The blue plaque, that is slightly faded and has some minor damage at the
bottom, reads:
Born: April 18, 1882 - London, England
Died: September 13, 1977 - Nether Wallop, Hampshire, England
The celebrated, spectaculary endowed, and magically communicative
English-born American conductor (and arranger), Leopold (Anthony) Stokowski,
was born into a Polish and Irish mother, but was raised as an Englishman.
His famous, vaguely foreign, accent somehow appeared later in his life. The
young Stokowski was a precocious musician, and as a child learned to play
the violin, piano, and organ with apparently little effort. At the age of
thirteen, he became the youngest person to have been admitted to the Royal
College of Music.
By eighteen, Leopold Stokowski had been appointed organist and choirmaster
at St. James', Piccadilly. He attended Queen's College, Oxford, receiving a
Bachelor of Music degree in 1903. He moved to the USA in 1905, but returned
to Europe each summer for further musical studies in Berlin, Munich, and
Paris. When a conductor fell ill in Paris in 1908, he made his debut as an
emergency substitute. The impression he made led to a position with the
Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra in which he quickly achieved notable success.
However, a more tempting prospect faced him when he was asked to take over
the Philadelphia Orchestra in 1912. It was during his long and fruitful
association with this ensemble that Stokowski established himself as one of
the leading musicians of his day.
Leopold Stokowski gave the orchestra an entirely new sound, popularly known
as the "Philadelphia sound" or the "Stokowski Sound." Its foundation was a
luxuriant, sonorous tone and an exacting attention to color. He pioneered
the use of "free" bowing, which produced a rich, homogenized string tone. A
relentless innovator, Stokowski experimented with orchestral seating,
famously lining up the string basses across the rear of the stage and, in an
early instance, massing all the violins on the left side of the orchestra
and the cellos on the right. He also had spotlights directed on his hands
and his impressively prominent hair to enhance his dramatic, theatrical
aura. One of the first modern conductors to give up the use of the baton,
Stokowski employed graceful, almost hypnotic, hand gestures to work his
magic.
Indeed, Leopold Stokowski was the first conductor to become a true
superstar. He was regarded as something of a matinee idol, an image aided by
his appearances in such films as the Deanna Durbin spectacle One Hundred Men
and a Girl (1937) and, most famously, as the flesh-and-blood leader of the
Philadelphia Orchestra in Walt Disney's animated classic Fantasia (1940). In
one memorable instance, he appears to be talking to the cartoon figure of
Mickey Mouse, the "star" of a sequence featuring Dukas' The Sorcerer's
Apprentice. In a clever parody, when the slumbering apprentice dreams of
himself directing the forces of Nature with the masterful sweep of his
hands, Disney artists copied Stokowski's own conducting gestures.
Following his tenure in Philadelphia, Leopold Stokowski directed several
other ensembles, including the All-American Youth Orchestra (which he
founded), NBC Symphony Orchestra and New York Philharmonic (both as
co-conductor), Houston Symphony Orchestra (1955-1960), and American Symphony
Orchestra, which he organized in 1962. He continued to make concert
appearances and studio recordings of both standard works and unusual
repertoire (including the first performance and recording of Charles Ives'
decades-old Symphony No. 4) well into his nineties. He made his last public
appearance as conductor in Venice in 1975, remaining active in the recording
studio through 1977.