sublime. Naturally, Wagner is excepted because he did not write absolute
music, and we are now dealing only with that form. Because of this trait
of sublimity Brahms has been called austere. His austerity and lack of
personal profile—sometimes—have made his loftiest music difficult of
comprehension. He never splits the ears of the groundlings. He never
makes any concessions to popularity. Like Ibsen and Manet, he goes
out of his way to displease. The facile triumph he despises. He saw
musical Europe filled with second and third rate men, and he noted that
their sole excuse was to give cheap pleasure to the tasteless. This
professional parasitism he abhorred; with him the reaction became a
species of puritanism. It is a gratifying proof of his flexible mental
operations that he understood and admired Wagner, whose ideals and
practice were the antipodes of his own. His workmanship is well-nigh
impeccable; formal and contrapuntal mastery marks it. His contribution to
the techniques of rhythm is considerable. He literally popularized the
cross-relation, rediscovered the arpeggio and elevated it to an integer
of the melodic phrase. Wagner did the same for the essential turn.
His trait of fidelity, his spiritual obstinacy, are characteristic.
There seems to be a notion because Brahms refused to swim the current
tendencies that he held himself aloof from humanity, a bonze, a Brahmin,
and not, as he really was, a bard chanting its woes and full-blooded
aspirations. It is platitudinous nowadays to say that his music throbs
with the rich, red blood of humanity. He is the greatest contrapuntalist
since Bach (pace Richard Strauss and Max Reger), and the supreme
architectonist since Beethoven. Nevertheless, in his songs he is as
simple and virile as Robert Burns. His topmost peaks are remote and
gleam in an atmosphere too rarefied for dwellers on the plains, but
how intimate, how gracious are the happy moments in his chamber-music.
Following the romantic side of Schumann, untouched by the fever of
the footlights, a realist with imagination, both a classicist and a
romanticist, he conducted music to its normal channel by showing that a
formal service and a mastery of polyphony are not incompatible with the
utterance of new ideas in a new way. Brahms is not reactionary any more
than is Wagner. Neither found what he needed in contemporary life and
art, so one harked back to the Greeks and Gluck, the other to Beethoven.
All progress is crabwise. In the past of the arts may be found the germs
of their future.
Study the massiveness of the Brahmsian tonal architecture; study those
tonal edifices erected after years of toil, consider his fertility in
invention, his patience in developing his ideas; consider the ease
with which he moves, though seemingly shackled by the most exacting
of forms, a form not assumed for the sake of overcoming difficulties,
but because it was the only form in which he could fully express
himself. The narrative-tone of the symphonic form—and this includes all
its practitioners from Haydn to Tschaikovsky—is like blank verse, it
has been the chosen field of the greatest masters; and who shall say
that either Shakespeare or Beethoven has suffered from its adoption?
Even such a Romantic, mad and morbid, as Charles Baudelaire employed
as his vehicles of expression forms as restricted and rigid as the
sonnet and the alexandrine. Note the leaven of genius which militates
against pedantry, scholastic aridity, academic music-making, and music
arithmetical. Consider the intellectual and emotional brain—for the seat
of the emotions is in the head, not the heart—of this composer, and then
realize that all art is the arduous victory of great minds over great
imaginations. Recall the introductions to the first and last movements
of the Symphony in C minor by Brahms. That magnificent work makes by
comparison other men’s efforts like facile improvising. Its bases are
laid for the brief “eternity” accorded to all things fashioned by mortal
hands.
Brahms ever consciously schooled his imagination. He was his own
severest critic. He worked slowly, produced as slowly, and, being of
the contemplative rather than of the dramatic, dynamic temperamental
type, he incurred the reproach of heaviness. There is enough sediment
in his collected work to lend truth to this accusation, but from the
very cloudiness of the ferment has come the richest of wines. And how
refreshing is a draft of this wine after the thin, frothing stuff
concocted at the vintage of every season! He has his metaphysical mood
when he wrestles with abstract speculations, as did Pascal or Spinoza. It
cannot be said that Brahms, the cryptic philosopher, is as interesting as
Brahms of the symphonies, the F minor piano sonata, the quintet for piano
and strings with the same key signature, or the fragrant lyrics. He has
the glorious simplicity of Beethoven, and, like that Master of masters,
he does not fear to employ such an elementary modulation-bridge as the
chord of the dominant seventh.
A full chord for his orchestra has not the rainbow tints of the first
or major chord in the Prelude to The Mastersingers, yet it can sink a
shaft into our consciousness quite as profound. He is a thinker, his
chilliness is rather in his manner than in his discourse, which often
is thrice eloquent. This plodder, at times without Promethean fire,
possesses shoulders wide enough upon which to drape the symphonic
mantle of Beethoven. He reminds us of a mediæval architect whose life
was a prayer, in marble; who patiently built Gothic cathedrals which
majestically flanked upon mother earth, whose thin pinnacles pierced the
vasty blue, and in whose marmoreal naves an army terrible with banners
could worship; while through the stony forest of arches music flowed as
the voices of many waters. Brahms is the master-builder of modern music.
VERDI’S OTELLO
The announcement that Otello is to be presented by the Chicago Opera
Association next Tuesday evening at the Manhattan Opera House is
interesting to lovers of Verdi’s hot-blooded music drama. That it is not
often heard is because of the difficulty in finding singing actors to
interpret the work. Since Tamagno and Victor Maurel, the ideal Otello
and the ideal Iago, we have had no two such interpreters. Antonio Scotti
was a remarkable Iago, and from time to time some unhappy tenor attempts
to bend the bow of Ulysses, but the two artists who set the town on fire
twenty-five years ago have not been rivalled. Tamagno with his barbaric
cry, “Sangue, sangue”—“Blood, blood!”—is unforgettable. In the killing of
Desdemona he fell short of his great dramatic model, the elder Salvini,
because, as we have elsewhere related, he left his spectators in doubt as
to the disposition of the pillow. But then his Desdemona was the lovely
Emma Eames, and that, no doubt, accounted for the indecision of the
murderous and amorous Moor at the fatal moment.
Otello in 1887 set the musical world agog with surprise, curiosity, and
delight. It reveals little of the narrow, noisy, violent, and vulgar
Verdi of 1850. The character drawing is by a man who is master of
his material. The plot moves in majestical splendor and the musical
psychology, especially in the case of Iago, is often subtle. Verdi has at
last flowered. Much of his earlier music, despite the admirable melodic
flow in Traviata, Rigoletto, Trovatore, smelling ranker of the soil,
showing abundant thematic invention, was but the effort of a hot-headed
man of the footlights, a seeker after applause and money. In Otello his
musical provincialisms have well-nigh vanished. The writing is clear, the
passion controlled, the effects aimed at easily compassed. The masterly
craft of Iago is cleverly contrasted with the fiery passion of Otello,
and Shakespeare is suggested; although an Italian Shakespeare. However,
the English poet is more Italian than the Italian in this moving drama.
Otello is veritable music drama; its composer seldom halts to symphonize
his events as does Wagner. Arrigo Boito, most intellectual of
librettists, has skeletonized the story; Verdi’s music endows it with
vitality, grace, fleshly contours, brilliancy. The Italian poet has
not gravely disturbed the original text. It is but a compliment to his
assimilation of the Shakespearian spirit to state that Iago’s credo, an
explosion of nihilism and hatred, does not seem out of perspective in the
picture. It is an intercalation of Boito’s, as were the Cypriote choruses
in Act II. The rest is Shakespeare undefiled, barring a few happy
transpositions from the Senate speech to the duo at the close of Act I.
As we have said, the characterization is masterly throughout. Do not
let us balk at comparisons, nor, for that matter, at superlatives. With
the exceptions of Mozart and Wagner, no composer has thus far lived who
could have painted the hot-blooded Moor and the cynical cannikin-clinker,
set them facing each other, allowing them to work out their fates,
musically speaking, as has Giuseppe Verdi. The key to Otello is its
characterization. The medium in which Verdi bids his puppets of destiny
to move, their fluidity, their humanity, with the complete dissection of
their secret springs of action—these elements are almost incalculable.
Criticism can only endeavor to disentangle them. Whether he is listening
to his cunning Ancient, or caressing Desdemona, or raging like the
hardy Numæan lion, it is always Otello, the Moor of Venice, a loving,
suffering, living man—Shakespeare’s Othello transposed to a fresco of
magnificent tones.
The character does not evoke a flashy, operatic ranter. Nor does Iago,
either as the bluff soldier or the loathsome serpent stinging his
chieftain’s soul, ever lag dramatically, ever mimic the conventional
attitudes of transpontine melodrama. It is always Iago, “the spirit that
denies,” perhaps underlined, for music must emphasize the emotions.
Desdemona is drawn in relief to her furious lover and warrior, and as a
white cloud of purity in contrast with her cold-blooded maligner. Verdi
has assigned her gentle music, the Ave Maria, the Willow Song. She is a
sweet background upon which was etched the darker, sinister motives of
the play. No masculine shadow but her lord’s has been projected across
her snowy, virginal soul. Delicacy and vivacity reveal, little by little,
the inner workings of her girlish nature. The other figures, Cassio,
Emilia, are sketches on the second plan, but figures that contribute to
the density of the dramatic scheme without detracting from our interest
in the protagonists.
From the opening storm to the strangling scene the music flows as swiftly
as does the action of the spoken drama. Rich, varied, eloquent, the
orchestra seldom tarries in its acute and vivid commentary. There is
scant employment of typical motives; the kiss theme in Act I is sounded
with psychologic fidelity when Otello dies. Only in the handkerchief
trio is there pause for instrumental elaboration; but in the main old,
set forms are avoided, and while there are melodic currents they seldom
crystallize. The duo at the end of Act I, the Credo of unfaith and
Otello’s frenzied exhortation in Act II; the tremendous outburst in the
following act, with Iago’s sardonically triumphant exclamation, “Behold
the lion!” as he plants his scornful heel on the recumbent Otello—then
the final catastrophe—these about summarize the high lights. Throughout
there are picturesque and poignant strokes, effects of massed splendor,
and hovering about the tempest-stirred souls is an atmosphere of gloom,
doom, guilt, and melancholy foreboding.
Verdi felt the moods of the poet and made them live again in his score.
Otello and Iago grow before our eyes and ears from act to act. The
simple-hearted, trusting general with his agonized cry, “Miseria mia,”
develops into a ferocious savage thirsting for blood. He is the jealous
male, who sees red. The multitudinous music is incarnadine with blood.
And it is all vocal. It is written for the voice, which is the centre
of gravity in this astounding drama of souls bedevilled, and not the
orchestra. The pedestal is not bigger than the statue, as is the case
with Salammbô. Another such Iago, subtle, sinister, evil incarnate,
withal a dangerously attractive fellow, such an impersonation as Victor
Maurel’s, may never be duplicated. And this remarkable singing actor
had the advantage of Verdi and Boito’s advice when the music drama was
produced at Milan, in 1887. Verdi’s first idea of a title was Iago. This
idea does not seem strange after a performance of Maurel.
The two most satisfying Iagos I remember were Henry Irving and Edwin
Booth. Maurel’s interpretation paralleled them at every point. Admitted
that the singing heightened the impression, though it weakens the
characterization, Maurel’s Iago never betrayed a tendency toward the
melodramatic; as difficult as treading on eggs without crushing them, he
held a middle course, and he was both a picture and a dramatic happening.
Malignant he was, but that is the “fat” of the part, but he underlined
the reasons for his wicked actions. Iago is also a human being with
a sound motive for revenge. I know you will remind me that critical
“whitewashing” is become the fashion, that Nero, Simon Magus, Judas
Iscariot, Benedict Arnold, Casanova—nay, even Lucifer, Prince of Morning,
has Anatole France for a defender (in The Revolt of the Angels)—are
only getting their just dues at the hands of various apologists. De
Quincey, a master casuist, has said that without Judas the drama of Jesus
crucified would not have occurred. Everything is necessary. Nero was a
much-abused monster, though Renan believes him to be the Beast mentioned
in the Apocalypse—it seems now that there were no “atrocities” during
the fabulous persecutions of the Christians, that Rome was not burned
by Nero, who had no fiddle technique; but in the case of Iago there is
something to be said in his favor. A pure devil, as we conceive devils to
be, he was not.
A rough, hard-drinking soldier of fortune, he admits himself to be, and
to call his advice, “Put money in thy purse,” cynical is to contravene
worldly wisdom. Otello had wronged him, Iago hated him for it, hated his
wife for her alleged infidelity—Emilia denies her treachery—therefore,
his revenge is credible. It is his method in achieving this revenge that
revolts our sensibilities. The innocent Desdemona is crushed between the
upper and lower millstones of inexorable destiny. Maurel did not paint
his conception all black, but with many gradations and nuances. Not a
movement but meant something; even that famous “psychological crook of
Iago’s left knee.” Maurel was economical in gesture. His was an objective
characterization. The drinking song was memorably, totally unlike
his drinking lyrics in Don Giovanni and Hamlet. Suffice to say that
Verdi intrusted him with the difficult task of “originating” two such
widely-sundered rôles as Falstaff and Iago. With them Victor Maurel made
operatic history.
And now what is the most surprising thing about Otello? I think that
it is the fact that it was composed when Verdi was past three score
and ten. This seems incredible. It seethes with the passion of middle
manhood, with the fervors of a flowering maturity. No one before him had
dreamed of setting Shakespeare in this royally tragic fashion. Rossini
but fluted with the theme. In Verdi, jealousy, love, envy, hatred, are
handled by a master music dramatist. It is a wonderful thing that Verdi
began it at a time when most men are preparing for the Great Adventure.
Reversing the usual processes, this extraordinary Italian wrote younger
music the older he grew. After Aïda, Otello. After grim tragedy, joyous
comedy—Falstaffio. If he had survived until ninety years, Verdi might
have bequeathed us an operetta that would have outpointed in wit and
sparkling humor the mercurial Johann Strauss. And when we think of the
later Verdi we should not forget his faithful friend and famulus, who
played Wagner to his Faust—Arriga Boito.
FAUST AND MEPHISTO
How does Faust wear in the flicker of the footlights? Do the monologues
sound with glorious resonance or are they only philosophical fustian?
The question is not difficult to answer. The thunder-words of the
poet-dramatist still thrill us with their meaning and with their music,
the clash of souls still makes thrall of our imagination. To read Faust
is to attain the summit of an intellectual peak of Darien. To witness
an adequate performance of Faust is to win fresh pleasure for eye and
ear. If Hamlet inspired Goethe and Marlowe before Shakespeare, his
Faust in turn created a memorable literature. The very title crowds
pages in encyclopædias. Sculptors chisel masterpieces after reading the
poem-play; the Mephisto of the Russian Antokolsky is not easily forgotten
and George Grey Barnard was inspired by the famous line, “Two spirits,
alas, reside within my breast” (the group is now at the Metropolitan
Museum). Painters, almost innumerable, from Ary Scheffer to the rawest
art student of yesteryear have traced on the canvas the loves of Gretchen
and Faust. Barbier and Carré mutilated the poem in search of effective
theatrical material, and Gounod melted with sensuous ecstasy when he
made the musical setting. Lenau presented a sinister, half-mad Faust,
a self-portrait; the conservative Spohr surrounded the story with
antiquated music. Wagner, perhaps more than other composers, realized the
travailing Faust spirit in his overture, which is a masterpiece. Franz
Liszt has of all men evoked within the walls of his symphonic palace both
the static and dynamic Faust and the Gretchen of our dreams. His Mephisto
is the cynical spirit of denial. Berlioz, as in a tremendous fresco, has
painted with torrential energy the infernal glories of the theme. He
even dragged his hero to Hungary so that he might give him the pleasure
of hearing the Rakoczy March as orchestrated by the audacious Frenchman.
Arrigo Boito, only half Latin, with Polish blood in his veins, has given
us the ideal Mephisto and dared the impossible by composing the second
part of Goethe’s master work.
In song Gretchen has been celebrated from Schubert to the troubadour of
yesterday. In romance, Turgénieff, that gentle giant, has depicted the
soul of Faust transposed to Russian soil. What the Faust spirit worked
in an unbalanced temperament may be noted in Nietzsche, whose later
rhapsodies stemmed from Euphorion’s song in the Second Part: “Let me be
skipping. Let me be leaping. To soar and circle through ether sweeping is
now the passion that me hath won.” Therein is the kernel of the dancing
philosopher, Zarathustra, who called man “a bridge connecting animal
and superman.” And recall the line in Faust: “Die ird’sche Brust im
Morgenrot,” which served as a title for one of the unhappy philosopher’s
sanest books. Goethe is the matrix of modern thought; he contained Wagner
as he contained Nietzsche. Wagner, of course, went to Schopenhauer for
his peculiar brand of pessimism. You can’t miss the Faustlike touches
in Tannhäuser; the thirst for illimitable pleasure, the redemption of
the eternal-womanly—all this is Faust redivivus. John Addington Symonds
laments that Marlowe did not follow his Doctor Faustus with a Tannhäuser.
“He assuredly would have not suffered this high mystic theme to
degenerate into any mere vulgarities of a sensual Venusberg,” wrote the
Englishman, with one eye fastened on Wagner’s version of the wonderful
legend. No trivial thirst for carnal pleasures but the desire for beauty
beyond human reach would have been Marlowe’s conception of the brave old
tale. Lohengrin is a Faust, so is Siegfried. Parsifal is Faust in the
vapors of mysticism, enveloped by a Buddhistic pity; surely the “Good
Friday spell” was born of that exquisite episode near the close of Act I
in Faust, where the poet-philosopher gives over his contemplated suicide,
ravished by sweet memories of his youth, his Sabbath wandering in spring
woods and meadows.
At one time Goethe thought of translating Marlowe. His music is magical.
It colored Shakespeare; it created a new dramatic school. Marlowe is
the father of English tragedy. What if Shakespeare had died at the
same age as Marlowe? “We may admit that in rhyme he never did anything
worth Marlowe’s Hero and Leander,” says Swinburne. Charles Lamb adored
Marlowe, though he mocked the “pampered jades of Asia.” Yet the hand
that fashioned the turgid and bombastic Tamburlane also penned that
lovely lyric “Come lie [‘live,’ in revised editions] with me and be my
love” (The Passionate Shepherd). It is as sparklingly pure as a bar of
Mozart. But Marlowe is more dramatic poet than dramatist. His characters
are set forth with a mass of psychologic details that recall some modern
masters. He is an early Browning with a mouth of gold. His words sing.
Yet he would never have written the last speech of Paracelsus: “I press
God’s lamp close to my breast; its splendor soon or late will pierce the
gloom.” Marlowe was not a believer. The desperate damnation of his Faust
chills the blood. “Where gods are not, ghosts abound.” Marlowe could
surround his unhappy hero with all the machinery of diabolism; Beelzebub,
Prince of Flies, the Seven Deadly Sins, imps and goblins. He could utter
that thrilling line, “See where Christ’s blood streams in the firmament,”
but he had not the talent of belief—for it is both a gift and talent,
belief in the unseen. If he had with Browning’s Childe Roland to the Dark
Tower come, he would have died hopeless, impenitent, as in reality he
did die. His Faust is the archetype of the explorer in the “unplumbed,
salt, estranging sea” of knowledge. He cries:
“Had I as many souls as there be stars I’d give them all for
Mephistopheles.” He craves eternal wisdom, “infinite richness in a
little room.” Mephistopheles has built for him the walls of Thebes with
ravishing music. He would fain have this devil “wall all Germany with
brass.” He sees Lucifer, “chief lord and regent of the night,” and still
are his longings unassuaged. This feverish simulacrum of a man who
aspired to know things terrestrial and celestial Marlowe incarnated in
his tragedy.
And what horrors he conjures up in Mephistopheles’s description of
Hades—a description less material, nevertheless revealing a grandeur of
conception second only to Dante’s. This damned creature of the English
poet stands for men who achieve victories or defeats by the force of
their intellect. Faust summons spirits from the vasty deep, converses
with them when they come, argues, even wrangles, and would circumvent
them in discussion. Spiritual explorers from Giordano Bruno to Spinoza
and Nietzsche are Fausts. And on the plane scientific so are Galileo
and Darwin and Einstein. All who slough off decaying half-truths are
Fausts who must suffer for their frankness the plagues of the world,
the flesh, and the devil. Sordello’s “Dante, pacer of the shore,” was a
mediæval Faust whose richly veined ore is half hidden in the clay of
scholasticism. And so the mountains converse with mountains, Dante with
Goethe, Bach with Beethoven, Marlowe with Browning.
Human insects, slowly toiling to the summits, from time to time catch
glimpses of trailing cloud-glories and overhear the far-off rumblings
of divine events. Then the mists part and another Faust comes to earth,
telling us of the strange secrets he has surprised. “A sound magician is
a mighty god,” sings Marlowe. Goethe said: “Gray are all theories and
green alone life’s golden tree.” To read Marlowe is to feel the itch of
quotation. Has there ever been anything more vivid or pitiable since
Dante than the English poet’s Edward II, in his “cave of care,” standing
in mire and puddle, “and lest I should sleep, one plays continually upon
a drum”? It is Chinese in its hideous suggestion of torture; we must
go to Octave Mirbeau’s Le Jardin des Supplices, or the newly published
fiction of Charles Petit, Le Fils du Grand Eunuque, for its match. Faust
is a fatalist; “his atheism has a background of terror thinly veiled
by the mind’s inquisitiveness.” Che sarà, sarà! he declares, and then
berates his satanic famulus for showing him so little. He knows that the
jealous gods have somewhere buried proofs of the origin of all things,
and, like Maurice de Guerin, he would have demanded: “But upon the shores
of what ocean have they rolled the stone that hides them?”
BOHEMIAN MUSIC