Once every twelve months, to be precise, as the year dies and the sap
sinks in my old veins, my physical and psychologic--isn't that the
new-fangled way of putting it?--barometer sinks; in sympathy with Nature
I suppose. My corns ache, I get gouty, and my prejudices swell like
varicose veins.
Errors! Yes, errors! The word is not polite, nor am I in a mood of
politeness. I consider such phrases as the "progress of art," the
"improvement of art" and "higher average of art" distinctly and
harmfully misleading. I haven't the leisure just now to demonstrate
these mistaken propositions, but I shall write a few sentences.
How can art improve? Is art a something, an organism capable of "growing
up" into maturity? If it is, by the same token it can grow old, can
become a doddering, senile thing, and finally die and be buried with all
the honors due its long, useful life. It was Henrik Ibsen who said that
the value of a truth lasted about fifteen years; then it rotted into
error. Now, isn't all this talk of artistic improvement as fallacious as
the vicious reasoning of the Norwegian dramatist? Otherwise Bach would
be dead; Beethoven, middle-aged; Mozart, senile. What, instead, is the
health of these three composers? Have you a gayer, blither, more
youthful scapegrace writing today than Mozart? Is there a man among the
moderns more virile, more passionately earnest or noble than Beethoven?
Bach, of the three, seems the oldest; yet his _C-sharp major Prelude_
belies his years. On the contrary, the _Well-tempered Clavichord_ grows
younger with time. It is the Book of Eternal Wisdom. It is the Fountain
of Eternal Youth.
As a matter of cold, hard fact, it is your modern who is ancient; the
ancients were younger. Consider the Greeks and their naïve joy in
creation! The twentieth-century man brings forth his works of art in
sorrow. His music shows it. It is sad, complicated, hysterical and
morbid. I shan't allude to Chopin, who was neurotic--another empty
medical phrase!--or to Schumann, who carried within him the seeds of
madness; or to Wagner, who was a decadent; sufficient for the purposes
of my argument to mention the names of Liszt, Berlioz, Tchaikovsky and
Richard Strauss. Some day when the weather is wretched, when icicles
hang by the wall, and "ways be foul" and "foul is fair and fair is
foul"--pardon this jumble of Shakespeare!--I shall tell you what I think
of the blond madman who sets to music crazy philosophies, bloody
legends, sublime tommy-rot, and his friend's poems and pictures. At this
writing I have neither humor nor space.
As I understand the rank and jargon of modern criticism, Berlioz is
called the father of modern instrumentation. That is, he says nothing in
his music, but says it magnificently. His orchestration covers a
multitude of weaknesses with a flamboyant cloak of charity. [Now, here I
go again; I could have just as easily written "flaming"; but I, too,
must copy Berlioz!] He pins haughty, poetic, high-sounding labels to his
works, and, like Charles Lamb, we sit open-mouthed at concerts trying to
fill in his big sonorous frame with a picture. Your picture is not
mine, and I'll swear that the young man who sits next to me with a silly
chin, goggle-eyes and cocoanut-shaped head sees as in a fluttering
mirror the idealized image of a strong-chinned, ox-eyed, classic-browed
youth, a mixture of Napoleon at Saint Helena and Lord Byron invoking the
Alps to fall upon him. Now, I loathe such music. It makes its chief
appeal to the egotism of mankind, all the time slily insinuating that it
addresses the imagination. What fudge! Yes, the imagination of your own
splendid _ego_ in a white vest [we called them waistcoats when I was
young], driving an automobile down Walnut Street, at noon on a bright
Spring Sunday. How lofty!
Let us pass to the Hungarian piano-virtuoso who posed as a composer.
That he lent money and thematic ideas to his precious son-in-law,
Richard Wagner, I do not doubt. But, then, beggars must not be choosers,
and Liszt gave to Wagner mighty poor stuff, musically speaking. And I
fancy that Wagner liked far better the solid cash than the notes of
hand! Liszt, I think, would have had nothing to say if Berlioz had not
preceded him. The idea struck him, for he was a master of musical
snippets, that Berlioz was too long-winded, that his symphonies were
neither fish nor form. What ho! cried Master Franz, I'll give them a
dose homeopathic. He did, and named his prescription a _Symphonic Poem_
or, rather, _Poéme Symphonique_, which is not quite the same thing.
Nothing tickles the vanity of the groundlings like this sort of verbal
fireworks. "It leaves so much to the imagination," says the stout man
with the twenty-two collar and the number six hat. It does. And the
kind of imagination--Oh, Lord! Liszt, nothing daunted because he
couldn't shake out an honest throw of a tune from his technical
dice-box, built his music on so-called themes, claiming that in this
matter he derived from Bach. Not so. Bach's themes were subjects for
fugal treatment; Liszt's, for symphonic. The parallel is not fair.
Besides, Daddy Liszt had no melodic invention. Bach had. Witness his
chorals, his masses, his oratorios! But the Berlioz ball had to be kept
a-rolling; the formula was too easy; so Liszt named his poems, named his
notes, put dog-collars on his harmonies--and yet no one whistled after
them. Is it any wonder?
Tchaikovsky studied Liszt with one eye; the other he kept on Bellini and
the Italians. What might have happened if he had been one-eyed I cannot
pretend to say. In love with lush, sensuous melody, attracted by the
gorgeous pyrotechnical effects in Berlioz and Liszt and the pomposities
of Meyerbeer, this Russian, who began study too late and being too lazy
to work hard, manufactured a number of symphonic poems. To them he gave
strained, fantastic names--names meaningless and pretty--and, as he was
short-winded contrapuntally, he wrote his so-called instrumental poems
shorter than Liszt's. He had no symphonic talent, he substituted Italian
tunes for dignified themes, and when the development section came he
plastered on more sentimental melodies. His sentiment is hectic, is
unhealthy, is morbid. Tchaikovsky either raves or whines like the people
in a Russian novel. I think the fellow was a bit touched in the upper
story; that is, I did until I heard the compositions of R. Strauss, of
Munich. What misfit music for such a joyous name, a name evocative of
all that is gay, refined, witty, sparkling, and spontaneous in music!
After Mozart give me Strauss--Johann, however, not Richard!
No longer the wheezings, gaspings, and short-breathed phrases of Liszt;
no longer the evil sensuality, loose construction, formlessness, and
drunken peasant dances of Tchaikovsky; but a blending of Wagner, Brahms,
Liszt--and the classics. Oh, Strauss, Richard, knows his business! He is
a skilled writer. He has his chamber-music moments, his lyric outbursts;
his early songs are sometimes singable; it is his perverse, vile orgies
of orchestral music that I speak of. No sane man ever erected such a mad
architectural scheme. He should be penned behind the bars of his own mad
music. He has no melody. He loves ugly noises. He writes to distracting
lengths; and, worst of all, his harmonies are hideous. But he doesn't
forget to call his monstrosities fanciful names. If it isn't _Don Juan_,
it is _Don Quixote_--have you heard the latter? [O shades of Mozart!]
This giving his so-called compositions literary titles is the plaster
for our broken heads--and ear-drums. So much for your three favorite
latter-day composers.
Now for my _Coda_! If the art of today has made no progress in fugue,
song, sonata, symphony, quartet, oratorio, opera [who has improved on
Bach, Handel, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert? Name! name! I say],
what is the use of talking about "the average of today being higher"?
How higher? You mean more people go to concerts, more people enjoy music
than fifty or a hundred years ago! Do they? I doubt it. Of what use huge
places of worship when the true gods of art are no longer worshiped?
Numbers prove nothing; the majority is not always in the right. I
contend that there has been no great music made since the death of
Beethoven; that the multiplication of orchestras, singing societies, and
concerts are no true sign that genuine culture is being achieved. The
tradition of the classics is lost; we care not for the true masters.
Modern music making is a fashionable fad. People go because they think
they should. There was more real musical feeling, uplifting and sincere,
in the Old St. Thomaskirche in Leipsic where Bach played than in all
your modern symphony and oratorio machine-made concerts. I'll return to
the charge again!
Dussek Villa-on-Wissahickon,
Near Manayunk, Pa.