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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780810114630 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Northwestern University Press |
| Publication date: | 02/05/1997 |
| Edition description: | 1 |
| Pages: | 332 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.80(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Fritz Reiner
A Biography
By Philip Hart
Northwestern University Press
Copyright © 1994 Philip HartAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8101-1463-0
CHAPTER 1
Reiner Frigyes
Frederick Martin Reiner was born on 19 December 1888 in the Pest section of Budapest, the principal Magyar city of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. That was his legal designation when he became a United States citizen in 1928 and when his second wife divorced him in 1930; it was probably how the government of the Hapsburg Dual Monarchy named him in his birth certificate and in other official documents. As Friderik Reiner he conducted for one season in Laibach (now Ljubljana). But in Magyar he was Reiner Frigyes, so enrolled at the Franz Liszt Academy of Music in Budapest and later known professionally there. His close friends knew him as Frici.
His parents, Ignácx and Vilma (Polak), were Jews, a heritage less important to Reiner than the Magyar. The family was apparently among those Jews who sought assimilation into the Hungarian middle class, by no means unusual in Central Europe then. Neither surviving documents nor family tradition indicates any significant Jewish identification or religious observance on Reiner's part. The Reiner family name probably originated in the late eighteenth century, when the Hapsburg emperor Joseph II decreed that all Jews take German names. Reiner's mother's family may have originally come from a Slavic region of the empire; a pencil notation in Reiner's handwriting on the back of a photograph of his maternal grandmother suggests that she came from Pressburg, now Bratislava in Slovakia but then a part of the Hapsburg domain. Some accounts refer to Ignácx as a tailor. In fact, according to his granddaughter Eva Reiner Bartenstein, he was a textile merchant of some means. Reiner's father was a stocky and formidable gentleman with a full dark beard. Reiner's mother was petite, vivacious, and loquacious.
Accounts of the childhood of a celebrated public figure can be notoriously unreliable when based on the subject's own frequently self-serving recollection. Much "information" about Reiner's childhood stems from an interview he gave to Gertrude Guthrie-Treadway in Cincinnati in 1925. The account of his career in Hope Stoddard's Symphony Conductors of the U.S.A. contains further anecdotal information from a 1954 interview. Shortly before her husband took up his post in Chicago in 1953, Carlotta Reiner supplied Claudia Cassidy of the Chicago Tribune with further anecdotes. From these and other sources, most originating from Reiner himself, and through their permutations over the years, such "facts" and their elaboration grew into an official legend.
Reiner had the good fortune to grow up in a family sympathetic to music and readily inclined to encourage his precocious talent. His mother, a talented amateur pianist, was the boy's first music teacher. The future conductor received his introduction to symphonies of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven from four-hand piano readings with his mother. Reiner traced his earliest encounter with music to a chiming clock in the hall of the family home. Its rendition of tunes from Lucia di Lammermoor, so fascinated him that his parents took him to a performance of that opera. More impressed by the conductor than by the singers, the six-year-old boy returned home to imitate his gestures. With this introduction to the wonders of opera, young Frigyes visited the opera house regularly, and his family encouraged this interest by giving him vocal scores, which he learned to play at the piano by heart. Reiner later recalled:
I lived in a household which had a natural tradition of Rossini, Meyerbeer, the songs of Schubert, and the piano music of Chopin. This family diet of music might have remained unchanged but for the visit of a friend, an amateur musician. It was he who, playing the Tannhäuser Overture, introduced my family and me to the music of Richard Wagner — hardly a familiar name on the piano racks of the musical bourgeoisie of those days! The music made such an impression on me that I promptly borrowed a piano score of Die Walküre, from a distant relative and, at the age of ten, could play the entire first act from memory.
At nine, when he required more disciplined training than a mother could provide, his parents sent him to study with a professional piano teacher, whom he amazed by playing his own transcription of the overture to Tannhäuser from memory and by displaying an extraordinary ability to improvise. At the gymnasium he organized an orchestra, in which he played percussion and which he conducted in Beethoven's First Symphony at the age of twelve. He made his first public appearance playing the Mozart's Concerto in D Major (K. 537) at the age of thirteen.
One day during a summer vacation in the country village of Budakerz, he was playing the Tannhäuser overture on the piano. Through a window open to the street, a boy three years his senior heard the music and knocked on the door of the cottage to propose that they join in piano duets. He introduced himself as Leo Weiner. The two shared an enthusiasm for music and eventually became fellow students at the conservatory. Although their paths later diverged — Weiner's toward composition and teaching in Budapest and Reiner's toward performance on the international scene — theirs remained an especially close friendship.
Despite his son's musical talent, Reiner's father pressed the study of law on him as a more secure career. Three months before his fifteenth birthday, Frigyes enrolled simultaneously at the Royal University to study law and at the National Hungarian Royal Academy of Music. Founded in 1875, the academy was also known in Reiner's time as the Franz Liszt Academy of Music. It is hard to avoid contrasting Reiner's mother's musical inclination with his father's more practical pressure. After his father's death a year later, Reiner abandoned the law to devote his studies exclusively to music.
Reiner was baptized a Roman Catholic several years after his father's death. His mother converted to Roman Catholicism at the same time and remained an ardent communicant for the rest of her life. Such religious conversion was by no means unusual at a time when many Jews favored assimilation into Central European society. Although Reiner's daughter Eva Bartenstein was under the impression that her father had embraced Catholicism in 1911 to marry a Catholic, his baptismal certificate — in Latin and Magyar — is dated 10 November 1908. Despite his conversion, Reiner's name appeared in the blacklist of Jewish musicians issued in the 1930s by the Nazi regime in Germany. Unlike many other converts, Reiner did not revert to his Jewish origins during World War II or upon the establishment of the state of Israel. He nevertheless resented anti-Semitic remarks, humorous or otherwise.
The Budapest of Fritz Reiner's youth was one of the most vital capitals in Europe. With a population in 1900 of 733,000, it was the sixth largest city in Europe, having nearly tripled its size in thirty-six years. Its economy relied on the manufacture of iron and steel, including armaments, and on the agriculture of the Danube basin. Until Minneapolis overtook it in 1900, Budapest was the largest grain milling center in the world. This rapid economic growth fostered public and private education and such urban amenities as an early underground railway and a proliferation of coffeehouses. Budapest supported a lively variety of performance activity ranging from restaurant-bars with entertainment, called "orpheums," to grand opera. In 1904 the city had sixteen thousand theater seats. Although German had been the official language of Budapest for some time, native Magyar was also in common use at the turn of the century; most residents were bilingual. Before World War I Budapest was relatively free of anti-Semitism, as compared to Warsaw or Vienna, for instance. That prejudice surfaced markedly after the self-styled regent, Admiral Miklös Horthy, took control of the government in 1919, proclaiming a "Christian and nationalist" state.
In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries Hungary produced a musical flowering quite out of proportion to its limited population and ethnic isolation. Although Franz Liszt received his training abroad and actually spoke little Magyar as an adult, his brilliant international career inspired young Hungarian musicians. After he retired from the concert platform, he took a great interest in the music of his native land. Although his "Hungarian" music owed more to a café style different from the authentic idiom later documented by Bartók and Kodály, his rich and generous personality made him a national hero. After Liszt, Hungary sent forth into the international music world such renowned artists as violinist Joseph Joachim and conductors Hans Richter and Arthur Nikisch. Some Hungarian musicians in Reiner's generation — Béla Bartók, Zoltán Kodály, and the great violin pedagogue Jenö Hubay — preferred to center their careers in their native land, while others, like Leopold Auer, Josef Szigeti, Reiner, and Eugene Ormandy, followed the trail of Liszt, Joachim, Richter, and Nikisch into the international music world.
The Royal Hungarian Opera, founded in 1873 and performing in one of Europe's most attractive opera houses since 1884, offered both staged performances and concerts by its Budapest Philharmonic Orchestra. Both Gustav Mahler and Arthur Nikisch had been musical directors there. During Reiner's youth, István Kerner held that post; a disciple of Richter and Nikisch, Kerner displayed elegance, musicianship, and economy of gesture that provided an early model for Reiner. Many years later, when Francis Robinson included a photo of the Royal Hungarian Opera auditorium in his book on Caruso, Reiner wrote him: "On page 44 — that small figure high in the proscenium loge could have been me at 15 years — and twenty years later I was in the pit."
At the Academy of Music admirers of Liszt and Wagner dominated the faculty, despite the emergence of an interest in authentic Magyar music among students and younger faculty. Ödon von Mihálovich, the director of the academy, was an ardent Wagnerian and an implacable foe of Magyar musical nationalism.
Reiner remained at the Liszt Academy until 1909, studying piano with István Thomán, piano pedagogy with Kálmán Chován, and composition with Hans Koessler. During his last two years at the academy his piano teacher was the young Béla Bartók, who had returned to Budapest from the pursuit of an international career as a concert pianist and had recently joined Kodály in studying authentic Hungarian folk music in the field. The acceptance of these two young musicians by the conservative academy in 1906 marked a major change there. Reiner's immediate elders — Bartók, Kodály, Ernö von Dohnányi, and Weiner — were all very much a part of the musical environment in which he studied and began his professional career. Throughout his later international activities he remained a loyal crusader for their music. When later pupils of Weiner, who revered him as an inspiring pedagogue, encountered Reiner as a conductor in the United States, they discovered an extraordinary correlation between the teaching of Weiner and the performance of Reiner. Although Bartók had played his piano music outside Hungary, Reiner was among the first to conduct his early orchestral compositions abroad. The conservatory did not then offer instruction in conducting, but a young musician aspiring to become a conductor received a thorough grounding in composition, theory, and the mastery of his chosen instrument, usually the piano. Chamber music was an important part of this curriculum. Reiner played percussion in the student orchestra and may even have had a chance to conduct it. Its conductor, Jenö Hubay, was, according to Reiner, a very poor one. When the young percussionist asked for a cue at a difficult passage, Hubay responded, "Don't bother me. Can't you see I am busy conducting?"
During his final years at the academy, Reiner accompanied several musicians on concert tours of Hungary, among them the singer Elena Gerhardt, the violinist Joan Manén, and the cellist David Popper. He also studied piano pedagogy and taught privately. A pupil from this time, Erzsébet ("Erzi") Szebestyén, recalled him as an excellent pianist but an impatient teacher. If Erzi played well, Reiner could be lavish in his praise, but he responded to poorly prepared playing with a violent display of temper that terrified the young girl. On one occasion, his teenage pupil so infuriated him that he threw the piano scores about the room. There they remained, since neither he nor his strong-willed pupil would stoop to recover them.
It was Leo Weiner, already a répetiteur at the Népszinház Vigopera, one of the independent popular companies offering plays, operettas, and operas, who brought his young friend into that organization, where he served first as a rehearsal pianist and then as a conductor. Reiner recalled joining this company in 1907–1908:
My friend, Leo Weiner, was a very excellent musician in every way but one. He could not conduct. To conduct is a special ability. It cannot be learned. One must be born with the tendency which would make you a conductor. Leo Weiner, although one of the best all-around musicians, was not a conductor. He was asked to become a coach for the comic opera at Budapest. He tried it, but after a while he came to me and said: "I want you to take my position. I am going to recommend you. I am going to resign. I am not a good conductor. I am not a success at the comic opera as a coach. You will succeed." ... They put me on the chair and gave me a little stick. I could scarcely see anything but the pretty girls. I conducted and they were all wild about me, especially the girls. I got the position as coach for the comic opera.
Fritz Reiner always maintained that the best place for a conductor to learn his craft was not in the classroom but in the opera theater. Only there could he encounter the full range of vocal and instrumental music. In coping with the diverse temperaments and limitations of singers, he could learn to meet the emergencies that every conductor would have to surmount in the opera pit or on the concert platform. Playing the piano well and being able to sight-read and transpose were indispensable qualifications for even the lowest rung on the ladder of the conducting profession — répetiteur or rehearsal pianist. That position trained a conductor in the score itself and gave him experience in working with that most treacherous of musical instruments, the human voice. Only after menial work as répetiteur did Reiner get his first chance to conduct a public performance in the spring of 1908, when a staff director suddenly became ill. He was nineteen, and the opera was Carmen, a work that he eventually conducted more than any other. It was, he said, "the hardest thing I ever did."
While at the Vigopera, Reiner wrote to Imre Mészáros, director of the Royal Hungarian Opera, hoping to obtain a position there. Still at the Vigopera early in 1910, he accompanied some auditions for the director of the Municipal Theater in the Slovenian capital of Laibach, who was so impressed that he engaged Reiner as a staff conductor for the following season. Known there as Friderik Reiner, he was described on his engagement as a brilliant pianist from Budapest. Laibach was a provincial center of some musical importance, with a population of under fifty thousand. Mahler had conducted there in 1881 at the city's excellent Municipal Theater, where opera was sung in both German and Slovenian. The local orchestra, which served for concerts as well as opera and operetta performance, was small; Reiner recalled performing Beethoven's "Eroica" Symphony with fewer than thirty-five players. Václav Talich, four years Reiner's senior, was first conductor in Laibach. He and Reiner became close friends, and both were great admirers of Arthur Nikisch. The Municipal Theater offered a six-month season of plays, operettas, and operas, as well as occasional concerts by the staff orchestra.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Fritz Reiner by Philip Hart. Copyright © 1994 Philip Hart. Excerpted by permission of Northwestern University Press.
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