Word: pianists
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...given by the Daughters of the American Revolution. In 1939 Mrs. Roosevelt had quit the D.A.R. because it refused to let Negro Contralto Marian Anderson sing in the Society's Constitution Hall; now the D.A.R. was embroiled in a similar controversy with publicity-seeking Negro Pianist Hazel Scott. But the girls tactfully asked no questions about Mrs. Truman's racial opinions...
...months later Pianist Alfred Cortot visited Berlin, shortly thereafter left his job as professor of the Ecole Normale de Musique in Paris to become Vichy's secretary for music. He signed an order banning Jews from all orchestras in France. Madame Lubin is now in a collaborators' concentration camp near Bordeaux; Lifar and Cortot are under house arrest...
...conducting German orchestras, is living alone near St. Moritz rather than return to face the music. At Lake Geneva gray-haired Wilhelm Furtwängler, conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic and Göring-appointed Nazi Staatsrat of Prussia, is writing a symphony. In Wiesbaden, bald Pianist Walter Gieseking played twice for U.S. Army audiences before someone got wind of his wartime collaboration. He was promptly forbidden to make another appearance...
...down-at-heel bistro on the French Riviera one night in August 1944, a pianist lazily fingered a nostalgic ballad from a crudely cleffed manuscript. Some G.I.s at the bar asked to hear it again. The musician played it once more, and then told its history. A Jewish friend of his in Nice, hunted by the Gestapo, had written it three years before, had left it with a publisher, then fled to the Alpes-Maritimes to join a band of the Maquis. Its title reflected its composer's despair: C'est Fini (It Is Finished...
...movies' master pianist, Jose Iturbi, contributes several fine plane solos and some good comedy, while Kathryn Grayson proves an attractive heroine. When the music stops, the film is devoted to skillful comedy that is both waggish and whimsical. It's the type of comedy that even Fred Allen fans would...