Richter and Mottl, the only considerable conductors besides
Lamoureux whom we had heard in England up to 1896, may be compared
with a couple of organists who come here, expecting to find their
instruments ready, in fair working order, and accurately in tune.
Lamoureux, on the other hand, was like Sarasate and Ysaÿe, who would
be reduced to utter discomfiture if their Strads were to stray on the
road. He played on his own instrument--the orchestra on which he had
practised day by day for so many years. Richter and Mottl took their
instruments as they found them, and devoted the comparatively short
time they had for rehearsal to the business of getting their main
intentions broadly carried out, leaving a good deal of minor detail to
look after itself, and not complaining if a few notes fell under the
desks at the back of the orchestra. Lamoureux had laboriously
rehearsed every inch of his repertory until it was note-perfect, and
each of his men knew the precise bowing, phrasing, degree of piano or
forte, and tempo of every minutest phrase. Now I do not mean by this
that the orchestras on which Richter and Mottl performed played many
wrong notes, while the Lamoureux orchestra played none; and still less
do I mean that Lamoureux got finer results than Richter or Mottl. So
far as the mere notes are concerned, the Englishmen who played for the
German conductors acquitted themselves quite as well as the Frenchmen
who played for Lamoureux. Both made mistakes at times; and a seemingly
paradoxical thing is that when a Lamoureux man stumbled all the world
was bound to hear it, whereas in our English orchestras a score of
mistakes might be made in an evening without many of us being much the
wiser. The reason for this is the reason why the playing of Lamoureux
on his trained orchestra, for all its accuracy, was not better than,
nor in many respects so good as, the playing of Richter and Mottl on
the scratch orchestras which their agents engaged for them. Probably
few uninformed laymen have any notion of the extent to which mere
noise is responsible for the total effect of a Wagner piece or a
Beethoven symphony--not the noise of big drum, cymbals and so on; but
the continuous slight discords caused by some of the players being
various degrees in front and others various degrees behind; the
scratching produced by uncertain bowing, or by an unfortunate fiddler
finding himself a little behind the general body (as he does
sometimes) and making a savage rush to catch it up; the hissing of
panting flautists; and the barnyard noises produced by exhausted
oboe-players. Even with Richter, stolid and trustworthy though he is,
these unauthorised sounds count for a great deal; and with a conductor
like Mottl, who varies the tempo freely in obedience to his mood in
the most rapid pieces, they count for very much more. They result in a
continuous murmur which, so to speak, fills the interstices in the
network of the music, covering wrong notes, and giving the mass of
tone a richness and unity which otherwise it would lack. In such
movements as the Finale of the Fifth symphony this continuous murmur
does the work done for the piano by the upper strings without dampers
and the lower ones when the pedal is pressed down; it gives solidity
and colour to the music; and certainly half the effect in fine
renderings of "The Flying Dutchman" overture, the Walkürenritt, and
the Fire-music, is due to it. But Lamoureux's men had practised so
long together under their conductor's beat that all the instruments
played like one instrument, no matter how the tempo was varied; the
bowing of each passage had been considered and finally settled, so
that there was no uncertainty there; and in the course of long
rehearsal every wind-player had learned precisely where he must
breathe, where he must reserve his breath, and where he could let
himself go, so that the tone of flutes, oboes, clarinets, and bassoons
never became in the smallest degree forced or hoarse. And the result
of this was the entire absence of that murmur which one has come to
regard as characteristic of the orchestra. If a wrong note was played,
there was nothing to hide its nakedness. It was as though a
penetrating flood of cold white light were poured upon the music and
made it transparent: one perceived every remotest and least
significant detail with a vivid distinctness that can only be compared
with a page of print seen through a strong magnifying glass, or,
perhaps better still, with a photograph seen through a stereoscope. As
in a stereoscope, the outlines were defined with a degree of clearness
and sharpness that almost hurt the eye; as in a stereoscope, there was
neither colour nor suggestiveness. An orchestral virtuoso, like a
piano or violin virtuoso, may over-practise.
Having delivered this verdict with all solemnity, I must straightway
proceed to hedge. If Lamoureux had not the qualities which give
Richter and Mottl their pre-eminence, he had qualities which they do
not possess, and his playing had qualities which one cannot find in
theirs. If he had not absolutely a genius for music, he certainly had
a genius for attaining perfection in all he did, which was perhaps the
next best thing. I imagine that he would have made a mouse-trap or
built a cathedral exactly as he played a Beethoven symphony. The mouse
would never escape from the trap; there would be nothing wanting, down
to the most modern appliances and conveniences, in the cathedral. In
the Fifth symphony he gave us every minute nuance in rigid obedience
to the composer's directions or evident intentions, and gave them with
a fastidious care strangely in contrast with Mottl's rough-and-ready
brilliancy or Richter's breadth. He began every crescendo on the
precise note where Beethoven marked it to begin; and he gradated it
with geometrical faultlessness to the exact note where Beethoven
marked it to cease. In diminuendos and accelerandos and ritenutos he
was just as faithful. In the softer portions his sforzandos were not
irrelevant explosions, but slight extra accents: he made microscopic
distinctions between piano and pianissimo; he achieved the most
difficult feat of keeping his band at a level forte through long
passages without a symptom of breaking out into fortissimo. His
players treated the stiffest passages in the "Dutchman" overture as if
they were baby's play; and I detected hardly a wrong note either in
that or in the Fifth symphony. In a word, nothing to compare with the
technical perfection of his renderings, or his unswerving loyalty to
the composer, has been heard in London in my time. Yet, by reason of
that very prodigious correctness, the "Dutchman" overture seemed bare
and comparatively lifeless: the roar and the hiss of the storm were
absent, and the shrill discordant wail of wind in the cordage; one
heard, not the wail or the hiss or the roar, but the notes which--in
our crude scale with its arbitrary division into tones and
half-tones--Wagner had perforce to use to suggest them. There was even
something of flippancy in it after Mottl's gigantic rendering: one
longed for the dramatic hanging back of the time at the phrase, "Doch
ach! den Tod, ich fand ihn nicht!" which is of such importance in the
overture. On the other hand, a more splendid reading of the first
movement of the Fifth symphony I have never heard; but the rest of the
movements were hardly to be called readings at all. The most devoted
admirers of Lamoureux--and I was his fairly devoted admirer
myself--will not deny that the slow movement is full of poetry, the
scherzo of a remote, mystical emotion, and the Finale of a wondrous
combination of sadness, regret and high triumphant joy; and anyone who
claims that Lamoureux gave us the slightest hint of those qualities
must be more than his admirer--must be his infatuated slave. The last
movement even wanted richness; for that excessive clearness which
prevented the tones blending into masses, and forced one to
distinguish the separate notes of the flutes, the oboes, the
clarinets, and so forth, seemed to rob the music of all its body, its
solidity. But, when all is said, Lamoureux was, in his special way, a
noble master of the orchestra; and, even if I could not regard him as
a great interpreter of the greatest music, I admit that the side of
the great music which he revealed was well worth knowing, and should
indeed be known to all who would understand the great music.
When I wrote the preceding paragraphs on Lamoureux, some of my
colleagues were good enough to neglect their own proper business while
they put me right about orchestral playing in general and that of
Lamoureux in particular. These gentlemen told me that, when Beethoven
(whom they knew personally) wrote certain notes, he intended them and
no others to be played; that the more accurate a rendering, the closer
it approaches to the work as it existed in Beethoven's mind; that,
ergo, Lamoureux's playing of Beethoven, being the most accurate yet
heard in England, was the best, the truest, the most Beethovenish yet
heard in England. All which I flatly deny, and describe as the foolish
ravings of uninformed theorists. Only unpractical dreamers fancy that
a composer thinks of "notes" when he composes. He hears music with his
mental ear in the first place, and he afterwards sets down such notes
as experience has taught him will reproduce approximately what he has
heard when they are played upon the instrument for which his
composition is intended, whether the instrument is piano, violin, the
human voice, or orchestra. And just as he counts on the harmonics and
sympathetic vibrations of the upper strings of the piano for the
proper effect of a piano sonata, so for the effect of an orchestral
work he relies on the full rich tone and the subdued murmur, which are
only produced by the members of the orchestra playing a little wrong.
That they play wrong in a million different ways does not matter:
provided they do not play too far wrong the result is always the same,
just as the characteristic sound of an excited crowd is always the
same whether there are a few more men or fewer women in one crowd
than in another. This may be wrong theoretically; but all theorising
breaks down hopelessly before the fact that it was such an orchestra
the masters wrote for. Perhaps some day the foot-rule, the metronome,
and the tuning-fork will take the place of the human ear and artistic
judgment; but until that day arrives I prefer the wrongness of Mottl's
orchestra to the strict correctness which Lamoureux used to give us;
and I leave the æsthetic illogical logic-choppers, who demand from
the orchestra the correctness they would not stand from a solo-player,
to find what delight they may in such playing as Lamoureux's used to
be in the "Meistersinger" overture, or the "Waldweben," or the Good
Friday music. It must be remembered, however, that the excessive
correctness of which I have complained was only one of the means
through which Lamoureux attained excessive lucidity. He sacrificed
every other quality to lucidity; and those who preferred lucidity to
every other qualify--that is to say, all Frenchmen--naturally
preferred Lamoureux's playing to that of any other conductor. In the
"Meistersinger" overture he would not allow the band to romp freely
for a single moment; in the "Waldweben" he succeeded in playing every
crescendo, every diminuendo, with astonishing evenness of gradation,
even when a trifling irregularity to relieve the mechanical stiffness
of the thing would have been as water to a thirsty traveller in the
desert; in the Good Friday music he stuck rigidly to the composer's
directions, and would not permit a breath of his own life to go into
the music. In Berlioz's "Chasse et Orage" (from "Les Troyens") and a
movement from the "Romeo and Juliet" symphony, he manifested the same
qualities as when he played Beethoven and Wagner. His playing wanted
colour, suggestiveness, and human warmth; and, lacking these, its
chill clearness, its cleanness and sharp-cut edges, merely made one
think of an iceberg glittering in a wan Arctic sunlight. Still he was
a notable man; and his death robbed France of her one perfectly
sincere musician.