Death Music

If Pianist Josef Hofmann lay dying in his home on Rittenhouse Square, Philadelphia, and were able to choose music to accompany his passing, if Retired Fisticuffer James Joseph ("Gene") Tunney were similarly stricken and privileged, both men would ask to hear the surging Funeral March from Wagner's Goetterdaemmerung.

Disregarding the fact that few dying men have strength or inclination to call for music, playing on the sentiment that the ideal exit would be made to the strains of some great composer, The Etude, music magazine whose appeal is usually more pedagogic than popular, last week published answers to a questionnaire sent out to various U. S. heroes asking what music they would choose to have played if they had only a few hours to live. Other choices:

Alfred Emanuel Smith: Holy Lord, We Praise Thy Name.

John Philip Sousa: His own Stars and Stripes Forever.

William Lyon Phelps: Beethoven's Ninth Symphony.

Nicholas Longworth: Beethoven's Seventh Symphony.

Otis Skinner: Something of Beethoven, preferably his Fifth or Seventh Symphony.

Howard Thurston: Phonograph record of Old Man River.

Cyrus Hermann Kotzschmar Curtis:

Softly Now the Light of Day by Organist Hermann Kotzschmar, his father's friend in Portland, Maine.

Ossip Gabrilowitsch: Schubert's Unfinished Symphony.

Rudy Vallee: Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherazade because "the beauty of the composition itself, the sweetness of so many parts of it, would make me feel less unhappy as I was preparing to leave this world."

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