Music: Week's Cargo

It was an expensive musical cargo that the S. S. Rex landed in the Port of New York one morning last week. Newsmen at Quarantine pounced first on Arturo Toscanini, who gravely said "How are you?" and turned his back.*

Other musical passengers were less reticent. Conductor Bernardino Molinari was on his way to San Francisco to play several new compositions. Pianist Vladimir Horowitz was with Toscanini's pretty daughter Wanda whom he married a month ago in Milan (TIME, Jan. 1). Janet Olcott,17-year-old daughter of the late Chauncey Olcott, would make her piano début. Bubbling over with talk was mousey little Moshe Menuhin, father of Yehudi. Yehudi had practiced with Toscanini every day aboard ship and Toscanini was a "very lovable man." Yehudi had received two telegrams from Conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler, Hitler's music man, asking him to "help mend the broken threads between Germany and the rest of the world." And when Yehudi refused unless the ban was raised against Bruno Walter and other Jewish musicians, Furtwängler had replied, "It will be your fault if music goes to the dogs in Germany."

Next day no one took much notice when a quiet, middle-aged woman arrived on the Europa, calmly saw her luggage through customs and sped out to the Steinway factory to choose her own pianos for a cross-country tour starting this week in Hartford. She was Myra Hess who does not go in for publicizing herself like most musicians. She does not assume that anyone is interested in the fact that she grew up in an orthodox Jewish home in London, started playing the piano when she was five, stuck to it because for her there seemed no other life.

Critics have little faith in women pianists but in the twelve years she has been playing in the U. S. Myra Hess has lived down the handicap. With her there is no pose, no affectation, no sentimentality. She comes on the stage usually in a severe black velvet dress, sits down calmly and plays Bach so that the audience shouts for more. She plays Beethoven with the stride and strength of a man. Her Brahms and Schumann are expertly tender. Evidence of Hess's powers are the houses she draws. During Depression when most audiences have dwindled hers have steadily increased until today she is rated not only as the world's greatest woman pianist, but as one of the world's few great musicians.

"Old 97"

"On September 27, 1903, a Sunday train, No. 97, which ran over the Southern Railroad from Washington to Atlanta, was late at Lynchburg and in making up lost time, its engineer ran it at a high rate of speed on a steep grade down one side of White Oak Mountain, just north of Danville, Virginia. As the train reached a curving trestle, it left the tracks and plunged into a ravine below. The crew was killed and the train was completely destroyed. Quite a number of songs were written by different persons to commemorate this sad event. . . ."