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.]

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