“WILLKOMMEN HERR JOACHIM”
in green leaves over the door of our music-room, carefully arranged by
my brother and myself. We adored him because he loved children and would
cut all manner of wonderful figures out of paper for us.
Liszt came on especially to officiate as godfather at the christening of
my older brother, Frank (Franz), who was named after him, but, as I was
not born at the time, my memory of it is not very vivid.
Once when Hans von Bülow arrived for dinner, my mother herself had
roasted a hare in his honor. To her despair she discovered at table that
she had seasoned it with sugar instead of salt, but Bülow, perfect
gentleman that he was, asked for a second helping, insisting that sugar
always improved roast hare immensely.
My favorite reading at the age of eight was a wonderful edition of
Homer’s “Iliad” and “Odyssey” in a fine high-sounding metrical
translation by Voss and with many beautiful illustrations by Friedrich
Preller, of Weimar, at whose house my mother (Helene von Heimburg)
became engaged to my father. As a result of reading these very exciting
Greek chronicles I constantly enacted scenes therefrom. My mother’s
clever fingers fashioned for me from silver paper and pasteboard helmet,
armor, and shield; and as Achilles I would drag Hector (my little
sister, Marie) on my chariot (two overturned chairs) around the walls of
Troy (the dining-room table).
In the winter there was always skating on the Oder, and I remember, aged
seven or eight, being given money to buy a ticket of admission and to
skate to my heart’s content. Part of this ticket had to be retained and
given up on leaving the ice. Of course I lost this ticket and being
refused egress by the uniformed attendant, I dismally skated about for
hours, becoming more and more frightened as the sun went down and the
river became more and more deserted. I thought I would have to remain
there for the rest of my young life, and it was a very tear-stained and
miserable little boy who ran toward the dear Tante Marie who, having
become anxious at my absence, had come to see where I was and who
released me, by payment for another ticket, from my dreadful
imprisonment.
Tante Marie is a younger sister of my mother’s who came to live with us
at the age of sixteen and who became my mother’s closest helper during
many years of storm and stress, whose gentle and patient self-sacrifice
have never failed her and who, thank God, is still living and as
wonderful as ever, the last link with that dim past of long ago.
I think I was somewhat afraid of my father in those days. He was rather
stern and taciturn. Life was hard and the struggle for existence
difficult. He was somewhat severe about my studies and as those were the
days when whipping children for naughtiness was considered an essential
of their education, I received my share of such punishment. In fact,
sometimes I was whipped in school and then had to take my school report
home to my father and he would perhaps repeat the dose. But with all
that I was very proud of him and used to enjoy trotting by his side
along the promenade on the banks of the Oder, because so many people
would take off their hats to him deferentially as he passed.
He also gave us children a good deal of his time in reading to us books
that would stimulate our imaginations and cultivate our instincts for
the beautiful—Grimm’s and Andersen’s “Fairy Tales,” the “Arabian
Nights,” and some of the parables from the New Testament.
But whenever I was sent supperless to bed or confined to my room for
some misdeed, it was always mother who would comfort me and perhaps
bring me a plate of soup or dessert secretly and talk to me gently until
my obstinacy would melt and I would be ready to knock at my father’s
study and ask his forgiveness. Once I did not dare, but instead drew a
picture of myself standing penitently at his door and underneath the
words: “Seven times seventy times shalt thou forgive.” This I shoved
under the door into his study and it produced the desired effect, as it
brought my father out and in a very forgiving mood.
One of my sins was that I simply could not bear to eat spinach, and as
in those days it was considered the absolute duty of a child to eat
anything that was put before him because “God had grown the spinach and
other vegetables in order to feed hungry children,” and “there were
thousands of poor little children who would be only too glad to eat
spinach,” I was forced to eat it although it often choked me and made me
ill. Even to this day I cannot bear spinach, and with all the reverence
and deep affection that I have for my father, I do not think he was
right in this particular case as regards his pedagogic theories.
* * * * *
The following excerpts from letters of von Bülow throw an interesting
light on the conditions under which my father worked in Breslau at that
time.
_To the Princess Carolyn Sayn-Wittgenstein (Liszt’s closest friend)_
Berlin, Feb. 10, 1859.
. . . Anticipating Liszt’s promise I have sent the score of his
“Ideale” to Damrosch who will have the parts copied and get the
work to his public already during this month. If we could only
have a half dozen soldiers like Damrosch at our disposal! . . .
_To Felix Draescke (composer and disciple of Liszt for whom Bülow had
tried to obtain a position)_
Berlin, Oct. 16, 1860.
. . . I am assured of my complete lack of power to help. To
achieve the like for Damrosch has also failed. D., with wife and
child, and another one in the nearest future, is _quasi_ near to
starvation. It has taken me much time to find out finally that I
cannot help. . . .
_To Hans von Bronsart (mutual friend and musician. Intendant of the Royal
Opera in Hanover. In relation to a joint concert with Bülow)_
. . . A propos! Please fix Damrosch’s honorarium as high as
possible. He needs it. In order to recompense him the better, I
do not desire any violoncellist. I had arranged with him in your
name for eight Louis d’or. You had authorized me to give as high
as ten for Laub. Damrosch is Laub + ½. . . .
Laub was a distinguished violinist living in Berlin.
_To Richard Pohl (distinguished writer on music and propagandist for
Wagner, Berlioz, and Liszt)_
Berlin, Sept., 1861.
. . . Damrosch had been engaged by Tausig for joint soirées in
Vienna and a long Russian concert tour, but the matter suddenly
came to naught, and although one cannot accuse T. of
irresponsibility, Damrosch is in such miserable fashion again
bound to that sterile Breslau. Poor, greatly talented, honest
chap—must fight his way through greatest _misère_. Is there
still no chance for him in Weimar? . . .
_To Joachim Raff (German composer of distinction)_
Berlin, Nov. 10, 1860.
. . . Your piano and violin sonata I am to play in Leipsig. Laub
and Singer are afraid of the Gewandhaus and are not keen about
it, so I don’t yet know whom I am to serve as accompanist.
Damrosch, with whom I played the composition six weeks ago,
conceives it according to my views quite exceptionally. The
adagio, for instance, he plays far more beautifully than Laub.
Very likely we shall turn to him. . . .
In 1870 the papers were filled with accounts of “the outrageous insult
of King William by the French ambassador, Benedetti,” and the hostile
attitude of Emperor Napoleon the Third. War was declared and of course
we boys immediately began to indulge in imitations of the military drill
of the soldiers of our city. The most exciting and welcome news to me at
the time was that my piano teacher had been drafted and I had high hopes
of not having to continue to undergo the dreary necessity of daily
finger exercises, but alas, my hopes were rudely dashed to the ground
when a bald-headed substitute appeared to continue the lessons.
Soon the trains were coming in, bringing the wounded, and the French
prisoners, among whom the dark-skinned Zouaves and Turks especially
excited our interest. We looked with envy at the older boys of our
school who, having studied French, used to go up to the French officers
and ask them whether there was anything they could do for them.
The war ended and my young piano teacher returned, resplendent in his
uniform with shining brass buttons, in which he paid his first
ceremonial visit to my father and mother. My mother, wishing to put him
at his ease, asked him to tell something of his experiences in the war,
but he was not very articulate. Yes, he had been at the beleaguering and
capitulation of Metz.
“How wonderful,” said my mother, “and what happened to you there?”
“Oh, well, they—they—shot at us.”
And that was all we could get out of him.
In the meanwhile my father had become more and more discontented with
musical, social, and political conditions in Breslau. He was really a
Republican at heart and the Prussian bureaucracy, which had become more
and more accentuated by the war, irked and angered him. With greatest
difficulty he could make a bare living for his family, and he found the
population of Breslau, except a small band of devoted followers, steeped
in materialism and not particularly sympathetic toward art, especially
the modern German composers.
In 1871 my father received an invitation through Edward Schubert, the
music publisher of New York, to come to America as conductor of the
Arion Society, and while this opening was small enough, it seemed to
offer him an opportunity through which better and bigger things might
develop and under conditions more free than were possible in Germany at
that time. He therefore determined, at forty years of age, to take the
plunge and to precede his family to America in order to find out whether
a living and a new career might be made possible in the New World. The
Arion Society occupied an honorable position in the social and musical
life of the Germans living in New York.
I can remember his farewell concert, in Breslau, at which he performed
Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. There were laurel wreaths, and chorus ladies
in white, and there was a general atmosphere of enthusiasm and of many
tears, but my memories are connected particularly with my astonishment
at seeing my teacher of arithmetic whom I hated, suddenly stand up in
the middle of the parquet during the intermission and ogle the ladies
with a pair of opera-glasses. It had never entered my childish mind
until then that a horrible school-teacher could be a man like other men
in private life.
A very tragic happening was that one of my suspenders burst during the
Ninth Symphony, and for the rest of the performance I was in mortal fear
that my trousers might not “stay put.”
After my father’s departure we children, of course, played nothing but
sailing off on a ship, again principally by aid of the parlor and
dining-room furniture. We read “Robinson Crusoe” and enacted its
chapters with great satisfaction to ourselves. It was all good fun to
us, but the anguish of parting from the country in which they had grown
up and lived for so many years, and the dread of the unknown in a
strange land, must have been terrible for my father and mother.
Finally came an enthusiastic letter from my father bidding us to follow
him to New York; we accordingly set sail, August, 1871, in a little ship
of the North German Lloyd, the _Hermann_ from Bremen, my mother, Tante
Marie, Frank, myself, and two younger sisters. I was desperately seasick
for several days until one Sunday morning, when, as I was lying on a
bench on deck, the young captain rudely kicked me off, saying, “Look
here, youngster, you have been ill long enough, now brace up,” which I
did and enjoyed the rest of the trip immensely. The captain was in a
very romantic mood because he was to marry a young American girl on his
arrival in New York. In the evenings my mother would sing Schubert and
Schumann on deck and the captain several times gave us firework
displays, rockets, etc., in honor of his approaching nuptials.
When we arrived in New York we found my father anxiously pacing the
wharf where he had been waiting, since early morning, for eight hours,
to take us in a carriage from Hoboken to a house in East 35th Street
which he had rented and furnished completely from top to bottom as a
surprise for my mother. The hot and cold water on every floor, the gas
and the carpets were a revelation to us, as these modern conveniences
were hardly known in Breslau at that time. My youngest sister, Elizabeth
(now Mrs. Harry T. Seymour), was born in this house.
My brother and I were immediately put into the primary department of
Public School No. 40 in East 23d Street, and as we did not know a word
of English we were entered in the lowest class, although I had already
been in the Sexta of the Gymnasium (High School) and my brother in the
Quarta, and I had studied Latin and he both Latin and Greek. But we
dutifully spelled out CAT, DOG, etc., until after a few weeks of this we
were promoted, and so these promotions went on with lightning rapidity
until we had acquired English and could enter a class more appropriate
to our years, nine and twelve respectively.
I continued my studies of piano under an old teacher, Jean Vogt by name,
and after his return to Germany I studied with Pruckner, von Inten, Max
Pinner, and Boeckelman. The last, feeling that I could not raise my
fingers high enough from the knuckles, gave me a machine of steel
springs which, through rings attached to the fingers, were to lift them
higher than nature would permit. Unfortunately this contrivance brought
about a weakness in the third finger of my right hand from which I have
never quite recovered and which unfortunately, or fortunately, has
prevented me from becoming a professional piano virtuoso. But I had
acquired a good technic and a singing quality of tone which served me
well years after when I began to give recitals at the piano on the
Wagnerian music-dramas, at which I played the orchestral part on the
piano while I recited the text and explained the various musical motifs
and their relation to the text.
My first appearance in an orchestra was, I am sorry to say, a rank
failure. I was only a boy of fourteen years and my father had prepared a
charming operetta of Schubert’s, “Der Häusliche Krieg,” for a “Summer
Night’s Festival” of the Arion Society. In this occurs a delightful
March of the Crusaders with one loud clash of the cymbals at the climax.
It did not seem worth while to engage a musician at “full union rates”
for this clash and I was, therefore, intrusted with it. At rehearsals I
counted my bars rest and watched for my cue with such perfection that
the cymbals resounded with great success at the proper time and in the
proper manner, but at the performance, alas, a great nervousness fell
upon me and as the march proceeded and came nearer and nearer the
crucial moment, my hand seemed paralyzed, and when my father’s flashing
eye indicated to me that the moment had come, I simply could not seem to
lift the cymbals which suddenly weighed like a hundred tons. The march
went on but I felt that the entire evening had been ruined by me and
that every one in the audience must know that I had “funked it.” As soon
as I could I slipped out of the orchestra pit underneath the stage and
into the dark night, feeling that life had no joy left for me. I could
not bear to hear the rest of the opera or to meet my father’s
reproachful eye.
[Illustration: AFTERNOON COFFEE IN THE DAMROSCH HOME, BRESLAU, 1867
Frank, Tante Marie, Mother, Marie, Father, Walter]