Scan 6
Musical Courier 1896-03-04: Vol 32 Iss 835, 1896
60 lines. Read by computer on 22 September 2026. Printed page 7. See the scan on archive.org.
1A SUFFICIENTLY variegated and interesting musical week began for me last Tuesday night with a nice performance at the Royal Opera House of Lortzing's comic opera, the Armorer (Der Waffenschmied). It is more than twenty years since I last heard Lortzing's work, and it was just like meeting with a good old friend whom I had not seen for quite a long period, everything sounded so familiar and pleasing, and really I could not find that the music was antiquated or had become in the least stale or uninteresting. The good old friend had not aged perceptibly in the long interval in which we had not met.
3You don't know what you are missing in the United States that you don't hear these lighter grade operas. They are beautiful and they are educational. You get too much Wagner, and you get it before you are ready to understand him. People in Germany are brought up on Haydn and Mozart in the way of symphony before they are given Beethoven and the works of the modern symphonists, and they get a good dose of Lortzing, Adam and Auber before through Weber they climb up to Wagner in the realm of the opera.
5Of an American it is expected that he shall swallow, understand and digest Brahms, Dvorák and Tschaiikowsky without having first appreciated Haydn, and that he shall love Wagner before he has ever heard Lortzing. This is all wrong, but of course I cannot change it, and if I could I wouldn't, for you would only call it reactionary nonsense. Henry T. Finck would flay me alive with a radical razor, and H. E. Krehbiel, who was an anti-Wagnerite until he came to New York, would call up the shades of the master to help him in demolishing me; and no armorer, not even Lortzing's roisterous, good-natured and easily fooled master Waffenschmied, could make me an armor of sufficient thickness and strength to save my skin. But whither am I wandering?
7I enjoyed Krolop's good-natured and easy going humor in the part of the renowned armorer and veterinary surgeon Stadinger very much. He is always funny wherever there is a chance for it and he was so particularly last Tuesday night, without falling into his only bad habit of occasional exaggeration. That he can be earnest, tender and sincere as well as witty and humorous, he showed in the touching but not hyper-sentimental delivery of the once so popular lied about the good old times.
9Bulsz, of course, was in his very element as the disguised knight, Count von Liebenau. He acted in his most approved chevalieresque manner and he sang with wonted sonority and clearness of pronunciation. Schmidt could not get along very well with the Suabian dialect which the part of Knight Adelhof demands, but he as well as Krasa sang well. Lieban as Georg, Count Liebenau's knave, was not excruciatingly funny, but he used his falsetto tenor voice in an amusing manner.
11Of the two ladies in the cast Miss Deppe impersonated the armorer's virtuous daughter, Marie, with a most prepossessing appearance, but her voice is not of sufficient power to fill the opera house and her forcing of the vocal organ makes it occasionally unsteady and irresponsive. Miss Pohl as Irmentraut was dreadful.
13Musikdirector Wegener conducted and did well with the forces on the stage and the body of the Royal Orchestra. After the opera the ballet Phantasies in the Bremen Rathskeller was given with the gorgeous outfitting and large display of legs and youthful beauties for which the corps de ballet of the Berlin opera is renowned.
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17While Tuesday had been free from concerts, Wednesday brought the average number of two, the first one of which in Bechstein Saal proved a fizzle.
19I don't want to say so much against Miss Helene, Opitz from Muehlhausen in Thuringia, who sang an alt aria from Bruch's Achilles in most lugubrious fashion; but her partner in giving this concert was the worst specimen of a concert giver that I have so far encountered. His name is Didric Ostermann; he is an alleged violinist and he hails from Liege, the very city from which such good violinists as Thomson, Musin and others have come. Ostermann does not prove himself a worthy compatriot of these masters of the bow. He attempted to play the by no means easy Dvorák A minor violin concerto, and he made such a mess of it and played so out of tune that the critics unanimously fled before the end of the first movement, and that the public, as I learned after the concert, protested against the artist's (?) further appearance by hissing him off the stage. This is the first time that such a thing has happened in Berlin, where the invited audiences of deadheads who attend these concerts are unusually patient and good-natured.
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23From the Bechstein Saal I rushed to the Singakademie, where Miss Edith Bagg gave a well attended song recital with the assistance of the pianist Walther Bachmann. The latter, a resident of Dresden, acted as accompanist in an unexceptional manner and also performed some smaller solo numbers with nice taste and agreeable touch and tone; for the Liszt E major polonaise, however, his technic did not quite suffice.
25Miss Bagg, a pupil of that excellent vocal teacher Agloja Orgeni, of Dresden, is a native of Springfield, Mass., the city of an annual music festival, which for that reason, and because of the quite unusual quantity of flies in which it always abounds, I hold in horrible memory. There are, however, no flies on its descendants, if I may be allowed to use such slang in connection with so charming, graceful and bewitching a young lady and so musical, sweet, expressive and delightful a singer as Miss Bagg. She has not a very large soprano voice, but what there is of it she can handle with consummate art and ease and her delivery is masterly and thoroughly musical. No reprint of the German text of the Lieder would have been needed, so clearly and distinctly did she pronounce, and no trace of an American accent was discernible either in her German or the Italian and French words of a group of older compositions she sang. In these latter, by Händel, Scarlatti, Garat and Paisiello, Miss Bagg also displayed vocal technic of a superior order. Moreover, I liked her way of program making: First this batch of old masters; then a whole series of seven Schumann Lieder belonging together (all taken from the cycle, op. 24), and lastly a group of six Rubinstein Lieder, among which, just as well as among the Schumann songs, were some which are not all too frequently heard. Not the usual hash of Brahms, a Franz, a Schubert and a Schumann song all thrown together pell-mell and down together on the program with a Tosti or other selection ad captandum. There is something recherché in Miss Bagg's entire manner, in her singing (which captivated the audience so that at the close she was forced to give two encores) and in her program, which herewith I reproduce in full:
27Suite, Aus Holbergs Zeit………………………………………E. Grieg
28Mio ben ricordati……………………………………………..G. F. Händel
29Spesso Vibra…………………………………………………….D. Scarlatti
30Dans le Printemps…………………………………………….Garat
32Musette aus dem XVII. Jahrhundert………………………..J. Paisiello
33La Zingarella…………………………………………………….R. Schumann
34Für Klavier—
35In der Nacht…………………………………………………….R. Schumann
36La Gondola…………………………………………………….A. Henselt
37Mazurka………………………………………………………..B. Godard
38Morgens steh' ich auf
39Es treibt mich hin…
40Ich Wandelte unter den Bäumen……
41Lieb' Liebchen……
42Schöne Wiege meiner
43Lieden……………………………Aus dem Cyclus, op. 24……R. Schumann
44Anfangs wollt' ich fast verzagen……
45Mit Myrthen und Rosen……
46Polonaise E-dur für Klavier……………………………….F. Liszt
47Pandero………………………………………………………..A. Rubinstein
48Nun die Schatten…………………………………………….A. Rubinstein
49Mein Herz schmückt sich mit dir…
50Morgens……………………………………………………A. Rubinstein
51Neue Liebe……………………………………………………A. Rubinstein
53Another foreign concert début which took place here last week was that of Mlle. Marie Panthès, who gave her first concert with orchestra in the Singakademie on Thursday night. This young lady is of Russian birth, but has received her pianistic education at Paris. She is of most striking and decidedly prepossessing appearance. One might call her beautiful, but that is not the right adjective; she is more than that, she is fascinating, with jet black, wavy masses of hair, very large, dark brown, dreamy eyes in which there lies a world of expression, and with a creamy, soft complexion, with olive tints in it. I have her photograph right here on my desk, and as I gaze upon it I can find no other comparison for this girl than to call her a female Flying Dutchman. Only this comparison, like all others, limps, for there is absolutely nothing weird or uncanny about her, and she is to me as fascinating in black as Miss Beatrice Davidson is in blond. They are absolutely different from each other, these two young ladies, and yet they are so very much alike.
55Manager Wolff had predicted to the boys of the press that Miss Panthès' appearance would prove a sensation. During the first half hour of last Thursday's début it almost looked as if the experienced impresario's prediction would not be verified. I, too, was mystified, for Miss Panthès' playing was so entirely different from what I had heard her do in private and so disappointing that, as I have done so often before, I inwardly resolved never more to judge of an artist until I hear him or her in public. But then there were two extenuating and explanatory circumstances.
57First of all, Mlle. Panthès was so nervous in the beginning that she could not do herself justice, and second and very unwisely she had chosen for her opening number that touchstone for artistic repose, the Beethoven Emperor concerto. I have frequently mentioned heretofore my conviction that this work was not written for women, especially not for female pianists who are not of the German school, and least of all for those who are nervous at their début. This explains much, and the explanation holds good also in the case of the Bach D minor toccata and fugue in Tausig's piano version, which was not played with the true Bach spirit or in the style demanded for that composer. But from that on things began to improve. Miss Panthès conquered her nervousness, got thorough control over her fingers, and her wonderful originality, depth, and I might almost say romanticism of conception began to assert itself, and from that moment on she won her public and her critics.
59The Mendelssohn Spinning Song was charmingly performed and really with quite a new conception of that hackneyed piece. Schumann's romanza in F sharp and the rhapsodie novelette in D major were played with a great deal of fantasy, and a group of Chopin pieces showed poetry as well as a wonderful variety of touch, in which especially
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