Paderewski Sails

Feeble, haggard, Ignace Jan Paderewski sailed last week for Europe after a serious illness brought on by an exhausting concert season. Friends and pressmen, some 50 of them, came to the boat to wish him a happy summer, came to find out whether there were any truth in the report that he would go back to politics, be a candidate for the presidency of Poland.*

Said he: “I am not on the way to Poland. I do not know very much of the conditions there. What I did learn of the disturbances in Warsaw saddened me and made me worse. I am, in consequence of my illness, not fully acquainted with the facts. I deeply deplore the cruel and stupid bloodshed. It is my hope and ardent prayer that what may still happen will be for the good of my country and for peace. That’s all I can say.”

Academy of Music

To remember the past is to sit in a theatre of shadows listening to lies. “… Never without his high hat …” — “Always drove his own team down to business . . .”—”It was breakfast, mind you, but the champagne . . .” The people who filled a bulky old building in Irving Place and 14th Street, Manhattan, one afternoon last week looked at one another suspiciously, each feeling that the rest had no business there. In the theatre of memory one sits alone. But the members of this audience tolerated one another because their theatre was a reality— a hideous brown edifice, the Academy of Music, about to be torn down by the Consolidated Gas Co.

George B. Cortelyou, President of the Gas Company, had arranged a last performance in the famous place. Under the huge chandelier that once had gravely lighted the 3,000 elegants in hoop-skirts and tight trousers who danced there one memorable night (Oct. 12, 1860) under the eyes of Albert Edward, Prince of Wales— upon the stage where Patti sang, where Modjeska triumphed, where Edwin Booth, Salvini, Lawrence Barrett, John McCullough, Campanini, Ole Bull, sang or spoke or played, white-haired Otis Skinner, actor, made a little speech. He spoke well, with that fine courtliness, which distinguishes actors and field marshals in old age. But the people in the stalls and boxes did not need to hear him; they too could have said everything he was saying, could have told about the cocktails at the Union Square Hotel, two for a quarter, about the terrapin and canvasback at the New York Hotel, about Tony Pastor’s and Niblo’s and golden Lillian Russell, gone now. Good songs they had then—the one about “Champagne Charlie” and:

On the Beach at Long Branch
One fine summer’s day
I was novel-reading to pass the time away.
So in-ter-es-ted was I
In the plot
A gent came up beside me and I saw him not.

As Mr. Skinner recited, the ghost of a frayed dance-tune capered stiffly under the verse for a moment and vanished. Now, talking about the great music that had been played in the Academy, he turned and swept a deep bow to a little old woman who sat in a wheel-chair in a plush-and-gold box. A storm of applause. She was Emma Thursby, whose celebrated colorature, first hailed on that stage, was the admiration of every drawing room long before the Metropolitan Opera Company had been dreamt of. The old singer (she had not been in the Academy for 20 years) ducked her bonnet excitedly, and the sight of her stirred to reminiscence a pair of aging gentlemen who sat shank by shank—John G. Pfeiffer,¹ 85, trumpet-player in the Academy orchestra when Adelina Patti sang; Frank Durkin,² who took tickets at the door for 20 years. . . . “Campanini could sing higher than any of them. . . .”—”I, for one, would not care to hear Tristan and Isolde without Nordica. . . .”—”And then, by the living Jingo, he poured half a bottle into her slipper and drank it down. . . .”

The New York Symphony Orchestra played a selection from Norma³; Mme. Frances Alda sang “Home, Sweet Home”4; the Choral Society of the Gas and Electric Co. sang “My Bonnie Lies over the Ocean”; the green curtain came down for the last time.

Gorki v. Chaliapin

In the Kazan of Imperial Russia, nearly half a century ago, the local opera company held tryouts for its chorus, so runs the story, and a group of great black-bearded judges listened to singer after singer, disputed the individual merits and stamped each one as a sheep or a goat—a very brutal stamp. They listened last to two boys who had held themselves terrified in the background. One gave his name as Gorki, 19 years old, he said, and he sang his trial piece creditably. A good second tenor, the bearded ones decided, signed him up, motioned to the other—a great gangling fellow with bright, bright eyes. Feodor Chaliapin was his name, 15 years old. … He would like to sing in the chorus. … He knew all the operas. . . . And he opened his mouth and sang in a shaky, breaking soprano that tried very hard to be a tenor.

They let him sing a few measures, growled a terrible noise, told the young Chaliapin to go home and hold his tongue for two years until he could sing like his friend Gorki.

So did Chaliapin, big Russian bass, and Maxim Gorki, famed Russian novelist, start their professional careers. So did Chaliapin tell it to pressmen when he arrived in London last week for his first appearance at Covent Garden; told them too of an invitation he had had to sing there 18 years ago, of his refusal because the management would not meet his price.

*Paderewski was Premier of Poland in 1919, was first delegate from Poland to the Council of Ambassadors and to the League of Nations in 1920. 1 Clerk in a Long Island police court. 2 Now “helps behind the scenes” at the National Theater. 3 Norma opened the Academy in Oct., 1854. 4 Jenny Lind sang it from the same stage.