My Musical Life

My train was to leave Paris in the evening, and my faithful friend and companion of the last five weeks, Lieutenant Weill, came to the station to bid me good-by. There were no r...

Lilli vowed that it was absolutely impossible for her to sing that night and I was in despair. It suddenly came to me that if I could divert her mind in some way the tension mig...

My father, naturally, was keen to be there and to rejoice with his old colleagues. He had not returned to Germany since he had left it in 1871 to found a home for his family in...

Our journey was uneventful. We saw no submarines and, what was still more important, no submarines saw us. When we reached the “danger zone” some hundred miles from the coast of...

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 wh...

I had found Ellis to be a delightful partner. He had had years of experience as manager of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and his equable temperament and fairmindedness had made...

The heat was again intense, but as the audience were in an extremely receptive and tumultuous mood, we did not mind it, and the orchestra played superbly. I was sorry therefore...

The week had been fully occupied with the preparations for these two concerts, but notwithstanding the attendant excitements and elations I had periods of great despondency. The...

In the meantime, the directors, after deliberating on their future course, decided that opera in German had come to stay and offered my father a contract for the following year...

In Washington Baron von Schloetzer, the Prussian minister, who was an old friend of my father’s, received me very kindly, and, to my delight, included me in the dinner which he...

At the close of the summer session Bülow invited me to go with him to the Cologne Musical Festival. He told me that he had written to Brahms about me and wanted me to meet him,...

For the following season I cast about to find a new work to mark my entry into this field, and decided that a concert performance of Wagner’s “Parsifal” would interest the New Y...

The first performance took place February 10, 1896. American audiences are proverbially kind to authors on first nights, and Boston was especially interested in this opera becau...

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-S...

Mr. Carnegie was absolutely unconscious of my aspirations regarding Margaret Blaine, and the following summer he suggested a visit to Bar Harbor, where Mr. Blaine had built a su...

The next morning I found a note from Jean de Reszke telling me that he, his wife, and Amhurst Webber would motor over from Nice for the concert, and asking my wife and me to lun...

Since then the Anglicization of music had been going on rapidly, thanks principally to great music-schools such as the Royal College of Music, under Sir Charles Villiers Stanfor...

Among this group I was made heartily welcome. The atmosphere was intensely local, if not provincial, and as against the searching, feverish life of a great metropolis like New Y...

From the very first chords of the “Eroica” Symphony, I noticed that the slight improvements in our scenic surroundings, and above all the fact that the house was filled with peo...

She had hired a bungalow near the theatre and a Japanese butler-cook. This little Jap would always appear at one o’clock with a basket filled with the most delicious luncheon di...

I doubt whether there ever was a musician who worked so incessantly for the benefit of other musicians as he. He was constantly seeking, either with his ten magic fingers as pia...

On our tours, Miss Steers usually attended to the local needs of the cities we visited—the music committees, the hall managers, and the newspapers—while Miss Coman travelled wit...

We accordingly resumed our New York concerts under the best possible auspices with an enthusiastic directorate and a large subscription list. I was, however, not satisfied with...

When my father died there were only three symphony orchestras in America, the New York Symphony, the New York Philharmonic (Thomas formed his travelling orchestra from this), an...

Lieutenant Weill and I first paid a _visite de cérémonie_ to the _Maire_ of Chaumont and explained to him our desire. The idea of what he called “_un petit conservatoire de musi...

_Because of you my disappointments have been cut in half and my happinesses made double, and if I have made known to you the wondrous muse of music, you in turn have brought int...

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 orig...

Paderewski, Ignace, 146 _ff._, 187 Pappenheim, Madame, 55 Paris concerts, 1920, 278 _ff._, 313 Paris Conservatoire, 46 _ff._ Paris in war time, 229 _ff._ Parker, Horatio, 181 Pa...