Discord among the harmonists

OLIN DOWNES

Some famous musicians are shown to be all too often "like sweet bells jangled —out of tune and harsh"

Musicians are a rare lot. If anyone wants to behold human nature in infantile and sometimes laughably cunning aspects, he should watch these masters of harmony at work. He should have opportunity to note the bright ingenuity, the inspired duplicity, the calm joy that shines in the eyes of those who play, sing or conduct orchestras, presumably for the benefit of mankind, when they have successfully ruined or beheld the disaster of a colleague.

For example, only a few years ago there was a quiet little affray, unperceived by anyone in the audience, on the stage of the Metro-, politan Opera House. The participants were two celebrated cantatrices, one of them famous not merely as an artist but as wife and mother. It was wholly a question of which one, attiring herself for the stage, should get the star's dressing-room. (This is always a delicate point with lady singers.) Invoking precedent, the soprano won out. She was given the dressing-room. The contralto's chance to even the scales came early in the evening, during a moment of impassioned Wagnerian music. That artist then approached the soprano, to whom her relation on the stage was one of a tender and confidential sort, and, during a particularly intimate embrace, drew four long and sharp finger-nails down the face of her rival. From the audience's point of view, the scene was touching—the kind of scene which would have caused your grandmother to murmur, "the pretty dears!" But Isolde was grateful for the darkened stage of the second act of the opera. She told me so.

Why the star's dressing-room should be such a bone of contention, mere man knoweth not. But it is. Geraldine Farrar was wise, in her generation, when she came as a young woman to the Metropolitan. She took a small, side dressing-room and kept it. Her name was put on the door and remained there all through the days of her glory there.

There was once a performance of Wagner's Walküre one night in the Academy of Music. Emma Eames was Sieglinde. Ernest Van Dyck was the Siegmund. These two indulged in the famous love-duet at the end of Act I, seated on a couch in the full light of the stage moon. Both stars desired the lion's share of the spot-light. As a result the couch was pushed, pulled and yanked almost off the stage as the two, locked in each other's arms, struggled for the spot-light circle. It was Mme. Eames who demonstrated the superior deadliness of the female when it is really aroused and fighting for its own. Some accounts of the episode say that she crept into the opera house and personally nailed the couch to the floor; others that a hired bravo did it for her. Anyhow, when the opera was repeated, Van Dyck approached the couch of romance and moonshine only to discover that on taking his prescribed place he would be buried in shadow. He kicked the couch savagely—and almost broke his toe.

In the opera house it is war to the knife —the opera house, where, as Mary Garden once remarked, Lina Cavalieri could get a Garden role "over my dead body". And who was the woman who expectorated, with sudden and deadly accuracy, in Maria Jeritza's direction some seasons ago at the Vienna opera? Yes, yes. Of course. It was Marie Olcewska. She is a hot-blooded Pole, handsome as a witch. Her voice blazes with color, and she has temperament, TEMPERAMENT, TEMPERAMENT. During a performance of Walkiire in Vienna, Olcewska, enacting the part of Fricka, heard derisive laughter in the wings. She called out that it must stop. It did not do so. In a loud stage aside Mme. Olcewska addressed the gigglers as "pigs," "silly gooses," etc., but the foolishness continued. Olcewska spat, "scoring a full hit," according to The New York Times' despatch of the day following, "on Mme. Kittel, one of the talking singers.

"As Olcewska retired from the scene, Mme. Kittel was prevented with difficulty from attacking her, but Olcewska, still fuming with rage, declared she was sorry, as she meant to attack. Jeritza.

"Jeritza then calmly declared 'You'll hear from me.'" She was never a coward. Olcewska was temporarily fired from the Vienna company. This was in May, 1925. There was much agitation, the matter outshining in conversational value every other topic of the day, including the Entente Conference, the Geneva reconstruction scheme, and even Austria's future.

Mme. Jeritza is indeed a storm centre and no puny woman anyhow. Ask Scotti, who has to Scarpia her Tosca. Or ask Martinelli, whose hair she pulls and whose face she rubs on the furniture when she sings Carmen. It was Farrar, perhaps, who put that evil idea in Jeritza's head when she slapped Caruso's face during a performance of the same opera. She was then fresh—decidedly fresh—from the movies. The angered Caruso retaliated in the next act, when he mowed her down. The time came, when, according to the press, the curtains parted after an act at the Metropolitan, to disclose a weeping Jeritza and her soft complaint, audible only to those who sat near—"Mr. Gigli—he was not nice to me." Others said he kicked her, but we believe it to be false. For days the press investigated this affair. The final consensus was that Gigli, dramatically excited, and himself an amateur wrestler, threw Jeritza down, so violently that she almost smashed the footlights. Fie upon him! That is what comes of these Italian operas, where the man throws down the woman with a curse and spits on her on Easter morning. They say there was a coldness between soprano and tenor for some time after.

Whole publics, as we have seen, have enlisted in these and similar affairs. The public, as a matter of fact, would be disappointed if it could not be provided with such sensations. The last great operatic rivalry on this side of the water, was that of Jeritza and Geraldine Farrar. When Jeritza, the fair Viennese appeared, "a blonde thunderbolt", as one of the reviewers called her, in 1921, out of the clouded post-war sky, Farrar had lorded it over the Metropolitan public for sixteen years. A young girl of 24, she came there brilliantly gifted, fresh from her studies and early successes in Germany. She was determined to be nothing less than the first lady of the Metropolitan Opera House, and this she accomplished. She did it by energy, brains, "personality", a realization to the full of the uses of publicity, and insatiable ambition. There were as great singers and greater, but there was one Farrar, whose power over the public increased steadily for fifteen years. The potency of Farrar's name may be estimated by the remark that her drawing power at the Metropolitan was equal to that of a singer who had a hundred times her gift of voice—Enrico Caruso. Caruso and Farrar made any opera a success, and sufficed for any opening night. Then suddenly, after Caruso's death, Jeritza flung herself into the ring. What the general director of the Metropolitan, the quiet and singularly astute Giulio GattiCasazza, thought about it all, he knows, and he does not tell. It is possible that Farrar, intoxicated with her success, abused her power and made difficulties for a gentleman who has no fancy to be dictated to by any of his artists. At any rate, in the unostentatious Gatti way, the "blonde thunderbolt" was produced one matinee, and the sway of the former occupant of the throne was no longer undisputed. A few months passed. Tosca had been one of Farrar's special and exclusive roles at the Metropolitan. The day came, and came soon, when Jeritza appeared in that part. The next day the resignation of Farrar was announced. She had not been asked to resign, of course. Very politely she had been begged to accept an offer of 25 performances for half a season. Jeritza was engaged for four seasons of 50 performances each. The end had come to the operatic career of a woman proud as she had been pugnacious. Farrar never came back to the Metropolitan.

But these rivalries are small scale beside one which extended to both sides of the Atlantic. Its latest phase was the sensational tour which Arturo Toscanini made last summer through Europe as conductor of the New York PhilharmonicSymphony Orchestra. For weeks, the night cables were humming with accounts of Europe's acclamation of the orchestra and the leader's genius.

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Back of this tour were personal and international rivalries. The musical vendetta began seasons ago in New York City. In the season of 19251926, Toscanini first came as conductor of the Philharmonic Orchestra to New York. His success was immediate and overwhelming. This success followed by only one season the almost equal success of a German newcomer. He was Wilhelm Furtwangler of Berlin and other middle-European centres. The American public, and especially perhaps, the nervous public of New York City, when it does take to a conductor—the orchestral conductor being anyhow the musical monarch of the present era, replacing in popularity and prestige the singer, pianist, or fiddler of a former day—takes to him handsomely. When Furtwangler mounted the rostrum, drew himself up to an impressive height, and, looming over the orchestra, gave the greatest performance of Brahms' First Symphony that the present writer ever heard, the public and press were at his feet. In one night, in one performance, he had completely conquered, and it seemed as though nothing could disturb his place in the public eye. But the head that wears the crown has reason to feel uneasy. Just a year later Furtwangler's decline began. Its unintentional author was a small, wiry, nervous man, then 59 years of age, under middle height, with a singular concentration and hypnotic power over his orchestra, and a sheer genius of incandescent temperament and command which are unique in the annals of orchestral conducting. This man was Toscanini. And yet it was not Toscanini who overthrew Furtwangler. What defeated Furtwangler was Furtwangler. Nothing else. Furtwangler, very sensitive to praise or blame, risen phenomenally in the ranks of German conductors of the day, surfeited with acclaim, came back to New York for his second visit as co-director of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra with Mengelberg and Toscanini, arriving in time to hear and see a Toscanini performance, and that was the beginning of the end.

For Furtwangler heard what Toscanini did with the orchestra and saw the rapturous ovation that the audience gave Toscanini. From that day on he was another man, flustered in rehearsal, changeable, sometimes almost incomprehensible in his directions to the men. He went about town with scores under his arm, explaining the shortcomings of his competitor. He made unfortunate appeals to the socially influential to intervene with the critics, or approach the proprietors of newspapers and tell them to call off their outspoken reviewers. And much else ill-advised propaganda. The end was disastrous, and a case of pure psychology. Furtwangler remains a great conductor. And Furtwangler remains in Berlin.