His heart swells with the appreciating returns from underappreciated appreciation teachers

My Hollywood correspondent, Duke Russell, who has his philosophical moods, writes to comment on a recent report of mine on High School Night at the Philharmonic.

“It brought back great memories of Hollywood High,” he says, “where we were all required to take a class called Music and Art Appreciation. Ten weeks of listening to classical music. Ten weeks of learning about art.

“I was not exactly an honor student. I was interested in baseball and basketball and the beach. But of all the classes I took, music appreciation was one of the highlights. Chopin, Mozart, Rossini, Tchaikovsky, Beethoven and many others entered my pool-hall life and have been my good friends ever since. . . .”

I, too, remember music and art appreciation, and have been forever grateful for those two required classes that seemed so onerous to most pupils at the time.

I took them at Belmont High School, in the early 1930s. I was living then in an apartment house on Witmer. It had a billiard room that was much classier than a mere plebeian pool hall. Only elderly gentlemen whose worst vice was smoking cigars played there, but I spent most of my evenings shooting pool in that mahogany-paneled room when I should have been upstairs studying. My father taught me three things: pool, poker and H. L. Mencken. He considered them fundamental to any young man’s education.

At school, I too was most interested in basketball, and I remember with what reluctance I dragged myself once a week to the classroom where a teacher whose name I no longer remember was supposed to teach us an appreciation for art and music.

We had radios at home, and occasionally I heard opera; but mostly it was prizefights, football games, Jack Benny and Amos ‘n’ Andy.

Adolescents did not then own expensive stereo equipment and cabinets full of tapes and records. Nor did expensive color art books decorate every cocktail table.

I knew nothing of Mozart or Michelangelo.

But to this day, like Russell, when I hear Chopin, Mozart, Rossini, Tchaikovsky or Beethoven my mind drifts back to those warm afternoons in the classroom when the teacher sat immobile beside the school’s precious windup Victrola, watching our faces hopefully for some light of response, while the voice of the great Caruso--thin, scratchy, tinny and remote, but still magnificent--came out of the walnut box. It might be “La Donna e mobile’ or “O Sole Mio,” both of which came to represent grand opera for me.

I also will never forget the Anvil Chorus from Verdi’s “Il Trovatore.” How I loved all those people singing at the tops of their lungs while the blacksmith kept the beat by banging on his anvil. What a song!

I also learned to appreciate the thrilling cadenzas of the sopranos. I don’t know who they were now. Probably Tebaldi and Galli-Curci, or maybe Lily Pons, but I loved the way their voices rose and fell, sweeter than any other sound I knew.

I don’t know whether the teacher anticipated my taste or whether she caused it to be what it is, but I cannot today hear the quartet from “Rigoletto” or the sextet from “Lucia di Lammermoor” without feeling once more those thrills running up and down my spine as they did in that schoolroom.

Throw in a few Strauss waltzes, something from “The Marriage of Figaro,” and the Triumphal March from “Aida,” and you will have a pretty good idea of my musical foundations.

Of course we never let on to the teacher that we actually appreciated that music. If you were the first-string center on the Class B basketball team you didn’t let on that you liked classical music, except for letting go in the locker room now and then with a chorus of “O Sole Mio,” which was always rendered with heavy mock bravado (and in the original Italian, or my best imitation of it).

So I don’t know whether that poor teacher ever knew that she really was teaching music appreciation, just by doggedly playing those records over and over again while her pupils either went to sleep or passed notes to each other or engaged in that most blissful of classroom activities--daydreaming.

To this day, when I’m at the Hollywood Bowl or the Music Center listening to the symphony, I have a tendency to drift off in daydreams. I wonder if that’s conditioned by my music appreciation class.

I don’t have as vivid a memory of my art appreciation class, but I do remember that it was regarded as a drag, like music appreciation, and we took it only because we had to.

I don’t believe we ever even made a trip to the museum, to see whatever art it then had, but we did see pictures of such classics as Michelangelo’s “David” and “Whistler’s Mother” and even some contemporaries, such as Picasso, so that later, when I was invited to a cocktail party and was asked by some sophisticated older college girl whether I was familiar with the work of Picasso, I could say, “Oh, yes--isn’t he the one who paints those two-faced women?”

Sometimes today I wonder how much of my small talk about art and music at cocktail parties derives straight from those old art and music appreciation classes, and that teacher who did her best, hoping that some of it might stick.

I urge high school students not to scorn those classes--they may be learning in them all they’ll ever know about art and music.