Laymen's Lessons

Few laymen who stuff themselves into full dress and go to sit with their wives at grand opera or concerts have such intellectual honesty and humility as patriarchal Lawyer Paul Drennan Cravath exhibited last winter. Lawyer Cravath is not "musical"' and, with the practical candor of Booth Tarkington's Plutocrat, he admits it. He felt that, as chairman of the Metropolitan Opera Company, he should understand more about what he sits and listens to. So all last winter he took lessons in appreciation from Pianist Olga Samaroff". So did 40 Junior League girls who in a few months lost their horror of music's technicalities. Pianist Samaroff would sound different notes until they learned to identify them. She grouped notes together in scales and chords. From that they learned how composers had worked out themes for their operas and symphonies, how they had elaborated on them.

Last week, Pianist Samaroff threw her music courses open to the public, engaged 17 teachers to help her in New York, eight in Philadelphia, announced besides the rudimentary course, special classes for businessmen and women, classes for opera and orchestra subscribers who want to study programs in advance.

Like most musicians, Mine Samaroff has suffered long from the superficiality of U. S. audiences. It was impressed upon her at the beginning of her career when a New York manager made her change her name from Hickenlooper (she was the daughter of a San Antonio army officer). She felt it even more in the years when she was making her career and Conductor Leopold Stokowski. to whom she was married for twelve years, was making his. Eight years ago Mine Samaroff fell over a trunk, tore a ligament in her right arm, had to five up concert work. She became critic of the New York Evening Post only to be criticized for constantly presenting the musician's point of view. She took to teaching and her most talented pupils had trouble finding audiences. Cornelius Bliss indirectly gave her the idea for a layman's school. He wanted her to teach his daughter Elizabeth enough music so that she would be interested when she went with him to the opera. Later Mme Samaroff experimented with her friends, Mrs. Theodore Steinway and Mrs. Otto Kahn--"guinea pigs" she calls them--who with Lawyer Cravath and the Junior League girls are booming the new school.

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