Don’t Say ‘Can’t’ to This Impresario; She’ll Say, ‘Why Not?’

“One statement that makes me crazy is when someone says, ‘It can’t be done.’ I would have to know, why can’t it?”

Caroline Stoessinger--classical pianist, concert producer, lecturer and founder and artistic director of the Cathedral Free Concert Society at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine here--believes that if it’s worth doing, it can be done.

Starting the concert series at St. John the Divine, for instance. Today, New Yorkers tend to agree that the cathedral is a great place to go for a concert, but when the Very Rev. James Parks Morton, Dean of the Cathedral, suggested the idea to Stoessinger about 10 years ago, it was a different story.

“Many people said to me, ‘Don’t waste your time,’ ” she said. “‘It’s uptown. The neighborhood isn’t so good. The acoustics are bad. It’s freezing cold in the wintertime. Why would anyone want to go there to a concert?’ ”

Stoessinger leans back into the sofa at her Upper West Side apartment, and as she speaks, her voice takes on a tone of gentle determination. “Well, when people are so negative, it’s more of a challenge than ever.”

She had heard that the Viennese pianist Paul Badura-Skoda had not appeared in the United States for a while, and on just two weeks’ notice, she was able to arrange for the first concert at the cathedral.

“It was on a weeknight in March,” Stoessinger said. “It was cold, and it was pouring down rain. We had no help with publicity; there was a very small calendar listing in the New York Times. Badura-Skoda was staying at my house, and he was playing free of charge. So I felt an enormous obligation to him.

“I went there at 6 o’clock at night with my heart in my throat, wondering how I’d live through it. By 6:30, there was a long line, and we had almost 3,000 people that first night! We had no sound system, no help with the acoustics, nothing. How people knew--it’s still a mystery to me.

“I knew then that if people were willing to stand in the freezing cold rain on a weeknight in March to go to a concert uptown, that something was right about it.”

Of course, the ambiance of the cathedral is special. It is the largest cathedral in the world. That the Statue of Liberty could fit under the dome.

“It’s a very grand setting for music,” says Stoessinger, who has watched the audiences grow from local to worldwide. The Cathedral’s annual New Year’s Eve Concert for Peace has become a New York tradition, featuring artists such as Leonard Bernstein and Frederika Von Stade, and drawing more than 6,000 people who will often wait in line for hours to get in. The New York Times has called it “New York’s most magnificent free concert.”

People seem to feel comfortable at the Cathedral concerts and, unlike the audiences at Carnegie Hall or Lincoln Center, which are often white and largely upper-class, those at St. John the Divine are often racially and socially mixed. The atmosphere, although quiet, is relaxed and casual.

Stoessinger produces more than 60 annual events at the cathedral in addition to being involved in a variety of other projects, among them benefit concerts for Amnesty International, writing articles on the arts and producing an operetta for children.

Performing as a pianist is an important part of her life. She often plays in the programs at the cathedral, and she has been hailed by the New York Times as “one of the most poetic pianists of our time.”

She recently performed a new work by Lukas Foss--”Remembering Anne Frank,” with Foss conducting the Brooklyn Philharmonic, at a tribute on the 60th anniversary of the birth of the teen-ager who died in a Nazi concentration camp.

Stoessinger, who holds degrees from Columbia University, Barnard College and the Eastman School of Music, talked about her background, an unusual one for someone who has become a kind of grande dame of the arts.

“I grew up in the Ozark Mountains in Missouri--it’s really along way from a city or from any seat of culture. My parents were very hard-working people. My father only went through the eighth grade in school, but he always said a woman can never have too much education. If you want to be President of the United States, why not? That is the way he perceived life.”

Stoessinger remembers growing up thinking mostly of music and having a career from the age of 9. “I was the organist in a funeral home for a dollar a funeral; I played for the Rotary club--I got out of school to do it! And I was the church organist and the school accompanist.”

Her talent for organization showed up early, too. She got her high school involved in putting on plays. In college, she produced her first concert, an ambitious benefit for Hungarian refugees, involving the Budapest String Quartet.

“When you’re inexperienced, you don’t understand the limitations--there aren’t any,” she says.

Reached by phone for an assessment of Stoessinger, Lukas Foss said: “I don’t know how she does it, but she always gets everybody to come to the concerts, and she gets a lot of very good people to give their services. Every event is ‘gala.’ Sometimes she does it at the last moment, and it always works. She’s full of ideas.”

Folk singer Odetta, who has performed at the cathedral, says working with Stoessinger has been encouraging. “She may be of a fading breed that are curious and daring--with taste,” Odetta said.

In discussing her recipe for success, Stoessinger begins by describing what it isn’t: “It’s not the bureaucratic approach of, ‘Here’s our $50,000. We’ll have a program on June 1. This fits into this slot. This is so-and-so’s job’ and you hope for the best.

“There’s no real care or passion in that. The arts are too important not to be passionate about them. We’re not selling shoes.”

As far as problems with fund-raising are concerned, Stoessinger takes a positive approach. “In the arts we have to find ways to use support to make the arts lively and healthy in this country. We just have to work harder and be more creative in finding ways to use the resources we have.”