not even allowed to play at the ensuing concert, but was sent away with a blessing and the year’s salary he had contracted for—shipped to a distant city where he could play in a theater and be as little as possible a thorn in the flesh of Boston. The veteran was hastily recalled and reëngaged, naturally at an advance in salary sufficient to assuage his wounded feelings.
The American life, and his strenuous part in it, caused Mr. Gericke, after the season of 1888-89,
From a photograph
Franz Kneisel to return to the quieter atmosphere of Vienna; and to succeed him Arthur Nikisch was summoned from his post of conductor at the Neues Theater—the municipal opera-house—of Leipsic. He was just then emerging into that fame that has since made him one of the most distinguished, and, it may also be added, one of the most highly paid conductors in the world; but he had not quite arrived at it then, and the series of concerts that he had conducted the previous winter in Berlin had been a disastrous financial failure.
In Boston he did much in the next three years to bring himself into prominence as one of the most original, daring, and intensely subjective of the modern school of conductors—a man who, with certain exaggerations and affectations, is illuminated by the living flame of genius. As about his predecessor, so even more about him, was Boston rent into contending factions. So it was also about his successor, Emil Paur, who, having stepped into Nikisch’s position at the Leipsic opera, stepped into it again in Boston as one who came to tide over an emergency. For after Mr. Nikisch’s contract had been canceled in 1893, under circumstances of some stress and strain, Mr. Higginson fully expected to secure for his orchestra Dr. Hans Richter. It is not perhaps generally known by how narrow a margin the great Viennese conductor, then as now recognized as one of the most gifted and authoritative in the world, failed to come to this country. He had just had trouble in the intriguing court circles of the Austrian capital, where the strings that direct the management of the Imperial Opera are pulled. He was disgusted and ready to leave Vienna. He had actually signed a contract with Mr. Higginson and was expected in Boston. Then came salve to his wounded feelings, auf hohen Befehl, in the shape of a decoration and an appointment to the post of of Hofhapellmeister at the opera on the death of Hellmesberger. So he calmly ignored his American contract and stayed. Mr. Paur exercised a rude but vigorous sway for five years, when he was succeeded, in 1898, by Mr. Gericke, who returned to a place that had been kept warm in the hearts of his admirers during the nine years of his absence.
It would be wrong to neglect the part that was played in the upbuilding of the Boston Symphony Orchestra by Franz Kneisel, whom Mr. Gericke took as a lad of twenty from the post of concert-master of Bilse’s orchestra in Berlin, and put in the corresponding post in Boston in the autumn of 1885. To the eye of the audi- ence the concert-master—so we somewhat unintelligibly translate the German word Konsertmeister, ignoring the more descriptive French name of chef d’attague—is the
