"Perhaps it is because I belong to an older school, or it may be because
I laid stress on technic because of its necessity as a means of
expression--at any rate I worked hard at it. Naturally, one should never
practice any technical difficulty too long at a stretch. Young players
sometimes forget this. I know that _staccato_ playing was not easy for
me at one time. I believe a real _staccato_ is inborn; a knack. I used
to grumble about it to Joachim and he told me once that musically
_staccato_ did not have much value. His own, by the way, was very
labored and heavy. He admitted that he had none. Wieniawski had such a
wonderful _staccato_ that one finds much of it in his music. When I
first began to play his D minor concerto I simply made up my mind to get
a _staccato_. It came in time, by sheer force of will. After that I had
no trouble. An artistic _staccato_ should, like the trill, be plastic
and under control; for different schools of composition demand
different styles of treatment of such details.
"Octaves--the unison, not broken--I did not find difficult; but though
they are supposed to add volume of tone they sound hideous to me. I have
used them in certain passages of my arrangement of 'Deep River,' but
when I heard them played, promised myself I would never repeat the
experiment. Wilhelmj has committed even a worse crime in taste by
putting six long bars of Schubert's lovely _Ave Maria_ in octaves. Of
course they represent skill; but I think they are only justified in show
pieces. Harmonics I always found easy; though whether they ring out as
they should always depends more or less on atmospheric conditions, the
strings and the amount of rosin on the bow. On the concert stage if the
player stands in a draught the harmonics are sometimes husky.
THE AMERICAN WOMAN VIOLINIST AND
AMERICAN MUSIC
"The old days of virtuoso 'tricks' have passed--I should like to hope
forever. Not that some of the old type virtuosos were not fine players.
Remenyi played beautifully. So did Ole Bull. I remember one favorite
trick of the latter's, for instance, which would hardly pass muster
to-day. I have seen him draw out a long _pp_, the audience listening
breathlessly, while he drew his bow way beyond the string, and then
looked innocently at the point of the bow, as though wondering where the
tone had vanished. It invariably brought down the house.
"Yet an artist must be a virtuoso in the modern sense to do his full
duty. And here in America that duty is to help those who are groping for
something higher and better musically; to help without rebuffing them.
When I first began my career as a concert violinist I did pioneer work
for the cause of the American woman violinist, going on with the work
begun by Mme. Camilla Urso. A strong prejudice then existed against
women fiddlers, which even yet has not altogether been overcome. The
very fact that a Western manager recently told Mr. Turner with surprise
that he 'had made a success of a woman artist' proves it. When I first
began to play here in concert this prejudice was much stronger. Yet I
kept on and secured engagements to play with orchestra at a time when
they were difficult to obtain. Theodore Thomas liked my playing (he
said I had brains), and it was with his orchestra that I introduced the
concertos of Saint-Saëns (C min.), Lalo (F min.), and others, to
American audiences.
"The fact that I realized that my sex was against me in a way led me to
be startlingly authoritative and convincing in the masculine manner when
I first played. This is a mistake no woman violinist should make. And
from the moment that James Huneker wrote that I 'was not developing the
feminine side of my work,' I determined to be just myself, and play as
the spirit moved me, with no further thought of sex or sex distinctions
which, in Art, after all, are secondary. I never realized this more
forcibly than once, when, sitting as a judge, I listened to the
competitive playing of a number of young professional violinists and
pianists. The individual performers, unseen by the judges, played in
turn behind a screen. And in three cases my fellow judges and myself
guessed wrongly with regard to the sex of the players. When we thought
we had heard a young man play it happened to be a young woman, and _vice
versa_.
"To return to the question of concert-work. You must not think that I
have played only foreign music in public. I have always believed in
American composers and in American composition, and as an American have
tried to do justice as an interpreting artist to the music of my native
land. Aside from the violin concertos by Harry Rowe Shelly and Henry
Holden Huss, I have played any number of shorter original compositions
by such representative American composers as Arthur Foote, Mrs. H.H.A.
Beach, Victor Herbert, John Philip Sousa, Arthur Bird, Edwin Grasse,
Marion Bauer, Cecil Burleigh, Harry Gilbert, A. Walter Kramer, Grace
White, Charles Wakefield Cadman and others. Then, too, I have presented
transcriptions by Arthur Hartmann, Francis Macmillan and Sol Marcosson,
as well as some of my own. Transcriptions are wrong, theoretically; yet
some songs, like Rimsky-Korsakov's 'Song of India' and some piano
pieces, like the Dvořák _Humoresque_, are so obviously effective on the
violin that a transcription justifies itself. My latest temptative in
that direction is my 'Four American Folk Songs,' a simple setting of
four well-known airs with connecting cadenzas--no variations, no special
development! I used them first as _encores_, but my audiences seemed to
like them so well that I have played them on all my recent programs.