Frisco's Frenchman

In one of the most musical cities in the U.S., San Francisco, the greatest French conductor alive will pad affably to the podium this week to round out his ninth season. During those nine seasons he had brought his orchestra close to the head of the symphonic class. The San Francisco Symphony, approximately 15% of whose annual budget is paid out of taxes, is one of the half-dozen finest orchestras in the U.S. It is kept so by San Francisco's first musical citizen, walrus-mustached Pierre Monteux. To those who watch Pierre Monteux still gay and zealous in the midst of music, it seems incredible that next week he will be 69 years old.

When, in 1935, the San Francisco Musical Association cast about for someone to rescue the San Francisco Symphony from complete financial and artistic collapse, Monteux was suggested for the job. He was then guest-conducting at the-Hollywood Bowl. "The only difference between Toscanini and Monteux," New York Times Critic Olin Downes is reported to have remarked, "is in the waistline." San Francisco took the waistline, soon found that it surrounded one of the most sensitive, civilized, versatile and shrewdly practical men who ever wielded a baton.

Pierre Monteux is also one of the very few Frenchmen whose favorite composer is the arch-Germanic Johannes Brahms. San Franciscans have marveled at the Rhine wine savor of his Beethoven, Brahms and Schumann, as well as the elegance of his Debussy and Ravel. Pierre Monteux's ranging tastes and orchestral mastery have come to him during a lifetime in which he has conducted no less than 63 symphony orchestras in Europe and the U.S.

Civic Attraction. In San Francisco, Monteux's portly figure, dyed black hair and Gallic wit have long since become civic features. He lives with his excitable, rolypoly French wife in the oldfashioned, palatial Fairmont Hotel atop Nob Hill. The Monteux blue-serge suits and pearl stickpins are often seen in social salons.

He gets all his exercise running after taxicabs. At mealtime he is apt to be found at the Blue Fox, a small French restaurant in an alley opposite the City Morgue. His idea of a good meal is an order of oysters washed down with champagne and followed by fruit for dessert.

Pierre Monteux rules the San Francisco Symphony like a good-natured, grandfatherly but absolute Czar. Only one person dares dispute his authority: Mme. Monteux, who broods over the symphony with a maternal passion that is sometimes embarrassing. Not long ago all the bald-headed musicians in the orchestra suddenly blossomed out with toupees. In this connection, Mme. Monteux's name was widely mentioned. Everyone agreed the effect was interesting.

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