The subject of long experiment, Music, as we know it, at length emerged
from the centuries, virtually a modern art. The fate of its founders
and their followers for long after, is that the names of these are
well-nigh forgotten, and their works are heard no more. Because of them
the later comers have survived rich through inheritance, but perhaps no
richer by nature.
Again has music reached the experimental stage. Sweeping upward in
mighty spiral, and so conforming to creation's universal trend, now,
at a point of departure overlooking the old, it finds inadequate
that result of compromise, the diatonic scale. It faces the problem
of tonality and those modern questions which a higher, wider outlook
brings to view.
In estimating the value and longevity of Strauss' art, let us remember
that the ancient experimenters in music evolved no definite types as
Nature in her domain has done. Half-formed, their pale and bloodless
attempts have perished from sheer lack of vitality. On the other hand,
the tone-dramas of our most modern virtuoso are anything but anæmic;
an all-too-turbulent flood rushes through their every vein. So much is
Strauss a product of his time that the characteristics now placing him
in the forefront would have little availed him in an age believing with
Schumann that Harmony is king and Melody queen in the composer's realm.
Were Strauss endowed with a lyric gift comparable to that of Schubert,
probably he would be impelled to exercise that gift almost within the
compass of convention. Were he, like Handel, able to accomplish the
majestic and the magical without recourse to chromatic progression, the
bizarre would lead him less far afield. Again, were he capable of a
kingdom like that wherein Beethoven, reigning by divine right, reigned
supreme, surely he would not have sought the seemingly unfruitful
wastes, the perhaps barren Saharas of sound. Deficient in the crowning
qualities of these masters, but not deficient in genius, he imagined,
and actually undertook with ardor, that of which they could never have
dreamed.
Having accredited Strauss with genius, though of a peculiar sort, we
are led, for the better understanding of this master, to ask, what is
genius? To this query the wisdom of all ages has given various answers.
According to Plato, a genius is one whose vision of Beauty, Truth,
and Good, existing in the Divine Mind, is clearer than that of other
men. Therefore genius does not actually originate. Its office is to
translate, to reproduce the great originals, the eternal archetypes
of the super-mundane world. Because of his high vision the artist
reproduces Beauty, the philosopher Truth, while the saint, enamoured
of Good, both teaches and practices it.
Granting this, we are at once led to ask, why the penetrating vision of
genius? To this query a brief answer is that because the possibilities
either latent or unfolding in man are immeasurable as the universe
itself, therefore that which men are pleased to call genius is but the
foreshowing of what the race as a whole shall attain to, but, in the
present stage of human progress, genius is in fact a rare exception
to Nature's slow and thorough methods. Nevertheless, the price of its
defiance of the universal law must be paid by genius, and that price is
unsymmetrical development.
Because of unsymmetrical development, genius may at times produce
what, to the average normal being would seem the work of a degenerate
mind; but in estimating Strauss it should be considered that the tonal
interpreter of Don Quixote can often be sanely logical, and even wholly
conventional.
The genius of Strauss, like that of Whitman, is essentially the genius
of the explorer. Each of these burned to reach the limits of his art
and plant victorious feet upon the pole. As in the material world, so
here, such daring spirits are necessary if we would know the geography
of the world of tone. To our old musical possessions, Strauss has
joined a vast and as yet vague territory much of which, while of little
present value, may yet develop unexpected and perhaps indispensable
uses.
It argues against the real sanity of Strauss' art as a whole, that,
for the exercise of his gifts, he chooses Oscar Wilde's version
of the story of Salomé, a version in which the central theme is a
monstrous and revolting passion unmatchable in actual life, and even
unthinkable except by the sexual pervert. Also, it is ominous that
Strauss undertakes the tonal treatment of the brilliantly written but
illogical work, «Thus spake Zarathustra;» a work wherein is discovered
the philosopher Neitzsche's ideal, the earth-shaping, earth-dominating
man to be, a proud, unconcerned, scornful, violent, and fear-inspiring
personage beloved of Wisdom the goddess woman that loves the warrior
only. In this «Super Man» evolved evil and evolved good are necessary.
Free from gods, and every adoration save that of self, he rises over
unnumbered small folk and timorous weaklings, and that protection
artfully invented for them by the Christian Church, «Slave Morality;»
and so he attains his goal, «Master Morality,» that which, to all but
the mind of the moral pervert, is the morality of the tyrant whose will
none dares gainsay.
We have already contended that the wide departure of Strauss
was natural and necessary to a genius lacking in certain gifts
indispensable to the older schools; also we have accredited him with
being a compound of various tendencies essentially modern. It may with
assurance be affirmed that the art of sound could have originated only
in a time like our own, a time whose methods are well illustrated by
the attitude of certain of our modern novelists.
Having proved to themselves and their following the correctness of the
new methods, and the falsity of the old, these have largely abandoned
plot and incident, and devoted their talents to psychology. Now while
it is incontestable that Walter Scott could by no means have brought
to the trivial and the commonplace the analytical mind of Henry James,
still we venture that the world has lost nothing because of this. The
poor plodding world looks downward; so its eyes must again and again
be diverted from the trivial and the commonplace, and lifted toward an
ideal which, even if overdrawn, is immeasurably better than none.
While preferring to grope in the dark regions of the abnormal, the
art of Strauss, the art of the modern psychologist has, as one might
expect, often treated the trivial and the commonplace. Besides it is
evident that neither in Salomé nor in «Thus spake Zarathustra» has
it given to the world a normal ideal. With the great masters of the
past it was always an ideal, the noblest within the range of their
inspired vision. To Haydn it was the terrestrial Eden yet undarkened
by the Fall. To Handel it was the Greater Adam, and His coming long
foretold. To Bach it was Gethsemane, and its immortal, crowning passion
of sorrow. To Mendelssohn it was the prophet and the saint those rich
flowerings of his ancient race. To Wagner it was the eternal womanly
prompting to noblest deeds of devotion and self-sacrifice.
With men like these, the presentation of high moral ideals resulted
from intuitive knowledge that the perpetuity of mankind, as something
nobler than the brute kingdom, depends upon acceptance of these ideals,
and therefore any so-called masterpiece which brings about confusion of
ideals, would render the real purpose of art abortive.
The music of such masters as Haydn and Mozart voices the pure emotions
spontaneous in the breast of man. God-given emotions, never to be
quenched, they will burst into utterance while throbs the human heart.
The evolution of music, as of all art, accords with the evolution of
man from a creature of primal impulses to one of a thousand involved
emotions and interests. The latest methods of Strauss are fraught with
peculiar peril to his art, as an epitome of life, in that a well-nigh
exclusive use of obscure and chromatic harmonies is restricting that
art to an expression of complex emotions only. Now, while through no
composer however gifted can music revert to the prevailing simplicity
of Handel, still, whatever its evolution, it must as an epitome of
life, have moments of native and simple emotion. Therefore it was a
sane and saving reaction which turned the efforts of Strauss from the
abnormal to the smaller, more subdued models of the song writer, and
also to that wholesome and human idyll, the Enoch Arden of Tennyson.
As an orchestral writer, Strauss has gathered to himself the technical
knowledge of Berlioz, Liszt, and Wagner. Having enlarged his resources
through original discovery, he dazzles by display of a virtuosity
wholly unprecedented. Technically he is fully equipped for exploration;
and thus he is pushing on into that new hemisphere the realm of sound.
In our exposition we have endeavored to point out certain tendencies
in the work of Strauss, tendencies which endanger realism in every
art whatsoever, tendencies which we believe are turning Strauss from
full and sane achievement, and so from his prospective goal the art of
sound. That such an art is legitimate and actually within sight we have
endeavored to show, as also the certainty that, once our possession,
it will supplement and not supersede its predecessors. Failing to
find in Strauss the lofty personage his worshippers deem him to be,
we nevertheless have accredited him with real though peculiar genius,
and this is but justice due. Living in a transition period largely of
his own bringing about, he has produced both the unquestioned and the
problematical. But that problematical can be ignored or forgotten no
more than the problematical of Whitman. At very least, it will survive
as a curiosity of tonal art.
In his theoretical writings on the opera and the drama, Wagner likens
music to the soulless nymph, a real woman only through the love of
some man. Poetry, to Wagner, is that masculine endowing music with
an immortal part. This novel finding of the poet-musician is but the
outcome of a theory; an outcome which the patent facts easily and
wholly refute. Instrumental music when treated by a virile master,
like Wagner himself, can be masculine enough, while, in the hands
of a versifier gifted chiefly with grace and smoothness, Poetry,
the masculine art so called, becomes weakly feminine, or even a
characterless thing not attaining to sex.
Wagner's theories are founded on a philosophy essentially of Eastern
origin, but, had he looked deeper, our speculator would have
discovered that Eastern philosophy considers sex to be but an outward
manifestation incident to the present stage of world evolution. The
human soul, and also the soul of every art, contains within itself the
potentiality of both male and female. Sex in the physical world is lack
of equilibrium, the temporary preponderance in the soul of specific
male or female characteristics outwardly exhibited, but, in the mental
world, the offspring of highest genius would attain an equilibrium
superior to distinction of sex.
In art, as in man its author, the masculine, untempered by the
feminine, becomes not wisely masterful, but harsh and brutal; hence the
peril of Strauss. The feminine, untempered by the masculine, becomes
not intuitive, but weakly capricious and wholly illogical; hence the
peril of Debussy. The great authors, whichever their sex, have produced
works wherein specific male and female characteristics modify one
another.
This view of sex in art makes for the validity of instrumental music
as such, and reënforces the position of Strauss when, in his wholly
instrumental tone poems, he would delineate every phase of life, and
even certain phases of philosophic thought as Wagner, despite theory,
has done in his «Faust Overture.»
Owing to the increasing vogue of Strauss, no prophet is necessary
to foretell a rank growth of imitators. These, because barren of
originality, will succeed in copying the eccentricities rather than the
merits of their model. What infliction, what torture to human ears will
result from the inevitable Bedlam of noise and fury, the near future
must reveal. But let us believe that a modicum of pity and saving
common sense, in even the most cruel devotee of such a school, will
insure speedy reaction toward saner and more satisfying methods.
While ignoring not its old estate, music is moving from its centre in
the emotional nature, to a stronghold well within the intellectual
life. Failures and wanderings indeed must be, but stagnation never in
this onward world. So, looking to desired fulfillment, let us prophesy
of music such rise as that of man from his emotional, half-formed self
toward an ideal not coldly intellectual, but always warmly and nobly
human with what the future foreshadows, namely, the balanced blending
of emotion and mind, the ideal of both man and his artistic creations,
in fact, the ideal of ideals in whose very anticipation is forgotten
the «Super Man» of Nieztsche.
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