Dear Dorothy: Letters from Nicolas Slonimsky to Dorothy Adlow ed. by Electra Slonimsky Yourke (review)

Nicolas Slonimsky was born into a distinguished family in St Petersburg in 1894 and arrived in the USA in 1923. His legacy is one of a lexicographer of genius. He raised the acquisition of information to the highest level, all in a pre-digital age, and his publications were landmarks. Music since 1900 (1937, followed by further editions and supplements) has a wide scope and is not limited to major figures; he took over O. Thompson’s The International Cyclopedia of Music and Musicians in 1946 and it was here that he was shocked to discover many articles simply lifted from other dictionaries; from 1958 he made Baker’s Biographical Dictionary of Musicians into a reliable reference work, with most of its entries in his own idiosyncratic style. In 1945 he published a pioneering study, Music of Latin America (New York, 1945, 1949, 1972; Spanish trans., 1947), based on material collected during a wide-ranging tour documented in these letters to his wife.

Slonimsky wore his learning lightly: he loved gossip. In 1948, A Thing or Two about Music appeared, revised in 1997 as Slonimsky’s Book of Musical Anecdotes, and his Lexicon of Musical Invective: Critical Assaults on Composers since Beethoven’s Time (NewYork, 1953, 2000) exposed the sheer ineptitude of what passed as criticism— which was mostly derisive antagonism to anything new. His own reviews are models of enlightenment by comparison and have been likened to the writings of Bernard Shaw. In the last decade, the composer’s daughter has edited four volumes of Slonimsky’s reviews. The first, Nicolas Slonimsky Writings on Music, Vol. 1: Early Articles for the Boston Evening Transcript (New York, 2004), covers 1927 to 1936, and remarkably little of what he wrote then has dated. How many reviewers would have greeted the arrival of Schoenberg in Boston in 1933 with: ‘Welcome for the Incoming Modern Master’ and gone on to observe:

Schoenberg’s latest composition, Accompaniment to a Cinematic Scene, with its subdivisions, ‘Danger, Fear, Catastrophe’, is not likely to be taken up by Hollywood. But what a marvellous background it would supply to a surrealistic film of images and geometric designs. The score, for small orchestra, is the acme of mastery. Here is the twelve-tone system brought into full life. It is simple as atonality goes, and it is immediately impressive. The visionary of Pierrot Lunaire and the rationalist of the Harmonielehre have here arrived at a synthesis.

Slonimsky was equally affirmative towards American composers, and he had a special relationship with Ives, as these letters show. It was Ives who wrote to him: ‘Anyone can write a good symphony—and it takes a better man to conduct it. But only you and Sam Johnson can write a good encyclopedia’ (Nicolas Slonimsky: The First Hundred Years, ed. Kostelanetz (New York, 1994), xvi).

There are intriguing cross-references in Slonimsky’s career, many worth further investigation. His maternal aunt was the famous piano teacher Isabelle Vengerova, who taught him before moving to the USA, where her pupils at the Curtis Institute included many leading pianists as well as composers such as Samuel Barber and Leonard Bernstein. Slonimsky worked for Serge Koussevitsky in Paris and Boston by playing orchestral scores on the piano for him to practise conducting and eventually got fired for being too clever. When it became clear that Koussevitsky could not cope with the varied metres of the Danse sacrale in The Rite of Spring, Slonimsky made a simplified version for him by adjusting the barring without altering the rhythm. Surprisingly, this version was also used by Bernstein. In 1984 he wrote to Slonimsky on his ninetieth birthday: ‘Every time I conduct Le Sacre, as I did most recently two weeks ago (and always from Koussy’s own score, with your rebarring), I admire and...