Click HERE or
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if you need one.Click on link below to hear a historic broadcast with Leopold Stokowski conducting the NBC Symphony in a WW II broadcast featuring four works by Bach including A Mighty Fortress Is Our God plus works by Copland:Short Symphony and Mauhaupt.
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Click HERE or
on QuickTime logo above to download player or browser plug-in
if you need one.
"I believe that music can be an inspirational force in all our lives, that its eloquence and the depth of its meaning are all important. . . that music comes from the heart and returns to the heart, that music is a spontaneous, impulsive expression, that its range is without limit, that music is forever growing, that music can be one element to help us build a conception of life in which the madness and cruelty of wars will be replaced by a simple understanding of the brotherhood of man."
When Leopold Stokowski published this musical confession of faith in 1943 its inconsistency may have eluded the casual reader: on the one hand the conductor acknowledged that music is of infinite importance in our lives, even in the realm of rhe intellect, rooted in morality; on the other hand he reduces it to the position of an emotion which unites all men. He had a vision, based partly on Beethoven's thinking, of the ethical and unifying effect of a musical art based on an anticipated identity of artistic perception. With this optimistic view he combined a commercialised approach to the masses. He became himself a focus of public attention, and was seen by the U.S. president Harry S. Truman as the "Monument of Americanism" because he had welded musical life there into a unit.
Originally, however, he came from the London area, where he was born on April 18, 1882, the son of a Polish cabinet-maker and an Irish mother. He studied violin, piano, organ, and conducting at the Royal College of Music and in Oxford, and at 18 was organist and choirmaster of a London church. After his emigration to the United States he worked initially in the same capacity at a church in New York, took over the direction of the Cincinatti Symphony Orchestra in 1909 and moved three years later to the famous Philadelphia Orchestra, remaining there as chief conductor until 1936. In the years that followed, his engagements were chiefly guest appearances in various countries. In 1940 he formed the All-American Youth Orchestra from a group of young musicians; later he was partly responsible for well-known orchestras in New York and Houston, and in 1961 founded the American Symphony Orchestra, which was made up of musicians from various nations and races. In 1977, at the age of 95, Leopold Stokowski died of a heart attack at the house where he spent his last years in Nether Wallop in Hampshire, England.
Husband of heiresses and film stars, Greta Garbo's constant companion, shockingly open when interviewed, full of temperament on the rostrum, he knew exactly how to show off by behaving in an unorthodox way. He would berate the audience if someone talked during a concert, and reprimand them for arriving late at a performance of modern compositions, or for leaving before it was over. Often he had the hall completely in darkness, only his head, with its long snow-white hair, or his hands--always without baton-spotlit or projected as a silhouette on to a screen.
But although he was promoted to film-star in the strip "One Hundred Men and a Girl" and in Walt Disney's cartoon "Fantasia" (1940), he was more than a flamboyant representative of American show business. His career as conductor, spanning more than 60 years, is associated with three high points. After he won Scriabin's "Poeme de L'extase" its American premiere, he was to remain the pioneer of modern music. The New World owes to him its first acquaintance with Mahler's Eighth Symphony, Berg's "Wozzeck," Strauss's Alpine Symphony, almost all the symphonies of Sibelius, Schoenberg's "GurreLieder," as well as his violin and piano concertos, and numerous works of Rachmaninoff, Stravinsky, Shostakovich, Varese, Messiaen, Liebermann, and Henze.
His transcriptions of Bach's organ works for a monumentally large orchestra were regarded by many purists as both a scandal and a musical sacrilege. His "Stokowskisation" idemified him as a musician who started out from the Romantic organ with its mixture of colours, and who aimed to produce orgies of euphony designed to make the public crave for more.
His genius as an orchestral trainer was never disputed. For example, Stokowski allowed the strings to play irregularly or with contrary bow movements, in defiance of the universally accepted ideal, and thus produced his incomparably "luxuriant" sound. He experimented with various seating arrangements within the orchestra, changing it in accordance with the work and the acoustic of the hall; with the "American" seating plan (in which the cellos sit at the front, to the right of the conductor) he furnished the model for the grouping of musicians which is used today all over the world; and with the Philadelphia Orchestra he attained an acme of precision, sensual tone colour, and effects.
Closely tied to this striving towards an almost "voluptuous," luxuriantly sweet sound was his crusade for optimal quality in recording and reproduction. He played a significant part in the development of recording techniques (he had supported the new medium since 1917), the extension of the range of frequencies to 13,000 hertz, the reduction of interference, and the conception of stereophony and electronic sound-processing. He was full of contradictions-he craved for glamour and publicity, yet was an assiduous worker, provocatively fastidious; he degraded some works of art into mere kitsch by touching up the sound, yet committed himself wholeheartedly to the avant-garde. These inconsistencies made him one of the most ambivalent and striking musical personalities of the 20th century.
Uwe Kraemer -
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