The Composer's Conductor: Koussevitzky

by NICOLAS NABOKOV

1

THE Berkshire Express is, as everybody knows, a slow and sulky train. It sulks for a long while at every one of its many stops, and each time I take it it seems to have added a new one. Between stops it crawls, shakes, and rattles. But I did not mind its slowness and shakiness when I boarded it on Sunday morning, May 11, 1947. I was free from the “pleasures of the army, I was on leave, I was going to the country, and I was eager to see Sergei Alexandrovich Koussevitzky, to visit him at his “musical fun grounds,” as someone in the Stars and Stripes had termed the Berkshire Music Festival.

I had never visited Koussevitzky before, nor had I seen much of him since I had come to America in 1933. Even before 1933, in Europe, despite the fact that I was one of “his” composers (my music was published by the publishing house for Russian music that he owned until 1948) and that Koussevitzky was the first important conductor to perform my music in America, I had seen him only on rare occasions, when, after his American season, he came to Paris and spenl a month or two in his comfortable home on the edge of the Bois tie Boulogne. In fact, I had had little opportunity to become a friend and intimate of the Koussevitzky household in Europe. When, in the early twenties, he lived in Paris, I studied in Germany. When I moved to France in 1923, I was an obscure, struggling aspirant to the compositorial profession, with very little to offer, while he was already a famous man, a man whose name had been ringing in my ears for more than a decade and who was known not only as a conductor but as an important public figure and as a rich Maecenas. I had little chance of meeting him before I had something concrete to offer in lerms of music. Besides, Koussevitzky soon went to America and except for the spring months in Paris, when he gave his famous series of concerts, there was no way for me to meet him.

I think it was Prokofiev who brought Koussevitzky and me together for the first time. He took me to a tea party at the Koussevitzkys’ residence in Paris sometime in the spring of 1928. It was a large affair with many composers, famous performers, critics, and important hostesses of the Parisian musical salons. Prokofiev introduced me to Koussevitzky as Diaghilev’s latest “find.” Koussevitzky grinned broadly, and asked me w hy I didn’t come and show him my music. I said that I had very little to show, but he insisted. I should come the next day, he said, for after that he was leaving for Plornbieres, the summer resort in the Vosges Mountains, where he used to go every y ear.

The next day 1 came and brought the score of Ode and banged it out on the piano and howled the parts of the chorus and soloists. Despite my outrageous performance he seemed to like the piece. He listened to it very attentively and asked me to repeal some parts of it. “Too had, he said after I had finished playing, “that I can’t play this in Boston. . . . It’s too . . . Russian, and besides it needs too many singers.” And tilting his head he asked me: “Have you something else . . . for orchestra alone?” “But this is the only thing he has written,” interrupted Prokofiev, who had come with me to give me courage and see what happened. “Well,” remarked Koussevitzky, “why doesn’t he then sit down and write something new?” He shrugged his shoulders, raised his eyebrows and smiled: and. as if giving me a classroom assignment, he added: “You write a symphony for me and I will play it everywhere.”

A year and a half later the symphony was written and he played it in 1931 in Boston and New York. After the New York performance he sent me a warm, two-page cable. When I came to America and settled in New York I had occasion to see Koussevitzky several times in the greenroom of Carnegie Hall. Each time he greeted me warmly and graciously, but somehow I felt that in the excitement of the post-concert bustle he did not quite connect me with the young man he had seen in Paris and whose music he had performed. Although by 1933 or 1934 I was no longer a struggling aspirant, but a. full-fledged struggling composer who, as such, needed Koussevitzky’s help, I did not press the matter, nor call him, nor try to see him, nor go on pilgrimages to boston.

I have always felt a certain difficulty and reticence in approaching and becoming friends with prominent performers, and in particular with famous conductors. In a curious and quite instinctive way, I feel that disinterested, human relations between famous conductors and composers are not only rare and difficult but of necessity precarious. The state of affairs in our world of music is such that conductors can easily afford to dispense with the “services” of most of the contemporary composers. Being in possession of a vast repertoire that conforms to the so-called “average taste of music lovers,” they can build (and 75 per cent of them do) most of their programs out of this repertoire. Only an occasional acknowledgment of the existence of contemporary music is necessary. Thus the conductor, instead of being a helper, a channel of communication between the contemporary composer and the public, often becomes an insurmountable obstacle to the development of a composer’s career.

True enough, in the last five to ten years things have somewhat improved (thanks to the courage of conductors, chiefly Koussevitzky and Mitropoulos, and composer-critics like Virgil Thomson), but still our symphonic repertoire continues to be clogged by the big B symphonies and all sorts of antediluvian monstrosities. The percentage of new music that the public should hear is just the reverse of the present state of musical affairs. Yet we are handicapped in obtaining it by the inordinate reverence we feel towards the so-called “treasures of our culture,” some of which, on calmer and closer view (especially the nineteenth-century ones), are far from being treasures and could readily be dispensed with, to the benefit of everybody concerned. As a result of this situation, a cleavage exists between the famous performing artists and composers. The conductor is like the banker from whom the composer expects to obtain the favor of a tiny loan.

Koussevitzky, however, is one of the very fewfamous conductors to whom this reticence of mine should not have applied, for not only has his life been dedicated to the fight for the music of his contemporaries, but on a quite personal level he was after all the first famous conductor to perform my music in America, he was my publisher, and he was also twice my compatriot. Yet, curiously enough, the habit of reticence once established worked even here.

2

TOWARDS the end of the war I received an unexpected assignment to go overseas as an employee of the War Department. Once in Germany a chain of accidents moved me info the position of a Deputy Chief of the American Military Government’s control of German music. Although I occupied this venerable post for only a very short time and soon drifted into more important bureaucratic occupations and acquired a more imposing nomenclature, I was able during this short interval to do something “in the line of duty” which seemed at the time of vital importance to the Koussevitzky publishing house.

The center of the publishing house since its foundation had been Berlin. During the bombing, the building in which the publishing house had its offices and where the main records were kept had been reduced to rubble. Moreover, the Berlin director of the house had lost contact with the main director of the firm, who lived in Paris. In short, the latter asked me to find the former, give him food and help, and find out whether he had been able to save the scores, parts, and documents in Germany. I did all of those things, and even arranged a two-week-long digging expedition at the desolate site of the destroyed publishing house to unearth — or rather unrubble — a steel safe in which the contracts were kept. We did not find the Schrank, as the German diggers called It, but my “activities” were duly reported to Dr. k, and several weeks later I received a very gracious letter from him thanking me for my trouble and asking me to visit him as soon as I returned home.

I knew at least one person in the Koussevitzky household, his niece, who soon was to become his wife, Olga Naoumov. Before coming to America she had lived with her parents in the South of France, in Nice, where the Naoumovs owned a villa surrounded by a large garden on one of the lovely hillside streets. My mother’s apartment was only a fifteen-minute walk from the Naoumov villa. We used to go there for tea or lunch when I came home from Paris to visit my mother. Olga and I became friends during one of my Easter visits, in 1924 or 1925. I liked her at once.

I was therefore happy to see Olga waiting for me at the Lenox station, greeting me in the subdued voice I remembered, and, as we drove past the gates of Tanglewood, telling me how busy Sergei Alexandrovich was, how much work had to be done in preparation for the festival, how little time he had to rest, and how exhausting was the Boston season with its four concerts a week and its harrowing tours. A moment later we drove past a sign marked “SERENAK — PRIVATE,” and stopped under a wooden canopy in front of a rambling white house.

The house, Serenak (an anagram made up of Ser from Sergei and An from Natalya, Koussevitzky s first wife, and K for Koussevitzky), stands on a terraced hillside, about a mile to the west, and high above the festival grounds, it is a large twostory house dominating an extraordinarily broad and panoramic view. From its terrace one can see a vast horizon filled with the rolling pattern of the Berkshires; and at its feet, encased between these hills, like a huge oval mirror, lies Lake Mahkeenac, the Stockbridge Bowl. The whole gives the impression of great serenity, a peaceful detachment from the busy life down in the valley, near the lake. And as one learns the mode of life of the inhabitants of the house, the feeling is pervasive, and restful for the visitors. Everything in Serenak is unhurried, calm, subdued repose. Even during the hectic days of the festival season this atmosphere of serenity remains unchanged.

But Serenak has its own style, very personal and quite Russian, not only because its inhabitants, with the exception of one or two maids, are Russian and constantly speak Russian, but because the mode of life, the habits of its master and both of its successive mistresses, have molded the environment around them and given it a flavor of an old-fashioned Russian Oussadba, the country home of a landowning squire.

3

THE curtains opened and Dr. K came towards me, his eyes shining with pleasure and friendliness. In his broad Russian he exclaimed: “Where were you all these years, where were you hiding? in the tone of a stage father scolding his disobedient child. “We looked and looked for you everywhere until we finally tracked you down in Germany.” And he looked me over as if he were appraising me. “It’s late and you must be hungry. Olya, Guenia, where’s lunch?” The meal was long and relaxed. Koussevitzky bombarded me with questions about Germany and about our relations with the Russians. He wanled to know whether I had news from Prokofiev, and whether it was true that Prokofiev had been ill and couldn’t compose for more than a year.

At the end of the meal, as we were getting up from the table, he turned to me with a glint in his eye and said: “And now I have to talk to you privately about something which may be quite interesting to you. He led me ceremoniously to the living room as if he had prepared there a surprise for me. “What I want to talk to you about.” he began as we sat down, “is . . . — he paused —

“a commission . . . yes, we were looking for you all over the place last winter to . . . give you a commission. But we couldn’t find you!” And he threw his arms in the air. “Well, anyhow, he continued after a moment’s silence, “what yvould you like to write for us, for the Koussevitzky foundation? We have put money aside to commission you to write a piece.’

I had suspected, when I received Dr. K’s wire, that something in the nature of a commission might be on his mind. At least I hoped that this was the meaning of the phrase “must see you at once.” I had thought about it on the train and decided that if he offered me a commission I would suggest writing the piece which, at moments of relative leisure between bureaucratic routine and official parties, I had begun sketching al the blond piano of my Berlin billet. I thanked Koussevitzky for his offer and began explaining. “Yes,” I said. “I have a piece in mind, Sergei Alexandrovich. I even started working on it while I was in Berlin. It has to do with a long poem of Pushkin and I don’t know yet whether I should write it for orchestra alone or set the text of the poem to music for tenor voice.”

At the mention of the name of Pushkin his face beamed. But he did not approve of a solo tenor voice. “The public does not like long solo pieces for tenor,” he explained; “they are hard to place because there are few good tenors nowadays. Besides it is difficult to write well for tenor and orchestra. The orchestra is always on top of the tenor part . . . like an elephant.” He paused for a moment and, as if a splendid idea had just struck him, he began speaking excitedly, his face growing crimson and the veins on his forehead swelling: “I tell you what you do. You write a concerto for soprano and orchestra. No one has ever tried it and I always wanted someone to write one. It will be a real novelty. And you should treat the voice as if it were an instrument; like an oboe . . . or a . . . flute.” And getting more excited at his proposal he exclaimed: “Write me a good concerto for this combination, and I will find you an excellent singer and play it everywhere. As for the text . . . it does not matter what kind of text you use, you can take a poem of Pushkin in Russian . . . you can take a poem in . . . Burmese, or anything you want. For a piece like tins the text doesn’t matter. It would be like the words of a . . . Handel aria. What is important is that it should show off the voice and be interesting musically.

He paused again and added in a quieter tone: “You know who should sing it? The little Marina . . . do you know her? Marina Koshetz, Nina Koshetz’s daughter. She has a wonderful voice and her mother’s schooling. I answered that I never had heard Marina but that I knew that her voice was very good, nearly us good as her mother s had been.

“But . . . but . . . Sergei Alexandrovich, my idea is different from yours,” I tried to explain. “To me the meaning of Pushkin’s poem is paramount. The words express something very intimate, something terribly close to my heart. In fact it is a kind of personal confession . . . a very grave and important thing to me.” At first I was afraid that he would be annoyed but, on the contrary, as I went on his expression changed and he became visibly more and more interested. Finally he interrupted me.

“But what poem of Pushkin is it?” he said. “Can you recite it ?”

“Yes, of course I can,” I answered, “but before reciting to you I must tell you how I came about choosing this particular poem, so that you know what it really means to me . . . but it will take a long time and you probably should go and have your afternoon nap.”

He looked at me with a gentle, friendly smile and said, “Go ahead, Kolyenka, tell me your story. Never mind the siesta. I can rest later. Go ahead.”

“You see, Sergei Alexandrovich,” I began, “it’s a long story. It has to do with my childhood in Russia and my love for Russia of the past. It has to do with this war and the circumstances that brought me to Germany at the end of it. It has to do with my knowing Russians in Germany, all kinds, in uniform and out of uniform, generals, soldiers, officials, D.P.’s. It has to do with all these things and with much more, with something which is hard to put into words.”

He continued to look at me with warm attention and occasionally he nodded his head as if to give me a silent signal of his understanding. “Go ahead, go ahead, try and say it. I want to hear every bit of it.”

4

EVERY exile,” I said, “carries for a long time within himself a nostalgic vision of his native country, a deep-rooted, irrational hope that somehow, by some miraculous process of history, he will be able to find a road back, a new communion with his native land, its people and its culture. Shunted around from country to country, passportless, not knowing where to go and where to settle, he is constantly aware of his exiled condition. Not belonging to the culture of the countries to which his exile takes him, even such cosmopolitan cities as Paris cannot make him forget. He is haunted by memories, by images of his childhood, by familiar smells, sounds, and tastes.

“During the early years of my exile, in Germany and in France, this nostalgia took hold of me at times with unbearable intensity. I was haunted by the vision of the streets and bridges of St. Petersburg or by the smells of the forests of Byelorussia or by the endless horizons of the Taurian Steppe, or the exuberant, fragrant springs at the Crimean seashore. Like a drug addict I would throw myself on the poems of Pushkin, of Tiutchev and Lermontov, avidly reread Tolstoy’s War and Peace and Chekhov’s short stories, thereby only increasing my nostalgia, only intensifying the haunting power of my wish-dreams. I would go to even greater lengths in nursing my ‘illness.’ I would try to meet travelers who came from ‘over there,’ even those who came as heralds of the new Socialist Fatherland and proclaimed the glories of the Bolshevik regime. Even though they intimated that people like myself were the scum of the earth, deserters, who had fled their country out of fear for their‘egoistic bourgeois interests,’ they attracted me because they came from tortured, tormented Russia.

“Thus in Berlin, in the early twenties, I met the poet Yessenin. Utterly confused and debauched. he was being toured around Europe by his mistress, the fat and disintegrating matron, Isadora Duncan. One night in a Berlin café he got drunk and violent and began yelling at me: ‘Get the hell out of here, you little bourgeois bastard . . .’ And I left, bitterly sad, because I admired him as a true Russian poet and because I felt that he himself was close to the end of his journey. Two years later, in total despair, he hanged himself and joined the many silent poets of his now totally poetless country. I met Meyerhold, the famous theater director and close friend of Prokofiev and Eisenstein, the great pioneer of modern cinema, and the writers Pilnyak, Katayev, Ilf, and Petrov. Avidly I asked them all about Russia. How was it there now? Was life getting easier? Would the regime mellow, or be replaced by another, more humane government?

“Then I came to America, thanks to the help of Dr. Albert Barnes and Archibald MacLeish, a friend, and collaborator on my ballet Union Pacific.

I obtained the rare privilege, the treasure of all treasures for the exiles of the twentieth century, the American immigration visa. Now I had a home again, a status, a country. I received my first, papers and I swore allegiance to this new home, this new country, and soon I became one of its citizens, with all the rights of a free human being. I was proud of my new state and grateful to my new country for making me again a full-fledged member of the human community. The old nostalgia, the wishful dreams that haunted me in those early years of my exile, died away.

“At the same time things began to be clearer about conditions in the Soviet Union. In the lingo of Stalinism, certain ‘concrete’ facts could not be explained away by hopes and wishes. I saw that instead of changing, instead of mellowing and humanizing, life in Russia became harder and tougher. There was only more famine, more fear, more deprivation, more silence, and more murder. The poets, writers, theater directors, in fact most of my acquaintances from Russia, began to disappear. Names that had been heralded as the greatest in Soviet culture were dismissed, showered with abuse, or imprisoned. No, nothing, not an iota of improvement, occurred in the tortured lives of my former countrymen. No statistics of increase in the production of tungsten or of improved breeding of tomatoes could change the facts: exile, prison, violence, and murder.

“Then came the war. Like most Americans, I followed with enthusiasm the battles of Moscow, the siege of Sebastopol, the great battles of Stalingrad and of the Don bend. And with the turn of the tide in the war, there seemed to be a vague glimmer of hope for the fate of Russia. “Maybe,’

I thought, as did so many idealistic Americans, ‘maybe now the people of Russia, will take their destiny into their own hands, maybe the Party will not be able to re-establish its authority over thc army, maybe those rumors about revolts in the Ukraine and in the Caucasus are true, and are preludes to the disintegration of the Soviet power . . . maybe . . . maybe . . . maybe . . .’

“This is why I wanted to go overseas and see for myself whether my new hopes, shared by all my American friends, were founded on reality. I wanted to meet Russians, speak to them, see what they are like, what they think, how they behave, what they say. Thus driven anew by a different form of ‘idealistic nostalgia,’ I was full of hope, full of great expectations. I was going overseas to see my hopes confirmed and the wishes of many long vears come true. Instead, I found a final cure for my nostalgia in the bitter recognition of the hard, morbid truth. Yes, I did get to meet Russians and talk to them; but before I met the Soviet officials, the counselors, marshals, generals, civilian advisers or colonels of the M.V.D., ‘active’ Soviet citizens, I saw thousands of others, ‘non-active’ victims of the Soviet state, debased, dejected, exploited, and hunted human beings, who lived in crowded camps in an agony of fear and despair.

“They were heroes of escape, these gray masses of Russian people, and they were being sent back into slavery and into dealh. We were packing them like sheep, whole families of them, into cattle cars and delivering them by the thousand to the Russian border posts, right into the death camps of the MAM)., as horrible and as murderous as Dachau and Auschwitz. Only ten months after the end of the war did our military government halfheartedly back out of this crime by association. By that time more than half of this miserable humanity was returned to its ‘rightful owners’ — the bosses of Stalin’s secret police.

“It did not lake me long to see, to hear, and to understand the truth. By August, 1945, when I moved to Berlin and began to take my minor part in the Chinese ceremonial known as the Allied Quadripartite Government of Germany, my old nostalgia, my deep-rooted illness, had left me. I knew then that my Russia, the Russia of an exiles wish-dream, had been wiped out, and thal all that remained of it was these tragic human beings, each one of whom had the same story to tell: misery, hunger, abuse, and violence. I also knew that those other men, the men who wore big stars on their epaulets and medals on their chests and stomachs, and the M.Y.D.‘civilians’ in blue serge suits (later replaced by porterlike uniforms), had nothing in common with what was once a real culture, a burgeoning civilization, the hope and the dream of our childhood. They were another breed of men, men from a ghastly inhuman world. Hard, treacherous, cruel, they did not even speak the same tongues, not our mellow, warmly modulated Russian, fail a belchlike, abrupt, ugly-v ovveled dialect.

“Among the officials of the Soviet military government in Berlin there was one couple to whom I took a sincere liking. They wenboth young, gentle, and friendly, and hence very unlike the usual run of Soviet puppets and bores with whom the Americans had to entertain polite business relations. We used to see each other occasionally at first, on neutral territory, then quite often, either at my billet or at their tiny villa in the Russian sector of Berlin, karlshorst.

“After the harriers of false pride were overcome and the propaganda slogans swept away, they acquired a certain amount of confidence in my discretion, and began to talk to me with increasing frankness. First they made one or two critical remarks about the Soviet regime, bathing them each time in a shower of awkward smiles and furtive glances, or Tania, the pale, slight wife of the officer, would take me aside and, after begging me not to repeat it. and not ted! her husband, she would tell me a joke about Stalin. Finally after several months of frequent long talks, their reticence melted away and they talked boldly and bitterly.

“It was the same old story, the one I had heard before from hundreds of D.P.’s: overwhelming fear, and an impotent hatred of the Soviet regime. They wanted to know what America thought of them. They listened eagerly to all my stories about America. They wanted to know how I felt in America, I, a former Russian, in a land that had adopted me as its citizen. I told them about myself. I told them about the nostalgia of exile that had burned in me, and how it had loll me. I remember the night I spoke to them about it all; 1 remember their wretched little drawing room cluttered with ugly , German furnilure and a worn upright piano. When I stopped talking there was a moment of awkward silence. It seemed as if we did not dare look at each other for fear of disturbing what each of us felt. Then, quietly, without raising her head or looking at anyone, Tania said, ‘You know, what v on just said is in Pushkin, in one of his long poems. Do you remember? The one in which he describes how he came back to his country after a long absence, and how he finds that none of the things he loved are there any more, that all has changed. Do you remember?’

“The next day, in the laic afternoon, a tiny car stopped in front of my billet and a man from the Soviet bookstore delivered a package. It contained a brand-new volume of Pushkin. I opened it, found the poem, and indeed it was my story, the story of exile, with its longing, its nostalgia, its bitterness, and its resignation. Of course it did not have the same ending, the discovery of a new life, the change of heart. . . . its America. And while reading it I felt that this must become my last tribute to my childhood, to its lost dreams and thwarted hopes. That same evening I sat down at the piano and began to compose. I searched for themes and sketched them on the Iasi sheets of music paper I had brought with me from America.”

Dr. K listened very attentively to every word of my long story. “I know . . . I know how you felt, Kolyenka,” he said with a sob in his voice and he put his friendly hand on my shoulder. “Yes, you should by all means . . . you must write your Pushkin, and Marina must sing it.

5

I REMEMBER well, as a child, looking at a photograph of bearded and must ached musicians, in heavy fur coats and hats, boarding a Volga steamer; and at another representing all sorts of instruments contrabasses, harps, cellos—being loaded on the same steamer. I remember my amazement when I was told that this was Koussevitzky’s orchestra going down the Volga to play in all of the Volga towns from Nijni-Novgorod to Astrakhan. It sounded like a fairy tale. I recall my first Koussevilzky concert in Berlin in 1922 or 1923. He conducted Stravinsky’s Rites of Spring with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra. It was my first encounter with this extraordinary work, and I believe it was the first time it had been performed in Berlin. Dazzled and dazed I returned home and wrote Koussevitzky an anonymous “thank you letter, the first and last fan letter of my file. Baler I went to the Koussevitzky concerts in Paris and heard their yearly stream of novelties, pieces of music rarely or never heard in the regular repertoire of Paris symphony concerts. Then he went to America and gradually the news of his achievements there began to seep into Paris and I envied the inhabitants of the city of Boston for having such a great orchestra and such a forward-looking, courageous conductor. Yes indeed, Koussevitzky’s career was unlike the career of other conductors. It is not only the success story of a brilliant virtuoso: it is an important part of the history of musical culture in our time.

Koussevitzky was in excellent form that evening at dinner. He told amusing stories about his concerts in Russia, about his first encounters with Scriabin, with Schonberg, with Stravinsky. He related in detail how he met Debussy and how Debussy came to Russia and stayed at bis house for three weeks in 1913. Me spoke of his first years with the Boston Symphony and how shocked the habitues of the Friday concerts were by the quantity of new music he played. “Then,” he said, “I told the trustees: ‘This is only the beginning of my plans, The public will have to learn to like new music and develop its taste — not me.'” He spoke with enthusiasm of contemporary American composers and told the story of his “discovery” of Walter Piston and Aaron Copland, and described the first performances of their music. Most of his stories were told with an awareness of the eminent role lie had played, and the important effect of his activity upon most of the musical events of his time, yet they were told with such candid conviction and enthusiasm that I felt a constantly growing sympathy with the storyteller himself.

After dinner, when we were having coffee in the living room, and Koussevitzky his cup of hot water with a slice of lemon in it. he asked me how long it had been since I had heard the Boston Symphony. I replied: “Not for at least five years.” “Well, my friend,” he s;iid with the tone of a farmer who is about to show you his prize-w inning Guernsey bull, “then you have a great pleasure in store for you when von come to Boston next fall. You will hear something which is like nothing else in this world.

It was late in the evening when we finally went upstairs to our rooms. For more than an hour Olga had been giving me silenl signs that it was time to go to bed, but Koussevitzky did not want to leave. Me was again questioning me about politics, about Europe and Russia, and wanted to hear every scrap of an answer I could give. Me took me up to my room and stopping at the door he said, “Noo, Kolyenka, much luck to you and don’t come back to me without a good piece of music. Good night.”

All during the summer I worked at my Pushkin poem, spending as much free time as I could glean from a very crowded schedule. I had left the militarv government and was participating in a new and quite fantastic venture: I was helping organize t he Voice of America to Russia, t hen in its precarious infancy. But I did get three weeks of leave in August and f. spent them in a quiet place in France where I finished my Pushkin piece. I called it The Return of Pushkin, an “elegy in three movements.”and sent the copy of the first movement to Dr. K.

It was agreed that I would come to visit the Koussevitzkys at the beginning of the concert season in October, and that I would stay at their house in Brookline, Massachusetts, i was eager to play mv new piece (or him, but I was also excited at the thought of hearing the Bostonians play. I nfortunately I was unable to get away from New York to be in time for the last rehearsal. I arrived at Symphony Mall just as the musicians were packing their instruments into their respective black coffins, and found Dr. K sitting in his black cape in the greenroom sipping tea out of the cap of a Thermos bottle. “Well, how did you like the rehearsal?” he asked, after we had embraced. “Didn’t you think we played well?” And he looked with pride at Mr. Burk, the program annotator of the orchestra, who had come into the room with me. Not wanting to disappoint him, I mumbled something made up of “splendid, magnificent, superb.” While we drove to his home, he spoke to me with great excitement and in great detail about the Fifth Symphony of Prokofiev, which he was studying at the moment, and about a new work by David Diamond, written for the Koussevitzky Foundation.

After lunch, I played my piece for him for the first time. He seemed to like the second and third movements of the elegy, but he frowned at the first. He was annoyed at my writing it in half notes to a beat instead of quarter notes to a beat, and changing time at certain movements from 5/2 to 9/4. “This is utterly unnecessary,” he said. “No one will play it right. Everybody will play it much too slowly.” But at a second hearing he began to like it better, and finally after its first performance he liked it as much as the other movements.

In the evening we drove to the concert, where I had a seat at the extreme right in the front row. As soon as the orchestra began playing I realized that Koussevitzky was right: there was nothing quite like the sound of the Bostonians. I had not heard an American orchestra since 1941 and for the last two years in Germany I had been treated mostly to the sound of decolorized and denazified orchestras. I had forgotten what a first-rate orchestra sounds like. Besides, this was not just a firstrater: it was one of the most perfect symphonic ensembles ever put together; an instrument of extraordinary beauty and precision, the result of careful selection, daily practice, and decades of a tradition of stringent discipline.

The round sensuous tone of its strings, the power and precision of the brasses, the clarity and transparency of its wood winds, and the internal balance among the various sections make it one of the finestsounding symphonic groups in the world, capable of achieving effects which composers like Beethov en or Schubert never heard except in the silent performances of their imagination. I thought, as I listened to the orchestra and watched its conductor, that Koussevitzky’s contribution to the construction of this extraordinary ensemble was immeasurable. It beanie clear to me that his profound knowledge and uncanny ability to recognize the worth (the technical and musical abilities) of each individual musician must have come, in part, from his early training as a double-bass virtuoso. Good conductors often grow up from orchestra players. But Koussevitzky had not only been an orchestra musician, he had also been a fabulous soloist, a virtuoso of one of the most difficult and most ungrateful instruments. Bui this, of course, is only a part of the story. Tenacity, persistence, the ability to work and make others work, enthusiasm, the spirit of youth and optimism in overcoming all kinds of difficulties and handicaps, constant merciless self-discipline — all these qualities of character crealed the Boston Symphony Orchestra.

The last number on the program was Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony, a famous piece of Koussevitzkiana. furiously enough, I had never heard him conduct it; hence it was a revelation to me. Flamboyant and exuberant, it was certainly the most romantic, the most Tchaikovskian performance of the Symphony I have ever heard. Since that time I have heard him conduct the Fifth Symphony twice and each time I marveled at the broad and generous sweep of his interpretation.

When he ended, a storm of applause broke in like thunder. He looked young and happy. I applauded gratefully to the small figure with its crimson face, its veins ready to burst, and its proud, content, and triumphant expression. As he was going off stage he caughl a glimpse of me from the corner of his eye and winked — slyly, like a child. I went backstage and there he was standing mopping his forehead, while Victor, his valet, tried to adjust the black cape on his shoulders. “Noo,” he said anxiously, expectantly. “How was it? Was it what I told you it would be?”