Two books about musicians who have been at the center of the classical-music debates of the last 75 years have just arrived. One is a short tell-all-about-me memoir centered around the mesmeric media-star conductor Leopold Stokowski by his former musical assistant (I Knew a Man Who Knew Brahms, by Nancy Shear), and the other is a monumental biography of John Williams (John Williams—A Composer’s Life, by Tim Greiving). Both men were (and still are) household names, and both managed to keep their inner selves complete mysteries while appearing in the company of movie stars, presidents, and foreign dignitaries.
Stokowski’s three marriages (including one to the 21-year-old Gloria Vanderbilt when he was 58) and his affair with Greta Garbo (“Just Friends” was one of the tabloid headlines) may be ancient history, but swap the names with “Gustavo Dudamel Seen in Positano with Beyoncé” or “Yannick Nézet-Séguin Marries Peter Thiel in Venice” and you get the idea. Throughout his career, Stokowski collaborated with big names like Sergei Rachmaninoff as well as Harpo Marx, but it was his handshake with Mickey Mouse in Disney’s Fantasia that sealed the orchestra conductor’s unlikely eternal fame. Stokowski was a movie star.
No one, however, knew who this extraordinary man was, when he was born, or what his background was. (English? Polish royalty?) People still discuss his bizarre accent—an elusive blend of British, American, and Eastern European—something the London-born conductor clearly invented.
Like Stokowski, who died in 1977 at the age of 95, John Williams is fundamentally a private person. “Johnny” Williams became John Williams in the 1950s, when he moved from New York, where he’d been studying piano at Juilliard, to Los Angeles, where he began working as an arranger, orchestrator, and keyboard artist in the Hollywood film studios. There, he collaborated with Henry Mancini and Elmer Bernstein on films such as Breakfast at Tiffany’s and To Kill a Mockingbird. More than 60 years and innumerable awards later, Williams, at 93, is undoubtedly the most well-known living composer on earth.
With that in mind, Tim Greiving has achieved a monumental biography in which the infamously stoic Williams somehow agreed to participate. You will learn very little about Williams’s inner life, but you will learn an immense amount about his life as a musician. This book will be the touchstone for all future research on Williams, much as Brendan Carroll’s biography of Erich Wolfgang Korngold and Steven C. Smith’s on Max Steiner are.
There is also a shadow narrative in Grieving’s book that, I think, is even more important than the many biographical facts it presents. It is the battle between the new symphonic music people today love and the juggernaut of negativity meted out by classical music critics against this music. The brutal attacks by classical-music critics on Williams’s immensely popular film scores—not to mention constant teasing about Star Wars from the German-American composer André Previn, whom “Johnny saw as an older brother,” according to Mia Farrow, one of Previn’s five wives—seems to have divided Williams’s music into two categories: “popular” and “serious” (as if the two words must be opposites). Previn once said, “They would just as soon forgive you for an axe murder as for having done a movie.”
This trap also ensnared Franz Waxman, Aaron Copland, Ennio Morricone, Leonard Bernstein, and Frank Zappa, who similarly struggled to defend their music’s mainstream appeal. While Arnold Schoenberg, the Austrian composer sometimes called “the Father of Modern Music,” wanted to be popular, these great and popular composers seemingly wanted to be Schoenberg.
Greiving reminds us that Williams faced accusations of plagiarism and pastiche for his score to Star Wars (which takes place “a long time ago,” and its score was composed to create a sense of nostalgia, which it did brilliantly)—a refrain that has dogged him throughout his Hollywood career. One cannot help but see, therefore, why Williams has been reluctant to sound like Williams when he writes his many “serious” concertos, which the never-satisfied critics have called “aimless,” “tiresomely monotonous,” and “dreary note-spinning”—words they would never use for contemporary, non-Hollywood composers whose music sounds very much like Williams’s. Those composers, however, have never been guilty of writing a good tune.
Perhaps for the reasons described above, Williams is incredibly self-demeaning when it comes to his film scores. Greiving goes out of his way to remind us (and perhaps Williams) that his great scores are indeed long-form orchestral works worthy of the concert hall and are not just a series of pop tunes. This might be the most important achievement of the book.
It should also be said that Williams has always been interested in non-tonal and “avant-garde” expressions and has employed them throughout his film scores, just as Jerry Goldsmith and Bernard Herrmann did, and Hans Zimmer continues to do today. Like Williams, Stokowski championed the avant-garde composers of the 20th century. However, unlike the modernist conductors who came after him, he was a voluptuary at heart.
He was also a man of the people. Shear’s book reminds us that Stokowski brought us the youth concerts decades before Leonard Bernstein did. He championed the latest recording techniques to bring music into people’s living rooms, and when he turned 80, he founded the American Symphony Orchestra (A.S.O.) in Carnegie Hall. “We have every kind of player: Negro, white, Indian, and so on, and many women.” In 2022, the New York Philharmonic Orchestra announced that for the first time in its 180-year history, half of its members were women. Stokowski’s A.S.O. achieved that in 1968. No one who was there those first few years will forget the sight of Elayne Jones—a tall, commanding Black woman standing center stage before her timpani as the heartbeat of Stokowski’s new orchestra.
At the end of her memoir, Shear writes, “It’s now time to reappraise [Stokowski’s] work—to listen with twenty-first century ears to the music of a man who was far ahead of his time.” Perhaps it is more accurate to say that Stokowski and Williams represent a continuation of 19th-century music into the modern age. Both composers let us “dream backward,” as Williams is fond of saying.
In an era when new classical music, as performed by our greatest ensembles, is a subject of dread for many, it is significant that Williams composes for symphony orchestras with a very similar sound to the one Stokowski perfected in the early years of the 20th century. The “Stokowski sound” is very much the “Hollywood sound,” which emerged directly from the late 19th century. It was Stokowski’s observation of the Austrian-Czech composer Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 8 (“Symphony of a Thousand”) in September of 1910 that sealed that link (a story that is sadly missing from Shear’s book).
“The orchestra hated Mahler,” Stokowski told me, “because he kept changing the orchestration.” Mahler taught Stokowski that it was a conductor’s responsibility to adapt a score to the acoustics of the hall and the abilities of each orchestra and not slavishly follow the sheet music. Just as Stokowski used this same freedom to create a rich, Dionysian sound from his players, seminal Hollywood conductor-composers like Korngold (The Adventures of Robin Hood), Steiner (Casablanca), and Waxman (Rebecca) carried the tradition into their scoring sessions and soundtracks.
Music history is not a series of revolutions: when it comes to music, if you like it, you want to hear more of it. You imitate it and, since humans are poor mimics, we change it and make it our own. When Williams turned 90, in 2022, he was given the opportunity to conduct concerts in Vienna and Berlin, and at Milan’s La Scala, a moment that perhaps signaled that the classical-music world was finally recognizing his value as a composer of great and popular art. And perhaps this change is coming from within, as each member of every orchestra in the world today has grown up with the music of John Williams.
John Mauceri is a Tony-, Grammy-, Olivier-, and Emmy Award–winning conductor and author. He assisted Leopold Stokowski during the 90-year-old maestro’s last year in America, and is the founding director of the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra
