COLUMBIA
LIBRARY
COLUMNS
 

Such Interesting People

Singers, Musicians and Constance Hope

MARY B. BOAALIXG

A SKED if it was possible to keep the many facets of her life
/-A separate, publicist and artists' representative Constance
A )\ Hope responded "Absolutel"v not!" Indeed, Miss
Hope's lives—professional, personal, philanthropical and social-
collide and interweave with apparently infinite \'ariet\'. This ob¬
servation is confirmed in the rich contents of her files of corres¬
pondence, photographs and other publicity materials recently
given to the Libraries. The Constance Hope Collection, dating
from the mid-1930s, covers over forty years of Miss Hope's as¬
sociations with hundreds of great performers, and chronicles her
career as a trailbla/.er in the field of artists" and commercial publicity.
In a recent interview I asked Miss Hope wl"\at first led her into
the field in which she was a pioneer. "It was an accident," was her
first reply. But in fact accident had very little to do with it. for
Miss Hope was well prepared from early childhood for all the
roles which she later assumed. Her father, luigenc Bernstein, was
a pianist and musical coach to such artists as Enrico Caruso, Joseph
Hoffman and Edward Johnson, and directed the Russian Trio, a
leading chamber music organization in the United States in the late
19th and early 20th Centuries. The young Constance, for the
privilege of staying up late, distributed programs and tea at her
father's concerts, which «ere given in private homes to a pur-

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