"Rinaldo, I love you!"

and the curtain fell to the applause of the audience.

* * * * *

We owe much to Germany in music, for it has produced many great musicians. It can set off against our trinity of Corneille, Racine, and Moliere, the no less glorious Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven. But Germany seems to have lost all respect for the meaning of its own music and for its own glories. Instead of watching over the purity of the text of its masterpieces, it alters them at its pleasure and makes them all but unrecognizable. We abuse nuances but they were rare in earlier days. An orchestra conductor who performs symphonies by Haydn and Mozart, even by Beethoven, has the right to make additions. But it is intolerable that the scores should be printed with these nuances and bowings which are in no way due to the author and which are imposed by the editor. Nevertheless, that is what happens, and it is impossible to tell where the authentic text ends and the interpolation begins. In addition, the interpolation may be the exact contrary of what the author intended.

This evil is at its worst in piano music. Our famous teachers, like Marmontel and Le Couppey, have published editions of the classics which are full of their own directions. But the player is forewarned; it is the Marmontel or Le Couppey edition and makes no pretence of authenticity. In Germany, however, there are supposedly authentic editions, based on the originals, but which superimpose their own pernicious inventions on the author's text.

The touch of the piano used to be different from what it is to-day. The directions in Mozart's and Beethoven's works show that they used the execution of stringed instruments as their model. The touch was lighter and the fingers were raised so that the notes were separated slightly, and not run together except when indicated. The supposition is that this must have led to a dryness of tone. I remember to have heard in my childhood some old people whose playing was singularly hopping. Then, there came a reaction, and with it a passion for slurring the notes. When I was Stamaty's pupil, it was considered most difficult to "tie" the notes; that required, however, only dexterity and suppleness. "When she learns to 'tie,' she will know how to play," said the mother of a young pianist. Nevertheless, the trick of perpetual legato becomes exceedingly monotonous and takes away all character from the pianoforte classics. But it is insisted on everywhere in the modern German editions. Throughout there are connections seemingly interminable in length, and indications of legato, sempre legato, which the author not only did not indicate, but in places where it is easy to see that he intended the exact opposite.

If this is the case, what shall be said of marking the fingering on all the notes—which often makes good playing impossible. Liszt taught hundreds of pupils according to the best principles, yet such erroneous principles have prevailed!

Disciples of the ivory keys are numerous in our day. Everybody wants to have a piano, and everybody plays it or thinks he does, which is not always the same thing, and few really understand what the term "to play the piano," so currently used, means.

The harpsichord reigned supreme before the appearance of the piano—an instrument which is beloved by some and execrated by others. To his utter amazement Reyer was considered an enemy of the pianoforte. The harpsichord has been revived of late so that it is needless to describe it. It lacks strength, and that was the reason it was dethroned in a period when strength was everything. On the other hand, it has distinction and elegance. As the player can not modify the intensity of the sound by a single pressure of the finger—in which it resembles the organ—like the organ, with its multiple keyboards and registers, the harpsichord has a wide variety of effects and affords the opportunity for several octaves to sound simultaneously. As a result, while music written for the harpsichord gains in strength and expression on the modern instrument, it often assumes a deceptive monotony for which the author is not responsible.

The players of the harpsichord were ignorant of muscular effects; there was nothing of the unchained lion about them. The delicate hands of a marquise lost none of their gracefulness as they skimmed over the keyboards, and the red or black keys emphasized their whiteness.

The introduction of the hammer in the place of the tiny nib permitted the modification of the quality of sound by differences in the pressure of the fingers, and also the production at will of such nuances as forte and piano without recourse to the different registers. This is the reason why the new instrument was first called the pianoforte. The word was long and cumbersome and was cut in half. When it became necessary to assault the note, they used the phrase "to hit the forte." The papers which gave accounts of young Mozart's concerts praised him for his ability to "hit."

Nevertheless one did not hit hard. These keyboards with their limited keys responded so easily that a child's fingers were sufficient. I first played on one of these instruments at the age of three. It was made by Zimmerman, whose son was Gounod's father-in-law.

Later, the weight of the keys was increased to get a greater volume of sound. Then, when long-haired virtuosi, playing by main strength, produced peals of thunder, they really "toucha du piano."

* * * * *

To return to Orphee and end as we began, I have to make a painful confession. If the works of Gluck in general and Orphee in particular have had a happy influence on our musical taste, a passage from this last work has been a noxious influence,—the famous chorus of the demons "Quel est l'audacieux—qui dans ces sombres lieux—ose porter ses pas?"

In the old days French opera was based on declamation and it was scrupulously respected even in the arias. There is a fine example of this excellent system in Lully's famous aria from Medusa to prove what strength results from a close relation between the accent of the verse and the music. Gluck was one of the most fervent disciples of this system, but Orphee, as we know, was derived from Orfeo. The question was whether he could even think of suppressing this spectacular chorus with its amazing strength which was one of the principal reasons for the work's success. Unfortunately the music of the chorus was moulded on the Italian text, and each verse ended with the accent on the antepenult, which occurs frequently in German and Italian, but never in French. And they sing:

Quel est l'auDAcieux Qui dans ces SOMbres lieux Ose porTER ses pas Et devant LE trepas Ne fremit pas?

As French is not strongly accented such faults are tolerated. Gluck's theme impressed itself on the memory, so that he dealt a terrific blow to the purity of prosody. We gradually became so disinterested in this that by Auber's time scarcely any attention was paid to it. Finally, Offenbach appeared. He was a German by birth and his musical ideas naturally rhymed with German in direct contradiction to the French words to which they applied. This constant bungling passed for originality. Sometimes it would have been necessary to change the division of a measure to get a correct melody, as in the song:

Un p'tit bonhomme Pas plus haut qu'ca.

In such a case we might say that he did wrong for the mere pleasure of going astray. But popular taste was so corrupted that no one noticed it and everybody who wrote in the lighter vein fell into the same habits.

We owe a debt of gratitude to Andre Messager for breaking away from this manner and setting musical phraseology aright. His return to the old traditions was not the least of the attractions of his delightful Veronique.

But we are wandering far from Gluck and Orphee, although not so far as we might think. In art, as in everything, extremes meet, and there are all kinds of tastes.



CHAPTER XVI

DELSARTE

Felix Duquesnal in one of his brilliant articles has written something about Delsarte, the singer, in connection with his controversy with Madame Carvalho. The cause of this controversy was the lessons she took from him. The name of Delsarte should never be forgotten, as I shall try to explain. Madame Carvalho did not refuse to pay Delsarte for her lessons, but she did not want to be called his pupil. Although she had attended the Conservatoire, she wanted to be known solely as a pupil of Duprez. As a matter of fact it was Duprez who knew how to make the "Little Miolan," the delightful warbler, into the great singer with her important place on the French stage.

But this was accomplished at a price. Madame Carvalho told me about it herself. Her medium register was weak and Duprez undertook to substitute chest tones and develop clearness as much as possible. "When I began to work," she said, "my mother was frightened. One would have thought that a calf was being killed in the house."

Ordinarily such a method would produce a harsh, shaky voice and all freshness would be lost. But in Madame Carvalho's case the opposite was true. The freshness and purity of her voice were beyond compare, while its smoothness and the harmony of the registers were perfect. It was a miracle the like of which we shall probably never see again.

But if Duprez made a wonderful voice at the risk of breaking it, I have always thought that Madame Carvalho owed her admirable diction, so distinguishing a mark of her talent, to Delsarte. Delsarte was a disastrous and deadly teacher of singing. No voice could stand up under his methods, not even his own, although he attributed its loss to teaching at the Conservatoire. But he studied deeply the arts of speaking and gesture, and he was a past master in them.

I once attended a course he gave in these subjects. He stated highly illuminating truths and gave the psychological reasons for accents and the physiological reasons for the gestures. He determined the use of gestures in some sort of scientific way. Mystic fancies were mixed up in these questions.

It was extremely interesting to see him dissect one of Fontaine's fables or a passage from Racine, and to hear him explain why the accent should be on such a word or on such a syllable and not on another, to bring out the sense. Although this course was so instructive, few took it, for Delsarte was almost unknown to people. His influence scarcely extended outside a narrow circle of admirers, but the quality made up for the quantity. This was the circle of the old Debats, which was formerly devoted exclusively to Romanticism, but at this time to the classics—the set headed by Ingres in painting and Reber in music. Theirs was a secluded and ascetic world in silent revolt against the abominations of the century. One had to hear the tone of devotion in which the members of this circle spoke of the ancients to appreciate their attitude. Nothing in our day can give any idea of them. "They say," one of the devotees once told me, "that the ancients learned Beauty through a sort of revelation, and Beauty has steadily degenerated ever since."

Such false notions were, however, professed by the most sincere people who were deeply devoted to art. So this group, which had no influence on their own contemporaries, nevertheless, without knowing it or wishing to do so, played a useful role.

As we know, the public was divided into two camps. On one side were the partisans of Melody, opera-comique, the Italians, and, with some effort, of grand opera. Opposed to them were the partisans of music in the grand style—Beethoven, Mozart, Haydn, and Sebastian Bach, although he was little known and is less well known now.

No one gave a thought to our old French school, to the composers from Lulli to Gluck, who produced so many excellent works. Reber showed Delsarte the way and the latter, naturally an antiquarian, threw himself into this unexplored field with surprising vigor. Only Lulli's name was known, while Campra, Mondonville and the others were entirely forgotten. Even Gluck himself had been forgotten. First editions of his orchestral scores, which it is impossible to find to-day, sold for a few francs at the second-hand book shops. Rameau was never mentioned.

Delsarte, handsome, eloquent, and fascinating, wielded an almost imperial sway over his little coterie of artists. Thanks to him the lamp of our old French school was kept dimly burning until the day when inherent justice permitted it to be revived. In this restricted world no evening was complete without Delsarte. He would come in with some story of frightful throat trouble to justify his chronic lack of voice, and, then, without any voice at all but by a kind of magic, would put shudders into the tones of Orpheus or Eurydice. I often played his accompaniments and he always demanded pianissimo.

"But," I would say, "the author has indicated forte."

"That is true," he would answer, "but in those days the harpsichord had little depth of tone."

It would have been easy to answer that the accompaniment was written for the orchestra and not for the harpsichord.

Delsarte's execution, on account of the insufficiency of his vocal powers, was often entirely different from what the author intended. Furthermore, he was absolutely ignorant of the correct way to interpret the appogiatures and other marks which are not used to-day. As a result his interpretation of the older works was inexact. But that did not matter, for even if masterpieces are presented badly, there is always something left. Besides, both the singer and his hearers had Faith. He had a way of pronouncing "Gluck" which aroused expectation even before one heard a note.

From time to time Delsarte gave a concert. He would come on the stage and say that he had a bad throat, but that he would try to give Iphigenia's Dream or something of that sort. His courage would prove to be greater than his strength and he would have to stop. He would then fall back on old-time songs or La Fontaine's fables in which he excelled. A skilfully studied mimicry, which seemed entirely natural, underlay his reading. A red handkerchief, which he knew how to draw from his pocket at just the proper moment, always excited applause.

One day he conceived the idea of giving one of Bossuet's sermons at his concert. Religious authority was very powerful at the time and forbade it. Yet there would have been no sacrilege, and I regretted keenly that I could not hear this magnificent prose delivered so wonderfully. Now that religious authority has lost its secular support, we see things in an entirely different way. Christ, the Virgin, and the Saints walk the stage, speak in prose or verse, and sing. It would seem that no one is shocked for there is no protest. For my own part I must frankly confess that such pseudo-religious exhibitions are disagreeable. They disturb me greatly and I can see no use in them.

* * * * *

In order to foster admiration for the old masters, Delsarte conceived the idea of publishing a collection of pieces taken from their works right and left, and, as a result, he created his Archives du Chant. He had special type made and the publication was a marvel of beautiful typography, correctness and good taste. At the beginning of each part was a cleverly harmonised passage of church music. The support of a publisher was necessary for the success of such a work, but Delsarte was his own publisher and he met with no success at all. Similar but inferior publications have been markedly successful.

Delsarte aimed at purity of text, but his successors have been forced to modernize the works to make them accessible for the public. This fact is painful. In literature the texts are studied and the endeavor is to reproduce the writer's thought as closely as possible. In music it is entirely different. With each new edition a professor is commissioned to supervise the work and he adds something of his own invention.

Delsarte, a singer without a voice, an imperfect musician, a doubtful scholar, guided by an intuition which approached genius, in spite of his numerous faults played an important role in the evolution of French music in the Nineteenth Century. He was no ordinary man. The impression he gave to all who knew him was of a visionary, an apostle. When one heard him speak with his fiery enthusiasm about these works of the past which the world had forgotten, one could but believe that such oblivion was unjust and desire to know these relics of another age.

Without the shadow of a doubt I owed to his leadership the necessary courage to make a profound study of the works of the old school, for they are unattractive at first. Berlioz berated all this music. He had seen Gluck's works on the stage in his youth, but he could see nothing in them that was not "superannuated and childish." With all respect to Berlioz's memory, it deserved a kinder judgment than that. When one reaches the depths of this music, although it may be at the price of some effort, he is well repaid for his pains. There is real feeling, grandeur and even something of the picturesque in these works—as much as could be with the means at their disposal.

It is only right that we should pay tribute to Delsarte's memory. He was a pioneer who, during his whole life, proclaimed the value of immortal works, which the world despised. That is no slight merit.



CHAPTER XVII

SEGHERS

While Delsarte was preparing the way for the old French opera and above all for Gluck's works, another pioneer of musical evolution was working to form the taste of the Parisian public, but with an entirely different power and another effect. Seghers was the man. He played a great role and his memory should be honored.

As his name indicates, Seghers was a Belgian. He started life as a violinist and was one of Baillot's pupils. His execution was masterly, his tone admirable, and he had a musical intelligence of the first order. He had every right to a first rank among virtuosi, but this man, herculean in appearance and tenacious in his purposes, lost all his power before an audience.

He had a dream of giving to lovers of music the last of Beethoven's quartets, which were considered at the time both unplayable and incomprehensible. In the end he planned a series of concerts at which, despite my age—I was only fifteen—I was to be the regular pianist. He planned to give in addition to these quartets, some of Bach's sonatas and Reber's and Schumann's trios. I spoke of this plan to his mother-in-law one day as she was peacefully embroidering at the window, and told her how pleased I was at the thought of the concerts.

"Don't count on it too much," she told me. "He'll never give them."

When everything was ready, he invited some thirty people to listen to a trial performance. It was wretched. All the depth of tone had gone from his violin as well as the skill from his fingers.... The project was abandoned.

It was left for Maurin to make something out of these terrible quartets. Maurin had peculiar gifts. He had a lightness of bow which I have never seen equalled by anyone and a lightness and charm which enchanted the public. But I can say in all sincerity that Seghers's execution was even better. Unfortunately for him I was his only listener.

Madame Seghers was a woman of great beauty, unusually intelligent and distinguished. She had been one of Liszt's pupils and was a pianist of first rank. But she was even more timid than her husband—a single listener was sufficient to paralyze her. When Liszt was teaching Madame Seghers, he came to appreciate her husband's real worth and entrusted his daughter's musical education to him. This is sufficient indication of the esteem in which Liszt held Seghers. So it was not surprising that he gave me valuable and greatly needed suggestions in regard to style and the piano itself, for his friendship with Liszt had given him a thorough understanding of the instrument.

I first saw and heard Liszt at Seghers's house. He had reappeared in Paris after long years of absence, and by that time he had begun to seem almost legendary. The story went that since he had become chapel-master at Weimar he was devoting himself to grand compositions, and, what appeared unbelievable, "piano music." People who ought to have known that Mozart was the greatest pianist of his time shrugged their shoulders at this. As a climax it was insinuated that Liszt was setting systems of philosophy to music.

I studied Liszt's works with all the enthusiasm of my eighteen years for I already regarded him as a genius and attributed to him even before I saw him almost superhuman powers as a pianist. Remarkable to relate he surpassed the conception I had formed. The dreams of my youthful imagination were but prose in comparison with the Bacchic hymn evoked by his supernatural fingers. No one who did not hear him at the height of his powers can have any idea of his performance.

* * * * *

Seghers was a member of the Societe des Concerts at the Conservatoire. This reached only a restricted public and there was no other symphony concert worthy of the name in Paris at the time. And if the public was limited, the repertoire was even more so. Haydn's, Mozart's and Beethoven's symphonies were played almost exclusively, and Mendelssohn's were introduced with the greatest difficulty. Only fragments of vast compositions like the oratorios were given. An author who was still alive was looked upon as an intruder. However, the conductor was permitted to introduce a solo of his own selection. Thus my friend Auguste Tolbecque, who was over eighty, was permitted to give—he still played beautifully—my first concerto for the violoncello which I had written for him. Deldevez, the conductor of the famous orchestra at the time, did not overlook the chance to tell me that he had put my concerto on the programme only through consideration for Tolbecque. Otherwise, he added, he would have preferred Messieurs So-and-so's.

Not only did the Conservatoire audiences know little music, but the larger public knew none at all. The symphonies of the three great classic masters were known to amateurs for the most part only through Czerny's arrangement for two pianos.

This was the situation when Seghers left the Societe des Concerts and founded the Societe St. Cecile. He led the orchestra himself. The new society took its name from the St. Cecile hall which was then in the Rue de la Chaussee d'Antin. It was a large square hall and was excellent in spite of the prejudice in favor of halls with curved lines for music. Curved surfaces, as Cavaille-Coll, who was an expert in this matter, once told me, distort sound as curved mirrors distort images. Halls used for music should, therefore, have only straight lines. The St. Cecile hall was sufficiently large to allow a complete orchestra and chorus to be placed properly and heard as well.

Seghers managed to assemble an excellent and sizable orchestra and he also secured soloists who were young then but who have since become celebrities. The orchestra was poorly paid and also very unruly. I have seen them rebel at the difficulties in Beethoven, and it was even worse when Seghers undertook to give Schumann who was considered the ne plus ultra of modernism. Oftentimes there were real riots. But we heard there for the first time the overture of Manfred, Mendelssohn's Symphony in A minor, and the overture to Tannhauser.

The modern French school found the doors in the Rue Bergere closed to them, but they were welcomed with open arms at the Chaussee d'Antin. Among them were Reber, Gounod, and Gouvy, and even beginners like Georges Bizet and myself. I made my first venture there with my Symphony in E flat which I wrote when I was seventeen. In order to get the committee to adopt it, Seghers offered it as a symphony by an unknown author, which had been sent to him from Germany. The committees swallowed the bait, and the symphony, which would probably not had a hearing if my name had been signed, was praised to the skies.

I can still see myself at a rehearsal listening to a conversation between Berlioz and Gounod. Both of them were greatly interested in me, so that they spoke freely and discussed the excellences and faults of this anonymous symphony. They took the work seriously and it can be imagined how I drank in their words. When the veil of mystery was lifted, the interest of the two great musicians changed to friendship. I received a letter from Gounod, which I have kept carefully, and as it does credit to the author, I take the liberty of reproducing it here:

My dear Camille:

I was officially informed yesterday that you are the author of the symphony which they played on Sunday. I suspected it; but now that I am sure, I want to tell you at once how pleased I was with it. You are beyond your years; always keep on—and remember that on Sunday, December 11, 1853, you obligated yourself to become a great master.

Your pleased and devoted friend,

CH. GOUNOD.

Many works which had been unknown to Parisian audiences were given at these concerts and nowhere else. Among them were Schubert's Symphony in C, fragments of Weber's opera Preciosa, his Jubel overture, and symphonies by Gade, Gouvy, Gounod, and Reber. These symphonies are not dazzling but they are charming. They form an interesting link in the golden chain, and the public has a right and even some sort of duty to hear them. They would enjoy hearing them too, just as at the Louvre they like to see certain pictures which are not extraordinary but which are, nevertheless, worthy of the place they occupy. That is to say, if the public is really guided by a love of art and seeks only intellectual pleasure instead of sensations and shocks. Some one has said lately that where there is no feeling there is no music. We could, however, cite many passages of music which are absolutely lacking in emotion and which are beautiful nevertheless from the standpoint of pure esthetic beauty. But what am I saying? Painting goes its own way and emotion, feeling, and passion are evoked by the least landscape. Maurice Barres brought in this fashion and he could even see passion in rocks. Happy is he who can follow him there.

Among the things we heard at that time and which we never hear now I must note especially Berlioz's Corsaire and King Lear. His name is so much beloved by the present day public that this neglect is both unjust and unjustifiable. The great man himself came to the Societe St. Cecile one day to conduct his L'Enfance du Christ which he had just written—or rather La Fuite en Egypt which was the only part of the work that was in existence then. He composed the rest of it afterwards. I remember perfectly the performances which the great man directed. They were lively and spirited rather than careful, but somewhat slower than what Edouard Colonne has accustomed us to. The time was faster and the nuances sharper.

In spite of the enthusiasm of the conductor and the skill and talent of the orchestra, the society led a hand-to-mouth existence. The sinews of war were lacking. Weckerlin directed the choruses and I acted as the accompanist at the rehearsals. Love of art sufficed us, but the singers and instrumentalists were not satisfied with that in the absence of all emoluments. If Seghers had been adaptable, he might have secured resources, but that was not his forte. Meyerbeer wanted him to give his Struensee and Halevy wanted a performance of his Promethee. But this was contrary to Seghers's convictions, and when he had once made up his mind nothing could change him. Nevertheless he did give the overture to Struensee and it would have been no great effort to give the rest. As to Promethee, even if the last part is not in harmony with the rest of it, the work was well worthy the honor of a performance, which the proud society in the Rue Bergere had accorded it. By these refusals Seghers was deprived of the support of two powerful protectors.

Pasdeloup craftily took advantage of the situation. He had plenty of money and, as he knew what the financial situation was, he went to the rehearsals and corrupted the artists. For the most part they were young people in needy circumstances and could not refuse his attractive propositions. He killed Seghers's society and built on its ruins the Societe des Jeunes Artistes, which later became the Concerts Populaires.

Pasdeloup was sincerely fond of music but he was a very ordinary musician. He had little of Seghers's feeling and profound comprehension of the art. In Seghers's hands the popular concerts would have become an admirable undertaking, but Pasdeloup, in spite of his zeal and skill, was able to give them only a superficial and deceptive brilliancy. Besides, Seghers would have worked for the development of the French school whom Pasdeloup, with but few exceptions, kept under a bushel until 1870. Among these exceptions were a symphony by Gounod, one by Gouvy and the overture to Berlioz's Frances-Juges. Until the misfortunes and calamities of that terrible year the French symphonic school had been repressed and stifled between the Societe des Concerts and the Concerts Populaires. Perhaps they were necessary so that this school might be freed and give flight to its fancies.



CHAPTER XVIII

ROSSINI

Nowadays it is difficult to form any idea of Rossini's position in our beautiful city of Paris half a century ago. He had retired from active life a long time before, but he had a greater reputation in his idleness than many others in their activity. All Paris sought the honor of being admitted to his magnificent, high-windowed apartment. As the demigod never went out in the evening, his friends were always sure of finding him at home. At one time or another all sorts of social sets rubbed elbows at his great soirees. The most brilliant singers and the most famous virtuosi appeared at these "evenings." The master was surrounded by sycophants, but they did not influence him, for he knew their true worth. He ruled his regular following with the hauteur of a superior being who does not deign to reveal himself to the first comer. It is a question how he came to be held in such honor.

His works, outside of the Barbier and Guillaume Tell, and some performances of Moise, belonged to the past. They still went to see Otello at the Theatre-Italien, but that was to hear Tamberlick's C diesis. Rossini was under so little illusion that he tried to oppose the effort to have Semiramide put into the repertoire at the Opera. And, nevertheless, the Parisian public actually worshipped him.

This public—I am speaking now of the musical public or what is called that—was divided into two hostile camps. There were the lovers of melody who were in the large majority and included the musical critics; and, on the other side, the subscribers to the Conservatoire and the Maurin, Alard and Amingaud quartets. They were devotees of learned music; "poseurs," others said, who pretended to admire works they did not understand at all.

There was no melody in Beethoven; some even denied that there was any in Mozart. Melody was found, we were told, only in the works of the Italian school, of which Rossini was the leader, and in the school of Herold and Auber, which was descended from the Italian.

The Melodists considered Rossini their standard bearer, a symbol to rally around, even though they had just obtained good prices for his works at the second-hand shops and now permitted them to fall into oblivion.

From some words he let fall during our intimacy I can state that this neglect was painful to him. But it was a just—perhaps too just—retribution for the fatality with which Rossini, doubtless in spite of himself, served as a weapon against Beethoven. The first encounter was at Vienna where the success of Tancred crushed forever the dramatic ambitions of the author of Fidelio; later, at Paris, they used Guillaume Tell in combating the increasing invasion of the symphony and chamber music.

I was twenty when M. and Mme. Viardot introduced me to Rossini. He invited me to his small evening receptions and received me with his usual rather meaningless cordiality. At the end of a month, when he found that I asked to be heard neither as a pianist nor as a composer, he changed his attitude. "Come and see me tomorrow morning," he said. "We can talk then."

I was quick to respond to this flattering invitation and I found a very different Rossini from the one of the evening. He was intensely interested in and open-minded to ideas, which, if they were not advanced, were at least broad and noble. He gave proof of this when Liszt's famous Messe was performed for the first time at St. Eustache. He went to its defense in the face of an almost unanimous opposition.

He said to me one day,

"You have written a duet for a flute and clarinet for Dorus and Leroy. Won't you ask them to play it at one of my evenings?"

The two great artists did not have to be urged. Then an unheard of thing happened. As he never had a written programme on such occasions, Rossini managed so that they believed that the duet was his own. It is easy to imagine the success of the piece under these conditions. When the encore was over, Rossini took me to the dining-room and made me sit near him, holding me by the hand so that I could not get away. A procession of fawning admirers passed in front of him. Ah! Master! What a masterpiece! Marvellous!

And when the victim had exhausted the resources of the language in praise, Rossini replied, quietly:

"I agree with you. But the duet wasn't mine; it was written by this gentleman."

Such kindness combined with such ingenuity tells more about the great man than many volumes of commentaries. For Rossini was a great man. The young people of to-day are in no position to judge his works, which were written, as he said himself, for singers and a public who no longer exist.

"I am criticised," he said one day, "for the great crescendo in my works. But if I hadn't put the crescendo into my works, they would never have been played at the Opera."

In our day the public are slaves. I have read in the programme of one house, "All marks of approbation will be severely repressed." Formerly, especially in Italy, the public was master and its taste law. As it came before the lights were up, a great overture with a crescendo was as necessary as cavatinas, duets and ensembles: they came to hear the singers and not to be present at an opera. In many of his works, especially in Otello, Rossini made a great step forward towards realism in opera. In Moise and Le Siege de Corinthe (not to mention Guillaume Tell) he rose to heights which have not been surpassed in spite of the poverty of the means at his disposal. As Victor Hugo has victoriously demonstrated, such poverty is no obstacle to genius and wealth in them is only an advantage to mediocrity.

I was one of the regular pianists at Rossini's. The others were Stanzieri, a charming young man of whom Rossini was very fond and who lived but a short time, and Diemer, who was also young but already a great artist. One or the other of us would often play at the evening entertainments the slight pieces for the piano which the Master used to write to take up his time. I was only too willing to accompany the singers, when Rossini did not do so himself. He accompanied them admirably for he played the piano to perfection.



Unfortunately I was not there the evening that Patti sang for Rossini the first time. We know that after she had sung the aria from Le Barbier, he said to her, after the usual compliments,

"Who wrote that aria you just sang?"

I saw him three days afterwards and he hadn't cooled off even then.

"I am fully aware," he said, "that arias should be embellished. That's what they are for. But not to leave a note of them even in the recitatives! That is too much!"

In his irritation he complained that the sopranos persisted in singing this aria which was written for a contralto and did not sing what had been written for the sopranos at all.

On the other hand the diva was irritated as well. She thought the matter over and realized that it would be serious to have Rossini for an enemy. So some days later she went to ask his advice. It was well for her that she took it, for her talent, though brilliant and fascinating, was not as yet fully formed. Two months after this incident, Patti sang the arias from La Gaza Ladra and Semiramide, with the master as her accompanist. And she combined with her brilliancy the absolute correctness which she always showed afterwards.

Much has been written about the premature interruption of Rossini's career after the appearance of Guillaume Tell. It has been compared with Racine's life after Phedre. The failure of Phedre was brutal and cruel, which was added to by the scandalous success of the Phedre of an unworthy rival. Racine's friends, the Port Royalists, did not hesitate to make the most of the opportunity. "You've lost your soul," they told him. "And now you haven't even success." But later, when he took up his pen again, he gave us two masterpieces in Esther and Athalie.

Rossini was accustomed to success and it was hard for him to run into a half-hearted success when he knew he had surpassed himself. This was doubtless due to the extravagant phraseology of Hippolyte Bis, one of the librettists. But Guillaume Tell had its admirers from the start. I heard it spoken of constantly in my childhood. If the work did not appear on the bills of the Opera, it furnished the amateurs with choice bits.

In my opinion, if Rossini committed suicide as far as his art was concerned, he did so because he had nothing more to say. Rossini was a spoiled child of success and he could not live without it. Such unexpected hostility put an end to a stream which had flowed so abundantly for so long.

The success of his Soirees Musicales and his Stabat encouraged him. But he wrote nothing more except those slight compositions for the piano and for singing which may be compared to the last vibrations of a sound, as it dies away.

Later—much later—came La Messe to which undue importance has been attributed. "Le Passus," one critic wrote, "is the cry of a stricken spirit." La Messe is written with elegance by an assured and expert hand, but that is all. There are no traces of the pen which wrote the second act of Guillaume Tell.

Apropos of this second act, it is not, perhaps, generally known that the author had no idea of ending it with a prayer. Insurrections are not usually begun with so serious a song. But at the rehearsals the effect of the unison, Si parmi nous il est des Traitres, was so great that they did not dare to go on beyond it. So they suppressed the real ending, which is now the brilliant entrancing end of the overture. This finale is extant in the library at the Opera. It would be an interesting experiment to restore it and give this beautiful act its natural conclusion.



CHAPTER XIX

JULES MASSENET

Massenet has been praised indiscriminately—sometimes for his numerous and brilliant powers and sometimes for merits he did not have at all.

I have waited to speak of him until the time when the Academie was ready to replace him,—that is to say, put some one in his place, for great artists are never replaced. Others succeed them with their own individual and different powers, but they do not take their places nevertheless. Malibran has never been replaced, nor Madame Viardot, Madame Carvalho, Talma and Rachel. No one can ever replace Patti, Bartet or Sarah Bernhardt. They could not replace Ingres, Delacroix, Berlioz, or Gounod, and they can never replace Massenet.

It is a question whether he has been accorded his real place. Perhaps his pupils have estimated him at his true worth, but they were grateful for his excellent teaching, and may be rightly suspected of partiality. Others have spoken slightingly of his works and they have applied to him by transposing the words of the celebrated dictum: Saltavit et placuit. He sang and wept, so they sought to deprecate him as if there were something reprehensible in an artist's pleasing the public. This notion might seem to have some basis in view of the taste that is affected to-day—a predilection for all that is shocking and displeasing in all the arts, including poetry. Sorcieres's epigram—the ugly is beautiful and the beautiful ugly—has become a programme. People are no longer content with merely admiring atrocities, they even speak with contempt of beauties hallowed by time and the admiration of centuries.

The fact remains that Massenet is one of the most brilliant diamonds in our musical crown. No musician has enjoyed so much favor with the public save Auber, whom Massenet did not care for any more than he did for his school, but whom he resembled closely. They were alike in their facility, their amazing fertility, genius, gracefulness, and success. Both composed music which was agreeable to their contemporaries. Both were accused of pandering to their audiences. The answer to this is that both their audiences and the artists had the same tastes and so were in perfect accord.

To-day the revolutionists are the only ones held in esteem by the critics. Well, it may be a fine thing to despise the mob, to struggle against the current, and to compel the mob by force of genius and energy to follow one despite their resistance. Yet one may be a great artist without doing that.

There was nothing revolutionary about Sebastian Bach with his two hundred and fifty cantatas, which were performed as fast as they were written and which were constantly in demand for important occasions. Handel managed the theater where his operas were produced and his oratorios were sung, and they would have indubitably failed, if he had gone against the accustomed taste of his audiences. Haydn wrote to supply the music for Prince Esterhazy's chapel; Mozart was forced to write constantly, and Rossini worked for an intolerant public which would not have allowed one of his operas to be played, if the overture did not contain the great crescendo for which he has been so reproached. These were none of them revolutionists, yet they were great musicians.

Another criticism is made against Massenet. He was superficial, they say, and lacked depth. Depth, as we know, is very much the fashion.

It is true that Massenet was not profound, but that is of little consequence. Just as there are many mansions in our Father's house, so there are many in Apollo's. Art is vast. The artist has a perfect right to descend to the nethermost depths and to enter into the inner secrets of the soul, but this right is not a duty.

The artists of Ancient Greece, with all their marvellous works, were not profound. Their marble goddesses were beautiful, and beauty was sufficient.

Our old-time sculptors—Clodion and Coysevox—were not profound; nor were Fragonard, La Tour, nor Marivaux, yet they brought honor to the French school.

All have their value and all are necessary. The rose with its fresh color and its perfume, is, in its way, as precious as the sturdy oak. Art has a place for artists of all kinds, and no one should flatter himself that he is the only one who is capable of covering the entire field of art.

Some, even in treating a familiar subject, have as much dignity as a Roman emperor on his golden throne, but Massenet did not belong to this type. He had charm, attraction and a passionateness that was feverish rather than deep. His melody was wavering and uncertain, oftentimes more a recitative than melody properly so called, and it was entirely his own. It lacks structure and style. Yet how can one resist when he hears Manon at the feet of Des Grieux in the sacristy of Saint-Sulpice, or help being stirred to the depths by such outpourings of love? One cannot reflect or analyze when moved in this way.

After emotional art comes decadent art. But that is of little consequence. Decadence in art is often far from being artistic deterioration.

Massenet's music has one great attraction for me and one that is rare in these days—it is gay. And gaiety is frowned upon in modern music. They criticise Haydn and Mozart for their gaiety, and turn away their faces in shame before the exuberant joyousness with which the Ninth Symphony comes to its triumphal close. Long live gloom. Hurrah for boredom! So say our young people. They may live to regret, too late, the lost hours which they might have spent in gaiety.

Massenet's facility was something prodigious. I have seen him sick in bed, in a most uncomfortable position, and still turning off pages of orchestration, which followed one another with disconcerting speed. Too often such facility engenders laziness, but in his case we know what an enormous amount of work he accomplished. He has been criticised as being too prolific. However, that is a quality which belongs only to a master. The artist who produces little may, if he has ability, be an interesting artist, but he will never be a great one.



In this time of anarchy in art, when all he had to do to conciliate the hostile critics was to array himself with the fauves, Massenet set an example of impeccable writing. He knew how to combine modernism with respect for tradition, and he did this at a time when all he had to do was to trample tradition under foot and be proclaimed a genius. Master of his trade as few have ever been, alive to all its difficulties, possessing the most subtle secrets of its technique, he despised the contortions and exaggerations which simple minds confound with the science of music. He followed out the course he had set for himself without any concern for what they might say about him. He was able to adopt within reason the novelties from abroad and he was clever in assimilating them perfectly, yet he presented the spectacle of a thoroughly French artist whom neither the Lorelei of the Rhine nor the sirens of the Mediterranean could lead astray. He was a virtuoso of the orchestra, yet he never sacrificed the voices for the instruments, nor did he sacrifice orchestral color for the voices. Finally, he had the greatest gift of all, that of life, a gift which cannot be defined, but which the public always recognizes and which assures the success of works far inferior to his.

Much has been said about the friendship between us—a notion based solely on the demonstrations he showered on me in public—and in public alone. He might have had my friendship, if he had wanted it, and it would have been a devoted friendship, but he did not want it. He told—what I never told—how I got one of his works presented at Weimar, where Samson had just been given. What he did not tell was the icy reception he gave me when I brought the news and when I expected an entirely different sort of a reception. From that day on I never intervened again, and I was content to rejoice in his success without expecting any reciprocity on his part, which I knew to be impossible after a confession he made to me one day. My friends and companions in arms were Bizet, Guiraud and Delibes; Massenet was a rival. His high opinion of me, therefore, was the more valuable when he did me the honor of recommending his pupils to study my works. I have brought up this question only to make clear that when I proclaim his great musical importance, I am guided solely by my artistic conscience and that my sincerity cannot be suspected. One word more. Massenet had many imitators; he never imitated anyone.



CHAPTER XX

MEYERBEER

I

Who would have predicted that the day would come when it would be necessary to come to the defense of the author of Les Huguenots and Le Prophete, of the man who at one time dominated every stage in Europe by a leadership which was so extraordinary that it looked as though it would never end? I could cite many works in which all the composers of the past are praised without qualification, and Meyerbeer, alone, is accused of numerous faults. However, others have faults, too, and, as I have said elsewhere, but it will stand repeating, it is not the absence of defects but the presence of merits which makes works and men great. It is not always well to be without blemish. A too regular face or too pure a voice lacks expression. If there is no such thing as perfection in this world, it is doubtless because it is not needed.

As I do not belong to that biased school which pretends to see Peter entirely white and Paul utterly black, I do not try to make myself think that the author of Les Huguenots had no faults.

The most serious, but the most excusable, is his contempt for prosody and his indifference to the verse entrusted to him. This fault is excusable for the French school of the time, heedless of tradition, set him a bad example. Rossini was, like Meyerbeer, a foreigner, but he was not affected in the same way. He even got fine effects through the combination of musical and textual rhythm. An instance of this is seen in the famous phrase in Guillaume Tell:

Ces jours qu'ils ont ose proscrire, Je ne les ai pas defendus. Mon pere, tu m'as du maudire!

If Rossini had not retired at an age when others are just beginning their careers and had given us two or three more works, his illustrious example would have restored the old principles on which French opera had been constructed from the time of Lulli. On the contrary, Auber carried with him an entire generation captivated by Italian music. He even went so far as to put French words into Italian rhythm. The famous duet Amour sacre de la Patrie is versified as if the text were Amore sacro della patria. This is seen only in reading it, for it is never sung as it is written.

Meyerbeer was, then, excusable to a certain extent, but he abused all indulgence in such matters. In order to preserve intact his musical forms—even in recitatives, which are, as a matter of fact, only declamation set to music—he accented the weak syllables and vice versa; he added words and made unnecessarily false verse, and transformed bad verse into worse prose. He might have avoided all these literary abominations without any harm to the effect by a slight modification of the music. The verses given to musicians were often very bad, for that was the fashion. The versifier thought he had done his duty by his collaborator by giving him verses like this:

Triomphe que j'aime! Ta frayeur extreme Va malgre toi-meme Te livrer a moi!

But when Scribe abandoned his reed-pipes and essayed the lyre, he gave Meyerbeer this,

J'ai voulu les punir ...Tu les as surpasses!

And Meyerbeer made it,

J'ai voulu les punir ... Et tu les as surpasses!

which was hardly encouraging.

Meyerbeer had other manias as well. Perhaps the most notable was to give to the voice musical schemes which belong by rights to the instruments. So in the first act of Le Prophete, after the chorus sings, Veille sur nous, instead of stopping to breathe and prepare for the following phrase, he makes it repeat abruptly, Sur nous! Sur nous! in unison with the orchestral notes which are, to say the least, a ritornello.

Again, in the great cathedral scene, instead of letting the orchestra bring out through the voices the musical expression of Fides sobs: Et toi, tu ne me connais pas, he puts both the instruments and the voices in the same time and on words which do not harmonize with the music at all.

I need not speak of his immoderate love for the bassoon, an admirable instrument, but one which it is hardly prudent to abuse.

But so far we have spoken only of trifles. Meyerbeer's music, as a witty woman once remarked to me, is like stage scenery—it should not be scrutinized too closely. It would be hard to find a better characterization. Meyerbeer belonged to the theater and sought above everything else theatrical effects. But that does not mean that he was indifferent to details. He was a wealthy man and he used to indemnify the theaters for the extra expense he occasioned them. He multiplied rehearsals by trying different versions with the orchestra so as to choose between them. He did not cast his work in bronze, as so many do, and present it to the public ne varietur. He was continually feeling his way, recasting, and seeking the better which very often was the enemy of good. As the result of his continual researches he too frequently turned good ideas into inferior ones. Note for example, in L'Etoile du Nord, the passage, Enfants de l'Ukraine fils du desert. The opening passage is lofty, determined and picturesque, but it ends most disagreeably.

He always lived alone with no fixed place of abode. He was at Spa in the summer and on the Mediterranean in the winter; in large cities only as business drew him. He had no financial worries and he lived only to continue his Penelope-like work, which showed a great love of perfection, although he did not find the best way of attaining it. They have tried to place this conscientious artist in the list of seekers of success, but such men are not ordinarily accustomed to work like this.

Since I have used the word artist, it is proper to stop for a moment. Unlike Gluck and Berlioz, who were greater artists than musicians, Meyerbeer was more a musician than an artist. As a result, he often used the most refined and learned means to achieve a very ordinary artistic result. But there is no reason why he should be brought to task for results which they do not even remark in the works of so many others.

Meyerbeer was the undisputed leader in the operatic world when Robert Schumann struck the first blow at his supremacy. Schumann was ignorant of the stage, although he had made one unfortunate venture there. He did not appreciate that there is more than one way to practise the art of music. But he attacked Meyerbeer, violently, for his bad taste and Italian tendencies, entirely forgetting that when Mozart, Beethoven, and Weber did work for the stage they were strongly drawn towards Italian art. Later, the Wagnerians wanted to oust Meyerbeer from the stage and make a place for themselves, and they got credit for some of Schumann's harsh criticisms,—this, too, despite the fact that at the beginning of the skirmish Schumann and the Wagnerians got along about as well as Ingres and Delacroix and their schools. But they united against the common enemy and the French critics followed. The critics entirely neglected Berlioz's opinion, for, after opposing Meyerbeer for a long time, he admitted him among the gods and in his Traite d'Instrumentation awarded him the crown of immortality.

Parenthetically, if there is a surprising page in the history of music it is the persistent affectation of classing Berlioz and Wagner together. They had nothing in common save their great love of art and their distrust of established forms. Berlioz abhorred enharmonic modulations, dissonances resolved indefinitely one after another, continuous melody and all current practices of futuristic music. He carried this so far that he claimed that he understood nothing in the prelude to Tristan, which was certainly a sincere claim since, almost simultaneously, he hailed the overture of Lohengrin, which is conceived in an entirely different manner, as a masterpiece. He did not admit that the voice should be sacrificed and relegated to the rank of a simple unit of the orchestra. Wagner, for his part, showed at his best an elegance and artistry of pen which may be searched for in vain in Berlioz's work. Berlioz opened to the orchestra the doors of a new world. Wagner hurled himself into this unknown country and found numerous lands to till there. But what dissimilarities there are in the styles of the two men! In their methods of treating the orchestra and the voices, in their musical architectonics, and in their conception of opera!

In spite of the great worth of Les Troyens and Benvenuto Cellini, Berlioz shone brightest in the concert hall; Wagner is primarily a man of the theater. Berlioz showed clearly in Les Troyens his intention of approaching Gluck, while Wagner freely avowed his indebtedness to Weber, and particularly to the score of Euryanthe. He might have added that he owed something to Marschner, but he never spoke of that.

The more we study the works of these two men of genius, the more we are impressed by the tremendous difference between them. Their resemblance is simply one of those imaginary things which the critics too often mistake for a reality. The critics once found local color in Rossini's Semiramide!

Hans de Buelow once said to me in the course of a conversation,

"After all Meyerbeer was a man of genius."

If we fail to recognize Meyerbeer's genius, we are not only unjust but also ungrateful. In every sense, in his conception of opera, in his treatment of orchestration, in his handling of choruses, even in stage setting, he gave us new principles by which our modern works have profited to a large extent.

Theophile Gautier was no musician, but he had a fine taste in music and he judged Meyerbeer as follows:

"In addition to eminent musical talents, Meyerbeer had a highly developed instinct for the stage. He goes to the heart of a situation, follows closely the meanings of the words, and observes both the historical and local color of his subject.... Few composers have understood opera so well."

* * * * *

The success of the Italian school appeared to have utterly ruined this understanding and care for local and historical color. Rossini in the last act of Otello and in Guillaume Tell began its renaissance with a boldness for which he deserves credit, but it was left to Meyerbeer to restore it to its former glory.

It is impossible to deny his individuality. The amalgamation of his Germanic tendencies with his Italian education and his French preferences formed an ore of new brilliancy and new depth of tone. His style resembled none other. Fetis, his great admirer and friend and the famous director of the Conservatoire at Brussels, insisted, and with reason, on this distinction. His style was characterized by the importance of the rhythmic element. His ballet music owes much of its excellence to the picturesque variety of the rhythms.

Instead of the long involved overture he gave us the short distinctive prelude which has been so successful. The preludes of Robert and Les Huguenots were followed by the preludes of Lohengrin, Faust, Tristan, Romeo, La Traviata, Aida, and many others which are less famous. Verdi in his last two works and Richard Strauss in Salome went even farther and suppressed the prelude—a none too agreeable surprise. It is like a dinner without soup.

Meyerbeer gave us a foretaste of the famous leit-motif. We find it in Robert in the theme of the ballad, which the orchestra plays again while Bertram goes towards the back of the stage. This should indicate to the listener his satanic character. We find it in the Luther chant in Les Huguenots and also in the dream of Le Prophete during Jean's recitative. Here the orchestra with its modulated tone predicts the future splendor of the cathedral scene, while a lute plays low notes, embellished by a delicate weaving in of the violins, and produces a remarkable and unprecedented effect. He introduced on the stage the ensembles of wind instruments (I do not mean the brass) which are so frequent in Mozart's great concertos. An illustration of this is the entrance of Alice in the second act of Robert. An echo of this is found in Elsa's entrance in the second act of Lohengrin. Another illustration is the entrance of Berthe and Fides in the beginning of the Le Prophete. In this case the author indicated a pantomime. This is never played and so this pretty bit loses all its significance.

Meyerbeer ventured to use combinations in harmony which were considered rash at that time. They pretend that the sensitiveness of the ear has been developed since then, but in reality it has been dulled by having to undergo the most violent discords.

The beautiful "progression" of the exorcism in the fourth act of Le Prophete was not accepted without some difficulty. I can still see Gounod seated at a piano singing the debated passage and trying to convince a group of recalcitrant listeners of its beauty.

Meyerbeer developed the role of the English horn, which up to that time had been used only rarely and timidly, and he also introduced the bass clarinet into the orchestra. But the two instruments, as he used them, still appeared somewhat unusual. They were objects of luxury, strangers of distinction which one saluted respectfully and which played no great part. Under Wagner's management they became a definite part of the household and, as we know, brought in a wealth of coloring.

It is an open question whether it was Meyerbeer or Scribe who planned the amazing stage setting in the cathedral scene in Le Prophete. It must have been Meyerbeer, for Scribe was not temperamentally a revolutionist, and this scene was really revolutionary. The brilliant procession with its crowd of performers which goes across the stage through the nave into the choir, constantly keeping its distance from the audience, is an impressive, realistic and beautiful scene. But directors who go to great expense for the costumes cannot understand why the procession should file anywhere except before the footlights as near the audience as possible, and it is extremely difficult to get any other method of procedure.

Furthermore, the amusing idea of the skating ballet was due to Meyerbeer. At the time there was an amusing fellow in Paris who had invented roller skates and who used to practise his favorite sport on fine evenings on the large concrete surfaces of the Place de la Concorde. Meyerbeer saw him and got the idea of the famous ballet. In the early days of the opera it certainly was charming to see the skaters come on accompanied by a pretty chorus and a rhythm from the violins regulated by that of the dancers. But the performance began at seven and ended at midnight. Now they begin at eight and to gain the hour they had to accelerate the pace. So the chorus in question was sacrificed. That was bad for Les Huguenots. The author tried to make a good deal out of the last act with its beautiful choruses in the church—a development of the Luther chant—and the terror of the approaching massacre. But this act has been cut, mutilated and made generally unrecognizable. They even go so far in some of the foreign houses as to suppress it entirely.

I once saw the last act in all its integrity and with six harps accompanying the famous trio. We shall never see the six harps again, for Garnier, instead of reproducing exactly the placing of the orchestra in the old Opera, managed so well in the new one that they are unable to put in the six harps of old or the four drums with which Meyerbeer got such surprising effects in Robert and Le Prophete. I believe, however, that recent improvements have averted this disaster in a certain measure, and that there is now a place for the drums. But we shall never hear the six harps again.

We must say something of the genesis of Meyerbeer's works, for in many instances this was curious and few people know about it.

II

We might like to see works spring from the author's brain as complete as Minerva was when she sprang from Jove's, but that is infrequently the case. When we study the long series of operas which Gluck wrote, we are surprised to meet some things which we recognize as having seen before in the masterpieces which immortalize his name. And often the music is adapted to entirely different situations in the changed form. The words of a follower become the awesome prophecy of a high priest. The trio in Orphee with its tender love and expressions of perfect happiness fairly trembles with accents of sorrow. The music had been written for an entirely different situation which justified them. Massenet has told us that he borrowed right and left from his unpublished score, La Coupe du Roi de Thule. That is what Gluck did with his Elena e Paride which had little success. I may as well confess that one of the ballets in Henry VIII came from the finale of an opera-comique in one act. This work was finished and ready to go to rehearsal when the whole thing was stopped because I had the audacity to assert to Nestor Roqueplan, the director of Favart Hall, that Mozart's Le Nozze di Figaro was a masterpiece.

Meyerbeer, even more than anyone, tried not to lose his ideas and the study of their transformation is extremely interesting. One day Nuitter, the archivist at the Opera, learned of an important sale of manuscripts in Berlin. He attended the sale and brought back a lot of Meyerbeer's rough drafts which included studies for a Faust that the author never finished. These fragments give no idea what the piece would have been. We see Faust and Mephistopheles walking in Hell. They come to the Tree of Human Knowledge on the banks of the Styx and Faust picks the fruit. From this detail it is easy to imagine that the libretto is bizarre. The authorship of this amazing libretto is unknown, but it is not strange that Meyerbeer soon abandoned it. From this still-born Faust, Scribe, at the request of the author, constructed Robert le Diable. An aria sung by Faust on the banks of the Styx becomes the Valse Infernale.

The necessity of utilizing pre-existing fragments explains some of the incoherence of this incomprehensible piece. It also explains the creation of Bertram, half man, half devil, who was invented as a substitute for Mephistopheles. The fruit of the Tree of Human Knowledge became the Rameau Veneree in the third act, and the beautiful religious scene in the fifth act, which has no relation to the action, is a transposition of the Easter scene.

So Scribe should not be blamed for making a poor piece when he had so many difficulties to contend with. He must have lost his head a little for Robert's mother was called Berthe in the first act and Rosalie in the third. However, the answer might be that she changed her name when she became religious.

Later, Scribe was put to another no less difficult test with L'Etoile du Nord. When Meyerbeer was the conductor at the Berlin Opera, he wrote on command Le Camp de Silesie with Frederick the Great as the hero and Jenny Lind as the musical star. As we know, Frederick was a musician, for he both composed music and played the flute, while Jenny Lind, the Swedish nightingale, was a great singer. A contest between the nightingale and the flute was sure to follow or theatrical instinct is a vain phrase. But in the piece Scribe created, Peter the Great took Frederick the Great's place and to give a motive for the grace notes in the last act it was necessary for the terrible Tsar, a half savage barbarian, to learn to play the flute.

It is not worth while telling how the Tsar took lessons on the flute from a young pastry cook who came on the stage with a basket of cakes on his head; how the cook later became a lord, and many other details of this absurd play. It is permitted to be absurd on the stage, if it is done so that the absurdity is forgotten. But in this instance it was impossible to forget the absurdities. The extravagance of the libretto led the musician into many unfortunate things. This extremely interesting score is very uneven, but there are a thousand details worth the attention of the professional musician. Beauty even appears in the score at moments, and there are charming and picturesque bits, as well as puerilities and shocking vulgarities.

Public curiosity was aroused for a long time by clever advance notices and had reached a high pitch when L'Etoile du Nord appeared. The work was carried by the exceptional talents of Bataille and Caroline Duprez and was enormously successful at the start, but this success has grown steadily less. Faure and Madame Patti gave some fine performances in London. We shall probably never see their equal again, and it is not desirable that we should either from the standpoint of art or of the author.

Les Huguenots was not an opera pieced together out of others, but it did not reach the public as the author wrote it. At the beginning of the first act there was a game of cup and ball on which the author had set his heart. But the balls had to strike at the exact moment indicated in the score and the players never succeeded in accomplishing that. The passage had to be suppressed but it is preserved in the library at the Opera. They also had to suppress the part of Catherine de Medici who should preside at the conference where the massacre of St. Bartholomew was planned. Her part was merged with that of St. Pris. They also suppressed the first scene in the last act, where Raoul, disheveled and covered with blood, interrupted the ball and upset the merriment by announcing the massacre to the astonished dancers.

But it is a question whether we should believe the legend that the great duet, the climax of the whole work, was improvised during the rehearsals at the request of Norritt and Madame Falcon. It is hard to believe that. The work, as is well known, was taken from Merimee's Chronique du regne de Charles IX. This scene is in the romance and it is almost impossible that Meyerbeer had no idea of putting it into his opera. More probably the people at the theatre wanted the act to end with the blessing of the daggers, and the author with his duet in his portfolio only had to take it out to satisfy his interpreters. A beautiful scene like this with its sweep and pleasing innovation is not written hastily. This duet should be heard when the author's intentions and the nuances which make a part of the idea are respected and not replaced by inventions in bad taste which they dare to call traditions. The real traditions have been lost and this admirable scene has lost its beauty.

The manner in which the duet ends has not been noted sufficiently. Raoul's phrase, God guard our days. God of our refuge! remains in suspense and the orchestra brings it to an end, the first example of a practice used frequently in modern works.

We do not know how Meyerbeer got his idea of putting the schismatic John Huss on the stage under the name of John of Leyden. Whether this idea was original with him or was suggested by Scribe, who made a fantastic person out of John, we do not know. We only know that the role of the prophet's mother was originally intended for Madame Stoltz, but she had left the Opera. Meyerbeer heard Madame Pauline Viardot at Vienna and found in her his ideal, so he created the redoubtable role of Fides for her. The part of Jean was given to the tenor Roger, the star of the Opera-Comique, and he played and sang it well. Levasseur, the Marcel of Les Huguenots and the Bertram of Robert, played the part of Zacharie.

Le Prophete was enormously successful in spite of the then powerful censer-bearers of the Italian school. We now see its defects rather than its merits. Meyerbeer is criticised for not putting into practice theories he did not know and no account is taken of his fearlessness, which was great for that period. No one else could have drawn the cathedral scene with such breadth of stroke and extraordinary brilliancy. The paraphrase of Domine salvum fac regem reveals great ingenuity. His method of treating the organ is wonderful, and his idea of the ritournello Sur le Jeu de hautbois is charming. This precedes and introduces the children's chorus, and is constructed on a novel theme which is developed brilliantly by the choruses, the orchestra and the organ combined. The repetition of the Domine Salvum at the end of the scene, which bursts forth abruptly in a different key, is full of color and character.



III

The story of Le Pardon de Ploermel is interesting. It was first called Dinorah, a name which Meyerbeer picked up abroad. But Meyerbeer liked to change the titles of his operas several times in the course of the rehearsals in order to keep public curiosity at fever heat. He had the notion of writing an opera-comique in one act, and he asked his favorite collaborators, Jules Barbier and Michael Carre, for a libretto. They produced Dinorah in three scenes and with but three characters. The music was written promptly and was given to Perrin, the famous director, whose unfortunate influence soon made itself felt. A director's first idea at that time was to demand changes in the piece given him. "A single act by you, Master? Is that permissible? What can we put on after that? A new work by Meyerbeer should take up the entire evening." That was the way the insidious director talked, and there was all the more chance of his being listened to as the author was possessed by a mania for retouching and making changes. So Meyerbeer took the score to the Mediterranean where he spent the winter. The next spring he brought back the work developed into three acts with choruses and minor characters. Besides these additions he had written the words which Barbier and Carre should have done.

The rehearsals were tedious. Meyerbeer wanted Faure and Madame Carvalho in the leading roles but one was at the Opera-Comique and the other at her own house, the Theatre-Lyrique. The work went back and forth from the Place Favart to the Place du Chatelet. But the author's hesitancy was at bottom only a pretext. What he wanted was to secure a postponement of Limnander's opera Les Blancs et les Bleus. The action of this work and of Dinorah, as well, took place in Brittany. In the hope of being Meyerbeer's choice, both theatres turned poor Limnander away. Finally, Dinorah fell to the Opera-Comique. After long hard work, which the author demanded, Madame Cabel and MM. Faure and Sainte-Foix gave a perfect performance.

There was a good deal of criticism of having the hunter, the reaper, and the shepherd sing a prayer together at the beginning of the third act. This was not considered theatrical; to-day that is a virtue.

There was a good deal of talk about L'Africanne, which had been looked for for a long time and which seemed to be almost legendary and mysterious; it still is for that matter. The subject of the opera was unknown. All that was known was that the author was trying to find an interpreter and could get none to his liking.

Then Marie Cruvelli, a German singer with an Italian training, appeared. With her beauty and prodigious voice she shone like a meteor in the theatrical firmament. Meyerbeer found his Africanne realized in her and at his request she was engaged at the Opera. Her engagement was made the occasion for a brilliant revival of Les Huguenots and Meyerbeer wrote new ballet music for it. To-day we have no idea of what Les Huguenots was then. Then the author went back to his Africanne and went to work again. He used to go to see the brilliant singer about it nearly every day, when she suddenly announced that she was going to leave the stage to become the Comtesse Vigier! Meyerbeer was discouraged and he threw his unfinished manuscript into a drawer where it stayed until Marie Sass had so developed her voice and talent that he made up his mind to entrust the role of Selika to her. He wanted Faure for the role of Nelusko and he was already at the Opera, so he had the management engage Naudin, the Italian tenor, as well.

But Scribe had died during the long period which had elapsed since the marriage of the Comtesse Vigier. Meyerbeer was now left to himself, and too much inclined to revisions of every kind as he was, re-made the piece to his fancy. When it was completed—it didn't resemble anything and the author planned to finish it at the rehearsals.

As we know, Meyerbeer died suddenly. He realized that he was dying and as he knew how necessary his presence was for a performance of L'Africanne he forbade its appearance. But his prohibition was only verbal as he could no longer write. The public was impatiently awaiting L'Africanne, so they went ahead with it.

When Perrin and his nephew du Locle opened the package of manuscripts Meyerbeer had left, they were stupefied at finding no L'Africanne.

"Never mind," said Perrin, "the public wants an Africanne and it shall have one."

He summoned Fetis, Meyerbeer's enthusiastic admirer, and the three, Fetis, Perrin and du Locle, managed to evolve the opera we know from the scraps the author had left in disorder. They did not accomplish this, however, without considerable difficulty, without some incoherences, numerous suppressions and even additions. Perrin was the inventor of the wonderful map on which Selika recognized Madagascar. They took the characters there in order to justify the term Africanne applied to the heroine. They also introduced the Brahmin religion to Madagascar in order to avoid moving the characters to India where the fourth act should take place. The first performance was imminent when they found that the work was too long. So they cut out an original ballet where a savage beat a tom-tom, and they cut and fitted together mercilessly. In the last act Selika, alone and dying, should see the paradise of the Brahmins appear as in a vision. But Faure wanted to appear again at the finale, so they had to adapt a bit taken from the third act and suppress the vision. This is the reason why Nelusko succumbs so quickly to the deadly perfume of the poisonous flowers, while Selika resists so long. The riturnello of Selika's aria, which should be performed with lowered curtain as the queen gazes over the sea and at the departing vessel far away on the horizon, became a vehicle for encores—the last thing that was ever in Meyerbeer's mind. But the worst was the liberty Fetis took in retouching the orchestration. As a compliment to Adolph Sax he substituted a saxaphone for the bass clarinet which the author indicated. This resulted in the suppression of that part of the aria beginning O Paradis sorti de l'onde as the saxophone did not produce a good effect. Fetis also allowed Perrin to make over a bass solo into a chorus, the Bishop's Chorus. The great vocal range in this is poorly adapted for a chorus. Some barbarous modulations are certainly apocryphal....

We are unable to imagine what L'Africanne would have been if Scribe had lived and the authors had put it into shape. The work we have is illogical and incomplete. The words are simply monstrous and Scribe certainly would not have kept them. This is the case in the passage in the great duet:

O ma Selika, vous regnez sur mon ame! —Ah! ne dis pas ces mots brulante! Ils m'egarent moi-meme....

The music stitched to this impossible piece, however, had its admirers—even fanatical admirers—so great was the prestige of the author's name at the time of its appearance. We must not forget that there are, indeed, some beautiful pages in this chaos. The religious ceremony in the fourth act and the Brahmin recitative accompanied by the pizzicati of the bass may be mentioned as an indication of this. The latter passage is not in favor, however; they play it down without conviction and so deprive it of all its strength and majesty.

* * * * *

I said, at the beginning of this study, that we were ungrateful to Meyerbeer, and this ingratitude is double on the part of France, for he loved her. He only had to say the word to have any theatre in Europe opened to him, yet he preferred to them all the Opera at Paris and even the Opera-Comique where the choruses and orchestra left much to be desired. When he did work for Paris after he had given Margherita d'Anjou and Le Crociato in Italy, he was forced to accommodate himself to French taste just as Rossini and Donizetti were. The latter wrote for the Opera-Comique La Fille du Regiment, a military and patriotic work, and its dashing and glorious Salut a la France has resounded through the whole world. Foreigners do not take so much pains in our day, and France applauds Die Meistersinger which ends with a hymn to German art. Such is progress!

Something must be said of a little known score, Struensee, which was written for a drama which was so weak that it prevented the music gaining the success it deserved. The composer showed himself in this more artistic than in anything else he did. It should have been heard at the Odeon with another piece written by Jules Barbier on the same subject. The overture used to appear in the concerts as did the polonnaise, but like the overture to Guillaume Tell, they have disappeared. These overtures are not negligible. The overture to Guillaume Tell is notable for the unusual invention of the five violoncellos and its storm with its original beginning, to say nothing of its pretty pastoral. The fine depth of tone in the exordium of Struensee and the fugue development in the main theme are also not to be despised. But all that, we are told, is lacking in elevation and depth. Possibly; but it is not always necessary to descend to Hell and go up to Heaven. There is certainly more music in these overtures than in Grieg's Peer Gynt which has been dinned into our ears so much.

But enough of this. I must stop with the operas, for to consider the rest of his music would necessitate a study of its own and that would take us too far afield. My hope is that these lines may repair an unnecessary injustice and redirect the fastidious who may read them to a great musician whom the general public has never ceased to listen to and applaud.



CHAPTER XXI

JACQUES OFFENBACH

It is dangerous to prophesy. Not long ago I was speaking of Offenbach, trying to do justice to his marvellous natural gifts and deploring his squandering them. And I was imprudent enough to say that posterity would never know him. Now posterity is proving that I was wrong, for Offenbach is coming back into fashion. Our contemporaneous composers forget that Mozart, Beethoven and Sebastian Bach knew how to laugh at times. They distrust all gaiety and declare it unesthetic. As the good public cannot resign itself to getting along without gaiety, it goes to operetta and turns naturally to Offenbach who created it and furnished an inexhaustible supply. My phrase is not exaggerated, for Offenbach hardly dreamed of creating an art. He was endowed with a genius for the comic and an abundance of melody, but he had no thought of doing anything beyond providing material for the theatre he managed at the time. As a matter of fact he was almost its only author.

He was unable to rid himself of his Germanic influences and so corrupted the taste of an entire generation by his false prosody, which has been incorrectly considered originality. In addition he was lacking in taste. At the time they affected a dreadful mannerism of always stopping on the next to the last note of a passage, whether or not it was associated with a mute syllable. This mannerism had no purpose beyond indicating to the audience the end of a passage and giving the claque the signal to applaud. Offenbach did not belong to that heroic strain to which success is the least of its cares. So he adopted this mannerism, and often his ingeniously turned and charming couplets are ruined by this silly absurdity now gone out of fashion.

Furthermore, he wrote badly, for his early education was neglected. If the Tales of Hoffman shows traces of a practised pen, it is because Guiraud finished the score and went out of his way to remedy some of the author's mistakes. Leaving aside the bad prosody and the minor defects in taste, we have left a work which shows a wealth of invention, melody, and sparkling fancy comparable to Gretry's.

Gretry was no more a great musician than Offenbach, for he also wrote badly. The essential difference between the two was the care, not only in his prosody but also in his declamation, which Gretry tried to reproduce musically with all possible exactness. He overshot the mark in this for he did not see that in singing the expression of a note is modified by the harmonic scheme which accompanies it. It must be recognized, in addition, that many times Gretry was carried away by his melodic inventiveness and forgot his own principles so that he relegated his care for declamation to second place.

What hurt Gretry was his unbounded conceit, with which Offenbach, to his credit, was never afflicted. As an indication of this, he dared to write in his advice to young musicians:

"Those who have genius will make opera-comique like mine; those who have talent will write opera like Gluck's; while those who have neither genius nor talent, will write symphonies like Haydn's."

However, he tried to make an opera like Gluck's and in spite of his great efforts and his interesting inventions, he could not equal the work of his formidable rival.

* * * * *

Although he was not a great musician, Offenbach had a surprising natural instinct and made here and there curious discoveries in harmony. In speaking of these discoveries I must go slightly into the theory of harmony and resign myself to being understood only by those of my readers who are more or less musicians. In a slight work, Daphnis et Chloe, Offenbach risked a dominant eleventh without either introduction or conclusion—an extraordinary audacity at the time. A short course in harmony is necessary for the understanding of this. We must start with the fact that, theoretically, all dissonances must be introduced and concluded, which we cannot explain here, but this leading up to and away from have for their purpose softening the harshness of the dissonance which was greatly feared in bygone times. Take if you please, the simple key of C natural. Do is the keynote, sol is the dominant. Place on this dominant two-thirds—si-re—and you have the perfect dominant chord. Add a third fa and you have the famous dominant seventh, a dissonance which to-day seems actually agreeable. Not so long ago they thought that they ought to prepare for the dissonance. In the Sixteenth Century it was not regarded as admissible at all, for one hears the two notes si and fa simultaneously and this seems intolerable to the ear. They used to call it the Diabolus in musica.

Palestrina was the first to employ it in an anthem. Opinions differ on this, and certain students of harmony pretend that the chord which Palestrina used only has the appearance of the dominant seventh. I do not concur in this view. But however the case may be, the glory of unchaining the devil in music belongs to Montreverde. That was the beginning of modern music.

Later, a new third was superimposed and they dared the chord sol-si-re-fa-la. The inventor is unknown, but Beethoven seems to have been the first to make any considerable use of it. He used the chord in such a way that, in spite of its current use to-day, in his works it appears like something new and strange. This chord imposes its characteristics on the second motif of the first part of the Symphony in C minor. This is what gives such amazing charm to the long colloquy between the flute, the oboe and the clarinets, which always surprises and arouses the listener, in the andante of the same symphony. Fetis in his Traite d'Harmonie inveighed against this delightful passage. He admits that people like it, but, according to him, the author had no right to write it and the listener has no right to admire it. Scholars often have strange ideas.

Then Richard Wagner came along and the reign of the ninth dominant took the place of the seventh. That is what gives Tannhauser, and Lohengrin their exciting character, which is dear to those who demand in music above everything else the pleasure due to shocks to the nervous system. Imitators have fallen foul of this easy procedure, and with a laughable naivete imagine that in this way they can easily equal Wagner. And they have succeeded in making this valuable chord absolutely banal.



By adding still another third we have the dominant eleventh. Offenbach used this, but it has played but a small part since then. Beyond that we cannot go, for a third more and we are back to the basic note, two octaves away.

But innovations in harmony are rare in Offenbach's work. What makes him interesting is his fertility in invention of melodies and few have equaled him in this. He improvised constantly and with incredible rapidity. His manuscripts give the impression of having been done with the point of a needle. There is nothing useless anywhere in them. He used abbreviations as much as he could and the simplicity of his harmony helped him here. As a result he was able to produce his light works in an exceedingly short time.

He had the luck to attach Madame Ugalde to his company. Her powers had already begun to decline but she was still brilliant. While she was giving a spectacular revival of Orphee aux Enfers, he wrote Les Bavards for her. He was inspired by the hope of an unusual interpretation and he so surpassed himself that he produced a small masterpiece. A revival of this work would certainly be successful if that were possible, but the peculiar merits of the creatrix of the role would be necessary and I do not see her like anywhere.

It is strange but true that Offenbach lost all his good qualities as soon as he took himself seriously. But he was not the only case of this in the history of music. Cramer and Clementi wrote studies and exercises which are marvels of style, but their sonatas and concertos are tiresome in their mediocrity. Offenbach's works which were given at the Opera-Comique—Robinson Crusoe, Vert-Vert, and Fantasio are much inferior to La Chanson de Fortunio, La Belle Helene and many other justly famous operettas. There have been several unprofitable revivals of La Belle Helene. This is due to the fact that the role of Helene was designed for Mlle. Schneider. She was beautiful and talented and had an admirable mezzo-soprano voice. The slight voice of the ordinary singer of operetta is insufficient for the part. Furthermore, traditions have sprung up. The comic element has been suppressed and the piece has been denatured by this change. In Germany they conceived the idea of playing this farce seriously with an archaic stage setting!

Jacques Offenbach will become a classic. While this may be unexpected, what doesn't happen? Everything is possible—even the impossible.



CHAPTER XXII

THEIR MAJESTIES

Queen Victoria did me the honor to receive me twice at Windsor Castle, and Queen Alexandra paid me the same honor at Buckingham Palace in London. The first time I saw Queen Victoria I was presented to her by the Baroness de Caters. She was the daughter of Lablache and had one of the most beautiful voices and the greatest talent that I have ever known. This charming woman had been left a widow and so she became an artist, appearing in concerts and giving singing lessons. At the time of which I speak she was teaching Princess Beatrice, now the mother-in-law of the King of Spain. In all the glory of the freshness of youth, the Princess was endowed with a charming voice which the Baroness guided perfectly. The Princess received Madame de Caters and myself with a gracefulness which was increased by her unusual bashfulness. Her Majesty, in the meantime, was finishing her luncheon. I was somewhat apprehensive through having heard of the coldness which the Queen affected at this sort of audience, so I was more than surprised when she came in with both hands extended to take mine and when she addressed me with real cordiality. She was very fond of Baroness de Caters and that was the secret of the reception which put me at my ease at once.

Her Majesty wanted to hear me play the organ (there is an excellent one in the chapel at Windsor), and then the piano. Finally, I had the honor of accompanying the Princess as she sang the aria from Etienne Marcel. Her Royal Highness sang with great clearness and distinctness, but it was the first time she had sung before her august mother and she was frightened almost to death. The Queen was so delighted that some days later, without my being told of it, she summoned to Windsor, Madame Gye, wife of the manager of Covent Garden,—the famous singer Albani—to ask to have Etienne Marcel staged at her own theatre. The Queen's wish was not granted.

I returned to Windsor seventeen years later, in company with Johann Wolf, who was for many years Queen Victoria's chosen violinist. We dined at the palace, and, if we did not enjoy the distinction of sitting at the royal table, we were nevertheless in good company with the young princesses, daughters of the Duke of Connaught. We were lodged at a hotel for the honor of sleeping at the Castle was reserved for very important personages—an honor which need not be envied, for the sleeping apartments are really servants' rooms. But etiquette decrees it.

Dinner was over, and princes in full uniform and princesses in elaborate evening dress stood about, waiting for her Majesty's appearance. I was heartbroken when I saw her enter, for she was almost carried by her Indian servant and obviously could not walk alone. But once seated at a small table, she was just as she had been before, with her wonderful charm, her simple manner and her musical voice. Only her white hair bore witness to the years that had passed. She asked me about Henri VIII, which was being given for the second time at Covent Garden, and I explained to her that in my desire to give the piece the local color of its times I had been ferreting about in the royal library at Buckingham Palace, to which my friend, the librarian, had given me access. And I also told how I had found in a great collection of manuscripts of the Sixteenth Century an exquisitely fine theme arranged for the harpsichord, which served as the framework for the opera—I used it later for the march I wrote for the coronation of King Edward. The Queen was much interested in music in general and she appeared to be especially pleased in this discussion. His Highness the Duke of Connaught wrote me that she had spoken of it several times.

The musical library at Buckingham Palace is most remarkable and it is a pity that access to it is not easier. Among other things, there are the manuscripts of Handel's oratorios, written for the most part with disconcerting rapidity. His Messiah was composed in fifteen days! The rudimentary instrumentation of the time made such speed possible, yet who is there to-day who could write all those fugue choruses with such speed? The fugue manner, which seems laborious to us, was current at the time and they were practised in it. The library also contains works of Handel's contemporaries, which are executed with the same mastery. We cannot say whether they were written with the same rapidity as Handel's, but it is easy to see that there was a general ability to do so, just as now it is a matter of common attainment to produce complicated orchestral effects, the possibility of which the old masters had no conception. What made Handel superior to his rivals was the romantic and picturesque side of his works; probably also, his prodigious and unvarying fertility.

The last word has been said about Queen Victoria, yet the peculiar charm which radiated from her personality cannot be too highly praised. She seemed the personification of England. When she passed on, it seemed as though a great void were left. All King Edward's splendid qualities were necessary to take her place, combined with the effect of the world's surprise at discovering a great king where they had expected to see only a brilliant prince who had been a constant lover of pomp and pleasure.

I was later admitted to Buckingham Palace to play with Josef Hollman, the violinist, before Queen Alexandra. We both were eager for this opportunity which we were told was impossible. The Queen was very busy, and, in addition, she was in mourning for the successive deaths of her father and mother, the King and Queen of Denmark. Suddenly, however, we learned that she would receive us. She was pale and appeared to be feeble, but she received us with the utmost cordiality. She spoke to me about her mother, whom I had seen at Copenhagen with her sisters the Empress Dowager of Russia, and the Princess of Hanover whom politics deprived of a crown which was hers by right. I have a very pleasant recollection of this visit. I do not know how it happened but I remained speechless at this lead from the Queen. She brought the subject up a second time and my timidity still prevented my responding. I ought to have had many things to say to one so obviously eager to listen. This Queen of Denmark, with her eighty years, was the most delightful old lady imaginable. Erect, slight, alert of mind and unfaltering of speech, she reminded me vividly of my maternal great-aunt, that extraordinary woman, who gave me my first notions of things and directed my hand on the keys so well.

A singer whom I had never seen or heard of, but of whom I had heard poor reports, had written Queen Louise that I wanted to accompany her to court. The Queen asked me if I knew her and if what she had written was true. My surprise was so great that I could not repress a start, which I followed by an exclamation of denial, which appeared to amuse her greatly. "I did not doubt it," she said, "but I'm not sorry to be sure."

Queen Alexandra was accompanied by Lady Gray, her great friend, and the hereditary princess of Greece. After M. Hollman and I had played a duet, she expressed a desire to hear me play alone. As I attempted to lift the lid of the piano, she stepped forward to help me raise it before the maids of honor could intervene. After this slight concert she delivered to each of us, in her own name and in that of the absent king, a gold medal commemorative of artistic merit, and she offered us a cup of tea which she poured with her royal and imperial hands.

Other queens have also received me—Queen Christine of Spain and Queen Amelie of Portugal. After Queen Christine had heard me play on the piano, she expressed a desire to hear me play the organ, and they chose for this an excellent instrument made by Cavaille-Coll in a church whose name I have forgotten. The day was fixed for this ceremony, which would naturally have been of a private character, when some great ladies lectured the indiscreet queen for daring to resort to a sacred place for any purpose besides taking part in divine services. The queen was displeased by this remonstrance and she responded by coming to the church not only not incognito, but in great state, with the king (he was very young), the ministers and the court, while horsemen stationed at intervals blew their trumpets. I had written a religious march especially for this event, and the Queen kindly accepted its dedication to her. I was a little flustered when she asked me to play the too familiar melody from Samson et Dalila which begins Mon coeur s'ouvre a ta voix. I had to improvise a transposition suited for the organ, something I had never dreamt of doing. During the performance the Queen leaned her elbow on the keyboard of the organ, her chin resting on one hand and her eyes upturned. She seemed rapt in exstasy which, as may be imagined, was not precisely displeasing to the author.