MUSICAL COURIER
50
June 7, 19 23
his widespread reputation for just dealing with his fellowman, and his capability of giving constructive criticism.
Now, this position of reportage for one of the world’s greatest musical magazines necessitates incidental expenses, such as a typewriter, stationery and postage. This is met by “Proctor” Mills with the “sacrifice of a few recreations.” (Would many of us relinquish as much in order to give time to uplift work?)
We may add that the State of Alabama has received excellent publicity since he took hold of the work. Also that he is working hand in hand with the Alabama Federation of Music Clubs, making numerous trips to smaller towns on the lookout for talent. He has given a number of free scholarships in piano and voice culture, even furnishing the pupils with the necessary sheet music and text books.
Ralph Leopold Wins More Praise
Ralph Leopold appeared in Chicago on his recent tour of the West and Middle West. The following extracts from Chicago and western newspapers show with what enthusiasm he was greeted.
Ralph Leopold was excellent, sympathetic in feeling and technically admirable. He contributed solos for the piano which were so well received by the public that he had to add an encore.—Chicago Post, April 4.
Ralph Leopold supplied piano solos by Dohnanyi, Chopin, Rachmaninoff and Leschetizky. Of these the C major rhaposdie by Dohnanyi was the most worth while. They were very well played. He pleased his audience and added an encore.—Chicago Daily News, April 4.
In a group of piano solos, he proved himself to be a very agile performer with a gentle style.—Chicago Daily Journal, April 4.
Ralph Leopold, as pianist, contributed no little part to the enjoyment of the evening. His piano solos gave opportunity to display his marvellous technic and musicianship. His interpretation of Humoresque, by Rachmaninoff, was particularly delightful. He responded to encores.—Riverside (Cal.) Press, March 14.
Ralph Leopold came in for justly earned applause for his marvellous technic and a new depth of feeling in an encore from Liszt. Mr. Leopold, playing with precision, wonderful facility, and at times great .power, allowed himself show of feeling.—Nevada State Journal, Reno, March 2.
Ralph Leopold rendered difficult selections in a manner most pleasing. —Morning Star, Merced, Cal., March 7.
Ordinarily,'mention of an assisting artist is reserved for a complimentary—or other—paragraph at the conclusion, but I should like to bring Ralph Leopold more prominently into this notice. His playing was of a very high order. His numbers gave evidence of a power and a technic that will carry him a long way.—Oakland (Cal.) Tribune, February 28.
Emma Heckle Honored in Cincinnati
Emma Heckle, who enjoys the honor of being the first soloist to sing in Music Hall at the now celebrated Cincinnati Music Festivals, attending the event this season, aroused much interest. One of the local papers commented quite at length upon Miss Heckle’s appearance in 1878, when she sang at the dedication of Music Hall. It said in part:
On Thursday and Saturday afternoons of next week, Emma Heckle, will attend the May festival matinee at Music Hall, as will 3,000 other auditors, more or less. But none of them, it is safe to say, will see a picture which is sure to flash before the eyes of Miss Heckle, for many years a teacher of voice in Cincinnati. She will see in memory a girl of eighteen, slender, pale, but with determination flashing in her gray eyes. The girl is in becoming frock of canary color, trimmed with white chiffon, and she occupies one of the seats for soloists, at the very front of the stage. She is Emma Heckle, eighteen, first Cincinnati soloist to sing at a May festival in Music Hall.
Yes, it is true that I was the first Cincinnati soloist to sing in a Music Hall festival,” says the Miss Heckle of today, plump, gray
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Praise for Thomas James Kelly’s Lecture
The following review from the Cincinnati Inquirer of March 19 shows in what esteem Thomas James Kelly is held in the Ohio City, not only as a singer and teacher, but also as a lecturer:
Yesterday afternoon the second of Thomas James Kelly’s series of four musical causeries gave a veritable feast of information, leavened with much wit and wisdom, on the general topic of Music and Belles Lettres. In his prologue to this fascinating theme Mr. Kelly quoted copiously from Sidney Lanier, saying that it is impossible to escape literature; for every one is the product of poetry. Like Emerson’s Brahma crying to the skeptic, literature pries to all the world, and there is no escaping it, for, as Lanier says, literature is “the wings wherewith you fly.”
Touching upon his first division of the subject, Voice and Verse, Mr. Kelly invoked Milton, Keats and Shakespeare to prove the eternal union of these “sphere-born harmonious sisters.” Shakespeare in his sonnets refers to the composer, Dowland, the writer of “Ayres and Songes,” the royal lutenist. In illustration of this period Mr. Kelly sang, in his delightfully clear, well-placed baritone, augmented by a diction impeccably correct, a “songe” by Dowland, Come Again, Sweet Love Doth Now Invite, and one of that composer’s most delectable “ayres,” a lovely old ballad, with its quaint I see, I hear, I touch, I kiss, I die, with thee again in sweetest sympathy. Mr. Kelly further emphasized this affiliation between poetry and music with quotations from many famous poets.
There are, said this interesting authority, certain poems that cannot be set to music, among others Joyce Kilmer’s well loved Trees. Another is John Masefield’s Cargoes, descriptive of the quinquiremes of Nineveh, the stately Spanish galleons and the British coaster, with its salt-caked smokestack, strutting up the channel in the mad March days with its much-needed wares. Who, he asked, could give a musical setting to some of the poems of Yeats?—And yet these men, he declared, could write poems which, in master hands, were even enhanced by the measures of music. In illustration Mr. Kelly sang with stirring appreciation the very wonderful, He Wishes tor the Cloths of Heaven—a most intriguing poem, by William Butler Yeats, set to music by Thomas F. Dunhill. This was followed by an equally delightful morceau—John Masefield’s Sea Fever, with music by John Ireland, a distinguished musician, whom Mr. Kelly interpreted with a fine sense of literary and musical values.
The attitude of English scholarship and literature toward music was well illustrated and cleverly described in quotations from Sir William Henry Hadow, followed by excerpts from Browning’s Shop, from the ever charming Byron, and from Shelley’s With Guitar, which Mr. Kelly introduced most aptly, singing Maude Valerie White’s setting of that matchless poet’s sonnet, To Mary. Richard Le Gallienne’s review of Bjornson; the relative values of Ibsen, Whitman, Dante, Barrie, Kipling, Wordsworth, Swinburne, Rossetti and Christina Rossetti all came in for a graceful and an appreciative word applicable to this subject. To this Miss Margaret Powell, in a lovely lilting soprano, added My Heart Is Like a Singing Bird, by Christina Rossetti, set to Dr. Frederick Cowen’s music, and later, after Mr. Kelly’s glimpse of the much-loved Herrick, she sang with much finesse To Daisies, set to song by Roger Quilter.
Mr. Kelly prefaced his allusions to the blunders made by the literatti in introducing music into their writings by declaring that as every symphony must have a scherzo—so should every lecture. He quoted most amusingly from a letter from his warm friend and kinsman, Meredith Nicholson, who declared that Mr. Kelly and Mr. Krehbiel had “scared him to death” about the errors of literary men on special topics. Ernest Newman’s criticism of John Drinkwater’s story of Anthony Crundle playing the piccolo to Sue; Tennyson, usually charming in his references to music and things musical, but who went singularly astray in his orchestra in Maude; Milton, Coleridge, Arnold, Hugo, Lamb, George Sand, Marie Correlli, Bulwer-Lytton, George Eliot, all were drawn upon to show the danger of dwelling upon musical terms and situations by those not themselves of the musical cognoscenti. Here Miss Powell sang with delightful verve two quatrains from Fitzgerald’s translation of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, the music by James H. Rogers.
Finishing with a few remarks upon Critics and Criticism, Mr. Kelly declared the latter to be the very soul of art, its natural corollary, its living force. Suppress it, he insisted, and art would degenerate into pure commercialism, a state of affairs which, having no standards, would therefore have no value. He said, however, that criticism had come to mean fault-finding in the minds of many, rather than judgment, which suggests two sides to a question, both carefully weighed. In this connection he quoted from Professor George Saintsbury on the dangers assailing those critics who either indorse the general opinion in a tame and banal assenting to it or who succumb to the temptation of saying something “different” in an effort to obtain cheap distinction by paradox or eccentricity. Huneker on Turgenieff, Balza, Daudet, George Moore, Romaine Rolland, Gautier and others added to this pleasant proof that critics and criticism have their just place but an equal responsibility. To crown the afternoon’s enjoyment, Mrs. Mary Towsley Pfau sang the Evening Song of Sidney Lanier, set to most charming music by Miss Elizabeth Cook, of Cincinnati, who recently was awarded the prize for the best madrigal submitted in a competition sponsored by the Chicago Madrigal Society, and who presided at the piano.
Margaret Powell followed with Coleridge’s Love Went A-riding, and Mr. Kelly capped the climax and sent his audience home rejoicing with two cavalier songs of Robert Browning, Marching Along and King Charles, the fascinating setting being by Maude Valerie White. Grace Woodruff was again the clever accompanist for Miss Powell and Mr. Kelly, adding much to the harmony of the whole.
Macbeth’s Appearance with Boston Symphony Lauded
The following are echoes of Florence Macbeth’s appearance in Boston:
Her voice has a very rare combination of purity, clarity and warmth of tone. She can sing very high notes with an ease and beauty almost unparalleled. She is one of the finest singers now before the American public, heard too seldom in this city.—The Boston Globe, April 24.
Miss Macbeth, who sang the arias from The Magic Flute and II Seraglio, has shown herself long since a singer of uncommon gifts, not only as regards her voice itself, but also the intelligence and art with which she employs it. She is well equipped to sing Mozart.— Olin Downes, in the Boston Post.
Florence Macbeth, soprano of the Chicago Opera Company, was the soloist of the evening and received a storm of applause for her rendering of Pamina’s aria from The Magic Flute. Miss Macbeth’s voice and charming personality won enthusiastic approval of the audience and members of the orchestra. She was recalled again and again.—The Boston Traveler.
Her voice is a joy in the purity of its tones and the flexibility and ease which shows at every turn. There is every mark of the coloratura, yet a regard for tone color and a discriminating nicety of phrase that is not always present in a singer of this type.—The Boston American.
Mills Galled Montgomery’s Most Useful Citizen
The Birmingham News recently offered a prize for the best essay on Alabama’s Most Useful Citizen and Why. The second place in the competition was won by Margaret Thomas, and the man she picked out as Alabama’s most useful citizen is John Proctor Mills, of Montgomery. Her reasons are many, and far too long to quote, especially as they have to .do mostly with social work not associated with music. But the following paragraph will be of interest:
Here we reach activities that spread beyond the confines of his own home town and State. Though pre-eminently self made along musical lines, Mills has received national recognition. But not satisfied with personal achievements, he thinks of a way in which he can inspire and help his fellow musicians. Adopting the slogan, “Tell the world what we are doing!” he bends his efforts to publicity, as much for the obscure though gifted music teacher, as for the State-known player, singer or composer. Accordingly, he offers his reporting service free to the Musical Courier, and is accepted because of
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