Music: Departures

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Conductor Rudolph Ganz resigned last week from the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra. For six years he had held his post, apparently with steadily mounting prestige. It is true that experts found him technically deficient in the details of baton wielding. Yet there was no disputing his interpretive ability, especially in rendition of the moderns. In rehearsal, he is known to have been exquisitely concerned with the most minute details of instrumental emphasis, phrasing, balance. His musicians were devoted. His audience was receptive. Yet he quit because the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra could not raise the $60,000 necessary to its continuance next year. With the season's end, he is at large.

Last week the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra played without a leader. On the empty conductor's stand an open score, a slim baton lay idle; before it musicians bent to their instruments, swept through Beethoven's Seventh Symphony, through the inspiring Andante Cantabile of Tschaikowsky with a feeling they had seldom known before. Below them in a flower-banked casket, their director lay dead. He, Walter Henry Rothwell, had died of apoplexy, seated at the wheel of his automobile. Through eight seasons he had guided their destinies with a firm hand.