A Negro Violinist—Sierra Leone—Some Violinists—Wagner—A Sea Chantey—Old
Memories
WHEN I got back to Sierra Leone I was glad of a rest and stayed at the
English hotel for a couple of weeks. At Freetown I heard a negro play
the violin really well. He held the fiddle to his breast, instead of to
his chin, and played Raff’s _Cavatina_ and _La Serenata_, very
expressively. I complimented him on his playing, and discovered that a
Hungarian violin-player had given him a course of lessons. He played
African dances and melodies wonderfully well. We had a glorious time,
that negro violinist and I.
In an old bungalow by a native village where soldiers and white men
congregated we gave concerts night after night. The men came from far
and near and joined in the sing-songs; our small, extemporised orchestra
played homeland songs; the exiles shouted themselves hoarse. We made up
part songs and put our own words to them, and the natives came from the
village and peeped into our bungalow with delighted eyes and ears as we
scraped away. It was there that I wrote the melody that is now the trio
of my military march, _Sierra Leone_. This is how it went in the
original setting; a few years later I made a military march trio of the
strain and sold it to a London publisher. I heard it performed by
Sousa’s Band at several commemoration festivals in New York city.
[Music: SIERRA LEONE.
[EXTRACT] (_Military March._) A. S. M.
We’ll all go march - ing back to Sier-ra Le -
_ff_
- one, Sier-ra Le - one,......... Sier - ra Le - one,......... etc.
_p_
TRIO
_p_ _f_ _ff_ Sier-ra Le - one belle, Sier-ra Le-one belle,
......... un-der your palm - trees I would dw - ell......... _ff_ etc.
Reproduced by kind permission of Messrs. BOOSEY & CO., London, W.]
I have heard many violinists, among them Joachim, whom I heard when I
was a boy. While on a ship in the East India Docks I obtained leave from
the skipper for a Saturday afternoon off, and full of excitement went to
Sydenham and heard the great violinist perform at the Crystal Palace. To
tell the truth, I was disappointed. He played a Viotti concerto, stood
like a statue, and his fingers and arms moved with the ease of
machinery. His bearded face was raised toward the ceiling the whole
time, as though he saw some beautiful sight in the sky above the palace
roof. It struck me as a very refined and intellectual-looking face. His
playing revealed perfection in the trained artistic sense, but lacked
the fire and emotion born of the singing stars.
I heard Sarasate play at his villa near Biarritz. His nostrils dilated
and pinched in as he played, and he had all that Joachim lacked (when
Joachim played in public), for he was a spiritual player; you could have
thought that the angels were wailing and fingering his own
heart-strings. M. Ysaye played rather like Sarasate, but seemed more
conscious of his own ability, which destroyed the atmosphere of the
public performance which I happened to hear.
Kubelik I have heard twice, at Bournemouth and in New South Wales. He
performed with Joachim’s machinery-like ease; his double-stopping
revealed the perfection of the performer’s ear and the dexterity of the
fingers that seemed to outdo the player’s own heart; but it struck me as
cold playing, as if the player’s command over technique was greater than
his musical temperament.
I have often heard it said that the marvellous technique of Paganini is
to-day the technical equipment of all violin virtuosos. I doubt it.
Certainly they are not mentally equipped with his way of playing. When
you look at Paganini’s compositions you see something that is the
outcome of _one_ personality, the white heat of genius who first
discovered the musical gold mines in the depths of the violin. What must
the man have been whose genius was so intense that he invented that
which all others imitate and call their equipment? Paganini could not
leave his playing to posterity, but a true critic can look at those
individual compositions and dream of the tremendous passion that
inspired the _maestro_ to leave us those fugitive echoes of his playing,
for that is all they are. Paganini played like an inspired, deep-feeling
barbarian; his style was not artifice and did not represent, by artistic
bowing and phrasing, the niceties of polite emotion and the artistries
of civilisation. We have no compositions as he played them. He stood
before his awestruck audience and extemporised melodies, chords,
sparkling arpeggios and staccato and cadenzas, that were all half
forgotten when the intense musical fury of his heart ceased and the
magic fingers were silent; and so we have only hints of his style. His
imitators scrape out phonographic records of his published compositions
and say they are equipped with Paganini’s art.
I heard an English violinist, Henley, in London. I was off to Jamaica
next morning and only heard him by accident. A friend of mine said:
“Come in this hall.” We went in, and I was astonished. I thought at
first that the violinist whom I saw playing, with Joachim’s ease and
Sarasate’s passion, must be some foreigner; but he was an Englishman.
His double-stopping was superb, with a passionate fire in it alien to
Kubelik’s temperament, I should think. Altogether he was really the most
artistic and passionate player I ever heard, Sarasate excepted. While he
played I realised that note that tells of genius, which makes you feel
that the performer’s violin and fingers are imperfect instruments, are
not as great as the heart that is trying to express its depth of feeling
upon strings.
I went abroad after that. I have not heard since of Henley the wonderful
violinist. He was English, and I suppose London’s fashionable musical
world positively refused to go mad about an Englishman when so many
German and Austrian violinists were about.
I heard “King Billy,” the Australian Aboriginal King, play the violin by
the kerb-side in Sydney. He was the world’s worst “great violinist,”
made a squeaking row and thought more of the cash the Colonials dropped
in his tin pot than of the melody which he performed.
[Illustration: RIVER SCENE, WEST AFRICA]
An artistic public performance on the violin is widely divided from the
poetry of violin-playing in solitude, out of sheer love to express the
performer’s feelings and relieve the tension of sorrow and joy that is
oppressing him. When I was a boy, staying at Leichardt, in Sydney, I
heard someone playing the violin and accompanying his playing with his
own voice. The sound came from a little wooden house on a flat. I stood
still and listened. It was dusk. On the window was a bit of scribbled
paper: “Room to let, cheap.” That gave me a good excuse, for I was
intensely curious to see the man who played and sang so beautifully. I
knocked at the door and was asked in, and I got in conversation with the
player. He was a Norwegian with a handsome face, but unshaved and
worried-looking. His wife was about thirty years older than he was, and
as he played to me she sat near and her old wrinkled face beamed with
delight as I praised his playing. He played by ear and was self-taught.
I could easily see that. But he was a great violinist. He expressed his
very soul as he played, in a weird, peculiar style, Norwegian melodies.
I felt greatly drawn toward him as he played and sang to me, looking
past me with steady, dreaming eyes as he extemporised sweet strains. He
had hard, rough hands, through working on the roads. I saw him night
after night. I thought at first that his wife was his mother, and I
said, “Your son is a real musician.” When he smiled at me and said, “My
wife, not mother,” I felt very uncomfortable. He took her old wrinkled
hand and led her into the little kitchen and kissed her tenderly. I
suppose Norwegian women age quickly, or they had fallen in love with
each other when he was quite a lad; but it was beautiful to see their
sincere, sweetheart-like affection for each other.
He secured a job on the Broken Hill Silver Mines, packed up and went off
to Melbourne. I never saw him again. I often think of him and his
clever, handsome face as he sat breathing heavily and playing and
singing to me. He would have been better than Joachim and Kubelik if he
had had their technical equipment and no road stones to break and ruin
his hands. I cannot remember any special feelings when I heard the great
violinists, Joachim, Kubelik and Kreisler, except curiosity and
momentary admiration, but the memory of the stone-breaking Norwegian’s
playing is as vivid to-day as then; and when I think of it all the
poetic atmosphere of his playing still haunts me. So if it’s true that
Time is the great critic of poetry and music, then assuredly, as far as
I am concerned, my Norwegian friend was the greatest violinist I ever
heard.
It is difficult to define art. I suppose anything that appeals to the
best emotions in men and women is art. A good deal of what is known as
art to-day will soon be cast on the rubbish heap of the mediæval ages
with the old ideals and idols. People move in the realms of art as they
do in frock-coats; it must be just _so_, and must have three buttons on
the front only; if it has four buttons it’s not art. Art should be
natural and oblivious of fashion, and, like true religion, beautiful in
rags and tatters, pale-faced, walking the streets of humanity, singing
with the birds and stars, and looked down upon by affluence.
Do the thousands who hear Wagner understand the depth and meaning of the
music as Wagner thought they would understand? Do they hear the
barbarian note in his music that tells so well of the savagery of the
German people, the barbarian shriek, the exultation over the fallen and
the tramp of bloodthirsty warriors driving the helpless victims of the
fallen cities before them? I do not think so. It’s fashionable, and to
have heard Wagner is to be in the fashion, and so off people go and hear
and see “Wagner.” Most of them would more thoroughly understand and
enjoy a phonographic record of a Solomon Islander’s cannibalistic dance,
accompanied by living pictures of the scantily clad native men and
women, beating their drums and whirling round the blushing bride, clad
in half a coco-nut shell and her hair only. Their funerals are conducted
with the same austere art that makes them all go and see Wagner.
I like Beethoven and Mendelssohn’s concertos, also Schubert’s music,
indeed all the really good classical compositions, but my memory of the
old chantey, _Blow the Man Down_, as I heard it sung, and sang it
myself, with crooked-nosed old sailors as we rounded Cape Horn, with
seas crashing over the decks and the flying scud racing the moon, the
old skipper on the poop shouting, muffled to the teeth in oilskins, his
grey beard swinging sideways to the wind as the full-rigged ship dipped
and rolled homeward bound, is something of music, singing and haunting
my soul, that will only die when my memory dies. I can still see the
crew climbing aloft and along the yards, their shadows falling softly
through the moonlit grey sails and yards on to the decks. Melodies from
the sails aloft, gliding under the stars, still sing beautifully to me
as I watch the sleeping sailors, far out at sea, in their tossing bunks.
Then they stand by the galley door, with their mugs for the hot coffee,
while the chief mate tramps away the night to and fro on the poop,
humming _Soon we’ll be in London Town_. Then, as I dream, the sails
crumble in the moonlight, the decks are awash, sink and disappear;
sailors are struggling in the moonlit waters. Their white hands are
tossed up as they sink, one by one; and now daybreak steals over the
sky-lines that fence that vast grave of wandering waters.
Often memories play on the strings of my heart as I stand listening to
the great orchestra of the winds fingering the giant forest boughs, or
to the noise of seas on the moonlit shores.
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