The Project Gutenberg eBook of Musical Portraits, by Paul Rosenfeld.

Wagner's music, more than any other, is the sign and symbol of the nineteenth century. The men to whom it was disclosed, and who first sought to refuse, and then accepted it, passionately, without reservations, found in it their truth. It came to their ears as the sound of their own voices. It was the common, the universal tongue. Not alone on Germany, not alone on Europe, but on every quarter of the globe that had developed coal-power civilization, the music of Wagner descended with the formative might of the perfect image. Men of every race and continent knew it to be of themselves as much as was their hereditary and racial music, and went out to it as to their own adventure. And wherever music reappeared, whether under the hand of the Japanese or the semi-African or the Yankee, it seemed to be growing from Wagner as the bright shoots of the fir sprout from the dark ones grown the previous year. A whole world, for a period, came to use his idiom. His dream was recognized during his very lifetime as an integral portion of the consciousness of the entire race.

For Wagner's music is the century's paean of material triumph. It is its cry of pride in its possessions,[Pg 4] its aspiration toward greater and ever greater objective power. Wagner's style is stiff and diapered and emblazoned with the sense of material increase. It is brave, superb, haughty with consciousness of the gigantic new body acquired by man. The tonal pomp and ceremony, the pride of the trumpets, the arrogant stride, the magnificent address, the broad, vehement, grandiloquent pronouncements, the sumptuous texture of his music seems forever proclaiming the victory of man over the energies of fire and sea and earth, the lordship of creation, the suddenly begotten railways and shipping and mines, the cataclysm of wealth and comfort. His work seems forever seeking to form images of grandeur and empire, flashing with Siegfried's sword, commanding the planet with Wotan's spear, upbuilding above the heads of men the castle of the gods. It dares measure itself with the terrestrial forces, exults in the fire, soughs through the forest with the thunderstorm, glitters and surges with the river, spans mountains with the rainbow bridge. It is full of the gestures of giants and heroes and gods, of the large proud movements of which men have ever dreamed in days of affluent power. Even "Tristan und Isolde," the high song of love, and "Parsifal," the mystery, spread richness and splendor about them, are set in an atmosphere of heavy gorgeous stuffs, amid objects of gold and silver, and thick clouding incense, while the protagonists, the lovers and[Pg 5] saviors, seem to be celebrating a worldly triumph, and crowning themselves kings. And over the entire body of Wagner's music, there float, a massive diadem, the towers and parapets and banners of Nuremberg the imperial free city, monument of a victorious burgherdom, of civic virtue that on the ruins of feudalism constructed its own world, and demonstrated to all times its dignity and sobriety and industry, its solid worth.

For life itself made the Wagnerian gesture. The vortex of steel and glass and gold, the black express-packets plowing the seven seas, the smoking trains piercing the bowels of the mountains and connecting cities vibrant with hordes of business men, the telegraph wires setting the world aquiver with their incessant reports, the whole sinister glittering faëry of gain and industry and dominion, seemed to tread and soar and sound and blare and swell with just such rhythm, such grandeur, such intoxication. Mountains that had been sealed thousands of years had split open again and let emerge a race of laboring, fuming giants. The dense primeval forests, the dragon-haunted German forests, were sprung up again, fresh and cool and unexplored, nurturing a mighty and fantastic animality. Wherever one gazed, the horned Siegfried, the man born of the earth, seemed near once more, ready to clear and rejuvenate the globe with his healthy instinct, to shatter the old false barriers[Pg 6] and pierce upward to fulfilment and power. Mankind, waking from immemorial sleep, thought for the first time to perceive the sun in heaven, to greet the creating light. And where was this music more immanent than in the New World, in America, that essentialization of the entire age? By what environment was it more justly appreciated, Saxon though the accents of its recitative might be? Germany had borne Wagner because Germany had an uninterrupted flow of musical expression. But had the North American continent been able to produce musical art, it could have produced none more indigenous, more really autochthonous, than that of Richard Wagner. Whitman was right when he termed these scores "the music of the 'Leaves.'" For nowhere did the forest of the Niebelungen flourish more lushly, more darkly, than upon the American coasts and mountains and plains. From the towers and walls of New York there fell a breath, a grandiloquent language, a stridency and a glory, that were Wagner's indeed. His regal commanding blasts, his upsweeping marching violins, his pompous and majestic orchestra, existed in the American scene. The very masonry and river-spans, the bursting towns, the fury and expansiveness of existence shed his idiom, shadowed forth his proud processionals, his resonant gold, his tumultuous syncopations and blazing brass and cymbals and volcanically inundating melody; appeared to be struggling[Pg 7] to achieve the thing that was his art. American life seemed to be calling for this music in order that its vastness, its madly affluent wealth and multiform power and transcontinental span, its loud, grandiose promise might attain something like eternal being.

And just as in Wagner's music there sounds the age's cry of material triumph, so, too, there sounds in it its terrible cry of homesickness. The energy produced and hurled out over the globe was sucked back again with no less a force. The time that saw the victory of industrialism saw as well the revival or the attempted revival of medieval modes of feeling. Cardinal Newman was as typical a figure of nineteenth-century life as was Balzac. The men who had created the new world felt within themselves a passionate desire to escape out of the present into the past once more. They felt themselves victors and vanquished, powerful and yet bereft and forlorn. And Wagner's music expresses with equal veracity both tides. Just as his music is brave with a sense of outward power, so, too, it is sick with a sense of inner unfulfilment. There is no longing more consuming, no homesickness more terrible, no straining after the laving, immersing floods of unconsciousness more burning than that which utters itself through this music. There are passages, whole hours of his, that are like the straining of a man to return into the darkness of the mothering night out of which he came.[Pg 8] There is music of Wagner that makes us feel as though he had been seeking to create great warm clouds, great scented cloths, wide curtains, as though he had come to his art to find something in which he could envelop himself completely, and blot out sun and moon and stars, and sink into oblivion. For such a healer Tristan, lying dying on the desolate, rockbound coast, cries through the immortal longing of the music. For such a divine messenger the wound of Amfortas gapes; for such a redeemer Kundry, driven through the world by scorching winds, yearns. His lovers come toward each other, seeking in each other the night, the descent into the fathomless dark. For them sex is the return, the complete forgetfulness. Through each of them there sounds the insistent cry:

"Frau Minne will

Es werde Nacht!"

There is no tenderness, no awareness of each other, in these men and women. There is only the fierce, impersonal longing for utter consumption, the extinction of the flaming torch, complete merging in the Absolute, the weaving All. In each of them, desire for the void mounts into a gigantic, monstrous flower, into the shimmering thing that enchants King Mark's garden and the rippling stream and the distant horns while Isolde waits for Tristan, or into the devastating fever that chains the sick Tristan to his bed of pain.

[Pg 9]For all these beings, and behind them Wagner, and behind him his time, yearn for the past, the pre-natal, the original sleep, and find in such a return their great fulfilment. Siegmund finds in the traits of his beloved his own childhood. Siegfried awakes on the flame-engirdled hill a woman who watched over him before he was born, and waited unchanged for his ripening. It is with the kiss of Herzeleide that Kundry enmeshes Parsifal. Brunhilde struggles for the forgiving embrace of Wotan, sinks on the breast of the god in submission, reconciliation, immolation. And it is towards an engulfing consummation, some extinction that is both love and death and deeper than both, that the music of his operas aspires. The fire that licks the rock of the Walkyrie, the Rhine that rises in the finale of "Götterdämmerung" and inundates the scene and sweeps the world with its silent, laving tides, the gigantic blossom that opens its corolla in the Liebestod and buries the lovers in a rain of scent and petals, the tranquil ruby glow of the chalice that suffuses the close of "Parsifal," are the moments toward which the dramas themselves labor, and in which they attain their legitimate conclusion, completion and end. But not only his finales are full of that entrancement. His melodic line, the lyrical passages throughout his operas, seem to seek to attain it, if not conclusively, at least in preparation. Those silken excessively sweet periods, the moment of recon[Pg 10]ciliation and embrace of Wotan and Brunhilde, the "Ach, Isolde" passage in the third act of "Tristan," those innumerable lyrical flights with their beginnings and subsidings, their sudden advances and regressions, their passionate surges that finally and after all their exquisite hesitations mount and flare and unroll themselves in fullness—they, too, seem to be seeking to distill some of the same brew, the same magic drugging potion, to conjure up out of the orchestral depths some Venusberg, some Klingsor's garden full of subtle scent and soft delight and eternal forgetfulness.

And with Wagner, the new period of music begins. He stands midway between the feudal and the modern worlds. In him, the old and classical period is accomplished. Indeed, so much of his music is sum, is termination, that there are times when it seems nothing else. There are times when his art appears entirely bowed over the past; the confluence of a dozen different tendencies alive during the last century and a half; the capping of the labor of a dozen great musicians; the fulfilment of the system regnant in Europe since the introduction of the principle of the equal temperament. For the last time, the old conceptions of tonality obtain in his music dramas. One feels throughout "Tristan und Isolde" the key of D-flat, throughout "Die Meistersinger" the key of C-major, throughout "Parsifal" the key of A-flat and its relative minor. Rhythms that had been used[Pg 11] all through the classical period are worked by him into new patterns, and do service a last time. Motifs which had been utilized by others are taken by him and brought to something like an ultimate conclusion. The ending, the conclusion, the completion, are sensible throughout his art. Few musicians have had their power and method placed more directly in their hands, and benefited so hugely by the experiments of their immediate predecessors, have fallen heir to such immense musical legacies. Indeed, Wagner was never loath to acknowledge his indebtedness, and there are on record several instances when he paraphrased Walther's song to his masters, and signaled the composers who had aided him most in his development. To-day, the debt is very plain. At every turn, one sees him benefiting, and benefiting very beautifully, by the work of Beethoven. The structure of his great and characteristic works is based on the symphonic form. The development of the themes of "Tristan" and "Die Meistersinger" and "Parsifal" out of single kernels; the fine logical sequence, the expositions of the thematic material of "Parsifal" in the prelude and in Gurnamanz's narrative, and its subsequent reappearance and adventures and developments, are something like a summit of symphonic art as Beethoven made it to be understood. And his orchestra is scarcely more than the orchestra of Beethoven. He did not require the[Pg 12] band of independent instrumental families demanded by Berlioz and realized by the modern men. He was content with the old, classical orchestra in which certain groups are strengthened and to which the harp, the English horn, the bass-tuba, the bass-clarinet have been added.

And his conception of an "unending melody," an unbroken flow of music intended to give cohesion and homogeneity to his music-dramas, was a direct consequence of the efforts of Mozart and Weber to give unity to their operatic works. For although these composers retained the old convention of an opera composed of separate numbers, they nevertheless managed to unify their operas by creating a distinct style in each of them, and by securing an emotional development in the various arias and concerted numbers. The step from "Don Giovanni" and "Euryanthe" to "Tannhäuser" and "Lohengrin" does not seem quite as long a one to-day as once it did. Indeed, there are moments when one wonders whether "Lohengrin" is really a step beyond "Euryanthe," and whether the increase of power and vividness and imagination has not been made at the expense of style. Moreover, in much of what is actually progress in Wagner the influence of Weber is clearly discernible. The sinister passages seem but developments of moments in "Der Freischütz"; the grand melodic style, the romantic orchestra with its sighing horns and chiv[Pg 13]alry and flourishes, seem to come directly out of "Euryanthe"; the orchestral scene-painting from the sunrise and other original effects in "Oberon."

Even Meyerbeer taught Wagner something more than the use of certain instruments, the bass-clarinet, for instance. The old operatic speculator indubitably was responsible for Wagner's grand demands upon the scene-painter and the stage-carpenter. His pompous spectacles fired the younger man not only with "Rienzi." They indubitably gave him the courage to create an operatic art that celebrated the new gold and power and magnificence, and was Grand Opera indeed. If the works of the one were sham, and those of the other poetry, it was only that Wagner realized what the other sought vainly all his life to attain, and was prevented by the stock-broker within.

And Chopin's harmonic feeling as well as Berlioz's orchestral wizardry played a rôle in Wagner's artistic education. But for all his incalculable indebtednesses, Wagner is the great initiator, the compeller of the modern period. It is not only because he summarized the old. It is because he began with force a revolution. In expressing the man of the nineteenth century, he discarded the old major-minor system that had dominated Europe so long. That system was the outcome of a conception of the universe which set man apart from the remainder of nature, placed him[Pg 14] in a category of his own, and pretended that he was both the center and the object of creation. For it called man the consonance and nature the dissonance. The octave and the fifth, the bases of the system, are of course, to be found only in the human voice. They are, roughly, the difference between the average male and the average female voice, and the difference between the average soprano and alto. It is upon those intervals that the C-major scale and its twenty-three dependents are based. But with the coming of a conception that no longer separated man from the rest of creation, and placed him in it as a small part of it, brother to the animals and plants, to everything that breathes, the old scale could no longer completely express him. The modulations of the noises of wind and water, the infinite gradations and complexes of sound to be heard on the planisphere, seemed to ask him to include them, to become conscious of them and reproduce them. He required other more subtle scales. And with Wagner the monarchy of the C-major scale is at an end. "Tristan und Isolde" and "Parsifal" are constructed upon a chromatic scale. The old one has had to lose its privilege, to resign itself to becoming simply one of a constantly growing many. If this step is not a colossal one, it is still of immense importance. The musical worthies who ran about wringing their hands after the first performance of each of Wagner's works, and lamented[Pg 15] laws monstrously broken, and traditions shattered, were, for once, right. They gauged correctly from which direction the wind was blowing. They probably heard, faintly piping in the distance, the pentatonic scales of Moussorgsky and Debussy, the scales of Scriabine and Strawinsky and Ornstein, the barbarous, exotic and African scales of the future, the one hundred and thirteen scales of which Busoni speaks. And to-day there are no longer musical rules, forbidden harmonies, dissonances. Siegfried has broken them along with Wotan's spear. East and West are near to merging once again. No doubt, had there been no Wagner, the change would have arrived nevertheless. However, it would have arrived more slowly. For what he did accomplish was the rapid emptying of the old wine that still remained in the wineskin, the preparation of the receptacle for the new vintage. He forced the new to put in immediate appearance.

The full impact of these reforms, the full might of Wagner, we of our generation doubtlessly never felt. They could have been felt only by the generation to whom Wagner first disclosed himself, the generation that attained maturity between 1850 and 1880. It was upon the men of those days that he did his full work of destruction and revival. It was in them he battered down walls. It was them he made to hear afresh, to stretch and grow in the effort to comprehend him.[Pg 16] At the moment we encountered Wagner, his work was already something of a closed experience, something we were able to accept readily and with a certain ease because it had been accepted and assimilated by an entire world, and become part of the human organism. Its power was already slightly diminished. For instance, Wagner the musician was no longer able to make either Wagner the poet or Wagner the philosopher exist for us as they existed for the men of the earlier generation. Only Houston Stewart Chamberlain still persisted in trying to stand upon the burning deck whence all the rest had fled. For us, it was obvious that if Wagner's work throned mightily it was because of his music, and oftentimes in spite of his verse and his doctrine. For us, it was a commonplace that dramatic movement and the filling up of scenes by the introduction of characters who propose pointless riddles to one another and explain at length what their names are not, are incompatible; that poetry does not consist in disguising commonplace expressions in archaic and alliterative and extravagant dress; that Wotan displays no grasp of the essentials of Schopenhauer's philosophy when he insists on dubbing Brunhilde his Will.

And yet, whatever the difference, most of Wagner's might was still in him when first we came to know his music. The spell in which he had bound the generation that preceded ours was still powerful.[Pg 17] For us, too, there occurred the moments when Siegfried's cavernous forest depths first breathed on us, when for the first time "Die Meistersinger" flaunted above the heads of all the world the gonfalon of art, when for the first time we embarked upon the shoreless golden sea of "Tristan und Isolde." For us, too, the name of Richard Wagner rang and sounded above all other musical names. For us, too, he was a sort of sovereign lord of music. His work appeared the climax toward which music had aspired through centuries, and from which it must of necessity descend again. Other, and perhaps purer work than his, existed, we knew. But it seemed remote and less compelling, for all its perfection. New music would arrive, we surmised. Yet we found ourselves convinced that it would prove minor and unsatisfactory. For Wagner's music had for us an incandescence which no other possessed. It was the magnetic spot of music. Its colors blazed and glowed with a depth and ardor that seemed to set it apart from other music as in an enchanted circle. It unlocked us as did no other. We demanded just such orchestral movement, just such superb gestures, just such warm, immersing floods, and were fulfilled by them. That there would come a day when the magnetism which it exerted on us would pass from it, and be seen to have passed, seemed the remotest of possibilities.

For we accepted him with the world of our minor[Pg 18]ity. For each individual there is a period, varying largely in extent, during which his existence is chiefly a process of imitation. In the sphere of expression, that submission to authority extends well over the entire period of gestation, well into the time of physical maturity. There are few men, few great artists, even, who do not, before attaining their proper idiom and gesture, adopt those of their teachers and predecessors. Shakespeare writes first in the style of Kyd and Marlowe, Beethoven in that of Haydn and Mozart; Leonardo at first imitates Verrocchio. And what the utilization of the manner of their predecessors is to the artist, that the single devotion to Wagner was to us. For he was not only in the atmosphere, not only immanent in the lives led about us. His figure was vivid before us. Scarcely another artistic personality was as largely upon us. There were pictures, on the walls of music-rooms, of gray-bearded, helmeted warriors holding mailed blonde women in their arms, of queens with golden ornaments on their arms leaning over parapets and agitating their scarves, of women throwing themselves into the sea upon which ghastly barks were dwindling, of oldish men and young girls conversing teasingly through a window by a lilac-bush, that were Wagner. There were books with stories of magical swans and hordes of gold and baleful curses, of phantasmal storm ships and hollow hills and swords lodged in tree-trunks[Pg 19] awaiting their wielders, of races of gods and giants and grimy dwarfs, of guardian fires and potions of forgetfulness and prophetic dreams and voices, that were Wagner. There were adults who went to assist at these things of which one read, who departed in state and excitement of an evening to attend performances of "Die Walküre" and "Tristan und Isolde," and who spoke of these experiences in voices and manners different from those in which they spoke, say, of the theater or the concert. And there were magnificent and stately and passionate pieces that drew their way across the pianoforte, that seized upon one and made one insatiable for them. Long before we had actually entered the opera house and heard one of Wagner's works in its entirety, we belonged to him and knew his art our own. We were born Wagnerians.

But of late a great adventure has befallen us. What once seemed the remotest of possibilities has actually taken place. We who were born and grew under the sign of Wagner have witnessed the twilight of the god. He has receded from us. He has departed from us into the relative distance into which during his hour of omnipotence he banished all other composers.

He has been displaced. A new music has come into being, and drawn near. Forms as solid and wondrous and compelling as his are about us. Little by little, during the last years, so gradually that it has[Pg 20] been almost unbeknown to us, our relationship to him has been changing. Something within us has moved. Other musicians have been working their way in upon our attention. Other works have come to seem as vivid and deep of hue, as wondrous and compelling as his once did. Gradually the musical firmament has been reconstellating itself. For long, we were unaware of the change, thought ourselves still opposite Wagner, thought the rays of his genius still as direct upon us as ever they were. But of late so wide has the distance become that we have awakened sharply to the change. Of a sudden, we seem to ourselves like travelers who, having boarded by night a liner fast to her pier and fallen asleep amid familiar objects, beneath the well-known beacons and towers of the port, waken suddenly in broadest daylight scarcely aware the vessel has been gotten under way, and find the scene completely transformed, find themselves out on ocean and glimpse, dwindling behind them, the harbor and the city in which apparently but a moment since they had lain enclosed.

It is the maturing of a generation that has produced the change. For each generation the works of art produced by its members have a distinct importance. Out of them, during their time, there sparks the creative impulse. For every generation is something of a unit.

"Chaque génération d'hommes

Germant du champs maternal en sa saison,

Garde en elle un secret commun, un certain noeud

dans la profonde contexture de son bois,"

Claudel assures us through the mask of Tête d'Or. And the resemblances between works produced independently of each other within the space of a few years, generally so much greater than those that exist between any one work of one age and any of another, bears him out. The styles of Palestrina and Vittoria, which are obviously dissimilar, are nevertheless more alike than those of Palestrina and Bach, Vittoria and Haendel; just as those of Bach and Haendel, dissimilar as they are, have a greater similarity than that which exists between those of Bach and Mozart, of Haendel and Haydn. And so, for the men of a single period the work produced during their time is a powerful encouragement to self-realization, to the espousal of their destiny, to the fulfilment of their life. For the motion of one part of a machine stirs all the others. And there is a part of every man of a generation in the work done by the other members of it. The men who fashion the art of one's own time make one's proper experiment, start from one's own point of departure, dare to be themselves and oneself in the face of the gainsaying of the other epochs. They are so belittling, so condescending, so nay-saying and deterring, the other times and their masterpieces! They[Pg 22] are so unsympathetic, so strange and grand and remote! They seem to say "Thus must it be; this is form; this is beauty; all else is superfluous." Who goes to them for help and understanding is like one who goes to men much older, men of different habits and sympathies, in order to explain himself, and finds himself disconcerted and diminished instead, glimpses a secret jealousy and resentment beneath the mask. But the adventure of encountering the artist of one's own time is that of finding the most marvelous of aids, corroboration. It is to meet one who has been living one's life, and thinking one's thoughts, and facing one's problems. It is to get reassurance, to accept oneself, to beget courage to express one's self in one's own manner.

And we of our generation have finally found the music that is so creatively infecting for us. We have found the music of the post-Wagnerian epoch. It is our music. For we are the offspring of the generation that assimilated Wagner. We, too, are the reaction from Wagner. Through the discovery we have come to learn that music can give us sensations different than those given us by Wagner's. We have learned what it is to have music say to us, "It is thus, after all, that you feel." We have finally come to recognize that we require of music forms, proportions, accents different from Wagner's; orchestral movement, color, rhythms, not in his. We have learned that we want an alto[Pg 23]gether different stirring of the musical caldron. A song of Moussorgsky's or Ravel's, a few measures of "Pelléas" or "Le Sacre du printemps," a single fine moment in a sonata of Scriabine's, or a quartet or suite of Bloch's, give us a joy, an illumination, a satisfaction that little of the older music can equal. For our own moment of action is finally at hand.

So Wagner has retreated and joined the company of composers who express another day than our own. The sovereignty that was in him has passed to other men. We regard him at present as the men of his own time might have regarded Beethoven and Weber. Still, he will always remain the one of all the company of the masters closest to us. No doubt he is not the greatest of the artists who have made music. Colossal as were his forces, colossal as were the struggles he made for the assumption of his art, his musical powers were not always able to cope with the tasks he set himself. The unflagging inventive power of a Bach or a Haydn, the robustness of a Haendel or a Beethoven, the harmonious personality of a Mozart, were things he could not rival. He is even inferior, in the matter of style, to men like Weber and Debussy. There are many moments, one finds, when his scores show that there was nothing in his mind, and that he simply went through the routine of composition. Too often he permitted the system of leading-motifs[Pg 24] to relieve him of the necessity of creating. Too often, he made of his art a purely mental game. His emotion, his creative genius were far more intermittent, his breath far less long than one once imagined. Some of the earlier works have commenced to fade rapidly, irretrievably. At present one wonders how it is possible that one once sat entranced through performances of "The Flying Dutchman" and "Tannhäuser." "Lohengrin" begins to seem a little brutal, strangely Prussian lieutenant with its militaristic trumpets, its abuse of the brass. One finds oneself choosing even among the acts of "Tristan und Isolde," finding the first far inferior to the poignant, magnificent third. Sometimes, one glimpses a little too long behind his work not the heroic agonist, but the man who loved to languish in mournful salons, attired in furred dressing gowns.

Indeed, if Wagner seems great it is chiefly as one of the most delicate of musicians. It is the lightness of his brush stroke that makes us marvel at the third act of "Tristan," the first scene of the "Walküre." It is the delicacy of his fancy, the lilac fragrance pervading his inventions, that enchants us in the second act of "Die Meistersinger." Through the score of "Parsifal" there seem to pass angelic forms and wings dainty and fragile and silver-shod as those of Beardsley's "Morte d'Arthur."

But the debt we owe him will always give him a[Pg 25] vast importance in our eyes. The men of to-day, all of them, stand directly on his shoulders. It is doubtful whether any of us, the passive public, would be here to-day as we are, were it not for his music.

Strauss

Strauss was never the fine, the perfect artist. Even in the first flare of youth, even at the time when he was the meteoric, dazzling figure flaunting over all the baldpates of the universe the standard of the musical future, it was apparent that there were serious flaws in his spirit. Despite the audacity with which he realized his amazing and poignant and ironic visions, despite his youthful fire and exuberance—and it was as something of a golden youth of music that Strauss burst upon the world—one sensed in him the not quite beautifully deepened man, heard at moments a callow accent in his eloquence, felt that an unmistakable alloy was fused with the generous gold. The purity, the inwardness, the searchings of the heart, the religious sentiment of beauty, present so unmistakably in the art of the great men who had developed music, were wanting in his work. He had neither the unswerving sense of style, nor the weightiness of touch, that mark the perfect craftsman. He was not sufficiently a scrupulous and exacting artist. It was apparent that he was careless, too easily contented with some of his material, not always happy in his detail. Mixed with his fire there was a sort of laziness and indifference. But, in those days, Strauss was unmistakably[Pg 28] the genius, the original and bitingly expressive musician, the engineer of proud orchestral flights, the outrider and bannerman of his art, and one forgave his shortcomings because of the radiance of his figure, or remained only half-conscious of them.

For, once his period of apprenticeship passed, and all desire to write symphonies and chamber-music in the styles of Schumann and Mendelssohn and Brahms, to construct operas after the pattern of "Tannhäuser" and "Parsifal" gone out of him, this slender, sleepy young Bavarian with the pale curly hair and mustaches had commenced to develop the expressive power of music amazingly, to make the orchestra speak wonderfully as it had never spoken before. Under his touch the symphony, that most rigid and abstract and venerable of forms, was actually displaying some of the novel's narrative and analytical power, its literalness and concreteness of detail. It was describing the developments of a character, was psychologizing as it had hitherto done only in conjunction with poetry or the theater. Strauss made it represent the inflammations of the sex illusion, comment upon Nietzsche and Cervantes, recount the adventures, somersaults and end of a legendary rascal, portray a hero of our time. He made all these intellectual concepts plastic in a music of a brilliance and a sprightliness and mordancy that not overmany classic symphonies can rival. Other and former composers, no[Pg 29] doubt, had dreamt of making the orchestra more concretely expressive, more precisely narrative and descriptive. The "Pastoral" symphony is by no means the first piece of deliberately, confessedly programmatic music. And before Strauss, both Berlioz and Liszt had experimented with the narrative, descriptive, analytical symphony. But it was only with Strauss that the symphonic novel was finally realized.

Neither Berlioz nor Liszt had really embodied their programs in living music. Liszt invariably sacrificed program to sanctioned musical form. For all his radicalism, he was too trammeled by the classical concepts, the traditional musical schemes and patterns to quite realize the symphony based on an extra-musical scheme. His symphonic poems reveal how difficult it was for him to make his music follow the curve of his ideas. In "Die Ideale," for instance, for the sake of a conventional close, he departed entirely from the curve of the poem of Schiller which he was pretending to transmute. The variations in which he reproduced Lamartine's verse are stereotyped enough. When was there a time when composers did not deform their themes in amorous, rustic and warlike variations? The relation between the pompous and somewhat empty "Lament and Triumph" and the unique, the distinct thing that was the life of Torquato Tasso is outward enough. And even "Mazeppa," in which Liszt's virtuosic genius stood him in good stead,[Pg 30] makes one feel as though Liszt could never quite keep his eye on the fact, and finally became engrossed in the weaving of a musical pattern fairly extraneous to his idea. The "Faust Symphony" is, after all, an exception. Berlioz, too, failed on the whole to achieve the musical novel. Whenever he did attain musical form, it was generally at the expense of his program. Are the somewhat picturesque episodes of "Harold in Italy," whatever their virtues, and they are many, more than vaguely related to the Byronism that ostensibly elemented them? The surprisingly conventional overture to "King Lear" makes one feel as though Berlioz had sat through a performance of one of Shakespeare's comedies under the impression that he was assisting at the tragedy, so unrelated to its subject is the music. And where, on the other hand, Berlioz did succeed in being regardful of his program, as in the "Symphonic Fantastique," or in "Lélio," there resulted a somewhat thin and formless music.

But Strauss, benefiting by the experiments of his two predecessors, realized the new form better than any one before him had done. For he possessed the special gifts necessary to the performance of the task. He possessed, in the first place, a miraculous power of musical characterization. Through the representative nicety of his themes, through his inordinate capacity for thematic variation and transformation, his playful and witty and colorful instrumentation, Strauss[Pg 31] was able to impart to his music a concreteness and descriptiveness and realism hitherto unknown to symphonic art, to characterize briefly, sparingly, justly, a personage, a situation, an event. He could be pathetic, ironic, playful, mordant, musing, at will. He was sure in his tone, was low-German in "Till Eulenspiegel," courtly and brilliant in "Don Juan," noble and bitterly sarcastic in "Don Quixote," childlike in "Tod und Verklärung." His orchestra was able to accommodate itself to all the folds and curves of his elaborate programs, to find equivalents for individual traits. It is not simply "a man," or even "an amatory hero" that is portrayed in "Don Juan." It is no vague symbol for the poet of the sort created by "Orpheus" or "Tasso" or "Mazeppa." It is Lenau's hero himself, the particular being Don Juan Tenorio. The vibrant, brilliant music of the up-surging, light-treading strings, of the resonant, palpitating brass, springs forth in virile march, reveals the man himself, his physical glamour, his intoxication that caused him to see in every woman the Venus, and that in the end made him the victim as well as the hero of the sexual life. It is Till Eulenspiegel himself, the scurvy, comic rascal, the eternal dirty little boy with his witty and obscene gestures, who leers out of every measure of the tone-poem named for him, and twirls his fingers at his nose's end at all the decorous and respectable world. Here, for once, orchestral music is really won[Pg 32]derfully rascally and impudent, horns gleeful and windy and insolent, wood-wind puckish and obscene. Here a musical form reels hilariously and cuts capers and dances on bald heads. The variation of "Don Quixote" that describes with wood-wind and tambourine Dulcinea del Toboso is plump and plebeian and good-natured with her very person, is all the more trenchantly vulgar and flat for the preceding suave variation that describes the knight's fair, sonorous dream of her. There is no music more plaintively stupid than that which in the same work figures the "sheep" against which Don Quixote battles so valiantly. Nor is there any music more maliciously, malevolently petty than that which represents the adversaries in "Ein Heldenleben." So exceedingly definite is the portrait of the Hero's Consort, for which Frau Richard Strauss, without doubt, sat, that without even having seen a photograph of the lady, one can aver that she is graced with a diatonic figure. And, certainly the most amusing passage of "Sinfonia Domestica" is that complex of Bavarian lustihood, Bavarian grossness, Bavarian dreaminess and Bavarian good nature, the thematic group that serves as autoportrait of the composer.

And just as there seemed few characters that Strauss could not paint, in those days, so, too, there seemed few situations, few atmospheres, to which he could not do justice. A couple of measures, the sinister[Pg 33] palpitation of the timpani and the violas, the brooding of the wood-wind, the dull flickering of the flutes, the laboring breath of the strings, and we are lying on the death-bed, exhausted and gasping for air, weighed by the wrecks of hopes, awaiting the cruel blows on the heart that will end everything. Horns and violins quaver and snarl, flutes shrill, a brief figure descends in the oboes and clarinets, and Till has shed his rascal-sweat and danced on the air. The orchestra reveals us Don Juan's love affairs in all their individuality: first the passionate, fiery relation with the Countess, quickly begun and quickly ended; then the gentler and more inward communion with Anna, with the boredom resulting from the lady's continual demand for sentiment and romantic posturing; then the great night of love and roses, with its intoxicated golden winding horns, its ecstatically singing violins; and finally the crushing disappointment, the shudder of disgust. The battle in "Ein Heldenleben" pictures war really; the whistling, ironical wind-machine in "Don Quixote" satirizes dreams bitingly as no music has done; the orchestra describes the enthusiastic Don recovering from his madness, and smiles a conclusion; in "Also Sprach Zarathustra" it piles high the tomes of science, and waltzes with the Superman in distant worlds.

And then, though less fecund an inventor than Liszt, less rich and large a temperament than Berlioz, Strauss was better able than either of his masters to organize[Pg 34] his material on difficult and original lines, and find musical forms representative of his programs. Because of their labors, he was born freer of the classical traditions than they had been, and was able to make music plot more exactly the curves of his concepts, to submit the older forms, such as the rondo and the theme and variations, more perfectly to his purpose. Compositions of the sort of "Till Eulenspiegel," "Tod und Verklärung" and "Ein Heldenleben," solidly made and yet both narrative and dramatic, place the symphonic poem in the category of legitimate musical forms. The themes of "Till" grow out of each other quite as do the themes of a Beethoven symphony or of "Tristan" or of "Parsifal." Indeed, Strauss has done for the symphonic poem something of what Wagner did for the opera. And not an overwhelming number of classical symphonies contain music more eloquent than, say, the "sunrise" in "Also Sprach Zarathustra," or the final variation of "Don Quixote" with its piercing, shattering trumpets of defeat, or the terrifying opening passage of "Tod und Verklärung." For Strauss was able to unloose his verve and fantasy completely in the construction of his edifices. His orchestra moves in strangest and most unconventional curves, shoots with the violence of an exploding firearm, ambles like a palfrey, swoops like a bird. There are few who, at a first hearing of a Strauss poem, do not feel as though some wild and troubling and panic[Pg 35] presence had leaned over the concert hall and bedeviled the orchestra. For, in his hands, it is no longer the familiar and terrorless thing it once had been, a thing about whose behavior one can be certain. It has become a formidable engine of steel and gold, vibrant with mad and unexpected things. Patterns leap and tumble out of it. Violin music launches swiftly into space, trumpets run scales, the tempi move with the velocity of express trains. It has become a giant, terrible bird, the great auk of music, that seizes you in its talons and spirals into the empyrean.

But it was what he seemed to promise to perform, to bring into being, even more than what he had already definitely accomplished, that spread about the figure of Strauss the peculiar radiance. It was Nietzsche who had made current the dream of a new music, a music that should be fiercely and beautifully animal, full of laughter, of the dry good light of the intellect, of "salt and fire and the great, compelling logic, of the light feet of the south, the dance of the stars, the quivering dayshine of the Mediterranean." The other composers, the Beethovens and Brahms and Wagners, had been sad, suffering, wounded men, men who had lost their divine innocence and joy in the shambles, and whose spiritual bodies were scarred, for all the muscular strength gained during their fights, by hunger and frustration and agony. Pain had even marred their song. For what should have been innocence and[Pg 36] effortless movement and godlike joy, Mozartean coordination and harmony, was full of terrible cries, and convulsive, rending motions, and shrouding sorrow. And Nietzsche had dreamt of music of another sort. He had dreamt of a music that should be a bridge to the Superman, the man whose every motion would be carefree. He had seen striding across mountain chains in the bright air of an eternal morning a youth irradiant with unbroken energy, before whom all the world lay open in vernal sunshine like a domain before its lord. He had seen one beside whom the other musicians would stand as convicts from Siberian prison camps who had stumbled upon a banquet of the gods. He had seen a young Titan of music, drunken with life and fire and joy, dancing and reeling and laughing on the top of the world, and with fingers amid the stars, sending suns and constellations crashing. He had caught sight of the old and eternally youthful figure of Indian Dionysos.

And even though Strauss himself could scarcely be mistaken for the god, nevertheless he made Nietzsche's dream appear realizable. He permitted one for an instant to perceive a musical realm in which the earth-fast could not breathe. He permitted one for an instant to hear ringing "the prelude of a deeper, mightier, perchance a more evil and mysterious music; a super-German music which does not fade, wither and die away beside the blue and wanton sea and the clear[Pg 37] Mediterranean sky; a music super-European, which would assert itself even amid the tawny sunsets of the desert; a music whose soul is akin to the palm-trees; a music that can consort and prowl with great, beautiful, lonely beasts of prey; a music whose supreme charm is its ignorance of Good and Evil." For he came with some of the light and careless and arrogant tread, the intellectual sparkling, the superb gesture and port, of the musician of the new race. The man who composed such music, one knew, had been born on some sort of human height, in some cooler, brighter atmosphere than that of the crowded valleys. For in this music there beat a faster pulse, moved a lighter, fierier, prouder body, sounded a more ironic and disdainful laughter, breathed a rarer air than had beat and moved and sounded and breathed in music. It made drunken with pleasant sound, with full rich harmonies, with exuberant dance and waltz movements. It seemed to adumbrate the arrival of a new sort of men, men of saner, sounder, more athletic souls and more robust and cool intelligences, a generation that was vitally satisfied, was less torn and belabored by the inexpressible longings of the romantic world, a generation very much at home on the globe. For it had none of the restless, sick desire of Wagner, none of his excessive pathos, his heaviness and stiff grandeur. It had come down off its buskins, was more easy, witty, diverting, exciting, popular and yet[Pg 38] cerebral. Though it was obviously the speech of a complicated, modern man, self-conscious, sophisticated, nervous, product of a society perhaps not quite as free and Nietzschean as it deemed itself, but yet cultivated and illuminated and refined, it nevertheless seemed exuberantly sound. The sweet, broad, diatonic idiom, the humor, the sleepy Bavarian accent, the pert, naïve, little folk-tunes it employed, the tranquil, touching, childlike tones, the close of "Tod und Verklärung," with its wondrous unfolding of corolla upon corolla, were refreshing indeed after all the burning chromaticism of Wagner, the sultry air of Klingsor's wonder-garden.

And this music glittered with the sun. The pitch of Wagner's orchestra had, after all, been predominantly sober and subdued. But in the orchestra of Strauss, the color-gamut of the plein-air painters got a musical equivalent. Those high and brilliant tints, these shimmering, biting tones, make one feel as though Strauss made music with the paint-brush of a Monet or a Van Gogh. His trumpets are high and brilliant and silvery, his violins scintillant and electric, at moments winding a lazy, happy, smoke-blue thread through the sunburnt fabric of the score. His horns glow with soft, fruity timbres. The new sweetness of color which he attains in his songs, the pale gold of "Morgen," the rose of the Serenade, the mild evening blue of "Traum durch die Dämmerung," shim[Pg 39]mers throughout his orchestra scores. Never have wind instruments sounded more richly, dulcetly, than in that "Serenade für dreizehn Bläser." At a first hearing of "Also Sprach Zarathustra," it seemed as though the very dayspring had descended into the orchestra to make that famous, brassy opening passage. For here, in the hand of Strauss, the orchestra begins to round out its form and assume its logical shape. The various families of instruments are made independent; often play separately. The shattering brass of which Berlioz had dreamt is realized. Violas d'amore, hecklephones, wind-machines, are introduced into the band; the familiar instruments are used in unfamiliar registers. Through the tone-poems of Strauss, the orchestral composer for the first time has a suitable palette, and can achieve a brilliance as great as that which the modern painter can attain.

To-day, it is difficult to realize that Richard Strauss ever incensed such high hopes, that there was a time when he made appear realizable Nietzsche's mad dream of a modern music, and that for awhile the nimbus of Dionysos burnt round his figure. To-day it is difficult to remember that once upon a time Strauss seemed to the world the golden youth of music, the engineer of proud orchestral flights, the outrider and bannerman of his art. For it is long since he has promised to reveal the new beauty, the new rhythm,[Pg 40] has seemed the wonderful start and flight toward some rarer plane of existence, some bluer ether, the friend of everything intrepid and living and young, the "arrow of longing for the Superman." It is a long while since any gracious, lordly light has irradiated his person. In recent years he has become almost the very reverse of what he was, of what he gave so brave an earnest of becoming. He who was once so electric, so vital, so brilliant a figure has become dreary and outward and stupid, even. He who once seemed the champion of the new has come to fill us with the weariness of the struggle, with deep self-distrust and discouragement, has become a heavy and oppressive weight. He who once sought to express the world about him, to be the poet of the coming time, now seems inspired only by a desire to do the amazing, the surface thing, and plies himself to every ephemeral and shallow current of modern life. For Strauss has not only not deepened and matured and increased in stature; he has not even stood still, remained the artist that once he was. He has progressively and steadily deteriorated during the last decade. He has become a bad musician. He is the cruel, the great disappointment of modern music, of modern art. The dream-light has failed altogether, has made the succeeding darkness the thicker for the momentary illumination. Strauss to-day is seen as a rocket that sizzled up into the sky with many-colored blaze, and[Pg 41] then broke suddenly and extinguished swiftly into the midnight.

It is not easy, even for those who were aware from the very first that Strauss was not the spirit "pardlike, beautiful and swift" and that there always were distinctly gross and insensitive particles in him, to recognize in the slack and listless person who concocts "Joseph's Legende" and the "Alpensymphonie," the young and fiery composer, genius despite all the impurities of his style, who composed "Till Eulenspiegel" and "Don Quixote"; not easy, even though the contours of his idiom have not radically altered, and though in the sleepy facile periods of his later style one catches sight at times of the broad, simple diction of his earlier. For the later Strauss lacks pre-eminently and signally just the traits that made of the earlier so brilliant and engaging a figure. Behind the works of the earlier Strauss there was visible an intensely fierily experiencing being, a man who had powerful and poignant and beautiful sensations, and the gift of expressing them richly. Behind the work of the latter there is all too apparent a man who for a long while has felt nothing beautiful or strong or full, who no longer possesses the power of feeling anything at all, and is inwardly wasted and dull and spent. The one had a burning and wonderful pressure of speech. The other seems unable to concentrate energy and interest sufficiently to create a hard and living[Pg 42] piece of work. The one seemed to blaze new pathways through the brain. The other steps languidly in roadways well worn. He is not even amusing any longer. The contriver of wonderful orchestral machines, the man who penetrated into the death-chamber and stood under the gibbet, has turned to toying with his medium, to imitating other composers, Mozart in "Der Rosenkavalier," Haendel in "Joseph's Legende," Offenbach and Lully (a coupling that only Strauss has the lack of taste to bring about) in "Ariadne auf Naxos." He has become increasingly facile and unoriginal, has taken to quoting unblushingly Mendelssohn, Tchaikowsky, Wagner, himself, even. His insensitivity has waxed inordinately, and led him to mix styles, to commingle dramatic and coloratura passages, to jumble the idioms of three centuries in a single work, to play all manner of pointless pranks with his art. His literary taste has grown increasingly uncertain. He who was once so careful in his choice of lyrics, and recognized the talents of such modern German poets as Birnbaum and Dehmel and Mackay, accepts librettos as dull and inartistic and precious as those with which Hofmannsthal is supplying him, and lends his art to the boring buffooneries of "Der Rosenkavalier" and "Ariadne auf Naxos." Something in him has bent and been fouled.

One thing at least the Strauss of the tone-poems indisputably was. He was freely, dazzlingly, daringly[Pg 43] expressive. And this is what the Strauss of the last years thinly and rarely is. It is not Oscar Wilde's wax flowers of speech, nor the excessively stiff and conventionalized action of "Salome," that bores one with the Strauss opera of that name. It is not even the libretto of "Der Rosenkavalier," essentially coarse and boorish and insensitive as it is beneath all its powdered preciosity, that wearies one with Strauss's "Musical Comedy"; or the hybrid, lame, tasteless form of "Ariadne auf Naxos" that turns one against that little monstrosity. It is the generally inexpressive and insufficient music in which Strauss has vested them. The music of "Salome," for instance, is not even commensurable with Wilde's drama. It was the evacuation of an obsessive desire, the revulsion from a pitiless sensuality that the poet had intended to procure through this representation. But Strauss's music, save in such exceptional passages as the shimmering, restless, nerve-sick opening page, or the beginning of the scene with the head, or certain other crimson patches, hampers and even negates the intended effect. It emasculates the drama with its pervasive prettiness, its lazy felicitousness where it ought to be monstrous and terrifying, its reminiscences of Mendelssohn, Tchaikowsky and "Little Egypt." The lascivious and hieratic dance, the dance of the seven veils, is represented by a valse lente. Oftentimes the score verges perilously on circus-music, re[Pg 44]calls the sideshows at county fairs. No doubt, in so doing it weakens the odor exuded by Wilde's play. But if we must have an operatic "Salome," it is but reasonable to demand that the composer in his music express the sexual cruelty and frenzy symbolized in the figure of the dancer. And the Salome of Strauss's score is as little the Salome of Wilde as she is the Salome of Flaubert or Beardsley or Moreau or Huysmans. One cannot help feeling her eminently a buxom, opulent Berliner, the wife, say, of the proprietor of a large department store; a heavy lady a good deal less "dämonisch" and "perverse" than she would like to have it appear. But there are moments when one feels as though Strauss's heroine were not even a Berliner, or of the upper middle class. There are moments when she is plainly Käthi, the waitress at the Münchner Hofbraühaus. And though she declares to Jokanaan that "it is his mouth of which she is enamored," she delivers the words in her own true-hearted, unaffected brogue.

Nor is "Elektra," more sharp than "Salome," though it oftentimes is, the musical equivalent for the massive and violent forms of archaic Greek sculpture that Strauss intended it be. Elektra herself is perhaps more truly incarnate fury than Salome is incarnate luxury; ugliness and demoniacal brooding, madness and cruelty are here more sheerly powerfully expressed than in the earlier score; the scene of recog[Pg 45]nition between brother and sister is more large and touching than anything in "Salome"; Elektra's paean and dance, for all its closeness to a banal cantilena, its tempo di valse so characteristic of the later Strauss, is perhaps more grandiosely and balefully triumphant than the dancer's scene with the head. Nevertheless, the work is by no means realized. It is formally impure, a thing that none of the earlier tone-poems are. Neither style nor shape are deeply felt. Both are superficially and externally conceived; and nothing so conclusively demonstrates it as the extreme ineffectually of the moments of contrast with which Strauss has attempted to relieve the dominant mood of his work. Just as in "Salome" the more restless and sensual passages, lazily felt as they are, are nevertheless infinitely more significant than the intensely contrasting silly music assigned to the Prophet, so, too, in "Elektra," the moments when Strauss is cruel, brutal, ugly are of a much higher expressiveness than those in which he has sought to write beautifully. For whereas in moments of the first sort the lions of the Mycenæ gates do at times snarl and glower, in those of the second it is the Teutonic beer-mug that makes itself felt. Elektra laments her father in a very pretty and undistinguished melody, and entreats her sister to slay Klytemnæstra to the accompaniment of a sort of valse perverse. It is also in tempo di valse that Chrysothemis declares her need of wifehood and[Pg 46] motherhood. As an organism the work does not exist.

But even the expressiveness and considerability of "Salome" and "Elektra," limited and unsatisfactory as they are, are wanting in the more recent works. With "Der Rosenkavalier," Strauss seems to have reached a condition in which it is impossible for him to penetrate a subject deeply. No doubt he always was spotty, even though in his golden days he invariably fixed the inner informing binding rhythm of each of his works. But his last works are not only spotty, but completely spineless as well, invertebrate masses upon which a few jewels, a few fine patches, gleam dully. "Salome" and "Elektra" had at least a certain dignity, a certain bearing. "Der Rosenkavalier," "Ariadne auf Naxos," "Joseph's Legende" and "Eine Alpensymphonie" are makeshift, slack, slovenly despite all technical virtuosity, all orchestral marvels. Every one knows what the score of "Rosenkavalier" should have been, a gay, florid, licentious thing, the very image of the gallant century with its mundane amours and ribbons and cupids, its petit-maîtres and furbelows and billets-doux, its light emotions and equally light surrenders. But Strauss's music is singularly flat and hollow and dun, joyless and soggy, even though it is dotted with waltzes and contains the delightful introduction to the third act, and the brilliant trio. It has all the worst faults of the libretto. Hof[Pg 47]mannsthal's "comedy for music," though gross and vulgar in spirit, and unoriginal in design, is full of a sort of clever preciosity, full of piquant details culled from eighteenth-century prints and memoirs. The scene of the coiffing is a print of Hogarth's translated to the stage; Rofrano's name "Octavian Maria Ehrenreich Bonaventura Fernand Hyazinth" is like an essay on the culture of the Vienna of Canaletto; the polite jargon of eighteenth-century aristocratic Austria spoken by the characters, with its stiff, courteous forms and intermingled French, must have been studied from old journals and gazettes. And Strauss's score is equally precious, equally a thing of erudition and cleverness. Mozart turned the imbecilities of Schickaneder to his uses; Weber triumphed over the ridiculous romancings of Helmine von Chezy. But Strauss follows Hofmannsthal helplessly, soddenly. Just as Hofmannsthal imitates Hogarth, so Strauss imitates Mozart, affects his style, his turns, his spirit; inserts a syrupy air in the style of Haendel or Méhul in the first act; and jumbles Mozart with modern comic-opera waltzes, Haendel with post-Wagnerian incantations. And like Hofmannsthal's libretto, the score remains a superficial and formless thing. The inner and coherent rhythm, the spiritual beat and swing, the great unity and direction, are wanting. "I have always wanted to write an opera like Mozart's, and now I have done it," Strauss is reported to have said after[Pg 48] the first performance of "Der Rosenkavalier." But "Der Rosenkavalier" is almost antipodal to "Don Giovanni" or to "Falstaff" or to "Die Meistersinger" or to any of the great comic operas. For it lacks just the thing the others possess abundantly, a strong lyrical movement, a warm emotion that informs the music bar after bar, scene after scene, act after act, and imparts to the auditor the joy, the vitality, the beauty of which the composers' hearts were full. It is a long while since Strauss has felt anything of the sort.

Had the new time produced no musical art, had no Debussy nor Scriabine, no Strawinsky nor Bloch, put in appearance, one might possibly have found oneself compelled to believe the mournful decadence of Richard Strauss the inevitable development awaiting musical genius in the modern world. There exists a group, international in composition, which, above all other contemporary bodies, arrogates to itself the style of modernity. It is the group, tendrils of which reach into every great capital and center, into every artistic movement and cause, of the bored ones, the spoilt ones. The present system has lifted into a quasi aristocratic and leisurely state vast numbers of people without background, without tradition or culture or taste. By reason of its largeness and resources, this group of people without taste, without interest, without finesse, has come to dominate in particular the world of art as the world of play, has come to demand[Pg 49] distraction, sensation, excitement which its unreal existence does not afford it. Indeed, this band has come to give a cast to the whole of present-day life; its members pretend to represent present-day culture. It is with this group with its frayed sensibilities and tired pulses that Strauss has become increasingly identified, till of late he has become something like its court-musician, supplying it with stimulants, awaking its curiosities, astonishing and exciting it with the superficial novelty of his works, trying to procure it the experiences it is so lamentably unable to procure itself. It is for it that he created the trumpery horrors, the sweet erotics of the score of "Salome." It is for it that he imitated Mozart saccharinely in "Der Rosenkavalier"; mangled Molière's comedy; committed the vulgarities and hypocrisies of "Joseph's Legende." And did no evidence roundly to the contrary exist, one might suppose this group to really represent modern life; that its modernity was the only true one; and that in expressing it, in conforming to it, Strauss was functioning in the only manner granted the contemporary composer. But since such evidence exists aplenty, since a dozen other musicians, to speak only of the practitioners of a single art, have managed to keep themselves immune and yet create beauty about them, to remain on the plane upon which Strauss began life, to persevere in the direction in which he was originally set, and yet live fully, one[Pg 50] finds oneself convinced that the deterioration of Strauss, which has made him musical purveyor to this group, has not been the result of the pressure of outward and hostile circumstances. One finds oneself positively convinced that it was some inner weakness within himself that permitted the spoilt and ugly folk to seduce him from his road, and use him for their purposes.

And in the end it is as the victim of a psychic deterioration that one is forced to regard this unfortunate man. The thing that one sees happening to so many people about one, the extinction of a flame, the withering of a blossom, the dulling and coarsening of the sensibilities, the decay of the mental energies, seems to have happened to him, too. And since it happens in the lives of so many folk, why should it surprise one to see it happening in the life of an artist, and deflowering genius and ruining musical art? All the hectic, unreal activity of the later Strauss, the dissipation of forces, points back to such a cause. He declares himself in every action the type who can no longer gather his energies to the performance of an honest piece of work, who can no longer achieve direct, full, living expression, who can no longer penetrate the center of a subject, an idea. He is the type of man unfaithful to himself in some fundamental relation, unfaithful to himself throughout his deeds. Many people have thought a love of money the cause of[Pg 51] Strauss's decay; that for the sake of gain he has delivered himself bound hand and foot into the power of his publishers, and for the sake of gain turned out bad music. No doubt, the love of money plays an inordinate rôle in the man's life, and keeps on playing a greater and greater. But it is probable that Strauss's desire for incessant gain is a sort of perversion, a mania that has gotten control over him because his energies are inwardly prevented from taking their logical course, and creating works of art. Luxury-loving as he is, Strauss has probably never needed money sorely. Some money he doubtlessly inherited through his mother, the daughter of the Munich beer-brewer Pschorr; his works have always fetched large prices—his publishers have paid him as much as a thousand dollars for a single song; and he has always been able to earn great sums by conducting. No matter how lofty and severe his art might have become, he would always have been able to live as he chose. There is no doubt that he would have earned quite as much money with "Salome" and "Der Rosenkavalier" had they been works of high, artistic merit as he has earned with them in their present condition. The truth is that he has rationalized his unwillingness to go through the labor-pains of creation by pretending to himself a constant and great need of money, and permitting himself to dissipate his energies in a hectic, disturbed, shallow existence, in a tremor of[Pg 52] concert-tours, guest-conductorships, money-making enterprises of all sorts, which leave him about two or three of the summer months for composition, and probably rob him of his best energies. So works leave his writing table half-conceived, half-executed. The score of "Elektra" he permits his publishers to snatch from him before he is quite finished with it. He commences composing "Der Rosenkavalier" before having even seen the third act. The third act arrives; Strauss finds it miserable. But it is too late. The work is half-finished, and Strauss has to go through with it. Composition becomes more and more a mechanical thing, the brilliant orchestration of sloppy, undistinguished music, the polishing up of details, the play of superficial cleverness which makes a score like "Der Rosenkavalier," feeble as it is, interesting to many musicians.

And Richard Strauss, the one living musician who could with greatest ease settle down to uninterrupted composition, gets to his writing table in his apartment in Charlottenburg every evening at nine o'clock, that is, whenever he is not on duty at the Berlin Opera.

And always the excuses: "Earning money for the support of wife and child is not shameful," "I am going to accumulate a large enough fortune so that I can give up conducting entirely and spend all my time composing." But one can be sure that when Strauss soliloquizes, it is a different defense that he[Pg 53] makes. One can be sure, then, that he justifies himself cynically, bitterly, grossly, tells himself that the game is not worth the candle, that greatness is a matter of advertisement, that only the values of the commercial world exist, that other success than the procurement of applause and wealth and notoriety constitutes failure. Why should you take the trouble to write good work that will bring you posthumous fame when without trouble you can write work that will bring you fame during your lifetime? The whole world is sham and advertisement and opportunism, is it not? Reputations are made by publishers and newspapers. Greatness is a matter determined by majorities. But impress the public, but compose works that will arouse universal comment, but break a few academic formulas and get yourself talked about, but write music that will surprise and seem wonderful at a first hearing, and your fame is assured. The important thing is to live luxuriously and keep your name before the public. In so doing one will have lived life as fully as it can be lived. And after one is dead, what does it all matter?

Yet, though the world be full of men whose spiritual energies have been lamed in kindred fashions, the terrible misadventure of Richard Strauss remains deeply affecting. However far the millions of bright spirits who have died a living death have fallen, their fall has been no farther than this man's. There can be[Pg 54] no doubt of the completeness of Strauss's disaster. It is a long while since he has been much besides a bore to his once fervent admirers, an object of hatred to thousands of honest, idealistic musicians. He has completely, in his fifty-sixth year, lost the position of leadership, of eminence that once he had. Even before the war his operas held the stage only with difficulty. And it is possible that he will outlive his fame. One wonders whether he is not one of the men whose inflated reputations the war has pricked, and that a world will shortly wonder, before his two new operas, how it was possible that it should have been held at all by the man. Had he been the most idealistic, the most uncompromising of musicians he could not be less respected. Perhaps his last chance lay in the "Alpensymphonie." Here was a ceremony that could have made him priest once again. Europe had reached a summit, humanity had had a vision. Before it lay a long descent, a cloudburst, the sunset of a civilization, another night. Could Strauss have once more girded himself, once more summoned the faith, the energy, the fire that created those first grand pages that won a world to him, he might have been saved. But it was impossible. Something in him was dead forever. And so, to us, who should have been his champions, his audiences, his work already seems old, part of the past even at its best, unreal except for a few of the fine symphonic works.[Pg 55] To us, who once thought to see in him the man of the new time, he seems only the brave, sonorous trumpet-call that heralded a king who never put in his appearance, the glare that in the East lights the sky for an instant and seems to promise a new day, but extinguishes again. He is indeed the false dawn of modern music.

Moussorgsky

The music of Moussorgsky comes up out of a dense and livid ground. It comes up out of a ground that lies thickly packed beneath our feet, and that is wider than the widest waste, and deeper than the bottomless abysses of the sea. It comes up from a soil that descends downward through all times and ages, through all the days of humankind, down to the very foundations of the globe itself. For it grows from the flesh of the nameless, unnumbered multitudes of men condemned by life throughout its course to misery. It has its roots where death and defeat have been. It has its roots in all bruised and maimed and frustrated flesh, in all flesh that might have borne a god and perished barren. It has its root in every being who has been without sun, in every being who has suffered cold and hunger and disease, and pierces down and touches every voiceless woe, every defeat that man has ever known. And out of that sea of mutilated flesh it rises like low, trembling speech, halting and inarticulate and broken. It has no high, compelling accent, no eloquence. And yet, it has but to lift its poor and quavering tones, and the splendor of the world is blotted out, and the great, glowing firmament is made a sorrowful gray, and, in a single instant,[Pg 58] we have knowledge of the stern and holy truth, know the terrible floor upon which we tread, know what man has ever suffered, and what our own existences can only prove to be.

For it is the cry of one possessed and consumed in every fiber of his being by that single consciousness. It is as though Moussorgsky, the great, chivalric Russian, the great, sinewy giant with blood aflame for gorgeousness and bravery and bells and games and chants, had been all his days the Prince in "Khovanchtchina" to whom the sorceress foretells: "Disgrace and exile await thee. Honors and power and riches will be torn from thee. Neither thy past glory nor thy wisdom can save thee. Thou wilt know what it is to want, and to suffer, and to weep the tears of the hopeless. And so, thou wilt know the truth of this world." It is as though he had heard that cry incessantly from a million throats, as though it had tolled in his ears like a bourdon until it informed him quite, and suffused his youth and force and power of song. It is as though his being had been opened entirely in orientation upon the vast, sunless stretches of the world, and distended in the agony of taking up into himself the knowledge of those myriad broken lives. For it is the countless defeated millions that live again in his art. It is they who speak with his voice. Better even than Walt Whitman, Moussorgsky might have said:

"Through me, voices long dumb, many long dumb voices,

Voices of the interminable generations of prisoners and slaves,

Voices of the diseas'd and despairing and of thieves and dwarfs,

Voices of cycles of preparation and accretion"—

It is as though he had surrendered himself quite to them, had relinquished to them his giant Russian strength, his zest of life, his joy, had given them his proud flesh that their cry and confession might reach the ears of the living.

Sometimes, Moussorgsky is whole civilizations discarded by life. Sometimes, he is whole cultures from under which the earth has rolled, whole groups of human beings who stood silently and despairingly for an instant in a world that carelessly flung them aside, and then turned and went away. Sometimes he is the brutal, ignorant, helpless throng that kneels in the falling snow while the conquerors, the great ones of this world, false and true alike, pass by in the torchlight amid fanfares and hymns and acclamations and speak the fair, high words and make the kingly gestures that fortune has assigned to them. Sometimes he is even life before man. He is the dumb beast devoured by another, larger; the plants that are crowded from the sunlight. He knows the ache and pain of inanimate things. And then, at other moments, he is a certain forgotten individual, some ob[Pg 60]scure, nameless being, some creature, some sentient world like the monk Pimen or the Innocent in "Boris Godounow," and out of the dust of ages an halting, inarticulate voice calls to us. He is the poor, the aging, the half-witted; the drunken sot mumbling in his stupor; the captives of life to whom death sings his insistent, luring songs; the half-idiotic peasant boy who tries to stammer out his declaration of love to the superb village belle; the wretched fool who weeps in the falling snowy night. He is those who have never before spoken in musical art, and now arise, and are about us and make us one with them.

But it is not only as content that they are in this music. This music is they, in its curves and angles, in its melody and rhythms, in its style and shape. There are times when it stands in relation to other music as some being half giant, half day-laborer, might stand in the company of scholars and poets and other highly educated and civilized men. The unlettered, the uncouth, the humble, the men unacquainted with eloquence are in this music in very body. It pierces directly from their throats. No film, no refinement on their speech, no art of music removes them from us. As Moussorgsky originally wrote these scores, their forms are visible on page after page. When his music laughs it laughs like barbarians holding their sides. When it weeps, it weeps like some little old peasant woman crouching and rocking in her grief. It has[Pg 61] all the boisterousness and hoarseness of voices that sound out of peasant-cabins and are lodged in men who wear birch-bark shoes and eat coarse food and suffer cold and hunger. Within its idiom there are the croonings and wailings of thousands of illiterate mothers, of people for whom expression is like a tearing of entrails, like a terrible birth-giving. It has in it the voices of folk singing in fairs, of folk sitting in inns; exalted and fanatical and mystical voices; voices of children and serving-maids and soldiers; a thousand sorts of uncouth, grim, sharp speakers. The plaint of Xenia in "Boris Godounow" is scarcely more than the underlining of the words, the accentuation of the voice of some simple girl uttering her grief for some one recently and cruelly dead. There are moments when the whole of "Boris Godounow," machinery of opera and all, seems no more elegant, more artful and refined than one of the simpler tunes cherished by common folk through centuries, passed from generation to generation and assumed by each because in moments of grief and joy and longing and ease it brought comfort and solace and relief. This music is common Russia singing. It is Russia speaking without the use of words. For like the folk-song, it has within it the genius and values of the popular tongue. Moussorgsky's style is blood-brother to the spoken language, is indeed as much the Russian language as music can be. In the phrase of Jacques Rivière, "it[Pg 62] speaks in words ending in ia and schka, in humble phrases, in swift, poor, suppliant terms." Indeed, so unconventional, so crude, shaggy, utterly inelegant, are Moussorgsky's scores, that they offend in polite musical circles even to-day. It is only in the modified, "corrected" and indubitably castrated versions of Rimsky-Korsakoff that "Boris" and "Khovanchtchina" maintain themselves upon the stage. This iron, this granite and adamantine music, this grim, poignant, emphatic expression will not fit into the old conceptions. The old ones speak vaguely of "musical realism," "naturalism," seeking to find a pigeon-hole for this great quivering mass of life.

No doubt the music of Moussorgsky is not entirely iron-gray. Just as, in the midst of "Boris," there occurs the gentle scene between the Czar and his children, so scattered through this stern body of music there are light and gay colors, brilliant and joyous compositions. Homely and popular and naïve his melodies and rhythms always are, little peasant-girls with dangling braids, peasant lads in gala garb, colored balls that are thrown about, singing games that are played to the regular accompaniment of clapping palms, songs about ducks and parrakeets, dances full of shuffling and leaping. Even the movements of the sumptuous "Persian Dances" in "Khovanchtchina" are singularly naïve and simple and unpretentious.[Pg 63] Sometimes, however, the full gorgeousness of Byzantine art shines through this music, and the gold-dusty modes, the metallic flatness of the pentatonic scale, the mystic twilit chants and brazen trumpet-calls make us see the mosaics of Ravenna, the black and gold ikons of Russian churches, the aureoled saints upon bricked walls, the minarets of the Kremlin. There is scarcely an operatic scene more magnificent than the scene of the coronation of Tsar Boris, with its massive splendors of pealing bells and clarion blares and the caroling of the kneeling crowds. Then, like Boris himself, Moussorgsky sweeps through in stiff, blazoned robes, crowned with the domed, flashing Slavic tiara. And yet through all these bright colors, as through the darker, sadder tones of the greater part of his work, there comes to us that one anguished, overwhelming sense of life, that single great consciousness. The gay rich spots are but part of it, intensify the great somber mass. Their simplicity, their childlikeness, their innocence, are qualities that are perceived only after suffering. The sunlight in them is the gracious, sweet, kindly sunlight that falls only between nights of pain. The bright and chivalric passages of "Boris," the music called forth by the memories of feudal Russia, and the glory of the Czars, give a deeper, stranger, even more wistful tone to the great gray pile of which they are a part. "Khovanchtchina" is never so much the tragedy, the monu[Pg 64]ment to beings and cultures superseded and cast aside in the relentless march of life, as in the scene when Prince Ivan Khovansky meets his death. For at the moment that the old boyar, and with him the old order of Russia, goes to his doom, there is intoned by his followers the sweetest melody that Moussorgsky wrote or could write. And out of that hymn to the glory of the perishing house there seems to come to us all the pathos of eternally passing things, all the wistfulness of the last sunset, all the last greeting of a vanished happiness. More sheerly than any other moment, more even than the infinitely stern and simple prelude that ushers in the last scene of "Boris" and seems to come out of a great distance and sum up all the sadness and darkness and pitifulness of human existence, that scene brings into view the great bleak monolith that the work of Moussorgsky really is, the great consciousness it rears silently, accusingly against the sky. As collieries rear themselves, grim and sinister, above mining towns, so this music rears itself in its Russian snows, and stands, awful and beautiful.

And, of late, the single shaft has out-topped the glamorous Wagnerian halls. The operas of Moussorgsky have begun to achieve the eminence that Wagner's once possessed. To a large degree, it is the change of times that has advanced and appreciated the art of Moussorgsky. Although "Boris" saw the light[Pg 65] at the same time as "Die Götterdämmerung," and although Moussorgsky lies chronologically very near the former age, he is far closer to us in feeling than is Wagner. The other generation, with its pride of material power, its sense of well-being, its surge toward mastery of the terrestrial forces, its need of luxury, was unable to comprehend one who felt life a grim, sorrowful thing, who felt himself a child, a crone, a pauper, helpless in the terrible cold. For that was required a less naïve and confident generation, a day more sophisticated and disabused and chastened. And so Moussorgsky's music, with its poor and uncouth and humble tone, its revulsion from pride and material grandeur and lordliness, its iron and cruelty and bleakness, lay unknown and neglected in its snows. Indeed, it had to await the coming of "Pelléas et Mélisande" in order to take its rightful place. For while Moussorgsky may have influenced Debussy artistically, it was Debussy's work that made for the recognition and popularization of Moussorgsky's. For the music of Debussy is the delicate and classical and voluptuous and aristocratic expression of the same consciousness of which Moussorgsky's is the severe, stark, barbaric; the caress as opposed to the pinch. Consequently, Debussy's art was the more readily comprehensible of the two. But, once "Pélleas" produced, the assumption of "Boris" was inevitable. Moussorgsky's generation had arrived. The men who felt as[Pg 66] he, who recognized the truth of his spare, metallic style, his sober edifices, had attained majority. A world was able to perceive in the music of the dead man its symbol.

But it is by no means alone the timeliness of Moussorgsky that has advanced him to his present position. It is the marvelous originality of his art. He is one of the most completely and nobly original among composers, one of the great inventors of form. The music of Moussorgsky is almost completely treasure-trove. It is not the development of any one thing, the continuation of a line, the logical outcome of the labors of others, as the works of so many even of the greatest musicians are. It is a thing that seems to have fallen to earth out of the arcana of forms like some meteorite. At the very moment of Wagner's triumph and of the full maturity of Liszt and Brahms, Moussorgsky composed as though he had been born into a world in which there was no musical tradition, a world where, indeed, no fine musical literature, and only a few folk-songs and orthodox liturgical chants and Greek-Catholic scales existed. Toward musical theory he seems to have been completely indifferent. Only one rule he recognized, and that was, "Art is a means of speech between man and man, and not an end." He was self-taught, and actually invented an art of music with each step of composition. And what he produced, though it was not great in bulk, was novel with[Pg 67] a newness that is one of the miracles of music. Scarcely a phrase in his operas and songs moves in a conventional or unoriginal curve. The songs of Moussorgsky are things that can be recognized in each of their moments, so deeply and completely distinctive they are. There is not a bar of the collection called "Sans soleil" that is not richly and powerfully new. The harmonies sound new, the melodies are free and strange and expressive, the forms are solid and weighty as bronze and iron. They are like lumps dug up out of the earth. The uttermost simplicity obtains. And every stroke is decisive and meaningful. Moussorgsky seems to have crept closer to life than most artists, to have seized emotions in their nakedness and sharpness, to have felt with the innocence of a child. One of his collections is entitled "La Chambre d'Enfants." And that surprise and wonder at all the common facts of life, the sharpness with which the knowledge of death comes, characterize not alone this group, but all the songs. He is throughout them the child who sees the beetle lie dead, and who expresses his wonder and trouble directly from his heart with all the sharpness of necessary speech. So much other music seems indirect, hesitating, timorous, beside these little forms of granite.

And then, Moussorgsky's operas, "Boris" in particular, are dramatically swifter than most of Wagner's.[Pg 68] He never made the mistake the master of Bayreuth so frequently made, of subordinating the drama to the music, and arresting the action for the sake of a "Waldweben" or a "Charfreitagszauber." The little scenes of Pushkin's play spin themselves off quickly through the music; the action is reinforced by a skeleton-like form of music, by swift vivid tonal etchings, by the simplest, directest picturings. Musical characterization is of the sharpest; original ideas pile upon each other and succeed each other without ado. The score of Boris, slim as it is, is a treasure house of inventions, of some of the most perfect music written for the theater. Few operatic works are musically more important, and yet less pretentious. And "Khovanchtchina," fragmentary though it is, is almost no less full of noble and lovely ideas. These fragments, melodies, choruses, dances are each of them real inventions, wonderful pieces caught up in nets, the rarest sort of beauties. A deep, rich glow plays over these melodies. Their simplicity is the simplicity of perfectly felicitous inventions, of things sprung from the earth without effort. They are so much like folk-tunes that one wonders whether they were not produced hundreds of years ago and handed down by generations of Russians. One of them even, the great chorus in the first scene, might stand as a sort of national anthem for Russia. Others, like the instrumental accompaniment to the first entrance of Prince Ivan Khovansky, are[Pg 69] some of those bits that represent a whole culture, a whole tradition and race.

These pieces are the children of an infinitely noble mind. There is something in those gorgeous melodies, those magnificent cries, those proud and solemn themes of which both "Boris" and "Khovanchtchina" are full, that makes Wagner seem plebeian and bourgeois. Peasant-like though the music is, reeking of the soil, rude and powerful, it still seems to refer to a mind of a prouder, finer sort than that of the other man. The reticence, the directness, the innocence of any theatricality, the avoidance of all that is purely effective, the dignity of expression, the salt and irony, the round, full ring of every detail are good and fortifying after the scoriac inundations of Wagner's genius. The gaunt gray piles, the metallic surfaces, the homelinesses of Moussorgsky, are more virile, stronger, more resisting than Wagner's music. Only folk aristocratically sure of themselves can be as gay and light at will. If there is anything in modern music to be compared with the sheer, blunt, powerful volumes of primitive art it is the work of Moussorgsky. And as the years pass, the man's stature and mind become more immense, more prodigious. One has but to hearken to the accent of the greater part of modern music to gauge in whose shadow we are all living, how far the impulse coming from him has carried. The whole living musical world, from Debussy to Bloch, from Strawinsky to Bartok,[Pg 70] has been vivified by him. And, certainly, if any modern music seems to have the resisting power that beats back the centuries and the eons, it is his pieces of bronze and ironware and granite. What the world lost when Modest Moussorgsky died in his forty-second year we shall never know.

But, chiefest of all, his music has the grandeur of an essentially religious act. It is the utterance of the profoundest spiritual knowledge of a people. Moussorgsky was buoyed by the great force of the Russian charity, the Russian humility, the Russian pity. It was that great religious feeling that possessed the man who had been a foppish guardsman content to amuse ladies by strumming them snatches of "Il Trovatore" and "La Traviata" on the piano, and gave him his profound sense of reality, his knowledge of how simple and sad a thing human life is after all, and made him vibrate so exquisitely with the suffering inherent in the constitution of the world. It gave his art its color, its character, its tendency. It filled him with the unsentimental, warm, animal love that made him represent man faithfully and catch the very breath of his fellows as it left their bodies. Certainly, it was from his race's dim, powerful sense of the sacrament of pain that his music flows. He himself confessed that it was the sense of another's inarticulate anguish, sympathy with a half-idiotic peasant-boy stammering out his hopeless love, that first stirred[Pg 71] the poet within him and led him to compose. The music of defeat, the insistent cry of the world's pain, sound out of his music because the Russian folk has always known the great mystery and reality and good of suffering, has known that only the humble, only those who have borne defeat and pain and misfortune can see the face of life, that sorrow and agony can hallow human existence, and that while in the days of his triumph and well-being man is a cruel and evil being, adversity often makes to appear in him divine and lovely traits. Dostoievsky was never more the Russian prophet than when he wrote "The Idiot," and uttered in it his humble thanksgiving that through the curse of nature, through the utter uselessness of his physical machine, through sickness and foolishness and poverty, he had been saved from doing the world's evil and adding to its death. And Moussorgsky is the counterpart of the great romancer. Like the other, he comes in priestly and ablutionary office. Like the other, he expresses the moving, lowly god, the god of the low, broad forehead and peasant garb, that his people bears within it. Both prose and music are manifestations of the Russian Christ. To Europe in its late hour he came as emissary of the one religious modern folk, and called on men to recognize the truth and reform their lives in accordance with it. He came to wrest man from the slavery of the new gigantic body he had begotten, to wean him from lust of power, to[Pg 72] pacify and humble him. Once more he came to fulfil the Old Testamentary prophets. The evangel of Tolstoy, the novels of Dostoievsky, the music of Moussorgsky are the new gospels. In Moussorgsky, music has given the new world its priest.

Liszt

Oh, magnificent and miserable Abbé Liszt! Strange and unnatural fusion of traits the most noble and the most mean! One can scarcely say which was the stronger in you, the grand seigneur or the base comedian. For in your work they are equally, inextricably commingled. In your art it is the actor who thrones it in the palace hall, the great lord of music who struts and capers on the boards of the itinerant theater. Nowhere, in all music, is grandeur nigher to the dust, and nowhere does the dust reveal more grandiose traits. Your compositions are the most brilliant of bastards, the most lamentable of legitimate things. They smite us with both admiration and aversion, affect us as though the scarlet satin robes of a patrician of Venice were to betray the presence beneath them of foul, unsightly rags. They remind us of the façades of the palaces of Vicenza, which, designed by the pompous and classicizing Palladio, are executed in stucco and other cheap materials.

And yet, the many works in which you do not show yourself the artist reveal the plenitude of your powers almost as much as the few in which you do. The most empty of your many ostentatious orchestral soliloquies, the most feeble of your many piano-pyro[Pg 74]technics, the iciest of your bouquets of icy, exploding stars, the brassiest of your blatant perorations, the very falsest of your innumerable paste jewels, declare that you were born to sit among the great ones of your craft. For they reveal you the indubitable virtuosic genius. The very cleverness of the imitation of the precious stone betrays how deep a sense of the beauty of the real gem you had, how expert you were in the trade of diamond cutter. Into the shaping of your bad works of art there went a temperament, a playfulness, a fecundity, a capriciousness, a genius that many better artists have not possessed.

You were indeed profusely endowed, showered with musical gifts as some cradled prince might be showered with presents and honors. Everything in your personality was grand, seigneurial, immense in scale. You were born musical King of Cyprus and Jerusalem and Armenia, titular sovereign of vast, unclaimed realms. Few composers have been more inventive. No composer has ever scattered abroad ideas with more liberal hand. Compositions like the B-minor piano-sonata, the tone-poem "Mazeppa," the "Dante" symphony, whatever their artistic value, fairly teem with original themes of a high order, are like treasure houses in which gold ornaments lie negligently strewn in piles. Indeed, your inventive power supplied not only your own compositions with material, but those of your son-in-law, Richard Wagner, as well. As James Hune[Pg 75]ker once so brightly put it, "Wagner was indebted to you for much besides money, sympathy, and a wife." For Siegmund and Sieglinde existed a long while in your "Dante" symphony before Wagner transferred them to "Die Walküre"; Parsifal and Kundry a long while in your piano-sonata before he introduced them into his "Bühnenweihfestspiel."

You were equipped for piano-composition as was no other of your time. For you the instrument was a newer, stranger, more virgin thing than it was for either Schumann or Chopin. You knew even better than they how to listen for its proper voice. You were more deeply aware than they of its proper color and quality. You seem to have come to it absolutely without preconceived ideas. Your B-minor sonata, however unsatisfactory its actual quality, remains one of the magistral works of the sort. For few works better exhibit the various ranges of the instrument, better contrast different volumes of piano-sound. The sonata actually lies on different planes, proceeds from various directions, delimits a solid form, makes even Beethoven's seem flat and two-dimensional by contrast. Here, almost for the first time, is a sonata that is distinctly music of the pianoforte. And the modern achievements in pianoforte composition do not by any means lessen the wonder of your comprehension of the instrument's dynamics. The new men, Scriabine and the composers of the modern French school, may[Pg 76] have penetrated more deeply than it was in your power to do, may have achieved where you failed. Nevertheless, they could not have progressed had it not been for your way-finding. They are immeasurably indebted to you.

Not even Wagner had an influence on the new age greater than yours, more largely prepared the way of the newest music. You are indeed the good friend of all who dream of a new musical language, a new musical syntax and balance and structure, and set out to explore the vast, vague regions, the terra incognita of tone. For you are their ancestor. If, in its general, homophonic nature, your work belongs primarily to the romantic period, your conviction that the content conditions the form of every piece makes you the link between classic and modern musical art. The symphonic poem, whether or not it originates in the overtures of Beethoven, is mainly your handiwork, since although you yourself were not sufficiently free of the classic formulas to create a symphonic form entirely programmatic, as Strauss has subsequently done, you nevertheless gave him the hint whereby he has profited most. The impressionists, too, seem to stem from you. The little piece called "Les jeux d'eau de La Villa d'Este" seems not a little to anticipate their style. And although you were not responsible for the music of the nationalistic Russian school, the robust, colorful barbarian in you nev[Pg 77]ertheless made you welcome and encourage their work. It made you write to Borodin and Moussorgsky those cordial letters which pleased them so much. For at that time they were but obscure workmen, while you were the very prince of musicians.

Indeed, nothing is more princely, nothing better reveals the amplitude, the generosity of your spirit, than your relations with your fellow craftsmen. Artists are oftentimes so petty in their conduct toward each other that it is indeed refreshing to read with what infallible kindness you treated so many composers less fortunately situated than yourself. And not only Wagner and César Franck benefited by your good deeds. Many obscurer and younger men, poor Edward MacDowell, for instance, knew what it was to receive cordial and commendatory letters from you, to be assisted by you in their careers, to have their compositions brought to performance by the best German orchestras through your aid. And you had no conceit in you, smilingly referred to your symphonic poems as "Gartenmusik," and replied to Wagner, when he informed you that he had stolen such and such a theme from you, "Thank goodness, now it will at least be heard!" Had you, O Liszt, expressed the nobility of your nature as purely in your composition as you expressed it in your social relations, we could have complained of no mountainous rubble, no squalor marring the perfect splendor of your figure.[Pg 78]

But, unhappily, the veritable grandeur of your endowment never begot itself a body of work really symbolic of itself. For if your music, as a whole, has any grandeur, it is the hollow grandeur of inflation, of ostentation, of externality. Your music is almost entirely a monstrous décor de théâtre. It is forever seeking to establish tragical and satanic and passional atmospheres, to suggest immense and regal and terrific things, to gain tremendous effects. It is full of loud, grandiloquent pronouncements, of whirlwinds, thunderstorms, coronations on the Capitoline, ideals, lamentations, cavalcades across half of Asia, draperies, massacres, frescoes, façades, magnificats, lurid sunsets, scimitars, miracles, triumphs of the cross, retreats from the world. It is full of all the romantic properties. Like vast pieces of stage scenery the various passages and movements are towed before our eyes, and we are bidden to feast our eyes on representations of titanic rocks and lowering skies and holy hermits' dwellings that remind us dangerously of the wonders displayed in the peepshows at gingerbread fairs. The atmosphere of the compositions is so invariably sensational, the gesture so calculated, so theatrical, that much of the truly impressive material, the quantities of original ideas, lose all substantiality, and become indistinct components of these vast mountains of ennui, these wastes of rhetorical and bombastic instruments, these loud and prancing concertos of cir[Pg 79]cus-music. There is something almost insulting to the intelligence in these over-emphasized works, these pretentious façades, these vast, pompous frescoes by Kaulbach, these Byronic instrumental soliloquies, these hollow, empty flourishes of the brass, these foolishly satanic chromatics, these inevitable triumphs of the cross and the Gregorian modes.

No doubt, much of your fustian and rhodomontade, your diabolic attitudes, your grandiose battles between the hosts of evil and the light of the Tree, your interminable fanfares, was due the age in which you grew. The externality, the pompousness of intention, the theatrical postures, was part of the romantic constitution. The desire to achieve sensational effects, the tendency to externalize, to assume theatrical postures and intend pompously, was inborn in every single one of the men among whom you passed your youth. For they had suddenly, painfully become aware that nature was supremely indifferent to their individual fates and sorrows. So wounded were they in their amour-propre that they sought to restore their diminished sense of self-worth by exaggerating the importance and intensity of their sufferings and seeking to convince themselves of their satanic sins and dreadful dooms. Manfred, posing darkly on an Alpine crag and summoning

"Nature to her feud

With bile & buskin attitude,"

[Pg 80]was the type of you all. You had to ward off consciousness of your own insignificance by conceiving yourselves amid stupendous surroundings, lurid natural effects, flaming prairies, pinnacles, torrents, coliseums, subterranean palaces, moonlit ruins, bandit dens, and as laboring under frightful curses, dire punishments, ancestral sins, etc., etc.

But while we find the frenetic romanticism of a Delacroix, for instance, attractive, even, because of the virtue of his painting, and forgive that of a Berlioz and a Chateaubriand because of the many beauties, the veritable grandeurs of their styles, we cannot quite learn to love yours. For in you the disease was aggravated by the presence of another powerful incentive to strut and posture and externalize and inflate your art. For you were the virtuoso. You were the man whose entire being was pointed to achieve an effect. You were the man whose life is lived on the concert-platform, whose values are those of the concert-room, who finds his highest good in the instantaneous effect achieved by his performance. From childhood you were the idolized piano-virtuoso. All your days you were smothered in the adulation showered upon you in very tangible form by the great ladies of every capital of Europe. And a virtuoso you remained all your existence. You never developed out of that early situation into something more salutary to the artist. On the contrary, you came to require the atmosphere[Pg 81] of the performance, the exhibition, about you continually, to find the rose leaves and the clouds of perfume absolutely necessary. Most of your composition seems but the effort to perpetuate about you the admiration and the adulation, the glowing eyes and half-parted lips and heaving bosoms. Everything in your piano-music is keyed for that effect. The shameless sentimentalities, the voluptuous lingerings over sweet chords and incisive notes, the ostentatious recitatives, the moist, sensual climaxes, the titillating figuration, the over-draperies, were called into existence for the immediate, the overwhelming effect at first hearing. Everything is broadened and peppered and directed to obtaining you the Pasha-power you craved. Besides being windy and theatrical, your music is what Nietzsche so bitterly called it, "Die Schule der Geläufichkeit—nach Frauen."

So your vast artistic endowment lies squandered, your ideas shallowly set, your science misused. For while fate showered you magnificently with gifts, it seems to have at the same time sought to negate its liberality by fusing in your personality the base alloy, by decreeing that you should have enormous powers and yet abuse them. It prevented you from often being completely genuine, completely incandescent, completely fine. It refused you for the greater part the true adamantine hardness of the artist, the inviolability of soul, the sense of style. It made you, the[Pg 82] prodigiously fecund inventor, the mine of thematic material, prodigal; unable to refine your ore, to chase your ideas, and give them their full value. Wagner could have said of you, had he so wished, what Haendel is reported to have said of the composer from whom he borrowed, "Of what use is such a good idea to a man like him?" One must indeed go to Wagner for the appreciation of many of the inventions, the Siegmund and Sieglinde, the Parsifal and Kundry, music, which you cast from you so carelessly. As for yourself, you are too much the "virtuosic genius"; too much, at heart, the actor. Your music is perhaps the most cunningly carpentered for effect, the most artificial known to us. You are perhaps the most brilliant artifex of music.

We always seem to see you sitting on the concert-platform before us, immersed in the expression of your passion, your disgust of passion, your renunciation of passion. But the absorption is not quite as complete as it would appear to be. During the entire performance, you have been secretly keeping one wicked little eye trained on the ladies of the audience.

Sometimes you play the religious. Perhaps there truly was in you a vein of devotion and faith. The fact that you took Holy Orders to escape marrying the Princess of Sayn-Wittgenstein, who pursued you those many years and doubtlessly bored you with her theological writings, does not entirely disprove its ex[Pg 83]istence. Indeed, your "Dante" symphony, with its Hell full of impenitent sexual offenders, its Purgatory full of those who repent them of their excesses, its Paradise represented by a hymn to the Virgin, suggests what manner of rôle, and how real a one, religion might have played in your luxurious existence. But, for the most part, the religiosity of your music recalls overmuch the fashionable confessor's. You bring consolation, doubtlessly. But you bring it by choice into the boudoir. You speak sadly of the cruel winds of lust. You dwell on the example of the pious St. Elizabeth of Hungary. You spread your hands over fair penitents, making a series of the most beautiful gestures. You whisper honeyed forgiveness for passional sins. You always excite tears and gratitude. But, in the end, your "Consolation" turns out only another "Liebestraum."

No doubt, you loved your native land. But your patriotism recalls dangerously the restaurant Magyar, the fiddler in the frogged coat. You draw from your violin passionate laments. In a sort of ecstasy you celebrate Hungaria. Then, smiling brilliantly, you pass the hat.

Once, only, your eye did not wander liquidly to the gallery. Once, only, your workmanship was not marred by schemes for titillating effects, for sensational contrasts, for grandiose and bombastic expression. Once, only, you were completely the artist, impregnating your[Pg 84] work with a fine glow of life, making it deeply dignified and impassioned, sincere and firm, profoundly moving. For you, too, there was the cardinal exception. For you there was the "Faust Symphony." The work is romantic music, the music of the Byronic school par excellence. Here, too, is the brooding and revolt, the satanic cynicism, the expert's language. But here the miracle has taken place, and your music, generally so loose and shallow and theatrical, has the point, the intensity, the significance that it seems everywhere else to lack. Here, for once, is a work of yours that moves by its own initiative, that has an independent and marvelous life, that is brilliant and yet substantial. Here you have materialized yourself. We believe in your Faust as we believe neither in your Tasso nor in your Mazeppa nor in your Orpheus. For he utters your own romantic brooding in touching and impressive terms. In the theme that conjures up before us "Faust in ritterlicher Hofkleidung des Mittelalters," you have expressed your own seigneurial pride and daintiness. Goethe must have tapped with his tragedy, his characters, some vein long choked in you. In each of the three movements, the Faust, the Marguerite and the Mephisto, you make your best music. There is real drama in the first. There is a warm, fragrant hush in the second. Perhaps Gretchen plucks her daisy a little too thoroughly. But there is a rare sensitiveness and delicacy of feeling[Pg 85] in her music. It is all in pastels. There is something very youthful and warm in it that perhaps no other composition of yours displays, as though in composing it you had recaptured pristine emotions long since spoiled.

But it is the third movement, the Allegro ironico, that opened your sluices and produced your genius. For in the conception of Mephisto you found in Goethe, you found your own spiritual equation. You, too, were victim of a disillusioned intellect that played havoc with all you found pure and lovely and poured its sulphuric mockery over all your aspiration. For all your mariolatry, you were full of "der Geist der stets verneint." And so you were able to create a musical Mephisto that will outlive your other work, sonata and all, and express you to other times. For here, all that one senses dimly behind your sugared and pretentious compositions speaks out frankly. Listening to this mighty scherzo, we know the cynicism that corroded your spirit. We hear it surge and fill the sky. We hear it pour its mocking laughter over grief and longing and pride, over purity and tenderness in those outrageous orchestral arabesques that descend on the themes of the "Faust" and "Marguerite" movements, and whip them into grinning distortions. We hear it deny and stamp and curse, topple the whole world over in ribald scorn. The concluding chorus may seek to call in another[Pg 86] emotion. You may turn with all apparent fervor and pray "das Ewig-Weibliche" to save you. The other expression remains the telling one. It is one of the supreme pieces of musical irony. It ranks with "Till Eulenspiegel" and "Petrouchka."

It is also the saddest of your works. For it makes us know, once for all, how infinitely much greater a musician you might have been, O miserable and magnificent Abbé Liszt!

Berlioz

The course of time, that has made so many musicians recede from us and dwindle, has brought Berlioz the closer to us and shown him great. The age in which he lived, the decades that followed his death, found him unsubstantial enough. They recognized in him only the projector of gigantic edifices, not the builder. His music seemed scaffolding only. Though a generation of musicians learned from him, came to listen to the proper voices of the instruments of the orchestra because of him, though music became increasingly pictural, ironic, concrete because he had labored, his own work still appeared ugly with unrealized intentions. If he obtained at all as an artist, it was because of his frenetic romanticism, his bizarreness, his Byronic postures, traits that were after all minor and secondary enough in him. For those were the only of his characteristics that his hour could understand. All others it ignored. And so Berlioz remained for half a century simply the composer of the extravagant "Symphonic Fantastique" and the brilliant "Harold in Italy," and, for the rest, a composer of brittle and arid works, barren of authentic ideas, "a better litterateur than musician." However, with the departure of the world from out the romantic house, Berlioz has[Pg 88] rapidly recovered. Music of his that before seemed ugly has gradually come to have force and significance. Music of his that seemed thin and gray has suddenly become satisfactory and red. Composers as eminent as Richard Strauss, conductors as conservative as Weingärtner, critics as sensitive as Romain Rolland have come to perceive his vast strength and importance, to express themselves concerning him in no doubtful language. It is as though the world had had to move to behold Berlioz, and that only in a day germane to him and among the men his kin could he assume the stature rightfully his, and live.

For we exist to-day in a time of barbarian inroads. We are beholding the old European continent of music swarmed over by Asiatic hordes, Scyths and Mongols and Medes and Persians, all the savage musical tribes. Once more the old arbitrary barrier between the continents is disappearing, and the classic traits of the West are being mingled with those of the subtle, sensuous, spiritual East. It is as if the art of music, with its new scales, its new harmonies, its new coloring, its new rhythmical life, were being revolutionized, as if it were returning to its beginnings. It is as if some of the original impulse to make music were reawakening. And so, through this confusion, Berlioz has suddenly flamed with significance. For he himself was the rankest of barbarians. A work like the "Requiem" has no antecedents. It conforms to no[Pg 89] accepted canon, seems to obey no logic other than that of the rude and powerful mind that cast it forth. For the man who could write music so crude, so sheerly strong, so hurtling, music innocent of past or tradition, the world must indeed have been in the first day of its creation. For such a one forms must indeed have had their pristine and undulled edge and undiminished bulk, must have insisted themselves sharply and compellingly. The music has all the uncouthness of a direct and unquestioning response to such a vision. Little wonder that it was unacceptable to a silver and romantic epoch. The romanticists had aspired to paint vast canvases, too. But the vastness of their canvases had remained a thing of intention, a thing of large and pretentious decoration. Berlioz's music was both too rude and too stupendous for their tastes. And, in truth, to us as well, who have felt the great cubical masses of the moderns and have heard the barbarian tread, the sense of beauty that demanded the giant blocks of the "Requiem" music seems still a little a strange and monstrous thing. It seems indeed an atavism, a return to modes of feeling that created the monuments of other ages, of barbarous and forgotten times. Well did Berlioz term his work "Babylonian and Ninevitish"! Certainly it is like nothing so much as the cruel and ponderous bulks, the sheer, vast tombs and ramparts and terraces of Khorsabad and Nimroud, bare and oppressive under the sun of[Pg 90] Assyria. Berlioz must have harbored some elemental demand for form inherent in the human mind but buried and forgotten until it woke to life in him again. For there is a truly primitive and savage power in the imagination that could heap such piles of music, revel in the shattering fury of trumpets, upbuild choragic pyramids. Here, before Strawinsky and Ornstein, before Moussorgsky, even, was a music barbarous and radical and revolutionary, a music beside which so much of modern music dwindles.

It has, primarily, some of the nakedness, some of the sheerness of contour, toward which the modern men aspire. In the most recent years there has evidenced itself a decided reaction from the vaporous and fluent contours of the musical impressionists, from the style of "Pelléas et Mélisande" in particular. Men as disparate as Schoenberg and Magnard and Igor Strawinsky have been seeking, in their own fashion, the one through a sort of mathematical harshness, the second through a Gothic severity, the third through a machine-like regularity, to give their work a new boldness, a new power and incisiveness of design. Something of the same sharpness and sheerness was attained by Berlioz, if not precisely by their means, at least to a degree no less remarkable than theirs. He attained it through the nakedness of his melodic line. The music of the "Requiem" is almost entirely a singularly powerful and characteristic line. It[Pg 91] is practically unsupported. Many persons pretend that Berlioz wanted a knowledge of harmony and counterpoint. Certainly his feeling for harmony was a very rudimentary one, in nowise refined beyond that of his predecessors, very simple when compared to that of his contemporaries, Chopin and Schumann. And his attempts at creating counterpoint, judged from the first movement of "Harold in Italy," are clumsy enough. But it is questionable whether this ignorance did not stand him in good stead rather than in bad; and whether, in the end, he did not make himself fairly independent of both these musical elements. For the "Requiem" attains a new sort of musical grandeur from its sharp, heavy, rectangular, rhythmically powerful melodic line. It voices through it a bold, naked, immense language. With Baudelaire, Berlioz could have said, "L'énergie c'est le grâce suprême." For the beauty of this his masterpiece lies in just the delineating power, the characteristic of this crude, vigorous, unadorned melody. Doubtless to those still baffled by its nudity, his music appears thin. But if it is at all thin, its thinness is that of the steel cable.

And it has the rhythmical vivacity and plenitude that characterizes the newest musical art. If there is one quality that unites in a place apart the Strawinskys and Ornsteins, the Blochs and Scriabines, it is the fearlessness and exuberance and savagery with[Pg 92] which they pound out their rhythms. Something long buried in us seems to arise at the vibration of these fierce, bold, clattering, almost convulsive strokes, to seek to gesticulate and dance and leap. And Berlioz possessed this elemental feeling for rhythm. Schumann was convinced on hearing the "Symphonie Fantastique" that in Berlioz music was returning to its beginnings, to the state where rhythm was unconstrained and irregular, and that in a short while it would overthrow the laws which had bound it so long. So, too, it seems to us, despite all the rhythmical innovations of our time. The personality that could beat out exuberantly music as rhythmically various and terse and free must indeed have possessed a primitive naïveté and vitality and spontaneity of impulse. What manifestation of unbridled will in that freedom of expression! Berlioz must have been blood-brother to the savage, the elemental creature who out of the dark and hidden needs of life itself invents on his rude musical instrument a mighty rhythm. Or, he must have been like a powerful and excited steed, chafing his bit, mad to give his energy rein. His blood must forever have been craving the liberation of turgid and angular and irregular beats, must forever have been crowding his imagination with new and compelling combinations, impelling him to the movements of leaping and marching. For he seems to have found in profusion the accents that quicken and lift[Pg 93] and lance, found them in all varieties, from the brisk and delicate steps of the ballets in "La Damnation de Faust" to the large, far-flung momentum that drives the choruses of the "Requiem" mountain high; from the mad and riotous finales of the "Harold" symphony and the "Symphonie Fantastique" to the red, turbulent and canaille march rhythms, true music of insurgent masses, clangorous with echoes of tocsins and barricades and revolutions.

But it is in his treatment of his instrument that Berlioz seems most closely akin to the newest musicians. For he was the first to permit the orchestra to dictate music to him. There had, no doubt, existed skilful and sensitive orchestrators before him, men who were deeply aware of the nature of their tools, men who, like Mozart, could scarcely repress their tears at the sound of a favorite instrument, and wrote marvelously for flutes and horns and oboes and all the components of their bands. But matched with his, their knowledge of the instrument was patently relative. For, with them, music had on the whole a general timbre. Phrases which they assigned, say, to violins or flutes can be assigned to other instruments without doing the composition utter damage. But in the works of Berlioz music and instruments are inseparable. One cannot at all rearrange his orchestration. Though the phrases that he has written for bassoon or clarinet might imaginably be executed by other instru[Pg 94]ments, the music would perish utterly in the substitution. What instrument but the viola could appreciate the famous "Harold" theme? For just as in a painting of Cézanne's the form is inseparable from the color, is, indeed, one with it, so, too, in the works of Berlioz and the moderns the form is part of the sensuous quality of the band. When Rimsky-Korsakoff uttered the pronouncement that a composition for orchestra could not exist before the orchestration was completed, he was only phrasing a rule upon which Berlioz had acted all his life. For Berlioz set out to learn the language of the orchestra. Not only did he call for new instruments, instruments that have eventually become integral portions of the modern bands, but he devoted himself to a study of the actual natures and ranges and qualities of the old, and wrote the celebrated treatise that has become the textbook of the science of instrumentation. The thinness of much of his work, the feebleness of the overture to "Benvenuto Cellini," for instance, results from his inexperience in the new tongue. But he had not to practise long. It was not long before he became the teacher of his very contemporaries. Wagner owes as much to Berlioz's instrumentation as he owes to Chopin's harmony.

But for the new men, he is more than teacher. For them he is like the discoverer of a new continent. Through him they have come to find a new fashion[Pg 95] of apprehending the world. Out of the paint-box that he opened, they have drawn the colors that make us see anew in their music the face of the earth. The tone-poems of Debussy and the ballets of Ravel and Strawinsky, the scintillating orchestral compositions of Strauss and Rimsky and Bloch, could scarcely have come to be had not Berlioz called the attention of the world to the instruments in which the colors and timbres in which it is steeped, lie dormant.

And so the large and powerful and contained being that, after all, was Berlioz has come to appreciation. For behind the fiery, the volcanic Berlioz, behind the Byronic and fantastical composer, there was always another, greater man. The history of the art of Berlioz is the history of the gradual incarnation of that calm and majestic being, the gradual triumph of that grander personality over the other, up to the final unclosing and real presence in "Roméo" and the "Mass for the Dead." The wild romanticist, the lover of the strange and the lurid and the grotesque who created the "Symphonic Fantastique," never, perhaps, became entirely abeyant. And some of the salt and flavor of Berlioz's greater, more characteristic works, the tiny musical particles, for instance, that compose the "Queen Mab" scherzo in "Roméo," or the bizarre combination of flutes and trombones in the "Requiem," macabre as the Orcagna frescoes in Pisa, are due his fantastical imaginings. But, gradually, the deeper Ber[Pg 96]lioz came to predominate. That deeper spirit was a being that rose out of a vast and lovely cavern of the human soul, and was clothed in stately and in shining robes. It was a spirit that could not readily build itself out into the world, so large and simple it was, and had to wait long before it could find a worthy portal. It managed only to express itself partially, fragmentarily, in various transformations, till, by change, it found in the idea of the Mass for the Dead its fitting opportunity. Still, it was never entirely absent from the art of Berlioz, and in the great clear sense of it gained in the "Requiem" we can perceive its various and ever-present substantiations, from the very beginning of his career.

It is in the overture to "King Lear" already, in that noble and gracious introduction. From the very beginning, Berlioz revealed himself a proud and aristocratic spirit. Even in his most helpless moments, he is always noble. He shows himself possessed of a hatred for all that is unjust and ungirt and vulgar. There is always a largeness and gravity and chastity in his gesture. The coldness is most often simply the apparent coldness of restraint; the baldness, the laconism of a spirit that abhorred loose, ungainly manners of speech. Even the frenetic and orgiastic finales of the "Harold" and "Fantastic" symphonies are tempered by an athletic steeliness and irony, are pervaded, after all, by the good dry light of the intellect. The[Pg 97] greater portion of the "Harold" is obviously, in its coolness and neatness and lightness, the work of one who was unwilling to dishevel himself in the cause of expression, who outlined his sensations reticently rather than effusively, and stood always a little apart. The "Corsair" overture has not the wild, rich balladry of that of the "Flying Dutchman," perhaps. But it is full of the clear and quivering light of the Mediterranean. It is, in the words of Hans von Bülow, "as terse as the report of a pistol." And it flies swiftly before a wind its own. The mob-scenes in "Benvenuto Cellini" are bright and brisk and sparkling, and compare not unfavorably with certain passages in "Petrouchka." And, certainly, "Roméo" manifests unforgettably the fineness and nobility of Berlioz's temper. "The music he writes for his love scenes," some one has remarked, "is the best test of a musician's character." For, in truth, no type of musical expression gives so ample an opportunity to all that is latently vulgar in him to produce itself. And one has but to compare the "Garden Scene" of "Roméo" with two other pieces of music related to it in style, the second act of "Tristan" and the "Romeo" of Tchaikowsky, to perceive in how gracious a light Berlioz's music reveals him. Wagner's powerful music hangs over the garden of his lovers like an oppressive and sultry night. Foliage and streams and the very moonlight pulsate with the fever of the blood. But[Pg 98] there is no tenderness, no youth, no delicacy, no grace in Wagner's love-passages. Tchaikowsky's, too, is predominantly lurid and sensual. And while Wagner's at least is full of animal richness, Tchaikowsky's is morbid and hysterical and perverse, sets us amid the couches and draperies and pink lampshades instead of out under the night-time sky. Berlioz's, however, is full of a still and fragrant poesy. His is the music of Shakespeare's lovers indeed. It is like the opening of hearts dumb with the excess of joy. It has all the high romance, all the ecstasy of the unspoiled spirit. For Berlioz seems to have possessed always his candor and his youth. Through three hundred years men have turned toward Shakespeare's play, with its Italian night and its balcony above the fruit-tree tops, in wonder at its youthful loveliness, its delicate picture of first love. In Berlioz's music, at last, it found a worthy rival. For the musician, too, had within him some of the graciousness and highness and sweetness of spirit the poet manifested so sovereignly.

But it is chiefly in the "Requiem" that Berlioz revealed himself in all the grandeur and might of his being. For in it all the aristocratic coolness and terseness of "La Damnation de Faust" and of "Harold en Italie," all the fresco-like calm of "Les Troyens à Carthage," find their freest, richest expression. "Were I to be threatened with the destruction of all that I have ever composed," wrote Berlioz on the eve[Pg 99] of his death, "it would be for that work that I would beg life." And he was correct in the estimation of its value. It is indeed one of the great edifices of tone. For the course of events which demanded of Berlioz the work had supplied him with a function commensurate with his powers, and permitted him to register himself immortally. He was called by his country to write a mass for a commemoration service in the church of the Invalides. That gold-domed building, consecrated to the memory of the host of the fallen, to the countless soldiers slain in the wars of the monarchy and the republic and the empire, and soon to become the tomb of Napoleon, had need of its officiant. And so the genius of Berlioz arose and came. The "Requiem" is the speech of a great and classic soul, molded by the calm light and fruitful soil of the Mediterranean. For all its "Babylonian and Ninevitish" bulk, it is full of the Latin calm, the Latin repose, the Latin resignation. The simple tone, quiet for all its energy, the golden sweetness of the "Sanctus," the naked acceptance of all the facts of death, are the language of one who had within him an attitude at once primitive and grand, an attitude that we have almost come to ignore. Listening to the Mass, we find ourselves feeling as though some vates of a Mediterranean folk were come in rapt and lofty mood to offer sacrifice, to pacify the living, to celebrate with fitting rites the unnumbered multitudes of the heroic dead. There[Pg 100] are some compositions that seem to find the common ground of all men throughout the ages. And to the company of such works of art, the grand Mass for the Dead of Hector Berlioz belongs.

Still, the commission to write the "Requiem" was but a momentary welcoming extended to Berlioz. The age in which he lived was unprepared for his art. It found itself better prepared for Wagner. For Wagner's was nearer the older music, summed it up, in fact. So Berlioz had to remain uncomprehended and unhoused. And when there finally came a time for the music of Wagner to retreat, and another to take its place, Berlioz was still half-buried under the misunderstanding of his time. And yet, with the Kassandra of Eulenberg, Berlioz could have said at the moment when it seemed as though eternal night were about to obscure him forever:

"Einst treibt der Frühling uns in neuer Blüthe

Empor ans Licht; Leben, wir scheiden nicht,

Denn ewig bleibet, was in uns erglühte

Und drängt sich ewig wieder auf zum Licht!"

For the likeness so many of the new men bear him has provided us with a wonderful instance of the eternal recurrence of things.

Franck

Belgian of Liège by birth, and Parisian only by adoption, César Franck nevertheless precipitated modern French music. The group of musicians that,—at the moment when the great line of composers that has descended in Germany since the days of Bach dwindled in Strauss and Mahler and Reger,—revived the high tradition of French music, created a fresh and original musical art, and at present, by virtue of the influence it exercises on the new talents of other nations, has come well-nigh to dominate the international musical situation, could scarcely have attained existence had it not been for him. He assured the artistic success not only of the men like Magnard and d'Indy and Dukas, whose art shows obvious signs of his influence. Composers like Debussy and Ravel, who appear to have arrived at maturity independently of him, have nevertheless benefited immeasurably by his work. It is possible that had he not emigrated from Liège and labored in the heart of France, they would not have achieved any of their fullness of expression. For what Berlioz was perhaps too premature and too eccentric and radical to bring about,—the dissipation of the torpor that had weighed upon the musical sense of his countrymen for a century, the re[Pg 102]awakening of the peculiarly French impulse to make music, not alone in single and solitary individuals, but in a large and representative group, the revival of a truly musical life in France,—this man, by virtue of the peculiarities of his art, and particularly by virtue of his timeliness, succeeded in effecting.

For César Franck overcame a false musical culture in the land of his adoption by showing it, at the moment it was prepared to perceive it, the face of a true. The French are not an outstandingly musical race. Music plays a comparatively insignificant rôle in their civilization. The mass of the people does not demand it, has never demanded it as insistently as do Germans and Russians, and as did the mass of Italians during the Renaissance, the mass of English before the Revolution. Something of a prejudice against its own musical impulse must exist in the race. For though France has a very definite musical feeling, a thing that varies little with the passing centuries and makes for the surprising similarities between the work of Claude Le Jeune in the sixteenth century, Rameau in the eighteenth and Debussy in the twentieth, she has, during her thousand years of culture, and while producing a flood of illustrious authors, and painters and sculptors, borne not more than four or five composers of indisputably first rank. Germany in the course of two centuries produced at least eight or nine;[Pg 103] Russia three within the last fifty years. In France centuries elapse between the appearance of a Josquin des Prés in the fifteenth century, a Rameau in the eighteenth, a Debussy in the early twentieth. And whenever the French have been given a musical art of their own, whenever a composer comparable to the Goujons and Montaignes, the Renoirs and the Baudelaires has made his appearance among them, they generally have been swift to turn from him and to prefer to him not only foreigners, which would not necessarily be bad, but oftentimes the least respectable of musicians. The triumph of Rameau was of the briefest. Scarcely had his magnificent lyric tragedies established themselves when the Guerre des bouffons broke out, and popular taste, under the direction of Jean Jacques Rousseau and the other Encyclopedists, discovered the light Italian music of the day more "natural" and infinitely preferable to the severe and noble forms of the greatest of French composers. The appearance of Gluck gave Rameau's work a veritable coup de grâce, and banished the master from the operatic stage. And for a century and a quarter, French music, particularly the music of the theater, was completely unfaithful to the racial spirit. During the greater part of the nineteenth century, Rossini and Meyerbeer dominated the operatic world. The native operatic composers, Auber and Boieldieu, Adam and Halévy, combined the slack[Pg 104]nesses of both without achieving anything at all comparable to their flashy brilliance. As far as the accent of their music went, they floated cheerfully somewhere between Germany and Italy. And when something recognizably indigenous did put in its appearance in the operas of Thomas and Gounod, it did but the veriest lip-service to the racial genius, and was a thing that walked lightly, dexterously, warily, and roused no sleeping dogs.

What the cause of this diffidence is, what sort of rigidity it betokens, one can only guess. But of its presence there can be no doubt. Were there nothing else to demonstrate it, the survival among the French of an institution named M. Camille Saint-Saëns would amply do so. For the work of this extraordinary personality, or, more correctly, impersonality, who for twenty-five years of the Third Republic dominated the musical situation in his country, got himself acclaimed everywhere, not only in Paris, but also in Berlin, the modern French master, and to-day at the ripe age of one hundred and forty still persists in writing string-quartets with the same frigid classicism that distinguished his first efforts, is obviously a compromise resulting from the conflict of two equally strong impulses—that of making music and that of fending off musical expression. For years this man has been going through all the gestures of the most serious sort of composition without adding one iota to musical art.[Pg 105] For years he has been writing music apparently logical, clear, well-formed. His opus-numbers mount well toward two hundred. He has written symphonies, concertos for piano and violin, operas, cantatas, symphonic poems, suites, ballades, fantasies, caprices. He has written large numbers of each. He has written "impressions" of Naples, of Algiers, of the Canary Islands, of every portion of the globe he has visited. But despite all this apparent activity, M. Saint-Saëns has really succeeded in effecting nothing at all. His compositions are pretty well outside the picture of musical art. To-day they are already older than Mendelssohn's, of which pale art they seem an even paler reflection. Mendelssohn, too, was a person inwardly at war with himself, and perhaps Saint-Saëns may be another example of the same conflict. Still, the latter has achieved a sort of waxy coldness from which the amiable Félix was after all saved. Elegant, finished, smooth, classicizing, the music of M. Camille Saint-Saëns leaves us in the completest of objectivity. We are touched and moved not at all by it. Something, we vaguely perceive, is supposed to be taking place beneath our eyes. Faint frosty lights pass across the orchestra. This, we guess, is supposed to be an inward and musing passage. This is a finale, this a dramatic climax. But we are no more than languidly pleased with the cleverness and urbanity of the orchestration, the pleasant shapeliness of certain melodies,[Pg 106] the neatness of composition. In the end, the man bores us thoroughly. He has invented a new musical ennui. It is that of being invariably pretty and impersonal and insignificant.

Do you know the "Phaeton" of Saint-Saëns? Oh, never think that this little symphonic poem recounts the history of brilliant youth and its sun-chariot, the runaway steeds and the bleeding shattered frame! The "Phaeton" of whom Saint-Saëns sings is not the arrogant son of Phœbus. Whatever the composer may protest, it is the low, open-wheeled carriage that he is describing. He shows it to us coursing through the Bois de Boulogne on a bright spring morning. The new varnish of the charming vehicle gleams smartly, the light, rubber-tired wheels revolve swiftly, the silver-shod harnesses glisten in the sunny air. But, alas, the ponies are frightened by something, doubtlessly the red dress of a singer of the Opéra Comique. There is a runaway, and before the steeds can be reined the phaeton is upset. No one is hurt, and in a few minutes the equipage is restored. Nevertheless, the composer cannot control in himself a few sighs for the new coat of varnish now so rudely scratched.

Franck was of another temper. The impulse that drove him to make music was not so weak and pliable. It could not be barbered and dapperly dressed and taught to conduct a clouded cane elegantly in the[Pg 107] rue de la Paix or the allée des Acacias. It was too hot and wild and shy a thing, too passionately set in its course, too homesick for the white fulgurant heights of Heaven to negate itself at the behest of French society and conform to what the academicians declared to be "la vielle tradition française." Franck was too much an artist in the spirit of La Fontaine and Germaine Pillon and Poussin and the others who formed that tradition, and who would be assailed in its name fiercely were they to reappear to-day. Moreover, he was of the race of musicians who come to make music largely to free themselves of besetting demons, of the sinister brood of doubts and fears and woes, and win their way back again into the bosom of God. He was the simple, heart-whole believer, the poor little man lost in the shambles, shaken and wounded by the "terrible doubt of appearances" and by the cruelty of things, yearning to cry his despair and loneliness and grief to the ears of the God of his childhood, and battling through long vigils for trust and belief and reconciliation. Again and again his music re-echoes the cry, "I will not let Thee go unless Thou bless me." Of modern composers Bruckner alone had affair so steadily with the heights, and Franck is the gentler, sweeter, tenderer of the two. He set himself, quite in the fashion of the composers of the dying renaissance, to write an hundred hymns to the Virgin. He sought in his piano compositions to re[Pg 108]capture the lofty, spiritual tone, the religious communion that informed the works of Bach. Only once, in the "Variations Symphoniques," is he brilliant and virtuosic, and then, with what disarming naïveté and joyousness! Oftentimes it is the gray and lonely air of the organ-loft at St. Clothilde, the church where he played so many melancholy years, that breathes through his work. Alone with his instrument and the clouded skies, he pours out his sadness, his bitterness, strives for resignation. Or, his music is a bridge from the turmoiled present to some rarer, larger, better plane. In symphony and quartet, in sonata and oratorio, he attains it. The hellish brood is scattered; the great bells of faith swing bravely out once more; the world is full of Sabbath sunshine and pied with simple field-flowers. And he goes forth through it released and blessed and joyous, and light and glad of heart.

How furious a battle the man had to wage to bring such a musical sense to fruition in the Paris of Ambroise Thomas and Gounod and Massenet may be gauged from the fact that the compositions that assure Franck his position were almost all produced during the last ten years of his life, after his fifty-eighth year had been passed. For thirty years the man had to struggle with his medium and his environment before he was even able to do his genius justice. Indeed, up to the year 1850, he produced little of im[Pg 109]portance at all. The trios recall Meyerbeer; the cantata "Ruth," with which this his first period of composition closes, has a sweetness of the sort afterward identified with the name of Massenet. The works of the second period, which ends around 1875 with the re-editing of the recently composed oratorio "Redemption," reveal him still in search of power and a personal manner. No doubt a great improvement over the works of the first period is visible. From this time there date the seraphic "Panis angelicus," and the noble and delicate "Prélude, fugue and variation" for harmonium and piano. But it was only with the composition of his oratorio "Les Béatitudes," completed in 1879, that Franck's great period commences. The man had finally been formed. And, in swift succession, there came from his worktable the series of compositions, the "Prélude, chorale et fugue" for piano, the sonata, the symphonic poem "Psyche," the symphony, the quartet and the three chorales for organ that fully disclose his genius. There is scarcely another example in all musical history of so long retarded a flowering.

And it was a music almost the antithesis of Saint-Saëns' that finally disclosed itself through Franck. In it everything is felt and necessary and expressive. It is unadorned. None of the light musical frosting that conceals the poverty and vulgarity of so many of the other's ideas is to be found here. The designs them[Pg 110]selves are noble and significant. Franck possessed a rare gift of sensing exactly what was to his purpose. He had the artistic courage necessary to suppressing everything superfluous and insignificant. His music says something with each note, and when it has no more to say, is silent. He is concise and direct. The Symphony, for instance, is an unbroken curve, an orderly progression by gentle and scarcely perceptible stages from the darkness of an aching, gnawing introduction into the clarity of a healthy, exuberant close. And whereas Saint-Saëns' style is over-smooth and glacial, a sort of musical counterpart of the sculpture of a Canova or a Thorwaldsen, Franck's is subtle, mottled, rich, full of the play of light and shadow. The chromatic style that Wagner has developed in "Tristan" and in "Parsifal" is built upon and further developed into a style almost characterized by its rich and subtle and incessant modulations. Old and mixed modes make their appearance in it. The thematic material is originally turned, oftentimes broad and churchly and magnificent; the movement of the Franckian themes being a distinct invention. The harmony is full and varied and brilliant. But it is pre-eminently the seraphic sweetness of Franck's style that distinguishes his music and sets it over against this other that is so hard of edge and thin of substance. Over it there plays a light and luminous tenderness, an almost naïve and reticent and virginal[Pg 111] quality. The music of "Psyche" is executed with the lightest of musical brushes. It is as sweet and lucent and gracious as a fresco of Raphael's. The lightest, the silkiest of veils floats in the section marked "Le Sommeil de Psyche"; the gentlest of zephyrs carries the maiden to her lord. Small wonder that devout commentators have discovered in this music, so uncorporeal and diaphanous, a Christian intention, and pretend that in Franck's mind Psyche was the believing soul and Eros the divine lover! Tenderness, seraphic sweetness were the man's characteristic, permeating everything he touched. Few composers, certainly, have invented music more divinely sweet than that of the third movement of the quartet, more ecstatic and luminous than the ideas scattered all through his work, that seem like records of some moment when the heavens opened over his head and the empyrean resounded with the hallelujahs of the angelic host. And, certainly, no composer, Mozart alone excepted, has discovered such naïvely and innocently joyous themes as those that fill the close of the sonata and the symphonic variations with delicious vernal sunshine.

The career of one fated to serve the art of music in the Paris of Franck's lifetime, and to wait thirty years for the flowering of his genius, was of necessity obscure and sad. The[Pg 112]

"yeux menteurs, l'hypocrisie

Des serrements de mains,

La masque d'amitié cachant la jalousie,

Les pâles lendemains

De ces jours de triomphe"...

of which M. Saint-Saëns in his little volume of verse complains somewhat pompously, were unknown to César Franck. For this man, even in the years of his prime, there were only the humiliations, the disappointments that are the lot of uncomprehended genius. He had rich pupils, among them the Vicomte Vincent d'Indy, but not one of them seems to have come forward to help him, to secure him greater time for composition, to save him from wasting his precious days in instructing a few amateurs. All his life, until the very last of his seventy years, César Franck was obliged to arise every morning at five o'clock in order to have a couple of hours in which to be free to compose before the waxing day obliged him to begin trotting from one end of Paris to the other giving lessons. During his lifetime he had to content himself with half-prepared performances of his works, had to resign himself to having composers of operettas preferred to him when chairs at the Conservatoire became vacant, to receiving practically no recognition from a government pretending with hue and cry to protect and encourage the arts. Had it not been for the fervor and faithfulness with which Ysaye labored[Pg 113] to spread his renown, practically cramming down the throats of an unwilling public the violin sonata and the quartet, the man would not have known any success at all even during the very last years of his career. As it was, his reputation spread only after he was dead. Then, of course, the inevitable monument was erected to him.

Still, the future was with César Franck as it has been with few artists. The timeliness of his art was almost miraculous. Without a doubt, during the years of his labor, the French were most ready for a musical renaissance. The defeat of 1870 had, after all, braced the nation, summoned its dormant energies. It had not been severe enough to destroy, and only fierce enough to force folk to shake off the torpor that had lain upon them during the two previous régimes. People began to work again, bellies were somewhat emptier and heads somewhat fuller than they had been under Louis-Philippe and Louis-Napoleon. Above all, the vapid and superficial life of the Second Empire was ended. People were more sober and inward and realistic than they had been. There was an unusual activity in all the arts. Painting, fiction, poetry, sculpture had or were having new births. A single creative spark was sure to set the very recalcitrant musicians ablaze. Vast talents such as those of Bizet and Chabrier were making themselves felt. But given a single powerful and constructive influence, a single classic[Pg 114] expression of the French musical feeling, and a score of gifted musicians were ready to spring into life. And that example was set by Franck. For, Belgian in part though his music indubitably is, Belgian of Antwerp and Brussels as well as of Liège and the Walloon country, Flemish almost in its broad and gorgeous passages, it is what the work of the superficially Parisian Saint-Saëns never attains to being. It is representative of the great classical tradition of France, deeply expressive of the French spirit. It must have been some profound kinship with the neighboring people, deeper even than that he bore his own countrymen, that sent the youth Franck from Liège to Paris, held him fast in the city all his long and obscure life, and made him flourish in the alien soil. For his music has traits that are common to the representative French artists and have come to identify the French genius. Once again, one caught sight in the music of the French clarity and orderliness, logicality and conciseness. Once again there were great, sonorous edifices in the grand style temperate in tone. The very diffidence that makes it so difficult for the race to express itself with ease in music was expressed in this work. Moreover, along with the silveriness of Rameau, the simple solidity of French prose, and some of the old jollity of the medieval French artists, is in the music of Franck. Old modes revive in it, old peasant rhythms beat the ground once more.

[Pg 115]But, chiefest of all, it expressed the people described in the section of "Jean-Christophe" significantly entitled "Dans la Maison." It expressed the essential France hidden by the glare of the Third Republic. The music of César Franck is the music of the people driven into themselves by the conditions of modern life. It is the music of the fine ones who stand hesitant on the threshold of the world, and have incessantly to struggle for the power to act, for faith and hope. It is the music of those who in the midst of millions feel themselves forsaken and alone and powerless, and in whose obscure and laborious existence Franck himself shared. It is a thing turned away from the market-place, full of the quiet of the inner chamber. Through so much of Franck one feels the steady glow of the lamp in the warm room. With its songs of loneliness and doubt and ruth, its self-communings and vigils and prayers, its struggle for the sunlight of perfect confidence and healthiness and zest, it might come directly out of the lives of a half-dozen of the eminent persons whom France produced during the closing years of the nineteenth century. Romain Rolland himself is of this sort. It was for these people, self-distrustful, disillusioned, doubtful, that Charles Péguy wrote, bidding them remember the divine origin of the life and the institutions that seemed so false to them, bidding them remember that the Republic itself was the result of a mystical im[Pg 116]pulse in the human heart, that the dead of a race live on in the bodies of the breathing, and that the members of a folk are one. The mysticism and Catholicism of Paul Claudel, the revulsion from the scepticism of Renan and Anatole France that has become so general in recent French thought, the traditionalism, nay, the intellectual reaction, of the latest France, are all foreshadowed and outlined in the music of César Franck. He must have pulsed with the very heart of his adopted country.

Confronted with such a piece of expression, with such a modern standard, the new generation could not but respond with all its forces, and throng out of the aperture made in the Chinese Wall. And after Franck there followed a generation of French musicians such as the world has not seen since the days of the clavecinists. Within ten years, from one of the most moribund, Paris had become the most important and vivid of musical centers. Something that had been wanting in the air of Paris a long while had swept largely into it again. The musical imagination had been freed. After Franck it was impossible for a French musician not to have the courage to express himself in his own idiom, to dare develop the forms peculiarly French, to break with the foreign German and Italian standards that had oppressed the national genius so long. For this man had done so. And with the Debussys and Magnards and Ravels, the d'Indys[Pg 117] and Dukas and Schmitts, the Chaussons and Ropartz's and the Milhauds that followed immediately on César Franck, an institution like the Société Nationale de Musique came to have a meaning. Once again, French music was.

Debussy

Debussy's music is our own. All artistic forms lie dormant in the soul, and there is no work of art actually foreign to us, nor can such a one appear, in all the future ages of the world. But the music of Debussy is proper to us, in our day, as is no other, and might stand before all time our symbol. For it lived in us before it was born, and after birth returned upon us like a release. Even at a first encounter the style of "Pelléas" was mysteriously familiar. It made us feel that we had always needed such rhythms, such luminous chords, such limpid phrases, that we perhaps had even heard them, sounding faintly, in our imaginations. The music seemed as old as our sense of selfhood. It seemed but the exquisite recognition of certain intense and troubling and appeasing moments that we had already encountered. It seemed fashioned out of certain ineluctable, mysterious experiences that had budded, ineffably sad and sweet, from out our lives, and had made us new, and set us apart, and that now, at the music's breath, at a half-whispered note, at the unclosing of a rhythm, the flowering of a cluster of tones out of the warm still darkness, were arisen again in the fullness of their stature and become ours entirely.

[Pg 120]For Debussy is of all musicians the one amongst us most fully. He is here, in our midst, in the world of the city. There is about him none of the unworldliness, the aloofness, the superhumanity that distances so many of the other composers from us. We need not imagine him in exotic singing robes, nor in classical garments, nor in any strange and outmoded and picturesque attire, to recognize in him the poet. He is the modern poet just because the modern civilian garb is so naturally his. He is the normal man, living our own manner of life. We seem to know him as we know ourselves. His experiences are but our own, intensified by his poet's gift. Or, if they are not already ours, they will become so. He seems almost ourselves as he passes through the city twilight, intent upon some errand upon which we, too, have gone, journeying a road which we ourselves have traveled. We know the room in which he lives, the windows from which he gazes, the moments which come upon him there in the silence of the lamp. For he has captured in his music what is distinguished in the age's delight and tragedy. All the fine sensuality, all the Eastern pleasure in the infinite daintiness and warmth of nature, all the sudden, joyous discovery of color and touch that made men feel as though neither had been known before, are contained in it. It, too, is full of images of the "earth of the liquid and slumbering trees," the "earth of departed sunset," the "earth of the vitreous pour of the full moon just tinged with[Pg 121] blue." It is full of material loveliness, plies itself to innumerable dainty shells—to the somnolence of the Southern night, to the hieratic gesture of temple dancers, to the fall of lamplight into the dark, to the fantastic gush of fireworks, to the romance of old mirrors and faded brocades and Saxony clocks, to the green young panoply of spring. And just as it gives again the age's consciousness of the delicious robe of earth, so, too, it gives again its sense of weariness and powerlessness and oppression. The nineteenth century had been loud with blare and rumors and the vibration of colossal movements, and man had apparently traversed vast distances and explored titanic heights and abysmal depths. And yet, for all the glare, the earth was darker. The light was miasmic only. The life of man seemed as ever a brief and sad and simple thing, the stretching of impotent hands, unable to grasp and hold; the interlacing of shadows; the unclosing, a moment before nightfall, of exquisite and fragile blossoms. The sense of the infirmity of life, the consciousness that it had no more than the signification of a dream with passing lights, or halting steps in the snow, or an old half-forgotten story, had mixed a deep wistfulness and melancholy into the very glamour of the globe, and become heavier itself for all the sweetness of earth. And Debussy has fixed the two in their confusion.

He has permeated music completely with his im[Pg 122]pressionistic sensibility. His style is an image of this our pointillistically feeling era. With him impressionism achieves a perfect musical form. Structurally, the music of Debussy is a fabric of exquisite and poignant moments, each full and complete in itself. His wholes exist entirely in their parts, in their atoms. If his phrases, rhythms, lyric impulses, do contribute to the formation of a single thing, they yet are extraordinarily independent and significant in themselves. No chord, no theme, is subordinate. Each one exists for the sake of its own beauty, occupies the universe for an instant, then merges and disappears. The harmonies are not, as in other compositions, preparations. They are apparently an end in themselves, flow in space, and then change hue, as a shimmering stuff changes. For all its golden earthiness, the style of Debussy is the most liquid and impalpable of musical styles. It is forever gliding, gleaming, melting; crystallizing for an instant in some savory phrase, then moving quiveringly onward. It is well-nigh edgeless. It seems to flow through our perceptions as water flows through fingers. The iridescent bubbles that float upon it burst if we but touch them. It is forever suggesting water—fountains and pools, the glistening spray and heaving bosom of the sea. Or, it shadows forth the formless breath of the breeze, of the storm, of perfumes, or the play of sun and moon. His orchestration invariably produces all that is cloudy[Pg 123] and diaphanous in each instrument. He makes music with flakes of light, with bright motes of pigment. His palette glows with the sweet, limpid tints of a Monet or a Pissaro or a Renoir. His orchestra sparkles with iridescent fires, with divided tones, with delicate violets and argents and shades of rose. The sound of the piano, usually but the ringing of flat colored stones, at his touch becomes fluid, velvety and dense, takes on the properties of satins and liqueurs. The pedal washes new tint after new tint over the keyboard. "Reflets dans l'eau" has the quality of sheeny blue satin, of cloud pictures tumbling in gliding water. Blue fades to green and fades back again to blue in the middle section of "Homage à Rameau." Bright, cold moonlight slips through "Et la lune descend sur le temple que fut"; ruddy sparks glitter in "Mouvement" with its Petruchka-like joy; the piano is liquid and luminous and aromatic in "Cloches à travers les feuilles."

Yet there is no uncertainty, no mistiness in his form, as there is in that of some of the other impressionists. His music is classically firm, classically precise and knit. His lyrical, shimmering structures are perfectly fashioned. The line never hesitates, never becomes lost nor involved. It proceeds directly, clearly, passing through jewels and clots of color, and fusing them into the mass. The trajectory never breaks. The music is always full of its proper weight and timbre.[Pg 124] It can be said quite without exaggeration that his best work omits nothing, neglects nothing, that every component element is justly treated. His little pieces occupy a space as completely as the most massive and grand of compositions. A composition like "Nuages," the first of the three nocturnes for orchestra, while taking but five minutes in performance, outweighs any number of compositions that last an hour. "L'Après-midi d'un faune" is inspired and new, marvelously, at every measure. The three little pieces that comprise the first set of "Images" for piano will probably outlast half of what Liszt has written for the instrument. "Pelléas" will some day be studied for its miraculous invention, its classical moderation and balance and truth, for its pure diction and economical orchestration, quite as the scores of Gluck are studied to-day.

For Debussy is, of all the artists who have made music in our time, the most perfect. Other musicians, perhaps even some of the contemporary, may exhibit a greater heroism, a greater staying power and indefatigability. Nevertheless, in his sphere he is every inch as perfect a workman as the greatest. Within his limits he was as pure a craftsman as the great John Sebastian in his. The difference between the two is the difference of their ages and races, not the difference of their artistry. For few composers can match with their own Debussy's perfection of taste,[Pg 125] his fineness of sensibility, his poetic rapture and profound awareness of beauty. Few have been more graciously rounded and balanced than he, have been, like him, so fine that nothing which they could do could be tasteless and insignificant and without grace. Few musicians have been more nicely sensible of their gift, better acquainted with themselves, surer of the character and limitations of their genius. Few have been as perseverantly essential, have managed to sustain their emotion and invention so steadily at a height. The music of Debussy is full of purest, most delicate poesy. Perhaps only Bach and Moussorgsky have as invariably found phrases as pithy and inclusive and final as those with which "Pelléas" is strewn, phrases that with a few simple notes epitomize profound and exquisite emotions, and are indeed the word. There are moments in Debussy's work when each note opens a prospect. There are moments when the music of "Pelléas," the fine fluid line of sound, the melodic moments that merge and pass and vanish into one another, become the gleaming rims that circumscribe vast darkling forms. There are portions of the drama that are like the moments of human intercourse when single syllables unseal deep reservoirs. The tenderness manifest here is scarcely to be duplicated in musical art. And tenderness, after all, is the most intense of all emotions.

A thousand years of culture live in this fineness.[Pg 126] In these perfect gestures, in this grace, this certainty of choice, this justice of values, this simple, profound, delicate language, there live on thirty generations of gentlefolk. Thirty generations of cavaliers and dames who developed the arts of life in the mild and fruitful valleys of "the pleasant land of France" speak here. The gentle sunlight and gentle shadow, the mild winters and mild summers of the Ile de France, the plentiful fruits of the earth, the excitement of the vine, contributed to making this being beautifully balanced, reserved, refined. The instruction and cultivation of the classic and French poets and thinkers, Virgil and Racine and Marivaux, Catullus and Montaigne and Chateaubriand, the chambers of the Hôtel de Rambouillet, the gardens and galleries of Versailles, the immense drawing-room of eighteenth-century Paris, helped form this spirit. In all this man's music one catches sight of the long foreground, the long cycles of preparation. In every one of his works, from the most imposing to the least, from the "String Quartet" and "Pelléas" to the gracile, lissome little waltz, "Le plus que lent," there is manifest the Latin genius nurtured and molded and developed by the fertile, tranquil soil of France.

And in his art, the gods of classical antiquity live again. Debussy is much more than merely the sensuous Frenchman. He is the man in whom the old Pagan voluptuousness, the old untroubled delight in[Pg 127] the body, warred against so long by the black brood of monks and transformed by them during centuries into demoniacal and hellish forms, is free and pure and sweet once more. They once were nymphs and naiads and goddesses, the "Quartet" and "L'Après-midi d'un faune" and "Sirènes." They once wandered through the glades of Ionia and Sicily, and gladdened men with their golden sensuality, and bewitched them with the thought of "the breast of the nymph in the brake." For they are full of the wonder and sweetness of the flesh, of flesh tasted deliciously and enjoyed not in closed rooms, behind secret doors and under the shameful pall of the night, but out in the warm, sunny open, amid grasses and scents and the buzzing of insects, the waving of branches, the wandering of clouds. The Quartet is alive, quivering with light, and with joyous animality. It moves like a young fawn; spins the gayest, most silken, most golden of spider webs; fills one with the delights of taste and smell and sight and touch. In the most glimmering, floating of poems, "L'Après-midi d'un faune," there is caught magically by the climbing, chromatic flute, the drowsy pizzicati of the strings, and the languorous sighing of the horns, the atmosphere of the daydream, the sleepy warmth of the sunshot herbage, the divine apparition, the white wonder of arms and breasts and thighs. The Lento movement of "Ibéria" is like some drowsy, disheveled gipsy. Even "La plus que lent" is full[Pg 128] of the goodness of the flesh, is like some slender young girl with unclosing bosom. And in "Sirènes," something like the eternal divinity, the eternal beauty of woman's body, is celebrated. It is as though on the rising, falling, rising, sinking tides of the poem, on the waves of the glamorous feminine voices, on the aphrodisiac swell of the sea, the white Anadyomene herself, with her galaxy of tritons and naiads, approached earth's shores once more.

If any musical task is to be considered as having been accomplished, it is that of Debussy. For he wrote the one book that every great artist writes. He established a style irrefragably, made musical impressionism as legitimate a thing as any of the great styles. That he had more to make than that one contribution is doubtful. His art underwent no radical changes. His style was mature already in the Quartet and in "Proses lyriques," and had its climax in "Pelléas," its orchestral deployment in "Nocturnes" and "La Mer" and "Ibéria," its pianistic expression in the two volumes of "Images" for pianoforte. Whatever the refinement of the incidental music to "Le Martyre de Saint-Sébastien," Debussy never really transgressed the limits set for him by his first great works. And so, even if his long illness caused the deterioration, the hardening, the formularization, so evident in his most recent work, the sonatas, the "Epigrammes," "En blanc et noir," and the "Berceuse héroïque," and[Pg 129] deprived us of much delightful art, neither it nor his death actually robbed us of some radical development which we might reasonably have expected. The chief that he had to give he had given. What his age had demanded of him, an art that it might hold far from the glare and tumult, an art into which it could retreat, an art which could compensate it for a life become too cruel and demanding, he had produced. He had essentially fulfilled himself.

The fact that "Pelléas" is the most eloquent of all Debussy's works and his eternal sign does not, then, signify that he did not grow during the remainder of his life. A complex of determinants made of his music-drama the fullest expression of his genius, decreed that he should be living most completely at the moment he composed it. The very fact that in it Debussy was composing music for the theater made it certain that his artistic sense would produce itself at its mightiest in the work. For it entailed the statement of his opposition to Wagner. The fact that it was music conjoined with speech made it certain that Debussy, so full of the French classical genius, would through contact with the spoken word, through study of its essential quality, be aided and compelled to a complete realization of a fundamentally French idiom. And then Maeterlinck's little play offered itself to his genius as a unique auxiliary. It, too, is full of the sense of the shadowiness of things that weighed upon Debussy, has[Pg 130] not a little of the accent of the time. This "vieille et triste légende de la forêt" is alive with images, such as the old and somber castle inhabited by aging people and lying lost amid sunless forests, the rose that blooms in the shadow underneath Mélisande's casement, Mélisande's hair that falls farther than her arms can reach, the black tarn that broods beneath the castle-vaults and breathes death, Golaud's anguished search for truth in the prattle of the child, that could not but call a profound response from Debussy's imagination. But, above all, it was the figure of Mélisande herself that made him pour himself completely into the setting of the play. For that figure permitted Debussy to give himself completely in the creation of his ideal image. The music is all Mélisande, all Debussy's love-woman. It is she that the music reveals from the moment Mélisande rises from among the rocks shrouded in the mystery of her golden hair. It is she the music limns from the very beginning of the work. The entire score is but what a man might feel toward a woman that was his, and yet, like all women, strange and mysterious and unknown to him. The music is like the stripping of some perfect flower, petal upon petal. There are moments when it is all that lies between two people, and is the fullness of their knowledge. It is the perfect sign of an experience.

And so, since Debussy's art could have no second climax, it was in the order of things that the works[Pg 131] succeeding upon his masterpiece should be relatively less important. Nevertheless, the ensuing poems and songs and piano-pieces, with the exception of those written during those years when Debussy could have said with Rameau, his master, "From day to day my taste improves. But I have lost all my genius," are by little less perfect and astounding pieces of work. His music is like the peaks of a mountain range, of which one of the first and nearest is the highest, while the others appear scarcely less high. And they are some of the bluest, the loveliest, the most shining that stretch through the region of modern music. It will be long before humankind has exhausted their beauty.

Ravel

Ravel and Debussy are of one lineage. They both issue from what is deeply, graciously temperate in the genius of France. Across the span of centuries, they touch hands with the men who first expressed that silver temperance in tone, with Claude Le Jeune, with Rameau and Couperin and the other clavecinists. Undiverted by the changes of revolutionary times, they continue, in forms conditioned by the modern feeling for color, for tonal complexity, for supple and undulant rhythm, the high tradition of the elder music.

Claude Le Jeune wrote motets; the eighteenth-century masters wrote gavottes and rigadoons, forlanas and chaconnes, expressed themselves in courtly dances and other set and severe forms. Ravel and Debussy compose in more liberal and naturalistic fashion. And yet, the genius that animates all this music is single. It is as though all these artists, born so many hundred years apart from each other, had contemplated the pageant of their respective times from the same point of view. It is as though they faced the problems of composition with essentially the same attitudes, with the same demands and reservations. The new music, like the old, is the work of men above all reverent of the art of life itself. It is the work of men of the[Pg 134] sort who crave primarily in all conduct restraint, and who insist on poise and good sense. They regard all things humanly, and bring their regard for the social values to the making of their art. Indeed, the reaction of Debussy from Wagnerism was chiefly the reaction of a profoundly socialized and aristocratic sensibility outraged by over-emphasis and unrestraint. The men of whom he is typical throughout the ages never forget the world and its decencies and its demands. And yet they do not eschew the large, the grave, the poignant. The range of human passions is present in their music, too, even though many of them have not had gigantic powers, or entertained emotions as grand and intense as the world-consuming, world-annihilating mysticism of a Bach, for instance. But it is shadowed forth more than stated. If many of them have been deeply melancholy, they have nevertheless taken counsel with themselves, and have said, with Baudelaire:

"Sois sage, ô ma douleur, et tiens-toi plus tranquille."

All expression is made in low, aristocratic tone, in grisaille. Most often it achieves itself through a silvery grace. It is normal for these men to be profound through grace, to be amusing and yet artistically upright. It is normal for them to articulate nicely. High in their consciousness there flame always the commandments of clarity, of delicacy, of precision.[Pg 135] Indeed, so repeatedly have temperaments of this character appeared in France, not only in her music, but also in her letters and other arts, from the time of the Pléiade, to that of Charles Louis Philippe and André Gide and Henri de Regnier, that it is difficult not to hold theirs the centrally, essentially French tradition, and not to see in men like Rabelais only the Frank, and in men like Berlioz only the atavism to Gallo-Roman times.

But it is not only the spirit of French classicism that Ravel and Debussy inherit. In one respect their art is the continuation of the music that came to a climax in the works of Haydn and Mozart. It is subtle and intimate, and restores to the auditor the great creative rôle assigned to him by so much of the music before Beethoven. The music of Haydn and Mozart defers to its hearer. It seeks deliberately to enlist his activity. It relies for its significance largely upon his contribution. The music itself carries only a portion of the composer's intention. It carries only enough to ignite and set functioning the auditor's imagination. To that person is reserved the pleasure of fathoming the intention, of completing the idea adumbrated by the composer. For Haydn and Mozart did not desire that the listener assume a completely passive attitude. They had too great a love and respect of their fellows. They were eager to secure their collaboration, had confidence that they could compre[Pg 136]hend all that the music intimated, regarded them as equals in the business of creation. But the music written since their time has forced upon the hearer a more and more passive rôle. The composers arrogated to themselves, to varying extents, the greater part of the activity; insisted upon giving all, of doing the larger share of the labor. The old intimacy was lost; with Wagner the intellectual game of the leit-motif system was substituted for the creative exercise. The art of Ravel and Debussy returns to the earlier strategy. It makes the largest effort to excite the creative imagination, that force which William Blake identified with the Saviour Himself. It strives continually to lure it into the most energetic participation. And because Ravel and Debussy have this incitement steadily in view, their music is a music of few strokes, comparable indeed to the pictural art of Japan which it so often recalls. It is the music of suggestion, of sudden kindlings, brief starts and lines, small forms. It never insists. It only pricks. It instigates, begins, leaves off, and then continues, rousing to action the hearer's innate need of an aim and an order and meaning in things. Its subtle gestures, its brief, sharp, delicate phrases, its quintessentiality, are like the thrusting open of doors into the interiors of the conscience, the opening of windows on long vistas, are like the breaking of light upon obscured memories and buried emotions. They are like[Pg 137] the unsealing of springs long sealed, suffering them to flow again in the night. And for a glowing instant, they transform the auditor from a passive receiver into an artist.

And there is much besides that Ravel and Debussy have in common. They have each been profoundly influenced by Russian music, "Daphnis et Chloé" showing the influence of Borodin, "Pelléas et Mélisande" that of Moussorgsky. Both have made wide discoveries in the field of harmony. Both have felt the power of outlying and exotic modes. Both have been profoundly impressed by the artistic currents of the Paris about them. Both, like so many other French musicians, have been kindled by the bright colors of Spain, Ravel in his orchestral Rhapsody, in his one-act opera "L'Heure espagnol" and in the piano-piece in the collection "Miroirs" entitled "Alborada del Graciozo," Debussy in "Ibéria" and in some of his preludes. Indeed, a parallelism exists throughout their respective works. Debussy writes "Homage à Rameau"; Ravel "Le Tombeau de Couperin." Debussy writes "Le Martyre de Saint-Sébastien"; Ravel projects an oratorio, "Saint-François d'Assise." Ravel writes the "Ondine" of the collection entitled "Gaspard de la nuit"; Debussy follows it with the "Ondine" of his second volume of preludes. Both, during the same year, conceive and execute the idea of setting to music the lyrics of Mallarmé entitled "Sou[Pg 138]pir" and "Placet futile." Nevertheless, this fact constitutes Ravel in no wise the imitator of Debussy. His work is by no means, as some of our critics have made haste to insist, a counterfeit of his elder's. Did the music of Ravel not demonstrate that he possesses a sensibility quite distinct from Debussy's, in some respects less fine, delicious, lucent, in others perhaps even more deeply engaging; did it not represent a distinct development from Debussy's art in a direction quite its own, one might with justice speak of a discipleship. But in the light of Ravel's actual accomplishment, of his large and original and attractive gift, of the magistral craftsmanship that has shown itself in so many musical forms, from the song and the sonatine to the string-quartet and the orchestral poem, of the talent that has revealed itself increasingly from year to year, and that not even the war and the experience of the trenches has driven underground, the parallelism is to be regarded as necessitated by the spiritual kinship of the men, and by their contemporaneity.

And, certainly, nothing so much reveals Ravel the peer of Debussy as the fact that he has succeeded so beautifully in manifesting what is peculiar to him. For he is by ten years Debussy's junior, and were he less positive an individuality, less original a temperament, less fully the genius, he could never have realized himself. There would have descended upon him[Pg 139] the blight that has fallen upon so many of the younger Parisian composers less determinate than he and like himself made of one stuff with Debussy. He, too, would have permitted the art of the older and well-established man to impose upon him. He, too, would have betrayed his own cause in attempting to model himself upon the other man. But Debussy has not swerved nor hampered Ravel any more than has his master, Gabriel Fauré. He is too sturdily set in his own direction. From the very commencement of his career, from the time when he wrote the soft and hesitating and nevertheless already very personal "Pavane pour une Infante défunte," he has maintained himself proudly against his great collateral, just as he has maintained himself against what is false and epicene in the artistic example of Fauré. Within their common limits, he has realized himself as essentially as Debussy has done. Their music is the new and double blossoming of the classical French tradition. From the common ground, they stretch out each in a different direction, and form the greater contrast to each other because of all they have in common.

The intelligence that fashioned the music of Debussy was one completely aware, conscious of itself, flooded with light in its most secret places, set four-square in the whirling universe. Few artists have been as sure of their intention as Debussy always was. The man could fix with precision the most elusive[Pg 140] emotions, could describe the sensations that flow on the borderland of consciousness, vaguely, and that most of us cannot grasp for very dizziness. He could write music as impalpable as that of the middle section of "Ibéria," in which the very silence of the night, the caresses of the breeze, seem to have taken musical flesh. Before the body of his work, so clear and lucid in its definition, so perfect in its organization, one thinks perforce of a world created out of the flying chaos beneath him by a god. We are given to know precisely of what stuff the soul of Debussy was made, what its pilgrimages were, in what adventure it sought itself out. We know precisely wherein it saw reflected its visage, in "water stilled at even," in the angry gleam of sunset on wet leaves, in wild and headlong gipsy rhythms, in moonfire, shimmering stuffs and flashing spray, in the garish lights and odors of the Peninsula, in rain fallen upon flowering parterres, in the melancholy march of clouds, the golden pomp and ritual of the church, the pools and gardens and pavilions reared for its delight by the delicate Chinese soul, in earth's thousand scents and shells and colors. For Debussy has set these adventures before us in their fullness. Before he spoke, he had dwelt with his experiences till he had plumbed them fully, till he had seen into and around and behind them clearly. And so we perceive them in their essences, in their eternal aspects. The designs are the[Pg 141] very curve of the ecstasy. They are sheerly delimited. The notes appear to bud one out of the other, to follow each other out of the sheerest necessity, to have an original timbre, to fix a matter never known before, that can never live again. Every moment in a representative composition of Debussy's is logical and yet new. Few artists have more faultlessly said what they set out to say.

Ravel is by no means as perfect an artist. He has not the clear self-consciousness, the perfect recognition of limits. His music has not the absolute completeness of Debussy's. It is not that he is not a marvelous craftsman, greatly at ease in his medium. It is that Ravel dares, and dares continually; seeks passionately to bring his entire body into play; aspires to plenitude of utterance, to sheerness and rigidity of form. Ravel always goes directly through the center. But compare his "Rapsodie espagnol" with Debussy's "Ibéria" to perceive how direct he is. Debussy gives the circumambient atmosphere, Ravel the inner form. Between him and Debussy there is the difference between the apollonian and the dionysiac, between the smooth, level, contained, perfect, and the darker, more turbulent, passionate, and instinctive. For Ravel has been vouchsafed a high grace. He has been permitted to remain, in all his manhood, the child that once we all were. In him the powerful and spontaneous flow of emotion from out the depths of being[Pg 142] has never been dammed. He can still speak from the fullness of his heart, cry his sorrows piercingly, produce himself completely. Gracious and urbane as his music is, proper to the world of modern things and modern adventures and modern people, there is still a gray, piercing lyrical note in it that is almost primitive, and reflects the childlike singleness and intensity of the animating spirit. The man who shaped not only the deliberately infantine "Ma Mère l'Oye," but also things as quiveringly simple and expressive and songful as "Oiseaux tristes," as "Sainte," as "Le Gibet," or the "Sonatine," as the passacaglia of the Trio or the vocal interlude in "Daphnis et Chloé," has a pureness of feeling that we have lost. And it is this crying, passionate tone, this directness of expression, this largeness of effort, even in tiny forms and limited scope, that, more than his polyphonic style or any other of the easily recognizable earmarks of his art, distinguishes his work from Debussy's. The other man has a greater sensuousness, completeness, inventiveness perhaps. But Ravel is full of a lyricism, a piercingness, a passionateness, that much of the music of Debussy successive to "Pelléas" wants. We understand Ravel's music, in the famous phrase of Beethoven, as speech "vom Herz—zu Herzen."

And we turn to it gratefully, as we turn to all art full of the "sense of tears in mortal things," and into which the pulse of human life has passed directly.[Pg 143] For there are times when he is close to the bourne of life, when his art is immediately the orifice of the dark, flowering, germinating region where lie lodged the dynamics of the human soul. There are times when it taps vasty regions. There are times when Ravel has but to touch a note, and we unclose; when he has but to let an instrument sing a certain phrase, and things which lie buried deep in the heart rise out of the dark, like the nymph in his piano-poem, dripping with stars. The music of "Daphnis," from the very moment of the introduction with its softly unfolding chords, its far, glamorous fanfares, its human throats swollen with songs, seems to thrust open doors into the unplumbed caverns of the soul, and summon forth the stuff to shape the dream. Little song written since Weber set his horns a-breathing, or Brahms transmuted the witchery of the German forest into tone, is more romantic. Over it might be set the invocation of Heine:

"Steiget auf, ihr alten Traüme!

Oeffne dich, dur Herzenstor!"

Like the passage that ushers in the last marvelous scene of his great ballet, it seems to waken us from the unreal world to the real, and show us the face of the earth, and the overarching blue once more.

And Ravel is at once more traditional and more progressive a composer than Debussy. One feels the[Pg 144] past most strongly in him. Debussy, with his thoroughly impressionistic style, is more the time. No doubt there is a certain almost Hebraic melancholy and sharp lyricism in Ravel's music which gives some color to the rumor that he is Jewish. And yet, for all that, one feels Rameau become modern in his sober, gray, dainty structures, in the dryness of his black. In "Le Tombeau de Couperin," Ravel is the old clavecinist become contemporary of Scriabine and Strawinsky, the old clavecinist who had seen the projectiles fall at Verdun and lost a dozen friends in the trenches. He finds it easy, as in some of his recent songs, to achieve the folktone. If it is true that he is a Jew, then his traditionalism is but one more brilliant instance of the power of France to adopt the children of alien races and make them more intensely her own than some of her proper offspring. In no other instance, however, not in that of Lully nor in that of Franck, has the transfusion of blood been so successful. Ravel is in no wise treacherous to himself. There must be something in the character of the French nation that makes of every Jew, if not a son, yet the happiest and most faithful of stepchildren.

And as one feels the past more strongly in Ravel, so, too, one finds him in certain respects even more revolutionary than Debussy. For while the power of the latter flagged in the making of strangely MacDowellesque preludes, or in the composition of such ghosts[Pg 145] as "Gigues" and "Jeux" and "Karma," Ravel has continued increasingly in power, has developed his art until he has come to be one of the leaders of the musical evolution. If there is a single modern composition which can be compared to "Petruchka" for its picture of mass-movement, its pungent naturalism, it is the "Feria" of the "Rapsodie espagnol." If there is a single modern orchestral work that can be compared to either of the two great ballets of Strawinsky for rhythmical vitality, it is "Daphnis et Chloé," with its flaming dionysiac pulses, its "pipes and timbrels," its wild ecstasy. The same delicate clockwork mechanism characterizes "L'Heure espagnol," his opera bouffe, that characterizes "Petruchka" and "Le Rossignol." A piano-poem like "Scarbo" rouses the full might of the piano, and seems to bridge the way to the music of Leo Ornstein and the age of steel. And Ravel has some of the squareness, the sheerness and rigidity for which the ultra-modern are striving. The liquescence of Debussy has given away again to something more metallic, more solid and unflowing. There is a sort of new stiffness in this music. And in the field of harmony Ravel is steadily building upon Debussy. His chords grow sharper and more biting; in "Le Tombeau de Couperin" and the minuet on the name of Haydn there is a harmonic daring and subtlety and even bitterness that is beyond anything attained by Debussy, placing the composer with the[Pg 146] Strawinskys and the Schoenbergs and the Ornsteins and all the other barbarians.

And then his ironic humor, as well, distinguishes him from Debussy. The humor of the latter was, after all, light and whimsical. That of Ravel, on the other hand, is extremely bitter. No doubt, the "icy" Ravel, the artist "à qui l'absence de sensibilité fait encore une personalité," as one of the quirites termed him, never existed save in the minds of those unable to comprehend his reticence and delicacy and essentiality. Nevertheless, besides his lyrical, dreamy, romantic temper, he has a very unsentimental vein, occurring no doubt, as in Heine, as a sort of corrective, a sort of compensation, for the pervading sensibleness. And so we find the tender poet of the "Sonatine" and the string-quartet and "Miroirs" writing the witty and mordant music of "L'Heure espagnol"; setting the bitter little "Histoires naturelles" of Jules Renard for chant, writing in "Valses nobles et sentimentales" a slightly ironical and disillusioned if smiling and graceful and delicate commentary to the season of love, projecting a music-drama on the subject of Don Quixote. Over his waltzes Ravel maliciously sets a quotation from Henri de Regnier: "Le plaisir délicieux et toujours nouveau d'une occupation inutile." With Casella, he writes a musical "A la manière de," parodying Wagner, d'Indy, Chabrier, Strauss and others most wittily. Something[Pg 147] of Eric Satie, the clown of music, exists in him, too. And probably nothing makes him so inexplicable and irritating to his audiences as his ironic streak. People are willing to forgive an artist all, save only irony.

What the future holds for Maurice Ravel is known only to the three norns. But, unless some unforeseen accident occur and interrupt his career, it can only hold the most brilliant rewards. The man seems surely bound for splendid shores. He is only in the forty-fifth year of his life, and though his genius was already fresh and subtle in the Quartet, written as early as 1903, it has grown beautifully in power during the last two decades. The continued exploration of musical means has given his personality increasingly free play, and has unbound him. The gesture of the hand has grown swifter and more commanding. The instruments have become more obedient. He has matured, become virile and even magistral. The war has not softened him. He speaks as intimately as ever in "Le Tombeau de Couperin." Already one can see in him one of the most delightful and original musical geniuses that have been nourished by the teeming soil of France. It is possible that the future will refer to him in even more enthusiastic tone.

Borodin

Borodin's music is a reading of Russia's destiny in the book of her past. "I live," the composer of "Prince Igor" wrote to a friend one summer, "on a steep and lofty mountain whose base is washed by the Volga. And for thirty versts I can follow the windings of the river through the blue of the immeasurable distance." And his music, at least those rich fragments that are his music, make us feel as though that summer sojourn had been symbolic of his career, as though in spirit he had ever lived in some high, visionary place overlooking the sweep of centuries in which Russia had waxed from infancy to maturity. It is as though the chiming of the bells of innumerable Russian villages, villages living and villages dead and underground a thousand years, had mounted incessantly to his ears, telling him of the progress of a thing round which sixty generations had risen and fallen like foam. It is as though he had followed the Volga, flowing eastward, not alone for thirty, but for thirty hundred versts through plains reverberant with the age-long combat and clashing, the bleeding and fusing of Slav and Tartar; had followed it until it reached the zone where Asia, with her caravans and plagues and shrill Mongolian fifes, comes out of endless wastes. And it[Pg 150] is as though, piercing further into the bosom of the eternal mother, Asia, his eye had rested finally upon a single spot, a single nucleus; that it had watched that nucleus increase into a tribe; had watched that tribe commence its westward march, wandering, spawning, pushing ever westward, battling and groping, advancing slowly, patiently, steadily into power and manhood, until it had come into possession of the wildest and fairest land of eastern Europe, until it had joined with other stocks and swelled into a vast nation, a gigantic empire; and that then, in that moment of fulfilment, Borodin had turned in prophetic ecstasy upon modern Russia and bade it ring its bells and sound its chants, bade it push onward with its old faith and vigor, since the Slavonic grandeur and glory were assured. For through the savage trumpet-blasts and rude and lumbering rhythms, through the cymbal-crashing Mongol marches and warm, uncouth peasant chants that are his music, there surges that vision, that sense of immanent glory, that fortifying asseveration.

It rises to us for the reason that although his music is an evocation of past times, a conjuring up of the buried Muscovy, it is a glad and exuberant one. It has the tone neither of those visions of departed days inspired by yearnings for greener, happier ages, nor of those out of which there speaks, as there speaks out of the "Salammbô" of Flaubert, for instance, a horror of man's everlasting filth and ferocity. A fresh and[Pg 151] joyous and inspiriting wind blows from these pages. The music of "Prince Igor," with its epical movement and counter-movement, its shouting, wandering, savage hordes, its brandished spears and flashing Slavic helms, its marvelous parade of warrior pride and woman's flesh, its evocation of the times of the Tartar inundations, is full of a rude, chivalric lustiness, a great barbaric zest and appetite, a childlike laughter. The B-minor symphony makes us feel as though the very pagan joy and vigor that had once informed the assemblies and jousts and feasting of the boyartry of medieval Russia, and made the guzli and bamboo flute to sound, had waked again in Borodin; and in this magnificent and lumbering music, these crude and massive forms, lifted its wassail and its gold and song once more. For the composer of such works, such evocations, it is patent that the past was the wonderful warrant of a wonderful future. For this man, indeed, the reliques, the trappings, the minaret-crowned monuments, the barbaric chants and gold ornaments, all the thousand rich things that recalled Muscovy and the buried empire to him, and that he loved so dearly, were valuable chiefly because they were the emblems of the time that bore the happy present.

He was one of the famous "five" who in the decade after 1870 found Russia her modern musical speech. The group, which comprised Moussorgsky, Balakirew, Cui, Rimsky-Korsakoff and Borodin, was unified by[Pg 152] an impulse common to all the members. All were in revolt against the grammar of classical music. All felt the tradition of western European music to be inimical to the free expression of the Russian sensibility, and for the first time opposed to the musical West the musical East. For these young composers, the plans and shapes of phrases, the modes, the rhythms, the counterpoint, the "Rules," the entire musical theory and science that had been established in Europe by the practice of generations of composers, was a convention; the Russian music, particularly that of Rubinstein and Tchaikowsky, which had sought to ply itself in accord with it, an artificial and sophisticated thing, as artificial and sophisticated a thing as the pseudo-Parisian culture of the Petrograd salons. It was their firm conviction that for the Russian composer only one model existed, and that was the Russian folk-song. Only in the folk-song were to be found the musical equivalents of the spoken speech. Only in the folk-song were to be found the musical accents and turns and inflections, the phrases and rhythms and colors that expressed the national temper. And to the popular and to the liturgical chants they went in search of their proper idiom. But it was not only to the musical heritage that they went. In search of their own selves they sought out every vestige of the past, every vestige of the fatherland that Peter the Great and Catherine had sought to reform,[Pg 153] and that persists in every Russian underneath the coating of convention. Together with the others, Borodin steeped himself in the lore and legends of the buried empire, familiarized himself with the customs of the Slavs of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, searched libraries for the missals illuminated by the old monks of the Greek church, deciphered epics and ballads and chronicles, assimilated the songs and incantations of the peasants and savage tribes of the steppes, collected the melodies of European and Asiatic Russia from the Ukraine to Turkestan.

And he and his companions were right. Their instincts had not misled them. The contact with real Russia loosed them all. Through that new musical orientation, they arose, each full of his own strength.

It was the contact of like with like that made them expressive. For what they inwardly were was close akin to the breath, the spirit, the touch, that had invented those chants, and built those minarets and wrought that armor and composed those epics. The accent of Moussorgsky was in the grave and popular melodies, in the liturgical incantations, before he was born. His most original passages resemble nothing so much as the rude, stark folk-song bequeathed to the world by medieval Russia. Rimsky-Korsakoff's love of brilliant, gay materials had been in generations and generations of peasant-artists, in every peasant who on a holiday had donned a gaudy, beribboned costume,[Pg 154] centuries before the music of "Scheherazade" and "Le Coq d'or" was conceived. So, too, the temperaments and sensibilities of the others. They had but to touch these emblems and reliques and rhythms to become self-conscious.

It must have been in particular the old warrior, the chivalric, perhaps even the Tartar imprint in the emblems of the Russian past that liberated Borodin. For he is the old Tartar, the old savage boyar, of modern music. In very person he was the son of military feudal Russia. His photographs that exhibit the great chieftain head, the mane and the savage, long Mongolian mustache in all their flat contradiction of the conventional nineteenth-century dress, the black and star and ribbon of court costume, make one half credit the legend that his family was of pure Circassian descent, and had flowed down into the great Russian maelstrom from out a Georgian stronghold. His idiom bears strongly the imprint of that body; suggests strongly that heredity. It is patently the expression of a personality who desired exuberant bright sound and color, needed the brandishing of blades and the shrilling of Tartar fifes and the leaping dance of Tartar archers, had nostalgia for the savage life that had spawned upon the steppes. And as such it is distinct from that of the other composers of the group. His music has none of the piercingness and poignancy and irony, none of the deep humility and grim resignation,[Pg 155] so characteristic of Moussorgsky's. It has none of the brilliant Orientalism of Balakirew and Cui, none of Rimsky-Korsakoff's soft felicity and lambency and light sensuousness. It is rude and robust and male, full of angular movements and vigorous blows and lusty, childlike laughter, and, at the same time, of a singularly fine romantic fervor. It is almost the contrary of that of the neurotic, sallow Tchaikowsky of the hysterical frenzies and hysterical self-pity and the habits of morose delectation. If there is any symphony that can be called pre-eminently virile and Russian, it is assuredly Borodin's second, the great one in B-minor. And in "Prince Igor" and the symphonic poem "On the Steppes," for the first time, continental Asia, with its sharp beat of savage drums and its oceanic wastes of grass, its strong Kurdish beverages and jerked steaks, comes into modern music.

And was not this restatement of the national character Borodin's great contribution to his age's life? For has not the most recent time of all beheld a resurgence of the Russian spirit in the political field, an attempted reconstitution of society in the light of the just and fraternal and religious spirit with which this folk has ever been endowed, and of which, in all its misery, it has ever been aware? If there is any teacher who dominates Russian thought and Russian affairs to-day, it is Tolstoy. And from whom did Tolstoy learn more than from that conserver of the pris[Pg 156]tine and dominating Russian traits, the moujik? And so men like Borodin who sought out the racial character and reflected it in their music seem to us almost like outriders, like the tribesmen who are sent on ahead of wandering folks to spy out the land, to find the passes, and guide their fellows on. Their art is a summons to individual life. Borodin in particular came upon the Russian people at a moment when, like a tribe that has quit its fields in search of better pasturage, and has wandered far and found itself in barren and difficult and almost impassable ground, it was bewildered and despondent, and felt itself lost and like to perish in the wilderness. And while his folk lay prone, he had arisen and mounted the encircling ridge. And with a joyous cry, and the flaunting of a banner, he called them to the way they had to traverse, and told them the road was found.

His work is not large in bulk. In a comparatively long life, long at least by the side of that of a Mozart or a Moussorgsky, he succeeded in producing only a single opera, "Prince Igor," two symphonies and the torso of a third, a symphonic sketch, "On the Steppes," two string quartets, and a score of songs. And many of these works are incomplete. "Prince Igor" is a fragmentary composition, a series of not quite satisfactorily conjoined numbers, a golden mosaic from which whole groups of enameled bits are missing. Indeed, Borodin had not even notated the overture when[Pg 157] he died, and we know it thanks only to a pupil who had heard him play it on the piano and recollected it well enough to reconstruct it. Other of his works that are complete are spotty, commingled dross and gold. He was a curiously uneven workman. There appear to have been whole regions of his personality that remained unsensitized. Part of him seems to have gone out toward a new free Russian music; part of him seems to have been satisfied with the style of the Italian operas in vogue in Russia during his youth. He who in the dances from "Prince Igor" wrote some of the most pungent, supple, wild of music could also write airs sweetly Italian and conventional. The most free and ruddy and brave of his pages are juxtaposed with some of the most soft and timid. In his opera a recitative of clear, passionate accent serves to introduce a pretty cavatina; "Prince Igor's" magnificent scene, so original and contained and vigorous, is followed by a cloying duet worthy of a Tchaikowsky opera. The adagio of the B-minor Symphony, lovely as it is, has not quite the solidity and weight of the other movements. The happy, popular and brilliantly original themes and ideas of the first quartet are organized with a distinct unskilfulness, while the artistic value of the second is seriously damaged by the cheapness of its cavatina. His workmanship continually reminds one that Borodin was unable to devote himself entirely to composition; that he could come to his writing[Pg 158] table only at intervals, only in hours of recreation; and that the government of the Tsar left him to support himself by instructing in chemistry in the College of Medicine and Surgery in Moscow, and kept him always something of an amateur. Borodin the composer is after all only the composer of a few fragments.

But sometimes, amid the ruins of an Eastern city, men find a slab of porphyry or malachite so gorgeously grained, that not many whole and perfect works of art can stand undimmed and undiminished beside it. Such is the music of Borodin.

Rimsky-Korsakoff

The music of Rimsky-Korsakoff is like one of the books, full of gay pictures, which are given to children. It is perhaps the most brilliant of them all, a picture-book illuminated in crude and joyous colors—bright reds, apple greens, golden oranges and yellows—and executed with genuine verve and fantasy. The Slavonic and Oriental legends and fairy tales are illustrated astonishingly, with a certain humor in the matter-of-fact notation of grotesque and miraculous events. The personages in the pictures are arrayed in bizarre and shimmering costumes, delightfully inaccurate; and if they represent kings and queens, are set in the midst of a fabulous pomp and glitter, and wear crowns incrusted with large and impossible stones. Framing the illustrations are border-fancies of sunflowers and golden cocks and wondrous springtime birds, fashioned boisterously and humorously in the manner of Russian peasant art. Indeed, the book is executed so charmingly that the parents find it as amusing as do the children.

More than the loveliest, the gleefullest, of picture-books the music is not. One must not go to Rimsky-Korsakoff for works of another character. For, at heart, he ignored the larger sort of speech, and was[Pg 160] content to have his music picturesque and colorful. The childish, absurd Tsar in "Le Coq d'or," who desires only to lie abed all day, eat delicate food, and listen to the fairy tales of his nurse, is, after all, something of a portrait of the composer. For all its gay and opulent exterior, its pricking orchestral timbres, his work is curiously objective and crystallized, as though the need that brought it forth had been small and readily satisfied. None of Rimsky's scores is really lyrical, deeply moving. The music of "Tsar Saltan," for instance, for all its evocations of magical cities and wonder-towers and faëry splendor, impresses one as little more than theatrical scenery of a high decorativeness. It sets us lolling in a sort of orchestra-stall, wakes in us the mood in which we applaud amiably the dexterity of the stage-decorator. How quickly the aërial tapestry woven by the orchestra of "Le Coq d'or" wears thin! How quickly the subtle browns and saffrons and vermilions fade! How pretty and tame beside that of Borodin, beside that of the "Persian Dances" of Moussorgsky, beside that of Balakirew, even Rimsky's Orientalism appears! None of his music communicates an experience really high, really poetic. There is no page of his that reveals him straining to formulate such a one.

His composition is never more than a graceful arrangement of surfaces, the cunning and pleasing[Pg 161] presentation of matter chosen for its exotic rhythms and shapes, its Oriental and peasant tang, its pungency. The form is ever a thing of two dimensions. The musical ideas are passed through the dye-vats of various timbres and tonalities, made to undergo a series of interesting deformations, are contrasted, superficially, with other ideas after the possibilities of technical variations have been exhausted. There is no actual development in the sense of volumnear increase. In "Scheherazade," for instance, the climaxes are purely voluntary, are nothing other than the arbitrary thickening and distention of certain ideas. And it is only the spiciness of the thematic material, the nimbleness and suavity of the composition, and, chiefly, the piquancy of the orchestral speech, that saves the music of Rimsky-Korsakoff from utter brittleness, and gives it a certain limited beauty.

It is just this essential superficiality which makes the place of the music in the history of Russian art so ambiguous. Intentionally, and to a certain extent, Rimsky's work is autochthonous. He was one of those composers who, in the middle of the last century, felt descend upon them the need of speaking their own tongue and gave themselves heartily to the labor of discovering a music entirely Russian. His material, at its best, approximates the idiom of the Russian folk-song, or communicates certain qualities—an Oriental sweetness, a barbaric lassitude and abandon—ad[Pg 162]mittedly racial. His music is full of elements—wild and headlong rhythms, exotic modes—abstracted from the popular and liturgical chants or deftly molded upon them. For there was always within him the idea of creating an art, particularly an operatic art, that would be as Russian as Wagner's, for instance, is German. The texts of his operas are adopted from Russian history and folklore, and he continually attempted to find a musical idiom with the accent of the old Slavonic chronicles and fairy tales. Certain of his works, particularly "Le Coq d'or," are deliberately an imitation of the childish and fabulous inventions of the peasant artists. And certainly none of the other members of the nationalist group associated with Rimsky-Korsakoff—not Moussorgsky, for all his emotional profundity; nor Borodin, for all his sumptuous imagination—had so firm an intellectual grasp of the common problem, nor was technically so well equipped to solve it. None of them, for instance, had as wide an acquaintance with the folk-song, the touchstone of their labors. For Rimsky-Korsakoff was something of a philosophical authority on the music of the many peoples of the Empire, made collections of chants, and could draw on this fund for his work. Nor did any of the others possess his technical facility. Moussorgsky, for instance, had to discover the art of music painfully with each step of composition, and orchestrated faultily all his life, while Rimsky-Korsakoff had a natural sense[Pg 163] of the orchestra, wrote treatises on the science of instrumentation and on the science of harmony, and developed into something of a doctor of music. Indeed, when finally there devolved upon him, as general legatee of the nationalist school, the task of correcting and editing the works of Borodin and Dargomijsky and Moussorgsky, he brought to his labor an eruditeness that bordered dangerously on pedantry. Nor was his learning only musical. He had a great knowledge of the art and customs that had existed in Russia before the influences of western Europe repressed them, of the dances and rites and sun worship that survived, despite Christianity, as popular and rustic games. And he could press them into service in his search for a national expression. Like the Sultana in his symphonic poem, he "drew on the poets for their verses, on the folk-songs for their words, and intermingled tales and adventures one with another."

Yet there is no score of Rimsky-Korsakoff's, no one of his fifteen operas and dozen symphonic works, which has, in all its mass, the living virtue that informs a single page of "Boris Godounow," the virtue of a thing that satisfies the very needs of life and brings to a race release and formulation of its speech. There is no score of his, for all the tang and luxuriousness of his orchestration, for all the incrustation of bright, strange stones on the matter of his operas, that has the deep, glowing color of certain passages of Boro[Pg 164]din's work, with their magical evocations of terrestrial Asia and feudal Muscovy, their

"Timbres d'or des mongoles orfevrèries

Et vieil or des vieilles nations."

For he was in no sense as nobly human of stature, as deeply aware of the life about him, as Moussorgsky. Nor did he feel within himself Borodin's rich and vivid sense of the past. Cui was right when he accused Rimsky of wanting "nerve and passionate impulse." He was, after all, temperamentally chilly. "The people are the creators," Glinka had told the young nationalist composers, "you are but the arrangers." It was precisely the vital and direct contact with the source of all creative work that Rimsky-Korsakoff lacked. There is a fault of instinct in men like him, who can feel their race and their environment only through the conscious mind. Just what in Rimsky's education produced his intellectualism, we do not know. Certainly it was nothing extraordinary, for society produces innumerable artists like him, who are fundamentally incapable of becoming the instrument every creative being is, and of discovering through themselves the consciousness of their fellows. Whatever its cause, there is in such men a fear of the unsealing of the unconscious mind, the depository of all actual and vital sensations, which no effort of their own can overcome. It is for that reason that they have so gigantic and[Pg 165] unshakable a confidence in all purely conscious processes of creation, particularly in the incorporation of a priori theories. So it was with Rimsky. There is patent in all his work a vast love of erudition and a vast faith in its efficacy. He is always attempting to incarnate in the flesh of his music law abstracted from classical works. Even Tchaikowsky, who was a good deal of an intellectualist himself, and dubbed "perfect," in a characteristically servile letter, every one of the thirty practice fugues that Rimsky composed in the course of a single month, complained that the latter "worshiped technique" and that his work was "Full of contrapuntal tricks and all the signs of a sterile pedantry." It was not that Rimsky was pedantic from choice, out of a wilful perversity. His obsession with intellectual formulas was after all the result of a fear of opening the dark sluices through which surge the rhythms of life.

If Rimsky-Korsakoff was not absolutely sterile, it was because his intellectual quality itself was vivacious and brilliant. Though he remained ever a stranger to Russia and his fellows, as he did to himself, he became the most observant of travelers. Though as the foreigner he perceived only the superficial and picturesque elements of the life of the land—its Orientalism, its barbaric coloring—and found his happiest expression in a fantasy after the "Thousand Nights and a Night," he noted his impressions skilfully and vividly, with an[Pg 166] almost virtuosic sense of his material. If he could not paint the spring in music, he could at least embroider the score of "Sniegourochka" delightfully with birdcalls and all manner of vernal fancies. If he could not recreate the spirit of peasant art, he could at least, as in "Le Coq d'or," imitate it so tastefully that, listening to the music, we seem to have before us one of the pictures beloved by the Russian folk—a picture with bright and joyous dabs of color, with clumsy but gleeful depictions of battles and cavalcades and festivities and banqueting tables loaded with fruits, meats and flagons. It is indeed curious, and not a little pathetic, to observe how keen Rimsky-Korsakoff's intelligence ever was. The satirization of the demoniacal women of "Parsifal" and "Salome" in the figure and motifs of the Princess of Samarcand is deliciously light and witty. Indeed, not only "Le Coq d'or," but most of his work reveals his dry, real sense of humor. And how often does he not point the direction in which Russian music has subsequently advanced! His latter style, with its mottled chromatic and Oriental modes, its curious and bewildering intervals, is the veritable link between the music of the older Russian group to which he, roughly, belongs and that of the younger, newer men, of Strawinsky in particular. Indeed, the works of Strawinsky reveal incessantly how much the master taught the pupil.

But if they reveal Rimsky's keenness, they reveal[Pg 167] his limitations as well. They bring into sharpest relief the difference between poetic and superficial expressiveness. For Strawinsky has in many instances successfully handled materials which Rimsky not quite satisfactorily employed. The former's early works, in particular "L'Oiseau de feu," and the first act of the opera "Le Rossignol," related to Rimsky's in style as they are, have yet a faëry and wonder and flittergold that the master never succeeded in attaining. The music of "L'Oiseau de feu" is really a fantastic dream-bird. "Petrouchka" has a brilliance and vivacity and madness that makes Rimsky's scenes from popular life, his utilizations of vulgar tunes and dances scarcely comparable to it. Nowhere in any of Rimsky's reconstructions of ethnological dances and rites, neither in "Mlada" nor in "Sniegourochka," is there anything at all comparable to the naked power manifest in "Le Sacre du printemps." But it is particularly in his science of orchestration, the sense of the instruments that makes him appear to defer to them rather than to impose his will on them, that Strawinsky has achieved the thing that his teacher failed of achieving. For Rimsky, despite all his remarkable sense of the chemistry of timbres, despite his fine intention to develop further the science which Berlioz brought so far, was prevented from minting a really new significant orchestral speech through the poverty of his invention. His orchestration is full of[Pg 168] tricks and mannerisms that pall. One hears the whistling parabolas of the flutes and clarinets of "Scheherazade" in "Mlada," in "Sadko," in a half-dozen works. The orchestra that paints the night-sky of "Mlada" rolls dangerously like that which paints the sea of "Scheherazade" and "Tsar Saltan." The famous "Chanson indou" seems to float vaguely through half his Oriental evocations. But the originality and fecundity and inventiveness that he lacked, Strawinsky to great degree possesses. And so it was given to the pupil to enter the chamber outside of which the master stood all his life, and could not enter, and saw only by peering furtively through the chinks of the door.

Rachmaninoff

It was in an interview given at the beginning of his recent American tour that M. Sergei Rachmaninoff styled himself a "musical evolutionist." The phrase, doubtless uttered half in jest, is scarcely nice. It is one of those terms that are so loose that they are well-nigh meaningless. Nevertheless, there was significance in M. Rachmaninoff's use of it. For he employed it as an apology for his work. His music is evidently wanting in boldness. On the whole it is cautious and traditional. Even those who are not professionally on the side of the musical anarchs find it somewhat unventuresome, too smooth and soft and elegantly elegiac, too dull. And in substituting for revolutionism a formula for musical progress less suggestive of violent change, more suggestive of a process like the tranquil, gradual and orderly unfolding of bud into blossom, was not M. Rachmaninoff very lightly and cleverly discrediting the apparently revolutionary work of certain of his fellows, and seeking to reveal a hitherto unsuspected solidity in his own?

However, it is questionable whether he was successful, whether the implications of the phrase do quite manage to manœuver his work into genuine importance. No doubt, music does not invariably reform itself[Pg 170] through the process we call revolutionary. It is a commonplace that there have been many composers of primary rank who have originated no new syntax, no new system of chords and key-relationships. It is said that J. S. Bach himself did not invent a single harmony. There have been composers of genius who have done little to enlarge the physical boundaries of their art, have accepted the grammar of music from others, and have rounded an epoch instead of initiating a new one. Nevertheless, M. Rachmaninoff cannot quite be included in their company. There is as great a difference between him and composers of this somewhat conservative type as there is between him and the radical sort. For though the recomposition of music does not necessarily consist in the establishment of a new system, and can be fairly complete without it, it does consist in the impregnation of tone with new character and virtue.

Doubtless, M. Rachmaninoff is an accomplished and charming workman. He is almost uniformly suave and dexterous. The instances when he writes badly are not frequent. The C-sharp minor Prélude is, after all, something of a sport. No doubt, there are times, as in so many of the passages of the new version of his first piano concerto, when he seeks to dazzle with the opulence and clangor and glare of tones. However, as a rule, he writes politely. If the second concerto is a trifle too soft and elegiac and sweet, a little too[Pg 171] much like a mournful banqueting on jam and honey, it is still most deftly and ingratiatingly made. On the whole, even though his music touches us only superficially it rarely fails to awaken some gratitude for its elegance. But there is an essential that his music wants. It wants the imprint of a decided and important individuality. In all the elaborate score of "The Island of the Dead," in the very one of M. Rachmaninoff's works that is generally deemed his best, there are few accents that are either very large or very poignant or very noble. The music lacks distinction, lacks vitality. The style is strangely soft and unrefreshing. Emotion is communicated, no doubt. But it is emotion of a second or even third order. Nor is the music of M. Rachmaninoff ever quite completely new-minted. Has it a melodic line quite properly its own? One doubts it. Many of the melodies of M. Rachmaninoff have a Mendelssohnian cast, for all their Russian sheen. Others are of the sort of sweet, spiritless silken tune generally characteristic of the Russian salon school. Nor can one discover in this music a distinctly original sense of either rhythm of harmony or tone-color. The E-minor Symphony, for all its competence and smoothness, is full of the color and quality and atmosphere of Tchaikowsky. It is Tchaikowsky without the hysteria, perhaps, but also without the energy. In all the music of M. Rachmaninoff there is something strangely twice-told. From it there flows the[Pg 172] sadness distilled by all things that are a little useless.

There are to be found in every picture gallery canvases attributed, not to any single painter, but to an atelier, to the school of some great master. One finds charming pieces among them. Nor are they invariably the work of pupils who painted under the direction of some famous man. Quite as often they are the handiwork of artists who appeared independent enough to their patrons and to themselves. Their names and their persons were familiar to those who ordered pictures from them. It is only that in the course of time their names have come to be forgotten. For there is in their canvases little trace of the substance that causes people to cherish an individuality, and makes a name to be remembered. Other personalities have transpired through their brush-strokes, and have made it evident that behind the man who held the brush in his hand there was another who directed the strokes—the man upon whom the artist had modeled himself, the personality he preferred to his own. It is this reflectiveness that has caused the attribution of the work to ateliers.

And had M. Rachmaninoff instead of being a musician been a painter, would not a like destiny await his compositions? For do they not proceed from the point of departure of the entire brilliant school of piano-compositions? Are they not a sort of throw[Pg 173]back to the salon school, the school of velocity, of effect, of whatever Rubinstein and Liszt could desire? Are not the piano-pieces of M. Rachmaninoff the result of a relationship to the instrument that is fast becoming outmoded? There was some slight justification for the pompous and empty work of his models. The concerti, the often flashy and tinselly pianoforte compositions of Liszt and Rubinstein were the immediate and surface result of that deeper sense of the instrument which arrived during the nineteenth century, and intoxicated folk with the piano timbres, and made them eager to hear its many voices in no matter how crude a form. A whole school of facile virtuosi arose in response to the demand. Since then, however, we have gotten a subtler sense of the instrument. We no longer require so insensitive a display. And together with those rather gross piano-works the piece par excellence characteristic of the period, the brilliant piano-concerto with its prancing instrument embedded in the pomp and clangor and ululation of the band, has lost in favor steadily. The modern men no longer write concerti. When they introduce a pianoforte into the orchestra, they either, like Brahms, treat it as the premier instrument, and write symphonies, or, like Scriabine and Strawinsky, reduce it to the common level. But M. Rachmaninoff has not participated in this change of attitude. He is still content with music that toys with the piano[Pg 174]forte. And he writes concerti of the old type. He writes pieces full of the old astounding musical dislocation. Phrases of an apparent intensity and lyricism are negated by frivolous and tinkling passage-work. Take away the sound and fury signifying nothing from the third concerto, and what is left? There was a day, perhaps, when such work served. But another has succeeded to it. And so M. Rachmaninoff comes amongst us like a very charming and amiable ghost.

For that, however, let us not fail to be duly grateful. Let us not fail to give thanks for the fact that setting forever is the conception of music as an after-dinner cordial, a box of assorted bonbons, bric-à-brac, a titillation, a tepid bath, a performance that amuses and caresses and whiles away a half-hour, an enchantment for boarding-school misses, an opportunity for virtuosi to glorify themselves.

One of the curious things about M. Rachmaninoff's season is the fact that it has not only brought him into prominence amongst us, but that it has brought into relief other composers through him. It has brought into relief the entire group of Russian musicians to which he belongs. It has evaluated the pretensions of the two conflicting schools of Russian music nicely. The school of which M. Rachmaninoff is perhaps the chief living representative, and which was represented at various times by Rubinstein and[Pg 175] Tchaikowsky and Arensky, is usually dubbed "universal" by its partisans. It is supposed to have its traditions in general European music, and to be a continuation of the art of the romanticists, in particular of the art of Chopin and Schumann. But for the men of the opposing faction, the men who accepted only the Russian folk-song as their touchstone, and sought in their work to find a modern equivalent for it, the music of this school was alien and sophisticated, as sophisticated as the pseudo-French culture of the Petrograd drawing-rooms. For them, the music of Tchaikowsky, even, was the result of the manipulation of themes of Slavic color according to formulas abstracted from classical music. Without regard, however, for any question of musical theory; apart from all question of the value for us of the science of the classical masters, one finds oneself of this opinion. For the music brought forward by the visit of the composer who is at present in this country as envoy of his school, convinces us that the work of the men of his party, elegant and brilliant as it often is, is the work of men essentially unresponsive to the appeal of their compatriots. For them, as it is for every Russian musician, Russia was without their windows, appealing dumbly for expression of its wild, ungoverned energy, its misery, its rich and childish laughter, its deep, great Christianity. It wanted a music that would have the accents of its rude, large-hearted[Pg 176] speech, and that would, like its speech, express its essential reactions, its consciousness. And some men there were, Moussorgsky and Borodin, who were quick enough of imagination to become the instruments of their folk and respond to its need. And so, when we would hear Russian speech, we go to them as we go to Dostoievsky and to Tolstoy. It is in "Boris" and "Prince Igor" as richly as it is in any work. But the men of the other school did not hear the appeal. They sat in their luxurious and Parisian houses behind closed windows.

Scriabine

There are solemn and gorgeous pages in the symphonic poems of Scriabine. And yet, despite their effulgence, their manifold splendors, their hieratic gestures, these works are not his most individual and significant. Save only the lambent "Prometheus," they each reveal to some degree the influence of Wagner. The "Idyl" of the Second Symphony, for instance, is dangerously close to the "Waldweben" in "Siegfried," although, to be sure, Scriabine's forest is rather more the perfumed and rose-lit woodland, Wagner's the fresh primeval wilderness. The "Poème de l'extase," with its oceanic tides of voluptuously entangled bodies, is a sort of Tannhäuser "Bacchanale" modernized, enlarged, and intensely sharpened. For, in spite of the fact that at moments he handled it with rare sympathy, the orchestra was not his proper medium. The piano was his instrument. It is only in composition for that medium that he expressed indelibly his exquisite, luminously poetic, almost disquieting temper, and definitely recorded himself.

There have been few composers more finely conscious of the piano. There have been few who have more fully plumbed its resources, few who have held it in greater reverence, few who have hearkened more[Pg 178] solicitously to its voice that is so different from the voices of other instruments. Of all piano music, only that of Debussy and Ravel seems as thoroughly steeped in the essential color of the medium, seems to lie as completely in the black and white keys, part of them, not imposed on them. And Scriabine, the barbarian and romanticist, is even more free of the hues of the keyboard than they, the Latins, the classicists. His works make one keenly aware of the rhythmical, the formalistic limitations of Chopin's piano pieces, of the steeliness of much of Brahms', of the shallow brilliancy, the theatricality, of Liszt's. They even make us feel at moments as though in them had been realized the definitive pianistic style, that the hour of transition to the new keyboard of quarter tones was nigh. For Scriabine appears to have wakened in the piano all its latent animality. Under his touch it loses its old mechanical being, cries and chants like a bird, becomes at instants cat, serpent, flower, woman. It is as if the currents of the man's life had set with mysterious strength toward the instrument, till it became for him an eternally fresh and marvelous experience, till between him and the inanimate thing there came to be an interchange of life. There is the rarest of science in his style, especially in that of his last period, when his own individuality broke so marvelously into flower. He wrote for it as one of two persons who had shared life to[Pg 179]gether might address the other, well aware with what complexity and profundity a smile, a gesture, a brief phrase, would reverberate. No one has caressed it more lightly, more tenderly, more voluptuously. No one has made of the piano-trill, for instance, more luminous and quivering a thing. And because he was so sensitive to his medium, the medium lured from out him his creative strength.

He grew to his high poetic stature from an elegant and aristocratic craftsman of the school of Chopin. More than that of any modern master, his art is rooted in the great romantic tradition as it comes to us through Chopin, Wagner, Liszt and Strauss; and develops almost logically out of it. And in the compositions of his first period, the period that ends, roughly, with the piano concerto, the allegiance is marked, the discipleship undeniable. The influence of Chopin is ubiquitous. Scriabine writes mazurkas, preludes, études, nocturnes and waltzes in his master's cool, polite, fastidious general manner. These pieces, too, might seem to have been written in order to be played in noble salons lit by massive candelabra, to countesses with bare shoulders. The twenty-four preludes Opus 11, for instance, are full of Chopinesque turns, of Chopinesque morbidezza, of Chopinesque melodies. The harmonic scheme rarely transgresses the limits which Chopin set himself. The pieces are obviously the work of one who in the course of concert-playing has come[Pg 180] to discover the finesses of the Pole's workmanship. And yet, César Cui's caustic description of the preludes as "Bits filched from Chopin's trousseau," is eminently unjust. For even in those days, when Scriabine was a member of the Russian salon school, there were attractive original elements in his compositions. There is real poetry and freshness in these soft-colored pieces. The treatment of the instrument is bold, and, at moments, more satisfactory than Chopin's. Scriabine, for instance, gives the left hand a greater independence and significance than does as a rule his master. Nor does he indulge in the repetitions and recapitulations that mar so many of the latter's works. His sense of form is already alert. And through the silken melodic line, the sweet, rich harmonies, there already makes itself felt something that is to Chopin's spirit as Russian iron is to Polish silver.

It is perhaps only in the compositions subsequent to Opus 50 that Scriabine emerges in the fullness of his stature. For it is only in them that he finally abandoned the major-minor system to which he had hitherto adhered, and substituted for it the other that permitted his exquisite delicious sense of pianistic color, his infinitely delicate gift of melody, his gorgeous, far-spreading harmonic feeling, free play. And it is only in these later pieces that he achieved the perfection of form, particularly of the sonata form, of which the Ninth Sonata is the magistral example, and which[Pg 181] makes his craft comparable to Bach's in its mastery of a medium, and enables one to mention the "Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue" and the Ninth Sonata justly in a single breath. And yet, the compositions of the middle period, the one that follows immediately the early, immature, Chopinesque period, are scarcely less rich and refined, scarcely less important. No doubt the influence of Scriabine's masters, though considerably on the wane, is still evident. The "Poème satanique" refines on Liszt. The Third Sonata, despite its lambent andante, is patently the work of one who has studied his Liszt and loves his Chopin. And yet, these works are characteristically male and raging and proud. And in all the works of this period there appears something new and magnificent that has scarcely before informed piano music. There is a truly Russian depth and vehemence and largeness in this now languid, now mystical, now leonine music, that lifts it entirely out of the company of the works of the Petrograd salon school into that of those composers who made orchestra and opera speak in the national tongue. The rhythms are joyously, barbarically, at times almost frenetically, free. They are finely various and depart almost entirely from the one-two, one-two, the one-two-three, one-two-three that makes monotonous so much of Chopin. At moments, the tones of the piano march with some of the now festive, now majestic, now solemn, movement of the orchestral processionals of a[Pg 182] Moussorgsky and a Borodin. And one has the sense of having encountered only in sumptuous Eastern stuffs, in silken carpets and golden mosaics, or in the orchestral faëry of some of the Russian composers, in the orchestral chemistry of, say, a Rimsky-Korsakoff, such brimming, delicious colors. Nevertheless, the voluptuousness and vehemence are held in fastidious restraint. Scriabine is always the fine gentleman, intolerant, for all the splendor of his style, of any excess, of any exaggeration, of any breach of taste. And throughout the work, there is evidence of the steady, restless bourgeoning of the exquisite, disquieting, almost Chinese delicacy which in the work of the last period attains its marvelous efflorescence.

These final works, these last sonatas and poems and preludes of Scriabine are but the essentialization of the personal traits adumbrated by the compositions of the earlier periods. It is as if in adopting the system based on the "mystic chord" that persisted in his imagination, the chord built up in fourths from the tones c, d, e, f-sharp, a, b, he had managed to rid himself of all the influence of the classic masters, to give every note that he employs an intense, poignant, new value, and through that revolution to achieve form comparable to the most eminent. His fantasy ranges over the keyboard with complete freedom; he creates new rhythms, new combinations of tones that cause the hands of the performer to become possessed of a new[Pg 183] and curious intelligence, to make significant gestures, and to move with a delightful life. And these latter compositions are entirely structure, entirely bone. There is a complete economy. There is not a note in the Ninth Sonata, for instance, that is not necessary, and does not seem to have great significance. Here everything is speech. The work actually develops out of the quavering first few bars. The vast resonant peroration only gathers into a single, furious, tragic pronouncement the material deployed in the body of the work. Scarcely ever has the binary form, the combat between two contradictory themes, been more essentialized. Scarcely ever has the prelude-form been reduced to simpler terms than in the preludes of Scriabine. These works are indeed radical. For they give us a fresh glimpse of the archetype of their forms.

And yet, how strange, how infinitely complex and novel a thing they are. There is indeed little music that throws into sharper relief the miracle of communication through material form. A few sounds, broken and elusive, are struck out of an instrument, die away again. And yet, through those vibrations, life for an instant is made incandescent. It is as though much that has hitherto been shy and lonely experience has undergone a sudden change into something clarified and universal. It is as though performer and auditor have themselves been transformed into more sensitive instruments, and prepared to par[Pg 184]ticipate more graciously in the common experience. It is as though in each one the ability to feel beauty has been quickened, that each for an instant becomes the man who has never before seen the spring come over the land, and who, glancing upward, for the first time beholds an apple-bough flowering against the blue. And Scriabine fills one with the need of making wonderful and winged gestures. It is as if for instants he transforms one into strange and radiant and ecstatic beings, into new and wonderful things.

For this music is full of the wizardry of perhaps the most exquisite sensibility that has for a long while disclosed itself in music. Perhaps only in the Far East, perhaps only among the Chinese, have more delicious and dainty and ecstatic tempers uttered themselves in music. Beside this man, with his music that is like clustering flowers breaking suddenly from the cool and shadowy earth, or like the beating of luminous wings in the infinite azure, or like the whispers of one sinking from the world in mortal illness, Debussy, even, seems cool, silvered by the fine temperance of France. For Scriabine must have suffered an almost inordinate subjugation to the manifestations of beauty, must have been consumed with a passion for communicating his burningly poignant adventures. There are moments when he seems scarcely able to speak, so intense, so enrapturing, is his voluptuous sensation. Indeed, the sensuality is at times so in[Pg 185]tensely communicated that it almost excites pain as well as pleasure. If there is any music that seems to hover on the borderland between ecstasy and suffering, it is this. One shrinks from it as from some too poignant revelation. One cannot breathe for long in this ether. Small wonder that Scriabine sought all his life to flee into states of transport, to invent a religion of ecstasy. For one weighed with the terrible burden of so vibrant a sensibility, there could be no other means of existence.

And the gesture of flight is present throughout his music. Throughout it, one hears the beating of wings. Sometimes, it is the light flutter of glistening ephemeridæ that wheel and skim delightfully through the limpid azure. Sometimes it is the passionate fanning of wings preparing themselves for swift sharp ascents. Sometimes, it is the drooping of pinions that sink brokenly. For all these pieces are "Poèmes ailés," flights toward some island of the blest. They are all aspirations "vers la flamme," toward the spiritual fire of joy, toward the paradise of divine pleasure and divine activity. The Fifth Sonata is like the marshaling of forces, the mighty spring of some radiant flyer launching himself into the empyrean. White gleaming pinions wheel and hover in the godlike close of the "Poème divine." Impotent caged wings poise themselves for flight in the mystic Seventh Sonata, beat for an instant, are ominously still. Sometimes,[Pg 186] as in the Eighth Sonata, Scriabine is like a gorgeous tropical bird preening himself in the quivering river light. Sometimes he is a seraphic creature outspreading his mighty pinions to greet some tremendous spirit sunrise. And in those last, bleeding, agonizing preludes, there is still the breath of flight. But this time it is another motion. Is it "the wind of death's imperishable wing"? Is it the blind hovering of the spirit that has quit its earthly habitation in the moment of dissolution? One cannot tell.

And it was the flight of ecstasy that he sought to achieve in his symphonic poems. He had made for himself a curious personal religion, a bizarre mixture of theosophy and neoplatonism and Bergsonian philosophy, a faith that prescribed transport; and these works were in part conceived as rituals. They were planned as ceremonies of elevation and deification by ecstasy, in which performers and auditors engaged as active and passive celebrants. Together they were to ascend from plane to plane of delight, experiencing divine struggle and divine bliss and divine creativity. The music was to call the soul through the gate of the sense of hearing, to lead it, slowly, hieratically, up through circle after circle of heaven, until the mystical gongs boomed and the mass emotion reached the Father of Souls, and was become God. With Jules Romains, Scriabine would have cried to his audiences:[Pg 187]

"Tu vas mourir tantot, sous le poids de tes heures:

Les hommes, delies, glisseront par les portes,

Les ongles de la nuit t'arracheront la chair.

Qu'importe!

Tu es mienne avant que tu sois morte;

Les corps qui sont ici, la ville peut les prendre;

Ils garderont au front comme une croix de cendre

Le vestige du dieu que tu es maintenant!"

In "Prometheus" he introduces a clavier à lumière into his orchestra, vainly hoping to induce the ecstasy through color as well as sound, and after his death there was found among his papers a sketch for a "Mysteria" in which the music was to be conjoined not only with light, but with dance and perfume as well. It is a pity it was not granted him to achieve this work. The theosophic programs of his orchestral works are, after all, innocuous. Much of the half-mystical, half-sensual coloration of his orchestra is due them. And had the score of the "Mysteria" been as much an improvement over that of "Prometheus" as "Prometheus" is over the other symphonic works, Scriabine might indeed have proved himself as eminent a writer for the orchestra as for the piano.

It is indeed likely that to-morrow the world will find in his piano-works its new Chopin, that Scriabine will shortly be given the place once occupied by the other. For not only is he in many ways the artistic superior of the man who once was his master. He is,[Pg 188] as well, one of the beings in which the age that is slowly expiring about us became conscious and articulate. Russia bore him, it is true, elemented him, gave him her childlike tenderness and barbaric richness and mystic light. But in developing out of the Russian "universal" school into perfect liberty and individuality, he became indeed a universal expression, the first really produced by the group. He became, like the intensely "national" Strawinsky, one of those men into whom an age enters. He is symbolic of his time. He seems to have felt his age's life in its intensest form. The hour that created him was an hour in which the power of feeling had waxed inordinately, almost to the point of hampering action, when an Asiatic delicacy had begun to be manifest in Western character, when the fusion of Europe and Asia was commencing to make itself felt. And in Scriabine, that new intensity of sensation attained something near to heroic supernatural stature. What was beautiful and sick in his age entered into his art. Through it, we learn, not a little, how we feel.

His music was a thing created in the flesh of a man, out of his agony. "Eine Entwicklung ist ein Schicksal," Thomas Mann once wrote. For Scriabine, the awakening of that aërial palpitant sensibility was such. It devoured him like a fire. One shudders as well as marvels at the destiny of one who came to feel life as it is felt in those last quivering poems—"Guir[Pg 189]landes," "Flammes sombres," he entitles them,—or in the mysterious Tenth Sonata, that glows with the feverish light of the dream, or in those last haunted preludes. Existence for the man who could write such music, in which unearthly rapture contrasts with unearthly suffering, must have been a sort of exquisite martyrdom. The man must have been indeed a nerve exposed. And, like a fragile thing suddenly ignited, he flared up, fiercely, magnificently, and went out.

Strawinsky

The new steel organs of man have begotten their music in "Le Sacre du printemps." For with Strawinsky, the rhythms of machinery enter musical art. With this his magistral work a new chapter of music commences, the spiritualization of the new body of man is manifest. Through Debussy, music had liquified, become opalescent and impalpable and fluent. It had become, because of his sense, his generation's sense, of the infirmity of things, a sort of symbol of the eternal flux, the eternal momentariness. It had come to body forth all that merges and changes and disappears, to mirror the incessant departures and evanescences of life, to shape itself upon the infinitely subtle play of light, the restless, heaving, foaming surface of the sea, the impalpable racks of perfume, upon gusts of wind and fading sounds, upon all the ephemeral wonder of the world. But through Strawinsky, there has come to be a music stylistically well-nigh the reverse of that of the impressionists. Through him, music has become again cubical, lapidary, massive, mechanistic. Scintillation is gone out of it. The delicate, sinuous melodic line, the glamorous sheeny harmonies, are gone out of it. The elegance of Debussy, the golden sensuality, the quiet, classic touch,[Pg 192] are flown. Instead, there are come to be great, weighty, metallic masses, molten piles and sheets of steel and iron, shining adamantine bulks. Contours are become grim, severe, angular. Melodies are sharp, rigid, asymmetrical. Chords are uncouth, square clusters of notes, stout and solid as the pillars that support roofs, heavy as the thuds of triphammers. Above all, there is rhythm, rhythm rectangular and sheer and emphatic, rhythm that lunges and beats and reiterates and dances with all the steely perfect tirelessness of the machine, shoots out and draws back, shoots upward and shoots down, with the inhuman motion of titanic arms of steel. Indeed, the change is as radical, as complete, as though in the midst of moonlit noble gardens a giant machine had arisen swiftly from the ground and inundated the night with electrical glare and set its metal thews and organs and joints relentlessly whirring, relentlessly functioning.

And yet, the two styles, Debussy's and Strawinsky's, are related. Indeed, they are complementary. They are the reactions to the same stimulus of two fundamentally different types of mind. No doubt, between the two men there exist differences besides those of their general fashions of thinking. The temper of Debussy was profoundly sensuous and aristocratic and contained. That of Strawinsky is nervous and ironic and violent. The one man issued from an unbroken tradition, was produced by generations and generations[Pg 193] of gentlemen. The other is one of those beings who seem to have been called into existence solely by the modern way of life, by express trains and ocean greyhounds, by the shrinkage of continents and the vibration of the twentieth-century world. But the chief difference, the difference that made "Le Sacre du printemps" almost antithetical to "Pelléas et Mélisande," is essentially the divergence between two cardinal manners of apprehending life. Debussy, on the one hand, seems to be of the sort of men in whom the center of conscience is, figuratively, sunken; one of those who have within themselves some immobility that makes the people and the things about them appear fleeting and unreal. For such, the world is a far distant thing, lying out on the rims of consciousness, delicate and impermanent as sunset hues or the lights and gestures of the dream. The music of Debussy is the magistral and classic picture of this distant and glamorous procession, this illusory and fantastical and transparent show, this thing that changes from moment to moment and is never twice the same, and flows away from us so quickly. But Strawinsky, on the other hand, is in the very midst of the thing so distant from the other man. For him, the material world is very real, sharp, immediate. He loves it, enjoys it, is excited by its many forms. He is vividly responsive to its traffic. Things make an immediate and biting impression on him, stimulate in him pleas[Pg 194]ure and pain. He feels their edge and knows it hard, feels their weight and knows it heavy, feels their motion in all its violence. There is in Strawinsky an almost frenetic delight in the processes that go on about him. He goes through the crowded thoroughfares, through cluttered places, through factories, hotels, wharves, sits in railway trains, and the glare and tumult and pulsation, the engines and locomotives and cranes, the whole mad phantasmagoria of the modern city, evoke images in him, inflame him to reproduce them in all their weight and gianthood and mass, their blackness and luridness and power. The most vulgar things and events excite him. The traffic, the restlessness of crowds, the noise of vehicles, of the clatter of horses on the asphalt, of human cries and calls sounding above the street-bass, a couple of organ grinders trying to outplay each other, a brass band coming down the avenue, the thunder of a railway train hurling itself over leagues of steel, the sirens of steamboats and locomotives, the overtones of factory whistles, the roar of cities and harbors, become music to him. In one of his early orchestral sketches, he imitates the buzzing of a hive of bees. One of his miniatures for string-quartet bangs with the beat of the wooden shoes of peasants dancing to the snarling tones of a bagpipe. Another reproduces the droning of the priest in a little chapel, recreates the scene almost cruelly. And the score of "Petruchka" is alive[Pg 195] marvelously with the rank, garish life of a cheap fair. Its bubbling flutes, seething instrumental caldron, concertina-rhythms and bright, gaudy colors conjure up the movement of the crowds that surge about the amusement booths, paint to the life the little flying flags, the gestures of the showmen, the bright balloons, the shooting-galleries, the gipsy tents, the crudely stained canvas walls, the groups of coachmen and servant girls and children in their holiday finery. At moments one can even smell the sausages frying.

For Strawinsky is one of those composers, found scattered all along the pathway of his art, who augment the expressiveness of music through direct imitation of nature. His imagination seems to be free, bound in nowise by what other men have adjudged music to be, and by what their practice has made it seem. He comes to his art without prejudice or preconception of any kind, it appears. He plays with its elements as capriciously as the child plays with paper and crayons. He amuses himself with each instrument of the band careless of its customary uses. There are times when Strawinsky comes into the solemn conclave of musicians like a gamin with trumpet and drum. He disports himself with the infinitely dignified string-quartet, makes it do light and acrobatic things. There is one interlude of "Petruchka" that is written for snare-drums alone. His work is incrusted with cheap waltzes and barrel-organ tunes. It is gamy and racy[Pg 196] in style; full of musical slang. He makes the orchestra imitate the quavering of an old hurdy-gurdy. Of late he has written a ballet for eight clowns. And he is reported to have said, "I should like to bring it about that music be performed in street-cars, while people get out and get in." For he finds his greatest enemy in the concert-room, that rut that limits the play of the imagination of audiences, that fortress in which all of the intentions of the men of the past have established themselves, and from which they dominate the musical present. The concert-room has succeeded in making music a drug, a sedative, has created a "musical attitude" in folk that is false, and robbed musical art of its power. For Strawinsky music is either an infection, the communication of a lyrical impulse, or nothing at all. And so he would have it performed in ordinary places of congregation, at fairs, in taverns, music-halls, street-cars, if you will, in order to enable it to function freely once again. His art is pointed to quicken, to infect, to begin an action that the listener must complete within himself. It is a sort of musical shorthand. On paper, it has a fragmentary look. It is as though Strawinsky had sought to reduce the elements of music to their sharpest and simplest terms, had hoped that the "development" would be made by the audience. He seems to feel that if he cannot achieve his end, the communication of his lyrical impulse, with a single strong motif, a single strong move[Pg 197]ment of tones, a single rhythmic start, he cannot achieve it at all. So we find him writing songs, the three Japanese lyrics, for instance, that are epigrammatic in their brevity; a piece for string-quartet that is played in fifty seconds; a three-act opera that can be performed in thirty minutes.

But it is no experiment in form that he is making. He seems to bring into music some of the power of the Chinese artists who, in the painting of a twig, or of a pair of blossoms, represent the entire springtide. He has written some of the freshest, most rippling, delicate music. Scarcely a living man has written more freshly or humorously. April, the flowering branches, the snowing petals, the clouds high in the blue, are really in the shrilling little orchestra of the Japanese lyrics, in the green, gurgling flutes and watery violins. None of the innumerable Spring Symphonies, Spring Overtures, Spring Songs, are really more vernal, more soaked in the gentle sunshine of spring, are more really the seed-time, than the six naïve piping measures of melody that introduce the figure of the "Sacre" entitled "Rondes printanières." No doubt, in venturing to write music so bold and original in esthetic, Strawinsky was encouraged by the example of another musician, another Russian composer. Moussorgsky, before him, had trusted in his own innocence instead of in the wisdom of the fathers of the musical church, had dared obey the promptings of[Pg 198] his own blood and set down chords, melodies, rhythms, just as they sang in his skull, though all the world rise up to damn him. But the penning of music as jagged, cubical, barbarous as the prelude to the third act of Strawinsky's little opera, "The Nightingale," or as naked, uncouth, rectangular, rocklike, polyharmonic, headlong, as some of that of "Le Sacre du printemps" required no less perfect a conviction, no less great a self-reliance. The music of Strawinsky is the expression of an innocence comparable indeed to that of his great predecessor. "Le Sacre du printemps" is what its composer termed it. It is "an act of faith."

And so, free of preconceptions, Strawinsky was able to let nature move him to imitation. Just as Picasso brings twentieth-century nature into his still lives, so the young composer brings it into his music. It is the rhythm of machinery that has set Strawinsky the artist free. All his life he has been conscious of these steel men. Mechanical things have influenced his art from the beginning. It is as though machinery had revealed him to himself, as though sight of the functioning of these metal organisms, themselves but the extension of human bones and muscles and organs, had awakened into play the engine that is his proper body. For, as James Oppenheim has put it in the introduction to "The Book of Self," "Man's body is just as large as his tools, for a tool is merely an extension of muscle and bone; a wheel is a swifter foot, a[Pg 199] derrick a greater hand. Consequently, in the early part of the century, the race found itself with a new gigantic body." It is as though the infection of the dancing, lunging, pumping piston-rods, walking beams, drills, has awakened out of Strawinsky a response and given him his power to beat out rhythm. The machine has always fascinated him. One of his first original compositions, written while he was yet a pupil of Rimsky-Korsakoff's, imitates fireworks, distinguishes what is human in their activity, in the popping, hissing, exploding, in the hysterical weeping of the fiery fountains, the proud exhibitions and sudden collapses of the pin-wheels. It is the machine, enemy of man, that is pictured by "The Nightingale," that curious work of which one act dates from 1909, and two from 1914. Strawinsky had the libretto formed on the tale of Hans Christian Andersen which recounts the adventures of the little brown bird that sings so beautifully that the Emperor of China bids it to his court. Strawinsky's nightingale, too, comes to the palace and sings, and all the ladies of the entourage fill their mouths with water in the hopes of better imitating the warbling of the songster. But then there enter envoys bearing the gift of the Emperor of Japan, a mechanical nightingale that amuses the court with its clockwork antics. Once more the emperor commands the woodland bird to sing. But it is flown. In his rage the emperor banishes it from his realm. Then[Pg 200] Death comes and sits at the emperor's bedside, and steals from him crown and scepter, till, of a sudden, the Nightingale returns, and sings, and makes Death relinquish his spoils. And the courtiers who come into the imperial bedchamber expecting to find the monarch dead, find him well and glad in the morning sunshine.

And in his two major works, "Petruchka" and "Le Sacre du printemps," Strawinsky makes the machine represent his own person. For the actions of machinery woke first in the human organism, and Strawinsky intensifies consciousness of the body by referring these motions to their origin. "Petruchka" is the man-machine seen from without, seen unsympathetically, in its comic aspect. Countless poets before Strawinsky have attempted to portray the puppet-like activities of the human being, and "Petruchka" is but one of the recent of innumerable stage-shows that expose the automaton in the human soul. But the puppet-show of Strawinsky is singular because of its musical accompaniment. For more than even the mimes on the stage, the orchestra is full of the spirit of the automaton. The angular, wooden gestures of the dolls, their smudged faces, their entrails of sawdust, are in the music ten times as intensely as they are upon the stage. In the score of "Petruchka" music itself has become a little mannikin in parti-colored clothes, at which Strawinsky gazes and laughs[Pg 201] as a child laughs at a funny doll, and makes dance and tosses in the air, and sends sprawling. The score is full of the revolutions of wheels, of delicate clockwork movements, of screws and turbines. Beneath the music one hears always the regular, insistent, maniacal breathing of a concertina. And what in it is not purely mechanistic nevertheless completes the picture of the world as it appears to one who has seen the man-machine in all its comedy. The stage pictures, the trumpery little fair, the tinsel and pathetic finery of the crowds, the dancing of the human ephemeridæ a moment before the snow begins to fall, are stained marvelously deeply by the music. The score has the colors of crudely dyed, faded bunting. It has indeed a servant girl grace, a coachman ardor, a barrel-organ, tintype, popcorn, fortune-teller flavor.

"Le Sacre," on the other hand, is the man-machine viewed not from without, and unsympathetically, but from within. So far, it is Strawinsky's masterwork, the completest and purest expression of his genius. For the elements that make for the originality of style of "Petruchka" and the other of Strawinsky's representative compositions, in this work attain a signal largeness and powerfulness. The rhythmic element, already fresh and free in the scherzo of "L'Oiseau de feu" and throughout "Petruchka," attains virile and magistral might in it, surges and thunders with giant vigor. The instrumentation, magical[Pg 202] with all the magic of the Russian masters in the earlier ballets, here is informed by the sharpness, hardness, nakedness which is originally Strawinsky's. Besides, the latter work has the thing hitherto lacking somewhat in the young man's art—grandeur and severity and ironness of language. In it he stands completely new, completely in possession of his powers. And in it the machine operates. Ostensibly, the action of the ballet is laid in prehistoric times. Ostensibly, it figures the ritual with which a tribe of stone-age Russians consecrated the spring. Something of the sort was necessary, for an actual representation of machines, a ballet of machines, would not have been as grimly significant as the angular, uncouth gestures of men, would by no means have as nakedly revealed the human engine. Here, in the choreography, every fluid, supple, curving motion is suppressed. Everything is angular, cubical, rectilinear. The music pounds with the rhythm of engines, whirls and spirals like screws and fly-wheels, grinds and shrieks like laboring metal. The orchestra is transmuted to steel. Each movement of the ballet correlates the rhythms of machinery with the human rhythms which they prolong and repeat. A dozen mills pulsate at once. Steam escapes; exhausts breathe heavily. The weird orchestral introduction to the second scene has all the oppressive silence of machines immobile at night. And in the hurtling finale the music and the dancers create[Pg 203] figure that is at once the piston and a sexual action. For Strawinsky has stripped away from man all that with which specialization, differentiation, have covered him, and revealed him again, in a sort of cruel white light, a few functioning organs. He has shown him a machine to which power is applied, and which labors in blind obedience precisely like the microscopic animal that eats and parturates and dies. The spring comes; and life replenishes itself; and man, like seed and germ, obeys the promptings of the blind power that created him, and accomplishes his predestined course and takes in energy and pours it out again. But, for a moment, in "Le Sacre du printemps," we feel the motor forces, watch the naked wheels and levers and arms at work, see the dynamo itself.

The ballet was completed in 1913, the year Strawinsky was thirty-one years old. It may be that the work will be succeeded by others even more original, more powerful. Or it may be that Strawinsky has already written his masterpiece. The works that he has composed during the war are not, it appears, strictly new developments. Whatever enlargement of the field of the string quartet the three little pieces which the Flonzaleys played here in 1915 created, there is no doubt that it was nothing at all to compare with the innovation in orchestral music created by the great ballet. And, according to rumor, the newest of Strawinsky's work, the music-hall ballet for eight clowns,[Pg 204] and the work for the orchestra, ballet and chorus entitled "Les Noces villageoises," are by no means as bold in style as "Le Sacre," and resemble "Petruchka" more than the later ballet. But, whatever Strawinsky's future accomplishment, there can be no doubt that with this one work, if not also with "Petruchka," he has secured a place among the true musicians. It is doubtful whether any living composer has opened new musical land more widely than he. For he has not only minted music anew. He has reached a point ahead of us that the world would have reached without him. That alone shows him the genius. He has brought into music something for which we had long been waiting, and which we knew must one day arrive. To us, at this moment, "Le Sacre du printemps" appears one of those compositions that mark off the musical miles.

Mahler

Almost simultaneously with the rise of Russian music and the new birth of French music, that of Germany has deteriorated. The great line of composers which descended from Bach and Haendel for two centuries has wavered and diminished visibly during the last three decades. The proud tradition seems to have reached a temporary halt in Wagner and Bruckner and Brahms. It may be that modern Germany is a difficult terrain, that the violent change in conditions of life, the furious acceleration, has created, for the time being, a soil unusually inimical to the disclosure of perfect works of art. The blight on the entire new generation of composers would seem to point to some such common cause. There is, no doubt, a curious coincidence in the fact that in each of the four chief German musicians of the recent period there should be manifest in some degree a failure of artistic instinct. The coarsening of the craftsmanship, the spiritual bankruptcy, of the later Strauss, the grotesque pedantry of Reger, the intellectualism with which the art of Schoenberg has always been tainted, and by which it has been corrupted of late, the banality of Mahler, dovetail suspiciously. And yet, it is probable that the cause lies otherwhere, and that the conjunction of[Pg 206] these four men is accidental. There have been, after all, few environments really friendly to the artist; most of the masters have had to recover from a "something rotten in the state of Denmark," and many of them have surmounted conditions worse than those of modern Bismarckian Germany. The cause of the unsatisfactoriness of much of the music of Strauss and Schoenberg, Reger and Mahler, is doubtless to be found in the innate weakness of the men themselves rather more than in the unhealthiness of the atmosphere in which they passed their lives.

Still, the case of Mahler makes one hesitate a while before passing judgment. Whereas it is probable that Richard Strauss would have deteriorated no matter how friendly the age in which he lived, that Reger would have been just as much a pedant had he been born in Paris instead of in Bavaria, that Schoenberg would have developed into his mathematical frigidity wherever he resided, it is possible that Mahler's fate might have been different had he not been born in the Austria of the 1860's. For if Mahler's music is pre-eminently a reflection of Beethoven's, if he never spoke in authentic accents, if out of his vast dreams of a great modern popular symphonic art, out of his honesty, his sincerity, his industry, his undeniably noble and magnificent traits, there resulted only those unhappy boring colossi that are his nine symphonies, it is indubitably, to a great extent, the consequence[Pg 207] of the fact that he, the Jew, was born in a society that made Judaism, Jewish descent and Jewish traits, a curse to those that inherited them. The destiny that had made him Jew decreed that, did he speak out fully, he would have to employ an idiom that would recall the harsh accents of the Hebrew language quite as much as that of any tongue spoken by the peoples of Europe. It decreed that, whatever the history of the art he practised, whatever the character of the age in which he lived, he could not impress himself upon his medium without impregnating it with the traits he inherited from his ancestors. It decreed that in speaking he would have to suffuse musical art with the qualities and characteristics engraved in the stock by the history and vicissitudes of his race, by its age-long sojourn in the deserts of Arabia and on the barren hills of Syria, by the constraint of its religion and folkways, by its titanic and terrible struggle for survival against the fierce peoples of Asia, by the marvelous vitality and self-consciousness and exclusiveness that carried it whole across lands and times, out of the eternal Egypt through the eternal Red Sea. But it was just the racial attributes, the racial gesture and accent, that a man in Mahler's position found inordinately difficult to register. For Austrian society put a great price on his suppression of them. It permitted him to participate in its activities only on the condition that he did not remind it continually of his[Pg 208] alienhood, of his racial consciousness. It permitted him the sense of equality, of fraternity, of citizenship, only on the condition that he should seek to suppress within himself all awareness of his descent and character and peculiarities, and attempt to identify himself with its members, and try to feel just as they felt and speak just as they spoke.

For if Austro-German society had admitted the Jews to civil rights, it had made them feel as never before the old hatred and malediction and exclusion. The walls of the ghettos had, after all, prevented the Jew from feeling the full force of the disability under which he labored, insomuch as they had repressed in him all desire to mingle in the life of the country in which he found himself. But in exciting his gregariousness, in appearing to allow him to participate in the public life, in both inviting and repelling him, a community like that of Austria, still so near the Middle Ages, made him feel in all its terrible might the handicap of race, the mad hatred and contempt with which it punished his descent. And it is but natural that amongst those very Jews best fitted to take part in affairs, and consequently most sensitive to the ill-will that barred them from power and success, there should be aroused, despite all conscious efforts neither to surrender nor to shrink, an unconscious desire to escape the consequences of the thing that stamped them in the eyes of the general as individuals of an inferior sort; to inhibit[Pg 209] any spiritual gesture that might arouse hostility; and to ward off any subjective sense of personal inferiority by convincing themselves and their fellows that they possessed the traits generally esteemed.

So a ruinous conflict was introduced into the soul of Gustav Mahler. In the place of the united self, there came to exist within him two men. For while one part of him demanded the free complete expression necessary to the artist, another sought to block it for fear that in the free flow the hated racial traits would appear. For Mahler would have been the first to have been repelled by the sound of his own harsh, haughty, guttural, abrupt Hebrew inflection. He would have been the first to turn in contempt from his own gestures. There was in him the frenetic unconscious desire to rid himself of the thing he had come to believe inferior. And rather than express it, rather than speak in his proper idiom, he made, unaware to himself, perhaps, the choice of speaking through the voices of other men, of the great German composers; of imitating them instead of developing his own personality; of accepting sterility and banality and impotence rather than achieving a power of speech.

And so his work became the doubtful and bastard thing it is, a thing of lofty and original intentions unrealized, of large powers misapplied, of great and respectable creative efforts that did not succeed in bringing into being anything really new, really whole. Of[Pg 210] what Mahler might have achieved had he not been the divided personality, his symphonies, even as they stand, leave no doubt. If Mahler is not a great man, he is at least the silhouette of one. The need of expression that drove him to composition was indubitably mighty. The passion with which he addressed himself to his labor despite all discouragement and lack of success, the loftiness and nobleness of the task which he set for himself, the splendor of the intentions, reveal how fierce a fire burnt in the man. He was not one of those who come to music to form little jewels. On the contrary, in gesture he was ever one of the eminently faithful. He came to music to create a great, simple, popular symphonic art for these latter days, a thing of broad lines and simple contours and spiritual grandeur. He sought to express sincerely his deep, real sorrow, his choking homesickness for the something which childhood seems to possess and maturity to be without; to dream himself into childlike, paradisaic joys and wake himself to faith and action once again. He attempted to create a musical language that would be gigantic and crude and powerful as Nature herself; tried to imbue the orchestra with the Dionysiac might of sun and winds and teeming clay; wished to be able to say of his symphonies, "Hier rörht die Natur." To a friend who visited him at his country house in Toblach and commented upon the mountains surrounding the spot, Mahler jestingly replied, "Ich[Pg 211] hab' sie alle fortcomponiert." And he had large and dramatic programs for his symphonies. The First should have been a sort of Song of Youth, a farewell to the thing that is alive in us before we meet the world, and is shattered in the collision. The Second should have been the Song of Death, the music of the knowledge of death. The Third was conceived as a Song of the Great Pan—his "gaya scienza," Mahler would have liked to call it. In the Fourth he sought to open the heart of a child; in the Sixth, to voice his desolation and loneliness and hopelessness; in the Eighth, to perform a great religious ceremony; in "Das Lied von der Erde" to write his "Tempest," his epilogue.

And in general plan, his symphonies are original enough. Mahler was completely emancipated of all the old prejudices concerning the nature of the symphony. He conceived the form anew. "Mir heiszt Symphonic," he is reported to have said, "mit allen mitteln der vorhändenen Technik mir eine Welt aufbauen." He conceived the form particularly with reference to the being, the exigencies, the frame, of the modern concert hall. He realized that the shortness of the classic symphonies handicaps them severely in the present day. For modern audiences require an hour and a half or two hours of musical entertainment. In order to fill the concert programs, the symphony has to be associated with other works. In consequence it[Pg 212] loses in effectiveness. So, taking hints from the Ninth of Beethoven and the "Roméo" of Berlioz, Mahler boldly planned symphonies that could stand alone and fill an evening. Beginning with his Second, he increased the number of movements, dropping the inevitable suite of allegro, andante, scherzo, rondo; prescribed intermissions of a certain length; and added choruses and vocal solos to give the necessary relief to the long orchestral passages. In the Second, he placed between an allegretto and a scherzo a soprano setting of one of the lyrics out of "Des Knaben Wunderhorn," and concluded the work with a choral setting of one ode of Klopstock's. In the Third Symphony, he preceded the orchestral finale with an alto solo composed on "Das Trunkene Lied" of Nietzsche, and with a chorus employing the words of another of the naïve poems in the anthology of Arnim and Brentano. The Eighth is simply a choral setting of the "Veni, Creator" and the closing scene of Goethe's "Faust." And in the Fifth Symphony, one of those in which he called for no vocal performers, he nevertheless managed to vary and expand the conventional suite by preceding the first allegro with a march, and separating and relieving the gargantuan scherzo and rondo with an adagietto for strings alone.

His material he organized fairly independently of the old rules. He was one of those who seem to have learned from Liszt that the content of a piece must[Pg 213] condition its form. Mahler's symphonies resemble symphonic poems. They are essentially dramatic in character. Although he strove continually for classic form, his works nevertheless reveal their programmatic origin. He was at heart one of the literary composers. But he was a better craftsman than most of them are. He was a finer workman than Strauss, for instance. His scores are much more bony. They are free of the mass of insignificant detail that clutters so many of Strauss's. He could asseverate with some justice, "I have never written an insincere note." And although his orchestration is not revolutionary, and is often commonplace enough, he nevertheless oftentimes employed an instrumental palette distinctly his own. He utilized instead of the violin the trumpet as premier instrument of the band; achieved all manner of brilliant effects with it. He increased the variety and usefulness of the instruments of percussion, forming out of them a new family of instruments to balance the families of the strings, brass, and wood-wind. In the score of the Second Symphony he calls for six timpani, bass and snare-drums, a high and a low tam-tam, cymbals, a triangle, glockenspiel, three deep-toned bells, in the chief orchestra; besides a bass-drum, triangle and cymbals in the supplementary. In the Eighth Symphony, the instruments of percussion form a little band by themselves. And he utilized the common instruments in original fashion, made the harps[Pg 214] imitate bells, the wood-wind blow fanfares, the horns hold organ-points; combined piccolos with bassoons and contrabasses, wrote unisons for eight horns, let the trombones run scales——

But there is not one of poor Mahler's nine symphonies, honest and dignified as some of them are, that exists as fresh, new-minted, vivid music. His genius never took musical flesh. His scores are lamentably weak, often arid and banal. There is surely not another case in musical history in which indubitable genius, a mighty need of expression, a distinctly personal manner of sensation, a respectable musical science, a great and idealistic effort, achieved results so unsatisfactory. One wonders whether Mahler the composer was not, after all, the greatest failure in music. If there is any music that is eminently Kapellmeistermusik, eminently a routine, reflective, dusty sort of musical art, it is certainly Mahler's five latter symphonies. The musical Desert of Sahara is surely to be found in these unhappy compositions. They are monsters of ennui, and by their very pretentiousness, their gargantuan dimensions, throw into cruelest relief Mahler's essential sterility. They seek to be colossal and achieve vacuity chiefly. They remind one of nothing so much as the huge, ugly, misshapen "giants" that stand before the old Palace in Florence, work of the obscure sculptor who thought to outdo Michelangelo by sheer bulk. And the first four of his sym[Pg 215]phonies, though less utterly banal and pedantic, are still amorphous and fundamentally second-hand. For Mahler never spoke in his own idiom. His style is a mongrel affair. The thematic material is almost entirely derivative and imitative, of an unequaled mediocrity and depressingness. One wonders whether indeed there has ever been a respectable composer who has utilized ideas as platitudinous as the ones employed in the first movement of the First Symphony, or the brassy, pompous theme that opens the Eighth, or the tune to which in the latter work the mystic stanza beginning

"Alles vergängliche

Ist nur ein Gleichnisz"

is intoned. One wonders whether any has used themes more saccharine and characterless than those of the last movement of the Third Symphony, or the adagio of the Fourth. Once in a while, no doubt, a vague personal tone, a flavor of the Bohemian countryside where Mahler was born, does manage to distinguish itself from the great inchoate masses of his symphonies. The strolling musician plays on his clarinet; peasants sit at tables covered with red cloths and drink beer; Hans and Gretel dance; evening falls; the brooks run silvered; from the barracks resound the Austrian bugle calls; old soldier songs, that may have been sung in the Seven Years' War, arise; the watchman makes his sleepy rounds.

[Pg 216]But, for the most part, it is precisely the personal tone that his music completely lacks. For he was never himself. He was everybody and nobody. He was forever seeking to be one composer or another, save only not Gustav Mahler. The fatal assimilative power of the Jew is revealed nowhere in music more sheerly than in the style of Mahler. Romain Rolland discovers alone in the Fifth Symphony reminiscences of Beethoven and Mendelssohn, Bach and Chabrier. Schubert flits persistently through Mahler's scores, particularly through that of the Third Symphony, whose introductory theme for eight horns recalls almost pointedly the opening of the C-major of Schubert, without, however, in the least recapturing its effectiveness. Bruckner, Mahler's teacher, is also incessantly reflected by these works, by the choral themes which Mahler is so fond of embodying in his compositions, and, more particularly, by the length and involutions of so many of the themes of his later symphonies. For, like Bruckner's, they appear chosen with an eye to their serviceability for contrapuntal deformation and dissection. Wagner, Haydn, Schumann and Brahms, the sentimental Wienerwald Brahms, also pass incessantly through these scores. But it was Beethoven whom Mahler sought chiefly to emulate. Over his symphonies (and it is a curious fact that Mahler, like the three men that he most frequently imitated, Schubert, Bruckner, and Beethoven, wrote[Pg 217] just nine symphonies), over his entire work, his songs as well as his orchestral pieces, there lies the shadow of the Master of Bonn. Mahler was undoubtedly Beethoven's most faithful disciple. All his life he was seeking to write the "Tenth Symphony," the symphony that Beethoven died before composing. He was continually attempting to approximate the other's grand, pathetic tone, his broad and self-righteous manner. His music is full of but slightly disguised quotations. The trumpet-theme that ushers in Mahler's Fifth Symphony, for instance, appears the result of an attempt to cross the theme of the funeral march of the "Eroica Symphony" with the famous four raps of Beethoven's Fifth. In the first movement of the Second Symphony, just before the appearance on the oboe of the scarcely disguised "Sleep" motif from "Die Walküre," a theme almost directly lifted out of Beethoven's violin concerto is announced on the 'cellos and horns. And the andante of the same symphony derives from both the allegretto of Beethoven's Eighth and the andante of his "Pastoral Symphony"; might, indeed, figure as a sort of "Szene am Bach" through which there flow the yellowish tides of the Danube. Beethoven is recalled by some of Mahler's triumphant finales, particularly by those of the Fifth and Seventh Symphonies, and by many of Mahler's adagio passages. "Es sucht der Bruder seinen Bruder," oh, how often and at what length through[Pg 218] Mahler's symphonies, and with what persistency on the tenor trumpet! And how often in them does not the German family man take his children walking in the woods of a Sunday afternoon and bid them worship their Creator for having implanted the Love of Virtue in the Human Heart!

Just as it was inevitable that Mahler, instead of developing his own artistic individuality, should seek all his life to identify himself with certain other composers, so, too, it was inevitable that it should be Beethoven whom he would most sedulously emulate. For not only was Beethoven the great classic presence of the German concert hall, and deemed, in the words of Lanier, the "dear living lord of tone," the "sole hymner of the whole of life." He was also, of all the masters, the one spiritually most akin to Mahler. For Beethoven was also one of those who wish to endow their art with moral grandeur, give it power to rouse the noblest human traits, to make it communicate ethical and philosophical conceptions. He, too, came to his art with a magnanimous hope of invigorating and consoling and redeeming his brothers, of healing the wounds of life and binding all men in the bonds of fraternity. Torn between desire of self-expression, and fear of self-revelation, Mahler found the solution of his conflict in this particular piece of self-identification.

And had Mahler been able really to be himself[Pg 219] alone, to develop his own individuality, he would no doubt have been the thing he most desired to be, and given the world a new Beethoven. But, as imitator, he is far from being Beethoven! Whatever Beethoven's limitations (and they were many, for all that the worshiping crowd may say), he nevertheless had in extraordinary degree two things which Mahler eminently lacked—inventive genius and a giant peasant strength. He was able to cope vigorously with the gigantic programs he set for himself. At moments, no doubt, as in the C-minor Symphony and so many of his piano-sonatas, one is repelled by a certain indefinable pompousness and self-righteousness and exasperated by the obviousness and dullness and heaviness of his art. The finale of the Ninth Symphony with its blare and crash, its chorus screaming on high C, its Turkish March with cymbals and bass-drum, is not entirely inspired, most folk will agree. And yet, for all his shortcomings, the wonders of Beethoven are innumerable. There are the many quartets with their masterly invention and composition, the First and Sixth Symphonies with their immortal youth and freshness, their hearty strength and simplicity, the deeply beautiful passages and movements to be found in nearly every one of his works. There is all the wonderful solidity that Mahler, for instance, never achieved. For in poor Mahler's work we feel only the intention, rarely the achievement. We[Pg 220] feel him agonizedly straining, pushing and laboring, trying to manufacture his banal thematic material into music by the application of all the little contrapuntal formulas. We find him relying finally upon physical apparatus, upon sheer brute force. His symphonies abound in senseless repetitions, in all sorts of eye-music. And in the Eighth Symphony, the apotheosis of his reliance on the physical, he calls for a chorus of a thousand men, women and children, and at the end, I believe, the descent of the Holy Ghost. But the ultimate effect is exactly the reverse of what Mahler planned. The very size of the apparatus throws into crudest relief his weariness and uncreativeness. For a moment, a work like the Eighth Symphony stuns the auditor with its sheer physical bulk. After all, one does not hear a thousand voices singing together every day, and the brass and the percussion are very brilliant. Soon, nevertheless, there insinuates itself the realization that there is in this work neither the all-creating spirit the composer so magniloquently invokes, nor the heaven he strives so ardently to attain. They are in the music of a score of other composers. For these men had lived. And it was to real life that Mahler never attained.

If his music expresses anything at all, it expresses just the characteristics that Mahler was most anxious to have it conceal. Life is the greatest of practical jokers, and Mahler, in seeking to escape his racial[Pg 221] traits, ended by representing nothing so much as the Jew. For if there is anything visible behind the music of Mahler, it is the Jew as Wagner, say, describes him in "Das Judentum in der Musik," the Jew who through the superficial assimilation of the traits of the people among whom he is condemned to live, and through the suppression of his own nature, becomes sterile. It is the Jew consumed by malaise and homesickness, by impotent yearning for the terrain which will permit him free expression, and which he conceives as an otherwheres, or as a dream-Palestine. It is the Jew unable to feel faith or joy or content because he is unable to live out his own life. It is the Jew consumed by bitterness because he is perpetually untrue to himself. It is the Jew afraid to die because he has never really lived himself out. It is the Jew as he is when he wants most to cease being a Jew. Mahler could have seemed no more the Jew had he expressed himself in all his Hebraic fervor instead of singing about Saint Peter in Heaven and seeking to reconcile Rhabanus Maurus and Goethe in a "higher synthesis." Only, it would have been good music instead of a nondescript and mongrel thing that he composed. All that he really attained by hampering himself was sterility.

And, in the end, we are forced to conclude that it was not solely the environment, however much that favored it, that condemned Mahler to sterility. Did we[Pg 222] have no example of a Jewish musician attaining creativity through the frank expression of his Semitic characteristics, we might presume that no choice existed for Mahler, and that it is inevitable that the Jew, whenever he essays the grand style, becomes just what Wagner called him in his brilliant and brutal pamphlet, a pretender. But, fortunately, such an example does exist. Geneva, "la ville Protestante," that saw unclose the art of Ernest Bloch, was, after all, not much more eager to welcome a Jewish renaissance than was the Vienna of Gustav Mahler. But some inner might that the elder man lacked gave the young Genevese composer the courage to speak out, and to attain salvation. It was, after all, a sort of intelligence, a sense of reality, a real overwhelming spiritual strength that Mahler lacked. For all his immense capacities, he was a weak man. He permitted his environment to ruin him.

Reger

The copies of most of Max Reger's compositions are ornamented with a cover design representing Beethoven's death-mask wreathed with laurel. It was in all sincerity that his publishers placed that decoration there. For there was a moment when Reger excited high hopes. At the time when he appeared, the cause of "absolute" music seemed lost. Musical modernity and the programmatic form had come to seem inseparable. The old classical forms were being supplanted by those of Wagner, Liszt and Strauss. Not that there was a paucity of bespectacled doctors of music who felt themselves called to compose "classical" works. But the content of their work was invariably formal. Reger, however, seemed able to effect a union between the modern spirit and the forms employed by the masters of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He, the troubled, nervous, modern man, wrote with fluency fugues and double fugues, chaconnes and passacaglie, concerti grossi and variations. He seemed to have mastered the secrets of the old composers, to be continuing their work, developing their thought and style. He excelled in the control of what appeared to be the technicalities of composition. Had he not, in his "Contributions to the Theory of Harmony," proposed one[Pg 224] hundred examples of cadences modulating from the common chord of C-major through every possible key and transpository sequence? Had he not written two books of canons displaying the most amazing technical ingenuities; found it simple, as in his "Sinfonietta," to keep five or six strands of counterpoint going? And so, believing that he was about to do for the music of the post-Wagnerian period what Brahms had done for that of the romantic period, the musical conservatives and traditionalists rallied to him. He was acclaimed by a large public lineal successor of the three great "B's" of music. Quite in the manner that they had once opposed Brahms to the composer of "Parsifal," the partisans of musical absolutism elevated Reger as a sort of anti-pope to Richard Strauss. Whole numbers of musical reviews were devoted to the study and discussion of his art in all its ramifications. Reger seemed on the verge of gaining a place among the immortals. And his publishers placed on the covers of his compositions the design that symbolized the great things they thought the man achieving, and the high heavens for which they believed him bound.

The success was momentary only. Long before he died, the world had found in Max Reger its musical bête noire. Closer acquaintance with his art had not ingratiated him with his public. Indeed, concert-audiences had become bored to the point of exasperation[Pg 225] with his classicizing compositions. To most folk, it appeared as though the man saw no other end in composition than the attainment of the opus-number One Thousand. And although his works are rife with the sort of technical problems and solutions which those initiated into musical science are supposed to relish, few musicians found them really attractive. Reger made various attempts to regain the favor he had lost. They were unavailing. Even when he turned his back on the absolutists and wrote programmatic music, romantic suites that begin with Debussy-like low flutes and end with trumpet blasts that recall the sunrise music of "Also Sprach Zarathustra," ballet suites that seek to rival the "Carnaval" of Schumann and the waltzes in "Der Rosenkavalier," "Böcklin" suites that pretend to translate into tone some of the Swiss painter's canvases, he only intensified the general ill-will. People who knew him whisper that he realized his failure, and in consequence took to emptying the vats of beer that finally drowned him. And on the occasion of his death, valediction went no further than frigidly applauding his creditable work for the organ, his erudition and productivity that almost rival those of the eighteenth-century composers. The final attempt to interest the public in his work, made during the succeeding season, brought but few people to repent of their former indifference. A revival of interest is scarcely to be expected.

[Pg 226]For it was not a Brahms the world had gotten again. Indeed, it was a personality of just the sort that Brahms was not. The resemblance was of the most superficial. Both men went to school to Bach and the polyphonic masters. Both were traditionalists. There the kinship ends. For the one was a poet, a sturdily living, rich and powerful person. The other was essentially a harsh and ugly being, eminently wanting the divine flame. For Brahms, erudition was only a means to his end, a fortification of his personal mode of expression. He saw that the weaknesses of many of the romantic composers, his kin, of Schumann his spiritual father in particular, were due their want of organizing power, their helplessness in the larger forms. And eager to achieve large, solid, resisting form in his own work, he went to the great masters of musical science, to Beethoven and Haydn and in particular to Bach, to learn of them, that he might do for his day something of what they had done for theirs. And he was able to assimilate vast quantities of his learning, and make it part of his flesh and bone. At times, no doubt, one is painfully aware of his erudition, painfully aware that he is applying principles learned from Beethoven and Bach, manipulating his music out of no inner necessity. At times, his music does smell of the lamp. And yet, how completely those juiceless moments are outbalanced by the mass of his living, fragrant, robust song! With what rareness the pedant[Pg 227] in Brahms emerges! Behind this music there is almost always visible the great, grave, passionate, resigned creature that was Brahms, the man who sought with all his might to hold himself firm and erect and unyielding before the hideous onslaughts of life, the man who lived without hope of fulfilment, loved without hope of consummation, and yet knew that it was enough fulfilment, enough consummation to have loved, to have been touched with a radiant dream; the man who prayed only that his heart might not wither, and that he might never cease to long and dream and feel the hurt and solace of beauty and have the power to sing. And in his music there is almost always the consolation of the great forests, the healing of the trees and silences, the cooling hands of the earth, the everlasting yea-saying to love and beauty, the manly resignation, the leave-taking from dreams and life. All this music says, "Song is enough."

But no such goodly presence glimmers through the music of Max Reger. No sturdy bardic spirit vibrates in it. This Reger is a sarcastic, churlish fellow, bitter and pedantic and rude. He is a sort of musical Cyclops, a strong, ugly creature bulging with knotty and unshapely muscles, an ogre of composition. He has little delicacy, little finesse of spirit. In listening to these works with their clumsy blocks of tone, their eternal sunless complaining, their lack of humor where[Pg 228] they would be humorous, their lack of passion where they would be profound, their sardonic and monotonous bourdon, one is perforce reminded of the photograph of Reger which his publishers place on the cover of their catalogue of his works, the photograph that shows something that is like a swollen, myopic beetle with thick lips and sullen expression crouching on an organ-bench. There is something repulsive as well as pedantic in this art. The poetry, the nobility, the moderation and cleanness of line of Brahms is absent. Instead, there is a sort of brutal coldness, the coldness of the born pedant, a prevalence of bad humor, a poverty of invention and organizing power that conceals itself under an elaborate and complex and erudite surface. The strong, calm, classic beauty of Brahms is wanting. For all its air of subtlety and severity and profundity, its learned and classicizing manner, the music of Reger is really superficial. The man only seldom achieves form. Generally, for all the complex and convulsive activity of his music, nothing really progresses, develops, happens in it. Above all, the stylistic severity of Brahms in Reger has become a confusion of styles; an absence of style. The classic has become the baroque.

Reger is one of the men who develop muscles that hamper all grace and freedom of activity. One cannot help feeling that he went to the classic masters for their formulas in order to make[Pg 229] of composition chiefly a mental exercise, that he accepted so many rules and manners and turns in order to free himself of the necessity of making free and full and spontaneous movements. With Reger, creation becomes routine. His works are stereotyped; stale terribly quickly. There are moments when one wonders whether he understood at all what creation is. For certainly, three-quarters of his compositions seem written out of no inner necessity, bring no liberation in their train. They are like mathematical problems and solutions, sheer brain-spun and unlyrical works. One is ever conscious in Reger that he is solving contrapuntal problems in order to astonish the vulgar herd of the professors. Reger certainly knew the art of talking with an astonishing show of logic, and yet saying nothing. Perhaps he talked continuously in order not to have to reflect. And for all his erudition, he understood his masters intellectually only. He felt himself called upon to continue the work of the three great "B's," and yet never understood the grand spirit that animated their art. Strauss, with his fine conduct of instruments through the score of "Salome," is nearer the spirit of Bach than Reger with all his fugues and double fugues ever got.

No doubt, Reger loved the mathematical solidity and balance of the older music, and therefore sought to assimilate it. But he did more than just learn of it, as Brahms had done. He sought to rival the great[Pg 230] men of the past on their own ground, to do what they did better than they had done it, to be able to say, "See, I can do the trick, too!" So we find him writing counterpoint for the sake of the learnedness and presumable respectability, rather than as a piece of expression. His compositions are overburdened and cluttered and marred by all sorts of erudite turns and twists and manœuvers. The man's entire attention seems to have been set on making his works astonish the learned and make mad the simple. Even a slight song like "Wenn die Linde blüht" is decked with contrapuntal felicities. He copies the mannerisms of the composers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, contorts his compositions with all manner of outmoded turns. He appears to have come to his worktable inevitably with his mind full of the compositions he had been studying. His impulse seems always a reflected thing, a desire to compete with some one on that person's terms. He writes fugues for organs and sonatas for violin solo under the influence of Bach, concerti grossi under the influence of Haendel, variations under that of Mozart, sonatas under that of Brahms. In vain one searches for a perfectly individual style throughout his works. The living man is buried under the mass of badly assimilated learning. Even at best, in the Hiller variations, in some of the string trios and organ fugues, some of his grave adagios, even in some of his sardonic and turbulent scherzi[Pg 231] (perhaps his most original contributions), his art is rather more a refinement on another art than a fresh and vital expression. In him, education had produced the typical pedant, a pedant of Cyclopean muscularity, perhaps, but nevertheless a pedant.

And so, instead of being Brahms's successor, Reger is to-day seen as the very contrary of Brahms. It is not that fugues and concerti in the olden style cannot be written to-day, that modern music and the antique forms are incompatible. It is that Reger was very little the artist. He mistook the material vesture for the spirit, thought that there were formulas for composition, royal roads to the heaven of Bach and Mozart. Something more of humanity, sympathy for man and his experiences, inner freedom, might have saved him. But it was just the poetic gift that the man was lamentably without. And so, freighted with too much erudition and too little wisdom, Reger went aground.

Schoenberg

Arnold Schoenberg of Vienna is the great troubling presence of modern music. His vast, sallow skull lowers over it like a sort of North Cape. For with him, with the famous cruel five orchestral and nine piano pieces, we seem to be entering the arctic zone of musical art. None of the old beacons, none of the old stars, can guide us longer in these frozen wastes. Strange, menacing forms surround us, and the light is bleak and chill and faint. The characteristic compositions of Strawinsky and Ornstein, too, have no tonality, lack every vestige of a pure chord, and exhibit unanalyzable harmonies, and rhythms of a violent novelty, in the most amazing conjunctions. But they, at least, impart a certain sense of liberation. They, at least, bear certain witness to the emotional flight of the composer. An instinct pulses here, an instinct barbarous and unbridled, if you will, but indubitably exuberant and vivid. These works have a necessity. These harmonies have color. This music is patently speech. But the later compositions of Schoenberg withhold themselves, refuse our contact. They baffle with their apparently wilful ugliness, and bewilder with their geometric cruelty and coldness. One gets no intimation that in fashioning them the[Pg 234] composer has liberated himself. On the contrary, they seem icy and brain-spun. They are like men formed not out of flesh and bone and blood, but out of glass and wire and concrete. They creak and groan and grate in their motion. They have all the deathly pallor of abstractions.

And Schoenberg remains a troubling presence as long as one persists in regarding these particular pieces as the expression of a sensibility, as long as one persists in seeking in them the lyric flight. For though one perceives them with the intellect one can scarcely feel them musically. The conflicting rhythms of the third of the "Three Pieces for Pianoforte" clash without generating heat, without, after all, really sounding. No doubt, there is a certain admirable uncompromisingness, a certain Egyptian severity, in the musical line of the first of the "Three." But if there is such a thing as form without significance in music, might not these compositions serve to exemplify it? Indeed, it is only as experiments, as the incorporation in tone of an abstract and intellectualized conception of forms, that one can at all comprehend them. And it is only in regarding him as primarily an experimenter that the later Schoenberg loses his incomprehensibility, and comes somewhat nearer to us.

There is much in Schoenberg's career that makes this explanation something more than an easy way of disposing of a troublesome problem, makes it, in[Pg 235]deed, eminently plausible. Schoenberg was never the most instinctive and sensible, the least cerebral and intellectualizing of musicians. For just as Gustav Mahler might stand as an instance of musicianly temperament fatally outweighing musicianly intellect, so Arnold Schoenberg might stand as an example of the equally excessive outbalancing of sensibility by brain-stuff. The friendship of the two men and their mutual admiration might easily be explained by the fact that each caught sight in the other of the element he wanted most. No doubt, the works of Schoenberg's early period, which extends from the songs, Op. 1, through the "Kammersymphonie," Op. 9, are full of a fervent lyricism, a romantic effusiveness. "Gurrelieder," indeed, opens wide the floodgates of romanticism. But these compositions are somewhat uncharacteristic and derivative. The early songs, for instance, might have proceeded from the facile pen of Richard Strauss. They have much of the Straussian sleepy warmth and sweet harmonic color, much of the Straussian exuberance which at times so readily degenerates into the windy pride of the young bourgeois deeming himself a superman. It was only by accident that "Freihold" was not written by the Munich tone-poet. The orchestral poem after Maeterlinck's "Pelléas" is also ultra-romantic and post-Wagnerian. The trumpet theme, the "Pelléas" theme, for instance, is lineally descended from the "Walter von[Pg 236] Stolzing" and "Parisfal" motives. The work reveals Schoenberg striving to emulate Strauss in the field of the symphonic poem; striving, however, in vain. For it has none of Strauss's glitter and point, and is rather dull and soggy. The great, bristling, pathetic climax is of the sort that has become exasperating and vulgar, rather than exciting, since Wagner and Tchaikowsky first exploited it. On the whole, the work is much less "Pelléas et Mélisande" than it is "Pelleas und Melisanda." And the other works of this period, more brilliantly made and more opulently colored though they are, are still eminently of the romantic school. The person who declared ecstatically that assisting at a performance of the string sextet, "Verklärte Nacht," resembled "hearing a new 'Tristan,'" exhibited, after all, unconscious critical acumen. The great cantata, "Gurrelieder," the symphonic setting of Jens Peter Jacobsen's romance in lyrics, might even stand as the grand finale of the whole post-Wagnerian, ultra-romantic period, and represent the moment at which the whole style and atmosphere did its last heroic service. And even the "Kammersymphonie," despite all the signs of transition to a more personal manner, despite the increased scholasticism of tone, despite the more acidulous coloration, despite the distinctly novel scherzo, with its capricious and fawn-like leaping, is not quite characteristic of the man.

It is in the string quartet, Opus 7, that Schoenberg[Pg 237] first speaks his proper tongue. And in revealing him, the work demonstrates how theoretical his intelligence is. No doubt, the D-minor Quartet is an important work, one of the most important of chamber compositions. Certainly, it is one of the great pieces of modern music. It gives an unforgettable and vivid sense of the voice, the accent, the timbre, of the hurtling, neurotic modern world; hints the coming of a free and subtle, bitter and powerful, modern musical art. As a piece of construction alone, the D-minor Quartet is immensely significant. The polyphony is bold and free, the voices exhibiting an independence perhaps unknown since the days of the madrigalists. The work is unified not only by the consolidation of the four movements into one, but as well by a central movement, a "durchführung" which, introduced between the scherzo and the adagio, reveals the inner coherence of all the themes. There is no sacrifice of logic to the rules of harmony. Indeed, the work is characterized by a certain uncompromisingness and sharpness in its harmonies. The instrumental coloring is prismatic, all the registers of the strings being utilized with great deftness. Exclusive of the theme of the scherzo, which recalls a little overmuch the Teutonic banalities of Mahler's symphonies, the quality of the music is, on the whole, grave and poignant and uplifted. It has a scholarly dignity, a magistral richness, a chiaroscuro that at moments recalls Brahms,[Pg 238] though Schoenberg has a sensuous melancholy, a delicacy and an Hebraic bitterness that the other has not. Like so much of Brahms, this music comes out of the silence of the study, though the study in this case is the chamber of a Jewish scholar more than that of a German. Were the entire work of the fullness and lyricism of the last two movements; were it throughout as impassioned as is the broad gray clamant germinal theme that commences the work and sweeps it before it, one might easily include the composer in the company of the masters of musical art.

Unfortunately, the magnificent passages are interspersed with unmusical ones. It is not only that the work does not quite "conceal art," that it smells overmuch of the laboratory. It is that portions of it are scarcely "felt" at all, are only too obviously carpentered. The work is full of music that addresses itself primarily to professors of theory. It is full of writing dictated by an arbitrary and intellectual conception of form. There is a great deal of counterpoint in it that exists only for the benefit of those who "read" scores, and that clutters the work. There are whole passages that exist only in obedience to some scholastic demand for thematic inversions and deformations. There is an unnecessary deal of marching and countermarching of instruments, an obsession with certain rhythms that becomes purely mechanical, an intensification of the contrapuntal pickings and peckings that[Pg 239] annoy so often in the compositions of Brahms. It is Schoenberg the intellectualist, Schoenberg the Doctor of Music, not Schoenberg the artist, who obtains here.

And it is he one encounters almost solely in the music of the third period, the enigmatical little pieces for orchestra and piano. It is he who has emerged victorious from the duel revealed by the D-minor Quartet. Those grotesque and menacing little works are lineally descended from the intellectualized passages of the great preceding one, are, indeed, a complete expression of the theoretical processes which called them into being. For while in the quartet the scholasticism appears to have been superimposed upon a body of musical ideas, in the works of the last period it appears well-nigh the generative principle. These latter have all the airlessness, the want of poetry, the frigidity of things constructed after a formula, daring and brilliant though that formula is. They make it seem as though Schoenberg had, through a process of consideration and thought and study, arrived at the conclusion that the music of the future would, in the logic of things, take such and such a turn, that tonality as it is understood was doomed to disappear, that part-writing would attain a new independence, that new conceptions of harmony would result, that rhythm would attain a new freedom through the influence of the new mechanical body of man, and had proceeded[Pg 240] to incorporate his theories in tone. One finds the experimental and methodical at every turn throughout these compositions. Behind them one seems invariably to perceive some one sitting before a sheet of music paper and tampering with the art of music; seeking to discover what would result were he to accept as harmonic basis not the major triad but the minor ninth, to set two contradictory rhythms clashing, or to sharpen everything and maintain a geometric hardness of line. One always feels in them the intelligence setting forth deliberately to discover new musical form. For all their apparent freedom, they are full of the oldest musical procedures, abound in canonic imitations, in augmentations, and diminutions, in all sorts of grizzled contrapuntal manœvers. They are head-music of the most uncompromising sort. The "Five Orchestral Pieces" abound in purely theoretical combinations of instruments, combinations that do not at all sound. "Herzgewächse," the setting of the poem of Maeterlinck made contemporaneously with these pieces, makes fantastic demands upon the singer, asks the voice to hold high F pppp, to leap swiftly across the widest intervals, and to maintain itself over a filigree accompaniment of celesta, harmonium and harp. But it is in the piano-music that the sonorities are most rudely neglected. At moments they impress one as nothing more than abstractions from the idiosyncrasies and mannerisms of the works of Schoenberg's second period[Pg 241] made in the hope of arriving at definiteness of style and intensity of speech. They smell of the synagogue as much as they do of the laboratory. Beside the Doctor of Music there stands the Talmudic Jew, the man all intellect and no feeling, who subtilizes over musical art as though it were the Law.

The compositions of this period constitute an artistic retrogression rather than an advance. They are not "modern music" for all their apparent stylistic kinship to the music of Strawinsky and Scriabine and Ornstein. Nor are they "music of the past." They belong rather more to the sort of music that has no more relation with yesteryear than it has with this or next. They belong to the sort that never has youth and vigor, is old the moment it is produced. Their essential inexpressiveness makes almost virtueless the characteristics which Schoenberg has carried into them from out his fecund period. The severity and boldness of contour, so biting in the quartet, becomes almost without significance in them. If there is such a thing as rhythmless music, would not the stagnant orchestra of the "Five Orchestral Pieces" exemplify it? The alternately rich and acidulous color is faded; an icy green predominates. And, curiously enough, throughout the group the old romantic allegiance of the earliest Schoenberg reaffirms itself. Wotan with his spear stalks through the conclusion of the first of the "Three Pieces for Pianoforte." And the second of the series,[Pg 242] a composition not without its incisiveness, as well as several of the tiny "Six Piano Pieces," Op. 19, recall at moments Brahms, at others Chopin, a Chopin of course cadaverous and turned slightly green.

It may be that by means of these experiments Schoenberg will gird himself for a new period of creativity just as once indubitably by the aid of experiments which he did not publish he girded himself for the period represented by the D-minor Quartet. It may be that after the cloud of the war has completely lifted from the field of art, and a normal interchange is re-established it will be seen that the monodrama, Op. 20, "Die Lieder des 'Pierrot Lunaire,'" which was the latest of his works to obtain a hearing, was in truth an earnest of a new loosing of the old lyrical impulse so long incarcerated. But, for the present, Schoenberg, the composer, is almost completely obscured by Schoenberg, the experimenter. For the present, he is the great theoretician combating other theoreticians, the Doctor of Music annihilating doctor-made laws. As such, his usefulness is by no means small. He speaks with an authority no less than that of his adversaries, the other and less radical professors. He, too, has invented a system and a method; his "Harmonielehre," for instance, is as irrefragable as theirs; he can quote scripture with the devil. He is at least demolishing the old constraining superstitions, and in so doing may exercise an incalculable influence on the[Pg 243] course of music. It may be that many a musician of the future will find himself the better equipped because of Schoenberg's explorations. He is undoubtedly the most magistral theorist of the day. The fact that he could write at the head of his treatise on harmony, "What I have here set down I have learned from my pupils," independently proves him a great teacher. It is probable that his later music, the music of his puzzling "third period," will shortly come to be considered as simply a part of his unique course of instruction.

Sibelius

Others have brought the North into houses, and there transmuted it to music. And their art is dependent on the shelter, and removed from it, dwindles. But Sibelius has written music innocent of roof and inclosure, music proper indeed to the vasty open, the Finnish heaven under which it grew. And could we but carry it out into the northern day, we would find it undiminished, vivid with all its life. For it is blood-brother to the wind and the silence, to the lowering cliffs and the spray, to the harsh crying of sea-birds and the breath of the fog, and, set amid them, would wax, and take new strength from the strengths of its kin.

Air blows through the music of Sibelius, quickens even the slightest of his compositions. There are certain of his songs, certain of his orchestral sketches, that would be virtueless enough were it not for the windy freshness that pervades them. Out of all his works, even out of the most commonplace, there proceeds a far and resonant space. Songs like "To the Evening," "Call," "Autumn Sundown," whatever their ultimate musical value, seem actually informed by the northern evening, seem to include within their very substance the watery tints of the sky, the naïve[Pg 246] fragrance of forests and meadows, the tintinnabulation drifting through the still air of sunset. It is as though Sibelius were so sensible to the quality of his native earth that he knows precisely in what black and massive chords of the piano, say, lie the silence of rocks and clouds, precisely what manner of resistance between chant and piano can make human song ring as in the open. But it is in his orchestral works, for he is determined an orchestral writer, that he has fixed it most successfully. There has been no composer, not Brahms in his German forest, nor Rameau amid the poplars of his silver France, not Borodin on his steppes, nor Moussorgsky in his snow-covered fields under the threatening skies, whose music gives back the colors and forms and odors of his native land more persistently. The orchestral compositions of Sibelius seem to have passed over black torrents and desolate moorlands, through pallid sunlight and grim primeval forests, and become drenched with them. The instrumentation is all wet grays and blacks, relieved only by bits of brightness wan and elusive as the northern summer, frostily green as the polar lights. The works are full of the gnawing of bassoons and the bleakness of the English horn, full of shattering trombones and screaming violins, full of the sinister rolling of drums, the menacing reverberation of cymbals, the icy glittering of harps. The musical ideas of those of the compositions that are finely realized recall the ruggedness[Pg 247] and hardiness and starkness of things that persist in the Finnish winter. The rhythms seem to approach the wild, unnumbered rhythms of the forest and the wind and the nickering sunlight. Music has forever been a movement "up to nature," and Schoenberg's motto is but the precision of a motive that has governed all composers. But Sibelius has written music that seems to come as the very answer to the call, and to be the North indeed.

Such a discovery of nature was necessarily a part of his self-revelation. For Sibelius is essentially the Norseman. For all his personal accomplishment, his cultural position, he is still the Finnish peasant, preserving intact within himself the racial inheritance. Other musicians, having found life still a grim brief welter of bloody combats and the straining of high, unyielding hearts and the falling of sure inalienable doom, have fancied themselves the successors of the Skalds, and dreamt themselves within the gray primeval North. But, in the presence of Sibelius, they seem only too evidently men of a gentler, later generation. Beside his, their music appears swathed in romantic glamour. For there are times when he comes into the concert-room like some man of a former age, like some spare, knotted barbarian from the world of the sagas. There are times when he comes amongst us like one who might quite conceivably have been comrade to pelted warriors who fought with clubs and hammers,[Pg 248] like one who might have beaten out a rude music by black, smoking hearthsides quite as readily as made tone-poems for the modern concert-room. And his music with its viking blows and wild, crying accents, its harsh and uncouth speech, sets us without circumstance in that sunken world, sets us in the very midst of the stark men and grave, savage women for whom the sagas were made, so that we can see them in all their hurtling strength and rank barbarity, can well-nigh touch them with the fingers of our hands. And because Sibelius is so fundamentally man as combat with the North has made him, only vision of his native earth could bring him rich self-consciousness. For his individuality is but the shape of soul given his race by its century-long adjustment. It is the North that has given him his profound experience. Its rhythms have distinguished him. Its color, and the color of his spirit, are twin. And so he turns toward it as to a mirror. Like that of the hero of his tone-poem, his life is a long journey toward Finland. Contact with Finnish earth gives him back into his own hands. It is the North, the wind and the moorland and the sea, that gathers the fragments of his broken soul, and makes him whole again.

It was with the sanction of a people that Sibelius came to his task. For centuries before his birth the race that bore him had lain prone upon its inclement coasts. But now a new vigor was germinating within[Pg 249] it. Youth had overtaken it once more, and filled it with the desire of independence. Chained to the Russian Empire, it was reaching out toward all that could give it the strength to persist and endure, toward all that could give it knowledge of its proper soul. And so Sibelius, in the search for the expression of his own personality, so much at one with that of his fellows, was traveling in the common way. The word that he was seeking, the word that should bring fulfilment to his proper soul, was deeply needed by his fellows. Inarticulate thousands, unaware though they were of his existence, awaited his work, wanted the sustenance it could give. And, certainly, the sense of the needfulness of his work, the sense of the large value set upon his best and purest attainments by life itself, must have been with Sibelius always, must have supplied him with a powerful incentive and made enormously for his achievements. He must have felt all the surge of the race driving him. He must have had continually the marvelous stimulus of feeling about him, for all the night and the cold, the forms of comrades straining toward a single lofty goal, felt himself one of an army of marching men. This folk, far in its past, had imagined the figure of a hero-poet, Vainemunden, and placed in his hands an instrument "shaped out of very sorrow," and attributed magical power to his song. And Sibelius, bowed over his music-paper, must have felt the dream stir within him,[Pg 250] must have felt incarnate within himself, however incompletely, that mysterious image, and so proceeded with his work everlastingly assured that all he actually accomplished woke from out of the heart of the people, and responded to its immemorial need.

Out of such an impulse his art has come. No doubt, some of it is not the response entirely worthy of so high a stimulus. Few modern composers of eminence are as singularly uneven as Sibelius. Moods like that which mothered the amiable elegance of the "Valse Triste" and that which produced the hard and naked essentiality of the Fourth Symphony are almost foreign to each other. The creative power itself is extraordinarily fitful in him. It is as if, for all his physical robustness, he has not quite the spiritual indefatigability of the major artist. He has not that inventive heat that permits the composer of indisputably the first rank to realize himself unflaggingly in all his independence and intensity. Too often Sibelius's individuality is cluttered and muffled by that of other men. No doubt every creative artist passes through a period of submission to alien faiths. But in Sibelius there appear to exist two distinct personalities, the one strong and independent, the other timid and uninventive, who dominate him alternately. Even some of the music contemporaneous with the magnificent Fourth Symphony is curiously ineffectual and pointless. True, the color, the air and tone of[Pg 251] the North are never entirely absent from his work. His songs invariably recapture, sometimes almost miraculously, the dark and mourning accents of the Scandinavian folk-song. For all the modernity of medium they are simple and sober. Moreover, in those of his compositions that approach banality most closely, there is a certain saving hardness and virility and honesty. Unlike his neighbor, Grieg, he is never mincing and meretricious. We never find him languishing in a pretty boudoir. He is always out under the sky. It is only that he is not always free and resourceful and deeply self-critical. Even through the bold and rugged and splendid Violin Concerto there flit at moments the shadows of Beethoven and Wagner and Tchaikowsky. The first theme of the quartet "Voces intimæ" resembles not a little a certain theme in "Boris." The close of "Nightride and Sunrise" is watered Brahms and watered Strauss. And there are phrases in his tone-poem that commence with all his proper rhythmic ardor and then suddenly degenerate. There are moments when his harmonic sense, generally keen and true, abandons him completely. And even works like the "Finlandia" and "Karelia" overtures, for all their generosity of intention, for all their suggestion of peasant voices lifted in song, disappoint because of the substitution of a popular lyricism, a certain easy sweetness, for the high poetry one might have anticipated.

[Pg 252]And yet, one has but to turn to the symphonies of Sibelius to encounter music of another intensity, and gauge the richness of response that, at times, it is given him to make. It is as if the very dignity and grandeur of the medium itself sets him free. Just as the form of the concerto seems to have given his sense of the violin a play apparently denied it by the smaller mediums, so these larger orchestral forms seem to have liberated his imagination, his orchestral genius, and made him poet of his folk indeed. His personal quality, spread more thinly in his songs and tone-poems, is essentialized and developed in these other works. The symphonies themselves are in a sense the stages of the essentialization. In the first of them his language emerges, to an extent imparting its unmistakable coloration to a matter perhaps not entirely distinguished. There is a looseness and lushness, a romanticism and balladry, in the work, that is not quite characteristic. Still, the honesty, the grimness and savagery and lack of sensuality, are Sibelius's own. The adagio is steeped in his proper pathos, the pathos of brief, bland summers, of light that falls for a moment, gentle and mellow, and then dies away. Something like a memory of a girl sitting amid the simple flowers in the white northern sunshine haunts the last few measures. The crying, bold finale is full of the tragedy of northern nature. And in the Second Symphony the independence is complete. The orches[Pg 253]tra is handled individually, sparingly, and with perfect point. Often the instruments sound singly, or by twos and threes. What had been but half realized in the earlier work is distinct and important in this. It is as if Sibelius had come upon himself, and so been able to rid his work of all superfluity and indecision. And, curiously, through speaking his own language in all its homeliness and peasant flavor, he seems to have moved more closely to his land. The work, his "pastoral" symphony, for all its absolute and formal character, reflects a landscape. It is full of home sounds, of cattle and "saeters," of timbered houses and sparse nature. And through it there glances a pale evanescent sunlight, and through it there sounds the burden of a lowly tragedy.

But it is only with his Fourth Symphony, dubbed "futuristic" because of the unusual boldness and pithiness of its style, the absence of a general tonality, the independence of the orchestral voices, that Sibelius's gift attains absolute expression. There are certain works that are touchstones, and make apparent what is original and virtuous in all the rest of the labors of their creator, and give his personality a unique and irrefragable position. The Fourth Symphony of Sibelius is such a composition. It is a very synthesis of all his work, the reduction to its simplest and most positive terms of a thing that has been in him since first he began to write, and that received heretofore[Pg 254] only fragmentary and indecisive expression. In its very form it is essence. The structure is all bone. The style is sharpened to a biting terseness. The coloring is the refinement of all his color; the rhythms have a freedom toward which Sibelius's rhythms have always aspired; the mournful melody of the adagio is well-nigh archetypical. All his life Sibelius has been searching for the tone of this music, desiring to speak with its authority, and concentrate the soul and tragedy of a people into a single and eternal moment. All his life he had been seeking the prophetic gestures of which this work is full. For the symphony is like a summary and a conclusion. It carries us into some high place before which the life of man is spread out and made apparent. The four movements are the four planes that solidify a single concept. The first sets us in a grim forest solitude, out in some great unlimited loneliness, beneath a somber sky. There is movement, a climax, a single cry of passion and despair, and then, only the soughing of wind through hoary branches. The scherzo is the flickering of mad watery lights, a fantastic whipping dance, a sudden sinister conclusion. In the adagio, a bleak lament struggles upwards, seems to push through some vast inert mass, to pierce to a momentary height and largeness, and then sinks, broken. And through the finale there quivers an illusory light. The movement is the march, the oncoming rush, of vast formless hordes, the passage of[Pg 255] unnamed millions that surge for an instant with their cries and banners, and vanish into nothingness. It is possible that Sibelius will create another work similarly naked and intense. More definitive, it cannot be.

Loeffler

Legend records of Inez de Castro, Queen of Castile, that she was dethroned and driven into exile by a rival, and that before her husband and her partisans could restore her to kingdom, she had died. But her husband caused her body to be embalmed and borne with him wherever he went. And when finally he had vanquished the pretender, he had the corpse decked in all the regal insignia, had it set upon the throne in the great hall of the palace of the kings of Castile, and vassals and liegemen summoned to do the homage that had been denied the unhappy queen in her lifetime.

The music of Charles Martin Loeffler is like the dead Inez de Castro on her throne. It, too, is swathed in diapered cloths and hung with gold and precious stones. It, too, is set above and apart from men in a sort of royal state, and surrounded by all the emblems of kingdom. And beneath its stiff and incrusted sheath there lies, as once there lay beneath the jeweled robes and diadem of the kings of Castile, not a living being, but a corpse.

For Loeffler is one of those exquisites whose refinement is unfortunately accompanied by sterility, perhaps even results from it. But for his essential un[Pg 258]creativeness, he might well have become the composer uniquely representative of the artistic movement in which the late nineteenth-century refinement and exquisiteness manifested itself. No musician, not Debussy even, was better prepared for bringing the symbolist movement into music. Loeffler is affiliated in temper, if not exactly in achievement, with the brilliant band of belated romanticists who adopted as their device the sonnet of Verlaine's beginning.

"Je suis l'empire à la fin de la décadence."

One finds in him almost typically the sensibility to the essences and colors rather more than to the spectacle, the movement, the adventure of things. The nervous delicacy, the widowhood of the spirit, the horror of the times, the mystic paganism, the homesickness for a tranquil and sequestered and soft-colored land "where shepherds still pipe to their flocks, and nun-like processions of clouds float over bluish hills and fathomless age-old lakes" are eminently present in him. He is in almost heroic degree the spirit forever searching blindly through the loud and garish city, the hideous present, for some vestige, some message from its homeland; finding, some sundown, in the ineffable glamour of rose and mauve and blue through granite piles, "le souvenir avec le crépuscule." He, too, one would guess, has dreamt of selling his soul to the devil, and called upon him, ah, how many terrible[Pg 259] nights, to appear; and has sought a refuge from the world in Catholic mysticism and ecstasy. Had it been given him to realize himself in music, we should undoubtedly have had a body of work that would have been the veritable milestones of the route traversed by the entire movement. Would not the "Pagan Poem" have been the musical equivalent of the mystic and sorrowful sensuality of Verlaine? Would not the two rhapsodies "L'Etang" and "La Cornemuse" have transmuted to music the macabre and sinister note of so much symbolist poetry? Would we not have had in "La Villanelle du Diable" an equivalent for the black mass and "Là-bas"; in "Hora mystica" an equivalent for "En route"; in "Music for Four Stringed Instruments" a musical "Sagesse"? Does not Charles Martin Loeffler, who, after writing "A Pagan Poem," makes a retreat in a Benedictine monastery, and who, at home in Medford, Massachusetts, teaches the choristers to sing Gregorian chants, recall Joris Karl Huysmans, the "oblat" of La Trappe?

To a limited extent, of course, he has succeeded in fixing the color of the symbolist movement in music. Some of his richer, dreamier songs, some of his finer bits of polishing, his rarer drops of essence, are indeed the musical counterpart of the goldsmith's work, the preciosity, of a Gustave Kahn or a Stuart Merrill. But a musical Huysmans, for instance, it was never[Pg 260] in his power to become. For he has never possessed the creative heat, the fluency, the vein, the felicity, the power necessary to the task of upbuilding out of the tones of instruments anything as flamboyant and magnificent as the novelist's black and red edifices. He has never been vivid and ingenuous and spontaneous enough a musician even to develop a personal idiom. He has always been hampered and bound. His earlier compositions, the quintet, the orchestral "Les Vieillées de l'Ukraine" and "La bonne chanson," for instance, are distinctly derivative and uncharacteristic in style. The idiom is derived in part from Fauré, in part from Wagner and other of the romanticists. The string quintet has even been dubbed "A Musical 'Trip Around the World in Eighty Days.'" Nor is the idiom of his later and more representative period primarily and originally any more characteristic. It never seems to surge quite wholly and cleanly and fairly. The chasing to which it has evidently been subjected cannot quite conceal its descent. The setting of "La Cloche fêlée" of Baudelaire, for instance, is curiously Germanic and heavy, for all the subtlety and filigree of the voice and the accompanying piano and viola. It is a fairly flat waltz movement that in "A Pagan Poem" is chosen to represent the sublunary aspect of Virgil's genius. And "Hora mystica" and "Music for Four Stringed Instruments," which have a certain stylistic unity, nevertheless reveal the composer[Pg 261] hampered by the Gregorian and scholastic idiom which he has sought to assimilate.

Nor has he ever had the power to express and objectify himself completely, and achieve vital form. In performance, most of his works shrink and dwindle. The central and sustaining structure, the cathedral which is behind every living composition and manifests itself through it, is in these pieces so vague and attenuated that it fades into the background of the concert-hall, is like gray upon gray. The gems and gold thread and filigree with which this work is sewn tarnish in the gloom. Something is there, we perceive, something that moves and sways and rises and ebbs fitfully in the dim light. But it is a wraithlike thing, and undulates and falls before our eyes like flames that have neither redness nor heat. Even the terrible bagpipe of the second rhapsody for oboe; even the caldron of the "Pagan Poem," that transcription of the most sensual and impassioned of Virgil's eclogues, with its mystic, dissonant trumpets; even the blasphemies of "La Villanelle du Diable," and the sundown fires that beat through the close of "Hora mystica" are curiously bloodless and ghostly and unsubstantial. Pages of sustained music occur rarely enough in his music. The lofty, almost metaphysical, first few periods, the severe and pathetic second movement of the "Music for Four Stringed Instruments"; certain songs like "Le Son du cor," that have atmosphere and a delicate[Pg 262] poetry, are distinctly exceptional in this body of work. What chiefly lives in it are certain poignant phrases, certain eloquent bars, a glowing, winey bit of color here, a velvety phrase for the oboe or the clarinet, a sharp, brassy, pricking horn-call, a dreamy, wandering melody for the voice there. His music consists of scattered, highly polished phrases, hard, exquisite, and cold. He is pre-eminently the precieux.

Of the scrupulousness, the fastidiousness, the distinction, even, of Loeffler's work, there can be no question. He is not one of the music-making herd. The subtlety and originality of intention which his compositions almost uniformly display, the unflagging effort to inclose within each of his forms a matter rare and novel and rich, set him forever apart, even in his essential weakness, from the academic and conforming crew. The man who has composed these scores makes at least the gesture of the artist, and comes to music to express a temper original and delicate and aristocratic, disdainful of the facile and the commonplace, a sensibility often troubled and shadowy and fantastic. He is eminently not one of the pathetic, half-educated musicians so common in America. He knows something of musical science; knows how a tonal edifice should be unified; has a sense of the chemistry of the orchestra. He appears familiar with the plainsong, and has based a symphony and por[Pg 263]tions of a quartet on Gregorian modes. Even at a period when the sophisticated and cultivated composer is becoming somewhat less a rarity, his culture is remarkable, his knowledge of literature eclectic. Gogol as well as Virgil has moved him to orchestral works. Above all, he is one of the company of composers, to which a good number of more gifted musicians do not belong, who are ever respectful of their medium, and infinitely curious concerning it.

It is only that, in seeking to compensate himself for his infecundity, he has fallen into the deep sea of preciosity. In seeking by main force to be expressive, to remedy his cardinal defect, to eschew whatever is trite and outworn in the line of the melody, the sequence of the harmonies, to rid himself of whatever is derivative and impersonal and undistinguished in his style, he has become over-anxious, over-meticulous of his diction. Because his phraseology was colorless, he has become a stainer of phrases, a sort of musical euphuist. All his energy, one senses, has gone into the cutting and polishing and shining up and setting of little brightly colored bits of music, little sharp, intense moments. One feels that they have been caressed and stroked and smoothed and regarded a thousand times; that Loeffler has dwelt upon them and touched them with a sort of narcissistic love. Indeed, it must have been a great labor that was expended on the darkening and spicing and sharpening of the style in cer[Pg 264]tain of his orchestral poems; the effort to create a new idiom based on the Gregorian modes, to which "Hora mystica" and the recent work for string quartet bear witness, must in itself have been large. But though in result of all the chasing and hammering on gold, the filing and polishing, the vessel of his art has perhaps become richer and finer, it has not become any fuller. His second period differs from his first only in the fact that in it he has gone from one form of uncreativity to another somewhat more dignified and unusual. The compositions of both periods have, after all, the selfsame lack. His destiny seems to have been inevitable.

And so, in its confused argentry and ghostliness, its crystallization and diaphinity, his music resembles at times nothing so much as the precious remains and specimens of an extinct planet; things transfixed in cold eternal night, icy and phosphorescent of hue. No atmosphere bathes them. Sap does not mount in them. Should we touch them, they would crumble. This, might have been a flower. But now it glistens with crystals of mica and quartz. These, are jewels. But their fires are quenched. These candied petals are the passage from "Music for Four Stringed Instruments" glossed in the score "un jardin plein des fleurs naïves," while this vial of gemmy green liquid is that entitled "une pré toute émeraude." The petrified saurian there, whose bones have suffered

"a sea-change

Into something rich and strange"

is the Spanish rhapsody for 'cello; the string of steely beads, the setting of the "To Helen" of Poe. And the objects that float preserved in those little flasks are some of the popular ditties with which Loeffler is so fond of incrusting his work. Once they were "à La Villette," and the Malagueña, and the eighteenth-century marching song of the Lorraine soldiery, and flourished under the windy heaven. But when Loeffler transplanted them respectively into "La Villanelle du Diable," into the 'cello rhapsody and into "Music for Four Stringed Instruments," they underwent the fate that befalls everything subjected to his exquisite and sterilizing touch.

One comes to the conclusion that perhaps the most significant and symbolic thing in the career of Charles Martin Loeffler is his place of residence. For this Alsatian, French in culture, temperamentally related to the décadents, writing music at first resembling that of Fauré and the Wagnerizing Frenchmen, later that of Dukas, and last that of d'Indy and Magnard, has lived the greater portion of his life in no other city than Boston. Coming originally to America for the purpose of playing first violin in the Boston Symphony Orchestra, he has found the atmosphere of the New England capital so pleasant that he has remained there practically ever since. He whom one might suppose[Pg 266] almost native to the Paris of Debussy and Magnard and Ravel, of Verlaine and Gustave Kahn and Huysmans, has found comfortable an environment essentially tight and illiberal, a society that masks philistinism with toryism, and manages to drive its radical and vital and artistic youth, in increasing numbers every year, to other places in search of air. And his own career, on the spiritual plane, seems just such an exchange, the preference of a shadowy and frigid place to a blazing and quivering one, the exchange of the eternal Paris for the eternal Boston. His music seems some psychic banishment. His art is indeed, in the last analysis, a flight from the group of his kinsmen into, if not exactly the circle, at least the dangerous vicinity of those amiable gentlemen the Chadwicks and the Converses and all the other highly respectable and sterile "American Composers."

Ornstein

Ornstein is a mirror held up to the world of the modern city. The first of his real compositions are like fragments of some cosmopolis of caves and towers of steel, of furious motion and shafts of nitrogen glare become music. They are like sensitive surfaces that have been laid in the midst of the New Yorks; and record not only the clangors, but all the violent forms of the city, the beat of the frenetic activity, the intersecting planes of light, the masses of the masonry with the tiny, dwarf-like creatures running in and out, the electric signs staining the inky nightclouds. They give again the alarum of dawn breaking upon the crowded, swarming cells; seven o'clock steam whistles on a winter morn; pitiless light filtering over hurrying black droves of humanity; thousands of shivering workers blackening Fourteenth Street. They picture the very Niebelheim, the hordes of slaves herded by giants of their own creation, the commands and cries of power in the bells, whistles, signals. The grinding and shrieking of loaded trains in the tubes, cranes laboring in the port, rotary engines drilling, turbines churning are woven through them. Blankets of fog descend upon the river; menacing shapes loom through it; rays of red light seek to cut the mist. Flowers that are gray and black blossom on the ledges[Pg 268] of tenement windows giving on bare walls. And human souls and songs that are gray and black like them bloom in the blind air, open their velvet petals, their lustrous, soft corollas, from crannies and windows into this metal, this dun, this unceasing roar.

For Ornstein is youth. He is the one striving to adjust himself to all this thunder and welter and glare. He is the spring as it comes up through the pavements, the aching green sap. In part, no doubt, he is the resurrection of the most entombed of spirits, that of the outlaw European Jew. He is the breaking down of the walls with which the Jew had blotted out the hateful world. He is Lazarus emerging in his grave clothes into the new world; the Jewish spirit come up into the day from out the basement and cellar rooms of the synagogue where it had been seated for a thousand years drugging itself with rabbinical lore, refining almost maniacally upon the intention of some obscure phrase or parable, negating the lure of the world and of experience with a mass of rites and observances and ceremonials, losing itself in the gray desert stretches of theory, or wasting itself in the impossible dream of Zion restored in modern Palestine and Solomon's temple rebuilt in a provincial capital of the Turkish Empire. And Ornstein's music is the music of a birth that is the tearing away of grave clothes grown to the body, the clawing away, stone by stone, of the wall erected against the call of ex[Pg 269]perience which was sure to be death-dealing. The old prohibitions are still active in it in the terror with which life is viewed, in the menace and cruelty of things, the sharpness of edges encountered, the weight of the masses that threaten to fall and overwhelm, the fury and blackness and horror of nature once again regarded. Again and again there passes through it the haggard, shrouded figure of the Russian Jew. The "Poems of 1917" are full of the wailings and rockings of little old Ghetto mothers. Again and again Ornstein speaks in accents that resemble nothing quite so much as the savage and woeful language of the Old Testament.

But the music of Ornstein is much besides. It is a thing germane to all beings born into the age of steel. It is the expression of all the men who have tried to embrace and love the towering piles, the strange, black, desolate pathways that are the world to-day. The figure that one discerns in the compositions beginning with the "Dwarf Suite," Opus 16, is one that we all have known intimately a space. These pieces are not youth seen through the golden haze of retrospection. They are the expression of groping, fumbling youth as it feels and as it feels, itself to be. They are music young in all its excess, its violence, its sharp griefs and sharper joys, its unreflecting, trembling strength. The spring comes up hot and cruel in them. There is all the loneliness[Pg 270] of youth in this music, all the mysterious dreams of a world scarce understood, all the hesitancies and blind gropings of powers untried. Always, one senses the pavements stretching between steel buildings, the black, hurrying tides of human beings; and through them all, the oppressed figure of one searching out the meaning of all this convulsive activity into which he has been born. It is such solitude that speaks in the first "Impression of Notre-Dame" with its gray mounting masses, its cloisteral reverberation of bells, its savage calls of the city to one standing alone with the monument of a dead age. Violent, uncontrolled passions cry out in the "Three Moods," with their youthful surrender to the moment. The energy of adolescence, unleashed, rejoicing in pure muscular activity, disports itself in the "Shadow Dances," and in the "Wild Man's Dance," with its sheer, naked, beating rhythm. The bitterness of adolescence mocks in the "Three Burlesques," in the "Dance of the Gnomes," with its parodying of clumsy movements. What revolt in the first "Piano Sonata"! And other emotions, timid and uncertain of themselves, uneasy with the swelling sap of springtide, speak their poetry and their pain, tell their tales and are silent, make us remember what once we felt.

The city, the birth into the new world, youth, exist in the music of Ornstein with all the sharpness of shock because of an imagination of a wonderful force[Pg 271]fulness. There is no indirectness in Ornstein, no vagueness. His tension is always of the fullest, the stiffest. What he feels, what he hears, he sets down, irrespective of all the canons and rules and procedures. Harmony with him is something different than it is with any other composer. Piano colors of a violence and garishness are hurled against each other. The lowest and highest registers of the instrument clash in "Improvisata." Rhythms battle, convulsively, almost. In portions of the "Sinfonietta," five rhythms are to be found warring against each other. Melodic curves, lines, sing ecstatically over turbulent, mottled counterpoint in the piano and violin sonatas. The violin sonata is something of an attempt to exhaust all the possibilities of color-contrast contained in the little brown box. In the first "Impression de Notre-Dame," the piano is metallic with the booming bells. In the second, it is stony, heavy with the congested, peering, menacing forms of gargoyles. In the accompaniment to the song "Waldseligkeit," it seems to give the musical equivalent for the substance of wood. No doubt, to one who, like Ornstein, regarded music only as a means of communication, as speech of man to man, and occupied himself only with the communication of his sensations and experience in briefest, directest, simplest form, there must have come moments of the most terrible self-doubt, when all the anathemas of the fathers of the musical church thundered loud[Pg 272] in his ears, and other men's forms and proportions seemed to make his shrivel. It was doubtless thankfulness to William Blake, that other "mad" inventor of wild images and designs, that other "rager in the wilds," for fortification and sustenance, that made him preface his violin sonata with the Argument of "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell," and defend himself with the verses:

"Once meek, and in a perilous path,

The just man kept his course along

The vale of death.

Roses are planted where thorns grew,

And on the barren heath

Sing the honey bees....

"Till the villain left the paths of ease,

To walk in perilous paths, and drive

The just man into barren climes.

"Now the sneaking serpent walks

In mild humility,

And the just man rages in the wilds

Where lions roam."

And certainly, for us, whatever the pundits claim, the wilds of Leo Ornstein are not so raging and lion-infested. For while one speculates whether these pieces are music or not, one discovers that one has entered through them into the life of another being, and through him into the lives of a whole upgrowing generation.

[Pg 273]At present, however, some of those qualities that were so clearly visible in Leo Ornstein during the first years in which he disclosed himself are somewhat obscured. Something not entirely reassuring has happened to the man. A great deal of the music that he has been composing of late wants the bite his earlier work had. The colors are not so piping hot. The outlines are less bold and jagged and clear-cut. Some of the convulsive intensity, the fury, has passed out of the rhythmic element. The melodies are less acidulous, the moods less unbridled. No doubt, something happier has entered into his music, something more voluptuous and smooth. The 'cello chants passionately and dreamily in the two sonatas Ornstein has written of late for it. The racial element is softened, become gentler and duskier and more romantic. The Jew in it no longer wears his gaberdine. If he wears a prayer-shawl at all, it is one made of silk. The Jeremiah of the desert has given way to the young, amorous, dream-filled poet, a poet of the sort that arose among the Jews in Spain during the years of the Moorish ascendency. Yet, a certain intensity, a certain originality, a certain vein of genius, has undergone eclipse in the change. Something a little brilliant, a little facile, a little undistinguished, has introduced itself, even into the best of the newest pieces. The texture is thinner, the tension slacker. Ornstein does not seem to be putting himself into them with[Pg 274] the same directness and completeness with which he put himself into his earlier work. Moreover, occasionally there come from his pen works into which he is not putting himself at all. A choral society of New York a year or two ago produced two small a capella choruses of his that might have been the work of some obscure pupil of Tchaikowsky's. The piano sonatina of the Funeral March, although by no means as insignificant, is nevertheless uncharacteristic in the resemblances it bears the music of Ravel. One thing the earlier compositions are not, and that is, derivative. Ornstein, they make plain, had benefited by the achievements of Debussy and Moussorgsky and Scriabine. But they made plain as well that he had developed a style of his own, a style that was, for all its crudeness and harshness, personal. In becoming again a disciple he reverts to something that he seemed to have left behind him when he wrote his clangorous "Dwarf Suite."

What this new period of Ornstein's composition represents it is not easy to say. Probably, it is a period of transition, a time of the marshaling of forces to a new and fiercer onslaught. Such a time of gestation might well be necessary to Ornstein's genius. It is possible that he has had to give up something in order to gain something else, to try for less in order to establish himself upon a footing firmer than that upon which he stood. His genius during his first years[Pg 275] of creation was lyrical purely. It was a thing that expressed itself in picturing moods, in making brief flights, in establishing moments musicaux. He is at his best in his piano preludes, in his small forms. The works composed during this period in the larger forms, the violin sonata excepted, are scarcely achieved. The outer movements of the Grand Sonata for pianoforte, for instance, are far inferior to the central ones. Whatever the merit of some of the individual movements of "The Masqueraders," Opus 36, and the "Poems of 1917," and at times it is not small, the works as a whole lack form. They have none of the unity and variety and solidity of the "Papillons" and the "Carnaval" of Schumann or the "Valses nobles et sentimentales" of Ravel, for instance, works to which they are in certain other respects comparable. As he grew a little older, Ornstein's nature probably began to demand other forms beside these smaller, more episodic ones. It probably began to strive for greater scope, duration, development, complexity. And so, in order to gain greater intellectual control over his outflow, to learn to build piles of a bulk that require an entirely different workmanship and supervision than do preludes and impressions, Ornstein doubtlessly has been withholding himself, diminishing the intensity of his fire. In order to learn to organize his material, he has doubtlessly uncon[Pg 276]sciously lessened its density and vibrancy for the time being.

And, too, it may be the result of a change from a pain-economy to a pleasure-economy. The adolescent has grown into the young man. The adjustment may have been made. The poet is no longer forced to mint his miseries and pains alone into art; he is learning to be glad. He may again be seeking to find himself in a world grown different.

At the same time, there is a distinct possibility that the present period of Ornstein's composition is not a time of preparation for a new flight. There is a distinct possibility that it represents an unwholesome slackening. After all, may it not be that he has flinched? Stronger men than he have succumbed to a hostile world. And Ornstein has found the world very hostile. He has found America absolutely unprepared for his art, possessed with no technique to cope with it. He has very largely been operating in a void. It is not so much that he has been tried and found wanting. He has not even been heard. Because the musical world has been unable to follow him, it has dismissed him entirely from its consciousness. Scarcely a critic has been able to express what it is about his music that he likes or dislikes. They have either ridiculed him or written cordially about him without saying anything. There is nothing more demoralizing for the artist. At present they are even classing him with[Pg 277] Prokofief. The virtuosi have shown a like timidity. Scarcely a one has dared perform his music. Many have refrained out of policy, unwilling to forfeit any applause. Others have no doubt quite sincerely refused to perform any music that sounded cacophonous to them. For the army of musicians is almost entirely composed of rearguard. Not a single one of the orchestral conductors in New York has dared consider performing his "Sinfonietta," to say nothing of the early and comparatively accessible "Marche funèbre" and "A la chinoise." Of the Philharmonic Society, of course, one expects nothing. But one might suppose that the various organizations allegedly "friendly" to music, eager for the cause of the "new" and the "modern," would see to it that the musician whom such an authority as Ernest Bloch has declared to be the single composer in America who displays positive signs of genius, was given his opportunity. The contrary has been the case. D'Indy's foolish war symphony, the works of Henry Hadley, of Rachmaninoff, of David Stanley Smith, even of Dvorsky, that person who exists as little in the field of composition as he does in Biarritz, have received and do receive the attention of our powerful ones. It would be small wonder, then, if an artist like Ornstein, who, like every real artist, requires the contact of other minds and cannot go on producing, hopeless of attaining performance and exhibition, had finally flinched[Pg 278] and wearied of his efforts, and suddenly found himself writing such music as the intelligences of his fellow-craftsmen can reasonably be expected to comprehend.

There are other reasons that might lead one to presume that these recent works represent a slump. For Ornstein has been devoting too much of his energy to concertizing. He has been traveling madly over the United States and Canada for the last few years, living in Pullman sleepers and playing to audiences of all sorts. During the first years that he was in America after the outbreak of war in Europe, he at least played the music that he loved. But no one was ready for programs beginning with Korngold and Cyril Scott and ending with Ravel and Scriabine and Ornstein himself. So little by little Ornstein began adulterating his programs, adding a popular piece here, another there. Recently, he has been playing music into which he cannot put his heart at all, Liszt and Rubinstein as well as Beethoven and Schumann. He has been performing it none too brilliantly. Such an existence cannot but dull the man's edge. No one can play the Twelfth Hungarian Rhapsody or the transcription of the Mendelssohn Wedding March or the Rigoletto Fantasy continually without being punished. No one who does not love them can play the Sonata Appassionata or the Etudes symphoniques or the waltzes of Chopin long without becoming dulled and spoiled. So with composition become an[Pg 279] interval between two trains, and expression an attempt to please audiences and to establish oneself with the public as a popular pianist, it is not the most preposterous of thoughts that Leo Ornstein has lost something he once possessed in beautiful and superabundant form.

Still, it is fairly incredible. It is impossible that great and permanent harm should have been done him already. He was too vital and sane a being to be so easily corrupted. For those who knew him in the first years of his return from Paris, he was nothing if not the genius. If he was less accomplished, less resourceful and magistral an artist than Strawinsky, for instance, whom he resembles in a certain general way, he was at least a more human, a more passionate being. It is this great vitality, this rich temperament, that makes one sure that we are not going to have in Leo Ornstein another Richard Strauss, another Strauss who has never had the many fertile years vouchsafed the other. It makes us sure that he will finally come to terms with his managers and audiences, and that the harm already done him by his way of life will grow no greater. It convinces us that his present mood is but the result of a necessary process of transition from one basis to another; that the man is really summoning himself for the works that will express him in his manhood. And we are positive that there will shortly come from him weighty[Pg 280] musical forms with colors as burning and deep as those of his first pieces, and of like intensity and boldness; and that Leo Ornstein is sure of reaching the high heaven of art for which he seemed and still seems bound.

Bloch

Once before, East and West have met and merged. On the plains where the soldiers of Darius and Alexander slaughtered one another, and where the Macedonian phalanxes recoiled before the castellated elephants of Porus, a marriage was consummated. Hovering over the heads of the opposing armies, the angel of Europe and the angel of Asia embraced, and sent their lifebloods coursing through each other. Passage was made to India. The two continents slowly faced about. Two reservoirs that had been accumulating for eons the precious distillations of two great centers of the human race began mingling their essences. In whatever the East did, there was evident the hand of the West. In whatever the West thought there was visible the prismatic intelligence of the East. The gods of Greece showed their smooth foreheads on the banks of the Ganges. Oriental systems refracted the blonde Mediterranean light into an hundred subtle tints. But the empire of Alexander crumbled, Parthians annihilated the legions of Crassus. Persians and Seljuks and Ottomans barred Europe from the East. Steady communication ceased. Asia withdrew under her cloudy mysterious curtains. Legendary fumes, Cathay, Zipango, the Indias of the Great[Pg 282] Ocean, arose. Once again, the two basins were cut off. Once again, each began secreting a substance radically different from the other's, a substance growing more individual with each elapsing century. For almost two thousand years, East and West developed away one from the other.

And now, a second time, in our own hour, the two have drawn close and confronted each other. Once again, a fusion has taken place. We are to-day in the midst of a movement likely to surpass the period of Hellenization in duration and extent. This time, perhaps, no dramatic march of Macedonians to the banks of the Indus has served to make the connection. Nevertheless, in the image of Amy Lowell, guns have again shown themselves keys. For a couple of centuries, great gates have been swinging throughout the East at the behest of frigates and armed merchantmen. And slowly, once again, Asia has been seeping into Europe. Warm spicy gusts have been drifting over the West, steadily permeating the air. At first, there appeared to be nothing serious in the infiltration. The eighteenth century was apparently coquetting only with Eastern motifs. If Chinese palaces put in their appearance at Drottningholm and Pillnitz, in all portions of the continent; if Chippendale began giving curious delicate twists to his furniture, it seemed nothing more than a matter of caprice. The zest for Persian letters, Oriental nouvelles, Turkish marches,[Pg 283] arose apparently only from the desire for masquerade. Grétry, Mozart, Wieland, scarcely took their seraglios, pashas, bulbuls earnestly. But, gradually, with the arrival of the nineteenth century, what had hitherto seemed play only, began to assume a different shape. The East was indeed dawning upon the West again. The mists were being burned away. Through Sir William Jones and Friedrich Schlegel, the wisdom of the dangerous slippery Indies was opened to Europe. Goethe, as ever the outrider, revealed the new orientation in his "West-Oestlicher Divan" and his "Chinesich-Deutsche Jahres-und-Tages-Zeiten." In 1829, Victor Hugo published "Les Orientales"; in 1859, Fitzgerald his "Omar." If Weber little more than toyed with Chinese and Turkish musical color in "Turandot" and in "Oberon," Félicien David in his songs and in his "Le Désert" attempted seriously to infiltrate into European music the musical feeling of the Levant. In the corner of Schopenhauer's apartment there sat an effigy of the Buddha; volumes of the Upanishads lay on his table. In 1863 for the first time, a Paris shop offered for sale a few Japanese prints. Manet, Whistler, Monet, the brothers De Goncourt came and bought. But though the craze for painting Princesses du Pays de la Porcelaine ended rapidly, European painting was revolutionized. Surfaces once more came into being. Color was born again under the brushes of the impressionists and the[Pg 284] post-impressionists. The sense of touch was freed. In all the arts the art of Japan became powerful. De Maupassant wrote a prose that is full of the technique of the Japanese prints; that works chiefly through means of sharp little lines and dainty spotting. All five senses were being born again. People listened with new keenness to the sounds of instruments. The Russian sons of Berlioz with their new orchestral chemistry arrived. The orchestral machine expanded and grew subtle. Huysmans dreamt of symphonies of liqueurs, concertos of perfumery.

And the new century, when it came, showed that it was no deliberately assumed thing, this fusion of Oriental and Occidental modes of feeling, showed that it was a thing arising deep in the being. Something that had long lain inert had been reborn at the contact in Western men. A part of personality that had lain dead had of a sudden been suffused with blood and warmth; light played over a hemisphere of the mind long dark. The very hand that drew, the very mouth that matched words, the very body that beat and curved and swayed in movement, were Western and Eastern at the same time. It was no longer the Greek conception of form that prevailed on the banks of the Seine, or wherever art was produced. Art was become again, what the Orientals had always known it to be, significant form. It was as though Persia had been born again in Henri Matisse, for instance. A sense of[Pg 285] design and color the like of which had hitherto been manifest only in the vases and bloomy carpets of Teheran dictated his exquisite patterns. Hokusai and Outamaro got in Vincent Van Gogh a brother. The sultry atmosphere and animal richness of Hindoo art reappeared in Gauguin's wood-cuts. One has but to go to any really modern art, whether produced in Paris or in Munich or in New York, to see again the subtle browns and silvers and vermilions, the delicate sensuous touch, the infinitely various patterns, the forms that carry with them the earth from Arabia to Japan.

As in the plastic arts, so in poetry. The imagists, Ezra Pound in particular, were Chinese long before they discovered Cathay in the works of Ernest Fennellosa. And in music, certainly, the East is on us; has been on us since the Russian five began their careers and expressed their own half-European, half-Mongol, natures. The stream has commenced setting since the Arabian Nights, the Persian odalisques, the Tartar tribesmen became music. And the Chinese sensibility of Scriabine, the Oriental chromatics of the later Rimsky-Korsakoff, the sinuous scales and voluptuous colors and silken textures of Debussy, the shrill fantastic Japanese idiom of Strawinsky, have shown us the fusion was near.

But in the music of no composer is it as plainly evident as it is in that of Ernest Bloch. In a work[Pg 286] like this composer's suite for viola and piano, one has a sense of a completeness of fusion such as no other gives. Here, the West has advanced furthest east, the East furthest west. Two things are balanced in the work, two things developed through a score of centuries by two uncommunicating regions. The organizing power of Europe is married to the sensuousness of Asia. The virile formative power of the heirs of Bach is here. An extended form is solid as mountains, projects volumes through time. One four-square movement is set atop another. There is no weakening, no slackening, no drop. One can put one's hand around these brown-gold blocks. And at the same time, this organizing power makes to live a dusky sensuality, a velvety richness of texture, a sultriness and wetness that sets us amid the bronzed glowing wood-carvings of Africans, the dark sunsets of Ceylon, the pagodas in which the Chinaman sits and sings of his felicity, his family, his garden. The lyric blue of Chinese art, the tropical forests with their horrid heat and dense growths and cruel animal life, the Polynesian seas of azure tulle, the spice-laden breezes, chant here. The monotony, the melancholy, the bitterness of the East, things that had hitherto sounded only from the darkly shining zither of the Arabs, or from the deathly gongs and tam-tams of the Mongolians, speak through Western instruments. It is as though something had been brought out from a steaming Burmese swamp and[Pg 287] exposed to the terrible beat of a New York thoroughfare, and that out of that transplantation a matter utterly new and sad and strange, favoring both father and mother, and yet of a character distinctly individual, had been created.

For no composer was better fitted by nature to receive the stimulus of the onrushing East. As a Jew, Bloch carried within himself a fragment of the Orient; was in himself an outpost of the mother of continents. And he is one of the few Jewish composers really, fundamentally self-expressive. He is one of the few that have fully accepted themselves, fully accepted the fate that made them Jewish and stigmatized them. After all, it was not the fact that they were "homeless" as Wagner pretended, that prevented the company of Meyerbeers and Mendelssohns from creating. It was rather more the fact that, inwardly, they refused to accept themselves for what they were. The weakness of their art is to be understood only as the result of the spiritual warfare that threatens to divide every Jew against himself. There was operative in them, whether they were aware of it or no, a secret desire to escape their stigmata. They were deliberately deaf to the promptings of the beings that were so firmly planted in the racial soil. They were fugitive from the national consciousness. The bourn of impulse was half stopped. It was not that they did not write "Jewish" music, utilize solely[Pg 288] racial scales and melodies. The artist of Jewish extraction need not do so to be saved. The whole world is open before him. He can express his day as he will. One thing, however, is necessary. He must not seek to inhibit any portion of his impulse. He must not attempt to deny his modes of apprehension and realization because they are racially colored. He must possess spiritual harmony. The whole man must go into his expression. And it was just the "whole man" who did not go into the work of the composers who have hitherto represented "Judaism in Music." An inhibited, harried impulse is manifest in their art.

For, like Meyerbeer, convinced of the worthlessness of their feelings, they manufactured spectacles for the operatic stage, and pandered to a taste which they least of all respected. Or, like Mendelssohn, they tried to adapt themselves to the alien atmosphere of Teutonic romance, and produced a musical jargon that resembles nothing in the world so much as Yiddish. Or, with Rubinstein, they gloved themselves in a pretty salon style in order to conceal all vestiges of the flesh, or tried, with Gustav Mahler, to intone "Ave Maria." Some, no doubt, would have preferred to have been true to themselves. Goldmark (the uncle) is an example. But his desire remained intention, largely. For his method was a trifle childish. He conceived it as a lying on couches amid cushions, sniffing Orient perfumes in scent-bottles. He did not[Pg 289] realize that the couch was the comfortable German canapé, the cushions the romantic style of Weber and the early Wagner, and that through the

"Sabæan odors from the spicy shore

Of Araby the blest"

But there is music of Ernest Bloch that is a large, a poignant, an authentic expression of what is racial in the Jew. There is music of his that is authentic by virtue of qualities more fundamentally racial than the synagogical modes on which it bases itself, the Semitic pomp and color that inform it. There are moments when one hears in this music the harsh and haughty accents of the Hebrew tongue, sees the abrupt gestures of the Hebrew soul, feels the titanic burst of energy that created the race and carried it intact across lands and times, out of the eternal Egypt, through the eternal Red Sea. There are moments when this music makes one feel as though an element that had remained unchanged throughout three thousand years, an element that is in every Jew and by which every Jew must know himself and his descent, were caught up in it and fixed there. Bloch has composed settings for the Psalms that are the very impulse of the Davidic hymns incarnate in another medium; make it seem as though the genius that had once flowered at the court[Pg 290] of the king had attained miraculous second blooming. The setting of the 114th Psalm is the very voice of the rejoicing over the passage of the Red Sea, the very lusty blowing on ox horns, the very hieratic dance. The voice of Jehovah, has it spoken to those who throughout the ages have called for it much differently than it speaks at the close of Bloch's 22nd Psalm?

And it is something like the voice of Job that speaks in the desolation of the third of the "Poèmes juives." Once again, the Ecclesiast utters his disillusion, his cruel disappointment, his sense of the utter vanity of existence in the soliloquy of the 'cello in the rhapsody "Schelomo." Once again, the tent of the tabernacle that Jehovah ordered Moses to erect in the wilderness, and hang with curtains and with veils, lifts itself in the introduction to the symphony "Israel." The great kingly limbs and beard and bosom of Abraham are, once again, in the first movement of the work; the dark, grave, soft-eyed women of the Old Testament, Rebecca, Rachel, Ruth, re-appear in the second, with its flowing voices.

Racial traits abound in this body of work. These ponderous forms, these sudden movements, these imperious, barbaric, ritual trumpet blasts, bring to mind all one knows of Semitic art, recall the crowned winged bulls of the Assyrians as well as Flaubert's Carthage, with its pyramided temples and cisterns and neighing horses in the acropolis. Bloch's themes oftentimes[Pg 291] have the subtle, far-flung, monotonous line of the synagogic chants. Many of his melodic bits, although pure inventions, are indubitably hereditary. The mode of a race is, after all, but the intensified inflection of its speech. And Bloch's melodic line, with its strange intervals, its occasional quarter notes, approximates curiously to the inflections of the Hebrew tongue. Like so much of the Gregorian chant, which it oftentimes recalls, one can conceive this music as part of the Temple service in Jerusalem. And like the melodic line, so, too, the phrases assigned to the trumpets in the setting of the three Psalms and in the symphony "Israel." They, also, might once have resounded through the courts of Herod's temple. The unusual accents, the unusual intervals, give the instruments a timbre at once imperious, barbaric, ritual. And how different from the theatric Orientalism of so many of the Russians are the crude dissonances of Bloch, the terrible consecutive fourths and fifths, the impetuous rhythms, savage and frenetic in their emphasis. This music is shrill and tawny and bitter with the desert. Its flavor is indeed new to European music. Certainly, in the province of the string quartet, nothing quite like the salty and acrid, the fruity, drugging savor of Bloch's work, has ever before appeared.

And it was not until the Jewish note appeared in his work that Bloch spoke his proper language. The works that precede the "Trois Poèmes juives," the[Pg 292] first of his compositions in which the racial gesture is consciously made, do not really represent the man as he is. No doubt, the brilliant and ironic scherzo of the C-sharp minor Symphony, whose verve and passion and vigor make the composer of "L'Apprenti sorcier" seem apprentice indeed, is already characteristic of the composer of the string quartet and the suite for viola and piano. But much of the symphony is derivative. One glimpses the influence of Liszt and Tchaikowsky and Strauss in it. So too with the opera "Macbeth," written a few years after the composition of the symphony, when the composer was twenty-four. Despite the effectiveness of the setting it gives the melodrama cleverly abstracted from Shakespeare's tragedy by Edmond Flegg, the score bears a still undecided signature. One feels that the composer has recently encountered the personalities of Moussorgsky and Debussy. No doubt, one begins to sense the proper personality of Bloch in the delicate coloring of the two little orchestral sketches "Hiver-Printemps," in the mournful English horn against the harp in "Hiver," in the chirruping hurdy-gurdy commencement of "Printemps." Unfortunately, the cantilena in the second number still points backward. But with the "Trois Poèmes juives," the original Bloch is at hand. These compositions were conceived at first as studies for "Jezabel," the opera Bloch intended composing directly after he had completed the scoring[Pg 293] of "Macbeth" in 1904. To-day, "Jezabel" still exists only in the libretto of Flegg and in the series of sketches deposited in the composer's portfolio. The moment in which Bloch is to find it possible for him to realize the work has not yet arrived. Planned at first to follow directly upon "Macbeth," "Jezabel" promises fairly to become the goal of his first great creative period. But out of the conception of the opera itself, out of the desire of creating a work around this Old Testamentary figure, out of the train of emotion excited by the project, there have already flowed results of a first magnitude for Bloch and for modern music. For in the process of searching out a style befitting this biblical drama, and in the effort to master the idiom necessary to it, Bloch executed the compositions that have placed him so eminently in the company of the few modern masters. The three Psalms, "Schelomo," "Israel," portions of the quartet, have but trodden further in the direction marked out by the "Trois Poèmes juives." "Jezabel" has turned out to be one of those dreams that lead men on to the knowledge of themselves.

And yet, the "Jewish composer" that the man is so often said to be, he most surely is not. He is too much the man of his time, too much the universal genius, to be thus placed in a single category. His art succeeds to that of Moussorgsky and Debussy quite as much as does that of Strawinsky and Ravel; he rests[Pg 294] quite as heavily on the great European traditions of music as he does on his own hereditary strain. Indeed, he is of the modern masters one of those the most conscious of the tradition of his art. He falls heir to Bach and to Haydn and to Beethoven quite as much as any living musician. Quite as much as that of any other his music is an image of the time. In the quartet, his magistral work, the Hebraic element is only one of several. The trio of the scherzo is like a section of some Polynesian forest, with its tropic warmth, its monstrous growths, its swampy earth, its chattering monkeys and birds of paradise. There is the beat of the age of steel in the finale. And the delicate Pastorale is redolent of the gentle fields of Europe, smells of the hay, gives again the nun-like close of day in temperate skies. It is only that as a Jew it was necessary for Ernest Bloch to say yea to his own heredity before his genius could appear. And to what a degree it has appeared, one can gauge from the intensity with which his age mirrors itself in the music he has already composed. His music is the modern man in his lately gotten sense of the tininess of the human elements in the race, the enormity of the animal past. For Ernest Bloch, the primeval forest with its thick spawning life, its ferocious beasts, its brutish phallic-worshiping humanity, is still here. Before him there still lie the hundreds and hundreds of thousands of years of development necessary to make[Pg 295] a sapient creature of man. And he writes like one who has been plunged into a darkness and sadness and bitterness all the greater for the vision of the rainbow that has been given him, for the glimpse he has had of the "pays du soleil," the land of man lifting himself at last from the brute and becoming human. For he knows too well that only aeons after he is dead will the night finally pass.

And he is the modern insomuch as the fusion of East and West is illuminated by what he does. The coloration of his orchestra, the cries of his instruments, the line of his melody, the throbbing of his pulses, make us feel the great tide sweeping us on, the wave rolling over all the world. In his art, we feel the earth itself turning toward the light of the East.

APPENDIX

WAGNER

Wilhelm Richard Wagner was born in Leipzig on May 22nd, 1813. He died in Venice February 13th, 1883. The facts of his career are too well known to justify rehearsal.

The dates of the composition and first performances of his operas are: "Rienzi," 1838-40; première in Dresden, 1842. "Tannhäuser," 1843-45 (Paris version, 1860); Dresden, 1845. "Lohengrin," 1845-48; Weimar, 1850. "Das Rheingold," 1848-53; Munich, 1869. "Die Walküre," 1848-56; Munich, 1870. "Tristan und Isolde," 1857-59; Munich, 1865. "Siegfried," 1857-69; Bayreuth, 1876. "Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg," 1861-67; Munich, 1868. "Die Götterdämmerung," 1870-74; Bayreuth, 1876. "Parsifal," 1876-82; Bayreuth, 1882.

STRAUSS

Richard Strauss was born in Munich June 11th, 1864. His father, Franz Strauss, was first horn-player in the Munich Court Orchestra. His mother was the daughter of the beer brewer, Georg Pschorr. He began composing at the tender age of six. From 1870 to 1874 he attended the elementary school at Munich. In 1874 he matriculated at the Gymnasium, and remained there until 1882. During the next year he attended lectures at the University of Munich. From 1875 to 1880 he studied harmony, counterpoint and instrumentation with Hofkapellmeister F. W. Meyer. His compositions were performed publicly from 1880 on. In 1885 he made the acquaintance of Alexander Ritter, who, together with Hans von Bülow, is supposed to have converted young Strauss, until then a good Brahmsian, to Wagnerism and modernism. In 1885 at Bülow's invitation, Strauss conducted a concert of the Meiningen Orchestra. In November of that year he succeeded Bülow as conductor of the organization. In 1886 he become third Kapellmeister at the Munich Opera; in 1889, director at Weimar. 1892-3 was spent in Egypt and Sicily after an attack of inflammation of the lungs.[Pg 300] In 1894 he became chief Kapellmeister at Munich. In 1895 his European concert-tours commenced. He conducted in Budapest, Brussels, Moscow, Amsterdam, London, Barcelona, Paris, Zürich and Madrid. In 1898 he became conductor of the Berlin Royal Opera. In 1904 he came to America to conduct at four festival concerts given in his honor in New York. In one month he gave twenty-one concerts in different cities with nearly as many orchestras. The tour ended with the hubbub over the fact that Strauss had conducted a concert in John Wanamaker's. Since 1898 Strauss has resided chiefly in Charlottenburg and, in the summer, at Marquardstein near Garmisch.

"Serenade for Wind Instruments," Opus 7, 1882-83; "Eight Songs," Opus 10, 1882-83; "Aus Italien," Opus 16, 1886; "Don Juan," Opus 20, 1888; "Tod und Verklärung," Opus 24, 1889; "Four Songs," Opus 27, 1892-93; "Till Eulenspiegel's Lustige Streiche," Opus 28, 1894-95; "Three Songs," Opus 29, 1894-95; "Also Sprach Zarathustra," Opus 30, 1894-95; "Don Quixote," Opus 35, 1897; "Ein Heldenleben," Opus 40, 1898; "Feuersnot," Opus 50, 1900-01; "Taillefer," Opus 52, 1903; "Sinfonia Domestica," Opus 53, 1903; "Salome," Opus 54, 1904-05; "Elektra," Opus 58, 1906-08; "Der Rosenkavalier," Opus 59, 1909-10; "Ariadne auf Naxos," Opus 60, 1911-12; "Josef's Legende," 1913; "Eine Alpensymphonie," 1914-15; "Die Frau ohne Schatten," 1915-17.

MOUSSORGSKY

Modest Petrovitch Moussorgsky was born March 16th, 1839, in the village of Karevo in the government of Pskow, Russia. His parents were members of the lesser nobility. His mother gave him his first piano lessons. At the age of ten he was sent to the School of St. Peter and St. Paul in Petrograd. His piano-studies were continued with a certain Professor Herke. At the age of twelve he played in public a Rondo de concert by Herz. In 1852 he matriculated at the school for ensigns, and the same year had his first composition, a polka, published. In 1856, while serving as an officer in the Preobrajensky Guards, he made the acquaintance of Borodin. Soon after, he met Dargomyjski. It[Pg 301] was with him that, in his own words, "he for the first time lived the musical life." Later, he became acquainted also with Cui, Balakirew and Rimsky-Korsakoff. He took lessons in composition of Balakirew, and finally realized what his direction really was. A nervous malady prevented him from working in 1859. But directly after his convalescence, he resigned from the guards, and set to work in earnest. In order to support himself, he accepted a position in the government service. He lived in Petrograd with five friends. In 1865 he was once more attacked by his malady, and had to retire to the country for three years. In 1869 he returned to Petrograd, living with his friends the Opotchinines. His moment of success came in 1874, with the performance of "Boris." Directly after, his health commenced to fail. In 1879 he resigned his office, and sought to support himself by playing accompaniments. He died in 1881 in a military hospital.

"Boris Godounow," 1868-71; "Khovanchtchina," 1872-81; "The Marriage" (one act), 1868; "The Fair at Sorotchinsk" (fragment), 1877-81; "The Defeat of Sennacherib," 1867-74; "Jesus Navine," 1877; "Sans Soleil," 1874; "La Chambre d'Enfants," 1874; "Chants et Danses de la Mort," 1875; "Marcia all Turka," 1880; "La Nuit sur le Mont-Chauve," 1867-75; "Tableaux d'une Exposition," 1874; "Hopak," 1877.

LISZT

Franz Liszt was born near Odenburg, Hungary, October 22nd, 1811. He died in Bayreuth, July 31st, 1886. He played in public for the first time at the age of nine, in Odenburg. In 1829 he came to Vienna, remaining there eighteen months studying piano under Czerny, and composition with Salieri. He then was taken to Paris, where he studied under Reicha till 1825. In 1831 he heard Paganini play. It is supposed that he was so impressed that he decided to become the Paganini of the piano. He was very much in demand in Paris as an artist. In 1835 he carried the Comtesse d'Agoult off from a ball, and went with her to Geneva. He remained in Geneva until 1839, when[Pg 302] his triumphal progresses through Europe commenced. In 1848 he became Kapellmeister in Weimar. Here, he caused "Lohengrin" to be produced, and had "Der Fliegende Holländer" and "Tannhäuser," as well as operas of Berlioz and Schumann, revived. It was while he was in Weimar that he formed a relationship with the Princess Sayn-Wittgenstein. In 1859 he went to Rome, where he remained till 1870. In 1866 Pius IX made him an Abbé. After 1870 he returned to Weimar, living there and in Budapest and in Rome.

His principal orchestral works are: "Eine Faustsymphonie," "Dante," "Bergsymphonie," "Tasso," "Les Préludes," "Orpheus," "Mazeppa," "Hungaria," "Hunnenschlacht," "Die Ideale," "Two Episodes from Lenau's Faust," etc.

His principal choral works are "Die Legende von der Heiligen Elisabeth" and "Christus."

His principal compositions for the pianoforte are: "Sonata in B-minor," "Concerto in E-flat," "Concerto in A," "Années de pèlerinage," "Consolations," "Two Légendes," "Liebesträume," "Six Preludes and Fugues (Bach)," etc., etc. Also innumerable transcriptions.

BERLIOZ

Louis Hector Berlioz was born at La Côte Saint-André near Grenoble on December 11th, 1803. His father was a physician, and wished his son to follow his profession. So Hector was sent to Paris to study. Instead of studying medicine he commenced to compose. A mass of his was performed at Saint-Roch in 1824. In 1826 he sought to enter the Conservatoire, but failed in the preliminary examination. In 1827, 1828 and 1829, he competed for the Prix de Rome, and failed. In 1830 he finally secured it. While in Rome in 1831, he composed the "Symphonie Fantastique" and "Lélio." In 1833 he married his adored Miss Smithson. In 1834 "Harold" was performed for the first time. "The Requiem" was composed in 1836, "Benvenuto Cellini" in 1837, "Roméo" in 1839. In 1840 Berlioz made his first journey to Brussels; in 1842-43 he toured Germany. The "Carnaval Romain" was performed in 1844. In 1845-46 Berlioz gave numerous concerts in France, and toured Austria and Hungary. In[Pg 303] December of the latter year "La Damnation de Faust" failed at the Opéra Comique. In 1847 Berlioz went to Russia and to England for the first time. In 1849 he began work on his "Te Deum"; in 1850 on "L'Enfance du Christ." The next years were spent in conducting. In 1854, on the death of his wife, he married Mlle. Récio. In 1856 we find Berlioz in North Germany, Brussels and London. He began the composition of "Les Troyens" the same year. At its performance in 1863, the work failed. His last years were darkened by the death of his wife and son. He died March 8th, 1869, in Paris.

FRANCK

César-Auguste Franck was born at Liège, Belgium, December 10th, 1822. His father hoped to make a piano-virtuoso of him, and supervised his musical education. At the age of eleven the young Franck was touring Belgium as a pianist. In 1835 the family emigrated to Paris, and two years later César was admitted to the Conservatoire. He studied composition with Leborne and the piano with Zimmermann. He took the first prize for fugue in 1840. In 1842 his father compelled him to leave the Conservatory and return to Belgium, but two years later he was once more in Paris, seeking to gain his living by teaching and playing. "Ruth" was performed in 1846. He was married in 1848. In 1851 he was appointed organist at the church of Saint-Jean-Saint-François, later of the church of Sainte-Clotilde, which post he occupied during the remainder of his years. In 1872 he was appointed professor of organ-playing at the Conservatoire. "Rédemption" was performed in 1873. "Les Béatitudes" was performed for the first time in 1880. Shortly after, the professorship of composition at the Conservatory was refused him, and five years later he was decorated with the ribbon of the Legion of Honor as "professor of organ-playing." In 1887 a "Festival Franck" was given under the direction of Pasdeloup at the Cirque d'hiver. His symphony was performed for the first time in 1889. He died November 8th, 1890.

The dates of the composition of his principal works are as follows:[Pg 304] "Ruth," 1843-46; "Six pièces pour grand orgue," 1860-62; "Trois offertoires," 1871; "Rédemption," 1871-72 (first version), 1874 (second version); "Prélude, fugue et variation," 1873; "Trois pièces pour grand orgue," 1878; "String-quintet," 1878-79; "Les Béatitudes," 1869-79; "Le Chasseur maudit," 1882; "Les Djinns," 1884; "Prélude, choral et fugue," 1884; "Hulda," 1882-85; "Variations symphoniques," 1885; "Sonate," 1886; "Prélude, aria et finale," 1886-87; "Psyche," 1887-88; "Symphonie," 1886-88; "Quatuor," 1889; "Trois chorales," 1890.

DEBUSSY

Claude-Achille Debussy was born August 22nd, 1862, at Saint-Germain-en-Laye. He died at Paris March 22nd, 1918. He entered the Conservatoire at the age of twelve, studying harmony with Lavignac and piano with Marmontel. At the age of eighteen, he paid a brief visit to Russia. But it was not until several years later that he became acquainted with the score of "Boris Godounow," which was destined to have so great an influence on his life, and precipitate his revolt from Wagnerism. In 1884 he gained the Prix de Rome with his cantata "L'Enfant prodigue." During his three-year stay at the Villa Medici he composed "Printemps" and "La Damoiselle élue." "Ariettes oubliées" were published in 1888, followed, in 1890, by "Cinq poèmes de Baudelaire"; in 1893 by the string-quartet and the "Prélude à 'l'Après-midi d'un faune'"; in 1894 by "Proses lyriques"; and in 1898 by "Les Chansons de Bilitis." The "Nocturnes" were performed for the first time in 1899. "Pelléas," upon which Debussy had been working for ten years, was produced at the Opéra Comique in 1902. In 1903, "Estampes" were published. "Masques," "L'Isle joyeuse," "Danses pour harp chromatique" and "Trois chansons de France" were published in 1904. The following year saw the disclosure of the first book of "Images" for piano and of "La Mer." The second book of "Images" appeared in 1906; "Ibéria" in 1907; "Trois chansons de Charles d'Orléans" and the "Children's Corner" in 1908. "Rondes de Printemps" was performed for the first time in 1909. In 1910 there appeared "Trois ballades de François Villon" and the first book of "Préludes for piano." It[Pg 305] was in the incidental music to d'Annunzio's Le Martyre de Saint-Sébastien, performed in 1911, that Debussy's genius showed itself for the last time in any fullness. In 1912 "Gigues" were performed; in 1913 there appeared the second book of Préludes for piano. The works produced subsequently are of much smaller importance.

RAVEL

Maurice Ravel was born in Ciboure, Basses-Pyrénées, March 7th, 1875. Shortly after his birth, his family moved to Paris. Henri Ghis was his first piano-teacher, Charles-René his first teacher of composition. He took piano-lessons of Ricardo Viñès, and in 1891 was awarded a "première médaille" in piano-playing at the Conservatoire. In 1897 Ravel entered the class of Fauré. In 1898, his "Sites auriculaires" were publicly performed. In 1901 he failed for the first time to gain the Prix de Rome. His quartet was performed in 1904. In 1903 he failed for the fourth time to gain the Prix de Rome. "Histoires naturelles" were performed in 1907, the "Rapsodie espagnole" in 1908. "L'Heure espagnole" was given at the Opéra Comique in 1911. "Daphnis et Chloé" was performed by the Russian Ballet in 1912. During the war Ravel served as ambulance driver. He was wounded while serving before Verdun, and dismissed from service. He is living at present in Paris.

"Miroirs," 1905; "Sonatine," 1905; "Gaspard de la Nuit," 1908; "Valses nobles et sentimentales," 1911; "Ma Mère l'Oye," 1908; "Histoires naturelles," 1906; "Cinq Mélodies populaires grecques," 1907; "Trois Poèmes de Mallarmé," 1913; "Quatuor à cordes," 1902-03; "Introduction et Allégro pour harpe," 1906; "Rapsodie espagnole," 1907; "Daphnis et Chloé," 1906-11; "L'Heure espagnole," 1907; "Le Tombeau de Couperin," 1914-17.

BORODIN

Alexander Porfirievitch Borodin was born in Petrograd November 12th, 1834, and died there February 27th, 1887.

RIMSKY-KORSAKOFF

Nikolai Andreyevitch Rimsky-Korsakoff was born March 6th, 1844, at Tikhvin, in the government of Novgorod, Russia. His father was a civil governor and landed proprietor. He began to study the pianoforte at the age of six. He was destined for a career in the navy, and, in 1856, he was sent to study at the Petrograd Naval College. In 1861 he made the acquaintance of Balakirew and of the group about him. After a two-year cruise in the navy, Rimsky returned to Petrograd in 1865. In 1866 he was installed in furnished rooms, having decided upon becoming a composer. He began work on "Antar" in 1868. It was performed the following year. In 1871 he became professor of composition and orchestration at the Petrograd Conservatory. In 1872 his opera "The Maid of Pskof" was produced. Rimsky married, on June 30th of that year, Nadejeda Pourgold. Moussorgsky was best man at the ceremony. In 1873 he became Inspector of Naval Bands. In 1874 he toured the Crimea. In 1883 he was called upon to reorganize the Imperial chapel. In 1889 he conducted two Russian concerts at the Paris Exposition. In the following year he conducted two Russian concerts in Brussels. He resigned his position as conductor of the Russian Symphony concerts and the inspectorship of the Imperial chapel in 1894. In 1900 he was in Brussels again. In 1904, due to his political views, he was called upon to vacate his post of Director of the Conservatory. He attended the Russian festival in Paris in the spring of 1907. The French Society of Composers, however, refused to admit him to membership. He died in April, 1908, at his property at Lioubensk.

The titles of his operas are: "The Maid of Pskof," 1872; "A Night in May," 1880; "Sniegouroschka," 1882; "Mlada," 1892; "Christmas Eve Revels," 1895; "Sadko," 1897; "Mozart and Salieri," 1898; "Boyarina Vera Sheloga," 1898; "The Tsar's Bride," 1899; "The Tale of Tsar Saltan," 1900; "Servilia," 1902; "Kashchei the Immortal," 1902; "Pan Voyevoda," 1902; "Kitj," 1907; "Le Coq d'or," 1907.

Among his orchestral compositions are: Symphony No. 1, "Serbian Fantasy," Opus 6; "Symphonic Suite Antar," Opus 9; Symphony, Opus 32. "Spanish Caprice," Opus 34; "Scheherazade," Opus 35; "Easter Overture," Opus 36.

RACHMANINOFF

Sergei Vassilievitch Rachmaninoff was born March 29th, 1873, at Onega in the government of Novgorod, Russia. He entered the Petrograd Conservatory in 1882, studying piano in the class of Demyaresky, theory in that of Professor L. A. Sacchetti. In 1885 he entered the Moscow Conservatory, studying under Zviereiff, Taneyef and Arensky. His first public appearance as a pianist took place in 1892. He has been composing steadily since 1894. His first symphony was produced by Glazounof in 1895. His European tours commenced in 1899. In 1903 he taught in the Moscow Maryinsky Institute. From 1904 to 1906 he conducted at the Imperial Opera in Moscow. His own operas, "The Miser Knight" and "Francesca da Rimini," were performed at that time. After 1907 he lived in Dresden. His first American tour took place in 1909. His second began in 1918.

Among Rachmaninoff's works are three operas, "Aleko," "The Miser Knight," "Francesca da Rimini"; two symphonies, Opus 13 and Opus 27; three concertos for pianoforte, Opus 1, 18 and 30; a symphonic poem "Die Toteninsel," Opus 29; a work for chorus and orchestra, "The Bells"; two 'cello sonatas, Opus 19 and Opus 28; a pianoforte trio, Opus 9; piano pieces, Opera 3, 5, 10, 16, 23, 32; and numerous songs.

SCRIABINE

Alexander Nicolas Scriàbine was born in Moscow in 1871, of aristocratic parents. In his tenth year he was placed in the 2nd Moscow Army Cadet Corps. His first piano lessons were taken from G. A. Conus. Musical theory he studied with Professor S. I. Taneieff. While still continuing the Cadet courses, he was enrolled as a student at the Moscow Conservatory of Music. He studied the pianoforte with Vassily Safonoff, counterpoint first with Taneieff and later with Arensky. His studies both in the Conservatory and in the corps were completed by 1891. In 1892 he toured Europe for the first time as pianist, playing in Amsterdam, Brussels, The Hague, Paris, Berlin, Moscow and Petrograd. The next five years Scriàbine devoted[Pg 308] to both concert-tours and composition. In 1897 he became Professor of Pianoforte, playing at the Moscow conservatory, remaining such for six years. He resigned from his post in 1903 in order to devote himself entirely to composition and concertizing, living principally in Beattenberg, Switzerland, and in Paris. It is during that time that he seems to have been converted to Theosophy. He spent 1905-06 in Genoa and in Geneva. In February, 1906, Scriàbine embarked on a tour of the United States. He played in New York City, Chicago, Washington, Cincinnati and other cities. The next years were spent in Beattenberg, Lausanne and Biarritz. From 1908 to 1910, Scriàbine lived in Brussels. Then he returned to Moscow, touring Russia in 1910, 1911 and 1912. In 1914 he visited England for the first time. Returning to Russia just before the outbreak of the war, he set about on a work involving the unification of all the arts entitled "Mysterium." On April 7th, 1915, he was taken ill with blood-poisoning. On April 14th he was dead.

His principal orchestral works are: "Le Poème divine," Opus 43; "Le Poème de l'Extase," Opus 54; and "Prometheus," Opus 60. It is not easy to say which of his many compositions for the pianoforte are the most important. Sonata No. 7, Opus 64; Sonata No. 8, Opus 66; Sonata No. 9, Opus 68; and Sonata No. 10, Opus 70; are perhaps the most magistral.

STRAWINSKY

Igor Fedorovitch Strawinsky was born at Oranienbaum near Petrograd, June 5th, 1882. His father was a bass singer attached to the court. Igor was destined for a legal career. But in 1902 he met Rimsky-Korsakoff in Heidelberg, and abandoned all idea of studying the law. He studied with Rimsky till 1906. His "Scherzo fantastique," inspired by Maeterlinck's Life of the Bee, which was produced in 1908, attracted the attention of Sergei Diaghilew to the young composer, and secured him a commission to write a ballet for Diaghilew's organization. The immediate result was "L'Oiseau de feu," which was composed and produced in 1910. "Petruschka" was written in 1911, the composer residing in Rome at the time. "Le Sacre du printemps" was written in Clarens, where Strawinsky generally lives.[Pg 309] It was produced in Paris in 1913. The opera "Le Rossignol," of which one act was completed in 1909, and two in 1914, was produced in Paris and in London just before the war. A new ballet "Les Noces villageoises" has not as yet been produced.

Opus 1, "Symphony in E-flat"; Opus 2, "Le Faune et la Bergère," songs with orchestral accompaniment; Opus 3, "Scherzo fantastique"; Opus 4, "Feuerswerk"; Opus 5, "Chant funèbre" in memory of Rimsky-Korsakoff; Opus 6, Four Studies for the pianoforte; Opus 7, Two songs; "Les Rois des Etoiles," for chorus and orchestra; Three songs on Japanese poems with orchestral accompaniment; Three pieces for string-quartet; An unpublished pianoforte sonata; A ballet for clowns.

MAHLER

Gustav Mahler was born in Kalischt, Bohemia, July 7th, 1860. He died in Vienna May 18th, 1911. He studied the pianoforte with Epstein, composition and counterpoint with Bruckner. In 1883 he was appointed Kapellmeister in Kassel; in 1885 he was called to Prague; in 1886 he was made conductor of the Leipzig opera. In 1891 he went to Hamburg to conduct the opera, and in 1897 he was made director of the Vienna Court Opera. In 1908 he came to New York to conduct the operas of Wagner, Mozart and Beethoven at the Metropolitan. In 1909 he became conductor of the New York Philharmonic Society. His health broke in 1911, and he returned to Vienna.

Mahler wrote nine symphonies. The first dates from 1891, the second from 1895, the third from 1896, the fourth from 1901, the fifth from 1904, the sixth from 1906, the seventh from 1908, the eighth from 1910, and the ninth from 1911.

Other of his compositions are: "Das Klagende Lied," for soli, chorus, and orchestra; "Das Lied von der Erde," for soli, and orchestra; "Kindertotenlieder," with orchestral accompaniment; "Lieder einer fahrenden Gesellen," with orchestral accompaniment; "Des Knaben Wunderhorn," twelve songs.

REGER

Max Reger was born in Brand, Bavaria, March 19th, 1873. His father was school-teacher at Weiden in the Palatinate, and Reger, it was hoped, would follow his profession. However, the musical profession prevailed. Reger studied with Riemann from 1890 to 1895. At first he decided to perfect himself as a pianist. Later, composition and organ-playing absorbed him. He was made professor of counterpoint in the Royal Academy in Munich in 1905. In 1907 he was made musical director of the University of Leipzig and professor of composition at the Leipzig Conservatory. From 1911 until his death he was Hofkepellmeister at Meiningen. He died in Jena, May 11th, 1916.

His works for orchestra include: "Sinfonietta," Opus 90; "Serenade," Opus 95; "Hiller-Variations," Opus 100; "Symphonic Prologue," Opus 120; "Lustspielouvertüre," Opus 123; "Konzert in Alten Stiel," Opus 125; "Romantische Suite," Opus 128; "Vier Tondichtungen nach Böcklin," Opus 130; "Ballet-Suite," Opus 132; "Mozart-Variations," Opus 140; "Violin-concerto," Opus 101; "Piano-concerto," Opus 114.

His works for chorus include: "Gesang der Verklärten," Opus 71; "Psalm 100," Opus 106; "Die Nonnen," Opus 112.

His chamber-works include: String-sextet, Opus 118; Pianoforte-quintet, Opus 64; Pianoforte-quartet, Opus 113; Five string-quartets, Opera 54, 74, 109, 121; Serenade for flute, violin and viola, Opus 77a; Trio for flute, violin and viola, Opus 76b; Nine violin sonatas, Opera 1, 3, 41, 72, 84, 103b, 122, 139; Four 'cello sonatas, Opera 5, 28, 71, 116; Three clarinet sonatas, Opera 49, 197; Four sonatas for violin solo, Opus 42.

His organ compositions include: Suite, Opus 16; Fantasy, Opus 27; Fantasy and fugue, Opus 29; Fantasy, Opus 20; Sonata, Opus 33; Two fantasies, Opus 40; Fantasy and fugue, Opus 46; The fantasies, Opus 52; Symphonic fantasy and fugue, Opus 57; Sonata, Opus 60; Fifty-two preludes, Opus 67; Variations and fugue, Opus 73; Suite, Opus 92; Intermezzo, passacaglia and fugue, Opus 127.

His pianoforte works include: Aquarellen, Opus 25; Variations and fugue, Opus 81; "Aus Meinem Tagebuch," Opus 82; Two sonatinas, Opus 89.

SCHOENBERG

Arnold Schoenberg was born in Vienna September 13th, 1874. He was self-taught until his 20th year. His first instruction was received from his brother-in-law, Alexander von Zemlinsky. In 1901 he went to Berlin, and became the Kapellmeister of the "Uberbrettl," the cabaret managed by Birnbaum, Wedekind and von Wolzogen. Due to the influence of Richard Strauss, he secured a position as instructor in Stern's Conservatory. In 1903 he returned to Vienna. He aroused the interest of Gustav Mahler, who secured performances for several of his works. The Rosé Quartet performed the sextet "Verklärte Nacht" and the Quartet, Opus 7. The "Kammersymphonie" and the choral work "Gurrelieder" were also played. In 1910 Schoenberg was appointed teacher of composition in the Imperial Academy. In 1911 he returned to Berlin, remaining there till 1916 (?). He is said at present to be in Vienna.

Opera 1, 2 and 3, Songs—"Gurrelieder"; Opus 4, sextet "Verklärte Nacht"; Opus 5, "Pelleas und Melisanda"; Opus 7, 1st String-quartet; Opus 8, Songs with orchestral accompaniment; Opus 9, "Kammersymphonie"; Opus 10, 2nd String-quartet, with setting of "Entrückung," by Stefan George; Opus 11, three pieces for Piano; Opus 13, a capella choruses; Opus 15, Songs; Opus 16, five Pieces for Orchestra; Opera 17 and 19, Piano pieces; Opus 21, "Die Lieder des Pierrot Lunaire."

SIBELIUS

Jean Sibelius was born in Tavastehus, Finland, December 8th, 1865. He matriculated at the University of Helsingfors in 1885, but shortly after gave up all idea of studying law, and entered the Conservatory in 1886. Here he remained three years, studying composition with Wegelius. In 1889-90 he studied with Becken in Berlin. In 1891 he went to Vienna to study instrumentation with Karl Goldmark. From 1893-97 he taught composition at the Helsingfors Conservatory. In 1897 the Finnish[Pg 312] Senate allotted him the sum of $600 yearly for a period of ten years, in order to permit him leisure for composition. In 1900 he toured Scandinavia, Germany, Belgium and France as conductor of the Helsingfors Philharmonic Orchestra. In 1901 he was invited to conduct his own compositions at the festival of the Deutscher Tonkünstlerverein in Heidelberg. In 1914, while in America, Yale University conferred upon him the degree of Doctor of Music. At present he is living in Järsengrää, Finland.

Five Symphonies: No. 1, Opus 39; No. 2, Opus 43; No. 3, Opus 52; No. 4, Opus 63; No. 5 (composed in 1916).

"En Saga," Opus 9; "Karelia Overture," Opus 10; "Der Schwan von Tuonela" and "Lemmenkainen zieht heimwarts," Opus 22; "Finlandia," Opus 26; "Suite King Christiern II," Opus 27; "Pohjohla's Daughter," Opus 49; "Nächtlicher Ritt und Sonnenaufgang," Opus 55; "Scènes historiques," Opus 66; "Die Okeaniden," Opus 72. Some fifty songs, etc., etc.

LOEFFLER

Charles Martin Loeffler was born in Mülhausen, Alsace, January 30, 1861. He studied the violin under Massart and Léonard in Paris, and under Joachim in Berlin. He studied composition with Guirand in Paris. Played violin in Pasdeloup's orchestra, then in the orchestras at Nice and Lugano. From 1883 till 1903 he was second leader in the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Since 1903 he has been devoting himself completely to composition. He is living at present in Medford, Massachusetts.

His compositions include: Suite for violin and orchestra, "Les Viellées de l'Ukraine," 1891; Concerto for cello, 1894; Divertissement for orchestra, 1895; "La Mort de Tintagiles," 1897; "Divertissement espagnol" for orchestra and saxaphone; "La Villanelle du Diable"; "A Pagan Poem"; "Hora mystica"; "Psalm 137"; "To One Who Fell in Battle"; Two rhapsodies for oboe, viola and pianoforte; String-sextet; String-quartet; Music for Four Stringed Instruments; Songs on poems by Baudelaire, Verlaine, Yeats, Rossetti, Lodge, Kahn, etc.

ORNSTEIN

Leo Ornstein was born in Krementchug, Russia, December 11th, 1895. His father was cantor in the synagogue. Until 1906 Ornstein was a pupil in the Petrograd Conservatory. Because of the pogroms, his family emigrated to New York. There he attended the Friends' School and studied music in the Institute of Musical Art. Later, he studied with Bertha Fiering Tapper. He made his début as pianist in January, 1911. In 1913-14 he lived in Europe, in Paris chiefly. He was introduced to the French public by Calvocoressi at a concert in the Sorbonne. In the summer he toured Norway. He returned to America in the autumn, and early next year gave a series of recitals of ultra-modern music at the Fifty-seventh Street Theatre. Next year he continued the series at four semi-private recitals at the home of Mrs. Arthur M. Reis. He has been giving concerts all over the United States and Canada since. He is living at present in Jackson, N. H.

Two symphonic poems, "The Fog" and "The Life of Man" (after Andrev); a Piano-concerto, Opus 44; a setting of the 30th Psalm for chorus; a Quartet for strings, Opus 28; a Miniature String-quartet; a Piano-quintet, Opus 49; two Sonatas for Violin and Piano, Opera 26 and 31; two Sonatas for Cello and Piano, Opera 45 and 78; Three Lieder, Opus 33; Four settings of Blake, Opus 18.—For piano solo: Sonata, Opus 35; Dwarf Suite, Opus 11; Impressions of the Thames, Opus 13; Two Impressions of Notre-Dame, Opus 16; Two Shadow Pieces, Opus 17; Six Short Pieces, Opus 19; Three Preludes, Opus 20; Three Moods, Opus 22; Eleven Short Pieces, Opus 29; Burlesques, Opus 30; Eighteen Preludes—à la Chinoise, Opus 39; Arabesques, Opus 48; Poems of 1917, Opus 68.

BLOCH

Ernest Bloch was born in Geneva, Switzerland, July 24th, 1880. He studied in Geneva with Jaques Dalcroze; in Brussels with Ysaye; at the Hoch Conservatory in Frankfort with[Pg 314] I. Knorr; and with Thuille in Munich. His opera "Macbeth" was produced at the Opéra Comique in Paris in 1910. In 1915 he was appointed professor of composition in the conservatory in Geneva. In 1916 he came to America as conductor of the Maud Allan Symphony Orchestra. His quartet was performed by the Flonzaleys that season, and in May, 1917, the Society of the Friends of Music devoted a concert entirely to his works. Returning to Switzerland in the summer he once more voyaged to America, this time with the intention of settling here. He taught composition at the David Mannes School from 1917 to 1919. In September, 1919, he won the Coolidge Prize with his Suite for viola. He lives in New York.

Besides "Macbeth," the list of his compositions includes a Symphony in C-sharp minor; "Vivre-Aimer"; "Hiver-Printemps"; "Trois Poèmes juives," "Trois Psaumes" (22nd for baritone, 14th and 137th for soprano); "Poèmes d'Automne" for mezzo-soprano; "Schelemo," rhapsody for 'cello and orchestra; "Israel" (symphony—two movements); String-quartet; and Suite for viola and piano or viola and orchestra. A sonata for violin and piano is in process of preparation.

MUSICAL PORTRAITS

INTERPRETATIONS OF TWENTY MODERN COMPOSERS

BY

PAUL ROSENFELD

NEW YORK

HARCOURT, BRACE AND HOWE

1920

COPYRIGHT, 1920, BYHARCOURT, BRACE AND HOWE, INC.

ToARTHUR MOORE WILLIAMSON

CONTENTS