thematic material is a difficult question to answer. Folk-tunes, it is
certain, are simple in structure, composed of short phrases expressing
the naïve emotions of childlike minds. On the other hand, had they not
fulfilled Grieg's personal needs, supplying the sort of atmosphere he
was meant to breathe in, he could never have assimilated them as he
has done. Perhaps a true account of the matter is that his nature is of
such unusual simplicity and ingenuousness as to find in folk-melodies
its natural utterance, and to feel in their primitive phrase-structure
no limitation. Intellectually, the man is not more mature than the
people. From whatever sources he might draw his germinal ideas, he
would never combine them in complexer forms or larger patterns than
he has found ready-made to his hand in the national song. There are,
however, in Norwegian music peculiarities of a different sort that we
can hardly conceive as proving other than hindrances in the formation
of a wholesomely eclectic style--peculiarities which are all present
full-fledged in so early a work of Grieg as the Piano Concerto,
opus 16, written in 1868. At the very outset, in the descending
octave passage, there are two melodic tricks that recur everywhere
in Grieg--the fall from the seventh of the scale to the fifth, and
from the third to the tonic. Both progressions, anomalous in classic
music, are prominent features of the Northern folk-tunes. Then, in
the first theme, assigned to the orchestra, there are to be noticed,
besides these melodic steps, the bodily displacement of the phrase
already described, carrying it from A minor into C major. In the second
theme, as well as in the _cantabile_ piano passage that prepares the
way for it, there is a rhythmic device characteristic of Grieg--the
mixing in one measure of three notes to the beat with two notes to
the beat, of which the prototype is to be found in the «Springtanz»
of Norwegian peasants. Here also is the weak cadence, that is to say,
the cadence with tonic chord coming on an unaccented beat. So much for
melodic and rhythmic peculiarities; as a harmonist Grieg has methods
equally persistent. His love of bare fifths, reiterated in the bass
with boorish vigor, and his manner of harmonizing with descending
chromatic sixths or thirds, both of which we remarked in opus 3, are
illustrated in this Concerto; the first in the conclusion-theme of the
first movement, and the second in measures fourteen to sixteen of the
beautiful Adagio. Finally, he is devoted to the secondary sevenths,
especially in harsh and daring sequence such as make up most of the
Norwegian March, opus 54, No. 2. Mannerisms like these Grieg has, on
the whole, in far larger measure than most composers. On almost any of
his pages the student will have no difficulty in finding for himself
instances of one or more of these mannerisms.
Now, so many little tricks and idiosyncrasies, however piquant in the
work of a beginner, could hardly escape becoming, as time went on,
an incubus to even the most vigorous imagination. Nothing menaces
thought more than affectations and whimsicalities of style. And even
in the meridian of Grieg's activity, when he was charming a staid
world with the fresh beauties of the Piano Sonata and the two early
Violin Sonatas, there were not wanting critics who discerned his danger
and foresaw that he must either broaden his methods or deteriorate.
Over twenty years ago the following words were written in an English
magazine by Frederick Niecks: «My fear in the case of Grieg always was
that his love of Norwegian idioms would tend to narrow, materialize,
and make shallow his conceptions, and prevent him from forming a style
by imposing on him a manner.» Subsequent events have proved that
this fear was but too well founded. Although, during the years at
Copenhagen, and the eight years, from 1866 to 1874, that Grieg lived
in Christiania teaching and conducting, he continued to do excellent
work, he seems to have even then reached the acme of his powers, and
thenceforward to have imperceptibly declined. It is rather a melancholy
fact that when, in 1874, receiving a pension of sixteen hundred crowns
from the Government, which enabled him to resign the conductorship of
the Musical Union of Christiania, he began to devote himself almost
entirely to composition, his mental vivacity was waning and his lovely
lyrical utterance was beginning to be smothered under mannerisms.
From this time on he advanced more by familiarizing the world with
his earlier compositions than by adding to them anything particularly
novel or precious. He traveled in Germany, Holland and Denmark, gave
concerts in England in 1888, and visited France a year later, playing
and conducting his works at Paris. For the rest, he retired to his
picturesque villa, Troldhangen, ten miles from Bergen, where he lives a
peaceful and secluded country life.
It is not difficult to see why Grieg's later works should decline
rather than advance. In the first place, his interest had been from
the first concentrated on personal expression. His impulse was
individual, not universal. He never sought to widen or deepen the forms
of musical beauty, to extend the range of resources at the command
of musicians; he merely used what he found ready-made to voice his
own poetic feeling. In this he succeeded admirably. In the second
place, charmed by the exotic quality of Norwegian music, a quality
that he found also in his own nature, he adopted the native idiom with
eagerness, and spent the years most composers devote to learning the
musical language in acquiring--a dialect. Thirdly, his mind was of the
type which cares much for beauty of ornament--even more, perhaps, than
for a highly wrought harmony of line and form. It was the inevitable
result of these three circumstances that, first, he should reach his
highest activity in early youth, when romantic feeling is at its acme
and thought habitually subjective, and thereafter decline; second,
that the dialect which at first was so charming, with its unfamiliar
words and its bewitching accent, should eventually reveal its paucity
and its provincialism; and finally, that a mind naturally fond of rich
detail, neglectful of large shapeliness, should have recourse, in the
ebb of inner impulse, to transcription, paraphrase, and all the other
devices for securing superficial ornament and luxury of effect. With
opus 41 Grieg began transcribing his own songs for the piano, dressing
up the simple melodies in all sorts of arpeggios, curious harmonies,
and other musical decorations; and between his fiftieth and seventieth
opus-numbers there is little but representation of Norwegian tunes,
now in one guise and now in another, but seldom indeed with any of the
old novel charm. (A trace of it there is, perhaps, in opus 62, No. 2,
and again in opus 80, No. 4.) The extraordinary pyrotechnical display
that the transcription, opus 41, No. 5, makes out of so simple a song
as «The Princess» is branded by M. Closson as «un crime de lèse-art.»
And to one who has felt the magic of the Kuhreigen, opus 17, No. 22,
it is saddening to turn to the same melody as it appears in opus 63,
No. 2, with all its maiden grace brushed and laced and furbelowed into
an _à la mode_ elegance and vacuity. Thus Grieg has not, like the more
cosmopolitan, objective, and universal composers, advanced in his work
up to the very end. As years have progressed, the accidental in it,
the inessential, has become more prominent, has tended to obscure what
is vital and beautiful. As the spirit waned, the letter has become more
rigidly insistent. Idiosyncrasy has supplanted originality. To find the
true Grieg, supple, spontaneous, and unaffected, we must go back to the
early works.
When all is said, however, Grieg has in these early works made a
contribution to music which our sense of his later shortcomings must
not make us forget. His Piano Sonata and his Violin Sonatas supply
chamber-music with a note of pure lyric enthusiasm, of fresh unthinking
animation, not elsewhere to be found. His Peer Gynt Suite fills a
similar place among orchestral works. His best piano pieces, and,
above all, his lovely and too little known songs, are unique in their
delicate voicing of the tenderest, most elusive personal feeling, as
well as in their consummate finesse of workmanship. It is a Lilliputian
world, if you will, but a fair one. That art of the future which Grieg
predicts in his essay on Mozart, which «will unite lines and colors in
marriage, and show that it has its roots in all the past, that it draws
sustenance from old as well as from new masters,» will acknowledge in
Grieg himself the source of one indispensable element--the element of
naïve and spontaneous romance.
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE.--Grieg has had the good sense to publish almost
all of his works in the inexpensive and excellent Peters Edition.
The amateur will wish to acquaint himself first of all with some
such representative pieces as the following: Piano-pieces--Poetic
tone-pictures, op. 3, Humoreskes, op. 6, Sonata, op. 7, Northern
Dances, op. 17, Albumblatter, op. 28, and the Lyric Pieces, op. 12,
38, 43, and 47 (op. 54, 57, 62, 65, and 68 are inferior). Four hand
arrangements--Elegiac Melodies, op. 34, Norwegian Dances, op. 35, and
the first Peer Gynt Suite, op. 40. Chamber-music--the three Sonatas
for Violin and Piano and the 'Cello Sonata, op. 36. Of the songs,
sixty are printed in the five «Albums» of the Peters Edition. The
second contains half a dozen of Grieg's most perfect songs, among them
«I Love Thee,» «Morning Dew,» «Parting» and «Wood Wanderings.» «To
Springtime» in Album I, «A Swan» and «Solvejg's Song» in Album III,
and «By the Riverside,» «The Old Mother,» and «On the Way Home» in
Album IV, are also characteristic and beautiful. The reader who feels
Grieg's charm at all will end by buying all five Albums, though there
is little of value in the last.
FOOTNOTES:
[A] Thus «4/4 time» is a compound of twos, «6/8 time» is a compound of
threes, and the interesting 5/4 measure, so effective in the second
movement of Tschaïkowsky's Pathetic Symphony, is a compound of twos and
threes regularly alternating.
[B] «Diary of My Tour in 1888,» translated in «Tschaïkowsky, His Life
and Works,» by Rosa Newmarch. (John Lane, New York, 1900.)
[C] «Edvard Grieg et la Musique Scandinave,» Ernest Closson. Paris,
Librairie Fischbacher, 1892.
III
ANTONIN DVOŘÁK
[Illustration: ANTONIN DVOŘÁK]
III
ANTONIN DVOŘÁK
On an October evening in 1892 there was given in New York City a «Grand
Concert» in exploitation of the «Eminent Composer and Director of
the National Conservatory of Music of America,» Dr. Antonin Dvořák.
There was an orchestra of eighty, a chorus of three hundred, and an
audience of several thousand; the ceremonies, partly hospitable and
partly patriotic, included an oration, the presentation of a silver
wreath, and the singing of «America» by the assembled multitude.
Outwardly picturesque as the occasion doubtless was, it must have
been even more striking in its suggestion of the extreme contrasts in
life which accompany the turning of fortune's wheel. Here was a man,
originally a Bohemian peasant, a village butcher's son, who for years
had endured the most grinding poverty, the most monotonous obscurity,
the most interminable labor for power and recognition, coming at
last, a famous musician, to hear his works performed and his genius
extolled in a great, enthusiastic country that wanted, and was «willing
to pay for,» a school of music. Even statistics are eloquent when
character is behind them; at a salary of fifteen thousand dollars a
year the National Conservatory of America had engaged as principal the
composer who, less than twenty years before, had been pensioned by the
Austrian Ministry of Education just one hundredth of that sum. Dvořák's
reception in New York was an appropriate outward sign of a victory
achieved over peculiarly indifferent destiny by peculiarly indomitable
pluck.
As one looks back from this imposing event over the course of Dvořák's
laborious, persistent youth, one's attention, no matter how much it
is at first engaged with the changes of his outer life, with his
progress from obscure poverty to comfort and fame, soon dwells even
more on the underlying identity of the man through all changes, on
his unswerving simplicity of nature and steadfastness of aim. More
remarkable than the diversity of his career is the unity of his
character. From first to last, whether in Mühlhausen, Prague, London,
or New York, he is essentially a peasant. His deepest moral trait is
the dumb persistence, the unthinking doggedness, of the peasant. His
mental atmosphere is the peasant's innocence of self-consciousness,
his unintrospective candor. Not like the sophisticated man, who weighs
motives and foresees obstacles, does he pursue his troublous way. He
is, on the contrary, like an engine placed on the track and started;
through darkness and day, through failure and success, through weakness
and strength, he steams ahead, ever propelled by irresistible inner
force, insensible and unamenable to circumstance. And his musical
impulse is of the same sort. His aims in music have always been simple,
definite, unsophisticated by intellectualism. Taking keen delight in
the sensuous beauty of sound, gifted with the musical sense in its
most fundamental form of physical susceptibility, from his earliest
days he set about learning to produce pleasant effects of rhythm and
consonance, with utter sincerity, with no reference to derivative
and secondary musical values. When, as a boy, he heard the villagers
playing their native dances, his blood stirred in sympathy, and as
soon as he was able he took a hand. When he was older he invented
similar pieces, gradually refining them, but always cherishing the
brightness of tone, the vigor of rhythmic life, that had first won his
devotion. And when, in New York, an experienced and honored musician,
he was expected to advise our composers, it was highly characteristic
of him that he recommended them to pour their ideas into the negro
molds. Here was a music simple, sensuous, highly rhythmic; he looked
no further, he was disconcerted by no ethnological problems, nor even
by the incongruity that any man of the world would have seen between
negro song and our subtly mingled, highly complex American character.
Bohemian folk-melodies had expressed him; why should not plantation
tunes express us? But perhaps his curious simplicity reveals itself
most of all in his perfectly uncritical fecundity as a composer. He
writes with extreme rapidity, and indefatigably. The great Stabat Mater
is said to have been completed in six weeks, and his opus numbers
extend beyond a hundred. He writes as if nothing existed in the world
but himself and an orchestra waiting to play his scores. He is never
embarrassed by a sense of limitation, by the perception in others of
powers he lacks. Though he has studied the masters, he is not abashed
by them. The standards of scholarship, those academic bugbears, have
for him no terrors. Indeed, of all great composers he is perhaps least
the scholar, most the sublimated troubadour, enriching the world with
an apotheosized tavern-music. In reading his life we must never forget
these things: his simple nature, his sensuous rather than emotional or
intellectual devotion to music, and his immunity from the checks and
palsies of wide learning and fastidious taste.
There is in a rural district of Bohemia, on the Moldau River, a quiet
little village called Nelahozeves, or, in German, Mühlhausen,[D]
where, in 1841, was born Antonin, eldest son of Frantisek Dvořák, the
village innkeeper and butcher. The Dvořáks were people not without
consideration among their fellow-townsmen; not only was mine host
of the tavern a widely acquainted man, but his wife's father was
bailiff to a prince. One may imagine the potency, in a small hamlet,
of such a conjunction of prominence and prestige. Nevertheless, as
social distinction has no direct effect on a man's income, and as the
butcher's family grew in the course of years inconveniently numerous,
it happened that Antonin, the eldest of eight children, was looked
to in early youth to learn his father's trade and contribute toward
the family support. Unfortunately, he wished to be a musician. Such a
desire, indeed, chimerical as it may have appeared at the time, was
natural enough in a boy of musical sensibility who had been surrounded
from his earliest years by a people passionately devoted to music.
Not only is music a part of the instruction in the Bohemian public
schools, but it is the adjunct of all the occasions of life. As many
as forty dances are said to be practiced by the peasants, and we have
it on Dvořák's own authority that laborers in Bohemia sing at their
work, and after church on Sunday begin dancing, which they «often keep
up without cessation till early on the following morning.» Taking
advantage of his opportunities, the boy had learned at fourteen to play
the violin, the organ, and the piano, and to sing. It was a year later
that, summoned by his father to surrender his dreams of musicianship,
he performed an exploit well worth mentioning, as an early example of
his indefatigable persistence and his blundering methods. Hoping to
enlist his father's sympathy, he wrote, scored, and had played by the
village band, an original polka. Mr. Hadow tells the story at length;
its point is that Dvořák, whose ambition was more robust than his
learning, failed to write the trumpets as transposing instruments,
and, of course, made a distressing fiasco. «There is some little irony
in the disaster,» comments Mr. Hadow, «if it be remembered that among
all Dvořák's gifts the instinct of orchestration is perhaps the most
conspicuous. He is the greatest living exponent of the art; and he was
once in danger of forfeiting his career through ignorance of its most
elementary principle.» He did, indeed, give up music for a year, but in
October, 1857, was allowed by his father to enter the Organ School at
Prague.
Had Dvořák been of an introspective turn of mind, he might now have
wondered rather dismally, as the months went by in Prague, the paternal
allowance ceased, and the tuition at the Organ School proved narrow
and technical, whether he had really benefited himself. Fortunately,
he was not given to metaphysical speculation; he got what training he
could from the school and joined a band. In Mühlhausen he had often
taken a viola part in the village band that played for weddings and
on holidays; now he turned his skill to account in the restaurants
of Prague. In this way, and by playing also in a church orchestra
on Sundays, he managed to amass about nine dollars a month, and to
acquire an instinct for the way instrumental parts should be written.
The only obvious advantage of this trying period was the intimate
knowledge of instruments it gave him. He lived, so to speak, cheek by
jowl with them, watching them, handling them, seeing what was written
for them, and hearing how it sounded. His is no book-knowledge of
orchestration. On the other hand, his extreme poverty, the limitations
of the school, and his lack of friends to lend him scores or the use
of a piano, cut him off cruelly from that equally essential part of
education, familiarity with classic masterpieces and the traditions of
academic learning. His band played only popular overtures and the usual
pot-pourris. Sometimes he coaxed a kettle-drummer to let him crouch
behind the drums and hear a concert. He once had an opportunity to hear
«Der Freischütz» for the modest sum of four cents, but the four cents
was not forthcoming, and «Der Freischütz» went unheard. He could afford
to buy no scores, and there was no library where he could read them.
Such were the meager advantages of which he made good use; such the
heavy obstacles he gradually surmounted.
After his graduation from the Organ School in 1860 his situation, both
practical and musical, slowly ameliorated. From Smetana, who gave him a
position in the orchestra of the Interimstheater, a home for Bohemian
opera founded in 1862, he received what was of even more importance
to him, the loan of scores and encouragement in composition. Already
twenty-one, he acquainted himself for the first time with Beethoven's
and Mendelssohn's symphonies and chamber-works, of which he became a
passionate student, and with Schumann's songs. For almost ten years he
labored steadily and silently. It was the period of apprenticeship, the
period of arduous, slow mastery of technique and thought through which
every creative artist must pass. The mere mass of his exercises is
bewildering; he composed and destroyed an opera and two symphonies, to
say nothing of many other sacrifices on the altar of skill of which not
even the names survive. Peculiar to himself, to be sure, and scarcely a
model for other students, was his method in this long self-evocation.
Not like Beethoven did he meditate and revise his themes, spending
infinite labor on sixteen bars of melody, and not quailing before
a dozen revisions so they were needed to pare away the marble and
reveal the perfect form. Not like Brahms did he install a systematic
training, day by day winning strength and plasticity of thought on the
chest-weights and dumb-bells of contrapuntal exercise. On the contrary,
he forged ahead, and somehow, without knowing where he was going or
what he was doing, made himself a master. He took Parnassus by storm,
as it were, overran rather than scaled it, and was victor more by
quantity than by quality of performance. Yet in all this blundering
progress he was protected by a genuine elevation of aim. Lacking the
sense of tradition and the safeguards of scrupulous taste, he was not
without his own rugged idealism. And so, although he doubtless had
every external inducement to join the ranks of the national movement in
music, then just acquiring momentum, he maintained his conscientious
silence for nearly a decade. His compositions saw the light neither
of the concert hall nor of the printing-press; written with ardor,
they were burned without regret. Dvořák showed in his _lehrjähre_ the
self-respect of all really great artists.
It was early in the seventies that he finally emerged from his studious
reserve and appeared before the world with an opera, «The King and the
Collier,» which he was commissioned to write for the National Theater.
So clear was the patriotic intent of this commission, so entirely
was the popular interest enlisted in Smetana's effort to build up
a Bohemian school of music, that it is hard to conceive how Dvořák
could have fallen into the error he now made. He prepared for his
fellow-countrymen a Wagnerian music-drama. The situation is comic.
The good Bohemians, come to hear folk-tunes, were given leit-motifs
and «infinite melody.» If they failed to sympathize with his adoration
for the Bayreuth master (and it seems indeed to have been but a
calf-sickness, afterwards bravely outlived), if «The King and the
Collier» was a flat failure, Dvořák had no one but himself to blame. At
this point, however, as at so many others in his career, his unfailing
energy saved the day so nearly lost by what one critic has called his
«brainlessness.» He set to and rewrote his work entire, leaving not
a single number of the unhappy music-drama. But now the libretto,
which had at first been spared a disapproval all concentrated upon the
music, proved worthless and flat, and the opera was damned afresh.
Still Dvořák persisted. Getting a poet to set an entirely new «book»
to his entirely new music, he made at last a success with an opera of
which Mr. Hadow well says that «the Irishman's knife, which had a new
blade and a new handle, does not offer a more bewildering problem of
identity.» No one but Dvořák would have so bungled his undertaking; no
one but he would so have forced it to a successful issue.
By 1873 Dvořák was well started on the career of increasing power and
fame that he had worked so hard to establish on firm foundations.
That year was marked not only by his installment as organist at St.
Adalbert's Church, with a comfortable salary, and by his marriage, but
also by the appearance of a composition which made his name at once
widely known in Bohemia--the patriotic hymn entitled «The Heirs of
the White Mountain.» Four years later his reputation began to spread
beyond the border. It was in 1877 that the approbation of Brahms,
then a commissioner of the Austrian Ministry of Education, to which
Dvořák had submitted some duets, induced Joachim to introduce the young
Bohemian's works into England and Germany, and the house of Simrock
to publish them. In 1878 the Slavonic Dances made their composer's
name immediately known throughout the musical world. His great Stabat
Mater, produced in England with acclaim in 1883, was the first of
several choral works given there in the next few years, all very
successfully. In 1889 he was decorated by the Austrian court. In 1890
he received an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Cambridge, was
made Doctor of Philosophy at Prague, and was appointed Professor of
Composition at the Conservatory there. The welcome accorded to him in
America has already been briefly chronicled. His sixtieth birthday was
celebrated by a musical festival in 1901, at Prague, where he now makes
his home. In Dvořák's varied life a youth of unusual hardship, of an
almost unparalleled severity of struggle both for livelihood and for
education, has been crowned with years full of a prosperity and honor
rarely allotted to composers.