Music and manners; personal reminiscences and sketches of character

urn:iso:std:iso:639:ed-3:eng

279-280

text excerpt

In the matter of open-air music, we Englishmen are heavily handicapped by our perfidious and malignant climate... In other lands, as northern as our own, where the seasons display a certain sense of order and decorum, proprietors of public gardens are enabled, year after year, when the buds begin to crack their cases and the birds have done their courting, to advertise al fresco instrumental performances at stated intervals throughout the warm months — say, from May 1 to September 30 — with a tolerable certainty that they will not be prevented from fulfilling their pledges to their patrons by any untimely marvel in the nature of a transposition of the seasons. In the famous Volksgarten, at Vienna, Edward Strauss's inimitable stringed orchestra, or some scarcely less renowned military band, such as that of the Koenig von Wuertemberg regiment — equally efficient with strings or brass and wood — plays every evening in the open during the summer, except when a thunderstorm drives musicians and audience alike for shelter into a straggling wood and glass shanty which stands hard by for their accommodation. There are bands on Sundays and holidays — that is, about four times a week throughout the pleasant time of the year — at the three Kaffeehaeuser, or chief refreshment-stations of the Prater, at the Neue Welt in Hietzing, and at cognate establishments in the other great suburbs : good military bands, if you please, not scratch orchestras like those to which one listens with dismay in English watering-places and the minor German Bad-Orte.

excerpt from 'Music and manners; personal reminiscences and sketches of character' pp. 279-280 (254 words)

1451911361949:

1451911361949