Cultural Monuments in their Salad Days

Given my professorial life, I spend most of my time working with 18-25 year olds. No objections there, mind you: that age is a time in life that I particularly cherish. My own sojourn through early adulthood was generally good; for the most part it went well enough, and I certainly grew and changed beyond all recognition from a painfully shy skinny kid who entered Peabody in September 1972, to a reasonably confident young pianist with a master's degree who joined the SF Conservatory faculty in 1978. Transformative as those years were, the intervening 33 years have seen much more sweeping changes. Certainly I barely recognize the me of today in the me of then. That's true of most of us.

I need to keep reminding myself of just how little we can anticipate the eventual outcome of our students. The promising ones don't always realize their potential; ones you barely remember sometimes wind up making a sizeable dent in society or history. More to the point, you can't always see the adult-to-be in those fresh, sparkling young faces. To be young is a special kind of beauty, while time creates its own compelling—and often striking—beauty as well.

I'm fascinated by pictures of young folks who are astoundingly different from their mature incarnations. I present three very young men whose pictures stand sharply at variance with our mental images of their eventual selves. Note that you can click on the pictures to see them a bit larger, should you be so moved.

First up, this distinctly androgynous fellow with a baby face and wispy, slight build. Take a look at his upper arms in that jacket—they're like toothpicks. He has an excellent nose, a hint of a shy smile, and fine, pale eyes. He looks like a puff of wind could knock him off that chair upon which he is so carefully perched, as he dutifully holds his pose long enough for the camera to capture the image. There's something sweet about him, but if you look closely enough, there's also someting just a tad insolent, even haughty, in that clear-eyed gaze. There's a brain inside that pretty head.

It's just damn near impossible to see Johannes Brahms, Brahms of the beard and cigar and rumpled look. Brahms the magnificent tower of German Romanticism, the creator of imperishable symphonies and immortal chamber works and all the rest. Brahms the heir to Beethoven, Brahms the rigorous structuralist, Brahms the humanist creator of the German Requiem. But it's Brahms—as he looked to early friends such as Joseph Joachim, and undoubtedly how he also looked to Robert and Clara Schumann when they took him into their circle and mentored the start of his career.

Next up, this well-turned-out, slightly ruffled but appealing pre-Raphaelite type. Replace the starched collar-tie-jacket with a sweater and stick a backpack on him, and he could pass unmodified as an undergraduate at the University of Anywhere for the past thirty years. Somehow you can tell from the headshot that he's a tall guy—he has that elongated oval face and long neck that bespeaks overall height. I'd guess that he had big feet as well. Judging from the picture I'd rate him as only marginally social, more inclined to take off by himself and very deeply absorbed in his interests. He doesn't look all that comfortable posing for the photo; one wonders if he resented having to spiff up for the occasion. I would also guess that he would form close alliances with his favored professors and would distinguish himself quietly, without fanfare, and graduate near the top of his class. Smart guy, strongly self-directed, likely to succeed at just about anything he attempted provided ordinary human weaknesses didn't get the upper hand.

I certainly don't see a man who was to become an object of near-mystical veneration, a "formidable magician, a man capable of setting an entire ensemble of musicians on fire," one of the most potent musical influences of the twentieth century and easily the most legendary of the great conductors. This is no less than Wilhelm Furtwängler, maestro of the Berlin Philharmonic. Gangling and maddeningly inarticulate in person, he eschewed formal baton technique and led his orchestra with gestures, eye contact, and a mesmerizing quality. He has his detractors as well as admirers, but there's no ignoring him. Like him or detest him, he was one of the bonafide giants, an artist with a vision of music as an integral whole, secure in his convictions yet always seeking new insights. The Third Reich business will haunt his posthumous reputation forever, I suppose, though the tempests have receded with time. What remains is the essence of the man—a musician, an artist down to the DNA level.

Then there's this distinctly patrician young man in a stately pose. This one's a lot harder to read; the guy gives off an aura of distance. His downward gave has something to do with that; you can't read those shaded, almost expressionless eyes. He looks neither pleasant nor unpleasant, just guarded. Like Brahms, he is posed with his arms folded. Unlike Brahms, however, his elbows are higher and his forearms horizontal. He looks a bit as though he's protecting and/or hugging himself. He looks like the scion of a good family—and he was—but he also looks as though his future was to be in business of some sort. Stockbroker, maybe. Lawyer. Executive somewhere. In fact he would go on to marry the daughter of the distinguished politician James G. Blaine, who narrowly missed becoming President and who served as both Representative and Senator from Maine and was twice appointed Secretary of State. So our young man married well and acquired access to the halls of power.

As it turns out, he did show a gift for organization and business dealings. But his eventual public persona was at distinct odds with that polished, attractive, aloof young man in the photo. You're looking at a picture of Walter Damrosch, longtime conductor of the New York Symphony that eventually merged with the NY Phil, dear avuncular Uncle Walter who addressed the kiddies nationwide as "My Dears" on his Friday morning radio show, The NBC Music Appreciation Hour, broadcast during school hours. Kids were marched into their respective school auditoriums on Friday morning to hear dear Uncle Walter teach them symphonies with his trademark lyrics: This is…the Symphoneeeee…that Schubert wrote and never fin-ished. He had a cushy warmth about him, Walter Damrosch, with his reedy oratorical tenor and strange accent that overlaid a New York base with a slight German lilt. I suspect that his teddy-bear persona was mostly an act; he was a canny guy and a tireless self-promoter. But a hero nonetheless, the most visible and undoubtedly most far-reaching of the Damrosch clan, that German-American dynasty called "America's First Family of Music."