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.