The Osceola Times

MUSICAL CULTURE.

The Joyful Violin Bird those Masters Who Have Touched It

"Musical culture is in the air. It could not be otherwise with two conservatories, the classical symphony concerts, the immense amount of newspaper criticism and the hundreds of teachers all about us. Young parents want their little children to be educated, according the present standard, and so it goes."

"But the violin playing," said I returning to my first theme. "How happens it that that instrument has become so popular with even Boston ladies?" "Because it is the king of instruments, and because a girl looks charming when she plays it."

After this I said no more, but recalled the fact for myself that fifteen years and more ago, when Camilla Urso enraptured everybody with her delicious playing, several young ladies begun to think they would like to play the violin too, and consequently the amount of scratching and squealing their families were obliged to endure was enough to have driven them insane. One Boston girl delighted society with her graceful playing for several seasons to the exclusion of all other performers, but as the Eichberg violin school grew in reputation and its scholars began to appear in public and gain laurels and money at home and abroad, amateur violin playing became rather dangerous unless the performer was an exceptionally pretty girl. These amateurs went to Mr. Eichberg, who improved their tone and style, and now when they have little boys and girls of their own they insist on their learning the violin, too, just as much as their arithmetic and geography. More than one genius has been developed under the Eichberg training. His pupils go abroad to have finishing lessons from Joachim to find they have been instructed in the best German school of the violin, and the polishing they receive is rather from art association than from actual knowledge or anything more to learn. It is study, study, study with them then. I heard at Mr. Eichberg's house last Sunday evening a young girl who is a pupil of Leonard, the great French master of the violin, and who has returned home for a little visit before entering on the final two years of uninterrupted study required before making her debut in public. She is now in her 16th year, and when only 6 years old began to have lessons from Mr. Eichberg. She was a mite of a thing then and used to stand with her little violin tucked under her chin scraping away with all the fervor of a born artist. No one supposed she would make music her career, but necessity has brought out the genius and some day if her teachers and friends are not much mistaken, she will join the ranks of the great violin virtuosos of Europe.

An immense change has taken place in the public taste for violin playing within a few years. Do you remember when the public went mad over Ole Bull and his "Mother's Prayer?" He was considered a great player, but in the new light we regard him as a sensational one, a person of much magnetism, a man of splendid stature, who knew enough to button his coat and throw up his head and raise his elbow so the audience could see the back of his violin. That caught the popular feeling, and people who regarded catgut as horrible and fiddlers as natural tormentors would howl and clap their hands at the tunes he played. Ole Bull was not precisely a charlatan, but he came very near it. He could appreciate classical music, but he also appreciated money, and when he found the untutored public liked his "Mother's Prayer" and the "Last Rose of Summer," he let it have them, and shook his mane like a Norwegian pony and showed his Apollo-like figure more buttoned up than ever. He died rich and much respected and his agreeable widow lives out in the James Russell Lowell house at Cambridge, and his brother-in-law is to marry a daughter of Mr. Longfellow. After the Bulls went to Cambridge to live and were the near neighbors of the Longfellows society opened wide its doors and have welcomed Mrs. Bull ever since But the Ole Bull style of violin playing is dead and buried with him. Wilhelm with his magnificent tone and broad, solid style; Wieniawski, who thrilled us all with his mild grace and brilliant phrasing, have been here and taught us much in the art of good and true music. There have been others who have starred in the concert room, but they have left no impress, no incentive, opened no new vein of ambition such as these masters have done. The resident orchestral first violinists who are occasionally soloists in the concert room include some fine players, each having his own individual style, admired by his followers. Boston Cor. Albany Journal.