March 15, 1923
22
certs, with their somewhat easy atmosphere, but real symphony concerts with the program departing from the regulation order of overture, symphony, concerto, symphonic poem. The kind of program we have in mind was given by Stokowski in Philadelphia last week (March 9 and 10) :
Daniel Gregory Mason..............Prelude and Fugue
John Powell
Eichheim .... Oriental Impressions for Orchestra I. Chinese Sketch II. Japanese Nocturne
Powell .	. Rapsodie Nègre (for piano and orchestra)
John Powell, soloist
Sibelius.........................“The Swan of Tuonela”
Strauss .... “Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks”
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H. T. Parker, musical assayist and curator of the Boston Transcript, reports that when the German opera company now playing here, put out feelers for a Boston engagement, the management of the Opera House there “received letters urging an invitation to the Germans and promising them hearty support. It also received vituperative letters from those for whom the late war will always be a pleasure.”
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The executives of the Musicians’ Foundation of The Bohemians (the New York Musical Club) announce that Josef Hofmann will give an April 6 Schumann recital at Aeolian Hall, “not only to do honor to the memory of one of the world’s greatest composers, but also because his daughters, one aged eighty-two, and the other seventy-two, are in need of help.” It is a fine thing for Hofmann to do— he does many others of the same sort, but Without public knowledge—and if you can, go to the concert and hear some grandly intellectual and deeply musical piano playing. If you can’t, send a check, large or small, to The Musicians’ Foundation, Inc., 520 West 114th street, New York.
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From the Morning Telegraph of March 8: “Joseph Conrad, British novelist, has announced that he will not lecture while in the United States, for which he is bound. If that’s his plan he’s likely not to get past Ellis Island, where the authorities may conclude there’s something wrong with his mental processes.” H »1 *t
No one seems to know who is the actual manager of the German opera company now in our midst. In other words, Ring, Ring, who’s got the Ring?
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Wagner fiber Alles just now, in these parts.
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Must a music critic be a sort of solemn ass to be considered weighty in his judgment?
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By word of mouth and pen we often have advised musicians not to speculate but to put their money in the bank and to stick to music and stay out of the things they do not understand. To show how correct our advice has been, we submit the following, from a New York newspaper of last week:
MUSIC EDITOR GOING IN
FOR FINANCE, LOSES $7,000
Dabbling in high finance, does not mix with criticizing music. At least that is the contention of Leonard Liebling, editor of the Musical Courier, who this week found himself poorer by $7,000 and the possessor of a neatly engraved summons to appear in court and answer to the charge of fraudulently procuring $500 by misrepresenting stock.
The gullible individual who secured a summons against Liebling in the West Side Court this week gave his name as Samuel Silverstein and his address as 10 West Fiftieth street. _ Efforts to find him at that address elicited the information that he never resided in that dwelling. But he is said to be a merchant of limited means who was looking for a “sure thing” in which he could get in on the ground floor and as a result of a well timed investment become a captain of commerce.
Liebling, who up to the time of his advent among the capitalists was diligently controlling the editorial affairs of the Musical Courier, has been named in Silverstein’s summons as the man who with another is responsible for the merchant’s falling from grace in the matter of his financial standing. But the journalist denied any such implication, saying that he was first and always an editor, and that he himself suffered a loss of $7,000 much in the same manner as Silverstein; that he was without guile and is totally irresponsible for the loss_ of Silverstein’s money.
The corporation in which these two men are said to have sunk a total of $7,500 was named the National Insuring Company by its promoters, one of whom, George Battier, is named with Liebling in Silverstein’s summons. The editor said that the scheme as presented to him by the founders of the corporation had all the earmarks of a successful venture.
“Mismanagement,” says Liebling, “caused the final disintegration of this corporation; though as it was presented to me it looked fine. The plans of the corporation were to arrange with proprietors of retail stores to distribute to their customers at each sale coupons proportionate to their purchases. Instead of giving gifts in exchange for these it was planned to issue insurance.
“There happened to be only $13,000 invested in the company, and $7,000 of it being mine the promoters graciously made me the nominal treasurer of the company. But I had no office, no desk, and I went at periodic intervals to the
MUSICAL COURIER
VARIATIONETTES
By the Editor-in-Chief
viewer gets a goodly number of requests for his unused opera tickets. Almost invariably ours come in the form of requests for performances by individuals—‘seats for Jeritza,’ ‘seats for Chaliapin,’ and the like. Now that the German Opera Company has arrived, it is ‘seats for Die Meistersinger,’ or ‘seats for Lohengrin’ that petitioners want. Perhaps there are two separate operatic audiences in New York, and the Metropolitan attracts only one of them.”
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Headline in the Herald of March 4: “How and What to Feed a Genius.” Flattery isn’t bad.
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Were the passenger-flying to London perfected we would go all the way there for an evening to hear a program like this given by the London Symphony Orchestra the other day:
Overture, “Benvenuto	Cellini”.................Berlioz
Sinfonietta (First Performance)........Eugene Goossens
Piano Concerto in E Flat.........................Liszt
Moriz Rosenthal
“Le Valse” ....................................  Ravel
Symphony in C minor,	No.	1.....................Brahms
Conductor—Eugene Goossens »?	»1 Щ
Wordsworth said that criticism is an inglorious employment. Barbey d’Aurevilly asserted that no such thing as real criticism exists. Byron gave it as his opinion that critics are brushers of noblemen’s clothes. Ruskin—was it Ruskin ?—called critics disappointed artists. All of which, if true, seems to give the critics little reason for existing. Their greatest achievement, however, is their success in convincing newspaper employers to the contrary. Any craft that struggles so frantically to keep itself alive should be tolerated in the general scheme of things. To our mind, critics are like the Chicago frog which found itself imprisoned in a half filled milk can on the train. When the can was opened at the other end of the trip it was found that the frog had jumped up and down so much that it had succeeded in churning the milk into a cake of butter upon which it sat and fed itself.
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Ultra modern poets, like their confreres in the realm of tone, use free rhythms and unshackled forms, but somehow they seem to get more beauty into their lines than the other chaps put into their music. For instance, this poem, entitled Beautiful, from James Oppenheim’s just published Golden Bird:
Alfred Seligsberg, legal pilot of the Metropolitan, was overheard exclaiming “Brains, brains, brains,” to some inquiry addressed to him in the lobby at the Mona Lisa performance the other evening. There were several applications which the remark might have had to the musical, vocal and histrionic doings on the stage and in the orchestra during that opera, *i *?	*?
Additions to our leisure library, sent by correspondents and contributors, and herewith thankfully acknowledged—with the admission that we cry quits and beg no more books or pamphlets be sent: W. H. Steiner’s The Mechanism of Commercial Credit and Henry Hayes’ American Petroleum Re-
Our youngest contributor calls attention to the fact that the four famous operas of Jeritza all begin with T—Tosca, Thais, Tannhäuser and Tote Stadt.
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The French invasion of Bochum has an added justification, one imagines, after reading this in The Times of March 4:
The patience of the town of Bochum was sorely tried by four composers of the most modern tendency in one concert. Six orchestral pieces by A. von Webern—he has beaten Schonberg by one—were received with strong distrust; the warmer blooded Bela Bartók could not restore confidence with his orchestral pieces. But when the most extreme modern Erwin Schulhoff presented his “thirty-two absurd variations upon a no less eccentric theme,” opposition began to make itself felt and heard. The theme, according to the program, was played twice, and the weather began to look threatening. At the end of the helpless variations strong men who were provided with instruments for the purpose made a noise described in German as a “hollenlarm,” which was answered by equally noisy applause. The composer made a speedy escape.
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^ The attitude of the Italians here toward the current German opera activity might be termed one of passive resistance.
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A society has been formed, membership of which is confined to persons in extra-hazardous occupations. We have just joined.
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The New Orleans racetrack had a Geraldine Farrar Handicap last week, so the management communicates, and adds: “We deserve a line in your paper as the most musical racetrack in the United States.” If ever they have a Harry Lauder Handicap we expect to see Comic Song enter and win it. Or perhaps Scottish Chief. By the way, neither Poor Butterfly nor Scarpia II ran in the Farrar Handicap.
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Percy A. Sholes (in the London Observer) is another gentleman who agrees with Henry T. Finck, that the best movements of symphonies and sonatas should sometimes receive separate performance as independent concert items, for most of the cyclic works in those forms establish no organic connection between their various movements. Often single acts from operas are given and much enjoyed. If operas, with their closely knit stories, why not sonatas and symphonies in which each movement tells a separate tale ?
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We are strong for the frequent popularization of symphony concerts if they are to accomplish their entire mission. We do not mean socalled Pop con-
Now Golden Bird,
Sleepless for warbling,
Sits in the warm dark beneath my eyelids.
Golden Bird, Golden Bird, my soul,
When you were a maiden in the evening in the starlight, And I brushed your lips with adoring,
The dark was like light about us,
Like gliding shuttles of golden light.
What could I do, Beautiful,
But take you deep in the folds of my ghost,
Where you sang all night long?
O Golden Bird,
Sleepless for warbling,
You are sitting behind shut eyes in the warm dark.
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Strangely enough, there comes Amy Lowell, intense and even violent defender and dispenser of free verse, and (in the Double Dealer for February) suddenly falls into rhymed and metred verse
I want no horns to rouse me up tonight,
And trumpets make too clamorous a ring To fit my mood, it is so weary white I have no wish for doing, anything.
A music coaxed from humming strings would please; Not plucked, but drawn in creeping cadences Across a sunset wall where some Marquise Picks a pale rose amid strange silences.
Ghostly and vaporous her gown sweeps by The twilight dusking wall, I hear her feet Delaying on the gravel, and a sigh,
Briefly permitted, touches the air like sleet.
And it is dark, I hear her feet no more.
A red moon leers beyond the lily-tank.
A drunken moon ogling a sycamore,
Running long fingers down its shining flank.
A lurching moon, as nimble as a clown,
Cuddling the flowers and trees which burn like glass.
Red, kissing lips, I feel you on my gown—
Kiss me, red lips, and then pass—pass.
Music, you are pitiless tonight.
And I so old, so cold, so languorously white.
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Many musicians tell you that they could shake out of their sleeves such stuff as Mother Machree, Three O’Clock in the Morning, I Hear You Calling Me and the like. Evidently, however, somebody has sewed up their sleeves.
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And yet we cannot refrain from saying that composers collect royalty and popular song writers collect indemnity.
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We heard Mme. Kousnetzova, the opera singer, ask: “What is an interview?” When we came to, we were being tenderly cared for by her press agent. *,	*,	t?
Correct this sentence: “Yes, professor,” said the mother, “I agree with you that my Mamie should keep on playing scales, arpeggios and Bach Inventions, and that it does not matter how many pieces Susie Nextdoor plays meanwhile.”
K X K
Bachaus gave a recital at which every piece was in C sharp minor, and the event was referred to as a novelty, although previously we had heard many a piano concert where the playing seemed to be all in one key.
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In our large type, from the World of March 4, and written by Deems Taylor: “Every music re-