“NUR WER DIE SEHNSUCHT KENNT”

MARGARET C. ANDERSON

In one of Chicago’s big department stores of the cheaper type you may—provided you’re something of a poet—walk straight into the heart of a musical adventure. It is that amazing, resentful, and very satisfying adventure of discovering genius at work, under the by no means unique condition of being unrecognized.

You go to one of the upper floors where the big lunch-room is. You find a table near a platform in the center, on which sit four musicians—a pianist, a ’cellist, a clarinetist (if there is such a thing), and a second violinist. You expect the usual clamor....

Suddenly you notice a fifth figure who has been sitting quietly in the background. She comes forward with a violin in her hand, and stands ready to play. There is something still about her—that quality of stillness which is invariably the first thing you notice in any dynamic. She seems not scornful of her surroundings, but quite indifferent to them; not arrogant, but sure of power; not timid, and yet incredibly soft and shy and serious. She is plainly foreign; she is German, looks French, and plays like a Viennese. Or, to be exact, she merges the German “heaviness” with the Viennese gay-sadness, and the result is a sensuousness that is both deep and clear, with the haunting wail that distinguishes all the music which comes from Vienna. She looks almost like a little girl; but you would notice her any place because of that stillness and the haunting appeal that always attaches to a certain type of eyes and mouth—the kind which seem to say: “I will make music for you; I will take you to a new world. I will do it because I can dream intensely.”

She begins to play, and you understand why you watched her. The depth of it startles you at first—it is so big, so moving, so almost uncanny coming from such a small person, whose hands seem scarcely large enough to hold a violin. It is playing of the Mischa Elman type, without his emotional extravagances and with something that is more soul-shaking. If I were an Imagist I could find the right word; but this music eludes me. It is sure and simple. It grips you till you don’t know whether you are listening to music or to the urge of some hidden inner self. It is a divine thing.

In the midst of it the waitresses rush back and forth, the patrons eat their food with interest, only pausing to applaud when some tawdry vaudevillian sings a particularly vulgar song. The dishes clang, some one upsets a tray with a great crash, and at intervals there is a tango outrage by a couple who know nothing about dancing. Underneath it all the violin throbs its deep accompaniment.

I wish I could make a poem of it. I have thought of taking my poet friends there and having the thing done. But almost without exception the poets I know don’t care for music essentially; though why a mind keyed to the tone qualities of words should be so tone-deaf in another medium has always been a mystery to me. And what a poet’s opportunity here: “the boom and squeal,” and out of it music that is as sacred as an organ meditation and as passionate as a Russian slave song!

However, generalizations will not serve to give any musician’s special quality, and this one is so emphatically individual as to make description easy. To begin with, she was concertising in Europe as a wonder-child at the age of six. For a number of years her playing brought forth a chorus of superlatives from the critics: “her full blooming tone, her great taste in phrasing, economic use of the bow, glowing passion of interpretation; her fiery temperament, remarkable earnestness and will power, the soul, life, and emotion in her presentations.” The verdict of a “a veritable artist soul” appeared to be unanimous; and one man summed up with admirable insight and simplicity: “Her chief excellence is in this: that she seeks her main task to be an artist in the real and earnest sense of the word, and whosoever comes to hear music does not go empty from her.”

Friedrich Spielhagen wrote a sonnet to her, of which I have a careful, but metrically inadequate, translation:

And he ended it with these lines:

Our apologies to Mr. Spielhagen for that more than atrocious twelfth line and for the other deficiencies! But the last line is particularly keen in its photography. It has the spirit of her.

After much touring in Europe she came to this country and played under the same promising conditions. The critics predicted that if she should decide to stay here she would probably out-rival our own few noted women violinists. And then came a period of sorrow, bereavement, hardship, and illness—and in the meantime the problem of living. That problem becomes a real one when an artist loves life just a bit more than her art and refuses to make that spiritual compromise which life tries to wrest from one in the hard places. One must live, and it takes money to do it rather than art. The romantic notion that all genius has to do is to stand up and make itself heard is one of the silliest notions the great public suffers from. Only the hundredth person recognizes genius when it proclaims itself; the rest are as blind as this department-store audience until the sign-posts have been put up, with letters large enough to be easily read. Also, the amount of machinery and money involved in the arrangement of concert engagements would surprise the public as much as the true stories of what it costs the “wealthy patron” to get his artist started toward recognition.

And so this particular genius will continue for a while to cast her pearls in a lunch-room, and a few of the discerning will find her out and thank their stars that they may hear such beauty at the small cost of a bad club sandwich and a worse cup of coffee.

If you go there you will be haunted by music for days afterward. I say “haunted” because that is the only word to describe your feeling of pursuit by melody. And I think I have discovered the reason for it. A poet once said that the only permanent emotion we human beings are capable of is—not love, as we like to imagine—but longing. And that is what this music says to you. It is the very essence of longing—the eternal seeking, the rapturous satisfaction, the disappointment, and the renewed quest. I have never heard such a quality of sehnsucht in any music; it is almost more than you can bear. Of course, in these surroundings, you must listen to the complete gamut of new popular songs; but at intervals, when the managerial demand for “noise” can be ignored for a moment, you will be rewarded by the Thais Meditation or a Schutt waltz or that exquisite Saint-Saens poem called The Swan—or even a Tschaikowsky song. Where does the tone come from, you keep wondering? Not from a wooden instrument, not from small human fingers, surely. It is tone of such richness and depth that you sometimes have the illusion of each note being sung twice. “It transcends music to me entirely and becomes a matter of life—or of soul,” said a critic who listened with me the other day.

Through it all the artist’s earnest face is still and unchanging. That is part of the fascination—the contrast of that tumultuous singing and the thoughtful, dreaming face that seems to control it all. “My violin belongs to me—yes,” she says, “but that is such a cold word. It is part of my body. I feel it is growing on me just like my arms and hands. I could not live without it.” If you watch her closely you will decide that her playing is the result of an extraordinary sensitiveness to life. If you know her, as I do, you will expand that judgment to this one: an extraordinary strength about life; for she is both deep and strong—qualities that are supposed to be inseparable, but which are so rarely found together that their combination means—a great spirit.

I am afraid I am too much of a musician not to be a romanticist. With out music life to me would be a mistake.—Nietzsche to Brandes, 1888.

All restlessness, misery, all crime, is the result of the betrayal of one’s inner life.—Will Lexington Comfort in “Midstream.”