228.—GREAT MUSICAL MEMORIES.
No matter what other talents a musician may have, if he has not a very strong and retentive memory his musical genius will probably remain obscure. It is fortunate, however, that a strong inventive power or talent for composition will generally be accompanied by an adequately developed memory. For this reason, when one begins to write of the retentive memories of the great composers, there seems to be no stopping place short of the end of the list.
It goes without saying that an opera singer must be able at all times to place perfect reliance on his memory. It is hard to appreciate the task that falls to a singer taking a prominent rôle in some of the grand operas, Wagner's, for instance. The mere notes form only a minor part of the work. There are the words, the nuance, and the action; and a slip in any one of these means a failure, more or less pronounced.
Many have been the fine voices that are lost to the stage because of a lack of that vital necessity, a reliable memory. But there is this redeeming feature—memory, like all other faculties, grows with use, and especially is this true of music, where the association of words and music is a great aid for the retention of either.
Next to the operatic singer comes the instrumental executant. Among these Mozart was most prominent for his good memory. Von Bülow was another whose memory seemed to have no end. He could play almost any classic composition that might be called for. Beethoven's sonatas he could give note for note, but this is told also of Sir Charles Hallé, Rubinstein and others.
Bülow could give a piano recital every day for a month, and repeat no number, all from memory. It is related of him that his manager desired him to give certain compositions at a recital in a distant city. A telegram to this effect reached him as he was about to set out on his journey. The pieces were new to him, having been just published; but he procured the music and learned them on the train en route. The first time he played them was at the concert that night.
As a conductor, his memory served him equally well. His precision was such that it gave evidence of thorough acquaintance with the entire score of nearly the whole repertoire of symphony and opera. Most of the great conductors such as Richter, Weingartner, Nikisch, Seidl, Thomas and Paur will do a large part of their orchestral conducting without score. Especially is this true of the standard classics.
We have related how Mozart, when a boy, retained Allegri's "Miserere" on one hearing, and how he wrote out the whole composition on his return home from the service. This phenomenal memory stood Mozart in good stead, as the following incident shows:—
Some three years before he died he played his concerto in C before a Leipzig audience. At the proper time Mozart sat down to begin and the orchestra was all ready. The concerto had not yet been printed, and the orchestra played from manuscript. To the surprise of the audience Mozart only used a bit of paper with a few of the beginnings of the themes written thereon.
When asked about it he said, "Oh, the piano part is safely locked up in my desk at Vienna. I am obliged to take this precaution when I am traveling; otherwise people contrive, somehow or other, to get copies of my scores and print them without the least acknowledgment to me."