Scan 4
Musical Courier 1907-06-12: Vol 54 Iss 24, 1907
12 lines. Read by computer on 25 September 2026. No printed page number was found. See the scan on archive.org.
1REFLECTIONS
3On Many Musical Matters in Paris.
5PARIS, May 27, 1907.
7The last of the "Salome" performances on Friday night was an exhibition of Anglo-Saxons in the auditorium, for the people present were, as an American who had been residing in Paris for a number of years said, three-fourths American, one-half of the remainder English and fully two-thirds of the rest Russian and foreign, with a few French people in the galleries and no Parisians present at all. As the opera could not be heard in New York, it seemed as if New York, Boston, Washington, Chicago and chiefly the Pacific Coast people came here to listen to it. Nikisch said to me on Saturday: "Yesterday I heard 'Salome' for the tenth time; it is more interesting to me now than ever; I could listen to it interminably."
9At the Russian concerts the audiences were chiefly American and some Russian and very few French people. An English entente cycle could draw the French even if it were all of English music, including even one of those uninteresting works which Sir Alexander Mackenzie writes and calls a symphony. But Russia is not very much on the tapis just now, except for a loan—the eighth being due in October, when the big banks and brokers will get the Paris press interested and a fifteen per cent. profit on a hundred million dollars will create sympathy again for the time being.
11By comparing the original program scheme I sent in with the following you will observe the changes that were made for the third concert on May 23. Rimsky-Korsakow's dreary, endless and academic "Nuit sur le mont Triglav" was produced with the fine old gentleman at the bat. The story is about obscurity; there is a clear night, but no stars (there wasn't one on the stage). Shadows of the filet de soles—no, souls, I mean—are hovering about the mountain gorge of the gorgeous mountain of Triglav, somewhere near Lima, Ohio, I suppose. Mlada, called malade for short, is in love with Taromir. She glides over the rocks and precipices, and he naturally follows her. And so forth, and so forth. All this is not told to one in the music, but it is explained in the program notes. The music tells you that there are three themes, and these themes irresistibly and irretrievably repeat themselves and very definitely and distinctly without change of orchestral timbre until you sorrowfully acknowledge to yourself that you now know them from memory. You can make any program you like, which is the usual fate of program music, unless the program be explained. Hence what object is there in separating music in the absolute from music in the relative when both styles, unless explained by some one else, give you all the latitude you require to make a program for yourself? Every composition one hears—instrumental, of course—offers a program if the listener is left to his own resources and not interfered with by explanations from others. I don't care for any explanation of a composition—the work written by Schillings or Hausegger or Georg Schumann or Debussy is sufficient in itself—and I am willing to dispense with the explanation of the work by Billy Schnodderack, critic
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