In cooperation with the Barnes Foundation, the Philadelphia Orchestra devoted half of October 2018 to the contentious relationship between conductor Leopold Stokowski and the art collector Albert Barnes. These two leaders in their fields shared much more than the public realized.
Stéphane Denève, the orchestra’s principal guest conductor, led two weeks of concerts inspired by their relationship. The Barnes/Stokowski Festival included a panel discussion on the intersection of Barnes, Stokowski and painter Henri Matisse, and two concerts of chamber music.
The year 1912 was a key. That was the year when Stokowski began his long reign as music director of the Philadelphia Orchestra, and it also was the year when Barnes began to acquire his vast collection. That’s when Barnes first sent his friend William Glackens to Paris to buy works by Cézanne, Picasso, Renoir and others.
Albert Barnes was a Philadelphia physician and chemist who got rich selling a solution to fight infections which he named Argyrol. Barnes’s collection eventually included 69 Cézannes — more than in all the museums in Paris — and 181 Renoirs — more than anywhere in the world. He built a mansion just outside Philadelphia to house his collection. Barnes often had classical musicians perform for him at his home. In 1922 he established The Barnes Foundation in his mansion as an educational institution.
Barnes and Stokowski both were champions of innovation, and Dr. Barnes invited him to be a speaker at the dedication of his foundation. But Stokowski was annoyed by Barnes’s belligerent personality and his insistence that visitors to his gallery had to study certain principles. Stokowski said that people should be allowed to enjoy art in their own way. He said he found it impossible to like the man because he was so opinionated.
Barnes respected Stokowski and sometimes complimented him, but at other times condemned Stokowski for wasting his talents. He wrote on October 18, 1920:
“When I think of your almost unique genius and great opportunities, I blush for your hackneyed programs, for the safely-arrived, commercially-pushed soloists, some of them mere dressed-up dolls and imitation artists; for your failure or delay until it is old-hat in Europe to give adequate new work of real merit; for the surfeit of theatrical claptrap like Rachmaninoff’s Bells or Mahler’s spectacular banalities; or Wagner’s voluptuous debauches.”
Sometimes they shared attitudes. Barnes described an art exhibition at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts as “just another bit of pretense for which the shallow lime-lighters of Philadelphia are notorious. It was, again, the specious, the fatuous, the blatant humbuggery that only the stupid could confuse with an interest in art. They desire to exploit others’ opinions as to merit concerning the work of the safely dead, while living art and live artists get scant recognition.” Stokowski was attacked by establishment types for promoting the work of contemporary avant garde composers such as Stravinsky and Schoenberg.
Barnes tried to encourage Stokowski by making “some frank suggestions for putting more of something worthwhile into the concerts of the Philadelphia Orchestra—I mean for the plain, ordinary, sensible persons who are alive to musical forms, whether they be those of Beethoven or Scriabine or Stravinsky or the unknown master in a garret. It is true that such people are in the minority but the minorities of today are the majorities of tomorrow and you could hasten the day.”
Two things about Barnes have not been adequately reported. One is that he, as a graduate of Central High School, had been reared with authoritarianism. Even when I attended Central a half century later, we students were taught to rise and snap to attention whenever the principal (at Central he’s called “the president”) entered a room. It was the nation’s second-ever public high school and taught pride in intellectual exceptionalism; in what some might call superiority.
The other fact is that Stokowski became world-famous while Barnes was acquiring his collection in relative anonymity. He was rich but not famous. So Barnes had to approach Stokowski, at first, with some deference. I’ve examined his letters in the archives at the Foundation and they show that he sometimes sucked up to Stokowski, and at other times was scornful.
For instance, Barnes wrote on October 25, 1920, “The good you have done is incalculable and no one appreciates it more than I. You are too big a man, too important to Philadelphia, have too much to accomplish for the public good, to lend your fine self to the purpose of a crowd of self-seekers masquerading as artists…the ignorant, bad-mannered leaders of Philadelphia society.”
But in 1933 Barnes wrote about Stokowski, “He has the skillful diplomat’s insincerity. He is a public idol because he is a genius at publicity and gives the public the kind of music they want….Anything which cannot put him in the limelight does not interest him very much.”
Denève led the Philadelphians in Stokowski orchestrations of Palestrina’s Adoramus te Christe and of Debussy’s La Cathédrale engloutie (“The Submerged Cathedral”). He gave a lovely reading of Debussy’s La Mer and an exciting rendition of Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du Printemps with even fiercer outbursts of volume than in Nézet-Séguin’s 2015 performances.
Denève and the orchestra also presented Poulenc’s Organ Concerto with Peter Richard Conte as soloist. It’s a work that creatively amalgamates religiosity with salon sensuality and with rhetorical grandeur. Poulenc described himself as “half monk and half bad boy.” He had immersed himself in drugs and Paris counter-culture before becoming devout, and this work personifies that duality.
Milhaud’s La Création du monde (“The Creation of the World”) was most interesting. It’s a 16-minute ballet for small orchestra with a jazzy sound, and its middle section resembles Gershwin’s An American in Paris; but Milhaud’s piece was premiered in 1923 and Gershwin didn’t write his until 1928. Milhaud composed in the Paris of Josephine Baker, Le jazz hot, and sculptures inspired by African masks, which were an important part of Barnes’s collection and were displayed on video screens during the music.
Denève led 18 instrumentalists, with flutes and clarinets seated immediately behind the violins and with Gary Lewis prominently on saxophone. This composition never was performed by Stokowski — or by Eugene Ormandy — probably because neither of those conductors devoted themselves to jazz, so it was a special pleasure to hear.
Clever programming by Denève placed the Creation and the Sacre in the same concert. The Milhaud, of course, is about the creation of the world, while the Stravinsky was re-interpreted, in Fantasia, to pictorialize that same subject. Denève says that he was inspired by that movie when he was a youngster, and by its musical director, Stokowski.
The music was interwoven with dramatic re-enactments of the encounters of Barnes, Stokowski, Glackens and art dealers, creatively written and directed by Didi Balle, based on materials in the Barnes archives. David Bardeen as Barnes and Nicholas Carriere as Stokowski were very convincing in their visual resemblance to their characters. The dialogue revealed how the two men made Philadelphia a creative center for innovative art and music.
The make-believe Stokowski sounded supercilious, as he sometimes was. (I worked with him for several years and saw that he had varied aspects, including humor and informality which were not displayed here.) To show more variety, I wish the actor had quoted part of the speech Stokowski gave at the dedication of the Barnes Foundation:
“Suppose tomorrow morning the cook asks you what you would like to have for breakfast: ham and eggs, or buckwheat cakes. You are perfectly free to choose one or the other. Suppose in Washington they made a law not to eat buckwheat cakes. We would rise up and slay those senators. We want freedom, and we have it here in this place. Dr. Barnes has given everybody a chance.”
In the Kimmel lobby for the festival, historian Jack McCarthy assembled many fascinating letters, photos and newspaper clippings which documented the men and their era.