Harp

In shadowy halls and at the gates of cities, under thatch, under rafter or with no roof but their caps between them and the gaping pocket of night, men played the harp--princes, captains, jongleurs, beggarmen. Their fingers wandered the strings, their heads bent to their music. Last week, the harp was played in Chicago. Enrico Tramonti, harpist of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, was permitted by Conductor Frederick Stock to play a solo on his instrument. Widor's Chorale et Variations he played. It is a good piece of music, well adapted to harp and orchestra. Chicagoans listened with interest to this novelty. Sweet were the strains they heard, filled with all the dreaming melancholy, the tender elegance, of another day. Yet they were glad when Conductor Stock led something else. For sentiment cannot long garble truth; the viol, the violin, the pianoforte are all superior to the harp; nor can that gracious instrument any longer move men as it could long ago when jongleurs played, by candlelight and firelight, in shadowy halls.

Lute

At the Musical Academy of Stockholm, Sweden, a poet gave a recital. He was Evert Taube, troubadour, who makes music with his lute to the words of his poems. Of gods and heroes he sang, of knights and demons fighting by waters black with ice, of flaxen-haired princesses. Ever, meanwhile, his lute spoke underneath, sadly, gayly, wildly. Loud did Swedish people in the Musical Academy applaud Poet Taube, last of the troubadours. "He is a second Bellman*," they said.

Hell in Boston

When Peter Ilyitch Tschaikowsky, the Russian composer, was about 37, a critic told him that he was past his prime. In his mind, at these unkind words, he heard the dwindling strophe of the heart's small drum, tapping into silence up an empty street. He sat down to write his tone-poem, Francesco da Rimini. Down in Hell's gilded street, the phantoms jostle; winds squeal like demented fiddles; ghosts squeak like dismal flutes; and lonely in the company of lovers who have sinned for love and have been damned for their sin to remember forever the joy of love's delight, Paolo and Francesca embrace in pangs and torment. But Tschaikowsky believed that he had lived his best years; his hand faltered. The music twists and tumbles, witless in anguish. Hell is peopled with platitudes. The cruel critic was right. The piece marks the first faltering of Tschaikowsky's genius, and for this reason, it is not often played by the great orchestras.

Last week, M. Koussevitsky, conductor of the Boston Symphony, played it in Boston. Superbly he conducted; magnificently the orchestra responded.

Blue Train

To London came the famed Russian Ballet of M. Diaghylev, gave there its grand and curious dance--The Blue Train.

Most bizarre of ballets is this Blue Train. It was invented by Jean Cocteau, to the music of Darius Milhaud. It has nothing to do with a blue train. The scenery was painted by a sculptor, Henri Laurens; it shows a saffron smear of beach before a casino, bathhouses. Music strikes up; a mixed chorus enters in bathing suits; to ribald strains they splash and squeal, duck one another, swan-dive, backflip, swim on their bellies and back, all in dance. A Bright Lad chases a certain Perlouse into a bathhouse. A female tennis champion, in a costume by Chanel, dances with an Anglo-Saxon golfer. Perlouse sneaks out of her bathhouse, partially covered, "cuts in," dances with the brawny golfer. As the curtain falls the entire company is playing ring-around-a-rosy with the Bright Lad as Rosy.

In Paris, this opus evoked cheers and applause. It was not part of the program of the Diaghylev dancers when they appeared in the U. S. in 1916-17.

Composer-Conductors

In Manhattan, Composer Henry Hadley conducted a concert. Rachmaninov, Hadley, Rimsky-Korsakov-- they were the composers whose works he interpreted. His own piece was his tone-poem Salome, composed in 1905, in the same year that another composer of even greater fame, Dr. Richard Strauss, composed an opera, Salome. Both of these compositions frankly owed their birth to the fact that Oscar Wilde had produced in Paris a play with the strikingly similar title of Salome. Mr. Hadley has since declared that he knew nothing of Dr. Strauss' opera until after his own work was finished. He doubtless spoke the truth. For Mr. Hadley is a capable and a truthful man. To the Manhattan audience which affably listened to his Salome, it was plain to whom this daughter of Hadley and Herodias owed her skirling witchery--as plain as if the shaggy countenance of Richard Wagner had leered all evening over the shoulder of the composer.

In Vienna, the name of Pietro Mascagni is the name of a god, elsewhere famed for having composed Cavalleria Rusticana. Long revered, applauded by the Viennese, Composer Mascagni last week agreed to appear in a guest engagement at the Staatsoper as a conductor of Italian opera. Further, no opera not Italian will be conducted by Composer Mascagni. He will open with Verdi's Un Ballo in Maschera.

An Answer

Last Fall The New York Evening Post imported Ernest Newman, eminent London music critic, to do its reviewing for a season. Last week the press agent of the Metropolitan Opera House wrote to Mr. Newman jocosely complaining "that you have spanked us good and hard since you arrived in America. Mr. Newman printed the letter in full and then made reply, saying:

"You ask us to take into account your internal difficulties and troubles. With all possible sympathy, we cannot. Neither the press nor the public has anything to do with the private difficulties of an artist or an artistic institution. . . . It is your business to face the difficulties and overcome them. If you will not face them, or having faced them fail to overcome them, and the artistic results are bad, you must not blame the critics and the public for noticing that they are bad. It is not a matter of ill-will on their part; it is merely a matter of good eyesight.

"There was once a Scotch parson who said in a sermon. 'And now, my brethren, we come to a varry deeficult passage ; and having looked it bowldly in the face, we will pass on.' His talents were wasted in the Church. He should have gone in for operatic management."

*Karl Mikael Bellman was a Swedish poet of the 18th Century, a colossal bronze of whom adorns the public gardens of Stockholm. When the god was about to visit him, in the presence of his admirers, he would shut his eyes, take his zither, improvise music and words in praise of love and wine.