Phonograph Monthly Review, Vol. 1, No. 8 (1927-05)

The Phonograph Monthly Review 334 of the faculty and the leading music critics of New York at that time, Krehbiel, Finck, Hender- son, Aldrich and Spanuth. The Kneisel Quartet was on its mettle and read like men inspired. We were all thrilled. At that time I was in the choir of Grace Church when Samuel P. Warren was organist, and I had to cut the morning service in order to have this wonderful experience. I ran the risk of losing my job but felt that didn't mat- ter. When the New World Symphony was an- nounced for public performance the newspapers gave the work probably more advance publicity than has been given before or since to the first performance of an orchestral work in this coun- try. Columns were written about the symphony and Dvorak's theories, whereas he was not a talk- ative man nor a man of theories at all. He did have, however, the conviction that art in order to be healthy and to carry any national flavor must be rooted in the soil out of which it springs, and finding American composers everywhere ab- sorbed in echoing trans-Atlantic strains and idioms he said “Here, in the music you have ne- glected, even despised, is something spontaneous, sincere and different, native to your country. Why not use it?" That was all and I remember one morning when I went to his room at the Conservatory for my hour in composition, finding him walking up and down the room shaking a New York morning paper like a rag and exclaim- ing with heat, “See what they make me say! I did not say it. I'll go back to my Bohemia." It was soon after this that he showed me a let- ter from his friend Hanslick, then Vienna's chief critic, and was greatly comforted because Hans- lick recognized in these works of Dvorak a fresh thematic element, a new trait and idiom denied them then by some American critics and still de- nied them by others. One day in New York Dvorak said to me “I used to write a la Mozart, or a la Schubert or Schumann, but now I am my- self." This was after he had written his E minor Symphony and his Quartet and Quintet Op. 96 and 97. The man's flow of musical thought was extraordinary. Once he showed me the sketch for his 'Cello Concerto first played by Victor Herbert). It consisted of a single page of music paper covered closely with pencilled scrawls evi- dently dashed down with the utmost rapidity. They were undecipherable to anybody but him- self. At another time he said “To get ideas, that is easy, but what you do with them is the thing." Perhaps Dvorak's closest frietid among the musicians in New York at that time was Anton Seidl, conductor of the Philharmonic Orchestra. I shall not forget Thursday, December 14, 1893. I had been having a lesson in orchestration with Dvorak and at its close he said in his usual mix- ture of German and English “Komm mit mir to Carnegie Hall. Seidl is going to rehearse my new symphony." It was the last private rehearsal. There was no one in Carnegie Hall except the Orchestra, Dvorak and myself. With wonderful insight and sympathy Seidl played each move- ment without a break and between the move- ments left his desk and came down to the back of the hall to exchange a few brief words with the composer. Dvorak told me then that he was hearing his symphony played for the first time. On the next afternoon at the first public per- formance Carnegie Hall was crowded to the ut- most. At the close of the Largo , so moving was the performance, so touched to the heart was the great audience, that in the boxes filled with women of fashion and all about the hall people sat with the tears rolling down their cheeks. Neither before nor since have I seen a great audience so profoundly moved by absolute music. At the close of the movement and again at the end of the sym- phony, the modest, simple-hearted, peasant com- poser was persuaded with difficulty to rise and acknowledge the ovation given him. This Largo with its haunting English horn solo is the outpouring of Dvorak's own home- longing with something of the loneliness of far off prairie horizons, the faint memory of the Red- man's bygone days, and a sense of the tragedy of the Black-man as it sings in his Spirituals. Dvorak told me after his return from the sum- mer spent in Spillville, Iowa, that he had been reading Longfellow's Hiawatha , and that the wide stretching prairies of the mid-West had greatly impressed him. The last time I saw this unspoilable man with the heart of a child was at the end of April, 1895, when over at Hoboken he stood on the deck of the steamer that was to carry him back to his beloved Bohemia. Sir Hamilton Harty and The Halle Orchestra Their History A MERICAN phonograph owners no less than British concert goers have the op- portunity of hearing and appreciating the work of Sir Hamilton Harty the famous conduc- tor of the Orchestra of the Halle Concerts Society and Recordings of Manchester, England, for the Columbia Com- pany has made and is making their splendid recordings available here. It has been an inter- esting and valuable experience to follow, through these recordings, the steady rise of the Halle