New World Symphony (Page 2)

What makes this absorbing narrative so convincing is Horowitz's gift for storytelling and his flair for the representative anecdote. Consider, for example, his breathtaking chronicle of the career of Arthur Judson. A business class of one who from 1922 to 1935 managed the Philadelphia Orchestra and the New York Philharmonic simultaneously and who was pivotal in creating the Columbia Broadcasting System, he rose to become the power behind the throne of an increasingly populist industry; his Columbia Concerts Corporation controlled two-thirds of the country's most successful artists and conductors. Judson's reach was awesome:

When the Portland [Oregon] Symphony's music director suddenly died in 1925, it was Judson whom the orchestra phoned. He recommended Willem van Hoogstraten; Hoogstraten was hired. It was Judson who recommended Eugene Ormandy to the Minneapolis Symphony, and who recommended Ormandy's successor, Dimitri Mitropoulos, and who recommended Mitropoulos's successor, Antal Dorati, and who recommended Walter Hendl to succeed Dorati in Dallas.... Looking back, Ormandy said of Judson, "I owe everything to him."

Horowitz clearly loves big personalities like Judson and Henry Lee Higginson, who built the Boston Symphony Orchestra from scratch into one of the world's leading orchestras. But behind his enraptured tributes lies a moralistic strand that sours our enjoyment of their creative contradictions. As the pages of history turn, as the big players come and go, Horowitz continually asks the Jesus question: What would Dvorak (or Seidl, or Stokowski) do?

Early in the book, Horowitz contrasts conservative Boston--in the figure of the influential but puritanical critic John Sullivan Dwight--with progressive New York, the stomping ground of such dynamic conductors as Seidl and Theodore Thomas. George Whitefield Chadwick, however, is presented as a more unifying figure. The most frequently performed of late-nineteenth-century Boston composers, he joins in the chorus of faint praise that greets Dvorak's "New World" Symphony at its Boston premiere (some critics were openly racist in their denunciations); like the impeccably professional Amy Beach, Charles Martin Loeffler and others, he is alternately supported and stifled by Boston's genteel culture. But Horowitz praises the "tangy American flavor" of Chadwick's music, proclaiming the composer as "the first American symphonic nationalist" and ceaselessly hyping "Jubilee," a slight if charming overture that owes quite a lot to Dvorak's "Carnival" overture without contributing much of its own.

One could excuse this as a connoisseur's indulgence. But Horowitz cannot forget Chadwick. The composer haunts the pages that follow: Conductor Serge Koussevitzky, composer-critic Virgil Thomson and composer-conductor Leonard Bernstein, all of whom Horowitz admires to varying degrees, are slapped on the wrist for failing to recognize his genius. In his introduction, Horowitz protests that although "I devote more space to Dvorak than Stravinsky, to Toscanini than Furtwängler...[this] does not imply that Dvorak was the greater composer, Toscanini the greater conductor." He wants to focus "on representative people, institutions, and events." The flaw in this approach is that it emphasizes what classical music stands for rather than what it actually is. Chadwick's flaws are lovingly forgiven; he is seen (improbably) as a comrade of Ives and (absurdly) as a precursor to Gershwin--whom Horowitz rightly celebrates, along with Griffes, Varèse and Ruth Crawford Seeger. But great music begins with strong ideas, not good intentions. Barber, who gave us Knoxville: Summer of 1915, the Violin Concerto and the ubiquitous Piano Sonata, and Copland, who not only wrote Appalachian Spring, Billy the Kid and all the rest but also mapped out an original, homegrown classical style on which American composers have ceaselessly drawn, are picked apart like flies, treated as secondary figures instead of the hugely influential creators they became.

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