Koussevitzky

This edition is published by Muriwai Books – www.pp-publishing.com

To join our mailing list for new titles or for issues with our books – muriwaibooks@gmail.com

Or on Facebook

Text originally published in 1947 under the same title.

© Muriwai Books 2017, all rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means, electrical, mechanical or otherwise without the written permission of the copyright holder.

Publisher’s Note

Although in most cases we have retained the Author’s original spelling and grammar to authentically reproduce the work of the Author and the original intent of such material, some additional notes and clarifications have been added for the modern reader’s benefit.

We have also made every effort to include all maps and illustrations of the original edition the limitations of formatting do not allow of including larger maps, we will upload as many of these maps as possible.

KOUSSEVITZKY

BY

MOSES SMITH

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS 3

DEDICATION 6

FOREWORD 7

CHAPTER I—YOUTH: FACT AND FANCY 8

CHAPTER II—MOSCOW 12

CHAPTER III—MARRIAGE 17

CHAPTER IV—BERLIN 23

CHAPTER V—MOSCOW-PETERSBURG SHUTTLE 31

CHAPTER VI—THEY SHALL HAVE MUSIC 37

CHAPTER VII—VOLGA BOATMEN 46

CHAPTER VIII—WAR AND REVOLUTION 53

CHAPTER IX—PARIS 62

CHAPTER X—THE BOSTON SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA 75

CHAPTER XI—GRAND SEIGNEUR IN THE HUB OF THE UNIVERSE 87

CHAPTER XII—EARLY AMERICAN YEARS 99

CHAPTER XIII—GRADUS AD PARNASSUM 118

CHAPTER XIV—ANNIVERSARY SEASON AND BEYOND 129

CHAPTER XV—FEUDS AND FRICTIONS 139

CHAPTER XVI—ARTIST’S LIFE 148

CHAPTER XVII—TANGLEWOOD 159

CHAPTER XVIII—THE CHANGING SCENE 171

CHAPTER XIX—UNIONISM COMES TO STAY 177

CHAPTER XX—THESE LATER YEARS 185

CHAPTER XXI—A CRITICAL SUMMING UP 191

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 199

APPENDIX A—WORLD PREMIÈRES PRESENTED BY THE BOSTON SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA DURING THE TENURE OF SERGE KOUSSEVITZKY 200

APPENDIX B—COMPOSITIONS BY AMERICAN COMPOSERS PRESENTED BY THE BOSTON SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA DURING THE TENURE OF SERGE KOUSSEVITZKY 205

APPENDIX C—COMPOSITIONS COMMISSIONED BY THE KOUSSEVITZKY MUSIC FOUNDATION 211

APPENDIX D—KOUSSEVITZKY RECORDINGS 212

REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 216

DEDICATION

To Ethel

MY WIFE

FOREWORD

THE ensuing pages are in no sense an authorized biography, and the sources are accordingly summarized herewith.

First of all, there was available an earlier biography of Koussevitzky by his friend Arthur Lourié.{1} The value of this source was unfortunately lessened greatly by its numerous errors, by the author’s excessively worshipful attitude toward his subject, and by the book’s inadequate factual content, particularly as to omissions of important matter about Koussevitzky’s origins and early life.

The special significance of these errors of commission and omission lies in the fact that Lourié’s Life was authorized by Koussevitzky. In an effort to correct them I had recourse, among other sources, to those who knew Koussevitzky when—for there are still many such in this country.

From 1905, when the printed accounts about Koussevitzky became plentiful, the task of reconstructing his life was relatively easy. Most of the material appeared in magazines and newspapers, Russian, French, German, English and American. The reference-books unfortunately tend to repeat the same misinformation as is contained in Lourié’s Life, even those that were published many years earlier. So do many of the autobiographical statements contained in published interviews with Koussevitzky.

For more than twenty years, ever since Koussevitzky first came to America, I have been able to observe much of his life at first hand. For fifteen years I was music critic of the Boston Evening American and the Boston Evening Transcript, and, in addition to being present at Koussevitzky’s public appearances, had the advantage of private acquaintance. During the following three years (1939–42), when I was Director of Columbia Masterworks of the Columbia Recording Corporation, my observation of him, though less frequent, was more intimate, as appears in one of the chapters of this book. I have also been greatly helped by many of my friends who have been close to Koussevitzky.

To these and numerous others who have been kind enough to furnish information I have to express my gratitude. Most of them must remain anonymous, for an obvious reason; a few are identified in the text.

Most of the anecdotes and other material for which specific sources are not cited are repetitions (often in my own language) of firsthand accounts. Here and there a tale has been included because it is characteristic, even though I have been unable to verify it specifically.

CHAPTER I—YOUTH: FACT AND FANCY

VISHNY-VOLOTCHOK, 75 years ago, was a town of about 15,000 inhabitants. Situated 160 miles northwest of Moscow on the railroad to St. Petersburg, it had a strategic importance by virtue of its position on a neck of land between two rivers, one a tributary of the Volga. This position gave the town its name, which can be translated roughly Upper Little Neck. A canal, the oldest artificial water route in Russia, here connected the two rivers, so that besides the railroad transportation system Vishny-Volotchok had access to the Caspian along the great waterway of the Volga. It was far from being rural, having nine industrial plants, four of them brick factories. In addition to perhaps 1500 factory employees the town had almost 1000 artisans, i.e., independent workers.

Since Vishny-Volotchok was outside the Pale of Settlement—that part of western Russia in which Jews were generally required to live in those days—it contained few Jews: 106 were listed in the 1860 census. The profession of music did not entitle a Jew to live beyond the Pale. And so Alexander Koussevitzky, who was a musician and a Jew, must have had the badge of some additional employment to permit him to live there with his family. Perhaps he was an artisan; perhaps he carried on one of the pursuits open to Jews outside the Pale.

Alexander Koussevitzky probably had an auxiliary occupation for another reason. He was a poor musician—poor in both senses. His instrument has been variously described as violin and double-bass. Perhaps he practiced them both and others as well, for he seems to have been a klesmer, a common type of Jewish musician in old Russia. Klesmers played at weddings and social parties, at amusement parks where a small circus troupe might be visiting. They were a varied class, in proficiency as well as in duties. Many of them worked in small cooperative groups, twelve to fifteen constituting a large orchestra. Their remuneration was slight and their financial position insecure. Yet a klesmer could be identified in a community of Jews because he was always cleanly dressed in a European suit. He had a cultured air. He taught his profession to apprentices as he had himself been taught by a master. For the klesmer usually had some theoretical training; he was virtually an outcast among his colleagues if he did not play from notes. On the other hand, the notes, for solo players like violinists and clarinetists, were often but a starting-point for free fantasy. The art of playing was taught in the orchestra itself; musical theory was taught at home. The system was strict, and the pupils might not complain at the most despotic practices of their teachers. The instruction was by the cruel trial-and-error method. If the master’s directions were not explicit enough the mistakes of the pupil were not thereby condoned.

The character of the first musical instruction the young Koussevitzky thus probably obtained from his father and other musicians was to serve him well in later years.

Alexander Koussevitzky had married another musician—Anne Barabeitchik, a pianist. Exactly how many children she bore her husband is not clear, although Serge Koussevitzky has implied that the family was large. A daughter, Anna, was ten years older than Serge. There were at least two other sons: Nicholas, later a piano-dealer in St. Petersburg, where he died in 1941, and Adolf, who attained a moderate reputation as musician, teacher, and conductor in Moscow before his death in 1939.{2}

The exact date of the birth of Serge Alexandrovitch is variously set down in reference-books and articles. For the most part the discrepancies are due to either misprints or confusion between the old and new styles of the Russian calendar. The date July 26, 1874, is given by the Riemann Russian Musical Dictionary, in this case the most reliable of the reference-books because it Was published in 1904, before Koussevitzky’s second marriage, which radically changed his life. This is the date now generally accepted, even by Koussevitzky himself.{3}

Serge Alexandrovitch was only three years old when his mother died. He grew up in a home where the parental discipline was severe. It was necessarily strict in the matter of religious practices, for Alexander Koussevitzky insisted upon his children’s rigid observance of the elaborate, taxing ritual of Orthodox Judaism. This demanded regular, frequent, and what must have been for young Serge wearisome attendance at religious services. In later life and in the presence of an intimate he has occasionally referred to his boyhood attendance at cheder, the Jewish school for instruction in Hebrew and religion. He has also alluded to the fact that as a boy he used to wear a skull-cap at meals. (Among Orthodox Jews the male head is never bared save in bed or bath.){4}

We were all good children and studied hard, Koussevitzky said not long ago.{5} When I was about five I read tales by Tolstoy which I have never seen translated. They taught that strength lies not in force, but in God and truth. The influence of these tales I still feel now. They have guided my life. By the time he was ten, Koussevitzky went on, he had already read largely in the literature of Russia and France.

Whatever young Serge’s early attainments in reading may have been, he was an exceptionally musical child. He must have got his first musical instruction, on the violin, from his father. More sweepingly Lourié says that of his own accord he gradually learnt to play every instrument, his principal teachers at the time being strolling musicians, wandering from place to place, from one village to another. Every instrument is a tall order, for man or boy, but the tenor of the statement seems not inapplicable to the son of a klesmer who got at least a passing acquaintance with a number of orchestral instruments during his youth, in later years Koussevitzky was to show an intimate knowledge, exceptional even for a conductor, of the instruments of the symphony orchestra. In Paris, for example, in the twenties, when he was giving an audition to a trombonist, he became impatient with the musician’s rendering of a passage. He took up the instrument and played the passage himself as he wanted it to sound.

When Serge was eight years old he came under the wing of a local patroness named Maria Fiodorovna Ropenberg. From her he received the benefits of motherly care in a sort of second home. She gave him lessons on the piano, which she played well herself. He is said to have made such rapid progress that he was soon playing duets with her. At about the same time he began to compose incidental music for dramatic performances at the local theatre. Ignorant of musical theory—so runs the romantic account—he would dictate his compositions by singing them (a more prodigious feat than actually writing out the parts). More, he became conductor of the primitive little orchestra of the theatre. When the Vishny-Volotchok troupe took to the road as far as Tver,{6} the lad was taken along in charge of the music department. Between the ages of twelve and fourteen he did all the musical work in connection with these tours.{7}

Thus began Serge’s close association with the world of the theatre. At one point, he said later, he had seriously considered a stage career. But at this time, spurred by his musical successes, the boy was more and more eager to study music seriously. Such study was obviously out of the question in Vishny-Volotchok. Besides, young Koussevitzky was encountering parental opposition to a musical career. The alternative was flight. Lourié tells us that as early as the autumn of 1888, when Serge was fourteen years old, he alighted from the train at Moscow without a farthing in the pocket, and set out to become enrolled at the Music Conservatory.

It is extremely unlikely that the boy left home so young. The evidence indicates clearly, on the contrary, that he was seventeen when he entered the Philharmonic School in Moscow.

But we have other information with which to fill in the jig saw puzzle of Koussevitzky’s youth. By his own account Koussevitzky as a boy would sometimes run away from home for several days at a time to follow the itinerant musicians around, as if he were hypnotized by the enchantment{8} of their beautiful tones. While music may have been an important urge, however, it was apparently not the only reason for getting away. I have been told categorically, by one who knew Koussevitzky intimately in childhood, that the principal motive for Koussevitzky’s leaving home was his desire to escape from the domination of his father.

For some time before Serge was enrolled at the Phil-harmonic he used to go to Moscow for private lessons on the ‘cello. As a Jew he could not stay there without being formally enrolled at a conservatory. If he stayed even a day or two to rest between trips, he had to hide at the house of family friends.

On the trains, between Vishny-Volotchok and Moscow, Koussevitzky used to entertain fellow-passengers for the proceeds of a collection. Such things were common enough in old Russia; even conservatory students eked out a precarious living by similar jobs. Serge used to play also for the amusement of passengers on the pleasure boats that sailed up and down the Volga in the old days. There is another story that he played the tuba, dressed in uniform, in the band of a traveling circus.

By putting together such reports as these one can make out a plausible account of Koussevitzky’s life before he settled in Moscow. He was doing musical odd jobs on several instruments, his principal instrument for serious study being the ‘cello. His home was still in Vishny-Volotchok, but he was eager to leave it for good, partly because he wanted to be free from his father’s authority, partly because he wanted to become a professional musician on a higher level than that of a mere klesmer. The widely published observation that Koussevitzky was determined, from childhood on, to become a conductor has little to support it except that later in life he did become a conductor when he got the chance. People who knew him in his early Moscow days say that he then gave no indication of an ambition to become a conductor.

In the fall of 1891 Serge Koussevitzky, plump, cherub-faced, seventeen years old, not fourteen, left his parental home for the big city.{9}

CHAPTER II—MOSCOW

Moscow! How much that sound holds for a Russian heart! (Pushkin, Eugene Onegin)

ACCORDING to one story, Koussevitzky reached Moscow A without a farthing in his pocket; according to another, he had precisely three and a half rubles. In any event, it was a poor boy who presented himself as a candidate for admission at the Imperial Moscow Conservatory. Because the term had already begun the lad was turned down point-blank. He was told to come back at the beginning of the next term the following spring. But Koussevitzky was in no mood to wait. He promptly repaired to the principal rival conservatory, the School of the Moscow Philharmonic Society, to see if they would receive him more kindly.

The Philharmonic refused him, too, and for the same reason. Koussevitzky was furious. He managed to get past an imperious doorman who barred his way and made straight for the office of the Director, Piotr Adamovitch Shostakovsky. The latter was said to look like Liszt; and the resemblance was the more striking because he was seated at the piano when Koussevitzky burst into the room. The boy told his story, but Shostakovsky simply repeated what Koussevitzky already knew. Koussevitzky shouted and stormed. "I will come here. You cannot turn me away!" The astonished Director tried to soothe the impassioned youth, but Koussevitzky stood his ground. Shostakovsky finally yielded.

Koussevitzky, of course, had no money for tuition. It appeared, however, that a place could be made for him if he would study the trombone or double-bass. Because students rarely chose these instruments voluntarily the institution, which needed them for a comprehensive musical program with a complete student orchestra, encouraged their study by free tuition and a small stipend besides. Double-bass, trombone or piccolo, it was small concern to Koussevitzky. Actually he chose the double-bass, akin to the ‘cello. What mattered was that he was in.

The Moscow Philharmonic Society had been formed in 1883 from an earlier musico-dramatic organization largely through the efforts of Shostakovsky, a concert pianist who had studied with Kullak and Liszt in Germany and later had taught for a time at the Moscow Conservatory. One preliminary stage of the expansion had been the founding, in 1878, of a musical and dramatic school with the program and all the rights of the Moscow Conservatory (as the charter put it). In 1895–96, a few years after Koussevitzky’s matriculation, this school had an enrolment of 322.

One of Koussevitzky’s fellow-students at the Philharmonic School was Leonid Sobinov, whose reminiscences give us some firsthand details about the school at the time Koussevitzky and he attended it. The building occupied by the Philharmonic was an ancient, squat, two-story house, jutting far out on the sidewalk. It was far less impressive than the Moscow Conservatory with its wealth of traditions. But the atmosphere of the newer school, a private enterprise, was far more to Sobinov’s taste than the official air of the state-controlled Moscow Conservatory.

Sobinov, who was captivated by the Director, gives us a clear picture of him: the lean figure..., his nervous face, penetrating eyes, small uneven beard, hair much thinned out, a faintly nasal voice and a kindly smile...{10}

There is a story illustrating Shostakovsky’s understanding. A young professor, A. F. Arends, was the assistant to whom Shostakovsky entrusted preliminary rehearsals for the student performances of opera and concert music. Arends, who later became the principal conductor at the Moscow Imperial Bolshoi Theatre, when Koussevitzky was a member of the Orchestra, was a stern disciplinarian. The gaiety of the students in rehearsal provoked him to such sharp criticism that a delegation of students appealed to Shostakovsky. The Director tactfully solved the problem by taking a place himself in the rehearsals under Arends. With the Director at the side of the students, there was no need for further reproof from Arends.

Shostakovsky himself was no easy taskmaster. He had acquired the stern discipline of the St. Petersburg and Moscow Conservatories. During a spell of protracted rehearsing he was not overly careful in his language to his charges, especially the girls, toward whom he often directed the epithet "doora" (fool). Even in excitement, though, he was careful not to provoke the students too far. On their side the students adored the Director, who worried himself about their financial problems and cultivated the patronage of wealthy bourgeois on behalf of the poor students. Jewish students like Koussevitzky were especially grateful to him because he exercised his influence to get them residential privileges in Moscow.

Koussevitzky eked out the small stipend he obtained from the Philharmonic School by odd jobs, like many of his fellow-students, playing in instrumental groups in and out of Moscow. Perhaps it was at this time, in a vacation, that he took to the road as a circus musician.

He was fortunate in his double-bass teacher, Joseph J. Rambousek, a Czech trained in Prague, who had come from the orchestra of the theatre in Stuttgart, Germany, to become first double-bass player at the Bol’shoi Theatre in Moscow. Rambousek was Professor of double-bass at the Philharmonic from 1882 until he died. A man of general musical culture, he had made several transcriptions for the double-bass. He exhibited sympathy and social consciousness in his efforts to help his students and orchestral colleagues.

Koussevitzky worked well under Rambousek’s direction, applying himself with exceptional industry and concentration; and by all accounts he made extraordinarily rapid progress on his cumbersome instrument. As early as 1892 (the year after he entered the Philharmonic School) he was presented to Tchaikovsky as a double-bass virtuoso. In Tchaikovsky’s rooms in Moscow, Koussevitzky, as he has told the story, was accompanied by the composer at the piano and played his arrangement of the Andante Cantabile from Tchaikovsky’s First String Quartet.

During these student years and later, when he was established as an independent musician, Koussevitzky practiced the double-bass tirelessly. His roommates finally objected, and Koussevitzky found a barn-like loft where he could practice as much as eight hours a day without disturbing anybody. The late Vladimir Dubinsky, who was a student at the Moscow Conservatory while Koussevitzky was at the Philharmonic, once recalled the time when, between terms, the two played a vacation job together in an orchestra at a summer resort near Riga. The two were drawn together because there were few Russians in the place.

He was a lovely chap—amiable and congenial, wrote Dubinsky of Koussevitzky.{11} He was also ambitious and determined in his decisions, but very modest about his ability as a musician...I used to love practicing together on our respective instruments. We would start with scales, go over to ‘cello studies, and wind up with concertos. Koussevitzky would play along, keeping pace with the ‘cello on the bass fiddle. There was no limitation for him. Listening to Koussevitzky one would forget that he was playing a bass; it wasn’t a bass at all, it was some instrument between a ‘cello and bass, of unusual beauty. He possessed everything that makes a great artist—tone, technical equipment, temperament, repose, a keen sense of rhythm and fine conception.

Koussevitzky’s progress in theoretical subjects, however, was not so spectacular, although here, too, he had good teachers: Pavel Blaramberg, under whom he studied counterpoint and composition, and Semion Kruglikov, later Director of the Philharmonic School, who was Koussevitzky’s instructor in harmony. It is hard to determine whether Koussevitzky neglected these studies or found them excessively difficult. The weakness of his grounding in them, however, was to handicap him throughout his whole conductorial career.

The reward for Koussevitzky’s efforts with his instrument was that on October 1, 1894, he was admitted to the Imperial Bol’shoi Opera Theatre Orchestra in Moscow. Although the published summaries of Koussevitzky’s life usually say that he was admitted to this orchestra without a competitive examination, Eugene Plotnikoff, a musician now living in New York, recalls otherwise, Plotnikoff, who had struck up an acquaintance with Koussevitzky at a rehearsal of the Moscow Civic Opera Orchestra, says that both Koussevitzky and he entered the competitions for the Bol’shoi Theatre Orchestra and that both passed, Plotnikoff as a ‘cellist and Koussevitzky as a double-bassist. Koussevitzky did remarkably well in the orchestra. Starting at the last stand of the double-bass section, he moved up to number three position within two years.

Koussevitzky apparently remained a student at the Phil-harmonic School for some time after he became a member of the Bol’shoi Theatre Orchestra. It is usually stated that he was graduated from the School with the diploma of Free Artist (Svobodnyi Khudozhnik). Some of his old acquaintances, however, doubt that he received at this time the citation of Free Artist. A prerequisite for it was completion of so-called educational or cultural courses, in which, according to these acquaintances, Koussevitzky’s record was deficient.

Whether or not Koussevitzky had earned the title of Free Artist did not matter greatly. The important thing for him, in 1894, was that at twenty he was established in a regular position in an established institution like the Bolshoi Imperial Theatre. He was making his own living, even if the living was hardly luxurious and had to be supplemented by outside jobs like the one with Dubinsky. His immediate ambition of becoming an orchestral musician had been realized. Beyond that he apparently was not concerned.

Not long after joining the Bolshoi Theatre Orchestra Koussevitzky learned of a vacancy in the orchestra of the Imperial Opera at St, Petersburg, and he entered the competition. Called on first, he explained to the judges that he always tuned his instrument a tone higher than customarily to get added brilliance and clarity. One of the judges promptly objected to the procedure; but, on Koussevitzky’s appeal, the objection was overruled by the Chairman of the judges. After Koussevitzky played, half of the contestants did not bother even to take their turn. At the end of the competition Koussevitzky was awarded the position.

To everyone’s surprise, and despite the fact that the position was attractive, Koussevitzky refused to accept it, on the technical ground that the occupant of the vacant desk was not to play in ballet performances. (In Moscow Koussevitzky was playing in ballet as well as opera.) The real explanation for Koussevitzky’s behavior, however, seems to have been that he was indulging boyish prankishness and never had any intention of accepting the position.

With an exceptional instrumental talent it was natural that Koussevitzky should not long remain content with the position of a mere orchestral musician. His instrument, to be sure, was one of the unlikeliest in the world with which to make a career of any account. In the past, solo double-bass playing had been limited almost entirely to musical peep-shows or occasional sorties in chamber music.

Only two double-bass players had had careers that might be described as notable. Domenico Dragonetti was a celebrated virtuoso on the double-bass at the end of the eighteenth century and the first part of the nineteenth. His exhibition of what could be accomplished on the double-bass is said to have so impressed Beethoven that, in the Trio of his Fifth Symphony, the composer assigned to the ponderous instrument passage-work of a difficulty then unparalleled in orchestra] literature. Half a century later another Italian, Giovanni Bottesini, who had taken to the double-bass for the same practical reason as Koussevitzky, achieved on it a phenomenal proficiency, which was celebrated in musical capitals all over Europe. Since he died as late as 1889 his fame was still relatively fresh when Koussevitzky began his double-bass career.

In 1896, two years after Koussevitzky’s admission into the Orchestra of the Bolshoi Theatre, he made his first appearance as a solo double-bass player in Moscow, and he played occasionally thereafter in St. Petersburg and other Russian cities. Solo music for the double-bass was small in quantity and inferior in quality, and even under the most persuasive ministrations it tended to monotony. Koussevitzky was therefore assisted at his recitals by another artist or two—or the other way about. One of his most frequent collaborators was his old fellow-student, Sobinov, now on his way to becoming the most celebrated tenor in Russia. In addition, Koussevitzky played chamber music in a group variously described as a trio and as a quartet. A few disgruntled musical colleagues might say of Koussevitzky’s solo double-bass playing that it sounded like poor ‘cello playing. Most of them were fairer and more complimentary. When Simandl, a well known Viennese double-bass player, appeared in a recital in Moscow at this time, it was generally agreed that Koussevitzky was a superior performer.

Another big chance developed right at home. Rambousek, Koussevitzky’s old master at the Philharmonic School, died on March 23, 1901. For his twofold post at the head of the bass section of the Bol’shoi Theatre Orchestra and on the Faculty of the Philharmonic School the obvious choice was Koussevitzky, even though the latter was only twenty-seven years old. One difficulty is said to have presented itself: a faculty member was expected to be a Free Artist. The Philharmonic School was jealous of its reputation, for it was making progress, and had by now almost 500 students. The way out of the dilemma, according to the story, was found in granting Koussevitzky, honoris causa, the diploma of Free Artist. His appointment to the faculty followed automatically.

Koussevitzky was thus not without honor and prestige in Moscow. He believed in himself, and he had an entourage who encouraged this belief. Then, as later, he was dignified in bearing and a little self-conscious. He was quite handsome, always well-dressed. He accepted compliments from his friends easily, apparently not because he was conceited but because they seemed to fit the facts. He was the kind of young man likely to get ahead.

He seems to have had fairly ready access to the homes of wealthy Muscovite bourgeois families, patrons of the arts and sciences. They constituted a cosmopolitan section of the old capital’s society, itself organized on a caste basis, with the exclusive nobility at the top. Jewish