Music: White House Harmony

After the Cabinet dinner at the White House last week President and Mrs. Roosevelt led their guests from the State dining-room to the Blue Room where 250 other guests had gathered for the first big formal function of the new Administration (see p. 7). All official Washington was there, shaking hands, expanding under Mrs. Roosevelt’s informal hospitality. Fat little Maxim Litvinoff grinned his toothless grin oftener than usual. He was going upstairs with the President afterward to receive the papers which would formally seal the recognition of Soviet Russia.

But before Litvinoff and Russia could be attended to there was a concert in the East Room. Naval and military aides (in full-dress uniform because as Mrs. Roosevelt said “they look better that way and it doesn’t cost anything to put it on”) ushered the guests to the spindling gold chairs, set 20 rows deep. On the platform was the famed gold piano. Mrs. Roosevelt introduced the musicians who had played for her in Albany. They were the Morgan Sisters, a harp-violin-piano combination, who came out dressed in crinoline to play a 50-minute program which included “Traumerei” and the “Blue Danube.” In all the show, few persons noticed a square-set ruddy-cheeked old gentleman who twice during the concert slipped in at the back and looked pleased to see that everything was going smoothly. He was Henry Junge, 75, who in the name of Steinway & Sons has purveyed music to the White House through six administrations.

As unique as the House of Steinway and its position in the piano industry* is the function, all unadvertised, which Henry Junge exercises in Washington. Presidents, unlike kings, may not favor any one commercial house but the White House has to have a piano and in 1902 when Theodore Roosevelt accepted the $18,000 Steinway Gold Grand “in behalf of the nation,” the die was cast. White House musicales began soon after. Mrs. Taft, who taught at the Cincinnati College of Music before she married, asked the Steinways to put them on. They looked around their office for some one both musical and businesslike who would not attempt to capitalize on the Presidential connection, decided on Henry Junge, one of their secretaries, a native of Hamburg who had planned to be a violinist until he decided he would never be good enough. It became Henry Junge’s job to line up artists who would donate their services, to submit programs to the President’s wife for the final say-so.

With Mr. Junge the First Ladies’ musical reputations have been safe. He prefers to talk about his farm in Newburgh, N. Y., where he grows grapes and makes wine; or about the House of Steinway for which he was working when the present Steinway heads wore knickerbockers and the factory sprawled over the corner of Manhattan’s

Park Avenue and 53rd Street with the lumberyard behind. But if Mr. Junge has not talked, the First Ladies and their programs have. The first Mrs. Wilson and Margaret, who had a pretty voice, took great pride in helping plan the musicales. Mrs. Harding, whose favorite piece was “The End of a Perfect Day,” was less interested. Mrs. Coolidge, who plays the piano a bit herself, liked Rachmaninoff and Violinist Albert Spalding. Mrs. Hoover’s favorite musician was Harpist Mildred Dilling, whose most famed pupil is Harpo Marx.

An artist’s standing with Steinway has nothing to do with a White House invitation. But it happens that a Steinway protege holds the record for having been asked there most often. He is Ignace Jan Paderewski, whom the Steinways first brought to the U. S. He has played for five successive administrations but this season his neuritis is too bad for him to leave his home in Switzerland. Compared with him, the Morgan Sisters were thoroughly unexciting for the season’s White House opener but they were Mrs. Roosevelt’s choice and she will make up for it before the season is over. She has asked Henry Junge to draw up an imposing list of musicians with the idea of increasing the number of musicales and inviting more people.

Symphonic Chesterfields

Thanks to Liggett & Myers Tobacco Co., makers of Chesterfield cigarets, radio listeners, starting next Tuesday, will be able to hear the highest type of symphonic music every night of the week but Sunday for some time to come. The programs will be given by expensive Leopold Stokowski and 65 members of his peerless Philadelphia Orchestra, from 9 to 9:15 (E. S. T.). First night, Nov. 28: excerpts from Parsifal. Each Philadelphia Orchestraman will earn $12 per broadcast.

*Since 1850 when Heinrich Engelhard Steinweg left Germany to set up business in New York, the House of Steinway has been a closed corporation, run by men who were either Steinways by birth or marriage. The first piano Heinrich made had two strings. He gave it to his wife for a wedding present.