XIX
During the winter of 1915 I received a letter from Margaret Anglin, our distinguished American actress, asking me to compose the incidental music for two Greek plays which she intended to produce the following summer at the great open-air Greek Theatre in Berkeley, California. The plays selected were the “Iphigenia in Aulis” of Euripides and “Medea” of Sophocles. I was fascinated by the problem involved, as it necessitated not only the composing of the music but the creation of a form in which it was to be cast.
We know very little of the music of the ancient Greeks, and if we sought to imitate that, it would sound so archaic and even unnatural to our modern ears as to fail in properly supporting the emotions of the drama for us. While the Greeks had developed the technic of the drama to a remarkable extent, music as an art was at that time in its infancy, although its importance was fully recognized by Plato and the great dramatists.
The problem for me was to write music which should take full advantage of the modern development of harmony and orchestration, and form an emotional current on which the drama could float without being in any way submerged. The treatment of the Greek chorus was another problem for which I had no precedents. Mendelssohn had written incidental music to “Antigone,” but this music does not represent Mendelssohn at his best, as much of it is dry and academic in character.
The Greek choruses usually begin with a recital of some old story of mythology, with which every Greek in the audience of that era had been familiar since childhood. Gradually this story is brought into connection with the situation on the stage and reaches its climax when the chorus implores the actors to draw their lesson from it. These choruses I treated in various ways, according to the needs of the dramatic situation. Some were recited to a soft but expressive undercurrent of music, others were sung, and still others were a combination of both. I would have the story of the old Greek legend recited by the first leader of the chorus. Then the second leader, as he applied it to the dramatic situation, would burst into song, until, in the third phase, the entire chorus would join in their impassioned pleadings or warnings.
In the spring of 1915 I took a little cottage in Setauket, Long Island, and there within six weeks wrote the entire music for the two plays, the orchestra parts being copied sheet by sheet as my score was finished. In June I packed them in my bag and travelled across the continent to meet Margaret Anglin and take charge of the musical part of the production.
On arriving in San Francisco I found the great World’s Fair already in full operation. Its Spanish architecture and the luxuriant verdure in which it was enclosed made it a perfect dream of beauty, but I gave myself little opportunity to enjoy it, as my real mission was across the bay at the Greek Theatre in Berkeley, where Margaret Anglin and a company of players were already busily engaged from morning till evening in rehearsing. They were anxiously awaiting my music in order to make it fit in properly with the stage arrangements.
The Greek Theatre at the California University is oneof the most remarkable structures of its kind in the world. Built amphitheatrically against the side of a hill and absolutely on the lines of the old Greek theatres, its top is fringed by sombre eucalyptus-trees.
A few years before I had seen a performance of the “Bacchante” of Euripides given by a company of Roman actors at an antique amphitheatre on the side of a hill overlooking Florence. Much of this performance had been impressive, but the music was tawdry, and as the play was given according to old Greek custom in the late afternoon, the cruel sunlight made the make-up of the actors and the garish colors of their costumes doubly prosaic. The ancient Greeks had no artificial lighting and were therefore compelled to give their performances in daylight, although they sought to temper it so that night would fall at about the end of the play. Margaret Anglin, with her characteristic genius, perceived that a much greater glamour and stage illusion could be produced by giving her performances at night, leaving the audience in darkness and marking out the stage with great electric lights from above, which could be heightened or lessened according to the actual needs of the drama.
If the drama in America had been treated as seriously by its cultured citizens as music has been, Margaret Anglin would perhaps be to-day the artistic head of an endowed theatre devoted to productions of Shakespeare, Goethe, Molière, Calderon, Æschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. These great masters of the stage would form just as important a part of her repertoire as the symphonies of Beethoven and Brahms make up an important part of the programmes of the New York Symphony Orchestra. Margaret Anglin is to-day the greatest tragedienne of theAmerican stage, and should be actingMedeaandLady Macbeth. But instead of that she has to tour the country, playing “Green Stockings” and similar piffle, and only indulges her artistic ambitions and ideals in occasional productions of Greek dramas at her own risk and very much at her own expense.
I was immensely interested in the rehearsals on the stage of the Greek Theatre. They began at nine-thirty in the morning and would often last—with an intermission of an hour or two for lunch—until eight o’clock at night, but as they were held outdoors in the glorious fresh air of California there was but little fatigue, and all concerned gave themselves up enthusiastically to Miss Anglin’s direction and picturesque conception.
She had hired a bungalow near the theatre and a Japanese butler-cook. This little Jap would always appear at one o’clock with a basket filled with the most delicious luncheon dishes, artistically decorated in real Japanese style by his own deft fingers. He seemed to have a great penchant for the stage, asserted that he had actedHamletin Japan, and would sit for hours after luncheon watching the rehearsal, with his little inscrutable eyes fixed on the stage. I have often wondered whether on his return to Japan he gave performances of the Greek plays to his own compatriots and whether any great changes or adaptations were necessary to make them comprehensible to his audiences.
While the general plan of the action and grouping had been carefully worked out by Miss Anglin, she had an open mind and eye, and would often change the arrangement completely if an improvement could be effected thereby. This meant incessant repetitions, during which her patience and cheerful courtesy never failed her.
A grand piano had been rolled into a corner of the stage, and I was so fascinated in watching the rehearsals and the gradual evolution of the stage pictures under her skilful hands, that I insisted on always playing the incidental music myself, even though some of the scenes were repeated dozens of times.
Miss Anglin had enlisted the services of fourteen of California University’s loveliest and most talented coeds to form her Greek chorus. Beauty seems to flourish naturally on the Pacific coast, and some of these young ladies were glorious specimens of a truly Greek and statuesque charm. The recitation of one of the choruses, which was to be spoken in a kind of elastic rhythm to the music of the orchestra, was intrusted to one of these Dianas of Berkeley, and as she had no conception of this, to her, novel combination, Miss Anglin asked me to give her a separate rehearsal after lunch. I sat down at the piano and recited the chorus to her while I played the accompanying music. She stood by my side listening intently and looking like a statue of Diana of Ephesus. Then, bending her head with stately dignity, she said: “I get ya!” Alas! the illusion was gone, and her voice brought me back suddenly from my dream of 400 B. C. to California of 1915. She had not “got me,” however, and I was finally compelled to give this chorus to another young lady, less statuesque in form but more clever in achieving plastic unity between speech and music.
But my real troubles began when I tried to collect an orchestra of fifty for the performances. At that time there were not many good players in San Francisco, and even those few were permanently engaged in the big World’s Fair orchestra. My first rehearsal was truly pathetic—I had been so spoiled by the many years ofassociation with my lovely New York Symphony Orchestra. But where there is a will there is a way, and by stealing a few men from the local theatres and borrowing a few more from the exposition orchestras, we were enabled to get a fairly good body of men assembled.
The success of Miss Anglin’s productions was truly remarkable. There were ten thousand people at each performance, and “Iphigenia in Aulis” had to be repeated twice. In this work the camp ofAgamemnonand its atmosphere of war were graphically illustrated, and five hundred Berkeley students, picturesquely attired and well trained, gave a very vivid picture of the soldier’s camp, especially at the end of the play when the Oracle has announced that the wind has changed, and these hundreds of soldiers rushed across the stage in a tumult of joy to board their ships and sail for Troy.
The “Electra,” for which William Furst had written music for Miss Anglin years before, was also performed. Eventually I also composed music for this play, and all three of the dramas were performed in New York a few years later at the request of Mr. Flagler, on the stage of Carnegie Hall, which had been skilfully converted for the occasion into a Greek theatre.
We all marvelled how vividly modern these plays, written more than two thousand years ago, seemed as given under the artistic direction of Margaret Anglin.Electra, waiting outside the walls of the palace for the sound that shall announce to her the death ofÆgisthusandClytemnestra;Medea, having entered the palace to kill her own andJason’schildren in order to punish him for his marriage to the young Princess, while the chorus, shaking the iron grill of the doors, imploreMedeanot toslay her children;Iphigenia, youngest daughter ofAgamemnon, descending alone the great flight of steps to suffer death in the sacred grove of the goddess Artemis, that her wrath may be appeased and favorable winds may send the armies ofAgamemnonto Troy—all these are unforgettable scenes, and I was overjoyed to feel that the music which I had written was not inappropriate, but formed a good background for these crucial moments.
XX
I have a large library of musical works. It was begun by my father in 1857, and contains many scores of the composers of that period, sent to him for first performance in Germany. He added to it considerably during his thirteen years in America as founder and conductor of the Symphony and Oratorio Societies, and I have still further enlarged it since I became conductor of these two organizations. My library now virtually represents the entire symphonic development up to the present time, and as I look through my catalogue I am amazed at the number of dead composers which it contains. By this I do not mean those who have passed away, but those who were once celebrated, were hailed as great, but whose works are now forgotten and only repose undisturbed on dusty shelves like mine, for no efforts or housewife’s art will prevent dust from seeping into the shelves of a New York City library!
To mention a few of these “dead” composers alphabetically: Who now plays the overtures of Auber’s “La Muette de Portici” and “Fra Diavolo”? Yet they figured frequently in my popular programmes thirty years ago, and both operas deserve more than a passing recognition. The first was a stroke of genius in which the commonplace Auber rose to real heights. The heroine is a dumb girl, a prima donna without a voice, but very dramatically portrayed in the orchestra, and the atmosphereof a people fighting for freedom pervades the entire story. “Fra Diavolo” is a delightful comic opera. The only trouble is that the music is too good for the abjectly dull audiences that now frequent our theatres and want to see a “musical show.” Its plot is delightfully consistent, which is another reason for looking on it with disfavor to-day; but I have always regretted the Nemesis which overcomesFra Diavoloin the last act. This delightful robber has by that time so endeared himself to us that he should be allowed at the end to escape, in order that the public may live in the hope of further pranks and misdeeds from him.
Thirty years ago I gave the first performance in America of a “Symphony in D Minor,” by Anton Bruckner. He was a man with the brains of a peasant but the soul of a real musician, and with a marvellous gift for improvisation, although he was, intellectually, incapable of developing and balancing his themes properly. A noisy party in Vienna wished, at the time, to acclaim this disciple of Wagner as a genius, to counteract the constantly growing admiration for Brahms, and more recently such eminent conductors as Mahler have tried to popularize Bruckner’s symphonies, but they have never gained a permanent hold on our public. Several years after my performance of his “Symphony in D,” I was in Berlin, and Siegfried Ochs, the conductor of the famous Philharmonic Choir, brought a little bald-headed man of over seventy years of age to my table at the Kaiserhof. On my being introduced to him, he suddenly grabbed my hand, and saying, “You are the Mr. Damrosch who has given my symphony in America!” he proceeded, to my great embarrassment, to cover my hand with kisses.
Vienna is full of stories of his childlike gentleness andmodesty. Hans Richter once invited him to conduct one of his own symphonies with the famous orchestra of the Vienna Society of Friends of Music. At the rehearsal he stood on the conductor’s platform, stick in his hand, with a beatific smile on his face. The orchestra were all ready to begin, but he would not lift his stick to give the signal. Finally Rosé, the concert master, said to him: “We are quite ready. Begin, Herr Bruckner.” “Oh, no,” he answered. “After you, gentlemen!”
At that time he was also commanded to appear before the old Emperor Franz Joseph to receive a decoration. After he had been decorated, the Emperor turned to him and said very kindly: “Herr Bruckner, is there anything more I can do for you?” Bruckner answered in a trembling voice: “Won’t you please speak to Mr. Hanslick (the famous musical critic of Vienna) that he should not write such nasty criticisms about my symphonies?”
In my father’s time the overture to Cherubini’s “Anacreon” had a frequent and honored place on his programmes. A modern audience would vote it too dry and old-fashioned.
The music of Niels W. Gade was quite a favorite with our grandfathers and grandmothers, but he is unendurable to-day.
A new orchestral composition of Carl Goldmark was eagerly waited for, forty years ago, and there was great rivalry between my father and Theodore Thomas as to which should have the privilege of performing it first. People used to revel in his “exotic and luxuriant orchestration,” but to-day his colors have faded before the greater glories of Strauss and Debussy and Ravel, and only his “Rustic Symphony” occasionally figures on our programmes.
During the second year of the German opera at the Metropolitan, Goldmark’s “Queen of Sheba” made a success which equalled that of the Wagner operas. Solomon’s temple, painted in gold, the Jewish rituals, the Oriental harmonies, and the naïve surprise of the public on seeing biblical characters upon a modern operatic stage, all combined to make the work a sensational success. To-day it has disappeared completely from the repertoire of European and American opera-houses.
The fate of Franz Liszt as a composer is still more tragic because it is partly undeserved. He created the form of the symphonic poem, but those who succeeded him have developed it so much farther as to leave his works somewhat submerged. I still have great admiration for his “Faust” Symphony, but neither I nor others of my colleagues who share this admiration have been able to make this work really popular with the general public. His “Dante” Symphony, “Festklänge,” and “Orpheus” receive still fewer public performances, and his “Ce qu’on entend sur les montagnes” has never been performed here to my knowledge. But “Les Préludes” and the two Piano Concertos, on the contrary, are still playedad nauseam.
The symphonies of Gustav Mahler have never received genuine recognition here, although he was a very interesting apparition in the musical field. He was a profound musician and one of the best conductors of Europe, and it is possible that, in the latter capacity, he occupied himself so intensely and constantly in analyzing and interpreting the works of the great masters that he lost the power to develop himself as composer on original lines. All his life he composed, but his moments of realbeauty are too rare, and the listener has to wade through pages of dreary emptiness which no artificial connection with philosophic ideas can fill with real importance. The feverish restlessness characteristic of the man reflects itself in his music, which is fragmentary in character and lacks continuity of thought and development. He could write cleverly in the style of Haydn or Berlioz or Wagner, and without forgetting Beethoven, but he was never able to write in the style of Mahler.
Of all the greater composers of the last hundred years no one has been killed oftener than Mendelssohn, yet he always seems to come back again with a new renaissance. His music for “Athalie,” his “Reformation” Symphony, his overtures to “Melusine” and “Ruy Blas” are dead as a door-nail, but his Violin Concerto is still the most perfect example of its kind, his “Midsummer Night’s Dream” the best incidental music ever conceived for a Shakespearean play, his “Elijah” the most dramatic oratorio ever written, and the Scotch and Italian Symphonies still possess a delightful and eternal charm.
The works of Meyerbeer, on the contrary, have deservedly disappeared even from our popular programmes. Those empty “Torchlight Dances” and the vulgar ballet music from “Le Prophète”! I confess, though, that I still have a sneaking fondness for the “Coronation March,” perhaps because I had to conduct it so many times at the Metropolitan, when I first began conducting the operas there. That the same man who penned the glorious fourth act of the “Huguenots” could have been satisfied with the empty drivel which preponderates during the rest of that opera, is one of the eternal mysteries.
About thirty years ago Moritz Moszkowski was oneof the most popular composers of the day, especially for the piano, but modern ears have but little use for his delicate, though evanescent, charm, and his orchestral suites are but rarely heard to-day. He has lived in Paris for many years, and during the war he suffered greatly. Advancing years and a long illness had left him very weak, and it seemed almost as if the musical world in which he had been so popular a figure had forgotten him completely.
But last winter, Ernest Schelling, one of our best American pianists, and an old friend of Moszkowski’s, conceived the happy idea of giving a testimonial concert in his honor, which should be thoroughly original in character. He, together with his distinguished colleague, Harold Bauer, accordingly enlisted the co-operation of twelve other celebrated pianists who were in America during the winter. This list, a truly remarkable one, included Elly Ney, Ignaz Friedman, Ossip Gabrilowitsch, Rudolph Ganz, Leopold Godowsky, Percy Grainger, Ernest Hutcheson, Alexander Lambert, Josef Lhevinne, Yolanda Mero, Germaine Schnitzer, and Sigismond Stojowski.
Mr. Flagler offered the services of our orchestra, but as the stage was to be completely filled with fourteen grand pianos, there was no room for an orchestra, and I had to content myself with the possibility of being taken on as a piano mover, as I longed to take part in the affair in any capacity. The morning before the concert, however, I received a hurried S. O. S. telephone call from Ernest Schelling. He said: “Please come down to Steinway’s immediately and help us out. The fourteen pianists are all here for rehearsal. We have arranged for several compositions to be played by all of us, butalas, each one has his own individual interpretation, and nothing seems to make us play together. We need a conductor!”
When I arrived at the rehearsal hall the confusion was indeed indescribable, and it took some time to bring order out of chaos. Here were fourteen of the world’s greatest pianists, veritable prima donnas of the piano, but several had never learned to adapt themselves to play together for a common musical purpose, and when I rapped on my stand for silence in order to begin the “Spanish Dances” of Moszkowski, at least five or six continued their infernal improvising, playing of scales, and pianistic fireworks. By using heroic measures I gradually produced a semblance of order, and gave the signal for the beginning of the music. The effect was extraordinary! Several of these pianists had never followed a conductor’s beat, and after the first ten bars, two of them rushed over to me, the one violently exclaiming that the tempo was too fast, and the other insisting with equal vehemence that it was too slow. Finally I obtained silence, and told my pianistic orchestra that they were, undoubtedly, the fourteen greatest pianists in the world, and that the interpretation of each one of them was undoubtedly equally the greatest in the world, but as they represented fourteen different grades and shades of interpretation, I intended to take the matter into my own hands and they would just have to follow my beat whether they liked my tempo or not. This was greeted with a roar of approval, and we now settled down to the work of rehearsing as solemnly as if these prima donnas of the ivories were orchestral musicians and routined members of the New York Musical Union. Order followed anarchy, and the results achieved were not withouthigher artistic interest, especially as I detailed such accomplished and routined musicians as Harold Bauer, Ernest Schelling, and Ossip Gabrilowitsch to use their own discretion in “orchestrating” the “Dances.” Gabrilowitsch, for instance, reserved himself for the entrance of the “brasses”; Bauer invested some of the more delicate portions with agile runs of flutes and clarinets, while Schelling imitated the kettledrums and cymbals with thrilling effect.
Carnegie Hall was jammed and the audience in a gale of happiness at the highly original proceedings. The stage was so crowded with the fourteen huge pianos that, after threading my way through them to introduce Mme. Alma Gluck, who was to auction off one of the programmes, I said that what this concert evidently needed most was not a conductor but a traffic policeman.
Perhaps the most artistic feature of the programme was the performance of Schumann’s “Carnival Scenes,” in which each little movement represents a separate carnival figure. The fourteen pianists drew lots as to which was to play which. The introduction was played by all, but after that, in quick kaleidoscopic succession, the different carnival figures fairly danced from the stage into the audience, as a pianist on one side of the stage would begin, followed by one from the other side, and so on. It was a most remarkable opportunity to compare the interpretative characteristics of the different pianists.
The receipts were considerably swelled by the auctioning of programmes and autographed photographs of Moszkowski, and fifteen thousand dollars was the result of an entertainment truly unique in the history of music.
The most popular modern symphonic composer in the’70’s was Joachim Raff. He was a young Swiss who, without a cent in his pocket, had walked many miles from his little village in order to hear Liszt play at a concert in Zurich. Liszt became interested in his undoubted talent, and took him with him to Weimar as musical secretary. Raff, von Bülow, and my father became great friends. But while every one expected that Raff would continue as a true disciple of Liszt’s, and write in the revolutionary style of his master, he gradually turned from him and leaned more and more on classic models, although in several of his symphonies he retained the Lisztian idea of programme music. As he grew older his conservatism became more and more marked. He had great facility and produced works in every known form of music, and his vanity gradually made him believe that his string quartets were equal to Mozart’s, his symphonies to Beethoven’s, and his oratorios to Handel’s and Mendelssohn’s. His fecundity was astonishing, but his pen too fluent for real musical depth. There was hardly a winter, however, that Theodore Thomas or my father did not perform “Im Walde,” or the very programmatic “Lenore” Symphony. This work, in which the last movement follows closely and dramatically Burger’s famous ballad, had an enormous popularity, and is occasionally performed by us to-day, but in general the name of Raff means but little to modern concertgoers.
But perhaps the greatest tragedy of all was Anton Rubinstein, who became, after Liszt, the world’s greatest piano virtuoso. The world fêted him, spoiled him, and sated him with adulation. It all brought him no satisfaction. He was consumed with the ambition to be considered a great composer, and wrote incessantly, nevercriticising what he wrote. His “Ocean” Symphony had a tremendous popularity in New York fifty years ago, but to-day no one would listen to it. His “D Minor Concerto” has been played,ad nauseam, by every pianist, but to-day it is threadbare and frayed at the edges. Only the supreme skill of a Josef Hofmann can make his “G Major Concerto” endurable and cloak its musical emptiness. He wrote opera after opera in a feverish desire to eclipse Wagner, whom he hated, and whose popularity he envied, and after “Parsifal” had been proclaimed at Bayreuth as a “Sacred Festival Play,” he immediately proceeded to write an opera on the life of Christ, which is so dull and unconvincing that it has hardly had a performance anywhere.
His personal popularity was so great that Pollini, the astute manager of the Hamburg Opera, occasionally used to put on one of his operas on condition that he himself would come to Hamburg to conduct the opening performance. His presence would insure a crowded house.
At the last rehearsal of one of these operas Rubinstein was so well pleased with the work of the orchestra that he turned to them and said: “Gentlemen, if my opera is a success you must all come to my hotel after the performance for a champagne supper.” Unfortunately, the opera was a decided frost and the audience so undemonstrative that Rubinstein, in absolute disgust, laid down the stick after the second act, and, bidding the local conductor finish the opera, returned dejectedly to his hotel and went to bed. At eleven o’clock there was a knock at his door. “Who is it?” he shouted in great irritation. “It is I, Herr Rubinstein, the double-bass player from the opera orchestra.” “What do you want?” “I have come for the champagne supper.”“What nonsense!” raged Rubinstein. “The opera was a ghastly failure.” “Well, Herr Rubinstein,” answered the thirsty and undaunted double-bass player, “Iliked it!”
The disappearance of Schumann’s symphonies from concert programmes is due to the fact that he was never at ease in writing for the orchestra. His instrumentation is so thick and turgid as to be the despair of conductors. So much of the music is exquisite, but it is like a precious jewel imbedded in a foreign substance which conductors try in vain to remove by changing the dynamics of this or that instrument, or by leaving out an unnecessary doubling up of certain harmonies. All these devices, however, can do but little. More heroic measures are necessary, and I was much interested last summer when Sir Edward Elgar asked me what I would think of his deliberately reorchestrating an entire symphony of Schumann’s. I heartily applauded such an idea and begged him to carry it out speedily as there is perhaps no one living to-day who better understands the colors of the orchestra and knows how to produce the most subtle shades in the intermingling of the different instruments. In the meantime Frederick Stock, the noted conductor of the Chicago Orchestra, has taken the bull by the horns and has written a new orchestration of Schumann’s “Rhenish Symphony” which I hope to produce this winter.
Are Sousa’s marches played nowadays? They should be. They are better than the military marches of Europe of to-day, and while one cannot put them into the category of higher musical efforts they are the only American compositions of musical worth that have triumphantly blazed their way all over the world.
Richard Strauss, who twenty-five years ago was the most interesting star in the musical firmament, has livedlong enough to have outlived a part of his popularity. He never originated a musical form, but accepted the symphonic poem of Liszt and the music-drama of Wagner as models. His workmanship is infinitely greater than Liszt’s, his counterpoint stupendous in its boldness, and in his treatment of the orchestra he sometimes transcends even Wagner in the originality of his orchestral combinations. But his compositions lack the ideality of either of these masters, and because of this and in spite of his marvellous paraphernalia, his works seem to carry within them the seeds of their own decay.
The gods endowed this man at his birth perhaps more richly than any other musician of our time, but something within him has made him relinquish the greatest of their gifts and has turned him to less pure ideals. In the “Sinfonia Domestica” the daily life of husband, wife, and baby are characterized by an orchestra of one hundred and ten players with such noisy fury and realistic prose as to give one an altogether distorted insight into what is supposedly a page from the composer’s diary. But the music descriptive of the composer who, after these dreadful domestic squabbles, retires to his workroom, lights his lamp, and begins to communicate with his muse, is so beautiful as to fill us with a deep regret that one so winged for flight in the ether should be so content to walk on the earth.
The instrumental devices, depictingDon Quixote’sadventure with the sheep and his fight with the windmill, which aroused such astonishment and admiration when they were first heard, have already lost their effect and are listened to to-day with hardly a smile. The final scene, however, depicting the dying ofDon Quixote, is so beautiful and tragic in its expression as to bring tears to thelistener. The “Heldenleben” is to me a work of noisy bombastic emptiness from beginning to end, and one might call it typical of certain German currents of to-day. It would, however, be manifestly unfair to call it typically German, as a race that has produced Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, and Wagner will surely find other men to continue their glorious traditions.
A composer’s fame is not affirmed by professional musicians but by the general public whose judgment in the end is infallible. A great masterwork that is not destroyed will always eventually be recognized as such whether, like the “Venus de Milo,” it has lain hidden for centuries beneath the earth or, like the “Matthew Passion” of Bach, equally hidden in the dusty shelves of the Royal Library of Berlin, to be rediscovered by Mendelssohn and pronounced the greatest religious choral work ever written.
The two works of Strauss which have retained their popularity with the public are undoubtedly his best, as their requirements do not enlist such qualities as he does not possess or has not sought to develop. In “Till Eulenspiegel” Strauss’s talent for mordant realism finds full expression. The wild pranks ofEulenspiegelfollow each other in mad, cynical humor, and, in the limited form of programme music, the work is flawless.
His “Salome” is as perfect a union with Oscar Wilde’s marvellous play as the “Pélléas” and “Mélisande” of Maeterlinck and Debussy. In both the composers have so steeped themselves in the spirit of the poem as to enhance its beauty. But with all my admiration for “Salome” I have never been able to sit through the final scene without a feeling of disgust, which sometimes mounted even to physical nausea. WhenSalomesings her horrible love music to the head ofJohn the Baptistithas always seemed to me a parody on the glorious finale of “Tristan and Isolde.”
I have spoken in another chapter of Tschaikowsky’s visit to America in 1891 as a guest of the Symphony Society. For twenty-five years his popularity was enormous and the mere announcement of his “Symphonie Pathétique” was sufficient to draw a crowded house. His symphonies appeared more often on our concert programmes than those of any other composer. They have a rhythmic and elemental strength which appealed even to the unmusical, but to-day a distinct lessening of this popularity is noticeable. There is a lack of real symphonic development of his themes, and certain crudities of workmanship stand out more clearly as the works have become better known. Young conductors, anxious for ready and cheap applause, still choose one of his symphonies for their début, and the melodic charm of his lighter music, if not heard too often, will retain its place in the affection of our public for some time longer.
And now we come to the greatest genius of the nineteenth century—Richard Wagner. “What!” exclaims my reader. “Do you consider him dead?” God forbid! The wings of his genius are still soaring aloft in the ether, but there is no doubt that the attitude of the world of to-day toward his music is absolutely different from that of fifty or sixty years ago when he first electrified or infuriated a public, amazed at his daring innovations. The inevitable has happened—Wagner has become a “classic.”
I was a boy of fifteen when I heard the first performance of “Lohengrin” at the old Academy of Music. The opera was sung in Italian with Italo Campanini asLohengrin, Valeria asElsa, and our own Anne Louise Cary asOrtrude. The conductor was old Luigi Arditi. I sat in the front row in the family circle, and was so excited by the drama and the music that at the end of the double male chorus—which accompanies the approach ofLohengrinin the boat drawn by the swan as the God-sent deliverer ofElsa—the tears rushed down my cheeks. But they were happy tears and a natural relief from the tension which the music had created in me.
Each succeeding opera of Wagner’s was a similar revelation. I pored over the scores of the “Nibelungen Trilogy” during every hour left me from school work and piano practice. In fact, I often stole time from the latter and would gladly have given up my entire school if my parents had not very properly kept me where I belonged. Later on my founding of the Damrosch Opera Company for the sole purpose of producing Wagner operas seemed an inner necessity, and I was driven to it by a force stronger than myself. For years a Wagner programme, whether it was at a symphony concert in New York, or in Oklahoma on a Western tour, or at the Willow Grove summer concerts, drew the largest audiences, and the same orchestral excerpts were repeated by me and other conductors year after year and received by our public with excited enthusiasm. To-day the amazement which his music called forth is no longer apparent. He is admired and loved, but the nerves of the younger generation are not thrilled by his harmonies as ours were. His works repose upon our shelves bound in morocco and gold and occupy places of honor, but, alas, on several of them the dust is beginning to gather and many of the young people of to-day find “Lohengrin” monotonous, and vote unanimously thatTannhäuser’srecital of his pilgrimage to Rome is too long.
Time and continued occupation with Wagner’s music may have made me more critical and analytical, and I am no longer in complete and enthusiastic accord with some of his theories regarding the music-drama. But much of his music still sweeps me off my feet, and his “Meistersinger”—which is so happy and perfect a compromise between the opera and the music-drama—is to me still the greatest musical work of our times.
I have spoken above of the finality of the judgment of the public regarding the ultimate vitality of an art work. Conductors have had their personal convictions and have tried to force them upon our audiences, but unless these convictions were based on actual worth the public has in the end consciously or unconsciously rejected them. Sometimes unworthy composers have had momentary popularity, but they were born but to dance in the sun for one day and then to die.
My orchestral parts of the symphonies of Beethoven, Mozart, and Brahms are old and worn by many rehearsals and performances, and some of them have been patched up and pasted together by my librarian so many times that they have had to be replaced by new ones twice over. I have performed them for nearly forty years, and the grandchildren of my audiences of 1885 are now listening to them with equal happiness. A few years ago I discovered a lovely symphony by Mozart, which had never been played in New York, and I was as proud of this as if it had been the fourth dimension.
The works of these masters are lifted above the fashion of the moment, and their creators smile upon us serenely and eternally from the heavens in which they dwell as gods among the gods.
FRITZ KREISLER, HAROLD BAUER, PABLO CASALS,AND WALTER DAMROSCH
FRITZ KREISLER, HAROLD BAUER, PABLO CASALS,AND WALTER DAMROSCH
XXI
These reminiscences were begun in New York in April, 1922, and finished the following August in Bar Harbor, Maine. My friends had urged me for some time to write down my experiences because they thought that the many and varied events in a long musical life would prove interesting to American musicians and readers generally.
I do not know. On re-reading the foregoing pages in the proof-sheets I feel that many happenings which seemed of great importance to me may prove but dull reading to others. But at least I have tried to tell a truthful tale and to give an honest account of my aspirations and struggles.
I have climbed a few hills, but only to see the mountains beyond rising higher and higher, the path upward often indiscernible through the mists surrounding the peaks.
I love the people among whom my father settled because he firmly believed that in America his children would have a greater opportunity for development than in old Europe.
The musical field in America is certainly wonderful in its possibilities, and all my life I have reached out with both hands and have worked incessantly and enthusiastically in my calling. In part at least I have tried to repay what I owe to my compatriots for their confidence and help. But the power of the individual is comparativelysmall, and while our musicians have already accomplished miracles within the short period that music has played a part in our civilization, so much yet remains to be done that I long for at least one hundred more years of life, partly to continue my work but still more to satisfy my eager curiosity as to the musical future of our people.
If this book serves to encourage my younger colleagues in their efforts to increase the love and appreciation of music in our country, it has not been written in vain.
INDEX
ff.: and following pages