Scan 18
Musical Courier 1896-07-01: Vol 33 Iss 852, 1896
77 lines. Read by computer on 20 September 2026, twice; the two readings disagreed in places. Printed page 19. See the scan on archive.org.
1turning up months afterward at the Canary Islands. This has happened several times, and his friends are no longer so anxious as in former years, for he usually returns with a new orchestral work in his portfolio. I can't criticise him for this, as Paris seems to possess a singularly antipathetic atmosphere for the creative musician. A wonderful place for the painter, sculptor and literary man, but for the tone poet it is too modern, too shallow and artificial. It is the greatest show town on earth and perhaps the loveliest.
3I attended the eighty-first representation of Die Walküre at the Opera on Saturday night and I was curious, amused, bored and finally disgusted. These people have no notion of Wagner, as much as they worship him nowadays. This performance was mediocre, yet I heard some good singing and the artists one and all displayed much intelligence. They simply had never been given tradition training.
5The music began at 8 or was supposed to, but it was 8:15 before the prelude sounded. Taffanel conducted, and you remember the old joke about the score in the head and the head in the score. This flutist conductor hardly ever lifted his head from the partition, and the orchestra, admirable as it was, generally played at sixes and sevens. I was angry at the thinness and coldness of the prelude. The basses were so piano that I swear I only recognized the cellos and violas. Now just fancy such a thing in this great storm fresco! Those elemental basses that should make the very earth tremble were kept down almost out of hearing. When Wotan's thunder motif is heard the woodwind attempted no echo effects, and the growl of the tempest was given us in dainty water colors.
7"Oh! for five minutes of Seidl," I groaned.
9The curtain rose on Hunding's hut, but judge of my dismay and mirth when I saw on either side of the stage—in on the stage, mind you, and consequently in Hunding's hearth—the boxes of the directors!
11And to cap this ludicrous climax men and women in evening dress entered, disrobed and conversed as Sieglinde presented Siegmund with the loving cup!
13Alas! holy was not Hunding's hearth!
15Naturally all illusion vanished at once, for it was exactly as if the nineteenth century had attended a pink tea given by the Volsungs in some remote primordial epoch. These stage boxes, literally on the stage, are painted a disagreeable dull red, and when the curtain falls they are obscured with the rest of the stage. It must be very entertaining for the occupants to watch the scene shifts during the entr'actes!
17Madame Bosman was the Sieglinde. She pleased me very much, withal her work was lacking in tenderness. She was at her best in the second act and sang her measures in the third act with great power and enthusiasm.
19The Siegmund (Siegmund the program read) was M. Duffaut; also a capable artist, too small to be heroic and too lyric at times. He sang the spring song badly and with little or no appreciation of its poetic content.
21Delmas was a picturesque Wotan. He is an artist of the first rank, but his Wotan was altogether too spry, too mercurial. He dashed up rocks, he leapt from crag to peak like any chamois, and he handled his dread spear as would a dandy his walking stick; besides his eyes were both uncovered. Yet his sonorous voice, fine musical feeling and handsome appearance told heavily in his favor.
23Breval, the Brunhilda, gave out completely in the third act. She was vocally pumped dry and looked like a used-up woman. The best thing she did was her first cry, and she then seemed to have exhausted her lungs. It takes more than good singing to make a Wagner singer. Breval is dark and good looking, but has not the grand manner. Gress, the Hunding (as they call him here), was good. Heglon, the Frika, made her entrance in the regulation fashion, driving her "ram-impelled car" with real horned rams. She has a big voice, but her principal solo was cut, and she was hardly shrewish enough. The Walküren sang in tune.
25The scene sets were admirable. Too much praise cannot be bestowed on the management in this respect. I never saw a more effective second act setting and the third act really looked like a gloomy, rocky mountain summit. The Ride of the Valkyries was managed most artistically. The stage of the opera house is not so wide as the Metropolitan's, but it seems deeper. The wild ride was very realistic. Through shifting chromatic, angry tornadic clouds a Valkyrie would dash on a horse, across her saddle bow slung the dead body of a warrior bound for Walhalla. The illusion is managed by means of a series of inclines high in air—a sort of tobogganing. Real women, the singers, fly before you, and Wotan's entrance was very impressive.
27The magic fire scene was a bit overdone; too much steam and fire were employed, and Brunhilda must have been half suffocated by the smoke. Oddly enough, after she has her godhood kissed away, Wotan did not place her shield upon her, but stood it at her feet.
29Now Breval is not a large woman and her shield was a toyish sort of an affair, so she could easily have borne its weight. When I think of the stomachic German ladies I have seen with 6 foot shields on their portly persons—looking like an annex to a brewery—I wondered why Breval sought fit to change this important bit of stage "business."
31There were only three cuts during the evening, and the two intermissions were at least twenty minutes each, yet the performance was over before half-past 11. Imagine Die Walküre in a little over two hours!
33The reason was because of the terrible tempi. Taffanel hurried his men continually. Hardly once did I hear a correct tempo, and remember I had the score before me. The orchestra played on a plane of monotone. There were a few pianissimos and few fortissimos. The strings were good, the brasses too noisy. The woodwind was excellent, although an oboe sounded a false note in a most trying place, viz., the scene of Wotan and Brunhilda in the last act. It set my teeth on edge, for it changed a major to a minor.
35The tympanist had little sense of nuance. His instruments sounded out of tune and in quality were inferior. Indeed I almost heard overtones. The horns were not good and the general orchestral color was muddy, the solos lacking in distinction and clean cut emphasis.
37Henri Joubert, the violinist, whom we all knew so well in New York, told me that I must not judge a repeat performance too critically. Taffanel is an old-fashioned conductor and the orchestra contained many substitutes. Admitting all this I, nevertheless, was distinctly disappointed, even if the prices for seats were so cheap. For 7 frs. I had a seat at the back of the orchestra and upstairs you can get a place for 1 fr. It surprised me, therefore, to find the standard of performance is so much lower than that of New York, as opera singers here, Melba and the rest, get hardly a tithe of what they earn in America. I hope THE MUSICAL COURIER will keep up its crusade against the ruinous prices paid artists in the United States and also the absurd prices charged for seats in our opera houses.
39The last concert I attended of any importance, and almost the last of the season, was a benefit affair at the Trocadéro one Thursday afternoon in June. It proved to be rather dull. Widor's third symphony for orchestra and organ was played, and was new to me, although I am told that it was heard several times during the past season. It is a composition not so large in design as finely worked out in spots. The first movement suggests Mendelssohn, and the organ has little to do until the close—an andante, in which organ answers orchestra almost antiphonally. The scherzo that follows is a good, well balanced piece of writing, not revealing much fantasy, rather a deft use of familiar material. The finale is pompous and brilliant.
41Widor conducted with a firm, intelligent beat. He is a capital musician, as well as a great organ virtuoso.
43Rimski-Korsakoff's tableau musical Sadko was played by the orchestra under Louis Pister. It recalled to me the old Pasdéloup Sunday afternoon concerts in the Cirque d'Hiver in 1879 when this very Sadko was hissed and applauded by opposing musical factions. Then I fancied it a remarkable work, now I recognize only a neat replica of Berlioz and Liszt. It was, however, played very badly at this concert. one of two readings
44Rimski-Korsakoff's tableau musical Sadko was played by the orchestra under Louis Pieter. It recalled to me the old Pasdéloup Sunday afternoon concerts in the Cirque d'Hiver in 1879 when this very Sadko was hissed and applauded by opposing musical factions. Then I fancied it a remarkable work, now I recognize only a neat replica of Berlioz and Liszt. It was, however, played very badly at this concert. one of two readings
46There was some mediocre singing by people unknown to me, who were wildly encored. Harold Bauer played Saint-Saëns' ever fresh G minor concerto and played very well on the technical side. This pianist says that he is twenty-two, but he looks five years older. He wears his hair à la Paderewski and it is a dark red. He is a little, stoutly built fellow, with Hebraic features, who is master of his keyboard. The Trocadéro, however, is no place for a piano except a Steinway. Bauer when he attempted a forte merely forced the tone of his instrument. The Trocadéro is a tone-devouring building.
48This pianist has a musical touch, excellent in cantabile, and his finger and wrist work is all that can be desired. He phrases in a musicianly manner, but he has much to learn on the emotional side. Life will be his best master in that sphere.
50I spoke a few words to him later and of course he said that he would be glad to visit America.
52All pianists are, for America is the Tom Tiddler's ground of gold for artists, and will continue to be so until home talent is appreciated and charlatanism despised.
54The afternoon closed with selections from a new work by a young composer, R. Mandl, called Grisélidis. It is promising, although it lacks individual profile. It was given by orchestra, one soloist and chorus.
56Joubert, who played, told me that nearly the entire program was given without a rehearsal!
58Of course I prostrated myself at the marble feet of the Venus of the Melian farm at the Louvre, and I melted before the subtle smile of Da Vinci's Mona Lisa. They are old loves of mine, and I fell desperately in love with the Victory, the headless goddess who floats before you, a dream in marble, at the Louvre.
60At the two Salons I saw good painting and some good modeling. Rodin's morbid and masterful marbles are at the new Salon. He has again exploited the most recondite emotions, and at times crosses the border land of the normal into that region of pallid passion and writhing loves. But he is the one genius of whom France can boast of to-day. France has many men of talent, a few of great temperament, but only one fiery, strange genius, and that is Auguste Rodin, the only successor to Michel Angelo, a morbid, unhealthy, paroxysmal Angelo, a man given to strange visions, but whose technique is supreme as his touch is often harsh, angular and unpleasant.
62The great picture of the Champ-de-Mars Salon is a Last Supper by Dagnan-Bouveret, a canvas charged with feeling, fine effects in lighting and characterization. It is the picture of the year.
64I admired too the canvases of our fellow countryman, Alexandre Harrison.
66In the Salon of the Champs Élysées I found just the condition of affairs described by Emile Zola—banality ruled, and the really remarkable works in color and stone were few.
68I have meditated in the cool dark gardens of Cluny, and bored myself at the open air café concerts on the Champs-Élysées. It is about the same here in the variety halls as elsewhere. The bushel of chaff you always get with one or two grains of good wheat. Yvette Guilbert in a new repertory at the Ambassadeurs, naughty Fougère at the Alcazar, etc., and so on.
70I enjoy hugely the second-hand bookstalls along the quais, and I enjoy best of all Paris-by-night—such a brilliant, mysterious, fascinating night it is, a blaze of glory in spots, and the shadows so black and caressing! But I should not care to live here and study. I might become a lotus eater, and dream my life away under rhythmic winged cathedrals and palaces of marble.
72JAMES HUNEKER.
74Danhauser.—Adolphe Leopold Danhauser, professor of solfège at the Conservatory, Paris, died June 9, aged sixty-one years. He distinguished himself at the Conservatory, gaining the first prize for harmony in 1857, the prize for fugue in 1858 and 1859, and the second prize of Rome in 1862. He was the author of many educational works, and was the inspector of the Paris city singing schools.
76Verdi.—Verdi has just deposited in bank at Milan a sum amounting to $80,000 in American money toward the first cost of the new "Verdi House of Repose" for aged and destitute musicians and operatic librettists. Furthermore, he has promised three times that amount for the completion and endowment of the institution, to which, after the death of Mme. Verdi, should she survive him, a large portion of the residue of his estate will be devoted. In this he is following the example of Rossini, who founded almshouses and music schools for his native Pesaro. The architect of the new Verdi building is Camillo Boito brother of Verdi's librettist.
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