Proud Tower - Barbara W. Tuchman [204]
In London he could enjoy the hospitality of Edgar Speyer, head of the syndicate which owned Queen’s Hall and manager of its orchestra, who with his wife, a professional violinist before her marriage, made their home at Grosvenor Square a center of musical and artistic society. Here he could meet Henry James or Debussy, listen to Mme Grieg sing her husband’s songs and enjoy a sumptuous dinner in company with John Sargent, to whom painting was a profession but music and food a matter of love. Noticing a gypsy band which had been wandering around London playing Spanish music, Strauss proposed that it be hidden in the garden to play during one of the Speyer parties, with results that tantalized Sargent, who was torn between his dinner and the need to run to the window to discover the source of the music.
In America, Strauss’s compositions had been known and played ever since Theodore Thomas, conductor of the Chicago Symphony, had performed his Symphony in F minor in 1884 and the German-born Emil Paur of the Boston Symphony had played Aus Italien in 1888. Thomas and Paur, who later moved to the New York Philharmonic, continued to play Strauss’s works as they came out, and in 1904 an American premiere was arranged for his newest work, Sinfonia Domestica, as the feature of a Strauss Festival to be held in New York. The composer was invited to conduct the new piece as well as a subsequent concert of his works in Chicago. Thomas, a fervent admirer over twenty years, considered him at this point in his career “the greatest musician now living and one of the greatest musical pioneers of all times.”
With the new wealth of American business tycoons overflowing their coffers, the United States was developing a whole new audience and source of support for music and the arts. It was a time of exuberant expenditure and large ideas. When the rector of Trinity Church in New York wanted a new pulpit, he asked the senior partner of the leading architectural firm, McKim, Mead and White, to design him something “big, broad, ample and simple but rich in the right places.” When the same McKim built the Boston Public Library a plaque was put up honoring the “splendid amplitude” of his genius. Splendid amplitude was in the air. Louis Tiffany designed for himself a house with a palatial flight of stairs leading up, between walls with complete Sudanese Negro huts built into them, to a hall so vast the ceiling was invisible in the dim light. In the center of the hall a black chimney soared to infinity, four immense fireplaces blazed, each with flames of a different color, mysterious light glowed through hanging Tiffany glass lamps and an invisible organist played the prelude from Parsifal.
The several major American orchestras subsidized by copper kings, railroad barons and their kind provided an important extra source of concert fees and royalties. Strauss was delighted to come and the concert-going American public breathlessly awaited the “most eminent of living composers,” who, they were told by Harper’s Weekly, uttered “imaginings of overpowering significance” and touched “the margin of the sublime.”
Sinfonia Domestica, it was apparent on first performance, touched the ridiculous. Although it was performed by the composer’s wish without program notes so that it could be listened to “purely as music,” Strauss had already told an interviewer that it illustrated “a day in my family life” in the form of a triple figure representing “Papa, Mama and Baby.” At the premiere it was presented only as Introduction and Scherzo, Adagio, Double Fugue and Finale, but, as usual, the composer soon obliged with an official analysis for subsequent performances which indicated the baby in its bath, the