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The passion was carried to its utmost point, but never torn to tatters, the freest use of tempo rubato permitted, but always within the limits of the most just regulation." In 1843 Ole Bull found his way to these shores, and in the following year both Vieuxtemps and Artot were giving concerts in New York.
Herwig, Nagel, Wallace, Artot, and De Bériot can only 'play second fiddle' to this king of the violin. His entrance upon the stage is remarkably modest, and after the Parisian graces of Artot seems a little awkward; a tip of his bow brings a crash from the orchestra.
To go back a bit in our composer's life story, to an affair of the heart which he experienced in 1868. He became engaged to the well-known singer Désirée Artôt; the affair never went further, for what reason is not known. He was not yet thirty, impressionable and intense. Later on, in the year 1877, at the age of thirty-seven, he became a married man.
In 1820 Robrechts returned to Brussels, where he was elected first violin solo to the king, Wil-helm I. It was shortly after this that De Bériot took lessons from him, and he it was who gave him the letter of introduction to Viotti. The same excellent professor also gave instructions to the young Artot. He died in 1860, the last direct representative of the great Viotti school.
And in any case, how shall we explain the influence of music in the life of Wagner's rival for supremacy, Johannes Brahms, a confirmed bachelor; or his other contemporary, Tschaikovski, who, after a normal love affair with a singer, Desirée Artôt, who jilted him, eventually married a girl by whom he seemed to have been deeply loved, without feeling any return?
He now went through Finland and so on to Sweden and Norway, where he was fêted. Although closely followed by Vieuxtemps and Artot, Ole Bull was the first celebrated violinist to visit America, and in 1843 he made his first trip, landing in Boston in November of that year and proceeding directly to New York, playing for the first time on Evacuation Day.
Ole Bull's quiet, rapt manner is the full remembrance of that land which he has seen, and which he unfolds to us is always the character and expression of the deepest insight. Monday evening I could not hear Vieuxtemps, but went on Tuesday to hear C. Damoreau and Artot.
The former, with the smallest voice, sings pleasantly from her wonderful cultivation, of which, however, the technicalities, so to say, are too much obtruded. She shakes through all her songs, and this power, which would render her plain singing so sure and pleasing, demands attention for itself, not because it improves the tone of the singing. Artot is an elegant artist.
A kind of triangular duel took place, for the admirers of Artot and Vieuxtemps, who were chiefly the French residents of the city, endeavoured to belittle the capabilities of Ole Bull, who nevertheless appears to have been very successful, and if anything, to have benefited by the competition.
There had come to the Moscow opera a Belgian singer, Désirée Artôt, who was then thirty-three years old, a woman whose pictures make her nearly beautiful, and who is recorded as a queen of grace and a queen of dramatic and lyric song. She was witty and magnetic, and Peter Iljitsch, five years her junior, like another Chopin and another Mary's lamb, followed her about.
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