156.—BÜLOW BITS.
The biographer of von Bülow will find no trouble in securing anecdotes characteristic of this whimsical player and conductor, for the peculiar things he did were legion. His criticisms, while often severe, were certainly to the point and were stated without hesitation or reserve. Especially cutting were his remarks about singers. He had a great antipathy to the majority of tenor singers. One especially did he dislike, and speaking of his singing, said, "Do you call that singing? I call it a disease."
While conducting a rehearsal of "Lohengrin" at Hanover he became enraged at the singer's rendition of a certain passage and, throwing his baton at him cried, "You don't sing like a "Knight of the Swan," but like a knight of the swine!"
A caller once noticed as the principal picture in his apartments that of the leader of the ballet. On his friend's expressing surprise, Bülow said, "Yes, she is the only woman of the artists on the stage who does not distress me by bad singing."
When this eccentric pianist met any one to whom for any reason he took a dislike, he would turn and hasten away in an opposite direction. Once in Copenhagen an accomplished player of the 'cello who was the unfortunate possessor of a very large nose was presented to him. Bülow gazed at him an instant, then, without returning the player's salutation, exclaimed, "That nose is impossible!" and fled away.
In America we sometimes hear the phrase "put a head on him," but the German idiom for the same phraseological gem is to "give one a nose." When Bülow was leading the Meiningen orchestra, on one occasion the duke wished a certain piece played. The conductor through some whim declined. The duke insisted. The next day Bülow appeared at rehearsal with an enormous false nose on his face. At the close of the first piece, he said to the orchestra, "Gentlemen, you will wish to know where I got this nose? I will tell you. His Highness gave it to me yesterday."
These are some of the whimsicalities of greatness; greatness viewed from its comical side. Viewed as an interpreter of the great masters from Beethoven to Wagner, on piano or orchestra Bülow was one of the very elect. A man of prodigious memory, of wide learning, of an all-conquering technic, he was a universal genius who concentrated his abilities upon music, yet to whom music was but one department of learning. At this writing there is no one that may take up his fallen mantle.