Glamourpuss

Mar 14, 2010

The figure of the maestro on the podium, the cynosure, the expressive locus, the Main Event of the orchestral concert, is one of high culture’s primal archetypes. The magisterial presence, the aura of divine authority and the buzz of charisma all contribute to making that iconic image to classical music what the long haired, sweaty guitarist thrashing on his Stratocaster is to rock, or to what a home run hitter in perfect swing is to baseball.

Marketing directors for symphony orchestras all over the world live and die on the potential for image making that their conductors can provide. The conductor as a combination of sex symbol and male authority figure all started with LEOPOLD STOKOWSKI, who managed to straddle the world of Hollywood-level glamour—he collaborated with Walt Disney, had a tabloid affair with a famous movie star, and later married a billionairess fashion designer —with a seriously adventurous attitude toward new music. For a period of nearly thirty-five years from about 1915 to 1950, Stokowski and his archrival, Arturo Toscanini, were the musical versions of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, virtually dominating the American public’s image of what a classical musician looked like and how he behaved.

Toscanini of course possessed that Italian charisma and those terrifyingly intense eyes. As Joseph Horowitz has written in his book about Toscanini, the Italian conductor managed to maintain his air of detached, Olympian devotion to precision and purity while at the same time behind the scenes collaborating in one of the most elaborate media-driven campaigns of hero worship ever accomplished in the fine arts. By the late 1950’s the image of his face, with its fiery expressions and emphatically nineteenth century moustache and long hair, was synonymous with classical music and what Ezra Pound liked to call “kulcha.” When I was a kid, the RCA LP’s of Toscanini’s Beethoven symphonies, each with a collage of the maestro’s face in its many moods, were in the living room of almost every home I visited, even if people didn’t listen to them.

Interesting, because over the past few years I’ve consulted Toscanini recordings of repertoire I’ve been doing only to find his interpretations frequently bewildering and puzzling. His performance of Strauss’s Töd und Verklärung, for instance, is wildly, willfully off the mark compared to what Strauss’s meticulous score asks for. One gets the feeling that Toscanini, famous for never using a score, eventually stopped consulting one, ending up with interpretations that could be bizarrely disconnected. The legend, of course, was that Toscanini restored “the composer’s intent” to the interpretive art. But his recordings don’t always bear that out.

Stokowski, however, was something else. There is no one in the world of classical music today who can even approach him for his shocking blend of chutzpah, self-promotion, or interpretive delinquency. And there is no Stokowski alive today who can make an orchestra sound the way he did, bringing forth not just the patented luxury “sound,” but also a range of expressivity, of surging lyricism and cliff-hanging, daredevil rhythmic and dynamic contrasts.

Anyone following his career will be driven mad trying to cull the pearls from the swill. Stokowski seems to have had no filter, no point at which he could look at himself in the mirror and say “No Leopold, THAT you will NOT do!”

But, all the tackiness aside, there is something refreshing about these adventures. Ultimately Stokowski’s was an intensely creative mind. Certainly “Fantasia,” probably his greatest moment of international mega stardom, helped to popularize classical music (Stravinsky included) to millions of children throughout the world just at a time when the movies had become the predominant vehicle for cultural communication throughout the planet. But by the time Stokowski collaborated with Disney in “FANTASIA” he was already an old hand at Hollywood. Three years earlier he had acted a starring role in a comedy feature, “One Hundred Men and a Girl,” for which he not only conducted but also spoke some scripted lines in his puzzlingly accented English (puzzling, because he was born in London and spent almost his entire career in the US).

From my point of view, Stokowski is infinitely more interesting a musician and a cultural figure than Toscanini. I can deeply admire Toscanini for his standing up to Hitler and fascism. No argument there. And I guess he helped to make classical music popular. But his repertory was blinkered, and he stuck to the pieces he’d learned as a young man, doing them over and over and over, whereas Stokowski was endlessly curious, always up for risk or a crazy idea. And Stokowski, even more than Koussevitzky, did more to introduce serious new music to America than any other big time conductor. The list of composers he advocated is enormous. He gave US premieres of Schoenberg’s Gurrelieder and the gnarly, twelve-tone Violin Concerto. He did the first US performances of Mahler’s Eighth Symphony and three of Shostakovich’s symphonies.

You can read about this in any number of web pages or blogs. What interests me is the style of playing he favored, an approach to orchestral phrasing and sound production that has all but died out in the interim. So much of this is the result of the warmth and expressivity of string playing that he encouraged. This is remarkable because Stokowski was himself not a principally a string player, but rather an organist. But then, string playing around the early part of the twentieth century still maintained the incredible expressive freedom, the sliding and warm portamento approach that nowadays is no longer permitted in orchestral playing. Listen, for example, to the collaboration Stokowski did with cellist Emanuel Feuerman in Bloch’s “Shelomo,” particularly to the way in which Feuerman’s phrasing sounds more like a passionate Klezmer cantilena than it does like a prim classical cello concerto.

When I conducted the Rachmaninoff Piano Concerto No. 2 some years ago, I researched the composer’s own recordings of the piece to see how it was performed in those days. His performance with Stokowski, made in the peak of the Philadelphia Orchestra era, shows that same incredibly warm, at times slipping-and-sliding portamento string playing. You can hear it in the first orchestral tutti right after the opening piano phrases of the first movement. I labored to get the Saint Louis Symphony strings to shed their standard precision style of playing and go for this older, more risky expressive approach (which, when you think about it, is actually more “historically informed”), but it ran so radically against the grain of their way of playing that they never could “go there.” Perhaps some imaginative young conductor some day will do for this kind of music what Harnoncourt has done for Monteverdi and Bach.

The absolute epitome of what’s maddening about Stokowski is right here in his 1937 recording of Debussy’s Clair de Lune.

The phrasing, both on the micro- and macro levels, is both imaginative and powerfully evocative. The expression in the melody feels intense, almost embarrassingly so to our contemporary ears, which have become accustomed to neat, precise, polished and demur representations. Stokowski’s is positively tumescent. And just to go one step further, is that a whanging, throbbing vibraharp I hear at about 3:20 into the piece? Could it be???? Well, the orchestral “version” of Clair de Lune is not Debussy’s anyway—-he never made one, if I am correct in thinking that. So we’ll assume this is one of those alien creatures of the classical music world, otherwise known as a “Stokowski Arrangement.” And oh, did Stokowski love to dick around with the details of orchestration, applying stage makeup in the manner of someone painting up characters for a Mardi Gras. But those little glimmers of sheer Hollywood tackiness in the midst of brilliantly creative phrasing—-all that is so perfectly a Stokowski touch. It’s as if after having decanted a bottle of perfect Burgundy and right before offering you a glass, your host stirs in three tablespoons of sugar.

Another truly thrilling take on Debussy is this 1940 recording of “Fetes” from the Three Nocturnes. (CAUTION! VIEWER DISCRETION ADVISED—-the crap on the screen, not to mention the comments beneath, are enough to make one rush to air out the room). As much as I love Boulez’s Debussy and acknowledge how much he’s done to raise the level of refinement and excellence with that composer, Stokowski’s “Fetes” really does feel like a genuine bacchanalia, with its wild, untrammeled energies and sudden shifts of mood.

Unfortunately, for all the wealth of video clips available on youtube, those of Stokowski are of him as a very old man. This is unfair, because his glory days were between 1915 and 1945. Clips of his conducting are mostly of a man in his eighties or even his nineties, and I am sure they do not do him justice. Nonetheless, it’s worth the very short peek of him conducting (along with an assistant, José Serebrier) the world premiere performance of the complete Fourth Symphony by Charles Ives. I have done this piece a number of times, and I can attest to it being a sonofbitch to conduct (and I had the benefit of recordings to consult while learning it). Stokowski was eighty-three when he gave this premiere, and I remember as a college freshman, eagerly scooping up the first copy of the Columbia Masterworks LP that arrived at the Harvard Coop a few months later.

Comments (12)

Edwin Outwater
March 14, 2010

What a great essay about Stokowski ... thanks for writing it! We musicians take an ironic stance about adding portamento. It becomes a kind of in-joke if you can get it to happen at all. The idea today of course is generally to sound clear and clean. But the Philly/Stoki recordings show (along with many others) portamento doesn't have to be sloppy and it went hand in hand with virtuoso playing that rivals any modern orchestra. I wish we were as daring today with music as Stokowski was then. It would be worth the moments of bad taste.

John Takis
March 14, 2010

Terrific essay! I'd also throw in Stokowski's version of "Pictures at an Exhibition," which makes for an interesting contrast with the Ravel. "Freely arranged," but I enjoy it tremendously.

As it happens, my favorite Stokowski video doesn't involve Stokowski at all ... it's Bugs Bunny taking the stage in the WB short "Long-Haired Hare," to awed whispers of "Leopold! Leopold!" :-)

Karl Holzmuller
March 15, 2010

Enjoyed the essay. Very interesting -- sent me back for some more informed re-listening. (Love the embedded links. Always fun to follow the trail. . .)

Joe Horowitz
March 16, 2010

Hi John,

Thanks for alerting me to your blog on Stokowski. I of course passionately concur that these days he is by far the more fascinating phenomenon than his rival Toscanini. Re: pearls vs. swill – do you know his two recordings (live, studio) of Schoenberg’s Gurrelieder (of which the gave the US premiere and made the first recording, both in 1932)? No one but Stokowski could so fundamentally have misconstrued what the “Klaus-Narr” and Narrator are supposed to do (insane liberties duly noted by the composer, who listened over the radio). But no one but Stokowski deserved to conduct this piece in the first place. I’m thinking of the Interlude in part one – a romantic maelstrom in which the Stokowski lava flow is simply tidal. Nothing we encounter today approaches his impact here.

My single favorite Stokowski recording is of the Andante from Beethoven’s Fifth, as experimentally recorded by Bell Labs at the Academy of Music in 1931. You can hear it at www.josephhorowitz.com (go to “books,” then “Classical Music in America” and “companion recordings”). Here the lava flow is thinned to a siren song, with many rests erased by elongated phrase-endings not by Beethoven. I enjoy playing this recording at conservatories. “Not a single subito dynamic,” a choral conductor pertinently observed at the University of Michigan, encapsulating the distance between this music and “Beethoven.” “It doesn’t sound like Beethoven,” was a complaint at the Bard Conservatory. And so what?

And yes, as you say, his glory years were in Philadelphia. His assistant Nancy Shear told me that in later decades, having been displaced by the inconsequential Eugene Ormandy, Stokowski would draw the shade of his Pullman compartment (he did not fly) when traveling through that city.

A Philadelphia story told by Abram Chasins captures the Stokowski conundrum.
Before a performance, he would secrete himself in his dressing room and do deep-breathing exercises. “If someone said ‘Good evening’ or merely brushed past him when he was on his way to the stage, he would wheel around and return to his room to restore his former degree of concentration.” This could delay a concert by as long as 15 minutes. The gesture was as practical as it was theatrical: Stokowski conducted in a trance.

I write in Classical Music in America: “If at all a charlatan or showman, Stokowski was essentially a principled fantasist. His impatience with the symphonic norm, its rites and repertoire, was irremediable. His belief in music as a ‘universal language’ was not a belief in Bach and Beethoven merely; he embraced music of Latin America, Africa, and Asia, and of the composers – Chavez, Cowell, Harrison, Messiaen, McPhee, Varese, Villa-Lobos -- to whom such universality mattered. He may yet prove prophetic.”

Or not.

Joe Horowitz

Michael Kaye
March 16, 2010

I remember watching Stoky rehearsing Ives' LINCOLN THE GREAT COMMONER at Carnegie Hall. He was very much in charge of the music and enjoyed calling out the various pitches of the massive tone clusters to members of the chorus. I bet he could have done that for music composed by John Adams as well!

Jeep Gerhard
March 16, 2010

your comment about Toscanini not using scores (of course he was 'blind as a bat' and too vain to wear glasses in public) and Stoky always using his reminds me of the fact that James Levine, bless him, ALWAYS uses a score, the sign to me of a man who trusts his sources. Once i saw him conduct the Vienna Phil @ Carnegie in (i think) Berg's Three Pieces, WITHOUT score - and was very surprised. I later learned HIS score had been stolen. An amazing performance - very edge of the seat.
I enjoy your blog - thanks for doing it

Robert Berger
March 17, 2010

I enjoyed your appreciation of Stokowski very much. However, I would like to add that
Toscanini's repertoire was actually much wider than most people realize, and that the narrowing of it came only in his late years
with the NBC Symphony.
In his earlier years, he actually conducted a considerable amount of new music, though none by composers of the Schoenbergian persuasion and other avant-garde figures. Most of works which are now forgotten,including many then new operas.
And many who are now gone and heard him in his earlier years say that he was much more free and spontaneous then, and that the the NBC recordings do not show him at his best.

Carl Pultz
March 18, 2010

So fine to see Mr. Adams and Mr. Horowitz together on this page.

Interested parties should consult (read!) the Oliver Daniel bio of Stokie.

Could Gunther Schuller please chime in here?

Please don't ignore the late recordings. Though less wild and sui generis, they do bring his magic into the current era and show how maybe the more sober (ironic?) current high-textual-fidelity approach can still be infused with passion and life.

I dunno. For all the faults, the man made music live.

Charles Keledjian
March 18, 2010

I was very young when I heard some Bach transcriptions by Stokowski and I couldn't understand what was about them that I liked until much later. It was that disconnected string sound that made everything so romantic, so less angular. I found this video of a rehearsal in which he specifically requests 'nicht zusammen' or 'not together', individual bow movements. I hope you enjoy: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MZhgmykgnJI

Edgar Self
April 8, 2010

I saw him conduct only once, Brahms First as guest in Dallas. Favorite records: Afternoon of a Faun, Tchaikovsky Fourth, Shostakovich Sixth, Tannhaeuser Prelude to Act III, the early Firebird, Scriabin's Prometheus.

John Kelly
July 27, 2010

Wonderful essay on Stokowski and I must say that I agree that the most impressive and seductive elements of his musicianship are his sense of phrasing and of orchestral color. To your list of super-sensual recordings I would add the Philadelphia 1927 Lohegrin Act 1 Prelude and the Parsifal "Synthesis" - with a reduced orchestra no less made in 1934. Also not to be missed are the Bell Labs experimental recordings of 1931-2 (Joe Horowitz has written on these elsewhere) featuring an extraordinary Liebestod and glowing string sound in some Walkure excerpts.

Stokowski certainly saw the score as a place to start from not as something to be "fully realised" in the way that Toscanini was known to espouse. Of course, he tinkered with scores too (try his Tchaikovsky Manfred for example) and so did Szell and Karajan. They all do, even if it's only with balances and dynamics.

I never heard Stokowski live (too young) but I have heard many many conductors and I have to believe Stokowski among the very finest on a good day when he wasn't up to something he should have looked at himself in the mirror and said "not today, no we won't do that".

BTW, check out his Enigma Variations with the Czech Phil - loved your insightful remarks on them elsewhere on this blog. Then again, I'm a transplanted Brit. Looking forward to Harmonielehre at Carnegie with Alan Gilbert and the NYPO in November!

Edward Johnson
July 27, 2010

John Kelly has just alerted me to the above and highly fascinating it is too! The mention of the Ives 4th clip on You Tube reminded me that you can obtain a DVD on Classical Video Rarities of the whole 1965 TV programme from which it came. It consists of a complete performance of the work, specially filmed in Manhattan Centre shortly after the premiere in Carnegie Hall, along with interviews with Jose Serebrier and David Katz (the two co-conductors) and others, as well as a discussion of the music by Stokowski himself ...

http://www.classicalvideorarities.com/store/product_info.php?products_id=562

Mr Adams' mention of "Fetes" reminds me also that the Three Nocturnes complete, in Stokowski's wonderful 1950 RCA recording, is available, along with 35 other Stokowski CDs, on the Cala label. Do wade through the list and see if there's anything you need to add to your Stokowski collection, as they're all well worth having! ...

http://www.calarecords.com/acatalog/The_Art_of_Stokowski.html

John Kelly mentions the Czech Philharmonic "Enigma Variations." It was a tragedy that on the way to Prague in 1972, Stokowski, now aged 90, had to miss the first rehearsal due to a fall and a leg injury. However, he was stubborn enough to want to fulfil the engagement, albeit on crutches, and although there are mishaps here and there (the work, recorded 'live', was totally new to the Czech players) it is a beautifully heartfelt and poetic reading. This performance is on Cala CACD 0524 and you can get an idea of the recording quality from the You Tube clip of "Nimrod" ...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6lQLyaiMieU

Looking forward to more discussions about this great conductor!

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Hell Mouth is a blog about music (mostly contemporary), literature (mostly good), politics (mostly pernicious) and culture (mostly American). It is written by John Adams with the help of several “friends” who live in the redwoods of coastal Northern California.