Word: conductor
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Music received its first special award when the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences handed out its annual Oscars last week (see p. 68). The special award went to Conductor Leopold Stokowski, for "the creation of a new form of visualized music" in Walt Disney's Fantasia, and it highlighted both the growing influence of Hollywood as a music capital and Hollywood's increasing dependence on music. Other musician winners...
Audiences of the early days nocked to hear the Polish pianist Volovsky "play 400 notes in one measure"; to watch jullien, famed French-English conductor of the 18505, lift a pair of kid gloves from a gold platter and carefully draw them on his fingers before conducting Beethoven; to hear & see 100 red-shirted firemen at the Boston Peace Jubilee of 1869 clanking 100 anvils to Verdi's Anvil Chorus...
...early Victrola era, a prized record was the $7 single-sided Sextet from Lucia, sung by Caruso, Tetrazzini, Jacoby, Amato, Journet, Bada. In the hysterical years of World War I, secret service men shadowed non-Germans Leopold Stokowski, Ossip Gabrilowitsch, Leopold Godowsky. The conductor-worshiping '205 showed the most extreme faddism ("Toscanini conducting Italian nonsense could pack the hall"). In the late-lamented Flagstad epoch, Tristan & Isolde grossed $150,000 in nine performances, "thereby becoming the greatest 'hit' ever to strike Broadway...
After the final curtain Composer Taylor, his quizzical face wreathed in a great smile, appeared before the footlights with Conductor Sylvan Levin. His upraised hand silenced the ovation. "Excuse me just a minute," he said, then leaned over, kissed the wiry little maestro on both cheeks, in true Basque fashion. The audience decided that it had enjoyed itself thoroughly; the critics, that the great American opera was still to be written...
Friendly Game. In Albany, Emile La Liberte had $106 when he boarded a train for Manhattan, three hours distant. By the time the conductor came for the $2.99 fare, La Liberte, who had met some poker-playing strangers, had nothing...