Leopold Anthony Stokowski ( , ; 18 April 1882 – 13 September 1977) was a British conductor. 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 characteristic sound from the orchestras he directed.
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. He was well known for his orchestral arrangements of Johann Sebastian Bach. 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.
Early life and education 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 (). Stokowski's birth certificateThe birth certificate was signed by J. Claxton, the registrar at the General Office, Somerset House, London, in the parish of All Souls, County of Middlesex. 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 Bethlem Hospital, Southwark, London, on 13 January 1879, at the age of 49.England and Wales General Register Office January–March 1879, St. Saviour, Surrey, 01D/53 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, in 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". The 5th Edition of Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians (1954) rendered his given names as Leopold Antoni Stanisław Bołesławowicz. These claims are readily disproved by reference not only to his birth certificate and those of his father, his younger brother and his sister, but also by the student entry registers of the Royal College of Music, the Royal College of Organists and The Queen's College, Oxford, along with surviving documents from his days at St Marylebone Church, St James's Church and St. Bartholomew's in New York City.
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. On occasion, he 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 biography Stokowski – A Counterpoint of View (1982), in which (in Chapter 12) Daniel reveals that Stokowski came under the influence of his first wife Olga Samaroff, an American pianist born Lucy Mary Agnes Hickenlooper. She was from Galveston, Texas, and adopted a more exotic-sounding name to further her career. She "urged him to emphasize only the Polish part of his background" for professional and career reasons once he became a resident of the United States.
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 conducted 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 became assistant organist to Sir Walford Davies at the Temple Church. By the age of 16 Stokowski had been 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 organist and choir director of St James's Church, Piccadilly. He also attended The Queen's College, Oxford, where he received the degree of Bachelor of Music in 1903.
Career
New York, Paris, and Cincinnati 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 to pursue a career as an orchestra conductor. Stokowski moved to Paris for additional studies 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 he accompanied his future wife, 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 the 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 policies 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.
Philadelphia Orchestra
Two months later, Stokowski was appointed the director of the Philadelphia Orchestra, and he made his conducting debut in Philadelphia on 11 October 1912. This position would bring him some of his greatest accomplishments and recognition. It has been suggested that Stokowski resigned abruptly at Cincinnati with the hidden knowledge that the conducting position in Philadelphia was his when he wanted it, or as Oscar Levant suggested in his book A Smattering of Ignorance, "he had the contract in his back pocket." Before Stokowski moved into his conducting position in Philadelphia, however, he returned to England to conduct two concerts at the Queen's Hall in London. On 22 May 1912, Stokowski conducted the London Symphony Orchestra in a concert that he was to repeat in its entirety 60 years later at the age of 90, and on 14 June 1912, he conducted an all-Wagner concert that featured the noted soprano Lillian Nordica. While he was director of the Philadelphia Orchestra, he was largely responsible for convincing Mary Louise Curtis Bok to set up the Curtis Institute of Music (13 October 1924) in Philadelphia. He helped with recruiting faculty and hired many of their graduates.
Stokowski rapidly gained a reputation as a musical showman. His flair for the theatrical included grand gestures, such as throwing the sheet music on the floor to show he did not need to conduct from a score. He also experimented with new lighting arrangements in the concert hall, at one point conducting in a dark hall with only his head and hands lighted, at other times arranging the lights so they would cast theatrical shadows of his head and hands. Late in the 1929–1930 symphony season, Stokowski started conducting without a baton. His free-hand manner of conducting soon became one of his trademarks. On the musical side, Stokowski nurtured the orchestra and shaped the "Stokowski" sound, or what became known as the "Philadelphia Sound". He encouraged "free bowing" from the string section, "free breathing" from the brass section, and continually altered the seating arrangements of the orchestra's sections, as well as the acoustics of the hall, in response to his urge to create a better sound. Stokowski is credited as the first conductor to adopt the seating plan that is used by most orchestras today, with first and second violins together on the conductor's left, and the violas and cellos to the right.Preben Opperby, Leopold Stokowski, Great Performers, Tunbridge Wells, Kent: Midas / New York: Hippocrene, 1982, , p. 127, reproduces four of Stokowski's seating plans, of which illustration No. 2 shows the string sections as here described.
Stokowski also became known for modifying the orchestrations of some of the works that he conducted, as was a standard practice for conductors prior to the second half of the 20th century. Among others, he amended the orchestrations of Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, Sibelius, Johann Sebastian Bach, and Brahms. For example, Stokowski revised the ending of the Romeo and Juliet Fantasy Overture, by Tchaikovsky, so it would close quietly, taking his notion from Modest Tchaikovsky's Life and Letters of Peter Ilych Tchaikovsky (translated by Rosa Newmarch: 1906) that the composer had provided a quiet ending of his own at Balakirev's suggestion. Stokowski made his own orchestration of Mussorgsky's Night on Bald Mountain by adapting Rimsky-Korsakov's orchestration and making it sound, in some places, similar to Mussorgsky's original. In the film Fantasia, to conform to the Disney artists' story-line, depicting the battle between good and evil, the ending of Night on Bald Mountain segued into the beginning of Schubert's Ave Maria.