33
MUSICAL COURIER
BERNARD SCHRAM,
cantor-tenor.
Schram now enjoys much more ease in delivery and a brilliancy of tone throughout his register. Mme. Soder-Hueck predicts a future for him, as he is a real lyric opera tenor, she believes.
From June IS to August 10, Mme. Soder-Hueck will hold summer master classes at her Metropolitan Opera House studios and already the enrollment is promising for a busy season.
Swedish Tenor Sings Turner-Maley Song
• Samuel Ljungvist, the Swedish tenor, whose concert from the WJZ radio station resulted in a second one on April 29, sang among other numbers “In a Little Town Nearby,” by Florence Turner-Maley. The song is written to a poem by Amy Ashmore Clark, whose songs are also popular.
Picchi’s Metropolitan Engagement
Italo Picchi was inadvertently referred to as a comprimario bass in an announcement in last week’s issue of his engagement for the Metropolitan Opera next winter. Mr. Picchi has been signed as one of the regular basses of the company.
ETHEL GROW
Contralto
The singer’s versatility made her capable o f expressing a 1 1 shades of emotion through the medium pf her songs and of pleasing an audience at once critical and appreciative. — N. Y. M owing T elegraph, Feb. 1, 1922.
27 West 57th Street New York Phone: Plaza 5859
exception of the Comedie Française, I found a lack and came away unhappy and troubled. When I talked with my French friends they admitted that it was true that all art in France was at a very low ebb, due undoubtedly to the great suffering of the French people. Not only was the new generation completely wiped out, but also many of the older men and women had died from grief or overwork.
Another reason for the change is accredited to the fact that during the war, when the soldiers came back from the front, they had to be entertained and the theaters had to take any available artist, and the public since has accepted a lower standard. Another very potent reason given is that America is responsible for the present decadence in the musical life, the lure of the American dollar having brought all that was best to this country, where we have commercialized art, and robbed them of their birthright.
New York is, unquestionably, the music center of the world today, and students are returning from France to study here.	Several people, whom I personally know,
have done so. In my opinion, all the technical work should be done in this country, where you not only can have the best of teaching but also at the same time you can hear the great artists and have an abundance of riches to choose from in all its branches. America has now arrived at a place in her cultural development where we shall more and more express our own idiom, and those who do not reach the heights will owe it to a certain snobbism or lack of belief in our power to create, untrammelled by false ideas. We have civilization, and are fast approaching culture. We have youth and its attendant courage. We have ideals and ideas, and why should they not be wrought into music as well as into commerce? I believe it is up to the young generation.of Americans to be the standard bearers.
In reply to your question as to whether students should go to Europe or not, I am ephatically of the opinion that they should, even if only for six months’ time. The subtle charm and grace which one finds in France is very beautiful, it is a great education and enhances one’s power to color and to give to his or her art. The finesse of the French school is incomparable, and the artist who lacks the touch of Old World life is certainly less well fitted for a career than he who has drunk from its inexhaustible fountains. Individuals of today may be made of poorer stuff, but the lives of -the great live on forever, and Paris with its glorious beauty is still there, and all who enter its portals may well rejoice and be grateful.
Sarah Robinson-Duff.
A Tribute to Mme. Soder-Hueck’s Vocal Art
The following letter from Bernard Schram, cantor-tenor of the Washington Heights Synagogue, has been received by Mme. Soder-Hueck, the vocal authority and coach, who has produced so many successful concert and opera singers: “I am sure you will be pleased to know that I have made a great success at the banquet. I owe it all to you, Madam, as it is due to your great method of voice placement and wonderful teaching of the Bel Canto method. I’ve expressed my gratitude to you many times, but to write it makes me feel happier. It is now that I realize that my study with other teachers was just a waste of many years. People used to say I had a naturally good voice, but never have they said that my voice was well placed and that I sing correctly and artistically. At this great banquet when about two thousand people were present, of which about fifty leading cantors and rabbis just marveled at my voice and in their speeches compared me with the late Caruso. The following evening, I sang at a big mass meeting of Zionists, where Mr. Untermeyer, Sokoloff, Colonel Patterson, Mrs. Gotthale, and many more notables were present, the same praise reigned. I feel it is my duty to let every one know that I think you to be a super-voice builder and the most sincere teacher on the continent.”
Mr. Schram, who joined the Soder-Hueck pupils last winter, devoted all his free time to study under her and has already undergone a wonderful change and improvement in his voice.
Possessed of an unusually lovely voice, but hampered then by throatiness and a strained manner of singing, Mr.
Newark Festival May 6 1922
“Judging by his singing of ‘Why Do The Nations’ Frank Cuthbert is the most accomplished of the younger Oratorio bassos in this country.”
Newark News, May 8 IQ22
Exclusive Direction
WALTER ANDERSON
1452 Broadway (Bryant 1212) New York
May 18, 1922
Present Day France
[No one could be better qualified than Mrs. Robin-son-Duff, the eminent vocal teacher, to speak of conditions in present-day France, especially with regard to what is known as “atmosphere.” The address printed below was read by Mrs. Robinson-Duff at an opery forum held at the Fifty-eighth Street branch of the New York Public Library and presided over by Dr. Noble, custodian of the Juilliard Foundation. It contains so much absolute truth about Europe—and what is here said probably may be justly applied to the rest of Europe as well—that the Musical Courier has obtained Mrs. Robinson-Duff’s permission to present it to its readers.—The Editor.]
I feel quite inadequate to the task you have asked of me, and my devotion and gratitude to the country from which I have received such inspiration and help, makes it doubly hard to define clearly the sad impression which France and her art left upon me last summer.
Previous to the war I had lived in Paris for over twenty years, and at a moment when that country was rich in
MRS. ROBINSON-DUFF, vocal teacher.
men and women whose contributions to music, art and literature challenged the world.
It has, perhaps, not been the good fortune of all to meet the geniuses of this world in their own familiar haunts. My life seems to have carried me far beyond the prosaic existence of my New England girlhood, and brought me into the delightful salons of the Old World whose presiding spirits have been beacon lights. I only wish it lay within my power to bridge the years, and give to the aspiring student of today some of the musical joys I have had in the great French capital. I can truthfully say with dear Mme. Viardot, “That I do not regret growing old, but I do regret that my younger friends have not had the artistic delights that I have enjoyed.” It all seems to me like a chain, and if a link is missing the understanding is less perfect.
I was peculiarly fortunate in having as my friend and counselor Miss Fanny Reed (a great artist herself). Although her great gifts were never dedicated to public use, she had an international reputation as à great artist, and was said to be the only American woman who ever had a real salon in Paris and it was in her house that I met the celebrities who made the last epoch so brilliant— Gounod, Massenet, Saint-Saëns, Lalo, Debussy, Faure, Bemberg, Reynaldo Hahn, and countless other minor lights.
The opera was in all its glory, and the Opera-Comique was world renowned for its exquisite art and loyalty to traditions. Massenet, Saint-Saëns, Debussy, Charpentier and many others were constantly creating, and the doors of the two houses were thrown open to produce and glorify their works. I say “glorify” because I sincerely believe that art was approached with such sincerity and reverence that performers gave the very best they had to give and any deviation from tradition was at once rebuked. I have a very vivid example of the present-day attitude of the artist toward tradition. I was present at the première of Charpentier’s chef d’oeuvre. “Louise” was simply dressed as a midinette, and in the scene on Montmartre, when they come to crown her, she wore a little figured muslin frock, and Julian was not yet divorced from the flowing tie and artist’s hat. I must confess that when I see the Louise of today dressed in silks and satins, and Julian in a modern business suit, fedora hat, and carrying a quite up-to-date gold headed cane, one is obliged to employ a great deal of imagination to recreate Charpentier’s “Louise.”
I have always had such reverence for art as the composer and writer intended it, and have been privileged to assist at the creation of so many of the great works of the past decade that I may possibly be prejudiced. Last spring I went back to Paris, took a furnished apartment on the rue de Rivoli (just across from the jardin des Tuil-leries), and determined, if possible, to find some of the artistic atmosphere which had so deeply influenced my earlier years. I immediately gave a musicale to some eight people, representing all that was best in the musical, artistic and fashionable world of the day. Thus being put in touch with my old milieu I looked in vain for the life I had known before the war. I went to the Opera, to the Opera-Comique, concerts and theater, and with ’the