Music, Wit, and Wisdom - The Autobiography of Artur Schnabel by Artur Schnabel

Author:Artur Schnabel [Schnabel, Artur]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9783936000535
Publisher: Wolke
Published: 2012-12-21T05:00:00+00:00

In East Prussia (I have to come back to this because it is rather interesting), I always stayed with a gentleman by the name of Kapp—I think he was the president or administrator of the province. He was known later on for starting a revolt which failed. This Mr. Kapp was a very gentle, genial, charming person. Ladies were very fond of him, and that was mutual. He was cavalier-like, and he had beautiful daughters. One night (and that was always a good time in his palatial residence), he wanted to hear from me, the young Austrian, as to my ideas about the future of Austria, and I told him that I thought that the Czech group in Austria was by far the most promising, reliable, industrious, and intelligent. He got up and said they should all be lined up against the wall and shot. This very gentle and genial man came to that! After that I was frightened by him and didn’t cultivate his contact any more.

Around 1910 there was great excitement about a prodigy in composition—comparisons were made to the young Mozart. His name was Erich Wolfgang Korngold. His father was a music critic for the most important newspaper in Vienna, successor to Eduard Hanslick, who was generally considered the leader of musical criticism in the German language in the nineteenth century. I gave the first performance of a sonata of Korngold’s which he wrote when he was twelve. The work was really amazing; of course, this is a relative judgment, for you cannot help but automatically judge a work by a twelve-year-old boy differently from that of a sixty-year-old. Yet I think even today, if you can see it in this perspective, it is still a most amazing piece. Unfortunately this Erich Wolfgang Korngold, who we hoped would become a very great composer, did not develop in the expected direction and is a rather unhappy man making much money writing music for Hollywood pictures. He is unhappy making that money. I am still a very intimate friend of his and I am under the impression that money or no money, he is absolutely fed up with Hollywood and will give it up very soon. Apparently he has had enough of the bad music which he has written.

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