Musical DOUBLES

Though unrelated by birth, US violinists Eudice Shapiro and Frances Shapiro (later Magnes) forged parallel careers which provide a fascinating insight into the lives of female musicians during the mid-20th century, writes Tully Potter

Once upon a time there were two violinists called Shapiro. Close in age, they were not related but were aware of each other and expressed mutual admiration of the other’s artistry. Their lives shed an interesting light on what it was like to be a female string player in America in the 20th century.

Eudice Shapiro was the elder, born on 7 August 1914 in Buffalo, New York, into a musical clan. ‘My father, a violin teacher, was born in Buffalo,’ she told me. ‘My mother, a pianist, was three months old when she came to the US for my grandfather to take on the duties of cantor at a synagogue in Buffalo. They came from Riga, Latvia.

‘Father studied first with Julius Singer, a Ševčík pupil. In the class he met Mother, who was the class pianist and sister of Julius. He then studied with Arthur Hartmann and finally with Ellie Levy, a concertmaster of the St Louis Symphony who invited him to join that orchestra, where he was the youngest member. He and my mom had just married, and when she became pregnant with me and wanted to return to Buffalo, they came back.’

Eudice took up the violin at four to get her father’s attention. ‘I resented that the students were taking up too much time, and they were all small – he loved working with little people. I decided that that was what I was going to do too.’ She got dressed up, went round to the front door and rang the bell as if she were a pupil, and the ruse worked. ‘I was playing already at five or six.’

Younger by five years and slightly less precocious was Frances Shapiro: born in Cleveland, Ohio, on 27 April 1919 into a music loving family, she was taught the violin from the age of six by her grandfather, who had been court violinist to Tsar Nicholas II. ‘My father was a pharmacist and my mother just a very involved mother in terms of my career – perhaps too involved. I survived, but not always happily.

‘My main teacher was Herman Rosen. It was a very busy childhood and I had scholarships all the time to help me work on the fiddle. Very often I got teased about it – and I take teasing very badly. I would rather have been out with kids of my own age. I had one brother. He was very musical, but because of me he got shoved a little into the background.’ At 14 she made her Cleveland Orchestra debut on 4 June 1933, playing Vieuxtemps’s Ballade et polonaise with Rudolph Ringwall conducting.

‘My father died early. It was a terrible blow to everyone, especially my mother. It messed her up, and my brother too – he was six years younger, I was in my early twenties. It shattered us all. I was due to try out for the Leventritt Competition just a few days after he died. I played very well because you’re trained to do that, but it was an awful thing to have to do.’

No such cataclysm disrupted Eudice’s progress. ‘I think I had a rather normal life – of course, I could get out of drying the dishes if I went to practise. At ten I won a contest with the Scherzotarantelle by Wieniawski. Mother always accompanied me as a child. At twelve I was admitted to high school, and Dad felt it was time to find another teacher. We were not far from Rochester, New York, so he took me to play for a teacher at the Eastman School of Music, Gustave Tinlot, who accepted me as a special scholarship student.

‘I was just touching 17 when I went to the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia: it was my father’s idea that I should study with Zimbalist. I won the scholarship, with even extra money to live on, and for five years I was the only female student in the class – there were eight young men and myself. The students were featured on weekly radio broadcasts and led a full and wonderful life. Summers were spent at the Curtis colony in Rockport, Maine.’

Inevitably, Eudice was the focus of the boys’ attention. Felix Slatkin was in the violin class, and she saw a lot of a young cellist from Philadelphia, Victor Gottlieb. She loved Efrem Zimbalist: ‘He was a darling, a warm, wonderful gentleman, a fine teacher musically and technically. He said that one didn’t do shifts just to get some place, but used slides for musical effects. It helped me when I did contemporary music. Also, we were asked to teach youngsters – Zimbalist insisted, as part of our education – and I learnt a lot from this experience.

‘The founder Mrs Curtis Bok’s gift to me on graduating from the institute was a set of debut recitals – New York Town Hall, Chicago and Boston. Also, the women of the Philadelphia Music Club, for whom I had performed several times, entered me – unbeknown to myself – into the contest sponsored by the National Federation of Music Clubs.’ She won state and district rounds, and the 1937 finals in Indianapolis, which brought $1,000 and recitals for societies all round the country. She had been finding that the women who ran many of the music clubs wanted to have men on their platforms. ‘But when I won that prize, they had to have me.’

In 1938 she wed Victor Gottlieb, who had been in the Coolidge Quartet for two years, and in 1941 they decided to go west: friends in the Hollywood studio orchestras assured them they would find work.

Gottlieb had to answer an SOS from the Pro Arte Quartet in Wisconsin, who were without a cellist, so Eudice went on to Los Angeles to establish the year’s domicile required to facilitate working in the studios there.

Her namesake Frances was also making progress, studying in New York with Louis Persinger and then, from 1941, with her most beloved teacher, Adolf Busch. She was in his new Busch Chamber Players from the start: the little band’s first project was a blistering recording of Beethoven’s Grosse Fuge – Arturo Toscanini attended a rehearsal – and they made their public debut in March 1942 with the first of Busch’s annual presentations of Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos at New York Town Hall. By 1943 they were giving six subscription concerts a season.

In May 1942 Frances married Busch’s only viola pupil Benedict Magnes, later known as a film and TV producer– director, and took his surname. ‘I was very much aware of Eudice Shapiro and didn’t want to upset her by keeping my own name,’ she explained. Early in 1945, the Busch Chamber Players went on a nationwide tour as the Busch Little Symphony, offering four programmes, which was unheard of. Fourteen of the twentyseven musicians were women, including both horn players.

‘That first tour was a difficult one,’ Frances recalled. ‘The trains we travelled on were old, had no dining cars and were very crowded. There were very few porters and we had to carry our suitcases and instruments ourselves. Many times we boarded “standing only” trains. The concerts were very well received, and in many places we were the first “live” chamber orchestra they had ever heard. I played the Bach “Double”

Concerto with Busch on those tours – and, of course, it was a marvellous experience. I had already done a great deal of my own concert giving, but these performances were special.’ For their second tour that October, they had their own bus, which rendered travelling easier and more convivial.

Having made a brilliant Carnegie Hall recital debut in October 1946, Frances embarked on a solo career. She was back at Carnegie Hall in 1947 and 1948, and had notable success in 1949, touring Israel with the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra and Jascha Horenstein in February, towards the end of the Arab– Israeli war (Busch, the orchestra’s first soloist in 1937, had been due to return in January but had been advised not to travel).

‘THE FIRST TOUR WAS A DIFFICULT ONE. THE TRAINS WE TRAVELLED ON WERE OLD, HAD NO DINING CARS AND WERE VERY CROWDED. MANY TIMES WE BOARDED “STANDING ONLY” TRAINS’

‘Magnes played the Mendelssohn and Tchaikovsky concertos and the Lalo Symphonie espagnole in three separate programmes, each one repeated about six times,’ says the conductor’s cousin Misha Horenstein. ‘She experienced small, miserable auditoriums but many subscribers. The tour included a concert for the troops, the first time the IPO played for the new Israeli army.’ One concert commemorated her father-in-law Judah Magnes, president of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, who had died in October 1948. Of her Mendelssohn, the Palestine Post reported: ‘With the first bars, we became aware of a very conscious musical intellect and deep-rooted musical feeling, manifested in a distinguished and graceful manner of execution.’

In a ‘special concert’ at the ‘Ohel-Shem’ Hall, Tel Aviv, she played the Tchaikovsky and Ravel’s Tzigane with the IPO under Louis Cohen. That same year she appeared in Paris and had a double London success: a Wigmore Hall recital with Gerald Moore and a broadcast of the Beethoven Concerto with Pierre Monteux.

Adolf Busch performs with the Busch Little Symphony in New York, 1945, with Frances Magnes leading

Perhaps her greatest triumph was having Dohnányi’s Second Concerto – with no violins in the orchestra – dedicated to her: she played it in San Antonio, Texas, on 26 January 1952, and on 14 and 15 February she played it with the New York Philharmonic-Symphony Orchestra under Dimitri Mitropoulos. ‘It was very exciting and great fun,’ she told me. ‘Dohnányi was a really lovely fellow. We played the Brahms D minor Sonata together, which was such a joy. He wasn’t at the premiere – I used my own hopefully good musical sense.’

The following year, with the birth of the first of her two sons, Frances gave up her big-time career. She kept up her playing, and as late as 1981 performed the Dohnányi again at Carnegie Hall, but expended most of her energy on teaching, especially at the Hoff-Barthelson Music School in Scarsdale, New York. There she led a chamber orchestra, directing from the first violin desk like Busch did. ‘I try to get my pupils to make music, as Busch did. There is too much note playing today and not enough music making. I wish there were a few people like Busch around now.’

Quite a story attaches to Frances’s 1641 grand pattern ‘Hambourg’ Nicolò Amati, which she was given in 1944: 19 years later, it was stolen from the boot of her car. Heartbroken, she acquired a smaller-pattern Amati to replace it. After two decades, grimy and covered with grease, her original Amati was bought by a Long Island dealer who took it to Charles Beare in London for an appraisal. He recognised it from his days at Wurlitzer’s in New York, and following a long legal battle, it was returned to Frances in 1996. She later sold it to Gidon Kremer.

Eudice Shapiro with Igor Stravinsky at the University of California in June 1952

While Frances Magnes built a career on the east side of America, Eudice Shapiro enjoyed a multifaceted musical life on the West Coast. She worked in the Paramount, United Artists and RKO studios, and soon RKO music director Constantin Bakaleinikoff made her his concertmaster, the first woman to lead a Hollywood orchestra. During 23 years in the studios up to 1965, she played on the soundtracks of famous films including For Whom the Bell Tolls (1943), The Lost Weekend (1945), Spellbound (1945), Rear Window (1954), Around the World in 80 Days (1956) and Irma La Douce (1963). She also led Werner Janssen’s orchestra and the first Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, founded in 1948.

Eudice also appeared in concert as a soloist, and was able to offer promoters 30-odd concertos or pieces with orchestra. She gained a reputation for playing modern music, premiering works by Copland, Ives, Milhaud, Piston, Stravinsky, Dello Joio, Foss, Jacobi, Josten, Kirchner and Rieti. She also played works by Berg, Martinů, Bloch, Szymanowski, Bartók, Barber, Prokofiev, Kohs, Dahl, Halsey Stevens and Lou Harrison. In many cases she knew the composers personally: Stravinsky conducted for her in his Violin Concerto (three times) and The Soldier’s Tale (‘He taught me to like Scotch’), Milhaud in his Concertino de printemps.

In 1942, she and Gottlieb founded what became the American Art Quartet, with Alexander Murray (later Robert Sushel, then Marvin Limonick), second violin, and Virginia Majewski, viola. This outstanding ensemble immediately became a pillar of the legendary Evenings on the Roof organised by writer Peter Yates and his wife the pianist Frances Mullen at their rooftop studio in Los Angeles. These events, which metamorphosed into the Monday Evening Concerts, gave priority to contemporary music. Lawrence Morton, who also ran the Ojai Festival, took over in 1953. ‘We played what we wanted and people came to listen,’ Shapiro said. ‘We graduated to a couple of auditoriums in Los Angeles.’

The American Art Quartet was also a staple of the La Jolla festival and toured widely in the western states. Shapiro and Gottlieb never lost their zest for music. ‘You play music for fun,’ she said. ‘We used to play a great deal. They were social evenings. We played quartets or, if there was a pianist around, piano trios. One evening we got together and decided to play a Mendelssohn quartet. We so fell in love with it that we went through the whole book and played all the Mendelssohn quartets.’

In 1963 Eudice lost Victor to cancer. Their son, Larry Gottlieb, recalls that in the 1950s his father fell foul of the House Un- American Activities Committee. ‘He refused to cooperate with the committee, got fired from his orchestral job at Universal, sued to get it back and won, and then lost it again when the orchestra was disbanded.’ In 1965, Shapiro wed fellow violinist George Kast, who died in 1987.

From 1956 she taught at the Thornton School of Music, University of Southern California (where colleagues included Heifetz, Primrose and Piatigorsky), until her death on 17 September 2007. Among her students were many orchestral concertmasters.

Frances Magnes with Ernst von Dohnányi, who dedicated his Second Concerto to her

‘EUDICE SHAPIRO NEVER DEMONSTRATED IN LESSONS. SHE WAS GOOD AT CONVEYING VERBALLY WHAT NEEDED TO BE FIXED’

‘I learnt so much from this marvellous musician,’ says Glenn Dicterow, who studied with her privately as a teenager in the 1960s. ‘What was unique about her was that she never demonstrated in lessons. She was exceedingly good at conveying verbally what needed to be fixed. She didn’t want me copying her. She wanted her students to develop their own styles on their own rather than just being parrots (the opposite of Heifetz). She was an inspiration, and her recordings prove what an amazing violinist she was. Certainly some of the most beautiful sounds ever to come out of a violin were made by her.’

As with Magnes, a singular story attaches to Shapiro’s instrument, which from 1944 to 1950 was the 1688 ‘Derenberg’ Stradivari. When Russian violinist Daniel Karpilowsky – who had led the pre-war Guarneri Quartet – came west to retire, he played in the RKO orchestra because he knew Bakaleinikoff. Shapiro recalled: ‘Karpilowsky said, “My violin is not being played. Don’t you want to play it a little bit?” He had another cheapy that he was playing. I said, “Sure, bring it.”’ She fell in love with his 1750 Pietro Guarneri of Venice on the spot, negotiated a swap and played it for the rest of her life.

Both women made important recordings. Magnes’s best-known is the Bach ‘Double’ Concerto with Busch and his Chamber Players, made in 1945 after their first tour. She matches her teacher well, their rapport is evident the little orchestra is right with them and this is among the most satisfying historical versions.

An absolute corker is the 1953 Bartók Records LP of Stravinsky’s Suite italienne (with David Garvey) and Serly’s Hungarian-inflected solo Sonata in modus lascivus, dedicated to Magnes and featuring many types of pizzicato (eight in the third movement alone). ‘I knew Serly very well,’ she told me. ‘He was a fine guy and it’s a fine sonata. The only thing I had to be concerned about was the movement that was all pizzicato. I had to train long and hard for that or my fingers wouldn’t hold up – it takes its toll.’ Another modern piece she recorded was Wolpe’s hair-shirt 1949 Violin Sonata (in 1954).

From her Hoff-Barthelson period Magnes has left a number of semi-private recordings of sonatas by Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms and others, as well as live performances with the school chamber orchestra – Bach’s Second Brandenburg Concerto, in which she both plays and directs, shows how well she had absorbed Busch’s precepts.

Whereas Magnes withdrew from the limelight just when her recording career was beginning, Shapiro made a number of splendid LPs: with the American Art Quartet, Haydn’s ‘Lark’; Beethoven’s ‘Harp’; Foss’s First Quartet (recorded 1957); Kirchner’s First (1952); a programme of encores; and Toch’s Piano Quintet with the composer at the piano. With pianist Leonard Pennario, violist Sanford Schonbach and her husband, Gottlieb, there’s a lovely 1960 coupling of piano quartets: Fauré’s First and the one by Schumann.

Ralph Berkowitz partnered Shapiro in all three Brahms violin sonatas; Toch’s romantic sonata; an LP of modern pieces; and a Stravinsky programme: the Pulcinella Suite dedicated to Paweł Kochański; Berceuse and Scherzo (The Firebird); Russian Song (Mavra); Ballad (The Fairy’s Kiss); and Russian Dance (Petrushka). More Stravinsky was set down with Brooks Smith: Duo concertant and Divertimento.

Roy Harris’s Violin Sonata was recorded with the composer’s wife, Johana Harris; and on her own Shapiro recorded Stevens’s three-movement 1954 Suite for solo violin. With William Kraft and the Los Angeles Percussion Ensemble she did Harrison’s Concerto for violin and percussion. In Hovhaness’s Tzaikerk (‘Evening Song’) her collaborators were flautist Gretel Shanley and the Crystal Chamber Orchestra under Ernest Gold. For Kohs’s Second Quartet (A Short Concert) she led an all-star group with Nathan Ross, Schonbach and Gabor Rejto. Many of these performances that Crystal Records produced are now available, for example, on Apple Music.

Among unofficial documents of Shapiro’s playing is Reger’s A major Solo Sonata op.42 no.2, a favourite with her mentor Zimbalist (who recorded its Andantino back in 1915). Others are Mozart’s ‘Turkish’ Concerto with the NBC Symphony Orchestra under Frank Black from 1944; three Sarasate Spanish dances, Conus’s Violin Concerto and both Beethoven romances, with pianist Vladimir Sokoloff; and Sol Kaplan’s A minor Sonata with Leo Kaplan on the piano.

Although I never met Eudice Shapiro or Frances Magnes, I had many long-distance contacts with them and formed impressions of two very different but equally delightful personalities who deserve to be remembered. In their separate ways they struck telling early blows on behalf of women violinists, making it easier for those who came after them.