Word: reiterations
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...years ago, Richard Strauss wrote to his friend, Conductor Max Reiter in San Antonio, that he was dedicating his last years (he is now 84) to "straightening out my house," reworking old compositions that had never satisfied...
...mentioned his ballet The Legend of Joseph, which Impresario Sergei Diaghilev had first produced in Paris and London in 1914. Joseph meant something special to Max Reiter: as a young man he had played the celesta in the Berlin Opera orchestra while Strauss himself conducted it. Reiter demanded the honor of being the first to perform the new version when it was ready...
Last week, Strauss's new Joseph was ready, and Max Reiter's well-drilled San Antonio Symphony Orchestra was ready to play it. Composer Strauss had done more than strain off a potpourri of the original music; he had taken six or seven of his best themes, added some new material, then stirred and blended it all into a symphonic piece, in the tradition of his great Death and Transfiguration (1889). Said Conductor Reiter: "Strauss's music craft is as perfect as ever...
...friend told him that pianos sold faster in Texas than anywhere in the U.S. So chunky Max Reiter hopped a bus for Texas. He had run out of money by the time he hit Waco, Tex. (pop. 56,000), but he had a letter addressed to two sisters who ran a china shop. To them he pleaded: "Just one concert let me give." They helped dig up money and musicians. Four weeks later Max Reiter conducted his first U.S. performance, with a makeshift Waco Symphony. San Antonio heard about it and invited him to form an orchestra there...
Last week, kindly, bustling Max Reiter was back in Manhattan as guest conductor of the ABC Symphony Orchestra. In eight years in San Antonio, he had turned 40 homespun musicians into a smoothly functioning symphony of 78 pieces. Among the treasures in his new scrapbook: U.S. citizenship, a letter from the maestro he had once trembled before in Milan. Wrote Toscanini, after hearing a Reiter broadcast: "A fine performance, which is a thing that does not happen very often even with famous orchestras and widely publicized conductors...