Jean De Reszke
by [Minton, Balch, $3,75]
‘CULTIVATE the love of words’ was one of Jean de Reszke’s oft-repeated injunctions to pupils in the last years of his life. From all one has heard and gathered about this incomparable singer, it was his deep understanding of poetry which, more than any other element of his almost miraculously complete equipment, gave his characterizations that extra dimension which put them in a class apart. ‘How hopeless,’ wrote one of his pupils, describing Low de Reszke once sang, in the course of a lesson, Lohengrin’s phrase ‘ Liegt eine Burg die Monsalvat genannt,’ ‘how hopeless to get the sort of passionate reverence he got into the word Monsalvat.’ Others have tried to describe the shattering effect upon them of his Tristan’s dying cry — ‘Isolde!’ Besides this poet’s gift of suggesting vista upon vista of meaning by no more than a word, or at times only a vowel sound or ‘a half-smothered m,’ he had, too, the intellectual grasp of design and sequence that gave to such transcendent moments their natural setting. Those who heard him sing Tristan recall his performance of the last act as something unique in their experience, and there is surely nothing in all operatic literature that requires, for its full presentation, such grasp of proportion on the singer’s part. Again, in his portrayal of the older Siegfried, after the latter has drunk the potion which makes him forget Brunnhilde, de Reszke deliberately suppressed the emotional quality of his singing — a procedure whose dramatic fitness was lost on the greater part of the audience, wdio accused him of ‘saving his voice.’
Miss Leiser, in writing this biography, had little besides press clippings and verbal reports to work upon, for de Reszke was no letter writer. Her task was the more difficult in that, musical criticism being no less ephemeral a branch of journalism than any other, it is rarely safe to take its pronouncements at their full face value. Critics are all too apt to disagree among themselves, and for reasons which, especially at a distance, seem anything but conclusive. But Miss Leiser is at once too fair-minded and too much concerned with making her book readable to record only a monotonous unanimity of praise, by this oblique method she conveys what was challenging in de Reszke’s personality as an artist, as well as what was seductive. Though not blest with any special gift for style or characterization, Miss Leiser has great taste and intelligence and tells her story with engrossing interest. She leads up with dramatic effect to de Reszke’s first performance, at the age of forty-five, of the rôle of Tristan, which was perhaps his greatest achievement. Rut what she conveys best is the sense of that steady and relentless pursuit of ever greater perfection, ever fuller and more poetic expression, which de Reszke’s genius demanded of him, and which enabled him to accept his triumphs simply, as a sustenance and stimulus, a means, and one that was no doubt indispensable to him, but never as an end.
THEODORE W. CHANLER