Read Ebook: My Musical Life by Damrosch Walter

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Ebook has 873 lines and 115792 words, and 18 pages

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.

As I look back on it now, it must have been an absolutely crazy performance, but the audience was hugely delighted and contributed so liberally that my co-director and I had a surplus with which to begin preparations for another play.

Some parents on reading this may think that all this was a huge waste of time, but I cannot agree with them. Quite apart from the fact that it taught me a good deal in the use of the brush, it was a great stimulus to the imagination and a welcome outlet for the desire all children have to live in a make-believe world of fancy. At any rate, Gustav Schirmer and I can claim that we were the first to produce Wagner's "Rhinegold" in America, and it is possible that this was the germ for my decision eighteen years later to form the Damrosch Opera Company solely for the purpose of producing Wagner throughout America.

The dolls' theatre was, however, not my only diversion from my school and musical studies.

At one Christmas my father and mother gave me a very complete tool chest, with which I fashioned, among other things, a dolls' house for my sisters and quite a little fleet of boats. I remember one three-master, about three feet in length, the wood for which I obtained from a foreman at the Steinway piano factory, then situated on Park Avenue. This three-master with all sails set won several races for me on the pond in Central Park.

In those days, Central Park was considered very far uptown, and where now the palaces of millionaires flank its borders, Irish squatters lived in improvised huts around which goats would gain a meagre livelihood from the rocks stretching on all sides. These squatters established a kind of lien on the land, which I believe was recognized as having some legal force when the property became more and more valuable and the owners began to grade the land for residential purposes.

Just as in the early days in Breslau, we continued to celebrate Christmas Eve in America in the good old fashion. Weeks before, a delicious atmosphere of mystery and secrecy began to envelop every member of the family. The "front parlor" became taboo for us children. Packages began to arrive and were stored there. The Christmas tree, which was always carefully chosen by my mother and which, according to old regulations, had to touch the ceiling with its top, was brought in in the evening after we had been carefully "shooed" upstairs into our respective bedrooms.

Dozens of sheets of gold and silver paper were cut by us into glittering garlands for the tree and we were, of course, expected to present our parents on Christmas eve with something fashioned by our own hands, or to be able to recite a poem or play a new piano solo. Of all this they were supposed to know nothing until the great day arrived, although they must have heard our dreary practising of it for weeks before.

The celebration was held on Christmas eve, before supper. My father and mother would disappear into the forbidden room to light the hundred candles on the tree and put the last touches on the heaps of presents. Then my father would play a march on the piano and we would all troop in and stand breathless before the tree so beautifully illuminated by the gentle light of the candles. Our presents would, of course, consist mainly of necessities in clothing and underclothing, shoes, etc., which we would have received anyhow, but which gained an added glow because of the occasion. But there were always books, and the tree was crowded with cakes and candies and gay-colored paper flowers and there were toys and joyous singing of Christmas songs and hymns around the tree. Then would come a delicious supper, accompanied by a cup of which Rhine wine and sliced pineapples were the constituent parts.

After supper we children had to recite our verses or play our piano solos, and, alas, these exhibitions sometimes ended in tears, as the exciting events that preceded this contribution to the festivities sometimes blunted our memories and we would get "stuck" in the middle. Then we would cast a frightened glance at my father, who would, perhaps, look rather serious until mother's smile or some joking remark would put him and us in good humor again.

Those wonderful Christmas celebrations of my childhood continued into my married life. Then when my children came, besides participating in my mother's tree, we tried, my wife and I, to bring into our own home on this beautiful day a kind of festive celebration which should pass on to our children and friends that which my father and mother and Tante Marie had so freely given to me.

We have had some wonderfully jolly Christmases. My four children and their cousin, Walker Blaine Beale, took on themselves the loving burden of our entertainment. A play was sometimes written or charades improvised, for which upstairs closets were ransacked for costumes and other paraphernalia in such haste and amid such ruthless confusion that Minna, our old Swedish nurse, who has been in our family since the birth of my oldest daughter, would often throw up her hands in horror at the bedrooms, which indeed looked as if a tornado had swept over them. I remember a delicious take-off on "Pell?as et M?lisande" which my oldest daughter, Alice, wrote. I had given a number of lecture recitals on the opera the previous season and it was much in the family mind. Then another year a drama on "The North Pole" was written. This was just after the dispute between Peary and Cook as to the discovery of the pole. There was a real shiver when we were heralded back to our transformed parlor. The Christmas tree had quickly become a lonely pine outlined against bleak areas of farthest north cotton sheets, stretching in all directions over "hummocks" of sofas and chairs. Our five children, for Walker seemed as much our very own in these celebrations as my own four girls, gave us a wonderfully spirited drama of the conquest of the polar regions!

I can see and hear dear David Bispham laugh, my old friends Doctor and Mrs. George Harris's enthusiasm, Margaret Anglin, Julie Faversham. . . . Our happy, happy Christmases!

The last Christmas party at our home was that of 1916. Then in 1917 Walker was training at Camp Dix and we all went out with his mother and spent Christmas Day at an inn near by to which he could come. There was a rumor everywhere that his regiment was to embark for overseas in a few days, although he really did not sail until May. We all did our best to make it gay in that hotel dining-room, the rain falling dismally. We were so proud of our young khaki-uniformed lieutenant! My Polly played and played, rags, anything and everything, on the old hotel piano. We did not know it was to be our last happy Christmas together, but war had already given to joy a kind of yearning anguish.

My nephew was killed the 18th of the following September, 1918, at Saint-Mihiel. Reconnoitring to assure the safety of his men, he leaped a fence to join three fellow officers. A shell tore them to pieces. This was in the early afternoon. Walker was taken to a field hospital and died at eleven that night.

We know that he did not suffer very much, and we think we know that he never understood how severely he was wounded, that he never knew that what, as a soldier, he so freely offered had been accepted.

He was his grandfather's, Mr. Blaine's, youngest grandson, only twenty-two, his mother's only son, our brightest and best.

There is no day we do not think of him, but Christmas, the day of giving, is his own especial day.

FOUNDING OF THE SYMPHONY AND ORATORIO SOCIETIES OF NEW YORK

In 1873 Anton Rubinstein, greatest of Russian pianists, accompanied by the violinist Wieniawski, came to America by invitation of Steinway and Sons. He dined at our house and expressed wonder that my father had not yet been able to achieve a position in New York commensurate with his reputation and capacity. My father explained to him how difficult the situation was and that the entire orchestral field was monopolized by Theodore Thomas. He told Rubinstein that when he had first arrived in New York he had met Thomas at the music store of Edward Schubert in Union Square and that after the introduction Thomas had said to him:

"I hear, Doctor Damrosch, that you are a very fine musician, but I want to tell you one thing: whoever crosses my path I crush."

Thomas at that time really believed that America was not large enough to contain more than one orchestra, but he lived long enough to see my father surpass him at the head of a symphony orchestra, as founder of the first great music festival in New York and, above all, of opera in German at the Metropolitan.

In 1881 the first symphony orchestra on a permanent basis had been founded in Boston by Major Higginson, and before Thomas's death there were half a dozen great subsidized orchestras actively operating in the United States, a number which has since then increased to twelve.

Rubinstein said to my father: "Why don't you begin by founding an oratorio society, and that will lead to other things?"

My father consulted a few devoted friends, and the Oratorio Society of New York was accordingly founded in 1873 and began rehearsals in the Trinity Chapel with a chorus of about eighteen singers, my mother's glorious voice leading the sopranos and my very humble and little self among the altos. The first performance took place in the warerooms of the Knabe Piano Company the following winter, at which time the chorus had increased to sixty singers. The programme was a remarkable one for that period, containing a capella chorus and accompanied choruses by Bach, Mozart, Handel, Palestrina, and Mendelssohn.

From this small beginning the society developed until it became the foremost representative of choral music in New York, performing, with a chorus of three hundred and fifty voices, under my father's direction, the older oratorios of Handel, Haydn, and Mendelssohn, and such novelties as the first part of "Christus" by Liszt, the Berlioz "Requiem" and "Damnation of Faust," the Brahms "Requiem," Cowen's "St. Ursula," the choral finale from the first act of "Parsifal," and the third act of "Meistersinger."

Indirectly, but logically, the founding of the Oratorio Society led to the founding of the Symphony Society of New York in 1877, which at last gave my father an orchestra with which he could demonstrate his abilities as a symphonic conductor.

Both conductors had their violent partisans, and, as they were at that time literally the only orchestral conductors in America, feeling ran very high. My father was the last comer, and Thomas was well fortified in the field, with a group of wealthy men to support him. The first years for my father were very hard and a portion of the New York papers assailed him bitterly, continuously, and with vindictive enmity. Again and again dreams of murder would fill my boyish heart when I would read one of these attacks in the morning paper.

It was hard work to keep the two societies going and to enable them to meet the bills for hall rent, soloists, and orchestra. There was as yet but a small public for the higher forms of music, and again and again it looked as if further efforts would have to be abandoned. But my father persevered and struggled on, making a living for his family by teaching violin, composition, and singing, and occasionally getting a fee of "a hundred dollars in gold" as violin soloist or in a chamber-music concert, officiating as musical director in a church and as conductor of the German male choral society, the Arion.

The first production of Symphony No. 1, in C minor, by Brahms became a subject of intense rivalry between the two conductors. Brahms had waited until his fortieth year before writing a symphony, and the work was eagerly awaited in New York, as the reports from Germany proved that it had made a sensation.

My father went to see old Gustav Schirmer at his store on Broadway and asked him whether the orchestral score of this work had yet arrived. Schirmer told him that it had, but that he was in honor bound to give it to Theodore Thomas as he had promised it to him. My father was very much chagrined to think that this prize should thus have escaped him, and he spoke of this very regretfully to a pupil of his in composition, Mrs. James Neilson, member of an aristocratic old family in New Brunswick, New Jersey, and a woman of great beauty and distinction. Mrs. Neilson said nothing to my father but quietly went down to Schirmer's and inquired of the clerk whether the orchestral score of the Brahms symphony had arrived, and when he answered in the affirmative, she asked whether it was for sale. "Certainly," answered the clerk.

She thereupon purchased a copy of the score and sent it up to my father with her compliments. His astonishment was intense, but she did not tell him until weeks afterward how she had obtained it.

He received the score on a Thursday and the first rehearsal for the next concert was to take place on the following Monday. This left but little time to obtain the necessary orchestral parts and Schirmer naturally would not sell him any. He therefore cut the score into three parts and divided them among three copyists, who worked day and night and managed to have the parts ready in time for the rehearsal. Great was the triumph in the Damrosch camp at this victory over the Thomas forces.

Some years later I gave the first performances in New York of the Third and Fourth Brahms Symphonies, but I had no need to resort to strategem to obtain the scores and orchestral parts.

Orchestral conditions were bad compared with to-day. There was no such thing as a "permanent orchestra." The musicians of the Symphony Society, for instance, played in six symphony concerts during the winter, each preceded by a public rehearsal. They also officiated at four concerts of the Oratorio Society, and this was almost the extent of their efforts in that direction. The rest of the time they made their living by teaching, playing in theatres, at dances, and some of them even at political or military processions and mass meetings. If a better "job" came along than the symphony concert they would simply send my father a substitute. Small wonder that occasionally their lips gave out and the first horn or trumpet would break on an important note during a symphony concert. And yet, in spite of this disheartening condition, my father succeeded in infusing the orchestral players with such emotional intensity, and in imparting so lofty an interpretation to them, that the audiences of that day were often roused to the greatest enthusiasm; and I would tuck my arm very proudly into his as we marched home from a concert, even though we knew that the subscription to the concert was not more than eight hundred dollars and the single sale at the box-office had not reached the hundred dollar mark.

But all this was changed like a flash in the year 1879 when my father decided to perform "The Damnation of Faust," by Berlioz, until then unknown in America. This concert, which was held at Steinway Hall, in East 14th Street, necessitated the services of solo singers, the New York Symphony Orchestra, the chorus of the New York Oratorio Society and the male chorus of the Arion Society.

The work and the performance made a sensation. All New York buzzed with it, and during that winter, 1879, it was given five times in succession to crowded houses, creating an excitement such as New York had never before seen in the concert field.

I played in all these performances at the last stand of the second violins, as my father considered it of the utmost value to me as a future conductor to be able to follow the conductor's beat as one of the orchestra.

AUGUST WILHELMJ--TERESA CARRENO

In the spring of 1878 Maurice Strakosch, an old concert manager, called on my father and asked him whether he would permit me to go on a Southern concert tour with the celebrated violinist, August Wilhelmj, who was then touring the country under Strakosch management. Mr. Max Liebling, his regular accompanist, had been taken ill and as both Wilhelmj and Strakosch knew that I had accompanied my father a great deal at home, they thought that I could acceptably fill the position at such short notice. I was naturally wild with delight at the idea and prevailed on my father to let me go. I was to receive the, for me, munificent salary of a hundred dollars a week and all my railway expenses.

We set forth the following Monday, the company consisting of Wilhelmj, a soprano singer whose name I have forgotten, and Teresa Carreno, who was then already a great pianist and certainly the most beautiful woman I had ever seen.

Wilhelmj, who was exceedingly lazy, refused even to rehearse with me. Our first concert was in Washington and I was to accompany him, among other things, in the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto. I was naturally nervous about it, and to my delighted astonishment, on the afternoon of the concert, Carreno turned on Wilhelmj, reproaching him for not giving me a rehearsal and insisting that rather than put me to such an unfair strain, she would accompany him in the concerto herself. This was a characteristic act of this remarkable artist and woman, and I shall speak more in detail about my immediate adoration for her in another chapter.

At his dinner he treated me somewhat as an older man would a child, and would tell his butler to my great chagrin to only half fill my glass because I was too young to drink as much as the older people. He had several rare vintages of claret standing on the sideboard and some of these I was not allowed even to taste, all for the same reason.

After dinner both Wilhelmj and Carreno played and then the beautiful Mme. de Hagemann, American wife of the Swedish Minister, sang most delightfully. She has since written charming memoirs of her earlier diplomatic life abroad, especially of the Court of Napoleon the Third just before the Franco-Prussian War, entitled "Courts of Memory."

From Washington we went farther and farther South and my young mind was tremendously impressed by its romantic atmosphere, the luxuriant tropical foliage and the lazy, cheerful life of the "niggers" swarming everywhere.

At Macon, Georgia, Wilhelmj and I stopped at an old ramshackle hotel in two rooms en suite. We did not wake up until about eleven o'clock the following morning, feeling very heavy and headachy, and on examination found our trunks rifled of whatever valuables they contained. We had evidently been chloroformed. A burly detective was engaged by Wilhelmj to take charge of the case, but of course nothing happened except that Wilhelmj and I purchased revolvers. His was very large and mine very small and this is about the only weapon that I ever acquired, and of course never used.

New Orleans was a real revelation. It was then still an absolutely French city. I was invited to dinner at several delightful Creole families and French was the language at table. The old Creole restaurants were at the height of their glory, and such delicious crabs, pompano, and shrimps I had never eaten before. Alas, their nice sanded floors have been replaced by dancing parquets, and noisy ragtime bands and wretched cooking are but poor substitutes for their past glories.

THE MUSIC FESTIVAL OF 1881

During the summer of 1880 my father conceived the idea of giving a monster music festival in May, 1881, which was to last a week and for which a chorus of one thousand two hundred, of which the Oratorio Society should be the nucleus, was to be trained in sections during the entire winter. He conferred with some of his friends, outlined his project to them, and a Music Festival Association composed of the directors of his Symphony and Oratorio Societies was formed. Other prominent New York citizens were added and a guarantee fund was provided, ample to protect the project financially.

Although I was only eighteen, my father deemed sufficiently advanced to intrust the drilling of a great portion of this chorus to me, a confidence of which I was very proud.

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