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Neither his character nor his playing was of such a nature as to appeal to the great mass of people in the way in which Remenyi and Ole Bull won their hearts. Wilhelmj was massive in person and in tone. He stood for dignity in his actions, appearance, and playing, and was honoured by the more cultivated and educated portion of the people.
I have used them in certain passages of my arrangement of 'Deep River, but when I heard them played, promised myself I would never repeat the experiment. Wilhelmj has committed even a worse crime in taste by putting six long bars of Schubert's lovely Ave Maria in octaves. Of course they represent skill; but I think they are only justified in show pieces.
There are doubtless many who remember the tour of August Wilhelmj, the celebrated violinist, who visited the United States about twenty years ago. He was considered second to no artist then living in his general command over the resources of his instrument, and he excelled in the purity and volume of his tone, no less than in the brilliancy of his execution.
In temperament he is quick and somewhat impatient. He expects much of his pupils, and is the very opposite of the painstaking, phlegmatic Wilhelmj. In 1896 M. Sauret again visited the United States, when it was admitted by those who had heard him twenty years before that he had grown to a consummate and astounding virtuoso. His tone was firm, pure, and beautiful, though not large.
In August Wilhelmj, once hailed by Henrietta Sontag as the coming Paganini, Richard Wagner saw "Volker the Fiddler living anew, until death a warrior true." So he wrote in a dedicatory verse beneath a portrait of himself, presented to "Volker-Wilhelmj as a souvenir of the first Baireuth festival."
The summer now brought more visitors into our neighbourhood, and amongst them several of my acquaintances. David, the Leipzig concert director, called on me with his young pupil, August Wilhelmj, the son of a Wiesbaden lawyer.
The high esteem in which he has been held was quaintly expressed by an eminent musician, who referred to his decadence in these words: "Ah, if Wilhelmj had not been what he is, Joachim would never have been what he is." By which one may infer that Wilhelmj was, in some respects, a greater man than Joachim. In 1894 Wilhelmj married Marcella Mausch-Jerret, of Dresden, a distinguished pianist.
But one day I happened to read a few lines reprinted in the Metronome from some European source, which quoted Wilhelmj as saying that Emanuel Wirth, Joachim's first assistant at the Berlin Hochschule, 'was the best teacher of his generation. This was enough for me: feeling that the best could be none too good, I made up my mind to go to him. And I did.
When Remenyi visited the United States in 1878, he arrived a few weeks after Wilhelmj, and notwithstanding the fact that the two violinists were widely different in temperament, ideas, musicianship, in fact in every particular, they were frequently made the subjects of comparison. At this time Remenyi played an "Otello Fantaisie," "Suwanee River," "Grandfather's Clock," etc.
Most of the orchestra, headed by Wilhelmj, had slaved without payment that there might be no deficiencies in their department. The stage machinery, crude though it seems to us nowadays when we read of it, was on all sides reckoned marvellous. Interminable rehearsals had been held, Wagner supervising them all.
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