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To have established chamber music within earshot of the very lobbies of Congress and actually under federal patronage was a feat for no ordinary woman. Mrs. Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge of Pittsfield. Mass., and Washington is certainly unique. Discerning travelers along the road from bustling Pittsfield to smart Lenox, Mass., cannot have failed to learn that the considerable eminence known as South Mountain, by which they must pass, is mostly Mrs. Coolidge's property; that the spacious house on its summit is hers. The smaller white stone building on the mountain's slope is where, seven years ago, she housed the Festival Quartet of South Mountain, when she determined, out of an insatiable craving and a comfortable pocketbook, to have chamber music and have it in a proper setting. Her benefactions to music were already many. There are prizes of her giving from coast to coast. She gave Yale University a concert hall in memory of her soldier son. But the South Mountain Festival was such a perfect and personal thing that none save her invited guests might enjoy it. There were seats for 500 but no ticket sale.
Then she was moved to insure the permanency of her creation by making the nation responsible for it. To generosity ($100,000 and $28,200 per annum) she had to add ingenuity, but she achieved her end. Now—for expense is no object—Europe is combed at her behest, native genius is more than ever encouraged and at least one art flourishes at the political but not the artistic U. S. capital.
Mrs. Coolidge, whose ancestors were New Englanders but were not closely related to the family now represented in the White House, is daughter of the late O. S. A. Sprague, wealthy Chicago wholesale grocer (Sprague. Warner & Co.), sister of Col. Albert A. Sprague, 1924 Democratic candidate for U. S. Senator from Illinois. Inhabitants of Pittsfield and environs tell anecdotes of her troublesome deafness and marvel that her interest in music is so intense, little knowing that an ear unsensitive to hurly-burly street sounds and flat conversational tones is the more sensitive to nuance in musical vibrations.
Notes
In Philadelphia. A great crowd flocked to the Academy of Music one afternoon last week for the opening concert of the Philadelphia Orchestra. "Buzz-buzz-buzz. . ." Well-bred greetings were hushed only when the stage darkened and two swift shafts of light shot out from either wing to frame the pale, curled head of Conductor Leopold Stokowski. Up went his hand and beauty floated, spread itself over the dusky hall—the orchestral season had begun. Mozart came first, an early overture long buried away in the library of the Paris Conservatoire, charming, tuneful, immature; "Pan," a rhapsody by U. S. composer William Schroeder, difficult, cleverly constructed, tedious; Dukas' "Sorcerer's Apprentice," brilliant, biting; Beethoven's "Seventh Symphony," great feat of the afternoon, magnificently played.