Bach with Red Tights

Thanks in good part to the mystical imagination and grim determination of Irene Lewisohn, there has evolved in the past few years a synthetic art-form whereby great masterworks are given stage presentations for which they were never intended. With her sister Alice (now married and living in Paris), Irene Lewisohn started her experiments in the Neighborhood Playhouse, a small theatre in Manhattan's slums. She interested Conductor

Nikolai Sokoloff of the Cleveland Orchestra with whom she worked out scenarios to several symphonic works. They amounted, in essence, to informal ballets in which the dancing was of the free interpretative kind, full of exaggerated, supposedly primitive poses and vigorous prancing. Audiences have received them in a state of self-conscious hush. Irene Lewisohn and her stage versions of music appeared to have found highest recognition when Mrs. Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge invited her to give the opening program at the Festival of Chamber Music at the Library of Congress in Washington last week. Mrs. Coolidge's Chamber Music programs are usually above reproach. But the Lewisohn dancers (who still retain the name of "the Neighborhood Playhouse") offended many a purist with their miming of Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D minor. Harpist Carlos Salzedo's arrangements of Troubadour airs, Ernest Bloch's Quatuor a Cordes. Critic Olin Downes of the New York Times wrote: "It is not possible to refer dispassionately to the complete misrepresentation of the noble music of Bach. To this music of Gothic design and Apocalyptic splendor the audience was privileged to behold the strange struttings, posings, leapings, of a man at the base of an elevation upon which and about which were grouped seven maidens in red tights. This performance was a caricature and profanation --unintended, of course, but none the less a profanation of great music. There is hardly any music more self-sufficient than Bach's or more beyond the power of words or pictures to convey. It is the purest and most absolute music, altogether sufficient unto itself. It should be held sacred from meddling. . . . There should be limits to a practice by which dancers, who apparently are without feeling for the true essence of music, may rush in where angels would fear to tread and jauntily misrepresent masterpieces."

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