Music: Cleveland’s Change

For 15 years the history of the Cleveland Orchestra was chiefly made by three people: John Long Severance, its chief patron; Mrs. Adella Prentiss Hughes, its manager, who first convinced Cleveland that it wanted an orchestra; and Conductor Nikolai Sokoloff who assembled the musicians, trained them from scratch. Peak of the first 15 years came in 1931 when John Severance gave the Orchestra a $2,500,000-home of its own. Most of his oil & steel fortune was lost not long after that. He could no longer go on contributing largely to the Orchestra’s support. The triumvirate’s day was done when Vice President Dudley S. Blossom stepped forward and said he would be the big backer. Conductor Sokoloffs contract was not renewed. Mrs. Hughes’s resignation was accepted. She was set to handing out routine publicity notices. Two guest conductors were tried out: England’s Sir Hamilton Harty and Artur Rodzinski, the wavy-haired, stoop-shouldered Pole who for four years had conducted the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

Last week in Severance Hall, Rodzinski began as regular conductor of the Cleveland Orchestra. The audience received him royally, stood up for his entrance; the musicians, glad for any change which may mean steady pay again, slapped their bows against their fiddle strings. Rodzinski in return gave a performance of Brahms’s First Symphony which became the musical talk of the town. New and exciting to Clevelanders was the way he often puts down his baton to shape the music with his bare hands, a mannerism he picked up from Leopold Stokowski.

Philadelphia’s fair-haired maestro discovered Rodzinski nine years ago in Warsaw, a quiet, determined young man of 30 who was conducting at the opera house instead of following the law career for which his parents had educated him. Stokowski invited Rodzinski to be his assistant in Philadelphia. He stayed there four years, then went to Los Angeles which began to have its financial worries last winter when William Andrews Clark Jr. announced that he could support the Orchestra for only one more season (TIME, Oct. 30). Los Angeles like Cleveland needed a new conductor for the sake of its boxoffice. It released Rodzinski from a contract which had another year to run, called towering Otto Klemperer from Berlin.

Human Brahms

None of the many books about Brahms has succeeded in portraying him as other than a stuffy, big-bearded German who, as composers go, led an ascetic, uneventful life and by some freak of nature managed to write some of the world’s greatest music. This week in a book described by Critic Lawrence Oilman as “the fairest and most balanced estimate of Brahms as man and artist that has yet appeared in any language,” Brahms is presented in credible, life-like drawing.* To gather his material Author Robert Haven Schauffler traveled around Europe, talked with 150 people who had known Brahms, among them his hitherto reticent Viennese housekeeper. An expert ‘cellist. Author Schauffler gives a sound analysis of Brahms’s music but his book’s big contribution is the masterly human portrait.

Author Schauffler stresses the fact that Brahms had a strong peasant streak which accounted for his constant use of folk-songs, for the terseness and simplicity of much of his music, for the peasantlike economy with which he used the same themes over and over again, elaborating on them with the imagination of a genius. Brahms never married, never defied convention as did the overromanticized Richard Wagner. But he was no ascetic. His mother bred in him an Oedipus complex which never quite squared with the notion of women that he got while playing the piano as a boy in the red-light district of Hamburg. Brahms patronized brothels all his life, a fact never before printed. He loved several women but he was shy of them, loved his bachelor freedom more. In Vienna where he lived his last 30 years he went around in a threadbare alpaca coat, trousers which he cut off above the ankle. He seldom wore a collar, spread his long beard over his shirtfront so that no one would know the difference. Cuffs were a joke. So were socks (he usually went barelegged). So were fatuous admirers on whom he would turn ferociously.

The death of Brahms, witnessed only by his housekeeper, has never before been described. Wagner was working at his desk when his death stroke came. Beethoven died in a thunderstorm shaking his great fist at the elements. Brahms’s housekeeper, feeling that a man’s death should be in keeping with his accomplishments, never spoke of the passing of Brahms until rangy, likeable Author Schauffler came along. For him she described the dying Brahms whose last words—”Ja, das ist schön”—concerned some wine that a friend had sent in. At the end. she said. Brahms could not speak at all because of his false teeth which kept slipping.

*The unkown brahms by Robert Haven Schauffler-Dodd, Mead ($3.50