Neither Mr. Damrosch nor Mr. Berlin may admit that he likes to be bracketed with the other, but expediency suggests that it be done here.
My Musical Life does not profess to be an autobiography though it is a more revealing one than many that purport to be autobiographies. Leopold Damrosch, the father, was forty years old when he determined to find out if a living and a career could be made for him and his family in the land of the free, and in the home of the brave, so he came to the U. S. A. The way Walter, the author of this book, feels about the country of his adoption may be gathered from the opening sentence, “I am an American musician and have lived in this country since my ninth year.” Judged from his book his life has been an interesting one. He has been on terms of intimacy with all the great figures in the world of music; we read that Liszt, Wagner, von Bülow, Clara Schumann, Taussig, Joachim, Auer, Haenselt, Rubinstein, when they were in Breslau, generally stayed at the Damrosch house, and he has known most of the great musicians that have favoured us with their talent.
Of it all he makes a charming kaleidoscopic picture, in which nearly every musician of note the past fifty years passes in review:
WALTER DAMROSCH
Photograph by Gutekunst
“It was not until midnight that we accompanied Liszt through the park and the lovely Goethe Garden back to his house. It was a gentle summer night with a hazy moon giving an indescribable glamour to the trees and bushes, and suddenly Liszt laid his hand on my shoulder and said 'Listen!’
“From the bushes came the song of a nightingale. I had never heard one before and stood spellbound. It seemed incredible that such ecstatic sweetness, such songs of joy and sorrow, could come from the throat of a little bird, and to hear it all at twenty-four years of age and standing at the side of Liszt! Dear reader, I confess that to-day, thirty-five years later, I still thrill at the memory of it.”
The chapter on Lilli Lehmann is delightful. He draws a picture of the stately Lilli in Pittsburgh, dressed in white, ready for her appearance as Brünhilde, covered from head to foot with soot, and at the same time he gives us an example of ready wit and graceful gesture. Lehmann insisted it was not Frau Engelhardt’s fault though she perpetrated the outrage, and that it was wrong of Damrosch to discharge her:
“Slowly I allowed myself to be persuaded and at the psychological moment gently left the dressing room, giving Frau Engelhardt a comprehensive glance which she understood.”