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March 26, 2007
TT: Ubiquity
You’ve heard Louis Kaufman play the violin, whether you know it or not—and you probably don't. He was the concertmaster of the studio orchestras that recorded the scores for a startlingly high percentage of the best Hollywood film scores of the Thirties, Forties, and Fifties. He also played with Aaron Copland, Darius Milhaud, and Francis Poulenc, made the first recording of Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons, bought the first oil painting ever sold by Milton Avery, lived in a house designed by Frank Lloyd Wright’s son, and wrote a lovely autobiography called A Fiddler’s Tale.Such a life deserves to be celebrated, and I did so in an essay published in Commentary three years ago:
Why, then, is Kaufman all but forgotten? Because he spent his peak years laboring anonymously in the Hollywood studios instead of performing in major American cities. As a result, he failed to win the critical acclaim that a violinist of his quality might reasonably have expected to receive. Virtually all of his commercial recordings (including his historic Four Seasons) were made for small independent labels and have long been out of print. And his adventurous musical tastes drew him away from the standard repertoire that is the bread and butter of every classical-music soloist who hopes to have an international concert career….
Yet if Kaufman was troubled by his failure to become famous, he gives no hint of it in his autobiography, whose charm and verve, like that of Nathan Milstein’s From Russia to the West, are clearly an outward sign of its author’s inner contentment. The epigraph to the fifth chapter of A Fiddler’s Tale comes from the Bhagavad-Gita: “He who really does what he should will obtain what he wants.” Those are the words of a man at ease in his own skin, as was the remark that Kaufman often made to his wife as they prepared for bed: “This was a great day and tomorrow will be fine too.”
The world would be infinitely poorer without such untroubled, unselfconscious craftsmen…
Kaufman died in 1994, but his wife Annette, a fine pianist who accompanied his recitals, is still alive (she sent a letter to Commentary thanking me for writing about her husband). You can hear her on a CD bound into A Fiddler’s Tale that contains recordings by Kaufman of pieces by Robert Russell Bennett, Copland, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Milhaud, Saint-Saëns, William Grant Still, and Vivaldi. In addition, a few of Kaufman’s commercial recordings have been reissued on CD since I wrote about him three years ago, including his splendidly vital, still-listenable 1947 performance of The Four Seasons.
What put Kaufman back into my head? I was reading a press release announcing the latest additions to the Library of Congress’ National Recording Registry, a list of American recordings deemed to be “culturally, historically, or aesthetically important,” and saw that his Four Seasons recording had been added in 2003:
Louis Kaufman was one of the most recorded violinists of the 20th century with a brilliant career performing both film music and classical music. His 1947 recording of Vivaldi's Four Seasons with the Concert Hall Orchestra conducted by Henry Swoboda was the first LP recording of the work that would become one of the most often recorded in the classical repertoire. Kaufman's performance would also play a pivotal role in the revival of Baroque music and interest in performance practice of early music.
This inspired me to reread A Fiddler’s Tale, which I found every bit as delightful the second time around. One of the appendices is a partial list of films on whose soundtracks Kaufman played. Here are some of the highlights:
• AARON COPLAND: Our Town, The Heiress, The Red Pony
• ADOLPH DEUTSCH: High Sierra, The Maltese Falcon
• HUGO FRIEDHOFER: The Best Years of Our Lives
• LEIGH HARLINE: Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Pinocchio
• BERNARD HERRMANN: The Devil and Daniel Webster, The Magnificent Ambersons, Jane Eyre, Vertigo, Psycho
• ERICH WOLFGANG KORNGOLD: The Adventures of Robin Hood, The Sea Hawk, The Sea Wolf, Kings Row, Between Two Worlds
• ALFRED NEWMAN: Wuthering Heights, The Grapes of Wrath, Captain from Castile
• ALEX NORTH: A Streetcar Named Desire, Spartacus
• DAVID RAKSIN: Laura, Forever Amber
• MIKLÓS RÓZSA: Double Indemnity, The Lost Weekend, Spellbound, Ben-Hur
• MAX STEINER: The Informer, Top Hat, Gone With the Wind, Intermezzo, Now, Voyager, Casablanca, Mildred Pierce, Key Largo, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
• FRANZ WAXMAN: Rebecca, The Bride of Frankenstein, Sunset Boulevard
All that and Vivaldi, too! What an admirable man.
Posted March 26, 2007 12:00 PM
