(The best of the Pops' beloved Beatles renditions, includi...)
The best of the Pops' beloved Beatles renditions, including Yesterday; Eleanor Rigby; I Want to Hold Your Hand (1964 and 1969 versions); And I Love Her (live 1965 version and the 1969 version); A Hard Day's Night (live 1965 version and the 1969 version) , and more-all newly remastered with a commentary track by Arthur Fiedler!
(1. A Time For Us (Theme fron :Romeo and Juliet"), 2. Anto...)
1. A Time For Us (Theme fron :Romeo and Juliet"), 2. Antony & Cleopatra Theme, 3. Theme from "Valley of the Dolls", 4. High Noon (Do Not Forsake Me", 6. Charade, 7. Love is a Many-Splendored Thing, 8. Gigi, 9. Jealous Lover (Theme from "The Apartment), 10. Theme from "Lawrence of Arabia, 11. Midnight Cowboy, 12. Theme from "Moulin Rouge"(Where is Your Heart), 13. When You Wish Upon a Star, 14. Evergreen (Love Theme from "A Star is Born"), 15. Days of Wine and Roses, 16. The Way We Were, 17. Love Theme from "The Godfather", 18. The Entertainer (Theme from "The Sting"). 19. Theme from "Jaws"
Arthur Fiedler was a long-time conductor of the Boston Pops Orchestra, a symphony orchestra that specializes in popular and light classical music.
Background
He was born in Boston, Massachussets, the son of Emanuel Fiedler and Johanna Bernfeld. His Austrian-born father was a violinist with the Boston Symphony Orchestra for twenty-five years. Although his grandfather and great-grandfather had also played the violin in Austria and young Arthur studied violin and piano, he had no immediate desire to become a musician.
His mother was an accomplished amateur pianist and three sisters also studied music; two of them, Else and Rosa, went on to have professional careers.
Education
He attended neighborhood elementary schools and the Boston Latin High School, where he played the drum in a marching band called the Cadets.
A year later, the family moved to Berlin, and about this time Arthur announced that he was not going on to a university.
He spent the summer of 1911 preparing for his audition at the Berlin Royal Academy of Music.
It also helped that he was Emanuel Fiedler's son and Willy Hess's pupil.
Career
As a boy, he studied with the distinguished pianist Carl Lamson even though he hated to practice. He would often look out Lamson's window at the patrol wagons pulling up to the police station next door. He would visit the neighborhood firehouse to play with the dalmatians and slide down the pole. These were the beginnings of Fiedler's lifelong fascination with police and fire departments. He eventually became an honorary fire chief in more than 250 cities.
He tuned his car radio to police and fire frequencies and would often appear at large fires.
In 1910, after twenty-five years with the Boston Symphony, Emanuel Fiedler settled his family in Vienna. A year later, the family moved to Berlin, and about this time Arthur announced that he was not going on to a university.
After a few menial jobs, he took his father's suggestion that he try music. He spent the summer of 1911 preparing for his audition at the Berlin Royal Academy of Music. It had thirteen openings; he placed thirteenth.
He studied violin with Willy Hess, former concertmaster of the Boston Symphony; conducting with Arno Kleffel, formerly of the Cologne Opera House; and chamber music with pianistcomposer Ern" Dohn nyi. Many years later, with the composer in the audience, he conducted Dohn nyi's Variations on a Nursery Song in honor of his old teacher.
At eighteen, Fiedler moved out of his father's house to assert his independence. To support himself, he played violin in cafes, toured with orchestras in the summer, and played in theater pit orchestras. It was his introduction to the kind of orchestral popular music he would later bring to the Boston Pops.
The next year, he received an offer to serve as fourth assistant conductor of a small German opera house. Fiedler realized he would have to remain in Germany and work his way up if he was to have a successful career in conducting.
The outbreak of World War I soon changed his plans. Because he was a dual citizen of Austria and the United States, Fiedler was eligible for the Austrian draft.
In 1915 he fled back to Boston, believing he was leaving his future behind him. He spent the summer playing violin for room and board on Nantucket Island until the Boston Symphony offered him a job playing second violin.
He had learned how to support himself through lean times, and he had learned the hard work of professional preparation. It also helped that he was Emanuel Fiedler's son and Willy Hess's pupil.
Always restless and insistently independent, he switched from violin to viola because he thought it would be more interesting. In 1918 he was drafted into the United States Army, but after two weeks a doctor discharged him for flat feet. When he returned to the Boston Symphony, he played viola and doubled on violin, piano, organ, celesta, and percussion so often that he became known as the orchestra's "floating kidney. "
During the early 1920's he conducted an intense affair with Jeanne Eagels, a vivacious blonde actress best known for creating the role of Sadie Thompson in the stage adaptation of W. Somerset Maugham's short story, Rain (1922).
Fiedler found an outlet for his restlessness in 1924 when he formed a small orchestral group, the Boston Sinfonietta. Its first program on October 30, 1925, combined light music with classical. For the next forty years, Fiedler used the Sinfonietta as his recording outlet for conducting "serious" music.
In 1926 he conducted the Boston Pops for the first time when conductor Agide Jacchia suddenly resigned his position just before the final concert of the season. Fiedler eventually became so closely associated with the Pops that many people believed he founded it, but it had actually been formed in 1885, four years after the founding of its parent orchestra, the Boston Symphony.
Each spring, after completing its winter season, the orchestra, calling itself the Boston Pops, played a ten-week series of light classics modeled on England's famous Promenade Concerts. Although Fiedler applied to fill the vacant position immediately after conducting in Jacchia's place, the board of directors hired Alfredo Casella.
The Italian conductor was unsympathetic to the Pops' repertoire and withdrew after three years.
In 1927, Fiedler had begun to think seriously about presenting great music to the public outdoors at no cost. Widely known and well liked by Boston society, he raised the necessary money for a series of Pops concerts in the Esplanade, a park along the Charles River.
His program for the first concert, on July 4, 1929, included works by Antonin Dvorjuk, Giuseppe Verdi, and Richard Wagner, as well as Sigmund Romberg and Victor Herbert. Fiedler began the evening with John Philip Sousa's "Stars and Stripes Forever, " the march that eventually became the Pops' signature piece.
The first season of six outdoor concerts drew more than 208, 000 people.
In late January 1930 the directors finally offered the thirty-five-year-old Fiedler the directorship of the Pops Orchestra, which he held for the next half-century. Although Casella had diminished the Pops' appeal, Fiedler soon demonstrated his gifts for programming and showmanship.
He conducted palatable doses of classical music by such masters as Wagner, Mozart, and Beethoven, but he was also astutely aware of his audience's tastes.
He began to introduce new works by such American composers as George Gershwin and Leroy Anderson, suites based on Broadway scores, and symphonic arrangements of songs associated with such popular performers as Frank Sinatra and the Beatles.
Eventually Fiedler and the Boston Pops would sell an estimated fifty million recordings.
During the Great Depression, Fiedler worked with the National Youth Administration Music Project to help form the national All-American Young People's Orchestra, and during World War II, he gave hundreds of concerts for USOs, veterans' hospitals, and army and navy bases.
Although he had the first of five heart attacks in 1939, he enlisted in the United States Coast Guard as an apprentice seaman in 1943.
After four months, he had a second and more serious coronary and left active duty to return to the Pops after his convalescence. Over the ensuing years, Fiedler conducted the Boston Pops on national tours, on hundreds of recordings, and on radio and a television program called "Evening at Pops. " Eventually, he formed a Boston Pops Touring Orchestra to augment the Boston Pops home orchestra, and he appeared with nearly every major and minor symphony orchestra in America.
His celebrity grew even greater when he conducted the Boston Pops on the Esplanade for the Bicentennial celebration on July 4, 1976, before an estimated audience of 400, 000. The televised program of Fiedler conducting "Stars and Stripes Forever" while young people clapped along and waved American flags is one of the more vivid images of the yearlong Bicentennial celebration.
Even in 1956, during his twenty-fifth anniversary season, the Boston Symphony did not invite him to conduct. Serge Koussevitzky, musical director of the Boston Symphony from 1924 to 1949, had invited him to conduct in 1944 but suddenly withdrew the invitation in a fit of pique. It was a slight Fiedler remembered all his life.
In May 1979 he returned from treatment for an unspecified brain disorder to conduct the Pops in a triumphant concert in honor of his fifty years with the Boston Pops. He retired at the end of the season and died two months later of cardiac arrest at his home in Brookline, Massachussets.
Although his family was Jewish, his parents were not observant. Fiedler, who never entered a synagogue as a boy, later observed, "Music was the only religion in our family. "
Views
He brought pleasure to millions of people and referred to those conductors who looked down on his music as "musical snobs" and "culture vultures. " He also wondered from time to time, however, if he should have strived to become a major conductor of serious music. Many critics disapproved of his programs and his shenanigans on the podium, but one longtime associate observed, "Arthur can step up there and make an ordinary orchestra sound good, a good orchestra approach greatness, and a great orchestra--well, the regular conductor might be hesitant at inviting him back. "
Quotations:
He once said, "I've never left a concert for a fire, but I have left fires to go to a concert. "
In later life, Fiedler told an interviewer, "Something is driving me. . I just can't sit and twiddle my thumbs. "
Personality
Although he was genial and irreverent and usually well liked by his musicians, Fiedler could be acerbic and demanding. He would not be bound by anyone or anything that threatened to curtail his independence or authority. At the same time, despite his great success and his enormous popularity, Fiedler was often of two minds about his own career.
Quotes from others about the person
In an appreciation accompanying Fiedler's obituary in the New York Times, John Rockwell called Fiedler "a genial, extroverted and vigorous exponent of populism in the realm of classical music" who provided "direct, efficient, no-nonsense conducting. "
Connections
Fiedler courted Ellen Bottomley for nearly ten years, beginning in 1932, when she was eighteen and he was thirty-seven. They often met in secret because of the opposition of her Catholic family. They married on Jan. 8, 1942, and had three children.