Mr. Flagler offered the services of our orchestra, but as the stage was to be completely filled with fourteen grand pianos, there was no room for an orchestra, and I had to content myself with the possibility of being taken on as a piano mover, as I longed to take part in the affair in any capacity. The morning before the concert, however, I received a hurried S. O. S. telephone call from Ernest Schelling. He said: “Please come down to Steinway’s immediately and help us out. The fourteen pianists are all here for rehearsal. We have arranged for several compositions to be played by all of us, but alas, each one has his own individual interpretation, and nothing seems to make us play together. We need a conductor!”
When I arrived at the rehearsal hall the confusion was indeed indescribable, and it took some time to bring order out of chaos. Here were fourteen of the world’s greatest pianists, veritable prima donnas of the piano, but several had never learned to adapt themselves to play together for a common musical purpose, and when I rapped on my stand for silence in order to begin the “Spanish Dances” of Moszkowski, at least five or six continued their infernal improvising, playing of scales, and pianistic fireworks. By using heroic measures I gradually produced a semblance of order, and gave the signal for the beginning of the music. The effect was extraordinary! Several of these pianists had never followed a conductor’s beat, and after the first ten bars, two of them rushed over to me, the one violently exclaiming that the tempo was too fast, and the other insisting with equal vehemence that it was too slow. Finally I obtained silence, and told my pianistic orchestra that they were, undoubtedly, the fourteen greatest pianists in the world, and that the interpretation of each one of them was undoubtedly equally the greatest in the world, but as they represented fourteen different grades and shades of interpretation, I intended to take the matter into my own hands and they would just have to follow my beat whether they liked my tempo or not. This was greeted with a roar of approval, and we now settled down to the work of rehearsing as solemnly as if these prima donnas of the ivories were orchestral musicians and routined members of the New York Musical Union. Order followed anarchy, and the results achieved were not without higher artistic interest, especially as I detailed such accomplished and routined musicians as Harold Bauer, Ernest Schelling, and Ossip Gabrilowitsch to use their own discretion in “orchestrating” the “Dances.” Gabrilowitsch, for instance, reserved himself for the entrance of the “brasses”; Bauer invested some of the more delicate portions with agile runs of flutes and clarinets, while Schelling imitated the kettledrums and cymbals with thrilling effect.
Carnegie Hall was jammed and the audience in a gale of happiness at the highly original proceedings. The stage was so crowded with the fourteen huge pianos that, after threading my way through them to introduce Mme. Alma Gluck, who was to auction off one of the programmes, I said that what this concert evidently needed most was not a conductor but a traffic policeman.
Perhaps the most artistic feature of the programme was the performance of Schumann’s “Carnival Scenes,” in which each little movement represents a separate carnival figure. The fourteen pianists drew lots as to which was to play which. The introduction was played by all, but after that, in quick kaleidoscopic succession, the different carnival figures fairly danced from the stage into the audience, as a pianist on one side of the stage would begin, followed by one from the other side, and so on. It was a most remarkable opportunity to compare the interpretative characteristics of the different pianists.
The receipts were considerably swelled by the auctioning of programmes and autographed photographs of Moszkowski, and fifteen thousand dollars was the result of an entertainment truly unique in the history of music.
The most popular modern symphonic composer in the ’70’s was Joachim Raff. He was a young Swiss who, without a cent in his pocket, had walked many miles from his little village in order to hear Liszt play at a concert in Zurich. Liszt became interested in his undoubted talent, and took him with him to Weimar as musical secretary. Raff, von Bülow, and my father became great friends. But while every one expected that Raff would continue as a true disciple of Liszt’s, and write in the revolutionary style of his master, he gradually turned from him and leaned more and more on classic models, although in several of his symphonies he retained the Lisztian idea of programme music. As he grew older his conservatism became more and more marked. He had great facility and produced works in every known form of music, and his vanity gradually made him believe that his string quartets were equal to Mozart’s, his symphonies to Beethoven’s, and his oratorios to Handel’s and Mendelssohn’s. His fecundity was astonishing, but his pen too fluent for real musical depth. There was hardly a winter, however, that Theodore Thomas or my father did not perform “Im Walde,” or the very programmatic “Lenore” Symphony. This work, in which the last movement follows closely and dramatically Burger’s famous ballad, had an enormous popularity, and is occasionally performed by us to-day, but in general the name of Raff means but little to modern concertgoers.
But perhaps the greatest tragedy of all was Anton Rubinstein, who became, after Liszt, the world’s greatest piano virtuoso. The world fêted him, spoiled him, and sated him with adulation. It all brought him no satisfaction. He was consumed with the ambition to be considered a great composer, and wrote incessantly, never criticising what he wrote. His “Ocean” Symphony had a tremendous popularity in New York fifty years ago, but to-day no one would listen to it. His “D Minor Concerto” has been played, ad nauseam, by every pianist, but to-day it is threadbare and frayed at the edges. Only the supreme skill of a Josef Hofmann can make his “G Major Concerto” endurable and cloak its musical emptiness. He wrote opera after opera in a feverish desire to eclipse Wagner, whom he hated, and whose popularity he envied, and after “Parsifal” had been proclaimed at Bayreuth as a “Sacred Festival Play,” he immediately proceeded to write an opera on the life of Christ, which is so dull and unconvincing that it has hardly had a performance anywhere.
His personal popularity was so great that Pollini, the astute manager of the Hamburg Opera, occasionally used to put on one of his operas on condition that he himself would come to Hamburg to conduct the opening performance. His presence would insure a crowded house.
At the last rehearsal of one of these operas Rubinstein was so well pleased with the work of the orchestra that he turned to them and said: “Gentlemen, if my opera is a success you must all come to my hotel after the performance for a champagne supper.” Unfortunately, the opera was a decided frost and the audience so undemonstrative that Rubinstein, in absolute disgust, laid down the stick after the second act, and, bidding the local conductor finish the opera, returned dejectedly to his hotel and went to bed. At eleven o’clock there was a knock at his door. “Who is it?” he shouted in great irritation. “It is I, Herr Rubinstein, the double-bass player from the opera orchestra.” “What do you want?” “I have come for the champagne supper.” “What nonsense!” raged Rubinstein. “The opera was a ghastly failure.” “Well, Herr Rubinstein,” answered the thirsty and undaunted double-bass player, “I liked it!”
The disappearance of Schumann’s symphonies from concert programmes is due to the fact that he was never at ease in writing for the orchestra. His instrumentation is so thick and turgid as to be the despair of conductors. So much of the music is exquisite, but it is like a precious jewel imbedded in a foreign substance which conductors try in vain to remove by changing the dynamics of this or that instrument, or by leaving out an unnecessary doubling up of certain harmonies. All these devices, however, can do but little. More heroic measures are necessary, and I was much interested last summer when Sir Edward Elgar asked me what I would think of his deliberately reorchestrating an entire symphony of Schumann’s. I heartily applauded such an idea and begged him to carry it out speedily as there is perhaps no one living to-day who better understands the colors of the orchestra and knows how to produce the most subtle shades in the intermingling of the different instruments. In the meantime Frederick Stock, the noted conductor of the Chicago Orchestra, has taken the bull by the horns and has written a new orchestration of Schumann’s “Rhenish Symphony” which I hope to produce this winter.