Music: Exile Coming

“For 20 years I have been trying to have the Government subsidize opera in this country. What has it subsidized instead? Mechanical inventions! The next time the Government will subsidize toy balloons and mechanical mice to amuse children further.”

The smooth-skinned gentleman with bushy dark beard and silky hair then added: “I go in a year’s time. I shall take every English musician to America with me I can. . . . A friend of mine in California spends as much on an orchestra as we spend in the whole of England. The future home of English opera is the United States. . . .”

He was that friendly, pleasing, erratically intense gentleman, Sir Thomas Beecham, patron, promoter and active proponent of the best in British music since 1906 when he first conducted his New Symphony Orchestra and 1908, when he founded the Beecham Symphony Orchestra. The London Philharmonic Society (1915-19) and opera in England (1909-19) were other activities to which he had given his time, imagination and much of his patrimony. At last he was discouraged with writing, reviving, conducting, subsidizing more music than any one man has ever done in England before or since.

It was really surprising that he had continued his fruitless efforts as long as he had, except that he was an Englishman, an artist, an idealist. Never able to respect the academic or conventional mind, he left Oxford before he had finished. Aged 19, he toured England with the Kelson Truman Opera Company, wrote three operas himself. In a few years he turned to symphony work, presenting highly unorthodox programs which were marked with deep musical scholarship as well as youth’s impetuous revolt. Calm, neat, leisurely, absentminded, he lavished £100,000 ($486,000) on his first season of opera at the Afternoon Theatre, where he conducted the first English performances of Elektra and introduced English enthusiasts to Composers Strauss and Delius.

The money Sir Thomas Beecham has poured out to advance the musical education and opportunities of Britons, not only at Covent Garden but in park bandstands and at the colleges, was amassed, as everyone knows, through the world-famed pills which his father, Joseph (later Sir Joseph) invented as a farm boy and peddled on country roads until he could make the backs of barns, signboards and fence-rails peddle for him. “Beecham’s Pills,”* the newspapers and country sides of England, eventually of the world (including Greenland), echoed and re-echoed. Sir Joseph died the third richest man in England ($140,000,000) in 1916, having virtually invented mass advertising—at least been its record utilizer. The genius that struck off those advertisements which some called vulgar, others “priceless,” such as— Hark! the herald angels sing Beecham’s pills are just the thing. Peace on earth and mercy mild, Two for a man and one for a child —passed to the son as a thinner, hotter flame.

Old Sir Joseph could laugh heartily at himself and never thought, when he was knighted, of exchanging the glebeland “Beecham” for its aristocratic original, “Beauchamps.” Young Sir Thomas, on the other hand, is at all times .deeply serious. Another of his reasons for exiling himself was that in the U. S. “the leading citizens love music and have the sense to endow orchestras hand-somely.”

“I am,” he revealed, “to be the guest conductor of the Philadelphia Symphony Orchestra and I hope to visit also American orchestras in New York, Baltimore and perhaps Chicago and Detroit. I shall not return until I am too feeble to be of any use and not as long as the present philosophy regarding music prevails in England.

“Broadcasting, the most damnable row ever heard on this earth, has ruined all art. . . . Broadcast music is the gibbering and whining of goblins and devils, and bears as much relation to art as the roaring of the bull of Bashan bears to the voice of Galli-Curci. No self-respecting musician would stay in England! . . .”

Orchestra

In Portland, Ore., the Portland Symphony Orchestra, beginning its 16th season, under the second year’s leadership of Willem van Hoogstraten, was found to be pleasantly augmented in personnel and skill. The playing of Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony (the incomparable Pathetique) with its great horn solo, its slow climax, was acclaimed the best thing yet heard in Portland. The bagpipe effect of Schelling’s Victory Ball contrasted sharply with the muted swift hum of Rimsky-Korsakov’s Flight of the Bumble Bee, the latter new to the audience. Not to lag behind San Francisco in modernity (TIME, Nov. 8) the second half of the program was broadcast by radio.

Centenary

A hundred years have passed since that cold Vienna twilight when Ludwig van Beethoven rose in his bed and shook his square fist at the lightning and the hail that dared disturb his dying; a hundred years since 20,000 people thronged the square in front of the old Schwarzspanierhaus hoping for a glimpse of the chunky little man, dressed neatly for the first time in years, quiet in his coffin.

Ludwig van Beethoven has outgrown his lesser self in those 100 years. He is more the 14-year-old boy who climbed every morning into the organ loft at Bonn to play for six-o’clock mass; less the youth who settled in Vienna, blustering, important, quarreling with his teachers, with Haydn himself. He was fussy, untidy, his table manners were gross, he would throw egg after egg at a servant who displeased him, he distrusted the expenditure of every half a penny, he would pour a dish of stew over an innocent waiter’s head and roar with laughter until great tears would spill from his fierce, protruding eyes and run in rivulets over his beefy cheeks. All this becomes minor, save to biographers, in Beethoven the genius, the grubby child, who, bright image of a musician grandfather in his heart, found beauty for himself in the empty keys of a rattletrap piano; the youth inspired who, nothing on but p. shirt, would stand and write his notes on the shabby walls of his bedroom; the master who built and tore down and built again, each time with a bolder purpose.

Musicians the world over are designing their programs this season to commemorate the centennial of Beethoven’s death.* Singers deep-voiced and shrill-voiced are dedicating their classical opening group to his songs, to arias from his Fidelio. Violinists and pianists are featuring his concertos and sonatas; painstakingly, reverently, string quartets are whispering his tenderest secrets, his hopes, his sentiments. Last week in Cincinnati Fritz Reiner opened the symphony season there with the Consecration of the House overture, played too the early Symphony in C. In Chicago Frederick Stock led the symphony there in the first of a series of consecrated programs—played the first two symphonies and the triple concerto. In Vienna a monument was completed and the canvas shroud stripped off with fitting ceremony. In Manhattan at the Metropolitan Opera House the Society of the Friends of Music gave for its first concert of the season, the Missa Solemnis.

Those of the 4,000 who went expecting a conventional musicianly concept of the Catholic ritual heard not that but more. They heard the soul of a great creator stomping through divine harmonies, shunting manufactured theories, demanding passage through forms and conventions to an Infinite. They heard Conductor Artur Bodanzky, inspired, fathom it all to the very depths with a fiery baton, get magnificent results from the Friends of Music Chorus.

*Sir Joseph Beecham while a boy helped cure sick farm animals, found that the English peasants liked potent effects from their medicines. They even used horse remedies on themselves. So when, at 20, he devised his physic pill he used aloes, ginger and soap. Aloe is bitter and astringent, and is used under prescription for some cases of menstrual irregularities, chronic constipation, atonic dyspepsia and worms. It is apt to be intensely griping, an effect which Sir Joseph modified with his ginger —but not too much, for his customers wanted lively results. The pills themselves are lively. They bounce 14 inches after a drop of three feet, thus affording a measure of amusement before taking. Their constant buyers have always been among the poorer middle classes everywhere, who cringe from a doctor’s bill, but can afford lOc for 12 pills, or 25c for 40, or 50c for 90. Still, Sir Joseph, on a visit to the U. S. in 1912, could brag: “My pills are taken by dukes and lords, who conceal the fact from their family doctors. I have positive evidence of this. Medical men take them on the quiet.”

*This is also the centennial anniversary of the dramatic death of Weber, forerunner of the Romantic composers (TIME, July 5).