How to Sell Goods

Guest Blogger Dept.: I was delighted to spend time recently with Nat Benchley, grandson of the humorist whose work I revere, and to discover that (among his many varied talents and interests) Nat strives to keep his grandfather’s legacy alive, and abetted that cause by issuing two CDs that collect nearly two dozen stories in Nat’s very effective readings. So as not to compete, the story below is not among them.

                                                                                         

THE RETAIL MERCHANTS’ ASSOCIATION ought to buy up all the copies of “Elements of Retail Salesmanship,” by Paul Westley Ivey (Macmillan), and not let a single one get into the hands of a customer, for once the buying public reads what is written there the game is up. It tells all about how to sell goods to people, how to appeal to their weaknesses, how to exert subtle influences which will win them over in spite of themselves. Houdini might as well issue a pamphlet giving in detail his methods of escape as for the merchants of this country to let this book remain in circulation.

"They intimate that I had better take my
few pennies and run 'round the corner
to some little haberdashery."
Drawing by Gluyas Williams

The art of salesmanship is founded, according to Mr. Ivey, on, first, a thorough knowledge of the goods which are to be sold, and second, a knowledge of the customer. By knowing the customer you know what line of argument will most appeal to him. There are several lines in popular use. First is the appeal to the instinct of self-preservation—i.e., social self-preservation. The customer is made to feel that in order to preserve her social standing she must buy the article in question. “She must be made to feel what a disparaged social self would mean to her mental comfort.”

It is reassuring to know that it is a recognized ruse on the part of the salesman to intimate that unless you buy a particular article you will have to totter through life branded as the arch-piker. I have always taken this attitude of the clerks perfectly seriously. In fact, I have worried quite a bit about it.

In the store where I am allowed to buy my clothes it is quite the thing among the salesmen to see which one of them can degrade me most. They intimate that, while they have no legal means of refusing to sell their goods to me, it really would be much more in keeping with things if I were to take the few pennies that I have at my disposal and run around the corner to some little haberdashery for my shirts and ties. Every time I come out from that store I feel like Ethel Barrymore in “Déclassée.” Much worse, in fact, for I haven’t any good looks to fall back upon.

Diva Farewell

From the Classical Vault Dept.: Eleven years ago, soprano Kiri Te Kanawa bid farewell to the performing stage with a tour that stopped in Schenectady, and which I was pleased to report on in the piece below.

                                                                                         

FIRST SHE COMPLETELY DISARMED US. Regally striding onto the stage, looking gorgeous in a full-length black sequined dress, soprano Kiri Te Kanawa spoke to the Proctor’s audience before her first number. In a friendly, intimate voice that nevertheless filled the hall, she spoke briefly about this stop on her farewell tour—“My first and last visit to Schenectady”—and her desire to make this concert the best of them all.

Kiri Te Kanawa

And then, just as serenely, she blew us away with a recital of well-chosen songs, a repertory of lesser-heard numbers that suited her voice magnificently.

A curiosity by Mozart opened the program. One of his final works, it’s a brief cantata written for the Masons, which he had recently joined. And it was a pleasant enough trifle, an ecumenical celebration of life, giving the singer and pianist Warren Jones plenty to do in seven or so minutes.

But it really served as a gateway to the masterworks that followed: five songs by Richard Strauss, showing a more introspective side of the composer best known for his orchestral bombast. From the first one, “Ständchen,” which gave the vocal line pleasant melodic leaps over a rippling piano arpeggio, Te Kanawa showed her intense dynamic control, which was even more effective in the next song, “Nacht,” a lullaby-like number.

Christmas Eve

An appropriate-for-the-day song I co-wrote with Tom Savoy for our musical adaptation of Booth Tarkington's "Beasley's Christmas Party."

Makings of the Middle East

CHEF ANA SORTUN graduated from La Varenne in Paris, but her interest in Middle Eastern food has taken her beyond that classical French foundation. She opened her first restaurant, Oleana, in Cambridge, Mass., in 2001; she now also owns Sarma, a Turkish-style tavern, and Sofra Bakery & Café, all in the same general area. And it doesn’t hurt that her husband, Chris Kurth, owns and operates nearby Siena Farms.

She won the James Beard Foundation’s “Best Chef: Northeast” designation in 2005, even as she was working on her first cookbook, Spice: Flavors of the Eastern Mediterranean. Her latest book is Soframiz: Vibrant Middle Eastern Recipes from Sofra Bakery & Café, co-written with Maura Kilpatrick, a longtime cooking partner who specializes in pastry.

We learn from the start that “sofra encompasses everything you prepare for the table: food, place settings, glassware, décor, linens.” (The literal translation from Turkish is “table,” allying it with an old-fashioned English sense of the term.) “Soframiz” means “our sofra,” which is as welcoming a title as you could wish.

It’s a handsome book with a hundred recipes, but be warned that these recipes aren’t always easy. Nor should they be. We confuse cooking with convenience, and we lack the tradition of handing down recipes and techniques across generations. Which means that scratch cooking usually means learning it from scratch. Fortunately, the procedures herein are laid out in careful detail, with photographs to illustrate the more complicated steps.

The New Fable of the Private Agitator and What He Cooked Up

Guest Blogger Dept.: We return, as we often should, to the fables of George Ade, this one a lengthier opus limning the hazards of succumbing to Ambition’s call.

                                                                                        

AMBITION CAME, with Sterling Silver Breast-Plate and Flaming Sword, and sat beside a Tad aged 5. The wee Hopeful lived in a Frame House with Box Pillars in front and Hollyhocks leading down toward the Pike.

“Whither shall I guide you?” asked Ambition. “Are you far enough from the Shell to have any definite Hankering?”

"You are entitled to One Hundred Thousand
Dollars," murmurs the stealthy Promoter."
Drawing by John T. McCutcheon

“I have spent many Hours brooding over the possibilities of the Future,” replied the Larva. “I want to grow up to be a Joey in a Circus. I fairly ache to sit in a Red Wagon just behind the Band and drive a Trick Mule with little pieces of Looking Glass in the Harness. I want to pull Mugs at all the scared Country Girls peeking out of the Wagon Beds. The Town Boys will leave the Elephant and trail behind my comical Chariot. In my Hour of Triumph the Air will be impregnated with Calliope Music and the Smell of Pop-Corn, modified by Wild Animals.”

Ambition went out to make the proper Bookings with Destiny. When he came back the Boy was ten years old.

“We started wrong,” whispered Ambition, curling up in the cool grass near the Day-Dreamer. “The Trick Mule and the Red Cart are all very well for little Fraidy-Cats and Softies, but a brave Youth of High Spirit should tread the Deck of his own Ship with a Cutlass under his Red Sash. Aye, that is Blood gauming up the Scuppers, but is the Captain chicken-hearted? Up with the Black Flag! Let it be give and take, with Pieces of Eight for the Victor!”

So it was settled that the Lad was to hurry through the Graded Schools and then get at his Buccaneering.

Brass Facts

From the Holiday Vault Dept.: Christmastime is here, by golly; disapproval would be folly ... so here’s a review I wrote of a brass quintet’s holiday concert in Schenectady, from the time when a city daily newspaper actually would commission a review about such an event.

                                                                                  

“WE HAVE OUR LITTLE BLUE BRASS BOOKS,” said Carleton Clay, one of the Catskill Brass’s two trumpets, “which every brass ensemble has to have at Christmas. So we’ll see if we can take your requests.”

Carleton Clay (a more recent view)

This brass quintet managed to work a holiday sing-along into a program of seasonal music that otherwise ran a gamut from Michael Praetorius to Leroy Anderson, performed Sunday night at the First United Methodist Church.

It provided a spectacular setting for the ensemble, enhancing the noble sound of instruments. Along with the music was some insight into the nature of those instruments, as genial Clay pointed out the differences hidden among a similar-seeming family.

Handel’s “Hallelujah Chorus” was a stirring beginning, in an arrangement by a member of the Canadian Brass. In response, the Catskill’s own Ben Aldridge transcribed another number from the oratorio, “And the Glory of the Lord,” a fitting companion piece.

Aldridge and Clay went from trumpets to the mellow conical-bore cornet and fluegelhorn for two settings of “Lo, How a Rose E’er Blooming,” which also took Donald Robertson from trombone to euphonium. And the difference in sound was remarkable, a darker color very appropriate to the Brahms choral prelude that constituted one of those settings.

Barricades of Mystery

PIANIST SIMONE DINNERSTEIN set the stage well before she entered. Her piano sat on a darkened stage at Columbia University’s Miller Theatre, with candles flickering on the soundboard and floor. The program notes – and you really have to read such things at an event like this – promised an intermission-free concert the components of which were organized into two sets, with applause requested only after each set.

 Simone Dinnerstein | photo by Lisa Marie Mazzucco

And then there were the sets. It was one of the most creative and satisfying arrays of pieces I’ve ever enjoyed in concert, each juxtaposition as powerful as the pieces themselves. The house was almost full on this cold, cold night. Dinnerstein swept in, acknowledged her greeting, and set to work, opening with one of the more overplayed and under-understood works in the repertory: François Couperin’s “Les Barricades Mystérieuses.” Written for harpsichord, it has traveled to many other instruments and feels very at home on the piano.

It’s a haunting, recursive work. As Tom Service wrote a few years ago in The Guardian, “The four parts create an ever-changing tapestry of melody and harmony, interacting and overlapping with different rhythmic schemes and melodies. The effect is shimmering, kaleidoscopic and seductive ... ” The lavish romanticism Dinnerstein imbued may send Baroque specialists screaming back to their cells, but it made great sense in the context of what followed: Schumann’s Arabesque, Op. 18, another work that conveys a sense of yearning. Its left-hand figurations seemed to pick up where Couperin’s left off, but in a voice that had harmonically advanced by a century. Like the Couperin piece, it’s in the form of a rondo, but its other-than-A sections are more obviously emotionally ravaged. Which is not surprising, coming from Schumann, who wore his heart on his keyboard.

The Art of the Cello

THERE’S A SCENE in the 1947 movie “Carnegie Hall” in which cellist Gregor Piatigorsky performs Saint-Saëns’s “The Swan” while surrounded by a half-dozen lady harpists plucking the accompaniment. He was a star cellist at a time when the instrument was still struggling to assert star status. And, as with all great soloists, he made it look easy. He was tall – tall enough to pose for a gag photo with the cellist hoisted under his chin like a fiddle. He had a chiseled face that seemed austere in repose, but lit up with his native merriment when he was at his ease.

You’ll get an excellent idea of the look of the man by browsing the photos at the Piatigorsky Archives at the Colburn School. Although the cellist died over 40 years ago, his widow lived to be 100 – and it was only after her death in 2012 that his collection of photos and letters; transcriptions, original compositions, and scores; books, concert programs, and audio – and more – went to the school thanks to the Piatigorsky Foundation, an organization founded by the cellist’s cellist grandson (and which also performs the admirable mission of offering live performances to underserved areas).

With some 19,000 items to deal with, the Colburn School put to work “a team of experts consisting of two archivists, two musicologists, a Russian translator, and a French translator” who collected their results in a 200-page inventory. Some 3,000 of those items were digitized, and the website gives an excellent taste of the breadth of those holdings.

A Precautionary Tale

PREACHING PRECAUTION isn’t often the same as practicing it. The “ounce of prevention” principle, seemingly instilled in us at birth, has long gone out the window where pesticide use is concerned. Touted as the farmer’s salvation before their risks were revealed, pesticides spawned a massive industry that flourishes, like any drug dealer, by keeping its users hooked.

As a political device, the Precautionary Principle – so named in the late 1980s – found a more secure footing in the European Union than it has in the United States. “In Europe the precautionary principle serves as a fundamental basis for generating sound public policy; public health and safety generally trumps potential threats to it. In the United States, however, dangers have to be established through what is generally termed risk analysis, meaning that ‘acceptable levels of risk’ are established. ... Precaution tends to be more of an afterthought than a guiding principle in the United States, and more of a guiding light in Europe.”

The quote comes from Philip Ackerman-Leist’s A Precautionary Tale, which tells the story of the small European village that took on and bested a corporate assault that would have spelled doom for small subsistence farmers – which was pretty much everybody not growing pesticide-anointed apples.

Russian Carnival

From the Vault Dept.: One of a series of liner notes I wrote for the sadly defunct Dorian Recordings label, although I swear my involvement with the concern had nothing to do with their downfall. This was for a CD of works by Prokofiev, Mussorgsky, Shostakovich, and Anthony DiLorenzo, lovingly described below – and with notes on the DiLorenzo piece by Tony himself..

                                                                                

BACK IN THE LATE ’60s, after conducting a rip-snorting performance of “Pictures at an Exhibition,” conductor Leopold Stokowski turned to the applauding Carnegie Hall audience and shouted, “Wonderful Russian music!” At which the audience stood and cheered.

In the late ’70s, while airing a recording of Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony, a radio announcer in Connecticut got a phone call from an angry listener who berated him for playing commie music – the same piece that has reduced an audience to tears with its trenchantly mournful slow movement.

Russian music has excited similar passions for centuries, politics aside. With a thousand-year-old history behind it that includes an Orthodox singing traditon, strong Byzantine and (in the 18th century) Italian influences, not to mention a varied and rhythmic folksong heritage. It’s well known that Stravinsky’s sensual “Rite of Spring” inspired rioting at its 1913 Paris premiere, but even the relatively staid Tchaikovsky inspired howls of nervous derision at what was then judged to be the barbaric nature of his music.

This recording collects music by some of the best-known Russian composers of the 19th and 20th centuries – and adds a new work by an American composer strongly influenced by the Russians.

When Genius Remained Your Humble Servant

Guest Blogger Dept.: Here’s Robert Benchley, back to set us straight about the travails of correspondence, which clearly was in a parlous state even in those dark old pre-e-mail days.

                                                                                     

OF COURSE, I REALLY KNOW NOTHING ABOUT IT, but I would be willing to wager that the last words of Penelope, as Odysseus bounced down the front steps, bag in hand, were: “Now, don't forget to write, Odie. You'll find some papyrus rolled up in your clean peplum, and just drop me a line on it whenever you get a chance.”

Drawing by Gluyas Williams

And ever since that time people have been promising to write, and then explaining why they haven’t written. Most personal correspondence of to-day consists of letters the first half of which are given over to an indexed statement of reasons why the writer hasn’t written before, followed by one paragraph of small talk, with the remainder devoted to reasons why it is imperative that the letter be brought to a close. So many people begin their letters by saying that they have been rushed to death during the last month, and therefore haven’t found time to write, that one wonders where all the grown persons come from who attend movies at eleven in the morning. There has been a misunderstanding of the word “busy” somewhere.

So explanatory has the method of letter writing become that it is probable that if Odysseus were a modern traveler his letters home to Penelope would average something like this:

Thai to Remember

OUR THAI CUSINE-INSPIRED Thanksgiving dinner had a preparation of khao soi, a wonderful coconut milk-based soup, as its centerpiece. Turkey appeared in the curry; an a-la-minute pad Thai satisfied the need for rice-stick noodles. The menu is below. Here's what we did in 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, and 1990 to 2012.

Carnival of Animals

HOW SENTIENT ARE OUR DOMESTICATED BEASTS? How about beasts in general? We’d like to think that those creatures we take into our houses and hearts, at least, have a capacity to reckon – but for many years we’ve been accused of anthropomorphizing the animals: informing them with human characteristics they can’t possibly have.

Isabella Rossellini and Pan

Isabella Rossellini knows otherwise, and science has been catching up with her. Her show “Link Link Circus,” which played at Bard College’s Fisher Center last Saturday (following acclaimed runs in Manhattan and throughout Europe), presents a cheerful array of lectures, sketches, films, animations, and circus tricks all in the service of animals.

One of which, a dog named Peter Pan, considerably ups the “awww” factor. Like Liberace, the dog goes by its surname; unlike the pianist, Pan doesn’t rely on costumes for effect. But that didn’t stop him from appearing in a dazzling array. Pan is a rescue dog, and we learned that Rossellini is deeply involved with animal rescue and training. In addition to dogs, her Long Island farm accommodates populations of chickens and bees.

The Art of Irony

LOUDON WAINWRIGHT III AND DAVID BROMBERG are guitar-playing singer-songwriters who gained fame in the 1970s, but who, beyond that, would seem to have little in common. One was termed a “new Bob Dylan”; the other recorded with him. Both record and perform with varying configurations of ensemble; both are keen students of American songwriting traditions. Wainwright performed solo during their Nov. 10 appearance at the Troy Music Hall; Bromberg was surrounded by ten other instrumentalists and singers. And the still-hale baby-boomer audience proudly shook its whitened manes as the house commenced to rock.

Mike Davis, Birch Johnason, Suavek Zaniesienko, and
David Bromberg | Photo by Andrzej Pilarczyk

Wainwright opened, going back to his 1973 album “Attempted Mustache” (superb title and cover art) for “Come a Long Way,” setting the stage for a thirteen-song set that would comment on family, relationships amorous and otherwise, holidays, and, briefly and memorably, politics. Bromberg’s opener, his own “Sloppy Drunk,” set us up for a different kind of set, in which lyrics of defiance and pain would be set off by blistering solos.

It’s well understood that Wainwright (by and large) is singing his own songs; Bromberg never calls attention to the songs her performs that are his own compositions, which means that they nestle amidst classics by others with similar craftsmanship and timelessness. What links the two most thoroughly is irony. Classic blues songs have that built in, and the best work of both performers tell stories of love pushed awry.

Take Wainwright’s “Donations.” It presents an “in case of accident” scenario: “I’'m an unmarried orphan whose children have scattered, / Estranged from my siblings, / close friends just a few. / And of those few friends I consider you closest. / They must contact someone. / Could they contact you?” Delivered, characteristically, with smirking awareness of the question’s craziness. The classic blues plaint casts the singer as the not-too-innocent victim, and Bromberg deftly mines that genre with lyrics like, “The first time the girl quit me – this month / She wouldn’t even tell me why. / I couldn’t eat, sleep, drink, or work; / It was all I could do to just lie across the bed and cry.”

Keep Your Temper

A RECENT ISSUE of a classical-music magazine sports a letter from a reader who is aggrieved by the practice of singers to perform Baroque and earlier works with well-tempered interval values. Dramatic impact would be heightened, she argues, if those leading tones led a little more acutely, as Nature and the composer intended. Until the composer was Bach, who created the most famous exercise in well-tempered tuning.

Mahan Esfahani

Tune a keyboard from one note to the next and you’ll end up with extremes wildly out of tune with each other. This is a simplified explanation of a natural phenomenon that didn’t bother musicians much until more sophisticated instruments allowed the ability to play in a range of key signatures. The twelve-note scale to which western listeners are accustomed produces 24 major and minor keys, so Bach celebrated this by writing a set of preludes and fugues in each of those keys. Twice.

It’s a pedagogical exercise, sure, but it’s also music by Bach, which means that it offers transcendent rewards. His preludes offer moods; his fugues fuse emotion with time. A fugue opens with a sequence of notes that’s not quite a theme because it exists in order to reflect upon itself as successive iterations of the sequence occur. Thus, there’s always a characteristic striking enough to allow even the unaccustomed ear to pick out the not-quite theme as it appears and appears again in different registers while surrounded by accompanying musings.

The Woods So Wild

JAMES LAPINE’S BOOK for the musical “Into the Woods” drew on the work of Bruno Bettelheim and Joseph Campbell to fashion a narrative that captured a number of seemingly disparate stories and intertwined them. Seemingly, because these stories all address a handful of fundamental fears, and, like all timeless storytelling, seek to offer some manner of comfort.

Gabriella Garcia and Celena Vera Morgan
Photo by Jazelle Photography

“The woods” offers the perfect hostile environment. It’s a place beyond cultivation; its native inhabitants are untamed. It’s a place of massive growth and what seems to be tangled confusion. In short, it’s an extension of our own fevered imaginations. But where, really, are the terrors today? I’d hazard the living room as potentially nasty place, being home to domestic conflict and that greatest of fearmongers, the TV set. Certainly it was terrifying to me to grow up with parents sparring nightly in knock-down-drag-outs, and I’ve had my own share of direct participation in squabbles since.

A pleasant living room (or gallery room, or performance space – call it as you will) provided the space for nine actors and a small audience group to engage in an up-close spectacle of a journey that (somewhat didactically) reminds us that storytelling is everything. That we must guide the children we bring into this world. And that witches aren’t necessarily all that bad.

Strike Force

PICKET LINES DON’T VARY MUCH. Marchers carry signs and chant slogans, and there’s usually some speechifying and music. When the strike looks to be long-term, a lot of planning and financial backing is needed. And participants need to withstand the nastiness both of the bosses and of the ignorant who have soaked up and spout the anti-union rhetoric made more and more popular since onetime Screen Actors Guild president Ronald Reagan wandered into the White House.  

Patrick Meyer energizing the picket line.
Photo by B. A. Nilsson

An enthusiastic supporter of the Hollywood Blacklist, Reagan remained a tool of Hollywood forces who sought to do away with hard-won union jobs. But the cause of anti-unionism has its most ardent champion in the current White House occupant, who has redistributed Labor Department forces to exponentially increase the resources available to dismantle organized labor.

The Screen Actors Guild picket line that formed outside the Tribeca headquarters of ad agency Bartle Bogle Hegarty numbered about 400, most of them actors, but with support from several other unions. The Guild’s recent consolidation with the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists six years ago created the more powerful bargaining unit SAG-AFTRA, which has seen much success in negotiating its way around the dizzying changes in entertainment technology, but will forever face the greedy forces of bosses crying poor-mouth.

Alls Wells in Williston

“LET ME SHOW YOU HOW COUNTRY FEELS,” sings Randy Houser before the lights dim for the start of “Williston,” a new play by Adam Seidel. And then we’re in that kind of country, in a mobile home, a one-room misery in an oil town in the northwest corner of North Dakota. A real town that suddenly turned expensive thanks to its oil resources.

Robert LuPone, Drew Ledbetter, and Kate Grimes
Photo by Jeremy Daniel

It’s the headquarters for three representatives of Smith Oil, a small, family-run business that stands a chance of leasing the last remaining chunk of oil-rich land in the area. Enough of a deal is at stake to give Larry, the oldest of the group, visions of a magnificent commission – and he’s enough of an old hand at this process that success is all but certain. If “Indian Jim” is as ready to sign as he seems.

The only hitch, as Larry sees it, is the possibility that the new guy, Tom, might screw things up. Tom has never been on this kind of mission before and, at 34, he still seems (to Larry, at least) green around the edges. Which puts Barb, their third, uncomfortably between them. It’s not a position Barb enjoys – she was barely civil to Tom at their first meeting – but her crankiness is nothing compared to Larry’s foul-mouthed, know-it-all, high-energy rancor.

Working in Coffeehouses, Part 119

IT IS EASILY ARGUED THAT, more than ambiance, a coffeehouse needs wifi and enough room on the table for your computer, coffee, and cellphone. Of course, we’re far from the days of Addison and Steele, when a single, notable newspaper might be produced: now the coffees have designs etched in foam and the writing contributes to the solipsistic howls of a million little blogs.

Photo by B. A. Nilsson

But that doesn’t make it any less fun to work in the right place. I don’t require much. It’s nice to be considered a regular, at least when it gets you a free beverage now and then, but it’s nicer to find an electrical outlet yawning near your seat. As one for whom caffeine is forbidden, I have no patience with the snob joints that eschew decaf roasts. What may seem trendily arrogant from your Brooklyn-aping perch is a serious health issue for me. And I think your tattooed forearm looks silly.

I’d like the background music kept interesting and quiet. It doesn’t have to be classical – I subject myself to a sufficiency at home – but good taste in jazz counts for a lot, so how about a Bill Evans track or two? And please don’t try to imitate Starbucks. That pretentious, labor-hostile chain is annoying enough on its own. Be different. Call it a “large.”

Nothing furthers the cause of atmosphere more effectively that age, and there’s a spot in Manhattan’s West Village that is the hands-down champ of coffeehouse ambiance: Caffè Reggio at 119 MacDougal Street. I’ve written about the place before, but it’s worth revisiting, which I had the chance to do this evening.

Occupation: Conductor

AT THE CENTER OF THE DISCOGRAPHY of conductor Charles Munch are his many recordings with the Boston Symphony, which he music-directed from 1949 to 1962. A new 13-disc Warner Classics set bookends that era. While it far from completes Munch’s extensive discography (he recorded for many labels not included here), it does give us his first and final recordings and presents a fascinating look at his wide-ranging programming style.

Munch was unique. A renowned violinist who began his professional career as concertmaster of several significant European orchestras, he came to conducting with no specific schooling other than what he gleaned from playing under the baton of others. Never one to over-rehearse a piece, he was beloved by musicians who played for him because of his comparatively relaxed attitude and the passion he’d summon in concert, where the unpredictable result were typically triumphant.

He was born in 1891 in Strasbourg, in an Alsatian region that was variously claimed by Germany and France. Both languages were spoken in his house. During World War I he was conscripted into the German army; when Nazi Germany occupied Paris, he was conductor of two top orchestras in that city and contributed greatly to the French resistance, both financially and in the programming he selected.