Part 6 (1/2)
A day in musical New York!
Not a bad idea, was it? I hated to leave the country, with its rich after-glow of Su October air, but a paragraph in a New York daily, which I read quite by accident, decided ood clothes fro 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-flatan admirer of Kapellmeister Kreisler (there's a writer for you, that crazy Hoffmann!), I selected the former I went over on the 730 A M, P R R, and reached New York in exactly two hours There's a _te for old landmarks that had vanished--twenty years since I saw Gotha
I felt quite ry, 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 encumberer of the earth Then an arh ht you had passed away to the ns in ivory splendor”
I turned and discovered e, a pianist, a bad pianist, and an alleged critic of music
He calls himself ”a reeting, and the lad noticed it
”NeverMoscheles'
_Ho like that, is my earliest and most revered memory How are you? What can I do for you? Over for a day's et you tickets for anything fro I dislike, it is flippancy or profanity, and this young ree Besides, I loathe theone week for one piano house and scarifying it the next in choice Billingsgate
”Oh, come into Luchow's and eat some beer,” iood-natured old hter And how I regretted it afterward! I ah, forsooth, but what I heard that afternoon surpassed 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 sed, and all dissipated looking They regardedabout ot 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 Hoff 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 hieneration 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 er, but he calnored 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 booraphs subtly hinting of his enorers, or his enormous technic----”
”Give us a _fermata_ on your enorruntled because the _Whiplash_ attacks your judgment” This from another journalist
Jenkins looked sourly atperson behaved ar 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 tiner, and it is a pity he was a suicide--”
”How,” I cried, ”Tchaikovsky a suicide?” They didn't even answer ht have outlived the last movement of that B-minor symphony, the suicide symphony, and if he had ould have had another ninth synant at such blasphee ”What a pity Beethoven did not live to hear a man who carried to its ute, Sledge could no longer control entlemen,” I shouted; ”utmost expression of the emotions, but what sort of emotions? What sort, I repeat, of shale 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 stor about any story and don't care to know it I coeneration of musicians that concerned itself little with the scandals and private life of cos” ”Go it, Fogy,” called out Sledge, ha the table with his seidl ”I believe that some cole into their score This Tchaikovsky of yours--this Russian--was a wretch He turned the prettiness and favor and noble tragedy of Shakespeare's _Romeo and Juliet_ into a bawd's tale; a tale of brutal, vile lust; for such passion as he depicts is not love He took _Ha 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 melodraentle, lovelorn pair in Dante's priceless poees 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 ibber 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 carcasses are whirled aloft on screa 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 co only to take breath and a fresh dip of my beak into the Pilsner, I went on:
”His _Manfred_ is a libel on Byron, as a libel on God” ”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, refinereat entlemen; I'll not adly lyto set to melody the consonants of his name
There's a name for you, Tchaikovsky! 'Shriekhoarsely' isof 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 aa theme than Tchaikovsky Coreat lected for the new man simply because, with your depraved taste, you h spices, rum, and an orchestral color that fairly blisters the eye You call it color I call it chroile fellow He lays hold on a subject, soums it and bolts it before it is half chewed He has not the logical charm of Beethoven--ah, what Jovian repose; what keen analysis! 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 ner All is froth and fury, oaths, gri like drunken Kalmucks, and when he writes a slow movement it is with a pen dipped in molasses I don't wish to be unjust to your 'modern music lord,' as some affected idiot calls him, but really, to make a God of ato offer his hearers but blasphearity, brutality, evil passions like hatred, concupiscence, horrid pride--indeed, all the seven deadly sins are mirrored in his scores--is too much for ive ner, thank the fates, is no hypocrite He says out what henasty Tchaikovsky, on the contrary, taking advantage of the peculiar mediu, 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 beenwith closed eyes for hours Wait until I catch that Sledge!
XVII