MAUD POWELL - A Pioneer's Legacy by Karen
A. Shaffer
The art of violin playing
was about to be revolutionized when Maud Powell
stepped into the Victor recording studio for
the first time in 1904. The unparalleled standard
for violin performance that Powell engraved
on the spinning wax ushered in the modern
age of violin playing and marked the historic
marriage of recording technology to the highest
achievement in violin playing.
The Victor Company's choice
of Maud Powell to be the first solo instrumentalist
to record for its newly inaugurated celebrity
artist series (Red Seal label) was no surprise.
Maud Powell was internationally recognized
as America's greatest violinist who easily
ranked among the supreme violinists of the
time -- Joseph Joachim, Eugene Ysaye, and
later, Fritz Kreisler. A popular favorite
as well, she won the affection of the American
public with her unabashed enthusiasm for the
violin.
In November 1904, Maud Powell
was ushered into a small, acoustically "dead"
room and strategically placed before a large
funnel that appeared like the gaping mouth
of a dragon. The nearer one could stand to
this mechanical monster, the better the recording.
The music's vibrations agitated a needle in
an adjoining room that scratched impressions
of sound waves on the soft, spinning wax from
which a record could then be molded.
"I am never as frightened
as I am when I stand in front of that horn
to play," Maud Powell once explained. "There's
a ghastly feeling that you're playing for
all the world and an awful sense that what
is done is done."
Acoustic recording was a
wholly mechanical process; electrical recording
(with microphone) began in 1925, five years
after Powell's death. Yet allied with the
impeccable art of Maud Powell, the primitive
technology revolutionized the way we hear
music.
At a time when music was
heard live or not at all, the pioneering Powell
welcomed the new technology, knowing that
classical music would become popular as it
became more familiar through repeated hearings.
By January 8, 1917, Powell could give a recital
in Carnegie Hall based solely on her recorded
repertoire, dramatically demonstrating how
her alliance with the talking machine had
transformed musical taste.
Maud Powell was born on August
22, 1867, in Peru, Illinois, on the western
frontier in the American heartland. A pioneer
by inheritance, she was endowed with the same
extraordinary passion, integrity and vision
that characterized her missionary grandparents
and unconventional parents. Her grandparents
had been Methodist missionaries in Ohio, Wisconsin,
and Illinois before the Civil War. Her father
William Bramwell Powell was an innovative
educator; superintendent of the public schools
in Peru, then Aurora, IL, and finally Washington,
D.C. Her mother Minnie Paul Powell was a pianist
and composer whose gender precluded a career.
Minnie and Bramwell's sisters were active
in the woman's suffrage movement. Maud's uncle
John Wesley Powell, Civil War hero and explorer
of the Grand Canyon, organized the scientific
study of the western lands and the native
Indians as the powerful director of the U.S.
Geological Survey and Bureau of Ethnology
and founder of the National Geographic Society.
A prodigy, Powell began violin
and piano study in Aurora, Illinois, then
studied violin four years with William Lewis
in Chicago, to whom she "owed the most." She
completed her training with Europe's greatest
masters -- Henry Schradieck in Leipzig, Charles
Dancla in Paris, and Joseph Joachim in Berlin.
Returning to the United States
knowing that "girl violinists were looked
upon with suspicion," Powell boldly walked
into a rehearsal of the all-male New York
Philharmonic in Steinway Hall and demanded
a hearing from Theodore Thomas, then America's
foremost conductor. Deeply impressed, Thomas
acknowledged his "musical grandchild" and
hired her on the spot to perform the Bruch
G minor violin concerto with the New York
Philharmonic on November 14, 1885. New York
critic Henry E. Krehbiel acclaimed the 18-year-old's
debut performance: "She is a marvellously
gifted woman, one who in every feature of
her playing discloses the instincts and gifts
of a born artist."
At that time, American appreciation
for her art was in its infancy with only five
professional orchestras, no established concert
circuits, and few professional managers. Solo
engagements were difficult to obtain; doubly
difficult for a female artist and an American
since all orchestra players and conductors
were male and generally German.
Yet she refused to be lured
into a comfortable career in Europe. Her pioneering
spirit preferred to face the challenges of
the raw, uncultured American continent. From
1885 forward, Theodore Thomas's "musical grandchild"
made it her mission to cultivate a higher
and more widespread appreciation for her art
by bringing the best in classical music to
Americans in remote areas as well as the large
cultural centers. As one of the most capable
and thoroughly artistic violin players of
her time, with a nature richly endowed with
genius, character, and spirit, Maud Powell
was ideally suited to her mission.
The young violinist pioneered
the violin recital as she blazed new concert
circuits throughout the country, even braving
the primitive touring conditions in the Far
West to reach people who had never heard a
concert before. The direct communicative force
of Powell's playing, evident in her recordings,
stemmed partly from her experience of taking
music to people on and off the beaten track.
Facing unsophisticated audiences, she began
with her uncle John Wesley Powell's premise
that "no one can love a symphony who does
not first love song." She explained: "I do
not play to them as an artist to the public,
but as one human being to another." Carefully
programming simple melodies with complex sonatas
and concertos, she built a bridge of understanding
between song and symphony.
Never "playing down" to an
audience, she performed concertos and sonatas
in recital and complex chamber music with
her trio (1908-09) and quartet (1894-98).
With her innovative recital programming, her
own program notes and music journal articles,
she steadily elevated her audiences' appreciation
for music.
Theodore Thomas chose Maud
Powell to represent America's achievement
in violin performance at the 1893 World's
Columbian Exposition in Chicago -- the
only woman violin soloist. During the 1893
Exposition, Powell presented a paper to the
Women's Musical Congress, "Women and the Violin,"
in which she encouraged young women to take
up the violin seriously. At a time when women
could not vote and were precluded from playing
in professional orchestras, she argued that
there was no reason why a woman should not
play the violin with the best of the men.
Powell herself had proved
to the world that a woman could play the violin
as well as a man, fulfilling the shared hopes
of her mother and woman suffrage leaders Susan
B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. As
a soloist and one of the first women to lead
her own professional string quartet, her example
inspired young girls to take up the violin
and women to form music clubs and orchestras
throughout the land.
America's acknowledged "educator
of a nation" played special programs for children
and advised young musicians aspiring to a
career, including the violinist Louis Kaufman
and Juilliard violin teacher Christine Dethier.
She performed for the benefit of hospitals
and schools and for the soldiers during World
War I.
Powell became one of America's
most revered and beloved musicians while her
1907 recording of Drdla's Souvenir
became the most popular violin record of its
day.
Maud Powell toured Europe,
North America and South Africa to wide acclaim,
appearing with the great orchestras of her
time under such conductors as Mahler, Nikisch,
Thomas, Safonov, Damrosch, Seidl, Richter,
Wood, Herbert and Stokowski.
She dared to play the most
demanding music and to uphold her art before
dubious conductors and critics as well as
skeptical managers and audiences. Perhaps
Powell's greatest artistic triumph was her
American premiere (November 30, 1906) of the
Sibelius Violin Concerto, which she glowingly
described as "a gigantic rugged thing, an
epic really....It is on new lines and has
a new technique. O, it is wonderful." In his
review, New York critic W.J. Henderson asked:
"...why did she put all that magnificent art
into this sour and crabbed concerto?" Yet
in the late twentieth century, the Sibelius
Violin Concerto is one of the most recorded
of all violin concertos. It was Maud Powell
who played it into this honored position in
the violin repertoire.
Powell
introduced fourteen violin concertos to the
American public -- by Tchaikovsky, Dvořák,
Saint-Saëns, Lalo, Sibelius, Coleridge-Taylor,
Arensky, Aulin, Huss, Shelley, Conus, Bruch
and Rimsky-Korsakov. She also revived neglected
works of the 18th century, including Mozart's
Sinfonia Concertante for violin and
viola, and even edited a Locatelli violin
sonata for publication.
The native American boldly
championed works by American composers Amy
Beach, Marion Bauer, Victor Herbert, Cecil
Burleigh, Edwin Grasse, John Alden Carpenter,
Henry Holden Huss, Henry Rowe Shelley, Arthur
Foote, Charles Wakefield Cadman, Grace White.
Composer-pianist Amy Beach dedicated her Romance
for Violin and Piano, Op. 23, to Powell
which they premiered together at the 1893
Women's Musical Congress. Powell even transcribed
music for violin and piano and composed her
own cadenza for the Brahms Violin Concerto.
Powell's art -- a synthesis
of the major European schools transfused with
the American spirit -- set an enduring standard
for virtuosity and musicianship. With an immense
repertoire, she was one of the first to play
works from Corelli to Sibelius with masterly
breadth of style, absolute technical command
and deep interpretative insight. With her
American premieres of the Tchaikovsky, Dvorák
and Sibelius violin concertos, she advanced
violin technique into the modern age.
Powell's records are a fitting
testimony to one whose dedication to the violin,
music and humanity inspired generations of
Americans to cultivate music on their own.
Despite their primitive sound, we can still
be thrilled by the dash and style of her playing
and moved by the power and conviction with
which she conveyed her musical message. This
rich recorded legacy confirms why the name
of Maud Powell stood alongside those of Caruso,
Melba, Kreisler and Paderewski as one of the
"Victor Immortals."
Ironically, Maud Powell's
life of achievement ended the same year that
the 19th Amendment granting national suffrage
to women was ratified. Upon her death on January
8, 1920, the New York Symphony paid tribute
to this "supreme and unforgettable artist":
"She was not only America's great master of
the violin, but a woman of lofty purpose and
noble achievement, whose life and art brought
to countless thousands inspiration for the
good and the beautiful."
© Karen A. Shaffer
Karen A. Shaffer, Maud Powell's
biographer and president of The Maud Powell
Society for Music and Education based in Arlington,
Virginia. E-mail: kshaffer@erols.com
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