The Juilliard School

Alumni News
Spotlight

Drawing on Experience

You know those folks who travel a straight-arrow path in life? The ones who always know exactly where they're headed? Leslie Dreyer (Diploma '50, violin) isn't one of them. Mind you, he's not complaining. Dreyer will retire this spring after 46 seasons with the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, 30 of them as associate principal second violin—not a bad track record for a guy who got booted from the Juilliard Orchestra for cutting rehearsals and lost his scholarship for hustling chess in the lounge and ping-pong in the International House gym.

Music and storytelling are embedded in Dreyer's DNA. His grandmother's first cousins included the violinist Mischa Elman and pianist Mischa Levitzky; his grandfather's uncle was the Yiddish writer Sholom Aleichem. (Dreyer's mother, who played the piano by ear without a lesson in her life, divorced his Romanian father, a bootlegger during Prohibition, when Dreyer was a year old—but that's another story.) A Russian movie called Beethoven Concerto prompted young Dreyer to switch from piano lessons to violin when he was 8, and he served as concertmaster of both the Erasmus Hall High School Orchestra in Brooklyn and the All-City High School Orchestra. In fact, his violin grades at Juilliard were stellar—but that C-minus in orchestra made him eligible to be drafted into the Marine Corps in 1951 during the Korean War.

Leslie Dreyer in the early 1950s. (Photo by Bruno of Hollywood)

But his mother was a Communist—"she had sent me to three left-wing camps when I was a kid; what did I know?"—so Dreyer wasn't sent to Korea. His drawing talent was put to use at Camp Lejeune, where he spent two years illustrating top-secret instruction manuals and maps and became a corporal. He also played a cappella—"always a Bach gavotte or something"—for the outdoor boxing matches. "I have photos of that and it's bizarre," he says. "Everyone's sitting there guzzling cans of beer and smoking cigars, and I'm standing there playing the violin."

After brief stints with the New Orleans Symphony and the National Symphony, Dreyer returned to the New York City freelance musician's life, juggling Radio City Music Hall gigs, the Kohon String Quartet, and the Symphony of the Air—"competing with guys from the NBC Symphony who had lost their jobs when Toscanini retired." He recorded with singers such as Paul Anka, Patti Page, and Tony Bennett, and was the lead violin with the Copacabana Strings in the late '50s—"I'd be playing a lyrical ballad while people were getting beat up in the back room." In the summer, there was good money to be made at the famed Catskills resorts, playing with the likes of Robert Goulet, Sammy Davis Jr., and Marlene Dietrich (who made all the musicians get down on the floor and do yoga exercises because she thought they were too fat).

Dreyer eventually tired of freelancing, and was earning an M.A. in musicology at Columbia with an eye toward teaching when he happened to run into a fellow musician on the subway who casually mentioned the Met was auditioning—and that very day was the finals. "I needed a shave and looked like hell, but I ran home to Brooklyn to grab my fiddle and put on my only suit," Dreyer recalls. He played Brahms and Bach, sight-read some Tannhäuser excerpts—and was offered a contract on the spot. It was 1960.

"I hate to sound like 'that was the golden era,' you know?" Dreyer says. "But it was Albanese, Milanov, Tebaldi, Corelli, Nielsen, Bergonzi—night after night." He recalls the thrilling debuts of Pavarotti and of Sutherland, as well as the awful day in 1988 when a patron plunged to his death from a balcony during an intermission of Verdi's Macbeth. And he once stood on a chair in the orchestra pit during intermission to hold hands with Marian Anderson, who was sitting in the front row on the last night in the old opera house—"there were tears on both sides of the railing," he wrote, in his recounting of the event for Classical Singer magazine.

Retirement will bring Dreyer, who turns 76 next month, more time for writing—"more than letters to The New York Times," he laughs. (For the record, 25 of them—signed Les Dreyer—have been printed in the past two years.) He has contributed many anecdotes and articles to publications such as Opera News and Classical Singer, and his cartoons—expanded from irreverent doodles in the second-fiddle parts in the Met pit—have entertained readers of The Juilliard Journal for years (one of them is on Page 2). "I'm like a cat," muses Dreyer—"always getting another chance at life."

— Jane Rubinsky

Alumni Relations

Discover Your Benefits