In 1856 my father and Hans von Bülow, pianist, were struggling to gain
recognition and a livelihood in Berlin. Both were idealists and
enthusiastic followers of the “new school” in music, of which Berlioz,
Liszt, and Wagner were the great representatives. Bülow’s letters of
that period show that they gave many chamber-music concerts together,
both in Berlin and elsewhere, and it is interesting to note that at one
of them, together with the violoncellist, Kossman, they performed a trio
by “César Franck of Liège,” about thirty years before this father of the
modern French school of composition became generally known and
recognized. It was through Bülow that my father and his achievements as
a violin virtuoso and composer became known to Liszt, who invited him,
in 1857, to become violinist at the first desk of the Weimar Opera
Orchestra, then under Liszt’s direction.
The friendship between Bülow and my father remained intimate and fine
during my father’s entire life, and even beyond, as this chapter will
show.
My first recollection of Bülow goes back to 1876, when he came to
America at the invitation of the Chickering Piano firm to inaugurate
their new Chickering Hall on Fifth Avenue and 19th Street, and to give
piano recitals all over the country.
When my father and mother went to Berlin in the sixties for a joint
concert with Bülow, they stayed with him and his wife, Cosima. Since
then much had happened. Cosima had run away with Wagner, Bülow’s most
adored friend, and Bülow had nearly died with the shame and misery of
it. One evening during dinner at our house my mother asked him about his
children, whom she had not seen since those early days, and I can still
hear the punctilious courtesy with which he answered: “They are where
they should be, and in the best possible hands—with their mother.”
The fine intellectuality of his playing, the quality of his phrasing,
especially in Bach and Beethoven, created a deep impression on our
public which was not minimized by certain eccentricities in his
appearance and behavior. He always appeared on the stage for his
afternoon recitals attired in the traditional black double-breasted
frock coat and very light-gray trousers, his hands incased in
light-brown gloves and holding a high silk hat which was carefully
deposited under the piano before he took off his gloves and began to
play.
For one of his recitals a young and highly talented soprano, Miss Emma
Thursby, had been engaged. She was a protégée of old Maurice Strakosch,
an impresario of the old school, shrewd, polished in his manners, who
very cleverly advertised the high personal character of the young singer
and especially her great “purity,” vowing that acquaintance with her,
hardened old sinner that he was, had made him a better man.
At the Bülow recital her singing of some German songs by Schubert and
Schumann, I think, was received with such enthusiastic applause that she
gave an encore, a rather trivial song by Franz Abt. When Bülow, in his
dressing-room, heard this “desecration” of a programme composed of works
of great masters only, his rage knew no bounds, and when he came out on
the stage to continue his own programme, he deliberately took out his
handkerchief and carefully wiped the keys of the piano up and down in a
noisy glissando scale and then began to improvise on the recitative from
Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, “O friends, not these tones. . . .”
Another time he gave a chamber-music concert with my father and they
played, among other things, the “Kreutzer Sonata” of Beethoven. Just
before going on the stage he turned to my father and said:
“Let us play it by heart.”
“With pleasure,” answered my father and laid down his music.
“No, no,” said Bülow, “take it on the stage with you.”
After they had taken their places on the stage Bülow ostentatiously
rose, took my father’s music from the stand and his own from the piano
and laid them both under the piano.
His memory, not only for music, but for all things that interested him,
was prodigious and to me uncanny. But it was, after all, human and not
infallible, and on this occasion he did lose his place in the last
movement of the sonata and my father had to improvise with him for a few
bars until, with quick ingenuity, he found the thread again.
I have spoken elsewhere of the terrible responsibilities which were
placed upon my shoulders because of the sudden death of my father, and
as the years went by I seemed to miss him more and more, not only his
wonderful companionship, but the wise counsel with which he used to help
me solve my musical riddles. I worked hard and made progress, I think,
for my circle of friends and followers grew larger and larger. But I
knew no one in this country to whom I could turn in the same way as to
my father, or who would have given me of his wisdom so freely and
generously as he. Seidl, my associate at the Metropolitan, was not
friendly and was completely wrapped up in himself, and besides, he had,
to my thinking, only one specialty, the Wagner music-dramas. As a
symphonic conductor he was completely without experience when he first
came to America and his interpretation of the classics lacked foundation
and real penetration, in spite of the noisy acclaim which a certain part
of our public gave him because of his undoubted genius as a Wagner
conductor.
A lucky chance brought me a clipping from a German newspaper announcing
that Hans von Bülow would spend the summer of 1887 in Frankfort, where
he would teach a class of advanced pianists and devote the entire
receipts toward building a monument to his old friend, Joachim Raff, who
had spent his last years in Frankfort as director of the conservatory.
I immediately determined to go to Germany and ask Bülow if, in view of
his old friendship with my father and my need of the help of some great
musician, he would be willing to let me study with him the
interpretation of the Beethoven Symphonies in especial, and such other
works as it would interest him to analyze for me.
Bülow was at that time considered the foremost conductor of Germany. He
had taken a little mediocre orchestra of fifty, belonging to the Grand
Duke of Meiningen, and through his supreme genius had galvanized it into
a marvellous instrument. Under his guidance this little orchestra had
created a sensation all over Germany and Austria and a special _tour de
force_ was their playing of certain symphonies entirely by heart without
any music before them.
When I arrived in Frankfort I found that Bülow was living at the Schwan
Hotel, and with much trepidation I told him what I wanted of him. He
seemed very much touched and claimed that it was the first time in his
experience that a musician who, as he put it, “was already prominent in
opera, symphony, and oratorio” thought he could learn anything from him.
In the warmest, I may say most affectionate terms, he promised me every
possible help and advised me to take rooms in the same hotel. This I
did, and I can truthfully say that the entire summer during which I was
with him in closest companionship, not only in his rooms and during the
lesson hours for the pianists, many of which I also attended, but on
long walks to the museums, the parks, and the suburbs of Frankfort, his
almost paternal kindliness, his wisdom, and his comments on things
artistic, literary, political, and personal were a revelation to me. So
many stories were current about his biting comments and brusque behavior
toward people who excited his enmity, that I was amazed to find him
throughout so companionable and so gentle in all his relations toward
me. He had a heart most tender and sensitive, but life had dealt this
idealist so many hard knocks that he incased his heart in a shell with
which to protect it from further onslaughts.
He went through all Beethoven’s nine symphonies with me, bar by bar,
phrase by phrase, and I still have the scores in which he made certain
notations of phrasing or illustrated changes in dynamics of certain
instruments in order to bring out the undoubted intentions of Beethoven
more clearly. He virtually analyzed the symphonies for me in the same
way as in his edition of the piano sonatas, and at the close of our
three months together he gave me a copy of his own score of the Ninth
Symphony with all his own annotations, many of which were based on the
analysis made by Wagner during his historic performance of that work at
the corner-stone laying of the Bayreuth Fest-Spielhaus.
During these three months of intensive study I received so much from him
that was new to me, such a wealth of ideas regarding interpretation and
the technic of the conductor’s art, that it took me years to digest it
properly and to learn how, instead of merely copying slavishly, I could
make it my own and accept or reject parts of it, according to the
methods of analysis taught me by him.
During our stay in Frankfort a little Prince of Hesse, whose mother, the
Landgravine, was a “Royal Highness,” being a niece of the old Emperor
William, invited von Bülow to give a Brahms recital at his palace. Bülow
immediately insisted that I, too, must be invited, which accordingly I
was. When I accompanied him he introduced me to the various exalted
personages assembled, and the Landgravine asked me if I were not “the
son of the great Doctor Damrosch.” I politely answered: “Yes, your Royal
Highness.”
“Was he not a friend of Rubinstein?” she continued.
“Yes.”
“He played the viola, did he not?”