Part 22

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.