There is a passage in Serge Koussevitzky’s latest recording of Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony that some listeners might hear with horror, but others with a certain dread.
He recorded the piece in 1949 with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, during the last weeks of his 25-year conducting stint. About two minutes into the first movement, the symphony is doing its best to maintain its composure. The flutes and clarinets bend gently, then the oboes and horns; the cellos and double basses remain steady beneath the nervous crackle of the other strings.
But then the bass begins to descend. Suddenly the higher strings begin to dominate, as anxiety sets in; this sinking bass becomes inevitable. Tchaikovsky asks for a crescendo. Koussevitzky grants it, but it also accelerates dramatically into the darkness, as fateful motifs ring out. A few seconds later, just as the music seems ready to face its fate, Koussevitzky decides to keep us waiting. The fanfares ring out, completely out of time, to announce an unwritten silence. And then, the savagery. As Tchaikovsky himself described it, “no haven exists.”
It’s the kind of moment that, in the wrong hands, gives Tchaikovsky a bad name. Koussevitzky wasn’t alone in taking liberties with the composer, but many other conductors at least tried to contain the drama rather than let hysteria set in. Even Wilhelm Furtwängler, who, like Koussevitzky, sought to follow the implicit spirit of a score as much as its explicit text, remained more faithful to what Tchaikovsky had actually written.
But in Koussevitzky’s hands, the effect is overwhelming. This Tchaikovsky Fourth Symphony is compelling evidence of what he and the Boston Symphony have accomplished in their quarter-century together. The conviction resonates. The playing is virtuosic, but not for the sake of showing off. Every phrase sings. There is tremendous power and intensity, but also enough elegance that writer Harris Goldsmith called the Boston strings “one of the hedonistic delights of Western civilization.” In 1944, New York Times critic Olin Downes said that Koussevitzky had refined his orchestra into “the most sophisticated and sensitive symphonic ensemble in the world.”
However, many of Koussevitzky’s contemporaries believed that his legacy would lie not only in the unmatched technical facility he instilled in his musicians, but in what he insisted they perform. As the critic and composer Virgil Thomson wrote in 1947: “His unique position in a world full of excellent conductors, many of them devoted to contemporary music, is that he has played, launched, published, and paid more of it than anyone else.” His place in history, Thomson concluded, was “already assured and glorious.”
Koussevitzky’s record remains remarkable, as if he had subjugated a significant part of musical history to his will. Using the fortune he had acquired through his marriage to his second wife, Natalie Ushkova, he founded the Éditions Russes de Musique in 1909, a publishing house that he used to provide financial security for Russian composers, as well as for himself, by providing him with scores to build his career. Scriabin, Prokofiev, and Stravinsky all benefited. In 1942, in memory of Natalie, he established the Koussevitzky Foundation for Music to fund new works. Early commissions went to Britten, Messiaen, and Martinu; his grants now total 448.
According to the Boston Symphony, the orchestra gave 146 world premieres during his tenure, as well as 86 American premieres and scores of other performances of recent works he deemed worthy of an audience. He conducted more than 300 works by Americans. To those who favored him, he was a hero. “It is easy to foresee that the story of Serge Koussevitzky and the American composer will one day assume the character of a legend,” said Aaron Copland, a friend of Serge Koussevitzky. “This is at least one legend that has been well founded.”
The legend has faded. The Boston Symphony has regularly tried to keep the flame alive, and as it tries to recapture its former progressiveness under its new president and CEO, Chad Smith, it cites Koussevitzky as a precedent. The orchestra is celebrating 150 years since his birth and 100 years since his arrival in Boston with a series of online and physical exhibitions, as well as concerts and events at Tanglewood, the summer festival and training center he founded in the Berkshires.
Otherwise, Koussevitzky has been largely abandoned to myth. The only serious biography written in English appeared 77 years ago. (Its author, the Boston critic Moses Smith, was so unforgiving that Koussevitzky sued to prevent its publication.) More recent volumes by musicologist Victor Yuzefovich are still awaiting translation from Russian. On disc, Koussevitzky has had a terrible fate. Oddly, few of his studio recordings are readily available, though Pristine and other labels offer them, as well as live broadcasts. Sony, which has recently released box sets of recordings by many lesser conductors, has not confirmed when its next Koussevitzky box set will be released.
How can we explain this fate for a man who was once mentioned in the same breath as Toscanini? For one thing, the sound of Koussevitzky’s Boston Symphony did not endure; his successor, Charles Munch, preferred drier, more pared-down textures. For another, Koussevitzky’s taste for subjectivity was not exactly fashionable in his day, and it became even less so as fidelity to the letter of a score became an article of faith among musicians. A third plausible reason is far more discouraging: classical music sank deeper and deeper into the past after Koussevitzky’s death, but a legacy resolutely turned toward the future paid the price.
Koussevitzky was born Sergei in 1874 in Vyshny Volochyok, a town on the Moscow-St. Petersburg road. His parents were klezmer musicians, and he turned to the arts at an early age, enrolling in a music school with the promise of learning the double bass. Remarkably, he became Europe’s leading soloist on the instrument before making his conducting debut in Berlin in 1908. “Oh Lord, how happy I would be if only I could play the double bass!” Furtwängler later said. “If Koussevitzky had not mastered the instrument, he would never have succeeded in producing such sonorities from the strings of his orchestra.”
Koussevitzky returned to Russia from Germany. He formed his own orchestra and took it on tour on a steamship along the Volga. In 1920, after the Bolsheviks seized his house and part of his fortune, he joined other émigrés in Paris, where he re-formed an ensemble and launched a concert series. Commissions such as Ravel’s orchestration of Mussorgsky’s “Pictures at an Exhibition” confirmed his reputation as a force for new music; he “created for us a new orchestral tradition,” one French critic noted. In fact, Koussevitzky’s reputation crossed the Atlantic before he did. Shortly before he arrived in America, the Boston Symphony Orchestra had to reassure its patrons that he was not “exclusively a modernist, under whose direction the classics would suffer neglect or worse.”
Smith’s biography says that Koussevitzky’s early years in Boston were challenging. The orchestra had seen its share of turbulence: the internment of its conductor, Karl Muck, and the dismissal of 18 German musicians during World War I; the death of its founder, Henry Lee Higginson, in 1919; and a strike in 1920, whose defeat left the musicians without union protection until 1942.
If conductor Pierre Monteux had brought the orchestra back to its old standards by 1924, Koussevitzky also faced difficulties. Boston had had a long season, and he was scheduled to conduct most of it. The players mocked his technique, while stories circulated that he could not read a score and that he was hiring pianists to play the pieces so he could learn them. “It is a great pity that there are not more conductors with such abysmal ignorance,” noted Downes, the Times critic.
Koussevitzky was a tyrant, humiliating his musicians with constant threats of firing them. “His orchestra, if they didn’t play well, it was a personal insult to him,” violinist Harry Ellis Dickson recalled in an oral history project now housed in the orchestra’s archives. “He wasn’t a very nice man,” flautist Phil Kaplan said. “He wasn’t a gentleman. He was autocratic to the point of nausea, sometimes.” Bassist Willis Page recalled Koussevitzky getting furious with a musician who had returned from World War II and told him the orchestra should embrace democracy. Page said Koussevitzky responded, “I’m the dictator. I say ‘do,’ and you do.”
Not surprisingly, Koussevitzky had an exorbitant view of the role of the conductor. “We have ample evidence that performers have the right to perform their compositions freely,” he declared in 1938. “They derive this right from the composer.” Some composers associated with Koussevitzky hated the idea, notably Stravinsky, but others were grateful for the honor it implied. “The American composer is accustomed to impromptu performances of his works,” wrote Howard Hanson. “He is less accustomed to Koussevitzky’s interpretation, a carefully rehearsed and thorough realization of the orchestral score.” Many of his recordings sound surprisingly free today, including much of his famous Sibelius.
Composers needed someone who would trust them, Koussevitzky believed, and above all who would perform their work with audible conviction. Radio recordings of Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra, Copland’s Third Symphony, and Shostakovich’s Ninth had their faults, but shyness was not one of them. Viewing music as a living art, Koussevitzky would play a composer’s early works if he saw potential in them, then pay for new works; if he admired the works, he would repeat them. In 1949 he gave two concerts at Carnegie Hall of music by Americans he had supported: Schuman, Barber, Cowell, Piston, Diamond, Fine, Hanson, Harris, Copland, and Burlingame Hill were all on the bill.
While the list was long, it was limited. Koussevitzky gave little exposure to the true experimentalists, rarely performing Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern, and never Ives, Ruggles, or Varèse. He played works by women such as Lili Boulanger, Germaine Tailleferre, and Mabel Daniels, but never offered them regular support. Tanglewood’s early classes were relatively diverse, but ongoing research by Douglas Shadle has shown that Florence Price was far from the only black composer who received perfunctory notes, or even no response, when she asked Koussevitzky to play their works. William L. Dawson and William Grant Still were similarly fortunate.
For better or worse, Koussevitzky’s influence was profound. “Of all the conductors who have come here, he will leave the deepest impression on American musical development,” Downes wrote in a tribute to him upon his death in 1951. That may not be the case today, but we can at least take note.