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ASTOFi. LFNOX AND
THE
MUJIC TRADE
VOL. XLIII. N o . 1.
Published Every Saturday by Edward Lyman Bill at 1 Madison Ave-, New York, July 7, 1906.
MARCHESI AND AMERICAN WOMAN
Quality of Voice Excellent, But They Lack
Musical
and Social Training—To What
Marchesi Attributes the Trouble.
Mme. Marchesi, the world-renowned teacher of
accomplished prima donnas in a chat the other
day expressed herself enthusiastically regarding
the quality of American women's voices, but
she added: "The main fault with the girls
who come to me from your country is that their
musical education has been so sadly, so shock-
ingly neglected in their childhood and youth.
Not only is their musical education defective,
but they haven't the most elementary concep-
tion of art and those little graces and courte-
sies which bespeak a careful training and which
are so indispensable to an operatic career.
"All of this is due to the artificial way they
are brought up, to the injudicious freedom al-
lowed them by their parents. They flit from one
study to another without retaining much lasting
benefit from any. Then, when they have spent
years filling their brains with a showy surface
knowledge of many subjects, they come abroad,
only to discover that they know practically
nothing of the languages, of art and music.
"I am speaking now not only of my pupils,
but in general of nearly all the young women
from the United States I nave ever come in con-
tact with. They enter upon careers or social
life without sufficiently realizing how much
training is needed before they can stand in the
light of the public eye. They lack serious
preparation of all sorts, but what impresses the
foreigner as the most notable shortcoming of
the young debutante is that she has none of
those little social niceties which are ingrained
in the European.
"The main troubles with the Americans I come
in contact with is that they have so little patri-
otic feeling. This may seem strange to you be-
cause your people outwardly are sounding their
country's praises. But the class that expatriates
itself and settles down contentedly abroad,
adopting Europe and European ways, is not
made up of patriots at heart. They have no
conception of the great boon of being born in the
United States, where intermarriages with dif-
ferent European races on a new soil have re-
sulted in producing the handsomest generation
on record. If they could only combine the man-
ners of the Old World with their native beauty!"
SOME UNFAMILIAR PIANO MUSIC.
Lhevinne, the Russian pianist, has written his
manager, Ernest Urchs, of Steinway & Sons, that
he will play some unfamiliar piano music by
Tschaikowsky during his American tour next sea-
son. Shortly before his death Tschaikowsky
wrote eighteen marceaux for piano which he
asked Lhevinne to play for him. Lhevinnne did
so, and after hearing the numbers performed
Tschaikowsky made many changes, and left the
works in Lhevinne's hands, with directions for
their interpretation. Tschaikowsky was on the
point of starting for St. Petersburg, and he re-
quested Lhevinne to study the works and play
SINGLE COPIES, 10 CENTS.
$2.00 PER YEAR.
them for him on his return to Moscow. But
Tschaikowsky never heard the compositions in
their amended form. Before he returned to Mos-
cow he was stricken with cholera and died. Of
his interesting group of compositions, Lhevinne
will feature a "Scene Dansante."
Nearly all the great teachers of the present day as
well as many who have already passed away
have been pupils and exponents of the Garcia
method.
WEST HAS SOUL FOR MUSIC.
The revenues of the Wagner family are equal
to an income of a hundred thousand dollars a
year in this country. Hence it is safe to say
that Wagner is the best paid composer of the
present. "Lohengrin" is performed oftener in
Europe than any other opera, and Wagner's rep-
resentations far outnumber those of any other
master. His name and fame were in more than
one sense a precious heritage to his family.
Next to Wagner the most successful composer
in Europe just now is Puccini, the creator of
"losca," "La Boheme" and "Madame Butterfly."
An estimate of his earnings is almost impossible
to get, because he draws royalties from so many
different sources and in so many different ways.
A conservative calculation of his earnings, how-
ever, puts them at about $25,000 a year, which
in the economical land of Italy makes him a
prince. And although he does not earn so much
as Wagner, he has one tremendous advantage
over that master in that he is still alive and may
add to his list of successes.
Coming over the ocean to our own country we
find that we are conspicuously without any Wag-
ners or Puccinis, says W. J. Henderson in Mun-
sey's. Our great composers are yet in embyro.
The money earned in the United States by the
composition of high-class music is so little that
it would scarcely be worth while to search for it.
On the other hand, we are not wholly without
producers of music which pays, and pays very
well. The field of profit in this happy land lies
in the composition of comic operettas and songs.
Kubelik Says Art Is Fashion's Slave in Cities,
But Our Country Folk Have the Finest
Instincts.
"My pleasantest single experience in America,"
says Jan Kubelik, the famous violin virtuoso, who
has just returned to London with $250,000 in
Yankee money as the net result of his tour of
35,000 miles, "was my performance at the White
House to an audience of about twenty persons,
one of whom was President Roosevelt. In a
talk with a representative of The World he
said further: "The President gave me autograph
signed copies of his books, including 'The Rough
Riders.' These I shall always treasure.
"What struck me about the President, who has
nervous alertness, was his pronounced natural
instinct for music. This I found also in a sur-
prisingly marked degree among audiences in the
backwoods of America, and in little towns like
Joplin, Mo. The people, though few have any
trained knowledge of music, had the truest in-
stincts and the most sensitive artistic feelings I
have perhaps ever met. I attribute this to the
fact that they are always living in direct touch
with nature. Mentally and spiritually they are
simple, but they are far from being ignorant.
"They formed a great contrast to many fash-
ionable audiences in the cities, where art is
largely a slave to fashion, and where there are
many, very many, people trained in technical mu-
sic but with no souls, no instinct for its beauties
or its meaning.
"I loved those far Western audiences, because
with their rugged surroundings they were nat-
ural. Now I am going to take a short rest and
then go to Australia."
MANUEL GARCIA DEAD.
Manuel Garcia, after having reached the age of
102 years, passed away in London on Sunday.
There has been no more interesting character in
the musical history, not so much of the operatic
stage as in the world of teaching. Manuel Garcia
was an excellent baritone, but he quitted the
operatic stage in 1829, and after undertaking care-
ful scientific study of the voice and the vocal or-
gans, he invented the laryngoscope, and wrote a
work entitled "Memoire sur la Voix Humaine,"
which he presented to the French Institute in
1840. He was Professor of singing at the Paris
Conservatoire at that time, and in 1847 he pub-
lished his "Complete Treatise on the Art of Sing
ing." In 1850 Garcia resigned his professorship
at Paris, and went to London a? professor at
the Royal Academy of Music. Manuel Garcia
was in this country with his father in 1825, at
which time he was twenty years of age. He was
a brother of Madame Malibran, and with her was
the first to introduce Italian opera in this city.
THE EARNINGS OF COMPOSERS.
SISTINE CHOIR TO RE-ORGANIZE.
By order of the Pope, the choir of the Sistine
chapel is to be reorganized. The soprano part
will be carried by thirty boys; the other mem-
bers will be two first and three second tenors,
two first and three second basses. The director
of the choir is the Abbe Perosi, who, it will be
remembered, was a seven-day wonder a few
years ago, when there was much ado about his
shallow, ephemeral oratorios.
•WHAT IS AMERICAN MUSIC?
Two further contributions on the question:
"What is American music?" appear in the
Etude for June. One of the writers, Prof. Ed-
ward Dickinson, expresses his conviction that
"we are apt to overrate the part that folksong
holds in that mysterious composite of influences
that moulds and directs the mind of the musical
genius. I could never feel that the music of the
negroes and Indians had vitality and sap enough
in it to serve as a foundation for a distinctive
and prolific form of art. Perhaps this is be-
cause the genius has not yet appeared who
has the ability to develop it. If this is to be
done, it is pretty certain that it must be ac-
complished by a composer of the same blood."