IX
ARTISTS AND MUSICIANS
My Musical Life, by Walter Damrosch. Irving Berlin, by Alexander Woollcott. Sunlight and Song, by Maria Jeritza. With Pencil, Brush and Chisel, by Emil Fuchs.
Neither Mr. Damrosch nor Mr. Berlin may admit that he likes to be bracketed with the other, but expediency suggests that it be done here.
My Musical Life does not profess to be an autobiography though it is a more revealing one than many that purport to be autobiographies. Leopold Damrosch, the father, was forty years old when he determined to find out if a living and a career could be made for him and his family in the land of the free, and in the home of the brave, so he came to the U. S. A. The way Walter, the author of this book, feels about the country of his adoption may be gathered from the opening sentence, “I am an American musician and have lived in this country since my ninth year.” Judged from his book his life has been an interesting one. He has been on terms of intimacy with all the great figures in the world of music; we read that Liszt, Wagner, von Bülow, Clara Schumann, Taussig, Joachim, Auer, Haenselt, Rubinstein, when they were in Breslau, generally stayed at the Damrosch house, and he has known most of the great musicians that have favoured us with their talent.
Of it all he makes a charming kaleidoscopic picture, in which nearly every musician of note the past fifty years passes in review: