Scan 4
Musical Courier 1901-04-24: Vol 42 Iss 1100, 1901
44 lines. Read by computer on 21 September 2026. Printed page 5. See the scan on archive.org.
A town on its own line is one of the directory's headings. That is where the town on a maker's page comes from.
1BOSTON
2BY PHILIP HALE.
4BOSTON, April 21, 1901.
6HE death of Sir John Stainer reminded me of the happy existence of an English cathedral organist, which seems to me an ideal life for a man of moderate desires. The actual existence is not known to me; it is as fictitious as the supper to which Zeus sat down with the blameless Ethiopians. I see in my mind's eye a venerable church with stately spires or towers and flying buttresses—there must be flying buttresses, though I do not know as I should recognize one if I were to see it. (How narrowing, dwarfing is the constant application of the mind to the hearing of music, not for idle pleasure, but for the sake of the necessary, inevitable article!) There is an organ with old-fashioned diapasons—not diapasons with a string quality, but of full, deep tone, that give forth Miltonic music. It is not a modern organ with electrical appliances, an elevator, all the modern improvements, including sanitary plumbing.
8The modern organ is a machine; it is to the old church instrument as a modern battleship is to the old Constitution. This organ that I see afar off should be for the music of Buxtehude, Bach, the old Fischer, the chorals of César Franck, and for the accompaniment of the older church services. The choir boys would be a necessary evil; but after all they are trained and under discipline, and you are sure that they will all become either celebrated composers of operetta and musical comedy or tenors and basses of renown, whereas the boy singers in this country are for the most part singers for services and without true musical instruction. The peace of those cathedral towns! No one is obliged to hear twenty-four Symphony concerts every season, and men singers and women singers may go and come, and fiddlers and pianists may press their claims, but the organist may smoke calmly a' church warden and drink his ale as though they were not. The windows, the carvings, the service, even the millinery conduce to restfulness. No doubt Mr. Trollope's novels are true sketches of social life in such towns, and the bishop is a pompous ass or an ecclesiastical tyrant, the dean is a sycophant, and envy and malice and hatred and treachery under smooth masks are at all the church gatherings, but I do not remember that the organist is thus found masquerading. Lucky dog, if he is not invited! And when death comes there is the music of his own choir, and snug lying where he can hear the organ and smile gently at any mistake of his successor.
10Even if one were to hold a position in London where Stainer last played, the professional life might not be wholly a burden. I remember a wedding service at St. Sepulchre's, the church whose bell accompanied the moving of the cart westward toward Tyburn Tree. Over the wall of the churchyard the sexton peered and cried: "All good people, pray heartily with God for the poor sinners who are now going to their death." If there was in the cart any popular highwayman or murderer, a perfect lady tripped down the steps of the church and gave him a bouquet. It is something to be organist of a church with such associations. I remember the organist, whose fee was three guineas, took me to an old inn, old chiefly by name and location—was it the Saracen's Head?—and we drank together a glass or two of whiskey and water, while commercial travelers, for so the bagmen preferred to call themselves, sat about victoriously and bragged of sales.
12What organist in this country has a life to be compared with that of his brother in a cathedral town? Here the organist is the plaything of a music committee. If he is not connected with a rich Episcopalian church or a Roman Catholic church, he "presides at the organ" on Sunday; then the church is locked up for the week. There is nothing to minister to his esthetico religious sense even on Sunday. The church is heavily upholstered; there is violent heat in winter; there is a contrivance to light at once all the fingers of the central chandelier; but there is nothing sensuous in the worship except the heavily perfumed soprano and alto, who might be more fitly characterized as instruments of Satan. The quartet choir still flourishes, and is preferred by many to a chorus. The congregation wishes the old music of the seventies. The clergyman asks once a month for "One Sweetly Solemn Thought." How does the organist live? He cannot on his salary; but he gives piano lessons, singing lessons and makes a brave struggle. Sometimes a rich and middle aged woman in the congregation takes pity on him and marries him—if he is under twenty-five.
14I was once an organist. I spent much time and a good deal of money in learning my trade. For five years I did not see my friends or country. When I came back I found that $600 was called by the majority of church committees a good salary; $900 a large salary. Instead of which, as Judge Boompointer remarked, I took to writing. My downfall is to be laid at the door of church committees. How is a man to provide himself with absolute necessities, as Quabourg water and Burton's translation of the "Arabian Nights" on $600 a year? Of course all writers about music have a country house, money in the bank, and carry heavy insurance. Did you ever stop to think how noble it is of insurance companies to accept writers about music without classing them as extra hazardous? Never say that corporations have no bowels.
16Here is a story that can be told at the tea table:
17"When I get to heaven," said a woman to her husband, "I am going to ask Shakespeare if he wrote those plays."
18"Maybe he won't be there," was the reply.
19"Then you ask him," said the wife.
21But let us go back to our proposition. What will be the future of three-fourths of the orchestral players in this country, as well as the future of half the organists, pianists, singers? In England they have a society of musicians for the support of decayed musicians and their families. (Decayed here is the older and true word; our American prudery has twisted it so that we are inclined to regard it only as a softer form of "rotten," that is, putrid.) Do you know the origin of the establishment of this society? Festing, Weidemann and Vincent, three musicians, were at the window of a coffee house in the Haymarket. They saw two good looking boys driving milk asses. They made inquiries, and found them to be intelligent and orphan sons of Kyth, an oboist, who had settled in London and died there, literally in the street, from want. I do not know of how much practical assistance this society is to-day. It is supposed to grant monthly allowances to necessitous members and their widows, &c. It can be joined "by any member of the musical profession (between the ages of twenty-one and forty-five) residing in Great Britain." Then others are the Choir Benevolent Fund, the Choir Mutual Aid Society, the Orphan School for Daughters of Musicians, &c. But are they all securely tied with red tape? Meanwhile, what have we in this country? Take the case of a player of the bassoon, the instrument not wholly understood by Coleridge. What are the wages of a good bassoon player? Not as much as those of sin. How is he to save money for his old age? By teaching? But how many wish to learn the instrument?
23The new conductor wishes younger men. Mr. Bassoon is without an engagement. He has a wife and three or four sons and daughters at home, for even orchestra players obey the great law of nature. Is the family to go to work so that the father may sit in the corner practising in the hope of a job that never comes?
25How different the fate of writers about music. Some are decorated by foreign governments, some become editors of magazines at an enormous salary, some write books and retire to private life, some are offered lifelong positions with piano manufacturers, some are awarded lucrative political offices, others do hack work on newspapers or are removed by kindly death. But you never see a writer about music asking the loan of $4.85—"no, not $5; all I need is $4.85"—and promising to return it "next Thursday at 2:15; please make a note of the time, for I have an engagement at 3 o'clock, and I can't get round here before 2:15, or say 2:20; yes, you had better give me five minutes leeway."
27There is this to be said in favor of Puccini and his idea of setting "Cyrano de Bergerac" and "The Second Mrs. Tanqueray" to music: the libretto will in all probability be decently written. The old librettos, even the French, abound in astounding lines. At the beginning of an act of "La Caravane du Caire" the curtain rises on a man absorbed with heaps of papers and bills. He counts out loud: "One, two, three—I'll stop. This calculation tires my head." And he stands up and gives signs of extreme mental exhaustion.
29And it was in "Jaguarita" that they sang "Let us glide in the grass, as the serpent, which, proud and haughty, advances by creeping."
31Might not the first Mrs. Tanqueray be introduced by Puccini in a prelude? Hundreds would embrace the opportunity of seeing her on the stage.
33The bassoonist is still troubling me. If he should break his leg or have a strange disease he would find the best of care in a hospital. This reminds me of the strange case of Loïlys Rat, a musician of Annessy, in Savoy, as told in old French by De Copponay de Grimaldy, general director of the Royal Ducal Academy of Chemistry.
35Rat had suffered some eighteen years from a swelling of the knee. The swelling at last was the size of his head, and he feared it was a wen, and the excruciating pain toward the end of December, 1684, drove him to seek the advice of Dom Antonio Fardella de Carvello, whose home was Trapano, in Sicily, but who was making wonderful cures in Savoy. Dom Antonio told him it was a live, venomous tortoise which had been born there from the wetness; that the disease was mortal, because the tortoise had kept his eyes shut; but when he should open them to find a way out for his head, Rat would die, unless he should follow his advice; he also told him to find an ordinary tortoise somewhere, which should assist in the cure by sympathetic action. Rat could not find one, nevertheless they began operations. The tortoise thrust out its head and two feet. Fortunately, one of its eyes was blind. The learned leech made the beast go back, told his patient that he should be very cold for four hours, and then in a burning heat for several days; that he should shiver and shake and endure palpitation of the heart; that at a certain hour the tortoise would come out piece by piece, but there would be such a foul stench that neither the wife nor weeping friends could endure it. Dom Antonio applied live frogs to the soles of the musician's feet and to the palm of a hand, while in the other hand he put an hour glass and warned him not to suffer the proximity of the frogs for over an hour, otherwise the cold venom which they had drawn out would strike in and he would die. The remedies were tried and the advice taken. The knee was fully restored.
37The story of this cure is followed by sworn and signed statements of the Rev. Charle Tripier, chaplain, &c.; Claude l'Epine, master surgeon; Miss Perrine Franc; Joseph Saget, counsellor at law; Claude Longy, priest and canon; the "Damoiselle Magdelaine," daughter of a counsellor of state, who saw the tortoise and knew the cure.
39They were as credulous in that epoch as they are to-day. But what an advertisement for a pianist or a cycle singer.
41For there should be singers and audiences, begotten, raised, trained, educated for the enjoyment of a cycle. How many of us have suffered from some infuriate singer with "Die Schöne Müllerin"? Vernon Blackburn had the courage to say: "Such interminable sets of songs written by one composer are not always among the best examples of art." And did not Mr. Blackburn say the true word about a piano piece played by Emil Sauer, "the Rider Haggard of the piano": "His pertinacity is the most extraordinary of all the qualities which he possesses. He played, among other things, Schumann's 'Carnaval'—a work which when it is half finished seems interminable."
43A pretty game that might be played at a musical club by each member naming the cycle that is the stupidest and
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