Nancy Shear on Stokowski, Rostropovich, and “I Knew a Man Who Knew Brahms”

This transcript is linked to the podcast and video versions and the show notes.

Nancy Shear:

Everybody who is in that concert hall, anybody who's sitting in a seat in the concert hall belongs there, period. And don't ever let anybody tell you any differently that you belong there as a listener just as much as a music critic belongs there. Period. No discussion. I have too many people who say, "Oh, I don't know anything about music. I don't know if I can go into a concert." And I always wish I can take them by the hand and just go in there with them. Get in there and just pay attention.

Leah Roseman:

Hi, you're listening to Conversations with Musicians with Leah Roseman. I was so honored and delighted to have this opportunity to have this conversation with Nancy Shear, whose diverse career in classical music will fascinate you. I loved reading her memoir "I Knew a Man Who Knew Brahms", which is very much a book about appreciation for great music making as well as the importance of reflecting on the legacies of our elders. You'll hear about insights gleaned from her close relationships with many luminaries, including Leopold Stokowski and Mstislav Rostropovich. Nancy was a troubled teenager when she began working as part of the Philadelphia Orchestra Library staff and her brave determination, sensitivity, and brilliance have led her to many unexpected opportunities. Whether or not you're currently a fan of classical music, I'm sure Nancy's wisdom and storytelling will inspire you. We're also including Nancy's suggested listening links in the show notes as well as other episodes you'll enjoy. You can watch this on YouTube or listen on your podcast app.

Thanks so much for joining me here today, Nancy. It's great to meet you.

Nancy Shear:

I'm delighted to be with you, Leah.

Leah Roseman:

I really enjoyed your memoir, which is not so much about you, so maybe we'll get into that a little bit, but so much about Leopold Stokowski and the very special relationship you had and a history of orchestral music. So let's get into "I Knew a Man Who Knew Brahms". It came out of your MFA thesis that you did later in life, right?

Nancy Shear:

I guess you could say that technically, but the truth of it is the MFA, I went back to school because I desperately wanted to write this book and I had never taken on a project, a literary project of this size. I'd been published since 1978 with articles and essays and commentary, not a book. And I thought, what's the best way to really get involved in the writing community and to make sure that I was on the right track? And I pictured myself in a classroom and I wanted to get an MFA 40 years. I went back to school around my 65th birthday. I had a choice between the senior citizen discount and the student discount wherever I went. But it was really the school that grew out of the book, not really the reverse. And it was just a great experience and it put me on the right track.

One of my professors was Susan Cheever, who of course had written about her father, John Cheever. And she did something that I really admired, which was deal honestly with the family and with their problems where somebody else might've just glossed over that, but she didn't and I needed help because I was in effect giving up the family secrets and I needed help with the way to do that and in a way getting permission to do that. Yeah.

Leah Roseman:

Well, you do talk about that right at the beginning of the book, your troubled home life. And so if you could just maybe explain to the listeners in your own words, you were in high school, you loved music, you started sneaking into Philadelphia Orchestra rehearsals.

Nancy Shear:

Well, I snuck into the concerts because at first I was given a free ticket and it was such a powerful experience that I had to go back. I had no choice. I lived about an hour away from the concert hall. It was a complicated trip and to a kid, it was pretty expensive. That ate up part of my allowance just getting there and back. So I didn't have enough money for a ticket. Ticket, I think was a dollar and a quarter. That was a lot of money. This was around 1962. So after getting the one free ticket, I kept going back and the only way eventually that I could get in was to sneak in, which was a little bit against my principles, but I wasn't doing anybody out of any money because I just couldn't afford it. It wasn't a choice, pay or don't pay, couldn't pay. So that's really how I got in.

And I got in through the stage door because that was the only door that wasn't locked. And I got to meet a lot of people and one day Eugene Ormandy passed by and he said, "I see you here every week. What are you doing here?" And all I said was, "I love the orchestra." And he said, "Do you have a ticket?" And I said, "No." And he said, "Come with me. " And he took me to his dressing room backstage. And with that, I learned what the backstage layout was so I could find ... Once I could get into the stage door, I could make my way past the ticket takers and sit in any empty seat that I could find. And that's how I met everybody. And that was the beginning of a 60-year and counting life in music.

Leah Roseman:

And you described that you have this archive of thousands of programs and they have your scribbled notes and newspaper reviews. It's an incredible resource really.

Nancy Shear:

Yeah. I wish I could turn this around because I'm looking, it's facing me. I'm looking at the bookcases that have just boxes after boxes full of the programs with the ticket stubs stapled in and handwritten notes and then occasionally autographs that archive. And then the wonderful development was when I had discovered the orchestra library backstage. Just by opening a door, I didn't know what was behind that door. I was curious what's in there. This was a concert hall built around the Civil War era, 1857. And every door just opened to something fantastic, whether it was opera props or offices. And this one time I opened the door, there were two men sitting and working at a long table and I started to close the door very quickly because I got scared and one of them said, "You may come in. " And I walked in and he said, "This is the library. This is where we prepare the music for the orchestra." I didn't know what he was talking about because I thought composers composed the music and that was it.

They reproduced that and they put it out on the music stands, everybody played. That is the beginning, not the ending. So he said, "If you pull over a chair, I'll show you what I'm doing." And I loved watching them and knowing what made the orchestra function and how it functioned. So I scraped up the money and I went back a lot sometimes after school, sometimes during school, which I have no regret doing. And after two years, without knowing it, I had served an apprenticeship. So after the two years I said to the librarian, one day I said, "How are you doing?" And he said, "Not so good. My assistant quit unexpectedly" and that was it. They hired me and that was the beginning of, I think it was about five years with the Philadelphia Orchestra. It was just a delight. So that's really how things began for me.

Leah Roseman:

And you were 17 at the time when you were on the payroll?

Nancy Shear:

Right.

Leah Roseman:

But at home it was really bad.

Nancy Shear:

It was difficult and it was not only brutally difficult with both parents because my mother was a darling. She was the one who really got me involved in classical music and she did it in the best way possible by sharing it where we would listen together. It's not like somebody who hands you a record or gives you a concert ticket, but it was a matter of her sharing and opening up about this art form that she loved more than any other. But my mother was mentally ill. We're not sure exactly from what it might have been some paranoias, obsessive compulsive disorder. In those days, not only did they really not know exactly what was going on, but there was a stigma attached to it where today, thank goodness you don't have that. So nobody knew. A couple members of the family knew, but not my friends, not the neighbors.

So this was where I had to make a brutal decision for me whether I was going to write this book or not and how I was going to handle the family situation. My father in his own way obviously was also mentally disturbed for other reasons, but he was quite violent and would just explode at the slightest provocation and didn't treat me or my mother very well. So that was really the big decision in writing the book. How much do I talk about the family? And I decided, and I think it's true in life, that if it's not truthful, what's the point? If you're not going to tell the truth, why bother? So I completely opened up about this in the book. So that kind of theme is in a counterpoint with my experiences with the music world, which probably saved my life.

Leah Roseman:

Yeah.

Nancy Shear:

It's a really beautiful story. It's certainly the opposite of what we have become accustomed to in the last number of years with the Me Too movement where women and very legitimately have this experience where they're taken advantage of and they're abused sexually and emotionally because they're connected. And I had with the Philadelphia Orchestra, it's incredible. I had basically 100 men who protected me and took care of me and taught me. And it was a very loving experience, except with Eugene Ormandy and there was on member of the Philadelphia Orchestra staff, but it certainly wasn't on the level that a lot of people have experienced. But the players in the orchestra, they really were like older brothers or uncles to me. It was beautiful.

Leah Roseman:

Now many people only know Leopold Stokowski from the movie Fantasia. So people who don't listen to classical music, they might've seen that and then he was the conductor. It was really interesting reading about all the innovations in terms of recording and his knowledge of acoustics. There's so much we could get into. I did take a lot of notes on the book. I'm not sure what we'll get to. Maybe we'll get into him a little bit because so much of the book is about him and you knew him much better than most people in his life over such a long period of time. I was interested that he programmed one new or unfamiliar piece every program and if the audience didn't like it, you said he would have the orchestra play it again.

Nancy Shear:

Yeah. He'd say," You don't understand this music. "And he'd turn around and play the thing again and some of it was quite radical. Now today, history is fascinating because some of the music or a lot of the music that he did that was considered seriously radical and people wondered, is it really music or is it just noise? Now it's standard repertoire. It's fascinating how things change and the ears adjust and people begin to understand that the art, that immediate art of your time will eventually become classic.

Leah Roseman:

Yeah. And the title of your book, it's clever because it brings people in. "I Knew a Man Who Knew Brahms" and maybe you'll share about that. But you did meet Stravinsky and through Stokowski he knew so many of the composers as well and premiered so many works.

Nancy Shear:

Oh yeah. Yeah. I knew many, many composers and worked closely with them because the relationship between conductors and composers, what it's supposed to be is absolute fidelity to the score to every note that the composer wrote the conductor and the musicians are supposed to bring it to life as close to the composer's wishes as they possibly can and they know where they can ascertain exactly what the composer wanted. But you have some musicians who are quite expressive of their own and free, have a lot of freedom, like Stokowski. And I have one incident in the book where I was sitting with Morton Gould, the American composer in Carnegie Hall, just the two of us in sitting at a rehearsal, nobody else was there. And Stokowski was conducting Morton's work and not as it was asked for in the score. And Morton turned to me and said," Gee, I wish I had thought of that."

So sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. But what the composer writes is really a point of departure. And it's just as Stokowski would say, it's black notes on paper and then it has to be colored and brought to life by an orchestra. Thank goodness that the music, the notation is very ambiguous because if it was not ambiguous, every performance would sound exactly alike, how boring. So everybody who, whether they were a conductor or soloists, it sounded different and with some conductors like Stokowski, every performance they did was different. He would do rehearsals during the week and then there were Monday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday concerts with the Philadelphia Orchestra and he was a guest conductor at this point. So that was fascinating that not only did he deviate completely from what he had rehearsed, because it was so spontaneous, but every performance was different and the librarians helped with that because we had to make the music, the notation and the parts that were sitting on the stands.

We had to make that as clear as possible, as easy to read. Where does a crescendo mark begin? Where does it end? Where does a slur mark begin and end? There are a lot of interpretive markings and not every composer put them in, but the ones who did, we had to make sure that everything was crystal clear because you do not want to waste rehearsal time by having the musicians have to figure out, is it an A flat? Is it an A natural? Is it a D sharp? Is it an F sharp? It has to be clear. And when they stop as a unit, as a group, then they have to have a place to start again. So we would mark a lot of what they call rehearsal numbers or letters into the parts. There's a lot that goes on. I've said this before and I'll say it a thousand times that when I go to concerts, even to this day and I see a hundred players on the stage and the conductor walks on and the audience applauds and the hands or the baton comes down, it's a miracle. It's just a miracle. They're all there and the music is all there. It's amazing.

Leah Roseman:

And Stokowski and maybe other conductors at this time would rearrange quite frequently to strengthen a line, not done so much now.

Nancy Shear:

Oh, they're not supposed to do that. I'm really glad that you brought that up because many people, most people will say they shouldn't do that. If Stokowski wanted that horn line to be also performed by the trombones, he would've written it that way. Well, Stokowski had his own ideas. He loved color and drama, he would make the changes to supplement a line or he would add things to change the color. Now, should he have done that? Probably not. Am I really happy that he did? Yeah, because I loved the results and I loved hearing what he did. It was just so dramatic and colorful. So yeah, they do it, but there's still a lot of debate if they should do it. And by the way, Toscanini also made some changes in the score. Everybody thinks of Toscanini as being such a purist and he went right back exactly to what the composer wanted, not always, nor Leonard Bernstein.

Leah Roseman:

So often I'm sitting in rehearsal and the conductor will say, well, even to the violins, "maybe it's marked mezzoforte, but you better play pianissimo so we can hear the bassoon," or whatever it is. And so often this happens, especially in Beethoven and different composers that we need this to come through and we have to completely readjust what's in the music in terms of dynamics. So it was interesting to hear that and also that Stokowski was a composer in his youth.

Nancy Shear:

There's a symphony that he wrote, only one movement, nobody knows where the parts are. Nobody could find the score. The score is gone on YouTube and you can hear the Stokowski Symphony. And of course the strong point is the orchestration because he was a great orchestrator and just translated an orchestrator is not just a composer, but someone who can assign specific parts to specific instruments. So they may blend a flute and a oboe or a flute and a bassoon or two string instruments, but it's up to that transcriber or arranger to decide what instruments are going to play what parts and also to try to, as you brought out, to try to keep the balance so that if it's too thick or one instrument or one section is too loud, can't hear another one of the parts. But Leah, I'd love to know about your experience. What do you play?

Leah Roseman:

Well, I'm a violinist. So I've been an orchestral musician for over 30 years. I'm in the National Arts Centre Orchestra here in Ottawa. So for 20 years or so, we had Pinchas Zukerman was our music director and he had some kind of the old school ideas about free bowings. Some of the stuff that came up was familiar to me with that approach. Yeah. So I have a lot of behind the scenes experience. Yeah, I'm friends with our principal librarian and she's reading your book right now.

Nancy Shear:

I would love to hear from her.

Leah Roseman:

Yeah, I'll tell her.

Nancy Shear:

Love to hear from anybody who reads the book.

Leah Roseman:

I was curious at the end of your book, you said, "My fellow Friday evening tea time members have patiently listened to my stories for decades." And I'm curious what stories didn't make it into the book.

Nancy Shear:

Trying to think. That's a good question. I guess one that was really kind of cute and this is just off the top of my head that we were all pretty broke. None of us had any money, but we would get free tickets from Stokowski and others. And we'd drive to New York. The guys would borrow their father's cars and we'd pile in these cars like a caravan going north on Route 95 or on the turnpike. And after the concert, we would save up. We'd go to the Russian Tea Room, which was next door. And it was wonderful because when you walked into The Russian Tea Room, there were all these faces that you recognize. And so we'd go there and they'd sit us at a table all the way in the back, which I called the Siberia of The Russian Tea Room. And we'd sit there and because we had no money, they had stacks of white bread and black bread and butter, condiments, celery, carrots, olives.

And you'd eat the freebies and then they'd come around, they'd take our order and everybody would order a shrimp cocktail and a black Russian, except for one composer, on Jackie Heller, he liked mint juleps, so that's what he drank. But we'd have a fabulous time and then the waiter would come around again and say, "What would you like now?" And after eating all of this free stuff we'd say the check because we had no money and we were treated so beautifully and I think that was the day and age. I don't know if that would happen today, even at The Russian Tea Room, but that was a gathering place for artists and musicians and they'd leave the stage door and they'd come just about next door. I'm trying to think if there were other stories. I had to cut a lot, there probably are. I can't really think right now of what I left out.

Leah Roseman:

If something comes to you later in this conversation, please share. I know you were prepared to read a couple of excerpts. Would you like to read one now?

Nancy Shear:

Sure. I'd be happy to. This is, I felt important because everybody talks about music and the goal is to have beautiful music. Now to Stokowski, music was not always beautiful and I think these couple of paragraphs will explain that. So that's what I'd like to share with everybody. Listeners who speak of the beauty of Stokowski's music are correct only part of the time. He was concerned with the dramatic power of music, its expressiveness, not its musicological or traditional correctness, nor its being beautiful. The key to his concept of the art was a remark I heard him make it a Philadelphia orchestra rehearsal when he felt the musicians were playing too prettily. Music he said passionately is not always beautiful. Sometimes it is ugly. In Stravinsky's Firebird suite, there's a run, a sequence of notes going from low to high that lasts no more than a second.

Rehearsing the Philadelphia Orchestra in November 1965, Stokowski stopped the orchestra. Conducting almost in slow motion, he stretched the run to five times its normal length. Over and over the orchestra played every note separately until each had a different character and color. Only then did he take the run up to tempo back to its split second length. It was no longer a blur but a multicolored breathtaking rainbow of sound. In Richard Strauss's tone poem Till Eulenspiegel's Merry Pranks, there's a fast descending run that another orchestra he was conducting played with perfect clarity. Each note beautifully articulated. Almost the kind of playing Stokowski had asked for in the Firebird. "No," he yelled at the musicians, "No, you are playing each note too clearly. This is Till falling down. That is the effect we must have. " I heard evidence of the same aesthetic in the earthy raw tones in his performances and recordings of Manuel De Falla's El Amor Brujo.

Nobody could touch Stokowski as far as pure sound is concerned. A veteran member of the New York Philharmonic told me, shaking his head in amazement. He was a magician, but he was also called a vulgarian for making the gorgeous, seductive or raw sounds he created as important an element as any other in his interpretations. Acting in partnership with the composer, he was using tonal coloration and texture as an artist uses pink. He wanted to place an endless pallet of color and effect at the service of the drama of the music.

So I think that explains a lot about his approach and what he wanted. And that to me was an important paragraph in the book so the people will listen differently and not always expect it to be pretty and beautiful and that's not what music is always about. It's about drama and it's about conveying messages to the audience and tone. And that to me is one of the things that make it such a remarkable art form.

Leah Roseman:

I was listening to bits of some of his earlier recordings and I was curious if you wanted to share a couple of your favorites. I could even link them in the show notes for people.

Nancy Shear:

Just yesterday and it's interesting, there are times where I need music and I need a sound to almost maybe as people need a drink or they need something else in life, but it's a need. It's almost a physical need. It wasn't yesterday, it was Sunday. I decided I needed that sound. So I put on, and this is on YouTube, Stokowski's recording of the Shostakovich Symphony number five with the Philadelphia Orchestra that was recorded live live concert in 1960. And you can hear there very clearly examples of what he called the free bowing, which you certainly know a lot about. And that's when bows, everybody's accustomed to bows moving in the same directions during concerts. Most conductors like the uniform bowing, but he did not in most music, certainly not in romantic era. He wanted everybody to bow in different directions. He didn't want the starting and stopping because when a bow moves in one direction and then changes direction, it's almost imperceptible, but there's a little tiny gap in the sound, little stop that you can barely hear.

But when a whole section is doing that, it's a little more magnified and he didn't like that. So he would become infuriated with orchestras where all the first violins were bowing in the same way and all the second violins, the violas, the cellos, the basses and he'd bring his hand down. He had quite a temper. He could be very frightening to a lot of people and he'd bring that hand down and the Wham." And he'd say, "No, do not bow together. Do not do what your neighbor is doing." But in this recording of the Shostakovich 5, this was made after he left Philadelphia as conductor music director. He was gone for 19 years and they were contentious years. He didn't go near the orchestra. They didn't go near him. He had created that orchestra, by the way, from a little rough, people call it a band almost, but it wasn't.

It was a symphony orchestra, but had no flexibility, had no color, but he was the one who created that orchestra, made it almost out of nothing. So he returned after 19 years and of course there were still many players after 19 years from his time who was still in the orchestra, but it was a great, great historic occasion in Philadelphia. And you can hear what he did with the orchestra, the plasticity and the colors and in this case, the drama. But you can hear all of that in that recording, Shostakovich 5 Philadelphia, 1960. There's also another recording that I believe is on YouTube made at exactly that same time. I think it was his transcription arrangement performing version of Tristan und Isolda. That recording is almost X-rated. I mean, the sensuality and the sexuality in that recording is astonishing. It'll really explain just about the flexibility of that orchestra and the expressiveness and the blend, but that is a truly magnificent recording.

And there's also some Bach that he did. Other recordings? I would have to give that a little bit of thought.

Leah Roseman:

Yeah. Well, we'll put a couple of links in if people want to explore more. It's a good jumping off place.

Nancy Shear:

Oh, I would love that. I'll be happy to supply some of those links.

Leah Roseman:

Okay. Well, people will know that Stokowski lied about his background, exaggerated.

Nancy Shear:

Totally.

Leah Roseman:

And I was interested that his first wife, Lucy Hickenlooper, was Olga Samaroff. And I mentioned this to a pianist friend of mine and she said, "Oh, she was the first woman to play all the Beethoven Sonatas."

Nancy Shear:

I believe that's true. I don't know as much about Olga as I do about Leopold.

Leah Roseman:

But she asked me to ask you if you knew anything about her.

Nancy Shear:

Yeah, I know a good bit about her, but she was one of the early, really well-known pianists. When she and Stokowski married in 1911, the headline in Musical America was "Olga Samaroff Marries Conductor". I mean, he didn't have a name. Nobody knew who he was. They knew who she was and she was a truly great pianist. She was very savvy in creating her own profile and then helped Stokowski create his persona because he was English. He had an English accent and luckily for him, the family name was Stokowski. It wasn't Stokes. It was Stokowski. That's a fact. But she helped him develop that sort of press-friendly profile where he would be Slavic, which at that time was considered a lot more interesting than being English. So he developed an accent and he spoke like an Englishman when he first got here.

Leah Roseman:

And I was interested to read in the 1920s, he really got into yoga and meditation and had spent time in India.

Nancy Shear:

Absolutely. There's a book called The Great Om. I think it's O-M. And that's the history of meditation and yoga in the United States. And Stokowski plays a very large part. He loved Eastern philosophy and art and the way Eastern thought all of it, medicine. It was all very important to him, but he meditated every day for his entire life.

And before a concert, he would be completely alone. You couldn't bother him and he would meditate. And then the stories, while 3,000 people waited in the concert hall and 100 waited on stage, the orchestra, he would be backstage meditating and then he'd come out of his dressing room and he was in this meditative bubble and he would walk toward the stage and if anybody said anything to him, it would be shattered. So he'd turn around and he'd go back to his dressing room while all these people waited again and he would meditate until his mind was there to come and conduct. But oh yeah, he was very open to ... He was completely open to any new ideas and new concepts and if something didn't work, he would get involved in developing the newer incarnations and recordings are certainly a great example of that. And he said one day he said, "I was very stupid." I said, "Why?" Because he said in the beginning, in the early days, the recordings were so bad, he said, "I will not record anymore.

It's just terrible sounding." And to him, the pure sound was very, very important. And he said, "I won't make records anymore." And then he said how stupid I was. And he decided, didn't take them too long, that instead of boycotting recording, why not work with the engineers? And he worked with the Bell Labs in improving the technology of recordings. And he was one of the first people to develop stereophonic sound.

So the technology we know today was very largely from him and his colleagues, but it's a remarkable story. The man's brain was so far ahead of its time and the way he thought if I would say something to him and he didn't know what it was, it was immediately, "What is that? How does it work? Where can I find it? Where can I see it? " Even his telephone was a very unusual Swedish model that was the receiver and what do you call it? The dialer were on the bottom. So this long thing, it looked like a piece of modern sculpture. So when it rang, you picked it up and answered it and talked. And then if somebody called and you had to put them on hold, you'd have to lay it down on its side because a lot of people, if they didn't know better, they would say, "Oh, just a minute, I'll get Maestro," and they'd put it down and it would disconnect.

But he didn't want the average phone. He wanted something new and interesting and forward looking and that went on until he was in his 90s and he was still eager for new ideas and to learn.

Leah Roseman:

Now you talked a little bit about meeting the librarians and in the book you talk about your mentor, Bill, and his expansive knowledge and sense of humor.

Nancy Shear:

Oh he was brilliant, brilliant. Yeah. His name was William R. Smith and the librarian was Jesse Taynton, T-A-Y-N-T-O-N. And Bill was incredibly brilliant. He knew so many different things, not just music. I don't remember a musical question that he couldn't answer. I mean, the man's knowledge truly was encyclopedic on many levels and he was a good conductor, a little bit uninspired. Now, see, this is where to me, it gets really interesting because he knew technically he knew anything you wanted to know about conducting and he knew the score and he would get up in front of the orchestra and it was very rigid and very uninspired. So it shows you that it's not just all the knowledge. It's a certain personality that you have to have in a form of communication. It's a miracle how conductors communicate to their orchestras and even though their backs are to the audience, they communicate with the audience too.

It's a phenomenon. It's fabulous. But Bill, oh, he knew everything. He knew literature and Sherlock Holmes, that was a strong interest of him. And there was an organization in Philadelphia called the Baker Street Irregulars and I think there was another one. It may have been the Sherlock Holmes Society and they met every month and they had a contest that everybody would take. And Bill won, he scored a hundred in this contest so often that they finally had to disqualify him from taking the test and he was the one then who developed the tests. He would formulate them, but the man's mind was so brilliant and he was a natural teacher. So he would sit and I shared a desk. It was a long desk. I sat at one of the long ends, Jesse sat at the other long end. Bill sat at the head at the narrower part of it.

And the slightest provocation he would start to in effect lecture lecture. And I'm sitting there. I'm the only person in that room other than Jesse. And Bill is going on talking about whether it was a Mahler symphony or what Mahler did or how Deryck Cooke, the British composer, arranger musicologist, basically a musicologist and an author, how he finished the Mahler symphonies. And Bill would just talk and I would put my pencil down and listen. And that was really my education. So I was so lucky on so many levels to find these beautiful human beings who wanted to share. So yeah, I was sort of the only student in Bill's class. He was the assistant conductor and he was Eugene Ormandy's assistant, which meant part of his job was, and when you think about it, it's incredible. Part of his job was to know every score well enough and to attend every rehearsal and every concert so that at the last minute, if a conductor became ill, Bill was ready to go on.

And it happened sometimes at the very last minute they'd call him and he lived right around the corner. He had to. And they'd say, "Get in here. Maestro or Mr. So- and-so isn't able to come." This may have been in a half hour before the orchestra, before the concert, and Bill would get there. He also worked on some of the bowings. If Ormandy or the concertmaster or the head of each section for some reason couldn't do the bowings, Bill was able to do that, even though he was a pianist organist.That was the other part of his responsibilities. He played keyboard. So if there was a piano part, Bill played it. Organ part, that was Bill. Yeah, it was remarkable being around these people for a long time.

Leah Roseman:

And you were a cellist when you were young. Did you keep that up?

Nancy Shear:

I was a cello student. I wasn't good enough to be a cellist. And I always stop people who say, "Oh, you were a cello." No, I played the cello. I was a cello student. I never really got beyond the cello student point. So could I play the Bach suites? I could get through the notes, but could I really play them and interpret them beautifully as they deserve to be played? No, I wasn't on that level, but I knew my way around the instrument and that helped.

Leah Roseman:

Well, so Eugene Ormandy was the music director when you were there and you didn't like him?

Nancy Shear:

No, I didn't like him.

Leah Roseman:

And he inherited that Stokowski sound, like he walked into this situation.

Nancy Shear:

It was given to him. Yeah. And his appointment was very political because there was an extremely powerful man by the name of Arthur Judson, who was sort of the king of the music business. He started out as a musicologist and knew a lot about music. He then went and became a manager, but on the highest level and he became ... Now imagine this simultaneously, he was the manager of the Philadelphia Orchestra and the New York Philharmonic.

And at that point when Stokowski was leaving the Philadelphia Orchestra, they had to get somebody in there who would not obliterate Stokowski's image, but Stoky wasn't there anymore. And the Philadelphia Orchestra was kind of eager to replace him with somebody who would continue to bring the public in. But it was very much a business decision. And because Judson managed both the Philadelphia Orchestra and the New York Philharmonic and Eugene Ormandy and at times Stokowski, it was a good business decision for them to bring Ormandy in. But was it a good musical decision? There's a quality about the Philadelphia Orchestra that cannot be underestimated. And that is that they loved and probably still do. I'm not as close to the orchestra certainly as I was, but I'm going back more and more, but they would never sabotage the music to get even with a conductor that they hated or who did not treat them well.

They always saved the music. So when Ormandy took over, whether they liked him or not, they played their best and they made the greatest music possible. And that is a tremendous, tremendous service to the art form. So Ormandy inherited that orchestra. Did he really have the talent and the knowledge to do with it what could have been done?

No. But on a personal level, he and I never got along, never. Even though he took me in, he saw me at the stage door and he brought me in. That was the last nice thing he ever did for me. It really was. But he and I, we just did not like each other and he was incredibly jealous of Leopold Stokowski because not only was Stokowski this giant figure in Philadelphia, huge, most famous citizen in Philadelphia for decades, but he also Stoky was six foot two and Ormandy I think was foot six. I think he was five and a half feet tall, which nobody would care about. They're short conductors. But Ormandy was very jealous of Stokowski's image and talent and standing in the city and his height. So there was a lot of jealousy. So we were told all of us in the orchestra, "Do not ever be seen with Leopold Stokowski. Do not mention his name, do not mention..." And the orchestra itself officially always underplayed Stokowski's role always. And I remember one publication, I think it said when Eugene Ormandy took over the Philadelphia Orchestra, he had inherited an ensemble of technical excellence, but it underplayed what Stokowski really had done. This was one of the probably most flexible, greatest ensembles in the history of the world, but it greatly underplayed that. And Jesse and Bill knew about my obsession with Stokowski and they shared it. They worshiped him, but Ormandy never knew that. So when they hired me, they told me, "Be careful if Ormandy ever, ever finds out that you're with Stokowski or that you admire him, your days are numbered." So I had to be very careful. One year after the Philadelphia Orchestra hired me, I was 18 years old when I was with Stokowski backstage during an intermission at the summer hall, which was the Robin Hood Dell's outdoor concert hall, when Stokowski turned to me and said, "Would you consider coming to New York and working with me as part-time orchestra librarian?" Well, here was my great, great musical hero, somebody that I used to fantasize that I could shake his hand and here he was, we were becoming really good friends and he said, "Would you come to New York to work with me? " And that started 1965 and he died in 1977. I used to go to England and France to work with him.

And then when he died, the Philadelphia Inquirer published an article about the fact that I had bought him a birthday gift that he would not live to receive. And that was an article and of course in that article talked about the fact that I had continued to see him and to work with him after he moved to England and Ormandy found out that I had been close to him and he stopped speaking to me for four years until I started to work at the Mann Music Center and then suddenly he started to talk to me again. And I really didn't care to be honest with you, but I did care about his wife Gretel. Her name was Margaret. She was Viennese and everybody called her Gretel. I called her Mrs. Ormandy because I was so young, but she was a wonderful person, took a lot from Ormandy. He did not treat her terribly well, but I loved her and she stopped speaking to me too. That hurt. So there was a real pettiness and a jealousy involved. Musicians, conductors, solo, they're human beings. We don't want them to be. We want them to be gods, but sometimes they can perform like gods, but they're human beings.

Leah Roseman:

And on the humorous side of it, you did put some of these sayings of Chairman Ormandy, these notebooks that people would keep. I did write down one of the quotes you have in your book. "I never say what I mean, but I always managed to say something similar. "

Nancy Shear:

Oh yeah. I mean, there were so many in that book and the great part of that book, all of these quotes were notated by a violist by the name of James Fawcett, F-A-W-C-E-T-T. And Jim sat right under Ormandy's nose. He was right there near the podium, in front of the podium and he hated Ormandy. So when Ormandy said one of these malapropisms, Jim would look up at him, no smile and he'd reach under his seat while he was still looking at Ormandy and he'd pick up a pencil and paper and he'd write them down blatantly and then he'd put them back. I mean, it was such an act of defiance. So these accumulated over the years and Jim compiled them and it was never sold commercially, but all of us have copies called "The Sayings of Chairman Ormandy" and some of them are really hilarious, but it shows ... I mean, nobody knew what he was talking about.

"What the hell is he talking? "But they were really funny and he'd say something that he considered serious and everybody would break up risking their job in a way, but they would laugh. And then sometimes for a bit of levity, he would tell a joke during the rehearsal and he was terrible at telling jokes and he couldn't tell a joke. So he'd try, he'd tell a joke and everybody would sit there stone faced and he'd get really upset and he'd say," I say something serious and everybody laughs and then I tell you something funny and nobody laughs. "I mean, it was fun.

Leah Roseman:

Hi, just a really quick break from the episode. I wanted to let you know about some other episodes that I’ve linked directly to this one in the show notes, with Christina Petrowksa Quilico, Jessica Cottis, Nimrod Borenstein, Clay Zeller-Townson of Ruckus, Yolanda Bruno, Jeremy Mastrangelo and the Euclid Quartet among so many since 2021. In the show notes you’ll also find a link to sign up for my newsletter, where you’ll get exclusive information about upcoming guests, a link for my Ko-fi page to support this project directly, where you can buy me one coffee, or every month, and my podcast merchandise store with a design commissioned from artist Steffi Kelly. You can also review this podcast, share it with your friends, and follow on your podcast app, YouTube, and social media. All this helps spread the word! Thanks. Now back to my conversation with Nancy.

Nancy Shear:

This also goes back to the south of France and one of Stokowski's daughters that I hadn't known before this, her name was Luba and she came with her family and one of her daughters, the granddaughter, Lila Janu. We are very, very close I think of her as a cousin or even a sister. Luba showed up in the South of France with her two daughters and we ate dinner and this is after dinner. After dinner one evening, Luba suggested that we all listen to one of her father's recordings. I pushed the dishes aside. She set up the cassette player at the center of the table and Natalie, a friend, brought a stack of tapes. "How about Scheherazade ?" Luba suggested. I dreaded listening to this music with Stokowski sitting close beside me. To avoid distracting him, I'd have to be still and quiet, not react outwardly, not look at him while the music played.

This wasn't Mozart or Bach. It was one of the most romantic works in orchestral literature, the symphonic suite by Rimsky-Korsakov based on the story of the Arabian nights. I lowered my head as the music began, but I could still see Stokowski's hands resting in his lap. Every so often he'd make a small characteristic conducting gesture. The first two sections, fiery and dramatic, give way to the third, the young prince and the young princess and a simple nine note phrase unfolds in the violins. It's sweet and innocent, even a bit shy. The line immediately repeats slightly embellished. Most conductors take this at the same steady tempo and degree of loudness as the first as it's written in the score, but Stokowski made the repeat softer, hushed, more hesitant. The slight drop in loudness intensified the music sense of yearning and I felt like we were eavesdropping on a lover's whispers.

As he had carefully shaped these lines, Stokowski had made gentle rubatos teasing the tempo. He had slowed it to his sweet seductiveness then pushed ahead with ecstatic impulsiveness. All this detail had occurred in just over one minute. I was astonished at what I was hearing. He had invested great thought in a work that many conductors consider trite. I particularly loved that to give the repeated phrase more dramatic power, he had made it softer, not louder.

Leah Roseman:

Beautiful. Thank you. Actually, back to Stokowski, one thing that I found amazing is he told you about meeting Stravinsky when he was preparing Rite of Spring. So if you could convey that story, I thought that was amazing.

Nancy Shear:

This was, let's see, 1965, 66, 67. Stokowski had given the ... I'm trying to remember. He did the Rite of Spring. I think he did the, was it the US premiere? I would have to check on that, but he also did a version in 1929 with Martha Graham.

Stokowski knew that this was a ballet and he wanted to do it with a dancer. So Martha Graham danced the sacrificial virgin, but Stokowski told me just ... And again, he could take liberties, he could do what he wanted to do. The composer may not have loved it, but the other hand, there were full of contradictions. Stokowski did want to give the composer what he or she had asked for. So when he was going to do the Rite of Spring, the first time he conducted it, Stravinsky came to visit him and Stokowski showed me, he pulled over a chair and he said Stravinsky sat right next to him and the score was open over both their laps and Stravinsky started to whistle and sing at the very, that high basoon solo. He'd start with that and he beat every measure illustrating to Stokowski how it should be interpreted and what he wanted done until he said 31 or 32 minutes later, (singing). And the piece ended. So they worked on it together.

Leah Roseman:

Amazing, to have been a fly on the wall for that.

Nancy Shear:

Yeah. Well, Stokowski also heard the Mahler symphony number eight in its world premiere conducted by Mahler and he vowed at that time that he was going to bring it to ... He was going to conduct that and he did a Philadelphia Orchestra March of 1916. So it took him only four years to develop the Philadelphia Orchestra. He started conducting the orchestra in 1912. Took him four years to get to the orchestra, to get the orchestra to the point where they could play the Mahler symphony number eight. And it's called the subtitle is a Symphony of a Thousand. It's kind of a nickname because it employed a thousand people. It has a huge orchestra and a huge chorus. And when Stokowski did it, 1200 people and it was just this. They had to build a whole separate stage over. They had to extend In the stage in the Academy of Music over the orchestra pit to allow for larger forces on stage.

So he knew what Mahler wanted. He wanted to give that to whatever composers works he was going to conduct. So that's why he asked Stravinsky. But Stokowski did. Oh, I don't even know how many. I think it was 1200 world premieres or something. It was huge amount. But I met a lot of composers through Stokowski.

Leah Roseman:

So another very important musical person in this book is Rostropovich known as Slava. I did have the opportunity to tour with him when I was, it must have been like 21, 22, and it was like a tour of Europe with the Schleswig-Holstein Orchestra. And so it was amazing. And he played Dvořak cello concerto. So I had that little taste of his presence.

Nancy Shear:

You had it in your ears.

Leah Roseman:

Yeah. This would've been like 1992. So you had a very close relationship with him. And in fact, you were so brave you went into the USSR when he was blacklisted to look for him. And you went to this Beethoven triple concert with Oistrach. Maybe you could tell that story.

Nancy Shear:

I decided in 1970 because nobody knew where Rostropovich was, nobody. And I ran into Rudolph Serkin, the great pianist, who was also director of the Curtis Institute of Music. And I had known him when he was soloist with the Philadelphia Orchestra. He actually in Ormandy were good friends. And I saw him on Locust Street and I said, "Does anybody know? Have you heard from Slava? And has anybody heard from him?" And he said, "No, no one has." And I said, "Well, I'm very frightened that they'll do something to him, that his life is in danger." And then I followed it up with, "Well, I doubt if they'd touch him because he's so famous and such a great musician." And Serkin looked at me and said, "Are you kidding?" He said, "They can do anything they want. " And he actually said they can kill him if they want and there are no repercussions.

So I thought nobody knows where he is. Nobody knows how he is. I'm going to go over. I think I was 24 years old. I'm going to go over and find him, see if he's okay. Now this was the height of the Cold War, height of the Brezhnev era, dead of winter. It was 18th of December 1970. Four months after the Leningrad trials where I'm trying to remember, it was a group of Jewish dissidents who were going to plan to hijack a plane and get out of the Soviet Union. And here I was, Jewish American and I'm going to go behind the Iron Curtain and find my friend. I mean, was it completely crazy? No. I mean, obviously it wasn't because it worked out beautifully, but it took me quite a while because he was persona non-grata in the Soviet Union, his concerts were constantly scheduled and canceled.

And then they'd reschedule it and then they'd cancel it again. It was terrible. And by a series of hair raising coincidences, I found him and I got to hear him perform. That was December 70 and it was a Beethoven anniversary.

This concert was a tribute to Beethoven and Oistrach was playing the violin solo. Sviatoslav Richter was the pianist, Mstislav Rostropovich playing cello in the Beethoven Triple Concerto with Yevgeny Svetlanov conducting the Moscow State Symphony in the Great Hall of the conservatory. I mean, can you imagine hearing this? But right before the performance, and again, it was a series of coincidences that I was able to get into that concert and they had one ticket. They sold out one person before me and yet I was very calm. I'd come all the way across the Atlantic. And at that moment, there was a man dressed in a white shirt and a black bow tie, black pants. I could tell he was a member of the orchestra who came through a door holding an envelope and he said, in Russian, "I have one ticket, one ticket." And I walked over, I bought the ticket from him and I got into that concert.

So I wanted very much for him to know that the Americans and especially me, because that we hadn't forgotten about him, but I couldn't ask for him because he would've gotten into trouble. I would've gotten into trouble. So I had to get backstage and I said to one of the guards, I couldn't ask for Richter because he suffered from a lot of mental problems and emotional problems. And I knew that it wouldn't be good to ask for him. So I asked in my broken Russian where I could find David Oistrach and he directed me to, I remember they were stairs, staircase and they went up and I walked up those steps and there was Oistrach and Rostropovich standing there. I walked over to Slava and I just extended my hand and just to make sure that nobody was going to get into any trouble or think that I was a close friend I said Nancy Shear, Philadelphia Orchestra. I had left the orchestra a year before, but I said Philadelphia Orchestra. And he nodded and we smiled at each other and that was it. But at least I knew that he was alive, he looked well and I went back to the United States.

Leah Roseman:

And you wrote about how during this time he was playing in villages with accordion accompaniment, but it struck me he didn't stop playing. He did whatever he could.

Nancy Shear:

You probably saw too that fierce passionate love of music

And nothing would stop him from playing nothing. Yes, there were times where he would have, instead of a pianist, he would have an accordionist accompany him or he would play solo. The concerts were booked by Goskontsert, which was, we used to call them Big Brother. That was the only concert agency in the Soviet Union because it was like bread. You didn't have your choice of all the different brand names of bread and all the different companies. It was bread. That's what it said on the truck and that's what it said on the loaf of bread, bread. And so there was only one concert agency and they arranged his concerts, but he had to promote them. And he told me that in the little villages he would have advertisements printed for his concerts and he would take a hammer and nails and go around the town and hammer up these advertisements, these little posters.

And he said sometimes he was playing for 10 people, but he made music and that's really what he cared about. A lot of people said to me, "Oh, he came to the United States. He defected." He did not defect. He was ousted from his country. His citizenship was taken away. He was in France and he was not allowed to go home for a while until he could finally get his cellos out and his dogs. It was a nightmare, but he never ... A lot of people said to me, Oh, he left the country because of money. He could make more money being concertizing independently. That was never part of his reasoning for leaving the Soviet Union. Sure, it was a great byproduct for him. It was wonderful, but that wasn't his reason. And he also wanted to make music as a free person, play what he wanted to play and play the way he wanted it and he did.

Leah Roseman:

And you yourself, Nancy, it really struck me reading this book, how independent you were, especially at the time that you didn't want to get married, you wanted to be independent, carve out your own career. And there was even that little story where you heard an announcement in the hotel for the International Festival of Youth Orchestras and you thought, "There's an opportunity. I'll grab that. " And do you want to talk about your broadcast career? You had a very long broadcast career.

Nancy Shear:

I miss that. I miss that a lot. Loved having a radio show, but I love this. What you're doing is extremely important with podcasts and being able to allow people to express themselves freely and to talk about anything the way anybody wants to. But yeah, the radio, it was really interesting. When this article appeared, when Stokowski died that I had worked with him, was on the staff of the Curtis Institute at that time as orchestra librarian. My phone rang and this woman said, "Oh, are you the Nancy Shear I read about in the Philadelphia Enquirer article about Stokowski?" I said, "Yes." And she said, "Do you lecture?" I had never given a lecture in my life. And I said, "Yes." And she said, "Oh, well, I'm the head of the lecture program at the Bala Cynwyd Women's Committee Women's Clubs." And she says, "And that was a town right outside of Philadelphia." And she said, "Would you consider giving a lecture here?" I said, "Yes, absolutely." She said, "What do you charge?" And I said, "Well, I'm really not sure about my price for that, but what do you usually pay?" She says, "Well, we usually pay about $50." I said, "That's my fee. That's perfect." I was winging it. And I had a Volkswagen Beetle at the time and I remember my mother and I got into the Volks and we drove out as a test run to Bala Cynwyd just where the lecture would be held because I didn't want to leave it for the last minute and have the possibility of getting lost. And I made a little outline and I'll never forget doing that lecture. And I love talking about music and Stokowski and these people were interested and I thought, "I want to do more lectures," which I still do. And I thought, how do I do that? So in those days we didn't have computers. I cut out letters from the newspaper and I repositioned them and I made a little brochure. I took it to a place where they could sort of photocopy it and I had the brochure. It was all homemade.

We also had a fabulous tool in those days called the Yellow Pages and I used the yellow pages a lot. And you could look up lecture organizations or you could look up clubs that would give you all the clubs. Now we can do it with a computer. And I developed a mailing list and I sent it to all these clubs and I thought, why not send it to the local radio station, which was WUHY in Philadelphia. Now it's WHYY. And I sent it and I got a phone call from quite a distinguished gentleman by the name of William Siemering. Now Bill Siemering is still with us and I have not been in touch with him, but he called and he said, "We don't need a lecturer." He said, "But you would be perfect as a radio host." He said, "Are you interested?" I said, "Absolutely." So I went up to see him 45th and Market.

Now 45th and Market Street was also where American Bandstand, Dick Clark was broadcasting from ... And I got into his broadcasting booth. It was like a telephone booth, but his name was on the wall. It was a great thrill, but Bill said, "What would you like to do? " I said, "Well, I'd love to do interviews." He said, "Oh, that sounds good." He said, "Who can you get? " Well, I mean, because of my orchestra library work, I could get anybody. And I said, "Who would you like? " And from what I remember, he said Rostropovich, not knowing that I was really good friends with Slava. I said, "Oh, that's easy. I'll be happy." So I started doing all of these interviews for WUHY. And then in 1980, I moved to New York and I asked the people at WUHY, I said, "Is there anybody in New York you'd know I'd love to continue doing radio?" And they said, "Yeah, we know this one guy." And they gave me his name and his phone number and I called him and I said, "I have a strong background in radio and writing and music. Do you need a radio host or interviewer?" And they said, "No." He said, "No, we don't need anybody." And I went on about what I could do. He said, "No, we have nothing opened here, nothing." I said, "Well, can make up a demonstration tape. Can I send that to you? " And he said, "No, we don't need anybody." I said, "Okay, thanks." I hung up and I sent him an audition tape. What did I have to lose?

And he called one week later and he said," How would you like to host a concert live from the Frick Collection? "I said," I'd love it. "And that was the beginning and then they gave me my own show, I guess it was a year or two later. So that went on for a while and loved it.

Leah Roseman:

Was he polite with you after that initial kind of rudeness?

Nancy Shear:

Oh, he wasn't rude. He was just being honest. He was very lovely. There was nothing rude about it. He was being honest. He just didn't need anybody. But then he later became the producer of several shows and specials we did. We did one called the Americathon and he was a total delight to work with. He was just delightful. His name was Andrew Berger and I have not been in touch with him, but I know when I did broadcast with him and somewhere live national or international, just having the sound of his voice and my headphones was such a feeling of security. He was a total pleasure and delight to work with.

Leah Roseman:

Oh, great to hear.

Nancy Shear:

It's about taking opportunities and seeing opportunities and not taking no as an ... You have to do it in a nice way. You have to work with people and work with them in nice ways, good ways, but there are so many opportunities sitting in a hotel lobby in London, which I never did. Again, it was coincidences and I heard over the loudspeaker said," Well, all members of the International Festival Youth Orchestras, please come to room 12. "I got up, I went to room 12. I mean, who wouldn't out of curiosity? And I walked in there and there were a couple of hundred young musicians and noise level was just fierce. And I screamed to one," Who's in charge? "And they pointed to a woman and I went over to her and I said," My name is Nancy Shear and I'm an orchestra librarian. Do you ever need an orchestra librarian?

"And she said," We don't right now, but when you get back to the States, send me your resume. "And I put a package together and she gave me her card and I sent her a resume and for the next three years for the summers, I worked in England, Scotland, and Wales. And one of my best closest friends I just talked to yesterday, I met her and that was 1972, 73. So again, you just let your imagination go and live creatively. That's really, I think, what it's all about.

Leah Roseman:

There were a couple of things I wanted to bring up that funny story about the Theramin is back to Stokowski, late 1920s that he ... Could you tell that story? I thought that was so funny.

Nancy Shear:

Yeah. Again, his fascination with anything new and technological and he just loved it, but he also loved a very rich face sound to serve as a foundation for tone and sound. And so he worked with the Wurlitzer Company. I think this is what you were talking about with the Theramin. Theremin is one of the first electronic instruments where you don't touch the instrument. It's sound waves. You just wave your hands in front of it and changes the pitch, but it's this eary sound almost like Twilight Zone kind of thing, but that was kind of a point of departure. So he wanted this very rich bass sound. So he worked with the Wurlitzer company to develop, I think it was just one octave keyboard that would deliver a very rich, low bass that was an octave or two below double basses.

Stokowski was the one who started the use in America, I believe, of the bass extension, the C string extension, which would provide three or four notes lower than what the lowest note had been. He loved that rich bass sound. So he worked with Wurlitzer and they had speakers and you could feel it more than you could actually hear it. And Stokowski loved it. The only problem was that it made it nauseated the people on stage, all the Philadelphia orchestra players suddenly were getting really queasy from these low vibrations to the point where they had to stop using it. So that was it.

Leah Roseman:

Yeah. I don't know if you explained it that specifically in the book, because my note said it was a camouflaged theremin and you mentioned that they felt nauseated. So I didn't realize about the two octaves lower. That's really interesting. Yeah.

Nancy Shear:

Yeah. It wasn't really a theremin, but he did a lot with the Theramin and he performed with Clara Rockmore, who was one of the great Theremin players, a virtuoso Theramin player. And he worked with her. He just didn't want to sit still. He wanted all the possibilities and he wanted to help develop them and not just use what was available but develop what had not been made available. Great imagination.

Leah Roseman:

And in your book, you talk about so many great performers you heard including Arthur Rubinstein, Jacqueline du Pré. Do you want to share any of those experiences? You seem to have such a great memory for concert experiences.

Nancy Shear:

There were so many at that time and I got to listen to rehearsals as well as concerts, which was one of the great gifts of my life was hearing, because in a rehearsal, it's not so much hearing what they say because not every musician, certainly not every conductor talks a lot. So it's not a matter of listening to what they say, but watching what they do and how that results in a performance that evolves, how it changes and hearing the first rehearsal and how it's molded and it's become something very plastic where the conductor can do what he or she wants to do and how that changes and certainly the rehearsals with these great, great soloists, that was really remarkable and how they were the ones in effect leading the org or deciding what that interpretation should be. And the conductors had to become really good accompanists.

And that's one area, I have to say, where Ormandy was excellent. He was a superb accompanist. He could follow what the soloists wanted and give and lead the orchestra to deliver how the soloists wanted that performance to go. The great, great pianist, Byron Janis called him ... In fact, he told me we were very, very good friends and he said that Ormandy was the best, if not one of the best. He was right up there. But yeah, Rubinstein, Byron Janis was incredible pianist. And I didn't write about him a lot in the book because I would go backstage and he had this aura of being in another world, a different century. And of course, he was one of the great, great interpreters of Chopin and all the other romantic composers and Bach as well, but his Rachmaninov was just hair raisingly wonderful. He was, I guess, the main student or I hate to call him a student, it was more than that.

He was a recipient of a lot of communication with Vladimir Horowitz, but Byron Janis was one person that when I saw him, he just seemed like he was in his own world and didn't want to be bothered, but he later became a very, very dear friend. But the rehearsals with these great musicians were revelations because you heard how that interpretation developed with the soloist, the conductor, and the entire orchestra. Jackie du Pré was quite young. She wasn't that much older than I was and what a tragedy, just this great expressive romantic concepts of these works. And I think almost every performance I heard with her was conducted by her young husband, Daniel Barenboim, who's now past 80.

Leah Roseman:

And you worked at Curtis for several years and you wouldn't have been that much older than some of the students. Did you become friends with some of these people?

Nancy Shear:

I became family with those students whom I just love dearly. And we are still to this day 50 years later in very close touch, but I'm about 10 years older than they are, but they are like relatives. Yeah. But I had an office and I had a teapot and my office had been in the basement of Curtis when I first started working there in 1972. And when we moved into the building right across the street, which they called Knapp Hall, K-N-A-P-P, just it was almost like a driveway right across. They sent a carpenter up to my office and said, they told me to build whatever shelves or cabinets you need. I said, yes, cabinets would be great on three sides of the room. My desk was on one corner and then I had the three other sides and they said, "Any specifications?" I said, "I'd like sliding doors, but I want each one to be able to hold at minimum of two students." And he said, "What do you mean?" I said, "Well, however much young people weigh, I want them to be able to boost themselves up on these cabinets." We had some fabulous discussions and I'd boil the water for tea, which was going all the time and they'd come up and pour cups of tea and we'd have these wonderful discussions about interpretation.

I remember one student came up, I think was he a trumpet player and he said he had an LP with him and I said, "What'd you buy?" And he said, "Oh, I just bought the definitive performance of the Mahler Fifth." I said, "Really? Come on, sit down, let's talk." And we talked about what makes it definitive and is there a definitive performance and why? And what were these interpretations? Was it Klemperer who worked with Mahler or was it Bernstein who had a very great awareness of Mahler's music and championed it? It was interesting questions, but we had some wonderful conversations and those students were total delights, just delightful people. They were great young musicians and many of them went on to major, huge careers, but they were beautiful people as well as wonderful musicians. So I was very lucky to have them in my life.

Leah Roseman:

Do you think some of those conversations prepared you in your life as a broadcaster doing interviews?

Nancy Shear:

Everything we learn helps. Everything contributes. It's all pieces of a big mosaic. Everything influences everything else. Nothing is ever lost.You do something in your life and it doesn't work out. You really can't say, "Oh, what a waste of time." It's not because somehow it works its way in. So I don't know. I think it's all part of a whole. I really do.

Leah Roseman:

Yeah. I think you wrote in your book that one of the quotes of Stokowski's was, "I learned more from the bad concerts than the good ones."

Nancy Shear:

It was twofold. He said, "You're right. I learned more from bad performances than I do from good ones." Now, we're not talking about enjoying ourselves or hearing the fullest experience that you can have with the music, but from a bad performance, it's not a waste of time for people who can hear what should have been done correctly and can correct that if they're in a position to do so. So for him, his advice was listen to the bad conductors, listen to the bad performances, listen to me he wrote, and I have this in a letter from him, listen to bad orchestration. That was it, because you can learn a lot from that. And as I write in the book, that is true if it's not a bad composer, because if the composer has composed the music and it's very unbalanced, then it's not the conductor's fault. That's the fault of the composer and it's very hard to fix that. But you can learn from almost every, you can learn from bad experiences, but you can learn from almost everything. But of course, I learned a lot from hearing Stokowski performances and hearing and from being an orchestra librarian. I could actually go to rehearsals and concerts and hear the markings that we had marked into the parts. So yeah, it was all, look, I'm learning like crazy right now.

Leah Roseman:

What kinds of things?

Nancy Shear:

A lot about life, about living, about other people, about empathy and not being as judgmental as I used to be. I want to learn a lot more about literature. I want to start writing some short stories. Let's be honest, my big travels, I haven't really traveled and I miss that desperate Absolutely. But I can learn a lot walking around the block and I can see some wonderful things and some beautiful things. I hope this doesn't sound kind of like Pollyanna. I don't mean it that way, but I'm being truthful that what we have to do too is to pay attention because everybody's so connected with cell phones and the technology and I can go through three hours just looking through my emails because I have 9,000 that have accumulated one of several accounts. So where do you draw the line? You say, "Wait a minute, I'm not going to be on my cell phone today or as much today. I'm not going to be as involved in answering every email within five minutes, but I'm going to unplug. I'm going to take a walk and go around the block or talk with somebody I love.

And it's very important to do that. On Sundays, I am not reachable. My phone is not on. Most of the time do not go online on Sundays. That's my day to just calm down, stay in my head, do my writing, do my thinking, do my listening.

It's like 1956 in my home. I mean, I'm back before cell phones. I'm back before telephone. I don't answer the phone. So I'm not saying that would work for everybody, but I think there's a place for it in the chaos. The input, so input, input, input. Stop. Take a deep breath. So yeah, I think everything can be a learning experience, sometimes easy, sometimes painfully. But yeah, I'm learning like crazy. I'd love to go back to school just to write fiction.

Leah Roseman:

Yeah, I was going to ask you if you're maybe writing short stories or a novel because you're such a storyteller and you write so well.

Nancy Shear:

Thank you. Yeah, but it takes something all of that takes something that gets to be in shorter and shorter supply and that's time. And I'm very aware that my time may be very limited. I don't know. I mean, I can live another 20 years, maybe not. So time becomes very precious and you become conscious of it. And the writing, to write a beautiful on the sentence level, to give that a lot of thought and the paragraphs and how that all fits into a chapter and how these chapters have a form just like a symphony in the totality of what you're doing. So it takes time. There was one paragraph I did not, I don't think I printed out talking about when Stokowski was watching a sunset and I was sitting next to him and then we had a big picture window and suddenly it really threw me, I have to say.

We're watching this like a movie and we're watching the sunset. And suddenly he said out of nowhere, "You can do that through music." So I said, I mean the obvious with, or maybe it was a sunrise. The obvious would be brass, sunrise. So I said to him with brass, and he said very quietly, "No, with strings." And I'll tell you, my hair stood on end. So I wanted to describe what we were seeing out the window. I talked about the yellows and the oranges and the reds. And I had something like the yellows like the lemons growing on the balcony. This was in the south of France where he had rented a villa, like the lemons on the balcony. And then I had something about the orange. And then I said, and red bloody gashes in the sky. Now it's very vivid, but there were two really beautiful analogies relating it to two very beautiful things.

The third one was a little bit violent, bloody gashes in the sky. And somebody at the publishing company said, "You want to rethink that? " Then I started doing research. What red was there that was in the south of France at that time that would've related to this story?

Well, I can't tell you. It took me about three days. I started researching, were strawberries available? Well, no, this was December in South of France. Strawberries were in the spring. That was, I guess, April or May. No, there weren't strawberries. And I went on and on and I was really becoming impatient because I was using a lot of time and I thought, "Nan, take out your pictures." I had slides that I had scanned. So I started looking through the pictures. Well, there was a photo of Stokowski that I had taken and his daughter and in the background right in back of him, there were gladiolas, bright red. And I thought that's the key. So I put in there that it was the red, like the gladiolas we had bought at the flower market in the center of Nice. It fit perfectly, but to get that correct and poetic and expressive, it took me three days to do research and I thought about nothing else but that.

So again, writing is a process and it takes the one thing that today we just don't see to have a lot of, which is time.

Leah Roseman:

Well, before we close this out, was there another excerpt that you prepared that you wanted to read?

Nancy Shear:

The excerpt I'm going to read now I particularly love because it shows, talks about color, tonal color and how musicians can change the color of colors that they produce and how Stokowski thought and I hope other conductors think this comments on a rehearsal that I heard him conduct. As I had seen and heard of the first rehearsal he permitted me to attend, there were obviously sounds in his imagination he was working to replicate. Apparently that had been the case for decades. A member of the orchestra told me that in the 1930s for one of his Bach transcriptions, Stokowski wanted a specific tone quality from Saul Caston, the orchestra's remarkable Principal trumpet player. He had Caston try every mute available. None produced the exact color and texture he wanted. He asked Caston to aim his trumpet up toward the ceiling down toward the floor. Then at the back of the stage, nothing worked. Then he spied the carrying case for Caston's trumpet. "What's that, "Stokowski asked, pointing to the crumpled canvas bag on the floor. "Put that over the bell of your horn," he ordered and Caston played through the fabric producing exactly the color Stokowski had in mind. Two Curtis students attending that evening's concert were baffled. What instrument had produced that sound? Was it brass or woodwind, high basoon or muted horn? The two boys who came backstage to solve the mystery were Samuel Barber and Gian Carlo Menotti. They'd become two of the most prominent composers of the 20th century.

Leah Roseman:

That's such a great story. I remember that very well from the book.

Nancy Shear:

I love this one that shows all the choices we have as interpreters of music and how all of us, this is so terribly important, all of us can hear these variations if we listen closely enough. And I'm not talking about knowing any technicalities. I'm just talking about the message that musicians communicate to their listeners through their playing and how everybody is equipped to listen and receive that. And you don't have to be a music critic, you don't have to be a musician, you don't have to be a scholar and how everybody who is in that concert hall, anybody who's sitting in a seat in the concert hall belongs there, period. And don't ever let anybody tell you any differently that you belong there as a listener just as much as a music critic belongs there, period. No discussion. I have too many people who say, "Oh, I don't know anything about music.

I don't know if I can go into a concert." And I always wish I can take them by the hand and just go in there with them, get in there and just pay attention.

Leah Roseman:

Well, Nancy, I was thinking to close this out maybe to reward the people who've listened through this two-hour episode, you could explain about how you met the man who met Brahms.

Nancy Shear:

I was 18 years old, 1964, 65, and sharing a desk with the assistant conductor of the Philadelphia Orchestra, William Smith. And this very elderly gentleman walked into the library. He was extremely short. He was wearing very thick round glasses and he was bolding. He was quite old. And when you're 18 or so, everybody's old. I mean, somebody in their 20s, certainly 30s is old. This man was probably well into his late 80s, 90s. And as he entered the room, William Smith said to me, he says, "Shake this man's hand." So I didn't know what was happening. So this guy walked over to me and I partially stood up. He walked over and leaned over and we sort of held hands and Bill said, "You are now shaking the hand that shook the hand of Johannes Brahms." Well, I'm getting chills now. When you are 18, it changes who you are.

So I said, "Where did you meet Brahms?" And he said, "In Hanslick's apartment." Now Eduard Hanslick was one of the great music critics of his time in Vienna and this Raoul Hellmer, his father had a pharmacy. So whenever Brahms or his doctor dropped off a prescription and asked for it to be delivered, they would call Raoul because he was a music lover and he would deliver it to Herr Brahms. And in this case, Brahms was visiting with Hanslick and he delivered the prescription there and he talked with Brahms and he had also walked through the Stadt Park with Mahler with Gustav Mahler and he received from the mayor of Vienna a copy of the facsimile of the Mahler symphony number 10 that Mahler never lived to finish. And William Smith and I had spent a summer working together comparing the finished score, the completed score that Deryck Cooke had made with the sketches of the Mahler 10th that the composer had not lived to finish.

So everything had come full circle, but there was one music critic who otherwise gave the book a great review, but he said the book bears the title that refers to an inconsequential event, inconsequential incident. And in a way I know what he means, but when you're 18 and something like that happens, it's not inconsequential. It's huge. It's huge.

Leah Roseman:

Yes. And what struck me when I read it that your whole book is kind of about legacy and the community of musicians and-

Nancy Shear:

That's lovely. That's lovely. Nobody has said that. Thank you for that, Leah. That's very beautifully put. Yeah.

Leah Roseman:

Well, it's been so amazing to talk to you and I do want to close this out, but is there anything we didn't talk about that you really want to get to?

Nancy Shear:

No, but I love what you just said about legacy and I think it's something that everybody can think of in their lives and the younger generations coming up now and how it's really part of our heritage to share these legacies with the young people and bring them in and open the door. And just as the librarian said to me, you may come in to say to these young people about our legacy, you may come in. You are welcome here.

Leah Roseman:

Wonderful. Well, thanks so much.

Nancy Shear:

Leia, thank you very much for this opportunity. It's been a delight talking to you.

Leah Roseman:

I hope you enjoyed this episode. Keep in mind, I've also linked directly several episodes you'll find interesting in the show notes of this one. Please do share this with your friends and check out episodes you may have missed at learoseman.com. If you could buy me a coffee to support this series, that would be wonderful. I'm an independent podcaster and I really do need the help of my listeners. All the links are in the show notes. Podcast theme music was written by Nick Kold. Have a wonderful week.