I
Two decades ago, more or less, John M. Robertson published several
volumes chiefly concerned with the gentle art of criticism. Mr.
Robertson introduced to the English-reading world the critical
theories of Emile Hennequin, whose essays on Poe, Dostoievsky, and
Turgenieff may be remembered. It is a cardinal doctrine of Hennequin
and Robertson that, as the personal element plays the chief role in
everything the critic writes, he himself should be the first to submit
to a grilling; in a word, to be put through his paces and tell us in
advance of his likes and dislikes, his prejudices and passions.
Naturally, it doesn't take long to discover the particular bias of a
critic's mind. He writes himself down whenever he puts pen to paper.
For instance, there is the historic duel between Anatole France, a
free-lance among critics, and Ferdinand Brunetiere, intrenched behind
the bastions of tradition, not to mention the _Revue des Deux Mondes_.
That discussion, while amusing, was so much threshing of academic
straw. M. France disclaimed all authority--he, most erudite among
critics; M. Brunetiere praised impersonality in criticism--he, the
most personal among writers--not a pleasing or expansive personality,
be it understood; but, narrow as he was, his personality shone out
from every page.
Now, says Mr. Robertson, why not ask every critic about to bring forth
an opinion for a sort of chart on which will be shown his various
qualities of mind, character; yes, and even his physical temperament;
whether sanguine or melancholic, bilious or eupeptic, young or old,
peaceful or truculent; also his tastes in literature, art, music,
politics, and religion. This reminds one of an old-fashioned game. And
all this long-winded preamble is to tell you that the case of Arnold
Schoenberg, musical anarchist, and an Austrian composer who has at
once aroused the ire and admiration of musical Germany, demands just
such a confession from a critic about to hold in the balance the music
or unmusic (the Germans have such a handy word) of Schoenberg.
Therefore, before I attempt a critical or uncritical valuation of the
art of Arnold Schoenberg let me make a clean breast of my prejudices
in the manner suggested by Hennequin and Robertson. Besides, it is a
holy and unwholesome idea to purge the mind every now and then.
First: I place pure music above impure, _i. e._, instrumental above
mixed. I dislike grand opera as a miserable mishmash of styles,
compromises, and arrant ugliness. The moment the human voice intrudes
in an orchestral work, my dream-world of music vanishes. Mother Church
is right in banishing, from within the walls of her temples the female
voice. The world, the flesh, and the devil lurk in the larynx of the
soprano or alto, and her place is before the footlights, not as a
vocal staircase to paradise. I say this, knowing in my heart that
nothing is so thrilling as Tristan and Isolde, and my memory-cells
hold marvellous pictures of Lilli Lehmann, Milka Ternina, and Olive
Fremstad. So, I'm neither logical nor sincere; nevertheless, I
maintain the opinion that absolute music, not programme, not
music-drama, is the apogee of the art. A Beethoven string quartet
holds more genuine music for me than the entire works of Wagner.
There's a prejudiced statement for you!
Second: I fear and dislike the music of Arnold Schoenberg, who may be
called the Max Stirner of music. Now, the field being cleared, let us
see what the music of the new man is like. Certainly, he is the
hardest musical nut to crack of his generation, and the shell is very
bitter in the mouth.
Early in December, 1912, the fourth performance of a curious
composition by Schoenberg was given at the Choralionsaal in the
Bellevuestrasse, Berlin. The work is entitled Lieder des Pierrot
Lunaire, the text of which is a fairly good translation of a poem
cycle by Albert Guiraud. This translation was made by the late Otto
Erich Hartleben, himself a poet and dramatist. I have not read the
original French verse, but the idea seems to be faithfully represented
in the German version. This moon-stricken Pierrot chants--rather
declaims--his woes and occasional joys to the music of the Viennese
composer, whose score requires a reciter (female), a piano, flute
(also piccolo), clarinet (also bass clarinet), violin (also viola),
and violoncello. The piece is described as a melodrama. I listened to
it on a Sunday morning, and I confess that Sunday at noon is not a
time propitious to the mood musical. It was also the first time I had
heard a note of Schoenberg's. In vain I had tried to get some of his
scores; not even the six little piano pieces could I secure. Instead,
my inquiries were met with dubious or pitying smiles--your music clerk
is a terrible critic betimes, and his mind oft takes upon it the
colour of his customer's orders. So there I was, to be pitched
overboard into a new sea, to sink or float, and all the while wishing
myself miles away.
A lady of pleasing appearance, attired in a mollified Pierrot
costume, stood before some Japanese screens and began to intone--to
cantillate, would be a better expression. She told of a monstrous
moon-drunken world, then she described Columbine, a dandy, a pale
washer-woman--"Eine blasse Waescherin waescht zur Nachtzeit bleiche
Tuecher"--and always with a refrain, for Guiraud employs the device
to excess. A valse of Chopin followed, in verse, of course (poor
suffering Frederic!), and part one--there are seven poems, each in
three sections--ended with one entitled Madonna, and another, the Sick
Moon. The musicians were concealed behind the screens (dear old Mark
Twain would have said, to escape the outraged audience), but we heard
them only too clearly!
It is the decomposition of the art, I thought, as I held myself in my
seat. Of course, I meant decomposition of tones, as the slang of the
ateliers goes.
What did I hear? At first, the sound of delicate china shivering into
a thousand luminous fragments. In the welter of tonalities that
bruised each other as they passed and repassed, in the preliminary
grip of enharmonics that almost made the ears bleed, the eyes water,
the scalp to freeze, I could not get a central grip on myself. It was
new music (or new exquisitely horrible sounds) with a vengeance. The
very ecstasy of the hideous! I say "exquisitely horrible," for pain
can be at once exquisite and horrible; consider toothache and its
first cousin, neuralgia. And the border-land between pain and pleasure
is a territory hitherto unexplored by musical composers. Wagner
suggests poetic anguish; Schoenberg not only arouses the image of
anguish, but he brings it home to his auditory in the most subjective
way. You suffer the anguish with the fictitious character in the
poem. Your nerves--and remember the porches of the ears are the
gateways to the brain and ganglionic centres--are literally pinched
and scraped.
I wondered that morning if I were not in a nervous condition. I looked
about me in the sparsely filled hall. People didn't wriggle; perhaps
their souls wriggled. They neither smiled nor wept. Yet on the wharf
of hell the lost souls disembarked and wept and lamented. What was the
matter with my own ego? My conscience reported a clean bill of health,
I had gone to bed early the previous night wishing to prepare for the
ordeal. Evidently I was out of condition (critics are like
prize-fighters, they must keep in constant training else they go
"stale"). Or was the music to blame? Schoenberg is, I said to myself,
the crudest of all composers, for he mingles with his music sharp
daggers at white heat, with which he pares away tiny slices of his
victim's flesh. Anon he twists the knife in the fresh wound and you
receive another horrible thrill, all the time wondering over the fate
of the Lunar Pierrot and--hold on! Here's the first clew. If this new
music is so distractingly atrocious what right has a listener to
bother about Pierrot? What's Pierrot to him or he to Pierrot? Perhaps
Schoenberg had caught his fish in the musical net he used, and what
more did he want, or what more could his listeners expect?--for to be
hooked or netted by the stronger volition of an artist is the object
of all the seven arts.
How does Schoenberg do it? How does he pull off the trick? It is not a
question to be lightly answered. In the first place the personality of
the listener is bound to obtrude itself; dissociation from one's
ego--if such a thing were possible--would be intellectual death; only
by the clear, persistent image of ourselves do we exist--banal
psychology as old as the hills. And the ear, like the eye, soon
"accommodates" itself to new perspectives and unrelated harmonies.
I had felt, without clearly knowing the reason, that when Albertine
Zehme so eloquently declaimed the lines of Madonna, the sixth stanza
of part one, beginning "Steig, o Mutter aller Schmerzen, auf den Altar
meiner Toene!" that the background of poignant noise supplied by the
composer was more than apposite, and in the mood-key of the poem. The
flute, bass clarinet, and violoncello were so cleverly handled that
the colour of the doleful verse was enhanced, the mood expanded;
perhaps the Hebraic strain in the composer's blood has endowed him
with the gift of expressing sorrow and desolation and the abomination
of living. How far are we here from the current notion that music is a
consoler, is joy-breeding, or should, according to the Aristotelian
formula, purge the soul through pity and terror. I felt the terror,
but pity was absent. Blood-red clouds swept over vague horizons. It
was a new land through which I wandered. And so it went on to the end,
and I noted as we progressed that Schoenberg, despite his ugly sounds,
was master of more than one mood; witness the shocking cynicism of the
gallows song Die duerre Dirne mit langen Halse. Such music is
shameful--"and that's the precise effect I was after"--could the
composer triumphantly answer, and he would be right. What kind of
music is this, without melody, in the ordinary sense; without themes,
yet every acorn of a phrase contrapuntally developed by an adept;
without a harmony that does not smite the ears, lacerate, figuratively
speaking, the ear-drums; keys forced into hateful marriage that are
miles asunder, or else too closely related for aural matrimony; no
form, that is, in the scholastic formal sense, and rhythms that are so
persistently varied as to become monotonous--what kind of music, I
repeat, is this that can paint a "crystal sigh," the blackness of
prehistoric night, the abysm of a morbid soul, the man in the moon,
the faint sweet odours of an impossible fairy-land, and the strut of
the dandy from Bergamo? (See the Guiraud poem.) There is no melodic or
harmonic line, only a series of points, dots, dashes, or phrases that
sob and scream, despair, explode, exalt, blaspheme.
I give the conundrum the go-by; I only know that when I finally
surrendered myself to the composer he worked his will on my fancy and
on my raw nerves, and I followed the poems, loathing the music all the
while, with intense interest. Indeed, I couldn't let go the skein of
the story for fear that I might fall off somewhere into a gloomy chasm
and be devoured by chromatic wolves. I recalled one extraordinary
moment at the close of the composition when a simple major chord was
sounded and how to my ears it had a supernal beauty; after the
perilous tossing and pitching on a treacherous sea of no-harmonies it
was like a field of firm ice under the feet.
I told myself that it served me right, that I was too old to go
gallivanting around with this younger generation, that if I would eat
prickly musical pears I must not be surprised if I suffered from aural
colic. Nevertheless, when certain of the Schoenberg compositions
reached me from Vienna I eagerly fell to studying them. I saw then
that he had adopted as his motto: Evil, be thou my good! And that a
man who could portray in tone sheer ugliness with such crystal
clearness is to be reckoned with in these topsyturvy times.
I have called Arnold Schoenberg a musical anarchist, using the word in
its best estate--anarchos, without a head. Perhaps he is a superman
also, and the world doesn't know it. His admirers and pupils think so,
however, and several of them have recorded their opinion in a little
book, published at Munich, 1912, by R. Piper & Co.
The life of Arnold Schoenberg, its outer side, has thus far been
uneventful, though doubtless rich in the psychical sense. He is still
young, born in Vienna, September 13, 1874. He lived there till 1901,
then in the December of that year he went to Berlin, where he was for
a short time conductor in Wolzogen's Bunten Theatre, and also teacher
of composition at Stern's Conservatory. In 1903 he returned to Vienna,
where he taught--he is pre-eminently a pedagogue, even pedantic as I
hope to presently prove--in the K. K. Akademie fuer Musik. In 1911
Berlin again beckoned to him, and as hope ever burns in the bosom of
composers, young and old, he no doubt believes that his day will come.
Certainly, his disciples, few as they may be, make up by their
enthusiasm for the public and critical flouting. I can't help
recalling the Italian Futurists when I think of Schoenberg. The same
wrath may be noted in the galleries where the young Italian painters
exhibit. So it was at the end of the concert. One man, a sane person,
was positively purple with rage (evidently he had paid for his seat),
and swore that the composer was verrueckt.
His compositions are not numerous. Schoenberg appears to be a
reflective rather than a spontaneous creator. Here is an abridged
list: Opus 1, 2, and 3 (composed, 1898-1900); Opus 4, string sextet,
which bears the title, Verklaerte Nacht (1899); Gurrelieder, after J.
P. Jacobsen, for solos; chorus and orchestra (1900), published in the
Universal Edition, Vienna; Opus 5, Pelleas et Melisande, symphonic
poem for orchestra (1902), Universal Edition aforesaid; Opus 6, eight
lieder (about 1905); Opus 7, E string quartet, D minor (1905); Opus 8,
six orchestral lieder (1904); Opus 9, Kammersymphonie (1906); two
ballads for voice and piano (1907); Peace on Earth, mixed chorus a
capella (1908), manuscript; Opus 10, II, string quartet, F-sharp minor
(1907-8); fifteen lieder, after Stefan George, a talented Viennese
poet, one of the Jung-Wien group (1908), manuscript; Opus 11, three
piano pieces (1908); five pieces for orchestra (1909) in the Peters
Edition; monodrama, Erwartung (1909); Glueckliche Hand, drama with
music, text by composer, not yet finished (1910); and six piano pieces
(1911). His book on harmony appeared in 1910 and was universally
treated as the production of a madman, and, finally, as far as this
chronicle goes, in 1911-12 he finished Pierrot Lunaire, which was
first produced in Berlin.
* * * * *
One thing is certain, and this hardly need assure my musical readers,
the old tonal order has changed for ever; there are plenty of signs in
the musical firmament to prove this. Moussorgsky preceded Debussy in
his use of whole-tone harmonies, and a contemporary of Debussy, and an
equally gifted musician, Martin Loeffler, was experimenting before
Debussy himself in a dark but delectable harmonic region. The tyranny
of the diatonic and chromatic scales, the tiresome revolutions of the
major and minor modes, the critical Canutes who sit at the seaside and
say to the modern waves: Thus far and no farther; and then hastily
abandon their chairs and rush to safety else be overwhelmed, all these
things are of the past, whether in music, art, literature, and--let
Nietzsche speak--in ethics. Even philosophy has become a plaything,
and logic "a dodge," as Professor Jowett puts it. Every stronghold is
being assailed, from the "divine" rights of property to the common
chord of C major. With Schoenberg, freedom in modulation is not only
permissible, but is an iron rule; he is obsessed by the theory of
overtones, and his music is not only horizontally and vertically
planned, but, so I pretend to hear, also in a circular fashion. There
is no such thing as consonance or dissonance, only imperfect training
of the ear (I am quoting from his Harmony, certainly a bible for
musical supermen). He says: "Harmonie fremde Toene gibt es also
nicht"--and a sly dig at the old-timers--"sondern nur dem
Harmoniesystem fremde." After carefully listening I noted that he too
has his mannerisms, that in his chaos there is a certain order, that
his madness is very methodical. For one thing he abuses the interval
of the fourth, and he enjoys juggling with the chord of the ninth.
Vagabond harmonies, in which the remotest keys lovingly hold hands, do
not prevent the sensation of a central tonality somewhere--in the
cellar, on the roof, in the gutter, up in the sky. The inner ear tells
you that the D-minor quartet is really thought, though not altogether
played, in that key. As for form, you must not expect it from a man
who declares: "I decide my form during composition only through
feeling." Every chord is the outcome of an emotion, the emotion
aroused by the poem or idea which gives birth to the composition. Such
antique things as the cyclic form or community of themes are not to be
expected in Schoenberg's bright lexicon of anarchy. He boils down the
classic form to one movement and, so it seemed to my hearing, he
begins developing his idea as soon as it is announced.
Such polyphony, such interweaving of voices--eleven and twelve and
fifteen are a matter of course--as would make envious the old tonal
weavers of the Netherlands! There is, literally, no waste ornament or
filling in his scores; every theme, every subsidiary figure, is set
spinning so that you dream of fireworks spouting in every direction,
only the fire is vitriolic and burns the tympani of the ears.
Seriously, like all complex effects, the Schoenberg scores soon become
legible if scrutinised without prejudice. The string sextet, if
compared to the later music, is sunny and Mozartian in its melodic and
harmonic simplicity. They tell me that Schoenberg once wrote freely in
the normal manner, but finding that he could not attract attention he
deliberately set himself to make abnormal music. I don't know how true
this may be; the same sort of thing was said of Mallarme and Paul
Cezanne and Richard Strauss, and was absolutely without foundation.
Schoenberg is an autodidact, the lessons in composition from Alexander
von Zemlinsky not affecting his future path-breaking propensities. His
mission is to free harmony from all rules. A man doesn't hit on such
combinations, especially in his acrid instrumentation, without heroic
labour. His knowledge must be enormous, for his scores are as logical
as a highly wrought mosaic; that is, logical, if you grant him his
premises. He is perverse and he wills his music, but he is a master in
delineating certain moods, though the means he employs revolt our
ears. To call him "crazy," is merely amusing. No man is less crazy,
few men are so conscious of what they are doing, and few modern
composers boast such a faculty of attention. Concentration is the
key-note of his work; concentration--or condensation formal,
concentration of thematic material--to the vanishing-point; and
conciseness in treatment, although every license is allowed in
modulation.
Every composer has his aura; the aura of Arnold Schoenberg is, for me,
the aura of subtle ugliness, of hatred and contempt, of cruelty, and
of the mystic grandiose. He is never petty. He sins in the grand
manner of Nietzsche's Superman, and he has the courage of his
chromatics. If such music-making is ever to become accepted, then I
long for Death the Releaser. More shocking still would be the
suspicion that in time I might be persuaded to like this music, to
embrace, after abhorring it.
As for Schoenberg, the painter--he paints, too!--I won't take even the
guarded praise of such an accomplished artist as Kandinsky as
sufficient evidence. I've not seen any of the composer's "purple
cows," and hope I never shall see them. His black-and-white
reproductions look pretty bad, and not nearly as original as his
music. The portrait of a lady (who seems to be listening to
Schoenbergian harmonies) hasn't much colour, a critic tells us, only a
sickly rose in her dress. He also paints grey-green landscapes and
visions, the latter dug up from the abysmal depths of his
subconsciousness. Schoenberg is, at least, the object of considerable
curiosity. What he will do next no man may say; but at least it won't
be like the work of any one else. The only distinct reminiscence of an
older composer that I could discover in his Pierrot was Richard Wagner
(toujours Wagner, whether Franck or Humperdinck or Strauss or
Debussy), and of him, the first page of the Introduction to the last
act of Tristan und Isolde, more the mood than the actual themes.
Schoenberg is always atmospheric. So is a tornado. He is the poet
whose flowers are evil; he is the spirit that denies; never a
realist, like Strauss, ingeniously imitating natural sounds, he may be
truthfully described as a musical symbolist.