Maestro. Showman. Magician. Matinee idol. Prima donna. Charlatan. Genius. Superstar.
The multifaceted Leopold Stokowski was born on this date, 140 years ago.
Preserved (or parodied) in all media, he could be as outrageous as he was revelatory. He brought to concert music a glamour and vitality that today it too often lacks. His wild hair and faux middle-European accent, his dove-like hands, his flamboyant experiments in sound, his pursuit of the novel and the cutting edge of technology, made him a celebrity, often to the chagrin of his critics. But the proof is in the pudding, and thankfully his recorded legacy is enormous. There is ample evidence to support all claims.
Stokowski died in 1977 at the age of 95. At 94, he signed his final recording contract, with Columbia Records, which would have kept him busy into his 100th year.
Here’s a documentary filmed when he was 88:
At around the 11:23 mark, he states, “We have a motto in the American symphony orchestra, which is ‘do better.’ And it would be a good motto for life all over the world today, when we are killing instead of loving. Do better, world!”
Well said. Happy birthday, Leopold!
One of my favorite live performances on YouTube, when it shows up (it keeps getting taken down), with Stokowski conducting Debussy at the age of 90.
Bach in Philadelphia in 1927
Conducting Tchaikovsky in the film “Carnegie Hall” (1947)
Shaking hands with Mickey Mouse in “Fantasia” (1940)
I mean no disrespect in saying that, for me, Good Friday is made better by Wagner’s “Parsifal.” I try to listen to it every year, whether I need it or not.
Here’s my annual posting of Leopold Stokowski’s transcendent Houston recording of the “Good Friday Spell” from Act III.
Also, a fascinating 1927 recording of the Transformation Music and Grail Scene from Act I, set down at the Bayreuth Festspielhaus. The recording employs the original bells designed by Wagner, which were later melted down by the Nazis for ammunition during World War II. A rare opportunity to experience “Parsifal” as Wagner actually knew it. (The bells begin at 5:57.)
The conductor, Karl Muck, was associated with the Bayreuth Festival since 1892. He became its principal conductor in 1903. Between 1901 and 1930, he conducted “Parsifal” at Bayreuth 14 times.
Another conductor who was a pillar at Bayreuth was Hans Knappertsbusch. Of Kna’s 95 appearances there, 55 were conducting “Parsifal,” for which he was especially renowned.
I was going to post a link to one of his performances of the Prelude to Act I , but then I couldn’t help it. Here’s the whole blessed thing – all four hours of it – from 1962. The live recording is regarded as the benchmark by many, rivaled only by Kna’s performances from the 1950s.
Sacrifice, compassion, healing, and rebirth. Every Friday is good, but Good Friday with “Parsifal” is subime.
The metal canisters used to produce Bayreuth bell sounds from the 1880s to about 1929:
With the birthday of Connecticut cranky Yankee, Charles Ives, the autumn of my content deepens, as golden leaves find parallel in the Golden Age of American music and a run of composer birthdays that stretch clear into early December (Howard Hanson, Aaron Copland, Virgil Thomson, Irving Fine, Morton Gould, etc.). As a radio programmer of so many years, I am sensitive to these types of patterns!
Ives, born on this date in 1874, was the first of our modern giants, and his influence has been the furthest reaching. While piling up acorns in the insurance business, he had the freedom to pursue his idiosyncratic muse. He composed in the evenings, on weekends, and on holidays, creating works of all stripes, tonalities, and quasi-tonalities, even atonality, navigating with remarkable certainty for some 30 years. And he did so in the relative isolation of a prophet, with very few performances to affirm his chosen course.
Ives retired in 1930, which allowed him to devote himself wholeheartedly to music. Ironically, by then, he found he was no longer able to compose. His wife recalled a day in 1927 when he came downstairs with tears in his eyes and confessed that everything sounded wrong to him. After that, he labored mostly at revision and publication.
By the time his works finally began to gain recognition, it had already been 20 years since he had stopped composing. At the time of his death, in 1954, he was still widely misunderstood and much of his music remained unperformed. Nevertheless, he had some important champions. He was a recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 1947, for his Symphony No. 3, “The Camp Meeting,” a work he had written in 1904. His reaction? “Prizes are for boys, and I’m all grown up.” He gave away the prize money, half of it to Lou Harrison, who had conducted the belated premiere.
Even in the 1960s, the world was still grappling with Ives. In 1965, Leopold Stokowski gave the first performance of the Symphony No. 4. At the time, the work’s complex, kaleidoscopic tempos and layered, shifting meters required multiple conductors, and Stokowski enlisted the aid of David Katz and a young Jose Serebrier. The performance took place at Carnegie Hall with the American Symphony Orchestra and the Schola Cantorum of New York.
The piece was composed between 1910 and the mid-1920s. The first two movements had been performed by members of the New York Philharmonic under the direction of Eugene Goossens in 1927. This was the only occasion on which Ives would hear any of the music performed live by an orchestra. (He died in 1954.)
Bernard Herrmann conducted an arrangement of the lovely third movement, the simplest and most conservative of the four (why, then, the need for an arrangement?), in 1933. The music as Ives wrote it was not heard until Stokowski’s complete performance.
The composer’s biographer, Jan Swafford, describes the work as “Ives’ climactic masterpiece.”
Stokowski recorded the symphony a few days after the premiere and led a televised studio performance, which can be seen here:
Stoky kicks off twenty minutes of spoken introductory material (including commentary from producer John McClure) at the 4:30 mark. The symphony proper begins 25 minutes in.
When’s the last time you saw anything like this on television?
Marveling at how out of step with musical convention his own compositions could be, Ives once famously remarked, “Are my ears on wrong?” Musicians are still scrambling to address this “unanswered question.”
Happy birthday, Charles Ives!
Ives’ “Hallowe’en” for string quartet and piano – watch out for that big drum!
Leonard Bernstein on the Symphony No. 2:
My preferred recording of the symphony, so beautiful (though not always entirely accurate, in regard to Ives’ intentions), with Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic in 1958:
With the possible exception of his own transcriptions of the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, Leopold Stokowski recorded more Wagner with the Philadelphia Orchestra than any other composer.
This Sunday night on “The Lost Chord,” on Stoky’s birthday, we’ll revisit some of his early recordings, originally issued on 78s, including the controversial “Liebesnacht,” the original version of his symphonic synthesis after “Tristan und Isolde” – an arrangement that infuriated listeners, with its inconclusive ending – and the “Liebestod,” which he subsequently undertook, by popular demand, in order to provide a more satisfactory conclusion.
We’ll also hear a superb performance of “Wotan’s Farewell and Magic Fire Music,” from “Die Walküre,” with baritone Lawrence Tibbett, in a role he never sang on stage. And, as an added bonus, Stokowski himself will supply a spoken summary of the “Ring Cycle,” done for CBS radio in 1932, complete with faux middle-European accent. (Stoky was a second-generation Londoner, his father of Polish extraction and his mother Irish.)
I hope you’ll join me for “Magic Fire” – Leopold Stokowski’s early Wagner recordings with the Philadelphia Orchestra – this Sunday night at 10:00 EDT, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.
And since the comments section is bound to be filled with gasps of “LEOPOLD,” we may as well get this out of the way right now. (Then read on!)
The snapping of the baton is a little bit of an in-joke, since Stokowski made it a point to lead not with a stick, but rather using his expressive, mesmerizing hands.
Here he is in “Carnegie Hall” (1947), real junk food for the classical music lover. Forget about the plot, which is total hokum – a brash young American pianist turns the classical music world on its ear with the debut of his corny “jazz” concerto (with Harry James, no less, playing trumpet obbligato) – the main draw is a parade of real-life classical music superstars.
The director Edgar G. Ulmer, emerged from German Expressionist cinema (he claimed to have worked on “Metropolis” and “M”), to direct atmospheric Hollywood films like “The Black Cat” and “Detour.”
The experience obviously prepared him for this showcase of Stokowski, who in the film’s best sequence conducts a movement from Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 5. The camera angles are striking, the lighting dramatic, and Stoky’s hair just keeps getting bigger… and bigger… and bigger.
Stokowski also shared screen time with Deanna Durbin in “One Hundred Men and a Girl” (1937). In case you’re curious, Charles Previn, credited as associate musical director, was the second-cousin of Andre Previn. Stokowski conducts the finale of the same Tchaikovsky symphony. Also, Deanna Durbin sings from “La Traviata.”
Naturally, there’s the obligatory shot of a bored husband (character actor Eugene Pallette) dozing in the audience, and a boy-next-store shouting from a balcony, just to keep it all comfortably “regular guy.”
But it goes without saying that the most enduring artifact of Hollywood’s romance with Stoky was the conductor’s work on Walt Disney’s “Fantasia” (1940), including this iconic handshake with Mickey Mouse:
Stokowski recorded the soundtrack in experimental stereo, captured by 33 microphones and three million feet of sound film, at Philadelphia’s Academy of Music in 1939. Stokowski served as the Philadelphia Orchestra’s music director from 1912 to 1938. Here he directs Bach’s “Toccata and Fugue in D minor,” from a Spanish print of the film:
Finally, Stokowski talks about his experiences in Hollywood, most specifically his work on “Fantasia,” in an interview given in the 1960s:
Notoriously, the accent is totally phony baloney. Stokowski’s grandfather was Polish, but he himself was a second-generation Londoner. But Stoky always did have a whiff of P.T. Barnum about him. He may have been a visionary, but, first and foremost, he knew how to captivate an audience.
I hope you’ll join me tonight for “The Lost Chord,” as I’ll be highlighting some of Stokowski’s early Wagner recordings with the Philadelphia Orchestra. The program, “Magic Fire,” will air at 10:00 EDT on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.
