Radio Digest (Nov 1930-Apr 1931)

78 Classical Music Simplified <ty€ M ont hly Feature By William Braid White Doctor of Music 1IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII1 Illllllllllilll :J ';;' :ll.: ,i: il, .!!:, Jlii: ii:; ;il;J;i, ,;i: :,: I :J, ]|, All :ll :;;,!; ,r. Dr. White will answer readers' inquiries on musical questions in his columns. Address him in care of the Editor, 420 Lexington Avenue, New York. A FEW weeks ago from New York the Philharmonic-Symphony under the direction of Toscanini played "one of those programs which delight the heart of the listener. Its two principal items were Schubert's Unfinished Symphony and the Erocia Symphony Of Beethoven. For reasons which my readers will, I hope, soon discover to be sufficient, and even perhaps admirable, I shall say something here about these two pieces of music. It would probably be fair to say that the so-called Unfinished Symphony by Franz Schubert is the best known, by name at least, among all large orchestral works. The reasons are numerous. Schubert wrote a great many songs and small piano pieces, and among these are several which almost everybody has heard and has liked. One only has to remember the Serenade, the Hark, Hark the Lark and the Ave Maria. Everybody no doubt remembers that very successful operetta Blossom Time, which toured the whole country a few years ago and which was built around the story of Schubert's life and of his music. What turned out to be by all means the most popular and catchy of the tunes in this charming' little musical play was nothing more than a slightly modified form of the second theme from the first movement of the famous Unfinished Symphony. When I add that the modification by no means improves the theme, which, as one might expect, is much more delightful and melodious in the shape in which Schubert first wrote it down, the reader will understand how it is that the Unfinished provides probably the very best of all introductions to the beauties of symphonic music which can be found by any uninstructed seeker after beauty. I shall therefore venture to join here the great army of those who during the last seventy-five years have united in a universal paean of praise for this lovely piece of inspired work. There may be a few readers who will like to hear about it from my point of view; and indeed there may even be some to whom it will come as actual news. So here goes. It was just twenty-seven years ago that I first heard the Unfinished. It was during that year (1903) when the Philharmonic Society in New York, not yet turned over to a group of rich guarantors but still a democratic association run by the players themselves, had made up its mind to experiment with a group of guest conductors. So it invited Colonne from Paris, Sir Henry Wood from London, Weingaertner from Munich, Kegel from Frankfort, Victor .Herbert from Pittsburgh, Gericke from Boston, Theodore Thomas from Chicago and Safonoff from Moscow. Each was to conduct one concert and at the end of the season we the audiences were to compare one with the other. Poor Theodore Thomas died just before his concert, and Weingaertner, I think it was, took his place. Victor Herbert came from the Pittsburgh orchestra, which he was then conducting, for one concert, and he took the Unfinished for his principal item. I was only a youngster, of course, and the music came to me, I have to say, as if it were manna from heaven. If I live to be a hundred years old, I shall never forget the thrill I got from it. To this day I remember that some one had told me to be very careful not to miss this special piece, and I can see myself again poring over the program notes from my seat high up in the balcony of Carnegie Hall, reading how poor Schubert wrote the glorious music as a token of gratitude for having been elected to some little footling musical society in a secondrate Austrian town; and how then he put Dr. William Braid White it aside after two movements had been completed, how he never took it up again, never sent any of it to its intended destination and, even more astonishing, never heard it played! He was only twenty-five years old when he wrote down the two movements, and then laid the lovely thing aside never to take it up again. That was in 1822. Shelley died that year, another favorite of the gods, drowned off the Italian shore. Six years later Schubert too was dead, partly of fever, but more of undernourishment. Poor Schubert! He probably never had so much money as twenty dollars in his possession at any one time. His total effects at his death were appraised as worth the equivalent of about twelve dollars and fifty cents, including a "miscellaneous lot of old music". Among the scattered sheets of this music were afterwards discovered, by the loving hands of Mendelssohn, the immortal pages of the Unfinished. The Sheer Delight of the Unfinished Symphony There never has been any satisfactory explanation of Schubert's putting aside his work after he had completed only two of its presumably four movements. Writing music was to him no task at all. He wrote down notes as you or I would write a letter to a friend. He wrote Hark, Hark the Lark on the back of a menu card at a tavern, and The Erlking in much the same unceremonious way and at much the same dizzy speed. Music flowed from him as water from a fountain. Hewas quite capable of writing down the first two movements of his symphony and the next day forgetting that he had ever written anything of the kind. Quite possibly that is just what happened. We today are more fortunate. We are also more appreciative than his contemporaries, who let him die at thirty-one in