The composer who later became a vice president showed that amateurs can create great and worthwhile art.
The composer who later became a vice president showed that amateurs can create great and worthwhile art.
I n July 1921, Fritz Kreisler, the most famous violinist in the world, went on tour. For the encore at his concerts, he chose a short waltzlike violin and piano piece titled Melody in A Major, written by a Chicagoan composer whose name had never before appeared in a major concert program: Charles G. Dawes.
Kreisler selected the work without knowing that its composer had the previous week been appointed the country’s first ever director of the Budget Bureau by President Warren G. Harding, or that he would one day become vice president of the United States. As Kreisler later explained:
When I was on tour it was my custom to try out new music, with Mrs. Kreisler playing the accompaniments. This piece came to me in a great bundle sent by a publisher for my consideration. When we tried it out, Mrs. Kreisler exclaimed: “This was a good one.” I was glad to hear her say so as it had also taken my fancy because of its tunefulness and strong musical value. I had no idea the author was a famous man.
For his part, Dawes was equally surprised that his Melody had made it into the master’s hands; nearly as surprised as he’d been a decade earlier to learn that the piece had been published at all. In 1911, Dawes showed the Melody to a well-connected violinist friend named Francis MacMillan, who fell for it — just as Kreisler later would. Dawes gave MacMillan the sheet music, telling him: “I never gave the thing a name. If you want it you can have it.”
Not long after, Dawes remembered: “I was walking down State Street and came to a music shop. I saw a poster size picture of myself, my name plastered all over the window in large letters and the window space entirely filled with the sheet music. . . . No one told me it had been published.”
Dawes and Kreisler both might have been further surprised three decades later, when the New York songwriter Carl Sigman gave Dawes’s Melody lyrics, turning it into the midcentury crooner sensation “It’s All in the Game.” This made Dawes the first of two people both to win a Nobel Prize (in 1924 for his “Dawes Plan,” which aimed to restructure Germany’s war reparations debts) and compose a major pop hit. The second was Bob Dylan.
What about Dawes’s Melody so captured Kreisler and Sigman’s attention? Giving it a listen today, it’s easy to see the appeal. From its gently undulating opening bars, the piece evokes the charming self-absorption of a young man out for a stroll on a hot summer’s day. Like an Amory Blaine soliloquy in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise, the Melody fuses youthful optimism with a certain nostalgic melancholy. Each phrase of its main theme encapsulates both these moods, starting with a capricious, energetic little turn and ending with a gentle sigh.
The Melody’s simple emotionalism places it in a genre of classical composition that has sadly ebbed in popularity over the century since: the so-called “light classics.” Its violin-and-piano brethren include such fading gems as Edward Elgar’s Salut d’Amour and Kreisler’s own Liebesfreud and Liebesleid.
I first learned of Dawes’s contribution to that genre from the administrator of the Calvin Coolidge State Historic Site, herself a violinist in her off hours. When I heard the piece and learned its history, I was struck not only by its beauty but by two lessons it might teach artists and art appreciators today.
The first lesson is one we might learn from Kreisler. In 1921, he was one of the most beloved artists in the world. He was under no obligation to open boxes of unknown music sent by publishers and try them out. And yet, he was too curious not to, beset by the nagging suspicion that there might be something worthwhile in there he would never otherwise hear. As a classical musician myself, I regret that too few of my present-day colleagues leave room for the sort of serendipity Kreisler experienced by opening that box. If only all performers, in all art forms, would follow his lead.
The second lesson we might learn from Dawes: that amateurism (literally, doing things purely out of love rather than for monetary reward or public acclaim) not only enriches the self, but makes a significant contribution to public art and culture. A true hobbyist, Dawes was pleasantly surprised by the acclaim his Melody attracted, though he never sought out popular recognition. The music was worth it for its own sake.
It was also good for a one-liner. As Dawes told his biographer:
My business is that of a banker and few bankers have won renown as composers of music. I know that I will be the target of my punster friends. They will say that if all the notes in my bank are as bad as my musical ones, they are not worth the paper they were printed on.
Dawes’s contemporary Charles Ives — the insurance executive whose compositions set American musical modernism in motion — would have gotten a good chuckle out of that one.