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Musical Courier 1892-05-11: Vol 24 Iss 638, 1892
55 lines. Read by computer on 19 September 2026. Printed page 5. See the scan on archive.org.
1The Musical Courier.
2PUBLISHED EVERY WEDNESDAY
3—BY THE—
4MUSICAL COURIER COMPANY,
5(INCORPORATED)
619 Union Square W., New York.
7ESTABLISHED JANUARY, 1880.
8No. 638.
9EDITORS:
10MARC A. BLUMENBERG. OTTO FLOERSHEIM.
11JAMES G. HUNEKER. HARRY O. BROWN.
12BUSINESS DEPARTMENT:
13SPENCER T. DRIGGS. R. S. MAXWELL.
14A. T. KING. FRANK M. STEVENS.
15WESTERN OFFICE: Chicago, 233 State St., John E. Hall, Manager.
16BOSTON OFFICE: 157 Tremont St., John E. Pinkham, Manager.
17BERLIN, GERMANY: PHILIPP ROTH, 8ta Lützow St.
18LEIPSIC, GERMANY: GEORGE HUG, Königstrasse 16.
19LONDON AND PARIS: BRENTANO'S.
20Subscription (including postage) invariably in advance.
21Yearly, $4.00; Foreign, $5.00; Single Copies, Ten Cents.
22RATES FOR ADVERTISING.
23PER INCH.
24Three Months………….$20.00 Nine Months………….$60.00
25Six Months……………..40.00 Twelve Months…………80.00
26Advertisements for the current week must be handed in by 5 P. M. on Monday.
27All remittances for subscriptions or advertising must be made by check draft, or money orders, payable to the MUSICAL COURIER COMPANY.
28American News Company, New York, General Distributing Agents.
29NEW YORK, WEDNESDAY, MAY 11, 1892.
30MR. SEIDL'S article in the "Forum" for May has provoked any amount of hostile criticism. Its estimate of American musical culture is based on the writer's personal experience, and as Mr. Seidl is not given to much useless parleying it should be read with care and understandingly.
31MR. RAFAEL JOSEFFY, a pianist of renown, who believes in hiding his technic under the bushel of modesty, was in the city last week. With pleasure one learns that next season he will be to the fore, and as he has been studying hard for the past two years interest of an unusual degree is already awakened at his re-entrance into the concert hall. At his first orchestral concert Mr. Joseffy will play Martucci's difficult B flat minor concerto and probably Sinding's concerto.
32THIS paragraph is taken from the "Vocalist" for May:
33Do musicians notice the constant improvement in THE MUSICAL COURIER? No musical journal is more entertaining nor has any other journal at the present time so much of general information in it. Appreciate the enormous labor and cost which is put into every issue and help meet that by subscribing the small amount each year which secures the journal regularly.
34THE MUSICAL COURIER can return the compliment most heartily, for the "Vocalist," of which Mr. Frank Herbert Tubbs is the editor, furnishes most interesting reading monthly for singers and students of vocalism.
35LAST Sunday's "World" thinks that no significance should be attached to the engagement of Mr. Anton Seidl at the Metropolitan Opera House next season. One must differ with Mr. De Koven on this point, for there is this much significant in the matter, and that is Messrs. Abbey & Grau know full well they cannot give an uninterrupted series of "Faust" performances and are preparing for the change which must come ere long. "Wagner on the wane!" The return wave of Wagnerian music will fairly overwhelm all petty obstacles, and there are signs now which may be interpreted in that fashion by the far seeing. Anton Seidl will, it is said, conduct a series of Sunday night winter concerts at the Metropolitan Opera House. "Tristan and Isolde," "Meistersinger," "Lohengrin," "Tannhäuser," "Flying Dutchman," "Rienzi," "Wal-küre" and "Siegfried" are promised us. The De Reszkes and Lassalle are excellent artists. Look out for that wave!
36IN all the sickening rot of so-called comic operas Reginald De Koven's charming opera "Robin Hood" shines like a work of the first rank. Clean and clever in story—(Harry Smith is the librettist) its music is sparkling, merry and well written. It opens at the Garden Theatre next Monday evening and the fact that the "Bostonians" present it is a guarantee of some excellent singing. Mr. De Koven is a capital musician whose music is unpretentious and precisely adapted to the subject. He was a pupil of Delibes and Genée and his touch is light and his orchestration dainty. During the past season Mr. De Koven was the music critic of the New York "World."
37THE shrewdness and diplomacy of Dr. Ziegfeld, of Chicago, were never better illustrated than in his enterprise of organizing the International Amusement Company, which is to give concerts and other musical performances at the First Regiment Armory, Chicago, that is to be known as the Trocadero. Dr. Ziegfeld, who is the president of the organization, is now in Europe, after having last summer secured options on most of the strongest musical attractions now to be found on the Continent. Mr. Geo. H. Wilson, the secretary of the music department of the world's fair, who has gone in pursuit of the very same attractions for world's fair purposes, will find that nearly all of the best have been secured by Dr. Ziegfeld, who will thus have an enormous advantage over the world's fair musical events.
38FROM time to time appear new systems of musical notation which live their brief hour and then disappear forever. The latest was set forth in last Sunday's "Herald," and is the production of a young lady. "Music," said the inventor of this system, "is a thing not invented; it is a living sense, and was from all time. It is part of the human life; lives in the smallest crevice of nature, and has no perfect exponent save in the mingling of human voices or in the mysterious harmonies of forest cadences. When we intelligently recognize its trinity (the triad) and the mystical seventh tone, and its relation to melodic and harmonic structure, then it is like the finding of some rare form wherein the first few stanzas in perfect consonance fascinate in lucid vein the reader's intelligence, while line by line is gradually grasped the unfolding sense of the whole."
39The philosophy of the discovery is the reading of music should be the primary and not the secondary stage in the student's career. The system hinted at seem at first blush about as intelligible as Sanskrit to a Patagonian, but that may be because of it not being fully set forth. The writer speaks thus of Paderewski:
40Paderewski affects me like a fine painting. He is natural. He does not pose, but sits down to interpret the language of the tone poets and forgets all about his audience. There is a sympathetic tie between great geniuses of one mind, and—to speak theosophically—Paderewski has caught or embodied the "ego" of Chopin. If he plays or writes in a minor key he preserves the lavender or violet hue which that key suggests from beginning to end—his sarabande in B minor, for instance, and his minuet in G are written in what I call an amber key.
41THE "Evening Sun" has recently been urging the introduction of singing in colleges purely as a functional gymnastic. Singing has already been adopted into the drill both of the French and German armies, its primary object being to give the soldiers "wind." While this is not tickling to one's aesthetic ideas, it is sound common sense. The "Evening Sun" says in regard to college music:
42Singing should be viewed in its respiratory aspect and its influence in developing and imparting vigor directly to that part of the human system. The consequences to the system as a whole which flow naturally as the effects of such a change in the respiratory function are familiar to those who possess even a rudimentary acquaintance with physiology.
43But the exercise of singing exerts more than a single influence. It may also be examined as music. The physiologic effects of music merely as such have undergone experimental investigation. Among these effects are found to be an increased rate in the pulse beats. Now, nutrition is effected by blood supply, and hence a physiological property in music is established.
44More than this, Mr. Rambois has maintained as a result of systematic observation that different kinds of music affect the nervous system in distinct modes. His classification is (1) music which acts specially on the intelligence and motor nerves; (2) that which acts specially on the nerves of sensibility and on the sentiments; (3) that which acts all at once upon the motor nerves and on the sensory—that is, on the intelligence and the sentiments. Now, unless this classification is purely fanciful it should follow that appropriate music ought to prove sedative to persons in a state of irritation from overworked nerves, and to those classes as hysterical. That music can in fact act in this way is agreeable to common experience.
45Advertising now to woman's colleges it is allowed that the one risk they are under a special obligation to avert is nervous deterioration in the pupil. So successfully have they in general done this that it is considered as proved that the tendency of a college course is favorable to the physical strength of women. But there are colleges and colleges. In the great majority the stimulus of music is never wholly absent, while the physical exercise of singing is an optional and usual though not a required part of the curriculum.
46Now, the question of nerve deterioration is one of balance between the consumption of energy imposed by study and the supply in the form of nutrition. The last we have seen is directly stimulated by music as such through its action upon the heart, while the act of singing co-operates by invigorating respiratory action. This combination of the two aspects of vocal music exhibit it as an ideal element in woman's physical training. And yet, as has been pointed out in these columns, college education exists whose demands on the student's time is such that the possibility of vocal exercise is actually excluded.
47THE "Evening Post" of last Saturday approvingly quotes the "North American" on the subject of Patti, the peripatetic gobbler of American bank notes and perennial warbler of homes and flowers:
48The Philadelphia "North American" had an article the other day entitled "The Passing of Patti," in which the fact that there were many empty seats at her last concert in that city is thus commented upon: "It means that after having retained her hold upon the public with remarkable tenacity during an extraordinarily protracted period Mrs. Patti has at last, to use a phrase more expressive than classical, begun to 'lose her grip.' Her spell has been broken, and it is safe to predict that hereafter her decline, not so much as an artist—for in any true and noble sense she has never been that—but as a money getter, will be steady, rapid and irrecoverable.
49"If Patti were a different kind of woman than she is," the "North American" continues, "and if her career had been other than it has been, these signs of a waning popularity would be the occasion of regret. As a singer—and she has never been anything more than a singer—she is not even now much below her best. But the trouble is that she has never done anything to elicit the sympathy, to win the affection, or to command the respect either of the musical world or of the public generally. She has used her incomparable gifts exclusively for the purposes of gain. She has employed her talents solely for her own personal and selfish gratification, and of anything like enthusiastic and disinterested devotion to the art which, in spite of all, she adored, she has never shown a trace. No one ever heard of her raising a hand to promote the interest either of music or of the musician. 'I hold,' says Bacon, 'every man a debtor to his profession; from the which as men, of course, do seek to receive countenance and profit, so ought they of duty to endeavor themselves by way of amends to be a help and ornament thereunto.' No such sentiment as that ever found a lodgment in Patti's breast."
50Patti was to have appeared one evening at the Actors' Fund Fair, to aid that most worthy cause. Did she do so? Not on your saccharine existence, as potent slang hath it. She was busy clipping coupons and capillary appearances on the nose of her new Mexican hairless pup. Patti has had her day.
51WHAT was first viewed suspiciously as a "fake" dispatch has since been substantiated by the San Francisco journals. Mr. S. G. Fleishman, a talented young composer and pianist, a pupil of Urban and Moszkowski, in Berlin, for nine years, was attacked with stage fright the night of his recital in San Francisco, disappeared mysteriously and was later found in the cellar of his home playing the flute and utterly demented. He is, according to later accounts, improving, but the shock was a severe one. While in this city last season Mr. Fleishman made a most favorable impression personally, and his symphonic poem "Hero and Leander," played by Mr. Seidl at Lenox Lyceum, proved to be the work of a talented and promising composer. He frequently expressed a dread of appearing before an audience and the sad sequel proved that his fears were not baseless. For such sensitive natures as Mr. Fleishman's there is but one course to pursue, no matter how often urged to play by zealous, well meaning, but bad advisers, to sternly refuse to appear in public. The following by W. W. Cobbet, in the London "Musical News," is very apposite:
52How much delicious music is lost to the world through nervousness! How much of a musician's intimate feelings remain unexpressed, their existence quite unsuspected by that grim ogre, the public! A writer, a composer or a painter can work in the seclusion of his chamber with the knowledge that all his most subtle qualities will appear in his work. Not so an executive musician, except he be one of the happy ones whose faculties are stimulated to the highest by the presence of an audience. Follow him into the artists' room; he waits his turn nervously, his hands are cold and clammy, he passes on to the platform and is dimly conscious that he is but a diluted edition of his usual self (the masculine pronoun must be taken to include the feminine). During the performance he seems to be listening to himself as in a dream, and to the dreamself easy passages seem difficult and difficult ones unplayable.
53As to the sentiment of the music there is not much to be expected from one who is relieved if he has played the mere notes correctly, and is possessed of one feeling alone—a burning desire to escape from the platform. This is not an overdrawn picture. What wonder if many give up their career in despair, leave off practicing and retire into private life. One of Mrs. Schumann's best pupils has done this. Advice, being cheap, is plentifully offered to the nervous one. "Take a glass of wine before going on." This may help some, but more frequently it makes bad worse. "Forget the audience." "Half the audience does not understand music, and since no one individually would make you nervous, why should they collectively do so?" Connu! The performer has told himself the same story many a time. No, it is like seasickness, and there is no cure for it.
54Even great artists who have been free from it in their youth find it gain upon them in later years. Joachim showed signs of extreme nervousness at the last Birmingham Festival; Sims Reeves has been a great sufferer that way; but such artists are exceptional, having a reserve of force denied to ordinary men, and, of course, greater experience. Besides which, no real artist is entirely free from nervousness; there is, indeed, a suspicion of impudence about those who are, and we may say among the flowers
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