Scan 12
Musical Courier 1891-12-16: Vol 23 Iss 617, 1891
111 lines. Read by computer on 19 September 2026, twice; the two readings disagreed in places. Printed page 709. See the scan on archive.org.
1was one of stateliness without the slightest dragging. The woodwind did some admirable work in this number.
3The soloist was Mr. Alwin Schroeder, late first violincelist of the Leipzig Gewandhaus orchestra. He fully justified and sustained the great reputation which preceded him by playing the Volkman A minor 'cello concerto in a most artistic and musicianly manner. Although commending the technic of his instrument to a degree of virtuosity, he never displays it as such, but, like the true artist he is, uses it as a means to an end. Mr. Schroeder was warmly applauded, not the least so by his own colleagues of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, among whom a praiseworthy esprit de corps seems to prevail.
5THE RACONTEUR.
7"And the noise in the pool at noon excels my piano."
8—Emily Dickinson.
10"The wretched tinkler called a piano, which tries at the whole orchestra and murders every instrument in the attempt, is like our modern civilization—a tuning and a diminishing of individuals for an insipid harmony."—George Meredith.
12THE first very Walt Whitman-ish sentence is from Emily Dickinson's letters to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, and it keys exactly my present mood, which is not, gentle reader, cynical indifference to music—that mood, praised be Apollo, has gone forever—but rather a groping after a music more spiritual than is made on the piano, a putting forth imaginative tentacles to feel, taste, touch an art that I fear exists only in the shadowy recesses of my inner consciousness. And yet that same consciousness gives a premonitory quiver when it encounters a rhythmical nature such as Emily Dickinson, who had a delicacy of expression like Chopin's—she was a New England Chopin—a Chopin living in the bleak soul—unfavorable conditions of the Yankee atmosphere, and her soul, timidly ardent and coy in color, repressed itself within the bounds of a few shyly passionate phrases that are as fragmentary as Sappho's, but nearly as precious. How unlike Marie Bashkirtseff's morbid vanity is the following bit of fluent inquiry:
14I'm nobody! Who are you?
15Are you nobody, too?
16Then there's a pair of us—don't tell!
17They'd banish us, you know.
18How dreary to be somebody!
19How public, like a frog,
20To tell your name the livelong day
21To an admiring bog!
23Indeed there are times when I sicken of all the garish glitter of the virtuoso life, and wonder how a sane being can go on a platform before gaping hundreds and lay bare his soul as he never could in speech—expose his weaknesses, his moral shallowness, his effeminacy, or his harsh brutality. All those things I hear, and am perhaps morbid myself for a critic who listens with his psychological ear sharpened, grows abnormally keen, and hears often what the virtuoso would rather have left unsaid. Is the rushing torrent, the impetuous tumbling cascade, the only beautiful side to nature? Those inviting drip haunted pools where one's heart uncloses and lets that other self—that soul doppelgänger—out to breathe in the open and to say, "Here I am—look at me; I'm looking at you; come, let us know each other better." Is not such a place also beautiful and soothing? Chopin wrote stormy etudes and polonaises, but he bared his heart more in his nocturnes and preludes, so I beg of you a truce from the concert room with people huddled together like sheep, watching a man or woman trying to skeletonize their inner natures. It may be art, but it is very sad nevertheless. Or perhaps it is the over subtilizing of expression and the departure from healthy ideal that makes me feel the morbidity of all this, and yet as I write those words, "healthy ideals," I think of roast beef or Alfred Grünfeld. I fancy after all I prefer morbidity, diseased chords of the thirty-ninth and Vladimir de Pachmann to healthy C major piano players and Kalkbrenner rondos.
25I met Pachmann the other night and he performed on himself a genuine Pachmann recital for an hour. What is the difference whether a man talks or plays? Pachmann is a virtuoso even when he drinks Würzburger beer (though without vanity my doppelgriffen technic in Würzburger is better than Vlad's) and the man is as funny as a jabberwock with whiskers. In company with many others at Chicker- ing Hall last week I enjoyed the spectacle of the little imp vigorously applauding after the Volkman 'cello concerto. "Bravo l'orchestre!" called out Vlad, for the accompaniment was beautifully played. He does not admire personally Arthur Nikisch, and he took this extremely subtle manner of showing it. The orchestra appreciated it anyhow. I can't exactly remember the details of the story, but it happened in Baltimore at Mr. Knabe's house. Mr. Nikisch made a remark to the effect that "a little more pepper and salt" would improve Mr. de Pachmann's playing. Mr. de Pachmann suggested in a roundabout way that Mr. Nikisch's terpsichorean abilities would shine to better advantage in the ballroom than before, the conductor's stand—all of which was very unkind and unladlike. I am going to christen De Pachmann the "Klavierfee" or, anglic, the "fairy of the piano," for he has a gossamer personality which, with his diaphanous intellect, gives the man a zephyr-ish coloring (not on his beard, however), which renders him quite unique. I know that he is unique when he sits down to play the Chopin etudes and mazurkas. one of two readings
26I met Pachmann the other night and he performed on himself a genuine Pachmann recital for an hour. What is the difference whether a man talks or plays? Pachmann is a virtuoso even when he drinks Würzburger beer (though without vanity my doppelgriffen technic in Würzburger is better than Vlad's) and the man is as funny as a jabberwock with whiskers. In company with many others at Chicker- ing Hall last week I enjoyed the spectacle of the little imp vigorously applauding after the Volkman 'cello concerto. "Bravo l'orchestre!" called out Vlad, for the accompaniment was beautifully played. He does not admire personally Arthur Nikisch, and he took this extremely subtle manner of showing it. The orchestra appreciated it anyhow. I can't exactly remember the details of the story, but it happened in Baltimore at Mr. Knabe's house. Mr. Nikisch made a remark to the effect that "a little more pepper and salt" would improve Mr. de Pachmann's playing. Mr. de Pachmann suggested in a roundabout way that Mr. Nikisch's terpsichorean abilities would shine to better advantage in the ballroom than before, the conductor's stand—all of which was very unkind and unladlike. I am going to christen De Pachmann the "Klavierfee" or, anglic, the "fairy of the piano," for he has a gossamer personality which, with his diaphanous intellect, gives the man a zephyrish coloring (not on his beard, however), which renders him quite unique. I know that he is unique when he sits down to play the Chopin etudes and mazurkas. one of two readings
28A funny story indeed I heard about him the other night. He saw an advertisement in the newspapers of a lady who offered to give piano lessons for 25 cents. Mr. de Pachmann, virtuoso, became Mr. Nobody, an anxious pupil, and visited the low priced teacher and took a lesson. It must have been a funny sight to see the little man with feigned stiff fingers learning a Chopin valse. "You have been taught very badly," said the teacher severely. "I know it," meekly said Pachmann, "but I began too late." Then he paid his quarter and gave the teacher his card. It may have meant nothing to her after all. What surprises me is how he could control himself so long. How that teacher would have been surprised if he had given his little Muscovite yell and dashed off into the D flat valse in double thirds and sixths!
30I was delighted at W. W. Story's, the poet sculptor, defense of versatility in artists. It is called "A Contemporary Criticism," in which one of the characters attacks Raffaelle for his many sidedness:
32Then why, too, will he try so many things?
33Instead of sticking to one single art,
34He must be studying music, twanging strings
35And writing sonnets, with their "heart and dart."
36Lately he's setting up for architect
37And planning palaces; and, as I learn,
38Has made a statue—every art in turn,
39Like Leonardo (and you recollect,
40How with his many arts even he was wrecked),
41But if he failed, what can this youth expect?
42But, later, this he says:
43Yet it seems to me
44All arts are one—all branches on one tree;
45All fingers, as it were, upon one hand.
46You ask me to be thumb alone, but pray,
48Reft of the answering fingers nature planned,
49Is not the hand deformed for work or play?
50Or rather take, to illustrate my thought,
51Music, the only art to science wrought,
52The ideal art that underlies the whole,
53Interprets all, and is of all the soul.
54Each art is, so to speak, a separate tone;
55The perfect chord results from all in one.
56Strike one, and as its last vibrations die,
57Listen—from all the other tones a cry
58Wails forth, half longing and half prophecy.
59So does the complement, the hint, the germ
60Of every art within the other lie,
61And in their inner essence all unite;
62For what is melody but fluid form,
63Or form but fixed and stationed melody?
64Colors are but the silent chords of light,
65Touched by the painter into tone and key
66And harmonized in every changeful hue.
67So colors live in sound—the trumpet blows
68Its scarlet and the flute its tender blue;
69The perfect statue, in its pale repose,
70Has for the soul a melody divine,
71That lingers, dreaming, round each subtle line,
72And stills the gazer, lest its charm he lose.
73So rhythmic words, strung by the poet, own
74Music and form and color—every sense
75Rhymes with the rest; 'tis in the means alone
76The various arts receive their difference.
78Life is too short perfection to attain,
79We all are maimed; and do the best we can
80Each trade deforms us with the overstrain
81Of some too favored faculty or sense,
82O'er fostered at the other's vast expense.
84Yet why should one art be the other's bane?
85The perfect artist should be perfect man.
86Oh! let at least our theory be grand,
87To make a whole man, not to train a hand;
88Rearing our temple, let it be our pride
89Nought to neglect, but build with patient care
90A perfect temple, finished everywhere,
91And not a mere façade with one good side.
93But please remember of the famous names
94Who is there hath confined him to one art?
95Giotto, Da Vinci or Orcagna. No;
96Or our great living master, Angelo—
97These are whole men, whose rounded knowledge shames
98Our narrow study of a single part;
99Not merely painters, dwarfed in all their aims,
100But men who painted, builded, carved and wrote
101Whole diapasons—not a separate note.
103Oh, what a noble championing of catholicity of culture! And how many times will I have to entreat, beg and cry out at the dull narrowness of musicians' lives—the want of intellectual sympathy and everlasting technical routine? Cui bono, the trombone meets me on the street. I say, "Wie gehts." He, "So, la la," and he passes on reading the "Bierblatt," and so it goes.
105"Man has lost his dignity, but art has saved it and preserved it for him in expressive marbles. Truth still lives in fiction, and from the copy the original will be restored," says Schiller, but I despair of even a Schiller driving idealism into the average musician. "Milton," said Charles Lamb, "almost requires a solemn service of music to be played before you enter upon him. But he brings his music, to which who listens had need bring docile thoughts and purged ears." But what kind of minds do most musicians bring to the performance of the music of such kindred geniuses as Beethoven and Bach? Alas! candor compels me to say that pinocle and gossip is the medium through which we hear much of the classics. If I keep on I'll have the whole Aschenbroedel Verein after me soon, so I'll change the subject.
107I struck the following nugget in the Emerson lode recently:
108"People are always talking about originality; but what do they mean? As soon as we are born the world begins to work upon us; and this goes on to the end. And after all, what can we call our own except energy, strength and will?"
110Bear this in mind, ye fanatics who search continually for resemblance among the themes of the great composers. Treatment, my children, is everything. You all remember what Gustav Flaubert said on that head? Suppose twenty composers orchestrate the C major common chord,
The computer misreads some letters and numbers. Where a name matters to you, read the scan.