on chamber music ❧ 77
also commissioned numerous works from composers, some of them among
the masterpieces of twentieth-century music.
By American standards, she was not particularly rich, but she spent every-
thing she had on music. During the time I knew her she had no domicile of
her own, but lived modestly in hotels either in Washington, Cambridge, or
Pittsfi eld. At as many of her concerts as possible, she was in attendance in the
front row, straining her blue celluloid ear trumpet toward the performers. She
always reminded me of a rosy-cheeked New England apple, and though she
was kindness itself, her humor had some of the same refreshing tartness. I had
fi rst caught sight of her in Paris in 1932 at a concert she had sponsored at the
Bibliothèque Nationale, but I have forgotten when and where I actually met
her. However, a letter I wrote to my family in April 1934 describes an episode
that took place in Washington and which cannot have been but painful for all
concerned. “Today we invited Mrs. Coolidge to hear the clavichord. A most
noble and lovely woman, devoted to music and donor of countless concerts all
over the world, she suffers from increasing deafness and strains always with her
ear trumpet as near as possible toward the musician or speaker, always with a
noble and tragic acceptance of her ironic fate. I seated her immediately beside
the clavichord and again played the G-major French Suite. Her face was blank,
she was hearing nothing. I brought her closer and at her request played the
fi rst prelude which she knew, but it was of no use, and with tears in her eyes
and a brave apology, she went away.”
Our tour began on June 30th with three concerts in Pittsfi eld, where Mrs.
Coolidge usually spent the summer. Our programs included the six Bach
sonatas and nine Mozart sonatas. After Pittsfi eld, we stopped at Buffalo and
at the Universities of Chicago and Illinois. Getting from Urbana, Illinois, to
Lawrence, Kansas, in the dead of midsummer represented something of a low
point, and we longed for the comfort of one seacoast or another (in those
days trains were not yet air-conditioned). But we continued to swelter our way
across the continent to Los Angeles.
Los Angeles then was sunny, and its air of impermanence and unreality
had not yet given sway to the smog and skyscrapers that now weigh it down.
Hollywood was still in its heyday and I took delight in the swimming pools of
Beverly Hills and in the acquaintance of a few minor fi lm personages. On most
subsequent visits to Los Angeles, I have always been overtaken by a violent
desire to fl ee the place without ever looking back.
San Francisco was another matter. I arrived there ahead of Sascha and
about a week before the fi rst concert. Its free and easy style of living pleased
me, as well as the friendliness I encountered everywhere, although at the time
I had not a single acquaintance in the city. The surrounding landscape had not
yet been built up, and the dizzy ascents and descents of the city itself had not
been dwarfed and its profi le irretrievably ruined by skyscrapers. What struck
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rick simeone
(Rick Simeone)
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