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THEY KNEW. Oh, for more students in these days with the genuine thirst for real musical knowledge, and not merely with the desire to make a superficial exhibition at the keyboard! I am told that some teachers lay a great deal of stress upon the necessity for the pupil learning the source of the composer's inspiration. This is interesting, of course, and may help to stimulate a dull imagination.
Daniel Brewster, played a prelude, and began to sing in a weak, high, composer's voice. All composers sing exactly alike, and they have to be heard to be believed. "One night a young man wandered through the glitter of Broadway: His money he had squandered. For a meal he couldn't pay." "Tough luck!" murmured Archie, sympathetically.
His orchestration is distinguished by its clarity, power and exquisite coloring. The orchestral music of Tschaikowsky, who died in 1893, symphonies and symphonic poems, are saturated with the glowing Russian spirit, are intensely dramatic, sometimes rising to tempestuous bursts of passion that are only held in check by the composer's scholarly control of his materials.
Leopold Auer, for instance, is one of the most careful, exact and practical of editors, and the fact is worth dwelling on since sometimes the great artist or teacher quite naturally forgets that those for whom he is editing a composition have neither his knowledge nor resources. Auer never loses sight of the composer's own ideas.
They grasp the composer's ideas quickly enough, it is true, so that sometimes in a few days, they can take up a difficult composition and clash it off with such showy effect as to blind the eyes of the superficial listener; but these students are not willing to work out the fine points of the piece and polish it artistically.
That Lenz should misdate Beethoven's visit to Berlin is not strange; that Marx, a Berliner, should, is. Nor is it remarkable that Lenz knows nothing of Beethoven's years of service as member of the Electoral orchestra at Bonn; but how Marx should have overlooked it, in case he has made any researches into the composer's early history, is beyond our comprehension.
Altogether the work is more than adroit musical composition. It is a prairie-fire of patriotism. L.A. Coerne. A grand opera by an American on an American subject is an achievement to look forward to. Though I have not seen this opera, called "A Woman of Marblehead," it is safe to predict, from a study of its composer's other works, that it is a thing of merit.
The flute, bass clarinet, and violoncello were so cleverly handled that the colour of the doleful verse was enhanced, the mood expanded; perhaps the Hebraic strain in the composer's blood has endowed him with the gift of expressing sorrow and desolation and the abomination of living.
All of them have been edited to death, reduced to the commonplace by vulgar methods of performance, but are altogether sprightly, delightful specimens of the composer's careless, vagrant and happy moods. Kullak utters words of warning to the "unquiet" sex regarding the habitual neglect of the bass. It should mean something in valse tempo, but it usually does not.
Experience shows conclusively that the most powerful stimulant of the composer's brain is the possession of a really poetic and dramatic text. To take only one instance it surely cannot be a mere coincidence that the best works of four great composers Spohr, Berlioz, Gounod, and Schumann, are based on the story of "Faust."
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