One winter, about ten years ago, I went to Berlin in the company of Mr Frederick Dawson, the famous English pianist, who had planned to give two recitals there. We stayed at the Fürstenhof, a luxurious and enervating hotel where we had a suite of rooms facing the front. In the large drawing-room that Karl Klindworth had engaged for Dawson was a good piano.
Now, music in Berlin is just a trade. Everyone plays or sings and everybody teaches somebody or other to play and sing. Unless you are an artist of colossal merit (and sometimes even if you are), you will find it practically impossible to persuade anybody to listen to you if you are not prepared to “square” the critics. In the season, twenty, thirty, forty concerts are given nightly, and by far the greater number of them are given to empty stalls. That does not matter: no artist of any European experience expects anything else. A musician does not go to Berlin to get money: he goes to get a reputation. Berlin’s cachet is (or, most decidedly, I should say was) absolutely indispensable for any pianist, violinist or singer who wishes to make a permanent and wide reputation. Before the war, Mr Snooks could play as hard and as fiercely and as long in London as he liked, but unless he was known in Berlin, and unless it was known that he was known in Berlin, he was everywhere considered but as a second-rate kind of person, a mere talented outsider. So that it is quite within the facts [213] to say that few artists have gone to sing or play in Berlin except for the purpose of obtaining Press notices, favourable Press notices, Press notices that glow with praise and reek of backstairs influence. An American, a French or a Danish artist will go to Berlin with a few years’ savings, give a short series of recitals, cut his Press notices from the papers, go back to his native land, and then advertise freely—his advertisements, of course, consisting of judicious excerpts (not always very literally translated) from his Berlin notices. This visit to Berlin, with the hire of a concert hall, etc., may cost a couple of hundred pounds, but it is counted money well spent, well invested.
Frederick Dawson had already paid several visits to Berlin and Vienna, and was so well known in both cities that his appearance in either always attracted large and enthusiastic audiences; but, apart from Dawson himself, d’Albert and Lamond, no other British artist or semi-British artist had, I imagine, the power to do so.
I was introduced to many critics and many artists. The critic was almost invariably a Herr Doktor and the Herr Doktor was almost invariably a Herr Professor: they all had degrees and they all taught. They were overworked, “doing” five or six concerts a night and receiving very little pay. They would dash about from one concert hall to another in taxi-cabs, jot down a few notes, and look down their noses; when they wished to leave a particular hall, they would look round furtively, gather their coat-tails together, and sidle slimly or roll fatly to the door.
Some of these gentlemen, I heard, were very shady in their dealings with young and inexperienced artists. They plied a trade of gentle blackmail, kid-gloved blackmail, of course, but the kid gloves contained the claws of a hungry eagle. The following describes one of their pretty little customs.
[214]
Hearing of the arrival in Berlin of a singer or pianist
whose agent had been advertising the fact that his client
would shortly give a series of three recitals, the critic
would call upon him, express interest in his work, and
ask to have the pleasure of hearing the artist sing or
play. The artist, flattered and already sure of one good
“notice” at least, would immediately accede; having
done his best or worst, something like the following
conversation would take place:—
Critic. Quite good. But that A-minor study of Chopin’s is, of course, rather hackneyed; you are not, I presume, including it in any of your programmes?
Artist (rather taken aback). I must confess I had intended doing so. But if you think....
Critic. I do. Most decidedly I do. There are in Berlin at least ten thousand people who play it; why should you be the ten thousand and first? Debussy, now. Why not Debussy? Or even Busoni. Busoni can write, you know.
Artist (eagerly). Yes, yes; I’m playing some Debussy: Les Poissons d’Or and Clair de Lune.
Critic. Clair de Lune is a little vieux jeu, don’t you think? However, play it. Play it now, I mean.
The artist, half angry, but tremulously anxious to please, does as he is told.
Critic. Oh yes; you have talent. I think, yes, I rather think I shall be able to praise you in my paper. However, we shall see. But there is something, just a little of something, lacking in your style. Your rhythm is not sufficiently fluid. It should, if I may say so, sway more. And your use of tempo rubato.... Well, now, I could show you. You see, I have heard Debussy himself play that, and I know pre-cise-ly how it should go.
Artist (absolutely staggered). Oh ... er ... yes. Quite.
Critic (having allowed time for his remarks to sink in). [215] Now what would you say if I were to suggest that I give you a few lessons—say a couple. I would charge you a guinea and a half each: lessons of half-an-hour, you know.
Artist (looking wildly round). If you were to suggest such a thing—of course, you haven’t done so yet—but if you were to suggest it....
Critic (with most un-German suavity). Of course, when I said “lessons,” I used entirely the wrong word. What I meant was hints and suggestions. Mere indications. A passing on of a tradition—passing it on, you understand, from Debussy to yourself. Not everyone, I need scarcely say, has heard Debussy play. If you were to play Debussy as I know he should be played, you would be one of the first to do so in Berlin, and I in my paper should record the fact.
Artist. I see. Yes, I do see. I think that perhaps you are right. You believe I could—I am rather at a loss for a word—you believe I could, shall we say “absorb,” the tradition in a couple of lessons?
Critic. I don’t see why you shouldn’t, though, of course, I may decide—I mean, we may agree—that a third lesson is necessary. Shall we have our first lesson now?
Artist (now quite at his ease, slyly). Lesson? You mean my first “hint,” “suggestion,” “indication.” Right-o.... Let’s get along with it.
They are friends: they understand each other. Within twenty-four hours three guineas pass from the pocket of the artist to the pocket of the critic, and, in due time, half-a-dozen lines of praise, golden-guinea praise, appear in the critic’s paper.
After all, how simple, how friendly, how altogether right and jovial!
You may think the artist a fool to pay so much for so little, but, really, you are quite wrong. It isn’t “so [216] little.” It is a good deal. Those half-dozen lines, in the old pre-war days, would help to secure valuable engagements not only in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, and the scores of large towns that lie in between, but also in London, Manchester, Bradford, Leeds; in Paris, Lyons, Rouen, Marseilles, Bordeaux, Brussels, Ghent, Antwerp. But not in Germany. Germany knows better. Not in Mannheim, Cologne, Hanover, Dresden. The secrets of Berlin were known in all the cities and towns of Germany some years before the war, and the playful little habits of the critics of that most wonderful city were looked at askance ... were looked at askance ... were looked at askance and imitated. And the imitators had for their secret motto: Honi soit.
A beastly city was Berlin. And yet not all of Berlin was beastly. But the artistic, the musical, part of it was “low, very low,” as Chawnley Montague said, on an historic occasion, of the slums of Sierra Leone.
But Karl Klindworth had nothing of beastliness in him. In writing about Klindworth I shall, I am convinced, feel rather old, and you, when reading about him, will, I greatly fear, also feel rather old. You see Klindworth belongs so awfully to the past. Yet he was a very great man in his day, and there must be still in London many people who knew him in those silly, savage days when stupid people (and they were brutally stupid) thought of Wagner what brutally stupid people think to-day of Richard Strauss.
Klindworth was not only a disciple of Wagner’s but he was also one of Wagner’s prophets: a forerunner. A great pianist, also: a great conductor: a great man. Frederick Dawson, one of the most generous-hearted of men, took me to Klindworth’s, and said some jolly, flattering things about me to the great musician. Klindworth was very old, about eighty years, and, when he [217] spoke, it was like listening to the voice of a man who had just got beyond the grave and was not unhappy there.
I egged him on to speak of Wagner.
“What can I say?” he mused. “Nothing. Wagner was from God.”
His large eyes, two great ponds of colour in a face not white but stained with ivory, smouldered and suddenly burst into flame. His hands, always trembling a little, now shook rather violently. I could not help feeling, as I gazed upon this old man, that Wagner lived in him as strongly as he lives in the mighty scores of Die Meistersinger and Tristan und Isolde.
We sat silent. Frau Klindworth, an Englishwoman speaking English most charmingly with a foreign accent, folded her hands and gave a little sigh. Dawson shot me a significant look which meant: “Keep quiet; if you do, he will begin to talk.”
And for a little while he did. Without a gesture, without a movement, Klindworth, looking with unfocussed eyes into space, began to talk. (He spoke in English, for he knew that I knew very little German.)
“No one,” said he, “who was a gentleman, I mean no one who had ordinary feelings of chivalry, could meet Wagner without feeling that he was in the presence of one of the Kings of our world. Certain people, both in England and Germany, have written stupid things of him; they have pointed fingers at his faults, banged their fists upon his sins. I hate those people. Faults and sins? Who has not faults? Who has not committed sins? You English have a word ‘uncanny.’ Or is it you Scottish people? Wagner was uncanny. He dived into things. Yes, he dived. And every time he lost his body in the blue sea, he brought back a pearl. A pearl? No: pearls have no mystery. He brought back, each time, a hitherto undiscovered gem.... ‘Gem’! [218] What silly sounds you have in English.... Jem.... Djem!”
His old mind, outworn and very weary, appeared to cease its functioning. He sat with no sign of life in him. It was as though a clock had stopped, as though a light had gone out. And then, without any apparent cause, he came to life again.
“Let us go to the piano,” he said, rising.
So we left the little room in which we were sitting and moved to the large music-room at the far end of which was a grand piano. Frau Klindworth, Dawson and I sat in the semi-darkness near the door; Klindworth’s tall but rather shrunken figure moved down the room to the little light that hung above the keyboard. He played some almost unknown pieces of Liszt, interpreting them in a style at once noble and half-ruined. The excitement of playing seemed to increase rather than add strength to his physical weakness, and many wrong notes were struck.
It was very pathetic to see this old man trying to revive the fires within him, trying and failing; and I felt that if, by some miraculous effort, he had succeeded, if the ashes of long-spent fires had indeed broken into hot flame, his frail body would have been consumed.
He gave me his photograph and wrote on the back some message, and when I left him I thought I should never see him again. But, a few days later, I saw him in the front row of one of Frederick Dawson’s recitals, and I occasionally heard from him a deep-noted “Bravo!” as Dawson electrified us with one of his stupendous performances.
Klindworth lingered on for some years later and, when I was in Macedonia last year, I saw in some newspaper a few lines recording his death. In the seventies he was a great figure in London, and Wagner-worshippers of those days worshipped Klindworth also, not only for his genius, but [219] also for his loyalty, his noble-mindedness, his devotion to his art.
Out of curiosity on the last day of my stay in Berlin, I went to a famous concert agent’s office, ostensibly to make some business inquiries, but, in reality, to have a look at the underworld of art; for the business side of all art has almost invariably an underworld of its own in which there is much irony and in which dwells a spirit of strangely sardonic humour.
The office was crowded with artists, most of them prosperous, all of them of recognised position. Though they were clients of the agent—that is to say, people able and eager to engage his services and pay handsomely for them—they were kept waiting an unconscionable time, as though they had come to beg favours. As, indeed, they had. For Herr Otto Zuggstein always made it perfectly clear by his manner that the favour was his to confer, the honour yours to accept. He had a hot, eager brain, cunning hands and hairy wrists.
And his work, his object in life? Well, he was the connecting-link between the artist and the public, just as a publisher is the connecting-link between authors and those who read. Otto Zuggstein “published” pianists, singers, violinists. He engaged concert halls for them, sold their tickets and collected the money, printed their programmes, distributed tickets to the Press, advertised their recitals, and so on. There are, of course, many such men, men engaged honourably in an honourable profession, in all the big cities of Europe; but Zuggstein was steeped in dishonour. It was freely said of him that he had all the powerful music critics of Berlin in the hollow of his hand. Instead of working for their respective editors they really worked for him. He could command a long and enthusiastic “notice” about almost any artist in almost any paper; he could also secure the publication [220] of the most damning criticisms. If you were a really great artist desiring to “succeed” in Berlin and he, or his friends, considered it against his own and his friends’ interest for you to succeed, he could and would prevent you doing so.
He occasionally emerged from the inner room in which he sat, moved among us for a minute or so, exchanging handshakes, smiles and other insincerities, and, singling out a man or a woman with special business claims upon him, returned with his companion to his private office. As he disappeared, some of those who waited smiled significantly at each other.
Zuggstein, as one used to write three or four years ago, “intrigued” me. He was such an efficient rogue: a rogue working, as it appeared, most openly, most flagrantly, but in reality working with an abundance of prepared camouflage.
I waited most patiently and, in the course of time, when he again issued from his private sanctum, he queried me with his right eyebrow, beckoned me almost imperceptibly with his left elbow and, preceding me, made a gangway to his room. I followed him with an air, recognising, as I did so, that I was in for a bit of an adventure, and resolved to lie like poor Beelzebub himself.
“Good-morning,” said he in English when the door was closed upon us. “Will you take a chair and also a cigar?” Mysteriously, he produced a box from the region of his knees and looked hard at me. “And a whisky?” he added, with a smile. “I never drink myself,” he apologised, “but you English!”
I accepted all three invitations.
“I have come,” said I, when I had lit my cigar and savoured it, “I have come to see you about half-a-dozen recitals, piano recitals, that a Norwegian friend of mine wishes to give here in Berlin next January.”
“To whom,” asked he—and a little chill descended [221] upon him as he asked the question—“to whom have I the honour of speaking?”
I smiled deprecatingly, and produced from my card-case a card bearing the name “Gerald Cumberland.”
“I am staying at the Fürstenhof. Room 4001.”
Disarmed, but still cautious, he wrote the number of my room on the pasteboard.
“I am, I think it is obvious, from England. This is my first visit to your great city. I am interested in art, in music.” I used a careless, all-embracing gesture. “And my Norwegian friend, Mr Sigurd Falk, knowing that I was about to set out for Berlin, asked me to try to arrange certain matters with you. He got your name from a compatriot of his.”
By this time he had poured out, and I had drunk most of, the whisky. A peculiar thing happened: whilst it was I who drank the whisky, it was he who became genial—more than genial: almost friendly.
“What,” he inquired, “does your friend wish to do in Berlin?”
“Play the piano and make a little money.”
He grunted sympathetically, if a man may ever be said to grunt sympathetically.
“Money is difficult to make in Berlin,” he said, looking at me keenly, “but I will do my best for him. Six recitals, you say?”
“Six. And at this, our first interview, I wished to have just a rough estimate of what those six recitals are likely to cost.”
“Why, it all depends.... Another whisky?... No?... It all depends. Depends on all kinds of things. What hall do you want? I ought, perhaps, to tell you, first of all, what hall you can have: you see, you come rather late, very late, in the day. It is now November, and your friend wishes to play in January. All the halls are usually booked months in advance.”
[222]
We went into particulars of halls, dates, etc. And
then he began to scribble figures on a sheet of paper.
“Press?” he queried.
“I beg your pardon?”
“You would, I mean your friend would, I imagine, like a favourable Press?”
“Why, yes.”
“Audience?”
“Do you mean any kind of audience?”
“I am afraid they will be mostly women, though, of course, I can get you a certain number of male students. But the audience, I can promise you, will be well disposed. Three or four encores at least.”
“Yes, then, both Press and audience.”
He scribbled a little more.
“An inclusive estimate?” he asked.
“Please. You mean by inclusive...?”
“Everything,” he said impressively; “the hall, the printing, the advertisements, a few invitations, the preliminary paragraphs, the audience, the critics’ articles. And not only the critics’ notices, but the presence of the critics themselves,” he added.
He worked hard for five minutes, looked up data in books, and at length very gently pushed over to me, across the shining top of the table, a properly written out estimate for the recitals my imaginary friend intended to give. The total amount, as represented by English money, was £325.
“Thank you so much,” said I; “I will call to see you to-morrow perhaps. But I must first of all get an estimate from Herr Dorn.”
“Who is Herr Dorn?” he asked, in surprise.
I did not know: his name had slid into my mind that very moment, and I was not quite sure whether, in the whole world, there was such a name. Then, greatly daring, I greatly lied.
[223]
“He is a cousin of Sigurd Falk,” said I.
As I left, he gave me another cigar, shook my hand most warmly, and looked me in the eyes very keenly.
Every night Dawson and I used to go either to the opera or to some concert, and, when the music was finished, which was generally very late, we would perhaps go to some supper-party or other.
I have a good appetite myself, but really some of the German ladies’ gastronomic feats were superb. I remember myself one night sitting fascinated and awestruck as I saw a Wagner-heroine type of woman, full-breasted, high-browed and majestic, eat plateful after plateful of oysters, until I began to wonder how it was so many oysters came to be in Berlin at one and the same time.
Elena Gerhardt, in those days, was large, white and serene. She was a little bitter, perhaps, and certainly greatly disappointed. I met her in Manchester shortly after my return to England, and found her mind insipid, her soul tepid.
Egon Petri had phlegm almost British: a real slogger: most uninspired: the possessor of faultless technique: the possessor of a brain that retained everything but expounded nothing. He had business ability and pushed ahead all the time: pushed ahead all the time, but never arrived anywhere. Never will arrive anywhere in particular, except at his own well-cleaned doorstep, where the polished knocker will respond to his carefully gloved hand.
Richard Strauss I also met in Manchester at about the same time. I have always maintained that, in at least one case out of three, it is unwise to judge a man by his face.
But I must for a moment digress. This question of [224] faces is most interesting. Every man, of course, makes his own face: even the most ugly of us will concede that much, for, if we are, and know we are, ugly, we always console ourselves with the thought: “Yes, but it is a special kind of ugliness. There is strength in my ugliness. There is character; there is soul. My ugliness is original. There is no ugliness quite like my ugliness.” For, so long as we are different from other people, that is all that matters. Now, in making our faces—a process that is always continuous from the time we are born to the moment of death—some of us are full of anxiety to make, not a face, but a mask. Our faces do not express our souls: they hide them. The consequence of this is that you will sometimes, though not often, meet a man with a mean, insignificant face who is, in reality, the possessor of a first-rate brain. But it is difficult to repress some facial hint of intellect; try how one may, one can do little to modify the shape of one’s brow or give the eye a sodden and unintelligent look.
Richard Strauss has disguised himself. At close quarters one sees at once that his head is both shapely and well poised: one notices the exceptionally high forehead, the firm rounded lips, the determined chin. “A financier,” you say to yourself; “at all events, if not a financier, a man of affairs, a man accustomed to deal with and order facts. Certainly not a dreamer—not a poet or a musician or an artist of any kind.”
He exhibits no emotion. Self-restrained, he speaks little but very much to the point. Even in moments of great success, he is reserved and businesslike. You can never take him unawares. He is guarded, on the alert, watchful. “All mind but no heart,” you say; at least, you say that if you are a careless observer.
His tastes are of the simplest and though, for a composer, he has amassed a large amount of money, he is absurdly economical. He rather likes abuse, and when [225] a critic makes a fool of himself he is inordinately amused. The spectacle of human vanity and human folly excites him. His handshake is firm, his regard direct.
His piano-playing is beautifully neat and polished, but he is not a virtuoso on the instrument.
Edvard Grieg—Sir Frederick H. Cowen—Dr Hans Richter—Sir Thomas Beecham—Sir Charles Santley—Landon Ronald—Frederic Austin
Very many years have passed since, one cold winter’s afternoon, I met Edvard Grieg on Adolph Brodsky’s doorstep. A little figure buried, very deeply buried, in an overcoat at least six inches thick, came down the damp street, paused a minute at the gate, and then, rather hesitatingly, walked up the pathway. He saluted me as he reached the door and we waited together until my summons to those within was answered.
I found him very homely, completely without affectation, childlike, and a little melancholy. He was at that time in indifferent health, and it was at once made evident to me that both Grieg himself and those around him—especially Mrs Brodsky—were very anxious that he should be restored to complete fitness. He said nothing in the least degree noteworthy, but when he did speak he had such a gentle air, a manner so ingratiating and simple, that one found his conversation most unusually pleasant.
Ernest Newman once called Grieg “Griegkin,” a most admirable name for this quite first-rate of third-rate composers. His music is diminutive. He could not think largely. He loved country dances, country scenes, the rhythm of homely life, the bounded horizon. Even so extended a work as his Pianoforte Concerto is a series of miniatures. And Grieg the man was precisely like [227] Grieg the artist. He was Griegkin in his appearance, his manner, his way of speaking: a little man: a gracious little man. His attitude towards his host and hostess was that of an affectionate child. Such dear simplicity is, I think, in the artist found only among men of northern races.
Some years later, in an intimate little circle, I was to hear his widow sing and play many of her husband’s songs. She was the feminine counterpart of himself—spirited, a little sad, simple yet wise, frank, and an artist through and through.
A great deal of comedy is lost to the world through lack of historians. It is almost impossible to conceive that Sir F. H. Cowen should ever have been in serious competition with Hans Richter: impossible to conceive that half the musical inhabitants of a large city should have been ranged fiercely on Sir Frederick’s side, and the other half ranged on the side of Richter: impossible to conceive that both Cowen and Richter were candidates for the same post. Yet so it was.
Sir Charles Hallé, who had founded and conducted for about half-a-century the famous orchestral concerts in Manchester still known by his name, died and left no successor. Literally, there was no one to appoint in his place, no one quite good enough. Month after month went by, a good many distinguished and semi-distinguished musicians came to Manchester and conducted an odd concert or two, but it was very widely felt that no British musician would do. Sir Frederick Cowen, always an earnest and accomplished composer, came for a season or two and did some admirable work, but Cowen was not Hallé. Then the German element in Manchester discovered that Richter would come, if invited. The salary was large, the work not heavy, the climate awful, the people devoted, the position unusually powerful. All [228] things considered, it was one of the few really good vacant musical posts in Europe.
All this is ancient history now, and I will record only briefly that ultimately Sir Frederick Cowen was, in effect, told (what, no doubt, he already knew) that Richter was the better man and that he (Cowen) must go. But before this decision was made a most severe fight was waged in the city. Cowen conducted, and thousands of partisans came and cheered him to the echo. Richter conducted, and thousands of partisans came and cheered him to the echo. People wrote to the newspapers. Leader writers solemnly summed up the situation from day to day. Protests were made, meetings were organised and held, votes of confidence were passed. London caught the infection, and passed its opinion, its opinions....
Sir F. H. Cowen (he was “Mr” then) received me in his rooms at the Manchester Grand Hotel. It was impossible not to like him, for, if he had no great positive qualities that seized upon you at once, he had a good many negative ones. He had no “side,” no self-importance, no eccentricities. He had neither long hair nor a foreign accent. He did not use a cigarette-holder. He did not loll when he sat down, or posture when he stood up. And he had not just discovered a new composer of Dutch extraction.... These are small things, you say. But are they?...
I remember looking at him and wondering if he really had written The Better Land. It seemed so unlikely. Faultlessly dressed, immaculately groomed, how could he have written The Better Land—that luteous land that is so sloppy, so thickly covered with untidy debris?
He would not talk of the musical situation in Manchester, and I could see that he was very sensitive about his uncomfortable position.
“If I am wanted, I shall stay,” was all he would give me.
[229]
“And are you going to write about me in the paper?”
asked he, at the end of our interview; “how interesting
that will be!” And he smiled with gentle satire.
“I shall make it as interesting as I can,” I assured him, “but, you see, you have said so little.”
“Does that matter?” he returned. “I have always heard that you gentlemen of the Press can at least—shall we say embroider?”
“But may I?” I asked.
“How can I prevent you? Do tell me how I can, and I will.”
“Well, you can insist upon seeing the article before it appears in print.”
“Oh, ‘insist’ is not a nice word, is it? But if you would be kind enough to send me the article before your Editor has it....”
Hans Richter was an autocrat, a tyrant. During the years he conducted in Manchester, he did much splendid work, but it may well be questioned if, on the whole, his influence was beneficial to Manchester citizens. He was so tremendously German! So tremendously German indeed, that he refused to recognise that there was any other than Teutonic music in the world. His intellect had stopped at Wagner. At middle age his mind had suddenly become set, and he looked with contempt at all Italian and French music, refusing also to see any merit in most of the very fine music that, during the last twenty years, has been written by British composers.
He irked the younger and more turbulent spirits in Manchester, and we were constantly attacking him in the Press. But with no effect. Richter was like that. He ignored attacks. He was arrogant and spoiled and bad-tempered.
“Why don’t you occasionally give us some French music at your concerts?” he was asked.
[230]
“French music?” he roared; “there is no French
music.”
And, certainly, whenever he tried to play even Berlioz one could see that he did not regard his work as music. And he conducted Debussy, so to speak, with his fists. And as for Dukas...!
Young British musicians used to send him their compositions to read, but the parcels would come back, weeks later, unread and unopened. His mind never inquired. His intellect lay indolent and half-asleep on a bed of spiritual down. And the thousands of musical Germans in Manchester treated him so like a god that in course of time he came to believe he was a god. His manners were execrable. On one occasion, he bore down upon me in a corridor at the back of the platform in the Free Trade Hall. I stood on one side to allow him to pass, but Richter was very wide and the corridor very narrow. Breathing heavily, he kept his place in the middle of the passage.... I felt the impact of a mountain of fat and heard a snort as he brushed past me.
Everyone was afraid of him. Even famous musicians trembled in his presence. I remember dining with one of the most eminent of living pianists at a restaurant where, at a table close at hand, Richter also was dining. The previous evening Richter had conducted at a concert at which the pianist had played, and the great conductor had praised my friend in enthusiastic terms; moreover, they had met before on several occasions.
“I’ll go and have a word with the Old Man, if you’ll excuse me,” said my friend.
I watched him go. Smiling a little, ingratiatingly, he bowed to Richter, and then bent slightly over the table at which the famous musician was dining alone. Richter took not the slightest notice. My friend, embarrassed, waited a minute or so, and I saw him speaking. But the diner continued dining. Again my friend spoke, and at [231] length Richter looked up and barked three times. Hastily the pianist retreated, and when he had rejoined me I noticed that he was a little pale and breathless.
“The old pig!” he exclaimed.
“Why, what happened?”
“Didn’t you see? First of all, he wouldn’t take the slightest notice of me or even acknowledge my existence. I spoke to him in English three times before he would answer, and then, like the mannerless brute he is, he replied in German.”
“What did he say?”
“How do I know? I don’t speak his rotten language. But it sounded like: ‘Zuzu westeben hab! Zuzu westeben hab! Zuzu westeben hab!’ I only know that he was very angry. He was eating slabs of liver sausage. And he spoke right down in his chest.”
He was, indeed, unapproachable.
Of course, he was a marvellous conductor, a conductor of genius; but long before he left Manchester his powers had begun to fail.
For two or three years I made a practice of attending his rehearsals. Nothing will persuade me that in the whole world there is a more depressing spot than the Manchester Free Trade Hall on a winter’s morning. I used to sit shivering with my overcoat collar buttoned up. Richter always wore a round black-silk cap, which made him look like a Greek priest. He would walk ponderously to the conductor’s desk, seize his baton, rattle it against the desk, and begin without a moment’s loss of time. Perhaps it was an innocent work like Weber’s Der Freischütz Overture. This would proceed swimmingly enough for a minute or so, when suddenly one would hear a bark and the music would stop. One could not say that Richter spoke or shouted: he merely made a disagreeable noise. Then, in English most broken, in English utterly smashed, he would correct the mistake [232] that had been made, and recommence conducting without loss of a second.
He had no “secret.” Great conductors never do have “secrets.” Only charlatans “mesmerise” their orchestras. Simply, he knew his job, he was a great economiser of time, and he was a stern disciplinarian.
He could lose his temper easily. He hated those of us who were privileged to attend his rehearsals. He declared, quite unwarrantably, that we talked and disturbed him. But he never appeared to be in the least disturbed by the handful of weary women who, with long brushes, swept the seats and the floor of the hall, raising whirlpools of dust fantastically here and there, and banging doors in beautiful disregard of the Venusberg music and in protest against the exquisite Allegretto from the Seventh Symphony.
Sir Thomas Beecham (he was then plain “Mr”) brought a tin of tobacco to the restaurant, placed it on the table, and proceeded to fill his pipe. He was not communicative. He simply sat back in his chair, smoking quietly, and behaving precisely as though he were alone, though, as a matter of fact, there were four or five people in his company. He was not shy: he was simply indifferent to us. If you spoke to him, he merely said “no” or “yes” and looked bored. He was bored.
And so he sat for ten minutes; then, with a little sigh, he rose and departed from among us, without a word, without a look. He just melted away and never returned.
I rather dreaded meeting Sir Charles Santley, and when I rang at his door-bell, I remember devoutly wishing that in a moment I should hear that he was out, or that he had changed his mind and no longer desired to see me. I dreaded meeting him because I realised that, temperamentally, we were opposed. I had read his reminiscences [233] and disliked him intensely for the things he had said of Rossetti. Instinctively, I drew away from his robust, tough-fibred mind.
But he was in, and in half-a-minute I was talking to an old, but still vigorous, gentleman whose one desire appeared to be to put me at my ease. I do not think I ever met a man so honest, so blunt. I felt that his mind was direct and his judgment decisive, but I found him lacking in subtlety, unable to respond to the mystical in art, and wholly deficient in true imaginative qualities. He was Victorian.
Now, I don’t suppose any of us who are living to-day (and when I say “living” I mean anyone whose mind is still developing—most people, say, under the age of forty-five) will be able to understand the point of view of the Victorian musician. It appears to me monstrous that anyone should still love Mendelssohn and hate Wagner, that anyone should sing J. L. Hatton in preference to Hugo Wolf, that anyone should still delight in Donizetti and Bellini. Those Victorian days were days when the singer wished that his own notions of the limitations of the human voice should control the free development of music. They loved bel canto and nothing else; they averred, indeed, that there was nothing else to love. They were admirable musicians from the technical point of view, and they had honest hearts and by no means feeble intellects. But they could never be brought to believe that music was a reflection of life, that there were in the human heart a thousand shades of feeling that not even Handel had expressed, that sound is capable of a million subtleties, that the ear of man is an organ that is, so to speak, only in its infancy.
It was a little pathetic, I thought, when speaking to Santley, that this very great singer had been living for at least thirty years entirely untouched by many of the finest compositions that had been written in that period.
[234]
And he declared, quite frankly, that “modern” music
had no interest for him. When I mentioned Richard
Strauss, he smiled. At the name of Debussy, he looked
bewildered, and about Max Reger, Scriabin, Granville
Bantock, Sibelius and Delius, he had not a word to say.
But soon we got on to his own subject—singing—and here again we were at cross-purposes. Singers who to me seem supreme artists he had either not heard of or had not heard.
“There is only one British singer to-day who carries on the old tradition,” said he; “I mean Madame Kirkby Lunn. She has technique, style, personality. The others, compared with her, are nowhere.”
Some general talk followed, and I soon discovered, beyond the possibility of doubt, that, like all great Victorians who have had their day, he was living in the past—in that particular past whose artistic spirit is embodied in the Albert Memorial, in the musical criticism of J. W. Davidson, in the pianoforte playing of Arabella Godard, in the poetry of Lord Tennyson, in the pictures of Lord Leighton, in the prose of Ruskin.
What had Santley to say to me, or I to him? Nothing, and less than nothing. We were from different worlds, different planets, for half-a-century divided us. In years, he was nearer to the Elizabethan age than I ... and yet how much farther away was he?
Perhaps Mr Landon Ronald will not be angry with me if I call him the most accomplished of British musicians. He would have every right to be angry if I said he was accomplished and nothing else.... How far back that word “accomplished” takes us, doesn’t it? Twenty years, at least. For aught I know to the contrary, it may still be employed in Putney. I observe that Chambers defines “accomplishment” as an “ornamental acquirement,” and, in my boyhood, that was precisely what it [235] meant. Young ladies “acquired” the art of playing the piano, the art of painting, the art of recitation. Their skill in any art was not the result of developing a talent that was already there, but it was the result of a pertinacity that should have been spent on other things. But one no longer uses “accomplished” in that precise sense.
Landon Ronald has more than a streak of genius in his nature, and his cleverness is so abnormal as to be almost absurd. His genius and his cleverness are evident even in a few minutes’ conversation. He radiates cleverness, and he is so splendidly alive that as soon as he enters a room you feel that something quick and electric has been added to your environment.
When I first met him—ten years ago, was it?—his one ambition was to be recognised throughout Europe as a great conductor. He was acknowledged as such in England, of course, and a visit to Rome had fired both the Italian public and critics with enthusiasm. But London and Rome are not Europe, whilst in those days Berlin most distinctly was. He was most charmingly frank about himself, full of enthusiasm for himself, full of delight in all life’s adventures.
“Of course, I know my songs aren’t real songs,” he said. “I can write tunes and I’m a musician, and I’m just clever enough to be cleverer than most people at that sort of work. But you must not imagine I take my compositions seriously. I think they’re rather nice—‘nice’ is the word, isn’t it?—and I enjoy inventing them—and ‘inventing’ is also the word, don’t you think? Besides, they make money; they help to boil the pot for me while I go on with my more serious work—that is to say, conducting.”
Havergal Brian was in the room—we were in that fulsome and blowzy town, Blackpool—and he remarked, as so many extraordinarily able composers have from [236] time to time remarked, that he found it impossible to write music that the public really liked.
“Nearly all my stuff,” said he, “is on a big scale for the orchestra. I am always trying to do something new—something out of the common rut.”
“Ah, but then,” exclaimed Ronald, quite sincerely, “you are a composer, and I am not.”
Brian was appeased, and I looked at Ronald with admiration for his tact. But he went even a little farther.
“I sometimes feel rather a pig,” he continued, “making money by my trifles when so many men with much greater gifts can only rarely get their work performed and still more rarely get it published. You told us just now,” said he, turning to Brian, “that you would like to make money by your compositions. Who wouldn’t? Well, it would be foolish of me to advise you to try to write more simply, with less originality, and on a smaller scale. It would be foolish, because you simply couldn’t do it. No; you must work out your own salvation: it is only a matter of waiting: success will come.”
A month or two later, we met at Southport, I in the meantime having written an article on Ronald for a musical magazine. With this article he professed himself charmed. He was as jolly about it as a schoolboy, and expressed surprise that I could honestly say such nice things about him.
“It is good to be praised,” said he, laughing; “I could live on praise for ever.” And then, lighting a cigarette, he added: “Perhaps the reason why I like it so much is that I feel I really deserve it.”
It was my turn to laugh.
“But I do feel that!” he protested; “if I didn’t, I should hate you or anyone else to say such frightfully kind things about me and my work.”
A month or two later he wrote me a long letter full of enthusiasm for some work of mine he had seen [237] somewhere, and when I saw him the following week in London I protested against his undiluted praise.
“I believe you think I am a bit of a humbug,” said he.
“I’m afraid I do,” I replied. (For, really, I think almost all subtle and clever artists are bits of humbugs.)
“Very good, then!” exclaimed he, ridiculously hurt.
“What I mean is, that if you like anyone, your judgment is immediately prejudiced in their favour.”
“So you think I like you?”
“I am sure of it.”
“Well, you’re quite right. But, really and truly, you mustn’t call me, or even think me, the slightest bit of a humbug. You can call me impulsive, superficial, or anything horrid of that kind ... but insincere! Why, sincerity is the only real virtue I’ve got.”
And I believe he believed himself. But who is sincere?—at least, who is sincere except at the moment? Are not all of us who are artists swayed hither and thither, from hour to hour, by the emotion of the moment? Do we not say one thing now, and an hour later mean exactly the opposite? Are we not driven by our enthusiasms to false positions, and do not glib, untrue words spring to our lips because the moment’s mood forces them there?
I have not met Landon Ronald for four years, but the other day I heard him conduct, and I recognised in his interpretations the supreme qualities I have so often observed before. He himself is like his work—polished, highly strung, emotional, fluid, intense. His mind works with lightning-like quickness; he knows what you are going to say just a second before you have said it. And over his personality hangs the glamour that we call genius.
Many well-known singers have I met, but very few of them inspire me to burst into song. They are a dull, vain crew. Among the few most notable exceptions is [238] Frederic Austin, a man with a temperament so refined, with a nature so retiring, that it is a constant source of wonder to me that he should be where he now is—in the front rank of vocalists.
Years ago Ernest Newman said to me:
“Frederic Austin has become a fine singer through sheer brain-work. He always had temperament, but his voice was never in the least remarkable until by ingenious training, by constant thought, and by the most arduous labour he developed it until it became an organ of sufficient strength and richness to enable him to interpret anything that appeals to him.”
He is, I think, the only eminent singer in this country who is a distinguished composer. But perhaps the most remarkable thing about him is that you might very easily pass days in his company without guessing that he is a famous singer, for his personality suggests qualities that famous singers seldom possess. He is distingué, austere, and devoted to his art.