Scan 23
Musical Courier 1906-09-26: Vol 53 Iss 1383, 1906
40 lines. Read by computer on 23 September 2026. Printed page 24. See the scan on archive.org.
1lins in their concerts and recitals in New York. He contends that since great manufacturing houses import great pianists to play their pianos in public, there is no reason why violin makers should not use distinguished violinists to bring their instruments before the public. Some interesting developments along these lines may be expected before the season advances very far.
3THE SATURDAY CLUB OF SACRAMENTO.
5The little year-book just issued by the Saturday Club of Sacramento, Cal., is a piece of literature which ought to be in the hands of every member of the music clubs of America. Practical object lessons is what most of those organizations need, to convince them that there is almost no limit to what may be accomplished in a musical way, if harmony prevails inside and united energy and perseverance are brought to bear outside. The active membership of the Saturday Club is only 40, and the associate members total 653. Those are eloquent figures! There were twelve "Artist Days" and nine "Home Days," and the average attendance per meeting was 608! The amount taken in during the season was $4,720.83, of which $2,753 went to artists, $250 to San Francisco sufferers, etc.
7The composers heard by Saturday Club members last year were Abt, Bach, Bach-Wilhelmj, Beach, Beethoven, Beethoven-Saint-Saens, Bemberg, Bennett, de Beriot, Bishop, Boccherini, Boëllmann, Brahms, Brainard, Bruch, Buck, Caracciolo, Chopin, Cook, Cowen, Creser, Deimel, Delibes, Dulbruck, Dvorák, Elgar, Albert I. Elkus, Foote, Franz, Gade, Geibel, German, Gerrish-Jones, Gilberte, Godard, Gounod, Gow, Grieg, Henselt, Henschel, Hermes, Hildach, Horn, Huhn, Hubay, Kalliwoda, Korby, Lavallée, Lawes, Lehmann, Liszt, Loewe, Gregh, Grünfeld, Haesche, Halevy, Handel, d'Hardelot, Hastings, Hawley, Haydn, Lohr, Macfarren, MacDowell, Mendelssohn, Morley, Mornington, Moszkowski, Mozart, Nevin, Norton, Numan, Olson, Paderewski, Paganini, Palliser, Parker, Paque, Peel, Pergolesi, Perry, Pierné, Polidini, Popper, Purcell, Rachmaninoff, Randegger, Rubinstein, Salter, Saint-Saëns, Scarlatti (D.), Schafer, Schubert, Schubert-Liszt, Schubert-Tausig, Schumann, Schütt, Schytte, Scriabine, Shelley, Sgambati, Shield, Sieveking, Simonetti, Edgar Smith, Shofforth, Spohr, Stewart, R. Strauss, Sullivan, Taubert, Ambroise Thomas, Tschaikowsky, Tunison, Viardot-Chopin, Viertemps, Wagner, Wagner-Brassin, Wagner-Liszt, Wagner-Wilhelmj, Webbe, Weckerlin, Weil, Weingartner, Wieniawski, Wieniawski-Weber, Wilson, Wollenhaupt, Wolf, Wright, Youferoff, and a number of Irish, Scotch, German, English and other folk songs.
9The artists who will assist the Saturday Club during the season of 1906-07 are Hugo Mansfeldt, Claude Cunningham, Dr. H. J. Stewart, Arthur Hartmann, Olive Mead; Mme. Schumann-Heink, Ethel K. Holladay, Mrs. Olive Reed Cushman, George Hamlin, Shanna Cumming and Anton Hekking.
11Dr. Muck Sailing.
13(By Cable to The Musical Courier.)
15Bremen, September 25, 1906.
17Dr. Carl Muck, the new conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, leaves today on the Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse for New York.
19P.
21Some Arrivals on Kronprinz Wilhelm.
23Among the passengers on the Kronprinz Wilhelm, reaching port yesterday, from Southampton-Cherbourg, were Marc A. Blumenberg, of The Musical Courier, and Mrs. Blumenberg, and Samuel Sanford, of Yale University; ex-Governor Francis, of Missouri; Charlemagne Tower, Ambassador to Germany; Mr. and Mrs. John Jacob Astor, Jefferson Levy, and other well known Americans were among the 80 first class passengers.
25A Budapest daily paper recently published a half-page portrait and a four-column appreciation of Arthur Hartmann, written by one of his artist pupils. The description is exceptionally interesting, and some extracts from it are given herewith, in translation:
27"He forgets himself completely during a lesson, and the less talented the pupil and the more unresponsive, the greater are Hartmann's exertions to arouse the dull-witted one mentally and to quicken the lethargic intelligence into making at least an attempt at accomplishing what the musical faculties seem unable to achieve. A stranger, coming suddenly upon Hartmann at some of these moments, would undoubtedly imagine that he had ventured into the presence of an escaped lunatic. On the spur of the moment, Hartmann invents operatic or dramatic scenes, to illustrate various moods which he wishes certain passages to suggest to the pupil. When he finds that his mere words effect no result, he stalks up and down the room, tears a colored Buffalo rug from the divan, grasps a long Norwegian dagger which serves as an ornament on his writing desk, rolls his eyes, and then and there acts in pantomime the drama he has been describing, singing the tenor role in falsetto, pleading in soprano as the girl, threatening in a guttural basso as the villain, and oftentimes frightening a female pupil to such an extent that when she resumes her performance her emotions are all a-tingle and her tone is rich with a certain vibrancy that had never been there before. Then it is that Hartmann throws off the buffalo rug, listens intently, and cries out: 'There it is—that's the quality—that's what I want. You've got it in you, you see, but it must be brought out. I won't do this scene again for you, but whenever you play that passage in public I want you to think of my drama, and to tell the listeners on your violin how realistically I acted and how frightened you were.' Of course, it must not be supposed that Hartmann always tries to frighten music into his pupils, for he fits his tactics to each particular case. * * *
29"Sometimes he finds that a pupil's emotional temperament overbalances his intellectual capacity. In that event he forces him to read, gives him or her a certain work on philosophy or a book of essays to study for the next lesson, and insists on the pupil's discussing it with him, arguing, analyzing and criticising. At first, some of the young violinists rebel at this sort of instruction, and cannot possibly conceive what it has to do with spiccato bowing or double stopping on the violin. However, they soon get interested in the new subject, and gradually understand its application as Hartmann draws the analogies between music and literature, leads over to the domain of esthetics, explains the well springs of all artistic creation, drifts into musical history, and finally brings the talk to an end with some specific deduction that lands teacher and listener at the very work which is being studied. Great teachers of all periods have been men of vast knowledge and wide outlook, and they have always instructed their pupils in more subjects than the one they came to study. The point I wish to make is simply this: That Hartmann is one of those great teachers. * * *
31"He has humor, too. * * * On one occasion, a pupil was playing the Saint-Saëns concerto in B minor. She had just finished the opening phrase when Hartmann interrupted her and said: 'Good heavens, play that as if it meant something!' The girl tried again, but made the snatch of melody sound even more commonplace than before. Hartmann grasped his fiddle and imitated her. 'That phrase is all important in the concerto, but do you know what it sounds like when you play it? Like this,' and then Hartmann executed the melody as follows, and sang the words herewith given:
33ARE YOU GOING DOWN TOWN?
35"The effect was irresistibly humorous, of course, and the pupil at once realized the point Hartmann was trying to make. * * *
37"On one occasion he noticed that a young girl was looking pale, as if from overwork. 'For the next month you must eat more than you practice,' he said to her, and at each lesson thereafter she had to tell him exactly how much and what she had eaten and how long she had practised. He made an unimaginative youth from Nebraska read Dumas, Sue, Poe and Walter Scott until the boy developed a mania for romantic literature, and, incidentally, acquired the bold style and free delivery which Hartmann had found it impossible to teach him by rule or example. * * * He went with some of his pupils to the art galleries, and lectured to them on the technic and fantasy of the masters; others he took to the Opera, and made them follow the vocal score of the work and mark with a pencil the phrasing, breathing pauses and natural accents with which the great singers delivered cantabile melodies. * * * 'You play as though your fiddle were made of glass and your bow of iron,' Hartmann told one pupil; 'don't play with your instrument, play on it. It won't break.' * * * 'When you are tired, don't expect your violin to be fresh,' was another of his aphorisms.
39"Once he caught a boy suddenly around the neck with one hand. The lad coughed and choked. 'Precisely,' explained Hartmann; 'that's the way you are squeezing the neck of your fiddle.' * * * To a pupil who dragged the tempo of Bach's 'Chaconne': 'That sounds like a train which is about to stop, but doesn't, and keeps moving just slowly enough to get the passengers nervous.' The pupil quickened the
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