Arts and Letters

In William J. Henderson, America lost one of its foremost writers on music, and I lost in him a dear friend who, however, never allowed friendship to interfere with his criticism of my public work.

To give proper expression and estimate of the life work of such a man would need a skilled literary pen, and with the exception of my appreciation of him from the standpoint of a musician and friend, I feel that I cannot adequately do justice to him.

He entered the world in 1855 and left it at the age of eighty-two and therefore was able to give us a long life of noble endeavors in his profession. The gods were kind to him at his birth and endowed him with many and diversified talents, all of which he developed so assiduously that he became expert in all of them. But early in his career music occupied most of his interest and activities.

His father was a theatrical manager in New Jersey and that gave him easily and naturally a practical knowledge of the stage and of the art of acting. It was the first representation here of some of the Gilbert and Sullivan operas that awakened in him an interest in the right combination of words and music—a combination so perfect that even today these masterpieces can be studied profitably by librettists and composers.

Journalism must have attracted him very early as a field in which he could develop his talents, for as soon as he was graduated from Princeton at the age of twenty-one, he worked as a typical cub reporter, first for the Tribune and then for the Times, writing up general news in excellent fashion. As yachting and the study of seamanship had been among his recreations during his student years, he was assigned to all manner of naval happenings besides the usual murders, burglaries, and general catastrophes of the night life of New York. Also such incidental musical events as could not be covered by the one musical critic whom the papers of that day employed but grudgingly on a subject which they did not then deem of great interest to their readers.

It was not until 1883 when the Metropolitan Opera House began its first season under Abby, Schauffel, and Grau, while at the same time its older rival, the Academy of Music, was still giving music under Colonel Mapleson, that two musical critics were appointed by the Times. One of these was Henderson, and it was this opportunity which gave him the chance to develop what proved, after all, to be the greatest of his talents and predilections.

Two years later, when he was covering the cruise of the New York Yacht Club at Marblehead, the Times appointed him principal musical editor, and from then on began his career in that field, which in importance and high quality, musicianship, literary skill, and fairness, is perhaps unequalled in the annals of our city.

He joined the Sun in 1902 and from then until the day of his death June 5, 1937, he worked daily, unceasingly, and with an incredible freshness and impartiality at this task.

You, my colleagues of the Academy, can hardly realize what that meant. Whether it was an opera performance at the Metropolitan, a symphony concert at Carnegie Hall, the first appearance of a young aspiring instrumentalist or vocalist—in all this flood of music, which begins in October and ends only in April, Henderson was always at his post. And whether his comment consisted of a short paragraph or of a lengthy dissertation, it always expressed the gist of the musical events with the clarity of a Dr. Johnson and with the background of an extraordinary knowledge of musical history and musical forms.

It is natural that I as a musician should be most interested in the great work which he accomplished as a writer on music, both as musicologist and as chronicler and critic of the daily musical events of a crowded New York season.

I am totally incompetent to weigh his accomplishments as a writer on naval matters. I cannot sail a boat and cannot even differentiate between the larboard and starboard of a ship. But those who know tell me that he was an expert on yachting and navigation and that one of his books on this subject was extensively used in the naval training classes as a text-book during the Great War.

His many works on music are important. His book The Art of the Singer proves him to have delved deeply into the history of this important part of music and its great exponents of the past. It is of inestimable value to the vocal student and artist of today. I believe that not only every singer, but every serious musician can learn much from a careful study of Henderson's research and knowledge of this branch of music.

That he was constantly expanding his horizon is proven by many other of his own publications on The Story of the Orchestra, Richard Wagner, and so forth and so on.

His fine literary training combined with complete understanding of the combination of words with music, made him for me an invaluable collaborator in my composition of an opera on Rostand's Cyrano de Bergerac. He knew how to retain all the wit, the pathos, the local atmosphere of this great French dramatic poem that were suitable for a musical version, and I count my association with him during the long period which it takes to write an opera, as among the happiest of my life.

But notwithstanding his many and diverse talents, his many books and lectures, his greatest influence on the musical public of New York was undoubtedly his daily chronicling and criticisms of musical performances on the concert and opera stage. In these the idealist as well as the practical realist, the critic as well as the teacher, the great lover of music as well as the cynic in regard to some of the abortions or imperfections of its exponents, expressed themselves in impeccable English, in absolute clarity and without any personal bias whatsoever. A perusal of these articles from the daily files of the Times and the Sun will give the reader a perfect picture of the musical life of New York, from almost its first beginnings, its gradual development up to its stupendous activity of today.

We who knew him well will always miss the personal contact with him, his wit, his devotion, and the clarity of his mind, but his noble efforts in connection with the art of music in our country will make themselves felt for many years to come.