21
Peer Gynt, L’Arlesienne, etc. Prax says that if he went to the Louvre, selected a Fragonard, and with his lead pencil sketched into the masterpiece a bicycle and airplane; then, if he had time, added a few deft touches to the Mona Lisa’s hair in order to give it a modern style, he would very quickly be seized by an indignant crowd, belabored with umbrellas, and finally locked up, tried, and heavily sentenced. “That is justice,” he adds; ’“Our paintings are well protected. Nobody is permitted to lay a finger on them.” You are not allowed to deface the statues by the masters, to modernize Shakespeare, to put a garage in the Parthenon or the Coliseum. “You are not permitted to mutilate a bush or pick a flower in a city park. You may not walk across flower beds in public gardens. But no authority interferes if you trample the divinest flowers of song. Dogs are protected, why not works of the great musicians?” Their music, cries Pax,
is handed over defenseless for desecration by vandals and imbeciles. Anyone has a perfect right to chop up Beethoven, Chopin, Mozart, Wagner, Bizet. Anyone at all may take obscene liberties with the purest and loftiest masterpieces of music.
Anyone at all may take Bethoven’s Ninth Symphony and turn it into a one-step, or make a tango out of The Enchanted Flute. The jazz orchestras have even׳ turned Chopin’s majestic Funeral March into a noisy Montmartre rag.
And not a soul makes a movement of protest in the face of such odious and grotesque experiments. It is quite all right to commit sacrilege upon the works of Jean Sebastian Bach or Wagner or Gounod.
*t *t *
Mussolini and Mascagni have been discussing ways and means to place Italian classical music once more on the high level it occupied in the past. The first step to be taken is to see that every second Italian does not start out to become either an opera singer, opera composer, opera conductor, or opera impresario.
w * *
An excellent old story told about many a. composer is circulating again, this time about Weingart-ner, and reaches us via the Boston Herald: Weingartner recently conducted one of his operas in Berlin. In rehearsal he stopped the first clarinet and said: “My friend, you play that phrase too slowly.” “But,” answered the clarinetist, “when we play that phrase in Tristan and Isolde we always take it that way.”
*	*t *,
St. Peter rushed up to the leader of the heavenly Sunday afternoon concert and cried: “What’s that awful stuff you’re performing?”
The conductor rapped for silence and said coldly: “Your Eminence. doesn’t seem to be in touch with the latest musical developments. This is Pierrot Lunaire by Schoenberg.”
“Well, it sounds like hell,” roared St. Peter, “and that’s where it belongs. Send it down to Hades.” “Very well,” answered the baton wielder, winking sarcastically at his players; “we’ll play the Boccherini minuet and Schubert’s serenade. Gentlemen, attention!”
*	*, »
The London Sackbut always has something quotable in its pages and its latest (April) issue is no exception to the rule. We found in it an article called “Why Musicians Have a Low Mentality” (a title which, we fear, will arouse resentment in some quarters) and we read it with curiosity and interest The writer’s opening thesis is that “competency as a musician is compatible with a very low standard of general culture. Proficiency in the other arts, such as literature or architecture, implies a certain amount of intellectual ability which is generally found in their exponents, but every one can recollect vocalists whose ordinary mental capacity can only be described as bovine. Most people have met violinists who with their instruments seemed capable of expressing things unutterable, and yet in ordinary conversation were dull dogs, uninteresting even when discussing their own shop, which was all they could discuss.” Pianists appear to escape this severe indictment of the writer, someone named A. Morrison. He describes the ritual and ceremonial music (usually accompanied by dancing) of some of the native tribes in Africa and elsewhere, and points out its deleterious effects, which usually ends in hysteria for the performers or makes them mere automatons. “According to some,” says our writer, “much modern ritual has the same deadening effect on the intellect, but let us avoid anything controversial and any ‘odium theologicum’ and ask whether the present-day performer—who must incessantly practice technic until all conscious effort is eliminated—does not necessarily strengthen the subconscious mind at the expense of the conscious.” Regarding over-emotionalism in music, we are told that it is no new menace, as Plato forbade songs in the Ioanian and Lydian modes in the Ideal Republic on account of their evil influence tending to effeminacy. On the whole, Mr. Morrison does not, in his short essay, make out
MUSICAL COURIER
April 19, 1923
VARIATI O NETTES
By the Editor-in-Chief
Orchestra, and yet none of them have anything to do officially with the nation, the State, or the city.
■ J. P. F. interrogates: “Writers often get their subjects from real life, from tales heard, or from reading. But where may a composer get motifs?” From other composers, if he doesn’t get caught at it.
*t *,	»?
Here is an idea from The Writer (November) which should prove useful to composers: “Ingenious Grant Overton whose Island of the Innocent is ‘privately dedicated,’ says that since a large number of persons merited the dedication, he is now able to assure each, quite privately, that the deep inward significance of ‘privately dedicated’ in the front of the novel is for him (or her) alone.”
*s' «? «
When American music clubs devote themselves exclusively to American music we call it patriotism. Were European music clubs to devote themselves to the music of their own countries we would call it chauvinism.
w, *, *
The light of inspiration must have been candlelight for by its rays some of the world’s greatest art masterpieces were created.
K n n
The annoying thing about a critic who knows all the dates and names in music is that he likes to put every one of them in every review he writes.
*, *, *
Add to amusing misprints, this from the Mead-ville (Pa.) Republican: “Ignatz Jan Paderewski, the world renowned Police pianist, will play,” etc. And from the New York Tribune, of March 25: “Alt Wein, by Godowsky.”
,* ,׳» *
“What music has America given to uplift the world?” inquires a cultured European. Well, there’s the dinner bell.
—Evening Telegram.
* * *
A man who owned a thousand fiddles is dead in Elmira. His neighbors had 999 things to be thankful for. He could play only one at a time.—Morning Telegraph.
* * *
The• reviewer of the London Times said that Frank Bridge is “in that not numerous class of conductors who prefer line to color and postpone private judgment to the quod omnibus et ubique.” No American reviewer, to our knowledge, has ever thought of this Latin phrase. And yet Messrs. Henderson, Aldrich, Liebling, and Finck—to mention only New York critics—are men who have “enjoyed the privileges of a collegiate education.”—Philip Hale in the Boston Herald.
*t H
“A pianist’s wife,” postcards “Misericordia,” from Buffalo, “is a person who asks you to strap on little Bobbie’s roller skates just as you reach the climax of the Chopin G minor ballade.”
*!, »,
Wilton Lackaye asked one of the visiting Russian actors how he liked our American plays and he replied that he could not understand them because of his ignorance of our language.
* * *
How in the world did Malibran, Farinelli, Beethoven, Liszt, Paganini, Bach, Schumann, Weber and others of previous periods ever manage to become great without pictures and interviews in the daily newspapers ?
w », *
Statistics from Sing Sing show that among the 1,457 prisoners received during 1922 there were •no professional men, no doctors, lawyers, musicians, journalists, clergymen, artists, or engineers. That is a damning indictment for the business world. r.
Dorothy, the American soprano, says that she is going to comb her hair straight back, have Bakst design her a Lady Godiva costume with ruffles around the bottom, and call herself Mme. Lookerova.
A musician worth $20,000 is considered a rich man by most of his colleagues, while the rest do not believe that so much money exists in cash.
*. * *.
When Stransky was conductor of the Philharmonic, Gentile, the bass-clarinetist, played a passage at rehearsal so delicately that it was almost inaudible. Stransky called out: “Remember, Gentile, that you are the bass-clarinetist, and not the secretary, of the Philharmonic Society.”
*t H
Maurice Prax, in Le Petit Parisien, warns us that if we lose our respect for good music we soon lose our loye for it especially when in every cabaret and restaurant and cafe and vaudeville we listen to and dance to shimmy and adapted from Tannhäuser,
Was it a peevish post-warrior or just a blundering linotyper who made an English local paper say (according to the London Musical Times, April) : “The opera to be given at the Grand Theater on Thursday next is Wagner’s Rotterdamerung.”
Bruno Huhn suggests that if either the Western Union or Postal Telegraph Company desires a song of its own, Mendelssohn’s anthem, How Lively Are the Messengers, might serve both as a stimulus for the employers and an advertisement for the corporation.
*, *t it
E.	A. H. writes: “Now I know why most musicians usually look so angry. I have just read the appended quotation:
“ ‘So with the ancient roots of man’s nature ־
“ ‘Twines the eternal passion of song.’ ”
»׳ *t *
Edna Horton, of the Musical Courier staff, rushes this news beat to our desk just as Variation-ettes goes to press: “One of the Hamilton College Glee Club boys who was down here last week asked me if I had heard the opera, Andante Allegro, at the Metropolitan.”
*	* *t
Philip Hale asks what has become of Maria Barrientos and his question sets us to wondering along the same line. Where’s Maria? Philip remembers at least one interesting thing about her: “Unfortunately, when she was about to take a very high note, she gave fair warning by assuming a facial expression that reminded one of a cat on a roof, not certain of safety in reaching the ground.” n *׳
F.	P. A. complained some time ago that he was kept awake at night singing La donna e mobile to these words:
Alma Gluck Zimbalist,
Ralph Waldo Emerson.
Isaac F. Marcosson,
AND Sara Teasdale;
Compton Mackenzie,
Maximilian Foster,
Dudley Field Malone—
Alexander Bloch.
Dudley Field, Dudley Field—
Alexander Bloch.
Along comes Edith and suggests that whenever she lies awake nights she finds herself singing Celeste Aida to the following text:
Leopold Stokowski Artur Toscanini Ignace Paderewski Willem Mengelberg.
* K *,
Maria Jeritza has been writing a series of beauty articles for the Evening World, thus succeeding the delectable Lina Cavalieri in an undertaking both useful and profitable. In the article lying before us Mme. Jeritza speaks of elbows. Have you ever thought that elbows play a large role in physical beauty and are very important in the revelation of personality? No? Well, Mme. Jeritza will tell you that "elbows must be educated; they must be taught to feel and look at ease, never to betray self-consciousness or uneasiness, or to overwork in gesturing. Also that Nature loves a curve and that your elbows should be “as inconspicuous and softly rounded as are the knuckles of a beautiful hand, and if your thought is quiet and calm and hence your arm movements and carriage are correct, no doubt your elbows are beautifully inconspicuous. If not, they will gradually improve as your thought grows calm and fearless and you cease overworking your muscles because of nervous tenseness.” We examined our own elbows and found them terribly conspicuous, and in quality about the consistency of rhinoceros hide. But our worry was only momentary, for Mme. Jeritza’s article immediately offered the remedy, as follows:
If your elbows are chapped, try rubbing mutton tallow into them with your greased palms. The tallow is pure and harmless and will smoioth all roughness away if it is rubbed in well before retiring.
A grapefruit cut in half makes a refreshing bleach for discolored elbows. Rest the point of each elbow in one-half the fruit and move your elbows about until the cleansing, whitening juice of the grapefruit penetrates every pore.
*S *t H
We have ordered a case of grapefruit but we don’t know how to fool the butler, for he always serves it with sugar and a dash of maraschino. We have written to Mme. Jeritza asking what effect the maraschino would have on the elbows.
*	*	*T,
In New York we have a National Orchestra, a State Orchestra, a City Orchestra, and a New York