In the official biographies of Serge
Alexandrovitch Koussevitzky you will find that the
boss of the Boston Symphony learned the art and mystery
of conducting at the Royal Hochschule in Berlin
under the great Artur Nikisch, but in this town there
lives and breathes a rather well-known Russian pianist
who tells a different story.
Long ago, says this key-tickler, when
he was a youth, he was hired by Koussevitzky, then
also a young fellow, to play the piano scores of the
entire standard symphony repertoire.
He pounded away by the hour, the day
and the week, while Koussevitzky conducted, watching
himself in a set of three tall mirrors in a corner
of the drawing room of his Moscow home.
The job lasted just about a year,
and our pianist has never looked at a conductor since.
There’s also an anecdote to
the effect that, much earlier, when Serge was still
a little boy in his small native town in the province
of Tver, in northern Russia, he would arrange the
parlor chairs in rows and, with some score open in
front of him, conduct them. Once in a while he’d
stop short and berate the chairs. Then little
Serge’s language was something awful.
Whether these stories are true or
not, the fact remains that Mr. Koussevitzky became
a conductor and a great one-one of the greatest.
The yarn of the mirrors is the most credible of the
lot, for the Russian batonist’s platform appearance
is so meticulous and his movements are so obviously
studied to produce the desired effects that he seems
to conduct before an imaginary pier glass.
For elegant tailoring he has no peer
among orchestral chiefs, except, perhaps, Mr. Stokowski.
It’s a toss-up between the two. Both are
as sleek as chromium statues. Mr. Stokowski,
slim, lithe, romantic in a virile way, looks as a
poet should look, but never does. Mr. Koussevitzky,
broad-shouldered, narrow-waisted, extremely military
and virile in a dramatic way, looks as a captain of
dragoons in civvies should have looked but never did.
Mr. Koussevitzy’s conductorial
gestures are literally high, wide and handsome.
His wing-spread, so to speak, is much larger than that
of either Mr. Stokowski or Mr. Toscanini, and he has
a greater repertoire of unpredictable motions than
both of them put together. Time cannot wither,
nor custom stale, the infinite variety of his shadow
boxing.
Those who knew his history look upon
Mr. Koussevitzky’s joyous, unrestrained gymnastics
with tolerant eyes. They realize that, for years,
he was forced to hide his fine figure and athletic
prowess from thousands of potential admirers.
For Mr. Koussevitzky, before he became
a conductor, was a world-famous performer on the double
bass, that big growling brute of an instrument popularly
known as the bull fiddle. In those days all that
was visible of his impressive person was his head,
one of his shoulders and his arms.
He didn’t want to be a bull
fiddler any more than you or you or you, and it’s
greatly to his credit and indicative of his iron will,
consuming ambition and extraordinary musicianship that
he developed, according to authoritative opinion,
into the best bull fiddler of his time.
Here’s what happened:
Serge was the son of a violinist who
scratched away for a meager living in a third-rate
theatre orchestra. The boy, intensely musical,
wished to be a fiddler like his father. When he
was fourteen, his family gave him their blessing,
which was all they had to give, and sent him to Moscow
to try for a scholarship at the Philharmonic School.
He arrived with three rubles in his
pocket. At the school he was told that the only
available scholarship was one in bull fiddling.
Serge tried for it and won. He was, so far as
is known, the first musician to make the barking monster
into a solo instrument.
An overburdened troubadour, he dragged
the cumbersome thing all over Russia and played it
in recitals with amazing success. In 1903, when
Mr. Koussevitzky was twenty-nine (he’s sixty-eight
now but looks a mettlesome fifty), the Czar decorated
him-the only instance in history of a decoration
bestowed for bull fiddling.
That same year, while giving a concert
in Moscow, the virtuoso happened to look into the
audience and his eyes met those of a stunning brunette
in the front row. The owner of the lovely eyes,
Natalya Konstantinova Ushkova, became his wife two
years later.
Natalya, the daughter of a wealthy
merchant and a rich girl in her own right, promised
him anything he wanted for a wedding gift. “Give
me a symphony orchestra.” was Koussevitzky’s
startling request. The bride was taken aback,
for it was with the bull fiddle that he had wooed and
won her and she hated to see him give it up, but she
kept her word.
Now here is where our old pianist
comes in. It was at that time, he says, that
Mr. Koussevitzky sent for him and began an intensive
course of study before the triple mirror.
A year or so later Natalya hired eighty-five
of the best musicians in Moscow. After a season
of rehearsals Mr. Koussevitzky took his band on tour
aboard a steamer-a little gift from his
father-in-law.
They rode up and down the Volga.
Every evening the vessel-a sort of musical
showboat-tied up at a different city, town
or village and the orchestra gave a concert, often
before peasants and small-town folk who had never
heard symphony music before. In seven years Mr.
Koussevitzky and his men traveled some 3,000 miles.
Came the revolution. Kerensky
ordered Koussevitzy and his men: “Keep
up with your music.” They did, but it wasn’t
easy. It was a terribly severe winter; the country
was in the killing grip of cold and famine.
Koussevitzky and his players starved
for weeks on end. The boss conducted in mittens.
The men wore mittens, too, but they had holes in them,
so they could finger the strings and keys of their
instruments.
The Bolsheviks made Mr. Koussevitzky
director of the state orchestras which, in those early
Soviet days, were at low musical ebb. He labored
in that job for three years, from 1917 to 1920, but
he was out of sympathy with the Lenin-Trotzky regime
and asked permission to leave the country. It
was refused because officials said, “Russia needs
your music.”
The fiery Koussevitzky told the Government
that, unless he were allowed to travel abroad, he’d
never play or conduct another note in Russia.
They let him go.
Mr. Koussevitzky says that the Bolsheviks
robbed him of about a million in money, land and other
property. In illustration of the state of things
that impelled him to leave his native land, he likes
to tell this story:
A minor Bolshevik official came in
one day to check up on the affairs of the orchestra.
“Who are those people?” he asked, pointing
to a group of players at the conductor’s left.
“Those,” said Koussevitzky, “are
the first violins.”
“And those over there?”
asked the inspector, indicating a group at the conductor’s
right. “The second violins,” was the
reply.
“What!” yelled the official.
“Second violins in a Soviet state orchestra?
Clear them out!”
Mr. Koussevitzky went to Paris, where
he conducted a series of orchestral concerts and performances
of Moussorgsky’s “Boris Godounoff”
and Tschaikowsky’s “Pique Dame” at
the Opera. Between 1921 and 1924 he also appeared
in Barcelona, Rome and Berlin. In Paris he established
a music publishing house (still in existence), which
issued the works of such modern Russian composers as
Stravinsky, Scriabine, Medtner, Prokofieff and Rachmaninoff.
In 1924, the offer of a $50,000 salary
and the opportunity of rebuilding the Boston Symphony
Orchestra, which had sadly deteriorated since the
days of Dr. Karl Muck, lured him to this country.
American customs, he now admits, at
first appalled him. He was amazed to find musicians
smoking in intermissions at rehearsals and concert.
This he called “an insult to art.”
He forbade smoking. The players raised an unholy
rumpus, but Koussevitzky persisted. The men haven’t
taken a puff in Symphony Hall since that time.
The next unpopular move he made was
to fire a number of the old standbys who had sat in
the orchestra for most of its forty-four-year history.
“I vant yongk blott!” he cried in his then
still very thick accent. “If dose old chentlemen
vant to sleep, let dem sleep in deir houses!”
The Boston music lovers didn’t
like it. To them the Symphony is a sacred cow
and they regarded the older members in the light of
special pets. But when, at the opening of the
new season, they heard a brilliant, completely rejuvenated
orchestra, they forgave the new conductor. Since
then, he has restored the Symphony to its old-time
glory. Today Beacon Hill has no greater favorite
than Serge Alexandrovitch Koussevitzky.
The orchestra men, too, learned to
like him. They discovered that, with all his
public histrionics, he was on the level as a musician.
He is a merciless task master, but in rehearsals he
gives himself no airs. Dressed in an old pair
of pants and a disreputable brown woolen sweater,
which he has worn in private since the day he landed
in Boston, he works like a stevedore. When he,
the pants and the sweater had been with the Symphony
ten years, the men gave him a testimonial dinner.
Next to Mr. Toscanini he’s the
world’s most temperamental conductor, but he
has the ability to keep himself in check-when
he wants to. “Koussevitzky,” says
Ernest Newman, the eminent English music critic, “has
a volcanic temperament, yet never have I known it to
run away with him. It is precisely when his temperament
is at the boiling point that his hand on the regulator
is steadiest.”
At a concert in Carnegie Hall four
years ago he gave a dramatic demonstration of self-control.
He was conducting Debussy’s “Prelude to
the Afternoon of a Faun,” when smoke from an
incinerator fire in a neighboring building penetrated
the hall. The smoke grew dense. People rose,
rushed for the exits in near-panic. Women screamed.
He stopped the orchestra, turned to
the audience, held up his hand and shouted:
“Come back! Sit down!
Sit down-all of you! Everything is
all right!”
The customers meekly resumed their
seats. Mr. Koussevitzky swung ’round and
continued playing Debussy’s brooding, sensuous
dreampiece as if nothing had happened.
Because he has done so much, both
as conductor and publisher, for living composers (he
is the high priest of the Sibelius cult), he has been
called a modernist. The label infuriates him.
“Nonsense!” he snarls.
“I’m not a modernist and I’m not
a classicist. I’m a musician! The
first movement of the Ninth Symphony of Beethoven
is the greatest music ever written and George Gershwin’s
’Rhapsody in Blue’ is a masterpiece.”
“There you are! Make the best of it!”