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Music-Study in Germany, a non-fiction book by Amy Fay |
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With Kullak - Chapter 11 |
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_ WITH KULLAK CHAPTER XI Eisenach. Gotha. Erfurt. Andernach. Weimar. Tausig.
Well, here I am back in smelly old Berlin! I really hated to leave Heidelberg, it was such a paradisiacal spot, but we saw so much that was beautiful afterwards, that my impression of it has become a little dimmed. From Heidelberg we went to Eisenach, its rival in a different way, for here we went over the Wartburg--the Castle famous for having been the dwelling of the holy St. Elizabeth, and where Luther translated the Bible and spent ten months of his life disguised as a knight. I saw his room, a bare and comfortless hole, but with a splendid view from the windows. The Castle is in good repair, and is a noble pile. I suppose the Duke of Weimar spends some time there every summer, as it looks as if it were lived in. It is endlessly interesting. There is a lovely little chapel in it where Luther used to preach, with everything left in just as it was in his time--a little gem. The Wartburg is on a very high hill, and the views from it are superb. Among other things to be seen from it is the Venusberg, which is the mountain Wagner has introduced in his famous opera of Tannhäuser. He was so carried away by the Wartburg when he concealed himself near it, as he was being pursued by the government to be arrested as a revolutionary, twenty years ago, that he never rested until he had united the legends of St. Elizabeth and of the Venusberg in his opera. Liszt, also, wrote an oratorio on St. Elizabeth as his tribute to the Wartburg. From Eisenach we went to Gotha, a lovely place, all shaded with trees, and surmounted by a very imposing castle, with two immense towers. It is an enormous edifice, and is surrounded by a magnificent park, through which goes the slowly winding river. I believe that Gotha belongs to the Duke of Saxe-Coburg, brother of the Queen of England, or something. At all events, in the middle of this river is an island where the ducal family is buried, and it is so thickly planted with trees whose boughs hang over the water, that their graves are quite shrouded from the vulgar eye. Pretty idea! The river laps lazily against the grassy slope which covers the princely ones, and the wind rushing through the trees, sings their dirge. From Gotha we went to Erfurt, where we only spent one night, in order to see the Cathedral. Erfurt is an Undine of a place, full of running streams and bridges and mills roaring all about you. I saw one street with a brook rippling down the very middle of it at a most rattling pace, and at every little distance two or three stepping stones by which to cross it. Just think how fascinating for children! I longed to stay and have a good play there myself. The Erfurt Cathedral is much smaller than those of Spire and Cologne, but the exterior is wonderfully beautiful. The transept is a masterpiece, and has fifteen enormous windows of rich old stained glass going round it. The nave did not please me so well, because in addition to its not being very rich, the side aisles were of equal height with the main body of the Cathedral, and were not sufficiently marked off from it to prevent the roof's looking like a ceiling. I believe the side aisles were of equal height with the main aisle in the Cologne Cathedral, but the archways and pillars cut them off more, so that it had a different effect.--I am more interested in cathedrals than anything else, and should like to travel all over Europe and see all the different ones. There is a lovely old church at Andernach, Roman Catholic, as most of the churches on the Rhine are. I went there to church one Sunday morning, and stayed through the service. They had the most powerful church music I've ever heard. There was an excellent boy choir which sang in unison and led the congregation, every person of which joined in. The organ was fine, as was also the organist, and the singing was so universal that the old church walls rang again. The priest preached an excellent sermon, too--the best I have heard in Germany. * * * BERLIN, August 31, 1871. Germany is a most lovely country, and perfectly delicious to travel through. I believe I have described all the places we went to excepting Weimar. Weimar is delightful, and so interesting, because Goethe and Schiller, Wieland and Herder lived there, and everything is connected with them, and especially with the first two. There are many fine statues in the little city, and a delicious great park along the river which was laid out under Goethe's superintendence.--One group of Goethe and Schiller standing together in front of the theatre is magnificent. One hardly knows which to admire the most, Goethe, with his courtly mein and commanding features, or Schiller, with his extreme ideality and his head a little thrown back as if to take in inspiration direct from the sky. It is a most striking conception. The palace of the Grand Duke of Weimar is the principal "show" of the place. It is filled with the richest works of art, and is beautifully frescoed in rooms devoted each to a particular author, and representing his most celebrated works. There is the Goethe room, and the Wieland room, etc. The Wieland room is the most charming thing. The frescoes on the walls are all illustrative of his "Oberon," which is his most celebrated work, and one picture represents what happened when Oberon blew his horn. You must know that when Oberon blows his horn everybody is obliged to dance. So in this picture he is represented blowing it in a convent, and all the fat friars and nuns are dancing away like mad. They look so serious, and as if they didn't want to do it at all, but their feet will fly up in the air in spite of them. The nuns' slippers scarcely stick on, and it looks so absurd! I was as highly amused at it as the mischievous Oberon himself must have been, so delicately has the artist touched it off. There was another design representing a band of nymphs dancing in the sky, hand in hand in the twilight, and it was the most graceful thing!--Their delicate little bare feet with every pretty turn a foot could have, their clothes and hair streaming in the breeze, and every attitude so airy. It was lovely! The Goethe frescoes were by another painter, and not so fine, but I prefer pictures to frescoes. Only one suite of the ducal rooms was frescoed. The others had superb pictures by the old masters, many of them originals. The Duke is an artist himself, and designs a great many pretty things. For instance, he designed the large candelabra which stood on each side of one of the doorways,--Cupid peeping through a wreath of thistles and nettles. He was kneeling on one knee, and pushing them aside with each hand. It was all done in gilt metal and made a very dainty conceit, beside being a good illustration of the pains of love! I think the Duke probably designed some of the picture frames, for they were peculiarly rich and artistic; for instance, the frames of the original cartoons of Leonardo da Vinci's Last Supper were entirely composed of the leaves and flowers of the calla lily. The leaves lapped one over the other, and here and there a lily was laid between. The flowers were done in a different coloured gilding from the leaves. They were very beautiful. The pictures were not all hung together, so as to confuse your eye, but here a gem and there a gem--and O, I saw the most bewitching little statue there that ever I saw in my life! The subject was "Little Red Riding Hood," and it stood in the corner of one of the great salons. It was about two feet high, and represented the most fascinating little girl you can imagine, clothed in the wolf's skin, which hung down behind and had formed the little hood. The child herself was quite indescribable--the daintiest little creature, with the most captivating expression of innocence and roguishness. If she looked like that I should have followed the wolf's example and eaten her up! It was really a perfect little pearl of a statue. I would give anything to possess it. In short, I wish the Duke of Weimar were my intimate friend, for he must be a man worth knowing. Now, if I could only play like Liszt!--I don't wonder Liszt spends so much of his time in Weimar. I am getting perfectly crazy to hear him, by the way, for everybody says there is nobody in the world like him, and that he is the only artist who combines everything. He does not play in public any more, but Weitzmann says that he is amiability itself, and that it would probably not be difficult for me to get an opportunity to hear him in private. In the palace I also saw the little boudoir of the Duchess. It was all panelled in white satin, and the furniture was of the richest white brocaded silk. The window frames were of malachite, and one looked out through the single great plate of glass on to the beautiful park, and the winding river spanned by a bridge which suggests immediately to your mind, "Walk over me into the Garden of Paradise, for I was made for your express benefit!" The park lies on each side of this little river Ilm, and Goethe's exquisite taste has given it more a look of nature than of art. It seems as if you were walking in a delicious meadow, the trees being sometimes grouped together, sometimes growing thickly along the water's edge. You go in and out of sunshine and shadow, and here and there are dusky little retreats, and, to borrow Goldsmith's elegant style,--"the winding walks assume a natural sylvage." Some distance up the river, on the side of a gentle hill, was a small house in the woods where Goethe used to live in summer. Here he slept sometimes, and farther up the hill was a summer house where he took his coffee after dinner. To the left of this summer house he had had made a long alley-way or vista of trees whose tops met overhead and formed a leafy ceiling. It was like a cloister, and here he could pace up and down and muse. It was a delightful idea. To the right of the summer house was a small garden, and beyond that was a path which wound through the wood down to the path below. In one of the rocks there Goethe had had a little poem cut. I was sorry afterward that I hadn't copied it, it was so pretty.--But it was such a charming place to read and study, and it seemed to give me a better impression of him than anything else. I saw a piano in the Duke's palace upon which Beethoven had played. It was a funny little instrument of about five octaves, but it was so wheezy with age that there wasn't much tone to be got out of it. After we had finished looking at the palace, we went over to see the ducal library. Here I saw a superb bust of Goethe as a young man. It was so handsome that it spurns description. He must have been a perfect Apollo. I also saw a likeness of him painted upon a cup by some great artist, for which he sat thirty-four times! The old librarian, who had known Goethe, said that it was exactly like him, and the miniature painting was so wonderful that when you looked at it with a magnifying glass it was only finer and more accurate instead of less so! There was also a most noble bust of the composer Glück. The face was all scarred with small-pox, so that the cast must have been moulded from his features after death, but I never saw such a living, animated, likeness in marble. It looked as if it were going to speak to you. There was a funny toy there, nearly three hundred years old. It was a drummer boy, with a little baby strapped on his back. The librarian wound him up, and then he beat his drum lustily, rolled his eyes from side to side, and wagged his head, while the baby on his back hopped up and down. Whenever little children see it, it scares them, and they begin to cry. It had on a red flannel coat, and hasn't had a new one since it was made.--"Nearly three hundred years old, and never had a new coat," is worse than when C. P. bought himself a trunk, and went round the house saying, "Twenty-seven years old, and been in twenty-three states of the Union, and never had a new trunk before!" Goethe's house is not exhibited, which I think highly inexcusable in the Goethe family, but Schiller's is. So we saw that, and what a contrast it was to the ducal palace!--You go to a small yellow house on one of the principal streets, enter a little hall by a little door, go up two flights of a little stair-case, and in the very low-ceilinged third story was Schiller's home--"home" I say, and the whole of it, so please take it in! The first room you enter is a sort of ante-room where photographs are now sold. The next room was the parlour, and of late years it has been comfortably furnished by the ladies of Weimar in the usual cheap German taste. The third room was Schiller's study, with an infinitesimal fourth room, or large closet, opening from it, which was his sleeping apartment. The study is precisely as he left it, and nothing could be more bald and bare. No carpet on the floor, the three windows slightly festooned at the top with a single breadth of Turkey red, his own portrait and a few wretched prints on the walls--in short, such a sordid habitation for such a soaring nature as seemed almost incredible! His writing table, with a globe, inkstand, and pens upon it, stands at one window, and his wife's tiny little piano with her guitar on top, is against the wall. There are two or three chairs, and a wash-stand with a minute washing apparatus. In one corner is the tiny unpainted wooden bedstead on which he died; a bed not meant to stretch out in, but to lie, as Germans do, half reclining, and so low, narrow, plain and mean that I never saw anything like it. In it and hanging on the wall over it are wreaths which leading German actresses have brought there as votive offerings to their great national dramatist, their white satin ribbons yellowing by time. At the foot of the stair-case as you go out, you see the little walled-up garden at the back of the house where the poet loved to sit. After getting through with the abodes of the living, we visited the ducal vault where Goethe and Schiller are buried. It is the crypt of a sort of temple built in the old secluded cemetery in Weimar, and in it all the coffins are laid in rows on supporters. Goethe and Schiller lie apart from the others, side by side, near the foot of the stair-case leading down into the crypt. Their coffins, especially Schiller's, are covered with wreaths and bouquets brought by strangers and laid there. Schiller's had on it a garland of silver leaves presented by the women of Hamburg, and another of leaves of green gauze or crape, on every one of which was worked in gold thread the name of one of his plays. A great actress had made it herself as her tribute to his genius. From all I observe, I should judge that the German people love Schiller much more than they do Goethe. The dukes and duchesses lie farther back in the vault in their red velvet coffins, quite unnoticed. So much better is genius than rank! Hummel is buried also in the cemetery, which is the most beautiful I ever saw--not stiff and "arranged" like ours, but so natural! with over-grown foot-paths, and with much fewer and simpler grave-stones and monuments, and many more vines and flowers and roses creeping over the graves. We went to Hummel's grave, and had I been Goethe and Schiller I should much rather have been buried out of doors like him, amid this sweet half-wild, half-gentle nature, than in that dismal vault. Speaking of Hummel reminds me of Tausig's death. Was it not terrible that he should have died so young! Such an enormous artist as he was! I cannot get reconciled to it at all, and he played only twice in Berlin last winter. He was a strange little soul--a perfect misanthrope. Nobody knew him intimately. He lived all the last part of his life in the strictest retirement, a prey to deep melancholy. He was taken ill at Leipsic, whither he had gone to meet Liszt. Until the ninth day they had hopes of his recovery, but in the night he had a relapse, and died the tenth day, very easily at the last. His remains were brought to Berlin and he was buried here. Everything was done to save him, and he had the most celebrated physicians, but it was useless. So my last hope of lessons from him again is at an end, you see! I never expect to hear such piano-playing again. It was as impossible for him to strike one false note as it is for other people to strike right ones. He was absolutely infallible. The papers all tell a story about his playing a piece one time before his friends, from the notes. The music fell upon the keys, but Tausig didn't allow himself to be at all disturbed, and went on playing through the paper, his fingers piercing it and grasping the proper chords, until some one rushed to his aid and set the notes up again. Oh, he was a wonder, and it is a tragic loss to Art that he is dead. He was such a true artist, his standard was so immeasurably high, and he had such a proud contempt for anything approaching clap-trap, or what he called Spectakel. I have seen him execute the most gigantic difficulties without permitting himself a sign of effort beyond an almost imperceptible compression of one corner of his mouth.--And then his touch! Never shall I forget it!--that rush of silver over the keys. However, he entirely overstrained himself, and his whole nervous system was completely shattered long before his illness. He said last winter that the very idea of playing in public was unbearable to him, and after he had announced in the papers that he would give four concerts, he recalled the announcement on the plea of ill health. Then he thought he would go to Italy and spend the winter. But when he got as far as Naples, he said to himself, "Nein, hier bleibst du nicht (No, you won't stay here);" and back he came to Berlin. He doesn't seem to have known what he wanted, himself; his was an uneasy, tormented, capricious spirit, at enmity with the world. Perhaps his marriage had something to do with it. His wife was a beautiful artist, too, and they thought the world of each other, yet they couldn't live together. But Tausig's whole life was a mystery, and his reserve was so complete that nobody could pierce it. If I had only been at the point in music two years ago that I am now, I could have gone at once into his class. His scholars were most of them artists already, or had got to that point where they had pretty well mastered the technique. A number of them came out last winter, and the little Timanoff played duets with Rubinstein for two pianos, at St. Petersburg. Since my return I have gone into the first class in Kullak's conservatory, instead of taking private lessons of him. I think it will be of use to me to hear his best pupils play. _ |
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