HOME.
MR. S. BECKER Y. GRABILL has opened a conservatory of music in Lancaster, Pa.
AUGUST HYLLESTED, the great Danish pianist, will make a concert tour through Canada in the early fall.
PROFESSOR E. VON ADELUNG, formerly of East Oakland, California, has been appointed Director of Music at the Columbia Atheneum, Columbia, Tenn.
THE Augustana Conservatory of Music, at Rock Island, Ill., has added psychology as a special study belonging to the course.
CLEMENTINE DE VERE-SAPIO, the eminent American soprano, has returned from Europe for a tour in concerts during the season.
MR. W. C. CARL, the organist, is giving concerts in Sweden and Norway. He will return to this country some time in the fall.
MAX KARGER, the young American violinist, after a successful tour in Germany, Holland, and Scandinavia, has returned to this country.
MR. ANTON SEIDL returned from Europe September 3d. He speaks enthusiastically of Bayreuth, but is glad to get back to the United States.
MME. NORDICA will arrive in this country early in October, and will immediately go to Portland, where she is to sing in the Maine Festival.
THE third annual Sängerfest of the German singing societies of New England was held at Worcester, Mass., in September. It was a very successful affair.
LEOPOLD GODOWSKY, director of the piano department of the Chicago Conservatory, expects to return from Vienna in time to resume his duties, October 4th.
MRS. CLARENCE EDDY and Miss Rose Ettinger sailed recently for Europe. Miss Ettinger begins her concert tour October 21st, at the Gewandhaus in Leipsic, under Nikisch.
THE Dayton, Ohio, Philharmonic Society will perform this season, Massenet's "Eve," Chadwick's "Phœnix Expiran," Hoffman's "Cinderella," and Haydn's "Creation."
THE Maine Music Festival will occur at Bangor, October 14th, 15th, and 16th, and at Portland, October 18th, 19th, and 20th. A chorus of 1000 voices and an orchestra of 70 musicians will be heard.
ROSENTHAL'S return to this country is awaited with the utmost interest. He will play in the larger cities only, being obliged to return to London early in April, where he will play a series of historical recitals.
THE Theodore Thomas Orchestra will visit the East in the spring, giving a series of concerts in New York, and appearing also in Boston, Worcester, Providence, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Brooklyn, and Washington.
THE first large concert of the coming season in New York will occur November 28th. The following artists will appear: Madame Nordica, Ysaye, Pugno, Gèrardy, and Plançon. Such an array of talent is bewildering at one time.
AN English contemporary speaks a good word for the American choir singer. It deems the American church choir a great recruiting ground for prima donnas. Most of our singers, from Albani and Nordica downward, have come from church choirs.
MR. LOUIS LOMBARD, formerly of Utica, N. Y., recently passed through Genoa, Italy, on his way to Paris, where he intends to found a conservatory of music for Americans. All the educational branches of this conservatory will be exclusively in the hands of Parisian teachers.
EUROPE has two great sources of revenue derived from American love of music; the one consisting of money paid to visiting musical artists, and the other of money paid by pupils to foreign school-teachers and trainers. The amount of money thus spent is estimated at $7,000,000.
THE California Music Festival Association will hold its second festival in San Francisco, on the 9th and 10th of November. Three concerts will be given. Mendelssohn's "Elijah" will be performed at the first one and the other two programmes will be made up of miscellaneous music.
THE Euclid Avenue Congregational Church, of Cleveland, last year inaugurated a plan which worked so well that it is to be repeated this year. The plan is nothing more nor less than paying the expense of voice training lessons for the members of a large chorus choir. This is something other churches might adopt with benefit.
THE following artists will be heard in this country during the coming season. Pianists: Rosenthal, Siloti, Pugno, and Sieveking. Organist: Guilmant. Violinists:
Ysaye and Henri Marteau. 'Celloists : Jean Gèrardy and Leo Stern. Of singers, hundreds will appear, prominent among them being the Henschels, Dyna Beumer, Plançon, Ffrangcon-Davies, Mlle. Trebelli, Lillian Blauvelt, and Emma Juch.
THE Inter-State University System of Musical Instruction, of which President E. H. Scott, of the Western Conservatory, Kansas City, Mo., is the founder, has become quite generally established among private music teachers of the West. The system presents a plan of co-operation whereby competent private teachers are enabled to offer their pupils peculiar incentives to greater thoroughness in the home study of music. The object is certainly a worthy one, and the enterprise should prove a grand success.
THE Woman's Department, which proved such an interesting feature at the recent M. T. N. A. convention, has issued a little circular, in which they invite all the musical clubs of this country to join them in the formation of a society to be known as the National Federation of Women's Musical Clubs. It is proposed to call a national meeting soon of representatives sent by the different clubs for the purpose of adopting a constitution and electing officers. Miss F. Marian Ralston, of St. Louis, Mo., is secretary, to whom all inquiries should be addressed.
PADEREWSKI is being critically dissected now, and the result is not very flattering for him. "The halo of romance surrounding his history, the story of his early life, the death of his young wife, his devotion to his afflicted son—all these, together with his personality, a certain languid grace of manner, and the wonderful hue of his sunny and much-talked-of hair, lent him a peculiar charm to feminine eyes. As an interpreter of Chopin's waltzes, nocturnes, preludes, ballades, and mazurkas he is unsurpassed, but for the works of Beethoven he is not fitted, and it is almost absurd to compare him with such giants as Rubinstein, Tausig, or von Bülow." Thus say the critics, and there is doubtless much truth in their criticisms.
FOREIGN.
THE veteran pianist, Chevalier Anton de Kontski, is, at the age of eighty years, touring in Siberia.
A COMPANY has been formed to build a new theater in Milan, to be called the Giuseppe Verdi Theater.
MR. PLUNKET GREENE expects to open his American season with a series of song recitals in Steinert Hall, Boston.
FRAU MATERNA, the famous Wagnerian singer, at a banquet in Vienna recently, announced her retirement from public life.
KARL KLINDWORTH is soon to publish 52 études from Clementi's "Gradus ad Parnassum," revised for the use of teachers.
DR OTTO GUENTHER, the esteemed director of the Royal Conservatory of Music of Leipsic, died in that city, September 12th.
CHRISTINE NILSSON recently visited her native land, Sweden. Wherever she appeared she was surrounded by crowds of admirers.
ROBERT RADECKER succeeds, by appointment, the late Woldemar Bargiel as director of the Academic Institute of Church Music in Berlin.
MR. WM. SMALLWOOD, a well-known English composer of pianoforte pieces for teaching and the drawing- room, died recently at Kendal.
CARACAS, the capital of Venezuela, which already possesses an opera house and a Philharmonic Society, is about to establish a conservatory of music.
WOMAN is coming to the front in opera composition. "Bianca Torella," an opera composed by Baroness de Fortmague, was recently produced at Toulouse, France.
THE reports that Mascagni had attempted suicide have generally been denied, but it seems to be conceded that, from some cause or other, his mind has become more or less affected.
THE first Gewandhaus concert of this season will occur October 7th. It will be a Brahms memorial concert, Dr. Kraus, of Vienna, and Willy Rehberg, of Geneva, appearing as soloists.
SIR ARTHUR SULLIVAN is said to have remarked recently in conversation that he was looking for a good libretto. Before three days had passed 280 librettos of operas and operettas had been sent him.
THE gifted composer and pianist, Ludwig Schytte, of Vienna, will give a series of concerts throughout Scandinavia, beginning October 1st. His countrymen will, no doubt, give this favorite artist a hearty reception, and make his tour a triumphal one.
A NEW pianoforte keyboard, having six rows of keys, has recently been exhibited in Manchester, England. An octave is formed by six keys in two contiguous rows. All the keys are on the same level, and each note is separated from the next by an interval of two semitones.
NEAR London, in the garden of a little villa, once the home of the historian Grote, is a relic of Mendelssohn. It is a broken tombstone, erected in affectionate remembrance by Mrs. Grote, to commemorate a spot where Mendelssohn loved to sit and compose while staying there.
SARASATE, like a true Spaniard, takes delight in the bull-fight, and while attending one recently is said to have thrown his sleeve buttons to one of the fighters as a gift. They were returned by the torero, however, who stated that he would prefer Sarasate's photograph and autograph. He received both, and was asked to keep the sleeve buttons as well.
AND now the English are beginning to preach against students of music going abroad to study. An English exchange says: "The private conservatories of Berlin are more busy filling (and overfilling) their benches than attending to the individual needs of their pupils. With the possible exception of Leipsic, there are no musical schools in the Fatherland to be compared with our own."
THE general opinion seems to be that the Wagner Festival at Bayreuth this year was very unsatisfactory. The various criticisms expressed are that the singers are heavy and sing out of tune; that the orchestra is poor and the instruments have no tone. Siegfried Wagner, it is said, by trying to conduct, is ruining Bayreuth, and Frau Wagner, with her policy of direction, will ultimately frighten everybody away.
