William H. Harrison

by Peter Cates

William Henry Harrison

Former President #9, William Henry Harrison (1773-1841) achieved renown as an army captain in command at Fort Washington, Ohio, when he was in his 20s; as a governor in the Indiana Territory during the early 1800s; and being promoted to Major General after defeating the Indians in a battle at Tippecanoe which was a Wabash River settlement in Indiana (Hence his nickname: 1840 presidential campaign slogan with vice-presidential running mate John Tyler – “Tippecanoe and Tyler, too.”) – and his success in a number of other War of 1812 battles, including the defeat of the formidable Indian Chief Tecumseh.

After resigning from the military in 1814, Harrison served in the Ohio state senate, as Congressional representative from the Buckeye state and finally U.S. Senator.

Anna Harrison

Harrison’s wife Anna Symmes Harrison (1775-1864) was born in New Jersey; her father was then serving in the American army. When her mother died, her father returned home, disguised himself as a Brtish officer and took his year-old daughter through enemy lines to live with her maternal grandparents on Long Island for the duration of the Revolutionary War.

After the war ended, her father had become a judge on the New Jersey Supreme Court, and then moved to Ohio where he accumulated 100,000 acres of land while Anna attended private schools on Long Island and in New York City.

Judge Symmes came east to remarry and took Anna, her stepmother and other settlers back to Ohio to live on his acreage. Shortly after arriving, Anna met her future husband who in­stantly fell in love with her but Papa considered Captain Harrison a poor prospect due to his low salary and refused his consent.

Anna was undeterred and, when her father was away, the couple married on November 22, 1795, exactly 168 years before tragedy struck a later president, in Dallas, Texas. By 1804, the couple was living in the Indiana Territory in a spacious log house which she and her husband built themselves, not long after he became governor.

The couple gave hospitality to many passing through, especially preachers, and spearheaded the building of schools, churches and libraries throughout the Territory.

When her husband won the White House, other family members traveled east with him but she was too ill at that point. D.C. was quite chilly while the inaugural festivities were going on, the president participating fully and throwing all caution aside. His March 4 inauguration speech clocked in at 75 minutes as he delivered it without any winter coat and hat.

The following day, already developing a cold, the president went shopping for groceries at an outdoor market and the cold worsened into pneumonia within a couple of days. He died a month later at the age of 68 and, on his deathbed, reciting one of the Psalms from memory.

Meanwhile Anna had recovered from her own illness back home in Ohio and had finished packing for the move when she received word of her husband’s death.

Congress gave her a $25,000 pension, which was the equivalent of the presidential annual salary and which would be granted to future presidential widows for several years.

She outlived her husband by 23 years, and nine of their ten children. Three of her grandsons, including the 22nd president Benjamin Harrison (1833-1901, who served from 1889 to 1893), fought on the Union side during the Civil War, a commitment she took much pride in even though she abhorred war as a general principle.

Martin Van Buren

by Peter Cates

Martin Van Buren

When I was in third grade, an aunt gave me a calendar with paintings and photos of all the presidents from George Washington to Dwight D. Eisenhower. I remember being fascinated by these names and faces: Washington’s implacable dignity, John Adams’ cherubic candor, Jefferson’s humane inscrutability, etc.

Martin Van Buren (1782-1862) with his bald head and wavy hair similar to that of the Three Stooges Larry Fine, had a good-natured congeniality and aura of approachability.

Reading up on his career in New York state politics and his subsequent rise to national clout, I now see how the term used to describe him, “sly fox”, was an apt one.

A few examples:

Van Buren was sympathetic to the farmers but also allied himself with the insidious Tammany Hall party machine which would influence so much of what went on in New York.

He supported state Governor Dewitt Clinton’s spearheading of the building of the Erie Canal but then threw his weight behind Clinton’s opponent in a re-election campaign.

He believed in the expansion of voting rights but opposed universal suffrage.

He opposed the annexation of Texas as a slave state but was otherwise silent, seeing the abolition of slavery as a threat to national unity (in 1848, he would speak out against slavery as the chosen candidate for the short-lived Free Soil party, a coalition of anti-slavery Democrats, Whigs and abolitionists.).

His skills as a mediator and good listener were highly conducive to building some bridges between political foes, as was his occasional support of policies anathema to his allies.

Van Buren’s wife Hannah died at 35 of tuberculosis in 1819. In 1838, their son Abraham married Angelica Singleton (1818-1877), a second cousin of former First Lady Dolly Madison who finagled the match. During the remaining two years of Van Buren’s presidency, she served as her father-in-law’s hostess with consummate elegance.

Van Buren outlived presidents Harrison, Tyler, Polk and Taylor and witnessed the election of the 16th president, Abraham Lincoln. Being born to Dutch-speaking parents, Van Buren learned English as a second language.

Robert Wagner

by Peter Cates

A Kiss Before Dying

Recently I viewed a 1956 film noir, A Kiss Before Dying, starring Robert Wagner and Joanne Woodward, both still living at 92; Virginia Leith (1925-2019) and Jeffrey Hunter (1925-1969).

From the visual perspective, it was a very good United Artists technicolor experience. The wide shots of the college campus, the small city downtown and the magnificent desert cliffs of the four corners horseback riding trails of New Mexico, Colorado, Utah and Arizona were skillfully done.

The movie was based on a 1953 novel of the same name by Ira Levin (1929-2007) whose Rosemary’s Baby and Stepford Wives were also transformed into successful films.

The plot concerns a college student, Bud Corliss (Wagner), who is pursuing a gold-digging courtship of a wealthy heiress, Dorey (Woodward), and she becomes pregnant. She is also madly in love with Corliss and desires marriage even if her father were to disown her, but a lack of reciprocation leads Corliss to planning a murder.

He forges her signature and mails a suicide note to Dorey’s father. Then, under pretense of taking her to the City Hall marriage bureau on the 12th floor (knowing that that office is closed during lunch hour), he suggests that the two of them, while waiting for the office to re-open, walk up to the rooftop balcony to enjoy the view, upon which he pushes her off the roof.

For “lack of any real evidence” – admittedly a point which stretches credulity, the murder is ruled a suicide by the authorities.

A few months elapse during which Corliss worms his way into the affection of Dorey’s sister Ellen (Leith) without her at first knowing of his connection with Dorey, but the plot thickens and I will leave off here.

I have generally found Robert Wagner’s acting to be overrated and his portrayal of Corliss does little to change my mind. The gifted Joanne Woodward considered Dorey her worst role but I found it a convincing, sympathetic depiction.

Virginia Leith

Virginia Leith was also very good at conveying charisma in sister Ellen’s personality, while Jeffrey Hunter as a tutor at the college who was working with Dorey, Mary Astor (1906-1987) as Bud’s mother and George Macready (1899-1973) as Dorey and Ellen’s father all did very good work.

Hunter was superb as John Wayne’s co-star in the 1956 John Ford classic The Searchers and the 1960 Hell to Eternity in which he portrayed the World War II Marine soldier Guy Gabaldon (1926-2006) who talked over 1,300 Japanese soldiers and civilians into surrendering during key battles in two of the Pacific Islands.

Mary Astor’s most famous role may have been as the murderess in Humphrey Bogart’s 1941 The Maltese Falcon.

Macready frequently portrayed either polished villains or temperamental men of wealth.

Berlin-born Director Gerd Oswald (1919-1989 and, as far as I know, no relation to John F. Kennedy’s assassin) did generally good work, except for the bland Wagner, and was most renowned for episodes of such TV shows as Perry Mason, The Outer Limits, Bonanza, The Fugitive and Gentle Ben.

Marcelle Meyer

by Peter Cates

Marcelle Meyer

Pianist Marcelle Meyer (1897-1958) was one of a superbly gifted group of pianists born between 1880 and the beginning of World War I, among whom other personal favorites include Artur Schnabel, Artur Rubinstein, Wilhelm Backhaus, Wilhelm Kempff, Edwin Fischer, Eduard Erdmann, Robert and Gaby Casadesus, Walter Gieseking, Rudolf Serkin, Shura Cherkassky, Oscar Levant, Dame Myra Hess, Sir Clifford Curzon, Sviatoslav Richter, Clara Haskil, Monique Haas, Claudio Arrau, Wanda Landowska, Friedrich Wuehrer, Cutner Solomon, Vladimir Horowitz, Cyril Smith.

The reason for this shopping list is to provide names of keyboard artists whose recordings can be found on Youtube so that the hopefully curious can indulge themselves and lead others, thus increasing the market for classical music which has shrunk to even lower levels (down from roughly 30 percent in previous decades to two per cent in this age of attention deficit disorder ignorance).

Born in France, Meyer started lessons at the age of five with her older sister Germaine and entered the Paris Conservatory at the age of 11 for further studies with the legendary pianists Alfred Cortot and Marguerite Long.

She drew the attention of composers Maurice Ravel, Igor Stravinsky and Claude Debussy, who coached her in the interpretation of his Preludes just before he died in 1918.

Meyer championed the works of several other 20th century composers both in France and elsewhere in Europe.

But her finest legacy might lie in her revival of interest in a handful of baroque and 18th century composers such as Bach, Scarlatti, Couperin, Rameau, Haydn and Mozart when she began recording their music during the 1940s.

I have been recently listening to a 17 CD set of Marcelle Meyer, Complete Studio Recordings 1925-1957 (Documents 600209) which can be bought inexpensively from online vendors. It features her playing of the above mentioned composers along with Emannuel Chabrier, Rossini, Schubert, Spanish composers Oscar Espla, Isaac Albeniz and Manuel de Falla, Richard Strauss, Darius Milhaud, and Francis Poulenc.

She played with the most extraordinary emotional warmth, delicacy and inspired one on one connection with the listener. Some of her most beautiful playing was found in the records of Bach, Scarlatti and Rameau where an undercurrent of melodic line was conveyed which eluded other pianists.

On November 17, 1958, Marcelle Meyer died suddenly, at the much too young age of 61, of a heart attack while playing piano at her sister Germaine’s apartment.

Youtube contains a 1956 broadcast of her phenomenal rendition of Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto with the underrated Volkmar Andrae conducting the Suisse Romande Orchestra in Geneva, Switzerland.

Bruno Walter, left. George Szell, right.

by Peter Cates

Back during eighth grade in 1964, I was hungrily eager to hear every record of classical music that I could beg, borrow, buy, barter for; and one neighbor was kind enough to loan the Arturo Toscanini/NBC Symphony RCA Victor Red Seal LP of Beethoven’s 5th and 8th symphonies, that I auditioned on another neighbor’s hi-fi which was quite superior in sound to the $32 manually operated phonograph I owned.

I was already quite familiar with the 5th Symphony via an old Columbia Masterworks set of five 12-inch 78s, conducted by Bruno Walter (1876-1962) with the New York Philharmonic.

I remember the black and white photo of Walter raising his arms in the air and conveying, in his stern eyes, that he meant business; Leonard Bernstein called him one of the great saints of music with a sweet gentle spirit and wearing silk gloves but beneath those silk gloves was an iron fist and a sneaky snakiness in Walter’s ability to look out for number one.

But Walter was a truly great conductor on the same level as his close friend Toscanini (1867-1957) and his recording of the 5th had a combination of dramatic power and nicely contrasting poetry while Toscanini’s performance had the excitingly riveting volatility of a sledgehammer.

Back to my first encounter with the 8th Symphony. Toscanini and his players tore into the first movement and fully communicated its growling jubilation, Beethoven being a 100 percent manic depressive.

This symphony had its first performance in 1812 in Linz, Austria, where the composer was visiting his brother Johann, enjoying his hospitality and, at the same time, trying to break up a relationship Johann was having with a woman whom Beethoven considered a lowlife. The situation and how it was resolved makes for hilarious reading.

The second movement is a perky dance with the bassoon taking center stage with its staccato notes.

The third movement is labeled as a Menuet but its beauty is a passionate outpouring of the heart, as opposed to a graceful elegant dance, with some very eloquent, almost heavenly writing for the strings.

The final movement is a vivacious highly spirited romp for the entire orchestra.

A similarly exciting performance of the 8th was an early 1960s one conducted by the arch perfectionist, SOB, taskmaster George Szell (1897-1970) with the Cleveland Orchestra while another one from 1957 with Andre Cluytens (1905-1967) conducting the Berlin Philharmonic has a more relaxed sedate quality that works beautifully, this Maestro being one who was quite underrated during his own lifetime.

While the 7th Symphony is a colossal masterpiece with the much shorter 8th seeming to a number of listeners anticlimactic, Beethoven himself considered the 8th immensely superior to the 7th.