rk and music at je (1983) ❧ 103
lished its reputation among the Yale colleges as the one most intimately and
constantly concerned with music.
In what must have been the season of 1942–43, I organized, in the not-yet-
divided Common Room on an almost nonexistent budget, a series of con-
certs which still dazzles me when I think of it. I imposed, however, so much
on the friendship and good will of those artists who agreed to come and play
in JE that I never again felt justifi ed in attempting such a massive imposition
on my colleagues. The pianists included Ray Lev and Ernst Lévy, who played
a program consisting of the Liszt sonata and the last two Beethoven sonatas.
There was a “grand gala gaslight concert” in costumes brought out of ancestral
attics and for which I rummaged the music library’s uncatalogued holdings
of Louis Moreau Gottschalk, then virtually undiscovered. The Secretary of the
University, Carl Lohman, and I gave the world premiere of Hindemith’s set-
ting of Dickens’s “Ode to a Dying Frog” from The Pickwick Papers. There were
piano duets by Professor Wight Bakke and Erwin Goodenough, and a heart-
rendingly funny performance of the “Maiden’s Prayer” by C. C. Hogan in an
original gown by Worth, complete with bustle and mutton-leg sleeves. But the
show was stolen, on this and many subsequent occasions, by the team of Lewis
and Jane Curtis in a more than irreverent performance of Richard Strauss’s
melodrama on Tennyson’s “Enoch Arden.” Other highlights of this series were
a concert by Maxine Sullivan and the Herman Chittison Trio, which I may
be right in regarding as the fi rst jazz concert ever given at Yale under offi cial
sponsorship; Olga Coelho singing Villa-Lobos and other Brazilian folk songs
with her guitar; and a joint recital by the tap dancer Paul Draper and myself
with works of Bach and Scarlatti. I think it was also in the same series that the
Albeneri Trio (Alexander Schneider, Benar Heifetz, and Erich Itor Kahn) gave
its fi rst performance and offered a bottle of champagne to anyone making the
most acceptable suggestion of a name for this newly formed ensemble. I think
there was also a string quartet in this series, perhaps the Gordon [sponsored]
through the generosity of Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge. But not to be outdone,
Hindemith capped the climax of the season by persuading his longtime friend,
Artur Schnabel, who once before had been brought to JE by John McCullough,
to come and play Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert for us.
In 1945, when Bruce Simonds was about to give the very fi rst performance
of Paul Hindemith’s Ludus Tonalis, he agreed to do a preview in my rooms.
After the war, and with the return of Beekman Cannon, the JE concerts con-
tinued with such frequency that one would have to resort to the archives to
mention the highlights. After the division of the Common Room, nearly all
subsequent concerts took place in the Great Hall. I myself must have played
nearly every year, but I particularly remember a preview of a 1952 concert I was
to perform with Gérard Souzay at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington. In 1973, I
gave a recital in honor of the then-retiring Master Beekman Cannon and his
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rick simeone
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