Scan 9
Musical Courier 1898-05-18: Vol 36 Iss 950, 1898
49 lines. Read by computer on 26 September 2026. Printed page 10. See the scan on archive.org.
1Berlin Branch Budget
3BERLIN OFFICE MUSICAL COURIER,
4BERLIN, April 30, 1898.
6GOUNOD'S "Faust," as you all know, is a very sweet and perfectly lovely opera, but to hear it twice in one week is a little wearisome and in fact a wee bit too much. I have never before been compelled to do so, even in the halcyon or rather Maplesonian days of the old Academy of Music at New York. I should not have done so now in the balmy spring days of Berlin had not the Royal Opera House offered us two guests in two different roles on two different nights of the past week.
8The first, Sunday night, brought the guesting performance of Miss Dvorák, who, for some reason unknown to me, is said to be a great favorite at the Prague Landes Theatre. I wonder whether she is a relative of the great Antonin? If so, I cannot congratulate him from an art or other viewpoint, for the young lady is not what Faust describes her to be, "a wonder." She was evidently taken with a nervous dread which caused her to lose most of her important cues in the third act, which is, as you know, the soprano's trial scene. Things went from bad to worse, culminating in a collapse, when, through inability to trill, Miss Dvorák had to make an awkward pause, and then the final B came out from the hapless girl's throat like a shot from a pop-gun, but over a quarter of a tone above pitch.
10She redeemed herself, however, to a slight degree at Valentine's death and in the church scene, when her acting was excellent, but her voice was at all times faulty as to intonation, not clear, and very strained in the upper head register. For this reason, no doubt, the end of the prison scene was cut.
12Herr Naval, as Faust, was vocally very good indeed, although he took his high C, as most other tenors do nowadays, falsetto. Faust was badly handicapped by his very "nervous" Marguerite, and thus he could not show himself to advantage as an actor, but he looked very handsome, even a bit too much so for a German Faust. Naval is a kind sort of a fellow, and when Miss Dvorák got out entirely or was tangled mentally, as happened several times, he would sing her lines for her.
14Moedlinger was a sonorous, quite humorous and at moments quite fierce Mephisto, and Miss Kranz, as Siebel, sang with intelligence and feeling, and she looked very well in doublets and hose. The chorus and orchestra dragged at moments quite deplorably under Sucher's laggard direction.
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18The cast and the performance underwent a change last night, when Lassalle made his third guesting appearance here in the part of Mephisto.
20I stated in my last week's budget that his début did not prove as much of a success as had been anticipated. But things went better in the second performance, in which the illustrious guest participated. This was in Meyerbeer's trashy and longwinded tedious last opera "L'Africaine," which is very well put on the stage here in Berlin, and which is always given with an excellent cast. Jean Lassalle, as Nelusco, pleased the large audience very much in the second act, and in the fourth act the enthusiasm had risen to such a pitch that the handsome, tall guest had to acknowledge its outbursts in open scene, a somewhat unusual proceeding at the Berlin Royal Opera House, where members of the personnel are forbidden to appear before the curtain even after the close of the act.
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24Lassalle's Mephisto, however, was a much more refined and artistically in every way polished impersonation than his Nelusco. The Frenchman plays the devil as a gentleman, which coincides very well with the conception of some of the greatest Goethe actors, albeit most other operatic Mephistos I ever saw give the part histrionically always in a very satanic, Bowery villain style. Thus, though it seemed a bit strange at first to the German audience to watch this cavalier and very gentlemanly devil, the consistency with which the part was carried through and above all the perfect vocal art of Lassalle and his polished, easy style of singing, took the audience by storm, and the guest was at the close of each act called before the curtain from three to five times. In fact, so much pleased was he with the Berlin public and the Berlin public with him that the royal intendency has invited M. Lassalle to extend his guesting stagione, and thus, besides in a repetition of the Nelusco and Mephisto appearances, the French baritone will probably also be heard here in some of his Wagnerian roles. This will be a new experience and experiment at the Berlin Royal Opera, where Wagner parts have so far always and exclusively been sung in German.
26At last night's "Faust" performance our own Fraulein Hiedler was the amiable and always sympathetic, truly Teutonic Marguerite, and although her coloratura in the jewel aria is not of a Gerster or a Patti-like perfection and brilliancy, her interpretation and her impersonation of the part of Gretchen is one of the most satisfying and most ideal one can see.
28The only other change in the cast was the substitution of Herr Hoffmann for Herr Bulsz in the part of Valentine. It turned out not to be a very happy one, despite the fact that the younger baritone is gifted with a more voluminous voice. He tried to drown with his big, burly baritone the bass of the guest, and at moments he forced his voice so much that he deviated from the pitch and overdid things generally. The worst, however, was that Herr Hoffmann, who seemed greatly and unnecessarily excited in the duel scene with Mephisto, actually wounded Lassalle so badly that the latter had to leave the stage abruptly and bleeding profusely from a deep gash in the right hand. Hoffmann blames the electric wires with which the swords are attached for the accident, but the fact remains that through his carelessness or over excitement the thing happened. Stage Manager Tetzlaff bound up the wound, which, by the way, is not a dangerous one, and the performance was carried to a successful end without the audience's knowledge of the untoward accident.
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32The concert halls are now all closed, but I have still to chronicle the final appearances of a few late comers.
34Among these was Miss Marie Janernik, a pianist who was heard in a chamber music soirée of her own at the Hotel de Rome. She performed with Herr Royal Chamber Musician O. Luedemann a very tedious and uninteresting sonata for piano and violoncello, op. 52, in A minor, by F. Kiel. Only the intermezzo of this luckily but rarely performed work is free from abstruseness, and this is ridiculously trivial.
36With Chamber Musician B. Gehwald Miss Janernik played the Beethoven Kreutzer sonata, and with both gentlemen combined the first piano trio in G, by Haydn. The young lady seems specially well adapted for the interpretation of chamber music, as she plays in an intelligent and musically manner, and knows and performs the piano part of all the works she interprets from memory.
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40Marcel Herwegh, the Paris violinist, who gave a concert of his own at the Singakademie, was especially well and sympathetically received by a good-sized audience, as he is the son of the well-known German poet Georg Herwegh, the poet for freedom in the German revolutionary war of 1848, for which partaking he was exiled.
42The son is a gifted musician and an excellent but not an existing violinist. In the Paris musical world he holds an assured and an esteemed position, and he would be sure of such an one if he lived in Berlin. Still, his performances are in a certain sense a trifle disappointing, for M. Herwegh has the habit of frequently straining for climaxes, and but rarely, if ever, attaining them. Wherever his naturally good musical taste, however, causes him to refrain from this exaggerated seeking for effect, his playing is very pleasing. Thus I liked him very much in portions of a very clever and interesting Concertstück in A for violin, by Saint-Saëns, while Schubert's B minor Rondo lost much of its inherent charm through lack of naturalness. Ries' Romanza and Scherzo, Wagner's Albumblatt and Edmund Singer's Hungarian Rhapsody, supplemented by several encores, were the remaining pieces performed by the concert-giver.
44Miss Anna Eggers, who sang the "Ah che faro" aria from Gluck's "Orpheus," and a group of lieder at this concert, has a lugubrious and not well cultivated contralto voice, but she is not unmusical, while the performances of Werner Rhenius, who acted throughout the program as pianist and accompanist, do not call for specially favorable comment.
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48A very painstaking and on the whole very interesting, though a bit old fashioned, pianist is Gustavus Adolphus Papendick, whom I heard at the Hotel de Rome last Tuesday night. He is one of the most conscientious and also quite successful piano pedagogues, although his name is perhaps little known to Americans. I was very much taken with the concise and clear style in which he performed (closely following the notes all through his recital)
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