“THE HOWARDS, THE HOWARDS, THE ANCIENT, GLORIOUS HOWARDS!”
Jerry Harkins
I am a Howard on my paternal grandmother’s side and the title of this essay is a toast often raised in my family. My father was Howard Edward Harkins [1] and I have a brother, John Howard Harkins. My granduncle was Judge John Howard, and I inherited the Howard silverplate from his sisters, my maiden grandaunts, the teachers Jane and Annie Howard. I had a cousin Howard Harkins of fond if not sainted memory, and have a cousin, Paul Howard Landau, a gentleman, the son of a gentleman and a truly gentle lady.
Two generations ago, two Irish families of the Brooklyn diaspora joined fortunes through the marriages of two Harkins brothers to two Howard sisters. The former were scions of the O’hEarcáin clan of Moville, County Donegal,[2] descendents in the direct male line of Saint Finian of Moville.[3] The Howards were the Anglo-Norman-Irish branch of one of Perfidious Albion’s most distinguished families. The nameplate that graces the family townhouse hard by St. Stephen’s Green reads O’hOurahan which is a backward rendering of the name into Irish—perhaps a reverse snobbery.
My particular branch of this vast and complex family settled in County Cork shortly after Strongbow defeated the ragtag Corkmen of Dermot McCarty in 1174. Dermot had been the first Irishman to cast his lot with Henry II, thinking the monarch had come to settle scores with Strongbow and not taking into account the capacity of the English to renege on mere treaties. The early Howards left few traces. It wasn’t until the English branch of the family came into prominence that the record becomes richer. Not in Ireland, of course, at least not until Elizabeth I began to exile upper crust Howards there. There was a Jane Howard of Cork who got herself listed as a landowner in Pender’s Census of 1659. Since this was at the height of the Cromwellian genocide, Jane had to have been some sort of Protestant. There was also a John Howard of Cork whose will was probated in 1741. With an estate large enough to require probate, he too was probably a Protestant.
The first well-documented Howard was Robert of Norfolk (1336-1388), a Norman [4] landowner who married Margaret Scales (1339-1416). They had one child, a son, the first John Howard (1365-1436), who married Margaret Plaiz (b. 1368). Their son Robert (1385-1437) married Margaret Mowbray, the daughter of Thomas Mowbray who was the first Duke of Norfolk but who was banished by Richard II in the aftermath of the Bolingbroke affair, the bloody feud that forms the heart of Shakespeare’s play about that accursed monarch (take your pick; I meant Henry but Richard was an equally obnoxious pervert). While these famous events were transpiring, Robert and Margaret had a son, the second John Howard (1430-1489), who became the second [5] Duke of Norfolk and the Earl Marshall of England in 1483.
The third Duke was Thomas Howard (1473-1554) who was the uncle of Anne Boleyn. [6] Thomas himself was condemned to death for treason but, unlike his niece, he managed to survive when Henry VIII died the evening before the scheduled decapitation. One of Tom’s sons had been named Henry [7] for obvious sucking-up reasons. Henry became a third rate poet and the Earl of Surrey but led a star-crossed life. He was the foster brother and brother-in-law of another Henry, Henry Fitzroy, who, as the name implies, was one of the tribe of bastard sons of Henry VIII. He, the Earl, ended up beheaded for treason on the testimony of his sister, Mary Howard Fitzroy, wife of the bastard and no mean bastard in her own right. His brother George Howard, Viscount of Rochford (through his wife Jane) was beheaded along with his sister Anne Boleyn for alleged incest between them. It wasn’t true, of course, but His Majesty had to blame someone for the stillbirth of Anne’s son. His own manhood was unquestionable. When he arrived at the block, George said, "Masters all, I am come hither not to preach a sermon but to die, as the law hath found me, and to the law I submit me." His cousin, Catherine Howard, also married the King and, in keeping with family tradition, was the only other wife he beheaded. [8] For Anne whom he actually seems to have liked, he had provided an expert swordsman imported from France for the occasion. No such niceties attended Catherine’s date with the axman. It should be admitted that various of the Howards (as well as George’s wife Jane) had testified against George, Anne and, later, Catherine but almost all of them lost their heads also. Hopefully for perjury.
The fourth Duke was Henry’s son Thomas (1538-1572) who turned out to be a supporter of Mary, Queen of Scots. It was suggested that he marry the lady but he declined. Instead, he plotted with the Spanish court to overthrow Elizabeth I which was a fatal error in judgment. Thomas’ son and heir, Philip Howard, “enjoyed the favor of the queen” for a time but was later twice tried for treason, the first time for reconciling with Rome, the second for allegedly praying for the success of the Spanish Armada. While the court ruled that prayer could not be treason, Philip was condemned anyway. British justice is famous for making subtle distinctions that leave the rest of us breathless. In the event, Philip evaded the headsman by dying in prison. Nevertheless, he was canonized by Pope Paul VI in 1970 as one of the 40 British “martyrs.” Don’t ask. [9] Philip’s brother, Lord William Howard, Lord High Admiral of Britain, was another one who married well, to the lovely Elizabeth Dacre whose inheritance included the vast estate upon which the family would establish Castle Howard. The castle was actually built several generations later by Charles Howard, the third Earl of Carlisle and Gentleman of the King’s Bedchamber. Again, don’t ask. Meanwhile, Lord William’s son, Charles, Earl of Nottingham and Baron of Effingham, followed his father’s footsteps, becoming Lord High Admiral of Her Majesty’s fleet just in time to become the victor over the Spanish Armada in the late summer of 1588. [10] Charles’ brother, William, Jr., is presently awaiting canonization in Rome. The seventh earl was a fellow named George who was something of a dandy and who was twice named Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. Charles Howard was an 18th Century Earl of Suffolk who is best known for marrying the Lady Henrietta who served also as mistress to King George II. She was by all accounts an attractive and witty woman but, like so many of the Hanoverians, George was an ingrate. On one occasion he described her as an “…old, dull, deaf, peevish beast.”
Not all members of the family died ignominiously but that was the general drift of things for several centuries. Elizabeth I exiled several Howards to Ireland where, following local tradition, they bred prolifically and managed to survive in what passed for high style with castles and townhouses aplenty. For the most part, the family in England, Ireland and Australia, remained true to its Catholic traditions, often at considerable cost. Through the centuries, it kept turning out notable sons and daughters. Elizabeth Howard, for one, was the wife of John Dryden and a decent poet in her own right. The third John Howard was High Sheriff of Bedfordshire and a noted prison reformer. He was the first warden not to charge prisoners for their meals. Luke Howard (1772-1864) is generally regarded as the father of meteorology and the godfather of clouds. General Tilghman A. Howard was a U.S. Senator from Indiana and American Charge d’Affaires to the Republic of Texas. Sir Ebenezer Howard (1850-1928) was a pioneer Nebraskan [11] who returned to London and started the city garden movement. The Comtesse de Beauregard was originally the English courtesan Lizzie Howard who in 1851 lent 800,000 francs to the Emperor Napoleon which he used to bribe key members of the military thereby assuring the success of his coup d’ etat. The grateful Emperor bestowed the title to recognize the lady’s contributions. [12] Sylvia Howard was the paternal grandmother of William Howard Taft, the 27th President of the United States and, later, the tenth Chief Justice. [13] Roy W. Howard (1883-1964) was the editorial head of the Scripps-Howard newspapers and, for many years, President of the United Press and its successor, UPI. John Winston Howard is the former Prime Minister of Australia. Even the late Lady Diana Frances Spencer [14], daughter of the eighth Earl Spencer, has a collateral and perhaps legitimate connection to the family through the first Visount Althorp, another ill-fated supporter of Mary, Queen of Scots.
It is a quirk of history that the only English word that rhymes with Howard may be the only pejorative that does not fairly describe one or another of the members of the family. Indeed, they were and remain a swashbuckling bunch. Two of England’s most famous regiments are the Green Howards and the Buff Howards, both named after Eighteenth Century Regimental Commanders, Charles of the Greens, Thomas and George of the Buffs. The Greens fought on the wrong side in the Battle of the Boyne, (1690) and the American Revolution but redeemed themselves on June 6, 1944 at Gold Beach in Normandy. [15] The Buffs were an important part of Marlborough’s forces at Blenheim (1704) and Wellington’s at Waterloo (1815) and played a notably heroic role at the bloody Battle of Anzio in 1944. [16]
John Eager Howard was a hero of the American Revolution who later served as Governor of Maryland and a United States Senator. It is his “warlike thrust” that is commemorated in the state song of Maryland. [17] His son George served as a General in the War of 1812 and his other son, Benjamin, was Governor of Maryland and a member of the House of Representatives. His great grandson, also John Eager, was the father of endocrinology. Oliver Otis Howard (1830-1909) was the commanding general of the Army of Tennessee and led Sherman’s right flank in the famous march through Georgia. He lost his right arm at the Battle of Fair Oaks. He received the Medal of Honor and went on to become the founding President of the great university that bears our name. He also wrote biographies of Zachary Taylor and Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce Nation. Major John Howard led a vanguard of 150 volunteers from the British 6th Airborne Glider Infantry in the first battle of D-day. At 12:20 AM, they landed deep behind the Normandy beaches and seized two vital bridges over the Caen Canal and the Orne River. John’s cousin, Mark Howard, was killed in the invasion later that day and his brother Christopher died flying with the famous 617th Squadron, the Dambusters [18]. Major General Miles Howard, the 17th Duke of Norfolk [19], fought throughout North Africa and Europe. He was awarded the Military Cross for bravery under enemy fire. His 2002 obituary in The Times quoted him as saying "Anyone can be the Duke of Norfolk, but I'm rather proud of that medal." The American General James Howell Howard was the only World War II pilot in Europe to win the Medal of Honor. He was the only ace in both the European and Pacific theaters and in one engagement he single-handedly fought off 30 German fighters attacking an American bomber squadron. Earlier, he had flown 56 missions over the hump as a member of the Flying Tigers. [20] There was another James H. Howard, an American Admiral, who was awarded the Silver Star for saving the lives of sailors under fire in the Battle of the Solomon Islands.[21]
Finally, our own era has been graced by the life and death of George Howard, a Port Authority cop who raced into work on an off day when he heard that a plane had hit the World Trade Center. It was the second time he had done something like this. During the first bombing in 1993, he had rescued an elevator full of children by rappelling his way down the shaft and taking them out the top. Afterward he told an incredulous reporter, “That’s what they pay us for.” But his luck ran out the second time and he became one of the 400 rescue workers who died on September 11, 2001. In his eulogy, his brother Pat Howard, a New York City police sergeant, quoted a poem George had written about a colleague who had died in the line of duty. “He died a quiet hero, there really is no debate / He saved the lives of others, snatching victory from defeat” His mother, Arlene, a Navy veteran of World War II, gave his badge, Number 1012, to President Bush who said he would keep it with him always.
All these Howards are related to each other and to me. The family tree is many-branched and, at this late date, none of us carries more than a tiny genetic inheritance from Robert of Norfolk. Even as an Irish person with a considerable amount of Celtic blood, however, chances are I have as much Howard blood by percentage as the current Duke. I’m happy to say.
Notes
1. HEH was the twelfth of twelve children, born on May 26, 1908. On the eighth day they took him up to Our Lady of Perpetual Help to be baptized. It was in the middle of a blistering heat wave and powerful thirsts had been potently slaked. The priest allowed as to how there had never been a Saint Howard, so Daddy acquired Edward as a middle name. In the general alcoholic miasma, he was named after the English king who by rights should be remembered as Edward II but is called Saint Edward the Confessor (1003-1066). The Harkins side never caught on to the Anglo-Irish pretensions involved here. But the connections are rich.
King Eddie was, arguably, the least effective of all English monarchs, a class of Neanderthals genetically predisposed to ineffectuality. He enjoyed a companionate marriage to Edith, but he was not a priest. I wish I could enlighten you as to why he was called Confessor, but can only speculate that he had much to confess, including his share of the blame for losing England to the Normans. Granted he was six months dead at the time but he had done much to set the stage, following the course laid out by his father, Æthelred the Unready. As death neared, Edward named Edith’s brother as his successor. This, of course, was Harold II, the Hapless. But Edward had previously promised the throne to another cousin, William the Bastard, Duke of Normandy, and it was this duplicity that led to the unpleasantness at Hastings on the only memorable date in English history, October 14, 1066. Anyway, you see the theme that emerges from all this. What’s in a name, indeed! Poor daddy!
2. The Brits always get this wrong. You will find Moville situated in County Down in English publications, even engraved in the stones of Westminster Abbey. On maps and on the ground, however, you will find it on the west bank of Lough Foyle, comfortably within the boundaries of Donegal and the Irish Free State. The Inishowen Peninsula was anciently part of Tyrconnell (the Land of Connell, the second son of Niall of the Nine Hostages) which was, in turn, part of Ulster. The eastern part of Down was also part of Tyrconnell which is probably the source of the confusion.
3. Actually, the second Finian of Moville, he of the Tenth Century. The first was Finnian, a Sixth Century teacher and scholar.
4. The name appears to be of Scandinavian origin, a combination of ha meaning high and ward meaning guardian or warden. In English, a warden is a guardian while a ward is a person guarded. Thomas himself was many generations removed from his barbarian forebears.
5. You often see him referred to as the first duke because he was the first Howard to hold the title which, of course, he got because his father had married well. This became a defining characteristic of the whole family.
6 . Anne’s mother was his sister, Elizabeth Howard who had married Thomas Boleyn.
7. This was the first in an intimidating number of Henry’s and Harry’s on the family tree. In 1857, Harry Howard was elected Fire Engineer for New York through the patronage of his good friend and former fire fighter, Boss Tweed. In our own time, Harry Howard married the heiress to the Butterick Pattern Company which he promptly sold to American Can of which he became Vice Chairman. He ran the whole thing into the ground and sold the corpse to Gerry Tsai who chopped it up into dog food and sold the empty shell to Sandy Weill who turned it into today’s CitiGroup.
8. Catherine was convicted on a bill of attainder that Henry sought and obtained from Parliament about 14 months into the marriage. The act declared that it was treason for an unchaste woman to marry the king. Catherine had been a lusty young lady, a fact that was well known to His Majesty who was one of the suitors who had enjoyed her favors. She was beheaded two days after the verdict. She was seventeen. Anne, on the other hand, was convicted on completely trumped up charges of adultery and incest with her brother George, Viscount Rochford.
9. It is not clear how one who dies of natural causes, even in prison, can be said to be a martyr but, then again, the Pope has special insights. Among the 40 chosen for sainthood in 1970 was Edmund Campion, S.J., who returned to England to minister to the Catholics in hiding. He wrote Campion’s Brag which I haven’t read but for which he was hanged, drawn and quartered at Tyburn.
10. Howard’s Number 2 was Sir Francis Drake, the famous pirate who also occasionally enjoyed the favor of the queen. His Number 3 was Sir John Hawkins, another pirate and slave trader. Hawkins made the key contribution to the victory by designing the faster, lighter but more heavily armed warships that did the Spanish in.
11. Howard County is located about 150 miles due west of Omaha. There are also Howard Counties, named in honor of various other members of the family, in Missouri, Arkansas, Iowa, Indiana, Missouri, Texas and, of course, Maryland.
12. Who says Emperors don’t have nuanced senses of humor? Beauregard, of course, means beautiful and Napoleon III like his illustrious uncle was certainly a connoisseur of feminine beauty.
13. Taft’s father, Alfonso, had been Secretary of War under Grant and his mother was Louisa Torrey, an 1845 graduate of Mount Holyoke. His son was Mr. Republican, Senator Bob Taft of Ohio from 1939 to 1953.
14. The women in the family never married as well as their brothers and, of course, Lady Di was no exception. I mean, Charles Phillip Arthur George Windsor may be a Prince but he is also a first class ass. See my essay, “Things His Father Never Taught Him.” By the way, Lady Di’s brother, also Charles (the Queen is his Godmother), is the current Lord Althorp and a perfect ass in his own right.
15. The Battle of the Boyne was fought before the Howards became associated with the regiment. It should also be noted that since the early Twentieth Century, the Colonel-in-Chief has been a member of the royal family of Norway, currently King Harald V.
16. Buff, in this case, refers to the buffalo’s dark tan coat not to a regiment accustomed to fighting in the nude. Anzio was the brainchild of Winston Churchill and turned out to be almost as disastrous as a similar plan he promoted in World War I. That, of course, was the Battle of Gallipoli in which the casualties were primarily troops of Australia and New Zealand.
17. The “warlike thrust” refers to a brilliant maneuver he commanded that won the day at the Battle of Cows Pen, South Carolina on January 17, 1781. Or maybe it had something to do with needing a phrase to rhyme with “Carroll’s sacred trust.” (With deep subjects like geneaology, you have to learn to take the bad with the good. The state song of Maryland is based on a poem written in 1861 by one James Ryder Randall. It complains about the Unionist sympathies of some traitors and looks forward to the day when Noble Maryland, “spurns the Northern scum.” It is sung to the tune of “O Christmas Tree.”
18. Christopher did not join the squadron until after its most famous exploit, Operation Chastise, the bombing of strategic German dams on the night of May 16-17, 1943. During the mission, 8 of the squadron’s 19 planes were lost and 53 of its 133 members were killed. These were indeed brave lads who specialized in low level skip bombing. After two years of trying to destroy the formidable battleship DKM Tirpitz, sister ship of the Bismark, the allies sent in the Dambusters. Weathering an absolute blizzard of anti-aircraft fire, they sank the behemoth with two 12,000-pound bombs on November 12, 1944.
19. Properly styled, “His Grace, The Most Noble Miles Francis Stapleton Fitzalan Howard, Duke of Norfolk, Premier Duke and Earl of England, Baron Beaumont, Baron Howard of Glossop, Knight of the Most Noble Order of the Garter, Knight Grand Cross of the Royal Victorian Order, Companion of the Most Honorable Order of the Bath, Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire, Earl Marshal, and Hereditary Marshal of England.” His Grace was born in 1915 and married Anne Mary Maxwell in 1949. He succeeded to the Beaumont and Glossop baronies in 1975 on the death of his formidable mother, Lady Ethel. He and Lady Anne had five children among whom the eldest son, Edward William Howard is the current Duke. The family remains staunchly Roman Catholic.
20. General Howard died on March 18, 1995 at the age of 81. He published his memoirs, Roar of the Tiger, in 1991.
21. Howard was an officer on the heavy cruiser USS New Orleans which participated in a record 15 battles in the Pacific. It survived Pearl Harbor and played a leading role in the Battle of the Coral Sea. When the aircraft carrier USS Lexington was mortally wounded, the New Orleans stood hard by her burning decks at great danger to itself and was able to rescue a good part of her crew. The New Orleans was hit often and hard and twice had to be drydocked for major repairs. She returned to action each time.
Thursday, July 09, 2009
GREENHORNS AND NARROWBACKS
Jerry Harkins
Some years ago, I wrote a short treatise called Narrowback’s History of Ireland. As I explained at the time, it represented, “…a pale shadow of the unstarted book length project to which the late Howard E. Harkins devoted the last 30 years of his life.” As it turned out, the market for such an effort was not exuberant. I now realize that it might have helped had I been a bit more forthcoming about the word “narrowback.” I did say it refers to a “…certain habit of mind characteristic of the American children and grandchildren of the Irish immigrants…a kind of intellectual hubris that assures one that knowledge is important only when it is certain to be on the test.” In other words, Irish history happened a long time ago, some of it even before people had television, and it is just not compelling to a generation brought up on Blackberries and American Idol.
Irish Americans are perfectly prepared to strut and fret their shamrocks, leprechauns and green beer on March 17—loudly, pugnaciously even, and always generously informed by “the creature taken.” Fortunately, however, celebration does not require actual knowledge of what is being celebrated. It is sufficient to drink, dance and be merry. The spirituality of a fifth century saint is simply less riveting than all the other things that compete for the attention of the hyperactive, multitasking Irish American community. Now that I think on it, even explaining the term probably will not increase sales of the book. Nevertheless.
Irish Americans tend to come in two flavors: those who know and care little about the heritage and those who possess vast amounts of misinformation to which they are ready to swear. The old community storyteller—the Seanchaí—is no longer the central feature of every circle of friends. Thus, the student interested in Irish American culture is forced to seek it in the surviving Irish fraternal organizations which are almost universally embarrassing. Exhibit A is the 80,000-member Ancient Order of Hibernians, a society whose original mission was to protect Catholic churches against the ravages of Protestant intellectuals intent on burning them down. They (I mean, of course, the AOH stalwarts but if you want to to think it was the Protestant intellectuals, well no one will fault you.) performed this much-needed and often heroic service in Ireland in the aftermath of the Lord Protector Cromwell’s depredations and in nineteenth century New York in defense against the Know Nothings and other defenders of Jeffersonian democracy. Today, however, they are reduced to campaigning against abortion, agitating for a united Ireland and protecting the purity of the St. Patrick’s Day parade by keeping the gays out. For years, they resisted having a woman named Grand Marshall of the parade so as not to offend the hierarchy. These are, of course, worthy causes even if they are a bit down market. However successful, assimilated and intermarried they become, Irish Americans still present a hang dog face to the world. Defeat and depression rise miasma-like from the prose of our writers. Jimmy Breslin, Pete Hamill, the McCourt brothers, and the others are merely following in the footsteps of the master, Eugene O’Neill. Do you remember Con Melody? “I have not loved the World, nor the World me.” He wants you to know (a) he is miserable and (b) he has read Lord Byron. “I’m done — finished — no future but the past.” Back to Pete. The first sentence of the biography on his official website is this: “Pete Hamill is a novelist, essayist and journalist whose career has endured for more than forty years.” Endured! You could look it up. It means to suffer. Like Jesus endured the cross only a lot longer.
Look at our periodicals. You’ll have to do it by yourself as I get bored looking at the vacant mug of the local bishop at yet another affair honoring some nondescript real estate speculator and, of course, “the lovely Mrs. Speculator.” Number One among the Top Hundred Irish-American Real Estate Speculators Of 2009. The Irish Roots Of Barack O’bama. At present we are being told that he is only 3% Irish (2 of his 64 great-great-great-great-grandparents) but the number is sure to rise over the next eight years. (If the morons who run the church had succeeded in banning him from speaking at the Notre Dame commencement exercises, we might have been spared this speculation.) Listen to Tommy Michael Smyth, perennial co-host of NBC’s parade coverage, as he extols the virtues of one obscure marcher after another. The people are interchangeable, it’s their achievements you have to pay attention to. Congratulations, Timmy, on the new job. Timmy is the new assistant deputy sewer commissioner. Hello, there, Mike, how are the marvelous grandchildren? The nine-year-old has just earned a girl scout badge for macramé. And here’s Father John Pat just back from six months rest cure in Arizona. Sobriety and two strokes off the handicap. Nice going, Father.
Nearly a half century after Jack Kennedy, we are desperate to protect whatever acceptance we might have gained. In part of course it is history, in part geography. For a thousand years and more we were sorely oppressed by the English and the holy Roman church, thralls to the former, pawns to the latter. And we were not like other Europeans. We lived at the end of the world far removed from the history of our nearest neighbors and speaking a language that was neither Latinate nor Teutonic. As European artists struggled through the centuries to create ever more accurate representations of their world, we were dealing in abstract symbols. Until the British came, ours was the most egalitarian and humane society the world had ever seen.
But Ireland fell on hard times. The song is true: the idiot Brits made it a capital offense to wear green clothes. The Flight of the Earls, the Wild Geese, the Penal Laws, the Ascendency, the Transportation, Cromwell and don’t forget the Famine. The Great Hunger, An Gorta Mor. The Troubles. That kind of experience leaves a scar on the soul of a people. It never heals and it takes generations to be rid of the nightmares.
At last though Ireland is changing. The English are gone, the clergy exorcised and, since the 1990’s, there have been years when the Irish have posted the highest standard of living in the EU. The Celtic Tiger attracted immigrants from all over the world. It took unspeakable sex scandals to throw off the yoke of the Roman church. The Irish have a long way to go but they have outlawed discrimination against gays and are about to enact the Civil Partnerships Act. Despite the bitter opposition of the hierarchy, Irish men and women, married and otherwise, can now buy condoms without a doctor’s prescription. And they seem to be doing it. The birth rate is still the highest in the EU but it has been declining every year since 2003. Ireland now has the 150th highest birth rate in the world. The United States is Number 151.
It is too soon to deplore or celebrate these changes or even to predict what Ireland will be like in ten years or a hundred and, anyway, that’s not the point. Ireland has changed already but hard-core Irish Americans have not. The total community is divided roughly 90 to 10, indifferent to hard core. The latter live in myth instead of history while the former are innocent of both. There are tens of thousands of the latter who refer to the government in Dublin as traitors and puppets for being heirs to the 1921 treaty. Among the former, neither they nor their parents know anything of the principals of that time, of O’Higgins or Collins. Indeed, they don’t recognize de Valera or Rossa as Irish names never mind someone called Barú. Names like Wolfe Tone, Napper Tandy and Daniel O’Connell are simply words in songs their parents used to sing. On Saint Paddy’s Day, you’ll hear The Minstrel Boy a hundred times but you won’t find one Irish American in a million who knows anything about Thomas Moore.
The fault, dear friends, is not in our stars but in our institutions. The church and the fraternal organizations have found it profitable to keep us beholden to them and to their surrealistic vision of the mother country. Only a dying minority keep even that faith today and they abide in ignorance and despair. The rest are embarrassed and have tried to rid themselves and their children of the myth and the history both. They have succeeded and so have abandoned the glorious heritage.
MAESTRO:
Celebrity, Obscurity and Serge Koussevitzky
Jerry Harkins
Serge Alexandrovich Koussevitzky (1874 – 1951) was arguably the most influential classical musician of the twentieth century. Not the best, not the most popular, not the most knowledgeable, just the most influential. Born into an impoverished family of klezmer musicians in the town of Vyshny-Volochok just outside the Russian Pale, he learned to play a variety of instruments at home and then studied the double bass at the then-new Moscow Conservatory. His second wife, Natalie, was a talented daughter of the Ushkov family whose great wealth derived from a tea monopoly granted by Tsar Nicholas I in the hope of reducing vodka consumption. Her money allowed him to become an important patron of the great Russian modernists, Scriabin, Stravinsky and Prokofiev. He commissioned, published and performed some of their most important works and, for several years, he was Scriabin’s financial mainstay.
He became the conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra (BSO) in 1924 and immediately set about promoting the first generation of explicitly American composers—Copland, Harris, Hanson, Barber, Schuman, Piston and his most important protégé Leonard “Lenuska” Bernstein. He commissioned and premiered hundreds of important works from them and their European counterparts—Ravel, Hindemith, Bartok, Britten, Honegger, Milhaud, Messiaen and Schoenberg. The numbers are impressive. During his tenure, the BSO gave the world premiers of 149 compositions. He or his foundation commissioned nearly a thousand works and the foundation, now housed in the Library of Congress, is still at it. He imagined a summer music festival and school in 1914 and created it at Tanglewood, Massachusetts in 1940. For eight weeks each year, it is still the spiritual center of American classical music.
Koussevitzky’s contributions were widely recognized throughout his life. With Toscanini and Stokowski, he was one of the first brand name conductors on the strength of recordings he made beginning in 1925. He was a celebrity. His comings and goings were chronicled in the social pages of all the leading newspapers. He received ten honorary doctorates. Today, however, he is all but forgotten. There is no heroic bust on the banks of the Charles River as there is of Arthur Fiedler. There is no monument anywhere save for a modest stele placed near his grave by the Israel Philharmonic. Thirty-six years after his death, the Boston Symphony got around to naming the music shed at Tanglewood in his honor but it neglected to put up a sign saying so. There has been no posthumous biography.
Of course conductors tend to have short shelf lives. As fashions change, they also make tempting targets for critics, musicians and other malcontents. Koussevitzky was, by far, the wealthiest musician of his era which made him the object of more than his fair share of envy. [1] By all accounts, he was also a difficult, mercurial, overbearing autocrat, an elitist who insisted that his musicians live only to serve Art. Part of his problem was an almost pathological insecurity. He was always worried about being found out as a fraud. Enemies quickly exploited this Achilles’ heel and even friends could easily feed into it. Arthur Fiedler for one understandably feared and despised him. Fiedler was a BSO violinist as well as the conductor of the world famous Boston Pops. Koussevitzky did not approve of his musicians moonlighting, playing anything other than classical music or, worst of all sins, competing with himself even if the competition was imaginary. He made Fiedler’s life miserable with unpleasant comments and capricious decisions for nearly twenty years. [2] In the 1920’s, Koussevitzky hired Nicholas Slonimsky as his secretary. [3] He was awed by Slonimsky’s knowledge, musical memory and absolute pitch. But these talents also threatened him and their relationship ended when Koussevitzky misunderstood a comment he mistakenly attributed to Slonimsky.
If his long tenure with the Boston Symphony was not untroubled, his departure from it was even more unhappy. In essence, after 25 years, he was fired. He was exhausted after the 1948 season and wanted an assistant conductor, specifically the 30-year old Leonard Bernstein. The trustees disliked Lenny for reasons that have been speculated and gossiped about but never resolved. Maybe it was as simple as the fact he was a local boy, a prophet without honor in his hometown. For whatever reasons, the trustees refused and Koussevitzky tendered his resignation which, to his great surprise, was instantly accepted. It turned out the trustees were already well along in their negotiations with Charles Munch, so much so it may well be they had deliberately provoked Koussevitzky to get rid of him.
In spite of his troubles, Koussevitzky was generous with his students and with musicians in need. He was devoted to the composers of his time including not a few whose work he did not like and sometimes could not conduct. Even if a piece was poorly received, he would program it again and again. He said, "I will keep playing this music until you hear it." This loyalty was not always reciprocated. Some of his beneficiaries—Stravinsky and Samuel Barber among them—often spoke disparagingly about him. Stravinsky especially was vitriolic—in private, of course—for reasons that are best left to psychoanalysis. Although obviously offended by the disdain, Koussevitzky never let it influence his artistic judgment or his support for his detractors. He was once asked why Stravinsky never talked about him while he “bowed and scraped” before other conductors. Koussevitzky merely replied, “I have done so much for him that he has no words to express his gratitude.” [4]
He was often accused of poor preparation, vague direction and deficiency in technical skills. But as Erich Leinsdorf said, unlike some more gifted technicians, Koussevitzky did not merely direct traffic, he made music. On rare occasions he gave concerts that turned out disastrously and, lacking a sense of humor, he invariably blamed his musicians. On other occasions, he would decide himself that he was not sympathetic with a new piece and would pass the baton to his concertmaster Richard Burgin. Burgin was a Russian-speaking Pole who filled that position with distinction from 1920 to 1962. He was also a sensitive observer of Koussevitzky and frequently ran interference for him with the orchestra.
It may be that the basic problem was that Koussevitzky believed a score is a document requiring interpretation rather than a road map to be slavishly followed, not a view likely to endear him to composers. In a paper he wrote in connection with the honorary doctorate he received from Harvard, he claimed that such interpretation was an art in itself, on as high a plain as other forms of creativity. Moses Smith ridiculed this notion arguing, “”We do not change the architecture the better to appreciate it. We change ourselves.” Koussevitzky’s conducting scores are filled with revisions, “corrections” and annotations proving that at least the argument was well joined but also belying any notion that he did not prepare carefully. The argument itself, however, is bootless. Styles change and emotionalism in conducting did not come back into favor until the emergence of his great pupil, Leonard Bernstein.
It must be counted in his favor that he married three exceptional women who seem to have worshiped him. He divorced his first wife, Nadezhda Galat, a young ballerina, to marry the tea heiress Natalie Ushkov, who was also an accomplished sculptor. For their wedding, she gave him an orchestra that quickly became highly successful. It is thought that she made a settlement on Nadezhda who later named her first daughter Natalie. When Natalie died, he married her niece Olga, a brilliant woman, a fine writer and a talented caricaturist.
It was sometimes said that Koussevitzky converted to Russian Orthodoxy and promptly forgot his Jewish heritage at the time he married into the aristocratic Ushkov family. He may have; such conversions of convenience were not uncommon in Tsarist Russia and were generally meaningless gestures. He certainly made the transition from poor Jewish boy to wealthy Russian aristocrat in record time. The Ushkovs themselves were only a generation or two removed from their own Jewish roots. But Olga didn’t believe he had been converted and had him baptized on his deathbed. Actually, Koussevitzky always thought of himself as a Jew. At the prompting of his friend, Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, he managed to bring some 200 Jewish and other endangered musicians out of Hitler’s Europe beginning in 1933. Still, his funeral service was a combination of Russian Orthodox and Episcopal rites and he was buried in the cemetery of the Congregational church in Lenox. [5]
There is a rich mythology surrounding the great man and it is difficult to discover or even guess which parts of what stories might be true. It is said, for example, that Mary Aspinwall Tappan gave or thought she gave her Tanglewood estate not to the Boston Symphony Orchestra but to Koussevitzky personally. It is believed by some that Olga transferred the deed to the Orchestra but there does not seem to be any public record of such a transaction. Scholars in Boston believe he meant to leave his papers to the Boston Public Library which has a large collection of his scores. It is rumored that the day after his death, a truck rolled up to his estate in Lenox and some 600 cartons were “removed” to the Library of Congress. When Olga died in 1978, she left all the material she still had to the Boston Library. His estranged nephew, the conductor Fabien Sevitzky, unsuccessfully challenged his will. The enmity between them became a catalyst for a great deal of speculation about his youth and his relationships with his parents and siblings. Many of the anecdotes recounted by Moses Smith in his 1946 biography, are questionable if only because Smith had no access to anyone, including Sevitzky, with first hand knowledge of events he reports as fact. [6] Some of Smith’s stories are demonstrably false.
None of this will surprise anyone familiar with the lives of great artists or conversant with the problems of interviewing people who knew them. Artists do not generally live their lives in sound bites and oral history is always at the mercy of memory and motive. Also, our culture does not always place a high value on dead artists. We make strange distinctions. There are popular songs known by millions of people who have no idea who composed them, songs that truly are part of the soundtrack of our lives like “Amazing Grace” and “White Christmas.” “Over the Rainbow” was named by the Recording Industry Association of America as the greatest popular song of the twentieth century. Millions of people associate it with Judy Garland but few remember the composer or the lyricist. Even well educated Americans would be hard pressed to name the sculptors of such iconic works as the Statue of Liberty, the Lincoln Memorial, Mount Rushmore or even the Pieta in St. Peter’s. Every American instantly identifies with the farming couple of “American Gothic” but not many can say who painted it. Who built the Brooklyn Bridge or designed the Vietnam Wall? Who wrote “A Visit From Saint Nicholas” or “Paul Revere’s Ride?” Of course, these are all simple questions simply answered with a few clicks of a computer mouse. A few more clicks will provide enough information to alleviate the curiosity of almost anyone.
But a data base is no substitute for living memory. One of the most melancholy poems in English is Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” with its mocking questions:
Can storied urn or animated bust
Back to its mansion call the fleeting breath?
Can Honour's voice provoke the silent dust,
Or Flattery soothe the dull cold ear of Death?
Of course not, and that is not the point of a memorial or of a biography. Job (19:23-34) laments, “Oh, that my words were recorded, that they were written on a scroll, that they were inscribed with an iron tool on lead, or engraved in rock forever.” He is not seeking justification of self but a record of his achievement. He knows he has played a small role in our understanding of the divine plan but, only when his story is embedded in the collective memory, will it and he become part of the cultural heritage and the social contract. Like Koussevitzky, his life marked a watershed of intellectual attainment. Unlike Koussevitzky, he had a good biographer.
Notes
1. Leopold Stokowski also married well, twice. His second wife was Evangeline Johnson, a Johnson and Johnson heiress. His third wife was Gloria Vanderbilt. He probably earned considerably more than Koussevitzky from his recording and film activities but the Ushkovs were a small family with a vast fortune to which Natalie was a principal heir.
2. Interestingly, Fiedler’s public image was as a charming, debonair man about town. He was a talented musician and a marketing genius. As described, however, by his daughter, Johanna, he was also misanthropic, an alcoholic and a womanizer. He seems to have been every bit as insecure as Koussevitzky. He too felt abused by the BSO trustees and the critics. See: Johanna Fiedler, Papa, the Pops and Me, Doubleday, 1994.
3. Nicolas Slonimsky (1894 - 1995) was a musical genius. He was a composer, conductor, pianist, accompanist, historian, critic and a prolific writer and editor. He was also a bon vivant and an extraordinary raconteur. His stories about Koussevitzky are humorous, often pointed but never really unkind. The only problem is they are not always accurate. Readers can only be certain that something like what he describes happened. See his autobiography, Perfect Pitch, Oxford University Press, 1988.
4. The quote appears as the epigraph to “Chronicle of a Non-Friendship: Letters of Stravinsky and Koussevitzky” by Victor Yuzefovich, The Musical Quarterly, Winter 2002, pp. 750-885. Neither principal was a model of maturity or even sanity. Robert Craft who knew Stranvinsky better than anyone, wrote that he was, “…a man who was extremely anal, exhibitionistic, narcissistic, hypochondriacal, compulsive, and deeply superstitious. He was also quarrelsome and vindictive, which is stated not as moral judgment but merely as description of behavior.” See: “My Life With Stravinsky,” New York Review of Books, June 10, 1982.
5. Koussevitzky was not religious but he was certainly Jewish in the cultural sense. He was not political either but he was openly sympathetic to the Zionist cause. He rarely did any guest conducting except for his work with the Israel Philharmonic.
6. I have discussed the Smith biography elsewhere and have posted my first take on it at: jerrysfollies.blogspot.com/2008/03/assassination-by-niggling-curious-case.html. A reconsideration of some of the issues written 15 years later is posted at: jerrysfollies.blogspot.com/2008/05/rethinking-moses-smith-jerry-harkins.html.
The portrait of Serge Koussevitzky was drawn by Olga Koussevitzky.
Subsequently: In the summer of 2014, Tanglewood unveiled a bust of Leonard Bernstein as part of a new program to honor several of its early leaders. A statue of Aaron Copland had already been erected on the grounds and it was said Koussevitzky would follow shortly. All three were commissioned and donated by the composer-conductor John Williams and were sculpted by Penelope Jencks whose works include the remarkable Eleanor Roosevelt in Riverside Park, New York.
Celebrity, Obscurity and Serge Koussevitzky
Jerry Harkins
Serge Alexandrovich Koussevitzky (1874 – 1951) was arguably the most influential classical musician of the twentieth century. Not the best, not the most popular, not the most knowledgeable, just the most influential. Born into an impoverished family of klezmer musicians in the town of Vyshny-Volochok just outside the Russian Pale, he learned to play a variety of instruments at home and then studied the double bass at the then-new Moscow Conservatory. His second wife, Natalie, was a talented daughter of the Ushkov family whose great wealth derived from a tea monopoly granted by Tsar Nicholas I in the hope of reducing vodka consumption. Her money allowed him to become an important patron of the great Russian modernists, Scriabin, Stravinsky and Prokofiev. He commissioned, published and performed some of their most important works and, for several years, he was Scriabin’s financial mainstay.
He became the conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra (BSO) in 1924 and immediately set about promoting the first generation of explicitly American composers—Copland, Harris, Hanson, Barber, Schuman, Piston and his most important protégé Leonard “Lenuska” Bernstein. He commissioned and premiered hundreds of important works from them and their European counterparts—Ravel, Hindemith, Bartok, Britten, Honegger, Milhaud, Messiaen and Schoenberg. The numbers are impressive. During his tenure, the BSO gave the world premiers of 149 compositions. He or his foundation commissioned nearly a thousand works and the foundation, now housed in the Library of Congress, is still at it. He imagined a summer music festival and school in 1914 and created it at Tanglewood, Massachusetts in 1940. For eight weeks each year, it is still the spiritual center of American classical music.
Koussevitzky’s contributions were widely recognized throughout his life. With Toscanini and Stokowski, he was one of the first brand name conductors on the strength of recordings he made beginning in 1925. He was a celebrity. His comings and goings were chronicled in the social pages of all the leading newspapers. He received ten honorary doctorates. Today, however, he is all but forgotten. There is no heroic bust on the banks of the Charles River as there is of Arthur Fiedler. There is no monument anywhere save for a modest stele placed near his grave by the Israel Philharmonic. Thirty-six years after his death, the Boston Symphony got around to naming the music shed at Tanglewood in his honor but it neglected to put up a sign saying so. There has been no posthumous biography.
Of course conductors tend to have short shelf lives. As fashions change, they also make tempting targets for critics, musicians and other malcontents. Koussevitzky was, by far, the wealthiest musician of his era which made him the object of more than his fair share of envy. [1] By all accounts, he was also a difficult, mercurial, overbearing autocrat, an elitist who insisted that his musicians live only to serve Art. Part of his problem was an almost pathological insecurity. He was always worried about being found out as a fraud. Enemies quickly exploited this Achilles’ heel and even friends could easily feed into it. Arthur Fiedler for one understandably feared and despised him. Fiedler was a BSO violinist as well as the conductor of the world famous Boston Pops. Koussevitzky did not approve of his musicians moonlighting, playing anything other than classical music or, worst of all sins, competing with himself even if the competition was imaginary. He made Fiedler’s life miserable with unpleasant comments and capricious decisions for nearly twenty years. [2] In the 1920’s, Koussevitzky hired Nicholas Slonimsky as his secretary. [3] He was awed by Slonimsky’s knowledge, musical memory and absolute pitch. But these talents also threatened him and their relationship ended when Koussevitzky misunderstood a comment he mistakenly attributed to Slonimsky.
If his long tenure with the Boston Symphony was not untroubled, his departure from it was even more unhappy. In essence, after 25 years, he was fired. He was exhausted after the 1948 season and wanted an assistant conductor, specifically the 30-year old Leonard Bernstein. The trustees disliked Lenny for reasons that have been speculated and gossiped about but never resolved. Maybe it was as simple as the fact he was a local boy, a prophet without honor in his hometown. For whatever reasons, the trustees refused and Koussevitzky tendered his resignation which, to his great surprise, was instantly accepted. It turned out the trustees were already well along in their negotiations with Charles Munch, so much so it may well be they had deliberately provoked Koussevitzky to get rid of him.
In spite of his troubles, Koussevitzky was generous with his students and with musicians in need. He was devoted to the composers of his time including not a few whose work he did not like and sometimes could not conduct. Even if a piece was poorly received, he would program it again and again. He said, "I will keep playing this music until you hear it." This loyalty was not always reciprocated. Some of his beneficiaries—Stravinsky and Samuel Barber among them—often spoke disparagingly about him. Stravinsky especially was vitriolic—in private, of course—for reasons that are best left to psychoanalysis. Although obviously offended by the disdain, Koussevitzky never let it influence his artistic judgment or his support for his detractors. He was once asked why Stravinsky never talked about him while he “bowed and scraped” before other conductors. Koussevitzky merely replied, “I have done so much for him that he has no words to express his gratitude.” [4]
He was often accused of poor preparation, vague direction and deficiency in technical skills. But as Erich Leinsdorf said, unlike some more gifted technicians, Koussevitzky did not merely direct traffic, he made music. On rare occasions he gave concerts that turned out disastrously and, lacking a sense of humor, he invariably blamed his musicians. On other occasions, he would decide himself that he was not sympathetic with a new piece and would pass the baton to his concertmaster Richard Burgin. Burgin was a Russian-speaking Pole who filled that position with distinction from 1920 to 1962. He was also a sensitive observer of Koussevitzky and frequently ran interference for him with the orchestra.
It may be that the basic problem was that Koussevitzky believed a score is a document requiring interpretation rather than a road map to be slavishly followed, not a view likely to endear him to composers. In a paper he wrote in connection with the honorary doctorate he received from Harvard, he claimed that such interpretation was an art in itself, on as high a plain as other forms of creativity. Moses Smith ridiculed this notion arguing, “”We do not change the architecture the better to appreciate it. We change ourselves.” Koussevitzky’s conducting scores are filled with revisions, “corrections” and annotations proving that at least the argument was well joined but also belying any notion that he did not prepare carefully. The argument itself, however, is bootless. Styles change and emotionalism in conducting did not come back into favor until the emergence of his great pupil, Leonard Bernstein.
It must be counted in his favor that he married three exceptional women who seem to have worshiped him. He divorced his first wife, Nadezhda Galat, a young ballerina, to marry the tea heiress Natalie Ushkov, who was also an accomplished sculptor. For their wedding, she gave him an orchestra that quickly became highly successful. It is thought that she made a settlement on Nadezhda who later named her first daughter Natalie. When Natalie died, he married her niece Olga, a brilliant woman, a fine writer and a talented caricaturist.
It was sometimes said that Koussevitzky converted to Russian Orthodoxy and promptly forgot his Jewish heritage at the time he married into the aristocratic Ushkov family. He may have; such conversions of convenience were not uncommon in Tsarist Russia and were generally meaningless gestures. He certainly made the transition from poor Jewish boy to wealthy Russian aristocrat in record time. The Ushkovs themselves were only a generation or two removed from their own Jewish roots. But Olga didn’t believe he had been converted and had him baptized on his deathbed. Actually, Koussevitzky always thought of himself as a Jew. At the prompting of his friend, Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, he managed to bring some 200 Jewish and other endangered musicians out of Hitler’s Europe beginning in 1933. Still, his funeral service was a combination of Russian Orthodox and Episcopal rites and he was buried in the cemetery of the Congregational church in Lenox. [5]
There is a rich mythology surrounding the great man and it is difficult to discover or even guess which parts of what stories might be true. It is said, for example, that Mary Aspinwall Tappan gave or thought she gave her Tanglewood estate not to the Boston Symphony Orchestra but to Koussevitzky personally. It is believed by some that Olga transferred the deed to the Orchestra but there does not seem to be any public record of such a transaction. Scholars in Boston believe he meant to leave his papers to the Boston Public Library which has a large collection of his scores. It is rumored that the day after his death, a truck rolled up to his estate in Lenox and some 600 cartons were “removed” to the Library of Congress. When Olga died in 1978, she left all the material she still had to the Boston Library. His estranged nephew, the conductor Fabien Sevitzky, unsuccessfully challenged his will. The enmity between them became a catalyst for a great deal of speculation about his youth and his relationships with his parents and siblings. Many of the anecdotes recounted by Moses Smith in his 1946 biography, are questionable if only because Smith had no access to anyone, including Sevitzky, with first hand knowledge of events he reports as fact. [6] Some of Smith’s stories are demonstrably false.
None of this will surprise anyone familiar with the lives of great artists or conversant with the problems of interviewing people who knew them. Artists do not generally live their lives in sound bites and oral history is always at the mercy of memory and motive. Also, our culture does not always place a high value on dead artists. We make strange distinctions. There are popular songs known by millions of people who have no idea who composed them, songs that truly are part of the soundtrack of our lives like “Amazing Grace” and “White Christmas.” “Over the Rainbow” was named by the Recording Industry Association of America as the greatest popular song of the twentieth century. Millions of people associate it with Judy Garland but few remember the composer or the lyricist. Even well educated Americans would be hard pressed to name the sculptors of such iconic works as the Statue of Liberty, the Lincoln Memorial, Mount Rushmore or even the Pieta in St. Peter’s. Every American instantly identifies with the farming couple of “American Gothic” but not many can say who painted it. Who built the Brooklyn Bridge or designed the Vietnam Wall? Who wrote “A Visit From Saint Nicholas” or “Paul Revere’s Ride?” Of course, these are all simple questions simply answered with a few clicks of a computer mouse. A few more clicks will provide enough information to alleviate the curiosity of almost anyone.
But a data base is no substitute for living memory. One of the most melancholy poems in English is Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” with its mocking questions:
Can storied urn or animated bust
Back to its mansion call the fleeting breath?
Can Honour's voice provoke the silent dust,
Or Flattery soothe the dull cold ear of Death?
Of course not, and that is not the point of a memorial or of a biography. Job (19:23-34) laments, “Oh, that my words were recorded, that they were written on a scroll, that they were inscribed with an iron tool on lead, or engraved in rock forever.” He is not seeking justification of self but a record of his achievement. He knows he has played a small role in our understanding of the divine plan but, only when his story is embedded in the collective memory, will it and he become part of the cultural heritage and the social contract. Like Koussevitzky, his life marked a watershed of intellectual attainment. Unlike Koussevitzky, he had a good biographer.
Notes
1. Leopold Stokowski also married well, twice. His second wife was Evangeline Johnson, a Johnson and Johnson heiress. His third wife was Gloria Vanderbilt. He probably earned considerably more than Koussevitzky from his recording and film activities but the Ushkovs were a small family with a vast fortune to which Natalie was a principal heir.
2. Interestingly, Fiedler’s public image was as a charming, debonair man about town. He was a talented musician and a marketing genius. As described, however, by his daughter, Johanna, he was also misanthropic, an alcoholic and a womanizer. He seems to have been every bit as insecure as Koussevitzky. He too felt abused by the BSO trustees and the critics. See: Johanna Fiedler, Papa, the Pops and Me, Doubleday, 1994.
3. Nicolas Slonimsky (1894 - 1995) was a musical genius. He was a composer, conductor, pianist, accompanist, historian, critic and a prolific writer and editor. He was also a bon vivant and an extraordinary raconteur. His stories about Koussevitzky are humorous, often pointed but never really unkind. The only problem is they are not always accurate. Readers can only be certain that something like what he describes happened. See his autobiography, Perfect Pitch, Oxford University Press, 1988.
4. The quote appears as the epigraph to “Chronicle of a Non-Friendship: Letters of Stravinsky and Koussevitzky” by Victor Yuzefovich, The Musical Quarterly, Winter 2002, pp. 750-885. Neither principal was a model of maturity or even sanity. Robert Craft who knew Stranvinsky better than anyone, wrote that he was, “…a man who was extremely anal, exhibitionistic, narcissistic, hypochondriacal, compulsive, and deeply superstitious. He was also quarrelsome and vindictive, which is stated not as moral judgment but merely as description of behavior.” See: “My Life With Stravinsky,” New York Review of Books, June 10, 1982.
5. Koussevitzky was not religious but he was certainly Jewish in the cultural sense. He was not political either but he was openly sympathetic to the Zionist cause. He rarely did any guest conducting except for his work with the Israel Philharmonic.
6. I have discussed the Smith biography elsewhere and have posted my first take on it at: jerrysfollies.blogspot.com/2008/03/assassination-by-niggling-curious-case.html. A reconsideration of some of the issues written 15 years later is posted at: jerrysfollies.blogspot.com/2008/05/rethinking-moses-smith-jerry-harkins.html.
The portrait of Serge Koussevitzky was drawn by Olga Koussevitzky.
Subsequently: In the summer of 2014, Tanglewood unveiled a bust of Leonard Bernstein as part of a new program to honor several of its early leaders. A statue of Aaron Copland had already been erected on the grounds and it was said Koussevitzky would follow shortly. All three were commissioned and donated by the composer-conductor John Williams and were sculpted by Penelope Jencks whose works include the remarkable Eleanor Roosevelt in Riverside Park, New York.
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