Willy and Roy
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 23: Essentially Creative
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Stephen Downes
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Roy Preston loved the smell. When the amplifier's valves warmed up: their filaments glowing orange, they gave off a sweet musty odour. He opened the cabinet doors just to inhale it. Who'd have thought gramophones could be so seductive. Roy smiled and swung the weighty arm of the Royce Senior Traverser into place across the turntable. It had its own smell, too – light machine oil and heavy steel. What a contraption! Manufactured in Melbourne, it was worth every penny of the £100 he had paid for it. Twenty times his weekly wage – but he'd made hundreds of recordings. Not just theatre organs and jazz, but the classics, which he was increasingly coming to like.
Roy placed a fresh black acetate disc on the turntable. The right stylus with the right worm drive could engrave half an hour of music on its gleaming surface. He selected a heavy steel scroll the thickness of a broom handle and fitted it. It looked like an industrial machine – not out of place amid the wreckage he'd seen in New Guinea less than a decade ago – but the Traverser's teal parkerised paint shouted modern.
He waded through the clutter of his lounge room. Nothing should ever be thrown out, Roy had told his mother time and again. But where was this week's Listener In? Why was it always buried? Roy sorted through old concert programs. He'd kept them all as well as boxes of secret reports, how-to-surrender leaflets and strategic maps he'd brought back from the Pacific. Intelligence clerk Lance-Sergeant Preston had typed and edited them. Why shouldn't he keep copies?
He found the program guide and turned to the radio listings for Thursday, October 22, 1953. 3AR was broadcasting William Kapell's last recital in Australia. The American pianist was touring for the ABC and Roy had already put down some of his concerts – filled four or five sixteen-inch acetates. Tonight at the Plaza Theatre in Geelong Kapell was playing Scarlatti, Schubert, and three of Mendelssohn's songs without words. Lots of variety, but the ABC was broadcasting only Chopin's second sonata – the so-called ‘funeral march'. He knew that one. ‘Daa-daa-de-daa,' he murmured. Roy inserted a new stylus and positioned it above the disc, adjusting its balance against a steel counterweight. The broadcast was delayed, didn't start till 10 pm. He'd have time to take a cup of tea to mum. Be ready when it did. ‘Daa-daa-de-daa,' he hummed.
WILLY KAPELL SHOOK OUT THE MATCH AND DREW HEAVILY ON HIS CIGARETTE. He closed his eyes, sat back and listened to the comforting low drone of the DC6's four Pratt & Whitney engines. He'd be happy to get back to New York for the cigarettes alone. Fourteen weeks away and he'd run out of Camels and Lucky Strikes. British brands were not the same.
He was beat. Thirty-seven concerts in three months. He'd seen all of Australia, but none of it. Committed artist that he was, when he wasn't performing he was practising. To get back to Anna Lou and the kids, little David and Rebecca, would be the best thing. He'd missed them. Those so-called music critics in Sydney wouldn't miss him. What did they know? He took a cup of coffee from the hostess. He was just thirty-one but already a great pianist, he told himself. Everyone knew it. The Australian tour had proved it. He'd never played better.
He'd been great against the odds. His Steinway damaged en route to Australia. The itinerary, he told the ABC managers, was ‘brutal'. They'd argued over programs. No wonder he wanted to quit halfway through. No wonder he'd been so depressed after Anna Lou left. But he showed them. Everything about that last concert was great. He couldn't have done the ‘funeral march' better. The surges in the presto final movement, the fingers steel-strong, the louds and softs, the crescendi and diminuendi ... It wasn't piano-playing. It was magic. That's what an artist was for. To create other worlds, and he was a great world artist. Even for the people of Geelong.
The critic rats of Australia knew nothing. He mustn't let them get him down. He meant it at Sydney airport when he told them: ‘This is goodbye forever. I shall never return.' I bet it made the papers. ‘I shall never return!' Unlike General MacArthur, he thought.
He lit another cigarette, sucked in the smoke and gave way to random thoughts. The plane was quarter-full. He'd slept okay. The flight was on time. At least Australians could run an airline. He was glad he hadn't stopped over in Hawaii. Anna Lou had said, get out in the sun and enjoy yourself. Take a few days, don't rush home, she'd said, but he knew deep down she wanted him back. He looked out the window. Grey cotton-wool clouds cushioned the wings. They stretched unbroken to the horizon. The plane was descending. San Francisco couldn't be far away. Probably foggy.
ON THE FLIGHT DECK, CAPTAIN BRUCE DICKSON OF CRONULLA the control column of ‘Resolution' a little more firmly. For all the modernity in the cabin, the comfy pull-down bunks, the reading lights, the pressurisation, piped air and wide reclining seats, the cockpit still reminded him of a bomber. The wheel was thin and black, like a Morris Minor's. But now he and first officer Frank Campbell had a job to do. The radio officer, navigator and flight engineer, too, would have their work cut out while they flew blind.
British Commonwealth Pacific Airlines Flight 304/44 had been en route from Honolulu for nine hours. San Francisco traffic control cleared Dickson's slow descent, but asked him to stay at least five hundred feet above the clouds. Visibility was nine miles and a wind from the west blew at twelve knots. Dickson got out his Dalton wheel, sliding its concentric rings of white lucite, aligning its gradations for ground speed, airspeed, altitude and air temperature. Peering at the finely etched lines, he scribbled calculations. He knew exactly where they were. He had landed here more than a hundred times, often using only instruments. At 8.42 am West Coast time – eight minutes before ‘Resolution' was due to nudge the tarmac blocks – Captain Dickson reported that he was turning on his final approach. He put down the landing gear and set the aircraft's flaps to fifteen degrees.
WILLY KAPELL WAS BORN TO RUSSIAN-POLISH JEWS who had emigrated from Europe to a dream come true – they owned a modest bookshop on Manhattan's Upper East Side. At a very early age, Willy is said to have demonstrated amazing musical precocity; his mother soothed him with Mozart recordings, and he loved banging the keys of any piano. Most children do this, but Edith and Harry paid for half-dollar piano lessons for Willy from when he was seven until he got tired of practising. The hiatus was short, and at ten Willy wanted to play again. His parents got Dorothy LaFollette to take him on. She immediately detected the boy's genius, tutoring him at a knock-down rate three days a week over several hours.
Mrs LaFollette was well connected, and the right people soon heard Kapell play. By sixteen he was studying with the distinguished pianist Olga Samaroff at the Philadelphia Conservatory where he won the Philadelphia Orchestra's Youth Contest, its world-renowned music director Eugene Ormandy conducting. He then enrolled at the famed Juilliard School and a second prestigious prize led to a debut recital at New York Town Hall. (Glenn Gould followed the same path fourteen years later.) Willy chose a brave program: Bach, Chopin, Rachmaninoff and Shostakovich. The New York Times called him ‘generously gifted ... but, more important, he has imagination and sensitivity', the Herald Tribune was left with a ‘feeling of exhilaration'. Willy was nineteen.
Although both his father and brother were servicemen, he was exempt from military duties because of allergies. But, like many artists, he was asked to make recordings for the troops. He put down at least one, which has become a sought-after rarity.
Four years later, in 1945, his fame was growing and he toured Australia for the first time. He asked for U$S1,000 a concert when the going rate was a hundred pounds. Wherever he played, commentators and fellow musicians fell in love with his work. Many raved, but following the slightest criticism he would brood for days.
Eight years later – when he returned to Australia – he was a superstar. Half James Dean, half Robert Mitchum, his publicity stills reveal an intense youth beneath an enormous bow-wave of brilliantined locks. Shorter than average, he had an athletic body, strong broad hands and dark, brooding features. Bobby-soxers adored him as much as music lovers. He was modest, serious and thoughtful, and when he wasn't practising he was reading scores or books or sucking on a Camel.
The ABC and the pianist wrangled over fees, programs and itineraries, but executives found him generally affable and enthusiastic. He began the tour with a two-concerto program in Melbourne Town Hall on Saturday, July 18. For the next three months he performed in Brisbane, Adelaide, Perth and Sydney, and in the town halls of Bendigo and Horsham, the Albert Hall in Canberra, the Century Theatre in Newcastle and the Star Theatre in Shepparton. One can imagine the quality of the instruments at some of these venues. Just a year before Kapell toured, the famed pianist Paul Badura-Skoda had taken a tuning lever on stage at Geelong for the second half of his concert and adjusted some of the strings himself. Only one concert was cancelled because of ‘nervous exhaustion', and Kapell declined to prepare Beethoven's Appassionata sonata for Shepparton because of a leg injury. The only glitches.
In general, critics were jubilant, noticing the pianist's great artistic development since he had last been in Australia. Linda Phillips in Melbourne's Sun called him a ‘more mature and thoughtful pianist', a master of ‘extraordinary brilliance' with the kind of musicianship that stamped him ‘among the elite'. The Age's music critic thought Kapell gave Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition a ‘re-creation in one of the most arresting versions ever likely to come our way'. Every section of the work was ‘vividly alive and seeable'. Kapell was ‘one of the greatest and most discerning pianists of his day'. Biddy Allen said the pianist's ‘command of rhythmical span and tonal mass' was ‘astonishing' . James Govenlock announced that Kapell was ‘now a mature artist' and ‘Fidelio' wrote: ‘My goodness! How that poet has grown in the seven (sic) years since [he] played here last!' Dr B.V. Pusenjak in Perth said Kapell's ‘astonishing' performance was ‘of great beauty, tender in its phrasing, full of dazzling virtuosities and constrained to the tiniest details at the same time'.
In Sydney the critics were lukewarm. Before he'd struck a note, the Sydney Morning Herald's Lindsey Browne was writing him off. He thought Kapell might approach playing Mozart ‘as a kind of fancy-dress ball'. Once he began playing, these attitudes congealed. One Sydney critic damned Kapell with faint praise, saying his recital was ‘spectacular if not very moving'. A Mozart sonata was ‘hard, arid playing, very efficient, but austere and chilly'. After two of three Sydney recitals in early September (Willy no doubt read the notices), Kapell asked the ABC how much he'd owe them if he withdrew from the contract. Mr R.G. Gifford, the ABC's Assistant Controller of Administration (Finance), forwarded a list to the pianist at the Hotel Australia in Castlereagh Street: publicity, advertising, printing concert tickets, broadcast-line rentals, deposits on accommodation and the full cost of his wife's airfare. Gifford's list rounds off the sum, his final line pregnant with threat: ‘Say £1,500'. It was more than ten times the average concert fee – £125 when he played with an orchestra and £160 for a recital. He opted to play on.
Indeed, the Sydney critics probably spurred him to even more sublime heights. But they'd got at him. Ten days before he left, he told the Sydney Sunday Telegraph's Eunice Gardiner that he would never play in Australia again. Most of his tirade was directed at Lindsey Browne, whom he described as the mastermind of a coterie of critics against him. It was time to put a stop to the ‘madhatters tea-party, which represents a large proportion of music criticism in Sydney ... Much of what is written is uninformed, false, and malicious; it is often even ridiculous,' Kapell complained. His critique of the critics splashed over three columns.
A decade later, Melbourne music writer Alan Gemmell, who had met Kapell during the tour, revealed that in the latter weeks the pianist had had ‘frequent fits of depression'. On the eve of his departure he told Gemmell that he ‘might not live to see home'. Joseph Post, who had conducted several of the concerto performances, wrote that Kapell was ‘in a rather depressed frame of mind'. Post and his wife entertained Kapell, and he told Gemmell he had ‘let off steam' about Sydney's critics. ‘I can still hear him spitting out with great venom, the epithet. The rats!'