“I remember that I was passed first in a class of eighty-four at an examination, after only three private lessons in which to prepare the concerto movement to be played.  I was surprised and asked him why Mlle.——­ who, it seemed to me, had played better than I, had not passed.  ‘Ah,’ he said, ’Mlle.——­ studied that movement for six months; and in comparison, you, with only three lessons, play it better!’ Dancla switched me right over in his teaching from German to French methods, and taught me how to become an artist, just as I had learned in Germany to become a musician.  The French school has taste, elegance, imagination; the German is more conservative, serious, and has, perhaps, more depth.

TECHNICAL DIFFICULTIES

“Perhaps it is because I belong to an older school, or it may be because I laid stress on technic because of its necessity as a means of expression—­at any rate I worked hard at it.  Naturally, one should never practice any technical difficulty too long at a stretch.  Young players sometimes forget this.  I know that staccato playing was not easy for me at one time.  I believe a real staccato is inborn; a knack.  I used to grumble about it to Joachim and he told me once that musically staccato did not have much value.  His own, by the way, was very labored and heavy.  He admitted that he had none.  Wieniawski had such a wonderful staccato that one finds much of it in his music.  When I first began to play his D minor concerto I simply made up my mind to get a staccato.  It came in time, by sheer force of will.  After that I had no trouble.  An artistic staccato should, like the trill, be plastic and under control; for different schools of composition demand different styles of treatment of such details.

“Octaves—­the unison, not broken—­I did not find difficult; but though they are supposed to add volume of tone they sound hideous to me.  I have used them in certain passages of my arrangement of ‘Deep River,’ but when I heard them played, promised myself I would never repeat the experiment.  Wilhelmj has committed even a worse crime in taste by putting six long bars of Schubert’s lovely Ave Maria in octaves.  Of course they represent skill; but I think they are only justified in show pieces.  Harmonics I always found easy; though whether they ring out as they should always depends more or less on atmospheric conditions, the strings and the amount of rosin on the bow.  On the concert stage if the player stands in a draught the harmonics are sometimes husky.

THE AMERICAN WOMAN VIOLINIST AND
AMERICAN MUSIC

“The old days of virtuoso ‘tricks’ have passed—­I should like to hope forever.  Not that some of the old type virtuosos were not fine players.  Remenyi played beautifully.  So did Ole Bull.  I remember one favorite trick of the latter’s, for instance, which would hardly pass muster to-day.  I have seen him draw out a long pp, the audience listening breathlessly, while he drew his bow way beyond the string, and then looked innocently at the point of the bow, as though wondering where the tone had vanished.  It invariably brought down the house.