Leopold Stokowski

Leopold Stokowski was born in London in April 1882, of Polish and Irish parentage. He studied at the Royal College of Music from the age of thirteen and read for an Oxford degree at Queen’s College — making him, despite his later cultivated continental persona, fully a product of late-Victorian London. He worked as a church organist in London and then in New York from 1905, before turning to conducting with the Cincinnati Symphony in 1909.

He was appointed music director of the Philadelphia Orchestra in 1912 and held the post for twenty-six years, transforming the orchestra’s sound — the famously rich Stokowski string sonority became identified with the ensemble for the rest of the twentieth century — and championing a substantial body of contemporary repertoire including the American premieres of Mahler’s Eighth Symphony, Berg’s *Wozzeck* and the *Three Pieces*, Schoenberg’s *Gurrelieder*, and Ives. He conducted on the soundtrack of Disney’s *Fantasia* (1940) — a project that did more to popularise classical music in mid-twentieth-century America than almost any other single act of public musicianship. He founded the American Symphony Orchestra in 1962, at eighty, and continued to record into his nineties.

Stokowski died in Hampshire in September 1977 at the age of ninety-five, four months after his last recording session. Music Preserved’s archive includes a range of his recorded work across seven decades of conducting.