Harp Column Blogs: Carl SwansonArchive

Mildred, being the intelligent and shrewd business woman that she was,  clearly understood her place on the concert circuit.  It was to entertain.  Her performances were as much shows  as concerts.  She traveled with many different harps on her tours, from tiny lap harps to perhaps an old single action wreck (that she attributed to Marie Antoinette!), to her gold Lyon  & Healy.  Her last driver told me that she once counted 26 harps on stage. They would be spread around  and she would talk to the audience about them, spinning fanciful tales, more fiction than fact, about the origin and history of each instrument.  She would also strum some little melody on each of the instruments.  It was the sum total of  the various elements; the exotic instruments, the entertaining  storytelling, the virtuoso playing, presented by a woman unlike anyone they had ever seen before, with patrician bearing, blond hair piled on her head and wearing an elaborate and elegant gown, that left her show, and her, imbedded in their memory. When I first started playing gigs many years ago, someone would invariably  come up to me and say "You know, when I was a child in Omaha, I remember going to this harp concert..."  It was always Mildred.  She played everywhere, and it was an experience that those who heard her remembered for the rest of their lives.

Underneath Mildred's astute business sense, her at times egregious obsession with money, her shrewd instincts for survival and self promotion, was a profound love of the harp.  I don't think she could really conceive of herself without the harp.  And when she was not using the harp to make money, she was a serious, dedicated, and very well trained harpist.

According to one source, it was Salzedo who encouraged the young Mildred to study with Renie(Mildred never studied with Salzedo). For years, most likely starting just after the end of World War I and continuing for the next 35 years, and broken only by the years during World War II, Mildred  went to France for about 3 or 4 months every summer to study with the woman many regard as the greatest harpist in the history of the instrument, Henriette Renie.  The reason, and the goal each summer, was to choose and learn music that would be used for the coming concert season.  I had long been under the (false) impression that Mildred's concerts were for the most part filled with music of a bygone era.  Cute salon pieces that have long since fallen out of favor.  I made a call to Mildred's former secretary( and a very good friend of mine) to check my facts, and was astonished to find out how wrong I was.  Mildred not only played serious repertoire, but she varied it considerably from season to season.  It would have been much easier to do what Zabaleta did,  and play the same program year in and year out.  But she didn't do that, and I can only guess that it was because she really wanted to keep herself interested in what she was doing.

She and Renie would choose pieces that offered a varied and interesting program, and then Mildred would work all summer, frequently having 2 or even 3 coaching sessions per week with Renie. Here are two of the programs Mildred played.  There were many others as well.  These are exact copies of the programs.

Part I

Pastorale Variations                                             Samuel-Rousseau
Bourree                                                    J.S. Bach
Chanson de Guillot Martin                                    Albert Perilhou

Part II

Short talk on the history of the harp illustrated on ancient instruments.

Part III

March of the Men of Harlech,                                arr. By John Thomas
an old Welsh Air
Les Follets                                                    Hasselmens
La  Source                                                    Zabel

INTERMISSION

Part IV

Four Dances composed for Mildred Dilling               David Watkins
Renaissance Dance
Bolero                                                  from Dance Suite, Aug. 1978
Hungarian Flute Dance
Fire Dance                                            Composed in 1961

Part V

Torre Bermeja                                            Isaac Albeniz(1860-1909)
Claire de Lune                                            Debussy
Legende                                                Henriette Renie(1875-1956)
After the poem 'Les Elfes' by Leconte de Lisle
************************************************
Another program:

Part I

Gavotte from the Violin Suite in E major                J.S. Bach
Siciliana XVI century                                      Respighi
Tic-toc-choc                                      Couperin
Capriccio                                              Scarlatti
Impromptu                                      Faure

Part II

La Jeune et la Veille                                Godefroid
Minute Waltz                                        Chopin
Etude in D flat(Un Sospiro)                    Liszt-Renie
The Fountain                                    Zabel

INTERMISSION

Part III

Torre Bermeja                                        Albeniz
Rain in the Garden(Jardin Mouille)                    De la Presle
Claire de Lune                                        Debussy
Prominade Matinale                                    Renie

Part IV

Gray Donkeys on the Road to El-Azib            Tournier
The Forest Pool( Vers la Source)                        Tournier
Legende                                            Renie

Miss Dilling uses a Lyon & Healy harp exclusively
Columbia Records            His Master's Voice(British)Records
Columbia Artists Inc.                Personal Direction:  Horace J. Parnelle
113 W. 57th St.
New York 19 NY

Some of the other repertoire that found its way onto her tour programs were the B flat Concerto of Handel, Etude de Concert of Tournier, Impromptu of Roussel, Liebestraum of Liszt/Renie, Colorado Trail of Grandjany, Granada of Albinez, Prelude in C of Prokofiev, the Hindemith Sonata, and there were others too.  The only Salzedo piece I can find on her programs is Song in the Night.  Her encores were usually  the Mazurka of Schuecker, and the Music Box of Poenitz.  The programming that she chose for these long and arduous tours stands as testament to her very considerable talent and training.

Mildred encouraged many young Americans to study with Renie too, and many did. But typically, there was an ulterior motive.  When a family expressed an interest in sending their daughter(or son)to study with Renie, Mildred would approach the parents and offer to be the child's chaperone, for a fee of course.  This way she could at least defray the cost of the trip, if not make money on it.  One former student told me that she was 27 when she decided to go spend a summer in France with Renie.  When Mildred approached her parents with the chaperone idea, they just laughed and said that their daughter could take care of herself.

The same woman told me that almost every morning Mildred would come to her and ask  innocently "Marian, do you have any plans this afternoon?"  She quickly learned to have (real or fictional) plans at the ready.  Because if she said no, she wasn"t planning anything in particular, Mildred would have her changing strings, tuning harps, bringing mail to the post office, etc. "There was another student there who never seemed to figure that out," she told me, "and Mildred ran her ragged all summer."

Renie died in 1956, and that brought an end to the stays at the seaside resort town of Etretat on the Normandy coast, which is where Renie taught during the summer.

I regret that I never heard Mildred in her prime.  I'm not sure why she didn't record more than she did.  During her best years(the 1920's into the 1950's) recording techniques were not the best, particularly for harp.  That may be the reason that she didn't pursue it.  Or maybe there wasn't enough money in it for her.

I only heard Mildred in concert once, and it was at the very end of her life.  The harp was hideously out of tune. HIDEOUSLY!  Mildred played some very difficult pieces on that program, and she really shouldn't have been playing them anymore.  But what struck me was the obvious fact that, earlier in her career, she must have had a very formidable technique.  You could still see that.

What's interesting about Mildred is that she never tried to fit into the harp world.  She aimed her career at a general public who knew nothing about the harp.  Perhaps it was the lack of an 'official' orchestra or teaching position that frequently caused the harp world to not take her as seriously as I think it should have.  She was often seen by other harpists as being dowdy, or kitchy, and this is unfair and inaccurate in my opinion.  She had a concert career at least as active as the next major concert harpist who followed her, Zabaleta.  The main difference between the two was that Zabaleta became a major recording artist(with Deutsche Gramafone), recording an enormous amount of solo and concerto repertoire, and performing, in addition to a staggering number of solo recitals, many many concertos.  As far as I can tell, Mildred didn't record very much, and rarely performed concertos.

Next time:  The final curtain falls