21
MUSICAL COURIER
May 4, 1922
ject was “The Importance of Musical Clubs.” Miss Fitziu had been up rather late the evening before with some friends around the convivial poker table and she says that it was difficult for her not to open her address by saying: “Clubs are very important, but, oh dear, how much more important was the spade last evening which didn’t arrive after I had raised the pot on a four flush.”
* ». »
The sensationally successful season revival of Gilbert-Sullivan light opera has just come to a close in London, with 4,000 persons turned away from the final performance. Whenever a Gilbert Sullivan revival turns out to be profitable, nearly everyone arches eyebrows, looks at everyone else in surprise, and says grudgingly: “What do you think of that?” The immortality of the Gilbert-Sullivan works should not occasion surprise. They survive just as Beethoven’s symphonies and Wagner’s music dramas survive. The reason for their longevity is that they are the best of their kind.
*,	*5 K
Do you remember that Deems Taylor said he considered “La Donna e Mobile” from “Rigoletto,” a trashy tune, that we quoted his utterance in this column, and that our Musical Courier colleague in Europe, César Saerchinger, wrote to us all the way overseas, giving us fits for giving Deems Taylor praise for giving courageous utterance to what he believed? Well, without trying to prove Taylor, Saerchinger, or ourself either right or wrong, we reprint what the New York Times (April 30) published from its musical correspondent in Paris, regarding the debut there of Charles Hackett, at the Grand Opera:
The tenor appeared April 8 in “Rigoletto,” thus described by one of the American dailies published in English in Paris:
"Mr. Hackett’s Duke was a revelation to hundreds in the audience, particularly to those Latins who persist in the belief that America is an arid waste so far as music is concerned, and to whom it causes such visible pain and anguish to admit, however slightly, that America has ever produced an artist in any wise worth listening to or considering. . .
“Of course everybody waited for the ‘Donna e mobile’ in the last act. As Mr. Hackett sang it, it was one of the few times I did not wish it had never been written!”
־* ׳* .*«
And do you remember what Sousa said, about jazz being “dance music for cripples?” Very well; here comes Ludwig Lewisohn, in his newly issued book “Up Stream,” a sort of challenge to a certain kind of Americanism, and in one place he remarks about our latest popular songs:
Has any other people ever expressed its Dionysiac mood so spiritlessly as in jazz, the new dances, the common cabaret? And yet . . . listen well to this raucous, syncopated music—not music so much as sheer, rude rhythm— like the stamping feet and clapping hands of rude, old orgiastic folk-dances. Now and then, in the tunes, you come upon a vain and melancholy cry—a cry of torment, a cry of liberation. Read the words of the popular songs—sung in a million parlors every evening by shop-girls, typists, laundresses, even college girls to their “beaux.” They are illiterate and vulgar and indescribably mean. But what imperious instinct cursed and beaten into hiding will not show the ugly marks of the slave? The choruses of these songs are ugly because they dare not be beautiful, stealthy because they dare not be frank. But in dance and song and ragtime there is a craving for rhythm—the rhythm of the world that is sex and poetry and freedom. It is an ugly, hoarse, tortured rhythm—like the dancing of a crippled child. . . .
>1	«	»5
On the other hand, Alfredo Casella, the famous Italian modernistic composer who visited this country recently, returned to his native land and told interviewers: “Without a doubt, the United States within a century will have a magnificent national art. I was greatly impressed by the Indian music and the negro ‘jazz,’ music of a most modern type and interesting in the highest degree.”
>?»?»?
We have received a membership card and an insignial button from the Sacramento Days of ’49 Whisker Club. Being ineligible for membership at present and not desirous of changing the Grecian smoothness of our countenance, we have passed the matter on to H. O. Osgood, our trusty aide-deoffice, who possesses in luxurious abundance the primary qualification for joining the hirsute Sacramento organization. When H. O. O. received our gift he merry jested: “Oh, I fall hair to it, do
Willie—“I want to go to some of those ‘Pop’ concerts.”
Nillie—“Why ?”
Willie—“Well, that’s the kind where you can pop in and out, aren’t they?”
*S *i »1
Willie’s English cousin says that they call them “Pop” concerts !because of the ginger pop consumed there.	Leonard Liebling.
VARIATIONETTES
By the Editor-in-Chief
be discovered, and still alive, he deserves a light jail sentence.
«Í *5 *Î
We have a sad and dreadful suspicion that, outside of “Samson and Delilah,” the works of Saint-Saëns soon will disappear into the place where those of Mendelssohn, Rubinstein, Henselt, Raff, Gold-mark, Meyerbeer, and Moszkowski are resting.
*e »־׳ »?
Apropos, a new life of Saint-Saëns by Arthur Hervey has just been published by Dodd, Mead & Co. The same persons hereintofore mentioned whose existence will be spent without knowledge of Haydn may be expected to remain similarly ignorant about Saint-Saëns, one of the most gifted, brilliant and versatile mentalities the world ever has known.
* .*« ׳*
Editor Variationettes:
Upon my recent visit to Anniston, Ala., a prominent vocal teacher of Montgomery told me the following:
“It was during a lesson with a young lady vocal student and she was studying Charles Wakefield Cadman’s ‘A Moonlight Song,’ your own lyric running as follows:
*The moonlight shimmers thro’ the vine That to my porch is clinging’ but the said student did not seem to notice that she sang as follows:
‘The moonlight shimmies thro’ the vine.’
“Of course I made the request that the next time the moonlight made such an assault upon the dignity of a poor poet like myself, that I should be present, for I was sure it was under the influence of ‘moonshine.’
Yours for phun,
John Proctor Mills.”
<׳* * *
From M. B. H. written on a piece of brown grocery paper: “I reported to you recently about the rising price of onions. Well, they have dropped again, from 50 to 80 per cent. Isn’t it lucky that this happens just as the Opera closes? By the way, the first bunched rhubarb of the season is 4 to 5 cents a bunch, wholesale. Maybe you could tell Gatti-Casazza to lay in a good stock for the beards of the priests and prophets in ‘Aida’ and ‘Samson and Delilah’ next winter. The spinach they have worn heretofore is quite expensive.”
<t >5
A contemporary rises to ask whether a sack-but is a one-button sack? Yes, on the same theory that the receptacle one shakes salt out of, at the table, is a psaltery.
»? *t H
A grand opera written by King Solomon has been discovered by impresario Raoul Ginsbourg and produced by him at Monte Carlo. This seems to prove that Solomon was not so wise after all, unless he had no prima donnas among the 700 Mrs. Solomons.
-<׳* ,* *
Mrs. A. T. King is the oldest member of the Musical Courier staff, both in age and in length of service. She is over eighty. However, no one ever gets truly old on the Musical Courier. To show how youthful Mrs. King really is, we offer in evidence her note of April 22, as below:
Dear Mr. Liebling:
“Music Hall” won the Grand National race at Liverpool, England, recently.
Sincerely,
A. T. King.
,« ,־«
If the truth were known, Mrs. King probably is betting on Morvich for the Kentucky Derby, as we
Rocky Mount, N. C., April 16, 1922. Dear “Variationettes”:—
Your apology for inserting that “unmusical article by Baron Rosen from the Saturday Evening Post was hardly necessary, to my humble way of thinking, because the average musician needs light and a plenty of it, on political affairs I regret to say it, but the great majority of musicians are absolutely ignorant as to why or how the Wilsons, the Lloyd Georges, the Clemenceaus, etc., are able to befuddle millions of people to shed rivers of blood. I have been associating with musicians all my life and I find that the greater the artist musically the more and greater is his ignorance about things in general and things political in particular. Hence you deserve all kinds of credit for inserting such very timely reading matter for the average musician surely needs it. Who is this Baron Rosen?	Yours very truly,
L. G. Shaffer.
*S *?
The saying that “There is no short cut to art,” does not take cognizance of Artur Bodanzky’s very abbreviated versions of the Wagner operas as given these days at the Metropolitan.
*? »? *e
Anna Fitziu was invited to make a speech at the Mundell Club in Brooklyn last Saturday. Her sub-
We know at last why the prima donnas and some of the pianists are so proud, for does not the Eighth Psalm read: “When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon, and the stars, which thou hast ordained; what is man, that thou art mindful of him?”
n *e h
Much amusement was created by the letter of Mr. Buzzi-Peccia, published in this column last week, in which he suggested the installation of an electrical clapping machine at the Metropolitan to take the place of the present human paid claque. Of course modern invention should supplant in everything the crude methods of other days, but such an ancient institution as the claque ought to be treated with some degree of respect and veneration. Most persons do not know how old the claque really is. Its inventor was no less a personage than Nero, who not only put to death all who failed to applaud his performances, but also organized a legion of 5,000 horny palmed and leather lunged young men, whose duty it was to cheer and applaud the Emperor. Suetonius spoke of the applause for Nero as consisting of three kinds: “ ‘Bombus,’ or a muffled and continuous noise; ‘testae,’ which was a real hand clapping, and ‘imbrices,’ uproarious enthusiasm.” The regular applause was done by striking one palm against the other, or by beating the palm of the left hand with the fingers of the right, or by striking together the backs of both hands. Finger snapping, such as is done by Spanish dancers to render the sound of castanets, also was a form of applause. Another part of the Roman claquer’s duty was to shout at the appearance of Nero, “Hail! Hail! How fair thou art! Thou art August! Thou art Apollo!” In the meantime Burus and Seneca were in the habit of motioning to the regular populace to join in the “enthusiasm.” These are valuable suggestions for our opera singers, and there is no reason why they should not follow the example of Nero in at least this one thing.
* *» *
From the Miami (Fla.) Herald of recent date one learns that at the Junior Music Club composition contest there, Alice McGhee won first prize with the “Mana-Zucca Glide.”
*5	*?	»5
“Zip” communicates zippily: “A professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania says that while brains are helpful, they are not necessary.
I knew that when I first began to read •about the salaries of opera tenors.”
*t *t *?
Sir Conan Doyle’s statement: “After death there are three days of absolute rest.” We wish the story of why Geraldine Farrar left the Metropolitan would
What was to be expected is happening in Paris, where, as the Musical Courier has reported, Wagner is the order of the day operatically, or, as the Boston Transcript puts.it: “Wagner is readily reestablishing himself as the ‘bread-winner’ of the Opéra in Paris even as in the years before the war. No pieces in ‘the standard repertory’ are more assured of profitable audiences than are his. ‘Rhein-gold’ for which the Parisians have a curious liking, and ‘Die Walkiire’ are in current performance ; while ‘Parsifal’ and ‘Lohengrin’ are on the way to restoration. Even the d’lndys of French music consent to Wagner.”
*i *t *t
That chap who discovered “cold light” is no real inventor, for we saw the same frozen glint in the eye of the first newspaper employer whom we ever asked for a raise of salary.
» k *,
Of what educational value is grand opera after all? During the very last performance at the Metropolitan we heard an usher in the lobby humming• “Ka-lua.”
•i *t t?
Many young and other Americans are going to read the recently published “Life of George West-inghouse” (Charles Scribner’s Sons) who never will know that a man named Haydn ever was in the world.
*t *t *?
On the other hand, no one really cares whether time eventually will answer the headline of the Tribune critic in his column of last Sunday: “Who Wrote the Libretto of ‘Cosi Fan Tutte’?” Should he