Impressions and comments / Havelock Ellis.

  • Ellis, Havelock, 1859-1939.
Date:
1926
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Credit: Impressions and comments / Havelock Ellis. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    20 IMPRESSIONS AND COMMENTS September 17.—It has often seemed to me that the bearing of musical conductors is significant for the study of national charac¬ teristics, and especially for the difference be¬ tween the English and the Continental neuro- psychic systems. One always feels inhibition and suppression (such as a Freudian has found characteristic of the English) in the movements of the English conductor, some psychic element holding the nervous play in check, and producing a stiff wooden embarrassed rigidity or an ostentatiously languid and careless indifference. At the extreme remove from this is Birnbaum, that gigantic and feverishly active spider, whose bent body seems to crouch over the whole orchestra, his magically elongated arms to stretch out so far that his wand touches the big drum. But even the quietest of these foreign conductors, Nikisch, for example, gives no impression of psychic inhibition, but rather of that refined and dehberate economy of means which marks the accomplished artist. Among English conductors one may regard Wood {lucus a non lucendo !) as an exception. Most of the rest—I speak of those of the old school, since those of the new school can sometimes be volatile and feverish enough—seem to be saying all the time : I am in an awkward