I had certainly outgrown the slapping age, but had not yet developed the courage to declare my adoration. I seem to have been quite content to sit next to Louise, and to look into her gentle eyes, or watch her deft fingers as they pleated and sewed and did all those clever things which women’s fingers alone know how to do. That spring, alas, the father and his daughters returned to France and I have never seen them again.
But so inconstant is youth that the following year I fell madly in love with Madame Teresa Carreno, of whom I have already written in an earlier chapter. I was sixteen and she was twenty-four, radiantly beautiful, brilliantly educated, and a remarkable linguist, speaking English, German, French, Spanish, and Italian with equal fluency. But for me her eyes spoke a language even more eloquent than her tongue, and it was small wonder that I was bowled over completely. On my first concert tour, her beauty, her exquisite playing, and the languorous half-tropical charms of the South through which we were touring was a combination I could not withstand.
But my schoolboy adoration received a severe shock when, on the last day of our tour, a handsome and very robust Italian barytone, by the name of Tagliapietra, came to meet her and I found that she was madly in love with him. They were married a short time after.
She, too, seems to have been unconscious of my adoration. Thirty-two years later, at a dinner given at the Hotel Plaza in honor of my twenty-fifth anniversary as a conductor, she was present and in my speech of thanks I humorously referred to her as the grande passion of my early youth. She afterward told my sister: “I never knew that Walter had felt like that about me!”
To proceed with my confessions. The following year I met—but, alas, this chapter is already overcrowded and I shall have to continue the (to me) so fascinating recital of my various romances in my next book of memoirs, which I expect to publish in about twenty years.
XIII
THE ORATORIO SOCIETY OF NEW YORK
My father had always considered that a study of the oratorios of Bach and Handel was a highly important foundation for the young musician, and I had spent many hours with him in studying their scores and imitating their form in my own counterpointal work. Bach’s “St. Matthew’s Passion” and Handel’s “Messiah,” “Samson,” and “Judas Maccabæus” I knew virtually by heart. My father also believed the development of amateur choruses to be a very strong factor in the musical growth of a people. Under his inspiration the chorus of the Oratorio Society constantly grew in numbers and technical proficiency; but it suffered from the great dearth of men singers, especially tenors. The terribly one-sided condition of musical development in our country, proceeding almost exclusively on feminine lines, showed itself markedly in this branch of the art. Many of the men singers who in one way or another had been cajoled or coerced into joining a choral society, had often to be drilled in their parts like children, though without a child’s quickness of perception. The result was that the labor of training was incessant and the mistakes of one year repeated themselves inevitably the next. In rehearsing such oratorios as Handel’s “Messiah” or Bach’s “St. Matthew’s Passion,” for instance, a good routined conductor could always prophesy beforehand what mistakes the chorus was going to make.
During my father’s time the sopranos in the Oratorio Society were of overwhelming power and quality; but this was largely because my mother, when we came to America, gave up all solo singing in public and devoted herself enthusiastically to leading the soprano choir. Her voice was phenomenal in its strength and quality, and when, as in some fugal chorus of Handel’s, the sopranos finally enter on the main theme, her triumphant voice would carry everything along with it. She always sang by heart, her beautiful, deep-set eyes fixed on the conductor, and when this conductor happened to be her own husband or son there was a devotion and a love in them that I can never forget.
To maintain a choral society in a huge city like New York is doubly difficult because of the many temptations and distractions that beset its members in so large a metropolis and threaten the regular attendance at rehearsals. I have always felt, therefore, that the many splendid performances which the society has given, in its long existence of forty-nine years, are especially to its credit. The rehearsals with these amateur singers, however, demand from the conductor ten times the energy, patience, and vitality that are necessary with an orchestra composed of trained professionals. And yet there is a charm in working with devoted amateurs. My father loved it, and even during the harassing labors of founding and maintaining the German opera at the Metropolitan, he always turned to the regular Thursday-evening chorus rehearsals of the Oratorio Society as a change and rest. I confess that I have similarly enjoyed the almost primitive study necessary with an amateur chorus after a day spent with my orchestra, and I look back with the deepest pleasure on the many years during which I conducted the Oratorio Society.