Some day an inquisitive musicologist will consider the part played in
the history of musical education and musical taste by that seemingly
indispensable adjunct of the symphonic concert room, the Programme Note.
When that time comes, the contributions made by Philip Hale to the
musical civilization of his time will appear in their true proportions.
For more than a generation, from the beginning of the twentieth century
to the fifth year of the Great Depression, Hale provided programme notes
for everything played by the Boston Symphony Orchestra in its regular
concerts—“upward of a thousand works”, as Mr. Burk informs us in his
valuable note to the present collection. The annual issue by the Boston
Symphony Orchestra of the bound volumes containing Philip Hale’s
annotations was an event in the musical world of America that exceeded
in importance and interest the appearance of the average new symphonic
work upon the Orchestra’s programmes. A decade ago, in commenting upon
the issue of one of those momentous and liberal tomes (sometimes they
included more than two thousand pages), I remarked that it provided a
musical education in one volume. Those famous annotations—modestly
indicated on the title-page, in small and light-faced type, as
“historical and descriptive notes by Philip Hale”—constitute a library
of musical information the like of which is not to be found elsewhere on
this sufficiently book-congested sphere.
Though Hale was a New Englander by birth, he had not the normal New
England suspicion of entertainment as an educational ingredient; and he
did not scruple to amuse. He was almost indecently readable. He never
hesitated to lighten musical instruction with diversion and with wit. He
knew much besides music; and he was able to peptonize for the reader his
vast and curious erudition. He could tell you about the maceration of
Oriental women, and what action is described by the word
“tutupomponeyer”, and who invented the first chess-playing automaton,
and how locomotive engines are classified, and what Pliny said
concerning the bird called penelope. He knew all about the various
editions of the singular _Commentaires sur les epistres d’Ovide_ by
Claude Gaspar Bachet, Sieur de Meziriac, in which the parentage of
Ulysses is discussed. He could tell you why the river Ebro bears that
name; and what Louis XIV ate for supper—which, you may like to be
reminded, often consisted of four plates of different soups, the whole
of a pheasant, a partridge, a heaped-up plate of salad, two huge slices
of ham, mutton stewed with garlic, and a plate of pastries topped off
with fruit and hard-boiled eggs. As for all the other things that Hale
knew, you must turn to his writings if you would appreciate their range
and number.
And all this fantastically varied learning—which not only seemed
boundless in extent, but which was also incredibly exact and
circumstantial—adorned a general culture that was nourishing and humane,
and a specifically musical culture which conceived no relevant fact as
inconsiderable, no anecdote unimportant, no human aspect unrevealing.
The average programme note is a deadly and a stifling thing; but these
amazing annotations, traversing all history and the ceaseless
tragi-comedy of life, assure us that a programme note may sometimes, if
an artist has contrived it, be more rewarding than the music that
occasioned it.
Philip Hale transformed the writing of programme notes from an arid and
depressing form of musical pedagogy into an exhilarating variety of
literary art. The formidable weight of learning which he bore was
employed with an ease and finesse, a lightness of touch, a charm of
manner, a wit and conciseness and flexibility, which belong among the
achievements of distinguished letters. His predecessor as annotator of
the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s programmes, the accomplished William
Foster Apthorp, had prepared the way for Hale’s achievement. Apthorp’s
notes, written between 1892 and 1901, surpassed in brilliance and acumen
anything that had come out of Europe or America. But Philip Hale, by
reason of his exceptional width of intellectual range, and the well of
knowledge which he drew upon, and his insatiable, devouring, delighted
curiosity, established himself almost at once as the master of an
enlivened order of creative musical scholarship which was a new thing
under the tonal sun.
One might justly say of him, as critic, commentator, analyst, what Sir
George Grove said of Schubert—a saying that Hale himself was fond of
quoting: “There never has been one like him, and there never will be
another.”
Lawrence Gilman.