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13. A Silent Exit
- University of Illinois Press
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^ chapter 13 A Silent Exit Ever the teacher and developer of young talent, Stokowski had long dreamed of gathering together a group of highly qualified young people and forming them into a first-rate orchestra. But it wasn’t until war began to overtake Europe in 1939, and German and Italian influence threatened to take hold in South America that Stoki’s All-American Youth Orchestra finally got its start. The Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra and performers from La Scala had recently made tours through South America, winning friends for their respective countries. Alarmed, the Roosevelt administration wanted to counter those successes by sending U.S. cultural emissaries to Latin America. However, little government money was available to finance such projects.1 Stokowski stepped up to offer one solution to the dilemma. What better way to challenge the cultural impact that the Berlin Philharmonic and La Scala made on South America and counter the propaganda then circulating about the Hitler Youth Movement than by forming an orchestra of fresh-faced and highly talented young Americans as goodwill emissaries? To do this, he proposed to form an orchestra of young people from all over the United States. It would forge cultural ties with South Americans through the universal language of music and the charm of youth, and he would find a way to pay for it. He found that way by contacting RCA, the company that recorded the Philadelphia Orchestra and had underwritten the orchestra’s two transcontinental tours, and securing a pledge from it to underwrite the South American tour. The concept was embraced by all involved, and Stokowski embarked on the project with the help of the National Youth Welsh_Text.indd 170 10/22/12 8:55 AM 171 6 A Silent Exit Administration, which set up rounds of auditions throughout the country to help Stoki winnow out applicants and choose players from among ten thousand instrumentalists between the ages of sixteen and twenty-five who tried out for the orchestra’s one hundred positions. Then a change of heart by RCA stopped progress on the project. Toscanini, an early and vociferous opponent of fascism, had latched onto the idea of traveling to South America to fight Nazi propaganda with his orchestra, which by then was the NBC Orchestra. Since RCA president David Sarnoff had created the NBC Orchestra especially for Toscanini, that ended RCA’s backing for Stokowski’s enterprise and left Stoki without the funding he had counted on.2 That might have ended the whole undertaking, but once Stoki had a vision, his commitment to it was not easily diverted. He and his aides scrambled to secure new backing, turning to Columbia Records, which eventually agreed to underwrite the tour. Now Stoki was able to continue choosing and assembling a group of highly talented young instrumentalists from across the States. Unfortunately, the break in the schedule had set the timing back, which meant that Stokowski had less than a month to work with his youthful musicians to weld them into a legitimate symphony orchestra before setting forth on the Good Neighbor Tour of LatinAmerica with the All-American Youth Orchestra (AAYO). Time magazine reported on June 10, 1940: “Last week, chins up, the Stokowski outfit insisted that its South American tour would begin in mid-July.”3 And so it did. Perhaps an orchestra made up of a hundred talented young people with shiny faces and big smiles would have been an appealing ambassador for the United States if it had played only reasonably well, but that wasn’t good enough for Stokowski. In the short time he had to work with the youthful instrumentalists, he managed to create an orchestra so noteworthy that even the most demanding of critics agreed that its playing equaled that of the finest professional orchestras—even the vaunted Philadelphia Orchestra.4 Relying on his strong organizational skills, Stoki chose thirteen players from the Philadelphia Orchestra and set them strategically within his new ensemble to provide a backbone of expertise for the final product so that it could be brought together quickly. “One of these was the splendid harpist Edna Phillips,” wrote Oliver Daniel. “She explained that Stoki wanted to have . . . a nucleus of Philadelphians with him, so everyone who had hair went along!”5 At first when Stoki asked her to join the tour, Phillips demurred, uneasy about leaving her children for two months, but Sam urged her to Welsh_Text.indd 171 10/22/12 8:55 AM [3.87.209...