The Flonzaleys

Old King Cole, by his memorable request for three fiddlers, demonstrated to posterity that his knowledge of musical symmetry was lamentably deficient. Four is, and has always been, the correct number. The better informed monarchs of today, care they to importune the music of sweet strings, always summon four and frequently, it is said, call for the Flonzaleys by name. There are few finer fiddlers than these quick-fingered gentlemen. Last week they gave a concert in Manhattan.

They played Haydn's Quartet in D minor, Brahms' Quartet in C minor; then, after a rest, they smiled among themselves, stroked the glossy wood of their instruments, began to play a strange composition. It was Ernest Schelling's Divertimento, for string quartet with piano obbligato. (Schelling himself was at the pianoforte, 'for this was the first time that his composition (dedicated to the Flonzaleys) had ever been played. There were critics who instantly dubbed it a tour de force, a term which critics find invaluable and sometimes even apt; it was, at all events, a tour. In the Evocation Catalane, the Flonzaleys went to Spain; in the Raga, to Kashmir; in the Ireland-aise, to Ireland; in the Gasal, to Persia. Clever, literary music it was, each division telling a story. The Fonzaleys told those stories with their fingers.

Kreisler

Some ladies in a play by William Congreve decided that they would elect to membership in their female club, for decorum's sake, one single man. They therefore enrolled two well known dandies. Witty were these ladies; they knew, indirectly, something of the relationship of talent to genius. It takes, for example, many good fiddlers to make a great one. The Flonzaleys play excellently well, yet if the alacrity of their 40 fingers were compressed into a single hand, if the sweetness that shakes from their four wooden boxes were in a single tone, only then would their plural be equal to a certain famed singular. Recently, that singular got off a boat. He, Fritz Kreisler, "World's Greatest Violinist," had come to the U. S. for a concert tour.

On his itinerary were approximately 70 engagements; immediately he began to play. He went to Princeton, N. J., where the students of the University adjacent to the town refused to permit him to leave the stage, oliver-twisted "More, more," until at length a youth leaped to the platform and organized townspeople and scholars alike to better delivery of prolonged and spontaneous hurrahs. He hurried to Passaic, N. J. (a town brought to the attention of his manager by the fact that its high school basketball team won 150-odd successive victories), there performed before a great assemblage. He played in Providence, in Boston, in 'Manhattan, in Buffalo and Rochester. He went North to Canada, stopped in Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago. Next week, he is scheduled to fill another engagement in Manhattan, then he returns to the Middle West. He will tour the Northwest, play in California in March, in Honolulu in April, in Australia in May and June.

Few violinists, even had they the public to make possible such a schedule, would have the stamina to carry it out. Kreisler has the courage of his popularity. Urbane, well-built, his face framed with grizzling hair, he is famed for two characteristics-his impeccable courtesy, his freedom from mannerism.

Born in Vienna, in 1875, he began to play the violin as soon as he was strong enough to hold one to his chin.* He disliked practicing. When he was ten, however, he won first prize in the Conservatoire at Vienna; at 12, the Prix de Rome at the Paris Conservatoire; at 14, he toured the U. S. with Moritz Rosenthal, was hailed as a "wonder-child." He returned to Austria for required general military service, returned to Austria again to sterner service in 1914.

When music lovers, whatever their patriotic allegiance, heard that he was serving as a Captain in the Austrian Army on the Russian front, they bitterly and justly reviled the implacable machine which held a famed violinist as of no more, no less importance than a butcher's apprentice of like military rank. Kreisler, on the other hand, found a method of using his musical knowledge for the benefit of the implacable machine. Hearing Death's orchestration booming, sputtering, whistling, mewing, he faced the music, inclined his ear. "Accustomed to the sound of deadly missiles," said he, 'I began to make observations of their peculiarities. ... I found that I could, with a trained musical ear, mark the spot where shells reached their acme, and so could give the almost exact range of the enemy's guns."

He suffered a wound in the leg, was mustered out, returned to the U. S. He played here and there, made money, gave it away. In Austria, 17 Russian, British, French, Italian artists he knew, were stranded, penniless. For three years he supported them, their families. He contributed to the U. S. Red Cross. Feeling against Germany, against Austria, was growing. People knew that he had served in the Austrain Army. Sometimes, when he played in U. S. cities, there were boos and catcalls jumbled with the applause; sometimes a disorderly hiss would interrupt his, music. In 1917, he canceled a concert tour, losing contracts worth $85,000. "I could not with self-respect accept U. S. money," said he. In an inimical country, he, an alien with a million friends, played only for charities until the War ended.

--Now he owns the famed del Gesu (1737) formerly used by Wilhelmj; also one of the finest Stradivaris.