Music: Angels’ Disciple

When he sits down to help judge the world’s first international harp competition in Jerusalem next week, U.S. Harpist Carlos Salzedo will face a difficult task. More than a few of the 50 competitors have studied under Salzedo and many are sure to play at least one of the master’s compositions. It could be no other way. At 74, the sprightly Basque musician stands at the top of his art, a man who has spent a lifetime studying “the angels’ instrument.” teaching others to play and the world to enjoy its mellow music. Salzedo. says Conductor Leopold Stokowski, “has expanded our whole understanding of the harp.”

Toscanini’s Choice. Born in the French Pyrenees. Salzedo started out to be a pianist. His mother was a pianist at the Spanish summer court, and she sat her son down at the keyboard so early that he gave recitals at five, was taken out of school when he was six to concentrate on music. When the family moved to Paris, Carlos entered the conservatory and started studying the harp as a sideline. On his graduation, he was the only student in the school’s history to win first prize in both piano and harp.

By 1909, the young musician’s reputation had reached the U.S.; Arturo Toscanini wanted a harpist for the Metropolitan Opera Company, and imported him, says Salzedo, “like a piece of cheese.” Salzedo stayed at the Met for four years, then organized the U.S.’s first harp ensemble, later set off to tour Europe with a flutist and a cellist. After a stint in the French army in World War I (wounded in action). Salzedo returned to the U.S. and got to work making the harp something better than one of those “extra” instruments rarely heard outside full-dress philharmonic orchestras.

Nijinsky’s Complaint. No point of style or appearance was too small for his attention. His friend, famed Dancer Vaslav Nijinsky, once complained that Salzedo did not make enough show with his hand movements. A harpist’s hands should be like a dancer’s toes, said Nijinsky: “Of all the instrumentalists, you are the one to be looked at when you play.” Salzedo formalized hand movements into a series of flowing gestures, tells his students to emphasize esthetic as well as musical qualities. Says he: “Good looks are an important requisite for an aspiring harpist.”

Salzedo turned to the harp itself, transformed its physical aspect by replacing the fussy gold with businesslike polished maple. Salzedo then experimented with compositions for the harp, made it into a versatile solo instrument. Says Modernist Composer Edgar Varese: “Carlos is an innovator, an adventurer. He has succeeded in changing the sex of the harp —minimizing its golden aura of Victorian femininity; he has discovered and explored its virility.”

In 1931 Salzedo bought a cottage on the rocky shore of Penobscot Bay in Camden, Me., called it the Summer Harp Colony of America. There every summer he teaches some 30 students who are almost always young women and who worship the brilliant, temperamental master (three marriages, three divorces). The practice is constant (five hours daily), the discipline severe. Salzedo must have it that way. For him. at least, “the harp is to music what music is to life.”