Saturday, May 10, 2014

In Germany in 1908, music, and a secret romance?

         For the remainder of her time in Berlin Ima continued to work hard at her music and her German. She wrote in her diary: “I certainly am going to see if I can’t get something into my head.”  
        
         She went to operas and concerts, and she made notes about what she saw. After a performance of Die Valkyrie, she confided to her diary that “The stage management for the Wagnerian opera is really dreadful.
         In February she wrote on a concert program that Siegfried Wagner was a “puny imitation of his father.”
         In March she wrote that Felix Moetl and the Berlin Philharmonic performed the “most inspiring interpretation of Eroica Symphony I have yet heard.” [How many had she heard?]
        
         What else did Ima do during that spring and summer in Germany?         
         Her diary does not say. Did she have a romance? Did she travel? On April 13,1908, her brother Tom wrote to her, begging her to tell him the “secret” had promised to tell him “one of these days.”
         What secret?

         If Ima did tell it to her brother, the letter has not been found.

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