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Paris orchestras, and fans gathered around. Among the musicians, the women and girls who jammed the front rows to admire "Le Beau Charles" were called Les Munchettes.*
Even so, one day in 1934 Conductor Munch put down his baton and picked up his fiddle. He slipped into the Champs-Elysees Theater, sat himself down at the last desk of the first violins. The score of Debussy's Iberia on his rack was of a different edition, and so Violinist Munch found his bowing frequently out of step. From the podium the great Arturo Toscanini noticed it too. First he chided, then he roared. Munch felt as hundreds of other musicians have felt before and since: "I wished that the floor would open and swallow me." Two years ago, he reminded the Maestro of that first meeting. Toscanini shook his head and asked sadly, "How can I do such things?"
Some Consolation. Conductor Munch is not known as a man of temper, but he can be fired. Once, after he had ascended to the conductorship of Paris' fine Conservatory orchestra—a post he held from 1938 to 1946—a drunken trombonist disrupted the calm of a Beethoven adagio with a terrific blast. Everyone, audience and musicians alike, was outraged and Munch gave the man a fortissimo furioso piece of his mind. Next evening, at the second performance, a smiling Charles Munch walked onstage with a big bottle of potent framboise (raspberry brandy) in his hand. Before audience and orchestra, he handed it to the flabbergasted trombonist with the explanation: "I treated you pretty roughly last night; here's some consolation."
In rehearsals, Boston's new conductor coaches and coaxes his men in a mixture of French, English and German. One passage in a Roussel symphony, he told them, undulating his hand through the air, should "glisse—glisse like the snake." One phrase in Ravel's Daphnis and Chloe should float into the air "like smoke"; in another, he whispered, "La nuit . . . you sleep, a tiny bit of sun comes through." Sometimes in rehearsal he will go on bended knee before the cellos to woo more tone from them. His most frequent admonitions are "Accent, more accent!" and "Respirez la musique." He believes that if music is a living thing, it should breathe.
"Less Fat." To the musicians, he is "the most economical rehearser we ever had." Unlike Koussevitzky, Munch does not believe in making the orchestra repeat passages until they play them by rote. As one musician explains the difference: "Performances of a given piece under Koussy were always exactly the same. Munch's may vary from concert to concert. After all, if you were repeating a speech, you wouldn't always try to repeat it in exactly the same way . . . Your inflections might be different."
Where many musicians felt that Koussevitzky had no confidence in them (snaps Koussy: "I never trust an orchestra until it has given me what I expect"), Munch has won them because he respects them both as men and musicians. He has the same respect ("One must be most faithful") for the composer whose work he is performing.