Scan 21
Musical Courier 1902-03-26: Vol 44 Iss 1148, 1902
59 lines. Read by computer on 26 September 2026. Printed page 22. See the scan on archive.org.
1broad panoply of our principle, and when they do their duty to music their recognition in these columns is swift. This is also a reply to those who are somewhat surprised at the very favorable criticism which appeared on Lilli Lehmann's singing when she last appeared here—surprise having been occasioned because, in previous criticisms of her concert work, her singing was not approved of. On that night she sang with noble sentiment and with remarkable artistic fervor, every note true to its pitch, and THE MUSICAL COURIER, having no anti-Lehmann policy, could without hesitation give to her what she deserved in the columns of such a paper as this.
3Policy may be an excellent attribute of political papers or of trade papers or of publications devoted to statical conditions, but a paper that is published in the interests of the moving and progressive and dynamic art of music must move with it and cannot fit itself within the confined and definite limits of a policy, with all its self-assumed rules, ideas and interested motives and plans. Music is motion, and not only motion but an onward, upward motion that is taking us into the realms of the future every second we indulge in it properly, and for this one reason alone there can be no policy associated with it or its culture. It is present impulse that must be left to control us in viewing it, and impulse is the greatest impediment to any policy. Policy and music! Go to.
5THERE seems to be a tribe of melomaniacs whose mania is to acquire possession of the skulls of great composers. The last story about these lunatics involves the skull of Haydn. Once on a time, the story goes, at a dinner given by Prince Esterhazy in London, one of the guests expressed his surprise that the composer who had so long been in the employ of the Esterhazy family as capellmeister was not buried in the tomb of the family. The Prince, on his return to Vienna, obtained permission to open Haydn's grave and remove the remains to Eisenstadt. Great was the surprise to find that, when the coffin was opened, the skull was missing and could not be discovered. Haydn had possessed three devoted friends in Vienna, who resolved at any cost to gain possession of the skull of the great musician. The theft must have been done while the tomb in the cemetery was building. One of the three friends was a physician, and he prepared the skull and kept it in a glass case on a black satin cushion. The agreement among the three maniacs was that the skull should pass on the death of the eldest to the next younger, and in the year 1822 it was in the possession of an official personage in Vienna, who may be denoted as P. He was suspected of having it and his house was searched, but Frau Q. hid it in the straw mattress of her bed. Finally P. made up his mind to bequeath it by his last will and testament to the "Society of Music Friends" in Vienna." His lawyer, however, pointed out to him that as he was not in lawful possession of the skull, it would certainly be sent to the Esterhazy home. The clause in the will, therefore, was struck out. Where is it now? One report is that it is in the Museum of the Vienna Music Society, and this is believed to be true.
7Poor Mozart fared worse. No one can tell whether the skull exhibited as his is genuine or false. It will be remembered that a similar doubt arose about the skull of J. S. Bach. A skull was found in the old St. John's churchyard which people believed was that of the great St. Thomas cantor. The question was solved by a physician and artist combining their talents to model upon the poor old cranium a plaster cast, and it was said to correspond to the portraits of Bach. Why not try the experiment with the skull supposed to be Mozart's?
9SINGING WOOD.
11UPON HEARING A GIRL PLAY THE VIOLIN.
13If with a kinsman's fingers you could fret
14The vital cord in any clod or stone,
15Would there be not bubble to the air a tone
16Of that one central music hidden yet?
17Would there not sound, in ears that still forget,
18Notes of the dumb, pre-natal antiphone
19Strains to unlock the sense from that long swoon
20Which holds us till we pay the bounden debt?
22So with this wood to-day you touched to song:
23In it there slumbered all a season's sweet,
24The moonlight and the morning and the wheat
25And crocuses and catbirds—one low, long
26Sweep of the bow, and there a year you drew
27As lies a landscape in a drop of dew.
28—Harrison S. Morris in the Atlantic Monthly.
30THE revival of "Paradise and Peri" last week was a loyal though thankless undertaking on the part of the Oratorio Society. Schumann's music was last heard here in 1876, when the late Dr. Leopold Damrosch conducted it. Frank Damrosch, the present conductor of the society, thus honored the memories of both the composer and his father.
32That Schumann had little sympathy with the larger dramatic forms we all know. He wrote marvelous little tragedies in his songs, crystallized a soul history in a page; but his intensity diffused itself and evaporated in the oratorio. We note the same failure to work largely and effectively when Rudyard Kipling attempts a novel. Like Guy de Maupassant, though vastly inferior as an artist, Kipling is really a short story teller. So is Schumann. He soon goes breathless in his symphonies, which are nothing but a series of episodes very loosely strung together. In his greater piano pieces, such as the C major Fantasia, the Symphonic Variations, the F sharp minor Sonata, it is always the short, choppy, emotional phrase, never the long curving line of the master. Compare the theme of Chopin's F sharp minor Polonaise with the opening bars of the F sharp minor Sonata of Schumann, and you will see what I mean.
34At times there is lovely coloring in "Paradise and Peri," though it is melodic and harmonic, never in the orchestra. Those critics of the Brahms instrumentation should study the Schumann scores and then endeavor to realize the greater mastery of Brahms in orchestration. He did not score in the brilliant rhetorical manner of Liszt, Berlioz, Wagner, Tschaikowsky and Richard Strauss, because his musical ideas, like Beethoven's, did not demand, did not need, such garbing. They stand naked and unashamed. Put many well-known modern composers to this test—and you will be shocked at the lean, shivering bodies without their gorgeous orchestral habiliments. You recall Carlyle's example in "Sartor Resartus"!
36And the vocal writing in "Paradise and Peri" is so ungrateful! Tenor and soprano sing all over the treble clef, below and above it as well. There is, however, pretty music scattered throughout, and one chorus, "The Genii of the Nile," is charming.
38But I hope never to hear again this very decadent production of the most decadent composer of all.
40Calvé, with jolly Gilibert and savage Salignac—Tommy is so fierce when he acts his songs!—gave a recital devoted to popular French chansons at the Waldorf-Astoria last week. It was a tragic affair. Calvé is not at ease on the concert stage, for her singing is too cruelly exposed when she leaves the footlights. Nor does she succeed as an imitator of Yvette Guilbert. But Gilibert, the unassuming Gilibert, proved that he could sing songs with that small, well trained, mellow baritone of his. He looks like a Christian Brother out on a furlough. Salignac is the Louis Lombard of opera.
42Jan Kubelik had nothing new to say last Friday afternoon at Carnegie Hall, though he played with his accustomed beauty of tone, technical finesse and delicate delivery. He gave the E minor Concerto of Mendelssohn, the Adagio from Bruch's G minor Concerto, Vieuxtemps' Polonaise and Wieniawski Variations. There was no passion, but there was peace, sweetness and the calm of ripe old age. A Slav, yet Kubelik plays as we think the Germans play—reposefully. Dear German race, so-called (I resisted the temptation to write "yclept") reposeful; when you are, with the single exception of the Russian, the most vital peoples in Europe. The Poles, Hungarians, Czechs (though not the Turanians, the Mongols, Tartars) are decadent. Their emotional brilliancy is the phosphorescence of the decadent. That is why they are so fascinating—and need I add—so musical. Kubelik seems more like the product of the German schools. He has the restful nerves; he looks before he takes those wonderful technical leaps. Will he ever play with the marvelous virility, the intellectual passion of Ysaye? Consider his slender hips, his narrow chest, his neat girlish walk, the feminine shape of his forehead, his small chin—it is a woman's nature that peeps out of his shy eyes! To talk of this fragile, poetic youth going forth into the byways and highways of life and soiling his heart would be ridiculous if it were not inutile. What shall it avail a fiddler if he gains a great temperament and loses his own soul!
44According to the World, Emile Zola's début as a lecturer is the sensation of the hour in Paris.
46He was invited to deliver a series of three lectures before an exceedingly aristocratic women's literary and political club. At the very beginning he told his "smart," rustling hearers that they knew nothing about literature or politics, but were simply possessed of that surface knowledge which society women find useful in daily chit-chat to create an impression of intellectual culture. Then he proceeded to demonstrate that a real understanding of literature or politics required hard work, of which such an audience as he saw before him manifestly was incapable.
48"You pretend to be interested in these questions," M. Zola said, "but really you are not.
50"Your days are solely devoted to foolish amusement and useless actions, interminable toilet making, séances with dressmakers, luncheons, dinners, pink teas, so-called literary lectures, receptions, balls and theatres. You spend your time in gossip which is stupid when it is not wicked.
52"You shirk motherhood, and when you have children they are mostly intrusted to mercenary hands.
54"You grovel with astonishing alacrity to gain admittance into social circles above your own, and cannot conceal your asinine contempt for people supposedly below your set.
56"You reduce your reluctant duty of charity to paltry offerings for a few famous institutions.
58"This is the sort of life a society woman leads.
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