I have written elsewhere of my first visit to Europe after my father’s
death, when the directors of the Metropolitan Opera House made me
assistant to the director, Edmund C. Stanton.
I had gone over to engage German singers for the coming season, and Emil
Fischer, bass from the Dresden Royal Opera, was one of those whose
contract I had ready for Stanton’s signature when he arrived a month
later. Emil Fischer had become discontented with his life in Dresden and
in signing with us broke his contract with the Royal Opera, and
according to an arrangement which all the directors of the various
German opera-houses had with each other, this prevented him from ever
again appearing on the stage of a German opera-house. He remained in
America and became one of the main props of the Metropolitan Opera House
Company, and later on of my Damrosch Opera Company.
His voice was a beautiful _basso cantante_ of great range and vibrancy.
His tone production was perfect, and his powers as an impersonator
equalled his singing. He will always remain in my memory as the greatest
_Hans Sachs_ I have ever heard. He imbued the part with a nobility and
at the same time with a delightful humor that no other _Hans Sachs_ has
quite equalled.
As a man he was a delicious mixture of childishness, vanity, generosity,
and kindliness, but I do not think that any emotions of life touched him
very deeply.
In dress he was always extremely fastidious, inclining toward a somewhat
flamboyant love of extremes. His neckties were rather vivid, his
trousers perhaps a shade lighter in gray than the most harmonious taste
would demand. He had a highly developed chest, of which he was so
inordinately proud that he never buttoned the upper part of his
waistcoat, as if to demonstrate that no waistcoat could be cut large
enough to encompass his manly proportions.
Of the value of money, as far as saving it was concerned, he had no
idea, and his constant effort was directed toward hiding from his wife
the fact that he had money in his pocket. She was a buxom lady somewhat
older than himself who, in her youth, had been a _tragedienne_ in one of
the smaller German court theatres. She must have played such parts as
_Medea_, and continued the rather exaggerated and gloomy articulation of
her words into private life and through all the years that followed her
final exit from the stage. Whenever she told me: “My Emil is not well
to-day. I have made for him a plate of beef soup into which I have
boiled four pounds of beef,” it boomed upon my ears like Shakespearian
blank verse or like a Greek tragedy of Sophocles. I think that she
annoyed Emil excessively, and that he was happiest when he could get
away from her no doubt excellent control and find enjoyment among a
circle of boon companions.
I recall that when he was a member of my opera company I paid him two
hundred and fifty dollars an appearance, with about twelve appearances a
month guaranteed, but he insisted that in the written contract I should
make it only two hundred dollars an appearance and give him the other
fifty in cash. He used this subtle method in order to have about six
hundred dollars a month spending money of which his wife should know
nothing. It was I who had to endure the complaints from her, which ran
something like this: “I do not know why my Emil is so badly paid while
all the others get these enormous salaries. My Emil sings better than
any of them and he has to be content with only two hundred dollars an
appearance!” And I would sit by feeling very guilty, and yet, from that
horrid loyalty which one man has for another, not daring to exculpate
myself by condemning him.
At one time in Chicago I accompanied him into a haberdasher’s shop as he
wished to buy a necktie. He selected one the price of which was two
dollars and a half, and then superbly handed the astonished clerk a
five-dollar bill, saying grandiloquently: “You may keep the change!”
He was a great gourmet, and every now and then would give a banquet at
his house to his fellow artists, with interminable courses and all
manner of wines. Needless to say he did not save anything from his
earnings and there came years, as he grew older and his voice left him,
when he had to turn to teaching. But he never changed his habits and his
appearance was just as carefully gotten up as in former years. Finally
came the time when he was really in want, and I assisted Mr. Flagler,
who was also an old admirer of his, in getting up a benefit for him at
the Metropolitan Opera House. The directors very generously gave the use
of the house, many of the stockholders bought their boxes, and the
climax of the performance was the appearance of dear old Fischer in his
greatest rôle of _Hans Sachs_ in the third act of “Die Meistersinger.” A
very good sum was realized with which we bought an annuity for him. He
was then, I believe, seventy-four (his wife had died several years
before), and a ten-year annuity seemed to us the best way of taking care
of him without giving him an opportunity to squander his money. He was
delighted, and the first thing he did on the strength of his new wealth
was to marry a young lady from the chorus, who, however, I believe took
excellent care of him until he died.
During the second year of the Damrosch Opera Company, while we were in
St. Louis and just the day before Fischer was to sing _Hans Sachs_, a
telegram arrived saying that his wife was very ill and was not expected
to live more than eight hours. Frau Alvary insisted that I must make him
go to New York to see her. He did not want to go. He had not been on
particularly pleasant terms with her, he knew he could not arrive in
time to see her alive, and besides that he knew also that I had no
substitute to sing _Hans Sachs_ for him and that the cancellation of the
opera would cost me about five thousand dollars. But Frau Alvary, who
seemed quite ready to insist on reasons of sentiment when her own purse
was not concerned, so bedevilled us both that I finally, being still
young and sentimental, decided that he should go. I was therefore
compelled to change the programme at the last moment and to substitute
single acts from different operas, which, of course, was a very costly
change, as the audience in St. Louis had especially looked forward to
the first performance of “Die Meistersinger.”
The news of a possible change of programme had travelled fast, and on
that morning I received a visit from a young singer, Gerhardt Stehmann,
who a year before had come to St. Louis with a little German opera
company which had promptly stranded, leaving him without a job. He had,
however, continued to live there, acting in occasional German plays and
teaching Latin, as he was a man of excellent education. He asked me if I
could not give him a place in my company. I found him to be an excellent
singer, but above all a man musically so gifted that he could learn an
entire rôle in a few hours. He learned the entire third act of “Die
Meistersinger” overnight, so that I was able at least to present that to
my St. Louis audience. I immediately engaged him as a permanent member
of my company, and he remained with me until its dissolution three years
later, when he returned to Germany and was grabbed by Mahler for the
Imperial opera at Vienna, where he has been ever since. He literally
knew and sang every bass and barytone part in the Wagner operas and
music dramas. His _Beckmesser_ in “Die Meistersinger” was a masterpiece
of delineation, and no one could depict this nasty, carping, jealous,
and vain person in so convincing a fashion as he. But if the exigencies
of the moment demanded it, he was just as able to sing _Hans Sachs_,
_Pogner_, _Kothner_, or any other of the good old burghers of that
opera. In “Tannhäuser” he was equally at home as _Landgrave_ or
_Biterolf_, but his most remarkable feat of learning a part quickly was
performed in New York one spring. The German composer, Xaver Scharwenka,
was at that time living in New York as piano virtuoso and teacher. He
had, years before, composed an opera which he was anxious to perform,
and William Steinway and others asked me if I would let him have my
opera company for this purpose, so that he could conduct it himself at
an extra performance. I agreed and a good cast was selected. The tenor
part was to have been sung by Ernest Krauss, a rather conceited heroic
tenor who, not finding the part to his liking, pleaded hoarseness only
the day before the performance. There was, of course, no substitute, and
it seemed as if the performance would have to be cancelled, which would
have been a cruel experience for the composer. To my astonishment
Stehmann appeared and said very simply: “Give me the part and I will
learn it for to-morrow night.” When I interposed, “But this is a tenor
part and you are a bass barytone,” he answered: “Give it to me. I think
I can transpose a few of the high notes and can at least save the
performance.” Scharwenka, overjoyed, gave him the part and he sang and
acted it the following evening without a mistake—a truly remarkable
feat.
I grew very fond of him, not only because of his musicianly qualities
but also because as a man he was so simple and honorable, and I was glad
to hear later on that he had made an excellent position for himself in
Vienna.
This summer of 1922, I visited Vienna again after many, many years. I
felt that the war should be completely over for us and that we should
seek in every way to re-establish cultural relations with our former
enemies.
I found Stehmann still at the Vienna opera, now no longer called
Kaiserliche but Staats-Oper. It was a joy to see him again, but the war
had brought to him also great misfortune! He told me that from his
savings, while a member of my opera company and from subsequent savings
in Vienna, he had bought a house with several acres of land in the
Austrian Tyrols. With tears in his eyes he showed me photographs of this
property. The house was charmingly situated in a picturesque valley with
the Tyrolean Alps beyond. After the war this territory was taken over by
Italy; and that government, wishing to drive out the Austrians and
settle the land with Italians, had compelled Stehmann to “sell” his
property for a sum fixed by them. He had no choice and the price which
he received amounted to about thirty-seven thousand five hundred kronen,
which happened to be the amount I had paid that morning for a pair of
shoes—at the present valuation about three dollars and seventy cents!
The Poles claim that Bismarck pursued the same policy in Posnia when
Prussia endeavored to suppress Polish national aspirations, by forcing
them to sell their lands to the Prussian Junkers.
I was sorry on arriving in Vienna not to see once more the venerable old
singer, Marianne Brandt, but she had died, aged eighty-four, during the
previous winter. In 1884-85 she had been one of the main props of my
father’s inaugural German opera season; and her emotional intensity in
“Fidelio” and as the mother in “Le Prophète” had made a deep impression
on our public. Nature had not endowed her with beauty of face or figure,
and she always insisted: “I have been a virtuous woman all my life
because I am so ugly that no man would ever look at me.”
Wagner had invited her to Bayreuth to sing the part of _Kundry_ in
“Parsifal,” but whether because of her lack of beauty or because, as she
thought, of terrible intrigues on the part of Madame Materna, she sang
the rôle only once and always remained exceedingly jealous of Madame
Materna, whose rather amplitudinous charms, she insisted, had completely
hypnotized Wagner.
She simply adored my father and his single-minded idealism, and the
spirituality of his character appealed to her to such an extent that she
was willing to undergo any amount of work and to sing any rôle which he
wanted of her, whether it were a star part or one of the Valkyries in
“Walküre.” After his death she was inconsolable, and always went on the
anniversary to Woodlawn Cemetery to deposit a wreath on his grave. She
also sought to demonstrate her veneration for his memory by helping me
in every way possible, both as superb artist and as one well versed in
the practical side of operatic life through years of experience in
Vienna and at the Royal Opera in Berlin. She always called me “Mein
Sohn,” and her encouragement and faith in my future as a musician during
many trying times can never be forgotten by me.
She had a delightful sense of humor, but also a very quick temper, and I
remember her telling me one day that she had received a notice from the
New York Post-Office Department that a registered letter was awaiting
her down in the General Post-Office at City Hall. She went there and
inquired at the proper window for her letter.
“Yes,” said the official, “we have it here. Have you got some document
to prove that you are Marianne Brandt?—a letter, a bank-book, or a
passport?”
“I have none of these things, but I am Marianne Brandt and I want that
letter.”
“I am sorry, madame, but the rules are strict, and you will have to
bring some one to identify you.”
By this time Brandt was in a state of high indignation. “You will not
give me the letter? I will prove to you that I am Marianne Brandt!” And
then she proceeded with full voice to sing the great cadenza from her
principal aria in “Le Prophète.” Her glorious voice echoed and re-echoed
through the vaulted corridors of the post-office. Men came running from
all sides to find out what had happened and finally the agitated
official handed her the letter, saying: “Here is your letter, but for
God’s sake be quiet!”
She finally retired from the stage to her old home in Vienna and gave of
her art with both hands to a group of devoted pupils. During the war I
heard from one of them that, owing to the destitute condition existing
in Vienna, she was in real want, but she promptly returned the check we
sent her and in a very sweet letter addressed as usual to “Mein Sohn”
assured me that she did not need any money, that she did not expect to
live much longer, and that she thought she could hold out without
receiving any alms from her friends. We did succeed, however, in sending
her food which she shared with others.
One of the singers whom I engaged for the Metropolitan Opera House
during my first visit to Germany and who afterward achieved great fame
was Max Alvary, a young lyric tenor at the Weimar Ducal Opera House. He
was the son of the well-known German painter, Andreas Achenbach, of good
education, gentlemanly bearing, and a refined artistic taste. He was
also exceedingly good looking. As a singer he was very uneven, although
he had studied with the Italian master, Lamperti. At first we paid him
only a hundred dollars a night, but after he had sung minor rôles for a
few months Anton Seidl chose him to create the part of _Siegfried_, and
in that rôle he made a success so instantaneous as to place him
immediately in the front rank of German opera-singers. No one else has
given _Siegfried_ such an atmosphere of boyish innocence and picturesque
beauty. The women, bless them, simply worshipped him, from the
sixteen-year-old schoolgirl to the matron of mature and more than mature
age, and this success repeated itself when he appeared as _Siegfried_ in
Germany, Austria, and England. He made a great deal of money and spent
it lavishly. His armor and helmet in “Lohengrin” were specially made for
him out of silver after a design which he had drawn himself. The stuffs
for his costumes were often specially woven for him. He reached the
climax of his career when he was chosen by Cosima Wagner to sing
_Tannhäuser_ and _Tristan_ at Bayreuth. At that time this shrine for the
Wagnerite had already become, under the guiding and autocratic hand of
the widow of Wagner, a highly artificial product. I saw several of these
performances and was frankly amazed at the apparent degeneration since
the days of Wagner. Alvary, who had a great sense of humor, gave most
entertaining descriptions of the rehearsals, and how, for instance, in
slavish imitation of certain rhythms in the orchestra, _Tannhäuser_ and
_Wolfram_ had to execute a kind of minuet opposite each other in order
to fill in the instrumental introduction before _Wolfram_ begins his
famous plea to _Tannhäuser_: “Als du im kühnen Sange uns bestrittest.”
In the spring of 1891 Carnegie Hall, which had been built by Andrew
Carnegie as a home for the higher musical activities of New York, was
inaugurated with a music festival in which the New York Symphony and
Oratorio Societies took part. In order to give this festival a special
significance, I invited Peter Iljitsch Tschaikowsky, the great Russian
composer, to come to America and to conduct some of his own works. In
all my many years of experience I have never met a great composer so
gentle, so modest—almost diffident—as he. We all loved him from the
first moment—my wife and I, the chorus, the orchestra, the employees of
the hotel where he lived, and of course the public. He was not a
conductor by profession and in consequence the technic of it, the
rehearsals and concerts, fatigued him excessively; but he knew what he
wanted and the atmosphere which emanated from him was so sympathetic and
love-compelling that all executants strove with double eagerness to
divine his intentions and to carry them out. The performance which he
conducted of his Third Suite, for instance, was admirable, although it
is in parts very difficult; and as he was virtually the first of great
living composers to visit America, the public received him with
jubilance.
He came often to our house, and, I think, liked to come. He was always
gentle in his intercourse with others, but a feeling of sadness seemed
never to leave him, although his reception in America was more than
enthusiastic and the visit so successful in every way that he made plans
to come back the following year. Yet he was often swept by
uncontrollable waves of melancholia and despondency.
The following year in May I went to England with my wife, and received
an invitation from Charles Villiers Stanford, then professor of music at
Cambridge, to visit the old university during the interesting
commencement exercises at which honorary degrees of Doctor of Music were
to be given to five composers of five different countries—Saint-Saëns
of France, Boito of Italy, Grieg of Norway, Bruch of Germany, and
Tschaikowsky of Russia.
The proceedings proved highly interesting and enjoyable. As each
recipient of the honor stepped forward in his doctor’s robe, the orator
addressed him in a discourse of orotund Latin phrases, praising his many
virtues and accomplishments, and these phrases were constantly
interrupted by the clatter of facetious remarks and requests from the
undergraduates in the balcony, all this according to old-established
custom. Sometimes the uproar became so great that the presiding officer
had to arise and demand “Silentium.”
Among the other recipients of degrees on that occasion was Field-Marshal
Lord Roberts, Baron of Kandahar, who, in his scarlet uniform beneath his
doctor’s robe, received of course the most uproarious welcome. At that
time no one dreamed that twenty-three years later he would go around
England uttering solemn warning against the inevitability of war with
Germany and bidding England gird on her sword and prepare, only to be
laughed at as an alarmist and publicly reprimanded by politicians for
seeking to arouse such feeling against a “friendly power.”
In the evening a great banquet was given in the refectory of the
college, and by good luck I was placed next to Tschaikowsky. He told me
during the dinner that he had just finished a new symphony which was
different in form from any he had ever written. I asked him in what the
difference consisted and he answered: “The last movement is an adagio
and the whole work has a programme.”
“Do tell me the programme,” I demanded eagerly.
“No,” he said, “that I shall never tell. But I shall send you the first
orchestral score and parts as soon as Jurgenson, my publisher, has them
ready.”
We parted with the expectation of meeting again in America during the
following winter, but, alas, in October came the cable announcing his
death from cholera, and a few days later arrived a package from Moscow
containing the score and parts of his Symphony No. 6, the “Pathétique.”
It was like a message from the dead. I immediately put the work into
rehearsal and gave it its first performance in America on the following
Sunday. Its success was immediate and profound. We gave it many
repetitions that winter and I have played it since in concerts all over
the United States. Other orchestras have cultivated it with equal
assiduity, and in fact for me the time came several years ago when I
cried a halt and let the work lie fallow, as it had evidently been
overplayed and its high-strung rhythms had excited the nerves of
executants and audiences so often that they were in danger of being
overstrained.
Ignace Paderewski made his first appearance in America in 1891, and I
conducted his first five orchestral concerts. He came under the auspices
of Steinway and Sons, and they told me that the gross receipts for the
first concert were only five hundred dollars! His playing as well as his
personality, however, immediately took our public by storm, and I do not
think that since the days of Franz Liszt there has been any other
travelling virtuoso in whom the man was as fascinating as the artist.
People who have wondered how it was possible for him when the Great War
began to throw himself so fully equipped at every point into the
struggle to achieve national unity for Poland, do not realize that he
was, consciously or unconsciously, preparing himself for just this
opportunity all his life. He had always dreamed of a united and
independent Poland. He knew the history of his people, their strength,
and their weakness. It is said that one day he played before the Czar
who, congratulating him, expressed his pleasure that a “Russian” should
have achieved such eminence in his art. Paderewski answered: “I am a
Pole, your Majesty,” and, needless to say, was never again invited to
play in Russia. His mind is one of the most extraordinary I have ever
come in contact with. All the world knows what he has achieved in
music—his inspired interpretations, his prodigious memory, and the
subtle range of colors of his musical palette, but not so many know of
his interest in literature, philosophy, and history, and it took the
Great War to demonstrate that as orator and statesman he ranks as high
as musician. I heard him make a speech on Poland during the Exposition
in San Francisco in 1915 before an audience of ten thousand, in which he
gave so eloquent a survey of Poland’s history and of her needs and
rights, as to rouse the people to a frenzy of enthusiasm, and I am
convinced that Poland owes her national existence to-day to his
statesmanship and to the sympathy which his personality created among
the Allies at the Versailles Conference. I believe that Colonel House
pronounced him to be the greatest statesman of the Conference, and it
was only the cynical Clemenceau who said to him: “M. Paderewski, you
were the greatest pianist in the world and you have chosen to descend to
our level. What a pity!”
When he first came to America, his English was very incomplete but even
then he demonstrated his grasp of it in unmistakable fashion. One
evening he, my wife, and I dined at the house of very dear mutual
friends, Mr. and Mrs. John E. Cowdin, in Gramercy Park. Cowdin had all
his life been an enthusiastic polo player, and after dinner Paderewski
and I admired some handsome silver trophies that he had won and that
were placed in the dining-room. I said: “You see the difference between
you and Johnny is that he wins his prizes in playing polo while you win
yours in playing solo.”
“Zat is not all ze difference!” Paderewski immediately exclaimed in his
gentle Polish accents. “I am a poor Pole playing solo, but Johnny is a
dear soul playing polo.”
He is highly gifted as a composer, and besides a very interesting and
spiritual symphony I remember with keen pleasure his opera “Manru,”
which Maurice Grau brought out at the Metropolitan Opera House in 1902
and which I conducted. I cannot remember ever having worked harder
toward achieving a successful première. The orchestral parts, which had
been copied in Germany in a great hurry, arrived so full of mistakes
that the first rehearsals were an agony of constant stopping and
correcting, and these corrections went on during the entire time of
preparation, and I believe that I still found two inaccuracies at the
rehearsal just preceding the general rehearsal. Again and again I took
some of the worst parts home and worked late into the night going
through them meticulously myself, and comparing them with the orchestral
score in an endeavor to bring order out of chaos. The opera received a
warm welcome, but the libretto was lacking somewhat in dramatic
interest; and the music, with all its genuine charm and warmth, was not
able to successfully combat this lack.
I think that if Paderewski had been willing to sacrifice his marvellous
career as a piano virtuoso (and that would have been a great sacrifice)
he would have become one of the greatest composers of our time. It does
not seem easy to unite the two careers, as they are essentially at war
with each other. Liszt, the only man with whom I can compare Paderewski,
recognized this fact, and at forty years of age resolutely turned his
back on virtuosodom, with its life in the public glare, its excitements,
crowds, and emoluments, in order to devote himself to composition. He
settled in the little town of Weimar, living a life of poverty, and
never again touched the piano for personal gain. Only now and then he
would play in public in order to gather funds for the Beethoven monument
in Bonn or for some great charity. And yet it is universally conceded
that even he stopped too late and that, great as is the sum total of his
contributions to creative art, he would have been still greater and able
to express himself more genuinely if he had never been “the greatest
pianist of his generation.”
It is difficult to define the charm with which the artists of Poland
seem to be imbued almost beyond any other race. It is more than a social
gift. It is not the result of calculation but seems to be a combination
of kindliness of heart and good breeding. Madame Marcella Sembrich has
it to a supreme degree, also Jean and Edouard de Reszke, also Tim and
Joe Adamowski, Paul Kochanski, and my old friend Alexander Lambert, and
if the new state of Poland were composed only of such of the Polish
elect as I have just mentioned it would soon become the ideal republic
of the world. On the other hand, a country composed exclusively of
musicians might not make a contented population, as it is well known
that we need an audience to listen to us, and musicians, rightly or
wrongly, have the reputation of never being willing to listen to each
other.
I do not, however, mean to imply that the Poles are the exclusive
possessors of personal charm. For instance, I do not know of any man who
has it in greater degree than my old friend Charles Martin Loeffler, who
was born in Alsace, received his musical education in France, was
violinist in the private orchestra of a Russian grand duke in Nice, and,
at the age of sixteen, came to America. My father immediately became
very fond of him, and on Sunday afternoons, when we always had
chamber-music at home in which my father played first violin and Sam
Franko second, Martin Loeffler would play the viola. I liked him
immensely and our friendship has lasted through the years. Our birthdays
are on the same day, and we are almost of an age, as he is only a year
older. When Higginson formed the Boston Orchestra under George Henschel,
Loeffler migrated to Boston and became first violin and second concert
master. At the same time he continued his studies in composition, and
has since become one of our foremost American composers. For years he
has lived as a gentleman farmer in Medfield, Massachusetts. His
compositions are few and far between, but all of them have the same
aristocratic conception, refinement, and original orchestration, such as
a man can write who has spent a great part of his life in the orchestra
and knows its literature and possibilities. His letters, exquisitely
penned, rank with those of Eugene Ysaye, and that is high praise, as
Ysaye is the very prince of letter-writers. I venture to insert one of
Loeffler’s here because it treats of the first performance of my opera,
“Cyrano,” and because it is so whole-hearted in its praise and so gentle
but discerning in its criticisms of the weak spots in my work.
Medfield, Mass.
Sunday, 26 March, 1913.
Dear Walter:
There was not a more amazed person amongst the audience last
Thursday than your old friend here. Having plowed away and
wallowed in storm for some time on my own One Act play, I know
of the difficulties, the doubts and hazards that one encounters
in the business of writing an opera. It is therefore with
genuine admiration, that I take off my hat and bow low to him,
who could write the Score of Cyrano. It is a masterly
accomplishment of a treacherous task. I did not see you on that
exciting night; there having been some uncertainty as to my
being able to obtain a bed on the 1 o’clock train, I finally had
to give up the pleasure of going to your house. I press your
dear old hand now in spirit and in sincere admiration.
Your orchestration sounded superbly. Your choruses blended
wonderfully with the orchestra and I have no doubt that with a
slight _remaniement_ and _raccourcissement_, Cyrano will give
great joy to many in the future. I understand that you have
already made considerable cuts, still do I advise cutting out
more. Four Acts is a long proposition and some of the best
things come in the last Act. But the public begins to tire and
can no longer thoroughly enjoy the beauties of this Act. A few
things have occurred to me besides. In the scene on the balcony,
I think it is a mistake to let Cyrano say what Christian shall
repeat to Roxane. Is this not what happens in Act III, “How
could I love you more,” etc? Would it not be more expressive to
let Cyrano prompt his stupid friend in whispering and pantomimic
gesture? Curiously enough, this scene which one would have
picked out as “made for an opera,” was perhaps the least
effective part of the Opera. After the climb to his lady love,
everything is again admirable.
Then, in the last act, I believe if you were to shorten Cyrano’s
delirium and hasten his death somewhat, you would strengthen and
heighten the final effect of your work. Cyrano dies hard and one
thinks of the nine-live-cat-death of Tristan! All this may only
seem long coming at the end of the preceding three intense
hours. There are really extraordinary effects in this final Act
of yours and one would like to look at such a score as yours.
Probably, like all telling things in this world, your effects
are obtained through simplest means.
The whole work is to me a delight on account of its real
musicianship—a work evolved from a highly sensitive, very
intelligent brain, that has absorbed and assimilated much,
without imitating anybody or anything.
These are my first sincere impressions of your work, to which I
will add my sentiments. While the musician listened during the
hours of the performance, the friend in him was carefully kept
apart. When, however, the musician’s heart began beating more
and more warmly, the friend and the musician became again at one
in their joy.
Here also arises the reflection: Where did you or where does
anybody acquire mastery? Do the gifted themselves really know
what they are doing and is Maeterlinck right when he makes
Mélisande say “Je ne sais pas ce que je sais”?
_A priori_ I shall always say: There must be Opera in
English—but at present there cannot be, as nobody knows how to
sing in it. The performance however was admirable. Amato was
superb and so was the orchestra, chorus and old Herty! Hats off
to him too!
Kindest regards to Mrs. Damrosch in which Elise joins me.
Believe me, dear Walter, as ever and more proudly than ever,
Your friend
CH. M. LOEFFLER.
In 1891 I was asked to give a concert for the Orthopædic Hospital in
which my friend, Mrs. John Hobart Warren, was always much interested,
and in casting about for some sensational feature which would draw the
public I conceived the idea of having Eugene Ysaye and Fritz Kreisler
play the Bach concerto for two violins. Ysaye was then at the very
zenith of his career and Kreisler had just come to America as a young
violinist of great attainments and charm, and still greater promise for
the future. The performance of the Bach concerto proved all that I had
hoped, and after the concert Ysaye had supper with me at the old
Delmonico’s in Madison Square. Ysaye is not only a remarkable artist but
one of the most brilliant conversationalists I have met, and during the
supper he proceeded in the most fascinating way to analyze himself and
Kreisler. He said: “I have arrived at the top and from now on there will
be a steady decrease of my powers. I have lived my life to the full and
burned the candle at both ends. For some time I shall make up in
subtlety of phrasing and nuance what my technic as a violinist can no
longer give, but Kreisler is on the ascendant and in a short time he
will be the greater artist.” It is not for me to say whether Ysaye’s
prophecy has come true, but no one who has heard him in his prime can
forget his truly gigantic conception of the Beethoven concerto, for
instance, and the mastery with which he poured out the golden flood of
his music.
In 1909 I gave a Beethoven cycle at which I performed all the Beethoven
symphonies and other smaller works of his in historical sequence. We had
engaged Ysaye to play the Beethoven Violin Concerto, but, to my
astonishment, he sent word only a week before that he must first play a
violin concerto by Vitali, as he had to get his fingers into proper
condition before playing the Beethoven. I remonstrated with him and
explained to him that in a Beethoven cycle I could not possibly give a
concerto by Vitali, even to oblige Ysaye, and suggested that he play the
Vitali concerto to himself in the greenroom before the concert, but he
refused to accept this amendment and I was ever so reluctantly compelled
to cancel his appearance in the cycle. This caused a coolness between us
which lasted several years and which I regretted exceedingly. But time
is a great peacemaker. We happened to meet again quite casually a few
years later, and by tacit consent this little contretemps was completely
buried and we are as good friends as of yore.
Perhaps the most important and interesting great musician of France whom
I have known was Camille Saint-Saëns, whom I met in 1908 when he came to
America on a concert tour. He was at that time seventy years of age. His
extraordinary vitality and the fluency of his playing amazed us all, and
America outdid itself to honor this venerable _grand maître_. I had the
great pleasure of conducting all of his concerts in New York at which he
played his five piano concertos, an extraordinary feat for a man of his
age. We had heard so many stories from French musicians of his “nasty
temper” at rehearsals and his caustic comments on this or that phrasing
in his symphonies or concertos that we were all very agreeably
disappointed in finding him genial, cheerful, and grateful for what we
were able to give him. He even insisted on playing the organ himself at
my performance of his Symphony No. 3, which is dedicated to the memory
of Liszt. I have always considered this to be his greatest work in that,
with all the clarity of form and diction which is a special
characteristic of his style, there is also a deep emotion which rises in
the last movement to a triumphant and thrilling climax.
I saw him again in Paris during the war in the summer of 1918, and
reminded him of a visit which my father had paid to him in 1876.
“That was not the first time I met your father,” he quickly rejoined. “I
remember very well meeting him in Weimar in 1857 while I was visiting
Liszt.”
In 1920 my second daughter, Gretchen, was to be married to the son of
Judge Finletter of Philadelphia. The young people had met at Chaumont,
France, where Finletter had been stationed at General Headquarters after
the armistice and while Gretchen and her friend, Mary Schieffelin, were
there as war workers. My daughter agreed enthusiastically with my
suggestion that the wedding should be in Paris after my European tour
with the orchestra was finished, and this to them highly important event
was carried out with great success on the 17th of July, the ceremony
being solemnized at the American church and the reception held at my
hotel, the “France et Choiseul,” in the Rue St. Honoré. As I had come to
this hotel for so many years, Monsieur Mantel, the _directeur_, and all
the employees from the chef down, helped on the affair with an
enthusiasm which can only be found in a country like France, where all
festivals of family life are treated with tremendous importance. All the
reception-rooms down-stairs and the greater part of the courtyard, which
had been charmingly framed in with laurel-trees and filled with
inviting-looking little tables, had been placed at our disposal. All the
employees of the house—including Leonie, François, Pierre, Adolph,
Theo, Félice, Madeleine, Michel, and Louis, all of whom I had known
during the war and even before—wore large white boutonnières and
ribbons in honor of the occasion; and at four o’clock about a hundred
French and American friends began to arrive from the ceremony at the
church. Among these was my old friend Madame Nellie Melba, who had come
over from London for the purpose, and “_le grand maître_” Camille
Saint-Saëns, whom all the hotel employees immediately recognized and
treated with great and fond deference.
As Saint-Saëns entered the courtyard he turned to me and said, rather
testily: “Mon cher ami, pourquoi est-ce que vous n’avez-pas donné une de
mes symphonies dans un de vos concerts à Paris ce printemps?” For a
moment I was nonplussed what to answer. We had given three concerts in
Paris and I had devoted one to the “Eroica” of Beethoven, and the other
two to the César Franck D Minor, the Mozart “Jupiter,” and the Dvořák
“New World” symphonies, but Albert Spalding, my soloist, had played the
Saint-Saëns Violin Concerto, so that his name had been represented on
our programmes. Suddenly the right answer came to me: “Cher maître,
don’t you know that during the war I played your great Symphony No. 3 at
a gala concert on the Fête Nationale at the Salle du Conservatoire for
the benefit of the Croix Rouge, and here is Monsieur Cortot who played
the piano part and here Mademoiselle Boulanger who played the organ.”
(Both of them were luckily standing by my side as Saint-Saëns entered.)
He was completely pacified and was carried off in triumph to the buffet
by a crowd of adoring French musicians in order to offer him some
refreshment.
Henri Casadesus told me afterward that when Saint-Saëns arrived at the
buffet he said: “I am thirsty.” “Here is some champagne,” said
Casadesus. “No. That is too cold,” “Well, here is chocolate.” “No. That
is too hot,” whereupon he took the glass of champagne and poured it into
the chocolate and drank it down with evident relish. Pretty good for a
man then eighty-two years of age!
Saint-Saëns had always preserved a great adoration for Liszt, who had
been one of the first musicians to befriend him in his early days, and
his admiration for Liszt’s music had remained much greater than for that
of Wagner. In fact, during the war the majority of the French musicians
were furious at his chauvinistic attitude toward Wagner.
It is told that when Saint-Saëns was still a very young man he was
calling on Liszt and the servant asked him to wait a few minutes as
Liszt was engaged in another room. Saint-Saëns, seeing a manuscript
orchestral score on the piano, sat down and proceeded with his
marvellous musicianship to read and play it at sight, when suddenly the
door opened and Liszt and Wagner rushed in, amazed at hearing the
intricate harmonies of Wagner’s “Rheingold” so marvellously reproduced.
Wagner had just brought the score to Liszt in order to show it to him.
During the winter of 1920-21 I accepted the co-editorship for a series
of music readers to be used in our public schools, and as I had agreed
to invite a small group of distinguished French and English composers to
contribute some songs for this publication, I requested Saint-Saëns to
honor us with two. He readily complied, and in the summer of 1921
invited me to come to his apartment as he had the songs all ready. When
I called, he immediately sat down at the piano and from his very neatly
written manuscript played them for me, begging me to observe that he had
made the accompaniment exceedingly simple in order that “the American
school-teachers should not be too much puzzled by it.” For one of the
songs composed in honor of the aviators of the war, he had even written
the words himself, and for the other he had taken words by La Fontaine.
He called at my hotel in August of 1921. He seemed to me to have grown
more feeble, but seeing on my piano an edition of Beethoven’s piano
sonatas, edited by von Bülow, with which I always like to travel as I
find the playing of these sonatas very agreeable and restful between the
inevitable irritations of travel, Saint-Saëns suddenly bristled up and
became very angry at a certain rather complicated fingering which Bülow
had given to a piano passage, as his fingers had not been adapted by
nature to rapid playing.
“This is the way it should be played,” said Saint-Saëns, as he sat down
at the piano and proceeded to let his fingers, though still clad in gray
lisle gloves, run up the keys with incredible swiftness, like little
gray mice. This extreme dexterity never left him. I had heard him but a
month before at a musical given by Widor in his honor and in which
Saint-Saëns played the piano part in his own “Septet with Trumpet.” His
fingers literally ran away with him, and every time there was a quick
passage, he accelerated the tempo to such an extent that the other
players simply had to scramble after him as best they could.
He died last winter at eighty-four years of age, and all Paris,
governmental, artistic, and scientific, united in giving him imposing
and significant obsequies. The respect which the young men of France
have for their old masters is something exceedingly sympathetic to an
American observer. Whenever Saint-Saëns appeared among them they would
hover around with eager deference, flushing with pride as he would say
something to the one or the other. In fact, Widor, who is perhaps ten
years younger than Saint-Saëns, always insisted on treating him as if
he, Widor, were a young, deferential schoolboy in the presence of his
great master. Indeed, they reserve the words “_grand maître_” only for
their very choicest men of the arts and the learned professions.
With Lillian Nordica I made a joint tour through New England, giving
Wagner concerts. As she had by that time arrived at true prima donna
estate she had a private car in which she lived and in which I also had
a room. The poor lady arrived on the first day with an attack of
bronchitis so acute that she could hardly speak. Her voice sounded like
the croak of a raven. I have never seen any woman in such abject
despair, walking up and down the little dining-room of the car like a
caged tigress, every now and then touching a note on the upright piano
which had been placed therein, and trying her voice. She was clad in a
wrapper, and tears and misery had ravaged her comely face so that it was
hardly recognizable. I, of course, thought that she would not sing that
evening, but at seven she disappeared into her room and an hour later
emerged clad in a magnificent toilet, with her diamond tiara on the top
of her head and her face wonderfully made up. When she appeared before
her audience with whom she was an old favorite, her manner had all the
regal but smiling charm of yore. Her voice? Well, that is another story.
During that entire week this tragi-comedy would repeat itself every day.
Her bronchitis never left her, and from my room I could hear this poor
woman, as she entered the dining-room, touch the piano furtively and try
to sing a few notes. It was agony, and I have hated private cars ever
since, and am quite content to occupy a drawing-room or a berth in a
regular sleeping-car when I travel. It is certainly more cheerful.
When we finally arrived in New York, where we expected to give two
Wagner concerts, lo and behold, the clouds suddenly lifted. Nordica was
her old self, and while the diamond tiara could not have looked more
regal nor the smile have been more ingratiating than at Worcester,
Massachusetts, her voice had again regained its old charm and the cry of
the Valkyrie and _Isolde’s_ Liebestod brought back to the memory of her
audiences the happy days when Nordica, Schumann-Heink, and Jean de
Reszke had electrified them at the Metropolitan.
Madame Nordica was, however, not the only American artist with whom I
came into frequent professional contact and who had achieved an eminence
equal to that of the best of Europe. David Bispham became a member of my
opera company in 1896. He came of an old Quaker family in Philadelphia,
into whose lives music had never penetrated. How Bispham got his intense
musical temperament is one of those mysteries that the laws of neither
heredity nor environment can explain.
He was a man of some means, and finding the local atmosphere in which he
lived uncongenial to his evident artistic needs, he went to Europe. He
had a vibrant barytone voice, studied singing with Lamperti, and
gradually began to make successful appearances on the stage, especially
in England. In my company he achieved especial successes as _Telramund_,
_Kurvenal_, and _Beckmesser_, also as _Roger Chillingworth_ in my own
opera on Hawthorne’s “Scarlet Letter.” He adored a part in which he
could “act.” In fact, he sometimes overacted. His musical memory,
especially in his later years, was not always to be relied on, but the
more he forgot the words the more intense his acting became, and as
_Chillingworth_, in which rôle he really never quite learned the text,
he fairly contorted his body in giving expression to the sinister
machinations and revengeful desires of that demon.
As a man he was of a singularly delightful, almost childlike
disposition. The things of this life rarely existed for him as they
really were. He saw them through the glass of his own exuberant
imagination. The mysterious, the extraordinary, always fascinated him,
and he therefore often became the prey of designing people who took easy
advantage of his trusting nature. He was a most generous colleague and
more free from jealousy than most operatic singers. Rehearsals, no
matter how long, were to him as the breath to his nostrils, and he would
often spend hours before his glass in the dressing-room making up his
face for some character part in close imitation of a famous picture he
had seen at the Uffizi in Florence or the Royal Gallery in London. He
loved to enact a villain, but, on the other hand, his doglike devotion
to _Tristan_ as _Kurvenal_ often brought tears to our eyes.
My wife and I became very fond of him and, later on, when he and I
joined the Metropolitan Opera House Company, again under Maurice Grau,
we would often take our meals together on the long Western trips to and
from California.
He was exceedingly irascible if servants did not carry out his orders
properly, and he would berate them in his very resonant voice with a
distinctness of utterance worthy of the _Comédie Française_. One morning
we were seated at breakfast in the dining-car of our train when the
colored waiter brought him his coffee, which was so weak that a drop of
the so-called cream turned it a bluish gray. “Take away that coffee!”
Bispham thundered. “It is not fit to drink. It is too weak!”
“Oh, no, sah!” expostulated gently the waiter. “Dat coffee am all right.
It’s de cream what’s too powerful strong!”
At that time leather suitcases were just making their first appearance
and I had bought one and carried it about with me. Bispham noticed it
and said, in his extreme Kensington English, which he had carefully
acquired over there: “Walter, that is a very nice bag you have there. I
think I will buy four of them, each one a little smaller than the other,
so that I can put them all inside each other.”
“Why,” I said, “David, aren’t you going to pack anything else inside of
those bags?”
“Ha, ha, ha!” laughed David. “Walter, you are always having your little
joke!”
Whenever my opera company came to Boston the supers, when an extra group
or crowd of knights or peasants, etc., were necessary, were always taken
from Harvard University. This became a source of enormous revenue to the
doorkeeper at the stage entrance. Our stage-manager paid him twenty-five
cents for each super, but he not only pocketed this money himself but
charged the students anywhere from fifty cents upward, according to the
popularity of the opera, for the privilege of hearing it from the stage.
In consequence we often had the most wonderful athletic specimens that
the ardent pursuit of sport produces among college men, delighting our
eyes as the curtain rose, and the knights and nobles in the second act
of “Tannhäuser,” for instance, clad in magnificent robes, would march in
and solemnly listen to the contest of song in the castle of the
Landgrave of Thuringia.
But they were not all athletes, and I remember one real student among
them. The curtain went up on the first act of “Lohengrin” and, to my
amazement as I looked up from my conductor’s stand, I saw one of these
college boys, dressed in the armor and cloak of one of King Henry’s
knights, calmly standing at the foot of the throne, large spectacles on
his nose, busily following the action of the opera from a libretto which
he held in his hand and close to his eyes.
Another time a much more terrible occurrence took place, but very much
“behind the scenes.” I was in Boston with the Grau Opera Company and, at
a Saturday matinée, “Carmen” was given with Madame Calvé in the title
rôle. I did not conduct that opera, and happened to saunter on the stage
after the third act. I found the whole company in a state of only
half-suppressed merriment. While Madame A—— was singing _Micaela’s_
air on the stage, in which she implores _Don Jose_ to leave _Carmen_ and
return to his old mother, one of these young wretches from Harvard had
crept into her dressing-room, and in order to have a triumphant souvenir
to hang up in his rooms at college he had stolen her— No, not her
stockings, but another important part of her wearing apparel. Madame
A——, on returning to her dressing-room, had discovered the theft. Her
maid had told the wardrobe mistress, the wardrobe mistress had told the
stage carpenter, he had repeated it to the stage-manager, and so forth
and so on, the whole company revelling in it, especially as Madame A——
was herself of New England parentage and was considered an exceptionally
proper young person.
[Illustration: CAMILLE SAINT-SAËNS AND WALTER DAMROSCH
From a snapshot taken in Paris at the wedding reception of Gretchen
Damrosch, July 17, 1920]