Books › Musical Courier 1909-06-02: Vol 58 Iss 22, 1909 › scan 22
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Musical Courier 1909-06-02: Vol 58 Iss 22, 1909
10 lines. Read by computer on 25 September 2026. Printed page 23. See the scan on archive.org.
1A correspondent writes: "What is the matter with the musical novel, so widely discussed and largely indulged in years ago? Are there no more musical novels being written? And if so, why do you not let us know about them? I think it would interest your readers." Strangely enough, the same mail that carried the foregoing communication brought me also a book called "Maurice Guest," of which more anon, as my bucolic journalistic brethren say.
3Musical novels seem to be coming into fashion again slowly, after some seasons of disuse and almost complete oblivion. The best thing of the sort done in the last decade undoubtedly is Moore's "Evelyn Innes"; and Von Wolzogen's "Der Kraftmeyer," a study of Weimar in the Liszt period, must be counted a very worthy second. Now and then imitators of the Polko method and of "The First Violin" style have found a fitful place on the bookstands, but on the whole the publishers revealed a wise and welcome disinclination to put forth slushy love stories whose authors attempt to murk their paucity of invention and the milksoopiness of their characters with liberal daubs of the so called "musical atmosphere." A real musical novel is the most difficult thing in the world to write, for musicians, generally, are not writers, and writers, almost never, are musicians. One's study years in this or that European music center, take on a certain tender glamor and a tinge of ineffable romance when regarded from the distant vista of ten or twenty years later. However, the mere retailing of the commonplace odds and ends of a student's existence and the tabulated roster of his utterances and opinions, do not constitute a musical novel (if such a thing exists at all) even though the hero be a dark haired pianist and the girl a blonde soprano, and they marry as soon as they have their graduation certificates. Also, it might be added, a novel is not necessarily musical because a few measures from a symphony or a nocturne are printed on the cover and all the musical terms, such as crescendo, ritardando, and appassionata—particularly appassionata—are italicized. In books of that kind, the hero always is a genius and the women are thrilled through and through at the mere glance of his eye or at the shake of his bovine mane. The real tragedy of music study abroad never has been written by any novelist, for it is a tragedy understood and seen only by some of those who are a part of it, and who have been made the victims.
5Those are the failures in the vast army of young musical adventurers who undertake artistic crusades to the famed foreign temples of tone, and try to carry away with them some of the sacred knowledge the ages have accumulated there. The story of those thousands and hundreds of thousands of students who failed, of those pitiful lives left in the rough, of promising men and women broken and maimed in usefulness to each other and to the world, that story is the real musical novel and it would take a Balzac, or a Gorky to do the telling.
7"Maurice Guest" is the name of a new book by Henry Handel Richardson. On the cover page are four measures of the leading theme in the finale of Beethoven's ninth symphony. The book has 562 pages. Is it a musical novel? Let us see. Page 1 says that: "One noon in 189—, a young man stood in front of the new Gewandhaus, in Leipzig, and watched the neat, grass-laid square, until then white and silent in the sunshine, grow dark with many figures. The public rehearsal of the weekly concert was just over. . . ." The young man, of course, was none other than Maurice Guest. He wanders past the Rathaus and goes to a secluded restaurant for dinner where he becomes acquainted with a young lady who seems to bring with her into the place "a breath of wind and outdoor freshness." After the dinner, Maurice, alone, walks along the curved Grimmaischestrasse, across the spacious Augustusplatz, and past the Café Français. Then he goes home and writes an encouraging letter to his parents, promising them not to waste or mispend a day of his time abroad. It was Guest's first day in Leipzig! His native place is a small English town, and his home one of those where "the days drip past, one by one, like water from a spout after a rain shower," and "existence grows as timid and trivial as the petty griefs and pleasures that intersperse it." A few days after the walk just mentioned, Guest meets Dove, a piano pupil of Schwartz, and becomes acquainted also with a violin genius named Schilsky. Guest sees one of the Conservatorium professors chuck a pretty girl under the chin. He visits Schwartz and hears a pupil play who throws him under an extraordinary spell. She has pale red lips, dull black hair, and was altogether unlike anything he had ever seen; "she made him think of a rare, hothouse flower; some scentless, tropical flower, with stiff, waxen petals." They sink their eyes in each other's, and Maurice Guest forthwith is madly in love. At the next Probe he stands next to the tropical flower girl, who, with open nostrils and wide, vigilant eyes, and the raptness of a painted saint, listens to Schilsky playing the violin. Later Maurice goes to Seyffert's Café where Schilsky is to be feted. Krafft is there, a young pianist and disciple of the pessimistic philosophers. Everybody drinks a great deal and Maurice goes home reflectively. After some weeks devoted to hard practising, he meets by chance the "breath of wind and outdoor freshness" girl of his first day in Leipzig. Her name is Madeleine Wade. They take a walk, and meet Schilsky and the "tropical flower," arm in arm. Madeleine stops to speak to them, but Maurice colors, walks on and stands out of earshot. The couples part, and in the Mozart strasse, Maurice's partner tells him that the exotic female is named Louise Dufryer. Gradually he meets other students of both sexes, but he thinks only of Louise. He has found out by a system of spying that she lives in Brüder strasse, and he watches the house for hours at a time. Once he sees her meet Schilsky in her doorway and "the passionate tenderness of the look she gives him," and "the sudden lighting of lip and eye" rack poor Maurice for days. He learns that Schilsky is an out and out rascal, and the hero of numerous soiled love adventures. He calls on Madeleine Wade, who makes tea for him—she is an English girl—questions him about his progress, his home and family and is generally comforting and womanly. Manlike, however, his thoughts are on Louise, and he asks Madeleine to introduce him. She warns him against Louise, and tells him without much glossing over, just what degree of intimacy that young woman and Schilsky have maintained toward each other.
9Maurice refuses to believe, practically calls Madeleine an atrocious scandal monger, and shuns her for days after this episode. He has a long period of despondency, but once a week takes private piano lessons in the Brandvorwerkstrasse, from Fürst, a pupil of Schwartz's. There is a photographic portrayal of Fürst's middle class German home and family. Fürst, Krafft, and Schilsky meet at the latter's lodgings in the Talstrasse. Schilsky shows a warm-blooded letter he has received from Louise, and Krafft and the others make ribald and cynical comments. Then they go out to the Bavaria. One day, returning from the Zeitzerstrasse. Maurice rescues a young girl's music, which had been blown away by the wind. She is blonde, pretty, and an American, and her name is Ephie Cayhill. She invites him to visit her, her sister Joan, and her mother. Joan is dark complexioned and literary. The mother reads sentimental novels in the Tauchnitz edition. The three women live in the Lessingstrasse and Maurice finds out that Dove calls there every Sunday afternoon to see Ephie. Maurice induces Madeleine to invite Louise for tea so that he can meet her. Instead of his divinity, however, Krafft appears, bringing with him Avery Hill, a mannish looking American girl, who is the platonic companion, mentor, and slave, of the philosophic pianist. Finally, on another afternoon, Maurice meets Louise at Madeleine's. He learns that she is from Australia, and finds nothing to say to her except: "That is very far away." That night he, Louise, Madeleine, and Dove go to hear "Die Walküre." Before the performance, Louise visit Schilsky at his room and reproaches him for his coldness to her. They make an appointment at the Opera. Ephie is there, too, and Maurice catches Schilsky flirting with the little American. When the party leaves the opera house, they break up into groups at the Peterstrasse. Maurice walks with Louise and again makes a conversational fool of himself. They cross the Rossplatz and he takes her to her door. Ephie, upon reaching home, goes over in her mind the scene with Schilsky, which had been preceded at the Conservatorium by that amorous violinist's kissing her thrice in an empty class room and thereafter meeting her surreptitiously for walks and finally allowing her to consider herself engaged to be married to him. In the beginning of August, when everybody is away, Maurice, takes another walk through the Braustrasse, the Promenade, and the Lampestrasse, stopping in front of the Pleissenburg, where he meets Krafft. He goes home with him and that learned youth discourses volubly on cats, Beethoven, Chopin, death, Berlioz, Wagner, Liszt, genius, Richard Strauss, Nietzsche, Dehmal, Klingler, Hamlet, Meyerbeer, anti-semitism, etc. In the fall, Schilsky plays his new tone poem "Zarathustra" to a few chosen friends. Maurice hears it whispered as a secret that the violinist is going away. A farewell evening is arranged soon after for the departing one. Maurice is invited by Fürst, and before going to the gathering, wanders about the Wächterstrasse, the Plagwitzerstrasse, the Brüderstrasse, (where Louise lives), the Brühl, and finally winds up at the café where the Kneipe was to be held. Among the guests are "a couple of Americans, loud, self assertive, careless of dress and convention. One of them has the mouth and chin of a Methodist." Schilsky gets drunk and tells how Louise had hit and scratched him when she learned he was going away. He tells also the story of his flirtation with Ephie Cayhill. Maurice, also tipsy, gives Schilsky the lie. The violinist throws a glass of beer into the Englishman's face, and holds a key under his nose. "Do you see that?" shrieks Schilsky, "its a key, isn't it? Well, with that key, I can let myself into Louise's room at any hour I want too." The combatants are separated. Schilsky leaves Leipzig, and Louise gets a protracted attack of brain fever. Madeleine nurses her, but quarrels with the patient, and in an angry moment tells Louise of Schilsky's affair with Ephie, the details of which Maurice had recounted to Madeleine, as he heard them at the Kneipe. That evening Maurice receives a note from Louise, asking him to call on her at once. He goes and she worms out of him the story of Schilsky's boasts. Louise demands to have Ephie brought to her and Maurice weakly complies. A strong scene follows, in which Ephie recognizes Louise as the girl who had been with Schilsky on one occasion when he treated her coldly. Louise
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