not perhaps so melodramatic as Toledo in Spain, yet quite as original,
when you consider that pretty, placid Dresden is only four hours away
and that further down the map lies Vienna. As the traveller approaches
the Bohemian city—as Praha it is known to the natives—the cathedral and
castles grouped on the hill form a fascinating silhouette against the
sky-line. At once the alluring prospects of wood and architecture are
evoked, and to the memory comes the sanguinary pages of its history.
Arthur Symons once wrote that to a Bohemian “Prague is still the epitome
of his country; he sees it as a man sees the woman he loves, with her
first beauty, and he loves it as a man loves a woman, more for what she
has suffered.” Needless to add, for me it was love at first sight, this
Prague, with its imperial palace and the Hradschin fortress so proudly
perched on the Hradcany; the pinnacle of the St. Vitus Cathedral, the
four Ottakan towers and the two towers of St. George, which swim so
gloriously in the air, a miracle of tender rose and marble white, with
golden spots of sunshine, form an ensemble that would intrigue the brush
of Claude Monet.
The city proper enchants with its bewildering jumbles of architecture,
its historical evocations. The Bridge of Prague, the Town Hall, the
Powder Tower, the historic Tyn church, the old Jewish cemetery, the
Belvedere, the Chapel of St. Wenceslas, the shrine of St. Nepomuc, the
Star Hunting Lodge, where in 1620 was fought the Battle of the White
Mountain, the Rudolphinium—to go on like this would send you to the
guide-books. There is the modern Representatives House, where you may
enjoy a symphony concert up-stairs, while in the restaurant on the first
floor you can eat an omleba royal, a Fogos fish, a Telec filet specanky
and Ledovy crème, ending with an Americky compôte, and—tell it not in
Gath—good light wine is to be had, or the incomparable product of Pilsen,
there pronounced Pizn. I stopped at the “Blauer Stern,” on the Hybernska
Ulice, which old-fashioned, comfortable hotel has probably changed its
name since the war. Even in 1913 anything German was anathema to the
Bohemians. There is the Bohemian National Theatre. Both Josef Stransky
of the Philharmonic Society and Artur Bodanzky of the Metropolitan Opera
House and the New Symphony Orchestra were some years ago conductors
at Prague. One afternoon in the Representatives House I listened to a
programme composed of national music—the Scherzo à Capriccioso of Dvorak,
a symphony by Smetana, a symphonic poem by Josef Suk and a work by
Sdenko Fibich, the latter a composer too little known here, whose piano
compositions were introduced to us more than a decade ago by Florence
Mosher and Emily Burbank at their lecture-recitals. One gray morning I
went astray while wandering about the twisting corridors of the “Blauer
Stern” and, tempted by the sounds of masterly violin playing, I stood
before a door which bore the legend: “Otokar Sevcik.” It might have been
his pupils, Jan Kubelik or Kocian, though it was neither. I had seen the
brilliant Kubelik at Marienbad, where I went annually to fight my fat and
also to war with the rum demon—temporarily. Since then Sevcik, the great
teacher of aspiring fiddlers, has removed to Vienna.
I mention these things concerning the delightful city of Ema Destinova,
Thomas Masaryk—who married a New York lady, one of the Misses Garrigue of
the well-known musical family; of the city wherein Mozart composed his
masterpiece, Don Giovanni—“in order to express the thanks of the great
master to his ‘dearest citizens of Prague’ for their ardent reception”;
that Prague which is so dramatic to gaze upon, the Slavic city further
west, the gateway to the Slavic lands—because I have just read with
considerable satisfaction a slender pamphlet of fifty pages entitled
The Music of Bohemia, by Ladislav Urban, published under the auspices
of the Czecho-Slovak Art Clubs of New York City. The author calls his
decidedly interesting contribution a sketch, but it is a sketch in which
is compressed much valuable matter. At the start he tells us that “Czech”
is the Slav name for the Slav people and language in Bohemia, Moravia
and Silesia. The terms used to designate the whole country, the state,
are ‘Bohemia’ and ‘Bohemian.’ The Czechs themselves do not employ this
distinction, continues Mr. Urban, but use the word Czech in both senses.
Slovaks are that people who live in the northwestern part of Hungary,
called Slovakia, which with Bohemia forms the present republic and nation
of the Czecho-Slovaks. Mr. Urban warns us not to confound Bohemians and
gypsies, and cites Balfe’s Bohemian Girl as an instance: a full-fledged
Czech folk-melody is introduced as a gypsy tune in the allegro theme of
the overture.
There has been bad blood between the Bohemians and Germans since the
reign of King Wenceslas (921-935 A. D.). After his assassination,
Wenceslas was canonized and is a national saint; a folk-song, known as
the Choral of St. Wenceslas, is one of the oldest among its kind. The
John Huss reformation also aroused the nation, and a battle hymn, “Ye
warriors who for God are fighting,” was another product of the folk.
Bohemia has always been a musical nation, as Mr. Urban proves by numerous
citations. Its folk-song literature is rich and varied. He quotes from
Seth Watson’s Racial Problems in Hungary: “Singing is the chief passion
of the Slovaks. Nothing will find its way so surely to the heart of the
Slovak people as a well-sung song. An old peasant woman once complained
to a friend of mine that her son was a useless, disappointing fellow.
‘What was the matter?’ inquired my friend; ‘did he drink or would he not
work?’ ‘Oh, no,’ said the old woman; ‘but nothing will make him sing.
It’s a great misfortune.’” Rather a companionable sort, we think—a young
man who doesn’t sing, whistle or make other disagreeable noises would be
a prize in our noisy Tophet of New York.
The polka must be credited to Bohemia; it was invented about 1830 by a
country girl. This sounds a trifle doubtful, as the dance—called polka,
rather pulka, because of the half step—is as old as the immemorial hills
of Bohemia, I have been informed by Bohemian critics. There is a polka
in Smetana’s The Bartered Bride, also a furiant, which means, we are
told, “a boasting farmer.” Dvorak in his first symphony introduces a
furiant in the place of a scherzo. But Mr. Urban is not seduced into that
most platitudinous of errors, to wit, that the people make a nation’s
music. He writes with admirable clearness on the subject: “It is no
wonder that the richness of folk-art was overestimated in Bohemia at
the beginning of the last century, and led to an error. Folk-art was
confused with nationality in art. A false principle was constructed
that ‘national art’ must be based upon folk-music. Thus the imitation
of folk-poetry and folk-melodies was approved as the real national art.
It is astonishing how long this principle, violating, as it did, the
national law of progress, could endure. All works of this feverish,
would-be-national period belong to history. They live no more, being but
imitations.” In a footnote to this inexpugnable statement the author adds
with his accustomed acuity: “The matter was also discussed in America,
where some people saw national American music under the guise of Indian
music. Nothing is easier for a composer than to imitate the melodies of
different nations, preserving their rhythmical or melodic mannerisms.”
He might have joined negro to Indian as our national, so-called, musical
characteristics. But there are no more Indians, in a tribal sense, and
as to negro music, the best of it was composed by white men, notably
Stephen Foster. Why should Afro-American folk-tunes represent America?
In MacDowell’s Indian Suite there are authentic Indian themes, while in
Dvorak’s From the New World the negroid tunes are mere suggestions; the
rhythms of Yankee Doodle are faintly heard as a contrapuntal device; in a
word, the Americanism of Dr. Dvorak’s plenary composition is as American
as his own name, not to mention the fact that its chief motto is taken
from Schubert’s unfinished symphony (Tchaikovsky went to the same source
for the principal theme of his E minor, the fifth, symphony, hence the
accusation that Dvorak borrowed from the Russian. Arcades ambo!) But
the negro folk-tune as a basic element for the American composer was
short-lived. Its logical conclusion landed us in the dubious and never
delectable region of ragtime, and there let it lie forever. The musical
culture of America must have its roots in more national soil, must stem
from neither the aboriginal natives nor yet from the one-time slaves.
It must be American or it will not be at all. At present our supreme
composer is Charles Martin Loeffler, by virtue of his individual genius.
I suspect all map-music; patriotism may cloak humbuggery—or worse (Dr.
Johnson says it does). So let us first make good music, and the national
ingredients will take care of themselves.
Mr. Urban devoted special sections to the chief composers of
Bohemia—Bedrich Smetana, Antonin Dvorak, Zdenko Fibich, Vitezslav
Novak, and Josef Suk. There are, of course, many others, but within
the scope of his little study these five suffice. Naturally, the palm
of superiority is awarded Smetana, whose music we heard last season,
thanks to Josef Stransky, himself a Bohemian. Smetana is the Bohemian
composer par excellence. There is a foreign alloy in Dvorak, especially
the later Dvorak, that rules him from entering into competition with his
fellow-countryman. Dvorak remained a peasant even in his best works,
which were written before he came to New York in 1892. The New World
Symphony is pleasing and wears well, notwithstanding its unblushing
plagiarisms—that excerpt from the Venusberg bacchanale in Tannhäuser
quite takes your breath away; quotation marks are sadly needed in
music!—but it remains presumably Czechish, and only faintly American. We
much prefer his earlier Slavic Dances, the orchestral scherzo and the
Husitzka overture. As for the newer men, it is to be hoped that Bodanzky
and Stransky and Stokowski—conductors nowadays seem to be sky-high—will
give them all a hearing. Quality, not quantity, rules Bohemian music, a
music racy of the national soil, nevertheless not without the larger,
profounder accents of universal music.
THE MUSIC OF YESTERDAY?
Notwithstanding the fact that he played the flute and ranked Rossini
above Wagner, Arthur Schopenhauer said some notable things about music.
Here is a wise observation of his: “Art is ever on the quest, a quest
and a divine adventure;” although this restless search for the new often
ends in plain reaction, progress may be crabwise and still be progress.
We fear “progress,” as usually understood, is a glittering “general idea”
that blinds many to the truth. Reform in art is like reform in politics.
You can’t reform the St. Matthew Passion music or the fifth symphony.
Is Parsifal a reformation of Gluck? This talk of reforms is confusing
the historic with the æsthetic. Art is a tricksy quantity and, like
quicksilver, is ever mobile. As in all genuine revolutions, the personal
equation counts the heaviest, so in dealing with the conditions of music
at the present time we ought to study the temperament of our music-makers
and let prophecy sulk in its tent as it may.
One thing is certain: The old tonal order has changed forever; there
are plenty of signs and wonders in the musical firmament to prove this.
Moussorgsky preceded Debussy in his use of whole-tone harmonies, and a
contemporary of Debussy and an equally gifted musician, Charles Martin
Loeffler, was experimenting before Debussy in a dark but delectable
harmonic region. The tyranny of the diatonic and chromatic scales, the
tiresome revolution of the major and minor modes, the critical Canutes
who sit at the edge of the musical sea and say to the modern waves, “Thus
far and no further!” and then hastily abandon their thrones and rush to
safety, else to be overwhelmed—all these are of the past, whether in art,
literature, music, or—let Nietzsche speak—in ethics. Even philosophy has
changed its garb and logic is “a dodge,” as Prof. Jowett used to say.
Every stronghold is being assailed, from the “divine” rights of property
to the common chord of C major.
If Ruskin had written music-criticism he might have amplified the
connotations of his famous phrase, the “pathetic fallacy,” for we
consider it a pathetic fallacy (though not in the Ruskinian sense) in
criticism to be overshadowed by the fear that, because some of our
predecessors misjudged Wagner, Manet and Ibsen, we should be too tender
in our judgments of our contemporaries. Here is “the pathos of distance”
run to seed. The music of to-day may be the music of to-morrow, but if
not, what then? It may satisfy the emotional needs of the moment, yet
become a stale formula to-morrow. What does that prove? Though Bach and
Beethoven built their work on the broad bases of eternity—employing that
tremendous term in a limited sense; no art is “eternal”—nevertheless,
one may enjoy the men whose music is of slight texture and “modern.”
Nor is this a plea for mediocrity. Mediocrity we shall always have with
us; mediocrity is mankind in the normal, and normal man demands of art
what he can read without running, hear without thinking. Every century
produces artists who are forgotten in a generation, though they fill the
ear for a time with their clever production. This has led to another
general idea, that of transition, of intermediate types. But after
critical perspective has been attained, it will be seen that the majority
of composers fall into this category of the transitional; not a consoling
notion, but an unavoidable conclusion. Richard Wagner had his epigones.
And so had Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven. Mendelssohn was a feminine variation
of Bach, and after Schumann followed Brahms—Brahms, who threatens to
rival his great exemplar. Yet I can recall the incredulous smiles when,
twenty-five years ago, I called the Brahms compositions “The Music of the
Future.”
The Wagner-Liszt tradition of music-drama and the symphonic poem have
been continued with personal modifications by Richard Strauss. Max Reger
pinned his faith to Brahms and absolute music, though not without an
individual variation. In considering his Sinfonietta, the Serenade, the
Hiller Variations, the Prologue to a Tragedy, the Lustspiel overture,
the two concertos respectively for pianoforte and violin, we are struck
not so much by the masterly handling of old forms as by the stark,
emotional content of these compositions. It is an error to dismiss
his music as merely academic. He began as a Brahmsianer, but he did
not succeed, as did his master, in fusing form and theme. There is a
Dionysian strain in him that too often is in jarring discord with the
intellectual structure of his work. The furor teutonicus in conflict
with the scholar. Yet at one period Reger was considered the rival of
Strauss, though that day has long passed. Arnold Schoenberg now divides
the throne. And there were many other claimants—Rezinek, d’Albert,
Ernest Boehe, Walter Braunfels, Max Schillings, Hans Pfitzner, Klose,
Ehrenberg, Noren, Franz Schreker, and the younger choir whose doings
are analyzed weekly by clever Cezar Searchinger in the pages of the
_Musical Courier_. Their name is legion. They enter the lists sounding
golden trumpets of self-praise and are usually forgotten after a solitary
performance of their huge machines, whether opera or symphony. Size
seems to be the prime requisite. Write a music-drama that consumes three
nights in its performance, a symphony that takes a hundred men, with a
chorus of a thousand, to play and sing. Behold! You are a modern among
moderns. But your name is as mud the following year. Exceptions are
Mahler and Bruckner, yet I have my suspicions that when the zeal of
William Mengelberg has abated, then the Mahler craze will go the way of
all flesh, despite the fact that he has composed some thrilling pages.
Otherwise, his symphonic structures are too mastodonic to endure; like
those of Berlioz, they are top-heavy with ennui, and many chambers are
empty of significant ideas or vital emotions. Musical intellectualism at
its extreme Kamchatska.
Our personal preferences incline us to the new French music. To be sure,
substance is often lacking, but you are not oppressed by the abomination
of desolation which lurks in the merely huge, by what Mr. Finck calls
Jumboism in music. The formal clarity, the charming color sense, the
sprightly, even joyful, spirit, combined with an audacious roving among
revolutionary ideas, all endear these youngsters to us. Debussy is their
artistic sire, Ravel their stepfather, and if d’Indy does not fall
into this category, being a descendant of Franck, he is none the less
admirable as a musician. Stravinsky outpoints them all in the imprévu,
as does the incredible Prokofieff—a man to be carefully estimated, one
who thus far hasn’t put his best foot foremost in America. The Richard
Strauss case is no longer a moot one. He has in all probability given his
best work, and superlative work it is, despite its slag, scoriæ, rubble,
and refuse. He is the chief of a school, a position from which he can
never be dislodged, and when history sifts the pretensions of all the
second and third rate men of his generation, his figure will be found
standing close to Wagner’s and Berlioz’s and Liszt’s. An epigone? Yes.
But an epigone of individual genius.
With Arnold Schoenberg freedom in modulation is not only permissible but
an iron rule; he is obsessed by the theory of overtones, and his music is
not only planned horizontally and vertically but in a circular fashion.
There is in his philosophy no such thing as consonance or dissonance,
only perfect ear training. (We quote from his Harmony; a Bible for
Supermen). He writes: “Harmonie fremde Tone gibt es also nicht”—and a
sly dig at old-timers—“sondern nur dem Harmonie-system fremde.” After
carefully listening to his “chaos” a certain order disengages itself;
his madness is methodical. For one thing, he abuses the interval of the
fourth and he enjoys juggling with the chord of the ninth. Vagabond
harmonies in which remotest keys lovingly hold hands do not dissipate the
sensation of a central tonality somewhere—the cellar, on the roof, in the
gutter, up above in the sky so high. The inner ear tells you that his D
minor quartet is really thought, though not altogether played, in that
key. As for form, you must not expect it from a man who has declared:
“I decide my form during composition only through feeling,” a procedure
which in other composers’ works might be called improvisation. Every
chord is the outcome of an emotion, the emotion aroused by the poem or
idea which gives birth to the composition. Such antique things as the
cyclic form or community of themes are not to be found in Schoenberg’s
bright lexicon of anarchy. He boils down the classic sonata form to one
movement and begins developing his theme as soon as it is announced. We
should be grateful that he announces it at all; themeless music is the
rage at present.
So, as it may be seen, the new dogmatism is more dogmatic than the old.
The absence of rule in Schoenberg is an inflexible, cast-iron law of
necessity as tyrannical as the Socialism that has replaced Czarism with a
more oppressive autocracy, the rule of the unwashed, many-headed monster.
Better one tyrant than a million. There is no music of yesterday or
to-morrow. There is only the music of Now.
LISZT’S ONLY PIANO SONATA
That two young American-born pianists, John Powell and Louis Cornell,
should have selected recently Liszt’s only piano sonata for their
programmes, and during the same week, is sufficiently significant to call
for comment. It is a sign of the times. Many of the innovations in modern
writing for the instrument may be directly traced to this same B minor
sonata, and when we name it as the composer’s solitary excursion into the
classical domain, it is with full consciousness that Liszt’s “fantasia
quasi-sonata,” after a reading of Dante, in Années de Pèlerinage, is
hardly to be described as a sonata. What is a sonata? Liszt answers the
question in his highly original work. He rejects the old order of three
or four separate movements, substituting a more complete organism. It may
not be, formally speaking, the Haydn, Mozart, or early Beethoven sonata.
Liszt employs as a spring-board the last sonatas of Beethoven to launch
him into novel territory (study opus 110 in A flat and you will recognize
the truth of this contention).
Charles Souilier has declared that the sonata expired with the eighteenth
century, which gave it birth. This is a rather risky statement. If true,
we should have missed such beautiful music in the form—Schumann, Chopin,
Brahms, Liszt. The Hungarian’s astonishing use of the leading-movement
and its metamorphosis, one theme of the slow introduction, as Shedlock,
in his book on The Pianoforte Sonata, is the source whence he derives the
principal part of his tone picture, and, adds Mr. Shedlock, “everything
depends on the quality and latent power of the fertilizing germ.” But on
the first page of the B minor sonata may be found Wotan’s chief theme,
the scream of Kundry, and a color scheme which Wagner later incorporated
in the Ring and Parsifal. So the “fertilizing germ” is not missing.
As for the form, that is easily discernible. Liszt has spun a complex
web, his sonata is an arabesque, and a logical one, for nothing is more
inexorably logical than a seemingly loose rhapsody. The chief fault
of this composition is not its form or lack of melodic invention, but
its length—it demands at least thirty-five minutes to play—caused by
repetitions, though in different keys, thus defeating the very purpose
for which it was composed, _i. e._, suppression of unnecessary episodes
and breaks in the continuity. The same criticism holds good for the
Symphonic Poems.
Liszt’s influence was not only profound upon his contemporaries—witness
Wagner—but on the latter-day school, headed by Richard Strauss, whose
tone poems are inconceivable without Liszt’s discoveries. He also
inspired the Russians, and his impressionism is the base of Debussy
and Ravel’s piano music. Rimsky-Korsakoff we long ago christened the
Russian Berlioz, yet he owes Liszt more; from Berlioz he learned how to
paint orchestrally, but in his manner of composition he leans heavily on
the Hungarian. Sadko comes from Liszt’s symphonic poem, Ce qu’on entend
sur la montagne, while Antar and Scheherazade come from Harold and the
Faust symphony. As a French critic has written: “The brand of Liszt
remains ineffaceable” on those charming works of Rimsky-Korsakoff. Like
Moses, Liszt saw the Promised Land, but was destined never to enter it.
He suffered the fate of intermediate types. He was recognized too late.
Dr. Frederick Niecks, the biographer of Chopin, has wisely said: “Be,
however, the ultimate fate of his works what it may, there will always
remain to Liszt the fame of a daring striver, a fruitful originator, and
a wide-ranging quickener.”