Scan 21
Musical Courier 1895-12-25: Vol 31 Iss 825, 1895
77 lines. Read by computer on 26 September 2026. Printed page 22. See the scan on archive.org.
1these are in the permanent repertory of the opera house. They attract the usual audiences, and are no greater attractions than the old standard operas.
31895.
5THE musical history of the year 1895, as mirrored in THE MUSICAL COURIER, is neither astounding nor yet celebrated. It has not been a year of great enterprises, although one of sound activity. There have been no great works of art composed, or rather produced, and the world has not been robbed of such men as Tschaikowsky, Gounod and Rubinstein. The necrology of the past twelve months has luckily not been one of magnitude. Benjamin Godard, the French composer, heads the list, and his loss, while an intimate one, is not an irreparable one, artistically estimated. He was not of the premier classe, although an artist of ideal aspirations and no uncertain execution. But his output is not especially noteworthy, while being sympathetic. He excelled in chamber music, and his A minor violin concerto is a grateful but not very original work.
7Sir Charles Hallé, the pianist and conductor in England, and an indefatigable worker in the cause and Frederick Lux, in Germany, composer and director, are the next two names that occur most readily to the memory. Martin Roeder in Boston, a genial artist, composer and teacher, is missed by a large group of friends and admirers, and the death of Philadelphia's veteran pianist, Charles H. Jarvis, recalls the enormous amount of music he played at his recitals, extending over a quarter of a century. Richard Genée, the composer of light opera, also passed away, as did his friend in the same field, Von Suppé. Here in New York Harrison Millard, the song composer, Frederick Rietzel, the veteran flutist of the Philharmonic Society, William Scharfenberg, the piano teacher, and Henry Widmer, the conductor, about complete a singularly small list. San Francisco lost J. H. Rosewald, and Paris the well-known singer Madame Miolan-Carvalho.
9Verdi, Boito, Brahms, Saint-Saëns, Bruckner, Grieg, Svedsden, Sinding, Goldmark, Sir Arthur Sullivan and Massenet, Mascagni, Leoncavallo, Puccini, Humperdinck and Sgambati Dvorák still live.
11The chronicling of new works first heard in America is of necessity brief. Verdi, who has just sent to his publishers a volume of songs for children—oh what a delightful second childhood is his!—we heard in his remarkable Falstaff, which was produced at the Metropolitan Opera House last season, with that great actor, Victor Maurel, in the title rôle. Its vigor, vitality and freshness marked a return to simpler, sunnier methods after all the stress and fuming of the Mascagni veristic school. Verdi is still hale, and shames the younger generation by his juiciness and jauntiness. He is an octogenarian optimist, and even now, when his work is seemingly done, his death would be a great loss to music.
13Then we had the renascence of the Wagner opera, with Walter Damrosch playing the pleasant and profitable rôle of the moving spirit in the reawakening. His second tour, headed by a great Wagner singer, Klafsky, is a success, and he will let New York taste of the quality of his new company next spring.
15In Paris they heard Faust for the 1,000th time and Tannhäuser for the first since the disgraceful days of the Jockey Club scandals. Hanslick published his recollections, and Paderewski gave us a Polish fantasy full of bright, characteristic music. He is making his third tour of the country with almost fabulous success. We have had among visiting violinists Ysaye, Ondricek, Rivarde, Thomson and Marsick; and Fannie Bloomfield-Zeisler, after triumphs abroad, returned and established herself firmly in the heart of musical America. Walter Damrosch's Scarlet Letter, an original opera, was heard here this year in concert garb, and Humperdinck's fairy opera Hänsel and Gretel was inadequately produced at Daly's Theatre, thereby spoiling utterly for us a characteristic and interesting work. It is only two weeks ago that Massenet's La Navarraise, written for Emma Calvé, was first heard in New York, and Bach's bones were disinterred in Leipsic, and Johann Strauss has had a jubilee in Vienna.
17Arthur Nikisch after leaving Boston town and its music critics achieved successes in such musical burghs as Budapest, London, Berlin and Leipsic. Bruno Oscar Klein's Kenilworth was produced at Hamburg with Klafsky as Amy Robsart, and a young New Yorker, Howard Brockway, jumped into instant and favorable notice in Berlin at a concert of his orchestral works.
19Then we have listened with pleasure to the De Reszkes, Nordica and Brema in Wagner's masterwork, Tristan and Isolde, and we have heard good things of George Chadwick's new and third symphony. E. A. MacDowell, America's greatest hope as a composer, worked this summer in Switzerland, and a new piano sonata and a virgin symphony were the results. The sonata we have received, the symphony is yet unheard. Yvette Guilbert has come to town full of lyric depravity, yet an artist to the hairy tips of her celebrated eyebrows, and Mr. Grau promises us Boito's Mefistofele for next Monday night at the opera. Anton Seidl is no longer Seidl of the Seidl Society of Brooklyn, but Seidl, conductor of the opera. We enjoined him to broaden his sphere of usefulness. In this city he is chained to the Philharmonic Society, a musical society which promises soon to outlive its usefulness, for its wheels are heavily clogged by age and thestale senilities of convention.
21And has not Germany's Kaiser turned composer? And has not Rafael Joseffy emerged from that self-imposed and hateful exile from our concert rooms? But he has played only in Chicago. New York hopes to hear him in two months.
23They revived Haydn's Apothecary in Germany, and Eugen d'Albert has been married again. Emil Paur still swings the baton of leaden despair over that matchless Symphony Band of Boston, and Henry Holden Hus' piano concerto in B was played by the composer in Boston. In Berlin they heard a new work by Kienzl, Der Evangelimann, and Rubinstein's sacred opera, Christus, was not an overwhelming success. Here we listened to a new overture by Goldmark, Sappho, and Mr. De Koven's Tzigane was not liked, and Victor Herbert's The Wizard of the Nile was.
25In Boston they had as novelties Benoît's symphonic poem for flute and orchestra, Sgambati's first symphony and a symphonic poem, Sarka, by the Bohemian and predecessor of Dvorák, Smetana. Antonin Dvorák did not return to this country, and Zerrahn resigned in Boston from the directorship of the Händel and Haydn Society in favor of E. J. Lang. W. H. Parker's Irish song for basso, with orchestral accompaniment, was sung in Boston by Max Heinrich with great acclaim. It is called Cahal Mór, and is tender and heroic, true Celtic music. Parker is a strong man. We have heard excerpts from Richard Strauss' Guntram, and a German composer, Urich by name, has enjoyed passing celebrity with an opera, The Pilot. Loeffler, a gifted violinist and composer, played his own interesting and piquant divertimento for violin and orchestra in Boston, and the Sutro sisters delighted critical audiences by their admirable ensemble work. Bernhard Stavenhagen did not please with his piano playing, while graceful Antoinette Szumowska, a Paderewski pupil, did. We have celebrated becomingly Beethoven's 125th anniversary, and August Spanuth, the music critic of the New York Staats-Zeitung, has proved his right to criticise piano playing by playing with Seidl's orchestra Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody and E flat concerto.
27Then that marvelous boy Jean Gerardy witched with his masterly violoncello playing, and Louis Blumenberg has once more returned to his first love, the 'cello, and is a favorite in the concert world. There has been a fierce Praeger-Wagner controversy conducted in THE MUSICAL COURIER, and Frida Simonson, a girl pianist, and Juanito Manen, a boy violinist, amused us by their preccious virtuosity.
29All these and a million more events we might chronicle, but have you not read it all in THE MUSICAL COURIER? and if you care to read it over again our files are at your service.
31We have kept a fair, minute and sympathetic record of the year 1895. We do not attempt to make any deductions yet from its happenings, but will in the near future. The theatrical happenings have been outlined in the columns of "The Raconteur." They show a pitiful decadence of the theatrical art as compared to musical art. If we should ever choose to take up in detail the criticism of the theatrical world we promise you a surprise. Sensationalism reigns rampant, and high-class dramatic entertainments few and infinitely less ideal when compared to our operatic and symphonic organizations. But all this by-and-by. We have taken a retrospective and much jumbled glance at the musical doings of the year 1895, which terminates in a week. And just here we can wish our readers A Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.
33RACONTEUR.
35"The old gods pass," the cry goes round,
36"Lo! how their temples strew the ground";
37Nor mark we where, on new fledged wings,
38Faith, like the phoenix, soars and sings.
40—Richard Le Gallienne.
42YVETTE GUILBERT.
44That was Yvette. The blithe Ambassadeurs Glitters this Sunday of the Fête des Fleurs;
45Here are the flowers, too, living flowers that blow
46A night or two before the odors go;
47And all the flowers of all the city ways
48Are laughing with Yvette, this day of days.
49Laugh with Yvette? But I must first forget,
50Before I laugh, that I have heard Yvette.
51For the flowers fade before her; see, the light
52Dies out of that poor cheek and leaves it white,
53And a chill shiver takes me as she sings
54The pity of unpitied human things;
55A woe beyond all weeping, tears that trace
56The very wrinkles of the last grimace.
58—Arthur Symons.
60SHE is a singing Zola, this Yvette Guilbert. She sings of the rogues, beggars, outcasts, drunkards, the shards and estrays of life, the human offal, the gutter's refuse. She is a singing Zola, this Yvette Guilbert; a pornographic Zola, a realist Zola, a Zola of bestiality supreme, a Zola of the love that lies in wait and supplicates with a grimace.
62Like Zola she paints the seams in a woman's life, the hideous crackling in a man's mean career. She is as unflinching a painter of warts and ulcers as Degas, and her smile is as tender as a female child.
64When she stepped forward Monday night of last week on the stage of Olympia—Oscar Hammerstein's Jovian abode on upper Broadway—she was a distinct disappointment to a Guilbert-hungry and huge auditory. She was decidedly too good looking, and she looked like a sweet, demure nun out on a lark—if you can fancy such a thing. Her hair is a tone or two darker than Paderewski's, and one of her eyes is much larger than the other.
66In the right eye innocence hath its abode, an ingenious, a pure eye, capable of chaste glances and occasional coy glances. But the left eye is the eye of a degenerate. It is veiled even when wide open, and in it lurk the devilries of lust, caprice, wantonness and deceit. It is this evil eye that leads its sister to devious and darkling wickednesses. It is this eye that drove Yvette Guilbert on the concert stage and restrained the other from becoming the eye of a canoness, a mother superior, an abbess, mayhap a saint!
68These eyes are the keynotes to the unique personality of the woman; they typify anew the old warring principles of evil and good. I would not be surprised if she named her eyes Ahriman and Ormuzd, for I will wager that she knows her Persian cosmogony.
70Her mouth is a cavern whence issues melodious méchanceté and piteous sighs, her teeth pearly traps that often imprison the new born speech and turn it into dangerously suggestive sibilants and sobs.
72Her voice; ah, I swear to you that it is golden, then gray, then it glitters like a gilded weathercock in the sun, and again it is staccato in its resiliency.
74Yvette sings as a great singer. Her emission is almost perfection, and her frugality in breathing admirable. She colors her tones, now dark as ebony, now white, staring whitewash. She expresses every nuance of feeling, and her irony is withering and belongs to the twentieth century.
76Her diction is almost classic. She "says" things marvelously. She chaunts, she declaims, she speaks, she has harsh modulations that chill you, flat, unrelieved tones that evoke visions of dreary levels of sullen landscapes. She is shrill, she can be as languorous as a summer night, and then she pronounces
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