"Honor to His Country"

A lean, wild-eyed New Yorker rose at dawn one day last week, took a quick walk in Central Park, gulped a chocolate ice cream soda, played three sets of tennis with his wife and hurried to Carnegie Hall. There his real work for the day began. That evening with a hop, skip & jump he was on the podium to conduct the Philharmonic-Symphony, billed as the first native New Yorker to be thus honored.

Backstage after the performance August Janssen, famed old restaurateur ("Janssen Wants To See You") ruefully regarded his hat, said, with tears in his eyes, that his head had outgrown it. The Philharmonic's new conductor was Janssen's 34-year-old son Werner--a wayward son, the old man used to think, who could come to no good end by tinkering with music and shunning his father's respectable Hojbrau (TIME, May 14). Next morning at breakfast Werner Janssen was teary-eyed, too, as he read to his wife what Critic Lawrence Gilman said of him in the Herald Tribune: "He is, in short, a musician of rare gifts, an indispensable conductor, and an honor to his country and his time."

Other critics avoided superlatives and laymen did not know what to think. Werner Janssen had chosen an unfamiliar program: a Haydn symphony which had never before been played in Manhattan, John Alden Carpenter's Sea-Drift, Leo Sowerby's Comes Autumn Time and d'Indy's Second Symphony. But Werner Janssen knew every note even if his audience did not. At rehearsals he conducted without a score. At the performance the audience liked him because his beat was clean and unmannered, because he built up his climaxes without fuming & fussing, because he seemed genuinely surprised each time he was called back to acknowledge the applause. That applause seemed to be more for Janssen, the New Yorker, than for any particular features of his debut performance.

Werner Janssen's father refused to support him so long as he trafficked in music. He put himself through Dartmouth by washing dishes, waiting on table, conducting a restaurant orchestra, playing the organ in church, the piano in a local cinema. After graduation his first job was in a waterfront dance hall in Boston. The pay was 75-c- a night plus tips. Janssen soon lost that job because he could never bang the piano loud enough to suit the proprietor.

Through the many hack jobs which followed, Werner Janssen was memorizing symphonic scores, trying his hand at serious composition. His New Year's Eve in New York won the Prix de Rome fellowship in 1930. The Philharmonic engagement was the result of a Sibelius concert he gave in Helsingfors last winter, during which the great Finnish composer remarked: "For the first time I am hearing my work exactly as I conceived it."

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