"A Great Human Being"

Seldom had a musician been so honored--or had so richly deserved it.

From President Truman came "Hearty birthday greetings to one whom the power of music has given the spirit of eternal youth." Pope Pius XII sent his apostolic benediction. From the speaker's table in a ballroom of Manhattan's Ritz-Carlton Hotel last week, Bruno Walter, Dimitri Mitropoulos, Georges Enesco, Nathan Milstein and Jennie Tourel all rose to add their tributes to the refrain. Finally a towered cake with 75 candles was carried in. While more than 400 guests stood and applauded and a string ensemble played his own Liebesfreud, white-haired old Violinist Fritz Kreisler got to his feet to blow out the candles (see cut).

Later, he stood before his friends in the same easy posture he always managed on the concert stage, his lined face wearing its wistful smile. He felt, he said, "like I had just listened to the obituary of my artistic career." Perhaps the eulogies, by his longtime friends, Commentator H. V. Kaltenborn and Monsignor Fulton J. Sheen, had been premature; but then, his had been the kind of life that had moved the New York Times last week to call Fritz Kreisler what in fact he was: "A great human being, one of our most magnificent contemporaries."

It had been 62 years since Kreisler, a shock-haired Austrian boy of 13, had first visited the U.S. Even then he had thrilled U.S. .audiences with the mellow beauty of his tone and interpretations. The son of a Viennese physician, he had already won all the gold medals Vienna and Paris could offer at their conservatories. But, as he reminded ambitious youngsters last week, he had had to wait until he was 40 before he could earn "a good living" as a violinist. "I am sorry when I hear of a young artist suddenly becoming rich. Wealth and lack of worry are bad for an artist."

Hostility & Homage. He had lived through "wars and depressions and catastrophes." Some of the guests at his party could remember how, as a man of 39, he had left the concert stage to serve in the Austrian army in World War I. He had been severely wounded--"A whole troop of Russian Cossacks rode over me." Some could also remember, with embarrassment, how he had returned to a U.S. that had become bitterly hostile to "Hun" music and "Hun" musicians, and how he had turned hostility to homage with the simple beauty of his playing.

Old Violinist Kreisler could smile at the memory of a gentle hoax: for years he programmed his own compositions--the Praeludium and Allegro, Menuet, Concerto in C Major--as "transcriptions" of the works of old masters. He thought it "tactless to repeat my name endlessly on the programs."

A Tug at the Tablecloth. At 75, Fritz Kreisler thought he had reached the age of "physical debilities and moral responsibilities." His health has been frail ever since he was struck down by a truck in Manhattan in 1941, and his hearing has grown poor. He was fiddling only occasionally; he did not want to "stand in the way of the younger generation," even though he thought that there were "too many crazy mothers who drive their children into careers when they're not fitted for it." He had some advice for kids who are fitted for it: no teacher after 14, not too much practice. "A man plays up here," he says, tapping his temple.

With Harriet, whom he married in 1902, Kreisler now lives quietly in an apartment overlooking Manhattan's East River. Many of the rewards of his long career--money, books and manuscripts--have gone to charities and public institutions. He was content with other kinds of rewards. Said Fritz Kreisler to his birthday well-wishers last week, while wife Harriet tugged at the tablecloth to remind him not to talk too long: "Accept the profound gratitude of one who will always remain your humble and faithful friend . . ."

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