2 0 1 1

d e s S t a a t l i c h e n I n s t i t u t s

f u r M u s i k f o r s c h u n g

P r e u G i s c h e r K u l t u r b e s i t z

H O I T

Mark Lindley

E R W I N BODKY ( 1 8 9 6 - 1 9 5 8 ) , A PRUSSIAN IN BOSTON 1

E rwin Bodky had two notable careers: first in the 1920s and early '30s in Berlin as a keyboard performer, and then in the 1940s and '50s in the USA as a champion of Baroque and Classical music.

He was born in 1896 in Ragnit (some 200 km northeast of Danzig), the popu­lation of which was in those days less than 5000. His father was a lawyer; the family, of Jewish descent, attended the local Lutheran church without formally joining.2 He began to compose music in 1906, and, after graduating from sec­ondary school in nearby Tilsit (where the population was nearly ten times that of Ragnit), began in 1914 to study in Berlin at the Hochschule fur Musik, where

1 Further information about Bodky is given at http://www.sim.spk-berlin.de/f0rschung_4.html. In addition to the books and pamphlets cited in the footnotes, my sources of information about Bodky have been as follows: (1) His Nachlass (ca. 6 cubic feet) donated in 1981 by his sole child, Angelica Bodky Lee, to the M. E. Grenander Department of Special Collections and Archives, University Libraries, University at Al­bany, State University of New York (for an inventory, see http://library.albany.edu/speccoll/findaids/ ger023.htm, access July 2011). (2) Relevant items in his house at 353 School Street, Watertown, Massachusetts: books, recordings etc. which were not sent to Albany in 1981. (3) The Universitatsarchiv of the Universitat der Kiinste Berlin (see www.archiv.udk-berlin.de, access July 2011). (4) Digital files, supplied by the Staatliches Institut fiir Musikforschung PreujSischer Kulturbesitz, of audio recordings made by Bodky in Berlin. (5) Archival files regarding Bodky in the library of the Longy School of Music (seehttp://www.longy. edu/librarybakalar/ library_contact.htm, access July 2011). (6) Photographs donated by Bodky's daughter in 2010 to the Black Mountain College Project (see http://www.bmcproject.org, access July 2011). (7) In the Robert D. Farber University Archives and Special Collections at Brandeis University (in Waltham, Massachusetts), from the Abraham L. Sacher Brandeis University Presidential Papers, in Box 16, the folder entitled "Faculty Applications - Erwin Bodky, 1948", and in Box 21, the folder enti­tled "Bodky, Erwin, 1949-1958" and the first ten annual Brandeis University bulletins. (8) Interviews and reminiscences gathered by me in 2009-10. To indicate, for all the facts in the article, exactly which parts of which sources they were taken from would have overloaded the article with footnotes; so I have supplied such information for only some of the facts.

2 I know of no statistical evidence as to how many families in Prussia in those days had some such religious status, but my impression from readings in German history is that it was not a rarity.

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one of his teachers was Ernst von Dohnanyi. It was after giving an amateur recit­al in a hotel in Ragnit in February 1916, and after performing the Bach D-major toccata in a student concert in Berlin in June - and after having composed in the last ten years a total of more than 300 pages of music - that he was enlisted in the army.3 (Figure 1 shows a photograph of him in uniform.) Returning home when the war ended toward the end of 1918, he composed during the next year some 100 additional pages of music (my tally is inexact because his Nachlass includes more than 300 pages of undated compositions), married a professional interior-decorator whom he had met in Berlin and to whom he had written doz­ens of letters while away during the war, performed - in a Wohltatigkeits-Kon-zert zum Besten des Vaterlandischen Frauenvereins in Ragnit - Liszt's St. Francis ofPaola Walking on the Waves and began in October to study composition with Richard Strauss at the Prussian Academy of the Arts (formerly the Royal Acad­emy; see Figure 2).4 In 1920 the Prussian Mendelssohn-Bartholdy-Stiftung gave him a subsidy of DM 200 "in recognition of the good outcome of your test" ("in Anerkennung des giinstigen Ausfalls Ihrer Pruning").5 In the winter semester of 1921 he began a year of further studies at the Academy, this time with Busoni, during which there was (according to family lore) a dispute between teacher and student as to whether it might be worthwhile, when performing Bach's music, to play just Bach's notes.

He had meanwhile embarked on a career as a pianist. This included accom­panying silent films, as the family's savings were exhausted during the post-war inflation. His first professional solo recital, in 1920, was a Bach-Abend: Buso-ni's transcription of the Eb-major prelude and fugue from Clavierilbung III, the

3 HELLMUTH FALKENFELD published a 65-page booklet, entitled Die Musik der Schlachten. Aufsatze zur Philosophie des Krieges ("Battle-music. Essays on the philosophy of war"), Constance 1916, somewhat about music but mainly dwelling on the fact that philosophy differs according to whether one is or is not confronted with death. In October he gave Bodky a copy of the booklet, inscribed: "Dem Kamaraden / Erwin Bodky vom Reg. 18. / in dankbarer Erinnerung an die Toccata in D=dur" ("To my comrade Erwin Bodky from the 18th Regiment in grateful remembrance of the D-major toc­cata").

* According to KURT WILHELM: Richard Strauss personlich. Eine Bildbiographie, Munich 1984, pp. 373-374, only two students ever had such a privilege, and the lessons were infrequent and re­markably informal. (That was, according to Wilhelm, during the war; so maybe Bodky, who studied with Strauss after the war, was, unbeknownst to Wilhelm, the third such student.) Strauss would send to the student a "brief, courteous" note saying when and where to meet with him. (Bodky's Nachlass includes two such notes.) According to Wilhelm's source, "He did not require us to write in his style. [...] He never corrected [our scores]. [Instead, he would say,] 'You have to redo that once more; here's how I would go about it' [Das miissen Sie noch einmal machen. So denke ich mir das.] -and would go to the piano and form something quite new from the student's [musical] ideas. He would explain in a few words why it must be thus and thus: 'Here is the pivotal place [das Gelenk] of your theme. Here you must build more [weiterbauen], here modulate out of the key, in order to come back into it here.'"

5 The Director of the Academy was the head of the committee at the Mendelssohn-Bartholdy-Stif­tung that determined the awards. For this fact and for other help, I extend warm thanks to Dietmar Schenk, who is in charge of the archives of the Universitdt der Kiinste Berlin.

Erwin Bodky (1896-1958), a Prussian in Boston 231

A-minor prelude and fugue from Part II of the "48", two of the four duets from ClavieriXbung III in modified versions of Busoni's transcriptions, the Capriccio sopra la lontananza del fratello dilettissimo (in a modified version of Busoni's transcription), the D-major toccata, two chorale-preludes: O Mensch, bewein in Max Reger's transcription and Wachet auf in Busoni's, and the Goldberg Vari­ations in a modified version of Busoni's transcription. The recital drew more than a dozen favorable notices in the press. After a tour in 1921-22 of several cities and towns, Bodky put together an impressive brochure of excerpts from such notices and met twice with Furtwangler, who after the first meeting sent him a handwritten note, saying: "I gladly confirm to you that your piano con­certo made a very good effect, and certainly regard it as worthy of a public per­formance. I do not yet know to what extent I myself will have occasion for that. With very high regard".6 The occasion arose in 1923 in a Leipzig-Gewandhaus performance of Beethoven's Opus 80 Fantasie for piano, chorus and orchestra.

In 1924 Bodky began to teach piano at the Klindworth-Scharwenka Conserva­tory, and in 1926 was appointed professor of piano at the Prussian State Acad­emy for Church and School Music (Staatliche Akademie filr Kirchen- und Schul-musik) and composed (in August) his last piece, a song entitled "O Schweigen, komm" ("O Silence, come"). Sometime around then or a little earlier he visited the Sammlung alter Musikinstrumente (Museum of Musical Instruments; this in­formation is from family lore) and was permitted to play on a harpsichord and a clavichord; in 1926 he wrote a two-page article entitled Cembalo und Clavichord for the program booklet of a concert hall in Berlin.7

In 1927 Hans Joachim Moser was appointed director of the Academy for Church and School Music, and during the next six years he and Bodky and the violinist Hermann Diener, who directed the Academy's Collegium Musicum, collaborated with one another in quite a number of projects: performances of music by Bach, including various cantatas (in which Moser sang the solo bass parts) and The Musical Offering and The Art of the Fugue; an analytical article by Moser and Diener about these latter two works; articles, published together in one issue of the journal Die Musik, by Moser on vocal Christmas-music and by Bodky on instrumental Christmas-music; six concerts by Diener and Bodky devoted to 17th- and 18th-century violin music; and an evening of "musical dia­logue between harpsichord and clavichord" during which Moser lectured, Bod-

<• "Sehr geehrter Herr Bodky, / ich bestatige Ihnen sehr gern, daft mir Ihr Klavier-Konzert einen sehr guten Eindruck gemacht hat, und es einer offentlichen Auffiihrung unbedingt fur wiirdig er-achte. Wieweit ich selber Gelegenheit dazu haben werde, weift ich noch nicht. / In ausgezeichneter Hochachtung[,] / Wilhelm Furtwangler". The evidence for the second meeting is in a letter of Septem­ber 11th which ends as follows: "Immerhin wiirde ich, wie gesagt, mich gerne noch einmal personlich mit Ihnen dariiber unterhalten und verbleibe bis dahin / als Ihr ganz ergebener / W. Furtwangler."

7 Die Kammerkunst. Zeitschrift fur Podium und Biihne. Programmbuch des Grotrian-Steinweg Sadies, Berlin, 15 December 1926, pp. 82-83 (= Mitteilungsblatt der Gesellschaft fur Akustik u. Pho-netik).

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ky performed on the clavichord some short pieces by J. S. Bach and sonatas by C. Ph. E. Bach (F-minor) and Haydn (G-minor), and Anna Linde (who published in 1933 the standard modern edition of Couperin's L'art de toucher le clavecin)8

performed on the harpsichord. A minority of Bodky's fairly frequent solo recit­als during this period were performed on harpsichord and/or clavichord. (Some­times he used more than one keyboard instrument.)

The Academy's yearbook for 1928-29 included an article by Bodky, "Wege und Ziele des Klavierunterrichts an der Akademie"9 ("Means and objectives of piano-teaching at the Academy"), advocating that students not practice the same piece over and over and get into a rut with it, and describing techniques for acquiring facility in playing. He may perhaps have been influenced in this re­gard by the most eminent and successful of his teachers. Richard Strauss played piano so effectively that Hans von Billow told him, "If you weren't something better you could also have been a [professional] pianist"10 - and yet the follow­ing report (sent to me in 2010 by Charles Burkhart) suggests that Strauss would rather rehearse too little than too much:

Some years ago, the late Sidney Edwards, cellist, told me that very early in his career he and two other young string players were chosen to perform Richard Strauss's pi­ano quartet in Carnegie Hall [in New York City] with Strauss himself, who was touring the USA. (This would seem to place the story in 1922.) The day of the concert, having heard nothing about a rehearsal, the three knocked on the door of Strauss's room in the Great Northern Hotel, instruments in hand. The composer opened the door wear­ing a dressing gown. "To what do I owe the honor of this visit?", he asked. With great deference the young men introduced themselves. "And why have you come to see me?" - "Why, to rehearse your quartet, Maestro." Strauss leaned back and eyed them, as though sizing them up. "You seem to me like fine young fellows. I don't think we need to rehearse. Let's just walk out on the stage and play!" Edwards told me that the performance that evening was exciting.

Bodky's publications in the early '30s included a book, Der Vortrag alter Klavier-musik11 ("The Performance of early keyboard music"), an historical anthology, Das Charakterstiick (of which a second edition was published in i960)12, and articles entitled "Anruf fur das Clavichord" ("Summons for the clavichord"), "Das

8 FRANCOIS COUPERIN: L'art de toucher le clavecin (Die Kunst das Clavecin zu spielen, The art of playing the harpsichord), Leipzig 1933.

9 ERWIN BODKY: "Wege und Ziele des Klavierunterrichts an der Akademie", in: Jahrbuch der Staatlichen Akademie fur Kirchen- und Schulmusik 1928/29, p. 33-47.

i" "Wenn Sie nicht was Besseres waren, konnten Sie auch Klavierspieler sein." See ERNST KRAUSE (ed.): Richard Strauss Dokumente: Aufsatze, Aufzeichnungen, Vorworte, Reden, Briefe, Leipzig 1980, p. 244.

11 ERWIN BODKY: Der Vortrag alter Klaviermusik, Berlin-Schoneberg 1932 (= Hesses Handbiicher der Musik 95).

12 ERWIN BODKY: Das Charakterstiick, Berlin-Lichterfelde 1933 (F Musikalische Formen in his-torischen Reihen 12).

Erwin Bodky (1896-1958), a Prussian in Boston 233

Cembalo- und Clavichordproblem in der heutigen Musikpflege" ("The harpsi­chord-clavichord problem in the current revival of [early] music"), "Das Cem­balo-Clavichord Problem" (the text of this article was extracted from his book), and "Hat das Klavier in der Hausmusik noch eine Zukunft?" ("Does the piano still have a future in 'house-music'?"). In this latter article he expressed concern lest the radio and phonograph displace the piano; he argued that music on the piano enables one to get to know it better than by just listening to it; and he urged piano manufacturers therefore to produce an inexpensive model based on a pianino of 1839 in the Sammlung alter Musikinstrumente.

He himself was by now performing occasionally for broadcast by radio (he used the museum's Brodmann piano for such a broadcast in November of 1932: see Figure 3), and was making recordings for the 2000-Jahre-Musik pro­ject ("2,000 years of music") directed by the Academy's professor of organology (Instrwnentenkun.de), Curt Sachs.

Under the Nazis, Moser in 1933 was obliged as Director of the Academy to carry out a purge of its faculty. He let Sachs go before Bodky. In a three-page letter of April 3rd (supplementing a letter of March 10th) to the Minister for Science, Art and Education (Wissenschaft, Kunst und Volksbildung), he admitted that a number of "half-Jews" and two "full-Jews" - a music-theory professor and Bodky (whom he described as professor of harpsichord as well as of piano) - had not yet been entirely dispensed with, although Bodky was now, since Easter, no longer allowed to offer a seminar but was only giving 18 hours a week of indi­vidual instruction. He mentioned Bodky's "dissident" religious status (i.e. that he had no religious affiliation), described in some detail his patriotic military service in World War I, and said that the family had always lived in Germany since time immemorial. The last sentence of the letter declared: "I can only say that the entire faculty carries out the teaching very well and dutifully, and takes joy in being beloved by the students, but of course I do not close my mind to the problem that here in an academy for school- and church-music the employ­ment of full-Jews can lead to difficulties." The Ministry was adamant. Moser advised the Bodkys to emigrate and, just before he himself was dismissed from the Academy later that year, wrote for Bodky a document of strong commen­dation. Bodky and his wife and four-year old daughter had meanwhile moved to Amsterdam. (His father declined to emigrate; he felt Germany could do no wrong; he died in Theresienstadt.)

The following incomplete sketch of the repertoire (in addition to pieces al­ready mentioned) which Bodky had performed and taught in Berlin will indicate the scope of his contributions to musical culture there: Jan Pieterszoon Swee-linck's Mein junges Leben hat ein End; Johann Jacob Froberger's Partita auffdie Mayerin and Tombeau sur la mort de M. Blanchrocher; Alessandro Poglietti's Aria allemagna and variations; a toccata by Matthias Weckmann; a chaconne by

234 Mark Lindley

Johann Pachelbel, and some of his fugues on the Magnificat; a suite by Johann Caspar Ferdinand Fischer; Franz Xaver Murschhauser's variations on "Lasst uns das Kindelein wiegen"; Georg Bohm's Prelude, Fugue and Postlude in C-minor; J. S. Bach's French Overture, Italian Concerto, Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue, toccatas in C- and D-minor, several of the Partitas and French Suites, parts of The Well-Tempered Clavier and of the 2- and 3-part Inventions, variations on "Sei gegriifiet, Jesu giitig", and harpsichord concertos in D-minor and A-major; Handel's Harmonious Blacksmith variations; a Fantasie by Telemann; Rameau's La Poule; a set of variations by f. C. Bach; a four-hand sonata by J. C. F. Bach; two sonatas by Haydn and the F-minor Andante and Variations; Beethoven's variations on Dittersdorfs "Es war einmal ein alter Mann", the 32 Variations in C-minor, the Diabelli Variations, the "Moonlight" sonata, the Op. 111 sonata, the Op. 126 Bagatelles, the "Spring" and "Kreutzer" sonatas, the "Archduke" trio and the "Emperor" concerto; several short pieces (including songs) by Schubert, and the F-minor Fantasie; a sonata by Carl Maria von Weber; several short pieces by Schumann and the Symphonic Etudes; several pieces by Chopin; Liszt's Don Giovanni Fantasie and the piano-duet version of Mazeppa; Brahms's three vio­lin sonatas, three piano-trios, four of the chorale-preludes, the Paganini Varia­tions and the Op. 116 Fantasies; Moussorgky's Pictures at an Exhibition; Tchai­kovsky's piano trio; Busoni's Fantasia Contrappuntistica, Respighi's Preludes on Gregorian Melodies; d'Indy's Op. 63 piano sonata; violin sonatas by Reger, Pfitzner and Joseph Marx; quite a few piano pieces by Reger, several by Bartok (e. g. the Quatres Nenies) and by Smetana, some by Bruckner, Casella, Debussy, Janacek and Paul Juon, and the first performances of Eugene Goossens's Three Nature Poems, of Vittorio Rieti's sonatina and of a Monologe by Stefan Kardos.

The program of Bodky's first concert in the Netherlands, in The Hague in October 1933, consisted of the Goldberg Variations played on his harpsichord and the "Hammerklavier" Sonata on a piano. But in most of his ca. 40 solo and chamber-music concerts during the next five years - in Amsterdam, Utrecht, The Hague, Rotterdam, Copenhagen, Zurich et al. - he did not perform on the piano, and his (part-time) teaching position in Amsterdam was in harpsichord. He had quite a few private pupils, and gave paid lectures in his home on the history of keyboard music from 1500 to 1800 and on the St. Matthew Passion. Dutch trans­lations were published of several of his German articles. Wanda Landowska's life-partner, Denise Restout, possessed at the time of her death a typewritten and annotated French translation of one of those Dutch texts, on how to play the harpsichord; Figure 4 shows that at some time in the late 1920s or '30s Bodky visited Landowska in Paris.13 Charles van den Borren published in 1937 a favorr

!3 This and another, similar photograph were given to me by Bodky's son-in-law. The other one is reproduced on p. 114 of MARTIN ELSTE: Die Dame mit dem Cembalo: Wanda Landowska und die Alte Musik, Mainz 2010.

Erwin Bodky (1896-1958), a Prussian in Boston 235

able review (in Flemish) of Der Vortrag alter Klaviermusik. Bodky and his family made many friends in the Netherlands, some of whom (Bruno Walter, Edward Lowinsky, Albert Smijers) were to collaborate with him later on. And it stands to reason that the dozens of concerts and lectures in which he performed on the harpsichord must have contributed to the 20th-century development of Dutch interest in such music. But even so, this part of his career would seem to have been less fulfilling than some of the parts earlier in Berlin and later in Boston.

In Amsterdam the family might imagine returning home one day to Ber­lin, but had to consider more remote possibilities as well. The father of one of Bodky's private pupils back in Berlin - Albert Einstein - wrote to him from the USA on Christmas day of 1934 a letter with advice about the American immigra­tion authorities and the Musicians' Emergency Fund, and concluded: "I would be very glad if you and yours were to find a new home in this land. That which is often lacking in culture and finesse will be richly compensated for by true-hearted nai'vity." The move was made in 1938 (shortly after the annexation of Austria and the beginning of the Sudeten crisis), and Bodky secured in Boston a part-time position at the Longy School of Music, a small conservatory which had been founded in 1915 by a member of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and had moved in 1937 to a location near Harvard University. Members of that or­chestra and venues at Harvard were to play vital roles in his subsequent career.

His work at Longy included tutoring in rudimentary skills such as "Piano Sight Reading and Keyboard Harmony" and "Score Reading." He gave occasional solo recitals, performed often in chamber-music programs, and gave elaborate sets of lecture-recitals with titles like "How to Understand Music" and "The Workshop of the Composer" as well as "Old Keyboard Music from 1500 until 1800". And he took care to secure scholarships to Longy for a young private pu­pil of his, Anton Kuerti, who went on to a distinguished career as a pianist.14

Meanwhile he had begun to lead ensemble concerts, at first with the Longy School Chamber Orchestra and later with players mostly from the Boston Sym­phony Orchestra. The first of his several concerts in Harvard's Adolphus Busch Hall15 was in 1940, and in 1943 the first of several in Houghton Library (hous-

14 See http://www.jwentworth.com/pianists/anton_kuerti/index.htm (access July 2011). The Bod­ky file at Longy includes carbon copies of letters to him from the Director of the school in 1947 and '48 about scholarships for Kuerti. A letter of 1946 from the Registrar mentions Kuerti as one of four pupils who had been notified that because Bodky would be away on tour for a while, they would not have lessons with him during that time. Another pianist who studied, albeit privately, with Bodky was Luise Vosgerchian. She had graduated in 1945 from the New England Conservatory, began in 1949 to study with Nadia Boulanger, and became in 1971 the first woman ever appointed to a senior professorship at Harvard. See apropos the following two websites: http://www.news. harvard.edu/gazette/2000/03.16/musical.html and http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2007/02/ luise-vosgerchian (access July 2011).

15 This Germanic Museum building, also known as the "Busch-Reisinger Museum", was designed in 1910 by German Bestelmeyer.

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ing Harvard's rare books and manuscripts) - an elite venue suitable for clavi­chord- as well as harpsichord-music. His initial program there was Part I of The Well-Tempered Clavier, with different pieces played on different instruments. His first concert in Harvard's Sanders Theater, with its more than 1,100 seats, was in 1949, and by the mid-1950s his early-music concerts there were virtu­ally filling it. This seems to me the most notable aspect of his career in Boston. Upon becoming in 1944 a citizen of the USA16, he had co-founded The Cam­bridge Collegium Musicum with two Longy colleagues, Wolfe Wolfinsohn and Iwan d'Archambeau; for eight years they gave an annual series of three concerts in Boston as well as various concerts elsewhere in northeastern USA. Then in 1952 he founded The Cambridge Society for Early Music, which would likewise give three programs annually in the Boston metropolitan area; its membership varied considerably, depending ad hoc on the programs.17

His teaching-career advanced as well - at first thanks to a boost from Edward Lowinsky, a fellow refugee who had become a friend in Holland in the 1930s. In 1942 Lowinsky joined the faculty of Black Mountain College, an innovative, small school in North Carolina; in 1944 a "summer music institute" was initi­ated there with a substantial celebration of Schonberg's 70th birthday; and the next summer, Lowinsky had Bodky, Alfred Einstein18 and Josef Marx collaborate with him in a series of lecture-recitals illustrating how chamber music and vocal polyphony can promote an "awareness of the fundamental task of our genera­tion: the reconciliation between individual and society" and can represent "the ideal community of free individuals, in which the whole makes possible the de­velopment of each part, while each part adapts itself to the higher development of the whole."19 Bodky returned to this unique school in the summers of 1947 and '48. (See Figures 5-6.) In 1947 he taught courses entitled "Bach's Keyboard Music" and "From Romanticism to Modern Music". The next year, he performed and discussed the standard piano-trio repertoire and Beethoven's 32 piano sona­tas; John Cage gave a series of concerts of music by Eric Satie and in introduc­ing them declared that Beethoven's influence "has been deadening to the art of music"; the students formed factions; and the rector suggested that they duel in the dining hall with the Satie devotees wielding crepes-suzettes against the Beethovenites' Wienerschnitzels.20

!' The Justice Department had determined that he was unlikely to "endanger the internal security of this country."

i? The concert programs of both groups are reproduced in HELEN E. SLOSBERG ET AL. (ed.): Erwin Bodky - A Memorial Tribute, Waltham, MA 1965.

18 Alfred Einstein was a professor of music at Smith College, where Bodky in 1943 had performed Part I of The Well-Tempered Clavier.

19 MARY EMMA HARRIS: The Arts at Black Mountain College, Cambridge, MA 1987, p. 101. 2° Op. cit., p. 154. See RICHARD KOSTELANETZ (ed.): John Cage: Documentary Monographs in Mod­

ern Art, New York 1968, pp. 77-84, for the full text of the relevant lecture. According to Cage: "With Beethoven the parts of a composition were defined by harmony. With Satie and Webern they are

Erwin Bodky (1896-1958), a Prussian in Boston 237

Bodky was now appointed to the regular faculty at Black Mountain, and so taught there rather than at Longy for the next academic year (1948-49), dur­ing which the local radio station broadcast several recitals played by him in their studio (including an all-Chopin program on the 100th anniversary of the composer's death)21; and yet he told a friend that "the quantity of work which I have to do here is so negligible that I have all the time I wanted to readjust myself after ten rather strenuous years, and my book [see below] has all good chances to be finished."22

He submitted meanwhile to a newly founded, Jewish-sponsored but nonsec-tarian university in a suburb of Boston a document entitled "Suggestions for the organization of a music department at Brandeis University"; and, the follow­ing summer (1949) the university announced the founding of that department.

At first Bodky was himself the entire music department at Brandeis, and taught a course not unlike the one for beginners that he had developed at Longy (where he continued to teach until 1952). But then a set of 18 courses was out­lined in the 1951-52 Brandeis catalogue and was thereafter gradually imple­mented and expanded upon as the number of teachers and students grew. The number of concerts at Brandeis also grew, with Bodky providing his full share.

In the summer of 1952 he completed the first draft of the book that he had hoped to finish in 1949, and read a paper apropos at a congress in Utrecht of the International Society for Musicology. The next summer he made a well-received concert-tour in England, Holland, Germany, Switzerland, Austria and Italy, and gave a lecture-demonstration at the Berlin Municipal Conservatory (Stadtisches Konservatorium Berlin), of which Moser was the director. While revisiting Mo-ser in the summer of 1954 he received a telegram from Brandeis appointing

defined by means of time lengths. The question of structure is so basic, and it is so important to be in agreement about it, that one must now ask: Was Beethoven right, or are Webern and Satie right? I answer immediately and unequivocally, Beethoven was in error, and his influence, which has been extensive as it is lamentable, has been deadening to the art of music." Judith Davidoff, who played cello in the trio-sonata performances that summer, has recalled that "Erwin Bodky never betrayed his feelings about these remarks [by John Cage], but during one social evening he entertained the assembled guests with his very own tribute to Satie in a gleeful and stylistically perfect satire." (See Erwin Bodky, 1896-1958. A Few Tributes and Memories from his Students, Colleagues and Friends. 12 April, 1996, a booklet printed for The Cambridge Society for Early Music. See also MARTIN B. DU-BERMAN: Black Mountain. An Exploration in Community, New York 1972, pp. 288-289 and 471-472.)

21 From the script preserved in Bodky's Nachlass in Albany: "On the 17th of October [1949] the entire musical world will commemorate the 100th anniversary of [...] Frederic Chopin [...]. We have asked Erwin Bodky, professor of music at Black Mountain College, well known to our listeners through his previous appearances over this station, to make his selections [...]. Mr. Bodky will end his program with two Mazurkas, Numbers 24 and 32, demonstrating one of the simplest, and one of the most complicated compositions of this type [...]. From our studios we have presented Mr. Erwin Bodky [...]."

22 Letter of 18 September 1948 from Bodky to Adele Borouchoff, who gave it to Bodky's daughter in 2009.

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him chairman of the university's School of Creative Arts. After that he tended to teach only one course each semester. The topics varied:

Advanced Contrapuntal Practice. Principles governing the construction of invertible counterpoint, various kinds of Canon, strict and free Fugues. Analysis of classic and modern Canons and Fugues and detailed study of Johann Sebastian Bach's "Art of the Fugue". Exercises. Contemporary Music. The development of the musical language from Wagner's "Tristan" until the beginning of the First World War: Strauss, Mahler, Debussy, Busoni, the young Schoenberg; Expressionism, Impressionism, Neo-Classicism. The contempo­rary scene: Bartok, Hindemith, Stravinsky, the twelve-tone system of Schoenberg and his disciples, contemporary American music. Theory and Practice in the Performance of Early Music. Historical, theoretical and prac­tical considerations. [...] Additional lectures by August Wenzinger [...]. The Classical String Quartet. The string quartets of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, with emphasis of the last quartets of Beethoven. The German Solo Song. The development of the German song from the "song with thorough-bass accompaniment" of the Baroque period (H. Albert, A. Krieger, Tele-mann), via the Lieder of the "Berlin" School (Reichardt, Zelter) to the great period of the German song represented by Beethoven, Schubert, Mendelssohn, Schumann, Brahms and Hugo Wolff.

He meanwhile collaborated with members of the Boston Symphony Orchestra (who played modern instruments) in making seven 33-rpm records of 18th-century chamber music (Loeillet, Couperin, Vivaldi, Bach, Telemann, Handel, Mozart). In the spring of 1955 he made a series, entitled Roads to Bach of five television programs for the leading non-commercial station in Boston, WGBH, and then in 1957 a series on Roads to Mozart. WGBH's archival films were de­stroyed by a fire in 1961, but the people whom I have interviewed about Bodky all remember with great pleasure those television programs (and yet not the 33-rpm recordings).

In 1957 the West German government designated him a professor emeritus. I have suggested that the most notable aspect of his career in Boston was to

win remarkably large audiences for his early-music concerts at Harvard. This opinion is shared by the current heads of the Boston Early Music Festival (the largest such American institution) and of the Cambridge Society for Early Music (which still exists as a sponsoring organization; during some but not all seasons of the Boston Early Music Festival, the Society's "Erwin Bodky Award" is pre­sented to a promising young performer or performing-group of such music). A somewhat different view, however, was expressed in 1964 at Brandeis when a bas-relief representation of him was dedicated. Most warmly appreciated there were his qualities as a brilliant and beloved teacher with an evidently strong grounding as a composer in the German classical tradition:

Erwin Bodky (1896-1958), a Prussian in Boston 239

Any discussion of music that was ever held with Erwin in the vicinity of a keyboard instrument was sure to send his interlocutor away filled with amazement at [...] the re­markable ease with which he could illustrate any point he made by excerpts from the vast musical literature that was incredibly at his fingertips - symphony, opera, chamber music, as well as the keyboard repertory [...]. Erwin's memory [included] a conceptual scheme that placed musical knowledge in the proper frame of reference for any of it to be available when necessary [...]. One of only three students that were ever accept­ed by Richard Strauss, a student also of the imaginative Ferruccio Busoni, Erwin was indeed a direct link between the grand tradition and ourselves [...]. [W]e are here to honor, among other things, [his] profound dedication to the loftiest musical ideals. [...] Among the many gifts he brought to this young [...] institution were his tangible links to a golden musical past. [...] [H]e had the power to dissolve the mists of history for young students [...]. But the technical record does not adequately convey the irrepress­ible human being [...]. No one, to my knowledge, ever saw Erwin merely walking. He bounced. He bubbled with enthusiasm [...]. He renewed himself in his pupils and they, in turn, gave him their pride, their respect, and, above all, inevitably, their love.23

He must have intended his American book. The Interpretation of Bach's Key­board Music, to win an enduring reception, and indeed a German translation of it was published in 1970, and a Japanese one in 1976, and it had meanwhile influenced deeply Sandra Rosenblum, whose Performance Practices in Classic Piano Music24 is nowadays a standard work. Bodky's treatise contains an as­tonishingly rich fund of discussions (many of them so thorough that anyone might guess that he was a Prussian) of various topics and detailed suggestions for performing each piece. But of course it all amounts to his last word rather than the last word. To discuss it in the detail which it merits would go beyond the scope this essay.

23 The remarks from which these excerpts are taken were made by Arthur Berger (a fellow Brand-eis music professor) and Abraham Sacher (the president of the university).

24 SANDRA ROSENBLUM: Performance practices in classic piano music: Their Principles and Appli­cations, Bloomington 1989.