VI
ONE afternoon in April, Theodore Thomas, the con-
ductor of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, had
turned out his desk light and was about to leave his office
in the Auditorium Building, when Harsanyi appeared in
the doorway. The conductor welcomed him with a hearty
hand-grip and threw off the overcoat he had just put on.
He pushed Harsanyi into a chair and sat down at his bur-
dened desk, pointing to the piles of papers and railway
folders upon it.
"Another tour, clear to the coast. This traveling is the
part of my work that grinds me, Andor. You know what
it means: bad food, dirt, noise, exhaustion for the men and
for me. I'm not so young as I once was. It's time I quit
the highway. This is the last tour, I swear!"
"Then I'm sorry for the `highway.' I remember when I
first heard you in Pittsburg, long ago. It was a life-line you
threw me. It's about one of the people along your high-
way that I've come to see you. Whom do you consider the
best teacher for voice in Chicago?"
Mr. Thomas frowned and pulled his heavy mustache.
"Let me see; I suppose on the whole Madison Bowers is
the best. He's intelligent, and he had good training. I
don't like him."
Harsanyi nodded. "I thought there was no one else.
I don't like him, either, so I hesitated. But I suppose he
must do, for the present."
"Have you found anything promising? One of your own
students?"
"Yes, sir. A young Swedish girl from somewhere in
Colorado. She is very talented, and she seems to me to
have a remarkable voice."
"High voice?"
"I think it will be; though her low voice has a beauti-
ful quality, very individual. She has had no instruction
in voice at all, and I shrink from handing her over to any-
body; her own instinct about it has been so good. It is
one of those voices that manages itself easily, without
thinning as it goes up; good breathing and perfect relaxa-
tion. But she must have a teacher, of course. There is a
break in the middle voice, so that the voice does not all
work together; an unevenness."
Thomas looked up. "So? Curious; that cleft often
happens with the Swedes. Some of their best singers have
had it. It always reminds me of the space you so often see
between their front teeth. Is she strong physically?"
Harsanyi's eye flashed. He lifted his hand before him
and clenched it. "Like a horse, like a tree! Every time
I give her a lesson, I lose a pound. She goes after what she
wants."
"Intelligent, you say? Musically intelligent?"
"Yes; but no cultivation whatever. She came to me like
a fine young savage, a book with nothing written in it.
That is why I feel the responsibility of directing her."
Harsanyi paused and crushed his soft gray hat over his
knee. "She would interest you, Mr. Thomas," he added
slowly. "She has a quality--very individual."
"Yes; the Scandinavians are apt to have that, too. She
can't go to Germany, I suppose?"
"Not now, at any rate. She is poor."
Thomas frowned again "I don't think Bowers a really
first-rate man. He's too petty to be really first-rate; in his
nature, I mean. But I dare say he's the best you can do,
if you can't give her time enough yourself."
Harsanyi waved his hand. "Oh, the time is nothing--she
may have all she wants. But I cannot teach her to sing."
"Might not come amiss if you made a musician of her,
however," said Mr. Thomas dryly.
"I have done my best. But I can only play with a voice,
and this is not a voice to be played with. I think she will
be a musician, whatever happens. She is not quick, but
she is solid, real; not like these others. My wife says that
with that girl one swallow does not make a summer."
Mr. Thomas laughed. "Tell Mrs. Harsanyi that her
remark conveys something to me. Don't let yourself get
too much interested. Voices are so often disappointing;
especially women's voices. So much chance about it, so
many factors."
"Perhaps that is why they interest one. All the intelli-
gence and talent in the world can't make a singer. The
voice is a wild thing. It can't be bred in captivity. It is
a sport, like the silver fox. It happens."
Mr. Thomas smiled into Harsanyi's gleaming eye.
"Why haven't you brought her to sing for me?"
"I've been tempted to, but I knew you were driven to
death, with this tour confronting you."
"Oh, I can always find time to listen to a girl who has a
voice, if she means business. I'm sorry I'm leaving so
soon. I could advise you better if I had heard her. I can
sometimes give a singer suggestions. I've worked so much
with them."
"You're the only conductor I know who is not snobbish
about singers." Harsanyi spoke warmly.
"Dear me, why should I be? They've learned from me,
and I've learned from them." As they rose, Thomas took
the younger man affectionately by the arm. "Tell me
about that wife of yours. Is she well, and as lovely as ever?
And such fine children! Come to see me oftener, when I get
back. I miss it when you don't."
The two men left the Auditorium Building together.
Harsanyi walked home. Even a short talk with Thomas
always stimulated him. As he walked he was recalling an
evening they once spent together in Cincinnati.
Harsanyi was the soloist at one of Thomas's concerts
there, and after the performance the conductor had taken
him off to a RATHSKELLER where there was excellent German
cooking, and where the proprietor saw to it that Thomas
had the best wines procurable. Thomas had been working
with the great chorus of the Festival Association and was
speaking of it with enthusiasm when Harsanyi asked him
how it was that he was able to feel such an interest in choral
directing and in voices generally. Thomas seldom spoke of
his youth or his early struggles, but that night he turned
back the pages and told Harsanyi a long story.
He said he had spent the summer of his fifteenth year
wandering about alone in the South, giving violin con-
certs in little towns. He traveled on horseback. When he
came into a town, he went about all day tacking up
posters announcing his concert in the evening. Before the
concert, he stood at the door taking in the admission money
until his audience had arrived, and then he went on the
platform and played. It was a lazy, hand-to-mouth ex-
istence, and Thomas said he must have got to like that
easy way of living and the relaxing Southern atmosphere.
At any rate, when he got back to New York in the fall, he
was rather torpid; perhaps he had been growing too fast.
From this adolescent drowsiness the lad was awakened by
two voices, by two women who sang in New York in 1851,
--Jenny Lind and Henrietta Sontag. They were the first
great artists he had ever heard, and he never forgot his
debt to them.
As he said, "It was not voice and execution alone. There
was a greatness about them. They were great women,
great artists. They opened a new world to me." Night
after night he went to hear them, striving to reproduce the
quality of their tone upon his violin. From that time his
idea about strings was completely changed, and on his
violin he tried always for the singing, vibrating tone, in-
stead of the loud and somewhat harsh tone then prevalent
among even the best German violinists. In later years he
often advised violinists to study singing, and singers to
study violin. He told Harsanyi that he got his first con-
ception of tone quality from Jenny Lind.
"But, of course," he added, "the great thing I got from
Lind and Sontag was the indefinite, not the definite, thing.
For an impressionable boy, their inspiration was incalcu-
lable. They gave me my first feeling for the Italian style
--but I could never say how much they gave me. At that
age, such influences are actually creative. I always think
of my artistic consciousness as beginning then."
All his life Thomas did his best to repay what he felt he
owed to the singer's art. No man could get such singing
from choruses, and no man worked harder to raise the
standard of singing in schools and churches and choral
societies.
