A day in musical New York!
Not a bad idea, was it? I hated to leave the country, with its rich
after-glow of Summer, its color-haunted dells, and its pure, searching
October air, but a paragraph in a New York daily, which I read quite by
accident, decided me, and I dug out some good clothes from their
fastness and spent an hour before my mirror debating whether I should
wear the coat with the C-sharp minor colored collar or the one with the
velvet cuffs in the sensuous key of E-flat minor. Being an admirer of
Kapellmeister Kreisler (there's a writer for you, that crazy Hoffmann!),
I selected the former. I went over on the 7.30 A. M., P. R. R., and
reached New York in exactly two hours. There's a _tempo_ for you! I
mooned around looking for old landmarks that had vanished--twenty years
since I saw Gotham, and then Theodore Thomas was king.
I felt quite miserable and solitary, and, being hungry, went to a
much-talked-of café, Lüchow's by name, on East Fourteenth Street. I saw
Steinway and Sons across the street and reflected with sadness that
the glorious days of Anton Rubinstein were over, and I still a useless
encumberer of the earth. Then an arm was familiarly passed through mine
and I was saluted by name.
"You! why I thought you had passed away to the majority where Dussek
reigns in ivory splendor."
I turned and discovered my young friend--I knew his grandfather years
ago--Sledge, a pianist, a bad pianist, and an alleged critic of music.
He calls himself "a music critic." Pshaw! I was not wonderfully warm in
my greeting, and the lad noticed it.
"Never mind my fun, Mr. Fogy. Grandpa and you playing Moscheles'
_Hommage à Fromage_, or something like that, is my earliest and most
revered memory. How are you? What can I do for you? Over for a day's
music? Well, I represent the _Weekly Whiplash_ and can get you tickets
for anything from hell to Hoboken."
Now, if there is anything I dislike, it is flippancy or profanity, and
this young man had both to a major degree. Besides, I loathe the modern
musical journalist, flying his flag one week for one piano house and
scarifying it the next in choice Billingsgate.
"Oh, come into Lüchow's and eat some beer," impatiently interrupted my
companion, and, like the good-natured old man that I am, I was led like
a lamb to the slaughter. And how I regretted it afterward! I am cynical
enough, forsooth, but what I heard that afternoon surpassed my
comprehension. I knew that artistic matters were at a low ebb in New
York, yet I never realized the lowness thereof until then. I was
introduced to a half-dozen smartly dressed men, some beardless, some
middle-aged, and all dissipated looking. They regarded me with
curiosity, and I could hear them whispering about my clothes, I got off
a few feeble jokes on the subject, pointing to my C-sharp minor colored
collar. A yawn traversed the table.
"Ah, who has the courage to read Hoffmann, nowadays?" asked a
boyish-looking rake. I confessed that I had. He eyed me with an amused
smile that caused me to fire up. I opened on him. He ordered a round of
drinks. I told him that the curse of the generation was its cold-blooded
indifference, its lack of artistic conscience. The latter word caused a
sleepy, fat man with spectacles to wake up.
"Conscience, who said conscience? Is there such a thing in art any
more?" I was delighted for the backing of a stranger, but he calmly
ignored me and continued:
"Newspapers rule the musical world, and woe betide the artist who does
not submit to his masters. Conscience, pooh-pooh! Boodle, lots of it,
makes most artistic reputations. A pianist is boomed a year ahead, like
Paderewski, for instance. Paragraphs subtly hinting of his enormous
success, or his enormous hair, or his enormous fingers, or his enormous
technic----"
"Give us a _fermata_ on your enormous story, Jenkins. Every one knows
you are disgruntled because the _Whiplash_ attacks your judgment." This
from another journalist.
Jenkins looked sourly at my friend Sledge, but that shy young person
behaved most nonchalantly. He whistled and offered Jenkins a cigar. It
was accepted. I was disgusted, and then they all fell to quarreling over
Tchaikovsky. I listened with amazement.
"Tchaikovsky," I heard, "Tchaikovsky is the last word in music. His
symphonies, his symphonic poems, are a superb condensation of all that
Beethoven knew and Wagner felt. He has ten times more technic for the
orchestra than Berlioz or Wagner, and it is a pity he was a suicide--"
"How," I cried, "Tchaikovsky a suicide?" They didn't even answer me.
"He might have outlived the last movement of that B-minor symphony, the
suicide symphony, and if he had we would have had another ninth
symphony." I arose indignant at such blasphemy, but was pushed back in
my seat by Sledge. "What a pity Beethoven did not live to hear a man who
carried to its utmost the expression of the emotions!" I now snorted
with rage, Sledge could no longer control me.
"Yes, gentlemen," I shouted; "utmost expression of the emotions, but
what sort of emotions? What sort, I repeat, of shameful, morbid
emotions?" The table was quiet again; a single word had caught it. "Oh,
Mr. Fogy, you are not so very Wissahickon after all, are you? You know
the inside story, then?" cried Sledge. But I would not be interrupted. I
stormed on.
"I know nothing about any story and don't care to know it. I come of a
generation of musicians that concerned itself little with the scandals
and private life of composers, but lots with their music and its
meanings." "Go it, Fogy," called out Sledge, hammering the table with
his seidl. "I believe that some composers should be put in jail for the
villainies they smuggle into their score. This Tchaikovsky of
yours--this Russian--was a wretch. He turned the prettiness and favor
and noble tragedy of Shakespeare's _Romeo and Juliet_ into a bawd's
tale; a tale of brutal, vile lust; for such passion as he depicts is
not love. He took _Hamlet_ and transformed him from a melancholy, a
philosophizing Dane into a yelling man, a man of the steppes, soaked
with _vodka_ and red-handed with butchery. Hamlet, forsooth! Those
twelve strokes of the bell are the veriest melodrama. And _Francesca da
Rimini_--who has not read of the gentle, lovelorn pair in Dante's
priceless poem; and how they read no more from the pages of their book,
their very glances glued with love? What doth your Tchaikovsky with this
Old World tale? Alas! you know full well. He tears it limb from limb. He
makes over the lovers into two monstrous Cossacks, who gibber and squeak
at each other while reading some obscene volume. Why, they are too much
interested in the pictures to think of love. Then their dead carcasses
are whirled aloft on screaming flames of hell, and sent whizzing into a
spiral eternity."
"Bravo! bravo! great! I tell you he's great, your friend. Keep it up old
man. Your description beats Dante and Tchaikovsky combined!" I was not
to be lured from my theme, and, stopping only to take breath and a fresh
dip of my beak into the Pilsner, I went on:
"His _Manfred_ is a libel on Byron, who was a libel on God." "Byron,
too," murmured Jenkins. "Yes, Byron, another blasphemer. The six
symphonies are caricatures of the symphonic form. Their themes are, for
the most part, unfitted for treatment, and in each and every one the
boor and the devil break out and dance with uncouth, lascivious
gestures. This musical drunkenness; this eternal license; this want of
repose, refinement, musical feeling--all these we are to believe make
great music. I'll not admit it, gentlemen; I'll not admit it! The piano
concerto--I only know one--with its fragmentary tunes; its dislocated,
jaw-breaking rhythms, is ugly music; plain, ugly music. It is as if the
composer were endeavoring to set to melody the consonants of his name.
There's a name for you, Tchaikovsky! 'Shriekhoarsely' is more like it."
There was more banging of steins, and I really thought Jenkins would go
off in an apoplectic fit, he was laughing so.
"The songs are barbarous, the piano-solo pieces a muddle of confused
difficulties and childish melodies. You call it naïveté. I call it
puerility. I never saw a man that was less capable of developing a theme
than Tchaikovsky. Compare him to Rubinstein and you insult that great
master. Yet Rubinstein is neglected for the new man simply because, with
your depraved taste, you must have lots of red pepper, high spices,
rum, and an orchestral color that fairly blisters the eye. You call it
color. I call it chromatic madness. Just watch this agile fellow. He
lays hold on a subject, some Russian _volks_ melody. He gums it and
bolts it before it is half chewed. He has not the logical charm of
Beethoven--ah, what Jovian repose; what keen analysis! He has not the
logic, minus the charm, of Brahms; he never smells of the pure, open
air, like Dvorák--a milkman's composer; nor is Tchaikovsky master of the
pictorial counterpoint of Wagner. All is froth and fury, oaths,
grimaces, yelling, hallooing like drunken Kalmucks, and when he writes a
slow movement it is with a pen dipped in molasses. I don't wish to be
unjust to your 'modern music lord,' as some affected idiot calls him,
but really, to make a god of a man who has not mastered his material and
has nothing to offer his hearers but blasphemy, vulgarity, brutality,
evil passions like hatred, concupiscence, horrid pride--indeed, all the
seven deadly sins are mirrored in his scores--is too much for my nerves.
Is this your god of modern music? If so, give me Wagner in preference.
Wagner, thank the fates, is no hypocrite. He says out what he means, and
he usually means something nasty. Tchaikovsky, on the contrary, taking
advantage of the peculiar medium in which he works, tells the most
awful, the most sickening, the most immoral stories; and if he had
printed them in type he would have been knouted and exiled to Siberia.
If----"
"Time to close up," said the waiter. I was alone. The others had fled. I
had been mumbling with closed eyes for hours. Wait until I catch that
Sledge!