Old Fogy: His Musical Opinions and Grotesques

My friend the publisher has asked me to tell you what I know about Old Fogy, whose letters aroused much curiosity and comment when they appeared from time to time in the columns...

The new century is at hand--I am not one of those chronologically stupid persons who believes that we are now in it--and tottering as I am on its brink, the brink of my grave, a...

As a matter of fact, the critics are not to blame. I have read the expostulations of Mr. Finck about the untilled fields of Chopin. Yet his favorite Paderewski plays season in a...

The big saving, then, in the pianistic curriculum is the dropping of studies, finger and otherwise. To give him his due, Von Bülow--as a pianist strangely inimical to my taste--...

The cement of brilliancy Liszt always contrived to cover his most commonplace compositions with. He wrote etudes _à la_ Chopin; clever, I admit, but for my taste his Opus One, w...

But my agony! The _via dolorosa_ I traversed from my chair to the piano! Since then the modern school of painter-impressionists has come into fashion. I understand perfectly the...

When the wet rain splashed my face as I walked the boulevards on the morning of the examination I was not cast down. I had determined to do or die. With a hundred of my sort, bo...

"His _Manfred_ is a libel on Byron, who was a libel on God." "Byron, too," murmured Jenkins. "Yes, Byron, another blasphemer. The six symphonies are caricatures of the symphonic...

"Let them play the theme of a symphony by Mozart or Haydn, an adagio by Beethoven, a scherzo by Mendelssohn, one of Schumann's or Chopin's compositions for the piano, or again,...

With what burning curiosity the night of the concert was awaited I need not describe, nor of the papers teeming with anecdotes of the venerable virtuoso whose name betrayed his...