The Boston Symphony Orchestra; An Historical Sketch

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Ill THE ESTABLISHING UNDER WILHELM GERICKE 1884-1889 MR. H. T. PARKER, of the Boston Transcript, once described the respective stages through which the Orchestra passed under Mr. Henschel, Mr. Gericke, in his first five years, and Messrs. Nikisch and Paur, as the primitive, the expert, and the romantic. It was a happy and suggestive characterization ? within the limits imposed upon all such attempts to compare the sounds of the past. In the very nature of the case, the art of music, like that of acting, is an art of the moment; and it is almost as difficult to compare the effectiveness of the tones created by a band of players at one time and another as to measure the relative merits of the voices of dead actors, or the relative beauty of successive waves as they break upon rocks or beach. The transiency, the consciousness of a supreme moment, ?these but add to the satisfaction in what ispassing, in what may be remembered with delight but never enjoyed in its fulness again. Through the primitive agency such moments come as special gifts from heaven; through the expert ?if the spontaneous power of the primitive be not annulled by too studious an expertness ? they come more surely, more often, more definitely on demand. The bringing of the Boston Symphony Orchestra to the point of expertness at which its best ? and that a better thing than before ? might more regularly be expected of it was, in a marked degree, the work of its second conductor. Both in Mr. Higginson's Account of the Orchestra, from which passages have already been drawn, and in a paper which Mr. Gericke has been kind enough to prepare for the advantage of this narrative, the story of his engagement as conductor of the work to which he gave himself is told. In spite of some inevitable repetiti...