Boston at that time occupied a unique position as the only city in America which possessed a permanent orchestra, maintained by Major Henry Lee Higginson, for the cultivation of symphonic music. A small group of highly educated and socially prominent Bostonians, belonging to the oldest New England families, made this orchestra almost the focus of their social life. The weekly concerts were the great events, the programmes eagerly discussed, and its conductor, Wilhelm Gericke, was alternately cursed or blessed according to their attitude toward some novelty which he had just produced.
Among this group I was made heartily welcome. The atmosphere was intensely local, if not provincial, and as against the searching, feverish life of a great metropolis like New York, with its many conflicting interests and racial currents, the tranquillity and purely American quality of Boston life, as it presented itself to me, was a complete contrast. I am speaking of Boston of thirty-five years ago and of conditions that have to a certain extent disappeared, for to-day even the young descendants of the New Englanders of that era seem to find their pleasures in different and more restless fashion.
In the group of which I have spoken, Mrs. Gardner was among the most original and fascinating. She was certainly the leaven in the Boston lump and sometimes shocked the more staid element by her innovations and interest in more modern currents in art and literature than had hitherto rippled its calm Emersonian surface. Boston was at that time perhaps the best example of that typically American musical culture of which I have spoken elsewhere, which instead of growing upward from the masses was carefully introduced and nurtured by an aristocratic and cultivated community through symphony concerts and lectures on music. Its original impulse sprang perhaps more from the head than the heart, but it would not be fair therefore to say that New Englanders approached music only from the intellectual standpoint. I have seen very emotional outbursts among Boston audiences, both at my Wagner recitals and years after when I returned with the Damrosch Opera Company to give the Wagner music-dramas. While it is possible that they felt heartily ashamed of these enthusiasms afterward, and exclaimed, “Is this Boston?” the fact remains that even a Bostonian is human, like other Americans, and needs only to be encouraged to prove that he too has a heart which can beat warmly and respond to the emotions kindled by art.
Their capacity for friendship in the finest sense of the word is wonderful, and I achieved many of my dearest friends at that time. We have all grown much older since then, with the exception of Mrs. Gardner, on whom the years leave no imprint and whose enthusiasms for life and art flame just as brightly to-day as then.
I was certainly very young in those days, and remember, after one of my lectures, which had gone off with great enthusiasm, walking along Boylston Street toward my hotel, thinking in my young conceit that I was evidently a good deal of a personage, when I saw that the street was filled with crowds of people and the police were making a passage with difficulty so as to allow an open carriage, drawn by two horses, to pass through. In it sat a rather stout, smooth-shaven gentleman with a very shiny high silk hat, and the people were cheering him like mad. “Who is this?” I asked a bystander. He gave me a contemptuous look and stopped cheering just long enough to say: “Don’t you know John L. Sullivan when you see him?” I accepted the rebuke meekly and entered my hotel a much more modest man than I had left it a few hours before. John L. Sullivan, “Boston’s greatest citizen,” had just come home from a fight in London, but I do not know to this day whether he had won or lost.
The Boston orchestra was at that time conducted by Wilhelm Gericke, who had brought it to a remarkable state of proficiency. I found him to be a very likable man, a thorough musician, and always gentle and friendly in his attitude. I used to envy him because, while I had to maintain my orchestra at that time by my own exertions, he had a great philanthropist behind him. His orchestra was engaged by the year, played under no other conductor, and assembled every morning at 9.30, like clockwork, for rehearsal. Gericke brought the orchestra up to a high standard of virtuosity. His sense of values was absolute, and under his training and greatly assisted by Franz Kneisel, his concert master, the strings soon acquired great unanimity and a ravishing quality of tone. His readings were always musicianly, although I felt occasionally that they were too reserved. He had a horror of the exaggeration of the brass instruments, and perhaps erred on the other side in subduing them too much; but when he returned, years after, for another five years in Boston his readings had gained in freedom and elasticity, and the balance of the different choirs seemed perfectly adjusted. Boston, and indeed the country, owes him much. He was fortunate in his opportunities, but he proved himself worthy of them.
Rightly or wrongly, Major Higginson had made it his rule to engage none but German conductors for his orchestra. He had gained his first enthusiasm for symphonic music as a young man in Vienna, and had got the idea firmly in his mind that only Germany could give his orchestra the leaders which it required. Among the long line of conductors who came and went, not all, naturally, were of equal worth. A few were distinctly second-raters, and I remember one whose blustering incompetence and conceit finally so enraged Major Higginson that, as the gentleman would not resign when requested because his contract still had another year to run, Higginson sent him a check for the entire amount and dismissed him. Curiously enough the impetus which the reputation of having been conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra gave was so great that it landed him in two other American orchestras, one of which he brought to the very verge of ruin and the other he ruined altogether, so that the city which had founded it and lavished hundreds of thousands upon it is now without any symphony orchestra and seems to have lost the courage to begin again.
But among the conductors of the Boston Orchestra two stand out as among the best that Europe has sent over. These are Arthur Nikisch and Doctor Karl Muck. The one died last winter, beloved and mourned by the musical public of all Europe and of North and South America; the other was sent from our country back to Germany after the war in deserved disgrace, after having been interned as prisoner of war at Fort Oglethorpe.
When I first met Arthur Nikisch in 1887 he was conductor at the Leipsig Opera House. I had gone there to attend an annual meeting and festival of the Tonkünstler-Verein, an association of which Franz Liszt had always been the president and which had originally been formed by a small group of Liszt-Wagner-Berlioz adherents, of whom my father was one. One of the features of the festival was a stage performance of Berlioz’s “Benvenuto Cellini,” given in honor of Liszt. The work fascinated me, and its performance under the young Nikisch delighted me beyond words. In appearance he already had the same characteristics which his enemies decried but which among his friends only aroused a delighted chuckle when he appeared on the platform, and which quickly changed to a hurricane of enthusiasm after he had demonstrated his marvellous skill as an interpreter. I refer to the long black lock which always hung low over his forehead and his still longer white cuffs which more and more enveloped his little white hands as the performance progressed.
Gericke had developed the orchestra into a perfect instrument, and when Nikisch arrived he played upon it like a virtuoso. I have always maintained that Nikisch achieved still greater mastery during his years in America, because until then he had had no such orchestra at his disposal. The much-vaunted Leipsig Gewandhaus and the Berlin Philharmonic, which he conducted, suffer from the troubles common to all co-operative organizations. Their members outstay their period of usefulness and retain permanent places in the orchestra after they should give way to younger and better men.