Mozart in the Jungle: Sex, Drugs, and Classical Music

by Blair Tindall

  Samuel’s reputation as a child prodigy grew. After winning WQXR radio’s Musical Talent in Our Schools competition, he stepped onstage at Carnegie Hall to play Rachmaninoff’s Concerto no. 2 with the New York Philharmonic. A solo career looked inevitable, but Samuel grew restless and enrolled at Hunter College instead.

  Teachers assigned him to accompany an Irish Catholic student tenor at Hunter, a singer who’d already finished a career as a child star. From age six, Little Bobby White had sung on radio shows from Fred Allen to Kay Kyser, bantering with Bing Crosby and other celebrities of the era. Since the emergence of television, White was searching for a new image as he worked toward his bachelor’s degree.

  At their first rehearsal in a Hunter College practice room, Sam nervously fiddled with the sheet music, apologizing in advance. Bobby cursed the music department for sending him an incompetent pianist and handed Sam the music to an aria from J. S. Bach’s Magnificat. “It’s not in A major. It’s F-sharp minor,” Bobby enunciated slowly, since both keys had the same three sharps, and this boy was clearly an idiot.

  “Uh, okay,” stuttered Sam. “Urn, I’ll try.”

  Sam played the aria perfectly. The two performed together again and again and became close friends, even though Bobby was gay and Catholic, Sam a straight Jew. Taking his new friend home to the Bronx, Sam introduced Bobby to his parents, and Mollie served up not one but three pork chops to her son’s new friend, who watched her cook in a kitchen lined wall-to-wall with white butcher paper, immaculate as her son’s musicianship.

  What’s not to like? thought Bobby. The food’s great, there’s a Cadillac downstairs, and the kid can sight-read!

  The pair earned fifty bucks a performance at communion breakfasts, where they also developed a deadpan comedy routine. “I have to move, the neighborhood is changing so,” one lock-jawed Catholic lady droned. “Up here in Fordham Hill, we’re taken over, you know, by the noses,” she whispered, putting fist to forehead, her elbow mimicking an enormous Jewish schnoz. Sam rubbed his beak and looked her slowly up and down. “Bobby, can you imagine? The noses.”

  Sam went on to study at Juilliard with Sergius Kagen and Irwin Freundlich. He married a singer and moved across from Yankee Stadium on Gerard Avenue, where the couple could count Roger Maris’s home runs by the roars from the stadium.

  He started to earn real money playing piano, but like most classical musicians in the early 1960s he did whatever paid the rent, artistic or not. At Carnegie Recital Hall, he played one concert accompanying singer Carolyn Raney, another with blind violinist Ruben Varga, and a third with a concertina soloist who fainted onstage, canceling the performance. For extra cash, he recorded a project with “the singing lady,” Irene Wicker, who was married to the brother of energy tycoon Armand Hammer. Wicker’s disc was packaged with a picture book aimed at parents of “the pre-nursery precocious,” with Sam repeating “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” for each letter and number.

  He joined Juilliard’s faculty at its granite fortress above Columbia University, demanding new recognition for accompanists, who were generally underpaid and unrecognized at the time. But just as Sam tasted success, his marriage and his health fell apart.

  Sam moved to an eighty-dollar-a-month five-room apartment (bathtub in the kitchen) in a building at 56th and Tenth owned by his brother, Martin. Bobby moved in upstairs, sometimes missing his rent payments. Since money was scarce, Sam began developing the powerful circle of artists, patrons, and journalists that would embrace him for many years, providing networking, employment, and financial support.

  Sam’s heart started giving him trouble again in 1965, as he dragged himself through coachings, rehearsals, and concerts. Frightened, he sought medical attention. Doctors hooked him up to diagnostic devices, carefully choosing classical music to soothe him during the tests. Sam grew restless and at one point exploded, “That’s all wrong!” Machines were shut down and tubes pulled out until the team realized he wasn’t in pain, at least not physical pain, but was instead critiquing the Dvorak Cello Concerto that was playing on the Muzak.

  New technology provided a solution for Sam’s latest heart complication: “total correction” that would close the hole between his ventricles, usually the final operation needed by a former blue baby. Mollie sold her diamond ring to help pay for the surgery, while Martin guaranteed the balance of the $30,000. When he woke from surgery in Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital and heard Lawrence Welk’s “Champagne Music” theme drifting from the intensive care unit’s TV, the tune convinced Sam he’d died and was not necessarily in heaven.

  Released from the hospital on November 9, Sam decided he really was dying as he rode down FDR Drive in a taxi with his mother and the lights of his beautiful city flickered and went dark. Mollie and the cabbie saw it too, as the blackout of 1965 plunged the entire Northeast into darkness. Since his parents lived on the eleventh floor of an elevator building now rendered a walk-up by the power outage, Sam struggled up five flights to Martin’s Sutton Place apartment to recover.

  A few months later, Sam married painter Rhoda Ross in the Hastingson-Hudson home of cellist Leonard Rose and launched a busy travel schedule of community concerts. He’d become first choice for such classical music stars as Jacqueline du Pre, Leonard Rose, Itzhak Perlman, Mstislav Rostropovich, Yo-Yo Ma, Jaime Laredo, Jessye Norman, and Beverly Sills; played debut recitals for cellists Lynn Harrell and Robert Sylvester and flutist Paula Robison; and accompanied silver medalist Stephen Kates at the 1966 Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow. Playing two hundred concerts a year, he zipped between different artists, cities, and repertoires.

  When Juilliard moved from Claremont Avenue to Lincoln Center in 1969, Sam shifted his teaching to a plush modern studio. Unfortunately, the school, along with the rest of Lincoln Center (and its new high-rolling arts budget), couldn’t afford to pay its faculty adequately or provide them health insurance.

  “Every institution at Lincoln Center is broke ... and Juilliard will be when it gets there,” said Juilliard’s chairman, John Drye, as the school opened. With the move, Juilliard’s maintenance expense quadrupled, and the stagehands’ union demands threatened to shut down its theater altogether. A New York Times article noted that Juilliard relied on massive subsidy by prestige-chasing faculty who could make better money elsewhere.

  By 1972, Bobby White had landed enough teaching gigs to move out of Martin’s West 56th Street building. After a rehearsal, flutist Thomas Nyfenger dropped him off at the corner of 99th and West End. “A lot of musicians live around here,” Nyfenger said. Just as Bobby slammed the car door, a pretty blond bass player he knew turned the corner and pulled him into her building, the Allendale, to meet rental agent Rudy Rudolph.

  The Allendale was run-down, but a three-room flat in the huge building that the landlords owned next door was far more refined. It was a lot of money, Bobby thought, writing a check for $280 rent, a month’s security deposit, and a $300 bribe, but with a doorman, thick walls, and windows facing residential West End Avenue, he was definitely moving up.

  Sam was moving up too. He and Rhoda found a large prewar place just uth of Bobby, on West End at 83rd and Rhoda gave birth to a little girl they named Sophie. Sam’s schedule was exhausting: Town Hall one night with Rose, Rockefeller University with Bobby the next, a three-city tour of Florida and then off to Peoria, Utica, and Galveston with Itzhak Perlman.

  Sam never got over his nerves, combating his fear with obsessive practice. He drilled pieces endlessly, in myriad variations of rhythm, tempo, and phrasing. Practice was a matter of survival, and he rehearsed every chance he got. Practice was his master, practice and Valium, which “brings me down from a wild panic to a mild hysteria,” he said.

  Sam started practicing in a friend’s soundproof apartment after midnight, so he would have more hours at the keyboard without being interrupted, returning home each morning at sunrise to sleep. When he woke at lunchtime, he either took a cab to Juilliard or packed his tuxedo between sheets of t
issue paper and headed to the airport for a short concert tour with Itzhak, with whom he was playing ever more frequently as time went on.

  After one run-out performance in North Carolina with Itzhak in 1978, Sam was packing up the hairbrush, address book, and wristwatch he always set out in precise parallel formation backstage before the concert, as a good-luck ritual. After a long week of concerts, he was eager to get home to see his young daughter Sophie, especially since he hadn’t been feeling well, and he was growing anxious hanging around while the ladies’ club shook Itzhak’s hand.

  As Itzhak put on his coat, Sam glanced back one last time to make sure nothing was left behind. Just as it looked like the two men could finally leave, a local girl who’d studied piano with someone he knew approached. She wanted to talk to him, but like so many music students she had nothing to say.

  CHAPTER

  4

  New World Symphony

  SAM SANDERS HAD succeeded despite huge physical odds. Born with a life expectancy of nine years, he twice benefited from medical advances that saved his life at the eleventh hour. The credit for his musical career, however, was his. Though he rose to prominence, Sam still had to piece together a living, artistic or not, by playing radio and television variety shows, performing an array of recitals, and recording whatever paid best.

  When Sam started out in the 1950s, few financial resources were available to classical musicians. No federal or state arts council would exist until 1960. With so few meal tickets, Sam learned to rely both on the musical network that brought him work as an accompanist and the social circle whose money backed organizations and performance projects.

  Musicians like Sam earned good fees playing community concert series, but the money was whittled away by expenses. He might earn $450 for a performance; after paying the presenter and manager fees, piano rental, hotel, travel, advertising, promotion, and buying formal wear, he’d have no more than $75 in his pocket. Health and retirement benefits were luxuries.

  During the 1950s, music groups began extending their seasons, and philanthropic organizations formed to offer support. New competitions sprang up, offering cash awards, debut recitals, and concert management contracts. Until this time, only two major contests in America existed in the entire classical music community: the Naumburg Prize, founded in 1926, and the Leventritt Prize, founded in 1940. In addition, faster jet flights were now allowing a soloist to fit in more concerts—and paychecks—than ever before.

  Musicians like me, born a generation after Sam, entered a very different music business, one filled with greater opportunity compared to earlier eras. During the 1960s, funding mushroomed for arts education, performing groups, and concert series. Jobs were still not plentiful compared to many nonmusical professions, but the improvement was so dramatic I assumed that a fairly active arts world had always existed, complete with big audiences who clapped in all the right places.

  “The American attitude toward the arts has completed a 180-degree turn since the end of World War II,” wrote Alvin Toffler in The Culture Consumers. “From one of apathy, indifference, and even hostility, it has become one of eager, if sometimes ignorant, enthusiasm.”1

  The apathy, Toffler argued, had begun in Puritan days, as settlers came to value work above idle pleasure. Statutes forbade plays, dancing, and “unprofitable” books, along with smoking, drinking, and gambling. Even so, theater, painting, and music had emerged by the late 1700s as villages grew to cities and hardscrabble lives became more comfortable. In 1789, George Washington urged Congress to “accelerate the progress of art and science; to patronize works of genius,” but his plea inspired little action at the time.2

  American arts paid their own way until the late nineteenth century. Market demand drove impresarios, who survived only by providing art that an audience could, and would, buy at competitive prices, like a retail product. Performers who were willing to trade low salaries for artistic gratification helped subsidize the production of entertainment in the nineteenth century, according to arts analyst John Kreidler.3

  To please the audience, presenters bowed to popular taste, mixing Shakespeare and Mozart with drinking songs and circus acts. Applause, shouts, hisses, stamping, jeers, and whistles punctuated performances, inspiring the orchestra to substitute “Tally Ho the Grinders” or “Yankee Doodle” for the classical overture.4

  European opera stars crisscrossed the country during the mid-1800s on lucrative tours, injecting popular tunes like “An Old Man Would Be a-Wooing” into a Rossini opera, which might then be followed by a comic play. Once English-language performances made their stories more accessible, the New York Home Journal could declare that “opera music has become a popular taste.”5

  Concert music, without the entertainment value of a story line, was still something of a Eurocentric rarity, and few instrumental concert performances were presented in the United States during the mid-nineteenth century. The wealthy traveled abroad for classical music. Members of the small middle class waited for European artists to tour America, while the workingman had neither time nor money for sophisticated entertainment. Bands and orchestras began forming, sometimes playing a few classical pieces, but the groups could not attract an audience without combining their Beethoven symphonies with polkas and popular music.

  When the New York Philharmonic was founded in 1842, it gave four concerts a season. A workers’ cooperative, its musicians maximized resources. They shared profits, chose their own conductor, and determined his salary. They substituted a violin for a missing oboe. They sold tickets even to rehearsals.6 During their summer seasons in a Central Park beer garden, conductor Theodore Thomas had to juxtapose waltzes and Wagner, complaining that “circumstances force me to prostitute my art and my talents.”

  One Philadelphia paper in 1899 noted the general public wasn’t interested enough in classical music to buy tickets for it, declaring “promoters must expect to pay the piper.” Pay they did, as wealthy elites of the era began to fund arts groups in order to satisfy their own preferences. Maestro Thomas’s yen for pure classics became a reality when orchestras began divorcing themselves from the marketplace through guaranteed funding. As the necessity of pleasing a paying audience diminished, “pure” elitist culture rose above the common entertainment, creating a wide gulf between the two.

  Art became a lofty pursuit, and Americans began regarding concert halls as cultural shrines, music as uplifting mysticism. “The sermons in behalf of the arts then preached (and which continue to be preached) laid a heavy moral burden on an experience that elsewhere was considered simply sophisticated entertainment,” wrote author Alice Goldfarb Marquis in Art Lessons.7

  Elites then controlled cultural policy by forming nonprofit organizations, which served as central clearinghouses for financial arts support. Under the aegis of these board-run operations, orchestras formed in St. Louis, Cincinnati, Minneapolis, and San Francisco.

  The nonprofit model pasted “an altruistic, morally chaste veneer over basically self-serving activities,” wrote Marquis. Arts marketing was born. By selling culture as snake oil for the masses, elites could engineer a city’s artistic life to separate themselves from commoners, creating a smoke-screen of cultural ritual that also distanced performers from their audience.

  The New York Philharmonic’s musicians finally relinquished control to a board of directors in 1908, accepting a $90,000 note from Andrew Carnegie, J. P. Morgan, and Joseph Pulitzer, who also left them ten times that amount upon his death, but only if their programs included his favorite musical warhorses.8

  A new system of American taxation in the early twentieth century further changed the business of philanthropy. When the country’s first income tax bill was enacted in 1913, charitable giving dropped when wealthy scions had to find the money to pay large sums to the government. There was a positive side to the 1913 bill, however, which gave nonprofit organizations like orchestras the new benefit of tax exemption. A second tax bill, in 1917, created a deduction for cont
ributions to those nonprofits, and the resulting tax incentive once again spurred philanthropy.

  When the 1929 stock market crash devoured fortunes, donations to the arts by foundations declined from $1.4 million to $740,000 between 1930 and 1933. Only a few organizations funded culture during the Great Depression, among them the Carnegie Corporation, which provided 82 percent of all foundation donations to the arts until it virtually withdrew in 1943.9 In the following years, audiences sought such lighter fare as movies, radio programs, and stage shows, which were popular as relief to the grim realities of the era’s everyday life.

  World War II immigration built a fervent audience of European Americans, many of them amateur or professional musicians. As the war ended, a renewed sense of democracy diffused the elite’s monopoly on artistic taste, opening the concepts of high and low culture to debate and often mixing the two. Operatic legends Lauritz Melchior, Risë Stevens, and Ezio Pinza appeared in Hollywood films, soprano Beverly Sills hawked Rinso soap powder on the radio, and dancers Agnes de Mille, Jerome Robbins, Gene Kelly, and Fred Astaire moved between the worlds of Broadway and ballet.10

  The Eisenhower era produced four million children each year, born into a healthy economy where luxuries were commonplace and technology freed the growing population to enjoy leisure activities. Real income had grown 50 percent between 1941 and 1952. The 1944 GI Bill spent $14.5 billion to educate 7.8 million veterans, guaranteeing free tuition to a generation rapidly gaining the knowledge and income for art appreciation.11

  Americans of all ages participated in the arts, with one in six involved in cultural pursuits. One symphony’s 1955 demographic survey revealed 54 percent of its audience was under thirty-five.12 Between 1940 and 1960, musical instrument sales quintupled, and more than half the world’s orchestras were located in America.13