WALTER DAMROSCH IN 1920

From a photograph by Pirie MacDonald

MY MUSICAL LIFE

BY

WALTER DAMROSCH

NEW YORK

CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS

1926

Copyright, 1923, by

CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS

Copyright, 1922, 1923, by CURTIS PUBLISHING CO.

Printed in the United States of America

To dearest M

This book I dedicate to you because you have walked hand in hand with me through most of the experiences related therein.

Because of you my disappointments have been cut in half and my happinesses made double, and if I have made known to you the wondrous muse of music, you in turn have brought into our home and given a permanent abiding place therein, the three gentle sisters—Faith, Hope and Charity.

My Musical Life

I

CHILDHOOD—1866-1875

I am an American musician and have lived in this country since my ninth year. I was born in Breslau, Silesia, on January 30, 1862, and my first memories are connected with war, the Austro-Prussian War of 1866. I was four years old and remember being with my mother in a room in our apartment in Breslau, which was filled with flowers and growing plants (mother always had a marvellous gift for maintaining and nursing plants) and various friends coming in to condole with her over the death of my baby brother, Hans, who had died of cholera, which was then raging in Breslau. The second child of my parents, born in 1860, had been christened Richard, after Richard Wagner, who had officiated as godfather at the ceremony. This child lived but a short time, and Wagner had vowed that he would never again stand as godfather for the children of any of his friends, as the ill luck which had pursued him all his life was thus carried even into their families.

In order to safeguard the rest of her children from the danger of the dread disease to which little Hans had succumbed, my mother took my older brother, Frank, myself, and a baby sister into the country near the Bohemian frontier, where the war was being fought. I can remember my brother and myself standing at a country road, each armed with a huge bouquet of flowers we had gathered, and watching for General Steinmetz and his army to pass on their way to the front. As they marched by, my brother bravely ran to one of the officers and gave him his flowers, but my courage gave out and I threw my bouquet so that it fell on the ground, from which one of the soldiers smilingly picked it up and stuck it on his bayonet. That same afternoon Frank and I lay on the ground with our ears closely pressed to it and we could plainly hear the booming of the cannon.

When peace was declared, King William of Prussia (afterward Emperor William the First) together with Crown Prince Frederick, Bismarck, Moltke, and a brilliant retinue of officers, made their triumphant entry into Breslau on horseback. My brother and I watched this gorgeous sight with delighted eyes from the balcony of our apartment. My mother threw a wreath, which fell on the neck of the horse carrying King William and he, looking up, saluted her.

Musical conditions when my father first came to Breslau in 1858, immediately after his marriage, were miserable enough, and it was not until he founded, together with some musical enthusiasts, the “Breslau Orchester Verein” that a regular symphonic orchestra was established with a series of subscription concerts. All the great artists of the day came to Breslau to take part in these concerts, and generally they stayed at our house, although our quarters were very simple—Liszt, Wagner, von Bülow, Clara Schumann, Tausig, Joachim, Auer, Haenselt, Rubinstein. Some of them I can remember vaguely, but of course many stories and anecdotes were current in the family regarding their visits.

When Tausig, Liszt’s greatest piano pupil, spent a night in our house, the bed in the guest-room broke down in the middle of the night and he calmly arranged his mattress on the floor and continued his slumbers. But his visit was connected in my brother’s and my mind particularly with a certain apple pudding which he adored and which my mother always baked especially for him, so that it became known in our family as the “Tausigsche Apfel-Speise.” It was a luscious mixture of apples, raisins, and almonds incased in a delicate, light pie-crust.

My father and Tausig would sometimes engage in the most violent discussions on musical or philosophical topics, and the latter would often become so enraged that he would rush out of the house, vowing he would never return. Then he would run around the block and come back in five minutes, smiling and saying, “Come, Damrosch, let us play a Beethoven Sonata together,” and all would be well.

When Joachim arrived he found a large

“Willkommen Herr Joachim”

in green leaves over the door of our music-room, carefully arranged by my brother and myself. We adored him because he loved children and would cut all manner of wonderful figures out of paper for us.

Liszt came on especially to officiate as godfather at the christening of my older brother, Frank (Franz), who was named after him, but, as I was not born at the time, my memory of it is not very vivid.

Once when Hans von Bülow arrived for dinner, my mother herself had roasted a hare in his honor. To her despair she discovered at table that she had seasoned it with sugar instead of salt, but Bülow, perfect gentleman that he was, asked for a second helping, insisting that sugar always improved roast hare immensely.

My favorite reading at the age of eight was a wonderful edition of Homer’s “Iliad” and “Odyssey” in a fine high-sounding metrical translation by Voss and with many beautiful illustrations by Friedrich Preller, of Weimar, at whose house my mother (Helene von Heimburg) became engaged to my father. As a result of reading these very exciting Greek chronicles I constantly enacted scenes therefrom. My mother’s clever fingers fashioned for me from silver paper and pasteboard helmet, armor, and shield; and as Achilles I would drag Hector (my little sister, Marie) on my chariot (two overturned chairs) around the walls of Troy (the dining-room table).

In the winter there was always skating on the Oder, and I remember, aged seven or eight, being given money to buy a ticket of admission and to skate to my heart’s content. Part of this ticket had to be retained and given up on leaving the ice. Of course I lost this ticket and being refused egress by the uniformed attendant, I dismally skated about for hours, becoming more and more frightened as the sun went down and the river became more and more deserted. I thought I would have to remain there for the rest of my young life, and it was a very tear-stained and miserable little boy who ran toward the dear Tante Marie who, having become anxious at my absence, had come to see where I was and who released me, by payment for another ticket, from my dreadful imprisonment.

Tante Marie is a younger sister of my mother’s who came to live with us at the age of sixteen and who became my mother’s closest helper during many years of storm and stress, whose gentle and patient self-sacrifice have never failed her and who, thank God, is still living and as wonderful as ever, the last link with that dim past of long ago.

I think I was somewhat afraid of my father in those days. He was rather stern and taciturn. Life was hard and the struggle for existence difficult. He was somewhat severe about my studies and as those were the days when whipping children for naughtiness was considered an essential of their education, I received my share of such punishment. In fact, sometimes I was whipped in school and then had to take my school report home to my father and he would perhaps repeat the dose. But with all that I was very proud of him and used to enjoy trotting by his side along the promenade on the banks of the Oder, because so many people would take off their hats to him deferentially as he passed.

He also gave us children a good deal of his time in reading to us books that would stimulate our imaginations and cultivate our instincts for the beautiful—Grimm’s and Andersen’s “Fairy Tales,” the “Arabian Nights,” and some of the parables from the New Testament.

But whenever I was sent supperless to bed or confined to my room for some misdeed, it was always mother who would comfort me and perhaps bring me a plate of soup or dessert secretly and talk to me gently until my obstinacy would melt and I would be ready to knock at my father’s study and ask his forgiveness. Once I did not dare, but instead drew a picture of myself standing penitently at his door and underneath the words: “Seven times seventy times shalt thou forgive.” This I shoved under the door into his study and it produced the desired effect, as it brought my father out and in a very forgiving mood.

One of my sins was that I simply could not bear to eat spinach, and as in those days it was considered the absolute duty of a child to eat anything that was put before him because “God had grown the spinach and other vegetables in order to feed hungry children,” and “there were thousands of poor little children who would be only too glad to eat spinach,” I was forced to eat it although it often choked me and made me ill. Even to this day I cannot bear spinach, and with all the reverence and deep affection that I have for my father, I do not think he was right in this particular case as regards his pedagogic theories.

The following excerpts from letters of von Bülow throw an interesting light on the conditions under which my father worked in Breslau at that time.

To the Princess Carolyn Sayn-Wittgenstein (Liszt’s closest friend)

Berlin, Feb. 10, 1859.

. . . Anticipating Liszt’s promise I have sent the score of his “Ideale” to Damrosch who will have the parts copied and get the work to his public already during this month. If we could only have a half dozen soldiers like Damrosch at our disposal! . . .

To Felix Draescke (composer and disciple of Liszt for whom Bülow had tried to obtain a position)

Berlin, Oct. 16, 1860.

. . . I am assured of my complete lack of power to help. To achieve the like for Damrosch has also failed. D., with wife and child, and another one in the nearest future, is quasi near to starvation. It has taken me much time to find out finally that I cannot help. . . .

To Hans von Bronsart (mutual friend and musician. Intendant of the Royal Opera in Hanover. In relation to a joint concert with Bülow)

. . . A propos! Please fix Damrosch’s honorarium as high as possible. He needs it. In order to recompense him the better, I do not desire any violoncellist. I had arranged with him in your name for eight Louis d’or. You had authorized me to give as high as ten for Laub. Damrosch is Laub + ½. . . .

Laub was a distinguished violinist living in Berlin.

To Richard Pohl (distinguished writer on music and propagandist for Wagner, Berlioz, and Liszt)

Berlin, Sept., 1861.

. . . Damrosch had been engaged by Tausig for joint soirées in Vienna and a long Russian concert tour, but the matter suddenly came to naught, and although one cannot accuse T. of irresponsibility, Damrosch is in such miserable fashion again bound to that sterile Breslau. Poor, greatly talented, honest chap—must fight his way through greatest misère. Is there still no chance for him in Weimar? . . .

To Joachim Raff (German composer of distinction)

Berlin, Nov. 10, 1860.

. . . Your piano and violin sonata I am to play in Leipsig. Laub and Singer are afraid of the Gewandhaus and are not keen about it, so I don’t yet know whom I am to serve as accompanist. Damrosch, with whom I played the composition six weeks ago, conceives it according to my views quite exceptionally. The adagio, for instance, he plays far more beautifully than Laub. Very likely we shall turn to him. . . .

In 1870 the papers were filled with accounts of “the outrageous insult of King William by the French ambassador, Benedetti,” and the hostile attitude of Emperor Napoleon the Third. War was declared and of course we boys immediately began to indulge in imitations of the military drill of the soldiers of our city. The most exciting and welcome news to me at the time was that my piano teacher had been drafted and I had high hopes of not having to continue to undergo the dreary necessity of daily finger exercises, but alas, my hopes were rudely dashed to the ground when a bald-headed substitute appeared to continue the lessons.

Soon the trains were coming in, bringing the wounded, and the French prisoners, among whom the dark-skinned Zouaves and Turks especially excited our interest. We looked with envy at the older boys of our school who, having studied French, used to go up to the French officers and ask them whether there was anything they could do for them.

The war ended and my young piano teacher returned, resplendent in his uniform with shining brass buttons, in which he paid his first ceremonial visit to my father and mother. My mother, wishing to put him at his ease, asked him to tell something of his experiences in the war, but he was not very articulate. Yes, he had been at the beleaguering and capitulation of Metz.

“How wonderful,” said my mother, “and what happened to you there?”

“Oh, well, they—they—shot at us.”

And that was all we could get out of him.

In the meanwhile my father had become more and more discontented with musical, social, and political conditions in Breslau. He was really a Republican at heart and the Prussian bureaucracy, which had become more and more accentuated by the war, irked and angered him. With greatest difficulty he could make a bare living for his family, and he found the population of Breslau, except a small band of devoted followers, steeped in materialism and not particularly sympathetic toward art, especially the modern German composers.

In 1871 my father received an invitation through Edward Schubert, the music publisher of New York, to come to America as conductor of the Arion Society, and while this opening was small enough, it seemed to offer him an opportunity through which better and bigger things might develop and under conditions more free than were possible in Germany at that time. He therefore determined, at forty years of age, to take the plunge and to precede his family to America in order to find out whether a living and a new career might be made possible in the New World. The Arion Society occupied an honorable position in the social and musical life of the Germans living in New York.

I can remember his farewell concert, in Breslau, at which he performed Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. There were laurel wreaths, and chorus ladies in white, and there was a general atmosphere of enthusiasm and of many tears, but my memories are connected particularly with my astonishment at seeing my teacher of arithmetic whom I hated, suddenly stand up in the middle of the parquet during the intermission and ogle the ladies with a pair of opera-glasses. It had never entered my childish mind until then that a horrible school-teacher could be a man like other men in private life.

A very tragic happening was that one of my suspenders burst during the Ninth Symphony, and for the rest of the performance I was in mortal fear that my trousers might not “stay put.”

After my father’s departure we children, of course, played nothing but sailing off on a ship, again principally by aid of the parlor and dining-room furniture. We read “Robinson Crusoe” and enacted its chapters with great satisfaction to ourselves. It was all good fun to us, but the anguish of parting from the country in which they had grown up and lived for so many years, and the dread of the unknown in a strange land, must have been terrible for my father and mother.

Finally came an enthusiastic letter from my father bidding us to follow him to New York; we accordingly set sail, August, 1871, in a little ship of the North German Lloyd, the Hermann from Bremen, my mother, Tante Marie, Frank, myself, and two younger sisters. I was desperately seasick for several days until one Sunday morning, when, as I was lying on a bench on deck, the young captain rudely kicked me off, saying, “Look here, youngster, you have been ill long enough, now brace up,” which I did and enjoyed the rest of the trip immensely. The captain was in a very romantic mood because he was to marry a young American girl on his arrival in New York. In the evenings my mother would sing Schubert and Schumann on deck and the captain several times gave us firework displays, rockets, etc., in honor of his approaching nuptials.

When we arrived in New York we found my father anxiously pacing the wharf where he had been waiting, since early morning, for eight hours, to take us in a carriage from Hoboken to a house in East 35th Street which he had rented and furnished completely from top to bottom as a surprise for my mother. The hot and cold water on every floor, the gas and the carpets were a revelation to us, as these modern conveniences were hardly known in Breslau at that time. My youngest sister, Elizabeth (now Mrs. Harry T. Seymour), was born in this house.

My brother and I were immediately put into the primary department of Public School No. 40 in East 23d Street, and as we did not know a word of English we were entered in the lowest class, although I had already been in the Sexta of the Gymnasium (High School) and my brother in the Quarta, and I had studied Latin and he both Latin and Greek. But we dutifully spelled out CAT, DOG, etc., until after a few weeks of this we were promoted, and so these promotions went on with lightning rapidity until we had acquired English and could enter a class more appropriate to our years, nine and twelve respectively.

I continued my studies of piano under an old teacher, Jean Vogt by name, and after his return to Germany I studied with Pruckner, von Inten, Max Pinner, and Boeckelman. The last, feeling that I could not raise my fingers high enough from the knuckles, gave me a machine of steel springs which, through rings attached to the fingers, were to lift them higher than nature would permit. Unfortunately this contrivance brought about a weakness in the third finger of my right hand from which I have never quite recovered and which unfortunately, or fortunately, has prevented me from becoming a professional piano virtuoso. But I had acquired a good technic and a singing quality of tone which served me well years after when I began to give recitals at the piano on the Wagnerian music-dramas, at which I played the orchestral part on the piano while I recited the text and explained the various musical motifs and their relation to the text.

My first appearance in an orchestra was, I am sorry to say, a rank failure. I was only a boy of fourteen years and my father had prepared a charming operetta of Schubert’s, “Der Häusliche Krieg,” for a “Summer Night’s Festival” of the Arion Society. In this occurs a delightful March of the Crusaders with one loud clash of the cymbals at the climax. It did not seem worth while to engage a musician at “full union rates” for this clash and I was, therefore, intrusted with it. At rehearsals I counted my bars rest and watched for my cue with such perfection that the cymbals resounded with great success at the proper time and in the proper manner, but at the performance, alas, a great nervousness fell upon me and as the march proceeded and came nearer and nearer the crucial moment, my hand seemed paralyzed, and when my father’s flashing eye indicated to me that the moment had come, I simply could not seem to lift the cymbals which suddenly weighed like a hundred tons. The march went on but I felt that the entire evening had been ruined by me and that every one in the audience must know that I had “funked it.” As soon as I could I slipped out of the orchestra pit underneath the stage and into the dark night, feeling that life had no joy left for me. I could not bear to hear the rest of the opera or to meet my father’s reproachful eye.

AFTERNOON COFFEE IN THE DAMROSCH HOME, BRESLAU, 1867
Frank, Tante Marie, Mother, Marie, Father, Walter

II

BAYREUTH IN 1876—MY DOLL’S THEATRE

In the summer of 1876 Wagner inaugurated the Bayreuth Theatre with the first production of his great “Nibelungen Trilogy.” All the old friends and the musicians who had been in the forefront of the fight in the early days when Wagner’s genius was not generally recognized, gathered there from far and near in order to be present at what was destined to be a magnificent demonstration of the final triumph of the cause.

My father, naturally, was keen to be there and to rejoice with his old colleagues. He had not returned to Germany since he had left it in 1871 to found a home for his family in the New World. He had never regretted this step, but many bonds of sentiment and many old friends drew him to Europe. Alas, he had no money for such a trip and there seemed no way of obtaining it. There was a lottery formed by a few Wagner enthusiasts the proceeds of which should go to the Bayreuth Fund. The winner of the lucky number was to receive a ticket for the first performance, and my father bought a number, but of course he did not win, and there was the price of the steamship passage to pay and the expenses of maintenance in Europe besides. In his despair he told his old friend Schirmer, the New York music publisher, of his distress and Schirmer immediately said:

“Doctor, you simply must go, and here is a loan of five hundred dollars, which you can repay me whenever you can afford it.”

This was so friendly and generous an act that it gives me pleasure to record it here, especially as his two sons, Rudolph and Gustav, also continued on terms of friendliest intimacy with me from boyhood to their all-too-premature deaths. Another friend of my father, Charles A. Dana, the great editor of the New York Sun asked him to write some articles on his Bayreuth experiences for The Sun and paid him another five hundred dollars, so that my father was liberally supplied with funds for his trip to Europe.

This visit, the reunion with Wagner, Liszt, Raff, Lassen, Porges, and hosts of other old friends, together with all the marvels of the first production of the “Nibelungen Trilogy,” refreshed my father immensely in body and spirit, and when he returned home and recounted to us all the glories of the trip, I fairly ached with the joy of it and immediately proceeded to spend all my pocket money in the making of a very remarkable doll’s theatre about three feet wide and equally high in order to produce Wagner myself. I painted all the scenery and the actor dolls for it, and had the most brilliant lighting effects and a curtain that went up and down with a perfection not always witnessed even on the real stage.

As I had some talent for painting and had attended the drawing classes at Cooper Union, I knew something of colors and perspective and delighted especially in designing interiors of palaces with dozens of pillars which, beginning in large size at the proscenium, would dwindle down to the smallest pillarets, gradually lost in the dim distances, so that my palaces always looked as if they were miles long.

My fellow director was my boy friend, Gustav Schirmer, son of the publisher, and our first production was, of course, a Wagner music drama. Gustav’s mother was an enthusiastic Wagnerite who eventually spent much of her life in Bayreuth and Weimar. “Rhinegold” seemed to me especially fitted for our theatre as it offered almost boundless scenic opportunities. The effect of water in the first scene which is supposed to depict the depths of the Rhine, I achieved very successfully by several alternate curtains of blue and green gauze, and behind the rocky reef in the centre of this scene a gas-burner was very cleverly hidden, the light of which, as it gradually increased in strength, brilliantly simulated the awakening of the “Rhinegold.”

The united children of the Schirmer and Damrosch families together with their elders constituted the audience. The children paid fifty cents admission, but both Gustav and I permitted our respective parents to contribute as much above that as their generosity would permit, and we looked on it as very much the same kind of a subvention as the king of Bavaria had allowed Wagner at Bayreuth.

The theatre had been very cleverly placed in the doorway between two rooms, but as the piano was in the same room where the audience sat, I had to rush backward and forward continually. For instance, when Gustav pulled the curtain to disclose the depths of the Rhine, I played the Rhine music, then would creep back under the table on which the theatre was placed and help him manipulate the Rhine Maidens. Then I would rush back again to play the music accompanying the awakening of the Gold and so on until the change of scene when, as the rising sun shines upon the mighty walls of Walhalla, I would reproduce the stately harmonies of the Walhalla motive.

As I look back on it now, it must have been an absolutely crazy performance, but the audience was hugely delighted and contributed so liberally that my co-director and I had a surplus with which to begin preparations for another play.

Some parents on reading this may think that all this was a huge waste of time, but I cannot agree with them. Quite apart from the fact that it taught me a good deal in the use of the brush, it was a great stimulus to the imagination and a welcome outlet for the desire all children have to live in a make-believe world of fancy. At any rate, Gustav Schirmer and I can claim that we were the first to produce Wagner’s “Rhinegold” in America, and it is possible that this was the germ for my decision eighteen years later to form the Damrosch Opera Company solely for the purpose of producing Wagner throughout America.

The dolls’ theatre was, however, not my only diversion from my school and musical studies.

At one Christmas my father and mother gave me a very complete tool chest, with which I fashioned, among other things, a dolls’ house for my sisters and quite a little fleet of boats. I remember one three-master, about three feet in length, the wood for which I obtained from a foreman at the Steinway piano factory, then situated on Park Avenue. This three-master with all sails set won several races for me on the pond in Central Park.

In those days, Central Park was considered very far uptown, and where now the palaces of millionaires flank its borders, Irish squatters lived in improvised huts around which goats would gain a meagre livelihood from the rocks stretching on all sides. These squatters established a kind of lien on the land, which I believe was recognized as having some legal force when the property became more and more valuable and the owners began to grade the land for residential purposes.

Just as in the early days in Breslau, we continued to celebrate Christmas Eve in America in the good old fashion. Weeks before, a delicious atmosphere of mystery and secrecy began to envelop every member of the family. The “front parlor” became taboo for us children. Packages began to arrive and were stored there. The Christmas tree, which was always carefully chosen by my mother and which, according to old regulations, had to touch the ceiling with its top, was brought in in the evening after we had been carefully “shooed” upstairs into our respective bedrooms.

Dozens of sheets of gold and silver paper were cut by us into glittering garlands for the tree and we were, of course, expected to present our parents on Christmas eve with something fashioned by our own hands, or to be able to recite a poem or play a new piano solo. Of all this they were supposed to know nothing until the great day arrived, although they must have heard our dreary practising of it for weeks before.

The celebration was held on Christmas eve, before supper. My father and mother would disappear into the forbidden room to light the hundred candles on the tree and put the last touches on the heaps of presents. Then my father would play a march on the piano and we would all troop in and stand breathless before the tree so beautifully illuminated by the gentle light of the candles. Our presents would, of course, consist mainly of necessities in clothing and underclothing, shoes, etc., which we would have received anyhow, but which gained an added glow because of the occasion. But there were always books, and the tree was crowded with cakes and candies and gay-colored paper flowers and there were toys and joyous singing of Christmas songs and hymns around the tree. Then would come a delicious supper, accompanied by a cup of which Rhine wine and sliced pineapples were the constituent parts.

After supper we children had to recite our verses or play our piano solos, and, alas, these exhibitions sometimes ended in tears, as the exciting events that preceded this contribution to the festivities sometimes blunted our memories and we would get “stuck” in the middle. Then we would cast a frightened glance at my father, who would, perhaps, look rather serious until mother’s smile or some joking remark would put him and us in good humor again.

Those wonderful Christmas celebrations of my childhood continued into my married life. Then when my children came, besides participating in my mother’s tree, we tried, my wife and I, to bring into our own home on this beautiful day a kind of festive celebration which should pass on to our children and friends that which my father and mother and Tante Marie had so freely given to me.

We have had some wonderfully jolly Christmases. My four children and their cousin, Walker Blaine Beale, took on themselves the loving burden of our entertainment. A play was sometimes written or charades improvised, for which upstairs closets were ransacked for costumes and other paraphernalia in such haste and amid such ruthless confusion that Minna, our old Swedish nurse, who has been in our family since the birth of my oldest daughter, would often throw up her hands in horror at the bedrooms, which indeed looked as if a tornado had swept over them. I remember a delicious take-off on “Pelléas et Mélisande” which my oldest daughter, Alice, wrote. I had given a number of lecture recitals on the opera the previous season and it was much in the family mind. Then another year a drama on “The North Pole” was written. This was just after the dispute between Peary and Cook as to the discovery of the pole. There was a real shiver when we were heralded back to our transformed parlor. The Christmas tree had quickly become a lonely pine outlined against bleak areas of farthest north cotton sheets, stretching in all directions over “hummocks” of sofas and chairs. Our five children, for Walker seemed as much our very own in these celebrations as my own four girls, gave us a wonderfully spirited drama of the conquest of the polar regions!

I can see and hear dear David Bispham laugh, my old friends Doctor and Mrs. George Harris’s enthusiasm, Margaret Anglin, Julie Faversham. . . . Our happy, happy Christmases!

The last Christmas party at our home was that of 1916. Then in 1917 Walker was training at Camp Dix and we all went out with his mother and spent Christmas Day at an inn near by to which he could come. There was a rumor everywhere that his regiment was to embark for overseas in a few days, although he really did not sail until May. We all did our best to make it gay in that hotel dining-room, the rain falling dismally. We were so proud of our young khaki-uniformed lieutenant! My Polly played and played, rags, anything and everything, on the old hotel piano. We did not know it was to be our last happy Christmas together, but war had already given to joy a kind of yearning anguish.

My nephew was killed the 18th of the following September, 1918, at Saint-Mihiel. Reconnoitring to assure the safety of his men, he leaped a fence to join three fellow officers. A shell tore them to pieces. This was in the early afternoon. Walker was taken to a field hospital and died at eleven that night.

We know that he did not suffer very much, and we think we know that he never understood how severely he was wounded, that he never knew that what, as a soldier, he so freely offered had been accepted.

He was his grandfather’s, Mr. Blaine’s, youngest grandson, only twenty-two, his mother’s only son, our brightest and best.

There is no day we do not think of him, but Christmas, the day of giving, is his own especial day.

On a frigid day last winter (January, 1922) travelling with my wife on an untidy, dilapidated post-war train through Germany, on my way to Stockholm to fill an engagement to conduct the orchestra there, we read in an English magazine an article on Tennyson ending with a description of the old graveyard in which lie the bodies of his two grandsons, both killed in the war. “I did not know,” I said, looking out over the black wintry flat German country, “that Tennyson lost two grandsons in the war!”

“But so did my father,” my wife said proudly, and she spoke truly, for another nephew, Emmons Blaine of Chicago was no less a war victim than Walker. Unable to pass the physical tests required to enter the army he agonized to find the nation’s greatest need behind the lines in which to enlist. He chose shipbuilding and offered himself as a workman at Hogg Island, near Philadelphia. Although never overstrong, he worked early and late, and fell a victim of the terrible epidemic of the “flu,” dying at Lansdown on October 9, 1918. Though Walker had already died in France, we knew only at the time that he was wounded. Of his death we learned four days later. Thus these two cousins, Emmons and Walker, are forever enshrined together in our anguish, in our pride, and in our love.

III

FOUNDING OF THE SYMPHONY AND ORATORIO
SOCIETIES OF NEW YORK

In 1873 Anton Rubinstein, greatest of Russian pianists, accompanied by the violinist Wieniawski, came to America by invitation of Steinway and Sons. He dined at our house and expressed wonder that my father had not yet been able to achieve a position in New York commensurate with his reputation and capacity. My father explained to him how difficult the situation was and that the entire orchestral field was monopolized by Theodore Thomas. He told Rubinstein that when he had first arrived in New York he had met Thomas at the music store of Edward Schubert in Union Square and that after the introduction Thomas had said to him:

“I hear, Doctor Damrosch, that you are a very fine musician, but I want to tell you one thing: whoever crosses my path I crush.”

Thomas at that time really believed that America was not large enough to contain more than one orchestra, but he lived long enough to see my father surpass him at the head of a symphony orchestra, as founder of the first great music festival in New York and, above all, of opera in German at the Metropolitan.

In 1881 the first symphony orchestra on a permanent basis had been founded in Boston by Major Higginson, and before Thomas’s death there were half a dozen great subsidized orchestras actively operating in the United States, a number which has since then increased to twelve.

Rubinstein said to my father: “Why don’t you begin by founding an oratorio society, and that will lead to other things?”

My father consulted a few devoted friends, and the Oratorio Society of New York was accordingly founded in 1873 and began rehearsals in the Trinity Chapel with a chorus of about eighteen singers, my mother’s glorious voice leading the sopranos and my very humble and little self among the altos. The first performance took place in the warerooms of the Knabe Piano Company the following winter, at which time the chorus had increased to sixty singers. The programme was a remarkable one for that period, containing a capella chorus and accompanied choruses by Bach, Mozart, Handel, Palestrina, and Mendelssohn.

From this small beginning the society developed until it became the foremost representative of choral music in New York, performing, with a chorus of three hundred and fifty voices, under my father’s direction, the older oratorios of Handel, Haydn, and Mendelssohn, and such novelties as the first part of “Christus” by Liszt, the Berlioz “Requiem” and “Damnation of Faust,” the Brahms “Requiem,” Cowen’s “St. Ursula,” the choral finale from the first act of “Parsifal,” and the third act of “Meistersinger.”

Indirectly, but logically, the founding of the Oratorio Society led to the founding of the Symphony Society of New York in 1877, which at last gave my father an orchestra with which he could demonstrate his abilities as a symphonic conductor.

The differences between him and Thomas were very marked. Thomas, who had educated himself entirely in America, had always striven for great cleanliness of execution, a metronomical accuracy and rigidity of tempo, and a strict and literal (and therefore rather mechanical) observance of the signs put down by the composers. America owed him a great debt of gratitude for the high quality of his programmes. My father had been educated in a more modern school of interpretation, and his readings were emotionally more intense. He was the first conductor in this country to make those fine and delicate gradations in tempo according to the inner demands of the music, gradations which are too subtle to be indicated by the composer’s signs, as that would lead to exaggerations, but which are now generally considered as necessary in order to bring out the melos of a work.

Both conductors had their violent partisans, and, as they were at that time literally the only orchestral conductors in America, feeling ran very high. My father was the last comer, and Thomas was well fortified in the field, with a group of wealthy men to support him. The first years for my father were very hard and a portion of the New York papers assailed him bitterly, continuously, and with vindictive enmity. Again and again dreams of murder would fill my boyish heart when I would read one of these attacks in the morning paper.

It was hard work to keep the two societies going and to enable them to meet the bills for hall rent, soloists, and orchestra. There was as yet but a small public for the higher forms of music, and again and again it looked as if further efforts would have to be abandoned. But my father persevered and struggled on, making a living for his family by teaching violin, composition, and singing, and occasionally getting a fee of “a hundred dollars in gold” as violin soloist or in a chamber-music concert, officiating as musical director in a church and as conductor of the German male choral society, the Arion.

The first production of Symphony No. 1, in C minor, by Brahms became a subject of intense rivalry between the two conductors. Brahms had waited until his fortieth year before writing a symphony, and the work was eagerly awaited in New York, as the reports from Germany proved that it had made a sensation.

My father went to see old Gustav Schirmer at his store on Broadway and asked him whether the orchestral score of this work had yet arrived. Schirmer told him that it had, but that he was in honor bound to give it to Theodore Thomas as he had promised it to him. My father was very much chagrined to think that this prize should thus have escaped him, and he spoke of this very regretfully to a pupil of his in composition, Mrs. James Neilson, member of an aristocratic old family in New Brunswick, New Jersey, and a woman of great beauty and distinction. Mrs. Neilson said nothing to my father but quietly went down to Schirmer’s and inquired of the clerk whether the orchestral score of the Brahms symphony had arrived, and when he answered in the affirmative, she asked whether it was for sale. “Certainly,” answered the clerk.

She thereupon purchased a copy of the score and sent it up to my father with her compliments. His astonishment was intense, but she did not tell him until weeks afterward how she had obtained it.

He received the score on a Thursday and the first rehearsal for the next concert was to take place on the following Monday. This left but little time to obtain the necessary orchestral parts and Schirmer naturally would not sell him any. He therefore cut the score into three parts and divided them among three copyists, who worked day and night and managed to have the parts ready in time for the rehearsal. Great was the triumph in the Damrosch camp at this victory over the Thomas forces.

Some years later I gave the first performances in New York of the Third and Fourth Brahms Symphonies, but I had no need to resort to strategem to obtain the scores and orchestral parts.

Orchestral conditions were bad compared with to-day. There was no such thing as a “permanent orchestra.” The musicians of the Symphony Society, for instance, played in six symphony concerts during the winter, each preceded by a public rehearsal. They also officiated at four concerts of the Oratorio Society, and this was almost the extent of their efforts in that direction. The rest of the time they made their living by teaching, playing in theatres, at dances, and some of them even at political or military processions and mass meetings. If a better “job” came along than the symphony concert they would simply send my father a substitute. Small wonder that occasionally their lips gave out and the first horn or trumpet would break on an important note during a symphony concert. And yet, in spite of this disheartening condition, my father succeeded in infusing the orchestral players with such emotional intensity, and in imparting so lofty an interpretation to them, that the audiences of that day were often roused to the greatest enthusiasm; and I would tuck my arm very proudly into his as we marched home from a concert, even though we knew that the subscription to the concert was not more than eight hundred dollars and the single sale at the box-office had not reached the hundred dollar mark.

But all this was changed like a flash in the year 1879 when my father decided to perform “The Damnation of Faust,” by Berlioz, until then unknown in America. This concert, which was held at Steinway Hall, in East 14th Street, necessitated the services of solo singers, the New York Symphony Orchestra, the chorus of the New York Oratorio Society and the male chorus of the Arion Society.

The work and the performance made a sensation. All New York buzzed with it, and during that winter, 1879, it was given five times in succession to crowded houses, creating an excitement such as New York had never before seen in the concert field.

I played in all these performances at the last stand of the second violins, as my father considered it of the utmost value to me as a future conductor to be able to follow the conductor’s beat as one of the orchestra.

IV

AUGUST WILHELMJ—TERESA CARRENO

In the spring of 1878 Maurice Strakosch, an old concert manager, called on my father and asked him whether he would permit me to go on a Southern concert tour with the celebrated violinist, August Wilhelmj, who was then touring the country under Strakosch management. Mr. Max Liebling, his regular accompanist, had been taken ill and as both Wilhelmj and Strakosch knew that I had accompanied my father a great deal at home, they thought that I could acceptably fill the position at such short notice. I was naturally wild with delight at the idea and prevailed on my father to let me go. I was to receive the, for me, munificent salary of a hundred dollars a week and all my railway expenses.

We set forth the following Monday, the company consisting of Wilhelmj, a soprano singer whose name I have forgotten, and Teresa Carreno, who was then already a great pianist and certainly the most beautiful woman I had ever seen.

Wilhelmj, who was exceedingly lazy, refused even to rehearse with me. Our first concert was in Washington and I was to accompany him, among other things, in the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto. I was naturally nervous about it, and to my delighted astonishment, on the afternoon of the concert, Carreno turned on Wilhelmj, reproaching him for not giving me a rehearsal and insisting that rather than put me to such an unfair strain, she would accompany him in the concerto herself. This was a characteristic act of this remarkable artist and woman, and I shall speak more in detail about my immediate adoration for her in another chapter.

In Washington Baron von Schloetzer, the Prussian minister, who was an old friend of my father’s, received me very kindly, and, to my delight, included me in the dinner which he gave in honor of Wilhelmj and Carreno. He was an original and delightful old bachelor and wildly fond of music, although his only accomplishment in that line was a real talent for whistling, his pièce de résistance being the “Tannhäuser Overture,” in which he would whistle the “Pilgrim’s Chorus” and the fluttering accompanying violins seemingly at the same time.

At his dinner he treated me somewhat as an older man would a child, and would tell his butler to my great chagrin to only half fill my glass because I was too young to drink as much as the older people. He had several rare vintages of claret standing on the sideboard and some of these I was not allowed even to taste, all for the same reason.

After dinner both Wilhelmj and Carreno played and then the beautiful Mme. de Hagemann, American wife of the Swedish Minister, sang most delightfully. She has since written charming memoirs of her earlier diplomatic life abroad, especially of the Court of Napoleon the Third just before the Franco-Prussian War, entitled “Courts of Memory.”

From Washington we went farther and farther South and my young mind was tremendously impressed by its romantic atmosphere, the luxuriant tropical foliage and the lazy, cheerful life of the “niggers” swarming everywhere.

At Macon, Georgia, Wilhelmj and I stopped at an old ramshackle hotel in two rooms en suite. We did not wake up until about eleven o’clock the following morning, feeling very heavy and headachy, and on examination found our trunks rifled of whatever valuables they contained. We had evidently been chloroformed. A burly detective was engaged by Wilhelmj to take charge of the case, but of course nothing happened except that Wilhelmj and I purchased revolvers. His was very large and mine very small and this is about the only weapon that I ever acquired, and of course never used.

New Orleans was a real revelation. It was then still an absolutely French city. I was invited to dinner at several delightful Creole families and French was the language at table. The old Creole restaurants were at the height of their glory, and such delicious crabs, pompano, and shrimps I had never eaten before. Alas, their nice sanded floors have been replaced by dancing parquets, and noisy ragtime bands and wretched cooking are but poor substitutes for their past glories.

THE MUSIC FESTIVAL OF 1881

During the summer of 1880 my father conceived the idea of giving a monster music festival in May, 1881, which was to last a week and for which a chorus of one thousand two hundred, of which the Oratorio Society should be the nucleus, was to be trained in sections during the entire winter. He conferred with some of his friends, outlined his project to them, and a Music Festival Association composed of the directors of his Symphony and Oratorio Societies was formed. Other prominent New York citizens were added and a guarantee fund was provided, ample to protect the project financially.

Although I was only eighteen, my father deemed sufficiently advanced to intrust the drilling of a great portion of this chorus to me, a confidence of which I was very proud.

The entire summer of 1880 I spent in the little New England town of Amherst. A very remarkable Frenchman, Doctor Sauveur by name, had perfected a new system of teaching French and Latin, and Amherst College had turned its buildings over to him for a summer course. It seemed to my father and me that this was an excellent opportunity for me to acquire the rudiments of these two languages.

I accordingly arrived in Amherst armed with a grand piano, reams of music paper, and the orchestral score of the great Berlioz’s “Requiem,” which my father had selected as one of the works to be performed at the Festival. There was no piano score in existence and, to my joy, my father intrusted me with the task of making one from the original orchestral score.

I obtained a lovely bedroom from a farmer on the main street for the opulent price of two and a half dollars a week, and my grand piano was installed in the parlor, of which I had the entire use for four hours a day to practise. My meals I got at the principal little hotel for six dollars a week and when the genial proprietor saw me consuming my first dinner he said:

“Ef I had known you et that hearty I would have charged you more. I won’t make nothin’ out of you.”

The meals were certainly delicious, and at eighteen one’s capacity in that direction is unlimited.

When I arrived in May the college was still in session and I was made welcome by several of the students, among them Lawrence Abbott, now editor of The Outlook, and John Cotton Smith, now rector of St. John’s in Washington.

My days were certainly busy ones. In the morning I attended the sessions of Doctor Sauveur in French and Latin and in the afternoon I practised piano and worked hard at the arranging of the piano score of the Berlioz “Requiem.” Incidentally, I seemed to find plenty of time for games and fun of all kinds with a delightful family who had a country place there and where I got my first real glimpse of American country life, which is indeed unique and with which no other country can compare.

As fast as the different numbers of my arrangement of the Berlioz “Requiem” were finished, I sent them on to my father who, after revising them, gave them to the publisher in order to have the piano scores ready for the rehearsals in the fall. He was well pleased with my work, especially the “Tuba Mirum,” in which he thought that I had condensed quite cleverly the four orchestras which Berlioz intended placed at the four corners of the stage to represent the trumpets of the last judgment.

When I returned to New York in September, my father intrusted to me Section B of the New York Festival Chorus, numbering two hundred voices and the Newark Harmonic Society of Newark, New Jersey, numbering three hundred. He himself drilled the chorus of the Oratorio Society of four hundred at which I always played the piano accompaniments, and Mr. Cortada, an old pupil of my father’s, trained a section in Brooklyn and another in Nyack, New York. I hurled myself at my task with such vehemence and enthusiasm that by the time the Festival came along my choruses were letter-perfect, but I had become voiceless. My vocal cords had quite gone back on me in justifiable anger at my abuse of them.

The choral works to be performed included the Berlioz “Requiem,” Rubinstein’s “Tower of Babel,” Handel’s “Messiah,” Beethoven’s “Ninth Symphony,” and shorter selections. The monster chorus and orchestra numbered fifteen hundred, and a special stage and sounding-board were built at the Seventh Regiment Armory at which the Festival took place. The organ from St. Vincent’s Church was transferred bodily, and I was intrusted with the organ accompaniments. An enormous audience of ten thousand people attended every performance, and the public acclaimed my father with much enthusiasm as America’s greatest musician. Such happy, happy days!

Among the many memories of this great occasion I can never forget the first rehearsal of the four orchestras and sixteen kettledrums which Berlioz used in the “Tuba Mirum” to depict the Last Judgment. This rehearsal took place in the Foyer of the old Academy of Music in Fourteenth Street; and as the sixteen kettledrums came in like one man just as the fanfare of the judgment Trumpets begins, the effect of these vibrations in a comparatively small room was so tremendous that one by one the orchestra men arose and a murmur began which grew and grew and finally relieved itself in a loud shout of enthusiasm. It was several minutes before my father could continue the rehearsal. I have never witnessed anything quite like it since. We are now so sophisticated by Strauss and the later-day dissonancers that so-called instrumental “effects” neither shock nor stir us. And as regards the dissonances with which some of the ultramoderns seek to irritate our ears, I have always claimed that the human ear is like the back of a donkey—if you whip it long enough and hard enough, it gradually becomes insensitive to pain.

Theodore Thomas and his supporters were much irritated that my father should have “gotten ahead” of them with so stupendous a musical demonstration, and they immediately proceeded to copy his idea by giving a Music Festival the following year in the same building.

For me, the immediate result of the Festival was my election at eighteen years of age as permanent conductor of the Newark Harmonic Society. This gave me the long-desired opportunity to produce choral works with orchestral accompaniment, and for several years I gave three or four of these every winter, including not only the older oratorios of Handel and Mendelssohn, but more modern works like Berlioz’s “Damnation of Faust,” Rubinstein’s “Tower of Babel,” the Verdi “Requiem,” and choral excerpts from the operas of Wagner. All of these concerts my father attended, and after each performance he would analyze my conducting, praise freely and enthusiastically where he thought I deserved it, and also show me where he considered a tempo wrong or an entrance of instruments or chorus not properly indicated. My mother and aunt would often lend their lovely voices in the choruses at the performances whenever I thought I needed them, but they would always insist in the most blindly partisan way that my concerts were wonderful and that I was altogether a very remarkable boy.

This year marked my real beginning as a professional musician, and I enjoyed my weekly rehearsals in Newark immensely, although horse-cars, ferry-boats, and trains made the trip in those days a cumbersome one. But after each rehearsal Mr. Schuyler Brinkerhoff Jackson, the president of the society, Mr. Shinkle, the secretary, my dear old friend Zach Belcher, enthusiastic tenor and music lover, Frank Sealey, my pianist and since then for so many years accompanist and organist of the New York Oratorio Society, used to go with me to a nice German beer saloon near the railroad station where, over a glass of beer and Swiss-cheese sandwiches, we waited until train time and discussed the welfare of the Harmonic Society and music in general. Alas, the Volstead Law has ended all such simple and happy foregatherings and the soda-water counter with its horrible concoctions is but a poor substitute for the gentle and soothing beer of Pilsen and Munich.

DOCTOR LEOPOLD DAMROSCH AND HIS SON
WALTER AT EIGHTEEN YEARS OF AGE

V

LISZT AND WAGNER

In the spring of 1882 I sailed for Europe. My father wanted me to know his old friend, Liszt, and to hear the first performances of “Parsifal” in Bayreuth. My throat was also still bothering me and the doctor thought that a cure at Ems would be a good thing.

I was naturally overwhelmed at the idea of seeing the great Liszt face to face. His name had been, ever since I could remember, a household word in our family. My father and mother had told me so much of his friendship for them, his genius and his triumphs as a piano virtuoso, and of his voluntary relinquishment of all this to devote himself exclusively to creative work, and toward helping the entire modern school of young composers. My father had kept up a desultory correspondence with Liszt during the years he had spent in America, and as soon as I arrived in Weimar I went to the little gardener’s cottage in which he lived to pay my respects to the old master. I entered his room in great trepidation, and when I managed to stutter a few words to tell him that I was the son of Doctor Leopold Damrosch, I was amazed at the kindness of his reception. He immediately spoke of my father and mother with such love that I forgot some of my timidity. He asked me about an opera on Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet,” which my father had composed in the old Weimar days but which he had subsequently destroyed as he was dissatisfied with it. He then asked me how long I expected to stay in Weimar. I said two days and that I was then going to Ems for a cure and then to Bayreuth to hear the first “Parsifal” performances.

A curious change came over Liszt as I spoke. He repeated several times, “Two days, ha, yes, ‘Parsifal,’ of course, Bayreuth.—‘Parsifal,’ of course,” and then he picked up a box of cigars.

“Well, at least you’ll take a cigar before you leave Weimar?”

I said: “No, master, thank you very much, I do not smoke.”

“You should then go to-night to the theatre to hear the first performance of Calderon’s play ‘Above all Magic is Love,’ for which your father’s old friend Lassen has written the music and which he will conduct.”

I assured the master that I would certainly go, but sensing a certain frigidity in the air, and feeling that so unimportant a person as myself must not take any more time of the great Liszt, I withdrew.

That evening I went to the historic little theatre doubly hallowed by the productions and ministrations of Goethe, as well as the memorable times in the fifties when Liszt officiated there and conducted the first performances of Wagner’s “Lohengrin” in which my mother had sung Ortrude. The theatre was so small that you could almost see every person in it as in a drawing-room, and to my astonishment, in the first intermission, one of the servants of the theatre came to me and asked me if I were Herr Damrosch. When I answered in the affirmative he said that Kapellmeister Lassen wished to see me. I followed him to the stage and was immediately accosted by Lassen whom I had not met before, but of whom I knew, because he and my father had been close friends for many years.

He said: “What did you do to the master this morning? I came in just after you left and found him in tears. He said, ‘a young son of Damrosch called on me this morning, I thought of course he would stay here and study with me, but instead of that he told me he was only going to stay two days. The young generation have forgotten me completely. They think nothing of me and they have no respect for us older men of bygone days. Am I a hotel in which one takes a room for a night, then to pass on elsewhere?’ ”

Needless to say, I was overcome at such a dreadful development of a perfectly innocent remark of mine. I could not conceive it possible that so small a person as myself should have unwittingly brought about so tragic a result, and I implored Lassen to tell me how I could efface it. Lassen, seeing my unhappy state, advised me to go the next morning at eight o’clock to see Liszt again and to explain everything to him. I sat through the rest of the play but actually did not hear a word of it or a note of Lassen’s music; I was too occupied with my own misery. I did not sleep all night, but tossed about restlessly and at six arose and wandered about dismally until seven when a frowsy waiter in the dining-room of my hotel, the “Russische Erb Prinz” gave me a cup of coffee.

Punctually at eight o’clock I knocked at Liszt’s door and as I entered I saw this wonderful-looking old man with his splendid white hair and deep-set eyes, already at his work-table. As he saw me his eyebrows arched and said:

“What, still in Weimar?”

I came forward and tried to speak, suddenly burst into tears and then managed to stammer out my great admiration for him, how my father had always held him up as the ideal musician of our times, and how he must have misunderstood my words of yesterday if he thought that I intended any lack of respect or reverence for such a man as he. As I reread this it seems quite articulate, but as I told it to Liszt it must have sounded very ridiculous, but nevertheless I suddenly felt his arms about me and a very gentle furtive kiss placed upon my forehead. He led me to a chair, sat down by me and began again to talk and reminisce about my father and mother. He then invited me to come that afternoon to his piano class and I left very much relieved at the outcome of my visit.

I then called on another old friend of my parents and also of Liszt’s, Fräulein von Schorn. I found at her house a friend of hers, Baron von Joukowski, a Russian painter of distinction and a highly interesting man, who had become very friendly with the Wagner family and who had designed the Hall of the Holy Grail for the “Parsifal” production at Bayreuth. When I told them of my experience with Liszt they explained to me that Liszt had grown very old, that he felt the modern musical world was forgetting him and that in choosing a sacred text like “Parsifal,” Wagner had been, so to speak, encroaching somewhat on his domain. Perhaps even a latent jealousy of Wagner’s all-usurping powers was slightly clouding a friendship and self-sacrifice which Liszt had so abundantly given to Wagner all his lifetime. They also told me that Liszt was now surrounded by a band of cormorants in the shape of ostensible piano students, many of whom had no real talent or ambition, but who virtually lived on the master’s incredible kindness, abusing it in every way and altogether making the Weimar of that day a travesty on former times.

Bülow confirmed this to me several years later and told me how he had once “cleaned out” Liszt’s rooms and bade this unsavory crowd never to return. Liszt had thanked him, but next morning they were all back again.

I attended the audition in Liszt’s rooms that afternoon and found that there was indeed a pitiful crowd of sycophants and incompetents assembled, but there were a few exceptions, notably young Eugene d’Albert who was then perhaps fifteen or sixteen years of age and who played wonderfully and to Liszt’s great satisfaction. There were a few others who, however, did not play on that afternoon. But another one who shall be nameless, sat down to play the Beethoven sonata in E flat, Op. 31, No. 3, and botched the introduction so horribly that Liszt gently pushed her off the chair and sat down himself saying, “This is the way it should be played,” and then the music seemed to just drop from his fingers onto the piano keys, and such a heavenly succession of sounds ravished my ear that I did not think it possible human hands could evoke it. He then said to her: “Now, try it again.” And she did, and, if anything, played even worse than before. Again Liszt played the opening phrases, and then, somewhat irritated, he said:

“So, blamieren Sie sich noch einmal.” (Now, make a fool of yourself again.) By that time to our relief she felt that both she and we had had enough.

After this I met Liszt several times and he always treated me with uniform cordiality, but every once in a while the memory of our first meeting would come to him and he would make some gently malicious remark, such as “Oh, here comes our young American; like lightning he flashes through the world!”

From Weimar I went to Ems and dutifully took the “cure” for five weeks, drinking the three glasses of the more or less miraculous waters while the band played before breakfast, and watching little girls dressed in white smilingly presenting bouquets of bachelor’s-buttons, popularly supposed to be his favorite flower, to old Emperor William, who, accompanied by an adjutant or two, used to take the cure at Ems every summer.

To strangers like myself the place on the promenade at which the French Ambassador, Benedetti, had “insulted” the King of Prussia in 1870 was always pointed out, but this was many years before Bismarck’s famous and cynical confession that it had all been a put-up job by him in so altering the famous telegram relating to the King’s meeting with Benedetti that, according to Bismarck’s memoirs: “It will be known in Paris before midnight, and not only on account of its contents but also on account of the manner of its distribution, will have the effect of a red rag upon the Gallic Bull.”

Two summers ago, after an absence of thirty-eight years, I revisited Ems with my wife and daughters. We had motored from Paris to Coblenz on a visit to General Allen, then in command of our Army of Occupation in Coblenz, and from there to Ems was but a short motor ride. We found the town occupied by French troops from Morocco, and our officer guides pointed out with some amusement the stone which marks the place where Benedetti and King William had met in 1870.

In July I went to Bayreuth in high expectation, to hear the first four performances of Wagner’s “Parsifal.” To a young musician from America such an experience was especially new and exciting. I arrived there a week or two before the first performance, hoping to gain admission to some of the rehearsals. I found this impossible, but I met scores of artists by whom I was cordially received because I was my father’s son. Many of his old friends were there for the “Parsifal” performances and I remember with much pleasure the kindly, refined and gentle Herman Levi, General Music Director of the Munich Opera, who had been chosen by Wagner to conduct the Bayreuth performances.

I received an invitation for the first reception held by Wagner and his wife, Cosima, at Wahnfried and dutifully presented myself there with some nervousness, which was allayed somewhat when I found Liszt almost at the door as I came in. He immediately recognized me and not only introduced me to Cosima, but when she said, “Father, you must introduce this son of our old friend, Doctor Leopold Damrosch, to the Meister,” he took me into Wagner’s workroom where I beheld Wagner surrounded by musicians and in front of him the giant tenor, Albert Niemann, well known later on to Wagner lovers in America as a member of the German company at the Metropolitan for a number of years, and also as the creator of Tannhäuser in Paris at the tragic and disastrous performances of 1861.

As we came in, Wagner was joking Niemann unmercifully, saying:

“Look at this man! I invited him to create the part of Parsifal for me and he refused because I told him that Parsifal must be a beardless youth and he said he would not cut off his beard for any man.”

“Why, Meister,” answered Niemann, “you know that is not true; I would cut off my nose if it were necessary to sing one of your rôles properly.”

Wagner greeted me with kindness, asked about my father, and a few days later sent me, through his publishers, for my father, a manuscript copy of the finale from the first act of “Parsifal” (no orchestral score was at that time engraved) for performance in New York by the Symphony and Oratorio Societies. This was a remarkable act of friendship on his part and I was very proud to be able to carry the precious score back to my father.

It was to me indescribably touching to note the way in which Liszt sought to efface himself at Wagner’s house, in order that Wagner’s glory should stand forth alone. When I first saw Liszt there I, following the custom of the young musicians at Weimar and elsewhere, sought his hand in order to kiss it; but, with a force incredible in so old a man, he pressed down my hand, saying with his gentle smile: “No, no, not here.”

I doubt whether there ever was a musician who worked so incessantly for the benefit of other musicians as he. He was constantly seeking, either with his ten magic fingers as pianist or with his pen as musical critic or propagandist, or with his own money, to save others from want or to help them to obtain the recognition which he thought they deserved. It is impossible to name the hundreds whom he thus benefited—Berlioz, Saint-Saëns, César Franck, Schumann, Cornelius, and so on, and of course above all Wagner himself, whose friendship with Liszt has become historic. Like most friendships, the one gives much more than he receives, and that one was Liszt, who, in his admiration for Wagner’s genius minimized himself and what he had accomplished as composer to an exaggerated degree. In those personal qualities that make up a man’s character, Liszt was infinitely the superior. Wagner’s genius as a musician was the greater, but this brought in its trail an overwhelming egotism and a vanity which made many of his relations with his fellow men unfortunate. Liszt gave up all worldly glories and honors and riches which he might have acquired if he had continued his career as perhaps the greatest piano virtuoso that ever lived, in order to devote himself absolutely to composition and musical propaganda, without any thought of pecuniary rewards. He literally, like his patron saint, Francis of Assisi, took the vows of poverty. When I saw him he lived in most simple fashion, always travelled “second class” and gave what little money he had to others who seemed to him to need it more. Without his never-ceasing support and encouragement, his absolute faith in the eventual triumph of Wagner’s music, and without continual financial support from Liszt and from those he constantly urged to help, Wagner could never have carried on his struggle toward the triumphant completion of a Bayreuth and an almost complete realization of his ideals.

The first performance of “Parsifal” made a tremendous impression on me. I was much moved by the noble allegory and the music accompanying the sacred rituals of the Christian Church as presented upon the stage in the scene during the uncovering of the Holy Grail. But I must confess that with each succeeding performance this feeling lessened. The fact that it was not a devotional ceremony but an imitation of one which had been carefully drilled and trained into the performers whose gestures of devotion repeated themselves each time with automatic regularity, gradually began to affect me disagreeably. I was at that time too young to analyze this feeling properly, but, as the years went by, I gradually arrived at the belief that such ceremonials should not be presented on a stage, for if we see a group of Christian Knights partaking of the Lord’s Supper, we should have the full conviction that it is a real ceremony and not an imitation. The foot-washing scene between Parsifal and Kundry also affected me disagreeably. It was too direct an imitation of Magdalen washing the feet of Christ. On the other hand, the Good Friday scene between Parsifal and Gurnemanz moved me and many others in the audience to tears because it was a lovely and lovable presentation of the divine mercy through the self-sacrifice of the Saviour. Old Scaria, the Vienna bass, who took the part of Gurnemanz, sang and acted this scene with convincing tenderness.

I was naturally much interested in the invisible, subterranean orchestra of the Bayreuth auditorium, and as the first noble theme of the prelude literally floated into the darkened hall, the great advantage of an invisible conductor was manifest. The division of the music into bars, which are an essential of the conductor’s beat, should be seen only by the orchestra, and I still wish it were possible to educate the public to listen to music with their ears only and not with their eyes. But this theory of mine would find violent opposition from the small but select company of “prima donna conductors” who, at that parting of the ways which comes to every conductor, whether he shall make himself an interpreter of the composers’ works or a perverter in order to demonstrate his own “tricks of the trade,” have chosen the primrose path because a large part of the public are easily gulled and more easily moved if the conductor “dramatizes” the music through his gestures. By the skilful manipulation of his arms and hands, his hips and his hair, he gives the impression that when the ’cellos play a soulful melody, it really drips from his wrists, and when the kettledrums play a dramatic roll it is really the result of a flash of his eye. There are many people, especially among the gentle sex, to whom admiration for one conductor entails a deep hatred of all others. It would be interesting to note how many of them could pick out their favorite if half a dozen of the prima donnas of the baton were to perform invisibly with an invisible orchestra in quick succession to each other.

The strings of the Bayreuth orchestra were noble and rich in tone, but I was disturbed by many inaccuracies and false intonations of the wind choir, which surprised me all the more as the orchestra was supposed to be composed of the best of every kind from the different opera-houses of Germany. These faults were not noticed or acknowledged by my German friends, and I think that the years have brought more and more of a cleavage in this respect between their orchestras and ours, and that to-day American orchestras obtain, especially in the wind-instrument choirs, greater purity of tone and, without sacrificing elasticity, a greater precision of ensemble.

I have always had a penchant for French wood-wind players and have given them and their Belgian cousins a preference in my orchestra. Generally speaking, a conductor can safely engage a first prize from the Paris Conservatoire in flute, oboe, or bassoon without giving him any further examination.

Where else can one find a flute of such ravishing tone quality as that of George Barrère, who has been first flute of the New York Symphony Orchestra for seventeen years and who was first recommended to me by his great teacher, Tafanel, in Paris? I am happy to say that he is developing many American players and giving to them something of his own luscious and spiritual tone quality, so that he, as well as Mathieu, our first oboe, and Lettelier, bassoon, are continuing the great traditions of the Paris Conservatoire in this country and imparting their qualities to a group of young American pupils. Germany has produced some great clarinet players, of whom Muhlfeld, for whom Brahms wrote his beautiful “Quintet for Clarinet and Strings,” was a fine example. Mr. Lindemann, first clarinet of my orchestra, is another, and his tone is of a peculiarly pure quality. I prefer the tone of the German trombonists to that of their French colleagues. The Germans cultivate a darker and more noble tone quality.

The summer of 1886 I returned again to Germany. I had been invited to conduct some selections from “Sulamith,” a cantata of my father’s, at the annual meeting of the “Ton-künstler-Verein” which took place at the beautiful Thuringian hill town of Sondershausen, the residence of the princely house of Schwartzburg-Sondershausen, where the prince maintained a good permanent symphony orchestra.

Liszt, as venerable founder and president of the Ton-künstler-Verein, an association of musicians the original purpose of which was the production and cultivation of the modern school of composition, again received me very kindly and expressed himself as much pleased at hearing my father’s work.

At the close of the Festival I accompanied him, together with Baron Joukowski and Fräulein von Schorn, back to Weimar. During the trip Liszt was in a very gay mood and kept us in gales of laughter with a number of outrageous puns and amusing comments on certain phases of the Festival, especially on a long debate between Doctor Rieman, an eminent musical theorist, and another man whose name I have forgotten, on certain theories regarding the science of harmony. This debate, which was wholly technical and very “gründlich” lasted for two hours, during which poor Liszt had to sit in the front row in a room crowded to suffocation and with not a door or window open. I can still see the venerable head of Liszt drooping and dropping every now and then from sheer fatigue, and then the Meister raising it again with that ineffable smile on his face in order to show an interest in the discussion.

When we arrived in Weimar, Joukowski invited us all, together with Lassen, to dinner at the Hotel “Zum Russischen Hof.” It was a jolly affair. Champagne was served immediately after the soup and Liszt reminisced so brilliantly and beautifully of the old Weimar days of which Fräulein von Schorn and Lassen had been a part and with which I, too, could claim some connection through my parents, that we all sat spellbound.

During the dinner Liszt asked me if I knew anything of a portrait of his which had been painted under interesting conditions many years before. Liszt occupied rooms at the old Villa d’Este at Tivoli, near Rome, for a month or two every winter. It then belonged to his old friend, Cardinal Prince Hohenlohe. One evening his bell rang, and as his servant had gone out, Liszt took a candle and opened the door. His visitors were Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, the American poet, who had brought a painter friend, Mr. Healy, to introduce to the maestro. Longfellow was so struck with the picturesque appearance of Liszt as he stood in the old doorway in his long black soutane, holding a lighted candle, that he asked Liszt for permission to have Healy paint a picture of him, and he consequently gave Healy several sittings. Longfellow took the painting back with him to America.

I had never heard of or seen this picture, but thirty years later, when Ernest Longfellow, a nephew of the poet, was lunching at our house I remembered the incident and asked him if he knew anything of the whereabouts of the picture. He told me that he remembered it very well and that it was still hanging in his uncle’s house in Cambridge. Through the courtesy of the present occupants I was permitted to take a photograph of it and it is reproduced in this book.

It was not until midnight that we accompanied Liszt through the park and the lovely Goethe Garden back to his house. It was a gentle summer night with a hazy moon giving an indescribable glamour to the trees and bushes, and suddenly Liszt laid his hand on my shoulder and said “Listen!”

From the bushes came the song of a nightingale. I had never heard one before and stood spellbound. It seemed incredible that such ecstatic sweetness, such songs of joy and sorrow, could come from the throat of a little bird, and to hear it all at twenty-four years of age and standing at the side of Liszt! Dear reader, I confess that to-day, thirty-five years later, I still thrill at the memory of it.

Alas! That was almost the last time that I saw Liszt. In July I went again to Bayreuth to hear the first “Tristan” performance, and one morning I met him, looking very old and worn, coming all alone out of the church from early mass. A few days later, July 31, he had followed his dearest friend, Wagner, into the beyond.

The following winter, in Liszt’s memory (March 3, 1887), I gave the first complete performance in America of his oratorio, “Christus.” This work made so profound an impression that I repeated it the following year.

I am sorry that “Christus” has not been performed since then by our choral societies, as I consider it to be Liszt’s greatest work. Many of its themes are based on the Gregorian modes. The choruses are set in sonorous harmonies and breathe a tranquillity which can only be achieved by a perfect mastery of the subject and the form in which it is treated. There are two orchestral numbers—a Pastorale, indicative of the shepherds and the annunciation, “Angelus Domini ad Pastores ait,” and the March of the Three Kings, “Et ecce Stella quam Viderant”—which are brilliantly orchestrated. The march depicts the three kings of the Orient with their mighty retinue, the star guiding them to the manger in Bethlehem being indicated by a sustained high A flat in the first violins in an organ point around which the processional continues. The trio, or middle part, in a beautiful unison of the violins and violoncellos, depicts the kings opening their treasures and presenting gold, frankincense, and myrrh to the little Jesu.

The entrance of Christ into Jerusalem is characterized by an atmosphere of exalted, joyous acclaim, and the setting for baritone of the prayer of Jesus,

O my Father, if this cup may not pass away

from me, except I drink it, Thy will be done,

is one of the most moving that I know of in the history of religious music.

In the last part there is an exquisite but simple setting of an ancient Eastern hymn, “O Filii et Filiæ.” Altogether I cannot understand why, in the dearth of religious music written by modern pens, “Christus” does not take its permanent place in the repertoire of choral societies.

Like many other works of the greatest masters, a few good cuts will add to the effectiveness of this oratorio.

VI

THE FOUNDING OF GERMAN OPERA AT THE
METROPOLITAN—DEATH OF MY FATHER

The Metropolitan Opera House was built in 1882 by a group of rich New Yorkers who, feeling themselves shut out by the older aristocracy who owned the old Academy of Music and occupied all the boxes at the Italian Opera seasons of Colonel Mapleson, determined to have an opera of their own. They leased their new house for the inaugural season of 1883-84 to Abbey, Schoeffel, and Grau, a firm of theatrical speculators and managers who had made a name for themselves by the tours of Mary Anderson and other celebrated “stars” of Europe and America.

The Metropolitan Opera stockholders had appointed as architect a man whose reputation had been made in building churches, but who knew nothing of theatrical or operatic requirements, or of the latest developments in Europe in the construction of the stage and modern stage appliances. As a result, the stage arrangements were of the most clumsy description. Great walls, many feet thick, ran beneath the stage from the front to the rear, thereby precluding the possibility of a “transformation” scene in which one set of scenery could sink into the ground while the other descended from above. The parquet floor was placed so low that the orchestra pit, which was supposed to be an imitation (but was not) of the sunken orchestra at Bayreuth, had to be placed still lower and in consequence the conductor was perched on a kind of pulpit high in the air so that the singers could see him. He had to gesticulate wildly upward toward the singers and downward toward the abyss in which the orchestra fiddled without being able properly to see his gestures. Besides this, the orchestra, being so far from the stage, was almost inaudible to the singers, and this often resulted in the most disastrous dropping of the pitch, especially in the concerted numbers. Years later and at huge expense some of these faults of construction were corrected.

For their season Abbey, Schoeffel, and Grau engaged a large number of operatic stars, including Nilsson, Patti, Sembrich, Trebelli, and many others of distinction, but there was absolutely no artistic head of the enterprise nor any one who had had any real managerial experience with grand opera, and in consequence all these stars stepped on each other’s feet and trains and the confusion was incredible. Good performances were an accident, as the principal artists usually deemed it beneath their dignity to attend rehearsals, and the season ended in failure and the bankruptcy of Abbey, Schoeffel, and Grau. Colonel Mapleson, the astute manager of the Academy of Music, rubbed his hands with glee at this downfall of what he called “the new yellow brewery on Broadway.” The directors of the Metropolitan were at a loss what to do with their elephant. Their president was James Roosevelt, an uncle of Hilborn Roosevelt who was then president of the New York Symphony Society and who was a stanch and devoted friend of my father’s. He suggested to his uncle that my father be appointed as director and that a season of opera in German be inaugurated, as Italian opera was evidently on the wane and Wagner, especially, on the ascendant.

The directors thought well of this scheme and accordingly made an arrangement with my father under which he should become director of the opera for the season 1884-85 and that he should engage a company of German singers of which, however, Madame Materna must be one, as she had sung with great success at the Theodore Thomas Festival of the preceding year and they wanted some name already known in America to head the list of singers.

This meant a complete revolution in operatic affairs, as until then Italian opera had been the only fashionable form of musical entertainment. Opera in German was rather looked down upon and Wagner’s genius was as yet too imperfectly known or recognized to exercise much influence on the opera-going folks of that time.

My father was to receive a salary of ten thousand dollars, for which he was to act as manager and also as musical conductor of the season. The salary was certainly not large, even for those days, but my father was glad to get it and at the same time to carry out the dream of his life, the introduction of the Wagner music-dramas to America, and to sweep away forever the artificial and shallow operas of the old Italian school with which Mapleson, Max Strakosh, and others had until then principally fed our public.

He sailed for Europe in May and returned in August with all his contracts made, including Madame Materna, to whom he had to pay a thousand dollars a night, as she had gotten wind of the dictum of the Metropolitan Opera House directors that under all circumstances she must be one of the company.

Among the singers were Marianne Brandt, one of the greatest dramatic mezzo-sopranos and contraltos of our times, and Anton Schott, a typical German “heroic tenor,” with whom Bülow had had his famous altercation at Hanover a few years before at a “Lohengrin” performance. Schott had sung Lohengrin’s “Farewell to the Swan” out of tune and this had so irritated Bülow, who was conducting, that he turned on the unfortunate tenor and said to him: “You are not a Knight of the Swan, but a Knight of the Swine.” Schott, as an ex-officer in a Hanoverian regiment, deemed his honor as an officer insulted, demanded an apology or a duel, and as the irate von Bülow would grant him neither the one nor the other, Bülow had to resign his post as director of the Royal Opera, while Schott remained triumphant in his position.

For the youthful lyric soprano rôles my father had engaged Madame Seidl-Kraus, the wife of Anton Seidl and possessor of a voice of great purity and simple appeal. The coloratura rôles were sung by Madame Schroeder-Hanfstangel, a truly great artist, with the real bel canto of the Italian school, whom Gounod had admired so greatly that he invited her to Paris to sing Marguerite in “Faust” at the Grand Opera.

The other singers possessed both the virtues and the failings of the German Opera School of that time. They were very amenable to ensemble work, carrying out the dramatic side of their rôles with real ability, forming an excellent ensemble, and tireless in rehearsing, but their singing was sometimes faulty and not equal to the naturally beautiful tone emission of the best Italian singers.

The stage-manager, Wilhelm Hock, was one of the best in Germany and his management of the movements of great crowds on the stage, as for instance in “Lohengrin” on the arrival of Lohengrin and the Swan, the building of the barricades in “Massaniello,” the Coronation Scene in Meyerbeer’s “Le Prophète,” was a revelation to our public. The orchestra was, of course, that of the New York Symphony Society, and my father infused the entire ensemble with such an ideal of perfection that during many of the performances, especially in “Lohengrin,” “Le Prophète,” “Fidelio,” and “Walküre,” the public seethed with excitement and enthusiasm. There had been an “improvised” performance of “Walküre” at the Academy of Music under the German conductor Neuendorf a few years before. The Brunhilde had been sung by Madame Pappenheim, possessor of a glorious voice, but the rest of the cast had been woefully deficient. Insufficient rehearsals and ignorance of the music of Wagner on the part of the conductor had also prevented this performance from making any impression or giving any real idea of the beauties of the work.

The performance under my father included Madame Materna as Brunhilde, who had created the rôle in Bayreuth in ’76 and who was then at the very height of her glorious vocal powers; Madame Seidl-Kraus, an exquisite and pathetic Sieglinde; Anton Schott, a vigorous and highly dramatic Siegmund; and Staudigl as Wotan. Staudigl was a son of the famous old Viennese bass with whom he had studied, singing with such good results that he made as fine an impression in concert and oratorio as in opera. The first barytone was Adolf Robinson, who had begun his career with my father in Breslau and whose warm impassioned bel canto won instant recognition here.

There was no professional opera claque at the Metropolitan in those days such as is now maintained by some of the singers and conductors who, in rivalry with each other, foolishly spend their money in the hiring of twenty to fifty husky men, under a well-trained leader, who stand at the side of the balconies and family circle and clap with the machine-like regularity of a steel hammer in an iron foundry in order to produce so and so many recalls after an act. In those days this was not necessary. The public applauded wildly and shouted themselves hoarse of their own free will, and the papers almost unanimously pronounced the performances an artistic revolution, and said that such dramatic truth and ensemble work had but seldom before been presented in such a convincing way on the operatic stage of New York.

During the entire winter I lived in a sea of excitement and of joy at seeing my father’s genius at last so universally recognized. But my anxiety was also very great. I was with him constantly, from morning until night, and could see that the labor of carrying everything entirely on his shoulders, the effort of organizing an artistic whole out of the many different elements, was overwhelming. The rehearsals often lasted all day and I do not think that I missed a rehearsal or a performance during the entire season. Sometimes I would timidly implore my father to put some of the work, especially the managerial part, on other shoulders, but he would not listen, saying that the responsibility was his and that he could not delegate what he conceived to be his solemn duty as one representing German art in a foreign country to any one else.

In the meantime, the directors, after deliberating on their future course, decided that opera in German had come to stay and offered my father a contract for the following year in which, however, with what they conceived to be real business methods, they reduced his salary to eight thousand dollars but offered him a share in any possible profits. Money matters were to my father always so unimportant as far as he was concerned, that I think he would have signed a contract in which he bound himself to pay eight thousand dollars a year to the Metropolitan Opera House for the privilege of maintaining Wagnerian opera there. He accepted their proposition and was happy in the evident security of opera in German for many years to come. During this winter he would not give up his beloved Symphony and Oratorio Societies, and he always insisted that the weekly Thursday-evening rehearsals with the chorus of the Oratorio Society were a rest for him from operatic affairs.

During one of these rehearsals in February 1885 (I think we were preparing the “Requiem” of Verdi) he suddenly complained of feeling ill and I rushed from the piano toward him, and together with some of the singers we carried him to a cab and brought him home.

Pneumonia set in and he was too worn with the gigantic struggles of the winter to withstand it. During this terrible week of illness the opera had to be kept going and I conducted “Walküre” and “Tannhäuser” without much difficulty. They had been so splendidly rehearsed by my father and had been performed several times; I knew them by heart, and artists, chorus, and orchestra gave me the most affectionate and willing assistance. I have therefore never claimed much credit for what many kind friends at that time considered an extraordinary feat.

The season had only one more week to run, but my father had made arrangements for a short tour comprising Chicago, Boston, and Philadelphia.

On February 15 he died and left me numb and overwhelmed by the terrible responsibilities which began to press in upon me. Even at this late date I cannot bear to write of my loss. Our relations had become so close and intimate, and during the last years he had so often leaned on me with such sweet confidence. I had always looked up to him as my ideal of a man and musician, and it seemed to me that I could never smile again.

The last performances at the Metropolitan immediately after his death were conducted by John Lund, a highly talented chorus master who has since made his home in America, but there were so many immediate necessities crowding in upon me that I had no opportunity for indulging in quiet grief. Events moved with incredible and terrible swiftness. The contracts for the tour had to be met. My father’s estate was technically liable, although he left literally no money. There was no one to assume the responsibility of taking the company on tour except poor me, and I accordingly set forth, together with the entire company of about a hundred and fifty members, on a special train of the West Shore Railroad for Chicago on Saturday afternoon of February 21. We were to open with “Tannhäuser” at the Columbia Theatre on the following Monday evening. During this trip the worst blizzard of the year struck our train. We were completely snowed in and the road, which was at that time a rather lame rival of the New York Central, was so ill-equipped with means to shovel us out that instead of arriving on Sunday evening, we did not get into Chicago until Monday at eight P. M., the hour at which the performance was to have begun. My dear brother Frank, who had come on from Denver to meet me in Chicago and to discuss future plans, boarded our train a little while out of Chicago and told me that not only was the house sold out, but all had determined to wait until we arrived and chivalrously to “see us through.” The mayor of the city had made an excited speech from the proscenium box in which he was sitting and said that Chicago must help a young man like myself who had so courageously undertaken to carry on the great work of his father.

When we arrived at the station the company were quickly bundled into cabs and omnibuses. Luckily the scenery had been sent on ahead, but the costume and property trunks were on our train, and the work of transferring them and getting out the “Tannhäuser” costumes and properties was agonizing.

Materna and I were the first to arrive at the theatre, and we were marched through the auditorium from the front entrance by the local manager who wished to give this ocular demonstration of our presence. The audience cheered.

Behind the scenes the confusion was incredible. The trunks with the wigs could not be found, nor the trunks with the footwear, and Tannhäuser and the other singers of the Wartburg, together with the noble lords and ladies, appeared on the stage in a most remarkable combination of costumes, mediæval and modern. But it made no difference. I began the overture after ten o’clock. The audience cheered themselves hoarse.

The trunk containing Materna’s costume as Elizabeth was not hurled on the stage until just before the beginning of the second act. It made no difference. When she appeared in all her smiling radiance and sang “Dich Theure Halle” the audience again went mad with delight, and so on until the curtain finally fell at one-thirty in the morning.

Ever since that terrible but wonderful evening I have had a soft spot in my heart for Chicago, and during the many years I have never lost the friendship of that remarkable city. Even to-day, every now and then, an old gray-headed or bald-headed citizen of Chicago comes to me and says: “Do you remember that first performance of ‘Tannhäuser’ at the Columbia Theatre in February, 1885?”

The success was so great that we extended our season an extra week, during which I produced for the first time “La Dame Blanche” by Boieldieu.

We finished our tour with a week in Boston, where we had a similarly enthusiastic reception, and especially “Walküre” and “Lohengrin” made a profound impression. There I produced (for the first time in America, I think) Gluck’s “Orpheus,” in which Marianne Brandt gave a glorious and touching impersonation of the title-rôle. It is characteristic of the audacity of youth that I should have given two new performances of operas which were rehearsed and produced while we were on tour, “La Dame Blanche” and “Orpheus.” But as the principal rôles had been sung by most of our artists in Germany, these two operas being in the regular repertoire of every German opera-house, the feat was not so extraordinary. The performances were good in ensemble and gave great pleasure to the audience.

My farewell performance in Boston was a Saturday matinée of the “Walküre” with Materna as Brunhilde. In the morning the orchestra struck. We had made arrangements to send the entire company to New York on one of the large Fall River steamers, but they vowed that they would not go by steamer and insisted on being sent by train. I was equally determined to send them by water. The steamers were palatial, the weather excellent spring weather, and there was no valid reason for objecting. When they persisted in their demands I told them that I would consider them as having broken their contracts, that I would not pay them their salaries for the week, and would give the “Walküre” performance accompanied on two pianos, by John Lund and myself. This was, of course, a crazy bluff, but it worked and they decided to accept passage by steamer.

At the close of the third act of “Walküre,” when Materna as Brunhilde had snuggled into the artificially deep hollow of the rocky couch which sustained her bulky form and on which she was to begin her slumber of years until the hero, Siegfried, should awaken her, and when Staudigl (Wotan) had disappeared in the flames, I suddenly noticed, while conducting the beautiful monotony of the last E-major chords of the Fire Charm, that the grass mats just below Brunhilde’s couch had caught fire, and that just as the curtain was descending slowly on the last bars a Boston fireman with helmet on his head and bucket in his hand quietly came out from the wings and poured a liberal dose of water on the flames. The thing happened so late and so quickly that there was no panic. The people went mad with enthusiasm and Materna, Staudigl, and I had to bow our farewells many, many times. Just after one of these recalls I noted the little fireman standing in the wings and saying: “Be jabbers, I ought to come out too.”

“So you should,” I said, and with that took him by one hand and Materna by the other and thus we dragged him before the footlights where, with true Hibernian sense of humor, he bowed right and left with a delighted grin on his face.

Thus ended my first opera tour.

While I was on tour the directors of the Metropolitan Opera House met to consider their future policy, and, in view of the success of the opera in German inaugurated by my father, they decided to continue on the same lines. Curiously enough they appointed a young man as director of the opera who had never had any managerial or musical experience in his life. His name was Edmund C. Stanton. He was a relative of one of the directors and had acted as recording secretary for the Board of Directors. He was tall, good-looking, with gentle brown eyes, always well groomed, of a kindly disposition and the most perfect and courtly manners which indeed never failed him and which were about all that he had left at the end of his seven years’ incumbency, at which time the German opera crumbled to dust as a natural result of his curious ignorance and incompetency in matters operatic. The directors at the same time very generously appointed me as his assistant and as second conductor, granting me a salary which was large enough to enable me to support my mother and my father’s family decently. This was naturally a great relief to me and I determined to strain every nerve to show myself worthy of such confidence and generosity.

VII

LILLI LEHMANN

In the spring of 1885 I was to accompany Mr. Stanton as assistant director and musical adviser to engage singers for the following season of German opera at the Metropolitan Opera House, but as Mr. Stanton’s little daughter became ill and subsequently died, I went over alone and have always been quite proud of the four contracts I had ready for Stanton’s signature when he, a month later, arrived in Germany. These were Lilli Lehmann, soprano from the Royal Opera House in Berlin; Emil Fischer, bass from the Royal Opera House in Dresden; Max Alvary, lyric tenor from Weimar, and Anton Seidl, conductor of the Angelo Neumann Wagner Opera Company. These four artists became subsequently the mainstay of the German opera and in America developed to greater and greater power and fame.

Lilli Lehmann, at that time forty years of age, had sung principally the coloratura rôles, and with these had made a great local reputation throughout Germany and Austria. She had sung the First Rhine Maiden at Bayreuth in 1876, and an occasional Elsa in “Lohengrin,” but it was not until she came to America that she began to sing the Brunhildes and Isoldes which made her one of the greatest dramatic sopranos of her time. Curiously enough, she insisted on making her first appearance in America as Carmen, a rôle to which she gave a dramatic, tragic, and rather sombre significance, but in which the lighter, coquettish touches were perhaps not sufficiently emphasized.

She had achieved her pre-eminence as a dramatic soprano only after years of the hardest kind of work, and had only through her indomitable will and energy changed her voice from a light coloratura to a dramatic soprano, and as I was at that period only twenty-three and already occupied a position of considerable responsibility, it took some time before she was ready to concede that I was really a musician of serious purpose who was working day and night to fit myself for the various responsibilities so suddenly thrust upon me.

Conducting is an art with a technic of its own, and good musicianship alone is not sufficient. During a performance the conductor must know how to make his singers and players convey his interpretation, and to do this, a glance of the eye and many different movements of hands and head have to speak a language of their own which his executants must quickly understand and follow. The conductor must also know when and how to follow a soloist with sympathy. This technic cannot be acquired overnight, and I owe to Lilli Lehmann a valuable hint in this connection. As Anton Seidl was the accredited and celebrated Wagner conductor, these operas and any other novelties of importance naturally fell to him, and it remained for me to conduct only such operas as he did not care to assume—Meyerbeer’s “Le Prophète,” Verdi’s “Trovatore,” etc., etc. This caused me great sorrow and anguish of heart, as a great part of my training had been in the modern operas. I almost knew the Wagner music-dramas by heart and had received a very thorough training in the symphonies of the classic composers, but for the operas of Meyerbeer and Verdi, I had a youthful intolerance, and of their traditions of tempi and nuance I knew but little, with the exception, perhaps, of Meyerbeer’s “Le Prophète,” which had been marvellously performed under my father the preceding year and in which Marianne Brandt had sung the part of the mother with incredible pathos and nobility.

One day, while I was rehearsing “La Juive,” of Halévy, Lilli Lehmann turned on me during the intermission and said: “Walter, in those old operas you do not watch the singers enough, you are occupied with the orchestra as if you were conducting a symphony. You give them the cue for their entrances and you look at them instead of at your singers. We need you and you need us. The orchestra have their printed parts before them; we sing by heart and have to rely on the conductor for difficult entrances. Watch my lips when I sing, and you will know when I breathe and you will breathe with me; you will immediately also sense the tempo rubato which is such an important part in the proper phrasing of these older operas.”

This advice was a revelation to me, and I found to my delight that by heeding it, not only was I able to follow the singers with the orchestra, but even to influence the singers in regard to tempi. At the performance of “La Juive” I must have stared at Lilli like a Cheshire cat whenever she was singing. The music went with remarkable unanimity and elasticity, and at the close of the performance Lilli, who was never very profuse in praise, turned to me and said: “You see, Walter, how well it goes. What did I tell you?”

In this way, slowly and often painfully, I strengthened my grasp of the technic of my craft, and with increased assurance on my part came an increased compliance on the part of the singers to follow my artistic desires as regards the interpretation of their rôles.

But the operas that I was permitted to conduct were still only the left-overs from Anton Seidl’s richly laden table, and he was naturally not willing to give up any of his prerogatives to a man so much younger. My first real opportunity came in the year 1890, when Seidl was to conduct an exquisite opera by Peter Cornelius, “The Barber of Baghdad.” Paul Kalisch, Lilli Lehmann’s husband, was to sing Nureddin and Emil Fischer the loquacious Barber. Cornelius had been a devoted and close friend of my father and mother in the old Weimar days under Liszt. Liszt had produced this opera in Weimar in those days, but the Weimar public had rejected it because of what they considered to be its ultramodern tendencies, and because of this, Liszt had resigned his position of Grand Ducal Kapellmeister. I was naturally much interested in our New York production. I had attended almost every rehearsal and had revelled in the exquisite beauties and humor of the work.

Two days before the performance, Seidl became dangerously ill and I was in a fever of uncertainty whether Stanton would postpone the performance or let me conduct it. I found that Lilli Lehmann protested loudly that it would be impossible for me to conduct this work, that it was too difficult and too intricate, and that it needed a conductor of many years’ experience and plenty of rehearsals at that. But I seemed to have “good friends at court” and it was decided that I should conduct the general rehearsal that morning for which singers, chorus, and orchestra had been hastily called together, and if all went well I was to conduct the performance. As I walked into the orchestra pit I could see Lilli Lehmann seated all by herself a few rows back, looking at me with what seemed to me baleful and threatening eyes. But as I turned my back on her and gave the signal for the overture, my apprehension left me and I gave myself up completely to the music. The curtain rose and Kalisch began Nureddin’s lovely song together with his attendants on awakening from his long illness to renewed health and with renewed longings for his beloved Margiana. Everything went as if on wings and at the end of the act I saw, to my delight, among the singers who were rushing toward me with affectionate congratulations, Lilli, the stately, telling me that she had not believed it possible, but was now convinced that I had a thorough grasp of the music and could conduct it successfully.

The performance the next day went even better than the rehearsal, and I date from this my entry as a full-fledged opera conductor, and my relations with Lilli Lehmann became artistically more and more fraternal and personally more and more friendly.

In 1897-98 I engaged her to sing Isolde and the Brunhildes in my Damrosch Opera Company and paid her a thousand dollars a night and all hotel and travelling expenses for two people (her sister Marie travelled with her), and she also insisted that I must pay her laundry bills. But I found that this remarkable woman, having established her right to these perquisites by contract, refused to abuse them, and when she found that I paid quite a large figure for her “parlor, bedroom, and bath” at the Normandie Hotel near the Metropolitan, she was furious; and, saying that she did not see why these rascally hotel proprietors should be enriched by me, she moved to a much cheaper suite at the top of the hotel and she and her sister did a great deal of their laundry in their own bathroom, partly because she wished to save me the expense, and also because she insisted that all American laundries ruined delicate lingerie. Incidentally the elevator boys insisted that she never tipped them, and I sent my manager to her hotel to do this, as otherwise she would not have received adequate service.

So much has been written about her marvellous portrayal of the heroic figures in the Wagner music-dramas that it is hardly necessary for me to add anything to the general chorus of admiration, but I wish to emphasize the fact that by far the greater part of the credit belongs to her for her indomitable will and perseverance, as nature had not given her originally a dramatic voice. It was a wonderfully clear and high coloratura soprano, but by persistent practice she developed an ample middle and lower register and made it equal to the emotional demands of an Isolde or a Brunhilde.

Her acting was majestic, but in the first act of “Tristan” and in the second act of “Götterdämmerung” her anger was like forked flashes of lightning. I suppose that her technic of acting would be called old-fashioned to-day, as those were the days of statuesque poses, often maintained without changes for long stretches at a time.

On the forenoon of the days that she had to sing Isolde she always sang through the entire rôle in her rooms with full voice, just to make sure that she could do it in the evening. Compare this to those delicate prima donnas who, on the days when they have to sing, often speak only in whispers in order that their precious vocal cords may not be affected.

Having achieved so much through her own energy and triumphed over so many obstacles, she thought that she could similarly transform her husband, Paul Kalisch, from a lyric to a dramatic tenor. How she worked and harassed that poor man! She certainly was the stronger of the two, and while his entire inclination was toward easy and delightful companionship with others of similar inclinations, she forced him to study and to sing for hours at a stretch, but with only partial success as far as his transformation into a real dramatic and “heroic” Wagner tenor was concerned. It simply was not in his nature to become “heroic,” and when, as sometimes happened, he committed some blunder, some false entrance while singing Siegfried in the “Götterdämmerung,” the glances which Brunhilde cast upon him on the stage were so terrible, so pregnant with punishment to come, that from my conductor’s stand I used to pity the poor man thus compelled to swim around in a pond which was so much larger than he wanted; and often after such a performance I would find him moodily seated all alone at a table in the restaurant of the hotel with a pint bottle of champagne before him and with no desire to go upstairs and face the anger of his Brunhilde spouse.

A tragic but rather amusing occurrence in Pittsburgh should here be recorded. The Damrosch Opera Company was playing a week there at the Alvin Theatre. On the night in question we were to give “Götterdämmerung” with Lilli Lehmann as Brunhilde. All was well. No singers had sent ominous messages of illness during the day, and I had just sat down to a quiet dinner at the Duquesne Club, previous to the performance, when a telephone summoned me. It was my wardrobe mistress, Frau Engelhardt, an excellent woman, devoted to her work, who had been at the Metropolitan in the old German opera days and who had been with me ever since the founding of the Damrosch Opera Company. She implored me to come to the theatre immediately as something dreadful had happened. I of course left my dinner with but faint hope of eating it later on, arrived at the theatre and found the stage silent as the grave, the scene set for the first act of “Götterdämmerung” and seemingly no one there but Frau Engelhardt, who in greatest agitation begged me to come immediately to Madame Lehmann’s dressing-room, where the “something dreadful had happened.”

I knocked at her door and heard a tragic and hollow voice call “come in,” and as I opened the door a sight indeed terrible met my astonished gaze. There stood Lilli Lehmann, already apparelled in her white Brunhilde garb, but covered from head to foot with soot, so black that she seemed more fit for a minstrel show than a Wagner music-drama. Her face was covered with black streaks, especially where her tears had made long and terrible furrows down her cheeks. I could not imagine what had happened, and only gradually and between hysterical bursts of tears, I learned that Lilli, according to her custom, had gone to the theatre hours before the performance and had proceeded to dress herself, only looking into the glass at the last moment to prepare her make-up. She had then discovered the terrible condition of her face and costume. It seemed that the janitor had given the heater in the cellar a special raking which had sent tons of this dreadful Pittsburgh soft-coal soot flying through the registers and into the dressing-rooms where it settled like a pall on everything within reach.

Lilli vowed that it was absolutely impossible for her to sing that night and I was in despair. It suddenly came to me that if I could divert her mind in some way the tension might be eased, and I therefore turned on poor trembling Frau Engelhardt and told her in as angry tones as I could dramatically summon, that she was discharged, that it was her duty to take care of my artists, and to allow such an outrage to happen to the greatest of all of them was something which I could not understand or forgive.

As soon as I denounced our wardrobe mistress in this manner, Lilli pricked up her ears and remonstrated with me at my injustice. She insisted that it was not Frau Engelhardt’s fault and that it was very wrong of me to discharge her. It showed that I had no heart and she for one would never hold her responsible for such an occurrence. Slowly I allowed myself to be persuaded and at the psychological moment gently left the dressing-room, giving Frau Engelhardt a comprehensive glance which she understood. I knew that the two women together would soon set matters to right.

Outside the dressing-room I found my faithful Hans, son of my prompter, Goettich. I gave him some money and told him to run to a florist and buy a bunch of the whitest flowers that he could find and to bring them to Madame Lehmann with my compliments. I then returned to the club and finished my dinner.

When I got back to the theatre just before the performance, I found Lilli already on the stage, newly attired in clean white robes, but as she turned toward me I could still discern darkish streaks beneath the make-up of her cheeks, and in her sombre, dramatic voice she said: “Walter, I thank you for the lovely white flowers, but they will never, never wash me clean again.” Her singing that night seemed to me more glorious than ever.

From Pittsburgh we went to New York, where I had arranged with Abbey and Grau to give me the Metropolitan Opera House for a short season of three weeks. As I wanted a special attraction for New York, I engaged Madame Nordica for a few “Lohengrin” performances in which she was to sing Elsa, and Lilli Lehmann, Ortrude, a part that she had never sung in New York, but whose dramatic possibilities interested her very much and for which she was eminently suited. At first she was furious that I had engaged any other singer for New York. “If I was sufficient to carry on your season out of town, I do not see why you have to engage that —— for New York.” But I explained to her my managerial reasons and somewhat pacified her, and as soon as we arrived in New York I arranged for a little rehearsal on the stage of the Metropolitan for Lehmann, Nordica, and myself, in order that all the scenes, especially of the second act, in which their acting together was of importance, might be properly arranged. At this rehearsal Lehmann treated Nordica with icy disdain, but Nordica acted with such clever tact and deference that Lehmann could find no hook upon which to hang her anger, and the rehearsal passed off with outward calmness, although I could feel the volcano trembling beneath. As we passed out into the street in the late afternoon a terrible rain-storm was raging and Lilli saw Madame Nordica approach a coachman in livery who was waiting with opened umbrella to take her to her coupé. Lilli, clad in a long gray rain-coat and old hat, turned to Nordica: “Ha, you ride? I valk!” she said, as she lifted her dress and showed a pair of great boots.

Incidentally my “showman’s instinct” had proved correct. Our performances of “Lohengrin” with this combination proved artistically very interesting and the public flocked to hear them. Nordica’s Elsa had been very carefully trained at Bayreuth, and Lehmann’s Ortrude was truly demoniac, worthy to rank with that of Marianne Brandt’s in its representation of concentrated hatred.

LILLI LEHMANN AS ISOLDE

VIII

HANS VON BÜLOW

In 1856 my father and Hans von Bülow, pianist, were struggling to gain recognition and a livelihood in Berlin. Both were idealists and enthusiastic followers of the “new school” in music, of which Berlioz, Liszt, and Wagner were the great representatives. Bülow’s letters of that period show that they gave many chamber-music concerts together, both in Berlin and elsewhere, and it is interesting to note that at one of them, together with the violoncellist, Kossman, they performed a trio by “César Franck of Liège,” about thirty years before this father of the modern French school of composition became generally known and recognized. It was through Bülow that my father and his achievements as a violin virtuoso and composer became known to Liszt, who invited him, in 1857, to become violinist at the first desk of the Weimar Opera Orchestra, then under Liszt’s direction.

The friendship between Bülow and my father remained intimate and fine during my father’s entire life, and even beyond, as this chapter will show.

My first recollection of Bülow goes back to 1876, when he came to America at the invitation of the Chickering Piano firm to inaugurate their new Chickering Hall on Fifth Avenue and 19th Street, and to give piano recitals all over the country.

When my father and mother went to Berlin in the sixties for a joint concert with Bülow, they stayed with him and his wife, Cosima. Since then much had happened. Cosima had run away with Wagner, Bülow’s most adored friend, and Bülow had nearly died with the shame and misery of it. One evening during dinner at our house my mother asked him about his children, whom she had not seen since those early days, and I can still hear the punctilious courtesy with which he answered: “They are where they should be, and in the best possible hands—with their mother.”

The fine intellectuality of his playing, the quality of his phrasing, especially in Bach and Beethoven, created a deep impression on our public which was not minimized by certain eccentricities in his appearance and behavior. He always appeared on the stage for his afternoon recitals attired in the traditional black double-breasted frock coat and very light-gray trousers, his hands incased in light-brown gloves and holding a high silk hat which was carefully deposited under the piano before he took off his gloves and began to play.

For one of his recitals a young and highly talented soprano, Miss Emma Thursby, had been engaged. She was a protégée of old Maurice Strakosch, an impresario of the old school, shrewd, polished in his manners, who very cleverly advertised the high personal character of the young singer and especially her great “purity,” vowing that acquaintance with her, hardened old sinner that he was, had made him a better man.

At the Bülow recital her singing of some German songs by Schubert and Schumann, I think, was received with such enthusiastic applause that she gave an encore, a rather trivial song by Franz Abt. When Bülow, in his dressing-room, heard this “desecration” of a programme composed of works of great masters only, his rage knew no bounds, and when he came out on the stage to continue his own programme, he deliberately took out his handkerchief and carefully wiped the keys of the piano up and down in a noisy glissando scale and then began to improvise on the recitative from Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, “O friends, not these tones. . . .”

Another time he gave a chamber-music concert with my father and they played, among other things, the “Kreutzer Sonata” of Beethoven. Just before going on the stage he turned to my father and said:

“Let us play it by heart.”

“With pleasure,” answered my father and laid down his music.

“No, no,” said Bülow, “take it on the stage with you.”

After they had taken their places on the stage Bülow ostentatiously rose, took my father’s music from the stand and his own from the piano and laid them both under the piano.

His memory, not only for music, but for all things that interested him, was prodigious and to me uncanny. But it was, after all, human and not infallible, and on this occasion he did lose his place in the last movement of the sonata and my father had to improvise with him for a few bars until, with quick ingenuity, he found the thread again.

I have spoken elsewhere of the terrible responsibilities which were placed upon my shoulders because of the sudden death of my father, and as the years went by I seemed to miss him more and more, not only his wonderful companionship, but the wise counsel with which he used to help me solve my musical riddles. I worked hard and made progress, I think, for my circle of friends and followers grew larger and larger. But I knew no one in this country to whom I could turn in the same way as to my father, or who would have given me of his wisdom so freely and generously as he. Seidl, my associate at the Metropolitan, was not friendly and was completely wrapped up in himself, and besides, he had, to my thinking, only one specialty, the Wagner music-dramas. As a symphonic conductor he was completely without experience when he first came to America and his interpretation of the classics lacked foundation and real penetration, in spite of the noisy acclaim which a certain part of our public gave him because of his undoubted genius as a Wagner conductor.

A lucky chance brought me a clipping from a German newspaper announcing that Hans von Bülow would spend the summer of 1887 in Frankfort, where he would teach a class of advanced pianists and devote the entire receipts toward building a monument to his old friend, Joachim Raff, who had spent his last years in Frankfort as director of the conservatory.

I immediately determined to go to Germany and ask Bülow if, in view of his old friendship with my father and my need of the help of some great musician, he would be willing to let me study with him the interpretation of the Beethoven Symphonies in especial, and such other works as it would interest him to analyze for me.