Red/The Importance of Electrical Picture Concerts

by Carl Van Vechten

The Importance of Electrical Picture Concerts

In a paper entitled Music for Museums^[1] I once complained of the unvaried fare offered to us by the program makers of the symphony concerts, a monotonous round of the symphonies of Beethoven and Brahms, the overtures of Weber, and excerpts from Wagner's music dramas. A law should be enacted restricting orchestral organizations to one Beethoven symphony a season, I asserted, and I berated the conductors for their tendency to give the old masters places that should be reserved, at least on occasion, for the younger generation. My remarks seem to have been read and taken seriously, unless it can be supposed that the conductors themselves have seen the error of their ways, for during the current season (1916–17) we have observed Mr. Damrosch and Mr. Stransky (at least insofar as he has been able to do so without cracking the conditions of the famous Pulitzer will, which stipulates that the music of Beethoven, Liszt, and Wagner shall be frequently performed at the Electrical Picture Concerts concerts of the Philharmonic Society) vying with one another in their effort to discover unperformed works in dusty attics or on the shelves of the music shops and the libraries, and in their desire to give early hearings to new music by modern composers. Up to date, to be sure, they have ignored a good many compositions that we might conceivably listen to with pleasure, but they have provided us with specimens previously unproduced, at least in these benighted parts, of the art of Haydn and Mozart; Richard Strauss's long-buried Macbeth has been exhumed and the new and still-born Alpine Symphony has been played; a suite from Stravinsky's earliest ballet, l'Oiseau de feu, and several movements of a symphony by Zandonai have been added to the repertory of the concert room; and d'Indy's Istar, which we have long prayed for, has been revived, together with a more ancient treasure, Raff's Lenore Symphony, once as popular as Tchaikovsky's Sixth. Now these are steps, tentative, to be sure, in the right direction, and although some of us, at the cost of burning in hell, would refuse to hear a good deal of this music twice, it is certainly pleasanter to hear it once than to listen year after year to the standbys and battle horses of the ordinary concert season, a state of affairs which forces me to cry out with Shakespeare's duke, "Enough; no more; 'tis not so sweet now as it was before." Dr. Muck in Boston does not agree with me. He even brings his men to New York to perform Schumann's Rhenish Symphony and Rimsky-Korsakoff's Scheherazade and calls the result a program. This strikes me as insolence, but it is an efficient kind of insolence. The concerts of the Boston Symphony Orchestra at Carnegie Hall are always sold out, and Dr. Muck could, if he so desired (I am expecting something of the sort), make up a program consisting of the Beautiful Blue Danube waltz and Beethoven's Ninth Symphony without any appreciable effect on the box office.

There is, of course, the necessity (at least it is so regarded) of educating the children. They must, according to the accepted theory of education, hear what has been done before they hear what is being done, but it does not seem necessary on this account to convert the best orchestra in America (one of the best anywhere) into a primary school. It is disheartening to realize, as some of us must, that this band, which one might hope to find exploiting new tonal combinations for our delectation, is fast becoming a museum where celebrated old bits of tune may be inspected and reheard.

Hope has appeared, however, in an unexpected quarter. The extreme popularity of the cinema theatres was not to be guessed at a few seasons ago, nor could any of us have foretold that symphony orchestras of a size and quality which compare more than favourably with some of our established organizations would dispense sweet melody in these temples of amusement from late morning until midnight. The accompaniment to the pictures is scarcely, as yet, a matter for congratulation, as I have indicated in Music for the Movies, but the accompaniment to the pictures is only a small part of the present duty of a band in a theatre devoted to the electrical drama. As a matter of fact, a concert at a moving-picture show is now often a much more serious affair than an old Theodore Thomas popular program. Symphonies, concertos, rhapsodies, arias, overtures (from those of Dichter und Bauer and Guillaume Tell to those of Lohengrin and Susannens Geheimnis), all figure in the scheme. At one of these theatres more music is performed in one day than an assiduous concert-goer could hope to hear in three days in the concert halls. The duration of a symphony concert is about two hours, including a fifteen-minute intermission, that of a song recital about an hour and a half, but in a moving-picture theatre an orchestra, or an organ, or a piano furnishes a pretty continuous flow of melody from eleven a. m. to eleven p. m. In the large houses soloists are sandwiched in between the films; sometimes these soloists are better performers than those one hears under more holy auspices; frequently they are identical. The violinists play Kreisler, the Beethoven Romances, and pieces by Drdla, Vieuxtemps, de Beriot, Paganini, and Mendelssohn. Yes, the first movement of the E minor concerto figures occasionally in moving-picture theatre concert programs, where, at the present day, I am inclined to believe it belongs.

This might be regarded as poetic justice. In any case, it is a fact, and a fact that cannot be ignored. It strikes me that from this time on we should hear precious little about "concerts for young people," "educational concerts," "popular concerts," and the like. In the circumstances, the directors of our best orchestras can invent no flimsy excuse for playing too much Beethoven, Schumann, Schubert, and Wagner, or any of the works of Grieg, Liszt, Mendelssohn, and Tchaikovsky. Brahms, by the peculiar veils of his art, seems, at the moment, to be protected from the cinema halls, although violinists occasionally perform his Gipsy Dances there, and almost any day I expect to hear some deep-voiced contralto sing the Sapphische Ode or the Vergebliches Standchen between Douglas Fairbanks and Charlie Chaplin.

The importance of the musical accompaniment to the films and of the intermediate concert numbers is obviously recognized by the managers of such theatres as the Strand and the Rialto. The close attention with which the music is followed and the very violent applause which congratulates each performer, often exacting recall numbers, are ready proofs of the pleasure experienced by the customers. What is known as cheap music is seldom played. In fact, there is so much of an air of the concert hall about these performances that I am afraid they would bore me even if the music were less familiar to my ears. I should prefer, on these occasions, more informality, more excursions into the rhythmic realms conjured up for us by Louis Hirsch and Irving Berlin. Nothing of the sort need be hoped for. The music performed, and desired by the audiences, is what is known to the less tone-educated multitudes as "classic."

Any intelligent child, therefore, with a little direction from a musical elder, could pick up the routine of the concert and opera world in a ten weeks' course at the Rialto or the Strand. Such unavoidable songs as the Prologue to Pagliacci, the subsequent tenor lament from the same opera, all three of Dalila's airs, the waltz from La Boheme, the prayer from Tosca, Celeste Aida, Cielo e mar, O Paradis, Danny Deever, Les Filles de Cadix, the Habanera from Carmen, Dich, theure Halle, The Two Grenadiers, Dost of thou know that fair land? from Mignon, the Jewel Waltz from Faust, the Page's Song from Les Huguenots, the Miserere, the Prayer from Cavalleria Rusticana, the Bach-Gounod Ave Maria, Depuis le jour from Louise, the Gavotte from Manon, Pleurez mes yeux from Le Cid, the Drinking Song from La Traviata, the Ave Maria from Otello, Plus grand dans son obscurité from Gounod's La Reine de Saba, and Che faro senza Euridice? will be as familiar to his little ears as Dixie or the stolen strains of America.

In like manner he will accustom himself to the delights of Kreisler's Caprice Viennois and Tambourin Chinois, Beethoven's two violin Romances, the Bach air arranged for the G string, the Preislied from Die Meistersinger, arranged for violin by Wilhelmj, Pierné's Sérénade, Dvořák's Humoresque. . . . As for the concert repertory, he will hear the overtures to Euryanthe and Oberon, Il Barbiere di Siviglia, Tannhäuser, Sakuntala, Semiramide, and such concert pieces and tone-poems as the Danse Macabre, Phaëton, Mephistowaltzer, Les Préludes, the orchestrated rhapsodies of Liszt, Rimsky-Korsakoff's Spanish Caprice, the Arlésienne Suite, the Peer Gynt Suite, a number of Strauss waltzes, Massenet's Elégie, the entr'actes from The Jewels of the Madonna, certain ballet airs of Gluck, etc.

Moreover, he will not be cognizant of the fact that he is acquiring what is known as a "musical education" (the knowledge of and the ability to hum tunes from one-fifth of the aforementioned numbers would generally be considered to constitute a musical education). Heaven forfend that such an idea be put into his head! The moving-picture concerts, like the pictures themselves, should be classified as amusements. Only, having gone this far, why not go a little farther? If one must become acquainted with Wagner in the concert hall at all, why not in the electrical picture theatre? There are no excerpts in the present concert repertory that could not well be played there; the Funeral March from Götterdämmerung, the Lohengrin prelude, the Good Friday Spell from Parsifal, the Ride of the Valkyries, and all the rest of them, should be doled out, between the actualities and the feature film, to the youngsters seeking tone-knowledge and to those oldsters who enjoy hearing them divorced from the text and the stage action. And while you can scarcely expect Dr. Muck or Mr. Damrosch to pay Beethoven the compliment of giving him up altogether for the time being, his music might be played less by the symphony organizations in view of the hearings it would receive at the hands of the moving-picture societies. The first two symphonies, at any rate, might be left to their mercies. Mendelssohn, as a symphonist, assuredly should be tendered to their keeping . . . Grieg and Liszt, for the most part . . . Rubinstein, Tchaikovsky, and Massenet . . . a good deal of Saint-Saëns . . . Glazunoff and Elgar, certainly Elgar, if the moving-picture audiences would permit it. There is another field for the Strand Philharmonic Society, for the band of the Academy of Music: the exploitation of the American composer^[2] who, one complains, never gets his chance at a hearing. The conductors of these concerts might introduce new music by George W. Chadwick, Henry Hadley, Arthur Farwell, Edgar Stillman Kelley, and Ernest Schelling.

If anything so nearly pleasant as this happens in the musical world (and there are, as I stated at the beginning of this paper, certain indications that it is happening), think of the space there would be on the programs of our august societies for the new music our curious ears are aching to hear! Think of the possible resurrections of works by Mozart, Haydn, and César Franck that one never does hear. Perhaps Debussy's La Mer, Nocturnes, and Images (Ibéria, Gigue, and Rondes de Printemps), all too infrequently performed, would become more familiar. I should like to listen at least once to Albéniz's Catalonia and Turina's La Procesión del Rocio, which Debussy has compared to a luminous fresco, which reminds me that Spanish music altogether is unknown in our concert halls. We might hear more Sibelius and Musorgsky . . . Borodin . . . John Carpenter . . . Schoenberg's Five Pieces . . . Stravinsky's Sacre du Printemps.^[3] Why not even Petrouchka? Ornstein's The Fog, Ravel, Dukas (has La Péri been played here?), d'Indy, Korngold . . .

December 7, 1916.

1. In a wretched book called Music After the Great War.
2. This actually happened. See page 71.
3. It is an interesting fact that, during the seven years which have elapsed since I wrote this paper, nearly, if not quite all of the pieces I mentioned have been performed in New York. It was not until January 1924, however, that Stravinsky's Sacre du Printemps, which I heard in Paris in 1913, was given a hearing in New York.