Music

MR. THEODORE THOMAS’S concerts have been, as usual, most interesting. At every hearing of this wonderfully drilled orchestra, each performance seems more perfect than the last; certainly Mr. Thomas has this year cured what few technical defects there might have been in the performances of past seasons, and his orchestra seems as nearly perfect as well may be. The somewhat too pronounced and strident quality of his brass instruments, that used to make it an unthankful task for the strings and reeds to try to hold their own in fortissimo passages, is now judiciously toned down; and he has at last succeeded in obtaining a perfectly even pianissimo from all his wind instruments, such we have never heard equalled in any but the finest French orchestras. Even the unmanageable bassoon has been brought to play as softly as the celli, and the usually irrepressible flutes and oboes vie with the violins in delicately subdued tones. In addition to this, Mr. Thomas’s flutes and reeds have an advantage over those in French orchestras, in that they can play loud when necessary. In France, the players of wooden wind instruments rarely succeed in going beyond the quiet, pastoral character of their instruments, and in passages of passionate intensity, as, for instance. the famous monologue of the clarinets that immediately follows the grand outburst of the horns in the overture to the Freischütz, they commonly show great want of power. German players, on the other hand, cultivate almost exclusively the heroic character of these instruments, and seem to find themselves at home only in strong passages, rarely succeeding in playing softly enough where a real pianissimo is required. Mr. Thomas’s artists show themselves equally acquainted with both the heroic and pastoral characters of their instruments. The bowing, phrasing, and purity of intonation of the strings is as fine as ever, and the dynamic balance of the whole orchestra is as perfect as is possible in one of its very moderate size. Of new music, Mr. Thomas has presented to us this season much that is interesting. His programmes have been, perhaps unavoidably, of a somewhat mixed character; and he seems to have an eye to strongly marked contrasts, rather than to any logical system of development in the succession of pieces performed. The character of much of the music on his programmes, especially the preponderance of music of the socalled “ future ” schools, has given rise to some quite lively discussion in the daily papers, (would that such public expression of individual opinion on musical matters were more common with us !) one writer contending that the production of music of a bad, or at least a not yet universally sanctioned school, must injure the popular taste, whatever chances such music may afford of displaying a highly developed executive power and brilliant virtuosity ; his opponent, on the other hand, holding that Mr. Thomas was doing the public a good service in impartially performing music of all schools. If we mistake not, Mr. Thomas is as far as possible from wishing to make his orchestra the means of indiscriminately bringing all schools of music under the notice of the public. He is, if anybody ever was, a confessed admirer of Wagner, Liszt, and Berlioz, and has, as far as we can find out, a definite object in view in the formation of his programmes, namely, a wish to advance the cause of “ the future,” even though the cause of classic music by the acknowledged great masters suffer by it. The different spirit in which both he and his orchestra take hold of the new music, from that in which they play Haydn, Mozart, and the earlier works of Beethoven, can be seen at a glance by any one who takes the trouble to listen critically to his performances. To be sure the same care and attention to even the minutest details is noticeable in the drilling of his orchestra, whether they be playing a Beethoven Symphony or a Liszt Symphonic Poem, a Mendelssohn Overture or an orchestral bit from one of Wagner’s musical dramas ; but the degree of interest in his task that he displays is vastly different, and however perfect his performances of classic music may be in all technical details, we must admit that they show neither the fire nor the sentiment that is so marked in his renderings of more recent music. But be his musical convictions what they may, so long as they are honestly come at, which we see no earthly reason to doubt, he has a perfect right to them and to do all in his power to propagate his ideas, — happy he who has such means of doing so ! — and we cannot think .him open to the charge either of aiming at the mere display of brilliant virtuosity on the one hand, or of an indolent and too lukewarm catholicity on the other. Whether his object, namely, the introduction of the new music, be one which will benefit the cause of art or not, is another question, and one, if the truth must be told, about which we ourselves are by no means sure. It may even be doubted whether Mr. Thomas has taken the right measures to secure his own end. It seems to us that many of his selections from the later composers are more calculated to frighten away than to fascinate and interest all listeners who are not already attracted towards such music. When a man wishes to interest the public in a school of music with which they are unacquainted, he will find it an object first to conciliate his public, and, if possible, to impress them favorably with the music he is trying to introduce ; not by means of eulogistic handbills and much talking, but by first playing to them such things of the new school as they are pretty sure to like. After an audience has once received a favorable impression of a composer, they will be much more inclined to appreciate those of his works which would at first have frightened them away by their unaccustomed style and strangeness of form, than if they knew the composer only by hearsay. When the Music Hall organ was first put up, some most admirable musicians tried to interest the public in Bach. In those days, Bach was a composer whom the most of us had, at best, only heard of; of his music and style wc knew nothing or next to nothing ; his greatness we were willing to take for granted. The first pieces of Bach that were played at the Music Hall were the Tocata in F, and one of the great Fugues (we think the great one in G Minor), —compositions which can be ranked with all that is greatest and most glorious in music, but whose first effect upon nearly the whole audience was as if some Juggernaut-car had mercilessly rolled over them. The music simply crushed them, and if they had no very unkind feelings toward the organist when the piece was over, it was on that queer principle of gratitude which prevents us from doing some violent personal injury to a dentist after undergoing a painful operation, because we are so grateful to him, when he stops, for kindly bringing our torture to an end. After the first few weeks of organ concerts, the general impression that Bach’s music had made upon the public was that of unparalleled noise and confusion worse confounded. “ Sehr gelehrt, aber sehr hässlich,” as an impromptu critic once said. It was not for some years that this first impression was wiped away. People now feel about the new music much as they then did about Bach. To most of our public, Wagner, Liszt, and Berlioz are only known as men whose sole delight is in the braying of brass, the clashing of cymbals, and the tinkling of triangles ; as men who make so much noise that ordinary mortals cannot hear what they say. Something over a century ago, the good Londoners thought the same thing of Mr. Handel. When we think of such compositions as the overture to the “ Flying Dutchman,” the Hunnenschlacht, or the overture to the Carnaval Remain, we do not wonder that many people have a prejudice against the “ future.” We do not mean to say anything against the actual merit of the compositions, but merely that they are in no wise calculated to enlist the sympathies of an unprejudiced audience. There is enough music by Wagner, Liszt, and Berlioz that is interesting without being painfully abstruse, passionate and intense without being almost absolutely annihilating, and which, while it sufficiently shows the habitual train of thought and modes of expression of the respective composers, does not so widely depart from the musical forms to which we are accustomed as to seem at first either strained or ugly. The first four movements of the Symphonie Fantastique by Berlioz would, we think, be deeply interesting, with their beautiful, finely marked theme and masterly orchestration. The fourth movement (La Marche au Supplice) does, to be sure, make a good deal of noise, but its well-defined and very characteristic march-theme, both dignified and brilliant as it is, can hardly fail to interest all listeners. Liszt’s Lcs Préludes has already become a tolerable favorite with most of us, and we think that hearing it oftener would do more toward endearing the composer to us than such things as the Hunnenschlacht or the Racoczy March. In making selections from the works of Richard Wagner, the task become a more difficult one, as there is little of his music that will well bear performance separated from the dramas of which it is a part. But if concert arrangements from Wagner are to be played at all, we think transcriptions of separate scenes, such as the Finale from Tristan (played here last year), or “Odin’s Farewell,” from the Walküre, with its everrecurring lullaby-melody, more repaying than “selections” in potpourri from such as were played here this season.

Mr. Thomas brings with him this year a more than usually attractive array of soloists. Miss Anna Mehlig, the pianist (if we may be pardoned for striking off the final e from her title), shows more genial sentiment than before, even something very like passion in her playing, which used to strike us as too purely intellectual, though she sometimes evinces a tendency to oversentimentalize, and to pay too much attention to the elaboration of separate passages, thus injuring the impression of the piece as a whole. In the two movements she played from Chopin’s F-minor Concerto, these traits, both of them new in her, were strongly marked. She played the beautiful Larghetto with a passionate earnestness of sentiment that we have never before felt in her, and, although she took the tempo remarkably slow, the interest was grandly sustained to the very end. In the final Rondo, on the other hand, her performance lacked totality of conception as well as élan, and, in spite of the exquisite finish she gave to all the various details, there was hardly a thought in the whole movement more than two or three bars long.

Mr. George L. Osgood, the young tenor, satisfies all the expectations which we have been led to entertain of him, which is saying much. He has a pure tenor voice of fine sympathetic quality, rather than of great power, and he uses it like a consummate artist. His singing is characterized by true musical sentiment and great artistic finish of style, uniting a thoroughly developed technique of the best Italian school with a manly, German spontaneity of expression equally removed from lackadaisical sentimentality and ungenial coldness. It was indeed a comfort to hear his rendering of Mozart’s delicious air, O, wie ängstich ! O, wie feurig! from the Entführung, after the lovelorn efforts of other tenorini di grazia, who usually give the little gem of passionate melody either with that calm self-satisfaction of manner which the possession of a tenor voice can alone impart, Or else in such tones of sombre despair as to make us for the moment fancy we are listening to Bellini or Donizetti, instead of Mozart. We would, however, caution Mr. Osgood against singing in so large a hall as the Music Hall, where it evidently costs him much exertion to make himself heard. These finely cultivated light tenor voices are too precious to be strained in large halls, and Mr. Osgood’s large repertory of German Lieder by the best masters increases our wish to hear him in a smaller room.

We cannot close our inkstand without saying a few words about Mrs. Charles Moulton’s first appearance in oratorio, in the Christmas performance of Handel’s Messiah by the Handel and Haydn Society. Mrs. Moulton’s singing of the grand old music was, in many respects, different, in some respects, perhaps finer, than any rendering we have yet heard here. She has an unaffected, almost childlike simplicity of style which lets the music tell its own story easily and naturally. If she does not give evidence of very deep sentiment, she is yet wholly free from all spurious sentimentality; and the beauty of her voice together with her easy and masterly use of it, her finished style and cultivated enunciation, combine to make her renderings of this class of music most genuinely enjoyable. In her recitatives she makes the music wholly subservient to the meaning of the words, as it properly should be. Her rendering of “ Rejoice greatly ” was perhaps the most perfect of her efforts. The masterly ease and joyous brilliancy with which she carried through Handel’s long, florid roulades was in strong contrast to the manner in which we usually hear them sung, which is, if anything, more indicative of the bursting of a bloodvessel than of triumphant joy. In “ I know that my Redeemer liveth,” her singing showed the song of songs in all its greatness and power. She is to be particularly commended for her rigid adherence to Handel’s music as he wrote it; we do not remember her introducing a single embellishment of her own. Upon the whole, Mrs. Moulton is one of the most satisfying oratorio singers that we have heard.