1812, with Guns

Nervously clutching a lanyard, a plump, bald little man stood in Manhattan's Madison Square Garden one night last week, out of sight of the audience but within range of a large orchestra whose members were blowing and fiddling for dear life. Suddenly the orchestra leader raised his hand with a jerk. The bald man shut his eyes, pulled the lanyard. Boom went a 17-in. cannon. Boom, Boom, Boom it went again, each time almost knocking the little cannoneer off his feet. Sixteen rifles in the hands of 16 U. S. Coast Guardsmen and infantry fired a volley of 16 blank cartridges and the 1812 Overture of Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky crashed to its close with the familiar progressions of the old Imperial Russian anthem.

The 1812, depicting Napoleon's retreat from Moscow, was augmented with artillery sounds at its first performance there in 1882. The fact that this old warhorse received its first NewYork rendition with similar effects last week was due to the Works Progress Administration and Colonel John Reed Kilpatrick, president of Madison Square Garden. The WPA's Federal Music Project, which has some 16,000 musicians on its rolls, wished to weld 210 members of three New York City WPA orchestras and a WPA symphonic band of 75 into a single unit for one big concert. Colonel Kilpatrick, who last spring offered $1,000 for the best suggestion to make his Garden pay during the summer, wondered if popular concerts might not be the answer. Although the WPA evening barely half-filled the house at 25-c- to $1.65 he considered the experiment promising.

Neither was the WPA concert a disappointment to the man who did much of the six weeks' work of organizing it, who whipped the 285 players together after they had been rehearsed in sections. Conductor Erno ("Ernie") Rapee not only led the biggest symphonic orchestra ever assembled in Madison Square Garden through the 1812 and a Strauss waltz, but also performed the feat of arranging for it a trio Tchaikovsky originally wrote for piano, violin and cello.

Dark, dynamic "Ernie" Rapee is a Hungarian who became proficient on the timpani and piano at the Budapest Conservatory. Immediately upon his impulsive arrival in the U. S., he was beaten by a taxi-driver whom he could not pay, soon got a job playing in a Manhattan restaurant. The late Samuel ("Roxy") Rothafel, who in the days of silent cinema astonished the industry by making use of large orchestras, discovered Rapee, kept him on his payroll for 16 years. Once invaluable in any cinemansion, still useful in cinema studios and on the radio, is Rapee's work of 1922, Encyclopedia of Music for Pictures, which contains agitati, furiosi, etc. for 300 screen situations. For two years general music director of National Broadcasting Co., he resigned to go with "Roxy" to Radio City Music Hall, where he outstayed and outlived that outmoded impresario. A radio conductor for General Motors, Rapee also wielded a brisk, competent baton in the Hollywood Bowl, at the Cleveland Great Lakes Exposition, in Newark for the new Essex County Symphony. Though he has not yet led a crack orchestra in Manhattan's Carnegie Hall or Philadelphia's Academy of Music, Erno Rapee has an eye to the behavior of men who have. Like Sergei Koussevitzky, who takes a shower in Boston's Symphony Hall during concert intermissions, ambitious Conductor Rapee carries a spare shirt, changes during intermission wherever he conducts.

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