certain parts of the "Freischütz," got his imagination into the proper
state of creative frenzy by picturing to himself his bride as if she
were singing new arias for him. Now, in one of Wagner's essays there
is a curious passage which seems to indicate that Wagner habitually
conjured his characters before his mental vision and made them sing to
him, as it were, his original melodies. He advises a young composer
who wishes to follow his example never to select a dramatic character
for whom he does not entertain a warm interest. "He should divest him
of all theatrical apparel," he continues, "and then imagine him in a
dim light, where he can only see the expression of his eyes. If these
speak to him, the figure itself is liable presently to make a
movement, which will perhaps alarm him--but to which he must submit;
at last the phantom's lips tremble, it opens its mouth, and a
supernatural voice tells him something that is entirely real, entirely
tangible, but at the same time so extraordinary (similar, for
instance, to what the ghostly statue, or the page _Cherubin_ told
Mozart) that it arouses him from his dream. The vision has
disappeared; but his inner ear continues to hear; an idea has
occurred to him, and this idea is a so-called musical _motive_."
As this passage implies, and as he has elsewhere explained at length,
Wagner looked on the mental process of composing as something
analogous to dreaming--as a sort of clairvoyance, which enables a
musician to dive down into the bottomless mysteries of the universe,
as it were, thence to bring up his priceless pearls of harmony.
According to the Kant-Schopenhauer philosophy, of which Wagner was a
disciple, objects or things in themselves do not exist in space and
time, which are mere forms under which the human mind beholds them. We
cannot conceive anything except as existing either in space or in
time. But there is one exception, according to Wagner, and that is
harmony. Harmony exists not in time, for the time-element in music is
melody; nor does it exist in space, for the simultaneousness of tones
is not one of extension or space. Hence our harmonic sense is not
hampered by the forms of the mind, but gives us a glimpse of things as
they are in themselves--a glimpse of the world as a superior spirit
would behold it. And hence the mysterious superterrestrial character
of such new harmonies as we find in the works of Wagner and
Chopin--which are unintelligible to ordinary mortals, while to the
initiated they come as revelations of a new world.
Without feeling the necessity of accepting all the consequences of
Wagner's mystical doctrine, which I have thus freely paraphrased, no
one can deny that the attitude of a composer in the moment of
inspiration is closely analogous to that known as clairvoyance. The
celebrated vocalist, Vogel, tells an anecdote of Schubert which shows
strikingly how completely this composer used to be transported to
another world, and become oblivious of self, when creating. On one
occasion Vogel received from Schubert some new songs, but being
otherwise occupied could not try them over at the moment. When he was
able to do so, he was particularly pleased with one of them, but as it
was too high for his voice, he had it copied in a lower key. About a
fortnight afterwards they were again making music together, and Vogel
placed the transposed song before Schubert on the desk of the piano.
Schubert tried it through, liked it, and said, in his Vienna dialect,
"I say, the song's not so bad; _whose is it?_" so completely, in a
fortnight, had it vanished from his mind. Grove recalls the fact that
Sir Walter Scott once similarly attributed a song of his own to Byron;
"but this was in 1828, after his mind had begun to fail."
There is no reason for doubting Vogel's story when we bear in mind the
enormous fertility of Schubert. He was unquestionably the most
spontaneous musical genius that ever lived. Vogel, who knew him
intimately, used the very word _clairvoyance_ in referring to his
divine inspirations, and Sir George Grove justly remarks that, "In
hearing Schubert's compositions, it is often as if one were brought
more immediately and closely into contact with music itself, than is
the case in the works of others; as if in his pieces the stream from
the great heavenly reservoir were dashing over us, or flowing through
us, more directly, with less admixture of any medium or channel, than
it does in those of any other writer--even of Beethoven himself. And
this immediate communication with the origin of music really seems to
have happened to him. No sketches, no delay, no anxious period of
preparation, no revision appear to have been necessary. He had but to
read the poem, to surrender himself to the torrent, and to put down
what was given him to say, as it rushed through his mind."
Schubert was the most omnivorous song composer that ever lived. He
could hardly see a poem--good, bad, or indifferent, without being at
once seized by a passionate desire to set it to music. He sometimes
wrote half a dozen or more songs in one day, and some of them
originated under the most peculiar circumstances. The serenade, "Hark,
hark, the lark," for instance, was written in a beer garden. Schubert
had picked up a volume of Shakespeare accidentally lying on the
table. Presently he exclaimed, "Such a lovely melody has come into my
head, if I only had some paper." One of his friends drew a few staves
on the back of a bill of fare, and on this Schubert wrote his
entrancing song. "The Wanderer," so full of original details, was
written in one evening, and when he composed his "Rastlose Liebe,"
"the paroxysm of inspiration," as Grove remarks, "was so fierce that
Schubert never forgot it, but, reticent as he often was, talked of it
years afterward."
These stories remind one of an incident related by Goethe, who one day
suddenly found a poem spontaneously evolved in his mind, and so
complete that he ran to the desk and wrote it diagonally on a piece of
paper, fearing it might escape him if he took time to arrange the
paper.
In a word, Schubert _improvised with the pen_, and he seems to have
been an exception to Schopenhauer's rule, that the greatest writers
are those whose thoughts come to them before writing, and not while
writing. Nevertheless, it must be admitted that much of the music
which Schubert composed in this rapid manner is poor stuff; and
although his short songs are generally perfect in their way, his
longer compositions would have gained very much had he taken the
trouble to think them out beforehand, or to revise and condense them
afterward, which he very rarely did.
With a strange perversity and persistency, musical students and the
public have been led to believe that the surest sign of supreme
musical inspiration is the power to dash off melodies as fast as the
pen can travel. Weber relates in his autobiographic sketch that he
wrote the second act of one of his early operas in ten days, and adds,
significantly, that this was "one of the many unfortunate results of
the wonderful anecdotes about great masters, which make a deep
impression on youthful minds, and incite them to imitation."
Mozart has always been pointed to by preference to show how a really
great master shakes his melodies from his sleeves, as it were. Yet, on
reading Jahn's elaborate account of Mozart's life and works, nothing
strikes one more than the emphasis he places on the amount of
preliminary labor which Mozart expended on his compositions, before he
wrote them down. It appears to be a well-authenticated fact that
Mozart postponed writing the overture to "Don Giovanni," until the
midnight preceding the evening when the opera was to be performed in
public; and that at seven o'clock in the morning, the score was ready
for the copyist, although he had been drinking punch and was so sleepy
that his wife had to allow him to doze for two hours, and kept him
awake the rest of the time by telling him funny stories. But this
incident loses much of its marvellous character, when we bear in mind
that Mozart, according to his usual custom, must have had every bar of
the overture worked out in his head, before he sat down to commit it
to paper. This last labor was almost purely mechanical, and for this
reason, whenever he was engaged in writing down his scores, he not
only worked with amazing rapidity, but did not object to conversation,
and even seemed to like it; and on one occasion when at work on an
opera, he wrote as fast as his hands could travel, although in one
adjoining room there was a singing teacher, in another a violinist,
and opposite an oboeist, all in full blast!
Mozart himself tried to correct the notion, prevalent even in his day,
that he composed without effort--that melodies flowed from his mind as
water from a fountain. During one of the rehearsals of "Don Giovanni,"
at Prague, he remarked to the leader of the orchestra: "I have spared
neither pains nor labor in order to produce something excellent for
Prague. People are indeed mistaken in imagining that art has been an
easy matter to me. I assure you, my dear friend, no one has expended
so much labor on the study of composition as I have. There is hardly a
famous master whose works I have not studied thoroughly and
repeatedly."
Jahn surmises, doubtless correctly, that the reason why Mozart
habitually delayed putting down his pieces on paper, was because this
process, being a mere matter of copying, did not interest him so much
as the composing and creating, which were all done before he took up
the pen. "You know," he writes to his father, "that I am immersed in
music, as it were, that I am occupied with it all day long, that I
like to study, speculate, reflect." He was often absent-minded and
even followed his thoughts while playing billiards or nine pins, or
riding. Like Beethoven, he walked up and down the room, absorbed in
thought, even while washing his hands; and his hair-dresser used to
complain that Mozart would never sit still, but would jump up every
now and then and walk across the room to jot down something, or touch
the piano, while _he_ had to run after him holding on to his pigtail.
Allusion has been made to the fact that it was almost always in the
open air that new ideas sprouted in Mozart's mind, especially when he
was travelling. Whenever a new theme occurred to him he would jot it
down on a slip of paper, and he always had a special leather bag for
preserving these sketches, which he carefully guarded. These sketches
differ somewhat in appearance, but generally they contained the melody
or vocal part, together with the bass, and brief indications of the
middle parts, and here and there mention of a special instrument.
This was sufficient subsequently to recall the whole composition to
his memory. In elaborating his scores he hardly ever made any
deviations from the original conception, not even in the
instrumentation; which seems the more remarkable when we reflect that
he was the originator of many new orchestral combinations, the beauty
of which presented itself to his imagination before his ears had ever
heard them in actuality. These new tone-colors, as Jahn remarks,
existed intrinsically in the orchestra as a statue does in the marble;
but it remained for the artist to bring them out; and that Mozart was
bound to have them is shown by the anecdote of a musician who
complained to him of the difficulty of a certain passage, and begged
him to alter it. "Is it possible to play those tones on your
instrument?" Mozart asked; and when he was told it was, he replied,
"Then it is your affair to bring them out."
Beethoven's way of mental composing appears at first sight to differ
widely from Mozart's. But if we had as many specimens of Mozart's
preliminary sketches as we have of Beethoven's, the difference would
perhaps appear less pronounced, and would to a large extent resolve
itself into the fact that Beethoven did not trust his memory so much
as Mozart did, and therefore put more of his _tentative_, or rough
sketches, on paper. He always carried in his pockets a few loose
sheets of music paper, or a number of sheets bound together in a
note-book. If his supply gave out accidentally, he would seize upon
any loose sheet of paper, or even a bill of fare, to note down his
thoughts. In a corner of his room lay a large pile of note-books, into
which he had copied in ink his first rough pencil-sketches. Many of
these sketch-books have been fortunately preserved, and they are among
the most remarkable relics we have of any man of genius. They prove
above all things that rapidity of work is not a test of musical
inspiration, and that Carlyle was not entirely wrong when he defined
genius as "an immense capacity for taking trouble." In the "Fidelio"
sketch-book, for example, sixteen pages are almost entirely filled
with sketches for a scene which takes up less than three pages of the
vocal score. Of the aria, "O Hoffnung," there are as many as eighteen
different versions, and of the final chorus, ten; and these are not
exceptional cases by any means. As Thayer remarks: "To follow a
recitative or aria through all its guises is an extremely fatiguing
task, and the almost countless studies for a duet or terzet are enough
to make one frantic." Thayer quotes Jahn's testimony that these
afterthoughts are invariably superior to the first conception, and
adds that "some of his first ideas for pieces which are now among the
jewels of the opera are so extremely trivial and commonplace, that one
would hardly dare to attribute them to Beethoven, were they not in
his own handwriting."
On the other hand these sketch-books bear witness to the extreme
fertility of Beethoven's genius. Thayer estimates that the number of
distinct ideas noted in them, which remained unused, is as large as
the number which he used; and he refers to this as a commentary on the
remark which Beethoven made toward the close of his life: "It seems to
me as if I were only just beginning to compose." And Nottebohm, who
has studied these sketch-books more thoroughly than any one else,
thinks that if Beethoven had elaborated all the symphonies which he
began in these books we should have at least fifty instead of nine.
The sketch-books show that Beethoven was in the habit of working at
several compositions at the same time; and the ideas for these are so
jumbled up in his books that he himself apparently needed a guide to
find them. At least, when ideas belonging together are widely
separated he used to connect them by writing the letters VI over the
first passage and DE over the second. He also used to write the word
"better" in French on some pages, or else the figures 100, 500, 1,000,
etc., probably, as Schindler thinks, to indicate the relative value of
certain ideas.
When his mind was in a creative mood, Beethoven was as completely
absorbed (or "absent-minded," as we generally say) as Mozart. This is
illustrated by an amusing trait described by his biographers.
"Beethoven was extremely fond of washing. He would pour water
backwards and forwards over his hands for a long time together, and if
at such times a musical thought struck him and he became absorbed, he
would go on until the whole floor was swimming, and the water had
found its way through the ceiling into the room beneath" (Grove).
Consequently, as may be imagined, he not infrequently had trouble with
his landlord. He was constantly changing his lodgings, and always
spent the summer in the country, where he did his best work. "In the
winter," he once remarked to Rellstab, "I do but little; I only write
out and score what I have composed in the summer. But that takes a
long time. When I get into the country I am fit for anything."
On account of his deafness, Beethoven affords a striking instance of
the power musicians have of imagining novel sound effects which they
never could have heard with their ears. In literature we blame a
writer who, as the expression goes, "evolves his facts from his inner
consciousness;" but in music this proceeding is evidence of the
highest genius, because music has only a few elementary "facts" or
prototypes, in nature. Beethoven was deaf at thirty-two. He never
heard his "Fidelio," and for twenty-five years he could hear music
only with the inner ear. But musicians are in one respect more
fortunate than painters. If Titian had lost his eyesight, he could
never have painted another picture; whereas Beethoven after losing his
principal sense still continued to compose, better than ever. Mr.
Thayer even thinks that from a purely artistic point of view
Beethoven's deafness may have been an advantage to him; for it
compelled him to concentrate all his thoughts on the symphonies in his
head, undisturbed by the harsh noises of the external world. And that
he did not forego the _delights_ of music is obvious from the fact
that the pleasure of creating is more intense than the pleasure of
hearing; and is, moreover illustrated by the great delight he felt in
his later years when he read the compositions of Schubert (for he
could not hear them) and found in them the evidence of genius, which
he did not hesitate to proclaim.
In considering Beethoven's deafness, it is well to bear in mind the
words of Schopenhauer: "Genius is its own reward," he says. "If we
look up to a great man of the past we do not think, How fortunate he
is to be still admired by all of us; but, How happy he must have been
in the immediate enjoyment of a mind the traces of which refresh
generations of men." Schumann, Weber, and others, repeatedly testify
in their letters to the great delight they felt in creating; and at
the time when he was arranging his "Freischütz" for the piano, Weber
wrote, more forcibly than elegantly, that he was enjoying himself like
the devil.
I have already stated that Weber, like Beethoven, generally got his
new ideas during his walks in the country; and riding in an open
carriage seems to have especially stimulated his brain, as it did
Mozart's. The weird and original music to the dismal Wolf's-Glen scene
in the "Freischütz" was conceived one morning when he was on his way
to Pillnitz, and the wagon was occasionally shrouded in dense clouds.
A curious story is told by a member of Weber's orchestra, showing how
a musical theme may be sometimes suggested by incongruous and
grotesque objects. He was one day taking a walk with Weber in the
suburbs of Dresden. It began to rain and they entered a beer garden
which had just been deserted by the guests in consequence of the rain.
The waiters had piled the chairs on the tables, pell mell. At sight of
these confused groups of chairs and tables Weber suddenly exclaimed,
"Look here, Roth, doesn't that look like a great triumphal march?
Thunder! hear those trumpet blasts! I can use that--I can use that!"
In the evening he wrote down what his imagination had heard, and it
subsequently became the great march in "Oberon."
Some psychological interest also attaches to the remark with which
Weber's son prefaces this story--namely that Weber was constantly
transmuting forms and colors into sounds; and that lines and forms
seemed to stimulate his melodic inventiveness pre-eminently, whereas
sounds affected his harmonic sense.
My subject is by no means exhausted, but for fear of fatiguing the
reader with an excess of details I will close with a few facts
regarding Richard Wagner's method of composing. I am indebted for
these facts to the kindness of Herr Seidl, of the Metropolitan Opera
House in New York, who was Wagner's secretary for several years, and
helped him prepare "Götterdämmerung" and "Parsifal" for the press.
Like his famous predecessors, Wagner always carried some sheets of
music paper in his pocket, on which he jotted down with a pencil such
ideas as came to him on solitary walks, or at other times. These he
gave to his wife, who inked them over and arranged them in piles. In
these sketches the vocal part was always written out in full, while
the orchestral part was roughly indicated in two or more additional
staves. Frau Cosima has preserved most of these sketches, and they
will doubtless some day be reproduced in fac-simile, like some of
Beethoven's.
Whenever Wagner was in the mood for composing he would say to Herr
Seidl, "Bring me my sketches." Then he would retire to his composing
room, to which no one was ever admitted, not even his wife and
children. At lunch-time, the servant would bring something to the
ante-room, without being allowed to see the master in his sanctum. How
Wagner conducted himself there is not known, except that strange vocal
sounds, and a few passionate chords on the piano would occasionally
reach the ears of neighbors. Wagner appears to have used his piano
just as Beethoven did his, even after he had become deaf:--as a sort
of lightning-rod for his fervent emotions.
Much nonsense has been written concerning the fact that Wagner used to
wear gaudy costumes of silk and satin while he was composing, and that
he had colored glass in his windows, which gave every object a
mysterious aspect. He was called an imitator of the eccentric King of
Bavaria, and some went so far as to declare him insane. But in truth,
Wagner was simply endeavoring to put himself into an atmosphere most
favorable for dramatic creation. We all know how much clothes help to
make a man, in more than one sense; and any one who has ever taken
part in private theatricals will remember how much the costume helped
him to get into the proper frame of mind for interpreting his rôle.
This was all that Wagner aimed at in wearing his mediæval costumes;
and the wonderful realism and vividness of his dramatic conceptions
certainly more than justify the unusual methods he pursued to attain
them.
After elaborating the melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic details of his
scores, Wagner considered his main task done, and the orchestration
was completed down-stairs in his music room. In his earliest operas
Wagner did not write his scenes in their regular order, but took those
first which specially proffered themselves. Of the "Flying Dutchman,"
for instance, he wrote the spinning chorus first, and he was delighted
to find on this occasion, as he himself says, that he could still
compose after a long interruption. He used a piano but rather to
stimulate and correct than to invent. In his later works the piano is
absolutely out of the question. He wrote the music, scene after scene,
following the text; and the conception of the whole score is so
absolutely orchestral that the piano cannot even give as faint a
notion of it as a photograph can give of the splendors of a Titian.
Wagner, as he himself tells us, was unable to play his scores on the
piano, but always tried to get Liszt to do that for him.
It is possible that some of my readers have never seen a full
orchestral score of "Siegfried" or "Tristan." If so, I advise them to
go to a music store and look at one as a matter of curiosity. They
will find a large quarto volume, every page of which represents only
one line of music. There are separate staves for the violins, violas,
cellos, double basses, flutes, bassoons, clarinets, horns, tubas,
trombones, kettle-drums, etc., each family forming a quartette in
itself, and each having its own peculiar emotional quality. In
conducting an opera the Kapellmeister has to keep his eye and ear at
the same time on each of these groups, as well as on the vocal parts
and scenic effects. If this requires a talent rarely found among
musicians, how very much greater must be the mind which created this
complicated operatic score! No one who tries to realize what this
implies, and remembers that Wagner wrote several of his best music
dramas among the mountains of Switzerland, years before he could dream
of ever hearing the countless new harmonies and orchestral tone-colors
which he had discovered, can deny, I think, that I was right in
maintaining that the composing of an opera is the most wonderful
achievement of human genius.
III
SCHUMANN
AS MIRRORED IN HIS LETTERS