title: Obligato: Untold Tales from a Life With Music
author: Ira Hirschmann
description: Hirschmann, who died in 1989 at the age of 88, was a New York City business executive known for his activities as a diplomat and anti-Nazi activist. In this charming memoir, he tells how he was able to blend his passion for classical music with his professional life. In the 1920s, he obtained a radio station for his company and utilized it to broadcast live symphony concerts. In the 1940s he founded the FM radio station WABF, which carried live classical music concerts. As organizer and president of the New Friends of Music, a nonprofit organization that presented chamber music concerts for the general public, he helped bring many of the world's greatest musicians to this country. It was at Hirschmann's instigation that his friend, Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, created New York City's High School of Music and Art. His reminiscences about these and other accomplishments and of his many friends in the music world are delightful, but disturbing is his account of his successful campaign in 1936 to force the New York Philharmonic to withdraw its invitation to the German conductor Wilhelm Furtwangler to succeed Arturo Toscanini as Music Director of the orchestra. The record of this episode is less clear-cut than Hirschmann suggests; Furtwangler, who conducted at the New York Philharmonic during 1927-1930 and claimed that he remained in Hitler's Germany to save his country's ``soul,'' maintained that he himself withdrew from the appointment because of the anti-German campaign. Illustrations not seen by PW.
zlib_text: CONTENTS
  Song List
  Chapter 1
  Chapter 2
  Chapter 3
  Chapter 4
  Chapter 5
  Chapter 6
  Chapter 7
  Chapter 8
  Chapter 9
  Chapter 10
  Chapter 11
  Chapter 12
  Chapter 13
  Chapter 14
  Chapter 15
  Chapter 16
  Chapter 17
  Chapter 18
  Chapter 19
  Chapter 20
  Chapter 21
  Chapter 22
  Chapter 23
  Chapter 24
  Chapter 25
  Chapter 26
  Chapter 27
  Chapter 28
  Chapter 29
  Chapter 30
  Chapter 31
  Chapter 32
  Chapter 33
  Epilogue
  Sneak peek at Be My Reason
  
  Other Books by Brooklyn Taylor:
  Acknowledgments
  Contact for Brooklyn Taylor
  
  Copyright Brooklyn Taylor 2020
  No parts of this story can be duplicated, copied or sold without the rights of the author.
  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the
  products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual
  persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
  Edited By: Karen Hrdlicka
  Cover Designer: Alora Kate
  Interior Formatting By: DL Gallie
  
  To all the women that want to give up on