Part 26
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 dishes, artistically decorated in real Japanese style by his own deft fingers. He seemed to have a great penchant for the stage, asserted that he had acted _Hamlet_ in Japan, and would sit for hours after luncheon watching the rehearsal, with his little inscrutable eyes fixed on the stage. I have often wondered whether on his return to Japan he gave performances of the Greek plays to his own compatriots and whether any great changes or adaptations were necessary to make them comprehensible to his audiences.
While the general plan of the action and grouping had been carefully worked out by Miss Anglin, she had an open mind and eye, and would often change the arrangement completely if an improvement could be effected thereby. This meant incessant repetitions, during which her patience and cheerful courtesy never failed her.
A grand piano had been rolled into a corner of the stage, and I was so fascinated in watching the rehearsals and the gradual evolution of the stage pictures under her skilful hands, that I insisted on always playing the incidental music myself, even though some of the scenes were repeated dozens of times.
Miss Anglin had enlisted the services of fourteen of California University’s loveliest and most talented coeds to form her Greek chorus. Beauty seems to flourish naturally on the Pacific coast, and some of these young ladies were glorious specimens of a truly Greek and statuesque charm. The recitation of one of the choruses, which was to be spoken in a kind of elastic rhythm to the music of the orchestra, was intrusted to one of these Dianas of Berkeley, and as she had no conception of this, to her, novel combination, Miss Anglin asked me to give her a separate rehearsal after lunch. I sat down at the piano and recited the chorus to her while I played the accompanying music. She stood by my side listening intently and looking like a statue of Diana of Ephesus. Then, bending her head with stately dignity, she said: “I get ya!” Alas! the illusion was gone, and her voice brought me back suddenly from my dream of 400 B. C. to California of 1915. She had not “got me,” however, and I was finally compelled to give this chorus to another young lady, less statuesque in form but more clever in achieving plastic unity between speech and music.
But my real troubles began when I tried to collect an orchestra of fifty for the performances. At that time there were not many good players in San Francisco, and even those few were permanently engaged in the big World’s Fair orchestra. My first rehearsal was truly pathetic—I had been so spoiled by the many years of association with my lovely New York Symphony Orchestra. But where there is a will there is a way, and by stealing a few men from the local theatres and borrowing a few more from the exposition orchestras, we were enabled to get a fairly good body of men assembled.
The success of Miss Anglin’s productions was truly remarkable. There were ten thousand people at each performance, and “Iphigenia in Aulis” had to be repeated twice. In this work the camp of _Agamemnon_ and its atmosphere of war were graphically illustrated, and five hundred Berkeley students, picturesquely attired and well trained, gave a very vivid picture of the soldier’s camp, especially at the end of the play when the Oracle has announced that the wind has changed, and these hundreds of soldiers rushed across the stage in a tumult of joy to board their ships and sail for Troy.
The “Electra,” for which William Furst had written music for Miss Anglin years before, was also performed. Eventually I also composed music for this play, and all three of the dramas were performed in New York a few years later at the request of Mr. Flagler, on the stage of Carnegie Hall, which had been skilfully converted for the occasion into a Greek theatre.
We all marvelled how vividly modern these plays, written more than two thousand years ago, seemed as given under the artistic direction of Margaret Anglin. _Electra_, waiting outside the walls of the palace for the sound that shall announce to her the death of _Ægisthus_ and _Clytemnestra_; _Medea_, having entered the palace to kill her own and _Jason’s_ children in order to punish him for his marriage to the young Princess, while the chorus, shaking the iron grill of the doors, implore _Medea_ not to slay her children; _Iphigenia_, youngest daughter of _Agamemnon_, descending alone the great flight of steps to suffer death in the sacred grove of the goddess Artemis, that her wrath may be appeased and favorable winds may send the armies of _Agamemnon_ to Troy—all these are unforgettable scenes, and I was overjoyed to feel that the music which I had written was not inappropriate, but formed a good background for these crucial moments.
XX
DEAD COMPOSERS
I have a large library of musical works. It was begun by my father in 1857, and contains many scores of the composers of that period, sent to him for first performance in Germany. He added to it considerably during his thirteen years in America as founder and conductor of the Symphony and Oratorio Societies, and I have still further enlarged it since I became conductor of these two organizations. My library now virtually represents the entire symphonic development up to the present time, and as I look through my catalogue I am amazed at the number of dead composers which it contains. By this I do not mean those who have passed away, but those who were once celebrated, were hailed as great, but whose works are now forgotten and only repose undisturbed on dusty shelves like mine, for no efforts or housewife’s art will prevent dust from seeping into the shelves of a New York City library!
To mention a few of these “dead” composers alphabetically: Who now plays the overtures of Auber’s “La Muette de Portici” and “Fra Diavolo”? Yet they figured frequently in my popular programmes thirty years ago, and both operas deserve more than a passing recognition. The first was a stroke of genius in which the commonplace Auber rose to real heights. The heroine is a dumb girl, a prima donna without a voice, but very dramatically portrayed in the orchestra, and the atmosphere of a people fighting for freedom pervades the entire story. “Fra Diavolo” is a delightful comic opera. The only trouble is that the music is too good for the abjectly dull audiences that now frequent our theatres and want to see a “musical show.” Its plot is delightfully consistent, which is another reason for looking on it with disfavor to-day; but I have always regretted the Nemesis which overcomes _Fra Diavolo_ in the last act. This delightful robber has by that time so endeared himself to us that he should be allowed at the end to escape, in order that the public may live in the hope of further pranks and misdeeds from him.
Thirty years ago I gave the first performance in America of a “Symphony in D Minor,” by Anton Bruckner. He was a man with the brains of a peasant but the soul of a real musician, and with a marvellous gift for improvisation, although he was, intellectually, incapable of developing and balancing his themes properly. A noisy party in Vienna wished, at the time, to acclaim this disciple of Wagner as a genius, to counteract the constantly growing admiration for Brahms, and more recently such eminent conductors as Mahler have tried to popularize Bruckner’s symphonies, but they have never gained a permanent hold on our public. Several years after my performance of his “Symphony in D,” I was in Berlin, and Siegfried Ochs, the conductor of the famous Philharmonic Choir, brought a little bald-headed man of over seventy years of age to my table at the Kaiserhof. On my being introduced to him, he suddenly grabbed my hand, and saying, “You are the Mr. Damrosch who has given my symphony in America!” he proceeded, to my great embarrassment, to cover my hand with kisses.
Vienna is full of stories of his childlike gentleness and modesty. Hans Richter once invited him to conduct one of his own symphonies with the famous orchestra of the Vienna Society of Friends of Music. At the rehearsal he stood on the conductor’s platform, stick in his hand, with a beatific smile on his face. The orchestra were all ready to begin, but he would not lift his stick to give the signal. Finally Rosé, the concert master, said to him: “We are quite ready. Begin, Herr Bruckner.” “Oh, no,” he answered. “After you, gentlemen!”
At that time he was also commanded to appear before the old Emperor Franz Joseph to receive a decoration. After he had been decorated, the Emperor turned to him and said very kindly: “Herr Bruckner, is there anything more I can do for you?” Bruckner answered in a trembling voice: “Won’t you please speak to Mr. Hanslick (the famous musical critic of Vienna) that he should not write such nasty criticisms about my symphonies?”
In my father’s time the overture to Cherubini’s “Anacreon” had a frequent and honored place on his programmes. A modern audience would vote it too dry and old-fashioned.
The music of Niels W. Gade was quite a favorite with our grandfathers and grandmothers, but he is unendurable to-day.
A new orchestral composition of Carl Goldmark was eagerly waited for, forty years ago, and there was great rivalry between my father and Theodore Thomas as to which should have the privilege of performing it first. People used to revel in his “exotic and luxuriant orchestration,” but to-day his colors have faded before the greater glories of Strauss and Debussy and Ravel, and only his “Rustic Symphony” occasionally figures on our programmes.
During the second year of the German opera at the Metropolitan, Goldmark’s “Queen of Sheba” made a success which equalled that of the Wagner operas. Solomon’s temple, painted in gold, the Jewish rituals, the Oriental harmonies, and the naïve surprise of the public on seeing biblical characters upon a modern operatic stage, all combined to make the work a sensational success. To-day it has disappeared completely from the repertoire of European and American opera-houses.
The fate of Franz Liszt as a composer is still more tragic because it is partly undeserved. He created the form of the symphonic poem, but those who succeeded him have developed it so much farther as to leave his works somewhat submerged. I still have great admiration for his “Faust” Symphony, but neither I nor others of my colleagues who share this admiration have been able to make this work really popular with the general public. His “Dante” Symphony, “Festklänge,” and “Orpheus” receive still fewer public performances, and his “Ce qu’on entend sur les montagnes” has never been performed here to my knowledge. But “Les Préludes” and the two Piano Concertos, on the contrary, are still played _ad nauseam_.
The symphonies of Gustav Mahler have never received genuine recognition here, although he was a very interesting apparition in the musical field. He was a profound musician and one of the best conductors of Europe, and it is possible that, in the latter capacity, he occupied himself so intensely and constantly in analyzing and interpreting the works of the great masters that he lost the power to develop himself as composer on original lines. All his life he composed, but his moments of real beauty are too rare, and the listener has to wade through pages of dreary emptiness which no artificial connection with philosophic ideas can fill with real importance. The feverish restlessness characteristic of the man reflects itself in his music, which is fragmentary in character and lacks continuity of thought and development. He could write cleverly in the style of Haydn or Berlioz or Wagner, and without forgetting Beethoven, but he was never able to write in the style of Mahler.
Of all the greater composers of the last hundred years no one has been killed oftener than Mendelssohn, yet he always seems to come back again with a new renaissance. His music for “Athalie,” his “Reformation” Symphony, his overtures to “Melusine” and “Ruy Blas” are dead as a door-nail, but his Violin Concerto is still the most perfect example of its kind, his “Midsummer Night’s Dream” the best incidental music ever conceived for a Shakespearean play, his “Elijah” the most dramatic oratorio ever written, and the Scotch and Italian Symphonies still possess a delightful and eternal charm.
The works of Meyerbeer, on the contrary, have deservedly disappeared even from our popular programmes. Those empty “Torchlight Dances” and the vulgar ballet music from “Le Prophète”! I confess, though, that I still have a sneaking fondness for the “Coronation March,” perhaps because I had to conduct it so many times at the Metropolitan, when I first began conducting the operas there. That the same man who penned the glorious fourth act of the “Huguenots” could have been satisfied with the empty drivel which preponderates during the rest of that opera, is one of the eternal mysteries.
About thirty years ago Moritz Moszkowski was one of the most popular composers of the day, especially for the piano, but modern ears have but little use for his delicate, though evanescent, charm, and his orchestral suites are but rarely heard to-day. He has lived in Paris for many years, and during the war he suffered greatly. Advancing years and a long illness had left him very weak, and it seemed almost as if the musical world in which he had been so popular a figure had forgotten him completely.
But last winter, Ernest Schelling, one of our best American pianists, and an old friend of Moszkowski’s, conceived the happy idea of giving a testimonial concert in his honor, which should be thoroughly original in character. He, together with his distinguished colleague, Harold Bauer, accordingly enlisted the co-operation of twelve other celebrated pianists who were in America during the winter. This list, a truly remarkable one, included Elly Ney, Ignaz Friedman, Ossip Gabrilowitsch, Rudolph Ganz, Leopold Godowsky, Percy Grainger, Ernest Hutcheson, Alexander Lambert, Josef Lhevinne, Yolanda Mero, Germaine Schnitzer, and Sigismond Stojowski.
Mr. Flagler offered the services of our orchestra, but as the stage was to be completely filled with fourteen grand pianos, there was no room for an orchestra, and I had to content myself with the possibility of being taken on as a piano mover, as I longed to take part in the affair in any capacity. The morning before the concert, however, I received a hurried S. O. S. telephone call from Ernest Schelling. He said: “Please come down to Steinway’s immediately and help us out. The fourteen pianists are all here for rehearsal. We have arranged for several compositions to be played by all of us, but alas, each one has his own individual interpretation, and nothing seems to make us play together. We need a conductor!”
When I arrived at the rehearsal hall the confusion was indeed indescribable, and it took some time to bring order out of chaos. Here were fourteen of the world’s greatest pianists, veritable prima donnas of the piano, but several had never learned to adapt themselves to play together for a common musical purpose, and when I rapped on my stand for silence in order to begin the “Spanish Dances” of Moszkowski, at least five or six continued their infernal improvising, playing of scales, and pianistic fireworks. By using heroic measures I gradually produced a semblance of order, and gave the signal for the beginning of the music. The effect was extraordinary! Several of these pianists had never followed a conductor’s beat, and after the first ten bars, two of them rushed over to me, the one violently exclaiming that the tempo was too fast, and the other insisting with equal vehemence that it was too slow. Finally I obtained silence, and told my pianistic orchestra that they were, undoubtedly, the fourteen greatest pianists in the world, and that the interpretation of each one of them was undoubtedly equally the greatest in the world, but as they represented fourteen different grades and shades of interpretation, I intended to take the matter into my own hands and they would just have to follow my beat whether they liked my tempo or not. This was greeted with a roar of approval, and we now settled down to the work of rehearsing as solemnly as if these prima donnas of the ivories were orchestral musicians and routined members of the New York Musical Union. Order followed anarchy, and the results achieved were not without higher artistic interest, especially as I detailed such accomplished and routined musicians as Harold Bauer, Ernest Schelling, and Ossip Gabrilowitsch to use their own discretion in “orchestrating” the “Dances.” Gabrilowitsch, for instance, reserved himself for the entrance of the “brasses”; Bauer invested some of the more delicate portions with agile runs of flutes and clarinets, while Schelling imitated the kettledrums and cymbals with thrilling effect.
Carnegie Hall was jammed and the audience in a gale of happiness at the highly original proceedings. The stage was so crowded with the fourteen huge pianos that, after threading my way through them to introduce Mme. Alma Gluck, who was to auction off one of the programmes, I said that what this concert evidently needed most was not a conductor but a traffic policeman.
Perhaps the most artistic feature of the programme was the performance of Schumann’s “Carnival Scenes,” in which each little movement represents a separate carnival figure. The fourteen pianists drew lots as to which was to play which. The introduction was played by all, but after that, in quick kaleidoscopic succession, the different carnival figures fairly danced from the stage into the audience, as a pianist on one side of the stage would begin, followed by one from the other side, and so on. It was a most remarkable opportunity to compare the interpretative characteristics of the different pianists.
The receipts were considerably swelled by the auctioning of programmes and autographed photographs of Moszkowski, and fifteen thousand dollars was the result of an entertainment truly unique in the history of music.
The most popular modern symphonic composer in the ’70’s was Joachim Raff. He was a young Swiss who, without a cent in his pocket, had walked many miles from his little village in order to hear Liszt play at a concert in Zurich. Liszt became interested in his undoubted talent, and took him with him to Weimar as musical secretary. Raff, von Bülow, and my father became great friends. But while every one expected that Raff would continue as a true disciple of Liszt’s, and write in the revolutionary style of his master, he gradually turned from him and leaned more and more on classic models, although in several of his symphonies he retained the Lisztian idea of programme music. As he grew older his conservatism became more and more marked. He had great facility and produced works in every known form of music, and his vanity gradually made him believe that his string quartets were equal to Mozart’s, his symphonies to Beethoven’s, and his oratorios to Handel’s and Mendelssohn’s. His fecundity was astonishing, but his pen too fluent for real musical depth. There was hardly a winter, however, that Theodore Thomas or my father did not perform “Im Walde,” or the very programmatic “Lenore” Symphony. This work, in which the last movement follows closely and dramatically Burger’s famous ballad, had an enormous popularity, and is occasionally performed by us to-day, but in general the name of Raff means but little to modern concertgoers.
But perhaps the greatest tragedy of all was Anton Rubinstein, who became, after Liszt, the world’s greatest piano virtuoso. The world fêted him, spoiled him, and sated him with adulation. It all brought him no satisfaction. He was consumed with the ambition to be considered a great composer, and wrote incessantly, never criticising what he wrote. His “Ocean” Symphony had a tremendous popularity in New York fifty years ago, but to-day no one would listen to it. His “D Minor Concerto” has been played, _ad nauseam_, by every pianist, but to-day it is threadbare and frayed at the edges. Only the supreme skill of a Josef Hofmann can make his “G Major Concerto” endurable and cloak its musical emptiness. He wrote opera after opera in a feverish desire to eclipse Wagner, whom he hated, and whose popularity he envied, and after “Parsifal” had been proclaimed at Bayreuth as a “Sacred Festival Play,” he immediately proceeded to write an opera on the life of Christ, which is so dull and unconvincing that it has hardly had a performance anywhere.
His personal popularity was so great that Pollini, the astute manager of the Hamburg Opera, occasionally used to put on one of his operas on condition that he himself would come to Hamburg to conduct the opening performance. His presence would insure a crowded house.
At the last rehearsal of one of these operas Rubinstein was so well pleased with the work of the orchestra that he turned to them and said: “Gentlemen, if my opera is a success you must all come to my hotel after the performance for a champagne supper.” Unfortunately, the opera was a decided frost and the audience so undemonstrative that Rubinstein, in absolute disgust, laid down the stick after the second act, and, bidding the local conductor finish the opera, returned dejectedly to his hotel and went to bed. At eleven o’clock there was a knock at his door. “Who is it?” he shouted in great irritation. “It is I, Herr Rubinstein, the double-bass player from the opera orchestra.” “What do you want?” “I have come for the champagne supper.” “What nonsense!” raged Rubinstein. “The opera was a ghastly failure.” “Well, Herr Rubinstein,” answered the thirsty and undaunted double-bass player, “_I_ liked it!”
The disappearance of Schumann’s symphonies from concert programmes is due to the fact that he was never at ease in writing for the orchestra. His instrumentation is so thick and turgid as to be the despair of conductors. So much of the music is exquisite, but it is like a precious jewel imbedded in a foreign substance which conductors try in vain to remove by changing the dynamics of this or that instrument, or by leaving out an unnecessary doubling up of certain harmonies. All these devices, however, can do but little. More heroic measures are necessary, and I was much interested last summer when Sir Edward Elgar asked me what I would think of his deliberately reorchestrating an entire symphony of Schumann’s. I heartily applauded such an idea and begged him to carry it out speedily as there is perhaps no one living to-day who better understands the colors of the orchestra and knows how to produce the most subtle shades in the intermingling of the different instruments. In the meantime Frederick Stock, the noted conductor of the Chicago Orchestra, has taken the bull by the horns and has written a new orchestration of Schumann’s “Rhenish Symphony” which I hope to produce this winter.
Are Sousa’s marches played nowadays? They should be. They are better than the military marches of Europe of to-day, and while one cannot put them into the category of higher musical efforts they are the only American compositions of musical worth that have triumphantly blazed their way all over the world.