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From Kuppenheim, near Baden, there came to these then hospitable
shores, one day in 1888, Max Dreyfus, a young pianist with
an itch to he a composer and ambitious to succeed as either
one or the other. Possibly if young Dreyfus' ambition and
equipment had been single instead of dual, he might never
have abandoned both careers in favor of still a third; a
single ambition, especially in the arts, is likely to be
fanatical and to survive drearily the flicker of talent. At
any rate, this thirteen-year-old boy found the going in New
York fairly hard and took what odd jobs he could find as
pianist and musical arranger. Fairly soon he struck up a
friendship and collaboration with Paul Dresser, whose
brother, Theodore Dreiser, was then editing a magazine
called Every Month. This magazine published music and
Dresser employed Max to arrange his songs in publishable
form. Dresser was the type of composer who plays a vamp
accompaniment for himself on the piano. To Max he submitted
the details of writing down and arranging the melody; that
is to say, setting it down in such form that the composer
himself, very likely, would be unable to read it. To the
outsider, this procedure is one of the odd phenomena of
music publishing, of which, as used to be said, more anon.
At that time the leading music-publishing firm was Witmark's,
Inc., a supremacy to be wrested away later by Harms, Inc.,
under the directing hand of Max Dreyfus. Max, creative
ambition for the moment uppermost, went to Harms with some
compositions. The compositions were put aside, but Max got a
job as pianist and arranger. This was in 1895—the firm of
Harms was then twenty years old. The big librettists and
composers then were Wilson Morse, Cheero Goodman, Gustave
Kerker, Reginald De Koven. The reigning musical hit was a
show called "Wang." The popular favorites of the time were
the so-called "motto songs": "The Picture That Is Turned to
the Wall," "The Letter That Never Came," "A Boy's Best
Friend Is His Mother" (mammy of the mammy songs). Max,
working away at arrangements and pounding out tunes with
such unassailable sentiments, managed to turn in a real hit
himself: a ballad, a song without words, called "Cupid's
Garden."
It is a singular attribute of Max's mind, a certain coolness and
detachment, that made him decide, quite impartially, and
while thousands of amateur and sentimental pianists
throughout the country were disporting themselves in the
melodic alleys of "Cupid's Garden," that he was not a
composer and would never be first-rate at it. Max relates
this conversion quite coolly. I imagine he arrived at this
decision without travail or heartburn, just as one might
discover a mistake in a total at the bottom of a column of
figures and start over again the process addition to correct
the error. Discussing his fondness for a young composer and
pianist who is now one of the "boys" under his protective
aegis, Max admitted to me his predilection for this
irresistible enfant terrible and said with a faint
smile: "I admit it's a weakness and may cause a little bad
blood among the other boys, but why shouldn't I he allowed a
little weakness?" But in his youth, I fancy, Max was
less indulgent with himself. There must have come a moment
of illumination when he decided that his craving to be a
composer was a weakness he could not afford and he exorcised
it with a Biblical ruthlessness. Max ceased being a composer
and became a businessman. Never was frustration so
felicitously capitalized; everything in his experience was
useful to him when it came to recognizing and fostering
other and sharper talents. Max is the only man in the
music-publishing business of whom it may be said that he is
also a musician; it was his early training and ambition
which enabled him to distill a profession from a racket.
Max did everything in his new job—ran errands, sold music,
arranged, played the piano, turned in an occasional hit. Two
years after he arrived in this country, his brother, Louis,
appeared from Kuppenheim and took to trudging around the
Southern states selling picture frames. Louis, who is a
larger, more aggressive and vigorous edition of Max, a Max
without musical or aesthetic taint, took on sheet music as a
sideline at Max's suggestion, and he plugged picture frames
and songs with strict impartiality until 1901, when Max
managed to raise the small sum of money necessary to buy a
twenty-five-per-cent interest in the firm of Harms. At this
point, Louis went one-hundred-per-cent musical. It was also
Louis' entry into a business which was to find him installed
in London twenty-five years later, the owner of Chappell,
Ltd., the oldest music-publishing- house in England.
John Golden, the producer—who, like Jimmie Walker, began his
career as a songwriter—tells how in those days you could go
to Harms and for two dollars get a frail young man who
worked there to make a piano arrangement of a whistled tune
or score it for orchestra. Another young man who walked in
on Max one day with some unpublished songs—Max describes him
as thin and
very good-looking—was greatly impressed by the fact that he
saw a Prince Albert coat hanging in Max's office. Here, the
young visitor thought, was dignity. Here, after the
fly-by-night outfits of Tin Pan Alley, was solidity. As a
matter of fact, Max had hired the coat to wear at a party he
was going to that afternoon as a paid pianist, but this fact
he did not disclose to the hopeful composer. Max heard some
of the young man's songs and was impressed by them, but he
advised him that it was more vital at the moment to sell
songs than to compose them, and he sent him into the Hudson
Valley territory to try his luck with some popular hits that
had just arrived from England: "A Bicycle Built for Two,"
then being sung by Vesta Tilley; "Algy, the Piccadilly
Johnny," and "Waiting at the Church," Vesta Victoria's
standby. The young man, with more tuneful melodies of his
own coursing through his mind, went nevertheless obediently
into the Hudson Valley to dispose of his wares. His name was
Jerome Kern.
The association between Kern and Harms affected Dreyfus' career
profoundly. Kern created a new style in song and
show-writing and his brilliant emergence gave the firm such
distinction that it suddenly became the ambition of every
musical talent above the routine to be associated with it.
Because the career of Kern, besides being the first and most
lustrous of the new school, is also the epitome of those of
the composers—from Gershwin to Youmans—who came after, it is
worth following in some detail. Kern's first opportunity—dug
up for him by Max —was to do some interpolations for Sam
Shubert, the early-deceased and lamented brother canonized
in those enlarged and melancholy photographs which you may
see hanging in any Shubert lobby throughout the country. It
was a period when the old composers were running dry, when
producers cried for the oxygenation of lifeless scores by
fresher talent. Kern got his first chance to do some songs
for Sam Shubert's production of "The Earl and the Girl" and
he made his mark with a song which turned out to be the
sensation of the show: "How Would You Like to Spoon with
Me?" This inquiry was brazenly directed to the gentlemen in
the front rows by the chorus-girls the while they were
sailing out over their heads in swings. The startling
audacity of the staging and the vitality of the number
itself gave Kern an immediate place. He became the late
Charles Frohman's white-haired boy for interpolations. From
his first full score, "Red Petticoat," in 1912, down to "The
Cat and the Fiddle"—considered by many to be his richest
achievement—Jerome Kern has kept up an unflagging career of
high distinction, lifting by himself the plane of
light-music and music-show making generally in this country;
for Kern, aside from his gift as a composer, is one of the
keenest generals of the show fields.
Harry Askin of Chicago, now manager for Sousa, then general manager
for Charles Dillingham's Hippodrome, came to Max about a
show called "Miss 1917" which Dillingham and Ziegfeld were
doing at the Century Theatre. Askin asked Max to have a look
at a kid who was playing the piano for rehearsals. He
summoned George Gershwin, who walked in surrounded by a
horde of acclamatory votaries. Songwriting is no occupation
for the solitary; it thrives on gregariousness. The young
songwriter generally carries his audience with him. The
ideas spring full-born; a brilliant pianist like Gershwin
sits down, plays his tunes, and gets the audience-effect
instantly from his coterie. (This may have a doubtful
result: George Kaufman is said to have remarked bitterly
that the "Of Thee I Sing" music was so well known by the
time of the New York opening that the show might have the
effect of a revival.) Gershwin struck fire immediately and
Max put him on the payroll at thirty-five dollars a
week. The first job Max got for him was as accompanist for
Nora Bayes on a vaudeville tour. Harms has published
everything of Gershwin's since then, including his serious
compositions: the Rhapsody in Blue, which sold seventy-five
thousand copies, and—con amore—the Concerto in F, the
"American in Paris," and the piano preludes. The new Second
Rhapsody is being played here this week by Koussevitzky and
the Boston Symphony Orchestra.
A "nice young boy" sitting around upstairs in Max's office
finally got a chance to play a tune for Max. The tune was
"Who's Who With You?" and the composer Vincent Youmans. He
had been a piano-player teaching songs to vaudeville acts,
but during his association with Harms he developed as one of
the most melodically talented composers in America. The song
"Who's Who With You?" became part of Youman's first full
score, "Two Little Girls in Blue," the lyrics for which were
decanted by Arthur Francis, a pseudonym from beneath which
Ira Gershwin later made a shy appearance. Kalmar and
Ruby were popular songwriters very anxious to do
musical-comedy work. Ruby's melodic gift impressed Max and
he got the team the commission to do the music and lyrics
for "The Ramblers." Rodgers and Hart were introduced to Max
by Larry Schwab of Schwab & Mandel. These boys had done the
brilliant and unforgettable first "Garrick Gaieties" show
while they were still in college. Max confesses that he
didn't "go" for them immediately, but later they became
Harms standbys and recently Max has organized a subsidiary
company to publish their work exclusively. Early in the
game, Max took over Victor Herbert's contract from Witmark
for the "prestige value." Sigmund Romberg, also under
contract to Witmark, came over to Harms because of the
firm's great standing with the musical-comedy producers. But
manifestly Max takes no pride in the acquisition of those
full-fledged, unaided talents compared with the paternalism
he feels for those of the boys whose abilities matured near
him.
Otto Harbach, Oscar Hammerstein 2nd, Cole Porter, "society
composer;" Lew Gensler, Phil Charig are Harms buddies.
Irving Caesar, the vociferous irresistible comic, is one of
the most successful of the lyricists who have worked for
Harms. It was Caesar who wrote the lyrics for "No, No,
Nanette" and the famous "Tea for Two" number. Oscar Levant,
the enfant terrible referred to before, in the
intervals when he is not playing Bach fugues or being witty
in Lindy's, composes sonatinas, hit songs like "Lady Play
Your Mandolin," and musical shows. The most industrious and
promising of the new crop is Arthur Schwartz, who has
emerged recently as the composer of the scores of "Three's a
Crowd" and "The Band Wagon." He edged into the game
in a semi-professional manner by getting in interpolations
where he could and is now a full-fledged composer much in
demand. It is a long roster, from the young Kern to the
young Schwartz, from "The Earl and the Girl" and the
swinging, organdied chorus-girls to "The Band Wagon" with
its brilliant, saturnine orchestration by Russell Bennett
and the mechanistic black-and-white orgy of the Astaires'
startling "White Heat" number.
The mention of Russell Bennett's name brings me to an aspect of
the song-publishing business which, to a complete outsider
like myself, is somewhat piquant. Bennett is generally
recognized by composers and the members of his own craft as
the foremost orchestrator in the country. He is a master, a
"whiz." Owing to the exigencies of time, if for no other
reason, it is impossible for a composer to orchestrate his
own score. Gershwin and Kern both use Bennett; "The Band
Wagon," "The Cat and the Fiddle," and "Of Thee I Sing" are
all orchestrated by him. You have only
to listen to the score of "The Band Wagon" to appreciate
Bennett's virtuosity with the orchestra. And this is what
seems to me so friendly about the business of composing: if
you have some tune jingling in your head, you have only to
go to Harms and, provided you can get by Max's factotum,
secretary, and Minister with All Portfolios, Irene—and by
Max, hum it or play it with one finger to Russell Bennett
and it will presently emerge fully arranged or scored,
suavely and colorfully, for a modern orchestra. It is as if
an aspiring writer who could neither read nor write were to
go into Scribner's, whisper an idea to the editor, and get
it written for him in novel form by John Galsworthy. Mr.
Bennett is a composer in his own right. He was born in
Kansas City, is self-taught, won a Guggenheim Fellowship,
and two of his compositions won prizes of five thousand
dollars each in the recent Victor contest: "Abraham Lincoln"
and a tone-poem, "Sights and Sounds," which is on the
program of the Philadelphia Orchestra. Another Dreyfus
dignitary is Dr. Albert Sirmay, a popular Viennese composer
who is general editor of the Harms publications. The
completeness of the organization, its equipment to transform
into sophisticated musical speech the stammering
inspirations of these random Homers, fill a writer who has
to go through it in longhand with the profoundest envy.
Now Max is merged. Several years ago, when the picture companies
went music-mad, Warner Brothers made Max an offer that ran
into the millions and Max allowed himself to be absorbed
with the understanding that he continue on in an "advisory
capacity." The phrase, so flattering and so ambiguous, took
Max in. He had his new estate in the country, he had the
"boys," to whom his presence at his familiar desk is as
inevitable as the stars in their courses, he had—an anomaly
in a music-publisher—his interest in music. But, he tells
me, these accessory possessions have proved not to be
enough. To advise where you have been accustomed to order,
to confer where you have been accustomed to O.K., to defer
to blunted and alien opinion—these are slings and arrows.
Max confesses that he was shortsighted, that the outside
interests on which he relied to bolster his it leisure are
not enough. There is the farm, there is music; but then,
too, at the core of the business which is his life, there is
that innocuous-seeming but lethal "advisory capacity."
Still, to the casual eye, things at 62 West Forty-fifth
Street are as they were in the days before Max was merged:
he sits at his desk, Oscar comes in to report his latest
"crack," Dr. Sirmay, mystified that Max should allow such
trivialities to intrude into business, waits solemnly and
impatiently with a score.
Thirty-five years of Harms have brought Max a home in Bronxville
with four pianos; a delightful country estate, Madrey, in
Brewster, with hundreds of acres, a private lake, sheep and
swans and a small family cemetery. The place belonged to
Daniel Drew, a mid-nineteenth-century buccaneer, and Daniel
is at his rest here together with his family and a few
contemporaries from Brewster. By town charter, Daniel's
living descendants may visit the cemetery whenever they
like, but they are a dwindling race and the privacy of
Madrey is seldom disturbed. Max took me through and we read
the ancient inscriptions amid the peace of a Sunday
afternoon, a peace unbroken except by conventional
pastoral sounds and the echo of Irving Caesar's voice in the
midst of one of his impersonations: a passionate Italian
saying farewell to his girl on a receding ocean liner, or
the mythical Russian of the old régime,
Sikoloeff,
inviting, in stertorous English, his American hosts, with
whom he has spent a weekend lasting nine years, to come to
his little place in the Crimea: "Two hundred thousand
a-a-c-r-r-e-s!" Here Mrs. Dreyfus and Max entertain the
"boys": Kalmar and Ruby, Jerome Kern, Irving Caesar, the
Gershwins, Russell Bennett, Oscar Levant, Dr. Sirmay. After
dinner in the evening, Max will play a Brahms symphony with
Oscar Levant; their two profiles, under the piano lamp—Max's
austere, marmoreal, like a bust of Scipio; Oscar's sensuous
and insurgent—are like contrasting medals of the old and the
new dispensations. (Mrs. Dreyfus will tell you of weekends
when Victor Herbert used to come to Bronxville and there
would be four pianos going on a Sunday morning.) In The
Playhouse at Brewster, the great, ingeniously transformed
barn where Daniel Drew used to keep his horses, there is
every conceivable kind of game to satisfy the childish
impulses said to be inherent in musicians and, in case of
emergency, two additional pianos. One of them is a
forty-year-old Steinway upright, still in good tune, the
first piano Max owned in this country. It came with the
office equipment when he took over Harms. Through the
multiple activity of the great room, Max moves with a
benignant detachment. Supper is after midnight (the food, as
Oscar Levant would say, is "powerful") and at around two in
the morning, Irving Caesar, the maestro of practical jokes,
will be on the telephone getting out of bed a sleepy
composer who lives in White Plains to give him the friendly,
if apocryphal, information that one of his songs is to be
broadcast from Denver at three in the morning and he can
catch it if he waits up an hour. The hysteria over Irving's
solicitude for the sleepy composer mounts. Max is in a
corner smiling; for this the long years of artistic midwifery, the endless
auditions, the projects, the mergers, the ocean voyages to
catch first nights in Berlin or Vienna or Budapest, the
flops and the successes, the ardors and endurances—for a
Saturday evening in Daniel Drew's old place in Putnam
County, for an hour of Brahms after dinner and a few laughs
amid the company of the "boys." |
