Music in the Morning

Majestic Soprano Nellie Melba was once asked by an eager young man if she would sing at a Manhattan morning musicale. "Sing!" snapped Melba. "I can't even spit at 11 a.m." But sing she did, and a whopping fee she got. That was nearly 50 years ago. After Melba, other great and near-great musicians jostled one another to perform for the dowagers at Albert Morris Bagby's Musical Mornings. Last January, in the Grand Ballroom of the Waldorf-Astoria, the 50th year of "the Bagbys," the 429th concert reached its end. For the first time dapper, ruddy, wax-mustached little Mr. Bagby, 81, was not present: he had the grippe. Later he caught pneumonia. Last week he died. Oscar of the Waldorf, Banker James Speyer, old Mrs. James Roosevelt, many another dowager went to his funeral.

Morris Bagby was one of the last links with Franz Liszt. Musician Bagby never learned from the master how to be a virtuoso pianist, but he played whist with Liszt, and like other pupils reverently snitched the hairs which drifted from Liszt's white mane to the collar of his morning coat. Morris Bagby heard Brahms play the piano, "as though he had ten thumbs." When Pianist Bagby returned to the U. S., he was invited by Julia Ward Howe to read a paper at Newport's Town and Country Club. Mrs. Howe's daughter advised Mr. Bagby to make his paper into a lecture. The Bagby lectures, with piano accompaniment, turned into plushy concerts.

Morris Bagby hired the finest artists but spared his audiences heavyweight music. Lurking behind the curtain, he gauged the applause; a number which did not get a great big hand never reappeared on his programs. After every Musical Morning he gave a lunch for 60 guests, deftly shuffling dowagers, younger women, socially acceptable musicians and the scattering of males who sat through the Bagbys. It all paid out handsomely. Although subscription lists were closed 30 years ago, the concerts attracted as many as 1,800 people at a time. Once a year, $10,000 or so was raised with a concert for the Bagby Music Lovers Foundation, which gave a lift to indigent artists. Among its beneficiaries: Minnie Hauk, the first Carmen in the U. S.; Frau Richard (Cosima Liszt) Wagner, whom Morris Bagby had known in Europe; Baritone Antonio Scotti, onetime bon vivant.

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