I have a large library of musical works. It was begun by my father in
1857, and contains many scores of the composers of that period, sent to
him for first performance in Germany. He added to it considerably during
his thirteen years in America as founder and conductor of the Symphony
and Oratorio Societies, and I have still further enlarged it since I
became conductor of these two organizations. My library now virtually
represents the entire symphonic development up to the present time, and
as I look through my catalogue I am amazed at the number of dead
composers which it contains. By this I do not mean those who have passed
away, but those who were once celebrated, were hailed as great, but
whose works are now forgotten and only repose undisturbed on dusty
shelves like mine, for no efforts or housewife’s art will prevent dust
from seeping into the shelves of a New York City library!
To mention a few of these “dead” composers alphabetically: Who now plays
the overtures of Auber’s “La Muette de Portici” and “Fra Diavolo”? Yet
they figured frequently in my popular programmes thirty years ago, and
both operas deserve more than a passing recognition. The first was a
stroke of genius in which the commonplace Auber rose to real heights.
The heroine is a dumb girl, a prima donna without a voice, but very
dramatically portrayed in the orchestra, and the atmosphere of a people
fighting for freedom pervades the entire story. “Fra Diavolo” is a
delightful comic opera. The only trouble is that the music is too good
for the abjectly dull audiences that now frequent our theatres and want
to see a “musical show.” Its plot is delightfully consistent, which is
another reason for looking on it with disfavor to-day; but I have always
regretted the Nemesis which overcomes _Fra Diavolo_ in the last act.
This delightful robber has by that time so endeared himself to us that
he should be allowed at the end to escape, in order that the public may
live in the hope of further pranks and misdeeds from him.
Thirty years ago I gave the first performance in America of a “Symphony
in D Minor,” by Anton Bruckner. He was a man with the brains of a
peasant but the soul of a real musician, and with a marvellous gift for
improvisation, although he was, intellectually, incapable of developing
and balancing his themes properly. A noisy party in Vienna wished, at
the time, to acclaim this disciple of Wagner as a genius, to counteract
the constantly growing admiration for Brahms, and more recently such
eminent conductors as Mahler have tried to popularize Bruckner’s
symphonies, but they have never gained a permanent hold on our public.
Several years after my performance of his “Symphony in D,” I was in
Berlin, and Siegfried Ochs, the conductor of the famous Philharmonic
Choir, brought a little bald-headed man of over seventy years of age to
my table at the Kaiserhof. On my being introduced to him, he suddenly
grabbed my hand, and saying, “You are the Mr. Damrosch who has given my
symphony in America!” he proceeded, to my great embarrassment, to cover
my hand with kisses.
Vienna is full of stories of his childlike gentleness and modesty. Hans
Richter once invited him to conduct one of his own symphonies with the
famous orchestra of the Vienna Society of Friends of Music. At the
rehearsal he stood on the conductor’s platform, stick in his hand, with
a beatific smile on his face. The orchestra were all ready to begin, but
he would not lift his stick to give the signal. Finally Rosé, the
concert master, said to him: “We are quite ready. Begin, Herr Bruckner.”
“Oh, no,” he answered. “After you, gentlemen!”
At that time he was also commanded to appear before the old Emperor
Franz Joseph to receive a decoration. After he had been decorated, the
Emperor turned to him and said very kindly: “Herr Bruckner, is there
anything more I can do for you?” Bruckner answered in a trembling voice:
“Won’t you please speak to Mr. Hanslick (the famous musical critic of
Vienna) that he should not write such nasty criticisms about my
symphonies?”
In my father’s time the overture to Cherubini’s “Anacreon” had a
frequent and honored place on his programmes. A modern audience would
vote it too dry and old-fashioned.
The music of Niels W. Gade was quite a favorite with our grandfathers
and grandmothers, but he is unendurable to-day.
A new orchestral composition of Carl Goldmark was eagerly waited for,
forty years ago, and there was great rivalry between my father and
Theodore Thomas as to which should have the privilege of performing it
first. People used to revel in his “exotic and luxuriant orchestration,”
but to-day his colors have faded before the greater glories of Strauss
and Debussy and Ravel, and only his “Rustic Symphony” occasionally
figures on our programmes.
During the second year of the German opera at the Metropolitan,
Goldmark’s “Queen of Sheba” made a success which equalled that of the
Wagner operas. Solomon’s temple, painted in gold, the Jewish rituals,
the Oriental harmonies, and the naïve surprise of the public on seeing
biblical characters upon a modern operatic stage, all combined to make
the work a sensational success. To-day it has disappeared completely
from the repertoire of European and American opera-houses.
The fate of Franz Liszt as a composer is still more tragic because it is
partly undeserved. He created the form of the symphonic poem, but those
who succeeded him have developed it so much farther as to leave his
works somewhat submerged. I still have great admiration for his “Faust”
Symphony, but neither I nor others of my colleagues who share this
admiration have been able to make this work really popular with the
general public. His “Dante” Symphony, “Festklänge,” and “Orpheus”
receive still fewer public performances, and his “Ce qu’on entend sur
les montagnes” has never been performed here to my knowledge. But “Les
Préludes” and the two Piano Concertos, on the contrary, are still played
_ad nauseam_.
The symphonies of Gustav Mahler have never received genuine recognition
here, although he was a very interesting apparition in the musical
field. He was a profound musician and one of the best conductors of
Europe, and it is possible that, in the latter capacity, he occupied
himself so intensely and constantly in analyzing and interpreting the
works of the great masters that he lost the power to develop himself as
composer on original lines. All his life he composed, but his moments of
real beauty are too rare, and the listener has to wade through pages of
dreary emptiness which no artificial connection with philosophic ideas
can fill with real importance. The feverish restlessness characteristic
of the man reflects itself in his music, which is fragmentary in
character and lacks continuity of thought and development. He could
write cleverly in the style of Haydn or Berlioz or Wagner, and without
forgetting Beethoven, but he was never able to write in the style of
Mahler.
Of all the greater composers of the last hundred years no one has been
killed oftener than Mendelssohn, yet he always seems to come back again
with a new renaissance. His music for “Athalie,” his “Reformation”
Symphony, his overtures to “Melusine” and “Ruy Blas” are dead as a
door-nail, but his Violin Concerto is still the most perfect example of
its kind, his “Midsummer Night’s Dream” the best incidental music ever
conceived for a Shakespearean play, his “Elijah” the most dramatic
oratorio ever written, and the Scotch and Italian Symphonies still
possess a delightful and eternal charm.
The works of Meyerbeer, on the contrary, have deservedly disappeared
even from our popular programmes. Those empty “Torchlight Dances” and
the vulgar ballet music from “Le Prophète”! I confess, though, that I
still have a sneaking fondness for the “Coronation March,” perhaps
because I had to conduct it so many times at the Metropolitan, when I
first began conducting the operas there. That the same man who penned
the glorious fourth act of the “Huguenots” could have been satisfied
with the empty drivel which preponderates during the rest of that opera,
is one of the eternal mysteries.
About thirty years ago Moritz Moszkowski was one of the most popular
composers of the day, especially for the piano, but modern ears have but
little use for his delicate, though evanescent, charm, and his
orchestral suites are but rarely heard to-day. He has lived in Paris for
many years, and during the war he suffered greatly. Advancing years and
a long illness had left him very weak, and it seemed almost as if the
musical world in which he had been so popular a figure had forgotten him
completely.
But last winter, Ernest Schelling, one of our best American pianists,
and an old friend of Moszkowski’s, conceived the happy idea of giving a
testimonial concert in his honor, which should be thoroughly original in
character. He, together with his distinguished colleague, Harold Bauer,
accordingly enlisted the co-operation of twelve other celebrated
pianists who were in America during the winter. This list, a truly
remarkable one, included Elly Ney, Ignaz Friedman, Ossip Gabrilowitsch,
Rudolph Ganz, Leopold Godowsky, Percy Grainger, Ernest Hutcheson,
Alexander Lambert, Josef Lhevinne, Yolanda Mero, Germaine Schnitzer, and
Sigismond Stojowski.
Mr. Flagler offered the services of our orchestra, but as the stage was
to be completely filled with fourteen grand pianos, there was no room
for an orchestra, and I had to content myself with the possibility of
being taken on as a piano mover, as I longed to take part in the affair
in any capacity. The morning before the concert, however, I received a
hurried S. O. S. telephone call from Ernest Schelling. He said: “Please
come down to Steinway’s immediately and help us out. The fourteen
pianists are all here for rehearsal. We have arranged for several
compositions to be played by all of us, but alas, each one has his own
individual interpretation, and nothing seems to make us play together.
We need a conductor!”
When I arrived at the rehearsal hall the confusion was indeed
indescribable, and it took some time to bring order out of chaos. Here
were fourteen of the world’s greatest pianists, veritable prima donnas
of the piano, but several had never learned to adapt themselves to play
together for a common musical purpose, and when I rapped on my stand for
silence in order to begin the “Spanish Dances” of Moszkowski, at least
five or six continued their infernal improvising, playing of scales, and
pianistic fireworks. By using heroic measures I gradually produced a
semblance of order, and gave the signal for the beginning of the music.
The effect was extraordinary! Several of these pianists had never
followed a conductor’s beat, and after the first ten bars, two of them
rushed over to me, the one violently exclaiming that the tempo was too
fast, and the other insisting with equal vehemence that it was too slow.
Finally I obtained silence, and told my pianistic orchestra that they
were, undoubtedly, the fourteen greatest pianists in the world, and that
the interpretation of each one of them was undoubtedly equally the
greatest in the world, but as they represented fourteen different grades
and shades of interpretation, I intended to take the matter into my own
hands and they would just have to follow my beat whether they liked my
tempo or not. This was greeted with a roar of approval, and we now
settled down to the work of rehearsing as solemnly as if these prima
donnas of the ivories were orchestral musicians and routined members of
the New York Musical Union. Order followed anarchy, and the results
achieved were not without higher artistic interest, especially as I
detailed such accomplished and routined musicians as Harold Bauer,
Ernest Schelling, and Ossip Gabrilowitsch to use their own discretion in
“orchestrating” the “Dances.” Gabrilowitsch, for instance, reserved
himself for the entrance of the “brasses”; Bauer invested some of the
more delicate portions with agile runs of flutes and clarinets, while
Schelling imitated the kettledrums and cymbals with thrilling effect.
Carnegie Hall was jammed and the audience in a gale of happiness at the
highly original proceedings. The stage was so crowded with the fourteen
huge pianos that, after threading my way through them to introduce Mme.
Alma Gluck, who was to auction off one of the programmes, I said that
what this concert evidently needed most was not a conductor but a
traffic policeman.
Perhaps the most artistic feature of the programme was the performance
of Schumann’s “Carnival Scenes,” in which each little movement
represents a separate carnival figure. The fourteen pianists drew lots
as to which was to play which. The introduction was played by all, but
after that, in quick kaleidoscopic succession, the different carnival
figures fairly danced from the stage into the audience, as a pianist on
one side of the stage would begin, followed by one from the other side,
and so on. It was a most remarkable opportunity to compare the
interpretative characteristics of the different pianists.
The receipts were considerably swelled by the auctioning of programmes
and autographed photographs of Moszkowski, and fifteen thousand dollars
was the result of an entertainment truly unique in the history of music.
The most popular modern symphonic composer in the ’70’s was Joachim
Raff. He was a young Swiss who, without a cent in his pocket, had walked
many miles from his little village in order to hear Liszt play at a
concert in Zurich. Liszt became interested in his undoubted talent, and
took him with him to Weimar as musical secretary. Raff, von Bülow, and
my father became great friends. But while every one expected that Raff
would continue as a true disciple of Liszt’s, and write in the
revolutionary style of his master, he gradually turned from him and
leaned more and more on classic models, although in several of his
symphonies he retained the Lisztian idea of programme music. As he grew
older his conservatism became more and more marked. He had great
facility and produced works in every known form of music, and his vanity
gradually made him believe that his string quartets were equal to
Mozart’s, his symphonies to Beethoven’s, and his oratorios to Handel’s
and Mendelssohn’s. His fecundity was astonishing, but his pen too fluent
for real musical depth. There was hardly a winter, however, that
Theodore Thomas or my father did not perform “Im Walde,” or the very
programmatic “Lenore” Symphony. This work, in which the last movement
follows closely and dramatically Burger’s famous ballad, had an enormous
popularity, and is occasionally performed by us to-day, but in general
the name of Raff means but little to modern concertgoers.
But perhaps the greatest tragedy of all was Anton Rubinstein, who
became, after Liszt, the world’s greatest piano virtuoso. The world
fêted him, spoiled him, and sated him with adulation. It all brought him
no satisfaction. He was consumed with the ambition to be considered a
great composer, and wrote incessantly, never criticising what he wrote.
His “Ocean” Symphony had a tremendous popularity in New York fifty years
ago, but to-day no one would listen to it. His “D Minor Concerto” has
been played, _ad nauseam_, by every pianist, but to-day it is threadbare
and frayed at the edges. Only the supreme skill of a Josef Hofmann can
make his “G Major Concerto” endurable and cloak its musical emptiness.
He wrote opera after opera in a feverish desire to eclipse Wagner, whom
he hated, and whose popularity he envied, and after “Parsifal” had been
proclaimed at Bayreuth as a “Sacred Festival Play,” he immediately
proceeded to write an opera on the life of Christ, which is so dull and
unconvincing that it has hardly had a performance anywhere.
His personal popularity was so great that Pollini, the astute manager of
the Hamburg Opera, occasionally used to put on one of his operas on
condition that he himself would come to Hamburg to conduct the opening
performance. His presence would insure a crowded house.
At the last rehearsal of one of these operas Rubinstein was so well
pleased with the work of the orchestra that he turned to them and said:
“Gentlemen, if my opera is a success you must all come to my hotel after
the performance for a champagne supper.” Unfortunately, the opera was a
decided frost and the audience so undemonstrative that Rubinstein, in
absolute disgust, laid down the stick after the second act, and, bidding
the local conductor finish the opera, returned dejectedly to his hotel
and went to bed. At eleven o’clock there was a knock at his door. “Who
is it?” he shouted in great irritation. “It is I, Herr Rubinstein, the
double-bass player from the opera orchestra.” “What do you want?” “I
have come for the champagne supper.” “What nonsense!” raged Rubinstein.
“The opera was a ghastly failure.” “Well, Herr Rubinstein,” answered the
thirsty and undaunted double-bass player, “_I_ liked it!”
The disappearance of Schumann’s symphonies from concert programmes is
due to the fact that he was never at ease in writing for the orchestra.
His instrumentation is so thick and turgid as to be the despair of
conductors. So much of the music is exquisite, but it is like a precious
jewel imbedded in a foreign substance which conductors try in vain to
remove by changing the dynamics of this or that instrument, or by
leaving out an unnecessary doubling up of certain harmonies. All these
devices, however, can do but little. More heroic measures are necessary,
and I was much interested last summer when Sir Edward Elgar asked me
what I would think of his deliberately reorchestrating an entire
symphony of Schumann’s. I heartily applauded such an idea and begged him
to carry it out speedily as there is perhaps no one living to-day who
better understands the colors of the orchestra and knows how to produce
the most subtle shades in the intermingling of the different
instruments. In the meantime Frederick Stock, the noted conductor of the
Chicago Orchestra, has taken the bull by the horns and has written a new
orchestration of Schumann’s “Rhenish Symphony” which I hope to produce
this winter.
Are Sousa’s marches played nowadays? They should be. They are better
than the military marches of Europe of to-day, and while one cannot put
them into the category of higher musical efforts they are the only
American compositions of musical worth that have triumphantly blazed
their way all over the world.
Richard Strauss, who twenty-five years ago was the most interesting star
in the musical firmament, has lived long enough to have outlived a part
of his popularity. He never originated a musical form, but accepted the
symphonic poem of Liszt and the music-drama of Wagner as models. His
workmanship is infinitely greater than Liszt’s, his counterpoint
stupendous in its boldness, and in his treatment of the orchestra he
sometimes transcends even Wagner in the originality of his orchestral
combinations. But his compositions lack the ideality of either of these
masters, and because of this and in spite of his marvellous
paraphernalia, his works seem to carry within them the seeds of their
own decay.
The gods endowed this man at his birth perhaps more richly than any
other musician of our time, but something within him has made him
relinquish the greatest of their gifts and has turned him to less pure
ideals. In the “Sinfonia Domestica” the daily life of husband, wife, and
baby are characterized by an orchestra of one hundred and ten players
with such noisy fury and realistic prose as to give one an altogether
distorted insight into what is supposedly a page from the composer’s
diary. But the music descriptive of the composer who, after these
dreadful domestic squabbles, retires to his workroom, lights his lamp,
and begins to communicate with his muse, is so beautiful as to fill us
with a deep regret that one so winged for flight in the ether should be
so content to walk on the earth.
The instrumental devices, depicting _Don Quixote’s_ adventure with the
sheep and his fight with the windmill, which aroused such astonishment
and admiration when they were first heard, have already lost their
effect and are listened to to-day with hardly a smile. The final scene,
however, depicting the dying of _Don Quixote_, is so beautiful and
tragic in its expression as to bring tears to the listener. The
“Heldenleben” is to me a work of noisy bombastic emptiness from
beginning to end, and one might call it typical of certain German
currents of to-day. It would, however, be manifestly unfair to call it
typically German, as a race that has produced Bach, Mozart, Beethoven,
and Wagner will surely find other men to continue their glorious
traditions.
A composer’s fame is not affirmed by professional musicians but by the
general public whose judgment in the end is infallible. A great
masterwork that is not destroyed will always eventually be recognized as
such whether, like the “Venus de Milo,” it has lain hidden for centuries
beneath the earth or, like the “Matthew Passion” of Bach, equally hidden
in the dusty shelves of the Royal Library of Berlin, to be rediscovered
by Mendelssohn and pronounced the greatest religious choral work ever
written.
The two works of Strauss which have retained their popularity with the
public are undoubtedly his best, as their requirements do not enlist
such qualities as he does not possess or has not sought to develop. In
“Till Eulenspiegel” Strauss’s talent for mordant realism finds full
expression. The wild pranks of _Eulenspiegel_ follow each other in mad,
cynical humor, and, in the limited form of programme music, the work is
flawless.
His “Salome” is as perfect a union with Oscar Wilde’s marvellous play as
the “Pélléas” and “Mélisande” of Maeterlinck and Debussy. In both the
composers have so steeped themselves in the spirit of the poem as to
enhance its beauty. But with all my admiration for “Salome” I have never
been able to sit through the final scene without a feeling of disgust,
which sometimes mounted even to physical nausea. When _Salome_ sings her
horrible love music to the head of _John the Baptist_ it has always
seemed to me a parody on the glorious finale of “Tristan and Isolde.”
I have spoken in another chapter of Tschaikowsky’s visit to America in
1891 as a guest of the Symphony Society. For twenty-five years his
popularity was enormous and the mere announcement of his “Symphonie
Pathétique” was sufficient to draw a crowded house. His symphonies
appeared more often on our concert programmes than those of any other
composer. They have a rhythmic and elemental strength which appealed
even to the unmusical, but to-day a distinct lessening of this
popularity is noticeable. There is a lack of real symphonic development
of his themes, and certain crudities of workmanship stand out more
clearly as the works have become better known. Young conductors, anxious
for ready and cheap applause, still choose one of his symphonies for
their début, and the melodic charm of his lighter music, if not heard
too often, will retain its place in the affection of our public for some
time longer.
And now we come to the greatest genius of the nineteenth
century—Richard Wagner. “What!” exclaims my reader. “Do you consider
him dead?” God forbid! The wings of his genius are still soaring aloft
in the ether, but there is no doubt that the attitude of the world of
to-day toward his music is absolutely different from that of fifty or
sixty years ago when he first electrified or infuriated a public, amazed
at his daring innovations. The inevitable has happened—Wagner has
become a “classic.”
I was a boy of fifteen when I heard the first performance of “Lohengrin”
at the old Academy of Music. The opera was sung in Italian with Italo
Campanini as _Lohengrin_, Valeria as _Elsa_, and our own Anne Louise
Cary as _Ortrude_. The conductor was old Luigi Arditi. I sat in the
front row in the family circle, and was so excited by the drama and the
music that at the end of the double male chorus—which accompanies the
approach of _Lohengrin_ in the boat drawn by the swan as the God-sent
deliverer of _Elsa_—the tears rushed down my cheeks. But they were
happy tears and a natural relief from the tension which the music had
created in me.
Each succeeding opera of Wagner’s was a similar revelation. I pored over
the scores of the “Nibelungen Trilogy” during every hour left me from
school work and piano practice. In fact, I often stole time from the
latter and would gladly have given up my entire school if my parents had
not very properly kept me where I belonged. Later on my founding of the
Damrosch Opera Company for the sole purpose of producing Wagner operas
seemed an inner necessity, and I was driven to it by a force stronger
than myself. For years a Wagner programme, whether it was at a symphony
concert in New York, or in Oklahoma on a Western tour, or at the Willow
Grove summer concerts, drew the largest audiences, and the same
orchestral excerpts were repeated by me and other conductors year after
year and received by our public with excited enthusiasm. To-day the
amazement which his music called forth is no longer apparent. He is
admired and loved, but the nerves of the younger generation are not
thrilled by his harmonies as ours were. His works repose upon our
shelves bound in morocco and gold and occupy places of honor, but, alas,
on several of them the dust is beginning to gather and many of the young
people of to-day find “Lohengrin” monotonous, and vote unanimously that
_Tannhäuser’s_ recital of his pilgrimage to Rome is too long.
Time and continued occupation with Wagner’s music may have made me more
critical and analytical, and I am no longer in complete and enthusiastic
accord with some of his theories regarding the music-drama. But much of
his music still sweeps me off my feet, and his “Meistersinger”—which is
so happy and perfect a compromise between the opera and the
music-drama—is to me still the greatest musical work of our times.
I have spoken above of the finality of the judgment of the public
regarding the ultimate vitality of an art work. Conductors have had
their personal convictions and have tried to force them upon our
audiences, but unless these convictions were based on actual worth the
public has in the end consciously or unconsciously rejected them.
Sometimes unworthy composers have had momentary popularity, but they
were born but to dance in the sun for one day and then to die.
My orchestral parts of the symphonies of Beethoven, Mozart, and Brahms
are old and worn by many rehearsals and performances, and some of them
have been patched up and pasted together by my librarian so many times
that they have had to be replaced by new ones twice over. I have
performed them for nearly forty years, and the grandchildren of my
audiences of 1885 are now listening to them with equal happiness. A few
years ago I discovered a lovely symphony by Mozart, which had never been
played in New York, and I was as proud of this as if it had been the
fourth dimension.
The works of these masters are lifted above the fashion of the moment,
and their creators smile upon us serenely and eternally from the heavens
in which they dwell as gods among the gods.
[Illustration: FRITZ KREISLER, HAROLD BAUER, PABLO CASALS,
AND WALTER DAMROSCH]