Leopold Stokowski - Personal Life

Personal Life

Stokowski married three times. His first wife was the American concert pianist Olga Samaroff (born Lucie Hickenlooper), to whom he was married from 1911 until 1923. They had one daughter: Sonya Stokowski, an actress, who married Willem Thorbecke and settled in the U.S. with their four children, Noel, Johan, Leif and Christine. His second wife was Johnson & Johnson heiress Evangeline Love Brewster Johnson, an artist and aviatrix, to whom he was married from 1926 until 1937 (two daughters: Gloria Luba Stokowski and Andrea Sadja Stokowski). His third wife, from 1945 until 1955, was railroad heiress Gloria Vanderbilt (born 1924), an artist and fashion designer (two sons, Leopold Stanislaus Stokowski, b. 1950, and Christopher Stokowski, b. 1952). He also had a much-publicized affair, or close friendship, with Greta Garbo during the 1930s.

After he had achieved international fame with the Philadelphia Orchestra, unsubstantiated rumours circulated that he was born "Leonard" or "Lionel Stokes" or that he had "anglicized" it to "Stokes"; this canard is readily disproved by reference not only to his birth certificate and those of his father, younger brother, and sister (which show Stokowski to have been the genuine polonised Lithuanian family name, original 'Stokauskas' where 'stoka' means 'lack or shortage'), but also by the Student Entry Registers of the Royal College of Music, Royal College of Organists, and The Queen's College, Oxford, along with other surviving documentation from his days at St. Marylebone Church, St. James's Church, and St. Bartholomew's in New York City. Upon his arrival in America, however, he briefly spelled his name as Stokovski to ensure that people could pronounce it correctly.

After Stokowski's death, Tom Burnam writes, the "concatenization of canards" that had arisen around him was revived—that his name and accent were phony; that his musical education was deficient; that his musicians did not respect him; that he cared about nobody but himself. Burnam suggests that there was a dark, hidden reason for these rumors. Stokowski deplored the segregation of symphony orchestras in which women and minorities were excluded, and, so Burnam claims, the bigots got revenge by slandering Stokowski.

Nevertheless, and notwithstanding the claims made by Tom Burnam, attitudes towards Stokowski have changed dramatically over the years since his death. In 1999, for Gramophone magazine, and quoted again in his notes for the Cala CD of Stokowski's recording of Elgar's Enigma Variations, David Mellor wrote: "One of the great joys of recent years for me has been the reassessment of Leopold Stokowski. When I was growing up there was a tendency to disparage the old man as a charlatan. Today it is all very different. Stokowski is now recognised as the father of modern orchestral standards. He possessed a truly magical gift of extracting a burnished sound from both great and second-rank ensembles. He also loved the process of recording and his gramophone career was a constant quest for better recorded sound. But the greatest pleasure of all for me is his acceptance now as an outstanding conductor of nineteenth- and twentieth-century music, including a lot that was at the cutting edge of contemporary achievement."

Mellor's words have been echoed by many other modern writers, such as Robert Matthew-Walker of International Record Review, whose comments fairly represent the opinions of many critics today: "That Stokowski was a great musician is beyond doubt; that he was a great conductor is self-evident; that he always placed himself at the service of the music may be more contentious to some ears, but in keeping with the established norms of the age into which he was born and musically nurtured, Stokowski remained loyal to those precepts from which we, in an era far removed from their prevalence, can still learn and draw aesthetic sustenance."

Stokowski is buried at East Finchley Cemetery, in north London.