BOOKMARK: Tanglewood: A Group Memoir

On three moonlit August evenings in 1934, the first Berkshire Symphonic Festival was held at the Hanna farm between Lenox and Stockbridge, Massachusetts. Reserved seats for all three concerts featuring the New York Philharmonic went for $7.50; general admission was less expensive. The concerts were organized by Miss Gertrude Robinson Smith, a Stockbridge summer resident, described by a friend as “a cannonball in both appearance and personality.” Two years later, in 1936, Serge Koussevitzky and the Boston Symphony Orchestra (BSO) had joined forces with Robinson Smith, and Tanglewood was established.

In Tanglewood: A Group Memoir, Peggy Daniel compiles a detailed history of the local institution,  interweaving first-person accounts, newspaper stories, interviews, letters, speeches, and memoirs from a wide array of sources, including Koussevitzky, Aaron Copland, Leonard Bernstein, Seiji Ozawa, James Levine, New York Times music critics, stars of the classical music world, Berkshire residents, and BSO orchestra and staff members. The result is a history that zigs and zags, full of chatty reminiscences and gossipy anecdotes.
 

There is a marvelous first person account of the catastrophic rainstorm that interrupted, several times, the performance of an all-Wagner evening in 1937. Miss Robinson Smith took advantage of the opportunity, and of the soaking wet audience, to raise a third of the eventual cost of building the Shed that very evening.
 

For three summers during World War II, the BSO did not perform at Tanglewood, but Koussevitzky arranged funding for the Berkshire Music School. The student orchestra gave the first concert performance of Dimitri Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony, an event reviewed in both the New York Times and the Daily Worker—Daniel includes excerpts from those reviews as well as Shostakovich’s own account of writing the symphony. And, in 1946, the first American performance of Shostakovich’s Ninth Symphony was on the bill for the first postwar BSO concert at Tanglewood.
 

Many passages in the book discuss the finer points of music and performance, but it may be more fun to read about the two BSO trumpet players who spent a summer living in tents on the shores of the Stockbridge Bowl. And did you know that on August 15, 1949, Aaron Copland, the venerable American composer of, among other works, Rodeo, was arrested after he hit and killed a cow in Richmond, Massachusetts, driving home after a dinner party? No bull!
 

This volume is a treasure for anyone who has ever picnicked on the lawn at Tanglewood or listened to a summer concert under the moon.

[JULY 2009]

THE GOODS

Tanglewood: A Group Memoir
By Peggy Daniel
Amadeus Press
www.amadeuspress.com