Music: A Little Garlic

World’s most famous oboe virtuoso is a tall, jovial Frenchman named Marcel Tabuteau, whose pure bleats and thrilling tootles bring him an estimated $300 per week in Eugene Ormandy’s Philadelphia Orchestra.

Last week when Marcel Tabuteau sat out in front of the orchestra at a Manhattan concert and soloed in Mozart’s Quartet in F Major for Oboe and Strings, hard-boiled critics threw kisses at the ceiling, and at the end of the first movement the audience cheered. Marcel Tabuteau grinned uneasily, but he did not rise to acknowledge the applause. When it was all over he boosted himself out of his chair and hobbled off the stage. Marcel Tabuteau had the gout. For two weeks, on tour, he had been traveling in wheel chairs, ambulances, on crutches, in the arms of his fellow orchestra musicians. For the Philadelphia Orchestra without Marcel Tabuteau would be like soup without salt.

Marcel Tabuteau did not so much mind the gout itself as the fact that it keeps him from his favorite occupation: eating. For Marcel Tabuteau is not only Philadelphia’s first oboe player, he is also Philadelphia’s most spectacular gourmand. “For two weeks I am on a milk diet!” he exploded. “Do you know what that is like? The hunger, it does not leave me. Whatever I do, wherever I go, it is like something I cannot take off. To me the cooking and eating are arts as great as music—maybe greater. One more week I shall go on. Then I will live again!”

Marcel Tabuteau likes nothing better than to fall reverently to sleep on the table after a Herculean meal and a bottle of wine. Says he, holding up his thumb and forefinger in an expressive circle: “A little garlic? M’sieu, there is no such thing as a little garlic!”