Each succeeding opera of Wagner’s was a similar revelation. I pored over the scores of the “Nibelungen Trilogy” during every hour left me from school work and piano practice. In fact, I often stole time from the latter and would gladly have given up my entire school if my parents had not very properly kept me where I belonged. Later on my founding of the Damrosch Opera Company for the sole purpose of producing Wagner operas seemed an inner necessity, and I was driven to it by a force stronger than myself. For years a Wagner programme, whether it was at a symphony concert in New York, or in Oklahoma on a Western tour, or at the Willow Grove summer concerts, drew the largest audiences, and the same orchestral excerpts were repeated by me and other conductors year after year and received by our public with excited enthusiasm. To-day the amazement which his music called forth is no longer apparent. He is admired and loved, but the nerves of the younger generation are not thrilled by his harmonies as ours were. His works repose upon our shelves bound in morocco and gold and occupy places of honor, but, alas, on several of them the dust is beginning to gather and many of the young people of to-day find “Lohengrin” monotonous, and vote unanimously that Tannhäuser’s recital of his pilgrimage to Rome is too long.
Time and continued occupation with Wagner’s music may have made me more critical and analytical, and I am no longer in complete and enthusiastic accord with some of his theories regarding the music-drama. But much of his music still sweeps me off my feet, and his “Meistersinger”—which is so happy and perfect a compromise between the opera and the music-drama—is to me still the greatest musical work of our times.
I have spoken above of the finality of the judgment of the public regarding the ultimate vitality of an art work. Conductors have had their personal convictions and have tried to force them upon our audiences, but unless these convictions were based on actual worth the public has in the end consciously or unconsciously rejected them. Sometimes unworthy composers have had momentary popularity, but they were born but to dance in the sun for one day and then to die.
My orchestral parts of the symphonies of Beethoven, Mozart, and Brahms are old and worn by many rehearsals and performances, and some of them have been patched up and pasted together by my librarian so many times that they have had to be replaced by new ones twice over. I have performed them for nearly forty years, and the grandchildren of my audiences of 1885 are now listening to them with equal happiness. A few years ago I discovered a lovely symphony by Mozart, which had never been played in New York, and I was as proud of this as if it had been the fourth dimension.
The works of these masters are lifted above the fashion of the moment, and their creators smile upon us serenely and eternally from the heavens in which they dwell as gods among the gods.
FRITZ KREISLER, HAROLD BAUER, PABLO CASALS,
AND WALTER DAMROSCH
XXI
POSTLUDE
These reminiscences were begun in New York in April, 1922, and finished the following August in Bar Harbor, Maine. My friends had urged me for some time to write down my experiences because they thought that the many and varied events in a long musical life would prove interesting to American musicians and readers generally.