This Navy letter is one of several in which I mention singing in a choir; see

 the passage in bold.

September 2, 1945

This letter is in German: the following is the published translation:

Hello ladies and gentlemen,

    Only a routine letter since there is not much to report. Yesterday afternoon I washed as never before – all this moving! And today I am more or less free. Since tomorrow is Labor Day, there will also not much be going on.

   Even though the choir is not in the least bit good, we will nevertheless sing on the radio on Sunday morning, December 16. If you listen you will surely hear me stand out, because I sing loud enough to hold those deaf baritones together.

   Father’s letter came yesterday. The only question in it is to be answered in the negative, namely that no boot leaves the camp, holiday or not. But we will be excused from duties and can probably attend Reform services.

   Well. We’ll see.

   Junior will now have ended his vacation, since school will soon start in again.

   Here there is nothing further to report, so I had best conclude.

                                    Solong

                                                      Rudy

   The choir in the Navy was not my first and certainly not the last. In high school, Brooklyn Tech, we had a very competent person in charge of music. His name, when I arrived at Tech in 1941, was Mr. Bardonsky, but he became Mr. Bardon by the time I graduated. The chorus he conducted sang real music, two works I still remember: the Brahms Schicksalslied and a work by Randall Thompson called Do you Remember an Inn, Miranda.

   Indeed, choral singing became my musical outlet, the substitute for the professional musician I might have become but did not. With choral singing, however, I was pretty lucky. Columbia’s chorus, in my day, was conducted by Jacob Avshalomov, a first rate musician and interesting composer. I did no singing during my San Francisco and Poughkeepsie years (1959-1973), but became the only dean in the Northwestern University chorus, singing a considerable variety of works under a number of different conductors. I was amusingly distinguished by the fact that when we were asked whether we wanted to sing the Carmina Burana, mine was the only hand to go up for NO. If there is such a thing, I think the piece is fascist music, grabbing you by the shoulders and shaking you, and I was not persuaded otherwise when I shouted my way through it in rehearsals and performance. 

   My last singing years were by far the best; I’m tempted to say “the most glorious.” Early in his Pittsburgh career, Mariss Jansons scheduled Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms, a composition I thought to be one of the truly great choral works of the 20^th century. I asked Bob Page, the conductor of the Mendelssohn Choir, to let me sing with them. While he was prepared right then to say “yes” (having been provost of Pitt had an unwarranted influence), I insisted on being auditioned like everyone else. To the aria I had prepared, he merely said: “you’re rusty, but you’ll be all right.” With the sight reading—not a forte of mine—I was just lucky. He asked me to sing a chunk of the Buxtehude Missa Brevis which I had sung at Columbia 45 years or so before. Luckily, I have a much better memory for music than for anything else.
   The result of all this was that I sang in every choral work that Mariss Jansons or a guest conducted during the Jansons years. That included the Mahler's Second Symphony, Beethoven's Ninth (both of these more than once), even Schoenberg’s Gurre Lieder and of course the Mozart Requiem. The Stravinsky was the hardest work I ever sang. I even “hired” a pianist friend to pound it into my head, with the pay a big bottle of gin. I loved Jansons’ conducting (and not just when I was singing: we subscribed to the season). He was ur-musical; his interpretations were always interesting but never eccentric; he let the score speak; he didn’t have a shtick.

   Pittsburgh took the Mozart Requiem to its Carnegie Hall concert. There I was placed on the top riser of the chorus, dead center—that is, directly opposite the conductor. When, after our one Carnegie Hall rehearsal, Mariss and I ran into each other in the lobby of our hotel, he said to me, grinning, “I heard you, I heard you!” Since individual voices are surely not supposed to stand out in a chorus (and most certainly mine did not), all I could say, “I hope not, I certainly hope not.”

   When I said to my son-in-law, an orchestral musician, that Jansons was not only a splendid musician, but a nice guy. His response was “that’s unusual in a conductor.”  Sad but plausible. Why?

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