Obligato: Untold Tales from a Life with Music

Hirschmann, who died in 1989 at the age of 88, was a New York City business executive known for his activities as a diplomat and anti-Nazi activist. In this charming memoir, he tells how he was able to blend his passion for classical music with his professional life. In the 1920s, he obtained a radio station for his company and utilized it to broadcast live symphony concerts. In the 1940s he founded the FM radio station WABF, which carried live classical music concerts. As organizer and president of the New Friends of Music, a nonprofit organization that presented chamber music concerts for the general public, he helped bring many of the world's greatest musicians to this country. It was at Hirschmann's instigation that his friend, Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, created New York City's High School of Music and Art. His reminiscences about these and other accomplishments and of his many friends in the music world are delightful, but disturbing is his account of his successful campaign in 1936 to force the New York Philharmonic to withdraw its invitation to the German conductor Wilhelm Furtwangler to succeed Arturo Toscanini as Music Director of the orchestra. The record of this episode is less clear-cut than Hirschmann suggests; Furtwangler, who conducted at the New York Philharmonic during 1927-1930 and claimed that he remained in Hitler's Germany to save his country's ``soul,'' maintained that he himself withdrew from the appointment because of the anti-German campaign. Illustrations not seen by PW. (Apr.)