I. En Voiture
II. The Policeman
III. The Hurdy-gurdy
IV. The Lake
V. Dogs
VI. Dreams
Mr. Carpenter has told us in music the outing of a child. One of his
first compositions was a collection of humorous _Improving Songs for
Children_. This fondness for children as subjects for art he shares with
Victor Hugo; with Swinburne, who abandoned the shrine of Venus to sing
of children’s beauty and innocence—after Watts-Dunton had docked him of
his rum. In the _Perambulator_ there is no sentimentalism, no
Sunday-school address to “you, little girl with the blue sash”; but his
music is as his child saw and thought, when wheeled about.
This suite is not only an ingenious work: it has true fancy, true humor,
pages of truly poetic feeling. Mr. Carpenter displays imagination;
witness his glorification of the lake that supplies Chicago with water.
But even his imagination was dormant at the thought of the Chicago
River. An unflinching realist would have introduced the child’s visit to
the stockyards and slaughter houses.
* * *
The composition of this suite was begun in July, 1914, and completed in
December of that year. The suite was performed for the first time at the
concerts of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Frederick Stock conductor,
March 19-20, 1915.
The suite is scored for these instruments: three flutes (and piccolo),
two oboes, English horn, two clarinets, bass clarinet, two bassoons,
four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, bass tuba, kettledrums, bass
drum, cymbals, triangle, tambourine, xylophone, glockenspiel, bells,
harp, celesta, pianoforte, and the usual strings.
This programme is printed as preface to the score:
I. _En Voiture._ Every morning—after my second breakfast—if the wind and
the sun are favorable, I go out. I should like to go alone, but my will
is overborne. My nurse is appointed to take me. She is older than I, and
very powerful. While I wait for her, resigned, I hear her cheerful
steps, always the same. I am wrapped in a vacuum of wool, where there
are no drafts. A door opens and shuts. I am placed in my perambulator, a
strap is buckled over my stomach, my nurse stands firmly behind—and we
are off!
II. _The Policeman._ Out is wonderful! It is always different, though
one seems to have been there before. I cannot fathom it all. Some sounds
seem like smells. Some sights have echoes. It is confusing, but it is
Life! For instance, the Policeman—an Unprecedented Man! Round like a
ball; taller than my Father. Blue—fearful—fascinating! I feel him before
he comes. I see him after he goes. I try to analyze his appeal. It is
not buttons alone, nor belt, nor baton. I suspect it is his eye and the
way he walks. He walks like Doom. My nurse feels it, too. She becomes
less firm, less powerful. My perambulator hurries, hesitates, and stops.
They converse. They ask each other questions—some with answers, some
without. I listen, with discretion. When I feel that they have gone far
enough, I signal to my nurse, a private signal, and the Policeman
resumes his enormous Blue March. He is gone, but I feel him after he
goes.
III. _The Hurdy-gurdy._ Then suddenly there is something else. I think
it is a sound. We approach it. My ear is tickled to excess. I find that
the absorbing noise comes from a box—something like my music box, only
much larger, and on wheels. A dark man is turning the music out of the
box with a handle, just as I do with mine. A dark lady, richly dressed,
turns when the man gets tired. They both smile. I smile too, with
restraint, for music is the most insidious form of noise. And such
music! So gay! I tug at the strap over my stomach. I have a wild thought
of dancing with my nurse and my perambulator—all three of us together.
Suddenly, at the climax of our excitement, I feel the approach of a
phenomenon that I remember. It is the Policeman. He has stopped the
music. He has frightened away the dark man and the lady with their music
box. He seeks the admiration of my nurse for his act. He walks away, his
buttons shine, but far off I hear again the forbidden music. Delightful
forbidden music!
IV. _The Lake._ Sated with adventure, my nurse firmly pushes me on, and
before I recover my balance I am face to face with new excitement. The
land comes to an end, and there at my feet is the Lake. All other
sensations are joined in one. I see, I hear, I feel the quiver of the
little waves as they escape from the big ones and come rushing up over
the sand. Their fear is pretended. They know the big waves are amiable,
for they can see a thousand sunbeams dancing with impunity on their very
backs. Waves and sunbeams! Waves and sunbeams! Blue water—white
clouds—dancing, swinging! A white sea gull floating in the air. That is
_My Lake_!
V. _Dogs._ We pass on. Probably there is nothing more in the World. If
there is, it is superfluous. _There_ IS. It is Dogs! We are coming upon
them without warning. Not _one_ of them—all of them. First, one by one;
then in pairs; then in societies. Little dogs, with sisters; big dogs,
with aged parents. Kind dogs, brigand dogs, sad dogs, and gay. They
laugh, they fight, they run. And at last, in order to hold my interest,
the very littlest brigand starts a game of “Follow the Leader,” followed
by all the others. It is tremendous!
VI. _Dreams._ Those dogs have gone! It is confusing, but it is Life! My
mind grows numb. My cup is too full. I have a sudden conviction that it
is well that I am not alone. That firm step behind reassures me. The
wheels of my perambulator make a sound that quiets my nerves. I lie very
still. I am quite content. In order to think more clearly, I close my
eyes. My thoughts are absorbing. I deliberate upon my mother. Most of
the time my mother and my nurse have but one identity in my mind, but at
night or when I close my eyes, I can easily tell them apart, for my
mother has the greater charm, I hear her voice quite plainly now, and
feel the touch of her hand. It is pleasant to live over again the
adventures of the day—the long blue waves curling in the sun, the
Policeman who is bigger than my father, the music-box and my friends,
the Dogs. It is pleasant to lie quite still and close my eyes, and
listen to the wheels of my perambulator. How very large the world is!
How many things there are!
CLAUDE ACHILLE
DEBUSSY
(Born at Germain [Seine and Oise], August 22, 1862; died at Paris,
March 26, 1918)
Debussy suffered at the hands of the ultra-orthodox and the snobs in
music. The former could not find either melodic lines or the semblance
of form in his orchestral and chamber works, his songs and pianoforte
pieces. The snobs, secretly bored, thought it the thing to swoon at the
mere mention of his name. In New York and Boston, as in Paris, there
were “_Pelléastres_,” to use the contemptuous term coined by Jean
Lorraine. There were some that spoke of Debussy as an ignorant fellow
who, not being able to achieve greatness in the conventional manner,
wrote in an eccentric way to attract attention, to make the bourgeois
sit up. They forgot that Debussy had taken the chief prize at the Paris
Conservatory, where harmony and counterpoint are taught rigorously.
Debussy fashioned his own musical speech. It is easy to say that he
learned much from Moussorgsky’s _Boris Godounov_—but no one has yet
pointed out exactly what he borrowed or imitated. That Debussy sojourned
in Russia was enough to excite those who are unwilling to admit that any
innovator has originality, for Debussy was an innovator, not a developer
of what was handed down to him. It is more probable that he learned from
the gypsies in Russia than from Moussorgsky.
The question arises whether in his compositions of the few last years
Debussy did not merely imitate himself, whether he had anything more to
say. The believer in plenary inspiration of course shouts with joy on
hearing the three sonatas that have been played in this country.
Admiring Debussy greatly as we do, we cannot in this instance shout with
him. Debussy can surely rest his fame on the string quartet;
_L’Après-midi d’un faune_; _Gigues_, _Ibéria_, _Pelléas et Mélisande_,
and some of the songs and the pianoforte pieces.
As for _Pelléas and Mélisande_, we believe it to be the perfect example
in opera of music wedded to words and situations, an opera more
remarkable in this respect than even _Tristan and Isolde_.
“PRÉLUDE À L’APRÈS-MIDI D’UN FAUNE” (ECLOGUE DE STÉPHANE MALLARMÉ)
Debussy’s _Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun_ is a masterpiece of
imaginative poetry in tones; it is a thing of flawless beauty. It
matters not whether the symbolism of Mallarmé be cryptic or
intelligible. It matters not whether the explanation of Gosse or of
another be ingenious and plausible. The title is enough to give a clue
to the hearer, if a clue be needed. Debussy himself has composed nothing
more charming in strictly orchestral music.
There is the suggestion of sunlight and warmth, forest and meadow dear
to fauns and nymphs. There is the gentle melancholy that is associated
with a perfect afternoon. There is the exquisite melodic line, and there
is harmonic suggestion with inimitable coloring that is still more
exquisite.
* * *
_Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune_, completed in 1892, was played for
the first time at a concert of the National Society of Music, Paris,
December 23, 1894. The conductor was Gustave Doret. According to Charles
Koechlin, there had been insufficient rehearsal, so the performance left
much to be desired, and the acoustics of the Salle d’Harcourt were
unfavorable. When the second performance took place at a Colonne
concert, a critic wrote: “This composer seems to dread banality.” “And
yet,” says Koechlin, “the charm of this music is so simple, so melodic.
But every _new_ melody should be heard several times. Besides, even the
construction—a supple melodic line that is expanded—could be
disconcerting. For certain writers about music, Debussy was a dangerous
artist with a diabolical fascination: the worst possible example.
Diabolical or not, the work has lasted. It has the votes of the élite:
that is enough.”
The second performance was at a Colonne concert, Paris, October 20,
1895. In the _Annales du théâtre_, we find this singular note: “Written
after a poem by Stéphane Mallarmé so sadistic that M. Colonne did not
dare to print the text; young girls attend his concerts.”
To Debussy is attributed a short “explanation of his _Prelude_, a very
free illustration of Mallarmé’s poem”: The music evokes “the successive
scenes in which the longings and the desire of the Faun pass in the heat
of the afternoon.”
Stéphane Mallarmé formulated his revolutionary ideas concerning style
about 1875, when the _Parnasse contemporain_ rejected his first poem of
true importance, _L’Après-midi d’un faune_. The poem was published in
1876 as a quarto pamphlet, illustrated by Manet.
Gosse gave this explanation of the poem that suggested music to Debussy:
“It appears in the _florilège_ which he has just published, and I have
now read it again, as I have often read it before. To say that I
understand it bit by bit, phrase by phrase, would be excessive. But, if
I am asked whether this famous miracle of unintelligibility gives me
pleasure, I answer, cordially, Yes. I even fancy that I obtain from it
as definite and as solid an impression as M. Mallarmé desires to
produce.
“This is what I read in it: A faun—a simple, sensuous, passionate
being—wakens in the forest at daybreak and tries to recall his
experience of the previous afternoon. Was he the fortunate recipient of
an actual visit from nymphs, white and golden goddesses, divinely tender
and indulgent? Or is the memory he seems to retain nothing but the
shadow of a vision, no more substantial than the ‘arid rain’ of notes
from his own flute? He cannot tell. Yet surely there was, surely there
is, an animal whiteness among the brown reeds of the lake that shines
out yonder. Were they, are they, swans? No! But Naiads plunging?
Perhaps! Vaguer and vaguer grows that impression of this delicious
experience. He would resign his woodland godship to retain it. A garden
of lilies, golden-headed, white-stalked, behind the trellis of red
roses? Ah! the effort is too great for his poor brain. Perhaps if he
selects one lily from the garth of lilies, one benign and beneficent
yielder of her cup to thirsty lips, the memory, the ever receding
memory, may be forced back. So when he has glutted upon a bunch of
grapes, he is wont to toss the empty skins in the air and blow them out
in a visionary greediness. But no, the delicious hour grows vaguer;
experience or dream, he will never know which it was. The sun is warm,
the grasses yielding; and he curls himself up again, after worshiping
the efficacious star of wine, that he may pursue the dubious ecstasy
into the more hopeful boskages of sleep.
“This, then, is what I read in the so excessively obscure and
unintelligible. _L’Après-midi d’un faune_; and, accompanied as it is
with a perfect suavity of language and melody of rhythm, I know not what
more a poem of eight pages could be expected to give. It supplies a
simple and direct impression of physical beauty, of harmony, of color;
it is exceedingly mellifluous, when once the ear understands that the
poet, instead of being the slave of the Alexandrine, weaves his
variations round it, like a musical composer.”
_The Afternoon of a Faun_ is scored for three flutes, two oboes, English
horn, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, two harps, small antique
cymbals, strings. It is dedicated to Raymond Bonheur.
The chief theme is announced by the flute, _très modéré_, E major, 9-8.
Louis Laloy gives the reins to his fancy: “One is immediately
transported into a better world; all that is leering and savage in the
snub-nosed face of the faun disappears; desire still speaks, but there
is a veil of tenderness and melancholy. The chord of the wood-wind, the
distant call of the horns, the limpid flood of harp tones, accentuate
this impression. The call is louder, more urgent, but it almost
immediately dies away, to let the flute sing again its song. And now the
theme is developed: the oboe enters in, the clarinet has its say; a
lively dialogue follows, and a clarinet phrase leads to a new theme
which speaks of desire satisfied; or it expresses the rapture of mutual
emotion rather than the ferocity of victory. The first theme returns,
more languorous, and the croaking of muted horns darkens the horizon.
The theme comes and goes, fresh chords unfold themselves; at last a solo
violoncello joins itself to the flute; and then everything vanishes, as
a mist that rises in the air and scatters itself in flakes.”[23]