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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