descriptive music, which is a species of mimetics. The transfer of
peculiar sounds and characteristic sound-motions, as in the cases of
whistling wind and undulating forest billows, to the musical canvas,
is a simple and natural process. It pleases the most superficial mind
by the translation of one art into terms of another. To "paint" in
sounds, as the musicians term it, is a pretty and poetic fancy. It is
like the poet's use of tone-speech to imitate qualities or motions.
It is the onomatopoetic in music. Sometimes it is the paronymous.
We are all cultivated savages. The primeval hordes of Europe had
their rude rhythms and their inarticulate cries, which were as
music to their ears. Significance was attached to these sounds
wholly because of their external resemblance to something lying in a
different plane of human experience. We have refined and extended the
scale and have attuned our ears and our spirits to higher tones. We
hear triads in stones, scales in running brooks, and chords of the
diminished seventh in everything.
How long was it before the musicians ceased to content themselves
with their tone pictures of ocean waves and murmuring streams?
Surely, it was not long after Monteverde found the rhythmic and
instrumental equivalents for the galloping of horses and the crashing
together of gallant and knightly combatants that the dream of joy or
woe, uttered in songs without words, entered the minds of composers.
Monteverde's lament of Arianna showed that the plaint of a sorrowing
heart might be most musical, most melancholy. Doubtless, as the
indolent Venetian gondolier hummed the melody and forgot the words
through the shining avenues of the island city, the thought came
dimly to him, as it did clearly to the musician, that the tune was
sad and saddening, even without the text.
But not till the time of Beethoven was a direct and explicit effort
made to paint soul pictures in wordless music. Beethoven was indeed
the regenerator of instrumental art, in that he demonstrated with
splendid and convincing power in his later symphonies that the
classic sonata form could sing the weal and woe of humanity with
eloquence as noble as that of the opera aria aided by the explanatory
comment of its own verses.
Beethoven, however, contented himself with broad outlines. He sang
passion, joy, grief, resolution, courage, force; but never did he
essay to impart to his music the virtue of an explanation. The fifth
symphony explains itself and it asks no aid from without. It does not
lean back against a wall of text for its support.
The seventh symphony has been subjected to various processes of
explanation, but it reads most clearly in its own light as a series
of mood pictures. The ninth symphony goes further, and here Beethoven
frankly confessed that in order to make his purpose clear he needed
text. The construction of the last movement brings to the hearer in
its opening measures a solution of the meaning of the three preceding
movements. It is the Wagnerian device of prophesying with themes in
the early part of a work, and furnishing the key when at length the
theme is associated with text later in the composition. There is no
utterly new thing under the _cantus firmus_.
Beethoven's psychographics are general and not specific. He does not
seek to chase the emotion to its source and to speculate upon its
nature and origin. He is content to represent it in tone, to decorate
it, if you will, with instrumental color, but there he stops. Shall
we say that therefore Beethoven's psychometry was saner and more
artistic than that of Strauss and his few brothers in art?
It is a question similar to that which arises in literature anent
the comparative merits of Shakespeare and Ibsen. But here is a
substantial difference. Shakespeare was unquestionably a mighty poet,
and Ibsen is a prose dramatist pure and simple. Shakespeare was an
idealist and Ibsen is the arch realist of the age. It is not just
criticism to compare these two. You may compare Clyde Fitch with
Sheridan or Augustus Thomas with Robertson, if you will, but it is
no more honest to compare Ibsen with Shakespeare than it would be to
compare him with Æschylus.
But when you come to music, you come to a different issue. Absolute
music is an entity. It is a very special branch of an art which has
varieties. The lied, for example, is an art form by itself; so is
the oratorio, and so again is the music drama of Wagner. It were
foolish to try to compare the symphonies of Beethoven with the songs
of Schubert and thence to decide which was the greater composer.
The development of the symphonic branch of musical art is that in
which Beethoven was most specially concerned, and it is to his
successors in that field that we must look to study the outcome of
his innovations.
When we trace the advance of symphonic art from Beethoven to
Strauss, we find a steady and irresistible movement away from the
representation of broad, fundamental soul states, from a strictly
scientific method of musical psychostatics down to a condition in
which the orchestra is transformed into a psychoscope, and the
symphony is become a treatise on mental diseases and methods of
conversing with the dead. Composers seem bent on pinning down to
their artistic dissecting-tables the very essence of the soul itself.
The simple imitative method of the pristine descriptions in tone
has become neurotic mimicry, and the melodic and harmonic idioms
hint that the modern ear is suffering from acute myringomycrosis, a
cheerful affliction caused by the growth of fungi on the ear drum.
Fungi are plentiful in damp and noisome places, and these seem to be
the artistic haunts of the imaginations of the Ibscene realists in
music.
This so-called "romantic" music of to-day owes a considerable debt
to the Abbé Liszt, whose undertakings in the domain of art are
overestimated by his adulators and undervalued by his detractors.
But there is no practical denial of the fact that Liszt fashioned a
system and set up a manner in his symphonic poem. Richard Strauss
might have been possible without Liszt, but as matters stand we are
bound to acknowledge the debt of the composer of "Don Juan" to the
composer of "Tasso."
Yet how far beyond Liszt has the psychologic composition of to-day
advanced? Liszt did undertake to make his music tell stories, and
that is a thing which, with all deference to Liszt, music cannot do
and never has done. You have to read Byron's "Mazeppa" to understand
Liszt's, just as you have to read Bürger's "Lenore" if you wish to
understand so naïve a story-teller as Raff's "Lenore" symphony. How
much more necessary is it to read Maeterlinck's "Death of Tintagiles"
in order to understand Charles Martin Loeffler? Not a bit.
But Liszt never dreamed of analyzing soul states and those
mysterious conflicts of soul and body which form the materials of
psychomachy. He never sought to trace the origin of life nor the
seat of the vital spark. The abbé was something of a mystic, too,
but he knew he was not a genius. A very able dissimulator, a pious
Mephistopheles, a Machiavellian master of musical arts, and the
father of Cosima Wagner, he exploited his external impositions with
consummate skill; and when he sat down to compose, he swore fealty to
the highest ideals with all the sincerity of Iago swearing vengeance
at the side of the kneeling Othello.
He sent forth into the easy world his purple and yellow masterpieces,
and the world called them royal. A little drawing and a great deal
of color was what he offered, and the public saw in his splotches of
sound Turneresque mystery and mastery. The dear public still loves
these works, and will probably continue to do so for many years.
And in one respect the public is right. Liszt never tried to be
too definite. He left something to the imagination, and when the
public has not any imagination, it imagines that it has, and that
it is discerning things in Liszt's works which Liszt himself never
discovered.
Camille Saint-Saëns of France is, in his boulevardian way, a
follower of Liszt. He also has written symphonic poems and he has
been wise enough not to go to the uttermost limits of detailed
expression. His Hercules is a gentleman and his Omphale dwelt not far
from the Rue de Berlin. Hercules went to see her in a Paris cab--you
can hear the cocher swear. Omphale dressed him in a Paquin gown and
dealt him exquisite love-taps with his rosewood opera cane.
Dainty Hercules of the Boulevard des Italiens and seductive Omphale
of the Rue de Berlin! Ye are the Watteau pictures of a would-be
pastoral, the mincing marionettes of a cigarette smoker's dream.
Between such gentle figures as you and the chortling barbarians of
the Strauss phantasy there is the vast and impassable gulf of fetid
inspiration which separates Alexander Pope from Rabelais. Though
he paint Phaeton swinging wide the chariot of the sun through the
affrighted heavens and plunging headlong into Eridanus, or Death
strumming the "zig et zig et zag sur son violon," Saint-Saëns is
always a gentleman, the Mendelssohn of romantic orchestration.
But the symphonic poem is not confined to Liszt and Saint-Saëns. It
has spread itself through all Europe and has inoculated the symphony.
Poor Rubinstein! When he wrote his "Ocean" symphony, he held himself
within the limits of the art of composition as formulated by
Beethoven in his fifth and seventh symphonies. He painted broad mood
pictures. He imitated motions as frankly as Haydn. He was elementary,
even at times elemental. At any rate, he was sane. He respected
the boundaries that lie, as Ambros has shown us, between music and
poetry, and did not call upon the tone art to write treatises and
handbooks. He strove to induce music to sing the might and majesty of
the ocean, but he did not ask it to find the latitude and longitude.
Other masters have struggled to make the symphony more definite in
its tale-telling, but till to-day it has succeeded in keeping its
place as the epitome of general emotional states. Tschaïkowsky--most
vigorous, if not most subtle, of all recent masters, bursting with
savage passions, flaming with wild northern fancies--wrote into the
symphony the representation of all human sufferings, the yearnings
and grim revel, the madness and despair of Russia. But he clung to
the deep-laid emotional scheme.
In his overtures he has gone not a whit further than Beethoven did
in the "Leonore" No. 3. Tschaïkowsky's "Hamlet," his "Romeo and
Juliet," are mood pictures, perfectly comprehensible to all who know
the dramas. They class with such works as Goldmark's "Sakuntala" and
"Prometheus." Of these latter how clear and convincing is the second
with its voices of sea nymphs, its solitude of the ocean, its mad
effort of the man, and its lightning blast of Jove.
True, you must know Æschylus, and therein lies the weakness of all
this kind of music, its temptation and its danger. If we may go so
far, how are we to be estopped from prying further into the mysteries
of musical depiction?
How this field has tempted the Frenchmen, and how little they have
found in it! After all, Saint-Saëns is not so bad. Think of the
intricate platitudes, the prolix prosiness and lofty emptiness of
Bruneau's "Penthesilée" and "La Belle aux Bois Dormant" (poèmes
symphoniques au sérieux, mes amis), while Godard, Joncières,
Paladilhe, and others have dipped respectfully into the romantic
_potage_ and barely soiled their fingers. But all have striven to
paint in tones, and have at any rate gone as far as sketching in
detail.
Possibly the time will come when music will be a universal language.
Certain cadences will be accepted in China, in Sussex, or in New
Jersey, as signifying such and such emotions or ideas, and certain
resolutions of suspensions will have a meaning current in St.
Petersburg, Vienna, and Cincinnati. But that time has not yet come,
and the programme note is still an essential accessory either before
or after the offence of the intimate symphonic poem.
The composers, while acknowledging this, continue to go forward
along the path which they have chosen. Music is daily moving away
from the broad mood pictures of Beethoven toward some form in which
every phrase shall have its part and place in the exposition of soul
secrets. The Frenchmen have made but little success, as we have seen,
for they have treated their composition, not as literary music, but
as literature itself.
If the work of Richard Strauss has any permanent significance at
all, it is that the æsthetic basis of the Liszt and Tschaïkowsky
compositions, the Goldmark overtures and the polished tone poems
of the Frenchmen is false, and that every attempt to rear upon it
a lasting art form must be futile. Here need be no discussion of
the stupendous achievements of Strauss's orchestration, nor the
astounding hideousness of his harmonic plan.
Who was it said recently that the good Mr. Loeffler of Boston
thought music in a scale of his own? The Loeffler scale--C, D, E,
F sharp, G sharp, A sharp, C. How sharper than a serpent's tooth!
Strauss thinks in a harmony of his own. A harmony? A cacophony. The
clash of jarring discord is as honey on the palate of his ear. The
tonic triad is not a stranger to him, but its devilish consonance of
the major third is to his mind, as it was to the pious fancies of the
mediæval fathers, the spirit of tonal evil, the seductive embodiment
of sensual sweetness.
Listen to his eternal feminine. When she plays the virtuous Kundry
to his Hero of the "Heldenleben" or the Venus to his nomadic
"Eulenspiegel" Tannhäuser, she sings in the wickedly purring major
mode. But when heroic virtue slaughters ink-stained critics or scales
the battlements of jarring worlds and plants the standard of manhood
on a minaret of the universe, then titanic visions are expressed
in crashing collisions of minor seconds or in strangled sixths
and desiccated elevenths. Trumpets bleat through their noses, and
clarinets chuckle in staccato treble; trombones rattle in raucous
gurgles, and bassoons snort in hoarse expirations.
But all this is superficial. This is the manner, not the matter
of the Strauss music. How far can this master magician, this royal
juggler with resolutions and suspensions, this acrobat of the flying
chord, go with his endeavor to make music say for him the things
that the entire decadent literature of modern Europe has striven to
put down in plain words? If Strauss means anything, he means that
Beethoven and Schumann were but the avant couriers of a vast march
of progress into the bowels of delineation, the vitals of psychic
communication.
Liszt and Tschaïkowsky and Goldmark postulated a false theory of
orchestral art because they clearly defined limitations. They
promulgated by their practice the doctrine that only the broader
moods of story could be represented in music. Strauss preaches that
when Beethoven depicted in his fifth symphony the struggle of a soul
and for the finer illustration of his thought united the scherzo with
the finale, he opened the gateway to indefinite progress, and swung
wide a banner with the old device, "Facilis descensus Averno."
Suppose, however, that this paragraph in the artistic treatise of
Strauss contains a germinal truth, does it of necessity follow that
to advance along the opened path is to finish in the corruption and
rank odor of the morgue? What has so got the start of the majestic
art of music as to lead it to the grave? First of all, decadent
poetry and fiction. When music began to strive to make itself a
representative art, it confronted itself with a choice of objects.
Primarily it had human life and experience as found in the composer's
own soul, and this was the noblest source of all. "Look into thine
own heart and write," is excellent advice for a composer. Then it had
literature, the conservation of the experience and observation of
man from the literary point of view. With these two sources it had
to rest content, for neither sculpture nor painting offered anything
other than the composition of life translated into other terms. The
musician would better paint the Laocoön from his own conception than
from the conception of the sculptor. He would but make music and
water of Raphael's Madonna if he studied her instead of the Mary of
the Holy Writ.
How long did it take the musician to discover that the Virgin was
not such inspiring musical material as Mary Magdalen? Just as long
as it took him to learn that he could not make a great composition
out of a steady flow of sweetness, that he must have a warring of
elements in his work, and that there must be some melodic principle
striving for victory and at the end emerging from temporary tonal
chaos in a pæan of triumph. The temptation of St. Anthony was better
matter for the composer than the meditations of St. Augustine, and
the fast of Christ in the wilderness was less alluring than the
legend of Herodias and John the Baptist.
In other words, the modern musician has found his finest inspirations
in that struggle of good with evil in the human soul which has
inspired the works of the greatest modern dramatists. The only
question that remained to be solved after this was, How far would the
musician go? The dramatist and the poet ran morbid; the musician,
seeking his inspiration in the records of human souls made in the
terms of literature, followed the man of the pen into the slough of
despond.
The morbid studies of such dramatists as Ibsen and Maeterlinck are
the real key to the music of such a composer as Strauss. Yet let
us not deny that the musician is less drastic in his methods than
the literary men. Strauss has indeed written his "Don Juan" and his
"Death and Apotheosis," but he has placed upon their pages some
passages of marvellous beauty. It is a beauty of orchestral idiom,
of instrumental development, rather than of melodic exfoliation.
Strauss, when all is said and done, is not master of melodic
invention, but he speaks a language which is all his own, and he
rises at times to a power of sonorous utterance which has not been
equalled in these modern days except by Wagner.
In his "Heldenleben" he has written more clearly than in some of
his earlier works, but when all is said, his chief concern seems to
be the dissection of souls for the purpose of exposing the lurking
spot of disease. He gives us psychonosology--the study of mental
diseases--rather than psychostatics--the study of the permanent
conditions of the soul--which Beethoven gave us.
Whether this be right or wrong, true or false art, is not for the
present to decide. Certainly such music is not for the masses. It
is not for those who persist in listening to tunes as tunes only
and condemning as no music that music which aims at some sort of
representation.
To condemn such music is to throw over the later works of Beethoven,
the choicest products of Chopin and Schumann, and many another
creation with which even the mere tune-lover would be loath to
part. But when the broad principles of all art are applied to the
soul searchings of Richard Strauss, questionings will arise. Is
it art? Certainly not, by the law of Schopenhauer, which guided
Wagner,--eternal ideas represented by means of prototypes.
This will hardly apply to Strauss's "Don Juan" or his "Till
Eulenspiegel." Beauty has thus far been the acknowledged end of all
art. Are these things beautiful? Is their æsthetic basis lofty and
wholesome? Surely not. Yet old Horace was indisputably right. Life is
short, and art is long. How many viewless ages yet shall run before
the process be complete? Who are we, to make final conclusions and
splutter our puny "Quod erat demonstrandum"? Let us wait.
For the fleeting present we must hang pendulous between two positive
extremes. Strauss is a symphonic poet or a symphonic poetaster. He is
a dreamer of grandly grotesque visions, a Cervantes, a Rabelais, if
you will, or a mere opium-eater without the genius of a De Quincey.
Something of the mystic phantasy of De Quincey certainly lurks in
the brain of him who wrote "Tod und Verklärung," and out of the
contrapuntal abyss of "Zarathustra" emerges at the last something
like the stupendous finale of the "Dream-Fugue":--
"Then was completed the passion of the mighty fugue. The
golden tubes of the organ, which had as yet but muttered
at intervals,--gleaming among clouds and surges of
incense,--threw up, as from fountains unfathomable, columns
of heart-shattering music. Choir and anti-choir were filling
fast with unknown voices. Thou also, dying trumpeter, with
thy love that was victorious and thy anguish that was finishing,
didst enter the tumult; trumpet and echo--farewell love and
farewell anguish--rang through the dreadful sanctus."
Or is it all, this music of Strauss, a monstrous joke, and does
the man laugh in his sleeve at the troubled world? Is he not only
a musical Rabelais, but also that malodorous jest of a Rabelaisian
brain, Gargantua himself?
"One of his governesses told me that at the very sound of
pints and flagons he would fall into an ecstasy, as if he
were tasting the joys of Paradise; and upon consideration
of this his divine complexion they would every morning, to
cheer him, play with a knife upon the glasses, or the bottles
with their stoppers, and on the pint pots with their lids;
at the sound whereof he became gay, would leap for joy,
and rock himself in the cradle, lolling with his head and
monochordizing with his fingers."
Till Eulenspiegel, Gargantua of Germany, noisome, nasty, rollicking
Till, with the whirligig scale of a yellow clarinet in his brain
and the beer-house rhythm of a pint pot in his heart, a joke upon a
joke,--was he, and not the posing _Held_ of the "Heldenleben," the
real Strauss?
III.--WHAT DOES IT ALL MEAN?
We transfretate the Sequane at the dilucul and crepuscul;
we deambulate by the compites and quadrives of the urb; we
despumate the Latin verbocination; and like verysimilary
amorabons, we captat the benevolence of the omnijugal,
omniform and omnigenal feminine sex.
RABELAIS, _Pantagruel_, bk. ii. ch. vi.
It matters little from what point we view the tendency of
musical art as it is disclosed to our vision through its most
potent manifestations. We are driven inward upon the central and
all-important question, How far can music go in the direction of
depicting things which lie outside itself? Is it to convert itself
into a language, or shall it sink into a kind of rapt mysticism
which shall be accepted in a vague way as a species of philosophic
speculation?
Walter Pater in his essay on Coleridge says: "The true illustration
of the speculative temper is not the Hindoo mystic, lost to sense,
understanding, individuality, but one such as Goethe, to whom every
moment of life brought its contribution of experimental individual
knowledge; by whom no touch of the world of form, color, and passion
was disregarded."
Herein lies a deep, pregnant suggestion. Pater knew little enough
of the inner nature of music, but he was able to make some sensible
deductions from his comprehension of art in the broader sense, and in
another place in the volume just quoted ("Appreciations") he suggests
the possibility that music might be the ideal of all art, "precisely
because in music it is impossible to distinguish the form from the
substance or matter, the subject from the expression."
Against such a summary of the nature of music the whole practice of
composition to-day cries out. And at the same time it finds itself
unsatisfied by such a standard of speculative thought as that set
up by Mr. Pater. Music would perhaps profit highly by a faithful
adherence to that law of continual regard to the suggestions of the
"world of form, color, and passion." But the rapt vacancy of the
Hindoo mystic woos and wins the favor of composers, for outwardly it
has a philosophic appearance, and to philosophize in music seems now
to be the highest desire of its masters.