The Stokowski Nobody Knew

HAVING TOILED IN THE TRENCHES of journalism for over forty years (albeit the more rarefied trenches of classical music, theater, and other cultural events), I like to think that I can manage sufficient objectivity to deal with anything I’m asked to cover. I may have strong opinions, sure, but I try to position myself as an open-minded audience representative. 

But I can promise no such objectivity in dealing with Nancy Shear’s new book I Knew a Man who Knew Brahms, and I’ll explain why after some introductory matter.

Nancy Shear Arts Services, founded in 1978, provides career consulting and public-relations services to musicians, and have worked and continue to work with a very distinguished roster. Shear herself has taught at New York University and The New School, been orchestra librarian with the Philadelphia Orchestra and the Curtis Institute, and has worked with a number of publishing companies in different capacities. She’s also a broadcaster who has been heard on WNYC, WHYY, and NPR, in the course of which she has conducted hundreds of interviews with star musicians.

Her memoir, however, chronicles her life in the years before she founded her agency, and it’s a fascinating, superbly written coming-of-age saga. It pulled me along not just through her skill at telling a good story but also because of the compelling commonality I discovered.

In 1960, Leopold Stokowski led a Philadelphia Orchestra concert at the Robin Hood Dell, an outdoor amphitheater in Philadelphia (now known as the Mann Center for the Performing Arts). Fourteen-year-old Nancy Shear, a resident of suburban Philadelphia, attended the event. She was enthralled by every aspect of it, from the orchestra tuning, to the sight of Stokowski waiting in the wings, to the program itself, which featured major works by Berlioz, Ravel, Debussy, and Shostakovich, among others.

Young Nancy already had developed something of an obsession with Stokowski. He was, at the time, the most celebrated conductor in America, if not the world. His musical interpretations were flamboyant and unique. So was his personal life. He was a movie star, rocketing to even more fame in “Fantasia.” He was impersonated by Bugs Bunny – and you don’t get much more famous than that. 

The obsession Shear describes hit home with me. As a youngster learning to play the violin, I became obsessed with Jascha Heifetz. Unlike Shear, I never met my hero or saw him perform, but my first classical-music concert, at Carnegie Hall on my 13th birthday, was conducted by Stokowski. It was packed with works that appealed to a young enthusiast: Beethoven’s Seventh, Mussorgsky’s “Pictures at an Exhibition” (in Stokowski’s own orchestration, of course), and the most rip-roaring performance of Ravel’s “Bolero” I’m ever likely to hear.

I became a Stokowski devotee, returning the following year to see him conduct Beethoven’s Ninth. Because my family lived in the Connecticut suburbs, I had to persuade my father to take me, which could be a struggle. And here’s where Shear’s book sounds another deeply resonant note. She describes a turbulent home life, marked by the sounds of her parents fighting late at night. I also grew up with those sounds as my mother drank her way into bitter belligerence night after night and dragged my dad out of bed for many a screaming match.

Shear’s mother was the classical-music enthusiast, but she was also the depressive victim of her husband’s rage. You learn to persevere as a kid in that kind of household, and Nancy found an emotional escape route through music, learning to play the cello and discovering through recordings the wonderland of concert music. 

She began stalking Stokowski by sneaking into his Philadelphia Orchestra concerts, moving from scoring comps from a box-office lady to begging spare subscriber tickets to simply sneaking in through a backstage door. Her backstage explorations led her to the library. There she met assistant conductor William Smith and librarian Jesse Taynton, who introduced her to this fascinating world:

Mr. Taynton explained that the printed music couldn’t convey everything needed for a performance. It instructed the musicians on what notes to play and basically how loud or soft, long or short, fast or slow, to play them. But the conductor, through gestures and sometimes verbal directions at rehearsals ... would communicate specific tempos, volume (called “dynamics”), phrasing, and the subtleties of expression that make each conductor’s interpretation uniquely his own.

She was about to turn 17, the perfect age to skip a day of high school and go to the Academy, dividing her time between hanging out in the library with Taynton and Smith or sitting in the hall to watch rehearsal. Again, I found personal resonance, as I used to skip high-school classes in order to take the bus to Manhattan for Broadway matinées, more useful to my planned acting career than a dull geometry session.

She attempted to crash a Stokowski rehearsal on February 3, 1964, but upon learning that the conductor had forbidden everyone from the hall, she waited outside for his car to arrive, then pursued him to the stage door, where she boldly asked his permission to attend. 

        “You may attend the rehearsal on one condition,” he said as I looked up at him. “You must come backstage when it is finished and tell me your impressions.” I considered this a serious responsibility.
        “I will, Maestro,” I assured him. He put his hand on the top of my back.
        “Now, go!” he commanded, and with a shove, propelled me toward the concert hall.

She watched him rehearse Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony for two and half hours, conveying his wishes more with more gestures than words. At the end of it, she hurried to his dressing room to praise him, but also to ask about a tempo change he’d demanded in the opening movement. Stokowski opened his score to the place in question and explained to her his concept of rubato, a valuable interpretive technique.

Leopold Stokowski

Four months before she graduated from high school, she was hired by Taynton to be a library assistant, which she did part-time. Working in a library of nearly 1,100 pieces, she was kept busy marking pages and, when returning rentals, erasing markings. It developed her capacity to hear the music by seeing it on the page. This also occasioned her to meet 92-year-old Raoul Hellmer, whose father had been a pharmacist in Vienna and delivered medications to Brahms – and once asked his son to be the messenger. Hence the title of her book.

Eugene Ormandy reigned supreme at the time as music director of the Philadelphia Orchestra, and there was no love lost between him and Stokowski, who’d been his predecessor there and now was returning for occasional concerts. “Of all the conductors I worked with,” she writes, “the one I most disliked, both personally and musically, was Eugene Ormandy. And he was the one I saw—and heard—on a daily basis. ... Nothing about him seemed out of the ordinary: his demeanor, the ideas and opinions he expressed, the conventional lifestyle he and his wife seemed to lead. There’s good reason why no one has written a biography of him.”

Along with all the women who worked with the orchestra, she was warned to beware of Ormandy’s advances. But she also was warned never to be alone with Stokowski. He’d been married and divorced three times and was famous for his philandering. Yet, as their friendship deepened, he never betrayed her trust. “He never revealed the reasons for his growing attachment to me, which I could sense,” she writes, and her book goes on to recount, in insightful detail, the many years she spent working for him and, after that, the friendship that endured until his death.

He hired her when she was 19 and he 83 to help organize his personal music library, which meant many visits to his Upper East Side penthouse. Those days would start off with him asking her opinion about concerts she’d recently seen before they settled into the work routine. Soon the days also included lunch cooked with the Maestro, who liked to assure her, “You are home now.”

She offers a brief but solid biography of Stokowski, itself a challenge because he spread so many outrageous and contradictory stories. And yet, she writes, “Nothing I discovered about Stokowski troubled me or diminished my admiration for him. It only added to the intrigue. Great musicians of that time, like famous movie stars, were expected to be special. They could behave as they wished, exempted from society’s rules.”

In April 1967, Shear met cellist Mstislav Rostropovich at a Philadelphia Orchestra rehearsal of the Dvořák concerto. Slava, as he was known, eagerly greeted this stranger, then sat her at his feet as the rehearsal begins. And then “he pulled tones from his cello that were richer and fuller than anything I’d ever heard.” She didn’t see him often, but when she did, the friendship deepened. He seemed as wild and undisciplined as Stokowski was reserved. A romance seemed to be brewing.

Slava was married, but often was separated and both partners had affairs. On Shear’s part, she sought no serious entanglements at all. “I might also have been put off by my parents’ explosive marriage,” she writes, “but I’ve known other people, growing up under similar circumstances, who got married to right the wrongs of the past. Instead, I continued to dream of an independent, adventurous life. I wanted only to be with Stokowski and Slava—and hear their music—as much as possible.”

Of course, the USSR was regarded as an enemy during the 60s and 70s, but few fully understood how the people of Russia suffered under this regime. When Slava traveled, his wife or daughters would be kept at home. 

As we follow her into her twenties, there’s no lack of excitement. She gets fired from the Philadelphia Orchestra library job because Taynton is retiring and no woman would be allowed to advance in that job. She enrolled at Temple University as a music history major. It didn’t hurt that Stokowski helped her with her homework.

Mstislav Rostropovich

Meanwhile, she embarked on an eight-year romance with a professor teaching a summer course on writing about music (after the course ended). This unnamed fellow lived in London, which  complicated further assignations, although she was resourceful enough, after Stokowski permanently relocated to England, not only to contrive to visit them both but also to get a summer job working for the International Festival of Youth Orchestras for three years. Her portrait of Stokowski post-relocation is one of the more poignant threads of the story, as we watch the vigorous 91-year-old settle into a lonely semi-retirement.

On the Rostropovich side, she was witness to the fallout when he wrote a widely circulated letter in 1970 defending Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, addressing issues of artistic freedom. She was worried enough to scrape together enough money to travel with an acquaintance to Moscow that Christmas, and almost missed out on seeing him at all. But when she did see him, he had to pretend not to know her.

“He nodded, we shook hands, and I left. He hadn’t uttered a word. I had no way of knowing what he had been through physically or psychologically, or if the authorities had permanently damaged his career. I stood off to the side, watching him greet other people. He seemed well, and I was grateful not to see any evidence that he had been ill or mistreated.”

He eventually would be allowed to travel and perform in Europe and the U.S., which is the period in which – you guessed it – I saw Rostropovich in a recital with pianist Samuel Sanders at the University of Connecticut, featuring an amazing performance of the Prokofiev sonata. 

What I have invested in this book is a my own discovery of the strengthening power of music in the midst of adolescent turmoil, along with the fascinating discovery of the man behind the Stokowski myth, never mind the glimpses we get of Rostropovich. I wouldn’t call this a kiss-and-tell narrative: the character studies are too insightful for such superficiality to obtain. (But you do discover Prokofiev’s favorite brand of perfume.) 

There’s much more to this book than my lengthy précis would suggest. The stories of both of the center-stage performers play out as all biographies must, but there’s much to learn about them along the way. Although someone with a long background in classical music will derive the most fulfillment from this book, Shear puts herself in a more average reader’s place throughout, carefully contextualizing what needs to be explained without seeming fussy or condescending. 

Her magical childhood reawakened for me my own less-glamorous early years; I suspect you’ll find a similar resonance here.

I Knew a Man Who Knew Brahms
by Nancy Shear
A Regalo Press Book