Boston's Boyar

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In the first half of the 19th Century, when such men as Philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson, Preacher Theodore Parker and Pundit Bronson Alcott were generating a whole kaleidoscope of intellectual sparks, Boston was in truth the cultural powerhouse of the U.S. Since then Boston's cultural graph has shown, a decline. Her writers and painters, once the most pioneering, are now for the most part complacent. But to the Back Bay Brahmins Boston's past glories are still present, her old-fashioned way of life still sacredly up-to-date.

One of Boston's hoary monuments to Brahmin gentility, that still stands like the Great Pyramid, is the Boston Symphony Orchestra. At its Friday afternoon concerts in venerable Symphony Hall, bald, spade-bearded oldsters and their classically corseted wives sit complacently, laved in the patrician strains of Beethoven and Brahms. So have they sat every week since the late Major Henry Lee Higginson, in 1881, materialized the expensive idea that Boston ought to have a good symphony orchestra. That idea cost Major Higginson a million dollars.

Higginson's Band. The fame of Henry Lee Higginson's orchestra has not been limited to Boston. Long before the Philadelphia Orchestra was heard of, connoisseurs rated the Boston Symphony the finest organization of its kind in the U.S., some said in the world. Although it has been rivaled in recent years by at least two other U.S. orchestras,* it has held its place fairly steadily for more than half a century. Only once in its history did it fall behind the front rank, and that was when its greatest conductor, razor-faced, German-born Karl Muck, was charged with espionage by New England patrioteers and interned during the World War.

There followed a six-year interlude of trouble. Aging Major Higginson, disgusted with the hue & cry over innocent, crotchety Dr. Muck, turned the orchestra's management over to a board of directors, died a year later. Many of the orchestra's best players had been deported as "enemy aliens." In turn, two more acceptable but less capable French conductors, Henri Rabaud and Pierre Monteux, strove vainly to regain the lost ground. A strike, supported by the American Federation of Musicians, though won by the management, further depleted the orchestra's ranks. But by 1924 the Boston Symphony, recovered from its wartime jitters, was being reorganized for a comeback. Soon it was back in its old place among the finest of U.S. symphonic organizations.

The man largely responsible for this comeback was a pince-nezed Russian who strongly resembles a diplomat of the Napoleonic era, Sergei Alexandrovich Koussevitzky. Imported by the Symphony's board of directors from Europe, where he had caused some loud critical quacks in the concert halls of London and Paris, Conductor Koussevitzky's first season was in the nature of a tryout. He was not at that time one of the towering figures of European music. Conservative Bostonians, in fact, found him at first somewhat exaggerated and theatrical. But soon Boston began to admit that Conductor Koussevitzky had two things: 1) an uncannily transparent tone that only he seemed able to elicit from the orchestra, 2) a repertory that was larger and more varied than that of any other conductor in the U.S. Insatiable in his search for good music by contemporary composers, he introduced the U.S. to such important modernist figures as William Walton, Paul Hindemith and Zoltan Kodaly, provided Boston with a better balanced symphonic diet than any other U.S. city was enjoying. While other orchestras were splitting up their seasons under successive guest conductors, the Bostonians made out with Koussevitzky all winter long.

Last week the 106 members of the Boston Symphony, like thousands of symphonic musicians all over the U.S., polished their brasswork and rosined their bows for the start of a new season. For Boston's orchestra, second oldest in the U.S.,* this was to be their 58th winter, their 15th consecutive year under Koussevitzky's baton.

Tyrant's 15th. When Boston's concertgoers gather in Symphony Hall this week for the season's opening concert, they will see a haughty, grey-haired, tyrannical aristocrat stride to the podium in faultlessly tailored morning clothes, bow to the audience, then turn imperiously to the orchestra. As he raps for attention he will clap a pince-nez to his nose. Before he turns again to the audience to take his bow, the pince-nez will be removed. During the performance his rear view will present the most thoroughly studied and poised appearance to be seen on any symphonic podium in the U.S. Even in climaxes where the average maestro would be fighting the air with fury, Conductor Koussevitzky's well-preserved figure well preserves a Vere de Vere calm.

This remarkably poised exhibition gives no hint of the scenes that preceded it. Koussevitzky on parade and Koussevitzky in rehearsal are as different as night and day. While trombonists sweat, fiddlers fidget, and horn players dump saliva from their hard-worked instruments, Tyrant Koussevitzky, hunched in an old sweater, shouts, sings, gesticulates, lunges and paddles with his baton, grins froglike at pleasant sounds, scolds frantically in heavily battered English. "You must zing," he admonishes, "you.must blay the nuts." "Vonderful, vonderful!" he exclaims, when the orchestra's tone suits him. "Don't spik!" he furiously warns some innocent player who is trying to make a suggestion. "If you spik, I go home!"

Since the Boston Symphony is the only important non-union orchestra in the U.S., musicians who cross Tyrant Koussevitzky risk their jobs. Stories of his tyranny (sometimes apocryphal) have become legend among musicians. Typical is that of the musician who persisted in playing sour notes. Exasperated, Koussevitzky finally shouted: "You are fired. Ged out. Ged out!" That ended the rehearsal. On his way out the discharged musician passed the dressing room, where the conductor was sitting gloomily hunched over a desk. The musician stopped. "Nuts to you, Koussevitzky!" he bellowed. Koussevitzky turned his haughty head. "It's too late to abologize," he snapped.

To Boston's John Q. Public, Koussevitzky is merely a funny name. But to Back Bay he is an idol, firmly pedestaled. If he showed signs of sociability, Boston's ladies would launch him in a flood of tea. But Conductor Koussevitzky has little time for fripperies, and his intimate friends are few. Few also are his hobbies. When he is not conducting, or studying the scores he keeps scattered about the living room of his home, he spends his time either walking or reading heavy tomes on metaphysics and philosophy. When walking he is accompanied by two joyfully yapping cocker spaniels named (in French) Bemol (flat) and Diese (sharp).

Conservative in his tastes, 64-year-old Sergei Koussevitzky lives in a large rented house in the quiet, substantial, somewhat stuffy Boston suburb of Brookline. Its furnishings and decoration are completely American, its staff completely Russian. Chief factotum is a blond, grinning, gangling valet named Victor, who follows his master about with serf-like devotion. Strapping, slant-eyed Victor has many duties, among them that of drying off his master who is always drenched with perspiration at the end of each concert. Victor's wife is the cook, who prepares Koussevitzky's regular and carefully-chosen meals. Regularly and carefully apportioned are all his daily habits, with so much time allowed for rehearsing, so much for walking, so much for studying his scores, for the Boston Symphony's aging master takes systematic and excellent care of himself.

Though he is a tyrant on the podium, Koussevitzky in private life is an affable, courtly, talkative, rather posey Russian boyar* of the old school. While his tastes in music range from the 18th Century up to the streamlined present, his tastes in nearly everything else are old-worldly. Temperamentally a romantic, he loves to brood over the oniony ideas of such dank German philosophers as Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, considers them his teachers. But his manner, far from gloomy, is as enthusiastic as champagne. And his conversation, always accompanied by violent gesticulation, is loaded with rhetorical "Ah!'s," and wreathy superlatives. Though he has long been a champion of the works of young Soviet composers, he has little enthusiasm for Russia's present form of government. Always loud in his praise of the U.S. and its institutions, he took out his first U.S. citizenship papers three years ago.

Bull Fiddler. Koussevitzky has taken few of life's bumps. One good reason has been Natalya Konstantinovna Koussevitzkaya, his pleasant, portly, beak-nosed Russian wife. Koussevitzky is her career. Once a sculptress, she has not only spent the best part of her life smoothing out her husband's path; she also played an important part in putting him on the path in the first place.

The facts of Sergei Alexandrovich Koussevitzky's life belie his haughty mien but not his profession. He was born in 1874 in the tiny bedraggled central Russian village of Vyshny Volochek. His mother, who died shortly after he was born, was a pianist; his father gave lessons on the violin. A poor boy, destined by a traditionally musical family for a musical career, he was soon on his way to Moscow in search of a scholarship at Moscow's Philharmonic Conservatory. Because he was late in applying, and because there were only a few places left in the conservatory orchestra, the only scholarships open to him were for instruction on 1) the trombone, 2) the bassoon, 3) the string bass. As the least of three evils, young Koussevitzky chose the bull fiddle (string bass). So expert did he become that eventually he toured Europe as a soloist on this clumsiest of instruments, was widely hailed as the world's No. 1 bull fiddler.*

It was during his days as a mustachioed virtuoso on the string bass that he met Natalya Konstantinovna. While sawing the thick strings of his groaning instrument at a Moscow concert, he noticed a girl in the front row, gazing at him in maidenly admiration. Koussevitzky's heart jumped, he sawed away more sweetly than ever. After the concert he searched for his admirer, but she had gone. For weeks romantic Koussevitzky was in a lovesick daze. Months later, at another concert, he spied her again in the audience, made his pachydermatous instrument serenade her with mournful and passionate moans. Again she eluded him. It was not until two years afterward that they met and married.

Like many a successful conductor's wife, Natalya Konstantinovna was a woman of means. Together they financed an orchestra for Koussevitzky to practice on, and gave a series of concerts in Moscow and St. Petersburg. The Koussevitzky Concerts began to catch on with the Russian public. The Koussevitzkys chartered a ferryboat, made a tour of the Volga. By 1910 Koussevitzky was the most widely-known maestro in Tsarist Russia. Meanwhile he had started a publishing house for music by contemporary Slavic composers, published for the first time (thus, incidentally, sparing himself the performance royalties) works by such famed artists as the late Alexander Scriabin, Sergei Prokofieff and Igor Stravinsky.

The revolution of 1917 put a stop to all this. Zealous Bolsheviks liquidated Capitalist Koussevitzky's self-endowed orchestra and publishing house, offered him instead the post of Russia's musical head man. He declined, though he accepted for a time the conductorship of Petrograd's State Orchestra, where his dictatorial instincts were continually curbed by bureaucratic rules & regulations. Once officers of the GPU caught him attempting to escape to Estonia. When he did finally succeed in getting a passport to leave the country, he abandoned virtually all of his money and personal property to the Soviet Government.

Today, greying, fastidious Koussevitzky is at the peak of his career. The resignations of Arturo Toscanini from the conductorship of the New York Philharmonic-Symphony,* and of platinum-blond Leopold Stokowski from the chief conductorship of the Philadelphia Orchestra (see below) have left him without rivals among the regular directors of U.S. symphony orchestras. Ten years ago, outside of Boston, there may have been some doubt about his preeminence. But today even Manhattanites and Philadelphians would admit that the No. symphony conductor of the U.S. is Boston's Sergei Alexandrovich Koussevitzky.

*The Philadelphia Orchestra, the New York Philharmonic-Symphony. * Oldest: the New York Philharmonic-Sym-phony (founded 1842). * In Tsarist Russia, a gentleman not of noble rank. *Among swing musicians, playing the bull fiddle--which is performed without a bow--is known as "slapping the doghouse." Palmiest slapper is Bob Haggert, who plays with Bob Crosby's band. *Today famed Maestro Toscanini's most important appearances in the U.S. are his dozen-odd annual broadcasts with the NBC Symphony Orchestra.

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