Alles ist nach seiner Art—everything goes after its own fashion; or, one’s fate is to live up to whatever one is. Such is the sage if hardly practical wisdom dispensed by the god Wotan (disguised as the Wanderer) to the Nibelung Alberich in Act II of Richard Wagner’s opera Siegfried. In the case of Nicolas Slonimsky, editor-in-chief of the standard Baker’s Biographical Dictionary of Musicians, genius, or at least the possession of many talents, has gone together with a personal awareness of failed ambitions and only accidental success.

Slonimsky, now a hearty and healthy ninety-four years old, has just provided the grounds for this self-imposed verdict in a curiously disquieting volume of memoirs.¹ Why a sentence of failure should be passed on his long life, and should ultimately seem so apt, is at first glance unclear. Few mortals, after all, are blessed, as he is, with talents that win widespread recognition; fewer still are fortunate enough to reach Slonimsky’s grand age and to do so, moreover, in good health, able to work vitally and gainfully at that which has occupied them their life long. But any appropriate sense of exultation is totally missing from this book, which on the contrary leaves the reader with a feeling of emptiness, as if life itself had turned out pointless.

The bare facts of Slonimsky’s story are, or ought to be, fascinating enough. Born in St. Petersburg in 1894 to assimilated and highly intellectual Jewish parents, he was immediately acknowledged by all and sundry as a genius; indeed, the nickname of “Newtonchik,” bestowed upon him even before birth, suggests just what prodigies he was expected to perform. In keeping with the then-regnant love of serious music and especially of the piano, Slonimsky was discovered in early childhood to have absolute pitch, the much-coveted ability to identify played or sung notes by name in themselves, rather than merely in relation to each other.² He also showed a precocious ability to memorize meaningless strings of numbers and calendar dates.

At the age of six Slonimsky was put to studying the piano with his aunt, Isabelle Vengerova, later to be famous as a faculty member (from 1924 to 1956) of the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia and as the teacher of, among others, Leonard Bernstein, Samuel Barber, Lukas Foss, Gary Graffman, and Jacob Lateiner. At fourteen he entered the St. Petersburg Conservatory, where his talent was recognized by the composer Alexander Glazunov. By the time of his graduation, though he disappointed his family by winning not the prestigious gold medal but only a silver, he was able to demonstrate his pianistic prowess by getting through the “Minute Waltz” of Chopin in 43 seconds (and by perfecting a party stunt in which he would play the upper part of Chopin’s “Black Key” étude not with his fingers but with an orange rolled with his right hand).

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Slonimsky’s life, like that of so many millions in Russian society, was forever shattered by the coming of war and revolution. Drafted into the army, he spent his time playing the piano; with characteristically dismissive levity he remarks of his army service, “With conscripts like me, how could Germany fail to win. . . ?” When the war was succeeded by revolution, Slonimsky found his mood fired by the social upheaval, but he soon discovered that one cannot live by political ecstasy alone: when the revolution triumphs, for food and shelter one must look elsewhere. So, working always as a musician, he began a harrowing long march which took him, sometimes in the company of his family and sometimes alone, first to Kiev in the Ukraine, then to Yalta in the Crimea, and finally abroad to Constantinople, Paris, and in 1923 to the United States.

His first real break came in Paris, where he worked as a kind of rehearsal pianist for the fledgling conductor Serge Koussevitzky, then parlaying his own formidable musical instincts and his wife’s fortune into the beginnings of an international celebrity career. As Slonimsky played piano reductions of the orchestral scores, Koussevitzky would practice his time-beating and cue-giving before an imaginary orchestra. Slonimsky also performed for Koussevitzky the duties of a musical secretary (in this capacity he found a way to rebar Stravinsky’s highly syncopated Rite of Spring so that the rhythmically insecure Koussevitzky could conduct it without going through the score’s frequent meter changes). Though working for Koussevitzky paid well—and the food was good—Slonimsky jumped at a generous offer to come to the United States, where in the unlikely venue of Rochester, New York, the camera king George Eastman was starting an opera company at his own Eastman School of Music.

In Rochester, in addition to learning English, Slonimsky coached operas, played classical and romantic music (including well-paid trio concerts for Eastman’s breakfasts), and even wrote a ballet score that sounded like Rimsky-Korsakov. More important for his future—or so he thought at the time—were his studies with Albert Coates, the brilliant English conductor then in residence in Rochester.

In 1925, Koussevitzky, who had been appointed the conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, invited Slonimsky to return to his employ. Yet despite all the necessary services which Slonimsky was able to provide, the vain conductor could not abide the younger man’s brash desire to be always in the right, or his penchant for appearing in the newspapers as a personality on his own. By 1927, Slonimsky was cut loose by Koussevitzky and forced to earn a living in Boston as a free-lance pianist and conductor.

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For a while Slonimsky led a Harvard student orchestra called the Pierian Sodality. But more to his taste was conducting professional musicians in performances of new works. He became friendly with the reclusive—and at that time almost completely unknown—Charles Ives, and in 1931 gave the world premiere in New York of Ives’s complex and dissonantal Three Places in New England (1903-14). In an example of the zany humor which has always marked Slonimsky’s public behavior, the daring program he chose for this historic event in American music included, in addition to the Ives, Carl Ruggles’s knotty and transcendentally serious Men and Mountains (1920-21) and closed with Mozart’s A Musical Joke, a work that ends with a polytonal, defiantly wrong-note coda. The purpose of this bizarre juxtaposition was to show that, in Slonimsky’s words, “Mozart did it too.”³

Ives became quite fond of Slonimsky, and in 1931 sponsored orchestra concerts for him in Paris where he conducted works by such important modernist figures as the American Henry Cowell, the French-American Edgar Varèse, the Cuban Amadeo Roldán, and the Mexican Carlos Chávez (as well as Ives and Ruggles). The concerts were successful, or at least attention-getting, and the next year Ives sponsored a second Slonimsky tour in Europe. This time, in addition to two Paris concerts—which included solo appearances by Béla Bartók (in his First Piano Concerto) and Arthur Rubinstein (in Brahms’s Second Piano Concerto)—Slonimsky conducted the Berlin Philharmonic, then at the height of its pre-Hitler glory. This concert was brilliantly received by a major part of the musical press, with the great musicologist and historian Alfred Einstein writing of Slonimsky in the Berliner Tageblattthe story up to the middle of, “This is a talent of the first rank.”

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On the strength of his European reception, Slonimsky was invited to conduct the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Here too he was successful—so successful that he was engaged to conduct the entire 1933 season of summer concerts at the Hollywood Bowl, outdoor events attracting, then as now, a broad and large public. At the Bowl, Slonimsky persevered in programming new music, including Varèse’s percussion spectacular Ionisation, an overture by the then very young American Roy Harris, and Arnold Schoenberg’s recently written and hermitic Accompaniment-music for a Film Scene. The outcry was so great that the Bowl’s influential patrons—Slonimsky calls them “moneyed dowagers”—forced his removal before the season’s end. Though Slonimsky now looks back with pride on his programs of outré music, the California fiasco effectively put an end to his entire conducting career.

Meanwhile, Slonimsky had married a young art critic for the Christian Science Monitor and became a father. To his young daughter’s musical education he characteristically applied the same strong will he had shown in programming concerts. Using Pavlovian methods, he attempted to get her to appreciate dissonantal music by playing Chopin while refusing to feed her when she was hungry and then, immediately after, playing Schoenberg while she was being fed.

Unable otherwise to support his family, Slonimsky increasingly relied on writing as a means of earning at least the semblance of a living. In 1937, he published Music Since 1900, a long, detailed, day-by-day record of important—or merely recondite—happenings in musical life. Now in a fourth edition updated to the end of 1969, and supplemented by a separate volume providing corrections and bringing the story up to the middle of 1985,⁴ this immense undertaking combines serious recounting of compositions and performances with descriptions at once acid and elfin. My own favorite item, sublimely prefiguring the current academicization of music, is the following entry for May 25, 1955, quoted in its entirety:

The Committee, comic opera in four scenes by the thirty-three-year-old American composer Matt Doran, detailing an examination for a Music Doctor’s degree in a Western American university, with a multiplicity of academically inane questions, including one asking which symphony begins with a tympani beat on the dominant (the correct answer is the first symphony by the chairman of the committee), is produced for the first time at the Del Mar College of Music in Corpus Christi, Texas.

In 1941, in line with his dedication to fact-gathering, Slonimsky went to Central and South America to collect orchestral manuscripts for the Fleisher Collection of the Free Library of Philadelphia. The published result of his “Pan-American Fishing Trip,” as he called it, was Music of Latin America (1945), a country-by-country description of a rich tradition and, at the time, a vibrant present; his book remains a standard source to this day, not just for the quality of its research but also for the hope it preserves in our media-ridden time of connecting unexploited folkloric material with serious music.⁵

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Rather less praiseworthy throughout the 1940’s was Slonimsky’s naive political orientation. At the time of the Russian Revolution of 1917 he had been (as we have seen) much elated—but not, it seems, for reasons of the supposed general betterment. Rather, as he is quoted in a patronizing 1986 New Yorker profile by Lawrence Weschler, “I was saved by the Revolution. Without the Revolution, I would have become obsessed with my vanity . . . [i]t forced me out into the world.” This absurd fancy remained with him even during the period of the Hitler-Stalin pact. Still later, when Stalin’s cruelty was at its height, Slonimsky spoke in 1948 at a meeting of the Committee for Soviet-American Friendship—a meeting that took place, in Slonimsky’s own words, “shortly after the promulgation of the infamous resolution of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the USSR . . . which damned Shostakovich, Prokofiev, and others for composing music disliked by party members.” For these and other stupidities, Slonimsky was visited by the FBI; nothing came of their questioning.

During the war years, and for some time thereafter, he devoted a great deal of effort to constructing a harmonic system based not on the diatonic scale so familiar in Western music but rather on new chromatic scales developed from the tritone, the interval of an augmented fourth frowned upon in the orthodox teaching of counterpoint. The result of his theoretical labors, comparable perhaps to Schoenberg’s construction of the twelve-tone system (though without the goad of hyper-emotional musical expression which inspired Schoenberg), was published in 1947 in the Thesaurus of Scales and Melodic Patterns. Although Schoenberg was less than overwhelmed by it, the book seems to have found some interest among jazz players looking for new patterns on which to found their improvisations.

A rather less laborious example of Slonimsky’s energy and intelligence is The Lexicon of Musical Invective (1952, currently in print in paperback). This entertaining collection of critics’ misjudgments of great composers has provided much harmless satisfaction to creators and critics alike, while also, not quite so harmlessly, contributing to the contemporary myth of the avant-garde as a force always persecuted in this world and always victorious in the next.

But the major work of Slonimsky’s life, the editing of Baker’s Dictionary, was still to come. His lexicographical labors had begun in 1939, when he became a contributor to and associate editor of the first edition of Oscar Thompson’s International Cyclopedia of Music and Musicians; upon Thompson’s death in 1946, Slonimsky became editor-in-chief of its subsequent editions. In performing this demanding work, he quickly found out a nasty truth of lexicography: since new compilations of words and facts are to a large extent based upon old ones, both truth and falsehood tend to be equally perpetuated. This insight prepared him well for his work on Eric Blom’s fifth edition of the massive Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians (1954).

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In 1958 Slonimsky produced the fifth, completely revised, edition of the venerable Baker’s Dictionary, a much-used compendium which had first appeared in 1900; under his direction, a sixth, expanded, edition followed in 1978, and a seventh, again expanded, was published in 1984. In these successive editions, Slonimsky, aided by numerous helpers, has increasingly indulged his ambition for achieving “comprehensiveness, biographical ubiquity, and, above all, infallibility.”

There can be no denying that in Baker‘s Slonimsky has indeed achieved a maximum of accurate information in a relatively compact format, even if his goal of infallibility, as he himself is well aware, cannot be reached.⁶ As for comprehensiveness, not surprisingly Baker‘s is less complete in its listing of compositions—one of the major functions of a musical dictionary—than the vastly larger and doubtless very much better-financed new (1980) Grove’s.

But surely more important than absolute accuracy and total inclusion is the delightful freedom—and often humor—with which Slonimsky evaluates composers and performers in the process of describing their lives and works. Thus, of the cerebral American serialist Milton Babbitt, he writes:

Babbitt’s scientific-sounding theories have profoundly influenced the musical thinking of young American composers; a considerable literature, both intelligible and unintelligible, arose in special publications to penetrate and, if at all possible, to illuminate Babbitt’s mind-boggling-speculations.

In a more positive vein, he writes of the French composer Francis Poulenc:

A master of artificial simplicity, he pleases even sophisticated listeners by his bland triadic tonalities, spiced with quickly passing diaphanous discords.

Along with his dictionary work, Slonimsky has made fitful attempts to come before the public, if not in his old way as a serious performer, then at least as a personality. In the 1950’s, for example, he appeared successfully on the television quiz program The Big Surprise, a descendant of the rather more famous $64,000 Question. In 1981, he received a call from the rock star Frank Zappa, an admirer of Slonimsky’s scale-book and of Edgar Varèse. When Zappa subsequently heard the by now eighty-seven-year-old man play (on the piano) the coronation scene from Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov, he invited him to perform the feat, accompanied by Zappa and his band, at an upcoming concert. Slonimsky cannot conceal his delight in the experience:

With demoniac energy Zappa launched us into my piece. To my surprise I sensed a growing consanguinity with my youthful audience as I played. My fortissimo ending brought out screams and whistles the like of which I had never imagined possible. Dancing Zappa, wild audience, and befuddled me—I felt like an intruder in a mad scene from Alice in Wonderland. I had entered my Age of Absurdity.

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This, then, is Slonimsky’s life: by turns glorious and self-deluded. Throughout his often compelling memoirs there lurks, as I noted at the outset, an air of disappointment and failure. At the book’s conclusion, he presents a balance sheet of nearly a century of activity in pursuit of four ambitions: to be a “Wunderkind of the piano and outshine all other Wunderkinder,” to be a composer, to be a great conductor, and to excel in the making of music dictionaries. Concerning the first three ambitions he professes total failure, and indeed this verdict, though here stated much too harshly, is not underserved. Of the last, in which he has been a great success, he writes:

Actually, I blundered into it by accident. If there was any passion in it at all, it was rooted in my infantile lust to prove that I was the smartest of them all. I almost succeeded.

To explain his failure to achieve his more grandiose ambitions Slonimsky resorts to one of the out-of-the-way words of which he is inordinately fond: pigritude—“a nice archaic word from Latin pigritia, meaning sloth.” It is a charge that seems hard to support, for if anything, he has shown superhuman energy throughout his life. By any usual criteria, he has labored constantly, and labored well; furthermore, his labors have been recognized, if not in the way he had initially planned.

And yet the reader, contemplating Slonimsky’s many and durable achievements, also finds it difficult not to agree with the writer’s own sense of a general failure. Perhaps a clue to the reason may be found in the phrase Slonimsky uses to describe his attachment—or lack thereof—to lexicography: “If there was any passion in it at all. . . .” This strangely distanced judgment on his central activity for the last fifty years accords well with his response when asked by Lawrence Weschler why he had not taken composing more seriously:

“What for?” he countered. “What am I going to do, eat the reviews?”

Didn’t he have music welling up inside him, crying out for expression?

“No,” he replied. “I don’t believe in that sort of thing. Sometimes, admittedly, it can get bothersome—I’m composing away in my head. If I let myself go, it would get to be like a vision, an aural vision—I have to watch it. But I feel no need to write out these symphonies. I know too many geniuses who composed masterpieces and become mental basket cases worrying about how they weren’t being recognized. I don’t have this problem.”

But the “problem” to which Slonimsky refers is, in fact, not the fear of going unrecognized but rather what can only be called a lack of musical passion—that passion which can more objectively be called commitment. This lack shows itself in many ways. As a composer and theoretician he has seemed unwilling to treat musical language as anything but factitious; brought up, as he writes, on a “musical grammar and syntax ingrained in my psycho-musical makeup,” he came to believe that “there were other possible musical languages, some natural though alien, and some artificial though plausible.” To this unwillingness to consider one “mode of melodic and harmonic expression” any more “natural” or “plausible” than any other is joined his seeming lack of real interest as a performer in any but shocking repertory. Even today, in discussing (in the New Yorker profile) his nephew, the Soviet avant-garde composer Sergei Slonimsky, in whom he plainly takes great pride, he can manage nothing more than that his “work is every bit as far out as the most outrageous stuff we’ve been able to produce here in the West.” However great a tribute Slonimsky may feel this to be, there can be little doubt that only on the rarest of occasions can the pursuit of outrage become the stuff of artistic immortality.

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Slonimsky is surely not the only richly talented 20th-century musician to substitute will and energy for passion and commitment. Almost everywhere we look in contemporary composition—and this has been the sad fact at least since World War II—both style and content are perceived as matters of choice, as if artistic creation were no more than a matter of selecting a meal in a cafeteria, and the temple of harmony had given way to the Tower of Babel. Composers, serialist or aleatoric in the recent past and minimalist in the present, talk incessantly of solving problems on the cutting edge, of finding ways of expression validated only by their up-to-dateness. Musicians everywhere chase after popular success and at the same time scoff at the possibility of a sympathetic, sophisticated audience. Meanwhile, the young fail to build upon their promise, and the middle-aged veer aimlessly from style to style, from language to language, and from influence to influence. Viewed against the musical panorama of the century in which he has lived, Nicolas Slonimsky’s self-confessed failure is both tragic and all too emblematic.

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¹ Perfect Pitch: A Life Story, Oxford University Press, 263 pp., $21.95.

² For a touching account of the role played by music and the piano among educated and prosperous Jews in turn-of-the-century Russia, see A Vanished Present, the memoirs of Alexander Pasternak (the brother of the novelist). This book, published in English translation (by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich) in 1984 but little noticed on its appearance, conveys both the atmosphere of home music-making and the high quality of local and visiting musical activity taken for granted at the time.

³ Documentation exists of Slonimsky's conducting at this time of part of the Ruggles work as well as of music by Ives and Edgar Varèse. Recordings of this music, on 78 RPMs, made for New Music Quarterly Records (Ruggles and Ives) and Columbia (Varèse) in the mid-1930's, were reissued in 1972 on an Orion LP (ORD7150) . The performances of the Ives and the Ruggles are attractively intense, possessing the strong flavor of a time when new music was played with a hard unsentimental edge, rather than with the schmaltzy and tremulous vibrato now so much in fashion.

⁴ Scribners, 1970 and 1986.

⁵ Happily, the second side of the Orion LP mentioned in footnote 3, above, contains valuable material (albeit not orchestral) gathered by Slonimsky on his trip: several short, attractive South American vocal and instrumental works, recorded by Columbia in 1941 with Slonimsky at the piano.

⁶ The problem of the carry-over of error, of which Slonimsky became aware when he first went to work for Oscar Thompson, has from time to time dogged his own work in Baker's as well. Thus from the fifth edition to the current seventh, he has the famous Russian piano teacher Rosina Lhévinne graduating from the Kiev Conservatory; she actually graduated, with the coveted gold medal, from the much more prestigious Moscow Conservatory. In another piano-related error, the current Baker's (1984) has the great piano manufacturer Steinway and Sons still under the control of the Steinway family; in fact the firm was sold to CBS in 1972, and ceased to be under even pro-forma family direction in the late 1970's.