"Definite feelings and emotions are unsusceptible of being embodied in
music," says Eduard Hanslick in his _Beautiful in Music_. Now, you
composers who make symphonic poems, why don't you realize that on its
merits as a musical composition, its theme, its form, its treatment,
that your work will endure, and not on account of its fidelity to your
explanatory program?
For example, if I were a very talented young composer--which I am
not--and had mastered the tools of my trade--knew everything from a song
to a symphony, and my instrumentation covered the whole gamut of the
orchestral pigment.... Well, one night as I tossed wearily on my bed--it
was a fine night in spring, the moon rounded and lustrous and silvering
the lake below my window--suddenly my musical imagination began to work.
I had just been reading, and for the thousandth time, Browning's _Childe
Roland_, with its sinister coloring and spiritual suggestions. Yet it
had never before struck me as a subject suitable for musical treatment.
But the exquisite cool of the night, its haunting mellow flavor, had
set my brain in a ferment. A huge fantastic shadow threw a jagged black
figure on the lake. Presto, it was done, and with a mental snap that
almost blinded me.
I had my theme. It will be the first theme in my new symphonic poem,
_Childe Roland_. It will be in the key of B minor, which is to be
emblematic of the dauntless knight who to "the dark tower came,"
unfettered by obstacles, physical or spiritual.
O, how my brain seethed and boiled, for I am one of those unhappy men
who the moment they get an idea must work it out to its bitter end.
_Childe Roland_ kept me awake all night. I even heard his "dauntless
horn" call and saw the "squat tower." I had his theme. I felt it to be
good; to me it was Browning's Knight personified. I could hear its
underlying harmonies and the instrumentation, sombre, gloomy, without
one note of gladness.
The theme I treated in such a rhythmical fashion as to impart to it
exceeding vitality, and I announced it with the English horn, with a
curious rhythmic background by the tympani; the strings in division
played tremolando and the bass staccato and muted. This may not be clear
to you; it is not very clear to me, but at the time it all seemed very
wonderful. I finished the work after nine months of agony, of revision,
of pruning, clipping, cutting, hawking it about for my friends'
inspection and getting laughed at, admired and also mildly criticized.
The thrice fatal day arrived, the rehearsals had been torture, and one
night the audience at a great concert had the pleasure of reading on the
program Browning's _Childe Roland_ in full, and wondering what it was
all about. My symphonic poem would tell them all, as I firmly believed
in the power of music to portray definitely certain soul-states, to
mirror moods, to depict, rather indefinitely to be sure, certain
phenomena of daily life.
My poem was well played. It was only ninety minutes long, and I sat in a
nervous swoon as I listened to the _Childe Roland_ theme, the squat
tower theme, the sudden little river motif, the queer gaunt horse theme,
the horrid engine of war motif, the sinister, grinning, false guide
subject--in short, to all the many motives of the poem, with its
apotheosis, the dauntless blast from the brave knight as he at last
faced the dark tower.
This latter I gave out with twelve trombones, twenty-one bassett horns
and one calliope; it almost literally brought down the house, and I was
the happiest man alive. As I moved out I was met by the critic of _The
Disciples of Tone_, who said to me:
"Lieber Kerl, I must congratulate you; it beats Richard Strauss all
hollow. _Who_ and what was _Childe Roland_? Was he any relation to
Byron's _Childe Harold_? I suppose the first theme represented the
'galumphing' of his horse, and that funny triangular fugue meant that
the horse was lame in one leg and was going it on three. Adieu; I'm in a
hurry."
Triangular fugue! Why, that was the crossroads before which Childe
Roland hesitated! How I hated the man.
I was indeed disheartened. Then a lady spoke to me, a musical lady, and
said:
"It was grand, perfectly grand, but why did you introduce a funeral
march in the middle--I fancied that Childe Roland was not killed until
the end?"
The funeral march she alluded to was not a march at all, but the
"quagmire theme," from which queer faces threateningly mock at the
knight.
"Hopeless," thought I; "these people have no imagination."
The next day the critics treated me roughly. I was accused of cribbing
my first theme from _The Flying Dutchman_, and fixing it up
rhythmically for my own use, as if I hadn't made it on the spur of an
inspired moment! They also told me that I couldn't write a fugue; that
my orchestration was overloaded, and my work deficient in symmetry,
repose, development and, above all, in coherence.
This last was too much. Why, Browning's poem was contained in my
tone-poem; blame Browning for the incoherence, for I but followed his
verse. One day many months afterward I happened to pick up Hanslick, and
chanced on the following:
"Let them play the theme of a symphony by Mozart or Haydn, an adagio by
Beethoven, a scherzo by Mendelssohn, one of Schumann's or Chopin's
compositions for the piano, or again, the most popular themes from the
overtures of Auber, Donizetti or Flotow, who would be bold enough to
point out a definite feeling on the subject of any of these themes? One
will say 'love.' Perhaps so. Another thinks it is longing. He may be
right. A third feels it to be religion. Who may contradict him? Now, how
can we talk of a definite feeling represented when nobody really knows
what is represented? Probably all will agree about the beauty or
beauties of the composition, whereas all will differ regarding its
subject. To represent something is to exhibit it clearly, to set it
before us distinctly. But how can we call that the subject represented
by an art which is really its vaguest and most indefinite element, and
which must, therefore, forever remain highly debatable ground."
I saw instantly that I had been on a false track. Charles Lamb and
Eduard Hanslick had both reached the same conclusion by diverse roads. I
was disgusted with myself. So then the whispering of love and the clamor
of ardent combatants were only whispering, storming, roaring, but not
the whispering of love and the clamor; musical clamor, certainly, but
not that of "ardent combatants."
I saw then that my symphonic poem, _Childe Roland_, told nothing to
anyone of Browning's poem, that my own subjective and overstocked
imaginings were not worth a rush, that the music had an objective
existence as music and not as a poetical picture, and by the former and
not the latter it must be judged. Then I discovered what poor stuff I
had produced--how my fancy had tricked me into believing that those
three or four bold and heavily orchestrated themes, with their restless
migration into different tonalities, were "soul and tales marvelously
mirrored."
In reality my ignorance and lack of contrapuntal knowledge, and, above
all, the want of clear ideas of form, made me label the work a symphonic
poem--an elastic, high-sounding, pompous and empty title. In a spirit of
revenge I took the score, rearranged it for small orchestra, and it is
being played at the big circus under the euphonious title of _The Patrol
of the Night Stick_, and the musical press praises particularly the
graphic power of the night stick motive and the verisimilitude of the
escape of the burglar in the coda.