CHAPTER 13 | SYMPHONY ORCHESTRAS, CELEBRITY CONDUCTORS, AND THE NEW MEDIA 307
The London-born Leopold Stokowski (1882–1977) came to the
United States in 1905 and in 1909 was named music director of
the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra. Three years later, Stokowski
began a twenty-fi ve-year stint as conductor of the Philadelphia
Orchestra. If Toscanini was known as a servant of the composer’s
score, Stokowski was known for showmanship. Tall and striking,
he made his Philadelphia string section famous for its singing
sound. In 1940 he appeared on-screen in Walt Disney’s Fantasia
shaking hands with Mickey Mouse. A champion of twentieth-
century music, Stokowski conducted over two thousand fi rst per-
formances—mostly of works by American composers. Among the
premieres were works by Griffes, Ives, Varèse, Copland, and Cow-
ell, as well as the A merican premieres of Strav insk y’s Rite of Spring,
Mahler’s Eighth Symphony, Berg’s Wozzeck, and Schoenberg’s Gur-
relieder. A musician of great vitality, he continued to conduct until
shortly before his death at age ninety-fi ve.
These sketches portray three very different fi gures. Toscanini was a passion-
ate champion of the classics. Koussevitzky was drawn to new musical experi-
ences, and he cultivated friendships with composers. Stokowski came to hold
an aggressively democratic philosophy, which he linked to technological prog-
ress. Believing that most adults had “diffi culty absorbing ideas and impressions,”
Stokowski did much of his crusading for new music at concerts aimed at young
listeners.
The contrasting careers of these three conductors show the symphony
orchestra between the wars as an arena with established norms that was also
open to fresh approaches. They also are a reminder that the most prominent
names in the American classical sphere were performers, such as violinists Fritz
Kreisler and Jascha Heifetz, pianists Arthur Rubinstein and Vladimir Horowitz,
and singers Amelita Galli-Curci, Ezio Pinza, and Kirsten Flagstad. Most were
foreign-born; all made their reputations presenting European masterworks
to audiences in Europe and the United States. Live performance remained the
public’s chief point of contact with classical music, though after electrical record-
ing replaced the acoustic process
in 1925, listeners could experience
something closer to concert-hall
sound at home.
The new medium of radio
broadcast a wide variety of music,
most of it popular but certainly not
all. In 1926 NBC presented Kous-
sevitzky and the Boston Symphony
in the fi rst live network concert,
attracting a million listeners. Five
years later, NBC paid $100,000
for the right to broadcast grand
opera live from the Metropoli-
tan in New York; soon these were
among the most popular broad-
casts on daytime radio. In the 1800sK Leopold Stokowski
shakes hands with a
deferential Mickey Mouse in
Walt Disney’s animated fi lm
Fantasia (19 4 0).Leopold Stokowski on Music’s Universal
Appeal (1943)M
usic is a universal language—it speaks to everyone—is the
birthright of all of us. Formerly music was chiefl y confi ned to
privileged classes in cultural centers, but today, through radio and
records, music has come directly into our homes no matter how far
we may live from cultural centers. This is as it should be, because
music speaks to every man, woman, and child—high or low, rich or
poor, happy or despairing—who is sensitive to its deep and powerful
message.In their own words
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