Two months later, Stokowski was appointed director of the
Philadelphia Orchestra. Stokowski made his
Philadelphia debut on
October 11 1912. This position would bring him some of his greatest accomplishments and recognition. It has been suggested that Stokowski quit at Cincinnati knowing full well that the job in Philadelphia was already his, or as
Oscar Levant suggested in his book
A Smattering of Ignorance, "he had the contract in his back pocket."
In 1914, he was elected to honorary membership in
Phi Mu Alpha Sinfonia, the national fraternity for men in music.
Stokowski rapidly garnered a reputation as a showman. His flair for the theatrical included grand gestures such as throwing the sheet music on the floor to show he did not need to conduct from a score. He also experimented with lighting techniques in the concert hall, at one point conducting in a dark hall with only his head and hands lighted, at other times arranging the lights so they would cast theatrical shadows of his head and hands. His hair, always unruly, he allowed to grow long, and he combed it straight back. This created a "lion's mane" effect that he carefully nurtured (his adopted first name "Leopold", means "lion-like"). Late in the 1929-30 season, he started conducting without a baton; his free-hand manner of conducting became one of his trademarks.
On the musical side, Stokowski nurtured the orchestra and shaped the "Stokowski" sound, or what became known as the "Philadelphia Sound". He encouraged "
free bowing" from the string section, "free breathing" from the brass section, and continually altered the seating arrangements of the sections as well as the acoustics of the hall in order to create better sound. Stokowski is credited as being the first conductor to adopt the seating plan used by most orchestras today with first and second violins together on the left, violas and cellos on the right. But he was also known for tinkering with the
orchestration of famous works by such composers as
Beethoven,
Tchaikovsky,
Sibelius,
J.S. Bach and
Brahms. In one instance, he even revised the ending of a work, the
Romeo and Juliet Fantasy Overture, by Tchaikovsky, so that it would end quietly, taking his notion from Modest Tchaikovsky's
Life and Letters of Peter Ilych Tchaikovsky (translated by Rosa Newmarch: 1906) that the composer had provided a quiet ending of his own at Balakirev's suggestion. He made major revisions to
Mussorgsky's
Night on Bald Mountain, discarding completely
Rimsky-Korsakov's orchestration of the work in favor of his own. In the film
Fantasia, however, Stokowski did not end the work with a big climax, but allowed the last measures of it to segue right into the beginning of
Schubert's
Ave Maria.
Many serious music critics have been horrified at the liberties Stokowski took—liberties which were common in the nineteenth century, but had since mostly died out, as faithful adherence to the composer's score became more common. However, Stokowski sometimes left scores completely unretouched, and he was by no means alone in his alterations to scores. Toscanini, for example, who had a reputation for "doing as written", was equally adept at making similar changes to composers' scores, as in Tchaikovsky's
Manfred symphony, where he added tam-tam crashes to the end of the first movement, rewrote the wind, brass and string parts here and there, and cut 100 bars out of the finale. Toscanini's alterations, however, nearly always tended to be much more subtle, and much less frequent than Stokowski's.
In 1939, Stokowski also made his
own orchestration of Mussorgsky's
Pictures at an Exhibition, in which he omitted two of the movements from the score. The composer and arranger
Lucien Cailliet, a member of the Philadelphia Orchestra who also acted as "house arranger", had assisted Stokowski in the copying of many of Stokowski's transcriptions, something which led to the incorrect assumption that they were Cailliet's work and not Stokowski's. In fact, many of Stokowski's penciled manuscripts still survive in the Stokowski Collection at the University of Pennsylvania. It was from these that Cailliet made good ink copies in his excellent calligraphic hand, and thus started the unfounded rumour that Stokowski's transcriptions were not his own work. Cailliet had actually created his own orchestration of
Pictures at an Exhibition in 1936, and as Ormandy's RCA Victor recording show, it is quite different from Stokowski's arrangement.
Stokowski's repertoire was broad and included many contemporary works. He was the only conductor to perform all of Schoenberg's orchestral works during the composer's own lifetime, several of which were world premieres. He gave the first American performance of Schoenberg's
Gurrelieder in 1932. It was recorded "live" on 78 rpm records and remained the only recording of the work in the catalog until the advent of the LP. Stokowski also gave the US Premieres of four of Shostakovich's symphonies, nos 1, 3, 6 and 11. In 1916, he conducted the United States premiere of
Mahler's 8th Symphony. He added works by
Rachmaninoff, giving the world premieres of his 3rd symphony, the 4th piano concerto and the Paganini Rhapsody;
Sibelius, whose last three symphonies were given their US premieres in Philadelphia in the 1920s; and
Igor Stravinsky, many of whose works were also given their first American performances by Stokowski. In 1922, he introduced
The Rite of Spring to the USA, gave its first staged performance there in 1930 with Martha Graham dancing the part of The Chosen One, and at the same time made the first US recording of the work. Seldom an opera conductor, Stokowski did give the US premieres in Philadelphia of the original version of Mussorgky's
Boris Godunov (1929) and Alban Berg's
Wozzeck (1931).
In 1933, he started "Youth Concerts" for younger audiences, which are still a Philadelphia tradition, and fostered youth music programs. He was very much a man of his times, and he understood his times well. He was famous for transcribing many of the major organ works of
J. S. Bach for Wagnerian-sized orchestra, his goal being to bring this magnificent music to a wider audience. Much admired in their day, these transcriptions are again being played now, and conductors such as Wolfgang Sawallisch, Matthias Bamert, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Seija Ozawa, Erich Kunzel and Jose Serebrier are among many who have performed and recorded Stokowski's Bach transcriptions. Even so, they are still considered by some to be bastardizations of the works. Today the organ works of Bach are widely heard in their original form via recordings and concerts, much more so than during Stokowski's time. Whether his transcriptions encouraged this resurgence of interest in Bach's organ music is a matter of debate.
After disputes with the board, Stokowski began to withdraw from involvement in The Philadelphia Orchestra from 1936 onwards, allowing co-conductor
Eugene Ormandy to gradually take over. He shared principal conducting duties with Ormandy from 1936-1940. After he left Philadelphia, he did not return until 1960, when he conducted several concerts and made stereo recordings for Columbia. His final concerts with The Philadelphia Orchestra were in 1969.
Stokowski appeared as himself in the motion picture
The Big Broadcast of 1937, conducting two of his Bach transcriptions. That same year he also conducted and acted in
One Hundred Men and a Girl, with
Deanna Durbin and
Adolphe Menjou. In 1939, Stokowski collaborated with
Walt Disney to create the motion picture for which he is best known:
Fantasia. He conducted all the music (with the exception of a "jam session" in the middle of the film) and included his own orchestrations for the
Toccata and Fugue in D Minor and
Night on Bald Mountain/
Ave Maria segments. Stokowski even got to talk to (and shake hands with)
Mickey Mouse on screen, although he would later say with a smile that Mickey Mouse got to shake hands with him. Most of the music was recorded in the Academy of Music, using multi-track stereophonic sound. Stokowski also appeared in the 1947 film
Carnegie Hall along with Bruno Walter, Fritz Reiner, Jascha Heifetz, Artur Rubinstein, Ezio Pinza and other great classical musicians of the day.
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