21
MUSICAL COURIER
May 31, 19 2 3
becoming one of those modern composers we listen to without being prompted by a sense of duty, which is the first step towards canonization.”
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Lamond gave a recital in London recently at which he played the last five piano sonatas of Beethoven. As Beethoven did not write them altogether, why should they be played altogether? Beethoven was a pianist himself but a survey of his public programs does not reveal that he ever performed five of his sonatas at a single sitting.
*S r, K
The radio is great for singers with a tremolo; they blame it on the waves, or the transmitter, or the static, or something.
H H H
A good American is a man who cannot be induced to join the MacDowell Society but belongs to the National Order of Pipe Smokers.
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“Spare the singing bird,” pleads the Audubon Association. Well, the stork doesn’t warble, but he is an exceedingly busy and useful bird neverthe-
Some children like to practice the piano and some are normal.
*t *i *Î
Russia is anxious for the world’s recognition. America has started by recognizing the Russian artists.
K *Í «Í
Leo Ornstein is in danger of being classified with the old-fashioned composers unless he does something wild at once. The moment radicals stop swimming against the tide they are carried back to the safe shores of conservatism.
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By the way, how are the new modern composers going to succeed quickly without Krehbiel as an enemy ?
n »? «e
Arthur Brisbane sweeps our land and our people with a keen and cosmic glance. In his inimitable column. Today (New York American) he says last Sunday:
At Shelby, Mont., Mr. Dempsey will fight somebody else, in a month or so. One hundred carpenters are working on an arena. And already four hundred thousand dollars worth of tickets have been sold. That is only a beginning. Two millions or more will be the total, and tens of thousands will spend other millions to travel from all over to Shelby.
What other show would draw a crowd so far in America, or draw two million dollars for a few minutes’ “pleasure” in America? When the historian of S000 A. D. gets the facts on that fight, do you think he will need much more information about our civilization in 1923?
•S *S *S
Remember, you makers of music, that envy is a kind of praise, and that some people grudge others what they cannot enjoy themselves.
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One does not learn to know composers from the stories of their lives. Their biographies are in their works, as Ouida nearly said.
K H *i
“What is the operatic tenor doing about the constant growth in feminine favor of the moving picture hero ?
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Neighbors having complained of a player piano in an all-night restaurant on Washington Heights, the proprietor, a tactful Chinaman, hangs on it each night a sign reading, “Out of order after 1 a. m.”—New York World.
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Here is a coincidence. In Ripon, Wis., says The Line (Chicago Tribune) “a duo-piano program was given by Mrs. W. H. Barber and Miss Viola Shave.” Martin Frank, also of Chicago, wishes to know whether the program was Barber of Seville or Barber of Bagdad. The same mail that brought Mr. Frank’s communication, also dropped this on our desk, from J. J. : “When the Barber of Seville saw Samson’s head after the hurried shearing he turned to Delilah and said contemptuously : “Amateur !”
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Egg and meat speculators put their products into cold storage to lessen the supply and so increase the demand and the prices. Why couldn’t something of the sort be done with American compositions?
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And yet Brahms, misunderstood musically and performed infrequently while he lived, left his heirs $100,000. Brahms, like Beethoven, was a good business man where the sale of his works was concerned.	k *î »!
Henry T. Finck reminds the world that Wagner got $800 from his publishers for Tristan and Isolde. «? n •i
Nilly—“Let’s go and see the new Murillo.” Willy—“I hate the Zoo.”
Leonard Liebling.
VARIATIONETTES
By the Editor-in-Chief
May 6, Mr. Straus writes a scathing musical arraignment of his own city, and his views show rare common sense and extreme courage. He says that New Orleans has lost its musical prestige of recent years because it has relied for its tonal fame solely on its past operatic reputation, and has done nothing to encourage orchestral or chamber music activity. Furthermore, as Mr. Straus points out, New Orleans is acquainted only with the operas (and chiefly French) of former periods and enjoys practically no acquaintance with lyrical stage works of recent times. Gounod, Meyerbeer, Halevy, hardly are the leading operatic composers today. Mr. Straus adds:
How many Orleanians have heard Faust, Les Huguenots or La Juive? Thousands and most of them know the leading numbers of the scores. But ask again, how many Orleanians have heard the nine symphonies of Beethoven, the four symphonies of Schumann, or the four Brahms works in this form? How, many are acquainted with the inimitable suites of Bach for orchestra or the C major symphony of Mozart, to mention a few of the works every person of any pretense to musical culture should know initmately? Thousands, is it? No, not even tens .
Who but a chosen few in the city know even the names of the composers who are rapidly becoming the signal writers of the day in the real music centers of the world, such as Malipiero, Cassella, De Falla, Respighi and others? How many have heard a single orchestral work by Schoenberg, Bloch, Ravel or even the earlier Scriabin, composers who rank among the highest in these later days? New Orleans is as little acquainted with the important music of the present as it has been of the great music of the past. It knew nothing of the significance of Haydn, Bach, Schumann or Mendelssohn in the old days, because those composers did not write operas. Is it any better off today, still without an orchestra or a string quartet? Music is dying of stagnation in this city. Nothing can be accomplished by singing operatic selections at musical gatherings, and little by hearing a few instrumental or vocal numbers by the great composers, new or old, sporadically in the concert hall. It takes much more than this to develop a musical public.
Mr. Straus offers a remedy for the condition he condemns, and his solution is the suggestion to establish a symphony orchestra, so that at least the present and next of the younger generations may be able to have opportunities for the acquirement of what their elders neglected. There is no contradicting the truth of what Mr. Straus writes. On our own visits to New Orleans we found a high order of intelligence and general cultural alertness on the part of the persons we met, and to this outsider it looks as though the proposal to organize a first class symphony orchestra should fall on particularly sym-pahetic ears in the Crescent City. They hold a tremendously successful horse race meeting there each winter, and also a brilliant Mardi Gras Festival. In addition, New Orleans is celebrated for pecans and pralines. Is that enough of artistic fame?
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There seems to be some belated concern in certain critical quarters about Rimsky-Korsakoff’s revision of the opera׳Boris Godunoff, by his deceased friend, MoussOrgsky. Rimsky should have allowed the work to remain as it was, is the contention of the fluttering censors. That is nonsense. Boris Godunoff was the creation of a man with musical invention but very little skill or craftsmanship with which to give it correct and effective form. Rimsky’s act was a pious one, a highly ingenious one, and in fact a necessary one. Without his aid Boris would be a series of fragmentary, badly made musical pieces, would not be in the operatic repertoire and the general public might be totally unaware of the very existence of Moussorgsky. This artificial indignation on the part of some critics whenever a work is revised, adapted, or transcribed, brings to mind the great truth that music has been harmed less by such skilled tonal jewelers than by those critics who seek to prevent every extension and amplification of the art. Their fear obviously is that truly widespread knowledge of music might impair their imagined importance and lessen their pretended power. They resemble the priests in the ages of idolatry. And like them they forgive no one who enlightens the people on his own. Such progressives are speared on the point of the sacrificial pen.
One reads in the London Morning Post about Rosenthal’s “exquisite playing” of Chopin’s E minor piano concerto, about the “cascade of notes that came gleaming and glistening from the piano,” about the “delicate beauty and sensuous curves” revealed in Rosenthal’s performance, and the Post ends by doubting “whether a nearer approach to the interpretation intended by Chopin could be made.” The occasion was the last of the Queen’s Hall Spring Symphony Concerts, and in the same notice was a most apt characterization in regard to Holst’s Planets. The critic said: “Gustav Holst is rapidly
Josef Hofmann places at our disposal a letter received from Petrograd recently, which in translation reads as follows :
Dear Mr. Hofmann :
Ten years ago I saw you at Beaumaroqhe and perhaps you may remember me. Since that time life has changed very much here, in fact so much that you will hardly believe it. I could tell you a great deal. Nearly everyone who belonged to the intellectual classes (many of those whom you knew) are all gone. My entire family has died during the past few years. I am now entirely alone and living in Petrograd. I cannot find peace anywhere. What we have suffered it is almost impossible to describe. To give you an idea of the people and the conditions of today in Petrograd, I would like to tell you that about a week ago announcements were spread' about two concerts to be given by Josef Hofmann. One was to be a Chopin recital and the other a Liszt recital. I could hardly believe my eyes and ears when I read and heard the good news. For me your music always has remained as one of the loveliest artistic memories of other days in Petrograd. I at once bought two tickets and felt more happiness than I have experienced for a long, long while. All the seats were sold immediately and the concerts were to take place in a very large building. When the time arrived for the first recital, an immense mass of people appeared at the portals of the building and encountered a large placard announcing that the concerts would not take place. The next morning the newspapers explained that the man who had advertised the concerts had no authority to do so and had decamped with all the money collected for tickets ; no trace of him has been discovered. Pretty, is it not? Your name was exploited in the most shameful manner. I know some people who sold almost their last belongings in order to be able to buy tickets for those recitals; almost no one has money here except the speculators. I cannot tell you how terribly disappointed and dismayed I was, because I had been looking forward with such extreme anticipation to hearing you again.
Please do not take it amiss that I am writing you this letter, but the swindle I have just described to you made me angry beyond measure and I felt that I had to tell you about it.
I send Mrs. Hofmann and yourself my heartiest greetings. I imagine that your daughter must be quite grown up by now. Will you ever come to Russia again? I repeat that you are my most treasured memory of the good old days. I am inexpressibly tired of life and nowhere, nowhere, can I find rest or peace.
(Signed) Olga Uspenska.
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Usually a conservatory of music building resembles its presentment in the prospectus as much as a garden resembles the pictures in the seed catalogue.
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In Ernst Decsey’s new biography of Johann Strauss, we read what is news to us : “In 1864 Jacques Offenbach was in Vienna. On one occasion he was chatting casually with Strauss at the Golden Lamb in the Tabor Strasse when he remarked casually, ‘You should write operettas. You have the stuff for it.’ Possibly Offenbach spoke without any particular intention but the idea had been born and words have might. ‘You should write operettas!’ The thought stuck in Strauss’ mind, took possession of him, and made him feel that he had not given his talent its fullest scope in the composition of waltzes only. . . . And so Offenbach became, unwittingly, the founder of the Viennese school of operetta which was destined to crowd his own out of existence.”
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J. P. F. sneers at us : “I’m waiting for you to say ‘The Philharmonic Society will put on Flesch next season.’ ” Sirrah, we did not even quote what we read in a Berlin musical paper which said: “Flesch has appeared very little in Germany since the war.” K *Ç ft
Mme. Melba is reported to be a candidate for Parliament at the next general election in England. If she will sing her campaign speeches she should have no trouble in securing- the seat.
H H H
The richest musical institution—if it can be called that—in the world, is the Victor Talking Machine Company. Its 1922 statement gives the corporation’s assets as $45,734,892.
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From I. H. :
Willy (as Mengelberg leads a strenuous climax)—“What opera does he remind you of?”
Nilly.—“Hush! I don’t know.”
Willy.—“The Flying Dutchman.”
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In composition, as in conversation, extremes of forwardness and reserve should be avoided, don’t you think?
K »! H
A belated explanation comes from Robert Hayne Tarrant, of New Orleans, whom we cited some months ago as saying that critic Roehl, of New Orleans, was a pianist and a pupil of Godowsky. It appears that Mr. Tarrant told us those facts about Noel Straus, critic of the Times Picayune, and we got the information twisted. In his column of
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