MUSICAL COURIER
May 17, 19 2 3
21
read them, or having read them, not to remember them.
H *Î *t
Commenting on the orchestral crisis in Chicago, Richard Alrdich writes some wise and timely words in the New York Times of May 6:
We hope it will be thoroughly realized that in its orchestra Chicago possesses something finer, something of a higher musical value, something that means more “education” than the opera company. The orchestra is one of the finest, if not the very finest, in this country; and that means now in the world. The weekly programs of its long season, and of the popular series, and of the various directly educational works it is engaged in mean vastly more for the musical culture of Chicago than the few weeks of opera that are given in the winter. The orchestra is deep-rooted in the Chicago soil ; the opera, no matter how “civic” it may be called, is an exotic.
And whether it ever gets to be something better than an exotic or not, the contribution that any opera company can make to the musical life of the community will never be comparable in value or musical stimulus to the contribution of a great orchestra. And with the necessary change of names the same is true of any other city in America that has its provision of orchestral music and its provision of opera.
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Some one speaking recently to Gabriel Fauré, the French composer, remarked that “modern composers can hardly go any further.” Fauré replied : “My dear friend, not even so far.”
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Several letters have informed us that Paderewski is said to have earned more last winter than any individual in the sporting world. We are sorry to have to reply that at last Saturday’s boxing bouts in the Stadium, the receipts were $390,000, more than Paderewski collected during his entire tour, and that on the same day, Vigil, W. J. Salmon’s fleet and sturdy three year old colt, won a $52,000 purse in a single race, the Preakness Stakes, at Pimlico, near Baltimore.
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The American composer who wrote a piece called Times Square has an English rival in Arthur Bliss (now visiting. New York) with his In the Tube at Oxford Circus. This should suggest to Ernest Bloch, master of Hebrew melody, to do a composition called Upper Broadway on a Sunday Afternoon. k *î •s
From the Chicago Tribune of May 6, 1923 :
This department acknowledges indebtedness to Leonard Liebling, editor of the Musical Courier, for the best characterization of musical criticism of the year. He says there are two kinds of critics—attaboy and atavistic.
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“Getting thin to music” is what an Indiana singer calls the Walter Camp Daily Dozen Exercises, done with phonograph accompaniment.
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L. V. N. suggests that while juries often acquit persons who murder human beings, critics always convict performers who murder compositions.
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America is not to be denied in art. This country not only holds the long distance dance record, but last week also won the endurance record for harp playing, the time being ten hours and five minutes.
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The Winfield (Kan.) College of Music received the attached from an ambitious garage employee of Ponca City, Okla. :
Gentleman.
I am intending to enter Music School soon, so I thought that I would write to you, asking you for little infermation, T have studied Clarinet and Saxiphone for eighteen months, but I am intending to reach higher points, so write and let me now about your School.
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That maxim coiner who wrote, “He is an unhappy man whom no one pleases,” must have been acquainted with a music critic.
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Our Spartanburg correspondent corresponds : “Down here they are all agog, as the saying goes, over Gigli, who sang at our festival. A local newspaper critic who had just purchased a black Minorca show bird which he expects to send to the next show at Madison Square Garden, christened the bird Gigli. A Spartan lady has called her tomcat Gigli and a young mother was trying the morning after the concert to Anglicize the famous tenor’s name to suit the baby.”
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And now they are to select the greatest ten men in America. We are curious to see who our nine companions will be.
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Truth crushed to earth rises again, and so do opera singers thé moment the curtain is lifted after they die. *, *, *,
N illy (at violin recital)—“He’s an Auer pupil.”
Willy—“Well, I’d hate to hear a half-hour pupil.”
Leonard Liebling.
VARIATIONETTES
By the Editor-in-Chief
parent the moment he attempts anything on a large scale. He is a fitting last representative of a national music that has always run to daintiness and elegance rather than strength. Somehow the legend has got about that Ravel is a master ironist in music. It would be interesting to know how the legend began; perhaps it owed its origin to his personality and his conversation rather than his work. He certainly had his chance to show himself an ironist in L’Heure Espagnole—the neatest bit of impropriety ever put on the operatic stage—but outside the circle of his official rhapsodists it is not generally held that he made as much as might have been made of Franc-Nohain’s delicious libretto. I should say that his mind is essentially a simple one, and that subtlety is a matter of aspiration with him rather than of achievement. It is a mind of exquisite fancy so long as it is working on a scale appropriate to it; there is nothing in all modern chamber music more lovely than, the first two movements of the quartet. But the gray matter of the brain will not last out the whole four movements; in the last two the substance of the music gets thinner and thinner, and we are finally left with merely a number of piquant effects without causes—the sauce without the fish.
“Like so many of his race in music, he is a cerebral: his music lacks humanity. Some of it is wearing very badly; even the Mother Goose suite seemed very thin stuff on Saturday, in spite of the piquancy of the coloring. In actual invention this music is merely second-rate. Ravel has never been much of a melodist; I have always said, since the days of Daphnis and Chloe, that you have only to scratch his tunes and you find Chaminade. His Sleeping Beauty and Tom Thumb and Little Ugly are all rather dried little sticks. We get the same dryness in La Valse, which, to my thinking, is Ravel’s biggest failure. Even the irresistible Viennese melodies in it cannot save it; they are finally ruined by Ravel’s heavy-handed treatment of them; it is the Frenchman, not the German who is here lacking in grace and lightness of touch. If Ravel’s idea has been to indulge in a smile at the expense of the charming little waltz, sentimentalities of the Vienna of the sixties or seventies, he would have been careful not to let his mouth slip into so broad a grin.”
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According to Deems Taylor’s computation, Tschai-kowsky’s fifth symphony had thirteen hearings in New York last season while his sixth, Beethoven’s third (Eroica) and Brahms’ first, second and fourth had seven performances each. Next came Mozart’s G minor with six, Tschaikowsky’s F minor with four, Franck’s D minor with two, and Beethoven’s eighth, Mozart’s Jupiter and E flat, and Schumann’s first had only one performance each. Brahms’ third symphony had none. Mr. Taylor suggests that the conductors meet in the early fall and compare and arrange their programs so as to insure a more equitable distribution of performances for the classics. It looks as though Mr. Taylor knows his symphonic literature better than his conductors.
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At the Lambs’ Spring Gambol, Patrick Francis Murphy, had he been speaking about music, would have had to change his address but little, and some of the passages might have sounded like this:
Providence has bestowed modesty on some people and on others a disposition for the career of a musical performer.
The musical career has a penalty that follows it like a shadow. It is the experience of many that they win recognition on their advance notices and lose it on their performances.
To be successful a modern composer has little time for family or friends; he must devote himself exclusively to his enemies.
In popular music there always is the man of the hour and he seldom lasts longer than that.
Musical history is peculiar; it does not record failures.
Composers praise two sorts of persons—the dead and themselves. They are like jealous lovers who pay court to the same woman in a spirit of emulation. Thev hate each other, but they love music.
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As showing the real democracy of our country and our institutions, Tito Schipa and James J. Corbett are candidates for■ admission to the Lambs Club. And both are fine fellows, with Corbett perhaps less belligerent than Schipa.
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At the Capitol Theater last week the news films showed a picture of the recent raging floods in Maine and the orchestra played sweetly and excellently the Barcarolle from Tales of Hoffmann.
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The Portland (Ore.) Orchestra program of April 25 contains the professional card of Jesse Parker who advertises: “Specializing a Short Course in Business■ Piano Playing.” The Gentleman who sends us the item, inquires : “Is it anything like business English?” It It It
The old saying that flattery is monstrous in a true friend does not apply in music.
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The remedy for unfavorable criticisms is not to
Some one said to an operatic tenor the other day: “Two hundred thousand persons crowded to see soccer in London the other day.” “Soccer?” asked the warbler; “what does he sing ?”
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If the boy is father to the man, one might say that the baby is father to the infant prodigy, were there not so many baby prodigies.
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It appears that Henry Ford may be a candidate for the Presidency. While this column has no politics at the same time it begs all musical voters to remember that Ford said: “I wouldn’t give five cents for all the art in the world.”
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We are waiting patiently for the appearance of that group of reformers which will call stridently for a musical censor. Opera librettos must be cleaned up, certain Strauss works suppressed, the passion eliminated from the pages of Chopin and Wagner, and Elman, Novaes, Paderewski, Gigli and Jeritza made to perform less sensuously. After that, all would be well with the musical world.
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Gretchen Dick is thanked herewith for sending us the attached clipping from a Moorhead, Minn., paper:
"Khvanis Club of Moorhead Pays Werrenrath $60,000 for ‘Insult.’ ”
“Insulted” at a meeting of the Moorhead Kiwanis Club, attended by over 110 persons, Reinald Werrenrath, baritone, who sang at Moorhead, Minn., High School last evening, was offered $60,000 by the club to “forget” the incident. The offer was accepted by the singer and Charles S. Marden, Moorhead attorney, appearing for one of the parties to the “insult,” paid over that sum !in cash. The money, however, was Russian paper and has a present day value of about six cents, according to Mr. Marden.
The affair arose during the introduction of Mr. Werrenrath, who made a short talk. Credit in the introduction was given to Dr. J. A. Aasgaard, president of Concordia College, under whose auspices Mr. Werrenrath appeared, for bringing him here. Another member of the club immediately denied that Mr. Aasgaard was responsible, declaring that on a previous appearance, the singer had been terribly “insulted” by Dr. Aasgaard.
This insult, it was said, came about through the posting of an announcement of a recital by Werrenrath several years _ ago. A poster was put on the Concordia College bulletin board over another announcement, so that the two read together, announcing that “Reinald Werrenrath, baritone, will sing here tonight. College not responsible for coats, caps and dogs lost.” After some discussion, the offer of $60,000 was made and the offer closed.
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Welcome, Goldmark, to the ranks of the musical horses. The colt so named ran twice at Jamaica last week and finished a brilliant second each time. By the way, “Variationettes” received exactly fourteen mail communications and four telephone messages calling attention to the matter.
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Stop, stop, stop, kind readers, and refrain from sending us any more suggestions and books for our summer reading. Over two dozen titles came to our desk last week, and three actual volumes, to wit: George R. Chatburn’s Highways and Highway Transportation, M. D. Heiser’s Farm Meats, and H. Gilbert Whyatt’s Streets, Roads, and Pavements, it it it
The author who said that there are only seven plots in the world, never spent any time among the personnel of an opera company.
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The thought of one’s rapidly approaching summer vacation is marred sadly by reading the lists of musical events in contemplation for 1923-24. One does not expect much feeling in royal circles, where the saying: “Le roi est mort, vive le roi” has become a law. But in music, at least, there might be common decency and respect for death. Here is 1922-23 with its very last gasps just finished and already ill-mannered devotees are shouting raucously the coming glories of 1923-24, not yet born. Very poor form,
It is difficult to conjecture—and perhaps illegal, too—what W. H. S. means when he postcards : “Now that the Mullan-Gage Prohibition Enforcement Law has been repealed in this State, the chances that the great American opera or great American symphony might come from New York are brightened immeasurably.”
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This is the kind of musical reviewing which has real value because it expresses an original and definite opinion and instructs without the desire to teach or to lay down law. The article is by Ernest Newman: Ravel is a “little master” whose limitations become ap-