Part 1
Music and Bad Manners
_By THE SAME AUTHOR_
MUSIC AFTER THE GREAT WAR
Music and Bad Manners
_Carl Van Vechten_
[Illustration]
New York Alfred A. Knopf MCMXVI
COPYRIGHT, 1916, BY ALFRED A. KNOPF
_All rights reserved_
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
_To my Father_
Contents
PAGE
MUSIC AND BAD MANNERS 11
MUSIC FOR THE MOVIES 43
SPAIN AND MUSIC 57
SHALL WE REALIZE WAGNER’S IDEALS? 135
THE BRIDGE BURNERS 169
A NEW PRINCIPLE IN MUSIC 217
LEO ORNSTEIN 229
Music and Bad Manners
Music and Bad Manners
Singers, musicians of all kinds, are notoriously bad mannered. The storms of the Titan, Beethoven, the petty malevolences of Richard Wagner, the weak sulkiness of Chopin (“Chopin in displeasure was appalling,” writes George Sand, “and as with me he always controlled himself it was as if he might die of suffocation”) have all been recalled in their proper places in biographies and in fiction; but no attempt has been made heretofore, so far as I am aware, to lump similar anecdotes together under the somewhat castigating title I have chosen to head this article. Nor is it alone the performer who gives exhibitions of bad manners. (As a matter of fact, once an artist reaches the platform he is on his mettle, at his best. At home he--or she--may be ruthless in his passionate display of floods of “temperament.” I have seen a soprano throw a pork roast on the floor at dinner, the day before a performance of Wagner’s “consecrational festival play,” with the shrill explanation, “Pork before _Parsifal_!” On the street he may shatter the clouds with his lightnings--as, indeed, Beethoven is said to have done--but on the stage he becomes, as a rule, a superhuman being, an interpreter, a mere virtuoso. Of course, there are exceptions.) Audiences, as well, may be relied upon to behave badly on occasion. An auditor is not necessarily at his best in the concert hall. He may have had a bad dinner, or quarrelled with his wife before arriving. At any rate he has paid his money and it might be expected that he would make some demonstration of disapproval when he was displeased. The extraordinary thing is that he does not do so oftener. On the whole it must be admitted that audiences remain unduly calm at concerts, that they are unreasonably polite, indeed, to offensively inadequate or downright bad interpretations. I have sat through performances, for example, of the Russian Symphony Society in New York when I wondered how my fellow-sufferers could display such fortitude and patience. When _Prince Igor_ was first performed at the Metropolitan Opera House the ballet, danced in defiance of all laws of common sense or beauty, almost compelled me to throw the first stone. The parable saved me. Still one doesn’t need to be without sin to sling pebbles in an opera house. And it is a pleasure to remember that there have been occasions when audiences did speak up!
In those immeasurably sad pages in which Henry Fothergill Chorley describes the last London appearance of Giuditta Pasta, recalling Pauline Viardot’s beautiful remark (she, like Rachel, was hearing the great dramatic soprano for the first time), “It is like the _Cenacolo_ of Da Vinci at Milan--a wreck of a picture, but the picture is the greatest picture in the world!” this great chronicler of the glories of the opera stage recalls the attitude of the French actress: “There were artists present, who had then, for the first time, to derive some impression of a renowned artist--perhaps, with the natural feeling that her reputation had been exaggerated.--Among these was Rachel--whose bitter ridicule of the entire sad show made itself heard throughout the whole theatre, and drew attention to the place where she sat--one might even say, sarcastically enjoying the scene.”
Chorley’s description of an incident in the career of the dynamic Mme. Mara, a favourite in Berlin from 1771 to 1780, makes far pleasanter reading: “On leave of absence being denied to her when she wished to recruit her strength by a visit to the Bohemian _baden_, the songstress took the resolution of neglecting her professional duties, in the hope of being allowed to depart as worthless. The Czarovitch, Paul the First of Russia, happened about that time to pay a visit to Berlin; and she was announced to appear in one of the grand parts. She pretended illness. The King sent her word, in the morning of the day, that she was to get well and sing her best. She became, of course, worse--could not leave her bed. Two hours before the opera began, a carriage, escorted by eight soldiers, was at her door, and the captain of the company forced his way into her chamber, declaring that their orders were to bring her to the theatre, dead or alive. ‘You cannot; you see I am in bed.’ ‘That is of little consequence,’ said the obdurate machine; ‘we will take you, bed and all.’ There was nothing for it but to get up and go to the theatre; dress, and resolve to sing without the slightest taste or skill. And this Mara did. She kept her resolution for the whole of the first act, till a thought suddenly seized her that she might be punishing herself in giving the Grand-Duke of Russia a bad opinion of her powers. A _bravura_ came; and she burst forth with all her brilliancy, in particular distinguishing herself by a miraculous shake, which she sustained, and swelled, and diminished, with such wonderful art as to call down more applause than ever.” This was the same Mara who walked out of the orchestra at a performance of _The Messiah_ at Oxford rather than stand during the singing of the _Hallelujah Chorus_.
In that curious series of anecdotes which Berlioz collected under the title, “Les Grotesques de la Musique,” I discovered an account of a performance of a _Miserere_ of Mercadante at the church of San Pietro in Naples, in the presence of a cardinal and his suite. The cardinal several times expressed his pleasure, and the congregation at two points, the _Redde Mihi_ and the _Benigne fac, Domine_, broke in with applause and insisted upon repetitions! Berlioz also describes a rehearsal of Grétry’s _La Rosière de Salency_ at the Odéon, when that theatre was devoted to opera. The members of the orchestra were overcome with a sense of the ridiculous nature of the music they were performing and made strange sounds the while they played. The _chef d’orchestre_ attempted to keep his face straight, and Berlioz thought he was scandalized by the scene. A little later, however, he found himself laughing harder than anybody else. The memory of this occasion gave him the inspiration some time later of arranging a concert of works of this order (in which, he assured himself, the music of the masters abounded), without forewarning the public of his purpose. He prepared the programme, including therein this same overture of Grétry’s, then a celebrated English air _Arm, Ye Brave_, a “sonata _diabolique_” for the violin, the quartet from a French opera in which this passage occurred:
“J’aime assez les Hollandaises, Les Persanes, les Anglaises, Mais je préfère des Françaises L’esprit, la grâce et la gaîté,”
an instrumental march, the finale of the first act of an opera, a fugue on _Kyrie Eleison_ from a Requiem Mass in which the music suggested anything but the words, variations for the bassoon on the melody of _Au Clair de la Lune_, and a symphony. Unfortunately for the trial of the experiment the rehearsal was never concluded. The executants got no further than the third number before they became positively hysterical. The public performance was never given, but Berlioz assures us that the average symphony concert audience would have taken the programme seriously and asked for more! It may be considered certain that in his choice of pieces Berlioz was making game of some of his contemporaries....
In all the literature on the subject of music there are no more delightful volumes to be met with than those of J. B. Weckerlin, called “Musiciana,” “Nouveau Musiciana,” and “Dernier Musiciana.” These books are made up of anecdotes, personal and otherwise. From Bourdelot’s “Histoire de la Musique” Weckerlin culled the following: “An equerry of Madame la Dauphine asked two of the court musicians to his home at Versailles for dinner one evening. They sang standing opposite the mantelpiece, over which hung a great mirror which was broken in six pieces by the force of tone; all the porcelain on the buffet resounded and shook.” Weckerlin also recalls a caprice of Louis XI, who one day commanded the Abbé de Baigne, who had already invented many musical instruments, to devise a harmony out of pigs. The Abbé asked for some money, which was grudgingly given, and constructed a pavilion covered with velvet, under which he placed a number of pigs. Before this pavilion he arranged a white table with a keyboard constructed in such a fashion that the displacing of a key stuck a pig with a needle. The sounds evoked were out of the ordinary, and it is recorded that the king was highly diverted and asked for more. Auber’s enthusiasm for his own music, usually concealed under an indifferent air, occasionally expressed itself in strange fashion. Mme. Damoreau recounted to Weckerlin how, when the composer completed an air in the middle of the night, even at three or four o’clock in the morning, he rushed to her apartment. Dragging a pianoforte to her bed, he insisted on playing the new song over and over to her, while she sang it, meanwhile making the changes suggested by this extraordinary performance.
More modern instances come to mind. Maria Gay is not above nose-blowing and expectoration in her interpretation of Carmen, physical acts in the public performance of which no Spanish cigarette girl would probably be caught ashamed. Yet it may be doubted if they suit the music of Bizet, or the Meilhac and Halévy version of Merimée’s creation.... A story has been related to me--I do not vouch for the truth of it--that during a certain performance of _Carmen_ at the Opéra-Comique in Paris a new singer, at some stage in the proceedings, launched that dreadful French word which Georges Feydeau so ingenuously allowed his heroine to project into the second act of _La Dame de chez Maxim_, with a result even more startling than that which attended Bernard Shaw’s excursion into the realms of the expletive in his play, _Pygmalion_. It is further related of this performance of _Carmen_, which is said to have sadly disturbed the “traditions,” that in the excitement incident to her début the lady positively refused to allow Don José to kill her. Round and round the stage she ran while the perspiring tenor tried in vain to catch her. At length, the music of the score being concluded, the curtain fell on a Carmen still alive; the _salle_ was in an uproar.
I find I cannot include Chaliapine’s Basilio in my list of bad mannered stage performances, although his trumpetings into his handkerchief disturbed many of New York’s professional writers. _Il Barbiere_ is a farcical piece, and the music of Rossini hints at the Rabelaisian humours of the dirty Spanish priest. In any event, it was the finest interpretation of the rôle that I have ever seen or heard and, with the splendid ensemble (Mme. Sembrich was the Rosina, Mr. Bonci, the count, and Mr. Campanari, the Figaro), the comedy went with such joyous abandon (the first act finale to the accompaniment of roars of laughter from the stalls) that I am inclined to believe the performance could not be bettered in this generation.
The late Algernon St. John Brenon used to relate a history about Emma Eames and a recalcitrant tenor. The opera was _Lohengrin_, I believe, and the question at issue was the position of a certain couch. Mme. Eames wished it placed here; the tenor there. As always happens in arguments concerning a Wagnerian music-drama, at some point the Bayreuth tradition was invoked, although I have forgotten whether that tradition favoured the soprano or her opponent in this instance. In any case, at the rehearsal the tenor seemed to have won the battle. When at the performance he found the couch in the exact spot which had been designated by the lady his indignation was all the greater on this account. With as much regard for the action of the drama as was consistent with so violent a gesture he gave the couch a violent shove with his projected toe, with the intention of pushing it into his chosen locality. He retired with a howl, nursing a wounded member. The couch had been nailed to the floor!
It is related that Marie Delna was discovered washing dishes at an inn in a small town near Paris. Her benefactors took her to the capital and placed her in the Conservatoire. She always retained a certain peasant obstinacy, and it is said that during the course of her instruction when she was corrected she frequently replied, “Je m’en vais.” Against this phrase argument was unavailing and Mme. Delna, as a result, acquired a habit of having her own way. Her Orphée was (and still is, I should think) one of the notable achievements of our epoch. It must have equalled Pauline Viardot’s performance dramatically, and transcended it vocally. After singing the part several hundred times she naturally acquired certain habits and mannerisms, tricks both of action and of voice. Still, it is said that when she came to the Metropolitan Opera House she offered, at a rehearsal, to defer to Mr. Toscanini’s ideas. He, the rumour goes, gave his approval to her interpretation on this occasion. Not so at the performance. Those who have heard it can never forget the majesty and beauty of this characterization, as noble a piece of stage work as we have seen or heard in our day. At her début in the part in New York Mme. Delna was superb, vocally and dramatically. In the celebrated air, _Che faro senza Euridice_, the singer followed the tradition, doubly established by the example of Mme. Viardot in the great revival of the mid-century, of singing the different stanzas of the air in different _tempi_. In her slowest _adagio_ the conductor became impatient. He beat his stick briskly across his desk and whipped up the orchestra. There was soon a hiatus of two bars between singer and musicians. It was a terrible moment, but the singer won the victory. She _turned her back on the conductor_ and continued to sing in her own time. The organ tones rolled out and presently the audience became aware of a junction between the two great forces. Mr. Toscanini was vanquished, but he never forgave her.
During the opera season of 1915-16, opera-goers were treated to a diverting exhibition. Mme. Geraldine Farrar, just returned from a fling at three five-reel cinema dramas, elected to instil a bit of moving picture realism into _Carmen_. Fresh with the memory of her prolonged and brutal scuffle in the factory scene as it was depicted on the screen, Mme. Farrar attempted something like it in the opera, the first act of which was enlivened with sundry blows and kicks. More serious still were her alleged assaults on the tenor (Mr. Caruso) in the third act which, it is said, resulted in his clutching her like a struggling eel, to prevent her interference with his next note. There was even a suggestion of disagreement in the curtain calls which ensued. All these incidents of an enlivening evening were duly and impressively chronicled in the daily press.
There is, of course, Vladimir de Pachmann. Everybody who has attended his recitals has come under the spell of his beautiful tone and has been annoyed by his bad manners. For, curiously enough, the two qualities have become inseparable with him, especially in recent years. Once in Chicago I saw the strange little pianist sit down in front of his instrument, rise again, gesticulate, and leave the stage. Returning with a stage-hand he pointed to his stool; it was not satisfactory. A chair was brought in, tried, and found wanting; more gesticulation--this time wilder. At length, after considerable discussion between Mr. de Pachmann and the stage-hand, all in view of the audience, it was decided that nothing would do but that some one must fetch the artist’s own piano bench from his hotel, which, fortunately, adjoined the concert hall. This was accomplished in the course of time. In the interval the pianist did not leave the platform. He sat at the back on the chair which had been offered him as a substitute for the offending stool and entertained his audience with a spectacular series of grimaces.
On another occasion this singular genius arrested his fingers in the course of a performance of one of Chopin’s études. His ears were enraptured, it would seem, by his own rendition of a certain run; over and over again he played it, now faster, now more slowly; at times almost slowly enough to give the student in the front row a glimpse of the magic fingering. With a sudden change of manner he announced, “This is the way Godowsky would play this scale”: great velocity but a dry tone. Then, “And now Pachmann again!” The magic fingers stroked the keys.
Even as an auditor de Pachmann sometimes exploits his eccentricities. Josef Hofmann once told me the following story: De Pachmann was sitting in the third row at a concert Rubinstein gave in his prime. De Pachmann burst into hilarious laughter, rocking to and fro. Rubinstein was playing beautifully and de Pachmann’s neighbour, annoyed, demanded why he was laughing. De Pachmann could scarcely speak as he pointed to the pianist on the stage and replied, “He used the fourth finger instead of the third in that run. Isn’t it funny?”
I cannot take Vladimir de Pachmann to task for these amusing bad manners! But they annoy the _bourgeois_. We should most of us be glad to have Oscar Wilde brilliant at our dinner parties, even though he ate peas with his knife; and Napoleon’s generalship would have been as effective if he had been an omnivorous reader of the works of Laura Jean Libbey. But one must not dwell too long on de Pachmann. One might be tempted to devote an entire essay to the relation of his eccentricities.
Another pianist, also a composer, claims attention: Alberto Savinio. You may find a photolithograph of Savinio’s autograph manuscript of _Bellovées Fatales, No. 12_, in that curious periodical entitled “291,” the number for April, 1915. There is a programme, which reads as follows:
LA PASSION DES ROTULES
La Femme: Ah! Il m’a touché de sa jambe de caoutchouc! Ma-ma! Ma-ma!
L’Homme: Tutto s’ha di rosa, Maria, per te....
La Femme: Ma-ma! Ma-ma!
There are indications as to how the composer wishes his music to be played, sometimes _glissando_ and sometimes “_avec des poings_.” The rapid and tortuous passages between the black and white keys would test the contortionistic qualities of any one’s fingers. Savinio, it is said, at his appearances in Paris, actually played until his fingers _bled_. When he had concluded, indeed, the ends of his fingers were crushed and bruised and the keyboard was red with blood. Albert Gleizes, quoted by Walter Conrad Arensberg, is my authority for this bizarre history of music and bad manners. I have not seen (or heard) Savinio perform. But when I told this tale to Leo Ornstein he assured me that he frequently had had a similar experience.
Romain Rolland in “Jean-Christophe” relates an incident which is especially interesting because it has a foundation in fact. Something of the sort happened to Hugo Wolf when an orchestra performed his _Penthesilea_ overture for the first time. It is a curious example of bad manners in which both the performers and the audience join.
“At last it came to Christophe’s symphony.” (I am quoting from Gilbert Cannan’s translation.) “He saw from the way the orchestra and the people in the hall were looking at his box that they were aware of his presence. He hid himself. He waited with the catch at his heart which every musician feels at the moment when the conductor’s wand is raised and the waters of the music gather in silence before bursting their dam. He had never yet heard his work played. How would the creatures of his dreams live? How would their voices sound? He felt their roaring within him; and he leaned over the abyss of sounds waiting fearfully for what should come forth.
“What did come forth was a nameless thing, a shapeless hotchpotch. Instead of the bold columns which were to support the front of the building the chords came crumbling down like a building in ruins; there was nothing to be seen but the dust of mortar. For a moment Christophe was not quite sure whether they were really playing his work. He cast back for the train, the rhythm of his thoughts; he could not recognize it; it went on babbling and hiccoughing like a drunken man clinging close to the wall, and he was overcome with shame, as though he himself had been seen in that condition. It was to no avail to think that he had not written such stuff; when an idiotic interpreter destroys a man’s thoughts he has always a moment of doubt when he asks himself in consternation if he is himself responsible for it. The audience never asks such a question; the audience believes in the interpreter, in the singers, in the orchestra whom they are accustomed to hear, as they believe in their newspaper; they cannot make a mistake; if they say absurd things, it is the absurdity of the author. This audience was the less inclined to doubt because it liked to believe. Christophe tried to persuade himself that the _Kapellmeister_ was aware of the hash and would stop the orchestra and begin again. The instruments were not playing together. The horn had missed his beat and had come in a bar too late; he went on for a few minutes and then stopped quietly to clean his instrument. Certain passages for the oboe had absolutely disappeared. It was impossible for the most skilled ear to pick up the thread of the musical idea, or even to imagine there was one. Fantastic instrumentations, humoristic sallies became grotesque through the coarseness of the execution. It was lamentably stupid, the work of an idiot, of a joker who knew nothing of music. Christophe tore his hair. He tried to interrupt, but the friend who was with him held him back, assuring him that the _Herr Kapellmeister_ must surely see the faults of the execution and would put everything right--that Christophe must not show himself and that if he made any remark it would have a very bad effect. He made Christophe sit at the very back of the box. Christophe obeyed, but he beat his head with his fists; and every fresh monstrosity drew from him a groan of indignation and misery.
“‘The wretches! The wretches!...’
“He groaned and squeezed his hands tight to keep from crying out.
“Now mingled with the wrong notes there came up to him the muttering of the audience, who were beginning to be restless. At first it was only a tremor; but soon Christophe was left without a doubt; they were laughing. The musicians of the orchestra had given the signal; some of them did not conceal their hilarity. The audience, certain then that the music was laughable, rocked with laughter. This merriment became general; it increased at the return of a very rhythmical motif with the double-basses accentuated in a burlesque fashion. Only the _Kapellmeister_ went on through the uproar imperturbably beating time.