Part 4
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 pianist or with his pen as musical critic or propagandist, or with his own money, to save others from want or to help them to obtain the recognition which he thought they deserved. It is impossible to name the hundreds whom he thus benefited—Berlioz, Saint-Saëns, César Franck, Schumann, Cornelius, and so on, and of course above all Wagner himself, whose friendship with Liszt has become historic. Like most friendships, the one gives much more than he receives, and that one was Liszt, who, in his admiration for Wagner’s genius minimized himself and what he had accomplished as composer to an exaggerated degree. In those personal qualities that make up a man’s character, Liszt was infinitely the superior. Wagner’s genius as a musician was the greater, but this brought in its trail an overwhelming egotism and a vanity which made many of his relations with his fellow men unfortunate. Liszt gave up all worldly glories and honors and riches which he might have acquired if he had continued his career as perhaps the greatest piano virtuoso that ever lived, in order to devote himself absolutely to composition and musical propaganda, without any thought of pecuniary rewards. He literally, like his patron saint, Francis of Assisi, took the vows of poverty. When I saw him he lived in most simple fashion, always travelled “second class” and gave what little money he had to others who seemed to him to need it more. Without his never-ceasing support and encouragement, his absolute faith in the eventual triumph of Wagner’s music, and without continual financial support from Liszt and from those he constantly urged to help, Wagner could never have carried on his struggle toward the triumphant completion of a Bayreuth and an almost complete realization of his ideals.
The first performance of “Parsifal” made a tremendous impression on me. I was much moved by the noble allegory and the music accompanying the sacred rituals of the Christian Church as presented upon the stage in the scene during the uncovering of the Holy Grail. But I must confess that with each succeeding performance this feeling lessened. The fact that it was not a devotional ceremony but an imitation of one which had been carefully drilled and trained into the performers whose gestures of devotion repeated themselves each time with automatic regularity, gradually began to affect me disagreeably. I was at that time too young to analyze this feeling properly, but, as the years went by, I gradually arrived at the belief that such ceremonials should not be presented on a stage, for if we see a group of Christian Knights partaking of the Lord’s Supper, we should have the full conviction that it is a real ceremony and not an imitation. The foot-washing scene between _Parsifal_ and _Kundry_ also affected me disagreeably. It was too direct an imitation of Magdalen washing the feet of Christ. On the other hand, the Good Friday scene between _Parsifal_ and _Gurnemanz_ moved me and many others in the audience to tears because it was a lovely and lovable presentation of the divine mercy through the self-sacrifice of the Saviour. Old Scaria, the Vienna bass, who took the part of _Gurnemanz_, sang and acted this scene with convincing tenderness.
I was naturally much interested in the invisible, subterranean orchestra of the Bayreuth auditorium, and as the first noble theme of the prelude literally floated into the darkened hall, the great advantage of an invisible conductor was manifest. The division of the music into bars, which are an essential of the conductor’s beat, should be seen only by the orchestra, and I still wish it were possible to educate the public to listen to music with their ears only and not with their eyes. But this theory of mine would find violent opposition from the small but select company of “prima donna conductors” who, at that parting of the ways which comes to every conductor, whether he shall make himself an interpreter of the composers’ works or a perverter in order to demonstrate his own “tricks of the trade,” have chosen the primrose path because a large part of the public are easily gulled and more easily moved if the conductor “dramatizes” the music through his gestures. By the skilful manipulation of his arms and hands, his hips and his hair, he gives the impression that when the ’cellos play a soulful melody, it really drips from his wrists, and when the kettledrums play a dramatic roll it is really the result of a flash of his eye. There are many people, especially among the gentle sex, to whom admiration for one conductor entails a deep hatred of all others. It would be interesting to note how many of them could pick out their favorite if half a dozen of the prima donnas of the baton were to perform invisibly with an invisible orchestra in quick succession to each other.
The strings of the Bayreuth orchestra were noble and rich in tone, but I was disturbed by many inaccuracies and false intonations of the wind choir, which surprised me all the more as the orchestra was supposed to be composed of the best of every kind from the different opera-houses of Germany. These faults were not noticed or acknowledged by my German friends, and I think that the years have brought more and more of a cleavage in this respect between their orchestras and ours, and that to-day American orchestras obtain, especially in the wind-instrument choirs, greater purity of tone and, without sacrificing elasticity, a greater precision of ensemble.
I have always had a penchant for French wood-wind players and have given them and their Belgian cousins a preference in my orchestra. Generally speaking, a conductor can safely engage a first prize from the Paris Conservatoire in flute, oboe, or bassoon without giving him any further examination.
Where else can one find a flute of such ravishing tone quality as that of George Barrère, who has been first flute of the New York Symphony Orchestra for seventeen years and who was first recommended to me by his great teacher, Tafanel, in Paris? I am happy to say that he is developing many American players and giving to them something of his own luscious and spiritual tone quality, so that he, as well as Mathieu, our first oboe, and Lettelier, bassoon, are continuing the great traditions of the Paris Conservatoire in this country and imparting their qualities to a group of young American pupils. Germany has produced some great clarinet players, of whom Muhlfeld, for whom Brahms wrote his beautiful “Quintet for Clarinet and Strings,” was a fine example. Mr. Lindemann, first clarinet of my orchestra, is another, and his tone is of a peculiarly pure quality. I prefer the tone of the German trombonists to that of their French colleagues. The Germans cultivate a darker and more noble tone quality.
The summer of 1886 I returned again to Germany. I had been invited to conduct some selections from “Sulamith,” a cantata of my father’s, at the annual meeting of the “Ton-künstler-Verein” which took place at the beautiful Thuringian hill town of Sondershausen, the residence of the princely house of Schwartzburg-Sondershausen, where the prince maintained a good permanent symphony orchestra.
Liszt, as venerable founder and president of the Ton-künstler-Verein, an association of musicians the original purpose of which was the production and cultivation of the modern school of composition, again received me very kindly and expressed himself as much pleased at hearing my father’s work.
At the close of the Festival I accompanied him, together with Baron Joukowski and Fräulein von Schorn, back to Weimar. During the trip Liszt was in a very gay mood and kept us in gales of laughter with a number of outrageous puns and amusing comments on certain phases of the Festival, especially on a long debate between Doctor Rieman, an eminent musical theorist, and another man whose name I have forgotten, on certain theories regarding the science of harmony. This debate, which was wholly technical and very “gründlich” lasted for two hours, during which poor Liszt had to sit in the front row in a room crowded to suffocation and with not a door or window open. I can still see the venerable head of Liszt drooping and dropping every now and then from sheer fatigue, and then the Meister raising it again with that ineffable smile on his face in order to show an interest in the discussion.
When we arrived in Weimar, Joukowski invited us all, together with Lassen, to dinner at the Hotel “Zum Russischen Hof.” It was a jolly affair. Champagne was served immediately after the soup and Liszt reminisced so brilliantly and beautifully of the old Weimar days of which Fräulein von Schorn and Lassen had been a part and with which I, too, could claim some connection through my parents, that we all sat spellbound.
During the dinner Liszt asked me if I knew anything of a portrait of his which had been painted under interesting conditions many years before. Liszt occupied rooms at the old Villa d’Este at Tivoli, near Rome, for a month or two every winter. It then belonged to his old friend, Cardinal Prince Hohenlohe. One evening his bell rang, and as his servant had gone out, Liszt took a candle and opened the door. His visitors were Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, the American poet, who had brought a painter friend, Mr. Healy, to introduce to the maestro. Longfellow was so struck with the picturesque appearance of Liszt as he stood in the old doorway in his long black soutane, holding a lighted candle, that he asked Liszt for permission to have Healy paint a picture of him, and he consequently gave Healy several sittings. Longfellow took the painting back with him to America.
I had never heard of or seen this picture, but thirty years later, when Ernest Longfellow, a nephew of the poet, was lunching at our house I remembered the incident and asked him if he knew anything of the whereabouts of the picture. He told me that he remembered it very well and that it was still hanging in his uncle’s house in Cambridge. Through the courtesy of the present occupants I was permitted to take a photograph of it and it is reproduced in this book.
It was not until midnight that we accompanied Liszt through the park and the lovely Goethe Garden back to his house. It was a gentle summer night with a hazy moon giving an indescribable glamour to the trees and bushes, and suddenly Liszt laid his hand on my shoulder and said “Listen!”
From the bushes came the song of a nightingale. I had never heard one before and stood spellbound. It seemed incredible that such ecstatic sweetness, such songs of joy and sorrow, could come from the throat of a little bird, and to hear it all at twenty-four years of age and standing at the side of Liszt! Dear reader, I confess that to-day, thirty-five years later, I still thrill at the memory of it.
Alas! That was almost the last time that I saw Liszt. In July I went again to Bayreuth to hear the first “Tristan” performance, and one morning I met him, looking very old and worn, coming all alone out of the church from early mass. A few days later, July 31, he had followed his dearest friend, Wagner, into the beyond.
The following winter, in Liszt’s memory (March 3, 1887), I gave the first complete performance in America of his oratorio, “Christus.” This work made so profound an impression that I repeated it the following year.
I am sorry that “Christus” has not been performed since then by our choral societies, as I consider it to be Liszt’s greatest work. Many of its themes are based on the Gregorian modes. The choruses are set in sonorous harmonies and breathe a tranquillity which can only be achieved by a perfect mastery of the subject and the form in which it is treated. There are two orchestral numbers—a Pastorale, indicative of the shepherds and the annunciation, “Angelus Domini ad Pastores ait,” and the March of the Three Kings, “Et ecce Stella quam Viderant”—which are brilliantly orchestrated. The march depicts the three kings of the Orient with their mighty retinue, the star guiding them to the manger in Bethlehem being indicated by a sustained high A flat in the first violins in an organ point around which the processional continues. The trio, or middle part, in a beautiful unison of the violins and violoncellos, depicts the kings opening their treasures and presenting gold, frankincense, and myrrh to the little Jesu.
The entrance of Christ into Jerusalem is characterized by an atmosphere of exalted, joyous acclaim, and the setting for baritone of the prayer of Jesus,
O my Father, if this cup may not pass away from me, except I drink it, Thy will be done,
is one of the most moving that I know of in the history of religious music.
In the last part there is an exquisite but simple setting of an ancient Eastern hymn, “O Filii et Filiæ.” Altogether I cannot understand why, in the dearth of religious music written by modern pens, “Christus” does not take its permanent place in the repertoire of choral societies.
Like many other works of the greatest masters, a few good cuts will add to the effectiveness of this oratorio.
VI
THE FOUNDING OF GERMAN OPERA AT THE METROPOLITAN—DEATH OF MY FATHER
The Metropolitan Opera House was built in 1882 by a group of rich New Yorkers who, feeling themselves shut out by the older aristocracy who owned the old Academy of Music and occupied all the boxes at the Italian Opera seasons of Colonel Mapleson, determined to have an opera of their own. They leased their new house for the inaugural season of 1883-84 to Abbey, Schoeffel, and Grau, a firm of theatrical speculators and managers who had made a name for themselves by the tours of Mary Anderson and other celebrated “stars” of Europe and America.
The Metropolitan Opera stockholders had appointed as architect a man whose reputation had been made in building churches, but who knew nothing of theatrical or operatic requirements, or of the latest developments in Europe in the construction of the stage and modern stage appliances. As a result, the stage arrangements were of the most clumsy description. Great walls, many feet thick, ran beneath the stage from the front to the rear, thereby precluding the possibility of a “transformation” scene in which one set of scenery could sink into the ground while the other descended from above. The parquet floor was placed so low that the orchestra pit, which was supposed to be an imitation (but was not) of the sunken orchestra at Bayreuth, had to be placed still lower and in consequence the conductor was perched on a kind of pulpit high in the air so that the singers could see him. He had to gesticulate wildly upward toward the singers and downward toward the abyss in which the orchestra fiddled without being able properly to see his gestures. Besides this, the orchestra, being so far from the stage, was almost inaudible to the singers, and this often resulted in the most disastrous dropping of the pitch, especially in the concerted numbers. Years later and at huge expense some of these faults of construction were corrected.
For their season Abbey, Schoeffel, and Grau engaged a large number of operatic stars, including Nilsson, Patti, Sembrich, Trebelli, and many others of distinction, but there was absolutely no artistic head of the enterprise nor any one who had had any real managerial experience with grand opera, and in consequence all these stars stepped on each other’s feet and trains and the confusion was incredible. Good performances were an accident, as the principal artists usually deemed it beneath their dignity to attend rehearsals, and the season ended in failure and the bankruptcy of Abbey, Schoeffel, and Grau. Colonel Mapleson, the astute manager of the Academy of Music, rubbed his hands with glee at this downfall of what he called “the new yellow brewery on Broadway.” The directors of the Metropolitan were at a loss what to do with their elephant. Their president was James Roosevelt, an uncle of Hilborn Roosevelt who was then president of the New York Symphony Society and who was a stanch and devoted friend of my father’s. He suggested to his uncle that my father be appointed as director and that a season of opera in German be inaugurated, as Italian opera was evidently on the wane and Wagner, especially, on the ascendant.
The directors thought well of this scheme and accordingly made an arrangement with my father under which he should become director of the opera for the season 1884-85 and that he should engage a company of German singers of which, however, Madame Materna must be one, as she had sung with great success at the Theodore Thomas Festival of the preceding year and they wanted some name already known in America to head the list of singers.
This meant a complete revolution in operatic affairs, as until then Italian opera had been the only fashionable form of musical entertainment. Opera in German was rather looked down upon and Wagner’s genius was as yet too imperfectly known or recognized to exercise much influence on the opera-going folks of that time.
My father was to receive a salary of ten thousand dollars, for which he was to act as manager and also as musical conductor of the season. The salary was certainly not large, even for those days, but my father was glad to get it and at the same time to carry out the dream of his life, the introduction of the Wagner music-dramas to America, and to sweep away forever the artificial and shallow operas of the old Italian school with which Mapleson, Max Strakosh, and others had until then principally fed our public.
He sailed for Europe in May and returned in August with all his contracts made, including Madame Materna, to whom he had to pay a thousand dollars a night, as she had gotten wind of the dictum of the Metropolitan Opera House directors that under all circumstances she must be one of the company.
Among the singers were Marianne Brandt, one of the greatest dramatic mezzo-sopranos and contraltos of our times, and Anton Schott, a typical German “heroic tenor,” with whom Bülow had had his famous altercation at Hanover a few years before at a “Lohengrin” performance. Schott had sung _Lohengrin’s_ “Farewell to the Swan” out of tune and this had so irritated Bülow, who was conducting, that he turned on the unfortunate tenor and said to him: “You are not a Knight of the Swan, but a Knight of the Swine.” Schott, as an ex-officer in a Hanoverian regiment, deemed his honor as an officer insulted, demanded an apology or a duel, and as the irate von Bülow would grant him neither the one nor the other, Bülow had to resign his post as director of the Royal Opera, while Schott remained triumphant in his position.
For the youthful lyric soprano rôles my father had engaged Madame Seidl-Kraus, the wife of Anton Seidl and possessor of a voice of great purity and simple appeal. The coloratura rôles were sung by Madame Schroeder-Hanfstangel, a truly great artist, with the real _bel canto_ of the Italian school, whom Gounod had admired so greatly that he invited her to Paris to sing _Marguerite_ in “Faust” at the Grand Opera.
The other singers possessed both the virtues and the failings of the German Opera School of that time. They were very amenable to ensemble work, carrying out the dramatic side of their rôles with real ability, forming an excellent ensemble, and tireless in rehearsing, but their singing was sometimes faulty and not equal to the naturally beautiful tone emission of the best Italian singers.
The stage-manager, Wilhelm Hock, was one of the best in Germany and his management of the movements of great crowds on the stage, as for instance in “Lohengrin” on the arrival of _Lohengrin_ and the _Swan_, the building of the barricades in “Massaniello,” the Coronation Scene in Meyerbeer’s “Le Prophète,” was a revelation to our public. The orchestra was, of course, that of the New York Symphony Society, and my father infused the entire ensemble with such an ideal of perfection that during many of the performances, especially in “Lohengrin,” “Le Prophète,” “Fidelio,” and “Walküre,” the public seethed with excitement and enthusiasm. There had been an “improvised” performance of “Walküre” at the Academy of Music under the German conductor Neuendorf a few years before. The _Brunhilde_ had been sung by Madame Pappenheim, possessor of a glorious voice, but the rest of the cast had been woefully deficient. Insufficient rehearsals and ignorance of the music of Wagner on the part of the conductor had also prevented this performance from making any impression or giving any real idea of the beauties of the work.
The performance under my father included Madame Materna as _Brunhilde_, who had created the rôle in Bayreuth in ’76 and who was then at the very height of her glorious vocal powers; Madame Seidl-Kraus, an exquisite and pathetic _Sieglinde_; Anton Schott, a vigorous and highly dramatic _Siegmund_; and Staudigl as _Wotan_. Staudigl was a son of the famous old Viennese bass with whom he had studied, singing with such good results that he made as fine an impression in concert and oratorio as in opera. The first barytone was Adolf Robinson, who had begun his career with my father in Breslau and whose warm impassioned _bel canto_ won instant recognition here.
There was no professional opera claque at the Metropolitan in those days such as is now maintained by some of the singers and conductors who, in rivalry with each other, foolishly spend their money in the hiring of twenty to fifty husky men, under a well-trained leader, who stand at the side of the balconies and family circle and clap with the machine-like regularity of a steel hammer in an iron foundry in order to produce so and so many recalls after an act. In those days this was not necessary. The public applauded wildly and shouted themselves hoarse of their own free will, and the papers almost unanimously pronounced the performances an artistic revolution, and said that such dramatic truth and ensemble work had but seldom before been presented in such a convincing way on the operatic stage of New York.
During the entire winter I lived in a sea of excitement and of joy at seeing my father’s genius at last so universally recognized. But my anxiety was also very great. I was with him constantly, from morning until night, and could see that the labor of carrying everything entirely on his shoulders, the effort of organizing an artistic whole out of the many different elements, was overwhelming. The rehearsals often lasted all day and I do not think that I missed a rehearsal or a performance during the entire season. Sometimes I would timidly implore my father to put some of the work, especially the managerial part, on other shoulders, but he would not listen, saying that the responsibility was his and that he could not delegate what he conceived to be his solemn duty as one representing German art in a foreign country to any one else.