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Anton Seidl crossed the Atlantic to conduct it and other of Wagner's operas. We had come to regard it as a pretty opera an opera full of an individual, strange, indefinable sweetness; but Mr. Anton Seidl came all the way from New York city to show us how out of sweetness can come forth strength. Mr.
Very thorough was the foreign training of Carl V. Lachmund, whose "Japanese Overture" has been produced under the direction of Thomas and Seidl, in the former case at a concert of that society at which many important native works have had their only hearing, the Music Teachers' National Association. Lachmund was born at Booneville, Mo., in 1854.
Very recently men hitherto blameless, like Andreas Weinzierl and Georg Seidl, had sent their eighteen-year-old sons to the University of Wittenberg, where the Lutheran heresies were flourishing most luxuriantly. But the worst of all was that even faithful sons and daughters of Holy Church could not keep themselves wholly untouched by such mischief.
Those who go to such places flatter themselves that they are getting into literary circles and improving their minds, especially if a popular magazinist or the son of some great author can be persuaded to read one of his rejected articles or to make a few remarks now and then. Then there is the musical dodge on the drawing-room scale, or by wholesale, like the Seidl Society, for example.
One of the traits to which he owes his great success as a Wagner conductor is his instinctive perception of what parts can be omitted with the minimum of injury to the work he is interpreting. Except at Bayreuth, Wagner's later works did not especially prosper at first, because they were either too long or injudiciously cut. Herr Seidl, however, succeeded with them everywhere.
Alvary spent a whole year in learning this rôle, availing himself of the hints given him by Herr Seidl, who has the Wagnerian traditions by heart; and to-day he might, if he felt so inclined, amass wealth and win honor by travelling about Europe and singing nothing but this one rôle. Vienna and Brussels made strenuous efforts to entice him away from New York after his great success as Siegfried.
Seidl was a Wagner conductor of the older type, and with some of the faults of that type; he knew little or nothing of the improvements in the manner of interpreting Wagner's music effected by Mottl, Levi, and that stupendous creature Siegfried Wagner; he was a survival of the first enthusiastic reaction against Italian ways of misdoing things; and he was, if anything, a little too strongly inclined to go a little too far in the opposite direction to the touch-and-go conductors.
Of these works three have been produced with marked success: the "Christmas Overture," at one of the public concerts of the Manuscript Society, under the direction of Walter Damrosch; the overture "Im Frühling," at concerts in Brooklyn and New York, under the baton of Theodore Thomas; and the American overture, "Hail Columbia!" at the Boston Peace Jubilee under Patrick Gilmore, at the Columbian Exposition under Thomas, and in New York under Anton Seidl.
Very recently men hitherto blameless, like Andreas Weinzierl and Georg Seidl, had sent their eighteen-year-old sons to the University of Wittenberg, where the Lutheran heresies were flourishing most luxuriantly. But the worst of all was that even faithful sons and daughters of Holy Church could not keep themselves wholly untouched by such mischief.
As Mr. Henderson records calmly: "We have beheld the curious spectacle of people going, to hear not Beethoven or Wagner, but Nikisch or Seidl." What the conductor is to a performance of orchestral music, the stage-manager is to the performance of a play in the theater.
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