He could lose his temper easily. He hated those of us who were privileged to attend his rehearsals. He declared, quite unwarrantably, that we talked and disturbed him. But he never appeared to be in the least disturbed by the handful of weary women who, with long brushes, swept the seats and the floor of the hall, raising whirlpools of dust fantastically here and there, and banging doors in beautiful disregard of the Venusberg music and in protest against the exquisite Allegretto from the Seventh Symphony.
. . . . . . . .
Sir Thomas Beecham (he was then plain “Mr”) brought a tin of tobacco to the restaurant, placed it on the table, and proceeded to fill his pipe. He was not communicative. He simply sat back in his chair, smoking quietly, and behaving precisely as though he were alone, though, as a matter of fact, there were four or five people in his company. He was not shy: he was simply indifferent to us. If you spoke to him, he merely said “no” or “yes” and looked bored. He was bored.
And so he sat for ten minutes; then, with a little sigh, he rose and departed from among us, without a word, without a look. He just melted away and never returned.
. . . . . . . .
I rather dreaded meeting Sir Charles Santley, and when I rang at his door-bell, I remember devoutly wishing that in a moment I should hear that he was out, or that he had changed his mind and no longer desired to see me. I dreaded meeting him because I realised that, temperamentally, we were opposed. I had read his reminiscences [233] ]and disliked him intensely for the things he had said of Rossetti. Instinctively, I drew away from his robust, tough-fibred mind.
But he was in, and in half-a-minute I was talking to an old, but still vigorous, gentleman whose one desire appeared to be to put me at my ease. I do not think I ever met a man so honest, so blunt. I felt that his mind was direct and his judgment decisive, but I found him lacking in subtlety, unable to respond to the mystical in art, and wholly deficient in true imaginative qualities. He was Victorian.
Now, I don’t suppose any of us who are living to-day (and when I say “living” I mean anyone whose mind is still developing—most people, say, under the age of forty-five) will be able to understand the point of view of the Victorian musician. It appears to me monstrous that anyone should still love Mendelssohn and hate Wagner, that anyone should sing J. L. Hatton in preference to Hugo Wolf, that anyone should still delight in Donizetti and Bellini. Those Victorian days were days when the singer wished that his own notions of the limitations of the human voice should control the free development of music. They loved bel canto and nothing else; they averred, indeed, that there was nothing else to love. They were admirable musicians from the technical point of view, and they had honest hearts and by no means feeble intellects. But they could never be brought to believe that music was a reflection of life, that there were in the human heart a thousand shades of feeling that not even Handel had expressed, that sound is capable of a million subtleties, that the ear of man is an organ that is, so to speak, only in its infancy.
It was a little pathetic, I thought, when speaking to Santley, that this very great singer had been living for at least thirty years entirely untouched by many of the finest compositions that had been written in that period.
[234]
]And he declared, quite frankly, that “modern” music had no interest for him. When I mentioned Richard Strauss, he smiled. At the name of Debussy, he looked bewildered, and about Max Reger, Scriabin, Granville Bantock, Sibelius and Delius, he had not a word to say.