BODANZKY

Bodanzky was Mahler's assistant in Vienna (1902) and in 1912 arranged a great Mahler Festival with over 1500 performers. He was at Mannheim 1909-1915, when, on the strength of a Parsifal he had conducted at Covent Garden, the Metropolitan in New York appointed him to conduct their German Repertoire.Frau Geissmar's husband Leopoldus was a lawyer in Mannheim, where he ran a well-known series of concerts. He owned a Stradivarius, which his daughter Berthe, 1892-1949, brought out under her arm when she and her mother escaped from the Nazis in the 1930s. See Berthe's 'The Baton and the Jackboot, Recollections of Musical Life', London, 1947 (published in New York as 'Two Worlds of Music').