SOME MUSICIANS
Edvard Grieg—Sir Frederick H. Cowen—Dr Hans Richter—Sir Thomas
Beecham—Sir Charles Santley—Landon Ronald—Frederic Austin
Very many years have passed since, one cold winter’s afternoon, I met
Edvard Grieg on Adolph Brodsky’s doorstep. A little figure buried,
very deeply buried, in an overcoat at least six inches thick, came
down the damp street, paused a minute at the gate, and then, rather
hesitatingly, walked up the pathway. He saluted me as he reached the
door and we waited together until my summons to those within was
answered.
I found him very homely, completely without affectation, childlike, and
a little melancholy. He was at that time in indifferent health, and
it was at once made evident to me that both Grieg himself and those
around him—especially Mrs Brodsky—were very anxious that he should
be restored to complete fitness. He said nothing in the least degree
noteworthy, but when he did speak he had such a gentle air, a manner so
ingratiating and simple, that one found his conversation most unusually
pleasant.
Ernest Newman once called Grieg “Griegkin,” a most admirable name for
this quite first-rate of third-rate composers. His music is diminutive.
He could not think largely. He loved country dances, country scenes,
the rhythm of homely life, the bounded horizon. Even so extended a
work as his Pianoforte Concerto is a series of miniatures. And Grieg
the man was precisely like Grieg the artist. He was Griegkin in his
appearance, his manner, his way of speaking: a little man: a gracious
little man. His attitude towards his host and hostess was that of an
affectionate child. Such dear simplicity is, I think, in the artist
found only among men of northern races.
Some years later, in an intimate little circle, I was to hear his
widow sing and play many of her husband’s songs. She was the feminine
counterpart of himself—spirited, a little sad, simple yet wise, frank,
and an artist through and through.
* * * * *
A great deal of comedy is lost to the world through lack of historians.
It is almost impossible to conceive that Sir F. H. Cowen should ever
have been in serious competition with Hans Richter: impossible to
conceive that half the musical inhabitants of a large city should have
been ranged fiercely on Sir Frederick’s side, and the other half ranged
on the side of Richter: impossible to conceive that both Cowen and
Richter were candidates for the same post. Yet so it was.
Sir Charles Hallé, who had founded and conducted for about
half-a-century the famous orchestral concerts in Manchester still known
by his name, died and left no successor. Literally, there was no one
to appoint in his place, no one quite good enough. Month after month
went by, a good many distinguished and semi-distinguished musicians
came to Manchester and conducted an odd concert or two, but it was very
widely felt that no British musician would do. Sir Frederick Cowen,
always an earnest and accomplished composer, came for a season or two
and did some admirable work, but Cowen was not Hallé. Then the German
element in Manchester discovered that Richter would come, if invited.
The salary was large, the work not heavy, the climate awful, the people
devoted, the position unusually powerful. All things considered, it
was one of the few really good vacant musical posts in Europe.
All this is ancient history now, and I will record only briefly that
ultimately Sir Frederick Cowen was, in effect, told (what, no doubt, he
already knew) that Richter was the better man and that he (Cowen) must
go. But before this decision was made a most severe fight was waged in
the city. Cowen conducted, and thousands of partisans came and cheered
him to the echo. Richter conducted, and thousands of partisans came and
cheered him to the echo. People wrote to the newspapers. Leader writers
solemnly summed up the situation from day to day. Protests were made,
meetings were organised and held, votes of confidence were passed.
London caught the infection, and passed its opinion, its opinions....
Sir F. H. Cowen (he was “Mr” then) received me in his rooms at the
Manchester Grand Hotel. It was impossible not to like him, for, if
he had no great positive qualities that seized upon you at once, he
had a good many negative ones. He had no “side,” no self-importance,
no eccentricities. He had neither long hair nor a foreign accent. He
did not use a cigarette-holder. He did not loll when he sat down, or
posture when he stood up. And he had not just discovered a new composer
of Dutch extraction.... These are small things, you say. But are
they?...
I remember looking at him and wondering if he really _had_ written _The
Better Land_. It seemed so unlikely. Faultlessly dressed, immaculately
groomed, how _could_ he have written _The Better Land_—that luteous
land that is so sloppy, so thickly covered with untidy debris?
He would not talk of the musical situation in Manchester, and I could
see that he was very sensitive about his uncomfortable position.
“If I am wanted, I shall stay,” was all he would give me.
“And are you going to write about me in the paper?” asked he, at the
end of our interview; “how interesting that will be!” And he smiled
with gentle satire.
“I shall make it as interesting as I can,” I assured him, “but, you
see, you have said so little.”
“Does that matter?” he returned. “I have always heard that you
gentlemen of the Press can at least—shall we say embroider?”
“But may I?” I asked.
“How can I prevent you? Do tell me how I can, and I will.”
“Well, you can insist upon seeing the article before it appears in
print.”
“Oh, ‘insist’ is not a nice word, is it? But if you would be kind
enough to send me the article before your Editor has it....”
* * * * *
Hans Richter was an autocrat, a tyrant. During the years he conducted
in Manchester, he did much splendid work, but it may well be questioned
if, on the whole, his influence was beneficial to Manchester citizens.
He was so tremendously German! So tremendously German indeed, that he
refused to recognise that there was any other than Teutonic music in
the world. His intellect had stopped at Wagner. At middle age his mind
had suddenly become set, and he looked with contempt at all Italian and
French music, refusing also to see any merit in most of the very fine
music that, during the last twenty years, has been written by British
composers.
He irked the younger and more turbulent spirits in Manchester, and we
were constantly attacking him in the Press. But with no effect. Richter
was like that. He ignored attacks. He was arrogant and spoiled and
bad-tempered.
“Why don’t you occasionally give us some French music at your
concerts?” he was asked.
“French music?” he roared; “there _is_ no French music.”
And, certainly, whenever he tried to play even Berlioz one could see
that he did not regard his work as music. And he conducted Debussy, so
to speak, with his fists. And as for Dukas...!
Young British musicians used to send him their compositions to read,
but the parcels would come back, weeks later, unread and unopened.
His mind never inquired. His intellect lay indolent and half-asleep
on a bed of spiritual down. And the thousands of musical Germans in
Manchester treated him so like a god that in course of time he came to
believe he was a god. His manners were execrable. On one occasion, he
bore down upon me in a corridor at the back of the platform in the Free
Trade Hall. I stood on one side to allow him to pass, but Richter was
very wide and the corridor very narrow. Breathing heavily, he kept his
place in the middle of the passage.... I felt the impact of a mountain
of fat and heard a snort as he brushed past me.
Everyone was afraid of him. Even famous musicians trembled in his
presence. I remember dining with one of the most eminent of living
pianists at a restaurant where, at a table close at hand, Richter also
was dining. The previous evening Richter had conducted at a concert at
which the pianist had played, and the great conductor had praised my
friend in enthusiastic terms; moreover, they had met before on several
occasions.
“I’ll go and have a word with the Old Man, if you’ll excuse me,” said
my friend.
I watched him go. Smiling a little, ingratiatingly, he bowed to
Richter, and then bent slightly over the table at which the famous
musician was dining alone. Richter took not the slightest notice. My
friend, embarrassed, waited a minute or so, and I saw him speaking.
But the diner continued dining. Again my friend spoke, and at
length Richter looked up and barked three times. Hastily the pianist
retreated, and when he had rejoined me I noticed that he was a little
pale and breathless.
“The old pig!” he exclaimed.
“Why, what happened?”
“Didn’t you see? First of all, he wouldn’t take the slightest notice of
me or even acknowledge my existence. I spoke to him in English three
times before he would answer, and then, like the mannerless brute he
is, he replied in German.”
“What did he say?”
“How do I know? I don’t speak his rotten language. But it sounded like:
‘Zuzu westeben hab! Zuzu westeben hab! Zuzu westeben hab!’ I only know
that he was very angry. He was eating slabs of liver sausage. And he
spoke right down in his chest.”
He was, indeed, unapproachable.
Of course, he was a marvellous conductor, a conductor of genius; but
long before he left Manchester his powers had begun to fail.
For two or three years I made a practice of attending his rehearsals.
Nothing will persuade me that in the whole world there is a more
depressing spot than the Manchester Free Trade Hall on a winter’s
morning. I used to sit shivering with my overcoat collar buttoned
up. Richter always wore a round black-silk cap, which made him look
like a Greek priest. He would walk ponderously to the conductor’s
desk, seize his baton, rattle it against the desk, and begin without
a moment’s loss of time. Perhaps it was an innocent work like Weber’s
_Der Freischütz_ Overture. This would proceed swimmingly enough for
a minute or so, when suddenly one would hear a bark and the music
would stop. One could not say that Richter spoke or shouted: he merely
made a disagreeable noise. Then, in English most broken, in English
utterly smashed, he would correct the mistake that had been made, and
recommence conducting without loss of a second.
He had no “secret.” Great conductors never do have “secrets.” Only
charlatans “mesmerise” their orchestras. Simply, he knew his job, he
was a great economiser of time, and he was a stern disciplinarian.
He could lose his temper easily. He hated those of us who were
privileged to attend his rehearsals. He declared, quite unwarrantably,
that we talked and disturbed him. But he never appeared to be in the
least disturbed by the handful of weary women who, with long brushes,
swept the seats and the floor of the hall, raising whirlpools of dust
fantastically here and there, and banging doors in beautiful disregard
of the Venusberg music and in protest against the exquisite Allegretto
from the Seventh Symphony.
* * * * *
Sir Thomas Beecham (he was then plain “Mr”) brought a tin of tobacco to
the restaurant, placed it on the table, and proceeded to fill his pipe.
He was not communicative. He simply sat back in his chair, smoking
quietly, and behaving precisely as though he were alone, though, as
a matter of fact, there were four or five people in his company. He
was not shy: he was simply indifferent to us. If you spoke to him, he
merely said “no” or “yes” and looked bored. He _was_ bored.
And so he sat for ten minutes; then, with a little sigh, he rose and
departed from among us, without a word, without a look. He just melted
away and never returned.
* * * * *
I rather dreaded meeting Sir Charles Santley, and when I rang at his
door-bell, I remember devoutly wishing that in a moment I should
hear that he was out, or that he had changed his mind and no longer
desired to see me. I dreaded meeting him because I realised that,
temperamentally, we were opposed. I had read his reminiscences
and disliked him intensely for the things he had said of Rossetti.
Instinctively, I drew away from his robust, tough-fibred mind.
But he was in, and in half-a-minute I was talking to an old, but still
vigorous, gentleman whose one desire appeared to be to put me at my
ease. I do not think I ever met a man so honest, so blunt. I felt that
his mind was direct and his judgment decisive, but I found him lacking
in subtlety, unable to respond to the mystical in art, and wholly
deficient in true imaginative qualities. He was Victorian.
Now, I don’t suppose any of us who are living to-day (and when I say
“living” I mean anyone whose mind is still developing—most people, say,
under the age of forty-five) will be able to understand the point of
view of the Victorian musician. It appears to me monstrous that anyone
should still love Mendelssohn and hate Wagner, that anyone should sing
J. L. Hatton in preference to Hugo Wolf, that anyone should still
delight in Donizetti and Bellini. Those Victorian days were days when
the singer wished that his own notions of the limitations of the human
voice should control the free development of music. They loved _bel
canto_ and nothing else; they averred, indeed, that there was nothing
else to love. They were admirable musicians from the technical point of
view, and they had honest hearts and by no means feeble intellects. But
they could never be brought to believe that music was a reflection of
life, that there were in the human heart a thousand shades of feeling
that not even Handel had expressed, that sound is capable of a million
subtleties, that the ear of man is an organ that is, so to speak, only
in its infancy.
It was a little pathetic, I thought, when speaking to Santley, that
this very great singer had been living for at least thirty years
entirely untouched by many of the finest compositions that had been
written in that period.
And he declared, quite frankly, that “modern” music had no interest
for him. When I mentioned Richard Strauss, he smiled. At the name of
Debussy, he looked bewildered, and about Max Reger, Scriabin, Granville
Bantock, Sibelius and Delius, he had not a word to say.
But soon we got on to his own subject—singing—and here again we were at
cross-purposes. Singers who to me seem supreme artists he had either
not heard of or had not heard.
“There is only one British singer to-day who carries on the old
tradition,” said he; “I mean Madame Kirkby Lunn. She has technique,
style, personality. The others, compared with her, are nowhere.”
Some general talk followed, and I soon discovered, beyond the
possibility of doubt, that, like all great Victorians who have had
their day, he was living in the past—in that particular past whose
artistic spirit is embodied in the Albert Memorial, in the musical
criticism of J. W. Davidson, in the pianoforte playing of Arabella
Godard, in the poetry of Lord Tennyson, in the pictures of Lord
Leighton, in the prose of Ruskin.
What had Santley to say to me, or I to him? Nothing, and less than
nothing. We were from different worlds, different planets, for
half-a-century divided us. In years, he was nearer to the Elizabethan
age than I ... and yet how much farther away was he?
* * * * *
Perhaps Mr Landon Ronald will not be angry with me if I call him the
most accomplished of British musicians. He would have every right to be
angry if I said he was accomplished and nothing else.... How far back
that word “accomplished” takes us, doesn’t it? Twenty years, at least.
For aught I know to the contrary, it may still be employed in Putney.
I observe that Chambers defines “accomplishment” as an “ornamental
acquirement,” and, in my boyhood, that was precisely what it meant.
Young ladies “acquired” the art of playing the piano, the art of
painting, the art of recitation. Their skill in any art was not the
result of developing a talent that was already there, but it was the
result of a pertinacity that should have been spent on other things.
But one no longer uses “accomplished” in that precise sense.
Landon Ronald has more than a streak of genius in his nature, and his
cleverness is so abnormal as to be almost absurd. His genius and his
cleverness are evident even in a few minutes’ conversation. He radiates
cleverness, and he is so splendidly alive that as soon as he enters a
room you feel that something quick and electric has been added to your
environment.
When I first met him—ten years ago, was it?—his one ambition was to be
recognised throughout Europe as a great conductor. He was acknowledged
as such in England, of course, and a visit to Rome had fired both the
Italian public and critics with enthusiasm. But London and Rome are not
Europe, whilst in those days Berlin most distinctly was. He was most
charmingly frank about himself, full of enthusiasm for himself, full of
delight in all life’s adventures.
“Of course, I know my songs aren’t _real_ songs,” he said. “I can write
tunes and I’m a musician, and I’m just clever enough to be cleverer
than most people at that sort of work. But you must not imagine I take
my compositions seriously. I think they’re rather nice—‘nice’ _is_ the
word, isn’t it?—and I enjoy inventing them—and ‘inventing’ is also the
word, don’t you think? Besides, they make money; they help to boil the
pot for me while I go on with my more serious work—that is to say,
conducting.”
Havergal Brian was in the room—we were in that fulsome and blowzy town,
Blackpool—and he remarked, as so many extraordinarily able composers
have from time to time remarked, that he found it impossible to write
music that the public really liked.
“Nearly all my stuff,” said he, “is on a big scale for the orchestra. I
am always trying to do something new—something out of the common rut.”
“Ah, but then,” exclaimed Ronald, quite sincerely, “you are a composer,
and I am not.”
Brian was appeased, and I looked at Ronald with admiration for his
tact. But he went even a little farther.
“I sometimes feel rather a pig,” he continued, “making money by my
trifles when so many men with much greater gifts can only rarely get
their work performed and still more rarely get it published. You told
us just now,” said he, turning to Brian, “that you would like to make
money by your compositions. Who wouldn’t? Well, it would be foolish of
me to advise you to try to write more simply, with less originality,
and on a smaller scale. It would be foolish, because you simply
couldn’t do it. No; you must work out your own salvation: it is only a
matter of waiting: success will come.”
A month or two later, we met at Southport, I in the meantime having
written an article on Ronald for a musical magazine. With this article
he professed himself charmed. He was as jolly about it as a schoolboy,
and expressed surprise that I could honestly say such nice things about
him.
“It _is_ good to be praised,” said he, laughing; “I could live on
praise for ever.” And then, lighting a cigarette, he added: “Perhaps
the reason why I like it so much is that I feel I really deserve it.”
It was my turn to laugh.
“But I do feel that!” he protested; “if I didn’t, I should hate you or
anyone else to say such frightfully kind things about me and my work.”
A month or two later he wrote me a long letter full of enthusiasm
for some work of mine he had seen somewhere, and when I saw him the
following week in London I protested against his undiluted praise.
“I believe you think I am a bit of a humbug,” said he.
“I’m afraid I do,” I replied. (For, really, I think almost all subtle
and clever artists are bits of humbugs.)
“Very good, then!” exclaimed he, ridiculously hurt.
“What I mean is, that if you like anyone, your judgment is immediately
prejudiced in their favour.”
“So you think I like you?”
“I am sure of it.”
“Well, you’re quite right. But, really and truly, you mustn’t call
me, or even think me, the slightest bit of a humbug. You can call
me impulsive, superficial, or anything horrid of that kind ... but
insincere! Why, sincerity is the only real virtue I’ve got.”
And I believe he believed himself. But who is sincere?—at least, who is
sincere except at the moment? Are not all of us who are artists swayed
hither and thither, from hour to hour, by the emotion of the moment? Do
we not say one thing now, and an hour later mean exactly the opposite?
Are we not driven by our enthusiasms to false positions, and do not
glib, untrue words spring to our lips because the moment’s mood forces
them there?
I have not met Landon Ronald for four years, but the other day I heard
him conduct, and I recognised in his interpretations the supreme
qualities I have so often observed before. He himself is like his
work—polished, highly strung, emotional, fluid, intense. His mind works
with lightning-like quickness; he knows what you are going to say just
a second before you have said it. And over his personality hangs the
glamour that we call genius.
* * * * *
Many well-known singers have I met, but very few of them inspire me to
burst into song. They are a dull, vain crew. Among the few most notable
exceptions is Frederic Austin, a man with a temperament so refined,
with a nature so retiring, that it is a constant source of wonder to me
that he should be where he now is—in the front rank of vocalists.
Years ago Ernest Newman said to me:
“Frederic Austin has become a fine singer through sheer brain-work. He
always had temperament, but his voice was never in the least remarkable
until by ingenious training, by constant thought, and by the most
arduous labour he developed it until it became an organ of sufficient
strength and richness to enable him to interpret anything that appeals
to him.”
He is, I think, the only eminent singer in this country who is a
distinguished composer. But perhaps the most remarkable thing about him
is that you might very easily pass days in his company without guessing
that he is a famous singer, for his personality suggests qualities that
famous singers seldom possess. He is _distingué_, austere, and devoted
to his art.