MARGARET C. ANDERSON

In one of Chicago’s big department stores of the cheaper type you may—provided you’re something of a poet—walk straight into the heart of a musical adventure. It is that amazing, resentful, and very satisfying adventure of discovering genius at work, under the by no means unique condition of being unrecognized.

You go to one of the upper floors where the big lunch-room is. You find a table near a platform in the center, on which sit four musicians—a pianist, a ’cellist, a clarinetist (if there is such a thing), and a second violinist. You expect the usual clamor....

Suddenly you notice a fifth figure who has been sitting quietly in the background. She comes forward with a violin in her hand, and stands ready to play. There is something still about her—that quality of stillness which is invariably the first thing you notice in any dynamic. She seems not scornful of her surroundings, but quite indifferent to them; not arrogant, but sure of power; not timid, and yet incredibly soft and shy and serious. She is plainly foreign; she is German, looks French, and plays like a Viennese. Or, to be exact, she merges the German “heaviness” with the Viennese gay-sadness, and the result is a sensuousness that is both deep and clear, with the haunting wail that distinguishes all the music which comes from Vienna. She looks almost like a little girl; but you would notice her any place because of that stillness and the haunting appeal that always attaches to a certain type of eyes and mouth—the kind which seem to say: “I will make music for you; I will take you to a new world. I will do it because I can dream intensely.”

She begins to play, and you understand why you watched her. The depth of it startles you at first—it is so big, so moving, so almost uncanny coming from such a small person, whose hands seem scarcely large enough to hold a violin. It is playing of the Mischa Elman type, without his emotional extravagances and with something that is more soul-shaking. If I were an Imagist I could find the right word; but this music eludes me. It is sure and simple. It grips you till you don’t know whether you are listening to music or to the urge of some hidden inner self. It is a divine thing.

In the midst of it the waitresses rush back and forth, the patrons eat their food with interest, only pausing to applaud when some tawdry vaudevillian sings a particularly vulgar song. The dishes clang, some one upsets a tray with a great crash, and at intervals there is a tango outrage by a couple who know nothing about dancing. Underneath it all the violin throbs its deep accompaniment.

I wish I could make a poem of it. I have thought of taking my poet friends there and having the thing done. But almost without exception the poets I know don’t care for music essentially; though why a mind keyed to the tone qualities of words should be so tone-deaf in another medium has always been a mystery to me. And what a poet’s opportunity here: “the boom and squeal,” and out of it music that is as sacred as an organ meditation and as passionate as a Russian slave song!

However, generalizations will not serve to give any musician’s special quality, and this one is so emphatically individual as to make description easy. To begin with, she was concertising in Europe as a wonder-child at the age of six. For a number of years her playing brought forth a chorus of superlatives from the critics: “her full blooming tone, her great taste in phrasing, economic use of the bow, glowing passion of interpretation; her fiery temperament, remarkable earnestness and will power, the soul, life, and emotion in her presentations.” The verdict of a “a veritable artist soul” appeared to be unanimous; and one man summed up with admirable insight and simplicity: “Her chief excellence is in this: that she seeks her main task to be an artist in the real and earnest sense of the word, and whosoever comes to hear music does not go empty from her.”

Friedrich Spielhagen wrote a sonnet to her, of which I have a careful, but metrically inadequate, translation:

Thou standst before us, a picture of wondrous charm;