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A year or so later Natalya hired eighty-five of the best musicians in Moscow. After a season of rehearsals Mr. Koussevitzky took his band on tour aboard a steamer a little gift from his father-in-law. They rode up and down the Volga.
"Give me a symphony orchestra." was Koussevitzky's startling request. The bride was taken aback, for it was with the bull fiddle that he had wooed and won her and she hated to see him give it up, but she kept her word. Now here is where our old pianist comes in. It was at that time, he says, that Mr. Koussevitzky sent for him and began an intensive course of study before the triple mirror.
He was amazed to find musicians smoking in intermissions at rehearsals and concert. This he called "an insult to art." He forbade smoking. The players raised an unholy rumpus, but Koussevitzky persisted. The men haven't taken a puff in Symphony Hall since that time.
When he, the pants and the sweater had been with the Symphony ten years, the men gave him a testimonial dinner. Next to Mr. Toscanini he's the world's most temperamental conductor, but he has the ability to keep himself in check when he wants to. "Koussevitzky," says Ernest Newman, the eminent English music critic, "has a volcanic temperament, yet never have I known it to run away with him.
Both are as sleek as chromium statues. Mr. Stokowski, slim, lithe, romantic in a virile way, looks as a poet should look, but never does. Mr. Koussevitzky, broad-shouldered, narrow-waisted, extremely military and virile in a dramatic way, looks as a captain of dragoons in civvies should have looked but never did. Mr. Koussevitzy's conductorial gestures are literally high, wide and handsome.
Koussevitzky director of the state orchestras which, in those early Soviet days, were at low musical ebb. He labored in that job for three years, from 1917 to 1920, but he was out of sympathy with the Lenin-Trotzky regime and asked permission to leave the country. It was refused because officials said, "Russia needs your music."
They realize that, for years, he was forced to hide his fine figure and athletic prowess from thousands of potential admirers. For Mr. Koussevitzky, before he became a conductor, was a world-famous performer on the double bass, that big growling brute of an instrument popularly known as the bull fiddle.
They did, but it wasn't easy. It was a terribly severe winter; the country was in the killing grip of cold and famine. Koussevitzky and his players starved for weeks on end. The boss conducted in mittens. The men wore mittens, too, but they had holes in them, so they could finger the strings and keys of their instruments. The Bolsheviks made Mr.
Once in a while he'd stop short and berate the chairs. Then little Serge's language was something awful. Whether these stories are true or not, the fact remains that Mr. Koussevitzky became a conductor and a great one one of the greatest.
In the official biographies of Serge Alexandrovitch Koussevitzky you will find that the boss of the Boston Symphony learned the art and mystery of conducting at the Royal Hochschule in Berlin under the great Artur Nikisch, but in this town there lives and breathes a rather well-known Russian pianist who tells a different story.
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