“There was not a mistake. I started the allegro in the whirlwind time of the Transteverine dancers; the audience shouted, ‘Bis!’ We played the overture again, and it went even better the second time. I went to the foyer and found Habeneck. He was rather disappointed. As I passed him, I flung at him these few words: ‘Now you see what it really is!’ He carefully refrained from answering me.
“Never have I felt more keenly than on this occasion the pleasure of conducting my own music, and my pleasure was doubled by thinking on what Habeneck had made me suffer.
“Poor composers, learn to conduct, and conduct yourselves well! (Take the pun, if you please.) For the most dangerous of your interpreters is the conductor. Don’t forget this.”
The overture is scored for two flutes (and piccolo), two oboes, English horn, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, two cornets, three trombones, kettledrums, two side drums, cymbals, triangle, and strings.
ERNEST
BLOCH
(Born at Geneva, Switzerland, July 24, 1880)
“SCHELOMO” (SOLOMON), HEBREW RHAPSODY FOR VIOLONCELLO AND ORCHESTRA
Mr. Bloch is most inspired when he stands firmly and proudly on Jewish ground. The well equipped composer is seen in all that he writes, but his three Jewish Poems for orchestra, his Psalms, for voice and orchestra, his Schelomo, are far above his what might be called Gentile work, even above his concerto, not to mention the cycloramic America. As he has written in an account of himself and his artistic beliefs, it is the Jewish soul that interests him: “the complex, glowing, agitated soul” that he feels vibrating through the Bible. No wonder that the despair of the Preacher in Jerusalem and the splendor of Solomon alike appealed to him; the monarch in all his glory; the Preacher, who when he looked on all his works that his hands had wrought and on the labor that he had labored to do, could only explain: “And behold, all was vanity, and vexation of spirit, and there was no profit under the Sun.” And so Mr. Bloch might have taken as a motto for this Hebrew rhapsody the lines of Rueckert:
Solomon! Where is thy throne? It is gone in the wind