Inferior

Women have yet to equal men as masters of the fine arts. They have aspired to them, plodded away at them, had very creditable results in occasional instances. They have produced a painter like Mary Cassatt, but Painter Cassatt specialized in women & children, in subjects bound to be peculiarly within a woman's scope: like Rosa Bonheur, whose specialty was domestic animals. There are no women's names to be ranked with Velasquez, Franz Hals, Romney, Holbein. True, in literature they have done more with such handmaidens as George Eliot, Jane Austin, Charlotte Bronte, to put against Shakespeare, Dante, Goethe. But in music the situation is back again on a par with painting. Women have given birth to no great music. There have been no Beethovens among them, no Bachs, no Wagners. There have been no conductors of importance, no Toscaninis, no Stokowskis, no Mucks. Olga Samaroff, Guiomar Novaees, Gitta Gradova, Myra Hess, Yolanda Merp are capable pianists, but then so is Ignace Jan Paderewski. The list might go on.

All this, by some consciously & by others unconsciously, was taken into consideration last week when Conductor Ethel Leginska put the Boston Women's Symphony Orchestra through the paces of its first concert. She played Weber's Oberon overture, Frederick Delius's C Minor Concerto, Beethoven's Fifth Symphony and Tschaikovsky's Nutcracker Suite. The overture and the Tschaikovsky fragments were best: the concerto with Pianist Reginald Boardman for soloist was soso; but the splendor of the Beethoven was lost. It had slipped away between individual passages and spread into nothingness. The audience, however, was kind. Loudly it clapped the virtuosity of the 70 trim players, emphatically it approved the gesticulations of Conductor Leginska, gave the verdict common to enterprises of the gentler sex: That (for women) they had done very well.