Conductors (Music) -- United States -- Biography; Damrosch, Walter, 1862-1950
At the Bülow recital her singing of some German songs by Schubert and
Schumann, I think, was received with such enthusiastic applause that she
gave an encore, a rather trivial song by Franz Abt. When Bülow, in his
dressing-room, heard this “desecration” of a programme composed of works
of great masters only, his rage knew no bounds, and when he came out on
the stage to continue his own programme, he deliberately took out his
handkerchief and carefully wiped the keys of the piano up and down in a
noisy glissando scale and then began to improvise on the recitative from
Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, “O friends, not these tones. . . .”
Another time he gave a chamber-music concert with my father and they
played, among other things, the “Kreutzer Sonata” of Beethoven. Just
before going on the stage he turned to my father and said:
“Let us play it by heart.”
“With pleasure,” answered my father and laid down his music.
“No, no,” said Bülow, “take it on the stage with you.”
After they had taken their places on the stage Bülow ostentatiously
rose, took my father’s music from the stand and his own from the piano
and laid them both under the piano.
His memory, not only for music, but for all things that interested him,
was prodigious and to me uncanny. But it was, after all, human and not
infallible, and on this occasion he did lose his place in the last
movement of the sonata and my father had to improvise with him for a few
bars until, with quick ingenuity, he found the thread again.
I have spoken elsewhere of the terrible responsibilities which were
placed upon my shoulders because of the sudden death of my father, and
as the years went by I seemed to miss him more and more, not only his
wonderful companionship, but the wise counsel with which he used to help
me solve my musical riddles. I worked hard and made progress, I think,
for my circle of friends and followers grew larger and larger. But I
knew no one in this country to whom I could turn in the same way as to
my father, or who would have given me of his wisdom so freely and
generously as he. Seidl, my associate at the Metropolitan, was not
friendly and was completely wrapped up in himself, and besides, he had,
to my thinking, only one specialty, the Wagner music-dramas. As a
symphonic conductor he was completely without experience when he first
came to America and his interpretation of the classics lacked foundation
and real penetration, in spite of the noisy acclaim which a certain part
of our public gave him because of his undoubted genius as a Wagner
conductor.
A lucky chance brought me a clipping from a German newspaper announcing
that Hans von Bülow would spend the summer of 1887 in Frankfort, where
he would teach a class of advanced pianists and devote the entire
receipts toward building a monument to his old friend, Joachim Raff, who
had spent his last years in Frankfort as director of the conservatory.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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