Believe me, dear Walter, as ever and more proudly than ever,
Your friend
Ch. M. Loeffler.
In 1891 I was asked to give a concert for the Orthopædic Hospital in which my friend, Mrs. John Hobart Warren, was always much interested, and in casting about for some sensational feature which would draw the public I conceived the idea of having Eugene Ysaye and Fritz Kreisler play the Bach concerto for two violins. Ysaye was then at the very zenith of his career and Kreisler had just come to America as a young violinist of great attainments and charm, and still greater promise for the future. The performance of the Bach concerto proved all that I had hoped, and after the concert Ysaye had supper with me at the old Delmonico’s in Madison Square. Ysaye is not only a remarkable artist but one of the most brilliant conversationalists I have met, and during the supper he proceeded in the most fascinating way to analyze himself and Kreisler. He said: “I have arrived at the top and from now on there will be a steady decrease of my powers. I have lived my life to the full and burned the candle at both ends. For some time I shall make up in subtlety of phrasing and nuance what my technic as a violinist can no longer give, but Kreisler is on the ascendant and in a short time he will be the greater artist.” It is not for me to say whether Ysaye’s prophecy has come true, but no one who has heard him in his prime can forget his truly gigantic conception of the Beethoven concerto, for instance, and the mastery with which he poured out the golden flood of his music.
In 1909 I gave a Beethoven cycle at which I performed all the Beethoven symphonies and other smaller works of his in historical sequence. We had engaged Ysaye to play the Beethoven Violin Concerto, but, to my astonishment, he sent word only a week before that he must first play a violin concerto by Vitali, as he had to get his fingers into proper condition before playing the Beethoven. I remonstrated with him and explained to him that in a Beethoven cycle I could not possibly give a concerto by Vitali, even to oblige Ysaye, and suggested that he play the Vitali concerto to himself in the greenroom before the concert, but he refused to accept this amendment and I was ever so reluctantly compelled to cancel his appearance in the cycle. This caused a coolness between us which lasted several years and which I regretted exceedingly. But time is a great peacemaker. We happened to meet again quite casually a few years later, and by tacit consent this little contretemps was completely buried and we are as good friends as of yore.
Perhaps the most important and interesting great musician of France whom I have known was Camille Saint-Saëns, whom I met in 1908 when he came to America on a concert tour. He was at that time seventy years of age. His extraordinary vitality and the fluency of his playing amazed us all, and America outdid itself to honor this venerable grand maître. I had the great pleasure of conducting all of his concerts in New York at which he played his five piano concertos, an extraordinary feat for a man of his age. We had heard so many stories from French musicians of his “nasty temper” at rehearsals and his caustic comments on this or that phrasing in his symphonies or concertos that we were all very agreeably disappointed in finding him genial, cheerful, and grateful for what we were able to give him. He even insisted on playing the organ himself at my performance of his Symphony No. 3, which is dedicated to the memory of Liszt. I have always considered this to be his greatest work in that, with all the clarity of form and diction which is a special characteristic of his style, there is also a deep emotion which rises in the last movement to a triumphant and thrilling climax.
I saw him again in Paris during the war in the summer of 1918, and reminded him of a visit which my father had paid to him in 1876.
“That was not the first time I met your father,” he quickly rejoined. “I remember very well meeting him in Weimar in 1857 while I was visiting Liszt.”
In 1920 my second daughter, Gretchen, was to be married to the son of Judge Finletter of Philadelphia. The young people had met at Chaumont, France, where Finletter had been stationed at General Headquarters after the armistice and while Gretchen and her friend, Mary Schieffelin, were there as war workers. My daughter agreed enthusiastically with my suggestion that the wedding should be in Paris after my European tour with the orchestra was finished, and this to them highly important event was carried out with great success on the 17th of July, the ceremony being solemnized at the American church and the reception held at my hotel, the “France et Choiseul,” in the Rue St. Honoré. As I had come to this hotel for so many years, Monsieur Mantel, the directeur, and all the employees from the chef down, helped on the affair with an enthusiasm which can only be found in a country like France, where all festivals of family life are treated with tremendous importance. All the reception-rooms down-stairs and the greater part of the courtyard, which had been charmingly framed in with laurel-trees and filled with inviting-looking little tables, had been placed at our disposal. All the employees of the house—including Leonie, François, Pierre, Adolph, Theo, Félice, Madeleine, Michel, and Louis, all of whom I had known during the war and even before—wore large white boutonnières and ribbons in honor of the occasion; and at four o’clock about a hundred French and American friends began to arrive from the ceremony at the church. Among these was my old friend Madame Nellie Melba, who had come over from London for the purpose, and “le grand maître” Camille Saint-Saëns, whom all the hotel employees immediately recognized and treated with great and fond deference.
As Saint-Saëns entered the courtyard he turned to me and said, rather testily: “Mon cher ami, pourquoi est-ce que vous n’avez-pas donné une de mes symphonies dans un de vos concerts à Paris ce printemps?” For a moment I was nonplussed what to answer. We had given three concerts in Paris and I had devoted one to the “Eroica” of Beethoven, and the other two to the César Franck D Minor, the Mozart “Jupiter,” and the Dvořák “New World” symphonies, but Albert Spalding, my soloist, had played the Saint-Saëns Violin Concerto, so that his name had been represented on our programmes. Suddenly the right answer came to me: “Cher maître, don’t you know that during the war I played your great Symphony No. 3 at a gala concert on the Fête Nationale at the Salle du Conservatoire for the benefit of the Croix Rouge, and here is Monsieur Cortot who played the piano part and here Mademoiselle Boulanger who played the organ.” (Both of them were luckily standing by my side as Saint-Saëns entered.) He was completely pacified and was carried off in triumph to the buffet by a crowd of adoring French musicians in order to offer him some refreshment.