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Musical Courier 1895-12-25: Vol 31 Iss 825, 1895
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1than with a dexterity—sinisterity, too—that were really astounding for one of her years. Lillian Blauvelt is not quite an infant phenomenon, though she is as fresh and fair as some of our sophisticated damoiselles of twelve, and her voice had the youthful ring, also. Among her selections was a croon by Arthur Foote hummed with closed lips in the Dorion mode common to the County Down. This and Bizet, Liszt, Mendelssohn, Verdi and Van der Stucken pieces made her selections. At the concert this week Camilla Urso and young Howard Brockway, who is a Brooklyn lad, are to play.
3Fannie Bloomfield Zeisler.
5HERE are a few critical notices of Fannie Bloomfield Zeisler's recent performance in Buffalo at the concert of the Buffalo Symphony Orchestra; Mr. John Lund conducted.
7Fannie Bloomfield Zeisler was the soloist, and received the cordial welcome so thorough a musician should be accorded. Her principal solo was the great Beethoven concerto in E flat major. It is a beautiful and extremely difficult work, giving opportunities of scoring some strong points. Mrs. Zeisler played it magnificently, her peculiarly firm, magnetic touch bringing out all its fine qualities. She received a hearty encore, and responded with Chopin's waltz in G flat, most charmingly played.
9Her second solo was the Litolff scherzo, with orchestral accompaniment. In this she aroused the greatest enthusiasm, for she played it with an absolute perfection of technical skill, surmounting all difficulties with brilliancy and ease. Her encore was the Li-zt transcription of Schubert's Erl King, in which she had complete mastery over all its trying technicalities.
11Mrs. Zeisler has won the right to be classed with the great pianists of the day.—Commercial.
13Slight and wiry of figure, with hands and wrists which suggest birds' claws, but which are as strong as bands of steel, with eyes dark and lustrous, Fannie Bloomfield Zeisler seems the very incarnation of nervous energy and artistic fire. She belongs to the race which gave the world Mendelssohn and Disraeli, Heine and Emma Lazarus, Rachel and Bernhardt, and stands to-day as an admirable example of a distinguished class—the Jew of artistic temperament.
15Her triumph at Music Hall last night was complete. The fashionable audience which gathered to hear the Symphony concert was captivated by Mrs. Zeisler's work on the piano, and applauded her with enthusiasm, which was deep as well as demonstrative. It would be hard to select any points and say that in this or that particular the pianist excels, so rounded out is her artistic self. She possesses a brilliant technique, a capable mind and artistic feeling—in short, is a thorough musician, with the brain to conceive and the art to execute.
17Mrs. Bloomfield Zeisler was first heard in Beethoven's concerto No. 5, in E flat major. She played the long composition through entirely without notes, which indicates the amount of study which this energetic little woman had put upon the piece. Her performance of the great master's celebrated work left nothing to be desired. The pianist and the orchestra, under its capable director, were as one in their appreciation of the score and in its rendition. The result was an ensemble delightful to the listeners.
19Mrs. Zeisler's touch was full of delicacy, strong where strength was required and wonderfully soft in the pianissimo passages, yet never losing its liquid clearness. Her exhibition of octave playing and execution of runs and trills were admirable. After the concerto was finished the pianist was recalled again and again until she acknowledged the compliment by playing Chopin's waltz in G flat. Not less brilliant was Mrs. Zeisler's rendition of the scherzo from Litolff's concerto in D minor. She was greeted with hearty and persistent applause after this number until she responded with the Erl King, by Schubert-Liszt.—Express.
21Fanny Bloomfield Zeisler has made such progress in her art that it is difficult to recognize in her playing to-day the erratic, fiery player that appeared in Buffalo years ago. She has retained all the life and brilliancy which have always characterized her performances. But she is now composed, calm and intense, and gave yesterday a most dignified and classic interpretation of the Beethoven concerto. There were great refinement and delicacy in all that she did, and there was no doubt that great depth of power lay underneath that calm and quiet playing. In the adagio her work was exquisite, and later in the scherzo by Litolff her beautiful staccato won her tremendous applause. It is to be regretted that every pianist in the city of Buffalo was not there to hear her, for the compositions were marvelously executed. The people would not allow the concert to proceed until she had responded by a solo, which she finally did, playing in the afternoon a fantastique by Moszkowski, op. 64, No. 1, which was especially dedicated to her, and in the evening Liszt's Erl King. This was one of the best things played. Mme. Zeisler is now ranked among the great piano virtuosos of the world, and she deserves the distinction.—Courier.
23That wonder, Fanny Bloomfield Zeisler, fairly electrified the audience. In the Litolff scherzo she made one's nerves tingle and thrill, and she completely dominated every musician in the house by her subtle, all pervading temperamental qualities. It is hardly possible to imagine a more exquisite touch than she exhibited last evening. As for execution, it was almost forgotten in the enjoyment of the finesse of her interpretation. Beethoven's concerto, No. 5, in E flat major, she played for her first number. It is almost unknown here as a concert number. In the first movement Mme. Zeisler only gave us an occasional glimpse at her remarkable qualities. The second movement with its toccata was played with beautiful grace, while the third, the rondo, showed us the real Mme. Zeisler. Of course she was enthusiastically encored, and she graciously responded, both in the afternoon and evening, playing for the last encore the Liszt transcription of the Erl King in a most dramatic manner.
25Every piano student who failed to hear Mme. Zeisler and yesterday's concert should record a sin of omission.—Evening News.
27Musical Possibilities of America.
29THE most disagreeable feature of an acquaintance between an Englishman and an American is the inevitable discussion over the relative merits of national characteristics and peculiarities. An Englishman and Frenchman can meet casually without drawing each other into such a controversy, but not so with the two main-springs of the English language, the very similarity of speech emphasizing the difference in habits and modes of thought employed by the two branches of the race.
31But, after all, there are few questions more interesting than why the English and the Americans handle any given subject from such different standpoints, never spontaneously assuming the same point of view.
33During several months of recent residence in London I was particularly impressed with the difference between the English and American musical life.
35The Englishman is not artistic where music is concerned, but he wants to be and tries to be; the American has a more deeply intuitive nature musically, but discourages his own sympathy for the art as being a waste of time and contrary to common sense.
37The Englishman cannot sing, but does his best when invited; the American could sing if he would, but becomes self conscious and refuses. An astonishingly large number of men who go about socially in England have a repertory of songs which they perform among their friends after dinner, and they evince hearty enjoyment from their own singing, whether anybody else does or not; but, on the whole, I believe their audiences get considerable out of their songs provided they are melodic. "A good tune" is dear to the heart of every Briton, whether it is in tune or not.
39An American gentleman in the same sphere of life would think himself effeminate and a fool generally if he attempted the same thing outside the profession, although most likely his voice and singing would equal, if not surpass, that of his English rival in the field of drawing room entertainment. John Bull may be a rank egotist, ever willing to show off, but he is not as self conscious and afraid of the opinion of people as is Uncle Sam.
41In an English church or cathedral the Briton is easily distinguished by his brave effort to give a free vocal performance of the service by means of a voice usually so throaty that he is nearly bursting a blood vessel before the end comes. His difficulty in singing does not disconcert him in the least, for he is expressing to the best of his ability the tune in his brain and the religion in his heart.
43He differs from the Italian in the art of expression, not in the feeling expressed. An Englishman tries to tell a woman that he loves her, but all he says is, "Jolly day for golf! Eh, miss?"—while his eyes speak what the Italian would have put beautifully and meant less; hence when he attempts to sing Schubert's Serenade (an English favorite) with the voice of a pump handle, his compatriots, owing to "the fellow feeling which makes us wondrous kind," hear beneath the bad tone production Schubert's exquisite musical thought.
45Among the lower classes in England everybody sings as a matter of course. During the summer the proprietors of all the large business houses give their employés what is called a bean feast, which means an all day outing, taken in large brakcs holding twenty-five or thirty men. They drive out of London for several hours, have dinner and drive back as evening closes down, stopping at every "public" along the road to refresh the inner man with what in Kentucky would be called "Oh, be joyful!" As soon as the city streets are left behind their vocal fun begins, and never ends until they are all safely in bed. They sing and sing until they are reduced to the vocal condition of an American boy after attending the Thanksgiving football game in New York.
47The costermonger songs seem to be most popular among "the bean eaters"; but during the past year Sweet Marie and Flo who came back with a naughty little twinkle in her eye have been their vocal lady loves.
49One can hardly walk a block in London without coming upon an impromptu skirt dance carried on by the street children, who collect about the concertina players, dancing and singing with childish grace and abandon interesting to watch. In America it is not so; the children but seldom gather in numbers about the street organs, nor would it enter their heads to do anything as spontaneous and conspicuous as to dance in the street. If they made the attempt their little legs would stiffen with self consciousness, a condition ruinous to grace of movement.
51No doubt the American child would hear and appreciate more entirely the discords of the organ playing than would the miniature John Bull, but he might permit the tune to continue endlessly without being affected to sympathetic motion of the body, as would the less critical English child. A well-known Boston musician of German extraction tells me, apropos of this point, that when his children listen apathetically to street music he makes them dance, because he looks upon that sort of free and sympathetic movement as an improving force both physically and morally.
53My plea is for the emotional side of American art, which is rapidly being subordinated to technic. When these two component elements are balanced we will have an American art, but not before. Among our professional musicians there seems to be only the one standard of perfection, and that is of technicality. They go to concerts to criticise, not to enjoy. In Boston I have a family of friends made up of two women who are piano teachers, a brother an architect, a friend a professional singer, and a dear old German mother who looks after the domestic arrangements. In this rather ideal family music is talked and taught, but rarely enjoyed at home. No one has time to sing or play about the house, excepting for the purpose of technical study, unless it is the brother, who occasionally whistles a popular refrain under his breath, or the old lady, who often, as she goes about her work, bursts into Ich weis nicht was soll es bedeuten das ich so traurig bin.
55As with the professional, so with the amateur. There is no country where a larger number of girls study singing and the piano, nor where so few can really sing or play—rather, say, will consent to sing or play. There is no more earnest advocate of the vital necessity of a perfected technic in every branch of art than I, but we cannot all expect to be equally perfect, and the great message remains even if not delivered with consummate skill by small as well as great.
57Music is studied in America too much, as is grammar; something to peg away at in a perfunctory way as a pedagogic necessity to be taken along with other disagreeable studies, but not as a means to a great end.
59One hour of intelligent and sympathetic practice will accomplish more than four hours of listless, mechanical work.
61Mr. William Shakspeare, of London, one of the world's truly great singing masters, said to me not long since: "The American girls are most interesting pupils. They are intelligent, industrious and possessed of strong musical feeling, but their grave fault is self consciousness and the lack of vocal spontaneity. When they come to me I miss in them the air of having breathed a musical atmosphere, which is incomprehensible owing to your splendid orchestras and long season of opera. How do you account for this lacking?"
63I replied by asking him if he had ever known people who read book after book without digesting thoroughly even one thought, and when he agreed with me that there are many such, I went on to say that in America during a winter we take in volumes of musical thoughts which remain unassorted and undigested in our brains from want of social interchange of musical ideas. Professional criticism is at such a low ebb that if a young mind forms an opinion, then hurries to the daily journals for corroboration or otherwise, he becomes more and more perplexed as he reads on, because one critic will declare the performer (say he were a pianist) the greatest master of that instrument born in our time, while another will decry the pianist's work in every particular. Both men are considered musical authorities, hence our student is impressed with the belief that there is either no standard of art and criticism or a great lack of conscience in one quarter or the other. Then among his friends, if an opinion concerning the performance were to be asked, each individual would utter without hesitation his belief that the performer was "all good" or "all bad." A foreign singer said to me once: "You haf no real criticism in America. Your critic he say: 'Die shentleman know nothing—he should return to his home and learn to zing;' or 'Die shentleman he zing like a angel;' but in Europe the critic points out what is goot and what is bat in die zinger's works und kindly makes die suggestion which helps him to do better," which comes very near hitting the nail on the head.
65Mr. Shakspeare was right also when he said that we lack an encouraging and stimulating atmosphere. The American musicians do not help each other by mutual enthusiasm and sympathy. Competition for dollars stands in the way of social encouragement and stimulus by means of friendly contact.
67In London it is different. There are about a dozen homes of prominent musicians in that city where open house is kept after the teaching hours are over. To these centres of gravity drift young, striving professionals and the best educated of the dilettanti, knowing that their liberty of entrée into any of those homes means a happy time, during which something is certain to be gained through being in touch with the people they will meet surrounding the master and his charming wife to whose home they are going.
69As an illustration of this sort of an evening I will tell of my farewell dinner with Mr. and Mrs. Shakspeare on leaving London the last time. Being good friends we chose to dine en famille, but by the time for coffee and cigars people began to come in. I will mention two types of the visitors.
71First, there came a young German composer, recently settled in London. Though still fighting circumstances, youth and obscurity, he makes daily strides toward the fame which is bound to come. Next came a sample of the all around cultured English gentleman, who does no one thing perfectly, because the mother of invention had no
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