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Authors: Rosamond Bernier

BOOK: Some of My Lives
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I
cannot remember a time when I didn't know Leopold Stokowski.
I hardly distinguished myself, however, at my first children's concert. Stokowski, avuncular, asked to have me brought backstage afterward. “And what did you like most about the concert?” he asked me. “My new shoes,” I replied.
I played the piano indifferently and at fifteen had taken up the harp, for which I seemed to have a certain facility. Stokowski, who had a genius for publicity, invented a series called Youth Concerts—no one younger than thirteen or older than twenty-one was admitted. As a stunt, he had a few instrumentalists within those age limits sit in with the orchestra for the first concert. At the last moment someone thought of the harp—where was there a harpist of the required age? The Curtis Institute was telephoned—the harpists were all too old. Finally, they thought of the Philadelphia Conservatory and found the only person who qualified for the age limits—me!
So the night before the concert, never having played in an orchestra—or even a duet—I was sent for, handed copies of the harp parts, and told to show up the next evening.
Luckily, the pieces to be performed were all in the familiar orchestral repertoire—
Scheherazade
,
The Firebird
,
La Grande Pâque Russe
, and so on—and we had recordings of them all. I listened to them carefully, marking the score where the harp could really be heard. My technique was not sufficient to play out all the notes, so I learned the passages where the harp sounded clearly and simply placed my fingers on the correct strings in the other sections, where the harp would be drowned out by the orchestra.
Stokowski had his own way of seating the orchestra—first violins on the left, second violins on the right, then the cellos. He placed the harps in front of the cellos, in full profile to the audience, horribly exposed for the novice. Fortunately, I had friends in the cello section next to me, and they would prompt me: “Four, three, two, one, here you go …”
I apparently didn't make too many gaffes, because none of the other young instrumentalists got asked back while I played in six more concerts, even in Stokowski's orchestration of “The Internationale” that had a grateful harp part.
Through Stokowski's keen interest in new music I got an early immersion in works far from the standard symphonic or operatic repertoire of the time. I heard Alban Berg's
Wozzeck
, Schoenberg's
Gurrelieder
, Shostakovich's
Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk
, Prokofiev's
Pas d'Acier
, to name a few.
Stokowski conducted the first performance in America of Ravel's
Boléro
. Afterward, a dear old lady came backstage to enthuse, “Oh, Mr. Stokowski, I so enjoyed your
Bordello
.”
He was alive to the technical possibilities of his times. When others scoffed at radio as a venue for classical music, he was working with engineers, twiddling the dials himself, to produce a richer, truer sound.
Stokowski was a fixture in my pantheon. He was the height of glamour, not only to me, but to most of female Philadelphia. He was a skillful showman with a great sense of theater. Careful lighting emphasized his blond mane and his expressive fingers (he was the first conductor, I believe, who gave up the baton).
He had a seductive, caressing accent, entirely self-invented. He was born in London.
And his personal life was delightfully thrilling. How could you get better copy than by going off to India with Greta Garbo? And marrying the young and ravishing Gloria Vanderbilt kept up the excitement.
However, Stoki (as we called him) took quite a shine to me. Occasional presents would show up especially made for me: a silver bracelet and ring with my monogram he designed, a set of luggage with my monogram. Pretty heady for a teenager.
One evening when my father was taking me to hear
Rosenkavalier
for the first time, Stoki asked me to come around to his apartment before the performance. My father drove me to the apartment but stayed in the car. “If you're not down in ten minutes, I'll be up to get you,” he warned. Stoki was a notorious lothario. My father needn't have worried. Stoki was waiting at his door and gallantly handed me a beautiful rose to hold during the performance.
One can only admire Stokowski's curiosity. He enlisted Carlos Chávez as his guide to hunt out authentic indigenous music in Mexican villages.
To thank him and, to quote him, “as an expression of his admiration for Mexican culture,” Stokowski waived his fee for a performance with the Philadelphia Orchestra of Chávez's ballet called
HP
, with décor and costumes by Diego Rivera.
I must have been about fifteen at the time, but I still remember it well. The dancers were transformed into fruits and vegetables, and at the climax they all disappeared into a giant refrigerator.
One can only admire Stoki's zest for the unexpected. He had accepted to conduct a benefit concert in the Mexican town of Morelia. (I was living in Mexico by that time.) The orchestra was barely above the amateur level, but that didn't faze him. The crux of the evening was to be a performance of Tchaikovsky's
1812 Overture
, with real guns blazing away at the finale.
Stoki arrived to find that one of the strikes endemic to Mexico had cut off the town's electricity. He was always extremely conscious of his appearance: catastrophe! He only used an electric razor and was not going to try anything else. He stormed. No electric razor, no concert.
The organizers were appalled. The concert was sold out. Total impasse.
I had somehow struck up a conversation in the hotel bar with some engineers overseeing the building of a new highway. I told them about the problem. After a few tequilas they gallantly offered to help me out—and they did. They installed a portable generator outside the hotel, and it was turned on just long enough to produce the current to feed Stoki's razor.
The concert was a wild success, with the roar of the guns eliciting great whoops of appreciation.
At ninety-five, Stokowski signed a five-year contract with Columbia
Records. But unfortunately, he died that year, when he was about to record Rachmaninoff's Second Symphony.
His legacy lasted a long time: the glorious, rich, unique sound of the Philadelphia Orchestra.
Postscript:
This was written before the sad news of the Philadelphia Orchestra's financial difficulties.
In the 1940s, Arnold Schoenberg's music was still considered impossibly difficult to play and/or to listen to.
Stokowski had heard a private performance of the Piano Concerto (op. 42) and, never daunted, decided to program it for one of the NBC Symphony radio broadcasts that he conducted. Although the performance—on January 6, 1944—went off without incident, it created such a furor that NBC didn't renew Stokowski's contract.
Recently, on January 26, 2010, I heard Daniel Barenboim play Schoenberg's concerto at Carnegie Hall with the Vienna Philharmonic to rapturous, almost frenetic applause.
Now we come to the two glowing strands that illuminated my life for half a century. They were inextricably woven into each other's lives too: Aaron Copland and Leonard Bernstein.
I
met Aaron Copland during the summer holidays after my sophomore year at Sarah Lawrence. I had gone to Mexico with a few friends. The conductor of the Sinfónica de México, Carlos Chávez, was one of the musicians who had come to our house several times while he was guest conductor of the Philadelphia Orchestra. My father wrote to him that I was arriving in Mexico, and I found a note from him at my hotel, inviting me to come to a rehearsal.
Typically for the times, a strike had closed the usual concert hall, the pompous Bellas Artes, a wedding cake of a building with the famous Tiffany glass curtain, so the rehearsal was taking place in a disaffected church.
I arrived to a wave of jazzy syncopations; Chávez was rehearsing Aaron Copland's early 1926 Piano Concerto, with the composer himself at the piano, a rangy figure with a splendid beak of a nose. He was grinning with delight as he bounced up and down on the piano stool.
The Indian musicians responded instinctively to his made-in-America rhythms. Chávez was obviously completely at home with Copland's idiom.
During a break in the rehearsal, Chávez introduced me. It was love at first sight, at least on my part. I always thought Aaron looked more like a scientist than a musician. He was tall, gangling, engagingly toothy. He gazed out at the world with blue-gray eyes, through clear-rimmed glasses, with an expression of benevolent curiosity.
This turned out to be an epic occasion for me. The only other people sitting in on the rehearsal were Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo. We were introduced, we chatted, and to my delighted surprise
they invited me to go with them in their box that evening to the concert.
After the concert we all went out to supper with Chávez. I sat next to Aaron. He told me he was living in a small house in a provincial town called Tlaxcala, about a four-hour drive from Mexico City. This was 1936, and Aaron was very hard up. “I've rented a piano; it's very quiet there. The electricity goes off now and then, but you get used to candles.” Later in the conversation he said, “Only trouble is, there is no marmalade there, and I miss marmalade with my breakfast.”
So the next day I enlisted an obliging boyfriend to drive me to Tlaxcala with a whole carton of marmalade. “The girl's crazy!” Aaron said, with a characteristic giggle.
Aaron was working on an opera for high school kids called
The Second Hurricane
. The manuscript sheets were on the battered upright piano, and he sat down and played it through for me, singing all the parts in that way composers with no singing voice manage to do.
I particularly loved a haunting melody called “Gyp's Song.” The words were by Edwin Denby, the poet and superlative dance critic who wrote for the old
Herald Tribune
.
After that it was back to Sarah Lawrence for me, and back to his fourth-floor walk-up loft for Aaron. He was a pioneer loft dweller. It was in what was then a seedy part of town, now transformed by Lincoln Center. It was cheap and practical because there were no residents in the floors below to complain about noise, only workshops of one kind or another.
It was strictly utilitarian—no attempt at softening the bleak space with memorabilia of any kind. Aaron's taste was always austere. He never even noticed the accumulation of dust, but finally I couldn't stand it any longer, and I spent a whole week's pocket money to get it cleaned up.
Even later, when Aaron had money and a good-sized house up the Hudson (now brought back to life as Copland House), his surroundings were modest and sparsely furnished. Only music and books mattered to him. He cared little about food—he never learned to cook, and he practically never took an alcoholic drink. His clothes were nondescript—neat but anonymous.
Leonard Bernstein once said to me about his beloved Aaron: “Plain, plain, plain! Can you imagine Aaron wearing a ring or jeweled cuff links?”
Our friendship blossomed. Aaron would take the train to Bronxville to visit me at Sarah Lawrence; I came into New York whenever a work of his was performed. I was always Aaron's “date,” and I would carefully collect programs after the concert for his archives.
Through Aaron, I met a number of young composers: Marc Blitzstein, David Diamond, Israel Citkowitz, Arthur Berger, and Paul Bowles (this was before Paul became known as a writer) and his wife, Jane. And Clifford Odets, Harold Clurman and the Group Theatre people, John Houseman.
Aaron took me to my first New York glamorous evening party, given by the Kirk Askews. Kirk was a fashionable art dealer; Constance was a well-known hostess and an occasional patron of Aaron's.
There I met such people as Salvador Dalí and his formidable wife, Gala; Pavel Tchelitchew, who painted Mrs. Askew's portrait with her mink coat as background; and Alice B. Toklas and other celebrities of the time.
Aaron himself cared absolutely nothing about “society” or “celebrities”—his friends were usually young musicians, writers, and artists.
In the months after I returned from Mexico, the obliging young man who had driven me to Tlaxcala was pressing me to marry him. I finally agreed. Aaron wrote to a friend, “My girl has gotten herself engaged—the only girl I could have married.” Then he added (I can almost hear the giggle), “This will confuse the biographers.”
Lewis A. Riley Jr. and I were married in my family's rose garden in Philadelphia. Aaron came, bringing a wonderful present. He had written out all the words to my favorite song from
The Second Hurricane
and orchestrated it; it was inscribed:
all written out for Peggy and Lew's wedding
for sole performance on Peggy's Harp and Lew's Guitar
from their composer friend Copland.
My handsome new husband was a young American who lived in Mexico. He had properties there and had an interest in the polyglot
firm (Mexican, German, American) that was developing Acapulco—and eventually ruining the idyllic coastline. He was completely at home in Mexico, spoke perfect Spanish, and even played the guitar.
A new friend from Mexico, the caricaturist and ethnologist Miguel Covarrubias, came up to be best man.
A string ensemble from the Philadelphia Orchestra played a favorite of mine: Mozart's
Eine Kleine Nachtmusik
.
I always kept in touch with Aaron, and in the summer of 1941 he invited me for the weekend at his rented house at Tanglewood, where he was teaching. This was unusual, because Copland, though affable, did not like to have guests under his roof. In fact, he would say darkly “There are guests in the house” the way someone else might say “There are mice in the house.” And I was a female. A first.
When I came down for breakfast the first morning in a very discreet dressing gown, Aaron looked at me, somewhat bemused, and asked, “Is that what girls wear?”
He had invited some students to come by that afternoon. A young whirlwind with a shock of black hair and a strong nose burst through the door and settled down at the piano—it was Leonard Bernstein. He played and played and played, until, exhausted, he flung himself, perspiring freely, full length onto the ground.
Lenny, having graduated from Harvard and studied piano at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia, was one of the chosen few pupils studying conducting with the great Serge Koussevitzky at Tanglewood. He had met Aaron a few years before and adopted him as idol and loved mentor. As Aaron said to me in an aside, after introducing the prodigiously gifted young man, “We don't have to worry about
that
one.” It was clear that he already was a star.
How right he was! “That one” in short order was conducting summer concerts. Then, in 1943, as the assistant conductor of the New York Philharmonic, he rocketed to fame when, without a rehearsal, he took over the podium when Bruno Walter fell ill.
A close, even at times romantic friendship linked the two—Aaron the older by eighteen years—that survived all the turbulence of Lenny's personal life and professional career.
But Aaron the teacher was never blinded by the brilliance of his protégé. On being shown some early compositions by Lenny (all of his life, in spite of the conducting triumphs, Lenny longed to make
his major mark as a composer), Aaron cautioned him, “Stop writing warmed-over Scriabin and write something that's really your own.” And Lenny, not known for his reticence, didn't hesitate on more than one occasion to write to Aaron that portions of a Copland score were “dull” and “needed re-working.”
That same weekend Aaron took me swimming to a nearby lake. Rather, I went swimming, and Aaron stood upright, fully dressed, on the shore, leaning against an overturned lifeboat, pages of musical manuscript in his hands. He was orchestrating a piano score—he always composed at the piano and orchestrated later. “Sometimes it's very tedious. I prefer to do it while something else is going on,” he said.
I came back to New York from Paris, where I was working, as Aaron's date to go to the gala concert celebrating the New York Philharmonic's 125th anniversary (in 1967). It was an extraordinary event: some two hundred musicians—performers who had appeared with the Philharmonic and composers who had had their works performed by the orchestra—were seated alphabetically by rows.
There was a photograph in a subsequent program of me in a oneshoulder evening dress by Grès, and long white gloves, walking proudly down the aisle on Aaron's arm.
By then, Lenny had become conductor and music director of the Philharmonic.
Although I had moved to Mexico, in 1940 I was in New York, where I suddenly fell ill and ended up in the hospital. It was my birthday, October 1, and Aaron came to visit with the most precious gift he could give me. He was always a voracious reader, and two of his favorites were the sixteenth-century French essayist Montaigne and André Gide. He brought me his own limited-edition copy of Gide's essay on Montaigne, signed by Gide and inscribed to me by Aaron.
I was also in town for Aaron's seventieth birthday, on November 14, 1970. He wrote me the following on receiving my note in which I tried to say something of what he had meant to me:
Dearest Peggy,
That was a beauty of a letter you sent me, such as only you could write. I loved it!
Can it possibly be more than thirty years since we first met? (Seems like yesterday.) Anyhow, it warms me just to think of you and I love you dearly …
Aaron
In the 1970s, Aaron gradually stopped composing; the muse was being elusive. But he threw himself into conducting with what I can only qualify as jubilation. He simply adored conducting, and he received engagements from all over the world (highly lucrative, incidentally). Technically, he was not the best of conductors, and players sometimes complained his beat was uncertain, but most orchestras did their best for him out of respect and affection.
The physical exertion kept him lean and supple, the new challenges were stimulating. But gradually the increasing loss of memory could no longer be ignored.
Lenny and I grieved to see our beloved Aaron's shining intellect dimmed by Alzheimer's. He didn't recognize most people, but he still recognized us. We wanted to be with him for his birthday, so Lenny and I drove up the Hudson to where Aaron had a house, and helpers. Incidentally, driving with Lenny sent one's pulse soaring.
Friends had organized a little event in the local movie house to celebrate the birthday, with performances of Copland's music. We collected Aaron and seated him between us. He sat quietly, showing no particular interest in the proceedings. But at the end, when there were exuberant bursts of applause, with the instincts of the old trouper, Aaron rose to his feet and acknowledged the ovation.
A combination of circumstances in the previous years had brought Aaron and me together in a number of places. Something inaugurated by the State Department called the Good Neighbor Policy sent Aaron to several Latin American countries as a musical ambassador.
Aaron was the perfect choice to represent American musical life: he was tactful, he spoke adequate Spanish, he had unquenchable curiosity about the local composers, and he promoted American composers as a whole, not just presenting his own work.
Our routes sometimes coincided. In Havana we used to go to an
enormous popular dance hall, just to listen. Two orchestras played at opposite ends of the room. We sat somewhere in the middle, and Aaron could listen to both orchestras at once. He particularly liked the
danzón
with the bright flute line riding above the violin, trumpet, and piano, and he enjoyed the endlessly inventive rhythmic patterns.
Eventually,
Danzón Cubano
was the result of these evenings. Incidentally, Aaron was never known to dance.
The next month I was back in Mexico, and Aaron was in California writing for the movies. He wrote to me on Thanksgiving Day:
Darling Peggley:
Victor [Aaron's companion at that time] seems to be having difficulties getting this letter started so here I am to the rescue. If I didn't know you were in Mexico I could read it on his face. He keeps urging me to write a symphony in Chapala, so if there weren't a war on that would be the thing to do. Write a symphony with you as inspiration. As it is, life runs along very quietly at Oakland and now I'm more sorry than ever that you never did get up here to see how very nice it is … Well, anyway, the thing for you to do is to rest up, and come back soon, and continue to be an inspiration to everybody as usual.
Love, A.

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