Scan 29
Musical Courier 1902-02-12: Vol 44 Iss 1142, 1902
58 lines. Read by computer on 22 September 2026. Printed page 30. See the scan on archive.org.
1smaller instrument with a power of one of full size, nearly, the Mendelssohn Concerto, the No. 1 Vieuxtemps in E, two Caprices of Paganini (Nos. 21 and 24), and the "Russian Airs" of Wieniawski.
3There was not the slightest indication in his marvelous playing that it was the result of consecutive "coaching" of an extremely talented pupil.
5No, it was the conception and authority of the master, not the imitator.
7To think of the manner in which this mere child grasped the rhythmic swing of the last movement of the Mendelssohn Concerto, playing with unfaltering sureness and sustained equality of power to the very end, and with an artist grip that few of the prominent violinists show. It staggered me so that my heart nearly stopped beating.
9And the opening of the Vieuxtemps Concerto. How like a master he dealt with its difficulties, both technical and interpreting, and how easily he overcome the bristling difficulties of the Paganini Caprices, before which many great players halt.
11Well, I would not have believed it if I had not heard it with my own ears.
13There is nothing forced in the appearance of the infant marvel; what he does is the outpouring of heaven born genius, the kind that Mozart had.
15I heard some reference to this little one's occasional false intonation, but I have known it to happen before and in a more pronounced form in the efforts of our great players.
17In the ripe artist false intonation is inexcusable, but this child, who overcame the most exacting passages known to violin technic, did so in the majority of cases, and more than that, with flawless facility and absolutely correct intonation.
19After this amazing display I saw him skipping around the corridor and hiding under Major Pond's big coat like any child of ten years.
21Well, history repeats itself, and when we remember the infant phenomenons, Spohr, Paganini, Vieuxtemps, Wieniawski, Wilhelmj and others who developed into the world's greatest masters of the violin, we can see the name of Florizel Reuter added to the roll, if kind fortune spares his life, and some appreciative, considerate hand guides his development.
23Miss Lucy Gates sang three numbers, displaying a good voice and a natural facility that has not fallen to the direction of correct instruction.
25There is the necessary need of a building up of the middle voice, the changing of the nasal direction to a front location and the cultivation of an open and flexible jaw. This would furnish a good foundation for her aptness in coloratura work, and serve in preserving her powers for an extended career.
27This necessity should not be neglected.
29She has a pleasing appearance and gained the favor of the audience with her songs. —WARREN DAVENPORT.
31ALICE SOVEREIGN'S SUCCESS.—"The contralto with the noble voice" made a great hit last week at a Brooklyn Institute concert. Elsewhere will be found detailed mention, and below we reproduce two press excerpts:
33Miss Sovereign made her first appearance as a concert singer in Brooklyn, and justified sanguine predictions for her future. Hers is a noble voice, with the richness of the true contralto, and with the possibilities of tone color not often heard in a voice of such body and volume. Her future as a public singer should be assured.—Brooklyn Times, February 7.
35Miss Sovereign's full, round tones were admirably fitted to her two solos, "Lungi dal caro bene" and a love lullaby by Thomas. Mr. Dufault and Miss Sovereign won great honor by their artistic singing of Carl Fique's duet, "From Autumn to Spring," the voices blending finely.—Brooklyn Eagle.
37EIGHT MONTHS IN PARIS.
39A STAY of eight months in the great French capital is likely to lead to many and varied experiences, and as this sojourn of mine was a particularly interesting one, being the year of the World's Exposition and a very busy musical season, I hope a recounting of notes made in my journal abroad will not be unwelcome to your many readers.
41The 2d of October, 1900, I found myself in that gay capital—the city of the merry and the light hearted—the people overflowing with the light jollity of young France, that France that will never grow old, but persists in remaining the irrepressible and rollicking child that cannot even yet govern its changing moods nor restrain its hot and varying tempers, and yet, strange paradox, really knows how to behave as no other can. For France will ever be a delightful home for the American foreigner, a place where charming manners, light grace, winsome tact and tender hearts cause the sordid cares of daily life to fold up their tents and steal away, leaving us sans souci in the magical charm of good company. How easy in France to forget that life has its responsibilities! How easy to be contented! and with so little; only let one sing in his heart with the "Vagabonde" of Catulle Mendes, "j'ai dans mon cœur ma mie!" One so seldom meets with the serious or thoughtful in Paris that to find a needle in a haystack would be but a feeble accomplishment compared with the powers of perception and discrimination necessary to a proper discernment and appreciation of that great spiritual force in the world of art justly or unjustly ascribed to the French.
43During my first few weeks in Paris, where the tens of thousands were crowding in at any one of the innumerable "Folies," the "Nouveau Cirque," the "Moulin Rouge," the "Café Concerts," the "Maxim," the "Variété," at such plays as "Louise," the "Demi Vièges" (Jane Hading in the title role), and even at the Grand Opéra when "Astarte" and the "Roi de Paris" were on the boards, the most convincing thing in evidence was that "esprit léger" which long tradition has attributed to that volatile, hot headed nation that can count more revolutions in a decade than any other of modern history. But there is another side to the French character and a better side, and how I became acquainted with and learned to know and enjoy this is the object of this letter to relate. This began with a more serious study of the
45FRENCH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE.
47under the guidance of my noble, spirituelle and amiable French professeur, Mlle. Valadier, who was my charming cicerone at the Sorbonne, the Collège de France and the Odéon, where I became acquainted with the lectures of "professeurs" like Faquet, the elder Deschanel, father of the president of the Chamber of Deputies, Laroumet and others. I must say in passing that, with all my admiration of the elegance and precision of the language, I could never, I fear, make it the language of my adoption because of its lack of variety of expression. Like Voltaire, I should like to petition the French Academy to allow me more than just one way, and that their way of saying the same thing, i. e., to render the language more flexible; and then it is not an expressive language like the German, which is so rich, so endless in variety, so full of heart and feeling. But French will ever be the language of "politesse" of elegance and precision, and hence of state diplomacy. Why it should ever have been called the language of love is beyond my power to discern.
49Faquet is the best example of this precision, this lucidity and clearness, where every word counts and every phrase contains a world of meaning. I began my study with his "étude" of Flaubert, with the intention of taking up the "Romanticism" of the French literature, and urged by enthusiasm like his and your "Raconteur's" I found courage to read "Salammbô" and "Mme. Bovary," the one written by the romanticist, the other by the realist. Faquet's pithy and racy style of portraying Flaubert's characters in his "étude" is one of the best things I have read in French. But after finishing "Salammbô" and "Mme. Bovary" I decided to postpone for another sitting "l'Education Sentimentale" and the "Temptation of St. Anthony," since I could not know how many days my life was to number, and books like these, with all the realist's extreme minutié of detail, require each a short lifetime in itself, for, with all one's admiration of Flaubert's consummate skill such books are a little "dur," as the French say, and that, sometimes, with the only reward of having made the acquaintance of existences like Frederic Moreau's "ou il n'arrive rien et sans qu'il arrive rien."
51I have no intention of taking you through the Zolas, the Maupassants, the Daudets, the Pierre Lotis, Anatole Frances and the whole modern school of naturalists, realists, romanticists and philosophers and the stacks of lesser authors. But it is comforting to know that there is one prophet's voice like Brunetière's, and his the only one I know, to teach the French the difference between a pure realism a mere chronicle of "Mauvaises Mœurs," for reduced to simplest terms that is what the average French novel amounts to with all its elegance, perfection of style and fervor of sentiment and imagination. As to the writer of to-day he is; as Richard Whiting has well said, a fine "Lord Chesterfield 'Gentleman'" of literature, for the French Academy has set its face against the "personal note," prevalent in England and America, which in its way is only another term for the "lyrism" of the French, and has decreed death to all individualism. With the decline of salon influence and this attitude of the French Academy the question of the future of French literature may prove an interesting query.
53I made an interesting discovery in the frank acknowledgment of the French themselves that they are not "poète." Except Alfred de Musset, Alfred de Vigny and now and then fugitive poems like the "Vase Brisé" of Prudhomme and the "Vagabonde" of Catulle Mendes you will find almost no real poetry in the French language. They are too practical a people, and withal of such a fine and sensitive imagination that this absence of real poetic expression is a matter of wonderment. The real trouble, as I divine it, lies in the extreme inflexibility of their language and its lack of variety of expression, which render figures and metaphors, as we use them, extremely difficult; but both of these are necessary to poetic fantasy. "Poets" like Lamartine, who set fine literary essays and personal reflections to verse, are the result of a fine classic education in the French language. About as near to poetry as they generally get is the poetic prose of Chateaubriand. Speaking of the classics, they give a performance, or at least rehearsal, of some old French drama like Molière's or Corneille's at the Odeon every Thursday at 10 o'clock, which is finely rendered, with the closest attention paid to the "unities" and "properties" and all the details of a perfect "mise-en-scène." You will see that poetry has now led me up or back to the one theme lawful to dwell upon in THE MUSICAL COURIER, i. e., music. Yet I believe THE MUSICAL COURIER admits the music of cadence and rhythm in poetry and prose, as well as of sound, since all have a harmonious relation. My first acquaintance with the musical art in Paris came naturally through my
55MUSIC STUDY.
57Yet although in France and in Paris I studied the piano and ensemble with Poles, i. e., Moszkowski and Gorski,
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