Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge--II: Thanks and Honors

Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge was well known by musicians throughout the world when she set up the Coolidge Foundation in the Library of Congress in 1925. She had given the Pension Fund of $200,000 to the Chicago Symphony and built the Sprague Music Building at Yale. For seven years she had been more directly involved with music patronage through her annual festivals of chamber music in the Berkshires and commissions to composers.

The Foundation began by sponsoring concerts in Washington similar to those at South Mountain. Its realm soon enlarged, however, to publications, radio, bringing European musicians to America, awarding medals for outstanding service to chamber music, continuing to commission new works, and, perhaps most important, beginning a program of free "extension concerts" in Europe and in educational and cultural institutions in the United States.

Mrs. Coolidge has brought the London, Pro Arte, Roth, and Rose Quarters to this country as well as the Italian Trio and the English Singers. All those groups have travelled under her auspices along with those which she organized herself, including Alexander Schneider and Ralph Kirkpatrick.

Today the Foundation-sponsored concerts at colleges throughout the country interest her most. She sees in them the best way of perpetuating the taste she has done so much to develop. The many programs she has presented at Harvard are typical of what the Foundation has done in every major college in the country. The resulting clamor for more testifies to her success in popularizing chamber music.

Before the war she frequently took groups of musicians to Europe with her. She has, in fact, presented concerts in practically every large city. She declines to verify a story about a visit to Venice. Riding down the Grand Canal in a gondola one day, it is said, her craft was suddenly surrounded by a host of others, full of Venetians shouting thanks to the great American who had helped their Malipiero. She tosses it off as legend and indeed she is bound to be legendary. As well as being the most generous music patron in America, she is an accomplished pianist and has frequently taken part with her artists in concerts which are wellknown for their excellence. A composer herself, she is an understanding critic of the works she commissions.

Although she is modest about her achievements, she is forced to admit that her letters in the Library of Congress, amounting to 32,000 today, along with her in valuable collection of manuscripts, tell a pretty complete story of the music and musicians of this century.

Since she gave away her houses in Chicago and Pittsfield to allow more money for music, Mrs. Coolidge has been living in a two-room apartment at the Hotel Continental. She continues to plan for the future, looking forward to the Twenty-fifth Anniversary of the Foundation next year. For, the past she says, "I've had my share of thanks." And they have been plentiful. Though she was not decorated by the Russians when she gave a festival in Moscow in 1931, she has the Legion of Honor from France and Belgium's Order of the Crown and Order of Leopold. She was also made an honorary citizen of Frankfurt in times when that distinction was more highly regarded than at present. A long list of honorary degrees from American colleges completes the roster.

More cherished are the thanks of all those whom she has helped or to whom she has given joy. One musicologist wrote not long ago, "She receives the homage of every musician the world over." A declaration from President Roosevelt for the celebration of her eightieth birthday probably best expresses the gratitude of the public. "Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge has done what none before her had found the means to do. No one has contributed more to the understanding of music in America, and no one has given greater encouragement to writers and performers of music in America than Mrs. Coolidge."