HOME.
Ysaye, the Belgian violinist, will return to this country next fall.
The two De Reszkes, Calvé, and Melba received this season about $500,000.
H. Woolson Morse, the composer of “Wang,” “Panjandrum,” and “Dr. Syntax,” is dead.
Indiana’s Music Teachers’ Association is the oldest in America. It has, at present, 318 members on its rolls.
Report says that Melba will sing with Damrosch next season in the roles of the French and Italian opera in which she has made her reputation.
Mr. Sherwood will give a recital for the M. T. N. A.
New York, and illustrate A. J. Goodrich’s lecture in addition to performing the Saint-Saëns G minor concerto with the Seidl Orchestra.
Mr. Carl Faelten will sever his connection with the New England Conservatory this year, and will establish and conduct a school of his own in Boston at Steinert Hall, to be known as the Faelten Piano School.
The Illinois Music Teachers’ Association will hold its ninth meeting at Kankakee from June 20th to July 2d. The programme committee, Mr. Liebling and Mr. Spencer, are working to secure an unusually fine programme.
Max Maretzek, the well-known pianist and opera manager, died recently at his home on Staten Island. He was the composer of two operas, “Hamlet” and “Sleepy Hollow,” the first being produced in Germany and the second in this country.
Edward Baxter Perry will give a lecture-recital at the M. T. N. A. meeting in New York late in June, which will be his last appearance in this country before going abroad for six months of concert work in Europe, mainly in the German cities.
Mrs. Theodore Sutro, president of the Woman’s Department of the M. T. N. A., has placed Miss Clara A. Korn at the head of a committee whose object it is to collect photographs, busts, bas-reliefs, paintings, prints, etc., of the women musicians, past and present. Miss Korn may be addressed at 49 Fifth Avenue, New York.
Sousa, the march king, believes that if a composer wishes to please the public the chromatic element must be avoided. He tries to write in a simple and direct way. In some of his productions he has written chromatically, but he does not expect these to become popular, but to sustain his reputation when he is dead.
It is announced that the Cincinnati College of Music will be reorganized. Miss Teckla Vigna, who has been with the college fifteen years, will leave; also Sig. Mattioli. The piano department will be placed under the general direction of Sig. Albino Gorno. The probability is that Broekhoven, Gantvoort, Seitz, Marien, and Schliewen will remain members of the faculty.
The May Festival at Ann Arbor, Mich., took place May 13th, 14th, 15th. The artists were: Mme. Calvé, Mrs. Francis Dunton Wood, Mrs. Katherine Bloodgood, Miss Jennie Mae Spencer, Barron Berthald, J. H. McKinley, Giuseppe Campanari, Heinrich Meyn, Gardner Lampson, Alberto Jonas, and Hermann Zeitz, with the assistance of a choir of 300, and 50 musicians from the Boston Festival Orchestra.
Foreign.
Frau Wagner met Brahms but once, and of all his famous works she has heard but one—a chamber-music piece.
The Bayreuth mine is yet a gold one. The advance sale of tickets for the coming performances has already reached upward of $90,000.
Beethoven’s only opera, “Fidelio,” had its first performance in Vienna in November, 1805. It has since then been heard in that city 322 times.
“Gernot” is the title of d’Albert’s opera which was performed at Mannheim recently. The libretto is by Gustav Kastrupp, and the subject was taken from the early history of the Germanic race.
Mr. Arthur Nikisch has been re-engaged to conduct the Berlin Philharmonic concerts for next season. Under his direction these concerts have regained the popularity they formerly enjoyed under Yon Bülow.
Siegfried Wagner, the son of Germany’s greatest musician, is reported as having just completed a three-act comic opera which differs materially from the ordinary character of such works and is considered something absolutely novel in the musical line.
A heretofore unknown pianoforte composition by Wagner was published recently in the Musikalisches Wochenblatt, of Leipsic. It was written in 1861, in Paris, and bears the title, “Arrival at the Black Swans,” and is inscribed, “To his noble hostess, the Countess Pourtales, as a reminder of Richard Wagner.”
The Vienna Fremdenblatt relates the following about the tenor, Van Dyk: He was a witness in a case before the law courts. “Do you spell your name with a ‘ck’ or only a ‘k’?” asked the examiner. “With a ‘k’ only,” answered the tenor; “you can hear the ‘c’ tonight at the opera.”
Paderewski generously refused to accept any fee for his recent performance of Sir A. C. Mackenzie’s Scotch concerto at the Philharmonic Concerts in London. The society has, in consequence, awarded him its gold medal, hitherto awarded to only a very few artists, among them Arabella Goddard and Adelina Patti.
William T. Best, the foremost of England’s great organists, died in London on May 10th. He was born in 1826. In 1855 he became organist of the Panopticon, Leicester Square, London; at St. George’s Hall, Liverpool, in 1855; and at the Royal Albert Hall, Kensington, in 1871. He gave up the organ at St. George’s Hall, Liverpool, in 1894.
The Guildhall School of Music in London, it is said, is the largest in the world. It has 42 class-rooms, 140 professors, and 3700 students. The corporation is, however, now about to enlarge the premises at a cost of $100,000, by building 27 new class-rooms besides a more commodious concert-room and theater. There will then be accommodations for over 5000 pupils.
London, it is claimed, is becoming more popular for American singers as a place wherein to secure a European reputation than Paris. The reason given is, that they find better opportunities for achieving their ambition in the former city. The struggling American genius has become so common in Paris that he is looked down upon. In London he is something of a novelty, and is regarded with favor.
During the last ten years about ten of Schubert’s autographs were sold at auction in Berlin. On May 21, 1894, the music for “Antigone,” dated “March, 1817, Frz. Schubert,” consisting of seven and a quarter folio pages, was sold for 460 marks. One of his longest lieder compositions “Einsamkeit,” was disposed of on November 24, 1887, for 180 marks. Of this work Schubert wrote in a letter on August 3, 1818: “It is, as I believe, the best that I have done, for I was free from care.” Other manuscripts brought 100 to 250 marks.
Dr. Richard Eisemann, of Berlin, for years a pupil of Helmholtz, has patented a system he calls the electro- phonic piano, its distinctive principle consisting in the fact that the vibrations of the chords are produced by an electric current and by means of microphones acting as interrupters of the current. All the delicate and complex mechanism of the old piano is done away with; little electrical devices are arranged on a cross-piece extending over the strings, and upon this electric magnets are placed so as to be only a hair’s breadth from the strings.
Pressing down the key sends the electric current into the corresponding electromagnet. This attracts the metallic string below, but the microphone interrupts the current and therewith the attraction. The string returns to its former place, and thus continued attraction and interruption of the current is carried on, the number of vibrations being regulated by the pitch of the string.
The high sounds produced by this method have a decided harp tone, and the lower and middle registers suggest the ‘cello or the organ. In reality, the installation of this new system creates a new instrument, so different are the qualities of sound produced by the new method and the old.
The funeral of Brahms at Vienna on Tuesday, April 6th, was an imposing ceremony. Thousands assembled in the picturesque square outside the Karlskirche, close to which he lived, and followed across the bridge into the city, and through streets and squares to the Protestant church. Members of the Society of the Friends of Music, the great Sangverein, and the Conservatory of Music, sang some very beautiful compositions of the deceased maestro, among them “Fahr-Wohl.” Dr. Zimmerman, the clergyman of the parish, delivered a touching address on the text, “Though I speak with the tongue of men and of angels,” from the first Epistle to the Corinthians, to which one of Brahms’ last compositions was set. The procession, on leaving the church, accompanied the hearse throughout the city to the suburbs, where an endless number of carriages waited. The hearse was followed by three carriages full of wreaths. There were 186 in all, and when the grave was closed a pyramid of them was built upon it. The grave is situated between the beautiful tombs of Beethoven and Schubert. All the artists, which included Sauer, Busoni, Goldmark, Dvorak, and Nikisch, followed the remains with burning tapers to the grave, where Concert-Director Perger uttered a farewell memorial speech in the name of his fellow-artists. A flag was laid over the coffin while it was lowered into the grave. Each artist threw a clod of earth upon the coffin, and took a leaf of the laurel wreath uppermost on the tomb as a memorial.
