Lea and Billy Wolf #2 - Oh So Close by Thomas Wolf

During the Depression in the 1930s, my parents grew increasingly concerned about the welfare and challenges facing students at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. While tuition was free and most received housing stipends, the only food provided at school was lunch; nothing was offered on weekends,[1] and many students struggled to eat. My parents, who by this time had a big house with several acres just outside the city limits, decided to provide weekend “open houses.” There were various games, a huge meal, orchestra reading sessions (often with Fritz Reiner conducting), and another meal before everyone left. Decades later, as I was growing up, musicians would come up to me and say, “Are you Billy and Irene’s kid? You know, they kept me from starving when I was at Curtis. I ate enough at their place on weekends to hold me for days.”

Max Gershunoff, a Curtis student who eventually became an artist manager with Sol Hurok’s office, wrote:

There was a wonderful family living outside of Philadelphia on the Main Line. Walter (called “Billy”) and Irene Wolf were very much into classical music. Walter’s hobby was playing classical flute, and Irene’s mother was the famous violinist Leah Luboshutz, who was on the faculty at Curtis along with Efrem Zimbalist …

The Wolfs’ large house was situated on many acres of wooded land and can only be described as an estate.

 Every so often, particularly during the winter months, the Wolfs would invite the Curtis “kids” to their home on a Sunday. We would all receive railroad tickets, and looked forward to being able to play and run around the woods all day, ride bikes or sleds, and play ping pong in the game room … After a full day of fun, we would be treated to a late afternoon buffet featuring filling foodstuffs for growing youngsters.[2]

 When I was growing up in that very house, I saw cabinets bulging with orchestral music, including all the instrumental parts. “Oh, that was from the time we had the Curtis parties,” my mother would say. Indeed, my grandmother, Lea, always claimed that these afternoons were for the music.  My mother on the other said that good food was the incentive.  What she did not tell me, and what I learned to my amusement from reading Gershunoff, was that a major motivation for these reading sessions was my father’s desire to play his flute with some really good instrumentalists and under the direction of some world-class conductors.  As Gershunoff recalled, “The purpose of these Sunday outings for Curtis students at the Wolf’s residence was not for our pleasure alone, but also for that of our host, Walter Wolf, who would enjoy sitting in and playing second or third flute as we concluded Sunday outings by getting together to play orchestral repertoire.” [3]

What nerve!  On a scale of one to ten, the Curtis “kids” were tens as far as musical accomplishment.  How and why they put up with Dad, I will never know.  As I said to one of my sisters many years later, “They must have been awfully hungry!” 

To give an idea of the level of Curtis kids and the motivation to come out to the house for these weekend events, one of those students was Willie Gibson, an Oklahoma-born trombone player, who came to hold the principal chair for the Boston Symphony Orchestra after leaving Curtis.  Missing the train one Sunday and not wanting to miss out on the fun at Billy and Irene’s (not to mention the food), he walked along the railroad tracks for more than ten miles from the center of Philadelphia to my parents’ home.

Another who came regularly and became my father’s lifelong friend was a clarinetist by the name of Mitchell Lurie.  Mitchell happened to be Gershunoff’s roommate and the story of his first exposure to the eminent conductor, Fritz Reiner, gives us a sense of what an extraordinary player he was.  In a 1983 interview with the Los Angeles Times, Lurie recalled that during his first year at the Curtis Institute, he was unexpectedly asked to play principal clarinet with the Curtis orchestra the day Fritz Reiner made his first appearance of the semester. 

While performing a solo during the rehearsal, Lurie noticed that Reiner continued to peer at him over his Ben Franklin glasses. At the end of the rehearsal, Reiner said he’d like to have a word with the young musician.  “We went backstage, and he said to me, ‘I need a principal clarinetist in Pittsburgh,’” Lurie recalled. “My heart went straight up into my teeth. ‘But not now,’ he said. ‘You must get your schooling; that’s the important thing for you right now. But when you graduate, you are my first clarinetist.’ Inside, I was screaming, ‘No, no! Take me now!’ because, as you know, in our business so many people make so many promises.”

But three years later, on Lurie's graduation day, a telegram arrived.  All it said was: “Now – Fritz Reiner.”[4]

One of Curtis’s most famous students, Leonard Bernstein, never showed up at my parents’ parties and it was Gershunoff who explained why. “Lenny,” as everyone called him, had come to Curtis in 1939 after graduating from Harvard. According to some fellow students, he was arrogant and unfriendly. This view was not shared by my uncle Boris Goldovsky, a fellow Curtis student who later worked with him at Tanglewood on Bernstein’s opera “Trouble in Tahiti,” who said that the arrogance was well-deserved, as Bernstein was a musical genius. But his was apparently a minority view.

 At one point, a situation arose when Fritz Reiner was unavailable to conduct the reading session at my parents’ home. According to Gershunoff:

Maestro Reiner was stuck in Pittsburgh, where he held the position of music director of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra. There had been a snowstorm and his return trip to Philadelphia had been cancelled. Irene Wolf called and spoke with me and my roommates, Mitchell Lurie and Morris Boltuck, telling us about the problem and explaining that Eugene Ormandy and Leopold Stokowski were not in town that weekend.  The only solution was to have Lenny Bernstein come out to conduct. What would the kids think? Would they come? Consulting with certain key players in the Curtis Symphony on that day, we discovered that most would prefer putting off the pleasure of our usual outing to the Wolfs’ home for another time when we could have a genuine conductor. We returned Irene’s call and informed her of the students’ preference for a movie as an alternative to performing under the baton of Leonard Bernstein.[5] 

As Gershunoff concluded the story, he wrote, “Needless to say, many who refused to perform on that occasion found themselves performing professionally under Lenny’s direction years later and loving it.”  One who did not have this opportunity, of course, was my father, who for the rest of his life regretted the day that the students had nixed the Bernstein-led session.  Dad would never be able to claim that he had played under Leonard Bernstein…and it would have been just like him to have done so.

[1] This information came from an interview on May 13, 2015 with faculty member Eleanor Sokoloff who at age 101 could still clearly recollect her student days at Curtis. She was fortunate to be able to live in a boarding house that offered her breakfast and dinner at $8/month. But many students could not afford such a luxury and depended on the Curtis lunch during the week and my parents’ meals on the weekend.

[2] Gershunoff, Max and Leon Van Dyke, It’s Not All Song and Dance: A Life Behind the Scenes in the Performing Arts, Pompton Plains, NJ: Limelight Editions, 2005, p. 18

[3] Ibid., p. 18-19.

[4]The anecdote is recalled in an article “Mitchell Lurie dies at 86; world-renowned clarinetist taught at USC,”  by Dennie McClellan, Los Angeles Times, November 30, 2008

[5] Gershunoff & Van Dyke, op. cit., p. 19.