Leopold Stokowski
Leopold Anthony Stokowski (18 April 1882 – 13 September 1977) was a British-born American conductor.[1] One of the leading conductors of the early and mid-20th century, he is best known for his long association with the Philadelphia Orchestra. He was especially noted for his free-hand conducting style that spurned the traditional baton and for obtaining a characteristically sumptuous sound from the orchestras he directed.[2]
Leopold Stokowski
13 September 1977 (aged 95)
- Conductor
- composer
- organist
Music director of the Philadelphia Orchestra;
Founder of the Hollywood Bowl Symphony Orchestra and the American Symphony Orchestra
5
Stokowski was music director of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, the Philadelphia Orchestra, the NBC Symphony Orchestra, New York Philharmonic Orchestra, the Houston Symphony Orchestra, the Symphony of the Air and many others. He was also the founder of the All-American Youth Orchestra, the New York City Symphony, the Hollywood Bowl Symphony Orchestra and the American Symphony Orchestra.
Stokowski conducted the music for and appeared in several Hollywood films, most notably Disney's Fantasia, and was a lifelong champion of contemporary composers, giving many premieres of new music during his 60-year conducting career. Stokowski, who made his official conducting debut in 1909, appeared in public for the last time in 1975 but continued making recordings until June 1977, a few months before his death at the age of 95.
Biography[edit]
Early life[edit]
Leopold Anthony Stokowski was the son of an English-born cabinet-maker of Polish heritage, Kopernik Joseph Boleslaw Stokowski, and his Irish-born wife Annie-Marion (née Moore). Stokowski's birth certificate[3] gives his birth on 18 April 1882, at 13 Upper Marylebone Street (now New Cavendish Street), in the Marylebone District of London. Stokowski was named after his Polish-born grandfather Leopold, who died in the English county of Surrey on 13 January 1879, at the age of 49.[4] Stokowski was the polonised Lithuanian family name, originally Stokauskas, where stoka means "lack" or "shortage".
On occasion in later life he altered his middle name to Antoni, per the Polish spelling. Compounding this, there were various rumours and inaccurate entries in otherwise authoritative reference works concerning his name. In Germany there was a rumour that his original name was simply Stock (German for stick). After he had achieved international fame with the Philadelphia Orchestra, unsubstantiated rumours circulated that he was born Leonard or Lionel Stokes or that he had "anglicised" it to "Stokes".[5] The 5th Edition of Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians (1954) rendered his given names as Leopold Antoni Stanisław Bołesławowicz. These canards are readily disproved by reference not only to his birth certificate and those of his father, younger brother, and sister, but also by the Student Entry Registers of the Royal College of Music, Royal College of Organists, and The Queen's College, Oxford, along with other surviving documentation from his days at St. Marylebone Church, St. James's Church, and St. Bartholomew's in New York City.[6]
There is some mystery surrounding his early life. For example, he spoke with an unusual, non-British accent, though he was born and raised in London.[7] On occasion, Stokowski gave his year of birth as 1887 instead of 1882, as in a letter to the Hugo Riemann Musiklexicon in 1950, which also incorrectly gave his birthplace as Kraków. Nicolas Slonimsky, editor of Baker's Biographical Dictionary of Musicians, received a letter from a Finnish encyclopaedia editor that said, "The Maestro himself told me that he was born in Pomerania, Germany, in 1889."
The mystery surrounding his origins and accent is clarified in Oliver Daniel's 1000-page biography Stokowski – A Counterpoint of View (1982), in which (in Chapter 12) Daniel reveals Stokowski came under the influence of his first wife, American pianist Olga Samaroff. Samaroff, born Lucy Mary Agnes Hickenlooper, was from Galveston, Texas, and adopted a more exotic-sounding name to further her career. For professional and career reasons, she "urged him to emphasize only the Polish part of his background" once he became a resident of the United States.
Education[edit]
He studied at the Royal College of Music, where he first enrolled in 1896 at the age of thirteen, making him one of the youngest students to do so. In his later life in the United States, Stokowski would perform six of the nine symphonies composed by his fellow organ student Ralph Vaughan Williams. Stokowski sang in the choir of the St Marylebone Parish Church, and later he became the assistant organist to Sir Walford Davies at The Temple Church. By age 16, Stokowski was elected to membership of the Royal College of Organists. In 1900, he formed the choir of St. Mary's Church, Charing Cross Road, where he trained the choirboys and played the organ. In 1902, he was appointed the organist and choir director of St. James's Church, Piccadilly. He also attended The Queen's College, Oxford, where he earned a Bachelor of Music degree in 1903.[8]
New York, Paris, and Cincinnati[edit]
In 1905, Stokowski began work in New York City as the organist and choir director of St. Bartholomew's Church. He was very popular among the parishioners, who included members of the Vanderbilt family, but in the course of time, he resigned this position in order to pursue a career as an orchestra conductor. Stokowski moved to Paris for additional study in conducting. There he heard that the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra would be needing a new conductor when it returned from a long sabbatical. In 1908, Stokowski began a campaign to win this position, writing letters to Mrs. Christian R. Holmes, the orchestra's president, and travelling to Cincinnati, Ohio, for a personal interview.
Stokowski was selected over other applicants and took up his conducting duties in late 1909. That was also the year of his official conducting debut in Paris with the Colonne Orchestra on 12 May 1909, when Stokowski accompanied his bride to be, the pianist Olga Samaroff, in Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto No. 1. Stokowski's conducting debut in London took place the following week on 18 May with the New Symphony Orchestra at Queen's Hall. His engagement as new permanent conductor in Cincinnati was a great success. He introduced the concept of "pops concerts" and, starting with his first season, he began championing the work of living composers. His concerts included performances of music by Richard Strauss, Sibelius, Rachmaninoff, Debussy, Glazunov, Saint-Saëns and many others. He conducted the American premieres of new works by such composers as Elgar, whose 2nd Symphony was first presented there on 24 November 1911. He was to maintain his advocacy of contemporary music to the end of his career. However, in early 1912, Stokowski became frustrated with the politics of the orchestra's Board of Directors, and submitted his resignation. There was some dispute over whether to accept this or not, but, on 12 April 1912, the board decided to do so.
Personal life[edit]
Marriages[edit]
Stokowski married three times. His first wife was American concert pianist Olga Samaroff, to whom he was married from 24 April 1911 until their divorce on 30 July 1923. They had one daughter: Sonya Maria Noel Stokowski (born 24 December 1921),[35] an actress, who married Willem Thorbecke and settled in the US with their four children, Noel, Johan, Leif and Christine.
His second wife was Johnson & Johnson heiress Evangeline Love Brewster Johnson, an artist and aviator, to whom he was married from 11 January 1926 until their divorce on 2 December 1937. They had two daughters: Gloria Luba Stokowski and Andrea Sadja Stokowski. In March 1938, Stokowski began a highly publicized relationship with film actress Greta Garbo after the two vacationed together in Italy, on the island of Capri.[36] Whether or not their relationship was romantic or platonic was the subject of much speculation and scrutiny in the press.
On 21 April 1945, Stokowski married heiress and actress Gloria Vanderbilt. They had two sons, Leopold Stanislaus Stokowski (born 1950) and Christopher Stokowski (born 1952). They divorced on 29 October 1955.[37]
Legacy[edit]
After Stokowski's death, Tom Burnam writes, the "concatenation of canards" that had arisen around him was revived — that his name and accent were phony; that his musical education was deficient; that his musicians did not respect him; that he cared about nobody but himself. Burnam suggests that there was a dark, hidden reason for these rumours. Stokowski deplored the segregation of symphony orchestras in which women and minorities were excluded, and, Burnam claims, his detractors got revenge by slandering him. Nevertheless, and notwithstanding Burnam's claims, attitudes towards Stokowski have changed dramatically since his death. In 1999, for Gramophone magazine, the noted music commentator David Mellor wrote: "One of the great joys of recent years for me has been the reassessment of Leopold Stokowski. When I was growing up there was a tendency to disparage the old man as a charlatan. Today it is all very different. Stokowski is now recognised as the father of modern orchestral standards. He possessed a truly magical gift of extracting a burnished sound from both great and second-rank ensembles. He also loved the process of recording and his gramophone career was a constant quest for better recorded sound. But the greatest pleasure of all for me is his acceptance now as an outstanding conductor of nineteenth- and twentieth-century music, including a lot that was at the cutting edge of contemporary achievement."
The Looney Tunes episode "Long-Haired Hare" has a satirical homage to Stokowski: Bugs Bunny impersonates him at the Hollywood Bowl. The cartoon pokes gentle fun at Stokowski's habit of conducting without a baton by having Bugs break the baton handed to him.
A statue of the maestro shaking hands with Mickey Mouse, a recreation of a memorable moment in Fantasia, stands in the lobby of Disney's Contemporary Resort in Walt Disney World in Orlando, Florida.