Part 11
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 which the New York Symphony and Oratorio Societies took part. In order to give this festival a special significance, I invited Peter Iljitsch Tschaikowsky, the great Russian composer, to come to America and to conduct some of his own works. In all my many years of experience I have never met a great composer so gentle, so modest—almost diffident—as he. We all loved him from the first moment—my wife and I, the chorus, the orchestra, the employees of the hotel where he lived, and of course the public. He was not a conductor by profession and in consequence the technic of it, the rehearsals and concerts, fatigued him excessively; but he knew what he wanted and the atmosphere which emanated from him was so sympathetic and love-compelling that all executants strove with double eagerness to divine his intentions and to carry them out. The performance which he conducted of his Third Suite, for instance, was admirable, although it is in parts very difficult; and as he was virtually the first of great living composers to visit America, the public received him with jubilance.
He came often to our house, and, I think, liked to come. He was always gentle in his intercourse with others, but a feeling of sadness seemed never to leave him, although his reception in America was more than enthusiastic and the visit so successful in every way that he made plans to come back the following year. Yet he was often swept by uncontrollable waves of melancholia and despondency.
The following year in May I went to England with my wife, and received an invitation from Charles Villiers Stanford, then professor of music at Cambridge, to visit the old university during the interesting commencement exercises at which honorary degrees of Doctor of Music were to be given to five composers of five different countries—Saint-Saëns of France, Boito of Italy, Grieg of Norway, Bruch of Germany, and Tschaikowsky of Russia.
The proceedings proved highly interesting and enjoyable. As each recipient of the honor stepped forward in his doctor’s robe, the orator addressed him in a discourse of orotund Latin phrases, praising his many virtues and accomplishments, and these phrases were constantly interrupted by the clatter of facetious remarks and requests from the undergraduates in the balcony, all this according to old-established custom. Sometimes the uproar became so great that the presiding officer had to arise and demand “Silentium.”
Among the other recipients of degrees on that occasion was Field-Marshal Lord Roberts, Baron of Kandahar, who, in his scarlet uniform beneath his doctor’s robe, received of course the most uproarious welcome. At that time no one dreamed that twenty-three years later he would go around England uttering solemn warning against the inevitability of war with Germany and bidding England gird on her sword and prepare, only to be laughed at as an alarmist and publicly reprimanded by politicians for seeking to arouse such feeling against a “friendly power.”
In the evening a great banquet was given in the refectory of the college, and by good luck I was placed next to Tschaikowsky. He told me during the dinner that he had just finished a new symphony which was different in form from any he had ever written. I asked him in what the difference consisted and he answered: “The last movement is an adagio and the whole work has a programme.”
“Do tell me the programme,” I demanded eagerly.
“No,” he said, “that I shall never tell. But I shall send you the first orchestral score and parts as soon as Jurgenson, my publisher, has them ready.”
We parted with the expectation of meeting again in America during the following winter, but, alas, in October came the cable announcing his death from cholera, and a few days later arrived a package from Moscow containing the score and parts of his Symphony No. 6, the “Pathétique.” It was like a message from the dead. I immediately put the work into rehearsal and gave it its first performance in America on the following Sunday. Its success was immediate and profound. We gave it many repetitions that winter and I have played it since in concerts all over the United States. Other orchestras have cultivated it with equal assiduity, and in fact for me the time came several years ago when I cried a halt and let the work lie fallow, as it had evidently been overplayed and its high-strung rhythms had excited the nerves of executants and audiences so often that they were in danger of being overstrained.
Ignace Paderewski made his first appearance in America in 1891, and I conducted his first five orchestral concerts. He came under the auspices of Steinway and Sons, and they told me that the gross receipts for the first concert were only five hundred dollars! His playing as well as his personality, however, immediately took our public by storm, and I do not think that since the days of Franz Liszt there has been any other travelling virtuoso in whom the man was as fascinating as the artist. People who have wondered how it was possible for him when the Great War began to throw himself so fully equipped at every point into the struggle to achieve national unity for Poland, do not realize that he was, consciously or unconsciously, preparing himself for just this opportunity all his life. He had always dreamed of a united and independent Poland. He knew the history of his people, their strength, and their weakness. It is said that one day he played before the Czar who, congratulating him, expressed his pleasure that a “Russian” should have achieved such eminence in his art. Paderewski answered: “I am a Pole, your Majesty,” and, needless to say, was never again invited to play in Russia. His mind is one of the most extraordinary I have ever come in contact with. All the world knows what he has achieved in music—his inspired interpretations, his prodigious memory, and the subtle range of colors of his musical palette, but not so many know of his interest in literature, philosophy, and history, and it took the Great War to demonstrate that as orator and statesman he ranks as high as musician. I heard him make a speech on Poland during the Exposition in San Francisco in 1915 before an audience of ten thousand, in which he gave so eloquent a survey of Poland’s history and of her needs and rights, as to rouse the people to a frenzy of enthusiasm, and I am convinced that Poland owes her national existence to-day to his statesmanship and to the sympathy which his personality created among the Allies at the Versailles Conference. I believe that Colonel House pronounced him to be the greatest statesman of the Conference, and it was only the cynical Clemenceau who said to him: “M. Paderewski, you were the greatest pianist in the world and you have chosen to descend to our level. What a pity!”
When he first came to America, his English was very incomplete but even then he demonstrated his grasp of it in unmistakable fashion. One evening he, my wife, and I dined at the house of very dear mutual friends, Mr. and Mrs. John E. Cowdin, in Gramercy Park. Cowdin had all his life been an enthusiastic polo player, and after dinner Paderewski and I admired some handsome silver trophies that he had won and that were placed in the dining-room. I said: “You see the difference between you and Johnny is that he wins his prizes in playing polo while you win yours in playing solo.”
“Zat is not all ze difference!” Paderewski immediately exclaimed in his gentle Polish accents. “I am a poor Pole playing solo, but Johnny is a dear soul playing polo.”
He is highly gifted as a composer, and besides a very interesting and spiritual symphony I remember with keen pleasure his opera “Manru,” which Maurice Grau brought out at the Metropolitan Opera House in 1902 and which I conducted. I cannot remember ever having worked harder toward achieving a successful première. The orchestral parts, which had been copied in Germany in a great hurry, arrived so full of mistakes that the first rehearsals were an agony of constant stopping and correcting, and these corrections went on during the entire time of preparation, and I believe that I still found two inaccuracies at the rehearsal just preceding the general rehearsal. Again and again I took some of the worst parts home and worked late into the night going through them meticulously myself, and comparing them with the orchestral score in an endeavor to bring order out of chaos. The opera received a warm welcome, but the libretto was lacking somewhat in dramatic interest; and the music, with all its genuine charm and warmth, was not able to successfully combat this lack.
I think that if Paderewski had been willing to sacrifice his marvellous career as a piano virtuoso (and that would have been a great sacrifice) he would have become one of the greatest composers of our time. It does not seem easy to unite the two careers, as they are essentially at war with each other. Liszt, the only man with whom I can compare Paderewski, recognized this fact, and at forty years of age resolutely turned his back on virtuosodom, with its life in the public glare, its excitements, crowds, and emoluments, in order to devote himself to composition. He settled in the little town of Weimar, living a life of poverty, and never again touched the piano for personal gain. Only now and then he would play in public in order to gather funds for the Beethoven monument in Bonn or for some great charity. And yet it is universally conceded that even he stopped too late and that, great as is the sum total of his contributions to creative art, he would have been still greater and able to express himself more genuinely if he had never been “the greatest pianist of his generation.”
It is difficult to define the charm with which the artists of Poland seem to be imbued almost beyond any other race. It is more than a social gift. It is not the result of calculation but seems to be a combination of kindliness of heart and good breeding. Madame Marcella Sembrich has it to a supreme degree, also Jean and Edouard de Reszke, also Tim and Joe Adamowski, Paul Kochanski, and my old friend Alexander Lambert, and if the new state of Poland were composed only of such of the Polish elect as I have just mentioned it would soon become the ideal republic of the world. On the other hand, a country composed exclusively of musicians might not make a contented population, as it is well known that we need an audience to listen to us, and musicians, rightly or wrongly, have the reputation of never being willing to listen to each other.
I do not, however, mean to imply that the Poles are the exclusive possessors of personal charm. For instance, I do not know of any man who has it in greater degree than my old friend Charles Martin Loeffler, who was born in Alsace, received his musical education in France, was violinist in the private orchestra of a Russian grand duke in Nice, and, at the age of sixteen, came to America. My father immediately became very fond of him, and on Sunday afternoons, when we always had chamber-music at home in which my father played first violin and Sam Franko second, Martin Loeffler would play the viola. I liked him immensely and our friendship has lasted through the years. Our birthdays are on the same day, and we are almost of an age, as he is only a year older. When Higginson formed the Boston Orchestra under George Henschel, Loeffler migrated to Boston and became first violin and second concert master. At the same time he continued his studies in composition, and has since become one of our foremost American composers. For years he has lived as a gentleman farmer in Medfield, Massachusetts. His compositions are few and far between, but all of them have the same aristocratic conception, refinement, and original orchestration, such as a man can write who has spent a great part of his life in the orchestra and knows its literature and possibilities. His letters, exquisitely penned, rank with those of Eugene Ysaye, and that is high praise, as Ysaye is the very prince of letter-writers. I venture to insert one of Loeffler’s here because it treats of the first performance of my opera, “Cyrano,” and because it is so whole-hearted in its praise and so gentle but discerning in its criticisms of the weak spots in my work.
Medfield, Mass. Sunday, 26 March, 1913.
Dear Walter:
There was not a more amazed person amongst the audience last Thursday than your old friend here. Having plowed away and wallowed in storm for some time on my own One Act play, I know of the difficulties, the doubts and hazards that one encounters in the business of writing an opera. It is therefore with genuine admiration, that I take off my hat and bow low to him, who could write the Score of Cyrano. It is a masterly accomplishment of a treacherous task. I did not see you on that exciting night; there having been some uncertainty as to my being able to obtain a bed on the 1 o’clock train, I finally had to give up the pleasure of going to your house. I press your dear old hand now in spirit and in sincere admiration.
Your orchestration sounded superbly. Your choruses blended wonderfully with the orchestra and I have no doubt that with a slight _remaniement_ and _raccourcissement_, Cyrano will give great joy to many in the future. I understand that you have already made considerable cuts, still do I advise cutting out more. Four Acts is a long proposition and some of the best things come in the last Act. But the public begins to tire and can no longer thoroughly enjoy the beauties of this Act. A few things have occurred to me besides. In the scene on the balcony, I think it is a mistake to let Cyrano say what Christian shall repeat to Roxane. Is this not what happens in Act III, “How could I love you more,” etc? Would it not be more expressive to let Cyrano prompt his stupid friend in whispering and pantomimic gesture? Curiously enough, this scene which one would have picked out as “made for an opera,” was perhaps the least effective part of the Opera. After the climb to his lady love, everything is again admirable.
Then, in the last act, I believe if you were to shorten Cyrano’s delirium and hasten his death somewhat, you would strengthen and heighten the final effect of your work. Cyrano dies hard and one thinks of the nine-live-cat-death of Tristan! All this may only seem long coming at the end of the preceding three intense hours. There are really extraordinary effects in this final Act of yours and one would like to look at such a score as yours. Probably, like all telling things in this world, your effects are obtained through simplest means.
The whole work is to me a delight on account of its real musicianship—a work evolved from a highly sensitive, very intelligent brain, that has absorbed and assimilated much, without imitating anybody or anything.
These are my first sincere impressions of your work, to which I will add my sentiments. While the musician listened during the hours of the performance, the friend in him was carefully kept apart. When, however, the musician’s heart began beating more and more warmly, the friend and the musician became again at one in their joy.
Here also arises the reflection: Where did you or where does anybody acquire mastery? Do the gifted themselves really know what they are doing and is Maeterlinck right when he makes Mélisande say “Je ne sais pas ce que je sais”?
_A priori_ I shall always say: There must be Opera in English—but at present there cannot be, as nobody knows how to sing in it. The performance however was admirable. Amato was superb and so was the orchestra, chorus and old Herty! Hats off to him too!
Kindest regards to Mrs. Damrosch in which Elise joins me.
Believe me, dear Walter, as ever and more proudly than ever,
Your friend CH. M. LOEFFLER.
In 1891 I was asked to give a concert for the Orthopædic Hospital in which my friend, Mrs. John Hobart Warren, was always much interested, and in casting about for some sensational feature which would draw the public I conceived the idea of having Eugene Ysaye and Fritz Kreisler play the Bach concerto for two violins. Ysaye was then at the very zenith of his career and Kreisler had just come to America as a young violinist of great attainments and charm, and still greater promise for the future. The performance of the Bach concerto proved all that I had hoped, and after the concert Ysaye had supper with me at the old Delmonico’s in Madison Square. Ysaye is not only a remarkable artist but one of the most brilliant conversationalists I have met, and during the supper he proceeded in the most fascinating way to analyze himself and Kreisler. He said: “I have arrived at the top and from now on there will be a steady decrease of my powers. I have lived my life to the full and burned the candle at both ends. For some time I shall make up in subtlety of phrasing and nuance what my technic as a violinist can no longer give, but Kreisler is on the ascendant and in a short time he will be the greater artist.” It is not for me to say whether Ysaye’s prophecy has come true, but no one who has heard him in his prime can forget his truly gigantic conception of the Beethoven concerto, for instance, and the mastery with which he poured out the golden flood of his music.
In 1909 I gave a Beethoven cycle at which I performed all the Beethoven symphonies and other smaller works of his in historical sequence. We had engaged Ysaye to play the Beethoven Violin Concerto, but, to my astonishment, he sent word only a week before that he must first play a violin concerto by Vitali, as he had to get his fingers into proper condition before playing the Beethoven. I remonstrated with him and explained to him that in a Beethoven cycle I could not possibly give a concerto by Vitali, even to oblige Ysaye, and suggested that he play the Vitali concerto to himself in the greenroom before the concert, but he refused to accept this amendment and I was ever so reluctantly compelled to cancel his appearance in the cycle. This caused a coolness between us which lasted several years and which I regretted exceedingly. But time is a great peacemaker. We happened to meet again quite casually a few years later, and by tacit consent this little contretemps was completely buried and we are as good friends as of yore.
Perhaps the most important and interesting great musician of France whom I have known was Camille Saint-Saëns, whom I met in 1908 when he came to America on a concert tour. He was at that time seventy years of age. His extraordinary vitality and the fluency of his playing amazed us all, and America outdid itself to honor this venerable _grand maître_. I had the great pleasure of conducting all of his concerts in New York at which he played his five piano concertos, an extraordinary feat for a man of his age. We had heard so many stories from French musicians of his “nasty temper” at rehearsals and his caustic comments on this or that phrasing in his symphonies or concertos that we were all very agreeably disappointed in finding him genial, cheerful, and grateful for what we were able to give him. He even insisted on playing the organ himself at my performance of his Symphony No. 3, which is dedicated to the memory of Liszt. I have always considered this to be his greatest work in that, with all the clarity of form and diction which is a special characteristic of his style, there is also a deep emotion which rises in the last movement to a triumphant and thrilling climax.
I saw him again in Paris during the war in the summer of 1918, and reminded him of a visit which my father had paid to him in 1876.
“That was not the first time I met your father,” he quickly rejoined. “I remember very well meeting him in Weimar in 1857 while I was visiting Liszt.”
In 1920 my second daughter, Gretchen, was to be married to the son of Judge Finletter of Philadelphia. The young people had met at Chaumont, France, where Finletter had been stationed at General Headquarters after the armistice and while Gretchen and her friend, Mary Schieffelin, were there as war workers. My daughter agreed enthusiastically with my suggestion that the wedding should be in Paris after my European tour with the orchestra was finished, and this to them highly important event was carried out with great success on the 17th of July, the ceremony being solemnized at the American church and the reception held at my hotel, the “France et Choiseul,” in the Rue St. Honoré. As I had come to this hotel for so many years, Monsieur Mantel, the _directeur_, and all the employees from the chef down, helped on the affair with an enthusiasm which can only be found in a country like France, where all festivals of family life are treated with tremendous importance. All the reception-rooms down-stairs and the greater part of the courtyard, which had been charmingly framed in with laurel-trees and filled with inviting-looking little tables, had been placed at our disposal. All the employees of the house—including Leonie, François, Pierre, Adolph, Theo, Félice, Madeleine, Michel, and Louis, all of whom I had known during the war and even before—wore large white boutonnières and ribbons in honor of the occasion; and at four o’clock about a hundred French and American friends began to arrive from the ceremony at the church. Among these was my old friend Madame Nellie Melba, who had come over from London for the purpose, and “_le grand maître_” Camille Saint-Saëns, whom all the hotel employees immediately recognized and treated with great and fond deference.
As Saint-Saëns entered the courtyard he turned to me and said, rather testily: “Mon cher ami, pourquoi est-ce que vous n’avez-pas donné une de mes symphonies dans un de vos concerts à Paris ce printemps?” For a moment I was nonplussed what to answer. We had given three concerts in Paris and I had devoted one to the “Eroica” of Beethoven, and the other two to the César Franck D Minor, the Mozart “Jupiter,” and the Dvořák “New World” symphonies, but Albert Spalding, my soloist, had played the Saint-Saëns Violin Concerto, so that his name had been represented on our programmes. Suddenly the right answer came to me: “Cher maître, don’t you know that during the war I played your great Symphony No. 3 at a gala concert on the Fête Nationale at the Salle du Conservatoire for the benefit of the Croix Rouge, and here is Monsieur Cortot who played the piano part and here Mademoiselle Boulanger who played the organ.” (Both of them were luckily standing by my side as Saint-Saëns entered.) He was completely pacified and was carried off in triumph to the buffet by a crowd of adoring French musicians in order to offer him some refreshment.
Henri Casadesus told me afterward that when Saint-Saëns arrived at the buffet he said: “I am thirsty.” “Here is some champagne,” said Casadesus. “No. That is too cold,” “Well, here is chocolate.” “No. That is too hot,” whereupon he took the glass of champagne and poured it into the chocolate and drank it down with evident relish. Pretty good for a man then eighty-two years of age!
Saint-Saëns had always preserved a great adoration for Liszt, who had been one of the first musicians to befriend him in his early days, and his admiration for Liszt’s music had remained much greater than for that of Wagner. In fact, during the war the majority of the French musicians were furious at his chauvinistic attitude toward Wagner.