In it Schurict is quoted as saying (allowing for translation), "Is there an ideal, exhaustive interpretation,which would thus of necessity be the only correct one and act as a canon ? in my opinion, no: because such an interpretation, once made general, would become purely automatic and end by being only a cliché." The opinions of Schuricht as recorded in the rest of the monograph hardly suggest a man on the verge of senility in 1956.
Dotage or willingness to experiment? When Gould or Cherkassky set down the same piece in a number of different ways it was taken to be the latter. If Schuricht was in his dotage in 1956, he seems to have been rejuvenated by 1957-9 when he set down a notable Beethoven cycle, not to speak of his memorable Bruckner at the beginning of the next decade. Perhaps Culshaw just didn't want to understand what the conductor was trying to do.
In "Putting the Record Straight" page 140, during Culshaw's first stint in Vienna, and at the same time as the quoted passage from "Ring Resounding", he refers to "The conductor Carl Schuricht, with whom I had worked some years earlier in Paris, was by now in his dotage and had eleven attempts at the first movement of Schubert's Unfinished Symphony, all of them in a different tempo."
June 1956, so it could not have been Stokowski.
Any clue regarding the date Culshaw was talking about ? I know that it was said that Stokowski didn't know where he was when he made his last recordings. Whether or not his confusion spread to the music he was recording is not clear.
On page 66, Culshaw refers to his misfortune in having to work with "a very elderly conductor who was on the verge of senility" and could not make up his mind about the tempo for the first movement of a symphony they were recording, employing eleven different tempi for eleven different sessions. Could anyone please enlighten me as to his identity?
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