CONTEMPORARY COMPOSERS

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
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Vincent d'Indy

CONTEMPORARY COMPOSERS

BY

DANIEL GREGORY MASON

AUTHOR OF "BEETHOVEN AND HIS FORERUNNERS,"
"THE ROMANTIC COMPOSERS," "FROM GRIEG TO BRAHMS," ETC.

NEW YORK
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1918
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Copyright, 1918,
By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.

Set up and electrotyped. Published July, 1918.

Norwood Press
J. S. Cushing Co.—Berwick & Smith Co.
Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.

PREFACE

"We live," wrote Stevenson to Will H. Low in 1884, "in a rum age of music without airs, stories without incident, pictures without beauty, American wood-engravings that should have been etchings, and dry-point etchings that ought to have been mezzo-tints.... So long as an artist is on his head, is painting with a flute, or writes with an etcher's needle, or conducts the orchestra with a meat-axe, all is well; and plaudits shower along with roses. But any plain man who tries to follow the obtrusive canons of his art, is but a commonplace figure.... He will have his reward, but he will never be thought a person of parts."

What would Stevenson say, I wonder, could he witness the condition to which this confusion of aims, rapidly spreading since he wrote, has now reduced all the arts, and perhaps especially music? "Painting with a flute" hardly sounds fantastic any longer, now that symphonies have given place to symphonic "poems," orchestral "sketches," and tone "pictures," and program music has taken the place of supremacy in the art of tones that magazine illustration occupies among graphic arts. Anyone who tries nowadays to write mere music—expressive of emotion through beauty—is more than ever "a commonplace person." The "persons of parts" are those who give it the quaint local color of folk-songs, like Mr. Percy Grainger; or who make of it an agreeable accessory of dance or stage picture, like Ravel and Strawinsky, or of colored lights and perfumes, like Scriabine; or who spin it into mathematical formulæ as a spider spins web, like Reger; or who use it as a vehicle for a priori intellectual theories, like Schoenberg, or as noise for a nerve stimulant, like Mr. Leo Ornstein.

The reader will look in vain for these names, in recent years on everyone's lips, in the table of contents of this book on "Contemporary Composers." In the work of most of them there is, indeed, much of charm or interest, of vividness, perhaps of permanent power. But the time when critical appraisal of them can be anything like final has not yet arrived; and meanwhile there is in their centrifugal tendencies, I believe, a real menace to the best interests of music. One and all, they look away from that inner emotion "to which alone," as Wagner said, "can music give a voice, and music only." They all represent in one way or another that trivializing of the great art, that degradation of it to sensationalism, luxury, or mere illustration, some of the historic causes of which I have tried to suggest in the introduction. No sincere lover of music can regard with anything but the gravest apprehensions such tendencies toward decadence.

Fortunately these are, however, powerfully counteracted, even now, by more constructive forces, carrying forward the evolution of music in and for itself which was the main concern of the great elder masters who regarded it as a supreme emotional language—Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Wagner, Franck. It is the representatives of this sounder tradition (despite the programmism of Strauss and the sybaritism of Debussy) that I have selected for discussion here. They have also the further advantage of having been long enough before the public to have vindicated already their claims to permanent place in musical history.

The present volume, it may be added, completes the series of studies of great creative musicians from Palestrina to the present day begun in "Beethoven and His Forerunners," "The Romantic Composers," and "From Grieg to Brahms." For permission to reprint the essays it contains, acknowledgment is made to the editors of the Musical Quarterly, the Outlook, and the New Music Review.

D. G. M.

New York,
January 26, 1918.

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

I
INTRODUCTION
DEMOCRACY AND MUSIC

I
INTRODUCTION
DEMOCRACY AND MUSIC

Lovers and critics of modern music who are at the same time interested students of the social changes which have preceded and accompanied its growth must often ask themselves whether there is any deep connection of cause and effect between the two sets of phenomena, or whether they merely happened to take place at the same time. Have the important social transformations of the nineteenth century reached so far in their influence as to the music of our time? Has sociology any light to throw upon musical art? The question raises a problem as difficult as it is fascinating; and the suggestions which follow are to be taken as guesses and hints, intended to provoke fertile thought, rather than as constituting in any sense a finished theory.

I

The change in the nature of the musical public that has taken place during the nineteenth century has been gradual but far-reaching. The essence of it is expressed by saying that at the end of the eighteenth century music was in the hands of the nobility and gentry, and that at the beginning of the twentieth it is in those of all the people. Under feudal conditions it was organized by the patronage system according to the tastes of the aristocratic few. The thirty most fruitful years of Haydn's life were spent in the employ of Prince Esterhazy; Mozart, a skilled pianist as well as composer, was less dependent on his patron, but his life was probably shortened by the hardships he had to face after he had broken with him; Beethoven, staunch democrat though he was, realized what he owed his four patrons, Archduke Rudolph, and Princes Lobkowitz, Kinsky, and Lichnowsky, and wrote, after the death of some of them had reduced the value of his annuity: "In order to gain time for a great composition, I must always previously scrawl away a good deal for the sake of money.... If my salary were not so far reduced as not to be a salary at all, I should write nothing but symphonies ... and church music, or at most quartets." No doubt the patronage system had its faults and abuses, which have been quite adequately discussed by critics; the fact remains that under it was done the supreme creative work of the golden age of music. Greater than any of its material advantages was the spiritual homogeneity of the group who practised it. By excluding the lower classes, however unjustly, they achieved, though artificially, a unity of feeling that could not then have been achieved otherwise; and as art is in essence an emotional reaction this unity of feeling provided a soil in which its seeds could grow.

But with the French Revolution and the passing of feudalism this old order perished. The proclamation of liberty, equality, and fraternity, paving the way for individualistic competition, introduced the epoch of industrialism and capitalism, in which art, like everything else, was taken out of the hands of a privileged class, and made theoretically accessible to all. As the appreciation of art requires, however, mental and emotional experience, discipline, and refining, a process which takes time, what actually happened was that those gradually emerging from poverty through industrialism—the workers themselves and their children and grandchildren—availed themselves much more slowly and timidly of these spiritual privileges than of the material ones. There remained over from the feudal world a nucleus of cultivated people, sufficiently homogeneous in feeling to retain a standard of taste, sufficiently numerous to exert an influence on production: these were the guardians of the better traditions. They were gradually but steadily interpenetrated and overrun by the emergents, at first in a minority but rapidly becoming the majority, and remaining, of course, unavoidably far more backward in artistic feeling than in economic independence and social ambition. Thus was introduced a formidable cleavage in the musical public, the majority breaking off sharply by their childlike crudity from the more disciplined minority.

The situation was further complicated by the presence of a third class, the idle rich, becoming more numerous under capitalism. It may be doubted whether their attitude towards art was qualitatively different in any important respect from that of the frivolous nobility under feudalism. Both groups regarded music either with complete indifference or else as an amusement, a plaything, a fad; both exercised an influence which through its essential artificiality was potentially perhaps even more baleful than that of the honest crudity of what we have called the emergent class, though actually less disastrous because they were a small minority instead of the majority. But the contribution of this group to the confusion and disorganization characteristic of art under democracy was greater than that of the feudal nobles, because their relation to society as a whole counted more. When they were placed by the emergence of the democratic majority in a vigorous opposition of attitude to the bulk of the people their influence no longer remained largely negative, but made positively for cleavage and disunion. Thus the unity of social emotion on which art so largely depends for a healthy universality was still further disrupted.

We find, then, under democracy, not a fairly homogeneous musical public with emotionally a single point of view, such as existed under feudalism, but a division into a well-meaning but crude majority and two minorities, one cultivated, the other frivolous: all three, but especially the two extremes, held apart by profound differences of feeling. Despite the inevitability and the desirability of democratization as the only path away from slavery, such a disorganization, even if temporary, must evidently, while it lasts, work serious injuries to art. It is worth while to try, taking frankly at first the attitude of the devil's advocate, to trace a few of the more striking of these injuries as they show themselves in contemporary music.

II

Of the "emergents" who constitute the most novel element in the contemporary situation, the well-meaning but crude listeners who form a numerically overwhelming majority of our concert-goers, the effect may be described, in most general terms, as being to put a premium on all that is easily grasped, obvious, primitive, at the expense of the subtler, more highly organized effects of art—on sensation as against thought, on facile sentiment as against deep feeling, on extrinsic association as against intrinsic beauty. Mentally, emotionally, and æsthetically children, they naturally demand the childlike, if not the childish.

There seems to be something far deeper than accident in the coincidence of the rise about 1830, that is, about a generation after the French Revolution, under Berlioz and Liszt, of that program music which is generally acknowledged to be peculiarly characteristic of our period, with the invasion of concert-halls by masses of these childlike listeners, as eager for the stories that music might be made to suggest as they were unprepared to appreciate its more intrinsic beauties. They were drawn by the "program" before they grew up with the "music." Lacking the concentration needed to hold all but the simplest melodies together in their minds, pathetically incapable of the far greater range and precision of attention required to hear synthetically a complex work like an overture or a symphony, they were puzzled or bored by Beethoven, and in their helplessness to follow a musical thread could only grope in the dark until they found a dramatic one. Such a clue in the labyrinth was the "program." They hailed it with the delight of the comparatively unmusical person in opera, who considers it the highest type of music because it supplies him with the largest apparatus of non-musical commentaries (scenery, gestures, words) on the music he cannot understand. Program music, a sort of idealized opera with scenery and actors left to the imagination, fulfilled the same indispensable service for the novice in the concert-room.

The immense popularity of the program idea, from that day to this, is evidence of its complete fitness to the needs of its audience. It says to them, in effect: "You have little 'ear' for music, and take no more joy in the highly organized melodies of a Beethoven symphony or a Bach fugue, with their infinite subtlety of tonal and rhythmic relationships, than in the most trivial tunes. Never mind: I will give you two or three short motives, clearly labeled, that you cannot help recognizing. This one will mean 'love,' that 'jealousy,' that 'death,' and so on.... You are not fascinated by, because you are unable to follow, the creative imagination by which such masters as these build whole worlds of musical beauty out of a few simple themes—an imagination as truly creative as that which carried Newton from the falling apple to the law of gravitation, or directed the infinite patient delving in detail of a Pasteur or a Darwin. Never mind. Remember the story, and you will know that during the love scene the composer must be developing the 'love' motive.... You are even more indifferent to the broader balance of part with part, the symmetry and coöperation of all in the whole, harder to grasp just as the concinnity of a Greek temple as a whole is harder to feel than the charm of a bit of sculpture here or the texture of the marble there. Never mind. I will give you a structure in sections, like a sky-scraper. Section will follow section as event follows event in the plot.... In short, the story shall be 'All you know, and all you need to know.' It shall be a straw that will keep you from drowning as the inundation of the music passes over you, and that will save you the trouble of learning to swim."

Of course, this does not mean that music of a high order cannot be associated with a program, or that the two cannot be not only coexistent but fruitfully coöperative. They are so in many a representative modern work—in Strauss's "Death and Transfiguration," for instance, or d'lndy's "Istar," or Dukas's "L'Apprenti Sorcier," or Rachmaninoff's "Island of the Dead." What is meant is that the program idea derives both its popularity and its peculiar menace in large measure from the stress it places on the appeal to something outside music—to association, that is—at the expense of the appeal to music itself, and thus from the official sanction it seems to give to what is essentially an unmusical conception of music. The program school of composers is the first school that has not merely tolerated but encouraged, elaborated, and rationalized the conviction of the unmusical that music is to be valued chiefly not for itself, but for something else. How dangerous such a compromise with the majority may be, both to public taste and to the composer, is startlingly, not to say tragically, illustrated by the steady tendency of the greatest master of the school, Richard Strauss, to become more and more trivially "realistic" with each new work, and by the complaisance of the public in paying him vast sums of money for thus progressively corrupting it. In every one of his symphonic poems, from the exuberant "Don Juan" (1888) to the surprisingly banal "Alpensymphonie" (1915), glorious pages of music have alternated with silly tricks of imitation, as for instance the splendid development of the husband theme in the "Symphonia Domestica" with the bawling of the baby; but in the latest we have the maximum of imitation and the minimum of music. Apart from their gorgeous orchestral dress its themes are with few exceptions commonplace, dull, and pretentious. Except in one or two passages they are not imaginatively or significantly developed. On the other hand there is no end of "tone-painting," much of it a revamping of the distant-hunting-horns, rustling-leaves, and warbling-bird-calls which have been timeworn theatrical properties of music ever since Raff's "Im Walde" and Wagner's "Waldweben"; some of it more original, like the pictures of sunrise and sunset with which the work begins and ends. In these associatively vivid but musically amorphous passages melody, harmony, rhythm, key disappear in a strange opaque cloud of tone, realistically representing night—the kind of night to which the German wit compared Hegel's Absolute—"in which all cows are black." The same childish realism which made Wagner show us his dragon on the stage instead of in our own imaginations introduces a wind-machine in the storm and sheep bells in the mountain pasture. In all this we see an artist who was once capable of writing the introduction and coda of "Death and Transfiguration" taking his art into the nursery to play games with.

But the effect of music on childlike audiences, indisposed to active mental effort and all for taking music passively like a kind of tonal Turkish bath, reaches its logical extreme not in the program music of which Strauss is the most famous exponent, but in that superficially different but fundamentally related movement known as impressionism, which is led by the other most discussed composer of our day, Debussy. Strikingly contrasted as are these two leaders of contemporary music in temperament, in artistic aims, in technical methods, their æsthetic theories are at one in the slight demands they make on the attention of an inevitably inattentive public. Both encourage the listener to look away from the music itself to something that it suggests to him. But impressionism goes further than programmism. May not those people, it says, who find organic melody, development, and form fatiguing, and to whom you give a program to help them out—may they not find the program fatiguing, too? May not its being prescribed offend their sense of "freedom"? Why exact of them the effort to follow even the story? Better to give them simply a title, as vague and elusive as possible, and foster the mood of day-dreaming thus suggested by avoiding all definite melodic, rhythmic, or harmonic features in the music, while enhancing its purely sensuous charm to the utmost degree possible. Such, carried out with extraordinary talent, is the artistic creed of Debussy. Just as programmism appeals from music to association, impressionism appeals to sentiment, to fancy, and to the phantasmagoric reveries upon which they are ever so ready to embark.

It is noteworthy, moreover, that both programmism and impressionism, however systematically they may minimize their demands on the intelligence of their audience, do not abate, but rather tend constantly to increase, their ministration to its sense. Indeed, they systematically maximize their sensuous appeal; and though their characteristic methods of making this appeal differ as widely as their general attitudes, that of programmism being extensive and that of impressionism intensive, the insistence of both on sensuous rather than on intellectual or emotional values is surely one of the most indicative, and it may be added one of the most disquieting, symptoms of the condition of modern music.

The method of the program school in general, and of Strauss in particular, is extensive in that it aims at boundless piling up of means, a formidable accumulation of sonorities for the besieging of the ear. Its motto is that attributed to the German by the witty Frenchman: "Plenty of it." Berlioz, the pioneer of the movement, with his "mammoth orchestras," and his prescription, in his requiem, of four separate brass bands, one at each corner of the church, and eight pairs of kettle-drums in addition to bass drum, gong, and cymbals; Mahler, commencing a symphony with a solo melody for eight horns; Strauss, with his twelve horns behind the scenes in the "Alpensymphonie," to say nothing of wind-machine, thunder-machine, sheep bells, and a whole regiment of more usual instruments—all these disciples of the extensive or quantitative method aim to dazzle, stun, bewilder, and overwhelm. They can be recognized by their abuse of the brass and percussion groups, their childlike faith that if a noise is only loud enough it becomes noble. They have a tendency, too, to mass whole groups of instruments on a single "part," as Tschaikowsky, for instance, so often does with his strings, whatever the sacrifice of interesting detail, for the sake of brilliance and éclat. To some extent, of course, all this is justified, even necessitated, by the vast size of modern concert-halls; but a candid observer can hardly deny that it is systematically overdone in the interests of sensationalism. The same tendency is observable also in other than orchestral music. The piano, treated with such admirable restraint by Chopin and by Debussy, has been forced by Liszt and his followers toward jangling, crashing sonorities that can penetrate the most callous sensorium. The equipment of organs with "solo stops" and other devices for the tickling of idle ears has turned the king of instruments too often into a holiday harlequin. Even the string quartet, last rallying-ground of music against the ubiquitous onslaught of sensationalism, begins in many modern scores, with their constant double stops and tremolos, and their "effects" of mutes, pizzicato, "ponticello," "col legno," and the rest, to sound like a rather poor, thin orchestra, striving for a variety and fulness of color beyond its capacity.

The fallacy of the extensive method is that it is trying to satisfy a craving essentially insatiable. Such an appetite for mere quantity of sound grows by what it feeds on; luxury breeds ennui; and, as every sensualist knows to his sorrow, there never can be "plenty of it." A sense of this futility inherent in the extensive method as it has been practised in modern Germany and elsewhere has led another school, chiefly modern French, to try for similar results by a different method, which may be called the intensive. Such a composer as Debussy, who may here be taken as typical, aims, to be sure, primarily at sensuous rather than at mental or spiritual values, but achieves them by qualitative refinement and contrast rather than by quantitative accumulation, and avoids exaggeration in favor of a delicate, almost finical, understatement and suggestiveness. While sonority is as much his god as Strauss's, he is the connoisseur of subtle, elusive sonorities, each to be sipped like a wine of rarest bouquet, rather than an enthusiast of the full-bodied brew. The subtlety of the methods often leads his admirers to claim a superior "spirituality" in the aims, but this is a mistake. His school is more spiritual than Strauss's only as a gourmet is more spiritual than a glutton. Both schools prefer sensation to thought and emotion, association to intrinsic beauty, color to line. The difference is that "Pelléas et Mélisande" is the violet or ultraviolet end of the spectrum of which "Salome" is the red.

A curious by-product of the cult of the elusive sonority is the exaggerated, the almost morbid, interest that has emanated from modern France in novelty of harmonic idiom. One would suppose, to read many contemporary critics, that the sole criterion of a good composer depended on his use of some recondite scheme of harmony, whether based on the whole-tone scale, on the mediæval modes, on new applications of chromaticism, on the "harmonic polyphony" of Casella and others, or on the arbitrary asperities of the Italian noise-makers and Mr. Leo Ornstein. If you wish to be considered an "ultra-modernist" you may do quite as you please, both as regards commission and omission, in rhythm, melody, polyphony, form, provided only you are harmonically eccentric. This insistence on harmony, on the momentary tone-combination, suggests a predominant concern with the sensuous side of music which is highly significant as a symptom. It is a stressing of that which the senses alone can perceive from moment to moment, without any aid from memory, imagination, comparison, and other mental acts required for the perception of rhythm and melody. In short, it is an evidence of the same materialistic tendency to rely on the physical rather than the mental appeal, on the investiture of the idea rather than on the idea itself, which we noted in the extensive method. Whatever their differences, both methods are thus at one in the tendency to use materials as makeshifts for thought. Mahler failing to get with eight horns the effect that Schubert got with two—plus a great melodic idea—at the opening of his C Major Symphony, Debussy confectioning a banal bit of tune in muted string or pastoral flute sonorities with piquant harmonies—both are appealing, with varying success, from our minds and hearts to our auditory nerves. The increasing measure of success attending such appeals shows vividly the numerical advantage that the hungry or curious auditory nerves have, in the modern democratic audience, over the enlightened minds and hearts.

III

And indeed, how should we expect it to be otherwise? Enlightened minds and hearts, we must remember, are the finest and rarest fruits of civilization, to be cultivated only under conditions of decent leisure, fair physical and mental health, and free association with "the best that has been done and thought in the world." When they are so rare even in the class that has all these advantages, how shall we expect them to be common among those living either in an industrial servitude that for monotony of toil is almost worse than chattel slavery, or by clerical and other secondary work that through the modern specialization and subdivision of labor condemns each individual to a more or less mechanical repetition of a few small acts through the larger part of his working hours, a routine the relation of which to human life as a whole he often does not see? Writers on sociology are beginning to realize[1] that such conditions of work inevitably produce a morbid psychological condition in the worker, dulling his mind by the meaningless drudgery and depressing his body and nerves by fatigue-poisons, so that even in his few hours of leisure his perfectly natural seeking for pleasure does not take entirely normal paths. Too exhausted to respond to delicate shades and subtle relationships, whether in sensuous or mental objects, his jaded nerves cry out for violent stimuli, for sharp contrasts, for something to goad and whip them into new activity. This craving for violent stimuli is the essential feature of the fatigue-psychology. Now, is it not highly suggestive that the age of industrialism is also the age of a hundred goads for tired nerves—of the newspaper headline, the dime-novel and "penny-thriller," the lurid moving-picture drama, ragtime and the "revue"? And is it not possible that the sensationalism of so much modern music is only another evidence, on a somewhat higher plane, of the working of this same psychology of fatigue?

Again, these overworn nerves of ours have within a comparatively short period had brought to bear upon them, through the progress of modern invention with its cheap printing, quick transportation, and long distance communication, a thousand distractions. No longer insulated from the outlying world, so to speak, by time and space, as were our more simply-living ancestors, we read, hear, and see as much in a day as they did in a week. The inevitable result has been a diffusion of attention fatal to concentrated thought except for the most resolute, breeding in the average man mental indigestion and habits of disorder and impatience, and gradually evolving the characteristic modern type—quick, sharp, and shallow. Outward distraction has thus added its influence to inner weariness to urge our art away from quiet thought towards ever noisier solicitation. For thought always depends on simplification, on inhibition: in order to think we must neglect the given-by-sense, as we see strikingly in the case of the absent-minded, in order to attend to the given-by-memory-and-imagination; and over-stimulation of sense is therefore just as hostile to thought as the depression of the higher mental faculties through fatigue. Thus it is highly characteristic of our prevailing attitude that we strive, not for elimination, but for accumulation, distraction, dissipation. The formula is always mental apathy, physical and nervous excitement. Not having the joy of the mastery which comes only through thought, because we lack both concentration and favorable opportunity to discipline ourselves, we seek the stimulus of constant change. We digest nothing, taste everything; "eclecticism" is our euphemism for spreading our attention very wide and very thin; and the nightmare that you soon uncover under all our art is not that our minds may become bewildered (for that they are already), but that our senses may become jaded—which of course they do.

Still another line of influence that may be traced from general modern conditions to the peculiar qualities of modern art concerns especially the third of the classes described above, the capitalist class. Here again we find a morbid condition, a distortion of wholesome human contacts; but here instead of the impediment of meaningless drudgery, it is the incubus of a fruitless, selfish idleness. Cut off from the normal outlet of energy in useful work, the luxurious classes become pampered and bored, and develop through very vacuity a perverted taste for the unusual, the queer, the generally upside down and backside to. Every season sees a new crop of the "isms" thus produced, the ephemera of the world of art, which live a day and die as soon as they lose their one interest, novelty. Of all manifestations of so-called "art" they are the most sterile, the most completely devoid of vital relation to any real impulse. They might be ignored did they not complicate still further an already complicated situation, and were they not an additional, though a largely negative, illustration of the close causative relation between general social conditions and artistic expression that our discussion is making more and more evident. Fortunately they produce little enduring effect beyond their own narrow circles; for as they spring not from any vital interest, but only from an unguided curiosity and desire for excitement, they take mutually opposing forms and largely cancel each other. Thus, for instance, fads for very old or for very new music, directed as they are toward the mere age or the mere newness, and having no concern with the quality of the music itself, leave the actual public taste just where it would have been had they never arisen. Nevertheless the diversion of so much energy, which might under better conditions find an outlet in fruitful activity, to a sterile posture-making, is uneconomical and to be regretted.

So far, we have been looking chiefly from the point of view of the devil's advocate, at the injurious influences on contemporary music that can be traced with some degree of plausibility to the capitalistic and industrial social system of the nineteenth century. Noting the sensational bent, whether extensively or intensively expressing itself, of the chief contemporary schools, we have asked ourselves whether it could be attributed in some measure to the kind of demand made by an audience dulled by overwork at monotonous tasks and depressed by fatigue-poisons. Remarking the multiplicity of fads and "isms" by which our art is confused, we have asked how far these might be attributed to the cravings of a group whose normal appetites have been perverted by luxury and self-centered isolation. All of these evils, we have insisted, are aggravated in their effects by the distractions under which we live. It is now time, however, taking a more positive view and attempting a more constructive theory, to ask how these evils may be combated, what more hopeful elements already exist in the situation, and what others may be expected to develop in the future.

IV

First of all, it may be suggested that, so far as these evils are fairly attributable to the social conditions of the nineteenth century, they may fairly be expected to be mitigated somewhat by those changes which already seem probable in those of the twentieth. The capitalistic era seems likely to be followed by an era of coöperation or communism; and in countless ways such a change must eventually be deeply revivifying to all forms of art. Of course, it is only too easy to indulge in baseless dreams of the results upon art of a millennium brought about in this way, only too easy to forget that we are only at the threshold of such new systems of organization, and that they may go the wrong way instead of the right. All we can safely say is that if they do go the right way they will rescue art, among many other human interests, from the condition to which much of it has been prostituted under capitalism.

Let us suppose, for instance, that something like what Mr. H. G. Wells calls the Great State[2] eventually results from the troublous reconstructions through which we are living. The Great State is only one of three possibilities he sees in the further adjustment of the leisure class and the labor class of our present order. The first possibility (and a disagre vivid one it must seem to all thoughtful Americans) is that "the leisure class may degenerate into a waster class," and the labor class "may degenerate into a sweated, overworked, violently resentful and destructive rebel class," and that a social débâcle may result. The second possibility is that the leisure class "may become a Governing Class (with waster elements) in an unprogressive Bureaucratic Servile State," in which the other class appears as a "controlled, regimented, and disciplined Labour Class." The third possibility is that the leisure class "may become the whole community of the Great State, working under various motives and inducements, but not constantly, nor permanently, nor unwillingly," while the labor class is "rendered needless by a general labour conscription, together with a scientific organization of production, and so re-absorbed by reendowment into the Leisure Class of the Great State."

The first two of these possible conditions would be fatal to art, one through anarchy and loss of standards, the other through conventionalization. The third would bring about a renascence, after a troubled period of conflicting standards and of readjustments such as we find ourselves in to-day. The main elements in such a progress would be, first, the gradual refining, deepening, and vitalizing of the taste of the general public under the influence of increasing leisure, health, self-respect, and education; second, the cutting off of extravagance, luxury, and faddism in the wealthier classes by a wholesome pressure of enforced economy; third, increasing solidarity of feeling in the whole social fabric through such a mutual rapprochement, giving the indispensable emotional basis for vital art.

There are already some encouraging evidences of such developments. Much preparatory work towards the formation of better standards of public taste has been unobtrusively done, at least in our larger cities, by free lectures and cheap recitals and concerts. Two disadvantages, however, have often attended such work, reducing its benefits. One has come from the common fallacy that what is done for the many must be done so as to please the many—a view often supposed to be "democratic." Emerson was more truly democratic when he told us to "cease this idle prating about the masses," and set about extracting individuals from them; for real democracy never forgets that the majority are always inferior, and its aim must be to give the superior minority a chance to make their influence felt. In other words, to level down to the people is to vulgarize rather than to popularize. Theodore Thomas set a model for the conductor of popular concerts in the best sense, for all time, when he replied to one of his orchestra players who said that people did not like Wagner: "Then we must play him until they do."

The second disadvantage is even harder to avoid, even for administrators of the highest standards, because it seems to be almost intrinsic in this kind of work. It comes from the passive nature of the people's participation. Giving even the best concerts seems often too much like handing the people music at the end of a stick—"Take it or leave it"; naturally, having so little choice in its selection, they often leave it; and even when they try their best to take it, they cannot get so much out of it as if they were actively helping to produce it. This is the reason that more active forms of music-making, even if crude, like the music school settlement work and the community choruses that have been making such strides in recent years, seem so full of promise. The singing in the public schools, too, would have done far more than it has, had not the standards been debased, as Mr. T. W. Surette has ably shown,[3] to the childish tastes, not of the children themselves, who could appreciate better things, but of their dull and routine-enslaved elders. Yet here again we must beware of a too easy optimism.

There is no magic about the community chorus that can suddenly change bad taste to good. Too often we seem here, as in all other activities for popularizing music, to oscillate helplessly between two evils. On the one hand is the crudity of actual taste: the majority prefer ragtime and the musical comedies to folk-songs or the simple classics. On the other hand is the apathy that comes of prescriptions from outsiders: musical activity that is not spontaneous is sterile. Progress seems to come painfully and uncertainly from a constant zigzagging between these two evils, getting gradually away from them as the taste of the minority exercises its persuasiveness.

As for the wealthier classes, it must be confessed that there are so far few evidences of any permanent displacement of luxury and artificiality by saner and simpler tastes. Yet there are even here one or two hopeful signs, of which the most conspicuous is the recent enthusiasm for folk-songs. This is rather too good to be altogether true. It is hard to believe in the complete sincerity of those who go into the same rhapsodies over a perfectly simple and rather crude peasant song that a year or two ago they reserved for the exquisite day-dreams of Debussy or the exotic inconsequentialities of Cyril Scott. Moreover, the appreciation of folk-song, though a normal and indeed indispensable stage in musical education, is only the very first phase of initiation to the deeper and subtler beauties of musical art, and not a stage to be dwelt in with complacency. Yet so far as it goes, and in the measure of its sincerity, the interest in folk-song is of good augury. It means concern with melody, always and everywhere the soul of music, rather than with externalities like orchestral color, or harmonic "effects," or quasi-poetic associations and programs. It means sympathy with simple and broadly human, universal emotions, such as inspire the greatest as well as such primitive music. It may mean the beginning of a real and eventually a developed taste for good music. And it is a good foundation for such a rapprochement of all classes of music-lovers as may come, we may hope, with the coming of the Great State.

If our cursory examination of the general tendencies of our day reveals no striking preponderance of good over bad, shows us no movement of any majority that we can acclaim without qualification, we may now remind ourselves for our comfort that this has always been the case in all times, and that there is indeed a curious illusion, resolvable only by close scrutiny, that makes our own time seem worse to us, in comparison with others, than it really is. We have to remember that the baser elements of our own time make a much greater impression on us, in relation to the finer ones, than those of the past. A living fool can make as much noise as a wise man (if not far more); a dead one is silent forever. The gold of Beethoven's day, of which he was himself the purest nugget, comes down to us bright and untarnished, so that we forget all the dross that has been thrown on the scrapheap of time. Our own gold is almost hidden from us by the glitter of the tinsel.

"The world of music," says Sir Charles Stanford,[4] "is not substantially different from what it has been. It has always exalted those of its contemporary composers who dealt in frills and furbelows above those who considered the body more important than its clothes. Only a few wise heads knew of the existence of Bach. Rossini was rated by the mass of the public far higher than Weber, Spohr than Beethoven, Meyerbeer than Wagner. Simrock said that he made Böhm pay for Brahms."

It is always necessary to wait for the winnowing process of time before we can see the true proportions of an age. Hence we can never see our own age in its true proportions, and since the second- and third-rate elements in it are ever more acclaimed by the majority than the first-rate, we always see it worse than it is. We live, so to speak, in the glare of noon-day, and cannot see the true coloring of our world, which will appear only at evening. Hence in every age the tragi-comedy is repeated of acclaiming the mediocre and the meretricious, and ignoring worth. The Gounods always patronize the Francks. The answer of philosophy is Emerson's:

"Ideas impregnable: numbers are nothing. Who knows what was the population of Jerusalem? 'Tis of no importance whatever. We know that the Saint and a handful of people held their great thoughts to the death; and the mob resisted and killed him: and, at the hour, fancied they were up and he was down; when, at that very moment, the fact was the reverse. The principles triumphed and had begun to penetrate the world. And 'tis never of any account how many or how rich people resist a thought."

Our final question, then, resolves itself to this: Are there in the music of our day, known or unknown to the majority, any such vital "thoughts," based on principles that a discerning criticism may see even now to have "triumphed and begun to penetrate the world"? Is there music being written to-day which is modern, not through its pampering to jaded sense or dulled intelligence, but through its intuition and expression of the deeper emotional experience and spiritual aspiration of our time? Is there music, in short, not only seductive to the ear but beautiful to the mind? To answer such a question intelligently we shall have to take account of certain truths which the foregoing discussion has tended to establish, and which may now be made explicit. Thought, emotion, all that we call the spiritual side of music, expresses itself not through sonorous or harmonic effects, primarily sensuous in appeal, but through melody and rhythm and their interplay and elaboration in so-called thematic development. In truly great music we remember, not such and such a bit of tone-color, not this or that sonority, but the soaring or tender curve of the themes, their logical yet ever new unfolding, their embodiment, in the whole composition, of richest variety with completest final unity. The man in the street is absolutely right in feeling that music succeeds or fails by its tunes; his limitation arises in his conception of "tune."

Again, since the creation and manipulation of great "tunes" or themes, unlike the hitting off of sonorous effects or the discovery of rococo harmonies, comes never by luck, but only through a discipline based on the assimilation of all that is best in music, we always find that all really fine music is firmly founded upon tradition, and reaches its roots into the past, while blossoming, so to speak, into the future. The artist, despite the popular supposition to the contrary, depends on his forerunners quite as closely as the scientist. You can no more write a solid sonata without knowing Beethoven than you can work efficiently in biology in ignorance of Darwin. Yet on the other hand this assimilation of the past has to produce, not an academic and sterile complacency with what is, but an equipped and curious advance upon what is to be: the artist, like the scientist, brings all his learning to the test in acts of creative imagination, leaps in the dark. Thus artistic advance may be figured as like the shooting of frost crystals on a window pane; never is there a crystal that is not firmly attached by traceable lines to the main body; yet no one can prophesy whither each fine filament may strike out in its individual adventure. The great artist is bound to the past by love and docility, to the future by a faith that overleaps convention.

Looked at in the light of these considerations, contemporary music presents a scheme of light and shade somewhat different from that ordinarily accepted. If some high lights are overshadowed, others seem to shine more brightly. There is plenty of hopeful promise for the future. Leaving aside the sounder elements in Strauss and Debussy, in whom there is so much of the richness of decay, we shall find the chief centers of truly creative activity perhaps in three composers who in their differing ways and degrees carry on the great tradition: Rachmaninoff in Russia, Elgar in England, and d'Indy in France. Each of these men reaches back roots to the primal sources of musical life—Bach and Beethoven: Rachmaninoff through Tschaikowsky, the eclectic Elgar through Mendelssohn, Brahms, Wagner, and others, and d'Indy through Wagner and Franck. Each, as we see in such modern classics as "Toteninsel," the A flat Symphony, and "Istar," can create, in settings of modern opulence of color, nobly beautiful forms, melodies that live and soar in a spiritual heaven. All, too, though in varying degrees, move on as creators should toward the unknown. Here the Frenchman has perhaps, with his characteristic lucidity and logic, something the advantage of the more sensuous Slav and the more convention-beset Anglo-Saxon. Rachmaninoff, for all his warmth, does not always escape the vulgarity of Tschaikowsky, and Elgar cannot always forget the formulæ of oratorio. But in d'Indy, with his untrammeled experimental attitude toward all modern possibilities, we have an influence destined steadily to grow and already clearly suggesting an epoch combining the best of the old ways with new ones at which we can for the present only guess.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] See, for example, "The Great Society," by Graham Wallas, and "Work and Wealth," by J. A. Hobson.

[2] "Social Forces in England and America," by H. G. Wells, New York and London, 1914.

[3] In an article on Public-School Music, Atlantic Monthly, December, 1916.

[4] "Pages from an Unwritten Diary," C. V. Stanford.

II
RICHARD STRAUSS

Richard Strauss

II
RICHARD STRAUSS

I

The chronology of Richard Strauss's artistic life up to the present time arranges itself almost irresistibly in the traditional three periods, albeit in his case the philosophy of these periods has to be rather different from that, say, of Beethoven's. "Discipline, maturity, eccentricity," we say with sufficient accuracy in describing Beethoven's development. The same formula for Strauss will perhaps be tempting to those for whom the perverse element in the Salome-Elektra period is the most striking one; but it is safer to say simply: "Music, program music, and music drama." Born in 1864, he produced during his student years, up to 1886, a great quantity of well-made and to some extent personal music, obviously influenced by Mendelssohn, Schumann, and Brahms, and comprising sonatas, quartets, concertos, and a symphony. He himself has told how he then came under the influence of Alexander Ritter, and through him of Wagner, Berlioz, and Liszt; how this influence toward "the poetic, the expressive, in music" acted upon him "like a storm wind"; and how the "Aus Italien," written in 1886, is the connecting link between his earlier work and the series of symphonic poems that follows in the second period. The chief titles and dates of this remarkable series may be itemized here: "Macbeth," 1886-7; "Don Juan," 1888; "Tod und Verklärung," 1889; "Till Eulenspiegel" and "Also Sprach Zarathustra," 1894; "Don Quixote," 1897; "Ein Heldenleben," 1898; and the "Symphonia Domestica," 1903. The period of program music, containing also, of course, other works such as the operas "Guntram" and "Feuersnot," innumerable songs, and a violin sonata strayed from the first period, thus lasts from his twenty-second to his thirty-ninth year. Since then Strauss has devoted himself chiefly to works for the stage, comprising "Salome" (1906), "Elektra" (1908), "Der Rosenkavalier" (1911), "Ariadne auf Naxos," (1913), and "Josephs Legende" (1914). His latest work is again in the province of instrumental music—an "Alpine Symphony."

This rapid survey of Strauss's creative activity shows that the natural bent of his mind is toward the realistic and dramatic side of his art; it was only in his youth, before he had found himself, that he wrote self-sufficing music; and though lyrical power is shown in many of his songs and in passages of almost all the orchestral works, yet it is on the whole true to say that the essential Strauss is Strauss the dramatist. And if we ask ourselves what are the qualities of temperament requisite to a dramatist, we shall find in Strauss's possession of them in altogether unusual measure the key to his commanding position among the musico-dramatists of our day.

These qualities are the same for a dramatic artist who works in tones as for one who works in words. First of all he must be a man of keen observation, of penetrating intelligence, able to note all that passes about him and to interpret it with something of cold scientific precision. He must be able to seize human types and divine human motives quite different from his own, as they are objectively. He must resist distorting them by reading into them his own impulses and sentiments, as a man of more subjective temperament and less critical detachment always does. In short, he must be of the active rather than the contemplative type, and have a good measure of that faculty of impersonal intellectual curiosity which gives a Shakespeare his supreme power of objective observation.

But though he must not distort others by viewing them through himself, he must nevertheless interpret them through reference to his own feelings, since these are the only feelings with which he is directly acquainted. That is to say, he must be able to place himself, by sympathetic imagination, at the points of view of those he studies. Such sympathetic imagination is so very different a thing from subjective distortion that without it no real understanding of one's fellows is possible at all. The great dramatist needs, then, deep and rich emotion, quite as much as the lyric singer—but emotion ever guided by the sympathy which brings it into play. It is this emotion, guided by sympathetic imagination, that gives the very aspect of life, and its power to move us, to the creation that mere intellectual observation alone could never vitalize.

And finally, the dramatic artist, besides observing keenly and interpreting sympathetically, must view all that he sees with a certain magnanimous many-sidedness, a sort of sweet and mellow wisdom, which is hard to describe but unmistakable when encountered. We find it in all really great creative artists, who seem to view life not only keenly, not only sympathetically, but also wisely and as if from above, from that vantage point of a wider insight than that of any of their subjects, so that in their summing up of them they are able to set them in proper relation one to another, and by so doing to get a true and calm picture of human life as a whole. This power of philosophic or poetic vision, this magnanimity, we instinctively demand of the artist. It satisfies a fundamental human craving. The moral in the fable is a naïve embodiment of it; it comes even into the uncongenial atmosphere of the light comedy of manners in the rhymed epilogue; its musical incarnation we find in many of the quiet codas of Brahms, or in the thoughtful "Der Dichter spricht" at the end of Schumann's "Kinderscenen."

The object of the present essay is to show that Strauss has, in unequal but high degree, these qualities of the dramatist: observation, sympathy, and magnanimity. The first he has in almost unparalleled measure; the second somewhat fitfully, sometimes inhibited by his ironic cynicism; the third in his most genial moods, as for instance, in the epilogue to "Till Eulenspiegel," but not when misled by over-realistic aims. The evidence of his possession of these qualities that we shall especially look for will be not that afforded by his acts or his sayings, but rather the irrefragable testimony of his musical works themselves.

II

Since a man's temperament is what ultimately determines the peculiar combination of qualities making up his artistic individuality—his characteristic powers and shortcomings—the first questions we have to ask ourselves regarding any artist we propose to study will always be: "What is his temperament?" "To which of the two great types does it belong, the active or the contemplative?" "Does its power lie primarily in observation or in introspection?" "Does it impel him towards objective characterization or toward the utterance of subjective feeling?" Elsewhere, in studying these antitheses of temperament in particular cases, such as those of Mendelssohn and Schumann,[5] and of Saint-Saëns and Franck,[6] occasion has been taken to discuss in some detail the rationale of their musical expression. At present our interest is in finding in Strauss a rather extreme case of the active temperament, a man of positively explosive nervous energy.

It is only necessary to assemble a few of his characteristic melodic motives to see that this energy naturally translates itself, melodically, into wide erratic skips and incisive abrupt rhythms. Here are a few of them:

Figure I. (a) From "Till Eulenspiegel."

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(b) From "Don Juan."

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(c) From "Ein Heldenleben."

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(d) From "Also Sprach Zarathustra."

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(e) From the "Symphonia Domestica."

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The chief theme of the arch mischief-maker, "Till Eulenspiegel," is necessarily capricious, but it is doubtful if even for him anyone but Strauss would have thought of those surprising jumps, landing each time on an unexpected note. In the main theme of "Don Juan" we have a good example of his rhythmic energy. Note the variety of the figures: the sixteenth notes in the first measure, swarming up to the high E; the still further ascending triplet; the even more incisive dotted group leading to the emphatic half notes. In similar general style is the chief theme of "Ein Heldenleben," depicting the hero, but less lithe, more burly and almost awkwardly powerful. The theme of "great longing" from "Also Sprach Zarathustra" conveys its impression through the wide jumps, covering almost three octaves in two vigorous dashes. The theme of "the Wife," from the "Symphonia Domestica," illustrates Strauss's love of turning the unexpected way. Notice the downward jump of a ninth, and the cadence transferred to a higher octave than we expect.

The same story of overflowing nervous energy is told by two other characteristics of Strauss's melody. Like all sanguine natures he has more rising than falling phrases. The buoyancy of (b), (c), and (d) in Figure I is irrepressible; (a) has a falling curve, somewhat coy; (e) begins in the same wheedling vein, but ends with a rise of self-confident energy. A canvass of all the motives in the symphonic poems would probably demonstrate that seventy-five per cent of them rise in pitch. The second peculiarity is more subtle but even more significant—a preference for "rising" or anacrustic rhythms, culminating in an accented final note after several unaccented ones, to "falling" or thetic rhythms beginning with the heavy part of the measure. The elasticity of the rising rhythm is clearly shown in all the excerpts of Figure I except that from "Ein Heldenleben"; that, naturally, begins doggedly on the down beat. Only a systematic study can show the extent of Strauss's addiction to the rising rhythm.

These considerations, to which might perhaps be added his preference for the major to the minor mode, and for the vigorous duple to the more subtle triple meter, afford us quite ample internal evidence of his belonging to the temperamental type of the actives, like Mendelssohn and Saint-Saëns (however he may differ from them musically) rather than to that of the contemplatives,—the Schumanns and the Francks. To these positive points we might add negative ones, dealing with his emotional shortcomings. This, indeed, we shall have to do later, in the interest of a just critical estimate; but for the present it will be better worth while to examine the positive results, in the way of keen observation and masterly characterization, of this active-minded interest of Strauss in what lies about him.

III

Strauss's characterization is consummate. Superlatives are dangerous, but probably no other musician has ever carried to such a point the power of music to depict, or at least, to suggest, varieties of character, both in human beings and in inanimate objects. Strauss's reported remark that music was becoming so definite that we should soon be able to portray a tablespoon so unmistakably that it could be told from the rest of the silverware is probably an instance of his sardonic delight in hoaxing the public; but if anyone is going to subject the art of tones to this curious test, we are all agreed, doubtless, that it should be Strauss himself. Meanwhile, failing a tablespoon, we have a sufficiently varied collection of portraits in his gallery, each sketched with a Sargent-like penetration.

We have seen, for example, in Figure Ia, Till Eulenspiegel the arch mischief-maker, irrepressible, incorrigible. Here, on the other hand, is Till sentimental, making love to a village maiden, his original insolence tamed into a simpering persuasiveness, his theme, at first so galvanic, now languishing in its plaintive downward droopings (Figure II, page 57). Later we see him, repulsed by the maiden, storming in ungovernable fury.[7]

Figure II. "Till" in love.

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Figure III. Don Quixote, the knight of the sorrowful visage.

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Here, again, belonging to a quite other world, is Don Quixote, "the knight of the sorrowful visage," aging and broken, yet full of chivalrous and idealistic notions, and thus at once inspiring and pathetic (Figure III, page 57). What a contrast is his rascal of a servant, Sancho Panza, good-natured and irresponsible, sauntering through life with a minimum of effort and a maximum of diversion:

Figure IV. Sancho Panza.

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We find a somewhat similar principle of contrast, though between very different types of character, in the themes of the husband and the wife in the "Symphonia Domestica." The latter has been cited at Figure Ie. Its suggestion of coy graciousness and feminine charm is due in part to the tender downward inflections of the opening figure, and partly to the anacrustic rhythm (beginning with unaccented notes). The theme of the husband, with which the work opens, starts out with an "inversion" of this three-note figure of the wife: the motives complementary to each other, so to speak, as if Strauss had wished to suggest the reciprocal relation of marriage. Yet the rising inflection and the falling rhythm of the husband version give it a vigor that completely differentiates it from the other, even if we ignore for the moment the effect of the contrasting keys of F major and B major, a matter of which we shall have more to say presently.

The subtlety of the composer's use of rhythm for characterization can hardly be exaggerated. It almost justifies the extreme detail of his annotator's analyses, as for example of Mr. Wilhelm Klatte's diagnosis of the hero's character in "Ein Heldenleben." This reads like an old-fashioned phrenological chart. Mr. Klatte finds in his hero "a genial nature, emotional and vibratory" (measures 1-6 and 9-12 of the opening theme), a "haughty and firm step" (measures 6-8), and an "indomitable will" (measures 13-16). Furthermore the continuation in B major and A flat, Mr. Klatte tells us, shows that the paragon has "richness of fantasy, warmth and elasticity of feeling, allied with lightness of movement—whose tendency is always toward buoyancy and onward and upward effort, thus imparting an effect of inflexible and well-directed determination instead of low-spirited or sullen obstinacy." Mr. Klatte makes a considerable demand on our powers of credence. Yet we must be reluctant to place limits to a power of rhythmo-melodic suggestion that can give us such extremes of opposed character as the naïve innocence of the "Childhood" motive in "Tod und Verklärung," and the degenerate superstition and pathological fear of Herodias, with her eerie whole-tone scale, in "Salome."

Highly characteristic of Strauss, both in its subtle use of rhythmo-melodic characterization and in the rather malicious quality of its humor, is the "Science" section in "Also Sprach Zarathustra." This powerful if over-ambitious work deals with a matter that can hardly be put into music, even by Strauss: with the opposition, namely, between the Christian ideal of self-abnegation and Nietzsche's philosophy of self-fulfilment. In this particular section of it Strauss is trying to suggest the dustiness, mustiness, and inconclusiveness of "Science" from the standpoint of the passions; this he does by making a frightfully complicated fugue from his main theme. How slyly does he here satirize science! How to the life does his fugue theme, starting off boldly in C major and square-cut rhythm, and presently wandering into chromatic harmonies and indecisive triplets, symbolize the initial arrogance and final futility of scholastic systems!

Figure V.
"Of Science." Fugue theme from "Also Sprach Zarathustra."

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In the use of harmony for characterization Strauss is no less skilful than in the more important matters of melody and rhythm. The essential quality of his harmony is perhaps less "ultra-modern" than is sometimes supposed. In spite of the sensational innovations of "Salome" and "Elektra," he is so intensely German in feeling and so well founded on the German classics that the nucleus of his harmonic system is the diatonic scale, simple and rugged. One thinks of such powerful themes as that of "Transfiguration" or the "Hero" as the essential Strauss. Even "Salome" has its Jochanaan, and the "Symphonia Domestica" is surprisingly diatonic. Strauss is more nearly related to the virile Wagner of "Die Meistersinger" than to that other more sensuous Wagner of "Tristan und Isolde." Of course, there are wondrously expressive chromatic passages in Strauss, as for instance the "Grablied" in "Zarathustra"; but on the whole his musical foundation is tonic-and-dominant, like Mozart's, Beethoven's, and Brahms's.

Figure VI.
Cadence from "Don Quixote."

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It is in the boldly imaginative and unconventional arrangement of simple material that Strauss gets his most striking harmonic effects. Plain "triads" and "dominant sevenths," the small musical change of hack composers, turn to gold in his hands. The touchingly expressive cadence of Don Quixote's theme will illustrate. The material is of the most ordinary, yet the effect is magical and its dramatic appropriateness surprising. In the words of Mr. Arthur Kahn,[8] "These confused harmonic windings through which the central chords of the previously established key are reached, characterize strikingly the well-known tendency of Don Quixote towards false conclusions. He goes carefully out of the way of natural sequences and palpable facts, in order not to demolish therewith his fancy structures."

Strauss has carried this principle of the close juxtaposition of chords more or less foreign to each other, and even of different keys, to greater and greater lengths in his more recent works, and to the effects of "queerness" which result when these foreign tonal groups quickly follow each other, and of more or less extreme dissonance when they occur simultaneously, he owes much of the violently adverse criticism to which he has been subjected. Indeed, nothing has more retarded his general acceptance than these abrupt transitions and unaccustomed discordancies. The matter is of sufficient importance to intelligent appreciation of him to justify a brief digression here. For any composer who conceives music as a number of melodies proceeding together in greater or less amity, but preserving the measure of independence that individuality and vigorous movement demand—and Strauss is to a peculiar degree such a polyphonic composer—a certain amount of physical harshness at moments when the melodies happen to clash is not only unavoidable but positively desirable, as tending to throw each into relief. According to the degree of his experience the listener follows the composer in this respect: that is, he accepts with something more than passive endurance, yes, with active pleasure, the physically disagreeable clashes (dissonances) which by setting off the differing contours of the melodies emphasize for him their mental and emotional appeal; but not—and the point is of prime importance to the would-be music-lover—not if he does not follow the melodies, that is, not if he cannot hear consecutively as well as moment by moment—for it is only by following the threads, so to speak, that we can untangle the knots. Accordingly most untrained listeners dislike, probably, music that contains many of these knots, the presence of which makes it so interesting and exciting to the experienced ear. The woman who confessed to her piano teacher that she did not like Bach's Two-part Inventions because they were so "ugly" was not less cultivated but only more frank than many who have not discovered that Bach has to be heard "horizontally" (to borrow a figure from musical notation) rather than "vertically."

This gift of horizontal hearing is peculiarly necessary to anyone who would disentangle the tonal knots in which Strauss delights, working as he does with many more than two voices and with the vast fund of harmonic possibilities accumulated since Bach's day to draw upon. And he is not the man to use his resources timidly, or to make any concessions to laziness or inexperience in his listeners. Here is a reduction of a passage from "Ein Heldenleben" to its essential elements.

Figure VII.

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The heavy brass gives the foundation harmonies; the strings and woodwind have an upward-moving melody, and the eight horns blare forth at the same time a slower-moving downward melody. If we read almost any single chord vertically, we shall find it has its measure of harshness, sometimes considerable. If we listen to the coherent voices, none of these dissonances will trouble us in the least. This is a very simple example of what Strauss is constantly doing in a far more complex way.[9]

It is a real difficulty in the way of Strauss appreciation that while only familiarity can enable us to follow the intricate windings of the threads that make up his gorgeously rich fabrics, frequent hearings of his later and more complex symphonic poems are not to be had, even in the large cities. In the meanwhile we have no recourse but piano arrangements, unsatisfactory for two reasons. In the first place, it is physically impossible to play with two hands even a respectable fraction of the melodies that Strauss delights to elaborate for two hundred; and four-hand versions are better only in degree, not in kind. Secondly, piano versions fail us precisely in this matter of unraveling dissonance, since by reducing a colored pattern to monochrome they diminish the salience of the lines we are trying to follow, and by juxtaposing in one tone-quality tones that in the orchestra are softened by difference of timbre they notably increase the physical harshness of the combinations. Obviously, then, we must be exceedingly chary of condemning Strauss, or any other composer, for orchestral dissonance that we have either become acquainted with insufficiently, or only through piano arrangements.

After making these subtractions, however, there undoubtedly remain many puzzling clashes of tone in Strauss's scores, which can be accounted for only as introduced either for color or for dramatic expression.

The use of dissonance for the sake of color enrichment is a familiar proceeding in modern music, especially in that of impressionistic type like Debussy's and Ravel's. Such use is essentially decorative. To a more or less clearly defined harmonic nucleus are added softer tones, clashing with it, and thus forming about it an aura or atmosphere elsewhere compared to the mist which softens the outlines of the landscape.[10] Strauss is too fond of clear outlines and solid mass to employ these impressionistic methods habitually, or even frequently; but when he does, it is with his usual skill and daring. The theme of the silver rose in "Der Rosenkavalier" is the inevitable example: the last pages of the score are crowded with those silvery, scarcely audible triads of celesta and flutes, shifting and settling on the stronger G major chord like snowflakes on a leaf (Figure VIII, page 70).

Figure VIII.
The silver rose motive, from "Der Rosenkavalier."

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Delicious as are these shimmerings, a use of dissonance on the whole more characteristic of the masculine nature of Strauss is the harsher, more insistent juxtaposition of clashing tones for the sake of their potency in the expression of the tragic, the gruesome, or the abnormal. Naturally this is pushed furthest in the treatment of such pathological subjects as "Salome" and "Elektra," where its effect is carefully enhanced by contrast with strong or clear consonant harmonies—"Salome" has its Jochanaan and "Elektra" its Chrysothemis. The close juxtaposition of foreign tone groups, either successive or simultaneous, is carried to great lengths in these operas. The theme of the chattering Jews in "Salome" is an example of the successive, as is the curious succession of the chords of F minor and B minor at Chrysothemis' entrance in "Elektra."[11]

The simultaneous kind was foreshadowed in the famous ending of "Also Sprach Zarathustra," where the woodwind instruments sound the chord of B major against the softly plucked C of the strings; but we have to go to the operas again to find it carried to its logical and sometimes cruel extreme. There we find alien triads marching uneasily together in double harness;[12] dominant sevenths similarly shackled;[13] and strange passages in which the upper parts move naturally, but above a dislocated bass.[14] Such procedures, which, it must always be remembered, because of differences in tone quality between instruments of different families, sound far less harsh in the orchestra than on the piano, even if they are no less queer musically, can theoretically be carried to any extent. How far Strauss sometimes carries them, a single example must suffice to show.

Figure IX.
Passage from "Elektra," vocal score, page 63.

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Whether one "likes" such passages as this or not is of course a question of taste. But one thing at least is certain: it will not do to charge Strauss with mere musical anarchy in writing them—his work as a whole shows too keen a sense of the traditional harmonic values. That æsthetic insensibility, posing as "freedom from rules," "independence," "liberalism," and the like, to which in the minds of so many modern composers all keys are the same, is happily not one of his failings. That he has the keenest possible sense of the individual qualities of the different keys, and of the structural importance of their interrelationships, each one of his long series of symphonic poems has by its masterly design shown afresh. How remarkable, for example, is the antithesis of C, minor and major, and B, minor and major, which is the constructive principle of "Also Sprach Zarathustra!" How interesting is the choice of F major for the easy-going husband in the "Symphonia Domestica," and of the keener, more brilliant B major for the wife! And how this strong tonal sense not only guides the design as a whole, but suggests endless charming and imaginative details! At the end of the lullaby, in the same work, when the child has fallen asleep and the music has sunk to a tranquil G minor chord, this quietude is irradiated by a flash of B major and three notes of the wife-theme,—the loving tenderness of the waking and watching mother over the sleeping infant. Twice this happens, and each time the somnolent G minor returns. Thus does genius use tonality.

Being thus brought back to consider how Strauss uses all the elements of music, even this subtlest one of contrasting tonalities, in the interest of characterization, we may ponder with profit one final interpretation which might seem over-ingenious had we not the example of Mr. Klatte to spur our critical imaginations. Why is it that we so seldom hear the four tones of Till Eulenspiegel's main theme on any other degrees of the scale than A, F, B, C? Why is it that, in spite of the constant movement from key to key of the music, this theme is hardly ever carried also into the new key?[15] Why does Strauss so insist on this A, F, B, C, not only when the music is in F major, but when, as at Till's anger, it is in D minor, when, as in the procession of the burghers, it is in A minor, and when, just before the return of the main theme, it is in C major? Why always A, F, B, C, whatever the key? Is it not because Till, half-witted, perverse, self-imprisoned, is not subject to social influences, and remains unplastically himself, whatever his environment? To transpose a theme into the key prevailing at the moment is to make order—but Till represents disorder.... Such at least is the ingenious explanation of a woman who understands character as well as Strauss understands keys.

IV

All that we have been saying so far has concerned itself primarily with Strauss's powers of observation and characterization; we have noted how broad a field of human character he covers, and what varied artistic resources he brings to its depiction; we have seen how peculiarly fitted he is for this part of his work by his active temperament, with its accompanying intellectual alertness and freedom from self-consciousness. But we saw that the great dramatist needs not only observation but sympathy, in order that his work may be as moving as it is vivid; and in this power of emotion we may at first be inclined to consider Strauss deficient. There is undoubtedly a popular superstition which puts him among the intellectuals. The clean-cut efficiency of his personality, his businesslike habits, his mordant wit, both in words and in notes (was there ever anything so witty as "Till Eulenspiegel"?), even questionably relevant details like his exquisitely neat handwriting and his well-groomed and not in the least long-haired appearance,—all these create the impression of a personality by no means schwärmerisch, far removed indeed from the rapt dreamer who is the school-girl's ideal composer.

There is perhaps a measure of truth in this picture. Many of Strauss's most characteristic merits, as well as defects, may be traced to his lack of the introspective tendency which has been so fundamental in most of the other great German musicians, from Bach to Wagner, and which is seen perhaps at its purest and best in Schumann. Strauss is at the other pole from Schumann—and music is wide! Mr. Ernest Newman, in the ablest studies of Strauss yet published in English,[16] points to the internal evidence of this lack in his earliest and therefore least sophisticated compositions. "The general impression one gets from all these works," writes Mr. Newman, "is that of a head full to overflowing with music, a temperament that is energetic and forthright rather than warm ..., and a general lack not only of young mannish sentimentality, but of sentiment. There is often a good deal of ardour in the writing, but it is the ardour of the intellect rather than of the emotions." And again: "Wherever the youthful Strauss has to sing rather than declaim, when he has to be emotional rather than intellectual, as in his slow movements, he almost invariably fails.... He feels it hard to squeeze a tear out of his unclouded young eyes, to make those taut, whip-cord young nerves of his quiver with emotion."[17]

Now, although Mr. Newman would not accept his own description of Strauss the youth as a fair account of the mature composer, although, indeed, he specifically insists, in a later passage, that Strauss's musical imagination lost, at adolescence, its "first metallic hardness" and "softened into something more purely emotional," yet his vivid phrases seem to give us a picture of Strauss that is in essentials as true at fifty as it was at fifteen. "A temperament that is energetic and forthright rather than warm," "an ardour of the intellect rather than of the emotions"—these are surely still Straussian characteristics. And what is more they are characteristics that, whatever their dangers, have exerted a splendid influence in modern music. Schumann's was a noble introspection that no one who knows it can help loving; but in natures less pure the introspective habit of German romanticism has not always been so happy in its effects. An unhealthy degree of self-contemplation tends to substitute futile or morbid imaginings for the solid realities of life; the over-introspective artist cuts himself off from a large arc of experience and is prone to exaggerate the importance of the more intimate sentiments, and when, as in German romanticism, such a tendency is widespread, a whole school may become febrile and erotic. The vapors of such confirmed sentimentalism can best be dispersed by a ray of clear, cold intelligence, such as Shaw plays through contemporary literature and Strauss through contemporary music. "Cynicism," says Stevenson, "is the cold tub and bath towel of the emotions, and absolutely necessary to life in cases of advanced sensibility." Strauss has administered this tonic shock to us, immersed as we were in the languors of the Wagnerian boudoir. He has rooted us out of our agreeable reveries, sent us packing outdoors, and made us gasp with the stinging impacts of crude existence and the tingling lungfuls of fresh air. Is it not worth while, for this vigorous life, to sacrifice a few subtle nuances of feeling?

If then we so emphasize his possession of the active rather than the contemplative temperament, it is not to blame him for not being a Schumann, but to render as precise as possible in our own minds the notion of what it is to be a Strauss. If there is a point where blame or regret must mingle with our appreciation, it will be likely to come not at the preliminary determination of what his temperament is, but at the further discovery of certain extremes to which he has allowed his interest in externals to carry him, especially in his later work. And here we must try to set right a misconception with which Mr. Newman leaves the student of his essay on "Program Music."[18]

V

Mr. Newman, wishing to draw a reasoned distinction between self-sufficing, or "pure," or "abstract" music—that is, music that makes its appeal directly and without the aid of any verbal tag—and "poetic" music, or, more specifically, music with a definite program or title, adopts, seemingly without criticism, the popular notion that the first is less "emotional" than the second, and supports it by piling up epithets which beg the very question he is supposed to be examining. It is easy to "damn a dog by giving him a bad name," and it is easy to make music without program seem a dry and academic affair by calling it "abstract note-spinning," "mathematical music," "mere formal harmony," "embroidery," "juggling," "the arousing of pleasure in beautiful forms"—much too easy for a man of Mr. Newman's penetration and fair-mindedness.

One expects this kind of thing from inexperienced youths whose enthusiasm has been inflamed by the gorgeous color and the easily grasped "story" of such a work as, let us say, Tschaikowsky's "Romeo and Juliet," who have not had time to live themselves into accord with the profound emotional life of the great musical classics such as Bach's fugues and Beethoven's symphonies; but from Mr. Newman such superficialities, especially when they are associated, as these are, with many penetrating and true observations, and an argument in the main convincing, come as a surprise.

The central fallacy that vitiates Mr. Newman's conclusions lurks in his assumption that "specific reference to actual life" necessarily means greater emotion, and that the generality or "abstractness" of classic music is a symptom of emotional deficiency. "In the old symphony or sonata," says Mr. Newman, "a succession of notes, pleasing in itself but not having specific reference to actual life—not attempting, that is, to get at very close quarters with strong emotional or dramatic expression, but influencing and affecting us mainly by reason of its purely formal relations and by the purely physical pleasure inherent in it as sound—was stated, varied, worked out, and combined with other themes of the same order...." And again: "The opening phrase of Beethoven's 8th Symphony refers to nothing at all external to itself; it is what Herbert Spencer has called the music of pure exhilaration; to appreciate it you have to think of nothing but itself; the pleasure lies primarily in the way the notes are put together." To this a footnote is appended: "There is emotion, of course, at the back of the notes; the reader will not take me to mean that the pleasure is merely physical, like a taste or an odour. But the emotive wave is relatively small and very vague; it neither comes directly from nor suggests any external existence." Once more, the assumption that degree of emotion is in a direct ratio with externality of suggestion.

But as a matter of fact is not the exact opposite the truth? Are we not most deeply moved when we are lifted clean out of the concrete and carried up to the universal of which it is only an example? Is not the general far more moving than the particular? Do we not feel external details to be irrelevant and even annoyingly intrusive when we are stirred to the recognition of inward truths, of spiritual realities? No doubt program music owes to its reference to the particular story, the well-known hero, the familiar book or picture, a certain vividness, an immediateness of appeal even to the unmusical, a rich fund of associations to draw upon; but even program music, surely, tends in all its more powerful moments to penetrate below this comparatively superficial layer of external facts to the profounder (and of course vaguer) emotional strata of which they are, so to speak, the outcroppings. It is odd how little difference there is between program music and music, without the tag, in their more inspired moments; in all symphonic poems it is the symphonic rather than the poetic element that is chiefly responsible for the effect produced; and indeed, increasingly realistic as Strauss has become in his later works, even here the memorable moments are those of emotional fulfilment and realization, in which we tacitly agree to let the program go hang. Far from the "emotive wave" being proportional to the suggestion of "external existence," then, one would say that it was rather proportional to the realization of universal spiritual truth, and that in systematically confronting us with ever more and more crassly external existences Strauss has in his later works followed a practice as questionable as the theory which supports it, and levied an ever greater tax of boredom on our joy in the finer moments of his art.

Even in "Tod und Verklärung," which remains to this day, in the words of M. Romain Rolland,[19] "one of the most moving works of Strauss, and that which is constructed with the noblest unity," the repulsively realistic details with which the gasping for breath of the dying man is pictured consort but incongruously with the tender beauty of the "childhood" passages and the broad grandeur of the "transfiguration." The love of crass realism thus early revealed has grown apace, by even steps, unfortunately, with the extraordinary powers upon which it is parasitic. In the works conceived partially in a spirit of comedy, to be sure, such as "Till Eulenspiegel" and "Don Quixote," it finds a whimsical, witty expression for itself which not only seldom strikes a false note, but is often exceedingly amusing. Till's charge among the market-women's pots and pans, the bleating of the sheep in "Don Quixote," even perhaps the baby's squalling in the "Symphonia Domestica," are clever bits of side play, like the "business" of an irrepressible comedian, which are not out of key with the main substance of the music. But even here these realistic touches are exuberances, and inessential; the essential thing in "Till," for example, is the spirit of mischief and destruction that existed in the human heart for centuries before the rascal Eulenspiegel was born, and that respond in us to his pranks; and this essence Strauss expresses in the purely musical parts of his work, and by means identical in kind with those employed in a Beethoven scherzo.

And if realistic detail is in such instances subordinate to musical expression it may in the treatment of more serious subjects become positively inimical to it. Do we really care very much about supermen and "convalescents" and the rival claims of Christianity and neo-paganism when we are listening to "Also Sprach Zarathustra"? Does not that everlasting C-G-C, with its insistence on an esoteric meaning that we never knew or have forgotten, pester us unnecessarily? What we remember in "Zarathustra" is much more likely to be the poignant passion of the "Grablied," or the beautiful broad melody of the violins, in B major, near the end, which bears no label at all save the tempo mark "Langsam." Similarly, in the "Symphonia Domestica" the family squabbles, growling father giving the réplique to bawling infant, leave us skeptically detached or mildly amused. It is the musical charm of the "easy-going" parts in F major, the cradle song, above all the largely conceived slow movement with its wonderful development of the husband's "dreamy" theme, that really stir us. As for "Ein Heldenleben," what an unmitigated bore are those everlasting Adversaries!

Thus in the later works Strauss's shortcomings on the subjective side, his native tendency to concern himself more with concrete appearances than with essential emotional truths, seem exaggerated to such a degree as seriously to disturb the balance of his art. As he has interested himself more and more in externals he has not entirely evaded the danger of exalting the "program" at the expense of the "music," and his work, for all its extraordinary brilliance, its virtuosity, its power, has become over-emphatic, ill-balanced, hard in finish and theatrical in emphasis. It is ultimately a spiritual defect that compels us to withhold our full admiration from "Ein Heldenleben" or the "Domestica." We admit their titanic power, their marvelous nervous vitality; their technical temerities grow for the most part acceptable with familiarity; it is their emotional unreality that disappoints us. This charge of unreality, made against realism, may surprise us, may seem to savor of paradox; but it is inevitable. For music, as we have been told ad nauseam, but as we must never be allowed to forget, exists to express feeling; the only truth essential to it is truth to emotion; and therefore realism, looking as it does away from inward emotion to external fact, ever tends toward musical unreality.

How shall we account for this progressive externalizing of Strauss's musical interest? Is it all temperament? Has environment had anything to do with it? Do those high-sounding but dubious things "modern German materialism" and its accompanying æsthetic "decadence" bear in any way upon the matter? These are questions too large for a humble annalist of music to answer. M. Romain Rolland, however, in his essay on French and German Music in "Musiciens d'aujourd'hui," has one suggestion too relevant to be neglected here. "German music," says M. Rolland, "loses from day to day its intimateness: there is some of it still in Wolf, thanks to the exceptional misfortunes of his life; there is very little of it in Mahler, despite his efforts to concentrate himself upon himself; there is hardly any of it in Strauss, although he is the most interesting of the three. They no longer have any depth. I have said that I attribute this fact to the detestable influence of the theatre, to which almost all these artists are attached, as Kapellmeisters, directors of opera, etc. They owe to it the often melodramatic or at least external character of their music—music on parade, thinking constantly of effect."

One hesitates to accept so damning a charge as this against any artist, especially against a musical artist, who above all others should render sincere account of what is in his own heart rather than "give the public what it wants." Yet there is only too much in the later Strauss that it explains. How else shall we account for the exaggerated emphasis, the over-elaboration of contrasts that seem at times almost mechanical, and that suggest shrewd calculation of the crowd psychology rather than free development of the musical thought? What else explains so well the sensational elements so incredibly childish in an art so mature as Strauss's: the ever-increasing noisiness, the introduction of wind-machines, thunder-machines, and heaven knows what diabolic engines; the appetite for novelty for novelty's sake? And is there not a reflection of the "saponaceous influences of opera," as Sir Hubert Parry so well calls them, in the cloying over-sweetness, the sensuous luxury, of those peculiar passages, like the oboe solo in "Don Juan," the love music in "Ein Heldenleben," which form such conventional spots in the otherwise vital tissue of the music? Surely the opera house, and not the concert hall, is the place where such sybaritisms naturally breed.

For one reason and another, then—temperament, environment, the enervation of the operatic atmosphere with its constant quest of "effect"—the fresh and vital elements in Strauss's art have not entirely escaped contamination by more stale, conventional, and specious ones. Particularly has he failed of his highest achievement when desire for immediate appeal, the bias of an over-active mind, or the fallacies of a one-sided æsthetic have led him too far from the subjective emotion which is truly the soul of music. Yet when all subtractions are made he must remain one of the great creative musicians of his day. His surprising vigor and trenchancy of mind, his wit, his sense of comedy (in the Meredithian use of the word), his unerring eye for character, and, at his best, his sympathetic interpretation of life and his broad grasp of its significance as a whole, combine to produce a unique personality. Some of the eloquence we find in the more pompous parts of "Zarathustra" or "Ein Heldenleben" posterity will probably dismiss as bombast; but posterity will be stupid indeed if it does not prize "Till Eulenspiegel" and "Don Quixote" as master expressions of the spirit of comedy in music. "Till Eulenspiegel" particularly is a well-nigh perfect blending of the three qualities of the master dramatist we began by discussing. It combines the observation of a Swift with the sympathetic imagination of a Thackeray. Beneath its turbulent surface of fun is a deep sense of pathos, of the fragmentariness and fleetingness of Till, for all his pranks; so that to the sensitive it may easily bring tears as well as smiles. Above all, it has that largeness of vision, rarest of artistic qualities, which not only penetrates from appearance to feeling, but grasps feeling in all its relations, presents a unified picture of life, and purges the emotions as the Greek tragedy aimed to do. All is suffused in beauty. The prologue: "Once upon a time there was a man," and the epilogue: "Thus it happened to Till Eulenspiegel," make a complete cycle of the work, and remove its expression to a philosophic or poetic plane high above mere crude realism. There are doubtless more impressive single passages in later works, but it may be doubted if anything Strauss has ever written is more perfect or more tender than this wittiest of pieces, in which the wit is yet forgotten in the beauty.

FOOTNOTES:

[5] See especially "The Romantic Composers."

[6] In the essays on these composers in "From Grieg to Brahms."

[7] The passage, page 13 of the two-hand piano arrangement, page 26 of the orchestra score, is too long to quote here.

[8] Don Quixote, erläutert von Arthur Kahn, Der Musikführer no. 148, Leipzig.

[9] The jump of the horns in the fourth measure illustrates another obstacle to understanding that the inexperienced listener often meets in Strauss. He is quite careless as to what register, high or low, the "resolutions" of his dissonances occur in; they jump about from octave to octave; and the hearer, to follow them, has to be equally agile.

[10] Essay on Chopin, in "The Romantic Composers."

[11] Vocal score, page 35.

[12] "Elektra," vocal score, page 21.

[13] Ibid. Page 23.

[14] Ibid. Page 20, the first line.

[15] It is transposed into B flat in the episode wherein Till dons the vestments of a priest.

[16] "Richard Strauss," in the Living Masters of Music Series, and "Richard Strauss and the Music of the Future," in "Musical Studies."

[17] "Richard Strauss," pages 30-32.

[18] In "Musical Studies."

[19] "Musiciens d'aujourd'hui," page 123.

III
SIR EDWARD ELGAR

Edward Elgar

III
SIR EDWARD ELGAR

The most inspiring chapters of musical history are those that tell of the struggles of great men, spurred by the desire for free, sincere, and personal speech, to wrest the musical language out of the triteness long conventional usage has given it; to make it say something new; to add, so to speak, to the impersonal organ chord it sounds an overtone of their particular human voices. This is what stirs us when we think of Beethoven, after he had written two symphonies in the style of Haydn and Mozart, finding himself at the opening of "a new road," leading he knew not whither, but irresistibly summoning him; of Gluck, at fifty, protesting against the hollowness of the Italian operas he had been writing up to that time; of Franck, still older, finding at last the secret of that vague, groping, mystical harmonic style he made so peculiarly his own. Men dread liberty, says Bernard Shaw, because of the bewildering responsibility it imposes and the uncommon alertness it demands; no wonder that they acclaim as truly great only those artists who fully accept this responsibility and successfully display this alertness. And it may be suggested that the more conventional, and therefore paralyzing to personal initiative, the style from which the artist takes his departure, the more alertness does he require, and the more credit does he deserve if he arrives at freedom. If this be true, Sir Edward Elgar, who, starting at English oratorio, has arrived at the cosmopolitan yet completely individual musical speech of the first Symphony, the Variations, and parts of "The Dream of Gerontius," is surely one of the great men of our time.

For nothing, not even stark crudity, is so unfavorable to artistic life as the domination by a conventional formalism like that of the Handel-Mendelssohn school from which Elgar had to start. It may take a great artist like Dvořák or Verdi to build an art on the naïvetés of Bohemian folk-song or the banalities of Italian opera; but to free an art from the tyranny of drowsy custom, as Elgar has done, requires not only a great artist, but something of a revolutionary.

Elgar is English in character, but cosmopolitan in sympathies, style, and workmanship. In other words, while retaining the personal and racial quality natural to all sincere art, he has been magnanimous, intelligent, and unconventional enough to break through the charmed circle of insularity which has kept so many English composers from vital contact with the world. Such insularity cannot but be fatal to art. It is bad enough when it confines the artist to narrow native models. It is even worse when, ignoring native music of the finest quality, such as that of Purcell, it follows blindly, through timidity or inertia, traditions imported by foreigners of inferior grade. Generations of English musicians have stultified themselves in imitating Handel's burly ponderousness and Mendelssohn's somewhat vapid elegance. They have turned a deaf ear, not only to the greater contemporaries of these idols—to Bach and to Schumann—but also to the more modern thought of Wagner, Franck, Tschaikowsky, and Brahms. They have been correct and respectable in an art which lives only through intense personal emotion. They have narrowed their sympathies. They have been national in an age of dawning internationalism.

Elgar, on the contrary, together with a few others whose work deserves to be better known than it is, has had the courage to aspire to a cosmopolitan breadth of style. He has made up for the lack of what are called "educational advantages" by something far more valuable—an insatiable intellectual curiosity. Self-taught except for a few violin lessons in youth, he has been all his life a tireless listener, observer, and student. When he was a boy, having no text-books on musical form, he wrote a whole symphony in imitation of Mozart's in G minor, "following the leader" with admirable and fruitful docility. As a youth he would play violin, at the last desk oftentimes, in any orchestra to which he could gain admission, for the sake of the experience; and between rehearsals would laboriously collate the instrumental parts to find out why a certain passage sounded well or ill. He would travel two hundred and fifty miles to London, from his home in Worcester, to hear a Crystal Palace Saturday concert, returning late at night. Knowing well that any potent individuality like his own grows by what it assimilates, he has had none of the small man's fear of injuring by the study of others his "individuality." The internal evidence of his works shows that there are few modern scores he has left unpondered; yet no living composer has a more unmistakably personal style than his.

His intellectual activity has by no means confined itself to music. He has always been an omnivorous reader. And while much of this reading naturally proceeded in desultory fashion, for the sake of relaxation, and took him sometimes as far afield as Froissart, the fourteenth-century French chronicler, as suggested by his early overture of that name, he has never lost the power of concentration, and can study a book to as good purpose as a score. His analytic notes to his symphonic study "Falstaff" (1913) reveal a surprisingly detailed knowledge both of Shakespeare and of Shakespeare's commentators. Science also interests him, and for some years his hobby was scientific kite-flying. He is of the nervously irritable temperament so often coupled with mental alertness, walks about restlessly while conversing, and detests all routine work like teaching. "To teach the right pupil was a pleasure," he once said, "but teaching in general was to me like turning a grindstone with a dislocated shoulder." In 1889 he married, gave up most of his teaching, and moved to London. Since then he has lived partly among his native Malvern Hills, partly near London, but has devoted himself almost entirely to composing and conducting.

Elgar's whole life has thus been a gradual and progressive self-emancipation from the limitations of inherited style, an escape from habit to initiative, from formality to eloquence, from insularity to cosmopolitanism. Nor has this progress been the less inspiring in that it has been spasmodic, subject to interruptions, and never complete. In that respect it shares the lovable imperfection of all things human. It has been instinctive rather than reasoned, has proceeded largely by trial and error, and has counted among its experiments almost as many failures as successes. There are commonplace pages in almost everything Elgar has written, unless it be the "Enigma" Variations. But the important point is that however much, in moments of technical inattention or emotional indifference, he may fall back into the formulæ of his school, he has at his best left them far behind, and made himself the peer of his greatest continental contemporaries in wealth and variety of expression—of such men as Strauss in Germany and d'Indy in France.

What are these never-quite-ejected formulæ, lurking in Elgar's brain, ever ready to guide his pen when for a moment he forgets to think and feel? If we look at the opening chorus of "The Black Knight," written in 1893, and numbered opus 25, we shall get a working notion of them (Figure X, page 102).

Figure X.
Opening chorus from "The Black Knight."

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How this passage calls up the atmosphere of the typical English choral festival: the unwieldy masses of singers, the scarcely less unwieldy orchestra or organ, the ponderous movement of the music, half majestic, half tottering, as of a drunken elephant, the well-meaning ineptitude of the expression, highly charged with good nature but innocent of nuance! There is the solid diatonic harmony, conscientiously divided between the four equally industrious parts. There is the thin disguising of the tendency of this hymn-tune type of harmony to sit down, so to speak, on the accent of each measure, by a few conventional suspensions. There is the attempt to give the essentially stagnant melody a specious air of busyness by putting in a triplet here and a dot or short rest there. And there is the sing-song phraseology by which a phrase of four measures follows a phrase of four measures as the night the day. In short, there is the perfectly respectable production of music by the yard, on the most approved pattern, undistorted by a breath of personal feeling or imagination.

How far Elgar, whenever his imagination is stirred, can get away from this conventional vacuity, even without departing materially from its general idiom, may as well be shown at once, for the sake of the illuminating contrast, by the quotation of a bit of genuine Elgar—the "Nimrod" in the "Enigma" Variations, opus 36 (1899).

Figure XI.
"Nimrod," from the "Enigma Variations."

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This touching tribute to a friend of the composer, Mr. A. J. Jaeger (the English equivalent of whose name, hunter, suggested the title), has all the serious thoughtfulness, the tenderness coupled with aspiration, the noble plainness, that belong to Elgar at his best. And it is a striking fact that the originality of the passage (for no one but Elgar could have written it) is due to subtle, almost unanalyzable qualities in the mode of composition rather than to any unusual features of style. The harmonic style, indeed, is quite the same simple diatonic one as that of "The Black Knight" chorus, showing that, in music as in literature, noble poetry can be made from the same materials as doggerel. There is the same predominance of simple triads and seventh chords, especially the more rugged sevenths, for which Elgar has a noticeable fondness; the same frequent use of suspensions, though here it is dictated by emotion rather than by custom; the same restless motion of the bass, one of the hall-marks of Elgar's style. The melody, however, shows a tendency to large leaps, often of a seventh, in alternating directions, giving its line a sharply serrated profile. This, it may be noted, is also one of the outstanding features of his more personal thought. But above all should be observed the rhythmic flexibility that here takes the place of sing-song—the free sweep of the line, scorning to rest on the accents, soaring through its long continuous flight like a bird in a favoring gale.

We have here, then, the vein of expression at once plain, serious, and noble, which makes Elgar at his best both English and universal. It recurs frequently throughout the whole body of his work: in the "Go forth" chorus in "Gerontius," so finely used in the prelude; in the theme of the Variations; in the fundamental theme of the first Symphony, which dominates the entire work and in which Elgar reaches perhaps his most exalted utterance; in the themes of the slow movement of the same symphony; and in another way in the Prince Hal theme of "Falstaff." Some may feel that this is the essential Elgar. Yet there is also in this quiet Englishman a passionate mysticism, a sense of subtle spiritual experience, which has urged him to develop progressively quite another mode of musical speech. On this side he is related to Wagner and to César Franck. Like them he has realized that there is a whole range of feeling, inaccessible to the diatonic system of harmony, that can be suggested by harmony based on the chromatic scale, and even more vividly and subtly by a harmonic system that opens up a path between all the keys, that makes them all available together—by what we may call, in short, "polytonal" harmony. This polytonal harmonic system is common to "Tristan und Isolde," to Franck's "Les Béatitudes," to much of Chopin, and to many parts of "The Dream of Gerontius," however much they may differ in other respects.

Elgar began early to experiment in this direction. Even in "The Black Knight," for example, at the word "rock" in the lines

When he rode into the lists
The castle 'gan to rock,

we have the following progression, equally striking from the musical and the dramatic point of view:

Figure XII.
From "The Black Knight."

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This is what Mr. Carl W. Grimm has well named a "modulating sequence"; that is, each unit group of harmony (in this case a measure in length) is the sequential repetition of the preceding, yet the chromatic texture is so managed that each begins in a new key; the total effect is thus much more novel and exciting than is that of the traditional monotonal sequence. Yet, as Mr. Stillman-Kelley has pointed out in a closely reasoned essay,[20] however ingenious may be the arrangement of the modulating sequence on the harmonic side, it is liable to the same fault that besets the monotonal sequence—that is, rhythmic monotony. Once we have the pattern, we know what to expect; and if the composer gives us exactly what we expect the effect is too obvious, and we are bored. It is precisely by his avoidance of this literal repetition, says Mr. Kelley, that Wagner, in such a modulating sequence as that of the Pilgrims' Chorus, maintains both the rhythmic and the harmonic vitality of the music.

Judged by the standard thus suggested, the sequence on the word "rock" is seen to be too literally carried out. The pattern is applied with the mechanical regularity of a stencil, necessarily with an equally mechanical result. It must be said in the interest of just criticism that Elgar frequently falls into this fault. Even Gerontius' cry of despair, so magnificently developed by the orchestra, contains less of subtle variety than is given to that curiously similar cry of Amfortas in "Parsifal" by the "inversion" of the parts, while the priest's adjuration to his departing soul[21] and the chorus afterward based on it, become irritatingly monotonous through the literal repetition of a pattern admirable in itself. At the beginning of the Development in the first movement of the second Symphony there is a passage illustrating the same fault. The tonal and harmonic coloring here are singularly impressive, and quite original; as Mr. Ernest Newman remarks in his analysis:[22] "A new and less sunny cast has come over the old themes.... The harmonies have grown more mysterious; the scoring is more veiled; the dynamics are all on a lower scale." Everything favors, in fact, a most impressive effect except the structure; but that, through its over-literal application of the modulating sequence, almost jeopardizes the whole.

Figure XIII.
In the Mountain,—Night. From "The Apostles."

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Fortunately, however, happier applications of this harmonically so fruitful device are not far to seek in Elgar's scores, especially the later ones. The following theme from "The Apostles," appropriately marked "mistico," is a fine example of the kind of mysticism that is not unmindful of the needs of the body and of the intelligence as well as of the soul. The principle is still that of the modulating sequence, but the application is here not mechanical but freely imaginative. Two of the one-measure units are in each phrase balanced by a unit twice as long, so that the rhythm is as a whole far more organic than in our earlier examples of sequences. Furthermore the purely harmonic treatment makes use of unforeseeable relations, so that the effect of stereotype is successfully evaded. Finally, here is a theme from the second symphony in which the sequential principle is still further veiled, so far as harmony is concerned. The harmonic progressions seem here to "shoot," so to speak, with complete spontaneity; we cannot anticipate whither the next move will take us, and we get constantly to interesting new places; yet the unity of the whole, beginning and ending in E-flat[23], prevents any sense of aimless wandering.

Figure XIV.
Theme from Symphony No. 2.

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The alert student will probably still feel, nevertheless, perhaps without being able to account in any way for his impression, that even in these last excerpts there is an unsatisfactory element, a something that keeps them on a lower level of art, for all their opaline color, than that of the forthright and transparent "Nimrod." This something, perhaps on the whole Elgar's most ineradicable fault, is rhythmical "short breath." He gets away from it, to be sure, in all his finest pages; but except when his imagination is deeply stirred his melodic line shows the dangerous tendency to fall into short segments, a measure or two in length, into a configuration of scallops, so to speak, rather than wide sweeps, exemplified in the three last illustrations. Instead of flying, it hops. Examples will be found right through his works, from the second theme of the early overture "Froissart" to that of the first movement of the Violin Concerto, opus 61.

Figure XV.
Second theme from "Froissart."

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Second theme of first movement of Violin Concerto.

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This kind of sing-songiness is as fatal to noble rhythm in music as it is in poetry—in much of Longfellow, for example; and the frequency with which Elgar relapses into it suggests that he has some of the same fatal facility, the tendency to talk without thinking, which so often kept the American poet below his best. The parallel might be carried out, if it were worth while, in some detail. Both men wrote too much, and both are "popular" in the bad sense as well as the good. The "Pomp and Circumstance" Marches are saved, despite the frequent triteness of their melody, by their buoyant high spirits; but of the vapid and sentimental "Salut d'Amour," which has sold in the thousands and been arranged for all possible combinations of instruments, including two mandolins and a guitar, the less said the better. Yet it is noteworthy that the very tendency to an over-obvious, monotonous rhythmic scheme which works for the popularity of a small piece with the thoughtless and trivial-minded, works against it in the case of a larger composition which appeals to the musically serious, and wins its way gradually at best. Thus Elgar's second symphony, which suffers much more from this besetting fault than the first, has been less popular for that very reason. Statistics are significant in such cases. The second symphony was played twenty-seven times before it was three years old, a considerable number for so serious a work[24]; but the first, called by Nikisch "Brahms's Fifth," a compliment which could be paid to few other modern symphonies without absurdity, achieved the almost incredible record of eighty-two performances in its first year, in such widely scattered places as London, Vienna, Berlin, Leipsic, Bonn, St. Petersburg, Buda-Pest, Toronto, Sydney, and the United States.[25]

Of course it is not intended to account for the wide favor accorded this symphony by adducing so technical a matter, from one point of view, as its comparative freedom from a rhythmic weakness to which its composer is unfortunately peculiarly subject. What is meant is simply that sing-song balance of short phrases is often a symptom of superficial feeling, and that, per contra, elastic, vigorous, and imaginative rhythms are a constant result, and therefore a reliable evidence, of the emotional ardor that makes a piece of music live. The A-flat Symphony is a work intensely felt by the composer, a work that, coming from his heart, finds its way to the hearts of others. And in this respect, in its emotional sincerity, earnestness, and subjectivity, it differs from his other works more in degree than in kind. For in everything Elgar writes there is the preoccupation with inner feeling which we find in such a composer as Schumann, but from which most of our contemporaries have turned away. Elgar is an introspective musician, not an externally observant tone-painter like Strauss. It is noteworthy how completely his treatment of death, for example, in "The Dream of Gerontius," differs from that of Strauss in "Tod und Verklärung." By no means accidental is it, but highly significant of the opposed attitudes of the two artists, that while Strauss emphasizes the external picture—the panting breath, the choking cries—Elgar penetrates to the inward emotional state. He has written surprisingly little program music. Aside from a few realistic touches scattered through the choral works, and the delicate little vignette of the friend at sea in the "Enigma" Variations, there is only "Falstaff"—and that deals more with character than with picture. In this respect Elgar deserves well of his contemporaries for standing against a popular but dangerous tendency to externalize the most inward of the arts, and for showing that even in the twentieth century the spiritual drama set forth in a work of pure music, like his first symphony, can be as thrilling as those that have made immortal Beethoven's later quartets and sonatas.

That this attitude indicates a preference rather than a limitation is proved by the felicity of the external characterization in passages scattered all through the choral works, as for instance the setting of the line "The castle 'gan to rock," cited above, from the "Black Knight," the music of the devils in "Gerontius," or the scene in "The Apostles" where Peter walks upon the water, and even more strikingly in "Falstaff," the composer's single contribution to program music. Here he frankly takes the Straussian attitude, and skilfully uses the Straussian methods. Leading themes, as he tells us in his analysis,[26] depict the fat knight, one "in a green old age, mellow, frank, gay, easy, corpulent, loose, unprincipled, and luxurious" (a); another "cajoling and persuasive" (b); and a third in his mood of "boastfulness and colossal mendacity" (c).

Figure XVI.
Three of the "Falstaff" themes.

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(b)

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(c) Grandioso e largamente

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These portraits evidently belong to the same gallery as Strauss's Don Quixote, Sancho Panza (cf. the first quotation), Till Eulenspiegel, and others; they are sketched in the same suggestive and telling lines; in the third there is even the same touch of caricature. The picture of Eastcheap, too, where, "among ostlers and carriers, and drawers, and merchants, and pilgrims and loud robustious women, Falstaff has freedom and frolic," has something of the German composer's brilliant externality. It should, as Elgar says in his notes, and it does, "chatter, blaze, glitter, and coruscate." Yet, vivid as all this is, even here from time to time, notably in the two "interludes," the composer characteristically withdraws from the turbulent outer world he has conjured up, to brood upon its spiritual meaning; and it is noteworthy that after stating in his analysis that "some lines quoted from the plays are occasionally placed under the themes to indicate the feeling to be conveyed by the music," he immediately adds, "but it is not intended that the meaning of the music, often varied and intensified, shall be narrowed to a corollary of these quotations only." This intensification arises, of course, through the universalizing of all the particulars by the power of music to express pure emotion.

The same instinctive leaning to introspection is curiously shown in the Enigma Variations.[27] "I have in the Variations," writes Elgar in a private letter, "sketched portraits of my friends—a new idea, I think—that is, in each variation I have looked at the theme through the personality (as it were) of another Johnny." The idea was not indeed quite new, however originally applied, as Schumann had already sketched a number of his friends in the "Carnaval." But what is of much greater import is that Schumann and Elgar, both introspective temperaments, go about this business of portrait painting in the same characteristic way—not by recording the external aspects of these "other Johnnies," but by sympathetically putting themselves at their points of view and becoming, so to speak, the spokesmen of their souls. The tender intimateness of Elgar's interpretations is their supreme charm. Whatever the character portrayed, whether the tender grace of C. A. E. (Lady Elgar), the caprice of H. D. S-P., the virile energy of W. M. B., the gossamer delicacy of Dorabelle, or the nobility of "Nimrod," we feel in each case that we have for the moment really got inside the personality, and looked at the world along that unique perspective. Even in the indescribably lovely Romanza, Variation XIII, calling up the thought of a friend at sea, though programistic devices are used, the spirit looks away from externalities. Violas in a quietly undulating rhythm suggest the ocean expanse; an almost inaudible tremolo of the drum gives us the soft throb of the engines; a quotation from Mendelssohn's "Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage," in the dreamy tones of the clarinet, completes the story. Yet "story" it is not—and there is the subtlety of it. Dim sea and dream-like steamer are only accessories after all. The thought of the distant friend, the human soul there, is what gently disengages itself as the essence of the music.

In his two symphonies the composer gives us even less encouragement to search for detailed programs. It is true that the second bears the motto from Shelley:

Rarely, rarely, comest thou,
Spirit of Delight.

But it will be observed, first, that these lines contain no pictorial images which would prevent their application to the most purely emotional music—a symphony of Beethoven, for example; and second, that even their emotional bearing is somewhat ambiguous, as we are left in doubt whether it is the Spirit of Delight itself, or the rareness of its visitations, that we are asked to consider. Mr. Ernest Newman thinks the former, and finds in the symphony the "jocundity and sweetness" which characterize English music from the earliest times. We read in the Musical Times,[28] however, that there is "some disagreement ... with the composer's own opinion that it is on a totally different psychological plane from that of the first symphony, and represents a more serene mood," although the writer adds that "it is unquestionable that the themes, even in the slow movement, speak of a lighter heart and more tranquil emotions." If there is thus room for doubt even as to the emotional content of the work, no attempt to read into it a "story" is likely to be successful. Even Mr. Newman, programist à outrance, is forced in this case to the admission that "though practically every musical work of any emotional value must start from this basis [of the composer's life-experience],[29] the connection of it with the external world or with the symbols of the literary and plastic arts may range through many degrees of vagueness or precision, according to the psychological build of the composer."

Coming now at last to Elgar's masterpiece, the Symphony[30] in A-flat, No. 1, opus 55, first performed under Dr. Hans Richter at Manchester and at London in December, 1908, we find Elgar's method at its purest—the preoccupation with spiritual states and experiences is complete. It is true that this may be the symphony upon which he was reported nine years earlier to be at work, and which was to bear the title "Gordon." If this is the case it shows only that he was moved to musical expression by the heroism of the great Englishman, as Beethoven was by that of Napoleon before it transpired that he was a tyrant. The A-flat Symphony is not for that reason any more program music than Beethoven's "Eroica." The two are indeed similar in being throughout profound searchings of the human spirit, highly dramatic in the vividness of their introspection, but never realistic. They penetrate to a level far deeper than that of action; they deal with the emotional springs of action; we may even say that each suggests a philosophy, since the philosophies, too, are born of those deep inarticulate emotional attitudes toward life which only music can voice in their purity.

This fundamental attitude is in the A-flat Symphony far more mature and chastened than that of the ebulliently youthful "Eroica." If we wished to find its analogue in Beethoven (and it is a high compliment to Elgar to say that there are few other places we could find it) we should have to go rather to the Ninth Symphony and to the later sonatas and quartets. It is in essence the attitude of religious resignation, and has as its constituents the primary opposition between the ideal and reality, the disappointment, softening, and impersonalizing of the soul by experience, the reciprocal activity of the soul winning its values out of experience, and the final reconciliation between them. Of course it is not meant that these ideas are intellectually formulated in the music. It is simply that the music expresses the emotional states that accompany such universal human experiences, and thus suggests and at the same time by its beauty transfigures them.

The noble melody in A-flat major with which the symphony starts, recurring in the finale, and indeed the nucleus of the whole work, suggests aspiration, resolute will, the quest of the Ideal. Everything about it,—its steady movement, its simple, strong harmonic basis, its finely flexible rhythm, notably free from the short breath of the composer's less exalted moments, even its rich and yet quiet tonality of A-flat major, raises it into a rarefied atmosphere of its own, above the turmoil of everyday life. With the theme in D minor marked Allegro appassionato, on the contrary, we are brought rudely down to earth, with all its confusion, its chaos, its meaningless accidents (note the constant feverish motion of the bass, the phantasmagoric nightmare harmonies at index letter 7, the increasing restlessness of the whole passage). Presently more poignant or tender phrases (10 and 11) suggest the longing of the spirit for the sweet reasonableness of the lost ideal world, and at 12, in the "second theme" in F major, we do get for a moment a breathing interval of peace. The beautiful, tender phrase, as of divine pity, beginning in the fourth measure of 11 and ushering in this theme, should be especially noticed for its deep expressiveness and its complete originality. This "phrase of pity," as we shall see, is destined to play an important part in the structure of the movement. Soon earlier fragments return, reintroducing the restless mood, the intensity of the feeling steadily grows, and at 17 we have a magnificent climax in which the "phrase of pity," much slower and more emphatic than before, suggests the first crisis of the struggle.

With the return of the theme of the ideal, now in C major (18) and in tentative accents, begins the long and complex development of the themes. We need not go into detail here, further than to remark that the strange, devious new theme at 24 seems almost to have some concrete "meaning," undisclosed by the composer, and introduces the most baffling element we find anywhere in the symphony. The development proceeds much upon it. At 32 begins the recapitulation of themes of the orthodox sonata-form, treated freely and with many interesting modifications. The climax recurs at 44, now impressively amplified. Even finer is the gradual but irresistible return of the fundamental theme, the "Ideal," and its triumphant statement through 49, 50, and 51. The sinister, groping theme returns, however, seeming to darken the atmosphere as when clouds come over the sun. The "Ideal" theme is heard in faltering, uncertain accents, and reaches, just before 55, a timid cadence on the tone C. Now comes one of the most exquisite things, not only in this symphony, but in modern music. While the clarinet holds this C, reached in the original key of A-flat major, the muted strings, high and tenuous, in the remote key of A minor, like voices from another world, gently breathe the "phrase of pity." It is magical. With fine dignity of pace they reach the tone C, whereupon we are again quietly but conclusively brought back to A-flat, and with a single plucked bass note the chord of the clarinets sinks to silence (Figure XVII, page 128).

The two middle movements of the symphony, Allegro molto (the scherzo) and Adagio, are played without intervening pause and conceived together. From the point of view both of form and of content their treatment is of exceeding interest. Structurally they are an inset between the first movement and the finale, contrasting sharply with them in key as well as in melodic material, embodying as they do the "sharp" keys (F-sharp minor and D major) in opposition to the A-flat major and D minor of the others. After this inset has been completed, the earlier themes and keys return in the finale and round out the cycle projected by the first movement. Thus the symphony as a whole consists of two interlocking systems—a scheme of structure which gives it both variety and unity in the highest degree.

Figure XVII.
End of first movement, First Symphony.

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The scherzo begins with a racing, eagerly hurrying theme, staccato, in the violins, in the fastest possible tempo. Together with a more vigorous, barbarically insistent tune to which it presently (59) gives place, it seems a musical expression of the forward-looking, all-conquering spirit of youth. These themes are separately elaborated, are displaced for a while by a quieter Trio, and finally return with renewed vigor, and at last in combination (75). And now, as coda, comes one of the most remarkable passages of the Symphony. The racing theme returns (82), but now pianissimo, mysterious, shorn of its pristine exuberance. It hesitates, halts, seems to lose faith in itself. It reappears in the more sombre key of F minor, instead of F-sharp minor, and with abated pace (84). A little later it sobers to a still quieter movement, in eighth notes (86), then (87) to quarter notes, and at last (90) the clarinets give it out in a movement eight times slower than the original headlong dash. Indeed, the rhythm seems about to fail entirely when, with a change of key to D major, and of time to Adagio, we hear the identical notes of the original theme, sung now with broad deliberation by the violins, completely transfigured in meaning.

Thus begins the slow movement with the coming of maturity, the taming of the blood, the sadness of self-acquaintance no longer to be postponed. The excitement of unlimited possibilities gives place to the sober recognition of limitations. Poignant grief there is here, unanswered questioning, moments of passionate despair. But with the beautiful and thoroughly Elgarian theme at 96 begins to creep in the spirit of resignation to the inevitable, and of divine pity for human failure, born of this bitter self-discovery. From this point on is heard unmistakably the deeper note of religious consolation, reaching full expression at last in the melody marked Molto espressivo e sostenuto, one of the noblest, profoundest, and most spiritual that Elgar has conceived, with which the movement ends.

The finale opens with a slow introduction, intended partly to direct our attention back to the first movement and partly to forecast the strains destined to complete the cycle which it began. We hear the mysterious groping theme first heard in its development and fragments of the "Ideal." Especial emphasis is laid, however, on a march-like tune, given out by bassoons and low strings at the sixth measure, and on an aspiring phrase for clarinet (measures 10-11) peculiar to the present movement. The prevailing mood here, both in the main theme with its emphatic interlocking rhythms (the opening Allegro) and in the second theme at 114, with its buoyant triplets recalling the finale of Brahms's third symphony, is energetic will. This seems to merge in jubilant achievement in the march-like theme of the introduction at its reëntrance at 118. For a moment, to be sure, doubt as to this triumph seems to be suggested by a rather halting version of the "Ideal" (129) and by a pondering version of the march theme (130). But with the return of the main themes of the movement at its recapitulation, beginning at 134 and now inflected towards A-flat, the radical tonality of the whole symphony, the mood of vigorous volition revives, and from now on to the splendid reassertion, by the full orchestra, in its richest sonorities, of the theme of the "Ideal," all is one long climax.

It is hard to see how any candid student can deny the greatness of this symphony. If only for the stoutness of its structure, the grasp with which the fundamental principles of musical form are seized, however the details have to be modified to suit the occasion, and for the richness and variety of its treatment of orchestral coloring, it would hold a conspicuous place among modern orchestral works. But of course these things are only means; the end of music is expression. It is, then, to the fact that the symphony gives eloquent voice to some of the deepest, most sacred, and most elusive of human feelings that we must attribute its real importance. That it does this at a time when most musicians are looking outward rather than inward, and incline to value sensuous beauty above thought, and vividness above profundity, gives us all the more reason for receiving it with gratitude, and finding in it a good omen for the future.

FOOTNOTES:

[20] "Recent Developments in Musical Theory," by Edgar Stillman-Kelley. The Musical Courier, July 1 and 8, 1908.

[21] Vocal score, page 39.

[22] Musical Times, London, May 1, 1911.

[23] Is not Mr. Newman mistaken in stating that this theme begins in G major?

[24] Musical Times, January, 1914.

[25] Musical Times, January, 1909.

[26] Musical Times, September, 1913.

[27] Arranged for piano by the composer. Novello, Ewer, and Company, London.

[28] July, 1911.

[29] This premise, which Mr. Newman expands as if it bore directly on the problem of program music, though true to the verge of truism, hardly helps us to solve that problem. The question, it may be said once again, concerns not the composer's stimulus, but his method; whether, that is, he works through the suggestion of external object or of inner emotional states.

[30] Arrangement for piano by S. Karg-Elert. Novello, Ewer, and Company.

IV
CLAUDE DEBUSSY

Claude Debussy

IV
CLAUDE DEBUSSY

No peculiarity of contemporary musical taste is more striking than the extraordinary popularity which the elusive songs and piano pieces of Debussy have enjoyed during the last decade or two. They have been heard, with a delight agreeably mixed with bewilderment, in the drawing-rooms of the whole world, just as Grieg's were at a slightly earlier period; and, like Grieg, their author has become the idol of the amateur. There is no doubt of it, Debussy has been the prime musical fad of the twentieth century. The fact is interesting—worth examination. The reasons of it throw a strong light not only on Debussy himself, but—which is more important—on our whole contemporary musical life.

Claude Achille Debussy, born in 1862 at St. Germain-en-Laye, near Paris, and educated at the Conservatoire, first gained wide fame by his opera, "Pelléas et Mélisande," produced at the Opéra Comique in 1902. By its imaginative re-creation in music of Maeterlinck's fatalism and atmosphere of mystery, by its dramatic directness, its justice of declamation, its moderation and avoidance of Wagnerian exaggeration, perhaps above all by the originality of its harmonic style and its delicately tinted orchestration, it undoubtedly marked an epoch in French music. Debussy had at this time already fixed the fundamental qualities of his style in such compositions as the quartet for strings (1893), more virile than his later works, and the well-known orchestral prelude after a prose poem by Mallarmé, archpriest of the symbolistic movement, "L'Après-midi d'un faune." In later orchestral pieces, the Nocturnes for orchestra (1899), the symphonic sketches "La Mer" (1905), the highly colored "Iberia" (1907), as well as in choral works like the "Martyre de Saint Sébastien" (1911), we see him refining the same manner, seeking always, like his compatriot the poet Verlaine, the subtleties, the delicacies, the shades and half-shades, la nuance, la nuance toujours. It is, however, through his smaller works—his songs and especially his piano pieces—that Debussy is best known to the mass of his admirers; and as the same qualities reveal themselves here too, it is in these that we shall try to understand them. In the "Estampes" (1903), the "Masques" (1904), the "Images" (1905 and 1908), the "Préludes" (1910 and 1913), and many lesser pieces he has created what is virtually a department of his own in the literature of the piano. Here is the essential Debussy.

The adaptation between the art and the audience here, as is always the case where there is extreme popularity, is so perfect that we can equally well begin our study from either end. Let us start with the audience. Not that Debussy consciously sought to "give the public what it wants"; no artist worthy the name does that. What is meant is simply that his qualities were spontaneously such as exactly to satisfy his audience's requirements; or, in biological terms, the organism was fortunate enough to be exactly suited to its environment, peculiarly "fit to survive." As investigating biologists we can therefore either approach the environment through the organism or the organism through the environment—and we choose to do the latter.

The environment of the modern composer is a public numerically larger than ever before, and qualitatively affected by this increased size according to the law of averages—degraded, that is, from the qualities of the minority toward those of the majority. In less abstract terms, the modern audience contains to every one intelligent listener ten or a hundred who are ignorant, untrained, or inattentive. The results of this disproportion are familiar to us on all sides; they range from such a general matter as the very conception of art, and especially of music, as a mere amusement or diversion rather than a spiritual experience, down to such details as the preference, natural to the untrained, of sensuous pleasure (in rich tone-combinations, for example) to emotion and thought (as embodied musically in melody), and of a vague day-dreaming mood when listening to music to the imaginative and sympathetic attention that music requires of him who would really grasp its objective beauty.