Prodigious Cleveland

Orchestras, like women, aspire to homes of their own. The ambition, in the case of orchestras, is lofty. It assumes a financial well-being and general confidence which few orchestras ever attain, yet last week it was realized by the prodigious Cleveland Orchestra in its 13th year.

Materially the Cleveland Orchestra's new home is the work of Architects Walker & Weeks, who also designed Cleveland's Public Library, Medical Library, and Federal Reserve Bank. It is an imposing Indiana limestone structure, roughly triangular, with a vaulted polygonal front spreading fanwise to the rear. It is situated in Wade Park opposite the Art Museum on land donated by Western Reserve University. Besides the silver-grey modernistic auditorium which seats 1,900, there is a chamber music hall (capacity 400), a large broadcasting studio, an air-conditioning plant.

Intellectually the new building is a monument to the efforts and foresight of two people: to Russian Nikolai Sokoloff, only conductor the Orchestra has had, who at last week's dignified housewarming gave a particularly eloquent reading of Charles Martin Tornov Loeffler's Evocation, composed specially for the occasion; and to Adella Prentiss Hughes, the Orchestra's enterprising manager, out of respect for whom John Davison Rockefeller Jr., a one-time Clevelander, gave $250,000. Financially the rest of the credit goes to Dudley Stuart Blossom, tireless campaigner who with his wife gave some $900,000; and to President John Long Severance of the Musical Arts Association who gave $2,500,000 of his oil & steel fortune, and for whose wife, the late Elizabeth DeWitt Severance, the building has been called Severance Hall.

New Pianist

When a conductor with the reputation of Bernardino Molinari troubles to introduce a young pianist at a formal tea, when Arturo Toscanini lets it be known that he greatly admires him, the young pianist becomes a figure to be reckoned with. Twenty-six-year old Carlo Zecchi was the Italian so marked last week in Manhattan. He earned his honors with a fleet-fingered, high-strung performance of Liszt's E Flat Concerto with the Philharmonic-Symphony, then resumed a tour of some 35 concerts into the midwest.* Pianist Zecchi's friends say that he is a shy, serious young person who sometimes wishes he had gone in for political economy instead of music. His musical instincts developed first. At 12 he had written a martial chorus called New Italy, dedicated it to the Italian Crown Prince, conducted it at a concert which the Crown Prince attended. After conservatory training in Rome, he went to Berlin to study intensively under famed Ferrucio Busoni, developed German ideas and a love for Schumann and Bach. In Milan Toscanini heard him, rushed up to the platform after the performance and embraced him. In Soviet Russia, on which he is writing a book, and in South America he has made a big name.

Pianist Zecchi's looks belie his rather austere reputation. He is small and dapper, has a tiny mustache. At his Manhattan debut last week he wore large, hornrimmed glasses which made him appear all the more diminutive in comparison with his big Bechstein piano. The Bechstein, a German piano introduced publicly to the U. S. this season, will be given a vigorous plugging by Pianist Zecchi. A Bechstein advertising stunt two years ago was to send one of its pianos over on the first trip of the Graf Zeppelin.

Thirteenth Try

(See front cover)

Two thousand years ago Aesop denied there was such a thing as a happy man. But last week a tired-looking little man with thinning reddish hair stood before the golden curtains at Manhattan's Metropolitan Opera House and said to the crowds who had stayed to applaud him: "When you get home tonight please remember that you have seen one completely happy man."

He was Joseph Deems Taylor, composer, and he had good reason to be happy. He had attained what any U. S. composer would consider an ultimate reward. He had had one opera. The King's Henchman, produced at the Metropolitan. But much of the credit for that success had gone to Poetess Edna St. Vincent Millay who wrote the rich but hard-to-sin? libretto. He had been commissioned to create another opera, the only U. S. composer to be given a second chance at the Metropolitan. Now he had lived to see his second opera handsomely mounted, splendidly sung. The audience had evidently liked it. The prima donna (Lucrezia Bori) had rolled out a big wreath for him. There were 36 curtain-calls and he joined the cast in almost every one. Next day not all the newspapers were so kind but the New York Times lavished six Sunday morning columns upon the triumph of his Peter Ibbetson.

The Metropolitan's search for a good, native U. S. opera has gone on almost as long as the scientists' search for life on Mars. Just what will make such a work "native" will probably remain a matter of debate until it arrives. Some say it will contain Indian themes, others say Negro themes. Some say it will reflect the mechanical spirit of modern times, or whatever other spirit informs a future time. Certainly, one way or another, the music must speak boldly for itself. It will not echo Wagner and Puccini and Debussy. Nor will the composer import his story as Composer Taylor did the Peter Ibbetson of George clu Maurier. Peter Ibbetson was the Metropolitan's thirteenth try for a U. S. work which could be given a permanent place in the repertoire.*

The method of Peter Ibbetson if not the music was indigenous. It was contracted for as the Metropolitan might have contracted with an excavator to dig the foundation hole for its proposed new opera house. Good, bad or indifferent, any piece of his making was guaranteed the kind of a hearing for which some writers of music would work a lifetime. Practically guaranteed also was the triumph as lengthily detailed by the Times.

Peter Ibbetson was Composer Taylor's third choice of subject. He had worked first on Heywood Broun's Candle Follows His Nose. Becoming involved in Broun's allegory, he dropped it for Elmer Rice's Street Scene. Deems Taylor music is essentially lyric and charming. Street Scene is sordid, grim. Composer Taylor shelved it for Peter Ibbetson the evening he met Constance Collier at a party given by Katherine Cornell. In his libretto he followed the structure of the Peter Ibbetson which Miss Collier adapted in 1917 as a play for herself and the Barrymore Brothers. The story which every lovelorn schoolgirl knows:

Peter, unhappy ward of swaggering Colonel Ibbetson, lives in the memory of his childhood when as Gogo Pasquier he played in perfect happiness with Mimsey Seraskier. Mimsey grows up to be the lovely Duchess of Towers with whom Peter falls in love. In Paris, near their old home in Passy, the grown-up Gogo and Mimsey meet again. She teaches him that dreams are more important than reality. He kills Colonel Ibbetson and, committed to life imprisonment, lives in a blissful dreamworld with his Mimsey until the Duchess of Towers passes out of real life and comes to take him with her.

Deems Taylor was a successful professional writer long before his music began to sell. His libretto, free from operatic archaisms, is excellent. Yet (as in other English opera) there were bits that sounded funny and forced. Contralto Grace Divine sang: "What a lovely ball!'' Contralto Marion Telva sang back: "You think so? Thank you!" Longer passages adapted themselves more smoothly to the flow of music, as in Peter's first-act narrative. Excerpt:

And when the hour grew late, and the sun went down, Then . . . home again, Mimsey and I, Through the sweet Paris twilight, The glow-worms shining through the grass, And the frogs, croaking, far away, In the Mare d'Auteuil.

With his music Taylor did not get off to a happy start. In the opening ballroom scene the waltz which he had long aspired to do in the Strauss genre was muddled and thin. The singing on the stage seemed to have little relation to the rambling accompaniment in the pit. Things improved with the beginning of the dream music, much of which was based on French folk songs. The orchestration took on a lovely, flowing sheen. Interludes in the manner of Pelleas et Melisande linked the scenes. Theatrically effective was the music for the scene in which Peter met his childhood hero, old Major Duquesnoir who did not recognize him; also in the killing of Colonel Ibbetson and in the wait for the execution call.

Throughout, Soprano Lucrezia Bori (the Duchess of Towers) acted with perfect grace, sang her English with very little accent. Hardworking, 56-year-old Tenor Edward Johnson was a sensitive, groping Peter, believably youthful. Baritone Lawrence Tibbett (Colonel Ibbetson) did a thrilling death. Joseph Urban's dream sets gave a happy, springtime effect.

Many in last week's audience wondered what estimate, if put to it, smart Deems Taylor would put on his new opera. As critic for the New York World he once wrote a review of one of his early symphonic works. He found it full of holes but said that the composer seemed to have talent and that he hoped to hear something more from his pen played by the Manhattan orchestras.

Between the time he left New York University (where in 1906 he wrote an undergraduate musicomedy called the Isle of Skidoo) and when he went to the World, Deems Taylor tried a dozen jobs. He read proof for the Nelson Encyclopedia, rose to write it articles on handball and pins, drew colored plates of U. S. flags. He went into the commercial art business, finished up a year with a net loss of $17. Then he edited an electrical magazine, went to France on $700 as a self-appointed War correspondent. He got his job on the World through his friend Colyumist Franklin Pierce Adams to whose "Conning Tower" he had sent many a bright verse signed "Smeed," Deems spelled backwards. Since leaving the World in 1925 he has edited Musical America, written stories for a dozen different magazines, told stories over the radio. Peter Ibbetson he wrote at his Stamford, Conn, farmhouse, on which, for relaxation, he carpentered two wings. Mrs. Joseph Deems Taylor is Actress Mary Kennedy, also a playwright (coauthor of Mrs. Partridge Presents).

*Pianist Zecchi had previously played privately in Manhattan, publicly in Washington, Tallahassee, Toronto, Guelph, Decatur, Winnipeg.

*0ther U. S. composers whose works have been produced at the Metropolitan: Frederick Shepherd Converse, the late Professor Horatio William Parker, of Yale (his Mono, was awarded a $10,000 prize), Walter Damrosch (to whom Peter Ibbetson is dedicated), Victor Herbert Reginald de Koven, Henry Franklin Belknap Gilbert, Charles Wakefield Cadman, John Adam Hugo, Joseph Carl Breil, Henry Kimball Hadley, John Alden Carpenter. Composer Carpenter's Skyscrapers, a ballet, and Taylor's The King's Henchman survived longer than the dreary ten which preceded them.

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