Chapter VII: Part 7

In Emile Hennequin’s La Critique Scientifique—introduced to English readers by John Mackinnon Robertson in his New Essays Towards a Critical Method—the brilliant Frenchman, unhappily dead before his time, advanced the idea that every critic should, in the preface of his book, set forth not only his qualifications, but also his prejudices, his limitations. This procedure might shed a dry light on what follows, although it would seem unnecessary, as all these virtues and defects are implicit in the critics’ work. However, Mr. Robertson has elaborated the theory and frankly exposes himself. I am minded of this by a signed letter, evidently written by a gentleman, which came to this department shortly after a notice had appeared criticising the Oratorio Society. The critic, it seems, must have been in a disgruntled humor when he declared that the oratorio form was as obsolete as the mastodon, or some other prehistoric monster; perhaps he meant hippopotamus. The writer of the communication protests, and logically, against sending a man to criticise choral singing when he is not in sympathy with such. Other people, numerous people, find in oratorio the musical staff of life. Why, then, trample on their feelings? The answer is an unqualified assent to the argument. As I signed the criticism in question, and as I was bored to death at the time, there is nothing left for me but to apologize—also put on paper my objections, thus following the advice of the distinguished French critic. And I fear I shall make out a poor case for the defense.

In the first place, on the night of the Oratorio concert, our oratorio editor, yielding to a perfectly human impulse—about the fourth time in his life—accompanied the sporting editor to a marvellous wrestling match between El Greco, the Terrible Greek (his real name is said to be Theototocopulous), and Goya, better known as the Man-Strangler. Which one first went to the mat on that tremendous occasion need not concern us now; suffice to say that I was butchered to make the oratorio editor’s holiday. Why do I dislike oratorio? I meekly retort—I don’t. I love it, and my correspondent is right when he asserts that the form has served as a vehicle for most masterly music. Think of Bach, Handel, Mendelssohn. I know it. I have heard and loved choral singing for a half century. Masterpieces never weary, but, as Arthur Symons says, books about books soon pass away, and there are some of us who prefer to read than “see” Hamlet, although I agree with Brander Matthews that the only test of a play is “the fire of the footlights.” In a word, public performance may rob the masterpiece of its original grandeur—and we must predicate grandeur for the B minor Mass, for the Messiah, for Elijah. This sounds as if I were about to lay the blame on the particular performance of the Oratorio Society—a cowardly evasion of my duty. On the contrary, I confess that with the exception of the inevitable limitations of amateur singing—Signor Setti choruses are not plentiful—I had never heard the Oratorio Society sing with such refreshing vigor as the week before last. Remember, too, that I heard the society under Leopold Damrosch, when it sang The Damnation of Faust at the Academy of Music, Philadelphia, and young Walter conducted a chorus in the wings.

You will ask, You love the noble music in this form, why write deprecatingly of it? Because it is my unshakable conviction that such music does not belong in the concert room, but in a church. After hearing the Passion music in Bach’s old St. Thomas’s Church, or the Brahms Requiem in a historical church, the anomaly of singers in festive array singing in concert halls is too much for my sense of eternal fitness. Yes, critics have “nerves,” and it needs a remarkable interpretation of the Messiah or kindred compositions to stir me. I am only answering for myself—qui s’excuse, s’accuse?—and do not presume to gainsay the feelings of pious folk who regard the Messiah as a sacred function. But for those who tell me that the mock-turtle Christianity of Parsifal is “sacred” I merely retort: “A fig for the mystic capon.” Naturally, a concert room better serves the practical purpose of singing organizations here than the house of God; yet I prefer the church, for the spectacle of five hundred humans, with their mouths wide open bawling the text—would it not distract one? Sacred fiddlesticks! you exclaim when a tenor, faultlessly clad, arises and solemnly intones, “And Jesus said,” the remainder of the speech being uttered by some one else. Æsthetically, oratorio has not a leg to stand on. It is neither fish nor flesh. How dull was Samson et Dalila till sung in costume and before the footlights! And it is not by any means very dramatic. Still, to many who do not visit the opera for religious reasons, oratorio is a species of emotional outlet. It is a half-way house, a compromise—you may enjoy both drama and religion. Another thing—I am weary of the music, as I weary when I see Hamlet or hear the Fifth Symphony, or look at the Dresden Madonna. I am not apologizing for this weakness, only trying to explain its genesis. William Gillette has written about the “first-time” element in acting; or why an actor must ceaselessly renew the freshness of his original inspiration. Would that some sympathetic writer deigned to take up the cudgels for the ear-sick music critic. It is difficult, nay, impossible, to recapture that first rapture when Tristan, or the C minor Symphony, or Hamlet, swam into our ken. That is why I did not “react” the other night at the Oratorio Society, and why, as my critique was reprehensible, I am now making a clean breast of the matter and crying: Peccavi!

And here is my old friend Frank Sealey mildly complaining that it was not his fault that his electric organ “ciphered” for a bar during the evening. As I have literally sat at Brother Sealey’s feet for nearly thirty years—since the opening of Carnegie Hall—it is not necessary to assure him that I never doubted that it was the fault of the organ, not his. He is a rock of certitude on the organ bench. But I did enjoy Wolf-Ferrari’s Vita Nuova, a beautifully fashioned score, too sweetly sentimental in spots for the austere and lovely sonnets of the deathless Dante; nevertheless, a tour de force, happily illustrating my primal contention that the oratorio form is as obsolescent as the epic; the spirit, I mean, rather than the form, for the bony framework is there, but the age of piety, the profound piety that prompted the composition of such glorious music as Bach’s or Handel’s, has quite vanished, to be replaced by machine-made music, the “movies,” and other stimulating arts. Contemporary bran is filling, but it nourishes not the soul. Need I add, when the Oratorio Society sings the Messiah at Christmas-tide, that the regular oratorio editor, a singularly pious person, will report the annual occurrence! That night, perhaps, I shall enjoy the brutal but diverting spectacle of a wrestling match. It all depends on the amiability of the sporting editor.

A MOOD REACTIONARY

I consider such phrases as the “progress of art,” the “improvement of art,” and “higher average of art” as distinctly harmful and misleading. How can art improve? Is art a something, an organism that is capable of growing into a fat maturity? If this be so, then, by the same token, it can become a doddering, senile thing, and finally die and be buried with the honors due its useful career. It was Henrik Ibsen who asserted that the vital values of a truth lasted at the longest about twenty years; after that the particular truth rolled into error. Now, isn’t this quibble concerning “artistic improvement” as fallacious as the vicious circle of the dramatist from the Land of the Midnight Whiskers—or is it the Land of the Midnight Bun? Contrariwise, Bach would be dead, Mozart moribund, Beethoven in middle-aged decay. Instead, what is the musical health of these three composers? Have we a gayer, blither, more youthful scapegrace writing to-day than Mozart? Is there a man among the moderns more virile, passionate, profound, or noble than Beethoven? And Bach is the boy of the trinity. The Well-Tempered Clavichord is the Book of Eternal Wisdom. In it may be found the past, present, future of music. It is the Fountain of Eternal Youth.

As a matter of cold fact, it is your modern who is ancient; the ancients were younger. Recall the Greeks and their naïve joy in creation. In sorrow the twentieth-century man brings forth his art. His music betrays it. It is sad, complicated, hysterical, morbid. No need to mention Chopin, who was neurotic—an empty medical phrase—nor Schumann, who carried in him the seeds of madness; nor Wagner, who was a typical decadent on an epical scale. Sufficient for the argument to adduce the names of Berlioz, Liszt, Tschaikovsky, and Richard Strauss. Some Sunday when the weather is wretched, when icicles hang by the wall, and “ways be foul” and “foul is fair and fair is foul,” I shall tell you what I think of the “blond barbarian” who sets to music crazy philosophies, bloody legends, sublime tommyrot, and the pictures and poems of his friend. At present I am not in the humor nor have I the space. Good white paper is become a luxury, like freedom of speechlessness and other indelicacies of the national cuisine.

As I understand the jargon of criticism, Berlioz is the father of modern instrumentation. That is, he says nothing original or significant in his music, but he says it magnificently. A purple, pompous rhetorician, a Chateaubriand of the orchestra. His style covers a multitude of musical—or unmusical—defects with the flamboyant cloak of chromatic charity. He pins haughty, poetic, high-sounding labels to his compositions, and, like Charles Lamb, we sit open-mouthed at concerts trying to fill in his big, sonorous, empty frame with an adequate picture. Your picture is not the same as mine. I swear that the young man who sits next to me, with a silly chin, goggle eyes, and a cocoanut-shaped head, sees as in a flattering mirror, the idealized image of a strong-jawed, ox-eyed, classic-browed youth, a mixture of Napoleon and Byron. I loathe the music that makes its chief appeal to the egotism of mankind, all the while slyly insinuating that it only addresses the imagination. Yes, the imagination of your own splendid ego in a white waistcoat driving a new model car through the White Light district on an immoral afternoon in the puberty of spring.

Let us pass to the Hungarian piano virtuoso, who posed as a great composer. That he lent his hard cash and musical themes to his precious son-in-law, Richard Wagner, is undeniable. Liszt admits it himself. But, then, beggars must not be choosers, and Liszt gave Wagner mighty poor stuff at times. We believe that Wagner liked far better the solid shekels than the notes of hand. Liszt would have had little to say if Berlioz had not preceded him. The idea struck him, for he was a master of musical snippets, that Berlioz was too long-winded—both in brass and wood—that his so-called symphonies were neither fish, nor form, nor good red tunes. What ho! cried Master Franz, I’ll give them a dose homœopathic. He did, and he named his prescription Symphonic Poem, or, if you will, Poème Symphonique, which is not the same thing. Nothing so tickles the vanity like this sort of verbal fireworks. “It leaves so much to the imagination,” murmurs the fat man with a 22-collar and a No. 6 hat. It does. And his kind of imagination—good Lord! Liszt, nothing daunted because he couldn’t shake out an honest throw of a tune from his technical dice-box, proceeded to build his noise on so-called themes, claiming that in this method he derived from Bach. Not so. Bach’s themes are subjects for fugal treatment, Liszt’s are used symphonically. The parallel is uncritical. Besides, Daddy Liszt had no melodic invention. Bach had, and in abundance; witness his chorals, masses, oratorios, preludes, suites, fugues. However, the Berlioz ball had to be kept a-rolling; the formula was easy. Liszt named his poems, named his very notes, put dog-collars on his harmonies—yet no one whistled after them. Whoever whistled a Liszt tune?

Tschaikovsky kept one eye on Liszt and Berlioz, the other on Bellini and Gounod. What would have happened if he had been one-eyed I cannot pretend to say. In love with lush, sensual melody, infatuated with the gorgeous pyrotechnical effects of Berlioz and Liszt, also the pomposities of Meyerbeer, this Russian, who began too late in his studies, succeeded in manufacturing a number of ineffectual works. On them he bestowed strained, fantastic titles, empty, meaningless, pretty, and as he was contrapuntally short-winded, he made his so-called tone-poems shorter than Liszt’s. He had little aptitude for the symphonic form, and his development section is always his weak point. Too much Italian sentiment, and a sentiment that is often hectic and morbid. He raves or whines like the people in Russian fiction. I think he was touched in the upper story, that is, till I heard the compositions of R. Strauss of Munich. What misfit music for such a joyous name, a name evocative of all that is gay, witty, sparkling, spontaneous in music. After Mozart, give me Strauss—Johann, not Richard.

No longer the wheezings, gaspings, short-breathed phrases of Liszt. No longer the sensuality, loose construction, formlessness and vodka besotted peasant dances of Tschaikovsky, but a blending of Wagner, Brahms, Liszt—and the classics. Richard Ostrich knows his little affair. He is clever, he is skilled. He has his chamber-music moments, his lyric outbursts. His early songs are singable. It is his vile, perverse orgies of orchestral noises that wound my ears. No normal man ever erected such mad architectural tonal schemes. He should be penned behind the bars of his own mad music. He lacks melody. He dotes on ugliness. He suffers from the uglification complex. He writes to distracting, unheavenly lengths, worst of all, his harmonies are hideous. But he doesn’t forget to call his monstrosities fanciful names. If it isn’t Don Juan—shades of Mozart—it is Don Quixote—shades of Cervantes. This literary title humbug serves as the plaster for our broken heads and split ear-drums. Berlioz, Tschaikovsky and R. Strauss are not for all time.

The truth is that musical art has gone far afield from the main travelled road, has been led into blind alleys and dark forests. If this art has made no “progress in fugue, song, sonata, symphony, string quartet, oratorio, opera,” who has “improved” on Bach, Handel, Haydn, Mozart, Gluck, Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, Chopin? Name, name, I ask. What’s the use of talking about the “higher average of to-day?” How much higher? You mean that more people go to concerts, more people enjoy music, than fifty or a hundred years ago. Do they? I doubt it. Of what use all our huge temples of worship if the true gods of art no longer be worshipped therein? Numbers prove nothing. Majorities are not always in the right. There has been no great original music composed since the death of Beethoven, for, strictly speaking, the music-drama of Wagner is a synthesis of the arts, and, despite his individual genius, in union there is death—in the case of the Seven Arts. United we fall, divided we stand! The multiplication of orchestras, opera-houses, singing societies, and concerts are not indicative that general culture is achieved. Quality, not quantity, should be the shibboleth. The tradition of the classics is fading, soon it shall vanish. We care little for the masters. Modern music worship is a fashionable fad. People go to listen because they think it the mode. Alack and alas! that is not the true spirit in which to approach the Holy of Holies, Bach, Handel, Mozart, and Beethoven. Oremus!

MUSICAL “POTTERISM”

Potterism is a clever, amusing satire on the British philistine which has had considerable vogue in London and New York. It was written by Rose Macaulay, who is said to have a dozen novels to her credit. The lady has evidently read Shaw profitably; that is, Nietzsche strained through the Shaw sieve, for G. B. S. never had an original idea. She defines Potterism as a frame of mind, not a set of opinions. Potterism is only a new word for an old thing—cant, or, as we say, humbug, and, on its more serious side, hypocrisy. Smug self-satisfaction is its keynote. Will Irwin in a flash of divination defined the particular quality as “highbrow,” a species of sterile intellectualism which irritates sensible people because of the lofty, condescending attitude assumed by certain persons who, terribly at ease in Zion, are seemingly in the secret councils of the Almighty. Don Marquis daily tilts at æsthetic sham in his stimulating Sun Dial column, and Gelett Burgess, the author of the deathless Purple Cow, long ago hit out at the Potterism of his time. Potterism, like the rich, is always with us. We are all of us more or less Potterites. Dickens painted the tribe, beginning with Mrs. Leo Hunter, not forgetting Podsnappery. Thackeray’s scimitar prose cut through snobbish pretenses, while a French philosopher, Jules de Gautier, in his Bovaryisme, has demonstrated that we are victims of the world illusion—to pretend to be otherwise than we are. It is a law of life, a superstition, this game of self-illuding, and superstition is the cement of civilization.

Therefore, Miss Macaulay has dealt with nothing novel, but she has written an agreeable variation on the theme of human weakness, and the most engaging quality of her formula is its elasticity. No matter the department of life, Potterism lurks thereabouts. Musical Potterism, for example, is everywhere rampant. It bobs up in music criticisms and peeps forth in daily intercourse. “Give me good old Mozart,” cries the classical Potterite, “and keep your modern kickshaws. Mozart is good enough for me!” Alas, we think Mozart is too good for this bonehead, who no doubt prefers a Broadway comic opera to The Marriage of Figaro. Another of the exasperating Potterites is the haunter of concert halls who spends his time in comparing violinists, pianists, singers, orchestras. Criticism thrives on comparisons. That we know; but the infernal hair-splitting over this bald subject gets on your nerves. Music and morals is another favorite grouping of two widely sundered things. Not so, asserts the uplifter who seeks sermons in running Bachs and usually finds immoral rubble. Of all the damnable nuisances in the Vale of Tone, commend me to your moralizer. He is too much in evidence nowadays, and his pernicious influence will, I feel certain, close every theatre, opera-house, picture-gallery, and book in our present United States of Slaves.

There is too much critical cant concerning the classics of music. How uncritical we are! We say Mozart and Beethoven just as we say Goethe and Schiller. Such bracketing is bubbling bosh. It is almost Hegelian in its identification of opposites. We can understand the conjunction of Mascagni and Leoncavello in Cavalleria and Pagliacci, a managerial marriage, with our eye on the box office. But Bach and Beethoven. Or Schumann and Chopin. How absurd and lazy-minded is such association of names! One of the most ingrained of Potterisms is that the gallery at the opera is the repository of the most precious criticism. For gallery, read the standees at our opera—the rail birds, so called. As a matter of fact, the most illegitimate applause comes from these quarters. Does a tenor bawl, a basso bellow, a soprano scream, thunderous explosions prove our contention. When Galli-Curci sang off key at the Lexington Theatre last season she was hailed in an unmistakably cordial manner. We have noticed the same lack of taste at the San Carlo, Naples; at La Scala, in Milan; in Paris, Berlin, and London. Italian audiences, especially of the top gallery, are supposed to possess finer ears than other people. More musical Potterism. They applaud in Italy, as they applaud in New York or London, the singers with the stentorian or extremely high voices; whether they sing in tune or not, whether they rhythmically distort the musical phrase or not, matters little to these fanatics for noise. And invariably they drown the orchestra if the singer happens to end a few bars before it. That the composition should be allowed to terminate logically does not enter into their unmusical comprehension. To bruise their muscular palms and shout is their idea of sensibility. We do not refer now to the official claque, if there be one at the opera, but to the diabolical hand-clapping and hurrahing which is becoming a formidable menace to the enjoyment of the musical portion of the audience. No applause is tolerated during Parsifal until act-ends, no applause is tolerated at Tristan and Isolde until the curtain falls, and what a relief it is not to be forced to endure the belching enthusiasm and vulgar fist-thumping in the middle of a musical phrase! Why, then, are not Italian and French operas given the same chance? We are indeed barbarians in this cult of noise. We can’t even escape noise within our opera-house. It would be a wise regulation if applause could be confined within legitimate limits—at the end of each act. It might not please some singers, who are so avid of applause that they actually hire it by the yard, but it would be a boon to the occupants of the stalls and boxes at the Metropolitan. Hasta la vista!

We blush to utter such Potterisms. There should be no necessity for these obvious criticisms. Another annoying Potterism is the growing hero-worship of conductors—nothing rare, by the way, in the history of art. We remember Theodore Thomas in his palmy days; remember that smoothly fitting dress coat of his. Yes, there were many women who attended the Philharmonic Society concerts to gaze ecstatically upon the shapely back and harmonious movements of this handsome conductor. Another prima donna conductor was Arthur Nikisch of the Boston band. He waved lily-white hands; his weaving motions fascinated the eye. They seemed in their rhythmic variety the externalization of the music he was interpreting, and, according to Delsarte and Dalcroze, they were. But both Thomas and Nikisch were great conductors—Nikisch still is; indeed, he is the dean of great conductors. His personal mannerisms were and are taken as a matter of course. We do not include Arthur Bodanzky among the prima-donna bâton heroes. Nevertheless, he is a hero, and a hero always in a hurry. He is the most precise and business-like of our conductors. He seems as if he were making a train to Eldorado. Yet it is only a fancy. He is absolutely master of his technical and intellectual resources. The enormous dynamic energy of the man, his driving power, are concentrated at the tip of his stick. If the Boston Symphony Orchestra boasts a demon drummer, the National Symphony Orchestra can boast a demon conductor. Bodanzky is demoniacal when he cuts loose. At the second Tristan performance he galloped his men at such a pace that the singers could only pant after them. A great conductor is Artur with the Weber profile and the propulsive right hand. If he had a calm left hand like Thomas or Nikisch his readings would benefit thereby. But how stimulating is his conducting! You swing along on the crest of exaltation and forget the composer’s intentions in the tumultuous symphonic sea. A brilliant apparition, a stroke of genius, but with brains, always brains. The dark horse of American conductors is Ossip Gabrilowitsch. That young man will bear watching.

His antipodes is Walter Damrosch, who is as familiar a spectacle nowadays as Trinity Church. Walter leaves nothing to chance. He doesn’t believe in the imprévu; with him the unexpected never happens. There is a sense of security at his Symphony Society, the sort of security that appeals to you when sitting under a long beloved preacher. Since 1881, on and off, we have sat metaphorically at the feet of Walter Damrosch, and not once has he startled, not once has he altogether disappointed us. He is safe, sane, and—sometimes—soporific. But he never uses rouge or pencils the eyebrows of his interpretations; perfume is to him abhorrent. Good old Walter! His has been a long race, and his a sober victory. Leopold Stokowski is a pocket edition of Nikisch, a Nikisch without genius. He is the ideal prima-donna conductor and exudes sweetness and light (Einstein says that light exudes), and as regards the technique of the bâton he has all his contemporaries beaten to a frazzle—save one, Arturo Toscanini. Such economy of gesture, such weighty significance in every motion are praiseworthy. His musicianship is excellent, his memory remarkable, although commanding intellectuality is absent. He too has a sinuous line in his back that enchants his feminine audience. He is graceful, and inevitably makes his entrance carrying his bâton as if it were a baby. The Philadelphia Orchestra is largely composed of mediocre material, but thanks to the admirable disciplinarian, that is, Stokowski, it sounds at times as if of prime quality. And tonal quality is precisely what it lacks. Its conductor hypnotizes his audience into thinking it is so. Ah, these Poles! The Oriental mango magic trick over again. Stokowski is young, blond, and has a Chopinesque head, but in profile his chin is as diffident as a poached egg. Pierre Monteux, like a happy nation, has no personal history. He is an accomplished chef. We enjoy his cuisine. There is a savory touch of the Midi in his musical ragouts. And to my horror I find myself indulging in the most reprehensible musical Potterism.

MY “CHILDE ROLAND”

If you keep good company too long it is difficult to remain a decent member of society. This sounds like a faded paradox, but I mean it. No doubt vaso-motor reflex action is the cause. Try it yourself. Frequent the abodes of the self-righteous, of prohibitionists, of reformers and uplifters generally, and you will soon crave moral wood-alcohol, possibly the more vicious benzine. Too much opera drives me back to the church, and thence to the House of the Flesh where the spirit sleepeth. Because he was a clergyman’s son and brought up in a moral straight jacket, dosed with moralic acid, Friedrich Nietzsche exploded such a phrase as “Christianity, alcohol—the two great means of corruption” to civilization. I have often wondered why he dragged in rum? (This is a variant on Whistler’s epigram.)

However, I’m not attempting unimaginary conversations, nor describing insurrections in oyster-shells. A Scotch proverb warns us: “Never tell your foe when your foot sleeps”; nevertheless I shall make a confession that involves both feet, also my sleeping cortical cells. The good company mentioned above chiefly consisted of young, ambitious composers, an approved gang of musical chaps who delighted in symphonically setting poetic ideas, whether from Byron, Nietzsche, Ben De Casseres, or d’Annunzio. And when I say symphonically I mean symphonic poems, for the great symphonists were long ago voted by this coterie as “old stuff.” Liszt and Richard Strauss were our springboards. The Debussy influence was yet to come. It was Tchaikovsky who most appealed to us. Realism, not imagination, was our shibboleth. As all my friends were composing I took it into my head to go them one better, to be more realistic than the ultra-realists. I had, so I fancied, the necessary science. I consulted young Henry Hadley, who was quite a promising lad at that time, and he advised—after putting me through a course of contrapuntal sprouts—to go ahead and do my worst, which worst would only mean spoiling music-paper, while my best—! Who knows?

I fancied that I had mastered the tools of my trade, that I knew every form from a song to a symphony, and that my scoring comprised the entire gamut of orchestral pigments—you see, false modesty didn’t stand in the way—so I began to cast about for my poetic subject and its musical counterpart, hoping—such is the audacity of youth—that the appearance of the pair would be simultaneous, as in the dual-composing of Richard Wagner. I didn’t expect much, did I? Well, one fine night, as I wearily tossed on my folding bedouin, my musical imagination began to work. I remember now that it was a spring night, the moon rounded, lustrous, and silvering the lake beneath my window. I had been re-reading for the hundredth time Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came, from my favorite poet, Robert Browning, with its sinister coloring, its spiritual overtones. Yet until that moment it had never suggested musical treatment. Perhaps it was the exquisite cool of the night, its haunting mellow atmosphere, that fermented in my brain-box. I went to the window. Suddenly I saw a huge fantastic cloud shadow project a jagged black pattern on the water. Presto! I had my theme. It came with an electric snap that blinded me for an instant. It would be the first motive of my symphonic poem, Childe Roland. It was thought in the key of B minor, a key emblematic of the dauntless knight who to “the dark tower came,” unfettered by enemies, physical or spiritual.

How my imagination seethed the night through, as I am one of those unhappy men who, the moment an idea comes to them, must develop it to the bitter end. Childe Roland kept me on tenterhooks till dawn. I heard the call of his “dauntless horn,” and saw the “squat tower.” The knight’s theme, so it seemed to me, was Roland incarnated in tone. I overheard its underlying harmonies with the instrumentation, all sombre, gloomy, the note of gladness missing. I treated my theme with vitality, announcing it on the English horn, with a strange rhythmic background supplied by the tympani; the strings in division played tremolando, the brass was staccato and muted. It was novel enough to me, although this description must sound banal to modern ears. After seven months of agonizing revision, pruning, clipping, cutting, and hawking it about for the inspection of my friends, and getting laughed at for my pains, I finished the unwieldy work. But the performance! Diplomacy won the day. A music-critic, who could compose a symphonic poem was more of a rarity in those far-away days than now, when children make fugues while you wait. There was an interview with Herr Kapellmeister Schnabelowsky and a definite promise. I shall spare you details of the seventeen rehearsals, hours and hours in duration, when my amateurish orchestration was held up to scorn by the conductor for the delectation of the band (though I always paid for his beer at Lüchow’s). The audience at the concert had the pleasure of reading in the programme-book the entire poem, Childe Roland, no doubt wondering what it meant. My symphonic poem would make clear the dark, dubious sayings of the poet. I believed then in the power of music to portray definite soul-states, to mirror moods, to depict, though indefinitely, common every-day physical facts.

My composition was adequately played, of that there was no doubt. Give the Herr Kapellmeister his due. It was only ninety minutes long—remember it was a symphonic poem, not a symphony—and I sat in nervous perspiration as I listened to the Childe Roland theme, to the squat tower theme, the “sudden little river” motive, the horrid engine of war motive, the sinister grinning false-guide theme, in short, to the many motives of the poem with its tremendous apotheosis, ending with the blast from the slug-horn of the dauntless knight. I hope you are acquainted with this extraordinary poem, for I have met confirmed Browningites who had never read it. After Paracelsus and Sordello it is my daily sustenance. The apotheosis theme I sounded with twelve trombones, twenty-one basset horns, one calliope and a chorus of one thousand two hundred, with a vacuum choir for celestial coloring. It almost brought down the roof and I was the happiest person in the audience. As I went away I encountered an old friend, the critic of The Disciples of Tone, who said to me:

“Mon cher maître, I congratulate you, it beats Richard Strauss all hollow. Who and what was your Childe Roland? Was he any relative of Byron’s Childe Harold? No, yes, no? I suppose the first theme represented the ‘galumping’ of his horse, and that funny triangular fugue meant the horse was lame in one leg and going it on three. Adieu! again congratulations. I’m in a hurry.” He fled. Triangular fugue! Why, that typified the crossroads before which Childe Roland hesitates. How I detested that unimaginative critic! I was indeed disheartened. Then I was saluted by a musical lady:

“It was grand, perfectly grand, but why did you introduce a funeral march in the middle? You know in the poem Childe Roland is not killed till the end.” I thanked her with a wry face. The funeral march she alluded to was not a march but the Quagmire theme, that quagmire from which queer faces threateningly mock at the brave knight. Hopeless, thought I, musical people have no imagination. In the morning newspapers I was treated rather roughly. I was accused of cribbing my opening theme from the overture to The Flying Dutchman, and giving it a rhythmic twist for my own ends—as if I hadn’t conceived it on the spur of an inspired minute! I was also told that I couldn’t write a fugue, that my orchestration was overladen, my part-writing crooked, while the work as a whole was deficient in symmetry, development, repose, above all in coherence. This last was too much. If Browning’s poem was pictured in my music, why, then, Browning was to be blamed for the incoherence, not I. I had faithfully followed his poetic narrative. Years later, when I became a member of the critical guild, I saw in a clearer light the reasons for those divagations. You can’t fool all the critics all the time.

Months afterward I read in his book, The Beautiful in Music, by Edward Hanslick, that “Definite feelings and emotions are unsusceptible of being embodied in music.” So I had been on a false track. Charles Lamb and Hanslick had reached the same conclusion by diverse roads. I realized that my symphonic poem Childe Roland told nothing to its hearers of Browning’s poem; that my own subjective and overthrown imaginings were not worth a rush; that as music the composition had objective existence, though not as a poetical picture, which must be judged on its musical merits alone; its themes, development, formal excellence, and not because of its arbitrary fidelity to a literary programme. When I set about analyzing, I discovered what poor stuff I had produced; how my fancy had tricked me into believing that my half dozen heavily instrumented themes, with their restless migrations into many tonalities were “souls and tales marvellously mirrored,” when they were nothing of the kind.

In reality my ignorance of form, and lack of contrapunted knowledge, had made me label the work a “symphonic poem”—an elastic, high-sounding, pompous, and empty tithe. In a spirit of revenge on my fatuity I rearranged the score for small orchestra and it is now played in the circus under the better understood name of The Patrol of the Night-Stick, and the critical press has particularly praised the graphic power of the night-stick motive and the verisimilitude of the quick “get-away” of the burglars in the elaborate coda. Alas! poor Childe Roland.

If our young composers would study Hanslick’s book much good might accrue. It is all very well to give your composition a grandiose title, but do not expect that your audience will understand your idea. We may be thinking of something quite different, according to our respective temperaments. I may enjoy the formal musical side; my neighbor, for all I know, will, in imagination, have buried his rich, irritable old aunt; therefore your pæan of gladness, with its clamor of brazen trumpets, means for him the triumphant ride home from the cemetery and the anticipated joys of the post-mortuary baked meats and the subsequent jag. You never can tell.

“OSCAR” AND DVORAK

Well I remember the day when Oscar Hammerstein first entered the office of the _Musical Courier_ and introduced himself to Editor Marc A. Blumenberg. The year may have been 1888, perhaps 1889. He told Mr. Blumenberg that he was worth a million dollars, which sum he had made from a patent cigar-cutting machine; he also said that he was the editor of a trade journal devoted to the tobacco industry. Blumenberg looked at me, winked, and shook his head. The future impresario, with that ironical smile of his, noticed the incredulous movement and asked: “You think I’m meshugah? I’ll prove that I’m not crazy,” and he produced irrefragable evidence that he was neither crazy nor poverty-stricken. He was worth more than a million, and Marc immediately became interested. Who wouldn’t have? Oscar was then dreaming of opera in English. The failures of American operatic companies had only blazed a trail for him, a trail that would be bound to end in success. He thought that good singing in our native language at moderate prices would solve the problem. Every experimenter starts out with that simple thesis, a dangerous one, as opera has little to do with art, music, good singing, or vernacular speech.

Opera is an exotic. It is a fashionable function or nothing. Oscar was told this by Blumenberg, but he in turn shook his head. He proposed to be another Columbus and show them the egg trick. He had a hundred predecessors, and no doubt he will have a thousand successors. But somehow the egg never stands; that is, in English.

There was much pow-wowing between the two editors that I can’t recall. The less I understand a libretto the more I enjoy the music. I agree with Harry B. Smith, who has said that when an opera is a success the composer gets the credit; when a failure, the blame is saddled upon the book. As the librettist of Robin Hood and a string of other De Koven and Smith operas, Mr. Smith knows what he is talking about. W. S. Gilbert was in the same rocking boat with Arthur Sullivan. Later, Oscar Hammerstein was to settle the question by writing both words and music for The Kohinoor, thus patterning after Richard Wagner. But at first he was rather timid. I don’t believe he took Blumenberg’s advice, or, indeed, the advice of any one, except Campanini’s. Opera at the Harlem Opera House followed after an interval. It was not an enlivening affair. When I read in some obituary articles that Hammerstein had engaged Lilli Lehmann, Schumann-Heink, Alvary, Fischer, and others for his One Hundred and Twenty-fifth-Street season, I also shook my head. I can’t remember such an imposing array—as they say in funeral notices—at the old Harlem Opera House. Does any one? I remember the burning mountain in Auber’s Masaniello, or The Dumb Girl of Portici (what a film it would make, this dumbness), and there were other mediocre revivals, not worthy of critical consideration.

However, Oscar was not to be discouraged. He proceeded to play the game with energy and recklessness. He was a gambler born. Organizing opera companies, vaudeville shows, erecting opera-houses in New York, Philadelphia, London, building theatres, playing with men and millions, what were the achievements of Henry E. Abbey or Colonel Jack Haverly compared with those of this shrewd, ever-witty, good-tempered Hebrew, who was more prodigal with his own money than other managers were, and are, with the capital of strangers?

Hammerstein’s original operetta was once upon a time as celebrated as his hat. The composition was the result of a wager made by Oscar and Gustave Kerker, the composer of The Belle of New York, Castles in the Air, and a dozen other popular pieces. Kerker is a well-trained musician, and, naturally, he was rather sceptical when Oscar boasted of his musical genius. Whatever gifts Oscar may have possessed, modesty was not one of his failings. I have heard him quote with gusto Goethe’s dictum as to the modesty of fools. At a table one afternoon a quarter of a century ago, at the old Gilsey House, in the café, sat Oscar, Kerker, Charles Alfred Byrne, dramatic critic and librettist; Henry Neagle, then dramatic editor of the _New York Recorder_—since defunct—and the present writer. Taunted by some one, Oscar became excited and offered to compose an opera, words and music, within forty-eight hours. Gus booked the bet—the amount of which I’ve forgotten. Rooms were engaged in the Gilsey, an upright piano installed, and, cut off from the world, Hammerstein began tapping out tunes—he was a one-fingered virtuoso—scribbling verse, and altogether making himself extremely busy. I forgot to say that Gus Kerker had agreed to orchestrate the masterpiece.

Then we had lots of fun. Louis Harrison engaged a relay of hand-organs to play under the composer’s windows, but Oscar never winced. The hotel authorities had to telephone the police in order to get rid of a string of Italian piano-organists passionately grinding out popular melodies on Twenty-ninth Street. Plates of sinister ham sandwiches were sent to his room, accompanied by a brigade of cocktails. And the tray was always returned empty, with the composer’s thanks. I’ve forgotten the other pranks we played, and all to no purpose. Complaints were made at the hotel office that a wild man was howling and thumping the keyboard; again, uselessly, for, barricaded, the composer refused to give up the fort. Exhausted, but smiling, Oscar at the end of the allotted time invited the jury on awards to listen to his music. It proved a tuneful hodge-podge, also proved the composer’s retentive memory. Every operetta composer was represented. The book was a joy. It would have pleased little Daisy Ashford. (Why doesn’t some humor-loving musician set The Visiters to music?) Kerker threw up the sponge. He had to pay the bet. The curious side of the affair is that the operetta was actually produced at the New York Theatre a few months later, reinforced by extra numbers, considerably “edited,” and it met with some success. To be sure, the composer was also the owner and manager of the three theatres clustered under one roof. That first night of The Kohinoor was not only notorious, it was side-splitting. The audience, of the true Tenderloin variety, laughed themselves blue in the face. I can only recall that the opening chorus consumed a third of the first act. Oscar knew the art of camouflage years before the word was imported. Two comic-stage Jews alternately sang, “Good morning, Mr. Morgenstern; good morning, Mr. Isaacstein,” while the orchestra shifted the harmonies to avoid monotony. I fancy that was a device of Kerker’s. Oscar “composed” a second operetta, but it never achieved the popularity of The Kohinoor.

During a certain period the Hammerstein hat was without duplicate, except that worn by William M. Chase, the painter. Nevertheless, the Hammerstein hat was unique, not alone for the gray matter it covered, but because of its atmospheric quality. It was a temperamental barometer. When the glass had set fair the tilt of the hat was unmistakable. If storm clouds had gathered on the vocal horizon the hat registered the mood and righted itself like a buoy in agitated waters. Its brim settled over the eyes of its owner; his people flurried into anonymous corners. Or else the hat was pushed off his forehead: unbuttoned then his soul. You might dare to approach and beg for seats. A weather gauge was Oscar’s hat. Ask his one-time famulus, W. J. Guard. He knew. Or Mary Garden. Oscar had hurled his hat at her head in the long ago. What a brim it had, this hat. Oh! the breadth and flatness thereof. How glossy its nap, in height how imposing. To have described Hammerstein without his hat would have been as disastrous as to give the Ring without Wotan. Shorn of it the owner would have been like Alberich sans Tarnhelm. As an Irishman would have said: His hat was his heel of Achilles. Oscar sported it while sleeping. Inside was stencilled the wisdom of Candide: “Il faut cultiver notre Jardin.” (Mary, of course.) Many painters yearned to portray that hat in Oscar’s dome of action. The impressionists would have painted it in complementary tones; the late William M. Chase would have transformed it into a shiny still-life. George Luks would have made it a jest for Hades; Arthur B. Davies would have changed it into a symbol—the old Hebraic chant, Kol Nidre, might have been heard echoing around its curved surfaces, as echoes the Banshee on a funereal night in dear old Tipperary. It was a hat cosmopolitan, alert, joyous, both reticent and expensive. It caused a lot of people sleepless nights, did this sawed-off stovepipe with its operatic airs. Why did Oscar Hammerstein wear it? For the same reason that a miller wears his hat, and not for tribal or political reasons. Requiescat in Oscarino! Pardon my Latin.

But Oscar musical? Oscar a man of fine musical tastes or intelligence? Basta! He had the native wit to select as General for his operatic army a skilled conductor and a musician of judgment and vision. That is the reason New York had such a wide and novel repertory offered to it at the Manhattan Opera House. When Signor Cleofonte Campanini left Hammerstein his musical fortunes began to wane. But as a dynamic driving force I cannot name his equal, except Jack Haverly, or Barnum.

* * * * *

When I was on the professional staff of the National Conservatory—the only musical institution in this country that deserved the appellation—I was intrusted by the President, Jeannette M. Thurber, with the care on his arrival of Dr. Antonin Dvorak, Bohemian composer and musical director of the Conservatory. For the “man in the street” his name means his Humoresque as played by the inimitable Fritz Kreisler, or wheezed out by some unmusical instrument of torture; canned music; in the consecrated phrase of Arthur Whiting, “musical waxworks.” But Dvorak also composed The New World symphony, and other trifles; these, however, do not trouble or soothe the digestion of table d’hôtes. With “Old Borax,” as Parker the composer affectionately called Dvorak, in tow I assured Mrs. Thurber that he would be safe in my hands, and then I proceeded to show him certain sections of our old town, chiefly the near east side. As he was a fervent Roman Catholic I found a Bohemian church for him; he invariably began his day by attending the first mass. Jauntily I invited him to taste the treacherous national drink called whisky cocktail. He nodded with that head which looked like an angry bulldog bearded. At first he scared me with his fierce Slavonic eyes, yet he was as mild-mannered a musical pirate as ever scuttled a pupil’s counterpoint. I always thought of him as a boned-pirate. But I made a mistake in believing that American strong waters would upset his nerves. We began our rounds at Goerwitz’s, then, as now, Scheffel Hall, which stood across the street from the National Conservatory. Later we went down to Gus Lüchow’s; for a musician not to be seen at Lüchow’s argued that he was unknown in the social world of tone. We traversed the great thirst belt of the neighborhood. At each stopping-place Doc Borax absorbed a cocktail or two. He seemed to take to them as a prohibitionist takes to personal abuse.

Now, alcohol I abhor. Therefore I stuck to my usual three-voiced invention of hops, malt, and water. We conversed in German, for he knew no English, and I rejoiced at meeting a man whose Teutonic accent, above all whose grammar, was worse than mine. Yet we got along swimmingly—an appropriate enough image, as the thirst-weather was wet, though not squally. He told me of his admiration for Brahms and of that composer’s admiration for Dvorak. I agreed with Brahms. After he had put away about nineteen cocktails, maybe more, I said, rather thickly: “Master, don’t you think it’s time we ate something?” He gazed at me through those jungle whiskers, which met his tumbled hair half way. He grunted: “Eat! I no eat. We go to Houston Street. You go, hein! We drink the slivavitch. It makes warm after beer.” I didn’t go that evening to the East Houston Street café with Dr. Antonin Dvorak. I never went there with him, for I not only feared the slivavitch, but also that deadly Humoresque played by a fake gypsy fiddler, attired in a red coat and wearing an ineffable grin. Such a man as Old Borax was as dangerous to a moderate drinker as a false beacon to a shipwrecked sailor. His head was like iron. He could drink as much spirits as I could beer, and never turn a hair. I tell this anecdote, not for a moral purpose, but as one of the rapidly vanishing specimens of rum-lore, soon to become legendary. Next year the nation will be put in cotton-wool and its feeble will coddled by noble precepts and winning words from mouths smoking with fiery wisdom. And yet—it was a better time when Hammerstein smoked or Dvorak drank than the dusty prospect ahead for baffled thirsts.

ENRICO CARUSO

Enrico Caruso is dead. The enormous displacement caused by this lamentable happening is not alone confined to the artistic sphere but literally to the entire civilized world. We doubt if there are more than a half dozen public men on the globe to-day whose demise would so stir the universal imagination as has the passing of the incomparable tenor, for it must not be forgotten that the voice of Caruso has been heard, still is, and always will be listened to, from the equator to both poles, thanks to his vocal records, meagre, mechanical things, if you will, yet at least the simulacrum of his golden organ. It is a curious commentary on Théophile Gautier’s famous poetic dictum that empires perish but art endures; that many of the great names contemporary with Caruso’s wall surely be forgotten, but the memory of his achievements not. Mankind always recalls with satisfaction the artists who have given pleasure to the senses. Kings are embalmed in deathless verse or live on the canvas of poet and painter. Yet where to-day are the monarchs who patronized Shakespeare, or Velasquez, or Molière? Their very titles would be forgotten were it not for art.

But actor and singer have not the luck of creative artists; they do but interpret, therefore, with their disappearance from the painted scene, for the majority there is naught but oblivion. The happy few who seem as of yesterday are, in the musical world: Patti, Rubinstein, Liszt, Rubini, Chopin—as pianist—Paganini, Malibran, and Lilli Lehmann. Great exemplars. To this brief list is now added Caruso. And he has one tremendous advantage over his celebrated predecessors—his voice is a living reality, after a fashion. That same voice has given profound satisfaction in hundreds of thousands of homes scattered over the world; that voice cheered the boys in the trenches during the World War. After all, it is a sort of immortality, this record, about as vital as we may hope for in a universe of changeless change.

Enrico Caruso is dead. There have been and will be other tenors, yet for this generation his memory is something sacred and apart. It is doubtful if the Metropolitan Opera House will again echo such golden music as made by his throat—that is, doubtful in our time. When he first came here, not two decades ago, there was a rich fruitiness to his tones that evoked such disparate images as the sound of a French horn and a golden autumnal sunset. Always the word golden comes to the lips. Golden, with a thrilling human fibre. Not the finished vocal artist that he developed into, nevertheless there was something indescribably fresh, luminous and youthful in the singing of the early Caruso. I had heard him in London before he sang here, which, alas! was to be his last home. Veteran as I was I could hardly trust my ears when he poured forth a golden stream of music, and with effortless art. It needed no critical clairvoyancy to predict that a star of the first magnitude had arisen in the firmament of art. That was in 1902, and since then this star grew in lustre and beauty till the day of his death. Caruso had not even then achieved his grand artistic climax. He was ever a prodigious student.