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ON HEARING WHAT YOU WANT

WHEN YOU WANT IT
By CARL VAN VECHTEN

HEREare times when life seems to be a very faulty reality.

Reflecting to-day, for example, in my garret, I find myself

in a melancholymood following a perusal of the advertising
columns of the newspapers. I have looked through the concertannouncementsfor the day only to discover that I must hear-if
I hear anything at all-either Beethoven's Seventh Symphony or
Mozart's Symphony in G minor; either the CoriolanOvertureor
the Overtureto Euryanthe; either Chabrier'sBourree Fantasque
(which I have never heard) or Sibelius's Finlandia; and, at the
opera, I am offered Aida! Now this is all very discouraging
to a man of temperament who would like to order his music as
he orders his library or his veal kidneys. One is never obliged
to eat at some one else's behest, one reads according to one's
fancy, but when one wants to listen to music, one must perforce
listen to what is being played or else not listen at all, unlessand here one must admit the futility of the comparison-one is
Ludwig of Bavaria. This afternoon I have a whim to attend a
concert which shall consist of Cesar Franck's D minor symphony,
Stravinsky's Sacre du Printemps, and Debussy's La Mer.
Franck's symphony will, of course, be performedsome time this
winter, but the performancewill be sure to fall on a day on which
I have no ambition to hear it, and the other pieces will not, in
all probability,be performedat all.
My temporaryprejudicesand tastes in music, indeed, never
seem to be in accord with my opportunities. I longed for many
years, for example, to hear Vincent d'Indy's Istar. The idea
of the music disrobing, as the goddess of the legend disrobed,
awakened my curiosity which was still further whetted by the
rhapsodieswhichPhilip Hale and James Hunekerhave constructed
around the piece. But curiosity dies in time and on the day
when, finally, I saw the thing announced, I discovered, to my
surprise,that all appetite had left me. Nevertheless, on a bright
winter afternoon, when I should have preferredto walk in the
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park or to go to a moving-picturetheatre, I forced myself into

the concert-hall. The hall was over-heated and stuffy; I was
surroundedby a crowd of hysterical females who had come to
see a Russian violinist, whose name, had it been translated,was
Mike or Alec. I sat through a long program,for Istar was last,
and when, finally, it was played I began idly to turn over the
pages of my book of notes about the music, reading the advertisements with an interest which I found I could not devote to
the compositionitself. To that, in fact, I scarcelylistened. This
is not a unique experience;it is usual. The evenings on which
I yearn to hear Boris Godunoff they always sing L'Amore dei
Tre Re at the Opera; the afternoons on which I have a deep
longing to listen to Liszt's B minor sonata, the Hofmanns and
Bauersand Moiseivitschesall are busy playing Chopin's.
This is very confusing and irritating, for taste in music
changes, especially if you hear a good deal of it. I have worshipped at several altars. To some of them I return when I
can. The cool, sane, classic beauty of Gluck, the gay, sweetsour, tragi-comedyof Mozart, the red blare and poster-like dash
of American ragtime, the lovely music of Debussy, so like the
nocturnes of Whistler, the refreshingmelody of Arthur Sullivan,
these are seldom unwelcome,but the days on which I enjoy the
orchestralorgiesof RichardStrauss,the trumpetblasts of Richard
Wagner, the fantastic inventions of Hector Berlioz, and the
thunderbolts of Beethoven come more rarely. Other intermittent humours find me hankeringfor the ironic acidity of the
quaintly perverse l'Heure Espagnole, the bombast of Handel,
whom Samuel Butler very nearly succeeded in making famous
again, Grieg's piano concerto, Chinese music, the adumbrations
of Charles Martin Loeffler,and the thrilling experimentsof Leo
Ornstein,but seldomdo mood and music strike me simultaneously.
There are days on which the charming melancholy and
sentimentality of Werther and Eugene Oniegin, lyric dramas
curiously similar in feeling, would come as a boon. There are
nights when "Les Larmes" would send me sobbing from the
theatre, for this air and the letter song in Tschaikovsky's opera
evoke a certain artificial atmosphereof grief more potently than
any book or picture with which I am familiar. When Tatjana
begins the letter song, if you are in the mood-and how seldom
this is!-the key of the play is handed into your keeping, the
soul of the composition communes with your own soul, and a
vague sympathy with somethingperhapsalien to your own nature
takes possessionof you.

On Hearing What You Want When You Want It 561

Sometimes I am seized with a desire for the dance, a desire
for a conventional rhythmic espression, for, at least, even if one
cannot dance, one sometimes wants to hear dance music, but
these will not be the nights on which the Beautiful Danube,
Coppelia, or Beethoven's Seventh Symphony will be played. Der
Rosenkavalier would fill the breach, but how often can one hear
Der Rosenkavalier?
I have never heard the Barber of Seville without enjoying it,
but there are times when I burn to carry Rossinian explorations
farther, when I might perhaps take delight in L'Italiana in Algeri,
Tancredi, with its still delicious, although unheard, "Di tanti
palpiti," sacred to the memory of Giuditta Pasta, William Tell,
and La Cenerentola. Often, indeed, sitting before the fire in
my garret, I wistfully beg the gods to put it into somebody's
head to play me the tunes I have read about so often, but which
now I can only hear in my mind's ear through the cold formality
of the printed score: Felicien David's Le Desert, for example, that
"ode-symphonie" which Hector Berlioz hailed as a chef-d'oeuvre
and which seemingly remained a chef-d'oeuvre until the calm ironic
Auber one day remarked, "I will wait until David gets off his
camel." Either the remark or the subsequent dismounting killed
the piece for now it is never played. But I would like to hear it.
What could be quainter than Second Empire orientalism? Would
Ingres's Odalisque come to life under this influence and stand in
ivory perfection in some sheik's harem, listening to the call of
the muezzin, while the camels tramped the desert with their
lumbering, swaying passing? What of Spontini's La Vestale?
Would this faded score do for Rome what Gluck's music has done
for Greece? I can decorate my garret with mid-Victorian trophies,
antimacassars, wallnut highboys, wall-paper representing Roman
temples with Victorian shepherd boys playing pipes near their
columns, while troops of ladies, dressed like Mrs. Leo Hunter,
take boats and embark for Cythera. I can examine at my leisure
mezzotints and engravings by John Martin, Richard Earlom,
Valentine Green, Goltzius, Edelinck, or J. R. Smith, and I can
enjoy the mellow cornfields and forests of George Inness whenever
I feel like it, which is not too often. I can take down from the
shelves The Monk by M. G. Lewis, Headlong Hall by Thomas
Love Peacock, The Art of Dining by Abraham Hayward, The
Truth about Tristrem Varick by Edgar Saltus, or read of one of
Ouida's wasp-figured guardsmen as often as I please. No strange,
old-fashioned byway, no hidden cranny of painting or literature is
denied me, but if I were dying of desire to listen to Purcell's Dido

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and Aeneas, Rameau's Hippolyte et Aricie, Balfe's The Maid of

Artois, or even Wagner's Die Feen or Puccini's Edgar, I should
perish before the medicine arrived.
Watteau, Voltaire, Cranach, H. B. Fuller, Rodin, and Joseph
Hergesheimer stand ready to please me whenever I am in the
proper mood to appreciate their work but, unless I follow Ernest
Newman's example-which I am not likely to do-and purchase
a player-piano, I am dependent on the Paris Opera or Mr.Walter
Damrosch for the privilege of listening to Lully, Couperin, or
Gretry. Even Ernest Newman must listen to most of his music
in transcription-transcriptions, which he admits in his laudatory
book on the subject, have been made carelessly enough for the most
part from transcriptions already fashioned for human players,
without reference to the orchestral scores, which the playerpiano, being gifted with more than two hands, could more nearly
duplicate-and in relation to such music as has not been cut in
rolls he would stand in just the same position that I stand. Could
he, for instance, buy a roll of Le Desert? At this very instant,
in reference to my mention of Gretry an inch or two above, I
would rather hear a performance of Richard Coeur de Lion, of
which an excerpt, quoted in Tschaikovsky's Pique Dame, has
haunted me ever since I heard that opera, than the complete
works of Giuseppe Verdi. Nay! I think I would desert all
other pleasures, even an evening at the theatre where Delysia
plays, for a performance of the rewritten version of Simone Boccanegra. I might want to hear it only once, but how much I do
want to hear it that once! At least I want to to-day. In 1926,
when Gatti-Casazza at last mounts Simone Boccanegra at the
Metropolitan Opera House, I shall probably go to bed entirely
ignorant of the fact. Curiosity and desire will equally be dead,
probably, so far as Cornelius's The Barber of Bagdad, Nicolai's
The Merry Wives of Windsor, and Berlioz's Benvenuto Cellini
are concerned, when the time at last comes when it will be easy
for me to satisfy this curiosity and desire.
The case is no better with modern music. It is just as
difficult to satisfy one's yearning to hear Dukas's Ariane et BarbeBleue as it is to hear Offenbach's Barbe-Bleue. The Boston
Symphony Orchestra probably will perform Ravel's Le Tombeau
de Couperin on the night when I am hungry for the Valses Nobles
et Sentimentales, and Bodanzky will provide these last delights
on the night when I can be satisfied with nothing but Daphnis
et Chloe. This is assuredly music in the modern French idiom,
although Erik Satie has said, "Ravel has refused the Legion of

On Hearing What You Want When You Want It 563

Honour, but all his music accepts it," and we know that in ten
years this epigram will become a platitude. We have heard a
good deal from the modern Italians, Respighi and Malipiero
lately, but I wantedto hearthem two years ago.
On the wholeit is amazingthat I or anybody else ever acquires
a taste for orchestralmusic or the opera. We are, it would seem,
completely in the power of Messrs. Bodanzky, Gatti-Casazza,
Stokovski, Pierre Monteux, the Messrs. Sargent and Milton
Aborn, and Fortuno Gallo. They not only decide what we shall
hear, they decide when we shall hear it. The situation, of course,
is monstrous and unbearable. A few comparisons may bring
it to you more forcibly. Suppose,for instance, that the directors
of the Metropolitan Art Museum issued a decree to the effect
that you could see Manet's Boy with a Sword only on July 17,
1922, and not again until February 4, 1930. Suppose that these
gentlemen further ordered that Renoir's portrait of Madame
Charpentierwould be on view only on odd sundays during Lent.
Suppose that the Greek vase room or the room containing the
Chinese porcelains was only open to the public on December 6,
1922 Let us imagineanotherexample,even moreterror-inspiring.
Suppose that Messrs. Brentano, Scribner, and Putnam, arbitrarily decided that the public could buy certain books only on
certain days. On January 1, for example, Putnam's would sell
only the works of Harold Bell Wright, Brentano's only Shaw's
new volume of Plays, and Scribner's, Joseph Hergesheimer's
San Christ6balde la Habana. On January 2, one would be permitted to purchasethe novels of James BranchCabellat Putnam's,
Benedetto Croce'sAesthetic at Brentano's,and CharlesDickens's
A Christmas Carol at Scribner's. On January 3, Putnam's
would dole out a new novel by Sinclair Lewis, Brentano's would
vend a book by Arthur Machen (if they could find one!), and
Scribner'swould sell Mencken'sA Book of Prefaces. On January
4, perhaps I might persuade Putnam's to put out my The Tiger
in the House; Brentano's would offer Max Beerbohm's Seven
Men; and Scribner's would display The Newcomes by William
Makepiece Thackeray. January 5 would be the day to buy
Esther Waters at Putnam's, William Dean Howell's Heroines of
Fiction, at Brentano's,and WyndhamLewis's Tarr at Scribner's.
On January 6, Putnam's would sell Philip Moeller's Sophie,
Brentano's Donald Evans's Sonnets from the Patagonian, and
Scribner's,Webster's Dictionary. Of course Dutton's, Malkin's,
Drake's, Stammer's,Schulte's, and Goldsmith's,and the officials
of the Public Library would also make arbitrarydecisions about

564

The Musical Quarterly

the book of the day. This would all seem very strange, no doubt,
and probably we would stop buying books, because the particular
book we wanted would never be on sale on the day we wanted it,
but it would be no stranger than the situation in the concert
and opera world.
The places where one must listen to music are also prescribed.
One can read a book by the fire, in an apple orchard, or in the
Grand Central Station-an excellent place to read some books,
by the way-but if I want to hear an orchestra I must go to a
concert-hall where the atmosphere is fetid, sit in a hard-backed
chair, surrounded by women smelling of opopanax, muguet,
and Mary Garden and men who have been smoking Lillian Russell
cigars.
And yet, it would appear, there is no remedy. Concerts,
after all, must be given within certain hours, and the number of
pieces that can be played during these hours-a concert that
lasts over 120 minutes is too long-is strictly limited. The
Metropolitan Opera House can give only one full-length opera,
or not more than three short ones, on one evening. Consequently
somebody has to make a choice. The directors naturally choose
the works which they think will appeal to the greatest number
of people at the time they are played. This accounts for the
fact that a symphony which perhaps has not been performed at
all for several years will be announced for performance in New
York by four conductors during as many weeks.
So we must put up with the inconvenience. We must listen
to music when we can, where we can, and with whom we can,
and not when, where, and with whom we want to. I wonder
if there are others who dream of Debussy's l'Apres-midi d'un
Faune while they are listening to Berlioz's Fantastic Symphony,
who go to hear Wagner's Die Meistersinger when they would
prefer to hear Gluck's Armide. If some one knows what can be
done about it, I hope he will tell me.