There is a passage in Serge Koussevitzky’s final recording of Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony that some listeners might hear in horror, but others with a degree of awe.
He recorded the piece in 1949 with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, during the last weeks of his 25 years as its music director. About two minutes from the end of the first movement, the symphony is doing its best to keep calm. Flutes and clarinets arc gently, then oboes and horns; the cellos and basses stay constant beneath the nervous skittering of the other strings.
But then the bass begins to pull down. Suddenly the higher strings start to dominate, as anxiety takes hold; that sinking bass becomes inescapable. Tchaikovsky asks for a crescendo. Koussevitzky gives him that, but he also accelerates dramatically into the darkness, as fateful motifs blare. A few seconds later, just as the music seems ready to meet its destiny, Koussevitzky decides to make us wait. Fanfares blaze, entirely out of tempo, only to announce an unwritten silence. And then, savagery. As Tchaikovsky himself described this coda, “no haven exists.”
This is the kind of moment that, in the wrong hands, gives Tchaikovsky a bad name. Koussevitzky was hardly alone in taking liberties with the composer, but many other conductors have at least tried to contain the drama here, rather than let hysteria hang out. Even Wilhelm Furtwängler, who like Koussevitzky sought to follow the spirit implied in a score as much as its explicit text, stayed truer to what Tchaikovsky actually wrote.
But in Koussevitzky’s hands, the effect is shattering. This Tchaikovsky Fourth is irresistible evidence of just how much he and the Boston Symphony achieved in their quarter of a century together. Conviction resounds. The playing is virtuosic, yet not for the sake of display. Every phrase sings. There is formidable power and intensity, but also enough elegance that it feels apt for the writer Harris Goldsmith to have described the Boston strings as “one of the hedonistic delights of Western civilization.” In 1944, the New York Times critic Olin Downes said that Koussevitzky had refined his orchestra into “the most highly perfected and sensitized symphony ensemble in the world.”
Many of Koussevitzky’s contemporaries, however, thought that his legacy would lie not just in the unmatched technical facility that he drilled into his players, but in what he insisted that they perform. As the critic and composer Virgil Thomson wrote in 1947, “His unique position in a world full of excellent conductors, many of them devoted to contemporary music, is that he has played more of it, launched more of it, published more of it and paid for more of it than anybody else living.” His place in history, Thomson concluded, was “already assured and glorious.”
Koussevitzky’s record remains remarkable, as if he bent a significant part of music history to his will. Deploying wealth acquired from his marriage to his second wife, Natalie Ushkova, in 1909 he founded Éditions Russes de Musique, a publishing house that he used to provide financial security for Russian composers, as well himself with scores to build his own career. Scriabin, Prokofiev and Stravinsky all benefited. In 1942, in memory of Natalie, he created the Koussevitzky Music Foundation to fund new works. Britten, Messiaen and Martinu received early commissions; its grants currently total 448.
According to the Boston Symphony, the orchestra gave 146 world premieres during his tenure, as well as another 86 U.S. premieres and many, many more performances of recent pieces he thought deserving of an audience. He led more than 300 works written by Americans. To those in his favor, he was a hero. “It is easy to foresee that the story of Serge Koussevitzky and the American composer will some day take on the character of a legend,” said Aaron Copland, a friend. “Here at least is one legend that will have been well founded.”
The legend has dimmed. The Boston Symphony has periodically labored to keep the flame alive, and as it tries to recapture its old progressivism under its new president and chief executive, Chad Smith, it is citing Koussevitzky as precedent. The orchestra is celebrating 150 years since his birth and 100 years since his arrival in Boston with an array of online and physical exhibitions, as well concerts and events at Tanglewood, the summer festival and training center he forged in the Berkshires.
Otherwise, Koussevitzky has been left largely to myth. The only serious biography written in English came out 77 years ago. (Its author, the Boston critic Moses Smith, was unsparing enough that Koussevitzky sued to prevent its release.) Newer volumes by the musicologist Victor Yuzefovich still await translation from Russian. On record, Koussevitzky has fared dreadfully. Bafflingly few of his studio recordings are readily available, though Pristine and other labels offer some, along with live broadcasts. Sony, which has lately brought out sets dedicated to the recordings of many a less consequential conductor, hasn’t confirmed a release date for its coming Koussevitzky box.
How to explain this fate, for a man who was once mentioned in the same breath as Toscanini? For one thing, the sound of Koussevitzky’s Boston Symphony did not endure; his successor, Charles Munch, preferred drier, leaner textures. For another, Koussevitzky’s taste for subjectivity was not exactly fashionable in his own time, and it became still less so as fidelity to the letter of a score became an article of faith among musicians. A third plausible reason is rather more disheartening: As classical music buried its head ever more deeply in the past after Koussevitzky’s death, a legacy that looked resolutely forward paid the price.
Koussevitzky was born as Sergei in 1874, in Vyshny Volochyok, Russia, a town on the road from Moscow to St. Petersburg. His parents were klezmer musicians, and he took to the arts young, forcing his way into music school on a promise to learn the double bass. Remarkably, he became Europe’s leading soloist on the instrument before his making his debut as a conductor in Berlin in 1908. “Oh Lord, how happy I would be if only I could play the double bass!” Furtwängler later said. “Had Koussevitzky not mastered this instrument he would never have succeeded in achieving such sonorities from the strings of his orchestra.”
Koussevitzky returned to Russia from Germany. He founded his own orchestra and took it on tour along the Volga River on a steamer. In 1920, after Bolsheviks seized his home and part of his fortune, he joined other émigrés in Paris, where he again formed an ensemble and started a concert series. Commissions like Ravel’s orchestration of Mussorgsky’s “Pictures at an Exhibition” confirmed his reputation as a force for new music; he “created a new orchestral tradition for us,” one French critic reflected. Indeed, Koussevitzky’s reputation crossed the Atlantic before he did. Shortly before he arrived in America, the Boston Symphony had to reassure its patrons that he was not “exclusively a modernist, under whose baton the classics will suffer neglect or worse.”
Smith’s biography relates that Koussevitzky’s initial years in Boston posed a steep challenge. The Boston Symphony had experienced its fair share of turbulence: the internment of its conductor, Karl Muck, and the firing of 18 German musicians during World War I; the death of its founder, Henry Lee Higginson, in 1919; a strike, in 1920, whose defeat left the musicians unprotected by a labor union until 1942.
If the conductor Pierre Monteux had brought the orchestra close to its old standards by 1924, Koussevitzky faced his own difficulties. Boston had a long season, and he was expected to conduct almost all of it. Musicians picked at his technique, while stories circulated that he could not read a score and employed pianists to play works through so he could learn them. “It is only a pity that there are not more conductors possessed of a similar abysmal ignorance,” noted Downes, the Times critic.
And Koussevitzky was a bully, humiliating his musicians with the threat of dismissal always in the air. “His orchestra, if they didn’t play well, it was a personal insult to him,” recalled the violinist Harry Ellis Dickson, for an oral history project now held in the orchestra’s archives. “He wasn’t a very nice man,” said Phil Kaplan, a flutist. “He was not a gentleman. He was autocratic to the point of nausea, sometimes.” The bassist Willis Page remembered Koussevitzky being furious at a player who had returned from fighting in World War II and told him that the orchestra should embrace democracy. Page said that Koussevitzky responded: “I’m the dictator. I say ‘do,’ and you do.”
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Koussevitzky had an exorbitant view of the role of the conductor. “We have a great deal of evidence that musical performers have a right to interpret compositions freely,” he said in 1938. “They hold that right from the composer.” Some composers associated with Koussevitzky hated this idea, most notably Stravinsky, but others were grateful for the honor it implied. “The American composer is accustomed to hit-and-run performances of his works,” Howard Hanson wrote. “He is less accustomed to the Koussevitzky performance, a carefully rehearsed and searching realization of the orchestral score.” Several of his recordings sound strikingly free now, including much of his famous Sibelius.
Composers needed somebody to trust in them, Koussevitzky thought, and above all to play their work with audible belief. Broadcast recordings of Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra, Copland’s Third Symphony and Shostakovich’s Ninth have their flaws, but timidity is not among them. Conceiving music as a living art, Koussevitzky performed a composer’s early works if he saw potential in them, then paid for new ones; if he admired the pieces, he repeated them. In 1949, he gave two Carnegie Hall concerts of music by Americans he had supported: Schuman, Barber, Cowell, Piston, Diamond, Fine, Hanson, Harris, Copland and Burlingame Hill all made the bill.
If the list was long, it was limited. Koussevitzky gave genuine experimentalists little exposure, performing Schoenberg, Berg and Webern only rarely, and never Ives, Ruggles or Varèse. He played music by women such as Lili Boulanger, Germaine Tailleferre and Mabel Daniels, yet offered them no consistent backing. Early Tanglewood classes were relatively diverse, but ongoing research by Douglas Shadle has found that Florence Price was far from the only Black composer to receive a cursory note, if any reply at all, when they asked Koussevitzky to play their works. William L. Dawson and William Grant Still had similar luck.
For better and worse, Koussevitzky’s influence ran deep. “Of all the conductors who have come here he will leave the deepest imprint upon the…
