Old Fogy Part 6

A day in musical New York!

Not a bad idea, was it? I hated to leave the country, with its rich after-glow of Summer, its color-haunted dells, and its pure, searching October air, but a paragraph in a New York daily, which I read quite by accident, decided me, and I dug out some good clothes from their fastness and spent an hour before my mirror debating whether I should wear the coat with the C-sharp minor colored collar or the one with the velvet cuffs in the sensuous key of E-flat minor. Being an admirer of Kapellmeister Kreisler (there's a writer for you, that crazy Hoffmann!), I selected the former. I went over on the 7.30 A. M., P. R. R., and reached New York in exactly two hours. There's a _tempo_ for you! I mooned around looking for old landmarks that had vanished--twenty years since I saw Gotham, and then Theodore Thomas was king.

I felt quite miserable and solitary, and, being hungry, went to a much-talked-of cafe, Luchow's by name, on East Fourteenth Street. I saw Steinway and Sons across the street and reflected with sadness that the glorious days of Anton Rubinstein were over, and I still a useless enc.u.mberer of the earth. Then an arm was familiarly pa.s.sed through mine and I was saluted by name.

"You! why I thought you had pa.s.sed away to the majority where Dussek reigns in ivory splendor."

I turned and discovered my young friend--I knew his grandfather years ago--Sledge, a pianist, a bad pianist, and an alleged critic of music.

He calls himself "a music critic." Pshaw! I was not wonderfully warm in my greeting, and the lad noticed it.

"Never mind my fun, Mr. Fogy. Grandpa and you playing Moscheles'

_Hommage a Fromage_, or something like that, is my earliest and most revered memory. How are you? What can I do for you? Over for a day's music? Well, I represent the _Weekly Whiplash_ and can get you tickets for anything from h.e.l.l to Hoboken."

Now, if there is anything I dislike, it is flippancy or profanity, and this young man had both to a major degree. Besides, I loathe the modern musical journalist, flying his flag one week for one piano house and scarifying it the next in choice Billingsgate.

"Oh, come into Luchow's and eat some beer," impatiently interrupted my companion, and, like the good-natured old man that I am, I was led like a lamb to the slaughter. And how I regretted it afterward! I am cynical enough, forsooth, but what I heard that afternoon surpa.s.sed my comprehension. I knew that artistic matters were at a low ebb in New York, yet I never realized the lowness thereof until then. I was introduced to a half-dozen smartly dressed men, some beardless, some middle-aged, and all dissipated looking. They regarded me with curiosity, and I could hear them whispering about my clothes, I got off a few feeble jokes on the subject, pointing to my C-sharp minor colored collar. A yawn traversed the table.

"Ah, who has the courage to read Hoffmann, nowadays?" asked a boyish-looking rake. I confessed that I had. He eyed me with an amused smile that caused me to fire up. I opened on him. He ordered a round of drinks. I told him that the curse of the generation was its cold-blooded indifference, its lack of artistic conscience. The latter word caused a sleepy, fat man with spectacles to wake up.

"Conscience, who said conscience? Is there such a thing in art any more?" I was delighted for the backing of a stranger, but he calmly ignored me and continued:

"Newspapers rule the musical world, and woe betide the artist who does not submit to his masters. Conscience, pooh-pooh! Boodle, lots of it, makes most artistic reputations. A pianist is boomed a year ahead, like Paderewski, for instance. Paragraphs subtly hinting of his enormous success, or his enormous hair, or his enormous fingers, or his enormous technic----"

"Give us a _fermata_ on your enormous story, Jenkins. Every one knows you are disgruntled because the _Whiplash_ attacks your judgment." This from another journalist.

Jenkins looked sourly at my friend Sledge, but that shy young person behaved most nonchalantly. He whistled and offered Jenkins a cigar. It was accepted. I was disgusted, and then they all fell to quarreling over Tchaikovsky. I listened with amazement.

"Tchaikovsky," I heard, "Tchaikovsky is the last word in music. His symphonies, his symphonic poems, are a superb condensation of all that Beethoven knew and Wagner felt. He has ten times more technic for the orchestra than Berlioz or Wagner, and it is a pity he was a suicide--"

"How," I cried, "Tchaikovsky a suicide?" They didn't even answer me.

"He might have outlived the last movement of that B-minor symphony, the suicide symphony, and if he had we would have had another ninth symphony." I arose indignant at such blasphemy, but was pushed back in my seat by Sledge. "What a pity Beethoven did not live to hear a man who carried to its utmost the expression of the emotions!" I now snorted with rage, Sledge could no longer control me.

"Yes, gentlemen," I shouted; "utmost expression of the emotions, but what sort of emotions? What sort, I repeat, of shameful, morbid emotions?" The table was quiet again; a single word had caught it. "Oh, Mr. Fogy, you are not so very Wissahickon after all, are you? You know the inside story, then?" cried Sledge. But I would not be interrupted. I stormed on.

"I know nothing about any story and don't care to know it. I come of a generation of musicians that concerned itself little with the scandals and private life of composers, but lots with their music and its meanings." "Go it, Fogy," called out Sledge, hammering the table with his seidl. "I believe that some composers should be put in jail for the villainies they smuggle into their score. This Tchaikovsky of yours--this Russian--was a wretch. He turned the prettiness and favor and n.o.ble tragedy of Shakespeare's _Romeo and Juliet_ into a bawd's tale; a tale of brutal, vile l.u.s.t; for such pa.s.sion as he depicts is not love. He took _Hamlet_ and transformed him from a melancholy, a philosophizing Dane into a yelling man, a man of the steppes, soaked with _vodka_ and red-handed with butchery. Hamlet, forsooth! Those twelve strokes of the bell are the veriest melodrama. And _Francesca da Rimini_--who has not read of the gentle, lovelorn pair in Dante's priceless poem; and how they read no more from the pages of their book, their very glances glued with love? What doth your Tchaikovsky with this Old World tale? Alas! you know full well. He tears it limb from limb. He makes over the lovers into two monstrous Cossacks, who gibber and squeak at each other while reading some obscene volume. Why, they are too much interested in the pictures to think of love. Then their dead carca.s.ses are whirled aloft on screaming flames of h.e.l.l, and sent whizzing into a spiral eternity."

"Bravo! bravo! great! I tell you he's great, your friend. Keep it up old man. Your description beats Dante and Tchaikovsky combined!" I was not to be lured from my theme, and, stopping only to take breath and a fresh dip of my beak into the Pilsner, I went on:

"His _Manfred_ is a libel on Byron, who was a libel on G.o.d." "Byron, too," murmured Jenkins. "Yes, Byron, another blasphemer. The six symphonies are caricatures of the symphonic form. Their themes are, for the most part, unfitted for treatment, and in each and every one the boor and the devil break out and dance with uncouth, lascivious gestures. This musical drunkenness; this eternal license; this want of repose, refinement, musical feeling--all these we are to believe make great music. I'll not admit it, gentlemen; I'll not admit it! The piano concerto--I only know one--with its fragmentary tunes; its dislocated, jaw-breaking rhythms, is ugly music; plain, ugly music. It is as if the composer were endeavoring to set to melody the consonants of his name.

There's a name for you, Tchaikovsky! 'Shriekhoa.r.s.ely' is more like it."

There was more banging of steins, and I really thought Jenkins would go off in an apoplectic fit, he was laughing so.

"The songs are barbarous, the piano-solo pieces a muddle of confused difficulties and childish melodies. You call it navete. I call it puerility. I never saw a man that was less capable of developing a theme than Tchaikovsky. Compare him to Rubinstein and you insult that great master. Yet Rubinstein is neglected for the new man simply because, with your depraved taste, you must have lots of red pepper, high spices, rum, and an orchestral color that fairly blisters the eye. You call it color. I call it chromatic madness. Just watch this agile fellow. He lays hold on a subject, some Russian _volks_ melody. He gums it and bolts it before it is half chewed. He has not the logical charm of Beethoven--ah, what Jovian repose; what keen a.n.a.lysis! He has not the logic, minus the charm, of Brahms; he never smells of the pure, open air, like Dvorak--a milkman's composer; nor is Tchaikovsky master of the pictorial counterpoint of Wagner. All is froth and fury, oaths, grimaces, yelling, hallooing like drunken Kalmucks, and when he writes a slow movement it is with a pen dipped in mola.s.ses. I don't wish to be unjust to your 'modern music lord,' as some affected idiot calls him, but really, to make a G.o.d of a man who has not mastered his material and has nothing to offer his hearers but blasphemy, vulgarity, brutality, evil pa.s.sions like hatred, concupiscence, horrid pride--indeed, all the seven deadly sins are mirrored in his scores--is too much for my nerves.

Is this your G.o.d of modern music? If so, give me Wagner in preference.

Wagner, thank the fates, is no hypocrite. He says out what he means, and he usually means something nasty. Tchaikovsky, on the contrary, taking advantage of the peculiar medium in which he works, tells the most awful, the most sickening, the most immoral stories; and if he had printed them in type he would have been knouted and exiled to Siberia.

If----"

"Time to close up," said the waiter. I was alone. The others had fled. I had been mumbling with closed eyes for hours. Wait until I catch that Sledge!

XVII

MUSICAL BIOGRAPHY MADE TO ORDER

No longer from Dussek-Villa-on-Wissahickon do I indite my profound thoughts (it is the fas.h.i.+on nowadays in Germany for a writer to proclaim himself or herself--there are a great many "hers"--profound; the result, I suppose, of too much Nietzsche and too little common sense, not to mention modesty--that quite antiquated virtue). I am now situated in this lovely, umbrageous spot not far from the Bohemian border in Germany, on the banks of the romantic river Pilsen. To be sure, there are no catfish and waffles _a la_ Schuylkill, but are there any to be found today at Wissahickon? On the other hand, there is good cooking, excellent beer and in all Schaumpfeffer, a town of nearly 3000 souls, you won't find a man or woman who has heard of any composer later than Haydn. They still dance to the music of Lanner and the elder Strauss; Johann, Jr., is considered rather an iconoclast in his _Fledermaus_. I carefully conceal the American papers, which are smuggled out to my villa--Villa Scherzo it is called because life is such a joke, especially music--and I read them and all modern books (that is, those dating later than 1850) behind closed doors. Oh, I am so cheerful over this heavenly relief from thrice-accursed "modernity." I'm old, I admit (I still recall Kalkbrenner's pearly touch and Doehler's chalky tone), but my hat is still on the piano top. In a word, I'm in the ring and don't propose to stop writing till I die, and I shan't die as long as I can hold a pen and protest against the tendencies of the times. Old Fogy to the end!

I walk, I talk, I play Hummel, Bach, Mozart, and occasionally Stephen h.e.l.ler--he's a good subst.i.tute for the sickly, affected Chopin. I read, read too much. Lately, I've been browsing in my musical library, a large one as you well know, for I have been adding to it for the last two decades and more by receiving the newest contributions to what is called "musical literature." Well, I don't mind telling you that the majority of books on music bore me to death. Particularly books containing apochryphal stories of the lives of great composers or executive musicians. Pshaw! Why I can reel off yarns by the dozen if I'm put to it. Besides, the more one reads of the private lives of great musicians, the more one's ideal of the fitness of things is shocked. Paderewski putting a collar b.u.t.ton in his s.h.i.+rt and swearing at his private chaplain because some of the criticisms were underdone, is not half so fearsome as Chopin with the boils, or Franz Schubert advertising in a musical journal. After years of reading I have reached the conclusion that the average musical Boswell is a fraud, a snare, a pitfall, and a delusion. The way to go about being one is simple. First acquaint yourself with a few facts in the lives of great musicians, then, on a slim framework, plaster with fiction till the structure fairly trembles.

Never fear. The publishers will print it, the public will devour it, especially if it be anecdotage. Let me reveal the working of the musical fiction mill. Here, for example, is something in the historical vein. Of necessity it must be pointless and colorless; that lends the touch of reality. Let us call it--"Bach and the Boehm Flute."

Once upon a time it is related that the great Johann Sebastian Bach visited Frederick the Great at Potsdam. Stained with travel the wonderful fugue-founder was ushered into the presence of Voltaire.

"Gentlemen," cried that monarch to his courtiers, "Old Bach has arrived; let us see what this jay looks like." Frederick was always fond of a joke at the expense of the Boetians. Attired as he was, Bach was ushered into the presence of his majesty. In his hand he held a small box--or, if you prefer it stated symbolically, a small bachs. "Ah! Master Bach,"

said the Prussian King, condescendingly, "What have you in your hand?"

"A Boehm flute, your majesty," answered Bach; "for it I have composed a concerto in seven flats." "You lie!" retorted the bluff monarch, "the Boehm flute has not yet been invented. Away with you, hayseed from Halle." Whereat the mighty Bach softly laughed, being tickled by the regal repartee, and stole home, and there he sat him down and composed a nine-part fugue for Boehm flute and jackpot on the word Potsdam, the ma.n.u.script of which is still extant.

How's that? Or, suppose Beethoven's name be mentioned. Here is a specimen brick from the sort of material Beethoven anecdotes are made.

Call it, for the sake of piquancy, "Beethoven and Esterhazy."

"No," yelled the composer of the _Ninth Symphony_, throwing a bootjack at his house-keeper--thus far the eleventh, I mean house-keeper and not bootjack--"No, tell the thundering idiot I'm drunk, or dead, or both."

Then, with a sigh, he took up a quart bottle of Schnapps and poured the contents over his hair, and with beating heart penned his immortal _Hymn to Joy_, Prince Esterhazy, his patron, greatly incensed at the refusal of Beethoven to admit him, hastily chalked on his door a small offensive musical theme, which the great composer later utilized in the allegro of his _Razzlewiski quartet_ (C sharp minor). From such small beginnings, etc.

You will observe how I work in Beethoven's frenetic rage, his rudeness, absent-mindedness, and all the rest of the things we are taught to believe that Beethoven indulged in. Now for something more modern and in a lighter vein. This is for the Brahms lover. Let us call it "Brahms'

hatred of Cats."

Brahms, so it is said, was an avowed enemy of the feline tribe. Unlike Scarlatti, who was pa.s.sionately fond of chords of the diminished cats, the phlegmatic Johannes spent much of his time at his window, particularly of moonlit nights, practising counterpoint on the race of cats, the kind that infest back yards of dear old Vienna. Dr. Antonin Dvorak had made his beloved friend and master a present of a peculiar bow and arrow, which is used in Bohemia to slay sparrows. In and about Prague it is named in the native tongue, "Slugj hym inye nech." With this formidable weapon did the composer of orchestral cathedrals spend his leisure moments. Little wonder that Wagner became an anti-vivisectionist, for he, too, had been up in Brahms' backyard, but being near-sighted, usually missed his cat. Because of arduous practice Brahms always contrived to bring down his prey, and then--O diabolical device!--after spearing the poor brutes, he reeled them into his room after the manner of a trout fisher. Then--so Wagner averred--he eagerly listened to the expiring groans of his victims and carefully jotted down in his note-book their antemortem remarks. Wagner declared that he worked up these piteous utterances into his chamber-music, but then Wagner had never liked Brahms. Some latter-day Nottebohm may arise and exhibit to an outraged generation the musical sketch-books of Brahms, so that we may judge of the truth of this tale.

For a change, drop the severe objectivity of the method historical and attempt the personal. It is very fetching. Here's a t.i.tle for you: "How I met Richard Wagner."

The day was of the soft dreamy May sort. I was walking slowly across the Austernheim-h.e.l.lmsberger Platz--local color, you observe!--when my eyes suddenly collided with a queer apparition. At first blush it looked like a little old woman, in visage a veritable witch; but horrors! a witch with whiskers. This old woman, as I mistook her to be, was attired in an Empire gown, with crinoline under-attachments. Around the neck was an Elizabethan ruff, and on the head was a bonnet of the vogue of 1840; huge, monstrously trimmed and bedecked with a perfect garden of artificial flowers. The color of the dress was salmon-blue, with pink ribbons. Altogether it was a fearful get-up, and, involuntarily, I looked about me expecting to see people stopping, a crowd forming. But no one appeared to notice the little old woman except myself, and as she drew near I discovered that she wore spectacles and a fringe of iron-gray hair around her face. Her eyes were piercingly bright and on her lips was etched a sardonic smile. Not quite knowing how to explain my rude stare, I was preparing to turn in another direction, when the stranger accosted me, and in the voice of a man: "Perhaps you don't know that I am Richard Wagner, the composer of the _Ring_? I am also Liszt's son-in-law, and from the way you turn your feet in, I take you to be a pianist and a Leschetizky pupil!" Marvelous psychologist! A regular Sherlock Holmes. And then, with a snort of rage, the Master walked away, a ma.s.sive Dachshund viciously snapping at a link of sausage that idly swung from his pocket.

There, you have the Wagner anecdote orchestrated to suit those musical persons who believe that the composer was fond of nothing but millinery and dogs. Finally, if your publisher clamors for something about Liszt or Chopin, you may quote this; not forgetting the allusion to George Sand. To mention Chopin without Sand would be considered excessively inaccurate. I call the story, "Liszt's Clever Retort."

It was midwinter. As was his wont in this season, Chopin was attired from head to foot in white wool. His fragile form and spiritual face, with its delicate smile, made him seem a member of some heavenly brotherhood that spends its existence praying for the expiation of the wickedness wrought by men. The composer was standing near the fireplace; without it snowed, desperately snowed. He was not alone. Half sitting, half reclining on a chair, his feet on the mantelpiece, was a man, spare and sinewy as an Indian. Long, coa.r.s.e, brown hair hung mane-like upon his shoulders. His lithe, powerful fingers almost seemed to crush the short white Irish clay pipe from which he occasionally took a whiff. It was Liszt, Franz Liszt, Liszt Ferencz--don't forget the accompanying _Eljen!_--the pet of the G.o.ds, the adored of women; Liszt who never had a hair-cut; Liszt the inventor of the Liszt pupil. There had evidently been a heated discussion, for Chopin's face was adorned with bright hectic spots, his smile was sardonic, and a cough shook his ascetic frame as if from suppressed chagrin. Liszt was surly and at intervals said "basta!" beneath his long Milesian upper lip. Such silence could not long endure; an explosion was imminent. Liszt, quickly divining that Chopin was about to break forth in an hysterical fury, forstalled him by jocosely crying: "Freddy, my old son, the trouble with you is that you have no Sand in you!" And before the enraged Pole could answer this cruel, mocking raillery, the tall Magyar leaned over, pressed the b.u.t.ton three times, and the lemonade came in time to avert blood-shed.

There, Mr. Editor, you have a pleasing comminglement of romance and colloquialism. Now that I have shown how to play the trick, let all who will go ahead and be their own musical Boswell.

But a truce to such foolery. I am wayward and gray of thought today. My soul is filled with the clash and dust of life. I hate the eternal blazoning of fierce woes and acid joys upon the orchestral canvas. Why must the music of a composer be played? Why must our tone-weary world be sorely grieved by the subjective shrieks and imprudent publications of some musical fellow wrestling in mortal agony with his first love, his first tailor's bill, his first acquaintance with the life about him?

Why, I ask, should music leave the page on which it is indited? Why need it be played? How many beauties in a score are lost by translation into rude tones! How disenchanting sound those climbing, arbutus-like arpeggios and subtle half-tints of Chopin when played on that brutal, jangling instrument of wood, wire and iron, the pianoforte! I shudder at the profanation. I feel an oriental jealousy concerning all those beautiful thoughts nestling in the scores of Chopin and Schubert which are laid bare and dissected by the pompous pen of the music-critic. The man who knows it all. The man who seeks to trans.m.u.te the unutterable and ineffable delicacies of tone into terms of commercial prose. And newspaper prose. Hideous jargon, I abominate you!

I am suffering from too many harmonic harangues. [Isn't this one?] I long for the valley of silence, Edgar Poe's valley, wherein not even a sigh stirred the amber-colored air [or wasn't it saffron-hued? I forget, and Poe is not to be had in this corner of the universe]. Why can't music be read in the seclusion of one's study, in the company of one's heart-beats? Why must we go to the housetop and shout our woes to the universe? The "barbaric yawp" of Walt Whitman, over the roofs of the world, has become fas.h.i.+onable, and from tooting motor-cars to noisy symphonies all is a conspiracy against silence. At night dream-fugues shatter the walls of our inner consciousness, and yet we call music a divine art! I love the written notes, the symbols of the musical idea.

Music, like some verse, sounds sweeter on paper, sweeter to the inner ear. Music overheard, not heard, is the more beautiful. Palimpsestlike we strive to decipher and unweave the spiral harmonies of Chopin, but they elude as does the sound of falling waters in a dream. Those violet bubbles of prismatic light that the Sarmatian composer blows for us are too fragile, too intangible, too spirit-haunted to be played. [All this sounds as if I were really trying to write after the manner of the busy Princess Sayn-Wittgenstein, who helped Liszt to manufacture his book on Chopin; indeed, it is suspected, altered every line he wrote of it.]

O, for some mighty genius of color who will deluge the sky with pyrotechnical symphonies! Color that will soothe the soul with iridescent and incandescent harmonies, that the harsh, brittle noises made by musical instruments will no longer startle our weaving fancies.

Yet if Sh.e.l.ley had not sung or Chopin chanted, how much poorer would be the world today. But that is no reason why school children should scream in chorus: "Life, like a dome of many-colored gla.s.s, stains the white radiance of eternity," or that tepid misses in their 'teens should murder the nocturnes of Chopin. Even the somnolent gurgle of the bullfrog, around the ponds of Manayunk, as he signals to his mate in the mud, is often preferable to music made by earthly hands. Let it be abolished. Electrocute the composer and banish the music-critic. Then let there be elected a supervisory board of trusty guardians, men absolutely above the reproach of having played the concertina or plunked staccato tunes on a banjo. Entrust to their care all beautiful music and poetry and prohibit the profane, vulgar, the curious, gaping herd from even so much as a glance at these treasures. For the few, the previous elect, the quintessential in art, let no music be sounded throughout the land. Let us read it and think tender and warlike silent thoughts.

And now, having too long detained you with my vagaries, let me say "good night," for it is getting dark, and before midnight I must patrol the keyboard for at least four hours, unthreading the digital intricacies of Kalkbrenner's Variations on the old melody, _Sei ruhig mein Herz, or the Cat will hear you_.