Emanuel Leplin

Biography

Below is a comprehensive bio of Emanuel Leplin. For corroboratiing articles, go to www.emanuelleplin.info, where you can also see many of his oil paintings and watercolors, as well as a visual history. This website is maintained and updated regularly by his son, Rocky Leplin. Leplin also has an article here: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emanuel_Leplin This article contains a complete list of publications, including many reviews of concerts of his music in the San Francisco Chronicle, the San Francisco Examiner, and other newspapers.

Leplin was born in 1917 in San Francisco. He was a violist in the San Francisco Symphony, a conductor, a composer, and, as well, an oil and watercolor painter of high caliber. Both his paintings and his compositions used a full pallete of colors to distinctive effect. But after 1954, he was unable either to compose or paint using anything below his neck but the first three fingers of his right hand.

Leplin, who went by Manny, was the only child of Russian Jewish immigrants, Dora and James Leplin. James worked as a welder at the Hunter’s Point Naval Shipyard in San Francisco. One day, when Manny was still a young boy, James was hit in the head by a falling ingot. One night shortly after that, he went after his wife Dora, quite unexpectedly, with a knife. The upshot of this change in his behavior was that James was committed to the Napa State Hospital, an asylum for those with a serious mental illness. His diagnosis was major depressive disorder. Dora Leplin raised Manny thereafter by herself.

She was a seamstress, but in those tough economic times, she struggled to make ends, if not seams, meet. One of Dora’s clients was a social worker. When she learned of young Manny’s singular talent for playing the violin, and Dora’s inability to afford private lessons, she informed the wife of Dan Koshland Sr., a vice president of the Levi Strauss Company. Koshland paid for Manny to have lessons, first with Kathleen Parlow, a Canadian former child prodigy turned virtuoso, who was known as “The lady of the golden bow.” This began a lifelong sponsorship of Manny by the Koshlands. Other San Francisco philanthropists would in the future follow suit, among them Ruth Liliienthal, another affiliate of Levi Strauss, and Agnes Albert, for decades the principal patron of the San Francisco Symphony. After Parlow, Manny studied with Naoum Blinder, concertmaster of the Symphony.

Manny excelled in any avenue that involved music, art or design. He built professional-grade furniture in junior high, designed houses and shopping centers while a student at Lowell High School, and was concertmaster of all of his school orchestras (back when they had them). On his last day of high school, he set off a firecracker under his desk. “Firecracker” was also the name of his very last completed composition.

Manny was a self-starter with a generous slice of derring-do. In 1932, when grand opera first performed in the new War Memorial Opera House, unable to purchase a ticket, he donned his suit, unlatched a back window, and boosted himself inside. He climbed catwalks upward that led him eventually to a narrow passageway between the ceiling and the roof. There he found a crawlspace whose destination was the huge glass panel chandelier that still hangs today over the Orchestra section of the Opera House hall. From this position he watched the inaugural performance of Tosca.

A meeting was arranged for Manny with Albert Elkus, chair of the U.C. Berkeley Department of Music. Manny brought a fellow violinist, and they played his first composition, which was for two violins. After several minutes, Elkus stopped them, saying that he couldn’t listen to another G major chord. However, he encouraged Manny to enroll in the Berkeley Music Department, which he did the next semester. After attending for a year, Manny was encouraged to submit a composition to the George Ladd Prix de Paris competition, which awarded the winner with a two-year fellowship to study in Paris. The only undergraduate to do so, he won the award, and spent the years 1937-39 in France.

Though able to study with the popular and accomplished Nadia Boulanger, he chose Darius Milhaud instead, as he felt the compositions of those who had studied with Boulanger were too bland and sounded too much alike. Milhaud was one of the young guns of the Groupe des Six (Milhaud, Honegger, Poulenc, Taillefere, Auric, Durey), who wrote rhythmically and harmonically feisty pieces such as the Scaramouche Suite for two pianos and percussion, and, while in Brazil, Le bouef sur le Toit. (The English title is The Ox on the Roof of The Nothing-Doing Bar.)

Manny studied conducting first in the south of France, then in Hancock, Maine, at the schools of Pierre Monteux, then the conductor of the San Francisco Symphony (SFS). Monteux had the distinction of having been the conductor of the world-premier of Igor Stravinsky’s Sacre de Printemps (Rite of Spring), which occasioned the music world’s most famous audience riot. Monteux called Leplin “a born conductor,” and in 1939, referred to him in pen as “mon Eleve-Etoile!!!” (“my star student!!!”). Manny studied violin with Rumanian composer and violinist George Enescu, and with Yvonne Astruc, whose Paris salon was a focus of chamber concerts.

After returning to the United States In 1943, Leplin met Anita Shiner, a student at San Francisco State University, who was also a child of Russian Jewish immigrants. They married three months later. Attending their wedding was Manny’s friend, the violin prodigy Isaac Stern.

In 1944, their first child, Jarrett, was born. (Jarrett Leplin is a philosophy of science professor at the University of North Carolina, and the author of A Novel Defense of Scientific Realism, and A Theory of Epistemic Justification. While a student at Amherst College, Jarrett was voted as having the most interesting name. He was one of several students whose photograph made the front cover of Time Magazine as they walked out on a ceremony awarding an honorary doctorate to Robert McNamara, an architect of the Vietnam War.)

Manny joined the San Francisco Symphony as a violist in 1942, but spent 1943-46 in the Army. His many letters to Anita described the cities and towns he visited in France and Germany, made recommendations for movies to see, and were replete with endearing references to Anita’s beauty (followed by a plethora of exclamation points), and suggestions as to how to bring up Jarrett in his absence. These letters were written in beautiful calligraphy, and often embellished with doodles and drawings of scenes he encountered en route.

Because Manny was fluent in French, the Army used him as a translator of German, of which he claimed scant knowledge. Upon his return to San Francisco, Manny began composing works for orchestra, and painting oils of San Francisco, its skyscrapers, the Japanese Tea Garden, the museums and bridges, as well as outlying scenes including Monterey Harbor and Carmel Valley. Leplin’s painting of Carmel Valley contains the colors of yellow-orange, salmon and red, in addition to a few small patches of green. It was with amusement that the Leplin family, one day while in Carmel Valley, encountered in an art gallery an oil of the Valley viewed from the identical site from which Manny painted his…only the painting on display in the gallery had three colors only: green for the fields, blue for the sky, and white for a few puffy clouds.

Manny was a gregarious and engaging gourmet, who loved good food, good friends, and a good cigar. In the summer of 1953, he went on a trip to the high Sierras, with several other members of the Symphony, including his friends violinist Robert Gottlieb and trumpet player Eddie Haug. (Gottlieb, after leaving SFS, moved to Olympia, Washington, where he became a music professor at Evergreen University, and then an authority on the art of the Indian tabla, authoring the book Solo Tabla Drumming of North India. Eddie’s father Julius played second violin in SFS, and was Personnel Manager.)

Gottlieb’s trail name on the Sierra trip was Satchel, and Manny’s was Short Stride. Photos of the trip include one in which Manny is standing nude in an icy lake, looking quite chilled.

After living in a basement apartment on Tenth Avenue near Golden Gate Park for four years, the Leplins built a house in the then bucolic suburb of San Mateo. Manny designed the house, giving it a set of windows in the living room that rose in a diagonal line, with each higher window a little smaller than the last. The siding was redwood, with a tourquoise trim. There were birch trees in the front yard, and fishponds both in front of the house and in a patio next to the dining room. Both fishponds were populated by goldfish, contained lily pads, and were fringed by cattails.

Manny was a dynamo of energy. After a Symphony concert, while still in his tails, he would haul off bricks that were left over from a San Francisco construction site, and drive the twenty miles to the new house on the Alameda de las Pulgas in San Mateo. The next day he would trowel them into a chimney that eventually rose above the living room fireplace up to the ceiling. In the patio floor he created a mosaic of a seagull with its foot on a fish.

He spent most of his free time composing and painting. Leplin conducted the Symphony himself in his Prelude and Dance for Small Orchestra of 1941, and his piece Comedy, in 1947, on the Symphony’s transcontinental tour, which gave concerts at 56 stops. He later bragged about the reception Comedy received in Pasadena, where some little old ladies came backstage after the concert to scold him for writing such unlistenable music. (This was his only bad review.) Other large early works were Galaxy (1942), for two solo cellos and orchestra, Cosmos (1947), for violin and orchestra, and Birdland (1948). The Mill Valley Philharmonic, conducted by Laurie Cohen, gave a valiant performance of Birdland in its adventuresome premier concert in 2000. The other two pieces have yet to be performed.

The Leplins had good friends in the Symphony. They were regular visitors of Eddie Haug (1925-2001), who delighted Jarrett and his younger brother Sheldon by making toys out of paper. Violinist David Schneider, who later wrote the book The San Francisco Symphony: Music, Maestros, and Musicians (published in 1983), was best man at Manny and Anita’s wedding. Manny founded the San Jose Junior Symphony, and also began conducting chamber concerts by members of the SFS.

An opening occurred for the conductor of the Honolulu Symphony Orchestra (now called the Hawaii Symphony Orchestra), and Manny was under consideration. During their interview, Manny and Anita made the faux pas of mentioning a problematic issue concerning the financing of their San Mateo home, which, of course, had nothing to do with music. It was a diplomatic foible that demonstrated that Manny might not be ready for prime time. The job went to George Barati. If not for that mistake, the rest of this biography would be very different indeed.

On summer Sundays, Manny played with SFS at Stern Grove, in a concert series that still goes on today (with a wide variety of performers), and during the off-season week he had a part-time job in an ice cream store. Every day he came home with a quart of different-flavored ice cream. Handsome and charismatic, with a beautiful wife and two healthy sons, he was a happy man.

One morning in 1954, he had trouble breathing. He told Anita to call an ambulance. He walked to the ambulance. That was the last time she saw him walk. It would be nine months before he returned home. He spent eight of those nine months in an iron lung. There was an epidemic of polio in the Bay Area. There are three kinds of polio, and Manny had all three.

While he was in Maimonides Hospital in San Francisco, a benefit was held, the proceeds going to Manny’s family. According to one press citation, “All unions, including the musicians, stagehands, drayage, box office, etc. are giving their services gratis for the May 11th event. What Leplin doesn’t yet know is that the radio engineers and the telephone company will run a direct line to his bedside at Maimonides, so that he will be among those present.” The California Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Murray Graitzer, performed, as well as members of SFS, guest conducted by Darius Milhaud in spite of his well-known arthritis, in two of his own pieces, Mediterranean Overture and Air for Viola and Orchestra, which he dedicated to Manny. Other works were by Wagner, Chausson, Bizet and Shostakovitch.

Later in the year, Comedy was played on The Standard Hour, a weekly radio broadcast of SFS concerts that was heard in major cities from Los Angeles to Seattle. (Standard refers to Standard Oil, which later changed its name to Chevron.) The orchestra played it brilliantly, not surprisingly considering the many previious performances on its transcontinental tour. The broadcast played in the room where Manny was recovering from polio.

Before leaving the hospital, Manny dictated a chamber work to someone who did the notation. Once he realized that he could still move the thumb and first two fingers of his right hand, and hold a pencil, he went back to composing. (Fortunately, he was right handed.) It can be jarring to compare Manny’s pre-polio scores with his post-polio scores. His notation before polio was shown in 1993 to G. Schirmer music engraver Peter Simsich. Mr. Simsich called it “the most beautiful notation I’ve ever seen.” (Simsich’s wife Janet Kutulas is a member of the critically acclaimed Oakland-based women’s vocal ensemble Kitka.) Without an explanation, there’s no way to grasp why the latter seem to have been written by someone with insufficient control over his pen (or in Manny’s case, pencil). Nonetheless, Manny carefully lined up notes in complex and often densely-textured scores for orchestra that were later performed by one of the world’s great orchestras.

As soon as he was able, Manny went back to work. While Anita was teaching in the Belmont School District, Manny would spend several hours each day composing. He had a lapboard that rested on the arms of his wheelchair, on which manuscript paper was placed. In the patio, with only the occasional barking of Mocha, the family Catahoula, or the rehearsing of the nearby Serra High School Band to disturb the silence, he conceived of highly energetic orchestral scores that, like Beethoven, he was only able to hear, while he composed them, in his mind.

When he was composing, he rarely requested help, but when he did, it was usually for a “pencil, tamp and light.” This called for three things: a freshly sharpened pencil, a tamping down of the tobacco in his pipe, and a pipe-light, because tamping it down made it go out.

On 4,6,7 of May 1960, SFS performed Manny’s first orchestral works written with three fingers and pencil. They are called Landscapes and Skyscrapers. SFS chose to display two of his paintings, one the aforementioned Carmel Valley, and the other a painting of S.F. skyscrapers jutting upward at angles in turquoise, red, yellow and black. They were prominently on view in the Opera House lobby during the three premier performances of his complementary pieces. The feature article in the May 1, 1960 section “This World” of the San Francisco Chronicle was titled “The World Premiere of Leplin’s Compositions and Canvases,” and ran photos of the two paintings.

Landscapes is, especially for anyone who has heard the highly energetic Comedy, a greatly contrasting, sometimes austere work, that evokes great vistas, in harmony that perhaps only once resolves into a triad. There is, as in all Manny’s pieces, continuous melody, taken up sometimes by a whole string section, sometimes by a single woodwind. The whole work is an arc, with a series of crescendos that gradually build up to a rhythmically stirring climax that brings to mind the same technique in the symphonies of Beethoven. (Manny always said that his models for composition were Beethoven and Brahms. After the climax, it resettles into a long diminuendo, and ends quietly.

Skyscrapers is just the opposite. It is by turns riotous and ribald, with alternating sections evocative of quiet city streets in wee small hours. For this piece, Manny stole and frequently deployed the main theme from the TV show “Highway Patrol,” starring Broderick Crawford. SFS has trouble being cohesive in the extant recording, once falling apart quite obviously to any ears. The climax at the end, however, is a full-blast, spot-on, down-to-the-wire thrill.

The conductor was Enrique Jorda, who also conducted Manny’s next piece, which was commissioned by Agnes Albert and other friends of SFS for the 50th Anniversary season. SFS premiered Manny’s Symphony No. 1 on 3, 4, 5 of January 1962. Subtitled “Of the Twentieth Century,” it has a name for each movement: Illumination, Consternation, Contemplation and Adaptation. For the premier, Manny painted four pictures with a brush held tightly in his teeth. The polio epidemic did not boast a lot of paralyzed painters. Many people paint with a mouth brush these days, but Manny may have been the first person ever to paint this way, and local newspapers including the San Francisco Chronicle ran stories about his dual capabilities.

All four of these paintings for the First Symphony were among 16 that disappeared from a Palo Alto residential community called Lytton Gardens in the 1980s. Most of the paintings were being stored in storage rooms, and when a new manager took over, he had the storage rooms emptied. Manny’s mouth-brush-created paintings were either thrown away or taken to Goodwill. In 1990, Sheldon Leplin (aka Rocky) returned to the Bay Area after a long absence, and went on a campaign to find as many as the paintings as he could. His quest was written up in Bay Area newspapers, including the Chronicle, the San Mateo Times and the Oakland Tribune. Only three of the paintings were found.

Leplin’s Symphony No. 1 is 45 minutes long. A reviewer for the San Francisco News Call Bulletin, a daily owned by William Randolph Hearst, wrote: “If any in the audience were minded to approach Leplin’s work with a kindly tolerance, suitable to a gallant effort by an afflicted fellow human, they were immediately put straight by Leplin’s music. It is a big, vital, masculine, muscular work. It defies you to pity a man who can blow such life into a big orchestra with his mind.” Manny wouldn’t say whether the triple fortissimo gong slam in the last movement was or was not meant to signify an atom bomb. But the fallout of quivering strings that succeeded it pretty much confirmed that interpretation.

Manny wrote two more symphonies. The second was premiered by SFS on 19, 20, 21 of January 1966. In SFS’ program notes, Edward Lawton, a professor of music at U.C. Berkeley, wrote: “Symphony No. 2 is, as a whole, rich in thematic material, with individual sections containing as many as four separate and distinct themes. Behind them, however, two principal impulses are at work, the rhythmic and the lyric, and much is made of the opposition between these impulses—not only in large sectional areas, but also in short, rapid, dramatic juxtapositions. All of this is supported by a sensitive, natural ear for instrumental color, cultivated and schooled by Mr. Leplin’s years in the orchestra and as a conductor.”

Josef Krips was conductor of SFS from 1963 to 1970. He came to Manny’s house in San Mateo, after reviewing the score. He sat beside Manny, and with pauses only between movements, in a one-man tour de force, sang through the entire Second Symphony. It took 45 minutes. When finished, he exclaimed, “It’s more complicated than Stravinsky!”

Manny received a letter from Leonard Bernstein dated 24 Sept. ’65. It reads: “Forgive my lateness in sending you word of your works; my schedule has been such that only this week have I gotten around to look at the scores piled up at the Philharmonic. I find it extraordinary music. Even though it sometimes moves into rather thick, turgid areas, there is always a very moving sense of struggle—particularly the struggle with tonality. I think that this music should be heard; and I hope one day, not too far off, to be able to include a work of yours on my programs. The very best to you.” (When asked about the reference to “turgid areas,” Manny said that they were intentional. He may have been sparing the Symphony’s execution of a complex score with many shifting time signatures.)

Manny never heard from Bernstein again. Two years later, Sheldon was on a flight from San Francisco to Boston, and he read an article in the flight magazine written by Bernstein. It contained the following reason for Bernstein’s stepping down as conductor of the NY Philharmonic to devote all his time to composing: “There has been no music of significance written by an American composer in the last twenty years.” This information contradicted what he wrote to Manny.

A photographer came to the Alameda de las Pulgas house in 1968 to take photos of Manny at work, hoping to place them in a national magazine. Everyone was disappointed, except perhaps for the medical community, when the only magazine that would run the story was MD. The story appeared in the February 1968 edition. It included a photo of Manny playing chess with Sheldon, using a wand to move his own pieces, and of Anita giving Manny a sip from a glass of wine. The cover read “Indomitable Artist,” and contained a photo of Mocha, the family Catahoula mix, stretching up to take a biscuit from Manny’s mouth.

Manny lived a full life. He was still a gourmet, and once a month, the Leplins went to a fine restaurant, including the four most high end in San Francisco: Ernie’s, The Blue Fox, Johnny Kan's, and La Borgogna. Manny’s good friend, a fellow “quad” mathematician named Bob Penn, had a van. One day they went to San Francisco together, and alighted at Enrico’s Sidewalk Café, a popular watering hole on Broadway in North Beach. Enrico Banducci himself was there. He and Manny were friends, and Manny had been slated to perform at Enrico’s legendary nightclub the hungry i, two weeks after he contracted polio. Enrico hauled out a cart full of pastries, and told the men they were on the house. Manny raved about the sumptuous repast.

To meet his needs during the day, when Anita was in Belmont teaching in an elementary school, Manny had a nearly endless stream of attendants. His first, Alec Blakes, was a kind and gentle black man from the tiny San Mateo minority district on the other side of the tracks. Alec stayed for four years. The shortest time an attendant—or prospective one—stayed was fifteen minutes. Just after he was showed the large studio where he’d be sleeping, the Leplins decided, for some reason, to put Manny’s First Symphony on the Ampex stereo in the living room—loud. When someone went to see how the new attendant was coming along, they discovered that he was gone, having slipped out a side door.

When out for a family drive, Manny had to be lifted in and out of the car by two canvas straps attached to a rooftop lift by chains. In those days, it was quite uncommon to see someone in a wheelchair. Once when on the Monterey pier, which boasted many fine seafood restaurants, while Manny was being transported from the car to his chair, a group of people stopped where they were and openly stared. This embarrassed and irritated Manny’s younger son Sheldon, if not his dad.

In the late 1960’s, Manny and Anita received an inheritance that enabled them to build a house in a gated seaside community called Pajaro Dunes. This was where San Francisco columnist Art Hoppe and future S.F. Mayor Dianne Feinstein had vacation homes. It was developed only enough to have all-wood houses, connected by plank walkways. (There was also a tennis court.) Manny designed their house, and spent many hours there sketching scenes for future oil paintings. They bought a dune buggy, and tooled around the fertile Watsonville-area farm country.

One day the dune buggy got stuck in the sand at the mouth of the Pajaro River when the tide was coming in. Anita had to leave Manny there and run for help. Shortly he was rescued by three men in a truck. He was a bit disappointed, having been hoping to be rescued by helicopter.

Manny became the editor of a newsletter that went out to people around the Bay Area who had become paralyzed by polio. It was called The Spokesman—Voice of the Handicapped. Manny added doodles, and wrote political columns advocating for disability rights. In the summer of 1967, Jarrett was in France. Manny urged Anita to take a break from the five wake-ups she coped with nightly, and go join him for her first trip to Europe. Manny’s attendant agreed to take on some night duties, and Sheldon was available. Anita went, with misgivings. Manny would be spending weekends at the Crystal Springs Rehabilitation Center, which had their own rocking bed and attendant staff.

The first Saturday got off to a rocky start. Manny was left alone for three hours without anyone noticing he was there. But things improved. One night during the week, however, Sheldon was off visiting his friend Bruce Fay, who lived with his parents in Belvedere. On his way home at about 1:00 a.m., he was driving through South San Francisco, and came across another car that seemingly materialized right in front of him in an intersection, without warning.

The result was that the family station wagon, which had been specially outfitted for the large battery that powered Manny’s chest respirator, which allowed him to breathe with his paralyzed lungs, was totaled. But that was only the beginning. The man driving the other car was hospitalized for a month. His wife died on the way to the hospital. Sheldon, whose only injury was a fat lip, was charged with involuntary manslaughter.

Matters were made even worse, the morning of the day that Anita returned from Europe. Manny was at the rehab center, where he woke up every morning at about six, but wasn’t gotten out of bed till nine. This was going to be his last day there. Something happened to the rocking bed that Manny was sleeping on. At ten minutes to nine, it jumped. Manny was pitched into the air, and landed on the linoleum floor. Fortunately, nothing broke but his ankle.

Manny and Anita’s friend Harry Margolis, a tax attorney who lived in Saratoga, bought the family a new station wagon, and had it outfitted for Manny’s battery. Sheldon was asked to write a letter to the presiding judge. He wrote the letter, which extolled the virtues of his father. That fall, Sheldon (who was known as Rocky by all his friends) was on the Dean’s List at UCLA. The Leplins’ lawyer expressed amazement when he informed the family that Sheldon’s charge had been reduced to reckless driving.

Manny took to writing funny, satirical letters filled with pictures to Harry’s wife, Ann. This extended his talent inventory into comedic rhymed verse. Manny wrote a piece called Prologue. It was intended to be the first in a four-part cycle including Comedy, then Tragedy, then Epilogue. The title of the cycle was to be The Drama. Prologue was performed by the Fresno Philharmonic, conducted by Paul Vermel. Maestro Vermel surprised everyone, after the applause ended, by saying that new music was sometimes difficult to assimilate on first hearing. So they played it again.

These days, there are so many disabled athletes that it’s not uncommon to see them taking on challenges that would prove daunting even to “normally-abled” individuals. Manny’s “wheelnick” buddy Bob Penn rarely ventured on excursions, because he was afraid of catching a cold, and dying from it. But when Manny was offered the adventure of flying over the Sierras in a two-seater plane by a Pajaro Dunes neighbor, he was all for it, and convinced Anita to let him go despite her misgivings. The neighbor flew him over the same mountains he had climbed with his Symphony friends the summer before he caught polio.

Similar to the car lift, Manny had a pneumatic hoist for swinging him onto and off of his rocking bed. In the fall of 1971, Manny and Anita were trying out a young male attendant, who was nervous, and not smooth in his use of the hoist. One morning, he jerked the hoist while Manny was in the air, the hoist tipped over and Manny fell on the floor. For the first time in eighteen years of patience, Anita became hysterical. Manny talked the attendant through getting him into his wheelchair. From there he went to the hospital. At the hospital, he contracted pneumonia. The doctors gave him medicine, without reading the fine print. There was a dangerous side effect. Manny went deaf.

Things went downhill from there. Manny spent ten weeks in three different hospitals, and, in 1972, died of a cerebral hemorrhage. In the week following Manny’s death, SFS, led by Seiji Ozawa, performed his five-minute piece Elegy for Albert Elkus. It was tender, and beautiful. A note in the program said that the concerts were dedicated to Manny. A sound engineering crew was recording it for the Leplin family. Something went wrong, and the tape contained nothing but silence.

Manny left behind him several unperformed works for orchestra including a violin concerto, five string quartets, numerous other chamber pieces, and the first twenty pages of a piano concerto. The last performance of one of his orchestral pieces was Elegy, in 1972. Sources for this article include:

There is an archive of Manny’s life at the San Francisco History Center of the S.F. Public Library.

A website www.emanuelleplin.info contains a list of Leplin's compositions.

A video of E. Leplin painting with a brush in his teeth is on Youtube.

All of Emanuel Leplin’s orchestral scores are available to borrow from the Fleisher Collection of Orchestral Music, Free Library of Philadelphia. 28 scores are also in the U.C. Berkeley Music Library.