Chopsticks
Ethel Smyth puts on a show for a self-declared music enthusiast.
1880
Introduction
Ethel Smyth (to rhyme with ‘blithe’) came home to England in 1880 after winning many friends among the musical celebrities of Leipzig, and found that she had become something of a celebrity herself. It took a visit from a neighbour to remind her that whether you are a Smyth or a Schubert, ‘celebrity’ is a relative term.
abridged
WHILE travelling with my mother I had been told about a charming newcomer in our neighbourhood whom she had as yet seen little of, but who was said to be very musical and looking forward to meeting the Leipzig daughter.
Knowing what ‘very musical’ amounts to in England expectation did not run high,* but on the day she had been asked to lunch I sat down at the piano, just for fun, as her dogcart drew up at the door, and began playing ‘Im Freien’, a Schubert song I was wild about just then.
Presently a very nice-looking woman of the smart sporting type was ushered in who cheerfully uttered the words:
“Ah! dear old Chopsticks!”*
abridged
From ‘Impressions that Remained’, by Ethel Smyth (1858-1944).
A little unfair on the English. Maybe it was her London perspective. “Some day” said Edward Elgar twenty years later, in a letter to Canon Gorton of the Morecambe Music Festival, “the press will awake to the fact, already known abroad and to some few of us in England, that the living centre of music in Great Britain is not London, but somewhere further North.” See ‘Musical Times’, July 1903.
“The drawback of this anecdote” wrote Smyth “is that probably few serious musicians know ‘Chopsticks’, and the sort of people who know ‘Chopsticks’ are still less likely to know ‘Im Freien’.” Smyth therefore provided short excerpts from the sheet music; for recordings of each one, see below.
Related Video
Euphemia Allen’s little waltz, composed in
1877 when she was sixteen, did not mention chopsticks, only a chopping
motion for certain passages, playing with the side of the hand, but as
Smyth’s story shows the ‘chopsticks’ soubriquet stuck early on. It
is played here by Stephanie McCallum and Kevin Hunt.
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Smyth gave a short snapshot of the sheet music for both ‘Im Freien’ and ‘Chopsticks’ to underline that the confusion was understandable – one might add, especially in someone who is getting down from a dogcart and can hear only a few notes from a piano, wafting out through an open front door. In the video below, Franz Schubert’s famous Lied is performed by baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau and pianist Gerald Moore.
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