Smit was a most interesting fellow, as can be seen in the following tribute (originally posted on the SUNY Buffalo site) . . . . .

In the days before e-mail, the typed (or handwritten!) letter sent through the US Postal Service was the usual method non-telephone of communication.  Back in the 1980s, with the help of agents and publicists, I wrote to a number of composers to ask about doing interviews.  Most of them responded, and appointments were made.  The one I received from Leo Smit is shown next . . . . .

         

Not long after our written back-and-forth, we set the date and time for our conversation, and naturally I made the phone call exactly as specified . . . . . . .


Leo Smit:  [Answering the telephone]  It’s got to be Bruce!  Boy, are you on the dot!  [Laughs]

Bruce Duffie:    Those of us in radio tend to watch the clock so accurately!  [Laughs]

LS:    I know.  I grew up in the radio era, too.  [Laughs]

BD:    Did you get your new phone?

LS:    Yes, indeed!  Just put it in.  I am luxuriating here.

BD:    Good, good.  I’m very glad that you have decided you can spend an hour talking with me.  I appreciate it.

LS:    Let’s see how it goes.

BD:    Okay.  You are a pianist and a composer and a conductor and a teacher.  Which of these is of primary importance, if any?

LS:    When I’m playing somebody else’s music, I’m a pianist/composer.  When I’m playing my own, I’m a composer/pianist.  When you’re composing, you’re nothing but.  I’ve also had some experience conducting, and I find that very exciting to stand up in front of an orchestra and conduct

or direct the airwaves as they come blasting upon you.  I’m thinking particularly of a performance of Tchaikovsky’s Third Symphony, the climax in the final movement.  To be a conductor, you’ve got to have tough knees, because they really buckled under me at that moment, it was so overwhelming.

BD:    Are you a better composer because you are also a pianist, and vice versa?

LS:    I think so.  I’ve been told so.  Some people have commented on that connection, yes.  As a composer, you have first-hand experience encountering the kind of problems that other composers work with.  You’re all related, in that sense.  You’re all fellow workers, and it enables you to understand, to see more clearly into the working minds of other composers.  At least you have that illusion; you have that perception.  It may be a delusion, but at least it gives you a base from which to radiate out, to think out.

BD:    Is this something that you encourage in others, this multi-faceted-ness, rather than specialization?

LS:    Yes, I have, as a matter of fact.  One of the most interesting examples of that was working with a piano student at SUNY Buffalo, and being rather discouraged by the chap’s lack of progress.  The weeks followed each other uneventfully until near the end of the semester.  I asked him if he had ever written anything, and he looked quite shocked at the idea.  He said, “No,” so I asked him, “Why don’t you try writing something in a simple dance form?  A minuet or a gavotte, a polka, anything that comes to mind?”  He came the following week with a charming little piece, and for the first time his playing had touch.  It had substance.  It had character because he understood his own piece.  He knew what he wanted to say, and that must have been a revelation to him.  Subsequently he went on to teach theory at Brandeis University, whereas before that I really had no hopes for him in the musical professional at all.

BD:    It’s something that captured his imagination, then.

LS:    Obviously, yes.  Having done it, having written a few notes, you have an idea of how you want them to go.  That’s reflected in certain performers who can identify with composers of their own time, and through them, composers of the past.  They seem to have the knack of capturing or understanding the character of the work as though they had written it themselves.  It’s the kind of ability to get into the composer’s mind, as it were.  You may or may not be right, but there will be a kind of authenticity in that approach, and a kind of identification.

BD:    I assume that the act of performing is interesting to you.  Is the act of composing interesting to you?

LS:    It’s so different.  Performing is not only interesting, it’s a pleasure.  Composing isn’t often a comparable pleasure.  First of all, when playing, for the most part you’re choosing a finished masterpiece or something that’s of interest to you.  In the process of composing, you are living in a period of uncertainty, of not knowing, which probably is the key to getting somewhere, to arriving somewhere.  If you know exactly where you’re going, it is probably not worth writing.  So at the end, you can look back upon this stony road with a certain amount of satisfaction, realizing that you had traversed it and it had come off like you had hoped it would.  Not planned, but hoped.

BD:    Are there no surprises, then, when you play a masterpiece?

LS:    Constantly, especially works on the scale of the Diabelli Variations, the Bach Well Tempered set, especially Book Two, which I’m particularly fond of.  There are certain works that interest you every day of your life, and instruct you, teach you, from which you can learn so much.  It’s not necessarily a surprise, but a deep pleasure in seeing how the composer did it again and again.  There are certain works that you can never get to the bottom of.  Mozart is the great magician that way.  He defies your best attempt at analysis.  All you can do is smile.

BD:    Can people get to the bottom of the works of Leo Smit?

LS:    I don’t know.  You’d have to ask those who know them or play them!  [Laughs]

BD:    When you’re performing a program that has both your works and other people’s works, does your expectation of the audience change from one to the other?

LS:    You mean, do I expect them to applaud my music?

BD:    Well, what do you expect of an audience that comes to hear your music?

LS:    I really don’t know.  I don’t think they know. You have to give them more time to decide. 

BD:    What can the audience expect of you as a composer?

LS:    It’s really hard to say.  It is difficult to speak about one’s own music, let alone dig for the ear’s sensibilities of it.  It’s very hard to know what other people really hear

BD:    Let us talk a little more about Stravinsky.  Was there any one specific thing that you learned from him?

LS:    I was pianist with the American Ballet at the age of sixteen, after having auditioned for Balanchine.  That was an awesome experience because the sight reading was the key ingredient, the key demand.  He played a few pages of the Glazunov ballet Raymonda in front of me, and these were two of the blackest pages I’d ever seen!  You could see fourth-notes crawling all over the place.  He told me to go.  I nearly blacked out from nervousness, but I got the job

Pianist and composer Alexander Goldenweiser was one of the great founders of the Russian Piano School, a tirelessly dedicated pedagogue who helped establish the very system of teaching piano in Russia that has led to many successful concert artists. Born in what is now Chisinau, Moldova, Goldenweiser's musical training as pianist and composer commenced once his family settled in Moscow in 1883, taking private lessons with Vasily Prokhunin, a student of Tchaikovsky. Goldenweiser's term as student at the Moscow Conservatory began in 1889, where he studied with Alexander Siloti, Sergey Taneyev, Ferruccio Busoni, and Anton Arensky; he made his debut in 1896 in a duet recital with fellow student Sergey Rachmaninoff. In his youth, Goldenweiser was a close friend of author Leo Tolstoy, and transcribed practically every word they shared together, publishing such comments in book form after Tolstoy died in 1910. We also owe the existence of Tolstoy's only musical composition to Goldenweiser, who took it down after Tolstoy played it to him in 1906. Just a year after his debut, Goldenweiser began to teach, and in 1906 was named to the staff of the Moscow Conservatoire, where he taught for the next 55 years. Goldenweiser also founded the Central Special Music School as an adjunct to the Moscow Conservatory in 1932 especially for the training of pianists; it remains in operation. Among the pianists who passed through Goldenweiser's instruction were Lazar Berman, Samuil Feinberg, Dmitry Kabalevsky, Tatiana Nikolayeva, Dmitry Paperno, and Nikolai Kapustin, though his favorite was Grigori Ginsburg who only outlived the master by less than a month. Goldenweiser was also a close friend to Alexander Scriabin and active in the founding of the Scriabin Museum in the 1920s. Rachmaninoff dedicated his Suite No. 2 for two pianos, Op. 17, to Goldenweiser and he enjoyed a lifelong friendship with Nikolay Medtner. Goldenweiser never made piano rolls and did not record until 1946, when he was named a People's Artist of the USSR. He was 71 at the time and would go on to make many records up until his death at age 86; while many of his recordings are outstanding, they are uneven owing to his advanced age and the poor sound of many Soviet-era recordings. As a composer, Goldenweiser published his first composition in 1887 and continued to compose through 1912, when he breaks off -- he did not pick it up again until the early 1930s, then continuing until his death. One of the last recordings he made was of his own Piano Trio in E minor, Op. 31, partnered by cellist Mstislav Rostropovich and violinist Leonid Kogan. --  Biography by Uncle Dave Lews, from the allmusic.com website

Whenever the opportunity presents itself, I always ask my guests for contact information about others who might be willing to do an interview.  Naturally, I inquired about Kabalevsky, and Smit was pleased to give me the address in Moscow.  So I wrote the Russian composer and got this positive reply... A friend of mine translated it for me . . . . . I dispatched another letter with the requested material, but alas, it was simply too late . . . . .

e strengthened my fingers quite a lot.

BD:    You’ve written one opera and I want to be sure and ask about that.

LS:    The man who really had a very strong influence on me and was a great friend was Fred Hoyle [shown with Smit in the next photo], the astronomer, who did provide me with two librettos, one for a work on Copernicus and the other for an opera as yet unperformed, The Alchemy of Love.

BD:    If this is unperformed, then it was not commissioned?

LS:    That was not commissioned, right.

BD:    After so many years of being a pianist and writing other kinds of music, why did you decide that you wanted to write an opera?

LS:    It was Fred’s idea.  We were out in the California desert one day and he started to talk about an idea that he had for an opera.  Incidentally, I should say that he was one of the most knowledgeable nonprofessional music lovers that I’ve ever met.  He has an extraordinary ear and a deep love of music!  In fact, that is how we really got together.  We were at a soiree, a very unusual party in New York which featured Nobel Prize winners in science and people like Auden.  It was quite a gathering place.  This was in ’53.  Fred came with the most recent photographs of the moon, and had just written a book on the nature of the universe, which originally was in the form of a series of six lessons for BBC.  I was sort of the official pianist-in-residence at these parties, and after the formal discussion about the latest in science and theology, I played and I included a work I had just finished for the piano, Fantasy: the Farewell.  Well, he shot across the room to where I was sitting at the piano and he asked me to play it again!  This one complimentary remark and I was really quite taken aback, because my experience with scientists in general is that they’re very conservative in their musical taste, and they like Mozart and Brahms and that’s it!  They’re not at all interested in the 20th century.  Not at all!  And here he was!  He invited himself over to my apartment the next day and we had lunch, and the rest of the afternoon was me at the piano playing everything that we had time for.  I must have played about four or five hours.  That was the beginning of a very close friendship, which eventually resulted in these two large works

BD:    He provided the libretto for the opera?

LS:    Yes.  It was his idea.  The Alchemy of Love is about a young, naïve but brilliant alchemist who discovers the secret of making of gold — how to transmute lead into gold — which interests the big, bad world immediately.  It is a kind of a space fable.  It’s supposed to take place on another planet which bears uncomfortable resemblances to our own.  Some people are looking at it right now, and I’m still hoping.

BD:    Is it a “message opera”?

LS:    Oh, yes.  All opera should be — at least classical opera.  The moral is important, especially if it’s a fable.  Definitely, and it does come in the form of a cantata-like finale.  There is no acting; there is no action.  It is pure singing.  It starts with the solos, then duets and quartets, and then with sextets of all the principals.

BD:    Then why do you call it an opera and not a cantata?

LS:    Because there’s a lot of action up until the finale.  A lot, and it contains all the elements that operas normally do contain.  A cantata’s much more restrictive, but with an opera, all the characters that go together will make it.  Another very important figure in my life was Alexander Siloti.  He was Liszt’s favorite pupil.  He’s in all the books.  He’s in many photographs.  Before he returned home to Russia, Liszt wrote a piece especially for him, a farewell, based on a Russian folk song.  It’s only recently been published.  I attended one of Siloti’s recitals in New York.  I must have been about nine or so, and his playing was the first that deeply moved me in such a way that although very shy at the time, I asked my father to take me backstage so I could get a look at him.  He was tall; he was about six-four, very elegant and gentle.  I just stood in the corner looking at him, and suddenly I felt myself being swept up practically to the ceiling.  He saw me

Alexander Siloti  (1863 - 1945) In the generation prior to 1917, Siloti was one of Russia's most important artists, with music by Arensky, Liszt, Rachmaninoff, Stravinsky and Tchaikovsky dedicated to him. At the Moscow Conservatory he studied piano with Zverev from 1871, and under Nikolai Rubinstein, Taneyev, Tchaikovsky, and Hubert from 1875. He graduated with the Gold Medal in Piano in 1881. He worked with Liszt in Weimar (1883-1886), co-founded the Liszt-Verein in Leipzig, and there made his professional debut on 19 November 1883. Returning in 1887 Siloti taught at the Moscow Conservatory, where his students included Goldenweiser, Maximov, and first-cousin Rachmaninov. In this period he began work as editor for Tchaikovsky, particularly on the First and Second piano concerti. He quit the Conservatory in May 1891, and from 1892-1900 lived and toured in Europe. He also toured New York, Boston, Cincinnati and Chicago in 1898. From 1901-1903 Siloti led the Moscow Philharmonic; from 1903-1917 he organized, financed, and conducted the supremely influential Siloti Concerts in St. Petersburg. He presented Auer, Casals, Chaliapin, Enesco, Hofmann, Landowska, Mengelberg, Mottl, Nikisch, Schoenberg and Weingartner, and local and world premieres by Debussy, Elgar, Glazunov, Prokofiev, Rachmaninov, Rimsky-Korsakov, Scriabin, Sibelius, Stravinsky and others. Diaghilev first heard Stravinsky at a Siloti Concert. In 1918 Siloti was appointed Intendant of the Mariinsky Theatre, but late the following year fled Soviet Russia for England, finally settling in New York in December 1921. From 1925-1942 he taught at the Juilliard Graduate School, performing occasionally in recital, and in November 1930 gave a legendary all-Liszt concert with Toscanini. Siloti's private students included Marc Blitzstein and Eugene Istomin. He wrote over 200 piano arrangements and transcriptions, and orchestral editions of Bach, Beethoven, Liszt, Tchaikovsky and Vivaldi.  Even though he had a great repertoire and was a famous figure during his life, his fame has gradually faded away making him quite unknown to most people of today .

Two years later I heard Prokofiev play at the Waldorf Astoria.  He really did something to me because he approached the piano first through his hands at the keys as though he were washing them with such abandon and such lack of self-consciousness, or concern!  I’d seen so many pianists fuss, you know, wipe the keys and adjust the bench.  He just sat down, and he played with such spontaneity and abandon that it really affected my whole approach to the instrument.  He played some very difficult things, like the Second Piano Sonata and the Toccata, no less.

BD:    Now is that the way you play — with more abandon?

LS:    He opened me up a little, without ever realizing it, probably.  Then came the Stravinsky episode, and after that I played for Bartók.  That was a moving experience.  Then playing for Copland was the final encouragement, because after I played his Piano Sonata for him, which he had just completed, he began to say nice things.  I asked him if he had any hot tips for me, anything that he would have wanted me to do or thought needed some change or improvement, but he said, “No, not at all.”  He said, “I’m more interested in the variety of performances, and not in having everyone play it the same way.”  Obviously, everyone plays it the way he wants it to go, to be played.  It’s very impressive, that detached and objective view, and the basic curiosity that lay underneath it affected me, also.

BD:    Do you feel that same way, then, about your music, when you hear other people play it?

LS:    No.  [Laughs]  I’m not quite as disinterested or as impartial.  It’s a great gift.  I don’t share it with Copland to that extent, maybe because he’s not performing as a pianist except in his own music.  That could be it.  There are certain margins or certain boundaries within which much is acceptable.  But if the character is missed completely

ot just performers, but audiences?

LS:    If performers would be more interested, then they could instruct through their example.  By their performances they could instruct audiences, which is exactly what Koussevitzky did in Boston.  He encountered fierce resistance when he first started to program new works there, but he didn’t give up.  He insisted, and after ten years or so they became aware of what he was doing and how interested the whole world was in happening there.  So they became part of his approach and they were very proud of him, and it was one of the most wonderful places for contemporary music in the world.  In fact, his list of commissions is a history of the 20th century.  So it’s really up to the performers to be consistent, and eventually, if they’re lucky, they’ll win out, or at least make a dent.

BD:    So in that case, you are playing both sides of the fence!

LS:    How?

BD:    By being the performer of other people’s new music and composing your own music.

LS:    Yes.  That is true.  I guess it’s unusual today, but it wasn’t in the past.  Liszt is a good example and Saint-Saëns is a good example.  They all played other people’s music, as did Anton Rubinstein.

BD:    Are you optimistic about the future of music?

LS:    I guess I ought to be.  I believe that the creative mentality will survive.  It will go on, even if you don’t see brilliant flashes at this point in history.  There’s no reason why it should not.  It’s like thinking all chess games have already been played.  I don’t think all the music has been written yet.

BD:    That’s a nice analogy.  I like that.

LS:    There’s one figure in American music, Harold Shapero, who represents one of the most fascinating cases.  In his twenties he showed prodigious talent.  More than that, he had a mastery of a kind that even impressed Stravinsky and Copland to say that he was certainly the most gifted of that generation.  Then around 1950 he slowed down.  His output has virtually come to a trickle, which is one of the great tragedies for American music.  He’s teaching at Brandeis University, and at one point became interested in electronic music.  So I thought, “Whoa, when a real composer will apply himself to electronic music, we might hear something at last!”  But there’s some strange inhibition there.

BD:    So you don’t think that the electronic works so far have been real compositions?

LS:    Some of them have been very interesting and promising — Stockhausen’s work, for example.  But even in the case of Berio, his acoustic music is more interesting.  A work like his Sinfonia will stand up.  Although, I must say, one of my favorite works is the Omaggio a Joyce, which is electronic, and that’s great.

Hindemith’s Mathis der Mahler Symphony, the Shostakovich First Symphony — which I thought was quite splendid for a teenager — and to crown it off, the Symphony of Psalms.  I walked around in a daze for about two or three days.  I just didn’t feel like talking to anyone.  I was in another world.

BD:    This was a concert you heard?

LS:    No, recordings, played for me by a man who was a friend of the family who tutored me for a while and then became a close friend.  He was considerably older than I was; he was about two-and-a-half times my age, but we had a lot in common.  That is the key element — hearing something and just being overwhelmed without any preparation, which I really didn’t have at the age of fourteen.  So it’s possible to be untutored in the ways of contemporary music and still fall in love.

BD:    But we’ve got to try and reach out catch more people.

LS:    Yes.  Well, it’s another world today, isn’t it?

BD:    Should we try to get the people who go to rock concerts to come to orchestral concerts or piano recitals?

LS:    How are you going to do that?

BD:    Should we at least try?

LS:    I know, but how do you try?  Even if it were desirable, how would you go about it?  I have neighbors who are not at all interested; their children are not at all interested in classical music.  They appreciate my piano playing, but they don’t want to hear anything.  They never go to a symphony or anything like that.  It’s sort of a running battle there.  I’ve tried every trick and ruse, and it doesn’t work.  But they know every word of every rock lyric the way my friends knew all the words of Don Giovanni. [Laughs] 

BD:    Is rock music?

LS:    Much of it isn’t.  It’s a very low IQ music, but I must confess that there have been a few personalities who interested me.  Very early on, I remember hearing Country Joe and the Fish, and when I heard Joe Cocker in the film Woodstock, I was bowled over.  He really did it very, very well.  In the pop field — that’s another field altogether — there’s a lot of wonderful singers and instrumentalists.  I’ve always loved jazz.  My first record, which I started my collection with, was the New Orleans Feetwarmers with Sidney Bechet.  Then there were the great boogie-woogie pianists like Pete Johnson, Meade Lux Lewis, Albert Ammons... and then I bought Horowitz’s records!  I had some idea what he was doing, but the jazz boys just mystified me.  And they never used music!  [Laughs]

BD:    That’s right, it’s all improvised.

LS:    I got to know Pete Johnson when I went to live in Buffalo.  He was living there in enforced retirement, having suffered a stroke.  I remembered hearing him play at the great concert in Carnegie Hall, “From Virgil to Swing” in 1938.  I remember him distinctly playing “Roll ’em, Pete.”  Oh, he’s marvelous!  I went to see him just to introduce myself.  We became friends, and at one point I asked him if he knew how to read music.  He said, “No, but I traveled in fast company.”  His ears were his eyes.  After hearing a song once, he could play it!   Great talent.  Extraordinary pianist.

BD:    What is next on the calendar for Leo Smit?

LS:    I just made my second comeback of the year in Los Angeles.  I did a program called “Liszt in Italy.”  Thirteen piano pieces accompanied by about 170 color slides I took — scenes in Italy associated with these mostly programmatic pieces.  That was very gratifying because I had had several surgeries just prior to this event, including one for the hand and three on the eye.  Now I’m composing, and I’ll get back to playing piano in public in the spring.

BD:    What are the compositions you’re working on?

LS:    I just finished a little piano piece that was commissioned by a friend, a rather nice piece called Piano Madrigal.  Another project will involve the setting of some Yugoslav folk melodies used by Beethoven and Haydn in various symphonic and chamber works, which I found in Bela Bartók’s collection of Yugoslav folk music.  I don’t want to give too much away, but I think it’s just going to startle people to realize, for example, that the melody which opens the Pastoral Symphony is a Yugoslav folk melody.  In fact there are three versions in Bartók’s collection with three different texts.  These settings will also include my versions of the texts, freely translated from the original.  I’m planning to call it From Banja Luka! It’s a city in northern Yugoslavia, part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire from which some of these melodies were gathered in small villages near Banja Luka.  There are a few other projects, but it is too early to discuss them.

BD:    I understand.  I’m just always curious, and I wanted to make sure that you were still working on composing.

LS:    Oh, yes, yes, of course.  That’s what my period out here is basically for.  I have a house on the ocean, very quiet, and a nice Yamaha studio upright which apparently had been rented by Neil Diamond before me.  [Laughs]  It was typical California...  They say, “Oh, that lamp!  You know, Greta Garbo sat under it!” 

BD:    How long will you spend in California?  Will you be there the whole winter?

LS:    Yes.  I’ll be coming back east in March.  Before that, there is a performance in New York that interests me

This interview was recorded on the telephone on November 5, 1986.  Segments were used (with recordings) on WNIB in 1991 and 1996.  The transcription was made and posted on this website in 2013.

To see a full list (with links) of interviews which have been transcribed and posted on this website, click here.  To read my thoughts on editing these interviews for print, as well as a few other interesting observations, click here.

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Award - winning broadcaster Bruce Duffie was with WNIB, Classical 97 in Chicago from 1975 until its final moment as a classical station in February of 2001.  His interviews have also appeared in various magazines and journals since 1980, and he now continues his broadcast series on WNUR-FM, as well as on Contemporary Classical Internet Radio.