Stokowski, the London-born maestro who ditched the baton and invented his own mystique
Leopold Stokowski was born in Marylebone and trained at the Royal College of Music, yet he spoke with a mysterious foreign accent and sometimes claimed to have been born in Kraków or Pomerania. The showman of American orchestras conducted Disney's Fantasia, lit only his hands in darkened halls and was still recording at 95.
His birth certificate settles the basics: born 18 April 1882 in London's Marylebone, son of an English-born cabinet-maker of Polish descent and an Irish mother. The family name traced back to a Lithuanian form, Stokauskas. Rumours later had him born Stokes or plain Stock, and he occasionally shaved five years off his age. His biographer Oliver Daniel traced the exotic persona partly to his first wife, the pianist Olga Samaroff, a Texan born Lucy Hickenlooper who had renamed herself and urged him to stress only his Polish roots in America.
Musically he was precocious. He entered the Royal College of Music at 13, among its youngest students, joined the Royal College of Organists by 16 and took an Oxford music degree in 1903. He went to New York in 1905 as organist at St. Bartholomew's Church, whose congregation included Vanderbilts, then studied conducting in Paris and campaigned by letter for the Cincinnati Symphony post, winning it in 1909. That year he made his official debut in Paris accompanying Samaroff in Tchaikovsky's first piano concerto.
In Cincinnati he introduced pops concerts and championed living composers, but he quit in 1912 after clashing with the board and within two months was leading the Philadelphia Orchestra; one wit claimed he had that contract in his pocket all along. There he became a theatrical star, tossing scores to the floor, experimenting with lighting and from 1929 to 1930 abandoning the baton. He cultivated a lush Philadelphia Sound through free bowing, free breathing and constantly shifting seating.
Critics bristled at his habit of rewriting orchestrations, from Bach to Tchaikovsky, a nineteenth-century liberty that had fallen out of favour. Yet he was a tireless advocate of new music: the only conductor to perform all of Schoenberg's orchestral works while the composer lived, and responsible for American premieres of Mahler's Eighth and four Shostakovich symphonies. His last public concert came in 1975; he died in 1977.
Source: Leopold Stokowski
