Sour Notes

After 20 years of handling musicians, Charles O'Connell had had enough of his job. As RCA Victor's musical director, "I was solely responsible for virtually every Red Seal record made in America" from 1930 to 1944. He had "played ping-pong most of the night with Jascha Heifetz (a good player and a bad loser); jumped naked and shivering into Albert Spalding's icy pool at 7 a.m. . . . soothed the childish rages of Iturbi . . . softened and diverted the bovine stubbornness of Flagstad; ignored Pons's sulks and Moore's tantrums. . . ." This week, in a book called The Other Side of the Record (Knopf; $3.50), O'Connell unloaded "the accumulated irritations of years."

O'Connell admires some musicians extravagantly, dislikes others with virulence. While he claims the friendship of "almost every notable musician of the last twenty years," he has found "that the world of music is a jungle inhabited almost exclusively by a few lions, a multitude of tigers, a numberless pack of jackals, and not a few snakes. . . ."

Farewell to Grace. His chapter on Grace Moore was written before her death: ". . . she was one of those obnoxious little girls, congenitally exhibitionist, for whom some sort of career that would keep her before the public gaze was inevitable. . . . She doesn't really love music. . . ."

Lily Pons fares no better: "The singing of a coloratura is a cross between cackle and a whistle, and performers on the vocal high wire and trapeze are utterly devoid of musical interest to me." O'Connell attacks Lily ("The Pons That Depresses") and husband Andre Kostelanetz with a waspish malice that a few, backhanded compliments fail to soften. He dislikes their "hand-decorated and chromium-plated" music, inveighs against their commercialism, even gossips that Lily's high heels are designed "to distract the eye from rather generous dimensions in the horizontal planes."

Target: Toscanini. Victim of O'Connell's fiercest blast is Conductor Arturo Toscanini. The Maestro seen here is ill-natured, stubborn, suspicious, resentful. The reason for O'Connell's dislike is soon apparent: Toscanini once informed RCA Victor that he would make no records while Director O'Connell was present.

Most readers will wish that they could hear Toscanini's side of the record. Writes O'Connell: "Toscanini loves no one. On his sleeve he wears not his heart but his spleen. . . . I think Mr. Toscanini has had a baneful effect on musical beliefs and standards in America. . . . His conception [of Bach's St. Matthew Passion] revealed him as a man of exquisite, ineffable, and almost infallible vulgarity--a peculiarly Italianate and melodramatic and theatrical vulgarity, exposed in a variety of musical horrors. . . ."

Sometimes Amiable. O'Connell has his favorites and devotes most of his book to them: Rachmaninoff, Traubel, Monteux, Rubinstein, Stokowski, Koussevitzky. Of these for the most part he writes amiably, if not profoundly. He recalls the way Conductor Pierre Monteux won over the Philadelphia Orchestra at a rehearsal: "Gentlemen, I know that you know this piece backwards, but please do not let us play it that way."

He says he has seen Stokowski "cruelly bait an inept player whose days in the orchestra were already numbered, and coolly and pleasantly torment the poor fellow into such embarrassment that he was unable to play a note." Koussevitzky's men, O'Connell reports, were so shamed by his fierce abuse that their union local forbade visitors at rehearsals. But O'Connell gives Koussevitzky high marks. In contrast to Toscanini, says O'Connell, Koussevitzky "asserted that he would never make a record unless I were present."

One of the effects of The Other Side of the Record even Author O'Connell has foreseen. Says he: "I think I have eliminated myself from the recording business."

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