nded, whether the instrument is piano, violin, the
human voice, or orchestra. And just as he counts on the harmonics and
sympathetic vibrations of the upper strings of the piano for the
proper effect of a piano sonata, so for the effect of an orchestral
work he relies on the full rich tone and the subdued murmur, which are
only produced by the members of the orchestra playing a little wrong.
That they play wrong in a million different ways does not matter:
provided they do not play too far wrong the result is always the same,
just as the characteristic sound of an excited crowd is always the
same whether there are a few more men or fewer women in one crowd
than in another. This may be wrong theoretically; but all theorising
breaks down hopelessly before the fact that it was such an orchestra
the masters wrote for. Perhaps some day the foot-rule, the metronome,
and the tuning-fork will take the place of the human ear and artistic
judgment; but until that day arrives I prefer the wrongness of Mottl's
orchestra to the strict correctness which Lamoureux used to give us;
and I leave the aesthetic illogical logic-choppers, who demand from
the orchestra the correctness they would not stand from a solo-player,
to find what delight they may in such playing as Lamoureux's used to
be in the "Meistersinger" overture, or the "Waldweben," or the Good
Friday music. It must be remembered, however, that the excessive
correctness of which I have complained was only one of the means
through which Lamoureux attained excessive lucidity. He sacrificed
every other quality to lucidity; and those who preferred lucidity to
every other qualify--that is to say, all Frenchmen--naturally
preferred Lamoureux's playing to that of any other conductor. In the
"Meistersinger" overture he would not allow the band to romp freely
for a single moment; in the "Waldweben" he succeeded in playing every
crescendo, every diminuendo, with astonishing evenness of gradation,
even when a trifling irregularity to relieve the mechanical stiffness
of the thing would have been as water to a thirsty traveller in the
desert; in the Good Friday music he stuck rigidly to the composer's
directions, and would not permit a breath of his own life to go into
the music. In Berlioz's "Chasse et Orage" (from "Les Troyens") and a
movement from the "Romeo and Juliet" symphony, he manifested the same
qualities as when he played Beethoven and Wagner. His playing wanted
colour, suggestive