| James Gibbons Huneker, from Steeplejack (New York, 1925) James Gibbons Huneker, from Steeplejack (New York, 1925), Vol. II, Chapter III (p. 26), VII (p. 65), and VIII (p. 70). [p. 26] IN THE MAELSTROM After I left the quaint Seventh Avenue house--I had swarmed up a column from the second-story piazza to the third, and though it was a warm night my absence of superfluous attire and the generaI row that ensued (it was because of a bet)--made me seek lodgings elsewhere. A small family hotel at the northeast corner of Irving Place and Seventeenth Street, kept by an elderly couple, was noted for its cooking and cheerfulness. Werle's, too, was an artistic rendezvous, and its table-d'hote dinner saw many celebrities. There were always entertaining companions. It was one of those houses where at any time before midnight the sound of pianos, violins, violoncellos, even the elegiac flute might be heard, and usually played by skilled professionals. There was also much vocal squawking. Across the street was, still is, the pretty Washington Irving house, and at another corner lived Victor Herbert. From the vine-covered entrance of Werle's I often heard string music made by Victor Herbert, Max Bendix--then concert-master of the Thomas Orchestra, and a Philadelphian--and others. I occupied on the ground floor a room about as big as the one I had lived in at Paris. It heId a bed, an upright piano, a trunk, some books, and music. It had one advantage, it was easy of access, and one disadvantage--I never knew when I would be alone. Friends knocked on the window with their sticks at all hours of the night. They also sang concerted noises. Finally, I stayed out on purpose till dawn to escape their intrusions . . . . [p. 38] I came to New York in 1886 and found the American Opera Company in full swing, with Jeannette M. Thurber on the managerial side-saddle and Theodore Thomas at the musical helm. And that is history, a history full of heart- burnings, bankers, Charles E. Locke, and other "bobos" inseparable from operatic infancy. That Theodore Thomas, by all odds the most satisfying conductor of symphony that America then had, and our supreme educational force, was at his happiest in opera I can't say. Like Toscanini, he was a martinet with his forces, but unlike the great Italian conductor, he was too rigid in his beat for the singers. My darling recollection of the Metropolitan Opera House is that of the first "Tristan and Isolde." I pawned my winter overcoat to buy a seat in the top gallery--it was the first seat, first row, to the right. But it was worth a hundred coats to hear Lehmann, with Seidl conducting. When I told Maurice Egan, our Ambassador to Denmark for many years, then an editor, always a poet, of the episode, he was in despair, saying that people don't do such things even for art's sake. At his home I met Henry George, and played for him a "Single Tax March" on the theme of his then celebrated book (with the assistance of Chopin; it was a funeral march). Earlier at the opera I had heard Patti in "Carmen"--not any worse than Lehmann's gypsy--and Signor Perugini, Johnny Chatterton in private life, as Alfredo in "Traviata," his solitary appearance, I believe. With the advent of German opera the now familiar head of Victor Herbert popped up among the violoncelli in the orchestra; he was then the husband of Theresa Herbert- Foerster, a handsome Viennese woman, who sang with a sumptuous voice in Goldmark's "Queen of Sheba." Marcella Sembrich I had first heard in Paris and afterwards in Philadelphia about 1884. She belongs to the great and almost vanished generation of vocal goddesses. Milka Ternina, an Isolde and Brunhilde without parallel, has left the lyric stage. Calve still sings. I heard her in vaudeville. I swear that my eyes were wet. There were holes in her voice, but the magnetism as of old. What a night was that first Carmen of hers! She chucked tradition to the winds, also her lingerie. Some of the elder critics are still blushing. I recall a certain hot morning in August, 1892, when I was hurriedly summoned by Manager Edmund C. Stanton to the Metropolitan--rather to an eruption of fire, for the stage and the rear of the house were burning. Otto Weil, now with the present management, stood with Rudolph and Albert Aronson on the roof of the Casino and watched the flare-up. I was luckier. After the worst had passed I stood in a parterre-box with Mr. Stanton and looked at the blazing pit which had been the stage. Tongues of flame, yellowish-red, still licked the edges of the proscenium, and I expected to hear the magic fire-music of the Valkyries. Wotan was fire chief, but Loki had fairly vanquished him. Where the Knickerbocker Theatre now is was Luehr's Cafe, and with a few of the house-staff, Thomas Bull among the rest, we discussed the depressing outlook for the forthcoming operatic season. There was none; 1892-1893 was a closed season, not the first that had gone up in smoke. The Luehr's hostelry saw many musical faces during the Stanton regime. Report hath it that Isolde Lehmann "rushed the growler" from the hotel across the street; I think she was then the wife of the tenor, Paul Kalisch. I was Mr. Stanton's private secretary at the National Conservatory of Music, where he was Mrs. Thurber's Secretary (I spelled my job with a small "s") and as two hired men we hit it off capitally. He was first and last the typical clubman. Tall, distinguished in bearing, he never lost his equilibrium even when verbally assaulted by irate lyrical ladies. Once, at a rehearsal, after Lehmann had protested in an eloquent manner about the dusty stage, and said that it was like a latrine, he calmly repIied in his homespun German: "Frau Lehmann, Sie sind nicht sehr lady-like." This drove her to fury and her retort froze my blood. It was both an invitation and a menace. Stanton never winced. Saluting the prima donna, he left the auditorium. Even the imperturbable Seidl smiled. But Stanton was not the man to lead a forlorn operatic hope. If Abbey, Schoeffel & Grau couldn't, who could? Certainly not Conried. Gatti-Casazza seems to have solved the problem. But he has subventions and Caruso. He also had Arturo Toscanini, who, I am sorry to say, is in Italy. He belongs to the Brahmin conductors; to the company of Richter, Levi, Seidl, Mottl, Mahler. A more poetically intense "Tristan" than his reading with the lovely Olive Fremstad as the impassioned Isolde, I have seldom heard. Toscanini is a superman! In that frail frame of his there is enough dynamic energy with which to capture Gehenna. He is all spirit. He does not always achieve the ultimate heights as did Seidl, as does Arthur Nikisch. While his interpretation of "Tristan" is a wonderfully worked-out musical picture, yet the elemental ground-swell, which Anton Seidl summoned from the vasty deep, is missing. But what ravishing tone colours Toscanini mixed on his orchestral palette! I saw much of Seidl. His profile was sculptural. So was his manner. But a volcano beneath. He was a taciturn man. He smoked to distraction. I've often seen him with Antonin Dvorak, the Bohemian composer, at the old Vienna Bakery Cafe, next to Grace Church. There the coffee and pastry were the best in town. The conductor and composer would sit for hours without speaking. It was Seidl who introduced the New World Symphony by Dvorak. Nahan Franko told me that Seidl's hair was originally red till he dyed it; and Fred Schwab asserted that he was a Jew. I only know that Seidl's hair was iron-grey, and that he had studied for the priesthood at Budapest. His expression was eminently ecclesiastical. He never seemed a happy man to me. His wife in the eighties was pretty and fresh-coloured, a Teutonic blonde, also an admirable singer. As Seidl-Krauss she was a member of the Metropolitan Opera House and I recall her Eva in "The Mastersingers" with pleasure. It was rumoured that the great Hungarian conductor had been in love with an equally celebrated Wagnerian singer in the Neumann company years before. His Gothic head I've seen in medieval tryptichs, as a donator at Bruges or Ghent or else among the portraits of Holbein. His shell was difficult to pierce, but once penetrated his friends found a very warm-hearted human . . . . [p. 65] ANTONIN DVORAK It was Rafael Joseffy who introduced me to Mrs. Jeannette M. Thurber. This energetic and public-spirited lady, who accomplished more by her failures than other people's successes, met with an enormous amount of critical opposition when she started the American opera movement. Some of her opponents would have liked to mount the "band wagon," and, failing, abused her audacity. But she had the right idea which was the French one. She first founded a National Conservatory in 1881 [1885], where musical talent was welcomed and tuition free. There was a "theatre d'application," with Emy Fursch- Madi, Victor Capoul, Emil Fischer, M. Dufriche, Jacques Bouhy, and other famous opera singers and teachers, where the rudiments of acting and vocal delivery could be mastered. What a list of artists the faculty comprised! Antonin Dvorak, the great Bohemian composer, in his prime, was musicaI director; Rafael Joseffy and Adele Margulies--a fine pianist and founder of the Margulies Trio--headed the piano department; Camilla Urso, greatest of women violinists, Victor Herbert, then a leading solo violoncellist, Leopold Lichtenberg, formerly of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and one of the most brilliant American talents I recall--although John F. Rhodes, of Philadelphia, had an immense technical gift--Anton Seidl, Otto Oesterle, the flutist of the Thomas Orchestra and the Philharmonic Society, conductor Frank Van der Stucken, Emil Paur, C. P. Warren, organist, Bruno Oscar Klein, Horatio Parker, Wassili Safanoff, Gustav Hinrichs, John Cheshire, the harpist, Sapio, Fritz Geise, great Dutch cellist of the Kneisel Quartet, Leo Schulz, first cellist of the Philharmonic, Julia Wyman, all these and others were teachers at this institution, which was then located on Seventeenth Street, east of Irving Place. Well I remember the day that I begged Harry Rowe Shelley, the Brooklyn organist, to submit his compositions to Dvorak; later he became one of the pupils of that master; some of the others were Rubin Goldmark, nephew of the famous composer, himself one of the most gifted among our younger Americans. Harvey W. Loomis, Henry Waller, Harry T. Burleigh, the popular coloured barytone, now a composer of repute, and William Arms Fisher. Henry T. Finck, the faithful, still lectures in the National Conservatory at its new building on the West Side. I taught piano classes twice weekly for ten years, and in addition was the press representative of the Conservatory and secretary to the Secretary, Mr. Stanton, and after he died, I was a secretary to Mrs. Thurber, my chief duty being a daily visit at her residence, where I sat for an hour and admired her good looks. She was a picturesque woman, Gallic in her "allures," but more Spanish than French in features. She spoke French like a Parisian, and after thirty years I confess that her fine, dark, eloquent eyes troubled my peace more than once. But I only took it out in staring. Curiously to relate, Mrs. Thurber has changed but little, a grey lock or two, which only makes her more picturesque than ever. Old Borax, as Dvorak was affectionately called, was handed over to me by Madame Thurber when he arrived. He was a fervent Roman Catholic, and I hunted a Bohemian church for him as he began his day with an early Mass. Rather too jauntily I invited him to taste the American drink called a whisky cocktail. He nodded his head, that of an angry-looking bulldog with a beard. He scared one at first with his fierce Slavonic eyes, but was as mild a mannered man as ever scuttled a pupil's counterpoint. I always spoke of him as a boned pirate. But I made a mistake in believing that American strong waters would upset his Czech nerves. We began at Goerwitz, then described a huge circle, through the great thirst belt of centraI New York. At each place Doc Borax took a cocktail. Now, alcohol I abhor, so I stuck to my guns, the usual three-voiced invention, hops, malt, and spring water. We spoke in German and I was happy to meet a man whose accent and grammar were worse than my own. Yet we got along swimmingly--an appropriate enough image, for the weather was wet, though not squally. He told me of Brahms and that composer's admiration for Dvorak. I agreed with Brahms. Dvorak had a fresh, vigorous talent, was a born Impressionist, and possessed a happy colour sense in his orchestration. His early music was the best; he was an imitator of Schubert and Wagner, and never used quotation marks. But the American theory of native music never appealed to me. He did, and dexterously, use some negro, or alleged negro, tunes in his "New World Symphony," and in one of his string quartets; but if we are to have true American music it will not stem from "darky" roots, especially as the most original music of that kind thus far written is by Stephen Foster, a white man. The influence of Dvorak's American music has been evil; ragtime is the popular pabulum now. I need hardly add that the negro is not the original race of our country. And ragtime is only rhythmic motion, not music. The Indian has more pretensions musically as E. A. MacDowell has shown in his Suite for Orchestra. This statement does not impeach the charm of the African music made by Harry Burleigh; I only wish to emphasise my disbelief in the fine-spun theories of certain folk-lorists. MacDowell is our most truly native composer, as an Alsatian-born is now our most potent American composer. His name is Charles Martin Loeffler, and he shared the first desk of the violins in the Boston Symphony Orchestra with Franz Kneisel, a noble artist. I mention Loeffler lest we forget. But Borax! I left him swallowing his nineteenth cocktail. "Master," I said, rather thickly, "don't you think it's time we ate something?" He gazed at me through those awfuI whiskers which met his tumbled hair half-way: "Eat. No. I no eat. We go to a Houston Street restaurant. You go, hein? We drink the Slivavitch. It warms you after so much beer." I didn't go that evening to the East Houston Street Bohemian cafe with Dr. Antonin Dvorak. I never went with him. Such a man is as dangerous to a moderate drinker as a false beacon is to a shipwrecked sailor. And he could drink as much spirits as I could the amber brew. No, I assured Mrs. Thurber that I was through with piloting him. When I met Old Borax again at Sokel Hall, the Bohemian resort on the East Side, I deliberately dodged him. I taught one class which was nicknamed "in darkest Africa" because all the pupils were coloured. I confess a liking for negroes, possibly because of my childhood days spent in Maryland. They are very human, very musical, their rhythmic sense remarkable. I had a talented pupil named Paul Bolin, who also studied organ with Heinroth; and another, Henry Guy, whose piano talent was not to be denied. I had the pleasure of hearing this pupil play Mendelssohn's "Cappriccio Brillante'' in B minor with an orchestra conducted by Gustav Hinrichs, well known to Philadelphians for his pioneer work there in opera. Both these young men are now professionals, and like the many hundreds educated at the National Conservatory are earning their living in a dignified manner. What Mrs. Thurber has done for the negro alone will, I hope, be credited to her account in any history of the coloured race. Her musical activities are still unabated. In 1891, Congress granted her school a charter, and the privilege of conferring the degree of musical doctorship. With the war over, the National Conservatory should by right of precedent, and by reason of the vast good accomplished in the musicaI world since 1881, be made a national institution. So mote [might] it be. [p. 70] STEINWAY HALL Old Steinway Hall on East Fourteenth Street, where it is at present, was my favourite rendezvous. It was the musical centre of the city. William Steinway, high in political councils, was a genuine philanthropist. He assisted struggling talent. He had his hand, a charitable one, in every enterprise of musical moment. A generous, hearty, forthright man. His chief aid was Charles F. Tretbar, in charge of the artistic section of the hall. Mr. Tretbar managed visiting pianists, and helped to organise such orchestral concerts as those given by Theodore Thomas and the Boston Symphony Orchestra. It was in Steinway Hall that I first heard the band from Boston, Gericke, conductor, and Kneisel, concert-master. I was fresh from the orchestra of the Paris Conservatoire, but it couldn't hold a candle to Boston's pride. One rival it had, still has, the Vienna Philharmonic, which I last heard in 1913 under Felix Weingartner. As for piano recitals, they rained on you; even in those days everybody played the piano well, as Felix Leifels has truthfully observed. It was there I heard Karl Klindworth play Chopin, but I preferred his masterly edition of the master's music to his personal performance. A giant then was Edmund Neupert, the Norwegian, to whom Edvard Grieg dedicated his A minor concerto, because it is said Neupert composed for it that massive cadenza in the first movement. Certainly no one before or since interpreted the work as did Neupert, and I heard Grieg himself in London. Neupert's eyes were so large, liquid, and luminous that Madame Alice Garrigue-Mott hinted a summer chalet might have been built on their edge. (Come on in, the water's fine!) He had an orchestral style, and he was to be found nightly at Maurer's or the Hotel Liszt. Think of a Liszt Hotel on Fourteenth Street! Truly a musical neighbourhood. Later it reminded me of the hotels and apartment houses in the vicinity of the Hispanic Museum in Audubon Park, founded by Archer M. Huntington. At every turn you read such names as Velasquez, Goya, Murillo or El Greco. Steinway Hall was once the resort of our crowd composed of Harry Rowe Shelley, Harry Orville Brown, Henry Junge, John Kuehl, Joseffy, Fliedheim, Max Bendix, Victor Herbert, and, when in town, the witty [pianist] Moritz Rosenthal. It was in Steinway Hall, at a Thomas concert, I heard Joseffy strike a false note for the first and only time in my life, and of all concertos the E minor was the one he played the best. The arpeggio after the opening chords, he rolled to the top, but didn't strike the E. I remember Theodore Thomas staring at the back of the little virtuoso as if he thought him insane. If burning glances couId have slain, Joseffy would have died on the stage that afternoon. But it didn't disturb him. I heard Rubinstein make a slip at one of his historical concerts, but with magnificent nonchalance he took as a point of departure the false note at the top and rolled down the keyboard, only to roll up again in the correct tonality. But he wasn't playing with orchestra. |