Leopold Stokowski

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Leopold Stokowski

Background information
Birth name Antoni Stanisław Bolesławowicz
Also known as Leopold
Born April 18, 1882
Flag of United Kingdom London, England, United Kingdom
Died September 13, 1977 (age 95)
Nether Wallop, Hampshire, England, United Kingdom
Genre(s) Classical
Occupation(s) Conductor

Leopold Stokowski (Antoni Stanisław Bolesławowicz) (April 18, 1882 – September 13, 1977) in Nether Wallop, Hampshire, England was the conductor of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, the Philadelphia Orchestra, the NBC Symphony Orchestra, Hollywood Bowl Orchestra and the Symphony of the Air. He was the founder of the New York City Symphony Orchestra and The American Symphony Orchestra. He conducted the music for and appeared in Disney’s Fantasia.

Contents

[edit] Early life

He was the son of Polish cabinetmaker Kopernik Józef Bolesławowicz Stokowski and his Irish wife Annie Marion Stokowski, nee Moore. As his Birth Certificate shows (source: General Register Office, London) he was named after his Polish grandfather, Leopold Stokowski, who died in 1879. There is some mystery surrounding his early life. For example, no one could ever determine why he spoke with a slightly Eastern European, foreign-sounding accent, as he was born and raised in London (it is surmised that this was an affectation on his part to add mystery and interest).[1] In addition, on occasion, he gave his birth year as 1887 instead of 1882.

Stokowski trained at the Royal College of Music (which he entered in 1896, at the age of thirteen, one of the college's youngest students ever). One of his fellow organ students was Ralph Vaughan Williams, six of whose nine symphonies Stokowski would later perform in America. Stokowski sang in the choir of St. Marylebone Church and later became Assistant Organist to Sir Henry Walford Davies at The Temple Church. At the age of 16, he was elected to membership in the Royal College of Organists. In 1900 he formed the choir of St. Mary's Church, Charing Cross Road, where he trained the choirboys and played the organ. In 1902 he was appointed organist and choir director of St. James's Church, Piccadilly. He also attended Queen's College, Oxford, where he earned a Bachelor of Music degree in 1903.

In later years, when he had achieved international fame with the Philadelphia Orchestra, rumours began to circulate that he was born "Leonard" or "Lionel Stokes" or that he had "anglicised" it to "Stokes." This canard, put about by his detractors in the 1930s, is readily disproved by reference not only to his Birth Certificate and those of his father, younger brother and sister (Source: General Register Office, London) which show Stokowski to have been the genuine Polish family name, but also by the Student Entry Registers of the Royal College of Music, Royal College of Organists, and Queen's College, Oxford, along with other surviving documentation from his days at St. Marylebone Church, St. James's Church, and St. Bartholomew's in New York City. The only small change he made to his name was on his arrival in America when he briefly spelled it as Stokovski in order to get people to pronounce it correctly. But at no time was Stokowski ever known as "Stokes." (His birth certificate states Leopold Anthony Stokowski: the other names noted above were family names, such as Boleslawowicx (after his father) that were added by the conductor later).[citation needed]

[edit] Professional career

[edit] New York, Cincinnati

In 1905 Stokowski began work in New York City as the organist and choir director of St. Bartholomew's Church. He became very popular amongst the parishioners (who included members of the Vanderbilt family) but eventually quit the position to pursue a post as an orchestra conductor. He moved to Paris for additional study before hearing that the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra would be needing a new conductor when it returned from a hiatus. So, in 1908, he began his campaign to obtain the position, writing multiple letters to the orchestra's president, Mrs. C. R. Holmes, and traveling to Cincinnati for a personal interview. Eventually he was granted the post and officially took up his duties in the fall of 1909. That was the year of his official conducting debut in Paris (12 May 1909) with the Colonne Orchestra. His first London concert took place the following week (18 May 1909) with the New Symphony Orchestra at the Queen's Hall.

Stokowski was a great success in Cincinnati, introducing the idea of "pop concerts" and conducting the United States premieres of new works by such composers as Edward Elgar whose 2nd Symphony was given there on 24 November 1911. However, in early 1912 he became sufficiently frustrated with the politics of the orchestra's board that he tendered his resignation. There was a dispute over the resignation, but on April 12 it was finally accepted.

[edit] Philadelphia

Two months later, Stokowski was appointed director of the Philadelphia Orchestra. Stokowski made his Philadelphia debut on October 11, 1912. This position would bring him some of his greatest accomplishments and recognition. It has been suggested that Stokowski quit at Cincinnati knowing full well that the job in Philadelphia was already his, or as Oscar Levant suggested in his book A Smattering of Ignorance, "he had the contract in his back pocket."

Stokowski rapidly garnered a reputation as a showman. His flair for the theatrical included grand gestures such as throwing the sheet music on the floor to show he did not need to conduct from a score. He also experimented with lighting techniques in the concert hall,[2] at one point conducting in a dark hall with only his head and hands lighted, at other times arranging the lights so they would cast theatrical shadows of his head and hands. His hair, always unruly, he allowed to grow long, and he combed it straight back. This created a "lion's mane" effect that he carefully nurtured (his adopted first name "Leopold", means "lion-like"). Late in the 1929-30 season, he started conducting without a baton; his free-hand manner of conducting became one of his trademarks.

On the musical side, Stokowski nurtured the orchestra and shaped the "Stokowski" sound, or what became known as the "Philadelphia Sound".[3] He encouraged "free bowing" from the string section, "free breathing" from the brass section, and continually altered the seating arrangements of the sections as well as the acoustics of the hall in order to create better sound. Stokowski is credited as being the first conductor to adopt the seating plan used by most orchestras today (first and second violins together on the left, violas and cellos on the right)[citation needed]. But he was also known for tinkering with the orchestration of famous works by such composers as Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, Sibelius and Brahms. In one instance, he even revised the ending of a work - the Romeo and Juliet Fantasy Overture, by Tchaikovsky, so that it would end quietly, taking his notion from Modest Tchaikovsky's "Life and Letters of Peter Ilych Tchaikovsky" (translated by Rosa Newmarch: 1906) that the composer had provided a quiet ending of his own at Balakirev's suggestion. He performed much the same task for Mussorgsky's Night on Bald Mountain, discarding completely Rimsky-Korsakov's orchestration of the work in favor of his own. (In the film Fantasia, however, Stokowski did not end the work with a big climax, but allowed it to blend right into Schubert's Ave Maria). Many serious music critics have been horrified at the liberties Stokowski took - liberties which were common in the nineteenth century but had since died out, as faithful adherence to the composer's score became more common.[4] However, Stokowski was by no means alone in his alterations to scores, and frequently left them completely untouched. Toscanini, for example, who had a reputation for "doing as written", was equally adept at making similar changes to composers' scores, as in Tchaikovsky's 'Manfred Symphony' where he added tam-tam crashes to the end of the first movement, re-wrote the wind, brass and string parts here and there, and cut 100 bars out of the finale.

In 1939 Stokowski also made his own orchestration of Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition, in which he omitted two of the movements from the score. The composer and arranger Lucien Cailliet, a member of the Philadelphia Orchestra who also acted as 'house arranger', had assisted Stokowski in the copying of many of Stokowski's transcriptions, something which led to the incorrect assumption that they were Cailliet's work and not Stokowski's. In fact, many of Stokowski's pencilled manuscripts still survive in the Stokowski Collection at the University of Pennsylvania. It was from these that Cailliet made good ink copies in his excellent calligraphic hand, and thus started the unfounded rumour that Stokowski's transcriptions were not his own work. Cailliet had actually created his own orchestration of "Pictures at an Exhibition" in 1936, and as Ormandy's RCA Victor recording show (made the same year and issued on a Biddulph CD), it is quite different to Stokowski's arrangement.

Stokowski's repertoire was broad and included many contemporary works. He was the only conductor to perform all of Schoenberg's orchestral works during the composer's own lifetime, several of which were World Premieres. He gave the first American performance of Schoenberg's 'Gurrelieder' in 1932. It was recorded 'live' on 78s and remained the only recording of the work in the catalogue until the advent of the LP. Stokowski also gave the US Premieres of four of Shostakovich's symphonies (Nos 1, 3, 6 and 11). In 1916, he conducted the United States premiere of Mahler's 8th Symphony. He added works by Rachmaninoff, giving the World Premieres of his 3rd Symphony, the 4th Piano Concerto and the Paganini Rhapsody; Sibelius, whose last three symphonies were given their US premieres in Philadelphia in the 1920s; and Igor Stravinsky, many of whose works were also given their first American performances by Stokowski. In 1922, he introduced 'The Rite of Spring' to the USA, gave its first staged performance there in 1930 (Martha Graham danced the part of The Chosen One) and at the same time made the first US recording of the work. Seldom an opera conductor, Stokowski did give the US Premieres in Philadelphia of the original version of Mussorgky's 'Boris Godunov' (1929) and Alban Berg's 'Wozzeck' (1931).

In 1933, he started "Youth Concerts" for younger audiences, which are still a Philadelphia tradition, and fostered youth music programs. He was very much a man of his times, and he understood his times well. He was famous for transcribing many of the major organ works of J. S. Bach for Wagnerian-sized orchestra, his goal being to bring this magnificent music to a wider audience. Much admired in their day, these transcriptions are again being played now, and conductors such as Wolfgang Sawallisch, Matthias Bamert, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Seija Ozawa, Erich Kunzel and Jose Serebrier are among many who have performed and recorded Stokowski's Bach Transcriptions. Even so, they are still considered by some to be bastardizations of the works. Today the organ works of Bach are widely heard in their original form via recordings and concerts, much more so than during Stokowski's time. Whether his transcriptions encouraged this resurgence of interest in Bach's organ music is a matter of debate.

After disputes with the board, Stokowski began to withdraw from involvement in The Philadelphia Orchestra from 1936 onwards, allowing co-conductor Eugene Ormandy to gradually take over. He shared principal conducting duties with Ormandy from 1936-1940. After he left Philadelphia, he did not return until 1960, when he conducted several concerts and made some stereo recordings for Columbia. His final concerts with The Philadelphia Orchestra were in 1969.3

Stokowski appeared as himself in the motion picture 'The Big Broadcast of 1937' conducting two of his Bach transcriptions. That same year he also conducted and acted in One Hundred Men and a Girl, with Deanna Durbin and Adolphe Menjou. In 1939, Stokowski collaborated with Walt Disney to create the motion picture for which he is best known — Fantasia. He conducted all the music (with the exception of a "jam session" in the middle of the film) and included his own orchestrations for the Toccata and Fugue in D Minor and Night on Bald Mountain/Ave Maria segments. Stokowski even got to talk to (and shake hands with) Mickey Mouse on screen, although he would later say with a smile that Mickey Mouse got to shake hands with him. Most of the music was recorded in the Academy of Music, using multi-track stereophonic sound. Stokowski also appeared in the 1947 film Carnegie Hall along with Bruno Walter, Fritz Reiner, Jascha Heifetz, Artur Rubinstein, Ezio Pinza and other great classical musicians of the day.

[edit] All American Youth Orchestra

In 1940, Stokowski formed the All-American Youth Orchestra, which toured South America in 1940 and North America in 1941 and was met with rave reviews. Although Stokowski made a number of recordings with the AAYO for Columbia, the technical standard was not as high as had been achieved with the Philadelphia Orchestra for RCA Victor. In any event, the AAYO was disbanded when America entered the war and plans for another extensive tour in 1942 were abandoned. During this time, following Toscanini's temporary withdrawal, Stokowski also became chief conductor of the NBC Symphony Orchestra on a three-year contract (1941-1944), while the NBC's regular conductor, Arturo Toscanini, undertook guest engagements with the Philadelphia Orchestra. Stokowski conducted a great deal of contemporary music with the NBC Symphony, including the US Premiere of Prokofiev's Alexander Nevsky in 1943, the World Premieres of Schoenberg's Piano Concerto (with Eduard Steuermann) and Antheil's 4th Symphony, both in 1944, and new works by Hovhaness, Stravinsky, Hindemith, Milhaud, Howard Hanson, William Schumann, Morton Gould and many others. He also conducted several British works with this orchestra, including Vaughan Williams' 4th Symphony, Holst's The Planets, and Butterworth's 'A Shropshire Lad'.

[edit] New York City Symphony Orchestra

In 1944, on the recommendation of Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, Stokowski helped form the New York City Symphony Orchestra, which they intended would make music accessible for middle-class workers. Ticket prices were set low, and performances took place at convenient, after-work hours. Many early concerts were standing room only; however, a year later in 1945, Stokowski was at odds with the board (who wanted to trim expenses even further) and he resigned.

[edit] Hollywood Bowl Symphony Orchestra

In 1945, he founded the Hollywood Bowl Symphony Orchestra. The orchestra lasted for two years before it was disbanded for live concerts, but not for recordings, which continued well into the 1960s. (It began giving live concerts again in 1991, under John Mauceri.) Then in the late 1940s, Stokowski became chief Guest Conductor of the New York Philharmonic. He made many splendid recordings with the NYPO, including the World Premiere Recording of Vaughan Williams's 6th Symphony in 1949. However, when in 1950 Dimitri Mitropoulos was appointed Chief Conductor of the NYPO, Stokowski began a new international career which commenced in 1951 with a nation-wide tour of England: during the Festival of Britain celebrations he conducted the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra at the invitation of Sir Thomas Beecham. During that same summer he also toured and conducted in Germany, Holland, Switzerland, Austria, and Portugal, establishing a pattern of guest-conducting abroad during the summer months while spending the winter seasons conducting in the USA. This scheme was to hold good for the next 20 years.

[edit] Symphony of the Air, Houston Symphony Orchestra

Stokowski returned to the NBC Symphony Orchestra in 1954 for a series of recording sessions for RCA. The repertoire included Beethoven's 'Pastoral' Symphony, Sibelius's 2nd Symphony, Acts 2 & 3 of Tchaikovsky's 'Swan Lake' and highlights from Saint-Saens's 'Samson and Delilah' with Rise Stevens and Jan Peerce. After the NBC Symphony Orchestra was disbanded as the official ensemble of the NBC radio network, it was re-formed as the Symphony of the Air with Stokowski as notional Music Director, and as such performed many concerts and made recordings from 1954 until 1963. From 1955 to 1961, Stokowski was also the Music Director of the Houston Symphony Orchestra. For his debut appearance with the orchestra he gave the first performance of the Symphony No.2 'Mysterious Mountain' by Alan Hovhaness - one of many living American composers whose music he championed over the years.

[edit] American Symphony Orchestra and London

In 1962, at the age of 80, Stokowski founded the American Symphony Orchestra. He served as Music Director for the orchestra, until May 1972 when, at the age of 90, he returned to England. One of his notable British guest conducting engagements in the 1960s was the first Proms performance of Gustav Mahler's Second Symphony, since issued on CD.[5] He continued to conduct in public for a few more years, but failing health forced him to only make recordings. An eyewitness said that Stokowski often conducted sitting down in his later years; sometimes, as he became involved in the performance, he would stand up and conduct with remarkable energy. His last public appearance in the UK took place at the Royal Albert Hall, London, on 14 May 1974. Stokowski conducted the New Philharmonia in the 'Merry Waltz' of Otto Klemperer (in tribute to the orchestra's former Music Director who had died the previous year), Vaughan Williams's 'Tallis Fantasia', Ravel's 'Rapsodie Espagnole' and Brahms's 4th Symphony. Stokowski's very last public appearance took place during the 1975 Vence Music Festival in the South of France, when on 22 July he conducted the Rouen Chamber Orchestra in several of his Bach Transcriptions.

[edit] Recordings

In 1917 he made his very first recordings for the Victor Talking Machine Company, beginning with two of Brahms' Hungarian Dances. He found ways to make the best use of the acoustical process, until electrical recording was introduced by Victor in the spring of 1925. Stokowski conducted the first orchestral electrical recording to be made in America (Saint-Saens' Danse Macabre) in April 1925. The following month Stokowski recorded Marche Slave by Tchaikovsky, in which he increased the double basses to best utilize the lower frequencies of early electrical recording. Stokowski was also the first conductor in America to record all four Brahms symphonies (between 1927 and 1933). He made the first US recordings of the Beethoven 7th and 9th Symphonies, Dvorak's 'New World', Tchaikovsky's 4th Symphony and Nutcracker Suite, the Franck Symphony, Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherazade, Rachmaninov's 2nd Piano Concerto (with the composer as soloist), Sibelius 4th Symphony (its first recording), Shostakovitch's 5th and 6th Symphonies, and many shorter works.

His early recordings were made at Victor's Camden, New Jersey studios but then, in 1927, Victor began recording the orchestra in the Academy of Music in Philadelphia. Stokowski and the Philadelphia Orchestra later participated in long playing, high fidelity, and stereophonic experiments, during the early 1930s, mostly for Bell Laboratories. (Victor even released some LPs at this time, which were not commercially successful because they required special, expensive phonographs that most people could not afford during the Great Depression.) Stokowski recorded prodigiously for various labels until shortly before his death, including RCA Victor, Columbia, Capitol, Everest, United Artists, and Decca/London 'Phase 4' Stereo.

[edit] Last years

In 1976, he signed a recording contract with CBS Records that would have kept him active until he was 100 years old.[6] However, he died of a heart attack the following year in Nether Wallop, Hampshire at 95. His very last recording (made shortly before his death), for Columbia, included remarkably youthful performances of the Symphony in C by Bizet and Mendelssohn's "Italian" Symphony (No. 4), with the National Philharmonic Orchestra in London.

[edit] Personal life

Stokowski married three times. His first wife was the American concert pianist Olga Samaroff (born Lucie Hickenlooper), to whom he was married from 1911 until 1923 (one daughter: Sonia Stokowski, an actress). His second wife was Johnson & Johnson heiress Evangeline Love Brewster Johnson, an artist and aviator, to whom he was married from 1926 until 1937 (two children: Gloria Luba Stokowski and Andrea Sadja Stokowski). His third wife, from 1945 until 1955, was railroad heiress Gloria Vanderbilt (born 1924), an artist and fashion designer (two sons, Leopold Stanislaus Stokowski b. 1950 and Christopher Stokowski b. 1952). He also had a much-publicized affair with Greta Garbo during the 1930's.

[edit] Trivia

[edit] Bibliography

  • Daniel, Oliver (1982). Stokowski: A Counterpoint of View.
  • Rollin Smith (2005) "Stokowski and the Organ".
  • Paul Robinson (1977) "Stokowski: The Art of the Conductor".
  • Abram Chasins (1979) "Leopold Stokowski: A Profile".
  • Preben Opperby (1982) "Leopold Stokowski".
  • William Ander Smith (1990) "The Mystery of Leopold Stokowski".
  • Leopold Stokowski (1943) "Music for All of Us".
  • Herbert Kupferberg (1969) "Those Fabulous Philadelphians"

[edit] References

  1. ^ Simon Callow, 'He would fix the audience with his glinting eye...'. The Guardian, 23 September 2005.
  2. ^ David Lasserson, "Are concerts killing music?" The Guardian, 19 July 2002.
  3. ^ David Patrick Stearns, "Leopold Stokowski, the father of the Philadelphia Sound". Philadelphia Inquirer, 26 January 2007.
  4. ^ Schonberg, Harold C. The Great Conductors New York: Simon and Schuster, 1967)
  5. ^ Edward Greenfield, "Mahler: Symphony no 2, Woodland/ Baker/ BBC Chorus and Choral Soc/ LSO/ Stokowski" (CD review). The Guardian, 13 February 2004.
  6. ^ Paul Vaughan, "Age cannot wither them". The Guardian, 13 March 2002.
  7. ^ Christopher Hawtree, Obituary for Adolph Green. The Guardian, 26 October 2002.

[edit] Notable premieres

[edit] In concert

[edit] On record

[edit] External links

Preceded by
Frank van der Stucken		 Music Director, Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra
1909–1912		 Succeeded by
Ernst Kunwald
Preceded by
Carl Pohlig		 Music Director, Philadelphia Orchestra
1912–1938		 Succeeded by
Eugene Ormandy
Preceded by
Ferenc Fricsay		 Music Director, Houston Symphony Orchestra
1955–1961		 Succeeded by
John Barbirolli
v • d • e
New York Philharmonic Music Directors
Ureli Corelli Hill (1842) • Theodore Eisfeld (1848) • Carl Bergmann (1855) • Leopold Damrosch (1876) • Theodore Thomas (1877) • Anton Seidl (1891) • Emil Paur (1898) • Walter Damrosch (1902) • Wassily Safonoff (1906) • Gustav Mahler (1909) • Josef Stránský (1911) • Willem Mengelberg (1922) • Arturo Toscanini (1928) • John Barbirolli (1936) • Artur Rodzinski (1943) • Bruno Walter (1947) • Dimitris Mitropoulos (1949) • Leopold Stokowski (1949) • Leonard Bernstein (1958) • George Szell (1969) • Pierre Boulez (1971) • Zubin Mehta (1978) • Kurt Masur (1991) • Lorin Maazel (2002) 
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