Brahms for Brahmins

Boston last week had six days of music by great Johannes Brahms. The first program began rather pompously with the Academic Festival Overture, a symphonic composite of German student songs written by Brahms as a thank-you for the Ph. D. degree conferred on him by the University of Breslau. There followed, during the Festival's course, the four symphonies-- the impassioned First, the pastoral Second, the heroic Third, the peaceful, elegiac Fourth; then the Variations on a theme by Haydn--cold, sparkling music for Brahms to have written; then the two piano concertos, Song of Destiny and A German Requiem; then more piano pieces, songs, the piano quintet with its conflicting themes and moods; and the Alto Rhapsody, sombrely inspired by Goethe's Harzreise im Winter. Soloists were Pianist Arthur Schnabel, famed in Europe as a Brahms interpreter and come especially for the Festival; Soprano Jeannette Vreeland, Contralto Margaret Matzenauer, Baritone Fraser Gange; members of Richard Burgin's String Quartet (Burgin is concertmaster of the Boston Symphony), and members of the Harvard Glee Club and the Radcliffe Choral Society. Head man of all was Conductor Serge Koussevitzky who conceived and planned the Festival, gave it the flair which raises all his performances far above the commonplace.

The Composer. Not always would Boston, have deemed the music of Brahms worthy of festival performance by its celebrated symphony orchestra. Just as Boston's Brahmins have always been conservative in their choice of acquaintances, so (until the arrival of Conductor Koussevitzky six years ago) have Bostonians been reluctant to hear unfamiliar music. Brahms they long ago dismissed as "austere," "obscure," "dull." Even wise Philip Hale, septuagenarian critic of the Boston Herald, once wrote: "Over the exit doors of Symphony Hall could well be written 'This way out in case of Brahms!'''' Europe, too, was slow in accepting the simple, lower-middle-class German who disdained to be a showman. Save as it involved the making of music, there was little in Brahms' career to attract attention. He had no sensational lovelife, no ravaging disease, could usually afford to eat. But on his first concert tour, when accompanying the Hungarian violinist, Eduard Remenyi, he was confronted with a piano a halftone off pitch. From memory and without the violinist's knowledge Brahms transposed the entire Kreutzer Sonata. This feat won him the attention of Violinist Joseph Joachim through whom he met Liszt and the Schumanns. Robert Schumann publicly recommended him as the genius of the day. Schumann's pianist-wife, Clara, became Brahms' great and life-long friend, the one to whom he submitted all his compositions, whose suggestions he invariably accepted. His devotion to her was the outstanding feature of his life. For the rest, he held teaching positions in Detmold, Hamburg, and Vienna. In Vienna, his headquarters for 35 years, everyone came to recognize the great bearded head, the colored shirts worn without collars, the little alpaca coat, the trousers too short, the long, black cigars. Appearances meant nothing to Johannes Brahms. On rainy days he wore an old-fashioned bluish-green shawl fastened in front with an enormous pin. His concern was music--molding deep, original ideas to fit established forms, thus earning the title of the last of the great classical composers. He wrote for the piano, the voice, for chamber and symphony orchestra; never for the theatre, never in any way for acoustical effect. Death came to him at 63, the immediate result of a cold contracted at Clara Schumann's funeral.

The Conductor. In the 33 years since his death, Brahms has achieved an immense popularity, especially with the musically meticulous. Perhaps for this reason Boston let itself wax particularly enthusiastic over last week's Festival. But there was another reason: Conductor Koussevitzky. For he is the Boston Brahmins' high priest and can do no wrong. He is handsome, distinguished in appearance, voted by many the Best-Dressed Man in Boston. He is an excellent musician, the world's greatest virtuoso on the double bass as well as one of the great conductors. His past has been romantic: in Russia before the Revolution he used to sail with his orchestra up and down the Volga, giving concerts in all the basin towns, introducing much new music. He has great personal magnetism--the kind that makes female hearts beat fast at every concert, although his matronly-looking wife is always present, sitting well back on the right. Surest sign of his Boston success is the fact that he has been admitted to the Somerset Club, a Beacon Hill institution so exclusive that little Brahmins are usually registered for it immediately after birth.

Bloch Subsidized

Practically all of the world's great composers had, at one time or other, patrons who provided their material support in order that genius might flourish unhampered. The custom is now outworn but last week in San Francisco a semblance of it reappeared when heirs of the late Jacob and Rosa Stern, wealthy Jews, established a fund whereby Jewish Com- poser Ernest Bloch will be endowed for the next ten years at the rate of $5,000 a year. Composer Bloch is regarded by many as the greatest U. S. composer.* Yet his livelihood has had to come largely from teaching--from 1920 to 1925 as director at the Cleveland Institute of Music, since then at the San Francisco Conservatory. Now, thanks to the Patrons Stern, his time will be more free for creative work. Last week the Stern heirs also gave $50,000 to found scholarships and a chair in music at the University of California.

*Born in Switzerland, Composer Bloch is a U. S. citizen. His last symphonic work, America, is a patriotic outburst in the manner of Walt Whitman (TIME, Dec. 31, 1928).

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