J. S. in Manhattan

While long-nosed Wanda Landowska was giving brilliant, vigorous, scholarly performances of C. P. E. Bach in Toronto last week (see col. 2), Leopold Stokowski was busy in Manhattan with Johann Sebastian Bach's tremendous St. Matthew Passion. He turned it into a weird theatrical spectacle that reminded Bach scholars of the audience reaction to the first performance in Leipzig's Thomaskirche in 1729. At that time a scandalized old lady rose to her feet and exclaimed: "God help us! It's surely an opera comedy!"

With his accustomed showmanship, Stokowski glamorized the great sacred composition. He cut Bach's music to slightly over half its length, reorchestrated many passages of Bach counterpoint, peopled the Metropolitan Opera stage with a bevy of hooded mimes, who prowled about a collection of ramps and platforms like Ku Klux Klansmen at a Konklave. The Saviour was represented by a vertical shaft of light whose symbolic feet were symbolically dried by the hair of Maria Magdalena (Lillian Gish).

Concertgoers, long familiar with Stokowski's ponderous schmalzing of Bach, were not unduly surprised. But New York Times Critic Olin Downes had had enough. Said he: ". . . More could have been heard had it not been for the extremely lachrymose and dilatory tempi, and the unblushing sentimentalism in interpretation, which almost uniformly prevailed, so that the B-Minor aria with the violin solo sounded like the Meditation from Thais. . . . Bach's music . . . stood up surprisingly well under the handicap. ..."

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