I just received and finished reading a short (133 pp) hardback book
remaindered from $25 to $1.00 by Daedalus entitled *Obligato: Untold
Tales from a Life with Music* by Ira Hirschmann (died in 1989 at age 88),
w/ whose name I was vaguely familiar.  He was a vice president of Saks
Fifth Avenue and Bloomingdale's and very active in New York City's
classical musical life, founder and president of the New Friends of Music,
and perhaps the one who induced LaGuardia to establish New York's High
School of Music and Art (as it was called when I went to school), which
later combined with the High School of Performing Arts and is now LaGuardia
High School.

The book is a delight to read, even if not always well proofread.  (The
Beethoven Quartet No. 14 is identified in different places as in C# major
and in c# minor; the Appasionata is identified as Op. 53.) It's an account
of his experiences w/ famous people in NY's, and the world's musical scene.
Aside from his refusal to forgive or accept the conduct of Aryan musicians
who stayed in Germany, like Gieseking and Furtwaengler (his extended
account of his attempts to abort the appointment of Furtwaengler to succeed
Toscanini w/ the New York Philharmonic in 1936 seemed, even by his own
account to have been due less to his efforts than to the unexpectedly large
number of subscription cancellations) and his annoyance at Fritz Stiedry's
unpredictable temper tantrums (necessitating the last minute substitutions
of artists like Schoenberg or Szell), he had no axes to grind and seemed to
like the people he wrote about.

The New Friends of Music was a chamber music ensemble created at a time
when the only established chamber music quartets in America were the
Flonzalay and Kneisal Quartets.  Hirschmann's concept was to present full
cycles covering the major works of one to three composers each season, in
a series of from sixteen to twenty concerts a year, until the entire major
literature of chamber music had been covered.  Concerts were never to last
longer than an hour and a quarter.  Emphasis was on the composer and not on
the performer(s).  Verbatim texts were written for the secretary replying
to telephone inquiries, a typical one of which would be:

Caller: Who will be playing at next Sunday's concert?
Secretary: Beethoven.
Caller: No, I mean who will be playing?
Secretary: Artur Schnabel will be the fortunate intermediary between
Beethoven and the public.

All elements foreign to the music were to be eliminated, such as encores,
applause between movements, flowers, and even intermissions, which were not
necessary, as the programs were varied in character and rarely more than an
hour and a quarter in length.  There was to be no exploitation of artists'
personalities.  Free passes were outlawed to ensure that the audience would
consist only of music lovers who cared enough about the music to be willing
to pay to hear it.  (For those who would decry all this as a further
example of elitism, etc., turning the public away from classical music, it
nevertheless appeared, that the programs were generally a resounding
success.  Maybe the times and customs were different then.)

And so, in 1937, Hirschmann asked Lotte Lehmann to sing *Winterreise* on
one of his programs.  Aghast, she replied, "It sould take me three years to
learn it." "Very good," Hirschmann replied, "You are engaged to sing it on
Sunday April 13, 1940."

She was scheduled for the Schubert cycle true to plan.  Hirschmann arrived
at Town Hall fifteen minutes before the concert was to begin.  It was an
SRO crowd.  And he found a "mild insurrection" going on backstage.  Mme.
Lehmann's manager was insisting that seats be made available on the stage
for the overflow, that a red carpet be put down running from her dressing
room to the center of the stage, and that flowers were to be handed to her
both before the intermission and at the conclusion of the concert.
Hirschmann refused as all requests were in direct violation of his rules.
He turned to Mme.  Lehmann but she adamantly refused to go on stage unless
her conditions were met.  It was nine minutes before curtain time.  "If you
do not go on stage in exactly nine minutes," he said, looking at his watch,
" I will go out and announce that the concert is off and why.  Would you
like to come out with me and make sure I say it correctly?" She glared at
me, her eyes on fire, and said, "Very well, I will agree about the red
carpet and the flowers, but I insist on your permitting people to sit on
the stage." "Why?" I implored.  "Because otherwise I will be lonely," she
replied, but Hirschmann held his ground, and she finally assented, Her
performance was a resounding success and Hirschmann ran backstage to offer
his congratulations, saying, "You sang like an angel." "Yes, but I was
lonely," she answered.  Hirschmann rejoindered, "You were not alone, Madame
Lehmann, Schubert was with you."

There are also interesting and touching anecdotes involving Feuermann
(whom he refused to schedule for a Mozart violin sonata rescored by Szell
for cello because it would be Szelling Mozart short, upon which Feuermann
promised to return w/ another suggestion in a few weeks, after his
operation, from which, alas, he never recovered, dying on the operating
table at age 38), Schnabel, Casals, Klemperer, Busch, Serkin, the Budapest
String Quartet (for whose release from Ellis Island he had to secure the
intercession of LaGuardia), Bartok, Walter, and of course Toscanini.

A business man by profession and simply an amateur musician, he was tapped
for various political assignments during and after World War II, mainly
in international relief work.  During the war, on an assignment in Turkey,
he was able to convince the Rumanian ambassador to arrange for the release
of 40,000 Jewish prisoners in Transnistria in exchange for four secret
American visas for himself and his family to escape the advancing Russian
armies.

He was the first owner of WOR, of WABF (later purchased by WBAI), and
tried, unsuccessfully to get the stores with which he was associated to get
into the television business, for which he had managed to secure licenses
when this was still easier.

A buck well spent.

Walter Meyer