Next he announced that light was a distraction at a concert.  Henceforth, the Philadelphia Orchestra would play in darkness.  Wails of dismay from the Friday afternoon dowagers.  How on earth was any one going to see what her friends were wearing?

At the next matinee the Academy of Music was black as a crypt.  On the stage, at each of the players’ desks, hung a small, green-shaded light.  Then Mr. Stokowski walked out on the podium.  The moment he had mounted the dais, a spotlight was trained on his head, turning his hair into a glittering golden halo.  The ladies forgot all about their friends’ dresses.  Why, the darling boy looked like an angel descended into a tomb to waken the dead!

Stoky explained to the press that the spot was necessary to enable his men to follow the play of his facial expressions.

Most conductors make their appearance in a leisurely manner.  Carrying the stick, they stride out on the platform, acknowledge the audience’s reception with a courtly bow, say a few kind words to the men, and when musicians and listeners have composed themselves, begin the concert.

Leopold changed all that.  Leander-like, he leaped from the wings, dashed to the center of the stage, nodded curtly to the customers, then accepted the baton which was handed to him, with a flourish, by one of the viola players, and, before you could say “Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart,” plunged into the opening number.

His audiences, particularly the ladies, doted on his conducting technique.  His slim, youthful, virile figure was held erect, his feet remained still as if nailed to the floor, while his arms went through a series of sensuously compelling, always graceful motions.  The view from the back was enhanced by the fact that the tailor who cut his morning and evening coats was almost as great as Stoky himself.  And his hands!  Ah, my dear, those hands——!

There was so much ecstatic comment on those slender, nervous, expressive hands that Mr. Stokowski decided to give the gals a full, unhampered view.  He did away with the baton.

About the same time he invented a new way of rehearsing the orchestra—­the remote-control method.  An assistant conductor wielded the stick while Stoky sat in the rear of the dark hall manipulating an intricate system of colored lights that made known his wishes to his understudy on the platform.

Mr. Stokowski is inordinately fond of gadgets and fancies himself as quite a technical expert.  When he first conducted for the radio he strenuously objected to the arrangement whereby the engineers in the control room had the last word as to the volume of sound that was to go out on the air.

Radio executives pacified him by rigging up an elaborate set of dials on his desk.  These he happily twirled, completely unaware that the doodads were dead.

Meanwhile—­and please don’t lose sight of this cardinal fact—­he made transcendently beautiful music.  His stature as a conductor grew with the years and so did the repertoire of scores he conducted from memory.  This feat involved heartbreaking work, for his memory, while good, is not unusually retentive.  In the middle years of his career, he devoted from ten to twelve hours a day to studying scores.