Part 7 (1/2)
_My Sweetheart is a Midnight c.o.o.n_ and almost in the same breath also wrote the heavy sacred solo, _Christ in Gethsemane_. The first is of the usual light order characteristic of this cla.s.s of music. The latter is as far removed to the contrary as is comedy from tragedy.
The 'c.o.o.n' song entered the bubbling effervescing cauldron of what is termed 'ragtime' music among the mult.i.tudinous others, and soon was seen peeping through at the surface among the lightest and most catchy.... The sacred solo found its level among the heavier in its cla.s.s, and if the term may be here applied, it was also a hit.”
S. Duncan Baker, born August 25, 1855, still lives (1902) in the old family residence at Natchez, Miss. ”In this house is located the den where he has spent many hours with his collection of banjos and pictures and in writing for and playing on the instrument which he adopted as a favourite during its dark days (about 1871).” We are told that he composed an ”artistic banjo solo,” ent.i.tled, _Memories of Farland_. ”Had this production or its companion piece, _Thoughts of the Cadenza_, been written by an old master for some other instrument and later have been adapted by a modern composer to the banjo, either or both of them would have been p.r.o.nounced cla.s.sic, barring some slight defects in form.”
I cannot stop to quote from the delightful accounts offered us of the lives and works of Albert Matson, George D. Tufts, D. O. Loy, Lavinia Pascoe Oblad, and forty or fifty other American singers, but it seems to me that I have done enough, Mencken, to prove to you that the great book on American music has been written. Without one single mention of the names of Horatio Parker, George W. Chadwick, Frederick Converse, or Henry Hadley, by a transference of the emphasis to the place where it belongs, the author of this undying book has answered your prayer.
_December 11, 1917._
Old Days and New
Old Days and New
Some toothless old sentimentalist or other periodically sets up a melancholy howl for ”the good old days of comic opera,” whatever or whenever they were. Perhaps none of us, once past forty, is guiltless in this respect. Nothing, not even the smell of an apple-blossom from the old homestead, the sight of a daguerreotype of a miss one kissed at the age of ten, or a taste of a piece of the kind of pie that ”mother used to make” so arouses the sensibility of a man of middle age as the memory of some musical show which he saw in his budding manhood. That is why revivals of these venerable inst.i.tutions are frequently projected and, some of them, very successfully accomplished. When a manager revives an old drama he must appeal to the interest of his audience; it may not be the identical interest which held the original spectators of the piece spell-bound, but, none the less, it must be an interest. When a manager revives an old musical comedy he appeals directly to sentiment.
Of course, the exact date of the good old days is a variable quant.i.ty.
I have known a vain regretter to turn no further back than to the nights of _The Merry Widow_, _The Waltz Dream_, _The Chocolate Soldier_, _The Girl in the Train_, and _The Dollar Princess_, in other words to the Viennese renaissance; another, in using the phrase, is subconsciously conjuring up pictures of _La Belle Helene_, _Orphee aux Enfers_, or _La Fille de Madame Angot_, good fodder for memory to feed on here; a third will instinctively revert to the Johann Strauss operetta period, the era of _The Queen's Lace Handkerchief_ and _Die Fledermaus_; a fourth cries, ”Give us Gilbert and Sullivan!” A fifth, when his ideas are chased to their lair, will rhapsodize endlessly over the charms of the London Gaiety when _The Geisha_, _The Country Girl_, and _The Circus Girl_ were in favour; a sixth, it seems, finds his pleasure in Americana, _Robin Hood_, _w.a.n.g_, _The Babes in Toyland_, and _El Capitan_; a seventh becomes maudlin to the most utter degree when you mention _Les Cloches de Corneville_, or _La Mascotte_, products of a decadent stage in the history of French opera-bouffe. Not long ago I heard a man speak of the cadet operas in Boston (did a man named Barnet write them?) as the last of the great musical pieces; and every one of you who reads this essay will have a brother, or a son, or a friend who went to see _Sybil_ forty-three times and _The Girl from Utah_ seventy-six. Twenty years from now, as he sits before the open fire, the mere mention of _They Wouldn't Believe Me_ will cause the tears to course down his cheeks as he pats the pate of his infant son or daughter and weepingly describes the never-to-be-forgotten fascination of Julia Sanderson, the (in the then days) unattainable agility of Donald Brian.
In no other form of theatrical entertainment is the appeal to softness so direct. The man who attends a performance of a musical farce goes in a good mood, usually with a couple of friends, or possibly with _the_ girl. If he has dined well and his digestion is in working order and he is young enough, the spell of the lights and the music is irresistible to his receptive and impressionable nature. There are those young men, of course, who are constant attendants because of the altogether too wonderful hair of the third girl from the right in the front row. Others succ.u.mb to the dental perfection of the prima donna or to the shapely legs of the soubrette. All of us, I am almost proud to admit, at some time or other, are subject to the contagion. I well remember the year in which I considered myself as a possible suitor for the hand of Della Fox. Photographs and posters of this deity adorned my walls. I was an a.s.siduous collector of newspaper clippings referring to her profoundly interesting activities, although my sophistication had not reached the stage where I might appeal to Romeike for a.s.sistance. The mere mention of Miss Fox's name was sufficient cause to make me blush profusely. Eventually my father was forced to take steps in the matter when I began, in a valiant effort to summon up the spirit of the lady's presence, to disturb the early morning air with vocal a.s.saults on _She Was a Daisy_, which, you will surely remember, was the musical gem of _The Little Trooper_. Here are the words of the refrain:
”She was a daisy, daisy, daisy!
Driving me crazy, crazy, crazy!
Helen of Troy and Venus were to her cross-eyed crones!
She was dimpled and rosy, rosy, rosy!
Sweet as a posy, posy, posy!
How I doted upon her, my Ann Jane Jones!”
You will admit, I think, at first glance, the superior literary quality of these lines; you will perceive at once to what immeasurably higher cla.s.s of art they belong than the lyrics that librettists forge for us today.
Wall Street broker, poet, green grocer, soldier, banker, lawyer, whatever you are, confess the facts to yourself: you were once as I.
You have suffered the same feelings that I suffered. Perhaps with you it was not Della Fox.... Who then? Did saucy Marie Jansen awaken your admiration? Was pert Lulu Glaser the object of your secret but persistent attention? How many times did you go to see Marie Tempest in _The Fencing Master_, or Alice Nielsen in _The Serenade_? Was Virginia Earle in _The Circus Girl_ the idol of your youth or was it Mabel Barrison in _The Babes in Toyland_? Theresa Vaughn in _1492_, May Yohe in _The Lady Slavey_, Hilda Hollins in _The Magic Kiss_, or Nancy McIntosh in _His Excellency_? Madge Lessing in _Jack and the Beanstalk_, Edna May in _The Belle of New York_, Phyllis Rankin in _The Rounders_, or Gertrude Quinlan in _King Dodo_?
What do you whistle in your bathtub when you are in a reminiscent mood? Is it _The Typical Tune of Zanzibar_, or _Baby, Baby, Dance My Darling Baby_, or _Starlight, Starbright_, or _Tell Me, Pretty Maiden_, or _A Simple Little String_, or _J'aime les Militaires_ (if you whistle this, ten to one your next door neighbour thinks you have been to an orchestra concert and heard Beethoven's _Seventh Symphony_), or _Sister Mary Jane's Top Note_, or _A Wandering Minstrel I_, or _See How It Sparkles_, or the _Lullaby_ from _Erminie_, which Pauline Hall used to sing as if she herself were asleep, and which Emma Abbott interpolated in _The Mikado_, or _A Pretty Girl, A Summer Night_, or the _Policeman's Chorus_ from _The Pirates of Penzance_, or _The Soldiers in the Park_, or _My Angeline_, or the _Letter Song_ from _The Chocolate Soldier_, or _I'm Little b.u.t.tercup_, or the _Gobble Song_ from _The Mascot_, or the _Anna Song_ from _Nanon_, or the march from _Fatinitza_, or _I'm All the Way from Gay Paree_, or _Love Comes Like a Summer Sigh_, or _In the North Sea Lived a Whale_, or _Jusqu'la_, or _The Harmless Little Girlie With the Downcast Eyes_, or _They All Follow Me_, or _The Amorous Goldfish_, or _Don't Be Cross_, or _Slumber On, My Little Gypsy Sweetheart_, or _Good-bye Flo_, or _La Legende de la Mere Angot_, or _My Alamo Love_?
There is a very subtle and fragrant charm about these old recollections which the sight or sound of a score, a view of an old photograph of Lillian Russell or Judic, or a dip in the _Theatre Complet_ of Meilhac and Halevy will reawaken. But it is only at a revival of one of our old favourites that we can really bathe in sentimentality, drink in draughts of joy from the past, allow memory full away. You whose hair is turning white will be in Row A, Seat No.
1 for the first performance of a revival of _Robin Hood_. You will not hear Edwin Hoff in his original role; Jessie Bartlett Davis is dead and, alas, Henry Clay Barnabee is no longer on the boards, but the newcomers, possibly, are respectable subst.i.tutes and the airs and lines remain. You can walk about in the lobby and say proudly that you attended the _first_ performance of the opera ever so long ago when operettas had tune and reason. ”Yes sir, there were plots in those days, and composers, and the singers could _act_. Times have certainly changed, sir. Come to the corner and have a Manhattan.... There were no c.o.c.ktails in those days.... There is no singer like Mrs. Davis today!”
Well the poor souls who cannot feel tenderly about a past they have not yet experienced have their recompenses. For one thing I am certain that the revivals of the Gilbert and Sullivan operettas to which De Wolf Hopper devoted his best talents were better, in many respects, than the original London productions; just as I am equally certain that the representations of _Aida_ at the Metropolitan Opera House are way ahead of the original performance of that work given at Cairo before the Khedive of Egypt.
Then there is the musical revue, a form which we have borrowed from the French, but which we have vastly improved upon and into which we have poured some of our most national feeling and expression. The interpretation of these frivolities is a new art. Gaby Deslys may be only half a loaf compared to Marie Jansen, but I am sure that Elsie Janis is more than three-quarters. Frank Tinney and Al Jolson can, in their humble way, efface memories of Digby Bell and Dan Daly. Adele Rowland and Marie Dressler have their points (and curves). Irving Berlin, Louis A. Hirsch, and Jerome Kern are not to be sniffed at.
Neither is P. G. Wodehouse. Harry B. Smith we have always with us: he is the Sarah Bernhardt of librettists.