The next unpopular move he made was to fire a number of the old standbys who had sat in the orchestra for most of its forty-four-year history.  “I vant yongk blott!” he cried in his then still very thick accent.  “If dose old chentlemen vant to sleep, let dem sleep in deir houses!”

The Boston music lovers didn’t like it.  To them the Symphony is a sacred cow and they regarded the older members in the light of special pets.  But when, at the opening of the new season, they heard a brilliant, completely rejuvenated orchestra, they forgave the new conductor.  Since then, he has restored the Symphony to its old-time glory.  Today Beacon Hill has no greater favorite than Serge Alexandrovitch Koussevitzky.

The orchestra men, too, learned to like him.  They discovered that, with all his public histrionics, he was on the level as a musician.  He is a merciless task master, but in rehearsals he gives himself no airs.  Dressed in an old pair of pants and a disreputable brown woolen sweater, which he has worn in private since the day he landed in Boston, he works like a stevedore.  When he, the pants and the sweater had been with the Symphony ten years, the men gave him a testimonial dinner.

Next to Mr. Toscanini he’s the world’s most temperamental conductor, but he has the ability to keep himself in check—­when he wants to.  “Koussevitzky,” says Ernest Newman, the eminent English music critic, “has a volcanic temperament, yet never have I known it to run away with him.  It is precisely when his temperament is at the boiling point that his hand on the regulator is steadiest.”

At a concert in Carnegie Hall four years ago he gave a dramatic demonstration of self-control.  He was conducting Debussy’s “Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun,” when smoke from an incinerator fire in a neighboring building penetrated the hall.  The smoke grew dense.  People rose, rushed for the exits in near-panic.  Women screamed.

He stopped the orchestra, turned to the audience, held up his hand and shouted: 

“Come back!  Sit down!  Sit down—­all of you!  Everything is all right!”

The customers meekly resumed their seats.  Mr. Koussevitzky swung ’round and continued playing Debussy’s brooding, sensuous dreampiece as if nothing had happened.

Because he has done so much, both as conductor and publisher, for living composers (he is the high priest of the Sibelius cult), he has been called a modernist.  The label infuriates him.

“Nonsense!” he snarls.  “I’m not a modernist and I’m not a classicist.  I’m a musician!  The first movement of the Ninth Symphony of Beethoven is the greatest music ever written and George Gershwin’s ’Rhapsody in Blue’ is a masterpiece.”

“There you are!  Make the best of it!”