Part 12
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-Saëns, seeing a manuscript orchestral score on the piano, sat down and proceeded with his marvellous musicianship to read and play it at sight, when suddenly the door opened and Liszt and Wagner rushed in, amazed at hearing the intricate harmonies of Wagner’s “Rheingold” so marvellously reproduced. Wagner had just brought the score to Liszt in order to show it to him.
During the winter of 1920-21 I accepted the co-editorship for a series of music readers to be used in our public schools, and as I had agreed to invite a small group of distinguished French and English composers to contribute some songs for this publication, I requested Saint-Saëns to honor us with two. He readily complied, and in the summer of 1921 invited me to come to his apartment as he had the songs all ready. When I called, he immediately sat down at the piano and from his very neatly written manuscript played them for me, begging me to observe that he had made the accompaniment exceedingly simple in order that “the American school-teachers should not be too much puzzled by it.” For one of the songs composed in honor of the aviators of the war, he had even written the words himself, and for the other he had taken words by La Fontaine.
He called at my hotel in August of 1921. He seemed to me to have grown more feeble, but seeing on my piano an edition of Beethoven’s piano sonatas, edited by von Bülow, with which I always like to travel as I find the playing of these sonatas very agreeable and restful between the inevitable irritations of travel, Saint-Saëns suddenly bristled up and became very angry at a certain rather complicated fingering which Bülow had given to a piano passage, as his fingers had not been adapted by nature to rapid playing.
“This is the way it should be played,” said Saint-Saëns, as he sat down at the piano and proceeded to let his fingers, though still clad in gray lisle gloves, run up the keys with incredible swiftness, like little gray mice. This extreme dexterity never left him. I had heard him but a month before at a musical given by Widor in his honor and in which Saint-Saëns played the piano part in his own “Septet with Trumpet.” His fingers literally ran away with him, and every time there was a quick passage, he accelerated the tempo to such an extent that the other players simply had to scramble after him as best they could.
He died last winter at eighty-four years of age, and all Paris, governmental, artistic, and scientific, united in giving him imposing and significant obsequies. The respect which the young men of France have for their old masters is something exceedingly sympathetic to an American observer. Whenever Saint-Saëns appeared among them they would hover around with eager deference, flushing with pride as he would say something to the one or the other. In fact, Widor, who is perhaps ten years younger than Saint-Saëns, always insisted on treating him as if he, Widor, were a young, deferential schoolboy in the presence of his great master. Indeed, they reserve the words “_grand maître_” only for their very choicest men of the arts and the learned professions.
With Lillian Nordica I made a joint tour through New England, giving Wagner concerts. As she had by that time arrived at true prima donna estate she had a private car in which she lived and in which I also had a room. The poor lady arrived on the first day with an attack of bronchitis so acute that she could hardly speak. Her voice sounded like the croak of a raven. I have never seen any woman in such abject despair, walking up and down the little dining-room of the car like a caged tigress, every now and then touching a note on the upright piano which had been placed therein, and trying her voice. She was clad in a wrapper, and tears and misery had ravaged her comely face so that it was hardly recognizable. I, of course, thought that she would not sing that evening, but at seven she disappeared into her room and an hour later emerged clad in a magnificent toilet, with her diamond tiara on the top of her head and her face wonderfully made up. When she appeared before her audience with whom she was an old favorite, her manner had all the regal but smiling charm of yore. Her voice? Well, that is another story.
During that entire week this tragi-comedy would repeat itself every day. Her bronchitis never left her, and from my room I could hear this poor woman, as she entered the dining-room, touch the piano furtively and try to sing a few notes. It was agony, and I have hated private cars ever since, and am quite content to occupy a drawing-room or a berth in a regular sleeping-car when I travel. It is certainly more cheerful.
When we finally arrived in New York, where we expected to give two Wagner concerts, lo and behold, the clouds suddenly lifted. Nordica was her old self, and while the diamond tiara could not have looked more regal nor the smile have been more ingratiating than at Worcester, Massachusetts, her voice had again regained its old charm and the cry of the Valkyrie and _Isolde’s_ Liebestod brought back to the memory of her audiences the happy days when Nordica, Schumann-Heink, and Jean de Reszke had electrified them at the Metropolitan.
Madame Nordica was, however, not the only American artist with whom I came into frequent professional contact and who had achieved an eminence equal to that of the best of Europe. David Bispham became a member of my opera company in 1896. He came of an old Quaker family in Philadelphia, into whose lives music had never penetrated. How Bispham got his intense musical temperament is one of those mysteries that the laws of neither heredity nor environment can explain.
He was a man of some means, and finding the local atmosphere in which he lived uncongenial to his evident artistic needs, he went to Europe. He had a vibrant barytone voice, studied singing with Lamperti, and gradually began to make successful appearances on the stage, especially in England. In my company he achieved especial successes as _Telramund_, _Kurvenal_, and _Beckmesser_, also as _Roger Chillingworth_ in my own opera on Hawthorne’s “Scarlet Letter.” He adored a part in which he could “act.” In fact, he sometimes overacted. His musical memory, especially in his later years, was not always to be relied on, but the more he forgot the words the more intense his acting became, and as _Chillingworth_, in which rôle he really never quite learned the text, he fairly contorted his body in giving expression to the sinister machinations and revengeful desires of that demon.
As a man he was of a singularly delightful, almost childlike disposition. The things of this life rarely existed for him as they really were. He saw them through the glass of his own exuberant imagination. The mysterious, the extraordinary, always fascinated him, and he therefore often became the prey of designing people who took easy advantage of his trusting nature. He was a most generous colleague and more free from jealousy than most operatic singers. Rehearsals, no matter how long, were to him as the breath to his nostrils, and he would often spend hours before his glass in the dressing-room making up his face for some character part in close imitation of a famous picture he had seen at the Uffizi in Florence or the Royal Gallery in London. He loved to enact a villain, but, on the other hand, his doglike devotion to _Tristan_ as _Kurvenal_ often brought tears to our eyes.
My wife and I became very fond of him and, later on, when he and I joined the Metropolitan Opera House Company, again under Maurice Grau, we would often take our meals together on the long Western trips to and from California.
He was exceedingly irascible if servants did not carry out his orders properly, and he would berate them in his very resonant voice with a distinctness of utterance worthy of the _Comédie Française_. One morning we were seated at breakfast in the dining-car of our train when the colored waiter brought him his coffee, which was so weak that a drop of the so-called cream turned it a bluish gray. “Take away that coffee!” Bispham thundered. “It is not fit to drink. It is too weak!”
“Oh, no, sah!” expostulated gently the waiter. “Dat coffee am all right. It’s de cream what’s too powerful strong!”
At that time leather suitcases were just making their first appearance and I had bought one and carried it about with me. Bispham noticed it and said, in his extreme Kensington English, which he had carefully acquired over there: “Walter, that is a very nice bag you have there. I think I will buy four of them, each one a little smaller than the other, so that I can put them all inside each other.”
“Why,” I said, “David, aren’t you going to pack anything else inside of those bags?”
“Ha, ha, ha!” laughed David. “Walter, you are always having your little joke!”
Whenever my opera company came to Boston the supers, when an extra group or crowd of knights or peasants, etc., were necessary, were always taken from Harvard University. This became a source of enormous revenue to the doorkeeper at the stage entrance. Our stage-manager paid him twenty-five cents for each super, but he not only pocketed this money himself but charged the students anywhere from fifty cents upward, according to the popularity of the opera, for the privilege of hearing it from the stage. In consequence we often had the most wonderful athletic specimens that the ardent pursuit of sport produces among college men, delighting our eyes as the curtain rose, and the knights and nobles in the second act of “Tannhäuser,” for instance, clad in magnificent robes, would march in and solemnly listen to the contest of song in the castle of the Landgrave of Thuringia.
But they were not all athletes, and I remember one real student among them. The curtain went up on the first act of “Lohengrin” and, to my amazement as I looked up from my conductor’s stand, I saw one of these college boys, dressed in the armor and cloak of one of King Henry’s knights, calmly standing at the foot of the throne, large spectacles on his nose, busily following the action of the opera from a libretto which he held in his hand and close to his eyes.
Another time a much more terrible occurrence took place, but very much “behind the scenes.” I was in Boston with the Grau Opera Company and, at a Saturday matinée, “Carmen” was given with Madame Calvé in the title rôle. I did not conduct that opera, and happened to saunter on the stage after the third act. I found the whole company in a state of only half-suppressed merriment. While Madame A—— was singing _Micaela’s_ air on the stage, in which she implores _Don Jose_ to leave _Carmen_ and return to his old mother, one of these young wretches from Harvard had crept into her dressing-room, and in order to have a triumphant souvenir to hang up in his rooms at college he had stolen her— No, not her stockings, but another important part of her wearing apparel. Madame A——, on returning to her dressing-room, had discovered the theft. Her maid had told the wardrobe mistress, the wardrobe mistress had told the stage carpenter, he had repeated it to the stage-manager, and so forth and so on, the whole company revelling in it, especially as Madame A—— was herself of New England parentage and was considered an exceptionally proper young person.
XII
ROMANCE
“At last!” my readers will exclaim. “All these reminiscences about musicians are well enough, but it is their love-affairs that we are interested in. Think of Beethoven and the Countess Giucciardi, of Berlioz and Miss Smithson, of Liszt and the Countess d’Agoult, of Wagner and Madame Wesendonck. Musicians are so romantic, so different from ordinary men. They wear their hair longer; they affect delightful eccentricities of conduct and of clothes; the ordinary humdrum of life does not touch them, and they live only in the higher and rarer atmosphere of art and poetry.” Therefore woman, who is so much more spiritual than man, sometimes thinks in her unguarded moments that true happiness can only be found by falling in love with an artist or, better still, having him fall in love with her.
Without venturing to place myself in the same category as the great musicians mentioned above, I nevertheless propose in this chapter to give a full and detailed account of all my love-affairs—all, or at least of as many as can be crowded into the confines of a chapter. I have lived a great many years and my life, like that of other artists, has been full to the brim of all kinds of interesting and fascinating happenings, and in order that my readers may gain a true picture I shall begin at the very beginning, promising to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.
Terrible as it may seem, I have to confess at the outset that I began my life as a gay _Lothario_ at the tender age of eight. My family were then living in Breslau, Silesia, and the rear of the house in which our apartment was situated opened on a large courtyard, upon which several other houses faced. This courtyard naturally became the playground of all the children who lived around it. We were particularly intimate with one family, the children of which consisted of an elder brother, already in the university, who affected the appearance and manner of the great German poet, Friedrich Schiller. He was supposed to have great poetical talents, and it was darkly rumored that he had already written two tragedies. I was greatly in awe of him, but his younger brother, who was a boy of my own age, was my classmate in school—the gymnasium, as it was called. And then there was a sister, little Lorchen, seven years of age, with blue eyes and many blond curls. I had played with her and her brother for several months before I suddenly discovered that her curls were beautiful, like spun gold, and that there was something particularly ingratiating in the blue of her eyes. I had an intense desire to put my arms around her, but, strange to say, the consciousness of this filled me with such anger that instead of giving way to it I took the first opportunity to slap this darling little child most unmercifully. To this day I cannot explain my unnatural depravity, and I wish that I could now—over fifty years later—meet little Lorchen again to tell her that this slap was my only way of letting her know how much I loved her. Alas, she never knew, and as we emigrated to America soon thereafter, I never had the time nor the opportunity to overcome my shyness and to place my love at her feet in proper fashion.
I cannot remember any new passions from then on until my sixteenth year. Lorchen’s picture soon and completely faded from my memory. I was tremendously taken up, first with learning English, New York school life, my musical studies, playing marbles, flying kites, and building ships to sail on the pond in Central Park. But when I was fifteen a little Frenchman came to New York and presented himself to my father with his two little daughters, Louise and Jeanne, who were both pianist prodigies. Louise was fifteen and little Jeanne only twelve. The latter was truly remarkable, and her playing made quite a stir in New York at the time. But I was singularly drawn toward the older sister, Louise. Their mother had died when the children were very young and Louise had quite taken the mother’s place and watched over Jeanne with a maternal solicitude and tenderness truly remarkable in so young a girl. She played exquisitely herself, and I can still hear the velvety touch of her fingers in the A Flat Etude of Chopin, but in her adoration for her younger sister’s more brilliant talent she completely effaced herself, and it was only with difficulty that one could get her to play if her sister was present. They lived in a little French boarding-house and I used to love to go there in the evening, and while Jeanne would play for us in most brilliant fashion Louise would sit at a table in the centre of the room and, under the mellow light of a centre lamp, would darn stockings or deftly refashion some dress which Jeanne was to wear at her next concert. Louise had the gentlest of brown eyes, and her face and bearing breathed a tranquillity and sweetness rarely found in the agitating nervous life of to-day. She was not talkative, but when she spoke her eyes would smile and crinkle up in very ingratiating fashion.
I had certainly outgrown the slapping age, but had not yet developed the courage to declare my adoration. I seem to have been quite content to sit next to Louise, and to look into her gentle eyes, or watch her deft fingers as they pleated and sewed and did all those clever things which women’s fingers alone know how to do. That spring, alas, the father and his daughters returned to France and I have never seen them again.
But so inconstant is youth that the following year I fell madly in love with Madame Teresa Carreno, of whom I have already written in an earlier chapter. I was sixteen and she was twenty-four, radiantly beautiful, brilliantly educated, and a remarkable linguist, speaking English, German, French, Spanish, and Italian with equal fluency. But for me her eyes spoke a language even more eloquent than her tongue, and it was small wonder that I was bowled over completely. On my first concert tour, her beauty, her exquisite playing, and the languorous half-tropical charms of the South through which we were touring was a combination I could not withstand.
But my schoolboy adoration received a severe shock when, on the last day of our tour, a handsome and very robust Italian barytone, by the name of Tagliapietra, came to meet her and I found that she was madly in love with him. They were married a short time after.
She, too, seems to have been unconscious of my adoration. Thirty-two years later, at a dinner given at the Hotel Plaza in honor of my twenty-fifth anniversary as a conductor, she was present and in my speech of thanks I humorously referred to her as the _grande passion_ of my early youth. She afterward told my sister: “I never knew that Walter had felt like that about me!”
To proceed with my confessions. The following year I met—but, alas, this chapter is already overcrowded and I shall have to continue the (to me) so fascinating recital of my various romances in my next book of memoirs, which I expect to publish in about twenty years.
XIII
THE ORATORIO SOCIETY OF NEW YORK
My father had always considered that a study of the oratorios of Bach and Handel was a highly important foundation for the young musician, and I had spent many hours with him in studying their scores and imitating their form in my own counterpointal work. Bach’s “St. Matthew’s Passion” and Handel’s “Messiah,” “Samson,” and “Judas Maccabæus” I knew virtually by heart. My father also believed the development of amateur choruses to be a very strong factor in the musical growth of a people. Under his inspiration the chorus of the Oratorio Society constantly grew in numbers and technical proficiency; but it suffered from the great dearth of men singers, especially tenors. The terribly one-sided condition of musical development in our country, proceeding almost exclusively on feminine lines, showed itself markedly in this branch of the art. Many of the men singers who in one way or another had been cajoled or coerced into joining a choral society, had often to be drilled in their parts like children, though without a child’s quickness of perception. The result was that the labor of training was incessant and the mistakes of one year repeated themselves inevitably the next. In rehearsing such oratorios as Handel’s “Messiah” or Bach’s “St. Matthew’s Passion,” for instance, a good routined conductor could always prophesy beforehand what mistakes the chorus was going to make.
During my father’s time the sopranos in the Oratorio Society were of overwhelming power and quality; but this was largely because my mother, when we came to America, gave up all solo singing in public and devoted herself enthusiastically to leading the soprano choir. Her voice was phenomenal in its strength and quality, and when, as in some fugal chorus of Handel’s, the sopranos finally enter on the main theme, her triumphant voice would carry everything along with it. She always sang by heart, her beautiful, deep-set eyes fixed on the conductor, and when this conductor happened to be her own husband or son there was a devotion and a love in them that I can never forget.
To maintain a choral society in a huge city like New York is doubly difficult because of the many temptations and distractions that beset its members in so large a metropolis and threaten the regular attendance at rehearsals. I have always felt, therefore, that the many splendid performances which the society has given, in its long existence of forty-nine years, are especially to its credit. The rehearsals with these amateur singers, however, demand from the conductor ten times the energy, patience, and vitality that are necessary with an orchestra composed of trained professionals. And yet there is a charm in working with devoted amateurs. My father loved it, and even during the harassing labors of founding and maintaining the German opera at the Metropolitan, he always turned to the regular Thursday-evening chorus rehearsals of the Oratorio Society as a change and rest. I confess that I have similarly enjoyed the almost primitive study necessary with an amateur chorus after a day spent with my orchestra, and I look back with the deepest pleasure on the many years during which I conducted the Oratorio Society.
Smaller cities should be able to develop choral societies far more easily than New York. Toronto, Canada, has always been an example of what can be accomplished in that direction. There are four choral societies of high merit there, among which perhaps the Mendelssohn Choir, founded by Doctor Vogt, ranks highest. The English have an inherited love and talent for choral singing, and in Toronto the weekly rehearsal is the one “dissipation” of the week, and is eagerly looked forward to by the singers. I have heard the Mendelssohn Choir repeatedly on their visits to New York and have been thrilled by the beauty and volume of their tone and the precision of their singing.
I have written elsewhere of the great musical festival which was projected and conducted by my father in May, 1881. For the great chorus of twelve hundred, which was its outstanding feature, the four hundred singers of the Oratorio Society formed the backbone, and I was intrusted with the drilling of two other sections of the festival chorus. As I had been the accompanist and organist for years at all the rehearsals of the Oratorio Society and had officiated as conductor of the Newark Harmonic Society for three years after the festival, I was technically well equipped to take over the directorship of the Oratorio Society when it was offered to me after my father’s death in 1885.
I conducted the last concert of that season, Bach’s “St. Matthew’s Passion,” and found that the affection and reverence which the chorus cherished for my father made them help me devotedly in my difficult beginning.