RAPHAEL FLIEGEL
Professor Emeritus of Violin
Retired, Houston Symphony

Houston Symphony Orchestra Conversations
Reproduced by courtesy of The Barbirolli Society

Society member Gary Werdesheim has written to us with details of conversations which he had earlier this year with two musicians from the Houston Symphony Orchestra: David Wuliger, a retired timpanist who had been with the orchestra for four decades; and Ray Fliegel, a retired concertmaster (leader). Gary spoke with Mr. Wuliger in mid-March and with Mr. Fliegel at the end of June. Here is what they had to say.

Here are Mr Wuliger's recollections as related to Gary Werdesheim:

[DW] called Sir John "very inspiring" and said "Sir John and Lady Barbirolli were wonderful people". "He knew music and felt it so well; he was able to convey his feelings very well. Therefore, the orchestra responded even if he was occasionally difficult to follow. Sometimes he would get carried away and the beat would not be definite, but it made one more aware and everyone wanted to do well. The orchestra responded because of his total dedication to the music. They really wanted to play; with Barbirolli it was not just a job. There was no animosity as there usually is between players and conductor." Mr. Wuliger emphasised, "I don't want to stress anything negative (i.e. occasional absence of a definite beat) because I feel so much respect and warm feelings for Sir John. His ability to inspire was foremost. Barbirolli took a less than first rate orchestra and made it sound much better than it was - first rate. Everyone liked him. He was never nasty to the orchestra; always a gentleman but still very demanding - and people were glad to give him what he wanted because he was so totally wrapped up in the music. Nothing personal, but always just about making music."

[GW] This is very rare, and confirms the comment made by my teacher, Saul Goodman, timpanist of the N. Y. Phil, "The only time the Philharmonic played for the sheer joy of making music was when Barbirolli was our conductor."

[DW] Mr Wuliger told me of a trip to Chicago on tour with the orchestra. It seemed they needed a new tam-tam and so he arranged to have Sir John "audition" instruments at the factory of the world famous Ludwig Drum Go. He played and Barbirolli listened. "He selected a superb instrument." Then owner William F. Ludwig offered Barbirolli a cigar and they shook hands. They posed for Mr. Wuliger who sent me a copy of the picture.

[GW] It was Wuliger who suggested I contact Ray Fliegel who "has a much better memory." Mr. Fliegel has been associated with the Houston Symphony Orchestra for 59 years! After several attempts, I managed to interview him, and this time I recorded the conversation. What follows is more a conversation between two musicians than a formal interview, but I think it will be of interest. I began by recalling my observations of Sir John rehearsing the New York Philharmonic in 1968 and the fact that most of his comments were directed towards the strings. I also mentioned the great sound he drew from the orchestra.

Mr Fliegel responded: [RF] At the time that the Shepherd School of Music at Rice University was about to become a reality, the first dean, a man chosen to really be at the helm of everything that was to be done, was a composer/conductor by the name of Samuel Jones. He was quite a wonderful man, and the interesting thing was that I met him not only when I was concertmaster, but also part of a concertizing string quartet, and he asked me to come to lunch with him which I did. And he said, "I loved the sound of the strings with Barbirolli better than anything I've heard before in my life, and I want you here at the Shepherd School because you must be a part of it [that sound]." He was charging me with the responsibility to recreate this kind of sound, and so my life at Rice started because of Barbirolli more than anyone or anything else.

[GW] Another person I talked to said he was never personal, it was always about music.

[RF] Yes, but he was personal too, he really was. Certainly with me, and not just me. There was one time we had three members of the orchestra who had been buddies, having grown up together in Chicago. One of them, particularly, had a tendency to be snobbish - he was very competent, I must say - but he just had an annoying personality. On one occasion (there was something Barbirolli had been harbouring for some time, and that was very unusual for him), I don't know what it was, but he turned to them and said, "I know about you Chicago guys ....". Now, can you imagine that from him? "I know about you Chicago guys, and we're going to do something ... ". I don't remember what it was specifically, so I'm no help to you on that, but it was interesting that he had felt that these three people were an annoyance - and they were. They were an annoyance without being very loud about it. I never believed that he would get on them for being "Chicago" which he perceived as an attitude that they had that was negative to what he was trying to do. The cutest thing we ever saw, I thought, was when he would be antagonistic about whatever kind of "noise" the basses were making. He always wore these house shoes at rehearsal, and he would paddle back to the bass section and he would say, "You play this thing like a piece of furniture". Then he would get behind that bass, but he was so small, and the principal bass player's bass was so large, that all you could see was his arms round it. He was totally hidden by it. He would play some of the passage himself on the bass - just a couple of notes or something and of course the orchestra would applaud and shuffle. Then he would proudly prance back to the podium in the cutest way possible amidst the applause of the orchestra. But can you imagine him being hidden by this big thing with these little arms around from behind? It was that type of thing.

[GW] I remember him saying "Everybody has a different idea where the tip is."

[RF] (Chuckling) That's right. You know, on the negative side, he smoked those damn Players cigarettes, and he had this horrid cough. I think they really killed him. He would get in these coughing fits, and during a performance I actually saw him on more than one occasion take his handkerchief while he was conducting and stuff it into his mouth - the whole thing- to try to keep from coughing in a piano [soft] passage. Once while he was having a snack with a colleague of ours, I was there at the time, he had such a coughing fit that they had to call a physician and take him to hospital to help him out. Getting back to the winds, especially since Evelyn played oboe herself (she did a Strauss concerto with us in New York, and of course here she played chamber music with us several times), like all oboe players - most wind players - they're always saying the strings are too loud so that they have to play too hard. And the strings complain the winds are too loud - you know, the normal attitude. Barbirolli used to say "By Jove, I don't know what you're complaining about, that damn thing can be heard on Main Street" (We were about six blocks from there!) And he used to tell that to Evelyn. Of course he could really mouth off to her, and frequently. He slept very poorly, and he'd get up in the middle of the night. He told me "Nothing else to do, I read". You know he used to go to the library and take a whole bag of books back; mostly medical books. He said, "Nothing else to do, so when I'm tired of reading I wash socks, handkerchiefs. You know for entertainment to help the night hours go buy." Evelyn said that contrary to his constant argument that he couldn't sleep at all, occasionally he would be asleep in a chair and in her concern she would get some sort of a comforter or shawl to put over him. Once as she covered him he roused a little bit and she said "John don't you think you ought to come to bed?" He said, "Woman I am in bed, can't you see me covers!" He made one hard statement once which I don't think I can recall verbatim. We were rehearsing the Beethoven ninth symphony, and there are these places in the last movement where there are rather abrupt tempo changes. It was really his fault we were not making these changes very nicely, just not turning those corners very well, so to speak. He said something to the effect that, "You are all so taken by the fact that you are playing the Beethoven ninth symphony, the greatest piece of music ever written. You've got it in your mind that way and you approach it with such trepidation ..". Some words of that kind, I don't recall exactly what he said. Then he said, "Granted, there are some of the most sublime moments in this piece, but there are a few places ... I threw away a few exercises that were better than that." How do you like that!

[GW] Do you think he was one of the great conductors?

[RF] I'll describe his greatness in this way. I would think that if John Barbirolli looked at a score of a Viennese waltz - and he had never heard a Viennese waltz - I think he would have seen what to do with it. He would have made something special that would be characteristic of a Viennese waltz as we know it today - assuming he'd never heard one. So it was with many pieces. Though he played a lot of English music for obvious reasons, I felt that he was not confined. He was into Mahler as much as Mahler himself. He adored the music, he knew all the language in there and insisted it be written into the musicians' parts in English so they would know it. So, musically he was - what do you call it - a renaissance man?.

[GW] So you think he had tremendous instincts and intuition.

[RF] His instincts were enormous, really enormous. He felt well Hungarian music, German music, he loved La Mer - we played it at the drop of a hat.

[GW] What about Sibelius?

[RF] Oh, my goodness, he was so dedicated to every morsel of Sibelius. And certainly Brahms. So, I can't think back and say "Well he was good at everything except ...." I can't say that. He was inspiring with any music. And if you had to play something by Britten, Elgar and my goodness I feel as though the [Enigma] Variations were written for him because of his feeling for it. So much so that some years after he was gone [from Houston], Lawrence Foster came and on the program was the Enigma Variations. It was while Foster was here that we learned of Barbirolli's passing. Foster never rehearsed Nimrod, we just played it at the performance. He told me he didn't think he could have stood the bath of tears that would have happened had he rehearsed it. So that's the way it was with Barbirolli.

[GW] Everyone seemed to like him.

[RF] His language to them. Well he was just cute, and we loved his silly little ways. Like when we'd finished the last note of a concerto, for instance, and he would circumscribe a little circle with his baton and then throw it on the podium and stalk off so cute. Everything he did was cute, you know. The music was great. He wasn't being cute with the music. There are a couple of solo [violin] passages in La Mer, and I had a good little bowing that ended up with a kind of a gesture in which the bow turned a little bit in the direction of the fingerboard and even the sound went off towards the fingerboard. He loved me doing that, and when I would do that during the performance he looked like a ballet dancer pointing to me.

[GW] He liked portamento [sliding from one note to another] didn't he?

[RF] That was one of the things that he got so mad at people about. In today's terminology he would have called them "square", but he had other terms for it, and you paraphrased what he meant. He had some wonderful expressions for it - why they wouldn't make a glissando [slide].

[GW] I once heard him complain about not being able to get some player to slide and he said he told them "I will pay for any damage it does to your instrument."

[RF] That's great. There were things like that; I just can't remember.

[GW] Did you play any concertos with Barbirolli?

[RF] Yes I did. I played two or three concertos, plus we tried to do things like Haydn's Sinfonia Concertante, the things the visiting artists don't play. I did the Bach Double with the oboe with his wife, the Vivaldi four violin concerto, that sort of thing.

[GW] My teacher, Saul Goodman, once said the only time the New York Philharmonic played for the sheer joy of making music - no politics, no other agendas - was when Barbirolli was the conductor.

[RF] I believe that with all my heart. We made a West Coast tour that was as successful as a tour is expected to be with a little better than a regional orchestra - and our orchestra really is fine. On the way back he wrote me a letter as if he were a general or an admiral and addressed to me as if I were under his command. In a military style he commended me for my participation in the "battle" of the West Coast tour with him. Things like that, lovely little things from him. Nowadays, some incident in everyday life will happen at which there will be a sudden recollection of some beautiful thing about Barbirolli. He apparently had a great deal of affection for me. When he left he gave me a little gold 'cello that was given to him when he left the [New York] Philharmonic. On the back it says "In honour of John Barbirolli" and the date on which he left. I carry it in my violin case. We had Stokowski for five years before Barbirolli. Our manager pulled off a real coup in getting Barbirolli right after Stokowski. It was a coup, and it was a magnificent time. When he came to Houston it was like royalty really did come here. He carried it off so well in every way, so everyone loved him - the guy who parked the car, people in the Society, the critic they all had this same kind of love, this air that went on about him. What a blessing to have had him around.

[GW] Postscript: My conversation with Dave Wuliger took place in mid-March just before I was to conduct Wagner's Siegfried Idyll on a faculty program at Florida State University. At the time I was so wrapped up in the multitude of non-musical details with which I had to deal that I was definitely loosing sight of the music and the satisfaction one hopes to realize when performing a masterpiece. Mr Wulliger's words about Sir John so inspired me that I was able to go into the rehearsals and performance refreshed and refocused only on the music. I also want to stress how rare it is to hear orchestral musicians wanting to emphasize only the positive characteristics of their conductor, and expressing such obviously genuine affection for him. While my own career has been devoted mainly to teaching, I began as an orchestral musician and was very fortunate in that my relatively brief (about 8 years) playing career brought me into contact with some of the world's foremost orchestras (San Francisco, New York, New Jersey, Stockholm) and conductors (Bernstein, Bohm, Boulez, Dorati, Kempe, Krips, Ozawa, Rhodzdestvensky, Susskind). So I can state from my own experience just how unique it is for musicians to speak so well and lovingly of their conductor. In the case of Misters Wuliger and Fliegel even the negative aspects are spoken of with affection and devoid of malice. This bespeaks of Sir John's enduring legacy of loving affection and respect amongst his musicians.