Casadesus' Tribute

Frail, white-haired composer Gabriel Faure, director of the Paris Conservatory, listened thoughtfully. A 14-year-old student was playing a set of piano variations. The recital over, Director Faure awarded the Conservatory's first piano prize to the fair-haired boy, saying in a voice so soft it could hardly be heard: "This youngster . . . has true musicality . . . he will go far." That was in 1914.

Even before Faure's death in 1924, blue-eyed Robert Casadesus (pronounced kah-sah-de-soo') was well on his way to becoming one of the world's fine pianists. Today many swear that he is the greatest interpreter of Mozart and Ravel. Last week, to mark the centennial of Faure's birth, he led a group of fellow French artists in a program of the composer's chamber music; the Museum of Modern Art audience of arty cosmopolitans voted it a fitting tribute and a notable curtain to another successful Casadesus season.

Robert & Gaby. Faure's prize student came from the most musical household in all Paris. Rue Rochechouart rang day & night with the exuberant music played by four uncles, a dozen aunts, a score of first cousins. Father, an actor, composed operettas; grandfather, an amateur fiddler, zealously watched the musical growth of each member of the clan.

Money was as scarce as music was abundant, and Robert went to work as a percussionist in the Opera-Comique; he rang the bells for Lakme. Tympani took him through his Conservatory days, and then he went into the army. During his military career he solemnly rataplanned the drums at Versailles as Woodrow Wilson marched by with Clemenceau.

In 1922 Robert married Gaby L'Hote, a pretty, brown-eyed Conservatory student who was the daughter of a Marseilles fonctionnaire. Three days after the wedding Robert joined the staff of the American Conservatory at Fontainebleau, and he and Gaby spent three terms with the carefree American students at Louis XV's summer shack.

Robert finally decided to concentrate on a serious concert career, toured Europe from London to Odessa, then North Africa and South America. With Gaby he played two-piano recitals.

Mozart & Ravel. In 1935 Casadesus rehearsed Mozart's Coronation Concerto to letter-perfection, and came to the U.S.

Although critics loftily wrote that a pianist could not really be gauged by Mozart, audiences liked the big, genial pianist who looked more like a Minnesota farmer than a Paris esthete. The critics eventually capitulated to Casadesus' expert left-handed soloing of Ravel's Concerto for the Left Hand Alone.

Casadesus made an annual U.S. tour, and in 1940 brought Gaby and their two sons for a holiday. When the Nazis invaded France, the family decided to stay, and subleased* the oldest (preRevolutionary) stone house in Princeton, N.J., complete with Hessian ghost.

The Princeton household is an echo of the rue Rochechouart days. In an upstairs room Robert, constantly smoking a pipe, composed his Second Symphony and his Ballet for the Birth of a Dauphine (celebrating the arrival of Therese, who is now three). Robert and Gaby rehearse continually on two Steinways in the first-floor living room. Jean (17) and Guy (13) do their practicing there, too. A fuzzy-haired neighbor, Albert Einstein, sometimes drops in with his violin.

* From Colonel L. B. Cuyler (see U.S. AT WAR).

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