edvard grieg—sir frederick h. cowen—dr hans richter—sir thomas beecham—sir charles santley—landon ronald—frederic austin
very many years have passed since, one cold winter’s afternoon, i met edvard grieg on adolph brodsky’s doorstep. a little figure buried, very deeply buried, in an overcoat at least six inches thick, came down the damp street, paused a minute at the gate, and then, rather hesitatingly, walked up the pathway. he saluted me as he reached the door and we waited together until my summons to those within was answered.
i found him very homely, completely without affectation, childlike, and a little melancholy. he was at that time in indifferent health, and it was at once made evident to me that both grieg himself and those around him—especially mrs brodsky—were very anxious that he should be restored to complete fitness. he said nothing in the least degree noteworthy, but when he did speak he had such a gentle air, a manner so ingratiating and simple, that one found his conversation most unusually pleasant.
ernest newman once called grieg “griegkin,” a most admirable name for this quite first-rate of third-rate composers. his music is diminutive. he could not think largely. he loved country dances, country scenes, the rhythm of homely life, the bounded horizon. even so extended a work as his pianoforte concerto is a series of miniatures. and grieg the man was precisely like 227grieg the artist. he was griegkin in his appearance, his manner, his way of speaking: a little man: a gracious little man. his attitude towards his host and hostess was that of an affectionate child. such dear simplicity is, i think, in the artist found only among men of northern races.
some years later, in an intimate little circle, i was to hear his widow sing and play many of her husband’s songs. she was the feminine counterpart of himself—spirited, a little sad, simple yet wise, frank, and an artist through and through.
. . . . . . . .
a great deal of comedy is lost to the world through lack of historians. it is almost impossible to conceive that sir f. h. cowen should ever have been in serious competition with hans richter: impossible to conceive that half the musical inhabitants of a large city should have been ranged fiercely on sir frederick’s side, and the other half ranged on the side of richter: impossible to conceive that both cowen and richter were candidates for the same post. yet so it was.
sir charles hallé, who had founded and conducted for about half-a-century the famous orchestral concerts in manchester still known by his name, died and left no successor. literally, there was no one to appoint in his place, no one quite good enough. month after month went by, a good many distinguished and semi-distinguished musicians came to manchester and conducted an odd concert or two, but it was very widely felt that no british musician would do. sir frederick cowen, always an earnest and accomplished composer, came for a season or two and did some admirable work, but cowen was not hallé. then the german element in manchester discovered that richter would come, if invited. the salary was large, the work not heavy, the climate awful, the people devoted, the position unusually powerful. all 228things considered, it was one of the few really good vacant musical posts in europe.
all this is ancient history now, and i will record only briefly that ultimately sir frederick cowen was, in effect, told (what, no doubt, he already knew) that richter was the better man and that he (cowen) must go. but before this decision was made a most severe fight was waged in the city. cowen conducted, and thousands of partisans came and cheered him to the echo. richter conducted, and thousands of partisans came and cheered him to the echo. people wrote to the newspapers. leader writers solemnly summed up the situation from day to day. protests were made, meetings were organised and held, votes of confidence were passed. london caught the infection, and passed its opinion, its opinions....
sir f. h. cowen (he was “mr” then) received me in his rooms at the manchester grand hotel. it was impossible not to like him, for, if he had no great positive qualities that seized upon you at once, he had a good many negative ones. he had no “side,” no self-importance, no eccentricities. he had neither long hair nor a foreign accent. he did not use a cigarette-holder. he did not loll when he sat down, or posture when he stood up. and he had not just discovered a new composer of dutch extraction.... these are small things, you say. but are they?...
i remember looking at him and wondering if he really had written the better land. it seemed so unlikely. faultlessly dressed, immaculately groomed, how could he have written the better land—that luteous land that is so sloppy, so thickly covered with untidy debris?
he would not talk of the musical situation in manchester, and i could see that he was very sensitive about his uncomfortable position.
“if i am wanted, i shall stay,” was all he would give me.
229“and are you going to write about me in the paper?” asked he, at the end of our interview; “how interesting that will be!” and he smiled with gentle satire.
“i shall make it as interesting as i can,” i assured him, “but, you see, you have said so little.”
“does that matter?” he returned. “i have always heard that you gentlemen of the press can at least—shall we say embroider?”
“but may i?” i asked.
“how can i prevent you? do tell me how i can, and i will.”
“well, you can insist upon seeing the article before it appears in print.”
“oh, ‘insist’ is not a nice word, is it? but if you would be kind enough to send me the article before your editor has it....”
. . . . . . . .
hans richter was an autocrat, a tyrant. during the years he conducted in manchester, he did much splendid work, but it may well be questioned if, on the whole, his influence was beneficial to manchester citizens. he was so tremendously german! so tremendously german indeed, that he refused to recognise that there was any other than teutonic music in the world. his intellect had stopped at wagner. at middle age his mind had suddenly become set, and he looked with contempt at all italian and french music, refusing also to see any merit in most of the very fine music that, during the last twenty years, has been written by british composers.
he irked the younger and more turbulent spirits in manchester, and we were constantly attacking him in the press. but with no effect. richter was like that. he ignored attacks. he was arrogant and spoiled and bad-tempered.
“why don’t you occasionally give us some french music at your concerts?” he was asked.
230“french music?” he roared; “there is no french music.”
and, certainly, whenever he tried to play even berlioz one could see that he did not regard his work as music. and he conducted debussy, so to speak, with his fists. and as for dukas...!
young british musicians used to send him their compositions to read, but the parcels would come back, weeks later, unread and unopened. his mind never inquired. his intellect lay indolent and half-asleep on a bed of spiritual down. and the thousands of musical germans in manchester treated him so like a god that in course of time he came to believe he was a god. his manners were execrable. on one occasion, he bore down upon me in a corridor at the back of the platform in the free trade hall. i stood on one side to allow him to pass, but richter was very wide and the corridor very narrow. breathing heavily, he kept his place in the middle of the passage.... i felt the impact of a mountain of fat and heard a snort as he brushed past me.
everyone was afraid of him. even famous musicians trembled in his presence. i remember dining with one of the most eminent of living pianists at a restaurant where, at a table close at hand, richter also was dining. the previous evening richter had conducted at a concert at which the pianist had played, and the great conductor had praised my friend in enthusiastic terms; moreover, they had met before on several occasions.
“i’ll go and have a word with the old man, if you’ll excuse me,” said my friend.
i watched him go. smiling a little, ingratiatingly, he bowed to richter, and then bent slightly over the table at which the famous musician was dining alone. richter took not the slightest notice. my friend, embarrassed, waited a minute or so, and i saw him speaking. but the diner continued dining. again my friend spoke, and at 231length richter looked up and barked three times. hastily the pianist retreated, and when he had rejoined me i noticed that he was a little pale and breathless.
“the old pig!” he exclaimed.
“why, what happened?”
“didn’t you see? first of all, he wouldn’t take the slightest notice of me or even acknowledge my existence. i spoke to him in english three times before he would answer, and then, like the mannerless brute he is, he replied in german.”
“what did he say?”
“how do i know? i don’t speak his rotten language. but it sounded like: ‘zuzu westeben hab! zuzu westeben hab! zuzu westeben hab!’ i only know that he was very angry. he was eating slabs of liver sausage. and he spoke right down in his chest.”
he was, indeed, unapproachable.
of course, he was a marvellous conductor, a conductor of genius; but long before he left manchester his powers had begun to fail.
for two or three years i made a practice of attending his rehearsals. nothing will persuade me that in the whole world there is a more depressing spot than the manchester free trade hall on a winter’s morning. i used to sit shivering with my overcoat collar buttoned up. richter always wore a round black-silk cap, which made him look like a greek priest. he would walk ponderously to the conductor’s desk, seize his baton, rattle it against the desk, and begin without a moment’s loss of time. perhaps it was an innocent work like weber’s der freischütz overture. this would proceed swimmingly enough for a minute or so, when suddenly one would hear a bark and the music would stop. one could not say that richter spoke or shouted: he merely made a disagreeable noise. then, in english most broken, in english utterly smashed, he would correct the mistake 232that had been made, and recommence conducting without loss of a second.
he had no “secret.” great conductors never do have “secrets.” only charlatans “mesmerise” their orchestras. simply, he knew his job, he was a great economiser of time, and he was a stern disciplinarian.
he could lose his temper easily. he hated those of us who were privileged to attend his rehearsals. he declared, quite unwarrantably, that we talked and disturbed him. but he never appeared to be in the least disturbed by the handful of weary women who, with long brushes, swept the seats and the floor of the hall, raising whirlpools of dust fantastically here and there, and banging doors in beautiful disregard of the venusberg music and in protest against the exquisite allegretto from the seventh symphony.
. . . . . . . .
sir thomas beecham (he was then plain “mr”) brought a tin of tobacco to the restaurant, placed it on the table, and proceeded to fill his pipe. he was not communicative. he simply sat back in his chair, smoking quietly, and behaving precisely as though he were alone, though, as a matter of fact, there were four or five people in his company. he was not shy: he was simply indifferent to us. if you spoke to him, he merely said “no” or “yes” and looked bored. he was bored.
and so he sat for ten minutes; then, with a little sigh, he rose and departed from among us, without a word, without a look. he just melted away and never returned.
. . . . . . . .
i rather dreaded meeting sir charles santley, and when i rang at his door-bell, i remember devoutly wishing that in a moment i should hear that he was out, or that he had changed his mind and no longer desired to see me. i dreaded meeting him because i realised that, temperamentally, we were opposed. i had read his reminiscences 233and disliked him intensely for the things he had said of rossetti. instinctively, i drew away from his robust, tough-fibred mind.
but he was in, and in half-a-minute i was talking to an old, but still vigorous, gentleman whose one desire appeared to be to put me at my ease. i do not think i ever met a man so honest, so blunt. i felt that his mind was direct and his judgment decisive, but i found him lacking in subtlety, unable to respond to the mystical in art, and wholly deficient in true imaginative qualities. he was victorian.
now, i don’t suppose any of us who are living to-day (and when i say “living” i mean anyone whose mind is still developing—most people, say, under the age of forty-five) will be able to understand the point of view of the victorian musician. it appears to me monstrous that anyone should still love mendelssohn and hate wagner, that anyone should sing j. l. hatton in preference to hugo wolf, that anyone should still delight in donizetti and bellini. those victorian days were days when the singer wished that his own notions of the limitations of the human voice should control the free development of music. they loved bel canto and nothing else; they averred, indeed, that there was nothing else to love. they were admirable musicians from the technical point of view, and they had honest hearts and by no means feeble intellects. but they could never be brought to believe that music was a reflection of life, that there were in the human heart a thousand shades of feeling that not even handel had expressed, that sound is capable of a million subtleties, that the ear of man is an organ that is, so to speak, only in its infancy.
it was a little pathetic, i thought, when speaking to santley, that this very great singer had been living for at least thirty years entirely untouched by many of the finest compositions that had been written in that period.
234and he declared, quite frankly, that “modern” music had no interest for him. when i mentioned richard strauss, he smiled. at the name of debussy, he looked bewildered, and about max reger, scriabin, granville bantock, sibelius and delius, he had not a word to say.
but soon we got on to his own subject—singing—and here again we were at cross-purposes. singers who to me seem supreme artists he had either not heard of or had not heard.
“there is only one british singer to-day who carries on the old tradition,” said he; “i mean madame kirkby lunn. she has technique, style, personality. the others, compared with her, are nowhere.”
some general talk followed, and i soon discovered, beyond the possibility of doubt, that, like all great victorians who have had their day, he was living in the past—in that particular past whose artistic spirit is embodied in the albert memorial, in the musical criticism of j. w. davidson, in the pianoforte playing of arabella godard, in the poetry of lord tennyson, in the pictures of lord leighton, in the prose of ruskin.
what had santley to say to me, or i to him? nothing, and less than nothing. we were from different worlds, different planets, for half-a-century divided us. in years, he was nearer to the elizabethan age than i ... and yet how much farther away was he?
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perhaps mr landon ronald will not be angry with me if i call him the most accomplished of british musicians. he would have every right to be angry if i said he was accomplished and nothing else.... how far back that word “accomplished” takes us, doesn’t it? twenty years, at least. for aught i know to the contrary, it may still be employed in putney. i observe that chambers defines “accomplishment” as an “ornamental acquirement,” and, in my boyhood, that was precisely what it 235meant. young ladies “acquired” the art of playing the piano, the art of painting, the art of recitation. their skill in any art was not the result of developing a talent that was already there, but it was the result of a pertinacity that should have been spent on other things. but one no longer uses “accomplished” in that precise sense.
landon ronald has more than a streak of genius in his nature, and his cleverness is so abnormal as to be almost absurd. his genius and his cleverness are evident even in a few minutes’ conversation. he radiates cleverness, and he is so splendidly alive that as soon as he enters a room you feel that something quick and electric has been added to your environment.
when i first met him—ten years ago, was it?—his one ambition was to be recognised throughout europe as a great conductor. he was acknowledged as such in england, of course, and a visit to rome had fired both the italian public and critics with enthusiasm. but london and rome are not europe, whilst in those days berlin most distinctly was. he was most charmingly frank about himself, full of enthusiasm for himself, full of delight in all life’s adventures.
“of course, i know my songs aren’t real songs,” he said. “i can write tunes and i’m a musician, and i’m just clever enough to be cleverer than most people at that sort of work. but you must not imagine i take my compositions seriously. i think they’re rather nice—‘nice’ is the word, isn’t it?—and i enjoy inventing them—and ‘inventing’ is also the word, don’t you think? besides, they make money; they help to boil the pot for me while i go on with my more serious work—that is to say, conducting.”
havergal brian was in the room—we were in that fulsome and blowzy town, blackpool—and he remarked, as so many extraordinarily able composers have from 236time to time remarked, that he found it impossible to write music that the public really liked.
“nearly all my stuff,” said he, “is on a big scale for the orchestra. i am always trying to do something new—something out of the common rut.”
“ah, but then,” exclaimed ronald, quite sincerely, “you are a composer, and i am not.”
brian was appeased, and i looked at ronald with admiration for his tact. but he went even a little farther.
“i sometimes feel rather a pig,” he continued, “making money by my trifles when so many men with much greater gifts can only rarely get their work performed and still more rarely get it published. you told us just now,” said he, turning to brian, “that you would like to make money by your compositions. who wouldn’t? well, it would be foolish of me to advise you to try to write more simply, with less originality, and on a smaller scale. it would be foolish, because you simply couldn’t do it. no; you must work out your own salvation: it is only a matter of waiting: success will come.”
a month or two later, we met at southport, i in the meantime having written an article on ronald for a musical magazine. with this article he professed himself charmed. he was as jolly about it as a schoolboy, and expressed surprise that i could honestly say such nice things about him.
“it is good to be praised,” said he, laughing; “i could live on praise for ever.” and then, lighting a cigarette, he added: “perhaps the reason why i like it so much is that i feel i really deserve it.”
it was my turn to laugh.
“but i do feel that!” he protested; “if i didn’t, i should hate you or anyone else to say such frightfully kind things about me and my work.”
a month or two later he wrote me a long letter full of enthusiasm for some work of mine he had seen 237somewhere, and when i saw him the following week in london i protested against his undiluted praise.
“i believe you think i am a bit of a humbug,” said he.
“i’m afraid i do,” i replied. (for, really, i think almost all subtle and clever artists are bits of humbugs.)
“very good, then!” exclaimed he, ridiculously hurt.
“what i mean is, that if you like anyone, your judgment is immediately prejudiced in their favour.”
“so you think i like you?”
“i am sure of it.”
“well, you’re quite right. but, really and truly, you mustn’t call me, or even think me, the slightest bit of a humbug. you can call me impulsive, superficial, or anything horrid of that kind ... but insincere! why, sincerity is the only real virtue i’ve got.”
and i believe he believed himself. but who is sincere?—at least, who is sincere except at the moment? are not all of us who are artists swayed hither and thither, from hour to hour, by the emotion of the moment? do we not say one thing now, and an hour later mean exactly the opposite? are we not driven by our enthusiasms to false positions, and do not glib, untrue words spring to our lips because the moment’s mood forces them there?
i have not met landon ronald for four years, but the other day i heard him conduct, and i recognised in his interpretations the supreme qualities i have so often observed before. he himself is like his work—polished, highly strung, emotional, fluid, intense. his mind works with lightning-like quickness; he knows what you are going to say just a second before you have said it. and over his personality hangs the glamour that we call genius.
. . . . . . . .
many well-known singers have i met, but very few of them inspire me to burst into song. they are a dull, vain crew. among the few most notable exceptions is 238frederic austin, a man with a temperament so refined, with a nature so retiring, that it is a constant source of wonder to me that he should be where he now is—in the front rank of vocalists.
years ago ernest newman said to me:
“frederic austin has become a fine singer through sheer brain-work. he always had temperament, but his voice was never in the least remarkable until by ingenious training, by constant thought, and by the most arduous labour he developed it until it became an organ of sufficient strength and richness to enable him to interpret anything that appeals to him.”
he is, i think, the only eminent singer in this country who is a distinguished composer. but perhaps the most remarkable thing about him is that you might very easily pass days in his company without guessing that he is a famous singer, for his personality suggests qualities that famous singers seldom possess. he is distingué, austere, and devoted to his art.
