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MUSICAL COURIER
March 2, 192 2
refinement of a tradition, and for the second the perfection of a style. Though exclusively a reproductive artist, his name will live with a creator’s fame.
Parallel to his qualities as an artist were his qualities as a man. Rarely in any rank or walk of life could one meet a personality so generous, so modest, so kindly. Free from the caprices and the conceit of the virtuoso, this true idol of the public, occupying the most exalted place in his profession, possessed the modesty and simplicity of a child, the humility and sympathy of a strong man. Always friendly, goodnatured and helpful to his fellows, little or big, few who ever met his quiet, kindly gaze and felt his warm handshake will ever forget him. As a translator, not only of life into art, but of art into humanity, Arthur Nikisch was unique.
César Saerchinger.
Kittay to Sing Varied Program
Theodore Kittay, operatic tenor, at his song recital at Aeolian Hall on March 9 will sing arias from “Werther,” “L’Elisir d’Amore” and “Eugene Onegin,” besides classical selections by Stradella, Giordano, Pergolesi and Handel, and songs by Faure, Koechlin, Purcell, Dunn, Kramer, Rimsky-Korsäkoff and Gretchaninoff.
Mr. Kittay was born in Russia, but is a naturalized American. _ He studied at the Conservatory of Petrograd and in Milan with Amato, besides other places. He has sung in many of the opera houses in Europe, including the Constanzi in Rome and in Monte Carlo; in America he is, perhaps, best remembered for his performances with the Boston Opera Company. He has also sung with the ,Bra-cale Opera Company in Havana. Some of his best known operatic roles are in “Iris,” “Butterfly,” “Puritan¡,” “Lucia,” “Traviata,” “Tosca,” “Boheme,” “Don Pasquale” and “Mefistofele.”
St. Denis-Shawn Combination Booking Rapidly
1 he announcement that Ruth St. Denis would return to the concert stage next season has aroused wide interest. Daniel Mayer, who is booking an October to December tour for Miss St. Denis, when she will be assisted by Ted Shawn and the Denishawn Dancers, has already closed numerous engagements, among them being for appearances in Oklahoma City, Okla. ; Ponca City, Okla. ; St. Louis, Mo. ; Louisville, Ky. ; Indianapolis, Ind. ; Austin, Tex., and Rochester, N. Y.
Zerffi Pupil in Recital
Florence Coleman, pupil of William A. C. Zerffi, gave an interesting recital at her home on February 5. Miss Coleman disclosed a clear soprano voice of excellent quality and ample power, and rendered her songs with charm and taste. Tier exceptional pianissimo effects called forth delighted comments from the large audience. The program included songs and arias by Handel, Puccini, Grieg, Rogers, Gilberte, Salter and others.
Stopak Draws Crowd in Peekskill
"It was the best attended concert ever given in Peekskill,” said the Daily Union in reviewing Josef Stopak’s recent appearance there. On the violinist’s program was the Vivaldi-Nachez concerto in A minor, the Arensky serenade, Schu-bert-Wilhelmj “Ave Maria,” the Tartini-Kreisler variations, jUon “Berceuse” and Wieniawski “Souvenir de Moscow.”
and their ^ authors, but utterly scorn the composer who is living right with us and is making folk songs ri^ht now. The old style folk song emerging without known authorship from the people cannot come into being in this day of copyrights and culture, but any song that lasts through the generations, and is used by the people as folk songs are used, is just as truly a folk song as any of these others. Why treat them with contempt ? They are not art music. No! And they are musically pretty uninteresting. Yes! Agreed!
But so is the folk song, and if one is worthy of record because it is the foundation of a national idiom, so is the other.	F. P.
virtuoso of the baton. Here was a musician—perhaps the first—whose talent was specifically and exclusively that of the conductor (for, after all, the conductor, in the modern sense, is a comparatively recent phenomenon). His predecessors; from Stamitz to Mendelssohn and to Wagner, were primarily^ creative musicians; Spohr, a violinist; Liszt and Biilow, pianists. The circle about Wagner: Richter, Mottl Levy, etc., really developed the art of conducting, of making music by signals. Nikisch represents the crown and pinnacle of this work.
His Mental Force.
This specific talent for conducting was outwardly expressed by the extraordinary manual technic for which Nikisch was famous. He had developed and condensed the whole science of sign-giving, so that only the utmost minimum of motion was left. He never “beat time.” He rarely gave cues with his hands; a look sufficed. His body was almost motionless, yet animated by a potential flexibility and the symbol of absolute concentration. To the public he appeared as a true embodiment of the music he made: asthetic to the last degree; never angular, ugly or bizarre.
His greatest asset, of course, was his mental force, his amazing power of suggestion. It would almost be false to say that he commanded the orchestra; he was grown together with it, as the head is with the body, and so determined its every act. It was his intelligertce, his emotion and his spiritual potency that divined the mood of the movement and found the expression for it. When he accompanied—and he was the master of all accompanists— he caught the mood of the soloists with the swiftness and sensitiveness of a seismograph, and somehow communicated it to the men below him in the achievement of perfect unity.
These, qualities determined both his significance and his limitations : He recreated the music which he understood as hardly any one else has interpreted it; at the same time he was excluded from the understanding of all music which did not square with his interpretative ideals. His sympathy for the moderns was mild; his full sympathy stopped with Bruckner and Brahms. Even Mahler lay slightly beyond his range. Tschaikowsky and the German neo-romantics he interpreted with unparalleled fire and penetration. His mission was obviously bound up with the classics and the romanticists; for the first it was the last
music.. The way to go about getting your name in the dictionaries of music is not to write a success that everybody plays and sings for a generation or so, but to write a symphonic failure which our orchestras play once or twice because they «want to oblige somebody and then cast into the discard, not because the work is not good musically and technically, but because it reflects neither the individuality of the composer nor the individuality of the American people.
The interesting part of this attitude on the •part of the musical dictionaries is the fact that antiquarians and other investigators are constantly at work collecting, classifying and tabulating folk songs
[The following eloouent a״d iust appreciation of and tribute to the late Arthur Nikisch was written by the Musical Courier’s foreign representative, César Saerchinger, who, besides being a great admirer of the famous conductor’s art, enjoyed the privilege of a personal acquaintance with him.—Editor’s Note.]
Berlin, January 28,—Arthur Nikisch, who died at his home in Leipsic on Monday night, January 23, was cremated, in accordance with his wish, on January 27 in the presence of only his family, his closest friends, and the men of his orchestra—the Gewandhaus in Leipsic. The ceremony was devoid of all pomp. The only speaker was the deceased’s eldest son, Dr. Arthur Nikisch, who said the “few friendly words at the bier” that the great musician had asked for as the sole reward of his life’s effort and affection. It was all as he had wished ; his burial was to be as simple as his life had been. No posthumous portrait, no death-mask was to be made of Arthur Nikisch.
Nikisch’s death, unexpected as it was, came as a shock to the whole musical world. His passing means a personal bereavement to the tens of thousands to whom his concerts up to within two weeks of his death were a solace and a joy. No musician within memory, perhaps none in all history, has been more loved than he. A bond of personal affection united him not only with the musicians who played and sang with him (rather than under him) but with every one of his listeners. For music, as he made it, had a wonderfully caressing quality, was an element that wrought, for the moment, a complete fusion of souls. When, therefore, the Gewandhaus and other public buildings in Leipsic fly their flags at half-mast, it is not an empty form, but a symbol of deepest, sincerest and universal mourning.
Nikisch’s illness—an attack of grippe complicated by an affection of the breast—lasted but thirteen days. Few of his friends had seen any danger in it. He had never been ill in his life. In the more than twenty-six years of his incumbency at Leipsic and at Berlin he had not missed a single concert. Last summer the sixty-seven-year-old. master had made a tour of South America; he had come back ruddy faced and vigorous, and resumed his work with the usual good nature and energy. I spoke to him in Leipsic and again in Berlin, after arrangements for his American tour were completed, and he looked forward to this new adventure with obvious pleasure.
His last concert was with the ,Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra on January 9, just fourteen days before his death; it concluded with Mendelssohn’s “Scotch” symphony. He returned to Leipsic, complaining of a slight cold; a few days later patrons of the next Gewandhaus concert found red placards at the door announcing that he lay in the grip of the influenza epidemic, which also affected his son, Mitja. At the time of the next Berlin concert, at which Nikisch was replaced by Max Fiedler, it became known that the illness had taken a serious turn, and that all the scattered members of his family had been gathered to his bedside. His last days were quiet and his suffering short ; his mind clear to the end. He passed away at half-past nine in the evening, in the presence of his wife, his two sons, two daughters and their husbands.
There was no public funeral, no ceremony or demonstration of any kind. Only the next concert at the Gewandhaus, which should have been conducted by him on the day of his creation, was made a memorial for him. Wilhelm Furtwängler conducted the “Coriolan” overture and the “Eroica,” which, dedicated to the memory of a great man, will long recall the memory of this, ffs greatest interpreter. Between the two works, Sigrid Onegin sang the four Serious Songs of Brahms.
His Love of Beauty.
“The world of super-earthly beauty of sound was the world of Arthur Nikisch.” These are the words which his son spoke at his burial. They are the key to the man’s artistic personality ; beauty of sound—that was his aim and his philosophy. Among all the great conductors who have lived, he will go down in history as the man who discovered the last beauties of the orchestra. His great predecessor, Hans Von Biilow, had prepared the way ; the utmost discipline ; the utmost finesse in interpreting the will of the creator; the inner rhythmic law that lives in every movement and every phase of the great classics was determined by him and delivered as a tradition to the present generation. Nikisch guarded this tradition with great piety; but beyond that, his life work was a new revelation of beauty. Never perhaps in the history of music has the essential balance between the choirs, never the characteristic beauty of every individual instrument and phrase been so exhaustively demonstrated. It is the perfection of orchestral virtuosity in the best sense.
This, in so far as it can be recognized as a principle, is the heritage that he leaves behind. But that which he could not pass on was the extraordinary intuitive power with which he discovered the key to the soul of a work. Nikisch was essentially an intuitive artist—a Musikant, or “Ur-musikant,” as the Germans say. He had no theories ; he did what he did because he fell it was right. In his youth he once played Beethoven’s “Eroica” and the “Ninth,” under Wagner, and what he saw him do was, according to his own words, “decisiye for his whole orchestral interpretation.”
Nikisch has been called, in the truest and best sense, a
Intimate Glimpses of a Great Conductor, the late Arthur Nikisch






/ A/M W
(1) Snapped by the Musical Courier correspondent at Zurich, summer, 1921.	(2) His last photograph, Berlin,
January, 1922.	(3) Mitja Nikisch, his son, who was to
have accompanied him to America. (4) Greetings sent to the Musical Courier shortly before his untimely death.
NIKISCH’S DEATH AN UNEXPECTED
SHOCK TO HIS MANY ADMIRERS