Boston Pops Poem by gershon hepner

POPS

When it came to pops
Arthur was the tops.
By Charles’s famous River
Fiedler could deliver
four hundred thousand fans,
more popular than Franz,
or Ludwig, Amadeus,
or Johann, with his players
who loved Boston, common,
untouchable, yet Brahmin,
performing pops, not caviar
for those who were unsavvier
than those whose brows were higher
than Fiedler when on fire.

Alan Chapman, broadcasting a performance of Manuel de Falla’s Three Cornered Hat on KUSC, recalls that Arthur Fiedler, conductor of the Boston Pops Orchestra, once performed this in Boston on a Labor Day before four hundred thousand people in what may have been a record audience for so-called classical music. Alan’s comment was:

I'll save it for the next time I have a Fiedler recording. In the meantime, can I put it on the KUSC blog?

My composer friend Bill Goldstein tells me this story about Arthur Fiedler:

I was in a box overlooking the stage at Symphony Hall during a rehearsal of Mah Na Ma Nah. Fiedler looked up at me and asked, 'Mr. Goldstein, how's the tempo? ' I thought it needed to go faster, so I asked him to pick up the tempo. He responded, 'Please give me your tempo.' I beat out the tempo for a couple of measures, at which point he looked up at me and said, 'Well. that's exactly the tempo I had been taking! ' That was the end of that discussion. The recording was fine.

1/27/10