Leopold Stokowski: A Re-Evaluation

Abstract

In his delightful 1958 book, The Musical Life, critic Irving Kolodin deliberately torpedoed the cliches of many of his colleagues in describing conductor Leopold Stokowski-no stories about the glamor boy of conducting, his womanizing, his supposed musical vulgarity, nor his Hollywood adventures. Instead Kolodin offered several insights about the musician and asked couple of thoughtful questions, doing so with something like awe of the then seventy-five-year-old maestro. Remarking that one could not in honesty mark him down as either a charlatan or poseur--which was, of course, exactly what number of critics had done over the years-Kolodin mused that Stokowski was unique among conductors and was difficult to fathom because he combined boy's sense of wide-eyed wonder with mature musical sophistication of the highest order, the whole governed by deep intuitive grasp of things rather than by rational judgment and pragmatic logic. Describing Stokowski's performances as memorable, but often mystifying, Kolodin wrote that he would gladly go to any New York concert that Stokowski gave knowing that what I expected I would not get. Quite unlike, yet fully the equal of, traditionalist Arturo Toscanini, Stokowski seemed to draw his interpretive power and his strength of command within rather than musical tradition and accepted concert norms. Like volcano, continued Kolodin, he tapped his reserve from some source deep in the nature of things with capacity ... quite elemental. His performances were musically engrossing and exciting even when they seemed to be wrong-headed, but, mused Kolodin, as though contemplating some profound mystery of nature, how could gifted musician, age seventy-five, with then almost fifty years experience in the concert hall remain so willful, so mercurial in measured art form so clear cut in its fundamental sense of order. And with the acknowledgment that Stokowski was and had ever been outside the established order of the concert world, Kolodin moved on to other musical matters.1