Gerhard Samuel, 1924-2008

One of the first names I look up in the index of any book I get on 20th-century music, especially biographies, memoirs, or collections of letters, is Gerhard Samuel. I knew him both in Cincinnati, where he headed the orchestral conducting department at the University of Cincinnati�s College-Conservatory of Music, and here in Seattle, where he retired. Samuel was part of the influx of European talent who in fleeing the Third Reich remade American classical music, and his death Tuesday, just a month short of his 84th birthday, marked the end of a living link to many of the greatest musicians of the century. (There�s a lovely obituary by Melinda Bargreen on the Seattle Times Web site.)

Naturally, he was full of stories. His family escaped Germany practically at the last moment, and only because of a chance meeting between two of his father�s acquaintances in Chicago; at the time, the U.S. wouldn�t accept immigrants without sponsors, and had one friend not run into the other ("Did you hear Dr. Samuel�s trying to get to America?"), Gerhard made clear (with a typical flair for theatrical effect), that "I would not be standing here talking to you today." He also joked that since his birthday, April 20, was the same as Hitler�s and since when he was growing up the day was observed as a national holiday, he always got his birthday off from school.

In America, he put his musical skills right to work, and quickly became established as an up-and-coming composer and conductor. He attended Tanglewood, the Boston Symphony�s summer school, and Ned Rorem mentions him in his memoir Knowing When to Stop as one of conductor Serge "Koussevitsky�s chief new pets." Back in Paris in the late �40s, Gerhard pops up in Aaron Copland�s memoir Copland Since 1943: "On the first night [of Copland�s Paris visit], I went for dinner. . . with younger composers Charles Strouse [yes, later the composer of Bye Bye Birdie and Annie], Bill Flanagan, and Gary Samuel." On the next page: "Pierre Boulez was the topic of conversation wherever music people got together in Paris. I met him for the first time when John Cage took him along to a party given by Gary Samuel." The first time I read this passage, I got a little dizzy: the gentleman whose conducting seminar I�d just attended once threw a party which saw Copland, Cage, and Boulez all in the same room. It was that same spring of 1949 that Rorem, also in Paris, describes a concert: "Bobby and Arthur [the piano duo Fizdale and Gold] were planning a two-piano recital at the Salle Gaveau on 24 June, including Paul Bowles�s clangorously delicious Concerto, with a small orchestra that Gary Samuel would conduct."

We jump ahead to the early �60s, when Gerhard, as the new-music-friendly conductor of the Oakland Symphony, was providing the Bay Area with intellectual musical stimulation that the reactionary, old-money institutions of San Francisco never could. Seattle�s Stuart Dempster, as it happens, was a trombonist in the orchestra under Gerhard. "Gary Samuel, charm itself," Rorem refers to him in his The Later Diaries; and, on page 211, there�s an even more interesting reminiscence: "Next morning Robert [Duncan] arranged to guide me through an LSD trip in Gary Samuel�s garden. Which he did. But as I refused to go alone, the split dosage was insufficient. We reached only the suburbs and not the magic city proper. . . there were no hints of horror, only Gary�s lemon tree heavy with luminous fruit." Ah, 1967.

A few years later, Anthony Tommasini tells us in Composer on the Aisle, his biography of Virgil Thomson, Gerhard was in New York City conducting the 1972 Juilliard premiere of Thomson�s opera Lord Byron. He gives us a hint of what Gerhard�s busy professional life was like: "The conductor Gerhard Samuel arrived late from California (having just been to Russia) and was virtually unprepared. Yet Samuel was unapologetic and unperturbed. A solid professional, he learned the score while rehearsing it and soon seemed to know its shapes and moves." Thomson, though, proved difficult to work with: "That Thomson treated Samuel contemptuously in the presence of the orchestra did not help matters." (In the cello section of that student orchestra, by the way, was Yo-Yo Ma.)

Bargreen�s obit mentions that Gerhard had just finished his own opera, on which he�d been working on for years; I believe the Peabody Institute in Baltimore was/is planning to premiere it, but projected performances have been pushed back season after season. It�s a setting of the Thomas Mann short story "The Blood of the Walsungs," a story of a contemporary family (contemporary for Mann) with psychosexual allusions to the legends of Wagner�s Ring. It would make, actually, an ideal project for the new-music recording relationships that Gerard Schwarz�s Seattle Symphony and Mina Miller�s Music of Remembrance have forged with record label Naxos.