March 8, 1923
MUSICAL COURIER
12
“A PIANISSIMO THAT ONE MUST SEARCH FOR.”
George Schnéevoigt in a characteristic pose. (Drawn by Marie Wetzel.)
ers have done in the past was mere “kitsch.” Having tried an illustrator for the Magic Flute, the Staatsoper this time took an architect. Hans Poelzig, the creator of the monster art mausoleum of Salzburg, is the man. His theory is that Don Giovanni’s character must be expressed, not only by the actor, but by the scenery; the more this lively, fantastic person (he looks like Don Quixote) is about, the livelier the houses and trees and things must be. That is “style.” Those who call in “Kultur-kitsch” are plebeians.
The performance in general showed how difficult an opera Don Giovanni is. The Salzburg production was not ideal, but it was gold in comparison with this. I shan’t dwell on details. Scheidl is no Don; Carl Braun no buffo. Both are giants, and made poor Ottavio (Carl Gunther, oh what a tenor!) look like a comic dwarf. Donna Elvira (Gertrud Bindernagel) was a weepy Hausfrau, and Donna Anna (Frieda Leider) only a beautiful voice. Masetto (Herbert Stock), the only buffonist, and Lola Artót de Padilla, as Zerlina, the only real Mozart singer, sprightly, light and graceful. The public was duly grateful to hen Egon Poliak, as guest conductor, did the best he could with a strange ensemble, which was not much. None of the ensembles had their effect; it was all too heavy, too slow, too• German. Oh Italy that was 1
The Jewels of the Madonna.
The Volksoper, a more and more successful rival to the Staatsoper, which has had ambitious plans for bringing out the modern foreign repertory, has had these plans spoiled, or deferred, by the French invasion of the Ruhr. It is virtually impossible today to produce a French piece of music—let alone an opera—in Berlin. Hence no Ariane et Barbe-bleue and no L’Heure espagnole for the present. But Wolf-Ferrari’s Jewels, produced last night, went over with a bang. Wolf-Ferrari, like d’Albert, is the Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde sort of a composer. When he is light, musical, graceful he has all the virtues of a classic, when he is dramatic he is a vicious Puccini-ist. And yet the Jewels has strong qualities. It is undraped melodrama, brutal in its methods but telling. It gets you, in spite of yourself.
It was a splendid performance, though given with modest means. Wilhelm Guttmann, as Raffaelo, was easily the strongest figure, and vocally the best of the men. Aline Sanden’s Maliella was a vivid character and an excellent voice, Bruna Korell’s Gennaro fair, as tenors go. Two Americans, Valerie Doob and Sonya Yergin did well in minor roles, and Ernst Praetorius got the dynamics and the swing of the Italian score very well. The pretty introduction to Act III had to be repeated.
Most admirable, however, were the stage management of Prof. d’Arnals, who handles mass scenes with an uncanny technic, and builds up dramatic climaxes with unfailing certainty; and the stage settings of Hans Strohbach, who comprises the crass realism of the Naples milieu by modern idealism and expressiveness. It was a delight to the eye. The last scene was accelerated to a terrific frenzy of excitement by the collaboration of Lucy Kieselhausen, the modern dancer, as Grazia.	César Saerchingee-
Rubinstein Club Activities
The Rubinstein Club, Mrs. William Rogers Chapman, president, held its annual ball for the 1922-23 season at the Waldorf-Astoria on the evening of March 6. A piano recital given by Ethel Leginska preceded the ball from¡ 8 :30 to 10 o’clock.
The next afternoon musicale of the club will be given on St. Patrick’s Day, March 17, in the Astor Gallery of the Waldorf. The Criterion Male Quartet and Mildred Dilling, harpist, will furnish the music for this program.
A card party for the benefit of the Philanthropic Fund of the club was given on February 27 at the home of Mrs. Rufus B. Cowing. The proceedings of this party are to be used to give a musical education to Ruth Johnson, a little ten-year-old girl who is blind.
Julia Claussen Returns to Metropolitan
Julia Claussen is in New York ready for her season at the _ Metropolitan Opera House. She will again sing the various leading roles with the company with which her name has been associated in the past. On April 24 Mme. Claussen will appear at the Columbus, Ohio, Festival.
Max Kotlarsky to Give Recital
At Aeolian Hall, Friday evening, March 16, Max Kot-larksky, pianist, will present a program consisting of Schur manp, Liszt, Weber-Tausig and other compositions.
BERLIN HAS A BELA BARTOK WEEK
Hungarian Composer, Invited by Melos Society, Presents Bulk of His Chamber Works—Star Conductors, Weingartner and Schneevoigt, Exalt the Usual—A Don Giovanni Nightmare—•Jewels of the Madonna in Modernist Garb
Two Violin Sonatas.
Two string quartets, two violin sonatas, piano pieces and songs, made up the three programs. In all of them is evident the same genuineness, the same terseness of expression, the same barbaric naivete tempered by the sensitiveness of an aesthetic soul. In a lesser degree perhaps in the second violin and piano sonata, which seems at first hearing to play a little more with effects, though less complicated in manner than the first and more expressionistic in the lyrical sense. The first sonata, which I first heard and reviewed in London for the Musical Courier, gains cm acquaintance and conquers by its extraordinary vitality rather than its beauty in the traditional sense. Both works are remarkable for the original “instrumentation,” and both make almost superhuman demands upon the players. Emmerich Waldbauer, violinist, and the composer mastered them in an astonishing degree.
And Two String Quartets.
The two string quartets, too, had masterful performances at the hands of the Hungarian (Waldbauer-Kerpély) Quartet. The first, which is familiar even in America, I believe, with its fetching rhythms and folk-like character, is of course tame in comparison with the second, by all odds the bigger work. Without a dull moment, it runs through the whole gamut of emotions, expressed in concentrated phrases in which there is not an unnecessary note. It left the strongest impression of the whole week. The last concert, devoted to songs and piano pieces, had the greatest popular success. In these smaller forms Bartok is closest to the soil, to the voice of the Hungarian and the Rumanian peasant. Violent, elegiac and grotesque by turns, these little sketches have the character and vividness of a Latzko story or a painting by Jan Steen.
Bartok has a genius for the absorption and sublimation of the folk song. Nowhere is lie more strikingly novel than in the handling of the piano piece, in utilizing the color of the instrument and in epitomizing his material in short, tight forms. At the end of the last program he was forced to add one after the other of these little gems as encores. They will spread his fame throughout the world.
Wfingartner Returns.
In the “regular” concert halls, meantime, life has been running on as usual, at somewhat slower pulse, perhaps. While Furtwängler fills his Leipsic and Vienna engagements, other star conductors have been standing in his place. The appearance of these desk virtuosos, whose mission is apparently the exaltation of the usual, delights the normal public as nothing else. Weingartner, who has been “coming” ever since the autumn, but has ■been prevented by one caprice after another, has at last made a caprice of coming—not for the sake of the dear Berlin public, but in order to accompany a lady singer, whose wealth is more luring than her voice. Incidentally, he also conducted a Philharmonic concert of his own.
The public, which knows no self-respect as regards its platform idols, bought up every available ticket for both concerts within a few hours, and applauded and stood on its heads not only for the fickle Felix, •but also for the lady who sang. A whole evening of arias and operatic excerpts, with full orchestra, in a recital hall is not an artistic proceeding at best, but—did I say the lady was reputed to be wealthy? ’Nough said. (I wonder what conductor of high repute could permit himself such an excursion into the realm of the practical in “mercenary” America?) _
Every return of Weingartner to Berlin after his prolonged absences is preceded by a rumor of war. His reputedly anti-German utterances three years ago have set some people against him, and the present wave of Ruhr patriotism even called forth a newspaper attack before he appeared. But nothing happened. People crowded the aisles and shouted bravo after the ten-thousand-oddth performance of the Eroica, ׳conducted in an eminently normal and incontestably correct manner; they applauded, almost as vociferously, the none-too-human reading of Tschaikowsky’s Pathétique, which Nikisch used to conduct in such unforgettable manner in the same hall. True, one cannot be a human volcano at fifty-nine. But reputations, in Germany, never die.
Schnéevoigt Conducts Sibelius.
Georg Schnéevoigt, conductor of an “extraordinary” subscription series with the Berlin Philharmonic, is in the same danger of becoming a platform idol of the normal sort. He, too, conducts Beethoven to cater to a popular demand. His Pastorale had all the qualities for which he_ is remarkable: superior ensemble, fine shadings (pianissimi that one must search for),.and extreme clarity. Personally I preferred his reading of Sibelius’ second symphony, for which he possesses the particular nerves. The strange fantasy of his countryman, the multiple colors of the orchestra he exploits with a remarkable sense of sound. He should let us hear more of that.
None of the other conductors, either, have strayed from the usual paths. Hermann Abendroth, at the Opera concert, chose Schumann’s D minor symphony for a “change,” though he allowed Carl Ehrenberg to conduct his second orchestral suite—a harmless piece never straying from the regions of Wagnerian harmony—as a novelty.
Don Giovanni en Baroque.
But the demands of modernity were catered to in the same house with a vengeance, in the revival of a classic masterpiece—namely Mozart’s Don Giovanni. Poor Mozart ! Had you known what artistic nightmares your music would inspire, would you—could you—have written it? I am referring to the scenery, which in a classical opera, an opera bouffe, may be innocent minds be considered the least important feature. But no, in this production it is the most important; it shouts so that you can barely hear the tunes. In the ballroom scene it grows, with tropical profusion, across the stage so that a one-step is the most one could dare. Every gate, every door, every window, has a flamboyant frame that shoots wildly out in every direction, an architectural vegetation that affects the works of both God and man.
In art parlance this is called baroque. It represents Mozart’s music, solidified. Hitherto its supposed classic limpidity has been misunderstood. The essential thing is to have a theory about these things. Whatever scene
Berlin, January 11.—This has been Bela Bartók Week. The Melos Society, which has had the enterprise and— thanks to its patron, Herbert Graf—the generosity to bring the Hungarian composer as well as the Hungarian String Quartet all the way from Budapest, announced it as such, though it consisted of only three concerts in Berlin’s smallest hall.
Two years ago the New Music Society of Berlin, now defunct, produced some Bartók works here for the first time, with the composer himself at the piano. The concerts took place in half empty halls, and there was scarcely a ripple on the artistic surface of the town. Nobody seemed to know who Bartók was, and he had difficulty in getting a hearing before some of the musical nabobs of Berlin. What a difference today! Via Paris• and London his fame has reached even the local bourgeois. Without being advertised in the ordinary way the concerts drew audiences that far exceeded the capacity of the hall, so that hundreds had to be turned away, and the critics ignored more official happenings in order to come.
It was worth while. These three evenings could leave no doubt in anyone’s mind—whatever he may think of the
BELA BARTÓK,
Hungarian composer, in whose honor a Bartók Week was given in Berlin.
method of expression employed—that these eruptive, fundamental utterances are the manifestations of one of the foremost creative potencies of the present time. He has what one might call a creative mechanism all his own, producing sound patterns that combine originality and spontaneity in an extraordinary degree. Harmony and form seem predestined by the very nature of these melodic rhythmic fragments, so that the manner of expression and development admits of no criticism whatever. Either you like it or you don’t; improved it cannot be. You cannot teach a giant manners.
Bartok’s “manners,” his methods of handling his subject, are not committed to any mode or system whatever. He is either polyphonic or harmonic (in its widest sense), or just percussive, the inherent rhythm or driving power determining the degree of sonority (or noise, according to the hearer’s conception). His dissonances at such times have a purely dynamic significance and must not be defined as harmony. Our ears, if willing, soon become accustomed to this hardness of expression. If, indeed, the second quartet contains a consonance it is effectively hidden; yet after three minutes of it the effect is no longer dissonant. Dissonance is a relative term, and it is the contrast with consonance that makes it “hurt.”'