Jacques Thibaud, whose gifts as an interpreting artist have brought him
so many friends and admirers in the United States, is the foremost
representative of the modern French school of violin-playing. And as
such he has held his own ever since, at the age of twenty, he resigned
his rank as concert-master of the Colonne orchestra, to dedicate his
talents exclusively to the concert stage. So great an authority as the
last edition of the Riemann _Musik-Lexicon_ cannot forbear, even in
1915, to emphasize his "technic, absolutely developed in its every
detail, and his fiery and poetic manner of interpretation."
But Mr. Thibaud does not see any great difference between the ideals of
_la grande école belge_, that of Vieuxtemps, De Bériot, Léonard, Massart
and Marsick, whose greatest present-day exponent is Eugène Ysaye, and
the French. Himself a pupil of Marsick, he inherited the French
traditions of Alard through his father, who was Alard's pupil and handed
them on to his son. "The two schools have married and are as one,"
declared Mr. Thibaud. "They may differ in the interpretation of music,
but to me they seem to have merged so far as their systems of finger
technic, bowing and tone production goes.