Scan 21
Musical Courier 1895-03-20: Vol 30 Iss 784, 1895
73 lines. Read by computer on 21 September 2026. Printed page 22. See the scan on archive.org.
1WITH PIPE AND FLUTE.
3With pipe and flute the rustic Pan
4Of old made music sweet for man;
5And wonder hushed the warbling bird,
6And closer drew the calm-eyed herd—
7The rolling river slowlier ran.
9Ah! would—ah! would, a little span,
10Some air of Arcady could fan
11This age of ours, too seldom stirred
12With pipe and flute!
14But now for gold we plot and plan;
15And from Beersheba unto Dan,
16Apollo's self might pass unheard,
17Or find the nightjar's note preferred—
18Not so it fared, when time began,
19With pipe and flute!
21—AUSTIN DORSON.
23SONNET TO JEAN GERARDY.
25Wrought from the whispering, sun kissed fir tree's heart
26And fashioned by skilled hands with loving care
27Into a curving shape of color rare,
28Thy perfect 'cello's born of time and art,
29And of thy soul, strange boy, is now a part.
30What spirit vast has come to breathe earth's air
31And dwell within thy fragile body, where
32It rules serene, makes from our eyes to start
33The dew of rapture, when thy 'cello sings
34With full, rich, luscious, throbbing, long-drawn tone,
35When elfin music breathes from magic strings,
36When thou dost soar where gods do dwell alone?
37Ah, heaven-gifted one, thou hast, in truth,
38The brain, the heart, the soul of man, not youth!
40—LOUISE CARPENTER.
42FOR the first time this season I heard the Kneisel Quartet play. It was last Friday night, and at the hall of the Mendelssohn Glee Club. I resisted the solid allurement of The Dusk of the Gods, for I was weary of gods, monsters, leading motives, tarnhelm and potions. I longed for music pure and simple, music without metaphysics and stagecraft. I heard Schubert's D minor Quartet, and it was a draught of Hippocrene after Wagner's heady and composite brew. The Kneisel Quartet is composed of four wingless angels, who make music for mortals out of goodness of heart and return to heaven on the midnight train. The Schubert Quartet, which suggests Ta-ra-ra boom-de-ay, the Nibelungs motif, and the last movement of the Kreutzer sonata, is one of those perfect things in art which remain eternally fresh. It was played with ineffable charm. I did not care much for the Borodine quartet in D. It is full of rude vitality and pretty themes, but it sounded melodramatic and most certainly not original. The Russian peeped out in the brisk vivace.
44The Beethoven septet, op. 20, for violin, viola, clarinet, horn, bassoon, 'cello and double bass, was played by Messrs. Kneisel, Svecenski, Portau, Hackebarth, Litke, Schroeder and Golde. It was, however, the one blur on an otherwise perfect evening of music. Fancy cutting Beethoven; fancy cutting out a couple of movements—fancy, I say, with honest indignation, coming from Boston to New York and omitting the theme and variations, the scherzo! Wasn't it a shocking thing to do, Mr. Kneisel, and aren't you ashamed of yourself? I missed that lovely solo for the 'cello in the trio of the scherzo and the droll dialogue of bassoon and clarinet in the variations; and that thrilling horn variation in B flat minor, where was it, I ask? Echo, in the person of Mr. Hackebarth, sadly answers, "In the score." It is written in true Beethoven fashion, simplicity and grandeur of effect being produced by the golden tone of the horn stealing mysteriously in across a triplet accompaniment. And Mr. Kneisel calmly scratched all this beautiful music, because, no doubt, he feared missing the last train for Walhalla. Couldn't he with the other angels of his company have taken a milk train for once and sneaked into Wotanville noiselessly? Again I cry, what a pity!
46The last time I heard the septet, which is delightfully old-fashioned, it was in company with Walt Whitman, "the good gray poet," who was very fond of music. I took the old man to the Camden ferry after the concert and left him to the company of a deck-hand and a blear-eyed yellow dog. It was at a Carl Gaertner soirée and, if I remember aright, the hornist was Koch, now with Sousa. Walt made copious memoranda during the performance of the septet and told me that music stimulated his brain enormously.
48The most devoted attendant at the German opera this season has been the Beethoven of Brooklyn, Mr. Robert Thallon. Mr. Thallon is no skeleton, as you all know, and if he looks excessively stout during the musical season do not blame it altogether on Moretti table d'hôte dinners. His overcoat was built after plans made by Mr. Clarence Luce, the well-known architect. The iron work and ornamental trellis in the back were designed by Mr. Nat Cooke, of the Edgewood Company, and when Mr. Thallon goes to a Wagner opera he carries about a half ton of scores and critical works. They say that he literally staggered out of a cab in Brooklyn the other night. No wonder, for he was loaded down with nine separate orchestral scores. For his benefit Mr. Damrosch has a big sofa built out in the north lobby of the Opera House, upon which Mr. Thallon reclines and devours his score. He is a notenfresser, and so Wagner always furnishes him a square musical meal.
50There can be no possible doubt about it. When Emil Paur came to America he was a big, loose gaited, lumbering man whose head was a mop of hair, and he certainly looked musical. Now all this is changed. Emil has become Americanized and believes in his barber as much as in his Brahms. Alas! he has become a bit of a dandy, and I charge it all to Timothy Adamowski's fatal influence. Tim is the handsomest man in the orchestra. (I ask the tympanist's pardon.) Mr. Paur naturally took him for a model. Else why that hirsute arrangement on the forehead! Is it not a hairy paraphrase of the famous Adamowski bang? Come, come, Monsieur Paur, give an account of yourself. Is this sort of thing to continue, and will you eventually become graceful and a lady killer! Alas! art is ever swamped by the materialistic tendencies of America. We may live to see the day when Paur will conduct from a bicycle and attired in Plymouth Rock panties. O Dies Irae!
52Some years ago in the San Francisco Argonaut, by all odds the best-edited weekly in the country, I read a story called "Aut Diabolus aut Nihil." It was credited to an English monthly, and it made a stir. So when I received from Brentano's last week a stout volume bearing the same title it was with pleasurable curiosity that I found again the same vivid tale of Parisian diabolism. It relates the adventure of a certain abbé, who, after preaching a powerful sermon on the personality of Satan, receives an invitation from a friend to visit a seance where the devil may be seen. The priest is at heart a sceptic, but goes, and the result is terrific. No raw head and bloody bones, no satanic gentleman with the traditional horns and hoof does he encounter, but, I shan't tell you, except that I agree with the review in the London Spectator, which agrees that the conception of His Majesty is Miltonic. Of course, that vile and wonderful book "La Bas" contains lots about devil worship, but the real article never appears. I wonder what this curious ferment and upheaval of diabolism means in the literary world. Having denied God, must the poor, wavering soul of man affirm its belief in the existence of a personal devil? Philip Hale, if he cares to, can relate for you more stories about the devil than I can. They have a live one chained up somewhere in the Bach-Bay (as Mrs. Jack calls it) of blooming Boston.
54In the same volume is a musical story called "A Waltz of Chopin." I don't advise you to read it. Like most stories with a musical name, it is a snare and a delusion. It contains a hideous account of an execution by guillotine, and the F minor valse of Chopin is lugged in very irrelevantly. I will have my say about musical stories some time. They are, with a few exceptions, mere mush.
56Although I reviewed the book last season, I read Max Nordau's "Degeneration" for the first time in English last Saturday night. It depressed me profoundly and I went to my bed with an earache. Such an idol-smasher I have never met. He hates everything Latin—Latin races and Latin arts. He uses an axe on Wagner, Ibsen, Maeterlinck, Swinburne, Tolstoi and the rest of our modern idols, and his logic is relentless. Well, a little Nordau is good for us occasionally. He is a powerful intellectual astringent, and we are all too hysterical in art matters. This savage but sane Goth will have no symbolism, no Wagnerism, no Ibsenism, and he passionately urges us to return to Shakespeare, to Goethe, to Beethoven. I got such an attack of nausea that the whole world of art and letters became a gloomy swamp of feverish "degenerates." I resolved last Sunday to return to Hans Christian Andersen, to Mozart, to Jules Verne and to God. But on Monday night I went to "Mistersinger," and am feeling as wicked and as "degenerate" as ever, thank you.
58Nordau should have been a demonstrator of anatomy. His new book is full of strange, uncanny smells. It is horribly morbid. Don't read it.
60The charming song Der Gärtner, sung at the Ashforth concert, and the Elegie overture, played by the Boston Symphony Orchestra on Thursday night last, are both by a very talented and promising young man, Robert Kahn by name. He is a Brahms pupil and is the first cousin of the senior editor of THE MUSICAL COURIER. The family throughout is musical. Kahn has certainly mastered the technics of composition. I remember well a work for piano and strings from his pen.
62Of course you were at the Ashforth concert the other night. If not you missed some of the most artistic singing heard this season.
64A man in Georgia the other day blasphemed the name of God, and a flash of lightning struck his piano and ruined it. Ah, me, God ever did dislike stencil instruments!
66I would like, says Rubinstein, to recommend a different use—touch and pedal—of the piano of our day, in playing the compositions of different epochs. So, for example, I would play a piece of Haydn or Mozart on the instrument of our day, especially in forte, with the left pedal, because their forte has not the character of the Beethoven forte, especially not of the latest composers. Playing Händel, and especially Bach, I would try, by means of variety of touch and change of pedal, to register—that is, give them throughout an organ-like character. Hummel I would try to play with scholastic, short, clear touch, and very little pedal; Weber and Mendelssohn with very brilliant execution and pedal; Weber in his sonatas and Concertstücke with operatic, dramatic style, and Mendelssohn in his Songs without Words with a lyrical character. Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, Chopin, and of course the latest composers, require all the resources that are obtainable in the pianos of the present day.
68Ponder well the above, pianists.
70Bote & Bock are the publishers of Otto Floersheim's new song. Mr. Floersheim, who ranks, in my opinion, far ahead of all German music critics, sends us, as you know, a weekly budget of criticism from Berlin. His letters are a feature of this journal, but he finds time to compose a little and study considerably. The new song is called Verlassene Liebe, and while I hardly agree with its composer in calling it a Lied im Volkston, as the harmonies are too subtle, yet it is charming and simple all the same. The poem is by Hans Kreutzer, and Mrs. O. B. Boise, the wife of the American composer, has Englished it. The very first bar has the characteristic Floersheim harmonic flavor. But its ingenuousness is decidedly modern nevertheless. I am afraid Nordau would not like this new song of my old friend Otto. It is too romantic in atmosphere.
72Our old friend Punch gives us a Du Maurier drawing on the subject of A Distinguished Amateur. "Ach! Dat is a putiful song, Laty Peacocke, and you bronounce Cherman very vell. Pot vy do you blay ze aggombaniment in B natural?" "The song's written in B natural, Herr Maestro." "Ach, zo! Then vy do you zing ze melody in B flat?" "Oh,
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