21
MUSICAL COURIER
March 1, 1923
INTERIOR OF WHITCHURCH CHAPEL AT CANNONS NEAR LONDON,
built by the Duke of Chandos. The organ at which Handel officiated in 1718-19-20 is in the center of the picture.
(Photographed for the Musical Couriek by Clarence Lucas.)
in that time. Mr. Mengelberg’s Man Friday explained to us that one was under the moral obligation to play a representative work by Schreker. We told him that we should be glad to afford Mr. Mengelberg all the space he wanted in the Musical Courier to explain just wherein that obligation lay.
----®-----
KANSAS CITY CONSERVATORY GETS A PAGE
A journalistic event which really must be considered one of importance in the history of the progress of music in America is the donation of two full pages in the rotogravure section of the Kansas City Journal-Post to pictures of the Kansas City Conservatory.
We all look with pleasure at the “picture-page” sections of our Sunday papers, and occasionally we find thereon the picture of some musical artist, generally some foreign artist who has arrived at our Metropolitan or has done some sensational thing here or abroad. But how often does American musical endeavor get a two-page spread ?
Here we see, across the top, a picture in front of the Conservatory showing its several hundred students. This is entitled Musicians in the Making. Below is a picture of an esthetic dancing class, next to this is a group picture of the several buildings of the Conservatory, and a separate picture of the dor-matory. On the right is a picture of Martha Flaugh, of the classic dancing department, in costume.
Across the bottom of the page are pictures of a class in grand opera; an ensemble class, showing thirty children at ten pianos directed by three teachers; the Conservatory Orchestra conducted by Arnold Volpe; and the kindergarten department.
The two pages make a fine showing and speak well for the importance of the Kansas City Conservatory in American music life.
----®-----
GOOD PROGRAM MAKING
Louis Graveure has always been credited with knowing how to make up an interesting program, and, quite apart from the beaten path, at his Washington’s Birthday recital he again showed evidence of having sought out some unfamiliar works which proved to be interesting, if not unanimously considered worthwhile. He opened his program with a group of modern Lieder, perhaps the most successful of which was Ich Hoert ein Sichlein Rauschen, by Jarnach, although if one were to judge the merit of the song by the applause each received they could all be called successful, and the group of American folk songs, marked first time in New York, was at least a novelty. To quote Max Smith in the American : “Here the singer had to make up in vocal and facial histrionism for what the primitive melodic phrases lacked in emphasizing the significance of the words, and he accomplished this task so well as to convince many of his listeners that the music itself had genuine substance.”
tion under Bruno Walter, a better performance than the Friends of Music has yet given it), it seems less, instead of more interesting. And while we are on the subject, it would be a shame not to quote Archie Coates in The World. “But,” he wrote, “all these attempts to make the occasion impressive failed to infuse much emotional mood or charm into the Mahler score. Mr. Urlus sang with great beauty and a heroic attempt to make something of his material, but he coped with the painstaking monotonies of the score in vain. Mme. Cahier has a moving, colorful contralto, but it wasted its sweetness on the desert air. It was unashamedly, evenly dull. There were moments, especially in the song Of Youth, when the music came hopefully near the poetry and loveliness, but shied off almost immediately and wandered again into the innocuous mediocrity whence it came.”
-----$-----
LUNATIC ON A LAWN
Said the lady beside us as Willem Mengelberg and the Philharmonic Orchestra finished playing Franz Schreker’s Chamber Symphony the other day: “All I can think of is a lunatic on a lawn.” Very apt, indeed, though a lunatic loose on a lawn might be interesting for a longer time than Schreker’s Chamber Symphony. It starts off well enough and for the first five minutes one is interested in his bag of tricks. Then they go stale, for there are no real musical ideas underlying them. At his best, Schreker sounds like Strauss at his worst; and at his worst he is bore-some to tears. It is an extraordinary coincidence (as we have pointed out before) that the four composers whom certain factions have been trying to ram down our throats for the last few years—Bruckner, Mahler, Schonberg and Schreker—are all proteges of the same Viennese publishing house. And the greatest of these is Schreker. It seems as if Brother Mengelberg must have read some of the adulatory articles by Paul Bekker, the Frankfort critic who swoons in ecstasy every time the sacred name is mentioned, for there was certainly nothing in the score that could have attracted him or made him think that an American audience wanted to hear it.
Schreker, it is true, is the director of the Hoch-schule der Musik at Berlin. That in itself may be a good reason for performing him in Germany or Holland, but it is no excuse for boring Amercians to tears with him. Mr. Mengelberg must, however, have read the lesson in the applause. The audience was so discriminative that there were only a bare half dozen handclaps in all big Carnegie Hall. Instead of being called out two or three times to bow as he is when something that the audience likes is performed, the scant applause that there was had ceased long before Mr. Mengelberg reached the door on his way out.
Let him play for us the most modern music there is as long as there is some point of interest in it, but with the stipulation that there be at least one idea to every fifteen minutes of music—■which is just one more than the number of ideas that Schreker exhibits
MORE ABOUT HANDEL
In 1718 the Duke of Chandos made Handel the organist and musical director of the chapel attached to his magnificent palace at Cannons, which at that time was a little village almost half a day’s journey from London. When was a composer more regally installed? Even Velasquez, the greatest of Spanish painters, was not more generously rewarded by King Philip IV. Horace in ancient Rome was not nearly as well treated by the Maecenas he made famous.
The original Chandos came over to England with William the Conqueror, and several of the family subsequently made resounding names in English history. But the eighth Duke, who fared so sumptuously at Cannons, was not cast in an heroic mould. He served his country to the best of his ability in the wars against the French, in which the soldiers received the wounds, Marlborough got the glory for his generalship, and the Duke of Chandos acquired a princely fortune for his amazing financial skill as paymaster general to the British army. His peculiar talents have had more imitators than Marlborough has had, but not one of the paymaster’s disciples has discovered another Handel and rewarded him according to his merits.
When Handel wrote his first English oratorio, called Esther, the Duke of Chandos presented the composer with £1,000—a good, round sum in 1720, and very much more than any composer of oratorios is likely to receive in 1923.
According to Richard Clark, a musician of importance in his day, who published an essay on Handel’s oratorios in 1822, the words of Esther were written by “Colonel David Humphreys, an American, who died at Canonbury, January 11, 1738, aged forty.”
Another work of a different character, which was first produced in the little chapel at Cannons, was Acis and Galatea, with words by the same John Gay who was afterwards to write the libretto of The Beggar’s Opera.
Gay and Handel are buried very near each other in Westminster Abbey, but their epitaphs are different.
Gay’s monument bears the flippant couplet:
Life is a jest, and all things show it;
I thought it once, but now I know it.
Handel’s monument, high up on the wall, bears a musical phrase from The Messiah and the words: “I know that my Redeemer liveth.”
While Handel was organist to the Duke of Chandos, he composed his twelve Chandos anthems, four Chandos Te Deums, and the First Set of Lessons for the Harpsichord. Rockstro says that “so great was the popularity of the Lessons that, during the greater part of the eighteenth century, they held a position similar to that accorded in the nineteenth to Beethoven’s sonatas.”
In 1720 Handel resigned his post as organist to the Duke of Chandos and entered upon his stormy career as an opera composer and director in London. In 1744 the grand Duke died. His palace was bought by a speculator who pulled it to pieces and sold the marble staircase, the great marble columns, and the equestrian statue of King George I to various purchasers. They may still be seen in other mansions in England. The chapel alone remains of all the former glory.
Although the village of Edgware is now connected with once distant London by rows of houses, railways and electric cars, the little chapel which lies a long way back from the busy thoroughfare stands exactly as Handel left it 203 years ago.
Few visitors turn aside into the unimportant lane that leads to the chapel hidden among the trees. When last I went there to photograph the building and the grave of the Harmonious Blacksmith no one disturbed me during my two hour visit. The drone of airplanes far overhead was the only sound that seemed out of harmony with the sylvan solitude of the old world cemetery.
Handel was born February 23, 238 years ago last Friday.	C. L.
----־»----
CANONIZATION
Maestro Bodanzky, it seems, has it in mind to canonize Mahler, just as Wagner is canonized at Bayreuth. Sunday some misguided persons, despite the printed request on the program, attempted to applaud between the parts of Mahler’s Lied von der Erde and were silenced by the Bodanzky frown and a deprecatory movement of the Bodanzky hand. Now we should be glad to discuss with Maestro whether or not he is doing Mahler a service by playing the Lied von der Erde without allowing interruptions between numbers by applause. Our idea is that, with a work of that length and general dullness, a chance to rustle in the seats and whisper a bit between numbers helps the audience to endure it. Hearing the work for the third time (we were present at its first produc-