Misfit Hound-Dog and Splendid Philadelphians

by Ann Zagoreos, Guest Contributor & Former Sembrich Board Member

Late last winter when I first heard of plans for this rare evening with prominently featured horns outdoors, my mind went right to my late beagle/bassett hound FLASH, and I wondered aloud to Richard Wargo whether any dogs nearby might come running toward the hunting calls? Richard remembered FLASH fondly because once I’d brought him to the lake for a few days with no live music planned.

At home, my darling hound dog didn’t carry on in the open air at all, since we lived next-door to an enormous Rottweiler I’d never seen on a leash. But without the sore constraint imparted by a neighborly beast, it would have been much too risky for FLASH to get close to any kind of music-making.

His problem wasn’t with music per se, it was with musicians whose attention was all on the opus at hand and not at all on him. He also adored the sound of his own voice, needless to say, and his “vocalizing” could shut down almost anything. Indoors, he discovered that the most reverberant potential was to be found from the top of a flight of stairs where he could howl into the entire stair-well!

There is peril in a narrative that’s predicated on a dog, because this very creature may start devouring the writer’s “homework” from the get-go, and then make off with all of it before he gets caught!

But FLASH has now been apprehended and detained for his misdeeds, and I can attend to other matters.

Shortly before the silent days began here, we had embarked on a translation project to put the only full and published Sembrich biography into English from the Polish text of Malgorzata Komorowska, a theater historian at the Chopin Academy in Warsaw (now retired), and a visitor to Bolton Landing, from time to time!

Quite serendipitously, as the translator’s work was getting underway (also in Warsaw), I was given Paul Krzywicki’s Book, From Paderewski to Penderecki: The Polish Musician in Philadelphia (2016).

Mr. Krzywicki is now retired from The Philadelphia Orchestra, where he played Principal Tuba for many years, but he remains a member of the Curtis faculty, and his book has been invaluable as I try to keep my bearings in the chapters of a sprawling treatment which concern Marcella Sembrich’s life and work in the United States, and her associates here as well.

Paul Krzywicki writes so beautifully that I’m a little grateful when a seeming surfeit of newly translated material sends me back to his book, for clarity and context. Thank you sir!

As of late July, we were nearly half-way through the major element of a Sembrich endeavor we hope to continue, by making much of this “new” information, along with some fresh insights, available to Anglophone readers and scholars.

FLASH has been so uncommonly patient that I’ve posted his bail, and he’ll be back on the street again (ready or not).

His name always troubled me, and I began worrying that it had been given him out of snarky irony. He must have been a chunky puppy, with legs that would never be long enough to gin up velocity, so he wasn’t speedy. And he wasn’t very bright either, unless filling a house with howling from some stairs is deemed to be “inspired.”

But for good or ill, the voice really was remarkable. FLASH had been a shelter dog with a sorrowful backstory, and I thought giving him a new home that was congruent with his strength might help him break from his history and garner some respect. (Such a portamento he would execute each time he drew his head back and stretched out his throat to form his signature “vocalise!”)

I wanted him to have a name with gravitas, but also some lyric exhuberance. So I sorted through a few possibilities, and this is how it went:

“Siegfried, sit.”

(no reaction)

“Siegfried! Sit and Stay!”

That “Heldenhund” just stared at me for many beats too long, and then he walked away.

At least the humiliation left me eager to let FLASH be FLASH for the rest of his days, and since he instigated the whole thing, the musicians surely get the final word!

Last summer, I wrote for an anniversary of Carlo Maria Giulini’s passing, but I also include him in here because not only did Maestro Nézet-Séguin study with him, Giulini was a great guest conductor of The Philadelphia Orchestra in 1969 and early to mid-1970s (before becoming Music Director in LA in 1978).

Through the Orchestra’s proximity in August and all this brings, the indispensable book by Paul Krzywicki, and the memory of Giulini, it makes me very happy to feel a sort of connection to Philadelphians-all.

Finally, a huge “Hooray!” for the deal with the Kimmel Center. It must be a great relief, after many anxieties and challenging times, that now it will be possible to consider the future with an optimism which is this well-founded.

The End