an execrable taste, but as I am a most commonplace person I cannot help
myself. I have loved it since childhood, when the dull pages of my
Violin Tutor were lit by crystalline fragments of Cherubini and
Donizetti, and when the house in which I lived was chattering day and
night Italianate melody. One of my earliest recollections is of hearing,
as a tiny thing in petticoats, the tedious noises of the professional
musician, and the E A D G of the fiddle was the accompaniment to all my
games. From noon until seven in the evening I played amid the squeak of
the fiddle, the chant of the 'cello, the solemn throb of the double
bass, and the querulous wail of flute and piccolo; and always the music
was the music of Italy, for these elders worked in operatic orchestras.
So I learned to love it, and especially do I still love the
moderns--Leoncavallo, Wolf-Ferrari, Mascagni, Puccini--for it was in "La
Boheme" that I heard both Caruso and grand opera for the first time; and
whenever I now hear "Che gelida manina," even badly sung, I always want
to sit down and have a good cry. It reminds me of a pale office-boy of
fifteen, who had to hoard his pence for a fortnight and wait weary hours
at the gallery door of Covent Garden to hear Caruso, Scotti, Melba, and
Journet as the Bohemians. What nights! I remember very clearly that
first visit. I had heard other singers, English singers, the best of
whom are seldom better than the third-rate Italians, but Caruso.... What
is he? He is not a singer. He is not a voice. He is a miracle. There
will not be another Caruso for two or three hundred years; perhaps not
then. We had been so accustomed to the spurious, manufactured voices of
people like de Reszke and Tamagno and Maurel, that when the genuine
article was placed before us we hardly recognized it. Here was something
lovelier than anything that had yet been heard; yet we must needs stop
to carp because it was not quite proper. All traditions were smashed,
all laws violated, all rules ignored. Jean de Reszke would strain and
strain, until his audience suffered with him, in order to produce an
effect which this new singer of the South achieved with his hands in his
pockets, as he strolled round the stage.
The Opera in London is really more of a pageant than a musical function.
The front of the house frequently claims more attention than the stage.
On Caruso and Melba nights it blazes. Tiers and tiers of boxes race
round in a semicircle. If you are early, you see them as black gaping
mouths. But very soon they are filled. The stalls begin to leap with
light, for everybody who is not anybody, but would like to be somebody,
drags out everything she possesses in the way of personal adornment,
and sticks it on her person, so that all the world may wonder. At each
box is a bunch of lights, and, with the arrival of the silks and
jewellery, they are whipped to a thousand scintillations.
The blaze of dancing light becomes painful; the house, especially
upstairs, is spitefully hot. Then the orchestra begin to tumble in;
their gracefully gleaming lights are adjusted, and the monotonous A
surges over the house--the fiddles whine it, the golden horns softly
blare it, and the wood-wind plays with it.
But now there is a stir, a sudden outburst of clapping. Campanini is up.
Slowly the lights dissolve into themselves. There is a subdued rustle as
we settle ourselves. A few peremptory _Sh-sh-sh!_ from the ardent
galleryites.
Campanini taps. His baton rises ... and suddenly the band mumbles those
few swift bars that send the curtain rushing up on the garret scene.
Only a few bars ... yet so marvellous is Puccini's feeling for
atmosphere that with them he has given us all the bleak squalor of his
story. You feel a chill at your heart as you hear them, and before the
curtain rises you know that it must rise on something miserable and
outcast. The stage is in semi-darkness. The garret is low-pitched, with
a sloping roof ending abruptly in a window looking over Paris. There is
a stove, a table, two chairs, and a bed. Nothing more. Two people are
on. One stands at the window, looking, with a light air of challenge, at
Paris. Down stage, almost on the footlights, is an easel, at which an
artist sits. The artist is Scotti, the baritone, as Marcello. The
orchestra shudders with a few chords. The man at the window turns. He is
a dumpy little man in black wearing a golden wig. What a figure it is!
What a make-up! What a tousled-haired, down-at-heel, out-at-elbows
Clerkenwell exile! The yellow wig, the white-out moustache, the broken
collar.... But a few more brusque bars are tossed from Campanini's
baton, and the funny little man throws off, cursorily, over his
shoulder, a short passage explaining how cold he is. The house thrills.
That short passage, throbbing with tears and laughter, has rushed, like
a stream of molten gold, to the utmost reaches of the auditorium, and
not an ear that has not jumped for joy of it. For he is Rudolfo, the
poet; in private life, Enrico Caruso, Knight of the Order of San
Giovanni, Member of the Victorian Order, Cavalier of the Order of Santa
Maria, and many other things.
As the opera proceeds, so does the marvel grow. You think he can have
nothing more to give than he has just given; the next moment he deceives
you. Towards the end of the first Act, Melba enters. You hear her voice,
fragile and firm as fluted china, before she enters. Then comes the
wonderful love-duet--"Che gelida manina" for Caruso and "Mi chiamano
Mimi" for Melba. Gold swathed in velvet is his voice. Like all true
geniuses, he is prodigal of his powers; he flings his lyrical fury over
the house. He gives all, yet somehow conveys that thrilling suggestion
of great things in reserve. Again and again he recaptures his first fine
careless rapture. His voice dances forth like a little girl on a sunlit
road, wayward, captivating, never fatigued, leaping where others
stumble, tripping many miles, with fresh laughter and bright quick
blood. There never were such warmth and profusion and display. Not only
is it a voice of incomparable magnificence: it has that intangible
quality that smites you with its own mood: just the something that marks
the difference between an artist and a genius. There are those who sniff
at him. "No artist," they say; "look what he sings." They would like him
better if he were not popular; if he concerned himself, not with Puccini
and Leoncavallo, but with those pretentiously subtle triflers, Debussy
and his followers. Some people can never accept beauty unless it be
remote. But true beauty is never remote. The art which demands
transcendentalism for its appreciation stamps itself at once as
inferior. True art, like love, asks nothing, and gives everything. The
simplest people can understand and enjoy Puccini and Caruso and Melba,
because the simplest people are artists. And clearly, if beauty cannot
speak to us in our own language, and still retain its dignity, it is not
beauty at all.
Caruso speaks to us of the little things we know, but he speaks with a
lyric ecstasy. Ecstasy is a horrible word; it sounds like something to
do with algebra; but it is the one word for this voice. The passion of
him has at times almost frightened me. I remember hearing him at the
first performance of "Madame Butterfly," and he hurt us. He worked up
the love-duet with Butterfly at the close of the first act in such
fashion that our hands were wrung, we were perspiring, and I at least
was near to fainting. Such fury, such volume of liquid sound could not
go on, we felt. But it did. He carried a terrific crescendo passage as
lightly as a school-girl singing a lullaby, and ended on a tremendous
note which he sustained for sixty seconds. As the curtain fell we
dropped back in our seats, limp, dishevelled, and pale. It was we who
were exhausted. Caruso trotted on, bright, alert, smiling, and not the
slightest trace of fatigue did he show.
It seems to have been a superb stroke of fortune for us that Caruso
should have come along contemporaneously with Puccini. Puccini has never
definitely written an opera for his friend; yet, to hear him sing them,
you might think that every one had been specially made for him alone.
Their temperaments are marvellously matched. Each is Italian and
Southern to the bone. Whatever Caruso may be singing, whether it be
Mozart or Gounod or Massenet or Weber, he is really singing Italy.
Whatever setting Puccini may take for his operas, be it Japan, or Paris,
or the American West, his music is never anything but Italian.
And I would not have it otherwise. It may offend some artistic
consciences that Butterfly, the Japanese courtesan, should sob out her
lament in music which is purely Italian in character and colour; but
what a piece of melody it is!
Puccini's is a still small voice; very pleading, very conscious of
itself and of the pathos of our little span of living; but the
wistfulness of its appeal is almost heartbreaking. He can never, I
suppose, stand among the great composers; dwarfed he must always be
against Mozart or Weber, or even Verdi. But he has done what all wise
men must do: he has discovered the one thing he can perform well, and he
is performing it very well indeed. His genius is slim and miniature, but
he handles it as an artist. There is no man living who can achieve such
effects with so slender material. There is no man living who can so give
you, in a few bars, the soul of the little street-girl; no man living
who can so give you flavour of a mood, or make you smell so sharply the
atmosphere of a public street, a garret, a ballroom, or a prairie. And
he always succeeds because he is always sincere. A bigger man might put
his tongue in his cheek and sit down to produce something like "La
Boheme," and fail miserably, simply because he didn't mean it.
When Puccini has something to say, though it may be nothing profound or
illuminating, he says it; and he can say the trite thing more freshly,
with more delicacy, and in more haunting tones, than any other musician.
His vocabulary is as marvellous as his facility in orchestration and in
the development of a theme. He gets himself into tangles from which
there seems no possible escape, only to extricate himself with the
airiest of touches. Never does his fertility of melodic invention fail
him. He is as prodigal in this respect as Caruso in his moments. Where
others achieve a beautiful phrase, and rest on it, Puccini never idles;
he has others and others, and he crowds them upon you until the ear is
surfeited with sweetness, and you can but sit and marvel.
There it is. Sniff at it as you will, it is a great art that captures
you against your reason, and when Puccini and Caruso join forces, they
can shake the soul out of the most rabid of musical purists. What they
do to commonplace people like myself is untellable. I have tried to hint
at it in these few remarks, but really I have told you nothing ...
nothing.
* * * * *
I am not over-fond of the Promenade Concerts. You have, of course,
everything of the best--the finest music of the world, the finest
English orchestra, and a neat little concert-hall; but somehow there is
that about it that suggests Education. I have a feeling that Sir Henry
is taking me by the hand, training me up in the way I should, musically,
go. And I hate being trained. I don't want things explained to me. The
programme looks rather like "Music without Tears" or "First Steps for
the Little Ones." I know perfectly well what Wagner meant by the
"Tannhaeuser" overture, and what Beethoven wants to say to me in the
Ninth Symphony. I don't want these things pointed out to me, and
sandwiched between information as to when the composer was born, how
long he lived, and how many hundred works he wrote. However, all that
apart, the Promenades are an institution which we should cherish. For a
shilling you can lean against the wall of the area, and smoke, and take
your fill of the best in music. If there is anything that doesn't
interest you, you can visit the bar until it is concluded. The audience
on the Promenade is as interesting as the programme. All types are to be
found here--the serious and hard-up student, the musically inclined
working-man, probably a member of some musical society in his suburb,
the young clerk, the middle-aged man, and a few people who KNOW.
The orchestra is well set, and its pendant crimson lamps and fernery
make a solemn picture in the soft light. The vocalists and soloists are
not, usually, of outstanding merit, but they sing and play agreeably,
and, even if they attempt more than their powers justify them in doing,
they never distress you. Sir Henry Wood's entrance on the opening night
of any season is an impressive affair. As each known member of the
orchestra comes in, he receives an ovation; but ovation is a poor
descriptive for Sir Henry's reception. There is no doubt that he has
done more for music in England than any other man, and his audiences
know this; they regard him almost as a friend.
He is an artist in the matter of programmes. He builds them as a chef
builds up an elaborate banquet, by the blending of many flavours and
essences, each item a subtle, unmarked progression on its predecessor.
He is very fond of his Russians, and his readings of Tchaikowsky seem to
me the most beautiful work he does. I do not love Tchaikowsky, but he
draws me by, I suppose, the attraction of repulsion. The muse who guides
the dreamings of the Russian artist is a sombre and heavy-lidded lady,
but most sombre, I think, when she moves in the brain of the musician.
Then she wears the glooms and sables of the hypochondriac. She does not
"nerve us with incessant affirmations." Rather, she enervates us with
incessant dubitations. It is more than a relief to leave the crowded
Promenade, after a Tchaikowsky symphony, to stroll in the dusky glitter
of Langham Place, and return to listen the clear, cool tones of Mozart,
as sparkling and as gracious as a May morning! Next to Tchaikowsky, Sir
Henry gives us much of Wagner and Beethoven and Mendelssohn. I can never
understand why Mendelssohn is played nowadays. His music always seems to
me to be so provincial and gentlemanly and underbred as to remind one of
a county ball. I am sure he always composed in a frock-coat, silk hat,
and lavender gloves. When he is being played, many of us have to rush
away and saunter in the foyer.
Usually the programme contains some examples of modern French music (a
delicate horror by Ravel, perhaps) and of the early Italians. You will
get something sweet and suave and restful by Palestrina or Handel, and
conclude, perhaps, with a tempest of Berlioz.
During the season of the Promenades, there are also excellent concerts
going on in the lost districts of London. There is, to begin with, the
Grand Opera season at the Old Vic. in Waterloo Road, where you can get a
box for one-and-sixpence, and a seat in the gallery for twopence. The
orchestra is good, and the singers are satisfactory. The operas include
"Daughter of the Regiment," and run through Verdi and some of Wagner to
Mascagni and Charpentier. The audience is mostly drawn from the
surrounding streets, the New Cut and Lower Marsh. It wears its working
clothes, and it smokes cut Cavendish; but there is not a whisper from
the first bar of the overture to the curtain. The chorus is drawn from
the local clubs, and a very live and intelligent chorus it is. Then
there are the Saturday evening concerts at the People's Palace in
Whitechapel, at the Surrey Masonic Hall, in Camberwell, at Cambridge
House, and at Vincent Square. In each case the programme is distinctly
classical. It is only popular in the sense that the prices are small and
the performers' services are honorary. Many a time have I attended one
of these concerts, because I knew I should hear there some old, but
obscure, classic that I should never be likely to hear at any of the
West End concert-halls.
These West End halls are unhappily situated. The dismal Bond Street
holds one, another stands cheek by jowl with Marlborough Police Court,
and the other two are stuck deep in the melancholic greyness of Wigmore
Street. All are absurdly inaccessible. However, when it is a case of
Paderewski or Hambourg or Backhaus or Ysayt, people will make
pilgrimages to the end of the earth ... or to Wigmore Street. It was at
the Bechstein, on a stifling June evening, that I first heard that
mischievous angel, Vladimir de Pachmann.
We had dined solidly, with old English ale, at "The Cock," in Fleet
Street. Perhaps tomato soup, mutton cutlets, quarts of bitter, apple
and blackberry tart and cream, macaroni cheese, coffee, and kuemmel are
hardly in the right key for an evening with Chopin. But I am not one of
those who take their pleasures sadly. If I am to appreciate delicate
art, I must be physically well prepared. It may be picturesque to sit
through a Bayreuth Festival on three dates and a nut, but monkey-tricks
of that kind are really a slight on one's host. However, I felt very
fat, physically, and very Maeterlinckian, spiritually, as we clambered
into a cab and swung up the great bleak space of Kingsway.
At the entrance to the Steinway we ran against a bunch of critics, and
adjourned to the little place at the opposite corner, so that one of the
critics might learn from us what he ought to say about the concert. We
had just time to slip into our seats, and then Pachmann, sleek and
bullet-headed, minced on to the platform. I said that I felt fat,
physically, and Maeterlinckian or Burne-Jonesy, or anything else that
suggests the twilight mood, spiritually. But the moment Pachmann came on
he drove the mood clean out of us. Obviously, _he_ wasn't feeling
Maeterlinckian or Chopinesque. He was feeling very full of Pachmann, one
could see. Nothing die-away or poetic about him. He was fat physically,
and he looked fat spiritually. One conceived him much more readily
nodding over the fire with the old port, than playing Chopin in a bleak
concert-hall, laden with solemn purples and drabs, stark and ungarnished
save for a few cold flowers and ferns.
However, there he was; and after he had played games and cracked jokes,
of which nobody knew the secrets but himself, with the piano-stool, his
hair, and his handkerchief, he set to work. He flourished a few scales;
looked up; giggled; said something to the front row; looked off and
nodded; rubbed his fingers; gently patted his ashen cheek; then
stretched both hands to the keys.
He played first a group of Preludes. What is there to say about him?
Nothing. Surely never, since Chopin went from us, has Chopin been so
played. The memory of my Fleet Street dinner vanished. The hall
vanished. All surroundings vanished. Vladimir, the antic, took us by the
hand and led us forth into a new country: a country like nothing that we
have seen or dreamed of, and therefore a country of which not the
vaguest image can be created. It was a country, or, perhaps, a street of
pale shadows ... and that is all I know. Its name is Pachmann-land.
Before he was through the first short prelude, he had us in his snare.
One by one the details of the room faded, and nothing was left but a
cloud of lilac in which were Pachmann and the sleek, gleaming piano. As
he played, change succeeded change. The piano was labelled Chappell, but
it might just as well have been labelled Bill Bailey. Under Pachmann,
the wooden structure took life, as it were, and became a living thing,
breathing, murmuring, clamouring, shrieking. Soon there was neither
Chappell, nor Pachmann, nor Chopin; only a black creature--Piano. One
shivered, and felt curiously afraid.
Then, suddenly, there was a crash of chords--and silence. That crash had
shattered everything, and, looking up, we saw nothing but the grinning
Pachmann. One half-remembered that he had been grinning and gesturing
and grimacing with ape-like imbecility all the time, yet, somehow, one
had not noticed it. He bobbed up and down, and grinned, and applauded
himself. But there was something uncanny, mysterious. We looked at one
another uneasily, afraid to exchange glances. Nobody spoke. Nobody
wanted to speak. A few smiled shy, secret smiles, half-afraid of
themselves. For some moments nobody even applauded. Something had been
with us. Something strange and sad and exquisitely fragile had gone from
us.
Pachmann looked at us, noted our dumb wonder, and--giggled like an
idiot.
A JEWISH NIGHT
WHITECHAPEL
_LONDON ROSES_
_When the young year woos all the world to flower
With gold and silver of sun and shower,
The girls troop out with an elfin clamour,
Delicate bundles of lace and light.
And London is laughter and youth and playtime,
Fair as the million-blossomed may-time:
All her ways are afire with glamour,
With dainty damosels pink and white._
_The weariest streets new joys discover;
The sweet glad girl and the lyric lover
Sing their hearts to the moment's flying,
Never a thought to time or tears.
O frivolous frocks! O fragrant faces,
Scattering blooms in the gloomy places!
Shatter and scatter our sombre sighing,
And lead us back to the golden years!_
A JEWISH NIGHT
WHITECHAPEL
Whitechapel exists under false pretences. It has no right to its name,
for the word Whitechapel arouses grim fears in the minds of those who
know it not. Its reputation is as theatrically artificial as that of the
New York Bowery. Its poverty and its tradition of lawlessness are
sedulously fostered by itself for the benefit of the simple-minded
slummer.
To-day it is, next to St. John's Wood, the most drably respectable
quarter of the town. This is explained by the fact that it is the
Ghetto: the home of the severely moral Jew. There is no disorder in
Whitechapel. There is no pillage or rapine or bashing. The colony leads
its own pleasant life, among its own people, interfering with none and
desiring intercourse with none. It has its own manners and customs and
its own simple and very beautiful ceremonies. The Jews in London are
much scattered. They live in various quarters, according to the land of
their birth. Thus, the French Jews are in Soho, the German Jews in Great
Charlotte Street, the Italian Jews in Clerkenwell, while those of
Whitechapel are either Russian Jews or Jews who have, for three
generations, been settled in London. The wealthy Jew, who fancies
himself socially, the fat, immoral stockbroker and the City philanderer,
has deserted the surroundings of his humbler compatriots for the
refinements of Highbury, Maida Vale, and Bayswater.
The Whitechapel Ghetto begins at Aldgate, branches off at that point
where Commercial Street curls its nasty length to Shoreditch, and
embraces the greater part of Commercial Road East, sprawling on either
side. Here at every turn you will meet the Jew of the comic papers. You
will see expressive fingers, much jewelled, flying in unison with the
rich Yiddish tongue. You will see beards and silk hats which are surely
those which decorated the Hebrew in Eugene Sue's romance. And you will
find a spirit of brotherhood keener than any other race in the world can
show. It is something akin to the force that inspired that splendid
fraternity that once existed in London, and is now no more: I mean the
Costers. If a Jew is in trouble or in any kind of distress, a most
beautiful thing happens: his friends rally round him.
The atmosphere of the Ghetto is a singular mixture. It is half-ironic
gaiety and half-melancholy. But it has not the depressing sadness of the
Russian Quarter. Its temper is more akin to that of the Irish colony
that has settled around Southwark and Bermondsey. There is sadness, but
no misery. There is gloom, but no despair. There is hilarity, but no
frivolity. There is a note of delight, with sombre undertones. There is
nothing of the rapture of living, but rather the pride of accepted
destiny. In the hotels and cafes this is most marked. At the Aldgate
Hotel, you may sit in the brasserie and listen to the Russian Trio
discoursing wistful music, while the packed tables reek with smoke and
Yiddish talk; but there is a companionable, almost domestic touch about
the place which is so lacking about the Western lounges. Young Isaacs is
there, flashing with diamonds and hair-oil, and Rebecca is with him, and
the large, admiring parents of both of them sit with them and drink beer
or eat sandwiches. And Isaacs makes love to his Rebecca in full sight of
all. They lounge in their chairs, arms enclasped, sometimes kissing,
sometimes patting one another. And the parents look on, and roll their
curly heads and say, with subtle significance, "Oi-oi-oi!" many times.