Dripping wet

Saturday, February 13th., London.
Yesterday afternoon, a sandwich man in Coventry Street, stooping with difficulty owing to his encumbrances, picked up a cigarette out of the gutter. "My first of the day," he exclaimed to his mate who was in front of him. 

This struck a chord with me. I have been told by my mother that when I was young I used to be taken out for walks by my Uncle Len, by the canal or to Bradwell Woods near Tunstall. He was more or less an itinerant, never working to my knowledge. My mother said it was because he had been on a ship that was sunk by a submarine during the war. Apparently I got into the habit of picking up cigarette ends for him to smoke later, because he could never afford to buy them. I saw nothing unusual in this behaviour at the time. It all came out when I was out shopping with my mother one day and automatically picked up a cigarette end I saw on the floor. She was horrified when I explained that it was to save for Lennie.


In either 1893 or 1894 I heard a Wagner opera for the fist time with understanding. It was at Drury Lane and we sat in the balcony. There was no crush on entering, not more than a dozen people had collected when the doors opened. At most 40 people occupied the balcony, and the other parts of the immense building were similarly forlorn. Nevertheless it was an excellent performance with Alvarez and (I think) Klapsky as chief stars. Contrast: Tonight with Frank I went to a Wagner orchestral concert (promenade) at Queen's Hall, under Henry J. Wood. We got there a quarter of an hour before the commencement and already the entrance hall was packed with an eager tumultuous mass (excited by expectation) struggling to get at the ticket offices. At eight o'clock the vast floor (promenade) and the upper circle were crowded in every part, and in the balcony only a few reserved seats were left, which in turn were taken before the second piece on the programme had been played. The audience was enthusiastic, keenly anticipatory; and the orchestra under the magnetic influence of the occasion played in a fashion which steadily increased the exquisite nervous tension of its hearers. At the opening bars of "The Flying Dutchman" overture I felt those strange tickling sensations in the back which are the physical signs of aesthetic emotion. The mysterious effects of orchestral colour contrast dazed and dazzled Frank's willing ears till he existed simply as a "receiver" - receiver of a microphone or other phonetic instrument ... The waves of sound swallowed him up, and at the end he emerged, like a courageous child from the surf of a summer sea, dripping wet, breathless, and enraptured.

Moved by music

Saturday, February 13th., London.

Yesterday afternoon, a sandwich man in Coventry Street, stooping with difficulty owing to his encumbrances, picked up a cigarette out of the gutter.
"My first of the day," he exclaimed to his mate who was in front of him. 
I have been told by my mother that when I was young I used to be taken out for walks by my Uncle Len, by the canal or to Bradwell Woods near Tunstall; apparently I got into the habit of picking up cigarette ends for him to 'recycle' later! I saw nothing unusual in this behaviour at the time.
In either 1893 or 1894 I heard a Wagner opera for the fist time with understanding. It was at Drury Lane and we sat in the balcony. There was no crush on entering, not more than a dozen people had collected when the doors opened. At most 40 people occupied the balcony, and the other parts of the immense building were similarly forlorn. Nevertheless it was an excellent performance with Alvarez and (I think) Klapsky as chief stars.
Contrast: Tonight with Frank I went to a Wagner orchestral concert (promenade) at Queen's Hall, under Henry J. Wood. We got there a quarter of an hour before the commencement and already the entrance hall was packed with an eager tumultuous mass (excited by expectation) struggling to get at the ticket offices. At eight o'clock the vast floor (promenade) and the upper circle were crowded in every part, and in the balcony only a few reserved seats were left, which in turn were taken before the second piece on the programme had been played. The audience was enthusiastic, keenly anticipatory; and the orchestra under the magnetic influence of the occasion played in a fashion which steadily increased the exquisite nervous tension of its hearers. At the opening bars of "The Flying Dutchman" overture I felt those strange tickling sensations in the back which are the physical signs of aesthetic emotion. The mysterious effects of orchestral colour contrast dazed and dazzled Frank's willing ears till he existed simply as a "receiver" - receiver of a microphone or other phonetic instrument ...
The waves of sound swallowed him up, and at the end he emerged, like a courageous child from the surf of a summer sea, dripping wet, breathless, and enraptured.

In 1893, Robert Newman became the first manager of the Queen's Hall. He had the idea for a series of concerts, at affordable prices for a mass audience, with a proportion of the audience able to promenade in a designated space without seats. Newman hired Henry Wood as the conductor for these "promenade concerts", and summarised his idea to Wood: 

"I am going to run nightly concerts and train the public by easy stages. Popular at first, gradually raising the standard until I have created a public for classical and modern music". 

The first "Promenade Concert" took place on Saturday 10 August 1895, with Henry Wood conducting his new "Queen's Hall Orchestra". This first season of concerts ran ten weeks, and was initially called "Mr Robert Newman's Promenade Concerts". To keep concerts affordable, Newman set his ticket prices at 1s for a single promenade concert ticket, and 1 guinea for a season ticket, transferable among more than one person, and valid for all that season's concerts. Newman and Wood included regular concerts within the series of "Wagner Nights" (Mondays) and "Beethoven Nights" (Fridays), and gradually began to introduce new works, or "novelties", by the composers of the day to promenade concerts audiences.

Headache!

Tuesday, October 5th., London.

To wake up at midnight, after an hours sleep, with a headache, slight but certainly indicative of the coming attack; to hear the clock strike, every note drilling a separate hole into your skull; to spend the rest of the night uneasily between sleeping and waking, always turning over the pillow, and tormented intermittently by idiotic nightmares, crowded with action, which fatigue the brain: this is a disturbed liver. Towards morning comes the hope, caused by the irregularity of the pain, that the headache will pass away on getting up. But it never does so. Then one comes downstairs, eyes as it were in red-hot sockets, and gulps some effervescing saline. One rises from breakfast with a mouth full of reminiscences - butter, cocoa, porridge, and the headache remains. One walks to the office in the fresh autumn air; the headache remains. Towards noon, one seeks the last remedy, a draught which weakens the action of the heart. It is effective, and after half an hour's somnolence, one recovers, half-dazed, but without the headache. The impulse to work is alive again, and one accomplishes an hour. But after lunch and dinner one has a consciousness that a new headache is lying in wait, and, one's resolve worn away by the constant sense of fatigue in the eyes and of rapid pulsation round the back of the head, one weakly lapses into idleness, trusting that tomorrow will be different.

I found myself at the Wagner Promenade concert. It seems to me that Henry J. Wood lacks the repose and reticence of a great conductor. He continually endeavours to express the music to his band in curves of the arm, sudden contractions of all the muscles, frowns and smiles. If such procedure is to be effective, it can only be effective at rehearsal. At the performance the conductor, knowing what the band can do, and the band knowing what the conductor desires, gestures should be unnecessary. At the performance the band needs, not an interpretation of the music, but merely control and reminders.

Sir Henry Joseph Wood,  (1869 – 1944) was an English conductor best known for his association with London's annual series of promenade concerts, known as the Proms. He conducted them for nearly half a century, introducing hundreds of new works to British audiences. After his death, the concerts were officially renamed in his honour as the "Henry Wood Promenade Concerts", although they continued to be generally referred to as "the Proms". Born in modest circumstances to parents who encouraged his musical talent, Wood started his career as an organist. During his studies at the Royal Academy of Music, he came under the influence of the voice teacher Manuel Garcia and became his accompanist. After similar work for Richard D'Oyly Carte's opera companies on the works of Arthur Sullivan and others, Wood became the conductor of a small operatic touring company. He was soon engaged by the larger Carl Rosa Opera Company. One notable event in his operatic career was conducting the British premiere of Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin in 1892. From the mid-1890s until his death, Wood focused on concert conducting. He was engaged by the impresario Robert Newman to conduct a series of promenade concerts at the Queen's Hall, offering a mixture of classical and popular music at low prices. The series was successful, and Wood conducted annual promenade series until his death in 1944. By the 1920s, Wood had steered the repertoire entirely to classical music. When the Queen's Hall was destroyed by bombing in 1941, the Proms moved to the Royal Albert Hall. He had an enormous influence on the musical life of Britain over his long career: he and Newman greatly improved access to classical music, and Wood raised the standard of orchestral playing and nurtured the taste of the public, presenting a vast repertoire of music spanning four centuries.

Steindl, the pianist aged 6 or 7, played a Schubert Impromptu (No. 4) and Raff's "Fabian". He is not more than 7, and has the pale face and the vast skull of the typical precocious genius. He runs onto the platform, takes his seat, and then stares down at the audience with calm reproachful expression. Then he turns to his father for the signal to begin. He is not lost in his performance, but rather (as it were) preoccupied with something else, seldom looking at the keyboard and constantly directing upon the audience that reproachful stare. During the performance his father exchanged looks of pride and pleasure with members of the orchestra, every man in which followed the child's movements with a sort of paternal wistfulness. At the end, when Steindl stood bowing and bobbing to the applause, my body shook and my eyes filled with tears, in spite of myself.