Scan 6
Musical Courier 1894-03-14: Vol 28 Iss 731, 1894
74 lines. Read by computer on 19 September 2026, twice; the two readings disagreed in places. Printed page 7. See the scan on archive.org.
1The Musical Courier.
2PUBLISHED EVERY WEDNESDAY
3—BY THE—
4MUSICAL COURIER COMPANY.
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40ESTABLISHED JANUARY, 1880.
41NO. 731.
42NEW YORK, WEDNESDAY, MARCH 14, 1894.
43THE MUSICAL COURIER is on sale at all newsstands throughout the United States where weekly papers are handled. It will be esteemed a favor if anyone failing to find the current issue on sale at any point will communicate with this office. A postal card complaint will cause the defect to be immediately remedied.
44THE celebrated pianist, Emil Sauer, who during his tour in the East went as far as Sophia, was the recipient there of the highest ovations. Both of his concerts were very successful, and the Prince and Court attended. He was invited also to a court concert at the Palace, at which each of his pieces was encored. To honor Sauer Prince Ferdinand gave him the medal for Art and Science, and created the post of Chamber Virtuoso. He was also elected unanimously honorary member of the Musical Society.
45WAGNERIANA.
46IN the London "Musical Times" Mr. de Ternant and Mr. W. Ashton Ellis are still searching for the "fair young lady with spectacles," who possesses the score and parts of Wagner's "Columbus" overture. But she has not as yet materialized. Mr. Ellis quotes one of the contemporary criticisms of the "Columbus" overture. After its performance at Riga (circa 1838) H. Dorn reported: "One cannot call the conception and working out of this overture anything other than truly Beethovenian. Grand and beautiful thoughts, daring rhythmic figures, the melody less prominent, the working out broad and purposely arranged in massive phrases; on the other hand, the externals modern in the extreme, well nigh Bellinian, as will be seen at once when I merely mention the naked fact that in the 'Columbus' two valve trum-pets are employed, and their united parts fill fourteen and a half closely written pages."
47He concludes by stating that the "Bayreuther Taschen-Kalender": for 1894 gives particulars of Wagner's op. 5. This consists of "seven compositions for Goethe's 'Faust,' written at Leipsic, 1832. These compositions rest among the 'Wahnfried' archives, and there is no present intention of publishing them. one of two readings
48He concludes by stating that the "Bayreuther Taschen-Kalender": for 1894 gives particulars of Wagner's op. 5. This consists of "seven compositions for Goethe's 'Faust,' " written at Leipsic, 1832. These compositions rest among the "Wahnfried" archives, and there is no present intention of publishing them. one of two readings
49He also quotes from the forthcoming new edition of Glasenapp's "Life of Richard Wagner" a story of the composer's endeavors to recover the only existing musical fragment of his destroyed and discarded opera, "Die Hochzeit." It consisted of thirty-six folio pages, but the music seller, who had somehow or other come into possession of this curio, demanded no less a sum than 5,000 marks. Wagner declined to submit to such extortion, and brought an action to recover possession of his property, the result of which was that he had to pay $150 in costs and go without his manuscript!
50WE ARE REPROVED.
51UNDER the caption of "Some Modern Phases of Musical Art," the London "Musical Standard" administers us a gentle reproof for the rather pessimistic view we recently took of modern art. In a short but well considered article, which we reprint below, the "Musical Standard" presently indulges in the vein pessimistic. But let us see what our worthy English contemporary really has to say:
52A wail has reached us from across the Atlantic. A writer in a New York contemporary has worked himself into such a state of nervous depression that almost all the works of modern composers seem to him but as Dead Sea fruit, and nowhere is there to be seen a gleam of hope. The world is played out; art is decadent; the hand of coming intellectual death has paralyzed, where it has not already turned cold, the brain of artists. Nowhere shall you find healthiness in literature or painting or music; everywhere morbid pessimism hovers over us like a plague cloud, and poisons all the natural and healthy springs of human endeavor. We have heard this cry before, this prophecy of modern Solomon Eagle's, and yet somehow or other the world rolls along, and among other things the divine art does not seem so threadbare, so palsied by old age as some would have us believe.
53If, however, you ask, Where now is your Beethoven? Where your Wagner? it is difficult to say with any certainty. Brahms we have and he is great, but not his most ardent admirers, and we would be reckoned among them, would care to put him forward as a candidate for a niche in the most honored place in the Temple of Fame; we cannot make him a pendant to Beethoven. And then certainly we have not our modern Wagner, which is just as well, perhaps, for the peace of the world; but though, as regards genius, we have plenty of room for new men, the world is not altogether in so bad a plight musically as our American prophet would have us think. A great deal of meritorious, healthy work is annually being turned out, and perhaps, though it may seem paradoxical, the trend of musical taste is better gauged by the works of mediocrities than by the exceptional works of exceptional men, for these are always in advance of their time and seldom reflect its tendencies in the matter of art.
54Having allowed this, we may be permitted to indulge in a small dose of that insidious drug, pessimism. It does not say much for the musical culture of the world, and by culture we do not mean pedantry nor an academic spirit that brooks not the claim of inspiration, that the immature, crude and, musically speaking, brutal works of the modern Italian school should have obtained so firm a hold on the suffrages of the world. They are, so far as we have had an opportunity of judging, the essence of melodramatic music, sincere, perhaps, more often only startling, all of them gaudy, and none of them marked by the beauty of poetic feeling and rare skillfulness of musical treatment which we have a right to expect in compositions which pretend to be works of art.
55They have succeeded because of the directness of their plots and because of a sufficiency of that melody which the plain man can carry away with the program of the entertainment. They deal with what are called realistic phases of life, that is to say, they deal not with anything higher than the struggle of life and its inherent tragedy in an ideal form as possible. Jealousy, murder and sensual love—these are the motives of their plots, and is it to be expected that music, the most ideal and abstract of all the arts, can be otherwise than besmirched by being yoked to such companions? In contemplating this phase of modern musical art pessimism is permissible, if not compulsory.
56This tendency to take pleasure in the portrayal of the more brutal emotions of man, or rather in the portrayal of the elemental passions of mankind without any of the accompanying mental tragedy being shown, is according to some a result of our over civilization, but, in our opinion, is more traceable to the reaction from the insipid romanticism of the first half of this century. The pendulum will swing back again, and we shall doubtless enter a more romantic and poetic phase of art, which, however, will have been made distinctly stronger by having gone through the mud-bath of realism.
57In the meantime we have to deplore the absence of modern music dramas written in what Matthew Arnold called the "grand style," and this is due not so much to the composers as to the public, that likes the plots of its operas to be "palpitating with actuality." It stands to reason that you cannot give full play to the powers and beauties of music if you ally it to such a story as that which Mascagni has musically illustrated in his "Cavalleria Rusticana;" for in the plot of that opera, with its incessant movement, there is no room for the reflective poetry in the interpretation of which music finds her truest level; the emotions are treated only in their baldest phases, in their most elementary sensuality; the poetry of that ideal form of passion that is one with intellect is entirely absent; and, instead of a love drama on the plane of "Tristan und Isolde," in which the very ordinary passion of love is idealized by reason of its self-sacrificing nature and intenseness, such as the salt of the earth alone can feel, we get the apotheosis of the crude dramas of the police court. Until the public turns from superficial realism and hearkens to poetry, music must follow the fashion and become the handmaiden of the coarser and lower phases of human emotion. Apart from the tendencies of music drama of the day the art is certainly healthy enough, and active enough, if not very inspired, and doubtless the Beethoven and the Wagner and the Mozart of the future will in time become facts.
58LOHENGRIN.
59A SKETCH BY R. LEONCAVALLO.
60DURING Leoncavallo's visit to Berlin to superintend the production of his "I Medici," he wrote a sketch of his first acquaintance with Wagner's works:
61"I was sixteen years old and was at Bologna when I heard the first opera by Wagner.
62"In the Conservatory of Naples, where I received my musical education, we grew up in fear and terror and dread of the horrible man who dared to attempt a revolution in art, and hurl down the gods of yore. But in profound secrecy I had managed to get a score of 'Tannhäuser,' and I read and read it, and was so moved, shaken, inspired by it, that I would have been glad—oh, so glad!—to raise a loud protest against the judgment that my teachers expressed about the genius who overshadowed all others, and indicated to all the new path for art.
63"But I had to keep silent and content myself with taking my part in silence, without being led into any revolt against the authority of my teachers.
64"At last—at last I was free! At last I had in my hands my diploma as 'Maestro:' at last I could think, act, feel according to my own free will and heart!
65"I went to Bologna, to attend the university, under Giosuè Carducci.
66"I had only been a few days in the beautiful, dismal, melancholy city, when as I walked across a square I suddenly stopped and stood rooted to the spot and breathless.
67"A simple play bill did it.
68"Simple for all the world, but not for me; for to me it meant a revelation, the attainment of my dearest wishes, my hopes, my longings—a Wagner opera, 'Lohengrin,' was announced.
69"So at last it was granted to me to hear the music of this Titan and to let it produce its full effect on my spirit, my heart, my soul.
70"One of my friends had taken a box for the evening. With beating heart, indeed emotion, such as I to the best of my recollection never felt again, not even when my own operas were produced, I took my seat by his side. Here I had not long to wait, for from the very first bars, I was, as it were, transported into another world and could see nothing, know nothing, only hear, nothing but hear!
71"I rose from my seat, and to be as far as possible from the crowd of people that filled the theatre I withdrew to the back of the box. Even then I did not turn my eyes to the stage; I gazed out, out into the void.
72"Alone, solitary in a box right opposite to ours, stood a young, beautiful, blond maiden—such a blond as Rubens loved, and such as are peculiar to Venice. Like me, she was standing erect, and, like me, she did not look at the stage, but gazed dreamily into the All, the Nothing.
73"Our eyes met with, to me as it were, an electric shock. A strange magnetic current seemed to flow
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