Chapter 10 - Last Years in Texas

Summary

Since, beginning in 1960, I was co-chair of the Dallas Chamber Music Society with Dorothea Kelley, I had easy contact with some of the groups we engaged to perform each year and also with the agent who provided many of these groups. Her name was Mariedi Anders. Mariedi was born in Austria, the daughter of a prominent judge in Vienna and had to leave after the Anschluss in 1938. Her husband was a businessman. When they came to the United States they lived in New York and had a difficult time financially. She was a hostess in a restaurant while he was a boiler-stoker in a large apartment house. Their luck changed when they settled in San Francisco and she started an artists’ bureau representing mostly European groups and prominent European musicians. Both Mariedi and her husband became very successful in their occupations, and because she had artists in whom we were interested, the Dallas Chamber Music Society very often turned to her to help us in bringing them to Dallas. She came to Texas frequently and we became friends. She commissioned me to write a solo harp piece for the great Nicanor Zabaleta, one of her artists, and a piano trio for the Alma Trio.

Several years later, I had the pleasure of visiting with her and her husband in their beautiful home in San Francisco and found out that Mariedi's husband was a collector of canes and chess sets. He had hundreds of canes from all over the world made of the most exotic woods, and chess sets from all over the world that were most fascinating. Incidentally, the Anderses were also neigh¬bors of Herbert Fromm's twin brother, Alfred, and we all had a fantastic time together during my visit. At my visit to the Anders house Mariedi told me that she was a niece of Eugene Ormandy, the famous conductor of the Philadelphia Orchestra. She told me that the last time she had visited Dallas she heard the Dallas Symphony Orchestra perform my Elegy for string orchestra and liked it so much that she sent it to Ormandy. He must have been favorably impressed: soon after this conversation I found out that my work was the only American work he took to China on the Philadelphians’ first trip to that country.