Solvent Symphony

In a Cleveland hotel last fortnight, four people named John Long Severance, Dudley Stuart Blossom, Mrs. Adella Prentiss Hughes and Nikolai Sokolov, had dinner together. Others were present, but those four might well have celebrated all alone. They were celebrating the financial emancipation of Cleveland's orchestra, the casting out of an old theme which one can nearly always hear booming from the tympanum of any U. S. symphony--the theme of debt.

In Cleveland's case the bills over and above the annual receipts have been in the neighborhood of $235,000 per yr. The reason for jubilation was that, after an eight (8) day drive, the Cleveland Orchestra had $4,970,195 for a hall, an organ, an endowment.

The four chief diners and celebrants had played parts as follows:

John Long Severance, president of the Cleveland Musical Arts Association, offered $1,000,000 to build a music hall for the Cleveland Orchestra on two conditions: 1) that Western Reserve University contribute a plot of ground for the building and 2) that other Clevelanders give $2,000,000 to endow the orchestra. Both conditions were fulfilled. Western Reserve University gladly offered a tract of land on Euclid Avenue not far from Cleveland's Art Museum. The required endowment for the orchestra was more than raised. To cap his generosity, Mr. Severance gave another $250,000 toward an endowment for the building's upkeep.

Dudley Stuart Blossom, Cleveland's popular Welfare Director, lent his impetus to the drive. As a boy he was concert master of Cleveland's University School Orchestra. Later he organized a banjo club at Yale. As chairman of the drive he played Orpheus to Cleveland's Eurydice, incidentally contributing $650,000 to the orchestra endowment himself. Some of this gift was from his wife, who gave $100,000 additional to endow the hall. Part of the Cleveland Orchestra furnished music at the dinner. The program was entitled "Blossom Time." He, once an accomplished musician, has lost fingers from both hands by freezing.

Adella Prentiss Hughes, lioness of Cleveland's musical population, saw her dreams fulfilled. For 30 years she has been leading Cleveland to music. For two decades she was instrumental in getting great U. S. orchestras to visit Cleveland. Then she organized the Musical Arts Association of Cleveland and in 1918 persuaded that organization to get Conductor Nikolai Sokolov from the New York Philharmonic, to start the Cleveland Symphony Orchestra. Since then she has managed the orchestra, helped repair its annual deficit. A tireless woman, she said only last fall, "there is no limitation to a woman's brain. . . ." To her largely must be given credit for an unexpected gift of $250,000 from John Davison Rockefeller Jr., exurbanite Clevelander, who, although he long since ceased to contribute to Cleveland institutions, still admires her efforts.

Nikolai Grigorovitch Sokolov, conductor of the Cleveland Orchestra, sensitive, diligent, musical, beamed with delight at his supporters' achievement. He tried to thank them in words, but words are not his medium. He turned to his musicians and held up his baton. As the music commenced, he put the baton into the hands of Mr. Blossom. Then he who in eight days had just played a five-million-dollar tune, happily led a few more bars.