Friendly Split

As difficult to dissociate as Rosencrantz & Guildenstern, liver & bacon or the Cherry Sisters are Pianists Guy Maier and Lee Pattison. For twelve years Pianists Maier & Pattison have given two-piano recitals the length and breadth of the U. S.. in Europe, Australia, New Zealand. Their success has inspired other two-piano teams. Two-piano literature has increased because of them: Composers Leo Sowerby, John Alden Carpenter, Edward Burlingame Hill and Leopold Godowsky have written music for them. But the two-piano repertory is limited at best and because they feel that they have pretty well exhausted it, because they are determined not to get stale, they are disbanding after this season. Last week, after farewell concerts throughout the Midwest and on the Pacific Coast, Maier & Pattison gave a last request program in Manhattan, took to the road for the last time together.*

Maier & Pattison audiences often express wonderment that two musicians with such contrasting methods can get effects so marvelously unified that it is often hard to tell which one is carrying the melody. Both excellent musicians, Pianist Maier is the better showman. He is more given to swaying over the keyboard, to making his crescendoes look mighty as well as sounding so. He is not above making occasional impromptu speeches or working for a laugh as he did last week with the titivating run in Arensky's Scherzo. Pianist Pattison's contribution is just as important but he makes it more quietly, focuses more on his piano.

In personality, background and ambition the teammates are as different as they appear on the platform. Pianist Maier, volatile, talkative, fairly bursting with energy, comes from Buffalo, the son of a retail shoe dealer. As a boy he had a burning desire to be a Presbyterian minister. He went to the New England Conservatory of Music instead, there met Lee Pattison of Eagle Grove, Iowa, who had always quietly intended being a musician. In Boston the friends gave their first two-piano recitals, then in 1914 went to Berlin to study with Arthur Schnabel, famed Brahms expert who came to the U. S. last year especially to participate in the Boston Symphony's Brahms Festival (TIME, March 31). When the U. S. entered the War, Pianist Pattison joined the infantry, Pianist Maier the entertainment service of the Y. M. C. A. They often played together for the soldiers in France and even the unmusical ones liked them because with their combined instruments they could make almost as much noise as a brass band. After the Armistice they gave a recital in Paris attended by Woodrow Wilson and Clemenceau.

For twelve years Guy Maier & Lee Pattison have held the title of world's best two-piano team (a few jazzists would wish to except Phil Ohman & Victor Arden) but they have kept their lives separate. They do most of their practicing apart, often stay at different hotels. If they should happen to eat together while traveling, Pianist Pattison would probably order oysters, Pianist Maier soup.

The last few summers Pianist Pattison has spent in composition at Warm Springs, Ga., with his English wife and their two little girls. Composition and chamber music with the Gordon String Quartet figure in his plans for the future. Pianist Maier has for several years been head of the piano department at the University of Michigan in which his wife has also taught. Much of Pianist Maier's time hereafter will be taken by Concerts for Young People, partially inspired by his young sons Ted and Bob with whom he has written a songbook soon to be published. Pianist Maier thinks that children who are studying piano should play for two years by ear before they even look at notes.

Glory's End

At the end of a career full of glory and adulation Death came last week to Dame Nellie Melba, 64, in Sydney, Australia. Her fate was a hideous, unnamed disease. In Cairo, some time ago, she contracted what was presumably some form of Leishmaniasis, a disease characterized by many boils and caused by a microscopic animal parasite which gets into the blood stream supposedly by bedbug or louse bite. She appeared to be cured in the Autumn before leaving England for Australia. On shipboard she suffered a relapse, was carried ashore to Melbourne on a cot. A German doctor who had helped her in the early stages of the disease directed treatment by cable. Three times King George and Queen Mary sent cheerful messages. But last week, when delirium set in, friends abandoned hope.

People everywhere have heard Nellie Melba sing "Home Sweet Home," "Comin' Thro' the Rye," Tosti's "Goodbye." Opera crowds have seen her as Mimi in La Boheme, Violetta in La Traviata, Marguerite in Faust, Gilda in Rigoletto, Lucia, Juliette. The pure and springlike quality of her voice established her as Patti's greatest successor. It lasted her well through middle age because she used it so intelligently, won her triumphs for 40 years. Melba's life was as glamorous as the prima donna of fiction. She made her American debut at the Metropolitan in 1893 five days after famed Emma Calve made hers. Her friends included Gounod, with whom she studied Marguerite, Verdi when he was old and gnarled, Sarah Bernhardt who gave her points in acting and taught her makeup, Oscar Wilde who after his disgrace begged money of her on a Paris street. She sang duets with King Oscar II of Sweden. She was made Dame Commander, Order of the British Empire, in consideration of -L-100,000 earned by concerts during the War and given to the Red Cross. At her operatic farewell in Covent Garden in 1926, attended by all the Royal retinue, she received a floral kangaroo.

The kangaroo was scarcely more Australian than Melba herself. In Australia she grew up as Nellie Porter Mitchell, daughter of a rigid Scottish contractor who thwarted all her early efforts to make music a profession. He relented after her unfortunate marriage to Charles Nesbitt Armstrong, manager of a sugar plantation in the Queensland Bush, whom she left two months after the birth of her son George. She left her son, too, although she continued to provide for him. When he was 23 their reconciliation took place in Kansas City, and in recent years she had displayed great pride in grandmothering his daughter Pamela. The patriotic instinct which prompted the choice of Melba, short for Melbourne, for a stage-name persisted all her life. She often harked, back to Australian scenes and sounds, the sudden rise of storms, the bright flash of parrots' wings, the cry of magpies at dawn. Friends say that she knew she was incurably sick this autumn, wanted to get home.

*Before disbanding Pianists Maier & Pattison will play in Chicago, Minneapolis, La Crosse, Wise., Rochester, Minn., St. Paul, Muskegon, Portsmouth, Ohio, Cleveland, Lawrence, Neb., Sioux Falls, S. Dak. La Porte, Ind.

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