His playing appealed alike
to the musically learned and to the unlearned -- for he would
magnetize the listener; but the artist felt in his performance
the superiority of the momentary living inspiration
to all the rules and shifts of mere technical scholarship.
His art was not only the art of art, but an art above art.
I will never forget the impression he made on me when he played
the flute concerta of Emil Hartmann at a Peabody symphony concert, in 1878, --
his tall, handsome, manly presence, his flute breathing noble sorrows,
noble joys, the orchestra softly responding. The audience was spellbound.
Such distinction, such refinement! He stood, the master, the genius!"*
--
* Quoted in Ward's Introduction to `Poems'.
--
He made the same impression on every other artist he ever played for.
Badger called his flute-playing "astonishing"; Wehner, the first flute
in Thomas's Orchestra, sought every opportunity to play with him.
Theodore Thomas planned to have him in his orchestra at the time
when Lanier's health failed in 1876; Dr. Damrosch said he played "Wind-Song"
like an artist, -- that "he was greatly astonished and pleased
with the poetry of the piece and the enthusiasm of its rendering."
His own compositions, too, appealed to men. At times the "fury of creation"
was upon him. During the first winter in Baltimore he wrote a midge dance,
the origin of which he thus gives in a letter to his wife:
"I am copying off -- in order to try the publishers therewith --
a `Danse des Moucherons' (midge dance), which I have written
for flute and piano, and which I think enough of to let go forward as Op.
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