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Edward Joseph Collins: An American Composer
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BY ERIK ERIKSSON
“My father was a composer and concert
pianist and required a piano in the cottage for his work. Martha
Farr, Dr. Welcker’s niece who managed the hotel after his
death, was very accommodating. She provided my father with an
upright piano placed in a large clothes closet with two windows.
One faced an apple orchard and the other the Friedmann garage.
There was just room for a small writing table. He loved this little
nook, drawing inspiration from the view of the orchard.”
“My parents loved Fish Creek. My father
would say when it applied, ‘What a perfect Fish Creek day!’
This meant a cool day, blue sky, a Northwest breeze and white
caps on Green Bay. On such a day they enjoyed walking down Cottage
Row [a row of large, elegant waterfront vacation homes on a sequestered
road running south from Fish Creek] to the stairs of the cliff
walk and returned to town ending up behind Thorp’s tennis
court. Another memorable ritual was the evening walk to Sunset
Beach.”
This vignette of life in Fish Creek notes
that following breakfast each day, she and her sister Dorothy
would be taken by their mother on a ride in order that her father
could spend the morning hours composing.
She recalled that the entire family, “loved
the movies after dinner at the Fish Creek Town Hall. One night
there was a long delay in the projection booth and the crowd became
very impatient. Dad went to the little piano in the front and
played ‘Stars and Stripes Forever.’ He brought down
the house. The people were mesmerized.”
“Every year Dorothy and I spent the
first two weeks of August in Fish Creek. When Louise and Eddie
came along, they stayed the last two weeks. Meanwhile, Dorothy
and I were returned to our Grandfather’s home at Cedar Lake,
Wisconsin.”
“Every summer, my father gave a concert
at the Casino, the social center of Welcker’s. This was
an eagerly awaited event and was well attended. He usually played
Bach, Beethoven, Schubert, and some of his own compositions. When
Miss Farr died, Dad played the Moonlight Sonata at her
memorial service.”
On 29 October 1931, Collins completed the
orchestration of his Concert Piece, promised to Stock
for performance with the Chicago Symphony. The second of two journal
entries for that day contained this outburst: “Years ago
I thought the battle scene in Strauss’ ‘Ein Heldenleben’
was a magnificent thing; now I think it is the silliest goddam
piece of childishness I know. In fact this idea of being inspired
by a woman to go out and knock the blocks off our neighbors has
been responsible for a lot of heartaches. Coming home then to
put on your house-slippers and wait for death is the teaching
of man’s second love—religion. Why can’t we
sail through life on a high place of courage tempered with charity,
and shake off these crazy substitutes for man’s marvelous
intelligence?”
Two days later, Edward Joseph Jr. was born.
“The idea of a having a son thrilled and scared me. I hope
this little fellow will get a break in life; I wish him health,
character, and genius in the order named; may his life be rich
and successful.”
The Concert Piece (actually Collins’s
second piano concerto) was premiered just over a month later (3
December 1931) with Collins as soloist and was generously praised,
not the least by Claudia Cassidy, then writing for the Chicago
Sun-Times, who found “splendor in its imagery, and a faunish
hint of capricious gaiety and something gallant that captured
fantasy in terms of modern melody”.
On 23 March 1933, a lengthy journal entry
contained this: “Creative work demands clean living and
much rest. The amateur or the layman insists on making a dope
fiend and a drunkard of his ideal but the more I see of genius
the more I realize that it is made up of concentration and sacrifice.”
In 1933, Collins had moved his studio to
the American Conservatory of Music where he remained
on faculty until the time of his death. This once venerable institution
has experienced some unfortunate times in recent years, and records
of Collins’s work and accomplishments there are, sadly,
available only in sketchy form through outside sources.
Daughter Marianna Collins’s brief family history, previously
mentioned, describes a turning point in the composer’s life
near the end of the decade. “In 1938, Edward and Frieda
Collins bought a log house on Highway 42, halfway between Fish
Creek and Egg Harbor. It belonged to Mrs. George Bass, a friend
of F.D.R. [President Franklin Delano Roosevelt], with whom she
exchanged cartons of mystery stories.” [Author’s note:
presumably, she was not told of Edward Collins’s intense
antipathy to the sitting president, confided to his journals in
biting terms.]
“The long logs for the two-storied
living room were brought to Door County over the ice from Northern
Michigan. My mother designed the studio for my father which was
constructed with the rocks from a stone fence that went along
the highway. Dad would spend mornings and afternoons working there.
We were neighbors of the Peninsula Players [the nation’s
oldest professional outdoor theater]. My sisters and brother and
I were often called upon to become supernumeraries in various
productions. Richard Fisher, the artistic director, often borrowed
furniture from my mother for stage settings. She was thrilled
to see her things on the stage.”
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