Act V. The Forum.

I need hardly tell you the original story—how Mathô, the fierce

Libyan warrior, first saw the lovely daughter of Hamilcar; how he

resolved to win her; the rape of the sacred veil of Tanit, called

the Zäimph, and Salammbô’s terror at seeing it shroud the person

of a Barbarian in her sleeping chamber; the pursuit, the escape,

the return of Hamilcar and the resolve of Salammbô to win back for

Carthage its holy veil. Who can describe after Flaubert the massed

shock of armies, the pillage of cities and the crucifixion of the

lions! To the march of his sonorous sentences we move through strange

scenes, scenes of repulsive horror, slaughtered men and beasts, and

the odor of sun-baked carcasses, over which hover obscene winged

creatures seeking carrion.

Salammbô, after a hieratic ceremonial with the huge sacred serpent

of the temple—Rodin alone might execute this episode in shivering

marble—visits the tent of Mathô, recovers the Zäimph, but meets with

an accident. She discovers her love for the Mercenary chief, who

justly besieges Carthage for the pay of his soldiers, and she snaps

the gold anklet-chain that daughters of patricians wore in those

times. Mathô is captured, tortured by having to run the gantlet of

Carthage’s enraged populace, and finally drops before the terraced

throne upon which sits Salammbô beside her affianced husband, Narr’

Havas, the Numidian. The poor hunted wretch, over whose red flesh the

skin hangs in bloody strips, dies, and his heart is cut out before

the eyes of Salammbô. She takes poison from a goblet handed her by

the expectant bridegroom. All who touch the veil of Tanit must

perish. So is it decreed by the law and the prophets!

M. du Locle has altered this significant ending by making Salammbô

stab herself, and then Mathô—by the usual “frenzied and superhuman

effort”—breaks his bonds and carves himself into eternity. It is

sweetly gory and melodramatic, this ending. Of course, the trip

through the aqueduct is omitted and the theft of the Zäimph takes

place before Salammbô’s eyes. This is in the second act. The

librettist, with memories of Faust, causes Mathô to make an imaginary

circle through which it would be impious to penetrate. Incidentally

he wooes the young lady with true Gallic ardor. Yet this act, far

removed as it is from the book, is the best of the five.

What follows is of no consequence; the council chamber is lugged in

for its picture, and the spectacle of Salammbô dressing on a terrace

under the rays of a Carthaginian moon, as round as a silver buckler,

does not advance the action materially. The camp and battle scenes do

credit to the taste of the decorator, though they are meaningless.

But in Mathô’s tent, where Salammbô presently arrives, Reyer strikes

fire for the first time. His hero and heroine have thus far been

smothered by processions of chanting priests, by mobs of soldiery,

by ballets and by monster choruses. Here the man and the woman,

face to face, bare their souls, and the music, not so passionate

or so desperate as Valentine and Raoul’s duo in the fourth act of

Les Huguenots, is yet sincere and touching. After that the opera

oozes away in mere pantomime. There is a fall down a series of lofty

staircases, which is not high art.

I could only distinguish two well-defined leading-motives in the

_partition_. One came from Gounod’s Romeo and Juliet, fourth act,

the other is a slight deviation from Tristan’s cry in Act III: “O

Isolde.” For the rest, I have a vague remembrance of _cantilena_

without melody, finales without climax, a thin, noisy, shallow, and

irritating stream of orchestration and a vocal score that either

screamed or roared. The harmonic scheme is dull and there is little

rhythmic variety. Reyer, as I said before, has few musical ideas,

and he does not conceal this deficiency by the graceful externals

of a brilliant instrumentation. As well meant as was Reyer’s

admiration for the immortal story, a story that will outlive the mock

antiquities of Bulwer, Ebers, and Sienkiewicz, the French critic and

composer was not the man to give it a musical setting. Wagner or

Verdi—none other—could have made of his glowing Oriental prose-poem a

music-drama of vital power and exquisite coloring.

* * * * *

It is a holy and wholesome thing to visit the graves of genius, for

the memories aroused may serve as an inspiration and a consolation

in the spiritually arid tracts of daily and doleful existence. But as

the emotions aroused at the sight of great men’s relics are profound

only to the individual—they seldom make interesting reading—so more

than a record of the fact that I have visited Rouen several times to

view the tomb of Gustave Flaubert is not of burning importance. I

cannot help protesting, however, at the tardy official recognition

accorded one of the greatest prose masters France can boast, and

one of the great world novelists. In the Solferino Gardens there is

the marble memorial by the sculptor Chapu, and up on the heights

of the Monumental Cemetery lie his remains in the Flaubert family

plot, not very far from the Joan of Arc monument. The Government has

done nothing, though it has erected marble quarries to mediocrities

not worthy to unlatch the shoes of Flaubert. Guy de Maupassant is

remembered in the Solferino Gardens by a statue _vis-à-vis_ to the

master whom he loved and to whom he owed so much. At Paris another

loving memorial stands in the Parc Monceau; yet for Flaubert, a

giant when compared to the unhappy writer of the Contes, there is

nothing—not even a commemorative tablet.

The least reparation for this neglect that the French Government

can offer is the purchase and preservation of the little house in

which Madame Bovary was composed with such painful travail. It

still stands, though fast crumbling into decay, on the bank of the

Seine at Croisset about half an hour below Rouen. The paternal house

has vanished, and occupying part of the little park is a dismantled

manufactory. Abbé Prévost is said to have written Manon Lescaut in

the old house—at least, Flaubert believed the story.

The faithful Colange, for twenty years servitor in the Flaubert

household, keeps a small café near his former home, and is always

ready to talk of the master and of his mother, Madame Flaubert. For

two seasons I vainly tried to get from Colange a photograph of this

mother. To me the mothers of great men are of extraordinary interest.

No money could tempt the old man, though he might have had the

picture reproduced and sold the copies.

With his phrase uttered at Flaubert’s grave, M. François Coppée

fastened more firmly to history the name of that noble artist, “The

Beethoven of French Prose.”

VII

VERDI AND BOÏTO

Drama is relentlessly encroaching upon the domain of music. In

Falstaff, the most noteworthy achievement since Die Meistersinger,

we get something which for want of a better title one may call

lyric comedy. But in form it is novel. It is not opera buffa; nor

yet is it opèra comique in the French sense; in fact it shows a

marked deviation from its prototypes; even the elaborate system of

Wagnerian leading motives is not employed. It is a new Verdi we hear;

not the Verdi of Il Trovatore, La Traviata, or Aïda, but a Verdi

brimful of the joy of life, sophisticated, yet naïve. A marvellous

compound is this musical comedy, in which the music follows the text,

and no concessions are made to the singers or to the time-honored

conventions of the operatic stage. Verdi has thrown overboard old

forms and planted his victorious standard in the country discovered

by Mozart and conquered by Wagner. A marvellous old man indeed!

The play’s the thing to catch the conscience of the composer to-day.

The action in Falstaff is almost as rapid as if the text were

spoken; and the orchestra, the wittiest and most sparkling _riant_

orchestra I ever heard,—comments upon the monologue and dialogue of

the book. When the speech becomes rhetorical, so does the orchestra.

It is heightened speech, and instead of melody of the antique, formal

pattern we hear the endless melody which Wagner employs. But Verdi’s

speech is his own and does not savor of Wagner. If the ideas are

not developed or do not assume vaster proportions, it is because of

their character. They could not be so treated without doing violence

to the sense of proportion. Classic purity in expression, Latin

exuberance, joyfulness, and an inexpressibly delightful atmosphere of

irresponsible youthfulness and gayety are all in this charming score.

We get a touch of the older style in the concerted numbers, but the

handling is very free and the content Verdian and modern. Here are

variety, color, freshness, earnestness, insouciance, and numberless

quaint conceits. The tempo is like an arrow-shot from the bow of

a classic-featured archer, whose arrows have been steeped in the

burning lake of romanticism. There is melodic repetition of phrases,

but it is more in the manner of Grétry than Wagner. I have called

Falstaff a pendant to Die Meistersinger, and the two works, directly

antithetical, are both supreme products of the Gallic and Teutonic

lyric genius. And how Verdi escaped the current of his younger

years! What wonderful adaptability, what receptivity, what powers of

assimilation! Some future biographer will write of The Three Styles

of Verdi as did de Lenz of Beethoven’s styles; perhaps he will even

increase the number.

Wagner did not shed his musical skin as absolutely as this Italian.

Compare the young and the old Verdi. In style to-day Falstaff is

younger than Il Trovatore half a century ago. Think of La donna è

mobile and then of the fugued finale to Falstaff. And remember, it

is not a fugato with imitative passages, nor the fugal treatment

of an ensemble finale, but a well-constructed fugue in eight real

parts, with episodes, inversions of the subject, stretti, and even

a pedal point. It is not so pleasing in effect as the magnificent

polyphonic close of Die Meistersinger, because of its severely

formal construction. It sounds as if Verdi had said, “Go to; after

all this mumming and masking I will show ye that I, too, can be

serious.” So he fugues the words “Tutto nel mondo è burlo,” of all

words in the world for such a form! What a gay old dog he must have

been! And heaven knows what jokes he had in store for us, hidden in

the capacious sleeves of his genius. I am sorry that an important

engagement in the Lethean fields prevented von Bülow from being

present at this Falstaff performance. He had to recant his opinion

of the Manzoni Requiem; but after this fugue he would have surely

bent the stubborn knee of pride and prostrated himself before the

Italian god of music.

No one can reproach Verdi with lack of ideas in Falstaff. They

are never ending. The orchestra flows furiously, like a stream of

quicksilver, tossing up repartee, argument, facts, amplifying,

developing, and strengthening the text. No melody? Why, the opera is

one long, merry tune—jocund, blithe, sweet, dulcet, and sunny. Few

moods of melancholy, no moods of madness, but all gracious folly and

fantasy.

The Honor soliloquy from Henry IV, with its pizzicati accompaniment

and its No! punctuated by a drum tap, is changed into strength and

sarcastic humor. When I Was a Page is another gem, and so is the

chattering quartet. But why enumerate details? It is a work of which

one cannot say “this and this,” it is so rich, so exuberant, so

novel, and yet so learned; little wonder then that we marvel. Verdi’s

musical scholarship is enormous. He paints delicate, fairylike

pictures, using the most delicate pigments and with the daintiest

touch imaginable; and then he pens a severe and truthful canon in the

second which excites the admiration of the scholar. The minuet is

an echo of old time, but how superlatives pale before the wealth of

rhythms, modes, subtle tonalities, simple diatonic effects contrasted

with gorgeous, sonorous orchestral bursts! And it must not be

forgotten that both composer and librettist have caught the true

Shakespearean note. The corpulent knight, despite his braggadocio

humor, lechery, and gluttony, is a gentleman born, although sadly

run to seed because of sack and petticoats. The glamour of the

revel at Herne’s Oak, the street scene at dusk, with the gossiping

of the women, and the clear, fresh air,—and there is no attempt at

Purcell madrigals, English local color,—all these prove Verdi’s

sympathy; also that music is a universal language and that an Italian

poet-composer may faithfully frame the story of an English dramatist.

And with what a light hand and vivacity of speech Verdi has done it!

Miracles of construction there are, but the grim bones of theory

are never exposed. Even the fugue is jaunty. The love element

peeps archly out behind the puffed mask of humor; the note is

never deep, just a sigh, and it has departed before you can fairly

grasp its beauty. The duos are all charming, and—but what boots

idle cataloguing? Its beauties should have become patent to our

opera-going public and the work a favorite long ago. “Après moi, le

deluge,” said the Wagnerites of the great Richard. “After Wagner,

Verdi!” some may explain. Falstaff suggests, of course, Victor

Maurel, and our debt of gratitude for his vital and sympathetic

interpretations is great. Is there an actor on any stage to-day who

can portray both the grossness of Falstaff and the subtlety of Iago?

I doubt it. Making all due allowances for the different art medium

the singing actor must work in, despite the slight exaggeration

of pose and gesture, Maurel had no superior, if indeed an equal,

in these two rôles. And then the man’s astonishing versatility!

What method, what manner of training has he had? Of what school or

schools is he the crystallized product? His voice, worn and siccant,

seemed to take on any hue he desired. In Falstaff, you may remember,

it was bullying, blandishing, defiant, tender, and gross; full of

impure suggestiveness, as jolly as a boon companion. And when he

sang “Quando ero paggio del Duca di Norfolk,” how his vocal horizon

lighted up!

The brainlessness of Verdi’s music previous to the time when Aïda

was composed should not close our eyes to the promise and potency

of that same early music. It is the music of a passionate Italian

temperament—music hastily conceived, still more speedily jotted

down, and tumbled anyhow on the stage. Musical Italy before 1880 was

devoted to the voice. Give it a plank, a dramatic situation, an aria,

and success pursued the composer. As for the dramatic unities, the

orchestral commentary, the welding of action, story, and music—why,

they could all go hang. Melody, irrelevant, fatuous, trivial melody,

and again melody, was the shibboleth. The wonder is that an orchestra

was ever employed—except that it made more noise than a piano player;

that costumes were ever worn—only because they looked braver, gayer,

in the flare of the footlights than street attire. And most wonderful

of all was the expense of a theatre, for to those melomaniacs

anything but a tune was a deterrent factor. The singer and the song

sung composed an opera. All the rest was sheer waste of material—or

Teutonic madness.

Verdi’s acquaintance with Arrigo Boïto was the turning-point in his

career. He knew Boïto’s far better than he knew Wagner’s scores. If

he was affected at all by Wagnerism, it was by way of Boïto and not

at first hand. I am not prepared to deny that Verdi ever listened

to the Ring, to Tristan, or to Die Meistersinger in its entirety

sung by competent throats; yet I sincerely doubt it. The Italian’s

early music is full of Rossini, Donizetti, Bellini, and Meyerbeer.

He could not, being of a receptive nature, have escaped Wagner had

he known him thoroughly. He was a very suspicious, proud old man,—as

proud of I Due Foscari as of Aïda,—and almost to the day of his death

deprecated Wagner’s influence on modern opera. To see, then, as do

many wise men of music, Wagner peering sardonically from behind the

lively and exciting bars of Verdi’s later scores, is to claim a

clairvoyance to which I dare not pretend.

Take any of Verdi’s operas previous to those of 1850, and what do

we get? A string of passionate tunes bracketed in the conventional

_cavatina-cabaletta_ style; little attempt at following the book—such

awful books!—and the orchestra, a huge strumming machine, strumming

without color, appositeness, rhyme, or reason. And then the febrile,

simian-like restlessness of the music. It was written for people

of little musical intelligence, people who must hum a tune or ever

after view it with contempt. Verdi could furnish tunes by the

hundred—real, vital, dramatic ones. Think of the waste, the saddening

waste, of material made by the young maestro in Oberto, Nabucco, I

Lombardi, Ernani, I Due Foscari, Attila, Macbeth, Luisa Miller, and I

Masnadieri! If he could have but saved them for his latter days—for

his so-called third period! I know that your early Verdian refuses to

consider the later music. He even listens to Aïda under protest. In

it lurks the Wagnerian _Wurm_ that in Otello and Falstaff stings to

death the melodic genius of the venerable master. Now, I quarrel with

no man’s artistic tastes. It were a futile proceeding. If you love

Rigoletto better than Otello, I have no objection to make. I cannot

bring any argument to bear upon you, for I am not a special pleader

in matters musical. As well try to convince a man who asserts that

Dumas père is a greater novelist than Flaubert. Yet I enjoy certain

moments in Rigoletto, just as I think The Three Guardsmen rattling

good reading. But to call either the opera or the romance great art

is to mix your critical values.

Verdi was not by nature a reformer. A man of sensual gifts in the way

of music-making, a born dramatizer of anything from an antique ruin

to a murder, he took up the operatic form as he found it and did not

seek to develop it. But he poured into its ancient, honorable, and

somewhat shaky mould stuff of a stirring nature—and also an amazing

amount of it. Think of the twenty-five and more operas he made before

he reached Aïda! To be sure, there is a suspicious resemblance

between his melodies, his characters, his situations; there is always

the blood-curdling story of intrigue,—political, passionate,—with

its elopements, loves, cutthroat conspirators, booted chorus, and

its orchestral tremolo. We get the dime novel set to music, the

inartistic glorification of the melodrama. Verdi needed money, love,

fame, easily gained, and being a much more industrious man than

Rossini he contrived to turn out in forty years twice as many musical

pot-boilers. I have always admired Rossini’s musical laziness. Once

rich, he refused to compose any more. As his facility was on a par

with his lack of artistic conscience, the thought of the amount he

might have left makes one shudder. But luckily he was content to

give us—not to mention any of the others—The Barber of Seville, a

masterpiece pure and undefiled.

Verdi, also lacking an artistic conscience, and without high artistic

ideals, produced operas as indefatigably as incubators chickens.

Naturally such music perished early, and his failures more than

balance his successes. He made money, an enormous amount; he was

probably the richest composer that ever drove a pen. The usual fate

has overtaken the early music, while even Rigoletto, Il Trovatore,

and La Traviata no longer draw unless sung by an “all star” cast.

I pass over the Manzoni Requiem of 1874. It was too near the Aïda

epoch to make a great forward step. Otello, in 1887, set the musical

world mad with surprise, curiosity, delight. It reveals little or

none of the narrow, noisy, vulgar, and violent Verdi of 1850. The

character-drawing is done by a man who is master of his material.

The plot moves in majestical splendor, and the musical psychology is

often subtle. At last Verdi has flowered. His other music, smelling

ranker of the soil, showing more thematic invention, was but the

effort of a hot-headed man of the footlights, a seeker after applause

and money. In Otello all musical provincialisms have vanished; the

writing is clear, the passion more controlled, the effects aimed at

easily compassed. The master craft of Iago is set over against the

fiery, nerve-shaking passion of Otello, and Shakespeare is suggested,

withal a very Italian one.

Falstaff was a second surprise. How an old graybeard of eighty could

have conceived such music is only to be explained by the young heart

of the man, by his sweetly healthy nature, his Latin frugality in

living. He was ever a taciturn man, a stoic, not an epicurean. As an

index to his character his music is often misleading. Add to these

qualities the beautiful friendship of Arrigo Boïto, from which came

a libretto, and the sum total is a setting of Shakespeare’s comedy

such as the world has never seen. Here again Wagner had less to do

with the matter than is supposed. In the musical dialogue Verdi

patterned after Die Meistersinger, for the emotion ever follows

the text. From Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro and Rossini’s Barber of

Seville he absorbed no little of gay sunshine and effervescence.

But his form is his own; it grew out of the situations of the play,

and was not a procrustean bed of theory upon which the composer

stretched his characters. It is laughing and joyous, this comedy of

an octogenarian. It fairly ripples with the humor of the Fat Knight.

There are no leading motives in the Wagnerian sense, though every

character is outlined with precision.

Now, I assert that Arrigo Boïto helped all this, stimulated a

young-old man to conquer new and more fruitful provinces. And Boïto,

who built two of the best librettos we know, certainly influenced

Verdi in his study of instrumentation. Compare Rigoletto and Otello

orchestrally! The advance is remarkable, all things being considered.

And at Verdi’s years! I suspect that Verdi made the sketches, which

Boïto transformed into painted pictures; just as I discern, as can

any one with ears, the intellectual characteristics in common between

Mefistofele and Iago’s monologues. Yet Verdi is true Verdi to the

last.

Rigoletto, Il Trovatore, and La Traviata have one cardinal merit,

in addition to their miracles of mellifluousness—they prefigure

the later Verdi, the thinking Verdi, the truer musical dramatist.

In regarding these we again encounter critical superciliousness of

the most pronounced type. The neo-Verdians will have none of the

middle-century Verdi—forgetting that no man may lift himself to the

stars by his own bootstraps. Verdi offers a fine picture of crawling,

creeping evolution. I confess that I believe the man would have stuck

at Don Carlos, Sicilian Vespers, Araldo, Un Ballo in Maschera, La

Forza del Destino, Simon Boccanegra, and the rest of the reactionary

stuff, had it not been for the masterful influence of Boïto, himself

a composer. Boïto helped Verdi to scramble upon the shoulders of

Verdi, compelled the Verdi of 1887 to forget the Verdi of 1871.

Aïda is pointed out as the great turn in the style of the composer.

It is fuller of Meyerbeerisms than any opera composed since

L’Africaine, as full as is Rienzi. Indeed, I doubt if Aïda would

have been born had not L’Africaine preceded it. The resemblance

to Meyerbeer does not stop at the libretto; there is the same

flamboyancy in color, the same barbaric taste for full-blown harmony

and exotic tunes—not to mention the similarities in the stories.

Wagner had far less to do with Aïda than Meyerbeer, though many

believe the contrary. To Rigoletto, in 1851, must we go in the search

for the roots of the mature Verdi. In the declamatory monologues

of the hunchback jester are the germs of the more intellectual and

subtle monologues of Iago and of Falstaff. Il Trovatore contains

strong dramatic situations, and if the tower scene is become

hackneyed, yet how well devised! In this much-admired, much-sung

composition are to be found harmonic straws which indicate to the

keen observer the way the musical wind was bound to blow nearly a

half-century later. With Traviata Verdi made his first attempt at

musical psychologizing. Banal as is the book, there is no denying

the power of some of its situations. No, decidedly it will not do

to overlook the Verdi of 1850. It would be building musical history

without straw.

As among modern German music-dramas Tristan and Isolde is the

greatest, so is Otello among the lyric dramas of Italy—one might

as well include France. Falstaff is their comic pendant as Die

Meistersinger is to Tristan. Verdi composed Otello when he was past

threescore and ten. The fact seems incredible; in its score seethes

the passion of middle manhood, the fervors of a flowering maturity.

No one ever dreamed of setting Shakespeare in this royally tragic

fashion. Rossini fluted with the theme; in Verdi jealousy, love,

envy, hatred, are handled by a master. It is a wonderful opera, and

a Shakespearean Verdi began at a time when most men are preparing

for death. Reversing natural processes, this phenomenal being wrote

younger music the older he grew. After Aïda—Otello! After grim

tragedy, joyous comedy—Falstaff! If he had survived ninety years, he

might have written a comic opera that would have outpointed in wit

and humor Johann Strauss!

Otello is a true music-drama; its composer seldom halts to symphonize

his events as does Wagner. Boïto, the greatest of librettists, has

skeletonized the story; Verdi’s music gives it vitality, grace,

contour, brilliancy. And yet the Italian poet has not gravely

disturbed the old original. It is but a compliment to his gift of

absorbing the Shakespearean spirit to say that Iago’s Credo, that

terrific explosion of nihilism and hatred, does not seem out of

perspective in the picture. It is Boïto’s intercalation, as are the

Cypriote choruses in Act II. All the rest is pure Shakespeare,

barring a few happy transpositions from the Senate speech to the duo

at the close of Act I.

Verdi’s character-drawing is masterly. Do not let us balk at

comparisons, or for that matter at superlatives. No composer ever

lived—Mozart and Wagner are alone excepted—who could have so

drawn the hot-blooded Moor and the cynical cannikin clinker, set

them facing each other in the score, and allowed them to work out

their own musical fates, as has Verdi. The key to Otello is its

characterization—in a musical sense, of course. But the medium in

which Verdi bids them move, their fluidity, their humanity—these

are the things that almost defy critical analysis. Whether he is

listening to his crafty Ancient, or caressing Desdemona, or raging

like the hardy Numean lion, it is always Otello, the Moor of Venice,

a living, suffering, loving man—Shakespeare’s Otello.

The character does not suggest the flashy operatic, the ranter of

the footlights. Nor does Iago, whether as the bluff hero of battles

and battles, or the loathsome serpent stinging the other’s soul,

ever lag dramatically, ever sink into the conventional attitudes

of a transpontine melodrama. It is Iago, “the spirit that denies,”

underlined perhaps, as music must emphasize ever the current emotions

of a character. Desdemona is drawn in relief to her furious lover and

warrior, and in relief to her cold-blooded maligner.

Verdi has assigned her gentle music, the Ave Maria, the Willow Song.

She is a pure white cloud against which as a background are etched

the powerful masculine motives of the play. Delicacy and vivacity

reveal, bit by bit, the interior of a sweet, troubled soul. The other

figures, Cassio, Emilia, are sketches that add to the density of

the background without detracting from the chief motives. It is a

remarkable libretto.

From the opening storm to the strangling scene the music flows

swiftly, as swiftly as the drama. Rich, varied, and eloquent, the

orchestra seldom tarries in its vivid and acute commentary. There

is scant employment of typical motives—the “kiss” theme in Act

I is sounded with psychologic fidelity when Otello dies. In the

Handkerchief Trio is there pause for instrumental elaboration; but,

in the main, old set forms are avoided, and while there is melodic

flow, it does not often crystallize. The duo at the end of Act I, the

Credo of unfaith, and Otello’s exhortation to the high heavens in Act

II; the tremendous outburst in the next act with Iago’s sardonically

triumphant exclamation, “Behold the lion!” as he plants his scornful

heel on the recumbent man—then the final catastrophe! Throughout

there are picturesque strokes, effects of massed splendor; and about

the tempest-stirred souls is an atmosphere of gloom, of doom, of

guilt and melancholy foreboding.

Verdi has felt the moods of his poet and made them his own. The

moods, the character-painting, are progressive; Otello, Iago, grow

from act to act. The simple-hearted, trusting general with his

agonized cry, “Miseria mia,” develops into a savage thirsting for

blood; “Sangue, sangue!” he howls; he sees blood; the multitudinous

music is incarnadine with it. And it is all vocal, it is written

for the human voice; the voice, not the orchestra, is the centre

of gravity in this astounding drama. Another such Iago, subtle,

sinister, evil incarnate, withal a dangerously graceful fellow,—such

an impersonation as Maurel’s may never be duplicated. And this

singing actor had the advantage of Verdi and Boïto’s “coaching” in

1887, when the music-drama was produced at Milan. This to show that

the music play demands as excellent an Iago as an Otello—indeed,

Verdi’s first idea of a title was the former—and while there have

been several Otellos, only one great Iago has appeared thus far on

the contemporary operatic stage.

BOÏTO’S MEFISTOFELE

Mefistofele by Arrigo Boïto to was revived at the Metropolitan Opera

House, January 14, 1901, where it was originally heard in December,

1883, and later, January 15, 1896. There is a record that Marie Roze

was the first Marguerite of Boïto at the Academy of Music. This was

as early as November 24, 1880. Mefistofele was first heard in Milan,

Italy, in 1868: its _première_ was a scene of rioting, and a duel

in which Boïto participated occurred later. Public feeling ran very

high, for they take their art seriously in Italy. The performance

lasted six hours, and was a hopeless failure. Not until the work,

pruned, revised, and greatly curtailed, was repeated in Bologna, did

Boïto receive a fair hearing. He had composed little previous to this

music-drama, preferring journalism and literary work. But Mefistofele

was such a challenge to older operatic forms that the work was soon

sung in London and elsewhere. Boïto, who is chiefly known as the

librettist of the later Verdi, is a man of the highest artistic

ideals. His mother was Polish, which may account for his versatility,

his poetic gifts. He worked over, re-orchestrated, and polished

Mefistofele, and changed Faust from a tenor to a barytone part. And

it all smells of the lamp, despite some beautiful pages.

Mefistofele was once music of the future; now it reminds one of

some strange, amorphous survival from a remote period. It is such

a tremendous attempt to embrace all of Goethe’s profound world

philosophy, poetry, dramatic symbolism, that it is a failure—a

remarkable failure. There is little melodic invention, the prison

scene being the top notch of its dramatic passion; while the tenor

solo, From the Meadows, From the Valleys, is strangely reminiscent

of the theme from the slow movement of Beethoven’s Kreutzer sonata.

It is mostly music of the head, not of the heart. Boïto has admirably

characterized Mefistofele. His sinister solo, I am the Spirit that

Denies, is very striking; the orchestra with its shrill, diabolical

whistling suggests Berlioz. And it also suggests in feeling the Honor

solo in Verdi’s Falstaff and Iago’s Credo in Otello. Boïto and Verdi

have collaborated so much that they must have absorbed each other’s

ideas. In the garden scene—a quartet and nothing more—Rigoletto is

recalled in the echoing laughter. It seems trifling though trickily

difficult. Goethe’s Marguerite is not realized. She is hardly

ingénue, this flirting girl who so calmly gives a sleeping potion to

her mother. And the loving side of her nature is barely outlined.

The Prologue in Heaven reveals Boïto’s fine skill in choral writing.

Mascagni did not fail to note this when writing the prayer in

Cavalleria Rusticana. The scene on the Brocken, the Witches’ Sabbath,

is very difficult to realize scenically. It contains a big fugue.

The dying scene is very strong, dramatically stronger than Gounod’s.

Gounod set out to write a very effective operatic scena. His trio

has in it the fire of the footlights. Boïto is possessed with the

tragic beauty of the situation, and so presents a more affecting and

dramatically truthful picture. Calvé has made this scene familiar to

New York.

Boïto attempts Part II of Faust. The classical Sabbath leaves us

dull, although the composer with his unrhymed dactylic and choriambic

verse, and the accompanying music, with its old-fashioned harmonic

flavor, endeavors to symbolize the embrace of German and Greek ideals.

The public sees only Faust consoling himself with the dark-haired

Elena, and the symbolism falls flat. There is some effort at unity

in the welding of the prologue and epilogue by using the opening

theme as a chorale finale. The one well-known duo of this second

part is La Luna Immobile for soprano and alto. But it is all too

episodic to rivet the attention; indeed, Mefistofele is a series of

loosely connected episodes. One is constantly reminded of Mascagni’s

obligations to Boïto. The spoor of Verdi’s later style is also

here. Boïto seems to have been the pivotal point of the neo-Italian

school—himself remaining in the background—while the youngsters

profited by his many experimentings. Mefistofele strikes one as an

experiment, with Wagner as a model. The most admirable thing in the

work is the free treatment of the declamatory passages. In this Boïto

set the pace for Verdi.

Boïto’s devil is greater than Gounod’s. The French devil is not a

terrible fellow; he is too fond of high living, and has a pretty

taste in wine. The sardonic, mocking arch fiend of Boïto is more

like the popular notion of mankind’s enemy. He is familiar with the

Powers, and is contemptuous of earthworms. His defiant and evil song

of Triumph is the best thing in the work. The solo in the Brocken

scene, Here is the World Empty and Round, does not make the same

impression as the Denial song. Faust in this version is rather

colorless, and more philosopher than lover. Marguerite’s most musical

episode is when she recalls her lost happiness in the mad scene. And

there is much music that is ugly and dreary, for Boïto, no matter

what he has accomplished in his unpublished music-drama, is in

Mefistofele rather the poet than the composer. Of rich, red, musical

blood, of vital figures, we are offered but little. This composition

is a product for the closet. It lacks that quality possessed by

musicians of meaner attainments than Boïto—the quality of humanity.

There are dramatic moments, but the story halts, the symbolism is not

appreciable, and the mystic element not quite realized. To give the

world a Faust in tone one must be a musical Goethe. Neither Gounod

nor Boïto was strong enough to cope with the grandeur and beauty

of Goethe’s masterpiece among masterpieces. Gounod was a musical

sensualist, lacking lofty imagination; Boïto fails in the sensuous

temperament and is ever cerebral.

VIII

THE ETERNAL FEMININE

I

A Grand Piano underneath the Bough,

A Gramophone, a Chinese Gong, and Thou

Trying to sing an Anthem off the Key—

Oh, Paradise were Wilderness enow!

—WALLACE IRWIN.

To the girl who plays Chopin! This sounds like a toast, and a cynic

would certainly add: “May her pretty fingers ne’er touch ivory

again!” But it is not a health that I wish to propose, nor yet an

exhortation. My notion is to put the question boldly: Can women play

Chopin? Before the rigor of such a query the hardiest-souled male

must retire abashed, or write with the usual masculine brutality and

lack of finesse. Chopin is the favorite composer of women; Chopin

rules the soul of the girl, and to Chopin is addressed a particular

form of worship. This consists of inarticulate gasps, irregular

sighs, and the glance which is called psychic. To girls of eighteen

or thereabouts Chopin is a religion—a sentimental one. Sympathetic

medical men diagnose the symptoms and declare them Chopinitis.

We have, many of us, suffered severely from it; most musical and

unmusical people do. Chopin is in the emotional curriculum of every

woman who plays the piano; therefore it shocks one if this question

be posed: Can women play Chopin?

Let us be scientific, let us be profound, and let us quote rows of

horrid, forbidding figures. I am now proposing a little journey

into the misty mid-region of Womanology, for the need of proving my

somewhat oblique case. It is crab-wise, this progression, but it may

serve. The Nineteenth Century some years ago contained an article

on woman’s brain by Alexander Sutherland. Written in fullest accord

with the aims and ideals of the new woman, the author is yet forced

to confess that “the male brain has an advantage of about 10 per cent

in weight,” and adds that “it is a difference which certainly affords

some little foundation for a very ancient belief,” said belief being

the inferiority of the female intellect to the male intellect. But

he proves that 90 per cent of women are the equals of 90 per cent of

men. And in the very beginning of his short study he demonstrates

that the neurons on the cortex of the brain are quite as numerous

in women as in men, and that these neurons “are the instruments of

mental energy.”

Mere brain weight, then, seems to prove nothing. It is the activity

of the neurons which determines the quality of brain power. Music

is denied a place among the more intellectual arts by many great

thinkers. Whether this is just or not, considering the vast claims

of Bach and Beethoven, I will not say, but one thing is certain: in

Chopin emotional sensibility predominates, and as women are supposed

to be more emotional than their mates, _ergo_ they should play Chopin

better. But are they more emotional? Lombroso, who has measured the

sighs of sentimental girls, and weighed her tears, says no. In an

extraordinary series of public experiments, conducted at Turin, the

learned Italian found that woman as compared with man was deficient

in tactile sensibility; that she did not record impressions, whether

optical, aural, or sensory, as rapidly or with such clear definition

as did man. I admit this sounds discouraging, and is enough to give

pause to the upward flight of the sex, if that flight is to be tested

by scientific analysis. But what is all this testing, weighing, and

measuring when faced by the spectacle of a glorious winged creature

which sails away on victorious pinions with plumage unruffled by

Lombroso and his laboratory logic?

A genuine _féministe_, one who gently felt the female pulse of his

century and suavely waved the patient aside, was the late Ernest

Renan. If ever a man should have had exalted ideals of womanhood,

he was that man. His sister Henriette was his life companion, a

veritable staff to him in his erudite studies, and when she died,

he withered, or, rather, grew fat and spiritually flabby. Yet this

most subtly feminine of men had the ingratitude to write: “There

is no doubt whatever that at the present time feminine instincts

occupy more space in the general physiognomy of the world than they

did formerly. The world is more exclusively preoccupied just now

with frivolities that formerly were looked upon as the exclusive

property of women. Instead of asking men for great achievements,

bold enterprises, and heroic labors, the women ask them for riches

only, to satisfy a vulgar taste. The general movement of the world

has put itself at the service of the instincts of woman, not those

splendid instincts through which they display more clearly than men

can, perhaps, the divine ideal of our nature, but the lower instincts

which form the least noble portion of her vocation.” This was written

in 1855. What would Renan have written in the twentieth century?

We have now laboriously collated the opinions of three men—Sutherland

on the brain, Lombroso on the sensibility, and Renan on the moral

nature of woman. The general tenor of these three messages is hardly

as hopeful as the new woman could desire. Let us leave the chill

topic in all its frozen splendor and turn to the latter part of my

question—Chopin. What is Chopin playing?

That Chopin was a Pole who went from Warsaw to Paris, there won

fame, the love of George Sand, misery, and a sad death are facts that

even schoolgirls lisp. The pianist-composer belongs to the stock

figures of musical fiction. He was slender, had consumption, slim,

long fingers, played vaporous moon-haunted music, and after his

desertion by Sand coughed himself off the contemporary canvas in the

most genteel and romantic manner. I like to recall George Moore’s

description of Robert Louis Stevenson: “I think of Mr. Stevenson,” he

wrote in his Confessions, “as a consumptive youth weaving garlands of

sad flowers with pale weak hands, or leaning to a large plate-glass

window and scratching thereon certain exquisite profiles with a

diamond pencil.” The piano was Chopin’s window, and upon it he

traced arabesques, tender and heroic, sorrowful and capricious. All

this is Chopin romantically conventionalized by artist-biographers

and associates. The real man, as nearly as we dare describe a real

man—was of a gentle, slightly acid temper, and of a refined nature,

who had a talent for playing the piano that was without parallel, and

a positive genius in composition. His life was stupid, if compared

with an actor’s or a sailor’s, and was devoid of public incident. We

can see him giving a few piano lessons to prim, chaperoned misses

of the Boulevard Saint-Germain before each noon; in the afternoons

making calls or studying; in the evening at the opera for an hour,

later in the enchanted circle of countesses who listened to his

weaving music, and afterward a space for breathing at a fashionable

café before retiring. Public appearances were rare; this aristocrat

loved not the larger world and its democratic criticisms. His was a

temperament prone to self-coddling. Only to the favored few did he

reveal the richness of his inner life. That he suffered intensely

from petty annoyances before which the ordinary man would hunch his

shoulders was but the result of a hyperæsthetic delicacy. An æolian

harp! you cry, and the simile is a happy one. But no wind harp has

ever discoursed such music as Chopin’s piano.

And then there is the national element, perhaps the most fascinating

of all the fibres of his many-colored soul. Chopin was Polish, he

loved Poland madly, yet Chopin never laid down his music to take up

arms for his native land, fight or die for, as did his countrywoman

Emilia Plater. Being infinitely more feminine than any woman,

Chopin sang his dreams, his disillusions, into his music, and put

his fiery patriotism into his polonaises. His range is not so wide

as Beethoven’s; but it is quite as intense. His mazurkas, valses,

nocturnes, studies, preludes, impromptus, scherzos, ballades,

polonaises, fantaisies, variations, concertos, cradle-song,

barcarolle, sonatas, and various dances are the most intimate music

written for any instrument. A lyric poet, he touched us to the core,

and with exquisite tentacles drew our soul to his. He is dead, yet

a vital musical force to-day. To play Chopin one must have acute

sensibilities, a versatility of mood, a perfect mechanism, the heart

of a woman and the brain of a man. He is not all elegant languors

and melancholy simperings. A capricious, even morbid, temperament

is demanded, and there must be the fire that kindles and the power

that menaces; a fluctuating, wavering rhythm yet a rhythmic sense of

excessive rectitude; a sensuous touch, yet a touch that contains an

infinity of colorings; supreme musicianship—Chopin was a musician

first, poet afterwards; a big nature overflowing with milk and honey;

and, last of all, you must have suffered the tribulations of life and

love, until the nerves are whittled away to a thin, sensitive edge

and the soul is aflame with the joy of death. Does this sound like

mocking at the impossible? All this and much more that is subtle and

indescribable are needed to interpret Chopin. And now do you see that

I am right when I declare that most women play his music mechanically?

Who has played Chopin in a remarkable manner? The list is not large.

Chopin himself must have been the greatest of all, though Liszt

declared that his physical strength was not able to cope with the

more heroic of his works. Liszt, Tausig, Rubinstein, Essipoff,

Joseffy, Karl Heymann, Pachmann, and Paderewski—a somewhat

attenuated number of names. Of course there were many others; but

these represent supreme mastery in various phases of the master’s

music. The real pupils all claimed to have inherited the magic

formula, the tradition. To-day the best-known Chopin players are

Joseffy, Rosenthal, Pachmann, Paderewski, and others. Each has

his virtues, and to define their limitations, enunciate their

excellences, would be critical hair-splitting. Nearly all the younger

professional men and women play Chopin after approved academic

models. He is expounded by æstheticians and taught throughout the

land. He is mauled, maimed, thumped, and otherwise maltreated at

conservatories, and the soul of him is seldom invoked, but floats, a

wraith with melancholy eyes, over nearly every piano in Christendom.

There have been and are charming interpreters of his music among

women pianists. Paderewski told me that he never heard the mazurkas

better played than by Marcelline, Princess Czartoryska, a beloved

pupil of Chopin’s. We have never had the mazurkas so charmingly

played here as by the wilful Vladimir de Pachmann; yet not even his

dearest foe would dower that artist with great mental ability. But he

is more feminine than any woman in his tactile sensibilities. Joseffy

has far more intellectuality; Paderewski is more poetic. All three

are, as all musical artists should be, feminine in their delicacy of

temperament.

Where, then, does woman enter this race, a race in which sex

traditions are topsy-turvied? If women are deficient in brain weight,

in nervous and spiritual powers, how is it that they dare attempt

Chopin at all?

Because, patient reader—and now I begin to draw in the very large

loop I have made—men of science deal with the palpable, and

the time for measuring and weighing the impalpable has not yet

arrived. Because there is no sex in music, and because you may not

be very moral or very intellectual, and yet play Chopin like “a

little god”—as Pachmann would say. And now for my most triumphant

contention: if the majority of women play Chopin abominably—so do the

majority of men!

II

“It may indeed,” answered Amelia; “and I am so sensible of it that

unless you have a mind to see me faint before your face, I beg you

will order me something—a glass of water if you please.” And then

that most fascinating chronicler, Henry Fielding, Esq., proceeds

to relate the further history of Captain Booth’s good lady, but

not until Mrs. Bennet infuses some “hartshorn drops” into a glass

of water for her. All this was about 1750. Since then Miss Austen

and her troop of youthful creatures, swooning to order, have stolen

with charming graces across the canvas of fiction; the young woman

of 1750, with her needles and her scruples, has quite vanished; and

passed away is the girl who played the piano in the stiff Victorian

drawing-rooms of our mothers. It has always seemed to me that

slippery haircloth sofas and the Battle of Prague dwelt in mutual

harmony. And now at the beginning of the century the girls who devote

time to the keyboard merely for the purpose of social display are

almost as rare as the lavender water ladies of morbid sensibilities

in the Richardson and Fielding novels. It was one of the new English

essayists who wrote of The Decay of Sensibility. He meant the Jane

Austen girl; but I wonder if the musical girl of the old sort may

not be also set down for study—the study we accord to rare and

disappearing types. Yet never has America been so musical, never so

crowded the recitals of popular pianists, while piano manufacturers

bewail the day’s brevity, so eager for their instruments is the

public. Here is a pretty paradox: the piano is passing and with it

the piano girl,—there really was a piano girl,—and more music was

never made before in the land!

Women and music have been inseparable in the male imagination since

the days when the morning stars sang cosmic chorals in the vasty

blue. The Old Testament tells of dancing and lyrics that accompanied

many sacred offices, and we all recall those music-mad maids who

slew Bacchus for a mere song. Women played upon shawm and psaltery,

and to her fate went dancing with measured tones the daughter of

Jephthah. I am not sure but Judith crooned a melody for the ravished

ears of Holofernes. An early keyed instrument was named in honor

of woman—the virginal—and the first printed piece of English music

was called Parthenia. On the title-page is represented a simpering

and rather blowzy young woman of Rubens-like physique, playing

upon a virginal, her fingers in delightfully impossible curlicues.

This piece was engraved in 1611. A variety of pictures, some as

early as 1440, show the inevitable girl seated at the spinet, or

clavichord. There is a painting by Jan Steen in the London National

Gallery, depicting an awkward Dutch miss fingering the keys, and

a Gérard Ter Borch at the Royal Museum, Berlin, reveals a woman

of generous breadth playing upon a violoncello. She appears to be

handling her bow like a professional; and she is, strange to say,

left-handed. Ample are the facts relating to the important rôle

enacted by woman as interpretative artist. To no less an authority

has been ascribed—wrongly, I suspect—a certain aphorism which

places in curious sequence wine, woman, and song. It was the woman

who entertained that then was considered. She pleased the rude

warrior, fatigued by the chase or war, and with her dainty tinklings

soothed his sottish brain. Like music, woman was a handmaiden. With

the emancipation of the art from churchly rubric came its worldly

victories. In the brilliant spaces of the concert room the piano was

king, and not seldom a king subdued by queenly fingers. The male

virtuoso, surely a thing of gorgeous vanities, soon had his feminine

complement. The woman who played the piano appeared in Europe; and

there were those that predicted the millennium. In the eighteenth

century pianos had sconces in which burned candles, while charming

women, hair powdered and patch on face, played Haydn, attempted

Scarlatti, and greatly wondered at the famously difficult music of

Mozart. Beethoven, a loutish young man of unbearable habits, wrote

music that was not to be thought of—it was simply not playable. To

be sure, a few grand ladies who gave themselves superior airs of

culture—as do Ibsen girls to-day—attempted the Beethoven sonatas in

the presence of the composer, who, quite deaf, lolled complacently

in their drawing-rooms and betimes picked his teeth with the candle

snuffers. But there was sterner stuff in the next generation. After

Camilla Pleyel came Madame de Belleville-Oury, admired of Chopin, and

the transition to the modern piano-playing women, Clara Schumann,

Annette Essipoff, Sophie Menter, Teresa Carreño, was an easy one.

The latter half of this century has witnessed an intense devotion to

a barren ideal. Years previous to the advent of the sewing-machine

there burst upon the civilized globe a musical storm of great

magnitude. Every girl whose parents respected themselves was led

almost manacled to the keyboard, and there made to play at least

one hour out of the twenty-four. This was before the age of eight;

after that crumby and pinafore period an hour was added, and O, the

tortures of her generation and the generation that succeeded her!

Veritable slaves of the ivory, they worked like the Niebelungs for a

stern Alberich, who pocketed the hoard of their fathers and rapped

their cold, thin, and despairing fingers with a lead pencil—one

usually “made in Germany.” With what infantile malignancy was

regarded the lead pencil of the German music-master! Why, even as

I write, my very sentence assumes an Ollendorffian cast because

of the harrowing atmosphere conjured up by that same irritable

Teutonic pencil-wielder. Piano music of those days was a thing of

horror. Innumerable variations and the sonatina that stupefied were

supplemented by diabolical finger studies without end. One hour after

breakfast, one hour after luncheon, and in the evening a little music

to soothe digestion and drive away dull drink—something of this sort

was the daily musical scheme of our natural rulers. Every girl played

the piano. Not to play the instrument was a stigma of poverty. The

harp went out with the Byronic pose, though harp-playing was deemed

“a fine, ladylike accomplishment” until the Civil War. But a harp

is a troublesome instrument “to keep in order”; it needs skilled

attention—above all, careful tuning. Now the piano is cheaper than

the harp—I mean some pianos—and it is the only instrument I know of

that is played upon with evident delight when out of tune. Even the

banjo is tuned at times; the average piano so rarely that it resents

the operation and speedily relapses below pitch. Because of its

unmusical nature, a very uncomplaining beast of burden, the piano

was bound to drive out the harp; it is more easily “worked,” and,

by reason of its shape, a more useful piece of furniture. Atop of a

piano may be placed anything, from a bonnet to an ice-cream freezer;

indeed, stories are told of heartless persons using it for a couch;

and once a party of French explorers discovered on the coast of

Africa an individual, oily but royal, who had removed the action and

wires of a grand piano and used the interior for his permanent abode.

The unfortunate instrument had drifted ashore from a wreck.

Other reasons, too, there are for the supplanting of the harp by its

more stolid half-brother, the piano—bigger brother, a noisier, more

assertive one, and a magnificent stop-gap for the creaking pauses of

the drawing-room machinery. And how nobly it covers thin talk with

a dense mantle of crackling tones! A provoker of speech, an urger to

after-dinner eloquence, the piano will be remembered in the hereafter

as the greatest social implement of last century’s latter half.

Liszts in petticoats have been so numerous during the past

twenty-five years as to escape classification. It was the girl

who did not play that was singled out as an oddity. For one Sonia

Kovalesky and her rare mastery of mathematics there were a million

slaves of the ivory. Not even the sewing-machine routed the piano,

though it dealt it a dangerous body blow. Treadles and pedals are

not so far asunder, and a neat piano technique has been found quite

useful by the ardent typewriter. What this present generation of

children has to be especially thankful for is its immunity from

useless piano practice. Unless there is discovered a sharply

defined aptitude, a girl is kept away from the stool and pedals.

Instead of the crooked back—in Germany known as the piano back—and

relentless technical studies, our young woman golfs, cycles, rows,

runs, fences, dances, and pianolas! While she once wearied her heart

playing Gottschalk, she now plays tennis, and she freely admits that

tennis is greater than Thalberg. Recall the names of all the great

women’s colleges, recall their wonderful curriculums, and note with

unprejudiced eyes their scope and the comparatively humble position

occupied by music. In a word, I wish to point out that piano-playing

as an accomplishment is passing. Girls play the piano as a matter of

course when they have nimble fingers and care for it. Life has become

too crowded, too variously beautiful, for a woman without marked

musical gifts to waste it at the piano.

Begun as a pastime, a mere social adjunct of the overfed, music,

the heavenly maid, was pressed into unwilling service at the piano,

and at times escorted timid youths to the proposing point, or eked

out the deadly lethargy of evenings in respectable homes. Girls had

to pull the teeth of this artistic monster, the pianoforte, else be

accounted frumps without artistic or social ambitions. Unlike that

elephant which refused to play a Bach fugue on the piano, because, as

the showman tearfully explained, the animal shudderingly recognized

the ivory of the tusks of its mother, the girl of the middle century

went about her task muddled in wits, but with matrimony as her

ultimate goal. To-day she has forsaken the “lilies and languors” of

Chopin, and the “roses and raptures” of Schumann, and if she must

have music, she goes to a piano recital and hears a great artist

interpret her favorite composer, thus unconsciously imitating the

Eastern potentate who boasted that he had his dancing done for him.

The new girl is too busy to play the piano unless she has the gift;

then she plays it with consuming earnestness. We listen to her, for

we know that this is an age of specialization, an age when woman

is coming into her own, be it nursing, electoral suffrage, or the

writing of plays; so poets no longer make sonnets to our Ladies of

Ivories, nor are budding girls chained to the keyboard. Never has the

piano been so carefully studied as it is to-day, and, paradoxical

as it may sound, never has the tendency of music been diverted to

currents so contrary to the genius of the instrument. All this is

better for woman—and for the development of her art along broader,

nobler lines. The tone-poem and music-drama are now our ideals, and I

dare publish my belief that in this year of grace there has been born

one who will live to see the decay of the piano recital. He may be a

centenarian before this change is wrought, but witness it he will,

for music, of all arts, changes most its vesture.

III

Balzac, master of souls, knower of the heart feminine, made his

lovely Princesse de Cadignan say to the enamored Daniel d’Arthez: “I

have often heard miserable specimens regret that they were women,

wish that they were men; I have always looked upon them with pity....

If I had to choose I would still prefer to be a woman. A fine

pleasure it is to have to owe one’s triumph to strength, to all the

powers that are given you by the laws made by you! But when we see

you at our feet, uttering and doing sillinesses, is it not then an

intoxicating happiness to feel one’s self the weakness that triumphs?

When we succeed we are obliged to keep silent under pain of losing

our empire. Beaten women are still obliged to keep silent through

pride. The silence of the slave frightens the master.”

This was written in 1839. If Balzac had lived a half-century, he

would have painted full-length portraits of women who keep quiet

neither in triumph nor in defeat; and at whose feet pedals, not

men, register new emotional experiences—for the pedals of the piano

are the soul of it. To be ashamed of one’s sex nowadays would be

an insane confession wrung from some poor overworked creature, one

to whom the French novelist might refuse even the name of woman.

Females may deny the beauty of being born to wear petticoats; women,

never. Indeed, the boot is now on the masculine leg. As the current

phraseology runs, Woman has found herself. She has also found a

panacea for irritated vanity and indigestion, at one time called in

romances a broken heart. This prophylactic is art; and when it is

used intelligently, misery flies forth from the window as music opens

the door.

Once, for the sheer fun of it, I made an imaginary classification

of music which various heroines of fiction preferred, or, rather,

might prefer—for many of them are, as you know, tone-deaf. Mr.

Howells remarked this years ago. But consider Clarissa Harlowe, or

any of the immortal Jane’s brood—do they not all suggest musical

possibilities? What a paper that would be to read before a mothers’

meeting on a sultry day in September!—The Musical Tastes of Fiction’s

Heroines. And with what facile logic, the logic of numbers, a clever

girl could unhorse her ruder opponents. The theme fascinates me; I

am loath to leave it. Think of the year 1800! Beethoven had written

some piano sonatas, but was not very well known abroad. In London

town there were still harpsichords, and Scarlatti and Mozart. The

modern grand piano was a dream that nestled in the later sonatas of

Beethoven—and in the brain of their maker. Tone was not thought of;

while a pearly touch, smooth scales, and crisp little rhythms were

affected by such women as spared the time to practise from their

social duties. The piano music of the eighteenth century was written

for women, is woman’s music. All these virginals, spinets, clavecins,

clavichords, harpsichords, are they not feminine? Are they not the

musical rib plucked by an amiable fate from the side of the masculine

church organ? Historical retrospects gall the mind at all times,

but it may not be amiss to consider the century’s piano music which

preceded ours. Out of the old dance suites burgeoned latter-day

piano music. Those graceful writers of old Italy and old France made

gay melodies, full of the artificial life of their time, of their

surroundings. You catch glimpses of delicate faces, with patches,

powdered heads, courtly struttings, and the sounds of courtly wooing.

The stately minuetto, lively courantes, decorous allemandes, smooth

sarabands, tripping gavottes and gigues,—all these, and many more

with high-colored titles, enchanted our great-great-grandmothers. The

more tragic note was not missing, either. They had L’Homicide and the

Fair Murderess, and any number of pieces named after tears, anger,

caprice, sorrow, revenge and desire. Animals and the gods of Greece

and Rome were quoted; flanked by wax candles, with suitors smirking

at the side of them, and peering in front of them, fair women played

music, played it with genteel gravity or bewitching coquetry; played

Scarlatti and Emanuel Bach, and all for the love of art—and perhaps

a matrimonial future. Let it be remarked, _en passant_, that the

keyboard, vastly modified, developed and improved as it is, is still

a favorite weapon of feminine offence. Just here get down your

Browning from the shelf and consider A Toccata of Galuppi’s.

Of Bach, the giant, we do not read in the diaries, letters, and books

of this fashionable epoch. That grim old forge-master of fugues would

hardly have appealed to the dreams of fair women, even had they been

cognizant of his existence. Handel’s piano music was more to their

taste; his suites, classical and solid in character, are full of

brightly said things, and lie well for the instrument. Joseph Haydn,

owing much to Bach’s son Emanuel, wrote pleasing music, light music,

for the piano. His sonatas are not difficult, were not difficult for

those ladies who could fluently finger Scarlatti. This Italian, with

his witty skippings, rapid hand-crossings, and implacable vivacity,

is still rainbow gold for most feminine wrists. Mozart, the sweetly

lyric, the mellifluous and ever gay Mozart, made sonatas as gods

carve the cosmos. Every form he touched he beautified. The piano

sonatas, written for money, written with ease, were also written

with both eyes on the fair amateur of the period. She admired Mozart

more than Haydn; his music was melodious, his decorative patterns

prettier. So Mozart raged in the hearts of the ladies, and slender

fingers troubled the chaste outlines of his sonatas. His eighteenth

sonata, preceded by a fantasia in the same key—C minor—alone impeded

the flight of these butterflies. In it were mutterings of the music

that awed and thrilled in Don Giovanni, and it was a precursor of

Beethoven and his mighty thunderings.

Behold the conqueror approaches, the Bonaparte, the Buonarroti, the

Balzac of music—Ludwig van Beethoven. In the track of his growling

tempests followed women, nobly nurtured, charming women of fashion,

Nanette Streicher, Baroness Ertmann, Julia Guicciardi, Thérèse,

Bettina, and many more besides. They played for him, and he, great

genius and despiser of idle conventions, stretched his stout short

body out upon drawing-room couches.

It is not a pretty picture this, but is a characteristic. It must

please latter-day pagans who flout the niceties of society. Not all

the Beethoven sonatas were admired to the studying point. The early

ones—mere exercises of a young athlete juggling with the weapons of

his grandsire—alone called for commendation. Dedicated to Haydn,

the first three did not excite the ire of critics or teachers. But

as the man grew, as he felt, suffered, and knew, then his canvases

began to excite fear and repulsion. “Why these gloomy tints, Herr

van Beethoven?” they cried, and listened eagerly to his rivals, the

Wölffls, the Gelineks, the Hummels. There is a modishness even in

the art of writing for the piano, and Beethoven despised modishness,

as would have Diana of the Ephesians the millinery of Lutetia. So he

was neglected for a half-century, and the long-fingered, long-haired

virtuosi overran Europe, with their variations, their fantasias,

their trills, and their trickeries. From Hummel to Thalberg effect

was their god, and before the shrine of the titillating, the

ornamental and the suave, womankind prostrated herself, pouring out

homage and gold—the latter provided by patient fathers and husbands.

It was a carnage, a musical rout, and a superior warrior like Liszt

trailed thousands of scalps after his chariots during triumphal

tours. The mediæval dancing manias were as nothing when compared with

the hysteria evoked by the new Pied Piper of Hungary. Chopin never

had the physique, and Mendelssohn was too moral, to copy Liszt. These

two men wrote lovely music, feminine music; while down in Vienna

a young man named Schubert died, after writing incomparable songs

and much beautiful piano music. His sonatas are not so feminine in

texture as his musical Moments, impromptus and dances. This music

is made for woman, with its intimate, tender feeling, its loose and

variegated structure. Von Weber composed chivalric sonatas and that

marvellous epitome of the dance, The Invitation. Schumann, broken in

fingers through too curious experimentings, dreamed twilight music,

which his gifted wife Clara interpreted to an incredulous world.

Since then the rest is history. Women virtuosi are as plentiful as

the shining sands, beginning with Clara Schumann and ending with the

prodigy of yesterday. Such thunderers as Sophie Menter and Teresa

Carreño, women of iron will and great muscular power, and a subtle

interpreter like Annette Essipoff, challenge men in their own sphere,

and relatively hold their own. I say relatively; and now comes

into view a serious question. It is this: Should women essay the

music of all composers? The answer is in the affirmative, for who

shall assert that a severe course of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms may

result in aught else but good. But do women interpret all composers

with equal success? The answer is here decidedly a negative one.

Though I have heard Menter play Liszt’s rhapsodies with overwhelming

brilliancy, though I have listened to Carreño in amazement as she

crashed out Chopin’s F sharp minor polonaise on her Steinway, yet

I know that the brawn and brain of this pair are exceptional. Half

a dozen such do not appear during a century. Therefore big tonal

effects, called orchestral by the critics, are usually not to be

found in the performances of women. For that reason I enjoy the

playing of women who are genuinely feminine in their style—Essipoff

or Madame Zeisler. Smoothness, neatness, delicacy, brilliancy, and a

certain grace are common enough. The average woman pianist is a hard

student, and strives to achieve that which men easily accomplish.

As a rule she has finger facility, a plentiful lack of rhythm, and

no particular interpretative power—exactly the qualities of the

average male pianist. When Maud Powell plays Bach or Beethoven on

her violin we are amazed and say, “Why, this is virile!” When Fanny

Bloomfield-Zeisler delivers the scherzo from the Litolff concerto,

we are surprised—not at her swiftness, ease, or delicacy, but at her

nervous force and bravura—these latter being selfishly annexed by men

as eminently masculine attributes. Are they? Certain feminine Wagner

singers possess them, and in opera they are accepted as a matter of

course. A genuine paradox, is it not?

The muscular conformation of a woman’s arm militates against her

throwing a stone as far as a man; it also operates adversely in

modern piano-playing, where the triceps muscles are a necessity

for a broad, sonorous tone. I have considered the pros and cons of

emotional intensity in writing of woman as a Chopin player, and

shall not again traverse that barren and ungrateful region. The

intellect remains to be discussed. Are women intellectual in the

interpretative sense? Yes. Without hesitation I answer this question,

for music, apart from the creative side, is a feminine art, and one

in which woman’s intuitions lead her many leagues toward success.

That women have as yet—you mark my use of a future contingency!—that

women have as yet exhibited powers of interpretation as keen, as

original, or even on a par with men, I am not prepared to say.

Illuminative in Bach or Beethoven they are not, though delightfully

poetic in Schumann and Chopin. I have never heard a woman play the

Hammer-Klavier Sonata, opus 106, of Beethoven with force, lucidity,

or imaginative lift.

_Enfin_: The lesson of the years seems to be that women can play

anything written for the piano, and play it well. In all the music

of the eighteenth century, in the sonatas of Haydn, Mozart, and the

early Beethoven, in Hummel, Weber, Schubert, Mendelssohn, some of

Schumann, some of Chopin, a goodly portion of Liszt, all of Field,

Heller, Hiller, Moszkowski, Grieg, Scharwenka, and a moiety of

Brahms,—all these composers have been essayed with success. Bach’s

Well-tempered Clavichord should be the bread and butter of a woman’s

musical _menu_; it should begin and end her day. One may quote Balzac

again—that dear Princesse de Cadignan, sometimes called Madame la

Duchesse Maufrigneuse, “Women know how to give to their words a

peculiar saintliness; they communicate to them I know not what of

vibration, which extends the sense of their ideas and lends them

profundity; if later, their charmed auditor no longer recalls what

they have said, the object has been completely attained, which is

the proper quality of eloquence.” And of this species of eloquence

is a woman’s playing of Bach and Beethoven and Brahms. It is often

charming; but is it ever great, spiritual, moving art?

The woman question—is it not one to be shunned? I mean the question,

not the theme itself, though one may recommend Laura Marholm’s

volumes. Frau Marholm is a Scandinavian, and Northern women must

have been bound with iron social gyves, to judge by the quality of

their protestant literature. Ibsen, Björnson, even Strindberg—whose

erratic pendulum swings to the other extreme—are full of the heady

polemics of sex. Sex—why, one sickens of the subject after reading

problem plays and novels. To all American women between the ages

of eighteen and eighty I say study Laura Marholm’s Studies in the

Psychology of Woman. The dissatisfied ones, those who really believe

all they read, may perhaps realize how much better off is The Unquiet

Sex—this capital phrase is of Helen Watterson Moody’s coining—in

America. Little wonder that there is a woman movement in Europe. For

its psychology read Marholm. Best of all, here is a woman telling us

secrets, secrets not to be captured by men watchful of the Sphinx

that Defies. And it is a sad corrective for masculine presumption,

masculine vanity. _We_ are only tolerated. Some of us have known that

for years; here it is elevated to the dignity of a psychological

system. These long-haired, soft-eyed animals, as Guy de Maupassant

described them, are our true critics weighing us ever in scales that

are mortifyingly candid, excusing us if they love us, but after all

only _tolerating us_, allowing the lords of creation to kneel in

humble attitudes at the shrine and rewarded at the end by—toleration.

And if this is the case on the Continent, where the equality of

women is as yet a half-hatched idea, how is it in America, where she

is queen, queen from kitchen to palace? I think Mrs. Marholm herself

would be amazed, and mayhap after five years’ residence here would

write a book about the Wrongs of Man. Her Six Famous Women betrays

the writer’s keenness of vision, the Studies reveal breadth of idea

and judgments. She does not belong to the “Shrieking Sisterhood.” She

is a woman, a defender of home and family. I assure you I enjoyed

her book far better than Zola’s Fecondité—that most miraculously

dull and moral tract. Tolstoy is the remote parent of both books,

though Marholm has her own feminine point of attack. No man may hope

to understand women as does a woman. It was Zangwill, I think, who

said that all women writers are of value—do they not tell us the

secrets of their sex? This is hardly polite, but it is true. When

the “messages” of George Eliot and Charlotte Bronté have grown stale

from usage—all truths breed rust after a time—their unconscious

self-portraitures will preserve them from those giant moths, the

critics.

The Marholm knows better than any envious male the limitations of

woman as artist, politician, and writer. In the admirable study of

Mrs. Besant she writes: “She has always possessed the wholly feminine

capacity of assimilating the most varied and incompatible mental

food, without disturbance or indigestion, and of giving it forth

with a certain accuracy; her brain was like a photographic plate

upon which the exposed picture is clearly and mechanically printed.

These characteristics, the quick perception and exact repetition,

are frequently praised by professors who examine feminine students,

and many have declared that in eagerness for knowledge and ability

to acquire it, women excel men. It is undeniable that in these

characteristics they excel most men; it would be a pity if most men

excelled them, for these characteristics rest upon the lesser power

and capacity for original thought, independent selection, and deeper

affinity to the appropriate idea; they depend upon a mechanical

instead of an organic process.”

This is not a pleasing paragraph, but it shows the writer’s style

of argument. She girds with something approaching violence at the

milk-and-water men of the day, declaring that Woman’s Emancipation

is the result of some deficiency in modern manhood. However, read

Marholm and draw your own pictures of what women should or should not

be. A charming woman told me that she had asked Jean de Reszké if he

cared to sing Romeo or Tristan with any particular singer.

“I always sing to my ideal woman,” replied the artist. And I fancy

that we all pursue that illuding composite. It is Woman who composes

all the great music, paints all the great pictures, writes all

the great poems—Woman the inspirer of all art! Is _She_, after

all, our coast of Bohemia? Then mankind, from the torrid time of

undifferentiated protozoa, has been frantically striving to acquire a

footing upon that fascinating territory.

IX

AFTER WAGNER—WHAT?

I

THE CAPRICE OF THE MUSICAL CAT

Few critics are prophets honored in their own musical country, and

but one or two in a generation possess _prévoyance_ enough to predict

the way the musical cat will jump. The antics of that exotic feline

since the day Richard Wagner pinched its tail and bade it leap

through the large and rather gaudy hoop of the music-drama, have been

mystifying and extraordinary. It coquetted with Brahms, it visited

Italy, and for a time took up its abode in the house of Grieg.

In a word, caprice of a deep-seated order has marked the progress

of music during the past half-century. I am not speaking now of

America, but of the world at large. Chopin died in 1849, Schumann

in 1856; with them were buried the ideals that lit the lantern of

the romantic school. It has flickered on, this sweet, phosphorescent

signal of revolt, but chiefly in the music of imitators. The strong

light of the torch first firmly held by Bach and passed on by men

like Mozart, Beethoven, and Brahms was not the sort desired of the

dreamers. For them the twilight and the strange-winged creatures

bred in the twilight; the classical composers—who were romantics in

their time—loved too much the luminary of day, and had few favors for

melancholy and moonshine.

Then came Richard Wagner, revolutionist, genius by the grace of God,

and a marvellous moulder of other men’s ideas. We are no longer

alarmed by the senile warnings of the extreme right camp; as for the

crazy boasts and affirmations of the musical romantics, we who know

our Wagner smile at the godlike things claimed for him. He had genius

and his music is genuine; but it is music for the theatre, for the

glow of the footlights; rhetorical music is it, and it ever strives

for effect. That this cannot be music to touch the tall stars of Bach

and Beethoven we know; yet why compare the two methods when they

strive for such other and various things? Wagner arrogated everything

to his music-dramas; this he had to do or else be left lonely,

bawling his wares to unsympathetic listeners in the market-place of

art. But he did not hesitate to invade its most sacrosanct precincts

to vend his musical merchandise. And we must not criticise him for

this—such auctioneering in his case was absolutely necessary.

Wagner caught up into a mighty synthesis all the loose threads of

romanticism, all the widely-severed strands of opera. He studied

Bach and Beethoven, and utilized the polyphony of the one, the

symphonic orchestra of the other; then, knowing that opera as opera

on Rossinian lines had reached its apogee, and that Mozart and Gluck

contained in solution the very combinations he needed, he, like the

audacious alchemist, the cunning Cagliostro that he was, made a

composite that at first smacked of German and then of Italian. He

ran through his Rienzi, Flying Dutchman, Lohengrin, Tannhäuser days,

strenuously testing his originality the meanwhile; and when the time

had arrived—in his case late in life—he calmly threw overboard old

formulas and served us the Ring and the rest of his masterpieces.

It was the most deliberate chase after and assumption of genius the

world had ever witnessed; and, strange as it seems, the wings that

carried Wagner, Icarus-wise, to the vistas of the sun showed no

weaknesses, no threatened and precipitous meltings. To change the

figure: We know that this conscious composer perfected his style with

other men’s ideas; he beat, bruised, battered into shape a method of

his own, strong, individual, and all-sufficing for his purpose. He

knew that certain subjects could stand operatic treatment, and that

your opera orchestra must not be a big guitar, nor yet as symphonic

as Beethoven’s. With the prescience of genius he helped himself to

precisely the material he wanted. How well he knew his needs we all

realize when we listen to Die Meistersinger and Tristan and Isolde.

George Bernard Shaw, in a long since vanished and brilliant essay,

held that “Wagner, like most artists who have great intellectual

power, was dominated in the technical work of his gigantic scores by

so strong a regard for system, order, logic, symmetry, and syntax

that, when in the course of time his melody and harmony become

perfectly familiar to us, he will be ranked with Handel as a composer

whose extreme regularity of procedure must make his work appear dry

to those who cannot catch his dramatic inspiration. If Nordau, having

no sense of that inspiration, had said: ‘This fellow, whom you all

imagine to be the creator of a new heaven and a new earth in music

out of a chaos of poetic emotion, is really an arrant pedant and

formalist,’ I should have pricked up my ears and listened to him

with some curiosity, knowing how good a case a really keen technical

critic could make out for that view.”

Wagner was the last of the great romantics; he closed a period,

did not begin one. It is the behavior of the musical cat—to resume

our illustration—since Wagner’s death that is so puzzling to

the prophets. The sword and the cloak, the midnight alarums and

excursions sentimental, occupied for long the foreground; but

music discarded adventure when adventure was reëntering the land

of letters in the person of Robert Louis Stevenson,—Stevenson who

wore his panache so bravely in the very presence of Émile Zola

and other evangelists of the drab in fiction. A curious return to

soberer ideals of form was led by Johannes Brahms. I may add that

this leadership was unsought, indeed was hardly apprehended, by the

composer. A more unpromising figure for a musical Messiah would

have been difficult to find. Wagner, a brilliant, disputatious,

magnetic man, waged a personal propaganda; Brahms, far from being the

sympathetic, cultured man of the world that Wagner was, lived quietly

and thought highly. His were Wordsworthian ideals; he abhorred the

world, the flesh, and the devil,—this last person being incarnate for

him in the marriage of music with the drama. Yet his music is alive

to-day; alive with a promise and a potency that well-nigh urge me to

fatidical utterance, so sane is it, so noble in contrast, so richly

fruitful in treatment. A sympathetic writer he is, and also a man

who deals largely in the humanities of his art. Learned beyond the

dreams of Wagner, Brahms buried his counterpoint in roses, set it to

blooming in the Old-World gardens of Germany; decked his science with

the sweet, mad tunes of Hungary, withal remaining a Teuton, and one

in the direct line of Bach, Beethoven, and Schubert.

And yet Brahms dreams of pure white staircases that scale the

infinite. A dazzling, dry light floods his mind at times, and you

hear the rustling of wings,—wings of great, terrifying monsters,

hippogriffs of horrid mien; hieroglyphic faces, faces with stony

stare, menace your imagination. He can bring down within the compass

of the octave moods that are outside the pale of mortals. He is a

magician, often spectral; yet his songs have the homely lyric fervor

and concision of Robert Burns. A groper after the untoward, I have

been amazed at certain bars in his F sharp minor sonata, and was

stirred by the moonlight tranquillity in the slow movement of the F

minor sonata. He is often dull, muddy-pated, obscure, and maddeningly

slow. Then lovely music wells out of the mist; you are enchanted,

and cry, “Brahms, master, anoint again with thy precious chrism our

thirsty eyelids!”

Brahms is an inexorable form maker. His four symphonies, his three

piano sonatas, the choral works and chamber music—are they not all

living testimony to his admirable management of masses? He is not a

great colorist. For him the pigments of Makart, Wagner, and Théophile

Gautier are unsought. Like Puvis de Chavannes, he is a Primitive.

Simple, flat tints, primary and cool, are superimposed upon an

enormous rhythmic versatility and a strenuousness of ideation.

Ideas—noble, profundity-embracing ideas—he has. They are not in the

smart, epigrammatic, flashing style of your little man. He disdains

racial allusions. He is a planetary Teuton. You seek in vain for the

geographical hints that chain Grieg to the map of Norway. Brahms’s

melodies are world typical, not cabined and confined to his native

soil. This largeness of utterance, lack of polish, and a disregard

for the politeness of his art do not endear him to the unthinking.

Yet, what a master miniaturist he is in his little piano pieces, his

intermezzi! There he catches the tender sigh of childhood, or the

faint intimate flutterings of the heart stirred by desire. Feminine

he is as is no woman; virile, as few men. The sinister fury, the

mocking, drastic fury of his first rhapsodies,—true Brahmsodies,—how

they pierce to the core the pessimism of our age!

He reminds me more of Browning than does Schumann. The full-pulsed

humanity, the dramatic—yes, Brahms is sometimes dramatic, not

theatric—modes of analysis, the relentless tracking to their ultimate

lair of motives, are Browning’s; but the composer never loses his

grip on the actualities of structure. A great sea is his music, and

it sings about the base of that mighty mount we call Beethoven.

Brahms takes us to subterrene depths; Beethoven is for the heights.

Strong lungs are needed in the company of these giants.

Now comes another enigmatic tangent of music, the heavenly maid.

The seed planted by Berlioz and carefully husbanded by Liszt has

come to a pretty and a considerable harvest. Of Liszt, whose

revolutionary music the world has not yet recognized, this is not

the time to write. Only volumes can do justice to his rare genius

as a man, artist, and composer. I spoke of the death of Chopin and

Schumann stifling the aspirations of the romantics; nothing ever

dies, and by an elliptical route there has returned to us something

of the fire and fury-signifying passion of these same romantics.

All this we find in the music of Peter Tschaïkowsky, all this and

more. Tschaïkowsky, artistically, is another descendant of Liszt

and Berlioz, with a superadded Slavic color—or, shall I say flavor?

Tschaïkowsky deliberately, though without malice, abandoned the old

symphonic form. Ravished by what Henry James calls the “scenic idea,”

though without compelling talent for the theatre, he poured into the

elastic and anonymous mould of the symphonic poem passion and poetry.

A poetic dramatist, he selected as typical motives Hamlet, Francesca

da Rimini, Romeo and Juliet, Don Juan, Jeanne d’Arc, and Manfred;

his six symphonies are romantic suites, resplendent with the pomp

and color of an imagination saturated in romanticism. His fierce

Cossack temperament and mingling of realistic, sensuous savagery and

Malo-Russian mysticism set him apart among composers. As musical

as Wagner or Brahms, he lacks the great central, intellectual grip

of these two masters. He never tested his genius with fundamental

brainwork. But if we wish a picture of musical psychological life of

the latter half of this century, it is to Tschaïkowsky that we must

go.

Rubinstein I do not consider a factor in the musical strife. He was

an ardent upholder of both camps, and, being a German-Russian and a

Russian-German Jew and Lutheran, his eclecticism proved his undoing.

Something of the same sort may be said of Saint-Saëns, the clever

Frenchman. Grieg built his nest overlooking Norwegian fjords, and

built it of bright colored bits of Schumann and Chopin. He is the

bird with the one sweet, albeit monotonous note. He does not count

seriously. Neither does Dvořák, of Bohemia, who, despite his intimate

mastery of orchestral color, has never said anything particularly

novel or profound. Smetana is his superior at every point. Eugen

d’Albert treads with care the larger footprints of Brahms; and

Goldmark, a very Makart in his prodigal amazements of color, has

contributed a few canvases to the gallery. But Germany and Austria,

with one exception, are dead. I do not count Bruckner; he patterned

after Wagner too closely. Italy, with the exception of Boïto, is as

bare of big young talent as Mother Hubbard’s cupboard. France has

Massenet, Bruneau, Saint-Saëns, César Franck, Vincent d’Indy, Fauré,

Charpentier, Lalo—!

We have heard little except a string quartet of Claude Debussy’s in

New York. The music to Maeterlinck’s Pelléas and Mélisande is so

absolutely wedded to the play, so incidental in the true sense of a

much-abused word, that as absolute music it is unthinkable. Hearing

it you set the composer down as lacking ear. But Richard Strauss

_via_ the music of Wagner, Liszt, and Berlioz has set the pace

for the cacophonists. Debussy, notwithstanding his unquestionable

musicianship, is obviously a “literary” composer. That is to say,

his brain must first be excited by the contemplation of a dramatic

situation, a beautiful bouquet of verse, a picture, a stirring

episode in a novel. But why cavil whether the initial impulse for his

music be the need of money or Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa! A composer who

can set Mallarmé’s difficult L’Après Midi, and the more recondite

poems of Baudelaire, need not be daunted by criticism as to his

methods of work. Take this Pelléas music for example; it is a perfect

specimen of decomposition. The musical phrase is dislocated; the

rhythms are decomposed, the harmonic structure is pulled to pieces,

melts before our eyes—or ears; is resolved into its constituent

parts. And his themes are often developed in opposition to all laws

of musical syntax. In Debussy’s peculiar idiom there seems to be

no normal sequence—I say seems, for it is simply because our ears

are not accustomed to the novel progressions and apparent forced

conjunctions of harmonies and thematic fragments. Tonalities are

vague, even violently unnatural. The introduction to the forest

scene, where Golaud discovers Mélisande is of a singular sweetness.

The composer has caught, without anxious preoccupation, the exact

note of Maeterlinck, and he never misses the note throughout the

opera. As it is impossible to divorce music and text,—Debussy

seems to be Maeterlinck’s musical other self,—so it is a useless

task to point out the beauties, the ugliness, the characteristic

qualities of the score. In the piano partition nothing may be

gleaned of its poetic fervor, its bold landscape painting, its

psychologic penetration. There are some isolated spots where the

orchestra soliloquizes, though few. It is the complete enveloping of

Maeterlinck’s strangely beautiful play with a musical atmosphere that

wins the attention. It is easy to conceive of the play apart from the

music, but not of the music as a separate entity.

Debussy, then, has a musical idiom of his own. He is a stylist and

an impressionist. There are purples on his palette—no blacks. If

the Western world ever adopted Eastern tonalities, Claude Debussy

would be the one composer who would manage its system, with its

quarter-tones and split quarters. The man seems a wraith from the

East; his music was heard long ago in the hill temples of Borneo, was

made as a symphony to welcome the head-hunters with their ghastly

spoils of war! Debussy’s future should be viewed with suspicion from

all the critical watch-towers.

In Belgium there are major talents such as Peter Benoit, Gilson,

Edgar Tinel, Jan Blockx, Lekeu, Van der Stucken—the last named was

one of the first among the young Belgians to compose tone-poems.

Charles Martin Loeffler is an Alsatian with French blood in his

artistic veins. He belongs by affinity to the Belgian group. His

symphonic poem is called The Death of Tintagiles after the mysterious

and horrible drama of Maurice Maeterlinck—whose plays, despite their

exquisite literary quality, act better than they read. Mr. Loeffler’s

poem was first produced in Boston under Emil Paur’s direction,

January 8, 1898. Then there were two violas d’amore employed in the

obligato, perhaps symbolizing the sobbing voices of Tintagiles and

Ygraine. Since that performance—when Messrs. Kneisel and Loeffler

played the violas—the composer has dispensed with one of these quaint

instruments, has remodelled the score and has also re-orchestrated it.

Thoroughly subjective as must ever be the highest type of the

symphonic poem, The Death of Tintagiles is rather a series of

shifting mood-pictures than an attempt to portray the drama too

objectively. One feels the horrid suspense of the storm—it is a

sinister night!—and what went on behind closed doors in that gloomy

castle not far from the sonorous breakers on the beach. There is soul

strife, but it is muted. Life here is a tragedy too deep for blood or

tears, and the silence—the Loeffler orchestra can suggest hideous and

profound silence when playing fortissimo—has the true Maeterlinckian

quality.

And then Ygraine’s agony, as she searches for her murdered brother,

Tintagiles,—“I have come up, come up high, countless steps between

high, pitiless walls,”—can be poignantly felt. Those four harsh

knocks, like the knocking at the gate in Macbeth, must surely

indicate the tragedy embouched in hidden spaces.

The music, considered as music, is very beautiful. It easily ranks

its composer among the stronger of the modern men. Loeffler is

primarily a painter, and then a poet. He seldom sounds the big heroic

note; he is too subtle, and a despiser of the easily compassed. His

orchestral prose is rather the prose of Walter Pater than the prose

of—say, Macaulay or Meyerbeer. Despising the cheap and grandiose, he

has formulated a style that is sometimes “precious” in its intensity

and avoidance of the phrase banal. A colorist, his tints begin where

other men’s leave off; and his palette is richer than the rainbow’s.

In general “tone” he hovers between the modern Russians and Richard

Strauss.

In theme he is Loeffler. The Death of Tintagiles has enclosed within

it much lacerating emotion, many new color perspectives, many

harmonic devices, and withal a human, though somewhat sublimated

human, quality which endears the music at the first hearing.

Despite its psychology, it is always music for music’s sake. There is

formal structure—Loeffler’s form—and a distinct climax. The sparing

use of the exotic-toned viola d’amore is most telling. The fanfares,

recalling the dim triumphs of the dusty dead, are superbly effective;

and the cantilena is ever touching. It is all poetic, “atmospheric”

music, yet it is none the less moving and dramatic.

Here then is the present situation: Wagner preaching in his music

dreams; Tschaïkowsky passionately declaiming the cumulative woes

of mankind in accents most pathetically dramatic; Brahms leisurely

breasting the turbid billows of this maelstrom and speaking in golden

tones the doctrine of art for art’s sake; and, finally, Richard

Strauss, a _Übermensch_ himself, seeking with furious and rhythmic

gestures to divert from the theatre the art he loves—who shall say

whither all this will lead? After Wagner—music for music’s own

symphonic sake, and not for impossible librettos, acting-singers, and

scene-painters.

II

WAGNER AND THE FRENCH

Stendhal—Henry Beyle—once wrote:—

“Romanticism is the art of presenting to people the literary works

which in the actual state of their habits and beliefs are capable

of giving them the greatest possible pleasure; classicism, on the

contrary, is the art of presenting them with that which gave the

greatest possible pleasure to their grandfathers.”

That the reaction from a brutal realism, a minute photography of

nasty details, would come in Parisian art was a foregone conclusion

to any acute observer of the history of literature, art, and music

since Goethe’s imperial mind set the fashion of things in the early

years of the last century. The splendor of Théophile Gautier’s famous

“gilet rouge,”—he declared that it was a pink doublet,—which graced

the memorable days of the first violent representations of Ernani,

was naught but a scarlet protest against the frozen classicism of

Cherubini the composer, the painters Ingres and David, and the

worship of writers like Boileau, Racine, and Malherbe. A wild rush

toward romanticism was inevitable after the colorless elegiacs

of Lamartine. And the grand old man at Weimar, in the twilight

of his glorious career, summed up the whole movement of 1830 by

saying:—“They all come from Châteaubriand.”

But Victor Hugo, Théophile Gautier, Delacroix, Chopin, Alfred

de Musset, George Sand, Franz Liszt, Heinrich Heine, and later,

Charles Baudelaire, in fact all that brilliant coterie which was the

nucleus of the artistic rebellion, strove at first independently,

with little knowledge of the others’ doings. They possibly came

from Châteaubriand, whose Genius of Christianity was but a return

to Middle Age ideals: but Walter Scott, with his great romantic

historical novels, and Lord Byron, with his glowing, passionate

verse, were the true progenitors of the reaction against stiff

scholasticism; and their influence even stirred phlegmatic Germany,

with its Gallic lacquer, to new and bolder utterances. Heinrich

Heine, an exile who spoke of himself as a “German swallow who had

built a nest in the periwig of M. Voltaire,” threw himself into the

fray with pen dipped in sparkling vitriol and did doughty deeds for

the cause.

Frédéric Chopin, despite the limited field of a piano keyboard, was

the unconscious centre of all the hazy, purple dreams, drifting

ideals, and perfumed sprays of thought that to-day we call

romanticism. As the hub of that vast wheel of poesy and gorgeous

imaginings, he absorbed the spirit of the time and shot out radiant

spokes, which lived after the whole romantic school became a faded

flower, a pallid ghost of the yesteryear. Hugo flamed across the

historical canvas like a painted scarlet meteor; Berlioz’s mad

talent, expressed by his symbolical coloring in orchestration—color

carried to insanity pitch—was a lesser musical Hugo. Delacroix, with

his brush dipped in the burning sun, painted vertigoes of color and

audacities of conception. All was turbulent exaggeration, all was

keyed above the normal pitch of life, and in the midst the still,

small voice of Chopin could be heard.

The end had come to all monstrous growths of the romantic epoch in

French art—be it remembered that earlier the movement was equally as

strong in Germany, beginning with Novalis, Schlegel, Tieck, Schubert,

Schumann, and Jean Paul Richter; the revolution of 1848 shattered the

dream of the mad republicans of art. That sphinx-like nonentity, the

third Napoleon, mounted the imperial tribune, and the Cerberus of

Realism barked its first hoarse bark. For a time this phantasmagoria

dominated Parisian art and letters.

All this was typical of cynicism, unbelief; technical perfection

was carried to heights undreamed of, and the outcome of it all was

Émile Zola. French painting was realized in the miniature manner of

Meissonier, or later in the marvellous brutalities of Degas. Two

geniuses who attempted to stem the tide that ran so swiftly died

untimely deaths: Georges Bizet, the creator of Carmen, and Henri

Regnault, who painted the Moorish Execution in the Luxembourg. The

last-named perished before Bougival in 1871, done to death by a

spent Prussian bullet. These two remarkable men, with possibly the

addition of Fortuny, the Spanish virtuoso of arabesques in color,

might have changed history if they had lived. But the fates willed it

otherwise, and realism became the shibboleth.

Even that ardent young group, the Parnassians, as they called

themselves, were beguiled into this quagmire of folly and

half-truths. La Terre marked the lowest depths of the bog, and again

a reaction began. Leconte de Lisle, Sully-Prudhomme, the graceful

Banville (a belated romanticist), Coppée, Puvis de Chavannes; the

impressionists, Monet, Manet, Rodin, the sculptor; the poets, René

Ghil, Catulle Mendès, Verlaine, ill-fated Albert Glatigny, Anatole

France, unhappy de Maupassant, and our own countrymen, Stuart Merrill

and Vielé-Griffin began steering for other waters. Symbolism,

Buddhism, every _ism_ imaginable, have been at the rudder since

then. Synthetic subtlety in art was the watchword of the party of

new ideas, and a renaissance of the arts seemed to be at hand. For

this movement, which agitated artistic Paris, the younger and fierier

spirits, musicians, painters, actors, poets, and sculptors, banded,

and, emulative of Richard Wagner’s Bayreuthian ideal, began the

fabrication of a new art, or rather the synthesis of all arts, which

seemed the wildest and most extravagant dream ever conceived by a

half-dozen frenzied brains.

The history of art moves in cycles, and each cycle carries with it a

residuum of the last. Richard Wagner attempted on a gigantic scale a

synthesis of the arts. He wished to condense, concentrate, epitomize

in his music-drama the arts of mimicry or pantomime, elocution,

singing, painting, sculpture, architecture, drama, and instrumental

music. He literally levied tribute on two of the senses and welded

them into an ensemble, in which every shade of emotion, particularly

the heroic and the tender, was depicted. But Wagner’s genius is,

after all, Teutonic in its diffusiveness. He could not escape his

national environment.

“Fifteen years ago,” said Paul Bourget, “poetry’s ambition was in

picturesqueness and execution to rival painting. To-day it models

itself on music. It is preoccupied with effects of mystery, of

shadow, of the intangible. This is strikingly illustrated in the

verse of Verlaine, whose poetic creed I have given you before in the

‘O la nuance, seule fiance, Le rêve au rêve et la flute au cor.’”

These new men are musicians in words. They follow Wagner; above all

are they descendants of Edgar Allan Poe, who has literally deflected

the mighty wave of French literature into his neglected channel.

Ah, if we but appreciated Poe as do our Gallic brethren! Mallarmé

and Gustav Kahn produce verbal effects akin to music, with its

melancholy mystery.

It is Richard Wagner who has done much of all this, preceded by Poe.

Symbolism, a soft green star, is but a pin-prick in the inverted bowl

of the night, but it sings like flame in thin glass. Its song is as

beautiful as the twilights of Chopin’s garden, or as the wavings

of the trees in Wagner’s luminous forest. Slowly but resistlessly,

and despite himself,—for Wagner never bridled his tongue where the

French were concerned,—this positive force conquered France, and

penetrated, not alone the musical world, but to the world of letters,

of moral ideas. It is nothing short of a miracle. The revolt all

along the line, as manifested by the impressionists in painting,

who preferred to use their eyes and see an infinity of tintings in

nature, undreamed of by the painters of a generation ago; the poets

and littérateurs who formed the new group called The Companions

of the New Life, whose aspirations are for the ideal of morality,

justice; sculptors like Marc Antokolsky and Auguste Rodin, who

sought to hew great ideas from the rude rock, instead of carving

lascivious prettiness,—all these new spirits, I say, but fell in with

the vast revolution instituted by Richard Wagner. In the region of

moral ideas Melchior de Vogüé, Ernest Lavisse, and Paul Desjardins

are combating the artistic indifferentism and black despair of the

school of materialists, realists, and the rest. A new idea in France

germinates as in no other country on the globe, because it finds

congenial soil somewhere. From an idea to a school is but a short

step, hence the rapidity of the Wagner worship after it once took

root.

III

ISOLDE AND TRISTAN

You notice the inversion! Wagner’s music-drama primarily concerns

the woman; she is the protagonist, not Tristan. Even in Act III,

where this lover of lovers lies awaiting Isolde and death, it is her

psychology which most concerns the composer. So I call it Isolde and

Tristan—the subjugation of man by woman.

It was Wagner himself who confessed that he had thrown overboard

his theories while penning this marvellous score. In it the music

stifles the action. It is the very flowering of the Wagnerian genius;

his best self, his fantasy, his wonderful power of making music

articulate, are there. And from the tiny acorn in the prelude grows

the mighty oak of the symphonic drama.

There is something primal, something of the rankness of nature, of

life’s odor and hum, and life’s fierce passions in this music—music

before which all other pictures of love made by poet, painter, and

composer pale. It is one of the most complex scores in existence;

yet it is built upon but one musical motive. Because of its epical

quality Tristan and Isolde may be compared to the works of the Greek

dramatists, to the Divine Comedy, to Hamlet, and to Faust.

Its weltering symphonic mass is as the surge and thunder of tropical

seas. It seems almost incomprehensible for a single human brain

to have conceived and carried to fruition such a magnificent

composition. In it are the pains, pleasures, and consoling

philosophies of life. Hamlet and Faust are its spiritual brethren.

The doubting, brooding spirit of these two dreamers are united to the

pessimistic, knightly nature of Tristan. He is human, all too human;

as Nietzsche phrased it—but he is also the human glorified.

He has grafted upon his mediæval soul the modern spirit, which we

are pleased to believe Schopenhauer typified in his profoundly

pessimistic philosophy. But this spirit is as old as Himalaya’s

hills. Saka-Munyi sang of the pains of love centuries ago; and the

bliss-stricken pair, Tristan and Isolde, dive down to death, groping

as they sink, for the problems of life, love, and mortality. Death

and Love is the eternal dualism chanted by Wagner in this drama. And

has the theme ever been chanted so enthrallingly?

No one of Wagner’s works enchains the imagination as does this

glowing picture of love and despair. From the first beautiful prelude

to Isolde’s exquisite death-song—one of those songs the world will

not willingly let perish—we are as in a hypnotic trance. The action

is psychologic rather than theatric. We are permitted to view two

burning souls; we analyze, rejoice and suffer in their psychical

adventures. This is not the drama of romantic wooing and the clash of

swords; all conventions of music and drama are set aside, are denied.

There is a love philter, but it is not the philter which arouses the

fatal love; the love is implicit in the lovers before the curtain

lifts.

We are given a night scene of magical beauty—yet how different from

the usual banal operatic assignation. In an old-time, Old-World

forest a man and a woman have revealed their souls; sobbing in the

distance is the soft horn music of the kingly hunt. Now it is love

against the world, the relentless instinct that mocks at conventional

gyves. Was ever such an enchanting romance sung? The very moonlight

seems melodious. After the storm and stress of the first act this

scene recalls Heine’s This is the Fairy Wood of Old. Wagner’s

philosophy should concern us but little; his music is his metaphysic;

its beauty and dramatic significance are worth tomes of his theories.

There is the superb web and woof of this tonal tapestry, the most

eloquent orchestra that ever stormed or sighed; there is every accent

and nuance of human speech, faithfully reproduced; and above all

there hovers the imagination of the poet-composer. These thematic

nuggets, these motives of love and death, which paint the lives of

his men and women—are they not wonderfully conceived, wonderfully

developed? Berlioz it was who confessed that the prelude to this

music-drama proved ever an enigma to him. Wagner’s melodic curves of

intensity mirror the soul’s perturbations. He is poet of passion, a

master of thrilling tones, a magician who everywhere finds willing

thralls.

And the music—how it searches the nerves. How it throws into the

background, because of its intensity, all the love lays ever penned

by mortal composer! How it appeals to the intellect with its exalted

realism! This music is not for those who admire the pink prettiness

of Gounod’s Romeo and Juliet. It is music that would have been loved

by that “fierce and splendid old man,” Walter Savage Landor, by

Shelley, by Byron and Walt Whitman—the latter once confessed to me

his love for Wagner; “it makes my old bones sweeter,” he said—but

it would not have been admired by Wordsworth or Tennyson. Swinburne

adores Wagner almost as much as he adores the sea, and he sings the

praise of both with an absence of reserve that recalls the _mot_ of

Vauvenargues: “To praise moderately is always a sign of mediocrity.”

Yet in Tristan and Isolde are the seeds of the morbid, the

hysterical, and the sublimely erotic—hall marks of most great modern

works of art. And there is, too, the _Katharsis_ of Aristotle, the

purification by pity and terror. This dominating tragic principle

places the drama within the category of the classic.

Ernest Newman, in his Study of Wagner, an epoch-making work in

musical criticism, puts the question in its exact bearings. Wagner

is a great _musical_-dramatist—his dramas alone could not stand

on their legs, so otiose are they. His poetry, _quâ_ poetry, is

second-rate; but as “words for music,” words that fly well in the

wind of his inspiration, they are unique. This composer was harassed

all his life long by the word “drama.” He believed that a perfect

union of music and drama could be effected—vain dream—and wasted much

valuable time and good white paper trying to prove his thesis. To

the end his musical ruled his dramatic instincts; he was always the

composer. Tristan and Isolde is the most signal instance of this. Its

Greek-like severity of form in the book, its paucity of incident,

were so many barriers removed for the poet-composer who, hampered by

the awful weight of material in the Ring, had to write ineffectual

music at times.

Newman thinks that the last scene of Act II of Isolde and Tristan is

an anti-climax. From a theatric viewpoint, yes; but not so if Wagner

the composer be considered. If he had dropped the curtain on the

infatuated pair—as he does in Act I of Die Walküre—a whole skein of

the moving story would have been missing. The action is pulled up

with a jerk by Melot’s entrance; yet what follows is worth a volume

of plays with the conventional thrilling “curtain.” Think of the

drama without Marke’s speech, without that compassion and love which

Isolde and Tristan exhibit, oblivious to all about them! Besides, the

scene needs a quieter, withal more tragic, note than the endings of

Acts I and III. Suppose that the King, Tristan’s uncle, had been like

that other monarch sung of by Heinrich Heine:—

Oh, there’s a king, a grim old king, with beard both long and gray.

The king is old. The queen is young. Her face is fresh as May.

And there’s a lad, a laughing lad, so blithe and debonair,

The queen herself has chosen him, her silken train to bear.

How runs the tale, that good grave tale the peasant women tell?

“So both of them were put to death, for loving over well.”

There has been so much discussion over the so-called slow _tempi_

of Bayreuth that it is time to shatter the little legend with

stern facts. A well-known conductor who has presided at Bayreuth

relates that when an old man Richard Wagner would occasionally take

up the baton and conduct Parsifal or Tristan at a rehearsal. His

admiration for his own music—an admiration that was starved during

his exile—manifested itself in a tendency to dragging _tempi_. The

venerable composer retarded each bar as if to squeeze from it the

last lingering drop of sweetness. This trait was noticed and copied

by the younger generation of conductors. The elder group, Richter,

Levi, and Seidl had and have the true tradition. The later one simply

means that Wagner’s pulse beat was older and slower. To slavishly

imitate this is but a sign of the humor-breeding snobbery now so rife

at Wahnfried. The music itself is the best refutation of such folly.

Wagner lets Love beckon Death to its side, and together Love and

Death, inseparable companions from time’s infancy, close the drama,

the king sadly gazing at the meeting of the great clear sky and sea,

while Brangaene, near by, is bruised and bent with immitigable grief.

What a picture, what a tale, what music!

“The world will find a wholesome reaction in the study of music from

its spiritual side, its inner life. In the laws of tonality the most

musical and the least musical will have a common ground of interest.

By study of tone, character, or mental effects, we are led to realize

that the marvellous intuition of Pythagoras, Plato, and Aristotle was

correct, that music is the basis of all human development.” This,

by an author unknown to me, is a prophecy of the track that music

must take if it is to ascend. Intellectual music, music that does

not appeal merely to the feverish nerves of this generation, is what

we need; and by intellectual music I do not mean too complex or

abstract music, abstract in the sense of lacking human interest. Is

there no mean between the brawls and lusts of Mascagni’s peasant folk

and the often abstruse delving of Brahms? Surely to think high means

to hear plainly—or else Wordsworth is mistaken. We fret, fumble,

and analyze too much in our arts. Why cannot we have the Athenian

gladness and simplicity of Mozart, with the added richness of Richard

Strauss? Must knowledge ever bring with it pain and weariness of

life? Is there no fruit in this Armida garden that is without

ashes? Why cannot we accept music without striving to extort from

it metaphysical meanings? There is Mozart’s G minor symphony—in its

sunny measures is sanity. To perdition with preachers and pedagogues!

Open the casements of your soul; flood it with music, and sing with

Shelley:—

Music when soft voices die

Vibrates in the memory.

NOTE

Several of the foregoing essays have appeared in Scribner’s Magazine,

the Musical Courier, Criterion, Harper’s Bazar, Metropolitan, New

York Sun, and elsewhere. They have been greatly altered and amplified

for republication. The study of Parsifal, the major part of which was

first printed in the Musical Courier, has been rigorously revised and

much enlarged. A few anecdotes of Richard Strauss must be credited to

the London Musical Times.

Transcriber’s Notes

pg 12 Changed: at the end its feverish esctasy

to: at the end its feverish ecstasy

pg 20 Changed: significance of the development from Hadyn

to: significance of the development from Haydn

pg 21 Changed: serious influence of the Brahms Schicksalied

to: serious influence of the Brahms Schicksalslied

pg 29 Changed: A critic considers O warst du mein

to: A critic considers O wärst du mein

pg 51 Changed: his juggling with bizzare rhythms

to: his juggling with bizarre rhythms

pg 68 Changed: Invocation and Parsifal, Hunnenschlact

to: Invocation and Parsifal, Hunnenschlacht

pg 97 Changed: Romantics for knights, mediæval myssteries

to: Romantics for knights, mediæval mysteries

pg 100 Changed: which so often gravitates pedulum-wise

to: which so often gravitates pendulum-wise

pg 117 Changed: Like the Buddhistic Tripatka

to: Like the Buddhistic Tripitaka

pg 178 Changed: at the foot of the Vierge au donitaire

to: at the foot of the Vierge au donataire

pg 191 Changed: he loves to finger the georgeous

to: he loves to finger the gorgeous

pg 217 Changed: social democrat and freethinker; and Tschaïkowsy

to: social democrat and freethinker; and Tschaïkowsky