“I Knew a Man Who Knew Brahms”

In I Knew a Man Who Knew Brahms, Nancy Shear, a consummate classical-music insider, takes us into the studios, rehearsals, and homes of some of artform’s most revered figures—think Leopold Stokowski, Mstislav Rostropovich, Eugene Ormandy—and countless orchestra musicians. We sit in on rehearsals with preeminent conductors and world-class orchestras, encounter the artists backstage and with their families, witness the artistic process in action, and accompany Shear when she ventures behind the Iron Curtain to check on Rostropovich, a foremost advocate for personal freedom, during a period of profound political oppression in the Soviet Union. The book bursts with behind-the-scenes anecdotes and vivid portraits of musicians onstage and off—Shear is a gifted and generous raconteur, with a great ear for the revealing conversation. More than that, Shear has an endless curiosity and deep insight into the music and the people who make it.

Here are excerpts from I Knew a Man Who Knew Brahms. They revolve around Shear’s time as assistant to the Philadelphia Orchestra’s librarian from February 1964 to December 1968. The appointment of a woman—at age 17—to the staff of the orchestra library made news back then; the headline of the Philadelphia Sunday Bulletin’s profile of her captures much about gender roles at the time: “Orchestra’s Pert Lady Librarian.” Shear went to establish herself as one of classical music’s leading publicists as well as a broadcaster and freelance writer.

In the excerpts below, Shear discusses the formidable discipline and sometimes surprising humor of Leopold Stokowski during his long association with the Philadelphia Orchestra. In the 1960s, Stokowski had no official role or title at the Philadelphia Orchestra, but his impact on that orchestra—and classical music at large—was significant. The excerpts say much about the expectations and imperatives, the imagination and sensibilities, the traditions and the experiments, of orchestras and their conductors not only then, but now.

The orchestra tuned, and the personnel manager, standing beside the empty podium, made announcements about scheduling. Then, facing the orchestra, he clapped loudly three times—the universal signal for an orchestra to be silent. From the stage right doorway, Stokowski emerged, moving swiftly through the first violin section toward the front of the stage. The players broke into cheers, knocking the wood of their bows against the metal of the music stands and shuffling their feet in tribute. As he walked, Stokowski waved at the players and nodded in acknowledgement. Then, mounting the podium, he turned to face the orchestra, raised his arms, and cut through the air with both hands. The two-note motif that opens the Shostakovich Fifth, stated first by the cellos and basses, then echoed by the violins, resounded throughout the hall. He knew how to play that orchestra; he had created it. In the years following this rehearsal, in live performances and in recordings, I would hear Stokowski convey a huge range of emotions through these opening notes: anger, defiance, introspection, sadness, tragedy. I’d come to learn that his interpretations, more than those of other conductors, were spontaneously shaped by his moods. (I’d also come to learn that he could begin a rehearsal without a smile or a greeting. He could be charming then intimidating, without warning.)

As I watched and listened, it became clear that there were sounds in his imagination he was striving to replicate. Tension built as he had the musicians repeat the same phrase over and over, wordlessly adjusting the contour or tempo or sonority with only a turn of his wrist or the slight lift of a finger. Then he heard what he wanted.

“That’s it, that’s it. Do it that way in the concert,” he said matter-of-factly as the players shot relieved glances at each other.

He knew when to ratchet up tension, pushing the players to an almost intolerable level of pressure. Then he’d sense when they needed a collective deep breath. Sitting back on the high stool, he began to tell stories. Setting the scene of his travels in Bali years earlier, he moved his hands evocatively in front of him, palms up, and described sailing slowly down a river in total darkness, without even moonlight to illuminate clusters of natives chanting on the riverbanks. The orchestra members were mesmerized. Then he told amusing stories of working with other orchestras, joining lightly in the laughter of the players.

That morning, I realized that his stories were not merely entertainment. They gave the musicians a break while putting them into the proper frame of mind for the works they were rehearsing. The tales of his travels to the Far East primed the players for works like Eichheim’s “Japanese Nocturne” from Oriental Impressions, an atmospheric, mystical converging of Eastern and Western musical styles that he’d conduct as an encore. A more dramatic story set the mood for the intense, extroverted final movement of the Shostakovich Fifth. He even used rehearsal letters, which serve as points of reference in the parts for musicians to know where to resume playing, to communicate the mood of the music. “Letter H! Hor-ri-ble!” he yelled, in tones of distress, when the music expressed ferocity or anguish. “Letter C, please, calm,” he intoned so quietly that the players could barely hear him before he led them into a section of Shostakovich’s solemn slow movement.

It became clear that there were sounds in Stokowski’s imagination he was striving to replicate. Tension built as he had the musicians repeat the same phrase over and over, wordlessly adjusting the contour or tempo or sonority with only a turn of his wrist or the slight lift of a finger.

Even during Stokowski’s lighthearted comments, when the orchestra wasn’t playing, the musicians sat with their instruments poised, ready to start. String players kept the fingers of their left hands in place on the fingerboards, their right hands gripping the bows in playing position; woodwind and brass players held instruments with their fingers hovering just above the keys; and percussionists stood close to their mallets, beaters, and sticks. The musicians’ eyes never strayed from Stokowski, who often shouted out a rehearsal number or letter and, in a flash of motion, resumed conducting. There was no clapping to get attention, no second or two of conversation among the players or a repeat announcement of the rehearsal number or letter. There wasn’t even a final pause before the full attention of the orchestra had to focus on his downbeat.

I suspected that Stokowski’s practice of resuming the playing with no more than a split-second’s notice was a way of keeping his musicians off balance. Focusing fully on him, totally under his control, they were able to give him the flexibility and spontaneity he demanded.

For two and a half hours, I absorbed every word he uttered and studied every gesture, amazed at the subtle and powerful effects they had on the evolution of the performance.

When the rehearsal ended, I rushed backstage to Eugene Ormandy’s suite in the Academy of Music, which Stokowski was using. I knocked on the door and he answered….

“What did you think of the rehearsal?” he asked, looking at me intently.

“It was remarkable!” I answered. “Thank you for allowing me to be there. But I didn’t understand something you did in the Shostakovich.”

Near the end of the first movement, he had suddenly pushed the tempo forward and then pulled back, slowing the speed like a rider pulling the reins of a horse. His hands had moved high above his head, his index fingers pointing upward like beacons, his eyes making contact with virtually every player so that he could control the orchestra’s winding down, done in a matter of seconds, as one cohesive unit. It was like watching a movie scene suddenly shift into slow motion, and I had found it difficult to breathe. Then he’d pushed ahead again, moving the tempo urgently, impulsively. I had heard the symphony in recordings and its speed had never fluctuated as dramatically as it had in this rehearsal.

“Why did you slow the orchestra, then speed up?” I asked. Stokowski opened his score and pointed to the section in question, then explained briefly what he had done and why. His playing with tempo—a slight hesitation, then a surging ahead, or the reverse—was, I would learn, a characteristic of his conducting. This elasticity, called tempo rubato, translated from the Italian as “stolen time”—time taken from the regular, measured pulse of the tempo. He was a master of this push-and-pull expressiveness.

At the time I started going to concerts, audiences rarely expressed displeasure; I never heard any booing (they were either well-mannered or apathetic). The opera house was different, but booing there usually targeted a controversial production or flawed singing. But in the 1920s and ’30s, Stokowski’s audiences let him know they didn’t want to be challenged. He had a running battle with audience members who didn’t want new music. He also grappled with the Friday matinee ladies (whose ranks included members of the orchestra’s influential Women’s Committees). These women didn’t hesitate to leave while the orchestra was playing, noisily grabbing their shopping bags to catch the train home to the Main Line. (Eventually, the railroad purposely delayed the departure times of the Friday afternoon trains.) Some of the older orchestra players told me about Stokowski’s not-so-subtle reprimand in 1926. He devised a program that opened with Lekeu’s Fantaisie Contrapuntique, a piece that starts with two players onstage then adds musicians one by one until the stage is full. The concert closed with Haydn’s “Farewell” Symphony; its final movement is scored to have musicians leave individually until only two violinists remain.

If Stokowski had had his way, concerts would have involved all the senses, incorporating color projections (he experimented with this technology) and the scent machines he advocated for movie theaters.

On April 17, 1926, the Philadelphia Record wrote an account of the event: “The staid and conservative audience which patronizes Philadelphia Orchestra concerts was treated to a new shock yesterday afternoon, when Conductor Leopold Stokowski staged a rather startling farce by way of rebuke to those music-lovers who annoy him by late arrival and premature departure, with attendant confusion in the auditorium. Stokowski’s revenge, perpetrated in a spirit of whimsical irony, took the form of an exaggerated imitation, on the part of the orchestra, of the conduct of his audiences.” The musicians, the Record reported, “were hurrying in like the late-comers on the other side of the footlights…” Audience members hissed when they realized they were being parodied. At the end of the Haydn symphony, only two violinists were to remain onstage (according to the composer’s directions), but Stokowski had them all leave. He alone remained, and, playing the satire to the hilt, he turned to acknowledge the empty seats. Audience members were scandalized. “This is outrageous!” they huffed.

It was outrageous! He loved being outrageous! And I think his audiences (especially the women) loved being scolded by him. It was exciting, and no other conductor had this kind of relationship with them.

Still, his desire for quiet was sincere. “Painters paint their pictures on canvas, but musicians paint their pictures on silence,” he’d say. Cartoons, in art deco-style drawing, show Stokowski, the orchestra, and the audience turning to glare at someone who has dropped a handkerchief. His campaign continued until his final concert with the Philadelphia Orchestra, on February 13, 1969, when people noisily began to leave early. “You provide the silence,” I heard him say. “We’ll provide the music!”

Few artists spoke from the stage in those days (and fewer still in the 1920s and ’30s), but audiences enjoyed his impromptu comments. It brought him closer to them. While members of the non-music press seemed amused, reporting on his unusual behavior, music critics didn’t hesitate to call him a showman and say he was theatrical. In the conservative, intellectual world of classical music, neither of those terms is ever complimentary. I understood why they wouldn’t approve of behavior that would distract attention from the music, but why would a bit of showmanship be bad? Did Stokowski go too far? Some people laughed when they told me about his experiments from those years—banishing applause and stage lighting, having the orchestra play in darkness except for a spotlight focused just on his abundant blond—then white—hair and his baton-free hands. “Serious” conductors are supposed to be concerned only with how the music sounds, not with anything else. And they are never to call attention to themselves. (An article in the New York Times on April 1, 2013, noted that Riccardo Muti seemed to have had two spotlights trained on him in the pit in a Rome Opera performance of I due Foscari. This might have happened by accident. “Theater officials said they had not noticed, and Mr. Muti said he had nothing to do with the lighting.” The implication was that a serious conductor would never have sanctioned such goings on.)

I know Stokowski would have loved being accused of theatricality. If he’d had his way, concerts would have involved all the senses, incorporating color projections (he experimented with this technology) and the scent machines he advocated for movie theaters.