Saturday, March 15, 2008

ASSASSINATION BY NIGGLING
The Curious Case of Moses Smith vs. Serge Koussevitzky

Jerry Harkins [1]




Anyone familiar with the life of Serge Alexandrovich Koussevitzky (1874-1951) knows two big things. First, although now largely forgotten, he was probably the most broadly influential classical musician of the Twentieth Century and the godfather of many seminal works of modern music. Second, more than fifty years after his death he still lacks a serious biography. Three attempts were made during his lifetime. Two are frankly hagiographic.[2, 3] The third is a vicious attack on his competence and integrity by the critic Moses Smith.[4]

The story of the Smith opus and the lawsuit it sparked [5] have been well documented elsewhere. By any reasonable standard, the book is a hatchet job, an early example of a now familiar genre, the attack biography. When the court ruled that its “…many depreciatory statements [are] invariably followed by ameliorative observations of unreserved praise,” it displayed not only a penchant for circumlocution but also an appalling insensitivity to rhetoric. It seemed to miss Smith’s subtle sarcasm and his skill at damning with faint praise. He employs innuendo, indirection and “niggling” or nitpicking [6] to paint a portrait that is both personally and professionally venomous. A few examples will illustrate these practices:

- On Page 35, Smith says that, as a student, Koussevitzky “…made rapid progress in the art of conducting, and his mastery grew steadily through the years.” However, “…the lack of a solid foundation cannot be concealed beneath the most ingenious patchwork of talents and random training.” The missing foundation included musical theory and composition. The idea that the Moscow Philharmonic Conservatory provided something that might be called “random training” is nonsense. Worse, on Page 13, Smith had already questioned whether Koussevitzky had been awarded the diploma of a Free Artist.

- On Pages 343 and 344, Smith characterizes the Boston Symphony under Koussevitzky as having “…superlative tone, often too beautiful, too intensely expressive at times that require simplicity.” Moreover, “…at the slightest suggestion of lyricism, [its] rhythm is likely to fall apart.”

- Throughout his career, Koussevitzky was widely regarded as the definitive interpreter of the Russian masters, especially Tchaikovsky.  Smith, however, has a very different view.  “The music degenerates into a nonsensical series of animal-like spasms.” Then, in practically the same breath, he refers to Koussevitzky as, “…one of the great conductors of our time. His interpretations have such varied qualities as poetry, sweep, originality and enkindling imagination.” However, when he arrived in Boston, “…he lacked the resourcefulness and technical agility without which no conductor in a third-rate Continental opera house could hope to hold his job. He does not quite have them today when he is past 70.” After thirty-five years of conducting, “…his beats and cues are often deceptive.”

This goes on and on: Koussevitzky was 17, when he left home, not 14 as he often claimed. His memory for scores was terrible. He was a poor accompanist and an inadequate musician.  Then, “Such reservations, however, are perhaps niggling in light of Koussevitzky’s positive achievement…[that] has set him in a class by himself.” It is little wonder that Koussevitzky felt put upon. In his suit, he complained that the book, “…describes me as generally incompetent as a conductor of orchestras, brutal to the musicians in my orchestra, incompetent as an instructor of conducting, and a poseur, deficient in musical education and training.” It did indeed even if it was not libelous.

Libel or not, Koussevitzky is, by default, the most important classical musician of the twentieth century. Thus the question: who was Moses Smith? Why did he dislike Koussevitzky? And, irresistibly, who were his sources?

Smith seems to have been born in Chelsea, Massachusetts on March 4, 1901, one of the five children of Fred and Rebecca Haifetz. There is no record of his birth and no record of a name change but he was Moses Smith by the time he entered Harvard with the class of 1921. The lack of documentation is not uncommon for the time and place. It is consistent, indeed, with other evidence hinting at a poor but hard working Jewish family seeking to cope with discrimination and better its lot. In any event, he graduated with an A.B. in music and subsequently spent two years at Harvard Law School. In time, he married Ethel Singer Robinson and they had two daughters. He became a wholesale shoe salesman and supplemented his income by writing freelance music reviews for the Boston American. In 1934, he succeeded the well known critic HTP (Henry T. Parker) at the prestigious Boston Evening Transcript where his reviews of Koussevitzky’s concerts were generally favorable. He left Boston in 1939 to take a position in New York as Music Director of Columbia Phonograph Company a year after it had been acquired by William S. Paley for CBS. In that capacity, he tried unsuccessfully to recruit Koussevitzky and the Boston Symphony away from archrival RCA Victor. In 1942, he became general manager of the Music Press. By that time, he had become afflicted with multiple sclerosis. He retired before the end of the war and devoted himself to completing Koussevitzky and writing a handful of freelance articles. He died in Roxbury, Massachusetts on July 27, 1964, the day after what would have been Koussevitzky’s ninetieth birthday.

Thirty-one years after his death, I placed an Author’s Query about Smith in The New York Times Book Review and received replies from six people who had known and worked with him after 1939. All spoke highly of him, using such descriptors as kindly, scholarly, courageous, compassionate, erudite and delightful. Together their letters make a persuasive case even if his book is deficient in all these traits. The inescapable conclusion is that we are dealing with a work that is out-of-character, a “pen breathing revenge” wielded by a sorely aggrieved human being. Koussevitzky had no doubt deeply offended him, something he was eminently capable of doing.

In his acknowledgments, Smith tells us that most of his sources “…must remain anonymous for obvious reasons.” However, it is not difficult to draw up a short list of suspects. We are looking for at least two people [7] who had access to information and a reason for disparaging Koussevitzky. Moreover, as late as 1947, they seem to have had some reason to fear exposure. The prime suspects I believe are Nicholas Slonimsky and Fabien Sevitzky.

Slonimsky, a man who gave new meaning to the word “polymath,” left what amounts to a confession, albeit an unsatisfying one. “To my horror, Smith intended to use some rather juicy tales about Koussevitzky that could have come only from me. Yes, the facts were there, but I told Smith that he would betray our friendship by reporting them.” Smith replied, “Nicolas, you cannot censor history.” [8] Unfortunately, he does not tell us which tales were his. He only regales us with the one story he was most worried about, the only one he persuaded Smith to withdraw. He fails to tell us why he was so worried about that particular morsel and it is not clear why he still feared Koussevitzky.

The complex relationship between Koussevitzky and Slonimsky is beyond the scope of this essay but it lasted little more than five years from late 1921 to the spring of 1927. Thus, anything said by Slonimsky about Koussevitzky’s life before or after that would have been hearsay filtered through two decades of memory and animus. [9] This might not have deterred Slonimsky who loved gossip and was a world class raconteur, but I suspect that Smith would have drawn the line at repeating it whole cloth. For the more intimate “niggles,” he probably relied on someone closer to the family either Sevitzky or his wife, the Polish soprano Maria Dormont Sevitzky.

Fabien Sevitzky was by no means the lout described by Slonimsky [10] and Maria was no shrew. Both were accomplished musicians, well thought of in their communities. Both had distinguished students. Both, too, were closer to their modest roots than Koussevitzky who had wholeheartedly adopted the manners and mores of his aristocratic in-laws. Over the years, the relationship between uncle and nephew deteriorated until, ultimately, the latter unsuccessfully went to court to challenge the former’s will.

The Sevitzkys arrived in the United States the year before Serge and Natalie, and Fabien seems to have come with a burden of family bitterness far heavier than the usual cause ascribed to it. Serge’s insistence, in 1908 or thereabout, that Fabien shorten his last name may have been inconvenient but it was not entirely unreasonable. Fabien’s father (Adolf I think), seems to have resented Serge’s departure and later success and probably was the original source of the bad-mouthing that was repeated to Smith. Many of the stories are the kind of family mythology that all biographers are familiar with: real grievances multiplied over time by misfortune and repetition. Oral histories compiled by Soviet musicologists tend to support Koussevitzky’s versions of disputed matters.

One can easily forgive Slonimsky who no doubt took a lot of guff from the haughty maestro, and one can readily understand the family foibles that might lie at the heart of Sevitzky’s stories. It is more difficult to understand Moses Smith, gentleman and scholar. Whatever the provocations, he must have realized that his sources were tainted and it must have offended his sense of history to pass on distortions and fabrications. Moreover, he added some mudslinging of his own. He is critical of Koussevitzky for “forgetting” his Jewish origins until the rise of Hitler. There is, however, no evidence that Smith himself was any more mindful of his heritage before or after 1933. (In contrast, one of Smith’s brothers served as President of Combined Jewish Philanthropies, a forerunner of the United Jewish Appeal.)

We are left trying to imagine the psychology that shaped Smith’s hostility, a response so strong that it overcame the habits and values of a lifetime, We are left, too, with Koussevitzky who could be charming but did not always choose to be. He seems to have been driven by his own devils not the least of which was a morbid fear of being judged incompetent. When Koussevitzky’s insecurities came together with Smith’s, the result was a book that serves the memory of both poorly.

NOTES

1. Jerry Harkins is a writer living in New York City. This essay was published in a slightly different form in the Journal of the Koussevitzky Recordings Society, Vol. IX, No. 1, Spring 1996.
2. Lourie, Arthur, Serge Koussevitzky and His Epoch (translated from the Russian by S. W. Pring) Knopf, 1931.
3. Leichtentritt, Hugo, Serge Koussevitzky: The Boston Symphony Orchestra and the New American Music, Harvard University Press, 1946.
4. Smith, Moses, Koussevitkzy, Allen, Towne and Heath, 1947.
5. Koussevitzky vs. Allen, Towne and Heath, Inc. et al. 68 N.Y.S.2d779 (March 4, 1947)
6. Smith himself characterizes at least some of his “reservations” as “perhaps niggling” (Smith, op. cit. p. 339).
7. There must have been more than one because there does not seem to have been any single person whose relationship with Koussevitzky extended from his youth through the 1940’s except his third wife, Olga, who left her own unpublished memoirs.
8. Slonimsky, Nicolas, Perfect Pitch: A Life Story, Oxford University Press, 1988, p. 106.
9. Slonimsky is not always reliable when it comes to basic facts about Koussevitzky. For example, he says the maestro was buried at Serenak, his Tanglewood estate, and that his suit against Smith netted him one dollar in “moral damages.” He refers to Olga as his second wife. Koussevitzky lost the suit outright and there is no such thing as “moral damages.” He was and remains buried in the graveyard of The Church on the Hill (Congregational) in Lenox, Massachusetts. Olga who was Natalie's niece was Koussevitzky's third wife. It should also be noted that as Editor of Baker’s Biographical Dictionary of Musicians (8th Edition, Schirmer, 1994), Slonimsky was nothing but laudatory in his entry about Koussevitzky.
10. In an interview with Tom Godell (Journal of the Koussevitzky Recordings Society, I:1, 1987, pp. 6-13), Slonimsky characterizes Sevitzky as the stupidest conductor and “…the greatest damn fool I ever met.” This is simply not credible. Sevitzky built several fine orchestras including that of Indianapolis, and enjoyed a better reputation among his musicians than his uncle.