For Beauty's Sake

A new kind of symphonic novelty was played by the Philadelphia Orchestra last week. It sounded no harsh or eerie effects, embodied no attributes of the mechanical age, neither steel works nor jazz. It was music made for beauty's sake, music suggested by the old Greek legend of Daphnis and Chloe, a shepherd and a shepherdess who grew up together and loved inevitably. Violinist Efrem Zimbalist wrote it. Conductor Leopold Stokowski played it first in Philadelphia. In Manhattan next day he put it on the same program with Stravinsky's new violin concerto, a superficial showpiece on which Violinist Samuel Dushkin has the purchased monopoly, also given its U. S. premiere last week, by the Boston Symphony. Few great virtuosi have written important music, particularly for instruments not their own. (Notable exception is Pianist Serge Rachmaninoff who has written extensively for both orchestra and voice.) Most of them cannot forget their audiences long enough, cannot help working for effects to the detriment of the musical substance. People well acquainted with the playing of Zimbalist, with Zimbalist himself, might have known that he would not fall into that error. His Daphnis and Chloe was simply wrought, unobtrusively lovely in the way the alto flute introduced the shepherds, then let the cellos and the violins carry them through the ecstasy of the love idyll.

Zimbalist's playing is an almost ideal blend of emotion and intellect. Boxofficially he has been outdone by Kreisler and Heifetz, in one case by emotional appeal, in the other by technical facility. But Zimbalist's prestige has been slowly, steadily growing since he was 9 and playing first violin in his father's orchestra in the Cossack city of Rostov-on-Don. When he was 12 his mother took him to Petrograd to study with Leopold Auer. Until the time of Auer's death, Zimbalist, an acclaimed virtuoso, went to him for advice.

Zimbalist had just arrived in the U. S. (1911) when he met Soprano Alma Gluck. She was standing at the prow of a ferryboat, on her way to sing in New Jersey. Some one spoke to her and she turned around to see Zimbalist standing there with a great wide smile wrinkling up his homely face. For three years thereafter he hung around the Metropolitan Opera stage door while she insisted that she was not interested in marrying again, that it would not be becoming for her to marry a man younger than herself. Finally she surrendered, and there began one of those rare successful marriages between artists. There are two children: Maria Virginia, 16, Efrem, 12. Young Efrem plays the violin capably, but he is having a general education at St. Paul's School now, is registered for Yale.

Efrem Senior (his friends call him "Zimmie") has become Americanized in other respects. He is a U. S. citizen, makes his home in Manhattan because he believes in spending his money where he makes it. Lately he has taken up golf which he plays alone because he hates competition, hates to see people lose their tempers. But golf is the merest pastime compared with his passion for collecting. His family speaks mournfully of an eagle (he calls it "iggle") with a six-ft. wing spread which he brought to his Manhattan home from an Atlantic City auction. Priceless is his collection of carved ivory, Japanese lacquer, Chinese snuff bottles, first editions. Once he had a large collection of fine violins but he sold most of them. In concert he plays a Lamoreux which he obtained in exchange for a Stradivarius given him long ago by Joseph Fels, soap tycoon.

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