Mrs. Highbrow Speaks of Wolffang Armageddon Mozart

1912

MRS. HIGHBROW SPEAKS OUT

Her Little Dissertation on Music Something to Be Read and Enjoyed

"Yes, yes, indeed! I simply adore music!" Mrs. Wood B. Highbrow clasped her hands with enthusiasm. "You know my beloved Shakespeare says 'If music be the food of love, play on' — he doesn't say on what, but I'm sure he meant the piano — and he adds, 'The man that hath no music in himself or is not moved by conflict of sweet sounds, is fit for trees and stratagems, he spoils!' How true it is; and the same might be said of a woman.

"Oh, yes, Gwendolyn is very musical. She studies at the conservatory — there is such an air of culture about such an institution, you know. Wood wanted her to take lessons at home until she is older, and offered to move the piano into our own conservatory, as we have to keep it heated, anyway, for the plants.

"Poor Wood! he is so practical — a regular pomme-de-terre! He thinks that, what With pianolas and victrolas and violas, there is so much music turned out by machinery nowadays that it hardly pays to do it by hand, anyway. Perhaps he is not altogether wrong — unless one has talent, and Gwendolyn certainly has!

"You should hear her play Ruben's 'Melody in F!' Then she can rattle off any cantata that John Sebastian Cabot ever wrote — or was it Wolffang Armageddon Mozart? I declare, I always get those antique composers mixed. Well, at any rate, it was the wonderful organist who, if he couldn't reach all the notes he wanted with his fingers, used his nose to help out.

"Yes, yes, indeed! Gwendolyn is so talented that her teacher says when she grows up she is sure to be a dilettante!"

—The Daily Commonwealth, Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, December 18, 1912, page 2.