MUSICAL COURIER
8
January 4, 19 2 3
won his musical admiration and respect. Seidl brought the pair with him for the new season at the Metropolitan where Therese sang and Victor played first cello. Herbert’s devotion to Seidl’s memory is a beautiful thing to encounter.
Strauss’ Visit.
Back in his days as conductor of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, Richard Strauss came to this country on a visit. Arrived in Pittsburgh, Richard II was naturally invited to the Herbert home, where a big dinner was held. During the evening Herbert corralled his guest and showed him some of his more important scores.
“Very fine, very fine,” grumbled the Bavarian. “But they are old-fashioned. You should spread out.”
The cursory appraisal didn’t please Victor the Vigorous any too much. As the dinner wound its course, he was suddenly seized with an idea. He remembered portions of the last two. pages of Berlioz' Treatise on Orchestration which had been edited and revised by Rtichard Strauss. Herbert recalled in particular the very last part which spoke of the narrow limitations of the present-day orchestra and then went on to speak assuredly of a future ensemble that was to contain 350 violins, thirty pianos, thirty harps, etc., etc. (We haven’t the pages before us.)
At the end of the dinner, Herbert brought up the Berlioz-Strauss work.
“Very, very fine,” grumbled the Bavarian.
“Maybe so,” said Herbert, “but where do you figure on getting the music paper on which to write your scores?”
“Why, why-------” stuttered Richard II.
He’d never thought of that.
Looking up at the wall of the room we were in, we said:
“Why, it would take the whole side of that wall.”
“Whole side of a wall ?’ said Herbert. "Why, my boy, it would take up the whole side of a house!”
Those Radical Composers.
Herbert has no use for the absurd lengths to which some radical composers are pushing the orchestra these days. The many percussion instruments concocted by a certain Australian, please him not. Thunder and wind machines excite his wrath.
Likewise the “moderns.” Igor Stravinsky’s Petrouchka he finds exceedingly interesting. Scene painting, is his description of the work. But the rest of the Stravinskiana —the quartet, etc.—he simply can’t stomach and throws up his hands in horror.
“If anyone can make a valse out of Ravel’s symphonic valses, I’ll eat my hat,” he said. “Why the other day some one sent me—why, I don't know—the score and parts of a
new string quartet in ‘C’ by-----and, so help me, the thing
starts off in ‘E’ fiat!”
Worships Wagner.
One gathers from long association with Herbert that his musical god is Richard Wagner. With his scores he is thoroughly familiar. Speaking further of the lack of necessity for expanding the orchestra to gargantuan proportions, he said:
“Why I can take my orchestra at Willow Grove and, with perhaps the addition of a few strings, do the entire score of Die Meistersinger without the slightest trouble.”
Of Brahms, the songs appeal to him most. Chopin, he thinks, has not yet received his just appreciation from the public.
Besieged by Would-Be Librettists.
As he travels about the country he is constantly being besieged by hopeful authors with books they hope to bring them fame. We overheard a phone conversation with a librettist who was anxious to have Herbert look at his book. Herbert was as gracious to this unknown chap who had interrupted his dinner as though he were speaking to Henry Blossom over some astral wire. When he hung up, he remarked:
“It’s so much trouble returning the things. Many of them are very good, but unless, the author has them placed with a producer, my labor is often apt to be in vain. The producer, having certain scenic effects in mind, certain combinations of principals, has his book written to order and the composer must also write to order and attempt to cover all the essential requirements. If the composer and author labor over a work and merely fit it to visionary characters, their chances of having it mounted are slim, indeed. I have two scores home now written under such conditions and—well, I still have them.”
His Best Seller.
Kiss Me Again has been his best seller for many years. It is worth noting in passing that Fritzi Scheff, for whom the song was written, didn’t care for it at all and wanted Herbert to write a new. one. It is taken from If I Were On the Stage, from the second act of Mile. Modiste. Scheff declared the opening B natural below the treble staff was too low for her voice. Henry Blossom, the author of the book, and Charles Dillingham, the producer, both thought little of the song and seconded the Scheff suggestion. Time has proven the marvelous erudition, musically speaking, of these critics.
Next in order of popularity comes I Might Be Your Once-In-A-W'hile, from Angel Face. His royalties were considerable.
“Don’t print them,” he said. “The public might think I’m rich,, and I’m not, heaven knows!”
Of late, the Gypsy Love Song, from The Fortune Teller, has sprung once again into prominence. If Herbert continues traveling about throughout the country as guest conductor of the picture orchestras, all of his music is due for awakened popularity, for each program includes a potpourri of such old favorites as When You’re Away, Put Down Six and Carry Two, Italian Street Song, March of the Toys, I'm Falling in Love with Some One, It’s a Great Day Tonight for the Irish, etc.
The Movies.
Herbert has played in every large movie theater from Montreal to Los Angeles. In the early days, the accommodations were of the crudest. A film theater had a screen and that was about all. Poor Herbert was forced to change his clothes in everything from the manager’s office to the check room. But with the years things have changed and in nearly all the theaters today he finds commodious quarters at his disposal.
His Children.
Strange it is that the children of such a musical father and mother should not have seen fit to try their fate in (Continued on page 49)
MORE HERBERTANA
By Gustav Klemm
Copyrighted, 1923, by The Musical Courier Company.
of the modern composer’s armor that seems to have escaped general detection.
"The trouble with the writer of today, is that he relies too much on the piano. It has been said that every composer should play this instrument fluently. A fine idea, but beware of the pernicious influence it exerts on the creator 1 Upon writing for orchestra he thinks only in terms of the piano. His piano technic is evidenced in the various figures appearing here and there in the orchestration. When a youngster shows me his score, I say, ,Where’s your pedal ?’ The successful composer for the orchestra must think in terms of the orchestra. Then and only then will he achieve effects that immediately impress the listener. I score directly for the orchestra. Of course, I often make sketches and develop them at the piano— which I play only fairly well—but the ideas invariably arrive already ‘scored’ and it is in their orchestral guise that I constantly hear them.”
English and the Foreigner.
Certainly no one is better able to present the difficulties awaiting the American composer of grand opera at the opera houses in this country today. There is one fact and no amount of patriotic juggling or mesmerism can spirit it away. The composer sets his score to a book in the English tongue and then is forced to submit his work to opera houses in which the English language is deader than Latin 1 How can the singers be at ease, how can they permit themselves the necessary artistic freedom, how can they convince, in a tongue which they know not or, at best, only fairly well? Herbert talked of those first dismal rehearsals of his Natoma. Each day would bring its cries of "impossible, impossible, impossible” from the chorus master, the conductor and the artists.
“Do you recall that portion of the opera just before the sixth scene in the first act where Alvarado is on the stage with Castro? Natoma eyes the pair suspiciously. Alvarado, turning to Castro, sings:	‘I never liked that
girl, She broods too much 1’
“At this point the rehearsal was stopped.
" ‘Broods,’ said the director. ‘What ees that?’
"Then and there a great discussion was entered into concerning this very, very strange word ‘broods.’ It simply meant nothing to the Italian director. Finally, Joe Redding, the librettist, had to change the word to one that jingled less queerly in the ears of the director. Would this trifling but annoying occurrence have arisen in a company of American singers?”
His Earlier Days.
Herbert harked back for a short while to his days as a youth at Stuttgart. His future wife, Therese Foerster, was the prima donna at the Court Opera in Vienna. It was in the summer of 1886 and Anton Seidl, the great Wagnerian conductor, was visiting in Vienna. He called on Miss Foerster at her apartment. He had heard her sing and wanted her to come back with him to America. The contract was inviting, but love is love.
"Do you need a good cellist?” she asked.
“Do I?” Seidl replied. “I’ve been looking for a good man for five years.”
“Well, my fiance is very fine. Perhaps you would like to hear him?”.
Seidl readily intimated that he most certainly would, Herbert was notified and finally arrived with his cello, played for the distinguished conductor and immediately
7TCTOR HERBERT has forgotten more about \ music than most composers ever knew.”
We don’t remember who first delivered this opinion. A bald statement, nonetheless. And yet, on second thought, it's not so bare of hirsute wisdom. As a matter of fact, the closer you come to the pate of the matter, the more do you recognize its verdant truth.
The first time we met Victor Herbert was at the Cort Theater in Atlantic City. It was a hot, a very hot, August evening in 1915. Herbert was on hand to conduct the orchestra for the first performance anywhere of his Princess Pat. During the years intervening we have spent many hours with him. In those seven years he has done much, far more in fact, than most composers ever accomplished in a lifetime.
It was shortly after we met him for the first time that we wrote a long and exhaustive study of him for a magazine. At that time we mentioned that he had written forty light operas, musical comedies, etc., in addition to his many tone poems, symphonic suites, concertos, chamber music compositions and two grand operas, Natoma and Madeleine. Since then he has written Her Regiment, Eileen, The Velvet Lady, The Golden Girl, Angel Face, Qui, Madame, the score for the film, The Fall of a Nation, many interpolated numbers in the Follies, and other Ziegfeld confections, and also the music for Orange Blossoms, which recently terminated a four months’ run in New York.
Scores the Modern Writer.
Recently we again met this great composer and conductor, who is first of all a charming gentleman and endowed with a magnetic personality such as is given to few men. Our paths crossed in Baltimore, where he was appearing as guest conductor at the Rivoli Theater, one of the city’s finest motion picture emporiums. During the week we dined often together. Our conversation was as fidgety as
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