d'Indy has insisted upon in his teaching, promulgated in the "Cours
de composition musicale," and exemplified in his works? They are all,
in essence, but differing forms of the central principle of all art,
of all beauty--that the utmost variety must be but the outgrowth and
flowering of a perfect unity. We have seen that many modern composers,
baffled by the richness of the materials with which they had to deal,
have failed in the effort thus to stamp unity upon them: their art
has been confused and fragmentary. Others again--the pseudo-classics
and reactionaries--have resorted to a violent simplification of the
material in order to preserve unity, and have thus impoverished their
art. Only the greatest, in the first rank of whom must be placed Franck
and d'Indy, have had at once a firm enough hold upon musical tradition
and a broad enough command of new methods and idioms to write music at
once various and unified, at once thoroughly "modern" and thoroughly
sane. To this unifying power of d'Indy's mind M. Rolland pays a
fine tribute. "Clearness!" he cries, "it is the mark of M. d'Indy's
intelligence. There are no shadows in him. His thought and his art are
as clear as his look, which gives to his face so much of youth. It is a
necessity for him to judge, to order, to classify, to unify. Never was
there a spirit more French.... And this is the more remarkable in that
his nature is far from being simple. Through a wide musical education,
a constant desire to learn, it has been enriched by many elements,
different, almost contradictory.... Not to be submerged by this
richness of opposing elements requires a great force of passion or of
will, which eliminates or chooses and transforms. M. d'Indy eliminates
almost nothing: he organizes. There are in his music the qualities of
a general: the knowledge of the end, the patient will to attain it,
the perfect acquaintance with the means, the spirit of order, and the
mastery over his work and over himself. Despite the variety of the
materials he employs, the whole is always clear."
II
[Illustration: =FIGURE XX.=]
If we examine, as typical of d'Indy's mature style, a passage such as
the introduction to the slow movement of the B flat Symphony, shown in
Figure XX, we are struck at once by the complexity of the detail--the
bold unexpectedness of the melodic lines, the chromatic harmony, the
constantly varying rhythms--and by the perfect final clearness with
which it nevertheless impresses us, so that each note seems inevitable
and the whole unmistakable in meaning. It is this combination of
complexity and simplicity, characteristic more or less of all really
great modern composers but perhaps to a peculiar degree of d'Indy, that
we have to analyze and account for to ourselves in some detail if we
would thoroughly understand his music. What is the mysterious power
in him that enables him to give so distinctly personal a stamp to
elements drawn from so many sources? What is the unifying principle in
all this variety? What lifts this insatiable student above his studies,
and renders his knowledge not a dead lumber weighing down his mind, but
a living force making it fruitful? For of the extent of these studies,
benumbing to any but the freshest mind, there is plenty of evidence in
his work as well as in his critical writings; if it were worth while
we might enumerate "influences" at great length. There would be, for
instance, the fundamental influence of Bach and Beethoven, and the
more superficial influence of the romantics, Schumann and Mendelssohn,
as shown in "Wallenstein" (1873-1879), and other early works. There
would be the potent Wagnerian influence, of which "Fervaal" is the
chief monument, although it appears in all that he has written; and
there would be the even more pervasive and inspiring influence of his
master, Franck. We should have to take account, too, of the reflection,
especially in later works like the piano sonata, the violin sonata,
and the second symphony, of the harmonic idiom of Debussy and other
contemporaries, the whole-tone scale, and the like. And under these
individual influences we should find more general, subtle, and
pervasive ones, we should find the great communal streams of the
French folk-song and the Gregorian plain chant. Yet all these streams,
and others too many to mention, have been gathered up into one clear
personality. What has been the transmuting magic?
The composer himself suggests the answer in several passages that may
here be brought together.
"It is perfectly logical," he writes in _Mercure de France_,[35] "and
in the order of things that, when a man of genius shows himself in
one country, the artists of the other nations try to assimilate his
processes. I see nothing reprehensible in that, and this international
free trade even appears to me one of the vital conditions of the
development of art....
Moreover, can the artist ever, in spite of all influences, give
anything else than the art that he carries in himself?"
"You ask me," he says to an interviewer of the _Revue Bleue_,[36]
"to define French music. In reality there is no French music, and in
general there is no national music. There is _music_, which is of
no country; there are musical masterpieces, which belong to no one
nation." He is led on to an interesting comparison of our period,
in its desire for greater simplicity, with the end of the sixteenth
century, and the illuminating statement: "M. Debussy is a little our
Monteverde; he abandons melody for recitative, for 'the representative
style,' as they said in the first years of the seventeenth century; he
renounces the resources of counterpoint, he even foregoes modulation."
But when the interviewer, seeking to entrap him into condemnation of
his contemporary which would make good copy, asks, "And do you not
desire rather the triumph of melody and polyphony?" he replies:
"I have but one desire; it is that they write beautiful things." The
third passage is one of the axioms that he gives to his students at
the Schola Cantorum: "All processes are good, on condition that they
never become the principal end, but are regarded only as means for
making music." And finally he makes his meaning even more definite in a
discussion of M. Roger Ducasse:[37] "I am sure that when M. Ducasse is
willing to trust himself more to the impulses of his heart rather than
to researches in sonorities, he will be able to make very beautiful
music. There is in art, truly, nothing but the heart that can produce
beauty--(_Il n'est vraiment, en art, que le cœur pour engendrer de la
beauté_)."
Yes, it is his heart that guides his mind through the mazes of its
knowledge; it is his luminous sincerity that shines through all he
writes, however complex it may be in detail; both the warmth and the
light of his music come from his emotion. Responsive emotion in the
listener, accordingly, is the key to the intricacies of his style. If
we attend to the letter only we are baffled, bewildered: there are so
many notes, such queer progressions, in that passage from the symphony,
for example. But if we hearken for the spirit, all becomes clear, and
strangely moving. It is waxing and waning feeling, a wave of emotion,
that expresses itself in that rise to the strident B of the fourth
measure and in the subsequent hesitating descent. And as emotion is the
motive force of the whole, emotion it is also that explains the details.
Take for instance the very texture of the melody. We note two
contrasting figures or motives, one, which we may call _a_, melancholy
or at least contemplative, characterized by the fall of a fourth,
and another, _b_, in which the more vigorous rise of a seventh gives
a sense of opposing will. The whole passage is wrought from these
two contrasting yet mutually supplementing strands with singular
concentration. There is not a note, save the chords in the last two
measures, that does not belong to one or the other. There is something
relentless in such insistence. The grip is not relaxed for a moment.
The thought is hammered in. The music throbs like a pulse. Yet there
is in this insistence nothing of the monotony of mere repetition; the
feeling never stagnates. On the contrary, each assertion accumulates
fresh force, the emotion rises by its own expression, and there is
ordered, purposeful, relentless progression. Thus motive _a_ is stated
first from D flat; then, at *3, from D, higher and louder; then, at *5,
from E flat but this time fairly carried off its feet by its oppugnant
fellow, _b_. Similarly _b_, first heard quietly, almost timidly, in the
bass, in the key of D flat, at *2, is repeated at *4 more firmly and
in the key of D minor, making it in the main higher than before though
starting on the same note; finally it appears in the treble, as just
stated, at *5, and rises as in a passionate cry to the B, whence it
slowly subsides. In short, we see here a "logic of emotion" quite as
absolute as that of the reason, and far more appropriate to music, in
which mere reason must be content with a subordinate place. As always
in the best music, the logic of emotion involves both the fundamental
unity of the motives (since no emotion would amount to much if it was
so weak that it forgot what it was about) and their gradual cumulative
growth in diversity as they realize themselves in expression. Even
d'Indy's music is not always so true to the logic of emotion as this,
as we shall have occasion later to notice; even Homer nods; but the
motival variety in unity of all good melody, as a result of its
emotional origin, is none the less ineluctable as a principle.
Looking again at the passage we may note more specifically the
interest, vitality, and flexibility of its rhythms. This is again, as
in all the composer's best work, ultimately due to truth to emotion.
Motive _b_ occurs three times, but never twice the same. The second
time, at *4, it enters earlier in the measure than before, as if
impatient, and ends with the persistent tramp of quarter notes. The
third time it strikes in almost roughly (*5), its second and third
notes are displaced--syncopated--by agitation, while its last three
notes, comprising the crisis and its subsidence, are lengthened out
from a half measure to a measure and a half. (See Figure XXI.) We see
thus exemplified the basic principles of expression through rhythm,
the hastening or compression of the phrase in response to passion,
its retardation or expansion with returning calm. "Expression,"
writes d'Indy,[38] "consists in the translation of sentiments and
impressions, by the aid of certain characteristic modifications,
affecting the rhythmic, melodic, and harmonic forms of the musical
discourse.... _Agogique_, consisting in the modifications of the
rhythmic movement,--precipitation, slackening, regular and irregular
interruptions, etc.--has for its effect to render the relative
impressions of _calm_ and _agitation_."
[Illustration: =FIGURE XXI.=]
Such a conception of rhythm, emphasizing its sensitive fluctuation
in response to mood, and demanding of the artist complete sincerity
and flexibility of expression, is at the pole from the conventional
notion of it as an almost mechanical balancing of equal sections of
melody, cut off so to speak with a yardstick. D'Indy leaves his readers
in no doubt as to his opinion of all such conventional sing-song,
the doggerel of music. "To beat the time and to give the rhythm of a
musical phrase," he says,[39] "are two completely distinct operations,
often opposed. The coincidence of the rhythm and the measure is an
entirely particular case, which men have unfortunately tried to
generalize, propagating the error that 'the first beat of the measure
is always strong.' This identification of rhythm with measure has had
the most deplorable consequences for music.... Rhythm, submitted to
the restricting requirements of meter, becomes rapidly impoverished,
even to the most desolating platitude, just as a branch of a tree,
strongly compressed by a ligature, becomes enfeebled and atrophied,
while its neighbors absorb all the sap."[40] Again: "In the seventeenth
century the bar-line ceased to be simply a graphic sign; it became a
periodic starting point for the rhythm, which it soon robbed of all
its liberty and elegance. Hence come those symmetrical and square-cut
forms to which we owe a great part of the platitudes of the Italianism
of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries."[41] Finally, summing the
whole matter up in a sentence: "The _carrure_ [that is, square-cut
phrase-balance, symmetry by measures, narrowly limited to the number 4
and its multiples] is an element of vulgarity, rarely useful outside of
certain special forms of dance music."[42]
The vulgarity of the _carrure_, of sing-song, as we may call it in
English, is due, it cannot be too much insisted upon, to the mental
and emotional inertia, the thoughtlessness, the surrender to the
mechanism of habit, of which it is the product and the index. It
proceeds from a conventionality essentially unspontaneous, uncreative,
a conventionality that permits the length and shape of the phrase to be
imposed by convenience, ease, and precedent rather than by the emotion
it ought to incarnate. Hence sing-song is found not only in all music
which, like so-called "popular songs," emanates from trivial people or
from people only superficially moved, but also in the music even of
sincere composers in their moments of inattention, pretentiousness,
or routine. Even so fine a composer as Elgar is frequently banal in
rhythm. On the other hand, deeply felt work always spontaneously
assumes individual rhythmic outlines; and undoubtedly such free
and unstereotyped outlines, though to the initiated listener they
constitute one of its most potent and lasting beauties, and thus are an
essential condition of its longevity, repel at first by their apparent
eccentricity or "obscurity" the uninitiated and the inattentive, and
thus postpone its general acceptance. Thus the attribution to d'Indy
of "dryness" and "lack of melody" which one sometimes hears may be
taken as an inverted tribute to the spontaneity of his melody and
especially of his rhythms. Only one who did not feel sympathetically
the wide ground swell of those phrases from the symphony could find
them groping or uncertain because they did not fall into exactly four
measures. The moment one felt the coördinating force of their fresh
personal emotion one would not regret the absence of the conventional
strait-jackets.
It is emotion again that explains his attitude toward harmony. Just
as he is ahead of most of his contemporaries in the fundamental and
surprisingly neglected matter of rhythm, because he conceives it as so
flexible an instrument of expression, so he is rather at odds with many
of them, especially with the impressionist school in his own country,
on the much studied--perhaps over-studied--question of harmony, because
he conceives harmony as primarily expressive, while they conceive it
as primarily sensuous.[43] A clue to his attitude is that sentence
of his in criticism of Ducasse: "I am sure that when M. Ducasse is
willing to trust himself more to the impulses of his heart rather than
to researches in sonorities, he will be able to make very beautiful
music." "Researches in sonorities"--that is, in the minds of the group
of French composers led by Debussy, almost a synonym for harmony; what
they ask of harmony is combinations of tone delicious to the physical
ear: subtly, delicately delicious, no doubt, and to a highly refined
ear, but still aiming consciously at the ear rather than at the mind
or the heart. The means of satisfying such a desire being sensations,
aural sensations ingeniously built up and combined, they have rightly
concentrated their attention on the single moment of merged sounds--the
chord--rather than on the procession of separate sounds--the melody,
and its relation to other melodies sounding with it. "Accord,"
"sonorité"--these are the slogans of the impressionists.
[Illustration: =FIGURE XXII.
From Chant Elégiaque, in Trio for Clarinet, Cello, and Piano.=]
To d'Indy, on the other hand, harmony, like all the other technical
elements of music, is primarily a means of expression, and therefore
results rather from the confluence of melodies, themselves dictated
by emotion, than from the adjustment of sonorities to please the ear.
One has only to look again at the passage from the symphony to see
how such an attitude works out in practise. There is no preoccupation
here with "effect"; the harmony, one might almost say, receives no
attention for itself, but is solely a result of the melodic movements;
yet so free and expressive are these movements, so truly conceived to
voice the emotions behind them, and combined with such art, that this
resultant harmony is far more poignant, far more fresh and unexpected
and striking than if it had been confected for itself alone. And this
is natural and easily comprehensible, since we should not expect any
amount of ingenuity spent on the single chord to achieve the results
that melodies, feeling out into the unknown, easily attain. Such an
attitude toward harmony requires, it is true, a certain daring: you
cannot swim with your feet on the ground; but the freedom of movement
you get by trusting yourself to the waves amply compensates your faith.
[Illustration: =FIGURE XXIII.
From "Souvenirs."=]
This melodic conception of harmony has always been a fundamental
characteristic of d'Indy's style, as examples from widely sundered
periods will easily show. The first, Figure XXII, is a bit from the
Chant Elégiaque in the early Trio for Clarinet, Cello, and Piano
(1887). The charming unexpectedness of the twist back into E major is
thorough d'Indy, as is also the use of a persistent figure (given to
the cello in the original) and the rhythmic modification of this same
figure to provide the bass in the second measure. The second passage,
shown in Figure XXIII, dates from thirty years later, and appears in
"Souvenirs" (1906). Here again the melodies "find a way," and a more
interesting, vista-opening way than any sonorities could suggest.
Such passages enable us to get the full sense of what their composer
means when he writes: "The study of chords _for themselves_ is, from
the musical point of view, an absolute æsthetic error, for harmony
springs from melody, and ought never to be separated from it in its
application.... There is only one chord, the perfect chord [triad],
alone consonant, because it alone gives the sense of repose or
equilibrium. All the combinations that people call 'dissonant chords,'
necessitating, in order to be examined, an artificial arrest in the
melodies that constitute them, have no proper existence, since in
making abstraction of the movement that engenders them, one suppresses
their unique reason for being. Chords have too often become the end
of music; they ought never to be anything but a means, a consequence,
a phenomenon essentially transient."[44] It may be held that d'Indy
sometimes goes too far in his denunciations of harmonic theories based
on the conception of the "chord," as for example in his note on the
famous opening phrase of "Tristan and Isolde." It may also be justly
remarked that his own method is not always happy in its results--that
the way his melodies find is sometimes an obscure and wandering, or
an unnatural and forced way. Nevertheless it remains on the whole
true that on the one hand the chord conception of harmony has been
responsible for a vast mass of pedantry, and has paralyzed and
hamstrung whole generations of students, and that on the other hand
it favors the purely sensuous trifling with tones of which there is
so much in our day; while the best pages of Bach, Beethoven, Brahms,
Wagner, Franck, d'Indy show a thousand beauties and poignancies which
without the help of melody could never have been discovered.
[Illustration: =FIGURE XXIV.=]
Seule la Mort l'injurieuse
Mort appellera, la
Clair Vie
In the course of Kaito's prophecy, in "Fervaal," there is a deeply
moving passage to the words: "Only Death, baleful Death, shall summon
Life," which strikingly illustrates its composer's way of making all
the elements of music contribute to expression (see Figure XXIV).
Here the upward inflection of the voice, the strange intervals, the
vague harmonies, the halting movement, even the sighing syncopation of
the bass, all contribute to the interpretation of the opening lines.
But above all, how inexplicably stirring is the gradual increase of
force and rise of pitch up to the clear chord of D major (note the
composer's indication, "Clair") at the word "Life" ("Vie")! Gloom and
mystery give place to hope, faith, will, to which the ecclesiastical
harmonies lend an unmistakable religious coloring. This change,
completely spontaneous in effect, is dictated by an art that conceals
itself, and introduces us to one of the most individual features of
d'Indy's harmonic technique, his ease of modulation. In his _Cours
de Composition Musicale_ he has worked out his theories of the
expressive use of modulation with characteristic thoroughness, and with
unprecedented amplitude of detail. To resume his points here, however,
interesting as they are, would take us too deeply into technical
matters, especially as our main interest is now in his application
rather than in his statement of them. The essential principles may
therefore be briefly summarized, in his own words, as follows:
(1) "Expression is the unique reason for being of modulation."
(2) "Modulation operates by a displacement of the tonic ['key-note'],
by its oscillation towards the higher fifths [that is, towards the
sharper keys, as to G, D, A, etc., from C] or towards the lower fifths
[that is, towards the flatter keys, as to F, B flat, E flat, etc., from
C]."
(3) "Modulation has for its effect to render relative impressions
of brightness [that is, movement towards sharper keys produces
'_éclaircissement_'] or of darkness [movement towards flatter keys
produces '_assombrissement_']."
(4) "Modulation can never be the _end_ of music, since it is by its
very nature a _means_ put _at the service of the musical idea_. Every
modulation which has not this character of subordination to the idea is
thereby inopportune, useless, and even injurious to the equilibrium of
the composition."[45]
Looking back at our examples in the light of these principles, and
especially with the illumination afforded by the text in Kaito's
contrast of death and life, we shall find a further element of art to
admire in them--their expressive use of modulation. The slow movement
of the symphony begins in the comparatively "dark" key of D flat,
but touches in the fourth measure, at the acme of the climax, the
brighter D major, whence with the waning emotion it subsides to the
original key. The passage cited from the _Chant élégiaque_ emerges
from the shades of E flat minor to the bright daylight of E major
(wherein starts a new statement of the main theme). The fragment from
"Souvenirs" commences in quiet grief, in the clear but rather subdued
key of A minor; with the third measure a downward inflection, a sort
of depression of mood, sinks it to hopeless groping in the glooms of G
flat and C flat, whence it again struggles forth to new assertion, in A
minor, in the phrase that follows our excerpt. Stated in bald technical
terms like these, such changes may seem crude, obvious, mechanical; but
anyone who will listen sympathetically to the music in which they are
embodied by a master will realize the infinite variety and subtlety of
their appeal.
A later appearance of this same theme in "Souvenirs," in which for
the first two notes in the second measure is substituted a triplet,
F, G, E, suggests the further remark that even ornament, so apt to be
used merely for show, is employed by d'Indy, like so many more basic
resources, singly for expression. His somewhat severe conception of
art--there is much in his style that, especially in contrast with
German sensuousness, is austere, bare, almost stark--leads him to
condemn superficial decoration. "The _fioriture_ of the Italian
dramatic school of the early nineteenth century," he insists, "intended
only to display the vocal agility of the singer (just as the Variation
of Chopin, although more musical, puts forward the fingers of the
pianist), this _fioriture_, consisting usually of embroideries about
an arpeggio, is truly more harmonic than melodic--and even the harmony
is usually extremely banal. The characteristic of the accomplished and
conscientious artist is a firm will to treat only subjects that have
a value in themselves, not borrowed from the apparel in which they
are dressed up."[46] And he elsewhere succinctly defines the Italian
_fioriture_ as "that art which consists in making heard the greatest
number of useless notes in the shortest space of time."[47] But he
takes pains to distinguish "this surcharge dictated by bad taste" from
the more essential ornament used in the "expressive vocalises of J.
S. Bach and his contemporaries, which, like the Gregorian Variation
from which they derive, form a part of the melody." And he cites
with approval melodies like the theme of the Allegretto in Franck's
Symphony, in which a short phrase is repeated not literally but with
ornamental variation resulting from the natural progression of the
thought or feeling--from what, in short, we have called the logic of
emotion. Such treatment is almost a mannerism in his own work. Other
instances, besides the place in "Souvenirs" just cited, are the first
theme of the violin sonata, the fugato in the first movement of the
quartet, the main theme of the same movement, and the main theme of
"Evening" in the "Summer Day on the Mountain" (Figure XXVII, _a_).