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William Mathews Sullivan, a music-minded lawyer, made public the details of Augustus Juilliard's will the day before John Erskine announced the Juilliard Foundation's gift. For two weeks Lawyer Sullivan had withheld his statement waiting for the Juilliard to act. Then he attacked the Foundation for shunning its Metropolitan obligations, for leaving unoccupied an "apparently ample building." for engaging too many foreign instructors. Mr. Erskine claimed in his retort that the principal of the $14,000,000 endowment was still intact, still yielding an annual income of $600,000. He said that last spring the Juilliard had given the Metropolitan $5,000, all that was asked.
The $5,000 was a loan to be repaid in 1938 with 6% interest. The Metropolitan's chairman, Lawyer Paul Drennan Cravath who is also a trustee of the Juilliard School, contradicted only the statement that the Juilliard Foundation had offered solid backing. But both he and quiet Cornelius Bliss, the boxholder who is working hardest to raise the $300,000, signified that as a mouthpiece John Erskine had overstepped his bounds.
Toscanini's Guest
There are two musicians for whom New Yorkers rise respectfully to their feet. They stand up when aged Ignace Jan Paderewski comes on stage to play for them. They stand for Conductor Arturo Toscanini when he starts the Philharmonic season in the autumn and when he returns after his long winter furlough. Last fortnight Toscanini returned to Manhattan after sunning himself for eight weeks in
Italy. In a box at his first concert were his ample, domestic wife and pretty daughter Wanda, who on request often gets out a tiny mustache and does uproarious imitations of her famed father. On the stage at intermission a lanky outsider shared bows with Toscanini. The guest was Composer Howard Hanson, down from Rochester to hear his Romantic Symphony played by Toscanini for the first time.
True to its name Howard Hanson's new symphony struck no harsh, debatable notes. He attempted to put his listeners in a mellow, tolerant mood when he de scribed it in the program as an "escape from the rather bitter type of modern musical realism which occupies so large a place in contemporary thought." He had used melodies which were conventionally sweet. His horns sang out politely over tremulous violins. Critics were not impressed but the bulk of the audience was far more enthusiastic than it had been over the stark, sardonic symphony of Bernard Wagenaar, played earlier in the season, or over the picture music of Abram Chasins which Toscanini played two years ago.
In the seven years that he has conducted the New York Philharmonic-Symphony, Toscanini has presented music by only four U. S. composers.* But Composer Hanson's name was made long before Tosanini honored him. At 20, a greenhorn from Wahoo, Neb., he was made a full-fledged professor at the College of the Pacific in Stockton, Calif. From there he went to Rome on an American Academy fellowship, grew his spindling little beard when he was invited to conduct the famed Augusteo Orchestra.