WEDNESDAY, MARCH 11, 2020 The Boston Globe C11
Obituaries
By Daniel J. Wakin
NEW YORK TIMES
NEW YORK — Anton Cop-
pola, who appeared in the chil-
dren’s chorus for the 1926 US
premiere of Puccini’s uncom-
pleted “Turandot,” conducted
his own ending to the work
some nine decades later, and in
between had one of the longest
careers as a maestro in modern
times, died on Monday at his
home in New York City. He was
102.
Mr. Coppola was the elder
statesman of the Coppola mov-
ie clan, which includes Francis
Ford Coppola (nephew), Talia
Shire (niece), Nicolas Cage
(grandnephew) and Sofia Cop-
pola (grandniece). His brother
Carmine, who died in 1991,
wrote music for his own son
Francis Ford’s three “Godfa-
ther” movies as well as “Apoca-
lypse Now” (1979).
Mr. Coppola, too, had a role
in the family film business, ap-
pearing as the conductor of the
opera “Cavalleria Rusticana” in
a scene from“Godfather III”
(1990) and conducting the
score to Francis Ford Coppola’s
“Bram Stoker’s Dracula”
(1992).
The creative flow went the
other way. Francis Ford Coppo-
la suggested that his Uncle
write an opera about Sacco and
Vanzetti, the Italian anarchists
executed — wrongly, many be-
lieve — in 1927. The resulting
work was what Mr. Coppola
considered his crowning glory,
“Sacco and Vanzetti.”
The opera had its premiere
in 2001 at Opera Tampa, where
Mr. Coppola was the founding
artistic director and conductor
from 1995-2012.
“Coppola indulges in some
hoary rhetorical red flag-wav-
ing,” Lawrence A. Johnson
wrote of the work in Opera
News, “but radical-chic politics,
happily, take a back seat to the
fascinating story and music.”
The work was distinguished
by a “highly accessible musical
style” redolent of Puccini and
Barber, Johnson said, adding,
“If ‘Sacco and Vanzetti’ has a
fault, it is that Coppola’s music
and lyrics lack an individual
voice.”
It was never staged else-
where, to Mr. Coppola’s disap-
pointment. He followed up
with another opera, “Lady
Swanwhite,” based on a Strind-
berg play, that was given a per-
formance at Opera Tampa in
early 2019.
Mr. Coppola remained ac-
tive on the podium into his fi-
nal years, leading a concert of
his own music with the Tampa
company at a gala to mark his
100th birthday.
For much of the previous
eight decades, he conducted
many of the nation’s medium-
size and larger opera compa-
nies, including New York City
Opera and the operas in Cincin-
nati, San Francisco, Seattle and
Tampa, Florida. He may, in
fact, have had the longest con-
ducting career in recent history.
Arturo Toscanini retired at the
tender age of 87, and Leopold
Stokowski left the podium at
90.
While his heart lay in the
core of the Italian opera reper-
tory, especially the works of
Verdi and Puccini, Mr. Coppola
conducted many contemporary
works as well, including the
premieres of “Lizzie Borden,”
by Jack Beeson, at the New
York City Opera in 1965, and
“Of Mice and Men,” by Carlisle
Floyd, at the Seattle Opera in- “He led a fluent, tasteful,
wholly musical performance,”
critic Robert Commanday
wrote of the Floyd premiere in
The Times.
Mr. Coppola had a reputa-
tion as an autocrat, more typi-
cal of the imperious maestros
of his time than today’s com-
paratively democratic podium-
ites. Conducting “has to be a
dictatorship, and in that way he
was a great leader,” the baritone
Sherrill Milnes, who worked
with him, once said. Other vo-
cal giants like Mario del Mona-
co, George London, Roberta Pe-
ters, Leonard Warren and Lu-
ciano Pavarotti also sang under
Coppola’s baton.
Antonio Coppola was born
on March 21, 1917, in Ocean
Hill, Brooklyn, but grew up
mostly in East Harlem. His Ital-
ian immigrant father, Agostino,
was a toolmaker; his mother,
Maria (Zasa) Coppola, was a
homemaker. He was the fifth of
seven brothers, all of whom
were encouraged to study mu-
sic. Mr. Coppola took up piano.
As a child, Mr. Coppola was
taken by his mother to see
Gounod’s “Faust,” put on by a
small touring company. “When
the lights came down I saw the
figure of a little man walk into
the pit and start to wave his
hands,” Mr. Coppola recalled.
“When all this wonderful music
was coming out, I turned to my
mom and said, ‘That’s what I
want to do.’”
He appeared in the ground-
breaking 1926 “Turandot,” af-
ter auditioning for the Metro-
politan Opera’s children’s cho-
rus.
In 1930, an opera-loving un-
cle introduced him to Gennaro
Papi, a Met conductor who was
a former rehearsal pianist for
Puccini himself. Papi noticed
that the boy was carrying a
score of Puccini’s “La Bohème.”
He was impressed, and took
Mr. Coppola under his wing.
Mr. Coppola would attend Pa-
pi’s performances, and the two
would dissect them afterward.
Papi also passed on Puccini’s
own insights about his scores.
Mr. Coppola attended Stuyve-
sant High School in Manhattan
and entered the Juilliard
School at about 16. He left for a
job with the orchestra and op-
era programs of the Depres-
sion-era federal Works Progress
Administration, conducting his
first opera, Saint-Saëns’ “Sam-
son et Dalila,” when he was 18.
Papi had suggested that An-
ton learn an instrument and
play in an orchestra to round
out his experience. Mr. Coppola
chose the oboe and became
good enough to enter the Radio
City Music Hall orchestra at 19.
With the start of World War II,
he enlisted in the Army and
served four years, mainly as a
bandmaster in Texas.
“Everybody had to contrib-
ute in some way,” he said. “This
was my contribution. Com-
pletely worthless, as far as I’m
concerned.” His discharge pa-
pers misspelled his first name,
Antonio, as Anton, and he de-
cided to adopt it professionally.
Mr. Coppola later returned
to Radio City as the orchestra’s
conductor and at one point no-
ticed a dancer there. “Instead of
looking at the score I looked at
this young lady and she became
my wife,” he said. He and
Almerinda Drago married in
1950, on his 33rd birthday.By Bryan Marquard
GLOBE STAFF
Though Philip Leder’s re-
search helped decipher the ge-
netic code and made advances
in the study of genetics and can-
cer, he had reservations about
his abilities in the early 1950s
when he arrived at Harvard Col-
lege as an undergraduate.
“I feared going to Harvard
because I thought I was a fraud
and they would find out,” he
told the Crimson, Harvard’s
student newspaper, in 2006. “I
figured I knew myself better
than they did.”
He turned out to be a more
dedicated student than he an-
ticipated — “my major ‘extra-
curricular’ activity was my lab
thesis,” he said — en route to an
award-winning career. Early
on, he worked with Marshall
Nirenberg, who would go on to
share the 1968 Nobel Prize for
physiology or medicine, on
what became known as the Ni-
renberg and Leder experiment
that illuminated the triplet na-
ture of the genetic code.
Dr. Leder, who more than 30
years ago became a co-holder of
the first US patent on an ani-
mal, the OncoMouse, was 85
when he died Feb. 2 in his
home in the Brookline part of
Chestnut Hill of complications
from Parkinson’s disease.
In a tribute posted on a Na-
tional Institutes of Health web-
site,Dr.MichaelM.Gottesman
said Dr. Leder was “among the
world’s most accomplished mo-
lecular geneticists.”
During Dr. Leder’s postdoc-
toral studies at the NIH in the
early 1960s, he was recruited
by Nirenberg to work on untan-
gling the genetic code.
Their experiments “defini-
tively elucidated the triplet na-
ture of the genetic code and cul-
minated in its full deciphering
— helped set the stage for the
revolution in molecular genetic
research that Phil himself
would continue to lead for the
next three decades,” wrote Got-
tesman, who is the NIH’s depu-
ty director for Intramural Re-
search and chief of the Labora-
tory of Cell Biology at the
Center for Cancer Research of
the National Cancer Institute.
In a eulogy at Dr. Leder’s fu-
neral, Dr. David Livingston, a
Harvard geneticist, said he was
“brilliant, bold, very good-hu-
mored, and blessed with excep-
tional scientific insight and cre-
ativity.”
Livingston, who had been
Dr. Leder’s second research fel-
low at the NIH, added that “ear-
ly on, it became readily appar-
ent that a natural eloquence in-
fused his oral and written
scientific discourse.”
The groundbreaking re-
search Dr. Leder and Nirenberg
conducted came about in part
because of the looming pros-
pect of military service. Instead,
he volunteered to serve in the
US Public Health Service.
“I got drafted, so I applied
for a position in the Public
Health Service, which supplied
physicians and scientists to the
National Institutes of Health in
Bethesda,” Dr. Leder said in a
2012 interview with a publica-
tion of the American Society for
Biochemistry and Molecular Bi-
ology. “A friend at NIH told me
that I ought to meet MarshallNirenberg because he was do-
ing interesting experiments
with the genetic code. Frankly, I
didn’t know anything about the
genetic code. But I went to see
Marshall, and he explained to
me what he was doing and its
importance.”
Their research was in com-
petition with work in another
laboratory run by Severo
Ochoa, a Nobel Prize-winner,
and “there was a mad race to
the finish,” Dr. Leder recalled.
“I couldn’t sleep for days at a
time because of the excitement!
I must admit it was very com-
petitive; there’s no question
about that,” he added. “I would
go to bed thinking about the
next day’s experiments and then
jump out of bed in the morning
and rush to the laboratory. I
stayed late at night. It was a lot
of work but the intellectual ex-
citement was enormous.”
After about 18 years, Dr. Led-
er left the NIH at the outset of
the 1980s to become founding
chairman of Harvard Medical
School’s department of genetics,
where he stayed until 2008.
“Working with Timothy
Stewart in 1988, he was award-
ed the first patent on the Onco-
Mouse, an animal genetically
engineered to have a predispo-
sition for cancer, which revolu-
tionized the study and treat-
ment of the disease,” George Q.
Daley, dean of the faculty of
medicine at Harvard, said in a
statement. “Additionally, Phil’s
research into Burkitt’s lympho-
ma was instrumental to under-
standing the origin of tumors
with antibody-producing cells.”
Dr. Leder’s many honors in-
cluded the Albert Lasker Award
for Basic Medical Research; the
Heineken Prize from the Royal
Netherlands Academy of Arts
and Sciences; the US National
MedalofScience;andtheWil-
liam Allan Medal from the
American Society of Human
Genetics.
“For his many accomplish-
ments, he was extremely mod-
est. He really didn’t like to talk
about himself much,” said his
son Ben of Westwood. “What he
loved about science was the ac-
tual work, and that’s what real-
ly motivated him.”
Scientists such as Livings-
ton, who worked with Dr. Leder
early in their own careers, con-
sidered him a key mentor.
“I shall miss Phil forever,” Liv-
ingston said in his eulogy. “In-
deed, only rarely has a week
passed when I haven’t thought of
him. If the past is any prologue,
my abiding hope will be that,
when faced with a particularly
potent scientific challenge, someof his mentoring magic will
spontaneously take hold and
point me in one of those special,
Phil Leder-like directions.”
Although Dr. Leder’s accom-
plishments were lasting, he be-
gan focusing more on family
and subsequent generations as
he neared and then entered his
retirement years.
“What a wonderful ride it
has been,” he wrote in 2001 for
an anniversary report of his
Harvard class. “But I now see
more clearly than ever before
that whatever modest gift of
knowledge my colleagues and I
have been able to turn over to
posterity, it has been poor by
comparison to the thrill of see-
ing our grandchildren walk off
into the future.”
Born in Washington, D.C.,
on Nov. 19, 1934, Philip Leder
grew up there and in Arlington,
Va., the only child of George
Leder and Jacqueline Burke.
Dr. Leder graduated from
Western High School in Wash-
ington and went to Harvard,
fromwhichhereceivedabach-
elor’s degree in 1956. He gradu-
ated from Harvard Medical
School four years later.
In 1959, he married Aya
Brudner. They had three chil-
dren and worked together on
research.
“I continue to collaborate
with my wife, Aya, in the re-
markable field of molecular ge-
netics,” he wrote for the 40th
anniversary report of his Har-
vard class. “Lately, however, we
find ourselves occasionally
sneaking off to New Hamp-
shire, where we have a second
home, a canoe, snowshoes, and
lots of opportunity to observe
nature in real time.”
A service has been held for
Dr. Leder, who in addition to
his wife, Aya, and son, Ben,
leaves a daughter, Micki of
Washington, D.C.; another son,
Ethan of Bethesda, Md.; and
eight grandchildren.
“I’ve discovered that great
joy comes from grandchildren,”
Dr. Leder wrote 50 years after
graduating from Harvard Col-
lege.
Eight grandchildren, he
added, “can easily shrink a fair-
ly successful career down to its
appropriate proportions. In the
next few years I’ll retire from a
life in genetics, which I’ve
loved, from the genetic code to
the human genome. But I won’t
retire from those grandchil-
dren, and I suspect that many
of you feel exactly the same
way.”Marquard can be reached at
[email protected].Philip Leder, 85, researcher who
illuminated genetics’s role in cancer
HARVARD UNIVERSITY/FILE 1981
Dr. Leder was the founding chairman of Harvard Medical
School’s department of genetics.AntonCoppola,102,famousmaestro
SANTIAGO MEJIA/THE NEW YORK TIMES/2016Mr. Coppola was the elder statesman of the Coppola movie clan.
By Emily Langer
WASHINGTON POST
WASHINGTON — Éva Sze-
kely never forgot the Hungari-
an fascist who, in the winter of
1944, passed over her in a
roundup of Jews to be shot on
the banks of the Danube River
in Budapest. He had one gray
eye and one brown, a visage
seared into her memory.
Ms. Szekely could have been
one of 20,000 Hungarian Jews
who were murdered along the
river that winter by the Nazi-
backed Arrow Cross Party, ac-
cording to the US Holocaust
Memorial Museum. More than
400,000 more had been deport-
ed to Auschwitz, the Nazi death
camp in occupied Poland.
Ms. Szekely was 17 at the
roundup — a star swimmer de-
spite anti-Semitic laws that had
forced her off her team in 1941
— and avoided arrest through
the intercession of her father,
who ordered her to feign illness
as the fascist approached.
‘‘Don’t take her — she is
sick,’’ she recalled her father
pleading. ‘‘Can’t you see she
cannot walk?’’ Moreover, her fa-
ther told the fascist official, ‘‘she
is the swimming champion of
Hungary, and one day you will
be happy you saved her life!’’
‘‘This is how I stayed alive,’’
Ms. Szekely said years later in a
testimony at the USC Shoah
Foundation. ‘‘Dad told him I
was a swimming champion and
he would still remember me.’’
Ms. Szekely survived the war
in a forced labor program and
later in a safe house operated by
the Swiss where, according to
the online Encyclopedia of Jew-
ish Women, she stayed fit by
running up and down five
flights of steps 100 times a day.
She went on to become of her
country’s greatest swimmers,
credited with numerous worldand Olympic records. She won a
gold medal in the 200-meter
breaststroke at the 1952 Games
in Helsinki and a silver medal
four years later in that race in
Melbourne, Australia.
Ms. Szekely, who became
known as the Hungarian ‘‘Ma-
dame Butterfly’’ for the butter-
fly style she brought to the
breaststroke, died Feb. 29 at
her home in Budapest. She was- Ms. Szekely had been in de-
clining health and had lost her
eyesight, according to Gergely
Csurka of the Hungarian Swim-
ming Association, but had con-
tinued swimming even as she
approached her 90th birthday.
Éva Szekely was born in Bu-
dapest on April 3, 1927. She
was inspired to become an
Olympic swimmer in 1936
when she listened on the radio
as her countryman Ferenc Csik
took home the gold medal in
the 100-meter freestyle race at
the Berlin Games.
She made her Olympic de-
but after World War II, at the
1948 Games in London, where
she placed fourth in the 200-
meter breaststroke. Her perfor-
mance in the same race four
years later in Helsinki set an
Olympic record.
After the Melbourne Olym-
pics in 1956, Ms. Szekely be-
came a pharmacist and a swim-
ming coach, teaching many, in-
cluding her daughter, Andrea
Gyarmati. Ms. Szekely attended
the 1972 Munich Games, where
her daughter won a silver med-
al in the 100-meter backstroke
and a bronze medal in the 100-
meter butterfly.
In 1976, Ms. Szekely was in-
ducted into the International
Swimming Hall of Fame, as was
Dezso Gyarmati, her first hus-
band, from whom she was di-
vorced. Andrea Gyarmati was
inducted into the hall of fame in- In addition to her daugh-
ter, in Budapest, survivors in-
clude a grandson, who is also a
noted Hungarian water poloist,
and a great-granddaughter.
Ms. Szekely said she was
most comfortable in the water,
remarking that at times she felt
as though she had been placed
on the land by mistake. Her
Olympic victories served her
through her life, she said, with
the immutable knowledge that
she had once been the best.
Recalling the times during
the Holocaust and under Sovi-
et-style communism when peo-
ple were ‘‘stripped of many
things’’ — title, rank, property,
even dignity — she described an
Olympic gold medal as ‘‘a fixed
shiny star in the universe.’’
In 1950, she competed in an
international swimming meet
held in Hungary where she won
a gold medal, as well as a spe-
cial prize awarded by Hungary’s
communist authorities.
‘‘Imagine, there I was stand-
ing there, up on top of the dais... and the man looks at me,’’ she
told the Shoah Foundation. ‘‘It
was that Arrow Cross man,
with his different colored eyes.’’
Éva Szekely; survived Holocaust to become Olympic champ
POPPERFOTO VIA GETTY IMAGES
Ms. Szekely after her world-
record shattering victory at
the 1952 Olympic Games, in
Helsinki.