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Musical Courier 1896-07-15: Vol 33 Iss 854, 1896
99 lines. Read by computer on 23 September 2026. Printed page 5. See the scan on archive.org.
1THE MUSICAL COURIER.
28 RUE CLEMENT-MAROT, CHAMPS-ELYSEES,
3PARIS, June 30, 1896.
5NOTICE.—Those people who have any interest in being known outside of Paris, please realize that everything concerning Paris, either in these columns or on page 3 of the paper, is reproduced every week in the London edition of THE MUSICAL COURIER, 21 Princes street, thereby giving you an English as well as an American clientele. Think for a moment what that means!
7GRUMBLINGS AND MUTTERINGS.
8There is more loss of pleasure through interference than by lack of the pleasure every day in the week.—F. E. T.
10TAKE a stereoscope. When you first put your eyes to the instrument you get nothing but a blur—wood all about, a black line down the centre, a woody bridge of distance, a muss of form at the end.
12Undisturbed for a minute or two, the division line drops away, the woody feeling is lost, the rod is absorbed; the picture chaos has become a charming landscape, a ball-room, a comic scene, a beautiful portrait. You are first bothered, then curious, then pleased, then absorbed, then permeated, and elated, if the subject is worth it.
14You derive no benefit whatever from the effort till the last stage sets in. The means have then dropped out of sight, the subject has gotten hold of you. Imagination begins to work, nerves are enlisted, fancy is touched; you may see people grow excited, cheeks flushed and eyes flashing, as the appeal has been of more or less strength. An impression is made and the end for which the instrument was made is reached.
16Suppose that this permeating process had been disturbed by a series of interruptions—irrelevant objects placed between you and the picture, black or empty paper inserted, a comic picture substituted for a grave one or the opposite, your attention called off by people who wanted you to listen to a letter, add a sum, sew on a button or look at a photograph? What would have become of your focus?
18You would never reach it in the wide world. You might see the picture, know the subject even. But that warm exciting feeling that belongs to a permeation by an idea, a transference of self from the real to the ideal, a "realizing sense" of a subject wholly away from and outside of your surroundings, would never have come to you in the wide, wide world!
20This peculiar, delicious, moving and truly powerful effect is only to be reached by persistent exclusion of extraneous features, by con-cen-tra-tion, by Focus!
22Take an opera. The tremendous power of effect that could come to an audience mentally as the result of a perfectly focused representation has never yet been experienced, and goes farther away instead of coming nearer, as the means of extraneous distractions are multiplied in the false hope of gaining the very effect it misses.
24The mistake is in counting upon the stage alone for this effect, whereas it can only be produced by-the complete union of stage, music and audience.
26The whole must be one magnetic fusion of imagination, intellect, intelligence, one unconscious interchange, giving and receiving, offering and accepting, suggesting and being informed, awakening and being awakened, painting and receiving impression.
28This fusion is possible in an empty barn between an itinerant actor full of his subject and an audience of street beggars.
30Personally I swear that the grand operatic performance has come to be more of an irritation than a pleasure, and more bother than it is worth, through the incessant interruptions to this focused vision. It is one of the most aggravating experiences in the realm of art, this being thumped awake just as the dream begins to fasten over one.
32To begin with, the whole thing seems to be in three separate sections—the story, the orchestra and the audience—which carry their persistent dislocations through the entire representation.
34The orchestra seems too loud for the story and the story for the orchestra, and each seems as if it would be so much more satisfactory without the other. The audience, in- stead of coming full of anticipated feeling (curiosity, interest, love, no matter what) for the subject matter, comes laden down with extraneous features (themselves, the house, the actors, the composer, opinions to be made or mended), or else blasé, dull, indifferent, looking twenty ways for flaws. They come determined not to be attentive except when throttled and held by some dramatic force or situation which, occurring only in spots, and rare spots at that, leave them totally free and irresponsible as regards effect on themselves or their neighbors.
36A college professor who was in no sense a mystic but a man of good hard sense and close observation was in the habit of saying to the school, before the repetition of the Lord's Prayer which opened the exercises:
38"I tell you, young people, aside wholly from any religious sentiment in the matter, there is a power, a great and a moving force, in the united outflow of an assemblage of thought in any one direction. For this and this only I do not suggest, I insist, that every single thought in this room fastens itself on the following words as we recite them aloud together."
40Would to God there were some such force put to bear on the roaming and disjointed imaginings of the average body of playgoers while the story is being told on the stage.
42The falling of the curtain between acts has come to me personally to be an intolerable nuisance. Its rude awakening, the back transference to house and neighbors and foyer, the stereotyped actions accompanying it, and the length of time that beats whole mouthfuls out of the dream picture before continuation, are jarring in the extreme.
44This, however, may only be individual. It is a question, perhaps, whether the picture ought to be continuous.
46Applause during the progress of a play is destructive in the extreme to the art fabric.
48There is a sort of a thing which occurs perhaps twice or three times in a season when plot, action and sentiment converge in a sharp point that probes the nerve centre like a flash and dethrones volition for a second. The involuntary explosion that accompanies such a sensation is applause that could come and go without hurting impression.
50But this dull, stupid, glassy frost of tradition that pats its weak little disturbance at every fourth falling inflection, that has neither warmth, sympathy nor appreciation in it, nothing but white conventional habit, like Christmas presents and New Year's wishes, is an awful nuisance.
52A real actor preserves the character and saves you from wreck. Not so all this common herd of applause (?) hunters. At the faintest pat out they pop, bobbing and hopping with delight, ruining the play and the pleasure and reducing their own weight—oh, if they could only know how much they reduce it! They become guignoles.
54If applause is bad, response is worse. That ends everything. I do not speak of the "claque." It is too stupid to be spoken about. It is not a type of nuisance. It could not possibly exist anywhere except in Paris, or old Italy perhaps, where art and tradition are so welded together that, like the fossilized frog on the rock, you cannot tell where rock ends and frog commences. Talk of "inartistic America." There is nothing so inartistic in all America as the claque in the Paris Opera House.
56Then the orchestra is a great interference in sight as well as in sound. That bank of queer-looking men, clad and seeming and acting wholly out of harmony with the imagination proceedings, forms a successful insulator against any possible circuit between story and listeners. Added to that is the conductor, like a crazy man be he ever so unaffected, and he more often is the reverse.
58Music is an atmosphere to a play, not a cyclone trying to destroy it. It was never so intended by any real art writer, either of words or music. It is impossible. This fight between music and acting has passed into all types and conditions of play and singing and sends one home sick. It was never so intended. The entire insulator should be dropped out of sight, with all that the word implies.
60The undue accenting of the features of a united whole, such as an opera should be (by star gazing, chorus worshipping, scene idolatry, novelty proceedings of all kinds, &c.) fully descanted upon and their deformity made hideous. It is all part of the same thing, wholly destructive of real excitement and real richness of effect. The very people who are building on it would be astonished were they to try the other way—focusing on the subject and subjecting the extraneous features as means to an end.
62For concentration is the law of Force.
64There are many interferences on the part of audiences more material than in attention. First of all is the liberty certain people assume to talk when they feel like it during music.
66With myself—and I am not alone—it is neither taste nor affectation that makes me suffer at the sound of conversation during music. It is a certain rasp of the nerves, as from a filing of saws, the playing together of two hand organs out of tune and different tunes. It is the clashing of the different keys, of singing and speaking tones, of rhythm with non-rhythm, of melody with conversation phrasing—in short, of two entirely different instruments playing entirely different tunes at the same time. The very thought of it as I write makes me sick and cross.
68Two things I cannot quite understand: first, why it is that the women of least personal charm, and generally of the advanced undesirable age, are the ones who do the most talking during the concert or opera number.
70I suppose it really is that the poor things get no other chance to be listened to except when all the other people keep still. I do not know, but if you observe you will find that while young and pretty women are generally worse behaved than homely ones, it is the homely old creatures who have so much to say while music is going on. Many of them become veritably skittish while the subtle tone pictures are being built before the more delicate and artistic people in the hall.
72The false-tooth conundrum I give up. But certain it is that the owners miss no opportunity of advertising their "wears" during the concert. The sibyllant siffle is, alas, too well known to us all, and the disturbed music lover has but to turn quickly in the direction of the talker to discover the man or the woman with the movable bones and red tar on the roof.
74I can imagine a sudden little blow of thought or suggestion bursting upward during a composition and passing like a mercury globule from mind to mind by gesture, eye glance, or even a quick, quiet sentence.
76But to deliberately lay out and carry on a conversation with all the accompaniments of gesture and motion, light and shade, all the conversational unconcern of a summer resort balcony chat, to the agony of surrounding people—what, on earth, in the name of all that is reasonable, do such people come at all for to such a place where they are even obliged to whisper and are disturbed by music? Why do they not go and have their chat out comfortably somewhere?
78There should be hush ushers with long pointed rods to punch such women in their bonnets, and at the third punch to tweak them out by the ears. The respect shown such people has always been incomprehensible, because rude, common people like that can't feel anything anyway, and a company may just as well as not be relieved of their presence.
80The French are pretty good about this. As a general thing, a Paris concert or opera hall is a place of grand silence compared with some places at home; but there does not seem to be such a thing on earth as a place where the dream pictures are not broken by reason of perhaps three spots of ignorant people who do not happen to know the laws of refined living.
82People say "chut!" here to it, but the irrepressibles are only stopped for the minute, and you have that nasty nervous expectancy as when you are reading a nice story, where you hear a door bang or a kettle boil over. You constantly dread the next bang or frizzle, and it is no use.
84Bronson Howard once said:
86"The only thing necessary to absolute politeness on any occasion the world over is to remember that you have a neighbor!"
88This of course passes on to a consideration as to whether that neighbor would be put out by what you might have the impulse to do. It is marching in step with the regiment. Otherwise it is like soldier Paddy, who complained: "The divils are all out o' shtep wid me!"
90I am going to say a horrible thing. My patriotism is sufficiently established to warrant it. The Americans are not a polite people, and for this very reason. It is wholly unconscious, for it is heredity.
92The misapplication of the idea of liberty to read "Guess I'm's good 's you are, I doff my hat to no man," begins with the old farmer who guesses he'll do as he pleases on his farm. Doffing his hat is to him a coming under to the other fellow—good Bull Run sentiment gone wrong. He plants his trees and builds his wall without any sort of thought to the man next door. His son skates on the pond Sundays and beats his drum under the windows of the Sabbath-loving family. It's his pond, his drum! The daughter wears her richest togs to the modest party of her poorest friend, and the wife empties the suds before the door of the invalid neighbor. Why not? Those things become ingrained, inherited. Rich descendants pay for their seats at the dining table, own their own cigar smoke, and buy tickets to concerts with their good money. Why on earth should they not do as they please then? The thought of being expected to do differently is always an added incentive to rebellion, after all, but an abuse of the Bull Run sentiment.
94Right here is the essence of the traditional French politeness. The buying, the paying for, the owning, but gives to them the privilege of being among people whom they are bound, for their own pride's sake, to treat with deference, respect and consideration.
96It is the habit, the training of real aristocracy, and we are basking in the sunshine of it to-day—as long as it lasts.
98You cannot be five minutes with any class of French
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