Music After the Great War
Music
After the Great War
AND OTHER STUDIES
BY
CARL VAN VECHTEN
NEW YORK
G. Schirmer
MCMXV
_Copyright, 1915, by G. Schirmer_
26311
_FOR FANIA_
Contents
PAGE
MUSIC AFTER THE GREAT WAR 1
MUSIC FOR MUSEUMS? 27
THE SECRET OF THE RUSSIAN BALLET 45
IGOR STRAWINSKY: A NEW COMPOSER 83
MASSENET AND WOMEN 119
STAGE DECORATION AS A FINE ART 137
ADOLPHE APPIA AND GORDON CRAIG 159
Music After the Great War
Music After the Great War
When the great war was declared, Leo Stein, in Florence at the time,
asserted that the day of the cubists, the futurists, and their ilk was
at an end. “After the war,” he said, “there will be no more of this
nonsense. Matisse may survive, and Picasso in his ‘early manner,’ but
Renoir and Cézanne are the last of the great painters, and it is on
their work that the new art, whatever it may be, will be founded.” Leo
Stein belongs to a family which, in a sense, has stood sponsor for the
new painters, but his remarks can scarcely be called disinterested, as
his Villa di Doccia in Florence contains no paintings at present but
those of Renoir and Cézanne. There are mostly Renoirs.
Of course a general remark like this in regard to painting is based
on an idea that there is no connection--at least no legitimate
connection--between the painting of Marcel Duchamp, Gleizes, Derain,
Picabia, and the later work of Picasso, and the painters (completely
legitimatized by now) who came before them. Without arguing this
misconception, it may be stated that a similar misconception exists in
relation to “modern” music. There are those who feel that the steady
line of progression from Bach, through Beethoven and Brahms, has broken
off somewhere. The exact point of departure is not agreed upon. Some
say that music as an art ended with Richard Wagner’s death. There are
only a few, however, who do not include Brahms and Tschaikowsky in the
list of those graced with the crown of genius. There are many who are
generous enough to believe that Richard Strauss and Claude Debussy
have carried on the divine torch. But there are only a few discerning
enough to perceive that Strawinsky and Schoenberg have gone only a step
further than the so-called impressionists in music.
Since the beginnings of music, as an art-form, there has always been a
complaint that contemporary composers could not write melody. Beethoven
suffered from this complaint; Wagner suffered from it; we have only
recently gone through the period when Strauss and Debussy suffered
from it. The reason is an obvious one. Each new composer has made his
own rules of composition. Each has progressed a step further in his
use of harmony. Now it is evident that in this way novelty lies, for
an entirely new unaccompanied melody would be difficult to devise. It
is in the combination of melody and harmony that a composer may show
his talent at invention. It is but natural that any advance in this
direction should at first startle unaccustomed ears, and it is by
no means uncertain that this first thrill is not the most delicious
sensation to be derived from hearing music. In time harmony is
exhausted--combinations of notes in ordered forms--but there is still
the pursuit of disharmony to be made. We are all quite accustomed to
occasional discords, even in the music of Beethoven, where they occur
very frequently. Strauss utilizes discords skilfully in his tonal
painting; in such works as _Elektra_ and _Heldenleben_ they abound. The
newer composers have almost founded a school on disharmony.
To me it seems certain that it is the men who have given the new
impetus to tonal art in the past five years who will make the opening
for whatever art-music we are to hear after the war, and I am
referring even to occasional pieces after the manner of Tschaikowsky’s
overture, 1812, in which the Russian National Anthem puts to rout the
_Marseillaise_.... Perhaps it will be Karol Szymanowski of Poland
(if he is still alive) or a new César Franck in Belgium who will rise
to write of the intensity of suffering through which his country has
struggled. But it seems to me beyond a doubt that music after the great
war will be “newer” (I mean, of course, more primitive) than it was
in the last days of July, 1914. There will be plenty of disharmonies,
foreshadowed by Schoenberg and Strawinsky, let loose on our ears,
but, in spite of the protests of Mr. Runciman, I submit that these
disharmonies are a steady progression from Wagner, and not a freakish
whim of an abnormal devil. I do not predict a return to Mozart as one
result of the war.
There are always those prone to believe that such a war as is now in
progress has been brought about by an anarchic condition among the
artists, as foolish a theory as one could well promulgate, and keep
one’s mental balance. It is this group which steadfastly maintains
that, after the war, things will be not merely as they were immediately
before the war broke out, but as they were _fifty_ years before. Now,
it should be apparent to anyone but the oldest inhabitant that the
music-dramas of Richard Wagner are aging rapidly. Public interest
in them is on the decline, thanks to an absurd recognition, in some
degree or other, everywhere from Bayreuth to Paris, from Madrid to
New York, of what is known as the “Master’s tradition.” Some of this
tradition has been invented by Frau Cosima Liszt von Bülow Wagner and
all of it is guaranteed to put the Wagner plays rapidly in a class with
the operas of Donizetti and Bellini, stalking horses for prima donnas
trained in a certain school. Without going into particulars which would
clog this issue, it may be stated that the tradition includes matters
pertaining to scenery, staging, lighting, acting, singing, and even
_tempi_ in the orchestra. It is all-inclusive.
It must have been quite evident to even the casual concert-goer that
German music has passed its zenith. It has had its day and it is not
likely that post-bellum music will be Germanic. In an article in a
recent number of “The Musical Quarterly,” Edgar Istel reviews German
opera since Wagner with a consistent tone of depreciation. The subject,
of course, does not admit of enthusiasm. He calls Edmund Kretzschmer
and Karl Goldmark “the compromise composers.” There are probably not
many Americans who have heard of the former or his “most successful
opera,” _Die Folkunger_. Goldmark is better known to us, but we do not
exaggerate the importance of _Die Königin von Saba_, the _Sakuntala_
overture, or _Die ländliche Hochzeit_ symphony. Nor do we foreigners
to the _Vaterland_ know much about Victor Nessler’s _Der Trompeter von
Säkkingen_, although we hear one air from it frequently at Sunday night
concerts in the opera house. August Bungert tried to outdo Wagner with
a six-day opera cycle, _Homerische Welt_, produced in 1898-1903 and
already forgotten. Max Schillings, whose name has occasionally figured
on symphony orchestra programmes in America, is thus dismissed by
Istel: “Schillings’ last work, _Der Moloch_ (1906), proves his total
inability as a dramatic composer.” Hans Pfitzner is another name on
which we need not linger. Engelbert Humperdinck, of course, wrote the
one German opera which has had a world-wide and continuous success
since _Parsifal_--_Hänsel und Gretel_. But the music he has composed
since then has not awakened much enthusiasm. _Hänsel und Gretel_ is,
after all, folk-music with Wagnerian orchestration. It assuredly is
not from Humperdinck that we can look for post-bellum music. We have
heard Kienzl’s very mediocre _Der Kuhreigen_ and we have been promised
a hearing of _Evangelimann_. The name of Siegfried Wagner signifies
nothing. Ludwig Thuille wrote some very interesting music in the last
act of _Lobetanz_, but that opera could not hold the stage at the
Metropolitan Opera House. W. von Waltershausen’s _Oberst Chabert_
has been given in London, not, however, with conspicuous success.
D’Albert has written many German operas in spite of his Scotch birth.
Of these the best is _Tiefland_, negligible in regarding the future.
Leo Blech’s unimportant _Versiegelt_ gave pleasure in Berlin for a
time. Wolf-Ferrari, one of the most gifted of the German composers,
is half Italian. His work, of course, is not notable for originality
of treatment. _Suzannen’s Geheimniss_ is very like an old Italian or
Mozart opera. So is _Le Donne Curiose_. His cantata, _Vita Nuova_,
is archaic in tone, a musical Cimabue or Giotto. _I Giojelli della
Madonna_ is an attempt at Italian _verismo_. Richard Strauss! the most
considerable German musical figure of his time. His operas will still
be given after the war and his tone-poems will be heard, but he has
done his part in furthering the progress of art-music. He has nothing
more to say. In _The Legend of Joseph_, the ballet which the Russians
gave in Paris last summer, it was to be observed that the Strauss idiom
exploited therein had fully expressed itself in the earlier works of
this composer. _Salome_ and _Elektra_ represent Strauss’s best dramatic
work, and _Don Juan_ and _Till Eulenspiegel_ are, perhaps, his best
tone-poems. Richard Strauss, however, is assuredly not post-bellum. His
music is a part of the riches of the past. One can easily pass rapidly
by the names of Bruckner, Weingartner, and Gustav Mahler. Max Reger,
I think, is not a great composer. But there are two Austrian names on
which we must linger.
One of them is Erich Korngold, the boy composer, who is now eighteen
years old. His earlier work, such as the ballet, _Der Schneemann_,
sounds like Puccini with false notes. It is pretty music. Later,
Korngold developed a fancy for writing Strauss and Reger with false
notes. And he is still in process of development. What he may do cannot
be entirely foreseen.
Arnold Schoenberg is another matter. He is still using as propaganda
music which he wrote many years ago. No public has yet caught up with
his present output. That is an excellent sign that his music is of the
future. The string sextet, _Verklärte Nacht_, which the Kneisel Quartet
played more than once in the season just past, dates from 1899. The
string quartets were written in 1905 and 1908. The five orchestral
pieces, the six piano pieces, and _Pierrot Lunaire_, other music of
his on which what fame he possesses outside of Austria rests, are all
over two years old. Now the Boston Symphony Orchestra has only recently
deemed it fitting to play the five orchestral pieces, and I believe the
piano pieces received their first public performance in New York at
one of the concerts given by Leo Ornstein, although several pianists,
notably Charles Henry Cooper and Mrs. Arensberg, had played them in
private.
In 1911 Schoenberg issued his quite extraordinary “Handbuch der
Harmonielehre,” which is one of the best evidences that, even though
the composer dies in the war, others will follow to carry on the torch
from the point where he dropped it. Yes, Schoenberg, no less than
Henri Matisse, is a torch-bearer in the art race. He is a stone in the
architecture of music--and not an accidental decoration.
May I quote a few passages from the “Handbuch”?
“The artist does not do what others find beautiful, but what he finds
himself bound to do.”
“If anyone feels dissatisfied with his time, let it not be because that
time is no longer the good old time, but because it is not yet the new
and better time, the future.”
“Though I refrain from overprizing originality, I cannot help valuing
novelty at its full worth. Novelty is the improvement toward which we
are drawn as irresistibly, as unwittingly, as towards the future. It
may prove to be a splendid betterment, or to be death--but also the
certainty of a higher life after death. Yes, the future brings with it
the novel and the unknown; and therefore, not without excuse, we often
hold what is novel to be identical with what is good and beautiful.”
With the single exception just noted it is not from the German
countries that the musical invention of the past two decades has come.
It is from France. Whether Debussy or Erik Satie or Fanelli first
developed the use of the whole-tone scale is unimportant; they have all
been writing in Paris.
Erik Satie is one of the precursors of a movement--not important
in himself, but of immense importance as an indication. He is not
a genius, and therefore his work has received little attention and
has had no great influence. But it must be remembered that he was
born in 1860 and that his _Gymnopédies_ and _Gnossiennes_, composed
respectively in 1888 and 1890, make a free use of the whole-tone scale
and other harmonic innovations ordinarily attributed to Debussy. A
_Sarabande_, written in 1887, should be tried on your piano. It will
certainly startle you. Satie has recently achieved a little notoriety,
thanks to Debussy and Ravel, who have dragged his music into the light.
The more dramatic resurrection of Fanelli by Gabriel Pierné has been
related too often to need retelling here.
Debussy, beyond question, is one of the high-water marks in the history
of music. _L’Après-midi d’un Faune_ is certainly post-Wagnerian in a
sense that _Salome_ is not. Maurice Ravel, Paul Dukas, Roger-Ducasse,
Florent Schmitt, Chausson, Chabrier, and Charpentier are all
revolutionists in a greater or less degree, and all of them are direct
descendants of the great French composers who came before them. But
what has been accomplished in France in the last few years? Dukas has
written nothing important since _Ariane et Barbe-Bleue_. Debussy’s
recent works are not epoch-making: a makeshift ballet, _Jeux_, a
few piano pieces; what else? Ravel’s ballet, _Daphnis et Chloë_, is
lovely music. Some people profess to find pleasure in listening to
Schmitt’s _Salome_. It is unbearable to me, danced or undanced. Vincent
d’Indy--has he written a vibrant note since _Istar_? Charpentier’s
_Julien_--a rehash of _Louise_. It sounds some fifty years older,
except the carnival scene. There is live futurist music in that last
act. When Charpentier painted street noises on his tonal canvas, were
they of night or morning, he knew his business. But certainly not a
post-bellum composer, this. Charpentier will never compose another
stirring phrase; that is written in the stars. Since _Pelléas et
Mélisande_ and _Ariane et Barbe-Bleue_, is there one French opera which
can be called great? There are two very good ones, Raoul Laparra’s _La
Habanera_ and Maurice Ravel’s _l’Heure Espagnole_, and very many bad
ones, such as Massenet’s _Don Quichotte_, the unbelievable _Quo Vadis?_
of Jean Nouguès, and the imitative and meaningless _Monna Vanna_ of
Février. I do not think it is from France that we may expect the
post-bellum music.
Italy, long the land of opera, has held her place in the singing
theatres. Verdi and Puccini still dominate the opera houses. But
Puccini’s work is accomplished. His popularity is waning, as the
comparative failure of _The Girl of the Golden West_ will testify. You
will find the germ of all that is best in Puccini in _Manon Lescaut_,
an early work. After that there is repetition and misdirection of
energy, gradually diffused talent. It does not seem necessary to speak
of Mascagni and Leoncavallo. They have both tried for so long a time
to repeat their two successes and tried in vain. Cilea, Franchetti,
Catalani, and Giordano--these names are almost forgotten already. Is
Sgambati dead? Does anyone know whether he is or not? Zandonai--ah,
there’s a name to linger on! Watch out for Zandonai in the vanguard of
the post-bellum composers. Save him from the war-maw. His _Conchita_
disclosed a great talent; that opera shimmered with the hot atmosphere
of Spain, a bestial, lazy Spain. This work I place with Debussy’s
_Iberia_ as one of the great tonal pictures of Spain. I have not
heard Zandonai’s opera, _Francesca da Rimini_, which was produced at
Covent Garden Opera House last summer, but I have been told that its
beauties are many. I hope we may hear it in New York. Pratella is one
of Marinetti’s group of futurists, one of the noise-makers. I am not so
sure of Pratella as I am sure that many of his theories will be more
successfully exploited by someone else.
Spain has been heard from recently--Spain, which has lacked a composer
of “art-music.” Albeniz and others have been writing piano music and
now we are promised a one-act opera by Granados. Perhaps in time Spain
may lift her head high and tinkle her castanets to some purpose, on
programmes devoted to her own composers. But now it is Bizet, Chabrier,
Debussy, Laparra, and Zandonai who have perverted these castanets and
tambourines to their own uses.
I am no admirer of modern English music. I take less pleasure in
hearing a piece by Sir Edward Elgar than I do in a mediocre performance
of _Le Prophète_--and I assure you that Meyerbeer is not my favorite
composer. A meaner skill than Sir Edward’s, perhaps, lies in Irving
Berlin’s fingers, but a greater genius. I once spent a most frightful
afternoon--at least nearly all of an afternoon--listening to Elgar’s
violin concerto, and I remember a dreadfully dull symphony, that
sounded as if it were played on a throbbing organ at vespers in a dark
church on a hot Sunday afternoon. The _Cockaigne_ overture is more to
my taste, although I think it no great achievement. Has there been a
real composer in Britannia since Sir Arthur Sullivan, whose works one
rehears with a pleasure akin to ecstasy? I do not think so. Cyril Scott
is interesting. Holbrooke, Delius, Grainger, Wallace, and Bantock write
much complex music for the orchestra, to say nothing of piano pieces,
songs, and operas. (Holbrooke supplements his labors in this direction
with the writing of articles for “The English Review” and other
periodicals, in which he complains bitterly that the English composer
is without honor in his own country.) I find Scott’s piano pieces
better. But since _Il Barbiere di Siviglia_ and _Le Nozze di Figaro_
there have been but few comic scores comparable to _Patience_. You will
hear the Sullivan operas many times after the war, but one cannot think
of founding a school upon them.
I shall not hesitate on the music of America, because in a country
that has no ante-bellum music--one cannot speak with too great
enthusiasm of Ethelbert Nevin and Edward MacDowell--there is no
immediate promise of important development. However, in a digression,
I should like to make a few remarks on the subject of the oft-repeated
charge, re-echoed by Holbrooke in relation to British musicians, that
American composers are neglected and have no chance for a hearing
in their own country. Has ever a piano piece been played more often
or sold more copies than MacDowell’s _To a Wild Rose_, unless it be
Nevin’s _Narcissus_? Probably _The Rosary_ has been sung more times in
more quarters of the globe than _Rule Britannia_. Other American songs
which have achieved an international success and a huge sale are _At
Parting_, _A Maid Sings Light_, _From the Land of the Sky-blue Water_,
and _The Year’s at the Spring_. Orchestral works by Paine, Hadley,
Converse, and others, are heard almost as soon as they are composed,
and many of them are heard more than once, played by more than one
orchestra. Of late years it has been the custom to produce an American
work each season at the Metropolitan Opera House, a custom fortunately
abandoned during the season just past. No, it cannot be said that the
American composer has been neglected.
Finland has presented us with Sibelius, whose latest works indicate
that Helsingfors may have something to say about the trend of tone
after the war, and from Poland Karol Szymanowski has sent forth some
strange and appealing songs.
But it is to Russia, after all, I think, that we must turn for the
inspiration, and a great deal of the execution, of our post-bellum
music. Fortunately for us, we have not yet delved very deeply into
the past of Russian music, in spite of reports to the contrary. Mr.
Gatti-Casazza once assured me that _Boris Godunow_ was the only Russian
opera which stood any chance of success in America. He has doubtless
revised his feeling on the subject, since he has announced _Prince
Igor_ for production this season, an opera which should be greeted
with very warm enthusiasm, if the producers give any decent amount of
attention to the very important ballet.
It is interesting, in turning to Russian literature, to discover
that Turgenev in the middle of the nineteenth century was writing a
masterpiece like “A Sportsman’s Sketches,” a work full of reserve and
primitive force, and a strange charm. And Turgenev was born and bred a
gentleman in the sense that Thackeray was born and bred a gentleman.
In English literature we have travelled completely around the circle,
through the artificial, the effete, and the sentimental, to the
natural, the forceful, the primitive. Art like that of D. H. Lawrence,
George Moore, and Theodore Dreiser is very much abroad in the lands.
Russia began her circle only in the last century with her splendidly
barbaric school of writers who touch the soil at every point, the soil
and the soul: Turgenev, Gogol, Pushkin, Dostoievsky, Andreyev, Tolstoy,
Tchekhov, Gorky, and Artzybachev, a noble group of names. We find in
Russia a situation very akin to that of Ireland, a people commercially
under-developed, in a large measure born to suffering, keenly alive to
artistic impulse.
In Ireland this impulse has expressed itself almost entirely through
the written word, but in Russia it has found an outlet in a thousand
channels. (The arts have grouped themselves together in the glowing
splendor of the Russian Ballet productions.) Music, like literature,
sprang into being in Russia, fed on the rich folk-songs of the
Slavic races, during the nineteenth century; and again like Russian
literature, its first baby notes were wild, appealing, barbaric,
forceful, and sincere--the music of the steppes and the people, rather
than the music of the drawing-room and the nobility. Let us remember
that about the time Richard Wagner was writing _Tristan und Isolde_,
Moussorgsky was putting on paper, with infinite pain, the notes
of the scores of the poignant _Boris Godunow_ and the intense _La
Khovanchina_. Since then the Russian music world has been occupied by
men who have given their lives to the foundation of a national school.
Their work has been largely overshadowed in America by the facile
genius of Tschaikowsky, who wrote the most popular symphony of the
nineteenth century, but who is less Russian and less important than
many of his confrères.
If for a time after the war one must turn to the past for operatic
novelties, one can do no better than to go to Russia. It is my firm
conviction that several of the Russian operas would have a real success
here. _La Khovanchina_ to many musicians is more beautiful than
_Boris_. It is indeed a serious work of genius. The chorus with which
the first act closes has power enough to entice me to the theatre at
any time. I do not know of a death-scene in all the field of opera
as strong in its effect as that of the Prince Ivan Khovansky. He is
stabbed and he falls dead. He does not sing again, he does not move;
there are no throbs of the violins, no drum beats. There is a pause.
The orchestra is silent. The people on the stage are still. It is
tremendous!
Rimsky-Korsakow’s music is pretty well known in America. His
_Scheherazade_ and _Antar_ suites are played very often; but his operas
remain unsung here. Why? He wrote some sixteen of them before he died.
Even so early a work as _A Night in May_ contains many lovely pages.
It is a folk-song opera built along the old lines of set numbers. It
reminds one of _The Bartered Bride_. First produced in 1880, it does
not show its age. _The Snow Maiden_ contains the _Song of the Shepherd
Lehl_ and one or two other airs familiar in the concert répertoire.
_Sadko_, if given in the Russian manner, would fill any opera house for
two performances a week for the season; and _Ivan the Terrible_ is a
masterpiece of its kind. But the greatest of them all is the last lyric
drama of the composer, _The Golden Cock_, in which this great tone
colorist bent his ear further towards the future than he had ever done
before.
The death of Alexander Scriabine recently in Petrograd created little
comment, although the papers had been filled a few weeks before with
descriptions of the very bad performance of his _Prometheus_ by the
Russian Symphony Orchestra. Scriabine, another Gordon Craig, was too
great a theorist, too concerned with the perfect in his art, ever
to arrive at anything approximating the actual. As an influence, he
can already be felt. His synchronism of music, light, and perfumes
was never realized in his own music, although the Russian Ballet has
completely realized it. (How cleverly that organization--or is it a
movement?--has seized everybody’s good ideas, from Wagner’s to Adolphe
Appia’s!) As for Scriabine’s strange scales and disharmonies, Igor
Strawinsky has made the best use of them--Igor Strawinsky, perhaps the
greatest of the musicians of the immediate future. I hope Americans may
hear his wonderfully beautiful opera, _The Nightingale_; and if all the
music of the future is like that, I stand with bowed and reverent head
before the music of the future (with the mental reservation, however,
that I may spurn it when it is no longer music of the future). His
three ballets are also works of genius.
It is indeed to Strawinsky, whose strange harmonies evoked new fairy
worlds in _The Nightingale_ and whose barbaric rhythms stirred the
angry pulses of a Paris audience threatened with the shame of an
emotion in the theatre, to whom we may turn, perhaps, for still new
thrills after the war. Strawinsky has so far showed his growth in every
new work he has vouchsafed the public. From Schoenberg, and Korngold
in a lesser degree, we may hope for messages in tone, disharmonic by
nature, and with a complexity of rhythm so complex that it becomes
simple. (In this connection I should like to say that there are
scarcely two consecutive bars in Strawinsky’s ballet, _The Sacrifice
to the Spring_, written in the same time-signature, and yet I know
of no music--I do not even except _Alexander’s Ragtime Band_--more
dance-compelling.) We may pray to Karol Szymanowski for futurist wails
from ruined Poland; a rearranged, disharmonic version of the national
airs of the warring countries may spring from France or Italy; but
for the new composers, the new names, the strong, new blood of the
immediate future in music, we must turn to Russia. The new music will
not come from England, certainly not from America, not from France,
nor from Germany, but from the land of the steppes--a gradual return
to that orientalism in style which may be one of the gifts of culture,
which an invasion from the Far East may impose on us some time in the
next century.
_June, 1915._
Music for Museums?
Music for Museums?
I saw people actually enjoying themselves at a recent piano recital.
During the performance of some of the numbers they laughed; at other
times they nudged one another and made comments. The conclusion of
each piece was punctuated by a certain amount of vociferous applause,
and an almost equal amount of disapprobation. One group of pieces on
the programme, Claude Debussy’s _Children’s Corner_, was familiar;
as a result, it aroused less interest than some of the other music
played. Albeniz, one of the new men who is making the list of Spanish
compositions extend beyond the folk-song, was represented by his _El
Albaicin_; Maurice Ravel by _Gaspard de la Nuit_, a very successful
attempt to paint atmosphere and character in the very limited tonal
medium of the pianoforte; Scriabine by four preludes and a sonata; and
Leo Ornstein, the pianist, by _Seven Sketches_ and _Two Shadow Pieces_.
Mr. Ornstein’s compositions have no truck with majors and minors,
thirds and fifths, pentatonic and diatonic scales. His descending
fingers strike masses of keys; some auditors seemed to think there is
no plan in these assaults on the board. Personally, I am willing to
wager that the last piano sonatas of the deaf Beethoven meant just
as little to their first hearers. We have become accustomed to the
sweet and unsubtle way of the tonic and dominant. Arnold Schoenberg
and Igor Strawinsky are yet discordant to our melody-soaked and
harmony-demanding ears.
Yet, if concert programmes are consulted, one will find in them
very little music earlier than the eighteenth century. The symphony
orchestra is really a discovery of the nineteenth century. When our
symphony orchestras play Bach, Haydn, or Mozart, the reënforcements,
the rearrangements, would astonish those old composers as much as the
electric signs on Broadway, could they be brought back to hear them.
Either one-half the band--nay, two-thirds--must sit still during
the playing of these numbers, if the original body of tone is to be
preserved, or else some readjustment is necessary. For instance, it
is quite customary to allow the full body of strings to play a Mozart
symphony, although the wood-winds and brasses are not appreciably
greater in number in the modern orchestra than they were in Mozart’s
time. Lack of proportion and over-emphasis are the natural results.
It is only the composers who have invented the modern orchestra,
Berlioz, Liszt, Wagner, Strauss, Reger, Strawinsky and Scriabine--to
mention a few names--who get justice done to their compositions. In
fact, as it stands, the modern orchestra exists for the perfect playing
of modern music. It is a dizzy, vertiginous force; floods of sound
are let loose on the hearer to drown his sensibilities and to make
him “feel.” Now, there was something very precise and exact and prim
about the peruked band of the day of Haydn, which would have played
the _Symphonie Pathétique_ as if it were the _Marche Funèbre d’une
Marionnette_. Music in the good old days did not cause women to swoon
and men to swear. There were no Wagnerites then. (Are there any now?)
The composer of _Armide_ would not have inspired an Aubrey Beardsley
drawing. So when the modern orchestra plays Mozart it makes just a
little too much of it. Mozart and Strauss! It is the difference between
Cimabue and Michael Angelo.
The conflict between periodic conventions and contemporary methods
and tastes is always great and will always serve as an excuse for
discussion. There seems to be no adequate reason why we should give
up Shakespeare because we do not perform his plays in the Elizabethan
manner. After all, a tune is a tune, and _Voi che sapete_ would
probably sound very well played on mandolins if Mme. Sembrich did not
happen to be handy to sing it. The Anglican church has found it well
adapted for hymnal purposes, as anyone knows who has heard _Adeste
Fideles_. So, perhaps, Bach rearranged by Gustav Mahler, or Josef
Stransky, or anybody else who happens to have the time, is to be
listened to, just as we are all forced to lend our ears several times a
year, whether it be in a concert hall or a restaurant, or on an ocean
liner, to Gounod’s idea of a Bach prelude.
There is a great deal of the old music which gives a pleasant
impression to the ear if it be not heard too frequently. Mozart, Bach,
and Gluck, however, stand the test of frequent repetition better
than Beethoven. It would also be a mistake, perhaps, not to give the
students of music an opportunity to hear past examples of the art, to
establish in their minds a knowledge of the successive steps which
have been taken in building up this arbitrary thing which we call
“art-music,” although it is neither the music of the Chinese, who,
after all, may be considered an artistic race, the African negroes, the
Indians, nor the Japanese. It would not be advisable, perhaps, to have
any admirer of present-day art-music believe that it was all that could
be said or done in music; an historical survey is necessary. For some
of us there is always the question of relative importance. It may be a
fact that nobody in the future will be able to extract more beautiful
arbitrary art-music out of the air than has been composed by Mozart and
Wagner. We are sure that Berlioz, Liszt, Meyerbeer, and Mendelssohn
can be improved on because they have been. Perhaps Beethoven’s Fifth
Symphony is really better music than any which has been composed
before or since. (Personally, I do not for a moment think so.) For
the purpose of argument, however, it is necessary to presuppose that
some people set up standards of this sort. There are those, doubtless,
who are really sincere in their devotion to the composers whose names
begin with a B; but there is a larger group whose ears find it easier
to listen not merely to music based upon a certain scale, but to
_certain_ music based on this scale. As a result, one might say that
the very limited attendance on which our symphony orchestras may count
is largely made up of middle-aged people who are never contemptuous of
familiarity.
The principle, of course, is all wrong. Still, when every person in a
vast population is expected to enjoy arbitrary art-music, one cannot
expect perception or taste. In our civilization everybody is supposed
to “love” music. Poor though we may be, we send our daughters to the
music-masters. From cottage to cottage the echoes of the pianoforte
resound and, especially in the beginning, each pupil is given a taste
of what is known in the provinces as “classical” music. Czerny is
hauled out to teach the fingers how to be agile. There must be a taste
of Bach’s _Wohltemperirtes Clavier_, a Chopin waltz or two.... Heller
is a favorite with small-town teachers, and then the student may burst
gaily into the intricacies of the latest air by Irving Berlin. Now,
why is it that the newest of the arts--at least the newest from the
arbitrary point of view from which we consider music as an art--is
taught to almost all the children of all the lands? They are actually
beaten with sticks to drive them to the keyboard. To be sure, children
are also taught to read, for more cogent reasons. It would do no
harm to anyone to be taught to read music; but to be taught to play
it is like being taught to act. What if we should all be taught to
paint?--Well, after all, why not?
The results are not heartening. The fact is that over fifty per cent.
of the audiences who attend symphony concerts cannot carry a tune.
Naturally they are not averse to hearing Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony
played over and over and over again, but I should like to ask these
same people how many times during the course of a season they would
listen to a masterpiece in words--_Hamlet_, for instance. How much less
often would they care to hear a play by Bernard Shaw?--and yet there
are some overtures and symphonies which every orchestra plays every
season to its patrons. Some of this music one also hears in restaurants
and in the opera house. It is monstrous!
I really do not think that a modern symphony orchestra ought to be
allowed to play more than one Beethoven symphony a season. This
fossilization would be deadening to any art. A set concert programme
is almost an occasion for despair under the brightest conditions, but
with no new life in its make-up, it had better remain an unperformed
programme. When an orchestra is the medium through which a new musician
pours out his inspiration to the world, there is meaning in the
organization. When it ambles idly through Brahms and Bach it occupies
the same place in the world’s affairs that the museum does. Why should
all our orchestras insist, except on rare occasions, on being museums?
We have seen that only an inert audience may be counted upon from the
ranks of the music students of the country. More interest might be
expected from auditors prepared to be unprepared. To be sure, every
conductor is keen to put a few “novelties” on his programmes every
year. This season, for instance, a symphony by Sibelius, which has been
played in Europe for some time and has been performed here before,
has been hauled out again to make the critics foam at the mouth. Igor
Strawinsky’s early work, _Fireworks_, composed and published in 1908,
has been vouchsafed us. Since then Strawinsky, who, to my mind, is
the most brilliant of the new composers, has written three ballets,
_The Firebird_, _Petrouchka_, and _The Sacrifice to the Spring_, and an
opera, _The Nightingale_. Not a note, so far as I am aware, of these
most interesting scores has been heard in New York, although Paris and
London are thoroughly familiar with them. Schoenberg is as yet barely a
ghoulish name in this country, to be whispered shudderingly until some
daring soul makes the Austrian composer a conventional thing of the
past. The Kneisels have at last taken him up, if that means anything,
and, of course, Ornstein has played him. The Flonzaleys have played
a quartet and the Boston Symphony Orchestra has performed the five
orchestral pieces. Chicago, too, has heard these. This is as far as we
have gone with Schoenberg. There is really no use of referring to so
bad a performance as the Russian Symphony Orchestra gave of Scriabine’s
_Prometheus_. We hear too much Strauss now. There was a time when we
did not hear enough. The academic Reger was feared like the plague for
whole years. Now that his message means as little as possible, he jumps
from programme to programme.
Symphony concerts, then, as they exist in America--and to a lesser
degree elsewhere--are museums, where one may inspect bits of old
musical armor, tunes in _Sèvres_, tinkling lace shawls from Brussels,
or harmonious bowls of the Ming period. The audiences are shameless
so-called music-lovers who dawdle through endless repetitions of the
_Euryanthe_ overture, and who whisper exquisite trifles to one another
about the delights of an audition of a Mozart symphony. Really there
is nothing so smug, so snobbish, to be found in the world as the
audience of a symphony society, unless it be a string-quartet audience.
Beside these groups you find opera-goers are simple human beings. Both
the organization and its supporters, then, we discover, are simply
corrupted by cob-webs. They are things of the past that persist in
going on. A live orchestra, built on living principles, which played
new music if it played at all, would serve not only to develop new
composers, but also new ideas. One can talk intelligently and even
quarrel with one’s neighbor about a new Strawinsky work. At best, if
one is a critic, one can write a column about how Gustav Mahler doubled
the brasses in a Beethoven symphony and thus became the most arrant of
knaves, or, if one is not a critic, one may say, “I like Mr. Stransky
so much when he conducts Liszt!” To be sure, the snobs and the smug
would be bewildered by the novelties. Perhaps they wouldn’t even go to
the concerts, although that seems unbelievable. But there would be new
audiences. At a recent concert of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, in New
York, Dr. Muck dared to place three unfamiliar works on the programme.
(God knows this was an unusual proceeding.) Not one of these was
formidable; not one of them new, except to those comfortable ladies and
gentlemen who have sat through concerts devoted to Beethoven and Bach
so long that they should know the tunes by heart. Yet the protests were
many and loud. I think Dr. Muck really stirred up an interest in music
by this procedure.
But if our symphony societies are dead, what of our string quartets?
Chamber music! Its title explains it. It is music intended to be played
at home ... _music intended to be played_, not to be listened to,
except, perhaps, by some doting members of the performers’ families.
Suppose you play the violin and you can find another violinist, and a
’cellist, and a violist, you invite them all to come to your house some
night and you take down Schubert’s quartets, or Tschaikowsky’s, and
entertain yourselves. Father, reading his paper, listens listlessly....
Sister Mary doesn’t object to giving her ear occasionally, but there is
no concerted attention devoted to you. Nor should there be. People do
not, as a rule, attempt to play piano duets in public. Why they should
play string quartets I do not know. Yet you will find the cult of the
string quartet is almost a mystic body. There is a great deal said
about this being the “highest and noblest” form of music (arbitrary
art-music), and a great many people are impressed with the idea that to
know the string quartets of the masters in itself constitutes a liberal
education. To know how to play them does, in fact, make for a certain
education, but to listen to them--well, that is a different matter. The
string quartet plays in the very dustiest part of the museum in which
“modern” concerts are given. Its audiences are fanatics who have gone
mad over an old religion, and while they will listen on occasion to
trios, sextets, and piano quintets, their idea of the limitations of
the possible combinations of instruments is circumscribed.... To my
mind, there seems to be no good reason why we should not have a duet
between child’s voice and flute; two guitars and two mandolins make
very pretty music.
I really do not know whether it is the concert-going public which makes
snobs of the critics, or the critics who make snobs of the public. It
is certain that the music critics are loftier in their self-created
mountain strongholds than almost any body of people since the worthy
mastersingers. They are the cataloguers of the museum, and as each
set of performers takes out an old doll and makes its arms and legs
wobble, and teases it to cry “Mama,” they express their delight or
their displeasure over the results. If a new doll, by any chance, is
brought in, it is quickly sent to the basement by these judges, unless
it imitates not only in appearance, but in gesture as well, some old
doll. Montemezzi is a doll who did not win the disapproval of the
critics because they had been hearing _L’Amore dei tre Re_ or something
like it all their lives.... Zandonai, on the other hand.... New dolls
are not wanted in a museum which contains the works of Beethoven, Bach,
and Brahms. Pratella’s name does not even begin with a B. But neither
does Strauss’s, nor Debussy’s. After all, however, if one writes
criticisms one must have a standard, I hear you objecting. Most critics
do, mercifully enough for their readers, for if one’s standard is not
to accept any innovations after a diminished seventh, it at least
gives his readers an opportunity to be aware of what he means when he
says that a work is discordant. When a seasoned examiner of musical
criticism meets this word he understands that the critic means that
the music under discussion is quite different from that of Weber and
Puccini. There may be, on the other hand, very good reasons to suppose
that to an unprejudiced ear, one not fed up on art-music, the new music
may not be any more discordant than the hum of a factory, the roar of
a city, or any of the familiar rhythmical sounds to which our ears are
so accustomed that we accept them. The Hottentot and the Chinaman find
real pleasure in what we call discords, and, as a result, they have
achieved in their music complexities of rhythm which would be beyond
the grasp of the ordinary composer of our art-music.... It is alone the
critic’s point of view, well-defined, which makes him comprehensible
when he disdains to be more scientific in his criticism.
There would seem to be a better way, unless the critic can describe
his emotions as poignantly as Pater painted his impressions of the
_Monna Lisa_. Why not a scientific description? For years columns and
pages have been pouring over to us about the “discordant” Schoenberg,
but nothing which actually gives you an idea of Schoenberg has yet
appeared, at least not under my eyes. (I might except a few paragraphs
in Huneker’s article.) One could give an idea of what the music really
was like, at least to a musician. Or one could make a confession, such
as I heard Alfred Hertz make after the first performance in London
of Strawinsky’s very beautiful opera, _The Nightingale_, in which
instruments are combined with such strange effect that it is almost as
if the composer had discovered a new scale of tones: “I am considered a
good musician. When I am conducting an orchestra I can detect a false
note in the furthest bassoon, or the nearest flute, but in the second
act of _The Nightingale_ I could not name a single note.”
_January, 1915._
The Secret of the Russian Ballet
Secret of the Russian Ballet
Irony certainly directed the workings of fate when it was decreed, in
this age of individualism, that the group-spirit should dominate the
movements of the theatre, an institution in which, not so many years
ago, the individual reigned, his head crowned with bays. Democracy has
two effects: it strengthens the individual and it gives him the power
to join with other individuals in fostering the growth of his ideals.
Thus Max Reinhardt, distinctly individual though he may be, has made
his impression through his artists, his actors, and his musicians. So
has Stanislawsky of Moscow, who in one instance solicited the services
of Gordon Craig. The Irish Theatre movement, which developed so great
a genius as Synge and many lesser, but still important, writers,
such as T. C. Murray and St. John Ervine, was essentially conceived
in the group-spirit. But more than any of these, the most brilliant
movement in the theatre of our time, the Russian Ballet (I am referring
specifically to the organization under the direction of Serge de
Diaghilew) has relied to an extraordinary degree on the group for its
effect--one which, on modern art, music, dancing, stage decorations,
and women’s fashions, can scarcely be overestimated. I have heard it
said, not altogether as a jest, that the Russian Ballet has had an
influence on European politics.
There are still many people, however, who have never seen the
performances of the Russian Ballet, who think of it only as an
aggregation of virtuosi, much after the manner of one of Mr.
Grau’s all-star casts in _Les Huguenots_. It is true that the
names of Nijinsky, Karsavina, Fokine, Miassine, Bolm, and Fokina
have inevitably awakened the same sort of magic sympathy that the
names of Nordica, Melba, Calvé and the de Rezskes once evoked. The
misunderstanding has followed in natural sequence. Nevertheless--and
this is said without any desire to depreciate the value of the Russian
stars--it is fortunate that the ideal of the producers of these
mimed dramas is aimed higher than at the exploitation of individual
talent. Their ultimate goals are cohesiveness and general pictorial
effect. And this fact makes it possible for the Ballet to give
representative performances with or without the aid of any particular
dancer. In the summer of 1914, for example, in the absence of the
superlative Nijinsky, the Russians made very lovely productions of
Rimsky-Korsakow’s _The Golden Cock_ and Richard Strauss’s _The Legend
of Joseph_.