I remember the Philharmonic in its glory one evening, when it had a
couple of distinguished foreigners to a kind of musical high tea, very
bourgeois, very long and very indigestible. One of the pair of
distinguished foreigners was Mr. Sauer; the other, Dvorák, was the
hero of the evening. Now, whatever one may think of Dvorák the
musician, it is impossible to feel anything but sympathy and
admiration for Dvorák the man. His early struggles to overcome the
attendant disadvantages of his peasant birth; his unheard-of labours
to acquire a mastery of the technique of his art when body and brain
were exhausted by the work of earning his daily bread in a very humble
capacity; his sickening years of waiting, not for popular recognition
merely, but for an opportunity of showing that he had any gifts worthy
of being recognised,--these command the sympathy of all but those
happy few who have found life a most delicate feather-bed. Dvorák has
honestly worked for all that has come to him, and the only people who
will carp or sneer at him are those who have gained or wish to gain
their positions without honest work. There could be no conjecture
wider of the mark than that of his success being due to any charlatan
tricks in his music or in his conduct of life. No composer's
music--not Bach's, nor Haydn's, nor even Mozart's--could be a more
veracious expression of his inner nature; and if Dvorák's music is at
times odd and whimsical, and persistently wrong-headed and _outré_
through long passages, it does not mean that Dvorák is trying to
impress or startle his hearers by doing unusual things, but merely
that he himself is odd and whimsical and has his periods of persistent
wrong-headedness. He is Slav in every fibre--not a pseudo-Slav whose
ancestors were or deserved to be whipped out of the temple in
Jerusalem. He has all the Slav's impetuosity and hot blood, his love
of glaring and noisy colour, his love of sheer beauty of a certain
limited kind, and--alas!--his unfailing brainlessness. His impetuosity
and hot blood are manifested in his frequent furious rhythms and the
abrupt changes in those rhythms; his love of colour in the quality of
his instrumentation, with its incessant contrasts and use of the
drums, cymbals, and triangle; his sense of beauty in the terribly
weird splendour of his pictures, and its limitations in his rare
achievement of anything fine when once he passes out of the region of
the weird and terrible; his brainlessness in his inability to
appreciate the value of a strong sinewy theme, in the lack of
proportion between the different movements of his works and between
the sections of the movements, and, perhaps more than in any other
way, in his unhappy choice of subjects for vocal works. One stands
amazed before the spectacle of the man who made that prodigious
success with the awful legend of "The Spectre's Bride" coming forward,
smiling in childlike confidence, with "Saint Ludmila," which was so
awful in another fashion. And then, as if not content with nearly
ruining his reputation by that deadly blow, he must needs follow up
"Saint Ludmila" with the dreariest, dullest, most poverty-stricken
Requiem ever written by a musician with any gift of genuine invention.
These mistakes might indicate mere want of tact did not the qualities
of Dvorák's music show them to be the result of sheer want of
intellect; and if the defects of his music are held by some to be
intentional beauties, no such claim can be set up for the opinions on
music which he has on various occasions confided to the ubiquitous
interviewer. The Slav is an interesting creature, and his music is
interesting, not because he is higher than the Western man, but
because he is different, and, if anything, lower, with a considerable
touch of the savage. When Dvorák is himself, and does not pass outside
the boundaries within which he can breathe freely, he produces results
so genuine and powerful that one might easily mistake him for a great
musician; but when he competes with Beethoven or Handel or Haydn, we
at once realise that he is not expressing what he really feels, but
what he thinks he should feel, that he is not at his ease, and that
our native men can beat him clean out of the field. To be sure, they
can at times be as dull as he, but that is when they forget the lesson
they should before now have learnt from him, when they leave the field
in which they work with real enjoyment and produce results which may
be enjoyed.