On December 6 and 7, 1918, Sergei Prokofiev appeared with the Chicago Symphony, conducting his own Scythian Suite and performing his First Piano Concerto. The program also included Haydn's Symphony No. 7 ("Le Midi"), d'Indy's The Enchanted Forest, and Chabrier's España, under Eric DeLamarter. As Phillip Huscher notes in a CSO blog post, Henriette Weber wrote in the Herald and American: “The music was of such savagery, so brutally barbaric, that it seemed almost grotesque to see civilized men, in modern dress with modern instruments performing it. By the same token, it was big, sincere, true.”
One or the other of these concerts was the scene of a significant meeting that changed the course of modern architecture. In the audience were Pauline Gibling, a composer, writer, educator, and activist who was working at Jane Addams's Hull House, and R. M. Schindler, an Austrian-born architect who was working for Frank Lloyd Wright. Both were so swept away by Prokofiev's "weird harmonies," as a headline had it, that they elected to leave the concert early, not wanting to hear anything more. Decades later, Gibling recalled that they had left at intermission and that the music they skipped was by Carl Maria von Weber. In fact, the Scythian Suite was the second-to-last piece on the program, and the final item was Chabrier's España. No matter: Gibling's memory was accurate enough, given the passage of time. The point is that Gibling and Schindler did not yet know each other. They struck up a conversation as they were walking out. They were married the following year. In 1920, they moved to Los Angeles, where Schindler had the task of supervising Wright's projects for the oil heiress Aline Barnsdall. Two years later, they took up residence at 835 Kings Road, the radical house that Schindler designed for two couples. The marriage did not last, but Gibling played a crucial role in planning the house and in expanding Schindler's field of vision. She continued to write incisively about Schindler's work even after the marriage had fallen apart. She is one of the most important voices in the early history of American modernist architecture.
Many of my readers will, I'm sure, be reminded of another great meet-cute in musical history: that of John Cage and Morton Feldman at a New York Philharmonic concert in 1950, at Carnegie Hall. The program, under the direction of Dimitri Mitropoulos, included Webern's Symphony, which both composers were eager to hear. At the end of the concert was Rachmaninoff's Symphonic Dances, which both composers wished to avoid. Walking out, they encountered each other in the lobby of Carnegie Hall and began a conversation that transformed American music. "Wasn’t that beautiful?” was Cage's opening remark. The event became sufficiently legendary that in 2002 Carnegie mounted a commemorative series titled "When Morty Met John." One more wrinkle: in the thirties, when Cage was still living in Los Angeles, he socialized in the bohemian atmosphere of 835 Kings Road and, his primary sexual inclinations notwithstanding, had an affair with Pauline Gibling Schindler. Their love letters were published in 1996 by ex tempore magazine.
