MUSIC
_Music is a kind of inarticulate, unfathomable speech, which leads us
to the edge of the Infinite, and lets us for moments gaze into that._
CARLYLE.
Paul began the study of music at an early age. He had natural aptitude
for it and an unerring ear. As a little boy he used to sing with much
expression in a sweet, clear voice. He received great assistance from
his mother in his musical studies. After he had turned fifteen, music
became one of his main interests. Indeed, if we except football, it
was his master passion, and, unlike football, it could be pursued
throughout the year. Whenever his scholastic studies and his athletic
activities permitted, he would spend his leisure at the piano. With
characteristic thoroughness he studied the lives as well as the works
of the great composers. During the Grand Opera season he was a
frequent visitor to Covent Garden Theatre and the performances of the
_Nibelungen Ring_ were for him a fountain of pure delight. He was also
a regular attendant with his mother at the Queen's Hall and Albert
Hall concerts. Ballad singing did not appeal to him in the same degree
as operatic and orchestral music. Thanks to instinctive gifts and
assiduous practice he became a scholarly and an accomplished musician.
A brilliant pianist, his playing was marked by power and passion, and
the colour and glow of an intense and sensitive personality. He could
memorise the most intricate composition, and would play for hours
without a note. Music was almost a religion with him: he found in it
solace, joy, inspiration.
Above all other musicians, he reverenced Beethoven and Wagner. For
Beethoven's music, with its spiritualised emotion and divine
harmonies, his admiration knew no bounds. Of the famous symphonies he
assigned first place to that in C minor, No. 5, which he thought stood
alone in the art of musical expression, peerless and unapproachable, a
unique emanation from the soul and mind of man. "It holds us in its
grasp," wrote Wagner of this composition, "as one of the rarer
conceptions of the master, in which Passion, aroused by Pain as its
original ground-tone, raises itself upward on the stepping-stone of
conciliation and exaltation to an outburst of Joy conscious of
Victory." Paul loved to play the Fifth Symphony as well as to hear it
performed by an orchestral band. When playing it he seemed to lose
touch with earth and to be transported to celestial heights. In his
marginalia he compares the methods of expression of Shakespeare with
those of Beethoven. That able critic, the late Professor Dowden, in
some penetrating observations on Shakespeare's works, wrote:
In the earliest plays the idea is at times hardly sufficient to
fill out the language; in the middle plays there seems a perfect
balance and equality between the thought and its expression; in
the latest plays this balance is disturbed by the preponderance,
or excess, of ideas over the means of giving them utterance.
After underlining this passage Paul made the comment: "An
extraordinary coincidence occurs to me in that the same thing happens
with Beethoven, the greatest of the absolute musicians. Anyone must
see that in the last symphony (No. 9 in D minor) he seems often at a
loss how to put his feelings into shape (or sound), as though musical
style up to his time could not express the intensity of his ideas.
Hence in this symphony there is a distinct lack of balance--a defect
which is absent from the works of his middle period (_e.g._, Symphony
No. 5 or No. 7)."
Another Beethoven work that he loved was the Third Symphony in E Flat,
with its epic opening; the mournful beauty of its funeral march, now
sad, calm, solemn like a moonless, starless night, now shining with
gleams of hope and faith; its crisp and lively scherzo; and the
triumphant finale, a veritable ecstasy of divine joy. My son as an
historical scholar found a peculiar attraction in this symphony by
reason of its association with Napoleon Buonaparte, for it was
inspired by Beethoven's belief--formed in those days when the soldier
of the Revolution was regarded as the liberator of peoples and the
enemy only of the old feudal order--that Napoleon was marked out by
destiny to realise Plato's ideal of government. One recalls how the
act of Napoleon in proclaiming himself Emperor shattered this
illusion; how Beethoven erased the fallen hero's name from the
title-page of his score, withheld the "Eroica" for a time, and then
gave it to the world in 1805 as "An Heroic Symphony composed in memory
of a great man." When Beethoven heard of Napoleon's death at St.
Helena, he said he had already composed his funeral ode 17 years
before. Of this _marche funebre_ M. Ballaique wrote: "It owes its
incomparable grandeur to the beauty of the melodic idea and also to a
peculiarity of rhythm. At the first half of each bar there is a halt,
a pause, which seems to punctuate each station, each painful slip or
descent on the way to the illustrious tomb."
Of Wagner, Paul was a whole-hearted worshipper. He was familiar with
the myths, legends and folk-poems from which Wagner drew his themes,
and he exulted in the master's superb treatment of them. Never, he
thought, had music and ideas been more felicitously blended than by
Wagner, whatever the theme--the storm-tost soul of "the Flying
Dutchman," to whom redemption came at last through loyalty and
compassion; the conflict between sensuality and love fought out in the
arena of Tannhaeuser's mind; the cosmic glories of the Ring with the
resplendent figures of Siegfried and Brunhilde; the self-dedication of
Parsifal, the Sir Percival of our Arthurian legends, whom "The sweet
vision of the Holy Grail drew from all vain-glories, rivalries and
earthly heats." Into the glowing music of Wagner my son read lessons
in renunciation, the sordidness of the lust for gold, the sublimity of
pure human love, the redemptive power of self-sacrifice. The
occasional voluptuousness of the music was so transmuted in the
alembic of his temperament that for him the sensual element was
eliminated. An incident illustrative of his devotion to Wagner is
worth recording. In the summer of 1913, during our holiday tour in
Germany, we had for part of the time our headquarters at
Assmannshausen, a smiling village sheltering snugly at the foot of
vine-clad hills on the right bank of the Rhine. That great river is at
its best at Assmannshausen; the broad current here flows swiftly over
a stony bed. Day and night one's ears are filled with the music of the
rushing waters hastening impetuously to the distant sea as though
eager to lose themselves in its infinite embrace. One evening the
guests at the hotel arranged a concert, and to our surprise--for we
knew how diffident he was--Paul, evidently moved by the _genius loci_,
volunteered to take part in it. When the time came he advanced to the
piano through the crowded room and, with an elbow resting on the
instrument, astonished the audience by a few explanatory words. He
said he was going to play the "Ride of the Valkyries," and explained
what Wagner meant to convey by that wild, stormy music. Then seating
himself at the instrument, he proceeded to play the "Ride" from
memory. His execution had a verve whose charm was irresistible. It
was a lovely summer night. Through the open windows of the
concert-room one caught glimpses of the moonlight quivering on the
waters of the swift-flowing Rhine. Nothing could be heard save the
river's melodious roar softened by distance, and this enchanting music
interpreted by one who was saturated with its spirit, both sounds
blending harmoniously like the double pipe of an ancient Greek flute
player. All of us felt the spell of the scene and the occasion.
Everyone listened tense and silent until the descending chromatic
passage at the end when the "Valkyries" vanish into space, the echo of
their laughter dies away, and the "Ride" ends in a sound like the
fluttering of wings in the distance. When Paul rose from the piano the
pent-up feelings of the audience found expression in enthusiastic
applause.
In the spring of 1913, just after he had turned 17, he wrote the
following appreciation of Wagner for the _Llanelly Star_:
The 22nd of May, 1913, marks the centenary of an event of supreme
importance in the annals of music. To-day just one hundred years
ago was born at Leipzig Richard Wagner, king of the music-drama,
who towers above all other operatic composers like some lofty
mountain rising from the midst of a dull and featureless plain.
Such a colossal revolution as was effected by Wagner in Art can
hardly find a parallel in any walk of life. What, in brief, was
the scope of Wagner's reforms? To answer this question it is
necessary to glance at the state in which the opera stood in
pre-Wagner days. From the days of Scarlatti the opera had
consisted of a number of semi-detached solos, duets or choruses
to which tunes were set. These pieces were joined up by any
jumble of notes sung by the characters on the stage, usually with
no artistic meaning whatsoever, known as the recitative. In a
word, the opera was a mere ballad concert. The recitative was so
utterly foolish and meaningless, as a rule, that men like
Beethoven and Weber, when they composed music-dramas, abolished
it altogether, and composed what is known as "Singspiel"--that
is, a number of ballads connected simply by spoken words. (The
well-known Gilbert and Sullivan operettas are really Singspiels
in a lesser form.) Thus it is obvious that the meaning of the
opera--that is, a drama whose significance is made more clear by
the aid of music suitable to the situation in hand--had been
entirely lost sight of.
In the average French or Italian opera, or in the singspiels, all
that matters is a number of songs, ballads or arias--call them
what you will--entirely disconnected and quite destructive to the
continuity that must be the essence of every drama. This
continuity is an absolute necessity to every spoken play; imagine
the effect if Shakespeare or Ibsen had written little pieces of
rhyming verse joined up by any jumble of nonsensical prose!
Neglect of this fact led every opera composer before Wagner
astray. We can imagine a pre-Wagner composer telling his
librettist, "Now, mind you arrange that in certain parts the
words will allow me to put in arias or choruses." In short, the
situation was summed up in Wagner's famous phrase, "The means of
expression (music) has been made the end, while the end of
expression (the drama) has been made the means." Now this state
of affairs is clearly wrong. If there is no dramatic idea kept as
end to work to, then what is the use of writing opera at all? Why
not be content with song-cycles or ballads, or lieder like
Brahms's and Schumann's?
There are no divisions into aria and recitative in Wagner's
operas, but dramatic continuity is retained by the voices of the
characters singing music the succession of whose notes is
determined by the emotional requirements of the moment.
Meanwhile, the orchestra forms a sort of musical background by
giving forth music which exactly suits the dramatic situation.
The orchestra, in a word, as Wagner himself said of _Tristan und
Isolde_, forms an emotional tide on which the voice floats like a
boat on the waters. The essential relevance of the music to the
dramatic situation is obtained, as a rule, by means of what are
known as "leading motives." These form the basis of all Wagner's
reforms. A leading motive is simply a musical phrase suggestive
of a dramatic idea. Wagner's motives are marvellous in their
descriptive and soul-stirring power. They seem to indicate not
only the pith, but the utmost depths of the heart of the ideas
which they represent. It is this that makes Wagner so very like
Shakespeare. All can appreciate him, yet he is above all
criticism, universal in his appeal.
Who but Wagner could make us feel the awful tragedy of
Siegfried's death, the calm of the primeval elements, the pompous
yet somewhat venerable character of the Mastersingers, the agony
of Tristan's delirium, the superb majesty of Valhalla, or the
free, noble nature of Parsifal? Even when Wagner uses motives
comparatively little, writing rather "freely," as in _Tristan und
Isolde_, he always has the power of imprinting an idea with the
utmost clearness upon our souls. He will sometimes make a slight
change in a motive, or make a development of it, that gives us an
entirely different psychological impression of the idea
represented by the motive, as indicating some new aspect of it in
which the motives are all dovetailed together into a compact
whole that is simply marvellous. If one considers the "Ring,"
that gigantic web of motives, and at the same time, in the words
of that able critic, Mr. Ernest Newman, "beyond all comparison
the biggest thing ever conceived by the mind of a musician,"
colossal yet logical, gigantic yet compact, the power of the
Bayreuth master will become even still more evident.
Wagner's first work, _Rienci_, composed frankly in the blatant
Meyerbeerian style, has no artistic significance. _The Flying
Dutchman_ marks a great advance. _Tannhaeuser_ and _Lohengrin_ are
milestones of progress, but in all these works Wagner's full
ideal is, generally speaking, but little perceptible. The really
great Wagner operas are his later works, _Tristan und Isolde_,
_Parsifal_, _Die Meistersinger von Nuernberg_, and, above all,
that gigantic tetralogy (a complete musico-dramatic rendering of
the Icelandic Saga put into English verse under the title of
_Sigurd the Volsung_ by William Morris) which consists of four
stupendous operas, _Das Rheingold_, _Die Walkuere_, _Siegfried_,
and _Gotterdaemmerung_. These marvellous works, the consummation
of the Bayreuth master's principles, undoubtedly stand with
Beethoven's symphonies as the greatest achievements in music.
For the rest, it may be mentioned that Wagner was in private life
a most kindly man, albeit at times quick-tempered, a great lover
of children and animals. His philosophy was a somewhat variable
quantity; he fell under the influence first of Feuerbach, then of
Schopenhauer, and to some extent possibly of Nietzsche. But
still, throughout all his works runs the doctrine of the Free
Individual, of which Siegfried and Parsifal are perhaps the most
striking impersonations.
Like Browning, Wagner believed in redemption by means of
sacrifice. In his richness and strength Wagner typified the
abounding vitality of the new Germany. To the Fatherland he is
what Shakespeare is to England. One may apply to him the noble
words Milton wrote of Shakespeare:
"Thou in our wonder and astonishment
Hast built thyself a livelong monument.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
And so sepulchred in such pomp dost lie
That kings for such a tomb would wish to die."
H. P. M. J.
I found among my son's papers a sketch in manuscript of Wagner's life
and work. It begins with some observations on Romanticism and
Classicism.
Whereas in the Classical style the spirit is held in restraint by
certain forms, in the Romantic it refuses to acknowledge these
forms and breaks away to give the soul entirely free play. It
necessarily follows that the Romantic style makes the wider
appeal, for it touches chords of the heart that the Classical
cannot. Also the Romantic is rather more definite and less purely
intellectual than the Classical, though the ideal may be equally
high in the one as in the other. In short, the Romantic style is
human in its appeal, while the Classical is superhuman. The best
examples of men great in these two forms of art are Shakespeare
in the Romance and Milton in the Classic.
Returning to music, he thought that Bach, "immortal though many of his
works are," was fettered by his servitude to rules.
The Classical may become too cold, may lose all connection with
the warmth of humanity. Such a fate does Haydn seem to have met
in many of his works. Beethoven, the mightiest classicist, also
to some extent Mozart, saw that the soul must not hold entirely
aloof from humanity. Hence it is that Beethoven broke
deliberately several, though not indeed very many, of Bach's more
enchaining rules, while Mozart, in his operas at least, had a
large amount of Romance worked into his music. On the other hand,
by its very nature the Romance style is occasionally apt to slip
into what is pre-eminently Classicism.
He confutes the argument that because base things have to be expressed
in the Romantic style therefore that style degrades Art, for "base
things handled artistically excite pure emotions of anger or
indignation."
Wagner, though he broke every rule set up by Bach, though he
abolished all the ideas of Classicism, produced with his later
works (_i.e._, _The Ring_, _Die Meistersinger_, _Tristan_, and
_Parsifal_) music which reveals infinitudes of art to quite as
great an extent as any classicist has done.... Wagner gives us
Nature's message, Beethoven the message of the incomprehensible
Empyrean, and it is for no one to say that the one message is any
greater or less than the other.
Necessarily the opera must be more romantic than the symphony.
"Composers who have given the world both opera and symphony such as
Beethoven, Mozart, Weber, Spohr, Berlioz, always wrote Romantically in
their operas and Classically in their symphonies." Of the development
of opera he wrote:
Opera was fast degenerating into a sort of collection of ballads,
with hardly any orchestration at all, when a strong man rose to
check these abuses. Gluck was the forerunner of the earlier
German school of opera composers, which includes such men as
Beethoven, Mozart, Weber and Schubert. Gluck had studied
carefully the progress of non-operatic music since Bach's time,
and seeing what vast strides the art had made in this direction,
tried to bring into line with the opera its improvements. He was
the first composer to show the immense and inestimable necessity
of properly orchestrated music in opera. Gluck's rich scoring,
beautiful melodies combined with dramatic connection between
action, voice and orchestra, entirely revolutionised the opera.
Fortunately, he had a still greater contemporary to carry on his
reforms. Gluck has himself explained how he set out to avoid any
concession of music to the vocal abilities of the singer; how he
had tried to bring music to its proper function, _i.e._, to go
side by side with the poetry of the drama--a clear forecasting of
Wagner's own reforms.
Whereas in Monteverde's operas the dramatic significance was
kept, but only at the expense of the music, which had absolutely
no signification at all, in the works of Gluck, Mozart and
Scarlatti the musical part is elevated, but entirely at the
expense of the dramatic idea, which is quite lost. A Mozart
melody, rhythmic, square-cut, is as different as possible from a
Wagner theme, for whereas the former suggests nothing the latter
is very rich in suggestion. It is clear that Gluck and Mozart,
though they performed an inestimable service to the musical art
by the raising of the orchestra to its proper position with
regard to the voice and the music, yet failed to keep in view the
continuity of the drama in opera. Hence it was that Weber and
Beethoven frankly abolished the recitative that joins the formal
melodies of the arias and melodic passages and composed
Singspiel, having their works built up of airs and melodies
joined by spoken dialogue. Such is Weber's _Der Freischuetz_ and
such Beethoven's _Fidelio_.
After discussing Meyerbeer, Scarlatti, and Rossini, Bellini and
Donizetti, my son comes to Wagner and the revolution in music he
accomplished:
Wagner was a man of ripe culture, who was equally familiar with
Beethoven's symphonies, Shakespeare's dramas, Kant's philosophic
writings and Homer's epics. All the great works of literature and
philosophy were well known to him. Thus he brought to bear on his
music a mind singularly well equipped in every direction. He was,
too, essentially a Teuton, with all the German massiveness of
conception and depth of soul. A lesser man must have fallen
before the prospect of attempting such a colossal reform. What
was that reform in its essentials? It was this--to compose opera
in which the idea of the drama was made the ruling conception; to
attain this end by a wedding of suitable poetry to music of such
a kind as should reflect by its themes what was happening on the
stage or in the minds of the characters. There was to be no aria
or fixed form of ballad, but continuous melody, in which the
voices of the characters are regarded as extra instruments of the
orchestra, with just that element of personality included....
To have succeeded entirely in this bold design he would have had
to be a Shakespeare in poetry and knowledge of human nature, as
well as a musician of equal ability. How could any one man fulfil
both of these roles? In the matter of the music Wagner is a very
Shakespeare. But if we take his own writings as evidences of what
he meant to do, then his librettos must necessarily be
unsatisfactory. They keep the dramatic idea in sight so much as
almost entirely to lose sight of poetic beauty. Wagner was
pre-eminently a musician; he was not a poet, as he wished also to
be. Whatever his poetical achievements, the main fact is
unaltered. The dramatic idea and the musical expression are kept
so indissolubly close by Wagner as to be one for all intents and
purposes.
Of Wagner's treatment of the vocalist he says:
The melody sung is modelled upon the way in which the speaking
voice rises and falls in accordance with the feelings of the
moment. With marvellous skill the master of Bayreuth has made the
music sung reflect as clearly as any oration what are the
thoughts and feelings of the character. The orchestra makes, as
it were, a tide or ocean, over which the voice, in this manner,
floats, now rising high on the crest of the wave, now sinking
into the trough of the seas. Sometimes for added poignancy,
Wagner makes the voice sing the _leitmotif_ of some idea
connected with the idea of the moment. This is constantly
occurring in _Die Meistersinger_.
After scornful allusions to French and Italian opera, he shows how
Wagner re-fashioned opera on new and nobler lines. Replying to those
who say "You must have lightness sometimes," he wrote:
Yes, but never triviality. If we want lightness of touch and
wittiness, have we not _Die Meistersinger_, the greatest comedy
in the world, or a merry piece like Mozart's _Nozze di Figaro_?
Here is all the wit that one wants, yet the level is kept high
throughout. It is the same in literature. We have absurd, banal
pieces, said to be humorous, such as _The Glad Eye_, which really
contain not one-millionth the humour that there is in a noble
comedy like Shakespeare's _Twelfth Night_, or _As You Like It_,
or a Shavian play like _John Bull's Other Island_. Man is too
great a thing ever to be of his nature low and banal. We have in
life farce sometimes, comedy very often indeed, but never
banality.
The essay thus concludes:
If we have been flooded with rag-times and musical comedies, the
fault lies in the first place with the French and Italian
composers of the period 1790-1850. Pre-Wagner opera is as low a
concoction as can possibly be conceived. It took all the genius
of the great Bayreuth master to turn things back into their
proper channel. But he has succeeded, and the old style is
moribund. Anyone who glances over the list of living composers
must see that they are all enormously influenced by Wagner's
principle. The last of the old style was Massenet, and he is
dead. We see Richard Strauss, an extreme Wagnerian, only without
the master's full powers; Engelbert Humperdinck, who is a user of
the _leitmotif_ and a most skilled orchestrator, though his
motifs are not so powerful as Wagner's or even Strauss's; Pietro
Mascagni, a Mozartean composer; Bruneau, an extreme Wagnerian;
Glazounov and Mossourgsky have combined Wagner's ideas with
Tschaikovsky's; Puccini at least is a very strong supporter and
admirer of Wagner. It will thus be seen that, with the exception
of Mascagni, Wagnerian ideas have been paid tribute to by all the
leading opera composers of the day. In a word, the Man is here.
Opera, as represented by Richard Wagner's music-dramas, takes its
place on a level with the absolute music of which Beethoven's
work is the noblest example.
Paul found keen pleasure in the Gilbert and Sullivan operas, liking
the witty libretto as much as the bright, tuneful melodies. For the
work of Caesar Franck, a gifted Belgian musician who died on the
threshold of manhood, he had profound admiration, and was of opinion
that had he lived Franck would have taken rank with the great masters.
As was to be expected, my son had for Welsh music a strong natural
sympathy. He held that "Men of Harlech" was one of the greatest of all
battle hymns, and that "Morfa Rhuddlan," the ancient Cymric dirge, had
never been surpassed as a piece of funereal music. Some of the old
Welsh hymn tunes he regarded as unique in their wistfulness and devout
aspiration; and as for Welsh choral singing, he thought it was
matchless for richness, fire and harmony.