Face to Face with Great Musicians (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1921 Excerpt: ...I love him. I have known him. He has been kind to me, and I have seen him more than most, and I know what is really in his heart and what he thinks. Surely he loves to be admired--who doesn't? He is sincere at least in his appeal for applause. "Oh, to bring down the house " How often I have heard him say it, and to change his music and a whole scene to do it Everybody knows he would sit beside his chief of the claque and change the cue sheets of the score to suit the applause. Some have sneered and placed it all to vanity, but isn't it possible "bringing down the house" meant good, moving, effective music to him? Isn't it likely that he felt the public knew when a great passage had been played? It is true, to be sure, that big and wonderful as he was, he would go behind the stage and listen to the remarks of the stage hands about his music--actually play the eavesdropper to know what the carpenters thought of him. He wanted his friends to applaud, applaud--he would never hire a gang to make a noise at the opera, but if some one else had done it he would have closed his eyes and swallowed it all with delight. Such traits as these, I imagine, were responsible for Heine writing: "When he is dead, who will take care of his glory?" I do not think the world will neglect to do that, when it hears "Robert the Devil," "The Huguenots," "L'Africaine," "The Prophet," and "Dinorah," and all those other masterful, tuneful works. I have faith in the people who know great music and will not let it be passed by. The other day the master showed me a passage out of a writing by Richard Wagner--"Meyerbeer is a miserable music maker, the weather-cock of music, who swings with the fashions of t...