I got started
on the oboe, almost by accident, in the fall of 1938 while a sophomore
at Erasmus Hall High School in Brooklyn. Since no instruction
on the instrument was available there, I initially tried teaching
myself with the aid of the fingering charts and exercises in Barret's
"Complete Method." There was also some informal advice
on reeds, embouchure and breath control (mostly incorrect, it
turned out) from the conductor of the school orchestra. Presently,
a friend put me in touch with a student at Juilliard, a reserved
but very talented young oboist whom I shall call Conrad, and I
took occasional lessons from him. (As I recall, he charged me
about $2 a session.) His teacher was Bruno Labate, then Principal
Oboist with the New York Philharmonic, who also taught at Juilliard.
Although rather noncommittal about him as a teacher, Conrad was
full of praise for Labate's artistry. I certainly agreed, for
ever since starting the oboe I had come to admire his exquisite
playing on Philharmonic recordings and radio broadcasts, and he
quickly became my ideal. So when I happened to learn in the spring
of 1940 that he would be teaching at Juilliard that summer in
connection with a six-week program aimed primarily at high school
students, the idea of having one-on-one lessons with a musician
of his calibre was just about irresistible.I immediately started pestering my parents about the program, and they ultimately gave in. (Much later on I learned that it had been done at considerable financial sacrifice.) The program, which also included orchestra, concert band and a course in theory, turned out to be a mixed bag for me. However, the weekly half-hour lessons from Labate did provide some concrete benefit, but in a very unexpected way as you shall see.
This was many years before Juilliard moved to its present location at Lincoln Center in Manhattan. Back then the school was further north, on Claremont Avenue close by Grant's Tomb. (Today those buildings are occupied by the Manhattan School of Music.) Labate, however, didn't do his teaching there, at least not that summer. Instead, he had a tiny studio in a building in the heart of the music district around West 48th Street. As I recall, it was furnished with little more than an old upright piano, a music stand, and a couple of chairs.
Labate was then in his upper fifties, quite short, with stubby fingers, and very portly - a veritable "Mr. Five-by-Five." There was something of a space between his two upper front teeth, and I always wondered whether this contributed to the fine quality of his tone. Although he had been in this country for thirty-five years, his English was still weighted with a very thick Italian accent. I had heard amusing stories about him which further heightened my interest. For example, the great German conductor Otto Klemperer supposedly once gave him a protracted bawling out for inattention during a rehearsal back in the 1930s, finishing up with, "Well, what do you have to say for yourself?" Labate's reported reply: "Klemp, you talka too much!" He was also reputedly one of the few musicians who could stand his ground with Toscanini.
The first thing Labate did was have me buy for $2.50 a copy of the Theodore Niemann "Method for the Oboe" which he had revised and amplified years before. The frontispiece featured his photograph taken when he was perhaps fifteen years younger and forty pounds lighter. At my request, he autographed it with a flourish.
My earlier fantasies of achieving a close student-mentor relationship with him were very quickly dashed. The Labate of the funny anecdotes was never in evidence. Although pleasant enough, it became clear that he was not an inspired or inspiring teacher; indeed, he seemed quite bored by the whole business. Generally he would just sit through the entire lesson and listen to me play my assignments, occasionally accompanying on the piano, quietly offering comments on this or that which I often had great difficulty understanding and was much too timid to ask him to repeat. I could never really draw him into any discussion beyond the barest outlines of the weekly assignment. The biggest disappointment, however, was that he never offered to play or demonstrate anything. I thought at first that his attitude arose from resentment at being obliged to spend valuable time with me, a near-beginner, naive, and musically still somewhat amorphous. However, when I compared notes with one of the really proficient fellow students, his experience turned out to be just about identical to mine. I sadly concluded that little would be gained from Labate that summer.
The final lesson with him was a near-disaster because I unexpectedly found myself with a reed problem. Conrad had given me some brief instruction on reed making not long before, and I was still floundering away at it. Shortly after the lesson started I unhappily discovered the fundamental truth that a reed which seems pretty good when you first make it doesn't necessarily stay that way the next time it's soaked and played. And that reed, unfortunately, was the only one I had. Near the end of that very uncomfortable half hour there was a knock at the studio door and one of the other students came in. He had an instrument with him on approval that Labate had promised to look over. The oboe was a battle-worn Selmer, and Labate immediately handed it to me to try out. It was a particularly untimely request. First, I was stuck with a reed I could just barely play; second, the Selmer was an open-hole model which I wasn't at all used to; and third, the instrument seemed to be in pretty poor shape. As feared, about the only sounds which emerged when I tried to play it were squeaks and squawks. After enduring perhaps a half minute of this, Labate abruptly took the oboe from me. He removed the reed, briefly crowed it, made a wry face, stuck the reed back in the oboe and started to play. What followed was a revelation I shall never forget. For what may have been three or four minutes (I quite lost track of the actual time) he put the instrument through its paces, starting with scales, then arpeggios, then trills and ornamental figures, taking in its entire range, and finished up with a few brief excerpts from the symphonic literature. The technical facility, the beauty and variety of tone, and the musicality which radiated through it all just astounded me. And with my awful reed and that third-rate instrument yet! I had never heard anything like it, and the intimacy of that little studio added further to the breathtaking impression. Labate then handed the instrument back to the other fellow, shaking his head and saying, "Oboe notta so good." Turning to me he added, "And you, da reed notta so good either!"
Considering all the lessons that summer, it was only in those few closing minutes that Labate provided a truly valuable learning experience, and I doubt that he realized it. For the very first time I was able to listen to a worldclass oboist up close. More important, he demonstrated that if you are really good, firstclass equipment is not necessarily required for high level performance. It made me tolerant of the far-less-than-first-class oboe I then had, and I became much more patient about the years of waiting until I was able to afford and acquire a fine instrument.
Many years later I happened to meet one of his sons-in-law. When I recounted this experience it didn't surprise him at all. He told me that the man had very limited mechanical ability, took poor care of his instruments, and always depended on others for his reeds. Many people who worked with him, he added, were amazed that he could play as well as he did considering those apparent handicaps.
I bumped into Labate around that West 48th Street neighborhood perhaps twice more in the early 1940s. He'd remember me and we would chat for a few moments. When I told him of my final decision against a career in music, his response was "That'sa good!". He retired from the Philharmonic in 1943 after twenty-three seasons, and was succeeded by the late Harold Gomberg.
In contrast to his contemporary in Philadelphia, Marcel Tabuteau, and despite his time with Juilliard (and also the Manhattan School of Music), there probably aren't many top-flight oboists who have boasted of having studied with Bruno Labate. I read that he died in 1968.
(The author is a retired chemical engineer. He has been an ardent amateur oboist for fifty-four years in New York, Delaware, Connecticut, Massachusetts, and points in between.)