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Walter Damrosch in 1920 Afternoon coffee in the Damrosch Home, Breslau, 1867 Doctor Leopold Damrosch and his son Walter at eighteen years of age Lilli Lehmann as Isolde Mathilde Marchesi Nellie Melba Camille Saint-Sa?ns and Walter Damrosch Lieutenant Walker Blaine Beale Fritz Kreisler, Harold Bauer, Pablo Casals, and Walter Damrosch

My Musical Life

CHILDHOOD--1866-1875

I am an American musician and have lived in this country since my ninth year. I was born in Breslau, Silesia, on January 30, 1862, and my first memories are connected with war, the Austro-Prussian War of 1866. I was four years old and remember being with my mother in a room in our apartment in Breslau, which was filled with flowers and growing plants and various friends coming in to condole with her over the death of my baby brother, Hans, who had died of cholera, which was then raging in Breslau. The second child of my parents, born in 1860, had been christened Richard, after Richard Wagner, who had officiated as godfather at the ceremony. This child lived but a short time, and Wagner had vowed that he would never again stand as godfather for the children of any of his friends, as the ill luck which had pursued him all his life was thus carried even into their families.

In order to safeguard the rest of her children from the danger of the dread disease to which little Hans had succumbed, my mother took my older brother, Frank, myself, and a baby sister into the country near the Bohemian frontier, where the war was being fought. I can remember my brother and myself standing at a country road, each armed with a huge bouquet of flowers we had gathered, and watching for General Steinmetz and his army to pass on their way to the front. As they marched by, my brother bravely ran to one of the officers and gave him his flowers, but my courage gave out and I threw my bouquet so that it fell on the ground, from which one of the soldiers smilingly picked it up and stuck it on his bayonet. That same afternoon Frank and I lay on the ground with our ears closely pressed to it and we could plainly hear the booming of the cannon.

When peace was declared, King William of Prussia together with Crown Prince Frederick, Bismarck, Moltke, and a brilliant retinue of officers, made their triumphant entry into Breslau on horseback. My brother and I watched this gorgeous sight with delighted eyes from the balcony of our apartment. My mother threw a wreath, which fell on the neck of the horse carrying King William and he, looking up, saluted her.

Musical conditions when my father first came to Breslau in 1858, immediately after his marriage, were miserable enough, and it was not until he founded, together with some musical enthusiasts, the "Breslau Orchester Verein" that a regular symphonic orchestra was established with a series of subscription concerts. All the great artists of the day came to Breslau to take part in these concerts, and generally they stayed at our house, although our quarters were very simple--Liszt, Wagner, von B?low, Clara Schumann, Tausig, Joachim, Auer, Haenselt, Rubinstein. Some of them I can remember vaguely, but of course many stories and anecdotes were current in the family regarding their visits.

When Tausig, Liszt's greatest piano pupil, spent a night in our house, the bed in the guest-room broke down in the middle of the night and he calmly arranged his mattress on the floor and continued his slumbers. But his visit was connected in my brother's and my mind particularly with a certain apple pudding which he adored and which my mother always baked especially for him, so that it became known in our family as the "Tausigsche Apfel-Speise." It was a luscious mixture of apples, raisins, and almonds incased in a delicate, light pie-crust.

My father and Tausig would sometimes engage in the most violent discussions on musical or philosophical topics, and the latter would often become so enraged that he would rush out of the house, vowing he would never return. Then he would run around the block and come back in five minutes, smiling and saying, "Come, Damrosch, let us play a Beethoven Sonata together," and all would be well.

When Joachim arrived he found a large

"WILLKOMMEN HERR JOACHIM"

in green leaves over the door of our music-room, carefully arranged by my brother and myself. We adored him because he loved children and would cut all manner of wonderful figures out of paper for us.

Liszt came on especially to officiate as godfather at the christening of my older brother, Frank , who was named after him, but, as I was not born at the time, my memory of it is not very vivid.

Once when Hans von B?low arrived for dinner, my mother herself had roasted a hare in his honor. To her despair she discovered at table that she had seasoned it with sugar instead of salt, but B?low, perfect gentleman that he was, asked for a second helping, insisting that sugar always improved roast hare immensely.

In the winter there was always skating on the Oder, and I remember, aged seven or eight, being given money to buy a ticket of admission and to skate to my heart's content. Part of this ticket had to be retained and given up on leaving the ice. Of course I lost this ticket and being refused egress by the uniformed attendant, I dismally skated about for hours, becoming more and more frightened as the sun went down and the river became more and more deserted. I thought I would have to remain there for the rest of my young life, and it was a very tear-stained and miserable little boy who ran toward the dear Tante Marie who, having become anxious at my absence, had come to see where I was and who released me, by payment for another ticket, from my dreadful imprisonment.

Tante Marie is a younger sister of my mother's who came to live with us at the age of sixteen and who became my mother's closest helper during many years of storm and stress, whose gentle and patient self-sacrifice have never failed her and who, thank God, is still living and as wonderful as ever, the last link with that dim past of long ago.

I think I was somewhat afraid of my father in those days. He was rather stern and taciturn. Life was hard and the struggle for existence difficult. He was somewhat severe about my studies and as those were the days when whipping children for naughtiness was considered an essential of their education, I received my share of such punishment. In fact, sometimes I was whipped in school and then had to take my school report home to my father and he would perhaps repeat the dose. But with all that I was very proud of him and used to enjoy trotting by his side along the promenade on the banks of the Oder, because so many people would take off their hats to him deferentially as he passed.

He also gave us children a good deal of his time in reading to us books that would stimulate our imaginations and cultivate our instincts for the beautiful--Grimm's and Andersen's "Fairy Tales," the "Arabian Nights," and some of the parables from the New Testament.

But whenever I was sent supperless to bed or confined to my room for some misdeed, it was always mother who would comfort me and perhaps bring me a plate of soup or dessert secretly and talk to me gently until my obstinacy would melt and I would be ready to knock at my father's study and ask his forgiveness. Once I did not dare, but instead drew a picture of myself standing penitently at his door and underneath the words: "Seven times seventy times shalt thou forgive." This I shoved under the door into his study and it produced the desired effect, as it brought my father out and in a very forgiving mood.

One of my sins was that I simply could not bear to eat spinach, and as in those days it was considered the absolute duty of a child to eat anything that was put before him because "God had grown the spinach and other vegetables in order to feed hungry children," and "there were thousands of poor little children who would be only too glad to eat spinach," I was forced to eat it although it often choked me and made me ill. Even to this day I cannot bear spinach, and with all the reverence and deep affection that I have for my father, I do not think he was right in this particular case as regards his pedagogic theories.

The following excerpts from letters of von B?low throw an interesting light on the conditions under which my father worked in Breslau at that time.

. . . Anticipating Liszt's promise I have sent the score of his "Ideale" to Damrosch who will have the parts copied and get the work to his public already during this month. If we could only have a half dozen soldiers like Damrosch at our disposal! . . .

. . . A propos! Please fix Damrosch's honorarium as high as possible. He needs it. In order to recompense him the better, I do not desire any violoncellist. I had arranged with him in your name for eight Louis d'or. You had authorized me to give as high as ten for Laub. Damrosch is Laub + 1/2 . . . .

Laub was a distinguished violinist living in Berlin.

. . . Your piano and violin sonata I am to play in Leipsig. Laub and Singer are afraid of the Gewandhaus and are not keen about it, so I don't yet know whom I am to serve as accompanist. Damrosch, with whom I played the composition six weeks ago, conceives it according to my views quite exceptionally. The adagio, for instance, he plays far more beautifully than Laub. Very likely we shall turn to him. . . .

In 1870 the papers were filled with accounts of "the outrageous insult of King William by the French ambassador, Benedetti," and the hostile attitude of Emperor Napoleon the Third. War was declared and of course we boys immediately began to indulge in imitations of the military drill of the soldiers of our city. The most exciting and welcome news to me at the time was that my piano teacher had been drafted and I had high hopes of not having to continue to undergo the dreary necessity of daily finger exercises, but alas, my hopes were rudely dashed to the ground when a bald-headed substitute appeared to continue the lessons.

Soon the trains were coming in, bringing the wounded, and the French prisoners, among whom the dark-skinned Zouaves and Turks especially excited our interest. We looked with envy at the older boys of our school who, having studied French, used to go up to the French officers and ask them whether there was anything they could do for them.

The war ended and my young piano teacher returned, resplendent in his uniform with shining brass buttons, in which he paid his first ceremonial visit to my father and mother. My mother, wishing to put him at his ease, asked him to tell something of his experiences in the war, but he was not very articulate. Yes, he had been at the beleaguering and capitulation of Metz.

"How wonderful," said my mother, "and what happened to you there?"

"Oh, well, they--they--shot at us."

And that was all we could get out of him.

In the meanwhile my father had become more and more discontented with musical, social, and political conditions in Breslau. He was really a Republican at heart and the Prussian bureaucracy, which had become more and more accentuated by the war, irked and angered him. With greatest difficulty he could make a bare living for his family, and he found the population of Breslau, except a small band of devoted followers, steeped in materialism and not particularly sympathetic toward art, especially the modern German composers.

In 1871 my father received an invitation through Edward Schubert, the music publisher of New York, to come to America as conductor of the Arion Society, and while this opening was small enough, it seemed to offer him an opportunity through which better and bigger things might develop and under conditions more free than were possible in Germany at that time. He therefore determined, at forty years of age, to take the plunge and to precede his family to America in order to find out whether a living and a new career might be made possible in the New World. The Arion Society occupied an honorable position in the social and musical life of the Germans living in New York.

I can remember his farewell concert, in Breslau, at which he performed Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. There were laurel wreaths, and chorus ladies in white, and there was a general atmosphere of enthusiasm and of many tears, but my memories are connected particularly with my astonishment at seeing my teacher of arithmetic whom I hated, suddenly stand up in the middle of the parquet during the intermission and ogle the ladies with a pair of opera-glasses. It had never entered my childish mind until then that a horrible school-teacher could be a man like other men in private life.

A very tragic happening was that one of my suspenders burst during the Ninth Symphony, and for the rest of the performance I was in mortal fear that my trousers might not "stay put."

After my father's departure we children, of course, played nothing but sailing off on a ship, again principally by aid of the parlor and dining-room furniture. We read "Robinson Crusoe" and enacted its chapters with great satisfaction to ourselves. It was all good fun to us, but the anguish of parting from the country in which they had grown up and lived for so many years, and the dread of the unknown in a strange land, must have been terrible for my father and mother.

When we arrived in New York we found my father anxiously pacing the wharf where he had been waiting, since early morning, for eight hours, to take us in a carriage from Hoboken to a house in East 35th Street which he had rented and furnished completely from top to bottom as a surprise for my mother. The hot and cold water on every floor, the gas and the carpets were a revelation to us, as these modern conveniences were hardly known in Breslau at that time. My youngest sister, Elizabeth , was born in this house.

My brother and I were immediately put into the primary department of Public School No. 40 in East 23d Street, and as we did not know a word of English we were entered in the lowest class, although I had already been in the Sexta of the Gymnasium and my brother in the Quarta, and I had studied Latin and he both Latin and Greek. But we dutifully spelled out CAT, DOG, etc., until after a few weeks of this we were promoted, and so these promotions went on with lightning rapidity until we had acquired English and could enter a class more appropriate to our years, nine and twelve respectively.

I continued my studies of piano under an old teacher, Jean Vogt by name, and after his return to Germany I studied with Pruckner, von Inten, Max Pinner, and Boeckelman. The last, feeling that I could not raise my fingers high enough from the knuckles, gave me a machine of steel springs which, through rings attached to the fingers, were to lift them higher than nature would permit. Unfortunately this contrivance brought about a weakness in the third finger of my right hand from which I have never quite recovered and which unfortunately, or fortunately, has prevented me from becoming a professional piano virtuoso. But I had acquired a good technic and a singing quality of tone which served me well years after when I began to give recitals at the piano on the Wagnerian music-dramas, at which I played the orchestral part on the piano while I recited the text and explained the various musical motifs and their relation to the text.

My first appearance in an orchestra was, I am sorry to say, a rank failure. I was only a boy of fourteen years and my father had prepared a charming operetta of Schubert's, "Der H?usliche Krieg," for a "Summer Night's Festival" of the Arion Society. In this occurs a delightful March of the Crusaders with one loud clash of the cymbals at the climax. It did not seem worth while to engage a musician at "full union rates" for this clash and I was, therefore, intrusted with it. At rehearsals I counted my bars rest and watched for my cue with such perfection that the cymbals resounded with great success at the proper time and in the proper manner, but at the performance, alas, a great nervousness fell upon me and as the march proceeded and came nearer and nearer the crucial moment, my hand seemed paralyzed, and when my father's flashing eye indicated to me that the moment had come, I simply could not seem to lift the cymbals which suddenly weighed like a hundred tons. The march went on but I felt that the entire evening had been ruined by me and that every one in the audience must know that I had "funked it." As soon as I could I slipped out of the orchestra pit underneath the stage and into the dark night, feeling that life had no joy left for me. I could not bear to hear the rest of the opera or to meet my father's reproachful eye.

BAYREUTH IN 1876--MY DOLL'S THEATRE

In the summer of 1876 Wagner inaugurated the Bayreuth Theatre with the first production of his great "Nibelungen Trilogy." All the old friends and the musicians who had been in the forefront of the fight in the early days when Wagner's genius was not generally recognized, gathered there from far and near in order to be present at what was destined to be a magnificent demonstration of the final triumph of the cause.

My father, naturally, was keen to be there and to rejoice with his old colleagues. He had not returned to Germany since he had left it in 1871 to found a home for his family in the New World. He had never regretted this step, but many bonds of sentiment and many old friends drew him to Europe. Alas, he had no money for such a trip and there seemed no way of obtaining it. There was a lottery formed by a few Wagner enthusiasts the proceeds of which should go to the Bayreuth Fund. The winner of the lucky number was to receive a ticket for the first performance, and my father bought a number, but of course he did not win, and there was the price of the steamship passage to pay and the expenses of maintenance in Europe besides. In his despair he told his old friend Schirmer, the New York music publisher, of his distress and Schirmer immediately said:

"Doctor, you simply must go, and here is a loan of five hundred dollars, which you can repay me whenever you can afford it."

This visit, the reunion with Wagner, Liszt, Raff, Lassen, Porges, and hosts of other old friends, together with all the marvels of the first production of the "Nibelungen Trilogy," refreshed my father immensely in body and spirit, and when he returned home and recounted to us all the glories of the trip, I fairly ached with the joy of it and immediately proceeded to spend all my pocket money in the making of a very remarkable doll's theatre about three feet wide and equally high in order to produce Wagner myself. I painted all the scenery and the actor dolls for it, and had the most brilliant lighting effects and a curtain that went up and down with a perfection not always witnessed even on the real stage.

As I had some talent for painting and had attended the drawing classes at Cooper Union, I knew something of colors and perspective and delighted especially in designing interiors of palaces with dozens of pillars which, beginning in large size at the proscenium, would dwindle down to the smallest pillarets, gradually lost in the dim distances, so that my palaces always looked as if they were miles long.

My fellow director was my boy friend, Gustav Schirmer, son of the publisher, and our first production was, of course, a Wagner music drama. Gustav's mother was an enthusiastic Wagnerite who eventually spent much of her life in Bayreuth and Weimar. "Rhinegold" seemed to me especially fitted for our theatre as it offered almost boundless scenic opportunities. The effect of water in the first scene which is supposed to depict the depths of the Rhine, I achieved very successfully by several alternate curtains of blue and green gauze, and behind the rocky reef in the centre of this scene a gas-burner was very cleverly hidden, the light of which, as it gradually increased in strength, brilliantly simulated the awakening of the "Rhinegold."

The united children of the Schirmer and Damrosch families together with their elders constituted the audience. The children paid fifty cents admission, but both Gustav and I permitted our respective parents to contribute as much above that as their generosity would permit, and we looked on it as very much the same kind of a subvention as the king of Bavaria had allowed Wagner at Bayreuth.

The theatre had been very cleverly placed in the doorway between two rooms, but as the piano was in the same room where the audience sat, I had to rush backward and forward continually. For instance, when Gustav pulled the curtain to disclose the depths of the Rhine, I played the Rhine music, then would creep back under the table on which the theatre was placed and help him manipulate the Rhine Maidens. Then I would rush back again to play the music accompanying the awakening of the Gold and so on until the change of scene when, as the rising sun shines upon the mighty walls of Walhalla, I would reproduce the stately harmonies of the Walhalla motive.

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