Wagner’s Piano, presented to him by King Ludwig of Bavaria, and on which some of his famous music dramas were composed, after having been lost for some years, has been found by an American soldier and is now in New York. Wagner was also known to value very highly an American-made piano.
Two New Musical Knights have been created recently by King George V. Henceforth we shall know them as Sir Henry Walford Davies and Sir Richard Runciman Terry. Each of them has been for years among the most active and successful of musical workers in Britain.
Vincent d’Indy, paradoxical as it may seem, is reported to be completing a comic opera, deriving his subject from an incident of the Trojan War which he has adapted to the recent “international unpleasantness.”
A Monument to Cesar Franck was dedicated on November 25th, in the foyer of the Royal Conservatoire of Liége. It was a gift from the city of Paris to the city of Liége. Queen Elizabeth, of Belgium, and leading statesmen and educators of France and Belgium were in attendance. Gala performances of Franck’s compositions were given on the afternoon and evening of the 26th.
The Bayreuth Festival Theater, which has now been closed for eight years, will not be reopened till the summer of 1924. Though funds are already subscribed for the resuming of these world-famous performances, necessary repairs to the house and its appliances will render it impossible to be ready for their use in the summer of 1923.
Marie Rappold May Sing in Her Apartment at night, by the decision of Justice Panken of the Municipal Court of New York in an eviction case brought by her landlady, who attempted to extort an additional thousand dollars in rental from the diva.
Shreveport, Louisiana, to the Fore! A Citizens’ Educational Council provides Shreveport with the best possible attractions along artistic and educational lines. Any citizen may hear these gratis by merely asking for a ticket. The series is supported by a fund subscribed by leading business firms and private citizens. “Who follows in their train?”
The Munich Summer Festival will be confined mostly to works of Mozart, Wagner and Richard Strauss. Aside from the standard Wagner operas, his Das Liebesverbot (its first performance since 1836) and Rienzi will be revived.
“Mockery, Deceit and Vengeance,” a comic opera by the late Max Bruch, is to have its first presentation in Berlin.
William Baines, one of the most promising of the younger English composers, died November 6th, at his home in York. Though but twenty-three years of age, and living most of these amid provincial environments, he had acquired a rather remarkable command of the current idiom and had orchestral and piano compositions of a high order to his credit.
A Heinrich Schütz Society has been formed at Dresden, with the aim of diffusing knowledge of the pre-Bachian musical works by means of their publication and performance.
A Monument to Edouard Lalo, composer of Le Roi d’Ys, has been dedicated at Lille where he was born a hundred years ago.
Tamaki Miura, the first singer of the Land of the Chrysanthemum and the Cherry Blossom to rise to international fame, is this season again winning American triumphs.
A National Director of Music has been inaugurated in Wales. The post has been created through the generosity of a philanthropist; and Sir Walford Davies, the new Welsh knight, is to be the first incumbent.
Jan Kubelik, master violinist, has the permission of the Czech Government to purchase the estate in Slovakia of Count Albert Apponyi, former Hungarian Premier. Kubelik’s wife was a Hungarian, and it is thought that he wishes to show his gratitude to Hungary by buying and preventing the division of this property which for centuries belonged to the Apponyi family, always great patrons of art.
The Juilliard Musical Foundation, with its resources of $7,000,000, has begun its work as purposed by the founder. For the present only the helping of deserving students has been attempted. Information of the workings of the Foundation may be had from Dr. Eugene Nobel, Executive Secretary, Guaranty Trust Building, Fifth Avenue, New York.
A Municipal Male Chorus of one hundred voices, for the musical, ethical and material uplift of the city and county, has been organized and sponsored by the Mayor and City Commissioners of Ogden, Utah. Free concerts and proper music for important municipal and public events are among the services it will render to the community.
The Original Player-Piano, invented by Edwin S. Votey, in 1896, has been presented to the Smithsonian Institute in Washington.
The Eighth Biennial Prize Competition for American Composers is announced by the National Federation of Music Clubs. Full particulars will be forwarded to prospective contestants by Mrs. Edwin B. Garrigues, Chairman of the Division of American Composers, 201 Bellevue-Stratford, Philadelphia, Pa.
The Prize of Rome in Musical Composition, two thousand dollars in all, is offered for a third time by the American Academy of Rome. Applications will be received till March 1st. Full particulars may be obtained by addressing Roscoe Guernsey, Executive Secretary, American Academy of Rome, 101 Park Avenue, New York.
Morristown Symphony Orchestra (New Jersey), with a membership of eighty-five and Christian Kreins, of New York, as Conductor, is a fair example of what may be accomplished in a comparatively small community when initiative and enthusiasm are back of the idea.
Lá Lyre is a new monthly Musical and Theatrical Review from Montreal, Canada. We are glad to welcome the second number of its Vol. 1 to our desk and to congratulate the management and staff on its excellent typography and especially on the interesting contents.
The Colonne Concerts of Paris will celebrate this year the fiftieth anniversary of their organization.
Granville Bantock is nearing the completion of his latest work in large proportions. It is a setting of the Song of Solomon, which is to be divided into five scenes or days. It is to be cast in a dramatic form by assigning the parts to a few characters.
Jaroslau Kocian, who first toured America in rivalry to Kubelik’s premier bid for our favor, and who has not been our guest in the last ten years, is with us again for a short tour.
The Music Supervisors’ National Conference will be held at Cleveland from April 9th to 13th, 1923. This splendid organization—this year under the presidency of Prof. Karl Gherkins, of Oberlin—is growing larger and more useful every year. One of the events of the convention week will be a “Music Memory Contest,” staged on a large scale in Masonic Hall, by the pupils of the Public Schools.
The New Organ in St. Luke’s Church, of Evanston, Illinois, was dedicated during the week of October 15th, by a series of recitals by Herbert E. Hyde, organist and choirmaster of St. Luke’s, and organists of Chicago and Evanston. The organ is rated as the largest in any church of Chicago or vicinity.
Eugen d’Albert, famous as pianist and composer, has written a new opera, Marieken von Nymwegen, founded on an old Flemish legend. It will have its premiere during the coming season in Munich.
Glinka’s “A Life for the Czar” has been banned by the Russian Soviet authorities till its text is so changed that the hero gives his life for the people rather than for the Czar.
E. Robert Schmitz, who was for several years prominent in New York musical circles, and is now returned to Paris, has been active in introducing the works of young American composers to French audiences.
The Metropolitan Opera Company management are standing firm against the pressure of the radio interests for broadcasting the musical features of their performances. The Chicago Civic Opera Company has yielded; but, as it is more or less of a traveling organization, broadcasting may act as a means of publicity. As the artistic value of broadcasting seems to be in question, there is doubt as to the surrender of the Metropolitan.
“The Moth Girl,” another Franz Lehar light opera with a “gay Viennese Lady” as the central figure, is breaking all continental records for works of this class. Three large theaters of Milan are crowded nightly by its alluring rhythms.
The Gloucester Festival, one of the most important of English musical events, has recently had its most successful meeting in a history of two hundred years, at least so from a financial standpoint, having closed with a balance of ten thousand dollars.
A Memorial Tablet to the thirty-eight students and members of the staff of the Royal College of Music (London), who made the supreme sacrifice in the late war, was unveiled in the entrance hall of that institution, on November 10, 1922.
The Montana State Teachers’ Association met in Annual Convention in Helena, November 27-29. The Music Section of the Association took formal charge of the details for the Second Annual Interscholastic Music Meet which is to convene in Big Timber next spring.
“Quand la Cloche Sonnera” (When the Bell Sounds), a new one-act opera by Bachelet, has had its premiere in Paris with a seeming sensational success. “A discriminating audience was …. tremendously enthusiastic over M. Bachelet’s exceptional composition.
Mary Garden, if reports are true, will next season tour at the head of an opera company of her own.
Josephine Lucchese, prima coloratura soprano of the San Carlo Opera Company, and Chevalier Adolpho Caruso, Philadelphia manager of the same organization, were married on November 22d, at which time the company was in the midst of a most successful season of performances in the Quaker City. Our congratulations go to the happy pair and a hearty welcome to the bride, the husband having been prominent among us for some ten years.
De Pachmann, at the age of seventy- four, has recently given a concert in London where he drew an audience which filled the Royal Albert Hall, the largest concert auditorium of Europe. Of him one critic said, “Those wonderful fingers, which first began to wiggle as long ago as 1848, still can draw tones from the piano which sound like the playing of no one else but Pachmann.”
Galli-Curci has been invested with the title and rank of Torchbearer—the highest honor within the gift of the organization—by the Camp Fire Girls of Minneapolis. During the ceremony the diva received the tribal name of “Cantawaste,” or Singing Heart.
Paderewski is with us for a series of concerts, and the five years devoted to the political, social and economic interests of his country seem in no way to have dimmed his ability as the premier pianist of his time.
Claudio Arrau, a young Chilean artist, has been received with much favor in his recent two Berlin recitals, at the first of which he played the entire Immortal Forty-eight of Bach.
The Royal Covent Garden Theater of London, during the last century the charmed goal of every singer’s operatic ambitions, is about to be turned to the more plebeian uses of vaudeville and the moving pictures, the Syndicate managing it having refused to accept the risk of continuing its lease for the higher artistic ventures. “So passes earthly glory!”
