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274 The Gramophone, Decembe1', 1929 another such interpretation for the gramophone i t will have the power to stir in me the memory of those moments I have loved long since and lost awhile. But all thi-s is an account of my personal reaction to the music, and ·i t may be, for instance, that some young man will get from the album of the Fifth Symphony, published last month by Parlophone, played by the Berlin State Opera House Orchestra, and conducted by Josef Rosenstock, at any rate as much as I got from those four old H.M.V. discs. In fairness to later publications, i t must be remembered that the performance by the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra was the only performance of a complete symphony we had in those days, and that the great wealth of music which has been poured out during the last five or six years was unknown, almoSG undreamed of. Another· album which appeared la.st month took me back to one of my first experiences of music, and that was the album of the Tchaikovsky Violin Concet'to, published by Columbia, with Huberman as the soloist, Steinberg as the conductor, and the Berlin State Orchestra. vVe have waited a long t ime for this Violin Concerto, and this is the first performance we have had of i t for the gramophone. Perhaps that was the reason why I seem to obtain from i t a revival of my youthful passion for Tchaikovsky's music. Not that my youthful passion was a case of love at first sight. Indeed, i t was by no means so. I never surrendered in some exquisite hour of youthful despair to the direct appeal of Tchaikovsky. I never, for instance, obtained from Tchaikovsky's music what for a year or two I took to be the final interpretation of human life I supposed I had obtained from my first reading of "The Brothers Karamazof." Nowadays, my volumes of Dostoievsky remain on my shelves undisturbed. I envy Mr. Arnold Bennett's ability still to think" The Brothers Karamazof" one of the supreme interpretations of life through fiction. To be sure, there are moments when I ask myself if Mr. Arnold Bennett really does know quite as much about human nature as I should like to think he does, and whether indeed his attitude toward" The Brothers Karamazof" may not in i ts essence resemble the attitude of a small boy in front of the conjuror who has successfully mystified him. And then in another mood I tell myself that Mr. Bennett's belief in " The Brothers Karamazof " may be the way in which his religious instinct, so ardently and so completely overcome in the matter of any credulity over the superna,tural, is compelled to express itself. I fancy that if a commission of inquiry were held into the mental state of those who in maturity still found Dostoievsky capable of stirring what, for convenience, I shall have to call their souls, i t would be discovered that all those remaining susceptible had been incapable of responding to the claims of a supernatural revelation. However, I must abandon this really unwarrantable discussion of Dostoievsky's effect on Mr. Arnold Bennett's imagination at the age of 62, and return to Tchaikovsky. To be honest, I certainly detect in myself the symptoms of enjoying Tchaikovsky's music again, and I shall take the first opportunity of testing my capacity to enjoy Dostoievsky as a writer, for perhaps I have been suffering from a temporary blindness, and perhaps as I draw nearer to the sixties I shall find in Dostoievsky that answer to the riddle of humanity with which he seemed to provide me in my earlier twenties. Such a remark seems to indicate that I am venturing to put Tchaikovsky on the same mental plane as Dostoievsky. But however far my own personal revolt aga.inst Dostoievsky's writing may have been carried for the last twenty years, I cannot bring myself to do that. I cannot so completely rid myself of intellectual snobbery as to admit, at any rate at present, that what has come to seem the facile grief of Tchaikovsky could ever affect me with such a conviction of human gTief in any way that could be compared with Dostoievsky's former power to affect me with i t . Well I remember the excitement with which the arrival of the Pathetic Symphony in England filled the young men and maidens of the t ime. I must have been about sixteen when I paid a visit to my friends, Dick Hewlett, the younger brother of Maurice, and Wolseley Charles, who had just come over from Dublin as a young pianist of the highest promise . You will remember V,T olseley Charles as the accompanist of the Co-Optimists, and we have several of his excellent songs on gramophone records. He and Dick Hewlett were l iving in a boarding-house in Lillie Road, close to one of the entrances of the Earl's Court Exhibition. I found them one morning sitting in the breakfast-room down in the basement, both in a state of ecstasy over a performance they had heard of the Pathetic Symphony, and I remember Charles's going to the piano and playing over that melody in the first movement. I can see now the expression on their two faces when I told them that I could not hear any melody in i t . I think that if either of them could have afforded i t they would have taken me off to consult an ear specialist in Harley Street. "But you must be able to hear the melody in this," Charles insisted, as he played i t over again. However, I was firm on the subject of my inability to make anything of i t . So then Hewlett had a shot and played i t over and over to me. When I still shook my head, they gave i t up in despair, and told me the story of a baboon which had escaped from Earl's Court Exhibition and had been found by their landlady sitting in the bath when she went up to make her morning ablutions. " Oh, Mr. Hewlett, Mr. Hewlett," she had called out as she slammed the door, " there's a big monkey in the bathroom! " Hewlett had supposed that Charles or one of the
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The Gramophone, December, 1929 275 other lodgers had been playing a trick on the landlady, and he had entered the bathroom with all the nonchalance in the world, only to drop all his shaving tackle as he just managed to slam the door in the baboon's face. Nobody had known what to do until somebody had suggested fetching in a policeman, the usual resource of the perplexed Londoner. The policeman had gone upstairs as if to arrest a burglar, but he too had come out of the bathroom quicker than he went in, for the brute had sat on the edge of the bath and chattered at him. In the end i t had been recaptured by a posse of keepers sent from Earl's Court Exhibition. Apparently i t had climbed up by a drain pipe outside the house. I t really was a baboon, too; one of those dog-faced brutes with large teeth. After we had finished laughing over this adventure, Hewlett and Charles returned to the attack with more Tchaikovsky. In turn they played through most of the melodies of the Sixth Symphony, but after an exhausting hour or two I remained as deaf to i ts appeal as when we started. Every t ime I went to visit them at that boarding-house in Lillie Road; Hewlett and Charles would try to convert me to Tchaikovsky, and I remember one terrible morning when Charles had been commanded to play before Queen Alexandra, the Princess of Wales as she was then, and in his excitement had nearly managed to sever his thumb while cutting the bread at breakfast. Poor Charles was in despair, for he was thinking that his future was ruined. The grief over Tchaikovsky was forgotten in the bitter disappointment of a friend, and i t was not until three or four years later, when I had played the Sixth Symphony over and over to myself on an Aeolian orga n belonging to my friend George Montagu, who was then l iving in the next house to mine at Burford, that I began to surrender to Tchaikovsky. I t may be significant that about the same period I was at the height of my devotion to Dostoievsky, but I am not going to make the least suggestion that there was any connection between enjoying .Tchaikovsky's music and appreciating Dostoievsky's novels. However, once I had succumbed to Tchaikovsky I succumbed in style, and for a year I could not hear enough of him, nor indeed had I sated myself with his music by the t ime I got interested in the gramophone, and well do I remember a pair of old Columbia discs on which the Milan Symphony Orchestra gave us an abbreviated performance of the Fifth Symphony of Tchaikovsky, the music of which was hardly audible above the scratch. Since then we have had many editions of his Fifth and Sixth Symphonies , and one of his Fourth Symphony, made by H.M.V. in the first days of electric recording. vVe have had the Pianoforte ConoeTto, and now we have the Violin Concerto. Possibly the effect of living at Jethou had something to do with my growing dislike of Tc}laikovsky's music apart from being sated with re-duplicated versions of the Fifth a nd Sixth Symphonies, for I note as Significant that having ha.d to spend the last month in London I have found the Violin ConCe1io as fascinating as ever. Yes, I think Tchaikovsky's music is of the city. I t does not survive the saner atmosphere of the country a,nd, as I never have the Slightest longing for London when I am away from i t , I never get from Tchaikovsky the sad music of huma,nity. But i f fortune should choose to deprive me of material goods, and I should find myself l iving in a London garret, I am inclined to think that I should derive a great deal of consolation from the music of Tchaikovsky, for i t would not be reminding me of what I had lost, but would always seem to be expressing for me the yearning of the fretful crowded restless life of a modern city, a yearning, moreover, which living in a garret without any visible means of subsistence I should be most unlikely to assuage. The publication of Rachmaninoff's Pianoforte Concerto in C minor, in an album of five discs published by H.M.V., with the composer as soloist and the Philadelphia Symphony Orchestra, under Stokowski, provides me with an excuse for one more reminiscence this month; and by the kindness and courtesy of the B.B.C. I am allowed to reprint the following article which appeared in the programme of the B.B.C Symphony Concerts on November 8th: * * * When I look back on the composers I have met, i t seems to me that the only ones who have always unmistakably resembled composers have been the composers of jazz. Sir Charles Stanford looked l ike a country gentleman, Sir Hubert Parry looked l ike a country gentleman, and Sir Edward Elgar looks like a country gentleman. Perhaps i t was this very air of a country gentleman coming up to town for lunch at his club that enabled me in the early days of my interest in the gramophone to feel less abashed than I might have been expected to feel in venturing to talk to Sir Edward in the Savile on the subject which was occupying so much of my thoughts. So long as the conversation remained firmly centred on the mechanical side of the gramophone all went well, but when, as was inevitable sooner or later with such a conversation, i t began to circle round the topic of music itself, Sir Edward shut up abruptly. " I really take no interest in music any longer," he told me, with that in his voice which warned me not to attempt to sit at his feet. Perhaps his kindness perceived that I was feeling uncomfortable at having trespassed, as i t were, into a private garden with a very high wall round i t , for presently he turned to me and asked jf I had ever used a microscope. I told him that I had had a microscope when I was very young, but that in later yea,rs I h ad neglected i t . " That is a mistake," he observed, "you should

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274

The Gramophone, Decembe1', 1929

another such interpretation for the gramophone i t will have the power to stir in me the memory of those moments I have loved long since and lost awhile. But all thi-s is an account of my personal reaction to the music, and ·i t may be, for instance, that some young man will get from the album of the Fifth Symphony, published last month by Parlophone, played by the Berlin State Opera House Orchestra, and conducted by Josef Rosenstock, at any rate as much as I got from those four old H.M.V. discs. In fairness to later publications, i t must be remembered that the performance by the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra was the only performance of a complete symphony we had in those days, and that the great wealth of music which has been poured out during the last five or six years was unknown, almoSG undreamed of.

Another· album which appeared la.st month took me back to one of my first experiences of music, and that was the album of the Tchaikovsky Violin Concet'to, published by Columbia, with Huberman as the soloist, Steinberg as the conductor, and the Berlin State Orchestra. vVe have waited a long t ime for this Violin Concerto, and this is the first performance we have had of i t for the gramophone. Perhaps that was the reason why I seem to obtain from i t a revival of my youthful passion for Tchaikovsky's music. Not that my youthful passion was a case of love at first sight. Indeed, i t was by no means so. I never surrendered in some exquisite hour of youthful despair to the direct appeal of Tchaikovsky. I never, for instance, obtained from Tchaikovsky's music what for a year or two I took to be the final interpretation of human life I supposed I had obtained from my first reading of "The Brothers Karamazof." Nowadays, my volumes of Dostoievsky remain on my shelves undisturbed. I envy Mr. Arnold Bennett's ability still to think" The Brothers Karamazof" one of the supreme interpretations of life through fiction. To be sure, there are moments when I ask myself if Mr. Arnold Bennett really does know quite as much about human nature as I should like to think he does, and whether indeed his attitude toward" The Brothers Karamazof" may not in i ts essence resemble the attitude of a small boy in front of the conjuror who has successfully mystified him. And then in another mood I tell myself that Mr. Bennett's belief in " The Brothers Karamazof " may be the way in which his religious instinct, so ardently and so completely overcome in the matter of any credulity over the superna,tural, is compelled to express itself. I fancy that if a commission of inquiry were held into the mental state of those who in maturity still found Dostoievsky capable of stirring what, for convenience, I shall have to call their souls, i t would be discovered that all those remaining susceptible had been incapable of responding to the claims of a supernatural revelation. However, I must abandon this really unwarrantable discussion of Dostoievsky's effect on Mr. Arnold Bennett's imagination at the age of 62, and return to Tchaikovsky.

To be honest, I certainly detect in myself the symptoms of enjoying Tchaikovsky's music again, and I shall take the first opportunity of testing my capacity to enjoy Dostoievsky as a writer, for perhaps I have been suffering from a temporary blindness, and perhaps as I draw nearer to the sixties I shall find in Dostoievsky that answer to the riddle of humanity with which he seemed to provide me in my earlier twenties. Such a remark seems to indicate that I am venturing to put Tchaikovsky on the same mental plane as Dostoievsky. But however far my own personal revolt aga.inst Dostoievsky's writing may have been carried for the last twenty years, I cannot bring myself to do that. I cannot so completely rid myself of intellectual snobbery as to admit, at any rate at present, that what has come to seem the facile grief of Tchaikovsky could ever affect me with such a conviction of human gTief in any way that could be compared with Dostoievsky's former power to affect me with i t . Well I remember the excitement with which the arrival of the Pathetic Symphony in England filled the young men and maidens of the t ime. I must have been about sixteen when I paid a visit to my friends, Dick Hewlett, the younger brother of Maurice, and Wolseley Charles, who had just come over from Dublin as a young pianist of the highest promise . You will remember V,T olseley Charles as the accompanist of the Co-Optimists, and we have several of his excellent songs on gramophone records. He and Dick Hewlett were l iving in a boarding-house in Lillie Road, close to one of the entrances of the Earl's Court Exhibition. I found them one morning sitting in the breakfast-room down in the basement, both in a state of ecstasy over a performance they had heard of the Pathetic Symphony, and I remember Charles's going to the piano and playing over that melody in the first movement. I can see now the expression on their two faces when I told them that I could not hear any melody in i t . I think that if either of them could have afforded i t they would have taken me off to consult an ear specialist in Harley Street. "But you must be able to hear the melody in this," Charles insisted, as he played i t over again. However, I was firm on the subject of my inability to make anything of i t . So then Hewlett had a shot and played i t over and over to me. When I still shook my head, they gave i t up in despair, and told me the story of a baboon which had escaped from Earl's Court Exhibition and had been found by their landlady sitting in the bath when she went up to make her morning ablutions.

" Oh, Mr. Hewlett, Mr. Hewlett," she had called out as she slammed the door, " there's a big monkey in the bathroom! "

Hewlett had supposed that Charles or one of the

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