Patroness

The string quartet was without a name, and about to disband. Its leader, First Violinist Jacques Gordon, had been ordered by his doctor to retire. Then Mrs. Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge, the nation's No. 1 patroness of music, came to the rescue. She put up money for enough additional concerts to make the quartet's summer season possible. For one of the few times in her life, Mrs. Coolidge then asked a sentimental favor in return: would the quartet please call itself the Berkshire Quartet? It was the name which Mrs. Coolidge had given to the first string quartet she organized, 32 years ago.

Last week the new Berkshire Quartet opened its season atop Music Mountain, a hilltop near Falls Village, Conn., where the Gordon Quartet had played every summer since 1930. Most of the audience that gathered in the white, green-shuttered concert hall were summer residents in the Connecticut hills. A few suntanned hikers, from the old Appalachian Trail near by, had left their knapsacks at the door. The old regulars missed a familiar sight: a limousine pulling up in front just before concert time, and a tall (6 ft. 1 in.) woman with a flower-garden hat and a look of the '90s about her clothes, stepping out on the arm of a friend. At 84, almost deaf and barely able to walk, Patroness Coolidge was too tired to go that far for a concert (although she did get to one nearer home, in Pittsfield, Mass.).

Appalachian Spring. Mrs. Coolidge has commissioned at least one of the great quartets of Bartok, another by Prokofiev, ballet music by Stravinsky (Apollon Musagetes), Aaron Copland (Appalachian Spring). Milhaud and Hindemith, and countless works by U.S. composers like Walter Piston, Quincy Porter, Howard Hanson, William Schuman. She built a $94,000 concert hall in the Library of Congress, and endowed it with $25,000 a year.

Daughter of a wealthy Chicago grocer and widow of a distinguished Chicago surgeon, Mrs. Coolidge* is something of an amateur of music herself. She has played the piano in informal recitals with violinists like Kneisel and Zimbalist. Five years ago, at 79, she amazed her friends by sitting in with the Kolisch Quartet at the Library of Congress, to play Schumann's Quintet for Piano and Strings. Last year one of her own trios, written in 1930, was performed at the Library.

Grocery Bills. A hearty and likable woman, Mrs. Coolidge entertains a lot, likes to laugh at jokes on herself--on her height, on her hearing, her habit of dropping her programs, gloves and handbags.

Musically, she admits that Bartok, Schoenberg and the atonalists are not her dish, although she has always been willing to help pay the grocery bills. Some of her friends claim that at concerts of jangling modern music, she turns off her hearing aid when the going gets too tough.

*No kin to Massachusetts' Calvin, or the socialite Boston Coolidges.

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