The “Rosamunde” Overture
In 1823, the same year in which Schubert brought to paper the operas Die Verschworenen and Fierrabras he wrote for a romantic play called Rosamunde, Princess of Cyprus, by the half-mad poetess Helmine von Chezy, a number of vocal and instrumental pieces which are perhaps the best loved samples of theatre music he ever composed. The play itself was a sorry failure, had exactly two performances (though Schubert gallantly assured the unfortunate librettist that he considered her work “excellent”) and the book was lost. The Overture we call Rosamunde today and which had been written originally for The Magic Harp was never used to preface the work whose name it has borne for generations—was, in fact, not entitled Rosamunde till later. The one with which Schubert had prefaced Helmine von Chezy’s drama was the introduction he had used for Alfonso und Estrella. There are lovely and striking things in the Rosamunde score—a soprano romanza, an ensemble for spirits and two other choruses as well as some ballet music and various entr’actes. The third interlude brings us that deathless melody which seems to have haunted Schubert’s imagination and reappears in the slow movement of the A minor Quartet and the B flat Impromptu for piano.
The Rosamunde score disappeared from view for more than forty years and the tale of its recovery belongs to the exciting legends of music. Like most legends even this one needs to be qualified. The story usually goes that the Englishmen, George Grove and Arthur Sullivan, in 1867 came upon the manuscript in a dusty cupboard at the Viennese home of Dr. Eduard Schneider, husband of Schubert’s sister, Therese. What the two British explorers found in that famous closet were the complete orchestral and vocal parts of the score, which made clear the correct sequence of the pieces and supplied certain accompaniments which had been missing. But Grove himself records that “besides the entr’actes in B minor and B flat and the ballet numbers 2 and 9, which we had already acquired in 1866, we had found at Mr. Spina’s (the publisher) an entr’acte after the second act and a Shepherd’s Melody for clarinets, bassoons and horns.... But we still required the total number of pieces and their sequence in the drama....”
For all his difficulties and privations Schubert’s health had been, up to 1823, perhaps the least of his worries. But early in that year he had been ailing and soon his illness took a serious turn. Confined to his lodgings at first he was presently taken to the General Hospital. He became darkly despondent and wrote to his friend, Leopold Kupelwieser, a mournful letter in which he alluded to himself as “a man whose health can never be right again ... whose fairest hopes have come to nothing ... who wishes when he goes to sleep never more to awaken and who joyless and friendless passes his days.” A little later he sets down in his diary the bitter reflection: “There is none who understands the pain of another and none his joy.” Nor is this by any means his only pessimistic entry.
The exact nature of Schubert’s malady has never been definitely established, even by modern medical authorities who have studied the case. We know that his hair fell out and that till it grew in again he had to wear a wig. Some have hinted at “irregularities” of one sort or another. At different times he complained of “headaches, vertigo and high blood pressure.” His condition was to improve greatly in the course of time but he was never again wholly well.
The melancholy of Schubert was surely not lessened by his dealings with publishers, who took the most despicable advantage of his woeful inexperience in business affairs. Diabelli once persuaded him to sign over for a mere 800 Gulden all his rights in a set of works. The publisher (and later his successor) made 27,000 Gulden on the Wanderer Fantasie (for piano) alone. Schubert got exactly 20 (about $10)! Another Viennese firm went so far as to ask him to sell them his compositions at the most favorable starvation rate “paid a beginner,” while publishers in Germany were, if anything, even worse! Yet when Schubert had a few dollars in his pocket he thought nothing of spending a part of it on tickets for himself and his friend Bauernfeld for a concert by Paganini, whose spectacular violin playing excited Schubert quite as much as it did the rest of Vienna.
In spite of illness and discouragement many of his works at this time rank among his very greatest. There are, first of all, the 23 songs of the Schöne Müllerin cycle—the unhappy story of the love of a youth for a miller’s daughter who jilts him for a green-clad hunter—containing such lyrics as Wohin and Ungeduld, which have virtually become folksongs; the piano sonata, Op. 143; the fabulous Octet, written for an amateur clarinetist, Count Troyer (and after a few hearings put away and forgotten till 1861); and that sweetest and most tender of Schubert’s chamber music works, the A minor Quartet, with its lovely Rosamunde melody, the indescribable lilt of its minuet and the Slavic and Hungarian influences in its finale.
He was to experience more of these influences the summer of 1824, for at that time he went once again to the Esterházys in Zseliz. The country air and the quiet life of the place in addition to regular meals and comfortable quarters exercised a recuperative effect. Moreover, the Countess Caroline was now a sightly young lady of seventeen. Possibly Schubert was not indifferent to her charms. But his letters to his father and his brother Ferdinand make it clear that he was homesick and often decidedly blue. Still, he wrote some admirable music at Zseliz—the Divertissement à l’Hongroise, the stunning Grand Duo for four hands, the sonata for arpeggione and piano; and thoughts of a great symphony, more imposing than any he had composed so far, began to occupy his mind. He had heard, also, that Beethoven intended to give a concert at which his Ninth Symphony would be produced. And he wrote to Kupelwieser: “If God wills, I am thinking next year of giving a similar concert!”
Schubert at the pianoforte during a musicale at the home of Josef R. v. Spaun
A rare coffee cup of Vienna porcelain in the collection of the Schubert Museum in Vienna. Shown are a portrait of Schubert and a replica of the “Novalis” Hymn No. II.
In May, 1825, Vogl invited Schubert to accompany him on an outing which proved to be the longest trip he was ever to take. Franz brought with him a number of compositions, finished and unfinished, among them settings of songs from Sir Walter Scott’s The Lady of the Lake, of which the Ave Maria is one of the best loved things he ever wrote. The friends revisited the haunts of their previous journey, but this time Vogl took Schubert further—to Gmunden, on the Traunsee in the Salzkammergut; to Salzburg; then southward as far as Bad Gastein. All along the way there was no end of music making, charming new acquaintances, hospitable folk who threatened to kill the travellers with kindness. Schubert cut up all manner of musical capers on occasion (one of his favorite pranks was to give a performance of Der Erlkönig on a comb covered with paper!). He was careful not to forget his parents. In an affectionate letter to his father he asks, chaffingly, if his brother, Ferdinand, “has not been ill seventy-seven times again” and surmises that he has surely imagined at least nine times that he was going to die. “As if death were the worst thing that could befall one!”, he suddenly exclaims, growing serious; “could Ferdinand only look on these divine lakes and mountains which threaten to crush and overwhelm us he would no longer love this puny human life but deem it a great happiness to be restored for a new life to the inscrutable forces of the earth”! It is a question how pleased Father Schubert was with this pantheistic declaration of his son’s; when Franz was in Zseliz, Ferdinand had warned him against discussing religious matters when writing to his parent.
Curiously enough, Schubert passed through Salzburg without any allusion to his idol, Mozart. In Gastein he found time to complete the great piano sonata in D and to write several songs, one of them a setting of Ladislaus Pyrker’s Die Allmacht—a grandiose musical duplication of that statement of faith he had fearlessly written his father. At this health resort, furthermore, Schubert is supposed to have completed that famous Gastein Symphony of which nobody has ever been able to find a trace. All manner of theories have been advanced with respect to this mysterious work. Some of Schubert’s intimates have insisted that the composer worked on it in the summer of 1825 and intended it for a benefit concert by the Vienna Society of the Friends of Music. Others charge the Society with negligence resulting in the loss of the score, while still other investigators have imagined that the Grand Duo, composed a year earlier, might be an unorchestrated version of the missing score; or else that Schubert had merely contemplated a revision of the early Sixth Symphony, with which he had never been satisfied. Whether the hypothetical Gastein or the subsequent C major of 1828 represents the “great symphony” to which Schubert aspired we have no way of knowing.
In 1826 a conductor’s post had become free and although Schubert had not long before turned down an organ position offered him (probably because he did not like the idea that his freedom might be curtailed) he did apply for this conductorship, attracted by the moderate salary it promised. It was not Schubert who got it but the popular mediocrity, Josef Weigl. How little Schubert harbored jealousy is clear from his satisfaction that the job had gone to “so worthy a man as Weigl.” Then a vacancy occurred at the Kärntnertor Theatre. The candidate for a minor conductor’s post had to submit a specially composed dramatic air for the singer, Nanette Schechner, and of course Schubert did so. But the Schechner, we are told, demanded changes in the music and Schubert peremptorily refused to make them. In spite of passionate entreaties and a spectacular fainting fit by the soprano, the composer pocketed his score and walked off coldly announcing: “I will change nothing.” So things remained about as they were. True, the Friends of Music in 1825 had permitted him to substitute for a viola player at some of their concerts—after first rejecting his plea to do so on the ground that he “made a living of music” and that professionals were ineligible! Thus when in the summer of 1826 he would have liked to go once more to Linz there was no money for him to go anywhere. He had to content himself with the suburb of Währing and to aggravate matters it rained for a month.
All the same, 1826 was a year of significant works. In June Schubert composed within ten days his last string quartet, the vast and almost orchestrally colored one in G major. During the preceding winter he had written what is undoubtedly the most familiar of his quartets, the D minor, the slow movement of which consists of those variations on his song Death and the Maiden which are among the supreme variations of musical literature. Further, there were the melodically blooming B flat Trio for piano, violin and cello, the lovely G major piano sonata, the “Rondo Brilliant,” for violin and piano and numerous songs, among them the two Shakespearean settings Hark, hark, the Lark and Who is Sylvia? Almost everybody who has ever interested himself in Schubert is familiar with the fable about the origin of Hark, hark, the Lark—how one day Schubert picked up a volume of Shakespeare in a Währing beer garden and how, after skimming through Cymbeline, he suddenly exclaimed: “A lovely melody has come into my head—if only I had some music paper!”; whereupon a friend drew some staves on the back of a bill of fare and the song was instantly written. Unfortunately for legend, the song was written originally not on a bill of fare but in a small note book including a number of other compositions—one of them on the reverse side of the very page containing Hark, hark, the Lark. What seems a likelier story is that Schubert wrote it in Schwind’s room, while the latter was trying to draw his picture.
March, 1827, was the date of Beethoven’s death. Schubert was one of the torchbearers at the funeral. Back from the Währing cemetery he went with some friends to a coffee house in the “Inner Town.” The gathering was in a solemn yet exalted mood. Schubert lifted his glass and drank a toast “To him we have just buried,” then another “To him who will be next.” Did that strange clairvoyance in which Michael Vogl once said he composed his music show him in mystic vision that his own sands had just twenty months more to run?
But before this he still had a little worldly journey to make—and a pleasant one. Karl Pachler, a cultured and musical lawyer, and his wife, Marie Leopoldine Koschak, an accomplished pianist whom Beethoven admired, invited Schubert to visit their home in Graz. The honored guest was to have been Beethoven but shortly after his passing Marie Koschak expressed a desire to know Schubert, whose importance she fully realized. So accompanied by his friend Jenger (who some years earlier had brought him his notice of membership in the Styrian Musical Association) he went in September, 1827, to Graz. In the home of the Pachlers, Schubert passed a happy, carefree, inspiring time. There was no end of sociability, music, picnics, excursions. He was even introduced to a local celebrity named Franz Schubert, who had a reputation as a folksong singer and who rendered Styrian folk melodies for his Viennese namesake. The Music Society gave a concert in honor of its visiting member, who also went to the theatre with Anselm Hüttenbrenner to hear an early opera of Meyerbeer’s—though after the first act he protested: “I can’t stand it any longer, let’s get out into the air.” He played his own Alfonso und Estrella to an operatic conductor, who made wry faces over its “difficulties” so that Schubert ended by leaving the score with Pachler, who kept it till 1841. Several songs were composed at Graz, also a quantity of waltzes and galops. Franz left Graz promising to come back another year—which was never to dawn.
Title-page for Variations on a French Song (opus 10), “dedicated to Mr. Ludwig von Beethoven by his admirer Franz Schubert.”
It is probably unlikely that, at the gathering of the Schubertians on New Year’s Eve, Schubert realized as poignantly as some may imagine that he was standing on the threshold of his last year on earth. But the winter was hard, there was little or no money and it seems likely that the good stepmother up in the Rossau schoolhouse had to help out with occasional pennies from the household stocking. To be sure, a little earlier the Friends of Music had elected Schubert a member of the Representative Body of the Society and the composer felt much honored. But such “honor” would not buy a meal. Even when half starved Schubert contrived to work. Between January and November, 1828, he turned out some of the most incomparable songs he ever composed (yes, even though planning to give up such trifling matters as Lieder!) issued posthumously under the collective title Schwanengesang; the Great Symphony in C major “of the heavenly length” (the score is dated March, 1828); a cantata, the three wonderful piano sonatas in A, C minor and B flat; that towering monument of chamber music, the C major String Quintet; the Mass in E flat (he had written a so-called Missa Solemnis in A flat as far back as 1820 besides a quantity of smaller masses) and much else. He devoted himself to the E flat Mass with such intensity that Josef Hüttenbrenner described him as “living in his Mass.” The supreme Lieder—one is tempted to say the most grandiose and prophetic of all the odd 600 he wrote—are the settings of six poems from Heinrich Heine’s Buch der Lieder, which had just come to his notice. They are Am Meer, Der Doppelgänger, Die Stadt, Der Atlas and Ihr Bild, anticipations of the whole song technic of the nineteenth century!
The C major Symphony is without its like in the whole range of music and by one magical pen stroke Schubert made it even a greater thing than when he first conceived it. The autograph score shows that by the substitution of a D natural for a G in the theme of the first Allegro the composer transformed what was scarcely more than a rhythm into one of the great symphonic subjects of all time. But he was never to hear the work. It came to a rehearsal by the Friends of Music, was found too difficult and “overloaded” and on the composer’s own advice, dropped in favor of the Sixth—the “little” C major. And yet it was the one symphony of its time which could have endured the sunlight of Beethoven undiminished and unashamed.
Exactly a year after Beethoven’s death Schubert at last gave the concert of his own works that he meant “if God wills” to give some day. It was the urging of Bauernfeld and other friends which finally caused things to materialize. The idea was that if all went well Schubert might offer his private concert annually and the rascally publishers would at long last be singing a different tune. His friends rallied nobly to his aid. Vogl sang, Josefine Fröhlich’s pupils gave Luise Gosmar’s birthday serenade, there was chamber music and a male chorus. The Musikverein hall was packed, encores were innumerable, the applause would not end and, best of all, there was a clear profit of more than half a hundred dollars. The only fly in the ointment was that no critics came, though several foreign publications carried flattering accounts.
But the little wealth quickly ebbed away. Again there were futile bickerings with publishers. Schubert would have liked to go to Graz once more but Baden and excursions to nearby Grinzing and Sievering were as much as he could allow himself. Headaches and other symptoms of a year before troubled him alarmingly. His doctor advised him to leave the stuffy center of town for some place where he could have plenty of fresh country air. So in September he moved to a house in the Neue Wieden section, where his brother Ferdinand had taken rooms. The building was new, still damp and unhealthy. Aside from a pilgrimage to Haydn’s tomb at Eisenstadt and some annoyances with the publisher, Schott, both September and October were uneventful. Suddenly, while at dinner one day in the Lichtental neighborhood of his birth, he threw down his fork, shouted that the food tasted like poison and refused to eat further.
Probably nobody suspected a serious illness, let alone a fatal one. At that Schubert did not immediately take to bed. He dragged himself a few days later to hear a Requiem by his brother, shortly before which he had been fearfully agitated by a first hearing of Beethoven’s C sharp minor Quartet. Yet so little does his condition appear to have worried him that he went to the theorist Simon Sechter to arrange for instruction in counterpoint—his intimates and a study of Handel’s oratorios having supposedly persuaded him of his deficiencies in that branch of technic. Nothing came of the project. By November 12 he wrote Schober that “he is sick, has eaten nothing in eleven days and can do no more than crawl from his bed to a chair.” And he implores his friend to procure him reading matter, preferably Fenimore Cooper. The sickness made rapid inroads, though he continued to toy with the operatic scheme of the Count of Gleichen, and carefully corrected the proofs of his Winterreise cycle. Soon he became delirious and the doctors held a consultation. The diagnosis was “nerve fever,” or typhus, the same sickness which had carried off his mother. Pathetically he begged his brother not to leave him “in this corner under ground”; and when the anguished Ferdinand assured him he was in his own room he insisted: “No, that’s not true, Beethoven is not here!” A little later he turned his face to the wall and murmured, we are told, “Here, here is my end!” “The days of affliction,” wrote Father Schubert to Ferdinand, “lie heavy upon us”; and he presently made in the old list of births and deaths in the Schubert family the entry with the mortuary cross: “Franz Peter, Wednesday, Nov. 19, 1828, at three o’clock in the afternoon, of nerve fever, buried Saturday, Nov. 22, 1828.”
It was Ferdinand who decided that his brother should, in death, be brought closer to Beethoven than ever he had been in life. And since “Beethoven was not there,” where Schubert would ordinarily have been buried, Ferdinand saw to it that Franz should rest as close to his divinity as an intervening grave or two permitted. They were destined in the process of time to lie closer still. For three score years later the two masters were exhumed and placed side by side in two of those “graves of glory” in Vienna’s great Central Cemetery.
Program for the première of Schubert’s opera, Fierrabras, performed in Karlsruhe on the hundredth anniversary of Schubert’s birth.
“Music has buried here a rich treasure, but fairer hopes,” read the epitaph which Grillparzer set on the original tomb in the Währing cemetery. “Fairer hopes,” indeed! How could Grillparzer know what even the wisest musical heads of his day did not know? Eleven years after Schubert died “all Paris” was said to be astounded at the “posthumous diligence of a song writer who, while one might think his ashes repose in Vienna, is still making eternal new songs”! It took decades to reveal the incalculable richness of this “treasure” and even now the world is not finally aware of its fullness. Another deathless master, Robert Schumann, gave the world Schubert’s C major Symphony, redeeming it from Ferdinand’s heaped but silent hoard of unprinted, nay, unsuspected scores. “Who can do anything after Beethoven?” the half-starved Konvikt student had wistfully asked. Here was at least one triumphant answer, made by Schubert himself, at a distance of only eight months from his early tomb!
COMPLETE LIST OF RECORDINGS
BY THE
PHILHARMONIC-SYMPHONY SOCIETY OF NEW YORK
COLUMBIA RECORDS
LP—Also available on Long Playing Microgroove Recordings as well as on the conventional Columbia Masterworks.
Under the Direction of Bruno Walter
Barber—Symphony No. 1, Op. 9 Beethoven—Concerto for Violin, Cello, Piano and Orchestra in C major (with J. Corigliano, L. Rose and W. Hendl)—LP Beethoven—Concerto No. 5 in E-flat major (“Emperor”) (with Rudolf Serkin, piano)—LP Beethoven—Concerto in D major for Violin and Orchestra (with Joseph Szigeti)—LP Beethoven—Symphony No. 1 in C major, Op. 21—LP Beethoven—Symphony No. 3 in E-flat major (“Eroica”)—LP Beethoven—Symphony No. 5 in C minor—LP Beethoven—Symphony No. 8 in F major—LP Beethoven—Symphony No. 9 in D minor (“Choral”) (with Elena Nikolaidi, contralto, and Raoul Jobin, tenor)—LP Brahms—Song of Destiny (with Westminster Choir)—LP Dvorak—Slavonic Dance No. 1 Dvorak—Symphony No. 4 in G Major—LP Mahler—Symphony No. 4 in G major (with Desi Halban, soprano)—LP Mahler—Symphony No. 5 in C-sharp minor Mendelssohn—Concerto in E minor (with Nathan Milstein, violin)—LP Mendelssohn—Scherzo (from Midsummer Night’s Dream) Mozart—Cosi fan Tutti—Overture Mozart—Symphony No. 41 in C major (“Jupiter”), K. 551—LP Schubert—Symphony No. 7 in C major—LP Schumann, R.—Symphony No. 3 in E-flat major (“Rhenish”)—LP Smetana—The Moldau (“Vltava”)—LP Strauss, J.—Emperor Waltz
Under the Direction of Leopold Stokowski
Copland—Billy the Kid (2 parts) Griffes—“The White Peacock,” Op. 7, No. 1—LP 7″ Ippolitow—“In the Village” from Caucasian Sketches (W. Lincer and M. Nazzi, soloists) Khachaturian—“Masquerade Suite”—LP Messian—“L’Ascension”—LP Sibelius—“Maiden with the Roses”—LP Tschaikowsky—Francesca da Rimini, Op. 32—LP Tschaikowsky—Overture Fantasy—Romeo and Juliet—LP Vaughan-Williams—Greensleeves Vaughan-Williams—Symphony No. 6 in E minor—LP Wagner—Die Walküre—Wotan Farewell and Magic Fire Music (Act III—Scene 3) Wagner—Siegfried’s Rhine Journey and Siegfried’s Funeral March—(“Die Götterdämmerung”)—LP
Under the Direction of Efrem Kurtz
Chopin—Les Sylphides—LP Glinka—Mazurka—“Life of the Czar”—LP 7″ Grieg—Concerto in A minor for Piano and Orchestra, Op. 16 (with Oscar Levant, piano)—LP Herold—Zampa—Overture Kabalevsky—“The Comedians,” Op. 26—LP Khachaturian—Gayne—Ballet Suite No. 1—LP Khachaturian—Gayne—Ballet Suite No. 2—LP Lecoq—Mme. Angot Suite—LP Prokofieff—March, Op. 99—LP Rimsky-Korsakov—The Flight of the Bumble Bee—LP 7″ Shostakovich—Polka No. 3, “The Age of Gold”—LP 7″ Shostakovich—Symphony No. 9—LP Shostakovich—Valse from “Les Monts D’Or”—LP Villa-Lobos—Uirapuru—LP Wieniawski—Concerto No. 2 in D minor for Violin and Orchestra, Op. 22 (with Isaac Stern, violin)—LP
Under the Direction of Charles Münch
D’Indy—Symphony on a French Mountain Air for Orchestra and Piano—LP Milhaud—Suite Française—LP Mozart—Concerto No. 21 for Piano and Orchestra in C major—LP Saint-Saens—Symphony in C minor, No. 3 for Orchestra, Organ and Piano, Op. 78—LP
Under the Direction of Artur Rodzinski
Bizet—Carmen—Entr’acte (Prelude to Act III) Bizet—Symphony in C major—LP Brahms—Symphony No. 1 in C minor—LP Brahms—Symphony No. 2 in D major—LP Copland—A Lincoln Portrait (with Kenneth Spencer, Narrator)—LP Enesco—Roumanian Rhapsody—A major, No. 1—LP Gershwin—An American in Paris—LP Gould—“Spirituals” for Orchestra—LP Ibert—“Escales” (Port of Call)—LP Liszt—Mephisto Waltz—LP Moussorgsky—Gopack (The Fair at Sorotchinski)—LP Moussorgsky-Ravel—Pictures at an Exhibition—LP Prokofieff—Symphony No. 5—LP Rachmaninoff—Concerto No. 2 in C minor for Piano and Orchestra (with Gygory Sandor, piano) Rachmaninoff—Symphony No. 2 in E minor Saint-Saens—Concerto for Piano and Orchestra No. 4 in C minor (with Robert Casadesus)—LP Sibelius—Symphony No. 4 in A minor Tschaikowsky—Nutcracker Suite—LP Tschaikowsky—Suite “Mozartiana”—LP Tschaikowsky—Symphony No. 6 in B minor (“Pathétique”)—LP Wagner—Lohengrin—Bridal Chamber Scene (Act III—Scene 2)—(with Helen Traubel, soprano, and Kurt Baum, tenor)—LP Wagner—Lohengrin—Elsa’s Dream (Act I, Scene 2) (with Helen Traubel, soprano) Wagner—Siegfried Idyll—LP Wagner—Tristan und Isolde—Excerpts (with Helen Traubel, soprano) Wagner—Die Walküre-Act III (Complete) (with Helen Traubel, soprano and Herbert Janssen, baritone)—LP Wagner—Die Walküre—Duet (Act I, Scene 3) (with Helen Traubel, soprano and Emery Darcy, tenor)—LP Wolf-Ferrari—“Secret of Suzanne,” Overture
Under the Direction of Igor Stravinsky
Stravinsky—Firebird Suite—LP Stravinsky—Fireworks (Feu d’Artifice)—LP Stravinsky—Four Norwegian Moods Stravinsky—Le Sacre du Printemps (The Consecration of the Spring)—LP Stravinsky—Scènes de Ballet—LP Stravinsky—Suite from “Petrouchka”—LP Stravinsky—Symphony in Three Movements—LP
Under the Direction of Sir Thomas Beecham
Mendelssohn—Symphony No. 4, in A major (“Italian”) Sibelius—Melisande (from “Pelleas and Melisande”) Sibelius—Symphony No. 7 in C major—LP Tschaikowsky—Capriccio Italien
Under the Direction of John Barbirolli
Bach-Barbirolli—Sheep May Safely Graze (from the “Birthday Cantata”)—LP Berlioz—Roman Carnival Overture Brahms—Symphony No. 2, in D major Brahms—Academic Festival Overture—LP Bruch—Concerto No. 1, in G minor (with Nathan Milstein, violin)—LP Debussy—First Rhapsody for Clarinet (with Benny Goodman, clarinet) Debussy—Petite Suite: Ballet Mozart—Concerto in B-flat major (with Robert Casadesus, piano) Mozart—Symphony No. 25 in G minor, K. 183 Ravel—La Valse Rimsky-Korsakov—Capriccio Espagnol Sibelius—Symphony No. 1, in E minor Sibelius—Symphony No. 2, in D major Smetana—The Bartered Bride—Overture Tschaikowsky—Theme and Variations (from Suite No. 3 in G)—LP
Under the Direction of Andre Kostelanetz
Gershwin—Concerto in F (with Oscar Levant)—LP
Under the Direction of Dimitri Mitropoulos
Khachaturian—Concerto for Piano and Orchestra (with Oscar Levant, piano)—LP
VICTOR RECORDS
Under the Direction of Arturo Toscanini
Beethoven—Symphony No. 7 in A major Brahms—Variations on a Theme by Haydn Dukas—The Sorcerer’s Apprentice Gluck—Orfeo ed Euridice—Dance of the Spirits Haydn—Symphony No. 4 in D major (The Clock) Mendelssohn—Midsummer Night’s Dream—Scherzo Mozart—Symphony in D major (K. 385) Rossini—Barber of Seville—Overture Rossini—Semiramide—Overture Rossini—Italians in Algiers—Overture Verdi—Traviata—Preludes to Acts I and II Wagner—Excerpts—Lohengrin—Die Götterdämmerung—Siegfried Idyll
Under the Direction of John Barbirolli
Debussy—Iberia (Images, Set 3, No. 2) Purcell—Suite for Strings with four Horns, two Flutes, English Horn Respighi—Fountains of Rome Respighi—Old Dances and Airs (Special recording for members of the Philharmonic-Symphony League of New York) Schubert—Symphony No. 4 in C minor (Tragic) Schumann—Concerto for Violin and Orchestra in D minor (with Yehudi Menuhin, violin) Tschaikowsky—Francesca da Rimini—Fantasia
Under the Direction of Willem Mengelberg
J. C. Bach—Arr. Stein—Sinfonia in B-flat major J. S. Bach—Arr. Mahler—Air for G String (from Suite for Orchestra) Beethoven—Egmont Overture Handel—Alcina Suite Mendelssohn—War March of the Priests (from Athalia) Meyerbeer—Prophète—Coronation March Saint-Saens—Rouet d’Omphale (Omphale’s Spinning Wheel) Schelling—Victory Ball Wagner—Flying Dutchman—Overture Wagner—Siegfried—Forest Murmurs (Waldweben)
