We realise what a diplomat was lost to the service when we read:
“Outside the dressing room I found my faithful Hans, son of my prompter, Goettich. I gave him some money and told him to run to a florist and buy a bunch of the whitest flowers that he could find and to bring them to Madame Lehmann with my compliments.”
We get interesting glimpses of the tribulations attached to the life of a musician in New York over fifty years ago:
“I enjoyed my weekly rehearsals in Newark immensely, although horse-cars, ferry-boats, and trains made the trip in those days a cumbersome one. But after each rehearsal, Mr. Schuyler Brinkerhoff Jackson, the president of the Society, Mr. Shinkle, the secretary, my dear old friend Zach Belcher, enthusiastic tenor and music lover, Frank Sealey, my pianist and since then for so many years accompanist and organist of the New York Oratorio Society, used to go with me to a nice German beer saloon near the railroad station where, over a glass of beer and Swiss-cheese sandwiches, we waited until train time and discussed the welfare of the Harmonic Society and music in general.”
In his efforts to familiarise the American public with Wagner’s music, he had many amusing, discouraging and thrilling experiences. Great singers there were in those days—Fischer, Sachs, Brema, Alvary and Gadski. With the coming of Melba, a successful combination of the French and Italian was made with the German school and we read of that remarkable group of singers, Jean and Edouard de Reszke, Bispham, Nordica, Schumann-Heink, and of performances of “Tristan,” “which came as near perfection as I ever hope to witness.... At the close we were so elated that all concerned kissed each other ecstatically after the last curtain fell.”
And how touching his account of a concert in Monte Carlo:
“Jean de Reszke was in the fifth row of the parquet, and as I came to the 'Prize Song’ in the Meistersinger Overture which he had sung so often and so ravishingly in New York, I could not help but turn around to look at him. He gave me an immediate smile, but the tears were running down his face.”
Mr. Damrosch may accept the assurance that he is wrong in thinking many of the happenings described may prove dull reading; there is not a word in the book most readers would be willing to part with. He did not need Mr. Roosevelt’s letter to establish his Americanism. But as a cosmopolitan, a citizen of the world, we must tell him that the little fireman he brought from the wings with Materna could not possibly have said “Be jabbers.” Occasionally Irishmen will say “Be jabers,” but the introduction of the extra “b” is a reflection on the good English they justly pride themselves on using.
Up until the time My Musical Life appeared, we believed editors and statesmen had a monopoly of writing the most interesting reminiscences; but Mr. Damrosch’s book suggests that the belief is not well founded.