Queen of the Flute

Memorials to great musicians usually take the form of plaques, busts or scholarships. When the time came five years ago to create a memorial to William Kincaid, for 39 years first flutist of the Philadelphia Orchestra, it seemed that something more was called for. So 70 of his former pupils and friends, together with Conductors Eugene Ormandy and Leopold Stokowski, chipped in to commission a new piece for flute by an American composer. Just as there was no doubt that the man to write the piece should be Aaron Copland, so there was no doubt that the flutist to play it should be Elaine Shaffer.

Shaffer had learned virtually everything she knew about the flute from Kincaid. Shortly before his death in 1967 at the age of 71, he had handed down his extraordinary platinum flute to her. She was not just the queen of the flute, but one of the world's two or three finest concert flutists, male or female. In 1971, Shaffer and Pianist Hephzibah Menuhin gave the world premiere of the new work at a benefit for Philadelphia's Settlement Music School, with Copland in attendance. Last week in New York, Shaffer recorded the work for Columbia Records, this time with Copland, 72, at the piano.

Pastoral and elegiac in mood, Duo for Flute and Piano is a chamber-music gem that should become a staple of the scant flute literature. In it, Copland returns to the comparatively simple harmonic and melodic world of Appalachian Spring, though the piece is far from simple to play. "Ai-yai-yai-yai-yai! Copland cried out repeatedly at the recording session as he missed one or another of his own notes. A few feet away, Shaffer smiled sweetly back, having nothing to swear about, since she misses a note about as often as the sun fails to come up.

The daughter of an Altoona, Pa., insurance agent, Elaine Shaffer got her first musical experience as a tympanist in her high school orchestra. "There wasn't much to do there behind the kettledrums," she recalls. "Then I noticed that the flutes were always busy, and gee, they got to play in the band at football games." She bought a flute and an instruction book and taught herself to play. Upon graduation, having become a Kincaid admirer through recordings, she auditioned for him, and was promptly enrolled as his pupil at the Curtis Institute of Music. Four years later she landed her first job: second flutist with the Kansas City Philharmonic. The conductor, Efrem Kurtz, not only took her with him as first flutist in 1948 when he began the reorganization of the Houston Symphony Orchestra, but in 1955 he also married her.

In those days, a solo career for a flutist was a virtual impossibility in the U.S. Most of the leading players were working in orchestras, giving recitals on the side. Shaffer had had enough of the orchestral life. She and Kurtz moved their base of operations to Europe, where despite Aristotle's warning ("The flute is not an instrument which has a good moral effect; it is too exciting"), the flute has remained in high standing. There she established herself among the concert world's handful of top-rank women instrumentalists.

Today the Kurtzes live in a chalet in Gstaad, Switzerland. Shaffer ranges out from Budapest to Berne, Australia to South Africa, to give 50 to 60 concerts and recitals a year. From the front door, she can also ski directly to the lift lines of the Gstaad ski area. This is more important than it might seem. A flutist must have the wind and physical stamina of a well-conditioned athlete.

Besides stamina, the hallmark of the Shaffer style is a big, crisply colored tone that can penetrate the thickest orchestral texture. Her Kincaid platinum instrument not only sounds like a veritable Heldenfloete; it actually is one. It weighs 20 oz., compared with 15 oz. for the average silver model. Shaffer psychs herself into certain musical moods, thinking of bright white lights for staccato passages, for instance, or of the setting sun when she has to change from fortissimo to pianissimo. "As the sun drops lower," she explains, "the heat may lessen but the colors become more intense. That is what a pianissimo should be like."

As her many Angel LPs attest (notably the Bach Flute Sonatas with Harpsichordist George Malcolm), Shaffer is thoroughly at home in the recording studio. "Making a recording is like taking your stage makeup off," she says. "For example, the same tempi that work well before an audience tend to sound too slow coming from a disk. The same is true of dynamics. You can't be as loud, and you can't be as soft." Wherever she is playing, Shaffer tries to preserve the feeling that she is singing instead of merely blowing. That helps explain why she watches her pre-concert diet as carefully as an opera star. Milk is out: it coats the vocal cords. Salad, fruit or anything acid is worse: it irritates the lips and the music. At the top of the danger list are carbonated beverages: "Largely," says Shaffer, "because bubbles have a way of rising to the wrong occasion."

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