Sonneck Society for American Music
Bulletin, Volume XXIV, no. 1 (Spring 1998)
Le concert américain au Trocadéro
By Brument-Colleville, Translated by Douglas Bomberger, University of Hawaii
In the spirit of Nicolas Slonimsky's Lexicon of Musical Invective, I offer what may be the
worst review everpublished of a concert of American msuic. The concert in question was conducted by
Texas-born Frank Van der Stucken (1858-1929) on 12 July 1889 in the Trocadéro Palace in Paris as
part of the Exposition Universalle. Le Monde Musical was in its first year of operation when this
review was published; provocative prose like the following may have contributed to the early success
of a journal that continued publication until 1940. The author begins with a confession of prior
ignorance, then admits that he skipped, not only the first piece on the program, but the last two sets
as well. This does not seem to have inhibited him from forming a strong opinion on the state of American
music in 1889:
I was very curious to see how the country that has given the world such super-stupendous [surabracadabrantes]
inventions as the telephone, suspenders, washing machines, and rich uncles would manage from an
artistic point of view. I went to the Trocadéro -- why should I hide it? - with defiance and a stupid
prejudice, devoid of any case of a spirit that strains to be impartial. Well, for once, my defiance
was not disappointed, and I spend there, in that désert trocadéux, two fo the worst hours
I have spent -- musically speaking, of course.
What I especially object to in some artists from over there who work conscientiously is that they are
absolutely, oh! but absolutely impersonal. Not one of these gentlemen, neither MacDowell, nor Van der
Stücken [sic] (a name precious little American, it should be said in passing), nor Huss, nor Bird,
not one I say, had three measures that belonged to him, truly to him. Ther is some of everything in
this music, a filet of Mendelssohn with a salmi of Schumann, some hors-d'oeuvres from here, from there,
from Wagner or from Brahms, not a few nebulosities, and for dessert, boredom and monotony, a
desperate monotony that left in the spirit of the hearer a spectral vision of a poor composer, or
supposedly such, fanning the flames to make the ideas and notes come out. The notes come . . . but the
ideas . . . !!!
The first number of the program was an overture by Goote [Arthur Foote] that I did not hear.
The Second Piano Concert by MacDowell is made to disgust you forever with the instrument so dear to
Reyer.1 There is especially a Presto giocoso that has pretensions to grace and
lightness but is nothing but irritating prattle. One asks oneself if it is really a piano playing or if it
is not rather a mill for grinding out notes. God! it's annoying!!! Up to the end (two eighth notes on
the fourth E-A) everything is pastiched, copied, repeated.
I refused to critique the mélodies which followed the concerto. Once cannot critique them because they
do not exist (I would willingly make an exception, however, for Les Jours passés by Chadwick).
La Chanson de la laitiére especially (A. Goote) is a nasty little song worthy at most of
La Scala. Add to that the fact that Mmd Maude Starvetta,2 who . . . presented the songs is less
of a singer . . . than the laitiére [milkmaid] in question, and you can judge with what
circumspection I invite you to go to concerts called American.
The Tempest, by M. Van der Stücken, the conductor (an excellent conductor and a great
musician) certainly merits more praise, but it is still not a work that is really worth the trouble of
describing. There are care, research, and study, but also unpardonable errors in tase, an excessively
vulgar phrase for trumpets, and ritards in the rhythms that are motivated by nothing and make the
piece resemble an introduction to a German or Hungarian waltz. The "Chasse infrernale' that ends this
orchestral suite has good style, but it is not develoepd and the author remains short of breath.
The only thing that I can really place beyond comparison in the Amerian concert is the overture
Melpomene by Chadwick. That is grand, wisely and seriously conceived and it is art (very German
art, to be sure) but it is art in every sense of the word.
I cannot refrain from speaking of M. Willis Nowell, who came to run his feeble fingers at random over
a violin that is a marvel of sonority and instrumental workmanship. Under the pretext (is it really
under that one?) that America has given us washing machines, M. Willis Nowell, American violinist, has
soaped [away] all of his traits. He has neither attack, nor precision, nor virtuosity, but he has, I
must confess, something that is half of a violinist . . . an incommensurable head of hair. If he
wants to take a scroll of the Conservatoire and go hear only the students of the preparatory class lead by
M. Gargin, he will see that he is much more American but much less skillful than the least skillful of
these urchins.
I left after the Carnival Scene by A. Bird. It is a polka (with an orgy of bassoon) in the middle of
which one sops every now and then as if for a quadrille. It is not a carnival scene; it's a collection
of dances.
Oh! American concerts (my excuses to Chadwick, the only one who interested me) but I won't be caught napping
again!
Notes
1. Ernest Reyer (1823-1909) was a French composer and critic. As a composer he was best known for his operas, while as
the long-time critic of the Journal des Débats he enjoyed a position of unusual influence
on France's musical life.
2. According to Otto Floersheim, "The American Concert at the Trocadero, Paris," Musical Courier
19/5 (31 July 1889): 108, this was the stage name of Mrs. Starkweather of Boston, an American
soprano studying with Mathilde Marchesi.
E. Douglas Bomberger is an assistant professor of musicology at the University of Hawaii at
Manoa. His Ph.D. is from the University of Maryland, where he wrote a dissertation on nineteenth-
century American students in Germany. He is currently researching the wave of All-American concerts
that swept the United States and Europe in the 1880s and 1890s.
Updated 4/20/98