Week's Cargo

It was an expensive musical cargo that the S. S. Rex landed in the Port of New York one morning last week. Newsmen at Quarantine pounced first on Arturo Toscanini, who gravely said "How are you?" and turned his back.*

Other musical passengers were less reticent. Conductor Bernardino Molinari was on his way to San Francisco to play several new compositions. Pianist Vladimir Horowitz was with Toscanini's pretty daughter Wanda whom he married a month ago in Milan (TIME, Jan. 1). Janet Olcott,17-year-old daughter of the late Chauncey Olcott, would make her piano debut. Bubbling over with talk was mousey little Moshe Menuhin, father of Yehudi. Yehudi had practiced with Toscanini every day aboard ship and Toscanini was a "very lovable man." Yehudi had received two telegrams from Conductor Wilhelm Furtwaengler, Hitler's music man, asking him to "help mend the broken threads between Germany and the rest of the world." And when Yehudi refused unless the ban was raised against Bruno Walter and other Jewish musicians, Furtwaengler had replied, "It will be your fault if music goes to the dogs in Germany."

Next day no one took much notice when a quiet, middle-aged woman arrived on the Europa, calmly saw her luggage through customs and sped out to the Steinway factory to choose her own pianos for a cross-country tour starting this week in Hartford. She was Myra Hess who does not go in for publicizing herself like most musicians. She does not assume that anyone is interested in the fact that she grew up in an orthodox Jewish home in London, started playing the piano when she was five, stuck to it because for her there seemed no other life.

Critics have little faith in women pianists but in the twelve years she has been playing in the U. S. Myra Hess has lived down the handicap. With her there is no pose, no affectation, no sentimentality. She comes on the stage usually in a severe black velvet dress, sits down calmly and plays Bach so that the audience shouts for more. She plays Beethoven with the stride and strength of a man. Her Brahms and Schumann are expertly tender. Evidence of Hess's powers are the houses she draws. During Depression when most audiences have dwindled hers have steadily increased until today she is rated not only as the world's greatest woman pianist, but as one of the world's few great musicians.

"Old 97"

"On September 27, 1903, a Sunday train, No. 97, which ran over the Southern Railroad from Washington to Atlanta, was late at Lynchburg and in making up lost time, its engineer ran it at a high rate of speed on a steep grade down one side of White Oak Mountain, just north of Danville, Virginia. As the train reached a curving trestle, it left the tracks and plunged into a ravine below. The crew was killed and the train was completely destroyed. Quite a number of songs were written by different persons to commemorate this sad event. . . ."

"The Wreck of the Old 97" was in the courts again and thus last week did Judge J. Warren Davis begin his opinion in the U. S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia. What Judge Davis had to decide was whether or not David Graves George, a spare, hollow-cheeked old hillbilly who still works for the Southern Railroad, had written the version of the "Old 97" sung by Vernon Dalhart on a Victor phonograph record in 1924. Hillbilly George claimed that he wrote the song in 1903, a week after he had helped to pry nine bodies out of the wreckage. Victor sold a million copies of the Dalhart record. George claimed royalties, estimated at $375,000, which last year a Federal district court awarded him (TIME, March 20).

Last week the Circuit Court reversed the District Court, decided that George was not the author of the folksong that ranks close behind "Casey Jones." Judge Davis quoted the Dalhart version which Victor attributes to two other Virginians, Charles Noell and Henry Whitter who took Noell's poem, modified it a bit and sang it around on street corners and in plank taverns to a guitar and harmonica accompaniment. Dalhart made "The Old 97" go this way:

"They gave him his orders at Monroe,

Virginia, Saying 'Pete, you're way behind time.

This is not 38, But it's old 97. You must put her

in Center on time.'

He looked round then to his black, greasy fireman

'Just shove on in a little more coal,

and when we cross That White Oak Mountain, you can

watch old 97 roll!

It's a mighty rough road from Lynchburg to Danville,

And a line on a three-mile grade. It was on that grade that he lost his

average And you see what a jump he made.

He was going down grade making

ninety miles an hour When his whistle broke into a scream He was found in the wreck with his

hand on the throttle, And a-scalded to death with the

steam.

Now ladies, you must take warning, from this time now and on

Never speak harsh words to your true love and husband,

He may leave you and never return."

George's version was like Dalhart's but it was the likeness that made Judge Davis pronounce George the copycat. Dalhart learned the song from an older Whitter phonograph record in 1923, made several mistakes which are also in George's version. The engineer's name was Steve. Dalhart did not understand it on the record so called him Pete. Average, in stanza three, makes no sense. It was airbrakes in the original version.

Judge Davis found several discrepancies in George's testimony. George said that he sang the song two weeks after the wreck in the home of Minnie McNeeley who had a new organ. Minnie McNeeley did not get her organ until 1907, four years later.

Home Talent

Two years ago the Pulitzer Prize Committee gave its $1,800 music award to Ernst Bacon, a young San Franciscan whose First Symphony made him seem most worthy for study and travel in Europe. Columbia's Daniel Gregory Mason, Professor Seth Bingham and Dr. Frank Damrosch, Conductor Walter's brother, made the decision by reading the score. But until last week it seemed as though the $1,800 would be Composer Bacon's only return. His Symphony was never played until Conductor Issai Dobrowen forgot Tchaikovsky long enough to give it place of honor on the week's San Francisco Symphony program.

San Francisco found its home talent gratifying. For brevity's sake Conductor Dobrowen had omitted the first movement but young Alexander Fried, San Francisco's most level-headed critic (Chronicle), found that the slow second movement had "emotional nobility" in spite of the instrumentation's technical shortcomings, that its jazzy third movement has "as just a place in a Yankee Symphony of this generation as a minuet has in a Mozart Symphony of the 18th Century." With the Bacon Symphony Conductor Dobrowen shot his last bolt until March. This week Conductor Bernardino Molinari takes over the San Francisco Symphony until Dobrowen returns from guest-conducting the Philadelphia Orchestra during Leopold Stokowski's winter furlough.

*Equally characteristic was Toscanini's greeting to his Philharmonic-Symphony men. Day after he arrived he attended a concert, went backstage in intermission and stopped a tremendous ovation to ask "Where is my first horn, Jaenicke?" Shy, red-faced Bruno Jaenicke, whom Toscanini considers the world's greatest horn player, had stayed home that day with a stomach-ache.

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