The celebrated, spectaculary endowed, and magically
communicative English-born American conductor (and arranger),
Leopold (Anthony) Stokowski, was born into a Polish and Irish
mother, but was raised as an Englishman. His famous, vaguely
foreign, accent somehow appeared later in his life. The young
Stokowski was a precocious musician, and as a child learned to
play the violin, piano, and organ with apparently little effort.
At the age of thirteen, he became the youngest person to have
been admitted to the Royal College of Music. By eighteen,
Leopold Stokowski had been appointed organist and choirmaster at
St. James', Piccadilly. He attended Queen's College, Oxford,
receiving a Bachelor of Music degree in 1903. He moved to the
USA in 1905, but returned to Europe each summer for further
musical studies in Berlin, Munich, and Paris. When a conductor
fell ill in Paris in 1908, he made his debut as an emergency
substitute. The impression he made led to a position with the
Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra in which he q