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Title: Musical Criticisms
Author: Arthur Johnstone
Release Date: February 15, 2013 [EBook #42097]
Language: English
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Musical
Criticisms
SHERRATT & HUGHES
Publishers to the Victoria University of Manchester
Manchester: 27 St. Ann Street
London: 65 Long Acre
[Illustration: AGED 26.]
MUSICAL CRITICISMS
BY
ARTHUR JOHNSTONE
WITH A MEMOIR OF THE AUTHOR BY
HENRY REECE AND OLIVER ELTON
MANCHESTER
AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS
1905
To Dr. Hans Richter
in Memory of his Friend and Admirer
Arthur Johnstone
FOREWORD.
The Editors desire to express their thanks to the Proprietors of the
_Manchester Guardian_ for their permission to reprint the articles
contained in this volume.
They also wish to acknowledge the assistance they have received in
compiling the memoir from the family of the late Mr. Arthur Johnstone
and from his friends, and they are more particularly indebted to
Professor Sidney Vantyn for the long correspondence he placed at their
disposal.
The letters quoted were for the most part written to Mr. Oliver Elton.
CONTENTS.
PAGE
=Memoir= i.
=Chapter I.--Bach=
The Genius of Bach 1
Mass in B minor ("Hohe Messe") 3
The "St. Matthew Passion" 5
A minor Concerto for two Violins 8
=Chapter II.--Beethoven=
Symphony No. 5 (C minor) 11
Symphony No. 6 ("Pastoral") 13
Symphony No. 7 14
Symphony No. 3 ("Eroica") 16
Symphony No. 2 18
"Missa Solennis" 20
"Fidelio" 21
=Chapter III.--Berlioz=
"Symphonie Fantastique" 24
"La Damnation de Faust" 27
The Centenary Celebrations 29
=Chapter IV.--Liszt=
"Faust" Symphony 33
Pianoforte Concerto in E flat 36
=Chapter V.--Wagner=
Overture, "Faust in solitude" 39
The "Ring" at Covent Garden (1903) 41
The Bayreuth Festival 51
"Parsifal" 53
The "Ring" at Bayreuth (1904) 56
=Chapter VI.--Tchaïkovsky=
Symphony No. 5 and other works 63
Symphony No. 4 67
Overture, "Romeo and Juliet" 69
Symphony No. 5 71
Symphony No. 6 ("Pathétique") 75
=Chapter VII.--Sir Edward Elgar=
"King Olaf" 78
The "Enigma" Variations 81
Overture, "Cockaigne" 85
The "Dream of Gerontius," Birmingham Festival 89
" " Düsseldorf 92
" " Preliminary Article 95
" " Hallé Concerts, Manchester 98
"The Apostles," Birmingham Festival 104
" Preliminary Article 108
" Hallé Concerts, Manchester 111
Overture, "In the South" 116
The "Coronation Ode" 117
=Chapter VIII.--Richard Strauss=
"Don Quixote," Rhenish Musical Festival at Düsseldorf 119
"Don Juan," Preliminary Article 122
" Hallé Concerts 124
"Till Eulenspiegel" 126
"Sehnsucht" 128
Strauss's conducting of Liszt's "Faust" Symphony,
Lower Rhine Musical Festival, Düsseldorf 129
"Tod und Verklärung" 131
"Also sprach Zarathustra" 133
"Ein Heldenleben," Liverpool Orchestral Society 136
Quartet in C minor, for Piano and Strings 139
=Chapter IX.--Chamber Music=
Dvoràk. Quintet in A Major 142
" Quartet, Op. 96 143
Beethoven. Razoumoffsky Quartet (No. 3) 145
Bach. Concerto in D minor for two Violins 146
Beethoven. Quartet in B flat major 147
Tchaïkovsky. Quartet in D major 148
" Trio in A minor, Op. 50 148
César Franck. Quintet in F minor 151
=Chapter X.--Piano Playing=
Reisenauer 153
Moszkowski 155
Busoni 157
" 159
Borwick 161
Siloti 163
Rosenthal 165
Paderewski 166
Godowsky 169
Lamond 171
=Chapter XI.--Violin Playing=
Ysaye 174
Ysaye and Busoni 176
Kubelik 178
Kreisler 180
=Chapter XII.--Music in the Nineteenth Century=
Extract from a review of Mr. J. A. Fuller Maitland's
"English Music during the 19th Century" 182
Centenary Article: "Music in England during the 19th
Century" 189
=Chapter XIII.--Hans Richter= 201
=Chapter XIV.--Nietzsche=
Nietzsche and Wagner 211
Nietzsche in English 222
Note.--The performances noticed were all given at Manchester, except
where otherwise stated.
PORTRAITS.
Aged 26 _Frontispiece_
Aged 20 face p. 10
Aged 26 face p. 30
MEMOIR.
ARTHUR GIFFARD WHITESIDE JOHNSTONE was born December 3rd, 1861, the
fourth son of the Rev. Edward Johnstone and Frances Mills. His father
was then taking the duty at Colton in Staffordshire, but in the
following year accepted the living of Warehorne in Kent; this he
resigned in 1866 and went to live at St. Leonards. Mr. Johnstone died in
1870, and the direction of Arthur's education fell entirely upon his
mother. Mrs. Johnstone gave her life to good works and to the care of
her children, one of whom was an invalid. Arthur looked on her as a
saint, and the thought held up his belief in humanity during the
somewhat long struggle when his powers and aims were uncertain, and when
he had to observe excessive dulness, dreariness, and meanness at close
quarters. He was also beholden to her for the gift that was at last to
determine his career. She was a good musician, and it was from her that
Johnstone inherited his fine taste and received his first instruction in
music. Later he studied under Mr. W. Custard, a local organist. The
atmosphere of his home was religious--extreme Anglican approaching to
Roman Catholic. Johnstone, though he became by reaction anti-clerical,
continued to appreciate the value of religion, chiefly through art and
music, as his letters and criticisms show. But his bent was secular as
well as artistic; a high Anglican school and a high Anglican college
were therefore not a pasture in which he could thrive. His spirit was
foreign to theirs. It says much for his strength of mind, that these
institutions left him able to admire certain forms of Christian art.
In 1874 he went to Radley and remained there four years, doing neither
well nor ill, stifled rather in the ecclesiastical atmosphere of the
school, caring little for games, and out of sympathy with the public
school spirit. He therefore lived his own life, learnt to protect
himself by ingenious tact and reserve, and read irregularly what he
liked. Though not specially built for athletics he was by no means
lacking in bodily arts and dexterities. When quite young he was a first
rate billiard-player, a good skater, and at lawn tennis well above the
average. His chief accomplishment was an odd one which never left him.
During these early years he made a constant pastime of conjuring, and
devoted to it much of his leisure and some of his business hours. He
even gave elaborate entertainments in public, from the age of fourteen.
On one occasion when he was only seventeen he was able to apply his
skill to a really practical use. He was going by train to give a
performance and happened to enter a compartment where there was a gang
of card sharpers. They drew him into playing "Nap" with them; soon he
began losing and knew that he was being cheated. They were using the
ordinary conjuror's cards with plain white backs, of which he had a
supply in his pocket. He soon found an opportunity of replacing their
pack with one of his own, won back his losses with schoolboy
satisfaction, and changed carriages at the first stopping-place, leaving
the experts to solve the mystery for themselves. His self-possession in
public and private, the mature and slightly initiate air that became
less marked as he grew older, were probably due to these performances.
They served in his real education. The intellectual side of what is
usually common showman's art attracted him. The psychology of the
conjuror's victim, amused and angry, straining all his wits on the wrong
point; the festal atmosphere, or _Stimmung_, of inattentive youth and
good temper necessary for success, the real poverty of intricate
mechanical appliance compared with skill and patter--of these things he
would talk in youth with an Edgar-Poe-like elaboration and solemnity, no
doubt as well as any man in England. The best of these exhibitions was
when Johnstone was professing to explain to a few friends a trick of his
own doing. There came first, in long and well-cut sentences, a kind of
metaphysic of conjuring; an account of those principles of delusion that
were inapplicable in the present instance; exposure of the vulgar and
obvious methods, which seemed to the crowd the same as those subtler
ones which merely satisfied the conscience of the artist; and lastly, on
the verge of the "explanation," a long parenthesis or a touch of
coldness and abstraction, not to be interrupted, which ended, if at all,
not in any explanation whatever, but in a last performance of the trick.
Johnstone made a point of seeking acquaintance with the chief professors
of manual illusion who visited England. He well knew, of course, the
methods of signalling to counterfeit clairvoyance; and in one case, that
of "Little Louie," whose show at the Westminster Aquarium was the best
public marvel of the sort, he was convinced that the performers only
eked out by signalling and other tricks the failures of some genuinely
supernormal power of the "telepathic" kind which they themselves did
not fully understand. We say thus much about legerdemain, as it was long
our friend's quaint and picturesque substitute for the less original
forms of young men's amusement. It gave a good deal of pleasure to other
people, and he needed amusement, for his life was not to be easy.
Johnstone left Radley at the end of the summer term 1878, and for the
next two years worked under Messrs. Wren and Gurney for the Indian Civil
Service, the limit of entrance then being nineteen years. It must be
admitted that he made no serious attempt to succeed, and that here, as
at Oxford later, the prospect of an examination proved to be the reverse
of an incentive to work. Perhaps it was fortunate for him that he
failed, for though he would have found a great interest in the natives
(and extended his _répertoire_ of tricks) he would have been repelled by
the average Anglo-Indian; besides, his abilities did not lie in the
direction of legal and political administration. In October, 1880,
Johnstone came up to Keble College, Oxford, and he quickly had a small
circle round him. Among his friends were R. A. Farrar, son of the
well-known Dean, and G. H. Fowler, the biologist, of his own College;
Winter, of St. John's, the best musician among undergraduates; his
biographers; and, later, Prof. York Powell, who instantly detected his
ability and force of nature. Amongst the dons of Keble, Johnstone cared
for two. One was the Warden, the Rev. E. S. Talbot, now Bishop of
Southwark, who behaved with tact, and encouraged as far as he might a
mind of no pattern type, which would not bring the College any
regulation honours; the other was the Rev. J. R. Illingworth, the best
writer of the school, and since known as a philosophical preacher.
Ascetic, but thoroughly humane, Mr. Illingworth attracted Johnstone by
his honesty and fineness of temper. But these clergymen, after all,
dwelt in their own world, not in his. Until he met York Powell,
Johnstone had found no older man from whom he could learn without
cautions and reservations, and who struck him as a master-mind and a
perfectly free spirit. The two men signally valued each other's
conversation; they had many delicate qualities in common--the kind of
delicacy only found in Bohemians of experience who have kept their
perceptions at the finest edge. Powell materially helped Johnstone more
than once by letting persons of consequence know what he thought of his
younger friend. Even in Powell's record there was hardly any friendship
more completely unruffled.
In youth, as an undergraduate, Johnstone was sallow, but healthy, rather
lean and light, with a large and well-moulded musician's head, like
Beethoven's or, still more, Rubinstein's, in the outline of the
overhanging brow. It is easy to recall that earnest face, that
delightful smile always characteristic of him, and, above all, the
fascination of his playing on the piano. His voice was clear and carried
well, with a sharp metallic ring when he was indignant, but was usually
pitched low, as if unwilling to be overheard. His manner was formed and
his talk was from the first what it remained: forcible, emphatic, and
undoubtedly over-superlative at times, cut into quaintly elaborate but
perfectly built sentences, which came so naturally to him that we have
heard him discharge one of them the moment after opening his eyes in the
morning. They can best be illustrated by his more familiar style in his
writings and letters; the latter, indeed, give a fairly exact reflex of
his talk. A _flâneur_ of the best kind, he observed closely and
curiously; in spite of long spells of apparent idleness, the alert
quality of his mind never showed the faintest trace of slackness. He
described vividly and accurately; and he had a remarkable gift for
explaining any subject or point of view unfamiliar to his listeners,
careful that the slightest detail should not escape them. And, in turn,
he would quickly catch up and develop the ideas of his friends however
vaguely suggested or insufficiently thought out. Johnstone professed
Radical principles and was a member of the Russell Club, where the
advanced Liberals met for papers and debates; but his Radicalism was
social rather than political, and after the foreign experiences of his
later years his opinions tended in the direction of strong government
and Imperialism. At this time it amused him to be rather eccentric in
dress, though he afterward became trim and fairly modish. In 1882 the
intellectual undergraduate was capable of wearing a wide-brimmed,
light-brown, hard hat, descending over the ears and eyes and long hair
penthouse fashion. He had one of these "built for me, ground plan and
projection" on a special scale. He also had a tie which could be folded
into twenty-five different aspects or patterns, some of them striking;
it was a mosaic of squares, and the harvest of a long search;
twenty-five neckties in one. His collars were ultra-Byronic. Otherwise
he was not markedly strange in attire; though the real incongruity was
between these freaks of dress, and the keen intent grey gleam of his
eyes, and the look of held-in vehemence and sensibility.
To what did this sensibility tend, what did it crave for? Not chiefly
for definite learning, or book-knowledge, or for abstract philosophical
truth. Johnstone's nature and gifts did not set towards scholarship
(except afterwards to musical scholarship) or to pure speculation. He
wanted, no doubt, to write, but he never cared to practise style as a
mere handicraft; "let us have," he would say, "something with blood in
it." He did not ask for religious solutions or consolations. Since
nearly all he printed was on musical subjects, only his letters and our
memories can give the impression of what he wanted. It was a
sufficiently rare ambition among the Oxford young men of our time,
though often enough professed. He wanted art and beauty. This desire, of
course, in others often was a cant; there were scholars and
verse-makers--more or less of the "æsthetic" type--sentimental and hard
at bottom like most such persons, who cultivated beauty, and have
usually come to nothing except prosperity. Johnstone was of another race
to these; they never heard of him; he did not care for the main chance;
he was in profound earnest. Few young men looked at life with so
definite an aspiration to get the grace, enjoyment, and beauty out of
it, and so definite a conviction that not much of these things is
attainable. To such spirits, pre-appointed to suffer and wait, society
seems at first an irrational welter, out of which, as by a miracle,
emerge enchanting islets of grace, and wit, and cheer. The desire to
find beauty in things or persons, and the desire to find soul and
humanity, are the unalloyed, intense, and usually disappointed passions
of elect youth claiming its rights. It is the second of them that saves
a young man from the conceit and exclusive folly that may beset the
first. Johnstone's tastes, his reading, loves and friendships were
guided by these two passions, and by a third which took off from the
strain of them, and was equally imperious--the wish to study the world
and to be entertained reasonably. Classes did not exist for him, except
that he often felt he was more likely to be able to foregather with and
help men and women who were at a discount in the world. With such
warring elements and a spirit so hard to satisfy, it was no wonder that
his earlier years seemed planless, and in part were so. The instinct for
travel and odd experience lasted long. No one but his near friends had
much knowledge of this complex but essentially single nature. To them
there seemed to be more than a seed of nobility and fair example in such
a youth, so externally disappointing to parents, and guardians, and
shepherds of colleges. Out of it was gradually wrought a character full
of fire and aspiration, fundamentally austere and uncompromising in
loyalty and in artistic conscience, but masked under a certain
reticence. But this is to forestall by several years.
[Illustration: AGED 20.]
Johnstone had entered Oxford at a time of great intellectual ferment.
Looking back we can now see that it was during the years about 1880 that
the revolutionary flood ran highest. The authority of Darwin and Huxley
was unquestioned by many of the younger generation and all-embracing.
The vague Christianity and sentimental optimism of Tennyson was held in
little esteem beside the wider tolerance, the subtle analysis, the
ceaseless curiosity of Browning. Above all "the Bard," as Swinburne was
admiringly called, was the poet of the young men. Another very important
factor in the mental development of our generation--and for Johnstone,
perhaps, the strongest of all--was supplied by the French literature of
the century, from the Romantic School onwards. It is no wonder,
therefore, that the reaction from the High Church influences and
surroundings of his youth was severe and complete, and that his highly
æsthetic nature demanded the fullest artistic and intellectual freedom.
The so-called "æsthetic movement," as we have before implied, left him
untouched. He would have nothing to do with the attempt to symbolise and
revive a civilisation that had utterly passed away, nor with the
deliberate neglect of the modern world, and its most intense and living
art--Music. Johnstone had not much mediæval sense, and was sparing in
his appreciation of Rossetti, to whom he became unjust. What he liked
best was "Jenny," though he was rightly critical on the unsound streaks
in its rhetoric. It was first brought home to him, as to others of his
group, by the skilful and dramatic reading, in a singular clanging
voice, of his chief Keble friend, C. W. Pettit: a young man of high and
melancholy character who was found drowned, probably by accident, in the
Upper River, near Oxford, in the spring of 1882. A memorial stone with
Pettit's initials marks the place, in an unfrequented reach of the
stream, and the inscription, if not effaced, is now a mystery except to
some few who remember him.
"Jenny" also struck upon what may be mentioned now as the deepest chord
in Johnstone's sympathies; it is heard sounding in the letters, quoted
below, that review the stories of Ruth, Fantine, and Tess of the
D'Urbervilles. His attitude in this matter was free from conventional
ethics, and was, therefore, essentially Christian; and the relations of
society to technically errant women, who have lapsed even once by
accident, preoccupied him bitterly, and that in no theoretical or
sequestered way. In his own gipsy experience, he witnessed at least one
instance where the issue only just escaped disaster. He was haunted by
the story, as De Quincey was by that of his lost companion in Oxford
Street. The girl whom Johnstone, though generally hard up, managed to
befriend in his secret, chivalrous and effectual fashion, finally
married some one decent and respectable. Concealing the place and
circumstance, he afterwards cast the incident of the "Fantine of
Shotover" (we also conceal, of course, the name of the village) into a
kind of prose sketch or _poème_, which he finished when he was about
twenty-six, re-wrote twice, and thought of printing. It is unfortunately
not now to be traced. Its musical, exalted prose, if inexperienced in
form, gave genuine promise in that kind of composition; but he never to
our knowledge, pursued the vein, and the prose in which he became expert
was, apart from his letters, purely critical and expository. Still,
enough has been said to show the force and unusual bent of Johnstone's
human sympathies. It is clear that a young man's truth of instinct and
strength of head are never more hardly taxed than when he is confronted
with a concrete story of this kind. He may become foolish in opposite
ways, especially if he is also an artist and has strength of
temperament. He may be personally entangled through his sympathies, and
make ill worse. He may be superior, and spoil everything by clumsy
missionary benevolence, hard of hand. It is something if he can get
behind the ordinary, blind, damnatory formulæ of society. This however,
is not so difficult to a free mind. What is harder is to do it, and yet
to see the facts without mere theorising, without the cumber of
rhetorical and literary sentiment that obscures them. A Scotch-descended
brain is useful at this point. In our memory Johnstone rose to the
occasion thus presented, and acted and judged with balance. But we are
more concerned now with the road by which he arrived at his force of
sympathy. Æstheticism of the rootless academic kind had, it is evident,
no hold upon him; he was too angry to be precious; but his motive power
at bottom was that of the artist, as it was surely not that of the
radical theorist or philanthropic organiser; although it was, if we use
accurate language, by no means less human than theirs. What was at work
was his sense of beauty; of physical beauty, first of all, or of grace,
in the victimised person, as the sign and vesture of an originally sound
and simple, or gay and innocently festal nature; beauty inbred, and then
marred by some rough contact, and then marred more by social punishment,
and seldom retrieved, even in part--as in the particular instance it
chanced to be retrieved--by any fortunate and final escape. All this
revolts the deepest of human feelings, which distinguishes us from most
of the beasts, namely the æsthetic feeling, which at this point happens
to coincide closely with the religious. A certain depth and rarity were
thus super-added to the plain good feeling and kindliness of the man;
and we can draw these facts from the jealous hiding-place of the past
without undue violence to the shyness in which he wrapped them, as they
show his personal and special path of approach to the human tragedy, and
may even come to the notice of, and serve for the encouragement of
similar minds at a corresponding stage of discontent. We may now go back
to his early youth, when he was halfway through Oxford, and when some of
these ideas were germinating into necessarily crude expression, which
none the less has its interest. In a letter of 1881, he writes:--
"How can we escape from Swinburne? Does not modern society drive one to
his school, at least the sort of society that I am _supposed_ to have
been brought up in, whose moral atmosphere is a sort of perpetual
afternoon tea, where all the men are pale young curates and the women
district visitors, their excitements vulgar ritualistic tea-pot
tempests, the doctrinal significance of birettas, purificators.... Their
minds ever on the alert to quash the smallest expression of any delight
in natural beauty--'beauty is only skin-deep,' the damnedest lie that
was ever formulated (compare Browning's Paracelsus). I wish with Gautier
that I had been born in the days of the Roman Empire, when asceticism
was almost unknown and what there was of it entirely specialised, before
ever such an astounding classification as the World, the Flesh, and the
Devil had been made, or every natural beauty writhed, like the divine
feminine torso, in the accused grip of fashion." These are the
outpourings of a very young man only twenty. It may fairly be said that
Johnstone was always far more of an ascetic, personally, than he ever
admitted, and the articles on Bach and Sir Edward Elgar abundantly prove
the religious habit of mind induced by the training and associations of
his early years. A year later his views have become better balanced, as
shown by the following extract from a letter on the same subject.
"I read most of the _Apologia_ a month or two back. As you say, Newman
stands quite alone in his sincerity and spiritual power, the only
orthodox thinker who is not an instance of self-deception resulting from
reiterated untruth. All the purest and most beautiful aspects of the old
faith seem to group round him. But the lights are almost out on the
stage where he poses so magnificently, a rough crowd is spoiling all the
scenic illusion, and garish sunbeams are coming in through the roof.
"I was moved to tears the day before yesterday by the appearance in this
place [Tunbridge Wells] of a pretty face.
"There she was, a radiant and triumphant vindication of human nature
among the myriad libels on the human form.
"I love the wonderful human body. How utterly the most beautiful of
imaginable things in its strange dualism; perfect form expressed with
infinite subtlety in two mutually supplemental phases. The one--tall,
lithe-limbed, and athletic, with its shifting net-work of muscles
beneath the clear brown skin, boldly chiselled features and short crisp
hair--emblem of strength and swiftness and godlike protection, buoyant
and fearless; the other--a harmony of exquisite curves, white and
sensitive, and crowned with rippling hair, fulfilled of tender life and
wondrous grace--living type of fruitfulness. To say that either deviated
from the abstract perfection of form is merely to say the very idea of
sex is such a deviation; and is there not a certain divine
suggestiveness in this very fact? Their union is perfect Beauty--veils
of the great human Sacrament. And all this is faded clean out of modern
life. The belief in the body is dead. I believe some of us live and die
never knowing the likeness of the human form, just as some of us do
without ever seeing the sunrise.
"The 'pale Galilean' has banished Beauty; and only here and there,
disguised almost beyond recognition, has it ventured with infinite
apology to return.... Yet let us not be all unthankful to the pale
Galilean and his lessons of suffering; there are too many of us who see
in their own instincts the very impress of impossibility to be
satisfied, who have to reflect with some bitterness, not '_il faut
mourir_,' but '_il faut vivre_' and gather up our scraps and skulk
along, hoping, perhaps, some day for a lowly place in some court in the
House of Life, if it be only that of a scullion. And then at what a
frightful cost have those lessons become part of the world's
inheritance! Surely it cannot have been for nothing."
* * * * *
Obviously, in all this outburst, if its literary and intellectual
origins are not hard to trace, there was no pose whatever; it was a mood
that Johnstone honestly and passionately lived through, or rather it
remained as a background to his nature. He was far from happy at this
period. He had many friends and varied interests, but he felt that life
was being wasted; in fact he had not "found himself," nor was he to do
so until his visit to Germany. No doubt Keble was not the college for
one of his temperament, and the English system of teaching the classics
made them, for him, dead languages indeed; but had their oral use been
encouraged (the practice of the late Professor Blackie) it is possible
that he might have taken a real interest in them. With one of his
friends he would speak constantly in Latin.
During the next few years Johnstone was mainly engaged in scholastic
work, and the necessity of earning his own living prevented him from
taking his degree. In a letter of September 1885, he regrets that he
"had to live much in continuous utter rebellion against outward
circumstances. In the morning is much strife and crying; in the evening,
comfort of the pot. The Day of Rest brings loneliness in
crowds--'stalled oxen and hatred.' _Ca finira._"
In the spring of 1887 he inherited a small legacy, which set him free,
for a time, from the drudgery of teaching, and enabled him to carry out
his long-deferred wish for a course of serious musical study at a
foreign conservatorium. At this period he knew absolutely no German, and
had only a fair knowledge of French, and was quite unconscious of
possessing the natural gift for modern languages, which he was
afterwards to turn to good account at the Edinburgh Academy and
elsewhere. In August he went to Kreuznach to acquire the elements of
German before proceeding to the Cologne Conservatorium, where he had
determined to study. The family where he stayed could speak no English
and but little French, so he was forced from the outset to express
himself in a strange tongue and make shift to understand it. Early in
October he entered the Conservatorium as a student, and engaged himself
to take the year's course. His chief friend was M. Sidney Vantyn, now
Professor of the Piano at the Liège Conservatoire, and then in his last
year of study. They met in the class of Professor Eibenschütz, one of
the most severe masters there, who made no allowance for Johnstone's
previous amateur training, and was rather harsh and discouraging. He
knew no English and Johnstone's German was still elementary, so Vantyn,
who knew English thoroughly, acted as interpreter between them. In his
recollections of those days M. Vantyn writes:--
"It was certainly evident that he had never had a musical training
before his arrival in Cologne. Johnstone's fingers were stiff and he had
to begin almost at the very beginning. And this he had the courage to
do. At that time I was one of the advanced pupils, I offered to help,
and for some months we practised together every day, more especially
with a view to developing the fingers. In April, 1888, he showed me a
sketch of a _Valse de Concert_. This composition was what one would have
expected from Johnstone--bright, original, thorough. At my request he
completed the _Valse_ which I played shortly afterwards at a concert,
where it met with a decided success. A little later it was sold to a
music publisher at Liège. He soon left Herr Eibenschütz for Dr.
Klauwell, with whom he studied the piano and harmony." Among the other
professors at the Conservatorium were Humperdinck, afterwards famous as
the composer of _Hansel und Gretel_, and Gustav Jensen, the brother of
the better-known song writer.
At length, Johnstone was living in a world which brought out his best
qualities and stimulated his keenest interests. But he now realised that
he had come ten years too late for the attainment of any eminence,
either as executant or composer, and contented himself with considerably
extending his general knowledge of music. Nor did he ever confine his
attention to music alone; but he endeavoured to see as much as possible
of German methods of work, especially as regards the teaching of
languages. In reading the Cologne verdict on Johnstone's early training
it must be remembered that in his youth the piano was not well taught in
England, where the principles and importance of a good technique were
alike unknown. Of course, the principal and all his masters liked him
personally, but naturally their chief interest lay with young pupils who
promised to make a name in the musical world. The year's course at the
Conservatorium ended in July, and about this time he writes:--
"As regards intentions, I am quite resolved now (and quite contented) to
become a modern language teacher for life. During this year I have
obtained some insight into the musical profession, with the conclusion
that for all but the very few of quite the first rank it is a wretched
life. So I am after all going to take my degree, and shall reside next
term as a member of Balliol.... I could get a living by music now, but
that would be to sink into a drudgery yet worse than anything I have yet
had to do. I _will_ not teach beginners. Besides, I can make a much
better living in another profession."
Johnstone returned to England at the end of August, 1888, in wonderful
spirits and in better health than he had ever before enjoyed, bursting
with ideas and enthusiasm for everything German. It was Gulliver's
homecoming after the voyage to the Houyhnhnms, and his friends had to
listen to criticism of a similar kind. There is no doubt that this year
brought real maturity to Johnstone. He gained a confidence in himself
and a grip on life, which even when the prospect seemed most hopeless
prevented him from ever again falling into his old moods of despondency.
In October he returned to Oxford. Some years back he had taken his name
off the books of Keble and migrated to New Inn Hall. The Hall had lately
been absorbed by Balliol, and so in the end Johnstone became a member
of the College which should have sheltered him from the beginning. In
Balliol he was tolerably well at home, though now senior to the men
around him. He forgathered with Farmer, who had just left Harrow for
Balliol and with the Master's support arranged a concert in the Hall
every Sunday evening. Once he gave a conjuring show, by Farmer's
request. Jowett shrilled in cherubic mirth, sent for Johnstone, listened
to his conversation, which flowed more easily than that of most of
Jowett's undergraduate visitors and was of another stamp; and continued
to treat him with politeness. Johnstone, whose classics had somewhat
rusted during his stay in Germany, read with Mr. St. George Stock, the
philosophical writer, then and since a well-known private teacher in
Oxford. In December he passed the necessary schools and took his degree;
his last experience of the old, disquieting city was pleasant, if
brief--a period of _recueillement_ before embarking upon the new career
which he had chosen.
In the March following, 1889, he received an offer to go as tutor to the
young son of Prince Abamélek in Podolia, a province of Southern Russia.
The following account of his journey is interesting:--
"I left Berlin on Thursday morning at 8.30; the stage through Galicia,
Oswiecim, Cracow, Lemberg, Podwoloczyska was a bad twenty-four hours.
Just at the frontier the snow was immensely deep, standing in a wall on
each side of the train. It was like being let into Russia through the
works of a great snow fortification. The worst mistake I made was in
bringing no victuals with me. I noticed at the frontier examination that
my portmanteau was the only one not half full of food. The restaurants
at the large junctions are excellent, being all under the management of
Tartars, a race possessing the genius of cookery, but if you have to
wait as I did, more than twenty-four hours at an out-of-the-way country
station, you may find nothing obtainable but tea. Travelling in Russia
is in any case tiring; the distances are interminable, and every journey
has to be regarded as a sort of pilgrimage. On coming from Osipoffka
here, we had to leave about ten in the evening to meet the desired
train.
"The start was rather amusing, for we were a considerable caravan with
children, servants, horses and dogs. All night we drove across the
Steppe, accompanied by several mounted men with torches, which they
lighted when the way was bad.
"I had an outside place and was somewhat dazed and curried by the wind
and dust by the time we got to the station. Railway travelling is
interesting if you have got the courage not to go first class. The
carriages are on the American plan, with an opening down the middle.
Instead of dapper bagmen you find long-coated and long-haired Jews,
besides soldiers and students in curious costumes, while whole families,
travelling together, produce the effect of an emigrant convoy. Everyone
undresses with complete _sang-froid_.
"The family always come for the summer to this estate. It lies in a
well-wooded district of Podolia, some hundred miles further north than
the region to which I first went. The house is very large, and the
garden magnificent. It is skirted by a river and there are primitive
boats and an excellent bathing place. They have also a steam-launch of
English manufacture, which is shortly to be got afloat.
"The neighbourhood is a paradise of Gipsies. The river throws out arms
and endless windings, and the ground between is much broken and covered
with undergrowth. Here the Gipsies encamp. One sees them in the evening
bathing with their horses, and thus I had an opportunity of observing a
thing, the peculiar and suggestive appropriateness of which is remarked
on by Darwin in his 'Voyage of the Beagle,' namely, a naked man on a
naked horse. This is the true centaur; they become one thing. I am now
convinced that the Gipsies are the most physically beautiful of all
races. In England they are abject beggars, but here rather more
well-to-do than the average of the population; for they are not like the
peasants, more than half-starved by ecclesiastical regulation, and
obviously, in a country in such a stage as Russia is at present, they
have a better time. There are plenty of immense regions where they can
trap and fish quite unmolested, and the climate favours their mode of
life--doubly, I should imagine, the winter giving a short account of
defective constitutions. I suppose they are thieves, but to the casual
observer they are entirely admirable. Troops of splendid little brown
children go about in the evening singing or shrieking with shrill
laughter. Their music, by the way, is valued in Russia. There are
several troops who get large sums for attending various festivities.
"It has gradually been borne in upon me that the climate of this region
is almost ideal. The sky is deep blue and far off, yet the heat is never
really oppressive, on account of a constant breeze which brings balsam
from the woods. For the landscape a finer contrast could scarcely be
found to the Southern Steppe, which is like the burnt and scraped
bottom of a pot. It has a character of its own, of course. From the fact
of being usually able to see to the level horizon in all directions, it
reminds one of the sea, while in summer the heated and quivering air
which rises from the ground produces marvellous atmospheric effects; but
there is always a wind, skin-drying and far from healthy. Here, on the
other hand, we are well watered and surrounded by deep and lordly
forest, and the aspect of the whole country is _riant_.
"I have not yet seen much of the _kirchliches Wesen_. The priest at
Osipoffka, I gathered, is a man who has to get in a mass as often as he
is sober enough. The Abaméleks do not receive him, and never go to
Church while there. In any case, I do not think the Princess is
particularly _dévote_. She is of Polish descent, and her family having
given up Western Catholicism, have never become, I suppose, enthusiastic
as Russian orthodox.
"Of the children the boy is much the most interesting. The eldest girl,
though not without promise of beauty, is at present in a somewhat gaping
and lumbering stage. The younger one is much smaller, though only a
little younger than her sister, also of better intelligence, if worse
temper. She laughs with a curious _abandon_ and is full of
_câlineries_, and is two totally different persons when pleased and
bored.
"Master Paul has not the faintest resemblance that I can trace to either
of them. He is an exceptionally round-limbed and well-made child, with
low forehead and hair like dead-black fur showing a dead-white skin
between, tending to stand up though perfectly soft, and always with a
backward sweep, as though he had lately stood facing a high wind; beady
brown eyes, clear brown colour, delicate little nose and chin and a
mouth like a cherry, make up a face which is no false promise of his
vivacity of temperament. It changes in the hundredth part of a second
from bubbling laughter to a sort of Last Judgment seriousness.
"He wags his little _tête de Polichinelle_ over his victuals, and
converses with them in several languages. Sometimes his mother
interrupts him and asks if he knows what he is saying, when he swears
that he hasn't spoken for a quarter of an hour. _Pauvre petit bijou_ she
calls him."
In the autumn of 1889 his engagement as tutor ended, and he spent the
winter in Odessa to study the language. He put himself, as usual, under
conditions where it was impossible to speak any other language; entered
a Russian family; prepared his questions in Russian when he shopped;
and addressed in Russian the official who delayed his necessary papers
until he had silently put down a bribe of two roubles, and who then
shook him warmly by the hand. He was full of tales; he told of the
English journalist, so aggressively and deliberately English that he
would not uncover before the Tsar's portrait in a hairdresser's shop; of
the Prince Abamélek, who was always talking of taking him out shooting,
but never did so; of the Princess, who feared that her little Paul was
"trop jeune encore pour profiter de son esprit eminemment cultivé"; of
the social tyranny of Russian orthodoxy, which drove free-thinking
persons of quality in the country to church and sacrament at all the
Christian festivals; and, finally, of his shortness of funds which
forced him to find his way home in humble style.
As an English liberal, Johnstone was naturally a welcome guest in the
society of the Reform party; and on his return to England he was to meet
Stepniak at the house of their common friend, York Powell, and to enroll
himself among the Friends of Russian Freedom. But he was more in
sympathy with the members of the Reform movement than with their
objects. While in Russia, such connections secured him a mild
surveillance on the part of the officials, and he had a little
difficulty in obtaining the necessary passport to leave the country; but
these vexations did not prevent him from holding that a paternal
government was required in Russia, and that his countrymen as a whole
were to blame for their harsh judgment of a civilisation merely because
it ran counter to their own political ideals. The late Bishop Creighton
arrived at precisely the same conclusion after his visit to Russia to
attend the Coronation in 1896.
[Illustration: AGED 26.]
On his way home he spent some months in Buda-Pesth, Vienna, and the
Tyrol, and made his first visit to Bayreuth and the Passion Play at
Oberammergau.
Shortly after his return to England Johnstone accepted a mastership in
Modern Languages at the Edinburgh Academy, where his elder brother had
been a classical master for some years. He came into residence in
September, 1890, and Edinburgh was his home until he left that city for
Manchester, in January, 1896. On the whole he was happy there; for
though teaching foreign languages to boys is rather a thankless task, he
was cheered from time to time by the successes of his pupils in
examinations elsewhere, mainly those for entrance to Woolwich and
Sandhurst. He could even confess, after a long summer holiday on the
Continent, that "he was again thoroughly penetrated with the atmosphere
of gray old long-faced Sawbath-keeping Edinburgh." After all, Johnstone,
though he considered himself an Englishman, was, as may be gathered from
his name, Scotch on his father's side; his mother, too, had a strain of
Scotch blood. So perhaps that quiet self-contained manner and all that
it implied came to him from north of the Tweed.
About this time, he was penetrated with the excellent purpose of
training his bodily nerve. He knew that he could never be noticeably
muscular, or anything more than wiry, with his light frame and high
tension. But he would say, "we ought to be able to see a man fall from a
high scaffolding on to the pavement, just before our feet, battered, and
to do whatever is necessary without turning a hair." Accordingly, though
himself most sensitive to pain and to the sight of it, he fraternised
with the young doctors and surgeons whom he met, accompanied them to
operations, watched the worst things, and even gave his help, which was
more than once invited owing to his deftness and neatness of handling.
In this way he got over any shrinking of the nerves. In Edinburgh he
also managed to find some amusement. He was a foreigner in his
adaptiveness to restaurant life, and found a quiet French café to his
taste, where he took his visitors. The odd stratification of Edinburgh
society into the various aristocracies of the country, University,
professions and commerce, and its broad Scotch democratic feeling,
entertained him. He was in one emergency summoned as French interpreter
in the police court, and was pleased at having given satisfaction to
himself and the magistrate, as the case was a somewhat delicate one and
demanded nicety of expression. York Powell, writing to a friend in June,
1893, spoke of Johnstone as
"a fine fellow, very interesting; a musician doomed for the sins of
others (for he is not a great sinner) to be a dominie in Edinboro',
where he is consoled by an old Frenchman who can talk and
understand; and they have, with one or two more, a little French
club. Each pays sixpence a night for expenses, and you have simple
refreshments and sound conversation."
Above all, his musical opportunities were good and varied, and he took
the fullest advantage of them. Music in Edinburgh had, for many years,
maintained a high standard. The orchestral concerts were second only to
those conducted by Hallé and Richter; the latter brought his own band
occasionally, and every solo player of eminence came there from time to
time. He found many congenial friends, and was a frequent guest at the
houses of Mrs. Sellar, the widow of the Professor of Humanity at
Edinburgh, and Dr. Berry Hart, the famous surgeon, where musical
amateurs met constantly; and he was a member of the "Rhyme and Reason
Club," where literary and artistic questions were discussed.
His most noteworthy contribution to the Club was a paper on the
"Relation of Music to the Words in Songs," which he afterwards read at
the Manchester College of Music, and which well merits a summary here
(and some extracts). It shows how his mind was steadily working in the
direction of musical criticism. Its origin was a statement made in a
paper on Tennyson's songs, that poetry, if it be true poetry, is
self-sufficient, and the addition of music to it, however fine the music
may be in itself, is an intrusion and a disturbance for the true lover
of poetry.
The first part of his paper is concerned with an examination into the
nature of music and its place among the arts. He goes on to deplore the
divorce between music and the songs of modern English poets, none of
which are capable of being sung, and traces this divergence back to the
days when Puritanism banished music from church and village green.
Burns, he adds, wrote genuine songs; but he is the only song-writer
since the days of Elizabeth, and worthy of being ranked with Heine. He
concludes by claiming for music "that it is not an inferior art, a mere
hand-maid to poetry, but a direct revelation of the principle of beauty
and on a footing of honourable equality with poetry. The songs of all
the really great lyrical poets are obviously and radiantly singable, and
meant to be sung, and in their authors' lifetime they were sung. So far
then from the finest lyrical poetry being impaired by association with
music, it is only the maimed poetry of decadence that does not admit of
such association, one unfailing mark of a lyric of the highest order
being that it rises to the true singing quality." In the following
passage Johnstone sets forth the ideal at which the composer of songs
should aim:--
"The great German song composers, such as Schubert, Schumann, Franz and
Brahms, working in profound sympathy with the 'Volkslied,' have arrived
at a conception of the song infinitely richer, more refined, and more
genial than is to be found elsewhere. With Franz and Schumann we find
that, in the best cases, the music positively furnishes a sort of
literary criticism on the text, with such exquisite exactness does the
composer appreciate the text and supply the appropriate musical
counterpart.
"We often hear of the music being _wedded_ to the words of a song, and
it is very curious to find so wonderfully neat and perfect a metaphor
being used by people who are far from suspecting its perfection. This is
in fact, precisely what takes place when a good song is composed--the
music is _wedded_ to the verse, though the expression is often used by
those who think that the music has nothing to do but to express again,
more forcibly perhaps, whatever feeling is expressed by the verse, who
think, in other words, that the music is enslaved, not wedded, to the
poetry.
"But music is not restricted to the expression of the feeling of certain
verses or of any other feeling or feelings. The poetry and the music
have each their independent character and their measure of independent
beauty, and this independent beauty and character is in no sense
destroyed by the union. The music has far more to do than merely express
again or emphasise whatever feeling is expressed by the verse. It may
accompany the verse, adorn the verse, brighten the verse, show up the
character of the verse in a new light, and, in turn, be much improved
by the association; but on the other hand, if destitute of independent
beauty, the music can never become beautiful by being _wedded_ to
something.
"It will now have become clear, what according to the view of music that
I have endeavoured to explain, is the task of a song composer. He has
far more to do than to express again in tones the feeling of the song.
He has to furnish a composition that, in the first place, has life; and,
in the domain of art, to have life is to have beauty.
"Secondly, it must have no incompatibility of temperament with the text,
but must be such as can once for all be wedded to the text with happy
results.
"It is needless to say that a composer who takes this view, or has a
subconscious appreciation of the facts on which this view is based, will
not, if he cares for his text, be satisfied with the first outworn
rubbish that comes to hand, by way of musical setting. He will regret
whatever is totally wanting in naturalness and freshness.
"He will not, like the composer of drawing-room ballads, capture some
wretched cadence, threadbare with much use, and trick it out, dragging
up the melody into long high notes, crowing and shouting as though he
had discovered America, whereas all he has really discovered is an old
shoe lying by the roadside that once, perhaps, belonged to a prince, but
after being stolen by the valet was given to a beggar, and so through a
succession of beggars, the last of whom left it by the side of the high
road."
Johnstone's interest in music was becoming more and more intense. In the
intervals of his school work he composed a Gavotte which had a quaint
origin. He was one day in a music publisher's shop in Edinburgh, when he
saw a gavotte on the counter which had won a prize of £5 or £10 offered
by the firm for the best composition in gavotte form submitted to them.
"And is this your prize gavotte?" said Johnstone, "Well, if I couldn't
compose a better gavotte than that in the time it takes to write it down
I should think _even_ worse of myself than I do." "Why then," said the
representative of the firm, "go home and compose your gavotte, we will
publish it if we take it and give you the same money as this
prize-winner got." Johnstone went home and composed it, and the firm
carried out their promise.
His few compositions were nearly always actually produced and completed
under some sudden pressure from outside. Left to himself, his critical
impulse was always stronger than his productive; he became dissatisfied
and dropped the thing he was working at. His friend, the well-known
singer, Fritz Hedmondt, having obtained from him a promise to arrange a
certain song, let matters drop until the concert date was fixed and the
programmes printed with the song announced "arranged by Mr. Arthur
Johnstone." He then forwarded the programme to Johnstone with the
observation that, of course, the thing had to be done. And it was done,
in twenty-four hours, and was a beautiful and original bit of
harmonization. He also set several songs, which, like the gavotte, met
with the approval of Prof. F. Niecks, and were the main subjects of a
fairly regular correspondence with Vantyn. In one of these letters he
gives an appreciation of the pianoforte piece he most admired.
"About Schumann's Etudes Symphoniques I can only say this: For a long
time past I have privately held the opinion that the work is on the
whole, the finest composition for pianoforte solo in existence. This
will no doubt seem to you exaggerated, but such is my feeling about it.
The extraordinary wealth of imaginative beauty in those variations I
believe to be quite without parallel. Just think of that last variation
before the finale. There is nothing else in music which bears even the
faintest resemblance to it."
Every summer he spent several weeks on the continent, and it was on one
of these visits that he first made the acquaintance of Nietzsche's
philosophy, which was then hardly known in England though beginning to
be talked of in Scotland under the influence of Dr. Tille of Glasgow.
In December, 1903, he writes to Miss Sellar:--
"The author of _Schopenhauer als Erzicher_ is Friedrich Nietzsche. I
suppose you will no more agree with the point of view than with
Sudermann's; for, in fact, the point of view of the two writers is
practically identical, but I do not think you can fail to recognise the
extraordinary originality and force, and, above all, the magnificent
honesty of Nietzsche.
"Have you not noticed that most serious-minded and well-intentioned
people in our day go about with a revised table of the virtues, saying
'truth' when they mean a certain group of optimistic delusions; saying
'courage' for readiness in accepting and energy in reiterating such
delusions, and persistency in closing the eyes to all those facts of
life which do not harmonise with them.
"So far as my experience goes, the only people in our day who say and
admit the truth to the best of their lights are the disciples of
Schopenhauer--Ibsen, Tolstoi, Zola, Sudermann, Nietzsche.
"No doubt you will regard this statement with my 'personal equation'
looming large. I mean you will consider there is no more in it than that
these are the teachers with whom I happen to agree. But I shall be
surprised if you do not admit Nietzsche's honesty and the
extraordinarily searching and luminous character of his thought."
If Johnstone had been put through the mangle of the Honour School called
"Greats," it might have left him superciliously deaf to Nietzsche. As it
was, being without philosophic training, but deeply sensitive to any
new, articulate and daring voice, as well as perfectly at home in
German, he found in Nietzsche a liberating and refreshing power. And
then his personal experiences disposed him to accept the main thesis of
Nietzsche's philosophy that mankind, owing to the teachings of
Christianity, had sacrificed the future of the race to over-much care
for the weaker brethren. At the same time he kept his head, and signed
no vow of submission to Nietzsche. The review of Tille's translation,
well bears partial reprinting in this volume for its keen intelligence
and also as a quite early sketch of the Nietzschian system in the
English press. It was one of the first articles written by Johnstone for
the _Manchester Guardian_, and makes us regret, unwisely no doubt, that
his mind was to be absorbed more and more in music.
Yet, in spite of that absorption, he was as deeply interested as ever in
literature and the drama, when dealing with the most serious issues and
problems of life. The purely technical and executive side of these arts
appealed less to him, and so, to take one instance, he soon outgrew his
early enthusiasm for Swinburne, wondered "whether he ever actually gets
there," and was even too severe in revulsion. Intentional obscurity
irritated him. Mallarmé and his school he would not attempt to
understand. His suspicions indeed were well founded, for at the last
Mallarmé in his lecture on "La Musique et les Lettres" had arrived at
forecasting a new future for music when the sound and rhythm of words
would replace the more clumsy and material tones of instruments.
Browning and Meredith repelled him by their style, though they attracted
him by their subjects and method of treatment. Some of his letters on
literature can be quoted here, as this side of his gifts is little
represented in reviews. It will be seen that he talks less of the style
and form, than of the temper and insight of the three great romancers,
Meredith, Hugo, and Hardy. He is still intent, as they are, on the
special kind of subject, "man's inhumanity to women," which we have seen
absorbing him. Meredith was not widely read in Oxford in the early
eighties by the younger men, though he had always had a small and
impassioned public there since 1870. In our time he was rarely quoted.
He was too strong for tender youth; and any "scholar" or worshipper of
pure form or arbiter of elegancies could preach on Meredith's harshness
and quaintness, and wish that he were more considerately feeble.
Johnstone's tone when at twenty-five, in 1886, he writes of Meredith is
decisive enough, though his words would now be taken as a repetition of
the obvious.
"Rhoda Fleming," he writes, "left me with increased wonder that its
author has not a more generally recognised position. He is the only
living English prose-writer with a real mind-kingdom of his own. The
story moves like fate--as inevitably, as cruelly (the white sacrifice!),
but just misses being dramatic. Why does he not write a play? He could;
perhaps something better than has been done for centuries."
A year earlier he had written:--"When you say Hugo is 'so false' you
must mean not quite practical. Mrs. Gaskell's 'Ruth' is 'false' if you
like, as well as irrelevant. Its real tendency is the reverse of the
authoress' ostensible purpose. The woman becomes a partner in a union
perfectly unpolluted and humane, but unauthorised, and even this is made
inevitable. The Quaker element then turns it into tragedy, and the
climax is effected by a person who is a sufficiently remarkable instance
of a figure created by an apostle of mild propriety. He would have upset
the whole scheme of the Redemption by making the good Jesus sin the sin
of hate. This worthy, but rather Pharisaical Methodist--this large-boned
man of substance who makes responses louder than anyone else--this
nameless monster, whose foul-mouthed brawling on discovery of the
woman's history while under him as a governess, is made the insult in
answer to which her protector produces the _plea_ (which is the purpose
of the book); who, perhaps, takes his place as the best type in fiction
of the most hateful character that the varying conditions of climate and
creed ever yet conspired to produce on this, God's flowery earth--comes
duly in for his share in the comprehensive wash-brush at the finish. By
the simple expedient of turning his hair from black to white he is
qualified for service at the heroine's peaceful tomb, where he joins in
dropping the charitable tear.
"The beautiful touches in this work are the seal of its futility,
arising as they do from the character of Ruth--an impossible incarnation
of all the virtues and graces--a sort of virgin mother, at last in fact
a crowned saint; and I cannot believe in her story, perhaps from being
too young. It may be that the remembrance of Ruth and other such works,
while reading Fantine, misled me; that the escape from the high-pew and
hassock flavour of Methodism to Hugo's 'prophetic soul of the wide
world' blinded. Yet, when a work like 'Les Misérables,' with the
prodigious activity of its dramatic impulse, takes in its sweep the
story of Fantine, something may surely be expected, if ever a writer is
to be adequate on such a subject, and, I cannot but think, rightly. The
'eternal Priestess of Humanity blasted for the Sins of the
People'--Fantine is just the thought dramatised.
"Essentially hopeless and inexorable, surpassing the limit of horror
permissible in art.... And still the nameless agonies of the martyr's
death are forgotten for the angel-benediction at her grave. And is it
nothing to have achieved that this benediction should have been
possible after such a life?...
"Yes, 'Les Misérables,' notwithstanding incidental impossibilities,
albeit ever in extremes, looms in my mind as incomparably the greatest
thing in fiction with which I am acquainted, and the longer ago it gets
since I read it and the more I read, the stronger this impression grows.
It seemed to me that the touches of truth in this 'false' work were
quite fearful in their power; such, for instance, of that gang of
convicts being jolted by in the van, 'their heads knocking together.' He
produces the physical effects of actual presence at what he describes.
Of course, it violates every possible canon from the 'Unities'
downwards; in fact, it might almost be made the basis of a new law of
multiplicities."
Some years later, in 1892, he wrote his impression on reading Hardy's
masterpiece: "I have just finished 'Tess of the D'Urbervilles.' You may
have noticed a passage in Vol. I. running thus (chap. xvi.):--'Long
thatched sheds stretched round the enclosure, their slopes encrusted
with vivid green moss, and their eaves supported by wooden posts rubbed
to a glossy smoothness by the flanks of infinite cows and calves of
bygone years, _now passed to an oblivion almost inconceivable in its
profundity_.'
"If a man speaks so of _cattle_ how must he feel towards his human
brothers and sisters! How strong must be in him that profoundest of
poetic passions, the '_carent quia vate sacro_' feeling! For, no doubt,
sometimes in these quiet country places a heart of such gold as Tess's
throbs away in complete obscurity its allotted number of pulses. Our
temper has altered from the time when this emotion was dismissed with a
'Let not ambition mock their useful toil,' etc., and Hardy has fully
realised the appalling paths of such tragedies in humble life. 'This
time,' he seems to have said, 'this time no mincing and no hedging. Let
the disdainful smilers and those others who shift all responsibilities
on to Providence look to themselves.'
"There are passages of infinite pathos in this story: the 'too-late'
meeting of Tess with Angel Clare in the sea-side lodging, and the
terrific scene immediately after, when Angel is gone and she is left to
sob out her distraction; where Tess says to Angel, 'Why didn't you stay
and love me when I was sixteen with my little sisters and
brothers?':--the long letter she writes about a year after Angel has
left her, and where she practises the ballads that he had liked best,
while working in the field, 'the tears running down her cheeks all the
while at the thought that, perhaps, he would not after all come to hear
her, and the silly words of the songs resounding in painful mockery of
the aching heart of the singer.' And, earlier, the baptising by Tess of
her own infant, and--perhaps lying nearest of all to the fountain of
tears--those glimpses of her early innocence. 'Tess's pride would not
allow her to turn her head again to learn what her father's meaning was,
if he had any, and thus she moved on with the whole body to the
enclosure where there was to be dancing on the green' ... when one knows
against what fate the poor girl is going! But is it not all just a
little too cruel? To represent such adorable goodness, and sweetness,
and faithfulness as being rewarded with the actual _gibbet_--is not this
a little hard, even on Providence? The unsparingly tragic ending is not
the only thing, nor even the main thing that distinguishes this from
other stories dealing with the same sort of subject.
"In George Eliot's Hetty we evidently have to do with a character quite
other than Tess's. The imputation of depravity attached to the fact that
Hetty, when scarcely more than a child, looked long in the glass and
thought how fine it would be to be a lady--this seems to me an
exceedingly miserable evidence of the somewhat crude vice of character
by which, notwithstanding George Eliot's immense genius, her sympathy
with the simple-hearted was, in certain cases, marred or destroyed. But
Hetty's character must be taken as it is revealed in action and
intention, and she abandons her infant, whereas the soul of Tess goes
out in an agony of endeavour to preserve hers, and, long after its
death, she exposes herself to ridicule by tending its outcast's grave.
In Hetty's dreams and schemes, again no thought of her parents and
people or hope of bettering their lot has place, while Tess at the
darkest moment of her _via dolorosa_--at Stonehenge, just before God
finally forsakes her--thinks of her sister 'Liza-Lu, and secures a
protector for those she is leaving behind.
"Scott is, of course, without a trace of George Eliot's defect, and
always treats Effie Deans like a gentleman. By certain touches, too, he
indicates how deep is his concern for her, such as that crowd of
blackguards and urchins about the court-house, for whose holiday Effie
was so nearly murdered. But besides the fact that Scott has no true
grasp of feminine character, he makes Jeanie his heroine and never
really undertakes to tell Effie's story. And George Eliot, after
disposing of Hetty in a hurry, actually offers to interest us in the
love affairs of that preaching woman! In Fantine there are details
perhaps more intolerable to hear than this story of Hardy's, but the
general effect is less strong. For partly we distrust Hugo's rhetoric,
and besides, we are beguiled and consoled at the end, however
unreasonably, by his 'fortunately God knows where to look for graves,'
while in 'Tess' the concluding incidents come with a thunderbolt
inevitableness, and at the end nothing stands between us and the hideous
ignominy, the entire forgetfulness, the utter nakedness. But though her
life has become forfeit, perhaps that ignominy of the actual gibbet
might have been spared. In any case, there is nothing to be said at the
end of such a tale but--
"Tir'd with all these, for restful death I cry,
* * * * *
And maiden virture rudely strumpeted!"
Yet let us not find fault, for terrible as it is to find a man who,
discarding the tradition that it is the office of poets to soothe and
amuse their fellow-prisoners with pretty fables and tales of the
governor's beneficence--a man who rejects this almost universal
tradition and appals his hearers with an account of malignant
treacheries committed by that governor--yet I sympathise with the
temper that does this, and believe that it has its roots in a genuine
and manly feeling, the feeling that I tried to suggest at the beginning.
"Hardy is a strong example of that curious, inverted Manichæism so
characteristic of our time--a sort of mediæval horror of the grossness
of matter, balanced by a most unmediæval sense of the utter madness of
insulting and despising matter, seeing that the tyranny of it is
absolute.
"He is perhaps the first Briton to write as a true man of the people on
such a subject, that is to say, to take it quite seriously. His story is
told with such passion that almost every particle of doctrinaire
affectation or easy pattern work is consumed and refined away, and he
has created in Tess the most inexpressibly pathetic figure that I know
of in literature."
About Zola he writes in a letter of July, 1893:--
"Perhaps you have read 'Le Rêve.' It and 'La Debâcle' are the only two
of Zola's longer novels that could be recommended to a lady, and even
the latter with some misgiving. I cannot say that I think 'Le Rêve' one
of Zola's best works. I am far from sure that the French critic who
said: 'Nous préférons Monsieur Zola à quatre pattes' was not in the
right. Nevertheless, there are passages in it stamped by Zola's unique
greatness. With regard to its defects, I would rather say nothing at
present, except one--the end strikes me as absurd, _franchement mauvais
et du placage litteraire_--a recrudescence of something that we have
left far behind, something dead that should have been left to bury its
dead. All the same there are, I think, truly great things in the book."
Of Marie Bashkirtseff, September, 1891, he writes:--
"Concerning Marie Bashkirtseff, she seems to me to have had nearly every
gift except two, namely imagination and heart. Above all, a sort of
critical intuition, which prevented her from ever resting satisfied in
anything second-rate. She was a typical little Russian, small of
stature, dark of tint; in temperament sensitive, romantic, versatile;
unlike the northern Russians, who are prevalently tall and fair and have
a certain contempt for the unpractical. Nearly the whole Russian harvest
of folk-songs and cognate treasure comes from the south, from Cossacks
and little Russians, the true Muscovite being almost a songless bird.
Marie must have had in a high degree the incomparable grace and
distinction of her countrywomen, with that wonderful animation and
'fever of life' which makes the atmosphere of Russian society the
warmest and brightest in the world. As to your statement that 'some of
her failings, like her love of luxury and her desire to be attended to
at all costs, are pure vanity and wormwood,' I have always stuck up for
this barbaric element, and believe that largely on it depends the
prodigious formative power of a _free feminine influence_--that thing of
such rarity as to be almost non-existent in our puritanical society. I
know a man at half a glance who has ever been under it."
Referring to his correspondent's remarks that Russians seem to look at
religious questions like intelligent children, he writes:--
"Did you ever hear of the Soo-ré-ye-vites, the sect of which Leo Tolstoi
is a member?
"Soorayeff was a peasant ignorant of reading and writing. He had read in
church 'God is a Spirit, and they that worship Him must worship Him in
spirit and in truth,' and by pure sympathy and unaided intelligence he
jumped to the conclusion that Jesus Christ meant what He said. Think of
the prodigious freshness of nature and the promise that this shows.
"There are the five hundred sects of Great Britain all accepting the
same fundamental absurdities, and yet this simple man, never having
heard of criticism, is enabled to penetrate the viewless veil, woven by
the years and the churches over the face of the Son of Man, so as to
understand that Christ actually meant that God was a Spirit.
"Suppose a missionary went among a savage tribe and tried to teach them
what Justice is; told them he himself was a son of Justice, and that
Justice was made manifest in him; lastly, that Justice is a spirit.
Suppose he came back after an absence and found the people teaching that
Justice was three persons and burning alive those who did not accept
this view!"
In England, unless it were in London, Johnstone seldom felt at home; in
Scotland, still less. He liked to wander from one easy variegated
foreign city to another, where good music and good plays are quickly
accessible, and British convention is a mere figure in the comic papers.
He valued his friends in Edinburgh, but the place displeased him. He
would sit on Arthur's seat and hate the modern Athens steaming there
below him. Its curious old mossy layers of culture, professional and
academic, could hardly satisfy him, and he quickly got through the moss
to the stone. The ferment of the young "Celtic" writers and painters
seemed to come to little. He did not inure himself to the occasionally
inconsiderate manners of the Lowland Scotch, nor could he bring himself
to repay them steadily in kind. Some of the officials with whom he dealt
appeared to have been born, where they would die, in Gath. He would
hardly agree with, but he could understand the unqualified remark of his
old French associate, "Il n'y a pas d'amour dans ce pays." Probably he
was unjust to Edinburgh; but though his forbears were partly Scotch, he
was not, like Stevenson, born Scotch, and he never really saw the native
character from within. Teaching may not have been the best introduction
to it. He taught well, having the right sort of delivery and insistent
method. But it is disgusting to an artist to teach anything for bread,
except, perhaps, his own craft. The hard work, the pull on the nerves
and patience, can scarcely have strengthened Johnstone's health.
Indeed, wherever he lived he had a touch of the exile. He dwelt really
in some region not of this earth at all, where the masters of music sit
in their Valhalla, where the hard waste matter that makes up most of our
life is eliminated, while the essence of its pain and pleasure is
distilled through art and presented in sublime purity of form. The saint
has his vision of personal goodness, the philosopher his of systematic
truth, the reformer his of a new society. The artist--for the term must
be extended to those who perceive as well as those who produce--has his
ideal vision, which varies in form with his special art. It follows that
the valuable part of actual life, to such a temper, is made up of such
stray hours of vivid experience and intelligence as, taken together,
give some notion of that other world. We had written "moments" instead
of "hours," but the former word would be misleading, with the false
suggestion of fleeting passive sensation, for which Walter Pater, or
rather those who misinterpret him, must answer. Every experience, in
truth, whether moral, sensuous, or intellectual, that is, of real worth,
contributes to the artist's dream. Johnstone posed so little and lived
by this principle so naturally and unwittingly that he could not be
called a doctrinairè. But few men save up their vital impressions about
everything so carefully, engraving them patiently on the memory, and
dismissing the vast mass of experience that tells us nothing. Hence
Johnstone was never quite naturalised in any abode, though he managed to
be sociable and festive when the chances came. In Edinburgh, however,
for the reasons given, he stayed over long, and we may regret that he
was not sooner freed from teaching school.
Practically, there was some compensation for so late an escape. The
teacher's attitude, as of one clearly laying down the law, remained in
much of his press work, and to its advantage. The public as a whole,
though it must not be told so, is like a large, impatient, grumbling,
half-ignorant class of schoolboys. Reviewing is therefore educational
work. Not that the dominie-tone is wanted; for that is the worst of
faults, even in school-teaching! But the teacher does not take his class
into the secret of his own doubts, hesitations, or revulsions; he gives
his results, he gives what he thinks the truth. Or, if a figure from
another calling be preferred, the critic _operates_, beneficently if
often without anæsthetics. Further, there was something to be said for
the late specialisation of Johnstone's ruling talent. His nature was
rich; his articles have the style of a man who has lived, as well as one
who knows his trade. No youth, though ever so clever, could have made
them. He treats music as a means by which all the emotions, whether
large and solemn, or light and happy, or sombre, or perverse, are
transformed, often out of recognition, into their counterparts in sound;
so that the kinds of joy and pain given by music, like those given by
high drama but in a rarer measure, are stripped of any stinging personal
reference, while unweakened in force. The hearer is thus mysteriously
shown, as Rossetti says, the "road he came," and yet has no more, for
the time, to do with himself, save in so far as he is one of a thousand
men to whom the music interprets their experience, widely and deeply.
Therefore, to understand music, a man must have suffered. Johnstone had
met and weathered some of the suffering which an intense nature, even
under conditions easier than his, must absolutely meet with on this
earth, and must either give in to and go under, or must get over and
appropriate--there is no choice! He chose the latter way, being strong
enough, and so became a better musical critic.
Besides, his bent for music was growing more marked during the last
years in Edinburgh. It was clear to his friends what his profession
ought to be, and his chance of adopting it came at the end of 1895. The
musical critic of the _Manchester Guardian_, Mr. Fremantle, died; and it
was hard to find a successor who would stamp his own mark and make the
critical judgments of the paper a power, in the musical capital in the
North of England. Johnstone had already written for the _Manchester
Guardian_ articles of sundry kinds; a review of the translation of
Nietzsche, part of which is reprinted in this book, and a notice on
Tolstoi; as well as on musical matters. York Powell was foremost in
commending his friend to the editor as a man of worth and high special
talent. An offer was sent to Johnstone, which he weighed with even more
than his usual deliberation. He felt the break with his friends in
Scotland, and he had misgivings, being a slow writer and not fond of his
pen, as to his power to work under journalistic conditions. As even his
letters show, he composed carefully and was a master of exact
expression; thus he felt some anxiety at having to work under the
pressure of a time limit, and that too at a late hour. He therefore
sent, without in any way jumping at the offer as an escape from
usherdom, a dignified reply that gave an impression of his quality. It
was not easy for his friends to make him decide with the necessary
haste. In the end he accepted the proposal, much to their relief, and
came to Manchester in January, 1896. There he stayed for the rest of his
life.
In Manchester, Johnstone's existence and outlook were quite altered. He
had not to wait until the daily chare was over before he could turn to
music, which now took up his force and time for the working part of the
year. He had taught well, but others could have done that. Now, for nine
years, he gave himself to the work for which he was built, and which few
could do so well. Certainly no one did it in quite his way. The union of
temperament, knowledge, style, gave him an accent of his own. His lore
and his sensibility always grew and enriched each other. He did not
wholly limit himself to music, and before passing to this his chief
occupation, we may note his activity elsewhere. It was too much to hope
he would have any great distracting interest. Music is enough and more
for one man. But he spared some time for literature. He had a swift
preference even as a boy for all that was fresh, vehement, and strange
in modern drama and fiction. He was not at all like the complacent,
young, up-to-date college tutor, who reads the latest exotic writers,
but remains unaltered. Johnstone, if he liked a play or story at all,
was seized and shaken; a kind of enthusiasm which is a better preface to
a true judgment than any amount of accomplished and balanced coldness,
or the pseudo-"judicial" frame of mind. He was not so fond of poetry, or
so sure in his perception of it, caring too little for purely verbal in
contrast with accompanied or wordless music. We have reprinted above,
however, a part of his lecture on the scientific frontier between the
two arts. He found time also, when the press of the season was over, for
some byplay as a reviewer. He wrote in commanding style about books on
conjuring, on billiards, and on cooking. He used to say that cooking was
his real gift. To go to a certain café and quote Mr. Johnstone's name,
was to ensure a respectful and an even terrified service; and the
well-drilled waiter would commend a particular sauce-bottle as that
which his distinguished customer had used. But he remembered, with more
pleasure than banquets, having slept on shelves with the Cretan rebels
in the mountains, and sharing and digesting their extremely dried fish.
He also wrote on weighty matters outside music; the chief of these were
English and German plays. The companies that travelled from the
Fatherland to the Germanic city of the British Empire, and acted in the
Schiller-Anstalt, often played pieces involving actual dialect.
Johnstone's familiarity with German, as well as his natural sympathy
with writers like Hauptmann (and Sudermann in a less degree), marked him
out as the right reviewer. Plays, like concerts, have to be noticed in
hot haste on the very evening; or, at best, if given on Saturday, by the
following evening; for so much expedition is the minotaur-public of a
daily paper supposed to stipulate. The work done on such terms is not
always the worst in substance, though only long wont can give the kind
of finish or varnish that is desired. The same remark applies to musical
reviewing; but Johnstone's distrust of himself was needless. The result
was more in accordance with the expectation of his friends than with his
own. Many of his articles were written at great speed, and as one of his
colleagues said, if it had been possible for him to wait till he felt he
could do justice to the subject, most of them would never have been
written at all.
Before passing to his main labours as a journalist, we may here quote,
in illustration, part of the notice that he wrote on the _Johannisfeuer_
of Sudermann. Our reprints in this book deal almost wholly with music,
and, as we have said, he thought of music as a comment, at several
removes and after strange distillations, on life and experience. But the
drama, which is a copy of life, not indeed a direct one, but subject to
the laws of theatrical art, also engrossed him, especially when it was
at once modern in form and homely and passionate in theme.
The Bavarian peasants and their girls still jump through the dying
embers of their bonfires on the eve of St. John:--
_"For the truth is Mr. Parson, a remnant of heathenism stirs in the
blood of us all. It has persisted through all the centuries since
ancient Germanic times, and, once a year, it blazes up with the
fire of St. John's Eve. For that night the spooks of ancient
heathenism are unchained. Witches ride on broomsticks, instead of
being beaten with them, and pass through the air, with mocking
laughter, on their way to the Blocksberg. The Wild Hunt scours over
the forest and wilder desires over our hearts--all that is most
frenzied and most utterly doomed to nonfulfilment. No matter what
the order may be that for the time being reigns in the world, for
one single heart's desire to be realised, and to give us something
to live on, a thousand others must go to ruin, not only for the
ever unattainable, but others, allowed to escape from a hand that
held them too carelessly. Yes, those bonfires which blaze up--do
you know what they are? They are the spectres of our heart's
desires, the red-winged birds of paradise that we might have kept
by us for life but allowed to escape, the spooks of the old order,
of the heathenism that is in us. However satisfied we may be in the
light of day and beneath the reign of law and order, this is St.
John's Eve in the night sacred to Midsummer Madness. I drink to
your ancient heathen fires. Let them blaze high! Will no one clink
glasses with me?"--(Act. iii., sc. 3.)_
"So the title 'Johannisfeuer,' with its double meaning, literal and
symbolical, must be rendered into English--according as we wish to lay
stress on the former or the latter--'The Bonfires of St. John's Eve' or
'Midsummer Madness.' On seeing the remarkably fine performance of this
play the non-German spectator, impressed with the general worthlessness
of German drama since the Augustan age (that is, the age of Goethe and
Schiller), might well wonder how it is possible for a German writer to
produce such a thing--a play, simple and unpretentious in design, yet
fraught through and through with poetic beauty; a play written with
northern sharpness of characteristic and, at the same time, with Italian
warmth, eloquence, and keenness of sympathy with the moods of nature; a
play distinctly Ibsenesque in structure and largely also in style, yet,
for all its sombre colouring, not haggard and aghast, like nearly all
the products of the Scandinavian's demonic spirit. The scene is in a
farm in East Prussia, in a neighbourhood with a mixed population of
Germans, Poles, and Lithuanians. The name of the farmer's family is
Vogelreuther. Marikke, a Lithuanian gipsy girl, is a foster-child in
their house, having been picked up along with her mother and carried
home by Mr. and Mrs. Vogelreuther in their sledge during the famine
winter of 1867. In the house she is known as Heimchen (the Cricket) and
in the neighbourhood as the 'famine child.' In the farm-house lives a
young man named George, an orphan nephew of Vogelreuther, indebted to
the famine for his upbringing. In the opening of the play George has
made a good start in life, having been apprenticed to an architect in
Königsberg and done well. He is betrothed to the farmer's daughter
Gertrude, but some years before there had been a love affair between him
and Heimchen, who had repulsed him hastily, not because she did not care
for him, but because she did not believe in the honesty of his
intentions. While busying herself with preparations for her
foster-sister's coming marriage, Heimchen discovers a manuscript book
belonging to George and containing verses and a diary. She cannot resist
the temptation to read, and she thus discovers that George had loved her
deeply and seriously, despite the difference in their standing.
Heimchen's mother--a besotted and thievish old woman--haunts the
neighbourhood, and has been recognised by her daughter. Heimchen has
been told that her mother is dead, but knows better. Meetings with the
terrible old woman re-awaken the gipsy instincts in Heimchen. George
loves her still at heart, and circumstances draw the two together. The
crisis is reached on the night of St. John's eve, when after an evening
in which the whole neighbourhood, lit up with bonfires, is given over to
punch drinking, dancing, and excitement. George is requested by the
unsuspecting farmer to escort Heimchen to the railway station, she
having a night train to catch to Königsberg. The ending is intensely
Ibsenesque in style. George, on the very day fixed for his wedding with
Gertrude, is ready to fly with Heimchen, but, mindful of the immense
obligations binding them both to the farmer's family, he insists that
there shall be at least an explanation. Heimchen, instinctively grasping
the difference between a man's and a woman's love, foresees the regrets
that would result from the overthrow of George's plans. She changes her
attitude and forbids him to speak to the farmer. The St. John fires are
burnt out. The midsummer madness is over. It is now for her to return to
duty and dulness and the burden of a starved heart. For life she must
remain satisfied with her one night of bliss on St. John's eve. So she
stands alone and watches the departure of George's and Gertrude's
wedding procession.
"The great scene of the play, in which Heimchen and George are left
alone together, is managed with wonderful stagecraft. Till the last
moment they seem to be adhering to 'good resolutions,' but a series of
incidents, all absolutely natural, occur to distract attention and cause
delay, till they hear the whistle of the train and know that it is too
late. The bonfires, the punch-drinking, and, above all, George's speech,
from which the quotation at the head of these notes is taken, have fired
their blood, and Heimchen is unstrung by the painful meeting with her
disreputable mother earlier in the day, when she had been obliged to buy
back things that her mother had pilfered. At last she throws herself on
her knees before George and says, 'Du! Küss' mich nicht! Ich will dich
küssen. Ich will alles auf mich nehmen. Meine Mutter stiehlt. Ich stehl'
auch'--and the curtain falls."
* * * * *
To return to the date of Johnstone's arrival at the _Guardian_ office in
Manchester, where he was made welcome. He found friends upon the staff,
and kept them in spite of his want of sympathy with some of the
political views of the paper. On politics he never wrote, except when
recording matters of fact on his mission to the Greco-Turkish war. But,
not to speak of living persons, he was brought for some years into close
contact with one of the best-equipped and finest-tempered journalists
of our time. William Thomas Arnold, the son of Thomas, and nephew of
Matthew Arnold, was one of the two or three men, senior to himself, in
his personal circle, for whom Johnstone had a profound regard both as a
man and as a master-craftsman. This regard was well-deserved. An
authoritative scholar in the history of the early Roman Empire, a critic
who cast original light on Keats and some of the Jacobean poets, at home
in Dryden, in the French literature both of the great century and the
romantic age, abreast also of criticism in both countries, and a sound
vigorous judge of acting and the drama, Arnold made time to share the
daily burdens and aid in sustaining the high uncompromising standards of
a newspaper whose many foes have never questioned its consistent and
iron courage during the last ten years. Arnold often stood to Johnstone
in the capacity of actual editorial chief for the evening. It is hateful
to be edited, even to the change of a comma, except where errors of fact
or risks of libel are in question. Political contributions are another
thing; a common line--the "view of the paper"--must be adhered to, and
self-sacrifice in detail, within large limits, is simply necessary. That
is warfare; you may resign your commission, but, if you do not, must
accept instructions. But in art and letters! The mutual respect of the
two men may be measured by the freedom that was left to Johnstone, and
by the spirit in which he, rightly the most sensitive of men in such
concerns and naturally irritable, took the occasional blue-pencillings.
His other colleagues also held Johnstone in regard, in spite of the
vehemence with which he went his own way. Sometimes he would come in
from the concert, like an instrument whose strings are still quivering
at full pitch, and this is not the mood for rapid committee work at
night. There might be one great explanation from time to time which
cleared the air. It was seen that he was thinking of his subject, and
not of his own vanity, and that he was immensely, indignantly, and
delightfully wrapped up in that subject. On the whole it was a good
training for him, and few strong men, beginning at the age of
thirty-four, would have shown themselves, despite occasional rubs, so
reasonably adaptive. It may also be said that few newspapers would have
stood so well by a writer who, whenever he felt it his duty to do so,
would promptly perturb the musical hive, careless whether drone or
hornet minded. Mr. John Morley, who ought to know, has expressed some
doubt as to whether journalism tends to special elevation of character.
There are cases where the doubt does not arise. When the critic, on
artistic, and therefore on public, grounds, and with due store of
knowledge, raises a fury by his condemnations, and when the editor, who
has to think of his paper and its standing, supports the critic,
believing him likely to be right, that is a good evening's work. The
scope therefore granted to Johnstone as a journalist by his editor was a
proof of sagacity, for he became a power in the musical community, not
only of Manchester but of the larger region the _Manchester Guardian_
reaches. No doubt, though he was allowed as free a hand in expressing
his opinions as any other of his craft, and a much freer one than the
majority, he sometimes wearied of the necessary restrictions of a
journalist's position and their deadening effect upon the mind. An
outburst, expressive of a deep and recurring mood, occurs in a letter of
January, 1902, written on his return to Manchester, and describing a day
he had spent in London with York Powell.
"There is now no one in this neighbourhood with whom I can _converse_. I
find myself permanently in the journalistic attitude, regarding it as
luck if I can say two per cent. of what I think about anything; so the
meeting with Powell was an oasis at the end of some very sandy months."
This complaint was laid not against the paper he served, but against the
sparseness of the kind of society he liked best. To understand it some
curious features of life in Manchester must be recalled. He used at
times to come to a small society of friends, which lasted for eight or
nine years, and met during the business year at about monthly intervals,
at the members' dwellings, for free conversation. He is remembered as
having there discoursed on Tolstoy's conceptions of art with his usual
energy and elaboration. The stringent mad-logic of the great art-hater
had once attracted, but at last disgusted him, and he saw that even
Tolstoy's famed novels, with their show of godlike equity, really held
the seed of his later prejudices against science, art, and sexual love.
But such occasions when he could talk freely seemed to grow rarer. The
fault lay somewhat, no doubt, in his own radical solitariness of mind,
but also in the surrounding conditions.
Huge Manchester, almost a metropolis, is full of force, full of mental
as well as commercial stir; it is not, no, it is not! a _social_ city.
If it ever learns how to amuse itself, it will really be that; it will
be a metropolis. The reasons of the defect are partly physical. It has
an air, a rainfall, a climate, and an aspect, that do not make for good
spirits. The suburbs lie far apart in a ring round the business crater,
which becomes dark and most unfestal after ten o'clock at night, and
which those who cannot drive think twice of crossing. Also there is an
unfused mixture of races and classes. Apart from Greeks and Armenians,
who stand apart from one another and from other nations, there are the
German and other Jews on one side, and the Germans who are not Jews
markedly on another side. There are the big Lancashire money-makers, of
the soil; the shopkeepers and the vast clerkly multitude; the
professional classes, or castes; and the hand-workers, rough, but in
essential breeding and wits perhaps the soundest of all. For social
purposes many of these elements do not count. It is the Germans, the
Jews, and the professional classes, with many of the intelligent
business men in a large way, who probably civilise Manchester, in the
stricter sense of the term. It is as civilised an English city as can be
found in England outside London, if the press, the libraries, the
university, the theatres, and the music, be all weighed together. But
its bent hardly lies towards society, in the sense of ringing,
collective, intellectually disinterested talk, or towards gaiety of the
more bearable kind. There is ample dining, dancing, and official
entertainment, but those are not enough for salvation. The vast number
of philanthropic, educational, religious, and political agencies, which
fill playtime with labour for the good of mankind or party, entitle the
city to be called great and progressive, but they do not precisely make
it blithe. They inspire respect, and no one who has not lived there many
years can realise their number or the strenuous, positive, character of
the place; the southern nature seems soft and vague in comparison. But
the free talk of the real capitals, and their resources for witty
amusement, imply a large leisured class, an element of _flâneurs_ in the
population, which is hardly possible in a big North-English city. There
is personal isolation in a curious measure--a want of rallying points
for talk. The atoms repel each other and fly apart. Men go home to their
families or rooms and stop there. If they go out, it is often for some
"meeting" of an earnest description, not to amuse themselves; or, if
they wish to do this, they go to music, which is a somewhat solitary
pleasure. Talk, for the satisfaction of talking, is less common. There
are exceptions; but this is the impression given by long residence in
Manchester. The Germans, with their club and singing and cheerfulness,
have done their best for their adopted city. But it was hard for a
cosmopolitan person like Arthur Johnstone, at once deeply bent on art
and beauty of all kinds, and also demanding some kind of cheerful
foreign life in the intervals of work, to find his account quickly in
his new abode, and the opinion of it we have recorded above is largely
his own.
For some time, therefore, he felt that Manchester was admirable rather
than refreshing. It had found for him the work of his life; he soon
became a force in his own calling; he had friends, new as well as old,
in the place; and he liked it better, as time passed, and as he managed
to find some of the intelligent festiveness that he wanted. Gradually he
touched several quite different circles, chiefly doubtless the musical,
but others also, journalistic, academic, and professional. Except with a
few, Johnstone made his way somewhat slowly in society. He could be
outspoken, uncompromising, and even explosive (though he never attacked
unless he thought there was provocation). These characteristics and his
daring line as a critic, both in talk and print, caused him to be
under-estimated by some otherwise intelligent persons. He might have
said, with Saint-Simon, that he was not "un sujet académique." He
disliked dons as a class; at Oxford and elsewhere they made him, of
course wrongly, restive. He had not been through their mill, and they
did not always care for or see his curious and original play of mind.
Their committee-trained caution of phrase was alarmed by his emphasis
and heavy-shotted superlatives, which merely amused his friends. There
were, of course, those among them who liked him well. In some houses he
had, apart from his musical gifts, a certain name for being "clever and
spiky." The latter epithet was only partially true, for he was
simple-hearted and good-natured the moment that the occasion arose. "His
sympathy," writes Madame de Navarro (Miss Mary Anderson), "never failed,
and his unaffected love and enthusiasm for the good, the true, and the
beautiful, could always be counted upon." All who had eyes saw this in
Johnstone, but all had not eyes. He was interested, absorbed, whelmed in
his subject, and thought instinctively more about ideas and purposes
than about persons, so that he sometimes ignored persons and therefore
dissatisfied them. He also said, what is true, that of the provinces, as
compared with the capital, "the favourite sin is cowardice." This, and
any semblance of snobbery, he openly despised. He liked to have power
and weight--and was right in liking it--in order to carry out certain
musical reforms. But he dismissed at once anyone who, as he put it, "may
be very well-informed, yet clearly cares nothing at all for things in
themselves, but simply and solely to be a person of consideration." So,
except as a musical critic, his measure, for good reasons, was not
invariably taken. He knew this fact, and felt it with some keenness, but
not from the side of disappointed conceit. He thought it was his lot in
life not to be able to talk freely and acceptably save to a very few
persons. He was sorry, but convinced that thus he was built. The old
Oxford sense of solitariness--and Oxford leaves dregs in the cup for
these her sensitive children--does not easily let go its victim. The
happiness and success of the latter years, however, were to leave him
markedly easier, mellower, and more communicative. He was, indeed, fully
entering on his own when he was cut down. But a larger and more various
experience than ever yet, both of thought and travel, was to be his lot
within the last eight years of his short life.
In April, 1897, Johnstone made his appearance in a new capacity. The
dispute between Greece and Turkey over the treatment of the Christians
in Crete had reached an acute stage and war was expected to break out at
any moment. The _Manchester Guardian_, more than any other English
newspaper, had championed the Greek cause. Naturally the proprietors
wished to secure the best and fullest accounts of the operations and to
have them despatched in advance of other papers. Mr. J. B. Atkins was
chosen to accompany the army in the field, and Johnstone's knowledge of
modern languages and acquaintance with Eastern Europe marked him out as
a valuable colleague. He was posted at Athens to receive reports from
the front, to arrange all the details connected with their transmission,
and to review the progress of the war, work which he carried through
very successfully. His gift of tongues, which once caused him to be
congratulated in Germany on "speaking English so well," enabled him soon
to get a working knowledge of modern Greek; he was fortunate too in
finding a Greek gentleman, who, grateful for the attitude of the
_Manchester Guardian_, acted as his interpreter and showed him about the
city. The same friend was on intimate terms with the Royal family, and
introduced Johnstone to the King and the Duke of Sparta. At the close of
his stay at Athens, he hesitatingly asked if there was any return he
could make for the various kindnesses he had received, when this friend
of royalty named so modest a fee that Johnstone was staggered; "it was
the pourboire of a head-waiter," he said afterwards when describing the
incident, adding that he had never realised what true democracy meant
until then. Among his associates there was the correspondent of a
Viennese paper who had somehow incurred the dislike and suspicion of the
war-party, but, as Johnstone thought, unjustly. At last his life was
openly threatened; there was no hope for him unless he managed to leave
the country at once, and even then there was a fair chance that he might
never reach the ship alive. Johnstone, being on good terms with the
patriotic party, pleaded for his life and undertook to get him away; he
cycled behind him for the four miles from Athens to the Piræus, and when
they reached the harbour kept the mob off until he was safely on board
an Austrian Lloyd steamer. The ride was an exciting one, for it was
expected that an attempt would be made to shoot the obnoxious
correspondent on the way down to the port; some shots were actually
fired, but went wide of the mark. When the war was nearing the end
Johnstone's services were not so necessary at Athens, and he went to
join Mr. Atkins in camp; but he saw no fighting, for the day after his
arrival peace was declared. His colleague returned to England, and
Johnstone spent some weeks in Crete to investigate the stories of those
atrocities which had been the immediate cause of the war. He went _sac
au dos_ like J. K. Huysmans in 1870, but unlike him, roughed it with
good humour and looked upon hardships of this kind as a helpful and
valuable experience. A year later when congratulating a friend, who was
somewhat habit-ridden, on his marriage, he wrote, "The problem of
changing one's habits is emphatically one of those to be solved
'_ambulando_.' The forms of ambulation best adapted to the purpose are
serving on a campaign, doing time 'with,' and getting married;"
admitting, however, that the last, though less drastic, was more
permanent in its effect.
Of the stay in Crete he always spoke as the best holiday of his life. He
was struck with the beauty both of the lowlands and the hills, and
predicted the day when the isle would be one of the great resorts of
Europe. The mountaineers redeemed for him the modern Greek race, which
his experience in Athens had led him to scorn utterly. He thought that
the citizen and official class were shifty and mendacious, and his
epithets were Juvenalian in vigour. The hillmen were of another race, in
body and spirit, and he loved sharing their hardy life. It is right to
add that he exempted the ordinary Greek soldier on the mainland from the
condemnation which he reserved for the officers. Some considerable time
he spent on the water, chartering a small steamer in order to coast up
near the seat of war. Before making his way homeward he went to
Constantinople, and the surface view, at any rate, of the Turk pleased
him well. He returned home in unusually buoyant health and wearing a
moustache, having fallen under the spell of Eastern prejudice against
the clean-shaved.
At the beginning of the musical season in October, 1898, a considerable
storm was raised in Manchester by the action of the guarantors of the
Hallé concerts, who had offered the post of conductor to Dr. Richter,
instead of renewing Dr. Cowen's appointment. It fell to Johnstone to
write the two leading articles on the subject which appeared in the
_Manchester Guardian_ of October 4th and 17th. His clear and judicial
summing up of the case left no room for questioning the right of the
guarantors to act as they had done, while his special knowledge of Dr.
Richter's immense services to musical art enabled him to write with
authority on the great chance now open for Manchester's acceptance. In
short, the point at issue lay between sentimental considerations and the
good of the community, and Johnstone very naturally declared for the
latter. Our reference to this controversy is intentionally brief, but
its importance at the time was considerable. Johnstone was now
recognised as a leader of musical opinion in Manchester, a position and
influence which became greatly extended in the years that followed.
There is no doubt as to the kind of power that he exerted. He did not
touch the actual administration of music in Manchester, in the College
of Music, or the Hallé concerts, or elsewhere. He did not directly
advise, therefore, in the choice of programmes, players, or singers. But
he went to every performance of the slightest note, whether popular or
not, and wrote about it incisively and heedfully, always preferring to
praise and interpret, but hitting very hard when he thought it
imperative to do so. He went to the prize exhibitions of the college
pupils, and reviewed them (omitting names) with a sympathetic ear for
promise. He lectured, often very well, at Mr. Rowley's Sunday gatherings
in Ancoats, and also in the History Theatre of Owens College. As a
lecturer, it may be observed, he suffered at times from having too much
to say and failing to compress it perfectly. But he held an audience of
unprofessional hearers with his sharply-cut and pungent style; and, in
one respect he was a fortunately un-English lecturer, for his power of
graphic gesture was quite noteworthy. These, however, were casual
activities; presswork took almost all his strength. He did a vast amount
of musical reviewing, and his room was stacked with the publications
that he simply found it useless to criticise. But the notices of actual
singing and playing were his main labour, as well as the pioneer
articles on unknown or imperfectly appreciated works. These were of high
value, and contain some of his best writing, being done at fuller
leisure. As to the quality of his published utterances we may say no
more; the articles we have saved for this book must speak for
themselves. But, without doubt, his judgment was looked for, and
welcomed or feared. He made it less easy for bad performers to come
again. He was generous, preferring even a slight excess, to oncoming and
unrecognised talent, or to remote and exotic kinds of talent which made
the fashionable multitude impatient. He became the worthy and articulate
voice of musical opinion in and beyond one of the English capitals of
the art.
We could hardly illustrate the kind of power that Johnstone exerted
better than by quoting what Canon Gorton writes concerning his
connection with the Morecambe musical festival:--
"Our festival was born in 1891. From the first it was organised entirely
apart from any pecuniary object; it brought us some delightful music, as
we set our own test pieces, and its aim was essentially educational. Our
special correspondent from the _Manchester Guardian_ did not arrive on
the scene until 1899. We had grown accustomed to unstinted praise, the
judges exhausted the adjectives in the language in describing the
excellence of the singing, composers told us that they had never heard
their part-songs so perfectly rendered. We thought we were perfect. Then
came a bomb from the critic (April 27th, 1899). He was not in touch with
us or cognisant with our aim, nor did he allow for our limitations. Much
of the music seemed to him unworthy; the competitive or sporting element
annoyed him; he saw rocks ahead, rocks on which others had been wrecked.
He wrote: 'The array of talent is no doubt imposing, but far too much of
the music is of an inferior stamp. It should not be forgotten that the
end and aim of such festivals is to foster a taste for music. But the
taste for inferior music needs no fostering. If, therefore, the
organisers of these festivals prescribe second-rate works for the
competitions, they simply destroy the _raison d'être_ of these
competitions. It is music as an art--not music as a sport or trade--that
requires fostering. There is a danger that such concerts may degenerate
into a vulgar pot-hunting business, and one would like to see everything
done, both as regards the music prescribed and the conduct of the
proceedings of the festival itself, to guard against that danger.' I do
not claim to know much about music, but I recognise good English when I
see it. I saw that 'our special correspondent' was a master of his
craft. I replied at once in the _Manchester Guardian_ rejecting his
interpretation of our motives, and still more the motives which brought
choirs to our Festival. I said that 'no chastening was joyous' and urged
that the critic should have patience, that we were then walking and that
some day we would run, and expressed a hope that he might be there to
see. I afterwards called upon him at the Reform Club, and this commenced
a friendship, the memory of which I shall always hold as a matter of
pride. He henceforth became for us 'the critic.' We not only awaited
his arrival, but in choice of music Mr. Howson (the choir-master) even
applied an additional test: 'This will test the choir, but will it also
satisfy Mr. Arthur Johnstone's taste?' The choir were conscious ever of
his presence. The judges were in the box giving their awards, but 'Mr.
Johnstone is in the grand circle, what does he think?' I heard him once
appeal to his wife; 'Am I not always open to conviction?' With his first
article in view, and with the knowledge of what subsequently he did for
us, I could but allow that he made good his claim, for he became the
most stalwart defender of our Morecambe musical festival--'a movement,'
he wrote in 1903 'that is one of the most genuine and hopeful things in
the musical England of to-day.' Again he complained that 'little or
nothing has been done by the teachers of music in Manchester to
encourage the musical revival that for a good many years had been going
on in the North of England, and more particularly in Lancashire.' Later,
he wrote a remarkable article in reply to the strictures of Mr. J.
Spencer Curwen. Mr. Curwen had questioned whether our festivals help
choral music in the long run, and proceeded to comfort us by saying that
'we were entering upon a dangerous path. The more success you have, the
nearer you will approach to the state of things which exists in Wales.'
To this belated warning Mr. Johnstone replied (October 5th, 1903): 'The
peculiar evils enumerated by Mr. Spencer Curwen as being fostered by
competitions were observed a good many years ago by those who are
organising meetings in North Lancashire. Indeed, one may say the
observation of these evils was the point of departure in Lancashire, and
we are, therefore, a little tired of these strictures on the choirs got
up to learn certain pieces, dispersing immediately afterwards; on
fragmentary performances, and the rest of the black things on Mr.
Curwen's list. It is evident that Mr. Curwen is entirely without
knowledge of the best Lancashire choirs formed by the influence of
competition in their own neighbourhood. These choirs have as strong a
principle of cohesion as any in the world. Their repertory is
exceedingly wide. Their organisers show immense enterprise in unearthing
the treasures of the old English and Italian madrigal writers and of the
finest modern part-song writers. Let Mr. Curwen go to Morecambe next
spring; his ideas on the subject of musical competition will be pretty
thoroughly revolutionised.' Yes, Mr. Johnstone was open to conviction,
sought nothing less than the truth, was at infinite pains to obtain
it--_O si sic omnes_. But the debt we owe to him was not merely because
he was a critic keen to discern the good, not merely because he proved a
fearless champion. He became a friend always ready to discuss methods of
development, and to place his exact and wide knowledge at our disposal,
and after we had formed our plans it was a great gain to Mr. Howson and
myself to test their wisdom by his opinion. He spoke frequently of the
capacity for conducting which the festival revealed, and inveighed
against the star system, whether among vocalists, instrumentalists, or
conductors--and of these last he had in his mind's eye several whom he
maintained we ought to rely upon. It does not fall to me to speak of him
as a friend, as a delightful companion, as a courteous gentleman--one
whom I married and one whom, alas! I buried in the prime of his powers."
Johnstone took the position he had thus made with increasing
seriousness, and worked during the Manchester musical season harder than
ever. In the summer he went abroad, but not entirely for rest. He
greatly expanded his knowledge, and also his musical reputation and that
of his paper, by his visit to festivals at Bayreuth, at Oberammergau,
at Düsseldorf, and at Vienna. Forced to choose, we have hardly been
able, within these limits, to quote from the contributions he sent home.
The last of his foreign journeys was unlike all the others, which had
been taken alone. The words quoted above from the letter of January,
1902, were no longer to be true, though the desired companionship came
late. A solitary life in lodgings, and the absence of domestic ties to
one of his affectionate and home-loving nature (which lay behind his
gipsy habits) could not be compensated even by hosts of friends; but
brighter days were in store. In June, 1902, he became engaged to Miss
Lucy Morris, a Manchester lady who had won considerable distinction at
Cambridge; and henceforward the most human of interests gave fresh
inspiration to his life and work.
Their marriage took place two years later, on June 28th, 1904, quietly
at Morecambe. The friend of both, Canon Gorton, married them, and
another friend, Mr. Howson, undertook the musical part of the ceremony,
which was performed by the Morecambe Madrigal Society and the church
choir. There never was a wedding with better music, and for once the
hackneyed description, "the service was fully choral," might have been
used with a real meaning. The honeymoon was spent on the Riffel Alp:
afterwards the travellers attended the Bayreuth festival, returning to
Manchester at the end of August, where they went to live at Tarnhelm
(named after the magic helmet of the "Ring") in Victoria Park. A few
more months of happiness remained to Johnstone. On Thursday, December
8th, he was taken seriously ill, but though in considerable pain he
attended a concert in the evening, and wrote a notice of the
performance. The next morning his condition was worse, and on Saturday
he was operated upon for appendicitis. But relief came too late, and on
Friday, December 16th, his sufferings ended. He had just completed his
forty-third year: he was in the plenitude of his intellectual powers,
and had entered upon the happiest and most useful period of his life.
This cruel and sudden ending to Johnstone's career, at a moment when he
had reason to be reconciled to life and to forgive circumstance, when he
was wider in his critical sympathies and more thoroughly master of his
means of expression than ever before, and when his public influence was
strong, stirred the musical society of north-western England. North and
South are two different nations--neighbours that often carefully ignore
and misunderstand each other. This appears to be specially the case in
musical criticism. The London press said much too little. But the word
"provincial" has no application to the musical energies of Manchester.
It is like one of the great German towns, Munich or Frankfurt, being
wholly independent of the capital, of which it is not a colony. The mark
made by Johnstone in this region was attested in a measure that he would
never have foreseen. The _Manchester Guardian_, besides giving an
honourable obituary notice to its critic, received far more letters in
his honour, expressing sorrow at his early death and admiration of his
character, than it found space to print, although the most salient of
them filled its columns. They were written with knowledge, not by
laymen, but by persons with whom Johnstone had worked and had dealt
faithfully, sometimes stringently. The remark of Canon Gorton, "I began
my friendship with a quarrel," might be echoed more than once.
Johnstone's clean, hard literary thrust, or _punch_, free from noisy
hammering violence, was a not infrequent introduction to his
acquaintance. It was given with a will, but in a spirit thoroughly, and
to third parties amusingly, impersonal. The letters as a whole give a
clear notion of the intelligent professional view concerning him; of
his honesty, catholicity, and knowledge. He had been everywhere, he
counted, and when he had gone he was missed.
One of Johnstone's brothers in the craft, Mr. Ernest Newman, after
referring to a dispute which had led to their friendship, spoke of him
as "the best and strongest Englishman of our time in this line." Dr.
Adolph Brodsky, after praising in especial Johnstone's accounts of
pianoforte performances, singled out his services in breaking down the
popular prejudice in England against Bach. Others wrote of his musical
erudition and his "laudable desire to prevent anything in the form of
charlatanism from finding a place in the musical assemblies of
Manchester." Canon Gorton, who, as we quoted above, wrote with gratitude
of the high stimulus given by Johnstone to those local efforts which
save music from being unduly centralised in the bigger cities, and his
pertinent remarks upon the rarity and value of great musical critics
claim quotation, as they bring home the public sense of loss in
Johnstone's death.
"He held a high view of his office, and would make a sacrifice of self
rather than a sacrifice of truth. It is difficult to calculate the
extent of your loss. Musicians succeed musicians; they being dead may
yet speak. But the critic's words are ephemeral; they remain in the
files of the newspapers. For musicians there are schools; but what
school is there for critics? In music we need guides, men with a wide
horizon, a general culture, men unfettered by musical faction, with
definite ideals, with command of the English tongue, of courage and of
true instinct. Such an one, I take it, was Mr. Arthur Johnstone. Who
will fill his place?"
Upon this precise statement of the case we could not try to improve. We
can only add some words upon the nature of the man apart from his
profession. In an estimate of Johnstone's character the foremost place
must be assigned to his love of truth in all things; this virtue was the
touchstone he applied to his friends and to all artistic work. M. Vantyn
happily quotes, as the most appropriate motto for him, Locke's words,
"To love truth for truth's sake is the principal part of human
perfection in this world and the seed-plot of all other virtues," adding
by way of comment, "In everything, in all intercourse, upon all
occasions, under all circumstances, whether in enjoyment, in work, in
serious intercourse, he was a gentleman in the strictest sense of the
word." Next we may place his wonderful sympathy with the oppressed in
every class. Even where there was much that roused his anger in the
sinner, as in the case of Oscar Wilde, he was indignant at the merciless
treatment he received, and pleaded for a minor punishment. Where his
sympathy could have free play he was tender in the extreme, he would
take infinite personal trouble, and give all that his modest means
permitted. He was fond of animals, he disliked the idea of killing them
in "sport," and was glad that most of his intimate friends shared his
view. But he was not unreasonable on this point; and, to take the real
test question, he was not absolutely opposed to vivisection under
stringent conditions. For all his early talk of the "joy of life" he was
more anxious to secure it for others than for himself. He was tolerant
under his armour, and would rebuke pointless severity by saying, "Well,
well, there is something wrong with almost everybody;" but he did not
extend this indulgence to the cruel and pedantic. His youthful
rebelliousness, apartness, and questioning of society did not all
vanish, but were taken up and transformed into a more flexible temper;
for they had never been the mere plant of nihilism and vanity, that a
selfish nature manures in its barren private garden. Some of his friends
valued, above all, his total lack of the small inquisitiveness, which he
resented more than anything in others. He was deep in his work or in
the minor preparations for the day, and did not trouble much about his
friends' affairs. But when anything was doing, he emerged at once. When
one of his old companions was in suspense over illness at home, and yet
could do nothing but wait, Johnstone planned for him and personally
conducted an elaborate series of distractions and amusements covering
about four hours--not an easy thing to do in Manchester--each of them
appearing to be improvised as it came. The trouble over, he relapsed
into thought and went his ways. There were many such incidents. A
picturesque and noble character of this kind, with its traits of
quaintness, claims thus much record, and the more so that reticence made
it less easy to discover. To the public the journalist is such a mere
spectral hand and pen, writing by lamplight, without a face or form
behind it, as we hear of in a certain class of old ghost-stories.
Johnstone had become more than this to many of his readers. But they
could not know him as a man. It is well, therefore, to lift so much of
his privacy as may enable them partially to do so. He went through the
world scornful of its common valuations, appraising for himself,
watching with a certain isolation, and always preferring (if he must
choose) liberty to happiness, and rightful pride to obvious advantage.
But he was all the more human for that.
We may here say something about his piano playing. Johnstone, of course,
never professed to be more than an amateur. He was quite aware that the
difference in executive skill between the professional and the best
amateur is almost as great in music as in billiards; and that, to
paraphrase Matthew Arnold's saying, "Technique is three-fourths of
musical performance." As to the remaining fourth his playing stood on a
very high level. Even in undergraduate days the charm of his rendering
was considerable, always carefully thought out and individual. If he had
never heard a piece performed, his insight was remarkable, lighting
instinctively upon what one realised was the best way of playing it. His
touch was very delicate; he never forced the tone out of a piano, and
always avoided anything that might be called hard hitting. He liked best
playing something in the style of a Rubinstein barcarolle, where the
music should speak through a veil of sound. But his strength really lay
in a fine sense of rhythm, a rare gift even among great pianists.
Whatever piece he attempted he took at the proper pace, even if
occasionally a note might be missed or a passage blurred, rather than
give a false idea of it by playing too slowly; what was altogether
beyond his powers he left alone. On his return from the Cologne
Conservatoire his actual execution was at its best, the fingers strong
and lissom; and, being at the top of his physical health, his playing
was full of almost exuberant vitality. A weak circulation was always a
trial, and it was his habit to warm his fingers at a fire, when
possible, before sitting down to the piano. It was perhaps a small
talent, but singularly dainty and cultivated, for which our memory of
twenty-five years is profoundly grateful.
We might expect that the qualities he aimed at in his own playing would
be those that most attracted him in the great pianists of his period. Of
course he admired at their full value those transcendent players,
Rubinstein, Sophie Menter, Paderewski, Rosenthal; but there are also
artists equally unapproachable in their own delicate way, such as
Pachmann, Godowsky, Reisenauer, Siloti, and it was from them he received
the greatest personal pleasure.
As critic his first object was to explain the qualities and scope of the
music (in Pater's words, "to disengage its virtue"); to show, if a
classic, why it had attained its position, if modern, why it should
command serious attention. He never assumed too much musical knowledge
on the part of his readers, avoiding the use of technical expressions,
still more of stereotyped phrases. Bad work and slovenly performance he
could chastise unsparingly, but he never wrote harshly when he
recognised genuine effort, and he was very generous in his praise of
young performers, and often attended minor concerts at some
inconvenience to encourage rising artists. His style was clear and
precise, rather expository in tone; coloured when the occasion demanded,
and occasionally enriched with allusions to other arts. Thus the
elaborate tracery of Gothic architecture exhibited in Strasburg
Cathedral (a favourite figure) is employed to illustrate Bach and
contrasted with the formal classicism of earlier composers, and the
Palladian style of Handel; Elgar's "Dream of Gerontius" is compared to
some "jewelled _ciboire_ of the Middle Ages;" a pianist's playing of
arabesque passages reminds him of the "arrogance and costly unreason of
fine jewellery." His discernment of any new work of permanent value was
quick and unerring; we may instance his early estimate of Elgar and
indeed of Strauss too (for his position then was uncertain) as having
been in advance of general musical opinion, though unquestioned at the
present day. Tchaïkovsky's Pathetic Symphony was a more obvious
discovery; here he showed his critical power rather in quenching the
popular enthusiasm (which he had at first assisted in creating) for this
work when the public seemed to have lost all sense of proportion, by
reminding his readers that after all "Tchaïkovsky and Dvoràk are
inspired barbarians and must not be put on the same level with Beethoven
and Schumann." Mention too should be made of his appreciation of Liszt,
whose services to music are too frequently ignored--the creator of the
modern pianoforte technique, the brilliant and original composer, and
the generous friend of Wagner.
In their choice of the articles of which this volume is composed the
editors have given special prominence to those on the works of Sir
Edward Elgar and Herr Richard Strauss, the two composers of our time
who, as Johnstone considered, would bear the largest share in
influencing the cause of musical development. Many of the articles were
written on the first production of important works, and, in Elgar's
case, further impressions are given of later performances of the same
work. Those on the great acknowledged masters, if they cannot add much
more to our stock of actual knowledge, are interesting as confessions
of a sound musical faith. It is also true that the sum of potential
energy in the works of these great masters is infinite; in this sense,
that they strike a new flash out of every fresh and apprehensive mind.
They can beget generations of critics, each with another thing to say.
Such criticism is not a mere absorptive or passive process; it is
re-creation: it puts into fresh terms, by the art of words, some of the
impressions that have been built up of sound without language; or it
tells those who have felt the same thing what they did not clearly know
or remember that they had felt. The power to explain music is rarer than
competence in judging books. It may be thought that amongst Englishmen
of our generation Arthur Johnstone had as large a share as any of this
re-creative genius.
Musical Criticisms
CHAPTER I.
BACH.
[Sidenote: =The Genius of Bach.=
_November 27, 1901._]
In the minds of those who have specially at heart the welfare and
progress of musical art in this country nothing at the present time
looms larger than the church music of Bach. To acquiesce in the
prevalent indifference of the public to that music we feel to be
impossible. If Shakespeare is nothing but a bore, there seems to be an
end of imaginative literature; and similarly, in music, any person whom
Bach entirely fails to interest had better give up all pretence to being
musical. For Bach is not one of the composers, like Berlioz, Liszt,
Tchaïkovsky, Dvoràk, or Richard Strauss, whom it is allowable to like or
dislike. Bach is the musical Bible--the foundation of the faith.
Historically considered, both Bach and Handel are artists of the
Reformation and the Renaissance. But if we fix attention on their
essential musical personalities, we find a certain broad difference
between the two great eighteenth century composers, which is fairly well
suggested by calling Bach a Gothic and Handel a Renaissance artist.
Bach's "Passion according to St. Matthew" stands to Handel's "Messiah"
in something like the same kind of contrast that Strasburg Cathedral
presents to St. Peter's in Rome. On the other hand, in its course of
development music has been quite different from architecture and the
graphic and plastic arts, and modern music owes quite a hundred times
more to Bach than it does to Handel. Bach represents by far the greatest
stimulating influence that has ever existed in the musical world. His
stupendous industry, resulting in a body of first-rate work that may be
reckoned among the greatest wonders of the world (it is not possible for
a modern to know it all); his awe-inspiring union of very great talent
with very great character; the completeness of his human nature and the
absolute purity of his life and art--these things unite to make of
Bach's personality something truly august, something that administers a
quietus to the ordinary critical, fault-finding spirit. Glancing over
the huge library of his collected works and knowing the glories that a
few of them contain, one is fain to say, "There were giants in the earth
in those days." Yet "giant" is scarcely the word. For the astounding
sinew and sturdiness of the man were quite secondary in the composition
of his character to that quality, in virtue of which he worked on
throughout a long life as though in perpetual consciousness of something
higher than ordinary human judgment; not waiting for full appreciation,
which did not come till about a century after his death (very much as in
Shakespeare's case), but perfectly realising the great ethical ideal of
Marcus Aurelius--the good man producing good works, just as the vine
produces grapes. No greater praise can be bestowed on Handel than to
say that in his very best moments he is almost worthy of Bach, as, for
example, in the choral section "The Lord hath laid on Him the iniquity
of us all," or in the tenor of the recitative "He looked for some to
have pity on Him, but there was no man; neither found He any to comfort
Him."
[Sidenote: =Bach's Mass in B minor.=
_November 29, 1901._]
Under Dr. Richter's irresistible generalship the most arduous task ever
yet undertaken by the Hallé Choir was yesterday carried through to a
brilliantly successful issue. Bach's great Mass illustrates his tendency
to throw all the weightier eloquence of a sacred composition into the
chorus, a solo or duet being treated as a delicate interlude, some
florid _obbligato_ for violin, oboe, or "corno di caccia"--the
eighteenth century name for the ordinary orchestral horn--being
intertwined with the melodic line in the manner of Gothic tracery. The
Mass is in six main divisions--the Kyrie, with three sub-sections; the
Gloria and the Credo, each in eight; the Sanctus, Benedictus, and Agnus
Dei, each in two sub-sections. The two choruses of the Kyrie--the former
a wailing supplication, the latter a mystical counterpart washed clean
of earthly passion--were sufficient to show that the choir had a most
thorough grasp of their parts, all the difficult and complex chromatic
harmonies coming out with admirable clearness and correctness. The first
chorus of the Gloria, with its joyous _vivace_ movement, breaks into a
style much more generally "understanded of the people." Here the choir
were on thoroughly firm ground. The ring of the voices was magnificent,
and the superbly effective contrast at the words "Et in terra pax" was
perfectly given. The first occasion on which we noticed any serious
defect in the choral singing was in the burst of jubilant melody at the
opening of the "Et resurrexit." The jar was only momentary and was
doubtless the result of an over-vehement attack. It can scarcely be
questioned that the most marvellous chorus in the whole work is the
Sanctus, which expresses in six-part harmony the mystical rapture of
celestial beings set free from all care, pain, and strife. The effect of
those persistent three-quaver groups in their garlanded similar motion
is like nothing else in this world. They create a harmony of
unparalleled richness, filling the ear with a feast of ravishing sound.
The contrast with such choruses as Handel's "Hallelujah" and "Worthy is
the Lamb" is extremely striking. Handel was always of the Church
Militant. He was always strenuous, affirming the faith as it were with a
note of triumph over its enemies. Such a rose of Paradise as this
Sanctus of Bach's is quite remote from all that Handel could do. For an
earthly choir, however, with lungs and vocal chords liable to weariness,
all this infinitely ornate and elaborate passage-work is very trying,
notwithstanding the absolute suavity of the musical expression, and in
the ensuing "Hosanna" there were occasional signs of exhaustion. But the
choir recovered their breath during the two succeeding solos, and gave a
magnificent performance of the concluding "Dona nobis pacem."
[Sidenote: ="St. Matthew Passion."=
_January 25th, 1900._]
It is possible to regard the "St. Matthew Passion" of Sebastian Bach as
the greatest work of sacred musical art in existence, and thus as
greater than Handel's "Messiah"; while at the same time thoroughly
acquiescing in the greater popularity of the "Messiah." Handel was a
mighty artist and a most lordly person; but he was a man of the world
and a Court composer, and his religion, though perfectly genuine, was
external and official in character. Bach, too, was a mighty artist, but
he was not a man of the world. He was a devout and pious man and a man
of the people, and his religion was inward and personal. Again, Handel
was cosmopolitan, whereas Bach was thoroughly German. Not that Bach was
wanting in knowledge of Italian and other foreign music. He was a
perfectly comprehensive encyclopædia of the musical knowledge that
existed in his time. But the basis of his character was too homely,
simple and loyal to be modified by foreign influence. Thus while Handel
became musically an Italian, Bach remained thoroughly German. All these
circumstances suggest reasons for the much wider popularity of Handel's
music by comparison with Bach's. The general public like the clear and
definite outline, the structural simplicity, that they find in the
Italian and quasi-antique style of Handel, while they are bewildered by
the subtlety, the complexity, the varied imaginative play, and the
rejection of set forms that they find in Bach. It must be remembered
that the average man of the world to a great extent determines the tone
of the general public; one may be thankful that there exists any work
of sacred musical art so splendid as "Messiah," which is to a great
extent intelligible to the average man of the world, and one may rest
satisfied that, for the present at any rate, the "Messiah" should be
performed often, the Passion music seldom.
A long line of Christian aspiration and endeavour culminates in the "St.
Matthew Passion" music. The Good Friday service, or mystery, of the
Passion dates back to mediæval times. Musical settings of it are quite
innumerable. They fall into three main groups, according to style. The
earliest are in the "Plain-song" of the mediæval church. At the period
of Luther's Reformation the plain song gave way to the chorale style.
Finally, there are many settings in the oratorio style. Of these Bach
himself certainly wrote four, and probably five. By universal consent
the "St. Matthew Passion" is the finest of Bach's settings. The main
outlines of the scheme were fixed by tradition. Bach had the assistance
of a poet named Picander in arranging his text, but it was by Bach's own
judgment that all important points were settled. He divided the story
into two parts. The first comprises the conspiracy of the High Priest
and Scribes, the anointing of Christ, the institution of the Lord's
supper, the prayer on the Mount of Olives and the betrayal of Judas, and
ends with the flight of the disciples. In the second part are set forth
the hearing before Caiaphas, Peter's denial, the judgment of Pilate, the
death of Judas, the progress to Golgotha, the Crucifixion, Death and
Burial of Christ. Between the two parts there is a broad contrast, a
certain solemn stillness prevailing in the first and a passionate stir
in the second. Fifteen chorales are heard in the course of the work,
each forming a meditation upon the foregoing incident in the story. The
chorus is double, and there is immense power in the manner in which the
two main masses of sound are used, both to emphasise all that has poetic
value and to express the many elements composing the mighty picture.
Most of the solos are supported by the first choir. The utterances of
Christ are given by a bass voice with string quartet accompaniment. The
bass voice is in accordance with tradition. Most of the other
recitatives have an _obbligato_ accompaniment, in which a _motif_
bearing figurative reference to some prominent image in the text is
worked out. The _obbligato_ is in most, though not in all, cases
assigned to a wind instrument, so as to contrast still further with the
music accompanying the words of Christ. The longest solo part is that of
the Narrator, who sings tenor. In the course of a long and masterly
discussion Dr. Spitta, the great biographer of Bach, contends that the
"St. Matthew Passion" is not, strictly speaking, either dramatic music
or oratorio music. One passage in the discussion may here be
quoted:--"Consider the passage where the Jewish people, prompted by the
High Priests and Elders, demand the release of Barabbas. The Evangelist
makes them reply to Pilate's question with the single word 'Barabbas.'
The situation is, no doubt, full of emotion, and an oratorio writer
might have let the tension of the moment discharge itself in a chorus.
But it would necessarily have been embodied in a form in which the
chorus could have its full value as a musical factor, in a broadly
worked-out composition with a text of somewhat greater extent. The
dramatic composer would have given it the utmost brevity, since it
stands midway in the critical development of an event. He would have to
consider the progress of the action as well as the expression of
feeling. A sudden roar of the excited populace--thronging tumultuously
about the governor--a sudden roar and brief turmoil of voices would be
the effect best suited to his purpose. Bach, composing a devotional
Passion, makes the whole choir groan out the name 'Barabbas' once only,
on the chord of the minor seventh approached by a false close."
Dr. Spitta's point is that Bach's music interprets the feeling of devout
Christians, neither subordinating the purport of the text to a musical
poem, like a conventional oratorio composer, nor entering into the point
of view of the actor, like any other kind of dramatic composer. Dr.
Spitta's arguments on this point are quite convincing; and we do not
follow his practice of calling the work a "mystery" instead of an
oratorio, only because the former word would not be generally
intelligible, and because, in this country, we call any work of sacred
art for voices and instruments an oratorio, if it is not a Mass, and if
it is on too grand a scale to be called a cantata.
[Sidenote: =A Minor Concerto.=
_March 14, 1902._]
Anyone who knows his interpretation of Bach's A minor Concerto can
scarcely help associating Dr. Brodsky with that work very much as one
associates Joachim with Beethoven's, and Sarasate with Mendelssohn's
Violin Concerto. There is no other work that gives us so much of Bach's
musical individuality within the scope of a clear, simple, and widely
intelligible scheme. Bach made no music for the theatre, the casino, or
the fashionable ballroom. He seems to have written almost exclusively
for the church and for innocent, paternally safeguarded merry-making. He
was a good old patriarch who composed either to praise God or to help
the young people enjoy themselves--for if anyone imagines that Bach's
gigues, gavottes, sarabandes, and so forth were not meant for actual
dancing he is greatly mistaken. In such works as the Concertos one may
still trace the twofold impulse clearly enough, though all is idealised,
structurally elaborated, and otherwise adapted to a purely artistic
purpose. For in the first movement of the A minor Concerto--Dr.
Brodsky's special piece--we have something that brings the spirit into
the proper atmosphere. Bach takes us, as it were, to church, composing
our minds, as we go, with strong and able talk about subjects
appropriate to the religious season and the service that we are to
attend. The second movement is the service, and the Finale is the
afternoon walk or dance; Bach would probably have approved of Sunday
dancing. Dr. Brodsky is unsurpassable in the andante, where the
powerful, composed, and majestic rhythm of the bass finds a poetic and
delicately fanciful commentary in the solo part. Here one perceives the
difference between Bach's and Beethoven's religious standpoint, between
the ages of faith and of strife, between the _ancien régime_ and the
revolutionary period. For Bach the ancient faith is enough, while in the
spirit of Beethoven there ferment, fume and rage the ideas of the
French Revolution. The Hellmesberger cadenza played by Dr. Brodsky in
the Finale is perhaps the best-written excursus of its kind in
existence. It passes in review the thematic material of the entire work,
with unfailing felicity of touch, and good judgment as to the amount of
development; and the extremely rich and florid figuration is all so
neatly spun out of elements contained in the body of the work, that it
seems to have grown where we find it hanging, and has no suggestion of
anything alien about it.
CHAPTER II.
BEETHOVEN.
[Sidenote: =C Minor Symphony, No. 5.=
_October 22, 1897._]
The opening of the first movement forms the subject of a celebrated
passage in Wagner's pamphlet on conducting, where he complains of the
manner in which the pauses on E flat and D used to be scamped, and of
many other defects which were usual in the performances of forty years
ago. He represents Beethoven rising from his grave and apostrophising
the conductor with a harangue that begins: "Hold thou my _fermate_
[pauses] long and terribly." Wagner was a most exacting critic, but we
venture to think that he would have been fairly satisfied with last
night's rendering of the first movement. The contrast of the masculine
and feminine elements which are inherent in the first and second
subjects respectively was presented with all possible effect; the pauses
were as long and terrible as Wagner could have desired, and were
sustained with a perfectly equable tone-delivery; the beautiful
unaccompanied phrase for oboe--which on the recurrence of the passage
takes the place of the _fermata_, or pause, at the twenty-first
measure--was given with all possible force of expression; and many
other individual beauties of the rendering might be cited. The second
movement is less taxing for the performers than the rest of the work; it
was given in a manner well in keeping with the spirit of the symphony,
which is like some vast work of sculpture in bronze, such as the gates
of the Baptistery at Florence. Just such plastic force in the moulding
of mighty tone-elements and just such nobility of the imagination did
Beethoven possess as enabled Ghiberti to mould those wonderful gates,
concerning which Michelangelo said that they were worthy to be the gates
of Paradise. The scherzo, too, was an artistic triumph for the
orchestra. Not a point was missed in that wonderful and uncanny
tone-picture. A dance of demons it has been called; but it must be
remembered that many great artists have treated grotesque and grisly
subjects with an ineffably beautiful touch, such as we see, for example,
in Alfred Rethel's marvellous drawing "Death the Friend." Not that the
scherzo in Beethoven's C minor symphony breathes the spirit of that
drawing, which is restful and serene, while the scherzo is full of weird
mockery. The only point of the comparison is that in both works we find
a grotesque subject ennobled and beautified by a great artistic
imagination. Strange that the C minor symphony should often have been
quoted as an irregular and anarchical composition. Sir George Grove has
pointed out in his well-known analysis that the entire work conforms
most strictly to structural principles, and that its chief
irregularities are the linking together of the scherzo and finale and
the _reprise_ of the scherzo shortly before the concluding presto.
[Sidenote: =The Sixth Symphony.=
_February 24, 1899._]
In dealing with this symphony, the conductor had occasion to show
qualities different from those that have been called forth by the
preceding works of the present Beethoven series. The third and fifth
symphonies are of a strongly exciting character, the second is also
distinctly exciting, at any rate in the finale, the fourth is a kind of
mildly celestial or seraphic utterance, and the first does not truly
represent the mature master in any of his moods. In previous
performances of the series it was the successful rendering of some
exciting element in the music, or the interpretation of a sublime
emotion, upon which the conductor seemed to lay a kind of stress.
Yesterday the case was quite different. The Pastoral Symphony is not
exciting, or sublime, or mysterious, those qualities being alien to the
genius of pastoral music or poetry. It is an expression of the emotion
stirred by simple and homely delights; and for its interpretation it
requires, in addition to the technical equipment, only a certain fresh
and healthy energy. Even the religious note near the end is of a simple
idyllic character. Once more the interpretation was, in our view, very
admirable. The conductor seemed fully to grasp the poetic import of each
section, and, under his guidance, the orchestra fully conveyed the
breezy delights of the opening movement, the soothing murmur of the
brook, the boisterous mirth of the ensuing allegro, the contrasting note
of the storm, and the final hymn of thanksgiving. It has been said that
Beethoven's music has an ethical bearing; and, as many persons have
great difficulty in understanding how any music can have an ethical
bearing, it may be worth while to suggest that the Pastoral Symphony,
following the tremendous emotions of the preceding symphonies, teaches
precisely the same lesson as the opening of Goethe's "Faustus and
Helena," where the sylphs, typifying simple, untroubled natural
influences, are busied about the person of the sleeping "Faust," pitying
the "unhappy man whether good or wicked," and seeking to soothe his
tormented spirit. According to the view of Goethe and Beethoven there is
no other healing for the unhappy man's tormented spirit but in the
simple, untroubled influences of nature. Such, in addition to its
musical beauties, is the ethical lesson of the Pastoral Symphony.
[Sidenote: =The Seventh Symphony.=
_March 3, 1899._]
One quality differentiating Beethoven's Seventh Symphony from the rest
of the nine is well expressed by Sir George Grove in his famous book
("Beethoven and his Nine Symphonies") when he calls it the most
rhythmical of them all. Beyond question the rhythm is on the whole more
strongly marked in the seventh than in any of the others. The slow
movement is not called a march; yet it has a far more definite tramping
rhythm than the movement that is called a march in the Heroic Symphony.
In the finale the rhythmical emphasis attains a degree of reckless
violence that has never been surpassed by any composer except
Tchaïkovsky. A scherzo is always strongly rhythmical; but in the scherzo
of this symphony one finds a kind of frenzied rushing, whirling
movement that is rare in Beethoven's works. Another differentiating
quality of the symphony is grotesque expression, which is strong in the
vivace, stronger in the scherzo, and goes all lengths in the finale. As
with the later works of many other great artists, it is hard to divine
the poetic intention of this symphony. One perceives a marvellous
design, for the most part grotesque in character; one perceives the work
of a gigantic imagination, smelting the stubborn tone-masses as in a
furnace and moulding them to its purposes with a kind of superhuman
plastic force. But what the mighty design illustrates is not, at
present, obvious. The grotesqueness of the first, third, and last
movements is all the more striking from the character of the slow
movement, which is absolutely remote from the grotesque. The quality of
the expression in that slow movement eludes all classification. It is
not exactly a funeral march, and not exactly a dirge, though it is
undoubtedly mournful in character. A kind of unearthly rhythmical chant
one might imagine it to be, accompanying some mysterious function among
the gods of the dead. There is perhaps no slow movement left by
Beethoven the beauty of which is more penetrating or more imposing.
After a fine and spirited rendering of the introduction and vivace, the
slow movement--inscribed "allegretto" in the score, though the composer
afterwards expressed a desire that the indication should be changed to
"andante quasi allegretto"--was played with fine expression, though
perhaps a trifle too quickly. The scherzo was entirely admirable. At the
opening of the finale the rushing semiquavers in the violin part were,
for some reason, not quite clear, though later in the movement, when the
music had become more complex, the same figure sounded clear enough. On
the whole, the rendering of the symphony well maintained the success
that had previously attended the series.
[Sidenote: ="Eroica" Symphony.=
_February 1, 1900._]
The fact that the leading theme in the first movement of the "Eroica"
Symphony is taken note for note from Mozart's youthful operetta,
"Bastien et Bastienne," is of no great importance. If an operetta
contained something that could thus be caught up into the seventh heaven
of art, its existence was thereby justified very much better than the
existence of most other operettas. The notion of bringing a charge of
plagiarism against Beethoven in reference to this theme is absurd beyond
expression. There is, after all, nothing in the theme but a certain
rhythmical arrangement of the common chord so simple that it might well
have occurred to two composers independently. Whether it occurred
independently to Beethoven or whether he heard Mozart's operetta at the
Elector's Theatre in Bonn while he was a boy and unconsciously
reproduced the theme, as is conjectured by Sir George Grove, is of no
importance. With Mozart the theme is little more than a piece of chance
passage-work. It leads to nothing; whereas with Beethoven it leads to
developments of extraordinary richness and significance, forming the
most important element in a tone-picture that greatly surpasses in
passionate and incisive eloquence, in fulness of matter, varied
interest, and plastic force anything that previously existed in the
world of music. It would be hard to mention any other of Beethoven's
themes from which results quite so tremendous have been obtained. It is
repeated between thirty and forty times in the course of the movement,
reappearing under an endless variety of forms, assigned to all sorts of
different instruments, changing in key, in tone-colouring, in loudness
or softness of utterance, producing an infinite variety of effects in
the harmony, combining in all sorts of unexpected ways with other
themes, and on every reappearance taking on new value, bringing fresh
revelation. To such great uses may an operetta tune come at last, if it
happen to be laid hold of by a Beethoven with an imagination like a
mighty smelting furnace, and a hand that can model like a great sculptor
in bronze. In Dr. Richter's interpretation of the "Eroica," the most
striking point is his treatment of the contrast between those musical
elements symbolising phases of virile energy and the strains of
consolation and reconciliation. Of the latter element a characteristic
example is the heavenly duet for oboe and 'cello that occurs just after
the terrific outburst of rage and defiance in the "working-out" section
of the first movement. It is a crisis of beauty and grandeur to which,
so far as we know, no other conductor can now do justice. But here, and
throughout the mighty first movement, we were reminded that Dr.
Richter's pre-eminence is really more unquestionable in Beethoven than
in any other music. His Wagner renderings are approached by others, but
his Beethoven renderings are not even approached. To the noble and
solemn strains of the Funeral March again complete justice was done; and
the same may be said of the scherzo--a movement full of radiant mirth
and containing in the trio the most beautiful horn music ever
written--and of the finale in variation form.
[Sidenote: =Symphony No. 2 in D.=
_January 15, 1904._]
According to Mr. Felix Weingartner, the advance from Beethoven's No. 2
to his No. 3 Symphony is so great as to be without parallel in the
history of art, and this we regard as sound doctrine. The No. 3--the
"Eroica"--represents not merely a contribution of unparalleled
brilliancy to the symphonic music of the period, but an immense
enlargement of its previously known possibilities. Such a work naturally
dwarfs all that has gone before in its own kind; but it is very
desirable to avoid the mistake of certain commentators who, perceiving a
great gulf between No. 2 and No. 3, declare the former to be an immature
work, not thoroughly characteristic of Beethoven, but exhibiting him as
a mere disciple of Haydn and Mozart. While listening yesterday to the
wonderfully animated and expressive rendering one could scarcely fail to
be struck by the fact that it is all intensely Beethovenish; that it
goes beyond Mozart, quite as distinctly and persistently as Mozart in
his superb G minor Symphony goes beyond Haydn. We need a revision of the
current view in regard to these early Beethoven Symphonies. Only the
first is immature. No. 2 is stamped with the true Beethoven
individuality on every page, and is comparable with Mozart's G minor in
the richness of its organisation and the potency of its charm. The
enormous difference between No. 2 and No. 3 is not to be correctly
indicated by calling the former immature. It is a difference that
separates the Beethoven Symphonies from No. 2 to the end into two
well-defined groups. As was long ago observed, the odd-number
Symphonies, beginning with 3, are cast more or less in the heroic mould,
while the intervening even-number Symphonies are much milder in
character--creations of halcyon periods in which the composer would seem
to have been storing up energy for the titanic labours of 3, 5, 7, and
9. Bearing this in mind, we have no difficulty in assigning No. 2 to its
proper place. It is to be grouped along with 4, 6, and 8, and it may
thus be called the first of the "halcyon" Symphonies. Besides the
general character of the music there is one very special reason for not
accepting the view of No. 2 as an immature work. In the second subject
of the Larghetto, we have a very beautiful and original musical idea, so
thoroughly recognised by the composer as one of his best and most
characteristic that he returned to it many years later when composing
his last and greatest slow movement. Compare pp. 29 and 363 of Sir
George Grove's "Beethoven and his Nine Symphonies," noticing in
particular that the key-relation of the syncopated theme to the general
scheme of the movement is the same in the two cases.
[Sidenote: ="Missa Solennis."=
_February 1, 1901._]
Until yesterday Beethoven's "Missa Solennis" had not been heard at these
concerts, but it is not surprising that performances of such a work
should be few and far between. It is, beyond question, the most austere
of all musical works--a product of Beethoven's quite inexorable mood. At
the period when it was written the composer had become a sort of
suffering Prometheus. Even apart from his deafness, it is wonderful that
Beethoven's persistent ill-fortune, his isolated and unhappy life,
should not have discouraged him and checked the flow of his creative
energy. But that the mightiest of his compositions should have been
produced when he was stone-deaf--that is surely one of the most
perfectly amazing among well-authenticated facts! So far as we know,
there never was any other case in which deafness failed to cut a person
off altogether from the world of music. With Beethoven it only brought a
gradual change of style. As the charm that music has for the ear faded
away he became more and more absorbed, aloof, austere, and spiritual.
The warm human feeling of his middle-period compositions gave way to a
style of such unearthly grandeur and sublimity as are oppressive to
ordinary mortals. Of that unearthly grandeur there is no more typical
example than the "Missa Solennis." Not only in regard to the composition
but even in regard to a performance the ordinary language of criticism
is at fault. Who ever heard a "satisfactory" performance of the "Missa
Solennis"? A spirit of sacrifice is demanded of the performers; for the
music is written from beginning to end with an utter want of
consideration for the weaknesses and limitations of the human voice. Of
course that would be intolerable in an ordinary composer. Handel's
combination of German structural solidity with Italian courtesy, sense
of style, and delight in rich vocal rhetoric is the ideal thing. By
comparison with the reasonable and tactful Handel, Beethoven is a kind
of monster, from the singer's point of view, but a monster of such
genius that his terrible requirements must occasionally be met.
The quartet was best in the astonishing "Dona nobis pacem" section,
where the composer seems to represent humanity as endeavouring to take
the Kingdom of Heaven by violence, protesting against all the oppression
that is done under the sun, and sending up to the throne of God so
instant a clamour for the gift of peace as may be heard amid the very
din of strife. For that prayer for peace sounds against the sullen
rolling of drums and menacing clangour of trumpets, the voices having
now a mighty unanimity, now the wail of this or that forlorn victim. One
looks in vain through the temple of musical art for anything to match
that tremendous conception marking the final phase of the "Missa
Solennis."
[Sidenote: ="Fidelio."=
_October 28, 1904._]
A most strange and unclassifiable chamber in the palace of musical art
is reserved for Beethoven's "Fidelio." A sort of despair is likely to
come over one who attempts to state how Beethoven stands in relation to
dramatic music. If one says that he was not a great dramatic composer,
there arise the questions--Did he not make the Symphony a hundred times
more dramatic than it ever was before? Did he not make music in
association with Goethe's "Egmont" that seems to belong for evermore to
that drama? Did he not individualise Leonora in music as well as Mozart
had individualised the much less exalted characters of Donna Anna and
Zerlina? Did he not achieve in his "Third Leonora" something that no one
has ever equalled or can ever hope to equal in the domain of the
dramatic overture? In fact he did all those things, and several more
that can be cited in apparent refutation of the statement that he was
not a great dramatic composer. And yet it is certain that he never
composed dramatic music as one to the manner born--not with the
unfailing adequateness to the theme of Gluck, the felicitous profusion
of Mozart, the glowing picturesqueness of Weber. No; in the mighty river
of Beethoven the symphonist's invention shrinks to a trickle in his one
opera. The water is incomparably limpid, and blossoms of the rarest
beauty and fragrance grow on the banks of the stream; but every page is
stamped, as it were, with the admission that writing operas was not
Beethoven's strong point: and beyond question he acted wisely in writing
only one. How mighty is the change when he takes the symbols of his one
musical drama and uses them for a monumental purpose, in the great
"Leonora" Overture! Beethoven is Shakespearean in the range of his mind
and in his attitude towards life, which he always approaches on the
purely human side, and without the preoccupations of the Court, the
camp, the cloister, the academic grove, or the church. But he is not
Shakespearean in his medium of expression, which is hard and
unyielding--a kind of musical bronze or granite. Yet "Fidelio"--despite
its jejune story, which suggests that Beethoven, having objected to
Mozart's "Don Giovanni" as scandalous, felt it his duty to compose an
opera on a subject that should be "strictly proper," and despite its
thin vein of invention--inevitably retains its hold on the musical
world. To call the success of it a _succès d'estime_ would be a misuse
of words. It focuses a certain range of poetic ideas that nothing else
of its kind touches, and stands--with its Wordsworthian simplicity and
moral goodness--among other operas like a Sister Clare amid a group of
fine ladies.
CHAPTER III.
BERLIOZ.
[Sidenote: ="Symphonie Fantastique."=
_November 1, 1901._]
The "Symphonie Fantastique" offers a more complete picture of the
composer's musical personality than any other single work. As a specimen
of youthful precocity it also stands alone. It was written at the age of
twenty-six, when the composer was still a student at the Conservatoire,
being persistently snubbed by a group of dons, who all--with the
possible exception of Cherubini, the Principal--were utterly his
inferiors in every kind of musical power, knowledge, and skill. The
experience of Berlioz at the Conservatoire of Paris was very similar to
Verdi's at a like institution in Milan; but the marks of genius in work
of the student period were far more distinct in Berlioz's than in
Verdi's case. We have said that, as a work of precocious genius, the
"Symphonie Fantastique" stands alone. No doubt other composers, such as
Mozart and Schubert, had shown genius of a higher order at an even
earlier age. But the "Symphonie Fantastique," as the work of a
'prentice-hand showing absolute mastery of the greatest and most complex
resources, has no parallel. The great fact that has always to be
remembered in regard to Berlioz is that he devoted himself with all the
energy of an enormous and highly original talent to one particular task
in music. That task was the winning of new material for the musical
medium, and what Berlioz accomplished in the world of tone was very like
what Christopher Columbus accomplished in the world of land and sea.
Berlioz too opened up a new hemisphere, and he did his work much more
thoroughly than the great navigator. This mighty achievement secures for
Berlioz a permanent place of the first importance in the musical
hierarchy. But to be deterred by respect for his genius from admitting
his faults is not the best way of using his magnificent legacy. Those
faults are none the less monstrous for being inseparable from his
individuality, and a thoroughly enlightened modern musician would
probably find it very difficult to define the attitude of his mind
towards the works of Berlioz's art. In a sense, everything in the best
of those works, among which the symphony played yesterday is
unquestionably to be reckoned, is justified. When one finds an artist
dealing with certain subjects as though to the manner born, and with
enormous power and resource, one must not condemn him because those
subjects are unpleasant or even horrible in the extreme. Such
condemnation is not living and letting live. Artistic power is
associated with qualities of the highest and rarest that human nature
produces, and it is always justified. The favourite subjects of Berlioz
may well prove a stumbling-block. "Orgy" very nearly became in his hands
a musical form. In at least three different works of his--"Symphonie
Fantastique," "Harold in Italy," and "The Damnation of Faust"--we find
a movement called by some such name, and, his appetite for horrors not
being satisfied with the "Witches' Sabbath" in the first of those three
works, he gives us another movement representing a procession to the
guillotine of a young man condemned for murdering his sweetheart. In
close association with this love of the lurid, spectral, and ghastly is
the bitterly ironical spirit which conceived an "Amen" chorus in mock
ecclesiastical style to be sung over a dead rat, the guying of the
composer's own love-theme with a jig-like variation on a specially ugly
instrument (the E flat clarinet) introduced into the orchestra for that
purpose, and the use of the stern and majestic Plain Song theme of the
"Dies Iræ" as a _cantus firmus_, to which the mocking laughter of
witches (rushing past through the air in a huge weltering broomstick
cavalcade) makes a kind of fantastic counterpoint. It is well to bear in
mind that the same talent gave us such miraculous gossamer fancies as
the "Queen Mab" Scherzo and the chorus of Sylphs and that most tenderly
beautiful and vividly conceived idyll "L'Enfance du Christ."
For the "Symphonie Fantastique" the orchestra had to be considerably
enlarged. In addition to all the usual instruments the score requires an
E flat clarinet, two bells (G and C), a second harp, an extra
kettledrum, and a second bass tuba. Everything had been rehearsed with
infinite care, and in all five movements the rendering was a display of
virtuosity such as only a very rare combination of favourable
circumstances would allow one to hear. No other composer displays a
very powerful and skilful orchestra to quite such immense advantage. As
Mr. Edward Dannreuther has finely and truly remarked--"With Berlioz the
equation between a particular phrase and a particular instrument is
invariably perfect." His violently wilful character manifests itself in
the harmony. His fancies devour one another, like dragons of the prime,
instead of progressing and developing in an orderly manner. But the
marvellous beauty of the tone-colouring and aptness of the passage-work
never fail. The parts of the symphony most thoroughly enjoyed by the
audience were, no doubt, the second movement in waltz rhythm (where the
most wonderful use is made of the two harps and the wood-wind) and the
march in the fourth movement, where the part symbolising the emotions of
the mob rather than of the victim is very brilliant and telling, with
suggestions of that Hungarian March which the composer afterwards made
his own.
[Sidenote: ="Faust."=
_March 7, 1902._]
No more original or more enigmatic figure than Hector Berlioz was
produced during the nineteenth century by the world of art--a word that
may here be understood in its widest acceptation, and thus as including
architectural, musical, graphic, plastic, and literary art. In one of
the earliest _critiques_ on his "Faust," which was first performed at
the Opéra Comique in Paris in 1846, the opinion was expressed that he
ought to have been a chemist, not a musician--a remark that gives
extraordinary point to a piece of advice that Berlioz once gave to
artists in general: "Always collect the stones that are thrown at you;
they may help to build your monument." The remark that Berlioz ought to
have been a chemist, originally intended as a sneer, is a perfect case
in point. He _was_ a chemist, and it is his chief glory to have been
that in the world of music. He tested, analysed, combined anew, and
prodigiously enriched those elements of tone which are the material of
the musical artist. Of course he was far more than chemist. He was also
explorer, but always in search of material for his essentially chemical
experiments in tone. One can scarcely wonder that "Faust" was a failure
at first. Amongst the happy-go-lucky patchwork of the book is much
evidence of that coarse and satirical vein which was so strong in the
composer. How could the public be expected to approve of an opera on the
subject of Faust that had no love-song or truly lyrical utterance of any
kind for the tenor hero, but, on the other hand, had a song about a flea
and a rat's requiem, ending with an "Amen" chorus in mock ecclesiastical
style, to say nothing of a scene in Pandemonium and an _orgie
infernale_? Berlioz was a sort of a belated mediæval. The very title,
"Damnation de Faust," is mediæval. Shakespeare and the other poets of
Renaissance and later times recognise the fate of a soul as a matter
_sub judice_ till the end of the world. But Berlioz had no more scruple
than Dante in anticipating the Last Judgment. Mediæval, too, is the
coarseness of the scene in Auerbach's cellar; and the _chanson
gothique_, about the King of Thule, sounds as if it had come to the
composer as a reminiscence from some previous state of existence, so
marvellous is the power of the quaint and weird melody to transport the
spirit back to a musty and hierarchic world with walled towns and narrow
streets, with terrorism and torture-chambers, with crusades and
knight-errantry, with impossible heights of holiness and unimaginable
depths of diabolism. But not to any of the defects or qualities rooted
in the composer's mediævalism must we look for the popularity which the
work acquired in this country some thirty-four years after the original
production in Paris and has retained ever since. What the general public
enjoys is the superb peasants' chorus near the beginning, the
arrangement of the Rácoczy March, which is the finest piece of military
music in existence, the chorus and dance of sylphs, Margaret's Romance,
and Mephistopheles' Serenade. Perhaps, too, a good many of them take a
sort of unregenerate pleasure in the rat and flea songs, while at heart
disapproving of such things, and of course they like the ballad of the
King of Thule, because no one who is musical at all can entirely fail to
perceive the charm of that wonderful melody. It appeals to plenty of
listeners who have no idea that there is anything Gothic or mediæval
about it.
[Sidenote: =The Centenary Celebrations.=
_December 10, 1903._]
Berlioz was the Columbus of music; he discovered the New World. By his
theory and practice of orchestration he so greatly enlarged and enriched
the resources of tone that all contemporary and subsequent composers
capable of understanding his message experienced an immense
exhilaration--a sense that new and hitherto undreamed-of possibilities
were opening out before them. The starting-point of his momentous
voyages was the idea of what is called "programme music." Like Wagner,
he perceived that after Beethoven symphonic music could do no more on
the old lines, but that music might learn to characterise much more
sharply than it had ever done before. His prodigious reform,
enlargement, and enrichment of orchestration was entirely carried out
under the influence of the desire for stronger and finer
characterisation, for a more varied and interesting play of emotion and
graphic suggestion. A good many musicians and music-lovers at the
present day, recognising the enormous merit of Berlioz's achievement in
orchestration, yet consider that, like Moses, he was not allowed to
enter the promised land to which he had led his people; or, more
literally, that Berlioz was not able to make really good use of his own
discoveries, the importance of which is to be recognised in the music of
Wagner, Dvoràk, Tchaïkovsky, and others who learned from Berlioz, rather
than in his own music. While admitting that later men, such as those
mentioned, have used the Berlioz instrument to a more spiritual kind of
purpose or with greater epic and dramatic significance, the open-minded
music-lover can scarcely deny that the compositions of Berlioz,
considered as absolute works of art, include a majestic array of
masterpieces. Such things as the "Te Deum" and "Messe des Morts" bear,
in their unparalleled vastness of conception, the stamp of an
imagination comparable only to Michel Angelo's. They are mighty
fragments of larger works never carried out--impossible to be carried
out. The best-known work by Berlioz--and the most perfect, on the whole,
of the extended works--is the "Faust," which must not be judged as an
operatic version of Goethe's "Faust," but rather as a musical setting of
the "Faust" story in the racy and drastic manner of the mediæval puppet
plays, Goethe's drama being only used in so far as it affords
suggestions for scenes of the well-salted and drastic animation that
Berlioz loved. Berlioz was a typical French Romantic. His music is
absolutely wanting in the ethical element that is so strong in Bach and
Beethoven. But he had a powerful and truly poetic sense of the
wonderful, the beautiful, the weird, and the characteristic. Over and
over again in his "Faust" he achieves typical excellence. That rapture
of spring which is one of the great, imperishable poetic themes has
nowhere in music been better rendered than in the first pages of "Faust"
(orchestra and tenor voice), and the ensuing peasant choruses are by far
the best musical expression of that "sunburnt mirth" which outside the
world of art is only possible under a southern sky. The Rácoczy March as
orchestrated by Berlioz is not only the finest piece of military music
in the world but is an immeasureably long way ahead of the next best
piece. The energy, gaiety, and tumultuous eloquence of the final section
(altogether Berlioz's own, of course), give us the musical symbol of "La
Gloire"--that important conception which has played a part in history
for three centuries. The scene on the banks of the Elbe is woven of
moonbeams and gossamer fancies that no other composer could have
handled. The rhythm of the Mephisto serenade is too good for this world.
Here the composer succeeds in expressing the diabolical without any
direct suggestion of malice--simply by creating the rhythm and accent of
laughter too monstrously whole-hearted and full-blooded for a mere man.
Another miracle is the "Chanson Gothique" (about the King of Thule),
which is, as it were, the distilled essence of all mediæval romances
about lovesick maidens looking forth from their casements. In the latter
part the composer falls a victim to his evil genius--the _macabre_,--and
the terrible squint of the madman is perceptible in the "Ride to the
Abyss" and the howling and gibbering of demons, which entirely lack the
significance of the demons in "Gerontius," and simply show us the
composer indulging his taste for the grotesque horrors of the old
miracle plays. The latter part of the composition should not be taken
too seriously. Even in the early part there is one example of the
composer's peculiar fondness for guying the offices of religion. But
this, too, should be lightly passed over and forgiven in consideration
of the feast that the work as a whole offers to the imagination and the
bracing salt wind of the composer's manly and affirmative genius.
CHAPTER IV.
LISZT.
[Sidenote: ="Faust" Symphony.=
_November 21, 1902._]
The melancholy fact has to be recorded that the "Faust" Symphony fell
flat on its first performance in Manchester. There seems to be something
in our national temperament which makes it peculiarly difficult for us
to penetrate the secret of Liszt and learn to understand his
tone-language. In musical society on the Continent "not to like Liszt"
is regarded as a fixed characteristic of the Englishman, and those few
Englishmen who have learned to like Liszt remember the gradual process
by which their ears were opened, like the learning of a foreign language
after one is grown up. Some composers have a manner of utterance that
may be picked up half unconsciously; but for Britons, at any rate,
Liszt's is not of that kind. Patience, persistent study, reflection,
observation, comparison, besides an ear of some subtlety, are necessary
for the understanding of it, and we have not the habit of taking music
seriously (except in the abstract) or of giving it our whole attention.
So a thing like the "Faust" Symphony goes over our heads as if it were a
poem in some foreign language of which we only apprehend the rhythm. It
is a pity, for to those few who understand the poem is very great and
splendid. Like some ghostly Ancient Mariner, the spirit of the master
holds us "with his glittering eye," and speaks as one who is full of
matter and wisdom and is a master of life. His story is that old one
about Faust and Gretchen--not the Berlioz version ending with the
Damnation of Faust, but the original Goethe version which deals with the
working out of Faust's salvation (the difference between the two being
really quite considerable),--and in the telling of this story he conveys
lessons to the heart that are much too delicate for words. A good many
composers have made "Faust" music of one kind or another. Spohr and
Schumann, Berlioz and Boïto, Wagner and Liszt, all paid their tribute to
the inexhaustible interest of the theme, besides Gounod--most
superficial and consequently best known of them all. Even in Gounod,
however, there is a little genuine "Faust" music--a very little. It is
to be found in the first few bars of the overture, in the Mephistopheles
Serenade, and, perhaps one might add, in the song about the King of
Thule, though Berlioz did that much better. Wagner's "Faust" Overture is
quite a great composition, and it is nearest akin to Liszt's Symphony.
But it is much too one-sided to vie in interest with Liszt's tremendous
composition, which seems to grasp the whole subject and tear the very
heart out of it, with a kind of imaginative power suggesting Victor
Hugo's, though the touch is more true. He begins with the solitary Faust
in his study, plunged in gloomy meditation, every phase of which the
music expounds (to him who listens closely enough)--intellectual pride,
reduced to impotence in the endeavour to solve the "riddle of the
painful earth"; the tranquillising of the spirit by mystical influences
seeming to emanate from a higher world; then the reawakening of pain in
the consciousness that had been hushed and charmed. Here the music,
passing up the chord with each note preceded by the semitone above,
sounds like a series of broken sighs. And presently we encounter
something quite new. A plaintive theme on the clarinet, answered by a
single viola, symbolises the vision of feminine companionship. Hope
reawakens, and the strength of Faust's nature asserts itself in the
splendid E major theme for full orchestra, destined to play the leading
part throughout the work. The movement is long, thoughtful, and no less
apt in invention than rich and glowing in tone-colour. In the second
movement, headed "Gretchen," we encounter quite a different atmosphere.
It is a worthy counterpart to the Gretchen episode in Goethe's poem--no
doubt the best picture of a girl, from the man's point of view, that
exists in literature. Inexpressibly beautiful is the contrast between
the fancy-free and the loving Gretchen. There is nothing in all music
more rich and rapturous than the ensuing love-scene, which reminds one
of the point in the first act of "Die Walküre" where the doors swing
open and reveals to the enchanted gaze of the lovers the spring
landscape bathed in moonlight. But Liszt is here more to the point than
Wagner. Then comes Mephisto with his diabolical dance, turning
everything into derision, till a light shines down from heaven, where
the soul of Margaret appears among the angels, and the "spirit that
denies," with his mask torn off, shrinks away, trembling and baffled.
Here the "chorus mysticus" gives utterance to the crowning idea of the
"Faust" drama--"The woman-soul draweth us upward and on." Such a work as
the "Faust" Symphony departs from the classical model inasmuch as it is
unified altogether by dramatic and characteristic and not at all by
architectural principles. It may also be regarded as three
character-sketches, which, with the help of some cross-reference,
together tell a story. Any person well versed in modern music, on
hearing this composition for the first time, cannot but be astonished at
the number of ideas, afterwards used by other composers, that it
contains. The most glaring case is the transformation music just before
the entry of the "chorus mysticus," which has been conveyed bodily by
Wagner, with only quite unimportant changes, into the third act of "Die
Walküre," after the words--"So streif' ich dir die Gottheit ab." But
dozens of other ideas in Wagner's "Tristan" and "Siegfried" and
Strauss's "Till Eulenspiegel" one here finds in embryo.
[Sidenote: =Pianoforte Concerto in E Flat.=
_November 13, 1903._]
The attitude of the musical public in this country towards Liszt is at
the present day the most unsatisfactory and anomalous feature of the
musical situation. It is not possible to name any individual who has
done more than Liszt towards creating all that is best in the modern
musical world. He created the pianoforte technique without which the
later works of Beethoven could never have been performed, he inaugurated
a new era of symphonic music by his invention of the Symphonic Poem, and
he was the first to understand and interpret Wagner. But we persist in
making our historic and traditional mistake. We do not appreciate the
continuity of musical art, and we do not value the stimulating and
school-forming influences. It is the same now as a hundred and fifty
years ago, when we preferred Handel, who never influenced any other
composer to good purpose, and who essentially represented the end of a
development, to Bach, who is the greatest and most fruitful formative
influence of any musical age, and who has powerfully influenced all
subsequent composers of genius, except two or three of the Latin races.
In the early nineteenth century we made precisely the same mistake in
regard to Mendelssohn and Schumann; now we are making it once more by
preferring Tchaïkovsky to Strauss. But worse still is our mistake of
refusing to listen to Liszt, without whom neither Tchaïkovsky nor
Strauss could have existed as musical personages. Once more yesterday
the superb Liszt Concerto in E flat was played and received with a kind
of tolerance. Very fine playing, the audience seemed to think; but what
a pity the composition was not something worth hearing! Yet it is quite
the most brilliant and entertaining of Concertos. No person genuinely
fond of music was ever known to approach it with an unprejudiced mind
and not like it, and--what is more remarkable--the effect of the music
on all those who study it with a view to playing it is so great that it
invariably overcomes the ancient and deeply-rooted prejudice. But, for
the general public, it is not a more notorious fact that Handel's
"Messiah" is a great and admirable work than that the original
compositions of Liszt are horrible. Consequently, when a work by Liszt
is played they do not listen, but resign themselves to be bored; and so
even a work like the E flat Concerto, which is quite popular in
character and free from anything tormented or obscure, besides being the
most brilliant pianoforte Concerto in existence, falls on listless ears
and provokes only the half-hearted applause intended exclusively for the
soloist.
CHAPTER V.
WAGNER.
[Sidenote: ="Faust in Solitude."=
_February 15, 1900._]
Musical biography teaches that a hard struggle, not only for
recognition but for existence, is the normal experience of a great
composer. A few great players and singers make fortunes, but great
composers never, and most of them have had to endure stress of poverty
to the end of their lives. Yet it may be doubted whether any other great
composer ever sounded the depths of human misery, as Wagner did during
that first visit to Paris, undertaken in the hope of making his fortune
at the Grand Opera. It is generally supposed that genius is conscious of
its own powers and works on with serene confidence in the future. But,
unfortunately, there is also such a thing as conceit--that is, the
illusory consciousness of powers that do not exist; and a man of genius
who, without private means, had thrown up his employment and taken
himself and his wife on a long journey to a foreign country in order to
win recognition in "la ville Lumière" must, in the course of three
fruitless years, have felt something worse than misgiving. That Wagner
did so feel is a matter not of speculation but of history. He has
described how, when meditating the subject of the "Flying Dutchman," he
sent for a pianoforte to see whether, after the mean drudgery and abject
misery of those years, "he was still a musician." Wagner was not an
ordinary man. Everything about him was on a grander scale--his folly and
rashness no less than his talent. Though more sensitive than others to
the most trifling discomfort, he showed, under an accumulation of
miseries that would simply have crushed almost anyone else, a stupendous
energy and reaction. He had failed to get his "Rienzi" performed in
Paris. For three years he had continued his fruitless endeavours to
obtain a hearing at the opera; and a crisis of frightful despondency
ensued, when, to ruin and beggary and the sense of having made a fool of
himself, was added an attack of a painful skin disease which tormented
him at intervals all his life. Now it was precisely at that crisis that
he wrote the "Faust" Overture--his masterpiece in the strict sense of
the term; that is, the first work of his mastership or mature power.
Thus, instead of being crushed, Wagner is suddenly found drawing upon
the reserve force of his genius to produce a work that stands very
nearly on a level with Beethoven's third "Leonora" Overture. For the
Faust Overture is a tone-picture of the utmost energy, nobility, and
beauty, utterly defying comparison with any other except Beethoven, and
attaining to a kind of demonic eloquence that Wagner himself never found
again, till quite late in life, during the "Ring of the Nibelung"
period.
[Sidenote: =The "Nibelung" Dramas.=
_May 11, 1903._]
Whatever may have happened in former years, it was scarcely possible to
leave the theatre after the "Götterdämmerung" performance on Saturday
with any disposition to satirise the management for the failure of the
stage effects in the final scene. In the course of the week Wagner's
greatest work had been presented with considerably brighter intelligence
and more adequate resource than ever before in this country, and it
was piteous that there should be a slight humiliation at the end. It
may be doubted, indeed, whether the "Ring" in its entirety has ever
been better done, for the amazing excellence of the orchestral
performance was to some considerable extent matched by the singers,
and the dramatic realisation of the composer's intentions was good
everywhere except in certain parts of the prologue, and showed
positive genius at certain points in each of the main dramas forming the
trilogy. The general impression was thus one of a great task nobly
carried out, and the concluding fizzle, however tiresome and distressing
to the stage managers, could but seem a trifling matter to any
appreciative spectator. It is a terrible business, that _finale_ of
"Götterdämmerung." Conceived in a mood of frenzied protest, it bears a
peculiar stamp of extravagance and violence. It shows Wagner as an
Anarchist of the Bakounine type, undertaking, as it were, to "grasp this
sorry scheme of things entire" and "shatter it to bits" on the
off-chance that Nature might afterwards "remould it nearer to the
heart's desire." A lifetime of noble endeavour and great achievement,
with scarcely any response from the world but the crackling of thorns
under a pot, had produced in Wagner such bitterness of spirit as little
men are saved from by their natural limitations, and it is that
bitterness of spirit which finds expression in the smashing and burning
and drowning of the "Götterdämmerung" _finale_. Heroes and demigods,
renouncing a hopeless conflict with the ugliness and meanness of the
world, involve heaven and earth in one red ruin. Such is the
significance of a tableau not worth a tithe of the time, trouble, and
expense devoted to it.
By engaging Dr. Richter for the 1903 production the Covent Garden
authorities made it clear that this time the nonsense of star performers
who make cuts for their own convenience and sacrifice the composer's
intentions to a performer's conceit would not be tolerated; and at the
same time they gave the public the only possible guarantee for adequate
rehearsal. For that privilege London has had to wait twenty-seven years
since the original production in Bayreuth, though "Die Walküre" and
"Siegfried" were long ago taken up into the ordinary Covent Garden
repertory. There can be little doubt that "Rhinegold" is in all
important respects the most difficult part of the "Ring" to make
effective. Epic rather than dramatic in character, it presents to the
actor an unfamiliar kind of task. He finds himself representing some
creature that is scarcely individualised at all, and taking part in the
interplay of elemental forces rather than of human passions. This goes
far towards accounting for the fact that last week the "Rhinegold"
performance fell very far below the level of all the rest. The
representative of Alberic in the first scene seemed to take very little
interest in the love-making with the Rhine maidens. He had apparently
adopted the guide-book view of the dwarf as a creature merely of greed
and hate, and had overlooked the "fruitful impulse"--to borrow Mr.
Bernard Shaw's expression--which drives Alberic towards the Rhine
maidens; for his acting was quite feeble and pointless, nor was it
possible for him to carry out the stage directions that require Alberic
to climb over the rock-work and rush after the Rhine maidens with the
"nimbleness of a Cobold," the rock-work being much too insecure and the
Rhine maidens too restricted in their movements. In that first scene the
rise of the curtain reveals something like the glazed side of a huge
aquarium tank, and it was apparently to the general effect of the
picture as first displayed that all the attention of the scenic artists
had been given. Nibelheim, with the clanking sounds of the Nibelungs at
their smiths' work, was fairly well rendered, but here again Alberic's
part was ineffectively done, and there was far too much fairy-tale
prettiness and variety in the aspect of his crowd of slaves. At Bayreuth
these victims of sweating and improper labour conditions are represented
with horrifying truth as a huddled crowd of little earth-men, driven
hither and thither by the cursing and lashing of their master, and,
instead of being to some slight extent adorned and differentiated,
uniformly grimy and abject. Stage prettiness was never more out of place
than in the Covent Garden presentation of the scene. The setting was
best in the final scene, where the Gods march over the rainbow bridge
into Valhalla. In the rainbow there was a curious predominance of
"greenery-yallery" tints to the exclusion of the primary colours, but it
took its place well enough in a fairly effective stage picture with a
prehistoric building on the heights to the left. Here the only point of
inferiority to the Bayreuth presentation was in the meteorological
background. After the magnificent orchestrated thunderstorm the sky is
supposed to clear and the Gods to enter their new abode amid the glow of
a most radiant sunset. But the secrets of atmospheric effect and cloud
pageantry seem to remain for the present exclusively in the hands of
Bayreuth and Munich, and these things, though they belong to the
framework rather than the essential drama, seem to have loomed large in
Wagner's imagination when he conceived the "Ring," and so to have a
certain importance.
II.
In strong contrast with the embarrassment and falling back on the mere
picturesque of the "Rhinegold" presentation was the rendering of "Die
Walküre" on Wednesday. A dramatic interpretation of Wagner at all
comparable to the musical interpretation which we derive from the
Liszt-Bülow-Richter tradition is not for the present, or for some time
to come, to be expected. But, making allowance for the difference in
standard between the musical and scenic arts, which is simply a
phenomenon of our time, one may well be thankful for such a rendering of
the music's proper scenic background and framework as was given at
Covent Garden on all but the first of the four evenings in the
production of the present year. In the opening act of "Die Walküre" the
setting was adequate, and a strikingly well-balanced performance was
given by Mr. Van Dyck (Siegmund), Mr. Klöpfer (Hunding), and Mme. Bolska
(Sieglinda). At the end of the only scene in which the three figure
together Sieglinda, dismissed by her husband, stands at the door of the
bedroom; Siegmund, who has told his story, sits on the further side of
the stage, the central place being occupied by the beetle-browed
Hunding. It is a moment big with fate in Wagner's peculiar manner.
Nothing certain is known or decided, but glances full of inquiry and
rapturous or sinister surmise pass between the three, whose variously
coloured kinds of suspense the music interprets. Here the _ensemble_ was
truly admirable, the stress and peculiar atmosphere of that moment big
with fate being successfully caught. Throughout the act Mr. Van Dyck's
suppleness and resource were finely exemplified, the sombre figure of
Mr. Klöpfer's Hunding contrasting effectively, while Mme. Bolska did
much by intelligent acting and good singing to compensate for a certain
lack of personal adaptation to the part.
The majestic Wotan of Mr. Van Rooy was much in evidence throughout the
rest of the drama. A rare loftiness of conception stamps nearly all that
Mr. Van Rooy does. On the other hand, he is somewhat wanting in
suppleness, here and there, sacrificing the _ensemble_ to some extent to
his own rigorous and ultra-heroic impersonation. This is particularly
noticeable in softer scenes, such as the leave-taking with Brynhild.
Only in scenes where Wotan is wrathful or oppressed by the "too vast
orb of his fate" does Mr. Van Rooy succeed completely. His finest moment
is in the muster of the Valkyries, where those terrible warrior maidens
hold converse in music as wild and tumultuous as goes up from some great
parliament of birds, till Wotan stamps with his foot, and the whole
covey of them rush for their horses and go wheeling and galloping away
into the clouds.
To the Brynhild of Miss Ternina it is not easy to do justice. No doubt a
specialist in voice-training might have some objection to raise against
the manner in which this or that note was produced, and as to her
impersonation in the earlier scenes, where Brynhild brandishes her spear
and sings "Ho-yo-to-ho," the doubt might be raised whether it is rugged
enough. But on the whole this artist seems to present a case of almost
providential adaptation to the task of impersonating Wagner's greatest
heroine. From whatever point of view her impersonation be regarded, it
seems better than one could reasonably expect. A most richly endowed and
harmonious personality is the basis of it. Fully matching Mr. Van Rooy
in breadth and dignity of conception, she greatly surpasses her
distinguished colleague in tact and cleverness, whether the matter in
hand be the management of draperies, the humouring of a horse, or any
such secondary matter upon which the proper development of a stage
picture may depend. Vocally, too, Miss Ternina is fully equal to the
tremendous task, and her Brynhild is thus a truly wonderful revelation
of Wagner's art at its best. For Brynhild is beyond all question
Wagner's finest individual creation. In a series of matchless scenes he
shows us the development of the warrior-maid into a perfect woman, every
phase of that development being touched with a kind of demonic power
that makes it impossible for anyone altogether to miss the point. In the
second act of "Walküre" Brynhild comes forth on to the crags in her
shining armour, with helm and shield and corselet of steel. In the
leave-taking with her obdurate father, who, against his better judgment,
has given way to the counsels of Fricka--that Mrs. Grundy of
Valhalla,--the insignia of her Valkyriehood begin to fall off, in
anticipation of the humanising process that is to be completed when
Siegfried, in the ensuing drama, removes the steel corselet for the
bridal feast. Before our eyes, therefore, and step by step Brynhild is
transformed, making the heroic life visible and rhythmic for us at every
moment. She is the vessel into which Wagner has poured the very finest
vintage of his genius. No blackguardly characteristics of the
_Uebermensch_, such as develop so very freely in the Siegfried of
"Götterdämmerung," are allowed to deform the figure and melody of the
superb heroine, who to the end glows with intense and untainted life.
Adequately to render such a conception--adequately both for our eyes and
ears--is no small achievement, and it is Miss Ternina's achievement
which well deserves to be reckoned, along with Dr. Richter's orchestral
interpretation, among the glories of the present production.
III.
"Siegfried is a revelation of sensuous life in its natural and joyous
fulness. No historical dress obscures his form, nor are his movements
obstructed by any force external to himself. The error and confusion
arising from the wild play of passion rage around him and involve him in
destruction. But till that destruction is compassed nothing in
Siegfried's environment can arrest his own impulse. Not even in presence
of death does he allow himself to be swayed by any other influence than
the restless stream of life flowing within himself. Fear, envy, and
vindictiveness are alike alien to his nature, and so, too, is any desire
for love arising from reflection. His every movement is determined by
the direct flow of vital force swelling the veins and muscles of his
body to rapturous fulfilment of their functions."
* * * * *
Such, according to his creator, is that central hero of the "Nibelung"
dramas whom critics still for the most part hopelessly misunderstand,
though the best of the actors who have to represent him seem long ago to
have mastered his secret. It is a familiar fact that the cultivated
instinct of a good actor will often go right where all current criticism
goes wrong, and no figure of the world's drama, ancient or modern,
exhibits the point in a more remarkable manner than Siegfried. To any
actor, indeed, with the necessary personal and vocal endowment the part
may well make a strong appeal. It is devoid of all subtlety, simply
requiring him to know his words and his notes and not to allow the
native hue of his resolution to be sicklied o'er with the pale cast of
thought. Mr. Kraus, the Siegfried of the Covent Garden performances, did
well in most essential respects.
But much more remarkable than any particular impersonation was the
catching of the proper tone and atmosphere in nearly every important
scene of the three main dramas. The glowing forge in the depths of the
primeval forest at the opening of "Siegfried," the play of the sunlight
through the moving branches that so terrifies the dwarf accustomed to a
subterranean environment, the highly realistic smith's work--all these
accessories in the picture of the godlike youth were well done, and the
peculiar early morning exhilaration of that first act was quite
successfully realised. So, too, were the fairy-tale terrors of the
dragon's cave and the leafy splendours of the glade in which Siegfried
holds converse with the birds. Where there is room for improvement in
the Covent Garden staging of these dramas is, above all, in the
meteorological background of "Rhinegold" and "Götterdämmerung";
secondly, in the "Ride of the Valkyries," which has not hitherto been
done in a sufficiently spirited manner anywhere but in Paris; thirdly,
in the final scene of conflagration and ruin. At present the final scene
is much too elaborately done. All that smashing and falling of timber is
a mistake. A chaotic design painted on a sheet of canvas can be let down
at the right moment with better effect to the eyes of the spectators, in
addition to the immense advantage of producing no noise or dust, costing
little, and being completely under control.[1] The present method of
rendering the scene is too costly, too noisy, and too dangerous. The
Valhalla building should be recognisably the same as in the final scene
of "Rhinegold."
[1] This suggestion was adopted in the performances at Covent Garden
in 1905.--ED.
Never have the musical splendours of the "Ring" been revealed to British
audiences as in the past three weeks. The windy and cloudy eloquence of
the "Walküre" music and the heroic pathos of Brynhild's leave-taking
have long been pretty thoroughly appreciated, but not so the songs of
the forge in "Siegfried," where Wagner throws an almost fabulous kind of
energy into the picture of the typical young man singing at his work,
summing up all that is finest in that enthusiasm of labour which is
perhaps the best part of our inheritance from the nineteenth century.
These songs were, in the recent production, allowed to develop without
cuts or distortion. The brawny rhythm, the iron clangour, the fizz and
tumult of the instrumentation--all these things came out as never before
at a performance in this country. So, too, with the long love duet of
Siegfried and Brynhild and the ravishing trio of the Rhine Maidens in
the last act of "Götterdämmerung." But, apart from such dazzling
moments, the performances were in their completeness and sustained
excellence an extraordinary revelation of the composer's power in the
use of musical symbolism. Just before the rise of the curtain on the
first act of "Siegfried" one hears that whine or snarl of the Nibelung
dwarf, entering on the minor ninth along with the hammering theme. It
sounds merely comical and trivial. But just as a personal fault, first
observed as something funny, may in the experience of life or study of
history be found developing into a source of appalling mischief, so, as
these dramas progress, do we find the symbol of Nibelung hatred
developing from a comical snarl into those monstrous and multitudinous
yells that rend the welkin and dismay the soul amid the gathering horror
of the "Götterdämmerung" tragedy. Persons who are in the habit of
chattering about the _Leitmotiv_ as though it were a nostrum might with
advantage take note of a few such points. The symbols of Nibelung hatred
are not more effective nor anywise better done than the other symbols in
the "Ring," but they are shorter and more peculiarly orchestrated, and
so easier to follow.
As to Dr. Richter's interpretation of these gigantic scores perhaps
enough has been said. The modern executive musician can approach no
greater task than that in the performance of which the foundation of Dr.
Richter's reputation was laid when the work was heard for the first time
twenty-seven years ago in the composer's presence, and we have been
fortunate in hearing his authoritative rendering once more. If Wotan had
understood his business anything like as well as Dr. Richter, Valhalla
would never have come to grief.
[Sidenote: =The Bayreuth Festival.=
_July 23, 1904._]
Apart from the Wagner Theatre and the undertakings connected therewith,
Bayreuth is a decayed "Residenzstadt," with an "Old Castle" of the
fifteenth century, a "New Castle" of the eighteenth, and other not very
carefully preserved relics of the Court which Franconian Margraves long
kept here. Of country residences and "pleasaunces" too, designed in the
over-fantastic manner of the South German potentate, there is more than
one in the neighbourhood, and no doubt such things help to create an
atmosphere that is favourable to artistic enjoyment. The smoke of modern
industrial enterprise is not unknown here, but in the fulfilment of the
part of its destiny which is connected with Wagnerian drama Bayreuth is
aided by the leafy dells and dingles and the stately avenues of the
Hofgarten, if not by the fantastic waterworks of the "Eremitage."
The Festival, which stands as a concrete symbol of Wagner's artistic
mission, is just now at the zenith of its prosperity. It is twenty-eight
years since the theatre was opened and twenty-one since Wagner's death,
and the only thing which Bayreuth now fears is American piracy. One kind
of calumny after another has been silenced, and in years past the
institution seems to have done nothing but gain in solidity and dignity.
It has formed an international public with a somewhat higher average of
intelligence than is to be found anywhere else; and if there are certain
weak and wrong-headed elements in the internal organisation, they are
not so bad as to ruin the combined result of the brilliant and
exceptional talent with which nearly every department--musical,
dramatic, scenic, architectural, mechanical, and administrative--is
worked. One might make a long list of the points in which the Wagner
Theatre is somewhat better than any other of the kind. For example, the
situation and approaches are more agreeable, the exits and entrances are
more convenient, the ventilation is much more satisfactory, the acoustic
is much finer, the distractions during the performance are fewer in
consequence of specially good arrangements, structural and other, and
by reason of the early start and long intervals the audience is less
fatigued; the stage machinery works better, and the discipline behind
the scenes is more thorough. The orchestra, besides being more
advantageously placed, is larger, and has a higher average of executive
ability. Apart, therefore, from the special Wagnerian enthusiasm, there
is much to attract persons who take any kind of interest in musical
drama, and as a matter of fact the audience commonly includes dozens of
well-known musicians from different parts of the world whose own
tendencies are anything but Wagnerian.
[Sidenote: ="Parsifal."=
_July 24, 1904._]
On the second day of this festival "Parsifal" was given for the 122nd
time in Bayreuth, where, since the original production in 1882, it has
formed the principal feature of every festival except that of 1896. Any
attempt to describe impressions of the performance has to be preceded by
a shaking of oneself free from that hypnotic influence which Wagner's
art in its latest phase exercises. The curtain falls on the first act,
the lights are turned up, and one emerges quickly into the light of day
to find oneself once more in the midst of a chattering but well-behaved
international crowd that wanders about the open sandy space girdled with
plantations on either side of the theatre. It is not quite the same
experience as a child's on awakening from an importunate dream, because
the feeling that it was not one's own dream but another's is peculiarly
strong, together with a sense of utter astonishment that it should be
possible for the consciousness of an adult person to be ravished away
into the dream-world of another. Then comes further reflection and the
inevitable question how it is done. Is it primarily by means of the
music, which passes through the chambers of consciousness like the fumes
of an anæsthetic, or does the peculiar potency lie in the dramatic
symbols, for the elaboration of which the subtlest essences of a hundred
arts seem to have been brought together? All the objections to
"Parsifal" would seem to resolve themselves ultimately into distrust of
something that is so dreamlike, and dreamlike in a manner so
inexpressibly soft and luxurious. It is all rhythmic with the slow,
musically ordered movements of the Grail's knights, who are so holy as
to feel sin like a bodily pain; it is solemn with hieratic pageantry,
and rich with the lustre of costly stuffs and the glitter of
ecclesiastical embroideries and jewels. In the first and last acts it
has the atmosphere of a Christian sanctuary, and the second act, passing
in Klingsor's garden, seems to represent the pleasures of sin as
imagined by the most innocent of mediæval monks. All this the orthodox
moralist regards with some distrust as tending to create a distaste for
hard work and cold water. But let him remember the mischief done by the
Puritans in the seventeenth century, and be careful how he lays about
him with the iconoclastic hammer. Whatever else "Parsifal" may be, it is
certainly the most marvellous theatrical show in the world, and, as the
ultimate achievement of a man who for a lifetime had been considerably
in advance of any other person in knowledge of theatrical art, it
deserves to be treated with a measure of respect.
What Bayreuth accomplishes at a "Parsifal" performance, in the smooth
and harmonious working of infinitely complex scenic resources, is
without parallel, and the almost miraculous stage management was last
week at its best. The slow transformations of the first and last acts
were carried out in faultless correspondence with the musical
suggestions. The sudden collapse of Klingsor's garden into ruin and
desolation was also perfectly done, and in all the elaborate evolutions
of the knights' retainers and scholars there was never the semblance of
a false move. A specially admirable feature was the fine co-ordination
of the dangerously complicated musical scheme in the latter part of the
first act, where the conductor has to keep together a body of singers
and players who are spaced out at four different levels--the orchestra
below the stage, the knights seated at the love-feast or manoeuvring
about on the stage, the older scholars on the first gallery of the dome,
and the younger scholars at the top. All the multifarious choir-singing
of boys and men was beautifully done; the only mistakes were made by
Amfortas and Titurel. The conductor was Dr. Muck, of Berlin, whose
_tempi_ seem to have been considered too slow by some of the _habitués_,
though his interpretation was admitted to be in all other respects above
reproach.
[Sidenote: ="The Ring."=
_July 28, 1904._]
This year's festival includes two complete presentations of the "Ring"
tetralogy, of which the first began on Monday. It seems to be generally
admitted here that the performance of the Prologue ("Rheingold") given
on that day was the best that has yet been achieved. Dr. Richter was at
the helm for the first time this year, and the generalship that has been
one great factor in Bayreuth's reputation ever since the opening of the
Wagner Theatre in 1876 soon became perceptible in the plastic force of
the orchestral rendering and the consummate knowledge with which
everything was disposed in such a manner as to give each performer the
best possible chance of doing justice to himself and his part. Moreover,
"Rheingold" is, of all the Wagnerian dramas, the one best adapted to
display the art of Bayreuth advantageously. The staging is of the most
extraordinary kind. All the action takes place up in the clouds, down in
the waters, or where the forges resound in the fiery caverns of
Nibelheim, and not one of the characters is a plain human being. Gods,
goddesses, giants, dwarfs, and water nymphs make up the _dramatis
personæ_, and the whole drama is more completely outside the range of
ordinary operatic art than any other musical and dramatic work. It is
therefore natural that Bayreuth, which alone among theatres devoted to
musical drama is not hampered by the operatic traditions, should
establish pre-eminence in the staging and dramatic presentation of
"Rheingold." There is no part for a prima donna or leading tenor, and
everything depends on a kind of extraordinary character-acting created
by Wagner, along with those richly animated figures from Norse mythology
which so effectively represent the natural forces and psychic impulses
of his greatest and most characteristic poem. The most important person
is Loge, the tricksy Fire God, who is far from sure that he did wisely
in joining the firm of Wotan and Company.
In the great revival of the "Ring" here in 1896 the impersonation of
Loge by the late Vogel of Munich was a brilliant feature. Vogel was at
the time recognised as the best Loge, and his mantle has now fallen on
Dr. Otto Briesemeister, who, with a much less effective costume than his
predecessor's, dances very cleverly through his long and important part.
But among the stage performers it was Mr. Hans Breuer, the
representative of the dwarf Mime, to whom the principal honours of
Monday's performance fell. Already in 1896 Mr. Breuer was the Bayreuth
Mime, and he seems to have been steadily improving his presentation ever
since. It is now beyond all expression brilliant. Mime (or Mimmy, as the
name has been well Anglicised) is perhaps the best invented of Wagner's
purely grotesque figures--better individualised than his master, the
sinister Alberich, representing gold as a world-power, for whom Mimmy is
compelled to do smith's work. From beginning to end the part presents
unfamiliar problems to the actor, for never before was the attempt made
to give a musical vehicle to such whining and cringing and snarling. But
those problems have all now been solved by Mr. Breuer in a manner
suggesting finality. He has penetrated to the very marrow of the
composer's conception, and he gives us a figure that glows with
imaginative power at every moment. Almost equally good in its very
different way is the mighty elemental brutality of Mr. Johannes
Elmblad's Fafner--another case of an actor completely identified with
the particular part,--and the second giant (Mr. Hans Keller) fairly
matched his colleague and Messrs. Breuer and Briesemeister in expressive
pantomimic interpretation of the music. The enchanting "Rhine Daughter"
trio of the first and last scenes was beautifully rendered, the swimming
manoeuvre of the former scene being done probably better than ever
before. Besides doing justice to the drama as an allegorical picture of
life in the light of certain nineteenth-century ideas, the performance
was a specially good revelation of its amusing and naïvely entertaining
qualities. Regarding the show simply as an enacted fairy-tale, one could
not but call it a mighty good one, and that aspect of the matter was
almost certainly never before brought out so well.
[Sidenote: ="The Ring."=
_July 30, 1904._]
Too much ridicule has been expended on those who, in the days when the
works of Wagner were new to the world, declared them impossible of
performance. After witnessing one complete series of the dramas forming
the programme of this year's festival I am profoundly impressed by the
newness of the art that has been worked out, mainly in this place, under
stress of Wagner's peculiar requirements. The stage manager and the
singing actor, no less than the orchestral player and the conductor,
have been compelled to acquire a new technique. It is even possible to
state approximately the order in which the special kinds of technique
required by Wagner were developed. Of course the instrumental came
first, for without it there could have been no attempt to bring the new
art before the world. Here the most important influence, in addition to
the composer's own, was that of Liszt, Bülow, and Richter--the original
stalwarts of the Wagnerian school. Next arose a new race of dramatic
singers, of whom Schnorr von Carolsfeld, Niemann, and Materna were early
examples; and the key to the enigma of the music was found. But Wagner's
art is complex. Including, as it does, all the elements of the tragedy,
which Aristotle describes as having music for one of its parts, together
with modern scenic presentation, it is indeed somewhat more complex than
any other known art, and that is why it has taken so long to master the
technique of it. To the civilised world of no more than twenty-five
years ago it was still inconceivable that both the drama and the music
in one work could be important. A play with a little incidental music
was a familiar thing, and so was an opera with a conventional dramatic
framework having as its only purpose the advantageous display of musical
embroideries. But a dramatic work with music as an integral part lay
outside the range of all that was then believed to be possible, and long
after the new race of dramatic singers had arisen the peculiar problems
of _mise-en-scène_ and stage management which Wagnerian drama presents
were left quite unsolved. However, no such battle had to be fought over
the stage presentation as had been fought over the music. There was the
Bayreuth theatre, with plenty of time and, latterly, plenty of money to
work out the scenic and mechanical problems; and very slowly they were
worked out. The improvement since 1896, when I last saw the "Ring" here,
is enormous, and from the mighty trilogy as now presented that old sense
of awkward, cumbrous, and unmanageable material has to a great extent
disappeared--not, indeed, to the same extent in all the four parts
(prologue and three-fold drama). The change and improvement is most
startling in "Rheingold," which, with all its mythological and
thaumaturgical paraphernalia, used to be thought peculiarly clumsy and
full of bad quarters of an hour, despite the genius that scintillated
here and there. Now that the staging has been perfected, it no longer
embarrasses the performers or distracts the spectator's attention, and
one has unimpeded enjoyment of the story, with all its rich imaginative
play and its Aristophanic quality, as it is interpreted by a group of
actors and actresses who have thoroughly mastered their peculiar
business. "Rheingold" one now perceives to be a comedy big with tragedy.
Notwithstanding the undertow of forces making for monstrous mischief, it
is as thoroughpaced an Aristophanic comedy as anything having Norse
instead of Hellenic characters and imagery could be. The scene in which
the different uses of gold are explained by Loge, with exquisitely
humorous interpolated comments by Fricka (the Mrs. Grundy of Valhalla)
and others, is worth the attention of any philosopher; and yet that and
other passages of similar merit used to pass unnoticed. Together with
the mention in my former message of Messrs. Briesemeister's, Breuer's,
and Elmblad's achievements as Loge, Mimmy, and Fafner respectively,
there should have been some reference to the Fricka of Mme. Reuss-Belce,
who was simply perfect in the scene where that dignified lady sidles up
to Loge to inquire whether the gold cannot also be used to make nice
ornaments for ladies.
In regard to "Walküre" and "Siegfried," which have long been in the
repertory of London, Paris, and other capitals, the superiority of
Bayreuth is very much less certain--that is to say, of Bayreuth as
represented by this year's performances. There was serious weakness in
two out of the three great protagonists, Wotan and Brünnhilde, and for
that weakness no degree of skill in the presentation of the finely
fantastic and ever-shifting backgrounds could compensate, nor even the
superb orchestral interpretation. The Siegfried of Mr. Ernst Kraus was,
however, on the whole a very striking performance, as it was at Covent
Garden in 1903. It was best in Acts i. and ii. of "Siegfried"--the
forging of the sword and the slaying of the dragon, preceded and
followed by the wonderful forest _rêverie_,--and it was least good in
the "Götterdämmerung" scene, where the hero tells the story of his youth
to his hunting companions. Here a certain lack of resource in purely
lyrical expression was a serious defect. But on the whole Mr. Kraus
would seem to be the best Siegfried of the present day--best, at any
rate, of those who can be induced to enact the part without mutilation.
No excellence in the staging and general interpretation could obviate
or appreciably soften the unsatisfactoriness of "Götterdämmerung." The
final drama of the "Ring" series remains a terrible monster among the
dramatic works of mankind, with a dreary first and second act, in which
little seems to occur besides the heaping up of gloomy storm-clouds. The
fierce animation of the retainers' muster in the Hall of the Gibichungs
produced on Thursday the utmost effect of which it is capable; but the
atmosphere of these scenes in which the tragedy of the curse resting on
the Ring is worked out remained, as before, almost intolerable; and,
despite the ravishing Rhine-daughter music in the third act, the
romantic beauty of the "Erzählung" (story of Siegfried's youth), and the
monumental grandeur of the funeral scenes, the last day of the trilogy
left one with the old sense of oppression. As most persons are aware,
the whole "Ring" drama began in the composer's mind with "Siegfried's
Death"--that part which is now called "Götterdämmerung,"--and the other
three parts were written to lead up to it. Nevertheless the original
nucleus remains the monstrous product of a disordered imagination, while
the three parts, conceived as something secondary, form a series of
masterpieces. Books, we know, have their fates, and the fate of this one
is not the least curious. The experience of this year, while tending to
show that the supposed defects of "Rheingold," "Walküre," and
"Siegfried" almost entirely vanish in a rendering that is harmonious on
all sides, leaves one with a greatly increased sense of the final
drama's inherent unsatisfactoriness.
CHAPTER VI.
TCHAÏKOVSKY.
[Sidenote: =Symphony No. 5 and other Works.=
_January 21, 1898._]
The experiment of devoting an entire miscellaneous concert to the works
of one composer is nearly always hazardous. We doubt whether any other
composer besides Wagner has ever withstood such a test quite
satisfactorily. It was, of course, inevitable that the unparalleled wave
of popularity upon which Tchaïkovsky's "Pathetic" symphony has been
carried over the country during the past two years should have had the
result of bringing other works by the same composer to the fore. That
result is in no way to be regretted. Tchaïkovsky is a thoroughly
interesting composer. His power and originality can scarcely now be
disputed, and, whatever may be the verdict upon his art arrived at by
those competent to judge when the excitement of novelty shall have
passed off, one fact seems already to be quite clear, namely, that he
was a great master of the orchestra. Listening to Tchaïkovsky's music
for a whole evening and comparing the new with former impressions may
have revealed more defects and limitations than merits; but the
experience confirms, to our mind, the view that the Russian composer
must be allowed to take rank along with Berlioz and Wagner as a
consummate and original master of the orchestra, regarded as a medium of
expression. He grasps the modern orchestra as if it were one instrument.
He sweeps over it like a mighty virtuoso with unerring touch. He knows
the suggestions and potencies that lie in the timbre of each pipe,
string, and membrane, just as a man knows the articulations of his
native language. To any musical strain that is in his mind he gives
outward form with absolute success. In short, he has consummate ability
to express himself in music, and such ability is so rare that it is
sufficient alone to make a composer very famous. There remain, of
course, certain questions about the self thus expressed, and not till we
reach those questions do the defects and limitations of Tchaïkovsky's
art come into view. The great prevalence of melancholy moods in
Tchaïkovsky's music is a matter of common observation. When he desires
to shake off his habitually gloomy and brooding state, how does he set
about it? Just as one would expect with such a disposition--by frenzied
excitement, by the blare and glare of military pageant or by an
orgiastic dance. His lighter music is bizarre or sardonic when it is not
merely intoxicating. The enormous predominance of the rhythmical
interest over every other kind of interest, such as that of melody or
harmony, in Tchaïkovsky's music, can scarcely have escaped notice; and
rhythm is the lowest element in music; it is the element representing
animal impulse, as shown by its preponderance in every kind of religious
music (Palestrina, for example). The music of Tchaïkovsky rocks, tramps,
jigs, whirls, and flies far more than it sings; and when it does sing
it is either profoundly melancholy, bitterly sardonic, or merely
bizarre. The composer has absolutely no serenity in his disposition, no
love of nature or of innocence, no naïveté, no calmness or coolness, no
healthy activity, no religion, though much picturesque patriotism, and
very little intellectuality--only just enough for the purpose of
expression. Such is the disposition revealed in the art of Tchaïkovsky.
Like Rubens, the painter, he cares for nothing but exuberant
animalism--for Rubens' Madonnas and other quasi-religious pictures are
all just as much studies of exuberant animalism as his Venuses and his
boar-hunts. Tchaïkovsky, too, loves hunting; though his more special
tastes are for fighting and military display, and for dancing. Such a
character could not be otherwise than profoundly melancholy in the
absence of strong excitement. At the same time, he was--again like
Rubens--an artist of enormous power, and his creations have their value.
The fifth symphony, which was given yesterday, affords a most
interesting comparison with the sixth and last. Such a nature as,
according to our view, Tchaïkovsky has revealed in his art would never
be thoroughly dignified except in great grief or in some situation
bringing his patriotism to the fore. This, we believe--added to the more
complete maturity of the art,--is the explanation of that greatness
which has been generally recognised as distinguishing the "Pathetic"
symphony among the composer's works. Alone among the larger works of the
composer it has dignity. The feeling that it embodies is tremendously
deep and sincere. It is an utterance of a strong semi-primitive nature
with robust appetite, but also with an immense capacity for
feeling--personal feeling, and family, tribal or patriotic feeling. In
the symphony given yesterday, on the other hand, we have a feast of
gorgeous tone-colour, orchestral figures of astonishing scope and
ingenuity, here and there motifs that are poignantly expressive,
vastness of design, superhuman energy; but the dignity of the work is
marred by the perpetual intervention of riotous and frenzied rhythms.
The other orchestral works given were all of minor importance. Perhaps
the best was the "Romeo and Juliet" overture, dealing with a subject
certain sides of which were naturally congenial to the composer's
temperament. He seized on these sides with unerring self-knowledge and
made an eloquent musical picture out of them. "The Variations on a
Rococo Theme" and "Pezzo Capriccioso" are two ingenious and bizarre
pieces, both very cleverly scored, which enabled Mr. Carl Fuchs to
display his admirable mastery of the violoncello as a solo instrument.
They were both very finely played, and, especially the latter, aroused
considerable enthusiasm. As far as the interpretation was concerned the
symphony, too, must be unreservedly commended. There was only one work
in the entire concert which, to our mind, bears the stamp of
perfection--namely, the little song "Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt," which
is worthy to rank with the best lyrics by Schumann, and indeed shows the
spirit of that composer in one of his moods--that which produced "Ich
grolle nicht"--very strongly. All the songs were interesting. In fact,
the lyrical power of Tchaïkovsky is so striking that it may be placed
side by side with his mastery of the orchestra among those qualities
which make him a great composer. All that has been said with more
especial reference to the orchestral works applies with equal truth to
the songs; they are either melancholy, like the first, third, and last
given at yesterday's concert, or sardonic, like "Don Juan's Serenade."
Brightness, happiness, confidence, resignation, reverence, sense of
mystery are qualities as alien to the composer's nature as simple
joviality or innocent badinage.
[Sidenote: =Symphony in F Minor.=
_November 25, 1898._]
The fourth symphony of Tchaïkovsky, which formed the principal
orchestral work at yesterday's concert, is full of life and zest,
affording an interesting glimpse of those powers which were destined to
produce the "Pathetic" symphony. Composed some fifteen years earlier
than the "Pathetic," the fourth symphony represents the composer in a
very different mood, though with nearly the same technical powers. It is
perhaps natural that the earlier work should be more cheerful; but,
considering that the composer was thirty-eight years of age when he
produced that earlier work, the music sounds curiously youthful. The
difference between the style of the symphony given yesterday and the
"Pathetic" is almost entirely of a kind that eludes analysis. It can
only be stated broadly that in the "Pathetic" there is a depth and
energy of feeling to be found in none but truly great works of art; also
that there is mature style, appearing especially in the marvellous tact
with which so much rich, highly coloured, and dangerous material is
disposed. On the other hand, the earlier symphony, while strongly akin
to the "Pathetic" in rhythmic and melodic invention, figuration,
instrumentation, and device in general, is not only wanting in the tact
of the mature artist, but shows the composer not under the influence of
any strong feeling, and simply revelling in his powers of gorgeous
orchestration, ingenious thematic work, and marshalling of tone masses
with a view to picturesque effect. Tchaïkovsky is nearly always martial
in one part or another of an orchestral work. In the great symphony the
first movement has a ferocious section suggesting actual slaughter,
while the greater part of the third movement is an elaborate military
pageant. The work given yesterday leads off with martial strains, which
recur several times in the first movement and again in the last. The
first movement also exemplifies the composer's practice of bringing in a
good deal of development immediately after the statement of a theme,
instead of waiting for the development section. Though every musical
element is telling, the movement is too prolix. In the andantino it soon
becomes apparent that the composer's mind is running on his national
folk-melody, the second theme especially having a very strong flavour of
Russian national music. The movement is short and very charming. Next
one passes from song to dance, the scherzo being a kind of Cossack dance
orchestrated in the most piquant style, the strings playing pizzicato
throughout. Here again the composer is irresistible. The music is
ballet-music, not worthy of a symphony, but it is so exhilarating that
there has to be a "truce with grimace." And the finale? On a former
occasion we have declared our view that none of Tchaïkovsky's music
except his last symphony has dignity, but probably in no other
quasi-serious work has he committed himself to such an astounding piece
of rodomontade as is here used to conclude the symphony. The music
enters like a voluble showman, beating a drum at the head of a
procession, and assuring the crowd that never in this world has anything
been seen quite so wonderful as that particular show. The show then
proceeds, seeming to be concerned with national exploits which are all
illustrated by the comments of the same voluble showman. A meritorious
rendering was given of this amusing and in some respects instructive
work. Many of the wind-instrument passages are very trying for the
performers, especially in the case of the bass trombone, which in the
last movement sometimes has to play as fast as the flute; but the
players struggled manfully with these difficulties and did justice to
the score.
[Sidenote: ="Romeo and Juliet" Overture.=
_December 14, 1900._]
The case of Tchaïkovsky, with his one great Symphony overtopping by such
immeasurable heights all his other compositions of whatever kind, is
isolated. One is almost compelled to think of everything else in the
light of the one great work. Here is something that dimly foreshadows
the stupendous battle-picture in the first movement. There we note some
faint suggestion of that power to represent a heart full of the most
awful foreboding, amid scenes of gaiety and gallantry, which gives its
peculiar character to the celebrated 5--4 movement; and there are
foretastes of the bustle and excitement rendered on a gigantic scale in
the scherzo, of the triumphal note in the March, of the final despairing
wail. But all else is faint and fragmentary by comparison with the great
symphony. The "Romeo and Juliet" overture, played yesterday, is probably
Tchaïkovsky's best early composition, and it is certainly that which
suggests the great last symphony in the most unmistakable manner. The
poetic basis of the tone-picture is to a considerable extent the same in
both. A warning prologue leads to the scenes of violence and bloodshed.
Then follows a romantic love-story with a tragic ending. Everything in
the overture is extremely well done--the fighting music is graphic and
the love music is deeply fraught with feeling,--but it is not a bit
Shakespearean in spirit. The peculiar neuralgic pathos which haunts
nearly all Tchaïkovsky's works takes us into a fevered and unnatural
atmosphere very unlike Shakespeare's; and the fighting is gory and
realistic in the haggard manner of Verestchagin. As with Berlioz's
treatment of "Faust," one must not seek for any sort of fidelity to the
spirit of the original. It is better to rest satisfied with the striking
and eloquent picture, founded on external features of a well-known poem
but belonging essentially to the composer's own dream-world. The
overture was splendidly played yesterday. Dr. Richter's interpretation
most fully revealed the beauty of the introduction, where the composer
had succeeded in finding a note of pathos unlike his usual narrow and
egotistic or merely tormented vein. Specially remarkable was the fine
precision of the percussion instruments in the sections representing the
strife of the Montagues and Capulets; but it is scarcely necessary to
mention details, for the whole tone-picture was superbly presented.
[Sidenote: =Symphony in E Minor.=
_March 8, 1901._]
There is a great diversity of opinion as to the merits of Tchaïkovsky's
fifth Symphony. More than one London critic has expressed the view that
it is equal to the much-better known sixth and last. Mr. Jacques
declares in yesterday's programme that, though No. 6--the
"Pathétique"--appeals more strongly to the emotions, No. 5 is
constructively the finer work. On the other hand, we have the opinion of
the Russian critic Berezovsky--quoted together with the same writer's
detailed account of the work in a recent English book on
Tchaïkovsky--that No. 5 is the weakest of all the Symphonies. There is
something rather depressing in such extreme divergence of opinion. It
proves one of two things;--either Tchaïkovsky is not one of the sane
composers whose works stand in a certain clear relation to the musical
needs of human nature; or else, for all our greatly increased musical
culture, we are no quicker than were the men of Beethoven's day in our
perceptions; and, in the absence of perception, we are even more tied
down than were our predecessors by pedantic notions. The reception of
the great "Symphonic Pathétique" in this country disposes of the former
alternative. No other instrumental work ever aroused so great a wave of
genuine public interest, and even persons who are no great admirers of
Tchaïkovsky ought, if they care for the musical life of this country, to
take an interest in him, on account of the astonishingly sudden and
powerful grip that he took of the public imagination. It is not to
externals--such as instrumentation, counterpoint, form, and so
forth--that we must look for the explanation. Glazounoff orchestrates no
less brilliantly than Tchaïkovsky and has probably a greater mastery of
scholastic device, and the same is true of Saint-Saëns. Yet neither of
those masters ever did or could stir anything in the least like the
interest that Tchaïkovsky stirs. We believe the secret of Tchaïkovsky
lies first in his sincerity, his being in earnest, his intentness, his
search after the true symbol of his idea or feeling, his rejection of
mere fabricated music. In listening to Glazounoff one perceives the
trotting out of device. "Note how cleverly," the composer seems to say,
"how cleverly I introduce this theme in augmentation." Whereas
Tchaïkovsky is always intent on his idea, and, when he uses device, it
is with the air of a man deeply in earnest and grasping at a resource of
expression. Thus the centre of gravity is with Glazounoff as often as
not in the device, with Tchaïkovsky always in the message, and with that
dim sub-consciousness of the musical soul we perceive the one to be a
cultivated trifler, the other a man with something important to say.
That is the first and chief point. Next comes Tchaïkovsky's gift of
rhythm--the quality in music for which the general public of the
present day cares most. When a person of rudimentary musical notions
says that he likes a good tune, it will nearly always be found that what
he likes is the rhythm, and that the melody can be freely changed
without his perceiving it. The same taste exists in the higher stages of
cultivation. A hundred times commoner than a real sense of melodic
beauty is the love of a powerful rhythm that carries the listener off
his feet. Now Tchaïkovsky does that for the listener much more often
than any other composer. He first captivates by something in which his
gift of rhythm plays a leading part, and, having captivated, he does not
disappoint us by saying empty things. Further points are his
astonishingly rich harmony, which is never twisted and inconsequent,
like so much of Berlioz's harmony, but always develops logically and
clearly his vastness of design; his warmth of colouring, and his
picturesque force. Needless to say, that to explain sudden and signal
success with the general public there must always be a mention of weak
points. Among Tchaïkovsky's weak points that which has gained him most
popularity is his persistent habit of presenting his ideas in a sort of
balanced and antithetical manner. He does not expect too much
intelligence in the listener. First he says a thing, then he says it
again an octave lower down or higher up and with different
instrumentation; next he repeats a tag of what has just been said, and
repeats that once or twice, and so forth. And the thing is not done
artificially; such procedure evidently came natural to him. By the time
he has finished, something of the idea has been conveyed into the
dullest mind; and all this is done along with the extremely modern
harmony and with instrumentation so dashing, brilliant, and varied that
only a dreadfully analytical person takes note of the thematic
iteration. It is a remarkable point that while all the other symphonies
are full of Slavonic folk-melodies, the thematic invention in the
"Pathetic" is all original--every scrap of it. There is not a folk-tune
from beginning to end. One has only to think of the first theme of the
first quick movement to perceive how thoroughly the composer was worked
up. The originality of it is absolute. One may go over all the
orchestral composers from Haydn to Wagner and Brahms, asking oneself
whether that theme could be by any one of them. Obviously it could not
be the work of anyone else except Tchaïkovsky. On hearing that theme for
the first time the listener pricks up his ears. "Here is a man with
something to say," he thinks. Now there is nothing of that kind in No.
5. The thematic material has been obtained in an easy-going
manner--mostly by borrowing. And the superiority of the great No. 6 is
just as remarkable in the richness and spontaneity of development as in
originality of thematic invention. In other respects the case against
Mr. Jacques's view is much stronger. There is not the ghost of an
indication in No. 5 of the power which produced that overwhelming
battle-picture in the first movement of the "Pathetic," or of the
completely new kind of eloquence introduced into the world of music in
the third movement--the Scherzo-March--of the "Pathetic," or of the
unparalleled poignancy of expression in the Finale. The fifth is a fine
picturesque work, chiefly interesting for the glimpse that it gives us
of those exercises by which the genius destined to produce No. 6
strengthened itself. We hear many of the same orchestral effects, such
as the frequent use of divided lower strings and the prominence of
bassoon parts. The figuration in the Valse, and again in the Finale,
also affords a faint premonition of the marvels that enthral us in the
latter work. But, before any comparison of the two is really possible at
all, one must knock off the last movement of the "Pathetic" and take it
as ending with the March, as the composer originally intended it to end.
[Sidenote: ="Pathetic" Symphony.=
_November 22, 1901._]
"Eighth time at these concerts," says last night's programme, in
reference to the great Tchaïkovsky Symphony, which is only eight years
old. The performances in London are to be numbered by dozens, and
whenever genuine orchestral concerts are given in this country the
swan-song of the late Russian master has probably been heard more often
than any other symphonic work. Let us not be in too great a hurry to
protest against this state of things. The enormous audience of yesterday
evening--much the largest of the present season so far--suggests that
the public have not lost interest in the Symphony. Nor do we dissent
from the views of the public in this respect. There is astounding
potency in the charm of the work and in the appeal that it makes to the
imagination. For some time past we have been preoccupied with the notion
that it forms a sort of pendant to Dvoràk's "New World" Symphony.
Dvoràk has caught in his music the breezy, hopeful, democratic,
optimistic, and free-thinking spirit of American life, with its upper
side of furious go-ahead civilisation, and its under side of primitive
humanity (Negroes and Red Indians) in which energy of feeling is out of
all proportion to intellectual faculty. Dvoràk's slow movement is
undoubtedly a hymn of such primitive humanity, with an undercurrent of
meditation on the prairie by night, in which the movements of sap and
the germination of seeds within the bosom of inexhaustibly fertile
nature become, as it were, audible. It is something like the poetry that
Walt Whitman would have written had he been a much better poet. In an
analogous manner Tchaïkovsky has caught up and fixed in his "Symphonie
Pathétique" the soul of modern Russia. Just as the American Symphony is
breezy, democratic, optimistic, and free-thinking, so the Russian is
languorous and oppressed, aristocratic, pessimistic, and hierarchic. The
absence of any slow movement, except the dirge at the end, is intensely
characteristic. The composer has no hymn of thanksgiving or serenely
contemplative interlude to give us, but only something with the perfumed
and artificial atmosphere of the ballroom, as a relief from the ardours
and terrors of his military and patriotic passages. Both in his first
and third movements he reminds us that the Russian, for all his profound
religiosity and mysticism, for all his abundance of talent and exquisite
courtesy under normal conditions, lives in a cruel country and has it in
him to be more cruel than any other modern white man. The dirge at the
end we believe to be the most powerful expression of tragic emotion that
exists in the entire range of music. Such a work will bear a good many
performances, especially in a place where there is a Richter to
interpret it. Of course neither the "New World" nor the Muscovite
Symphony is for a moment to be compared with Beethoven. Fellows like
Dvoràk and Tchaïkovsky, belonging to the fringe of civilisation, have
something of the savage about them, whereas Beethoven inherited the
central European culture and expressed in music the emotions of a
completely civilised character. The part of the nineteenth century
subsequent to the death of Wagner will probably be remembered for the
_avènement_ of the semi-savage in music. But, be it remembered, music is
an art of expression, and all thoroughly and richly expressive music is
good music, no matter what the informing emotion or underlying idea.
CHAPTER VII.
ELGAR.
[Sidenote: ="King Olaf."=
_December 2, 1898._]
Mr. Edward Elgar seems to owe his fame almost entirely to those autumn
festivals which are so important a feature of musical life in this
country. An organist, with a turn for serious composition, occupying a
post in some city where one of those festivals is periodically held, is
favourably placed with a view to getting a hearing for the productions
of his musical genius; and Mr. Elgar was, and so far as we know is
still, organist at St. George's Roman Catholic Church in Worcester. His
career as a festival composer dates from 1890, in which year his
overture "Froissart" was produced at the Worcester Festival. Three years
later a choral work--"The Black Knight"--was brought to a hearing in the
same city, apparently with advantageous results to Mr. Elgar's
reputation, for since that time he has devoted much of his energy to
composition. The cantata performed yesterday evening for the first time
in Manchester seems to have been the fourth of Mr. Elgar's important
choral works. When first performed at the Hanley Festival two years ago
it attracted much attention, and was hailed by many writers for the
press as a work for the Leeds Festival--generally considered the most
important event of the kind in the country. The work composed for Leeds
and produced there last October was called "Caractacus." It is in
general style similar to "King Olaf," while naturally representing a
later stage in the composer's development. In both works one notes the
same dramatic instinct, the same unconventional treatment, the same
faculty of genuine thematic invention, and the same unmistakeable gift
for orchestration. As this composer gains in experience it does not
seem, as with many others, that his inventive powers become exhausted,
but that, on the contrary, they ripen and develop. "Caractacus" is
obviously a finer work in every way than "King Olaf." Now, all these
facts make Mr. Elgar a very interesting person. The qualities enumerated
above--gift for thematic invention, ingenious and telling orchestration,
unconventional treatment, and so forth--are extremely rare and valuable.
It is quite possible for a composer to have a long and successful career
without possessing any one of them, and it is therefore very natural
that a composer who does possess them should be hailed with enthusiasm.
But, unfortunately, they are not the only qualities necessary to a
composer of extended choral works, and Mr. Elgar, who rises so far above
mere feeble conventionalities in his actual music, is not free from the
common but most mischievous delusion that almost anything will suffice
by way of "verses for music." He throws away the resources of his
remarkable art upon a text that is in places unfit for any kind of
musical treatment, and is, on the whole, hopelessly rambling,
incoherent, and tiresome. One becomes interested in a dramatic episode
where a bride seems on the point of murdering her bridegroom with a
dagger that gleams in the moonlight. But the narrative wanders away to
other subjects; a fresh heroine, with quite different affairs and
interests, occupies attention, and one hears nothing more of the lady
with the dagger. No doubt, the title "Scenes from" the Saga of King Olaf
seems to justify such procedure, but it does not prevent the interest
from flagging or the general impression left by the work from being
fragmentary and incoherent. The best of the music is at the beginning,
where there is an extremely fine chorus, "The Challenge of Thor,"
containing various musical elements all truly expressive and fraught
with the same primitive and racy vigour. The more important of the
elements in question are the Hammer music, the Iceberg music, the
Thunder and Lightning music, and the strains which carry the defiance of
Christianity by the old Norse religion. The most effective, too, of the
solos is the long tenor recitative following the great chorus. At the
words "listening to the wild winds wailing" a highly original and
interesting strain begins to be heard in the accompaniment. But the
promise of these fine things is not well carried out in the latter part
of the work. Everywhere the difficulties are very formidable, and in a
good many cases they were too much for the chorus, who, except in "The
Challenge of Thor," did not sing in a very free or expressive manner.
Nor did they always take their leads with precision; but, in a complex
work abounding in accompaniment figures with such puzzling
cross-rhythms, these defects were excusable. The cantata did not seem to
make any great impression on the audience; but we should expect to find,
if ever Mr. Elgar were so fortunate as to obtain a really good subject
and a good book, and especially a subject and book thoroughly adapted to
his remarkable dramatic powers, that he would produce something of
lasting value.
[Sidenote: =The "Enigma Variations."=
_February 9, 1900._]
The style of composition called "Variations" is a striking example of a
primitive form that has proved imperishable. Sir Hubert Parry has
pointed out that the fundamental idea of variations in instrumental
music is co-ordinate with the _canto fermo_ and counterpoint of the
early choral composers. Each system resulted from an attempt at giving
form and unity to a composition by repeating a theme over and over
again, each time in some new aspect, or with fresh ornamentation; though
the effect obtained by winding ingenious counterpoint for other voices
about an unchanging _canto fermo_ is, of course, very different from the
tricking out of the melody itself. In choral music the _canto fermo_
system almost died out when maturer principles of structure were
discovered; but variation-form has never fallen into disuse at any
period since its invention. It has been used by all the great masters,
and by many of them as a vehicle for great and splendid ideas. General
progress from the mechanical to the imaginative marks the successive
stages through which the form has passed. One great reason for its
vitality is that it admits of treatment in every possible style.
Variations may be melodic, or contrapuntal, or harmonic. A superficial
composer can make them by simply worrying his theme, a profound composer
by developing the musical ideas that are in it. Bach's were mainly
contrapuntal, Mozart's mainly melodic--one may even say melismatic--and
Beethoven made variations of every kind, in his later works obtaining
results of undreamed-of grandeur from the form. But the later Beethoven
has never really been followed by any mortal in the austere and
wonderful path that he struck out for himself, though Brahms and others
have obtained a few hints from him. The originator of modern romantic
variations was Schumann, whose "Etudes Symphoniques" revealed a fresh
source of life in the form, that has proved less austerely inaccessible
than Beethoven's; Brahms, Tchaïkovsky, and many others having obviously
derived inspiration from it. Mr. Elgar stands in a peculiar relation to
the modern masters of variation-form. He seems to be much preoccupied
with the curious idea of musical portraiture, which, again, owes its
existence to Schumann. The miniature of Chopin occurring in Schumann's
"Carnaval" was the first, and perhaps remains to this day the best,
example in its kind, and the sketch of Mendelssohn forming No. 24 of the
same composer's "Album for the Young" is also a recognisable piece of
musical portraiture. Mr. Elgar has carried out the idea in an extended
scale in these variations. His theme, which he calls "enigma," has no
eccentricity. It is a rather march-like strain in regular form, having
three sections, the last of which is a repetition of the first, with
fresh harmony and instrumentation. There are nominally fourteen
variations;--including the finale, actually thirteen, for No. 10,
described as intermezzo, is not a variation. Each of the variations, and
the intermezzo, bears initials, or a nickname, which are commonly
assumed to represent the composer's friends. Why any such thing should
be assumed we do not know. It is both possible and allowable to portray
persons who are not one's friends, and some of Mr. Elgar's portraits
seem to us extremely severe and satirical. One of the early numbers, in
particular, gives a vivid impression of a very unsympathetic
personality, garrulous, querulous, trivial, meanly egotistic, and rather
ape-like. The composer does well to let the identity of the original
remain shrouded in mystery. The variations are grouped according to the
usual principles of contrast, and they are all extremely effective.
However much the composer may call his theme an enigma--Berlioz called
his variation-theme in an early symphony _idée fixe_--one can scarcely
escape the impression that it represents the temperament of the artist,
through which he sees his subjects; for that, and nothing else, is what
forms the connecting link between any series of portraits by the same
hand. Wonderful ingenuity is shown in varying the relation in which the
theme stands to the musical picture. During the first part of the work,
down to the end of the sixth variation, the attitude of the audience
seemed rather reserved. But a change began to be noticeable at the
seventh variation, called "Troyte," an impetuous presto movement that
shows a hitherto unsuspected kind of energy. Nor did the attention flag
at all during the noble and serene harmonies of the ensuing Allegretto.
The richly-organised "Nimrod," forming No. 9, leads to the dainty and
tripping "Dorabella" Intermezzo, which has no connection with the theme.
The eleventh variation, headed "G. R. S.," is another demonstration of
abundant vigour, and the following "B. G. N." has for leading feature a
fine lyrical melody for 'cello. No. 13 obviously has reference to
someone on a sea voyage, the "prosperous voyage" theme from
Mendelssohn's "Meeresstille" overture being heard amid delicate
suggestions of distant sea sound. In the very extended finale there is
some powerful polyphonic writing, and the movement ends with a
repetition of the theme in augmentation, forcibly declaimed by the heavy
brass to the accompaniment of the full orchestra. The audience seemed
rather astonished that a work by a British composer should have had
other than a petrifying effect upon them. They applauded with the energy
that the composer's imaginative power and masterly handling of the
orchestra deserve. Dr. Richter signalled to Mr. Elgar, who was seated
among the audience, and he thereupon mounted the stage and received an
enthusiastic greeting from the public. The striking success of this
composition reminds us of the following passage occurring at the end of
an article by Sir Hubert Parry written some years ago:--"It is even
possible that, after all its long history, the variation still affords
one of the most favourable opportunities for the exercise of their
genius by composers of the future."
[Sidenote: ="Cockaigne."=
_October 25, 1901._]
Dr. Elgar's more recent compositions seem to require nearly as much
talking about as Wagner's. But, be it observed, that is not the
composer's fault, but is the result of the primitive stage at which not
only the bulk of our musical public but many of our "leading musicians"
still find themselves, as regards understanding the poetic import of a
musical work. On two occasions in recent years a work full of slaughter
and frenzy, of barbarous revelry and sensuality, of glittering and
blaring pageantry, and ending with annihilation--a work the powerful
appeal of which lies precisely in the fact that it is the most powerful
existing expression in music of everything most un-Christian and
anti-Catholic--has been performed without public protest in a British
Cathedral. We here refer, of course, to the "Symphonie Pathétique." Dr.
Elgar is another composer whose music means something; but what chance
is there for us to understand him? One quails before the task of
discussing in a concert notice all the questions to which such a work as
the "Cockaigne" overture gives rise. First let us state, without
stopping to give reasons, that we think it worth hearing and worth
studying. If any previously existing overture is to be mentioned in
order to indicate the type to which "Cockaigne" belongs, it must
obviously be "Meistersinger." The humorous element is somewhat more
prominent than in "Meistersinger," and the general tone and colouring of
the two works are utterly dissimilar. But that the composer of
"Cockaigne" had "Meistersinger" in mind is rendered practically certain
by one particular point--the use of a Londoner theme and of the same
theme in diminution for the youthful Londoner, in exact analogy with
Wagner's symbols for the Meistersingers and the apprentices. Again the
opening bustle, giving way to a love-scene, suggests "Meistersinger,"
and so does the polyphonic elaboration of the middle part. But there is
a great difference between following Wagner's procedure and borrowing
his musical ideas. To some slight extent in the E flat section, and more
particularly in the harmony thereof, we find the Wagner flavour. For the
rest, while the procedure seems at any rate to be based on Wagner's, we
find the materials used and the character of the artistic result
achieved to be entirely different from Wagner's. There are seven musical
elements in "Cockaigne," the significance of which may be roughly
indicated as follows:--(1) Bustle of the streets; (2) a virile personal
note; (3) companionship and interchange of ideas between two
sweethearts; (4) pert children playing their pranks; (5) military band
episode; (6) impressions on passing from the street into a church; (7)
new phases of street-bustle music. Musical symbols of very considerable
plastic force are invented for these things, and are woven into a
powerful and entertaining tone-picture with that mastery of the
orchestra which no one can now refuse to recognise in Dr. Elgar. He
always works with definite lines, and does not seem to care much for
those atmospheric effects in which certain moderns, such as Richard
Strauss, are so strong. The music has a far wider range of ideas and
emotions than would be possible in a poem occupying the same time in
delivery. It gives us impressions of London by day and by night,
impressions that are partly realistic and partly antiquarian, following
the flight of the imagination with absolute freedom, forming a sort of
musical parallel to Henley's "London Voluntaries."
And lo! the wizard hour
Whose shining silent sorcery hath such power!
Still, still the streets, between their carcanets
Of linking gold, are avenues of sleep.
But see how gable ends and parapets
In gradual beauty and significance
Emerge! And did you hear
That little twitter-and-cheep,
Breaking inordinately loud and clear
On this still spectral exquisite atmosphere?
'Tis a first nest at matins! And behold
A rakehell cat--how furtive and acold!
A spent witch homing from some infamous dance--
Obscene, quick-trotting, see her tip and fade
Through shadowy railings into a pit of shade!
And if this is effective, does not a certain sonnet of Wordsworth's
exist to prove that an aspect of London may furnish a magnificent poetic
inspiration? It should be remembered that there is originality in
emotion as well as in ideas and in devices; and this is where we find
Dr. Elgar strong--perhaps stronger than any other British composer.
Besides the technical ability to express himself in music, he has
originality of emotion. He takes us into regions where music never took
us before. As to his use of Wagner's procedure, that was also
Beethoven's procedure in some of his finest works. In fact, it is the
procedure of everyone for whom music is a language, such as it has
tended more and more to become ever since Beethoven's time. The history
of music in the nineteenth century is the history of something growing
constantly more articulate.
No doubt some persons would like to ask--Should we have known all this,
or any of it, about the significance of the "Cockaigne" music had there
been no programmes? The answer is, Probably not. But the beauty of an
artistic design illustrating a certain subject may often be perceived
when one cannot make out what the subject is. In such a case the subject
is not "all nonsense." It is the stimulating cause of the beautiful
design, and it is very natural for those who find the design beautiful
to like to know what it is all about. It is a mistake to think that a
definite play of the imagination has nothing to do with musical
composition. It has very much to do with it. The kind of music with no
underlying play of fancy is only too familiar.
The name "Cockaigne" occurs in some form in old English, French,
Italian, and Spanish literature, meaning "the land of delights." The
fancied connection with "Cockney" is of much later date. Henry S.
Leigh's "Carols of Cockayne" (1869) shows the recognition of the word in
the sense of "Cockneydom." There is said to be a connection between
"Cockney" and the French "coquin," and if that is so the appropriation
of "Cockaigne" as correlative of "Cockney" is justified by community of
origin, all these words being derived from the stem of _coquere_ (to
cook). No doubt "coquin" originally meant "cook's boy" or "loafer in a
cook-shop," and "Cockney" at first meant something of the same sort. At
the same time there hangs about the word "Cockaigne" a certain
proverbial suggestiveness, derived from the time when it was used in the
sense of "land of delights," the etymology being forgotten. It thus has
a peculiar appropriateness as the title of Dr. Elgar's genial and
largely humoristic tone-picture.
[Sidenote: ="The Dream of Gerontius," Birmingham Festival.=
_October 3, 1900_]
"The Dream of Gerontius," Cardinal Newman called his poem, with
exquisite modesty. How that poem may stand in the estimation of those
who share Cardinal Newman's point of view in regard to religious matters
is perhaps an important question, but not one with which musical, or any
artistic, criticism is concerned. For nothing is more certain about art
than that it is subservient to a person's view of life. Artistic or
æsthetic criticism must be humble, and must abstain from trespassing on
the ground of faith and morals. Indirectly, indeed, æsthetics may have a
bearing on these more serious subjects. For is it not written of
religious doctrines, "By their fruits ye shall know them"?--and nothing
else is in so complete a sense a "fruit" of a religion as a work of art
arising therefrom. Nevertheless, the function of æsthetics is not to
commend or blame a view of life, but rather to enquire with what
eloquence, with what sincerity, with what measure of convincing power
the artist expounds his ideas and communicates his feelings, whatever
those ideas and feelings may be. With these reflections I find it
necessary to premise my notes on Edward Elgar's new work. The
reflections are rather solemn, but the new work is very solemn. It is
deeply and intensely religious; it is totally unconventional, and must
be discussed in an unconventional manner. First, then, let me state a
point of difference from all that I have experienced in listening to
other oratorios and sacred cantatas, and, I may say, all other musical
works with words made by one person and music by another. The point is
that _this_ music, on the whole, is apt to bring home to the listener
the greatness of the poem. The composer has not merely chosen from the
poem such material as suited him. He has expounded the poem musically,
and to the task of expounding it he has brought what may be described
without inflation as the resources of modern music. We shall doubtless
hear of plagiarism from "Parsifal," and there is indeed much in the work
that could not have been there but for "Parsifal." But it is not
allowable for a modern composer of religious music to be ignorant of
"Parsifal." One might as well write for orchestra in ignorance of the
Berlioz orchestration as write any serious music in ignorance of the
Wagnerian symbolism. Edward Elgar does nothing so affected as to ignore
the development which, for good or for evil, the language of music
underwent at the hands of Wagner. His orchestral prelude, however,
reverts to an earlier Wagnerian type. It gives a forecast of the whole
story in such wise that at the end of it the imagination has to be
carried back. We have the last agony of the sick man, his death, and
passage to the unseen. The symbols, though employed in the Wagnerian
manner, are, nevertheless, thoroughly original, taking us into an
atmosphere and a world absolutely remote from all that is Wagnerian.
When the voice of Gerontius (assigned to a tenor solo) enters we are
carried back to the death-bed--to the prayers of Gerontius and his
companions. A series of choruses with intervening and accompanying
passages for the solo voice is devoted to the King of Terrors. Here the
music touches the various notes in the gamut of feeling, from the agony
of terrors to serene confidence. After the parting of Gerontius, with
the words "Novissima hora est," a new voice enters, that of the Priest
(baritone), chanting "Proficiscere, anima Christiana." Among the
supplications for the departed is a chant three times repeated, each of
the two parts ending with a choral "Amen" that bears a tender echo of
the mediæval "Cantus fictus." An extended section of chorus and
semi-chorus bring the first part of the cantata to a peaceful and
prayerful ending.
In the second part the soul of Gerontius is winging its way towards the
celestial regions, holding colloquy with an angel. There is a Dantesque
passage in which a chorus of demons is overheard by the pair--the soul
and the angel. Gerontius is encouraged by the angel. Echoes of earthly
voices, praying for the departed soul, are borne up from the earth, and
in the end the soul of Gerontius is affectionately delivered over to
Purgatory by the angel, there to wait suffering indeed, but in
resignation and in the assurance of salvation.
Naturally the prevalent poetic note in such a work is the mystical
exaltation, now of the contrite sinner, now of the aspiring saint. The
chief climax is reached, not at the end, but in the hymn of the Angels,
"Praise to the Holiest in the Height," recurring before the departure to
Purgatory. But the whole work sings "Praise to the Holiest in the Height
_and in the Depth_." A powerfully contrasting note is heard in the
death-agony of Gerontius and, above all, in the chorus of demons
occurring in the second part. Here a comparison with Berlioz is simply
inevitable--for Edward Elgar's dramatic power admits of comparison with
the great masters. His demons are much more terrible than those of
Berlioz, who was a materialist in the profound sense--not, that is, in
virtue of more or less shifting beliefs, but of unalterable temperament.
Infinitely remote from that of Berlioz is the temperament revealed in
Edward Elgar's music, which, like parts of the poem, fairly merits the
epithet "Dantesque."
[Sidenote: ="Gerontius,"
Lower Rhine Festival,
Düsseldorf.=
_May 22, 1902._]
"Ever since the far-off times of the great madrigal composers England
has played but a modest part in the concert of the great musical powers.
For the products of the musical mind it has depended almost entirely on
importation, and has exported nothing but works of a lighter order."
Such are the words with which the German author of the "Gerontius"
programme, specially written for this Festival, introduces his subject.
The economic metaphor is ingenious. It does not imply too much or
justify the state of things to which it refers. Rightly or wrongly,
Germany and the Continent of Europe in general did not feel that serious
English music was a thing to be taken seriously, and to that fact the
writer refers with ingenious delicacy, going on to say that about the
turn of the century a change began to be noticeable. Everyone conversant
with musical affairs knows how that change was brought about, though not
everyone on our own side of the Channel cares to admit what he knows. It
is in the main to Edward Elgar--a man who has done his best work living
quietly in the Malvern hills, without official position of any kind,
remote from social distraction and the strife of commercialism--that the
change is due. The presentation of so lengthy a work as the "Dream of
Gerontius" at a Rhine Festival has a kind of significance that the
English musical public would do well to consider. The programme is much
more carefully selected than at our own festivals, the idea being not at
all that it should contain "something for all tastes," but that it
should be characteristic of musical art as it now stands, giving only
the most typically excellent of newer compositions, and of older
compositions only those upon which it is felt that contemporary genius
had been more particularly nourished. It is not accidental that on the
present occasion the names of Handel, Mendelssohn, Schumann are absent
while Bach is very abundantly represented; Beethoven's name figures in
connection with the most modern in feeling of all his works (the C minor
Symphony), and Liszt's with his revolutionary "Faust" Symphony. Nor is
it accidental that the preference is given to Strauss among German and
Elgar among English composers. For those are the men who really carry
the torch, and the Germans are not to be deceived in such matters.
The performance of "Gerontius" yesterday evening had a good many
features of special interest. Full justice was done to the instrumental
part of the work by the magnificent Festival orchestra of a hundred and
twenty-seven performers. Those peculiar qualities of the imagination
which make of Dr. Wüllner, jun., by far the best representative of
Gerontius as yet found were once more demonstrated, and the part of the
Angel was given by Miss Muriel Foster with the wonderfully beautiful and
genuine voice that has long been recognised as her most remarkable gift,
and with considerably greater and more expressive eloquence than any
previous experience might have led one to expect from her. In the bass
parts of the Priest and the Angel of Death Professor Messchaert sang
with wonderful dramatic power, and the semi-chorus, seated in a line
before the orchestra, acquitted themselves almost to perfection in the
delicate task that they have to perform throughout the death-bed scene.
I have already expressed the view that the final section of the first
part, beginning with the Priest's "proficiscere, anima Christiana," is
the point at which one first becomes conscious of actual genius in the
composition; but now, after further study and another complete hearing
of the work, I am not quite satisfied with that statement. Perhaps at
that point a good many listeners first become clearly conscious of the
composer's genius. But on looking back at the extraordinary eloquence
and beauty of the musical symbolism in the prelude and death-agony of
Gerontius, one perceives that the _quietus_ which comes to the spirit in
the scene following Gerontius's death is merely a climax in a process
that really begins with the first notes. The heavenly calm at the
opening of the second part I realised yesterday more thoroughly than
ever before. Splendid as the treatment of the hymn "Praise to the
Holiest in the Height" is, the final section is not so completely
adequate as the rest. The truth is that the composer there found himself
in presence of a task hopelessly beyond the powers of any mortal except
Bach. In the "Sanctus" heard on Sunday evening the shining circles of
the heavenly choir are, as it were, made audible to the ears of mortals.
Bach could only do it once, and no other composer could do it at all.
Elgar gives a beautiful and grandly conceived hymn of the Church
Triumphant, and with that we may well rest satisfied. He is in the main
a dramatic composer, and, in those cases where he enters the domain of
purely religious music, he gravitates back rather to Palestrina, with
his "souls like thin flames mounting up to God," than to the greater and
serener spirit of Bach.
[Sidenote: ="Gerontius,"
Preliminary Article.=
_March 12, 1903._]
In subject, though not in treatment, this oratorio--the first
performance of which in Manchester will be given this evening--is
closely akin to the morality play "Everyman." Gerontius is not a
historical character, but a typical person, belonging to no particular
age or country. He is further like Everyman in being a layman, who has
lived in the world, as distinguished from the Church, and in being just
a plain, well-meaning man, without very great or shining qualities. The
poem on which the oratorio is founded begins, at a later stage than
"Everyman," with the death-bed scene, and does not end with the death of
Gerontius's mortal part, but peers wistfully into the world beyond, and
"under the similitude of a dream," tells much of what holy men have
imagined about the experiences of Christian souls going to their account
under the guidance of angels.
In the oratorio the utterances of Gerontius are assigned to a tenor
soloist, who in the first part has to deliver the broken phrases of the
sick man "near to death," and in the second the delicately restrained
raptures of the soul that "feels in him an inexpressive lightness and a
sense of freedom," as he gradually becomes conscious of the angelic
presence that is bearing him along towards the heavenly regions. The
only other soloist in the first part is the Priest (bass), who delivers
the solemn "Proficiscere, anima Christiana, de hoc mundo," as the soul
of Gerontius quits the body. In the second part the second and third
soloists represent, one the Guiding Angel (mezzo-soprano) and the other
the Angel of the Agony (bass), who, at the most solemn moment of the
oratorio, is recognised by the Soul as "the same who strengthened Him,
what time he knelt, lone in the garden shade bedewed with blood." The
semi-chorus in the first part is the group of "assistants," or friends
gathered about the dying man's bed. The function of the chorus in the
first part is not defined, but it may be taken as voicing the prayers
and aspirations of other faithful souls, aware of Gerontius's case and
sympathising with him. In the second part the chorus is now of
"angelicals," now of demons. The semi-chorus again represents the voices
of friends on earth, which at one point are imagined as again becoming
audible to the Soul, and also takes part in certain phases of the great
hymn "Praise to the Holiest in the Height," where the vocal harmony
falls into as many as twelve parts.
Those who are to hear this music to-day for the first time should beware
of judging it by false standards. Let them be prepared for the fact that
from beginning to end there is not a particle of anything in the least
like Handel or Mendelssohn. Without the slightest intention of doing
anything revolutionary, but simply following the bent of his own genius,
the composer here brushes aside the conventions of oratorio very much as
Wagner brushed aside the conventions of opera, and justifies himself
just as thoroughly in so doing. To hear the "Gerontius" music is to
become acquainted with by far the most remarkable and original
personality that has arisen in musical Britain since the days of
Purcell. One might trace the manifestations of that originality in the
harmony, that always shows a touch both sensitive and sure, in the
orchestration and interplay of chorus and semi-chorus, in the amazing
sweetness and depth of feeling that sounds in the Angel (mezzo-soprano
solo) music, in the force and truth of musical expression which, for the
most part, extends even to elements of minor importance in the work. But
for the present these broad indications must suffice, and we will only
add the warning that the music is powerful, subtle, and of manifold
significance, not to be judged in too great a hurry, and yielding up the
best of its secrets only to those who listen repeatedly and study
between.
[Sidenote: ="Gerontius,"
Hallé Concerts.=
_March 13, 1903._]
Originality is disadvantageous to a composer at first in two ways. The
more obvious is that listeners find the music speaking to them in an
unknown or partially unknown tongue, and are displeased; and the less
obvious, that players and singers cannot, as a rule, do justice to an
unfamiliar style. When it is a case of winning recognition for something
new and original a thoroughly adequate rendering is half the battle.
Such a rendering carries with it a sense of enjoyment and satisfaction
in the performers, and there is always a chance that this may to some
extent communicate itself to the public; whereas in the other case the
embarrassment of the performers will certainly communicate itself, and
the audience attribute everything unsatisfactory to the unknown or
insufficiently guaranteed composer. In Elgar's "Gerontius" the
originality is strong and unmistakeable, and the performers find their
technical skill severely taxed. But fortunately the composer has a clear
head; he knows the technique of each instrument and he never
miscalculates. Performers therefore find their task, though often
difficult, is always possible and, further, that the result is always
satisfactory. For Elgar has an ear; he is a man of tone, and does not
care for music that looks well on paper but sounds rather muddy. These
points, known to those who for some time past have taken a close
interest in Elgar's work, made it possible to hope that the Manchester
performance of his great oratorio would be a striking success, and
perhaps even throw a new light on the merits of the composition; and it
can scarcely be questioned that the experience of yesterday evening
fulfilled those hopes. It was doubtless the most carefully prepared of
the performances that have been given thus far in this country. Dr.
Richter was, for various reasons, peculiarly anxious that it should go
well; Mr. Wilson made up his mind some time ago that whatever
conscientious work could do to secure a worthy performance should be
done; the hopes and endeavours of choir-master and conductor were
seconded by the choir in an admirable spirit; and, though it seems that
for some time the usual difficulties of an unfamiliar style were felt,
not a trace of any such thing was to be observed in the performance, the
remarkably willing and energetic style in which the choral singers had
grappled with their task bearing its proper fruit in a rendering that
sounded spontaneous and unembarrassed, as though the singers were sure
of the notes and could give nearly all their attention to phrasing,
expression, and dynamic adjustments. In the highest degree remarkable,
too, was the orchestral performance. Passages of such peculiar
difficulty as the rushing string figures, that represent the strains of
heavenly music overheard by the Soul and the Angel as they approach the
judgment-seat, came out with much greater distinctness than we have
ever heard before, and we had a similar impression at many other points
in the performance, which was as delicate as it was precise in detail
and broad in style. But experience of all the complete performances yet
given induces us to think that the difference between thorough success
and ordinary half-success with this oratorio depends more on the
semi-chorus than on any other point, and this is where the pre-eminence
of last night's rendering, among all yet given in this country, is most
unquestionable. Though not placed in front of the orchestra--as they
should have been and, we hope, will be next time,--this group of twenty
picked singers was really excellent. The voices blended well, and their
combined tone was clearly distinguishable from the larger choir's. At
the notoriously dangerous points, such as the re-entry with the "Kyrie"
after the invocation of "angels, martyrs, hermits, and holy virgins,"
there was no hint of embarrassment, and they played their part as a
slightly more delicate choral unit with absolute success in the litany
and throughout the marvellous concluding chorus of the first part,
where, as the original analysis suggested, the noble pedal-point
harmonies symbolise the swinging of golden censers, as the supplications
of the friends and of the church rise up to the throne of God. Among the
astonishingly new kinds of musical eloquence obtained in this work by
the interplay of chorus and semi-chorus it is worth drawing special
attention to the tenor and alto unison in the semi-chorus on p. 108 (we
quote from the second edition). The passage is not difficult, but to
realise the particular effect of tone as well as it was realised
yesterday shows exquisite adjustment.
As principal soloist Mr. John Coates had an enormously difficult task,
which he performed about as well as was possible with the vocal material
that has been assigned to him by nature. All that thorough knowledge of
the part, together with high artistic intelligence, could do was done.
His voice did not break on the high B flat (p. 33), and he seemed to be
well disposed, notwithstanding his recent illness. Though it is usually
said that Elgar writes better for orchestra than for choir, and better
for choir than for the solo voice, he was very finely inspired when he
conceived the part of the mezzo-soprano Angel. The opening arioso, "My
work is done," is a most lovely song, to which the haunting "Alleluia"
phrase forms a kind of refrain. But even this--one of the very few
detachable things in the oratorio--is not the best of the Angel's music.
It is surpassed by the other song, "Softly and gently, dearly ransomed
Soul," where the dropping of the Soul down into the waters of Purgatory
is accompanied by music of quite unearthly sweetness and tenderness.
These are things which make it seem almost a shame to discuss this work
in any purely technical aspect. Miss Brema made the Angel's part one of
the few entirely satisfactory features of the first performance, and
again yesterday her nobly expressive style did full justice to the
marvellous beauty of the music. Mr. Black was vocally irreproachable in
the part of the Priest who speeds the parting soul of Gerontius, and
again as the Angel of the Agony in the second part.
In reference to a musical composition the word "dramatic" has sometimes
to be used in a sense different from "theatrical." Thus the two great
Passions by Bach--the "St. Matthew" and the "St. John"--both have a
dramatic element so strong that at certain points the music becomes
altogether dramatic. Yet no sane person ever called it theatrical, in
the sense of unfit for a church. By "dramatic" in such cases one means
two things--(1) having thematic material that is conceived with a
certain vividness, in reference to a particular situation or mood of
feeling; (2) developed according to procedure that does not sacrifice
the vividness to formal or structural considerations. In this sense,
then, we call Elgar's "Gerontius" a dramatic composition from beginning
to end. To find fault with it for the absence of choral climax in the
manner of Handel and Mendelssohn is as much out of place as it would be
with Wagner's "Tannhäuser." On the other hand, we do not agree with the
criticism that "Gerontius" is Wagnerian music. In two places there is a
brief and faint suggestion of "Parsifal," first in the _sostenuto_ theme
for _cor anglais_ and 'celli that enters in the fifty-second bar of the
Prelude and recurs in some form at several points in the course of the
work, and secondly in a recurrent phrase for strings at the entry of the
recitative assigned to the Angel of the Agony--and to some extent
throughout that recitative, which vaguely recalls "Parsifal." The other
elements we find to be unlike Wagner and unlike every other composer but
Elgar. These elements it is convenient to classify, not according to the
usual technical or formal principle, but according to a dramatic
principle. One notes, in the first place, four main categories--(1) the
purely human; (2) the ecclesiastical; (3) the angelic; (4) the demonic.
The Prelude opens with the symbols of Judgment and Prayer. Next the
"slumber" theme enters, to be joined at the fourteenth bar by the
"Miserere." The note of feeling contracts and sinks towards utter
abasement, which reaches the lowest point in the _cor anglais_ theme
with _tremolando_ accompaniment. But now the sick man's despair finds
expression in a loud cry, which is answered in the majestic and ringing
tones that remind him to face death hopefully. A quite new musical
element enters with the Andantino theme, developed at some length, and
informs the penultimate section of the noble tone-poem, which continues
till a brief _reprise_ of the slumber theme suggests the passing of the
soul. New phases of the Judgment theme connect the Prelude with the
opening recitative, and here the imagination has to be carried back, as
usual after the Prelude of a dramatic composition, which as a rule
epitomises a good part of the action. It is evident, then, that the
Prelude is concerned only with the first two of the categories above
enumerated--that is to say, with the purely human and the
ecclesiastical, and not at all with the angelic or demonic. Of the
angelic music the principal elements, in addition to those already
mentioned, are the various phases of the great hymn "Praise to the
Holiest in the Height." The extraordinary demon music would in itself
offer material for an essay. Here we can only touch on a few obvious
features--the upward rushing semiquaver figure in chromatic fourths,
which is grotesque and rat-like; the three-part figure for strings in
quavers which is first heard with the words "Tainting the hallowed
air," but belongs more particularly to "in a deep hideous purring have
their life"; the terrific fugato "dispossessed, thrust aside, chuck'd
down"; the sinister and ominous four-note theme "To every slave and
pious cheat"; the _motif_ of demonic pride, p. 83; and the sarcastic
prolongation of the last word in "He'll slave for hire." The long chorus
formed of these elements is a welter of infernal but most eloquent
sound, the enormous technical difficulties all of which were completely
mastered yesterday.
[Sidenote: ="The Apostles,"
Birmingham Festival.=
_October 15, 1903._]
To-day, when Elgar's new Oratorio "The Apostles" was first publicly
performed, was a sufficiently striking contrast with the corresponding
day in the Festival of three years ago that witnessed the production of
the same composer's "Gerontius." On that earlier occasion the interest
both of performers and public was languid. That Elgar's music was
difficult and harassing to perform was generally known, while the merit
of it was regarded as doubtful. The upholders of British musical
orthodoxy, with their faith in the saving virtues of eight-part
counterpoint, shook their heads, the choral singers found their work
disconcerting, and the public doubted whether the composer was anything
more than an eccentric. The three intervening years have placed Elgar's
reputation on a very different footing. Vague hostility towards the
unusual and the unknown has given way almost universally to the
recognition that he is one of the great originals in the musical world
of to-day; and he thus compels attention even in those who instinctively
dislike both his particular methods and the kind of general atmosphere
into which his religious art transports the listener.
In "The Apostles" Elgar adheres completely to those principles which
were exemplified by "Gerontius" first among works of British origin.
That is to say, the music is continuous, as in Wagnerian musical drama.
There is no such thing in the work as a detachable musical
"number"--whether air, song, chorus, concerted piece, march, or anything
else. The composer has musical symbols corresponding to ideas, feelings,
moods, aspects of nature or personality, religious conceptions or
aspirations, animated scenes of popular life, phases of local and
national custom, exhortations of the angels, suggestions of the devil,
mystical rapture, rebellious despair; and he uses those symbols in the
manner of a language. There is no mechanical work, no carrying out of
architectural schemes with lifeless material. Everything in the score is
vivified by the idea. The composition heard to-day consists of the first
and second parts of the projected oratorio. In the first part there are
three scenes--"The Calling of the Apostles," "By the Wayside," and "By
the Sea of Galilee"; in the second part four scenes--"The Betrayal,"
"Golgotha," "At the Sepulchre," and "The Ascension." After the prologue
and the narrator's opening recitative, the setting forth of the
Apostles' calling begins with the changing of the Temple watch at dawn,
the watchmen on the roof as they salute the rising sun being conceived
as the unconscious heralds of Christ's kingdom on earth. Here the
musical treatment is stamped with the utmost grandeur, and points of
amazingly vivid and picturesque detail are successively made, the
curious Oriental _Melismata_ of the watchman's cry, accompanied by the
_Shofar_ (Hebrew trumpet of ram's horn), giving way to the psalm within
the Temple, between the phrases of which is heard the brazen clangour of
the opening gates, while the air is flooded with the rushing music of
harps. For the psalm an old Hebrew melody is used. So rich in matter is
the text of the oratorio that I cannot attempt here even to give an
outline of it, but must refer readers to Canon Gorton's booklet "An
Interpretation of the Libretto" (Novello and Co.). There will be found
an account of the sources from which the composer took his text, and in
particular the justification for his view of Judas as a man who intended
not to betray his Master to destruction but to force His hand, to make
Him declare His power and establish His earthly kingdom forthwith--a
view for which there would seem to be patristic authority.[2] The
oratorio is not theological; it is a dramatisation of the Gospel story
that may be compared with Klopstock's "Messiah." After the introductory
sections, broadly expounding the scheme of Redemption as accepted by the
entire Christian world, but not enforcing any particular doctrine, all
the stress is laid on the individuality of the persons--the Apostles,
the Magdalene, and the Mother of Christ--and on the collective character
of the groups, such as the women who are scandalised at the
ministrations of the Magdalene and the mob which cries "Crucify Him!"
As an accompaniment of the drama we have the mystical chorus of angels
commenting on the progress of earthly affairs and giving utterance to
the sweet, passionless jubilation of sinless beings after the Ascension.
To those who are acquainted with "Gerontius" it is almost needless to
say that the composer is at his best in rendering the music of the
heavenly choir. His marvellous faculty of finding music that matches the
words inevitably, so that once heard the associations seem to have been
long known, is here repeatedly illustrated. Perhaps the most absolutely
perfect examples occur at the words "What are these wounds in Thine
hands?" and in the recurrent "Alleluia" phrase.
[2] Compare De Quincey's famous essay on Judas Iscariot.--ED.
Elgar's austerity is more strongly pronounced in "The Apostles" than in
"Gerontius," and so, too, is his audacity in using the special resources
of the modern dramatic orchestra to expound a religious theme. The old
pompous oratorio manner he has left an immeasurable distance behind him.
He sticks at nothing in his determination to cut down to the quick of
human nature, to reject all abstractions and conventions and illustrate
an idea or fact of religious experience in its relation to actual flesh
and blood. The sinister parts of the oratorio recall by their general
tone, atmosphere, and colouring the scene in Klopstock's "Messiah" in
which an avenging angel carries the soul of Judas up to Golgotha and
there shows him the results of his work. Mighty as the music is, it is
all strictly illustrative, and so the centre of gravity remains in the
text.
Some time must elapse yet before anyone can offer a confident estimate
of "The Apostles" as a work of art. It will possibly be found to stand
to "Gerontius" in something like the relation of Beethoven's Ninth
Symphony to his Seventh, the later work being of greater depth and
significance but less perfectly finished.
[Sidenote: ="The Apostles,"
Preliminary Article.=
_February 25, 1904._]
Elgar's most recent oratorio, "The Apostles," which will be heard by the
Manchester public for the first time this evening, stands in much the
same relation to recent works in oratorio form by other composers as one
of the later musical dramas by Wagner holds to the kind of opera that
was in vogue when he began to write. According to current ideas,
justified by the practice of many well-known composers, an oratorio
comes into existence by some such process as the following. A composer
casts about for a subject, either being guided in his choice by
consideration of what is in some manner appropriate to the particular
occasion, or simply taking a story from the Bible that has not been used
before, or not too frequently before, for musical purposes. He then
either obtains the services of a librettist or himself arranges a
libretto setting forth the chosen story. In the drawing up of the
libretto the most important matter is the engineering of "opportunities"
for the composer--here an effective air for the principal personage,
there a chorus with scope for effective contrapuntal writing, everywhere
due regard for the well-varied interest which the public loves, and, at
the end of a part, provision for an effective Finale. But some
recognised kind of musical opportunity is always the chief matter. No
one cares much about the subject except in so far as it provides the
musical opportunity of an accepted kind. It is a case of chorus, air,
concerted piece, march, air for another sort of voice, and Finale, with
connecting recitatives as a necessary evil, and the whole thing standing
or falling according as the composer seizes the said opportunities and
turns them to account in the accepted manner, or neglects or fails to do
that. For so long a time has that kind of oratorio been regarded by the
general public as the only possible kind, that even now immense numbers
of persons discuss works like "Gerontius" and "The Apostles" on the old
lines. That a musician should have a mind, and a message to which notes
and chords are subservient, is an idea so new as to be disquieting, if
not at once dismissed as absurd. People are so much accustomed to say
that they never did care about the subject of a musical work; that no
sensible person does; that if the music is pretty the work is good; and
there is an end of the matter. Yet now comes a composer and makes the
subject the chief thing, writing music that gives no one the slightest
encouragement to take interest in it apart from the subject--in short,
displaying the most complete indifference to everything that used to be
expected of a composer, and giving us all to understand that, in a
religious work, if the music does not in some clear manner contribute to
the exposition of the subject, it is not justified at all. In this
respect "Gerontius" and "The Apostles" are alike. People can take them
or leave them, but they cannot make them out to be pretty music, such as
one can enjoy without "bothering about" the subject. For Elgar so orders
that we have to enjoy with the head and the heart or not at all. He will
not allow us to enjoy simply with the nerves or by recognising approved
kinds of musical rhetoric.
Whatever Elgar may do in the future, he can never approach a more
weighty subject than is expounded in the two parts of "The Apostles,"
which make up the oratorio in its present form. This deals with the
calling of the Apostles and with some of the most important incidents in
the life of the Redeemer during His ministry. Everyone intending to hear
the work should read the short and clear account given in Canon Gorton's
"Interpretation of the Text." The writer is remarkably successful in
bringing out the profound consistency and psychological insight which
distinguish this oratorio text so very sharply from most others.
Attention may be drawn specially to the characterisation of the three
Apostles, John, Peter, and Judas, expounded mainly on pages 13 and 15.
Canon Gorton also shows us the sources from which some of the most
fruitful ideas and telling symbols of the oratorio have been derived.
The music exemplifies a further development along the lines indicated by
"Gerontius." In the resources which he calls into play the composer is a
thorough-going modern. His orchestra is of great size, and he does not
scorn the specially modern instruments or the modern tendency to group
and subdivide in an elaborate and subtle fashion. In the quality of his
absolute musical invention he shows himself to be neither a classic nor
a romantic, but a psychological musician. His thematic web is the exact
analogue of the emotional and imaginative play to which the exposition
of the story gives rise from point to point, and it thus partakes of the
nature of language. The composer cares nothing for accepted views as to
what is in accordance with the proper dignity of oratorio; but, trusting
to his conception as a whole to ennoble every part, he allows himself to
be here and there extremely realistic, very much as the great religious
painters have done. He works on a great scale; in the handling of
musical symbols he is not dismayed by tasks that might well be
considered impossible, and he thus reminds one of the compliment which
Erasmus paid to Albrecht Dürer--"There is nothing that he cannot express
with his black and white--thunder and lightning, a gust of wind, God
Almighty and the heavenly host."
[Sidenote: ="The Apostles,"
Hallé Concerts.=
_February 26, 1904._]
A faultless rendering of "The Apostles" is not to be expected. The same
thing has been said of "Gerontius," and the score of the later work yet
more obviously transcends the powers of the best endowed and disciplined
musical forces to render it in a manner which "leaves nothing to be
desired." All hope of reaching the end of their task with a feeling of
complacency must be abandoned by the choir, orchestra, soloists, and
conductor who undertake to perform "The Apostles," which, in point of
technical difficulty, is a "Symphonie Fantastique" and Mass in D
combined. Still, in a relative sense, a rendering may be
satisfactory--in the sense that it has the root of the matter in it, not
that it is faultless in every detail,--and in that sense we should call
the rendering of yesterday highly satisfactory. The general intonation
of the choir was better than on any previous occasion, all the delicate
fluting rapture of the celestial choruses at the end sounding
wonderfully sweet and showing not the least trace of fatigue. The
orchestral playing was more subtle than at Birmingham, and it seemed to
afford a better justification of the composer's extraordinary colour
schemes. It would be hard to suggest a better representation for any of
the solo parts. As at Birmingham, Mr. Ffrangcon Davies gave the words of
the Redeemer with admirable dignity, and here and there with a trumpet
tone in his voice that might have reminded an Ammergau pilgrim of the
late Joseph Mayer. As the Narrator and the Apostle John Mr. Coates gave
a rendering worthy of his Gerontius earlier in the season. In the parts
for women's voices Miss Agnes Nicholls and Miss Muriel Foster once more
proved their immeasurable superiority to singers of the "star" order in
music of real poetic quality. Mr. Black gave a most telling
interpretation of the part of Judas, which, as in the Passion Play at
Oberammergau, has greater dramatic significance than any other. All the
solo parts, except the Redeemer's, are in certain sections so much
interwoven with each other and with the chorus that the combined result
overpowers the individual interest, though in the parts of the Magdalene
and of Judas there are also important independent developments. There
can be no question as to the general excellence of the rendering, and
the audience was on the same enormous scale as when "Gerontius" was
given in November; but the reception was very different. There was
applause, of course, yesterday, but no scene of great enthusiasm such as
the earlier and simpler oratorio evoked. Some persons seem to be of
opinion that the comparative reserve of the public was caused by the
extreme solemnity of the subject; that they were really impressed by the
music, but in such a manner that there was no inclination to be
demonstrative. In this there may be some truth; but, "The Apostles"
being unquestionably much more austere and difficult to understand than
"Gerontius," we are inclined to accept the simpler explanation that the
audience did not like it so well.
It seems impossible to deny that the music of "The Apostles" represents
in many important respects an advance upon the earlier oratorio. The
poetic theme of the whole work is incomparably more ambitious, and the
musical invention is in more respects than one of greater power. In
regard to this point the obvious case to take is Mr. Jaeger's example 3
(Novello's edition), "Christ, the Man of Sorrows," that being the
_motif_ of which more frequent and varied use is made than any other.
Here we find unmistakable progress. In its simplest form the theme is
more intense and more profound in feeling than any in "Gerontius," and
furthermore the manner in which the significance of it develops
throughout the work, up to the Ascension phrase, where it occurs in its
most expanded form, though not for the last time, shows a great advance
in the composer's art. Again, the interest of the "Apostles" music is
much more varied. All the symbolism having reference to Christ in
solitude makes a most powerful appeal to the imagination; and the
opening of the Temple gates at dawn is a scene of astonishingly graphic
force and bold design. In the second part the tragedy of the Passion is
given in four scenes of tremendous intensity, and then, in the section
headed "At the Sepulchre," we begin to become aware of the spirit which
is Elgar's most rare and wonderful possession. "And very early in the
morning," says the text, "they came unto the sepulchre at the rising of
the sun." Thereupon are heard the watchers singing an echo of the music
from the great sunrise scene at the beginning. After a dozen bars the
fluting notes of a celestial chorus begin gliding in, and then we have
an example of that _naïf_ mediævalism at which the second part of
"Gerontius" here and there hints. A kind of unearthly exhilaration
begins to sound in the music. The Resurrection has brought a new fact
into a sorrowful world. It is a sublime adventure, at news of which
heaven and earth bubble into song. Throughout all the rest of the work
the composer creates that sense of the multitudinous which belongs to
parts of the hymn "Praise to the Holiest" in the earlier oratorio. But
the angelic rapture that accompanies the Resurrection and Ascension in
the "Apostles" is far greater and more wonderful. The heavenly strain is
repeated in so many different ways that the air seems to be full of it,
and it never loses the angelic character by becoming militant or
assertive. It remains to the end an efflorescence of song--the sinless,
strifeless, untiring, sweetly fluting rapture of the heavenly choir,
mixing or alternating with the more substantial tones of holy men and
women on earth. Elgar can also render for us the grief of angels. This
he does in a page of unparalleled beauty, describing how Peter, after
denying his Master, went out and wept bitterly. This page alone might
well save the composition from ever being forgotten.
The less convincing parts of the oratorio are sections ii. and iii.,
especially those parts devoted to the Beatitudes and the conversion of
the Magdalene. It is obviously a work the secrets of which are to be
penetrated only with the aid of many hearings and much study. At present
we are disposed to regard "Gerontius" as the more perfect work of art,
though the individual beauties of the "Apostles" are greater and more
wonderful. Nearly everything in the later oratorio is stronger. The
symbols of the Church show an advance upon the corresponding parts of
"Gerontius" scarcely less remarkably than the symbols of the heavenly
choir. The strange Old Testament element connected with the Temple
service again shows imaginative power of quite a new kind, wonderfully
enriching the background of the composition, and the tragic force of the
"Passion" scenes is immensely greater than anything in "Gerontius." But
with our present degree of knowledge we miss in the "Apostles" that
crowning artistic unity which prompted us to describe "Gerontius" as a
pearl among oratorios.
[Sidenote: ="In the South."=
_November 4, 1904._]
Sir Edward Elgar's most recent Overture, "In the South," has a
picturesqueness, or rather a kind of graphic power, arising from
far-reaching play of the imagination. In thematic invention it is
perhaps more strongly stamped with Elgar's originality than any other
work. Its whole tone, atmosphere, and colouring are something
essentially new in music, the only hint of any other composer's
influence occurring in the viola solo, which bears a faint suggestion of
Berlioz's "Harold in Italy." But, being a secondary element in the
latter part of the Overture, it is to be regarded merely as that kind of
reference which in music is as allowable as it is in literature. The
_grandioso_ theme beginning in A flat minor, which was suggested by the
Roman remains of La Turbie, is so striking that it has already acquired
a good many nicknames. The "steam-roller" theme, it has been called;
elsewhere, the "seven-league-boot" theme, the "Jack the Giant-killer,"
and, among Germans, the "Siebentöter" theme. In any case it is a most
extraordinary piece of musical expression, of a kind scarcely ever
foreshadowed by any other composer, except once or twice by Beethoven,
who first sought and found the musical symbol of great historic or
cosmic forces, or of the emotion stirred in the human consciousness by
the play, or after-effects, of such forces. One thing remains to be said
about this Overture. The composer's procedure is a compromise between
the old procedure by way of thematic development and the newer by way of
dramatic suggestion, and he does not always succeed completely in the
fusion of the two, as, for example, Beethoven does in his greater
"Leonora"; but here and there he permits the feeling to arise that the
one is interfering with the other. In particular, the composition is
open to the charge of a certain weakness in thematic development; but
that does not prevent it from being, as a whole, a very striking,
beautiful, and original tone picture. Dr. Richter's interpretation very
finely revealed all the strong points. He saved three minutes of the
composer's own time by taking the _vivace_ sections at a somewhat
quicker tempo. As at Covent Garden last March, Mr. Speelman played the
incidental viola solo with marvellous beauty of tone.
[Sidenote: ="The Coronation Ode."=
_October 3, 1902._]
To the Coronation Ode I listened with great curiosity, remembering the
ordinary fate that overtakes patriotic composers and wondering what Sir
Edward Elgar would make of the subject. I find that he has let himself
be inspired by the nymph of the same spring whence flowed those two
delightful Tommy Atkins marches known as "Pomp and Circumstance." It is
popular music of a kind that has not been made for a long time in this
country--scarcely at all since Dibdin's time. At least one may say that
of the best parts, such as the bass solo and chorus "Britain, ask of
thyself," and the contralto solo and chorus "Land of hope and glory."
The former is ringing martial music, the latter a sort of Church parade
song having the breath of a national hymn. It is the melody which
occurs as second principal theme of the longer "Pomp and Circumstance"
march, which I beg to suggest is as broad as "God Save the King," "Rule
Britannia," and "See the Conquering Hero," and is perhaps the broadest
open-air tune composed since Beethoven's "Freude schöner Götterfunken."
Moreover, it is distinctively British--at once beefy and breezy. It is
astonishing to hear people finding fault with Elgar for using this tune
in two different compositions. I find it most natural in a composer, to
whom music is a language in which, desiring to say exactly the same
thing again, one has no choice but to say it in the same notes. Besides,
such tunes are composed less frequently than once in fifty years. How
then can one blame Elgar for not composing two in six months? The chorus
enjoyed themselves over it, and so did the audience. As to the
sentimental parts of the Ode, frankly I find them uninspired.
CHAPTER VIII.
RICHARD STRAUSS.
[Sidenote: ="Don Quixote,"
Düsseldorf.=
_May 26, 1899._]
Richard Strauss is now beyond question the most prominent figure among
the younger composers of Germany. He was born at Munich in 1864. At an
early age he mastered the various arts of composition and produced works
that showed originality and power. Among such early works may be
mentioned a String Quartet produced in 1881, and a Symphony first heard
in the following year. Within a few years he also composed a Sonata for
'cello, a Serenade for wind instruments, a Concerto for violin, a
Concerto for horn, besides songs and pianoforte pieces. These early
works show the influence of classical models, and in three cases--the
Sonata for 'cello and the Concertos for violin and horn
respectively--the influence of Mendelssohn. At a later period Richard
Strauss became a disciple of the Wagner-Liszt school and adopted the
Symphonic Poem as his principal medium of expression. His fine Sonata in
E flat for pianoforte and violin marks the transition stage. In his
later phase Strauss appears as a psychologist and an _esprit fin_. His
study of Nietzsche's philosophy appears not only in his "Zarathustra,"
but in nearly all his "Symphonic Poems." The "Heldenleben" might quite
well be labelled with the Nietzschian expression "Der Uebermensch."
Strauss thus seems to stand to Nietzsche in something like the relation
that Wagner bore to Schopenhauer, and it is a curious point that in each
case the musician is found diverging somewhat violently from the taste
of his philosophical master. These two philosophers--the only two that
have taken a genuine interest in modern music--had both somewhat
rudimentary musical taste, though good taste as far as it went.
Schopenhauer's preference was for Rossini and Nietzsche's for Bizet, and
even as Wagner's style differs _toto coelo_ from Rossini's, so do
Strauss's incredible richness of imaginative detail and indifference to
rhythmical charm stamp him as something very different from those
"Halcyonian" composers whom Nietzsche loved. Strauss is not likely to
become popular in England, but two or three of his larger orchestral
works, and especially the "Heldenleben," would probably find favour with
a section of the English public. To the mandarins and to the majority he
is and must remain anathema.
On the third and last day of this Festival Strauss's "Don Quixote" was
the work upon which public curiosity was chiefly concentrated. In these
"Fantastic Variations" we find the composer once more adopting a style
as frankly grotesque as in "Till Eulenspiegel." The long and important
introduction stands in a relation to the rest of the work that, so far
as I know, is unique. It is a preparation for the principal theme,
successively emphasising all the different kinds of significance
supposed to be contained in that theme. First we have a naïve, stilted,
and pompous phrase suggesting Don Quixote's absorption in the romances
of chivalry. Succeeding passages touch upon the hero's pose of gallantry
and the great predominance of imagination over reason which leads him
into grotesque adventures. The psychological method of the composer
causes him to lay stress on the crisis forming the _point de départ_ of
Don Quixote's career--a vow of atonement for sins and follies. At last
we get the theme in its complete form--a masterpiece of droll
characterisation,--and immediately after it the prosaic jog-trot of
Sancho Panza. In the first variation a musical element is introduced
typifying Don Quixote's feminine ideal--Dulcinea of Toboso. It ends with
the windmill incident. One hears the airy swing of the mill-sails, the
furious approach of the knight, and his sudden overthrow. Variation No.
2 gives the meeting with the flock of sheep. In the third we have a
colloquy between Don Quixote and Sancho, forming an elaborate movement.
Next comes the quarrel with the pilgrims, and then the scene in the
tavern where Don Quixote undergoes regular initiation into the order of
knighthood by keeping guard over his armour all night. No. 6 represents
the scene of the peasant woman mistaken for Dulcinea, and No. 7 the ride
of the two companions on wooden horses at the fair. Nos. 8 and 9 are
concerned with the enchanted boat and the priests mistaken for
magicians. No. 10 gives the disastrous fight with the Knight of the
Shining Moon. There is also a finale setting forth the reveries of Don
Quixote in his old age, and, last of all, his death. Together with the
purely grotesque elements are many touches of wonderful poetic beauty,
among which may be mentioned the scene of Don Quixote's midnight watch
and, above all, the concluding strain--a sigh of ineffable pathos. On
the other hand, it may be urged against the encounter with the flock of
sheep that such sounds do not really belong to the domain of music, but
rather to that of farm-yard imitations. On the whole, "Don Quixote"
strikes me as a less admirable work than the "Heldenleben," heard on the
previous day. The chief feature in the interpretation on Tuesday was the
superb rendering, by Professor Hugo Becker, of Frankfurt, of the
violoncello solo which throughout the work is identified with the person
of the titular hero.
[Sidenote: ="Don Juan,"
Preliminary Article.=
_January 17, 1901._]
"Don Juan," though much less eccentric than most of the other "Symphonic
Poems" by Richard Strauss, is a typical example of his overwhelmingly
rich and effective orchestration. It also exemplifies the peculiar
quality of his design, crowded with a Düreresque multiplicity of forms
and details, his indifference to symmetry and sustained rhythmical flow,
and his systematic endeavour to render the musical medium less vague and
more nearly articulate than it ever was before, by enlarging the range
of emotional expression, sharpening the instruments of graphic
representation, and exploring the mysterious by-ways of the tone-world.
Two imaginary figures that originated in Spanish literature have become
the property of mankind. If Don Quixote stands isolated, without any
close analogue in the romance of other countries, Don Juan--a somewhat
later creation--has much in common with several heroes of Germanic
legend, such as Tannhäuser, the Wild Huntsman, and Faust. The closest
parallel is between Don Juan and Faust. Both are rebellious spirits; but
Faust is ruined by intellectual pride, Juan by sensual passion. As those
two kinds of revolt belong to the persistent facts of life, neither Juan
nor Faust can ever cease to be interesting. It is quite natural that
each of them should be found as the subject of innumerable plays, poems,
romances, operas, and ballets. The poetic scheme forming the basis of
Richard Strauss's Symphonic Poem is remarkably simple. There is no
incident of a definite kind. Don Juan is simply conceived as
personifying the most direct and vivid affirmation of what Schopenhauer
called the "Will to live." He is enamoured of no one particular woman,
but of all the beauty and charm that are in womankind. He has a new kind
of love for each kind of beauty. Defying the laws of gods and men with
demonic recklessness, he rushes from one enjoyment to another, leaving
the trail of weeping victims behind him, while he himself remains the
incarnation of gaiety--for remorse is unknown to his heart, and he never
keeps up a love affair for a moment longer than it amuses him, nor is he
ever at a loss for fresh delights. The music of Strauss plunges us at
once into this whirl of intoxicating gaiety. A series of love-episodes
ensue, each one being individualised with amazing subtlety. It is, of
course, no new thing for masculine and feminine elements to be clearly
distinguishable in music; but the wealth of resource that Strauss shows
in these dialogues of dalliance and passion amounts to originality of a
very remarkable kind. After several such episodes we have a section
symbolising a masked ball that is very strongly stamped with the
composer's genius as a musical humourist. In the latter part the spirit
of Juan begins to flag. Reminiscences of the foregoing episodes recur
with an ominous change in the emotional colouring, and in the end Juan
is brought face to face with the black and cold embers of his once so
glowing heart.
Beethoven protested against the desecration of music by so scandalous a
subject as the Don Juan story. But Mozart produced from the same subject
the prize opera of all the ages. It seems, too, that Richard Strauss has
made of it his masterpiece.
[Sidenote: ="Don Juan,"
Hallé Concerts.=
_January 18, 1901._]
There can be no gainsaying that Strauss's "Don Juan" Fantasia was
received yesterday with much applause. But there is room for doubt
whether the excitement that thus found expression was not due rather to
the bold and highly picturesque orchestration than to the essentially
musical qualities of the work. Richard Strauss postulates an audience of
great mental activity. He expects to be understood instantly, instead of
letting a musical idea gradually soak in to the listener's mind, as did
the older composers. In order to stimulate such mental activity he
constantly deals in strange and violent effects. Hence the irritation of
orthodox musicians, who, hearing so much noise and jingle, too rapidly
conclude that there is nothing behind; whereas, perhaps, if they
listened a little longer, they would begin to discover that Strauss has
nearly every gift that was ever in a composer--every gift, that is,
except those of a very profound or very sublime order. His power of
inventing thematic material to correspond exactly with some peculiar
mood of feeling is almost as remarkable as Wagner's. The opening of the
"Don Juan" Fantasia is characteristic of that excited condition of mind
which is so frequent with the composer. A passage beginning with an
upward rush for the strings shows us Juan launched upon his career.
Presently a rapid passage, mainly in triplets, for wood, wind and
afterwards strings, suggests the eager hunt after enjoyment. Next the
impetuous Don is himself characterised. Of these elements a tone-picture
of intoxicating gaiety is composed. Then follow the love-episodes, the
most beautiful being that in which the oboe has the melody while the
lower strings _a divisi_ add a rich and sombre accompaniment. The masked
ball scene is, in places, a little like a travesty of the "Venusberg"
music. This leads to the scene in which Juan is struck down by some
calamity--probably a sword-thrust. As he lies stricken, memories of
former days crowd back upon him. He has one or two momentary returns of
his old fire and energy. But at last his time comes and his soul departs
with a shiver. Strauss knows how to make such a scene marvellously
poignant. His most wonderful achievement in this kind is the parting
sigh of Don Quixote in the work on that subject. But his treatment of
Juan's death is also very powerful.
[Sidenote: ="Till Eulenspiegel."=
_February 14, 1902._]
"Till Eulenspiegel" was the great mediæval _farceur_. His name is well
known to students of folk-lore. In Flemish books it figures as Thyl
Uylenspiegel, in English as Till Owlglass. Like other heroes of popular
story, Till lies buried in more than one place, each of his tombstones
being adorned with his armorial bearings--an owl perched on a
hand-mirror. He originated and, for the most part, lived in Westphalia
or some country of the Lower Rhine; but he was a migratory person, and
one of his best authenticated exploits occurred in Poland, where he had
a contest of skill with the King's professional jester. Till is the
incarnation of mockery and satire and buffoonery, sometimes witty and
usually coarse. He represents a literary development that may be
regarded as a kind of Scherzo, after the Andante of the Troubadours,
Minnesingers, and other courtly poets--the inevitable reaction of the
popular spirit against too much high-flown sentiment. The legendary
figure of Till has appealed with the most extraordinary results to that
composer who first brought into the domain of the musical art the
specific qualities of the South German imagination, as represented, for
example, by Holbein, Dürer, and Adam Krafft. Incisive, graphic, ornate,
and with no less unheard-of power of characterisation is Richard
Strauss in his music than those other masters in their graphic or
plastic achievements. His "Till" reminds one of Dürer's woodcut
illustrations to the Apocalypse, but, of course, with colour added. And
what colour! and what characterisation in the colour! He controls the
orchestra precisely as a good actor the tones of his own voice. He can
make it render the finest shades of emotion. "Till" is a musical
miracle, unlocking the springs of laughter and of tears at the same
time. It enlarges one's notions of what is possible in music, so
multifarious and inconceivable are the drolleries, so prodigious the
technical audacities which the composer succeeds in justifying. Strauss
has, in a sense, revived an art said to have existed in the ancient
world--the telling of a story in the form of a dance. From the point
where that chromatic jig is heard which symbolises Till wandering about
in search of material for the exercise of his talents, the imagination
is spell-bound.
Strauss goes a distinct point beyond Wagner in the articulateness of his
musical phrases, and he knows better than any other composer that it is
the special province of music to express what cannot be expressed in any
other way--what is too delicate, or too indelicate, to be expressed in
any other way. The most wonderful quality of "Till" is its mediævalism.
Listen to those triplets, in four-part chromatic harmony for five solo
violins with _sordini_, expressing the agony of terror into which Till
is thrown by his own wicked mockery of religion. By such devices the
composer conjures up the atmosphere of the age, characterised by
"Furcht auf der Gasse, Furcht im Herzen." The treatment of the prologue
and epilogue, where all that is blackguardly is taken out of Till's
themes now that he has become a story, is of inconceivable felicity.
[Sidenote: ="Sehnsucht."=
_March 18, 1902._]
Richard Strauss's song "Sehnsucht," raises a good many interesting
questions, such as whether it is not, after all, on harmony rather than
on tone-colouring that the essential quality of Strauss's music depends;
whether the eminent South German composer would have found it necessary
to be so persistently galvanic in his procedure had he not addressed a
musical generation that is too fond of taking opium with Tchaïkovsky;
whether it is with Eulenspieglish intent that he sets so many
unsophisticated love-song texts to music that betrays contempt of mere
lyrism, or whether he genuinely misunderstands the trend of his own
talent. Thus one might continue indefinitely; for it is the regular
effect of Strauss's music to crook the listener's mind into one huge
note of interrogation. One further and more important question must,
however, be added. Is it Strauss's deliberate intention to abolish
rhythm? Would he add to the well-known saying, "_Am Anfang war der
Rhythmus_" the rider "_aber jetzt nicht mehr_?" The over-strongly salted
and too highly flavoured "Sehnsucht" was admirably sung, and the
fascination of it, not unmixed with horror, was such that it had to be
repeated. Nothing about Strauss is more disquieting than his
after-effect on the musical palate. Whether one likes his style or not,
any other sounds are tame by contrast with it, and a naïf and mild
composer such as Grieg (the Hans Andersen of music) seems almost
bread-and-butter.
[Sidenote: ="Faust Symphonie,"
Düsseldorf.=
_May 23, 1902._]
The many violent anti-Lisztians in England should be particularly
careful just now to keep their powder dry. They are going to have great
trouble with this Eulenspiegelisch Mr. Strauss. A considerable group of
English visitors heard his interpretation of the "Faust Symphonie" on
Monday evening, and they are not likely to forget it. Strauss does not
belong to the small group of international conductors who can travel
from place to place, commanding success everywhere and in music of every
style. He has not studied conductor's deportment carefully enough to be
generally pleasing to the public. At the same time, his demonic talent
comes out clearly enough in his conducting when he has to deal with some
work that makes a special appeal to his sympathies. It seems to be his
mission to justify Liszt after decades of misunderstanding and
detraction. His rendering of the "Faust Symphonie" was simply a gigantic
success. The stress and anguish of the first movement, the wonderful
sweetness and charm of the Gretchen music, the almost incredible
incisiveness and pregnancy of the characteristic music in the
Mephistopheles section of the finale, and the unparalleled grandeur of
the concluding idea, where the mask is torn from the face of the
"spirit that denies" and the "chorus mysticus" enters with the final
stanza, leading up to the crowning idea of the whole drama, "Das
Ewig-Weibliche zieht uns hinan"--these beauties and splendours of the
composition were revealed with the infallible touch of a master into
whose flesh and blood it long ago passed: and the audience, including
even the English visitors, felt it. The "Faust Symphonie" declares the
composer to be, in his attitude towards art and life, akin to Hugo,
Delacroix, and the other great French Romantics, and the result of that
attitude seems more completely happy in music than in painting or
literature. It makes one look back with envious longing to the freshness
and abounding vitality of those fellows who found such huge relish in
the great, broad, fundamental human themes, and resources so vast in the
treatment of them. It also provokes bewildered reflections on the
complex and enigmatic personality of the composer, who, for all his
religious orthodoxy, was a more tremendous revolutionary in art than
Wagner, and was, in fact, the originator of certain particularly
fruitful Wagnerian ideas. All this and much more is to be learned from
the Liszt interpretations of Strauss--a sphinx-like person who, as his
abnormally big head sways on the top of his tall and bulky figure, to
the accompaniment of fantastic gestures, works up his audience into a
sort of phosphorescent fever, here and there provoking a process of
sharp self-examination.
[Sidenote: ="Tod und Verklärung."=
_October 17, 1902._]
It is difficult to make out the prevalent state of mind in this country
in regard to Richard Strauss--Richard II., as he is often called in
Germany. Of course the upholders of a turnip-headed orthodoxy will not
hear of him, any more than they would hear of Richard I. a quarter of a
century ago, and he seems to have an irritating effect on all critics,
except a certain very small minority in whose temperament there is
something giving them the key to some part, at any rate, of Strauss's
genius. What irritates the critics is simply the difficulty of finding a
formula for Strauss. He has the annoying impertinence not to fit into
any of their pigeon-holes. He is enigmatic, Sphinx-like, a complex
personality not to be conveniently catalogued. That complex personality
we are not here proposing to analyse, but on one point we venture to
state a definite opinion. Those who assert that Strauss is a mere
eccentric will sooner or later find themselves in the wrong. He has in a
few cases played tricks on the public, but he is nevertheless a
master-composer, in the full and simple sense of those words--a
master-composer just as Mozart was. In "Tod und Verklärung" we find him
in a mood of absolute seriousness. The theme is a death-bed scene, the
phantasmagoria of a sick brain during the last moments of earthly
consciousness, the final struggle with death, and then a wonderful
suggestion of reawakening to immortality. The composition is thus, as a
German critic has pointed out, the counterpart of Elgar's "Gerontius,"
so far as the subject is concerned; but in no other respect have the
two works any similarity. The qualities with which Strauss's name is
most commonly associated--audacious and grotesque realism, gorgeous,
intoxicating orchestral figuration and colouring--are here completely in
abeyance. In the mood of the opening section there is kinship with the
third act of "Tristan"--the same hush and oppression of the sick man's
lair,--but not in the musical treatment, which with Strauss has much
more reference to external detail (_e.g._, the ticking of the clock)
than with Wagner. The introductory notes are full of weird power, and
they lead on to some exquisitely pathetic "Seelenmalerei." In the
ensuing agitato section any listener acquainted with other Symphonic
Poems by the same composer--earlier or later--is likely to be surprised
at his comparative moderation and restraint in depicting the terrors of
the struggle with death. It cannot be denied that Strauss is greatly
preoccupied with such ideas. He has set the very article of death to
music on at least four different occasions ("Tod und Verklärung," "Don
Juan," "Till," and "Don Quixote"). The hanging of "Till" is
inconceivably drastic in its realism, and the last sigh of Don Quixote
is the most unearthly thing in all music. Don Juan's death is purely
_macabre_; but in "Tod und Verklärung" a certain suggestion of the
_macabre_ gives way to something very different--the suggestion of the
soul rising to immortality; and thus is initiated the final section,
dominated by the noble and beautiful "transfiguration" theme. Those of
the composer's admirers who "always thought he was a heathen Chinee" may
here find matter for searchings of heart. For the thing is too well done
not to have been sincerely felt.
[Sidenote: ="Zarathustra."=
_January 29, 1904._]
"Also sprach Zarathustra" ("Thus spake Zarathustra") is the first work
in Strauss's most advanced manner. It is scored for the following
enormous orchestra:--One piccolo and three flutes; three oboes and one
cor anglais; one clarinet in E flat, two clarinets in B flat, and one
bass clarinet in B flat; three bassoons and one contrafagotto; six horns
in F, four trumpets in C, three trombones, and two bass tubas; kettle
drums, bass drum, cymbals, triangle, and glockenspiel; a bell in E;
organ, two harps, and the usual bow instruments; and the demands on the
_technique_ of the performers are as exceptional as the number of
instruments employed. It is as striking an example of Dr. Richter's
energy that he should not have shrunk from the task of interpreting so
vast and bewildering a score, as it is of his openness of mind that at
his age he should have cared to bring forward the most typically
advanced and modern of compositions--for that we take Strauss's
"Zarathustra" to be in respect both of subject and treatment. We doubt
whether another living musician of anything like Dr. Richter's age
possesses in the same degree that youthful elasticity which can do full
justice to the works of a younger generation. Moreover, he is not in any
special sense a Straussian. He simply knows, as everyone conversant with
the musical affairs of the present day knows, that Strauss is a composer
of very great and commanding talent, and he thinks that in such a
musical centre as Manchester his more important works ought to be
known. So, in spite of a rather discouraging attitude on the part of the
public and an amount of extra trouble that can scarcely be reckoned up,
he gives one of them from time to time. It is not Lancashire any more
than it is London that, among British musical centres, has displayed the
readiest appreciation of Strauss--the great and typical modern. It is
the part of the country served by the Scottish Orchestra, where "Tod und
Verklärung" has before now been chosen for performance at a _plébiscite_
concert. This seems very natural, for "Tod und Verklärung" is the
clearest, simplest, and least heterodox of Strauss's orchestral works,
and much easier to understand at a first hearing than Beethoven's C
minor Symphony. It has, in fact, been recognised as a classic nearly
everywhere, though here it still lies under suspicion of being a mere
piece of eccentricity. We can only hope that after hearing
"Zarathustra"--which certainly is rather a large order--some of our
conscientious objectors may reconsider their position. The extraordinary
thing is that it was better received than the far more generally
comprehensible "Tod und Verklärung." This was no doubt, in part, due to
sheer astonishment, but also, we believe, to the perception that
whatever else there may be in the work there is a certain grandeur of
perception. It is scarcely possible to listen in a state of complete
indifference to the opening tone-picture of sunrise, with its great
booming nature ground-tone, that recalls the Introduction to Wagner's
"Rheingold," and the ringing trumpet harmonies following the three notes
of the soulless nature theme. The plan of the tone-poem that gradually
unfolds is one of the clearest. It is on the same plan as the discourse
of St. Francis on "La Joie Parfaite," quoted by Sabatier from the
"Fioretti," where the holy man, the better to impress upon Brother Leo
wherein perfect joy consists, first enumerates a series of things in
which it does not consist, and then, having disposed of the erroneous
opinions corresponding to various stages of the upward path towards true
wisdom, tells us at last what perfect joy is. The wisdom of Zarathustra
is, of course, very different from the wisdom of St. Francis, but his
method of inculcating it is the same. He, too, has mortified the flesh
with the "Hinterweltler" (perhaps "other-worldlings" is the nearest
English equivalent), and thrown himself for a change into the vortex of
exciting pleasures--the "Freuden und Leidenschaften" he calls them, as
who should say the "fruitions and passions of youth." It is
characteristic that he puts the religion first and the exciting
pleasures afterwards. He also "did eagerly frequent doctor and saint and
heard great argument," that experience being symbolised by Strauss's
"Fugue of Science." But none of these things, he gives us to understand,
by emphatic use of the "disgust" theme, is the pearl of great price, or
perfect joy, or anything of the sort. The penultimate part of the
tone-poem deals with the conversion of Zarathustra into a dancing
philosopher--his learning of the great lesson that one must "get rid of
heaviness"; and here, of course, the musician is very thoroughly in his
element. Very remarkable and surprising is the conclusion. Strauss has
declared that the whole composition is simply his homage to the genius
of Nietzsche, but it is impossible to resist the impression that in the
manner of the ending he has endeavoured to suggest an improvement on
Nietzsche--and he might well be pleased with himself, and so a little
overbearing, after producing that "Tanzlied" (a sort of waltz for
demigods or "Uebermenschen"), which he has done much better than any
other composer that ever lived could have done it. He ends with a night
picture in B major against the final notes of which the persistent
nature theme in C major once more reasserts itself as a pizzicato
bass;--in words, "but you have left the riddle of the painful earth just
as much unsolved as it was before, for all your wisdom." Whether that
ending is more to the point than Nietzsche's own or not, it is really
wonderful that musical notes can be made to speak so plainly, and even
to say something quite important.
[Sidenote: ="Ein Heldenleben,"
Liverpool Orchestral Soc.=
_Feb. 8, 1904._]
We have here to deal with the latest phase of Strauss, and to arrive at
anything like a true estimate of "Heldenleben" we have to remember that
Strauss is a reformer and the recognised leader of a party which,
whether we like it or not, has played and is playing a great part in the
world of music. The central principle of the Strauss school rests upon
the perfectly correct observation that the general development of music
during the last two centuries shows continual progress towards greater
articulateness, and that there is no reason for regarding that progress
as having reached its final stage with Berlioz, Liszt, and Wagner.
Brahms and the neo-classicists were on a wrong track, they consider, and
it is the mission of Strauss and his connection to bring the art back
into the paths of true progress. This indicates the sense in which
Strauss is called a reformer. It is the usual fate of reformers to
overshoot the mark; Mr. Weingartner thinks that Strauss has done so very
seriously in his last three Symphonic Poems--"Zarathustra," "Don
Quixote," and "Heldenleben,"--and I am constrained to give in my
adherence to Mr. Weingartner's view. In each of the three works named
there is much that only genius could have produced, but also something
that is alien to genius. The perpetration of deliberate cacophony for a
symbolical purpose we first encounter in "Zarathustra," where it is done
in a tentative and restrained manner and on a very small scale. In "Don
Quixote" the same procedure is used on a larger scale and with much
greater boldness, and in "Heldenleben" it has given rise, in the
"battle" section, to an extended movement that I can only call an
atrocity. That section displays the composer in a mood of unparalleled
extravagance. Taking harmony in the most extended sense that is
possible, it still remains a thing outside the limits of which Strauss's
battle-picture lies. It therefore fails altogether, I suggest, to carry
on the progress of music towards greater articulateness. It is not
music, and does nothing whatever for music. It is a monstrous
excrescence and blemish--a product of musical insanity, bearing no trace
whatever of that genius which produced the lovely and perfect "Tod und
Verklärung" and the superbly racy and pithy orchestral Scherzo "Till
Eulenspiegel."
The expression of such views carries with it the terrible consequence of
being identified with "The Adversaries," whom Strauss, disarming
criticism by a novel method, symbolises in the awful strains quoted as
examples 4 and 5 in Mr. Newman's programme. But one must testify
according to one's convictions, and I confess that I cannot be
reconciled to section 4 of "Heldenleben," and find in section 5 a
considerable element of merely curious mystification. The principle of
"horizontal listening," which the whole-hog-going Straussians recommend,
does not help me. Horizontal listening becomes, beneath the murderous
cacophony of that battle section, simply supine listening.
In other parts of the work there is much that is thoroughly worthy of
Strauss. Perhaps the most attractive thing of all is the violin solo
representing the feminine element in the hero's life-experience. The
wayward emotion of that part is rendered by the composer with a truly
magical touch that shows with what wonderful freshness he conceives the
task of such character-delineation in tones. How different from Chopin's
princesses is the Straussian lady! How infinitely more subtle, varied,
interesting, and psychologically true! The hero, too, is powerfully
sketched, though throughout the section specially devoted to him one is
conscious of the gigantic rather than the heroic. Most of the thematic
invention is telling--perhaps more so than in "Zarathustra,"--and the
"Seelenmalerei" in the love music and afterwards in the renunciation
music is all very finely done. Even the drastic musical satire of the
"Adversaries" is acceptable enough in its earlier phases. It is the
polyphony in the sections of storm and stress that goes wrong. The
subject of the work as a whole has the merit of general
intelligibleness. But the composer identifies the hero much too
insistently with himself; nor does he maintain the consistency of tone
that is proper to a work of art. If sections 3, 4, 5 and 6 carried out
the promise of sections 1 and 2 we should have a sort of gigantic
Gulliverian humoresque. But with section 3 a new atmosphere is conjured
up, and henceforth the work gravitates backwards and forwards between
two irreconcilable elements--the one drastic, sarcastic, and
cataplastic, the other at first subtle, sinuous, and soulful, and
afterwards turning towards a mood of religious exaltation and austere
contemplation.
[Sidenote: =Quartet in C Minor.=
_March 10, 1904._]
The case of Strauss is certainly an awkward one for the believers in the
neo-classicism of Brahms. In such works as the Quartet, op. 13, and the
violin Sonata, op. 18, written twenty or more years ago, he declares
himself an absolute Brahmsian, worshipping before all things the
well-constructed musical sentence, using the extended harmonies and
profuse figuration of the modern technique to express emotions that have
but little individuality and are merely typical of the thorough-going
German sentimentalist. Indeed, he here shows himself a better Brahmsian
than Brahms, avoiding all his model's worst faults, such as his groping
and fumbling, his muttering and whining, and only sentimentalising in
quite a healthy sort of way and with a flow so abundant and easy that to
find fault would seem intolerant. Yet, with all these wonderful
qualifications for a great Brahmsian career, Strauss would have none of
it, except during his most youthful period. For many years now he has
been displaying utter contempt of the well-constructed musical sentence;
also of German sentimentalism and of all the other traditional subjects
of musical eloquence. As an orchestral composer, he has pursued a path
of adventurous hardihood scarcely paralleled in the history of art, and
he looks back to his Brahmsian chamber-music as belonging to a
fledgeling state of his talent. As it is not open to the Brahmsians to
say that those early works prove Strauss's incompetence as a composer of
the orthodox kind, the only thing left for them to say is that the
chamber-music is much the best of his whole output. Sooner or later we
shall doubtless begin to hear that, and in the meantime those who like
the early works can play them or listen to them with the comforting
assurance that the composer would not object, inasmuch as he has himself
quite recently taken part in public performances of them. The
Quartet--which Dr. Brodsky and his usual associates, assisted by Mr.
Isidor Cohn, played yesterday--might rank as the mature work of anyone
but Strauss. It is youthful, relatively to the composer, in the
emotional basis of the music; but not in the workmanship, and least of
all in the invention, which has all the pith and weight commonly telling
of ripe experience. In short, it is an extremely good Quartet of the
orthodox kind--one may even say, one of the best existing works for
pianoforte and three bow instruments. The Andante is not quite such a
marvel as the slow movement of the violin Sonata, but it is very nearly
as good in invention and quite as good in its adaptation to the
medium--that is, to the particular group of instruments. The Scherzo is
as pithy as the Andante is glowingly sentimental, and the framing-in
movements are magnificently done. Thoroughly adequate was the rendering
of this immensely interesting composition. The tempo in the Scherzo was
faster than the composer's own; but, as it is not possible for him to
keep up the technique of a solo pianist, he may possibly avoid a very
rapid tempo for that reason. Mr. Cohn brought out all the passage work
clearly enough, though the rapid tempo caused a certain dryness in the
string tone. The other movements were satisfactory from every point of
view. It is interesting to note in this Quartet an early example of
Strauss's tendency to associate a certain mood with a certain key. A
contrasting section with an easier flow he assigns to B major, and
throughout the recurrences the original key assignment is preserved in a
manner very unlike the procedure of the older composers. Throughout the
work the connection between tonality and emotional import is preserved
in detail, and we here note a further development of the principle which
prompted Beethoven to throw his prevalently dark and mysterious Symphony
of Fate into C minor and his Rhythmic or Dancing Symphony into A major,
but which, from him, met with no more than a very broad kind of
recognition.
CHAPTER IX.
CHAMBER MUSIC.
[Sidenote: =Dvoràk
Quintet in A Major.=
_February 2, 1897._]
Music for pianoforte, combined with two or more bow instruments, is
usually constituted on anything but democratic principles, the
percussion instrument standing to the others in very much the same
relation as Jupiter to his satellites. But the splendid quintet by
Dvoràk given last night forms an honourable exception to this principle,
the Bohemian composer's well-known preference for bow instruments having
apparently counteracted the usual tendency to make the pianoforte part
too prominent. Throughout the quintet there is an endless wealth and
fertility of beautiful ideas. The opening allegro is based on two main
elements which form an effective contrast, the one moving prevalently in
syncopated double time, and the other approaching the character of a
tarantelle. The pianoforte part is sometimes of independent interest,
and sometimes consists of beautiful accompanying passages constructed
from chords in extended position. The second movement bears the name
"Dumka," which, we believe, was first used as the name of a musical
movement by Dvoràk, or at any rate first became familiar to the world in
general through his works. It is derived from a Slavonic root meaning
"to think," and may be taken as something like the equivalent of
"meditation." There are several peculiarly interesting and charming
movements in the works of the Bohemian composer bearing this name, and
that which occurs in the quintet is one of the best. It is in the
relative minor of the opening key, and exhibits the composer as a poet
of the same sort as Burns--at once sturdy in bearing and delicate in
feeling. Here and there the pianoforte part conveys a suggestion of
Chopin; but the courtly sentiment of Chopin is soon merged in a broader
and more full-blooded vein of feeling. The thematic material is
remarkably varied and episodic, while the Scherzo--called, as in other
Bohemian compositions "Furiant"--is compact and free from any trace of
the rambling tendency. The finale is dominated by a dance theme in
double time of enormous energy and vivacity.
[Sidenote: =Dvoràk
Quartet, Op. 96.=
_December 6, 1900._]
The Op. 96 Quartet might almost as well be called "From the New World"
as the Symphony. Whether it was written during the composer's stay in
America we do not know, but it is certainly an outcome of his American
experiences no less than the "New World" symphony. All the themes of
both those works are idealised Negro or Red Indian melodies, and though
the results may not be in the Quartet quite so wonderfully felicitous as
in the Symphony, they are fine enough to make it a most interesting
feature in the music of the wonderful Bohemian composer's American
period. That music has taught some of us a rather important lesson. The
value of folk-melody has long been recognised, but until these works by
Dvoràk became known it was pretty generally thought that Negro tunes
formed an exception to the principle that all sincere, unsophisticated,
and original musical utterance has artistic value. Dvoràk has taught us
the danger of regarding any natural thing as common or unclean. He has
shown that Negro melody may give rise to beautiful works of art no less
than Irish, Hungarian, or Scandinavian melody. Dvoràk is the most
impossible to classify of all composers. He is naïf and yet a master of
complex and ingenious design; a scorner of scholastic device and at the
same time a successful worker in the classical forms; the most original
of the composers who became known during the latter half of the 19th
century, yet suspected, on occasion, of the most barefaced plagiarism.
It is hard to say whether his absolute musical invention, his skill,
taste, and resource in laying out for single stringed instruments, or
his ear for orchestral colouring is the most remarkable faculty. He is
the musician who seems to have learned but little from text-books and
professors, and yet, by a continual series of miracles, he avoids all
the pitfalls that beset the path of the unlearned composer. He is never
at a loss--never does anything feeble or ineffective,--but again and
again overwhelms and delights us with his inexhaustible flow of racy and
full-blooded melody and with his splendid handling of whatever
instrument, or group of instruments, he may choose to handle.
[Sidenote: =Beethoven
Razoumoffsky Quartet, No. 3.=
_December 5, 1901._]
The third Razoumoffsky Quartet stands among Beethoven's chamber
compositions very much as the C minor Symphony among his orchestral
works. To define the qualities in virtue of which these two cognate
works appeal so very strongly and directly to the imagination is a
matter of great difficulty. They belong to the same period; and, utterly
dissimilar as they are in form and detail, they are akin to one another
in spirit. Both reveal the composer during that short but golden prime
of his artistic life when he had done with technical experiments; and
when that austere indifference to mere sensuous beauty of sound, which
in course of time his deafness inevitably brought, had not yet begun.
Hence these works, though they fall far short of the exaltation,
intensity, and rugged grandeur of many third-manner compositions, are
more perfectly balanced. They are also entirely free from certain
perverse--one may almost say misanthropic--elements which are a
stumbling-block in much of Beethoven's music. Such is the felicity of
the invention that each new thematic element strikes the ear like a sort
of revelation. Nowhere is there an overlong development or anything that
bewilders or alienates. The Andante quasi Allegretto of the Quartet
reveals the composer in an extremely rare mood. The delicate romance of
it recalls the slow movement of the Schumann Quintet, however much more
profound Beethoven may be. The harmony is full of dreamlike beauty, and
here and there accents of extraordinarily eloquent appeal give that
impression (so frequent with Wagner) of music trembling on the verge of
articulate speech. A case in point is the recurring G flat in the viola
part in bars 8, 9, and 10 after the second repeat. The pizzicato bass is
another feature that irresistibly arrests attention. The unparalleled
delights of this enchanting work were brought home to the audience by a
performance which was not only masterly but was stamped by peculiar
felicity. Everything in the marvellous Allegretto was thrown into a kind
of delicate relief, and the fugal finale was given with the utmost
animation and perfection of detail.
[Sidenote: =Bach
Concerto in D Minor.=
_January 15, 1903._]
The association of Lady Hallé and Dr. Brodsky in Bach's Concerto for two
violins yesterday brought together by far the largest audience ever yet
seen at these concerts. The D minor, with two solo parts, is doubtless
the finest on the whole of Bach's violin Concertos. The Largo, cast in a
mould that the composer used more than once, obviously takes the first
place among movements of the kind, in virtue of stately magnificence
paired with a certain royal mildness and amiability of expression. Other
examples may be deeper or more poignant in feeling, but none other is so
richly and perfectly organised in structure or so sweetly benign in
expression. The two solo instruments are treated by the composer on a
footing of absolute equality, and the manner in which his intentions
were yesterday realised by the two masterly performers was above praise.
Why (one is likely to ask on hearing such a performance) did a composer,
who could make a couple of instruments sing so sweetly and graciously
and in a manner so perfectly adapted to their proper genius, very
frequently force the singing voice to follow a crabbed line,
instrumental rather than vocal in character? In the more vivacious
movements preceding and following the Largo nothing could have been
finer than the delicate interplay of the two well-matched solo parts,
and the whole composition lost little or nothing by the rendering of the
accompaniment on a pianoforte instead of the small orchestra for which
it was originally scored. As pianoforte accompanist Miss Olga Neruda
showed unfailing discretion, and so contributed not a little to the
exquisite impression produced by the whole work.
[Sidenote: =Beethoven
B Flat Major Quartet.=]
In Beethoven's B flat major Quartet--the last of the third volume--the
intricate lines of the composition were brought out with admirable
unanimity of purpose, perfection of _ensemble_ never once being lost
amid the utmost fire and freedom of the execution in the rapid parts.
The Quartet, which occupies quite forty-five minutes in performance, is
remarkable for an opening movement in which adagio and allegro sections
alternate with wayward frequency, for the curious fourth movement in a
sort of Ländler rhythm, and for the Cavatina in E flat preceding the
Finale. It is capricious and multifarious, but has neither the
abstruseness nor the occasional violence of the later Beethoven as
revealed in the last Quartets and Sonatas.
[Sidenote: =Tchaïkovsky
Quartet in D Major.=]
Tchaïkovsky's first Quartet is chiefly remembered in connection with the
Andante, which makes a peculiar appeal to the imagination. Though the
thematic basis is evidently derived from folk-music, and the tones of
the muted instruments are such as one associates with "soft Lydian airs"
that merely play upon the senses without further significance, there is
in this movement a strange mystical exaltation that is not often met
with in Tchaïkovsky. It sounds like a dream of the shepherds who watched
their flocks by night and heard the angels sing, or an illustration of
some kindred theme in which a homely and pastoral note is associated
with devout and joyous feeling. It is the movement that so greatly moved
Count Tolstoy when, in company with the composer, he heard a performance
of it, also led by Dr. Brodsky. The rest of this beautiful and zestful
work causes one to wonder how the composer was able so early in his
career to make stringed instruments speak with such free, ready, and
natural eloquence.
[Sidenote: =Tchaïkovsky
Trio in A Minor.=
_February 26, 1903._]
Most astonishing are the comments that one hears and reads occasionally
on such "In Memoriam" pieces as Tchaïkovsky's noble Trio, written in
honour of Nicolas Rubinstein--brother of the more famous Anton and a
pianist of nearly equal eminence. The psychological basis of this Trio
is of exceptional clearness; it is probably clearer than in any other
composition of similar extension. Yesterday, Mr. Siloti played the
pianoforte part at these concerts for the second if not for the third
time. Frequenters have therefore enjoyed unusually good opportunities of
becoming acquainted with the music, which we regard as on the whole the
best example of Tchaïkovsky's chamber composition. As in Schubert's
"Wanderer Fantasie," the centre of the whole is the theme of the second
movement--a beautiful and expressive strain that, in the composer's
imagination, evidently symbolised the personality of his lost friend.
The ensuing Variations--which include a waltz, a mazurka, and others
that are anything but sombre in character--range back over scenes and
memories connected with that personality, the composer now giving
himself up to lively characterisation, and now thrown back into an
elegiac mood by the returning consciousness of the friend's death.
Occasionally the two moods are mingled, as in that part of the waltz
where the dainty dalliance of the pianoforte part is accompanied by the
tragic variant of the central theme in the strings. The opening
movement, "pezzo elegiaco," is dominated by that tragic variant which,
at the very outset, is given out with mighty eloquence by the richest
tones of the 'cello--a wailing complaint that recurs in many different
forms and informs all three movements in one way or another. Analysing
the composition, therefore, not with reference to musical
technicalities, but psychologically, we find it to consist of three main
elements:--(1) The composer's affection for his friend and grief at his
loss; (2) biographical reminiscences and reflections thereon; (3) the
funeral panegyric. To some extent these elements are intermingled
throughout the work; but they dominate the respective movements as here
numbered, so that, broadly speaking, one may call the first movement
"lament," the second "recollections," the third "eulogy." In all
important respects the Trio strikes us as thoroughly original, though in
a few superficial matters the composer seems to take hints from certain
predecessors. Probably the "Wanderer Fantasie" influenced the general
design to some extent; the opening of the Finale suggests the
corresponding part of Schumann's "Etudes Symphoniques" by its rhythm and
atmosphere, and the short "funeral march" section at the end contains an
obvious reference to Chopin. One can scarcely hear a better rendering
than Mr. Siloti's of the pianoforte part, which is throughout of
paramount importance. Like Dr. Brodsky, Mr. Siloti was an intimate
friend of the composer, and as he is also an acknowledged master of
pianoforte technique and a highly accomplished musician, his Tchaïkovsky
interpretations have a certain authority. Moreover, no living
instrumentalist can charm a melody into life in a more suave and natural
manner, and the lines of a composition always fall into their proper
place in his renderings. Dr. Brodsky, always at his best in the music of
his famous compatriot and friend, gave a most eloquent rendering of the
violin part, and he was well matched by Mr. Fuchs, who, as before,
brought out the superb opening theme with amazing warmth and breadth of
style, and gave all the rest of his part in a manner worthy of that fine
entry.
[Sidenote: =César Franck
Quintet in F Minor.=
_December 12, 1903._]
The Quintet, for pianoforte and strings in F minor and major, is a
typical example of the composer's profound learning and immense
technical mastery, of his lofty ideal as a musical artist, and of his
quite marvellous originality. Judging by such a composition, one would
hardly claim the gift of melodic charm for César Franck. He has little
or no lyrism, and he seems to be chiefly interested in delivering music
from the bondage of the tonic and dominant system, while calling upon
each instrument for what is most characteristic in its technical
resource. He is thus as far removed as possible from Grieg and the
song-and-dance men of recent time. He is a great master of form, but he
dramatises the chamber-music forms very much as Beethoven dramatised the
symphony, reconciling the claims of structure and emotion with the touch
of unmistakable genius. The great Quintet is written for performers
whose technique is subject to no limitations. Each part is intensely
alive, and at many points the listener's imagination is carried into
regions never before opened up. The music proves that the composer
understood his medium with extraordinary thoroughness. Some of his
audacious progressions, his persistent reduplications, and his rushing
unison passages one might, at first blush, call orchestral, yet more
careful observation quickly convinces one that they are not orchestral,
but that the special kind of eloquence in the music belongs essentially
to the particular combination for which it was written. The key system
is disconcerting at first. The composer seems to insist that two chords
so unlike tonic and dominant as F major and D flat minor (if anyone
thinks there is no such key he cannot have studied César Franck) will do
just as well for the main props of an extended composition; and he has
all the best of the argument. The technical interest of the work is of
the keenest from beginning to end; but the poetic interest seems to
develop slowly, the imaginative play being nowhere as definite as in the
finale, which begins with strong passages of extreme nervous agitation
and culminates in a tumultuous _dénoûment_ with strong reiterated
insistence on the two chords aforementioned, above which the strings
rush towards their point of repose in a unison of unparalleled energy
and breadth. The subtle and heavy emotion of the slow movement reminds
one of Maeterlinck. César Franck (1822-90) was a Liégeois who migrated
to Paris, where he became the founder of the young French school--that
school of which Mr. Vincent d'Indy is now the principal ornament.
Another follower, much less truly distinguished than d'Indy but better
known in this country, is Gabriel Fauré. Franck is the only great
composer that Belgium has produced in modern times. The task of
interpreting the wonderful Quintet was one of the most formidable that
Dr. Brodsky and his associates ever took in hand. But they were equal to
the occasion. With such a past master as Mr. Busoni at the pianoforte
there could be no uncertainty as to the interpretation, and the
immensely difficult string parts were rendered with that repose and
sureness of touch which alone can make a great and complex composition
intelligible.
CHAPTER X.
PIANO-PLAYING.
[Sidenote: =Reisenauer.=
_February 13, 1896._]
The reception of Mr. Alfred Reisenauer by the large audience in the
Gentleman's Hall yesterday afternoon was marked by considerable reserve.
Not once during the recital was there any display of enthusiasm. Yet it
cannot be said that the performance fell short of Mr. Reisenauer's great
reputation. In his rendering of Schumann's "Carnaval" not a point was
missed, and the "Paganini" intermezzo, occurring in the middle of the
slow waltz, gave a foretaste of the quite extraordinary technical powers
which were more fully displayed later on. The "Davidsbündler" finale was
played with less noise and more subtlety than is usually bestowed upon
this curious march, with the Grossvaterstanz creeping in unobserved,
much as the "Marseillaise" creeps into the "Faschingschwank in Wien" by
the same composer. In certain numbers the pianist showed a tendency to
prefer pieces of a secondary and almost trivial character such as the
"Rondo à Capriccio" to which Beethoven has given the whimsical sub-title
"Rage over the lost penny stormed out in a Caprice." Not that this work
is altogether frivolous. As in almost all Beethoven's music, the
working-out sections contain much that is beautiful and interesting; but
the opening theme is quite as bald as the _motif_ of Haydn's "Surprise"
symphony. In the first part of the programme--that is, down to the end
of the Beethoven selections--there were comparatively few indications of
the pianist's true calibre. But in Liszt's transcription of the
"Forelle" Mr. Reisenauer began to reveal some of those marvels of which
he and perhaps one other living pianist have the monopoly. That
interminable trill, with the song _motif_ freely and expressively played
by the same hand first below the trill and then above it, was a thing to
be remembered. There was not the least trace of those licences which
even first-rate players commonly allow themselves in order to facilitate
such manoeuvres. To the ear the effect was absolutely that of three
independent hands. The "Erlkönig" transcription, on the other hand, was
much less impressive. It was performed with an exaggerated _tempo
rubato_, and was altogether too noisy. Of the Chopin Nocturne in D flat
as rendered yesterday afternoon it is difficult to speak in measured
terms. Mr. Reisenauer seems to be pretty generally put down by amateurs
as wanting in "soul." But if so, it must surely be admitted that he gets
on extraordinarily well without one. Anyhow, soul or no soul, his
rendering of the Nocturne was a revelation. In the midst of an almost
nebulous pianissimo the parts were still differentiated with perfect
mastery, and altogether a science of tone-gradations was displayed that
is probably unique. Not a lurking beauty in the composition escapes his
research or exceeds his powers of interpretation. For the concluding
number Liszt's "Hungarian Fantasia" was chosen, and this piece again
fell totally flat on the greater part of the audience, possibly owing to
want of familiarity with the Hungarian style. For this Fantasia is based
on Hungarian popular songs, and decorated with passages that are a sort
of glorified imitation of an Hungarian improvisatore's performance on
the "cembalo." The song-themes are some of the most beautiful and
interesting to be found in all Liszt's Rhapsodies and Fantasias,
especially the first, which, in Korbay's edition, is set to the words
"They have laid down him dead upon the black-draped bier," and the
wonderful "Crane" song, which colours all the latter part of the
Fantasia. The difficulties of the piece are some of the most
heart-breaking to be found anywhere in the literature of the instrument.
[Sidenote: =Moszkowski.=
_November 18, 1898._]
To those who already knew Mr. Moszkowski as a composer it must have been
interesting yesterday to make his acquaintance as a pianist. His playing
is the exact counterpart of his composing. It is brilliant, ingenious,
elegant. It shows a knowledge of pianoforte technique so consummate that
the listener is apt to be completely dazzled and to forget that our old
friend the pianoforte is capable of other kinds of eloquence besides the
eloquence of technical display. At the same time, it is not at all our
intention to speak slightingly of Mr. Moszkowski's technical display.
Though not the highest thing in music, technique is a very important
thing, and, when carried to such a pitch of excellence, has a kind of
self-sufficient beauty that may be compared to the lustre of pearls and
diamonds. Perhaps it does not mean anything; but it is beautiful,
cheering, enlivening. It raises the spirits somewhat like champagne, but
better than champagne, and it has all the arrogance and costly unreason
that are so fascinating in fine jewellery, in common with which it seems
to convey a kind of magnificent protest against matter-of-fact and
gloom. The wonderful charm of Mr. Moszkowski's composing and playing
depends, further, on the fact that he attempts nothing but what he can
do to perfection. He knows well enough that there was a Beethoven and a
Brahms, for whom music was the expression of profound poetic ideas. But
such ideas are not his affair. He leaves them frankly alone, in the
well-founded confidence that almost anything in the way of an idea will
serve his most entertaining purposes. The Concerto played yesterday is a
perfectly characteristic work. Completely devoid of originality as to
material, it is nevertheless put together with an unfailing sense of
style, and everything is so adorned and so laid out for the solo
instrument that there is not a dull moment from beginning to end. If
only as a compendium of all the most telling musical effects that are
absolutely peculiar to the pianoforte, the Concerto is likely to be
remembered. The two Mazurkas that were played in the second part of the
concert were interesting examples of that form which apparently no
composers but those of Slavonic descent can handle successfully. It may
be hoped that anyone who listened to them attentively will have grasped
the rudimentary point that there is nothing in common between that
clumsy dance of Western Europe called the Polka Mazurka and the
elaborate figure dance the music of which has been so wonderfully
idealised in the Mazurkas of Chopin, Tchaïkovsky, Wiéniawski,
Moszkowski, and Scharwenka.
[Sidenote: =Busoni.=
_December 23, 1898._]
Of the four principal pianoforte styles--the Bach, Beethoven, Chopin,
and Liszt styles--Mr. Busoni has shown himself a past-master. It has
been said that these four are the only genuine pianoforte styles. But if
there is a fifth having typical originality distinct from all others, it
is the Brahms style, and in that style Mr. Busoni was heard for the
first time yesterday evening. His interpretation of Brahms's first
Concerto was no less masterly than his Bach, Beethoven, Chopin and Liszt
renderings. The work is one of exceptional importance. Written when the
composer was only twenty-five years of age, and almost entirely unknown,
and proving, when first produced at Leipsic, with the composer himself
as soloist, a dead failure, it nevertheless was, like Carlyle's "French
Revolution," the first work showing the author to be a genuine and
original man of genius. It shows him deliberately rejecting all that was
traditionally connected with the idea of a work in "concert style,"
affording to the soloist none of the conventional opportunities for
display, demanding from him the mastery of an enormously difficult
technique, full of double-note passages, full of heavy and exhausting
reduplications; demanding also exceptional tact, intelligence, and
presence of mind such as are only to be found in a few players of the
very first rank. The music of the first movement is of profoundly
sinister and tragic import, portraying the rage, grief, and unrest in
some struggle of the heroic soul. It has nothing entertaining and
nothing to propitiate superficial taste. No wonder it was a failure at
Leipsic in 1859, when that centre of enlightenment was given up to the
Mendelssohn cult! After the composer himself, the first pianist to take
up the Concerto was Hans von Bülow, who with a performance at a
Philharmonic Concert in Berlin won early recognition of its surpassing
merit. Other performers who contributed towards the success of the work
with the world in general were Madame Schumann and Mr. D'Albert. At the
present time it may be doubted whether there is any better exponent of
it than Mr. Busoni. What a German writer has called the
"heaven-storming" first motive was delivered in a manner that showed
perfect grasp of its poetic import, and the tragic eloquence of the
ensuing development was never marred either by any sort of technical
fault or by inappropriate expression. The "Benedictus" forming the slow
movement is fraught with that profound religious feeling the musical
expression of which has been accomplished only by Bach, Beethoven, and
Brahms. It was no less perfectly rendered than the opening movement, and
the concluding Rondo was played with appropriate breadth, energy, and
mastery of heavy and intricate passages. Afterwards another work for the
same instrumental combination was played, namely, Liszt's "Spanish
Rhapsody," which Mr. Busoni has treated very much as Liszt himself
treated the "Wanderer Fantasie" of Schubert, making an arrangement on
the concerto principle, with a part for pianoforte and orchestral
accompaniments. The Rhapsody is put together on the same principle as
the Hungarian Rhapsodies, having majestic motives in the first part, and
afterwards dance themes with variations and ornamentations in the
transcendental manner peculiar to Liszt. Mr. Busoni's orchestration is
all very clever and telling, and in playing the solo part, which is
brilliant beyond all description, he, as it were, came down from the
pedestal of seriousness and showed that he also can, on occasion, be
simply entertaining. As an extra piece without orchestra, Mr. Busoni
played Liszt's "Campanella"--probably the most catchy and difficult
concert study in existence. The almost incredible brilliancy with which
it was performed seemed to leave the audience half dazed and wholly
captivated.
[Sidenote: =Busoni.=
_November 25, 1904._]
The concert was remarkable for one of Mr. Busoni's meteoric appearances,
the special function of which, in the order of nature, seems to be to
throw critics into a state of utter confusion and bewilderment. He has
been more frantically praised and more severely blamed than any other
pianist of the present day, and he never fails to justify both praise
and blame. He is the modern Sphinx among executive musicians, just as
Strauss is among composers. Nothing is certain but his matchless
technical power and the uncanny force of his own individuality that,
without misconception or inadequate conception, still does violence to
every composer, by a sort of inner necessity. Every accusation except
that of dulness or feebleness has been brought against Mr. Busoni, and
with justice. Yet he can well afford to smile at his critics; for the
fury of one is as eloquent a testimony as the rapture of another to his
prodigious faculty of stimulation. Most of the fault-finding is a covert
expression of rage at the writer's hopeless inability to estimate so
prodigious a talent or to guess what it will "do next." Henselt's
Concerto, hackneyed in Germany but almost unknown in England, was his
accompanied piece yesterday. It is the most considerable work of that
curious composer, who made a great reputation as a pianist though he
scarcely ever played in public, and some reputation as a composer though
he never did anything more original than the pianoforte Etude "Si oiseau
j'étais," and for the most part rested satisfied with giving enfeebled
reproductions of Chopin's ideas thinly disguised by arpeggio
accompaniments in extended harmonies and ornamental passages in double
notes. In a few points, such as the use of _martellato_ octaves and
chord passages, he had a more modern technique than Chopin's; but there
is no justification for his compositions except good laying out for the
instrument. From beginning to end one finds him cultivating the same
kind of mild and voluminous euphony. Mr. Busoni played the three
movements in his customary style, solving all the technical problems
that they present rather more intelligently than anyone else. His
unaccompanied solos were, first, two astonishingly ingenious Preludes
constructed on themes of chorales by Bach, which are treated as _canti
fermi_, and accompanied by passages in florid counterpoint, having the
character of an _obbligato_. The theme of the first was "Sleepers,
wake," and of the second the chorale known in this country as "Luther's
Hymn." The third piece was Liszt's seldom-heard transcription of
Beethoven's "Adelaide."
[Sidenote: =Borwick.=
_February 10, 1899._]
Among all kinds of solo playing it is pianoforte playing, the high
standard of which is specially characteristic of our age. The violin was
perfected in the seventeenth century, and, though the technique of the
violin has been further developed in comparatively recent times by
Paganini and others, there has not been during the nineteenth century
any other advance in a particular kind of musical performance at all
comparable with the advance in pianoforte playing, which, apart from
improvements in the construction of the instrument, is generally
attributed to the genius of Liszt. It is sometimes forgotten that Liszt
did not stand quite alone. He was the most brilliant pupil of a certain
school, namely the Czerny school. But Czerny, though probably the
greatest of all pianoforte pedagogues, does not stand quite alone as
the father of modern playing. There was another great pedagogue with
an independent system, namely Friederick Wieck, whose most brilliant
pupil was his daughter Madame Schumann. The modern art of pianoforte
playing may be traced back to one or other of those two remarkable
teachers, Czerny and Wieck. The most famous representative of the
Czerny-Liszt school at the present day is Mr. Paderewski, and the
most famous representative of the other--the Wieck-Schumann school
is Mr. Borwick. For a long time it was supposed that no member of the
English-speaking races was capable of taking rank among first-rate
solo-players, and it is therefore cheering to find Mr. Borwick--a
true-born Britisher--holding the position that he now holds. For his
first piece Mr. Borwick chose, appropriately enough, the Schumann
Concerto for pianoforte, which Rubinstein considered a no less happy
inspiration than Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto. It is the most important
of all Schumann's works for pianoforte, and Mr. Borwick, as a pupil of
the Schumann school is, of course, completely in his element when
playing it. Yesterday he seemed thoroughly well-disposed, and he played
the whole work with admirable purity of style and insight into its
delicate ingenuities and romantic beauties. On his second appearance Mr.
Borwick played a Ballade by Grieg in the form of fifteen variations on a
Norwegian air. The air is plaintive and pretty, and in the harmonization
is strongly stamped with the composer's individuality. Some of the
variations, too, contain examples of graceful movement, but there is not
much more to be said for them. They are not for a moment to be compared
with the typical modern works in variation form, such as Mendelssohn's
"Variations Sérieuses," Schumann's "Etudes Symphoniques," or the
variations on a chorale of Haydn by Brahms. The one really fine work of
considerable scope for pianoforte by Grieg is the Concerto. All that was
possible, however, to be made of the Ballade was made of it by Mr.
Borwick.
[Sidenote: =Siloti.=
_March 9, 1900._]
Of Svendsen, the contemporary Scandinavian whose name stood first on
yesterday's programme, we know very little. Until yesterday we had heard
nothing of his but the familiar Romance for violin. The first hearing of
his Moorish "Legend" for orchestra left an impression of sweetness and
picturesque charm, but also of a talent scarcely equal to the conception
and laying out of extended orchestral works. As painters sometimes say,
the interest of the picture was literary rather than artistic. It was
nice to read the pretty story in the programme to the accompaniment of
the pretty music going on in the orchestra. But whether the music by its
own eloquence could have roused the desire to know what was the
imaginative or narrative basis of the design in tones is doubtful.
Except for a short section at the end, containing some slight
suggestions of development, the composition is almost entirely arabesque
work, which is perhaps an appropriate arrangement, the subject being
Moorish. The amazing double power that Liszt possessed of translating
from orchestra to pianoforte and from pianoforte to orchestra was
certainly never matched in any other mortal. Both processes he performed
with consummate ability. Mr. Siloti rendered the solo part with the
restraint and the mature mastery of his resources that are
characteristic of him. He tears no passion to tatters; he does not play
"in Ercles' vein"; the tricks of the "Oktavenbändiger" delight him not;
nor does he tickle and paw the notes in the velvety-ineffable style. Mr.
Siloti is so considerate as not to obliterate the composer in any way.
There is a certain largeness and gentleness in his manner. His technical
power is unlimited, but he uses no more of it than is necessary to bring
out the composition, and with regard to tone-gradations, pedalling, and
the entire management of the pianoforte--as medium of musical
expression, not of acrobatic display--one may say that "what there is to
know, he knows it." Among distinguished pianists of the day there is
perhaps none other whose style is so good a model for learners. Many
other pianists have great powers, but nearly every other has some
frightful fault, whereas Mr. Siloti has no serious fault. He is simple,
equable, gentlemanly, masterly. He seeks not to dazzle, to bewilder, to
impose, to appal, to petrify--but simply to convince. He _brings out the
music_ written by the composer, and that is what a pianist should do.
The group of Russian pieces played by Mr. Siloti on his second
appearance we thought, on the whole, very charming, especially the
Caprice by Arensky. The concluding piece by Rubinstein was not quite so
interesting, but it gave the performer his opportunity of treating the
audience to that "rampage" which is considered the only proper
conclusion to a group of pianoforte solos; and it had, at any rate, the
advantage of not being hackneyed.
[Sidenote: =Rosenthal.=
_November 23, 1900._]
An exceedingly remarkable performance of Schumann's Pianoforte Concerto
was given by Mr. Rosenthal and the orchestra. In no other performance
that we remember was the balance between orchestra and solo part so well
preserved. Mr. Rosenthal played with his usual perfection of technical
mastery; his phrasing was beautifully intelligent, and the distinction
of his style was to be noted no less in the homely sweetness and
graceful fancy of the Intermezzo than in the rich and complex Allegro.
Again, in the finale, his marvellous accuracy and fine phrasing enabled
the hearers to enjoy every _nuance_ of the composition, notwithstanding
a tendency to hurry that was perceptible at certain points. The
tremendous "Don Juan" fantasia, for pianoforte alone, gave Mr. Rosenthal
an opportunity of exhibiting his technical powers in one of the most
audacious _bravura_ compositions that exist. In many persons the fine
frenzy that rages through the middle and latter parts of this piece
awakens no sympathy. It has, nevertheless, a legitimate place in the
Palace of Art, being nothing more than the logical development to the
highest possible point of the _bravura_ style that originated with
Liszt. The latter of the two variations on "_Là ci darem_"--that section
which precedes the entry of the champagne song--is the most bewildering
and repugnant part of the piece to the general public. For that reason,
and also on account of its heart-breaking difficulties, the variation in
question is often omitted. But Mr. Rosenthal omitted nothing yesterday.
He hurled forth the Dionysiac declaration of war against all the chilly
conventions and proprieties, the priggeries and pruderies of Mrs.
Grundy, that forms the real content of the piece, with that technical
power in which he is surpassed by no living performer. After many
recalls he was constrained to play once more; and, by way of the
sharpest possible contrast, he gave Chopin's Berceuse, bringing out all
the delicate moonshine filigree of the right-hand part with infinite
subtlety.
[Sidenote: =Paderewski.=
_October 29, 1902._]
The recital given yesterday evening at the Free Trade Hall seems to have
been the last of Mr. Paderewski's art that we are likely to hear for
some time. He is not expected to visit Manchester again during the next
few years, and the occasion therefore seems fitting for a more general
discussion of his playing than is usual in a simple notice of a recital.
No doubt Mr. Paderewski is, on the whole, the most distinguished
executive musician now before the public. The Paderewski "craze" in
England and America is not a mere matter of fashion and folly, but is
shared by experts and brethren of the craft, many of whom are
irresistibly fascinated by Mr. Paderewski's playing, even while they
disapprove of much that he does. Why will he insist on using a
pianoforte with so hard a tone? Why is the skelp of his hand on the
keys so frequently audible from the most distant point of the hall, as a
sound quite separate from the musical notes? Why does he never play
Bach? Why does he always play Liszt's second Rhapsodie? Such are a few
among the searchings of heart to which Mr. Paderewski's public
performances give rise, and to none of them--probably--is there a
complete and satisfactory answer. The shallow-toned instrument admits of
greater clearness in the bass, and has a more scintillating kind of
brilliancy in the upper octaves, and Mr. Paderewski, who likes all
passage-work a little staccato, naturally favours it. The rage of his
"con gran bravura" lends greater charm to his _grazioso_ style, by the
principle of contrast--a point on which he often lays emphasis by rapid
alternations of the two styles. Iteration of show pieces, such as the
second Rhapsodie, is excusable in a pianist who is incessantly touring
the two worlds and playing to all sorts and conditions of men by land
and by sea. As to the Bach question we know nothing. He may even have
played Bach in other parts of the world. Mr. Paderewski's distinguishing
quality is a certain extraordinary energy--not merely a one-sided
physical, or even a two-sided physical and intellectual, energy; it is
of the fingers and wrists, of the mind, the imagination, the heart, and
the soul, and it makes Mr. Paderewski the most interesting of players,
even though to the extreme kind of specialist, absorbed in problems of
tone-production, he is not the most absolute master of his instrument at
the present day. His art has a certain princely quality. It is
indescribably _galant_ and _chevaleresque_. He knows all the secrets of
all the most subtle dancing rhythms. He is a reincarnation of Chopin,
with almost the added virility of a Rubinstein. No wonder such a man
fascinates, bewilders, and enchants the public! Greatly surpassed by
Busoni in the interpretation of Beethoven, by Pachmann in the touch that
persistently draws forth roundness, sweetness, and fulness of tone, and
by Godowsky in the mastery of intricate line and the power of sucking
out the very last drop of melody from every part of a composition,
Paderewski still remains the most brilliant, fascinating, and
successfully audacious of present-day musical performers, and in
preferring him the general public is probably right, though the keen
student of the pianoforte in particular may learn more from Godowsky,
and the earnest lover of the musical classics in general, more from
Busoni.
The programme of yesterday's recital was on the usual lines, except in
regard to the Paganini Variations by Brahms, of which a selection from
the two volumes were played with astounding dash and incisiveness. The
unfamiliar Fantasia by Schumann was made perhaps a little more
interesting than any other player could have made it. Beethoven's C
sharp minor Sonata was given in a manner typical of Mr. Paderewski's
Beethoven renderings, except that there happens to be nothing in the
first and second movements that is alien to his Slavonic temperament.
The finale, belonging to that element in Beethoven which appeals to a
more broadly based human nature, sounded flimsy. The Chopin and Liszt
pieces were all splendidly done. The long-continued demonstrations of
enthusiasm in the latter part of the recital led to three additional
pieces, namely, a Nocturne of the performer's own composition, the
inevitable Rhapsodie aforementioned, and Chopin's A flat Waltz, with a
mixture of double and triple time.
[Sidenote: =Godowsky.=
_March 17, 1903._]
It is a little difficult to do justice to the qualities of Mr.
Godowsky's pianoforte playing without at the same time saying too much
and making claims that are not justified by the facts. It must be
remembered that there is no Liszt or Rubinstein at the present day.
Those men were giants--mighty personalities who dominated the musical
world, being essentially great as well as good players. The present
generation has no such personality among solo performers. Talents that
come to the top show a specialising tendency, and it is no longer
possible to say that so-and-so is the greatest pianist of the age. One
can only say that Mr. Busoni is the greatest musician who now plays
pianoforte solos in public, and Mr. Paderewski is the most brilliant
performer on the pianoforte, and Mr. Godowsky the most absolute expert
in tone production on the same instrument. It is not to be denied that,
taking Mr. Godowsky's art as a whole, and thus including musical
conception, one finds it imposing. He never comes within a measurable
distance of bad style: he always gives an essentially good rendering of
anything that he undertakes to perform. But what one principally admires
is not his mind, imagination, or temperament, but simply his hands--his
warm, subtle, and preternaturally deft wrists and fingers. Having
apparently been warned that the peculiar acoustic of the hall has a
tendency to make any pianoforte sound as if the pedal were down nearly
all the time, he yesterday avoided the bewilderingly elaborate style of
which he has made a speciality. But, in addition to the flawless
perfection of all the passage work, there was abundant opportunity in
the series of pieces by Beethoven, Chopin, and Liszt to admire that
marvellous control of tone which often enables him to reveal fresh
melody in quite familiar compositions. The pieces that were least
affected by the cross reverberations of the hall were the Etude in
extended chords and the C sharp minor Scherzo by Chopin. On the other
hand, no one who has not heard Mr. Godowsky under more favourable
circumstances can imagine, from the experience of yesterday evening, the
magical effect of his performance in the G sharp minor Etude in thirds
for the right hand. In playing the exquisite F minor Concert Etude by
Liszt he deliberately kept the tone down to a minimum, to avoid the buzz
and confusion as far as possible. Liszt's transcription of the
"Tannhäuser" Overture was used for the display piece that audiences
expect at the end of a recital. It is characteristic of Mr. Godowsky
that his favourite amusement is making rearrangements of Chopin's
Etudes--the "Godowsky Bedevilments," Mr. Huneker calls them. These
include the celebrated combination of the two G flat Etudes, where the
left hand has to play the one in the first book while the right plays
the legato and staccato improvisation from the second volume, and
another in which three Etudes in A minor are brought together
contrapuntally. Though they are all of course anathema to the purist,
the ingenuity displayed in some of these things is so prodigious that no
one interested in pianoforte playing can well be indifferent to them.
[Sidenote: =Lamond.=
_December 15, 1903._]
Mr. Frederic Lamond's strongest points as a pianist are not those which
the wider public most readily appreciates. He is not one of the
pianistic experts in the narrower sense, like Messrs. Pachmann and
Godowsky, for whom neat fingering and smooth tone-production are much
more important than musical interpretation. Mr. Lamond is before all
things a virile player. His style is broad and a little severe. He lacks
the peculiar grace and charm of Mr. Paderewski in the treatment of
dancing rhythm no less obviously than that faculty, akin to a Japanese
juggler's, which enables Mr. Pachmann to bring from the pianoforte a
tone more smooth and sweet than was ever before imagined possible. Mr.
Lamond's qualities are entirely different. Plastic force, technical and
imaginative grasp of the greater composers' greater ideas, a deep and
powerful but rather rough tone--these are the characteristics of his
playing, and they are characteristics better appreciated in Germany than
in this country, where music-lovers think too much of the merely smooth
and the merely deft and the "sweetly pretty." It is rather surprising
that neither of his recent performances in Manchester should have
included any example of Beethoven, of whose greater Sonatas Mr. Lamond
is now probably the best living interpreter, with the possible exception
of Mr. Busoni. He was of course quite right to play plenty of Liszt, but
it may be regretted that he gave so much of the later Liszt--who,
conscious of himself as the world-famous magician of the piano, often
improvised on rather poor themes, as if to show that any theme, however
weak, could be made interesting by his transcendental style of
ornamentation--rather than the earlier Liszt who wrote things of such
power and eloquence as the "Mazeppa" Etude. Mr. Lamond's mind seems
recently to have been running on Liszt's Tarantelle Fantasias. He played
the "Venezia e Napoli" Tarantelle at the Hallé Concert and the "Muette
de Portici" Tarantelle yesterday--both pieces which are chiefly of
interest as proving that Liszt could improvise effectively upon any
conceivable sort of thematic material. It would have been much more
interesting to hear the "Mazeppa," which Mr. Lamond played in the
composer's presence and to his evident satisfaction when last he was in
London, a few months before his death in 1886, or some piece in that
pregnant early manner. His best performance yesterday was in Chopin's A
flat Polonaise--a composition of such excellence that, hackneyed as it
is, it cannot in a good rendering fail to give pleasure. Mr. Lamond did
full justice to the majestic beauty of the themes, which are all
absolutely good, and brought out the famous _basso ostinato_ section in
some respects better than we have heard it done since Rubinstein's
death. He did not adopt any of the revised versions of the left-hand
octave passages favoured by certain distinguished modern performers. On
the other hand, he did adopt Rubinstein's version of the ending, with
the unexpected and telling chord of C major just before the final
phrase. In Rubinstein's F minor Barcarolle--so interesting in rhythm, so
original in colouring--Mr. Lamond was not entirely successful, his
temperament apparently not furnishing a key to the vein of lyrism in
which the piece is conceived. Yet in Liszt's "Liebestraum" he was
perfect, though one might have expected that his Beethovenish tastes
would have rebelled against the hothouse atmosphere of the composition.
The opening performance of Schumann's "Carnaval" was powerful and
distinguished, but too broad in style to be in keeping with the
sub-title "Scènes mignonnes." On neither of these recent occasions has
Mr. Lamond played anything of his own, though he has composed plenty of
effective stuff for his instrument. He is beyond all question by far the
most distinguished pianist of British extraction that has yet arisen.
CHAPTER XI.
VIOLIN-PLAYING.
[Sidenote: =Ysaye.=
_November 8, 1900._]
Two complete Concerti, each in the orthodox three movements, exhibited
the distinguished Belgian master's style, first in strictly classical
then in more florid and more highly coloured modern music. Of concerti
by the great Bach for a single solo violin only two are extant. One, in
A minor, has been frequently played here in recent years by Dr. Joachim
and Mr. Brodsky. The other, in E major, is comparatively unfamiliar.
Perhaps the accompaniment, which in the original score is for strings
alone, has been considered rather meagre, and the extremely simple form
of the concluding Rondo may also have been regarded as unsatisfactory.
For Mr. Ysaye's performance of the E major Concerto the accompaniment
has been strengthened with an organ part written by Mr. Gevaert,
Principal of the Conservatoire de Musique in Brussels, and it can
scarcely be questioned that the work as he presents it is beautiful,
interesting, and highly satisfactory as a concert piece. The most
characteristic part is the middle movement, which, as in Bach's Sonata
for the same instrument and in the same key, is in Chaconne form, with a
bass theme that wanders freely through different keys, while the upper
strings play a descent and the solo instrument embroiders. A most
powerful and telling performance was given of this noble Adagio, the
accompaniment being assigned to a small group of orchestral players
together with the organ, and the soloist devoting all the resources of
his art to bringing out the delicate figuration of the upper voice with
ineffably sweet tone and subtle phrasing. The first movement is
remarkable for such wealth of thematic development as one scarcely
expects to find in a work composed so long before Beethoven's time, and
the finale brings the work to a close upon a note of simple and hearty
feeling. If strong contrast with the style of Bach was desired, the
Saint-Saëns concerto was well chosen for the second example of violin
music. Rich in colouring and surcharged with sensuous delights, the
modern Frenchman's composition passes along on its triumphant career,
like some fine lady, radiant in natural beauty and superbly attired,
witty, graceful, charming, and in every way effective--perhaps all the
more effective for being a little heartless. In the performance of this
music Mr. Ysaye was altogether in his glory. His astonishing warmth and
depth of tone lent fresh eloquence to such new phase of the solo part.
He made his instrument sing his Andantino theme with ravishing
sweetness, and his overwhelming technical power enabled him to revel in
the rushing and flying passages of the Mephistophelean finale.
Everything was magnificent, including even the harmonies in the Coda of
the slow movement, and the Concerto ended in a blaze of triumph. There
is only one fault to be found with Mr. Ysaye, namely, that he makes
everything sound modern.
[Sidenote: =Ysaye and Busoni.=
_February 6, 1902._]
If another and older master of the violin is commonly described--as it
were, _emeritus_--as greatest living violinist, it is unquestionably to
Mr. Ysaye that the title belongs in its full sense. Unparalleled warmth,
richness, and bouquet of tone, added to sovereign mastery of technique
and a marvellous temperament, full of fiery energy and yet apparently
incapable of exaggeration--such are the most obvious qualities of Mr.
Ysaye's art. He is not a genuine classic, like Joachim. Bach and
Beethoven he plays in virtue of infallible artistic _savoir vivre_; but
he is obviously in fuller sympathy with a Sonata or Concerto by
Saint-Saëns, a Suite by Vieuxtemps, or a Fantasia by Wiéniawski. Yet
that artistic _savoir vivre_ is so complete that it is nearly always
impossible to find specific fault with his renderings of the classics.
This was the case yesterday in the Bach Sonata, which headed the
programme. Each of the four movements declared the mastery of the string
player, no less than of the pianist, Mr. Busoni--real kindred spirits of
Bach and Beethoven. The Vieuxtemps Suite, too, was given with such
beauty of tone that the superficiality of the composition was entirely
disguised, the slow movement sounding almost as though Bach had written
it. In the concluding sonata--a late work by Saint-Saëns--it is
scarcely necessary to say that the violin-playing was perfect. Perhaps
some of the listeners remembered a performance by the same violinist of
Saint-Saëns's Third Concerto at a Hallé Concert not long ago. Again
yesterday we were treated to such playing as bewilders the senses and
seemed to place the transcendental cleverness of the French composer on
a level with the real imaginative power of greater men. Mr. Ysaye was
extremely well disposed--in fact, quite at his best--and was rapturously
applauded. As an extra piece he gave Beethoven's Romance in G, the
rendering being above criticism.
Utterly dissimilar as Messrs. Ysaye and Busoni are in temperament and
artistic character, they meet as master musicians, and the association
is in the highest degree interesting. The one is all sense and the other
all spirit, and one feels that only the immensely high accomplishment of
both makes the association possible. Mr. Busoni's solo was that most
capricious and austere Sonata, Beethoven's 109th work. It was all
incomparably well rendered, and the Variations in the last movement,
which ultimately spin themselves into a kind of Fantasia, were a
prodigious revelation of technical power. It is long since such a
pianoforte performance has been heard in this city--a performance
stamped by austere beauty and lofty ideality, and free from all earthly
elements. What other pianist at the present day, we venture to ask,
could give us such a thing?
[Sidenote: =Kubelik.=
_November 5, 1902._]
Popularity such as Mr. Jan Kubelik, the young Bohemian violinist, at
present enjoys makes it very difficult to criticise his performance. He
has not to meet the same conditions as other violinists. Thousands of
persons who care little or nothing for music attend his recitals merely
because he is a recognised society pet, and he commands a fee that makes
it impossible for orchestral societies to engage him. The restrictions
imposed by this state of things are obvious. He can only play with
pianoforte accompaniment, or with none at all; he is obliged to adhere
almost entirely to music that is light in style and of only secondary
artistic worth, and during a certain proportion of each recital he has
to give himself up entirely to sensationalism. Thus, after hearing him
play through three complete recital programmes, we do not feel qualified
to express more than a very fragmentary opinion upon his art. That he
has all the ordinary technique of the instrument at his fingers' ends is
a notorious fact. His tone is never remarkable for volume, but often for
sweetness. His truth of intonation in the midst of intricate
passage-work is remarkable, and gives the sense of hearing a rare kind
of satisfaction. His memory seems to be entirely trustworthy, and his
manner is free from affectation; but as to his musical conception, we
can only say that it is quite adequate to the interpretation of such a
charming piece of light, racy, and popular music as Grieg's third
Sonata. The one scrap of Bach that he played yesterday--the
unaccompanied Prelude in E major--was not specially well done, and how
he plays Beethoven, Mozart, or any of the great masters we do not know
at all. His most _recherchés_ effects of tone Mr. Kubelik seems to hold
in reserve for the encore pieces. In the allegretto movement of the
Grieg Sonata--a most tenderly homesick and lovesick little northern
Romance--he did not let his violin sing with all the sweetness of which
it is capable, as was afterwards shown in the arrangement of Schubert's
"Ave Maria" and in an unpublished Serenade by the performer's friend and
compatriot Drdla--both played as extra pieces at the end of the recital.
Virtuoso music, in the rendering of which Mr. Kubelik is well known to
be a great expert, was represented in yesterday's recital by the
following pieces:--Wieniawski's Fantasia on Themes from Gounod's
"Faust," Paganini's caprice "I Palpiti," Bazzini's "Ronde des Lutins,"
the last-named played among the encore pieces. We do not, as a rule,
care for the Fantasia on operatic airs, but Wieniawski's "Faust"
Fantasia is written with such wonderful ingenuity and musical skill that
it cannot be placed in the same category with the mere strings of tunes
with perfunctory accompaniments and connecting sections that such pieces
usually are. The Variation on the waltz theme, with the melody in
harmonics and the rushing accompaniment figure in the ordinary tone of
the instrument, is a marvel of successful audacity. It so happens, too,
that the rendering of this almost impossible Variation was the most
brilliant thing in yesterday's recital.
[Sidenote: =Kreisler.=
_November 6, 1902._]
We live in an age that seems likely to be known in the future as the
period of star violinists. It is curious to note how the musical world
illustrates the saying "It never rains but it pours." At one period we
have a long string of pianistic infant prodigies. Hoffmann, Hegner,
Hambourg--they come rapidly to the front, one after another, growing
ever younger and younger, and nearly always beginning with "h." Next we
break into the period of youthful violinists, beginning with "k."
Kubelik, Kocian, Kreisler come tumbling over each other's heel, each one
causing embarrassment to the critics for lack of any stronger terms of
commendation than were bestowed upon the last. It is true the string
players are not of such tender years as were the pianists on their first
appearance. The youngest of the violin prodigies was Bronislav
Hubermann, who not many years ago shook his elf-locks at the
Philharmonic Society of Vienna and more nearly succeeded in turning the
heads of that august, formidable, and severely critical body than might
have been thought possible. For the present we are mainly concerned with
Mr. Kreisler, who is not so desperately youthful, but is a mature and
military-looking man, though he is commonly reckoned among the players
of the new school, or the rising generation. His programme yesterday was
open to some of the same objections as Mr. Kubelik's on Tuesday evening.
It included nothing from the major prophets of music, the most important
piece being Tartini's "Trillo del Diavolo" Sonata--no doubt one of the
best examples of that school which grew up in Italy soon after the
perfecting of the violin at the end of the seventeenth century. In a
well-contrasted style was the only other piece in more than one movement
that he played, namely, Vieuxtemps' second Concerto. In the rendering of
these pieces one noted a peculiarly incisive manner of giving full value
to all the detail of the figuration, and also a singing tone of rich and
strangely penetrating quality. Mr. Kreisler's style is in sharp contrast
with Mr. Kubelik's. Instead of caressing the instrument and coaxing the
tone out of it, he wrestles with it and plucks out the heart of its
mystery. Nor does he seem to care for the sputtering Paganinities so
dear to the heart of Mr. Kubelik. His pieces in the second part of the
programme were a rather Mozartian Larghetto from a Sonata by Nardini (an
eighteenth-century Italian); a "Tambourin" by Leclair (an
eighteenth-century Frenchman), much modernised in the arrangement; a
bagatelle called "L'Abeille," by Franz Schubert of Dresden--not, of
course, the famous Schubert, but a violinist who died some twenty-five
years ago; an arrangement by Marcello Rossi of the "Song without Words"
in F, by Tchaïkovsky; and, finally, the Allegretto grazioso from the
same Nardini Sonata, played as an encore piece. "L'Abeille"--a clever
show-piece in perpetual motion triplets, played with a mute on the
bridge--was encored and repeated.
CHAPTER XII.
MUSIC IN THE 19th CENTURY.
[Sidenote: =Mr. J. A. Fuller Maitland's English Music in the 19th
century.=
_May 20, 1902._]
As applied to Parry, Stanford, or Mackenzie, we are instructed, the
reproach of being "academic" has absolutely no aptness whatever. These
worthy dons are creative artists of the highest possible order, to be
classed with Bach, Beethoven, and Wagner, and it thus appears that about
the middle of the century British music arose like the lark, soaring at
once to the topmost airs of the welkin; that to find a parallel for the
revelation of genius during the fifty ensuing British years one has to
range over two German centuries! Not even Beethoven is to be excepted
from the list of things that were matched by our professorial larks,
swans, giants, heroes, angels, and demigods! Now all this represents a
rather deplorable state of things. Why is it--I cannot help asking once
more--that at the present time in this country so much worse nonsense is
written about music than about drama, literature, or any other kindred
subject? A great stir was recently made by the production of "Paolo and
Francesca," yet no admirer of Mr. Stephen Phillips has thought it
necessary to call him the equal of Shakespeare. There is certainly this
excuse for Mr. Fuller Maitland, that in the London press of recent years
much extravagance of the opposite kind has appeared--excessive and, in a
few cases, positively brutal detraction of Parry and Stanford and their
school--and perhaps the chief blame for the hysterical nonsense of
supporters lies within certain opponents who have attacked without
regard either for the facts of the case or even for common decency. In
any case a state of things has been brought about in which one party
howls "Incompetent humbug!" while the other shrieks "Genius of the
highest order!"
In the meantime what about the truth and the critical currency? And is
it not a pity that Mr. Fuller Maitland should have missed the
opportunity afforded to him by the writing of this history to put off
controversial frenzy and return to a more judicial spirit? We that have
to do with the musical world are all perfectly well aware--whether we
describe Parry and Stanford as "academic" or protest against that
epithet--that they are men of high distinction who have played a leading
and brilliant part in the English musical revival and generally have
deserved well of the musical republic. For my part, while fully
recognising their eminence both in talent and character, I am of opinion
that their claims to regard as absolute creative artists are habitually
overstated by their supporters in the press. The appearance of Parry
created a considerable stir. His imposing grasp of choral polyphony was
something new in English music. His great intelligence, his wide
sympathy and geniality, his virility and industry--all these qualities
united to arouse enthusiastic hopes. But, as Mr. Fuller Maitland writes
on page 185, "with the passage of years the group of composers will fall
into truer and truer perspective." There has already been a considerable
passage of years since those first compositions, but the early
enthusiastic estimate has not been justified. Outside the circle of his
pupils and personal friends no one now seems to care very much for his
music. Here in the North of England concert societies find that the
public admiration of it is a rapidly vanishing quantity. Three years ago
his "Job" and "Blest Pair of Sirens" were given here, but ever since
that occasion his name has been something of a terror to our concert
societies. A frequent experience in regard to Parry's music is that,
whereas a first hearing impresses in virtue of massiveness and energy or
of striking and unconventional dramatic touches, second and subsequent
hearings are discouraging. "Job" is the most favourable case among the
choral and orchestral works that I have heard. It is thoroughly artistic
in conception and unconventional in treatment. Moreover, the lyrical
interlude of the shepherd-boy's song helps along the early part very
happily, and Mr. Plunket Greene is always eloquent in the
"Lamentations." Nevertheless, I found the second hearing a sad
experience. Now the impression that there is something wrong with
Parry's music--notwithstanding all the learning, resource, wide
sympathies, intelligence, and so forth that it shows--is undoubtedly a
very general one. To find any person not personally attached to the
composer taking up one of his works, great or small, is exceedingly
rare. The composer's personal popularity is great, but outside the
charmed circle no one seems ready to spend a shilling in hearing his
stuff or to risk a shilling in giving it. Mr. Fuller Maitland says that
the provincial choral societies are faithful to Parry, and this may be
true in some cases. To a society in the habit of occupying themselves
with the cantatas of Dr. Gaul I could imagine Parry would seem the
seventh heaven of art. But in the great centres or in any place where
there are ardent souls not to be deceived as to what is genuine in music
a revival of interest in Parry seems to me very improbable.
At his worst, _e.g._, in "King Saul," he appeals; at his best, _e.g._,
in the "Soldier's Tent" (song with orchestral accompaniment), he almost
persuades. But the horrors of the empty tone masses hurled at one's head
in the "Saul" choruses, or of the purple patches of Wagnerian
orchestration associated with inept vocal phrases in the principal
monologue of the same oratorio--those horrors are so very genuine,
whereas the charm of such a song as the "Soldier's Tent," where the
composer keeps comparatively well to the point and scores with
comparative aptness, is still somewhat doubtful. A remark of Mr. Fuller
Maitland's helps me to a possible explanation of the something wrong. He
commends the "delicate humour" of "When icicles hang by the wall" in
Parry's English Lyrics. Now I have certainly never heard that song, but
I must have read it somewhere, for I distinctly remember the humorous
and expressive accompaniment at the words "coughing drowns the parson's
saw." It also comes back to me that other passages, such as all that
eight-part counterpoint at the end of "Blest Pair of Sirens," look
exceedingly well on paper. Possibly, then, the key to the mystery is
that Parry's music is analogous to those plays which read well but act
badly. Perhaps the way to enjoy it is to read it and admire the
fertility of device while taking great care never to hear it, and so
escape the consciousness of the fact that the actual wine of that music
as it flows forth is not quite the genuine thing; that, notwithstanding
notable fulness of body, the quality is gritty, the flavour somewhat
acrid and inky, the bouquet artificial and multifariously compounded.
The root of the mischief I take to be that the composer--for all his
great and imposing powers, his fine taste, his profound and varied
learning--is wanting in sureness of touch and consequently in the
ability to establish that correspondence between form and idea without
which a work of art cannot properly be said to exist. Mr. Fuller
Maitland claims for Parry and his group that they "have far more
extensive resources in the different styles of music" than, for example,
the modern Russians, and this brings us back to the point of the
reproach conveyed in the epithet "academic." To musicians bent on the
holding of official posts and on success in a worldly career it is of
the first importance to "show extensive resources in the different
styles of music," and in the large body of Parry's compositions I find
far more evidence of desire to show such extensive resources than of the
artistic impulse to make music that is absolutely genuine. Sullivan,
with his much lower aims and ideals, is for me a better balanced
personality and a truer artist. Much of his music in the comic operas is
quite to the point. The outward form corresponds to the inward idea in a
certain absolute and final manner which there is no mistaking. Hence the
clearness of Sullivan's musical individuality or physiognomy. He was not
intent on showing resources, but on modelling his material into
conformity with his idea, and, because at his best he had the power of
doing that, his physiognomy is clear to us and his art vital. It thus
appears that such commercialism as Sullivan's does less mischief than
such academic tendencies as Parry's.
In Stanford's case I have often protested against the indiscriminate use
of the epithet "academic." It seems to me that his compositions on Irish
subjects require to be considered quite apart from all the rest. However
deplorable may be that Brahmsian vein running through a great mass of
his non-Irish music, he really does in his "Phaudrig," "Shamus," and
Irish Symphony and in many of his Irish songs entirely escape from his
common-room and give us open-air music. No doubt, as Mr. Fuller Maitland
very justly points out, the humour of the Dogberry scenes in Stanford's
latest opera is admirable. Those are the scenes in which the composer
has followed the model of Verdi's "Falstaff" most closely. Elsewhere he
has undertaken to be more original and has not prospered so well. The
music of the love scenes is terrible. All that twisted, clever stuff can
never have any but a chilling, afflicting, alienating effect on a soul
in which any spark is left either of youthfulness or of sympathy with
youth. Stanford's musical cleverness, exceeding that of any other
mortal except Camille Saint-Saëns, has been his bane. His sense of
humour, too, is perversely adjusted. In connection with any but an Irish
subject it is always liable to mislead him, and I have little doubt that
it is the humourist quite as much as the don in him which nowadays makes
it impossible for him to treat a love-passage in any but a chilly,
clever, allusive, intelligible-only-to-the-initiated style. He was a
very different man in 1881 when his "Bower of Roses by Bendeemer's
Stream" was first heard. Not that he has even now lost his faculty of
lyrical tenderness altogether. If the sentiment be associated with an
infant, or penetrated with a sense of the weird and uncanny, or
intermingled with (Irish) patriotic feeling, he can still find the
symbol, as his quite recent music to Moira O'Neill's "Songs from the
Glens of Antrim" abundantly proves. But the note of warmth and
simplicity proper to youthful romance he seems to have lost. A peculiar
case among Stanford's compositions is represented by the Irish Symphony,
concerning which Mr. Fuller Maitland has nothing to say. Here,
notwithstanding the Irish subject, the gown shows through to some slight
extent in one place, namely, the development section of the first
movement. The conventional critic finds fault with the scherzo in the
form of an Irish jig as unsymphonic, as it undoubtedly is. But there
would be more sense in suggesting that the composer should have made up
his mind to be thoroughly unsymphonic throughout the work, bringing his
first movement into harmony with the fine sennachee's improvisation that
stands second, the magnificent racy jig, and the buoyant finale. We
should thus have had an Irish Rhapsody in four movements without any
defect. Even now the one touch of the composer's evil genius that comes
out in the first movement is too slight to spoil the work, which has
been a joy for a long time, and does not seem to lose its charm. It thus
seems to me that Stanford is far too good a man for an "academic,"
though I cannot deny that the epithet is actually justified by more than
half the entire body of his published works.
After all it was scarcely likely that the sudden efflorescence of
English music, ensuing upon a long period of sterility, would lead at
once to fruit of complete maturity. We have now reached the second
generation since the revival, and it would be a pity if our best men at
the present day were nowise in advance of the leaders who came forward
thirty years ago.
[Sidenote: =Centenary Article.=
_January 1, 1901._]
At the dawn of the nineteenth century music was at a low ebb in this
country. Purcell had been dead more than a hundred years, and Handel
about forty years. The spirit of Puritanism had killed the
madrigal-singing of Shakespearean England and suppressed every other
manifestation of the popular musical genius. Charles II. had come back
from his long residence abroad with a contempt for English music, both
sacred and secular, which, as Pepys's Diary shows, he did not hesitate
to express in public, and thus the merry-makings of the Restoration
brought no revival of the national art. Nor was it likely that the
situation, as regards Court influence, should be improved by the House
of Hanover--at the time of their accession a race of aliens having no
sympathy with the national development of the art. Characteristic of the
view that cultivated Englishmen took of music about the middle of the
eighteenth century is a letter of Lord Chesterfield's,[3] written when
his son was staying at Venice, to warn him against all the "singing,
piping, and fiddling" of Italy. He gives the young man to understand
that it is unbecoming in a gentleman to take part in such things, though
he may pay a fiddler to play to him. Elsewhere, too, Lord Chesterfield
is even more crushing. He lays stress on the inevitable connection
between music and low company. The Venice letter was written in
1749--six years after the first performance of the "Messiah" in London
and ten years before Handel's death. Perhaps, therefore, the
Chesterfield view of music was at that time exceptional. But it must
have become more prevalent in the ensuing half-century, and the view of
music as an inferior art, represented in its extreme form by Lord
Chesterfield, is far from being extinct at the present day. At the same
time, fully to account for the low level of musical taste in the England
of 1801, due allowance must be made for the comparative neglect of all
but political and military affairs caused by the tremendous agitations
of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars.
[3] "A taste of sculpture and painting is in my mind as becoming, as a
taste of fiddling and piping is unbecoming, a man of fashion."
In the first year of the nineteenth century began the triumphant career
of John Braham, the first of the three great English tenor singers who
successively adorned the ensuing hundred years. Braham was a good
singer, but perhaps the most deplorable composer that ever successfully
foisted his rubbish on a tasteless public. His "Death of Nelson"
persists to the present day, for the justification of those who share
Lord Chesterfield's musical opinions, and even that unpardonable mixture
of sentimental slip-slop and half-hearted cock-a-doodle-doo seems to
have been a comparatively favourable example of the compositions with
which Braham regaled the London public during the early years of the
century. The scene of his first triumphs was Covent Garden Theatre,
where he was accustomed to appear in composite operatic entertainments,
his own part being almost invariably written by himself. A few years
after the London _début_ of Braham the penny-whistle melodies of Sir
Henry Bishop sufficed to make him the most popular composer of the day.
In 1810, when Bishop became director at Covent Garden, none of the
institutions that have played an important part in the musical progress
of the century as yet existed in this country. It is true the Festival
of the Three Choirs had been held regularly for a very long time
already. But there was no Philharmonic Society, no genuine opera, no
Saturday and Monday popular concerts of chamber-music, no Academy or
College of Music, no Crystal Palace or Hallé orchestra. The great choral
associations, independent of Cathedral authorities, had not yet been
formed, and England was far too much isolated from the rest of the world
in regard to musical affairs.
It is curious to note how precisely the downfall of Napoleon corresponds
with the beginning of better things in the English musical world.
Leipsic was fought in 1813, and earlier in that year--as though with a
premonition that an era was at hand in which it would be possible to
cultivate the arts of peace--a group of musicians assembled in London to
discuss the formation of a Philharmonic Society. The event is of
striking significance. Hitherto music had flourished only under the
patronage of Lords Temporal and Spiritual; but the _souffle_ of the
French Revolution had passed over the world, and it was time for
music--which had put off the courtly periwig and the courtly graces, and
had attained in Beethoven to the purely human standpoint--to be
established on a broader basis. Let us give the worthy Bishop his due. A
well-meaning person, if a trivial composer, he helped to found the
London Philharmonic Society, which was the first society in Europe, and
in the world, consciously formed for the furtherance of musical art and
for no other purpose.
Glancing now at musical activity in other countries, we find attention
necessarily concentrated in the first instance upon the heroic figure of
Beethoven, who in this year (1813) had already given to the world his
Eroica, C minor, Pastoral, and Seventh Symphonies, besides his Violin
Concerto, Razoumoffsky Quartets, Waldstein and Appassionata Sonatas, his
one opera "Fidelio," together with the third "Leonora" overture, and
many other works of towering genius. As yet, however, the real
significance of Beethoven was undreamed-of in the philosophy of mankind
in general, if dimly suspected by a few enlightened persons, mostly
resident in Vienna. Mozart had died before the dawn of the century, and
Haydn soon after it, having demonstrated the incomparable excellence of
that Viennese school (founded on the teachings of Fux's "Gradus ad
Parnassum"), which had early attracted Beethoven--a Rhinelander by
birth--within its charmed circle, and held him there for life. In the
first year of the London Philharmonic Society's activity the music of
those three--Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven--formed the staple of the concert
programmes. In the second year the first performance in England of the
Eroica was given. Other works of the highest importance by the same
master soon followed, and in 1817 an unsuccessful attempt was made to
induce Beethoven to come to England himself and conduct compositions of
his own for the Society. In this manner connection was established
between this country and the great central stream of musical life and
energy at that time.
Beethoven was the colossus who bridged over the gulf between the two
great countries of Classicism and Romance. Of the Romantic composers,
Weber--the founder of German National Opera--was the earliest born. His
music was first heard in England during the twenties, the opera "Oberon"
being brought out at Covent Garden under his own direction. Another
great Romantic composer born before the close of the eighteenth century
was Schubert--a wonderful but most unfortunate man of genius, destined
to meet with scarcely any recognition during his lifetime. At a much
later period he was discovered and introduced to this country by Sir
George Grove. The real seed-time of the Romantic School, however, was
the period from 1803 to 1813, which saw the birth of Berlioz,
Mendelssohn, Chopin, Schumann, Liszt, Verdi, and Wagner (of all except
Berlioz between 1809 and 1813). It is curious that all the stars
destined to dominate the musical firmament of the period following
Beethoven's death should thus have risen above the horizon within the
short period of ten years, and all but one within a period of five
years. Every one of them, except Schumann, came sooner or later to our
hospitable shores and played a more or less important part in that
process by which we have gradually learned to discard Lord
Chesterfield's maxim about having nothing to do with fiddling ourselves,
while laying more and more to heart his other maxim about paying
fiddlers to play to us.
Even more important than these flying visits of master composers from
abroad, for their influence on the formation of taste, were the more
regular visits of distinguished Continental performers, some of whom,
indeed, not only came regularly but came to stay. Of these the most
important were Mr. (afterwards Sir Charles) Hallé, who in 1857 founded
the Manchester concerts that still bear his name; Mr. August Manns, who
became conductor at the Crystal Palace in 1855; and Dr. Richter, who has
been our regular visitor since 1877 and is now, to the great credit of
the Hallé Committee and their supporters, living in our midst. Scarcely
less important among such foreign influences making for the welfare of
musical art in this country is the violin-playing of Dr. Joachim, who
has been our constant visitor ever since 1844.
Pursuing the signs of awakening musical life in the second and ensuing
decades of the century, we note the foundation of the Royal Academy of
Music in 1823, and of the Sacred Harmonic Society in 1832. That Society,
now defunct, was originally founded with the idea of replacing an older
institution called the "Antient Concerts," which had come to grief
through depending too much on aristocratic patronage. The Sacred
Harmonic Society did good work by performing Handel's "Israel in Egypt,"
"Dettingen Te Deum," and other works, besides the "Messiah." They also
did something to make Mozart's church music known in London, though with
little encouragement from the public, and they rendered a service to art
by insisting on complete performances instead of the scraps and tit-bits
from oratorios that were popular at that day. Soon after the founding of
the Sacred Harmonic Society, that is about the beginning of the
Victorian era, came the palmy days of Italian opera in London. But
though the expensive warblings of Grisi, Lablache, and Rubini were no
doubt found highly exhilarating by the privileged few who could afford
to hear them, it is doubtful whether they did anything for the
development of the national taste, except, perhaps, by firing the
ambition of Sims Reeves.
Great as is the value of such fine stimulating influences--the visits of
distinguished players, singers, composers, and conductors, and
performances of master works by musical societies,--they are not enough
to leaven the mass of the people without systematic educational
endeavour. Reference has been made to the founding of the Royal Academy
of Music. Sixty years later the Royal College was instituted, with a
view to bringing educational opportunities more into conformity with
the wants of the time. Among the work done for the improvement of
musical education during the intervening period Mr. John Hullah's is
worthy of specially honourable mention. After studying popular musical
education in France, and especially the Orphéon movement, Mr. Hullah
began classes at Exeter Hall for the musical instruction of
schoolmasters, and thus originated the vast development of musical
training in English elementary schools. In opposition to Mr. Hullah's
principles, Mr. John Curwen in 1853 founded the Tonic Sol-fa
Association, which has since spread its branches all over England. There
is supposed to be some sort of connection between staff notation and
Church principles, tonic sol-fa and Dissent. Some day, it may be hoped,
the history of choral singing in England will be written with the care
that the subject deserves. It remains to this day the principal
contribution of this country to musical art in modern times. Theoretical
mastership originated with the Germans, refined and exact orchestral
playing with the French, and brilliant solo singing with the Italians,
but it has been reserved for this country to perfect the art of choral
singing. Certain persons, more patriotic than truthful, try to make out
that the English are best in everything, but this claim in regard to
choral singing bears investigation.
Next to the absolute contempt and neglect of music from which we began
to emerge early in the century, our greatest misfortune has been a
tendency to prefer composers representing the end of some artistic
development while rejecting the turbid and formally imperfect but
inspiring initiators. Thus, in one age we worship Handel--a mighty
musical architect, but one who never did and never could inspire
anyone--while we detest Bach, the most powerful of all inspiring,
stimulating, school-forming influences. In another age we make a
somewhat similar mistake in regard to Mendelssohn and Schumann, and it
is even possible to recognise the same unfortunate tendency at the
present day in the public attitude towards Richard Strauss and
Tchaïkovsky respectively, the former a rugged composer teeming with
ideas and varied suggestions, the other a remarkable painter in tones
but peculiarly restricted in the range of his ideas and emotions, taking
care never to suggest anything, but only to attempt what he can render
with symmetrical completeness. It is impossible not to regret that we
should thus continually prefer composers who lead to nothing, though
that is just what might be expected as a result of Lord Chesterfield's
principles.
With regard to the extraordinary Mendelssohnian taste of the British
public which placed the accomplished fair-weather composer on a much
higher pinnacle here than he ever occupied in his own country, there is
even now one important question that has not yet been, and probably
never will be, settled. That Mendelssohn was long absurdly overrated is
certain; but the question is--Had there been no Mendelssohn, would our
choirs and public taken to better stuff, or would they simply have
concerned themselves so much the less with any sort of music? Possibly
the Mendelssohn craze was a necessary evil, supplying the requisite
spoon-meat for a period of musical infancy. It is, however, associated
with much humiliation. The main current of musical life and energy
since Beethoven's time has lain in the field of dramatic composition,
and from that main current we remained excluded for a most
unconscionable time. The case became a painful one, only to be met by
such sapient observations as that of the late Mr. Hueffer that "the
British public likes the dramatic stage and likes serious music, but
does not like the two things in combination." The real champion of the
Wagnerian art in this country was Dr. Richter, who, by the performance
of extracts at his orchestral concerts, gradually opened the ears of the
public and brought home the music to their hearts. In that task he was
well supported by Mr. Manns at the Crystal Palace and by Sir Charles
Hallé in the Manchester neighbourhood. Hence the fact that though the
two impresarios who gave performances of the great "Ring" drama in
London in the eighties incurred grievous loss, Mr. Schultz Curtius gave
it in the nineties and prospered, and that the voice of senseless
detraction is mute, except in the case of one or two incorrigible old
mandarins who cannot escape from the fixed idea that life consists in
the correspondence of an organism with the environment of its
great-grandfather.
The best of the English Cathedral composers was Samuel Sebastian Wesley,
whose enthusiasm for Bach, antedating the movement initiated by
Mendelssohn, has scarcely met with sufficient acknowledgement. Soon
after the middle of the century a group of British composers with a
wider than the purely ecclesiastical scope began to appear. Sullivan,
Mackenzie, Parry, Cowen, and Stanford all learned their art in Germany,
and came back to their native country to practise it. All of them have
written oratorios, but without lasting success except in the case of
Sullivan's "Golden Legend." Dr. Cowen's Scandinavian and Professor
Stanford's Irish Symphonies have done something to win esteem for
English music in other countries. But the great achievement of British
music during the past fifty years has been the Gilbertian operas, in
which Sir Arthur Sullivan matched with a perfect musical counterpart the
kind of libretto furnished by W. S. Gilbert, an original type of comic
opera being thus created. Among younger composers, Mr. Hamish M'Cunn
made a reputation with his "Land of the Mountain and the Flood" overture
that he failed to confirm. Mr. Coleridge-Taylor has had a very rapid
success with his "Hiawatha" music, whether of a more lasting kind
remains to be proved. By far the most remarkable British composer of
recently made reputation is Dr. Edward Elgar. Mr. Otto Lessmann, editor
of the "Allgemeine Musikzeitung" and the most distinguished musical
critic of Germany at the present day, wrote thus (after hearing "The
Dream of Gerontius" at Birmingham last October): "If I am not mistaken,
the coming man of the English musical world has already appeared, an
artist who has shaken off the bonds of conventional form and opened his
mind and heart to those great gifts which the masters of the expiring
century have left as an inheritance to the future--Edward Elgar,
composer of the one great religious choral work brought to a first
hearing at the Birmingham Festival, namely 'The Dream of Gerontius.'"
Progress has been very much more rapid during the last twenty-five
years than in any other period of the century. Indeed, so wonderfully
has been the revolution in public taste effected by improved educational
opportunities and the more artistic and expressive style of singing and
playing introduced by the Wagnerian school, that musical art now finds
itself in a completely new atmosphere, and hope leaps out, probably
asking too much of the immediate future. The great lesson that requires
to be brought home at the present time to all concerned, directly or
indirectly, with musical affairs is that music is one of the fine arts,
that it is subject to the laws of art and no others. This seems a
painfully obvious principle when stated, but how rarely does anyone act
on it! We find any number of persons pursuing music as a sport, others
as a business, others as a mild discipline for children--a kind of
drill,--others again as a learned subject, but very few as an art. The
first result of mastering this lesson would be the shaking off of fixed
ideas, such as that every composer must play the organ and write church
music. Chopin wrote nothing but pianoforte pieces, yet his fame is
undying, and much more is heard of his music now--fifty years after his
death--than ever before, while plenty of composers whose works include
voluminous compositions for choir and orchestra are absolutely forgotten
in their own lifetime. The real artist is distinguished from other men
above all by being enamoured of perfection. He finds what he can do and
rests satisfied with doing that, whether it be a great thing or a small,
whether it be one thing or many.
CHAPTER XIII.
DR. HANS RICHTER.
(_October 20, 1897._)
The genius of musical interpretation is a phenomenon of modern times.
Beethoven marks the end of that great symphonic period which begins with
Haydn, and though seventy years before the production of Beethoven's
greatest symphony, Joseph Haydn had been drilling the little Esterhazy
orchestra and trying to secure satisfactory performances, yet to the end
of Beethoven's time the most important orchestras were usually filled up
with amateurs for those special occasions on which a symphony was to be
performed. It seems certain that the notion of a rendering actually
corresponding to a symphonic composer's ideal intentions never dawned on
musicians as a practical possibility till long after the greatest of
symphonic composers was dead and buried.
Beethoven, no less than Sebastian Bach, often wrote for the future--not
even for the next generation, but for the distant future. And
Mendelssohn, who re-discovered Sebastian Bach and did so much to stir up
the lethargy of his musical contemporaries and re-awaken interest in
the great works of the past--did not Mendelssohn announce, as a general
principle for the guidance of conductors, that they should beware of
slow _tempi_, and take everything at a good pace, so that the faults of
phrasing might not be too obvious?
The very terms in which the recommendation was couched show that
Mendelssohn was not unconscious of the faults that marred the best
orchestral playing of his time; but being of a mild, easy-going
disposition, he was not the man to expect impossibilities--such is the
ordinary musician's term for any exertion a little out of his ordinary
routine. It was reserved for a more masterful mind to expect
impossibilities, and to obtain them.
When the works of Wagner began to attract attention, consternation fell
on all the old-fashioned conductors of Germany, the "Pig-tails" as
Wagner never wearied of calling them. Life was not worth living, they
felt, if they had to deal with such scores, and then lamentations were
reinforced by the bandsmen, who found that countless passages written by
Wagner were impossible of performance.
But it so happened, as if by a special Providence, that along with
Wagner certain performing musicians, who were not so easily frightened,
had been ripening towards their life's task. From Liszt and Von Bülow
presently came demonstrations of the fact that Wagner's music was not so
impossible as at first thought to be, though requiring a method of
interpretation different from that of the "Pig-tails." In 1869 appeared
Wagner's pamphlet "On Conducting," just three years after his first
meeting with Hans Richter, and, whatever may be thought of the style of
that pamphlet, it is beyond question that it marks the beginning of a
new era in the history of orchestral music. Besides Richter, all modern
conductors of world-wide reputation--Bülow, Levi, Seidl, Weingartner and
Richard Strauss--were found in the same school. They learned from Wagner
how to play Beethoven, and their method has revolutionised the musical
world.
Now that Bülow is gone, the acknowledged leader and master of them all
is Hans Richter, the incarnate genius of musical interpretation.
To Richter's influence and example, far more than to anything else that
could be named, is due that prodigious improvement in the standard of
orchestral performance all over the world, which is the most notable
feature in the history of music during the past thirty years.
Principally owing to Richter's matchless combination of artistic
enthusiasm, practical mastery, and genial good sense, we now hear things
that musical prophets and wise men, such as Beethoven desired to hear
and had not heard.
Hans Richter belongs to a German family of musicians. He was born at
Raab, in Hungary, in 1843, and, after a good musical grounding, entered
the Conservatorium at Vienna in 1859. He chose the horn as his principal
instrument, but his gift for playing musical instruments was so
prodigiously strong that in the course of a few years he acquired the
technical control of all the more important instruments in the
orchestra, besides pianoforte and organ.
One of the earliest appointments that he held was that of principal
horn-player at the Imperial Opera in Vienna. After quitting the
Conservatorium he continued his studies under Sechter, the celebrated
contrapuntist, and thus when the great opportunity of his life came he
approached his task with magnificent and perhaps unparalleled resources,
in respect of practical and theoretical knowledge. The opportunity came
in 1866--Wagner, then living in Switzerland, wanted a competent musician
to help him in preparing the score of "Meistersinger" for the press.
To Vienna, then, as now, the metropolis of the musical world, he
forwarded the request that such a musician should be found and
despatched to him at Triebschen, near Lucerne. The choice fell on
Richter, and thus the two great men, the exact complements of each other
as regards their artistic power became acquainted. Richter took up his
residence in Wagner's house; the great composer, who possessed a
Napoleonic eye for talent, at once appreciated the immense powers of his
youthful colleague, and an alliance sprang up between the two men which
only terminated at Wagner's death.
Trial performances with orchestras brought together from the musicians
of Zürich and Lucerne quickly convinced the Wagnerian circle of
Richter's genius for selecting, training and conducting an orchestra,
while the preparation of the "Meistersinger" score was carried out to
the composer's complete satisfaction. Those who examined the fair copy
of Richter's handwriting which was on view at the Musical and Theatrical
Exhibition of 1892 in Vienna can testify to the marvellous neatness as
well as to the technical correctness and good style of Richter's
manuscript. It should be remembered, too, that the score of
"Meistersinger" was at that time by far the most intricate in existence,
and is even now only surpassed in elaborate complexity by "Tristan."
But not only with the preparation of the score was Richter concerned.
Long before Wagner had put the final touches to "Meistersinger," Richter
had taken the solo and choral parts to Munich, and had there personally
trained the singers who were to take part in the first production. The
style was so new and so perplexing to the musicians of the day that
Richter encountered apparently insuperable obstacles at every turn.
Nevertheless, everything was carried through to a brilliantly successful
issue, and the first performance of "Meistersinger," which took place at
Munich in June, 1868, was really the first great triumph of the
Wagnerian cause. Though Bülow was at the conductor's desk, it is
unquestionable that the labour of Hercules, which was necessary to bring
the work to a first hearing, was performed in the main by Richter.
At the sixth performance the representative of Kothner fell ill, and, at
the last moment, Richter stepped into the breach, donned the costume of
Kothner, and sang and acted the part with great success. No wonder a
distinguished critic should have said that Wagner's "Meistersinger" has
become part of Richter's flesh and blood.
He prepared the score; he trained all the singers and players for the
first performance; he has conducted countless brilliant representations
of the entire work, and on one occasion, at any rate, he enacted one of
the characters. The qualities exhibited by Richter in connection with
the production of "Meistersinger" caused him to be appointed
fellow-director with Bülow at the Royal Opera in Munich, and when Bülow
resigned in the following year Richter stood alone in that post.
The impatience of the King of Bavaria to have Wagner's immense
"Nibelung" trilogy performed was the cause of a premature attempt to
present "Rheingold" before the extraordinary _mise-en-scène_ required by
that work was ready. Rather than take part in an unworthy rendering,
Richter tendered his resignation and quitted the brilliant post to which
he had been so recently appointed. Thus early did Richter show the stuff
of which he was made. He had absolutely nothing else in view. He simply
had to look about for employment, and we next find him in Paris, working
in combination with Pasdeloup, who was engaged in a scheme for bringing
out "Rienzi" at the Théatre Lyrique. The scheme came to nothing, but the
authorities of the Théatre de la Monnaie in Brussels, who had heard of
Richter's fame, invited him to come and superintend the first production
of "Lohengrin" in French which they were preparing.
With "Lohengrin" in Brussels he was no less successful than with
"Meistersinger" in Munich. Though at first everyone found the music
"impossible," on March 21st, 1870 a magnificent performance was
achieved. As an example of the difficulties with which Richter had to
contend in preparing for that performance, it may be mentioned that he
found the choral singers at the theatre incapable of rendering their
parts, and had to teach them, note by note, like children. Yet in the
public performance there was no trace of these miseries, everything went
with freedom and spontaneity, and ever since the first production under
Richter "Lohengrin" has been a great feature of the Brussels repertory.
After fulfilling his engagement in Brussels, Richter returned to
Triebschen, near Lucerne, where he found Wagner just finishing that
colossal work, the "Ring of the Nibelung." It seems almost incredible
that in addition to their gigantic labours in bringing what was almost a
new art into existence, these remarkable men should have found means at
this period of devoting much time to the study of Beethoven's string
quartets. Richter took part regularly in the quartet playing, and he
considers these hours during which he was initiated by Wagner into the
deepest mysteries of Beethoven's art among the most valuable of his
experiences. In the same year, 1870, Wagner finished his "Siegfried
Idyll," a lovely _aubade_ that was written in honour of his infant son's
birthday. Richter had been entrusted with the task of getting together a
small orchestra in Lucerne, and of rehearsing the new work with them. On
the appointed day the musicians assembled on the steps of the villa at
Triebschen and performed the piece under Richter's direction to the
delight of the Wagner household, among whom the "Siegfried Idyll" is
generally known as the "Treppenmusik" (from "Treppe," a stair or flight
of steps).
The following year Richter accepted an invitation to Buda-Pesth, and
there he remained until, in 1875, he was appointed conductor at the
Imperial Opera in Vienna, a post that he still (in 1897) holds. Thus
the Austrian Capital became for the second time his home and the centre
of his activity, and, indeed, those who know him well, know that in
spite of all cosmopolitan experiences, Richter is "ein echter Wiener"--a
true child of Vienna.
The next "labour of Hercules" was the bringing out of Wagner's trilogy,
the "Ring of the "Nibelungs" with which the Bayreuth theatre was
inaugurated in 1876. During the rehearsals Wagner sat on the stage
directing the actors and Richter stood at the conductor's desk.
Now that the work has become familiar we have lost all standard for
estimating the task which Richter undertook and once more carried
through to a brilliantly successful conclusion.
That vast scene which occupies four evenings in performance he seemed to
have at his fingers' ends. Such was the impression made by Richter upon
all who were concerned, either actively, or merely as spectators and
listeners, in the inaugural Festival of 1876 at Bayreuth that they
recognised him as a new phenomenon in the world of art.
The period of modern orchestral conducting may be said to date from that
occasion. It was then brought home to everyone that conducting was a
great art worthy of independent cultivation. The public began to take an
interest in the style of different conductors, and to show some
sensitiveness as regards interpretations of the great masters. The era
of the "Pig-tails" had come to an end.
In 1877 Richter came with Wagner to London, and ever since that year the
"Richter Concerts" have been a regular institution in this country. In
Vienna, the city of his adoption, he is conductor, not only at the
opera, but also of the Philharmonic Concerts, and latterly of the music
in the Imperial Chapel.
Of late years Richter has conceived a certain dislike to the theatre,
where he finds his work beset with small worries. He is coming to regard
the concert-hall more and more as his special sphere of activity. Upon
Richter's art as a conductor a good-sized book might be written. Here I
can attempt no more than to enumerate a few of his qualities:--Practical
knowledge of the technique belonging to all the more important
instruments; mastery of musical theory in all its branches; an unerring
rhythmical sense; judgment and insight with regard to every possible
musical style, enabling him always to find the right tempo for any
movement or section of a movement (the most important and most difficult
thing for a conductor); mastery of the principles discovered by Wagner
respecting orchestral dynamics, such as the necessity of equably
sustained tone without crescendo or diminuendo, as a basis to start upon
the conditions determining proper balance of strings and wind, the
nature of a round-toned _piano_ delivery (to be studied from first-rate
singers), the manner of producing long crescendos and diminuendos, also
of producing a true _piano_ and a true _forte_ (Wagner having pointed
out that old-fashioned orchestras never played anything but
mezzo-forte); mastery of Wagner's system of phrasing, his far-reaching
investigations with regard to _cantabile_ passages, his treatment of
_fermate_, his distinction between the naïf _allegro_ and the poetic
_allegro_; mastery and practical realisation of all Wagner's other
ideas concerning musical interpretation or public performances, a
subject in which Wagner took a far more deep, expert and fruitful
interest than any other of the great composers.
Finally, Richter is distinguished from most other conductors by his
personal behaviour at the conductor's desk. He is free from antics;
every movement has significance and every attitude has dignity.
CHAPTER XIV.
NIETZSCHE.
[Sidenote: =Nietzsche and Wagner.=
_June 18, 1896._]
The intellectual world of the later nineteenth century has no more
remarkable and original, and also no more tragic, figure to show than
the author of these essays. He was descended from a noble Polish family
originally named Nietzky, who gave up their title and estates and
settled in Germany on account of Protestant convictions. Friedrich
Nietzsche was born in 1844. He received a classical education, and at
twenty-eight years of age became Professor of Classical Philology in the
University of Bâle; but throughout life his love of art, and especially
of music, remained an absorbing passion. It appears that his musical
instinct was first aroused by the works of Schumann, and that youthful
enthusiasm led to serious musical studies. Later on he became the most
ardent of Wagnerians, and finally the fiercest of Wagner's assailants.
Nietzsche's earliest writings are academic monographs on various
classical subjects, the brilliant scholarship of which led to his
appointment at Bâle. The philosophical essays began to appear towards
his thirtieth year, during his professorship at Bâle. There are verses,
too, by Nietzsche which exhibit a genuine poetic faculty. The manner and
order of Nietzsche's mental awakening is worthy of attention--first, the
love of music, leading to a general interest in art; next, philological
studies, originally undertaken, in the opinion of his sister Madame
Förster-Nietzsche, as a relief from the feverish problems of modern
æsthetics, and pursued to such purpose that he became a master of Roman
and Greek learning. His writings also reveal a wide knowledge of Hebrew
and Indian literature, besides thorough familiarity with all that is of
first-rate importance in modern thought. His first intellectual master
seems to have been Schopenhauer. In the year 1889 Nietzsche became
hopelessly insane. There is not the least trace of mental disorder in
the previous family history. The stocks from which he was descended were
on both sides of exceptional energy, ability, and character. There is
also abundant testimony to the simplicity, amiability, and charm of his
personal character. His friends and colleagues at Bâle seem to have had
no suspicion of the explosive energies which appear in his writings. His
tastes were throughout life reserved and fastidious, and the ultimate
breakdown of his mind can only be attributed to the sheer excess of
feverish energy with which he lived the intellectual life and to the
effects of spiritual isolation upon a sensitive and most arrogant
nature. He now lies to all intents and purposes dead at
Naumburg-on-the-Saale, in Saxony, which for the past fifty years has
been the home of the family.
The present volume contains Nietzsche's latest essays, the publications
of 1888. The sub-title given to the "Twilight of the Idols," namely,
"How to Philosophise with a Hammer," applies equally well to the entire
volume, which deals exclusively in destructive criticism. The "idols"
upon which Nietzsche here exercises the hammer of a singularly
comprehensive iconoclasm are those of modern democratic civilisation.
The editor of the series is Dr. Tille, Lecturer on German Language and
Literature in the University of Glasgow, and author of "Von Darwin bis
Nietzsche," a book that has attracted some attention in Germany. No
explanation is offered of the motives which prompted the choice of
Nietzsche's latest works for the first volume of the English edition.
The history of Nietzsche's life since 1876 is the history of a tragic
struggle. In that year he attended the Bayreuth festival, though in a
weak state of health. The impression was overpowering, and henceforth
the Wagnerian drama appeared to him in a new light. He conceived a
horror of Wagner, but so deeply rooted in his affections was the
Wagnerian art that with his belief in Wagner everything else that he had
cared for was cast to the winds; he turned upon the religion of his
childhood, the philosophy of his youth, the very land of his birth, and
the only language that he really knew. Why, it may be asked, is the
"Wagner Case," where the Bayreuth master figures as a "rattlesnake,"
offered to readers who have had no means of access to the earlier essay
by the same writer called "Wagner in Bayreuth," an utterance of
enthusiastic discipleship and probably the most discerning appreciation
of Wagner ever yet published? Again, in the early essay on
"Schopenhauer as Educator," one of the "Inopportune Contemplations,"
Nietzsche reckons himself among those readers of Schopenhauer who know
almost from the outset that they have encountered a determining
influence; and, indeed, so saturated is Nietzsche with Schopenhauer's
ideas that he cannot get rid of the Schopenhauer terminology even in his
later writings, where Schopenhauer has become an "old false-coiner." The
expression "Wille zur Macht," an obvious modification of Schopenhauer's
"Wille zum Leben," continually recurs even in Nietzsche's latest
writings, and was to have formed the title of an entire book in his
projected work "The Transvaluation of all Values." The same early work
contains a passage in which Christianity is called one of the purest
examples of the striving after perfection to be found in the history of
mankind, while the "Antichrist," the last essay in the volume now before
us, is a new and more formidable version of the Voltairian "Ecrasez
l'Infâme," a furious denunciation not merely of Christian dogma, but
also, and more especially, of the ethical principles that are the
essence of the Christian system for the modern world. All these
recantations thus appear with scarcely a hint of the antecedent
confessions of faith. It has been denied that the mental development of
Nietzsche underwent any revolution or breach of continuity in the year
1876. German disciples have attempted to prove the consistency of that
development, and in the April number of the "Savoy" Magazine Mr.
Havelock Ellis remarks, with reference to Nietzsche's Polish descent,
that he was "not Teuton enough to abide for ever with Wagner." But in
any case the apostacy of Nietzsche from Wagner is a painful subject.
When he satirises Germany as the "flat-land" of Europe, the land of the
Hyperboreans and worshippers of Woden, the god of bad weather, when he
accuses the Germans of loving everything nebulous and ambiguous and
hating clearness, consistency, and logic, we may remember that though
Germany was the land of his birth Nietzsche was not a German by blood.
But to Wagner he had been bound by ties of personal friendship as well
as by fervent artistic admiration, so that no sufficient excuse can be
offered for the appalling diatribe in which he smothers with ridicule
both Wagner himself and everything connected with the Wagnerian art. The
plea of insanity can scarcely be allowed. There is too much method in
Nietzsche's madness. Moreover, he is no vulgarian like Nordau, lecturing
in a muddy pathological jargon about subjects completely over his head.
Nietzsche knew what he was talking about; if he had not first been the
most enthusiastic of Wagner's disciples he could not have become so
formidable an enemy. But though we may wish that on arriving at a new
mental standpoint he had dealt more gently with his former friends, yet
the temper which leads a writer to disregard every other consideration
in sheer intentness on the truth of the matter in hand is a quality not
to be slightly discounted.
That Nordau should have anticipated Nietzsche in this country is a
public calamity. The talk about Wagner's degeneracy and decadence had
thus passed into a tiresome cant, and now that the real source of the
only serious anti-Wagnerian criticism makes its appearance the task of
disengaging the important side of that criticism seems almost hopeless.
A few of the leading points against Wagner's works may, however, be
mentioned here--the want of life in the whole and the excess of life in
the small parts, the internal anarchy, the distress and torpor
alternating with disturbance and chaos, the dwelling on the pathetic
note till taste is overcome and resistance overthrown, the hypnotic
character of Wagner's influence, his musty hierarchic perfumes, his
wealth of colours and demi-tints, his mysteries of vanishing light that
spoil us for other music--these are some of the characteristics of
decadent art upon which the case against Wagner is based, and it is
impossible to deny either the acuteness of Nietzsche's observation or
the damaging character of his indictment. On the other hand, it must be
remembered that the renovation of musical drama under Wagner's influence
is an unquestionable fact. Wagner saved us from the period when operas
were concocted from point to point by the most distinguished composer of
the day with a view to the tastes of the Parisian Jockey Club. Wagner
brought back dignity and poetry; he brought back sincerity, he infused a
strain of powerful and far-reaching vitality into the art that he
practised. The enthusiasm of the Wagnerian renascence absorbed nearly
all that was commanding in the musical talent of the time; it affected
even the Italian school, which had hitherto pursued an absolutely
independent line of development. Admitting, therefore, that Nietzsche is
often right in detail, just as Voltaire is now and then right when he
finds fault with "Hamlet," we are disposed to reject Nietzsche's general
conclusion no less emphatically than Voltaire's description of Shakspere
as a drunken savage. The truth is that decadence or decline in one
principle of vitality often means awakening energy in another. Nietzsche
had latterly worked himself to a point of view from which the mystery of
northern poetry and the vividly imaginative detail of Gothic art are
intolerable. His remarks about Wagner's want of taste in the disposition
of broad masses and his over-liveliness in minute detail are like a
criticism of Strasburg Cathedral by an ancient architect; his view of
the Wagnerian drama as concerned with problems of hysteria and as
exhibiting a gallery of morbid personages is like an indictment by a
Roman patrician of the entire "Corpus Poeticum Boreale." Nietzsche was
all his life a stranger to tolerance and compromise, and towards the end
this peculiarity became greatly accentuated. His failing health
attracted him to southern climates, and he presently decreed that the
north was no longer to exist. Having found a sort of salvation among the
"Halcyonians," he is constrained to wage spiritual warfare against all
Hyperboreans, and especially against Wagner, regarded as the typical
Hyperborean. "Ah, the old Minotaur!" says Nietzsche, "What has he not
cost us already! Every year trains of the finest youths and maidens are
led into his labyrinth to be devoured. Every year all Europe strikes up
the cry: 'Off to Crete! Off to Crete!'" It is highly interesting to
observe where Nietzsche finds an antidote for the painful impression of
the Wagnerian art. The one modern work that thoroughly satisfied his
later taste was Bizet's "Carmen." "This music seems to me perfect," he
says; "it approaches lightly, nimbly, and with courtesy. It is rich and
precise. It builds, organises, completes, and is thus the antithesis of
that polypus in music which Wagner calls unending melody. It has the
subtlety of a race, not of an individual. It is free from grimace and
imposture. I become a better man," says Nietzsche, "when this Bizet
exhorts me. Such music sets the spirit free. It gives wings to thought.
With Bizet's work one takes leave of the humid north and all the steam
of the Wagnerian ideal." "Carmen" is only the music of devil-may-care,
of gaiety and sunburnt mirth, with a strong spice of southern passion;
but it has really vivid originality, it has true unity of style, and the
unerring perfection with which the composer has caught and reflected a
certain mood of wayward grace and mastered the musical symbolism of the
bright and fierce and fickle south, the lightness and fire, the logical
development and rhythmical charm of the music stamp the work as an
unmistakable masterpiece of its kind. In his delight at finding
something congenial to his later taste Nietzsche forgot the question of
scope, and forgot that Bizet was only a trifler. It was enough for him
that he had found a "Halcyonian" to contrast with Wagner, the
"Hyperborean." Another objection to the line taken in the introduction
is that the isolated insistence on Nietzsche's "physiological" standard
gives the impression of a type of thinker inconceivably remote from what
he really was. Many a dull and stodgy materialist, such as the author
of "Kraft und Stoff," has maintained the universality of the
physiological standard; while the special characteristic of Nietzsche's
ethical ideas is surely something very different. Is it not the
audacious denial that any one ethical system is valid for all classes of
mankind?--the theory of "Herrenmoral" and "Sklavenmoral,"
master-morality and slave-morality--and the attribution of all social
mischief to the ever-increasing prevalence of slave-morality over
master-morality. Is it not the acceptance of the caste-system as the
simple recognition of a universal and unchanging fact of life which
really differentiates Nietzsche both from the English moralists and from
all other European writers whatsoever? Perhaps Dr. Tille was unwilling
to alarm his readers, and conscious of addressing a public which regards
the question of human equality as having been finally settled a hundred
years ago, deliberately avoided bringing forward opinions that savour of
Oriental despotism. But seeing that every line of Nietzsche's writings
is animated by such opinions, it is impossible to deal with the subject
at all without shocking the ideas of a democratic age. Nietzsche, it
should be remembered, was a belated scion of the proudest, most
turbulent, and most ruthlessly tyrannical aristocracy that ever existed.
He witnessed, with despairing rage, both the success of vulgarity in
that modern Europe which had ruined his ancient and noble race, and what
he regarded as the progressive depreciation of the high-bred qualities
in human nature under the influence of socialistic ideas. Though nowhere
expressly stated, the thought of his people, disinherited for their
inability to adapt themselves to the modern spirit, is never absent
from his consciousness, and he uses his matchless literary power to tell
the men of an industrial and co-operative civilisation what the last of
genuine aristocrats thinks of them. With advancing years Nietzsche
became less and less German and more and more Polish, till after the
break with Wagner and Schopenhauer we find him openly satirising
everything German. He has, in fact, "reverted to type," and from 1876
onwards he figures as a feudal aristocrat in exile.
In his general type of culture Nietzsche was very un-English. The
questions of æsthetics have never been treated in this country as
anything but an affair of dilettantes--at best a superior kind of
trifling; whereas for Nietzsche they were a matter of life and death.
And if it is a point of conscience with cultivated Englishmen to take
some interest in graphic and plastic art, we have nevertheless
practically excluded music from our scheme of culture. We have, perhaps,
advanced a little beyond Lord Chesterfield's view of music as a pursuit
leading to nothing but waste of time and bad company, and an English
nobleman of the present day would probably hesitate to lay down, as Lord
Chesterfield laid down, that the legitimate claims of music upon the
attention of a cultivated man are adequately met by the occasional
giving of a penny to a fiddler. Yet in the depths of his consciousness
the typical Englishman has still a tendency to regard the disputes of
the musical world as Byron regarded the Handel and Buononcini
controversy:--
"Strange all this difference should be
'Twixt Tweedledum and Tweedledee."
Excepting, perhaps, one or two recent cases, such as Dr. Parry and Mr.
Hadow, our men of light and leading have had nothing important to say
about music, whereas for Nietzsche, a scholar and critic of commanding
reputation, music was the one art possessing genuine vitality in the
modern world, and the questions of musical æsthetics were anything but
an affair of dilettantes; they were the questions connected with a
tremendous power for good or evil.
Of all Nietzsche's fantastic conceptions that which has produced the
most curious results is the famous "blonde beast," a sort of bogey
invented for the purpose of annoying and frightening Socialists. The
satirist begins by expressing contempt of herding creatures and
admiration of "beautiful solitary beasts of prey." Sheep and cattle, he
reminds the Socialists, are naturally gregarious, but lions have never
been known to acquire the gregarious instinct. Next he develops the
theory of analogy between great men of the conquering type and common
criminals--the same theory as is set forth, ostensibly as a joke but
really with much seriousness, in Fielding's "Jonathan Wild." This theory
stands in high repute among Socialists, who find it useful for attacking
great men of the conquering and warfaring type, so that when Nietzsche
turns it against Socialism he strikes with a two-edged sword. Lastly, he
conjures up a fearsome image of predatory and unscrupulous vigour, a
combination of Napoleon and feudal aristocrat. This is the "blonde
beast" which, according to the programme of the Nietzschian apocalypse,
is to devour the enfeebled man of the modern world. It is one of
Nietzsche's happiest inspirations, and has already provoked a
literature. Quite recently, for example, a book appeared in Germany
accepting with perfect gravity and recommending for immediate practical
adoption the principles of the "blonde beast." One might almost imagine
that Nietzsche foresaw some such result with secret satisfaction at the
idea of his posthumous revenge on the "flat-land." There are signs, too,
in the English press that the popular imagination is about to fix on
Nietzsche as a writer who recommends promiscuous ruffianism. Was not
Darwin known for many years as the preposterous eccentric who said men
were descended from monkeys? It is, however, advisable to warn those who
are not greatly concerned with mental problems, who value tradition and
take a hopeful view of life, that they had better leave Nietzsche alone.
His influence is on the whole gloomy, disquieting, and profoundly
unsettling, though in relation to the critical literature of the
Continent he is unquestionably one of the great originals, one of the
few "voices" that find many echoes.
[Sidenote: =Nietzsche in English.=
_August 4, 1899._]
The publication of a complete English translation of the works of
Nietzsche is an enterprise which deserves the cordial thankfulness of
all lovers of profound thought and fine literary style. It is not too
much to say that no German writer since Goethe's death, with the
possible exception of Schopenhauer, has united in the same degree as
Nietzsche the two characteristics of originality of matter and charm
and pungency of expression. And of no modern writer whatever, except of
George Meredith, can it be said that he possesses anything like
Nietzsche's power of compelling his reader, whether he is an admiring
reader or a protesting one, to think for himself about the fundamental
problems of life and conduct. Nietzsche's philosophy, with its intense
hatred of Christianity and modern humanitarianism, is scarcely likely to
make any large number of converts among us, but if it can compel us to
ask ourselves honestly and plainly what the unacknowledged ideals of our
civilisation are, and whether they are, after all, capable of being
rationally justified, he will have done an infinitely greater service to
thought than any founder of sect or school.
If one measures the worth of a book by its suggestiveness rather than by
the degree in which its propositions can be accepted as a whole,
Nietzsche's own description of his "Thus spake Zarathustra" as the
profoundest of German works will hardly appear exaggerated. In the
absence of the great work on the "Transvaluation of all Values," which
was so lamentably cut short by the philosopher's incurable illness,
"Zarathustra" must probably be accepted as the prime document of the new
moral code, of which Nietzsche was the best known and most eloquent
preacher.
Nietzsche's hero has, of course, very little in common with the
semi-historical fighting prophet of Iran. Under the disguise of a story
with no particular scene or date, he gives you a treatise on the moral
life as it might be if men would regard the extirpation of the unfit and
the propagation of a race of physically and mentally superior beings as
the first and last of human duties. Of course, in any such picture there
must always be many subjective features, and much that is characteristic
of Zarathustra, his extreme individualism, his love of loneliness and
solitary places, his hatred of a complex and expensive life, is simply a
reflection of the peculiar personal taste of his Creator. Had Nietzsche
himself not been free from ordinary social and domestic ties, it is
likely that the individualistic and anti-social strain in his teachings
would have been far less prominent than it is. But when all allowance
has been made for such personal idiosyncrasies, it remains the fact that
Nietzsche has more boldly than any other writer of our time raised the
most important of social questions; the question whether the ethical and
political ideals of Christianity, of democracy, of universal
benevolence, are those of a healthy or those of a radically diseased
humanity. No future vindication of our current idea can be regarded as
of any value unless it sets itself to grapple, more seriously than
professional moral philosophy has as yet done, with the attack of
Zarathustra. In the minor writings which fill the other two volumes of
the translation already published, Nietzsche is less constructive and
more purely iconoclastic. The "Antichrist" subjects the established
religion of Europe and the moral code based upon it to a criticism which
is always suggestive, often profound, sometimes merely angry and
wrong-headed. The attack upon Wagner, in whom Nietzsche had once looked
for a master, is closely connected with the furious onslaught upon
Christian ideals. Of Wagner the musician Nietzsche has many things both
hard and shrewd to say, but the Wagner against whom the main brunt of
his polemic is directed is Wagner the psychologist, the pessimist, the
preacher of chastity and resignation--in a word, as Nietzsche
understands him, the decadent. Christianity, according to Nietzsche, has
made decadence into a religion, Schopenhauer has turned it into a
philosophy, Wagner into an æsthetic theory. Hence the constant polemic
against all three which recurs in all Nietzsche's writings. The
"Genealogy of Morals" is devoted to the exposition of a favourite theory
of Nietzsche's, that there have always been two antithetical codes of
moral values, that of "masters" and that of "slaves." "Masters" prize
above everything else qualities which bespeak a superabundance of
personal force, strength, beauty, wealth, long life; "slaves" set the
highest store by qualities which make servitude more endurable, and in
the end render revenge upon the "master" possible. Starting from this
primary assumption, Nietzsche shows wonderful insight in his examination
of the growth of concepts like "guilt," "sin," "bad conscience."
Transcriber's Note
Obvious typographical errors were repaired, as listed below. Other
apparent inconsistencies or errors have been retained. Missing,
extraneous, or incorrect punctuation has been corrected and hyphenation
has been made consistent.
Text enclosed by underscores is in italics (_italics_).
Text enclosed by equal signs is in bold (=bold=).
Page i, "directon" changed to "direction". (Mr. Johnstone died in 1870,
and the direction of Arthur's education fell entirely upon his mother.)
Page xii, "symbolize" changed to "symbolise" for consistency. (He would
have nothing to do with the attempt to symbolise and revive a
civilisation that had utterly passed away,...)
Page xii, "civilization" changed to "civilisation" for consistency. (He
would have nothing to do with the attempt to symbolise and revive a
civilisation that had utterly passed away,...)
Page xli, "Nietzschean" changed to "Nietzschian" for consistency. (The
review of Tille's translation, well bears partial reprinting in this
volume for its keen intelligence and also as a quite early sketch of the
Nietzschian system in the English press.)
Page xxvi, "nor h" changed to "north". (It lies in a well-wooded
district of Podolia, some hundred miles further north than the region to
which I first went.)
The absence of the sub-heading, I., in CHAPTER V has been kept true to
the original.
Page 41, missing "on" added. (... a man of genius who, without private
means, had thrown up his employment and taken himself and his wife on a
long journey to a foreign country in order to win recognition in "la
ville Lumière" must, in the course of three fruitless years, have felt
something worse than misgiving.)
Page 42, "aud" changed to "and". (... it is that bitterness of spirit
which finds expression in the smashing and burning ...)
Page 58, "naively" changed to "naïvely" for consistency. (Besides doing
justice to the drama as an allegorical picture of life in the light of
certain nineteenth-century ideas, the performance was a specially good
revelation of its amusing and naïvely entertaining qualities.)
Page 61, duplicate "which" deleted. (In regard to "Walküre" and
"Siegfried," which have long been in the repertory of London, Paris, and
other capitals, the superiority of Bayreuth is very much less
certain--that is to say, of Bayreuth as represented by this year's
performances.)
Page 80, "begining" changed to "beginning" for consistency. (The best of
the music is at the beginning, where there is an extremely fine chorus,
"The Challenge of Thor," containing various musical elements all truly
expressive and fraught with the same primitive and racy vigour.)
Page 84, "same" changed to "some". (The striking success of this
composition reminds us of the following passage occurring at the end of
an article by Sir Hubert Parry written some years ago.)
Page 122, "Frankfort" changed to "Frankfurt" for consistency. (The chief
feature in the interpretation on Tuesday was the superb rendering, by
Professor Hugo Becker, of Frankfurt, of the violoncello solo which
throughout the work is identified with the person of the titular hero.)
Page 129, "Symphony" changed to "Symphonie" for consistency. (="Faust
Symphonie," Düsseldorf.=)
Page 129, "like" changed to "likes". (Whether one likes his style or
not,...)
Page 151, "dramatized" changed to "dramatised" for consistency. (He is a
great master of form, but he dramatises the chamber-music forms very
much as Beethoven dramatised the symphony,...)
Page 153, "Carneval" changed to "Carnaval" for consistency. (In his
rendering of Schumann's "Carnaval" not a point was missed,)
Page 179, "Wienaiwski's" changed to "Wieniawski's" for consistency.
(Wieniawski's Fantasia on Themes from Gounod's "Faust," Paganini's
caprice "I Palpiti," Bazzini's "Ronde des Lutins," the last-named played
among the encore pieces.)
Page 180, duplicate "and" deleted. (For the present we are mainly
concerned with Mr. Kreisler, who is not so desperately youthful, but is
a mature and military-looking man, though he is commonly reckoned among
the players of the new school, or the rising generation.)
Page 192, "Leonara" changed to "Leonora" for consistency. (Glancing now
at musical activity in other countries, we find attention necessarily
concentrated in the first instance upon the heroic figure of Beethoven,
who in this year (1813) had already given to the world his Eroica, C
minor, Pastoral, and Seventh Symphonies, besides his Violin Concerto,
Razoumoffsky Quartets, Waldstein and Appassionata Sonatas, his one opera
"Fidelio," together with the third "Leonora" overture, and many other
works of towering genius.)
Page 224, "idiosyncracies" changed to "idiosyncrasies". (But when all
allowance has been made for such personal idiosyncrasies, it remains the
fact that Nietzsche has more boldly than any other writer of our time
raised the most important of social questions ...)
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