Silenced Oracles

In Rome last week grey Richard Aldrich, 73, died of a brain hemorrhage. To hard-bitten compositors on the New York Times his death meant no more scroogy handwriting to labor over reverently. It also meant the passing of an institution. Richard Aldrich was one of the two deans of musical criticism in the U. S. The other dean, Critic William James Henderson, 81, of the New York Sun, wrote a fine tribute to the man who had been for 40 years his friend.

Three days later in his west side Manhattan hotel, weak from influenza and nervous collapse, aged Critic Henderson stopped writing an essay on Pianist Josef Hofmann, placed a .38 revolver in his mouth and with one bullet completed the ending of an epoch in U. S. letters.

Henderson and Aldrich were the last survivors of a critical age rich and already remote. They moved freely and importantly in the world of Henry Edward Krehbiel. Philip Hale, James Gibbons Huneker, Henry Theophilus Finck. Patti was more than a name to them, and Sembrich a vivid, unforgettable presence. Each had worked tirelessly to establish Brahms in the U. S. Each had seen Debussy's worth when inferiors were yelping about his "decadence" and "lack of form." The great fight over Wagner was no legend to them: they had helped win it.

Henderson came by his music naturally. His father was a theatrical producer who put on U. S. premieres of Gilbert & Sullivan at the old Fifth Avenue Theatre. Ettie Henderson, his mother, was an ac tress, playwright and musician. She taught her son to sing and play when he was only seven.

Henderson kept up with his music at Princeton, whence he was graduated in 1876, three years before Woodrow Wilson. He served his apprenticeship on the New York Tribune, worked for brief spells on the Morning Journal (now the New York American), Financial & Mining News, as business manager of the Standard Theatre. In 1883 Henderson joined the staff of the New York Times, and four years later he was made its music critic. But editors did not forget Billy Henderson's fine news stories on the death of William Henry Vanderbilt and the blowing up of Flood Rock. When, in 1889, the great flood destroyed Johnstown, Pa., the Times sent him to get the story.

From 1902 until his death Henderson wrote on music for the Sun. He always insisted that he was simply "a reporter with a specialty--music." Singers thought enough of his specialty to ask him about their placement, production, control.

As a critic Henderson never minced matters. He called Marion Talley "A Chamber of Commerce soprano with a phonograph voice." He wrote of a soprano singing Iphigenie en Aulide that "she seemed a fit subject for the sacrifice." Because the Metropolitan put on too many Fausts in the 18905 he called it "Das Faustspielhaus."

People who learned to respect Henderson's taste and judgment often forgot that he was as much at home in navigation as in music. For years the U. S. Navy used his Elements of Navigation, written in 1895. He wrote three children's books: Sea Yarns for Boys, Afloat with the Flag, and The Last Cruise of the Mohawk. When the Spanish-American War broke out, Henderson commanded the first detachment of naval militia to enter Federal service since the Civil War.

Henderson was a great yachtsman and golfer, at Princeton a good ballplayer. Therein he differed from Aldrich, a son of Harvard, almost as sharply as in his prose. Aldrich cared little for sport aside from horses. He liked tweeds, quiet, his 400-acre estate near Barrytown, N. Y. His articles were always calm, stately, exact.

Aldrich studied his music at Harvard and later in Germany. In 1885 he went back to Providence, his birthplace, and wrote editorials and reviews for its Journal. For two years he was secretary to Senator Dixon of Rhode Island. For eleven more he was the New York Tribune's assistant music critic, working with Krehbiel. When Henderson left the Times in 1902 he proposed Aldrich as his successor. Until 1924, when failing health made Aldrich write more sparingly, his articles, as oracular as Henderson's, proved the wisdom of the choice.

Aldrich was a stutterer. As if by compensation he wrote rapidly, seldom revised. On his 70th birthday, the late Adolph Ochs, publisher of the Times, wrote to him: "You did your work with rare intelligence and conscientiousness. Your labors as a critic constituted a public service. . . . You held high the best traditions of journalism and of the New York Times . . . helped much to make the Times a powerful force. . . ."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.