Patrick Bade
Leopold Stokowski: Genius and Showman

Patrick Bade - Leopold Stokowski: Genius and Showman

- [Instructor] Very good to be back with you. I’ve been occupied the last couple of weeks with a very delightful group of Australians that I was taking around Paris. But as you can see, I’m now back in London, and I’m going to start off tonight by getting Leopold Stokowski himself to talk. And this is him talking over the radio, explaining the plot of Wagner’s Ring Cycle to an American audience. And I have to say, I think it’s almost as funny as Anna Russell.

• [Stokowski] Now we are going to play music from Wagner’s Nibelungen Ring. The story is probably familiar to most of you, but I should like to speak a bit to those who are far from places where these music dramas are played. The story deals with the legends of Northern Europe. Wotan, the father of the gods feels that his power is lessening and builds a great stronghold called Valhalla high in the mountains, to which he with the other gods retires. Deep down in the valley, the Rhine maidens are guarding a treasure of gold. This gold is stolen by Alberich, the chief of a race of gnomes, or dwarfs. From this gold is made a ring of manic power, the Nibelungen Ring. This ring and all the gold carries a curse to its possessor. As the God’s power lessens, the power of the heroes increases. Siegfried, a young hero of overwhelming courage with a nature filled with sunlight and laughter becomes possessive of the ring.

• Well, the obvious question is, how on earth did he get that weird accent? His family were of Polish origin. It was actually, his grandfather was Polish, but his father was born in London and he was born in London. This is the street where he was brought up in. He was born in Marylebone, so an inner suburb of London. This is New Cavender Street, which was an 18th century street. The first building you can see on the left is actually a somewhat altered Georgian building. But the other Victorian buildings, as that you see in this image were constructed around the time that he was born in 1882. So we have his birth certificate. It says he was born in Marylebone in 1882, but he was a great self mythologizer. He took five years off his age. He claimed to be born in 1887. And he claimed to be born in Krakoff, hence the rather strange, vaguely middle European accent that he affected throughout his life. Amazing to create that accent and keep it up for over 75 years. So it was always something, a little touch of the charlatan about Stokowski. He was a great showman, a great self publicist, but a very brilliant man. And I think you could claim that he did more for the cause of classical music in America in the 20th century than any other musician. He enormously raised orchestral standards. In the early years of the 20th century, he transformed several orchestras, notably the Philadelphia Orchestra, raising them to a very high level of technical excellence.

He created new orchestras. He was a great advocate for new music. He gave premieres of works by Mahler, by Schoenberg, by Stravinsky, Varese, Berg, Shostakovich, and many, many other composers. And he embraced new technology in a way that no other conductor did. He made enormous numbers of recordings that have shelves and shelves and shelves of the CDs taken from his old recordings. He did an enormous amount to reach out to the American public and to create a new audience for classical music. Here you can see him, he’s very much playing a role, I suppose, with this fake European accent. And he very flamboyant style of conducting. He did away with the baton, he conducted with his hands. And he was very conscious, I think, of his beautiful hair that went white at an early stage. So he always seems to be posing in the photographs that we have of him. So he was quite a humble background. His father was a cabinet maker, and he was gifted at a very, very early age. It was I think one of the younger students, the Royal College of Music has ever had. And he started off his career as an organist. And his first important career was as an organist. First of all, this is the Temple Church in London. Beautiful gothic church of the Knight’s Templar made world famous, of course, by it’s in the DaVinci Code, used to be this very quiet church that nobody visited. Now it’s of course always full of people wanting to visit it because of the DaVinci Code. And then he moved on to the rather smarter church of St. James Piccadilly in the west end of London. I think he always must have been a very ambitious character.

And from there, in 1905, he went to New York and he became the organist of Saint Bartholomew’s Church in New York, in a neighbourhood where there were many very wealthy people. And he was good at cultivating the interest of wealthy patrons. The Vanderbilts, for instance, took an interest in him and he met a young, a very gifted young pianist. And they eventually married. She called herself Olga Samaroff. And it’s been speculated she had a role in this creation of the fake accent and the fake middle European persona. ‘Cause she was born in Texas. Her real name was Lucy Hickenlooper. I can imagine that actually even today, it would be quite difficult to have a major career as an international concert pianist with a name like Lucy Hickenlooper. So she decided to call herself Olga Samaroff. And it’s been suggested that she was the one who persuaded him to create this strange accent. And so he had aspirations to become a conductor. And it was Olga Samaroff who spotted that Cincinnati was looking for a new conductor. The Cincinnati Orchestra was quite a recent one. It had been created in 1895 and had achieved a certain respectability and fame under its conductor, Frank Van Stucken. But there were big problems with labour disputes. And the orchestra was disbanded in 1907 and it was reconstituted and going to be relaunched in 1909. So Olga persuaded Leopold to apply for this job with a certain chutzpah. 'Cause he had actually, at the point he applied, never conducted a concert in his life. But again, through her connections and her persuasion, she managed to set up a conducting debut for him in Paris, followed by one in London.

He just had two concerts under his belt when he went to Cincinnati to be interviewed. And obviously he was very persuasive and they were impressed by him and his elegant appearance and his fake accent. And they gave him the job. And here is the concert hall, very magnificent, late 19th century concert hall in Cincinnati. And this is the interior of it. And he was only there for three years. But in that time he already made a great impression and as he did everywhere, enormously raised the standard of the orchestra and the reputation of the orchestra. But he was very ambitious Cincinnati and he wanted something a bit more prestigious than that. And so he was already almost immediately angling for the job of conductor of the rather more prestigious Philadelphia Orchestra. And this he got in 1912 in Philadelphia. And again, straight away he set about completely transforming the orchestra. And he was with the Philadelphia Orchestra for nearly 30 years, from 1912 until 1941. And he created its distinctive sound 'cause the Philadelphia Orchestra to this day is famous for its incredibly sumptuous sound and particularly in the string section. And I’m going to, my first musical excerpt for you is a recording made in 1939 with Stokowski conducting the Philadelphia Orchestra in the Fifth Symphony of Tchaikovsky. So this was a very new work, a very few years old. And this is the Largo. And here you’ll see that this incredible lushness, lush, lush sound of the Philadelphia strings, which might rather surprise you in this music, you don’t really think of Shostakovich as being a lush composer. It’s a sound that you might more associate with Mahler or Strauss.

Got some lovely swooning portamento. So he played an important role in creating international reputation of Shostakovich and gave premiers of his works of Shostakovich in America, including the, so the Sixth Symphony. He was the great promoter of Shostakovich in America. And this led him into a dispute with Toscanini in 1942. One of the great musical events of the Second World War, of course, was the series of premiers of Shostakovich’s Leningrad Symphony. And this work had been composed in the besieged city. The score was smuggled out of Russia on microfilm via Persia to the west. And there was eager competition amongst America’s conductors, Koussevitzky, Rodzinski, Stokowski, and of course Toscanini for the honour of conducting the first broadcast performance of the Leningrad Symphony. And there’s quite an interesting correspondence that survived between Stokowski, saying, “Well, of course you know that I am the conductor most associated with Shostakovich, and I should have the honour of giving this premier.” And some very nasty letters by Toscanini, one really libellous letter to Stokowski, which luckily he didn’t actually send but actually survives in his archives. So Stokowski was and remains quite a controversial and I would say disputed conductor amongst critics and music lovers. The Brits amongst you will understand what I’m saying when I say he’s a Marmite conductor. That means some people love him, some people hate him.

And I will declare straight away that I absolutely adore Stokowski, like I said I have shelves and shelves of CDs of his recordings and I love everything. He does some very, very naughty things. And I’m prepared to forgive him all his sins as a conductor. The sins being that he takes a lot of liberties with the work of great composers. Most notoriously with Bach. He made a whole series of transcriptions of Bach organ music or chorals for orchestras making full use of the virtuosity and the lushness of the Philadelphia Orchestra. And some people find this shocking. He’s certainly not, I’ll be interested what your reactions are at the end of this lecture. But you know, he’s not a conductor, I would say for purists. But Bach, I mean, Bach is truly divine. Nothing Bach, he can take care of himself. You can’t really destroy Bach, whatever way you do it, it’s wonderful. But this is a very far, of course, from any kind of modern inverted commas, authentic performance, this is the most famous of the Stokowski. I think you’ll have to see them as works of art in their own right. They’re something, he’s recreated Bach I think in a very extraordinary way. Well, that’s nothing compared with what he does with Wagner. He created what he called syntheses of several Wagner operas, including Tristan and Parsifal. And to my ears, Tristan has never sounded as marvellous as it does in Stokowski’s outrageous version. He chops it up and mixes it up and puts it all back together again.

The excerpt I’m going to play you, it starts off with part of Love Duet and then it moves into Tristan’s Lament in Act Three and then back to the Love Duet and so on. And so for people who have trouble listening through an entire Wagner opera lasting more than four hours, you might be able to enjoy Wagner like this. Stokowski has reduced the four hours plus of Wagner’s Tristan to 23 minutes. And we get all the best bits woven together and played absolutely gorgeously and sumptuously, the most extraordinarily sensuous and erotic interpretation of Wagner’s music. That wasn’t actually the bit I intended to play. My computer seems to have a mind of its own and it seems to jump around when I try to pull out excerpts from tracks. But anyway, it’s still very gorgeous and you get a sense of the excitement of his conducting in that music. Now, he was a great innovator in many ways. Well, you can see him here with waving his hands and not using the baton. He also experimented with the seating arrangements of the instruments in the orchestra, trying to get a better sound for the audience. And he’s usually credited with the arrangement that most orchestras follow today, where you have the first and second violins to the left of the conductor and the cellos and the violas to the right of the conductor. And he was also very interested, as I said, he embraced the medium of recording. Whereas other great conductors, for instance, Toscanini and , they’re very wary of making recordings in the studio, Wagner only really came round to it towards the very end of his career. And Toscanini never really came round to studio recordings.

I mean, he made a great many live recordings, broadcast recordings at the end of his life, but he didn’t like going into the recording studio. Whereas Stokowski really embraced the technology and he tried to improve it. And I’m going to play you a very interesting unpublished recording made in 1931. It’s an experimental recording made in the Bell Laboratories in New York, experimenting with stereo sound, full stereo sound. This is nearly two decades before stereo sound came into common usage after the Second World War. So this is an excerpt from Scriabin’s Prometheus Poem of Fire course. It’s a very incredibly iridescent lush piece. I’m sure he chose it because he wanted to see what he could get out of this new stereo recording process. And the sound quality is really extraordinary for 1931. Now I’m going to move on to another experimental recording he made in 1945 that went disastrously wrong. And this, it’s a pity 'cause this is certainly a performance. It’s never been officially published. Don’t ask me how I got hold of this recording, but it would’ve been a wonderful thing to have. And this is Rachmaninoff’s second piano concerta with Arthur Rubenstein as the soloist. And they decided to have Rubenstein in one studio and Stokowski and the Orchestra in another studio. One explanation for this was that Rubenstein and Stokowski loathed each other and couldn’t get on. But the result was unfortunate because nobody had really checked that the piano was properly tuned with the orchestra and they recorded the whole thing, how they got through it, I dunno, they ploughed through the whole thing with the piano and the orchestra at odds with one another. So anybody who’s very sensitive to pitch is going to have an uncomfortable moment while I play this. Ouch is all I can say to that.

This photograph is 1916 when Stokowski gave the premier of Miles Symphony, how many people are in this image? Certainly many hundreds. And he loved these big scale works. And that was the American premiere in 1916. And in 1933, he gave the American premier of Schoenberg’s Gurre-Lieder. Schoenberg, of course became, well, actually just shortly afterwards, became a refugee in America, driven out of Nazi Germany. This was recorded, this was a tremendously thing to do, but it’s also, Gurre-Lieder, is an absolutely enormous work requiring huge choirs and enormous orchestra and soloists. And to issue this at the height of the depression on a large number of 78s was, as I said, a very, very bold enterprise. But it had one very strange consequence because Irving Thalberg, who’s the golden boy of MGM, heard it and loved it. And he was planning to make a movie of Pearl Buck’s, a blockbuster novel, the Good Earth with Luise Rainer. And he approached Schoenberg and he said, one, he said, “I’d love to have you write the music for the movie.” And Schoenberg said, “Yes, fine, I’ll,” he said, “On just two conditions. And that is that the actors will have to speak their words in rhythm with my music. And I also want is my new idiom I want to use, which was atonal.” So not surprisingly, Irving Talbert took fright and that project never happened. But of course, Gurre-Lieder is an early work by Schoenberg. It’s really Mahler plus, and it’s quite different from the kind of music that Schoenberg was writing in the 1930s. So here is an excerpt from that recording. In the course of his long career, Stokowski created several new orchestras and one of them was the All American Youth Orchestra that was set up in 1940.

And it employed 80 very young musicians between the ages of 15 and 25. And it was really his response to Nazi and fascist propaganda that the inverted commas, Anglo-Saxon nations were unmusical and uncultured. And so he created this orchestra at the purpose of which was to tour other countries, particularly South America. It was quite short-lived of course, because soon after America entered the war at the end of 1941, conscription was introduced and many of the members of the orchestra were conscripted into the American military. Oh yes, sorry. This is the American Youth Orchestra in Brahms, wonderfully lively, certainly those of you who’ve people who find Brahms stodgy, this would be a very good counter argument to that. There’s nothing stodgy about Brahms when it’s conducted by Stokowski. So he may have created this rather sophisticated persona for himself, but he was never a snob and he really wanted to reach out to a large part of the American population. And he took part in several Hollywood films that certainly brought music to a far wider audience in America than ever before. In 1937, he played a role in the Deanna Durbin film, 100 Men and a Girl. And this is a story of a girl who helps to create an orchestra of unemployed musicians in New York. Course this was a very big political issue at the time with many refugee musicians arriving in America to escape Nazi persecution. And of course many musicians unemployed as a result of the Great Depression in the early to mid 1930s. So here is Stokowski as you can see with the lovely young Deanna Durbin. And she was just in her mid teens when she, this is one of her first films. I think she was about 14 or 15. And so this is from the soundtrack of the movie and it’s with another, with an orchestra that Stokowski actually did create a new orchestra. It’s a Hollywood Bowl Orchestra.

And I’m sure that was an orchestra that gave employment to many refugees arriving from Europe in the 1930s. So here is Deanna Durban singing the Brindisi from La Traviata, rather inappropriate, you might think, considering the plot of La Traviata and the character of the Violetta, this sweet innocent young girl singing this drinking song at a courtesan’s party. But I’m going to, it is quite short and I play it through because I want you to hear the wonderfully outrageous ending where Verdi’s music morphs into Stokowski. And you think what other serious classical composer would’ve done anything quite as naughty as that? That’s from the soundtrack of the movie, I suppose was the last scene of the movie in the Stokowski is to, you know, bring up the end titles of the movie. So while in Hollywood, Stokowski met Walt Disney, he’s seen together and they conceived this project for the film Fantasia, which came out in 1941 with animated visuals accompanying pieces from Stokowski’s repertoire, quite bold includes Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. The premier of Fantasia in 1941. And this is the making of the movie and of course a famous scene where Stokowski shakes hands with Mickey Mouse and this wonderful version of Dukas’s Sorcerer’s Apprentice with Mickey Mouse. And this is Stokowski’s recording of it. It was quite a daring thing to include that cornerstone of modern music, Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. I’m sure it was for many people who went to see the movie, their first encounter with contemporary music. It was certainly when my sister and I were taken to see Fantasia when we were children. This was certainly the first time I had ever heard the Rite of Spring. And it bowled me over straight away. Here is the opening sequence in the movie, of course it’s the creation of the world and volcanoes.

And of course for some people who got to know the Rite of Spring through Fantasia, they can’t really disassociate it from exploding volcanoes and lumbering dinosaurs. While in Hollywood, he met Greta Garbo in 1938 and they had a very widely publicised romance at which ended his second marriage. He was married three times and one can’t help suspecting a certain element of self-interest and calculation in his marriages. Certainly Olga Samaroff was much more established than he was when they got married. And then he moved on from her to a great heiress Evangeline Johnson, she was the heiress of the Johnson and Johnson fortune. So one of the richest women of America. And you see her on the left hand side. They were married for about a decade from the late 20s up until his affair with Greta Garbo. And then he, once again, in 1945, he married another great heiress, Gloria Vanderbilt, who was the richest girl in America, very extraordinary. There was 40 years between them. She was very beautiful, 21-year-old and he was 64. So he was actually old enough to be her grandfather, let alone her father. So each of these marriages, all three of his marriages lasted a decade. So the fact that they could last a decade suggests that there was something substantial in the relationship, and he had children with all three of his wives. So he continued until the end of his very, very long life. I see if I have a, I seem to be missing the last little link to music that I wanted to play you. After leaving the Philadelphia, it was a regular pattern, he would fall out with the boards of the orchestras and he fell out with the board of the Philadelphia and he left them, announced his leaving in 1936, but didn’t actually leave until 1941. And then he was with various different orchestras, NBC, Houston Symphony Orchestra for several years.

Once again, he completely transformed its standards. And I’m just going to see if I, where is my link gone to play you? I wanted to play you a bit of Scriabin’s Poem of Ecstasy. It was a particular signature piece for Stokowski. And he recorded it with the Houston Symphony Orchestra once again, he fell out with the board and this time for actually very honourable reasons, because of their racism. I mean, he’d invited the Afro-American mezzo Shirley Verrett to appear at a concert and they refused to have her because she was Black. And then the real breaking point was when he wanted to employ Black chorus for a performance of Gurre-Lieder and the white members of the chorus refused to form with them and the board backed the members of the chorus and Stokowski flounced out saying he wasn’t going to work in a place that was tainted by racism. He continued performing into his mid 90s. He gave his last public performance in 1975. I saw one of the very last performances. And that was the reason why I really wanted to play you the Poem of Ectasy 'cause that’s what he performed. And it was at the festival hall in London and he was extremely frail and had to be helped onto the podium. I thought, “Oh my goodness, how is he going to get through this?” But then he gave the most incandescent, brilliant, extraordinary, effervescent performance of the Poem of Ecstasy. So age to 94. He signed a six year recording contract. He was recording right up until the end. So he envisaged continuing his recording career until he was 90, but until he was 100. But in fact he didn’t last quite that long. He died at the age of 97. And so I’m going to open up the questions.

Q&A and Comments:

Thank you Paul. I’m glad to be back with you.

Yes, well Faith, you had a similar experience to me. He was still a very fiery, energetic conductor, right to the very end.

I think it must be your computer Rita. 'Cause nobody else is making that complaint.

Q: Well, how is he able to be so competent in training an orchestra with only an organist background?

A: It’s a mystery. What can you say? As I said, he’s part charlatan. He was, you know, getting away with it, and part genius, he could really do it.

The primary reason for the lush sound of the Philadelphia strings is that he wouldn’t allow steel strings. The strings had to use gut strings. And I think that’s only part of the truth.

Herbert, you, I’m sure you are right, but it also had to do with the kind of bowing that he trained them to do.

Jacqueline Du Pre adopted a rather strange accent. I’m not sure if I’ve heard, I remember what she sounds like when she speaks.

Q: When were women invited to play in his orchestra?

A: Now I don’t know the answer to that. That is a very interesting question. I would expect him to be, you know, ahead of the game and things like that.

Monty, I so agree with you that, I mean, Bach can be done anyway. I like Benny Goodman doing Bach. I love the Swingle singers. There’s much to be gained from modern authentic performances there. I’ve been having a discussion with my friend Mike and Munich about the performances of the B minor mass. There are losses and gains, you know, the people like Klem Pro who do it with tremendous grandeur and you lose some of that grandeur in the modern, in inverted commas, authentic performances which go much faster and much lighter. It certainly is gorgeous music and gorgeous music making.

The Brahms Youth Orchestra version sounds like music for a movie, which is not a compliment. Oh dear. I’m sorry about that, Shelly, I’m not sure I agree with you.

You’ve read that Deanna Durbin and Judy Garland were rivals. That’s true. It was a publicity stunt. Of course, it was a film short that was put per MGM and that’s right Judy Garland sang her, well, of course she couldn’t sing opera. She wouldn’t have that kind of a voice. And the story is that I think who, you know, I can’t remember which mogul it was at MGM saw this short with both Deanna Durbin and Judy Garland and said, “Get rid of the fat one,” meaning get rid of Judy Garland. But actually they got rid of Deanna Durbin, which was the biggest mistake that MGM ever made. 'Cause she went to Universal Studios and she saved them from bankruptcy and became the highest earning female star in Hollywood.

Thank you Nikki. Thank you Judy.

Q: Who dubbed Deanna?

A: Nobody dubbed Deanna Durbin’s voice. That is Deanna Durbin’s voice. She had a remarkably mature sounding voice for a girl in her mid-teens.

And this is, Rita, thank you, Fantasia, available on Vimeo. There are two versions of it, and I hope it’s the original version with Stokowski conducting. 'Cause it was re-issued a few years ago with the new soundtrack. And you really want Stokowski of course.

Again, Donald asking that question about the female members of the orchestra. I have to look at the photographs more carefully and see if there are any women amongst them. And I like that sort of, yes, he had his fingers in lots of pies and melodious ones.

Q: Why would Rubenstein play with somebody he disliked?

A: Yes. Why? And of course he did play with all the main conductors. Free bowing. That’s what I was talking about.

Yes, Richard. Yes. That is part of the answer to the question about the lushness of the string sound. Oh, did the reception wasn’t back in London. I’m afraid it’s not as good as it is in Paris.

So I’ll, oh, several people saying they had recept. Sorry about that.

And you had a Deanna Durbin doll. Thank you. I’ll try it because I think part it works, this particular computer I can’t link, I have to do it by wifi, but if I’ll try on Sunday doing it on another computer, which where I can do it with a cable link, which might be better. Thank you all very much for your patience despite the bad quality of the sound. And I’ll see you again on Sunday.