Requiem

The close of a concert season is an emotional time for the faithful who have listened all winter. When the fast note has fallen away, shouts rise above the handclapping. The conductor becomes an object of overt adoration, especially if he has won the heart of his audience only recently. So it was last week in Carnegie Hall, at the end of Guest Conductor Wilhelm Furtwangler's third season with the New York Philharmonic. In 1925 he first came as guest conductor, a studious young man from Berlin and Vienna who had pleased without enchanting. Last year he was a serious, efficient workman, but sometimes also an experimenter, a personality to the few. This winter he permitted his private feelings more rein and the audience knew him for its own man. Of no one was there more good talk in musical Manhattan than of the tall, concentrated, sparse-haired primate of the Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra. He gave them Brahm's "Requiem" last week, as personal a thing as ever a German wrote. "Behold, all flesh is grass and all the glory of man is as the flower of the field," sang the Choral Symphony Society and Soprano Elizabeth Rethberg and Baritone Fraser Gange. "Behold," Conductor Furtwangler seemed to say: "This is out of the Bible phrased by that humble countryman of mine, Martin Luther. This music is by another countryman, aged 34, who had lately lost his mother. This is not church ritual but the inner feeling of people like ourselves. Come, let us understand." They wanted to stand up and cheer at the intermission after the third movement, but he bade them wait, with a gesture, until the tender parable of mortality should be rounded with the exalted parable of resurrection--"Blessed -- are the dead which die in the Lord." They waited, meditated, applauded thoughtfully, gave Conductor Furtwangler a wreath and went home full of peace instead of excitement. Perhaps they would see him again in a year; perhaps he would be called somewhere else.

Last week the Philharmonic Society of New York, angling for conductors for its orchestra, made the prize catch of the year. The directors announced that they had engaged Arturo Toscanini, world-famed Director of La Scala in Milan, as a regular conductor; he will lead the Philharmonic symphony in 41 concerts next season. Conductor Toscanini, slim, volatile, once successfully defied Il Duce; he is considered the world's finest leader of orchestras.