Of Sonia's Doli, Grandfather's Fiddle, and the Changeling: The Fantasy Childhood of Leopold Stokowski

Abstract

For two generations critics of conductor Leopold Stokowski commented on his strange accent, inconsistent accounts of his origins, birth date and childhood. Hostile and influential critics averse to Stokowski's music making and to his life style created a Stokowski stereotype based largely on these inconsistencies in which the conductor was summed up as "charlatan, poseur and phony." However the accent, romanticised childhood and family were so implausible and easy to expose that the motive behind their creation could not be charlatanry-if only because these transparent fabrications gave Stokowski's critics their most potent weapon against him. What then was his motive? It lay in his intense aversion to his real background and his creation of a "family romance" as an alternative, in accord with his adult conception of his own identity. Stokowski's fabrications, believed in the telling, protected him from the guilt and shame associated with his real London childhood.

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