Page 29G MAY 1920 THE ETUDE As Great Composers See Each Other By Yorke Bannard understanding with the pupils was that when he com -menced to play the pupil was to stop playing. Three times he started playing, every time with the remark, Tha t was not quite so good, see if you can play this way.' Three times the girl made a futile effort. Les-chetizky rose in a towering rage and said, 'Leave this house at once and never come near me again!' "The girl went away in tears. If she had stayed away Leschetizky would never* have forgiven her. She came back in two weeks and he was delighted above all things and a model of courtesy. The passage she had found impossible was now all right, and the master could not say enough in her praise. Perhaps it was just what she needed to force her to get the phrase right? Wh o knows? But it seemed unreason-able. "The world-advance in music during the last few years has been enormous. When I was a boy in Odessa, one of my friends was Mischa Elman. To -gether with another boy we had a little trio of piano, violin and cello, and whenever any visitors came to the school we were always selected to play. That was the day before mechanical appliances for repro-ducing music were made. To-day thousands and thousands of people have heard Elman play who have never seen him and who will never see him—because of the popularity of mechanical playing contrivances. Many will hear my records whom I shall never see, or who will never see me. In this new tendency fo r the expansion of interest in the piano and in music there is possibly the biggest advance of the times. Let us hope that the quality of art will not suffer by these means—that it will not be grossly commercial-ized. There is no reason why it should, and there is every reason why it should lead to benefits untold for the music lover, the student and the teacher. A Note on Interpretation By Francis R. Burke LET twelve of the best actors or actresses read aloud the same piece of prose or verse. It will be found that no two read it in the same way, though the rendition of each might in itself be a joy to hear. Between deadly monotony at the one extreme and pure ranting at the other—'both wrong—there are varying degrees of dramatic intensity, each capable of giving a maxi-mum of sesthetic pleasure to individuals of correspond-ingly different tastes. It may be pointed out that in each case beauty of voice is the essential quality, heightened and emphasized, it may be, by gesture and facial expression. Bearing in mind that there is, probably, no such thing as perfect analogy, it might be useful to find an application of this to the art of the instrumental soloist. Beauty of tone is of the first importance. Deadly monotony and ranting are equally reprehensible. • Be-tween these extremes there is ample room for liberty of action, although expression marks must be observed, according to the intention of the composer, the liberty of the musician being here more circumscribed than that of the reader of verse or prose. However, it is difficult to see how gesture or facial expression, or bodily contortions can beneficially modify the effect of, say, a violin solo. They appear to dis-tract the attention of the listener from the appeal of the most subjective and most impersonal of all the arts, although some music lovers seem to think that the executant should indicate by pantomimic antics the effect the music has upon himself and ought to have upon his audience. Build Beautiful Ideals IN teaching musical history it might be well to con-sider what kind of facts we are putting into the mind of the student. W e conceive that the art of music touches mankind at his highest point. It is, therefore, incongruous that, in studying musical history, we should pick out the ugly things in the character of the composers and musicians. Since they were human, it must be that they had their ugly side. But the true side of the composers was the divine aspect of them that was inspired to give the world beautiful music. The warts on their noses—so to speak—are veritable facts, but they are not the most edifying facts for the student to emphasize, and the knowledge of them will not help him to play their music better. There are other facts just as true that relate to the better selves of the composers and that will inspire the student to loftier ideals. Let us stress these and not the others. "TRUE criticism can only come from creative minds," declared Schumann. His statement may, or may not, be true; but it is certainly true that the creative mind, when applied critically, has often produced unsatisfac-tory results. Generally speaking, men of marked abil-ity regard their rivals unfavorably; they are more prone to give expression to contemptuous opinions than to enthusiasm. N o one has been more roundly strafed by men of his own craft than Wagner. Rossini, of. William Tell fame, and a composer of the period, dispraised him. Speaking of Tannhauser, he said, "It is too elaborate a work to be judged after a single hearing, but so far as I am concerned I shall not give it a second." Later on, somebody handed him the score of Lohengrin, and presently remarked that he was holding the music upside down. "Well," answered Rossini, "I have already tried it the other way and now I am trying it this, as I really can make nothing of it." Rosenbach solemnly avowed that such music left him "aching all over, as if tossed by the billows of a heavy sea"—a cross-channel sort of feeling. Schumann declared that both Tannhauscr and Lohengrin were amateurish, a pronouncement which Wagner returned with interest by saying that Schu-mann had "a tendency to greatness." "Tf, " said Marschner, "Wagner, who is a highly gifted man, had been a genuine composer, he would not have thought it necessary to make such a noise, and to employ quack methods to win musical fame and hide the pov-erty of his productions." Berlioz had a no less hazy vision; he had "not the slightest idea of what the composer wanted to say " Neither had Offenbach, composer of the now-forgotten Madame Favart. H e it was who made merry over some Wagnerian poetry. Wagner sent to him a copy o f his Rienzi. After three weeks the copy was returned with the verdict which runs thus : "Dear Wagner, your music is trash; stick to poetry." Now, Offenbach was an Israelite, and some months later the author of Rienzi was out with his celebrated brochure denounc-ing the Jews. Seeing revenge in this direction, Wag -ner sent his pamphlet to his downright critic. But Offenbach returned it in two days with 'the following sober pronouncement written over the first page: "Dear Wagner, your brochure is rot; stick to music " Tchaikovsky spoke disparagingly of the Ring. "The king bores me to death," he exclaimed, "there never was such endless and tedious twaddle " Then Nor -dau was similarly unimpressed; he found the Ring in particular and Wagner in general "a bleating echo from the far-away past." And so on, da capo. Mozart's Admirers Mozart, on the contrary, came nearest to the dis-tinction of escaping adverse criticism at the hands of brother composers. H e was the chief among Meyerbeer's favorites of the past Haydn greatly revered him, describing him as "the most extra-ordinary, original, and comprehensive musical genius ever known in this or any age or nation." " I only wish I could impress upon every friend of mine," he wrote in 1787, "and on great men in particular, the same deep musical sympathy and profound appreciation which I myself feel fo r Mozart's inimita-ble music; then nations would vie with each other to possess such a jewel within their frontiers. It enrages me to think that the unparalleled Mozart is not engaged at any Imperial Court. Rossini named Mozart as his favorite among tHe masters. "Bee-thoven," he said, " I take twice a week, Haydn four times, and Mozart every day." On another occasion he put it even more pointedly. H e had been speak-ing to a friend about Beethoven, whom he called the greatest of all musicians. "What, then, of Mozart? " he was asked. "Oh," he replied, "Mozart is not the greatest; he is the only musician in the world." Gounod, in his long commentary on Don Giovanni, extols "that unequaled and immortal master-piece, that apogee o f the lyrical drama," and adds that "it has exercised the influence of a revelation upon the whole of my life ; it has been and remains fo r me a kind of incarnation of dramatic and musical infallibility. I regard it as a work without blemish, of uninterrupted perfection." Schubert's enthusiasm for the same genius was unbounded. "Oh, Mozart! immortal Mozart!" he exclaimed, "how many and what countless images of a brighter world hast thou stamped on our souls!" Grieg opined that "where Mozart is greatest he embraces all time;" Ferdinand David declared that master to be "music made man; " Wagner always had great respect for anything Mozar-tian, as is fully attested in his writings. To-day these many eulogisms are no longer acceptable by many who look fo r something more "advanced," more "modern." What They Thought of Beethoven Albrechtsberger had a decided contempt for his pupil Beethoven. His counsel to some inquiring person was to have nothing to do with him, "for, " said he, "he has never learnt anything and will never do anything in a decent style." Haydn, too, failed in feelings of sympathy and appreciation towards Bee-thoven. A s a fact, each regarded the other's ways with dislike. Howbeit, at bottom Beethoven had a great reverence for the old master. In later days— on being shown a picture of Haydn's birthplace -Beethoven exclaimed, "T o think that so great a man should have been born in so humble a cottage!" Mozart was much given to a worship of Haydn. A new string quartet of the latter was being played one day when Kozeluch (a now-forgotten composer of the time), envious of Haydn, leaned forward to Mozart at a certain bold passage and whispered, "I would not have done that." "No r I," promptly rejoined Mozart; "and do you know why? Because neither you nor I would have had such an idea." Haydn himself had a marked preference fo r Handel. In 1791 he attended the Handel Commemoration Festival in Lon -don ; when the Hallelujah Chorus was sung he wept like a child, and exclaimed: "Handel is the master of us all!" Afte r listening to the chorus The Nations shall tremble (Joshua), he told Shield that he "had long been acquainted with music, but never knew half its powers before, as he was perfectly certain , that only one inspired author ever did or ever would pen so sublime a composition." Schumann and Mendelssohn _ Mendelssohn persisted in regarding Schumann as a literary man and art critic, not as a composer of any standing; Schumann, on the other hand, was roused to a pitch of very high enthusiasm about Mendels-sohn's creative ability. Berlioz, it should be remem-bered, could not endure Bach, called Handel a "big hog," held the bulk of Don Giovanni to be in singu-larly bad taste, and declared himself to be "amazed at the splendor of Mendelssohn's Walpurgis Nacht"— a compliment which Mendelssohn rewarded by saying that soap and water were emphatically necessary after handling a Berlioz score. Grieg was much dis-credited by the composers of his own day. Repeat-edly it was hinted that the freshness of his native dances caused him to uproot them and transplant them bodily into his "academic flower-pots." Later it was said that he "stuck in the fjor d and never got out of it; " that "he betrayed a truly childish pleasure in everything that sounded ugly; " that "when he had hatched out a particularly juicy dissonance he clung to it for dear life." But the whirligig of time brought its revenges! So much for the criticism of creative minds. But how is one to account for the untrustworthiness of so many of these impressions? Probably because each composer possesses so decided and so strong a per-sonality himself that he can accept nothing that is out of sympathy with that personality. Is not this the reason why Wagner's coarseness rejected Mendels-sohn's refinement? why Brahms' reticence failed to tolerate Tchaikovsky's hysteria? Does not this ac-count for the preponderance of the faculty of appre-ciation over that of condemnation amongst creative musicians. Berlioz, Wagner, Chopin, Mendelssohn, Moscheles—all these and scores of others found no difficulty in appreciating their affinities. They were less happy in their critical pronouncements on works lying outside the range of their own artistic prefer-ences—From the Monthly Musical Record (London) .
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