arts at the University of Illinois in Urbana, each ofus to have our music played and to lecture. I had not started to fly yet and I was apprehensive at the prospect. So although Copland was reluctant Isucceeded in persuading him to make the trip by rail. It so happened there was a coal strike and the delays were inordinate, so that for the return trip Copland was adamant about not taking the train. He persuaded me to return by plane, and assuming the fatherly, protective stance for which hewas well known among composers of my generation, he gave me a silverdollar as a token to guarantee my safety. The flight was as smooth and calmas it could be, with a clear sky revealing a full moon and with a tail wind.
I don't know how serious he was but Copland used to say he hated to givehis autograph since some stranger might have it in his or her head to use itto forge a check.
When Copland came to dinner at our apartment in New York in the fortiesas he did on several occasions he sometimes helped dry the dishes in the days before dishwashers and dryers were common. On one occasion he said
In the early thirties Koussevitzky gave the American premiere of Stravinsky's Persephone, a work that to my mind stands beside the Bach Passions as one of the choral masterpieces of all time. I was sitting with Copland, always a staunch admirer of Stravinsky, at a rehearsal for the occasion in Boston's Symphony Hall when he turned to me and in a voice indicating asense of disappointment remarked, “So French.” He was obviously referring to the perfumed atmosphere of Impressionism.
VIRGIL THOMSON
I first visited Virgil Thomson in his New York apartment at the Chelsea Hotel some time in the mid-thirties. He cultivated a Victorian decor thatwas consistent with the character of the hotel. At the time it did not seemtoo extreme. It was well before the general influx of Bauhaus-type furniture and I came to take it very much for granted. Around 1970 when Ibrought my wife Ellen to meet Virgil I suddenly saw it through her eyes. It was, she said, like walking into a different century, the nineteenth: the heavy drapes and rugs, the loveseat in which each of the occupants faces ina different direction, the cartoonish painting by Florine Stettheimer withthe Statue of Liberty and the American flag. The Victorian decor was quitechic at the time, cultivated especially by folk in the arts.
Thomson was discussing a soprano who had made a simple German Lied sound grand and operatic. “It's as if she were taking the Queen Mary to Brooklyn,” was his assessment of the affair. I do not know whether he everused the observation in a review. It seems too good to squander.
AARON COPLAND
Shostakovitch was having a piece played in Carnegie Hall and he was herein the United States for it. I remember neither what piece nor when. Onopening the program book he was shocked to see the standard (in Americaamong other places) torso of a woman advertising a brassiere.
Some time during World War II Elliott and Helen Carter invited Estherand me to visit them for a few days at their rented summer place on the Pamet River in Truro on Cape Cod. Esther and I decided to spend one afternoon window shopping in Provincetown about ten miles away and wetook the bus to get there, since gasoline was severely rationed so even ifpeople had cars they used them sparingly. We thought we could solve the problem of a house gift if we brought back some lobsters since we knewthere was doubt what we would do for dinner. Naturally we brought them live, and it was with some difficulty that we kept them from creeping outof the cardboard boxes on the crowded bus. When we arrived at the house Helen said we had to leave immediately for a cocktail party. We knew wecould keep the lobsters alive on ice. There was an ice chest that opened ontop that was perfect for this, except that out of force of habit Helen closedthe lid. When we returned the lobsters were no longer alive but we werenot ready to dispose of them before calling the marine laboratory in Woods Hole. We were told they would be poisonous and to discard them at once, which was something we could not get ourselves to do since lobsters werean even greater luxury then than they are now. We then called some natives who pooh-poohed the experts and said the lobsters had been dead tooshort a time for it to matter. Of course that was the advice we took and here I am over half a century later to tell the tale.
It must have been some time in the mid-thirties when the writer and musician Paul Bowles, the expatriate member of the Young Composers Group that Copland had created, was on one of his trips to New York from Morocco or Paris. We were walking back from a meeting of the group and when we arrived at the apartment house on West Fourteenth Street wherehe was staying he invited me up for tea. When I entered his apartment Iwas struck by the objects that adorned his walls: knives and whips. I dismissed the notion that these were the paraphernalia for unnatural sex actsand I summoned up the courage to ask what made him opt for such gruesome decor. He told me he had more than the ordinary fear of violence and having these objects around him helped him face it. When he served tea hebrought out some cookies but he warned me they were laced with hashish. If I was not used to it I should know “they make you feel like flying,” and while there was no harm in that in Tangiers where living quarters were atground level, here we were in a penthouse fourteen stories up. Since I decided not to take the chance he offered me some cheese in a glass jar. Whenhe opened the jar it was swarming with creeping objects but he was quite
One would have taken the pipe-smoking Walter Piston to be a businessmanor perhaps a lawyer. He was someone who seemed to be completely self-possessed, without any of the flightiness or unpredictability that we expectfrom an artist. He spent almost four decades on the Harvard music faculty(never held a regular position anywhere else), and during most of that timehe almost never missed a concert of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and could be seen Thursday nights year after year in the same seat, a preferredarea for acoustics in the first balcony right and quite near the front of the hall. (It is a convenient place for composers to get on to the platformquickly to take a bow.) As a teacher he was soft-spoken and placid, and inthe sessions one on one with him I had to pry the words out to get him totalk. It was well worth it since he always spoke good sense.
Alvin Lucier was one of my earliest graduate students in composition at Brandeis. He came from Yale where he had written a Broadway show and his style for serious music was dyed-in-the-wool neoclassic. I helped himmake his music sound more contemporary within that idiom, but when hewent to Italy on a Fulbright and studied with Boris Porena in Rome, histeacher criticized the first work he brought as “troppo tradizionale!” Lucierinserted a few extra dissonances in his next work and increased the fragmentation. Porena said, “poco meglio ma ancora troppo conventionale” (alittle better but still too conventional). This process continued for severalweeks until Porena was satisfied with the modernity of Lucier's composing. The experience makes one suspect that perhaps Lucier continued the process on his own until he finally arrived at the nonmusic genre that is sometimes called “Sound Art.”
David Diamond dedicated a song to me, but after I wrote an unfavorable review of his music he came to the door unexpectedly and practically in tearsdemanded I return the manuscript. He rescinded the dedication. It wastoo bad since we were very close friends and I admired his music in general. Our friendship was ultimately patched up but not his annoyance atmy review.
In 1939, while I was teaching at Mills College, Henry Cowell was not veryfar away in San Quentin, where he was in about the third year of a fifteen-year sentence on a morals charge as the outcome of an appalling miscarriage of justice. (He was released in 1940 and granted full pardon in 1942.) Cowell was very active and successful in educating the large prison population musically, and he established an orchestra and chorus, at the sametime composing fluently. Among the pieces he wrote were some for the Mills College dancers in the form of modules that could be put together invarious ways by Cage and Harrison (anticipating Stockhausen's Klavier-stucke XI by quite a number of years) tailored to the dancers' needs. (These two young composers, as I said, provided the music for the college dancers.) One day it occurred to me that it might be a good idea, if a bold one, to takemy graduate composition seminar to see Cowell. It was a great success. Cowell was in a good mood and talkative, and the students were exposed toa creative personality with some extraordinary ideas.
VARIORUM
Nathan Milstein was playing the Glazunov violin concerto with the Pittsburgh Symphony under the direction of the guest conductor Paul Paray, who was desperately looking for a permanent post and coveted the oneopen in the orchestra he was guest-conducting. (I was at the concert because Paray was doing a string orchestra piece of mine on the same program.) At one point Milstein stopped dead and went over to examine the score on the podium music stand. He later told me it was impossible toknow a piece better than he knew the Glazunov, he had played it about athousand times. (If such was the case why should he not be bored with it?) Paray corroborated this, saying he had conducted a Milstein performanceof that very piece when the violinist was a boy. The sad part was that the Pittsburgh audience thought the great Milstein could do no wrong, couldnot possibly forget what he was playing, and so it had to be the conductorwho was responsible for the mishap.
A pianist by the name of Hortense Monath gave a concert in Town Hall in 1932 or there abouts at which she played Schoenberg's Suite Op. 25, a mostunusual choice at the time (it is still not a repertory piece). I borrowed the score from the library (it had not been bound yet) and took it along to follow the performance. The pianist got lost several times and just flounderedaround though most listeners were unaware. I went to the green room to
The American Composers Alliance gives a prize annually known as the Laurel Leaf to an individual or an organization in recognition of a contribution to the advancement of contemporary American music. In 1955 the conductor George Szell was the recipient, and according to one observer, “the poor man was utterly nonplussed since he hadn't played any American music that season.” Indeed, he almost never played any contemporary works, and in Cleveland, which was the scene of his main conducting post, he would farm them out to guest or assistant conductors to balance the season's programs.
When I was at Townsend Harris High School in the twenties I founded and was president of the Fine Arts Society, and I was quite enterprising. Ithought the school ought to have the new phonograph that you did nothave to wind laboriously, but the machine was costly and there evidentlywere no funds for it. It might have been 1926, but no later than 1927, when I decided that in my capacity as the club's president I would approach the manufacturers of the new Orthophonic machine directly and persuadethem to donate one to our club—one that would remain as a fixture in the school. We invited the student body to a demonstration on its arrival—asmany as would fit into the assembly hall—and on the platform, a lonelyeminence in the middle of the large vacant space, stood this elegant rectangular box, new to practically everyone, magic in its capacities, and as awe-inspiring as an altar before which one worshipped. I wish I could remember what we played, but it hardly mattered, we were all so spellbound bythe contraption and the fact it played by itself.
The distinguished painter Robert Motherwell was a student in art historyand philosophy in the Harvard Graduate School while I was a student inmusicology and we developed a close friendship. When I went to Paris onthe John Knowles Paine Traveling Fellowship he decided to make a tripabroad at his own expense since he (or his parents) could well afford it, and we saw each other there several times. We commiserated together on our
It seems, though my political leanings were somewhat leftish, I alwaysended up on the most conservative newspapers. Also, they were all on the way to extinction and in each case folded not long after I left. The signswere palpable, as I said earlier: turn the lights off when not absolutelyneeded; use the phone as little as possible, even for business calls; don'tmind that the floors haven't been swept for weeks and electric light bulbshave not been replaced. I never felt any pressure to toe a political line but it was a hardship that friends who did not normally read the paper I workedfor felt put upon when they had to buy it to read a review of mine.