Scan 25
Musical Courier 1896-12-23: Vol 33 Iss 877, 1896
59 lines. Read by computer on 26 September 2026, twice; the two readings disagreed in places. Printed page 26. See the scan on archive.org.
1BOSTON, Mass., December 29, 1896.
3MR. STEPHEN TOWNSEND, baritone, assisted by Mr. Fiedler, violinist, and the Verdi Male Quartet, gave a concert in Chickering Hall Monday, the 14th. Messrs. Wry and Shapleigh were the accompanists. Mr. Townsend sang Monologue, by Ponchielli; three songs by William A. Fisher, who played the accompaniments to them; songs by Cantor, Smith, Bullard, Cowen, Massenet's Vision Fugitive, Tschaikowsky's A Heavy Sea, No Tidings Come from Thee and Spanish Serenade; songs by Norris, Grieg, Spalding, Schumann, and, with the Verdi Quartet, Meyer-Helmund's In a Gondola, and Stanford's Cavalier Songs.
5This program was an agreeable departure from the stereotyped list so much in favor with singers who live here or visit us. Not that the songs were all of high value. Those by Mr. Fisher seem to me after one hearing to be deficient in melody. There is the attempt to be unconventional in harmonic progressions; there is the anxious searching out of a characteristic phrase. Mr. Fisher shows in these songs careful study and laudable ambition, but he should remember that after all a convincing melody is the first thing to be demanded in a song. I admit that there may be pieces of music in which the voice assists the composer in the suggestion and confirmation of a mood; but it is not given to everyone to create such moods. I should not speak thus at length concerning Mr. Fisher if he did not exhibit unmistakable musical feeling. At present he is not technical master of his feelings, and in the absence of direct, frank, vocal appeal the songs appear to be more or less experimental.
7Mr. Townsend is a singer who makes steady improvement. Nature gave him a full, rich voice, of ample compass, a voice that lends itself easily to varying degrees of emotion. His intonation is pure; his tone production is better than it was a year ago. On former occasions he has been inclined to force tone, as though he were following the example of misguided dramatic singers. Monday night he was free from this fault. He no longer sings his consonants in hope of gaining effect, but his enunciation is natural and distinct. He now knows the value of legato, and his use of it, especially in Cantor's Oh, Fair, Oh, Sweet and Holy! was admirable. He also knows the value of a climax—that it must not be anticipated or hinted at too strongly; that when it does come it must be irresistible. I do not mean to say that he has reached his full stature. He will probably sing Massenet's air with more subtlety a year from now, and I do not believe he revealed to us Monday the whole force of Tschaikowsky's songs. But here is a young man who shows constant gain in the technical and the spiritual walk of his calling. If friends do not praise him injudiciously, if he is not too easily contented with his present proficiency, I see no reason why his career should not be very honorable. one of two readings
8Mr. Townsend is a singer who makes steady improvement. Nature gave him a full, rich voice, of ample compass, a voice that lends itself easily to varying degrees of emotion. His intonation is pure; his tone production is better than it was a year ago. On former occasions he has been inclined to force tone, as though he were following the example of misguided dramatic singers. Monday night he was free from this fault. He no longer sings his consonants in hope of gaining effect, but his enunciation is natural and distinct. He now knows the value of legato, and his use of it, especially in Cantor's Oh, Fair, Oh, Sweet and Holy! was admirable. He also knows the value of a climax—that it must not be anticipated or hinted at too strongly; that when it does come it must be irresistible. I do not mean to say that he has reached his full stature. He will probably sing Massenet's air with more subtlety a year from now, and I do not believe he revealed to us Monday the whole force of Tschaikowsky's songs. But here is a young man who shows constant gain in the technical and the spiritual walk of his calling. If friends do not praise him judiciously, if he is not too easily contented with his present proficiency, I see no reason why his career should not be very honorable. one of two readings
10Mr. Emanuel Fiedler, a member of the Symphony Orchestra, played with considerable beauty of tone and technical ease pieces by Saint-Saëns, Zarzyci and Hauser.
12Meyer-Helmund's In a Gondola was taken at so slow a pace that the melody suffered and monotony reigned. For the life of me I cannot enjoy the Cavalier Songs by Stanford. I know that the Musical Times regards this composer with superstitious reverence, and the critic removes his hat at the mere mention of the word "Stanford," just plain Stanford, without the titles.
14This reminds me of a story told lately by Mr. Runciman, the brilliant Saturday Review man. He was talking about Mrs. Cowden Clarke and other members of the Novello family. "That Mrs. Clarke should think Vincent Novello a great musician is perhaps inevitable; one has an almost unconquerable inclination to overrate one's parents, but the truth is he was a most ordinary person. Some pages of My Long Life remind me of how a certain music critic one evening took me upstairs in a business house off Oxford street, and, standing outside the door of a very ordinary looking room, said in that rasping whisper so familiar to those who have wished to hear the pianissimo passages at Richter and Mottl concerts, 'This is Mr. Alfred's room!' I don't know definitely to this day who Mr. Alfred is, but I conjectured that he was the head of the firm, and endeavored by my demeanor to express awe and something of terror. We descended the stairs softly, and did not speak again until we were in the open air."
16These Cavalier Songs are neither English nor chivalric, nor bold and swaggering in rhythm, nor brave and gallant in melody. Possibly there are persons who like them solely because of the "Hampden to Hell" and "Noll's Damned Troopers"; for there are men, and even women, who enjoy vicarious profanity. This pleasure is given here by Browning, not by Stanford. The latter has not italicized musically the swear words, and yet I think that the learned doctor and professor must have sworn more than once at the Saturday Review and the Pall Mall Gazette. Poor Mr. Bennett and his friends! How sorely their good nature is tried! And they are obliged to answer in dull burlesque—as in Is Beethoven Played Out? by "George Verdant Bouncingham," in the Musical Times of December 1. Read this—if you can—and you will then see that the deadly arrows are still sticking.
18Mrs. W. H. Sherwood, pianist, gave a concert in Association Hall Tuesday afternoon, the 15th. She was assisted by a string quartet (Messrs. Mahn, Berger, Fisher and Barth), and by Miss Gerda Nelson, pianist, who then made her début. The program included Beethoven piano quartet, op. 16, E flat; Schumann's piano quintet, op. 44, E flat; Chopin's Nocturne, op. 62, B minor; Grieg's Brooklet and Paderewski's Cracovienne Fantastique, played by Mrs. Sherwood; Schubert's Impromptu, B flat, and Liszt's Gnomenreigen. Mrs. Sherwood played with taste in the solo numbers. In the ensemble she showed intelligence, and above all discretion, which is a word of little meaning to many who play the piano in chamber music. Miss Nelson is still a pupil. Her technical proficiency was the chief point of interest in her performance, and this proficiency was occasional, not chronic.
20The quartet played the andante from Tschaikowsky's op. 11, the familiar andante, which custom has not staled. And as I listened I thought of its supreme fitness as funeral music.
22Music at church funerals is often conventional and without specific character. Death itself is conventional. Perhaps the music, then, should always be the same in a generation. But as I should think a bride would wish something particular and intimate, and therefore protest against Mendelssohn's Wedding March, and the chorus from Lohengrin, so I should think mourners would be more fastidious in their choice of musical mitigation of woe.
24You are an organist of a church. Jones imprudently died. He was a pompous, blatant fellow, rich, prominent in the congregation; his funeral is to be a social event. Now what are you going to play on the organ? Funeral march on the death of a hero?
26There is an impressive Funeral Prelude by Chauvet; there's a long-winded funeral march by Lefébure-Wély; there are two marches by Guilmant; the shorter one is perhaps the more effective for us, and there is a Lamentation, as well as an Elegy or two, and funeral preludes by the same eminent Frenchman, but don't play the Dead March from Saul unless the woe is national. If you wish the audience to divert itself with a panorama of Nibelungen recollections, play Siegfried's dead march.
28I no longer hear Chopin's funeral march without whispering Tam O'Shanter. A woman in the flat below used to practice them alternately.
30Singing at a house funeral is too often an enlargement of the grief. If the piano is used it has not been tuned for two years; if the pitch is given by the tenor, he happens that day to have a severe cold. Or the family demands a preposterous tune. "George was so fond of it," and you shudder at the taste of the departed.
32It might reasonably be supposed that a choir would sing with pleasure over the body of its late organist. But the soprano is very likely to be hoarse with emotion, and the alto forces her low G as though she would put it in the grave with Mr. Drawstops.
34It is seldom that an organist has a chance to play at the funeral of his soprano. She is seldom long enough at one church to contract a serious illness during her engagement. "Change and decay" is the motto; not "stay and decay."
36A string quartet with the Tschaikowsky andante is the thing. I know of nothing in music that is of this peculiar melancholy, a melancholy that is disembodied. In the melancholy of Schubert there is always the presence of humanity. His dismal cyclus, the winter journey, although I admire it beyond measure, perhaps absurdly—but I do not wish to hear it as a cyclus in toto—is full of earthliness; there is material horror of death or longing for it, according to the mood. But in this quartet of Tschaikowsky there is no thought of extinguished sensuousness. The song is of the soul, and not the body. The restlessness that precedes the chant of the soul is not assuaged by the purity of that chant; it sighs and sobs quietly in the second violin and the viola, while the march of the 'cello is as coolly obstinate as that of Fate.
38Bronislaw Huberman, violinist, gave his second concert, in Music Hall, yesterday afternoon. He played Bruch's G minor concerto, Wilhelmj's arrangement of the Romanza from Chopin's E minor concerto for piano, and Wieniawski's Faust fantaisie. He was assisted by Mrs. Joseph Adamowski, who played most delightfully Haydn's variations, Schumann's Papillons, impromptu by Chopin, Hark, Hark, the Lark, Schubert-Liszt, and the sixth Hungarian rhapsody of Liszt.
40Mr. Richard Burmeister, pianist, gave a concert yesterday afternoon in Steinert Hall. He played Liszt's arrangement of Bach's preludes and fugue in A minor, for organ; one of Mendelssohn's songs without words, minuetto capriccioso from op. 39, Weber; impromptu in F sharp major; two preludes, scherzo in C sharp minor, Chopin; sonata in F sharp minor, Schumann; elegy and capriccio, Burmeister; ballade in B minor, valse impromptu in A flat major, Hungarian rhapsody, No. 8, by Liszt.
42I was unable to be present. The following review, by Mr. C. L. Capen, appeared in the Boston Journal this morning:
44Mr. Richard Burmeister is a virtuoso; what is more, he uses virtuosity as a means and not as an end, thereby eschewing any such evil as an inordinate display of self. Such being the case one should not question how sincerely devoted to his art Mr. Burmeister really is when presenting, howsoever triumphantly, such a mind-taxing program as he did yesterday afternoon in the new Steinert Hall. This program required two hours for its performance. It contained the great A minor organ fugue of Bach, transcribed by Liszt; the Schumann F sharp minor sonata, and very much else of classic import, but the recital was too long by far to admit even such superb interpretations as Mr. Burmeister's appearing at a just advantage to himself or, what is more important, to the composers themselves. Furthermore, the artistic necessity of performing in public any such hysterical music as the final allegro of Schumann's otherwise great sonata in F sharp minor can only be apparent to the hyper-orthodox idolater of Schumann. The dazed expressions of mystery displayed in the faces of many of the audience while this so-called classical music was being played can only be likened to Endymion when Diana kissed him by the light of the crescent moon.
46No wonder Lord Byron regarded music as "such a queer thing."
48The exigencies of time and space now impel but a brief recognition of Mr. Burmeister's recital, in which, to sum up, the great artist displayed rare versatility of technic, exquisite reposefulness of style, breadth and grandeur of artistic treatment, and as delicate yet firm a cantabile in the utterance of melody as the most captious could desire. It was a memorable recital, excellently attended.
50The program of the eighth Symphony concert, given last evening in Music Hall, was as follows:
52Overture, Roman Carnival………………………………………Berlioz
53Concerto for 'cello in B minor…………………………………….Dvorák
54(First time in Boston.)
55Ocean Symphony…………………………………………………Rubinstein
56(Second version.)
58This concert was, on the whole, a dull one, although Mr. Schroeder's artistry was displayed constantly in the
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