John Philip Sousa. “Keeping Time.“ Published in six parts in the
Saturday Evening Post, volume 198, issues 18–24
(October 31 through December 12, 1925).
Scans of these issues are available via Wikimedia Commons:
18,
19,
21,
22,
23, and
24.
Scans of these issues are available on the Internet Archive:
18,
19,
21,
22,
23, and
24.
Printed in the Saturday Evening Post 198(18), 1925-10-31.
Without pretending to be an unfailing authority, I lean to the opinion that wives generally desire a boy for their first-born. Those wives who have a preponderance of daughters I am certain receive with delight the coming of a boy.
I was the third child and the first boy. The joy in our household was without bounds, upon my advent, and I became a despot absolute and merciless.
When I had reached my fifth year, for disobedience on the part of my mother in not supplying me with as many crullers as I had ordered of her, I told her she “would be sorry later on,” and with imperious audacity, an unspanked infant planned a cruel revenge.
It was raining hard, and I moved out a plank in our front yard, placed it on two trestles, and then proceeded to make it my bed. In fifteen minutes I was soaked to the skin, and in half an hour my mother discovered me shivering and chattering with cold. I was carried into the house and put to bed. In a few days I had pneumonia, and I was not able to leave my home for two years. My warning to my mother was correct—she was sorry later on.
During the two years of my illness, my sister Tinnie and my father taught me to read and write, and I became quite a student. It was a very common thing for me to hear from some whispering neighbor, “I don’t think they’ll raise that boy,” but as I was punishing my mother I didn’t seem to care.
[Photograph: John Philip Sousa and His Mother (About 1910).]
[Photograph: Mr. Sousa at the Age of 17.]
Looking back from this day there would have been several things omitted if I had passed in my checks in my wicked endeavor to punish my mother for not giving me an extra cruller: An enthusiastic and kindly musical public would never have had the opportunity to call me the March King; King Edward VII would have kept his Victorian Order for someone else besides me; the French Government would have had to bestow the Palm of the Academy on someone else; five Presidents of the United States of America would have had another band master than myself, and a lot of other things wouldn’t have happened that have, although I still maintain I made my mother sorry. At this stage of the proceedings perhaps the information is in order that I was born in Washington, D. C., on the 6th day of November, 1854.
When I was able to be out again, I was sent to a little private school opposite my father’s house; from there to a larger one halfway down the block, and soon after I applied for admission to the primary department of the public school in our district. I was there only a few hours when I was transferred to a secondary school. It seemed the teacher realized I knew too much for a primary pupil. I spent the rest of the term at the secondary and then was transferred to the intermediate, where I remained the following year. I had probably then reached my seventh year. At eight I was in grammar school.
Every evening there came to our house an old Spanish gentleman and his wife.
I can remember that as early as I can remember I was passionately fond of music and wanted to be a musician, and I have no recollection of ever wanting to be anything else. Washington was an armed camp at that time, and there were bands galore—and God help the boy who doesn’t love a band! I, being a boy, loved all of them, and I imagine some of them were pretty terrible. So far as I know, I don’t think there was any heredity in my love for music; I simply loved it because it was music.
The first to induct me into the mysteries of the art was this old Spanish friend of my father’s. One night when I was particularly active in rolling a baseball around the room, to the evident discomfort of our visitors, my father’s friend suggested that it would be a good plan to give me lessons in solfeggio. My father thought I was too young to begin the study of music, but finally consented.
My start was not very encouraging. The old Spaniard was a retired orchestra player and had a voice that would not have excited the envy of Caruso or Bonci. I believe he had the worst voice I have ever heard. All musical intervals were sounded alike by him. When he was calm he squawked; when excited, he squeaked. At the first lesson he bade me repeat the syllables of the scale after him. “Do,” he squawked.
“Do,” I squawked in faithful imitation.
“No, no,” he cried, “sing do,” and he squeaked the note.
“Do,” I squeaked, in a vain effort to correspond with his crowlike vocalization.
He grew very angry, stormed and abused me. His mental ear was alert and true, but the articulated sounds of his voice conveyed nothing but a grating noise to my child mind. For an hour he squeaked and squawked, and I hopelessly floundered after him. At last the lesson was over, and I was almost a nervous wreck. Though I remained a pupil of the old gentleman’s, the sound of his toneless voice hung over me like a pall and filled my soul with horror and despair.
One night when my highly irascible teacher came to the house to give me my usual music lesson, he discovered the loss of his spectacles. He searched in his pockets and in his cloak which hung on the balustrade, but all in vain. His wife assured him that he had the glasses when he left his home, which was but a few minutes’ walk from our house; so it was proposed that the entire household should search the street for the lost spectacles.
The younger members of the Sousa family took lighted candies and, with myself well in the lead, began the hunt. The street was deserted, and as I came near the old gentleman’s house I saw the glasses on the lawn. I quickly picked them up and put them in my pocket and then began searching more assiduously than ever. I am sure no boy could have shown more interest or proposed more places to hunt than I. When someone would suggest the fruitlessness of our efforts, I, with some wedgelike word of encouragement, would renew interest in the hearts of the party. The horror of the lesson was ever before me, and I felt that if I could prolong the search I might escape at least for one night. We finally gave up and my teacher, with many imprecations on his ill luck, dismissed my lesson for the evening.
We had returned to my father’s house, and I sat on the stair near the place where the old gentleman’s cloak hung, and when the family and guests were engrossed in conversation, I slipped the spectacles into the inside pocket of the cloak and then, with a cheery “buenas noches,” I stole to my room, not to sleep but to listen. On the stroke of nine, my teacher arose, and when he wrapped his cloak about him his hand struck the pocket which contained the spectacles.
Quickly pulling them out he cried, “Caramba maldita! To think we have been hunting all evening for that which I have just found! I searched my pockets,” he added pointedly, “so this must be the work of the devil or one of his imps,” and with many angry mutterings he made his departure. I crept into bed with the consciousness of a duty well done and closed my eyes for the first peaceful slumber of many days.
[Photograph: The March King at the Age of 21.]
A short time afterward, the son of the old Spanish gentleman started a conservatory of music in our neighborhood which he was pleased to call an academy of music. He came to my father and suggested that I be sent to him as a pupil, for, he said, “even if he doesn’t learn anything it will keep him off the streets.”
I was enrolled as a student in his class of some sixty pupils. I am sure that during the first three years I was there I was the silent boy of the class. I was noisy enough out of the classroom, but Iago himself couldn’t have outdone me for silence when a class met—and it probably came from the professor’s remark to my father that if I didn’t learn anything it would keep me off the street.
I resented the imputation, but drank in knowledge without talking about it at the time.
At the end of the third year I was at the academy, the first examinations were held, and, to the surprise of the professor and the judges he had selected, I won every medal offered. The professor went to my father next morning and, with that emphatic way peculiar to himself, said, “That damn boy of yours has won all my medals, but I can’t give all of them to him—it would excite comment.”
My father, who was always chivalric, said, “Why, it isn’t necessary to give him any. I’m happy that he has won all of them. The possession of the medals won’t make him any smarter, and if you can make better use of them you’d better do so.”
“Oh, no,” said the professor, “I’m going to give him three of them and I’ll give the other two to other pupils,” which he did. I have those three medals today—little gold lyres—a constant reminder, when I see them, that I fooled everyone by silence, always golden.
When I had reached my eleventh year, I had made sufficient progress on the violin to be selected by him as one of the soloists for his annual concert at St. Elizabeth’s Asylum for the Insane, just outside of Washington. I was already playing as a professional. Unfortunately, on the day of the concert, the baseball club of which I was pitcher had had a match and I took part. After the game I returned home hungry, tired and dirty. I found the house in a state of confusion; the usually faithful maid-of-all-work absent, my eldest sister away on a visit, and my mother so ill I was not allowed to see her. As it was near the hour for me to dress for the concert, I had but a few moments to eat a quickly made sandwich, then, going to my room, I got out my Sunday clothes, my clean shoes and stockings, but for the world of me I could not find a shirt, the laundress having failed to return our linen. I hurried to the conservatory to tell my teacher of the predicament.
“That’s all right,” he said, “run over to my wife and tell her to give you one of my shirts.”
I went over, and the good-natured lady put one of the professor’s shirts on me. The bosom seemed to rest on my knees, and as the collar was many sizes too large, she pinned it together and I started with the party to the asylum.
When it came my turn to play I tuned my violin and began the first movement. As the physical effort of playing became greater the pins that held the shirt in place suddenly gave way and it fell from my neck. I forgot my notes, looked wildly at the dropping shirt and the laughing audience, and rushed from the stage in confusion, where I sought an obscure corner and wished that I were dead.
At the end of the concert, the superintendent invited the professor and the pupils into the dining room to have some ice cream and cake. I thought only of escape, but the professor intercepted me, and said:
“You made a sweet mess of it. You should be ashamed of yourself, and you do not deserve any refreshments for your miserable breakdown.”
And in a spirit of contrition, notwithstanding an aching void within, I refused every invitation to partake of the ice cream and cake.
The professor told me I should not have spent the afternoon playing ball, but should have prepared myself for the more important work of the evening. His lecture and punishment had a salutary effect upon me, and from that day to this I have made it a rule never to swap horses in crossing a stream. I either play or work, but I never try to do both at one time.
[Photograph: Mr. Sousa’s Father and Mother in the Seventies.]
When I was a boy in Washington, everybody who lived east of Sixth Street S. E. and south of Pennsylvania Avenue lived “on the Navy Yard.” In fact it was not a difficult matter to find out just what section of town a boy lived in by asking him what he was. The city was divided in our boyish minds between the Navy Yard, Capitol Hill, Swamp Poodle—which is now in the vicinity of the Terminal Railway Station and the Post Office—and “the Island,” which was south of Pennsylvania Avenue between Tiber Creek and the Potomac River. The nabobs who lived in the Northwest hadn’t reached the dignity of a neighborhood nickname and the nearest approach to their vicinity was the “Northern Liberties,” which was out Seventh Street, N. W. Though the Navy Yard section was probably ten squares from the United States Navy Yard, near where I lived, I always said “I live on the Navy Yard.”
The boys who lived “on the Navy Yard” with scarcely an exception toted a gun as soon as they were old enough to shoot, and went out on the river—the Potomac or “Anacastia,” as we called the eastern branch—and into Prince George County whenever game was in season. A boy who couldn’t shoot a gun or sit out all day in the sun fishing had no standing “on the Navy Yard.”
So, very early in my life I was inoculated with the love of duck and quail shooting, my father being an inveterate hunter, and whenever in season he had the time he was out hunting quail or decoying ducks.
When I was still too young to carry a gun, but not too young to carry the provender, my father took me on hunting trips. We would usually be up at four o’clock in the morning, for a hearty breakfast, if it was to be a quail shoot over Bennings Bridge and into Prince George County. I remember one occasion when I everlastingly disgraced myself.
My mother always prepared a lunch for us of four boiled eggs, two rolls and a couple of apples, which, heaven knows, was enough for anybody for a luncheon. On this particular morning we started out and when we got over in the cultivated fields where there were quail, the dogs made a point, the birds were flushed and my father brought down one of them. He then started in a relentless pursuit of the squandered birds. About ten o’clock he was so far ahead of me I could just hear the occasional sound of his gun, and suddenly I became very hungry. It was two hours before luncheon and in my boyish mind I felt I would probably starve to death if I hadn’t something to eat before lunch hour. So my hand stole into the haversack and I felt a hard-boiled egg in the corner. I took it out, looked at it admiringly, almost reverently, took off the shell and ate it. I next took one of the rolls and ate that. Instead of appeasing my appetite it seemed to give me more, and, to hasten matters, before twelve o’clock had come I had eaten four eggs, two rolls and one apple.
About twelve o’clock I caught up to my father and he, putting his gun against a tree, said cheerily, “Now we’ll sit down and have luncheon.”
Suddenly, at the word luncheon, it dawned on me that I was probably the most abject scoundrel in the world, but I said nothing. My father lifted the haversack off my shoulders, put his hand in it, and then a puzzled look came over his face and he said, “Strange, strange; your mother never forgets,” and drew forth one solitary apple, left of the entire luncheon.
He raised his eyes and caught my face and the telltale egg around my mouth. He looked at me for perhaps half a minute, then said, “You’re not a hunter; you’re a loafer.”
He went down to the brook, took a drink, came back and offered me the other apple, but he said, “Before I eat it I would wash my face, if I were you.”
And from that time to the day of his death he never mentioned the fact that I was “not a hunter but a loafer.”
My father was one of the best-informed men it has ever been my lot to meet. Speaking several languages—he was, according to those who knew, a most accomplished linguist—and being an inveterate reader, he had stored up wisdom from a multitude of sources. In the latter days of his life, when he was an invalid, I have seen on his table four or five books in different languages, each of which he would be reading.
I was not only his son but his companion, and whenever there was a hunting trip, or a fishing trip, or any other pleasure, I would be with him. Many of the things he said made an impress on my mind, and with his wide knowledge he had a story suitable for anything that could occur. One thing he fastened on my mind very strongly was not to assume that you knew all about a thing by talking the other man down, but rather to agree as near as you possibly could with the other man’s view and gradually in that way force him to oppose yours; and I have found many times that that was a splendid way to get at the truth.
He was very reticent about his boyhood days, but I did know that his father and mother were driven out of Portugal during the Revolution of 1822, or thereabouts, and went over into Spain, where my father was born, in Seville, on September 14, 1824. As he grew to his youth he left either Portugal or Spain and went to England, and from England came to America sometime early in the 40’s. In Brooklyn he met my mother, who was visiting America with some school friends—-she was born in Franconia, Bavaria—and they were married; and my mother used to tell, with a great deal of pride—because if there ever was a wife who loved her husband it was my mother—that she learned English by her using her German Bible and his using an English one, which they translated in that way. He never let us know—or, if he told my mother, she never told us—just what his standing was in the Old World, but I have read so much of the Sousas since I have grown to manhood that I have every reason to believe he was a man exceptional in standing and education.
There was one thing—he was wonderfully handy in doing anything he liked, but he was not fond of work; and, like the average Portuguese or Spaniard, after his luncheon hour he would want to take a siesta, and I can recall many times when my mother, who was loaded down with ambition and energy, would say, “Tony, Tony, don’t go to sleep this afternoon.” He would slowly go upstairs, saying, “Elise, the day is for rest and the night for sleep,” and would go up and rest and sleep for at least two hours.
His knowledge of music was very limited, but he had an unusually acute and musical ear, and would no doubt, in these days of jazzing, have made a great name for himself as a jazz player.
My father did not talk much about his youth in Spain, or when he was on the sea; he found many things to interest him in the present. He was a gentleman in the liberal and accurate significance of that much-abused and variously defined word. Enough dropped from his lips to show that his family was prominent and influential. My mother said he served in the Mexican War. He was in the Civil War, and died a member of the Grand Army of the Republic.
I had reached my last year with my music professor and it was marred by the only time we came within a point of having a personal combat.
The professor had been suffering with boils, and in giving his lessons he had a hammock swung near the stove in the recitation room, and I came to get my violin lesson. He was in a very bad humor and probably in pain. I began my lesson, which did not meet with his unqualified indorsement, and finally he told me to draw a long bow.
“I am drawing the bow as long as I can,” I said.
That seemed to incense him greatly and he shouted at me, “Don’t you dare to contradict me.”
“I’m drawing the bow as long as I can; my arm is up against the wall now,” I replied.
He had in his hand a violin bow that had been presented to him a short time before—quite a valuable one. Just what he intended to do I don’t know, but in his anger he jerked the bow back and struck the stove, breaking the bow in two. Then his anger knew no bounds.
“Get out of here,” he said, “before I kill you!”
I took my fiddle by the neck and said, “You attempt to kill me and I’ll smash this fiddle over your head.”
“Get out,” he said.
“I’ll get out,” I replied, “but don’t you dare attempt to hit me, because if you do you’ll get the worst of it.”
I put my fiddle in its green bag and walked out and went home.
My father, sensing something was wrong, said, “What’s the trouble?”
“Oh, I have just had a fight with my music teacher,” I told him, and explained the whole thing.
“Well,” my father said, “I suppose you don’t want to be a musician. Is there anything else you would prefer?”
With my heart full of bitterness, I said, “Yes; I want to be a baker.”
“A baker?” he said.
“Yes, a baker.”
“Well,” he said, “I’ll see what I can do to get you a position in a bakery. I’ll go and attend to it right away.”
He put on his hat and in about half an hour came back and said, “I saw Charlie”—the baker just two blocks from where we lived—“and he says he will be glad to take you in and teach you the gentle art of baking bread and pies; but,” he added, “in my observation I have noticed as a rule that bakers are not very highly educated, and I believe if you would educate yourself beyond the average baker it would tend to your financial improvement in this world at least; so I insist as gently as a father can that you keep on going to public school and pay no attention to your music; give that up, and when you are through school the baker can start you.”
Father then went on to say, “The baker has consented that you come tonight. You should be there by half-past eight.”
So that night I went to Charlie, the baker’s, and I don’t believe any boy was ever treated with more distinguished consideration than Charlie and his journeyman bakers, and even his wife, showed me. I was there all night, and in the morning helped load the wagon with bread and went out with the driver delivering the bread to the various customers. I was particularly attracted by the intelligent ability of the horse, who knew every customer and where he had to stop on the entire route.
After I got back to the bakery, about eight in the morning, I went down home, ate my breakfast, and as my father said he wanted me to be a highly educated baker, I went to school. I had had probably half an hour’s sleep that night. The bakers, after all the bread was in the ovens and the pies were ready to be baked, threw a blanket on the troughs and took forty winks of sleep, which I was permitted to do.
When I came home that afternoon from school I suddenly lost interest in playing baseball and hung around the house, and after supper went up to the bakery for my second night.
As I look back at it, I thought the baker and his assistants and his more or less loving wife were slightly severe with me, and I was kept on the jump pretty thoroughly the whole night. When everything was in the ovens, we had our usual half-hour’s sleep, then started loading the wagons. I went around delivering bread, returning home about eight o’clock with an appetite, but very drowsy. At school that day I learned nothing and that night went back to the baker shop. The baker had turned from a kindly mannered man into a dictator of the worst description and he and his bakers and his wife worked me every minute.
About half-past twelve, the baby—the baker’s wife had only lately become a mother—began to cry and she said, “Here you”—meaning me—“go up and rock the cradle.”
I mounted the steps in weariness, and I don’t believe I had rocked the cradle over three times, with the baby yelling in my ears, before I was fast asleep. I awoke with a cuff on the ear. The baker’s wife called me a “miserable lummox,” whatever that was, and sent me downstairs.
When I got to the house the next morning after serving the bread again, I was absolutely all in. My father said, “How do you feel this morning?” with a solicitude that didn’t sound true at all.
Before I could answer I had fallen asleep. He woke me up, called my mother over and said, “Give the boy some breakfast and put him to bed. Let him sleep all day. Of course you want to be a baker, don’t you?”
“No,” I said; “I’d rather die than be a baker!”
“Then,” he said, “I think you had better make it up with your teacher and start in with your music again.”
My father brought the professor and myself together and we buried the hatchet for good, and ever after that—years later I orchestrated a mass for him—we were always very friendly. I started in again to study just as hard as I could and made great advance in orchestration and harmony and sight reading, but not as great on the violin as I should have.
But I was even beginning to attract some attention that way and doing some solo work in amateur concerts, besides earning money with a little quadrille band that I had organized. This little quadrille band had a second violin, viola and a bass, clarinet, cornet, trombone and drum. They were all men, the bass player a very old man. We became popular as a dance orchestra in Washington and continued our popularity until I listened to the anarchistic utterances of the members of the band and talked myself out of a job.
We were playing for Professor Sheldon’s dances.
They came to me and said, “You’re a great favorite here and you ought to make Sheldon pay you more money for the music.”
He was paying as much as anyone else would have to, and I couldn’t understand why he should be singled out because I was popular. But they kept on until I finally fell before their urge and went to the professor and told him he had to pay two dollars a man more for the orchestra hereafter.
“And if I don’t do it, what’ll happen?” he asked.
“I’ll quit,” I replied.
“Well, I’ll be very sorry to lose you, but it’s all I can pay and all I propose to pay.”
“Then,” I said, “I quit.”
At the next Saturday night’s hop there was another man in my place, but the same seven anarchists were playing there at the same figure they received when I was leading them. It was a lesson I have never forgotten and, I hope, never will.
One day while I was playing one of DeBériot’s concertos there came a rap at my door. Going to the door and opening it, I found a gentleman there who said, “I have been listening for five minutes to your playing. I was anxious to know just who you were, so I rapped at the door.”
“Won’t you come in?” I asked.
He came in, sat down, and said, “You play very nicely. Have you ever thought about joining a circus?”
I said, “No.”
“I am the leader of the band that is showing near Pennsylvania Avenue,” he said, “and if you would like to join I can get you a place.”
Visions of beautiful ladies in spangled tights, and pink lemonade, and all the other attractions that catch a boy when he is thinking of a circus, flashed through my mind and I said, “I’d like to be in your circus, but I don’t think my father would let me go.”
“There’s no necessity of asking your father,” he replied.
I told him I wouldn’t like to do it without asking him, as he was an awfully nice father.
“Yes, but fathers don’t understand the chances for a boy traveling with a circus and he might object.”
“Yes, probably he would,” I said.
“I tell you what you do,” he said. “Tomorrow night we are going to strike the tents. You come over with your fiddle and go along with us, and after you are away for a day or two write your father and tell him what a good time you are having and he probably won’t object then; but if you tell him now he probably would have some objections. And, by the way, do you play any brass instrument?”
I said, “Yes, I play barytone.” And I got out the barytone and played him a few measures.
He enjoined secrecy, telling me to keep it entirely to myself and report the following night, and left. The more I thought of it the more necessary it seemed to me for me to follow the life of the circus and make money, probably sometime becoming leader of a circus band myself, and that would be simply a grand life.
I was full of these thoughts which had taken possession of me when I thought I ought to let somebody into the secret. Next door to my house lived a good-looking boy and a great playmate of mine by the name of Edward Accardi, so I must go and tell Ed my good fortune that I was going away with a circus. Ed, not to be outdone in generosity in spreading knowledge to the world, immediately told his mother, and his mother, with that wild desire to have everybody know everything, told my mother, and my mother, by a simple process, conveyed the information to my father, who evidently smiled and said, “I’ll handle this myself.”
The next morning, when my heart was full of the idea that I was going away with the circus and that no one knew anything about it—I had forgotten about telling Ed—my father came to my room and said, “Good morning, son.”
“Good morning, father.”
“When you dress today,” he said, “put on your Sunday clothes.”
Down “on the Navy Yard” we always had a special suit for Sunday which was religiously kept for that day and that day alone. With some misgivings I didn’t like the idea of making such a radical departure from custom as to put on Sunday clothes on a week day, but I said, “Yes, sir.”
I got up, had my bath, put on my Sunday clothes and went downstairs. Father and I had breakfast together, and chatted. At the end of the meal he said, “We’ll take a walk.”
We took the walk and went in the direction of the Marine Barracks. My father, who had been a member of the Marine Band, from 1850, playing trombone, was very much liked by everybody in the corps from the commandant down. When we went in the gate we crossed the parade ground to the commandant’s office.
The record of the Marine Corps says, “John Philip Sousa enlisted on the ninth day of June, 1868.” Somewhat over thirteen years of age, and not fourteen until the following November.
This father of mine, bless his soul, had gone to see General Zeilin, the commandant, and they had discussed the matter as two fathers would, and they concluded to enlist me in the corps as an apprentice boy to study music until I got over my infatuation for the circus. My father knew that I was that much of a law-abiding boy that I wouldn’t desert, for fear the authorities would catch me and shoot me at sunrise, which would spoil all subsequent proceedings for me.
Being a boy in the band was not a novel situation for me, for from my tenth year I had at times played triangle, cymbals and E flat alto horn—God forgive me—at various times with the band, and was a great friend with all the musicians in it.
The first time that I heard music—outside of an ordinary orchestra or a band—of a fine character, was when the Franko family of five wonderfully talented children came to Washington for a concert. Our music professor announced to the school that they were exceptionally talented and he wanted each and every student to attend the concert; which I think the majority of us did. It was the first time I heard real violin playing. Little Nahan Franko was a wonder on the instrument, and his sisters—if I recall rightly, there were three of them—and his brother added to the pleasure of the concert.
My youth up to this time was largely spent “on the Navy Yard,” but as I developed as a professional musician, I became acquainted with people who lived in the Northwest, and from that time until I left Washington my companions were almost entirely of the Northwest.
Some of the young people had organized a club which they were pleased to call the Vis-à-vis, a literary club, and they issued a little magazine giving forth their own articles. I can’t recall whether I ever wrote anything for them, but I probably did.
While playing, I became a member of the Orchestral Union, of which Mr. George Felix Benkert was the conductor. Mr. Benkert was a remarkably fine musician and one of the greatest pianists of that day. I played first violin in the Orchestral Union and evidently looked younger than I really was, for on one occasion when they gave the oratorio Creation, Clara Louise Kellogg, the famous American prima donna, singing the soprano rôle, came over and patted me on the head. I have no doubt she did it because she thought I was in the infant class. I was too shy to reciprocate by returning the pat; which shows I still had something to learn.
A great admirer of my ability as a musician, Doctor Swallow, introduced me to a music lover of Washington, the Hon. William Hunter, who was Assistant Secretary of State. Mr. Hunter, every Tuesday evening during the concert season, had a string-quartet party come to his house and play from eight until ten o’clock, after which he served a supper, and I was invited to come and take part in one of these musical evenings. I must have favorably attracted the attention of Mr. Hunter as a musician, for until I left Washington a couple of years later, I invariably spent my Tuesday evenings with Mr. Hunter; and my knowledge of some of the leading composers, such as Frescobaldi, Haydn—what they did and what they wrote—was entirely due to Mr. Hunter. He would place advertisements in the London, Berlin, Paris and Vienna musical papers for certain rare works that he could not secure in the ordinary music store, and when they came he would read the history of the composer out of a European encyclopedia, which he would translate as he read, and in that way I grew to know a lot about these men. Knowing that I was earning my living as a musician, he took a very delicate way of paying me for my services. Every Tuesday evening after the quartet playing, when we were packed up and had on our coats and were about to leave, he would come over to me and say, “Young man, you did very finely tonight.”
Of course I would give a very modest, “I thank you.”
He would then say, “What a splendid vest you have on tonight,” and would slip five dollars into my vest pocket. Which five dollars meant money in those days.
I was growing very tired of my position in the Marine Band. At a change of leadership of the band I had written a march, Salutation, and when the new conductor came on the Parade we were playing it in his honor.
When the new conductor reached the band he said, “What is that you’re playing?”
The assistant leader said, “That’s a march by the boy there”—pointing to me.
“Take it off the stands!” he said—and he and I never became friendly.
I went to Mr. Hunter and told him I was unhappy in the band and asked him to see the Secretary of the Navy and secure my release, which he did—and I was in civil life again.
The very moment I was released from the Marine Band, Mr. Hunter said, “You should go to Europe and complete your musical education.”
I told him that was impossible; that my father had a number of children and could not afford to do it.
“I know a gentleman,” he said, “who I’m quite sure would send you.”
“But I wouldn’t want anybody to support me,” I replied.
“I wouldn’t be so particular about that,” he said. “If the man wants to spend money to educate talented young musicians, why not let him do it? I’ll see the gentleman tomorrow and make an appointment for you to meet him.”
The gentleman was Mr. W. W. Corcoran, the great philanthropist of Washington. Mr. Hunter made me promise a few days later, after he had seen Mr. Corcoran, that I would call on him. So I went to his house, pulled the bell rather timidly, and a wonderfully respectable-looking footman came to the door and asked me, in the splendid manner of footmen, what I wanted. I told him I would like to see Mr. Corcoran, and also told him to tell Mr. Corcoran that I had been sent there by Mr. Hunter.
In a little while Mr. Corcoran descended the stairs, came over and asked me my name and my ambitions.
He finally said, “Well now, I’ll think over your case and you call again in five or six days.”
I never got out of a house quicker than I did out of Mr. Corcoran’s, and I didn’t call in five or six days; in fact, I haven’t called up-to-date! The idea of being under obligations to somebody was very distasteful to me, and while Mr. Corcoran might have sent me to Europe, I feel that I was better off that he didn’t.
I was beginning to get pupils. I had three or four little Italian boys who played the violin—holding them like a cello—in the streets to a harp accompaniment. The little fellows had talent, even if they did smell ungodly of garlic.
I had one pupil on the cornet who wanted to learn just one tune, The Last Rose of Summer, and my efforts to teach him the scale went for naught—he wanted only the fingering for the cornet for The Last Rose of Summer, and that’s all he ever studied with me for a period of three months. He had a yacht, and his great delight was to take friends down the Potomac for a sail, get out his cornet and play The Last Rose of Summer. He was a great swimmer, and when he’d have a party of men only aboard, after a while The Last Rose would get very much wilted and they would throw the cornet overboard, whereupon he would immediately follow and bring it up. He certainly was a wonderful swimmer.
The principal variety theater in Washington was Kiernan’s Theatre Comique. The variety theater of those days corresponded to the vaudeville of today, only ladies were always absent except on the stage. Mr. Kiernan concluded in the spring of the year to open a summer garden in a lot adjoining the Theatre Comique. This lot was beneath the street level, but seemed to lend itself otherwise to a fine out-of-doors, heaven-is-the-roof sort of place. The stage was built, singers and orchestra engaged, and they suddenly found they hadn’t a conductor, for the regular conductor of the Theatre Comique had gone off for the summer with his orchestra to some watering place in Virginia. Leaders of varieties were scarce in Washington and Mr. Kiernan was in a quandary, until one of the orchestra men told him, “I know a boy up on Capitol Hill, who I think would suit you to lead the orchestra.”
Kiernan immediately sent a messenger to my house and asked me to call on him, which I did with a speed that would not have shamed Nurmi.
Kiernan said, “What experience have you had in variety?”
“None,” I said.
“Do you read music?”
“Of course.”
“Well, I’m willing to give you a chance.”
“Thank you.”
“Rehearsal will be on Saturday morning and we’ll give a performance Saturday night.”
When I went in the orchestra to lead it for rehearsal it was a very easy matter to play songs and dances, and so on, and I got through swimmingly, with everybody delighted.
I went home; and in order that I would be in time for the performance at eight o’clock that night, I returned to the Theatre Comique at five!
About 5:30 one of those beautiful showers, for which Washington is celebrated in the summer months, in which you think all the water in the world is dropping, came down and flooded the garden so that the only thing that wasn’t afloat was the piano, and the waves of that storm were lapping the black keys.
I stood there with Kiernan looking out, and finally he said, “We can’t give a show in there tonight; we’ll have to give it in the Theatre Comique, indoors.”
Washington is not the coolest place in June, July and August in the known world, so no one thought of his overcoat. Finally, putting on rubber boots, I said, “Well, if you’re going to give a performance in the theater it will be necessary to have the piano moved up.”
They got three or four husky Africans, who were more anxious about getting the piano up than the way they got it up. When the piano finally reached the Theatre Comique and was installed in the orchestra pit, every wire from middle C down to below the lowest string was torn off.
It was before the days of a steel E string for fiddles, and at a time when you sometimes got a lot of bad strings for your fiddle. Evidently I had a lot of bad ones on that occasion, for before we had finished what they were pleased to call on the program The Overture, I had snapped my E string and was giving an exhibition of jumping up to positions on the A that would have done credit to a half-dozen Paganinis rolled into one.
One of the admirable qualities of a vaudeville entertainment is incessant, never-ending action; so we had no more than played the last note of the overture—I frantically trying to get on an E string—when the bell rang for the beginning of the performance.
With the little dialogue that went between, I managed to put the E string on; but I hadn’t played fifteen measures of the next movement before the D string broke, and during that performance I think every string on the violin broke from one to five times, except the G, and that was a hardened old sinner and stayed by me the whole evening. It was without any doubt the worst orchestral performance that was ever given in the world. The pianist couldn’t hit a note because there was no note there to hit; the cornet player worked hard, but was wheezy; the clarinet player was extremely nervous, and the drummer did some bad thumping.
When the performance finally came to a close, the stage manager walked on the stage and apologized for the faults of the performance and informed everybody that it would be improved the following day. I had one wild desire, while he was talking—because it seemed as if everything he said should have been directed to my miserable work, even though it wasn’t—to have the floor open and let me glide into eternity.
While I was putting my violin in my box, the cornet player leaned over and said, “Here’s Kiernan coming down the aisle. I hope he don’t kill you.”
I looked and saw him coming down with that measured tread that never bodes any good for anyone. Just as he got to the orchestra railing, I wheeled around and shouted at him, “I never want to play in your theater again!”
He looked at me, the most astonished man in the world.
“What’s the matter with you?” he said.
“Matter with me? This is a hell of a way to treat a man. You brought me up here in the hottest theater the Lord ever allowed a man to work in, had a lot of darkies smash the piano so we couldn’t play a note on it, and then you expect me to stand here and submit to it. I never want to play in your theater again!”
“Now, son,” he said, “listen.”
“I don’t want to listen.”
“Now you listen, or I’ll get angry.”
“Well, go ahead; what do you want to say?”
“I know you’re right. It was no place to put you. We shouldn’t have given a performance. But we’ll have a rehearsal tomorrow morning and everything will be all right.”
I shook my head dubiously. The fact that he didn’t know where to get a leader had made him very gentle, so I said, “All right, I’ll come. I’ll help you out anyway.”
Next morning, when I came, the lady who sang We Used to be Friends, But We’re Strangers Now, or some such grand-opera-like song, came down with fire in her eyes and said, “You spoiled my song last night.”
Kiernan, who was sitting in the first row, called to her sharply, “That’s enough from you; sit down! We have heard all we want from you. Go ahead with your rehearsal.”
We went ahead with the rehearsal, everything was all right, and I stayed there until the winter season opened.
At heart, my music professor was evidently a very kind man, but he had educated himself to believe that, as far as boys were concerned, the way was to “treat ’em rough.” He was always very considerate and kind to the girl students, but almost invariably put on an air of severity with the boys. This was about the very worst way in the world to treat me, for at home I had always been treated with every kindness and love; and with the knowledge that I was following a profession entirely apart and different from my home life, because my mother was absolutely unmusical and my father was not what you would call a good technical musician, I thought that everybody who was studying music knew more than I did, and I required encouragement to keep me from being unhappy.
On one occasion I brought the professor an arrangement of my very first composition. I had heard the Träumerei of Schumann played very beautifully, and thought it the most perfect melody I had ever heard—even today it seems to me most beautiful—and I wondered if I could write something even a thousandth part as good. So I evolved a little piece which I called An Album Leaf, for piano and violin, which I played to my unmusical mother, who said it was beautiful, and my father honored me to the extent of asking me to play it over again. Even some of the neighbors said that though it wasn’t as jolly as Dixie, nor as solemn as Nearer, My God, to Thee, they thought it was pretty. So when I went for my first lesson that week I took it to the professor and put the piano part on the piano. He sat down at the instrument and we played it through. With probably no desire except perhaps to stimulate me to greater efforts, as we completed the last chord he took the piano part between his fingers, tossed it over the instrument, and said, “This thing is nothing but cheese and bread, and bread and cheese.”
If he had hit me in the eye he couldn’t have hurt me more than by that expression. I picked it up, and, if it is only “bread and cheese, and cheese and bread,” I have kept the little piece as my own private property even unto today.
When I began to take lessons from Mr. Benkert, the idea was that I was to study harmony, violin and piano. Mr. Benkert took unusual interest in me and under his genial instruction I made rapid progress, especially in harmony, which would occupy most of the hour’s lesson; although as he became interested in my work in harmony he would sometimes, when his engagements permitted, give me two and three hour lessons. My violin playing with him would be after we would get through harmony lessons. He would pick out a sonata of Beethoven or Mozart, and I would play the violin part while he would play the piano; but he never gave me any instruction on the piano. Happening to mention that fact to my father, I was told, “Will you kindly say to Mr. Benkert I am anxious that you should know something about the piano.”
So on the occasion of my next lesson I mentioned it to Mr. Benkert. He went over to the piano and struck C on the ledger line below the staff of the right hand and asked me what note it was. I said “That’s C.”
Then he struck the same note again and said, “What note is that?”
“Why,” I said, “that is C in the ledger line above the staff in the G clef.”
He said, “I think that’s as much piano as I want you to know. You seem to have a gift of knowing a composition by looking at it, and you may develop into a very original composer if you follow that line of procedure; whereas if you become a good pianist you would probably want to compose on the instrument, and if you are not careful your fingers will fall into pleasant places where yours or somebody else’s have fallen before.”
After I had been with Mr. Benkert I grew to love him. He seemed to me the perfect man, with his brown beard, deep sunken eyes, and æsthetic features.
I remember while I was playing first violin at Ford’s Opera House, the Alice Oates Opera Company came there, and among the operas they played was one called Les Bavards, by Offenbach. I took the violin part with me to my lesson to have Mr. Benkert mark the fingering in one or two more or less intricate passages, and at the end, after going over it, with an outburst of boyish enthusiasm, I said, “Mr. Benkert, do you think I will ever be able to write an opera?”
He put his hand on my head and said, “My son, you will write a better opera than this one you have just been playing.”
That was encouragement. The nearest he ever showed his displeasure at any of my exercises was slowly to raise his nose as if it didn’t smell right. He died in his forties, beloved by everyone who knew him, and he was one of the finest musicians America has ever given birth to.
I published a few compositions while he was still with us; and, while he didn’t approve of a young man rushing into print too rapidly, he was good enough to go over the proofs of one with me; and he hoped the composition would be a success. It wasn’t, but that wasn’t his fault. The way it got into print was: A man much older than myself was very much in love with a pretty girl and he thought, if a piece of music was dedicated to her, the road to matrimony would be very much smoothed. So he offered to pay for the publication of the piece. That brought into existence—long since dropped into oblivion—a set of waltzes, A Moonlight on the Potomac.
My next compositions were a march called The Review and a galop called The Cuckoo. I took them to Philadelphia to the well-known firm of those days, of Lee & Walker. Their editor was the late Thomas a Becket, a fine musician and a splendid man. When he played the compositions they sounded much better than when I played them, and I sold them to him for a hundred copies each of the pieces. They did not electrify the public, but they were played by some bands and I imagine did not cause great depression thereby.
I was getting over nineteen by that time and playing first violin at Ford’s Opera House. The conductor of the orchestra was suddenly taken ill and I had to assume this position. The play of the week was Bohemians and Detectives, written by Milton Nobles, who was also the star. I sat on the high chair of the leader, and I imagine that no one ever took up the cues of that melodrama with more alertness than I did.
Mr. Nobles left the opera house at the end of the week. Before the following week was up a telegram had come from him from Chicago offering me the position of leader of orchestra of his company.
Just at that time I had reached the age to fall in love, and I was head over heels in love with a clergyman’s daughter. This young lady was a member of the Vis-à-Vis Club, wrote very good poetry and painted with unusual skill. With that impetuosity that belongs to nineteen or twenty, I made my love known and we became engaged; but the young lady insisted on secrecy, which I couldn’t understand, as I wanted to yell it from the housetops that I had won such a charming creature.
We wrote various songs together, one of which was sung by several singers and made what you might call a little hit. This song, the words of which are given here, was written after we had had a tiff, which I believe is a common practice among all young lovers. I had kept away from her house for several days, and she sent me this, which was an absolute peace offering:
AH, ME!
A knight there was of noble name, Ah, me! A knight of wond’rous deeds and fame, Ah, me! He wooed a lady, wooed and won, No fairer lady ’neath the sun, She lived and smiled for him alone, Ah, me!
A shadow crept into the light, Ah, me! The lady’s face grew strangely white, Ah, me! The knight one morning rode away Nor came again, ah, well-aday, The sunset’s glory turned to gray, Ah, me!
And love is fleeting, love will go, Ah, me! No hand can stay its ebb and flow, Ah, me! And death is sweet when love has fled, A rest of heart, a rest of head, A fold of hands and we are dead, Ah, me!
But secrecy is a hard proposition in this world—I understand that even bootleggers have confessed as much. My charming inamorata must have confided in her bosom companion, who had just married; she must have confided it to another almost equally close companion, who was about to be married; and between the two her father got full information.
The father and mother were extremely fond of me, and when I called the following night expecting the sunshine of a smile, the maid who opened the door said, “The doctor told me to tell you, if you called, that he would like to see you in his study.”
I went upstairs to his study and found him sitting down, looking very serious. He had an oratorical voice and was a very large man.
Looking at me with piercing eyes, he said, “Young man, you have come into my house like a thief in the night and stolen my daughter!”
If he had said he was going to hang me just then, it wouldn’t have surprised me more; but I quietly said, “Will you kindly explain?”
“What right have you to become engaged to my daughter?” he asked.
Thinking that perhaps levity would be the strongest weapon, I replied, “Well, she had to become engaged to somebody.”
The remark didn’t strike him as funny, or even amusing, and he said, “This engagement must end now.”
“Let’s argue the point,” I replied.
“I have no desire to argue the point,” he said. “I simply insist that it end now.”
“Why? Do you object to me as a man?” drawing myself up.
“No.”
“Do you object to my family?” I inquired, a little louder and more impressively.
“Not in the least,” he replied.
“Well, then, just what is your objection?”
“I object to you because you are a musician.”
“There is no nobler profession in the world,” I answered.
“I am willing to grant all that,” he said, “but point out to me one musician who ever had a dollar.”
“That’s no reason why I shouldn’t get one,” I said.
“No. The history of your profession is that they live in poverty. My daughter has been brought up in the lap of luxury and I’ll never consent to her marrying a musician.”
“Well,” I said, “I have one proposition to make to you, and only one, and I propose to abide by it and you must also.”
He looked at me, and I continued, “I will leave Washington. I will stay away from Washington for two years, and, if at the end of that time I have not made some progress in the world in a money way, I will give up your daughter. But if I have made progress I will come back here and marry her, whether you agree to it or not—that is, if she still loves me.”
“I’ll not consent to that,” he said.
“I don’t care whether you consent to it or not. That is what I propose to do.”
Resigning my place at Ford’s Opera House, next day I left for a town in Illinois to join Mr. Nobles, reaching there at about the same time that his company did.
I reported to him and the first question he asked was, “Have you had any experience in engaging musicians?”
“No,” I said, “except at home, a little dance orchestra or something like that.”
“You go down to the theater,” he said, “and find out who the leader of the orchestra is, then go out and engage not over ten men at the best price you can, have a thorough rehearsal, because they’ll need it, and then report conditions to me.”
I found the local leader in a paint shop, and after ascertaining that he was the man with whom to do business, I told him that I was the leader of the traveling company which was to perform that night and asked if he could supply ten men for the orchestra.
He took his cigar from his mouth and said, “Can supply you as many as you want.”
“How much,” I asked, “do you charge a man?”
“Two dollars a skull,” was his reply.
“Well,” I said, falling into his mode of expression, “I want ten skulls—one first skull, one second skull, viola, cello and bass skulls for the strings, and flute, clarinet, cornet and trombone skulls for the wind, and a drum skull besides.”
“Anything else you want?” he asked.
“Yes, I would like them at the theater for rehearsal at two o’clock sharp,” I said.
He looked at me with a half-sorry-for-you expression and said:
“Stranger, there are just two things that you don’t want here. One is that you don’t want any first fid, and you don’t want any viola or celly and you don’t want no flute, ’cause we ain’t got them. The second thing you don’t want is a rehearsal at two o’clock or any other time.”
“But,” I said, “we must have a rehearsal.”
“Rehearsal be blowed,” he said. “We never rehearse here.”
“But,” I persisted, “my music is difficult and a rehearsal is absolutely necessary. Several numbers must be transposed. Can your orchestra transpose?”
With a wave of his hand, he disdainfully said, “Transpose? Don’t worry. We transpose anything.”
No argument could budge him; and he finally stopped any further discussion by saying that I could take his orchestra or leave it, just as I liked.
It was Hobson’s choice with me, so I said, “Well, I’ll take your orchestra, and I do hope everything will go all right tonight.”
“Don’t you lose any sleep over us. We’re all right,” he called to me as I was leaving his store.
Shortly after seven I went to the theater and found the orchestra in the music room under the stage. The leader said, “You might as well know the boys, and I’ll just introduce you. What is your name?”
“My name,” I answered, “is Sousa.”
“Well, Sousa,” this with an awkward bow, “allow me to introduce Professor Smith, our second fid; and, Sousa, this is Professor Brown, our clarinet player; and, Sousa, this is Professor Perkins, our bull fid; and this,” pointing to a cadaverous-looking fellow, “is Professor Jones, who agitates the ivories on our pipe organ. Sousa, these are Professors Jim and Bill Simpson, solo and first cornet; this is Professor Reed, who whacks the bull drum, and yours truly, solo trombone. Now that all of us know each other, what is your overture?”
I explained that the overture we used I had written myself and it had met with great favor.
“I ain’t sayin’ that’s so or not, but it won’t go here. Will it, boys?”
A unanimous “No” from the orchestra dispelled any doubt as to their feelings. I expostulated with warmth and injured pride, “But you have never heard my overture, you know nothing about it, and I can assure you it is all right.”
“It may be all right in Chicago or Bosting, but I tell you it won’t go here. I got the overture that our people want and that’s the one we are going to play tonight.”
“But I think ——”
“Don’t think,” said the leader, putting his hand on my shoulder. “Just make up your mind that you are going to play our overture. Do you read first fid at sight?”
I mildly admitted that I could do so.
“Well, just take a look at this thing,” and he held up the first violin part of his “overture.”
“Now, I want to explain this piece to you. When we open up on her we go along quietly, not making any fuss, almost sneaking like,” and he pantomimed the tempo. “When you are playin’ that first strain you do it just as if you didn’t have no train to ketch, but when we get here”— he pointed at the next strain marked allegro—“just go as fast as hell! You’ll have to chase your fingers all over the fiddle.”
I sighed and answered, “All right, I think I understand.”
After we were seated in the orchestra box I rapped for attention and we began the overture. I noticed immediately that all of them were wretched players, and when I started into the movement which the local man told me was to be taken “fast as hell,” I began playing the strain with a rapidity evidently unknown to the orchestra, and pandemonium reigned. But curiously enough each man felt that it was his duty to play the notes to the end regardless of what the rest did, and they finished one after the other, stretched out like a bunch of horses in a race. I had no time to express my disgust, as the curtain was raised immediately and the first number was to be sung. It was Come Back to Erin, in E flat. When we began the introduction of the song, every member of the orchestra was blowing a note either in a different time or different key.
I shouted, “It’s in E flat.”
The louder I shouted, the louder they played. The singer sang on, trying to appear oblivious to the cacophony that reigned. As soon as the song was finished, I turned to the leader, and said, “This is the rottenest orchestra I have ever heard. You do not know one note from another.”
He looked at me calmly, and said, “You are too particular. If you don’t like our style of playin’, pay us and we’ll go.”
“Pay you?” I cried. “You have not earned a cent.”
“Well, if you don’t like us, give us our money and we will go.”
I was very much excited, and I shouted, “Give you your money? Not under any circumstances. Pack up your instruments and get out of this theater.”
“We’ll go when we are paid, and not before,” said the leader.
“I’ll see about that,” I said, jumping up and walking through the center aisle of the theater; and going to the box office, I explained the situation to my manager. He called the manager of the theater over and told him, and he said, “All right, just call in the constable and put them out as usual.”
As the constable walked in to drive out the orchestra, I said to the local manager, “Just think, these men told me they could read anything, and when I wanted them to come to rehearsal they said they never rehearsed in this town.”
“Yes,” said the local manager, “that is true; they never have a rehearsal because,
if they did, they would be discharged before the performance.”
Printed in the Saturday Evening Post
198(19), 1925-11-07.
Part 2
I was very happy in Mr. Nobles’ company. He was a fine man, a reader, and we got along splendidly the entire season. After we had been out six or eight weeks, through some disagreement the actor who played the part of Dionysius O’Gall, the Irish lawyer, in The Phœnix, suddenly resigned his part and left the company. Mr. Nobles was in a great dilemma, until a little Englishman, valet to one of the actors, volunteered to do the part. He had heard the play so often that he was dead letter-perfect and went on immediately. Those familiar with the play will recall that the first act ends with a great fire scene. Mr. Nobles played the part of Carroll Graves, and while he is sitting at a table writing the famous story, The Villain Still Pursued Her, the Irish lawyer makes his entrance. On the night of the valet’s debut, the exigencies of the stage required that one of the fire traps should be immediately in front of the door marked for the entrance of the Irish lawyer. Through some inadvertence, the young valet actor had not been informed of the situation of the fire trap and the necessity of stepping over it. When the cue came, the door was swung quickly open and with a hearty, “Good morning, Carroll, I have brought you some oysters,” the valet rushed forward and stepped into the open trap.
The audience, who thought it was part of the play, gave the most spontaneous laugh I have ever heard in my life, while I, sitting in the orchestra, felt my hair standing on end. Believing the valet must be maimed or killed, I rushed through the orchestra door to the stage, while Mr. Nobles with a look of great anxiety motioned to the stage manager to ring down the curtain. When I reached the stage, I found a ladder had been lowered into the trap to the caverns beneath and a group of actors and grips peering into the abyss, all fearing that the poor fellow was dead; but at that moment the valet ascended and poked his head above the trap.
Mr. Nobles grabbed him by the arm, and said, “Are you hurt?” The little Englishman looked at him much perplexed and replied very slowly, “No, I am not hurt, but greatly surprised.”
We were gradually working into the extreme Middle West, and when we were to give a performance in a town in Kansas the manager of the theater said to Nobles and myself, “If you want to pack this house tonight”—which there was no question we did want to do—“just get the city band to play out in front of the theater from 7:30 to eight o’clock. By that time you will have the whote town here. And,” he added, “they won’t cost you a cent; all they ask is that you pass them in to see the performance.”
So I hunted up the leader and he said he and his boys would be delighted to play. All they wanted was to see the show afterward, and they would use their instruments as a passport into the house.
At 7:30 the band, resplendent in their uniforms, struck up a march and for half an hour entertained the audience that gathered in the street; but no one seemed to be jeopardizing his neck by trying to get into the house.
Finally the leader of the band said, “I guess we’ll go in now.”
The theater was a ground-floor one, barnlike, and had windows, a number of them, on one side just above the ground.
The band passed in.
I went to the music room to tune up my fiddle and had been there perhaps ten minutes when the call boy came running back and said, “How many men are in that band?”
“Oh,” I said, “I should say about twenty.”
“Well,” he said, “there have been about a hundred men gone in already with their instruments.”
“That’s impossible,” I replied. “I’ll go and investigate.”
As I came out into the theater, I noticed a man come in with an instrument, immediately go to an open window and hand it out to a fellow outside, who went around to the front door and came in with it, and he in turn handed it to someone else outside. If I hadn’t closed the window there is no doubt the entire town would have viewed the performance, and all for the half hour’s work of the band.
Most of the towns, in fact the vast majority of them, were small, and I very soon got used to the depth of musical degradation a country orchestra could reach. Most of the so-called musicians were men who were employed in other walks of life; and without an opportunity to practice their instruments daily, they would make a sorry mess of the melodramatic music that was used in the performance.
The original name of the play Mr. Nobles gave was Bohemians and Detectives. The hero is rescued from fire in the tenement house where he lives and is lying in a hospital reading John Hay’s poem, Jim Bludsoe. An officer of the hospital asks his name, and the idea suddenly strikes him that his name is Jim Bludsoe; then dramatically he says, in an undertone, “From the ashes of Carroll Graves will arise Jim Bludsoe.”
I suggested to Mr. Nobles that as that was the rebirth of Carroll Graves, The Phœnix would be a good title for the play. Nobles immediately adopted it and the play for the greater part of the season was known as The Phœnix. The famous line, where Carroll Graves writes the story for The Chambermaids’ Own, “The villain still pursued her,” is still quoted.
When we reached Omaha, there was a decided improvement in the orchestra, the members of which were of the band stationed at the military fort outside the town, and it was a great relief for me to find I could go through a rehearsal without losing some of my hair. We played several nights in Omaha, and as our next stand was in a smaller city not far away I suggested to Mr. Nobles that I should go and see the manager of that theater and ask him to engage the members of the Omaha orchestra for our engagement. When I called on the gentleman the next day I found he kept a livery stable which occupied the ground floor of the building that contained the theater.
“What’s the idea?” he asked.
“Well,” I said, “the orchestra at Omaha is the best I’ve struck in this part of the country, and I’d like to have them here.”
He stood up, and, exhibiting great anger, said, “Those miserable wretches there”—pointing in the direction of Omaha—“are vilifying us as usual. You go back and tell them that no Omaha man can play in my theater as long as I’m manager of it. And if you don’t like it,” he added, “you needn’t bring your show here.”
We took the show there and the orchestra was one of the worst a kindly and long-suffering Providence has ever allowed to exist.
From there we went to Lincoln, and on the way learned from the morning paper that the opera house where we were to play had burned down the night before, just after the theater had been emptied of its audience.
I was met at the station by the leader of the orchestra, who gave me a full account of the fire and at the end of it said, very dramatically, “The opera house burned down and I lost my violin. But, thank God, I saved the Poet and Peasant overture!”
While in Lincoln, I was offered a position as teacher in the college there, but was too fascinated with traveling to accept, so went on my way.
[Photograph: The United States Marine Band, About 1885.]
[Photograph: The Commandant’s Home, Marine Barracks, Washington, D.C.]
In one city where we stopped I found a fairly capable orchestra, with an old German as leader. In those days it was customary, at the end of a rehearsal, to invite the orchestra out to have a drink—which it never refused—and the old leader tacked himself onto me, staying until lunchtime. I invited him to lunch and he remained during the afternoon. I invited him to dinner, then we went to the performance, and after its close we went out to have supper. By that time, with three of my meals in his possession, he conveyed to me his great respect for my musical ability, which I modestly acknowledged, and said he wanted to honor me with the dedication of a new composition of his, adding, “If you will call the orchestra for Thursday morning, I’ll play it for you.”
So Thursday morning the orchestra met at ten o’clock. I rehearsed one or two numbers and then he played his composition, which was a very pretty concert polka which the orchestra played with a smartness that struck me as most unusual. Then he lunched with me. I might add that he lunched, dined and supped with me on the Tuesday and Wednesday preceding. This was a Thursday and there followed Friday. They changed the bill on Saturday night for a number without music, so I was sent to New Orleans to rehearse the orchestra for the first time in my life that I had led a Sunday dramatic performance.
I found the leader of the orchestra a very nice man—the father of Minnie Maddern of those days, Minnie Maddern Fiske of today. He was a gentleman and a good musician. At the end of the rehearsal, while we were talking, I happened to mention the city from which I had just come.
He immediately said, “Did you have a piece dedicated to you?”
“Yes,” I replied. “The leader is going to send a copy over here to me.”
“That piece has been dedicated to every leader that has ever gone there,” he said, “ever since that old fellow has been leader of the orchestra there, which is a great number of years. In fact, it will keep on being dedicated until he passes in his checks, for it has paid his board for half of his lifetime. I don’t believe he can write a note, but he works it on every leader who comes, and never leaves him. He is a regular Old Man of the Mountain until the leader departs and he works a new victim.”
Maddern was probably correct, because I have never received the piece.
[Photograph: John Philip Sousa, Conductor of the U. S. Marine Band, About 1885.]
Our last stand was New Orleans and from there we went back to Washington. A smash-up on the railroad which carried us North detained us some twelve hours or more at a place called Duck Hill, in Mississippi. One member of the company became acquainted with some Mississippi River gamblers, and what they did to him, or rather to his pocketbook, was good and plenty. He came to me, after we had been there three or four hours, and said, “I’ve just lost a little bit of money. Can you let me have twenty-five dollars until we reach Washington?”
I gave him the twenty-five dollars, and an hour later he came back saying, “Let me have another twenty-five dollars.”
“No,” I said, “I haven’t any more money to loan.”
“But,” he said, “I owe these people twenty-five dollars. It is a debt of honor and I must pay it.”
“Then ask somebody else in the company to give it to you,” I replied.
“There isn’t a soul in the company who’ll lend me a cent,” he said. “This is a debt of honor, Sousa, and I’ve got to pay it.”
“I can’t help that,” I said. “You can’t get any more from me. I need the rest of my money.”
He became very much worried and hid himself on the train until we were miles beyond and he felt safe in coming out. He felt very much hurt to think I had refused to help him pay “a debt of honor”; but somehow he forgot to pay me my twenty-five dollars, and I am still waiting for it. I suppose my twenty-five dollars was not a debt of honor.
Back in Washington, they immediately found a position for me in my old theater. After playing there a couple of weeks there came to the theater a very sensational series of tableaus known as Matt Morgan’s Living Pictures. I believe it was the first time that America had seen the undraped female on the stage in quantities, and at times America gasped at the spectacle. From an artistic standpoint, the tableaus were very beautiful. Matt Morgan, who had been the artist for Frank Leslie’s Weekly, had painted some very effective scenery, and had seven statue girls and one statue man to depict these pictures, among which were Phryne Before the Tribunal, Cleopatra Before Cæsar, The Christian Martyr, The Destruction of Pompeii, The Shower of Gold, and others equally famous.
The audiences were almost entirely men, and the performance, while harmless in itself, never got out of the risqué class. During the week, the management, being dissatisfied with their conductor, approached me and I was engaged to go with the company as leader of the orchestra. I immediately began—just as I did in Nobles’ company—to rearrange some of the old music and compose some necessary new for the tableaus. As we played in the biggest theaters in the East, the orchestras were uniformly adequate for the music.
When we reached Pittsburgh the morals of that goodly city were so shocked that the statue girls, seven of them, were arrested and locked up in the police station. Just why they didn’t arrest the manager or me, as my name was on the bills as musical director, I don’t know.
The manager immediately engaged one of the best lawyers of the city and the trial proceeded next morning. Charges were made by one of the officers of the police force who, after he had given his opinion about the depravity of the exhibition, was cross-examined by our lawyer, who began talking art, especially in the nude; and finally, taking a photograph of Minerva, the lawyer said, “Did you ever arrest this party?” handing the picture to the perspiring police officer.
The patrolman looked at it long and intently, slowly mopping his brow, then said, “I arrest so many people I can’t remember all of them.”
This struck everybody in court as so funny that they roared, and the judge dismissed the case.
We turned people away from the doors that night.
When we reached Louisville, our manager had received an offer to go direct to San Francisco and continue there for an indefinite period—and he hoped the period would be at least the entire season. That meant the company would be in California for the summer of 1876, or longer, and that didn’t suit me. I had set my heart on going to Philadelphia and viewing the first great exposition this country ever held—the Centennial.
I went to the manager, explained my desire, adding that all the music of the piece was carefully arranged and was in proper form, and that no doubt when he reached California—after having saved my fare across the continent—he would find thoroughly capable conductors in San Francisco.
He said he was sorry to lose me, but if I wanted to go he wouldn’t stop me. So I left the company and returned to Washington. As soon as friends of mine in Washington heard I was going to Philadelphia, in the kindness of their hearts they wrote letters of introduction to musical people of the town.
When I reached Philadelphia I stopped at a modest little hotel on Filbert Street called The Smedley, and went out two or three days in succession, taking in the sights of the Centennial, and there heard the first really good and well-equipped band, which was the famous Gilmore aggregation. After three or four days I took one of the letters of introduction from the pile I had and proceeded to call on the gentleman to whom it was addressed. I found him to be the prime minister of the joy-killers of the world.
He read the letter and said, “My advice to you is to get out of Philadelphia as quickly as you can. There is not enough work here for local musicians instead of our helping anyone else who is a rank outsider like yourself. If you stay here you’ll starve to death.”
I shook hands with him most cordially, thanked him for his advice, went back to the hotel and destroyed my other letters of introduction.
As I had no desire to starve to death, I thought I’d call on Mr. Simon Hassler, who was one of the popular conductors of Philadelphia and a most genial and pleasant man. I sent in my card.
In a few minutes I was admitted, and he said, “You’re John Philip Sousa?”
“Yes,” I replied.
“You wrote the music for Mr. Nobles’ play?”
“Yes, I’m the man.”
He looked at me and, with eyes twinkling, said, “Well, at least I’ll say it was copied very nicely. What are you doing in Philadelphia?” he next inquired.
“Oh,” I said, “I’ve come over to look at the Centennial, and if anything in my line turns up I may consider it.”
“I’m glad you came in,” he said. “I’ve been commissioned to recruit the extra men for the Offenbach orchestra. Offenbach doesn’t take but about half of the men from Paris to come here, and I have been deputized to engage the rest of the orchestra. Your instrument, of course, is the violin?”
“Yes.”
“I would like to have you in the orchestra if you can pass the examination,” he said.
“Well, there’s no harm in trying me,” I replied.
“When would you like to undertake the examination?” he asked.
“In a half hour,” I said.
“That sounds good,” he replied.
“I’ll go get my fiddle and be back here in a half hour.”
I came back in a half hour and I don’t think I played over five minutes for Mr. Hassler when he said, “That’s all right. I’ll put you down as one of the first fiddles with Offenbach.”
So, notwithstanding the terrible prediction of the joy-killer, I didn’t starve to death, but got a most pleasant engagement.
The orchestra was a very large one and Monsieur Offenbach conducted only his own numbers, which embraced possibly half of the program. The other numbers were conducted by Max Maretzek, Antonio Reiff and Simon Hassler.
I found Mr. Hassler a very good-natured man with a keen sense of humor and always very kindly and considerate to his orchestra.
I recall one incident while we were rehearsing. The orchestral platform was in the center of this building, which was called the Offenbach Garden and was on the corner of Broad and Cherry streets, Philadelphia. One morning a real la-de-da composer came with a big bundle of music under his arm and went to the kind-hearted Mr. Hassler, whe was rehearsing the last number on the program, and had some conversation with him, and Mr. Hassler turned to the orchestra and said, “Gentlemen, this is Mr. So-and-So, a composer whom I have known and who has just finished a new composition which he would ask you gentlemen to play over.”
Anybody who knows orchestras well knows just how they feel about playing a thing over when they have already had a long rehearsal; but when Mr. Hassler said he would be glad if they’d do it they accepted and the parts were handed out. Mr. Hassler handed this society composer the baton, which he almost too readily took. He mounted the platform and began the number. As I remember, it didn’t amount to a great deal; besides, the copyists had not been overscrupulous in keeping it free from wrong notes. As we finished it his head was buried in the score, evidently looking over pages where things hadn’t sounded just right to him, and while he was so engrossed each member of the orchestra of at least eighty men—with the single exception of the young fellow who sat next to me, and myself—silently walked, or I might say slid, off the platform. Then, still with his head buried in the score, his mind very much engrossed, he said, “Now, gentlemen, that we understand each other, we will go through the composition again.”
He raised his head and his baton at the same time, and he was the most astonished man in the world as he looked forward, for in front of him sat two boys! The rest of the orchestra was on its way home, and I don’t think he could have brought them back even at union rates. He walked off the platform a very sad man.
Offenbach was a small man with muttonchop whiskers and sideburns. He had in America an unusually large orchestra, but conducted only his own works. The arrangements of his work were poorly copied and had many mistakes. The Trip to the Moon ballet was printed and correct. His attention was called by Max Maretzek, the assistant conductor, to an arrangement of his most famous melodies by Conradi called Offenbachiana which he played at every concert. We also played very often a polka—I think it was called La Belle America. Offenbach was a kindly man and got on splendidly with the orchestra. He spoke in French only.
I played in the Offenbach orchestra during his entire season, which ended sometime in July. I wrote one piece for the orchestra, The International Congress, since published for wind band. It started with a short fugue on Yankee Doodle, then ran a gamut of the principal national songs of the world, winding up with The Star-Spangled Banner treated in imitation of the last part of the Tannhäuser overture.
At the end of the season I was in doubt whether to remain in Philadelphia, return to Washington, or seek my fortune in New York; but dear old Simon Hassler settled the question for me by giving me a position in his orchestra at the Chestnut Street Theater.
This orchestra was probably the best-equipped and largest of the theatrical orchestras of that day. The theater was run as a stock company under the management of Gemmill, Scott and Mackey, and had in its company Minnie Conway, Arthur McKee Rankin, W. J. Ferguson, Lizzie Harold, and many others who became famous as great actors. The star of the company was one of the finest actors it has been my pleasure to see—W. E. Sheridan. I thought his Louis XI was far superior to any other I had seen, including Irving’s.
In 1876, Byron’s play, Our Boys, ran neariy two hundred nights. It is always a matter of interest to meet somebody who corresponds to a character in a play or story. I think most of us are apt, when we become acquainted with someone, to associate him with some incident in a play or a story.
We had a viola player in the orchestra who always recalled to me that well-known story of a very high society lady calling her footman and saying, “James, I want to rest today and don’t want to see anyone; so if anybody calls, I don’t want you to indulge in an untruth, but give them some evasive answer.”
James, with that deference peculiar to footmen, said, “I understand, madame.” So when Mrs. Nouveau Riche called in the afternoon, the footman went to the door.
She asked, “Is Mrs. Brown in?”
The footman, leaning over to her, said, “Is your grandmother a monkey?”
Well, this viola player always reminded me of this footman, because if you asked him if it was going to snow, he’d probably tell you his baby had the croup. Mr. Hassler tried on several occasions to pin him down to an answer, but without success. One night as we sat in the music room smoking and playing cards, awaiting the end of the act, the viola player got up quickly and said, “I guess I have time to run to the drug store before the act’s over.” The acts were being timed to the minute. He pulled out his watch and noticed the time.
Mr. Hassler believed he saw his opportunity and called to him, “What time is it, Joe?”
Joe took out his timepiece for a second look, put it back in his pocket slowly, and starting for the door, turned and said, “I’ll tell you when I get back,” and disappeared.
It was in the Chestnut Street Theater that I first met Mr. F. F. Mackey, a very great character actor and the stage manager of a splendid company. When we did Masks and Faces he played Triplet, and a year before that event he took lessons from our principal violinist to learn to play one measly little jig for Peg Woffington to dance to. He was absolutely devoid of any musical sense, so it surprised all of us that he should attempt to scrape for Peg’s diversion; but he was the most painstaking stage manager I have ever met. In the middle of the stage during rehearsals there was a large unabridged dictionary on the table, and whenever there was an argument as to the accepted pronunciation of a word, Mackey would go to the dictionary and would read out the word and the pronunciation.
As I said before, Our Boys ran nearly two hundred nights. There was an old German in the band who had the reputation of being a great grouch. We very seldom heard his voice, and he would reach the theater at least fifteen minutes before the overture waa played, tune his instrument, and sit down waiting for the rest of the orchestra to come in. He did that every night during the run of Our Boys.
Mr. Hassler, who always had some funny ideas in his head, said, “Sousa, I’ll bet a supper with you that that old fellow, although he had heard Our Boys for at least a hundred and fifty nights, is not able to tell us what the first line in the play is.”
As I believed it would be impossible for a man, even without listening, to fail in a thing like that, I accepted the bet.
Mr. Hassler sent for the old German at the end of the act, and said, “I have just made a bet with Sousa here about what the first line in Our Boys is. You’ve looked at the play and heard it every night for a hundred and fifty nights. Will you kindly tell us what it is?”
The old musician stood on one foot, then shifted to the other, thought a long while and finally said, “Vell, it was somedings.”
After the season at the Chestnut Street Theater was over, I accepted an engagement to lead an orchestra for a vaudeville entertainment at Cape May Point. It was not a great success, although they had very good people.
The following season found me back with Mr. Hassler in the Chestnut Street Theater, and part of the time playing with the Permanent Exhibition Orchestra that was giving concerts at the Finance Building of the Centennial. I began making money teaching; besides I was assistant to Thomas a’ Becket correcting proofs for the W. F. Shaw Company, and occasionally sold a composition. During these days I wrote a Te Deum and began to look about for an opera libretto.
The funny man of the Philadelphia Bulletin was Charles Heber Clark, who had written a very humorous obituary poetry article, and had published Elbow Room and another book. They were pleasant works, and Mr. Hassler, who had unbounded confidence in my ability as a writer—as I had written all sorts of things while I was with him, among them a great deal of dramatic music for several of the plays at the Chestnut Street Theater—suggested I go with him to see Mr. Clark to find if he would write a libretto for me. Mr. Clark was very affable, but wanted as a starter $5000. That ended it. He produced a play a short time afterward. It was a failure. So we were even in disappointment.
Mary Dennison, author of That Husband of Mine and Opposite the Jail, started in to write a libretto for me called Florine, but only reached a portion of the first act when she gave it up owing to the death of her husband. For those who have read her books but have never met her, I may say she was a very beautiful woman, with an equally beautiful character. I gave her violin lessons; she had considerable talent. She was a sister of the pastor of the church I attended.
What was my surprise, walking down Chestnut Street, but to come face to face with the girl I had left in Washington two years before! Her father was with her and they were to return to Washington the next day. I invited them to dine with me, then we went to the hotel where they were stopping. Of course she wanted to know all about what I had been doing, and I gave her a most rosy account of the number of pupils I had, the number of pages of proof I had corrected—at twelve cents a page—how I was playing in two orchestras and how my compositions were beginning to attract attention.
They left next morning. Two days later I received a letter from her telling me her father was delighted at the progress I was making and would be very glad to see me whenever I should call. I left Saturday night for Washington, went to church with them Sunday morning, and then had a long and satisfactory interview with the father, and all was merry as a marriage bell—but—the girl’s mother appeared on the scene. She came while the young lady was changing her dress after luncheon, preparing to take a stroll with me. I have always felt that her mother loved me as a son. She had no sons of her own, and from the time I first met her she was always most kind to me and interested in everything I did. She came into the room, put her hand on my shoulder in a most motherly manner and said, “Philip, I’m worried.”
“What’s worrying you?” I asked.
She continued, “Em may love you, but I can’t be certain. There’s a man who has been paying attention to Em for a year past. He is years older than she, is a fine man, was an officer in the Confederate Army, and I know loves her dearly. Of course she will marry you if you insist; but will you be happy?”
This was a thunderbolt out of a clear sky.
I took her hand and said, “I understand.”
She left the room and in a little while Em came in. I took my hat and overcoat and said, “I’m going.”
“Where?” she inquired.
“To Philadelphia.”
“Why, you said you wouldn’t leave until midnight.”
“I’m going at four o’clock.” It was then three.
“What made you change your mind?”
I looked at her intently, then said, “Ask your mother.”
I left and returned to Philadelphia.
Monday morning I received a letter from her advising me not to be a foolish boy. I tore the letter up. Wednesday I received another warning if I didn’t answer that letter she would marry the other man. I didn’t answer it, and the following Wednesday I received a copy of the Evening Star of Washington announcing her marriage. Thus ended my first romance.
J. M. Stoddart engaged me to write a series of fantasies from such operas as Carmen and The Sea Cadet and others, that gave me a new interest and kept me busy. The fortunes of the Chestnut Street Theater waning, I accepted an invitation to fiddle at Mrs. John Drew’s Theater on Arch Street, Philadelphia. She was a splendid manager and during the time I was there I can recall but one mistake she made; that was the production of The Sorcerer. It was not a howling success at the best, and with actors unused to musical pieces, inadequate rehearsals and exploitation, it failed.
Fred Zimmerman, the leader of the orchestra, and I made the orchestration. Just at this time Pinafore was getting into the ears and hearts of the public, and one day when I went to W. F. Shaw’s to correct some proofs I met Tom a’ Becket.
During our conversation he said, “A bunch of society amateurs want to give Pinafore and they want me to drill them. I have neither the time nor the inclination, so I recommended you. They rehearse tomorrow night at 7:30. You be there. They pay ten dollars each rehearsal, and if you suit them you may get the engagement to conduct all the performances they intend giving.”
I went there the next night and found about the finest collection of voices and beauty I had ever heard or seen. I was young, therefore was very severe in rehearsals. It’s wonderful the amount of drilling competent people will take! The ones who get hot under the collar are the stupid or vain ones, never the well equipped for the work. I drilled them until eleven and called a rehearsal for the next night. When we gave our first performance it made a sensation. It was, I believe, the best singing cast Pinafore ever had in all the myriad of companies that did the piece. The operetta was a craze in America. In Gilbert’s life, he complained that he had been consistently unfairly treated by the professional critic, and it is rather amusing nowadays to read the many futile criticisms written of H. M. S. Pinafore over fifty years ago. It was said that in the story itself there is not much of humor to balance its studied absurdity, and it was described as a frothy production destined soon to subside into nothingness.
The immediate success of Pinafore was to some extent due to an admirable topical joke. Just before it was produced Disraeli had appointed W. H. Smith, head of a firm of publishers, as First Lord of the Admiralty. Mr. Smith was an admirable man of business and a high-minded politician, and his proved an excellent administration, though there was something humorous in the British Navy being ruled by a man without sea experience. Gilbert worked the joke for all it was worth in Sir Joseph Porter’s song, And Now I’m a Ruler of the Queen’s Navee.
Pinafore was produced at the Opera Comique, London, Saturday, May 25, 1878, and ran over 700 nights in its first run. “What, never? Hardly ever,” was heard times without number every day, and everybody sang, whistled or went to see Pinafore. It was a poor town that didn’t have at least two Pinafore companies. In Philadelphia, at the South Broad, was the original American company; at the North Broad, Fatty Stewart had another permanent company; while at other theaters there were always one or two traveling companies regaling the audience with the melodies and satires of the piece. Its popularity in America was perhaps brought to a cumulative interest by an editorial in the Philadelphia Public Ledger. The Ledger’s second name was the Philadelphia Bible. Mr. Childs, its editor, was greatly respected and had a penchant for giving everybody who called on him a cup and saucer as a remembrance. The Ledger published an editorial pointing out the innocence, the cleanliness and purity of Pinafore in happy contrast to the tights—God knows they were modest in those days—and coarseness of the French pieces that occupied the stage. The effect was electrical. People who had never been in a theater in their lives came to see Pinafore. It was a time of emancipation for penned-in youth, for all the myriads of puritanical people suddenly discovered that the theater gave innocent enjoyment and wasn’t such a hole of the devil as they had been taught to believe.
We called our company the Philadelphia Church Choir Company and gave performances in Philadelphia and adjacent towns like Wilmington, Trenton and Pottsville, always with great success.
One day—to be very accurate, the twenty-second of February—I was introduced by the Hebe of the company to her understudy, one of the prettiest little girls I had ever seen—Jennie Bellis, of Philadelphia. She had the most perfect complexion, I believe, of anybody on earth. She had on a little gray hat, sort of poke bonnet effect, and was very prettily dressed.
After I had shaken hands with her she said, laughingly, “There are two birthdays today. I am celebrating Washington’s ——”
“And,” I broke in, “whose?”
“Mine,” she said. “I’m sixteen.”
Well, we were married before she was seventeen. She became Mrs. John Philip Sousa and has remained Mrs. John Philip Sousa even unto this day. She has given me three children; Philip, Priscilla and Helen, and all of these, including the young lady herself, are glad that she was introduced to me and that we were married and lived happy ever after.
The company finally got into the hands of professional managers, John Gorman and William Mead; most of the amateurs faded out of the picture and were replaced with professionals, and then we invaded New York. Opening at the Broadway Theater, afterward Daly’s, under the management of Edgar and Fulton, we were a great success and stayed there the entire season.
In November, 1879, Gilbert and Sullivan and Blanche Roosevelt, who had come from London to give Pinafore and the Pirates of Penzance, came to our performance, unheralded and supposedly incog, but our very alert stage manager, Peaks, recognized them and had a young lady of our management sit by them and catch whatever they said about the piece. This was the nature of her report:
“ ‘Piece finely sung,’ said Sullivan. ‘Couldn’t be better.’ ”
“Blanche Roosevelt didn’t believe she could vocalize as well as the soprano did the following verse:
“This very night, With bated breath, And muffled oar, Without a light, As still as death, We’ll steal ashore, A clergyman Shall make us one At half-past ten, And then we can Return, for none Can part us then!
“Gilbert was indignant because Dick Deadeye interpolated a song by Molloy.”
“Sullivan thought the orchestration was excellent.” It was mine, so I joined in the general joy.
“Gilbert said the acting was below par.” And in that respect I also agreed with him; but we had organized the company as a singing one and paid very little attention to the dramatic side.
A few weeks later we were off on a tour of New England, and as the season advanced it was seen that Pinafore was getting weak in the knees and a new opera was necessary, so it was suggested that we take Sullivan and Burnand’s opera, The Contrabandista, rewrite the libretto and make it more of a chorus piece—that was our strong point. The task devoived on me to do the music. Charles Gaylord, author of the successful play, Our Fritz, was to write the libretto. The opera was finished in an incredibly short time, rehearsed as each new number was written, and produced in Jersey City first. It met with just a little bit of favor, but not enough to set a special day aside for universal rejoicing. We took it through New England and finally closed it in Holyoke, Massachusetts. I hurried to Philadelphia and a little while afterward was married.
I picked up my fiddle and played substitute in various theaters, and just then Mr. F. F. Mackey wrote he would like to meet me. We met, he told me he had the libretto of a musical comedy, Our Flirtation, written by James Bird Wilson, of Cleveland, and would like me to write the music. I made a contract with him, took my bride, a couple of quires of music paper and a large capacity for work, to Cape May and wrote the piece. It was put in rehearsal late in July and first produced at Park Theater on Arch Street, Philadelphia.
The flutist of the orchestra was a Scotchman named John S. Cox, probably the finest artist on his instrument in America. His great delight was difficult music; so, knowing this weakness, in the overture to Our Flirtation I wrote a cadenza for the flute that was extremely difficult. The copyist in writing out the parts had placed the cadenza on a turn-over page. The first thing the player met when he turned the page was a myriad of notes extending through the gamut of the instrument. Cox, like most of these old-time players, never turned the page until he had reached it. It is my belief that musicians felt it was a reflection on their ability to read at sight to turn a page before they got to it.
Cox’s eyes opened when he saw the cadenza.
He looked up at me and said, “Just wait a minute.” Bending over, he softly played the passage through and then said, “All right, I’m ready,” and phrased and played it beautifully.
The orchestra applauded him, and while we were at the Philadelphia theater there was always applause when he played the cadenza.
After closing at Philadelphia we went to Reading, and when the orchestra was assembled I noticed the flute player was a very rotund and very short German, bespectacled and taciturn. Rehearsal began. When the flutist turned the page and his eyes fell on the notes, which seemed to be as many as the sands of the sea, his eyes opened and a puzzled look came into his face.
I turned to him and said, “Go ahead, play it.”
He looked daggers at me, slowly took his flute apart, put it in the case and said, “I vill not blay vhat I cannot blay,” and walked out of the orchestra.
“Come back,” I cried. “We’ll cut the cadenza.”
“Nein, nein, mein Herr,” he said, “I vill not blay vhat I cannot blay,” and disappeared. Reading never heard the cadenza.
We traveled west and when we reached St. Louis I received a letter from my father telling me that he had had an interview with the colonel commandant of the Marine Corps, who wanted me to come on as quickly as possible. I spoke to Mr. Mackey, but he was not willing to let me go at that time. I telegraphed my father I would come as soon as I could, and we went on to Kansas City.
At Kansas City I received a telegram from my father, “Have accepted the position in your name. Come at once.”
I went to Mr. Mackey again. He finally agreed to let me go and I secured Charles Zimmerman to take my place as leader of the organization.
I reached Washington on the last day of September, 1880. I called on the commandant and discussed what he expected of me and what I expected of the Government. The next day I joined the marines as leader of the band and for the first time in my life conducted a military band.
There was a little old man who had been in the band for years and years who had always started out by making a great ado over each new leader and ended by hating him. Outside of that characteristic he was a most ordinary musician, but he seemed to have a rather exalted idea of his own importance.
When I arrived with my wife at the station, my father was waiting for me, and out of the crowd came this little old fellow.
He shook hands very cordially and then said, “Mr. Philip, we will bring you a serenade tomorrow night.”
I tried to explain to him that we did not want a serenade, but couldn’t move him from his purpose.
Finally I said, “I’ll not allow you to serenade me tomorrow night; but if you love me as much one year from tomorrow as you do now I’ll consider it a great honor if you will serenade me.”
Forty-five years have passed and I’m still waiting for the serenade! I suppose he has passed on to that haven where there is rest and no serenades.
As my father had been a former member of the band, a trombonist—at this time long on the retired list—and I had been in the band during a short time while in my boyhood, I had a decided advantage over a perfect stranger in my new position.
The commandant had impressed on me the necessity of a complete reorganization of the band. The men were dissatisfied and, to use the commandant’s words, “The band gives me more trouble than all the rest of the corps put together.”
I found its library of music small, antiquated and most of it badly arranged and copied. Not a note of Wagner, Berlioz, Grieg, Tschaikowsky, or any of the modern composers that were attracting attention in the musical world. I immediately selected first-class compositions from the leading catalogues of Europe and proceeded with the most rigid rehearsals, bringing the band up to modern requirements.
Owing to the small pay received by the musicians, together with the impossibility of getting a discharge from the service except through disability or dishonor, many of the men developed an accentuated perpetual grouch. It was getting on my nerves so much I went to the commandant and explained to him the condition of affairs, and suggested I should like him to grant a discharge to any member of the band who applied for his release and of which I approved. With great reluctance he finally consented. At the very next rehearsal one of the best players in the band put down his instrument and said the rehearsals were too hard; in fact were beyond endurance.
“Well,” I said, “what are you going to do about it?”
Very sullenly he said, “I want my discharge.”
I knew he didn’t want it, but I said, “Make out your application and I will get it for you.” Much to the musicians’ surprise he received his discharge within twenty-four hours. By the end of the first year, the band was reduced to thirty-three men and even the commandant was a little alarmed; but I gradually gathered about me an ambitious and healthy lot of young players, and the public performances of the band were such that it began to attract very favorable attention from Washingtonians and those coming to the city.
From a motley mob of nurses and baby carriages and some hangers-on, the audiences at the White House grounds concerts grew into the thousands, and the Saturday afternoon concerts at the White House became a social event. Thursday concerts at the barracks were splendidly attended and Wednesday concerts at the Capitol drew large audiences, although we suffered from the noise of street cars and carriages passing in close proximity to the band stand. The harmony and good behavior of the men became proverbial; for be it said to their everlasting credit during the last eight years I was with the band, not a man was reported for dereliction of duty or unsoldierly conduct.
When the men found that I played fair with them and my approval for their discharge meant carrying it into effect, they never asked for it unless they really wanted to go, in which respect they were very much like the rest of the human family.
The many and various parades we had took on the character of events, and we would be followed from wherever we assembled to the end of the march, not only by small boys but by many of the business men of Washington—and, perhaps, some unsophisticated congressmen. I believe there was no better marching band in existence during the last ten years I was with it. The front file consisted of trombones and basses—finely built young fellows who could step out and keep up a cadence of one hundred and twenty a minute from the time the parade started until it ended.
But during my first days with the band, and the preceding years, it was a hotbed of dissension. The members were mostly Italians and Germans, with a few Americans and English. The main cause of the trouble was what was known as outside business—the engagements the men made apart from their governmental duties which were their principal means of existence. The government pay ran thirty-eight dollars a month for a first-class musician, twenty-four dollars for a second, twenty-one dollars for the third, and the grandly remunerative sum of thirteen dollars for the fourth, or private class. Of course there was thirteen cents a day for rations, besides some fuel and clothing money, but it was all so pitifully small that it was hard te recruit men and equally hard to keep them satisfied after you got them.
“Soft words don’t butter parsnips,” I knew, but if I could build up the private practice of the band something would be gained, I thought. The repertoire of the organization was very limited; some selections of old Italian operas, a few of the standard overtures, and a great number of ordinary marches, polkas, and so on. I knew from former experience that the music played at the White House receptions, state dinners, and Saturday afternoons in the winter was too robust for the limits of the White House, and I began almost immediately to soften the blow to the guests who came to greet, eat with, or simply meet the President.
The first appearance of the band under my direction was at a New Year’s Day reception. The first to enter are the ambassadors, then the cabinet, then the Supreme Court, then the officers of the Army, Navy and Marine Corps stationed in Washington, the bureau chiefs of the departments, winding up with the general public. As the first named came, I played music of a subdued character, eliminating the percussion instruments, so that the drums, tympanums and cymbals were largely squelched, all of which did not please the drummers, who had from long usage believed that they not only came to be seen, but heard. Then as the guests came in greater numbers, light operas were played, and then when the general public came I ran into marches, polkas, hornpipes and music of the liveliest character. I think my method gave the President a chance to shake hands and pass along double the number of people he could have met had I played slow pieces. President Hayes’ secretary told me it was a splendid idea, that the President was less fatigued than he had been in former receptions. The President evidently appreciated the work I was doing. As a band we played in the anteroom that was an entrance to the portico; as an orchestra, beside the staircase between the East Room and the reception rooms. When we had orders to play for the President, we assembled at the Marine barracks and went to the White House in a street car.
General Hayes was an American of America. He was very quiet and a man of unquestionable ability. The dispute over his election no doubt made him a more serious man than necessary, even for a President, but everybody who knew him loved and respected him. Mrs, Hayes was a beautiful woman and looked a very queen in the White House. In my opinion she was the most beautiful First Lady of the Land we have had.
On the occasion of my second appearance at the White House, at a dinner given to the ambassadors and the Supreme Court, I had a little run in with a man of African descent that brought about immediate reform in regard to refreshments served the band.
The members of the band had complained to me that when they were called to get something to eat, after playing several hours, by the time they reached the dining room in the basement of the White House it would be filled with a motley crowd of waiters, garden helpers, policemen, and so on, who would devour nearly everything that was on the table. One bandsman told me the last time he went to supper he got only a plate of oyster soup.
However, on the night in question, we had been playing almost incessantly from 7:30 until nearly 10, when this burly, dictatorial colored man—he was a left-over from General Grant’s time—came over to my stand and said, “You and your musicianers can go downstairs and get something to eat.”
I looked at him for a moment, and then, with a far-away look in my eyes, replied: “It has been my pleasure to see the Jungfrau in all her snowy grandeur; I have seen the lazy Adriatic lap the Venetian pebbled shore; I have heard the melodic words of the silver-voiced orator expound on the beauties of America and Americans. I have heard much and I have seen much; but I never expected to hear a menial of the President of the United States of America use a word not in a dictionary and not used in polite society on any part of this mundane sphere. What do you mean by ‘musicianers’? The word is obsolete. Explain.”
“Explain?” he said. “If you don’t go downstairs to the dining room you won’t get anything to eat.”
I turned to the band and said, “This colored man, evidently deputized by someone higher in authority, says if you don’t hurry you won’t get anything to eat. Those who want to go are excused.”
Eight or ten went. They came back in a short time reporting there was nothing left to eat.
The next time we played the same colored man came to me and said, just a little less aggressively, “Der’s some grub downstairs for the band if dey wants it.”
I said, “One moment, please, until I give your order.” Then, turning to the bandsmen, I said, “This dusky factotum reports there is some grub downstairs for you. Whoever wants it is excused.”
Not a man left his place.
The old darky went off shaking his head and muttering, “I’ll be damned!”
The next morning there was a message at the barracks asking me to call at the White House as soon as I could. I went immediately. Colonel McCook was the officer in charge, and he said “Mrs. Hayes wants to see you.”
Mrs. Hayes came in in a few moments and said, “Mr. Sousa, the President is anxious at all times to contribute to the welfare of those who entertain his guests. It was reported to him that neither you nor the band accepted his invitation to have some refreshments. There must be some mistake, and no doubt it is on our part. Please talk it over with the colonel and I’m sure everything will be set all right.”
She left the room and I told the colonel just what had happened, giving him a history of the colored man’s actions and the disappearance of food before the men got there.
He said, “Mr. Hayes was very particular about ordering a luncheon for your men, and hereafter we will see that they, and they only, get it.”
And at the next affair at the White House, when the time came for the lunch, a young man came up to me and said, “Mr. Sousa, there’s a luncheon for your men down in the dining room. Please tell each of them to rap twice on the door and they will be admitted. The President has arranged for your luncheon in the State Room and will be pleased to have you accept the invitation.”
In a few months General Hayes’ term of office expired and he returned home beloved by all who knew him as well as I did.
The next President was General Garfield, and his tenure of office was so short that I did not have much opportunity to meet him. We played just one time at the White House while he was in office. That is, we should have played there, but we did not connect, much to Mrs. Garfield’s disappointment, to say nothing of our own.
We were ordered with the Marine Battalion to take part in the dedication of the Farragut statue. We left the barracks about eight A.M., marched to the Northwest of the city, waited until the ceremonies commenced, took part in them, which comprised several hours, and reached barracks about 6:30 that evening. The band was dismissed. All the men who lived outside the barracks left at once, I went home, took a bath, put on my civilian clothes, and sat down to dinner.
In a few moments the doorbell rang and the maid came and said, “The commanding officer wants you as quickly as possible.”
I got into my undress uniform and hurried to the barracks three blocks away.
“Sousa,” said the commanding officer, “a message has just been received for the band to report at the White House in full dress at eight o’clock.”
“But,” said I, “it’s after seven now, the band was dismissed for the day, and the men are probably scattered over the town, and no doubt many of them are playing at private engagements and I know it will be hopeless to try to find them in time.”
“Well,” said the officer, “those were my instructions and those are your orders.”
We sent the messengers out and they found just one man, and he was the bass drummer. So at eight o’clock, I, in my gorgeous red uniform, sat at one end of the platform, and the bass drummer down at the other. There was a dazzling array of music stands and empty chairs, but no men. The President evidently saw the humorous side of it, for when I explained it to him he said it couldn’t be helped. All evening long we sat there, the drummer and I. When the reception was over, I dismissed the drummer with proper military ceremony and we filed out. We had reported for duty, were present and accounted for, though the President and his guests heard never a note.
That was the only time I met Mr. or Mrs. Garfield, for, soon after, an assassin’s bullet ended the life of the President. I was so confident that the President would recover that Wilson J. Vance, at that time the appointment clerk of the Treasury Department, and myself were planning a hymn of thanksgiving for his recovery. We had several interviews and were about to begin work when the terrible message came that the President had died at Elberon. I had retired when I heard the newsboys shouting the sad tidings. I got up, dressed, and told my wife I wanted to get out in the air, and I walked all night, in fact until ten o’clock next morning. I came home, took music paper and wrote the In Memoriam Dirge, the one we played when the President’s body was received at Washington and the one we played when he was put to rest in the cemetery in Cleveland.
When Mr. Arthur became President we were still idle because of the period of mourning over the death of General Garfield, and we did not appear at the White House for several months. President Arthur was much more reserved when he talked to me than was President Hayes.
I can hardly credit the oft-repeated story that General Grant knew only two tunes, one of which was Yankee Doodle and the other wasn’t. I have known more than one President, relieved from the onerous duties of a great reception, to find rest by sitting quietly in the corner of a convenient room and listening to the music.
During Arthur’s Administration, on the occasion of a state dinner, the President came to the door of the main lobby of the White House and, beckoning me to his side, asked me to play the Cachucha. A young lady wanted to dance a Spanish dance to that tune. When I explained that we had not the music with us, but would be glad to include it on our next program, the President looked surprised and said: “Why, Sousa, I thought you could play anything. I’m sure you can. Now give us the Cachucha.”
This placed me in a predicament, as I did not wish the President to believe that the band was not at all times able to respond to his wishes. Fortunately one of the bandsmen remembered the melody and played it over softly to me on his cornet. I hastily wrote out several parts for the leading instruments and told the rest of the band to vamp.
We played the Cachucha to the satisfaction of Mr. Arthur, who came to the door and said, “I knew you could play it.”
As bandmasters were beginning to play my marches, Across the Danube, written in commemoration of the victory of the Russians over the Turks; the Resumption March, written after our return to specie payment, and Our Flirtation, a march still enjoying unquestionable popularity, I was beginning to make a little dent in the march line.
I again turned to opera, and Colonel Wilson Vance offered to write a libretto using the music of The Smugglers as much as possible. When the piece was finished we retained the name and gave an amateur performance in Washington. With our more than friendly audience, together with a host of friends of the National Rifles, one of the crack military companies of the city, who appeared as a chorus of soldiers in the piece, the piece seemed to make a kindly impression, and Vance insisted we should form a company and send it on the road. We engaged a very clever English girl, Fannie Wentworth, for the principal part; Jim Rennie, a good comedian, and Henry Mansfield—a brother of the famous Richard—for the principal barytone. When I was in New York and engaged Mansfield his brother was playing in the Black Cloaks at the Standard Theater. I went to see the performance with Henry Mansfield, and after the performance he introduced me to his brother.
After shaking hands with Richard he said, “So you have engaged my brother to take a part in your opera?”
I nodded in acquiescence.
He looked at me, then at his brother, and said, “Well, he’ll make a hell of a mess of it!”
We kept the piece on the road for only about three weeks, closing in Philadelphia at the Chestnut Street Opera House. All our money was spent and we had to borrow to bring our company back to Washington, which we did, and buried The Smugglers in the vast dramatic cemetery of musical failures.
I went to my hotel after the company had departed on the midnight train, the most woebegone man in the world. I sized myself up and I could only see that I was a colossal failure as a composer, as a dramatist and as a man. I buried my head in the pillow and pictured myself as the smallest and most insignificant specimen of any member of the human race. If ever a man berated himself and placed himself in the lowest depths, I did that night. There seemed to be nothing left for me in the world but to crawl into a hole and pull the hole in after me.
I finally fell asleep. When I woke it was nearly midday and the sun was shining in my window. My wife was sitting, demurely hemming a handkerchief and waiting for me to dress. I got up.
She came over, put her arms around my neck and said, “Don’t grieve. It’s going to be all right sometime.”
“You bet,” I said, “it will be all right. I’m going to start on a new opera tomorrow and it’s going to be a knockout.”
The next day I started on the libretto of Desirée, and though, when it was finished and produced, it was not entirely a knockout, it made quite a number of critics sit up and take notice. Edward Taber and I worked hard on the piece, and it was more or less kindly received as among the first of the American comic operas. It was produced May 1, 1884, in Washington, and the following autumn transferred to Philadelphia, where it occupied the Broad Street Theater for some weeks. It was memorable for the fact that it introduced that splendid comedian, De Wolf Hopper, to the public. In this opera he made his debut as a comic-opera star. The plot of the opera was taken from an old English comedy called Our Wife, the subject of quite a number of pieces before that time and since, and Hopper played the part of an old haberdasher whose beautiful daughter is loved by the Count de Courville, but she loves the Marquis Delavare and finally marries him. The coming marriage of the marquis and the daughter gave birth to a topical song in the opera, which was sung with great success by Hopper, and was also used in a number of musical pieces after the opera ceased its run.
The verse was as follows:
Generosity’s a virtue that evinces The noble family from which I spring; When our daughters marry marquises or princes, We never fail to do the proper thing. Now if I find it possible to do so, Within so small a fraction of a day, I’ll get the most expensive sort of trousseau, For all of which my son-in-law will pay.
This excessive liberality Approaches prodigality, For all of which his son-in-law will pay.
Taber wrote for Hopper so many verses that it was not an unusual thing for eighteen, nineteen or twenty verses to be sung in this song.
Colonel John McCaull was the manager who produced the piece, and being a member of the Clover Club of Philadelphia he invited Taber and myself to be guests at one of their famous dinners. I could not go, owing to concerts with the Marine Band, but Taber was there, and one of those unfortunate episodes occurred which ended the life of the opera.
It seems Governor Curtin, who had been war governor of Pennsylvania, when called upon to speak, dwelt largely upon the things he had done during the Civil War. He probably offended McCaull in some reference to the Confederacy—because the colonel had been on the Southern side during the late unpleasantness. When he said something that particularly riled McCaull, he jumped up and called Curtin to order. There were murmurs and a few hisses, and McCaull sat down. Quietly pulling out his handkerchief, Curtin wiped his glasses slowly with it, then put them on again, and looking across the table said, with mocking sarcasm, to McCaull, “Will you kindly give me your name?”
McCaull sank back in his chair speechless, and the chairman ended the
unfortunate episode by changing the subject. A few days later a Washington paper had a
full account of the affair. I don’t know whether Taber wrote it or not, but I do
know it corresponded with the story Taber told me, and I do know that McCaull
blamed Taber for its publicity and took Desirée off the boards. I wrote him asking
when the opera would be continued. He answered with a vituperative letter about
Taber and said he would neither play the opera nor give up his contract, which was
for a period of five years. At the end of the five years the opera reverted to its
original owners and has been resting in peace ever since.
Printed in the Saturday Evening Post
198(21), 1925-11-21.
Part 3
The Arthur Administration was drawing to a close. From time immemorable, the Marine Band had opened its program at the White House, also whenever the band marched past the reviewing officer in a parade, with the old Scotch boating song, Hail to the Chief. Whatever merit the old tune possessed, it was not suitable for reviewing purposes. It did not permit the introduction of trumpets and therefore the full musical power of the reviewed musicians was lost. At the White House it smacked rather of royalty than of Jeffersonian simplicity, that members of the cabinet, ambassadors, generals and admirals who would be assembled in the East Room ready to receive the President, were reminded that he was coming by the band thumping out Hail to the Chief. It did not savor of democracy and equality, but neither I nor any bandmaster of the Marine Band before me had had the temerity to change it, because we believed some President at some former time had made a ritualistic precedent of it.
But one night President Arthur left his guests in the East Room, and coming out into the corridor beckoned to me.
I went over to him and he said, “What piece did you play when we went in to dinner?”
“Hail to the Chief, Mr. President,” I answered.
“Do you think it a proper tune?”
“No, sir,” I replied. “It was selected at some time on account of its name, not on account of its character. It’s a boat song and lacks modern military character either for a reception or a parade.”
“Change it,” he said, and walked away.
I wrote the Presidential Polonaise for the White House indoors and the Semper Fidelis March for review purposes outdoors. Semper Fidelis became and is one of the most popular of my marches, and it is played by more bands that have a trumpet and drum corps than any other march ever written. It is the one official piece of music in the United States, because it is the official march adopted by the Marine Corps, by an order of the general commanding the marines. No other composition can establish a claim to official recognition by authority in our Government.
Mr. Arthur’s term expired, and there came to the White House a great man, even though his enemies have proclaimed that he was successful in his failures.
During Mr. Arthur’s administration, his sister, Mrs. McElroy, was the first lady of the land. With the coming of Mr. Cleveland, his sister, Miss Rose Elizabeth Cleveland, assumed that honor and place. If there ever lived a kindlier or sweeter-mannered woman than Miss Cleveland it has not been my lot to meet her; and if there ever lived a finer man than Colonel Dan Lamont, the President’s private secretary, I have never met him. Mrs. Lamont was a lovely, kindly, considerate woman. Then add to these the great Secretary of the Navy, W. C. Whitney, and one can see what a splendid administration started when President Cleveland came into office.
I had gotten off on a wrong foot with the Arthur administration, but I certainly got off with both feet with the Cleveland régime. In a little while I had written a set of waltzes and dedicated them to Miss Cleveland, called Sandalphon; and a short time afterward a set for Mrs. Whitney, called La Reine de la Mer, which still enjoys some favor.
On the occasion of the first New Year’s reception of President Cleveland, Secretary Whitney came over where the band was playing and said, “Sousa, when you get through here I want you to bring the boys of the band to my house. I want them to have a lunch as my guests.”
So at the end of the White House reception the band marched over to Mr. Whitney’s house. He had instructed the butler to find a place for the men to put their instruments, telling the men that they were his guests and were not to play any music, but simply to eat and drink and have a good time. The band enjoyed an hour of good cheer and good wine. One of the newspaper correspondents who was present made a special story out of the occasion and, among other things, said that when the Italians in the band were asked what they wanted, with one voice they answered “spaghetti and Chianti”; that the Germans evinced a desire for sauerkraut and speck, together with Munich beer; while the Americans demanded hog and hominy with hard cider. Of course it was plain fun, but it was copied largely.
Finally the news was given out that Mr. Cleveland was to be married and we were to have a new first lady of the land. When the time was drawing near for the wedding, Colonel Lamont and I carefully measured the number of steps from the place where the bride and groom were to start to the place where they were to stand to be wedded, and I measured off Mendelssohn’s Wedding March to correspond to the exact number of steps.
A week or so before the wedding I received a dispatch from the White House stating the President desired I should bring up the program of music for the wedding if I had made it out. I had not only made it out, but had thoroughly rehearsed it.
I went to the White House and was asked into the President’s office. I handed him the program. He read it slowly. Among the numbers was one by Arditi called I Am the Rose, of which he said, “Of course that is a compliment to the bride.”
“Yes, Mr. President,” I answered.
Another number was from my opera Desirée. On the program it ran Quartette, the Student of Love.
He read it slowly, then said, “I think I’d play that number just as A Quartette, leaving out the Student of Love.”
“It’s quite an effective number, Mr. President,” I rejoined.
“Yes,” he said, “doubtless an effective number, but I think it will sound just as well as A Quartette as it will as the Student of Love.”
“Very well,” I said; and so it was played as A Quartette.
I offered to cut it out and substitute something else, but the President vetoed the suggestion.
“Oh, no,” he said; “don’t do that. No doubt it is very pretty, and as A Quartette will sound very effective.”
I imagine he thought that a ribald newspaper correspondent might find a subject for laughter in associating him with the Student of Love.
At the wedding each member of the band, including myself, received a bouquet of flowers with the compliments of the bride.
While the President was a congenial and fairly approachable man before his marriage, afterward he became more serious and decidedly distant. Whether or not the cares of state hung more heavily on him, he was never as accessible after he married as he was before. His bride was a very beautiful young woman and assumed the position of first lady of the land with honor to herself and, no doubt, satisfaction to her husband.
Though I scarcely met the President or his wife after their marriage, I met the delightful Lamonts more than ever. They would come to the room, when we were playing at a state dinner, and sit for hours listening to the music.
[Photograph: Mr. Sousa and a Groom on the Sousa Estate at Sands Point, Long Island.]
[Photograph: Miss Priscilla Sousa at the Time of Her Graduation From Vassar.]
Finally the administration came to an end and General Harrison moved in. The coming of President Harrison was a return to the simplicity of American life as we know it in the home and by the fireside.
General Harrison was no doubt one of the greatest of the intellectual giants that graced the Presidency. Kind-hearted, he was a gracious man to meet—if your presence was desired. He very quickly became a national hero to those who had no axes to grind. Mrs. Harrison and Mrs. McKee, his wife and daughter, followed out the custom of giving Saturday afternoon receptions during the social season—that is, from January first to the beginning of Lent—and an occasional children’s party would be given for Baby McKee, who was a much-talked-of youngster at the White House during those times.
At one of these children’s parties, the grown-ups at the mansion had evidently planned how the children were to go in to the refreshment room and how they were to be seated. The President was there looking on, but when he attempted to place Baby McKee next to a little tot of the gentler gender, the baby pulled away from the President and said “I won’t!”
The President went after him and pulled him back against his struggles, when he decamped again. Looking at him, and then turning to me, the President said, “Don’t play the march until I get him back.”
“Mr. President,” I replied, “it’s easier to control eighty million people than that little fellow.”
“Watch me,” the President rejoined, very decidedly. He caught the refractory youngster, held him tight in his arms, put him up to the head of the line, pumped him down—almost too firmly—on his feet and, making him shake hands with his selected partner, started them into the march into the refreshment room. Whatever sulkiness Baby McKee had, vanished at the sight of the ice cream, candies and cake.
One drizzly day I drove up to the White House, and through my cab window saw a short man with a big umbrella almost run down by a street car. As I looked, I discovered it was President Harrison. I went into the mansion and was there when he returned from his walk.
I said to him, “Mr. President, I saw you awhile ago picking your way in the rain across the street entirely unattended and as the most humble citizen might have done.”
It was quite different from an incident I had seen in Paris not long before. I was walking down one of the crowded streets when I saw a great commotion some distance ahead of me. I asked what might be the occasion of it and was informed it was perhaps the approach of some dignitary. Directly there appeared a platoon of hussars with drawn revolvers, clearing the streets. Following these at a ahort distance came another platoon with drawn sabers. Then came a hollow square of cavalry in the center of which was a barouche carrying President Carnot of the French Republic. I could not help contrasting the customs in the two republics.
Mrs. Harrison’s favorite musical number, which she requested frequently, was Nevin’s Good Night, Beloved. Mrs. Cleveland had a special liking for the Tannhäuser Overture. I do not recall that we received any other requests from Presidents’ wives.
We occasionally were complimented for our playing by members of the diplomatic corps attending White House receptions. I suppose it was in order for them to praise the President’s band. We were quite popular at the British Embassy, where we played every year on the Queen’s birthday. After each annual appearance Sir Julian Pauncefote gave the band a handsome honorarium.
There had been for some time a new commanding officer of the post at the marine barracks. The barracks was divided into headquarters and post. That part of the barracks on the G Street side was occupied by the residence of the commandant, and the Ninth Street side by offices of the various members of the staff of the Marine Corps.
The officer in command of the post on the west side of the barracks was Major George Porter Houston, who walked lame through the effects of Chagres fever contracted when he commanded the marines at Panama; an officer who, while quick-tempered, was one of the finest of the many fine officers of the Marine Corps. He was as brave as Julius Cæsar, with a steely blue eye that could look clean through you when you happened to be under his gaze.
[Photograph: The Bandmaster and His Daughter, Priscilla.]
[Photograph: Mr. and Mrs. Sousa at The Farm, Their Home on Long Island.]
My first introduction to Houston was rather a trying one. Though I always tried to be diplomatic, I sometimes spoke perhaps a little more warmly than I should; and one morning, after the major had been in command of the post for three weeks or so, when I entered the barracks the sergeant at the gate said, “The commanding officer wishes to see the bandmaster.”
I went up to his office, rapped, and a gruff “Come!” induced me at once to open the door.
He looked up from his desk and said, very sternly, “Are you the bandmaster?”
“Yes, sir,” I replied.
“Well, I want you distinctly to understand that these German dukes and Italian counts that constitute your band can’t run this barracks.”
“I fail to understand you,” I replied.
“Well, I’ll make myself understood. There were three of them late at guard mounting this morning and they can’t run me or this barracks, and I want you to understand it!”
I looked at him and said, “If I am not greatly mistaken, there are certain ruies and regulations governing a marine, be he bandsman or anything else, who fails to be on time at guard mounting.”
He looked at me fully a minute, then said, “Sit down and we will talk this matter over.”
Well, we talked it over. His apparent anger was all assumed, and in twenty minutes Major Houston and I became the closest kind of friends and remained so until his death.
He had qualities that were admirable. I do not think during the time he was commanding officer that a body of troops were ever fed better than he fed his command. He would take some of the money that was intended for beef and convert it into money for oysters. He did this each day of the week so that the marines at the barracks would have a varied bill of fare.
One thing he could not stand and that was a man who lied to him. He was rather easy in his punishment for dereliction of duty when he felt that the man was truthful, but if he found a man was deceiving him he gave him the severest sentence he could under the regulations. I remember on an occasion when the first sergeant—he is really the prosecuting attorney in the police court held every morning before the commandant at the barracks—reported a man for jumping the wall, going out, getting whisky in him, and then returning and having an altercation with the corporal of the guard.
Houston said, “Show him in.”
The door opened and Private Smith came in, his head all bandaged, limping and looking as if he had been through a threshing machine.
Houston turned to me and said, “Sousa, what do you think of a man enlisting in this glorious service of the Marine Corps, getting three fine meals each day, a fine room and bed to live and sleep in, medical attendance if ill, a pension if injured in the service; what would you think of such a man jumping the wall, filling himself full of bad whisky, then coming back and assaulting the sacred presence of the corporal of the guard?”
Of course my cue was to look grave, but say nothing.
Then turning to the first sergeant, he said, “What are the charges against this man?”
“Well, sir, he jumped the wall, got full of whisky, came back and attacked the corporal of the guard; but was overpowered and placed in the brig.”
Houston, looking at the man, said, “Ha, ha! You’re one of those fellows, are you? Now what have you to say for yourself?”
The marine straightened himself slowly, painfully, and said, “I’d thank the commanding officer to hear my story.”
“All right, I’ll hear it, but be careful what you say!”
“Yes, sir, I will be careful,” said the poor, sadly maimed and battered-up private. ‘I was sitting in my quarters about eight o’clock last night and I got thirsty for a drink, and went up to the gate and said to the sergeant of the guard, ‘Can I see the officer of the day?’ He said ‘No, you can’t see the officer of the day. Go back to your quarters.’ I went back to my quarters and I tried to think out why I couldn’t see the officer of the day, and I was getting thirstier; so I went back again and said, ‘I’d like to see the officer of the day. I’d like to get permission to go outside of barracks for fifteen minutes.’ ‘No, you can’t see him,’ said the sergeant. ‘You go back to your quarters, and the next time you come up here and want to see the officer of the day I’ll chuck you in the brig.’ I went back to quarters and I couldn’t see why I should be chucked into the brig; so I sneaked around and jumped the wall, went down and got one drink, and that made me so hot because the sergeant said he would chuck me in the brig, that I took a couple more. I don’t think I was drunk. I walked up to the gate to go in. When the corporal saw me he said, ‘How did you get outside?’ I said, ‘I jumped the wall.’ He came up and said something to me that I wouldn’t allow any man to say, and I struck him. He struck back, and the first thing you know there was a general rumpus and I guess I got the worst of it, for they finally chucked me in the brig and then had to take me to the dispensary to bandage me up; but I wouldn’t allow any man to say to me what he did without fighting him back, whether I got killed or not.”
Houston looked at him and said, “It’s a very serious case, Smith, and requires some thought on my part. You go back to your quarters and I’ll think over your case.”
The woebegone-looking marine limped out.
Houston turned to the first sergeant and said, “Release that man from custody and send him to the hospital.” Then turning to me he said, “Sousa, it’s pretty hard to get all the cardinal virtues for thirteen dollars a month!”
It was very pleasing to me that Houston was passionately fond of my music. One day an advertisement appeared in the Washington papers that a concert would be given by a symphony orchestra from New York, in which the program would consist entirely of music by American composers. Finally the program was announced, and after Houston looked it over and found there was nothing of mine on it he dismissed it by saying he knew it would be rotten.
I defended the program, because there were some really good composers on it, and I said, “They come from New York and perhaps don’t know much about me there,” and tried to excuse the management as best I could.
The concert was given. Next morning, when I went to the barracks, the major sent for me and asked, “Did you play last night at Willard’s Hotel?”
“No, sir; I did not.”
He showed me a criticism of the concert, in which it stated that after the concert there was a reception at Willard’s Hotel and the Marine Band was present. “You answer that,” he said. “Let the rest of the public know you weren’t there.”
So I wrote this to the Washington Post:
“To the Editor: In your account of the concert of American compositions given two evenings since at the Lincoln Hall, you state, ‘The Marine Band stationed behind tall palms played music in violent contrast to that heard earlier in the evening at the American Composers’ Concert.’ I desire to offer a few corrections:
“First: The Marine Band was not placed behind tall palms at Willard’s Hotel.
“Second: The Marine Band did not play music in violent contrast to that heard earlier in the evening at the American Composers’ Concert.
“Third: The Marine Band was not present.
“Fourth: Outside of the above corrections the rest of the article is substantially correct.”
The colonel commandant of the corps was suddenly taken ill and was put on sick leave. I had gotten along splendidly with him, although he opposed any request I made to take the band on a concert tour. The most he would allow would be twenty-four hours’ furlough which would carry us as far as Richmond, Baltimore or Philadelphia. I had applied many times for leave, but he had always refused to indorse an application to the department for it. As I was in the Marine Corps I didn’t propose, even if I had the opportunity, to do anything against his wishes.
As soon as he had left Washington I called on the acting commandant and he said he had no objections to the band making a tour—in fact he approved of it—and gave me permission to call on the Secretary of the Navy.
General Tracy was the Secretary. He was a great friend of the band. He said it was entirely agreeable to him that we should make a tour, but “you’d better see the President and see how he feels about it.”
In my years in Washington I had found out that if you want to see the President, see his wife first; so I called on Mrs. Harrison. She liked the idea and told me that if the President was in good humor and not too tired she would speak to him about it at dinner and let me know as soon as possible.
Next morning when I went to the barracks for my usual rehearsal a telephone message was given me that I should come to the White House at once. I went there, and the doorkeeper led me to the President’s office. As I went into the room he got up, shook hands cordially and, leading me to one of the windows looking out on the Potomac River, said, “Mrs. Harrison told me last night that you are anxious to make a tour with your band. I was thinking myself about going out of town, and,” with a smile, “it would be tough on Washington if both of us were away at the same time. I have thought it over and I believe the country would rather hear you than see me; so you have my permission to go.”
I immediately arranged a five weeks’ tour, which was a success both artistically and financially. The tour was directed by David Blakely, manager of Gilmore’s Band and, at times, of the Thomas Orchestra. After we had completed our tour our commandant died.
His son, a Philadelphian, told me his father said to him two months before, “I see by the paper that Sousa is going on a tour with the band. He has got his own way at last!”
The tour had been a very hard one for me, what with two concerts a day, luncheons, banquets, civic demonstrations, traveling incessantly, scarcely any sleep, and I broke down on my return and the post surgeon sent me to Europe to recuperate. We sailed, my wife and I, on the City of Richmond.
The first day out the people on board who craved excitement—or thought they did—said the Atlantic was no rougher than a duck pond. Well, by Tuesday a terrible storm arose, and while I have crossed the ocean many times since I have never seen such stupendous waves. The third night about one o’clock we were called on deck with the terrible cry that the ship was on fire. We walked up to the saloon. It was raining and the sailors were getting the lifeboats ready. I don’t believe the lifeboats would have lasted five minutes in that storm. We waited patiently for the day to break and before four o’clock the dawn came slowly. As soon as it was light the captain asked for a volunteer to go down into the hold and locate the trouble. A brave Scotch engineer named Grant was dropped down the hatchway, supported by ropes. He put tackle on a bale of cotton which was pulled up on deck and thrown overboard to an accompaniment of our cheers. He sent up another bale, then he was pulled up, overcome by the smoke. When he came to he said something to the captain, who immediately gave orders to batten down everything, covering the ventilators with tarpaulin, which was done.
That day my cabin burned out, and all the day was rainy and dismal. Finally we saw a vessel ahead and ran for it, throwing out our signals. When we got near enough and told her we were on fire her captain, in the excitement, dropped dead.
The flags on both ships were placed at half-mast and we traveled together, not knowing what minute the fire would get beyond control.
That night about ten o’clock we saw a light to the northward. “It’s a Cunarder,” said the captain; and leaving the faithful boat that had stood by us all day, we cut after the Cunarder, throwing up signal rockets. She could not understand our predicament because we were going so fast. Signals were exchanged and she agreed to stand by us until we reached Queenstown. She was the Servia. They fought the fire steadily.
On Thursday it looked particularly bad, as the linen room had caught fire, but by pouring tons of water into the hold of the boat, we managed to reach Queenstown. While some of the sensible ones disembarked, some of the others—including myself—concluded to stand by the captain who had, according to one gushing female, stood by us. The run from Queenstown to Liverpool was an exciting one because the fire began to make great headway.
They would not allow the ship to dock when we reached Liverpool, but took us off on a lighter. The vessel was towed down to the mouth of the Mersey and some of the cargo salvaged. Then they opened everything and let her burn herself out. I think that accident brought about the passage of the law forbidding a cotton cargo on a passenger ship; so while it was exciting and terrible, it brought about a well-ordered reform.
When we reached London, a lady and her husband, old friends of ours, suggested that we go to their quarters in Woburn Square as we were pretty well rumpled up after our terrible trip across the ocean. It was a high-class boarding house, and just as I reached the house the fire engines were passing going to a fire somewhere in the vicinity. With the American boy’s irresistible impulse to follow the engines, I ran along with them. I viewed the fire, saw the engines put it out, and slowly started back; but in the meantime I had forgotten where I lived. I didn’t know the name of the proprietor, or the boarding house, or the street it was on! Here was a pretty how-de-do! Lost in London!
I stood on a corner for fully twenty minutes considering whether I should go to a police station and have all London called, or whether I should put an advertisement in the morning paper telling I was lost, when a genteel stranger came up to me and said, “Can you direct me to No. — Woburn Square? I’m a stranger.”
It flashed across my mind that that was the number of my boarding house and I said, “So am I, and I’m just going that way and will take you along.” I called a cab. We drove five or six minutes, reached the number and, the Lord be praised! It was where I lived! My wife was really glad to see me.
After we had spent some time in Paris and Berlin, we finally arrived in Bayreuth where the Bayreuth Festival was in progress. I had written ahead for tickets, but for once German thoroughness went back on itself and I found it impossible to buy a ticket. Finally, one farsighted and coming-fast millionaire-to-be offered to sell me his ticket for what he gave for it—which was 20 marks—if I would come out immediately after the first act was over. I agreed, and went in and saw the first act of Tannhäuser.
I came out and started to walk down to the Wagner villa to go through the grounds and see the grave of Wagner, but Frau Wagner had that day gone to the theater and left orders that no visitors should be admitted to the ground where Wagner is buried. I tried all my powers of persuasion on the housekeeper, but in vain, so I went around to the back through a sort of park, where the composer and the “Crazy King” Ludwig II of Bavaria used to walk together. I met a German student in the road and told him of my disappointment as we walked along together. A little girl with a basket of bread walked behind us and she seemed very much interested in our conversation. Finally she came up and said she was so sorry I could not get in, but that she thought she could get me admitted, as she knew the housekeeper. We all went to the front door again, where she called the housekeeper out and told her she thought it was a shame to send me away when I had come all the way from America to visit Wagner’s grave.
A consultation was held among the servants, and the little German girl’s eloquence prevailed where mine had failed. They agreed to admit me for five minutes.
There was no name on the stone which marked his grave, and I asked the housekeeper the reason.
“He does not need it,” she said proudly, in German, “he is the first man.”
Both Secretary Whitney and Secretary Tracy were known as the Father of the Navy. Modesty and the greatness of either of the men would have made it extremely difficult to get their personal views on that, but at least from the time of Secretary Tracy the progress and development of the Navy was very great.
Secretary Tracy had been a general in the Civil War and was oftener called general than he was secretary. He was a great lawyer, and a man with a keen sense of humor. I recall when the band was ordered to go on the Despatch, which was known as the President’s boat, and usually took foreign parties of importance on a trip to Mount Vernon, where they would see the home of the Father of His Country and, incidentally, the key of the Bastile, get a bountiful lunch and hear a lot of music from our band. On this occasion, when the ambassadors of nearly all the embassies in Washington were aboard, together with a great number from the official life of Washington, the Secretary sent his naval attaché to me with the request that I come to him at once.
I went over where he was sitting and he said, “Sousa, if you have the music here I would like you to play the national air of every embassy on board,” and he instructed the naval attaché to find out how many nations were represented.
The report came back that there were seventeen. I always carried the national songs of a great number of countries in a folio, so I said, “I think I can play all of them.” The music was handed out and I began with God Save the Queen, at which the English Ambassador immediately arose, followed by the rest of the guests. I then continued with France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Russia, Sweden, Denmark, and so on. As I played each anthem the ambassador or minister of that country arose, and I finally ended with The Star-Spangled Banner.
A few days later when I happened to be up in the Navy Department I met the Secretary and walked into his office with him. He congratulated me on my industry in collecting the airs. I told him I had spent much time in getting them, and he said they should be formulated and made into an official document.
“I would like them published under your authority,” I said.
He immediately sat down and wrote the following:
Navy Department
Washington“October 18, 1889.
“Special Order: John Philip Sousa, the bandmaster of the band of the United States Marine Corps, is hereby directed to compile for the use of the Department, the National and Patriotic Airs of all Nations.
“B. F. Tracy,
“Secretary of the Navy.”
The work was issued a year or so later, and is a standard all over the world, known as The National, Patriotic and Typical Airs of All Lands. I have once before referred to it. It still remains the most exhaustive work of its kind.
After we had discussed the compilation, he said, “Sousa, I want to compliment you on the excellence of your band. I was very much impressed with the solo playing of your cornetist at your last concert.”
It was my opportunity to talk for the band, and I began:
“Yes, Mr. Secretary, that young cornet soloist is a fine Western boy. He comes from Schoolcraft, Michigan; his name is Walter F. Smith. He doesn’t drink, he doesn’t smoke, his general habits and conduct are excellent; and all the Government pays him is thirty-eight dollars a month.”
“You say he doesn’t drink?”
“Not a drop,” I replied.
“And doesn’t smoke?”
“Never a puff.”
“And his general habits and conduct are excellent?”
“He leads absolutely the simple life,” I said, carried away by the fascination of the subject.
“Well, Sousa,” and the Secretary leaned back in his chair, “for heaven’s sake, what does he want with money?”
I joined in the laughter.
Another time the West Penn Hospital at Pittsburgh had secured permission from President Harrison for the band to go to Pittsburgh and give a concert for the benefit of the hospital. As soon as the concert was announced some musicians in Cincinnati telegraphed the Secretary protesting against the band accepting the engagement. The telegram read:
“To the Secretary of the Navy, Washington, D. C.: We musicians of Cincinnati hereby protest against the Marine Band giving a concert in Pittsburgh, thereby taking the bread out of the mouths of American musicians.
“Wasserman,
“Hesslein,
“Heymeyer,
“Krantz.”
I read the telegram and indignantly said, “Why, Mr. Secretary, there isn’t an American name signed to this telegram.”
He took the telegraph blank, read it slowly, then turning to me remarked, “They’re damn good American names in Cincinnati, Sousa.”
We proceeded to Pittsburgh and gave the concert. One of the Washington correspondents had had a little fun with me by saying that there was no city in the world in which they demanded such highbrow music as Pittsburgh, and, he said, “If you play anything of a so-called popular nature, they’ll hiss you off the stage just as sure as beans is beans.”
He carried such an air of conviction that I believed him. I built my program of very solid material; something by Brahms, something by Bach, something by Wagner, and something by Richard Strauss. The house was crowded, and when I finished the first number I turned to the audience expecting salvos of applause.
The number was received in silence.
“But,” I thought, “perhaps this piece was too trivial for them—they certainly are highbrows!” and I started off with the next number.
That piece likewise was received in frigid silence.
I was terribly worried and decided, “If the next is too light for them I’ll play something popular and have them hiss me off the stage.”
Then I began the Parsifal Procession of the Grail.
As I finished it half the audience was asleep and most of those who were not sleeping were apparently half yawning.
“Boys, get ready to be hissed off the stage. They’ll do it in quick time,” I muttered. “We will now play Annie Rooney, and if any of you get maimed or killed, I’ll tell the Government you did it in the line of duty and your widows will get a pension. Now together!” And we blared off for all we were worth.
Strong men wept! Husbands threw their arms around their startled wives! Brothers hugged brothers, sisters hugged sisters, and the rest of the evening was taken up with Annie Rooney. As the band embarked for home, loud above the chug of the engine and the whistle of the locomotive was heard the dulcet melody that carries the words:
Little Annie Rooney is my sweetheart!”And on we sped to Washington.
My marches were forging ahead and beginning to grow in popularity. The Yorktown Centennial was played by a great number of bands and the Gladiator became the rage. That came out in 1885, and was published early in 1886. At a parade in Philadelphia, a friend of mine counted no fewer than seventeen bands playing the march.
At this time some little-known English brass-band journal had an article declaring that America was entitled to the palm for the best military marches, and cited among the composers who were doing good work in that line, in America, Graffula, Downing, Reeves, Missud, Brooks and Sousa; and, continued the article, “The last named, who we understand is conductor of the government band at Washington, is entitled to the name of March King as much so as Strauss is to that of Waltz King.”
My publisher showed me the article and also a little advertisement he issued, which said, “You can hear his music from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from the St. Lawrence to the Gulf Stream. The March King reigns supreme!”
And that title has remained with me ever since.
The time was approaching for celebrating the centennial of the Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence. This declaration antedated the Philadelphia one by more than a year. Senator Ransom, of North Carolina, called on President Harrison asking him to come and deliver a speech, but the President’s engagements were such he could not accept. The Marine Band was asked for and President Harrison sent us to take part in the ceremonies, which lasted upward of a week and were held in Fayetteville.
When the band arrived we were met at the station by a committee of citizens and taken to our quarters, a large hall fitted up in barracks shape with beds, washbasins, and so on. The chairman of the committee said after we had had supper he would call and discuss the programs with me. This was only twenty-five years after the war, and just what a government band under a Republican President would play was problematic. I felt by the action of the chairman that that was uppermost in his mind. He asked what I had intended for music for the ceremonies the next day.
“Well,” I said, “we’ll open with The Star-Spangled Banner.”
“O. K.,” he said.
“Then we’ll play the Coronation March from the opera of The Prophet, by Giacomo Meyerbeer. We will follow with the Overture to William Tell, On the Blue Danube, excerpts from Aïda, and then My Country, ’Tis of Thee.”
“I think that’s very fine,” he said soberly, “but I’d like to say there’s a tune down here that we love like mother’s milk. I don’t know whether your band plays it, but I’m sure our people would love to hear it.”
“What’s the name of the tune?” I asked in an almost unconcerned and discouraging manner.
“It is called Dixie,” he said.
“Dixie?” I said. “I know the tune. I’ll think it over whether we make use of it. You know we are a very artistic institution and must always consider our programs.”
“Yes, yes,” he reflected, “but if you can get it in I know the people would like it. Some of them haven’t heard it since the surrender.”
He left. Of course I was only torturing the poor fellow. A musician who went South in those days and didn’t have Dixie in his repertoire was mentally, morally and physically damned by everybody—and should have been!
Next morning the ceremonies began. The town was crowded. They had come from the mountains and from the plains, from the forests and from the fields. They lived in covered wagons, and I even saw boys asleep in dry-goods boxes, under stoops and on benches. Governor Fowle made the first speech. As he finished his address I brought my band to its feet and played the national anthem, which was very quietly received. Then I passed the word to the bandsmen Dixie would be the next number.
The next speaker was the chairman, who made a short speech introducing Senator Vance, the idol of the state. As the chairman sat down, and before Senator Vance rose to deliver his speech, I signaled to the band and we launched into Dixie.
It was like an electric shock. A rebel yell, starting on the grand stand, went booming down the street back and forward through the surging crowds. There never was such a yell before. The very air seemed to quiver with excitement. Myriads of hats were tossed up; grim old warriors hugged their young, women hugged women, girls hugged girls, and for fifteen minutes this continued. After that, and during the entire time we were in Fayetteville, our programs ran something like this:
And the encore to every one of those numbers was Dixie!
One of the odd things about the conflict between the states was the love of certain tunes. The favorite of the South was of course Dixie, written by Dan Emmet, a Northern man, and first sung in New York at a minstrel show in 1859.
One of the favorite tunes of the North was The Battle Hymn of the Republic, the music by Steffe, a Southern man.
Dixie was written as a minstrel walk-around, The Battle Hymn of the Republic as a sacred song, but when the populace want a thing they take it wherever they find it.
Albert Pike gave Dixie new words that awakened the Southerner to enthusiasm and defiance.
Lo! All the beacon fires are lighted, Let all hearts be now united, To arms! To arms! To arms in Dixie.
Advance the flag of Dixie! Hurrah! Hurrah! For Dixieland we’ll take our stand And live and die for Dixie. To arms! To Arms! To arms for Dixie.
We gave a concert in the lobby of the hotel the next night. The crowd was so great that the musicians scarcely had room to move, much less play their instruments. I called the chairman of the occasion to my side and told him that unless he could get the crowd to keep from interfering with us, I’d be obliged to abandon the concert. He mounted a chair, and after rapping for attention, spoke:
“The professor informs me that the professor’s professors are unable to play owing to the great crowd and their interference. And the professor said unless you keep back from his stand, the professor and the professor’s professors will be compelled to withdraw, thus making it impossible for the professor and the professor’s professors to continue.”
After that the “professor and the professor’s professors” were given ample room to continue the concert to its conclusion.
We returned to Washington after a very pleasant week in the South, for we had enjoyed Southern hospitality during the entire time we had been there.
I found in my concerts in Washington during that season that the piece that was most called for was the Washington Post. Everybody seemed to be Washington Post mad. I had written the piece for General Frank Hatton and Beriah Wilkins, owners of The Washington Post newspaper, who had gotten up a prize essay contest among the school children of the capital, and it had grown to such proportions they had secured the National Museum grounds in which to deliver the prizes, and the Marine Band was to furnish the music. General Hatton had asked me if I wouldn’t write a march for the occasion. The fee was $35. That was the birth of the Washington Post, a lucky composition, for almost immediately the dancing masters in their yearly convention had selected it for their new dance, the two-step, and it swept from one end of the world to the other. In fact, when I went to Europe I found that the two-step itself in England and in Germany was called a Washington Post, and no concert in Europe that I gave was complete without the performance of that march. I remember a dance leader telling me in a New England town that he had played at a ball where there were twenty-two dance numbers, and the only reason he didn’t play the Washington Post twenty-three times was because there were only twenty-two numbers on the program.
On my return to Washington, David Blakely wrote me asking if I could get permission to make a tour to the Pacific Coast. I secured permission of General Haywood, the commandant, then of the Secretary, and finally of the President, for a seven weeks’ tour from ocean to ocean. We left Washington in March, arriving in San Francisco, April 9, 1892.
We played across the continent in all the leading cities and reached the great city of San Francisco. I quote an article from the San Francisco Argonaut, of those days, which was no doubt written by an Englishman:
“The United States Marine Band closed, on last Saturday, a season in this city which must have been profitable, if the proportion of paper in the Grand Opera audiences was not excessive. The management was distinctly bad; but the music was so good that people overlooked inconveniences arising from carelessness or inexperience for the sake of artistic merit. As a rule, military bands have not been always successful here, and if, as Mr. Haweis says, the connection between morals and orchestral music can be detected at a glance, we must be in pretty bad case. The Hungarian Band, Cappa’s Seventh Regiment Band, the Mexican Military Band, all discoursed most excellent music, but they are none of them believed to have carried away many bushels of shekels.”
“It seems that the taste for orchestral music is a tardy plant, and flourishes chiefly in communities which have reached a high stage of development. Forty-four years ago, one of the most perfect bands that ever played in this country—the Germania Band, under Carl Bergman, which had been recruited in Berlin—made a tour through New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Washington, and other Eastern cities. They played to empty houses. In Philadelphia, they played to nine dollars and a half, the rent of the hall being ten dollars; in the middle of the performance, the proprietor appeared on the stage and threatened to turn off the gas if the other half-dollar was not forthcoming; whereupon the bandsmen, with one voice, bade him ‘Turn her off!’ They kept on playing, at intervals, for six years; but when they finally disbanded, there was no money in the treasury. The members found work separately. Bergman became conductor of the New York Philharmonic—a post which he retained to his death.
“Jullien, who came to New York in 1853, may be said to have created the taste for orchestral music in the United States. He was a man of genius, and knew a little of everything except the science of music. But he was an admirable conductor, and possessed the gift of imbuing his players with the feeling that they must deny themselves the luxury of expressing their own feelings, in order to render the conductor’s conception of the composer’s idea, He was, also, an absolutely perfect judge of public taste.
“He used to say of himself that his vocation in life was to popularize music. He was a Frenchman, and, like many Frenchmen, was nothing if not theatrical. Those whose memories go back forty years will remember him as he used to appear, graciously smiling, in an enormous white waistcoat, with huge wristbands folded back over his coat sleeves, bowing his thanks for plaudits. As he stood before the footlights, a valet in fuli dress brought him a pair of white gloves on a silver salver. Having donned these and seized his jeweled baton, he gave the signal, and very capital music, indeed, ensued.
“Gilmore, Cappa, Godfrey, and Mr. Sousa—who has just left us—conducted their bands less turbulently; Mr. Sousa’s legs were as motionless as if he were a sentinel on duty; Jullien writhed and flung himself from side to side as if the violence of his emotions electrified his muscles. When the piece ended, he flung himself, breathless and panting, into a velvet armchair, and fanned himself with a lace handkerchief.
“As he still figures as the prince of bandmasters, it is sad to recall the harshness with which he was treated by fortune throughout his life. He made money by his concerts, but invested it in a lease of Drury Lane, which landed him in bankruptcy. He wrote an opera and brought it out at his own exponse at Covent Garden; it was a total failure. His entire stock in trade was destroyed by a fire. He started a company to give garden concerts; it went to smash, taking Jullien with it.
“Driven out of England by poverty, he went to Paris, ran into debt, and was imprisoned at Clichy. His friends in London were raising money to clear him, when the news reached them that he had died suddenly.”
The notices in all the papers were most gratifying. On our way back, we gave concerts again in Chicago.
Mr. Blakely came to me and said, “How much does the Government pay you a year?”
“Oh, about fifteen hundred.”
“Well,” he answered, “I have been talking the matter over with a party of business men. They are willing to organize a syndicate, pay you six thousand a year and 20 per cent of the profits, if you will resign from the Marine Band and organize a private concert band.”
“I’ll think it over,” I replied.
The next morning, before any reply had been given to the offer, the Associated Press carried a story that I was going to leave Washington and organize a concert band to be located in Chicago. Within the week I received hundreds of letters, some congratulating me, others hoping I would not leave Washington. The Washington Post of April 9, 1892, published the following:
Washingtonians Amazed at the Fear He Will Accept the Bid
Presumption of Chicago
“Washington, April 18—‘Chicago will want the White House next.’ The remark was made this noon in the Senate Restaurant by one of a group of senators and newspaper correspondents who were discussing pie, milk and Chicago’s attempt to capture Sousa, the leader of the Marine Band. The news that Chicago was negotiating with the leader caused not so much surprise as regret. The people of Washington would receive with equanimity the news that Chicago had determined to introduce a bill to remove the Capitol of the nation to her capacious limits or to annex the present capital. But they are not prepared to witness the attempt to deprive them of the able and popular leader of the Marine Band and are very much exercised over the prospect of losing him. They don’t blame Chicago, nor in fact do they blame Sousa for considering the offer, and they would not blame him if he accepted it. But they do blame the Government, and, moreover, they are bringing to bear upon the devoted heads of the congressmen a great deal of pressure to induce them to vote for a bill that shall give to the leader of the Marine Band a salary commensurate with his worth.”
“Even Frank Hatton, who is used from long practice to view with imperturbed soul the march of empire toward the West, has devoted considerable time and space in his newspaper this week to sounding the alarm by declaring that the loss of Sousa means the loss of the Marine Band, it being naturally expected that if Sousa leaves he will take with him such of the players whose terms of enlistment have expired and others will follow in due course.”
When I reached Washington on May sixth, I had fully made up my mind to secure my release from the Government. My release was granted in the latter part of July, and with a number of graceful letters of appreciation from those in authority, I left Washington on the first of August for New York to begin the organization of a concert band.
After twelve years of service under five presidents of the United States, it was natural for me to draw some estimate of the various presidents in my mind. The office is such a great one—undoubtedly in the minds of true Americans the greatest one on earth, and it must be to many thinking aliens. Therefore it is not hard to see that every President is a hero to his musical director. And he should be. Whatever partisanism or acrimonious discussion may ensue during a campaign, the moment a man becomes President the office glorifies him and he would be very ordinary clay if he did not live up to the glory of his exalted position.
I recall once in crossing the ocean I spent many hours on deck with a United States senator who was particularly severe in his comments on Mr. Harrison, whom I defended as best I could against his violent onslaught. He said, among other things, that he’d called on the President a month after he had been inducted into office and requested him to withdraw his objections to a man he desired appointed to a certain office. The President said he would not change his decision.
The senator angrily retorted, “You seem to forget, Mr. President, that during your campaign, when the Republican Party needed money badly, I went out and got it and thereby assured your election.”
The President said, “I appreciate your efforts, senator, but you forget I am not the President of the Republican Party, but the President of the United States, and I know the people at large are not in favor of your man occupying the office you want me to appoint him to.”
“Darn the little runt!” the senator added to me. “His posterior is too near the ground to make him great, in my estimation.”
“But,” I protested, “size is no gauge of bravery or brains.”
“Maybe not, but I don’t like him!”
Mr. Harrison often showed in his administration that he was the President of the United States and not the President of a party.
We know the greatness of Mr. Hayes. He was a gallant soldier and a splendid statesman whom the Electoral Commission put in the White House by the close vote of 8 to 7. And we know that he was such a great President that he calmed the country into a tranquil peace and withdrew the Federal troops from the South, the very troops which, it was believed, were the cause of his election. He diligently served his country, many times in opposition to his party.
Mr. Garfield’s tenure of office was too short to form any idea of him as President or man. I had the pleasant duty of composing and playing his inaugural march, and the melancholy duty of composing and playing his funeral dirge when he was laid away to rest in Cleveland.
The coming of Mr. Arthur placed the administration, as far as I could discover, poles away from the Americanization of the Hayes administration.
One snobbish official said to me, in great glee, “We at last have a gentleman for President.”
If he meant a President different from what I had heard Grant was, and I knew that Hayes was, then I knew he was right; but as a President following the lines of pure Americanism I do not think his view was a correct one. Mr. Arthur was always a gentleman who would have fitted admirably in an absolute monarchy; but that he represented American traditional or constitutional cordiality, I do not believe. The studied austerity of President Arthur reminded one of a scion of an effete civilization of the Old World, while the genial activity and urbanity of Presidents Hayes, Cleveland and Harrison suggested the pioneer of America.
The coming of Mr. Cleveland was a coming back to American ideals. Up to the time he married, he was most democratic in his manner toward me. I remember once when he was escaping a Saturday afternoon reception held by his sister, Miss Rose Cleveland, he opened a door near where the band was stationed and found it necessary to thread his way through the band. In going through he probably passed twenty men, and with a smile and an apologetic word or two won the hearts of his musicians.
When he finally reached my stand he said, “I’m a terrible lot of trouble, Mr. Sousa, but I’ll be out of the way in a minute.” After he married he became much more serious and rather taciturn. But even then he never lost his American traits.
When Mr. Cleveland was superseded by Mr. Harrison, American life, American tradition and American custom, it seems to me, came into their own to the fullest extent at the White House. He at times relaxed from the cares of office and entertaining and sat as the solitary auditor while we played our best. The most brilliant speech I have ever heard was one he delivered at a Gridiron Club dinner. His sense of humor was great and his speech could be scintillating and satirical.
The five Presidents all had facets of character that made them heroes in the eyes of their musical director.
Of the ladies of the White House during the time I was there—Mrs. Hayes, Mrs. Garfield, Mrs. McElroy, Miss Rose Cleveland, Mrs. Cleveland and Mrs. Harrison—as beautiful women I should place Mrs. Cleveland and Mrs. Hayes in the van. Mrs. Cleveland’s youth and the romance of a White House wedding brought her and her beauty permanently into the minds and hearts of the populace. The only time I ever had any communication with Mrs. Cleveland was when she sent a request that I play the Tannhäuser Overture, showing that she had excellent taste in music.
Mrs. Hayes dressed in exquisite taste and had the charm of beauty of person in its full fruition. No gentler hostess could be found anywhere.
Mrs. McElroy, Mr. Arthur’s sister, was a painstaking hostess and much more genial than her distinguished brother.
Miss Rose Cleveland was a rather plain little body, but her plainness you promptly forgot when you conversed with her five minutes.
Mrs. Harrison was a very sweet-looking woman, kind-hearted, considerate, ever
mindful of those about her and a splendid type of American womanhood—one never to
be forgotten by those privileged to know her.
Printed in the Saturday Evening Post
198(22), 1925-11-28.
Part 4
[Photograph: Mr. and Mrs. Sousa at Their Estate on Long Island.]
It was a new sensation to be under private management after twelve years of official life in Washington. During the two tours I made with the Marine Band under the management of David Blakely I met him only a few times, when we started the tour and when we settled up at the close.
Blakely had been manager of Theodore Thomas’ Orchestra for several tours and had also managed Gilmore’s Band a number of years. He told me that he had gone to Europe after his split with Gilmore to find a conductor to take his place in popularity, but had come back from Europe empty-handed; and by chance happened to be in Chicago when we played our second engagement there. He was very flattering, and he made a deep impression on me. He told me he had been Secretary of State for Wisconsin and editor of The Chicago Post, and had entered the managerial world by organizing and bringing to a successful conclusion a huge musical festival in Minneapolis. He had a splendid nose for news and wrote well, but left the route making and date making of his attractions very largely in the hands of his two assistants, Howard Pew and Frank Christianer. He asked if I had confidence in the success of our enterprise. I assured him that I had.
Then he said, “If you have, why don’t you buy some stock in our concern?”
“How much?” I asked.
Not less than $1000 was suggested, and I bought it then and there. We opened our season on September 26, 1892, at Plainfield, New Jersey, and continued on the road for a period of eight weeks. On the day of our first concert Gilmore lay dead in St. Louis, having died on the twenty-fourth. I arranged and played for the first number ever played publicly by my band a composition of Gilmore’s called The Voice of a Departed Soul.
We continued on the road with varying success. Sometimes business would be wretched, then when we would go to a town where I had been with the Marines it would be good. When we reached Boston, Blakely came on. He was most dejected.
He called me into his room at the hotel and said, “I’m going to close down this tour tonight.” I was frantic.
“You’ll do nothing of the kind!” I cried. “The routing of the band has been wretched; it is not my fault. You booked me in territory where no one could draw, and now you threaten to ruin my career. make me a disgraced musician, to have the authorities at Washington laugh at my humiliation. I won’t allow you to close! We have two weeks more and I insist you carry out your contract!”
He finally said, “Very well, I’ll continue.”
We went from Boston to Portland, Maine, and had a very large house; from there to Lewiston, Bangor, Rockland, Manchester, Burlington and other towns in New Hampshire and Vermont; all gave us good houses.
In October, 1892, I had the honor to play in conjunction with Theodore Thomas’ Orchestra at the dedication of the World’s Fair buildings in Chicago. The program consisted, among other numbers, of Columbus, a march and hymn for orchestra, military band and chorus, written by John Knowles Payne, of the faculty of Harvard University. I had very thoroughly rehearsed the music we were to play in combination with the orchestra and a general rehearsal was held in the Auditorium. Mr. Thomas stopped the combination while they were playing, and turning to my band said, “Sousa Band, start it from the beginning.” He began to conduct and they played, and he went through without stopping them once. He turned to me—I was sitting with Mr. Blakely in the front seat of the Auditorium—and smilingly said, “I thank you for the pains you have taken.”
After the rehearsal he came over to me and said, “Let’s get some lunch.” We sat in the Auditorium Hotel restaurant until after six. It was one of the happiest afternoons I had ever spent. I do not think any man admired Thomas and his great ability as a conductor more than I. I believed then, and I believe now, that he was one of the greatest conductors that ever lived.
It pleased my vanity to compare Thomas’ career with my own, as they were very much alike. He had played second horn in a United States Navy band stationed at Portsmouth, Virginia, when he was but thirteen; I had played second trombone in the Marine Band when I was but thirteen. He had played violin for dancing; I had played violin for dancing. He had become an orchestral violinist and I had become an orchestral violinist. He was an American, coming from Esens, East Friesland, but was born in New York ten years later; I was born in Washington and came to America on the day I was born, while he had to wait ten years before he had that honor. He had conducted an opera at sight without ever having seen the performance or score before; I had done the same thing for a German opera company in Washington. The conductor had missed the train and I conducted A Night in Granada, by Kreutzer, without ever having seen anything but the overture before that night.
It was said of Thomas that one of the greatest violinists in the world was sidetracked to become the greatest conductor. He had run the gamut from a little horn player to the conductorship of one of the greatest orchestras in the world. No wonder I was happy to be with him!
After he had ordered luncheon he became reminiscent and told me things about his earlier career. He laughed over the memory of a concert in Terrace Garden in New York. He had on the program The Linnet Polka for two piccolos, and he got the piccolo players to get up in the trees. When the audience heard the sounds coming through the foliage above they applauded the piece into an undoubted hit. I told him my first dream of a heaven was when he played Schumann’s Träumerei in Washington when I was a little fellow.
“That was some pianissimo,” he laughingly commented.
“You want to be very careful and always watch your management,” he said. “Managements will stick very close to you when you are making money, but some of them will desert you without a qualm the first squall that comes. So beware of speculators—if for no other reason, for art’s sake.”
We discussed many compositions I had heard him give, and when I would grow enthusiastic over some especially brilliant effect he produced, he would inquire, “Do you remember that?” adding “I worked over that effect for hours; but I got it.”
The afternoon sped, and I left only when I had to get ready for my concert that evening. I do not believe there ever lived a conductor who interpreted Beethoven to equal Thomas, and he was the only one of the symphony conductors who idealized Wagner. Wagner to him was not a blare of brass or scraping of strings, but at times he made him ethereal in beauty. His idea was that he was an educator, and nothing stopped him in emphasizing that idea. It made him lose his sense of proportion and at times brought him into sharp conflict with his public and his critics. I believe that nearly all the captious things reflecting on Thomas were directed against Thomas the man rather than Thomas the musician, the conductor of a great orchestra.
As I sat musing over our conversation, I naturally compared his character with my own. I was tenacious of my rights, but was more diplomatic than given to irrevocable dicta. I would listen to advice, and if I knew it was no good would quietly say, “I’ll think that over,” leaving the other fellow with no ammunition to discuss the matter further. If I thought the advice good, I’d make the other fellow advance more arguments in favor of it and thereby convince me of its practical worth.
Thomas, who became the director of music for the World’s Fair, engaged me and my band to play at the exposition during the spring and early summer of 1893. Our concerts were a great attraction and drew thousands at ever performance.
Mr. Tomlins, the vocal director at the exposition, came up one night on the band stand, after I had played a selection of old-time songs, and said, “Sousa, while you were playing that last piece thousands of these people were just crazy to join in with the band. Let me announce that you want the audience to join when you play The Old Folks at Home.”
He announced this; then gave me a sign, and with him leading the voices, we broke into Way Down Upon the Suwanee River, and before we finished we had played half a dozen songs and hymn tunes dear to the hearts of America. We repeated the experiment several times during the season I was there, with many encores.
The passing away of Patrick Sarsfield Gilmore in the autumn of the previous year filled the country with sadness. Mr. Gilmore had organized and gathered together the very best wood wind and brass players of both Europe and America. He had gone into the highways and byways of the land, playing Wagner and Liszt and other great composers where their music was absolutely unknown and their names scarcely more than a myth. His concerts were tremendously popular, and no doubt Mr. Thomas intended Mr. Gilmore to be the band attraction at the beginning of the fair; but Gilmore had passed away.
Mr. Thomas had known me while I was with the Marines. Once he had instructed his agent, when his organization came to Washington with the American Opera Company, to engage my men for the extra men required in the operas for stage playing. It was not an accident that he engaged me for the spring season at the World’s Fair.
On April 16, 1898, we gave a joint concert with Mr. Walter Damrosch’s Symphony Orchestra which was billed as “the only permanent orchestra in New York.” A notice from the New York Press records:
“The experiment of uniting the efforts of two of the chief musical organizations of the country resulted in a novel and enjoyable concert at Carnegie Hall last night. The Sousa Band joined the Symphony Orchestra and filled the stage with 150 performers.
“The volume of sound produced by so large a body of players was something unprecedented in the annals of the house. This effect was especially noticed in the concerted numbers that brought both bands under one baton, in which instances the gossamerlike delicacy of the Damrosch strings were quite lost in the richness and fullness of tone from the Sousa brass and percussion.
“The rival organizations were best heard apart. It was a contest of skill between the two leaders and their superlatively trained musicians. The audience bestowed especially enthusiastic approval on both conductors. In his charming delivery of Grieg’s Solvejg’s Song from the Peer Gynt suite and Czibulka’s dainty Love’s Dream After the Ball, Walter Damrosch won as much applause as was given Mr. Sousa for his spirited rendering of Titl’s Military Overture, Barnard’s Serenade Enfantine and three numbers from The Damnation of Faust. The competition between these talented conductors for the favor of the audience induced an unusually animated spirit in the musicians, and the concert was, in all matters, one of the most intensely interesting and enjoyable of the Music Hall series.”
On May 5, 1893, we gave a Columbian Festival in Boston at the Mechanics’ Pavilion. We gave five performances. The artistic end of it was well spoken of, but financially we just about broke even. Most of the vocal artists were from the Metropolitan Opera House. From Boston we went to Buffalo.
[Photograph: Mr. Sousa.]
[Photograph: Mrs. Sousa.]
[Photograph: Sousa at the Traps, Shooting Clay Pigeons.]
I said, “You can’t do that. We have advertised the man and the public will expect him, so we had better pay him his salary and let it go at that, even though it is not due.”
The treasurer did as I said and the concert was given. That night we left for Detroit. When we started the concert in Detroit the tenor was not there—he had missed the train and he came in just before he was to appear on the stage. When his turn came, as he entered the stage, I started the prelude to his number. As the music reached the point where he was to begin not a sound came from his lips—his voice had completely failed him! I have never seen a more agonized expression on a man’s face in my life. He left the stage and I substituted one of our popular soloists in his place.
At the end of the concert he came to me, and, poor fellow, he was frantic. He could speak only in a whisper. I suggested he go at once to a hospital and let me know when he was well again, but not to bother me until he was able to sing again and was fully recovered. He left, and I have never seen or heard from him from that day to this.
The only other unpleasantness I had on that tour was with one of the women artists. She was extremely temperamental. I had arranged a program that included the grand finale in Lohengrin, in which the vocal force of the organization, with a chorus and the band, were used. It was the grand climax to the concert. The number before the last one was a band number.
One night in St. Louis, this lady came to me and said, “Mr. Sousa, I cannot understand the manner in which you make our programs. Nobody in the world makes up a program like you.”
Laughingly, I said, “Well, then you should give me credit for originality, madame.”
“No, no,” she continued. “You have a piece on for the last number for the vocalists. Why not have a piece for the band alone?”
“Well, madame,” I said, “we have a number of high-priced and excellent vocal artists with us and I believe we should climax our concerts by bringing them all together at the end.”
She answered, “Will you change for me? It makes me so late for my supper, which I always have after the concert.”
“Anything to oblige a lady once,” I answered. “I will reverse the last two numbers tonight, but never again.”
I left, and the next morning we were in Omaha. The Apollo Chorus Club assisted us, and I invited their conductor to lead the closing number.
As I left the stage just after my last number, the local conductor came up much excited and told me that my friend the lady soloist had left the hall. She said I had insulted her.
“In what manner?” I asked.
“She said you promised to change the program and you didn’t do it.”
“I didn’t do it because I plainly said I would change it only for last night; but come on, we can’t keep the audience waiting. I will have Miss —— take the part and it will be all right.”
The number was sung and the concert was at an end, with the usual enthusiasm.
Our next stand was Minneapolis. Coming to the hotel, I found a note from the singer addressed to me. Opening it, I found:
“M. Sousa: I would like to see you at once in my room.”
I went to the lady’s room, rapped and heard a gloomy “Come in.”
I went in. The lady was seated. I greeted her with great respect. “I want to say that you insulted me last night,” she exclaimed angrily.
“In what way?” I asked.
“You promised me to change the program and you did not do it.”
“Well,” I continued, “you’re mistaken. I thought I made it very clear that I changed the program for one night only. But you need not worry. I have arranged everything.”
She evidently did not like my tone, and impatiently asked, “What do you mean?”
“I mean,” said I very slowly, “that I have instructed the treasurer of the band to fine you $200 for your nonappearance at the final number last night.”
She was the maddest woman I ever saw in my life. She glared at me like a tigress, and coming over, said, “If you do that I’ll not sing.”
“Very well, madame, if you are not on the stage tonight when your number is called, I shall go down to the footlights and say, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, one of our soloists refuses to appear because she prefers to have her supper before she serves her public. Instead of this lady, who has gone to her supper, the band will play The Washington Post,’ and,” I continued, slowly walking toward the door, “all will be forgotten.”
Madame was on the stage at the very minute that night and sang like an angel!
These engagements took up nearly the entire year and every day was guaranteed almost from the start of the season to its close. It was a great achievement for the second year of my organization. During the Trocadero engagement I brought out The Liberty Bell. I had finished the march, but had not settled on its title. Happening to go into the Auditorium, where they were giving a spectacle entitled America, I was impressed with a most artistic scenic drop depicting the Liberty Bell. At the end of the performance I went into the office of the Auditorium Hotel and my mail was handed me. In it was a letter from my wife informing me that our little boy, Philip, had paraded that day in Philadelphia with his kindergarten class in honor of the Liberty Bell. I called the march The Liberty Bell. It was successful from its first performance.
While we were at the Trocadero Mr. Blakely had several interviews with Mr. Michel De Young, a leading spirit in the forthcoming midwinter fair to be held in San Francisco, beginning January, 1894; but Mr. De Young balked at the figure Mr. Blakely demanded for the band and the negotiations fell through.
About the first of December we returned to New York from Chicago and began planning the ’94 tour. Early in January, Blakely received a telegram from Mr. De Young which said:
“How soon can you reach San Francisco?”
Blakely replied:
“In three weeks. Come at terms discussed in our last interview.”
We got our men together and started to cross the continent, giving concerts on the way. When we reached San Francisco we found the band they had engaged had not succeeded in satisfying musical San Francisco, and to placate the populace they had engaged us.
Of course, we were in splendid condition. When Gilmore died we took into our organization about nineteen of his best men—such men as Herbert Clarke, Gustave Stengler, Herman Conrad, Joseph Raffyola, William Wadsworth, Albert Bode and others; and together with Arthur Pryor—who had been in my band since its inception—Henry Koch and some others, we had a wonderful host of brilliant players.
The musicians of San Francisco were delighted with us and at the end of the first week gave us a magnificent banquet. One of their number, called upon for a speech, said he had been deputized by the Musicians’ Union to attend the first concert of the band and report on value received.
“Well,” he added, “when you fellows played your first piece I knew it was Tannhäuser because the program said so; but I soon found out something I never knew before, and that is that the clarinet and the flute and the oboe can be played just as softly as a muted violin, and the rest of the band can play an accompaniment to them even softer than they play. I never knew that clarinets and flutes had soft-pedal keys on them until I heard you fellows play.”
This was received with great applause by everybody, and from that day to this there has always been a warm friendship between the musical fraternity of California and my band.
While we were at the fair, Fritz Scheel, an excellent musician and conductor, was giving concerts in a large auditorium at the fairgrounds, which I think they called the Vienna Prater. The public attendance was ordinary—I might say very ordinary, though ours could be counted by the thousands. So someone in authority suggested to Mr. De Young the advantage of boosting the enterprise by giving a double concert with Scheel’s Imperial Orchestra and our band.
I was asked my opinion and told them I was engaged by the exposition, and if they saw fit to have me play in conjunction with the Imperial Orchestra, I would not object. They needed money, and if I was instrumental in bringing money to the Vienna Prater people and the exposition, I would be extremely happy. So the concert was announced.
Scheel, who was a very nice fellow, had evidently been told that I was dictatorial and would ride over him if he didn’t watch out, and apparently he believed it.
I said, “Only one—Mr. Arthur Pryor.”
Then he said he would introduce only one—Mr. Franz Hell, who afterward became a member of my band. It was agreed that we should have two numbers by the entire aggregation, two numbers each by the separate organizations and the two solos.
“What is your piece for the combined orchestra and band?” asked Mr. Scheel.
“I’ll take Tannhäuser,” I replied.
“Nein, Nein!” cried Scheel. “I must have it.”
We argued, both getting pretty angry, when Frank Truesdale, the publicity man of the exposition, whispered to me, “Let him have it. Don’t wrangle any more.”
I quieted down, and Scheel said, “What is your next piece?”
“The Second Rhapsody of Liszt,” I said.
“Nein, Nein!” he said. “I must have that.”
“Very well.” And so it was written.
“What is your opening piece?” asked Scheel.
Not to be caught with an objection again, I asked, “What is yours?”
“Mignon Overture.”
“Good!” I said. “I congratulate you, and I’ll take William Tell.”
It was finally settled that Scheel should open the program with Mignon, I should follow with William Tell; then Franz Hell was to play his solo, followed by Arthur Pryor; then I would do the Feremors music, he would do the Liszt rhapsody, then the combined bands would play Tannhäuser with Scheel conducting and I would conduct Rienzi.
Scheel, as I have said, was an excellent conductor. Years afterward we became very close friends, and he died while occupying the position of conductor of the Philadelphia Symphony Orchestra.
The concert started with a packed house at high prices. Scheel’s orchestra played Mignon and played it very well. He got a small amount of applause and he bowed off the stage. His men immediately left and my men filed in.
There had been some friction between the men at the morning rehearsal over the studied indifference of some of the foreigners in Scheel’s orchestra, and they had been very bluntly told by Henry Koch and a few of my men that there would be a row if they didn’t give their best attention when I was conducting.
To make matters a little worse, one of the San Francisco papers had a cartoon depicting a great big six-footer labeled “Scheel,” leading by the hand a little two-footer labeled “Sousa,” intimating that the Sousa Band and its conductor should feel highly honored to be allowed to play on the same stage with the Imperial Orchestra, This, of course, didn’t add to the gayety of nations or the exhilaration of my bandsmen, and they were a grim and determined lot when they filed on the stage to play our opening number, the William Tell Overture.
We started, and if William Tell was ever played near perfection, it was that night. The musicians’ fingers never moved with more agility, and the clear-cut execution of all the parts was a marvel.
It swept the audience off its feet, and at the end of the number I heard the most spontaneous applause I have ever heard. I bowed and bowed and bowed. Still the applause rang out.
I then did the meanest thing I have ever done in my life. I whispered to the band, “The American Patrol.” I mounted my platform and we began, almost inaudibly, the beginning of the Patrol, working up to a great crescendo, suddenly launching into Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean. The audience began to applaud, and then as we went into Dixie, they yelled as if every one of them came from south of the Mason and Dixon Line. We gradually reached Yankee Doodle and finished the number. Like the Chinaman of Bret Harte, the subsequent proceedings interested Scheel no more.
It was a mean thing to do, but Scheel and I, years afterward, laughed over it and he forgave me. The rest of the concert passed off decorously. Financially and for excitement, it was a great success. We were compelled to give a second one. There is never a love like a first love. There is never a kiss like a first kiss. It was not to be expected our second concert would duplicate our first in thrills. It was a good concert, and toward the end was brought to an abrupt termination by the electric lights suddenly leaving the hall in darkness.
At this time the march rivaling The Washington Post in popularity was The High School Cadets. I had written it for the company of high-school-cadet students in Washington and they had paid me twenty-five dollars for the dedication. I never knew the value of money and at that time I did not know the value of my compositions. I had sold Semper Fidelis, The Picador, The Crusader, The Washington Post, High School Cadets and a number of others under a contract I had made with a Philadelphia music publisher, for thirty-five dollars each, and, in addition, agreed to furnish three arrangements—one for piano, one for orchestra and one for band.
The Gladiator March, my first great hit, I had written for a publishing firm in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, offering it to them for fifty dollars. They rejected it and returned the manuscript. I sent it to the Philadelphia publisher and he got it for thirty-five dollars. It was that march that put me on the map. I believe every band in America played it.
When I was a boy in Washington, the pay for a fourth-class clerk in a government department, $1800 a year, seemed to be about as much as anyone should earn or require; in fact, in our neighborhood an $1800 clerk was a nabob and stood somewhere between an emperor and a Crœsus. I believe that boyhood idea had much to do with making me a poor business man. Up to and including 1892, I had sold all my compositions outright, some for as low as five dollars and the very highest at fifty dollars. Many of them became immensely popular and coined money for their publishers. I was more interested in producing pieces that the public would take to its heart with avidity than in what I received for them. I had understood from Mr. Blakely that he would undertake the publication of my compositions, as he had a large private establishment in Chicago. A line in our contract caused many a heartache years afterward. The first piece I wrote after I went with Blakely was the well-known Belle of Chicago March. I offered the manuscript to him and he refused it. I asked him why.
“My dear Sousa,” he began, “a man usually makes one hit in his life. You have made two, The Washington Post and The High School Cadets. It is not reasonable to expect you to make another.”
The Philadelphia house published the Belle of Chicago and The Beau Ideal, which followed, and they made another little ripple on the river of success. Because they did not electrify the country as The Washington Post and The High School Cadets had, the head of the firm believed I was through as a writer of popular hits. When I’d ask him how the marches were going, his invariable reply would be, “Well, they’re moving along slowly.”
In 1895 we started a tour, reaching Manhattan Beach for the season; then went to St. Louis again and then to the Cotton States Exposition at Atlanta, where we were to play. I had written King Cotton while on tour, as the official march of the exposition. This march proved to be a wonderful success. About a week before we were to arrive in Atlanta, Blakely received a telegram from the manager of the exposition:
“Impossible to carry out contract. Consider canceled.”
Blakely came to me and said, “What’s to be done?”
“Done?” I answered. “Telegraph them you will open at the exposition at the time named in the contract.”
This he did. If he had done otherwise, we would have lost at least $10,000 in bringing the band back and rearranging our tour after Atlanta. Blakely sent his assistant to Atlanta and told him to explain to the manager the impossibility of canceling the contract, to advertise our opening date and exploit us as fully as possible.
We reached Atlanta on the morning of our opening. Blakely’s man said he could do nothing with the board of directors. They had two famous bands from New York, neither of which had drawn any money. The board had been forced to borrow from a public-spirited citizen enough money to carry on the exposition, and the outlook was very bad.
“We will open today,” said Blakely.
We did open and had a splendid crowd, the next largest since the opening of the exposition.
Blakely was delighted and said, “Just watch them; they’ll come around with an apology on a silver platter.”
We went to dinner. We had just sat down when a bell boy entered the dining room and handed Blakely a large official-looking envelope.
“Bully!” he said. “I bet it’s an apology.”
He opened the envelope and it seemed to me his chin whiskers almost touched the ground. He handed the letter to me. The note was from some petty official connected with the exposition, and it read:
“David Blakely,
“Manager Sousa’s Band.
“Sir: The exposition paid three dollars to carry your large instruments
from the hall to the band stand. Kindly reimburse us on receipt of this and hereafter
make your own arrangements for the transportation of your instruments.
“I’ll show them what’s what,” he exclaimed, “at the end of dinner!“
I went to the evening concert and Blakely remained in town. When I came back from the concert he introduced me to a gentleman whom he had engaged as his lawyer to look after our interests. This gentleman knew the general manager and the board of directors of the exposition and had made an appointment with them to meet us and discuss matters the next day. We met the board, a number of fine men who seemed distressed over their inability to carry out their contract. One member told me they had borrowed money and that 80 per cent of what came in daily had to be paid over to the people they had borrowed the money from, leaving the exposition but 20 per cent to carry on business. Finally, after talking over various plans to have us stay that countenanced the fact they didn’t have the money to pay us, I made a proposition. It was that we would release the management from the contract; we would give a series of concerts in the Festival Hall, charging an admission of fifty cents, and either side could terminate this agreement by one week’s notice.
It was accepted, and the next day we gave our first concert indoors at the exposition. I got a great number of abusive letters upbraiding me for charging the populace for music when they already had to pay fifty cents for admission to the grounds. One paper had a cartoon in which I was shown in a glass case, with the legend, Drop Fifty Cents in the Slot and Hear Sousa.
Our plan worked beautifully. Though the public was angry, still they came and filled the hall. We played the week out, and on Sunday gave a musicale at De Grive’s Opera House. The exposition was making money on us and it wasn’t costing them one penny. The second week was as good as the first, and on Saturday night the management and board of directors received the following from Mr. Blakely:
“Sousa’s Band will terminate its engagement with the exposition next Saturday evening.
The fellow who had written the three-dollar letter was the first to come to expostulate.
“What are you stopping for? You’re making money and we are making money, so why end the concerts?”
“I’ll tell you,” was my reply, “After we had come to an agreement to give these concerts without any expense to you, Mr. Biakely sent his assistant ahead to book and make contracts for the band in various towns between here and New York. He has been successful in doing so, and we open in Spartanburg, South Carolina, a week from Monday.”
Months before, B. D. Stevens, manager of the DeWolf Hopper Opera Company, had come to me with a libretto. He said that Mr. Hopper retained a happy recollection of the music of Desirée, which I had composed and in which he had made his inaugural appearance in comic opera, and had said if I saw enough in this libretto to write the music for it he would produce it. I took the libretto, which was written by Charles Klein and was called El Capitan. I read it carefully and liked it very much, sending Stevens and Hopper my opinion that it was an excellent vehicle for musical treatment. Klein was not a lyric writer, so we called in Tom Frost, who enjoyed some reputation as a versifier. I marked out the places for music, and Frost and I wrote the lyrics. I wrote the words and music of the El Capitan song, Sweetheart, I’m Waiting; The Typical Tune of Zanzibar; and quite half the lyrics of the piece. I wrote the El Capitan song while in Atlanta.
There was a newspaper man on The Constitution of whom I became very fond. His name was Robert Adamson and he became quite a famous man during the time Mr. Gaynor was mayor of New York. He came into the hotel to see me one morning and I said, “Hopper has written me for a different song for an El Capitan entrance. He doesn’t like the words and music of the one I sent and I have written a new one, words and music.”
I sat at the piano and played it while Mrs. Sousa sang it.
“If that doesn’t make a hit, I’ll eat it!” he exclaimed. He didn’t eat it, so it must have made a hit.
In the third act there was a cumbersome and expensive change of scene. B. D. Stevens—who sometimes, owing to his initials, was called Breakfast-Dinner-and-Supper Stevens—was a careful and not a wasteful manager. He did not see the necessity of spending a large sum on scenery that might prove of no value, so he wrote me and said:
“Hopper wants a knock-out song for this act. Send it as soon as possible.”
I remembered some verses I had written a few years before for a now defunct magazine. They were called The Typical Tune of Zanzibar, and going from Omaha to Chicago I wrote music for them, and wired I would be in Philadelphia in a week to see Stevens. He and Klein were there and I played it for them. It struck their fancy and has remained one of the many hits of the perennial El Capitan. It was produced in Boston and made an instantaneous hit, although the critics were not all unanimous in their praise of the work.
El Capitan is played almost every year and vies with the Gilbert and Sullivan operas in revivals. Only two years ago I saw it and it sounded as fresh in words and music as it did the first time it was played.
After Desirée, I had composed with Ned Taber a one-act piece called The Queen of Hearts, representing the nursery story of the queen of hearts who made the tarts and the Jack who ate them. It was produced in Washington and made a moderate hit. El Capitan was my fourth opera and my first positive success. The march of the opera stirred the country and is today one of my most-played marches.
When we reached San Francisco our lady violinist, Miss Currie Duke, was quite ill, but with that courage and ambition common to the American girl, insisted on appearing. We were to be there for a week.
She said, “I’ll not disappoint your audience, but I prefer to play one of my lighter solos until I become myself again.”
Of course I agreed; so that night she played a Hungarian fantasie by Natchez, which, throughout the week, owing to her illness, she repeated at every performance. Of course the programs had all been printed for the week, and it was impossible to alter the names on the program and we made no announcement to the audience.
We started eastward. When we got to Missoula, after days of snow, the chinook winds had descended and were melting the ice and snow and had carried away the bridge. We finally got across, but later in the day we found another bridge carried away by the melting snow and ice and had to wait until a plank walk was constructed. Instrument trunks and music trunks were carried over by hand, and leaving our Pullmans on one side of the river, we took a passenger train waiting for us for our concert in Butte. We reached there at 10:30. I immediately went to the theater. It was packed with people who had patiently waited for us since eight o’clock.
The manager said, “Go out and tell them you’re here. It will quiet them down.”
I went before the curtain and cheerily said, “How do you do, everybody? We have been fighting the chinook winds since we left Missoula, but if you will bear with us for a few minutes we will give you the best concert we have ever given in our lives.”
We began the concert at eleven o’clock and played the last note a little before one.
At the close of the Manhattan Beach engagement in 1896 I needed a rest, so, with Mrs. Sousa, sailed for Europe.
London was our first stop, where I had the pleasure of hearing Hans Richter’s Orchestra. At that performance there was given an almost entire Wagner program, with the single exception of one of Haydn’s symphonies. Own own Lillian Nordica was the vocalist and sang the Elizabeth song from Tannhäuser.
At the end of the first part the orchestra left the stage. At the conclusion of the intermission and the beginning of the second part of the program, which opened with a Haydn symphony, instead of the hundred men forming the Richter Orchestra there came on stage an orchestra in size such as Haydn employed in his day. There were six first violins, four seconds, four violas, three cellos, four double basses, two flutes, two oboes, two bassoons, two trumpets and tympani. The contrast from the heavier fare of Wagner in the first part to a delightful miniature orchestra was most exhilarating and pleasing. It showed rare showmanship on the part of Richter to do this. After all, men in every walk of life succeed—if they have got the proper goods—by showmanship. Men may object to being called showmen, but the history of mankind is continual showmanship from the very beginning.
From London we went to Paris and then down to Switzerland. When we reached Interlaken, coming from my room in the hotel, I went to the major-domo, the high-much-a-muck, who had more gold braid and a stiffer back than anyone else in all Europe—there’s one of these supergrandees attached to every European hotel—and with becoming deference, but in my rather easy American manner, said, “Is there anything interesting to see in this burg?”
He eyed me benignly.
“Come with me,” he said, and he waved in a grandiloquent manner to the door. I followed him up the street about half a block, and then, dramatically pointing up, he said, “Look!”
“Yes,” I replied. “What is it? What is it?”
He almost shouted “It is the Jungfrau.”
High up in the heavens stood the Jungfrau, snow-clad and grand, the sunlight glistening in the snow. It was sublime in its beauty.
“The Jungfrau?” I inquired wearily. “What do you call it?”
“A mountain, sir; a grand mountain,” he answered.
“A mountain?” I echoed. “My friend, don’t make fun of me because I come from far-off America. A mountain? That a mountain?” I repeated slowly; then turning solemnly to him I intoned: “My friend, do not try to deceive me. Why, in America we have holes in the ground taller than that!”
More in sorrow than anger, he walked off murmuring, “Mein Gott im Himmel! Mein Gott im Himmel!”
We stopped in Switzerland some days and then went to Italy; first to Florence, then to Venice.
Among the attractions at Venice at that time were the concerts given in the Piazza by Castiglioni’s Band. Mrs. Sousa, some friends and myself were attending the concert, listening with great interest, and we were very much delighted when the band struck up The Washington Post. Near the band stand was a music store. I walked in and said to the proprietor, “The band just played a piece I should like to buy. Will you kindly have your clerk ask the bandmaster what the name of it is?”
He sent the clerk to the stand and he returned in a few moments and said, “The last piece the band played was The Washington Post.”
“I would like a copy,“ I ventured.
He looked in a folio, found to his regret he was out of copies, but assured me if I would return in an hour he would have one for me. In the hour, Mrs. Sousa and I returned and the shopkeeper had an Italian edition of The Washington Post, by Giovanni Filippo Sousa!
I took the copy, went to the piano, played the first two measures and, looking back smilingly at the shopkeeper, said, “Yes, that’s it—that is the piece the band was playing. I see here on the title-page it is composed by one Giovanni Filippo Sousa. Who is this Sousa?”
“Oh,” said the shopkeeper, “he is one of our famous Italian composers.“
“Indeed! I am delighted to hear it. Is he as famous as Verdi?“
“Well, I should not say so famous as Verdi; he is young yet.”
“Have you ever seen him?” I inquired.
“I do not remember.”
“I would like, with your permission,” I said, “to introduce you to his wife. This is Signora Giovannia Filippo Sousa.”
And Mrs. John Philip Sousa said, “Permit me to introduce my husband, Signor Giovanni Filippo Sousa, the composer of the march The Washington Post.”
Explanations and laughter followed, and the shopkeeper charged me only the wholesale price for a pirated copy of my own march.
We went from Venice to Rome and were there the night Mr. McKinley was elected to the presidency. The bell boys evidently for a few years had not received a great number of tips, owing to the shortage of opulent American tourists, and had evidently heard some good Republican say that prosperity would come with Mr. McKinley’s election. That night of the election they went around shouting, “McKinny and prosperity! McKinny and prosperity!”
While we were in Naples, preparing to go to Sicily, I bought a Paris Herald and sat in the hotel to read it. Suddenly an item caught my eye. It was a cable from New York saying that David Blakely, the well-known musical manager, had dropped dead in his office the day before. The paper was four days old when I bought it, and at first I tried to make myself believe it was some other Blakely, not my manager. Then I recalled I had not let my office know my itinerary. I immediately sent a cable to find out the truth, and the answer came back from Christianer confirming the passing of my manager, with the further information that it was necessary for me to be responsible for the coming tour of the band.
I answered, telling Christianer to represent me, saying the tour would be carried out as contracted for, and that I would be responsible for whatever money was required; that I would go immediately to Paris and would stop at the Continental Hotel, where they could reach me by cable. When I reached the Continental Hotel I found a large number of cables sent by Low’s Agency trying to locate me all over Europe. I quickly procured passage on the Teutonic and sailed for America the following Saturday.
As the vessel steamed out of the harbor I was pacing the deck absorbed with the contemplation of my manager’s death and my urgent need to get to New York as soon as possible. Suddenly it seemed as if a band was playing in my brain, and it kept on playing, playing, playing, and for the entire time we were on the ocean that imaginary band kept on playing, playing, playing, and the same themes echoed and reëchoed over and over again. I did not put a note on paper while on the steamer, but when I got ashore I recalled the notes that this imaginary band had been playing for me, and not a note from that time to this has ever been changed. The composition is known to the world as The Stars and Stripes Forever, probably one of the most popular pieces ever written. A short time afterward I wrote the words that are sung to it in countless schools and by countless singing societies throughout the world.
We started in 1897 under the management of Everett R. Reynolds. Mr. Reynolds had been the manager of the Long Island Railroad and the Manhattan Beach Hotel all the years I had played at the Beach. When Mr. Corbin died Reynolds was superseded by someone else, and I appointed him my manager.
When we reached Providence, Bob Fitzsimmons, who had in the March before attained the position of champion heavyweight of the world, came to the theater where we were giving a concert and said to the ticket seller, “I’m Bob Fitzsimmons, champion of the world. I want a box to see the show.”
“I’m awfully sorry, Mr. Fitzsimmons,” said the very respectful ticket seller to the champion of the world, “but all of the boxes are filled.”
“Then give me an orchestra seat.”
“I regret exceedingly that I haven’t one left; in fact, we have only standing room.”
“Well, give me a standing room.”
He came into the theater and stayed with hundreds of others to the end of the concert. He then went to my manager and said, “I want to shake hands with the little fellow that led the band. I just want to shake hands with the man who can draw more than the champion of the world. I had a rotten matinée today!”
He came back to my dressing room. I, being an American boy, could talk of prize fighting, past and present, and finally he, Ed Corliss, Wallace Reeves and myself retired to my room at the Narragansett Hotel. Of course the conversation drifted to the late encounter between Jim Corbett and himself. Fitz was rather severe on Jim, for the memory of the little playful rubbing of the laces of Jim’s gloves on Fitz’s nose whenever they broke away was irritating. Fitz confided that his nose was like raw beef for days.
Ed Corliss weighed at least 200 pounds. Ed, inspired with great interest, wondered how Corbett could do it. Fitz got up, pulled Ed over to him, placed one hand against his mouth, the first finger of his right hand pressing under Ed’s nose, and, with the other hand pressing against Corliss’ back, raised him off the ground. When he let Corliss down the latter instantly felt his nose, for he believed it was torn off; but it was there. For a month afterward Ed told me it was so sore he couldn’t touch it.
We went to dinner, and agreed to meet after our respective performances and sup together. It was during the time leading up to the Spanish-American War and nearly every conversation would either begin or end about Spain and Cuba. The day of the destruction of the Maine was nearing.
My father, who had accidentally been born in Spain, was an excellent student of the history of that land and I had imbibed a great deal of his knowledge from him. I began to tell salient points of Spanish history and found Fitzsimmons a most attentive listener. I finally got to the Saracens and began to expound on the glories of the last Moorish king, commonly known as Boabdil, who finally was defeated by Ferdinand of Aragon and was forced to leave the land where he and the Saracens had been masters for 500 years.
“ ‘Whipped and disgraced, Boabdil,’ I recited, ‘riding toward the mountains, turned to take a last lingering look at Granada and cried in despair, “God is great,” and then burst into violent and uncontrolled tears. His mother, standing beside him, said angrily, “If you didn’t cry like a woman, you’d fight like a man.” ’ ”
Fitzsimmons had shut his eyes during this narration of mine. I thought he was dozing. Suddenly he shook his head and looked around and said, “Sousa, tell us again about poor Boabdil and his mother.” Someone attempted to interject a remark, but Fitz pointed a finger at him, saying, “Don’t you say a word. Let the little fellow talk,” meaning me.
About this time Mr. Reynolds and I began planning a European tour in 1898. We sent Col. George Frederick Hinton to look over the ground and make arrangements. The idea was to play mostly on the Continent, and Mr. Mapleson, the well-known manager, became interested in our tour; but the Spanish-American War broke out and changed our plans. Mr. Mapleson cabled that there was an anti-American feeling on the Continent and he did not believe the band should come to Europe at that time. The band made a tour in January, February, March and April in the States.
I wrote a show piece called Trooping the Colors, starting with a company of trumpeters proclaiming, in a fanfare, “Liberty throughout the world!” Then each nation friendly to the United States was represented by a song or tableau—the British Grenadiers for England, the Marseillaise for France, and then came Cuba, Belgium, and all the rest, winding up with Columbia entering, singing The Star-Spangled Banner, with band and chorus. The effect was electrical and the performance was an enormous success financially.
I sent John Braham, the well-known Boston conductor, ahead to rehearse the chorus. Cuba was represented by a company of Cuban patriots protecting a pretty yellow girl from the onslaught of the Spanish. Braham telegraphed from Louisville:
“Fine chorus, but they will not appear if you have colored girl in production. I believe in holding out.”
As John was born in New England and lived there all his life, I could understand his desire that everybody on earth should be considered equal; but as I was born south of the Mason and Dixon Line, I knew no Southern lady or gentleman would ever agree with him, however well disposed they might be to the African race. I telegraphed back:
“Request the prettiest girl in the chorus to make up for the darky, but be sure you ask for the prettiest one.”
When we gave our performance feminine Cuba was represented by a dazzling beauty rouged in rather an Indian copper.
That summer, as I had given up my engagement at Manhattan Beach, expecting to go to Europe, and not going, I leased a farm up at Suffern, New York, and there wrote the lyrics and music of The Charlatan. It was produced in Montreal on August 29, 1898, by the DeWolf Hopper Company. It did not make so great a hit as El Capitan, but musically it was considered superior.
It went from Montreal to New York and was produced at the Knickerbocker Theater on September fifth. It was one of the hottest nights I can recall. Why anyone went to a theater that night is beyond me. The favorable reception the piece met with in Montreal was lacking on the part of the audience; it was an awful test for a new piece. The comments of the critics ranged from ordinary praise to loud acclaim.
After The Charlatan had made a tour of the States, DeWolf Hopper went to England and produced there successfully El Capitan and The Charlatan under the name of The Mystical Miss. On his return to America he continued the season with The Charlatan. The first reports that came from London were not unanimous in praise of El Capitan. I was worried, so I wrote an English musical friend whose judgment I believed in, and asked him if the piece was a success. He cabled back:
“Don’t worry. London indorses El Capitan.”
Whether it was propaganda that somebody was trying to work, I never knew, but every now and then it would appear in some paper that Hopper was going to put on Wang, one of his former pieces, to replace El Capitan in London; but as El Capitan and The Charlatan were the only two pieces that ran during Hopper’s entire English season, evidently there was no necessity for a change and no intention to make one.
In December we started across the continent on one of our long tours, and on my way out I was particularly struck with the disregard of the finer amenities of social custom on the part of some of the minor employes of either the railroads or the Pullman Company. It was almost a daily occurrence for a porter, conductor or one of the division hands to walk into my drawing-room totally oblivious of the privacy for which I was supposed to be paying. I had used the quiet and satirical, and had gone so far as to indulge in the explosive invective, but to no avail.
One morning we stopped at a little station. I was just out of my berth and indulging in my morning bath, when, without warning, a key was turned in the door of my drawing-room and in stalked a sixfooter with a bucket of ice to replenish my water cooler.
The thought occurred to me, “Now here is an opportunity to teach this barbarian something by example.”
Hastily throwing a robe around me, I said, “My young friend, you have noticed that when you came into this room without rapping or invitation, I was in the same defenseless condition as when I came into this world. Now suppose that instead of your coming into my drawing-room I should this morning have called at your house, inserted a key in the front door, walked without warning into your wife’s bedroom and found her as unpresentable as I was when you came in here. What would you have said?”
He rested the ice bucket on my shirt, looked pityingly at me, and then with an evident wish to set me at ease, thus deposed:
“Don’t worry about that, boss; we don’t mind a little thing like that out here.”
Sometime after the first performance of El Capitan, the Lambs Club invited Klein and myself to a dinner party. Though Klein was an excellent talker and raconteur when seated among a few friends and good listeners, it seemed utterly impossible for him to think on his feet; his brain refused to work when he was called upon. At this dinner, after I had said a few words of a more or less funny nature, the toastmaster called on Mr. Klein. The poor fellow got up, looked about him, staring helplessly into vacancy, waited an unusually long while, said “I am yours truly, John L. Sullivan,” and stopped another minute. And then, in a voice tinged with agony, continued, “Will somebody kindly hit me with a bottle?”—and sat down. There was a roar of laughter from the diners.
Charlie Klein, after El Capitan was produced, shot forward into the world of success as a playwright with great rapidity. His Lion and the Mouse, The Auctioneer, The Music Master and several others enjoyed immense popularity and brought to the playwright very substantial returns.
Poor fellow, at the height of his success God called him home. He sank with the Lusitania. Those who knew him best, loved him best.
When war was about to begin between the United States and Spain I was touring the States and reached New York on April tenth for my concert at the Metropolitan Opera House. The war fever was intense, and the New York Herald thus described the scene at my concert; it was thrilling and never to be forgotten by those who were there:
“There have been some lively scenes in the theaters of late, when The Star-Spangled Banner was played, but none of them equaled the extraordinary demonstration of last night at the Metropolitan Opera House, when Sousa’s Band played the national anthem and then swung into Dixie.
“During the playing of the former piece the demonstration kept up, and when it came to a conclusion with the final crash of music from the band, the scene beggared description. An encore was demanded, but Sousa stood calmly awaiting quiet before he would go on. Then when he could be heard he said, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, it seems the only appropriate encore I can give in these days is Johnny Get Your Gun. But stop. There’s another air we all will cheer tonight ——’ The musicians swung into Dixie.”
“If there had been orderly enthusiasm before, there was bedlam let loose now, and while the cheers went up as heartily as ever, there burst from certainly a thousand throats the famous rebel yell. It came from all parts of the house. For quite a time this continued, men and women joining in the uproar, the ladies leaning out of the boxes and waving their handkerchiefs while the Southern air was played.
“The audience had hardly quieted when a man in one of the boxes leaped over the rail and yelled, ‘Who says we’re not ready for war?’ and the house went wild again with another combination of Union cheers and rebel yells.
“Then someone in the orchestra jumped into the aisle and called for three cheers for our ‘flag and our country, the North and the South—we’re all ready,’ and the previous scene was repeated.
“When The Stars and Stripes Forever was sung there was still another demonstration and then 5000 tired and hoarse individuals took themselves home.”
These scenes were repeated in nearly every town we visited. In Chicago the Interocean said:
“The spectacular feature described as Trooping the Colors is a stunning affair, cleverly arranged in detail, calculated to arouse patriotic fire in the most phlegmatic. First came the trumpeters ‘America proclaiming liberty to the world.’ Then came the invincible Continentals playing ‘Yankee Doodle, the Spirit of ’76.’ The national allotment then proceeds, God Save the Queen, Die Wacht am Rhein, The Marseillaise, The Wearing of the Green. The Scottish bagpipes, playing The Campbells are Coming, entered the auditorium through one of the tunnels, marched down the aisle and up to the stage. The Cubans marched to the air You’ll Remember Me. When the boys in blue and the Marines came marching to the front to salute the flag the enthusiasm was uproarious. The Star-Spangled Banner was encored three times. There were 200 young women in the chorus that made a striking background for the brilliant color of the fine costumes. Trooping the Colors is one of the most remarkable displays of its kind ever seen on the local stage.”
But with all this enthusiasm, in a very little while the country had virtually shouted itself hoarse. A victory was assured and expected; so when we returned to New York for our final concert it was a very decorous and music-loving audience that greeted us, and not one that was moved to patriotic fervor.
[Small illustration: eagle with scroll]
Printed in the Saturday Evening Post
198(23), 1925-12-05.
Part 5
As I grew in popularity a number of men and a few women began to do supposed imitations of me—some of them clever, some of them the broadest kind of burlesque. Walter Jones, a comedian with Rice’s musical pieces during their stay at Manhattan Beach, was a constant attendant at my concerts and began giving imitations of me wherever he went with musical comedy. As his fame increased as a mimic and a burlesquer of my conducting, there grew up a host of others trying to emulate his example. Lafayette, Zimmerman and others took up the mimicry. On an occasion when Klaw and Erlanger’s Round of Pleasure company was at the Knickerbocker Theater in New York, they gave a benefit for the Herald Ice Fund, and I volunteered and brought my band up from Manhattan Beach to take part in the performance. Walter Jones was the comedian of the play. After I had given my program, and while the audience was still applauding and I bowing, Mr. Jones walked on the stage made up in a perfect disguise of me. He came over, and with great dignity extended his hand and then spoke.
“Ah, Mr. Jones,” he exclaimed, “I desire to congratulate you and your splendid band. I knew there was something in you when I saw the clever way in which you mimicked me last season in In Gay New York and I am glad to see you got such a goed band of your own. Go ahead, my dear Jones, go ahead.” And with another hearty handshake, the actor, still mimicking my walk, bowed himself off as the concert proceeded. It wes so well done that for a moment the audience itself was surprised.
“Headquarters
“Department of Matanzas and Santa Clara,
“Matanzas, Cuba.“May 29, 1900.“John Philip Sousa, Esq.,
“Paris, France“Dear Sir: In as much as you accepted my invitation at the outbreak of the Spanish War to become the musical director of the Sixth Army Corps, I now take pleasure in handing you the headquarters badge, which you are entitled to wear upon all occasions.
“My idea, you will remember, in asking you to accept the above-mentioned position was to utilize your great skill as a composer and director in securing uniformity in the music of the regimental bands, without which regularity of time and step in marching, especially in parades and reviews, is impossible. The necessity for this needs no demonstration to military men.
“You will also recall that I recommended you to the War Department and the President for the commission of captain in order that you might have proper rank and consideration in the performance of your duties, but for some reason not explained and much to my regret the commission was not issued. It is understood that while this was a disappointment to me at least, if not to yourself, you were prevented by sickness alone from reporting for duty at Camp Thomas, Chickamauga.
“Wishing you continued success, I am,
“Very respectfully yours,
“James H. Wilson,
“Major General, Vols.”
[Photograph: Mr. Sousa and Mr. Edison.]
On December 28, 1897, The Bride Elect, for which I wrote the libretto and music, was produced in New Haven by Messrs. Klaw and Erlanger. A number of New York critics attended to write up the initial performance. The success of El Capitan had been so great that naturally there was great interest in the question whether I could do it again. With a cast without a star in it, the piece made a wonderful hit. At the finale of the second act, “Unchain the dogs of war,” the enthusiasm of the audience was very great, and Mr. Bunnell, the owner of the Hyperion Theater, came to my box and said, “Mr. Sousa, I’ll give you $100,000 for your opera.”
“Thanks, very much,” I replied. “It is not for sale.”
Next morning a newspaper man who was present deplored the fact that poor Bizet died in poverty three months after the production of Carmen, while I was offered $100,000 for The Bride Elect. In meeting the gentleman afterward, I said to him, “I do not know whether your remarks about Carmen were a reflection on my opera or on Mr. Bunnell, who offered me $100,000 for it. I think the reflection should be against the French managers who failed to see the beauties of Carmen and did not offer Bizet a huge sum for it. For myself I admire the American manager more for making the offer than the French managers who failed to do so.”
And that characteristic belongs to America. Europe may call us infants in musical art, but America today is the Mecca of every European musician who has anything to offer. In fact, some of them come over when they have nothing to offer. Some theatrical managers drive close bargains, but I want to say a word about what I consider the greatest theatrical firm America has ever had. I refer to Messrs. Klaw and Erlanger. When I wrote The Bride Elect, the first opera I wrote for them, a contract was drawn and every line of that contract was carried out to the letter. I afterward wrote for the same firm The Free Lance and Chris and the Wonderful Lamp, and never took the trouble even to discuss a contract with them. There would be a ring at the telephone the day after I played the opera for them, and either Mr. Erlanger or Mr. Klaw would say, “Well, we’re going to produce that opera of yours very soon. How much do you want for it?”
“The usual terms,” I would say, and I’m confident that every dollar I was entitled to for the production of any of my operas by Kiaw and Erlanger I received to the very last penny.
In 1899, our tour stretched from coast to coast and from the St. Lawrence to the Gulf, and at its close I returned to Manhattan Beach. On this tour, when we were playing in Los Angeles, I, having some friends in Pasadena, concluded one bright morning to accept an invitation from them to breakfast. Those who know me best know that I am very fond of horseback riding, and that I indulge in it whenever I can. So I thought instead of going by trolley or train to Pasadena, I would cross country on a saddle horse—which I did.
The street was crowded with various vehicles and the horse began plunging and rearing in a crazy variety of antics. The liveliness of the experience knocked my glasses off, not to speak of upsetting my dignity, which I cherish; and to my great concern the horse seemed trying to find a place to bolt from the tangle of wagons.
At this moment, very much alarmed, my glasses somewhere in the road and myself sitting in the vicinity of the horse’s neck and not too sure of staying, I called to a Chinaman standing near, “Catch the bridle! Catch the bridle!”
With a face like a graven image, he looked at me and said very slowly, “I will not; it is not my horse.”
During the existence of my band it has appeared three times as a marching organization. At the dedication of the World’s Fair the first time, when the Cleveland City Troop went to the Spanish-American War, and when the Pittsburgh Volunteer Regiment returned from the Spanish-American War.
While I was on the road my manager was approached in New York to get the band for the parade in honor of Admiral Dewey. This manager gave them his figures, which were published in the New York papers, and excited the comment of some musicians owing to the price asked. I was at the Pittsburgh Exposition when I read these reports, and I immediately telegraphed my manager, “Tender my services and band free of charge to the committee. Admiral Dewey is an old friend of mine and I much desire to honor myself by appearing in the parade given in his honor.”
I augmented my own band to 150 men and we headed the Olympia crew on that eventful September thirtieth. The march began at Grant’s Tomb, and we went, after the parade was dismissed, with the Olympia crew down to the dock where the sailor lads reëmbarked on their ship.
I have always believed that we have never had a venal President; that whatever a man’s predilection may be in seamy politics, when he assumes the office of President he becomes to himself a glorified being. The greatness of the office, the dignity and the veneration are such that any man is exalted to a very great degree. That belief has led me to say that all Presidents are heroes to their musical directors; but though I have believed in the greatness of all Presidents, the first time I ever saw the personification of glory was when I saw Admiral Dewey at the Washington Arch at the closing of this parade. He stood in his carriage as we passed, and as I gave him the proper salute he looked intently at me and a smile illuminated his face; and then he seemed to grow taller and more imposing. It seemed as if his heart and mind were filled with the thought, “They have made me great. Nothing I have done compares with the honor they have bestowed on me.” And he seemed to grow in height and grandeur, and stood a veritable giant. He became glorified, and, great man that he was, he passed beyond himself and became a superman.
A year later I dined with him and spoke of it. He said, “I felt greatly the honor that my country had bestowed on me. I was awe-inspired, and the event is one that will never lessen in my memory. The proud thought that I was loved by the people came to me repeatedly. I had served them faithfully and this was their great reward.”
The Chicago Democrat said, “When Dewey’s squadron sailed out of Mirs Bay on the way to attack Manila, the Olympia band played El Capitan.” And the march we played in passing the reviewing stand was El Capitan.
After the Dewey parade, I finished my engagements and then went to Boston to give concerts at the Food Fair. It was there I gave the first public performance of The Fairest of the Fair, which has retained its popularity.
I was followed at the fair by Lieut. Dan Godfrey, the famous conductor of the British Grenadier Guards Band. His advance man, who had intently watched my methods of concert procedure, my quickness of responding to hearty applause with an encore, and no waits between, conveyed to Lieutenant Dan the importance of a similar response on his part if he expected success.
Godfrey listened, and said, “What do they like for an encore?”
“Oh, one of Sousa’s marches will knock ’em silly,” the press agent replied.
“All right,” said the lieutenant; and turning to his men, when the performance was about to begin, he said, “Remember, immediately, immediately—now don’t forget—immediately after the overture we will perform Mr. Sousa’s march, The Stars and Stripes Forever, and be ready immediately to go into it.”
At the end of the overture there was a round of applause. Godfrey bowed and sat down. Then rose and bowed again. The agent whiepered to him, “Play the Sousa march.” Lieutenant Dan got up slowly, asked each man if he had his part handy, and after rapping for attention twice, played the march. The audience had ceased applauding ten minutes before and dear Dan’s “immediately after” was fifteen minutes after the close of the overture!
Miss Hannah Harris, the manager of the then famous star course at the Philadelphia Academy of Music, is the one who suggested my composing the symphonic poem, The Chariot Race, After I had appeared with the Marine Band in Philadelphia, Miss Harris engaged me for a concert at the Academy. She wrote me the following, which justified her belief, because the Chariot Race, announced in several subsequent concerts, never failed to pack the Academy:
“Now I knew how easily and how charmingly you adapt any fancy to music, and will you think of this suggestion? It is that you prepare a piece of music and call it The Chariot Race from Ben-Hur. No doubt you are familiar with the spirited description, and if you are not, a single reading will give you the inspiration, I am sure. You would have the preparation for the race, the start, the progress of the race, with the applause, and so on, of the vast audience. The unfair advantages of Messala, the blow to the steeds of Ben-Hur, and after all this, the victory of Ben-Hur, the Jew. There is opportunity for a grand climax, and anything with the name of Ben-Hur draws.”
Her judgment proved correct.
In these Academy concerts I learned that the popularity of my marches had gone beyond the boundaries of my home in Washington. No composition of mine figured in the program. Instead, there was a list comprising gems from Wagner and other standard composers. During the first half of the concert regular numbers and encores were of the classic kind. During the applause that followed the first piece in the second half of the concert, an old gentleman rose from his seat in the audience and holding up his arm, said, “Will Mr. Sousa play the High School Cadets?” And I did, to vociferous applause.
While in a Pennsylvania town, just as I was going on to conduct a concert, I received a note written on the edge of a program. It read: “I came forty miles over the mountains to see the man who makes $25,000 a year out of his compositions. Kindly oblige me by playing them all.”
Another time, I received the following:
“Bandmaster Sousa: Please inform me what is the name of those two instruments that look like gas pipes.”
A musically inclined member of the African race sent this: “A colored lady would like to hear a coronet solo by your solo coronet.”
Another sent the request: “Please play Ice Cold Cadets.” I played the High School Cadets, and probably that was what he wanted.
[Photograph: Father Neptune Greeting Sousa and His Band as They Crossed the Equator, 1911.]
The year 1900 was a busy year for the band. After making a tour up to April twenty-second, on the twenty-fifth we sailed for Europe on our first tour outside the United States and Canada. There seemed to be great interest on the part of the people as to how Europe would accept us, and I recall meeting John L. Sullivan at Madison Square Garden two days before we sailed.
He came up and said, “How are you, Mr. Sousa? I see you are going to Europe.”
“Yes,” I said, “we are going over and we hope we’ll please them.”
“Please them!” he replied. “Why, you’ll knock hell out of them.”
Although with these kind assurances that we were going to be a success, I left with a heavy heart, for only three days before sailing, Mr. Reynolds, the manager of the band, withdrew and took with him his financial support. He refused to continue because I would not sign an agreement to give him an extension of his contract until I returned from Europe. His contract still had a year to run, and I could see no reason why I should sign one with him at that time, as it seemed to me it would be better to have the matter of my future settled on my return. I said we were going into new territory and if he was successful in his management I would be very foolish not to sign a new contract with him; and if he was unsuccessful he knew me well enough to know I would give him an opportunity to recover his losses with an American tour.
But he was not satisfied, and declared himself out of the European tour. He told me te bring my check book to the office, as there was several thousand dollars for transportation and other expenses to be paid.
I came with my check book and suggested to Reynolds that possibly he was bluffing.
He said, “No, I’m not bluffing. Give me a contract for another three years on the same terms and I’ll sign, but I won’t wait until you return from Europe.”
The Reynolds management came to an abrupt end. I immediately obtained two letters of credit, one for $25,000 and the other for $100,000, and we sailed on the St. Louis.
The publicity agent of the band was Col. George Frederick Hinton and he was then in Europe. We met him at Southampton. I appointed him manager of the tour and we went on to Paris. I went to the Élysée Palace Hotel, and Mr. Hinton quartered the men in various hotels in the city.
Mr. Ferdinand Peck, United States Commissioner General, had appointed my band the official American band at the exposition and we gave our initial concert on May sixth on the Esplanade des Invalides.
I had not been in Paris a day before I was called upon by Monsieur Gabriel Pares, the conductor of the Garde Républicaine Band, probably the greatest band in Europe. Mr. Pares immediately gave me a card for the Army and Navy Club and invited me to lunch with him the following day with a coterie of his friends. Of course I accepted.
This gentleman had scarcely left the hotel when the card of an interviewer was sent me. I invited him to come to my room. We talked music and bands in a pleasant sort of way, when he suddenly asked, “How do you compare your band with the Garde Républicaine?”
Of course it was a question that no gentleman or guest of France would think of answering.
“Oh,” I exclaimed, “we have the greatest admiration possible for the Garde Républicaine. When they came to America as the representative band of France to the Gilmore Jubilee in Boston, everybody was charmed with their playing and the wonderful degree of perfection they had attained.”
“But you have not given me any information as to the comparison between your band and them.”
“No, I have not; but you can rest assured no foreign organization was more welcome in America than the Garde Républicaine and its brilliant conductor, Monsieur Gabriel Pares.”
We talked a few minutes longer and he withdrew.
Next morning, when his paper appeared, the interview with me said: “M. Sousa was asked how his band compared to the Garde Républicaine. He threw his American arms upward, pointing to the French sky, and said, ‘We are much superior to the Garde Républicaine.’ ”
When I met Pares at the luncheon he was a most quiet and sedate man and carried a look of injured feeling in his face. He had read the article, and his pride and professional standing were hurt. I could see it plainly, so I said to a French gentleman at the table who spoke English splendidly, “Please say to Monsieur Pares that the article in the paper that he must have read this morning was a pure fabrication and a gross and uncalled for exhibition of yellow journalism.”
I do not think he was able to get over the thought of the article, although it was made out of the whole cloth.
During our first engagement in Paris we played at the dedication of the American Pavilion, dedication of the Washington and Lafayette statues, and gave a concert in the famous Trocadéro Concert Hall by invitation of the French Government.
On May fifteenth we were assigned to proceed to the American Machinery Building in the Vincennes annex of the exposition to dedicate it. The American Ambassador, Genera! Porter, chartered two Seine River ferryboats, known as hirondelles in Paris, and had them lashed together. On one were the officials and guests, on the other my band. A young society tad, with a great desire to become internationally famous, came over to me and made a most earnest request that I permit him to conduct my band in one of my marches.
Leading a band in a rhythmic thing like a march or waltz or polka or a piece of jazz, consists only in interpretation and not in time beating, if the men know how to keep together, for good orchestral and band players can mentally play a thing as strongly marked in rhythm as a march or waltz without the aid of a baton. Grinding out music does not require much direction; interpreting requires ceaseless effort.
I good-naturedly said, “All right, go ahead. As we are rather cramped, suppose you take my baton and go over on the other boat and conduct the band from there.”
He climbed over the railings of the two boats, then rapped for attention, and then—some devil in human guise unlashed the rope that held the two boats together and they rapidly drifted apart, he frantically beating time from his boat, which was then at least sixty feet away from the band.
On this same day we serenaded the German commission in the German Building, which they were at the same time dedicating. As France and Germany were not at war, I naturally played the favorite German patriotic song, Die Wacht am Rhein. The Germans were terribly nervous about it, and one of their officials came over to me and whispered to me to stop, which I didn’t do. It was the first time the tune had been played in Paris since the Franco-Prussian War. The French officials and the populace didn’t seem to mind it a bit. I didn’t want to play the German national anthem, Heil dir im Siegeskranz, because the music is the English God Save the King. It was talked about in German circles for days afterward.
On May twentieth, Harry Thaw, of Pittsburgh, the young fellow who got into trouble in New York some years afterward, gave a party at the Ritz Hotel that made even gay Paris get up and rub its eyes. Mr. Thaw got in communication with my manager and engaged my band and myself to give one hour’s concert, for which he agreed to pay $1500. So as not to be short of music, he had a large Hungarian orchestra to play dance music. His guests numbered twenty-five. I recall among the well-known people there, Mrs. Arthur Paget. It was said that the party cost $8000, which someone with mathematical accuracy gave forth as follows:
Number of guests 25Sousa’s Band $1500Price of entertainment 8000Cost per guest 320
I was particularly struck with Thaw’s intelligence in music. Though he did not ask for anything from the old masters, he was fond of Wagner and Liszt, and we played Tannhäuser, The Second Rhapsodie, and a Carmen fantasie, together with some of my marches.
He was an attentive and enthusiastic listener to each number and was very genuine in his praise of all but one number—the Carmen number. Of one movement he said, “Don’t you”—designating a movement by singing a few measures—“take that number too slow?”
“I don’t think so,” I replied. “It is marked molto moderato.”
“Well, I heard it sung by Calvé and she sang it faster than you played it.”
“Ladies first,” I replied. “The next time I play it for you I’ll adopt the lady’s tempo.”
After Paris we went to Brussels and Liège, and our receipts and criticisms were both very satisfactory. We went on from Liège to Berlin on a special train, which was a nine days’ wonder to the people who had never heard of a mere troupe of musicians traveling special all the way from Paris to Berlin. It was almost too much for their credulity. It was a bold stroke on the part of the management. Its publicity made every man, woman and child appreciate the fact that we would be in Berlin on the twentieth of May.
Occasionally, in our travels through Germany, we met critics who said things just to be satirical, or what they thought funny, rather than truthful; but taking German criticism from beginning to end, the treatment of the band as an artistic institution was thoroughly satisfactory.
While we were in Berlin I had an interview with Count Hochberg, the intendant at the Royal Opera House, relative to giving a command performance for the Kaiser at the Schloss. My experience at Washington had taught me that the Presidents did not want their names used to advertise a show before they attended it, and it was always considered good manners never to tell that the President was coming to a theater before he appeared—but be sure to tell everybody afterward. So, believing that the Kaiser would probably feel the same, no one except Count Hochberg, my manager and myself knew that we were to play the following Friday for the Kaiser.
On Thursday morning a notice appeared in one of the Berlin papers stating that I had received a royal command to play for the Kaiser. Before I was out of bed a reporter called and asked to see me on an important matter. I asked him to come up to my room. He came, showed me the article underscored with blue pencil and asked me what I knew about it? I said I knew absolutely nothing about the article and there was evidently some mistake in its appearing in the paper—which was rather begging the question, but it was necessary. He seemed to be satisfied, and left.
When we reached the Royal Opera House for rehearsal, Count Hochberg came and said he regretted exceedingly, but the Kaiser was called out of town and there would not be any concert. I have reason to believe that the advertising fever had taken possession of the German manager and he had advertised the concert for the Kaiser with the idea of filling up the house that night; and I also believe that the Kaiser felt it was a breach of good manners and called the concert off.
The Washington Post was probably the most popular piece of music in the world at that time. It had established the two-step in America; a dance, I was told by a famous dancing master, which had languished for years until the Washington Post brought it into publicity. In England and Germany they not only called the dance a Washington Post but European composers, writing compositions for the dance, called their numbers Washington Posts. Thus, when Herr Diffenderfer wrote a number, he called it Vorwaerts, a Washington Post.
My experience regarding the march was interesting. I would usually play it as an encore to the third number on the program. Everybody who came to my concerts expected me to play it for the third number. If I had not given it, usually a gentleman with a guttural Teutonic voice would shout out from some part of the house, “Die Vashingtun Pust! Die Vashingtun Pust!” Then a unanimous “Yah! Yah!” and deafening applause would greet this request. Perhaps about the sixth number another guttural Teuton would cry out, “Die Vashingtun Pust! Die Vashingtun Pust!” And the same scene would again take place. I had on more than one occasion to render it no fewer than six times.
We finally left Berlin for a tour of Germany. The manager of the German Musical Bureau who had conducted our affairs had been superseded by Mr. Salomon Liebling, a fine musician and court pianist to the King of Saxony. The night when we closed, Mr. Liebling came to me and said, “Mr. Sousa, I have noticed in your tipping waiters and others you show but little discrimination. If you are pleased with them you tip too liberally, and if you are displeased you show your displeasure in too marked a way. I would like the privilege of doing your tipping for you on our tour. I have toured this country and know it thoroughly. I will take charge of the tipping and give you a faithful account every week of the amount I spend.”
I was delighted. To take the disagreeable task away from me was to grant a boon. I thanked him and said he might assume the duty.
Cassel was the first town we went to after Berlin. Though Mr. Liebling could not be called the tightest wad in the world, he certainly did not believe in spending money unnecessarily for tips. I understood German somewhat, and this would be the usual experience:
Liebling and I would enter a hotel. I would approach the office and stand like a poor boy at a huskin’. Mr. Liebling would advance boldly to the desk, register myself and himself, and then looking around at the menials in the office—porters, bell boys, waiters, and so on—he would say, “Men, look at him!”—nodding toward me—“look at him. Look well. He is so great that he never carries money. Look to me for everything. See that he gets the best of service. Be careful—the best of service—but look to me for everything.“ And then he would walk pompously away. Of course, I was supposed not to know what he was talking about, and it worked splendidly. If ever there was a traveling man who received perfect attention in a hotel, I did.
When the time came to leave and Mr. Liebling and I were in the office, he’d settle up and begin rewarding the various servants. There would be a line of the many who had served me waiting with palms ready. Liebling would take out his pocketbook, bring it up very close to his nose and search diligently for a coin of a certain value, then hand it to the man or the woman. I do not believe he ever gave a pfennig more than the coldest custom had established. But, strange, whatever the opinion of his parsimony was, these men, waiters, bell boys, maids and chambermaids never seemed to show the slightest feeling toward me or look to me for any redress for his closeness. I was a stranger in a strange land, and I had nothing to do with tips, because I was so great I never carried money!
Of course I had to reciprocate. From the time of the cholera in Hamburg in the 80’s, Liebling had never touched a drop of water. He substituted Moselle wine instead. Six or seven times a week I would invite Liebling to dine with me. We would sit at the hotel table. I would ask the waiter for the wine card. My eye would reach the Moselles. I would turn to Liebling and ask if he was fond of Moselle wine. Of course his answer would be, “I drink no other.” I would see a Moselle marked twenty marks.
“May I ask,” I would inquire solicitously, “do you consider Fleckenberg a fit wine to drink?”
“Oh, Mr. Sousa,” he would exclaim, “that is a very rare wine, only drunk by emperors on state occasions.”
I would look grieved, but would continue, “I did not ask you, Mr. Liebling, if this wine is only drunk by emperors on state occasions. I asked you the simple question if you consider it fit wine for gentlemen to drink.”
“Oh, Mr. Sousa”—and his eyes would grow large and his face assume a look of ecstatic joy—“it is a delicious wine.”
“And you indorse it?”
“Oh, Mr. Sousa, yes!”
“Very well. Waiter, bring us a bottle of Fleckenberg.”
This dialogue, with the usual exclamations, was repeated daily; the only change would be the name of the wine and the price.
In June, after my tour of Belgium, I received the following:
“In recognition of the success of the concerts given in Belgium, the Academy of Arts, Science and Literature of Hainault has conferred on you the Grand Diploma of Honor and decorated you with the Cross of Artistic Merit of the First Class.”
I am still wearing the decoration and hope to continue to do so.
When I was about twelve my father called me to his side and spoke of tobacco.
“You know,” he said, “that I am an inveterate smoker; it is seldom I am not smoking either a cigarette or a cigar, and I rather imagine you will follow in my footsteps in your love of tobacco. I would ask, though, that you do not commence smoking until your sixteenth birthday. I think it is best if you don’t. If you do not smoke until you are sixteen, you have my full permission to do so thereafter, and I have no doubt that on some occasions I may be so liberal as to give you a cigar.”
I gave him my hand, and I smoked my first cigar and got beastly sick on my sixteenth birthday. With a few lay-offs, I have smoked steadily ever since, and if no reformer shuts me off, I shall probably smoke until the end.
I did not touch any alcoholic beverage until I was twenty-one, although wine and beer were always on my parents’ dining table. My older sister has never known the taste of alcoholic drinks. After I left the Marines, I made a resolution never to smoke until after lunch and never to drink between meals, and I have kept this resolution inviolable. Up to 1898, my only drink was a little wine or beer at lunch and dinner. In that year, on the advice of a humorous physician, who said that Scotch whisky contained only one poison, while other alcoholic beverages contained many, I dropped wine and beer and took a well-diluted highball of Scotch whisky, sometimes for lunch, but always for dinner. After Mr. Volstead injected his objections, with the legal support of the Constitution, I had to amend my custom, for there is so little preprohibition Scotch in the cellars of people who entertain me at dinner that I have been compelled to fall back on water.
This is all introductory to a confession I desire to make of an episode in which I figured in a certain proud and aristocratic German city. We were announced and booked to give three concerts in this lordly town—an evening, a matinée and an evening. When I arrived at the hotel, in a very short time the American consul called on me. He seemed strangely apprehensive, and finally explained his fears as delicately as he could. He had been consul for twelve years in Germany, and naturally his acquaintance was very great. He knew nearly everybody in town, and as soon as it was announced that I was to come there and give a series of my concerts, every man he met when he went to his office in the morning suddenly became sarcastic, and would say, “Why doesn’t America send us a pork butcher? She knows more about pork than music. We don’t want an American band.” Then, he said, they’d give him the merry ha-ha, and this continual poking fun at American music got on his nerves until he was almost a wreck.
I tried to reassure him. I said we had played in Paris, Berlin and Brussels and other metropolitan towns of the Continent with success and I saw no reason to believe we would register anything but success in his city.
“If audiences get what they expect, they are always satisfied, and perhaps we shall prove ourselves superior to what they expect of us,” I said.
“I hope so,” he wearily replied, and went on his way.
We gave our performance to a remarkably enthusiastic audience, encores being even more than usual, and band and soloists received great approval. At the end of the concert I met the consul at the hotel and he was radiant in his joy. If there ever was joy unconfined, he had it that night. We went to his apartment and had a glass of Rhine wine. He then went over the program and discussed each and every piece, claiming each was better than the one before it; and then, putting his hand on my shoulder, he said, “This is the happiest night of my life, Sousa, we are Americans. Let us celebrate this great victory as Americans should. I have a bottle of Kentucky whisky. We will take it down to the café, select a private room and drink to your great success.”
We took his bottle of whisky and, with his wife accompanying, we went down to a little private room in a café. He mixed two highballs. We drank to each state in the Union. Then he mixed two more and we drank to the governor of each state in the Union. Then we drank to the President and to the cabinet, and to every man, woman and child in the United States of America and its possessions. Then we got slightly pugnacious. We fought the Revolution over again, switched to the War of 1812, took a couple of sips while we were doing up Mexico in 1846, then we drank a long one to the flag and then proceeded to whip Spain over again. Then I, looking at him steadily, with love in my heart for my country, said, “We have whipped everything in this world; bring on another planet.”
His poor little wife was fast asleep by this time, and the dawn was beginning to creep through the window. We took a final drink and lit a fresh cigar, I bade him good night and asked him to say good-by to his wife when she woke up.
I went to my room. I never was more wide-awake in my life; there wasn’t a suggestion of sleepiness. I sat on the edge of the bed for ten minutes, then rang for a waiter. The waiter who had attended us the entire night, and who was loaded down with a myriad of tips—we gave him one every time he filled the glasses—came, and I said, “I think I have what is known in this monarchy of yours as Katzenjammer. What would you, with your superior knowledge, advise me to take?”
Without hesitation he suggested a large glass of Munich beer. The thought was repellent to me, and I said, “No, no!”
“Then take some cognac.”
The thought of any spiritous addition was frightful, and I again replied, “No, no! Bring me four quart jugs of Seltzer. Be sure you bring four quarts.”
The waiter retired and in a few minutes returned with my order. I opened the first bottle and sipped the quart, then started on the second, then the third and finally the last bottle. By that time it was midday and whatever alcohol was left in my system was diluted to a harmless consistency. I took a bath, ordered some soup and toast, dressed, went out for a walk, and then to the matinée. The matinée had a crowded and appreciative audience. After the matinée, I repaired to the hotel and ate a dinner worthy of a laboring man. I helped it along with a pint of champagne, had a cigar, and was at peace with the world. I then went to the theater and conducted the evening concert. The audience was insistent for encores and I believe we gave more there than anywhere else.
After the performance I returned to the hotel, where I met a bedraggled and woebegone consul. He looked as if he had been through a threshing machine.
His first words were, “What did you do today?”
“I don’t understand you,” I answered.
“Did you go to the matinée?” he asked.
“I’m not here for my health,” I replied. “Of course I went to the matinée and also to the evening performance. But why do you ask?”
“Why, man, do you know what we did last night?”
“Of course I do. We sat down and had a few drinks, celebrating the success of the concert; that’s about all,” I said.
“All!” he said, feeling his head and moaning. “All! Why, man, we drank an entire bottle of Kentucky whisky! I have been in bed all day with a towel around my head and I have been so knocked out I could not even sign important official papers.”
“Consul,” I said impressively, “you have been here twelve years. You have grown soft. Go back to America, my dear sir, and be a man again.”
When we left Paris for our second invasion of Germany, our first stop was Mannheim. I took an earlier train than the bandsmen. When the bandsmen’s train reached the frontier, the manager, baggage-man and the entire corps were fast in the arms of Morpheus. Either through stupidity, lack of knowledge of the passengers or pure cussedness, the three cars containing the band were shunted to three different trains going in as many directions. One was going to Mannheim, the two others to some point in France. The baggage car was finally located at Ems and reached us in Heidelberg.
When the car containing the American musicians reached some village far to the north, at the end of the line, the boys got off and inquired where they were. The name of the town was given them. They made themselves understood that they were Americans, and finally they found an American in the village who said he would interpret whatever they said.
“But,” he asked, “who are you?”
“We,” said Arthur Pryor, the solo trombonist of the band, “are members of Sousa’s Band.”
“Sousa’s Band?” queried the American. “I never heard of them.”
“You never heard of them?” shouted Pryor. “Never heard of Sousa’s Band?” Then, in utter contempt for the American, he said, “Stranger, I don’t know what part of America you come from, but I’ll bet ten dollars to one that your town isn’t on the map!”
The stranger didn’t want to lose his money on a sure thing, so he didn’t accept the wager.
One-third of the men reached Mannheim about eight o’clock, but only those who played clarinet, flute or oboe had their instruments with them; the rest were in the baggage car. We hoped against hope until 8:30 that the instruments and the rest of the men would arrive, but as they did not, we were compelled to dismiss the audience and refund the money. I made the announcement through an interpreter to the audience, assuring them that they were the artistic center of the universe and I hoped I could return later and give them a concert. One little sawed-off fellow mounted a chair and shouted that that was very true, but he had come fifteen miles on the railroad, and who was going to pay his fare?
Arguments are of no avail in an angry mob, so I retired and left them to disperse.
We finally got together in Heidelberg and gave a concert in the municipal garden of the town. There is a peculiarity about German terms for amusements. In the summer months, when we played in the famous gardens, we would get anywhere from 85 or 100 per cent of the gate—that is, the money taken in at the various public entrances. The audience would reserve the tables, but when we played indoors in the winter months—as we did in 1905—we would have difficulty in getting 70 per cent. In the gardens the proprietors look to food and drink for their profit, and as we were a strong attraction, we received nearly all the entrance money. In Heidelberg, the local management was rather indifferent if anyone came in without paying.
I noticed a pole across the road and a stream of people stooping under it and coming in without any tickets. I went to the attendant—who is always a count or a duke, or something of the kind—and complained to His Giblets that people were coming in under this pole without paying any admission.
He said, “Impossible!” and became exceedingly angry, and wanted me distinctly to understand that no German would for a moment come in without paying.
“Very true,” I said; “but please remember there are Americans, French, English, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and Senegambians at large in the world, and they may have all concentrated on my concert today in Heidelberg. I want them to pay just as well as the Germans.”
“Nonsense!” he shouted louder. “I will do nothing in the matter.”
“Very well,” I said. “If in five minutes there are not proper guards put on that road, I will march my band out of here, sue you for breach of contract, besides reporting you to the authorities at Berlin for dereliction of duty and limited capacity.” I pulled out my watch and held it in my hand. He got busy and became remarkably tractable. In three minutes he had guards at the pole and I do not believe they would have allowed the Kaiser in if he hadn’t a ticket! Authority, assumed or real, is a great weapon in Germany.
When we reached Dresden, we found a beautiful city and a splendid audience. Among the musical artists there was the famous pianist and composer Emil Sauer. At the end of the concert he called at my dressing room and we had a very pleasant chat. The German maidens kept us busy for an hour writing our autographs on postal cards. The importunate maidens’ pleading “Bitte, bitte” filled the air. When we had signed the last card and the last maiden had departed and the final “Bitte, bitte” had melted into the lambent atmosphere, we talked. He was very complimentary regarding the performance that night. I had played an overture, two suites, a valse, and several marches, all of my own, and he wondered at the difference between the German and French composers and myself.
“We,” he said, “travel along a rough musical path, full of cobblestones, ruts, and often discordant; while you have discovered a delightful little path of roses of music which you seem to hold entirely for yourself.”
After Dresden, we played Nuremberg and then Munich. The proprietor of the hall we played in had guaranteed us 16,000 marks for four concerts and advertised that fact as widely as he could. It was an unusually large sum for the times and the country, and he hammered it home with great persistency.
At the first concert, Miss Olive Fremstad, the famous prima donna of later years at the Metropolitan, was present and told me afterward that she was compelled to stand up during the entire concert, it was so crowded; and at a breakfast next day with a party of friends she said she wouldn’t have stood up for anyone in the world but an American like me. She was young, pretty and a great favorite with the Munich operatic people.
The day after the first concert, I lunched with the proprietor of the concert hall. While at lunch a tall cadaverous individual in a somber black shining suit and cloak entered, and said in German, “Herr Sousa?”
I nodded. He handed me a large envelope. I opened it and read that a law passed before the whale swallowed Jonah, or in the Pleistocene period, required that any stranger giving a concert in Munich had to pay a tax of 10 per cent of his takings for the privilege.
“This doesn’t concern me,” I said. “This is a matter for this gentleman with me to adjust. We are guaranteed and our expenses are guaranteed for this concert, and no doubt all expense of taxes is to be borne by him.”
The proprietor said, “Don’t worry; I’ll fix it up,” and said something to the cadaverous and sorrowful intruder, who, bowing very low, withdrew. “Don’t bother,” he assured me; “I’ll fix it.”
Just before the last concert I was dining with him and the same individual appeared and placed the same envelope in my hand.
“What’s this?” I asked, turning to my dinner companion and handing him the envelope.
“It’s a demand that you pay 10 per cent of 16,000 marks.”
“But I understood you to say you had fixed it.”
“I did. The original order gave you until four o’clock today to pay it; I had the authorities extend the time to six.”
“But the debt is yours,” I said.
“That’s what I thought,” he replied, “but the tax office told me that it reads that any stranger coming to Munich must pay 10 per cent, and of course you know I am not a stranger, so the law makes you pay. I hope to have the law changed later on.” I paid.
After a short tour in Holland, we sailed on the St. Louis, reaching New York on September ninth. The boat was decorated with the colors of Germany, France, Holland and Belgium, the cities of Cologne and Frankfort. Forward on deck, we played American airs, and especially Home, Sweet Home. I told reporters I was delighted with the successes which had marked the tour of the band and the favor with which we had been received everywhere. I was pleased that our Americanism had been one of the factors of our success abroad.
I said, “We have more than once been in towns where they did not know that our colors were red, white and blue, but they do now, and are familiar with The Star-Spangled Banner and The Stars and Stripes Forever. We have made them known throughout Europe. I cannot speak too highly of our reception abroad. Everywhere our treatment was most cordial.”
I received hundreds of telegrams and letters of congratulation—one from a lady who had been a prima donna in a company when I was the conductor, but who was then retired and living the life of the enviable being whose husband loves her and gives her all the money she wants. She inclosed a note I had sent her when she sang Josephine in Pinafore.
The lady had the unforgivable habit of singing sharp, and the equally unforgivable habit of being slouchy in her dress. One night when she made her appearance, her petticoat showed fully two inches below her dress, and she was singing a shade or two above the pitch. I hurriedly scribbled a note that she, after all the years, returned to me, and the note read:
“Dear M—— Please raise your petticoat two inches and lower your voice one inch.
While we were in Glasgow playing a four weeks’ engagement at the International Exposition, His Majesty’s Grenadier Guards were there also, and after an introductory period of looking offishly at one another, which is common among musicians of rival organizations, a friendship sprang up among the members of the two bands, and we got up a dinner to the Grenadiers which was reciprocated by them in the same week.
Musicians as a rule are very loyal to their organization, or else horribly indifferent. At the very beginning of our engagement at the exposition our men might easily have become enemies owing to the rivalry existing between the two bands. Mr. Hedley, manager of the exposition, read to me a note from the leader of the Grenadiers complaining that we were assigned a better place to play than that given his band, intimating that Hedley was favoring the American band to the detriment of the British band.
“What would you do in my place?” Hedley asked.
“The easiest thing in the world,” I answered. “Just write and tell him the stand where Sousa’s Band plays is to be his without change during the time he is playing at the exposition, and that you will assign the American band to the despised point now occupied by him.”
And if the people afterward flocked in greater numbers to where we were playing, I had no reason to object.
But this dinner smoothed out and brought the two bands in close companionship. At the dinner, of course, we toasted His Majesty King Edward and the President of the United States; then I proposed the health of the Grenadier Guards and said:
“It is thirty years since the Grenadiers and the Americans have had a drink together. Thirty years ago the Grenadiers took part in Boston in what was believed to be the greatest musical festival ever organized, and it was organized by the great bandmaster, Patrick Sarsfield Gilmore. It had 3000 of the best players in the world and there were the three leading bands of the world—one from France, one from Germany and the Grenadier Guards from Great Britain. At that festival American bandsmen got one father and three mothers. The father was Gilmore, the man who knew that music was a universal language and believed no geographical lines stood between musicians; while the mothers were the English band, the French band and the German band; and from those mothers and one father came that which was ultimately known as Sousa’s Band. There is, therefore, a brotherhood. It may be necessary for diplomats to keep their own politics, but as music is a universal language, I have great pleasure in asking you to drink to the health of the Grenadier Guards and its distinguished conductor.”
Your true-born Briton is a man who will fight an injustice, maybe only for the pleasure of squelching a knocker. While we were playing in England one paper in a city where we held a concert was so manifestly unfair that the president of the syndicate that I was under came into my room and asked me if I had read the notice. I had not, for my valet had purposely forgotten to give it to me. The president of the syndicate pulled the paper from his pocket and I read it. It was a clear case of vituperation and abuse.
“What are you going to do about it?” he asked.
“Let it die in its swaddling clothes,” I replied. “It’s absolutely at variance with the attitude of the audience and they’ll know it’s unfair.”
“I don’t propose to let it rest. I propose to proceed legally. Do you want to contribute to the fund?”
“Yes,” I said. “How much do you want?”
“Ten pounds,” he said.
Now in England the way they start a lawsuit is to engage a solicitor who writes a polite note to the offender. Our solicitor sent a letter to the proprietor of the offending newspaper, and in a few days an answer eame back from the paper that the editor had the utmost confidence in his critic, in his honesty, his capability and his integrity, and whatever the critic said the paper would indorse. They would not withdraw any of the remarks that had been made.
That brought the matter to the second stage—that is calling in a barrister. The barrister, after reading the letter and consulting me, immediately entered suit against the newspaper for £100,000 damages.
The barrister informed the offender that the syndicate, the conductor, and each and every bandsman from the piccolo to the bass drum, had been horribly mortified and grossly libeled by misleading and false statements and £100,000 damages was not enough to compensate for the ignominious position in which the offender tried to place the offended.
I then took part in the conversation by saying that it was not so much money I wanted as a full retraction in their paper.
The barrister said if I would be satisfied with a recantation of the remarks, he would give the paper an opportunity to retract or suffer the suit. This is the retraction:
“Mr. Sousa and His Band. “We learn with regret that Mr. Sousa is deeply hurt by the criticism of the performance in —— which appeared in the ——.
“Mr. Sousa considers our critic very far outstepped fair criticism. That was certainly not the intention. Our critic has strong preferences—they may be called prejudices—in favor of other bands, and the interpretation they give of classical music; but the superlative excellence of Mr. Sousa’s band in the treatment of American music has undoubtedly been proved by his great popular success throughout his British tour, terminating in his performance by royal command before the King, Queen and royal family at Sandringham. We regret, therefore, that the publication of our article gave pain to Mr. Sousa, whose tuneful genius has been a source of infinite delight to thousands.”
This was the amende honorable and we let it go at that.
When we returned to London for some final concerts, I was called on by Mr. George Ashton, who has charge of the entertainments for the royal family. After enjoining secrecy and dismissing the valet from my room, he said, “His Majesty desires a command performance by you. He desires it as a surprise to the Queen on her birthday.”
We quickly arranged matters. I told the bandsmen we were going to Baron Rothschild’s on Sunday to give a concert, and asked them to be in Liverpool Street Station at six o’clock. An Englishman in the band immediately told me that the station from which to reach Rothschild’s was the Euston Street.
I told him, “This may be a concert on the railroad. That station was given me, there is no mistake about it.”
When we got aboard the train, not a soul but Ashton and myself knew where we were going. The band was entertained at dinner on the train, and we reached Sandringham about 8:45. The concert was announced for ten.
At that hour Their Majesties entered the large ballroom, which had been converted into a temporary concert hall. The Prince and Princess of Wales, Princess Victoria, the Prince and Princess of Denmark, Lady de Grey, and a few others were present. The program was as follows:
1. Suite, three quotations Sousa2. March, El Capitan Sousa3. Trombone Solo, Love’s Thoughts PryorMr. Arthur Pryor 4. Collection of Hymns of the American Churches Sousa5. Soprano Solo, Will You Love When the Lilies are Dead? SousaMiss Maude Reese Davies 6. Caprice, Water Sprites Kunkel(b) March, Stars and Stripes Forever Sousa(c) Coon Song, The Honeysuckle and the Bee Penn7. Violin Solo, Reverie, Nymphia SousaMiss Dorothy Hoyle 8. Plantation Songs and Dances Clarke
The King demanded no fewer than seven encores and in most cases stipulated what they were to be. At the end of the concert he presented me with the medal of the Victorian Order and congratulated me on the fine performance I had given. The Prince of Wales—now King George—came over and, with the Queen, joined the party. The Queen said something very complimentary about the beauty of Mrs. Sousa, and the Prince of Wales took the casket from my hand, withdrew the medal, and said, “Where shall I pin it?”
“Over my heart,” I replied.
“How American!” he said.
I told His Majesty I hoped to have the honor of composing a march to be dedicated to him. He said he would be delighted to accept the dedication.
We left at one A.M. and had supper on the train as we sped to London.
After a week more of concerts, we sailed from Southampton for New York on December thirteenth on the good ship Philadelphia.
The English as musical audiences are the best listeners in the world. Perhaps some of our bigger cities equal them, but I do not believe they can be surpassed. I have found the English audiences always fair and sometimes wonderfully enthusiastic. If I had to build a reputation, I would not want a better country to do it in than among the educated English. And it is natural that it should be so. They have been educated in music by the oratorio and the organ—the two severest forms of vocal and instrumental music. They are particularly fond of fine orchestral music and light music as well. As they have no society to maintain by the standard of wealth, grand opera does not assume the importance that it does in America.
The educated ones have a musical perception that makes it a delight to play for them. They know values and place a composition where it belongs. An inspired waltz or march will get applause when a dry-as-dust symphony will be met in silence; and an inspired symphony will meet with spontaneous approval where a poor waltz or an inane march will fall positively flat. They judge a composition for its musical worth rather than for its genre.
I had a lot of fun in England in interviews, and sometimes Constant Reader or Vox Populi would write a complaining letter to the press over my poking fun at something that struck me as funny in Great Britain. It never occurs to some people that a musician can be a human being and try to cultivate a sense of humor. As I am guilty of trying to be a human being, I’m sometimes misunderstood.
Willow Grove is a famous park outside of Philadelphia which stands unique as an amusement enterprise. Its first consideration is its music, and it tries every year to engage the best the country affords. Organizations like the Chicago Symphony, the Damrosch Orchestra, the Russian Orchestra and famous bands like Conway’s, Pryor’s, Creatore’s and Bandarossa’s have played there at various times. All these can be heard without the payment of a penny. The park from its inception has had one marked difference from others: It started nonalcoholic twenty-eight years ago and has remained nonalcoholic. I recall on the first day I opened there I dined at the Casino. I asked a waiter for a wine card.
He said, “We do not have any wine or liquors.”
“Tell a bellboy to come here,” I said, and scribbled a note to the manager, saying, “Please send me a bottle of claret.”
The manager returned with the note in his hand and said: “Mr. Sousa, as a true Philadelphian, I love you and your band and am ready to do anything for you within possibility. I can give you the park, if you want it, but I can’t give you a bottle of claret, for such a thing doesn’t exist in this place.”
I found the water quite iced.
At the close of the Willow Grove season we left for Buffalo on a special train and opened there in June for a month’s stay.
The man who does not exercise showmanship is a dead one. I noticed at my first evening concert that the lights were suddenly dimmed until the grounds were involved in darkness; then a little light appeared, the illumination grew brighter and brighter until the grounds seemed a blaze of beauty brightness. It was new then and seemed almost supernatural.
When you look deep into the heart of real America you will find an intense affection for the hymn tunes of the churches. It doesn’t matter much what a man’s religious predilections are; a hymn tune gets to his heart and soul quicker than anything else. With this thought, the next evening when the illumination started, I had the band begin softly Nearer, My God, to Thee, and as the lights grew the band swelled out its power to the utmost. The effect was electrical. It was the subject of editorial comment, and one paper said, “It was left to a bandmaster to discover the meaning of the illumination.” It was inspiring and beautiful. I received hundreds of letters of congratulation and the crowds flocked near the band stand to hear the music.
After several days someone in authority sent me an order not to play Nearer, My God, to Thee, but to play The Star-Spangled Banner.
Patriotic songs are inspiring only on patriotic occasions, and at other times are simply perfunctory; but having been brought up a soldier, I immediately obeyed orders, for the law of the soldier is to obey orders first and protest afterward. I played The Star-Spangled Banner the next night, and the morning afterward received a number of protests; and I have no doubt the responsible official did also. After three nights of The Star-Spangled Banner, the order was revoked and the request came to me to resume Nearer My God to Thee. And we continued to play it every evening during our stay at the exposition.
At the end of the week, Mr. Barnes, my manager, received a check for the week’s work amounting to several thousand dollars. He asked me to go to the bank to identify him. When we went to the paying teller’s window, I saw on the other side a very old man. Barnes handed him the check, which was made out to my order.
“Are you Mr. Sousa?” asked the teller of Mr. Barnes.
“No,” I answered, “I’m John Philip Sousa.”
The teller looked at me with calm indifference, and then said, handing back the check, “You’ll have to be identified.”
Turning my back to the teller’s window, I raised my arms as if I was going to start the band, then began whistling The Stars and Stripes Forever, bringing my arms up and down in the manner familiar to everyone who has attended my concerts.
The clerks sitting in the room broke out in laughter and applause, and one ran over
and whispered to the aged cashier, who beckoned for the check and cashed it—but
without uttering a word.
Printed in the Saturday Evening Post
198(24), 1925-12-12.
Part 6
We sailed for Europe on the twenty-fourth of December, on the St. Louis, and opened in London on January second. A graceful compliment paid me by King Edward is worth recording. A few days after we gave a concert in honor of Her Majesty’s birthday I received four beautifully marked pheasants, accompanied by a card on which was the legend, “To John Philip Sousa, from His Majesty, Sandringham.” I had them mounted and hung in my dining room.
On January thirtieth we played a second command performance for the King. It is perhaps well to mention here that there is a popular error about alleged commands by the English courts. A letter to me came first which read: “I am commanded by His Majesty to ascertain if it is convenient for you to give a concert at Windsor.”
So we were at Windsor for our second command performance. There were about forty persons present. Before the performance, Lord Farquhar came to me and said: “Mr. Sousa, we are to have the unusual thing of two Sousa concerts at Windsor tonight. When the children heard you were coming they had the gramophone rolled into the nursery and have selected a program of your compositions, and while you are giving your concert in the Waterloo Chambers they are going to give theirs in the nursery, following your program as far as the records will allow them.”
I imagine the present Prince of Wales was the master of ceremonies at that affair.
The King’s equerry came again and said that the King was very anxious to hear, at the end of the performance, the American national anthem. At the end of the program I passed the word to my bandsmen to play The Star Spangled Banner and then go into God Save the King, playing just as softly as possible and gradually growing louder.
I brought my band to its feet, the assembly rising with us, the King, wearing the sash of a Knight of the Garter, standing most erect during the rendition of The Star-Spangled Banner. And then softly, almost inaudibly, came the sound of the British anthem. His Majesty’s face was a study—I was facing him. As the music swelled and swelled, I thought I could read his thoughts: “These aliens are asking God to save me,” and he, in the solemnity of the thought, seemed to grow taller and to become glorified.
At the end of the concert, he came over and shook hands cordially, told me how much he enjoyed the concert, and then said that he had invited the band of the Scots Guards to sit in the gallery to hear American music played as it should be played, and the King and Queen, Mrs. Sousa and myself chatted for some moments about America and Americans.
After touring the cities of Great Britain, we sailed for America again. On August thirtieth we started for the season at Willow Grove, then went to the Cincinnati Fall Festival and from there to the Indianapolis Fair. My novel of The Fifth String, published not long before by an Indianapolis firm, attracted so much attention that when I reached Indianapolis a dinner was given me by the firm, where I met for the first time the great Hoosier poet, James Whitcomb Riley. On my return to New York I sent Mr. Riley some medicine and a box of my Havana cigars, which elicited the following letter:
“James Whitcomb Riley,
“Indianapolis.“Aug. 4, 1904.“John Philip Sousa,
“Master of Melody.“Dear Mr. Sousa: The promised box of medicine is received most gratefully—likewise the box of exquisite Havannahs; and now, in consequence, like the lordly old Jew Longfellow draws—
“My presence ‘breathes a spicy scent Of cinnamon and sandal blent, Like the soft aromatic gales That meet the mariner who sails Through the Malaccas, and the seas That wash the shores of Celebes.’“In return, all inadequate, I send you two favorite books of mine, together with last photograph, that I may beg the latest of your own.
“The Child book you may hand on to your children, but I charge you, do most seriously ransack the other. Still we talk you over delightedly at our publishers, ever agreeing that you’re our kind of man. God bless you!
“Most gratefully and truly yours,
“James Whitcomb Riley.”
We opened at the St. Louis World’s Fair in May, 1904, for a several weeks’ engagement. During our stay there the French Ambassador, Monsieur Jules Jusserand, presented me, on behalf of his government, with the rosette of Officier de I’Instruction Publique de France, which gave me the golden palms and rosette of the French Academy, which I added to my various decorations.
We volunteered to play at a reception and dinner given to Miss Alice Roosevelt, and I was the recipient of a beautiful bouquet of flowers from the young lady.
[Photograph: Lieutenant Sousa Conducting the Band Battalion of the Great Lakes Naval Station, 1917.]
After our engagement in St. Louis I went to Mitchell, South Dakota, to play at the Corn Palace Exposition. A company of vaudeville artists were there and entertained the public a couple of times a day in the same hall where we gave our concerts, but not at the same time. Among the actors taking part was one who had a comedy scene in which, among his properties, were about 200 hats that were kept in a net and at a certain cue were freed and came tumbling on the stage. These hats were carefully picked up afterward and put back in the net for the next performance.
We were on the stage, and in response to an insistent demand the band struck up the Manhattan Beach March. Just how it happened I don’t know; but in the middle of the number someone cut the rope that held the hats in the net, and we were the most surprised lot of men you ever saw when no less than 200 hats came tumbling through the air; and in the bells of the Sousaphones of the band they were piled up at least three deep. The laughter was so great that you couldn’t hear the band.
Perhaps it would not be amiss here to say a few words in praise of the splendid galaxy of American gizis who have assisted in our concerts as vocalists and violin soloists. I recall Amy Leslie, famous critic of the Chicago News, in a review of one of our concerts, said she wondered how we could find so much talent and beauty at the same time; that every girl that sang or played with us was a good singer and very delightful to look at; that all seemed to combine beauty, grace and talent.
There were a host of them with us, and almost without exception they are all married and doing well. The band got the reputation of being a matrimonial bureau. It didn’t make any difference how little inclination a girl might have to marry, she would be directed to the matrimonial highway the very moment she sang with the band. Among the first of our prima donnas was Marcelle Lindh, who married and became a famous artist of the German stage. Beautiful Lenora von Stosche, who played violin solos with us, married Lord Speyer and is now Lady Speyer. We had two Kentucky beauties, both very talented young women—Miss Currie Duke and Miss Florence Hardman.
Myrta French, a talented soprano, married a Philadelphia man, and Elizabeth Northrup is resting on her laurels in Washington. Martina Johnston and Blanche Duffield have been married some years. Sweet Bertha Bucklin married a gentleman from Syracuse, but died some years since. The Hoyt sisters are still very much before the public, with their attractive duets. Elizabeth Schiller became a well-known German grand-opera singer, and sweet and lovable Jeanette Powers left us to marry the Wanamaker of Peoria, Carl Block. Lucy Ann Allen, a statuesque beauty, became Mrs. Haviland; and the Misses Rickard, Rocco, Grace Jenkins and Margel Gluck never miss a concert when I am in their towns. One of the ladies who has the reputation of singing in more than 1000 concerts with the band is Miss Estelle Liebling, who toured Europe twice with us, and as her soloist companion she had the remarkable violinist, Maud Powell.
Our artists on our first European tour were Misses Maude Reese Davies and Dorothy Hall. On our trip around the world, our vocal artist was Miss Virginia Root, and our violinist Miss Nicoline Zedeler, both now married and mothers. Beautiful characters and splendid artists.
Miss Mary Baker, Miss Nora Fauchald and Miss Margery Moody have contributed many happy hours in concertizing with the band. And last but not least the charming harpist Miss Winifred Bambrick. I will say for all of them, they were a noble band of women. God bless them all!
We returned to Europe in 1903 for a tour comprising the leading countries of the Continent. We opened in St. Petersburg, Russia, on May sixteenth. The audiences at the Cisnicelli where we played were, with the exception of the boys from the Westinghouse Air Brake Company, Russian officers, their wives and civilian officials. The poorer class either hadn’t the means or the inclination to come. The royal box was so draped that the occupants could not be seen. How often the Czar was present I do not know, but I imagine several times. We gave nine performances.
Before I reached Russia, I received a telegram from my advance man saying, “The police authorities demand copies of the words to be sung by your vocalist—must be sent immediately.”
As Miss Estelle Liebling, our vocal artist, sang coloratura songs in which “Ah” was apt to occur at any moment, I did not know the lines, aside from the “Ah’s” of the numbers she sang. Of course I couldn’t send a telegram stating that the words consisted of a series of “Ah’s,” and it looked as if it wasn’t so easy to give concerts in Russia as it is in America. Having all programs and advertisements submitted for approval to the official censor makes it rather hard, especially as songs are apt to be sung in half a dozen different languages. But something had to be done, so I telegraphed the words of Annie Rooney and Marguerite as the words of the songs our vocalist was to use; so our vocalist got through the difficulty by singing the words of Annie Rooney to the tune of The Pearl of Brazil.
I was also annoyed in St. Petersburg at finding the town plastered with the name of some supposed rival who seemed to have come at the same time and who called himself Cyza. I wondered who this Cyza was and remonstrated with my advertising agent for not billing me as largely. However, I found out afterward that “Cyza” is the Russian way of spelling “Sousa.”
There have been instances when I have played the national anthem in which the intensity of public feeling and patriotism of the audiences evoked great enthusiasm, but I can remember no instance where the song was received with greater acclaim than in Russia. During my tour of Europe in 1903 we were in St. Petersburg on the Czar’s birthday. When I came to my dressing room in the Cirque Cisnicelli, which corresponds to our New York Hippodrome, I was waited upon by the secretary of the prefect of the city, who requested that I open my performance with the Russian national anthem.
“And,” said he, “if it meets with a demonstration, will you kindly repeat it?”
I said I would. “And,” he continued, “if it meets with a further demonstration, will you repeat it again?” I said I would repeat it just so long as a majority of the audience applauded.
The audience consisted almost entirely of members of the nobility and the military, with their wives, sweethearts, sons and daughters. At the playing of the first note the entire audience rose and every man, almost all in uniform, came to a salute. At the end of the anthem there was great applause, and I was compelled to play the air four times before the audience was satisfied.
On retiring to my dressing room at the end of the first part, I was again visited by the secretary, who told me it was the wish of the prefect that I begin the second part of my program with the national anthem of America, and that he would have an official announce to the public beforehand the name and sentiment of the song.
Before we began our second part, a tall Russian announced to the public the name and character of the words of The Star-Spangled Banner, and I have never heard more sincere or lasting applause for any musical number than that which greeted our national anthem. We were compelled to repeat it no less than four times, with everyone in the vast hall standing and the military men holding hands to their caps in the attitude of salute; and I am sure that no body of musicians ever played a piece with more fervor, dignity and spirit than our boys did The Star-Spangled Banner in the capital of the Russian Empire.
At the end of our St. Petersburg season we went to Warsaw, Poland, and opened there on May twenty-second. I stopped at the hotel built by Mr. Paderewski, and I want to congratulate the gentleman, for he evidently had admired many things in American hotels which he had placed in his Warsaw house to the advantage of his guests.
At the intermission Monsieur Jean de Reszke came back with Godfrey Turner, treasurer of the organization. Mr. Turner had with him a statement of the receipts which, if I remember rightly, were about 5000 rubles, or $2600 American money, and showed me, with anger, the various items charged against it. There were so many hundred rubles for police tax, so many for orphans’ tax, so many for school tax, and so on. I turned to Monsieur de Reszke and said, “Just read this,” handing him the statement.
De Reszke handed it back to me, saying, “Forget it, Sousa; you’re not in America.”
From Warsaw we went to Vienna, where we gave eight concerts. After the first matinées I had a caller at my dressing room, Mr. Emil Lindau, a dramatist, and brother of Paul Lindau. We began talking about Viennese composers and compositions, and I said, “Is the Blue Danube still popular in Vienna?”
He said, “The Blue Danube will endure as long as Vienna endures.”
“Thank you very much,” I said. “I’m going to play it tonight as an encore.”
I did, and it was received with tremendous applause; and as an encore to that I played The Stars and Stripes Forever, which met with uproarious delight. One of the papers was kind enough to say that the performance of the waltz as played by my band was the first time it had really been heard since Johann Strauss had died. It was flattering, if true.
[Photograph: John Philip Sousa Heading the “Jackie Band” in a Parade for the Red Cross Drive, Down Fifth Avenue.]
When I left St. Petersburg I bought a hat such as was used by some of the officers in the Civil War, a black slouch hat. When we reached Vienna, newspapermen at the station who came for an interview spoke in their reports of my arrival and described my uniform, and dwelt on the American hat I was wearing, one that was unknown in any country save America. When I looked for the name of the maker of the hat I found it was manufactured in Vienna.
The analogy between man and music has not escaped the close observer. We say an instrument is in tune when the several strings or chords are of such tension that each gives the proper sound and the sounds are at due intervals. So it is with man. When his heart is filled with courage, happiness, love, ambition and general goodness, adjustment is so perfect that he is in tune with all Nature and the infinite. But should weariness, disappointment, envy or illness crawl in, the balance is lost and the chords of life jangle. Tune as applied to a pleasing melodic invention is the soul of music. No tuneless composition has ever lived. Though harmonic cleverness and orchestric painting may attract for a time, tune alone survives, and man loves tune to the extent that many of the simplest airs are embedded in his mind from infancy to the grave. My memory recalls two delightful bits that have been with me many, many years; one a child’s song:
And the other:
The fondness of humankind for simple tunes, some having only the merit of jingles, is as instinctive as admiration for the nut-brown maid of the country lane or the gallant soldier off to fight for his country’s cause.
The peculiarities of instruments are duplicated by the characteristics of humankind, the wide range affording interesting study. The queen of the musical family is the violin, sensitive under all conditions, capable of the most minute gradations of sound and pitch; now sentimental, now brilliant, now coquettish, now breathing notes of passionate love. Look about you and you will find the violin’s double among some you know; high-strung, diffident, capable of all the emotions, beautiful in the stirring harmonies of affection and sympathy. Another affinity is the heavy-going, stolid, slow-thinking, one-idea man whose life is little more than punctuating time with breakfast, luncheon, dinner, sleep; breakfast, luncheon, dinner, sleep, ad infinitum, with the bass drum, with its “Thump, thump, thump, thump,” and again “Thump, thump, thump, thump”; the thump, like the meals and sleep of the man, may be great or little, but it is always “Thump, thump, thump, thump!”
Then again, we have the man in life, like the instrument in the orchestra, destined never to rise above second position. A third-alto-horn man may envy a solo-alto man, but he remains a third-alto man. A second trombone may cast jealous eyes at his brother in the first chair, but it availeth him not. Fourth cornets and second fiddles, eighth clarinets and sixth trumpets may deride the masters of the instrumental group, but they remain in obscurity. If instruments were born equal, all would be sovereigns; and if men were born equal, all would be soloists.
Dispositions in instruments and people go hand in hand. The shrieking fife and hysterical woman are twins, and both can become nuisances; the golden thread of the oboe’s tone and the beautiful voice of shy sixteen walk arm in arm. The pomp and circumstance of the emperor are exemplified in the nobleness of the trombone; the languorous lisp of the summer girl is echoed in the rhythm of the Andalusian guitar. The love proposal is pictured in the impassioned melody enunciated in the tenor clef of the cello, while the flirty giggling of the shallow coquette finds its mate in the fickle flights of the piccolo. The man who never deviates, a sort of animated ordinance, meets his rival in the positive “Umph” of the bass horn, while the undecided never-can-make-up-his-mind individual may be classed with the hesitating “Pah” of the second alto.
Here the analogy ends, for, when out of tune, man and instruments require different treatment. The tuner, the adjuster, the bridge-and-sound-post expert, the reed maker, the mandrel maker—are the ones called in when the piano, organ, violin, wood wind or brass requires tuning. When the balance of life is lost and its chords jangle out of tune, adjuster, expert and tuner do little good. Like a tired child, man must turn back to mother—Mother Nature—living much in her companionship until he becomes a part of her eternal symphony. There is strength in the hills; there is solace in the plain; there is companionship in the forest; while infinite skies and the majesty of ocean are ever suggestive of spiritual immortality. Sweet music murmurs ceaselessly in the faint breath of calm, and rich in harmony is the weird roar of storm. From spring’s overture to winter’s dirge the motif ever varies, and always the wide range of Nature is rich in melody.
My father died on April 27, 1892, at the age of sixty-eight. I was giving a concert in Duluth. At the end of the concert my manager came back holding aloft a telegram while I was still on the stage bowing. When I finally left, the curtain was lowered and the telegram handed me. It was from my brother. It read: “Father died this morning. Mother insists you continue your concerts and not disappoint the public. Will have funeral postponed until your return.” He was a grand man.
My mother died August 23, 1908, when she was eighty-three years old. She was brave and fearless, and her simple faith in goodness was beautiful. During wartimes when father was off with the Marines and we little ones would be preparing our lessons for the next day at school, some soldier, either drunk or capricious, would walk into the house. Mother would go up, promptly take him by the arm and lead him to the door with a warning to keep out. Then she would gather all of us about her and say a prayer for our safety. She was a wonderful woman. She gave birth to ten children and lived her life for them and her husband. I sadly fear I was her favorite.
In an account of her death, the Philadelphia Press said, in an interview with me:
“I am glad my mother was spared to me for so long, and up to three weeks before her death she never had a day’s sickness. It is to her I owe my faith in mankind. She always had a good word for everybody and could not see the wrong things in this world. She came to hear my band only once, and that made her so nervous that she never went again, declaring at that time she knew what I could do and that letting her hear about my music always satisfied her. When I was but a small boy I used to write little tunes and stand her in a corner and play them to her on my violin. She was not musical, but she always encouraged me by saying that they were beautiful.”
We played our usual season at the Pittsburgh Exposition, going from there to the Food Fair in Boston, where I produced The Fairest of the Fair march.
On November fifteenth there appeared a symposium by Madame Chaminade and myself on music. The Sunday editor of the New York Herald had conceived the idea of bringing together a European and American point of view to bear on matters of more or less interest. Mr. Frank A. Munsey and Lord Northcliffe gave their opinions of the periodic magazine from the standpoint of their respective countries; Messrs. Guggenheim and Zangwill elaborated on the Jewish question, and other subjects were discussed by prominent people.
Madame Chaminade, a French composer, and myself were brought together to talk music. Mr. Cleveland Moffett, editor of the Sunday Herald, was the questioner; Mr. Rupert Hughes, the well-known writer, was the recorder. Then there was the inevitable photographer.
Notwithstanding the credo of certain people, “popular” does not necessarily mean “vulgar” or “ephemeral” music. In London once a friend told me that a certain conductor had sneered at my efforts and said, “He gets the mob because he plays nothing but marches.” Now marches are a very small part of my program. There is never more than one on the program. If the audience get others, it is because they demand them as encores. Madame Chaminade asked me how I met this conductor’s criticism.
“By sending word to him that I would give a concert in London that would consist only of compositions of the so-called classic writers, and I felt confident it would be the largest in point of receipts given in my season,” I replied.
“What was the program?” asked the lady.
“Miss Maud Powell played Mendelssohn’s violin concerto, the most popular of all violin literature; Miss Estelle Liebling sang Mozart’s fascinating Batti-Batti from Don Giovanni; the band played Handel’s Largo, Bach’s Loure, Haydn’s Surprise Symphony, Beethoven’s Leonore Overture No. 3, Weber’s Invitation to the Waltz, Schumann’s Traümerei, and Mendelssohn’s Wedding March. Those, I maintain, are among the most popular compositions ever written, and every one is from the pen of a great composer, whom the sneering critic would call a classic writer. I didn’t even include an opera composer like Wagner.”
Madame Chaminade was asked, “Would you agree that these eight names stand for the greatest in music?”
The answer was, “Yes, yes.”
What I desire to impress and try to prove is that popular music is not a question of writing down to the masses. The noblest compositions have been popular at their best, in spite of themselves.
Probably there is no term more abused and so often mistaken in its real meaning than “popular music.” To the average mind, especially the average professional mind, popular music is banal and vulgar in conception and commonplace in treatment. That is an absolutely incorrect contention. If we take the music that has been performed the oftenest, we find in every instance that the most meritorious and inspired works, whether based on complex or simple lines, have survived the longest. There certainly is no composition in the world today that has enjoyed greater vogue and popularity among the widest range of listeners of the past twenty-five years, from the technical musician to the uneducated and merely sympathetic auditor, than the Tannhäuser Overture. It is a debatable question among musicians whether the William Tell Overture is not the best thing Rossini wrote, yet none can deny that this work enjoys the greatest popularity of any of the Italian composer’s writings. For spontaneity, brilliancy and melodic charm most people will agree that the Poet and Peasant Overture is the master work of Von Suppe, and that composition has been thrummed and hammered, scraped, twanged and blown lo, these many years. Some melody, happening to catch the fancy of the public, becomes momentarily popular, but unless it bears the absolute signs of genius it soon palls on the ear and sinks into oblivion.
I was asked, “What makes a composition popular?”
“Inspiration. The power that forces the inspiration out of you and me also prepares the world for it. Anybody can write music of a sort. But touching the great public heart is another thing. My religion is my composition. Nobody can rob me of what I have done.
“My success is not due to any personal superiority to other people. But sometimes some power helps me and sends me a musical idea, and that power helps the public to lay hold of my meaning. It doesn’t happen all the time by any means, and I know when a composition lacks inspiration. I can almost always write music. At any hour of the twenty-four, if I put pencil to paper, something comes. But twenty-four hours later I usually destroy it. For years I have been able to wear the same-sized hat.”
Of all sports, there is none that appeals to me like clay-bird shooting. I have been for a great number of years opposed to live-pigeon shooting, for I feel it’s a wanton destruction of a domestic bird parading under the head of sport. I have not indulged in it since early childhood. Some of my scores in the clay-pigeon contests are very good. In Augusta, Georgia, one season, I led the field, both professionals and amateurs, breaking 98 out of 100. That is my best score, although one year I shot so consistently that my average for at least 15,000 clay birds was 90 per cent. I have always been fond of the trap shooters and am proud to name many of them friends of mine. They are clean sportsmen and always ready to applaud the winner in a contest.
Clay pigeon or trap shooting is comparatively a new sport in America. Like golf, it appeals to all ages and all strata of society. On the golf course at Hot Springs, Virginia, I have seen the multimillionaire Rockefeller wait while John Jones drove off the tee, and John Jones is a ribbon clerk at twenty a week. John Jones and his bride are honeymooning at the Springs, spending three days and six months’ savings at the same time. For the time being, millionaire, savant, ribbon clerk and wage earner are members of the Ancient and Honorable Society of Golfers. So with trap shooting. In a state shoot one year a squad of five consisted of one famous baseball pitcher, one equally famous divine, one well-known financier, one hard-working carpenter and yours truly. True democracy that, and much to be commended! None of us had ever met before; but all—clergyman and athlete, carpenter, banker and musician—worked like Trojans to give the squad a distinction as a topnotcher. Like love, trap shooting levels all ranks. We had been squadded by the handicap committee, and our status as marksmen was at stake.
With the public arrayed against the killing of live birds at the traps, with many of the states enacting laws prohibiting the trapping and shooting of pigeons, the interest in the clay birds has increased enormously, At the present time every town has its trap-shooting club; every university, college and athletic association its gun team. Each shotgun factory, powder mill, shell-loading or kindred interest has its corps of professional shooters, whose duty it is to appear at various tournaments, giving exhibitions of their skill as marksmen and incidentally proving the worth of the goods manufactured by the firms they represent.
The great charm of trap shooting is that you can’t bribe, buy, cajole or implore anyone to do it for you. It is your game first, last and all the time. In field shooting, water-fowl shooting, in fact in every form of live-bird shooting, there is an element of chance in which luck plays an important part. The conditions of the sport are so evenly distributed in trap shooting that, everything else being equal, it is up to you and you alone to make good. In a well-conducted tournament the variations of light, wind and temperature very rarely work to the injury of the individual shooter.
One November we were in Atlanta giving concerts. The warden and the clergyman attached to the Federal prison wrote asking if it wouldn’t be possible for me to bring my band to the penitentiary and give a concert for the prisoners. The band to a man volunteered and we gave the concert in a very large hall, the white prisoners marching in and taking the rows of seats on the left, the colored ones on the right.
One of the attachés stood by me as they marched in, and finally pointed out a young man, not more than thirty, handsome, with a devil-may-care expression.
The attaché said: “Notice that man. He’s a bad one. He was sent here from one of the territories after his sentence had been commuted from hanging to life imprisonment. In little more than a year he was pardoned; within a few months he nearly killed another man, was tried and sentenced to twenty years, and came here. In a year he was pardoned again and went back. In six months he had killed another man, was tried and sentenced to be hanged, but the sentence was commuted to imprisonment for life, and here he is, and, I trust, will remain.”
The man interested me. When we played the first number the applause was deafening; but he sat with folded arms, absolutely impassive, and remained so. When Miss Root, the vocalist, sang he never wavered an eyelash. I thought a pretty girl, singing beautifully, would arouse some interest in him; but there wasn’t a sign. As we reached the close of our program I played The Stars and Stripes Forever. At the first measures he began to straighten up, and as the last notes died away he began to applaud as loudly as anyone in the place. He was a study, and I made up my mind that the one redeeming trait in his character was that he had a deep feeling of patriotic fervor. Notwithstanding his evil life, he probably would have died for his country.
Having made a contract to appear ten weeks at the Panama-Pacific Exposition, we left New York early in April, 1915, for the Pacific Coast, giving concerts as we crossed the continent.
We gave a number of concerts with the bands at the exposition combined—Conway’s, Cassassa’s and mine—and the combination attracted huge audiences. Monsieur Charles Camille Saint-Saëns, the great French composer, wrote the official musical composition for the exposition. On June twentieth it was given its initial performance. It was written for orchestra, band and organ.
It’s a strange thing about official music for expositions and world’s fairs. Wagner wrote the official march for the Centennial. Although he was helped by no less a conductor than Theodore Thomas, the Wagner march died before the exposition closed. I have had the honor to play a number of official marches, including Monsieur Saint-Saëns’, but with the single exception of King Cotton, the official march of the Cotton States Exposition at Atlanta, all of them fell into innocuous desuetude. King Cotton is still a great favorite.
Saint-Saëns and myself became good friends. We would wander about the grounds. He was a little fellow and seemed to have an extra eye for woman and her beauty. Slender or slim beauty did not seem to make much impression on him, but when one with territorial expansion hove in view, he would nudge me, calling my attention to the “beaming beauty”; and the greater the beam the greater his delight.
While we were on the Pacific Coast the Music Teachers’ Association of California adopted a resolution petitioning Congress to make The Stars and Stripes Forever and Dixie the official airs of the United States. The idea does not appeal to me. Congress can do many things, but it can’t make people sing what they don’t want to sing. If The Stars and Stripes Forever ever becomes a national air it will be because the people want it and not because Congress wills it.
We left San Francisco late in July, toured east to Willow Grove, and from there to the Pittsburgh Exposition, and from there to the Hippodrome, where we opened late in September. I wrote the New York Hippodrome March for these performances, and it is now in the repertoire of every band in the country. During the season we gave Sunday-night concerts in which we had, in conjunction with the band, most of the leading artists before the public at that time.
As these artists appeared at the concerts some of them met with great success. The night that Miss Emmy Destinn walked briskly on the stage at the end of her second encore, very suddenly she clasped me about the shoulder and gave me a most hearty but surprising kiss. As the unexpected always makes a hit, the audience yelled and applauded. After that every good-natured prima donna would bestow a chaste salutation on the blushing conductor; even the doll-like little Japanese prima donna, Miss Tamaka Miura, reached up for me and managed just about to reach my collar. It bore the gentle brunt of her osculatory exhibition.
On May 20, 1917, I received a telegram from Mr. John Alden Carpenter, a friend of mine and a famous composer. It said:
“The naval station has an undeveloped band which needs the inspiration of a master hand to start it on the right track. Could you come here, if only for a few days, to start the work and bring with you a bandmaster of the right personality to continue the instructions? I realize how much I ask and know your enthusiasm for the cause.”
I left as soon as I could arrange my affairs, met Mr. Carpenter in Chicago, and we went to the naval station at Great Lakes. I was introduced to the commandant, now admiral, then Captain Moffett. He had the band appear on the parade ground. They probably numbered seventy-five men, mostly young fellows. They played a march or two and went back to their quarters. The admiral invited me to lunch. Before lunch was over he spoke of his plan and the necessity of good music for the Navy, and said, “You, Sousa, know the game better than any man in the country, with all your years with the Marines, your knowledge of discipline and how to handle men. I don’t know where to look if you fail me.”
“I won’t fail you,” I answered. “I’ll join. I’m past sixty-two, but I’m a healthy lot.”
“When will you join?”
“Right away,” I answered.
I returned to Chicago, telegraphed home my intention and was sworn in as a lieutenant to take charge of the music. I had explained to the commandant that I had some dates contracted for that would have to be filled. He agreed, and I remained at the station several days getting things in shape for the time when I returned. I told the commandant, until I came to stay, I desired to be placed on the one-dollar-a-month basis. So I did not go on the active list until a few months later. He agreed, and I celebrated my new position with a verse that met with many printings throughout the land:
During the entire time I was in the Navy, from May, 1917, to March, 1919, I learned to love and admire Admiral Moffett. Every man who had the honor to serve with him loved him. His hours of work were all hours. He asked no man to do more than he did himself. His executive ability was second to that of no man I have ever met. Though he was a great disciplinarian, there was nothing that ever suggested the martinet. We who served with him believed him one of the greatest men in the service of our country, and my opinion has never changed.
In a month we had more than 600 enlistments for the band. They were getting cumbersome to handle. The commandant and I were invited to a banquet at the Chicago Club. Coming back in the trolley placed at our disposal, I said: “Commandant, the musical forces have become an unruly mob and I have a plan to propose if it meets your approval. I propose to form a band battalion of 350, with military commander, musical director, surgeon, master-at-arms and petty officers. After that I propose to organize, as enlistments warrant, bands to consist of double-battleship units of the Delaware type and assign one to each regiment at the station. Will you kindly issue an order for me to do it?”
“Order be hanged!” he said. “You’re the musical director. Do it. If it doesn’t work you’ll know it.”
Next day I sent for the senior bandmaster, had him bring a list of all the musicians at the station, their rating, ability and age, and formed a battalion which became my special work while the war continued. We had from first to last about 3500 musicians. My system had an advantage in this way: If we received a telegram from the department, or a letter or dispatch, to send a band to a ship or to a station, I could send an organized whole; men who knew one another and had a repertoire and had played together.
I remember we got a request from Admiral Mayo, commander of the Atlantic Fleet, for a band for his flagship, the Pennsylvania. The commandant sent for me, read the telegram and said, “Let’s send Admiral Mayo the best band we can.” There was a bright young bandmaster at the station named V. D. Grabel. I suggested Grabel and his band be sent to Admiral Mayo. They were, and later when I was ordered to the Pennsylvania, dining with the admiral, he said, “Sousa, you gave me a great surprise when you sent me a band. They reported at six o’clock and gave a concert at seven, which was never heard of before in either the Army or the Navy.”
The first engagement of the battalion was an order to proceed to Kansas City and take part in Old Glory Week, the week of September twenty-second. We gave a concert in Electric Park. Among the thousands present was Colonel Roosevelt, who sat with his family near the band stand. I went to him and asked if there was anything special he would like to hear.
He immediately replied, “It would make me very happy if you would play Garry Owen.”
We played it and he applauded most enthusiastically.
On our return to Great Lakes I received a letter from Mr. Henry P. Davison asking if the Red Crosa could have the band for a drive in New York. I wrote advising that he take the matter up with Admiral Moffett. At the conclusion of the correspondence we were ordered to New York by the department to take part in the Red Cross drive and the Rosemary Pageant at Huntington, give a concert at Carnegie Hall, then proceed to Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washington and return to New York for a concert at the Hippodrome.
The band battalion was composed of young men from eighteen to twenty-five in years, many of them belonging to college bands and small-town bands of the West and Southwest. They were a bright lot and filled with enthusiasm. I used great care in the selection of the music to be played—everything to be bright and within the comprehension and execution of the band; nothing of a somber character except a ballad or two. I selected the most effective street marches. Such stand-bys as The Thunderer, The National Emblem, Semper Fidelis, Washington Post, High School Cadets, and others were used. The drum major, a handsome sailor named Micheaux Tennant, was an excellent drillmaster, and the boys marched with an unusually fast step.
When we went to Philadelphia we were rendezvoused in front of the Union League Club, on Broad Street. An old Civil War general came out of the club and began to inspect each file of the band. We were at rigid attention.
He came up to me and said, “Sousa, you’ve got a remarkable lot of men.”
“Yes, sir, I think so,” was my reply.
He continued, “I have inspected every file of the 300 or more men you have and there isn’t a belly in the band!”
I thanked him again.
After Philadelphia we went to Baltimore for the First Liberty Loan drive. Patriotic Baltimore responded beautifully. The banks had all named the amount of their subscriptions before we arrived, but when we gave our concerts in the Fifth Regiment Armory, with thousands of people present, I would have a man with a megaphone state to the public, “If somebody will subscribe $100,000, the band will play Dixie.” We’d get that $100,000 in a few minutes. Then I’d have the megaphone man say, “If somebody will subscribe $200,000, the band will play Maryland, My Maryland,” and the subscription would be forthcoming.
After Baltimore we went to Washington for a Liberty Loan drive there. My home town was good to me. It was a refutation of the old saying that a prophet is not without honor, save in his own country.
We returned to Great Lakes, then were ordered to Milwaukee, Cleveland, Columbus, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh and other cities. I believe we were the strongest card in the country to get subscribers for the various objects that required money. The millions that were subscribed for Liberty Loans; the money given for Red Cross drives and naval relief, and other things, must have amounted to billions. Even in little affairs, where we were after $50, $100 or $200 at a time, some sailor lad would hold up my twenty-cent baton and ask what he was offered for it. If somebody bid only $50, he would say, “This is a money affair. Can’t do anything like that for $50,” and he would work it up sometimes to $300 or $400.
The week of the seventh of November we were, at the request of the Canadian Government, ordered to report to a committee at Toronto, Canada, for duty in connection with a Victory Loan campaign. We proceeded to Toronto, paraded, gave concerts, did everything possible to help the cause, and in a few days the Armistice came. Such a night probably was never experienced in the history of civilization. I didn’t sleep, and I don’t think anyone else did, although I sadly needed it. I caught influenza, and my right ear was giving me a terrible lot of trouble. I had three operations on it, to have abscesses cut out, by a wonderful surgeon in Toronto. But what was a little thing like an abscess to the thought that the war was over?
The first of the classic orchestras dating from Haydn consisted of two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, two horns, two trumpets, tympani and the strings. The additions today used by the moderns are piccolos, English horns, contrabassoons, hecklephones, saxophones, cornets, an array of French horns, trombones, tubas, euphoniums and Sousaphones. The publishers, in issuing new orchestral compositions, publish these parts and know that players will be found for them. That is where the symphonic orchestra has an advantage over the wood-wind band. No two nations have the same instrumentation for a wood-wind band. It seems as if some committee got together and decided what should be the instrumentation of an army band, and the civilian bands adopted the same instruments. In the case of the Garde Républicaine, they have a greater variety in wood wind than the German bands. The German bands have plenty of brass, which makes them desirable for outdoor playing.
Gilmore’s Band went to Europe in 1878. Gilmore was a splendid organizer and had equipped his band the nearest to musical perfection and artistic possibilities of any known organization of that day. His band numbered about sixty-six people. As compared to my organization they were divided as follows:
2 Piccolos 2 Flutes 2 Oboes 1 A-flat clarinet 3 E-flat clarinets 8 First clarinets 4 Second clarinets 4 Third clarinets 1 Alto clarinet 1 Bass clarinet 1 Soprano saxophone 1 Alto saxophone 1 Tenor saxophone 1 Barytone saxophone 2 Bassoons 1 Contrabassoon 1 E-flat cornet 2 First cornets 2 Second cornets 2 Trumpets 2 Flügelhorns 4 French horns 2 Altos 2 Tenor horns 2 Euphoniums 3 Trombones 3 E-flat tubas 2 B-flat tubas 3 Battery
6 Flutes 2 Oboes 1 English horn 14 First clarinets 6 Second clarinets 6 Third clarinets 1 Alto clarinet 2 Bass clarinets 2 Bassoons 4 Alto saxophones 2 Tenor saxophones 1 Barytone saxophone 1 Bass saxophone 4 First cornets 2 Second cornets 2 Trumpets 4 Horns 4 Trombones 2 Euphoniums 6 Sousaphones in B-flat 3 Battery
In the instrumentation of these two bands there are no fewer than sixteen of Mr. Gilmore’s instruments that are obsolete in mine.
With the coming over to America at times of the better class of European bands, some of the comments made by their conductors after their return to Europe have been amusing, if they weren’t deplorable. I read a few years ago of one who came over with a fairly good band, who went back and complained about the very cheap kind of music America demanded in performances. With a knowledge perhaps greater than any foreign bandmaster has of America and Europe, I want to say that appreciation of music played in an inspirational manner is just as great in America as it is in any part of the Old World. The same programs that I have played in America are the programs I have played in Europe, and I have been in some fourteen different countries on the other side of the water and around the world. But it is absolutely necessary, if you are to hold your public by any music that combines the intellectual with the inspirational, that it not be rendered in a prosaic manner. With no desire to criticize or find fault, I believe that many times music falls flat not on account of the music or on account of the players, but on account of the lack of inspiration of the conductor; and perhaps it is well to quote no less an authority than Berlioz in the theory of his art. Speaking of the conductor, he said:
“The performers should feel what he feels, comprehend his mood; then his emotion communicates itself to those whom he directs; his inward fire warms them; his electric glow animates them; his force of impulse excites them; he throws around him the vital undulation of musical art. If he be inert and frozen, on the contrary, he paralyzes all about him, like those floating masses of the polar seas, the approach of which is perceived through the sudden cooling of the atmosphere.”
With a nation as young as America it could not be expected she should immediately become a power in the arts. Commerce, invention, utilities were of greater importance and more necessary than pictures, music and the drama. Therefore the best brains went into that which was most important for the progress of the country.
Up to fifty years ago there were only one or two serious operas by native composers produced. The growth of light musical pieces during the past twenty years has been enormous; and from being a suppliant at the door of the theatrical manager, the American composer is received with open arms if he has something worth telling to the public. Of course the basis of our progress musically is entirely due to commerce. As soon as your followers of commercial pursuits find themselves on Easy Street, they begin to look around and see what they can enjoy most. They are willing to pay for it. When one considers the number of first-class orchestras in America, and the number of prosperous musicians, we have every reason to be happy.
Among the contributing educational factors in a musical way in the country that reach the greatest number and have an unquestionable effect, is the finest class of moving-picture house. Such houses as the Strand, Rivoli, Rialto, Capitol, in New York, and many others throughout the country, have great educational value. Their orchestras are well equipped and they are very valuable to the students of instrumentation. He can hear combination and he can learn the absolute tone and character of the rarer instruments; he knows how the oboe sounds, what the tones of the horns are, the difference between a trombone and a cornet. All this makes for better knowledge and makes it easier for the musical student to reach his point.
The development of players, I should say, is easily 200 to one composer. Though geographic lines have nothing to do with the development of the composer, still, where there are a great number of people they must, everything else being equal, develop many composers. In my own organization I have had some Americans who have stood at the very front of their particular branch of playing. I have never heard a better cornetist than Herbert L. Clarke, who for more than twenty years was the solo cornetist of my band and is now a director of his own. I never heard a finer trombone player than Arthur Pryor and I don’t believe he had his equal on earth when he was with me. Among the present-day artists is John Dolan, and many more can be named who are an honor to any organization to which they are attached.
More than 200 years ago Andrew Fletcher, of Saltoun, a philosopher and a keen observer of men and their ways, said: “I knew a very wise man that believed that if a man were permitted to make all the ballads, he need not care who should make the laws of a nation.”
At the very beginning of man’s authentic record there came a series of laws, now known as the Decalogue, that have remained through all the ages as a very Gibraltar of universal justice.
Biblical history tells how the people with fear and trembling heard these commandments; still, they have remained as a monument erected on a foundation of everlasting truth. Tome upon tome of statutes has been enacted since the days when the finger of God traced the Decalogue upon the tablets of stone, but very few man-made laws have lived. Macklin says: “The law is a sort of hocus-pocus science that smiles in yer face while it picks yer pocket; and the glorious uncertainty of it is of more use to the professors than the justice of it.”
Music, on the contrary, reassures and comforts. It tends to soften the hardships of life and add joyousness to our days. Its appeal is to the most lovable traits in man’s nature, therefore it is not difficult to understand why Fletcher’s wise man preferred writing the songs of a nation to making its laws.
The first popular song ever written was the one sung by Moses and the children of Israel in exultation over the destruction of Pharaoh’s hosts. Nothing but song and dance were adequate to celebrate that great event. In triumph and mighty unison, they sang, “I will sing unto the Lord . . . the Lord is a man of war ——” And Miriam and the women played upon timbrels and danced in graceful abandon to the accompaniment of the mighty choir.
With the advent of the sweet singer of Israel came the first great writer of popular songs, for by his genius he swayed the multitude and became the idol of all his land—David, the beloved one, he who wrote the Book of Psalms. He was a musician, a poet and a first-class fighter.
Singing the Forty-sixth Psalm, “God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble,” Polycarp went toward his funeral pile, as did Savonarola. Centuries later, strengthened by this psalm, Martin Luther braved his enemies. Cromwell’s soldiers marched forth to their victory at Marston Moor chanting the songs of David.
Time has kept for us a record of David as a poet, a record of David as a ruler, a record of David as a fighter, but not one vestige remains of David as a composer. More’s the pity, for he must have written splendid music or he could not have moved the people as it is recorded.
David might well be called the first bandmaster mentioned in history. Of course we know in Genesis Jubal is spoken of as father of all such as handle the harp and pipe. But David was the first orchestral organizer. His band numbered 288, and he thus led the first body of players on record.
David without question had in his band all the component parts of the modern orchestra—strings, wood winds, brass and percussion. At the dedication of Solomon’s temple, David and all the house of Israel played before the Lord with all manner of instruments made of fir wood and with harps, and with psalteries, with timbrels, castanets, cornets and cymbals, and the sound of the trumpet was heard in the land even as it is heard today. Popular as a composer and popular as a conductor, David was certainly to be envied. These ancient records are the lamps that led the way to our days, wherein music has taken its place among the recorded inspirational outbursts of man.
At the very dawn of history, vocal and instrumental combinations existed.
Again, is it not recorded in Daniel:
“Nebuchadnezzar spake and said unto them, Is it true, O Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, do not ye serve my gods, nor worship the golden image which I have set up?
“Now if ye be ready that at what time ye hear the sound of the cornet, flute, harp, sackbut, psaltery, and dulcimer, and all kinds of musick, ye fall down and worship the image which I have made; well: but if ye worship not, ye shall be cast the same hour into the midst of a burning fiery furnace; and who is that God that shall deliver you out of my hands?
“Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego answered and said to the king, O Nebuchadnezzar, we are not careful to answer thee in this matter.”
Evidently Nebuchadnezzar and his band were not very popular. Poor old Nebuchadnezzar had as much trouble getting an audience as some of the moderns.
“Be sure you do not miss my concert tonight,” says the Nebuchadnezzar of today. “Sorry, but I can’t,” says the Shadrach of these times, edging away. “I have a previous engagement to take a nap in a boiler factory.”
Hugo Riemann, Sir Charles Villiers Stanford and Cecil Forsyth, those indefatigable delvers into the mystical mines of musical antiquity, agree that everything in music up or down to 900 A.D. should be considered ancient. They record the use of voices and instruments giving melody only, or, at most, octaves in singing and playing. Of course, the rhythmic instruments of percussion were used to mark the time and accentuate the melodies.
If, as some claim, music is a man-created invention, its improvements in the innumerable years that preceded the makers of modern harmony were slight indeed.
It is self-evident that man, in the ancient days, had brain, eyes, voice and hands, even as he has today; but polyphonic music did not exist until the breath of God warmed into music a soul, and cold mathematics gave way to creative genius, inventive skill and inspiration.
The messiahs who brought the glad tidings—Palestrina, Bach, Beethoven, Wagner and a multitude of divinely endowed musicians—have led the world out of the wilderness of crudity into the dazzling realm of the present—a present rich in the treasures of the masters who have arrived, rich in the promise of those to come.
The precursor of the present in relation to the combination known as the symphony orchestra dates from the eighteenth century.
Joseph Haydn has long been known as the Father of Orchestral Music. Many of his symphonies remain in the repertoire of the famous orchestras of the world and are played with never-ending delight to the auditor, the performer and the conductor each succeeding year.
Although it is a far cry from the combination of strings, wood wind and brass of Papa Haydn’s orchestra to the instrumental tools employed by Richard Strauss, to the composer of The Surprise, The Farewell, The Clock and other immortal works should be given the honor of establishing the classic orchestra. The group of the Father of Orchestral Music—1766—consisted of six violins, two violas, one cello, one bass, one flute, two oboes, two bassoons and two horns. The earliest of the Haydn symphonies were given to the world by these instruments. The Alpine Symphony of Richard Strauss—1914—calls for two flutes, two piccolos, two oboes—doubled, one English horn, one hecklephone, one E-flat clarinet—doubled, two B-flat clarinets, one C clarinet—doubled, one bass clarinet, three bassoons, one contrabassoon, sixteen horns, four tenor tubas in B and F, six trumpets, six trombones, two bass tubas, two harps, organ, celest, timpani, eighteen first violins, sixteen second violins, twelve violas, ten cellos, eight double basses, small drum, bass drum and a host of effect instruments which we, in America, call the traps. Besides the above instruments, Strauss in a previous composition employed saxophones.
It will be noticed that between 1766 and 1914 composers have added a multitude of wood wind, brass and percussion instruments to the primitive symphonic combination. With the single exception of the harp, there has been no effort made permanently to incorporate into the string band any other stringed instrument. Though the guitar, the lute, the mandolin, the banjo, the zither and the viola d’amour have been used in orchestral combinations, they have been employed only for some effect believed necessary by the composer. In fact, “The symphony orchestra,” to quote W. S. Rockstro, “has become a large wind band plus strings, instead of a string band plus wind.”
Why? The most æsthetic of the pure families of instruments is beyond question the violin group. In sentiment, mystery, glamour, register, unanimity of tonal facility and perfection in dexterity it more than equals all other families. But aside from its delicate nuances and diffident dynamics, it reduces itself to the skeleton of the symphonic structure, because, like bread served with each course, it loses its novelty; and if violins are used alone, beyond a certain time limit, they suggest an Adamless Eden, which, however beautiful, does not appeal to Eve. Instruments can be likened to man. Man is a social animal; orchestral instruments crave company.
Of the separate instrumental groups, apart from the violin, the vocal, though it is not the equal of the violin family in compass, lightness or mobility, possesses a power for pathos, passion and soul-gripping quality not possible by any other group. The wood wind has a slightly greater register than the violin. In marbleized chastity, crystallized coquetry, humorous murmurs and voicing animated nature, it is in a class by itself. The last orchestral family, the brass, is less in gamut than any save the vocal, but it has the power to thunder forth the barbaric splendor of sound or intone the holiness of the cathedral.
Therefore composers have found a greater diversity of tone color in a multitude of wind instruments—cylinder or conical, single reed, double reed, direct vibration by blowing into an aperture, or cup-shaped mouthpiece, taking the vibrations from the trumpet muscles of the human lip and various sizes of tubes—than in the string family alone. All these wind instruments have added to the palette of the orchestrator and have permitted him to use his creative power in blending the various colors. In this connection, it is not amiss to point out that that giant of the music drama, Richard Wagner, in nearly every instance enunciates the leitmotifs of his operas through the agency of wood wind or brass.
The so-called Thürmer—Watchman—bands of the Middle Ages seem to be the progenitors of the present-day concert band. They were made up of fifes, oboes, Zinken, trombones and drums. Trumpets were not at first used, because they were for royal ears alone, not for the common herd. As time passed numerous wind instruments were added to this group, some of the originals became obsolete and others were improved upon, until today the wind band consists of four flutes, two piccolos, two oboes, one English horn, two bassoons, one contrabassoon or sarrusophone, two alto saxophones, two tenor saxophones, one barytone saxophone, one bass saxophone, twenty B-flat clarinets, one alto clarinet, two bass clarinets, four cornets, two trumpets, two Flügelhorns or added cornets, four horns, four trombones, two euphoniums, eight basses—double B, one harp, one tympani, one small drum and one bass drum.
The tendency of the modern composer to place on the shoulders of the wood wind corps and the brass choir of the orchestra the most dramatic effects of the symphonic body has much to do with the development of the wind band, although there is no question that the inventive genius of Böhm, Klosé, Wieprecht and Sax has been an important factor. With the improvements in mechanism, looking to purity of intonation and facility of execution, observant musicians and capable conductors saw the coming of a new constellation in the musical firmament—a constellation of star players on wood wind, brass and percussion instruments.
The pioneers were Wieprecht and Parlow in Germany, Paulus and Sellenik in France, the Godfreys and George Miller in England, Bender in Belgium, Dunkler in Holland, and, last but not least, Patrick Sarsfield Gilmore in America. Gilmore organized a corps of musicians superior to any wind-band players of his day, many of them coming from the leading orchestras of the world and possessing a virtuoso’s ability on their respective instruments. He engaged his musicians regardless of expense and paid them salaries commensurate with their talents. Conductors and piayers alike should tenderly cherish the memory of Patrick Sarsfield Gilmore for what he did in the interest of instrumental performers.
The only distinction that can be made in the name of progressive art between the modern string band and the modern wind band is which one at the moment presents the most perfect massing of sounds and tonal colors. An incessant playing of all groups combined, or the serving of music pabulum in solid blocks of string, wood wind or brass becomes wearisome. Recitals by a single vocalist or instrumental performer are made attractive through the personality and pedagogy of the performer rather than through the entertainment itself. When personality is missing, auricular fatigue prevails sooner or later.
In placing the string band and the wind band on the same plane, I see, in my mind’s eye, the lover of Haydn, of Mozart, of Beethoven and the violin family standing aghast at the thought and asking why wind instruments should attempt the immortal symphonies of these beloved masters; and well may they stand aghast and question. These compositions were created for one purpose only—to be played by the instruments the masters intended for them, and never by any other combination. The efforts on the part of some misguided conductors and orchestrators to improve on the original, and the equally self-elective task of some wind-band arranger to transcribe Mozart, Beethoven and Haydn to the wind-instrument combination are greatly to be deplored. The earlier symphonies are the musical flowers, plants and trees grown in the shadowy lane of the past, and it is not necessary to put up barbed-wire fences and telegraph poles to modernize these masterpieces. Either play them as they are or let them alone entirely.
There is much modern music that is better adapted to a wind combination than to a string, although for obvious reasons originally scored for an orchestra. If in such cases the interpretation is equal to the composition, the balance of a wind combination is more satisfying.
The all-pervading aim of the composer is to produce color, dynamics, nuances, the story-telling quality and the greatest number of mixed and unmixed quartets, and the combination and composition that vivify that result are the most desired ones. To presume that the clarinet, the cornet and the trombone should be used simply to blare forth marches and jazz tunes, or that the violin family should devote its days to scraping waltzes and fox trots is ludicrous.
The string band and the wind band are among the brightest constellations in the melodic heavens. The former may be likened to the feminine, the latter to the masculine, for like maid and man, they can breathe into life the soulful, the religious, the sentimental, the heroic and the sublime. The mission of each is to uplift humanity; the doctrine, God’s sunshine is for all; the motto, Beauty, Love and Harmony Must Prevail.