He has built an international reputation tracking down and publishing the ”nasty little secrets” of classical music`s performers, and, on the eve of his 93d birthday, Nicolas Slonimsky is soon to go public with a gold mine. If his autobiography, due out later this year from Oxford University Press, reads anything like his other decidedly uninhibited books on classical artists, there likely will be more than a few virtuosos who will feel exceedingly nervous.
”I simply decided to tell it all–about everybody,” says Slonimsky, who has never been shy when it comes to publishing the truth. In a magazine article he wrote last year called ”Sex and the Music Librarian,” for instance, Slonimsky pointed out that because ”heterosexual melancholy oozes out of every note of Tchaikovsky`s music, it may come as a shock to discover that the signals are crossed and the signs point in the opposite direction.
”It is of special interest to know that an early Soviet edition of Tchaikovsky`s correspondence with his relatives, which contains some juicy passages–for example, Tchaikovsky responding in full empathy to his brother Modeste`s ecstatic description of his excitement at watching a bevy of young seminarians filing out after classes–is an un-book whose very existence is denied by Soviet bibliographers.”
Slonimsky long ago developed a passion for uncovering and publicizing such material, so long as he could verify that it was true, which is not to say that his literary efforts have been anything less than scholarly. On the contrary, his wittily wrought lexicons–such as ”Music Since 1900,”
”Lexicon of Musical Invective” and ”Baker`s Biographical Dictionary”
(of which a new edition will be out in September)–hold an honored place in every worthwhile music library. And last week he became one of the oldest recipients (he turns 93 on Monday) of a Guggenheim Fellowship.
But Slonimsky has always been compulsive about printing every morsel of the truth, which makes the prospect of his autobiography all the more intriguing. After all, how many of today`s music authors have known Rachmaninoff, Gershwin, Prokofiev and scores of others whom the rest of us have only read about?
”At first the publishers were taken aback” by the manuscript, says Slonimsky, ”and they threatened to cut out all sexual references. After all, they are based in staid old Oxford, England. I wanted to notify them that Queen Victoria died 86 years ago, but I decided not to.”
Quips aside, Slonimsky likely will be fighting his publishers until press time to get every last nuance into his book. And considering the remarkable life Slonimsky has led, his long-overdue memoirs should cast an interesting light on areas of music history sorely in need of it.
For instance, ”Did you know that Henry Cowell spent 3 1/2 years in San Quentin penitentiary?” asks Slonimsky, referring to the brilliant 20th-Century American composer whose reputation survives today predominantly among connoisseurs. ”And do you know what he served time for? I`ll give you a hint: He was not indicted for armed robbery or embezzlement or anything of the kind. So what is left?
”Yes, they got him for taking liberties with young boys! It was a tragedy.
”You see, Henry was an extremely liberal and wonderful person, and he had let some kids in his neighborhood use his shack and his jalopy. There were complaints from neighbors, so the police came and chased the kids away.
”This was in 1939, and anybody who had liberal notions at that time was considered a Red. The police were interested in Cowell because he had contributed articles to liberal magazines. He was never a Communist or anything of the sort, but the authorities decided to go after him. They found one of those young boys, who incidentally had served a term in reform school, pressured him to say that Cowell had been too `friendly` and arrested Cowell. `The district attorney told Cowell that if he would confess he would merely be sent to a sanitarium for a couple of months. Cowell believed it and pleaded guilty as instructed. The judge said he was preying on the innocence of God-only-knows-what and sentenced him to 3 to 15 years!
”Cowell (who was subsequently pardoned) sent me a letter from prison asking, `Do you still want to be my friend?` My correspondence with him during those 3 1/2 years was remarkable, and I`ve reproduced it in my autobiography.”
Slonimsky has made it his life`s work to keep track of such things, and nobody does it with more style and humor. Yet the last thing Slonimsky aspired to become as a young man was a musical lexicographer. He fell into this unusual line of work because his musical gifts, generally considered to be nothing less than phenomenal, brought him more trouble than triumph.
Born in St. Petersburg, Russia, in 1894, Slonimsky early on discovered that he had a nearly photographic memory, a natural brilliance with languages (he speaks several fluently), an easy virtuosity at the piano and a remarkable sense of perfect pitch. (During a recent hearing test, reported the New Yorker magazine, Slonimsky`s doctor asked him to identify which of two pitches was higher, and Slonimsky responded that ” `the first one was 3,520 cycles per second and the second was 3,680 cycles per second.` He rechecked his dials and then looked over at me dumbfounded.”)
Unfortunately for Slonimsky, he flopped at his ”first career” as a piano accompanist based in Boston in the 1920s (he had fled Russia after the revolution of 1917) because ”I got tremendous reviews. Strangely enough, I began losing my jobs because the singers I accompanied complained that the reviewers devoted more attention to my playing than to their singing.”
Nevertheless, Slonimsky holds rich–and, of course, amusing
–recollections of his accompanying days, most notably the work he did for the revered Boston Symphony conductor Serge Koussevitzky.
It seems that ”Koussie,” in the era before radio, couldn`t learn a score without someone playing it for him several times through at the piano as he cut figure-eights in the air with his baton. He engaged the best accompanist around for the job, ”but I never could stand it,” says Slonimsky.
”I felt kind of silly playing Stravinsky`s `Rite of Spring` on an upright piano and watching Koussevitzky waving his baton at me as I did. He was what the French call an amateur, and he had extreme difficulty with rhythm. I had to re-bar (changing the unusual meters to a simpler form) the entire `Rite of Spring` so that he would be able to conduct it.
”And he had this peculiar Russian slave-owner characteristic of telling people what kind of a wunderkind he had as a serf, meaning me. He would say,
`I have a helper who not only is an extraordinary pianist and can hear every pitch, but he is a mathematician, a linguist,` and so forth.
”So I would get back at him by showing off. I particularly remember one case that eventually led to his firing me. He had conducted `Khovanschina` by Mussorgsky at the Paris Opera, and during lunch afterwards he said to me in his usual grand manner, `Well, you who know everything, was there anything wrong with the performance?`
”And I said, `Yes, in the seventh bar of the introduction to the aria by Martha, the second bassoon played G instead of F,` and he absolutely blew his top.
”He didn`t talk to me for a day, and at the next rehearsal the first thing he started was the introduction to that aria. He asked the bassoon about the note, and indeed I was right.`
”Later he said to me, `all right, you win,` ” but in truth Slonimsky would lose shortly thereafter when Koussevitzky fired him.
The lack of employment drove Slonimsky to take up the baton, an art at which he had no training yet became an instant–if short-lived–phenom enon.
Consumed with the daring new music of Ives, Cowell, Varese and other composers ”whom no one would touch, but whose works are considered classics today,” Slonimsky gave the world premieres of such then-avant garde pieces as Ives` ”Three Places in New England,” Varese`s ”Ionisation” and a long list of other difficult contemporary scores. His work won him raves from critics in Paris, Berlin and the United States, but the success ended abruptly after stints conducting the Los Angeles Philharmonic in 1932 and `33.
”At first, all was going well in Los Angeles,” says Slonimsky.
”Unfortunately, the old dowagers who supported the orchestras didn`t like to listen to Varese and Cowell and Ives.” I quickly acquired the reputation of being a maverick, of playing music that put people to flight,” and the Los Angeles Philharmonic never called him back.
By the late `30s the conducting engagements had dried up, and that`s when Slonimsky came to the craft in which being a maverick and an outcast can be a virtue, so long as you tell the truth: writing. Having provided information for the Boston Symphony program notes during the Koussevitzky days, Slonimsky ”realized that wherever I turned, dates and other information were wrong. I would look something up in the Groves Dictionary, and it was just plain wrong, with Groves writers having copied incorrect information going back generations! It was a witches` brew, and I began to wonder what to do with this mess.”
Slonimsky slowly and meticulously went about digging up contemporary reviews of concerts where other researchers had merely duplicated old errors. The data he gathered became ”Music Since 1900,” a time-line reference book that has become standard reading for every college music student.
Slonimsky hit high stride with his ”Lexicon of Musical Invective,” an ingenious dictionary that catalogues insults to great composers written by long-forgotten critics.
”I loved these contemporary reviews,” says Slonimsky, ”and always found myself with some kind of a perverse relationship with those writers. On the one hand, I would wonder how could any writer be so stupid as to write the things they did? But on the other hand, these reviews had so much character!
”Take Debussy`s great piece `La Mer` (`The Sea`). An American critic, James Lyons, wrote in the Boston Advertiser that `obviously there was an error in the title. It shouldn`t be `La Mer,` it should be `La Mal de Mer`
(`Seasickness`).
”These reviews filled me with joy. Many people ask why I don`t bring the `Lexicon` up to date, and the explanation is very simple: Critics don`t write that way anymore, they don`t have the capacity. They don`t have the wonderful style that, for instance, a critic in the London Musical World showed in a review of Chopin. I remember it until this day:
” `Cunning must be the connoisseur who could tell right notes from wrong notes in Monsieur Chopin`s compositions. One only wonders why Madame Georges Sand, who had known such wonderful lovers, would be willing to spend her remaining wanton years in the company of such an artistic nonentity as Monsieur Chopin.` ”
To this day, Slonimsky continues to collect his little tidbits of information and yellowed reviews, filing them away among roomfuls of paper in his Los Angeles home. And he knows full well that the world of serious music, and our perception of it, would not be the same, nor be half so interesting, were it not for his many years in the business, despite repeated rejection.
”It has been 55 years since I first conducted those works of Varese and Ives and Cowell in Los Angeles, and now the L. A. Philharmonic just opened its season with Varese`s `Arcana` and Ives is probably one of the most popular American composers,” says Slonimsky, who last year was ”tickled” to appear on Johnny Carson`s ”Tonight Show.” (”They paid me $400,” he says, ”which comes to $11 a second!”)
”I was recently reading Ives` letters, and he had written to everybody that I was the only musician who ever took an interest in his works, I was the only one who could understand them and so forth.
”It may be a terrible exaggeration, but now, after the fact, it makes pleasant reading for an old man.
”At least I know I was right.”
SLONIMSKY ON MUSIC: IS THERE ANYONE HE DIDN`T KNOW?
George Gershwin
”He complained to me that people thought he didn`t really know the fundamentals of music. Well, he did, and he proved it to me by writing out a song during lunch. He just jotted down a Gershwin song, and then he even gave me that piece. Unfortunately, I gave it to somebody else as a gift, and now I probably could have sold it for a thousand dollars.”
Frank Zappa
”He called me up quite unexpectedly, and when he said `This is Frank Zappa,` I thought maybe he was joking. But he said he had admired my books for years and invited me over to his house. He sent over a stretch limousine to pick me up, and I quickly realized that he was extremely well-versed in modern music. Then he asked me if I would like to play with his band at his next concert, which was the next day. So I thought, `What do I have to lose?` I played electric piano with his group, and I had a wonderful time. Fortunately, he was kind enough to give me earplugs to wear during our very loud concert.” Leopold Stokowski
”He was an extraordinary example of someone who caused sleepless nights for lexicographers, because he lied about his own life. He changed his age as well as the date when he married. If you add up the dates, however, he would have to be playing the organ publicly in London at the age of 9 and conducting in the United States at the age of 13. He wanted to be born in Poland. During orchestra rehearsals he affected a Polish accent. I asked him point blank whether he spoke any Polish, and he said, `Not a word.` ”
Igor Stravinsky
”My teacher at the St. Petersburg (Leningrad) Conservatory told our class that the most trying experience he had with any student was with Stravinsky. He said that in two years, Stravinsky could not master the harmonization of a simple chorale melody. And Rimsky-Korsakov, the great composer and teacher, said `This young man has no ear!` ”
Serge Diaghilev
”When he found out that the trombone player in the ballet orchestra actually lived with a woman, he fired him! The word `gay` was not known than,` but he was strictly that. Once he scolded Stravinsky, telling him that he could never become a real artist if he lived with women.”
Charles Ives
”I remember the day I asked him if he had a work that I could conduct, and he pulled out of his drawer `Three Places in New England,` which had never been heard before! Now it`s a classic. The piece required more players than I had in my orchestra, so I asked him if he could arrange it for me, and Ives said, `Oh yes, we can rig it up!` So he rearranged it for my small orchestra, and–because he was suffering from diabetes, arthritis and heart trouble–that was probably the last time he put pen on paper.”
Serge Prokofiev
”When you meet these people, you don`t realize that they are fantastic people whose art will become chapters in books. I knew Prokofiev moderately well, but I thought, `All right, here`s Prokofiev. So what?` It was only later that I realized he was a very great man.”
Alexander Glazunov
”I remember until this day the audition I gave for Glazunov at the St. Petersburg (Leningrad) Conservatory when I was 14 years old. To Glazunov and rest of the professors at the con servatory, the most important thing was to have perfect pitch, which I always had. If you had perfect pitch, they thought, you could become a first-class genius; if you didn`t, you would amount to nothing. So the great Glazunov sat down at the piano and played for me one of his favorite chords: F, C, B-flat, E and A–in other words, a dissonant chord that had to be resolved. Of course, I named the notes immediately. Then Glazunov marked down in his book, next to my name, `5-plus,` which is like A-plus, and in parentheses he wrote `talent.` How do I know this? I got it from the librarian of the Leningrad Conservatory of Music–70 years after the fact!”
Serge Koussevitzky
”He once said to me in an unguarded moment that if he had my capacity to hear exact notes and memorize as I could, he would have been the greatest conductor in the world.”
