Confessions of a Juilliard Renegade


I was probably the worst student who ever graduated from the Juilliard School of Music. I practiced my fiddle for two
hours a day (and hardly ever a minute more), but all other homework was limited to the IRT [Interborough Rapid Transit] subway, on which I commuted to and from Brooklyn. While my composer-teachers Bernard Wagenaar and Peter Mennin expounded on the orchestration of everyone from Palestrina to Stravinsky, I would doodle cartoons in my notebook. Often I found myself daydreaming, or ogling my voluptuous classmate, Leontyne Price, who rarely even said hello to me. (If only I could have told her then how, 30 years later, I would be in the Met Opera pit applauding her magnificent Aida performances!)

A faded copy of my Juilliard scholastic records has just been discovered in a desk drawer. It confirms that I entered Juilliard on Sept. 8, 1947 with a scholarship, and graduated in 1951 with a diploma (which meant I had taken no academic courses). My scholarship lasted only the first year, thanks to my notorious practice of hustling classmates in chess and Ping-Pong.

My graduation violin exam eked out a feeble B+, and my records include some Bs and even some disastrous Cs! I say disastrous because when, upon graduation, I was drafted into the Marine Corps for the Korean Conflict, my
grade-point-average was not in the top third, which was the cutoff for draft deferral. I begged dean Judson Ehrbar to erase the Cs, but he was incorruptible. He sternly advised me to “bite the bullet” and perform my patriotic duty—with a reminder that if I had studied instead of gambling, I might have been deferred.

All the same, my student days in Juilliard were carefree and enjoyable. I was, in the collegiate slang of that time, a “lounge lizard.” A feisty but sexually inexperienced teenager, I was content to converse with any attractive female student who would endure my banter. When not playing chess or Ping-Pong, I would linger in the cafeteria and chat with leotardclad dance students over their salads.

I hated orchestra rehearsals, and I loathed opera. The voice students had little to do with us string players, and they, like the organ majors, always seemed to me a secret society, with musical problems and terminology only a vocalist could appreciate. I recall Leontyne once, terribly upset, complaining to another voice major about a bad case of “morning phlegm.” Singers seemed forever obsessed with a dread of drafts, catching colds, and laryngitis, and used expressions like “weak middle register,” and “scooping high notes”— all meaningless to an aspiring Heifetz.

Finding an empty practice room in the old Juilliard was as rare as finding an unlocked bathroom on a New York subway. My classmate, an Israeli pianist named David Bar-Illan, came up with a solution: As long as he and I practiced in the same agreed-upon key, we could practice simultaneously in one room! This worked out rather well, unless he warmed up with the Chopin etude in chromatic sixths, which he rattled off with incredible accuracy and speed.

The occasional cacophony of me fiddling a Paganini caprice while David hammered out chromatic passages attracted curious eavesdroppers. Dean Ehrbar once crashed into the room shouting, “What the hell is going on here?” David winked at me and instantly knocked off his Chopin chromatic-sixths etude at a breakneck tempo. Our dean’s scowl dissolved. “Well, well, well,” he said, “this boy sure can get around on the piano!” Then, scolding us for “cheating Juilliard by sharing a practice room,” he left. (Incidentally, “this boy” went on to a brilliant concert career, and later became the chief spokesman for Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister of Israel.)

Needless to say, my two-hour practicing routine didn’t amount to a hill of beans compared to my colleagues. Yet I managed to get my Juilliard diploma with a minimal investment of time, energy, and concentration—unless chess and table tennis are considered valuable assets to success in the music business. Since I’d heard that less than l percent of Juilliard graduates in those days subsisted solely with their voice or instrument, (without teaching or supplementing their income by other means), I figured I could always make a living hustling Ping-
Pong and chess on the side.

All of which brings me to another academic adventure. After two years in the Marine Corps, my mother persuaded me to go for a master’s in music education at Columbia Teacher’s College. (“If you can’t play,” she said, “you can always teach!”) I plunked down my Juilliard diploma and records on the desk of the college admissions secretary. She stared at me as if I were a homeless man asking for a handout.

“Where are your academics?” she asked. “This diploma is practically useless for a music education degree. Well, we might accept a few of these instrumental courses for credit, but you should have taken academic courses for a bachelor of science, not a diploma!”

Suppressing my shock, I filled out the paperwork. I went home and started practicing the fiddle with a vengeance. The music business was in a depression. Toscanini had just retired, freeing the NBC musicians to gobble up any lucrative free-lance jobs in New York—and even though I had managed to practice my violin during my time as an
NCO in Camp Lejeune (as a supply clerk and cartoonist), I was not in shape for orchestral auditions. That Columbia admissions clerk had, in a negative manner, inspired me. I vowed to start practicing like never before, even in Juilliard—scales, etudes, concertos, excerpts—and to take every audition possible, anywhere, anytime. Teaching would only be a desperate last resort.

So, I found myself, a week later, in a classroom at the Horace Mann building, sitting amidst a motley group of mostly adult students. The class included swarthy men with turbans, nuns, ministers, middle-aged white-haired folk from Middle America, bald men with full beards, a stunning, young, freckled blond from Utah, an obese Asian man with acne and bad breath, and a few disgruntled music conservatory graduates like myself. And there sat I, the Juilliard graduate and former Marine, once again noodling cartoons in my notebook, bored to death, listening to instructors pontificate on “Square-Dancing in Junior High School,” “How to Fix Woodwind Instruments with Rubber Bands and Cardboard,” “Eating Habits of Elementary School Children in Central Idaho,” and other such brain-numbing subjects.

At last, in 1961, still practicing my violin, plodding through the drudgery of homework, subbing at Radio City Music Hall, and doing some free-lance jobs that made my mother wince (the Mafia’s Copa nightclub, for example), I received a bachelor of science from Teacher’s College. I decided to apply for a master’s in musicology. At least, I
figured, this would land me a teaching job in a college, not an elementary school or, God forbid, a high school in the Bronx.

I enrolled in a four-credit course with Paul Henry Lang. As soon as I received my first reading assignment—eight pages about Handel, in German—I realized I’d made another bad academic choice. Moreover, Professor Lang had me play a Bach partita for the class. Then he sat down at the piano and demonstrated, with one finger and a few wrong notes, the musical structure of the piece—without a word about my rendition, not even a thank you.

Crestfallen, I boarded the subway train to my home in Brooklyn. I had reached the finals in an audition for the New York Philharmonic a week earlier—my solo went well, but I botched up the difficult sight-reading excerpts. A pat on the shoulder startled me. I turned and recognized the smiling face of a musician I’d worked with while subbing at Radio City Music Hall. “Hey, Les,” he said, “today is the finals for the Met Opera auditions!” I hugged him and heard not another word.

Within 20 minutes I was at the stage door of the Met Opera House on 39th Street, violin in hand. The orchestra secretary, Rosalind Nees, greeted me with: “Who are you? Did you play in the semis?” I said no, not even the preliminaries, but pleaded for a chance to audition. She looked at her watch. “Oh well, why not,” she said, “actually, they haven’t chosen anyone so far.”

She led me to a small room, where five conductors sat fidgeting with clipboards: Erich Leinsdorf, Fausto Cleva, Thomas Schippers, Kurt Adler, and Josef Rosenstock—a very tired-looking group of Met maestros. With apprehension, they glared at this unshaven young man wearing baggy trousers and a torn sweater.

It suddenly struck me that I didn’t have a chance in hell, so I had nothing to lose. I plunged into the Brahms Concerto with abandon. All nervousness vanished. After five minutes of bravura fiddling, with intense vibrato and vigorous bowing, they stopped me. Did I know any Bach? I played the “Sarabande” from the Bach B-minor Partita, which I’d played at my Juilliard entrance exam and knew backwards. The maestros were nodding and whispering among themselves. I “sightread” a few passages from Wagner’s Tannhäuser—which, luckily, I had played at a free-lance concert in Carnegie Hall a few days earlier. They applauded, and I even heard a hoarse “bravo!” I was offered a contract on the spot.

That was in 1961, and I have been in the Met orchestra ever since. Thus ended my academic aspirations, without ever finishing either my master’s in music education or musicology. My only regret is that those degrees would look so impressive, framed, on my living-room wall—next to those autographed photos of opera stars.

Les Dreyer

Violinist Les Dreyer recently retired after a long and illustrious career in the Metropolitan Opera orchestra, including 30 years as associate-principal.