The Kneisel Quartet and Hofmannized Chopin
... And in the meantime war went on beyond the ocean. Strange, but this absurd thought accompanied me as a shrill dissonance throughout the concert. I could not help conjecturing what would be the result, if all the warriors were brought together to listen to the Kneisel Quartet: Would they not become ennobled, harmonized, pacified, humanized? Could they go on with their dull work—for modern war gives no thrills for the individual fighter—after Mozart’s Quartet in E Flat Major, which has the soothing effect of a transparent vase? They might have found Brahms’s Quintet suffering from this artist’s usual weakness—lack of sense of measure,—but the Scherzo would certainly have elated the most avowed anti-German. The four instruments performed their work so artistically that one forgot their existence and heard “just music.” The only number that could have aroused international complications was the insincere grotesque of Zoltan Kodaly, who succeeded in misusing an excellent source, Danuvian motives. “But this is Modern”, I was shrapnelled. Well, call me a conservative, but if this is modern music, then, in the name of Mozart and Beethoven, Pereat!
Still imagining a Marsian audience I was not dismayed even by the appearance of the effeminate Chopin. For Josef Hofmann took the artistic liberty of interpreting the gentle Pole in his own way, and the Scherzo in B Flat Minor sounded as a virile volcanic charge. The pianist refuses to take Chopin sentimentally, and he puts charming vigor even into the moon-beamed, tear-strewn D Flat Nocturne, even into the frail ephemeral E Minor Valse.
K.