OF CONTENTS

Editorials.

R. ARTHUR FARWELL, who sits up nights pondering the future of "American music," explained ingeniously in the Mercure Musical (Paris) of November 15, 1907, the "indifference and disdain" shown by American critics toward any attempt at the establishment or development of a purely "American" school of music. It appears that "Sassiety" at present does not believe that there is any other music than European. "The power of wealth and fashion does not allow American names to appear on programmes. The great daily newspapers reflect the power of wealth and fashion and the critics write for

the great newspapers. Let Society change its opinion and turn toward some of our best orchestral or operatic composers, and newspapers and newspaper-men will turn about quickly, as the tail of a comet which has suddenly changed its course. The essentially artistic interest is of no value in these questions in America. 'Fashion' and the caprice of a rich society are the only powers. It will not always be thus." Ha-ha! "I go, but I return." Ha-ha!

WH

HY DOES Mr. Farwell write nonsense to mislead guileless Frenchmen? So "Society," which he rails against, makes the programmes of symphony and oratorio concerts throughout the land. Mr. Pohlig, the latest of the imported conductors, has already obeyed the cracking of the whip. Dr. Muck in making out his programmes consults the society editor of the Boston Herald. Messrs. Damrosch and Safonoff are guided in their programmes exclusively by the ukase of our Four Hundred. Mr. Stock is in constant communication with the Chicago citizen who donned a swallow-tail for a formal breakfast and with Bath-house John, Arbiter Deliciarum, John of the gorgeously colored waistcoats. Oratorio societies persist in performing "The Messiah" or in producing Wolf-Ferrari's "Vita Nuova" instead of singing cantatas by Bradbury and Root. Yet the Worcester County

(Mass.) Musical Association dared to produce Converse's "Job" at its last festival and thus turned a derisive thumb at the high society of the town. Dr. Muck shows signs of revolt. Two compositions of MacDowell have already been played in Boston this season by the Symphony Orchestra and pieces by Chadwick and Hadley are announced.

Furthermore, a Fantastic Suite for orchestra by Mr. Schelling, who was born in New Jersey, will be performed this season in New York and Boston, and the Finale, which is in the form of a Virginia Reel, is based on "Dixie," "Old Folks at Home" and "Yankee Doodle." Great Hevings!

Does not Mr. Farwell know by this time that an orchestral work by an American or a chamber work by an American will be produced if it have substantial worth, whether the composer's name be MacDowell or Gilbert, Chadwick or some unknown wild man of the western plains? A piano trio by a man named Smith of New Haven will be played this season by the Adamowskis. Crude compositions, music without value of thought, without grace or power of expression, will not and should not be performed, though the composer were to sit on the platform clothed handsomely in the American flag and with the written indorsement of Mr. Roosevelt in his good right hand.

stage business with Masetto or the rakehelly Don? "I shall not wear the usual velvet and spangles. My costume is of olive green cloth, very pretty, but not too expensive for that sort of a girl to wear. My hair hangs in two braids, and my skin is a dark olive." This of course will be subject to Mr. Mahler's criticism. He may insist on only one braid, as more in accordance with Mozartian simplicity.

Mme. Eames has also been talking. The New York Times published recently portraits of a few opera singers and under each one was a golden thought of the singer. No lozenge without a motto. Mme. Eames was represented as saying: "I love the role of Tosca as it deals with the elemental emotions and is direct and simple. A rest after Wagnerian brain-pickings." Yes, our old friend the Baron Scarpia, in spite of his Pinkertonian eye that never sleeps, is direct and simple in action. He is elemental in the scene where he does harm to the furniture in paying attentions to Floria. His wooing is that of a cave-dweller.

Miss Lina Cavalieri said nothing on this occasion. Her mission is to look, not to talk, not to think, and as some would have us believe, not to sing. It was said not long ago in Chicago that she "manifested little charm. beyond the mere pulchritude of physical embodiment to interest a musical audience."

Yet Miss Cavalieri writes. She answered Mr. Marcel Prevost's article on "The Downfall of Beauty," as though it were a personal matter. She exclaimed passionately: "Assuming the Duchess of Devonshire had a lovely and lovable face-we don't dispute that for a moment-what knowledge have we of her figure, the sculpture of her bust and waist and feet? Gaze on Gainsborough's admired canvas. The ensemble is admirable, most picturesque. Very charming! But when all's said, it's a composition of draperies, of wig, feathers, frills and

furbelows. Do we know if she possessed a 26inch waist and a 36-inch bust?" Miss Cavalieri does not intend that posterity will be obliged to ask like questions about herself. She answers for all time through photography.

W

THEN BOEHE'S symphonic poem, "Taormina," was performed here, the critics had all sorts of geographical fun with it. We have learned since then that the Emperor William re-discovered the Sicilian town as a suitable place for royal honeymooning or for a holiday. When he went there some years ago he insisted that the inn and other houses used by his party should be painted and re-papered, and the picturesqueness of the town, which is elsewhere called dirt, was cleaned out of it. Prince George of Greece and his bride spent their honeymoon there. Taormina is said to be the laziest spot on earth. No one has the energy to look at a curio-shop or visit a theatre. Yet it is the one place that Ruskin, as he said shortly before his death, wished to see again. It's a pity that all this was not known before the performance of Boehe's symphonic poem. Appreciation might have been keener.

[R. ALVAREZ, the tenor, whose real name is Gourron, has sued a critic of Comoedia for libel. The critic said the tenor was false to the true pitch in "Le Prophète" that he was, in other words, a false prophet. Now John of Leyden was a false prophet, and Mr. Alvarez might say that his impersonation was realistic, therefore admirable; but he preferred to sue for a sum equivalent to $20,000. The critic was by no means vague in his accusation: he said that Mr. Alvarez sang a certain air so flat that "whereas the accompanying horn in the orchestra should follow the voice a sixth below, the interval heard in reality was a shade over a fifth." Comoedia evidently had it in for the distinguished tenor: it likened him to "a bumble-bee blundering among blossoms" in a scene of "Salammbo"; and it made mock of him because he had a statue of himself placed "as a caryatid pillar in the frontage of his house." This last charge was proved untrue by the tenor's lawyer. The reporter had mistaken the house of a neighbor for the palace of Alvarez.

When Alvarez visited the United States the second time he often sang distressingly flat. To prove the flatness in a court of law is not an easy matter. Suppose for a moment that a critic in Germany should deal honestly with the intonation of the singers in opera house and concert hall. If they were as sensitive as Mr. Alvarez, the court would be constantly busy trying libel suits. But critics in Germany have become so accustomed to false intonation that a singer who is true to the pitch at once excites suspicion.

T

HINK OF THE position in which a critic will be placed in New Caledonia. when the orchestra formed of convicts gives its first concert! The conductor, who was formerly connected with the Paris Opera, has thrice been convicted of murder. The cornet player killed his own father; the trombonist, his mother; and the first clarinet has put six persons out of this world, possibly because they described his instrument as yellow. The other members of the orchestra are characterized as desperate men. If the critic knows his business he will lay stress on the “temperamental interpretation," even though the orchestra murder every composer on the programme.

AMILLE SAINT-SAENS, disapprov

Cing certain changes in the score of

Gluck's "Orpheus" as it is performed in Paris, says that the changes have been made in the name of High Art. He takes the occasion to knife Debussy. "You also know 'the Blessed Damozel,' with her elbows on the bar of heaven, regretting her well-beloved, and as he appears to have forgotten her, she weeps! There are people who are moved by such silliness. It is High Art! For the first condition. of High Art at the present time is to be without common sense. . . . High art does not admit joy; it reproves mirth, which is without 'distinction.' There are estimable persons who make faces at the final choruses and ensembles of the Ninth Symphony. Who would dare to play Mozart's ravishing sonata in Dmajor for four hands? It is gaiety; it is light itself; there are handfuls of flowers in it. For shame! it is good only for the vulgar herd.

One forgets that 'airs of distinction' which are cracked up by the bourgeois are no more distinguished than paper flowers are flowers. Distinction is in the race, in the very nature of persons and works. A grand seigneur has always the grand air, and so has a great artist in his works."

This is all true, but is there no "distinction" in Rossetti's poem or in Debussy's music to this poem? Saint-Saëns is now in his seventythird year. He does not grow old gracefully. In his youth he was looked on by his contemporaries as a dangerous fellow, who was under German influence, who was a revolutionary. Now that he is old he delights in strange sayings, as when he insists that Gounod's oratorios will outlive his "Faust" and "Romeo and Juliet"; as when he praises extravagantly the operas of the ultra-modern school of young Italian composers who raise the banner with the inscription, “l'erismo."

L

ETTERS OF TURGENEF to Mme.

Pauline Viardot have been published. The novelist met the singer in St. Petersburg in 1843 when he was scarcely

twenty-five years old. She was then twentytwo. She and her husband made a home for him in France when his mother, angry because he purposed to lead the literary life, refused to provide for him. Unfortunately for the reader, Mme. Viardot would not give permission to print all the letters and she insisted on the cutting out of many passages that referred, though not maliciously as we are assured by the editor, to persons now living.

The allusions to music in the letters as published are creditable to Turgenef's judgment. He knew no overture worthy to be placed by the side of the "Coriolanus," yet in 1871, when it was not the fashion to admire Wagner, the overture and "the entr'acte" from "The Mastersingers" as played at a concert in St. Petersburg gave him the greatest pleasure. "The entr'acte especially is grandiose; it is, indeed, powerful music."

What he said in 1847 apropos of a dramatic performance might well be now applied to operatic singers and interpreters of songs: "There are artists who succeed in ridding themselves of their individuality; but back of the character impersonated, you see, nevertheless, the actor effacing himself, observing himself, and this species of constraint reacts on you."

The death of Mendelssohn moved him to write: "I knew him very slightly. From what I have heard of him, I am ready to esteem him, but to be very fond of him—that is something different. A man does fine things only when talent and instinct work together; with head and heart; and I am so bold as to think that in Mendelssohn's case the head predominated."

"Is there anything more disgusting than a brutality that is not naive?"

Asked in what beauty consisted, he answered: "Beauty is the only thing that is immortal, and as long as a vestige of its material manifestation remains, its immortality exists. It shines nowhere with as much intensity as in the human individuality; it is there that it speaks the most to the intelligence, and for this reason I should always prefer great musical power served by a defective voice, to a beautiful and stupid voice, a voice whose beauty is only material."

"The majority of literary folk search in mubad listeners and bad judges." sic only literary impressions; they are as a rule

According to Turgenef, Nicolas Rubinstein. played the piano better than his brother Anton, "more simply and more correctly."

Here is a delightful sketch of Balakireff in 1871: "At night I went to the house of Mr. J, the brother of the man whom you saw at Baden-Baden, and is such a bore. This one is still handsomer-he has a 'volcano' of gray hair on his head-and he is a bigger bore. I found there several adepts of the new Russian musical school (not Cui, unfortunately), but the great Balakireff, who is recognized as their chief. The great Balakireff played very badly some fragments of an orchestral fantasy by Rimski-Korsakoff; this fantasy on the subject of a bizarre Russian legend, seemed to me to have true fancy. Then the great Balakireff played very badly some reminiscences of Liszt and Berlioz, who is to these gentlemen, and especially to him, the Absolute and the Ideal. I believe after all that Balakireff is an intelligent man. Kein Talent, doch ein Character." (These German words are in the original.)

In 1847 Mme. Viardot was engaged at Hamburg. Turgenef wrote to her: "If you sing The Barber' after you receive this letter, interpolate the air of Balfe. May I be hanged if the audience does not break the benches. I know the Hamburg people (Ich kenne meine Pappenheimer): they demand something spicy." What was this "air of Balfe"?