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1936-39

Jorge may not have been the greatest pianist, but he was always my favourite pianist.

William Livingstone

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Summer 1936 was spent in Cuba, where Jorge gave two piano recitals in Havana in September, briefly noted in Musical Courier, 24 October 1936 by Huberto de Blanck, no less. The first was in the Auditorio for Pro Arte Musical, and was entirely devoted to Godowsky; the second was at the Miramar Yacht Club and featured Beethoven's 32 Variations in C minor, a Godowsky group and Rachmaninoff's second piano concerto with Hellen Metzer taking the orchestral role on a second piano.

Jorge then arrived on the SS Pennsylvania at the Port of New York on 28 September 1936, as a ‘returning USA resident’. On the immigration form, it is stated that he is aged 21 and that his address is a friend’s house, M. Barnhouse , 1701 Delancey St., Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. This is the address of Donald Grey Barnhouse, Senior Pastor of the Tenth Presbyterian Church from 1927-1960.

Video: Europe 1935-39

The Reverend Donald Grey Barnhouse

Jorge seems to have been "adopted" by the Barnhouse family while studying in Philadelphia as a student.

Donald Barnhouse had met his wife in Belgium after World War I, where both were doing religious work. They were married in London; a daughter Ruth (1923-1999) was born near Grenoble, France, where her father had a church. By her parents’ design, her first language was French; she didn’t speak English until she was 2, when her father returned to Philadelphia to take a small church and teach history at the University of Pennsylvania.

Since her famous father “was a nut about education,” Ruth and her younger siblings - two brothers and a sister - were schooled at home by their grandmother Tiffany. At evening devotions, Barnhouse would read a biblical passage in the original Greek or Hebrew, and the other members of the family would read the same passage from translations into other languages.

Jorge became a friend of the Barnhouses when he was 13 and Ruth was 3. Bolet’s elder sister, Maria, became Ruth's first piano teacher at that time; Jorge himself taught her later on. It seemed to Ruth that she was bound for a concert career until she failed her auditions for the Curtis Institute of Music. She finished private secondary school at the age of 14, entering Vassar College in 1940 at 16.

The Reading Eagle (4 September 1937) reported that Dr Donald Grey Barnhouse had organised the annual Bible conference at Mt Gretna (a borough in Lebanon County, Pennsylvania), at which the Rev James R. Graham, jr., missionary from Xinjiang, China spoke. 'Music had been managed throughout by Señor Jorge Bolet of Havana, Cuba.'

Donald Barnhouse was the first nationwide electronic preacher in the United States, with a coast-to-coast weekly radio show on the NBC Blue Network, which originated from his sermons at Tenth Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia starting in 1927. A statement attributed to him (but also to many others - I've seen it said by a missionary of 1930s Shanghai) 'If God doesn't destroy America, he'll have to apologise to Sodom and Gomorrah.'

Barnhouse Hall, one of the student residences at The Stony Brook School (where Jorge spent a year 1933-34), was built in 1962 and named in memory of this prominent pastor and board member.

Ruth Tiffany Barnhouse (1923-1999)

This section owes its origin to Nigel Cameron, to whom I am grateful for alerting me to the Sylvia Plath connection (I didn't know). He is currently engaged in writing a biography of Ruth. He tells me that

'I gather Maria and Ruth spent time together in France, and later in Cuba during Ruth's teens.'

Ruth Tiffany Barnhouse, also known by her married name Ruth Beuscher, became a psychiatrist, theologian, and Episcopalian priest. (Her grandmother was one of the Tiffanys, the famous Fifth Avenue jewellery store, founder was a distant cousin.) Best known for being the psychiatrist of Sylvia Plath, she had corresponded with her since they met at McLean Hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts following Plath's breakdown in 1953.

Those who follow Plath scholarship first learned of a group of "Plath-Barnhouse letters" in March 2017 when Ken Lopez, a bookseller in western Massachusetts, announced he was offering for sale The Harriet Rosenstein Sylvia Plath Archive. Ruth Barnhouse had seen Plath for weekly therapy sessions during 1959 when Plath, now married to Ted Hughes, lived in Boston. After Plath and Hughes moved to London in early 1960, Plath and Barnhouse set out on a correspondence that in many ways proved to be a lifeline for Plath.

For research purposes, Barnhouse had entrusted those letters to Harriet Rosenstein - who planned to write a biography of Plath - in 1970. Ultimately, Rosenstein abandoned her biography, but she maintained her archive, including the Plath letters.

'Just before Rosenstein’s departure for England to do more interviewing for [her projected] Plath biography, Barnhouse entrusted the biographer with fourteen letters Plath had written to Barnhouse between 1960 and 1963. During this period Plath worked on her novel, The Bell Jar, creating a character, Dr. Nolan, based on Barnhouse. (...) The trauma of possession that had prompted Barnhouse to burn earlier Plath letters now returned, but with a difference. Now she believed she had found someone to preserve Plath’s legacy—someone apart from the coterie that protected Hughes and disparaged Plath. According to Rosenstein, biographer and therapist agreed that the letters would not be released during Barnhouse’s lifetime but would eventually become available.' (Carl Rollyson)

There was a contentious debate over ownership of the letters; an out-of-court settlement was reached with Smith College late in 2017 that precluded a trial. (Because of Plath’s close association with the college - she had taught there - Barnhouse had donated her own literary estate to Smith not long before she died in 1999.) For an undisclosed sum of money, Rosenstein turned over the 14 letters to Smith where they became a part of the special collection holdings. The copyright of the letters was always held by Frieda Hughes, Plath’s daughter, who, upon receiving copies of the letters from Smith, decided to include them in The Letters of Sylvia Plath Volume 2, edited by Karen Kukil & Peter K. Steinberg.

“From everything she said to me, her marriage was ideal,” Ruth Barnhouse told Paul Alexander. “That was how she experienced it—like the Garden of Eden. I don’t think she had an inkling that the marriage was unraveling until Ted pulled the rug out from under her.” (Plath discovered Hughes was having an affair with their friend Assia Wevill.) “When Ted left her that led to a depression that culminated in her suicide."

Plath wrote her last letter to Barnhouse on 4 February, 1963. For some reason, it was not mailed until 8 February. Plath committed suicide on the morning of 11 February. Barnhouse did not receive the letter until after Plath died. In it, Plath confessed that, for the first time in years, “the madness” had returned.

Ruth Barnhouse later underwent a career change and entered a field closely associated with her father. After studying at Weston College of Theology in Cambridge, a Jesuit Roman Catholic institution, she was ordained as a priest in the Episcopalian Church at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C. in 1980. That same year, she was made a “Texas offer I couldn’t refuse” by Perkins School of Theology at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, to join its teaching faculty.

Paul Alexander, author of Rough Magic: A Biography of Sylvia Plath (Literary Hub, 23 October 2018)

Sylvia Plath's last letter to Ruth Barnhouse, from Twitter/X @ProjectPlath

When Ruth was 14, her father the Reverend Donald Barnhouse. had wanted her to start at Vassar College (a private liberal arts college in Poughkeepsie, New York, founded in 1861). She was accepted but told to wait until she was 16 to begin her studies. In the meantime she became involved with her first husband, Francis Edmonds, who was a student at Princeton. They met in a religious youth group and fell in love. Her father refused to consent and demanded that she stop seeing him.

They eloped and they went to live with his family. Her father came and made a scene at his new in-laws' house, begging Ruth to come home. She refused. Not long afterward Ruth's mother wrote her a letter telling of her cancer. Ruth had not known her mother was sick and would never have left if she had. Within a month of marrying Edmonds she knew she'd made a mistake, but was now pregnant. She said she wished she had returned to Vassar instead of getting married. Three years later her mother died.

At age 21, Ruth continued her education at Barnard. After graduation she entered Columbia Medical School. At the end of her first year, she decided to divorce her husband. She said the divorce agreement was very favourable to him and that she had limited access to her children, Francis and Ruth.

Not long after her divorce, Ruth met fellow medical student William Beuscher. "He looked like Clark Gable, only blond," she said. They both went into psychiatry and did their residencies at McLean. She had five more children with Beuscher.

Karen Maroda, Salon (29 November, 2004).

During the interviews Ms. Maroda informed Ruth, who was not well off financially, that a rare books dealer had said her first edition of "Colossus" (which she had noticed on her shelves) - signed and dedicated to her by Plath - would probably fetch at least $15,000 at auction.

Fritz Reiner, conductor

On his return from Europe, Jorge had gone back to Curtis, and among other things took two years of lessons in conducting with the Hungarian Fritz Reiner (who had joined the faculty in 1931). Reiner said that Jorge was a wonderful pianist, but that he would never make a conductor.

Reiner Frigyes - in the Magyar tongue - (19 December, 1888 – 15 November, 1963). Hungarian born and trained, he emigrated to the United States in 1922, where he rose to prominence as a conductor with several orchestras.

Reiner was born in Budapest, Austria-Hungary (at the time) into a secular Jewish family that resided in the Pest area of the city. After preliminary studies in law at his father's urging, Reiner instead decided to pursue the study of piano, piano pedagogy, and composition at the Franz Liszt Academy. During his last two years there, his piano teacher was the young Béla Bartók (1906-8). Among the works studied with the composer were Beethoven's last Sonata Op. 111 and Liszt's B minor Sonata, so he must have had a very good technique. (Kenneth Morgan p.26)

Reiner's job at Curtis was not onerous: he had only to undertake one conducting class (of 2 hours) a week. Some of his pupils included Leonard Bernstein and Lukas Foss, the latter fifteen years old 'and still in kneepants'. The composer, Gian Carlo Menotti claimed to have learned more about how music was made in one Reiner rehearsal than in a month of composition lessons. According to legend, Reiner only once rewarded a student with an A grade, and that student was Bernstein.

He had a vast knowledge of music, but one blind spot was Sibelius. He declared in front of his students that Sibelius was an amateur.

In the early 1930s Mr and Mrs Reiner lived in a spacious Manhattan apartment on Park Avenue, with 17th century, Venetian furnishings brought from Italy. Their home from 1938 onwards was a 43 acre property based around a two- storey French villa near Westport, Connecticut.

Fritz Reiner himself would reach the pinnacle of his career while music director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in the years 1953-63.

Igor Stravinsky called the Chicago Symphony under Reiner 'the most precise and flexible orchestra in the world', but this was more often than not achieved with tactics that bordered on the personally abusive, as Kenneth Morgan documents in his 2005 biography of the conductor. Any day on which he failed to lose his temper, one critic remarked, was a day on which he was too sick to conduct. His facial expressions ranged from Mephistophelian to a good imitation of Bela Lugosi, the Hungarian actor who played the Transylvanian vampire Count Dracula in the 1931 film.

The end of Beethoven's Symphony No. 7 in A major: Chicago Symphony Orchestra and Fritz Reiner, here appearing during his initial season as Music Director, recorded on kinescope in 1954 at the WGN studios.

'Reiner’s Beethoven mostly just expresses the sour expression on his face.' (David Vernier)

Gunther Schuller told of playing French horn in the Metropolitan Opera orchestra under Reiner. At one rehearsal, Reiner scolded Gunther for a mistake - 'it's as

if this is your first time playing Der Rosenkavalier'.

Gunther, who was probably still in his teens, replied

'But this is my first time'. Everyone went silent, terrified of what Reiner would happen next. Reiner smiled and said: 'How wonderful! To be playing Der Rosenkavalier for the first time!'

Naumburg Prize & New York Town Hall recital

In April 1937, Jorge was awarded the Naumburg Prize. There were 55 international competitors and in the final 3 US pianists and Jorge Bolet. The impresario Arthur Judson, the biggest in the US at this date, now added him to his list (though Jorge seems to dispute this).

A report in The New York Times for 7 April 1937 states: ‘It was announced yesterday that pianists Ida Krehm and Jorge Bolet, etc. had been selected as winners of the annual Walter W. Naumburg Music Foundation [13th] competition.’ The judges included Walter Spaulding of Harvard University, Wallace Goodrich of New England Conservatory, Bruce Simmonds of Yale, Adolfo Bett, formerly of the Flonzaley Quartet and singer Povla Frijsh.

The prize of the Walter W. Naumburg Music Foundation competition was a recital in New York.

(Jorge was in Havana in June where he gave a recital in the Auditorio, including Balakirev's Islamey, not. a usual item. He sailed back to New York on the Santa Elena on the 27th. The ship was loaded with 800 crates of pineapples!)

There is a review of that recital by H. Taubman in the New York Times: Jorge's debut at Town Hall on Tuesday, 19 October 1937. The recital included Bach/Liszt G minor Fantasia and Fugue, the rondo from Schubert’s D major sonata D.850 (a delightfully playful and innocent gem), a Chopin group, Liszt’s B minor Sonata, Prokofiev, Rachmaninov and Godowsky.

‘Jorge Bolet, 23-year-old Cuban pianist, made a striking debut yesterday afternoon, injecting excitement into a season that has leaned heavily thus far on mediocrity. Mr Bolet tended to be prodigal of his powers...several times he tore into the piano as if he was about to dismantle it and astonishingly the resultant tone was rounded and pleasing in quality.’

In an interview with Elyse Mach in 1988, Jorge said that nothing much came of this recital, despite fabulous reviews. ‘I had no manager.’

Bolet had already performed the above recital on Tuesday evening, 19 October at Curtis.

Organ Fantasia and Fugue in G minor (Bach-Liszt)

Rondo from the Sonata in D major, Opus 53 (Franz Schubert)

Etudes: E flat major, Opus 10, No. 11 , C sharp minor. Opus 10, No. 4/ C sharp minor, Opus 25, No. 7/ A minor, Opus 25, No. 11, Fantasie in F minor, Opus 49 (F.Chopin)

Sonata in B minor (Franz Liszt)

Suggestion diabolique (Serge Prokofiev)

Preludes: E flat major, Opus 23, No. 6 & G sharp minor, Opus 32 (Sergei Rachmaninov)

Waltzes from "Die Fledermaus" (Strauss-Godowsky)

The next evening, Wednesday 20th, JB took part in a radio broadcast from Casimir Hll, Curtis (4pm) with Eunice Shapiro (violin). He can be heard here playing Rachmaninoff's G# minor Prelude Op. 32 No.12. This was a live transmission by CBS.

Rachmaninoff Op.32 No.12

Curtis Institute & Josef Hofmann

When the full effects of the Depression took hold, it was evident that financial restructuring was necessary. Hoffman was not in agreement with the changes, thinking they would destroy the philosophy behind the Curtis Institute, and he tendered his resignation in September of 1938. Attempts to dissuade him were all unsuccessful, and he left Philadelphia, moving to California in 1939. On 14 February 1939 at the Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles, Hofmann gave an interview to the Los Angeles Daily News in which he spoke directly of his resignation:

It proved to be just a little too strenuous to be director as well as to concertize and to teach, so I gave up the Directorship. I spent too many years and too many days at a desk reading letters and reports and composing more reports and more letters ,instead of composing music and reading new compositions.

Whether his departure was truly voluntary, and the outcome of financial considerations, philosophical differences, and overwork, or whether it was actually the result of a Palace revolt, hastened by Hofmann's, alleged womanising and drinking, or some combination of the foregoing remains a source of speculation. Whatever the reason for his departure Hofmann and Mary Louise Bok maintained apparently friendly contact. (Elizabeth Carr)

A Palace Coup, Spring 1938

Gregor Benko for Marston Records gives a more complicated and detailed account (edited with headings also supplied):

The highlight of the series of Hofmann's 50th Jubilee concerts was a gala program presented at the Metropolitan Opera House on 28 November 1937, where just one day less than fifty years earlier Hofmann had been presented in his American debut. Many Curtis students, alumni and faculty participated in the concert.

Absent from the Institute during the tour, Hofmann returned to Philadelphia at the end of March 1938, and on 4 April, the Philadelphia Orchestra celebrated his Golden Jubilee with a special broadcast concert at which he played solos and the Beethoven 4th Concerto conducted by Eugene Ormandy.

Behind the scenes

Hofmann was greeted with a crisis when he returned to Curtis. What had happened behind the scenes during his absence was unexpected and brutal: Mrs. Bok had always been dependent on the advice of trusted advisors, including her husband and her elder son, Curtis Bok, an eminent jurist. Curtis Bok was, like his father, a dear friend and staunch ally of Hofmann, but during Hofmann’s tour he had been supplanted by his younger brother, Cary Bok, as his mother’s chief advisor.

Cary had always lived in his brother’s shadow. He convinced Mary Bok that it was ridiculous to pay the Institute’s faculty such princely salaries when other music schools like New York’s Juilliard were infamous for the low salaries they paid their teachers, and that Hofmann and his friends had been on a gravy train which should be stopped.

Hofmann found all this out just prior to his performance - the recital of 7 April 1938 in Casimir Hall—it had to be one of the most emotion laden recitals he ever played. He apparently knew it was to be his last at Curtis.

Few at this historic concert, to the audience a jubilant homecoming, could have known what intense emotions the pianist was feeling, for he was being forced to resign from the Institute. The device the Boks used was an offer for him to continue as Director, but with most of his artistic policies dismantled and his salary less than half of the previous year.

Resignation

Hofmann spent several months preparing for his departure—there were furtive attempts to come to a compromise, and he offered to waive his fee for teaching if any way could be found to prevent the school’s policies from changing. No solutions could be found which were satisfactory, and on 26 September he tendered his resignation. Mary Bok, apparently unaware of the humiliation she had helped visit on him, tried to convince him to remain at the Institute as the head of the piano department, but in a letter dated 31 October 1938, he demurred: “I would not be happy holding a position of a mere piano teacher—hired by the hour—regardless of the fee per hour. My artistic standing and artistic ambitions would demand that I shape the destiny of the department I am active in.”

Hofmann moved his family to California in 1939, where he hoped to devote some of his time to the making of recordings, and wrote David Saperton: “There is a tangible record of my ideas on music education, but there is no tangible record of the tradition I inherited from Rubinstein.” Unfortunately, the recordings never materialized. He suffered a nervous breakdown, fed also by a deteriorating situation with his wife.

Damnatio memoriæ

Mary Bok acted as Director of Curtis until the distinguished American composer Randall Thompson was appointed to the post a year later. In the interim the “de-Hofmannization” of the premises was instituted—Casimir Hall was renamed, all photos and portraits and even any reference to Hofmann were removed (reminiscent of the removal of the name and images of the Pharaoh Akhnaten from all historical records by subsequent Pharaohs), and before long almost all faculty members who had been hired by Hofmann were fired.

*[Akhenaten (c. 1353–1336 BC), the so-called 'heretic Pharaoh', noted for abandoning Egypt's traditional polytheism and worshipping the Aten, the Sun disk.]

Randall Thompson, not understanding the process that was taking place, prevailed upon Mary Bok to institute a special Josef Hofmann award, to be given periodically to that alumnus of the Curtis piano department “who, over and above his technical proficiency, has, in the practice of his art, arrived at spiritual and artistic maturity. Such an award is deemed worthy of the master whose name it is to bear.”

With those words Thompson presented the first Hofmann award to Jorge Bolet at the Curtis commencement exercises on 10 May 1940. But that was the end of Hofmann at Curtis for years.

Hofmann continued to perform in public for eight years after leaving the Institute, but he played only two more concerts in Philadelphia, where his last recital took place on 28 February 1946 at the Academy of Music.

The Institute had been deprived of the Director’s guidance for most of the year, and Mary Bok and the other Board members managed the school while he was away. Her annual President’s report dated 13 June 1938 stated that “it became evident in early spring that a drastic curtailment of our expenditures would have to be made.” She reported that she decided to make several changes, among them the reduction of the number of weeks in the school year, the reorganization of some departments and the dropping of others entirely as well as a minimal salary cut for non-faculty staff members, and a much higher cut for the faculty, and the introduction of a new policy that provided little or no financial aid for students.

The report was apparently a sham, insinuating as it did that there had been fiscal mismanagement and shoddy executive planning. (...)

F. Chopin, Andante Spianato e Grande Polonaise Op.22. Live from Josef Hofmann's Golden Jubilee concert, 28 November, 1937 in the Metropolitan Opera House, New York.

"It was a key performance in a series of concerts celebrating the Polish pianist’s 50 years on stage, and fortunately for posterity this incredible event was recorded, without his knowledge (his wife arranged it and he found out about it soon after). Columbia issued some of the solo works on LP in 1955, and the International Piano Library and then International Piano Archives would later make the entire concert available." (Mark Ainley)

Hofmann, 28 November 1937

Jorge Bolet, Naumberg recital in Town Hall, New York City 1937

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