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Musical Courier 1892-03-02: Vol 24 Iss 628, 1892
78 lines. Read by computer on 19 September 2026. Printed page 5. See the scan on archive.org.
1The Musical Courier.
2PUBLISHED EVERY WEDNESDAY
3BY THE
4MUSICAL COURIER COMPANY,
5(INCORPORATED)
619 Union Square W., New York.
7ESTABLISHED JANUARY, 1880.
8No. 628.
10EDITORS:
11MARC A. BLUMENBERG. OTTO FLOERSHEIM.
12JAMES G. HUNEKER. HARRY O. BROWN.
14BUSINESS DEPARTMENT:
15SPENCER T. DRIGGS. R. S. MAXWELL. A. T. KING.
17WESTERN OFFICE: Chicago, 233 State St., John E. Hall, Manager.
18BOSTON OFFICE: 157 Tremont St., John E. Pinkham, Manager.
19BERLIN, GERMANY: PHILIPP ROTH, 66 Potsdamerstr.
20LEIPZIG, GERMANY: FRITZ SCHUBERT, JR., Lindenstr., 20.
21LONDON AND PARIS: BRENTANO'S.
23Subscription (including postage) invariably in advance.
24Yearly, $4.00; Foreign, $5.00; Single Copies, Ten Cents.
26RATES FOR ADVERTISING.
27PER INCH.
28Three Months………….$20.00 Nine Months………….$60.00
29Six Months……………..40.00 Twelve Months…………80.00
30Advertisements for the current week must be handed in by 5 P.M. on Monday.
31All remittances for subscriptions or advertising must be made by check draft, or money orders, payable to the MUSICAL COURIER COMPANY.
33American News Company, New York, General Distributing Agents.
35NEW YORK, WEDNESDAY, MARCH 2, 1892.
37THE attention of those readers of this paper interested in pianos and piano playing is directed to an article in the trade department of this issue describing a new and recently patented piano keyboard.
39BERLIN will have a new small concert hall by October 1 of this year. It is being built for Manager Herman Wolff on his own property, Linkstrasse 42. The hall will have a seating capacity of 500, and it is quite significant that it will be known to the world as "Bechstein" Hall.
41MASCAGNI has just finished another one act opera entitled "Zanetto." It is said to be an almost exclusively lyric work, and the book is taken from that poetic little drama by Coppée, "Le Passant," which has been brought into fame by Sarah Bernhardt's masterly portrayal of the heroine.
43ATTENTION is called to a very curious and interesting article in the current issue on wonder children of the second half of the last century, written by that indefatigable burrower of rococo music lore, Karl Klauser, of Farmington, Conn. He promises some more of the same sort in the near future.
45IN Mantua recently Gounod's opera "Romeo and Juliet" was unmercifully hissed off the stage. We wonder if this is a case of tit for tat and whether the citizens of Mantua wanted to get even with the Parisians for not taking kindly to "Cavalleria Rusticana." The latter work, by the way, is just being made a chauvinistic casus belli at Trieste, where it was to be performed in German by German artists. To this the Italians and the Italian papers objected, and the "Indipendente" goes so far as to call it a "desecration" of Mascagni's work. The directors of the German opera at Trieste, however, are going to put the work on the stage in German in spite of a really rather lively opposition, and it is thought that the police will be called into requisition on the night of the first performance, as was the case at Paris during the recent "Lohengrin" demonstrations. What nonsense all this seems to people who live in a cosmopolitan city like New York!
47A TIMELY and interesting critical study of Paderewski appears in the March issue of the "Century," by the well-known authority Dr. William Mason. There is also a biographical sketch of the great pianist which is full of new material about his early life. Two portraits accompany these articles.
49EVERY city has its musical curiosities, "cranks," to use a well worn colloquialism. These are the would-be composers, pianists and violinists who harrow the critic and musician's ears with their annual or semi-annual concerts. Only their friends go to these affairs, and applaud; and, of course, the deluded victims of this misplaced applause are more firmly convinced than ever that they are geniuses. Oh, the pity of it all!
51MORITZ ROSENTHAL is evidently waking up to the fact that the pen is mightier even than the piano, or he begins to see the value of free advertising, for he just publishes over his signature a letter to the "Musikalisches Wochenblatt," of Leipzig, in which he handles Heinrich Ehrlich, the Berlin "Tageblatt" music critic, and Hofrat Professor Edward Hanslick, of the Vienna "Neue Freie Presse" with no sparing pen, and with a sarcasm worthy of his friend and former teacher, our incomparable Rafael Joseffy.
53A PRIVATE correspondent of THE MUSICAL COURIER from Berlin informs the paper that at a recent concert in that city Etelka Gerster scored a great artistic success, singing in her former marvelous style; that Max Bruch after attending the recent American concert in Berlin stated that he recognized in Franz Arens a first-class conductor before he had directed fifty measures; that Mr. Vert, of London, had just closed a number of important engagements in Berlin; that Richter will not direct the London opera season, and that Rubinstein will absolutely not come to the United States. He played in Berlin recently as effectively as ever.
55AT Zwickau in Saxony, Robert Schumann's native town, they are battling for a monument to the city's greatest son. They finally have gotten together about 14,000 marks ($3,500), and they are promised a good round sum by an unnamed friend of the cause, if the undertaking proceeds so far that the monument can be unveiled within the next five years. In a recently received circular the committee of the Schumann monument at Zwickau ask for money from all parties who are Schumann admirers and have anything to spare for so worthy a cause. THE MUSICAL COURIER publishes this with the expectation and in the hope that among its many readers there will be some who will respond to the circular.
57AT his recent Berlin concert Anton Rubinstein made use of a novel device for indicating to the frantically applauding public that he was too tired to comply with their clamorings for an encore. He sent out the man who handles the piano (it wasn't Mr. Lohmann!) to close not only the lid of the piano but also to lock up the instrument with a big, plainly visible key before he (Rubinstein) ventured out for the third or fourth time upon the platform in response to the furious applause. It must be stated to the great credit of the Berlin audience that, although they could not but understand this plain hint, their enthusiasm did not abate, and they had Rubinstein out on the podium until he was tired from bowing as well as from piano playing.
59LAROUSSE, of Paris, has just published a "Life of Wagner in Caricatures" ("Wagner en Caricatures," par John Grand-Carteret). In the 130 caricatures, most of which are really amusing, all civilized nations of the globe are represented, and it is interesting to observe what a great rôle Wagner really played in the public life of all peoples, and how he was at first ridiculed absolutely everywhere and then gradually conquered the whole world with his genius. The tastefully gotten up and richly illustrated book is, moreover, agreeable reading and offers a complete but by no means scientific biography of Wagner, a view of the position he held in the estimation of his contemporaries and the battles he had to fight before he arrived at recognition.
61THE Chicago critics have apparently been putting their foot in it again. Paderewski in a recent recital in that city was to have played Bach's G minor fantasia and fugue, at least so the program announced. Instead of that he played the chromatic fantasia and fugue. Several music critics fell into the tonal pitfall unwittingly prepared for them by Paderewski and criticized the great work in D minor as if it were the G minor fantasia and fugue, and some of them remembered that the reading was not so good as at the hands of other artists. Was ist los mit Chicago?
63THE irrepressible Hans von Bülow has again seen fit to snub the Berlin public at one of his recent concerts. He had just started the last movement of the Beethoven D major symphony when some people left the overcrowded hall. The noise caused thereby irritated Von Bülow to such a degree that he stopped the orchestra, turned around toward the public and hurled at the offenders in a snarling tone the words: "Unmusical herd!" This time, we think, Von Bülow's action and the reproof it conveyed were deserved, although the form which he chose was not in good taste and therefore not commendable. Theodore Thomas has been known to do the same thing in a much nicer way, and one remembers Anton Seidl stopping the orchestra in an operatic performance at the Metropolitan Opera House, and literally withering a box party of the 400 with a fierce glance leveled at their box. This is perfectly justifiable in the not infrequent instances in which people display their poor taste and low breeding by disturbing an artistic entertainment.
65FERDINAND DEWEY, the pianist, has this to say about "touch" in a contemporary:
67"Touch," it has been said, "makes the pianist, but touch itself cannot be made." The former of these statements has much of truth to commend it; the latter scarcely more than its semblance, as may be readily seen upon due investigation, for touch is simply the power of producing tone, and is based upon principles that can be demonstrated as completely as those of a mathematical problem. The tone may be beautiful or unbeautiful. If the former, there is required: First, feeling for the beautiful; second, mental judgment; third, the physical means to excite what the feeling conceives and the judgment approves. Of course it is assumed that one possesses some feeling for the beautiful, some mental capacity for judging, some powers of physical motion; so possessing, it is simply a matter of their development by good training, care and perseverance, bestowed not alone upon the hand, but the feeling and thought as well—the former by association with and contemplation of beautiful ideals, the latter by determining their true proportions. This being done, the touch is made. So much for the theoretical. For the practical: Experience as teacher and student has proven beyond a doubt that touch can be taught and acquired just as far as any other quality. In point of fact, with average ability, a good touch can be acquired more easily than a good technic. Both have their limits—technic by the nervous and muscular powers, touch by the emotional and intellectual, but those limits may be extended so long as one possesses good health, youthful feeling and remains willing to receive new thought.
69Yes, touch can be learned, but a made touch is, after all, just like a made voice. It may be correct in all its tonal gradations, but somehow or other it fails to warm one. Perhaps, after all, the "objective" pianist does not wish you to grow warm when he plays, and as a rule you do not, for the so-called "objective" pianist generally has an objective touch, i.e., a made one.
71PADEREWSKI'S PERSONALITY CRITICIZED.
73NEW YORK people were under the impression that Paderewski possessed rather a curious, a fine subtle personality, that his eyes were rather uncommon in expression and that his features were certainly not commonplace, even if they were not distinctly Greek. But the Milwaukee "Sentinel," in its issue of February 21, seems to think that we were all wrong in our judgments, for it prints the following extraordinary editorial:
75A young man without eyes—that is without the fine eyes that are the mark of genius—and a rather commonplace face sits at a piano and thrills even the philistines until they are ashamed. Men who allow themselves to be dragged to recitals where they are Beethoven bored to wretchedness and fugued into unspeakable weariness by pianists of good repute, and who are sometimes made murderous by the senseless sounds that beat against their ear drums, go to pieces emotionally under the playing of this extraordinary shockheaded young man of inexpressive, pale blue eyes—a Pole taken from the Fourteenth Ward and put into a dress suit, as far as appearance goes.
77The philatine, from whose standpoint alone we can write, is disappointed when the first few bars are played; he has come to hear a great pianist and yet this Pole doesn't fling his arms about—not half as wildly as the pestilential pianist who "favors the company" whenever two or three are gathered together to be bored. He doesn't pose. His dress suit doesn't fit. He has no superior smile to indicate a merely amiable tolerance of the applauding herd. But heavens! how he drags the immortal soul out of compositions that have been ground out mechanically by 10,000 pianists. Some day we shall write the confessions of an unmusical person and his experience in a world of unmusical pianists—his sham admiration for Beethoven and Bach, his pretended contempt for tunes, his artificial smile of derision for every piece of music that induces people to applaud. It will be the confessions of an accomplished hypocrite who has the
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