Scan 17
Musical Courier 1894-08-29: Vol 29 Iss 755, 1894
85 lines. Read by computer on 21 September 2026. Printed page 18. See the scan on archive.org.
1MUSIC IN BOSTON
3MALPEQUE, P. E. I., August 21, 1894.
5THERE is little music in Malpeque. Perhaps it is out of season, like lobsters and oysters, for which, however, this coast is famous. The Presbyterian church is flourishing, but there is no organ in the building because two white headed pillars of the society object. There is a piano in this farm house, but it serves as a table, and it is covered with lamps, newspapers, books. There is a little pile of sheet music, and I found with pleasure that masterpiece in its way, "Boarding School Life, Its Lights and Shades, a Descriptive Potpourri," by Ch. Grobe, op. 980. Since my arrival here I have not heard the sound of musical instrument or human voice in song. The Bettina, who milks the cows and serves as mascotte to the place, does not indulge herself in carols, ballads or roundelay.
7I regret to say that thus far I have been unable to find any collection of folk-songs with tunes which might provoke the creation of a symphony. Prince Edward Island is not without poets, however. Witness "The Island Minstrel," a collection of some of the poetical writings of John Le Page, formerly third master of the Central Academy. In the second volume there is an acrostic with the title "Abraham Lincoln, President, Assassinated by Booth," and here are the first lines of the opening poem "Licentia Vatium:"
9There is a rumor that the Prince of Wales
10Is just about to leave the English sod,
11Intent while summer in the North prevails
12To see his Mother's Colonies abroad.
14The Raconteur asked me to say something about the club described some time ago in the Boston "Saturday Evening Gazette"—the club made up of decadents and symbolists who read in turn mystical or erotic verses to the music of muted 'cellos and in the yellow light that comes from antique cressets. I can give no information, for I know nothing about the said club. There may be such meetings, attended by rising young Jacobites, daring young publishers, amateurs of rugs and wall paper, but I have never been honored with an invitation, oral, or written on the skin of a virgin blonde. At the same time, as Oscar Wilde once remarked cautiously about the Communists, "God knows I am with them in some things." I certainly am with the members in their protest—that is, if there be such a club—against the fetch of an alleged great name in any art. With them I prefer Chapman's Homer to Bryant's or Derby's. With them I prefer such a poem as "The Haunted Palace" to the complete works of Wordsworth. And to me the life of Heliogabalus, by Aelius Lampridius, is of infinitely greater consequence than is the history of the United States by the late Mr. Bancroft.
16You spoke the other day of Walter Pater. Do you remember his description of Leonardo's "Gioconda"? "She is older than the rocks among which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many times and learned the secrets of the grave; and has been a diver in deep seas and keeps their fallen day about her, and trafficked for strange webs with Eastern merchants, and, as Leda, was the mother of Helen of Troy, and, as Saint Anne, the mother of Mary; and all this has been to her but as the sound of lyres and flutes, and lives only in the delicacy with which it has molded the changing lineaments and tinged the eyelids and the hands."
18SPECIAL ATTRACTION!
19The widest ranged Soprano in the world,
20Miss Ellen Beach YAW,
21Supported by the distinguished artists:
22Mr. MAXIMILIAN DICK, Violinist, and
23Miss GEORGIELLA LAY, Pianiste.
24For engagements write immediately to
25Mr. VICTOR THRANE, Manager,
26148 East 56th St., New York City.
28When you read such prose you understand the sentence of George Moore concerning Pater's "Marius the Epicurean: 'This book was the first in English prose I had come across that procured for me any genuine pleasure in the language itself, in the combination of words for silver or gold chime and unconventional cadence, and for all those lurking half-meanings and that evanescent suggestion, like the odor of dead roses, that words retain to the last of other times and elder usage.'"
30Now here is a singular thing about Moore. When he wrote his delightfully irritating "Confessions of a Young Man," he remembered the phrase of Baudelaire; that a vocabulary is a palette. He revealed in splashes of color, in nerve-exciting or nerve-soothing tints and tones. When he wrote "Esther Waters" he used a dull gray. Adjectives delayed him. Conjunctions seemed superfluous. There was no time to hint, to suggest.
32I have just finished "Le Comique en Musique," by Emmanuel Briard. The book is a volume of 125 pages, published in Nancy, 1884.
34Briard first considers joy and laughter, and then analyses the comic.
36"Vital force produced in excess will manifest itself, not in the interior and in the regular play of the wheel-work of the organization, but in exterior movements—as cries, leaps, gestures, gambols, faces. Laughter is one of these safety valves."
38Then why should not laughter also be a safety-valve for indignation aroused by the stupidity of a comic opera? If there were no laughter in such a case the hearer would possibly break the furniture or tear an usher limb from limb. Surely the laughter heard at many comic operas is the safety-valve for indignation or despair, and the very badness of the work is paradoxically the cause of the apparent popular approval that beats triumphantly upon the drum of the manager's ear.
40Briard investigates the cause of the laughter that follows "the common accident of a person who is skating and falls, legs in air, without serious injury." The fall is well known to all lovers of "American comic opera," and never fails to produce uproarious merriment, whether the victim slips or is knocked down by a fellow comedian. (So, too, the word "damn" or the drinking out of a bottle causes invariably a stray deacon in an audience to beat his sides and snatch a fearful joy.) Whence comes this joy? asks Briard. Not because we see another's misfortune which we dread. Not because the victim escaped without injury. It is because "laughter is a protest against an irregularity, an exception, an anomaly." A man should not appear in the ordinary walks of life with his legs in the air. Therefore there is laughter when he falls. Eleven pages are devoted to the discussion of this problem, and thus the author rambles on, talking of the accidentally comic in music, the accidentally comic in performance, the comic result of the repetition of an accident, the difficulty of judging accurately a foreign work, the sterility of imitation of comic sounds and noises, the intentionally comic in musical ideas, the difficulty of caricature in music, anachronism and exoticism as sources of comic music, the lack of sympathy between railiery and music, the union of poetry and music, the slaughter of the comic by romanticism, the origin of opéra comique and the vaudeville; and not until the 111th page does the author speak of the operetta. It may be thought that Briard, like the Walrus and the Carpenter, speaks of many things, as to whether "pigs have wings;" but he is always entertaining and many of his reflections are shrewd and sane.
42To Briard the opéra comique is a "genre faux, artificial, artistique, caractérisé par l'intervention non justifiée de la musique au milieu d'une comédie." He claims that the first French opéra comique was a comedy by Molière; that it is in reality a comedy in which the music plays a secondary rôle. "Take 'Jean de Paris,' 'Les Diamants de la Couronne;' the chief interest is in the piece, in the subject, which is too interesting to allow the spectator to occupy himself seriously with the music. This music is in short an hors d'oeuvre, and the scenes which they accompany are practically only 'divertissements,' as in the time of Molière." * * * The music seizes the most absurd pretext to intervene brusquely and impertinently. The composer wishes to introduce a cradle-song or a popular tune. He obliges the poet to say to one of his characters: 'And, as my nurse used to say,' or, 'As a song of my country has it,' and the interlocutor changes his thought immediately. 'Let us hear the song of the nurse; let us hear the folk-song!' And the chorus, if there be one, sings with profound conviction, 'Let us hear the song of your country.' * * * I may be serious and a musician, and yet the appearance of a morceau right in the middle of a fine scene bores me to death, distracts me, and I long to say to the composer, 'Hurry up, for I wish to see the rest of the piece.'"
44In speaking of Offenbach, Briard describes him as "a musician of bad taste, if you please, of an inferior rank, but a musician from head to foot, a musician always and first of all, of far greater temperament than Auber and Adam, who may be preferred on account of the genre of their music." After the reign of Offenbach and Hervé there was a banishment of extravagance as well as of fantasy, and a return to sentiment and sense. Leocq thus turned little by little the operetta toward opéra comique, to the great advantage of good taste and perhaps decency, but with a loss of the savory salt, and to the detriment of originality and above all unity. The unheard of success of 'La Fille de Madame Angot' can be explained only by this triumphant return to subjects and tone truly French. * * * As in the old fashioned opéra comique, music in the modern operetta tends to subordination of self to the libretto; it is distinguished by esprit, light and easy grace, and by qualities literary rather than musical. Compared with the music of Offenbach, this music of close kin to old fashioned French music has more distinction and less temperament. It is the image of a people whose prominent natural characteristics have been effaced by the politeness which is the result of society."
46Briard utters a doleful note as he nears the end. "Not only in music but in all the arts the extraordinary, the accidental, the ugly and the monstrous no longer excite a protest. The realistic school does not exhibit ugliness to cause laughter or horror, but to make ugliness loved. * * * Adieu the youthful freshness of good sense, which made us as children burst with laughter at everything uncommon." Then of course he whacks Zola lustily, and the reader gathers that if there is no operetta in the future, the fault must be laid at the door of the historian of the Rougon Macquart people.
48* * *
50In his preface to "Les Rapports de la Musique et de la Poésie," Jules Combarieu bewails the lack in France of certain things pertaining to music.
52"We have," he says, "no review of a scientific character, such as the one published in Leipsic under the direction of Messrs. Chrysander, Spitta and Adler. We have not the habit of analysing thematically the operas and the symphonies in reviews, and showing clearly their structure by abundant citations, introducing as many musical quotations as possible; we have no history of music written broadly; we have no dictionary after the manner of Mendel's."
54Now these wants are not perhaps real to any country. The review mentioned is a ponderous affair, and the thematically illustrated review of an opera or a symphony does not necessarily make for musical righteousness. But if such works as Briard's book are not written in English, they might at least be translated into English; and yet how many American publishers would dare to undertake the task of bringing them before the great English speaking musical public of this country? The publisher would at once say: "There's no money in such a book."
56Perhaps the most humiliating thing in the scanty history of musical literature in the United States is the fact that Mr. Thayer's Life of Beethoven—as yet, unfortunately, unfinished—is published only in German and by a German.
58Why would not a volume of essays carefully chosen from the pungent and healthy writings of Heinrich Dorn be of
60GRAND CONCERT TOUR.
61New York Philharmonic Club.
62EUGENE WEINER, Director.
63SEVENTEENTH SEASON, 1993-94.
64EUGENE WEINER, Flute Virtuoso. SOL. MARCOSSON, Violin Virtuoso.
65PAUL WENDE, Viola. FRANK S. PORTE, Violin.
66HENRI HAAGMANS, Violoncello Virtuoso. RICHARD HELM, Double Bass Soloist.
67ASSISTED BY
68Miss CLARA S. HENLEY, Soprano.
69For terms, dates, &c., address
70STAR LYCEUM BUREAU,
71ALFONSO FOSTER, Manager. Tribune Building, New York.
73An Inspired Genius,
74YSAYE,
75ALSO
76MARTEAU.
77The Wilczek Concert Co.
78Thedora Pfafflin,
79Marguerite Wuertz,
80Rosa Linde,
81Little Tuesday and others.
82DIRECTION:
83JOHNSTON & ARTHUR,
84Decker Building, Union Square W., New York.
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