The year 1904 was one of peculiar perplexity and vexation for Belasco—of incessant strenuous labor and (as I deem) of most malicious harassment which might well have broken both his health and his spirit had he not been sustained by vital enthusiasm and a steadfast, invincible will. In that year he had not only to bear the heavy expense of producing “Sweet Kitty Bellairs,” together with the loss and anxieties incident to theatrical management amid generally disturbed business conditions and the distraction and annoyance of Miss Montagu’s monstrous lawsuit, but, also, he had to provide new plays and new productions for Mrs. Carter and for Warfield, to make his plans for the future of Blanche Bates, and to encounter at last the open and unrestricted animosity of the Theatrical Syndicate. “I am,” Belasco has truly said about himself (1903), “a patient and peaceful man: I don’t want to fight with anybody. I want to attend to my business in my own way—to do my work unmolested and to interfere with nobody. But neither will I permit anybody to interfere with me, or to dictate to me, if I am able to resist.” And speaking of Belasco’s course in theatrical management, his general representative, B. F. Roeder, publicly declared at about the same time (June, 1903): “Mr. Belasco’s policy will remain exactly what it has always been. He will be independent of all factions and [will] place his companies wherever he can get the best terms and time.” Such a policy, indisputably right as it is, was not one which the Theatrical Syndicate would brook, and it soon brought that oppressive monopoly into direct and open conflict with Belasco in the conduct of his business. Foreseeing an immense popular interest in the World’s Fair (Louisiana Purchase Exposition) at St. Louis, in 1904, Belasco resolved that his superb production of “The Darling of the Gods” should concurrently be presented there. He felt great and wholly natural and frank pride in that production: he knew that he could not much longer hold together the company acting in it, and he desired that as many persons as possible should see his tragedy to the best advantage. When, however, he applied to the Syndicate booking agency, presided over by Mr. A. L. Erlanger, to arrange for an engagement in St. Louis, during “the Fair,” he was informed that it could not be done. He thereupon instructed his own booking agent, an experienced manager, William G. Smyth, to arrange for presentment of “The Darling of the Gods” at an independent theatre there, the Imperial, and his order was at once obeyed. It is not worth while to relate in detail the story of the attempt to coerce Belasco into cancelling that engagement: it is enough to state that (as he told me at the time) when it had proved impossible to intimidate him the uncouth Erlanger destroyed the contracts previously executed through his agency, between Belasco and theatre managers in various cities,—and, in profane and insulting language, sent him notice that he could not thereafter present his productions in any Syndicate theatre.
WARFIELD IN “THE MUSIC MASTER.”—AN ANIMATED SPEECH.
Once committed to “open war” with the Trust and having got the St. Louis engagement of Miss Bates securely arranged, Belasco turned to completion of the plays for Warfield and Mrs. Carter. He had, at first, intended to write the Warfield piece unaided, but the demands on his time and strength had rendered that impossible and he had employed the late Charles Klein (1867-1915) to work with him. “I had,” he said, “given much thought to the subject of the play I needed for Warfield, but with all my other responsibilities and cares I found that I must get somebody else to do much of the actual writing. One night while having supper in a restaurant with Roeder, after the play, I told him that I was going to ask Klein to undertake it. ‘Well,’ Roeder said, ‘this is a good time to ask him—here he comes,’ and Klein, who had just come in, walked over to our table and told me he had been thinking for some time about writing a play for Warfield! I told him what I had in mind, and before we separated we had agreed to do the piece together.”
The outcome of that agreement was the play of “The Music Master,” which was produced for the
Photograph by Sarony. The Albert Davis Collection.
DAVID WARFIELD AS HERR ANTON VON BARWIG, IN “THE MUSIC MASTER”
first time at the Young’s Pier Theatre, Atlantic City, New Jersey, on September 12, 1904. “The Music Master” is not remarkable for either originality of design or felicity of construction, but it is pure in spirit, interesting in story, picturesque in setting, and healthful in influence, and it was apparent from the first that it would have a long and abundantly prosperous career. There has been on our Stage such excessive exposition of vice and degradation, of the possible depravity of human conduct and wickedness of human motive, that it was an active benefaction to place such a play before the public, a positive blessing to receive the privilege of mental contact with its pure and noble ideal of humanity. It was announced, without qualification, as having been written by Charles Klein: that was an injustice. It is, in fact, a patchwork,—in the form in which Klein first shaped it being based to some extent on a play by Felix Morris (1847-1900) called “The Old Musician,” and then made over by Belasco, with a distinctively perceptible interfusion of dramatic expedients from that fine old drama “Belphégor; or, The Mountebank.” The central person, Herr Anton von Barwig, the Music Master, is a German musician, of a familiar type,—peculiar but attractive; impassioned but gentle; droll but piteous; fervid but patient: an image of moral dignity and self-sacrifice,—and the posture of situations and incidents that have been utilized for his presentment shows him as a loving father, occupied, under conditions of almost sordid adversity, in a quest for his daughter, whom an unworthy wife and mother has taken from him, flying, with a paramour, from Germany to the United States, whither he has followed them. That daughter, at last, he finds and, in circumstances cruel to himself, practically befriends by keeping the secret of her paternity. The conspicuous attributes of this person,—attributes blended and interwoven beneath a serio-comic surface of foreign manner and broken English,—are, intrinsically (of course with variant investiture), those that have long endeared such characters as Michonnet, Triplet, Mr. Peggotty, Caleb Plummer, and Doctor Primrose: attributes, namely, of love, charity, fidelity, fortitude, patience, humor, simplicity, spontaneous goodness, and an unconscious grace equally of conduct, manner, and thought. The purpose, manifestly, was to place an eccentric, gentle, affectionate, humorous, and somewhat forlorn elderly man in a predicament of sad circumstance, and in that way to arouse pity and stimulate the promptings of charitable impulse. That purpose was accomplished; and therefore, aside from all consideration of its inspiration and while the play is neither novel with invention, potent with strong dramatic effect, nor brilliant with polished dialogue, it possesses the solid worth of fidelity to simple life, the charm of diversified character, and the beauty of deep, tender, human feeling.
It was a wise choice to combine those attributes into a stage figure, and David Warfield,—finding himself liberated, mind and heart, into a congenial character,—gained in embodying it the most substantial success of his professional career,—making of that figure a vital emblem of heroism that is never flamboyant and virtue that is never insipid; an image of paternal affection that typifies innate dignity of character and the sweet, gentle, lovely patience of pure self-abnegation. In earlier performances this comedian was almost exclusively photographic; but time, thought, and practice,—the forces that constitute experience,—gradually expanded and ripened his art, and in his performance of this part (when repetition had eliminated excessive nervous trepidation and made it “a property of easiness” to him) he showed intuitive insight and was deeply pathetic. That is true success; because the higher purpose of acting a play is not proclamation of the talents of an actor, but liberation and enforcement of the utmost of beneficial influence upon an audience that a play contains. Warfield in “The Music Master” conquered by the two great virtues of simplicity and sincerity. The principal artistic defects in the personation—defects conspicuous in all Warfield’s acting and to the elimination of which he seems to be curiously indifferent—were a hard, metallic voice and a poor method of elocution. The best dramatic expedient in the play is that by which the father’s dubious, inchoate recognition of the daughter is confirmed. At that point and in the sequent situation (“lifted” from “Belphégor”) the actor evinced sympathetic delicacy and tempestuous fervor. The closing scenes of the play are marred by episodes of irrelevant incident and by prolixity, obscurity and artifice, in the long-drawn passage of parental and filial recognition,—which, indeed, requires but a glance.