Music: Sounds Never Heard Before

Leopold Stokowski: 1882-1977

He had one of the most expressive backs in all history. His hands became a legend, and he kept them in the spotlight, even when his players were in penumbral gloom. In his mind's ear he heard orchestral sounds never made before—and proceeded to make them. "Music appeals to me for what can be done with it," Leopold Stokowski once remarked. By that he meant that he knew better than Beethoven or Brahms how instruments should sound, and that Johann Sebastian Bach surely would have loved his lush orchestral transcriptions...