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Musical Courier 1895-11-06: Vol 31 Iss 818, 1895
41 lines. Read by computer on 22 September 2026. Printed page 5. See the scan on archive.org.
1GERMAN HEADQUARTERS OF THE MUSICAL COURIER.
2BERLIN, W., LINKSTRASSE 17, October 15, 1896.
4THE past week, from Tuesday to Tuesday, was a particularly interesting and eventful one for me. It began a week ago to-day with the Berlin première of Mascagni's two act opera Silvano, at the Neues Theater, under the composer's direction, followed by a trip to Leipsic for the first Gewandhaus concert, under Arthur Nikisch's new conductorship, which function he also exercised last night for the first time at Manager Wolff's series of Von Bülow Philharmonic concerts.
6Of the tremendous success the former Boston Symphony Orchestra conductor scored on these important occasions, a success which was even more pronounced and still more enthusiastic in Berlin than it was in Leipsic, I cabled to you last night after the concert. I also sent a cable message announcing the double engagement for the Berlin Royal Opera House of Mary Howe, the gifted American soprano, and of her husband, William Lavin, the no less gifted tenor. This must be pleasing and interesting news to the many American friends and admirers of this artistic couple, and I take some pride in the fact that it was through the introduction and the influence of THE MUSICAL COURIER that these artists were brought to the notice and into the presence of Count Hochberg, the Royal Intendant, and his faithful fides Achatis, Henry Pierson, director of the Royal Intendency. These two gave our American artists a hearing in the presence of court conductors Dr. Muck and Felix Weingartner. Mary Howe sang an aria from Rigoletto and the bell song from Lakmé, and William Lavin was heard in the first aria from Aida (usually omitted by the German tenors), and the entire big tenor aria from L'Africaine, which is ordinarily mercilessly chopped up. His Excellency took the occasion to compliment the writer for having introduced such fine singers to him, and engaged them on the spot.
8Mary Howe, as I cabled to you, will make her début at Kroll's next Sunday night in Lucia, which opera was her choice for an introduction. She will have the benefit of having Goetze for a partner as Edgardo, this being his last appearance here as "guest." He postponed his trip to Munich in order to sing this rôle with Mary Howe. William Lavin will make his first bow at the Royal Opera House in January next after he has coped a few months longer with the German language, with which his wife is already familiar. But now let me begin at the beginning.
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12With the advent of Pietro Mascagni not only a new element, but, as I said in my last week's letter, new life and success came into Mr. Sonzogno's operatic stagione. Too bad that he arrived at the fag end of the season and thus could not entirely save the enterprising impresario's undertaking from the financial losses he must have sustained here. Mascagni's presence, however, and the few performances of his Silvano, which were given here before good houses, must have helped him on considerably, and I learn by telegraph from Frankfort-on-the-Main, where the troupe is now "guesting," that it is doing well there.
14As for Silvano I can hardly understand why it did not meet with more success than it did at Milan or in the few other towns of Italy where it has so far been produced. The Berlin public took very kindly indeed to Mascagni's latest production, and for once I am inclined to disbelieve the old trusted axiom, Vox populi vox Rindreh, and "go with the crowd," as Henry Ward Beecher said. However, it was not an ordinary public at this première; on the contrary, the beautiful little house—one of the most tasteful theatres on the Continent—contained the élite of Berlin's literary, artistic and bohemian world. I leave out the aristocracy and finance, for they don't count on such occasions. On the other hand, the press was there in its entirety, and the more many of the Berlin music critics (most of whom have a Raconteur-like prejudice against Mascagni, Leoncavallo e tutti quanti) disliked or pretended to disdain Silvano, the surer I felt of the correctness of my own judgment in attributing considerable talent to the score of the opera.
16This may sound egotistical on my part, but I don't mean it to be taken in any such way. Only experience has taught me (and not only a Berlin experience, but one of many years in New York) that whenever I found myself in opposition to such and such critics the test of time told in my favor. Thus I gradually learned to trust all the more in the correctness of my judgment when their opinions differed from mine, and, on the contrary, I always began to distrust myself when they happened to think my way. Now I have said before, and I put it down again for cold print, that Silvano is a most talented work, and by far the best thing that Mascagni has written since his Cavalleria Rusticana. It contains the same melodic flavor and harmonic daring, and wherever the situation demands it the same fiery passion that breathes through the score of Cavalleria. The choruses are as good, especially the flower chorus in the first act, and the intermezzo which opens the second act, and without which no Mascagni opera can be imagined, is as effective with its sweet violoncello solo, and as stimmungsvoll, as that celebrated one from Cavalleria. Of course it was redemanded, and so was one of the choruses, while the reception generally was as enthusiastic as Mascagni and Sonzogno could have wished. The former appeared before the curtain several times with his artists after each of the two acts, and also had to acknowledge applause singly when the calls for the composer rang out through the house.
18Whatever weakness there may be in the music is primarily caused through the defects in the book, which, as George Davidsohn rightly says in the Boersen Courier, is episodic. G. Targioni Tozetti, who compiled this "drama," took his text from a novel of Georges Sand. The book gives in compact form a few striking situations, but that is all that can be said in its favor. First of all, it is not a theatrical play, but rather the fragment of one compressed into a few closing scenes. The people who are introduced, their feelings and passions, are strangers to us, and we cannot feel a deep interest in them, because their love and their hatred spring from causes with which we are not made acquainted. It was one of the great superiorities and one of the main reasons of the success of Cavalleria that the book of Mascagni's first opera forms a dramatic whole, that its simple action deals with natural personages, whose relations to each other lead of a necessity to the catastrophe. In Silvano, on the other hand, we stand before unsolved riddles. The action begins with the confession of the heroine, Matilda, that she still loves Silvano, the bandit, but is not able to feel joyful over the fact of his having been pardoned, because she fears his return; for during his absence she has given herself to Renzo, a fisherman. Why she did so, although she loved Silvano, remains one of the unsolved riddles, all the more so as she did not fall through frivolousness. Then her lover returns. She tries to repulse him, but again she is conquered by his love and returns his passion. As soon as Silvano has left Matilda the other one, Renzo, arrives upon the scene and claims his rights. She resists, full of disgust, and tells him that she does not love nor ever has loved him, but that her heart belongs to Silvano. But Renzo does not give up so easily. He threatens that if she does not meet him that night at a certain cliff near the ocean he will kill Silvano. These are the contents of the first act.
20The second act opens at eventide and upon a rocky scene by the sea. The aforementioned very beautiful intermezzo, which is introduced by a chorus behind the scenes, describes the Stimmung and the gradual change from evening twilight to night most admirably. Of course this second act brings the catastrophe. Matilda goes to the seashore at night in order to save the life of her lover and to break off forever with Renzo. Silvano finds them there, learns of his mistress' unfaithfulness during his absence, shoots Renzo and then flees for safety, while Matilda is left in a swoon on the stage.
22As regards the performance of Silvano I have nothing but praise for the chorus and orchestra, who were admirable under the composer's this time not very lackadaisical direction. The principals, however, especially Matilda, were vocally anything but satisfactory. Frandin, albeit she occasionally overdoes things, is a fine dramatic actress, but her singing is distressing, on account of a continuous tremolo. She has not a steady note in her voice. It is like a mass of wobbling tone waves. Giovanni Laura, in the title part, was in anything but good voice, and had to be excused. He did not sing as well as he had done when I last heard him in Festa a Marina. Still the tenor was the best singer in the lot. Broggi-Mutini gave a dramatically fair representation of Renzo, and Signora Lucazewska made the most of the small part of Silvano's mother, Rosa.
24I am curious to hear the work in German, with the far better forces of the Royal Opera, which will produce Silvano later on, also under the composer's direction. Mascagni will stay in Germany during the next few months, and will visit several cities where his operas are being given, among others Stuttgart, where the German première of his Ratcliff will take place. Then he intends to return to Berlin, where the Royal Opera House intendency has accepted his newly finished Zanetto, which is to be brought out here even before Ratcliff. Indeed it would appear as if Berlin is about to have a perfect Mascagni cycle. The young Italian composer was made much of at Frankfort, and both there and at Berlin he was flooded with new opera libretti, which being in German he could not read even if he had had time and inclination to do so.
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28That musical sleepy hollow, Leipsic, whose celebrated Gewandhaus concerts have for the last twenty years, or thereabout, been dozing in a Rip Van Winkle or, to be a little more courteous, Dornroeschen-like slumber, awakened from its lethargy last Thursday evening. The prince who tore down the hedges of apathy that had gradually grown up and who awoke the sleeping beauty Music and her lazy servants, the musicians, as well as her court and attendants, the audience, was Arthur Nikisch, and he did it not with the sword, but with his wonder wand the baton. For a good many years the audience has not been as enthusiastic, except perhaps over some favorite soloist, nor has the famous orchestra played as it did on this occasion, the début of Nikisch. The fine new Gewandhaus hall, which has only the one fault—that it is too small to hold the audiences which will henceforth try to gather in it to hear Arthur Nikisch—has never yet resounded with such performances as were given there last Thursday night, and I verily believe that the musicians themselves were delighted and not a little surprised at their own efforts. Certainly they never played under Reinecke as they did under Nikisch, and albeit there is a good deal of material in the orchestra that needs weeding out and substitution of better artists, notably among the woodwind, the orchestra as a whole did wonderfully well. If, however, there should be changes in the orchestra, there should also be some made in the audience or at least in its behavior. These audiences evidently pride themselves on their coldness, which they probably consider will be taken for discrimination, but nobody will be fooled by people who show a reluctance to be carried away by masterly interpretations of master works and then applaud vociferously the performance of variations for the fiddle of no earthly musical value, but shallow virtuoso music pur et simple, and the only number which ought not to have been permitted on a program scheme of such excellent taste otherwise and on an occasion of such importance.
30It was a very nice and graceful thing for Arthur Nikisch to do to open his Leipsic activity with the conducting of a work of his now venerable predecessor, Dr. Carl Reinecke, whose fine King Manfred overture in E major was the first number of the program. Of course it received an interpretation at the hands of Nikisch such as the composer probably never dreamed of attaining. Dr. Reinecke, however, did not hear it, for he was absent.
32The other orchestral numbers were the unfinished symphony by Schubert and the C minor symphony by Beethoven, the selections indicating that Nikisch intends to continue the scheme of these concerts certainly at first in the well-known classic trend for which they have become chiefly famous. As for the cold Leipsic public, it was carried away almost and apparently against its own volition, more and more and from movement to movement, until at last, after the rousing reading of the fiery finale from Beethoven's most passionate symphony the house broke out in a perfect storm of applause, and Nikisch, the conquering hero, was recalled again and again.
34These were the outward symptoms of the first Gewandhaus concert under Nikisch. The critical description of it I leave to the excellent and interesting pen of THE MUSICAL COURIER's new Leipsic correspondent, Mr. Alvin Kranich, of New York, pianist and composer.
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38As for the first Berlin Bülow Philharmonic concert (which series I shall henceforth call Nikisch Philharmonics, in order to distinguish Mr. Wolff's cycle of ten concerts from the regular popular concerts of the Philharmonic Orchestra, which are given at the Philharmonie three times every week under Prof. Franz Mannstaedt's direction), I cabled and wrote that it proved a tremendous success. Manager Wolff was delighted beyond bounds, for he had begun very nearly to despair of ever finding a successor to the late Hans von Bülow who would take the latter's place of popularity with the Berlin cultured audience. All others, among them some of Germany's greatest conductors, Levi, Mottl, Schuch, Richard Strauss and a few others, had all failed to fascinate Berlin for any length of time. Now, however, the savior for these fine concerts has appeared, and to judge from last night's genuine outbursts of enthusiastic applause and the very nearly unanimous praise and approval in this morning's best papers, Nikisch bids fair to become as great a favorite in Berlin as he was in Boston. Be it so, for he deserves it. He is the first of all these conductors I have named, and I want to include Weingartner in the list, who conducts for his orchestra, and only for his orchestra, and not for the audience.
40You all know Nikisch, and it would seem superfluous to enumerate once more his great qualities as a conductor for the readers of THE MUSICAL COURIER, the paper which was first and foremost in recognizing his superior merits and has upheld him ever since he went to Boston. Still, not having heard Nikisch for over three years, I was again taken prisoner and newly surprised by the freshness and spontaneity of his readings even of so old and familiar works as Beethoven's third Leonore and Wagner's Tannhäuser overture, which opened and closed last evening's concert program. You will hardly believe me when I say that the Tannhäuser overture absolutely electrified me, and so it did the entire audience. Still, there is not a note in it that I don't know by heart; at least I thought so until last night, and then I found out that I was mistaken. For
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