Meeting of the Psychoanalytic Association of New York

April 23, 1984. OF SONIA'S DOLL, GRANDFATHER'S FIDDLE AND THE CHANGELING: THE FANTASY CHILDHOOD OF LEOPOLD STOKOWSKI. William A. Smith.

Professor William A. Smith, Professor of History at California State Polytechnic University, presented biographical material about Stokowski's life, as informed by psychoanalytic concepts, in an effort to understand certain of the great conductor's fabrications about his past. These fabrications involved the mythologizing of his early life and origins and his use of a variety of foreign accents. Professor Smith reported on the various accounts given by the Maestro himself and cited by biographers and by musicians who played for him during his formidable, innovative, seventy-year career. The accounts included at least four distict birthplaces in Poland—both parents having been Polish—and two different dates of birth; a great grandfather who served as a general in the Polish army and marched with Napoleon; and a grandfather who, robbed of his lands by the Czarist regime, led the family westward over the Continent and finally to London. In those versions in which Stokowski admitted to having been born in England (while never denying rumors of illegitimate descent from Richard Wagner), he described his childhood as impoverished and grim in the extreme. The "Sonia's doll" and the "grandfather's fiddle" of Professor Smith's intriguing title were specific "mystifications" promulgated by Stokowski within the fabric of his unique personal myth. Sonia's doll referred to a gift given to the conductor's daughter by one of his colleagues, the composer Edgard Varèse, which, in the presence of the gift giver, Stokowski boldly proclaimed was sent by the people of his family's village in Poland. Similarly, Stokowski alleged that his namesake, grandfather Leopold Stokowski, had taken his grandson, then seven, to his London club which had served as a meeting place for various European emigrés. The talk, drink, and fellowship was accompanied