Philadelphia's Bye

Between Chicago's Samuel Insull and Philadelphia's Mary Louise Curtis Bok there was never much in common except that they both backed grand opera. For reasons which everyone knows. Chicago will have no grand opera this winter.

Last week the Philadelphia Grand Opera Company also suspended performances for a year, but its reason was not quite Chicago's. Advance sales were bad. but it was also announced that Conductor Leopold Stokowski wanted an off-year to perfect a new form of "drama with music" for 1933-34. The Curtis-Bok fortune is far, far from collapse but Mrs. Bok has the expensive Curtis Institute on her hands. If in the next few months another patron for Philadelphia's opera appears, her friends suspect that she will not be sorry.

Blaring Redhead

Casual concertgoers would have been surprised if they could have peered over the shoulder of Alfred A. Knopf some years ago and seen a letter which had come to him from Critic Ernest Newman in London. Publisher Knopf had asked his favorite writer on music to do a book on Composer Hector Berlioz, the erratic red-haired Frenchman who shocked his igth Century contemporaries with what then seemed to be defiant and unaccountable music. Critic Newman agreed with his publisher that Berlioz' story was fascinating. But, he pointed out, Berlioz was unlike most musicians. He had been able to talk about his trade, to handle words in as lively and vigorous a fashion as he handled musical notes. Berlioz' own Memoirs, according to Critic Newman, had wit, humor, raciness that made the language of his biographers seem like cold tea after champagne. Better to brush up the translation of the Memoirs than do another biography. Publisher Knopf agreed and now comes a noteworthy book with omissions and distortions of the original carefully corrected.-- The facts of Berlioz' early life go far toward making his accomplishments remarkable. His father was a smalltown doctor in the hilly South of France. Son Hector was allowed to toy with the flute, the flageolet, the guitar, but medicine was to be his profession. He had no sound musical grounding. Not until he was sent to Paris, set to dissecting corpses did he rebel and on his own account go after the rudiments of music which most musicians learn as children. For years Berlioz scraped along on next to no money. He had a few pupils to whom he taught singing, flute, guitar. He sang evenings in the chorus of a second-class theatre, ate his meals of dry bread and raisins at the base of Henri IV's statue--all so that he could study at the Conservatoire. Conservatoire students were supposed to bow down to the Academicians but in spite of his inexperience, Berlioz developed theories of his own. He wrote scores which called for an incredible number of players. He combined instruments in ways that had never been done before. He even endorsed the mongrel saxophone which the instrument-maker, Adolphe Sax, had introduced into the clarinet family. An Irish actress. Harriet Smithson, came to Paris and Berlioz was fairly beside himself. After staging a suicide in her presence he persuaded her to marry him but the romance ended there. Marie Recio, a mediocre singer, accompanied him on his tour through Europe. She often spoiled his music by insisting on singing it, kept him from being friends with Wagner. But abroad Berlioz was a lion. His countless quarrels were with Parisians and their frothy musical tastes; with Parisians because they rarely performed his music to his liking, or did not trouble to perform it at all. Berlioz blared out his indignations as he did much of his music. When a French editor undertook to improve on one of Beethoven's symphonies. Berlioz introduced a monolog into his Lelio cursing out all such desecrators: "They are like the vulgar birds that swarm in our public gardens and perch arrogantly on the most beautiful statues; and when they have fouled the forehead of Jupiter, the arm of Hercules, or the bosom of Venus, strut about with as much pride and satisfaction as if they had laid a golden egg." Composing never made a living for Berlioz and his double menage. For years he wrote magazine articles but he resented having to do it: "Oh, let them give me scores to write, orchestras to conduct, rehearsals to direct; let me stand eight or ten hours at a time, baton in hand, training choirs without accompaniments, singing their refrains myself, and beating time until I spit blood and till my arm is paralyzed by cramp; let me carry desks, basses, harps, remove steps, nail planks like a commissionaire or a carpenter, and, by way of a rest, let me correct proofs or copies at night. . . . But everlastingly to have to write feuilletons for one's bread! To write nothings about nothings! To bestow lukewarm praises on insupportable insipidities! To speak one day of a great master and the next of an idiot, with the same gravity, in the same language! . . ." Disappointments increased. Outside France, Berlioz was recognized more & more as an uneven genius whose audacious use of instruments was affecting all orchestral writing, but Parisians in the 1860's were flocking to hear the operas of Meyerbeer, Gounod, Offenbach. Berlioz' brain at the end was thoroughly befuddled by the opium he took to relieve his intestinal neuralgia. His writings dwindled to a series of sentimental letters addressed to an old lady who had been his adolescent idol. Five years before his death he wrote: "I have neither hopes, nor illusions, nor great thoughts left." Publisher Knopf, if he were so inclined, could take the same pessimistic tone concerning books on music. Ten years' experience has taught him that they will not sell.-- But music is his hobby. He has musical friends--Sergei Koussevitzky, Sir Thomas Beecham, Leopold Stokowski. Paul Kochanski, Jascha Heifetz. Musical books are becoming a specialty of his house just as horsey books are with Scribner, explorers' books with Putnam, young Yalemen's novels with Doubleday, Doran.

*MEMOIRS OF HECTOR BEREIOZ--Annotated and edited-- by Ernest Newman--Knopf ($5). To be published Oct. 15. *Of the many excellent ones that he has published only two have paid for themselves: Wagner as Man and Artist by Ernest-Newman (2,424 copies) and My Musical Life by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakoff (3,830 copies).

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