that there is a real difference "'twixt tweedledum and tweedledee."
To those who accept music, as they accept soup, as one of the
conventional details of a polite existence, all this pother about
Strauss must seem unnecessary, yet since it has come, they naturally
desire to know what it is all about. They must, then, begin by
recognizing the fact that the modern orchestra has developed from
a collection of ill-assorted and misunderstood instruments into a
single instrument, the most eloquent at the disposal of the composer.
It is majestic in power, royal in dignity, brilliant in gayety,
convulsing in sport, inspiring in appeal, melting in supplication.
Its variety of tonal shades is exhaustless. Its scale ranges from the
profoundest bass to the acutest treble. Its dynamic power modulates
from the faintest whisper of a pianissimo to the thunderous crash of
a fortissimo. It sings, it laughs, it weeps, it woos, it storms, it
hymns, it meditates,--all at the command of the composer who knows
how to utilize its powers.
Yet it is still an imperfectly understood instrument. Remember always
that music is the youngest of our modern arts. Remember, too, that
although we can trace its beginnings back to the fourth century of
the Christian era, we find that twelve hundred years were occupied
with the development of a single form of music,--vocal polyphony,
the form in which the mighty masterpieces of the Roman Church down
to the day of Lasso and Palestrina were composed. The masters of
this vocal polyphony were engaged in studying how they could compose
for the liturgy of the church music in which several voice-parts,
each singing a melody, could sound simultaneously and yet produce
agreeable harmonies. The discovery of the principles underlying this
method was made slowly, yet it was essential that this discovery
should be made. Without it musical art could not advance, for the
laws of counterpoint and harmony are the first principles of musical
art.
Toward the close of the sixteenth century a change came over
the spirit of music. The mass of the Roman Church had become
so complicated and ornate in its style of composition that the
congregations did not know what words of the liturgy were sung. The
revival of Greek learning in Italy brought with it the study of the
Greek Testament in the original, and this study revealed the defects
of the Vulgate used by the church. A blow at Latin was a blow at
the authority of the church, and the questionings aroused by the
revelations of the Greek Testament touched the mass, and made the
people desirous of hearing the text and knowing what it was about.
Such a demand called for a simplification of musical style. This
demand was strengthened by the invention of printing. The people
began to get books and to read, and that led them to think and
inquire. Furthermore the chaste beauty of Greek art had become known,
and its influence promoted the simplification of musical style in the
church. The broad and dignified hymns employed by the great reformer,
Martin Luther, were another powerful argument in favor of simpler
music in the sanctuary. The church was not blind to the signs of the
time, and its composers made some efforts toward clarifying their
style.
The revival of Greek learning led also to an attempt to resuscitate
the dead Greek drama, or rather to reconstruct the Italian play
on its lines. The fact that the Greeks had chanted rather than
declaimed their dramatic texts suggested to the little band of
Italian enthusiasts led by Galilei, Peri, and Caccini, an attempt
to reproduce this musical delivery. Their efforts resulted in the
invention of dramatic recitative and the birth of opera. With the
advent of this form of vocal art the supremacy of church polyphony
was overthrown. It did not cease to exist, but it lost its dominion
over the musical world, and it almost stopped developing. To this day
the works of Palestrina composed in the second half of the sixteenth
century remain the model and the despair of church composers. Handel
and Bach, introducing more modern harmonies and employing the
resources of the orchestra, which Palestrina and his predecessors
never used, carried vocal polyphony a little further, but their
advance was external rather than fundamental.
It was at this stage of musical progress that the orchestra made its
appearance,--a feeble, tottering, purposeless instrumental infant.
Collections of instruments had of course existed. Millionaires of
the Middle Ages drowned the inanities of their dinner conversation
with banquet music, just as the moderns do. But their assemblies of
instruments were merely fortuitous. Any instruments which chanced to
be in the house, and for which there were players, were utilized.
There was no music specially written for these orchestras. We may
suppose that they played the popular tunes of the day. When the opera
came into existence, some sort of orchestra had to be extemporized.
Here again in the beginning any instruments easily accessible seem
to have been taken up. It was not till Claudio Monteverde began
his experiments in instrumental combinations in his operas in the
early part of the seventeenth century that anything like method in
instrumentation was discernible.
Monteverde began the exploration of the resources of each instrument
in characteristic expression. He endeavored to measure the powers
of the viol, the trumpet, the organ, and certain combinations of
instruments as illustrators of dramatic action. He invented some
of the now familiar tricks of orchestration, such as the tremolo
and the pizzicato. Furthermore he created an instrumental figure to
imitate the galloping of horses and another to depict the struggle
of a combat, and thus was really the artistic progenitor of Richard
Strauss, with his battle dins and his pirouetting maids. Succeeding
composers were not slow to follow the suggestions offered by the work
of Monteverde. The opera became a field for instrumental experiment,
and the orchestra, as employed by the operatic composers, was
continually in advance of the symphonic orchestra in the variety and
extent of its combinations and in the utilization of the special
powers of each individual instrument. This continued to be the case
up to the time of Liszt, Berlioz, and Wagner, when the technics
of conventional orchestration were so thoroughly established that
the demands of the new romantic school of composers affected the
orchestra simultaneously in opera and symphonic composition.
That the operatic orchestra should have taken the lead was perfectly
natural. When vocal polyphony was deposed from its supremacy,
instrumental music was in its infancy. Only the organ had achieved
anything approaching independence, and that was because all the
leading composers had been writing for the church and knew the church
instrument. For practice at home they used the clavichord, one of the
forerunners of the piano, and they began presently to compose special
music for it, but in the style of their organ music. Gradually they
fell into the way of writing for small groups of instruments, and
after a time the orchestra found its way from the opera house to the
church, and the orchestrally accompanied mass came into existence.
But meanwhile the composers who wrote for the clavier, with the aid
of those who wrote for the solo violin, were fashioning a form, and
after a time the sonata began to assume a definite shape. Now it was
borne in upon composers that their auditors would not arrive at the
opera in time to hear the overture, for operatic publics were much
the same then as they are now; and the poor composers had recourse to
writing their overtures so that they could be played independently
and having them performed at concerts. As these overtures were
written in a form founded upon the principles of the sonata form,
nothing was more natural than that gradually composers should be led
to the composition of complete sonatas for orchestra, and a sonata
for orchestra is a symphony.
In the middle of the eighteenth century, then, after Sebastian
Bach had carried the piano solo through the splendors of his "Well
Tempered Clavichord," and the piano sonata had attained something
like defined shape, we see Stammitz, Gossec, and, at length, Haydn
producing thin, tentative weakly orchestrated sonatas for orchestra,
and the real development of independent orchestral composition began.
This was nearly a century and a half after the birth of the orchestra
as an adjunct to the opera, and the same length of time after the
beginning of independent composition for the clavichord. In other
words, although the modern art of music may fairly be said to have
begun at least as early as the beginning of the twelfth century,
when the fundamental principles of counterpoint were enunciated by
the French masters, the most splendid and powerful of all musical
instruments, the orchestra, is to-day in its infancy. For if the
masters of vocal polyphony took some twelve centuries to elaborate
their science, it is fair to presume that, even though the general
laws of music are now firmly established, the technics of the
orchestra and of orchestral composition, which are a little over a
hundred years old, are yet by no means fully understood.
The method of composition employed by the early masters of
orchestral music was elaborate, yet not recondite. It was a system
of architecture in tones, and its achievements were distinctly
satisfying to the æsthetic discernment and to the appetite of
the human mind for a logical arrangement of ideas. Four parts or
movements were allotted to a symphonic work. Contrast of time,
rhythm, key, and harmonic color was sought. Each movement differed
from that next to it. Variety in unity was the ultimate object.
But each movement had to have a well-defined shape within itself.
Two melodic ideas, complementary to each other in key, rhythmic
nature, and sentiment, were invented. They were held up for the
inspection of the hearer at the beginning of the movement Then the
composer embarked upon what was called the "working out." He took the
essential features of his two melodies and juggled them through the
tricks of musical metamorphosis. He dressed them in new harmonies;
he made them writhe in the embraces of counterpoint; he expanded
them into new melodies; he sang them with the different voices of
the instrumental body. In the end he repeated them in their original
shape, and brought his movement to a close. The entire purpose was
the treatment of themes. The only aim was to make symmetrical,
intelligible, interesting music.
In evolving this form the composers fell, as I have said, into a
conventional use of their orchestra. They had three choirs, one of
wooden wind instruments, one of brass, and one of strings played
with bows. They allotted fixed functions to each choir and to the
members of each, and there they stopped. Occasionally a hint from
the operatic treatment of the instruments enlightened them and they
made a slight advance, but nevertheless, when Beethoven came to
write his symphonies, in which he attempted to make orchestral music
attain something more than mere musical beauty, he found himself
hampered by the conventionalities of symphonic orchestration, as
well as by those of the symphonic form. It was the limitation of the
form, indeed, which restrained the instrumentation. The form itself
had first reached definiteness with Haydn, who died when Beethoven
was thirty-nine. Only in his later years did Haydn learn the use of
clarinets, the most important members of the wood wind choir.
Beethoven, striving to make the symphony a vehicle for emotional
expression, was compelled to busy himself with changes in the form,
and he gave no special study to instrumental effects. He used such
new ones as readily suggested themselves to him, but they were
nothing more than elaborations of the old conventions. However, the
seed sown by Beethoven speedily bloomed in the growth of the new
romantic school. The principal tenet of this school was that music
must express emotions, and that the form must develop entirely
from the emotional purpose and plan of the work. Two distinguished
explorers of this new style devoted their highest efforts to the
production of orchestral composition.
Liszt endeavored to tell stories in music by erasing the dividing
line between movements and writing his work all in one piece. He
retained the two contrasting themes of the old symphonists, but
he asked his hearers to affix a meaning to each of them. Then he
proceeded to handle them in much the same way as the symphonists
did, working them out, and varying them with much skill, though
always with a view to suggesting the development of the incidents
of his story. To such a purpose the resources of orchestral color
lent mighty aid, and Liszt was not slow to perceive this. He began
to draw away from the conventions of the symphonists, and to seek
for new and striking instrumental combinations. Nevertheless in his
compositions for orchestra Liszt was the debtor of two men much more
remarkable than himself, namely, Wagner and Berlioz. From the former
he got the idea of the use of themes with definite meanings attached
to them. From the latter he obtained the suggestion of the employment
of the orchestra to tell stories and much information as to its
technics. Berlioz, however, continued the use of separate movements,
and his attempts to use definitely representative themes were few and
uncertain. He preceded Wagner, nevertheless, in the revelation of the
resources of the orchestra, and he antedated Liszt in the use of the
orchestra for romantic composition.
Later imitators of Berlioz and Liszt failed to perceive anything
except the vast color schemes of their orchestration. Borrowing a few
of the conventional figures of the older writers, such as Haydn's sea
waves and Beethoven's thunder-storms, they asked us to see things
through a kaleidoscope of instrumental color. They forgot that we
could not understand them when they made no logical appeal to our
intelligence.
Richard Strauss, standing upon the vantage ground made for him by
Berlioz, Liszt, and Wagner, has evidently tried to carry the direct
expression of the orchestra to a higher plane by utilizing the best
elements of their work. He has sought to make the orchestra tell
stories, but he has not made the error of supposing that he could
ignore the fundamental principles of musical form which constituted
the ground plan of the old symphony. He has utilized themes with
definite meanings attached to them, as Wagner did, without confining
himself to two, as the older writers did, and as Liszt did in most of
his works. He has returned in his later compositions to the fashion
of clearly separated movements, while he has made them pass before
the hearer without pauses between any two of them. He has developed
his themes according to the principles laid down by the symphonic
masters, and has striven to enforce their meaning with all the
effects of orchestral color. And withal he has endeavored to compose
only music with a purpose, never music for its own sake. In short,
Strauss has shown that the principles of musical form which the
earlier writers painfully evolved out of their attempts to produce
nothing beyond musical beauty, not only can be, but must be, utilized
by the composer who cares nothing whatever about musical beauty, and
who aims only at making music a means of expression.
This I believe to be Strauss's greatest and most significant
achievement. It is the legacy which he will leave to his successors,
and which will influence the progress of musical development.
His handling of the orchestra itself is a natural outgrowth of
the researches of Berlioz and Wagner. The former left little to
be learned about the capacity of each individual instrument; the
latter developed to an extraordinary degree the employment of many
voice-parts and the use of striking combinations. The early writers,
for example, used violins always in two parts, whereas Wagner
divided them sometimes into as many as fifteen. Flutes, oboes, and
clarinets were used by the classic masters in pairs; Wagner began to
employ them by threes. Strauss uses three or four of each. He makes
his orchestra sing in many parts, and he keeps the various voices
weaving and interweaving in marvellously learned counterpoint. When
he wants a great climax of sound, he gets one that is overwhelming.
Furthermore, he habitually introduces solo voices among the mass of
tone. He individualizes his instruments, and in some compositions
fairly casts them for definite dramatic impersonations. Musicians
will understand me when I add that he has asked every orchestral
player to be a virtuoso. He writes formidably difficult passages
for horns, for trombones, for oboes. He makes no concessions to the
technical difficulties of the instruments, as the older writers did.
He treats the instruments, as Wagner treated human voices, simply as
means of expression. The players must master the difficulties.
The critical quarrel with Strauss is based upon three grounds:
first, that he endeavors to make music tell a complete story; second,
that he seeks materials which are unsuited to musical embodiment;
and, third, that he writes ugly music. Composers have yielded to
the temptations of their fancies since the earliest days. Away back
in the fifteenth century, Jannequin tried to describe The Cries of
Paris in four-part vocal polyphony. Later composers fashioned piano
pieces which were supposed to tell whole histories. Ambros, the
distinguished German historian of music, felt it incumbent on him to
write a book to show where the communicative power of music ended
and the aid of text must be called in. Wagner declared that music
unassisted could go no further than Beethoven's symphonies, and that
the last movement of the Ninth Symphony was a confession of that fact.
It was long ago conceded that music could depict the broader
emotions. It has generally been denied that it could go into details
or explain to the hearer the causes of the feelings which it
expressed. Yet by the judicious use of titles and the establishment
of a connection between a composition and some well-known drama or
poem, the imagination of the hearer is stimulated to conceive the
meaning of many details otherwise incomprehensible. Strauss goes
the furthest in the elaboration of detail. He uses numerous themes,
each a guiding motive in the Wagnerian sense, and he asks us to
follow them through a myriad of musical workings out, all having
direct significance in telling a story. The stories are not without
unpleasant incidents and the music is rasping in its ugliness at
times. But this is not for us to judge. What is said of the music of
Strauss now was said twenty-five years ago of Wagner's. But a few
years, and the acidulated croakings of the singer of Munich may be
as sweet upon our ears as now are the endless melodic weavings of
"Tristan und Isolde."
Of the ideas which lie behind the music of Strauss less can be
said in opposition now than could be said five years ago. Then we
knew Strauss as the writer of "Don Juan," an attempt to put into
music the sensuality of a libertine, his final satiety, his utter
coldness of heart; of "Death and Apotheosis," a weird endeavor
to portray with an orchestra the horrors of dissolution, the
gasps, the struggles, the death-rattle, the _tremor mortis_; "Till
Eulenspiegel's Merry Pranks," a study in musical depiction of
wandering vulgarity, of jocular obscenity, a vast and coruscating
jumble of instrumental cackles about things unfit to be mentioned.
We felt that the nineteenth century was closing with something like
midsummer madness in art. With Ibsens, Maeterlincks, and Strausses
plucking like soulless ghouls upon the snapping heart-strings of
humanity, treating the heart as a monochord for the scientific
measurement of intervals of pain, and finally poking with their
skeleton fingers in the ashes of the tomb to see if they could not
find a single smouldering ember of human agony, we had attained a
rare state of morbidity in art. We felt that when Art had turned for
her inspiration to the asylum, the brothel, and the pesthouse, it
was time for a new renaissance. Strauss was our musical Maeterlinck,
our tonal Ibsen. Vague, indefinable fancies, grotesque and monstrous
mysticisms, gaunt shapes and shapeless horrors, seemed to be his
substitutes for clean, strong, pure ideals; and when he set to music
Friedrich Nietzsche's "Thus Spake Zarathustra," the philosophy of
the solution of "world riddles," we thought he had utterly gone mad.
For in this work we found the highest skill in the development and
polyphonic treatment of leading motives devoted to an attempt to make
music lecture on metaphysics, when all the time it was perfectly
obvious that without reading Nietzsche's book no one could have any
notion of the composer's intent. The mastery of orchestration and of
the technics of composition shown in this work convinced thoughtful
critics that Strauss was not to be sniffed out of consideration. Here
was a force to be reckoned with in musical progress, even though it
was mistakenly wielded.
With the introduction of "A Hero's Life," Strauss seemed suddenly
to have entered upon cleaner vision. To this day I am lost in wonder
at the vast and appalling ugliness of some parts of the composition,
but I know that custom will make dear to us musical idioms which now
excite our antipathy. That is an old story. Artusi of Bologna said
that Monteverde had lost sight of the true purpose of music,--to
give pleasure. A similar accusation was once brought against the
mellifluous and tactful Rossini. It was shouted through Europe
against Wagner. We may use it against Strauss, but if we do, we must
chance the ridicule of the hereafter. "A Hero's Life," despite its
frequent attempts to make music speak more definitely than music can,
is based on broad moods which are suitable for musical exposition.
Wild, chaotic, discordant as many of the passages of this remarkable
work certainly seem to us now, there is no denying the extraordinary
mastership shown in its thematic development. The Wagnerian method
of modifying themes in rhythm and harmony so as to alter their
dramatic significance is combined successfully with the methods of
the classicists in working out. Modern polyphony, the polyphony of
hazardous cross paths in acrid harmony, of the Impinging contrapuntal
curves, is handled with consummate ease. It is orchestral technic
of the highest kind, but it all aims at making music which shall
describe the minutest feelings, the finest shades of thought, and the
most varied actions of personages whom the hearer must see with his
mind's eye.
It aims at a wider and more detailed expression than the repulsive
"Don Juan" and the vulgar "Till Eulenspiegel," but it is clean and
wholesome in tone, and most of its material is safe from the charge
of unfitness for publication. It is not impossible to conceive of
Strauss after producing this work as looking back over his entire
orchestral product and addressing us in the words of the inscrutable
McIntosh Jellaludin: "Some of it must go; the public are fools
and prudish fools. I was their servant once. But do your mangling
gently--very gently. It is a great work, and I have paid for it in
seven years' damnation."
It is too soon for us to say that Strauss will influence the
future. He may leave us nothing but certain purely mechanical
improvements in orchestral technics. Even these will have their
value. Yet all recent attempts at progress in music have been in the
direction of more definite expression, and Strauss may be only a
stepping-stone in an advance toward that blissful epoch whose hearers
will display as much imagination as its composers, that transcendent
condition in which genius understands genius. As in that faculty-free
heaven celebrated in undergraduate song, no musical critics will be
there. Every man will be his own critic. The millennium will have
come.
II.--THE ÆSTHETIC VIEW
Denique sit quidvis, simplex duntaxat et unum.
HORACE, _Ars Poetica_.
Mr. Strauss has been acclaimed as an explorer, a pathfinder in the
wilderness of new art. But after all he is simply a product, or
perhaps it would be more exact to say a result; for the trend of
musical art in the past century was toward representation.