Reunion in Pittsfield

Like a beneficent country parson, a tall, portly woman stood in the doorway of an old New England meetinghouse at Pittsfield, Mass. one day last week. There she shook hands with some 500 persons who had come to be her guests at another oldtime Berkshire Festival. The guests were either established musicians or else socially important neighbors from Lenox, Stockbridge, Lee. For a few old friends the hostess stooped from her height (6 ft. 1 in.), endeavored to hear their greetings through the mother-of-pearl earphone she wore clasped to her head. But the guests had plenty to hear because, with her customary generosity, Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge* had provided five rich programs of her own chosen chamber music.

An electric gong signaled the beginning of the concert. An attendant notified Mrs. Coolidge and she straightened her leopard shawl, took her usual place four pews from the front. Of the quiet string music she heard nothing. But the programs were enough gratification as her mind reviewed them. In three days, of the 23 works played, 13 were dedicated to her, five were first performances anywhere, four first in the U. S. On the wall was a new bronze tablet, proclaiming Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge the "fairy godmother of chamber music." The unfamiliar harmonies bewildered many of the Berkshire neighbors but they knew that the tablet was placed where it belonged: it was in Pittsfield. 16 years ago, that Mrs. Coolidge began to concentrate on musical philanthropies.

A series of personal griefs was responsible for the first quartet, which she hired to play in her home. Within 15 months she lost her mother, her father and her husband. Dr. Frederick Shurtleff Coolidge, Chicago surgeon, who in 1904 settled in Pittsfield for his health. Her father had been Albert Arnold Sprague of Chicago, a wealthy wholesale grocer who had indulged his daughter's desire to study the piano and compose. Her house quartet gave her the greatest satisfaction she had ever known. She chose its programs, watched always for undiscovered talent. Often she, too, played with a remote, wooden touch which revealed her increasing deafness.

Conductor Frederick Stock suggested the Pittsfield Festivals and to house them Mrs. Coolidge bought a little Cape Cod church, dismantled it and moved it to South Mountain. She commissioned scores from composers. They would dedicate them to her, give her the manuscripts. In six years her collection and her concerts had such prestige that she decided to build a chamber music hall in Washington, D. C. and to endow the Music Division of the Library of Congress. The hall cost her $94,000, the yearly endowment $25,000.* Washington festivals supplanted the ones in Pittsfield. There was new music by Ravel, Schoenberg, Casella, Respighi, Stravinsky, Bloch. Mrs. Coolidge imported quartets from Europe--the Brosa from London, the Roth from Budapest, the Pro Arte from Belgium, the Busch from Germany. She organized the Elshuco Trio.

Coolidge concerts have since spread far from Washington. She has endowed series in Manhattan, Chicago, in California where she has a home in the Ojai Valley because there her hearing is at its best. She has financed festivals in Europe. The governments of France, Belgium and Czechoslovakia have honored her. She paid for the first chamber musicales to be heard over the radio (TIME, Jan. 18, 1932).

Through it all. friends say, Mrs. Coolidge has longed to return to the friendly Pittsfield atmosphere. There was no other explanation for having the festival there last week instead of in Washington. Outsiders understand that each new work earned $500 for its composer. There were four new U. S. offerings--a rambling Sonata by Henry Eichheim; a conservative Quintet by John Alden Carpenter; a hard, austere Trio by Roy Harris; a crafty Sextet by Edward Burlingame Hill. Critics preferred the things they had heard before--the earthy string sextet of Bohuslav Martinu, a Czech; the chromatic, well-knit Triptyque of Alexandre Tansman; the Canticum Fratis Soils of Charles Martin Loeffler. Carl Engel, one-time music librarian in Washington, asked Composer Frank Bridge if he considered any of the new works worth $500. Composer Bridge, a dry Briton, answered, "Well, Carl, don't forget the American dollar has been devalued."

* No kin to the proud Boston Coolidges or to the late Calvin Coolidge.

* Her other musical philanthropies had already included $200,000 to the Chicago Civic Orchestra's Pension Fund; generous contributions to the MacDowell Colony in Peterboro, N. H.; the gift of Albert Arnold Sprague Memorial Hall to house the Yale School of Music.

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