Sounds Never Heard Before

Leopold Stokowski: 1882-1977

He had one of the most expressive backs in all history. His hands became a legend, and he kept them in the spotlight, even when his players were in penumbral gloom. In his mind's ear he heard orchestral sounds never made before--and proceeded to make them. "Music appeals to me for what can be done with it," Leopold Stokowski once remarked. By that he meant that he knew better than Beethoven or Brahms how instruments should sound, and that Johann Sebastian Bach surely would have loved his lush orchestral transcriptions of the Toccata and Fugue in D minor. For such arrogance--and for the skill with which he argued his claims--Stokowski earned the adulation of audiences, the grudging admiration of most critics, the constant hostility of musical purists.

He also turned conducting into a spectator sport, giving the role of conductor a panache that has not yet been surpassed. When he died last week of a heart attack during a morning nap at his farmhouse in an English village called Nether Wallop, a titan of music was gone, an era ended. At age 95, he had been expecting to go to London to make another album for Columbia Records.

Had Stokowski been a full-time politician, instead of the most political of maestros, he would have been a sitting duck for the cartoonists. As it was, detractors mocked his phony accent and snickered when he shook hands with Mickey Mouse in Walt Disney's Fantasia (1940). Yet he was one of the 20th century's handful of true geniuses. He could draw from an orchestra--almost any orchestra--sounds that shimmered gloriously.

He catered to no one's taste but his own. In the 1920s and 1930s, by which time he had turned the once provincial Philadelphia Orchestra into one of the world's great ensembles, he had a more progressive view of contemporary music than either of his two main rivals--Arturo Toscanini in New York and Serge Koussevitsky of the Boston Symphony. He gave the American premieres of both Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring and Berg's Wozzeck. He was constantly concerned with helping young musicians. That was why, at age 80, he helped to found the American Symphony Orchestra in New York in 1962. He had demanded and received huge salaries in Philadelphia ($110,000 a year at his peak), plus the income from radio and recordings, at a time of low income taxes. Stokowski took no pay from the American Symphony, and even backed it with $60,000 of his own.

He was born Leopold Antony Stokowski in the Marylebone section of London in 1882, the son of a Polish cabinetmaker and a mother of Irish descent. They managed to scrape up enough money to send him to Oxford and to the Royal College of Music. He got a job as an organist in a London church, then moved to St. Bartholomew's in New York. In 1909 he became the conductor of the Cincinnati Symphony. He was young (27) and virtually untried, but magisterially handsome and already with the mark of genius upon him. Under the gaze of his stern blue eyes, matrons twittered, instrumentalists quailed and other cities began paying attention. Three years later he was off to Philadelphia--the wooing had been mutual--where he would reign for 26 years.

By 1912 Stokowski's hair had burgeoned into a blond corona about his head, his cheeks hollowed to romantic gauntness, his aquiline profile so sharp-edged that it seemed in search of a coin -- and the maestro always found it easy to be seen in profile. It was Stokowski's notion that a concert was not just an entertainment, but a metaphysical experience and a sacred rite. With that in mind he dared scold audiences about their man ners. Philadelphia matrons who for years had made Friday afternoon at the symphony a fixture on their social calendar, stopped their knitting, tried to control their coughing, arrived on time -- and left early at their personal peril.

Under his hands (he gave up the use of a baton early in his career), the Philadelphia Orchestra developed a sound equaled by none and envied by many. He achieved this by listening for sonorities not themes, by moving instrumental choirs about the stage, and most of all by encouraging players, particularly the string and wind instruments, to bow or blow as they liked or felt, rather than in classical unison. To get the musical mood he wanted, he would sometimes resort to parable. Once, wanting the orchestra to hold back for a climax, he reminded them of how sailors, going on shore leave for the first time after a long voyage, use up all their money and their energy, and thus when they finally reach home have nothing left for their wives. "That's what you are doing. Save some for the end."

If he sought to enhance the old masters, he was equally diligent in seeking new composers. "I don't believe in tradition," he said. "It is a form of laziness." Collaborating on Fantasia, for instance, he pioneered "three dimensional" (or stereophonic) sound recordings, and helped alter the science of cinema acoustics. Every summer he went to Europe, returning with new scores by such (then) avant-garde composers as Ravel, Satie, Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Berg.

Whatever he did made headlines. In 1937 his second wife Evangeline Brewster Johnson, heiress to a pharmaceutical fortune, divorced him amid gossip about his romance with Greta Garbo, whom he was soon squiring around Italy and Scandinavia. From then on, his life was ever more peripatetic and flamboyant. His third marriage was to Gloria Vanderbilt, who was 21 at the time. Stokowski was 63. Quipped a columnist: Sic transit gloria. But the marriage lasted ten years and produced two sons. Even after the divorce in 1955, Stokowski remained remarkably attentive to his two young sons. Until Gloria put a stop to it, he had them at his place every other night, and on the alternate evenings sat with them as they had supper at Gloria's home. In the custody suit that followed, she charged that the great conductor hovered over the boys like "an overanxious, harassing and harassed great-grandmother, creating neurotic explosions every minute."

Stokowski kept himself in extraordinary physical shape, experimented endlessly with diets, took a masseur with him wherever he went. In his later years he lived in lonely splendor in a large apartment overlooking Manhattan's Central Park, receiving visitors in a chair set against the light to reveal his still handsome profile, still making guest appearances, conducting with all his old authority. Then in 1972 he moved back to his native England and devoted himself primarily to making records.

His figure had become frail and stooped, and he needed a cane to get to the podium. Yet to the end, he retained the commanding presence and serene authority of old. However musical history judges him, it will certainly note that he helped free the classics from the often stultifying academicism of Germanic conducting, and was a major force in expanding the U.S. audience for serious music to its present broad dimension. Most of all, he made people feel, with justice, that it was a stimulating experience to have Leopold Stokowski in their midst during the years of his long life.

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