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.