Stephen Foster was the ne’er-do-well of a good Pennsylvania family. A
sister of his had married a brother of James Buchanan. There were two
daughters of this marriage, nieces of the President, and when they were
visiting the White House we had—shall I dare write it?—high jinks with
our nigger-minstrel concerts on the sly.
Will S. Hays, the rival of Foster as a song writer and one of my
reporters on the Courier-Journal, told me this story: “Foster,” said
he, “was a good deal of what you might call a barroom loafer. He
possessed a sweet tenor voice before it was spoiled by drink, and was
fond of music, though technically he knew nothing about it. He had a
German friend who when he died left him a musical scrapbook, of all
sorts of odds and ends of original text. There is where Foster got his
melodies. When the scrapbook gave out he gave out.”
I took it as merely the spleen of a rival composer. But many years
after in Vienna I heard a concert given over exclusively to the
performance of certain posthumous manuscripts of Schubert. Among the
rest were selections from an unfinished opera—“Rosemonde,” I think it
was called—in which the whole rhythm and movements and parts of the
score of Old Folks at Home were the feature.
It was something to have grown up contemporary, as it were, with these
songs. Many of them were written in the old Rowan homestead, just
outside of Bardstown, Ky., where Louis Philippe lived and taught, and
for a season Talleyrand made his abode. The Rowans were notable people.
John Rowan, the elder, head of the house, was a famous lawyer, who
divided oratorical honors with Henry Clay, and like Clay, was a Senator
in Congress; his son, “young John,” as he was called, Stephen Foster’s
pal, went as minister to Naples, and fought duels, and was as Bob Acres
wanted to be, “a devil of a fellow.” He once told me he had been
intimate with Thackeray when they were wild young men in Paris, and
that they had both of them known the woman whom Thackeray had taken for
the original of Becky Sharp.
The Foster songs quite captivated my boyhood. I could sing a little, as
well as play, and learned each of them—especially Old Folks at Home and
My Old Kentucky Home—as they appeared. Their contemporary vogue was
tremendous. Nothing has since rivalled the popular impression they
made, except perhaps the Arthur Sullivan melodies.
Among my ambitions to be a great historian, dramatist, soldier and
writer of romance I desired also to be a great musician, especially a
great pianist. The bone-felon did the business for this later. But all
my life I have been able to thumb the keyboard at least for the
children to dance, and it has been a recourse and solace sometimes
during intervals of embittered journalism and unprosperous
statesmanship.
V
Theodore Thomas and I used to play duos together. He was a master of
the violin before he took to orchestration. We remained the best of
friends to the end of his days.
On the slightest provocation, or none, we passed entire nights
together. Once after a concert he suddenly exclaimed: “Don’t you think
Wagner was a —— fraud?”
A little surprised even by one of his outbreaks, I said: “Wagner may
have written some trick music but I hardly think that he was a fraud.”
He reflected a moment. “Well,” he continued, “it may not lie in my
mouth to say it—and perhaps I ought not to say it—I know I am most
responsible for the Wagner craze—but I consider him a —— fraud.”
He had just come from a long “classic entertainment,” was worn out with
travel and worry, and meant nothing of the sort.
After a very tiresome concert when he was railing at the hard lines of
a peripatetic musician I said: “Come with me and I will give you a
soothing quail and as dry a glass of champagne as you ever had in your
life.”
The wine was poured out and he took a sip.
“I don’t call that dry wine,” he crossly said, and took another sip.
“My God,” without a pause he continued, “isn’t that great?”
Of course he was impulsive, even impetuous. Beneath his seeming cold
exterior and admirable self-control—the discipline of the master
artist—lay the moods and tenses of the musical temperament. He knew
little or nothing outside of music and did not care to learn. I tried
to interest him in politics. It was of no use. First he laughed my
suggestions to scorn and then swore like a trooper. German he was,
through and through. It was well that he passed away before the world
war. Pat Gilmore—“Patrick Sarsfield,” we always called him—was a born
politician, and if he had not been a musician he would have been a
statesman. I kept the peace between him and Theodore Thomas by an
ingenious system of telling all kinds of kind things each had said of
the other, my “repetitions” being pure inventions of my own.