Dropping
Names
Rudolph H. Weingartner
Note: I submitted this piece—slightly edited since then—to
Granta, a publication that does
biographical pieces. They were not
interested: OK by me. But did they
have to take three days less than a full year to let me know?
I am
living in sedate retirement and am unlikely to meet famous people. So if I now tell about those I have
encountered, it will surely be a complete list. The admissions ticket is simple: anyone for whom The New York Times has published an
obituary or for someone, happily still alive, who might confidently be expected
to appear in those pages. My life
was not spent among Important People nor did I seek them out, making this an
account of encounters that occurred in the normal course of things, often by
happenstance. The order in which I
mention these prominent persons is roughly the order in which I met them. But I will be quite loose as to what I
consider to be an encounter.
My very
first big shot was hardly an encounter.
On some day in 1937 or ‘38 and unbeknownst to my parents, I mingled in
the crowd on the Brückenstraße in
Heidelberg, where I was born a decade earlier. Had they known where I was headed they would have made me
stay at home. Jewish boys were not
to roam around the city in Nazi Germany.
The crowd was there in expectation of important personages to be driving
toward the city’s center. They
came, not at slow parade speed, but not just whizzing by either. It was thus quite possible for me (and
my considerably more enthusiastic sidewalk companions) to recognize Adolf
Hitler in the back seat of the second or third open vehicle. Not an actual meeting, as I said: the Reichskanzler—better known as the Führer—and I did not even wave to each
other.
Hitler
got his Times obituary all
right. I hope that many years will
pass before that fate befalls my second distinguished personage. How I met her requires an explanation. My father’s business was selling what
used to be called “druggist sundries” to New York area drug stores—namely,
brushes of many different kinds, sun glasses, combs and hairnets (believe it or
not) and much more. Especially
early after our arrival in the US, I often delivered small packages of such
merchandise to his customers to save postage. Not during school hours, of course. One such trip—circa 1943 or
‘44—took me to the Park View
Pharmacy near Orchard Beach. The
daughter, a year or so younger, was not delivering prescriptions when I showed
up, so I got to meet Cynthia Ozick.
Moreover, I must have been untypically daring that day since I asked her
for a date.
That
story, alas, is brief, with a wistful ending that New Yorkers remembering those
days will understand. Properly
brought up boys and girls did not then meet in front of Radio City Music Hall,
say, or the Roxy. Instead, the boy
traveled to the home of the girl, squired her to the movies and a soda and
accompanied her back to her home before returning to his own. I did that: from Jackson Heights in the
borough of Queens to Pelham Bay way up in the Bronx; from the Ozick home we
went to the Times Square area in Manhattan for the evening’s
entertainment. Movie seen and
milkshake consumed, it was back down into the subway to ride up to the Bronx
and from there via Manhattan back home to Queens. A subway ride then cost a nickel, so that was not a
burden. But neither my patience
nor my homework obligations, could afford the many hours spent traveling
underground. I think Cynthia Ozick
and I got along just fine, but whether a relationship might have blossomed was
never tested. Geography and custom
confined us to that single date.
While I have since read some of her essays, we never met again in the
seventy or so years since that evening.
The
time was at most two years later; the setting was radically different. Promptly after graduating from Brooklyn
Technical High School, in 1945, I went into the Navy. While the war ended during my stint in boot camp, I was next
assigned to a few weeks of preliminary schooling, as the first step toward
learning to repair radars, devices that had only recently been deployed. (I soon signed out of that program and
became a crew member on an LST.) Luckily
for me, both classes and living quarters were on Chicago’s Navy Pier that juts
out in into the lake from the very heart of the city. It was also a quite manageable walk to the home of Chicago
Opera, a short-lived but grand chapter of opera in the Second City. Having been bitten by the classical
music bug some years earlier, I showed up there regularly, since we were
allowed out most evenings. I saw
quite a few performances without ever paying a dime. For the folks back stage (where I went) I was a novelty and
quasi-adopted: an eighteen year old in the uniform of a sailor who knew
something about opera and spoke German.
(The latter mattered since some of the staff—e.g. assistant
conductors—were fellow refugees from Germany or Austria.) But now to a couple of famous persons. I was standing at the stage door after
a (much cut) performance of Parsifal,
when the conductor emerged, to stand near the door to wait for his cab. I had the nerve to introduce myself to
Bruno Walter, who promptly asked, “sind
Sie verwandt mit Felix Weingartner?”
Are you related to Felix W.? –a revered conductor who had died a few
years before. The answer was “Nein, das bin ich nicht;” I’m not, but
we made further insignificant conversation until his ride arrived. I was thrilled and tried not to show
it. After all, he was the
conductor whose many recordings I admired, not the least that of the first act
of Walküre with the soloists, Lotte
Lehmann and Lauritz Melchior, I had heard at the Met (still on 38th
Street) a couple of years earlier.
But by
then the singers (who had had to get out of their costumes) started coming
out. One of them was Martial
Singher, a Frenchman who, untypically, sang Wagner—that evening Amfortas and
quite wonderfully. I do not
remember how we got connected, but we did to such a degree that Singher told me
to come along to have dinner with him.
We talked, among other topics, about the family of the woman he had
recently married, Margareta, the daughter of Fritz Busch, the conductor, who
was the brother of Adolf Busch, the violinist, who was the father of Irene, who
had married Rudolf Serkin ten years earlier. Gossip ended when we moved to his hotel suite, where he let
me listen in as he was studying the role of Golaud, with the score of Pelleas open, singing sotto voce. The treat ended when it was time for me to get back to my
naval environment, where meeting Bruno Walter and Martial Singher would not
have served as an excuse for being late.
While
it was a long stride in a very short time from a high school date to that
operatic intermezzo while in the Navy, the next chapter arrived equally soon
and was just as different. I met
Carl Hovde when we were taking placement exams in January of 1946, after we had
been admitted to Columbia College which had allowed in two hundred Veterans in
the middle of the academic year.
Who is or was Carl Hovde, you ask; and while I sympathize with your
puzzlement, Carl was indeed accorded a New
York Times obituary, picture and all.
And deservedly so, since, from being a professor of American literature
at Columbia, he was appointed dean of the College by consensus, a rare event,
near the end of the Columbia student turmoil in the spring of 1968, since Carl
was a major force in the restoration of peace and common sense to the campus.
But
back to these pre-freshman exams: we became close friends just about instantly
and spent much time with each other on and off campus, often hanging out at the
New School for Social Research of which his father was president. We became so well known as a duo that
both of us were awarded Adam Leroy Jones traveling fellowships that took us to
Europe after graduation. Before
graduation, however, when we took the de
rigueur oral final exams of the Colloquium of Great Books, Lionel Trilling
sat in, since he was curious who these guys were who had copped these
prestigious awards. That half hour
or so allows me to drop the name of that
famous person: renowned teacher and seminal critic.
While I
did not take the course that Trilling taught with Jacques Barzun, I did take
Barzun’s cultural history seminar the first year he offered it, having survived
the interview he used to select a dozen or so seniors. In an opening discussion we picked (or
were led to pick) the period around the turn of the 19th to 20th
century. The seminar was
interesting and genuine fun, bristling with freewheeling arguments by a bunch
of bright people. Two more lasting
benefits: I learned more about writing in that course—from Barzun’s comments on
my papers—than I had in the composition courses I had taken earlier. Further, I was flattered that Barzun, a
prodigious author, with several books on musical topics, liked one of my
papers—about Gebrauchsmusik as a
Reaction to the 19th century—that he saw to it that it was
published: my first publication.
We subsequently became quite friendly and corresponded about a variety
of topics, though I never mustered the nerve to visit him many years later in
San Antonio where he died at the age of 104.
Of
course other Columbia professors of mine were accorded New York Times obituaries, but I will spare the reader my
explanations as to why they deserved them. Two Greats gave talks at Columbia during my years there, but
then not being into famous people, I foolishly went to hear neither John Dewey
nor Bertrand Russell. I did attend
a lecture by a saintly Martin Buber without understanding anything he
said. Finally, I had two
quasi-encounters with Dwight Eisenhower, then Columbia’s president. For reasons unknown to me, he came over
to Hamilton Hall, a classroom building, where we briefly shared a corridor and
I found out that he was quite a bit shorter than I was. (I’ve shrunk since.) Our second quasi-relationship consists
of the fact that Eisenhower signed my bachelor’s degree, the only words on that
certificate not in Latin. I once
inquired how much that signature is worth in the autograph market and was told
a disappointing fifty cents. That
was a long time ago; maybe inflation has tripled its value in the interim.
Neither
my New York years nor my extended sojourn in San Francisco made me acquainted
with people who have names worth dropping. (I spent two years as a fellow in Mortimer Adler’s Institute
for Philosophical Research, but notwithstanding his New York Times obituary, familiarity had bred disrespect.) I later taught philosophy at San
Francisco State, but I left for Vassar before S. I. Hayakawa became famous or,
as I prefer, infamous, as the agent of Governor Ronald Reagan in squelching
student initiatives, many of which were adopted after the turbulence had
subsided.
To be
sure, my six years at Vassar brought me in contact with quite a few
distinguished professors—there was a generous budget for visiting speakers—only
one of them, as I recall it, was familiar to people outside the academy. As chairman of philosophy, I had lunch
with Hannah Arendt the day she gave a talk at Vassar. Since of her many writings, I had only read her New Yorker account of the Eichmann
trial, that’s what we talked about, when I wasn’t answering questions about
Vassar. I had found myself in
considerable agreement with her concept and analysis of the views she expressed
under the heading of the banality of evil
and, as a fellow Holocaust evader (as I refer to those of us who got out),
spoke very positively about Eichmann in
Jerusalem. I don’t know whether it helped or hindered that I was blissfully
unaware of the many criticisms that had been lodged against her.
Let me
conclude the Vassar chapter with another quasi-encounter. I saw Meryl Streep, then a Vassar
student, perform in Eugene O’Neill’s only comedy, Ah Wilderness!
In 1974 I left Vassar to become dean of
the college of arts and sciences at Northwestern University, a stint that
lasted thirteen years. I followed
Hanna Gray in that job, giving that college the distinction, probably unique,
of being led by two deans in a row who were born in Heidelberg am Neckar. Needless to say, in that job I came in
contact with many professors and administrators, in my own shop and at other
institutions, who were or will be accorded recognition in the Newspaper of
Record. But even when a book or
discovery escapes from its academic confines into a broader world, professorial
distinction does not necessarily blossom into the kind of fame that justifies
name dropping. There were,
however, frail links between me and the scientists of double helix renown:
Watson and Crick. From the former
I received a letter of recommendation for a young scientist we wanted to
hire—the shortest and most effective of the many I received through the years: “I will do everything in my power to
keep Mr. X here at Cold Spring Harbor.
Sincerely, Jim Watson.” And
of course he did.
Francis Crick
was a friend of one of our biochemists and visited to talk to students,
faculty, and such privileged people as I was. All he did these days, he told me, is talk. He spends most of the day in a pleasant
room in the Salk Institute (how could a room in that great Louis Kahn complex not be pleasant?) and scientists young
and old come to visit him with their problems. Others later told me that Crick was remarkable in that role,
almost always coming up with fruitful suggestions. As the edge of scientific originality wanes, scientific
wisdom may well wax; and so it was with Sir Francis.
I had a
more significant relationship to another scientist, who became famous after I
left Northwestern. I was the dean
who offered a job to Rick Silverman, two years after he received his PhD in
chemistry and two years after I became dean. While he was promoted to full professor under my aegis, it
was in 2004, almost two decades after I had left, that Rick developed
pregabalin, a drug marketed under the name of Lyrica. I will let you look up all that the drug is good for. That it is good for plenty is testified
by the fact that its “sales reached a record $3.063 billion in 2010” and that
Richard Bruce Silverman was awarded a slew of prices and distinctions. Now on the NU campus stands the
formidable Richard and Barbara Silverman
Hall for Molecular Therapeutics and Diagnostics, paid for by some of the
Lyrica royalties that went to Northwestern and to Rick.
But let
me now go to back to the beginning of my deanship, since before the end of my
first year I had met Newton Minow, famous for his speech, more than a decade
earlier, declaring television to be a vast wasteland. Yes, famous: Google that phrase and be
astonished!
I had
resolved to establish a senior convocation for the College of Arts and
Sciences, just as there were for all the other Evanston schools. There had not been such, because the
only space big enough for the Evanston campus’s largest school was the
gymnasium, where the graduation ceremony for the entire university took place,
featuring awards of honorary degrees to the famous; graduation speakers were
left to school convocations. My
solution was to have our own event in the same gymnasium, but, faut de mieux, after the graduation
ceremony—a bit late and posing a few awkward logistical problems, but
doable. Since the go ahead came
close to D-Day, I was grateful that Newton, an NU trustee, was suggested as a
convocation speaker. When we
relaxed afterwards at a late lunch in our house, he asked me for a copy of my
introduction, so he could send it to his mother. He gave a good graduation speech—not at all an easy
genre—and I gave him a good send-off, a much easier task.
I want
to mention two others who came to speak at the College’s graduation
ceremony—the first for a kind of heroism and the second for being a real
dud. We were able to recruit
Robert McFarlane, President Reagan’s National Security Advisor, because a daughter
or niece of his was a Northwestern student. Tradition had it that the speaker would have dinner the
night before with the student board that had selected him. As a result of the evening’s discussion,
Mr. McF. spent most of the night rewriting his speech. I never found out details at the—also
traditional—late lunch at our house, but I greatly admired his action and told
him so. Buckminster Fuller was
that unfortunate second famous speaker.
He insisted on using a lavalier microphone, which hung around his neck
as he walked back and forth on the improvised stage. He spoke all right, but adding the acoustics in the
gymnasium to his mode of delivery, nobody understood a word he said.
Even more
tenuous was my connection to the next entrant. The college had received an endowment in the early 70’s to
bring women of accomplishment to the campus, either for a substantial
conference, or for a quarter as visiting professor. I was then attempting to improve studio arts at Northwestern
and thought of using those funds to bring Louise Bourgeois to campus, having
come to greatly admire her work. I
could offer her studio space and some support, while requiring few duties
except to be there. I screwed up
my courage to call her up, but to no avail. We had a conversation of twenty minutes or so during which I
listened to the most charming French accent. She was flattered, etcetera (her real fame came later), but she simply could not see
leaving her New York studio.
I was
much more successful with Ed Paschke, to whom I was introduced by friends who
were collectors of his paintings.
Right away I took to the daringness of his work and was surprised, when
I met him, that he would consider not only a faculty position, but that he was
also agreeable to head the department, at least for a while. The flamboyance of his painting
contrasted sharply with his gentle demeanor, not to mention his straight and
firm thinking as departmental chairman.
The one work of his that I own is a delightful print entitled Execo, commissioned by a Chicago young
executives organization, who, lacking both a sense of humor and self-awareness,
were said to have been incensed by the product of their commission. If Ed Paschke is a new name for you,
read the wonderful Times obituary by
Roberta Smith.
My next
prominent person, the author of more than forty books on a considerable variety
of subjects, needs no introduction; I will only recount how we became friends.
(I can’t resist making a couple of exceptions to my resolve not to include good
friends.) A group of humanities
faculty at Northwestern had launched a new program, entitled American
Culture. Shortly afterwards, the
Henry R. Luce Foundation granted us a Luce professorship as part of their
effort to support interdisciplinary education. The committee I appointed to
recommend possible candidates did a remarkable thing: they presented me with
five names without ranking them. I never found out whether they couldn’t
agree or whether they generously intended to leave me unfettered. Since I greatly admired one of the
proposed candidates—having read many of his pieces in the New York Review of Books—I promptly got in touch with Garry Wills
and was delighted to find out that he was interested. A visit to the NU campus followed with all the trimmings and
before he left for home in Baltimore, we amiably agreed on terms in our living
room. Garry and I have been
friends ever since and for some years we were two of three couples that preceded
our Thursday subscriptions to the Chicago Symphony with drinks and dinner at
the original Berghoff—dry martinis, solid German food, and outstanding beer on
tap.
Of the
many things deans do, going to meetings is near the top of the list, a duty
shared with all American bureaucrats.
Numerous such gatherings are boring, a few are tense, not many are
informative or entertaining, quite a few are unnecessary, while an
insufficiently large fraction accomplishes something real. An exception to this pessimistic
assessment were the annual meetings of arts and sciences deans belonging to the
American Association of Universities, an organization of research
universities. The host, each
December, was one of us member colleges, with institutions engaged in quiet competition
as to the arrangements: food, accommodations, and modest entertainment. The
best feature of these get-togethers, however, was the fact that there was no
agenda. Their unspoken purpose was
to provide the collected deans with an opportunity not to be had at home. We could bitch and complain to
understanding ears about the latest irrationalities proposed by our faculties
and the more recent stupidities perpetrated by our bosses.
For
practical purposes, that’s where I met Vartan Gregorian, though I knew him
slightly when he came to San Francisco State College even before he received
his doctorate from Stanford. A
dozen years after coming to SF State, he was appointed dean of arts and
sciences at the University of Pennsylvania, the same year, 1974, I started
deaning at Northwestern. Thanks to
those annual boondoggles, we became friendly and have remained in touch.
One
phone call I remember vividly. By
then (early 1981), Vartan was provost of Penn and had every reason to believe
that he would follow Martin Meyerson as president of the university. In that expectation, he told me, he had
turned down the chancellorship of Berkeley. To his shock (and that is the right word) he was passed over
and Sheldon Hackney became Penn president instead. Vartan speculated that there was trustee opposition to
having someone with a foreign accent speak for the university. It may be that after the end of the
tenure of the first Jewish president of an Ivy League institution Penn needed a
cooling-off period with a genuine WASP and not another “exotic” chief
executive.
The New
York Public Library was the beneficiary of that Penn goof and so was I, with
lunches at the Algonquin (where I never succeeded in grabbing the check) every
time I came to New York. His next stint was the presidency of Brown, with a speech
by Arthur Schlesinger among the classy diversions at his inauguration. From there a return to New York and the
Carnegie Corporation. .
I
became friendly with George McGovern when he came to Evanston weekly to give a
lecture course sponsored by an affluent McGovern patron. Long ago, in 1953, he had earned a
Northwestern PhD in American History and when in 1980 he was evicted from the
Senate in the Reagan revolution, he was free to dip his toe once more into the
academic world he had left for a career in politics. That revolution did not make much headway with the NU
student body, so that a course by so unalloyed a liberal as George McG. filled
up Tech Auditorium, the largest enrollment in any course during my day. At least when the course began, for
after some time attendance began to wane.
Apparently the former Senator had begun to run out of enticing tales
from the nation’s capital, without being very successful in replacing personal
experience with the fruits of academic research. A quarter of a century out of the classroom was too long a
stretch. But as a diehard liberal
myself and finding him simpatico, I was an admirer; we managed to meet in
Washington a few times when I went there for inevitable meetings.
I was also a
great admirer of Maria Tallchief whom I had seen dance many times with the New
York City Ballet, often with André Eglevsky as partner. How Northwestern came to award her an
honorary degree I don’t know, but I was on the stage with her during graduation
ceremonies in 1982 with no role to perform other than to add another academic
gown to the stage. Again I managed
to screw up my courage, as I had with Bruno Walter, more than thirty-five years
earlier, to walk over to her during a lull in the proceedings, to tell her how
much I enjoyed her performances in the old Mecca Temple on 55th
Street.
The last
Northwestern name I propose to drop arrived at that university well before I
did and became truly famous years after I had left. But while were together, I got to know Professor of
Economics Dale Mortensen very well, especially since he chaired his department
for a term. Not only are
economists a go-getting, not to say aggressive, bunch, the competition to hire
the most talented of freshly-minted doctorates is fierce, making for extensive
interactions between the departmental chairperson of such a highly-ranked
department and the College’s dean.
Of
course I knew that Dale was a much respected member of his profession who gave
lectures hither and yon and published widely. But it took twenty-three years after I left Northwestern for
me to find out that “respected” was not strong enough an honorific. For in 2010 Professor Mortensen was
awarded the Nobel prize in Economics!
It was a pleasure to meet up with him when he was being honored by his
doctoral alma mater, Carnegie Mellon, down the street in Pittsburgh from where
I then lived.
Truly
distinguished, but also an honest fellow!
Through the years, he and I had a friendly argument, with Dale asserting
that the university ought to do more to publicize the high ranking of its
economics department to potential undergraduates, while I claimed that such
propaganda was of interest to potential graduate students, while undergraduates
were interested in a host of things, but seldom, if ever, in departmental
rankings. One day, Dale, grinning,
came up to me with “you are right.”
He had squired around campus the son of a relative and his friend, to
size up the place for college.
What impressed them? The
way the magic touch buttons worked in the elevator of Norris Hall, the student
center. Cool, really cool. Alas, Dale Mortensen succumbed to
cancer only a few years after becoming a Nobelist.
My late
wife, Fannia and I met Richard Brettell and his wife Caroline not long after he
came to the Art Institute, in 1980, as curator of European paintings. We have been good friends ever
since. It would take a piece as
long as this one to give an account of Rick’s prodigious writings (Amazon lists
twenty-two books) and whirlwind activities—as teacher, curator, administrator,
critic and more. He has been an
influential force not just in the cities in which he has lived since
1980—Chicago and Dallas—but in the world of art both in this country and in
France. No slouch herself, Carol
is a distinguished professor of anthropology and sometime administrator at
Southern Methodist University, with five books under her belt, according to
Amazon. But all that is
prestigious background to a relationship that has not much to do with all of those
accomplishments. We enjoy each
others’ company, talking about whatever.
And it
was Rick who introduced me to James Magee. In a lecture at the National Gallery—no minor platform—Rick
called him the greatest unknown American artist. I will not here describe his Hill of four buildings in the
Cornudas Mountains outside El Paso; a description and more is available on the
Magee Hill website and even better in the wonderful book Rick wrote about it. The cruciform site is impressive from a
distance and awesome when one steps on it and then gazes on the complex works
of sculpture inside, after the tall iron doors have been open to the tune of
metallic screeches. I became
active in efforts to support the Hill and Jim and I became good friends.
In 1987
I left Northwestern to become provost of the University of Pittsburgh. But even before moving to that city, I
had gotten to know Herbert Simon, since we had both been members of the
Visiting Committee of Pitt’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences. And when we moved to Pittsburgh, we
came to live on his street and could see Herb walking past our house every
morning on his way to his office at Carnegie Mellon University. Herbert Simon made fundamental
contributions to just about every branch of the social sciences, including to
several which he invented. Because
there is no Nobel prize for polymaths, they gave him one in economics! I was fortunate that we shared
occasional meals where the real food were our conversations. Whatever the topic, Herb’s comments
were illuminating and had the obviousness of a mathematical proof after someone
had the wit to work it out. His
humor, moreover, was seldom far from the surface. I was grateful, too, for a generous blurb he wrote for one
of my books.
Professionally, my move to Pitt was a mixed bag at best. The university’s president was probably
not happy to have been more or less obliged to offer me the job, given the
complicated way in which academics make administrative appointments. We certainly turned out to have
different opinions about what a Pitt—or any—provost should be doing, with the
result that I resigned after two years in harness. Those years, however, made me acquainted with Mrs. Posvar,
whose professional name is Mildred Miller, mezzo-soprano at the Metropolitan Opera
and my first Cherubino in the Marriage of
Figaro. Now she is mostly known as Millie, the founding director of Opera
Theater of Pittsburgh. The circle
is closing from Bruno Walter to Millie, who together, won the Grand Prix du
Disque for Mahler’s Lieder eines
fahrenden Gesellen.
One
more name to drop, with humble pleas for forgiveness from those who are
deserving of this questionable honor, but whose names are not here
dropped. Forgetfulness,
sloppiness, but neither rationale nor excuses.
My final
name to drop is Mariss Jansons, music director of the Pittsburgh Symphony from
1997 to 2004 and now the boss of what may now be the best orchestra there is:
Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw. I am
proud that I was on the search committee that brought him from Oslo to
Pittsburgh. Mariss is a subtle,
captivating, indeed endearing, musician, never eccentric, never routine and
never tainted by some trademark shtick, such as extreme tempi or extravagant
dynamics. His music making
indulged in neither exaggerated intensity nor in relaxedness that verged on
boredom. To my ear, Mariss is a
certain kind of ideal musician, granting that there is more than one ideal.
My good
fortune was to sing in the chorus of every choral work he conducted—from
Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms to Schönberg’s Gurre Lieder, from the Beethoven Ninth Symphony to the Mahler Second. And then there was Mozart’s Requiem that I had sung several times
before.
But
certainly not in Carnegie Hall! My
assigned place was on the top row of the chorus’s risers, dead center, directly
opposite the conductor. The
rehearsal went well; Jansons seemed satisfied. That afternoon we ran into each other in the lobby of the
hotel that housed us all. “I heard
you, I heard you,” was his greeting, pronounced with a wide grin. That should not have been the case and
happily, I knew that could not have been.
The New York Times later
reported that “the huge Mendelssohn Choir of Pittsburgh . . . sang with both an
enlivening robustness and, particularly in the Lacrimosa, a sublime delicacy.”
