It is not, of course, possible that New York feels any chagrin that
Boston has given the most colossal concert ever known upon the
continent; but it is observable that, as wind and fire finally levelled
the last timbers of the Boston Coliseum in the dust, the first step
taken was taken towards the Beethoven Centennial Celebration, in New
York. The project is not yet matured; but a vision of something very
large indeed, something "metropolitan," begins to allure expectation;
and Boston, having scored handsomely in the game, sits upon the ruins of
her Coliseum and the profits of her Jubilee to see what New York will
do.
If New York will build a proper hall for music and other public
purposes, she will do well, and the Beethoven Centennial will not be in
vain. The Cooper Institute hall is large enough for political meetings,
and Steinway Hall is good for many purposes; but it is not a beautiful
nor imposing room, as a great hall should be. The most impressive hall
in the country is still the Boston Music Hall, where the great height
and the two galleries, one above the other, with the organ and imposing
statue of Beethoven, give a feeling of dignity. But the Music Hall lacks
one of the chief characteristics of a noble room for the purposes to
which it is devoted, and that is brilliancy. It is too dark. There is no
smiling splendor of effect, which is always so enlivening. The darkness
of the hall may be agreeable to weak eyes, it may even be described as
"very much better than a glare of light," but brilliancy remains an
indispensable quality of a great hall devoted to popular enjoyment.
Yet, whether dark or light, how much has been enjoyed in that stately
room! What memorable figures have passed across that platform! What
exquisite strains of music, sung, played, or spoken, have died along
those walls! No one who is familiar with our history for the last twenty
years will sit in the hall for any purpose but suddenly he sees it
crowded with a silent and attentive throng; sees a reading-desk with
vases of flowers, and a man[A] of sturdy figure standing behind it,
whose voice is deep and penetrating and sincere; whose words are things;
who has a certain rustic shyness of movement; but whose sentences roll
and flash like volleys of trained soldiery, and who stands in the warmth
of his own emotion and the sympathy of his audience, an indomitable
gladiator, compelling the admiration even of his enemies as he fights
with the Ephesian beasts. Against him, as he stands there every Sunday
preaching to that vast multitude what seems to him the truth, and
breaking to them what he believes to be the very bread of life, other
men are preaching and praying, and the excommunications of the Vatican
against Luther, shorn of their thunder and lightning, are hurled. Who
is he that judges motives and sincerity? We do not know in this world
what is believed, but only what is said and done.
[A] Theodore Parker.
This man, with bald head set low upon high square shoulders, who looks
firmly at the great audience through spectacles, and speaks in a low
half-nasal tone, visits the widows and fatherless, and keeps himself
unspotted from the world. What he believes, others may question. What he
is, every aspiring soul must admire. Although almost every one of them
would have theologically cast him out and have recoiled from him with
dismay, yet he preserves more than any other the traditional power and
individualism of the old New England clergy. He applies the eternal
truth and the moral law as he feels it to the life and times around him.
They are heated white, and his words are blows of a sledge-hammer to
mould them into noble form. That dauntless mien is the true symbol of
his mental aspect as he confronts the menacing principalities and
powers, and the man whose voice has so often charmed the crowded hall
is one of the few who distinctly see and foretell the terrible war.
Long since his tongue is silent. He who came of the toughest stock and
might have looked to live almost a century, died when it was half spent.
It may have seemed to the great throng easy to climb that platform and
preach a sermon every Sunday morning; but to study early and late as if
he would master all knowledge; to write books, lectures, and speeches;
to travel hard by night and day, losing his sleep and his food, and by
the dim light in the car still pushing out the frontiers of his
learning; to deny himself exercise and needful rest while the mental
tension was so constant and the moral warfare so intense--this was not
easy; this was to violate all the laws of life, which none knew better;
and suddenly the stretched harp-string snapped, and there was no more
music!
Not every one who knew his power knew into what sweetness and tenderness
it could be softened, nor suspected that in the gladiator there was the
loving and simple heart of the boy. Here, as the Easy Chair sits
listening to the orchestra, it recalls the preacher when he was the
minister of a rural parish, and used to come strolling through the
fields and patches of wood to measure his wit with the friendly scholar
who was the chief at Brook Farm, or to sit docile at his feet of counsel
and sympathy. Or, again, it sees him in his country pulpit, the same
sturdy, heroic athlete, trying and tempering the weapons with which he
was to fight upon this larger scene. It was a noble character; a
devoted, generous, inspiring life, a memory always hallowed in this
hall. The conductor waves his baton! The symphony thunders from a
hundred instruments, but through them all breathes the low tone of the
remembered voice.
"Fled is that music. Do I wake or sleep?"
And as the concert proceeds--one of the series of the Harvard Musical
Association, whose concerts are the musical pride of Boston, at which
the performance is all of the purest classical music, so pure and so
severe that the profane sometimes secretly ask whether melody in music
is the unpardonable sin, and are peremptorily answered by the elect:
"No, but rub-a-dub-dub and tumti-id-dity are not music"--and as the
concert proceeds it is surely a striking spectacle. The great hall,
rather dimmer than ever because of the consciousness of daylight
outside, is full of people, gathered in the afternoon not only from the
city, but from all the environs within twenty miles, and they sit as
attentive and absorbed as a class of students at an interesting lecture.
If, in such a concert, melody is not the unpardonable sin, whispering
is. Woe betide the whisperer at a Harvard Musical. It were better for
him, or even her, that the money for the ticket had been expended at the
minstrels or the museum. You might as well be a forger, a swindler, a
perjurer, or a burglar in ordinary life as to be a whisperer at a
Harvard Musical. Yes, you might as well "speak right out in meetin'"
itself as whisper here.
Such a disciplined audience, so quiet, so attentive, so susceptible to
the slightest sigh of the oboe or wail of the violin, is a marvellous
spectacle. They are hearing the finest and much of the freshest music in
the world. They are not exactly sympathetic; perhaps the character of
the music does not permit it. They applaud calmly--as it were, with
reservations. It really seems sometimes as though they approve the music
rather than enjoy it. But the Easy Chair reflects with pride that the
organizer of these concerts, if such a word may be used, and certainly
with no exclusion of the co-operation which alone makes such concerts
possible, is a Brook-Farmer; and it complacently smiles upon the great
multitude as unconscious pupils of that Arcadian influence.
And, indeed, in other days in this same city of Boston, in the halcyon
days of the "Academy" concerts at the old Odeon, or still more ancient
Boston Theatre, many of the Brook-Farmers were present in the flesh.
Those were the days--or, rather, the nights--when Beethoven was truly
introduced to America. Preluded with the pretty "Zannetta" overture by
Auber, or with the "Serment" or the "Domino Noir," or with Herold's
shrill "Zanetta," or some strain which would not now be tolerated in the
Harvard concerts, the Fifth Symphony was played until it became
familiar. And the long, willowy Schmidt stood at the head directing,
proud as a general commanding his column. In the audience, earnest,
interested, attentive, sparkling with humor, was Margaret Fuller, not
hesitating, when the thoughtless girls whispered and tittered and
giggled in the most solemn adagio strains, to lean over when the
movement ended and to say to the offenders: "But let us have our turn,
too; some of us came to hear the music."
There, also, was the delegation from Brook Farm, in whose appearance it
was plain to see that in Arcadia the hair was worn long, that the stiff
collar and cravat were repudiated, and that woollen blouses were a mute
protest against the body coats of a selfish and competitive
civilization. Those young fellows walked in from Brook Farm and out
again. They made nothing of ten miles or so each way under the winter
stars. And with them and of them, already accomplished in the beautiful
science, already familiar with the great works of the great composers,
was the present tutelary genius of the Harvard concerts, whose life,
consecrated as critic and lover to this art, has been a true service to
his city, and, reflectively, to the country.
But even Boston does not deny the charm of Theodore Thomas's orchestra
and the delight of the New York Philharmonic music. Indeed, there was no
audience which, for its training, was more authorized to judge the great
excellence of the Thomas orchestra than that of the Harvard concerts.
But when he went to Boston it was not as a doubting Thomas. He did not
play Bach and Beethoven only, but he tickled the amazed multitude with
positive tunes. He raised his baton, and his varied orchestra, a single
instrument in his magic grasp, consented to waltzes; or, like a
cathedral choir becoming suddenly a lark, trilled airy roundelays, at
which the delighted (but not all assured of the propriety of delight)
audience smiled and shook, and the youngest catechumens even tapped time
faintly with their feet!--a sound which, could it be conceived audible
in the midst of one of the Harvards, would probably cause such a shudder
of horror that the hall itself would fall as by an earthquake.
Thus the Music Hall itself is a kind of symphony of memories. It is full
of delightful ghosts. Among the visible figures there are a host of the
unseen, and every singer, player, speaker, as he stands for an hour upon
the platform, is measured by the masters of his art. But in the famous
Peace Jubilee it had no part. Indeed, the musical taste of which it is
peculiarly the temple resisted the colossal and continuous concert with
bells, anvils, and cannon as something monstrous, and as repulsive to
true art as a huge and clumsy Eastern idol. But not even the finest
taste of the Music Hall denied the impressiveness and grandeur of the
result. New York, in the Beethoven Centennial, will have immense
advantages. The musical resources of the city are truly "metropolitan,"
and such should the festival be.