Wisecracks About the News

1911

That New York person who shot himself five times and failed to kill himself will probably die some day of the pip. You never can tell.

A Washington man has started suit for $300,000 for the loss of his wife. All of which leads us to remark that she must have been some wife.

"In the future," says Doctor Wiley, "the air will furnish heat, fuel and power." It might do so right now if some way to extract the coal from it could be found.

That Kansas City man, as we understand the case, did not want a divorce merely because his wife smoked, but on account of what she smoked.

Europe's wine shortage this year is said to be the greatest for a century. Still there will no doubt be enough for us who buy it only for medicinal purposes.

A writer in the New York Medical Journal says whisky is not a cure for snake bite, but kindly refrains from expressing an opinion as to its suitability for fish bait.

Wagner As a Humorist

1903

How the Master Responded to a London Critic's Suggestion

Richard Wagner was not a man to whom one would naturally ascribe the faculty of ready joking. It is not from the creator of the serious, somber "Flying Dutchman" or the composer of the half mystical, half religious, opera "Parsifal" that one would expect cheerful pranks at the expense of other people. Nevertheless an instance is on record of how the great tone painter of Baireuth played a very funny trick on a newspaper and probably a good many of the readers accustomed to relying on what it said. It was in the fifties. Wagner, then still climbing the ladder of fame, was conducting the Philharmonic concerts in the British metropolis for a season.

Being, as he remained to the end, a very ardent admirer of Beethoven and, in fact, knowing that master's nine symphonies by heart, he selected several of them for performance in the said series of concerts. The first time, then, that Wagner conducted a Beethoven symphony in London the public received the rendition kindly enough, but the next morning a certain newspaper with a very large circulation came out with a rather severe criticism. The author of "Lohengrin" was in cold print but in unreserved terms scolded for directing a symphony by the immortal Beethoven without the score in front of him. Such a proceeding, to which London was unaccustomed, was sheer presumption, so ran the criticism, and, after further uncomplimentary remarks, the great and influential journal advised young Heir Wagner to use a score when he conducted a Beethoven symphony again.

Well, soon Herr Wagner did, this time with a book of music before him on the desk. He was seen to turn over the leaves with a certain amount of regularity too. His reward came the next day in the form of a commendatory article in the aforesaid newspaper which praised him for a very much better interpretation of Beethoven than his last, due, of course, to the suggested use of the score, whereupon Wagner announced the fact that the score in front of him the previous evening was that of Rossini's opera, "The Barber of Seville," turned upside down. — Collier's Weekly.