April 26, 1923
MUSICAL COURIER
BERLIN HAS ITS FILL OF EASTER MUSIC
3G
Many Splindid Offerings Given During the Spring Holidays—Beethoven’s Ninth Ends Philharmonic Series—Anti-Semitic International Society Active—Contemporary and Modern Music—The Real Revolutionaries—Back to Sanity Operatic Inactivity—Discovering Russian Opera—A Week of Parsifals
which received its first German hearing at the fourth concert of the Society would certainly have been ruled off the program. Which would have been a pity, for it is an altogether charming if not highly significant work in classic style, in which the ideas rather than their execution are new. Original certainly is the idea of the last movement, in which a theme is varied in accordance with the character of the several instruments which have the leading voice.
Another woodwind quintet, by the versatile Hindemith, entitled Kleine Kammermusik, which had its first Berlin performance at this concert, is one of the happiest inspirations that the young Frankfort composer has had. He not only commands his medium perfectly—as usual—but his wit and liveliness in this case have that rare spontaneity which is natural without being trivial. It is harmonically bold, but not outré, and like the Nielsen work, ought to make a valuable addition to the limited ensemble literature for wind instruments.
Anton von Webern’s string quartet, which stood between these comparatively “harmless” works, and which we first heard at Salzburg last summer, impressed me this time as an intensely felt, highly concentrated emotional utterance. It consists of five short—and shorter—movements, almost aphoristic in their form, like most of Webern's works, whose melodic shapes, almost bizarre in their freedom, derive from Schonberg, of course. But the sparseness of their language, where every note is made to count, not only for its relation to other notes, but for its own quality (every known device of instrumentation is employed for weird effects)—this uncanny eloquence is Webern’s own. It will be a long time before this music will be popular, but this uncompromising idealist, it seems to me, is a musical clairvoyant.
The Real Revolutionaries.
At the extreme left wing of the modernists of Berlin— lefter than the International and the Melos group—stands the November group, which takes its name from the month in which the German revolution occurred. In private séances it propagates the young and youngest •schools. It repeated, a few days later, the Webern quartet and •added thereto the clarinet pieces of the other favorite Schonberg disciple, Alban Berg, and five piano pieces by Vladimir Vogel, the Russian and most radical pupil of Busoni’s class. The clarinet pieces (with piano), outwardly much in the same style as Webern’s, are too loosely knit, fragmentary—too rhapsodic if you will—to convey a clear idea of their content, if indeed, they have any. Vogel’s piano pieces, still more wild and unorganized, yet have a certain eruptive force which gives promise of more than these—that might be the stammerings of an idiot.
Back to Sanity.
If, as cannot be denied, there is something unhealthy in all these ultraistic manifestations—whatever their ultimate aesthetic value may be—exactly the opposite may be said of Georg Liebling’s compositions, an entire program of which was given with the composer at the piano a few days ago. Two violin and piano sonatas, two groups of songs, and some piano pieces, all attested the wholly normal, incontestably musical intuitions of this avowed romanticist. Standing between Robert Franz and the generation of Strauss, he pours out his lyrical ideas with a naturalness and unconcern about modern problems that the pathological youngsters of today ought to envy. There is undeniable melody in the second sonata (op. 63), for instance, and a certain dash that carries it “across.” Boris Kroyt and the composer, a famous pianist of the Liszt school, played it with complete unanimity of feeling. The songs, sung by Albert Fischer, basso, kindled the audience”s enthusiasm so that some of them had to be repeated.
A group of modern songs that ought also to be mentioned were on the program of Maria Ekeblad, an excellent song interpreter. They are six settings of Tagore poems (Ghi-tanjali and The Gardener) by Alexander M. Schnabel, lyrical and atmospheric, in which a background of modern dissonance gives atmosphere to an unproblematic but finely illustrative melody. Music of quality.
Operatic Inactivity.
The Berlin opera houses have been singularly inactive this winter in the matter of novelties. The Staatsoper, in fact,
dally in the long, improvisational cadenza of the first movement he gave his fancy free rein and conjured forth a dream world of sound-color that would have transported old Bach—all the tradition-monging critics notwithstanding —into the seventh heaven of delight. It was a stimulating experience that caught the audience’s fancy as little else this season.
Anti-Semitic.
In contrast to Furtwängler, whose position at the head of the Philharmonic is assured, Hermann Abendroth has not been able to win the hearts of his public at the head of the wonderful Staatskapelle. Attacked from the start by the “left wing” of the Berlin critics, who resented the attempt of having a provincial “Generalmusikdirektor" forced upon them by the weight of official dignities, he has not been able to rally enough enthusiastic support from the conservatives to settle him firmly in the chair once held by Weingartner and Strauss. Now that his fate seems sealed' and the Prussian ministry of instruction, incapable of finding another available pure Teuton of rank, has made an abortive attempt to get Furtwängler back, a vituperative article entitled The Case of Abendroth has appeared in the Deutsche Zei-tung, the organ of the German nationalists, which accuses the “Semitic elements” of driving the Cologne conductor away. His successor is yet to be found; certain it is that neither Bruno Walter nor Otto Klemperer, acknowledged to be the most eminent German conductors besides Furtwängler, will get the post — though both have embraced Christianity.
In justice to Abendroth it must be said that he is by no means as bad as the radicals paint him. He conducts some things—Brahms’ C minor symphony, for instance—with imposing authority. But he has not been lucky in the choice of his programs. At his eighth pair of concerts again he gave Mozart’s E flat symphony and the Oberon overture, both requiring delicacy, with an all-too-heavy hand. At the ninth pair he risked a novelty, an E. T. A. Hoffmann overture׳ by Besch, which, with its ironic humor, spookish romanticism and coloristic effects, could certainly have found a more appropriate sponsor. One more concert and Mr. Abendroth will have said good-bye to Berlin, for the Staatskapelle season will have ended.
Free-lance symphony concerts decrease both in number and in interest as the season advances toward its close. The reasons for t.!e unusually early decline—chiefly economic— I have explained in my last report. There are still concerts like that of Mr. Werner von Siemens, whose father is one of the biggest electrical manufacturers in the world, in which not unfamiliar works by Brahms and Tschaixowsky are given more or less correct readings before an invited company of business and social friends; or those conducted by foreign “guests” who can support a mythological deficit witn equal ease. If they happen to be Russians, moreover, they can count upon a fair-sized public composed of their compatriots—which helps to bring it down a “million” or two.
Mr. Vladimir Metzl, of Petrograd, for instance, gathered together a goodly crowd with a fair performance of Scriabin’s Divine״ Poem, some Rimsky - Korsakoff and Tschaikowsky operatic excerpts. Ernest Pingoud, a Russian composer-conductor, was, however, unable to reuse even the enthusiasm of the Russian colony with his own works (a symphony, suite, piano concerto, etc.), a rather impersonal blend of Scriabin and other Russian influences constructed with German science and routine. Leonid Kreutzer, who played the Pingoud concerto brilliantly, achieved his usual personal success.
Russiscii.
Alexander Selo, too, who tried his wings as a conductor recently, relied upon a Russian pianist to fill his house. And indeed, Nicolai Orloff, an idol of the Russian public, gave a performance of Rachmaninoff's third concerto that was astonishing in its plastic strength, color and brilliance. A technical phenomenon, without a doubt, this Orloff! A novelty heard at this concert was the Prelude, Passacaglia and Hymn for orchestra by a young pupil of Busoni, Kurt Weill. Remarkable technical faculty, contrapuntal ingenuity and command of form could not hide an almost terrifying sterility of ideas and .an absence of emotion that—if it is symptomatic for this youngest generation — opens a most pessimistic outlook for the future. That Weill is held in considerable esteem by the young musicians was evident from the demonstrative applause which greeted this brain-spun barrenness.
International Society Active.
This tendency to make brain-music, in which the emotional factor is purposely suppressed, is one of the dangers that beset the younger school of German musicians. Ernest Krenek, whose great talent is not to be denied, is doubtless subject to this tendency, and yet his music, in which contrapuntal problems are solved with relentless perseverance, achieves at least a new sonority, an architectural grandeur that grips by the sheer proportions of its inner dynamics. Under the auspices of the International Society for Contemporary Music, Eduard Erdman. pianist, repeated his toccata and fugue on an alleged old chorale, Ja ich glaub an Jesum Christum, but he left off the suite-appendix in which the chorale (which is Krenek’s own invention) was converted into a fox-trot and various other ungodly things. Magnificently played by Erdman the work made an unquestionable impression, though one cannot easily acquire a genuine affection for music like this.
More amiable by far are the three new piano pieces by-Heinz Tiessen on the same program, one serious and two light. They are clever and poetic applications of the ultramodern idiom to ideas essentially lyric and pastoral—in other words old-fashioned. The little piece called Amsel (Blackbird) is one of the most charming and witty nature pieces that I have heard. It had to be repeated. Artur Schnabel’s formidable Dance Suite, played before by Erdman and reviewed in these columns, concluded the program.
Contemporary and Modern.
It is a lucky circumstance that the name of the society lias chosen the word Contemporary instead of Modern for its name. Otherwise ׳the woodwind quintet by Carl Nielsen,
Berlin, April 3.—Easter, the Christian festival of Spring, is. in this Christian country, so replete with musical traditions that there is little room for music that does not somehow pertain to them. There is the St. Matthew Passion, done by various choruses, without fail; there is Parsifal, performed in as many opera houses as there are. There are oratorios and musical services in churches and in concert halls. The quality of these performances, insofar as they are not merely perfunctory, is, I suppose, still better in Germany than most anywhere else. And this year there was a good deal that was not perfunctory, as for instance the remarkable performance of Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis by the venerable Singakademie, already recorded in a recent letter from here, which had to be repeated on Maunday Thursday night, Prof. Siegfried Ochs’ Academic Chorus at the Hochschule gave a performance of Handel’s Israel in Egypt that was, likewise, more than respectable—especially when one considers that the orchestra, as well as the chorus, was from the Hochschule itself. Elevating and altogether festive was the rendition of Mozart’s Requiem by the Dom-chor under Prof. Riidel at the Philharmonie.
Another unusual performance that took place about the Easter holidays was that of Beethoven’s ninth under Furtwängler, with which this remarkable conductor concluded his Philharmonic season in Berlin. Untraditional in many details and abounding in striking contrasts, this manifestation of genius impressed an immense audience as it rarely does in these days of musical piece work. With this annual Pension Fund concert Furtwängler definitely affirmed his position as Nikisch’s successor in Berlin, if indeed such confirmation was still needed. A few days before, he conducted the last of the regular subscription concerts and proved his genial musicianship in a Bach-Beethoven program that had the refreshing effect of a novelty. The clou of this concert was the fifth Brandenburg concerto with Furtwängler as pianist-conductor at the Steinway grand. Espe-
PAPALARDO
Now scheduling for festivals and operatic performances 1923-24.
Studios:
315 West 98th Street, New York
Telephones:
Riverside 1669	Marble 1573
ADELAIDE GESCHEIDT
Has Extraordinary Record
Apoda photo
Artists Secure Ten Festival Engagements from April 12 to May 25, 1923
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Sydney, N. C.
Columbus, Ohio Oberlin, Ohio Charlotte, N. C.
Worcester, Mass.
Bach, Bethleh Em Reengaged, Fifth Avenue Pres. Church, New York
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Halifax, N. S.
Truro, N. S.
New Glasgow, N. S. Worcester, Mass. Spartanburg, N. C. Reengaged, Fifth Avenue Pres. Church, New York
FRED
PATTON
Baritone
RICHARD
CROOKS
Tenor
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Oberlin, Ohio
First Presbyterian Church, Brooklyn
FREDERIC BAER
Boritone
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JUDSON	Oberlin, Ohio
t	TQF	Columbus, Ohio
IHJUO	Qn tour with Wade Hin_
Tenor	shaw Mozart Opera Co.
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Studios:
15 West 74th St.	817 Carnegie Hall
Tel. 1350 Circle