Ghost at the Metropolitan

A rich man's ghost walked the faded red corridors of Manhattan's Metropolitan Opera House last week. Singers backstage talked of little else. Board members held consultations over it. Newspapers gave front-page headlines to Augustus D. Juilliard, the name of the rich old, man who used to sit quietly and attentively listening to opera from Box No. 2.

Augustus Juilliard's money, the public was informed, had saved the life of the Metropolitan Opera Company. Author-Musician John Erskine, in his capacity as president of the Juilliard School of Music, said so. Fifty thousand Juilliard dollars had been given outright toward the $300,000 needed to guarantee another opera season (TIME, Feb. 20). Should public appeal fail to bring in the rest. Mr. Erskine implied that the Juilliard would make up the difference. Stipulations had been made, he said, to which the Metropolitan had agreed: more encouragement would be given to U. S. singers and composers; Juilliard students would be permitted to attend rehearsals; a supplementary season of opera-comique would be given in which Juilliard students would presumably play the important parts; the opera Merry Mount by Richard Leroy Stokes and Howard Hanson would surely be produced.

For a few hours after John Erskine's announcement it appeared as though the Metropolitan had in desperation sold its independence, as though Mr. Erskine would hereafter be giving orders to Manager Giulio Gatti-Casazza. People tried to withdraw their donations. They were informed that Mr. Erskine had given the wrong impression, that the Juilliard was contributing $50,000 and no more, that the Metropolitan's future next year still depended on the outcome of its campaign which, even with the Juilliard's, $50,000, had brought in only $110,000.

To many, the fact that the Juilliard was not seeing the Metropolitan through its difficulties seemed as unaccountable as Mr. Erskine's erroneous implication. When Augustus ("A. D.") Juilliard died in 1919 he was president of the Metropolitan boxowners. He had grown up in Stark County, Ohio, migrated to Manhattan, made a fortune in textiles which toward the end of his life interested him far less than the opera. He went to nearly every performance. He was in his box the night he became fatally ill. In his will he left $14,000,000 to create a Juilliard Musical Foundation which should supply funds for a school of music and give help, at the discretion of the trustees, to the Metropolitan. The Juilliard School of Music has thrived on its fat capital. Under President Erskine's administration a $3,000,000 building has been erected, where students put on their own opera. Jack & the Beanstalk, a collaboration of President Erskine and Composer Louis Gruenberg, was given as part of the housewarming.

William Mathews Sullivan, a music-minded lawyer, made public the details of Augustus Juilliard's will the day before John Erskine announced the Juilliard Foundation's gift. For two weeks Lawyer Sullivan had withheld his statement waiting for the Juilliard to act. Then he attacked the Foundation for shunning its Metropolitan obligations, for leaving unoccupied an "apparently ample building." for engaging too many foreign instructors. Mr. Erskine claimed in his retort that the principal of the $14,000,000 endowment was still intact, still yielding an annual income of $600,000. He said that last spring the Juilliard had given the Metropolitan $5,000, all that was asked.

The $5,000 was a loan to be repaid in 1938 with 6% interest. The Metropolitan's chairman, Lawyer Paul Drennan Cravath who is also a trustee of the Juilliard School, contradicted only the statement that the Juilliard Foundation had offered solid backing. But both he and quiet Cornelius Bliss, the boxholder who is working hardest to raise the $300,000, signified that as a mouthpiece John Erskine had overstepped his bounds.

Toscanini's Guest

There are two musicians for whom New Yorkers rise respectfully to their feet. They stand up when aged Ignace Jan Paderewski comes on stage to play for them. They stand for Conductor Arturo Toscanini when he starts the Philharmonic season in the autumn and when he returns after his long winter furlough. Last fortnight Toscanini returned to Manhattan after sunning himself for eight weeks in

Italy. In a box at his first concert were his ample, domestic wife and pretty daughter Wanda, who on request often gets out a tiny mustache and does uproarious imitations of her famed father. On the stage at intermission a lanky outsider shared bows with Toscanini. The guest was Composer Howard Hanson, down from Rochester to hear his Romantic Symphony played by Toscanini for the first time.

True to its name Howard Hanson's new symphony struck no harsh, debatable notes. He attempted to put his listeners in a mellow, tolerant mood when he de scribed it in the program as an "escape from the rather bitter type of modern musical realism which occupies so large a place in contemporary thought." He had used melodies which were conventionally sweet. His horns sang out politely over tremulous violins. Critics were not impressed but the bulk of the audience was far more enthusiastic than it had been over the stark, sardonic symphony of Bernard Wagenaar, played earlier in the season, or over the picture music of Abram Chasins which Toscanini played two years ago.

In the seven years that he has conducted the New York Philharmonic-Symphony, Toscanini has presented music by only four U. S. composers.* But Composer Hanson's name was made long before Tosanini honored him. At 20, a greenhorn from Wahoo, Neb., he was made a full-fledged professor at the College of the Pacific in Stockton, Calif. From there he went to Rome on an American Academy fellowship, grew his spindling little beard when he was invited to conduct the famed Augusteo Orchestra.

George Eastman, the late camera tycoon, gave Howard Hanson his golden chance. He made him director of the richly-endowed Eastman School of Music it Rochester, a post for which Hanson has shown his gratitude by putting on annual spring festivals of music by U. S. composers hard put to get a hearing elsewhere (TIME, May 16). In Rochester Composer Hanson has worked hard. No detail at the Eastman School is too humdrum to receive his attention. He frequently conducts his adoring Eastman students, screwing up his long face, vigorously beating time with his long, flyaway arms.

Eastman students packed Kilbourn Hall this winter when Composer Hanson broadcast from Europe with Leipzig's Gewandhaus Orchestra. In his naive, unaffected way he sent his greetings that night to his father and mother who keep house for him in Rochester. Of all Hanson's music Rochester likes best the rugged Lament for Beowulf, a choral work which holds out greater hopes for Merry Mount, the opera the Metropolitan has accepted, than does the pleasant Romantic Symphony. Toscanini did not choose to play the Romantic Symphony on his visits to Philadelphia, Washington and Baltimore this week --the last out-of-town concerts the Philharmonic feels it can afford.

*His friend Ernest Schelling was one. In addition to Hanson, the others were Wagenaar (Symphony No. 2) and Chasins (Impressions in a Chinese Garden and Parade).

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.