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The Conductor. In the 33 years since his death, Brahms has achieved an immense popularity, especially with the musically meticulous. Perhaps for this reason Boston let itself wax particularly enthusiastic over last week's Festival. But there was another reason: Conductor Koussevitzky. For he is the Boston Brahmins' high priest and can do no wrong. He is handsome, distinguished in appearance, voted by many the Best-Dressed Man in Boston. He is an excellent musician, the world's greatest virtuoso on the double bass as well as one of the great conductors. His past has been romantic: in Russia before the Revolution he used to sail with his orchestra up and down the Volga, giving concerts in all the basin towns, introducing much new music. He has great personal magnetism—the kind that makes female hearts beat fast at every concert, although his matronly-looking wife is always present, sitting well back on the right. Surest sign of his Boston success is the fact that he has been admitted to the Somerset Club, a Beacon Hill institution so exclusive that little Brahmins are usually registered for it immediately after birth.
Bloch Subsidized
Practically all of the world's great composers had, at one time or other, patrons who provided their material support in order that genius might flourish unhampered. The custom is now outworn but last week in San Francisco a semblance of it reappeared when heirs of the late Jacob and Rosa Stern, wealthy Jews, established a fund whereby Jewish Com- poser Ernest Bloch will be endowed for the next ten years at the rate of $5,000 a year. Composer Bloch is regarded by many as the greatest U. S. composer.* Yet his livelihood has had to come largely from teaching—from 1920 to 1925 as director at the Cleveland Institute of Music, since then at the San Francisco Conservatory. Now, thanks to the Patrons Stern, his time will be more free for creative work. Last week the Stern heirs also gave $50,000 to found scholarships and a chair in music at the University of California.
*Born in Switzerland, Composer Bloch is a U. S. citizen. His last symphonic work, America, is a patriotic outburst in the manner of Walt Whitman (TIME, Dec. 31, 1928).