OLD FOGY
HIS MUSICAL OPINIONS
AND GROTESQUES
With an Introductionand Edited
BY
JAMES HUNEKER
1712 Chestnut Street Philadelphia
London, Weekes & Co.
.
are dedicated to
delight to his fellow-countryman,
INTRODUCTION
My friend the publisher has asked me to tell you what I know about OldFogy, whose letters aroused much curiosity and comment when theyappeared from time to time in the columns of The Etude. I confess I dothis rather unwillingly. When I attempted to assemble my memories of theeccentric and irascible musician I found that, despite his enormousvolubility and surface-frankness, the old gentleman seldom allowed usmore than a peep at his personality. His was the expansive temperament,or, to employ a modern phrase, the dynamic temperament. Antiquated aswere his modes of thought, he would bewilder you with an excursion intolatter-day literature, and like a rift of light in a fogbank you thencaught a gleam of an entirely different mentality. One day I found himreading a book by the French writer Huysmans, dealing with new art. Andhe confessed to me that he admired Hauptmann's Hannele, though hedespised the same dramatist's Weavers. The truth is that no humanbeing is made all of a piece; we are, mentally at least, more of amosaic than we believe.
[Pg 6]Let me hasten to negative the report that I was ever a pupil of OldFogy. To be sure, I did play for him once a paraphrase of The Maiden'sPrayer (in double tenths by Dogowsky), but he laughed so heartily thatI feared apoplexy, and soon stopped. The man really existed. There are ascore of persons alive in Philadelphia today who still remember him andcould call him by his name—formerly an impossible Hungarian one, withtwo or three syllables lopped off at the end, and for family reasons notdivulged here. He assented that he was a fellow-pupil of Liszt's underthe beneficent, iron rule of Carl Czerny. But he never looked his age.Seemingly seventy, a very vital threescore-and-ten, by the way, he wasas light on his feet as were his fingers on the keyboard. A linguist,speaking without a trace of foreign accent three or four tongues, he wasequally fluent in all. Once launched in an argument there was nostopping him. Nor was he an agreeable opponent. Torrents and cataractsof words poured from his mouth.
He pretended to hate modern music, but, as you will note after readinghis opinions, collected for the first time in this volume, he very oftencontradicts himself. He abused Bach, then used the Well-temperedClavichord as a [Pg 7]weapon of offense wherewith to pound Liszt andthe Lisztianer. He attacked Wagner and Wagnerism with inappeasablefury, but I suspect that he was secretly much impressed by several ofthe music-dramas, particularly