80 ❧ chapter four
preface to my Scarlatti book, he is the one musician from whom I learned
more than from any other.
In January 1945, Sascha and I played our fi rst four concerts in the music
room at Dumbarton Oaks.^2 I had fi rst played there in 1934 when Mildred and
Robert Bliss were still living in the house. In 1940, they gave it to Harvard for
an Institute of Byzantine Studies. At the time of my fi rst visit in April 1934, I
reported in the letter to my family:
Saturday night I played in Mrs. Bliss’s great music room in a huge and rich
house fi lled with all sorts of art treasures, arranged not in bad taste but with
a remarkable lack of real love and appreciative force behind them, sur-
rounded by vast gardens fi lled with old boxwood bought and transplanted.
The party was graced by many people whose names I recognized when intro-
duced and many others whom I probably should have known had I any idea
of the present governmental personnel. I was told later that it was a great
honor to me that Mrs. Longworth actually stopped talking. Although most
of my success was based on purely specious appreciation of the clavichord
expressed in the most incredible succession of sentimental and cant phrases
and would-be bons mots, chiefl y from women, as expected, to the effect that
it was reminiscent of the angel’s wings, or that it sounded so far away or that
one conjured up (oh, heavens!) wigs and brocades. But, after all, the sublime
and pedantic Goethe set the precedent by remarking after a Bach movement
that he thought of stately dressed people walking up and down staircases!
Truly music is a great and sublime blessing to most of mankind! But there
were a few gratifi ed members in my audience who really caught and admired
real musical value and who really meant something when they talked of tran-
scendent “beauty.”
Our audiences in 1945 and thereafter were much the same as in 1934, a mix-
ture of persons genuinely devoted to music and persons to whom concerts were
but another aspect of the interminable round of embassy dinners and manifes-
tations of luxury, rank, and social position, to be taken for granted in much the
same way as caviar and champagne. But it was an audience from which John
Thacher, the director of the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library, who himself
was a passionate lover of music, could collect the money to make our concerts
possible. Between 1945 and 1965, the twenty-fi fth anniversary of the donation
of Dumbarton Oaks to Harvard, I participated in forty-fi ve different programs,
most of them with Sascha. He will have been involved in even more in which I
had no part. All of these were made possible by the devotion and persistence
of John Thacher, who, along with Mrs. Bliss and others, donated large sums to
supplement the relatively small income from subscriptions.
- Estate in the Georgetown section of Washington, DC, owned at the time by
Mildred and Robert Bliss.
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