Music-Study in Germany, from the Home Correspondence of Amy Fay

MUSIC-STUDY IN GERMANY
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY NEW YORK · BOSTON · CHICAGO · DALLAS ATLANTA · SAN FRANCISCO MACMILLAN & CO., LIMITED LONDON · BOMBAY · CALCUTTA MELBOURNE THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, LTD, TORONTO
FROM THE HOME CORRESPONDENCE OF AMY FAY
EDITED BY MRS. FAY PEIRCE Author of CO-OPERATIVE HOUSEKEEPING
WITH A PREFATORY NOTE BY O. G. SONNECK
NEW YORK THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 1922 All rights reserved
COPYRIGHT, JANSEN, McCLURG & COMPANY 1880. ——— Copyright, 1896, By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY. Printed August, 1896; reprinted June, 1897; September, 1900; February, 1903; March, 1905; June, 1908; July, 1909; August, 1913; April, 1922. Norwood Press: Berwick & Smith, Norwood, Mass., U. S. A.
COMPARATIVELY few books on music have enjoyed the distinction of reissue. Twenty-one editions is an amazing record for a book of so narrow a subject as Music Study in Germany. The case of Miss Amy Fay's volume becomes all the more unusual, if one considers that her letters were written only for home, not for a public audience and further that within twenty years from the year of first publication, her observations had become more or less obsolete.
The Germany of the years 1869-1875 was quite different from the Germany of 1900 and certainly of 1912, even down to German table-manners. The earlier Spiessbürgertum of which Miss Fay gives such entertaining glimpses even in high quarters with their pomp and circumstance, was rapidly being replaced, at least outwardly, by the more cosmopolitan culture of the fin de siècle , not to mention the ambition for political, industrial and commercial Weltmacht in a nation thitherto known, perhaps too romantically, as a nation of Denker und Dichter.
Most of the heroes of the book are long since dead, Miss Fay included, who died in 1921. While even as late as 1890, Miss Fay's volume could have been used as a guide of orientation by the would-be student of music in Germany, certainly it could no longer serve such a purpose during the years just prior to the war, when the lone American student of her book who despised Germany and everything German was definitely in the ascendency. In other words, her personal observations had ceased to be applicable except in certain details of ambient and had passed into the realm of autobiography valuable for historical reading. As a piece of historical literature proper, I doubt that the book would have survived the war, because it is lamentably true that the average American music-student or even cultured lover of music is not particularly interested in musical history as such.