“OSCAR” AND DVORAK

Well I remember the day when Oscar Hammerstein first entered the office of the Musical Courier and introduced himself to Editor Marc A. Blumenberg. The year may have been 1888, perhaps 1889. He told Mr. Blumenberg that he was worth a million dollars, which sum he had made from a patent cigar-cutting machine; he also said that he was the editor of a trade journal devoted to the tobacco industry. Blumenberg looked at me, winked, and shook his head. The future impresario, with that ironical smile of his, noticed the incredulous movement and asked: “You think I’m meshugah? I’ll prove that I’m not crazy,” and he produced irrefragable evidence that he was neither crazy nor poverty-stricken. He was worth more than a million, and Marc immediately became interested. Who wouldn’t have? Oscar was then dreaming of opera in English. The failures of American operatic companies had only blazed a trail for him, a trail that would be bound to end in success. He thought that good singing in our native language at moderate prices would solve the problem. Every experimenter starts out with that simple thesis, a dangerous one, as opera has little to do with art, music, good singing, or vernacular speech.

Opera is an exotic. It is a fashionable function or nothing. Oscar was told this by Blumenberg, but he in turn shook his head. He proposed to be another Columbus and show them the egg trick. He had a hundred predecessors, and no doubt he will have a thousand successors. But somehow the egg never stands; that is, in English.

There was much pow-wowing between the two editors that I can’t recall. The less I understand a libretto the more I enjoy the music. I agree with Harry B. Smith, who has said that when an opera is a success the composer gets the credit; when a failure, the blame is saddled upon the book. As the librettist of Robin Hood and a string of other De Koven and Smith operas, Mr. Smith knows what he is talking about. W. S. Gilbert was in the same rocking boat with Arthur Sullivan. Later, Oscar Hammerstein was to settle the question by writing both words and music for The Kohinoor, thus patterning after Richard Wagner. But at first he was rather timid. I don’t believe he took Blumenberg’s advice, or, indeed, the advice of any one, except Campanini’s. Opera at the Harlem Opera House followed after an interval. It was not an enlivening affair. When I read in some obituary articles that Hammerstein had engaged Lilli Lehmann, Schumann-Heink, Alvary, Fischer, and others for his One Hundred and Twenty-fifth-Street season, I also shook my head. I can’t remember such an imposing array—as they say in funeral notices—at the old Harlem Opera House. Does any one? I remember the burning mountain in Auber’s Masaniello, or The Dumb Girl of Portici (what a film it would make, this dumbness), and there were other mediocre revivals, not worthy of critical consideration.

However, Oscar was not to be discouraged. He proceeded to play the game with energy and recklessness. He was a gambler born. Organizing opera companies, vaudeville shows, erecting opera-houses in New York, Philadelphia, London, building theatres, playing with men and millions, what were the achievements of Henry E. Abbey or Colonel Jack Haverly compared with those of this shrewd, ever-witty, good-tempered Hebrew, who was more prodigal with his own money than other managers were, and are, with the capital of strangers?

Hammerstein’s original operetta was once upon a time as celebrated as his hat. The composition was the result of a wager made by Oscar and Gustave Kerker, the composer of The Belle of New York, Castles in the Air, and a dozen other popular pieces. Kerker is a well-trained musician, and, naturally, he was rather sceptical when Oscar boasted of his musical genius. Whatever gifts Oscar may have possessed, modesty was not one of his failings. I have heard him quote with gusto Goethe’s dictum as to the modesty of fools. At a table one afternoon a quarter of a century ago, at the old Gilsey House, in the café, sat Oscar, Kerker, Charles Alfred Byrne, dramatic critic and librettist; Henry Neagle, then dramatic editor of the New York Recorder—since defunct—and the present writer. Taunted by some one, Oscar became excited and offered to compose an opera, words and music, within forty-eight hours. Gus booked the bet—the amount of which I’ve forgotten. Rooms were engaged in the Gilsey, an upright piano installed, and, cut off from the world, Hammerstein began tapping out tunes—he was a one-fingered virtuoso—scribbling verse, and altogether making himself extremely busy. I forgot to say that Gus Kerker had agreed to orchestrate the masterpiece.

Then we had lots of fun. Louis Harrison engaged a relay of hand-organs to play under the composer’s windows, but Oscar never winced. The hotel authorities had to telephone the police in order to get rid of a string of Italian piano-organists passionately grinding out popular melodies on Twenty-ninth Street. Plates of sinister ham sandwiches were sent to his room, accompanied by a brigade of cocktails. And the tray was always returned empty, with the composer’s thanks. I’ve forgotten the other pranks we played, and all to no purpose. Complaints were made at the hotel office that a wild man was howling and thumping the keyboard; again, uselessly, for, barricaded, the composer refused to give up the fort. Exhausted, but smiling, Oscar at the end of the allotted time invited the jury on awards to listen to his music. It proved a tuneful hodge-podge, also proved the composer’s retentive memory. Every operetta composer was represented. The book was a joy. It would have pleased little Daisy Ashford. (Why doesn’t some humor-loving musician set The Visiters to music?) Kerker threw up the sponge. He had to pay the bet. The curious side of the affair is that the operetta was actually produced at the New York Theatre a few months later, reinforced by extra numbers, considerably “edited,” and it met with some success. To be sure, the composer was also the owner and manager of the three theatres clustered under one roof. That first night of The Kohinoor was not only notorious, it was side-splitting. The audience, of the true Tenderloin variety, laughed themselves blue in the face. I can only recall that the opening chorus consumed a third of the first act. Oscar knew the art of camouflage years before the word was imported. Two comic-stage Jews alternately sang, “Good morning, Mr. Morgenstern; good morning, Mr. Isaacstein,” while the orchestra shifted the harmonies to avoid monotony. I fancy that was a device of Kerker’s. Oscar “composed” a second operetta, but it never achieved the popularity of The Kohinoor.

During a certain period the Hammerstein hat was without duplicate, except that worn by William M. Chase, the painter. Nevertheless, the Hammerstein hat was unique, not alone for the gray matter it covered, but because of its atmospheric quality. It was a temperamental barometer. When the glass had set fair the tilt of the hat was unmistakable. If storm clouds had gathered on the vocal horizon the hat registered the mood and righted itself like a buoy in agitated waters. Its brim settled over the eyes of its owner; his people flurried into anonymous corners. Or else the hat was pushed off his forehead: unbuttoned then his soul. You might dare to approach and beg for seats. A weather gauge was Oscar’s hat. Ask his one-time famulus, W. J. Guard. He knew. Or Mary Garden. Oscar had hurled his hat at her head in the long ago. What a brim it had, this hat. Oh! the breadth and flatness thereof. How glossy its nap, in height how imposing. To have described Hammerstein without his hat would have been as disastrous as to give the Ring without Wotan. Shorn of it the owner would have been like Alberich sans Tarnhelm. As an Irishman would have said: His hat was his heel of Achilles. Oscar sported it while sleeping. Inside was stencilled the wisdom of Candide: “Il faut cultiver notre Jardin.” (Mary, of course.) Many painters yearned to portray that hat in Oscar’s dome of action. The impressionists would have painted it in complementary tones; the late William M. Chase would have transformed it into a shiny still-life. George Luks would have made it a jest for Hades; Arthur B. Davies would have changed it into a symbol—the old Hebraic chant, Kol Nidre, might have been heard echoing around its curved surfaces, as echoes the Banshee on a funereal night in dear old Tipperary. It was a hat cosmopolitan, alert, joyous, both reticent and expensive. It caused a lot of people sleepless nights, did this sawed-off stovepipe with its operatic airs. Why did Oscar Hammerstein wear it? For the same reason that a miller wears his hat, and not for tribal or political reasons. Requiescat in Oscarino! Pardon my Latin.

But Oscar musical? Oscar a man of fine musical tastes or intelligence? Basta! He had the native wit to select as General for his operatic army a skilled conductor and a musician of judgment and vision. That is the reason New York had such a wide and novel repertory offered to it at the Manhattan Opera House. When Signor Cleofonte Campanini left Hammerstein his musical fortunes began to wane. But as a dynamic driving force I cannot name his equal, except Jack Haverly, or Barnum.

When I was on the professional staff of the National Conservatory—the only musical institution in this country that deserved the appellation—I was intrusted by the President, Jeannette M. Thurber, with the care on his arrival of Dr. Antonin Dvorak, Bohemian composer and musical director of the Conservatory. For the “man in the street” his name means his Humoresque as played by the inimitable Fritz Kreisler, or wheezed out by some unmusical instrument of torture; canned music; in the consecrated phrase of Arthur Whiting, “musical waxworks.” But Dvorak also composed The New World symphony, and other trifles; these, however, do not trouble or soothe the digestion of table d’hôtes. With “Old Borax,” as Parker the composer affectionately called Dvorak, in tow I assured Mrs. Thurber that he would be safe in my hands, and then I proceeded to show him certain sections of our old town, chiefly the near east side. As he was a fervent Roman Catholic I found a Bohemian church for him; he invariably began his day by attending the first mass. Jauntily I invited him to taste the treacherous national drink called whisky cocktail. He nodded with that head which looked like an angry bulldog bearded. At first he scared me with his fierce Slavonic eyes, yet he was as mild-mannered a musical pirate as ever scuttled a pupil’s counterpoint. I always thought of him as a boned-pirate. But I made a mistake in believing that American strong waters would upset his nerves. We began our rounds at Goerwitz’s, then, as now, Scheffel Hall, which stood across the street from the National Conservatory. Later we went down to Gus Lüchow’s; for a musician not to be seen at Lüchow’s argued that he was unknown in the social world of tone. We traversed the great thirst belt of the neighborhood. At each stopping-place Doc Borax absorbed a cocktail or two. He seemed to take to them as a prohibitionist takes to personal abuse.

Now, alcohol I abhor. Therefore I stuck to my usual three-voiced invention of hops, malt, and water. We conversed in German, for he knew no English, and I rejoiced at meeting a man whose Teutonic accent, above all whose grammar, was worse than mine. Yet we got along swimmingly—an appropriate enough image, as the thirst-weather was wet, though not squally. He told me of his admiration for Brahms and of that composer’s admiration for Dvorak. I agreed with Brahms. After he had put away about nineteen cocktails, maybe more, I said, rather thickly: “Master, don’t you think it’s time we ate something?” He gazed at me through those jungle whiskers, which met his tumbled hair half way. He grunted: “Eat! I no eat. We go to Houston Street. You go, hein! We drink the slivavitch. It makes warm after beer.” I didn’t go that evening to the East Houston Street café with Dr. Antonin Dvorak. I never went there with him, for I not only feared the slivavitch, but also that deadly Humoresque played by a fake gypsy fiddler, attired in a red coat and wearing an ineffable grin. Such a man as Old Borax was as dangerous to a moderate drinker as a false beacon to a shipwrecked sailor. His head was like iron. He could drink as much spirits as I could beer, and never turn a hair. I tell this anecdote, not for a moral purpose, but as one of the rapidly vanishing specimens of rum-lore, soon to become legendary. Next year the nation will be put in cotton-wool and its feeble will coddled by noble precepts and winning words from mouths smoking with fiery wisdom. And yet—it was a better time when Hammerstein smoked or Dvorak drank than the dusty prospect ahead for baffled thirsts.