The violinist, conductor, composer, teacher and writer Luigi von Kunits was a dominant figure in the musical life of Toronto in the early twentieth century.Footnote 1 During the 19 years he spent in the city, from his arrival in the summer of 1912 until his death in October 1931, he was active on many fronts: teaching violin, composing, writing about music, editing The Canadian Journal of Music, performing as a violin soloist and chamber musician and serving as the conductor of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra. To many he seemed by his birth, upbringing and musical training to embody the great Central European musical traditions of the nineteenth century.
It is difficult at this remove to separate fact from fiction in his life story. Much of what we know about Kunits derives from statements issued by the musician himself, or from his close associates and family (especially his daughter Aglaia); not much corroborating documentary evidence exists to support the various assertions. Biographical information which has not been substantiated by reliable sources will be introduced here with qualifying phrases such as ‘it is said that’, or ‘allegedly’, or will be questioned in the footnotes. By casting doubt on stories about Kunits that have enjoyed a long circulation, I do not mean to imply he was a charlatan or fraud. On the contrary, he seems to have been a cultivated, educated and talented musician. I suspect that many of the tall stories were the work of well meaning supporters and friends of his, who were attempting to burnish his reputation in the interest of furthering the cause of classical music in Toronto. The purveyors of these anecdotes may have meant well, but in the interests of accuracy it is time now to scrape off the accretions of fantasy and make-believe and uncover the basic facts about Kunits's life as honestly and truthfully as possible.
Life and Career before Toronto
Ludwig Paul Maria von Kunits, Edler von Varasdin, was born in Vienna, allegedly within sight of St Stephen's Cathedral, on 20 July 1870.Footnote 2 Of Serbian ancestry, the family is said to have been ennobled on 12 April 1578, when a paternal ancestor, Anton Kunič, was bestowed with the title of Baron by the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II in gratitude for rescuing a prince of the realm who had been wounded in battle against the Ottomans.Footnote 3 As a student at the Schottengymnasium, an elite private Catholic school,Footnote 4 young Luigi von Kunits quickly came to the attention of the most august musical circles in Vienna for his prodigious talent as a violinist. By the age of nine he is said to have mastered the violin. The often-told story that at the age of 11 he was asked by Brahms to take part in one of the great composer's quartets, however, must be taken with a grain of salt.Footnote 5 Similarly, tales of a close and intimate relationship between the members of the Kunits family and Brahms seem to be at best an exaggeration, if not an outright falsehood.Footnote 6
In his teens Kunits studied at the University of Vienna and the Vienna Conservatory. At the former, he studied languages, jurisprudence, philosophy and classical philology, graduating with honours at the age of 21.Footnote 7 An accomplished linguist, he was fluent in ancient and modern Greek, Latin, German, English, French, Italian and Spanish,Footnote 8 and he was well versed in Greek poetry and philosophy.Footnote 9 His musical studies were undertaken with Johann Král (violin and viola d'amore), Jakob M. Grün and Otakar Ševčík (violin), Anton Bruckner (theory), Franz Jaksch (composition) and Eduard Hanslick (music history).Footnote 10 During these years he is said to have led a string quartet at the Tonkünstlerverein in Vienna (of which Brahms was the honorary president) and conducted the Wiener Damenchor.Footnote 11 At age 21 he is said to have performed a violin concerto of his own composition with the Vienna Philharmonic.Footnote 12 Also dating from this period is a String Quartet in D minor, completed in February 1891, which shows the influence of the Brahmsian style.Footnote 13 Among those with whom Kunits associated in Vienna, in addition to Brahms, were the composers Karl Goldmark and Johann Strauss, Jr; indeed, he is said to have been ‘very closely associated with all the celebrated musicians and composers then in Vienna’.Footnote 14
As the concertmaster and assistant conductor of Carl Michael Ziehrer's orchestra, Kunits travelled to Chicago in 1893; the ensemble performed nightly at the World's Fair, representing Austria.Footnote 15 Kunits is said to have won first prize as best solo violinist in an open competition at the Chicago fair.Footnote 16 When the fair closed, in the autumn of 1893, Kunits remained in the United States, initially teaching violin and composition in Chicago, and founding a string quartet there.Footnote 17 He composed his virtuosic Three Études for solo violin in Chicago in 1894, though they were not published until 1900.Footnote 18 He was the concertmaster and assistant conductor of the Chicago Festival Orchestra, a short-lived touring ensemble founded by the violinist Adolph Rosenbecker.Footnote 19
In 1896 Kunits relocated to Pittsburgh, which was to be his home for the next 14 years. He served as the concertmaster of the newly established Pittsburgh Orchestra under the conductor Frederick Archer, a local organist. Though he was dismissed from this position after a disagreement with Archer in 1897,Footnote 20 he was soon reinstated when Victor Herbert became music director of the orchestra in 1898. Herbert and Kunits became close friends; the conductor jokingly referred to his concertmaster's surname as ‘Kennt nichts’ (‘knows nothing’) to tease him about his erudition.Footnote 21 Kunits also befriended the organist and impresario Joseph Henry Gittings in Pittsburgh. After a whirlwind courtship, he married Gittings's daughter Harriet Jane in 1899. The couple had two daughters, Nausicaa and Aglaia, and a son, Astyanax.Footnote 22 When Emil Paur succeeded Herbert as conductor of the Pittsburgh Orchestra, Kunits stayed on as concertmaster until April 1907, when he was forced to resign from the orchestra because of a disagreement with Paur. During his years in Pittsburgh, Kunits formed another string quartet,Footnote 23 toured widely with the orchestra (including several trips to Toronto for concerts with the Toronto Mendelssohn Choir), taught at the Pittsburgh Conservatory and the Pittsburgh College for Women and, in 1905, opened the Von Kunits School of Music and Art. Among his pupils in Pittsburgh were the composer Charles Wakefield Cadman and the violinist Vera Barstow.Footnote 24 In 1907 Kunits was joined in his concertizing by his sister Josephine Pawlikowsky, a professional pianist who was on an extended tour of the United States at the time.Footnote 25
In 1910 the Pittsburgh Orchestra was dissolved because of financial difficulties, and although he had not been employed by the orchestra for the past three years by that time, Kunits seems to have taken this as a sign that it was time for a change; he returned to Vienna with his young family. Settling in an apartment near Türkenschanz Park in Vienna's Eighteenth District, Kunits is said to have entertained the leading musicians of the day, including Fritz Kreisler, Vladimir de Pachmann, Moriz Rosenthal, and Eugène Ysaÿe.Footnote 26 Kunits appeared as a soloist with orchestras and in recital, and on one occasion gave a command performance for Archduke Leopold Salvator of Austria and his wife, the Archduchess Blanca.Footnote 27 In addition to his concertizing, Kunits taught at the Lutwak-Patonay-Konservatorium on Mühlgasse in Vienna's Fourth District.
Early in 1912 Kunits received an offer to teach at the newly established Columbian Conservatory in Toronto (soon to be renamed the Canadian Academy of Music), and to be head of its violin department.Footnote 28 By September 1912 the Conservatory had moved into new premises on Spadina Road, and Kunits was in Toronto, ready to begin the challenges of his new position.
Reflections: Name, Ancestry and Nobility
Kunit's given name at birth was Ludwig; it is not known why or when he changed it to Luigi, but it must have been early in life, for by the time he had emigrated to North America he was known solely as Luigi. It was a curious decision, given the strength of his attachment to German musical traditions in general, and the music of Ludwig van Beethoven in particular.
It is not clear how Kunits felt about his Serbian ancestry in relation to his Viennese birth; indeed it is difficult to prove that his ancestry was indeed Serbian. Without further research into his family tree, the only corroborating evidence of his Serbian background is a genealogy in the family Bible, and oral legends passed down by Kunits's sister Josephine. The surname Kunits is said to be derived from the Serbian patronym Kunič, but documentary evidence to support this is lacking. According to an essay in the book Serbs in Ontario, Kunits became more aware of his Serbian roots in Chicago and Pittsburgh; the author writes ‘from then on, von Kunits always maintained that he was by descent a Serbian though his birthplace and training was Austrian’.Footnote 29 No source is given for this assertion, but the article is based in part on an interview with Kunits's daughter Aglaia, and it seems likely that she is the source of this observation. During his lifetime in Toronto, little if any mention was made of Kunits's Serbian ancestry. It was not a secret, though, and indeed it was mentioned in at least one obituary.Footnote 30 Seven years after Kunits's death, John Murray Gibbon in his book Canadian Mosaic stated that ‘to Serbia Canada owes a special debt for it was a Serbian, Dr. Luigi von Kunits, who laid the foundations of musical Toronto’.Footnote 31 Despite his linguistic prowess, Serbian does not seem to have been one of the languages Kunits mastered. His musical interests were solidly Viennese, and his broader cultural interests centred on ancient Greece, as the naming of his three children attests. His Serbian heritage seems to have been a matter of private interest, perhaps even personal pride, but it was not something that he regarded as an important part of his public persona. In public, he identified himself (for instance, in ads in The Canadian Journal of Music) as an ‘Austrian violinist’ until the end of the First World War (even though Canada and Austria were on opposite sides of the conflict). And indeed he remained an Austrian citizen until 4 April 1925, when he became a naturalized Canadian citizen, along with his wife and son.Footnote 32
The issue of his nobility is similarly open to differing interpretations. One obituary noted that ‘he had the unaffected simplicity of true greatness, laying aside his title of Baron’.Footnote 33 This certainly seems to be true, and was no doubt well advised. The use of the surname von Kunits in Toronto was not only acceptable, it may even have lent an air of authenticity to his reputation as a representative of the great European musical traditions. To have called himself ‘Edler von Varasdin’ in North America, however, would have been to invite accusations of living in the fantasy land of a Viennese operetta rather than in the real world. Writing for The Canadian Journal of Music, he sometimes signed articles ‘Varasdin’ or ‘Paul Varasdin,’ but this use of his hereditary aristocratic predicate was a secret joke to create a vaguely Central European sounding nom de plume, rather than a celebration of his aristocracy. To the end of his life, however, he continued to include the aristocratic ‘von’ in his surname, even after this usage was eliminated in Austria by the Adelsaufhebungsgesetz (Law on the Abolition of Nobility) of 1919. He was not alone in this regard; the law ended the use of ‘von’ for official purposes, but artists were allowed to continue using it as part of a performing or stage name, and many did so (a notable example is Herbert von Karajan). It should be noted, though, that Kunits's father did not use the aristocratic ‘von’ in his name, so the suspicion remains that it was casually added by Luigi upon crossing the Atlantic. In general, Kunits adapted well from the world of aristocratic privilege in which he had been raised to the democratic egalitarianism of North America; he can be forgiven for clinging to this innocent reminder of past glories. He was certainly no aristocrat in terms of financial circumstances; after his death, his widow was forced to open a music studio to make ends meet, and she in turn left just $28 to her children at the time of her death in 1940.
The Toronto Years
Colonel Albert Edward Gooderham (1861–1935) was born into a wealthy family that operated one of the largest distilleries in Canada: Gooderham & Worts in Toronto. He was also one of the leading philanthropists in Toronto, and invested large amounts of money in two projects, both of which involved Luigi von Kunits – the Canadian Academy of Music and the Toronto Symphony.
The Academy's goals were to provide advanced training in music to Canadian students, and attract leading teachers from Europe. First opened as the Columbian Conservatory of Music in 1911, the Academy moved into spacious new quarters in 1912, and at the same time bought out one of its local rivals, the Metropolitan School of Music. These arrangements were complete just in time for Kunits to begin his duties in September 1912.
Although his most recent visit to Toronto had been six years before taking up this new appointment, Kunits knew the city fairly well and had an established reputation there. His first appearances in Toronto had been in the period from 1903 to 1907 when, as the concertmaster of the Pittsburgh Orchestra, he had been heard not only as the leader of the orchestra, but also in movements from concertos by Paganini, Mendelssohn, Tchaikovsky and Paur (the orchestra's conductor). He had also given at least one solo recital locally. Kunits was exactly the right person for the Academy job: he offered the glamour and prestige of an aristocratic lineage and close artistic connections with some of the leading contemporary European musicians, but also a clear sighted and well-informed approach to music making in North America, based on his long experience in Chicago and Pittsburgh. His polished manners, profound learning and varied musical talents, along with his charming and supportive American wife, ensured a quick and smooth introduction to the leading music circles in Toronto.
His first local recital took place on 18 September 1912 in the King Edward Hotel, and was given together with two other musicians who had been newly appointed to the Academy: the pianist Walter Kirschbaum, also of Vienna, and the baritone Francis Fischer Powers, of New York. Within a few years Kirschbaum would return to Vienna and Powers to New York; Kunits, on the other hand, would stay in Toronto for the rest of his life.
Kunits built up an impressive violin studio. He had trained excellent violinists before arriving in Toronto (notably Vera Barstow, who after Kunits's death retired from the concert stage and became a sought after violin teacher in Los Angeles), but in Toronto the number of talented students who passed through his studio multiplied. Some were child prodigies, as Kunits himself had been, including Doris Robins, Manny Roth, Albert Steinberg and Bettina Vegara. In a recital in 1922 at age 16, Roth emulated his teacher's multiple talents by playing the Beethoven Violin Concerto, performing the slow movement of Haydn's ‘Emperor’ Quartet as first violinist, and conducting a Mozart symphony.Footnote 34 Two years later he joined the Philadelphia Orchestra, and remained in it for nearly 50 years, retiring in 1972; among his colleagues there was fellow Kunits pupil Louis Gesensway, a member from 1925 to 1971.Footnote 35 Quite a few of Kunits's pupils went on to play in the Toronto Symphony, including two concertmasters who served 50 years apart, Moses Garten (1922–1926) and Albert Pratz (1971–1979); another former pupil, Berul Sugarman, was still playing in the orchestra over 50 years after Kunits's death.Footnote 36 Other students went into different professions, including the CBC music producer Geoffrey Waddington, the composer Ernest Dainty, the music educator Harvey Perrin, the conductor Paul Scherman and the grocery magnate Leon Weinstein.Footnote 37
A challenge to Kunits's position as the leading violin pedagogue in Toronto materialized when the Polish violinist Henri Czaplinski arrived in September 1921 to set up a studio in the rival Hambourg Conservatory. Czaplinski lured a number of pupils away from Kunits. One of the defectors was Maurice Solway, who contrasted the two teachers’ approaches as follows: ‘As a student of César Thomson, [Czaplinski] was an exponent of the Belgian school of playing … von Kunits was more interested in developing the general musical instincts of a player by accompanying him from the piano [rather] than concentrating on the ways and means of solving technical problems. Czaplinski, on the other hand, knew all the tricks, and demonstrated them himself … he was also adept at teaching students how to practise intelligently. In the final analysis he was simply a better violinist than von Kunits, with a far greater ability for self-expression.’Footnote 38 Harry Adaskin, another student who switched from Kunits to Czaplinski, quoted Kunits as remarking bitterly to him about his move as follows: ‘I'm not surprised. It's a well know fact that, if a Jewish student has a choice of a Jewish or a non-Jewish teacher, he will always choose the Jewish teacher.’Footnote 39 The quotation is hearsay; as Ezra Schabas remarks, ‘one would not have expected such a comment from von Kunits’.Footnote 40 But according to Adaskin, soon after he switched teachers, ‘every single pupil of talent that Kunits had, promptly left him and joined Czaplinski's class. It was a mass exodus. The poor man's humiliation must have been appalling’.Footnote 41 The challenge from Czaplinski was short-lived, for he left Toronto in 1923; in 1924 he became a member of the Philadelphia Orchestra, before returning to Poland in 1933.
Kunits's work as a violin pedagogue was not confined to training violinists in his studio. For the Frederick Harris Music Company, he revised The Violin by Berthold Tours, a classic violin instruction manual that was first published in the nineteenth century by Novello. In his preface to the primer, Kunits praises the basic principles of Tours's method, but goes on to explain that his editorial interventions involved applying the systematic approach typical of Ševčík to the way that Tours introduces and explains bowing and fingering, in order to bring the primer into line with modern ideas about violin playing. Kunits also published a book of scales and arpeggios for the violin with Frederick Harris, which was intended for use by students at the Toronto Conservatory of Music (which absorbed the Canadian Academy of Music in 1924).Footnote 42 A companion volume of Technical Work for the beginning violinist presents 10 simple but musically rewarding études, composed by Kunits.Footnote 43
Kunits continued to be active as a performing violinist throughout his years in Toronto, appearing as a recitalist, a chamber musician (including at least one performance with his rival Czaplinski)Footnote 44 and a soloist with orchestra. The violin on which he played has variously been identified as an Amati,Footnote 45 a GuarneriFootnote 46 and a Stradivarius.Footnote 47 It is not clear whether he owned instruments by all three of these prestigious makers in the course of his career, or if one or more of these writers is in error about the maker of his instrument. Kunits also owned a viola d'amore and performed on it in public in Toronto on at least one occasion.Footnote 48 He is said to have composed two Trios for viola d'amore, violin and bass that were published in Vienna, but no trace of these works has been found.Footnote 49
As a chamber musician, Kunits was most active in Toronto as the leader of the Academy Quartet, which was in existence from 1914 to 1924. The group concentrated on the mainstream chamber music repertoire, including all the Beethoven string quartets, but it also gave the local premieres of Kunits's own String Quartet in D minor (on 3 February 1915), and Schoenberg's String Quartet No. 1 (on 31 May 1915).Footnote 50 Another of Kunits's chamber works heard locally was his four-movement Viola Sonata, completed on 30 March 1919 and dedicated to Alfred Bruce, the violist of the Academy String Quartet.Footnote 51 Kunits himself gave what seems to have been the first public performance of the Viola Sonata, with Frank S. Welsman on piano, as part of an Academy String Quartet recital on 15 January 1921. The Academy Quartet disbanded when the Canadian Academy of Music ceased to exist after it was folded into the Royal Conservatory of Music in 1924. Kunits continued to be heard locally in duo recitals, including one with Welsman on 14 January 1925 that again featured his Viola Sonata.
In the same year that he became a founding member of the Academy String Quartet, Kunits started up another venture that would make a significant contribution to the musical life of Toronto and beyond. In May 1914, The Canadian Journal of Music was launched; it appeared in monthly or bimonthly issues up until December 1919.Footnote 52 Kunits was editor for all but the first few issues of the journal, and wrote a good deal of the copy for it himself. Kathleen McMorrow notes that ‘the total of his signed contributions is well over 75,000 words’, with perhaps an equal number of words in unsigned notices and concert reviews.Footnote 53 Reference is often made to famous European musicians with whom he had personal contact (Brahms, Goldmark, Ysaÿe) and to his teachers (Král and Ševčík) and students (especially Vera Barstow, whose career is tracked in almost obsessive detail). There are regular puff pieces celebrating the career and achievements of his friends and colleagues, but these are no more numerous than was the norm for journalistic practices of the era. His editorials and other longer articles for the journal demonstrate the range and depth of his knowledge. His writing style is charming and graceful, and the subjects that he covers are wide-ranging. As McMorrow notes, his reviews ‘display critical intelligence, attention to detail, and absence of cliché’, while the editorial essays present ‘broader ethical reflections, philosophic explorations of what, for a musician, the good life might mean’.Footnote 54 All told, his work for The Canadian Journal of Music was an impressive achievement, given that journalism was new to him and that he was not working in his native language.
Kunits's writing activities were by no means confined to The Canadian Journal of Music. He wrote programme notes and newspaper articles, kept up correspondence with friends and former students, and frequently gave lectures which he wrote out ahead of time. It is sometimes stated that he wrote a book about Beethoven titled The Hero as Musician.Footnote 55 In reality, this is a privately published 16-page pamphlet; the text, as the title page states, is ‘An address delivered at the First Unitarian Church of Toronto at the Evening Service of Sunday, March 2nd, 1913’.Footnote 56 Kunits attended the Unitarian Church on Jarvis Street throughout his years in Toronto; he often played the violin at its services and officially joined the church in 1920.Footnote 57 The Beethoven lecture concludes by touching on ‘something that brings [Beethoven] particularly near to us Unitarians, and that is his spiritual convictions’.Footnote 58 Constructing a view of Beethoven's spiritual beliefs from remarks in the correspondence, Kunits claims to ‘discover a gradual evolution from the anthropomorphous conception of the Deity, which was but the natural result of his Roman Catholic training, to an all-embracing pantheistic comprehension of the Eternal Principal’.Footnote 59 In portraying Beethoven as a Unitarian avant la lettre, Kunits was expressing his own deep affinity for the composer. Augustus Bridle reported that ‘[Kunits] found in Beethoven, as he said only a few months before his death, the most permanent values in music’.Footnote 60 In 1927, to commemorate the centenary of the death of Beethoven, Kunits conducted the Toronto Symphony in the funeral march from the Eroica Symphony. Four years later, Ernest MacMillan would conduct the same orchestra and the same music, this time in commemoration of the death of Kunits.
Notwithstanding his importance as a string player and his laudable initiative in editing The Canadian Journal of Music, Kunits's claim to fame rests mainly on his work as a conductor. His first performances locally in this capacity were with the Toronto Symphony Band, a 35-piece wind ensemble, formed in 1915. Kunits conducted the band for a week of open-air concerts at Scarborough beach in the Toronto suburbs in July 1915. There were repeat engagements there and in other local summer entertainment locations in subsequent years. The band provided employment for some of the musicians of Frank Welsman's Toronto Symphony Orchestra in the summer months; the orchestra itself, however, ceased operations in 1918 because of straitened circumstances as a result of the First World War.
It was to be nearly five years before a successor orchestra was assembled. In 1922, under the direction of Kunits, the New Symphony Orchestra began rehearsing, and gave its first concert on 23 April 1923. Throughout Kunits's tenure, the concerts began at 5 pm, to allow patrons to get home in time for their evening meal and to enable musicians to play better paying engagements in movie-theatre orchestras. The musicians in the orchestra initially played for next to nothing; the sole source of income was the sale of tickets (each member received one share of the revenues; Kunits was given ten shares). In 1923 a board of directors was formed under Albert Gooderham, and the players were guaranteed a set fee; by special agreement with the Toronto Musicians’ Protective Association (the local musicians’ union), the honorarium was allowed to be considerably less than scale. In 1927 the charter of Welsman's orchestra was inherited, and the name was changed to the Toronto Symphony Orchestra. The musicians now received union scale, which increased their pay by 50 per cent. At the start of the 1923–24 season, the orchestra had boasted 27 violins, 10 violas, 8 cellos, 6 basses and 24 winds and percussion, for a total membership of 75. With the enhanced professionalization of operations, the number of players dropped somewhat; 64 players were listed for the 1929–30 season. The orchestra came to national attention with the introduction of radio broadcasts on the Canadian National Railways network in its eighth season. The first of the 25 Sunday radio broadcasts by the orchestra was given on 20 October 1929 (less than a week before the stock market crash). Kunits introduced children's concerts as well, with a rather strict educational focus; students had to prepare ahead of time for the experience of listening to an orchestra, and at the end of the concert they were encouraged to answer a test that was printed on the back of the programme.
Under Kunits's leadership, the programming of the orchestra was conservative in nature, concentrating on the mainstream German orchestral repertoire from Haydn to Brahms (with good doses of Wagner as well), to which were added the most popular works from the Russian and French repertoire (Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, Franck). Any modern music that was heard was traditional in idiom, and usually English or Canadian, with a few works by US composers whom Kunits had taught (Charles Wakefield Cadman) or befriended (Louis Victor Saar, Adolph Martin Foerster) during his years in Pittsburgh. Modern English music performed included Elgar's Cello Concerto (played by Leo Smith in its Canadian premiere in 1924), and works by Arnold Bax and Constant Lambert, as well as music by little known composers such as James Lyon (The Miracle of the Roses), Arthur Wade (Symphonic Phantasie) and F.W. de Massi-Hardman (Manx Rhapsody). Kunits gave a fair hearing to Canadian composers, including works by Thomas J. Crawford (Variations for Orchestra on an Original Theme), W.O. Forsyth (Romanza, Op. 17), Albert Ham (Three Dances in the Old Style), Francis Paget Macklem (‘The Broken Rose’ for tenor and orchestra, and a Harp Concerto subtitled ‘Lavender and Old Lace,’ premiered by his wife), Ernest MacMillan (Overture in A major; on the same concert Kunits played his own Violin Concerto in E minor), Colin McPhee (Piano Concerto No. 2), Clarence Lucas (Overture ‘Macbeth,’ Op. 39) and Léo Roy (Danse de fête canadienne no. 3).Footnote 61
Kunits was a cautious orchestra builder rather than a galvanizing leader. Thanks in large part to the generous supply of violinists from his own studio, the strings of the orchestra played well and carried the other sections along. As a conductor, Kunits did not command a loyal and devoted following by the force of his personality; he was respected rather than loved or admired. Experimentation, innovation and dynamism – characteristics that his contemporaries such as Stokowski and Koussevitzky brought to their orchestra building tasks in Philadelphia and Boston respectively – were in short supply in Toronto. An obituary in the New York Times reported of Kunits's conducting that ‘he did not wield the baton with fire and dynamic energy as did some of his contemporaries, but achieved results with directness and simplicity that had nothing of the showman in it’.Footnote 62 The violinist Berul Sugarman, a Kunits pupil who had joined the orchestra at the age of 16, stated that Kunits ‘was not a showoff; he believed the music had to show itself. He was closer to the Toscanini ideal’.Footnote 63 But Kunits was close to Toscanini in only one respect – his preference for music of the past and disdain for the music of his own time.
Kunits's aesthetic and musical allegiances were strongly rooted in the nineteenth century. Performing Schoenberg's String Quartet No. 1 (1905) represented the furthest he was prepared to go in terms of concessions to the twentieth century. Support for Leo Ornstein in The Canadian Journal of Music was likely occasioned by the fact that this enfant terrible of American music was closely associated with Kunits's star pupil Vera Barstow, rather than any sympathy for or affinity with Ornstein's music.Footnote 64 Kunits did not compose much during his years in Toronto, and the major work from that period – the Viola Sonata of 1919 – was defiantly Brahmsian in style, in much the same idiom as his String Quartet that had been written almost 30 years earlier.
Kunits expressed his ideas on modern music most forcefully in a newspaper article that was provocatively titled ‘Bolshevism in Music: Another “Hymn of Hate”‘.Footnote 65 The article dates from 1930, less than a year before his death. He begins by approvingly quoting Paderewski, who had recently stated ‘I cannot understand the meaning of most of the music that is being written today’. He then relates the story of the Emperor's new clothes, and draws a parallel between that fable and a discussion he had witnessed among a group of local musicians who were praising ‘a few impressionistic and futuristic lucubrations of contemporary composers’: just as the citizens were afraid to tell the Emperor that he had no clothes on, so the musicians were afraid to criticize the new music. Not so Kunits; he writes that he preferred ‘ragtime and jazz music because it was at least sincere and intelligible, while the unalloyed anarchism of the musical cubist seemed simply a carefully gotten-up fake on the part of impotent and improperly trained minds, who, in their craving for conspicuous notoriety, do their utmost to create an artificial, contagious taste for compound ugliness’. Kunits ends the article, characteristically, by quoting a Latin proverb: ‘Mundus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur’.Footnote 66 Like many of his contemporaries – Richard Strauss, Jean Sibelius, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Sergei Rachmaninoff and many others – Kunits turned his back on radical modernism in music, both as a composer and as a performer.
Closing Thoughts
Kunits left behind no recordings, either as a conductor or as a violinist, and thus his legacy as a performer is difficult to assess. Reviewers in Toronto wrote positively of his playing; when he performed his own Violin Concerto with the New Symphony Orchestra in 1924, a local reviewer wrote that ‘Mr. von Kunits astonished his hearers with his masterly technique, his bravura passages being always clearly defined and a fine tone maintained’.Footnote 67 But music critics tended not to write harshly of local performers in those days – it was, after all, a small world in which they operated. As noted above, Maurice Solway stated that Henri Czaplinski was a better violinist than Kunits, and Czaplinski ended up as a rank-and-file violinist in the Philadelphia Orchestra, playing alongside two of Kunits's own former pupils. As a conductor, Kunits achieved similarly equivocal results. During the years Kunits led the Toronto Symphony, Stokowski – starting with an orchestra of similar ability – created a world-class ensemble in Philadelpia, one of the three best in North America. Kunits could be credited with no such achievement. Indeed, Ezra Schabas notes that ‘good as von Kunits may have been with the TSO, MacMillan [his successor] brought the orchestra to a higher level almost immediately’.Footnote 68 Harry Adaskin, who studied with Kunits for four years and played in the Academy String Quartet with him, sums up the man as follows:
Von Kunits … was a well educated man with a 19th-century Viennese background. He was a good violinist, played the piano quite well, and was a capable conductor and composer. He spoke several languages, and read the Greek classics fluently in the original. His general personality was one of amiable detachment.Footnote 69
Though this could be read as, and is probably intended to be, damning with faint praise, one is nevertheless left with an impression of the scope of Kunits's knowledge and achievements. Few professional musicians active today could boast of such wide learning.
It was Kunits's fate to be a generalist in an era of increasing specialization. He was a talented violinist, conductor, composer and writer about music, but never achieved international fame in any of these areas. Had he arrived in Toronto a generation earlier, his impact would have been all the stronger. Indeed, if he had remained in Pittsburgh, he likely would have thrived to a greater degree. The culture of classical music in the United States was more strongly indebted to the Central European models that Kunits represented than was the case in Canada, where the influence of British music making remained decisive until after the Second World War. Leo Smith, a contemporary and friend of Kunits, and himself an émigré from England, captured the nuances of Kunits's position in Canadian musical life with insight and poignancy in an editorial that he wrote shortly after Kunits's death:
When Dr. Von Kunits came to Toronto the first great gain seemed that of strengthening musical traditions. He had come from Vienna, had played with Brahms, and could impart that composer's thoughts, not from hearsay, but from actual intercourse. This, after living some years in a community which considered Brahms as ‘news’, was to me an event of great moment. The musical education of England of the last decade of the last century, and perhaps the first of this, had taught us that everything Brahms did was in the category of excellent – that you could neither change it, add to it, nor remove from it, without impairing its value. I doubt, however, if Canadians had ever felt this. I doubt also if we think quite as highly of Brahms [now] as we did … And so it was perhaps inevitable that Dr. von Kunits thought Toronto a little lacking in appreciation of the real nineteenth-century German musical culture, and we of Toronto felt perhaps that Dr. von Kunits was prone to worship an ideal with a devotion that we could not always understand.Footnote 70
In the final analysis, Kunits may not have been an intimate acquaintance of Brahms, nor an outstanding conductor, nor a virtuoso violinist, but he was certainly an accomplished musician, and he did much to improve the musical life of Toronto. Norman Del Mar quotes Kunits's contemporary Richard Strauss as saying of himself, ‘I may not be a first-rate composer, but I am a first-class second-rate composer’.Footnote 71 With a suitable adjustment of standards, the same might be said of Kunits; he was not a first-rate musician, but he was a first-class second-rate musician. There would have been no scope for a first-rate musician in Toronto during the 1920s when Kunits was working there. He brought the musical life of Toronto up to his own level, which was a good deal higher than where it had been before; it would be up to his successors to complete the job.
