I
The years now with us are prophetic of a century notable from its
beginning; a century destined to achieve perhaps beyond our boldest
imagining. Already is the century achieving, as, like a youthful but
formidable being, it assaults that citadel of mystery wherein Truth
must relinquish, one by one, her most valued and guarded possessions.
To the observant, the present is a time of shaken foundations, a time
of much actual overthrow, and even a time of planning that broader
and deeper bases shall well sustain the super-imposed new. Amidst an
upheaval of things social, political, scientific, ethical and æsthetic;
an upheaval world-wide, and necessarily sourced in the sub-strata
of the world of causes; Art, for instance, is unavoidably disturbed
throughout its various provinces.
Only the over-sanguine will assume that the better must needs rise from
upheaval and overthrow. Therefore let us look but for the reasonable,
for does not many a desolated province of this material world belie the
theory of uninterrupted advance?
Appearances indicate that the art of music is entering upon a period
the most momentous of its existence, a period of transition more
radical than when it was emerging from the Greek modes; a period
perhaps of storm and stress, of morbid and eccentric individualism; a
period like that which almost overwhelmed literature in the early days
of Goethe and Schiller; or, perhaps, a period of real progress; but,
in either event, a period from which it will come forth an art far
different from that of Bach, Beethoven, Chopin and Wagner.
Because progressive, the human mind will not regard its greatest work
with a complacency inimical to further effort. Ever it fashions and
re-fashions, achieving yesterday, failing to-day, and then more than
retrieving on some fortunate morrow. Strange doings and sayings are
rife in the musical world of the present. Denying the validity of
fixed key, Claude Debussy begins and ends his tone creations anywhere
within the limit of the chromatic scale. Max Reger teaches the intimate
fellowship of the entire twenty-four keys, while Richard Strauss has
well-nigh outgrown the twelve semitones of our time-honored gamut
which must be enlarged if it would meet the needs of his successors.
It is the opinion of many that, in this event, the art of music will
be merged in what we shall here call the art of sound. Concerning this
realistic art, this art to be, let us explain briefly that, whereas
the word sound signifies all that the ear cognizes, whether as euphony,
cacophony or mere noise, yet, for sound to attain to the status of
an art, art must endow with definite and adequate purpose not only
euphony, but also every other sound, including mere noise.
While Strauss with almost audacious boldness is leading toward the
enharmonic possibilities of an augmented scale, the more conservative
but no less ingenious Reger is looking back to his beloved Bach,
and showing what, through a greatly extended key relationship, that
master might have accomplished with the good old semitones. Eschewing
programme music, and all else demanding literary elucidation, Reger
will, to the tone-poems of his rival, offset a fugue or a sonata ultra
enough for any save the disciples of Strauss and Debussy.
Like Strauss, Debussy is in no wise to be ignored, but always and
wholly to be reckoned with in an estimate of advanced methods.
Paradoxical at first thought is the fact that Debussy, whose measures
abound in unresolved discords of ultra-modern origin, should found
his music not uniformly on the major and the minor scales, but, by
preference, largely on the old church modes. This reversion to the
mediæval indicates a period of crisis wherein the beam fluctuates
between the extremes of old and new tonal methods. Dispensing with
the size and blare of the modern orchestra, and shunning, as if
an obsession, the Wagnerian models, Debussy will not for one brief
moment permit in the lyric drama such outbursts of vocal melody as
crown the climaxes of «Lohengrin,» and the passionate love scenes of
«Tannhäuser.» And this for the specific reason that «Melody is almost
anti-lyric, and powerless to express the constant change of emotional
life. Melody is suitable only for the song which confirms a fixed
sentiment.»
While Strauss is held to be the lineal successor of Liszt, he is in
fact a compound of various modern tendencies. In him we find the
philosophy of Nietzsche, the impressionism of Manet, and the realism
of which De Maupassant and Zola and Whitman and the youthful Swinburne
were exponents; a realism which, because it over-emphasizes the erotic,
the pathological, and the ugly, misinterprets man and nature, and so
betrays the characteristics of decadent art.
What would have been the attitude of Wagner toward Strauss may be
inferred from his caustic attacks on Berlioz whose music he called
foolish and eccentric; and yet, as a producer of novel effects he
himself was much indebted to the French composer, and, in turn, was
no small factor in the formation of one whom Strauss' disciples deem
the greater Richard. Notwithstanding which, we affirm that Strauss is
more closely related to Liszt whose talents, both in pianoforte and
orchestral composition, tended to virtuoso display more than to the
utterance of original and lofty ideas.
Prior to the advent of Wagner, the musical composer deemed it necessary
always to appeal to the sense of the beautiful. Whatever his theme, his
music, ever conforming to the established laws of harmony, must not
be repugnant to that æsthetic sense. At times he no doubt overstepped
his self-imposed limit, but, somehow, the ear of the listener has
accustomed itself to the innovation, and with the result that not a few
wholly doubt the existence of a line of cleavage between the ugly and
the beautiful. However, a sane philosophy will demonstrate that beauty
and ugliness are as unlike as are good and evil.
Neither the painter nor the sculptor restricts himself to pleasing
subjects; the grotesque and the horrible have been deemed not unworthy
the brush and the chisel of artists indubitably great, and it can be
argued that to music should be accorded an expression free and faithful
as that allowed to painting and the plastic arts. On the other hand,
popular opinion has ever been, and perhaps ever will be, that what is
actually ugly is not music. To this opinion the modern reply is that
the word music carries with it far too restricted a meaning; the office
of the tonal art, like that of all other arts, is to express not the
half but the whole of life; in fact, the universal duality in nature
and in man.
With deep philosophic and artistic insight, Wagner elaborated an art
destined, as he believed, to supersede Italian Opera. Despite his harsh
but convincing strictures, and despite the theories and practice of
Debussy who holds that in the Music Drama the vocal parts, lest they
hinder the dramatic action, should be reduced to a rhythmic chant
devoid of melody, Italian Opera survives; from temporary eclipse it is
emerging bright as before. In the life labors of the great reformer, we
are beginning to see simply a new school supplementing the old. We are
beginning to see that the denouncer of Donizetti and Rossini and Verdi
and Bellini and the rest, was himself not quite faultless in practice,
however correct in theory. Musicians of eminence now admit that the
incongruities of Italian Opera are offset by the over-long and the
slow-moving in the Wagnerian Music Drama. Naturally the world refuses
to forget «Lucia» and «Il Barbiere» and «Rigoletto» and «Norma,» and
in fact any work whereinto the muse of Italy has poured her quenchless
fire.
Granting that the faulty and inadequate Greek modes had so cramped and
chilled musical expression that, in their abandonment, little of value
was lost to the musicians of past centuries, what shall be said of
our modern musical heritage, the gift of the last two hundred years,
and which the universal adoption of a new and enlarged musical scale
would render obsolete? Will not that spirit of love and loyalty which
defends the cause of Italian Opera, make determined stand against the
novel system? From the twelve notes of the chromatic scale the great
German masters have evoked the superlatively beautiful. Shaping their
imaginings to lofty ideals, they have in fact epitomized the larger,
better part of man and nature, as understood by the German mind.
Admitting this, can the cultured musician bring himself to ignore the
past of German art? for this he must needs do under an exclusively
modern regime. No! a thousand times no! That for music a different
scale can be no more than supplementary is indicated by the history of
all other æsthetic arts. Their every worthy type endures; not any one
has quite eclipsed another.
The two leading races, once peopling the southmost peninsulas of
Europe, were extinct centuries ago, but their daily tongues survive,
dead languages never while endures the world, for they bring to all
enlightened peoples the period and climax of the orator, the meter of
the tragic dramatist, and the notes of the Homeric and the Virgilian
muse, fresh and unrivalled as when Greece and Italy first lent ear.
There have been schools of architecture, both Pagan and Christian,
schools of sculpture from Phidias onward; schools of modern painting
since the mature work of Giotto; and the wise ages, far from selecting
and excluding, have preserved them all.
To men of creative genius were granted glimpses of Truth; each from
his own angle beheld the ineffable vision. Through the sundered veils
of illusion, as through the storm's momentary rift, the permitted
artist beheld his own ruling star, sometimes a royal sun, sometimes
a subordinate planet, but always one without which the hierarchy of
heaven were incomplete.
That neither the school of Wagner nor that of Strauss will supersede
existing national schools is assured for the additional reason that
these are the outcome of national ideals. In every race of civilization
the man of creative genius proves his people to be possessed of ideals
of art peculiarly their own. There results for example the Slavic, the
Scandinavian, the English, the German, the Spanish, the French, the
Italian ideals, and, lofty in possibilities, that of the amalgamating
race destined to fill this ample western land of ours.
The ideals of tonal art! Surely the Wagnerian and the Straussian models
cannot include them all! Varied as the geography of the globe, as the
configurations of its surface, those national ideals are sombre with
the solitude of barren steppes; they are gloomy with the twilight of
deep-indenting fjords; they are rich with the ancient, the mediæval,
the modern, of a land of memories gathered since the coming of Arthur.
Otherwhere they are fraught with the romance of Rhenish castles where
Minnesingers and Meistersingers have proved the magic power of song;
or else they bring the southern night of castinets and tripping feet,
and the moonlit wonder of Moorish Alhambra. How well those ideals have
embodied the gay and the graceful, also the volatile as the vintage
of vine-clad Champagne! And how fitly are they born by Adriatic and
Mediterranean shores where the ardent day-beam warms the heart to
love's emotion; and, in days to come, shall they not suggest the
amplitude of snowy mountain chains, the undulating sweep of prairies,
the breezy expanse of vast inland seas, and the eternal dash and roar
of ocean on our eastern and our western coasts?
These, and countless other ideals sourced in the world's composite
life, have given rise to a necessarily varied art whose inner unity
must remain undiscovered till mankind becomes one great family, bound
by a community of ideals and interests in the millennial dawn of a
yet-unrisen day.