‘The Celebrated Chop Waltz’ was composed by sixteen-year-old Euphemia Allen (calling herself Arthur de Lulli) in 1877, only three years before Ethel’s neighbour came to call. Euphemia’s brother, a music publisher, rushed into print and the little waltz became an instant hit with the Victorian public. The original said nothing about chopsticks, but directed that some passages should be played with a chopping motion, using the side of the hand.
WHILE travelling with my mother I had been told about a charming newcomer in our neighbourhood whom she had as yet seen little of, but who was said to be very musical and looking forward to meeting the Leipzig daughter.
Knowing what ‘very musical’ amounts to in England expectation did not run high,* but on the day she had been asked to lunch I sat down at the piano, just for fun, as her dogcart drew up at the door, and began playing ‘Im Freien’, a Schubert song I was wild about just then.
Presently a very nice-looking woman of the smart sporting type was ushered in who cheerfully uttered the words:
“Ah! dear old Chopsticks!”*
A little unfair on the English. Maybe it was her London perspective. “Some day” said Edward Elgar twenty years later, in a letter to Canon Gorton of the Morecambe Music Festival, “the press will awake to the fact, already known abroad and to some few of us in England, that the living centre of music in Great Britain is not London, but somewhere further North.” See ‘Musical Times’, July 1903.
“The drawback of this anecdote” wrote Smyth “is that probably few serious musicians know ‘Chopsticks’, and the sort of people who know ‘Chopsticks’ are still less likely to know ‘Im Freien’.” Smyth therefore provided short excerpts from the sheet music; for recordings of each one, see below.
Précis
Ethel Smyth came home to England from Germany in 1880 with a reputation as a musical prodigy. One lady music enthusiast in the neighbourhood was keen to meet her, and as she rang the doorbell Ethel began playing a Schubert song for her. The lady was most appreciative, but to Ethel’s lasting amusement mistook the song for Chopsticks. (57 / 60 words)
