Memories of the Legendary Dr. Robert Page
The Grammy Award-winning conductor in concert and at home
Nobody could help a dreary city feel the magic of the holidays quite like the boisterous Dr. Page—not even Santa Claus. It was one of the great honors of my musical career to play concertmaster for his last Holiday Concert with the Carnegie Mellon Philharmonic and Choirs, a treasured Christmas tradition in Pittsburgh. At 85, his conducting was as sharp as ever, and he demanded the very best from every one of us on stage.
I think of Dr. Page this time of year as I listen to what I see as the greatest Christmas album of all time, “The Glorious Sound of Christmas,” for which he prepared the choirs under Eugene Ormandy in 1962. We played many of the same orchestral arrangements under Page at CMU, so it always brings memories of my undergrad flooding back. My family and I love the authenticity of the vinyl, which I found on eBay, but you can listen on Spotify as well.
Robert Page was born in 1927, the 8th of 10 children. His father, a song leader for the Church of Christ, believed that next to being a minister or an elder, music—“Singing for the Lord”—was the greatest thing you could do. His mother said, “Without music, you’re not going to be a decent citizen.”1 He did not imagine he would go into music as a profession until the age of 19, when, after returning from serving in the Navy at the end of WWII, he began studying voice seriously and taking roles in operas.
His career and achievements as a choral conductor and educator over the next several decades would be unmatched in the world of classical music. He became a strong advocate for the professional choir and modeled the highest respect for the musical profession. While passion was absolutely non-negotiable in music making, he believed that creativity was birthed out of discipline.
I remember an important talk he gave us in a Holiday Concert rehearsal that required us to sacrifice a day of our mid-semester break. “If you’re going to complain about this, just go ahead and quit this profession right now. For the rest of your life, it will be your job to play on weekends and holidays. When others are resting, that’s when we play!”
I got to know another side of Dr. Page during my graduate studies at CMU. He was done conducting concerts, but he stayed on faculty long enough to help a couple of conducting students who had lost their teacher finish their degrees. I do not doubt that he was hard on them, but I saw his fatherly care behind the scenes.
One of his students, Geoff, wanted to conduct Pierrot Lunaire by Arnold Schoenberg for his graduate recital. This devilishly hard piece calls for a unique ensemble, including a violinist who can double on viola, switching back and forth quickly between the two instruments. I was perhaps the only student at CMU who could pull it off at the time, but I had also decided to take that semester part-time and limit my commitments around school so I could spend time working and avoid going into debt for my degree. I had to decline. Then, Dr. Page reached out and offered to pay me for each service needed, asking that I not tell Geoff that he was doing so. I texted Geoff back that I could join after all and never told him that his teacher paid me out of pocket so that he could have the experience of conducting Schoenberg.
As I was taking just a couple of classes and installing custom closets in homes around Pittsburgh to save up for the next semester, Dr. Page said he had some additional work for me. He needed help organizing his sheet music library at his home. A couple hours a day, I would take stacks of scores down from his shelves, read off the titles, and he would say, “I’d better keep that,” or, “Throw it away!” or, when he couldn’t decide, “Oh Robert! Oh Robert!”
Inside each score was the concert program from when he performed it. The names and stories of the conductors he worked with had my jaw on the floor regularly: Stokowski, Szell, Previn, Maazel, and Rattle, just to name a few. There were many duplicates of scores because he would mark up a new score each time he performed.
“What program is in that one?” “Claudio Abbado?” (Who had passed away just months prior.) “Oh, I miss him!”
“What’s that there? Oh, Catulli Carmina! I got my first Grammy for that one.” (Then, after holding up Carmina Burana) “Yes, with Tilson Thomas—that was my second Grammy.”
He would often say that I had no idea how much I was helping him, but I also knew that offering this work was his way of helping me be able to finish my degree.
My favorite part of these incredible afternoons was witnessing the interactions of this musical legend with his sweet wife, Glynn. However gruff Dr. Page could be with others, he always treated her like a queen. On our lunch break one day (he usually made us pimento cheese sandwiches) he told me about the first time he heard Glynn singing from outside the door of their rehearsal hall in college. “I’m going to marry that woman,” was his reaction, sight unseen. His friend informed him that this might be difficult since the voice belonged to Glynn Castleberry, who was dating his best friend. “It took me all summer to break up that relationship,” he said, “And now I’ve been married to Glynn for 67 years.”
(After lunch, Dr. Page would always say, “Back to the salt mines!”)
Glynn built and led the musical theatre program for CMU’s School of Drama for over 20 years, which today is one of the most prestigious in the country. Their two daughters pursued musical careers as well, with Paula serving as principal harpist of the Houston Symphony for 30 years, and Carolann singing and acting in the Grammy and Emmy award-winning opera Nixon in China. Robert and Glynn lived to see three grandchildren and five great-grandchildren.
While Dr. Page could be intense—to say the least—in rehearsals, it was always clear to me that this came from his passion for music. Meanwhile, he demonstrated great tenderness with his loved ones and had a fatherly way of looking out for students. There are a couple of stories about Bach getting upset in rehearsals too, from calling someone a “greenhorn bassoonist,” which led to a duel, to the anecdote about him throwing a wig at an organist. But the same Bach instilled and cultivated a lifelong love of music in his family and students, elbowed and joked with his sons at concerts, and bought carnations and even a pet canary for his wife to accompany her singing.
We made a pile of scores to pass along to Dr. Page’s conducting students, and he let me take some as well, which I shared with my choral conductor friend, Michael. I kept a full score and parts for Bach’s “Coffee Cantata” BWV 211, along with a note from Dr. Page that says, “Thanks mucho, Tiger!”
You can watch a short compilation from the last holiday concert I got to play under Dr. Page below, which ends with the “Hallelujah Chorus” from Handel’s Messiah. Twelve years later, I continue to be inspired by Dr. Page’s professional and personal example. Tonight, I have the honor of playing concertmaster for the Messiah with the Erie Philharmonic and Chorus, and I know I will be thinking of Dr. Page.