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Old Scores and New Readings
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Table of Contents
Page 1
WILLIAM BYRDE ... HIS MASS
Many years ago, in the essay which is set second in
this collection, I wrote (speaking of the early English
composers) that “at length the first great wave
of music culminated in the works of Tallis and Byrde
... Byrde is infinitely greater than Tallis, and
seems worthy indeed to stand beside Palestrina.”
Generally one modifies one’s opinions as one
grows older; very often it is necessary to reverse
them. This one on Byrde I adhere to: indeed
I am nearly proud of having uttered it so long ago.
I had then never heard the Mass in D minor. But
in the latter part of 1899 Mr. R.R. Terry, the
organist of Downside Abbey, and one of Byrde’s
latest editors, invited me to the opening of St. Benedict’s
Church, Ealing, where the Mass in D minor was given;
and there I heard one of the most splendid pieces of
music in the world adequately rendered under very
difficult conditions. I use the phrase advisedly—“one
of the most splendid pieces of music in the world.”
When the New Zealander twenty centuries hence reckons
up the European masters of music, he will place Byrde
not very far down on the list of the greatest; and
he will esteem Byrde’s Mass one of the very
finest ever written. Byrde himself has rested
peacefully in his grave for over three hundred years.
One or two casual critics have appreciated him.
Fetis, I believe, called him “the English Palestrina”;
but I do not recall whether he meant that Byrde was
as great as Palestrina or merely great amongst the
English—whether a “lord amongst wits,”
or simply “a wit amongst lords.” For
the most part he has been left comfortably alone,
and held to be—like his mighty successor
Purcell—one of the forerunners of the “great
English school of church composers.” To
have prepared the way for Jackson in F—that
has been thought his best claim to remembrance.
The notion is as absurd as would be the notion (if
anyone were foolish enough to advance it) that Palestrina
is mainly to be remembered as having prepared the
way for Perosi. Byrde prepared the way for Purcell,
it is true; but even that exceeding glory pales before
the greater glory of having written the Cantiones
Sacrae and the D minor Mass. In its way the D
minor Mass is as noble and complete an achievement
as the St. Matthew Passion or the “Messiah,”
the Choral symphony of Beethoven or the G minor symphony
of Mozart, “Tristan” or the “Nibelung’s
Ring.” It is splendidly planned; it is
perfectly beautiful; and from the first page to the
last it is charged with a grave, sweet, lovely emotion.
The reason why Byrde has not until lately won the
homage he deserves is simply this: that the musical
doctors who have hitherto judged him have judged him
in the light of the eighteenth-century contrapuntal
music, and have applied to him in all seriousness Artemus
Ward’s joke about Chaucer—“he
couldn’t spell.” The plain harmonic
progressions of the later men could be understood
Page 2
by the doctors: they could not understand the
freer style of harmony which prevailed before the
strict school came into existence. Artemus Ward,
taking up Chaucer, professed amazement to find spelling
that would not be tolerated in an elementary school;
the learned doctors, taking up Byrde, found he had
disregarded all the rules—rules, be it remembered,
formulated after Byrde’s time, just as our modern
rules of spelling were made after Chaucer’s
time; and as Artemus Ward jocularly condemned Chaucer,
and showed his wit in the joke, so the doctors seriously
condemned Byrde, and showed their stupidity in their
unconscious joke. They could understand one side
of Tallis. His motet in forty parts, for instance:
they knew the difficulties of writing such a thing,
and they could see the ingenuity he showed in his
various ways of getting round the difficulties.
They could not see the really fine points of the forty-part
motet: the broad scheme of the whole thing, and
the almost Handelian way of massing the various choirs
so as to heap climax on climax until a perfectly satisfying
finish was reached. Still, there was something
for them to see in Tallis; whereas in Byrde there was
nothing for them to see that they had eyes to see,
or to hear that they had ears to hear. They could
see that he either wrote consecutive fifths and octaves,
or dodged them in a way opposed to all the rules,
that he wrote false relations with the most outrageous
recklessness, that his melodies were irregular and
not measured out by the bar; but they could not feel,
could not be expected to feel, the marvellous beauty
of the results he got by his dodges, the marvellous
expressiveness of his music. These old doctors
may be forgiven, and, being long dead, they care very
little whether they are forgiven or not. But
the modern men who parrot-like echo their verdicts
cannot and should not be forgiven. We know now
that the stiff contrapuntal school marked a stage
in development of music which it was necessary that
music should go through. The modern men who care
nothing for rules—for instance Wagner and
Tschaikowsky—could not have come immediately
after Byrde; even Beethoven could not have come immediately
after Byrde and Sweelinck and Palestrina, all of whom
thought nothing of the rules that had not been definitely
stated in their time. Before Beethoven—and
after Beethoven, Wagner and all the moderns—could
come, music had to go through the stiff scientific
stage; a hundred thousand things that had been done
instinctively by the early men had to be reduced to
rule; a science as well as an art of music had to
be built up. It was built up, and in the process
of building up noble works of art were achieved.
After it was built up and men had got, so to say,
a grip of music and no longer merely groped, Beethoven
and Wagner went back to the freedom and indifference
to rule of the first composers; and the mere fact of
their having done so should show us that the rules
were nothing in themselves, nothing, that is, save
Page 3
temporary guide-posts or landmarks which the contrapuntal
men set up for their own private use while they were
exploring the unknown fields of music. We should
know, though many of us do not, that it is simply
stupid to pass adverse judgment on the early composers
who did not use, and because they did not use, these
guide-posts, which had not then been set up, though
one by one they were being set up. For a very
short time the rules of counterpoint were looked upon
as eternal and immutable. During that period
the early men were human-naturally looked upon as barbarians.
But that period is long past. We know the laws
of counterpoint to be not eternal, not immutable;
but on the contrary to have been short-lived convention
that is now altogether disregarded. So it is
time to look at the early music through our own, and
not through the eighteenth-century doctors’
eyes; and when we do that we find the early music
to be as beautiful as any ever written, as expressive,
and quite as well constructed. There are, as
I have said, people who to-day prefer Mr. Jackson
in F and his friends to Byrde. What, I wonder,
would be said if a literary man preferred, say, some
eighteenth-century poetaster to Chaucer because the
poetaster in his verse observed rules which Chaucer
never dreamed of, because, to drag in Artemus Ward
once again, the poetaster’s spelling conformed
more nearly to ours than Chaucer’s!
The Mass is indeed noble and stately, but it is miraculously
expressive as well. Its expressiveness is the
thing that strikes one more forcibly every time one
hears it. At first one feels chiefly its old-world
freshness—not the picturesque spring freshness
of Purcell and Handel, but a freshness that is sweet
and grave and cool, coming out of the Elizabethan
days when life, at its fastest, went deliberately,
and was lived in many-gabled houses with trees and
gardens, or in great palaces with pleasant courtyards,
and the Thames ran unpolluted to the sea, and the
sun shone daily even in London, and all things were
fair and clean. It is old-world music, yet it
stands nearer to us than most of the music written
in and immediately after Handel’s period, the
period of dry formalism and mere arithmetic.
There is not a sign of the formal melodic outlines
which we recognise at once in any piece out of the
contrapuntal time, not an indication that the Academic,
“classical,” unpoetic, essay-writing eighteenth
century was coming. The formal outlines had not
been invented, for rules and themes that would work
without breaking the rules were little thought of.
Byrde evades the rules in the frankest manner:
in this Mass alone there are scores of evasions that
would have been inevitably condemned a century afterwards,
and might even be condemned by the contrapuntists
of to-day. The eighteenth-century doctors who
edited Byrde early in this century did not in the least
understand why he wrote as he did, and doubtless would
have put him right if they had thought of having the
Page 4
work sung instead of simply having it printed as an
antiquarian curiosity. The music does not suggest
the eighteenth century with its jangling harpsichords,
its narrow, dirty streets, its artificiality, its
brilliant candle-lighted rooms where the wits and
great ladies assembled and talked more or less naughtily.
There is indeed a strange, pathetic charm in the eighteenth
century to which no one can be indifferent: it
is a dead century, with the dust upon it, and yet
a faint lingering aroma as of dead rose petals.
But the old-world atmosphere of Byrde’s music
is, at least to me, something finer than that:
it is the atmosphere of a world which still lives:
it is remote from us and yet very near: for the
odour of dead rose petals and dust you have a calm
cool air, and a sense of fragrant climbing flowers
and of the shade of full foliaged trees. All
is sane, clean, fresh: one feels that the sun
must always have shone in those days. This quality,
however, it shares with a great deal of the music
of the “spacious days” of Elizabeth.
But of its expressiveness there is not too much to
be found in the music of other musicians than Byrde
in Byrde’s day. He towered high above all
the composers who had been before him; he stands higher
than any other English musician who has lived since,
with the exception of Purcell. It is foolish
to think of comparing his genius with the genius of
Palestrina; but the two men will also be reckoned close
together by those who know this Mass and the Cantiones
Sacrae. They were both consummate masters of
the technique of their art; they both had a fund of
deep and original emotion; they both knew how to express
it through their music. I have not space to mention
all the examples I could wish. But every reader
of this article may be strongly recommended at once
to play, even on the piano, the sublime passage beginning
at the words “Qui propter nos homines,”
noting more especially the magnificent effect of the
swelling mass of sound dissolving in a cadence at
the “Crucifixus.” Another passage,
equal to any ever written, begins at “Et unam
Sanctam Catholicam.” There is a curious
energy in the repetition of “Et Apostolicam Ecclesiam,”
and then a wistful sweetness and tenderness at “Confiteor
unum baptisma.” Again, the whole of the
“Agnus” is divine, the repeated “miserere
nobis,” and the passage beginning at the “Dona
nobis pacem,” possessing that sweetness, tenderness
and wonderful calm. But there is not a number
that does not contain passages which one must rank
amongst the greatest things in the world; and it must
be borne in mind that these passages are not detached,
nor in fact detachable, but integral, essential parts
of a fine architectural scheme.
OUR LAST GREAT MUSICIAN (HENRY PURCELL, 1658-95)
I.
Page 5
Purcell is too commonly written of as “the founder
of the English school” of music. Now, far
be it from me to depreciate the works of the composers
who are supposed to form the “English school.”
I would not sneer at the strains which have lulled
to quiet slumbers so many generations of churchgoers.
But everyone who knows and loves Purcell must enter
a most emphatic protest against that great composer
being held responsible, if ever so remotely, for the
doings of the “English school.” Jackson
(in F), Boyce and the rest owed nothing to Purcell;
the credit of having founded them must go elsewhere,
and may beg a long time, I am much afraid, in the
land of the shades before any composer will be found
willing to take it. Purcell was not the founder
but the splendid close of a school, and that school
one of the very greatest the world has seen.
And to-day, when he is persistently libelled, not
more in blame than in the praise which is given him,
it seems worth while making a first faint attempt
to break through the net of tradition that has been
woven and is daily being woven closer around him,
to see him as he stands in such small records as may
be relied upon and not as we would fain have him be,
to understand his relation to his predecessors and
learn his position in musical history, to hear his
music without prejudice and distinguish its individual
qualities. This is a hard task, and one which
I can only seek to achieve here in the roughest and
barest manner; yet any manner at all is surely much
better than letting the old fictions go unreproved,
while our greatest musician drifts into the twilight
past, misunderstood, unloved, unremembered, save when
an Abbey wants a new case for its organ, an organ
on which Purcell never played, or a self-styled Purcell
authority wishes to set up a sort of claim of part
or whole proprietorship in him.
II.
Hardly more is known of Purcell than of Shakespeare.
There is no adequate biography. Hawkins and Burney
(who is oftenest Hawkins at second-hand) are alike
rash, random, and untrustworthy, depending much upon
the anecdotage of old men, who were no more to be believed
than the ancient bandsmen of the present day who tell
you how Mendelssohn or Wagner flattered them or accepted
hints from them. Cummings’ life is scarcely
even a sketch; at most it is a thumbnail sketch.
Only ninety-five pages deal with Purcell, and of these
at least ninety-four are defaced by maudlin sentimentality,
or unhappy attempts at criticism (see the remarks
on the Cecilia Ode) or laughable sequences of disconnected
incongruities—as, for instance, when Mr.
Cummings remarks that “Queen Mary died of small-pox,
and the memory of her goodness was felt so universally,”
etc. Born in 1658, Purcell lived in Pepys’
London, and died in 1095, having written complimentary
odes to three kings—Charles the Second,
James the Second, and William the Third. Besides
Page 6
these complimentary odes, he wrote piles of instrumental
music, a fair heap of anthems, and songs and interludes
and overtures for some forty odd plays. This is
nearly the sum of our knowledge. His outward
life seems to have been uneventful enough. He
probably lived the common life of the day—the
day being, as I have said, Pepys’ day.
Mr. Cummings has tried to show him as a seventeenth
century Mendelssohn—conventionally idealised—and
he quotes the testimony of some “distinguished
divine,” chaplain to a nobleman, as though we
did not know too well why noblemen kept chaplains in
those days to regard their testimony as worth more
than other men’s. The truth is, that if
Purcell had lived differently from his neighbours he
would have been called a Puritan. On the other
hand, we must remember that he composed so much in
his short life that his dissipations must have made
a poor show beside those of many of his great contemporaries—those
of Dryden, for instance, who used to hide from his
duns in Purcell’s private room in the clock-tower
of St. James’s Palace. I picture him as
a sturdy, beef-eating Englishman, a puissant, masterful,
as well as lovable personality, a born king of men,
ambitious of greatness, determined, as Tudway says,
to exceed every one of his time, less majestic than
Handel, perhaps, but full of vigour and unshakable
faith in his genius. His was an age when genius
inspired confidence both in others and in its possessor,
not, as now, suspicion in both; and Purcell was believed
in from the first by many, and later, by all—even
by Dryden, who began by flattering Monsieur Grabut,
and ended, as was his wont, by crossing to the winning
side. And Purcell is no more to be pitied for
his sad life than to be praised as a conventionally
idealised Mendelssohn. His life was brief, but
not tragic. He never lacked his bread as Mozart
lacked his; he was not, like Beethoven, tormented
by deafness and tremblings for the immediate future;
he had no powerful foes to fight, for he did not bid
for a great position in the world like Handel.
Nor was he a romantic consumptive like Chopin, with
a bad cough, a fastidious regard for beauty, and a
flow of anaemic melody. He was divinely gifted
with a greater richness of invention than was given
to any other composers excepting two, Bach and Mozart;
and death would not take his gifts as an excuse when
he was thirty-seven. Hence our Mr. Cummings has
droppings of lukewarm tears; hence, generally, compassion
for his comparatively short life has ousted admiration
for his mighty works from the minds of those who are
readier at all times to indulge in the luxury of weeping
than to feel the thrill of joy in a life greatly lived.
Purcell might have achieved more magnificent work,
but that is a bad reason for forgetting the magnificence
of the work he did achieve. But I myself am forgetting
that the greatness of his music is not admitted, and
that the shortness of his life is merely urged as an
excuse for not finding it admirable. And remembering
this, I assert that Purcell’s life was a great
and glorious one, and that now his place is with the
high gods whom we adore, the lords and givers of light.
Page 7
III.
Before Purcell’s position in musical history
can be ascertained and fixed, it is absolutely necessary
to make some survey of the rise of the school of which
he was the close.
In our unmusical England of to-day it is as hard to
believe in an England where music was perhaps the
dominant passion of the people as it is to understand
how this should have been forgotten in a more musical
age than ours. Until the time of Handel’s
arrival in this country there was no book printed
which did not show unmistakably that its writer loved
music. It is a fact (as the learned can vouch)
that Erasmus considered the English the most given
up to music of all the peoples of Europe; and how
far these were surpassed by the English is further
shown by the fact that English musicians were as common
in continental towns in those days as foreign musicians
are in England nowadays. I refrain from quoting
Peacham, North, Anthony Wood, Pepys, and the rest
of the much over-quoted; but I wish to lay stress on
the fact that here music was widespread and highly
cultivated, just as it was in Germany in the eighteenth
century. Moreover, an essential factor in the
development of the German school was not wanting in
England. Each German prince had his Capellmeister;
and English nobles and gentlemen, wealthier than German
princes, differing from them only in not being permitted
to assume a pretentious title, had each his Musick-master.
I believe I could get together a long list of musicians
who were thus kept. It will be remembered that
when Handel came to England he quickly entered the
service of the Duke of Chandos. The royal court
always had a number of musicians employed in the making
or the performing of music. Oliver Cromwell retained
them and paid them; Charles the Second added to them,
and in many cases did not pay them at all, so that
at least one is known to have died of starvation, and
the others were everlastingly clamouring for arrears
of salary. It was the business of these men (in
the intervals of asking for their salaries) to produce
music for use in the church and in the house or palace;
that for church use being of course nearly entirely
vocal—masses or anthems; that for house
use, vocal and instrumental—madrigals and
fancies (i.e. fantasias). As generation
succeeded generation, a certain body of technique was
built up and a mode of expression found; and at length
the first great wave of music culminated in the works
of Tallis and Byrde. Their technique and mode
of expression I shall say something about presently;
and all the criticism I have to pass on them is that
Byrde is infinitely greater than Tallis, and seems
worthy indeed to stand beside Palestrina and Sweelinck.
Certainly anyone who wishes to have a true notion of
the music of this period should obtain (if he can)
copies of the D minor five-part mass, and the Cantiones
Sacrae, and carefully study such numbers as the “Agnus
Dei” of the former and the profound “Tristitia
et anxietas” in the latter.
Page 8
The learned branch of the English school reached its
climax. Meantime another branch, not unlearned,
but caring less for scholastic perfection than for
perfect expression of poetic sentiment, was fast growing.
The history of the masque is a stale matter, so I will
merely mention that Campion, and many another with,
before, and after him, engaged during a great part
of their lives in what can only be called the manufacture
of these entertainments. A masque was simply a
gorgeous show of secular ritual, of colour and of music—a
kind of Drury Lane melodrama in fact, but as far removed
from Drury Lane as this age is from that in the widespread
faculty of appreciating beauty. The music consisted
of tunes of a popular outline and sentiment, but they
were dragged into the province of art by the incapacity
of those who wrote or adapted them to touch anything
without leaving it lovelier than when they lighted
on it. Pages might be, and I daresay some day
will be, written about Dr. Campion’s melody,
its beauty and power, the unique sense of rhythmic
subtleties which it shows, and withal its curiously
English quality. But one important thing we must
observe: it is wholly secular melody. Even
when written in the ecclesiastical modes, it has no,
or the very slightest, ecclesiastical tinge.
It is folk-melody with its face washed and hair combed;
it bears the same relation to English folk-melody
as a chorale from the “Matthew” Passion
bears to its original. Another important point
is this: whereas the church composers took a
few Latin sentences and made no endeavour to treat
them so as to make sense in the singing, but made the
words wait upon the musical phrases, in Dr. Campion
we see the first clear wish to weld music and poem
into one flawless whole. To an extent he succeeded,
but full success did not come till several generations
had first tried, tried and failed. Campion properly
belongs to the sixteenth century, and Harry Lawes,
born twenty-five years before Campion died, as properly
belongs to the seventeenth century. In his songs
we find even more marked the determination that words
and music shall go hand in hand—that the
words shall no longer be dragged at the cart-tail
of the melody, so to say. In fact, a main objection
against Lawes—and a true one in many instances—is
that he sacrificed the melody rather than the meaning
of the poem. This is significant. The Puritans
are held to have damaged church music less by burning
the choir-books and pawning the organ-pipes than by
insisting (as we may say) on One word one note.
As a matter of fact, this was not exclusively a plank
in the political platform of the Puritans. The
Loyalist Campion, the Loyalist Lawes, and many another
Loyalist insisted on it. Even when they did not
write a note to each word, they took care not to have
long roulades (divisions) on unimportant words, but
to derive the accent of the music from that of the
poem. This showed mainly two tendencies:
first, one towards expression of poetic feeling and
Page 9
towards definiteness of that expression, the other
towards the entirely new technique which was to supersede
the contrapuntal technique of Byrde and Palestrina.
In making a mass or an anthem or secular composition,
the practice of these old masters was to start with
a fragment of church or secular melody which we will
call A; after (say) the trebles had sung it or a portion
of it, the altos took it up and the trebles went on
to a new phrase B, which dovetailed with A. Then the
tenors took up A, the altos went on to B, the trebles
went on to a new phrase C, until ultimately, if we
lettered each successive phrase that appeared, we
should get clear away from the beginning of the alphabet
to X, Y, and Z. This, of course, is a crude and stiff
way of describing the process of weaving and interweaving
by which the old music was spun, for often the phrase
A would come up again and again in one section of
a composition and sometimes throughout the whole,
and strict canon was comparatively rare in music which
was not called by that name; but the description will
serve. This technique proved admirable for vocal
polyphony—how admirable we have all the
Flemish and Italian and English contrapuntal music
to show. But it was no longer available when
music was wanted for the single voice, unless that
voice was treated as one of several real parts, the
others being placed in the accompaniment. A new
technique was therefore wanted. For that new
technique the new composers went back to the oldest
technique of all. The old minstrels used music
as a means of giving accent and force to their poems;
and now, as a means of spinning a web of tone which
should not only be beautiful, but also give utterance
to the feeling of the poem, composers went back to
the method of the minstrels. They disregarded
rhythm more and more (as may be seen if you compare
Campion with Lawes), and sought only to make the notes
follow the accent of the poetry, thus converting music
into conventionally idealised speech or declamation.
Lawes carried this method as far as ever it has been,
and probably can be, carried. When Milton said,
“Harry, whose tuneful
and well-measured notes
First taught our English music
how to span
Words with just note and accent,”
he did not mean that Lawes was the first to bar his
music, for music had been barred long before Lawes.
He meant that Lawes did not use the poem as an excuse
for a melody, but the melody as a means of effectively
declaiming the poet’s verse. The poet (naturally)
liked this—hence Milton’s compliments.
It should be noted that many of the musicians of this
time were poets—of a sort—themselves,
and wished to make the most of their verses; so that
it would be a mistake to regard declamation as something
forced by the poet, backed by popular opinion, upon
the musician. With Lawes, then, what we may call
the declamatory branch of the English school culminated.
Except in his avowedly declamatory passages, Purcell
Page 10
did not spin his web precisely thus; but we shall
presently see that his method was derived from the
declamatory method. Much remained to be done first.
Lawes got rid of the old scholasticism, now effete.
But he never seemed quite sure that his expression
would come off. It is hard at this day to listen
to his music as Milton must have listened to it; but
having done my best, I am compelled to own that I
find some of his songs without meaning or comeliness,
and must assume either that our ancestors of this period
had a sense which has been lost, or that the music
played a less important part compared with the poem
than has been generally supposed. Lawes lost
rhythm, both as an element in beauty and a factor
in expression. Moreover, his harmonic resources
were sadly limited, for the old device of letting
crossing parts clash in sweet discords that resolved
into as sweet or sweeter concords was denied him.
What would be called nowadays the new harmony, the
new rhythm and the new forms were developed during
the Civil War and the Puritan reign. The Puritans,
loving music but detesting it in their churches, forced
it into purely secular channels; and we cannot say
the result was bad, for the result was Purcell.
John Jenkins and a host of smaller men developed instrumental
music, and, though the forms they used were thrown
aside when Charles II. arrived, the power of handling
the instruments remained as a legacy to Charles’s
men. Charles drove the secular movement faster
ahead by banning the old ecclesiastical music (which,
it appears, gave him “the blues"), and by compelling
his young composers to write livelier strains for
the church, that is, church music which was in reality
nothing but secular music. He sent Pelham Humphries
to Paris, and when Humphries came back “an absolute
Monsieur” (who does not remember that ever-green
entry in the Diary?) he brought with him all that
could possibly have been learnt from Lulli. He
died at twenty-seven, having been Purcell’s master;
and though Purcell’s imagination was richer,
deeper, more strenuous in the ebb and flow of its
tides, one might fancy that the two men had but one
spirit, which went on growing and fetching forth the
fruits of the spirit, while young Humphries’
body decayed by the side of his younger wife’s
in the Thames-sodden vaults of Westminster Abbey.
IV.
A complete list of Purcell’s compositions appears
somewhat formidable at a first glance, but when one
comes to examine it carefully the solidity seems somewhat
to melt out of it. The long string of church
pieces is made up of anthems, many of them far from
long. The forty odd “operas” are
not operas at all, but sets of incidental pieces and
songs for plays, and some of the sets are very short.
Thus Dryden talks of Purcell setting “my three
songs,” and there are only half a dozen “curtain-tunes,”
i.e. entr’actes. Many of the harpsichord
pieces are of tiny proportions. The sonatas of
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three and four parts are no larger than Mozart’s
piano sonatas. Still, taking into account the
noble quality that is constantly maintained, we must
admit that Purcell used astonishingly the short time
he was given. Much of his music is lost; more
of it lies in manuscript at the British Museum and
elsewhere. Some of it was issued last century,
some early in this. Four expensive volumes have
been wretchedly edited and issued by the Purcell Society,
and those amongst us who live to the age of Methuselah
will probably see all the accessible works printed
by this body. Some half century ago Messrs. Novello
published an edition of the church music, stupidly
edited by the stupidest editor who ever laid clumsy
fingers on a masterpiece. A shameful edition of
the “King Arthur” music was prepared for
the Birmingham Festival of 1897 by Mr. J.A. Fuller-Maitland,
musical critic of “The Times.” A publisher
far-sighted and generous enough to issue a trustworthy
edition of all Purcell’s music at a moderate
price has yet to be found.
Purcell’s list is not long, but it is superb.
Yet he opened out no new paths, he made no leap aside
from the paths of his predecessors, as Gluck did in
the eighteenth century and Wagner in the nineteenth.
He was one of their school; he went on in the direction
they had led; but the distance he travelled was enormous.
Humphries, possibly Captain Cook, even Christopher
Gibbons, helped to open out the new way in church
music; Lawes, Matthew Lock, and Banister were before
him at the theatres; Lock and Dr. Blow had written
odes before he was weaned; the form and plan of his
sonatas came certainly from Bassani, in all likelihood
from Corelli also; from John Jenkins and the other
writers of fancies he got something of his workmanship
and art of weaving many melodies into a coherent whole,
and a knowledge of Lulli would help him to attain
terseness, and save him from that drifting which is
the weak point of the old English instrumental writers;
he was acquainted with the music of Carissimi, a master
of choral effect. In a word, he owed much to
his predecessors, even as Bach, Haydn, Mozart, and
Beethoven owed to their predecessors; and he did as
they did—won his greatness by using to
fine ends the means he found, rather than by inventing
the means, though, like them, some means he did invent.
Like his predecessors Purcell hung between the playhouse,
the church, and the court; but unlike most of them
he had only one style, which had to serve in one place
as in another. I have already shown the growth
of the secular spirit in music. In Purcell that
spirit reached its height. His music is always
secular, always purely pagan. I do not mean that
it is inappropriate in the church—for nothing
more appropriate was ever written—nor that
Purcell was insincere, as our modern church composers
are insincere, without knowing it. I do mean
that of genuine religious emotion, of the sustained
ecstasy of Byrde and Palestrina, it shows no trace.
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I should not like to have to define the religious
beliefs of any man in Charles II.’s court, but
it would seem that Purcell was religious in his way.
He accepted the God of the church as the savage accepts
the God of his fathers; he wrote his best music with
a firm conviction that it would please his God.
But his God was an entity placed afar off, unapproachable;
and of entering into communion with Him through the
medium of music Purcell had no notion. The ecstatic
note I take to be the true note of religious art;
and in lacking and in having no sense of it Purcell
stands close to the early religious painters and monk-writers,
the carvers of twelfth century woodwork, and the builders
of Gothic cathedrals. He thinks of externals
and never dreams of looking for “inward light”;
and the proof of this is that he seems never consciously
to endeavour to express a mood, but strenuously seeks
to depict images called up by the words he sets.
With no intention of being flippant, but in all earnestness,
I declare it is my belief that if Purcell had ever
set the “Agnus Dei” (and I don’t
remember that he did) he would have drawn a frisky
lamb and tried to paint its snow-white fleece; and
this not because he lacked reverence, but because
of his absolute religious naivete, and because this
drawing and painting of outside objects (so to speak)
in music was his one mode of expression. It should
be clearly understood that word-painting is not descriptive
music. Descriptive music suggests to the ear,
word-painting to the eye. But the two merge in
one another. What we call a higher note is so
called because sounds produced by the mere rapid vibrations
make every being, without exception, who has a musical
ear, think of height, just as a lower note makes us
all think of depth. Hence a series of notes forming
an arch on paper may, and does, suggest an arch to
one’s imagination through the ear. It is
perhaps a dodge, but Handel used it extensively—for
instance, in such choruses as “All we like sheep,”
“When his loud voice” ("Jephtha"), nearly
every choral number of “Israel in Egypt,”
and some of the airs. Bach used it too, and we
find it—the rainbow theme in “Das
Rheingold” is an example—in Wagner.
But with these composers “word-painting,”
as it is called, seems always to be used for a special
effect; whereas it is the very essence of Purcell’s
music. He has been reproved for it by the eminent
Hullah, who prettily alludes to it as a “defect”
from which other music composed at the time suffers;
but the truth is, you might as well call rhyme a “defect”
of the couplet or the absence of rhyme a “defect”
of blank verse. It is an integral part of the
music, as inseparable as sound from tone, as atoms
from the element they constitute. But the question,
why did Purcell write thus, and not as Mozart and Beethoven,
brings me to the point at which I must show the precise
relationship in which Purcell stood to his musical
ancestors, and how in writing as he did he was merely
carrying on and developing their technique.
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For we must not forget that the whole problem for
the seventeenth century was one of technique.
The difficulty was to spin a tone-web which should
be at once beautiful, expressive, and modern—modern
above all things, in some sort of touch with the common
feeling of the time. I have told how the earlier
composers spun their web, and how Lawes attained to
loveliness of a special kind by pure declamation.
In later times there was an immense common fund of
common phrases, any one of which only needed modification
by a composer to enable him to express anything he
pleased. But Purcell came betwixt the old time
and the new, and had to build up a technique which
was not wholly his own, by following with swift steps
and indefatigable energy on lines indicated even while
Lawes was alive. Those lines were, of course,
in the direction of word-painting, and I must admit
that the first word-painting seems very silly to nineteenth
century ears and eyes—eyes not less than
ears. To the work of the early men Purcell’s
stands in just the same relation as Bach’s declamation
stands to Lawes’. Lawes declaims with a
single eye on making clear the points of the poem:
the voice rises or falls, lingers on a note or hastens
away, to that one end. Bach also declaims—indeed
his music is entirely based on declamation,—but
as one who wishes to communicate an emotion and regards
the attainment of beauty as being quite as important
as expression. With him the voice rises or falls
as a man’s voice does when he experiences keen
sensation; but the wavy line of the melody as it goes
along and up and down the stave is treated conventionally
and changed into a lovely pattern for the ear’s
delight; and as there can be no regular pattern without
regular rhythm, rhythm is a vital element in Bach’s
music. So with Purcell, with a difference.
The early “imitative” men had sought chiefly
for dainty conceits. Pepys was the noted composer
of “Beauty, Retire” and his joy when he
went to church, “where fine music on the word
trumpet” will be remembered. He doubtless
liked the clatter of it, and liked the clatter the
more for occurring on that word, and probably he was
not very curious as to whether it was really beautiful
or not. But Purcell could not write an unlovely
thing. His music on the word trumpet would be
beautiful (it is in “Bonduca"); and if (as he
did) he sent the bass plunging headlong from the top
to the bottom of a scale to illustrate “they
that go down to the sea in ships,” that headlong
plunge would be beautiful too—so beautiful
as to be heard with as great pleasure by those who
know what the words are about as by those who don’t.
Like Bach, Purcell depended much on rhythm for the
effect of his pattern; unlike Bach, his patterns have
a strangely picturesque quality; through the ear they
suggest the forms of leaf and blossom, the trailing
tendril,—suggest them only, and dimly, vaguely,—yet,
one feels, with exquisite fidelity. Thus Purcell,
following those who, in sending the voice part along
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the line, pressed it up at the word “high”
and down at “low,” and thus got an irregularly
wavy line of tone or melody, solved the problem of
spinning his continuous web of sound; and the fact
that his web is beautiful and possesses this peculiar
picturesqueness is his justification for solving the
problem in this way. After all, his way was the
way of early designers, who filled their circles,
squares, and triangles with the forms of leaf and
flower. And just as those forms were afterwards
conventionalised and used by thousands who probably
had no vaguest notion of their origin, so many of
Purcell’s phrases became ossified and fell into
the common stock of phrases which form the language
of music. It is interesting to note that abroad
Pasquini and Kuhlau went to work very much in Purcell’s
fashion, and added to that same stock from which Handel
and Bach and every subsequent composer drew, each adding
something of his own.
It was not by accident that Purcell, with this astonishing
fertility of picturesque phrases, should also have
written so much, and such vividly coloured picturesque
pieces—pieces, I mean, descriptive of the
picturesque. Of course, to write an imitative
phrase is quite another matter from writing a successful
piece of descriptive music. But in Purcell the
same faculty enabled him to do both. No poet of
that time seems to have been enamoured of hedgerows
and flowers and fields, nor can I say with certitude
that Purcell was. Yet in imagination at least
he loves to dwell amongst them; and not the country
alone, the thought of the sea also, stirs him deeply.
There need only be some mention of sunshine or rain
among the leaves, green trees, or wind-swept grass,
the yellow sea-beach or the vast sea-depths, and his
imagination flames and flares. His best music
was written when he was appealed to throughout a long
work—as “The Tempest”—in
this manner. Hence, it seems to me, that quality
which his music, above any other music in the world,
possesses: a peculiar sweetness, not a boudoir
sweetness like Chopin’s sweetness, nor a sweetness
corrected, like Chopin’s, by a subtle strain
of poisonous acid or sub-acid quality, but the sweet
and wholesome cleanliness of the open air and fields,
the freshness of sun showers and cool morning winds.
I am not exaggerating the importance of this element
in his music. It is perpetually present, so that
at last one comes to think, as I have been compelled
to think this long time, that Purcell wrote nothing
but descriptive music all his life. Of course
it may be that the special formation of his melodies
misleads one sometimes, and that Purcell in inventing
them often did not dream of depicting natural objects.
But, remembering the gusto with which he sets descriptive
words, using these phrases consciously with a picturesque
purpose, it is hard to accept this view. In all
likelihood he was constituted similarly to Weber,
who, his son asserts, curiously converted the lines
and colours of trees and winding roads and all objects
Page 15
of nature into thematic material (there is an anecdote—apparently,
for a wonder, a true one—that shows he
took the idea of a march from a heap of chairs stacked
upside down in a beer-garden during a shower of rain).
But Purcell is infinitely simpler, less fevered, than
Weber. Sometimes his melodies have the long-drawn,
frail delicacy, the splendidly ordered irregularity
of a trailing creeper, and something of its endless
variety of leaf clustering round a central stem.
But there is an entire absence of tropical luxuriance.
A grave simplicity prevails, and we find no jewellery;
showing Purcell to have been a supreme artist.
V.
So far I have spoken of his music generally, and now
I come to deal (briefly, for my space is far spent)
with the orchestral, choral, and chamber music and
songs; and first with the choral music. I begin
to fear that by insisting so strongly on the distinctive
sweetness of Purcell’s melody, I may have given
a partially or totally wrong impression. Let
me say at once, therefore, that delicate as he often
was, and sweet as he was more often, although he could
write melodies which are mere iridescent filaments
of tone, he never became flabby or other than crisp,
and could, and did, write themes as flexible, sinewy,
unbreakable as perfectly tempered steel bands.
And these themes he could lay together and weld into
choruses of gigantic strength. The subject and
counter-subject of “Thou art the King of Glory”
(in the “Te Deum” in D), the theme of “Let
all rehearse,” and the ground bass of the final
chorus (both in “Dioclesian"), the subjects
of many of the fugues of the anthems, are as energetic
as anything written by Handel, Bach or Mozart.
And as for the choruses he makes of them, Handel’s
are perhaps loftier and larger structures, and Bach
succeeds in getting effects which Purcell never gets,
for the simple enough reason that Purcell, coming
a generation before Bach, never tried or thought of
trying to get them. But within his limits he
achieves results that can only be described as stupendous.
For instance, the chorus I have just mentioned—“Let
all rehearse”—makes one think of
Handel, because Handel obviously thought of it when
he wrote “Fixed in His everlasting seat,”
and though Handel works out the idea to greater length,
can we say that he gets a proportionately greater
effect? I have not the faintest wish to elevate
Purcell at Handel’s expense, for Handel is to
me, as to all men, one of the gods of music; but Purcell
also is one of the gods, and I must insist that in
this particular chorus he equalled Handel with smaller
means and within narrower limits. It is not always
so, for Handel is king of writers for the chorus,
as Purcell is king of those who paint in music; but
though Handel wrote more great choruses, his debt to
Purcell is enormous. His way of hurling great
masses of choral tone at his hearers is derived from
Purcell; and so is the rhetorical plan of many of
Page 16
his choruses. But in Purcell, despite his sheer
strength, we never fail to get the characteristic
Purcellian touch, the little unexpected inflexion,
or bit of coloured harmony that reminds that this
is the music of the open air, not of the study, that
does more than this, that actually floods you in a
moment with a sense of the spacious blue heavens with
light clouds flying. For instance, one gets it
in the great “Te Deum” in the first section;
again at “To thee, cherubim,” where the
first and second trebles run down in liquid thirds
with magical effect; once more at the fourteenth bar
of “Thou art the King of Glory,” where
he uses the old favourite device of following up the
flattened leading note of the dominant key in one
part by the sharp leading note in another part—a
device used with even more exquisite result in the
chorus of “Full fathom five.” Purcell
is in many ways like Mozart, and in none more than
in these incessantly distinctive touches, though in
character the touches are as the poles apart.
In Mozart, especially when he veils the poignancy
of his emotion under a scholastic mode of expression,
a sudden tremor in the voice, as it were, often betrays
him, and none can resist the pathos of it. Purcell’s
touches are pathetic, too, in another fashion—pathetic
because of the curious sense of human weakness, the
sense of tears, caused by the sudden relaxation of
emotional tension that inevitably results when one
comes on a patch of simple naked beauty when nothing
but elaborate grandeur expressive of powerful exaltation
had been anticipated. That Purcell foresaw this
result, and deliberately used the means to achieve
it, I cannot doubt. Those momentary slackenings
of tense excitement are characteristic of the exalted
mood and inseparable from it, and he must have known
that they really go to augment its intensity.
All Purcell’s choruses, however, are not of
Handelian mould, for he wrote many that are sheer
loveliness from beginning to end, many that are the
very voice of the deepest sadness, many, again, showing
a gaiety, an “unbuttoned” festivity of
feeling, such as never came into music again until
Beethoven introduced it as a new thing. The opening
of one of the complimentary odes, “Celebrate
this festival,” fairly carries one off one’s
feet with the excess of jubilation in the rollicking
rhythm and living melody of it. One of the most
magnificent examples of picturesque music ever written—if
not the most magnificent, at any rate the most delightful
in detail—is the anthem, “Thy way,
O God, is holy.” The picture-painting is
prepared for with astonishing artistic foresight,
and when it begins the effect is tremendous. I
advise everyone who wishes to realise Purcell’s
unheard-of fertility of great and powerful themes
to look at “The clouds poured out water,”
the fugue subject “The voice of Thy thunders,”
the biting emphasis of the passage “the lightnings
shone upon the ground,” and the irresistible
impulse of “The earth was moved.”
Page 17
And the supremacy of Purcell’s art is shown
not more in these than in the succession of simple
harmonies by which he gets the unutterable mournful
poignancy of “Thou knowest, Lord,” that
unsurpassed and unsurpassable piece of choral writing
which Dr. Crotch, one of the “English school,”
living in an age less sensitive even than this to
Purcellian beauty, felt to be so great that it would
be a desecration to set the words again. Later
composers set the words again, feeling it no desecration,
but possibly rather a compliment to Purcell; and Purcell’s
setting abides, and looks down upon every other, like
Mozart’s G minor and Beethoven’s Ninth
upon every other symphony, or the finale of Wagner’s
“Tristan” upon every other piece of love-music.
VI.
Purcell is also a chief, though not the chief, among
song-writers. And he stands in the second place
by reason of the very faculty which places him amongst
the first of instrumental and choral writers.
That dominating picturesque power of his, that tendency
to write picturesque melodies as well as picturesque
movements, compelled him to treat the voice as he
treated any other instrument, and he writes page on
page which would be at least as effective on any other
instrument; and as more can be got out of the voice
than out of any other instrument, and the tip-top
song-writers got all out that could be got out, it
follows that Purcell is below them. But only the
very greatest of them have beaten him, and he often,
by sheer perfection of phrase, runs them very close.
Still, Mozart, Bach, and Handel do move us more profoundly.
And an odd demonstration that Purcell the instrumental
writer is almost above Purcell the composer for the
voice, is that in such songs as “Halcyon Days”
(in “The Tempest”) the same phrases are
perhaps less grateful on the voice than when repeated
by the instrument. The phrase “That used
to lull thee in thy sleep” (in “The Indian
Queen”) is divine when sung, but how thrilling
is its touching expressiveness, how it seems to speak
when the ’cellos repeat it! There are,
of course, truly vocal melodies in Purcell (as there
are in Beethoven and Berlioz, who also were not great
writers for the voice), and some of them might almost
be Mozart’s. The only difference that may
be felt between “While joys celestial”
("Cecilia Ode” of 1683) and a Mozart song, is
that in Mozart one gets the frequent human touch,
and in Purcell the frequent suggestion of the free
winds and scented blossoms. The various scattered
songs, such as “Mad Tom” (which is possibly
not Purcell’s at all) or “Mad Bess”
(which certainly is), I have no room to discuss; but
I may remark that the madness was merely an excuse
for exhibiting a series of passions in what was reckoned
at the time a natural manner. Quite possibly it
was then thought that in a spoken play only mad persons
should sing, just as Wagner insists that in music-drama
only mad persons should speak; and as a good deal
Page 18
of singing was required, there were a good many mad
parts. Probably Purcell would have treated all
Wagner’s characters, and all Berlioz’s,
as utterly and irretrievably mad. Nor have I space
to discuss his instrumental music and his instrumentation,
but must refer shortly to the fact that the overtures
to the plays are equal to Handel’s best in point
of grandeur, and that in freedom, quality of melody,
and daring, and fruitful use of new harmonies, the
sonatas are ahead of anything attempted until Mozart
came. They cannot be compared to Bach’s
suites, and they are infinitely fresher than the writings
of the Italians whom he imitated. As for Purcell’s
instrumentation, it is primitive compared to Mozart’s,
but when he uses the instrument in group or batteries
he obtains gorgeous effects of varied colour.
He gets delicious effects by means of obligato instrumental
parts in the accompaniments to such songs as “Charon
the Peaceful Shade Invites”; and those who have
heard the “Te Deum” in D may remember that
even Bach never got more wonderful results from the
sweeter tones of the trumpet.
VII.
Having shown how Purcell sprang from a race of English
musicians, and how he achieved greater things than
any man of his time, it remains only to be said that
when, with Handel, the German flood deluged England,
all remembrance of Purcell and his predecessors was
swiftly swept away. His play-music was washed
out of the theatres, his odes were carried away from
the concert-room; in a word, all his and the earlier
music was so completely forgotten that when Handel
used anew his old devices connoisseurs wondered why
the Italians and Germans should be able to bring forth
such things while the English remained impotent.
So Handel and the Germans were imitated by every composer,
church or other, who came after, and all our “English
music” is purely German. That we shall
ever throw off that yoke I do not care to prophesy;
but if ever we do, it will be by imitating Purcell
in one respect only, that is, by writing with absolute
simplicity and directness, leaving complexity, muddy
profundity and elaborately worked-out multiplication
sums to the Germans, to whom these things come naturally.
The Germans are now spent: they produce no more
great musicians: they produce only music which
is as ugly to the ear as it is involved to the eye.
It is high time for a return to the simplicity of
Mozart, of Handel, of our own Purcell; to dare, as
Wagner dared, to write folk-melody, and to put it
on the trombones at the risk of being called vulgar
and rowdy by persons who do not know great art when
it is original, but only when it resembles some great
art of the past which they have learnt to know.
It was thus Purcell worked, and his work stands fast.
And when we English awake to the fact that we have
a music which ought to speak more intimately to us
than all the music of the continental composers, his
work will be marvelled at as a new-created thing,
Page 19
and his pieces will appear on English programmes and
displace the masses of noisome shoddy which we revel
in just now. It will then be recognised, as even
the chilly Burney recognised a century ago, failing
to recognise much else, that “in the accent of
passion, and expression of English words, the vocal
music of Purcell is ... as superior to Handel’s
as an original poem to a translation.”
Though this is slight praise for one of the very greatest
musicians the world has produced.
BACH; AND THE “MATTHEW” PASSION AND THE “JOHN”
I.
More is known of our mighty old Capellmeister Bach
than of Shakespeare; less than of Miss Marie Corelli.
The main thing is that he lived the greater part of
his obscure life in Leipzig, turning out week by week
the due amount of church music as an honest Capellmeister
should. Other Capellmeisters did likewise; only,
while their compositions were counterpoint, Bach’s
were masterworks. There lay the sole difference,
and the square-toed Leipzig burghers did not perceive
it. To them Master Bach was a hot-tempered, fastidious,
crotchety person, endured because no equally competent
organist would take his place at the price. So
he worked without reward, without recognition, until
his inspiration exhausted itself; and then he sat,
imposing in massive unconscious strength as a spent
volcano, awaiting the end. After that was silence:
the dust gathered on his music as it lay unheard for
a century. Haydn and Mozart and Beethoven hardly
suspected their predecessor’s greatness.
Then came Mendelssohn (to whom be the honour and the
glory), and gave to the world, to the world’s
great surprise, the “Matthew” Passion,
as one might say, fresh from the composer’s
pen. The B minor mass followed, and gradually
the whole of the church and instrumental music; and
now we are beginning dimly to comprehend Bach’s
greatness.
II.
The “John” Passion and the “Matthew”
Passion of Bach are as little alike as two works dealing
with the same subject, and intended for performance
under somewhat similar conditions, could possibly be;
and since the “Matthew” version appeals
to the modern heart and imagination as an ideal setting
of the tale of the death of the Man of Sorrows, one
is apt to follow Spitta in his curious mistake of
regarding the differences between the two as altogether
to the disadvantage of the “John.”
Spitta, indeed, goes further than this. So bent
is he on proving the superiority of the “Matthew”
that what he sees as a masterstroke in that work is
in the “John” a gross blunder; and, on
the whole, the pages on the “John” Passion
are precisely the most fatuous of the many fatuous
pages he wrote when he plunged into artistic criticism,
leaving his own proper element of technical or historical
criticism. This is a pity, for Spitta really had
Page 20
a very good case to spoil. The “Matthew”
is without doubt a vaster, profounder, more moving
and lovelier piece of art than the “John.”
Indeed, being the later work of a composer whose power
grew steadily from the first until the last time he
put pen to paper, it could not be otherwise.
But the critic who, like Spitta, sees in it only a
successful attempt at what was attempted unsuccessfully
in the “John,” seems to me to mistake
the aim both of the “John” and the “Matthew.”
The “John” is not in any sense unsuccessful,
but a complete, consistent and masterly achievement;
and if it stands a little lower than the “Matthew,”
if the “Matthew” is mightier, more impressive,
more overwhelming in its great tenderness, this is
not because the Bach who wrote in 1722-23 was a bungler
or an incomplete artist, but because the Bach who
wrote in 1729 was inspired by a loftier idea than
had come to the Bach of 1723. It was only necessary
to compare the impression one received when the “John”
Passion was sung by the Bach Choir in 1896 with that
received at the “Matthew” performance
in St. Paul’s in the same year, to realise that
it is in idea, not in power of realising the idea,
that the two works differ—differ more widely
than might seem possible, seeing that the subject
is the same, and that the same musical forms—chorus,
chorale, song and recitative—are used in
each.
Waking on the morrow of the “John” performance,
my memory was principally filled with those hoarse,
stormy, passionate roarings of an enraged mob.
A careless reckoning shows that whereas the people’s
choruses in the “Matthew” Passion occupy
about ninety bars, in the “John” they
fill about two hundred and fifty. “Barabbas”
in the “Matthew” is a single yell; in
the “John” it takes up four bars.
“Let Him be crucified” in the “Matthew”
is eighteen bars long, counting the repetition, while
“Crucify” and “Away with Him”
in the “John” amount to fifty bars.
Moreover, the people’s choruses are written in
a much more violent and tempestuous style in the earlier
than in the later setting. In the “Matthew”
there is nothing like those terrific ascending and
descending chromatic passages in “Waere dieser
nicht ein Ubelthaeter” and “Wir duerfen
Niemand toeden,” or the short breathless shouts
near the finish of the former chorus, as though the
infuriated rabble had nearly exhausted itself, or,
again, the excited chattering of the soldiers when
they get Christ’s coat, “Lasst uns den
nicht zertheilen.” Considering these things,
one sees that the first impression the “John”
Passion gives is the true impression, and that Bach
had deliberately set out to depict the preliminary
scenes of the crucifixion with greater fulness of
detail and in more striking colours than he afterwards
attempted in the “Matthew” Passion.
Then, not only is the physical suffering of Christ
insisted on in this way, but the chorales, recitatives,
and songs lay still greater stress upon it, either
directly, by actual description, or indirectly, by
Page 21
uttering with unheard-of poignancy the remorse supposed
to be felt by mankind whose guilt occasioned that
suffering. The central point in the two Passions
is the same, namely, the backsliding of Peter; and
in each the words, “He went out and wept bitterly,”
are given the greatest prominence; but one need only
contrast the acute agony expressed in the song, “Ach
mein Sinn,” which follows the incident in the
“John,” with the sweetness of “Have
mercy upon me,” which follows it in the “Matthew,”
to gain a fair notion of the spirit in which the one
work, and also the spirit in which the other, is written.
The next point to note is, that while the “Matthew”
begins with lamentation and ends with resignation,
“John” begins and ends with hope and praise.
In the former there is no chorus like the opening
“Herr, unser, Herrscher,” no chorale so
triumphant as “Ach grosser Koenig,” and
certainly no single passage so rapturous as “Alsdann
vom Tod erwecke mich, Dass meine Augen sehen dich,
In aller Freud, O Gottes Sohn” (with the bass
mounting to the high E flat and rolling magnificently
down again). So in the “John” Passion
Bach has given us, first, a vivid picture of the turbulent
crowd and of the suffering and death of Christ; second,
an expression of man’s bitterest remorse; and,
last and above all, an expression of man’s hope
for the future and his thankfulness to Christ who
redeemed him. These are what one remembers after
hearing the work sung; and these, it may be remarked,
are the things that the seventeenth and eighteenth
century mind chiefly saw in the sorrow and death of
Jesus of Nazareth.
III.
The “Matthew” Passion arouses a very different
mood from that aroused by the “John.”
One does not remember the turbulent people’s
choruses, nor the piercing note of anguish, nor any
rapturous song or chorus; for all else is drowned
in the recollection of an overwhelming utterance of
love and human sorrow and infinite tenderness.
Much else there is in the “Matthew” Passion,
just as there is love and tenderness in the “John”;
but just as these are subordinated in the “John”
to the more striking features I have mentioned, so
in the “Matthew” the noise of the people
and the expression of keen remorse are subordinated
to love and human tenderness and infinite sorrow.
The small number and conciseness of the people’s
choruses have already been alluded to, and it may
easily be shown that the penitential music is brief
compared with the love music, besides having a great
deal of the love, the yearning love, feeling in it.
The list of penitential pieces is exhausted when I
have mentioned “Come, ye daughters,” “Guilt
for sin,” “Break and die,” “O
Grief,” “Alas! now is my Saviour gone,”
and “Have mercy upon me”; and, on the other
hand, we have “Thou blessed Saviour,”
the Last Supper music, the succeeding recitative and
song, “O man, thy heavy sin lament,” “To
us He hath done all things,” “For love
Page 22
my Saviour suffered,” “Come, blessed Cross,”
and “See the Saviour’s outstretched arm,”
every one of which, not to speak of some other songs
and most of the chorales, is sheer love music of the
purest sort. This, then, seems to me the difference
between the “Matthew” Passion and its
predecessor: in the “John” Bach tried
to purge his audience in the regular evangelical manner
by pity and terror and hope. But during the next
six years his spiritual development was so amazing,
that while remaining intellectually faithful to evangelical
dogma and perhaps such bogies as the devil and hell,
he yet saw that the best way of purifying his audience
was to set Jesus of Nazareth before them as the highest
type of manhood he knew, as the man who so loved men
that He died for them. There is therefore in
the “Matthew” Passion neither the blank
despair nor the feverish ecstasy of the “John,”
for they have no part to play there. Human sorrow
and human love are the themes. Whenever I hear
a fine rendering of the “Matthew” Passion,
it seems to me that no composer, not even Mozart,
could be more tender than Bach. It is often hard
to get into communication with him, for he often appeals
to feelings that no longer stir humanity—such,
for instance, as the obsolete “sense of sin,”—but
once it is done, he works miracles. Take, for
example, the scene in which Jesus tells His disciples
that one of them will betray Him. They ask, in
chorus, “Herr, bin ich’s?” There
is a pause, and the chorale, “Ich bin’s,
ich sollte buessen,” is thundered out by congregation
and organ; then the agony passes away at the thought
of the Redeemer, and the last line, “Das hat
verdienet meine Seel,” is almost intolerable
in its sweetness. The songs, of course, appeal
naturally to-day to all who will listen to them; but
it is in such passages as this that Bach spoke most
powerfully to his generation, and speaks now to those
who will learn to understand him. Those who understand
him can easily perceive the “John” Passion
to be a powerful artistic embodiment of an eighteenth
century idea; and they may also perceive that the
“Matthew” is greater, because it is, on
the whole, a little more beautiful, and because its
main idea—which so far transcended the
eighteenth century understanding that the eighteenth
century preferred the “John”—is
one of the loftiest that has yet visited the human
mind.
HANDEL
Mr. George Frideric Handel is by far the most superb
personage one meets in the history of music.
He alone of all the musicians lived his life straight
through in the grand manner. Spohr had dignity;
Gluck insisted upon respect being shown a man of his
talent; Spontini was sufficiently self-assertive;
Beethoven treated his noble patrons as so many handfuls
of dirt. But it is impossible altogether to lose
sight of the peasant in Beethoven and Gluck; Spohr
had more than a trace of the successful shopkeeper;
Spontini’s assertion often became mere insufferable
Page 23
bumptiousness. Besides, they all won their positions
through being the best men in the field, and they held
them with a proud consciousness of being the best
men. But in Handel we have a polished gentleman,
a lord amongst lords, almost a king amongst kings;
and had his musical powers been much smaller than they
were, he might quite possibly have gained and held
his position just the same. He slighted the Elector
of Hanover; and when that noble creature became George
I. of England, Handel had only to do the handsome thing,
as a handsome gentleman should, to be immediately
taken back into favour. He was educated—was,
in fact, a university man of the German sort; he could
write and spell, and add up rows of figures, and had
many other accomplishments which gentlemen of the
period affected a little to despise. He had a
pungent and a copious wit. He had quite a commercial
genius; he was an impresario, and had engagements to
offer other people instead of having to beg for engagements
for himself; and he was always treated by the British
with all the respect they keep for the man who has
made money, or, having lost it, is fast making it
again. He fought for the lordship of opera against
nearly the whole English nobility, and they paid him
the compliment of banding together with as much ado
to ruin him as if their purpose had been to drive his
royal master from the throne. He treated all opposition
with a splendid good-humoured disdain. If his
theatre was empty, then the music sounded the better.
If a singer threatened to jump on the harpsichord
because Handel’s accompaniments attracted more
notice than the singing, Handel asked for the date
of the proposed performance that it might be advertised,
for more people would come to see the singer jump
than hear him sing. He was, in short, a most superb
person, quite the grand seigneur. Think of Bach,
the little shabby unimportant cantor, or of Beethoven,
important enough but shabby, and with a great sorrow
in his eyes, and an air of weariness, almost of defeat.
Then look at the magnificent Mr. Handel in Hudson’s
portrait: fashionably dressed in a great periwig
and gorgeous scarlet coat, victorious, energetic,
self-possessed, self-confident, self-satisfied, jovial,
and proud as Beelzebub (to use his own comparison)—too
proud to ask for recognition were homage refused.
This portrait helps us to understand the ascendency
Handel gained over his contemporaries and over posterity.
But his lofty position was not entirely due to his
overwhelming personality. His intellect, if less
vast, less comprehensive, than Beethoven’s,
was less like the intellect of a great peasant:
it was swifter, keener, surer. Where Beethoven
plodded, Handel leaped. And a degree of genius
which did nothing for Bach, a little for Mozart, and
all for Beethoven, did something for Handel. Without
a voice worth taking into consideration, he could,
and at least on one occasion did, sing so touchingly
that the leading singer of the age dared not risk
Page 24
his reputation by singing after him. He was not
only the first composer of the day, but also the first
organist and the first harpsichord player; for his
only possible rival, Sebastian Bach, was an obscure
schoolmaster in a small, nearly unheard-of, German
town. And so personal force, musical genius,
business talent, education, and general brain power
went to the making of a man who hobnobbed with dukes
and kings, who ruled musical England with an iron rule,
who threatened to throw distinguished soprano ladies
from windows, and was threatened with never an action
for battery in return, who went through the world
with a regal gait, and was, in a word, the most astonishing
lord of music the world has seen.
That this aristocrat should come to be the musical
prophet of an evangelical bourgeoisie would be felt
as a most comical irony, were it only something less
of a mystery. Handel was brought up in the bosom
of the Lutheran Church, and was religious in his way.
But it was emphatically a pagan way. Let those
who doubt it turn to his setting of “All we
like sheep have gone astray,” in the “Messiah,”
and ask whether a religious man, whether Byrde or
Palestrina, would have painted that exciting picture
on those words. Imagine how Bach would have set
them. That Handel lived an intense inner life
we know, but what that life was no man can ever know.
It is only certain that it was not a life such as
Bach’s; for he lived an active outer life also,
and was troubled with no illusions, no morbid introspection.
He seemed to accept the theology of the time in simple
sincerity as a sufficient explanation of the world
and human existence. He had little desire to
write sacred music. He felt that his enormous
force found its finest exercise in song-making; and
Italian opera, consisting nearly wholly of songs,
was his favourite form to the finish. The instinct
was a true one. It is as a song-writer he is
supreme, surpassing as he does Schubert, and sometimes
even Mozart. Mozart is a prince of song-writers;
but Handel is their king. He does not get the
breezy picturesqueness of Purcell, nor the entrancing
absolute beauty that Mozart often gets; but as pieces
of art, each constructed so as to get the most out
of the human voice in expressing a rich human passion
in a noble form, they stand unapproachable in their
perfection. For many reasons the English public
refused to hear them in his own time, and Handel,
as a general whose business was to win the battle,
not in this or that way, but in any possible way,
turned his attention to oratorio, and in this found
success and a fortune. In this lies also our
great gain, for in addition to the Italian opera songs
we have the oratorio choruses. But when we come
to think of it, might not Buononcini and Cuzzoni laugh
to see how time has avenged them on their old enemy?
For Handel’s best music is in the songs, which
rarely find a singer; and his fame is kept alive by
performances of “Israel in Egypt” at the
Albert Hall, where (until lately) evangelical small
grocers crowded to hear the duet for two basses, “The
Lord is a man of war,” which Handel did not
write, massacred by a huge bass chorus.
Page 25
His “Messiah” is in much the same plight
as Milton’s “Paradise Lost,” the
plays of Shakespeare and the source of all true religion—it
suffers from being so excessively well known and so
generally accepted as a classic that few want to hear
it, and none think it worth knowing thoroughly.
A few years ago the late Sir Joseph Barnby went through
the entire work in St. James’s Hall with his
Guildhall students; but such a feat had not, I believe,
been accomplished previously within living memory,
and certainly it has not been attempted again since.
We constantly speak of the “Messiah” as
the most popular oratorio ever written; but even in
the provinces only selections from it are sung, and
in the metropolis the selections are cut very short
indeed, frequently by the sapient device of taking
out all the best numbers and leaving only those that
appeal to the religious instincts of Clapham.
I cannot resist the suspicion that but for the words
of “He was despised,” “Behold, and
see,” and “I know that my Redeemer liveth,”
Clapham would have tired of the oratorio before now,
and that but for its having become a Christmas institution,
like roast beef, plum-puddings, mince-pies, and other
indigestible foods, it would no longer be heard in
the provinces. And perhaps it would be better
forgotten—perhaps Handel would rather have
seen it forgotten than regarded as it is regarded,
than existing merely as an aid to evangelical religion
or an after-dinner digestive on Christmas Day.
Still, during the last hundred and fifty years, it
has suffered so many humiliations that possibly one
more, even this last one, does not so much matter.
First its great domes and pillars and mighty arches
were prettily ornamented and tinted by Mozart, who
surely knew not what he did; then in England a barbarous
traditional method of singing it was evolved; later
it was Costa-mongered; finally even the late eminent
Macfarren, the worst enemy music has ever had in this
country, did not disdain to prepare “a performing
edition,” and to improve Mozart’s improvements
on Handel. One wonders whether Mozart, when he
overlaid the “Messiah” with his gay tinsel-work,
dreamed that some Costa, encouraged by Mozart’s
own example, and without brains enough to guess that
he had nothing like Mozart’s brains, would in
like manner desecrate “Don Giovanni.”
Like “Don Giovanni,” there the “Messiah”
lies, almost unrecognisable under its outrageous adornments,
misunderstood, its splendours largely unknown and hardly
even suspected, the best known and the least known
of oratorios, a work spoken of as fine by those who
cannot hum one of its greatest themes or in the least
comprehend the plan on which its noblest choruses are
constructed.
Page 26
Rightly to approach the “Messiah” or any
of Handel’s sacred oratorios, to approach it
in any sure hope of appreciating it, one must remember
that (as I have just said) Handel had nothing of the
religious temperament, that in temperament he was
wholly secular, that he was an eighteenth century
pagan. He was perfectly satisfied with the visible
and audible world his energy and imagination created
out of things; about the why and wherefore of things
he seems never to have troubled; his soul asked no
questions, and he was never driven to accept a religious
or any other explanation. It is true he went to
church with quite commendable regularity, and wished
to die on Good Friday and so meet Jesus Christ on
the anniversary of the resurrection. But he was
nevertheless as completely a pagan as any old Greek;
the persons of the Trinity were to him very solid
entities; if he wished to die on Good Friday, depend
upon it, he fully meant to enter heaven in his finest
scarlet coat with ample gold lace and a sword by his
side, to make a stately bow to the assembled company
and then offer a few apposite and doubtless pungent
remarks on the proper method of tuning harps.
Of true devotional feeling, of the ecstatic devotional
feeling of Palestrina and of Bach, there is in no
recorded saying of his a trace, and there is not a
trace of it in his music. When he was writing
the “Hallelujah Chorus” he imagined he
saw God on His throne, just as in writing “Semele”
he probably imagined he saw Jupiter on his throne;
and the fact proves only with what intensity and power
his imagination was working, and how far removed he
was from the genuine devotional frame of mind.
There is not the slightest difference in style between
his secular and his sacred music; he treats sacred
and secular subjects precisely alike. In music
his intention was never to reveal his own state of
mind, but always to depict some object, some scene.
Now, never did he adhere with apparently greater resolution
to this plan, never therefore did he produce a more
essentially secular work, than in the “Messiah.”
One need only consider such numbers as “All
they that see Him” and “Behold the Lamb
of God” to realise this; though, indeed, there
is not a number in the oratorio that does not show
it with sufficient clearness. But fully to understand
Handel and realise his greatness, it is not enough
merely to know the spirit in which he worked:
one must know also his method of depicting things and
scenes. He was wholly an impressionist—in
his youth from choice, as when he wrote the music
of “Rinaldo” faster than the librettist
could supply the words; in middle age and afterwards
from necessity, as he never had time to write save
when circumstances freed him for a few days from the
active duties of an impresario. He tried to do,
and succeeded in doing, everything with a few powerful
strokes, a few splashes of colour. Of the careful
elaboration of Bach, of Beethoven, even of Mozart,
there is nothing: sometimes in his impatience
Page 27
he seemed to mix his colours in buckets and hurl them
with the surest artistic aim at his gigantic canvases.
A comparison of the angels’ chorus “Glory
to God in the highest” in Bach’s “Christmas
Oratorio” with the same thing as set in the
“Messiah” will show not only how widely
different were the aims of the two men, but also throws
the minute cunning of the Leipzig schoolmaster into
startling contrast with the daring recklessness of
the tremendous London impresario. Of course both
men possessed wonderful contrapuntal skill; but in
Bach’s case there is time and patience as well
as skill, and in Handel’s only consummate audacity
and intellectual grip. Handel was by far a greater
man than Bach—he appears to me, indeed,
the greatest man who has yet lived; but though he
achieves miracles as a musician, his music was to
him only one of many modes of using the irresistible
creative instinct and energy within him. Any
one who looks in Handel for the characteristic complicated
music of the typical German masters will be disappointed
even as the Germans are disappointed; but those who
are prepared to let Handel say what he has to say
in his own chosen way will find in his music the most
admirable style ever attained to by any musician,
the most perfect fusion of manner and matter.
It is a grand, large, and broad style, because Handel
had a large and grand matter to express; and if it
errs at all it errs on the right side—it
has too few rather than too many notes.
On the whole, the “Messiah” is as vigorous,
rich, picturesque and tender as the best of Handel’s
oratorios—even “Belshazzar”
does not beat it. There is scarcely any padding;
there are many of Handel’s most perfect songs
and most gorgeous choruses; and the architecture of
the work is planned with a magnificence, and executed
with a lucky completeness, attained only perhaps elsewhere
in “Israel in Egypt”—for which
achievement Handel borrowed much of the bricks and
mortar from other edifices. Theological though
the subject is, the oratorio is as much a hymn to
joy as the Ninth symphony; and there is in it far
more of genuine joy, of sheer delight in living.
Of the sense of sin—the most cowardly illusion
ever invented by a degenerate people—there
is no sign; where Bach would have been abased in the
dust, Handel is bright, shining, confident, cocksure
that all is right with the world. Mingled with
the marvellous tenderness of “Comfort ye”
there is an odd air of authority, a conviction that
everything is going well, and that no one need worry;
and nothing fresher, fuller of spring-freshness, almost
of rollicking jollity, has ever been written than
“Every valley shall be exalted.” “And
the glory of the Lord shall be revealed” is
in rather the same vein, though a deeper note of feeling
is struck. The effect of the alto voices leading
off, followed immediately by the rest of the chorus
and orchestra, is overwhelming; and the chant of the
basses at “For the mouth of the Lord” is
Page 28
in the biggest Handel manner. But just as “He
was despised” and “I know that my Redeemer
liveth” tower above all the other songs, so three
or four choruses tower above all the other choruses
in not only the “Messiah,” but all Handel’s
oratorios. “Worthy is the Lamb” stands
far above the rest, and indeed above all choruses
in the world save Bach’s very best; then comes
“For unto us a Child is born”; and after
that “And He shall purify,” “His
yoke is easy,” and “Surely He hath borne
our griefs”—each distinctive, complete
in itself, an absolute piece of noble invention.
“Unto us a Child is born” is written in
a form devised by Handel and used with success by
no other composer since, until in a curiously modified
shape Tschaikowsky employed it for the third movement
of his Pathetic symphony. The first theme is very
simply announced, played with awhile, then the second
follows—a tremendous phrase to the words
“The government shall be upon His shoulders”;
suddenly the inner parts begin to quicken into life,
to ferment, to throb and to leap, and with startling
abruptness great masses of tone are hurled at the
listener to the words “Wonderful, Counsellor.”
The process is then repeated in a shortened and intensified
form; then it is repeated again; and finally the principal
theme, delivered so naively at first, is delivered
with all the pomp and splendour of full chorus and
orchestra, and “Wonderful, Counsellor”
thundered out on a corresponding scale. A scheme
at once so simple, so daring and so tremendous in
effect, could have been invented by no one but Handel
with his need for working rapidly; and it is strange
that a composer so different from Handel as Tschaikowsky
should have hit upon a closely analogous form for a
symphonic movement. The forms of the other choruses
are dissimilar. In “He shall purify”
there are two big climaxes; in “His yoke is easy”
there is only one, and it comes at the finish, just
when one is wondering how the splendid flow of music
can be ended without an effect of incompleteness or
of anti-climax; and “Surely He hath borne our
griefs” depends upon no climactic effects, but
upon the sheer sweetness and pathos of the thing.
Handel’s secular oratorios are different from
anything else in the world. They are neither
oratorios, nor operas, nor cantatas; and the plots
are generally quaint.
Some years ago it occurred to me one morning that
a trip by sea to Russia might be refreshing; and that
afternoon I started in a coal-steamer from a northern
seaport. A passport could hardly be wrested from
hide-bound officialdom in so short a time, and, to
save explanations in a foreign tongue at Cronstadt,
the reader’s most humble servant assumed the
lowly office of purser—wages, one shilling
per month. The passage was rough, the engineers
were not enthusiastic in their work, some of the seamen
were sulky; and, in a word, the name of God was frequently
in the skipper’s mouth. Otherwise he did
not strike one as being a particularly religious man.
Page 29
Nevertheless, when Sunday evening came round he sat
down and read the Bible with genuine fervour, spelling
the hard words aloud and asking how they should or
might be pronounced; and he informed me, by way of
explaining his attachment to the Book, that he had
solemnly promised his wife never to omit his weekly
devotions while on the deep. Though I never shared
the literary tastes of Mr. Wilson Barrett, the captain’s
unfathomable ignorance of the Gospels, Isaiah and
the Psalms startled even me; but on the other hand
he had an intimate acquaintance with a number of stories
to be found only in the Apocrypha, with which he had
thoughtfully provided himself. To gratify my curiosity
he read me the tale of Susanna and the Elders.
Being young, my first notion was that I had chanced
on a capital subject for an opera; and I actually
thought for ten minutes of commencing at once on a
libretto. Later I remembered the censor, and
realised for the first time that in England, when
a subject is unfit for a drama, it is treated as an
oratorio. As soon as possible I bought Handel’s
“Susanna” instead, and found that Handel
curiously—or perhaps not curiously—had
also been before me in thinking of treating the subject
operatically. In fact “Susanna” is
as much an opera as “Rinaldo,” the only
difference being that a few choruses are forcibly
dragged in to give colour to the innocent pretence.
Handel’s librettist, whoever he was, did his
work downright badly. That he glorifies the great
institution of permanent marriage and says nothing
of the corresponding great institution of the Divorce
Court, is only what might be expected of the horrible
eighteenth century—the true dark age of
Europe; but surely even a composer of Handel’s
powers could scarcely do himself justice with such
a choice blend of stupidity and cant religion as this—
“Chorus.
How long, O Lord, shall Israel groan
In bondage and
in pain?
Jehovah! hear Thy people moan,
And break the
tyrant’s chain!
“Joachim. Our crimes repeated
have provok’d His rage, And now He scourges
a degen’rate age. O come, my fair Susanna,
come, And from my bosom chase its gloom,”
etc.
Or is the abrupt third line of Joachim’s speech
to be regarded as a masterstroke of characterisation?
I will tell the whole story, to show what manner of
subject has been thought proper for an oratorio.
Joachim and Susanna are of course perfect monsters
of fidelity; though it is only fair to say that Joachim’s
virtue is not insisted on, or, for that matter, mentioned.
Joachim goes out of town—he says so:
“Awhile I’m summoned from the town away”—and
Susanna, instead of obeying his directions to entertain
some friends, goes into a dark glade, whither the
Elders presently repair. She declines their attentions;
then they declare they caught her with an unknown lover,
who fled; and she is condemned to death, the populace
seeing naught but justice in the sentence. But
Page 30
before they begin to hurl the stones, Daniel steps
forward and by sheer eloquent impudence persuades the
people to have the case re-tried, with him for judge.
He sends one elder out of court, and asks the other
under what tree Susanna committed the indiscretion.
The poor wretch, knowing no science, foolishly makes
a wild shot instead of pleading a defective education,
and says, “A verdant mastick, pride of all the
grove.” The other, in response to the same
question, says, “Yon tall holm-tree.”
Incredible as it seems, on the strength of this error,
which would merely gain a policeman the commendation
of an average London magistrate, the two Elders are
sent off to be hanged! Why, even the late Mr.
Justice Stephen never put away an innocent man or
woman on less evidence! But the chorus flatters
Daniel just as the Press used to flatter Mr. Justice
Stephen; Susanna is complimented on her chastity; and
all ends with some general reflections—
“A virtuous wife shall
soften fortune’s frown,
She’s far more precious
than a golden crown.”
Nothing is said about the market value of a virtuous
husband. Probably the eighteenth century regarded
such a thing as out of the question. As I have
said, I tell this story to show what the British public
will put up with if you mention the word oratorio.
Voltaire’s dictum needs revision thus:
“Whatever is too improper to be spoken (in England)
is sung, and whatever is too improper to be sung on
the stage may be sung in a church.”
Nevertheless, out of this wretched book Handel made
a masterpiece. The tale of Susanna is not one
in which a man of his character might be expected
to take a profound interest; though it should always
be remembered that hardly anything is known of his
relations with the other sex save that he took a keen
and lifelong interest in the Foundling Hospital.
But so strong had the habit of making masterpieces
become with him that he could not resist the temptation
to create just one more, even when he had nothing
better than “Susanna” to base it on; just
as a confirmed drunkard cannot resist the temptation
to get one drink more, even if he be accustomed to
the gilded chambers of the West End, and must go for
really the last to-night into the lowest drinking-saloon
of the East. Some of the choruses are of Handel’s
best. The first, “How long, O Lord,”
shows that he could write expressive chromatic passages
as well as Purcell and Bach; the second is surcharged
with emotion; “Righteous Heaven” is picturesque
and full of splendid vigour; “Impartial Heaven”
contains some of the most gorgeous writing that even
Handel achieved. But the last two choruses, and
“The Cause is decided” and “Oh, Joachim,”
are common, colourless, barren; and were evidently
written without delight, to maintain the pretext that
the work was an oratorio. But it stands to this
day, unmistakably an opera; and it is the songs that
will certainly make it popular some day; for some
Page 31
of them are on Handel’s highest level, and Handel’s
highest level has never been reached by any other composer.
His choruses are equalled by Bach’s, his dramatic
strokes by Gluck’s, his instrumental movements
by Bach’s and perhaps Lulli’s; but the
coming of Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Weber, and Wagner
has only served to show that he is the greatest song-writer
the world has known or is likely to know. Even
Mozart never quite attained that union of miraculously
balanced form, sweetness of melody, and depth of feeling
with a degree of sheer strength that keeps the expression
of the main thought lucid, and the surface of the
music, so to speak, calm, when obscurity might have
been anticipated, and some roughness and storm and
stress excused. “Faith displays her rosy
wing” is an absolutely perfect instance of a
Handel song. Were not the thing done, one might
believe it impossible to express with such simplicity—four
sombre minor chords and then the tremolo of the strings—the
alternations of trembling fear and fearful hope, the
hope of the human soul in extremist agony finding
an exalted consolation in the thought that this was
the worst. As astounding as this is the quality
of light and freshness of atmosphere with which Handel
imbues such songs as “Clouds o’ertake
the brightest day” and “Crystal streams
in murmurs flowing”; and the tenderness of “Would
custom bid,” with the almost divine refrain,
“I then had called thee mine,” might surprise
us, coming as it does from such a giant, did we not
know that tenderness is always a characteristic of
the great men, of Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Wagner,
and that the pettiness, ill-conditionedness, and lack
of generous feeling observable in (say) our London
composers to-day stamp them more unmistakably than
does their music as small composers. If the poor
fellows knew what they were about, they would at least
conceal the littlenesses that show they are destined
never to do work of the first order. The composer
of the “Rex tremendae” (in the Requiem)
wrote “Dove sono,” Beethoven wrote both
the finale of the Fifth symphony and the slow movement
of the Ninth, Wagner both the Valkyries’ Ride
and the motherhood theme in “Siegfried,”
Handel “Worthy is the Lamb” and “Waft
her, angels”; while your little malicious musical
Mimes are absorbed in self-pity, and can no more write
a melody that irresistibly touches you than they can
build a great and impressive structure. And if
Mozart is tenderest of all the musicians, Handel comes
very close to him. The world may, though not probably,
tire of all but his grandest choruses, while his songs
will always be sung as lovely expressions of the finest
human feeling.
Page 32
“Samson” is not his finest oratorio, though
it may be his longest. It contains no “Unto
us a Child is born” nor a “Worthy is the
Lamb,” nor a “Now love, that everlasting
boy”; but in several places the sublime is reached—in
“Then round about the starry throne,” the
last page of which is worth all the oratorios written
since Handel’s time save Beethoven’s “Mount
of Olives”; in “Fixed is His everlasting
seat,” with that enormous opening phrase, irresistible
in its strength and energy as Handel himself; and
in the first section of “O first created beam.”
The pagan choruses are full of riotous excitement,
though there is not one of them to match “Ye
tutelar gods” in “Belshazzar.”
But there is little in “Belshazzar” to
match the pathos of “Return, O God of hosts,”
or “Ye sons of Israel, now lament.”
The latter is a notable example of Handel’s
art. There is not a new phrase in it: nothing,
indeed, could be commoner than the bar at the first
occurrence of “Amongst the dead great Samson
lies,” and yet the effect is amazing; and though
the “for ever” is as old as Purcell, here
it is newly used—used as if it had never
been used before—to utter a depth of emotion
that passes beyond the pathetic to the sublime.
This very vastness of feeling, this power of stepping
outside himself and giving a voice to the general
emotions of humanity, prevents us recognising the
personal note in Handel as we recognise it in Mozart.
But occasionally the personal note may be met.
The recitative “My genial spirits fail,”
with those dreary long-drawn harmonies, and the orchestral
passage pressing wearily downwards at “And lay
me gently down with them that rest,” seems almost
like Handel’s own voice in a moment of sad depression.
It serves, at anyrate, to remind us that the all-conquering
Mr. Handel was a complete man who had endured the
sickening sense of the worthlessness of a struggle
that he was bound to continue to the end. But
these personal confessions are scarce. After
all, in oratorio Handel’s best music is that
in which he seeks to attain the sublime. In his
choruses he does attain it: he sweeps you away
with the immense rhythmical impetus of the music, or
overpowers you with huge masses of tone hurled, as
it were, bodily at you at just the right moments,
or he coerces you with phrases like the opening of
“Fixed in His everlasting seat,” or the
last (before the cadence) in “Then round about
the starry throne.” It is true that with
his unheard-of intellectual power, and a mastery of
technique equal or nearly equal to Bach’s, he
was often tempted to write in his uninspired moments,
and so the chorus became with him more or less of
a formula; but we may also note that even when he was
most mechanical the mere furious speed at which he
wrote seemed to excite and exalt him, so that if he
began with a commonplace “Let their celestial
concerts all unite,” before the end he was pouring
forth glorious and living stuff like the last twenty-seven
bars. So the pace at which he had to write in
Page 33
the intervals of bullying or coaxing prima donnas or
still more petulant male sopranos was not wholly a
misfortune; if it sometimes compelled him to set down
mere musical arithmetic, or rubbish like “Honour
and arms,” and “Go, baffled coward,”
it sometimes drew his grandest music out of him.
The dramatic oratorio is a hybrid form of art—one
might almost say a bastard form; it had only about
thirty years of life; but in those thirty years Handel
accomplished wonderful things with it. And the
wonder of them makes Handel appear the more astonishing
man; for, when all is said, the truth is that the
man was greater, infinitely greater, than his music.
HAYDN AND HIS “CREATION”
It is a fact never to be forgotten, in hearing good
papa Haydn’s music, that he lived in the fine
old world when stately men and women went through
life in the grand manner with a languid pulse, when
the earth and the days were alike empty, and hurry
to get finished and proceed to the next thing was
almost unknown, and elbowing of rivals to get on almost
unnecessary. For fifty years he worked away contentedly
as bandmaster to Prince Esterhazy, composing the due
amount of music, conducting the due number of concerts,
taking his salary of some seventy odd pounds per annum
thankfully, and putting on his uniform for special
State occasions with as little grumbling as possible,
all as a good bandmaster should. He had gone through
a short period of roughing it in his youth, and he
had made one or two mistakes as he settled down.
He married a woman who worked with enthusiasm to render
his early life intolerable, and begged him in his
old age to buy a certain cottage, as it would suit
her admirably when she became a widow. But he
consoled himself as men do in the circumstances, and
did not allow his mistakes to poison all his life,
or cause him any special worry. His other troubles
were not very serious. A Music Society which
he wished to join tried to trap him into an agreement
to write important compositions for it whenever they
were wanted. Once he offended his princely master
by learning to play the baryton, an instrument on
which the prince was a performer greatly esteemed
by his retainers. Such teacup storms soon passed:
Prince Esterhazy doubtless forgave him; the Society
was soon forgotten; and Haydn worked on placidly.
Every morning he rose with or before the lark, dressed
himself with a degree of neatness that astonished
even that neat dressing age, and sat down to compose
music. Later in each day he is reported to have
eaten, to have rehearsed his band or conducted concerts,
and so to bed to prepare himself by refreshing slumber
for the next day’s labours. At certain periods
of the year Prince Esterhazy and his court adjourned
to Esterhaz, and at certain periods they came back
to Eisenstadt: thus they were saved by due variety
from utter petrifaction. Haydn seems to have liked
the life, and to have thought moreover that it was
Page 34
good for him and his art. By being thrown so
much back upon himself, he said, he had been forced
to become original. Whether it made him original
or not, he never thought of changing it until his
prince died, and for a time his services were not
wanted at Esterhaz or Eisenstadt. Then he came
to England, and by his success here made a European
reputation (for it was then as it is now—an
artist was only accepted on the musical Continent
after he had been stamped with the hall-mark of unmusical
England). Finally he settled in Vienna, was for
a time the teacher of Beethoven, declared his belief
that the first chorus of the “Creation”
came direct from heaven, and died a world-famous man.
To the nineteenth century mind it seems rather an
odd life for an artist: at least it strikes one
as a life, despite Haydn’s own opinion, not
particularly conducive to originality. To use
extreme language, it might almost be called a monotonous
and soporific mode of existence. Probably its
chief advantage was the opportunity it afforded, or
perhaps the necessity it enforced, of ceaseless industry.
Certainly that industry bore fruit in Haydn’s
steady increase of inventive power as he went on composing.
But he only took the prodigious leap from the second
to the first rank of composers after he had been free
for a time from his long slavery, and had been in
England and been aroused and stimulated by new scenes,
unfamiliar modes of life, and by contact with many
and widely differing types of mind. Some of his
later music makes one think that if the leap—a
leap almost unparalleled in the history of art—had
been possible twenty years sooner, Haydn might have
won a place by the side of Mozart and Handel and Bach,
instead of being the lowest of their great company.
On the other hand, one cannot think of the man—lively,
genial, kind-hearted, garrulous, broadly humorous,
actively observant of details, careful in small money
matters—and assert with one’s hand
on one’s heart that he was cast in gigantic
or heroic mould. That he had a wonderful facility
in expressing himself is obvious in every bar he wrote:
but it is less obvious that he had a great deal to
express. He had deep, but not the deepest, human
feeling; he could think, but not profoundly; he had
a sense of beauty, delicate and acute out of all comparison
with yours or mine, reader, but far less keen than
Mozart’s or Bach’s. Hence his music
is rarely comparable with theirs: his matter
is less weighty, his form never quite so enchantingly
lovely; and, whatever one may think of the possibilities
of the man in his most inspired moments, his average
output drives one to the reluctant conclusion that
on the whole his life must have been favourable to
him and enabled him to do the best that was in him.
Yet I hesitate as I write the words. Remembering
that he began as an untaught peasant, and until the
end of his long life was a mere bandmaster with a small
yearly salary, a uniform, and possibly (for I cannot
Page 35
recall the facts) his board and lodging, remembering
where he found the symphony and quartet and where
he left them, remembering, above all, that astonishing
leap, I find it hard to believe in barriers to his
upward path. It is in dignity and quality of
poetic content rather than in form that Haydn is lacking.
Had the horizon of his thought been widened in early
or even in middle life by the education of mixing
with men who knew more and were more advanced than
himself, had he been jostled in the crowd of a great
city and been made to feel deeply about the tragi-comedy
of human existence, his experiences might have resulted
in a deeper and more original note being sounded in
his music. But we must take him as he is, reflecting,
when the unbroken peacefulness of his music becomes
a little tiresome, that he belonged to the “old
time before us” and was never quickened by the
newer modes of thought that unconsciously affected
Mozart and consciously moulded Beethoven; and that,
after all, his very smoothness and absence of passion
give him an old-world charm, grateful in this hot
and dusty age. If he was not greatly original,
he was at least flawlessly consistent: there
is scarce a trait in his character that is not reflected
somewhere in his music, and hardly a characteristic
of his music that one does not find quaintly echoed
in some recorded saying or doing of the man.
His placid and even vivacity, his sprightliness, his
broad jocularity, his economy and shrewd business
perception of what could be done with the material
to hand, his fertility of device, even his commonplaceness,
may all be seen in the symphonies. At rare moments
he moves you strongly, very often he is trivial, but
he generally pleases; and if some of the strokes of
humour—quoted in text-books of orchestration—are
so broad as to be indescribable in any respectable
modern print, few of us understand what they really
mean, and no one is a penny the worse.
The “Creation” libretto was prepared for
Handel, but he did not attempt to set it; and this
perhaps was just as well, for the effort would certainly
have killed him. Of course the opening offers
some fine opportunities for fine music; but the later
parts with their nonsense—Milton’s
nonsense, I believe—about “In native
worth and honour clad, With beauty, courage, strength,
adorned, Erect with front serene he stands, A man,
the Lord and King of Nature all,” and the suburban
love-making of our first parents, and the lengthy references
to the habits of the worm and the leviathan, and so
on, are almost more than modern flesh and blood can
endure. It must be conceded that Haydn evaded
the difficulties of the subject with a degree of tact
that would be surprising in anyone else than Haydn.
In the first part, where Handel would have been sublime,
he is frequently nearly sublime, and this is our loss;
but in the later portion, where Handel would have
been solemn, earnest, and intolerably dull, he is light,
skittish, good-natured, and sometimes jocular, and
Page 36
this is our gain, even if the gain is not great.
The Representation of Chaos is a curious bit of music,
less like chaos than an attempt to write music of
the Bruneau sort a century too soon; but it serves.
The most magnificent passage in the oratorio immediately
follows, for there is hardly a finer effect in music
than that of the soft voices singing the words, “And
the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters,”
while the strings gently pulse; and the fortissimo
C major chord on the word “light,” coming
abruptly after the piano and mezzo-forte minor chords,
is as dazzling in its brilliancy to-day as when it
was first sung. The number of unisons, throwing
into relief the two minor chords on C and F, should
be especially noted. The chorus in the next number
is poor, matched with this, though towards the end
(see bars 11 and 12 from the finish) Haydn’s
splendid musicianship has enabled him to redeem the
trivial commonplace with an unexpected and powerful
harmonic progression. The work is singularly deficient
in strong sustained choruses. “Awake the
harp” is certainly very much the best; for “The
heavens are telling” is little better than Gounod’s
“Unfold, ye everlasting portals” until
the end, where it is saved by the tremendous climax;
and “Achieved is the glorious work” is
mostly mechanical, with occasional moments of life.
As for the finale, it is of course light opera.
On the whole the songs are the most delightful feature
of the “Creation,” and the freshness of
“With verdure clad,” and the tender charm
of the second section of “Roaming in foaming
billows,” may possibly be remembered when Haydn
is scarcely known except as an instrumental composer.
The setting of “Softly purling, glides on, thro’
silent vales, the limpid brook” is indeed perfect,
the phrase at the repetition of “Thro’
silent vales” inevitably calling up a vision,
not of a valley sleeping in the sunlight, for of sunlight
the eighteenth century apparently took little heed,
but of a valley in the dark quiet night, filled with
the scent of flowers, and the far-off murmur of the
brook vaguely heard. The humour of the oratorio
consists chiefly of practical jokes, such as sending
Mr. Andrew Black (or some other bass singer) down
to the low F sharp and G to depict the heavy beasts
treading the ground, or making the orchestra imitate
the bellow of the said heavy beasts, or depicting
the sinuous motion of the worm or the graceful gamboling
of the leviathan. It has been objected that the
leviathan is brought on in sections. The truth,
of course, is that the clumsy figure in the bass is
not meant to depict the leviathan himself, but his
gambolings and the gay flourishings of his tail.
It is hard to sum up the “Creation,” unless
one is prepared to call it great and never go to hear
it. It is not a sublime oratorio, nor yet a frankly
comic oratorio, nor entirely a dull oratorio.
After considering the songs, the recitatives, the
choruses, in detail, it really seems to contain very
little. Perhaps it may be described as a third-rate
oratorio, whose interest is largely historic and literary.
Page 37
MOZART, HIS “DON GIOVANNI” AND THE REQUIEM
It may well be doubted whether Vienna thought even
so much of Capellmeister Mozart as Leipzig thought
of Capellmeister Bach. Bach, it is true, was
merely Capellmeister; he hardly dared to claim social
equality with the citizens who tanned hides or slaughtered
pigs; and probably the high personages who trimmed
the local Serene Highness’s toe-nails scarcely
knew of his existence. Still, he was a burgher,
even as the killers of pigs and the tanners of hides;
he was thoroughly respectable, and probably paid his
taxes as they came due; if only by necessity of his
office, he went to church with regularity; and on
the whole we may suppose that he got enough of respect
to make life tolerable. But Mozart was only one
of a crowd who provided amusement for a gay population;
and a gay population, always a heartless master, holds
none in such contempt as the servants who provide
it with amusement. So Mozart got no respect from
those he served, and his Bohemianism lost him the
respect of the eminently respectable. He lived
in the eighteenth century equivalent of a “loose
set”; he was miserably poor, and presumably never
paid his taxes; we may doubt whether he often went
to church; he composed for the theatre; and he lacked
the self-assertion which enabled Handel, Beethoven,
and Wagner to hold their own. Treated as of no
account, cheated by those he worked for, hardly permitted
to earn his bread, he found life wholly intolerable,
and as he grew older he lived more and more within
himself and gave his thoughts only to the composition
of masterpieces. The crowd of mediocrities dimly
felt him to be their master, and the greater the masterpieces
he achieved the more vehemently did Salieri and his
attendants protest that he was not a composer to compare
with Salieri. The noise impressed Da Ponte, the
libretto-monger, and he asked Salieri to set his best
libretto and gave Mozart only his second best; and
thus by a curious irony stumbled into his immortality
through sheer stupidity, for his second best libretto
was “Don Giovanni”—of all possible
subjects precisely that which a wise man would have
given to Mozart. When Mozart laid down the pen
after the memorable night’s work in which he
transferred the finished overture from his brain to
the paper, he had written the noblest Italian opera
ever conceived; and the world knew it not, yet gradually
came to know. But the full fame of “Don
Giovanni” was comparatively brief, and at this
time there seems to be a hazy notion that its splendours
have waned before the blaze of Wagner, just as the
symphonies are supposed to have faded in the brilliant
light of Beethoven. At lectures on musical history
it is reverently spoken of; but it is seldom sung,
and the public declines to go to hear it; and, though
few persons are so foolish as to admit their sad case,
I suspect that more than a few agree with the sage
critic who told us not long since that Mozart was
Page 38
a little passe now. Is it indeed so?
Well, Mozart lived in the last days of the old world,
and the old world and the thoughts and sentiments
of the old world are certainly a little passes
now. But if you examine “Don Giovanni”
you must admit that the Fifth and Ninth symphonies,
“Fidelio,” “Lohengrin,” the
“Ring,” “Tristan,” and “Parsifal”
have done nothing to eclipse its glories, that while
fresh masterpieces have come forth, “Don Giovanni”
remains a masterpiece amongst masterpieces, that in
a sense it is a masterpiece towards which all other
masterpieces stand in the relation of commentaries
to text. And though this, perhaps, is only to
call it a link in a chain, yet it is curious to note
how very closely other composers have followed Mozart,
and how greatly they are indebted to him. Page
upon page of the early Beethoven is written in the
phraseology of the later Mozart; in nearly every bar
of “Faust,” not to mention “Romeo
and Juliette,” avowedly the fruit of a long study
of “Don Giovanni,” a faint echo of Mozart’s
voice comes to us with the voice of Gounod; Anna’s
cries, “Quel sangue, quella piaga, quel volto,”
with the creeping chromatic chords of the wood-wind,
have the very accent of Isolda’s ’"Tis
I, belov’d,” and the solemn phrase that
follows, in Tristan’s death-scene. Apart
from its influence on later composers, there is surely
no more passionate, powerful, and moving drama in
the world than “Don Giovanni.” Despite
the triviality of Da Ponte’s book, the impetus
of the music carries along the action at a tremendous
speed; the moments of relief occur just when relief
is necessary, and never retard the motion; the climaxes
are piled up with incredible strength and mastery,
and have an emotional effect as powerful as anything
in “Fidelio” and equal to anything in Wagner’s
music-dramas; and most stupendous of all is the finale,
with its tragic blending of the grotesque and the
terrible. Or, if one considers detail, in no
other opera do the characters depict themselves in
every phrase they utter as they do in “Don Giovanni.”
The songs stamp Mozart as the greatest song-writer
who has lived, with the exception of Handel, whose
opera songs are immeasurably beyond all others save
Mozart’s, and a little beyond them. The
mere musicianship is as consummate as Bach’s,
for, like Bach, Mozart possessed that facility which
is fatal to many men, but combined with it a high
sincerity, a greedy thirst for the beautiful, and an
emotional force that prevented it being fatal to him.
For delicacy, subtlety, due brilliancy, and strength,
the orchestral colouring cannot be matched. And
no music is more exclusively its own composer’s,
has less in it of other composers’. Beethoven
is Beethoven plus Mozart, Wagner is Wagner
plus Weber and Beethoven; but from every page
of Mozart’s scores Mozart alone looks at you,
with sad laughter in his eyes, and unspeakable tenderness,
the tenderness of the giants, of Handel, Bach, and
Beethoven, though perhaps Mozart is tenderest of them
Page 39
all. He cannot write a comic scene for a poor
clownish Masetto without caressing him with a divinely
beautiful “Cheto, cheto, mi vo’ star,”
and in presence of death or human distress the strangest,
sweetest things fall from his lips. And finally,
he is always the perfect artist without reproach;
there is nothing wanting and nothing in excess; as
he himself said on one occasion, his scores contain
exactly the right number of notes. This is “Don
Giovanni” as one may see it a century after
its birth: a faultless masterpiece; yet (in England
at least) it only gets an occasional performance,
through the freak of a prima donna, who, as the sage
critic said of Mozart, is undoubtedly “a little
passee now.”
After all, this is hardly surprising. Perfect
art wants perfect listeners, and just now we are much
too eager for excitement, too impatient of mere beauty,
to listen perfectly to perfect music. And there
are other reasons why “Don Giovanni” should
not appeal to this generation. For many years
it was the sport of the prima donna, and conductors
and singers conspired to load it with traditional
Costamongery, until at last the “Don Giovanni”
we knew became an entirely different thing from the
“Don Giovanni” of Mozart’s thought.
Not Giovanni but Zerlina was the principal figure;
the climax of the drama was not the final Statue scene,
but “Batti, batti”; Leporello’s
part was exaggerated until the Statue scene became
a pantomime affair with Leporello playing pantaloon
against Giovanni’s clown. Such an opera
could interest none but an Elephant and Castle audience,
and probably only the beauty of the music prevented
it reaching the Elephant and Castle long ago.
So low had “Don Giovanni” fallen, when,
quite recently, serious artists like Maurel tried to
take it more seriously and restore it to its rightful
place. Only, unfortunately, instead of brushing
away traditions and going back to the vital conception
of Mozart, they sought to modernise it, to convert
it into an early Wagner music-drama. The result
may be seen in any performance at Covent Garden.
The thing becomes a hodge-podge, a mixture of drama,
melodrama, the circus, the pantomime, with a strong
flavouring of blatherskite. The opera is
largely pantomime—it was intended by Mozart
to be pantomime; and the only possible way of doing
it effectively is to accept the pantomime frankly,
but to play it with such force and sincerity that
it is not felt to be pantomime. And the real
finale should be sung afterwards. Probably many
people would go off to catch their trains. But,
after all, Mozart wrote for those who have no trains
to catch when this masterpiece, the masterpiece of
Italian opera, is sung as he intended it to be sung.
Page 40
The Requiem is a very different work. There is
plenty of the gaiety and sunshine of life in “Don
Giovanni.” The Requiem is steeped in sadness
and gloom, with rare moments of fiery exaltation, or
hysterical despair; at times beauty has been almost—almost,
but never quite—driven from Mozart’s
thought by the anguish that tormented him as he wrote.
While speaking of Bach’s “Matthew”
Passion, I have said it “was an appeal, of a
force and poignancy paralleled only in the Ninth symphony,
to the emotional side of man’s nature ... the
aesthetic qualities are subordinated to the utterance
of an overwhelming emotion.” Had I said
“deliberately subordinated” I should have
indicated the main difference as well as the main likeness
between Bach’s masterwork and Mozart’s.
The aesthetic qualities are subordinated to the expression
of an overwhelming emotion in the Requiem, but not
deliberately: unconsciously rather, perhaps even
against Mozart’s will. Bach set out with
the intention of using his art to communicate a certain
feeling to his listeners; Mozart, when he accepted
the order for a Requiem from that mysterious messenger
clad in grey, thought only of creating a beautiful
thing. But he had lately found, to his great
sorrow, that his ways were not the world’s ways,
and fraught with even graver consequences was the world’s
discovery that its ways were not Mozart’s.
Finding all attempts to turn him from his ways fruitless,
the world fought him with contempt, ostracism, and
starvation for weapons; and he lacked strength for
the struggle. There had been a time when he could
retire within himself and live in an ideal world of
Don Giovannis and Figaros. But now body as well
as spirit was over-wearied; spirit and body were not
only tired but diseased; and when he commenced to
work at the Requiem the time was past for making beautiful
things, for his mind was preoccupied with death and
the horror of death—the taste of death was
already in his mouth. Had death come to him as
to other men, he might have met it as other men do,
heroically, or at least calmly, without loss of dignity.
But it came to him coloured and made fearful by wild
imaginings, and was less a thought than an unthinkable
horror. He believed he had been poisoned, and
Count Walsegg’s grey-clad messenger seemed a
messenger sent from another world to warn him of the
approaching finish. As he said, he wrote the
Requiem for himself. In it we find none of the
sunshine and laughter of “Don Giovanni,”
but only a painfully pathetic record of Mozart’s
misery, his despair, and his terror. It is indeed
a stupendous piece of art, and much of it surpassingly
beautiful; but the absorbing interest of it will always
be that it is a “human document,” an autobiographical
fragment, the most touching autobiography ever penned.
Page 41
The pervading note of the whole work is struck at
the beginning of the first number. Had Mozart
seen death as Handel and Bach saw it, as the only
beautiful completion of life, or even as the last opportunity
given to men to meet a tremendous reality and not be
found wanting, he might have written a sweetly breathed
prayer for eternal rest, like the final chorus of
the “Matthew” Passion, or given us something
equal or almost equal to the austere grandeur of the
Dead March in Saul. But he saw death differently,
and in the opening bar of the “Requiem aeternam”
we have only sullen gloom and foreboding, deadly fear
begotten of actual foreknowledge of things to come.
The discord at the fifth bar seems to have given him
the relief gained by cutting oneself when in severe
pain; and how intense Mozart’s pain was may be
estimated by the vigour of the reaction when the reaction
comes; for though the “Te decet hymnus”
is like a gleam of sweet sunshine on black waters,
the melody is immediately snatched up, as it were,
and, by the furious energy of the accompaniment, powerful
harmonic progressions, and movement of the inner parts
(note the tenor ascending to the high G on “orationem"),
made expressive of abnormal glowing ecstasy.
To know Mozart’s mood when he wrote the Requiem
is to have the key to the “Kyrie.”
His artistic sense compelled him to veil the acuteness
of his agony in the strict form of a regular fugue;
but here, as everywhere else in the Requiem, feeling
triumphs over the artistic sense; and by a chromatic
change, of which none but a Mozart or a Bach would
have dreamed, the inexpressive formality of the counter-subject
is altered into a passionate appeal for mercy.
In no other work of Mozart known to me does he ever
become hysterical, and in the Requiem only once, towards
the end of this number, where the sopranos are whirled
up to the high A, and tenors and altos strengthen
the rhythm; and even here the pause, followed by that
scholastic cadence, affords a sense of recovered balance,
though we should observe that the raucous final chord
with the third omitted is in keeping with the colour
of the whole number, and not dragged in as a mere
display of pedantic knowledge. The “Dies
Irae” is magnificent music, but the effect is
enormously intensified by Mozart first (in the “Kyrie”)
making us guess at the picture by the agitation of
mind into which it throws him, and then suddenly opening
the curtain and letting us view for ourselves the
lurid splendours; and surely no more awful picture
of the Judgment was ever painted than we have here
in the “Dies Irae,” “Tuba minim,”
“Rex tremendae,” and the “Confutatis.”
The method of showing the obverse of the medal first,
and then astonishing us with the sudden magnificence
of the other side, is an old one, and was an old one
even in Mozart’s time, but he uses it with supreme
mastery, and results that have never been equalled.
The most astonishing part of the “Confutatis”
is the prayer at the finish, where strange cadence
Page 42
upon cadence falls on the ear like a long-drawn sigh,
and the last, longer drawn than the rest, “gere
curam mei finis,” followed by a hushed pause,
is indeed awful as the silence of the finish.
Quite as great is the effect of the same kind in the
“Agnus Dei,” which was either written by
Mozart, or by Sussmayer with Mozart’s spirit
looking over him. Written by Mozart, the Requiem
necessarily abounds in tender touches: the trebles
at “Dona eis” immediately after their
first entry; the altos at the same words towards the
end of the number, and at the twenty-eighth bar of
the “Kyrie”; the first part of the “Hostias,”
the “Agnus Dei,” the wonderful “Ne
me perdas” in the “Recordare.”
And if one wants sheer strength and majesty, turn
to the fugue on “Quam olim Abrahae,” or
the C natural of the basses in the “Sanctus.”
But the prevailing mood is one of depressing sadness,
which would become intolerable by reason of its monotony
were it possible to listen to the Requiem as a work
of art merely, and not as the tearful confessions
of one of the most beautiful spirits ever born into
the world.
“FIDELIO”
As an enthusiastic lover of “Fidelio”
I may perhaps be permitted to put one or two questions
to certain other of its lovers. Is it an opera
at all?—does it not consist of one wonderfully
touching situation, padded out before and behind,—before
with some particularly fatuous reminiscences of the
old comedy of intrigue, behind with some purely formal
business and a pompous final chorus? “Fidelio”
exists by reason of that one tremendous scene:
there is nothing else dramatic in it: however
fine the music is, one cannot forget that the libretto
is fustian and superfluous nonsense. Had Beethoven
possessed the slightest genius for opera, had he possessed
anything like Mozart’s dramatic instinct (and
of course his own determination to touch nothing but
fitting subjects), he would have felt that no meaner
story than the “Flying Dutchman” would
serve as an opportunity to say all that was aroused
in his heart and in his mind by the tale of Leonora.
As he had no genius whatever for opera, no sense of
the dramatic in life, the tale of Leonora seemed to
him good enough; and, after all, in its essence it
is the same as the tale of Senta. The Dutchman
himself happens to be more interesting than Florestan
because of his weird fate; but he is no more the principal
character in Wagner’s opera than Florestan is
the principal character in Beethoven’s opera.
The principal character in each case is the woman
who takes her fate into her own hands and fearlessly
chances every risk for the sake of the man she loves.
And just as Wagner wrote the best passage in the “Dutchman”
for the moment when Senta promises to be faithful
through life and death, so Beethoven in the prison
scene of “Fidelio” wrote as tremendous
a passage as even he ever conceived for the moment
when Leonora makes up her mind at all costs to save
the life of the wretched prisoner whose grave she is
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helping to dig. The tale is simple enough—there
is scarcely enough of it to call a tale. Leonora’s
husband, Florestan, has somehow fallen into the power
of his enemy Pizarro, who imprisons him and then says
he is dead. Leonora disbelieves this, and, disguising
herself as a boy and taking the name of Fidelio, hires
herself as an assistant to Rocco, the jailer of the
fortress in which Florestan is confined. At that
time the news arrives that an envoy of the king is
coming to see that no injustice is being done by Pizarro.
Pizarro has been hoping to starve Florestan slowly
to death; but now he sees the necessity of more rapid
action. He therefore tells Rocco to dig a grave
in Florestan’s cell, and he himself will do
the necessary murder. This brings about the great
prison scene. Florestan lies asleep in a corner;
Leonora is not sure whether she is helping to dig his
grave or the grave of some other unlucky wretch; but
while she works she takes her resolution—whoever
he may be, she will risk all consequences and save
him. Pizarro arrives, and is about to kill Florestan,
when Leonora presents a pistol to his head; and, before
he has quite had time to recover, a trumpet call is
heard, signalling the arrival of the envoy. Pizarro
knows the game is up, and Florestan that his wife
has saved him. This, I declare, is the only dramatic
scene in the play—here the thing ends:
excepting it, there is no real incident. The
business at the beginning, about the jailer’s
daughter refusing to have anything more to do with
her former sweetheart, and falling in love with the
supposed Fidelio, is merely silly; Rocco’s song,
elegantly translated in one edition, “Life is
nothing without money”—Heaven knows
whether it was intended to be humorous—is
stupid; Pizarro’s stage-villainous song of vengeance
is unnecessary; the arrangement of the crime is a
worry. These, and in fact all that comes before
the great scene, are entirely superfluous, the purest
piffle, very tiresome. Most exasperating of all
is the stupid dialogue, which makes one hope that
the man who wrote it died a painful, lingering death.
But, in spite of it all, Beethoven, by writing some
very beautiful music in the first act, and by rising
to an astonishing height in the prison scene and the
succeeding duet, has created one of the wonders of
the music-world.
Being a glorification of woman—German woman,
although Leonora was presumably Spanish—“Fidelio”
has inevitably become in Germany the haus-frau’s
opera. Probably there is not a haus-frau who faithfully
cooks her husband’s dinner, washes for him, blacks
his boots, and would even brush his clothes did he
ever think that necessary, who does not see herself
reflected in Leonora; probably every German householder
either longs to possess her or believes that he does
possess her. Consequently, just as Mozart’s
“Don Giovanni” became the playground of
the Italian prima donna, so has “Fidelio”
become the playground of that terrible apparition,
Page 44
the Wifely Woman Artist, the singer with no voice,
nor beauty, nor manners, but with a high character
for correct morality, and a pressure of sentimentality
that would move a traction-engine. I remember
seeing it played a few years ago, and can never forget
a Leonora of sixteen stones, steadily singing out
of tune, in the first act professing with profuse
perspiration her devotion to her husband (whose weight
was rather less than half hers), and in the second
act nearly crushing the poor gentleman by throwing
herself on him to show him that she was for ever his.
A recent performance at Covent Garden, arranged specially,
I understand, for Ternina, was not nearly so bad as
that; but still Ternina scared me horribly with the
enormous force of her Wifely Ardour. It may be
that German women are more demonstrative than English
women in public; but, for my poor part, too much public
affection between man and wife always strikes me as
a little false. Besides, the grand characteristic
of Leonora is not that she loves her husband—lots
of women do that, and manage to love other people’s
husbands also—but that, driven at first
by affection and afterwards by purely human compassion,
she is capable of rising to the heroic point of doing
in life what she feels she must do. Of course
she may have been an abnormal combination of the Wifely
Woman with the heroic woman; but one cannot help thinking
that probably she was not—that however
strong her affection for Florestan, she would no sooner
get him home than she would ask him how he came to
be such a fool as to get into Pizarro’s clutches.
Anyhow, Ternina’s conception of Leonora as a
mixture of the contemptible will-less German haus-frau
with the strong-willed woman of action, was to me
a mixture of contradictions. Yet, despite all
these things, the opera made the deep impression it
does and always will make.
That impression is due entirely to the music and not
to the drama. Dramatic music, in the sense that
Mozart’s music, and Wagner’s, is dramatic,
it is not. There is not the slightest attempt
at characterisation—not even such small
characterisation as Mozart secured in his “La
ci darem,” with Zerlina’s little fluttering,
agitated phrases. Nor, in the lighter portions,
is there a trace of Mozart’s divine intoxicating
laughter, of the sweet sad laugh with which he met
the griefs life brought him. There is none of
Mozart’s sunlight, his delicious, fresh, early
morning sunlight, in Beethoven’s music; when
he wrote such a number as the first duet, intended
to be gracefully semi-humorous, he was merely heavy,
clumsy, dull. But when the worst has been said,
when one has writhed under the recollection of an
adipose prima donna fooling with bear-like skittishness
a German tenor whose figure and face bewray the lager
habit, when one has shuddered to remember the long-winded
idiotic dialogue, the fact remains firmly set in one’s
mind that one has stood before a gigantic work of
art—a work whose every defect is redeemed
Page 45
by its overwhelming power and beauty and pathos.
There has never been, nor does it seem possible there
ever will be, a finer scene written than the dungeon
scene. It begins with the low, soft, throbbing
of the strings, then there is the sinister thunderous
roll of the double basses; then the old man quietly
tells Leonora to hurry on with the digging of the
grave, and Leonora replies (against that wondrous phrase
of the oboes). After that, the old man continues
to grumble; the dull threatening thunder of the basses
continues; and Leonora, half terrified, tries to see
whether the sleeping prisoner is her husband.
Then abruptly her courage rises; her short broken phrases
are abandoned; and to a great sweeping melody she
declares that, whoever the prisoner may be, she will
free him. These twenty bars are as great music
as anything in the world: they even leave Senta’s
declaration in the “Dutchman” far behind;
they are at once triumphant and charged with a pathos
nearly unendurable in its intensity. The scene
ends with a strange hushed unison passage like some
unearthly chant: it is the lull before the breaking
of the storm. The entry of Pizarro and the pistol
business are by no means done as Wagner or Mozart
would have done them. The music is always excellent
and sometimes great, but persistently symphonic and
not dramatic in character. However, it serves;
and the strength of the situation carries one on until
the trumpet call is heard, and then we get a wonderful
tune such as neither Mozart nor Wagner could have written—a
tune that is sheer Beethoven. The finale of the
scene is neither here nor there; but in the duet between
Leonora and Florestan we have again pure Beethoven.
There is one passage—it begins at bar 32—which
is the expression of the very soul of the composer;
one feels that if it had not come his heart must have
burst. I have neither space nor inclination to
rehearse all the splendours of the opera, but may
remind the reader of Florestan’s song in the
dungeon, Leonora’s address to Hope, and the
hundred other fine things spread over it. It
is symphonic, not dramatic, music; but it is at times
unspeakably pathetic, at times full of radiant strength,
and always an absolutely truthful utterance of sheer
human emotion. Wagner hit exactly the word when
he spoke of the truthful Beethoven: here
is no pose, no mere tone-weaving, but the precise
and most poignant expression of the logical course
taken by the human passions.
SCHUBERT
Excepting during his lifetime and for a period of
some thirty years after his death, Schubert cannot
be said to have been neglected; and last year there
was quite an epidemic of concerts to celebrate the
hundredth anniversary of his birth. Centenary
celebrations are often a little disconcerting.
They remind one that a composer has been dead either
a much shorter or a much longer time than one supposed;
and one gets down Riemann’s “Musical Dictionary”
Page 46
and realises with a sigh that the human memory is
treacherous. Who, for instance, that is familiar
with Schubert’s music can easily believe that
it is a hundred years since the composer was born
and seventy since he died? It is as startling
to find him, as one might say, one of the ancients
as it is to remember that Spohr lived until comparatively
recent times; for whereas Spohr’s music is already
older than Beethoven’s, older than Mozart’s,
in many respects quite as old as Haydn’s, much
of Schubert’s is as modern as Wagner’s,
and more modern than a great deal that was written
yesterday. This modernity will, I fancy, be readily
admitted by everyone; and it is the only one quality
of Schubert’s music which any two competent
people will agree to admit. Liszt had the highest
admiration for everything he wrote; Wagner admired
the songs, but wondered at Liszt’s acceptance
of the chamber and orchestral music. Sir George
Grove outdoes Liszt in his Schubert worship; and an
astonishing genius lately rushed in, as his kind always
does, where Sir George would fear to tread, boldly,
blatantly asserting that Schubert is “the greatest
musical genius that the Western world has yet produced.”
On the other hand, Mr. G. Bernard Shaw out-Wagners
Wagner in denunciation, and declares the C symphony
childish, inept, mere Rossini badly done. Now,
I can understand Sir George Grove’s enthusiasm;
for Sir George to a large extent discovered Schubert;
and disinterested art-lovers always become unduly
excited about any art they have discovered: for
example, see how excited Wagner became about his own
music, how rapt Mr. Dolmetsch is in much of the old
music. But I can understand Wagner’s attitude
no better than I can the attitude of Mr. Shaw.
I should like to have met Wagner and have said to him,
“My dear Richard, this disparaging tone is not
good enough: where did you get the introduction
to ’The Valkyrie’?—didn’t
that long tremolo D and the figure in the bass both
come out of ‘The Erl-king’? has your Spear
theme nothing in common with the last line but one
of ’The Wanderer’? or—if it
is only the instrumental music you object to—did
you learn nothing for the third act of ‘The Valkyrie’
from the working-out of the Unfinished Symphony? did
you know that Schubert had used your Mime theme in
a quartet before you? do you know that I could mention
a hundred things you borrowed from Schubert? Go
to, Richard: be fair.” Having extinguished
Richard thus, and made his utter discomfiture doubly
certain by handing him a list of the hundred instances,
I should turn to Mr. Shaw and say, “My good G.B.S.,
you understand a good deal about politics and political
economy, Socialism, and Fabians, painting and actors
[and so on, with untrue and ill-natured remarks ad
lib.], but evidently you understand very little
about Schubert. That ‘Rossini crescendo’
is as tragic a piece of music as ever was written.”
Yet, after dismissing the twain in this friendly manner,
I should have an uneasy feeling that there was some
Page 47
good reason for their lack of enthusiasm for Schubert.
The very fact of there being such wide disagreement
about the value of music that is now so familiar to
us all, points to some weakness in it which some of
us feel less than others; and I, poor unhappy mortal,
who in my unexcited moments neither place Schubert
among the highest gods, like Liszt and Sir George
Grove, nor damn him cordially, like Wagner and Mr.
Shaw, cannot help perceiving that along with much that
is magnificently strong, distinguished, and beautiful
in his music, there is much that is pitiably weak,
and worse than commonplace. The music is like
the man—the oddest combination of greatness
and smallness that the world has seen. Like Wagner
and Beethoven, Schubert was strong enough to refuse
to earn an honest living; yet he yielded miserably
to publishers when discussing the number of halfpence
he should receive for a dozen songs. He had energy
enough to go on writing operas, but apparently not
intelligence to see that his librettos were worth
setting, or to ensure that anything should come of
them when they were set. He thought, rightly or
wrongly, that he needed more counterpoint, yet continued
to compose symphonies and masses without it, vaguely
intending to the very end to take lessons from a sound
teacher. He had spirit enough to fall in love
(so far as stories may be relied on), but not to make
the lady promise to marry him, nor yet resolutely
to cure himself of his affliction. He had courage
to face the truth, as he saw it, and he found life
bitter, and not worth enduring; yet he could not renounce
it, like Beethoven, nor end it as others have done.
As in actual life, so in his music; having once started
anything, he seemed quite unable to make up his mind
to fetch it to a conclusion. He was like a man
who lets himself roll down a hill because it is easier
to keep on rolling than to stop. He repeats his
melodies interminably, and then draws a double bar
and sets down the two fatal dots which mean that all
has to be played again. If the repeat had not
been a favourite resort of lazy composers before his
time he would have invented it, not because he was
lazy, but because he wanted to go on and could not
afford infinite music-paper. Hence his music
at its worst is the merest drivel ever set down by
a great composer; hence at anything but its best it
lacks concentrated passion and dramatic intensity;
more than any other composer’s it has one prevailing
note, a note of deepest melancholy; and therefore,
when a few pieces are known, most of the rest seem
barren of what is wanted by those who seek chiefly
in music the expression of all the human passions.
Page 48
Of his lengthiness, his discursiveness, Schubert might
possibly have been cured, but not of his melancholy:
it is the very essence of his music, as it was of
his being. “The Wanderer” is his typical
song: he was himself the wanderer, straying disconsolately,
helplessly, hopelessly through a strange, chilly,
unreal world, singing the saddest and sometimes the
sweetest songs that ever entered the ears of men.
That his home and his happiness lay close at hand counts
for nothing; for he did not and could not know that
he was the voice of the eighteenth century, worn out
and keenly sensible of the futility of the purely
intellectual life. Even had he arrived at a consciousness
of the truth that the cure for his despair lay in
throwing over the antiquated forms, modes, and ideas
of the eighteenth century and living a nineteenth
century life, free and conscienceless in nature’s
way, he would have been little better off; for the
tendencies of many generations remained strong in him;
and besides, had he the physical energy for a free,
buoyant, joyous existence, was he not physiologically
unfit for happiness? He lived with an ever-present
consciousness of his impotence to satisfy his deepest
needs. He was even destitute of that sense of
the immeasurable good to come which of old time found
expression in the fiction of a personal immortality,
and in the nineteenth century in the complacent acceptance
of full and vigorous life, with death as a noble and
fitting close. Life and death alike were tragic,
because hopeless, to Schubert. His career, if
career it can be called, is infinitely touching.
His helplessness moves one to pity, odd though it seems
that one in some ways so strong should also in so
many ways be so weak; and his death was as touching
as his life. Of all the composers he met death
with least heroism. Mozart, it is true, shrieked
hysterically; but death to his diseased mind was merely
an indescribable horror; and the fact of his hysteria
proves his revolt against fate. Beethoven, during
a surgical operation shortly before the end, saw the
stream of water and blood flowing from him, and found
courage to say, “Better from the belly than
the pen;” and as he lay dying and a thunderstorm
broke above the house, he threatened it with his clenched
fist. Schubert learnt that he was to die, and
turned his face to the wall and did not speak again.
It is hard to say whether his music was sadder when
he sang of death than when he sang of life. Even
in his rare moments of good spirits one catches stray
echoes of his prevailing note, and realises how completely
his despair dominated him. He could not sing
of love or fighting or of the splendours of nature
without betraying his deep conviction of the futility
of all created things. It is characteristic that
his major melodies should often be as sad and wailing
as his minor, and that his scherzos and other movements,
in which he has deliberately set out to be light-hearted,
should often be ponderous and without the nervous
energy he manifests when he gives his familiar feelings
free play.
Page 49
Despite its incessant plaintive accent, his music
is saved by the endless flow of melody, often lovely,
generally characteristic, though sometimes common,
in which Schubert continually expressed anew his one
mood; and he was placed among the great ones by the
miraculous facility he possessed of extemporising
frequent passages of extraordinary power and bigness.
At least half of his songs are poor—for
a composer capable of rising to such heights; but of
the remainder at least half are nearly equal to any
songs in the world for sweetness, strength, and accurate
expressiveness, while a few approach so close to Handel’s
and Mozart’s that affection for the composer
presses one hard to put them on the same level.
But, compared with those high standards, Schubert,
even at his best, is unmistakably felt to be second-rate,
while his average—always comparing it with
the highest—cannot truly be said to be
more than fourth-rate. That he stands far above
Mendelssohn and Schumann, and perhaps a little above
Weber, almost goes without saying; for those composers
have no more of the great style, the style of Handel
and Mozart, and Bach and Beethoven at their finest,
than Schubert, and they lack the lovely irresistibly
moving melody and the bigness. But it must be
recognised that Schubert never rose to a style of
sustained grandeur and dignity; he was always colloquial,
paying in this the penalty for the extreme facility
with which he composed ("I compose every morning, and
when I have finished one thing I commence something
fresh"). Compose is scarcely the word to use:
he never composed in the ordinary sense of the word;
he extemporised on paper. Even when he re-wrote
a song, it meant little more than that, dissatisfied
with his treatment of a theme, he tried again.
He never built as, for instance, Bach and Beethoven
built, carefully working out this detail, lengthening
this portion, shearing away that, evolving part from
part so that in the end the whole composition became
a complete organism. There is none of the logic
in his work that we find in the works of the tip-top
men, none of the perfect finish; but, on the contrary,
a very considerable degree of looseness, if not of
actual incoherence, and many marks of the tool and
a good deal of the scaffolding. But, in spite
of it all, the greatness of many of his movements
seems to me indisputable. In a notice of “The
Valkyrie,” Mr. Hichens once very happily spoke
of the “earth-bigness” of some of the
music, and this is the bigness I find in Schubert
at his best and strongest. When he depicts the
workings of nature—the wind roaring through
the woods, the storm above the convent roof, the flash
of the lightning, the thunderbolt—he does
not accomplish it with the wonderful point and accuracy
of Weber, nor with the ethereal delicacy of Purcell,
but with a breadth, a sympathy with the passion of
nature, that no other composer save Wagner has ever
attained to. He views natural phenomena through
a human temperament, and so infuses human emotion
Page 50
into natural phenomena, as Wagner does in “The
Valkyrie” and “Siegfried.” The
rapidly repeated note, now rising to a roar and now
falling to a subdued murmur, in “The Erl-king”
was an entirely new thing in music; and in “The
Wanderer” piano fantasia, the working-out of
the Unfinished symphony, and even in some of the chamber
music, he invented things as fresh and as astounding.
And when he is simply expressing himself, as at the
beginning of the Unfinished, and in the first and
last movements of the big C symphony, he often does
it on the same large scale. The second subject
of the C symphony finale, with its four thumps, seems
to me to become in its development, and especially
in the coda, all but as stupendous an expression of
terror as the music in the last scene of “Don
Giovanni,” where Leporello describes the statue
knocking at the door. In short, when I remember
Schubert’s grandest passages, and the unspeakable
tenderness of so many of his melodies, it is hard to
resist the temptation to cancel all the criticism
I have written and to follow Sir George Grove in placing
Schubert close to Beethoven.
WEBER AND WAGNER
There are critics, I suppose, prepared to insist that
Weber, like Mozart, is a little passe now.
And it is true that no composer, save Mozart, is at
once so widely accepted and so seldom heard; for even
Bach is more frequently played and less generally praised.
At rare intervals Richter, Levi, or Mottl play his
overtures; the pieces for piano and orchestra are
occasionally dragged out to display the prowess of
a Paderewski or a Sauer; and one or another of the
piano sonatas sometimes finds its way into a Popular
Concert programme. But the pieces thus made familiar
to the public may be counted on one’s ten fingers;
and the operas are scarcely sung at all, though they
contain the finest music that Weber wrote. The
composers who have lived since Weber, even if they
differed on every other subject and did not agree
as to the value of his instrumental music, united to
sing a common song in praise of the operas. Indeed,
so enthusiastic were they, that after listening to
them anyone who does not know his Weber well may easily
experience a certain disappointment on looking carefully
for the first time at the scores of “Der Freischuetz,”
“Oberon,” and “Euryanthe”;
and it is perhaps because they have experienced that
disappointment, that some critics whose opinions are
worth considering have come to think that a faith in
Weber is nothing more than a part of the creed learned
by every honest Wagnerite at the Master’s knee.
But it need be nothing so foolish, so baseless If you
look, and look rightly, for the right thing in Weber’s
music, disappointment is impossible; though I admit
that the man who professes to find there the great
qualities he finds in Mozart, Beethoven, or any of
the giants, must be in a very sad case. Grandeur,
pure beauty, and high expressiveness are alike wanting.
Page 51
You look as vainly for such touches as the divine
last dozen bars “Or sai chi l’onore”
in “Don Giovanni,” or the deep emotion
of the sobbing bass at “the first fruits of
them that sleep” in “I know that my Redeemer
liveth,” as for the stately splendour of “Come
and thank Him” in the “Christmas Oratorio,”
or the passion of “Tristan.” His music
never develops in step with the movement of the drama
he treats: if he writes a tragic scene, he is
apt to commence with a scream; and if he is not at
his best, then the scream may degenerate into a whimper
before the moment for the climax has arrived.
Like Spohr, with whom he had much in common, despite
the difference between his mercurial temperament and
the pedagogic gravity of the composer of “The
Last Judgment,” he set great store upon his
learning, and was fond of trivial themes that admitted
of obvious contrapuntal treatment. Even when
he avoided that failing, his music is often uncouth
and ponderous, while on its surface lies a superfluous,
highly-coloured froth. The basses move with leaden-footed
reluctance; the melodies consist largely of ineffective
arpeggios on long-drawn chords; the embroidery seems
greatly in excess of modest needs. All this may
be conceded without affecting Weber’s claim
to a place amongst the composers; for that claim is
supported in a lesser degree by the gifts which he
shared, even if his share was small, with the greater
masters of music, than by his miraculous power of
vividly drawing and painting in music the things that
kindled his imagination. Drawing and painting,
I say; for whereas the other musicians sang the emotions
that they experienced, Weber’s music gives you
the impression that he depicted the things he saw,
that melody and harmony were to him as lines and colours
to the painter. He is first, and perhaps greatest,
of all the musicians who have attempted landscape;
and that froth of seemingly superfluous colour and
excess of melodic embroidery, instead of being in
excess and superfluous, are the very essence of his
music. Being a factor of the Romantic movement,
that mighty rebellion against the tyranny of a world
of footrules and ledgers, he lived and worked in a
world where two and two might make five or seven or
any number you pleased, and where footrules were unknown;
he took small interest in drama taken out of the lives
of ordinary men and enacted amidst everyday surroundings;
his imagination lit up only when he thought of haunted
glens and ghouls and evil spirits, the fantastic world
and life that goes on underneath the ocean, or of
men or women held by ghastly spells. Hence his
operas are not so much musical dramas as series of
tableaux, gorgeous glowing pictures of unheard-of things;
in them we must expect only to find the elfish, the
fantastic, the wild and weird and grotesquely horrible;
and to look for drama, captivating loveliness, and
emotional utterance, is to look for qualities which
Weber did not try to attain, or only in a small measure
Page 52
and not very successfully. And if we consider
carefully the remarks of the best critics amongst
the later masters, Berlioz and Wagner, we can see that
they knew Weber had not attained these high qualities,—that
what they grew enthusiastic over was his astonishing
pictorial gift, shown, first, in the pictures his
imagination presented to him, and second, in the way
he projected those pictures on to the music-paper before
him, using the common musician’s devices of his
day to suggest line, colour, space, and atmosphere.
The precise provocation of this essay was a certain
performance of “Lohengrin.” During
the first act the drama proceeded with charming, almost
Mozartean, smoothness; and I was surprised to find
that the smoother it went the more irresistibly the
music reminded me of Weber, until I remembered that
“Lohengrin” is Wagner’s most Weberish
opera, and that in his youth Wagner heard Weber sung,
not as he is sung now—that is, like an
early Wagner music-drama—but as Weber intended
it to be sung, like a later Mozart opera. For
Weber stood very near to Mozart, modern as he often
seems. He was born before Mozart died; he worshipped
him, and absolutely refused to speak to Salieri because
Salieri had been Mozart’s enemy; and it is easy
to see, when once we rid ourselves of the idea that
he was a rudimentary music-dramatist, that in his
music he adhered as closely to Mozartean simplicity
as his very different genius would permit. Perhaps,
after all, it is his greatest glory that he is the
connecting link between Mozart and Wagner, between
the greatest composer born into the eighteenth century
and the greatest born into the nineteenth; for the
musical-pictorial art which he evolved from Mozart’s
technique was used by Wagner with only the slightest
modifications in the making of his music-dramas.
But whereas Weber was a factor in the Romantic movement
when it was most magnificently unreasonable, Wagner
came later, and, though he felt the force of the current,
it did not carry him into the absurdities that weaken—for
they do weaken—much of Weber’s work.
Wagner has been described as Weber, as Weber might
have become; but the truth is that he was Weber’s
younger brother, who took Weber’s art and used
it to nobler ends with a degree of intellect, dramatic
power, invention, and passion which Weber did not
possess. To Weber the scenery was the important
thing, and humanity almost seemed to be dragged in
because the human voice was indispensable; but Wagner,
going back to Mozart, restored humanity to its proper
place, thus making his opera into real drama, and
kept the fantastic creatures who haunted Weber’s
woods and glens and streams only as emblems of the
natural forces that war for or against humanity.
Above all, he got rid of Weber’s stage villains—for
Samiel is merely the stage villain of commerce; and,
instead of the dusk and shadow in which Weber’s
fancy loved to roam, he gives us sunlight and the
sweet air. “Lohengrin” is full of
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sunlight and freshness; full, too, of a finer mystery
than ever Weber dreamed of—the mystery
with which the most delicate German imagination invested
the broad rivers that flowed through the black forests
from some far-away land of unchangeable stillness and
beauty, some “land of eternal dawn,” as
Wagner calls it. No more Mozartean music is in
existence, save Mozart’s own, than that first
act of “Lohengrin,” where Wagner, by dint
of being Weberish, came nearer to Mozart than ever
Weber came; for Weber never wrote anything which,
regarded as absolute music, apart from its emotional
significance, or the picture it suggests to the inner
eye, is so purely beautiful as, for instance, the
bit of chorus sung after Lohengrin concludes his little
arrangement with Elsa. Both the first and the
second acts are full of such melodies, any two of
which would prove Wagner to be the greatest melody-writer
of the century; and those critics who say that Verdi
is greater because his melodies are more like Mozart’s
in form, would have said, had they lived last century,
that Salieri was greater than Mozart because Salieri’s
melodies were more like Hasse’s in form.
Perhaps the last act might be quite as exquisite on
the stage, for it is even more exquisite in the score;
but that we shall not know until our operatic singers
abandon their vanity and their melodrama, and by reading
an occasional book, and sometimes going out into the
world, learn how much they themselves would gain if
they always worked with artistic sincerity.
ITALIAN OPERA, DEAD AND DYING
All art forms are conventions, and all conventions
appear ridiculous when they are superseded by new
ones. The old Italian opera form is laughed at
to-day as an absurdity by Wagnerians, who see nothing
absurd in a many-legged monster with a donkey’s
head uttering deep bass curses through a speaking-trumpet;
and perhaps to-morrow the Wagnerian music-drama and
the many-legged monsters will be laughed at by the
apostles of a new and equally absurd convention.
It is absolutely the first condition of the existence
of an art that one shall be prepared to tolerate things
ludicrously unlike anything to be found in real life;
and when (for instance) you have swallowed the camel
of allowing the heroes and heroines to sing their woes
at all, it is a little foolish to strain at the gnat
of permitting them to sing in this rather than in
that way, when both ways are alike preposterous.
It is not, therefore, on the score of its inherent
absurdity that I should throw brickbats at Italian
opera, any more than with the female dress of to-day
before my eyes I should insist that the women who
wore the fashions of ten years ago were only fit to
be incarcerated in a lunatic asylum; knowing, as I
do, that the dress of ten years ago was not—and
could not be—more absurd than the dress
of to-day. The only reasonable objection that
can be brought against Italian opera is that when
it is sincere it offers what no one wants, and that
when it tries to offer what everyone wants it is not
sincere. I cannot quite understand what this
means, but will endeavour to explain.
Page 54
Italian opera was moulded to its present form chiefly
by Gluck, before whose time it was less irrational
than it became later. In the beginning it was
music-drama of a pedantic kind; then it served as the
opportunity for setting singers to deliver a series
of beautiful songs for the delectation of an audience
largely seated in the wings; and finally Gluck, with
his immense dramatic instinct and lack of lyrical
invention, saw that by securing a story worth the telling,
and telling it well, and inserting songs and concerted
pieces only in situations where strong feelings demanded
expression, and making his songs truthful expressions
of those feelings, a form might be created which would
enable him to lever out the best that was in him.
Of these three periods of opera, the second was the
luckiest; for then the form entirely fulfilled its
purpose. The sole function of the story was to
provide a motive for song after song; so that no one
was scandalised or moved to laughter when the death
of the hero was re-enacted because his death-song
pleased the audience, or when the telling of the story
was interrupted on any other equally ridiculous pretext.
The characters were the merest puppets, or shadows
of puppets; and there was no reason why Julius Caesar
should not be a male soprano and sing charmingly feminine
florid airs. In a word, there was no drama nor
pretence of drama in the old Italian form; and those
who can accept it as it is will find in many old Italian
writers some perfect music of its sort, and in the
Italian operas of Handel the divinest songs ever written—songs
even more divine than Mozart’s. But the
childish delight in lovely melodies and in absolute
perfection of vocal art, at its highest in the early
part of the eighteenth century, died out rapidly after
1750; and Italian opera became the medium of the vulgarest
instead of the most refined kind of ear-tickling.
How Gluck rebelled, and determined to “reform”
the opera stage, and how in reforming it he was impelled
to a large extent by a desire to find a medium through
which he could express himself, are matters well enough
known to everyone nowadays. Like every other teacher,
he left no disciples; for Mozart, the next master
of Italian opera, was a hundred thousand miles away
from him in intention, in method, and in achievement.
He commenced where Gluck ended his pre-Reformation
period; and all his life his intention was to please
first, and only in the second place to express himself.
But so splendid were his gifts, so inevitably did
he fit the lovely word to the thrilling thought, so
lucky was he in the libretto of “Don Giovanni”
(the luckiest libretto ever devised), that he went
clean ahead not only of Gluck but of Beethoven and
every composer who has written opera since.
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His operas stand at the parting of the ways.
In them we find the fullest measure of dramatic truth
combined with the most delicious ear-tickling.
But it is safe to say that Mozart is the only composer
of Italian operas who ever succeeded in combining the
two things thus, for in Gluck there is short measure
of sheer beauty, and in Handel—who used
the oldest form—no attempt at drama.
Mozart, like Gluck, had no disciples—only
the second-rate men have disciples; but their example,
and the tendency which they represented, had a curious
result. Before their time all opera-writers had
been avowed ear-ticklers. But after them, and
especially after Mozart, the old line of composers
may be observed to have split up into two lines, the
one doing the old ear-tickling business, the other
trying to express dramatic movement, and their thought
and feeling, in the old medium. The first of
these lines has not been broken to this day: Rossini
came, and, after Rossini, Donizetti, Auber, Bellini,
Meyerbeer, and the rest; and ear-tickler follows ear-tickler
unto this day. The second line in its turn quickly
split into those who, not content with the form, sought
to alter it, and those who, quite content with it,
went gaily on, turning out opera after opera, dealing
with modern subjects in the old-fashioned way.
Of these last Gounod must be reckoned the chief; and
he began, not where Mozart left off, but with the
Mozartean method of the “Don Giovanni”
period. Now, it is of the very essence of the
Italian opera of the Gluck-cum-Mozart model that it
enables a composer to represent moments. The drama
does not unfold gradually, as it does in the music-play,
with its continuous flow of music marking the subtlest
changes. It unfolds in jerks, each number advancing
it a stage; so that Gluck never got any appearance
of continuity whatever, while Mozart got it only by
the consummate tact with which he arranged his pictures,
and by the exciting pace at which he passes them before
us. The figures seem to move, as in the Kinetoscope,
or its forerunner the Wheel of Life: the Mozartean
opera, when most dramatic, is a musical Wheel of Life.
Gounod possessed neither Mozart’s tact nor his
fiery energy. Neither was called for in “Faust,”
which is not a drama, but a series of scenes, of crucial
moments, from a drama; and since the moments were moments
charged with the one feeling which Gounod appears
to have felt very strongly or to have had the faculty
for expressing, he is here at his very best.
There was nothing spiritual in love as Gounod knew
it—it was purely animal, though delicately
animal; and Marguerite remains, and will remain, as
the final expression of the most refined and voluptuous
form of sensuality. What he had done in “Faust”
he attempted to do again, with sundry differences,
in “Romeo and Juliet”; and here the method
which had served him so faithfully and so well in “Faust”
utterly broke down. In “Faust” there
were virtually but two characters, Faust and Marguerite,
Page 56
while in “Romeo” the stage was encumbered
with Tybalt, Capulet, Mercutio, Laurent; and what would
have been Mozart’s opportunity was his undoing.
He could give none of them pungent or characteristic
language; they are the merest Italian operatic puppets;
and it is only when they are off the stage that the
opera shows any signs of life. In the story of
“Romeo” the passion is of a far more fiery
quality than in that of “Faust”; and whereas
in “Faust” the passion, once aroused,
remains at an even level until the finale, where it
becomes a little more intense, in “Romeo”
it is passion which gradually amounts to a tremendous
climax in the Balcony scene, and in the Bedroom scene
is strangely blended with chilly forebodings of death.
The Mozartean method did not permit Gounod to depict
these metamorphoses and blendings of feeling.
Mozart himself would have been hard pressed to do
it; and, for want of the only method that might have
enabled Gounod to do it,—the Wagnerian method
of continuous development of typical themes,—the
unfolding of the drama hangs fire in every scene,
not a scene ends at a higher pitch of feeling than
it began. The last scene of all, the scene where
a more sincere composer would have made his most stupendous
effect, demanded at least sympathy with emotions for
which Gounod at no time showed the slightest sympathy.
He could give us the erotic fervour with which Romeo
looks death in the eyes, but the mood preceding and
indeed leading up to that fervour he could not give
us—the mood which finds the world barren,
ugly, and so repellent that death itself appears beautiful
by comparison, the mood to which Christianity makes
its strongest appeal. But it was not the subject
which led to Gounod’s failure in “Romeo
and Juliet.” He failed in every opera excepting
“Faust,” and he failed because, lacking
perfect sincerity and perfect knowledge of his own
powers, he endeavoured to express feelings he had
never experienced, in a form which he would have felt
at once to be inadequate had he experienced them for
ever so brief a moment. As Gounod failed in “Romeo,”
and failed in every other opera, so every modern composer
who tries to treat dramatic subjects in the old undramatic
form has failed, and will fail. The Italian opera
was well enough for the purpose it was devised to
serve; but as soon as composers seek to put strenuous
action, elaborately worked-out situations, and the
gradual growth and change of human passion into it,
we feel that there must be a lack of artistic sincerity
somewhere. Italian opera may offer all these
things, the things that the age wants in its opera,
but it can never be sincere in offering them, and
art is the one place where insincerity is intolerable.
Page 57
But those who have heard “Romeo and Juliet”
may possibly prefer even the insincere and unsatisfactory
form of Italian opera which it represents to the perfectly
sincere and perfectly satisfactory kind represented,
say, by “La Favorita.” For, as I said,
when Italian opera is sincere it offers what no one
wants—ear-tickling, and ear-tickling, moreover,
of a sort which is gone completely out of fashion.
Donizetti was a genuine descendant of the true line
of opera-composers upon whom Gluck laid his curse,
and he spent his life in devising pleasant noises
to make his patrons’ evenings pass agreeably.
I cannot believe that anyone ever yet understood what
“La Favorita” is all about, or that anyone
ever wanted to understand. It is a series of
songs of the inanest and insanest sort, without a
single expressive bar, or a single tone-pattern which
is beautiful regarded simply as a pattern. Even
the famous “Spirito Gentil” is merely
a stream of the brackish water that flowed, day and
night, from Donizetti’s pen, only it happens
to be a little clearer than usual. But those
tunes, so feeble and insipid now, pleased the ears
of the time when Lord Steyne went to the opera for
a momentary respite from boredom and to recruit his
harem from the ballet corps; and Donizetti wrote them
with no intention of posing as a grand composer, but
simply as a humble purveyor of sweetmeats. In
those days there was no music-hall, and the opera
had to serve its purpose: hence the slight confusion
which results in Donizetti, poor soul, being thought
a better man than Mr. Jacobi is thought at the present
time, although Mr. Jacobi cannot have less than a
thousand times Donizetti’s brains and invention.
Mr. Jacobi’s music is capital in its place; but
I doubt whether it will be revived fifty years hence;
and but for the fact that Donizetti was an opera-composer—and
Mozart and Gluck were opera-composers too!—it
is pretty certain that not the united prayers of Patti,
Albani, Melba, and Eames would induce any operatic
management to resurrect “La Favorita.”
Even up-to-date ear-tickling is not popular now in
the opera-house: we go to the music-hall for it;
and we don’t want to pay a guinea at the opera
to be tickled in a way that arouses no pleasurable
sensations. Those terrific tonic and dominant
passages for the trombones, sounding like the furious
sawing of logs of wood, only make us laugh; and pretty
tootlings of the flutes have long been done better,
and overdone, elsewhere. Donizetti is amongst
the dead whom no resurrection awaits.
VERDI YOUNG, AND VERDI YOUNGER
And first, for the sake of chronology, Verdi younger.
“La Traviata” was produced in 1853, says
the learned Grove, which I have consulted on the point,
and “Aida” not till 1871. And though
Verdi was not young, for an ordinary man, in 1871,
he was very young indeed for the composer of “Falstaff”
and “Otello”; while in the “Traviata”
period one can scarcely say he was doing more than
Page 58
cutting his teeth, and not his wisdom teeth.
One finds it difficult to understand how ever the
thing came to be tolerated by musicians. Of course
the desire to find a counter-blast to Wagner has done
much for Verdi; but while one can understand how Dr.
Stanford and others hoped to sweep away “Parsifal”
with “Otello” and “Falstaff,”
it is not so easy to see what on earth they proposed
to do with “Traviata.” It won fame
and cash for its composer in the old days when people
went to the opera for lack of the music-hall, not
yet invented; when Costa still lorded it not over
living musical London merely, but over all the deceased
masters, and without compunction added trombones to
Mozart’s scores, and defiled every masterwork
he touched with his unspeakable Costamongery; when
Wagner was either unheard of or regarded as a dangerous
lunatic and immoral person; and it shows every sign
of having been written to please the opera-goers of
those days. Curiously, the critics of the time,
in the words of the “Daily Telegraph,”
saw in “the Bayreuth master another form of
Bunyan’s man with the muck-rake,” who “never
sought to disguise the garbage he found in the Newgate
Calendar of Mythland, or set his imagination to invent,”
and they were disgusted, also like the “Daily
Telegraph,” by “approaching incest”
in “The Valkyrie”; yet they saw no harm
whatever in the charming story of “Traviata”—the
story of a harlot who reforms to the extent of retaining
only one lover of her many, and who dies of consumption
when that one’s father does his best to drive
her out upon the streets again by making her give
up his son. Far from condemning the story myself,
I am glad Verdi or his employers had the courage to
go boldly to Dumas for it; only, let us be cautious
how we condemn the morality of other opera-stories
while praising the immorality of this. Let us
see how Verdi has handled it. The opera is built
after the same hybrid model as Gounod’s “Romeo”;
it is neither frankly the old Italian opera, existing
for the sake of its songs, nor the later form in which
the songs exist for the sake of the drama, but an attempt
to combine the songs with the continuous working out
of a dramatic impulse in the modern manner. But
the attempt is far less successful than in “Romeo”;
and indeed it is a faint-hearted one. Whenever
a song occurs, the action is suspended, and all the
actors save the lucky vocalist of the minute are at
their wits’ end to know where to look, and what
to do with their hands, feet—their whole
persons in fact—and the parts they are
playing. And the songs are far from being expressive
of the feeling of the situation that is supposed to
call them up. The drinking tune in the first
act is lively and appropriate enough; and not much
more can be said against Violetta’s song, “Ah!
fors’ e lui,” than that while rather pretty
its endless cadenzas are more than rather absurd.
But in the next act Alfredo sings of the dream of his
life to a pretty melody until he is interrupted by
Page 59
his sweetheart’s maid, who tells him that his
joy is at an end, and then he howls “O mio rimorso”
to a march-tune of the rowdiest kind. Equally
undramatic, untrue, false in feeling, are the sentimental
ditties sung by Alfredo’s father. The last
act is best; but I must say that I have always found
it a tedious business to watch Albani die of consumption.
At the production of the piece, a soprano who must
have looked quite as healthy played Violetta, and
it is recorded that, when the doctor told how rapidly
she was wasting away and announced her speedy decease,
the theatre broke into uproarious merriment. I
respect Madame Albani too highly to break into uproarious
merriment at her pretence of consumption; but no one
is better pleased when the business is over, although
the music is more satisfactory here than in any other
portion of the opera. Anyone who has sat at night
with a friend down with toothache or cholera will
recognise the atmosphere of the sickroom at once.
But it is not pleasant enough to atone for the rest
of the opera. For, to sum up, there is small interest
in the drama, and, on the whole, smaller beauty in
the music, of “La Traviata.” It was
made, as bonnets were made, to sell in the fifties;
like the bonnets sold in the fifties, it is hopelessly
out of date now; and it wants the inherent vitality
that keeps the masterworks alive after the fashion
in which they were written has passed away. The
younger Verdi is not, after all, so vast an improvement
on Donizetti and Bellini. His melodies are too
often sadly sentimental, and any freshness with which
he may have endowed them has long since faded.
True, they occasionally have a terseness and pungency,
a sheer brute force, which those other composers never
got into their insipid tunes; while, on the other
hand, Verdi rarely shows his strength without also
showing a degree of vulgarity from which Bellini and
Donizetti were for the most part free.
“Aida” is a different matter, though not
so very different a matter. Here we have the
young Verdi—Verdi in his early prime, for
he was only fifty-eight; here also we have a story
more likely to stir his rowdy imagination, if not
more susceptible of effective treatment in the young
Verdi manner. The misfortune is that the book
is a very excerebrose affair. The drama does
not begin until the third act: the two first
are yawning abysms of sheer dulness. Who wants
to see that Radames loves Aida, that Amneris,
the king’s daughter, loves Radames, that Aida,
a slave, is the daughter of the King of the Ethiopians,
that Radames goes on a war expedition against that
king, beats him and fetches him back a prisoner, that
the other king gives Radames his daughter in marriage,
that Radames, highly honoured, yet wishes to goodness
he could get out of it somehow? A master of drama
would begin in the third act, reveal the whole past
in a pregnant five minutes, and then hold us breathless
while we watched to see whether Radames would yield
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to social pressure, marry Amneris, and throw over
Aida, or yield to passion, fly with Aida, and throw
over his country. All this shows the bad influence
of Scribe, who usually spent half his books in explaining
matters as simple and obvious as the reason for eating
one’s breakfast. Verdi knew this as well
as anyone, and used the two first acts as opportunities
for stage display. For “Aida” was
written to please the Khedive of Egypt; and Verdi,
always keenly commercial, probably knew his man.
Now, when the masters of opera—Handel,
Gluck, Mozart, Weber—got hold of a bad book,
they nearly invariably “faked” it by getting
swiftly over the weak points and dwelling on the strong;
and, above all, they flooded the whole thing with
a stream of delicious melody that hypnotises one, and
for the time puts fault-finding out of the question.
Not so Verdi. He wrote to please his audience,
and he knew that what one can only call dark-skinned
local colour was still fresh in spite of “L’Africaine,”
and that the vulgar would find delight in a blaze of
glaring banners and showy spectacle. So he set
the two first acts as they stood, trusting to local
colour and spectacle to make them popular; and, as
we know, at the time they were popular, and the populace
exalted Verdi far above such second-rate fellows as
Mozart and Beethoven. But now, when local colour
has been done to death, and when it has had a quarter
of a century to bleach out of Verdi’s canvases,
what remains to interest, I do not say to touch, one?
Certainly not the expression of Radames’ or
Aida’s love, for here as everywhere Verdi fails
to communicate any new phase of emotion, but (precisely
as he did in “Falstaff” and “Otello”)
has written music which indicates that he had some
inkling of the emotion of the scene, and could write
strains calculated not to prevent the scene making
its effect. That Verdi has no well-spring of
original feeling, perhaps explains why he is so poor
in the scenes with Radames, Amneris, and Aida. (Also,
perhaps, it explains why he has fallen back in his
best period upon masterpieces of dramatic art for
his librettos. It is almost outside human possibility
to add anything to “Falstaff” or “Otello”;
and such success as Verdi has made with them is the
result of writing what is, after all, only glorified
incidental music—music which accompanies
the play. To class these accompaniments with the
masterpieces of original opera is surely the most
startling feat of modern musical criticism.) Moreover,
the plan of writing each scene in a series of detached
numbers—for, even where song might flow
naturally into song, the two are quite detached—breaks
up the interest as effectually as it does in “Traviata”;
and the songs do not themselves interest. Verdi’s
music is not based, like the masters’, upon the
inflexions of the human voice under stress of sincere
feeling, but upon figures and passages easily executed
upon certain instruments. The great composers
strove to make instruments speak in the accent of the
Page 61
human voice, while Verdi has always tried to make
the voice sound like an instrument. His roulades
and cadenzas, for example, sound prettier on the clarinet
than on the voice, as one hears when he sets the one
chasing the other in “Traviata”; and if
only our orchestral players would take the trouble
to play with the same expression as the stage artists
sing, we might soon be content to have a repetition
(with a difference) of the feat of the old-world conductor
who, in the absence of the hero, played the part upon
the harpsichord with universal applause. The
stock patterns out of which the songs are made soon
grow old-fashioned, and are superseded by fresh ones:
hence Verdi’s songs are the earliest portions
of his operas to wither. There are two powerful
scenes in “Aida”—the second
of the second act, and the final in the last act.
The last is certainly terribly repulsive at the first
blush; but the weird chant of the priestesses in the
brightly-lit temple, where the workmen are closing
the entrance to the vault underneath in which we see
Radames left to die, contrasts finely with the sweet
music that accompanies the declaration of Aida that
she has hidden there to die with him; and, while guessing
at the splendour of the music Wagner might have given
us here, one may still admit Verdi to have succeeded
well in a smaller way than Wagner’s. But
on the whole “Aida” is to be heard once
and have done with, for save these scenes there is
little else in it to engage one. Aida is alive,
but Amneris is a hopeless piece of machinery—something
between the stage conception of a princess and the
Lady with the Camellias, any difference in modesty
being certainly not in favour of Amneris. The
music very rarely rises above commonness—that
commonness which is proclaimed in every bar of Verdi’s
instrumentation, and in his shameless Salvation Army
rhythms; and it is sometimes (as in the Priest’s
solo with chorus in the last scene of the second act)
odiously vulgar. “Aida” is more dramatic
than “Traviata,” has more of Verdi’s
brusque energy, less of his sentimentality; but it
has none of the youthful freshness of his latest work.
The young Verdi has already aged—how long
will the old Verdi remain young?
“THE FLYING DUTCHMAN”
Wagner took “The Flying Dutchman”, “Tannhaeuser,”
and “Lohengrin,” in three long running
steps; from “Lohengrin” he made a flying
leap into the air, and, after spending some five or
six years up there, he landed safely on “The
Nibelung’s Ring.” The leap was a prodigious
one, and you may search history in vain for its like;
and still more astounding was it if you reckon from
the point where the run was commenced. “The
Flying Dutchman” was avowedly that point.
“Die Feen” is boyish folly, and “Rienzi”
an attempt to out-Meyer Meyerbeer. But in the
“Dutchman” Wagner sought seriously to realise
himself, to find the mode of best expressing the best
that was in him. That mode he found in “The
Rheingold” and mastered in “The Valkyrie,”
with its continuous development and transmogrification
of themes. And (to discard utterly my former
metaphor) after steeping oneself for several nights
in that last great river of melody, wide and deep and
clear, it is interesting to be led suddenly to its
source, and see it bubbling up with infinite energy,
a good deal of frothing, and some brown mud.
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Compared with “The Valkyrie,” “The
Flying Dutchman” is ill-contrived and stagy.
It is flecked here and there with vulgarity. It
has far less of pure beauty; it has only its moments,
whereas “The Valkyrie” gives hours of
unbroken delight. “The Valkyrie” appeals
to the primary instincts of our nature—instincts
and desires that will remain in us so long as our
nature is human; while for a large part of its effect
the “Dutchman” trusts to a feeling which
is elusive at all times and has no permanent hold
upon us. Horror of the supernatural is not very
deeply rooted in us, after all. Modern training
tends to eliminate it altogether. In later life
Goethe could not call up a single delightful shiver.
There are probably not half a dozen stories in the
world from which we can get it a second time.
The unexpected plays a part in producing it, and the
same means does not produce it twice with anything
approaching the same intensity. Hence the Dutchman’s
phantom ship must be more ghost-like at each representation,
its blood-red sails a bloodier red; and in the long-run,
do what the stage carpenters will, we coldly sit and
compare their work with previous ships. True,
the music which accompanies its entry is always impressively
ghastly; yet, while we know this, we are acutely conscious
that our feeling is more or less a laudable make-believe—a
make-believe that requires some little effort.
Then Heine’s notion, which seemed so brilliant
at first, that the Dutchman could be redeemed by the
unshakable love of a woman, has now all the disagreeable
staleness of a decrepit and obvious untruth. It
has no essential verity to give it validity, it is
no symbol of a fact which is immediately and deeply
felt to be a fact. The condition of redemption
is entirely arbitrary: it might as reasonably
be that the Dutchman should find a woman who would
not shrink from eating his weather-stained hat.
What was it to the Dutchman’s damned soul if
all the women in the world swore to love him eternally,
so long as he was unable to love one of them?
The true Wandering Jew is not the unloved man, but
the man who cannot love, who is destitute of creative
emotion and cannot build up for himself a world in
which to dwell, but must needs live in hell—a
world that others make, a world where he has no place.
Wagner knew this, and makes the Dutchman fall in love
with Senta; and that only leaves the drama more than
ever in a muddle. One wants a reason for his
suddenly being able to love. It cannot be because
Senta promises to love him till death; for he has had
hundreds of fruitless love-affairs before, and knows
that all women promise that, and some of them mean
it. Besides, the highest moment of the drama
ought either to arrive when he feels love dawning in
his loveless heart, or when he renounces his chance
of salvation and sails away to eternal torment, believing
that Senta made her promise in a passing fit of enthusiasm;
and at one or other of those moments we ought to have
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some sign that he is redeemed. There is no such
sign. The phantom ship falls to pieces, and the
Dutchman is freed from his curse when Senta casts
herself into the waves; and the highest moment of
the whole drama is that in which the dreamy monomaniac,
the modern Jeanne d’Arc, the real heroine of
the opera, wins her own salvation, masters the world
and makes it her heaven, by taking her fate in both
hands and setting out to do the thing she feels most
strongly impelled to do. If the Dutchman’s
salvation depends on himself, it is evidently unnecessary
for Senta to be drowned; if it depends upon her, it
only shows that Wagner, writing fifty years ago, and
dazzled by the brilliance of a new idea, could not
see so clearly as can be seen to-day that Senta was
her own and not the Dutchman’s saviour; and if
(as it apparently does) it depends upon both Dutchman
and Senta, then, at a performance at least, one can
merely feel that something in the drama is very much
askew, without knowing precisely what.
In minor respects “The Flying Dutchman”
falls considerably short of perfection, even of reasonableness.
For example, the comings and goings of Daland are
fearfully stagy. But worst of all are the arrangements
of the first act. I can go as far as most people
in accepting stage conventions. If Wagner brought
on a four-eyed, eight-horned, twenty-seven-legged
monster and called it a Jabberwock, I should not so
much as ask why the legs were not all in pairs, like
the horns and eyes, so long as I saw in the animal’s
habits a certain congruity, a conformity to what I
would willingly regard as Jabberwock nature.
But who can pretend to believe in a ship which comes
against the rocks in a storm and anchors there while
the captain goes ashore to see whether shipwreck is
imminent? That the majority of opera-goers cannot
live near the sea is self-evident, and that few of
them should ever have seen a shipwreck unavoidable;
but surely anyone who has crossed the Channel must
have a vague suspicion that to place this vessel against
the rocks in a tempest is the last thing a seaman
would dream of doing, and that, if he were driven there
and managed to get ashore, he would call his men after
him (if they needed calling), and trouble neither
about casting anchor nor going aboard again. The
thing is ludicrously stagy. I suppose that Wagner
was too sea-sick to observe what happened during his
weeks of roughing it in the North Sea. But the
second scene is admirable. That monotonous drowsy
hum of the Spinning song is exactly what is needed
to put one in the mood for sympathising with Senta
and her dreams. With the third there is an occasional
return to the bad stagecraft of Scribe; but there are
also hints of the simple directness of the later Wagner.
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The music is like the stagecraft: now and then
simply dramatic, now and then stagily undramatic;
sometimes rich and splendid, sometimes threadbare
and vulgar. And by this I do not mean that the
old-fashioned set pieces are of necessity bad, and
the freer portions necessarily good. Good and
bad may be found in the new and the old Wagner alike.
That sailor’s dance is to me as odious as anything
in Meyerbeer, and the melody which ends the love-duet
is scarcely more tolerable. On the other hand,
not even in “The Valkyrie” did Wagner
write more picturesquely weird music than most of the
first act. The shrilling of the north wind, the
roaring of the waves, the creaking of cordage, the
banging of booms, an uncanny sound in a dismal night
at sea,—these are suggested with wonderful
vividness. At times Wagner gives us gobbets of
unassimilated Weber and Beethoven, but some passages
are as original as they are magnificent. The finest
bars in the work are those in which Senta declares
her faith in her “mission,” and the Dutchman
yields himself to unreasoning adoration. Other
moods came to Wagner, but never again that mood of
rapturous self-effacement. It is perhaps a young
man’s mood; certainly it is identical with the
ecstasy with which one contemplates a perfect piece
of art, or a life greatly lived; and here it finds
splendid expression.
“LOHENGRIN”
“Lohengrin” has been sung scores of times
at Covent Garden in one fashion or another; but I
declare that we heard something resembling the real
“Lohengrin” for the first time when the
late Mr. Anton Seidl crossed the Atlantic to conduct
it and other of Wagner’s operas. We had
come to regard it as a pretty opera—an opera
full of an individual, strange, indefinable sweetness;
but Mr. Anton Seidl came all the way from New York
city to show us how out of sweetness can come forth
strength. Mr. Seidl was a Wagner conductor of
the older type, and with some of the faults of that
type; he knew little or nothing of the improvements
in the manner of interpreting Wagner’s music
effected by Mottl, Levi, and that stupendous creature
Siegfried Wagner; he was a survival of the first enthusiastic
reaction against Italian ways of misdoing things;
and he was, if anything, a little too strongly inclined
to go a little too far in the opposite direction to
the touch-and-go conductors. But there is so much
of sweetness and delicacy in “Lohengrin”
that the whole opera, including the sweet and delicate
portions, actually gains from a forceful and manly
handling—gains so immensely that, as already
said, those of us who heard it under Mr. Seidl’s
direction must have felt that here, at last, was the
true “Lohengrin,” the “Lohengrin”
of Wagner’s imagination. It was a pleasure
merely to hear the band singing out boldly, getting
the last fraction of rich tone out of each note, in
the first act; to hear the string passages valiantly
attacked, and the melodies treated with breadth, and
the trumpets and trombones playing out with all their
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force when need was, holding the sounds to the end
instead of letting them slink away ashamed in the accepted
Italian style. And not only were these things
in themselves delightful—they also served
to make the drama doubly powerful, and the tender parts
of the music doubly tender, to show how splendid in
many respects was Wagner’s art in the “Lohengrin”
days, and to prove that Maurel’s way of doing
the part of Telramund some years ago was, as Maurel’s
way of doing things generally are, perfectly right.
Maurel, it will be remembered, stuck a red feather
in his cap; and the eternally wise critics agreed
in thinking this absolutely wrong. They told him
the feather was out of place—it made him
appear ridiculous, and so on. Maurel retorted
that he was playing the part of a fierce barbarian
chief who would not look, he thought, like a gilded
butterfly, and that his notion was to look as ferocious
as he could. Now the odd thing is, that though
Maurel was right, we critics were in a sense right
also. As the music used to be played, a Telramund
one degree nearer to a man than the average Italian
baritone seemed ludicrously out of place; and when,
in addition, the Lohengrin was a would-be lady-killer
without an inch of fight in him, Henry the Fowler a
pathetic heavy father, and Elsa a sentimental milliner,
there was something farcical about Maurel’s
red feather and generally militant aspect. What
we critics had not the brains to see was that the playing
of the music was wrong, and that Maurel was only wrong
in trying to play his part in the right manner when
Lohengrin, Elsa, King, and conductor were all against
him in their determination to do their parts wrong.
Mr. Bispham follows in Maurel’s footsteps, as
he frequently does, in a modified costume, but when
for the first time the orchestra played right he would
not have seemed ridiculous had he stuck Maurel’s
red feather into his helmet. The whole scene became
a different thing: we were thrown at once into
the atmosphere of an armed camp full of turbulent
thieves and bandits itching for fighting, and wildly
excited with rumours of conflicts near at hand.
Amidst all this excitement, and amidst all the unruly
fighters, Telramund, strongest, fiercest, most unruly
of them all, has to open the drama; and to command
our respect, to make us feel that it is he who is
making the drama move, that it is because all the barbarians
are afraid of him that the drama begins to move at
all, he cannot possibly look too ferocious and hot-blooded,
too strong of limb and tempestuous of temper.
The proof that this (Seidl’s) reading of the
opera was the right one, was that, in the first place,
the drama immediately interested you instead of keeping
you waiting for the entry of Elsa; and, in the second
place, that the noisy, energetic playing of the opening
scene threw the music of Elsa and Lohengrin into wonderfully
beautiful relief—a relief which in the old
way of doing the opera was very much wanting.
To play “Lohengrin” in the old way is to
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deny Wagner the astonishing sense of dramatic effect
he had from the beginning; to play it as Seidl played
it is to prove that the conductor appreciates the
perfection of artistic sense that led, compelled,
Wagner to set the miraculous vision of Lohengrin against
a background made up of such stormy scenes. Had
Seidl kept his vigour for the stormy scenes, and given
us a finer tenderness in the prelude, the love-music,
and Lohengrin’s account of himself, his rendering
would have been a flawless one.
And even as Seidl interpreted it, the supreme beauty
of the music, the sweetness of it as well as its strength,
were manifest as they have never been manifest before.
“Lohengrin” is surely the most beautiful,
the fullest of sheer beauty, of all Wagner’s
operas. Some thirty or forty years hence those
of us who are lucky enough still to live in the sweet
sunlight will begin to feel that at last it is becoming
feasible to take a fair and reasonable view of Wagner’s
creative work; and we shall probably differ about
verdicts which the whole musical world of to-day would
agree only in rejecting. Old-school Wagnerites
and anti-Wagnerites will have gone off together into
the night, and the echo of the noise of all their
feuds will have died away. No one will venture
to talk of the “teaching” of “Parsifal”
or any other of Wagner’s works; the legends
from which he constructed his works will have lost
their novelty. The music-drama itself will be
regarded by the Academics (if there are any left)
with all the reverence due to the established fact,
and possibly it may be suffering the fierce assault
of the exponents of a newer and nobler form. Then
the younger critics will arise and take one after
another of the music-dramas and ask, What measure
of beauty is there, and what dramatic strength, what
originality of emotion? and in a few minutes they will
scatter hundreds of harmless and long-cherished illusions
that went to make life interesting. In that day
of wrath and tribulation may I be on the right side,
and have energy to go forward, giving up the pretence
of what I can no longer like, and boldly saying that
I like what I like, even should it happen to be unpopular.
May I never fall so low as to be talked of as a guardian
of the accepted forms and laws. But even if it
should prove unavoidable to relinquish faith in Bach,
in Beethoven, in Wagner, yet it is devoutly to be
hoped that it will never be necessary to give up a
belief in “Lohengrin”; for in that case
my fate is fixed—I shall be among the reactionaries,
the admirers of the thing that cannot be admired,
the lovers of the unlovable. But indeed it is
incredible that “Lohengrin” should ever
cease to seem lovely—lovely in idea and
in the expression of the idea. The story is one
of the finest Wagner ever set; it remains fresh, though
it had been told a hundred times before. The
maiden in distress—we know her perfectly
well; the wicked sorceress who has got her into distress—we
know her quite as well; the celestial knight who rescues
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her—we know him nearly as well. But
the details in which “Lohengrin” differs
from all other tales of the same order are precisely
those that make it the most enchanting tale of them
all. Lohengrin, knight of the Grail, redeemer,
yet with a touch of tragedy in his fate, drawn down
the river in his magic boat by the Swan from a far
mysterious land, a land of perpetual freshness and
beauty, is an infinitely more poetic notion than the
commonplace angel flapping clumsily down from heaven;
and even if we feel it to be absurd that he should
have to beg his wife to take him on trust, yet, after
all, he takes his wife on trust, and he tells her
at the outset that he cannot reveal the truth about
himself. Elsa is vastly preferable to the ordinary
distressed mediaeval maiden, if only because a woman
who is too weak to be worth a snap of the fingers
does move us to pity, whereas the ordinary mediaeval
is cut out of pasteboard, and does not affect us at
all. The King is perhaps merely a stage figure;
Ortrud is just one degree better than the average
witch of a fairy story; but Frederic, savage and powerful,
but so superstitious as to be at the mercy of his wife,
is human enough to interest us. And Wagner has
managed his story perfectly throughout, excepting
at the end of the second act, where that dreary business
of Ortrud and Frederic stopping the bridal procession
is a mere reminiscence of the wretched stagecraft
of Scribe, and quite superfluous. But if there
is a flaw in the drama, there cannot be said to be
one in the music. The mere fact that, save two
numbers, it is all written in common time counts for
absolutely nothing against its endless variety.
Wagner never again hit upon quite so divine and pure
a theme as that of the Grail, from which the prelude
is evolved; the Swan theme at once carries one in
imagination up the ever-rippling river to that wonderful
land of everlasting dawn and sacred early morning
stillness; and nothing could be more effective, as
background and relief to these, than the warlike music
of the first act, and the ghastly opening of the second
act, so suggestive of horrors and the spells of Ortrud
winding round Frederic’s soul. Then there
is Elsa’s dream, the magical music of Lohengrin’s
tale, the music of the Bridal procession in the second
act, the great and tender melody first sung by Elsa
and Ortrud, and then repeated by the orchestra as Ortrud
allows Elsa to lead her into the house, the whole of
the Bridal-chamber duet, and perhaps, above all, Lohengrin’s
farewell. To whatever page of the score you turn,
there is perfect beauty—after the first
act not a great deal that is powerful or meant to be
powerful, but melody after melody that entrances you
merely as absolute music without poetic significance,
and that seems doubly entrancing by reason of the
strange, remote feeling with which it is charged,
and its perpetual suggestion of the broad stream flowing
ceaselessly from far-away Montsalvat to the sea.
“Lohengrin” is a fairy-story imbued with
seriousness and tender human emotion, and the music
is exactly adapted to it.
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“TRISTAN AND ISOLDA”
Says Nietzsche (pretending to put the words into the
mouth of another), “I hate Wagner, but I no
longer stand any other music”; and though the
saying is entirely senseless to those who do hate Wagner,
the feeling that prompted it may be understood by all
who love him and who stand every other music, so long
as it is real music. Immediately after listening
to “Tristan and Isolda” all other operas
seem away from the point, to be concerned with the
secondary issues of life, to babble without fervour
or directness of unessential matters. This does
not mean that “Tristan” is greater than
“Don Giovanni” or the “Matthew”
Passion—for it is not—but that
it speaks to each of us in the most modern language
of the most engrossing subject in the world, of oneself,
of one’s own soul. Who can stay to listen
to the sheer loveliness of “Don Giovanni,”
or follow with any sympathy the farcical doom of that
hero, or who, again, can be at the pains to enter into
the obsolescent emotions and mode of expression of
Bach, when Wagner calls us to listen concerning the
innermost workings of our own being, and speaks in
a tongue every word of which enters the brain like
a thing of life? For one does not have to think
what Wagner means: so direct, so penetrating,
is his speech, that one becomes aware of the meaning
without thinking of the words that convey it.
Nietzsche is right when he says Wagner summarises
modernism; but he forgot that Wagner summarises it
because he largely helped to create it, to make it
what it is, by this power of transferring his thought
and emotion bodily, as it were, to other minds, and
that he will remain modern for long to come, inasmuch
as he moulds the thought of the successive generations
as they arise.
“Tristan and Isolda” is one of the world’s
half-dozen stupendous appeals in music to the emotional
side of man’s nature; it stands with the “Matthew”
Passion, the Choral Symphony, and Mozart’s Requiem,
rather than with “Don Giovanni,” or “Fidelio,”
or “Tannhaeuser;” like the Requiem, the
Choral Symphony, the “Matthew” Passion,
there are pages of unspeakable beauty in it; but,
like them also, its main object is not to please the
ear or the eye, but to communicate an overwhelming
emotion. That emotion is the passion of love—the
elemental desire of the man for the woman, of the woman
for the man; and to the expression of this, not in
one phase alone, like Gounod in his “Faust,”
but in all its phases. It is a glorification of
sex attraction: nevertheless, it refutes Tannhaeuser
or Venus as completely as it refutes Wolfram or Elizabeth.
Tannhaeuser, we know, would have it that love was
wholly of the flesh, Wolfram that it was solely of
the spirit. That there is no love which does
not commence in the desiring of the flesh, and none,
not even the most spiritual, which does not consist
entirely in sex passion, that the two, spiritual and
fleshly love, are merely different phases of one and
the same passion, Wagner had learnt when he came to
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create “Tristan.” And in “Tristan”
we commence with a fleshly love, as intense as that
Tannhaeuser knew; but by reason of its own energy,
its own excess, it rises to a spiritual love as free
from grossness as any dreamed of by Elizabeth or Wolfram,
and far surpassing theirs in exaltation. This
change he depicted in a way as simple as it was marvellous,
so that as we watch the drama and listen to the music
we experience it within ourselves and our inner selves
are revealed to us. Nothing comes between us and
the passions expressed. Tristan and Isolda are
passion in its purest integrity, naked souls vibrating
with the keenest emotion; they have no idiosyncrasies
to be sympathised with, to be allowed for; they are
generalisations, not characters, and in them we see
only ourselves reflected on the stage—ourselves
as we are under the spell of Wagner’s music
and of his drama. For “Tristan” seems
to me the most wonderful of Wagner’s dramas,
far more wonderful than “Parsifal,” far
more wonderful than “Tannhaeuser.”
There is no stroke in it that is not inevitable, none
that does not immensely and immediately tell; and,
despite its literary quality, one fancies it could
not fail to make some measure of its effect were it
played without the music. Think of the first
act. The scene is the deck of the ship; the wind
is fresh, and charged with the bitterness of the salt
sea; and Isolda sits there consumed with burning anger
and hate of the man she loves, whose life she spared
because she loved him, and who now rewards her by
carrying her off, almost as the spoil of war, to be
the wife of his king. It has been said that Tolstoi
asserted for the first time in “The Kreuzer
Sonata” that hate and love were the same passion.
But the truth is, Wagner knew it long before Tolstoi,
just as Shakespeare knew it long before Wagner; and
the whole of this first act turns on it. Isolda
sends for Tristan and tells him he has wronged her,
and begs him to drink the cup of peace with her.
Tristan sees precisely what she means, and, loving
her, drinks the proffered poison as an atonement for
the wrong he has done her, and for his treachery to
himself in winning her, for ambition’s sake,
as King Mark’s bride instead of taking her as
his own. But the moment her hatred is satisfied
Isolda finds life intolerable without it, without love;
her love a second time betrays her; and she seizes
the poison and drinks also. Then comes the masterstroke.
Done with this world, with nothing but death before
them, the two confess their long-pent love; in their
exalted state passion comes over them like a flood;
in the first rush of passion, honour, shame, friendship
seem mere names of illusions, and love is the only
real thing in life; and finally, the death draught
being no death draught, but a slight infusion of cantharides,
the two passionately cling to each other, vaguely wondering
what all the noise is about, while the ship reaches
land and all the people shout and the trumpets blow.
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What is the stagecraft of Scribe compared with this?
how else could the avowal of love be brought about
with such instant and stupendous effect? Quite
as amazing is the second act. Almost from the
beginning to close on the end the lovers fondle each
other, in a garden before an old castle in the sultry
summer night; and just as their passion reaches its
highest pitch, Mark breaks in upon them. For
Tristan, at least, death is imminent; and the mere
presence of death serves to begin the change from the
desire of the flesh to the ecstatic spiritual passion.
That change is completed in the next act, where we
have the scene laid before Tristan’s deserted
and dilapidated castle in Brittany, with the calm sea
in the distance (it should shine like burnished steel);
and here Tristan lies dying of the wound he received
from Melot in the previous scene, while a melody from
the shepherd’s pipe, the saddest melody ever
heard, floats melancholy and wearily through the hot,
close, breathless air. Kurvenal, his servant,
has sent for Isolda to cure him as she had cured him
before; and when at last she comes Tristan grows crazy
with joy, tears the bandages from his wounds, and
dies just as she enters. This finishes the metamorphosis
begun in the second act: after some other incidents,
Isolda, rapt in her spiritual love, sings the death-song
and dies over Tristan’s body. What is the
libretto of “Otello” or of “Falstaff”
compared with this libretto? From beginning to
end there is not a line, not an incident, in excess.
Anyone who is wearied by King Mark’s long address
when he comes on the guilty pair, has failed to catch
the drift of the whole opera—failed to see
that two souls like Tristan and Isolda, wholly swayed
by love, must find Mark’s grief wholly unintelligible,
and have no power of explaining themselves to those
not possessed with a passion like theirs, or of bringing
themselves into touch with the workaday world of daylight,
and that all Mark’s most moving appeal means
to them is that this world, where such annoyances
occur, is not the land in which they fain would dwell.
They live wholly for their illusion, and if it is
forbidden to them in life they will seek death; nothing—not
honour, shame, the affection of Mark, the faithfulness
of Kurvenal, least of all, life—is to be
considered in comparison with their love; their love
is the love that is all in all. It is entirely
selfish: Mark is as much their enemy as Melot,
his affection more to be dreaded than the sword of
Melot.
Perhaps I have given the drama some of the credit
that should go to the music; and at least there is
not a dramatic situation which the music does not
immeasurably increase in power. But indeed the
two are inseparable. The music creates the mood
and holds the spectator to it so that the true significance
of the dramatic situation cannot fail to be felt;
while the dramatic situation makes the highest, most
extravagant flights of the music quite intelligible,
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reasonable. It cannot be said that the music
exists for the sake of the drama any more than the
drama exists for the music: the drama lies in
the music, the music is latent in the drama.
But to the music the wild atmosphere of the beginning
of the first act is certainly due; and though I have
said that possibly “Tristan” might bear
playing without the music, it must be admitted that
it is hard to think of the fifth scene without that
tremendous entrance passage—that passage
so tremendous that even Jean de Reszke dare hardly
face it. To the music also the passion and fervent
heat of the second act are due, and the thunderous
atmosphere, the sense of impending fate, in the last,
and the miraculous sweetness and intensity of Tristan’s
death-music, and the sublime pathos of Isolda’s
lament. Since Mozart wrote those creeping chromatic
chords in the scene following the death of the Commendatore
in “Don Giovanni,” nothing so solemn and
still, so full of the pathetic majesty of death, as
the passage following the words “with Tristan
true to perish” has been written. This
is perhaps Wagner’s greatest piece of music;
and certainly his loveliest is Tristan’s description
of the ship sailing over the ocean with Isolda, where
the gently swaying figure of the horns, taken from
one of the love-themes, and the delicious melody given
to the voice, go to make an effect of richness and
tenderness which can never be forgotten. The
opening of the huge duet is as a blaze of fire which
cannot be subdued; and when at last it does subside
and a quieter mood prevails we get a long series of
voluptuous tunes the like of which were never heard
before, and will not be heard again, one thinks, for
a thousand years to come. And in the strangest
contrast to these is the earlier part of the third
act, where the very depths of the human spirit are
revealed, where we are taken into the darkness and
stand with Tristan before the gates of death.
But indeed all the music of “Tristan”
is miraculous in its sweetness, splendour, and strength;
and yet one scarcely thinks of these qualities at the
moment, so entirely do they seem to be hidden by its
poignant expressiveness. As I have said, it seems
to enter the mind as emotion rather than as music,
so penetrating is it, so instantaneous in its appeal.
There never was music poured out at so white a white
heat; it is music written in the most modern, most
pungent, and raciest vernacular, with utter impatience
of style, of writing merely in an approved manner.
It is beyond criticism. It is possible to love
it as I do; it is possible to hate it as Nietzsche
did; but while this century lasts, it will be impossible
to appreciate it sufficiently to wish to criticise
it and yet preserve one’s critical judgment with
steadiness enough to do it.
“SIEGFRIED”
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In all Wagner’s music-plays there is shown an
astonishing appreciation of the value and effect of
scenery and of all the changes of weather and of skies
and waters, not only as a background to his drama
but as a means of making that drama clearer, of getting
completer and intenser expression of the emotions for
which the persons in the drama stand. The device
is not so largely used in “Tristan” as
in the other music-plays, yet the drama is enormously
assisted by it. In the “Ring” it is
used to such an extent that the first thing that must
strike everyone is the series of gorgeously coloured
pictures afforded by each of the four plays. For
instance, no one can ever forget the opening of “The
Valkyrie”—the inside of Hunding’s
house built round the tree, the half-dead fire flickering,
while we listen to the steady roar of the night wind
as the tempest rushes angrily through the forest—nor
the scene that follows, when through the open door
we see all the splendours of the fresh spring moonlight
gleaming on the green leaves still dripping with cold
raindrops. The terror and excitement of the second
act are vastly increased by the storm of thunder and
lightning that rages while Siegmund and Hunding fight.
A great part of the effect of the third act is due
to the storm that howls and shrieks at the beginning
and gradually subsides, giving way to the soft translucent
twilight, that in turn gives way to the clear spring
night with the dark blue sky through which the yellow
flames presently shoot, cutting off Bruennhilde from
the busy world. The same pictorial device is used
throughout “Siegfried” with results just
as magnificent in their way; though the way is a very
different one. The drama of “The Valkyrie”
is tragedy—chiefly Wotan’s tragedy
(the relinquishing first of Siegmund, and his hope
in Siegmund, then of Bruennhilde)—but incidentally
the tragedy of Siegmund’s life and his death,
of Siegmund’s loneliness and of Bruennhilde’s
downfall; and at least one of the scenic effects—the
fire at the end—was thrown in to relieve
the pervading gloom, and in obedience to Wagner’s
acute sense of the wild beauty of the old legend,
rather than to illustrate and assist the drama.
It is sheer spectacle, but how magnificent compared
with that older type of spectacle which chiefly consisted
of brass bands and ladies insufficiently clothed!
“Siegfried,” on the other hand, contains
no tragedy save the destruction of a little vermin.
It is the most glorious assertion ever made of the
joy and splendour and infinite beauty to be found
in life by those who possess the courage to go through
it in their own way, and have the overflowing vitality
and strength to create their own world as they go.
Siegfried is the embodiment of the divine energy that
makes life worth living; and in the scenery, as in
the tale and the music of the opera, nothing is left
out that could help to give us a vivid and lasting
impression of the beauty, freshness, strangeness,
and endless interest of life. Take the first
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scene—the cave with the dull red forge—fires
smouldering in the black darkness, and the tools of
the smith’s trade scattered about, and, seen
through the mouth of the cave, all the blazing colours
of the sunlit forest; or again the second—the
darkness, then the dawn and the sunrise, and lastly
the full glory of the summer day near Fafner’s
hole in a mysterious haunted corner of the forest;
or the third—a far-away nook in the hills,
where the spirit of the earth slumbers everlastingly;
or the final scene—the calm morning on
Bruennhilde’s fell, the flames fallen, and all
things transfigured and made remote by the enchantment
of lingering mists,—these scenes form a
background for the dramatic action such as no composer
dreamed of before, nor will dream of again until we
cease to dwell in dusty stone cities and learn once
again to know nature and her greatest moods as our
forefathers knew them. Had Wagner not lived in
Switzerland and gone his daily walks amongst the mountains,
the “Ring” might have been written; but
certainly it would have been written very differently,
and probably not half so well.
I have so often insisted on the pictorial power of
Wagner’s music, that, save for one quality of
the pictures in the “Ring,” and especially
in “Siegfried,” it would be unnecessary
to say more about it now. That quality is their
old-world atmosphere, their power of filling us with
a sense of the old time before us. When the fire
plays round Bruennhilde’s fell—Hinde
Fell, Morris calls it—lighting the icy
tops of the farthest hills, or when Mime and Alberich
squabble in the dark of early morning at the mouth
of Fafner’s hole, or again when the Wanderer
comes in and scarifies Mime out of his wits, we are
taken back to the remotest and dimmest past, to the
beginnings of time, to a time that never existed save
in the imagination of our forebears. This may
be partly the result of our unconscious perception
of the fact that these things never happen nowadays,
and partly the result of our having been familiar
with the story of Bruennhilde and the gods since earliest
boyhood; but it is in the main due to Wagner’s
intense historical sense, his sense of the past, and
to his unapproached power of expressing in music any
feeling or combination of feelings he experienced.
So cunningly do music and scenery work together that
we credit the one with what the other has done; but,
wonderful though the pictures of “Siegfried”
are, there cannot be a doubt that the atmosphere we
discover in them reaches us through the ear from the
orchestra. Besides giving us a series of singularly
apposite and significant pictures, Wagner has reproduced
the very breath and colour of the old sagas; he has
re-created the atmosphere of a time that never was;
and it is this remote atmosphere which lends to “Siegfried”
and all the “Ring” a great part of their
enchantment. Fancy what it might have been, this
long exposition of sheer Schopenhauerism in three
dramas and a fore-play! imagine what Parry or Stanford
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or Mackenzie would have made of it! And then think
of what the “Ring” actually is, and especially
of the splendour and weirdness of some parts the “dulness”
of which moves dull people to dull grumbling.
For example, a great many persons share Mime’s
wish for the Wanderer to go off almost as soon as
he comes on, “else no Wanderer can he be called.”
They tell us that this scene breaks the action, neglecting
the trifling fact that were it omitted the remainder
of the act would be inconsequent nonsense, only worthy
to rank with the librettos of English musical critics,
and that the truth happens to be that nearly the whole
of the subsequent drama grows out of it. In itself
it is a scene of peculiar power, charged to overflowing
with the essence of the Scandinavian legends.
The notion of the god, “one-eyed and seeming
ancient,” wandering by night through the wild
woods, clad in his dark blue robe, calling in here
and there and creating consternation in the circle
gathered round the hearth, is one of the most poetic
to be found in the Northern mythology; and the music
which Wagner has set to his entry and his conversation
cannot be matched for unearthliness unless you turn
to the Statue music in “Don Giovanni,”
where you find unearthliness of a very different sort.
The scene with Erda in the mountains is even more
wonderful, so laden is the music with the Scandinavian
emotional sense of the impenetrable mystery of things.
The scene between Mime and Alberich, or Alberich and
the Wanderer, gives us the old horror of the creeping
maleficent things that crawled by night about the
brooks and rock-holes. It is true this last will
bear cutting a little; for Wagner being a German,
but having, what is uncommon in the German, an acute
sense of balance of form, always tried to get balance
by lengthening parts which were already long enough,
in preference to cutting parts that were already too
long. Hence much padding, which a later generation
will ruthlessly amputate.
All these things are the accessories, the environment,
of the principal figure; and their presence is justified
by their beauty, significance, and interest, and also
by their being necessary for the development of the
larger drama of the whole “Ring.”
But in following “Siegfried” that larger
drama cannot altogether be kept in mind: it is
the hero that counts first, and everything else is
accessory merely to him. That Wagner, in spite
of his preoccupation with the tragedy of Wotan, should
have accomplished this, proves how wonderful and how
true an artist he was. Siegfried is the incarnation,
as I have said, of the divine energy which enables
one to make the world rich with things that delight
the soul; he is Wagner’s healthiest, sanest,
perhaps most beautiful creation; he is certainly the
only male in all Wagner’s dramas who is never
in any danger of becoming for ever so brief a moment
a bore, whose view of life is always so fresh and novel
and at the same time so essentially human that he interests
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us both in himself and in the world we see through
his eyes. Never had an actor such opportunities
as here. The entry with the bear exhibits the
animal strength and spirits of the man, and the inquiries
about his parents, his purely human feeling; his temper
with Mime the unsophisticated boy’s petulant
intolerance of the mean and ugly; the forging of the
sword the coming power and determination of manhood.
The killing of the dragon is unavoidably rather ridiculous;
but the scene with the bird is fascinating by its
naturalness and simplicity as well as its tenderness
and sheer sweetness. Finally, after the scene
with the Wanderer, the scene of the awakening of Bruennhilde
affords an opportunity for love-making, and it is love-making
of so unusual a sort that one does not feel it to
be an anti-climax after all the big things that have
gone before. In fact, not even Tristan has things
quite so much to himself, nor is given the opportunity
of expressing so many phases of emotion and character.
And the music Siegfried has to sing is the richest,
most copious stream of melody ever given to one artist;
in any one scene there is melody enough to have made
the fortune of Verdi or any other Italian composer
who wrote tunes for the tenor and prima donna; not
even Mozart could have poured out a greater wealth
of tune—tune everlastingly varying with
the mood of the drama. Every scene provides a
heap of smaller tunes, and then there are such big
ones as the Forge song, Siegfried’s meditation
in the forest and the conversation with the bird, and
the awakening of Bruennhilde—every one
absolutely new and tremulous with intense life.
“THE DUSK OF THE GODS”
Quite a fierce little controversy raged a little while
ago in the columns of the “Daily Chronicle,”
and all about the “meaning” of “The
Dusk of the Gods” and the behaviour of Bruennhilde.
Mr. Shaw played Devil’s Advocate for Wagner,
declaring “The Dusk of the Gods” to be
irrelevant and operatic (as if that mattered); and
Mr. Ashton Ellis and Mr. Edward Baughan, two mad Wagnerians,
rushed in to protect Wagner from Mr. Shaw (as if he
needed protection). In reading the various letters,
my soul was moved to admiration and reverent awe by
the ingenuity displayed by the various correspondents
in their endeavours to make the easy difficult, the
perfectly plain crooked. Wagner took enormous
pains to make Bruennhilde a living character—that
is to say, to show us her inmost soul so vividly that
we know why she did anything or everything without
even thinking about it; he set her on the stage, where
we see her in the flesh behaving precisely as any
woman—of her period—would behave.
And then these excellent gentlemen come along and
tell us that because Wagner at one time or another
thought of handling her story, and the story of Wotan
and Siegfried, in this or that way, therefore Wagner
“meant” this or that, and failed or succeeded,
or changed his original plan or held fast to it.
All these things have nothing to do with the drama
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that is played on the stage: by that alone, and
by none of his earlier ideas, is Wagner to be judged:
he is to be judged by the effect and conviction of
the finished play. Now, it seems to me that in
the finished play Bruennhilde is neither “a
glorious woman “—i.e. an Adelphi
melodramatic heroine—nor “a deceitful,
vindictive woman”—i.e. an
Adelphi melodramatic villainess. Also, while considered
by itself “The Dusk of the Gods” is interesting
mainly on account of the music, considered in association,
as Wagner wished, and as one must—for,
after all, it is but the final act of a stupendous
drama, and it is unfair and foolish to consider any
one act of a drama alone—with the other
minor dramas of the greater drama, “The Nibelung’s
Ring,” it is dramatically not only interesting,
absorbing, but absolutely indispensable, true, inevitable.
It is true enough that the “Ring” suffered
somewhat through the fact that Wagner took nearly a
quarter of a century to carry out his plan, and during
this period his views on life changed greatly; yet
nevertheless “The Dusk of the Gods” stands
as the noble—in fact, the only possible—conclusion
to a story which is, on the whole, splendidly told.
When seeing “The Valkyrie,” one thinks
of Sieglinde or Siegmund or Bruennhilde; when listening
to “Siegfried,” one thinks of Siegfried
and Bruennhilde and no others; but when one thinks
of the complete “Ring,” the person of
the drama most forcibly forced before the eye of the
imagination, the person to whom one realises that sympathy
is chiefly due, is Wotan. Wotan, not Siegfried
or Siegmund, is the hero of the “Ring.”
His tragedy—if it is indeed a tragedy to
emerge from the battle in the highest sense of the
word triumphant—includes the tragedy of
Siegfried and Siegmund, Sieglinde and Bruennhilde—in
fact, the tragedy of all the smaller characters of
the play. “The Rheingold,” in spite
of its glorious music, is entirely superfluous—dramatically,
at all events, it is superfluous—but there,
anyhow, the problem which we could easily understand
without it is stated. Wotan, who has been placed
at the head of affairs by the three blind fates, has
caught the general disease of wishing to gain the
power to make others do his will. So anxious is
he for that authority that he not only makes a bargain
for it with the powers of stupidity—the
giants, the brute forces of nature—which
bargain is afterwards and could never be anything
but his ruin, but also he stoops to a base subterfuge
to gain it, and with the help of Loge, fire, the final
destroyer, he does gain it. So determined was
Wagner to make his point clear, that even in “The
Rheingold,” the superfluous drama, he made it
several times superfluously. He was not content
to let his point make itself—the humanitarian,
the preacher of all that makes for the highest humanity,
was too strong in him for that: it was a little
too strong even for the artist in him: he must
needs make the powers of darkness lay a curse on power
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over one’s fellow-beings, the Ring standing
as the emblem of that power. While Wotan takes
the power, his deepest wisdom, which is to say, his
intuition—represented by the spirit of
the earth, Erda—rises against him and tells
him he is committing the fatal mistake, and he yields
to the extent of letting the giants have the supreme
power. But he thinks, just as you and I, reader,
might think, that by some quaint unthinkable device
he can evade the tremendous consequence of his own
act; and, instead of at once looking at the consequence
boldly and saying he will face it, he elaborates a
plan by which no one will suffer anything, while he,
Wotan, will gain the lordship of creation. From
this moment his fate becomes tragic. The complete
man, full of rich humanity—for whom Wotan
stands—cannot exist, necessarily ceases
to exist, if he is compelled to deny the better part
of himself, as Peter denied Jesus of Nazareth.
And in consequence of his own act Wotan has immediately
to deny the better part of himself, to make war on
his own son Siegmund, and then on his own daughter
Bruennhilde: he destroys the first and puts away
from him for ever Bruennhilde, who is incarnate love.
The grand tragic moment of the whole cycle is the
laying to sleep of Bruennhilde. Wotan knows that
life without love is no life, and he is compelled
to part from love by the very bargain which enables
him to rule. Rather than live such a life, he
deliberately, solemnly wills his own death; and a
great part of “Siegfried” and the whole
of “The Dusk of the Gods” are devoted
to showing how his death, and the death of all the
gods, comes about through Wotan’s first act.
In “Siegfried” and “The Dusk of
the Gods” there is no tragedy—how
can there be any tragedy in the fate of the man who
faithfully follows the impulse that makes for his
highest and widest satisfaction, for the fullest exercise
of his beneficent energies, for the man who says I
will do this or that because I know and feel it is
the best I can do? “The Dusk of the Gods”
is Wotan’s most splendid triumph; he deliberately
yields place to a new dynasty, because he knows that
to keep possession of the throne will mean the continual
suppression of all that is best in him, as he has
had already to suppress it. Incidentally there
are many tragedies in the “Ring.”
The murder of Siegmund by Hunding, aided by Wotan,
before Sieglinde’s eyes; the hideous incident
of Siegfried winning his own wife to be the wife of
his friend Gunther; the stabbing of Siegfried by Hagen;
Bruennhilde’s telling Gutrune that she, Gutrune,
was never the wife of Siegfried,—all these
are terrible enough tragedies. Bruennhilde’s
is the most terrible of them all, though she too takes
her fate into her hands, and by willing the right
thing, and doing it, goes victorious out of life.
What there is difficult to understand about her, why
she should be accused of deceit and have her conduct
explained, I can hardly guess. In “The
Valkyrie” she is a goddess; but when she offends
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Wotan by disobeying him and walking clean through all
the Commandments, he is bound, for the maintenance
of his power, to punish her. So he takes away
her godhead, and she is thenceforth simply a woman.
Siegfried treats her treacherously—as she
necessarily thinks—and she very naturally
takes vengeance on him. Mr. Shaw speaks as though
he wished her to be a bread-and-butter miss; but a
woman of Bruennhilde’s type, a daughter of the
high gods, could scarcely be that.
In short, “The Dusk of the Gods” seems
to me perfectly clear, and in no more need of explanation
than “The Valkyrie” or “Siegfried.”
Of course there are a thousand loose ends in the “Ring,”
as there are in life itself; but to count them and
find out what they all mean would occupy one for an
eternity. To throw away “The Dusk of the
Gods” because one cannot understand the loose
ends, is ridiculous; instead of wishing there were
fewer of them, I wish Wagner had been more careless,
less German, and left more. It was through his
endeavours to get unity, to show the close relation
of each incident to every other incident, that he
nearly came to utter grief. The drama was so
gigantic, to secure sympathy for Wotan it was so necessary
to secure sympathy for the minor characters whose
story helps to make up Wotan’s story, that Wagner
seemed perpetually afraid that the real, main drama
would be forgotten. And it is true that the story
of Siegmund and Sieglinde, or of Siegfried and Bruennhilde,
absorbs one for a time so completely that one forgets
all about Wotan and his woes. So Wagner came
near to spoiling one of the most tremendous achievements
of the human mind, by shoving old Wotan on to the
stage again and again to recapitulate his troubles.
But of these interruptions “The Dusk of the
Gods” has none. The story proceeds swiftly,
inevitably to the end; from the first bar to the last,
the music is as splendid as any Wagner ever wrote.
It is the fitting conclusion to the vision of life
presented in the “Ring”: it is a funeral
chant, mournful, sombre, but triumphant. The
seed has been sown, the crop has grown and ripened
and been harvested, and now the thing is over:
a chill wind pipes over the empty stubble-land where
late the yellow corn stood and the labourers laboured:
there is nothing more: “ripeness is all”
that life offers or means.
“PARSIFAL”
“Parsifal” is an immoral work. One
cannot for a moment suppose that Wagner, who had written
“Tristan” and “Siegfried,”
meant to preach downright immorality, or that he meant
“Parsifal” to stand as anything more than
the expression of a momentary mood, the mood of the
exhausted, the effete man, the mood which follows the
mood of “Tristan” as certainly as night
follows day. Nevertheless, in so far as “Parsifal”
says anything to us, in so far as it brings, in Nonconformist
cant, “a message,” it is immoral and vicious,
just as in so far as “Siegfried” carries
a message it is entirely moral, healthful, and sane.
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It is useless to quibble about this, seeking to explain
away plain things: the truth remains that “Siegfried”
is a glorification of one view of life, “Parsifal”
of its direct opposite and flat contradiction; and
anyone who accepts the one view must needs loathe
the other as sinful. To me the “Siegfried”
view of life commends itself; and I unhesitatingly
assert the sinfulness of the “Parsifal”
view. The two operas invite comparison; for at
the outset their heroes seem to be the same man.
Siegfried and Parsifal are both untaught fools; each
has his understanding partly enlightened by hearing
of his mother’s sufferings and death (compare
Wordsworth’s “A deep distress hath humanised
my soul"); each has his education completed by a woman’s
kiss. All this may seem very profound to the
German mind; but to me it is crude, a somewhat too
obvious allegory, partly superficial, partly untrue,
a survival of windy sentimental mid-century German
metaphysics, like the Wagner-Heine form of “The
Flying Dutchman” story, and the Wagner form of
the “Tannhaeuser” story. However,
I am willing to believe that Siegfried, when he kisses
Bruennhilde on Hinde Fell, and Parsifal, when Kundry
kisses him in Klingsor’s magic garden, has each
his full faculties set in action for the first time.
And then? And then Siegfried, with his fund of
health and vitality, sees that the world is glorious,
and joyfully presses forward more vigorously than
ever on the road that lies before him, never hesitating
for a moment to live out his life to the full; while
Parsifal, lacking health and vitality—probably
his father suffered from rickets—sees that
the grief and suffering of the world outweigh and
outnumber its joys, and not only renounces life, but
is so overcome with pity for all sufferers as to regard
it as his mission to heal and console them. And
having healed and consoled one, he deliberately turns
from the green world, with its trees and flowers,
its dawn and sunset, its winds and waters, and shuts
himself in a monkery which has a back garden, a pond
and some ducks. There is only one deadly sin—to
deny life, as Nietzsche says: carefully to pull
up all the weeds in one’s garden, but to plant
there neither flower nor tree—and this
is what “Parsifal” glorifies and advocates.
Now, far be it from me to go hunting a moral tendency
in a work of art, and to praise or blame the art as
I chance to like or dislike the tendency. I am
in a state of perfect preparedness to see beauty in
a picture, even if the subject is to me repulsive.
But in the case of a picture it is possible to say,
“Yes, very pretty,” and pass on. In
the case of a story, a play, or a music-drama, you
cannot. You are tied to your seat for one or
two or three mortal hours; and however perfect may
be the art with which music-drama or play or story
is set before you, if the subject revolts or bores
you, you soon sicken of the whole business. And
in the highest kind of story, play, or music-drama,
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subject and treatment merge inseparably one in the
other, substance and form are one; for the idea is
all in all, and the complete idea cannot be perceived
apart from the dress which makes it visible.
Besides, in the Wagnerian music-drama, it is intended
that beauty of idea and of arrangement of ideas shall
be as of great importance as beauty of ornament.
Wagner certainly intended “Parsifal” to
be such a music-drama; and indeed the idea is only
too clearly visible. The main idea of the “Ring”
is so much obscured by the subsidiary ideas twined
about it that very few people know that the real hero
is Wotan, and the central drama Wotan’s tragedy,
that Siegmund and Sieglinde, Siegfried and Bruennhilde,
and their loves—all the romance and loveliness
that enchant us—are merely accessory.
But in “Parsifal” there is nothing superfluous,
no rich and lovely embroidery on the dress of the
idea to divert us from the idea itself—the
idea is as nearly nude as our limited senses and our
modern respectability permit. And the idea being
what it is, it follows that the play, after the drama
once commences, is not only immoral, but also dispiriting
and boring, and, to my thinking, inconsequential and
pointless. The first act, the exposition, is
from beginning to end magnificent: never were
the lines on which a drama was to develop more gorgeously,
or in more masterly fashion, set forth. Had Wagner
seen that Amfortas was merely a hypochondriac, a stage
Schopenhauer, imagining all manner of wounds and evils
where no evils or wounds existed, had he made Parsifal
a Siegfried, and sent him out into the world to learn
this, and brought him back to break up the monastery,
to set Amfortas and the knights to some useful labour,
and to tell them that the sacred spear, like Wotan’s
spear, had power only to hurt those who feared it,
then we might have had an adequate working-out of so
noble a beginning. Instead of this, Kundry kisses
Parsifal, Parsifal squeals, and we see him in a moment
to be only an Amfortas who has had the luck not to
stumble; and he, the poor fool who is filled with so
vast a pity because he sees (what are called) good
and evil in entirely wrong proportion—as,
in fact, a hypochondriac sees them—he, Parsifal,
this thin-blooded inheritor of rickets and an exhausted
physical frame, is called the Redeemer, and becomes
head of the Brotherhood of the Grail. Beside
this inconsequence, all other inconsequences seem as
nothing. One might ask, for instance, how, seeing
that no man can save his brother’s soul, Parsifal
saves the soul of Amfortas? This is a fallacy
that held Wagner all his life. We find it in “The
Flying Dutchman”; it is avoided in “Tannhaeuser”—for,
thank the gods, Tannhaeuser is not saved by
that uninteresting young person Elizabeth; it plays
a large part in the “Ring”; it is the culmination
of the drama of “Parsifal.” Had Wagner
thought more of Goethe and less of the Frankfort creature
who formulated his hypo-chondriacal nightmares, and
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called the result a philosophy, he might have learnt
that no mentally sick man ever yet was cured save by
the welling-up of a flood of emotional energy in his
own soul. He might also have seen that Parsifal
is as much the spirit that denies as Mephistopheles.
But these points, and many others, may go as, comparatively,
nothings. The first act of “Parsifal”
is unsurpassable, the second is an anti-climax, and
the third, excepting the repentance of Kundry, which
is pathetic, and strikes one as true, a more saddening
anti-climax. There is one last thing to say before
passing to the music, and this is that “Parsifal”
is commonly treated with respect as a Christian drama—a
superior “Sign of the Cross.” I happen,
oddly enough, to know the four Gospels exceedingly
well; and I find nothing of “Parsifal”
in them. It is much nearer to Buddhism in spirit,
in colour: it is a kind of Germanised metaphysical
Buddhism. Schopenhauer, not Christ, is the hero;
and Schopenhauer was only a decrepit Mephistopheles
bereft of his humour and inverted creative energy.
After hearing the whole opera twice, with all the
supposed advantages of the stage, the main thing borne
in upon me is that the stage and actors and accessories,
far from increasing the effect of the music, actually
weaken it excepting in the first act. In that
act there is not a word or a note to alter. The
story compels one’s interest, and the music
is rich, tender, and charged with a noble passion.
Even the killing of the duck—it is supposed
to be a swan, but it is really a duck—is
saved from becoming ludicrous by the deep sincerity
of the music of Gurnemanz’s expostulations.
The music, too, with the magnificent trombone and
trumpet calls and deep clangour of cathedral bells,
prevents one thinking too much of the absurdity of
the trees, mountains, and lake walking off the stage
to make the change to the second scene. On reflection,
this panorama seems wholly meaningless and thoroughly
vulgar; and even in the theatre one wonders vaguely
what it is all about—for Gurnemanz’s
explanation about time and space being one is sheer
metaphysical shoddy, a mere humbugging of an essentially
uncultured German audience; but one does not mind it,
so full is the accompaniment of mystical life and
of colour, of a sense of impending great things.
The whole cathedral scene—I would even
include the caterwaulings of Amfortas—is
sincere, impressive, and filled with a reasonable
degree of mysticism. There is no falling off
in the second act until after the enchanting waltz
and Kundry’s wondrously tender recital of the
woes suffered by Parsifal’s mother (here the
melody compares in loveliness with the corresponding
portion of “Siegfried"); indeed, the passion
and energy go on increasing until Parsifal receives
Kundry’s kiss, and then at once they disappear.
Between this point and the end of the act there is
scarcely a fine passage. Every phrase is insincere,
not because Wagner wished to be insincere, but because
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he tried to express dramatically a state of mind which
is essentially undramatic. Parsifal is supposed
to transcend almost at one bound the will to live,
to rise above all animal needs and desires; and though
no human being can transcend the will to live, any
more than he can jump away from his shadow—for
the phrase means, and can only mean, that the will
to live transcends the will to live—yet
I am informed, and can well believe, that those who
imagine they have accomplished the feat reach a state
of perfect ecstasy. Wagner knew this; he knew
also that ecstasy, as what can only be called a static
emotion, could not be expressed through the medium
that serves to express only flowing currents of emotion;
he himself had pointed out, that for the communication
of ecstatic feeling, only polyphonic, non-climatic,
rhythmless music of the Palestrina kind served; and
yet, by one of the hugest mistakes ever made in art,
he sought to express precisely that emotion in Parsifal’s
declamatory phrases. The thing cannot be done;
it has not been done; all Parsifal’s bawling,
even with the help of the words, avails nothing; and
the curtain drops at the end of the second act, leaving
one convinced that the drama has untimely ended, has
got into a cul-de-sac. And in a cul-de-sac it
remains. There is much glorious music in the
last act; the “Good Friday music” is divine;
the last scene is gorgeously led up to; and the music
of it, considered only as music, is unsurpassable.
But heard at the end of a drama so gigantically planned
as “Parsifal,” it is unsatisfying and
disappointing. It is to me as if the “Ring”
had closed on the music of Neid-hoehle with the squabblings
of Alberich and Mime. The powers that make for
evil and destruction have won; one knows that Parsifal
is eternally damned; he has listened and succumbed,
even as Wagner himself did, to the eastern sirens’
song of the ease and delight of a life of slothful
renunciation, self-abnegation, and devotion to “duty.”
The music of the last scene sings that song in tones
of infinite sweetness; but it cannot satisfy you;
you turn from the enchanted hall, with its holy cup
and spear and dove, its mystic voices in the heights,
its heavy, depressing, incense-laden atmosphere; and
you hasten into the night, where the winds blow fresh
through the black trees, and the stars shine calmly
in the deep sky, just as though no “Parsifal”
had been written.
“Parsifal” does not imply that Wagner
in his old age went back on all he had thought and
felt before. Born in a time when the secret of
living had not been rediscovered, when folk still thought
the victory, and not the battle, the main thing in
life, he always sought a creed to put on as a coat-of-mail
to protect him from the nasty knocks of fate.
Nowadays we do not care greatly for the victory, and
we go out to fight with a light heart, commencing
where Wagner and all the pessimists ended. Wagner
wanted the victory, and also, lest he should not gain
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it, he wanted something to save him from despair.
That something he found in pessimism. In his
younger days—indeed until near the last—he
forgot all about it in his hours of inspiration, and
worked for no end, but for the sheer joy of working.
But towards the end of his life, when his inspiration
came seldomer and with less power, he worked more
and more for the victory, and became wholly pessimistic,
throwing away his weapons, and hiding behind self-renunciation
as behind a shield. He won a victory more brilliant
than ever Napoleon or Wellington or Moltke won; and
in the eyes of all men he seemed a great general.
But life had terrified him; he had trembled before
Wotan’s—or Christ’s—spear;
in his heart of hearts he knew himself a beaten man;
and he wrote “Parsifal.”
BAYREUTH IN 1897
To Bayreuth again, through dirty, dusty, nasty-smelling,
unromantic Germany, along the banks of that shabby—genteel
river known as the Rhine, watching at every railway
station the wondrously bulky haus-fraus who stir such
deep emotions in the sentimental German heart; noting
how the disease of militarism has eaten so deeply into
German life that each railway official is a mere steam-engine,
supplied by the State with fuel in case he should some
day be needed; eating the badly and dirtily cooked
German food,—how familiar it all seems
when one does it a second time! One week in Bayreuth
was the length of my stay in 1896; yet I seem to have
spent a great part of my younger days here. The
theatre is my familiar friend in whom I never trust;
the ditch called the river has many associations, pleasant
and other; I go up past the theatre into the wood
as to a favourite haunt of old time; I lunch under
the trees and watch the caterpillars drop into my
soup as though that were the commonest thing in the
world; I wander into the theatre and feel more at
home than ever I do at Covent Garden; I listen to
the bad—but it is not yet time for detailed
criticism. All I mean is, that the novelty of
Bayreuth, like the novelty of any other small lifeless
German town, disappears on a second visit; that though
the charm of the wood, of the trumpet calls at the
theatre, of the greasy German food, and the primitive
German sanitary arrangements, remains, it is a charm
that has already worn very thin, and needs the carefullest
of handling to preserve. Whether, without some
especial inducement, the average mortal can survive
Bayreuth a third time, is, to me, hardly a question.
As for my poor self, it suits me admirably—certainly
I could stand Bayreuth half a dozen times. I
like the life—the way in which the hours
of the day revolve round the evening performance,
the real idleness, passivity, combined with an appearance
of energy and activity; I like to get warm by climbing
the hill and then to sit down and cool myself by drinking
lager from a huge pot with a pewter lid, dreamily speculating
the while on the possibility of my ever growing as
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fat as the average German; I like to sit in a cafe
with my friends till three in the morning, discussing
with fiery enthusiasm unimportant details of the performance
we have lately endured; I like being hungry six times
a day. All these trifles please me, and please
others. But the majority of the crowd of visitors
are not pleased by them; and what can they do in Bayreuth
after the freshness of novelty is worn off? They
go to Villa Wahnfried and look for a few seconds at
the spot where Wagner is buried—as I heard
it said, like a cat in a back garden; they look for
a few seconds at the church; they lunch; they buy and
partly read the English papers; and then? Inevitably
the intelligent reader will say, the opera in the
evening. And I, who have been to the opera in
the evening, gasp and remark, Really!
Lest this ejaculation be entirely misinterpreted by
the irreverent, let it be said at once that the performances
are not, on the whole, very bad. But I wish to
consider whether they are of a quality and distinction
sufficient to drag one all the way from England, and
to compensate those who find the day dull for the
dulness of the day, whether they are what Bayreuth
claims them to be—the best operatic representations
in the world, the best that could possibly be given
at the present time. The circular sent out by
amiable Mr. Schulz-Curtius states that, “while
not guaranteeing any particular artists, the aim of
Bayreuth will be to secure the best artists procurable”
(or words to that effect). Is this genuinely
the aim of Bayreuth, and does Bayreuth come near enough
to the mark to make some thousands of English people
think they have spent their time, money, and energy
well in coming here? For my part I say Yes:
even were the representations a good deal poorer,
they form, as I have said, a centre for the day; I
rise in the morning with them before me, and make
all my arrangements—my lunches, discussions,
and lagers—so as to reach the theatre at
four o’clock; they save me from a life without
an object, and add a zest to everything I do; they
correspond to the trifling errand which renders a
ten-mile walk in the country an enjoyment. But
those who come here for nothing but the theatre, who
do not feel the charm of the Bayreuth life, will, I
am much afraid, answer No. Had I no friends here,
or did I not enjoy their company and conversation,
if my stomach refused lager and I could not smoke
ten-pfennig German cigars, if I were not violently
hungry every two hours, I am very much afraid I should
answer No. The working of the scenic arrangements
is, of course, as perfect as ever. Of course there
are one or two mistakes,—stage machinists,
after all, are built of peccable clay,—but
these occur so seldom that one can sit with a feeling
of security that is not possible at Covent Garden.
In “The Valkyrie” the fire does not flare
up ten minutes late; the coming of evening does not
suggest an unexpected total eclipse of the sun; the
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thing that the score indicates is done, and not, as
generally happens at Covent Garden, the reverse thing.
The colours of the scenery are likewise as intolerably
German as ever—the greens coarse and rank,
the yellows bilious, the blues tinged with a sickly
green, the reds as violent as the dress of the average
German frau. On the other hand, many of the effects
are wonderful—the mountain gorge where Wotan
calls up Erda, Mime’s cave, the depths of the
Rhine, the burning of the hall of the Gibichungs.
But the most astounding and lovely effects in the
setting of the drama will not avail for long without
true, finished, and beautiful art in the singing and
acting; and, with a few exceptions, the singers do
not give us anything approaching true, finished, and
beautiful art. The exceptions are Van Rooy, Brema,
Gulbranson, Brema, and Schumann-Heink. Van Rooy
has a noble voice, admirably suited to Wotan, and
he both sings and acts the part with a majesty and
pathos beyond anything dreamed of by any other Wotan
I have heard. He appears to have been the success
of the Festival; and certainly so strong and exquisite
an artist deserves all the success he can gain in
Bayreuth. Brema’s Fricka is noble and full
of charm; Schumann-Heink sings the music of Erda with
some sense of its mystery and of Waltraute in “Siegfried”
with considerable passion; and Gulbranson has vastly
improved her impersonation of Bruennhilde since last
year. She is still unmistakably a student, but
no one can doubt that she will develop into a really
grand artist if she avoids ruining her fine voice
by continually using it in a wrong way. Her Bruennhilde
is just now very beautiful and intensely pathetic,
but it owes less to her art than her personality.
She does not interpret Bruennhilde—rather
she uses the part as a vehicle for her private emotions;
to an inordinate degree she reads into it her real
or imaginary experience; and she has not learnt the
trick of turning her feelings into the proper channels
provided, so to say, by the part—of so directing
them that Gulbranson disappears behind Bruennhilde.
Still, it is a great thing to find an artist of such
force and passion and at the same time such rare delicacy;
and I expect to come here in 1899 and hear an almost
perfect rendering of Bruennhilde. As for the rest
of the singers, the less said about most of them the
better. They have no voices worth the mentioning;
the little they do possess they have no notion of
using rightly; and their acting is of the most rudimentary
sort. We hear so much of the fine acting which
is supposed to cover the vocal sins of Bayreuth that
it cannot be insisted on too strongly that the acting
here is not fine. I can easily imagine how Wagner,
endeavouring to get his new notion into the heads of
the stupid singers who are still permitted to ruin
his music because they are now veterans, would fume
and rage at the Italian “business”—the
laying of the left hand on the heart and of the right
on the pit of the stomach—with which incompetent
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actors always fill up their idle intervals, and how
he would beg them, in Wotan’s name, rather to
do nothing than do that. But to take the first
bungling representation of the “Ring”
as an ideal to be approached as closely as possible,
to insist on competent actors and actresses standing
doing nothing when some movement is urgently called
for, is to deny to Wagner all the advantages of the
new acting which modern stage singers have learnt
from his music. The first act of “The Valkyrie,”
for example, will be absurd so long as Sieglinde,
Hunding, and Siegmund are made to stand in solemn
silence, as beginners who cannot hear the prompter’s
voice, until Sieglinde has mixed Hunding’s draught.
And some of the gestures and postures in which the
singers are compelled to indulge are as foolish as
the foolishest Italian acting. Who can help laughing
at the calisthenics of Wotan and Bruennhilde at the
end of “The Valkyrie,” or at Wotan’s
massage treatment of Bruennhilde in the second act?
The Bayreuth acting is as entirely conventional as
Italian acting, and scarce a whit more artistic and
sane. Even the fine artists are hampered by it;
and the lesser ones are enabled to make themselves
and whole music-dramas eminently ridiculous.
On the whole, perhaps, acting and singing were at
their best in “Siegfried.” In “The
Rheingold” some of the smaller parts—such
as Miss Weed’s Freia—were handsomely
done; the Mime was also excellent; but I cannot quite
reconcile myself to Friedrichs’ Alberich.
“The Dusk of the Gods” was marred by Burgstaller,
and “The Valkyrie” by the two apparently
octogenarian lovers. That is Bayreuth’s
way. It promises us the best singers procurable,
and gives us Vogl and Sucher, who undoubtedly were
delightful in their parts twenty years ago; and it
would be shocked to learn that its good faith is questioned
so far as lady artists are concerned. Whether
it is fair to question it is another matter. In
Germany feminine beauty is reckoned by hundredweights.
No lady of under eighteen stones is admired; but one
who is heavier than that, instead of staying at home
and looking after her grandchildren, is put into a
white dress and called Sieglinde, or into a brown robe
and called Kundry; and a German audience accepts her
as a revelation of ideal loveliness through the perfection
of human form.
The Germans are devoid of a sense of colour, they
are devoid of a sense of beauty in vocal tone, and
I am at last drawing near to the conclusion that they
have no sense of beauty in instrumental tone.
Throughout this cycle the tone of many of the instruments
has been execrable; many of them have rarely been
even in approximate tune. The truth is that the
players do not play well unless a master-hand controls
them; and a master-hand in the orchestra has been urgently
wanted. Instead of a master-hand we have had to
put up with Master Siegfried Wagner’s hand (he
now uses the right), and in the worst moments we have
wished there was no hand at all, and in the best we
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have longed passionately for another. I do not
propose to discuss his conducting in detail.
Under him the band has played with steady, unrelenting
slovenliness and inaccuracy; the music has been robbed
of its rhythm, life, and colour; and many of the finest
numbers—as, for example, the Valkyrie’s
Ride, the prelude to the third act of “Siegfried,”
the march in “The Dusk of the Gods”—have
been deliberately massacred. One cannot criticise
such conducting: it does not rise near enough
to competence to be worthy of criticism. But one
has a right to ask why this young man, who should be
serving an apprenticeship in some obscure opera-house,
is palmed off on the public as “the best artist
procurable”? He scarcely seems to possess
ordinary intelligence. I had the honour of being
inadvertently presented to him, and he asked me, should
I write anything about Bayreuth, to say that he objected
very much to the Englishmen who came in knickerbockers—in
bicycle costume. When I mildly suggested that
if they came without knickerbockers or the customary
alternative he would have better reason to complain,
he asserted that he and his family had a great respect
for the theatre, and it shocked them to find so many
Englishmen who did not respect it. I mention this
because it shows clearly the spirit in which Bayreuth
is now being worked. The Wagner family are not
shocked when Wagner’s music is caricatured by
an octogenarian tenor or a twenty-stone prima donna;
they are shocked when in very hot weather a few people
wear the costume in which they suffer least discomfort.
So the place is becoming a mere fashionable resort,
that would cause Wagner all the pangs of Amfortas could
he come here again. The women seem to change
their dresses for every act of the opera; the prices
of lodgings, food, and drinks are rapidly rising to
the Monte Carlo standard; a clergyman has been imported
to preach on Sunday to the English visitors; one sees
twenty or thirty fashionable divorce cases in process
of incubation; and Siegfried Wagner conducts.
With infinite labour Wagner built this magnificent
theatre, the most perfect machine in the world for
the reproduction of great art-works; and Mrs. Wagner
has given it as a toy to her darling son that he may
amuse himself by playing with it. And, like a
baby when it gets a toy, Siegfried Wagner is breaking
it to pieces to see what there is inside. Unless
it is taken from him until he has spent a few years
in learning to play upon instead of with it, Bayreuth
will quickly be deserted. Already it is in decadence.
I shall always come to Bayreuth, for reasons already
given; but fashions change, and the people who come
here because it is the fashion will not be long in
finding other resorts; and those who want only to see
the music-plays adequately performed will have learnt
that this is not the place for them. With one
voice the ablest German, French, and Dutch critics
are crying against the present state of things; and
it is certainly the duty of every English lover of
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Wagner to refuse to take tickets for the performances
that are to be conducted by Wagner’s son.
Bayreuth promises us the best artists. Whether
some of the singers are or are not the best artists
is largely a matter of taste. But that Siegfried
Wagner is the best conductor procurable in Germany
is too preposterous a proposition to be considered
for a moment. He may be some day; but that day
is far off.
As for the representation of “Parsifal,”
I should not trouble to discuss it had not Mr. Chamberlain’s
book on Wagner lately come my way. It shows me
that the old game is being pursued as busily as ever.
Since Wagner’s death the world has been carefully
and persistently taught that only Bayreuth can do
justice to “Parsifal”; and since the world
believes anything if it is said often enough, it has
come to think it sheer blasphemy to dream of giving
“Parsifal” elsewhere than at Bayreuth.
“Parsifal” is not an opera—it
is a sacred revelation; and just as the seed of Aaron
alone could serve as priests in the sacred rites of
the temple at Jerusalem, so only the seed of Wagner
can serve as priests—that is to say, as
chief directing priests—when “Parsifal”
is played. Thus declare the naive dwellers in
Villa Wahnfried, modestly forgetting the missing link
in the chain of argument which should prove them alone
to be the people qualified to perform “Parsifal”;
and I regret to observe the support they receive from
a number of Englishmen and Scotchmen, who are grown
more German than the Germans, and just as religiously
forget to make any reference to this missing link
of proof. But these Germanised Scotchmen and
Englishmen work hard for Bayreuth: now they whisper
in awestruck tones of the beauty and significance
of “Parsifal”; now they howl at the unhappy
writers in the daily and weekly Press who dare to find
little significance and less beauty in the Bayreuth
representation; and, to do them bare justice, until
lately they have been fairly successful in persuading
the world to think with them. Verily, they have
their reward—they partake of afternoon
tea at Villa Wahnfried; they enjoy the honour of bowing
low to the second Mrs. Wagner; Wagner’s legal
descendants cordially take them by the hand. And
they go away refreshed, and again spread the report
of the artistic and moral and religious supremacy
of Bayreuth; and the world listens and goes up joyfully
to Bayreuth to be taxed—one pound sterling
per head per “Parsifal” representation.
The performances over, the world comes away mightily
edified, having seen nothing with its own eyes, heard
nothing with its own ears, having understood nothing
at all;—having, in fact, so totally miscomprehended
everything as to think “Parsifal” a Christian
drama; having been too deaf to realise that the singers
were frequently out of the key, and too blind to observe
that the scenery in the second act resembled a cheap
cretonne, and that many of the flower-maidens were
at least eight feet in circumference. On the way
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home the world whiles away the long railway journey
by reading metaphysical disquisitions on “Parsifal’
and the Ideal Woman,” “‘Parsifal’
and the Thing-in-Itself,” “The Swan in
‘Parsifal’ and its Relation to the Higher
Vegetarianism.” It knows the name of every
leit-motif, and can nearly pronounce the German for
it; it can refer to the Essay on Beethoven apropos
of Kundry’s scream (or yawn) in the second act;
it can chat learnedly of Klingsor, in pathetic ignorance
of his real offence, and explain why Amfortas has his
wound on the right side, although the libretto distinctly
states it to be situated on the left. It is a
fact that this year a lady was heard to ask why Parsifal
quarrelled with his wife in the second act. (I might
mention that an admirer of “Parsifal”
asked me who the dark man was in the first act of
“The Valkyrie,” and whether Sieglinde or
Bruennhilde was burnt in the last.) The which is eminently
amusing, and conjures up before one a vision of Richard,
not wailing, like the youth in Shelley’s “Prometheus
Unbound,” for the faith he kindled, but gazing
patiently, rather wearily, with a kindly ironical smile,
on the world he conquered, on the world that adores
him because it fails to understand him.
Happily, it is not my business to reform the world;
and writing in October, when so many of the idealists
who felt with Parsifal in his remorse about the duck-shooting
episode are applying the lesson by wantonly slaughtering
every harmless creature they can hit, it would be
superfluous to point out in any detail how very wrong
and absurd is the world’s estimate of the Bayreuth
performance. In fact, were it my object to assist
in the destruction of Bayreuth, no better plan could
be found than that of approving cordially of everything
Bayreuth does. For it is fast driving away all
sincere lovers of Wagner; it lives now on fashionable
ladies, betting men, and bishops: when the fashion
changes and these depart, the Bayreuth festivals will
come to an end. Bayreuth is only an affectation;
not one pilgrim in a hundred understands the “Ring”
or “Parsifal”; not one in a thousand is
really impressed by anything deeper than the mere
novelty of the business. Visitors go and are
moved by the shooting of the duck (the libretto calls
it a swan, but the management chooses to use a duck);
they talk of Wagner’s love of animals and of
how they love animals themselves; they go straight
from Bayreuth to Scotland and show their love in true
sportsmanlike fashion by treating animals, birds, and
fishes with a degree of cruelty so appalling as to
disgust every right-thinking and right-feeling man
and woman; and they tell you that the stag likes to
be disembowelled, the bird to have its wings shattered,
the fish to be torn to pieces in its agonised struggle
for life. Or, having been moved by the consequences
of sin, they straightway go and prepare cases for
the divorce courts; having appreciated the purity and
peace of monastery life and a daily communion service,
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they return without hesitation or sense of inconsistency
to their favourite modes of gambling; having revelled
in the most lovely music in the world, they proceed
to listen nightly to the ugliest and silliest music
in the world. Their appreciation of Bayreuth
is a sham; they would cheerfully go elsewhere—say
to Homburg—if Bayreuth were shut up; and
before long they will go to Homburg or elsewhere,
whether Bayreuth is shut up or not.
A NOTE ON BRAHMS
It is not an exaggeration to say that probably there
are not a dozen musicians in Europe who have formed
any precise and final opinion as to where Brahms should
be placed. One gets to know him very slowly.
His appearance and manner (so to speak), so extremely
dignified, are very much in his favour; but when one
tries to get to terms of intimacy with him he has
a fatal trick of repelling one by that “austerity”
or chilliness of which we have heard so much.
And the worst of it is that too frequently a sharp
suspicion strikes one that there is little behind
that austere manner—that his reticence does
not so much imply matter held in reserve as an absence
of matter. I do not mean by this that Brahms
was a paradoxical fool who was clever enough to hold
his tongue lest he was found out, nor even that he
purposely veiled his lack of meaning. On the contrary,
a composer who wished more devoutly to be sincere
never put pen to paper. But he had not the intellect
of an antelope; and he took up in all honesty a role
for which he had only the slightest qualification.
The true Brahms, the Brahms who does not deceive himself,
is the Brahms you find in many of the songs, in some
of the piano and chamber music, in the smaller movements
of his symphonies, and in certain passages of his
overtures; and I have no hesitation whatever in asserting
(though the opinion is subject to revision) that his
songs are much the most satisfactory things he did.
Here, unweighted by a heavy sense of a mission, he
either revels in making beautiful—though
never supremely beautiful—tunes for their
own sake, or he actually expresses with beauty and
considerable fidelity certain definite emotions.
Had he written nothing but such small things—songs,
piano pieces, Allegrettos like that in the D symphony—his
position might be a degree lower in the estimation
of dull Academics who don’t count, but he would
be accepted at something like his true value by the
whole world, and the whole world would be the better
for oftener hearing many lovely things. But merely
to be a singer of wonderful songs was not sufficient
for Brahms: he wanted to be a great poet, a new
Beethoven. It was a legitimate ambition.
The kind of music Brahms really loved was the kind
of which Beethoven’s is the most splendid example;
and he wanted to create more of the same kind.
He doubtless thought he could; in his early days Robert
Schumann predicted that he would; and in his later
days his intimate friend Hanslick and a small herd
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of followers asserted that he did. He was run
as the prophet of the classical school with all the
force of all who hated Wagner and had not brains enough
to understand either Brahms’ or Wagner’s
music; he became the god of all the musical dullards
in Europe; and it is small wonder that he took himself
with immense seriousness. A little more intelligence,
ever so little more, would have shown him that, despite
the noise of those who perhaps admired him less than
they dreaded Wagner, he was not the man they said
he was. He had not a great matter to utter; what
he had he could not utter in the classical form; yet
he tried to write in classical form. If ever a
musician was born a happy, careless romanticist, that
musician was Brahms—he was even a romanticist
in the narrower sense, inasmuch as he was fond rather
of the gloomy, mysterious, and dismal than of sunlight
and the blue sky; and whenever his imagination warmed
he straightway began breaking the bonds in which he
had endeavoured to work. But that miserable article
of Schumann—deplorable gush that has been
tolerated, nay, admired, only because it is Schumann’s—the
evil influence of the pseudo-classicism of Mendelssohn
and his followers, the preposterous over-praise of
Hanslick,—these things drove Brahms into
the mistake never made by the really able men.
Wilkes denied that he ever was a Wilksite; Wagner
certainly never was a Wagnerite; there are people
who ask whether Christ was ever a Christian. But
Brahms became more and more a devoted Brahmsite; he
accepted himself as the guardian of the great classical
tradition (which never existed); and he wrote more
and more dull music. It is idle to tell me he
is austere when my inner consciousness tells me he
is merely barren, and idler to ask me feel beauty
when my ears report no beauty to me. He had no
original emotion or thought: whenever his music
is good it will be found that he has derived the emotion
from a poem, or else that there is no emotion but
only very fine decorative work. In most of his
bigger works—the symphonies, the German
Requiem, the Serious songs he wrote in his later days—he
sacrificed the beauty he might have attained to the
expression of emotions he never felt; he assumed the
pose and manner of a master telling us great things,
and talked like a pompous duffer. An exception
must be made: one emotion Brahms had felt and
did communicate. It was his tragedy that he had
no original emotion, no rich inner life, but lived
through the days on the merely prosaic plane; and
he seems to have felt that this was his tragedy.
Anyhow, the one original emotion he brought into music
is a curious mournful dissatisfaction with life and
with death. The only piece of his I know in which
the feeling is intolerably poignant, seems to cut
like a knife, is his setting of that sad song of Goethe’s
about the evening wind dashing the vine leaves and
the raindrops against the window pane; and in this
song, as also in the movement in one of the quartets
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evolved from the song, the mournfulness becomes absolutely
pitiable despair. Brahms was not cast in the big
mould, and he spent a good deal of his later time
in pitying himself. It is curious that one of
his last works was the batch of Serious songs, which
consist of dismal meditations on the darkness and
dirt of the grave and feebly-felt hopes that there
is something better on the other side. That does
not strike one as in the vein of the big men.
Much of Brahms’ music is bad and ugly music,
dead music; it is a counterfeit and not the true and
perfect image of life indeed; and it should be buried
or cremated at the earliest opportunity. But much
of it is wonderfully beautiful—almost but
never quite as beautiful as the great men at their
best. There are passages in the Tragic overture
that any composer might be proud to have written.
If the opening of the D symphony is thin, unreal,
an attempt at pastoral gaiety which has resulted merely
in lack of character, at anyrate the second theme
is delightful; if the opening of the slow movement
is also twaddle, there are pleasant passages later
on; the dainty allegretto is as fresh and fragrant
as a wild rose; and the finale, though void of significance,
is full of an energy rare in Brahms. Then there
are many of the songs in which Brahms’ astonishing
felicity of phrase, and his astounding trick of finding
expression for an emotion when the emotion has been
given to him, enable him almost to work miracles.
And it must be remembered that all his music is irreproachable
from the technical point of view. Brahms is certainly
with Bach, Mozart, and Wagner in point of musicianship:
in fact, these four might be called the greatest masters
of sheer music who have lived. A Brahms score
is as wonderful as a Wagner score; from beginning
to end there is not a misplaced note nor a trace of
weakness; and one stands amazed before the consummate
workmanship of the thing. The only difference
between the Wagner score and the Brahms score is,
that while the former is always alive, always the
product of a fervent inner life, the latter is sometimes
alive too, but more frequently as dead as a door-mat,
the product of extreme facility and (I must suppose)
an extraordinary inherited musical instinct divorced
from exalted thought and feeling. The difference
may be felt when you compare a Brahms and a Tschaikowsky
symphony. Although in his later years Tschaikowsky
acquired a mastery of the technique of music, and succeeded
in keeping his scores clear and clean, he never arrived
at anything approaching Brahms’ certainty of
touch, and neither his scoring nor his counterpoint
has Brahms’ perfection of workmanship. Yet
one listens to Tschaikowksy, for the present at least,
with intense pleasure, and wants to listen again.
I have yet to meet anyone who pretends to have received
any intense pleasure from a Brahms symphony.
Brahms is dead; the old floods of adulation will no
longer be poured forth by the master’s disciples;
neither will the enemies his friends made for him
have any reason to depreciate his music; and ultimately
it will be possible to form a fair, unbiassed judgment
on him. This is a mere casual utterance, by the
way.
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ANTON DVORAK
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, Dvorak, was the
hero of the evening. Now, whatever one may think
of Dvorak the musician, it is impossible to feel anything
but sympathy and admiration for Dvorak 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. Dvorak 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 Dvorak’s music is at times odd and whimsical,
and persistently wrong-headed and outre through
long passages, it does not mean that Dvorak 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
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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 Dvorak’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 Dvorak
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.
TSCHAIKOWSKY AND HIS “PATHETIC” SYMPHONY
A very little while since, Tschaikowsky was little
more than a name in England. He had visited us
some two or three times, and it was generally believed
that he composed; but he had not written any piece
without which no orchestral programme could be considered
complete, and the mere suggestion that his place might
possibly be far above Gounod would certainly have
been received with open derision. However, when
his fame became great and spread wide on the Continent,
he became so important a man in the eyes of English
musicians that Cambridge University thought fit to
honour itself by offering him an honorary musical
degree. Tschaikowsky, simple soul, good-humouredly
accepted it, apparently in entire ignorance of the
estimation in which such cheap decorations are held
in this country; and it is to be hoped that before
his death he obtained a hearing in Russia for the Cambridge
professor’s music. The incident, comical
as it appeared to those of us who knew the value of
musical degrees, the means by which they are obtained,
and the reasons for which they are conferred, yet served
a useful purpose by calling public attention to the
fact that there was living a man who had written music
that was fresh, a trifle strange perhaps, but full
of vitality, and containing a new throb, a new thrill.
Since 1893 his reputation has steadily grown, but in
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a curious way. One can scarcely say with truth
that Tschaikowsky is popular: only his “Pathetic”
symphony and one or two smaller things are popular.
Had he not written the “Pathetic,” one
may doubt whether he would be much better known to-day
than he was in 1893. It caught the public fancy
as no other work of his caught it, and on the strength
of its popularity many of the critics do not hesitate
to call it a great symphony, and on the strength of
the symphony Tschaikowsky a great composer. (For in
England criticism largely means saying what the public
thinks.) Passionately though that symphony is admired,
hardly any other of his music can be truly said to
get a hearing; for, on the rare occasions when it
is played, the public thoughtfully stays away.
It is true that the Casse Noisette suite is always
applauded, but it is a trifling work compared with
his best. Tschaikowsky shares with Gray and one
or two others in ancient and modern times the distinction
of being famous by a single achievement. The public
is jealous for the supremacy of that achievement,
and will not hear of there being another equal to
it.
Whether the public is right or wrong, and whether
we all are or are not just a little inclined to-day
to exaggerate Tschaikowsky’s gifts and the value
of his music, there can be no doubt whatever that he
was a singularly fine craftsman, who brought into
music a number of fresh and living elements.
He seems to me to have been an extraordinary combination
of the barbarian and the civilised man, of the Slav
and the Latin or Teuton, the Slav barbarian preponderating.
He saw things as neither Slav nor Latin nor Teuton
had seen them before; the touch of things aroused
in him moods dissimilar from those that had been aroused
in anyone before. Hence, while we English regard
him as a representative Russian, or at anyrate Slav,
composer, many Russians repudiate him, calling him
virtually a Western. He has the Slav fire, rash
impetuosity, passion and intense melancholy, and much
also of that Slav naivete which in the case of Dvorak
degenerates into sheer brainlessness; he has an Oriental
love of a wealth of extravagant embroidery, of pomp
and show and masses of gorgeous colour; but the other,
what I might call the Western, civilised element in
his character, showed itself in his lifelong striving
to get into touch with contemporary thought, to acquire
a full measure of modern culture, and to curb his
riotous, lawless impulse towards mere sound and fury.
It is this unique fusion of apparently mutually destructive
elements and instincts that gives to Tschaikowsky’s
music much of its novelty and piquancy. But,
apart from this uncommon fusion, it must be remembered
that his was an original mind—original not
only in colour but in its very structure. Had
he been pure Slav, or pure Latin, his music might
have been very different, but it would certainly have
been original. He had true creative imagination,
a fund of original, underived emotion, and a copiousness
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of invention almost as great as Wagner’s or
Mozart’s. His power of evolving new decorative
patterns of a fantastic beauty seemed quite inexhaustible;
and the same may be said of his schemes and combinations
and shades of colour, and the architectural plans
and forms of his larger works. It is true that
his forms frequently enough approach formlessness;
that his colours—and especially in his
earlier music—are violent and inharmonious;
and that in his ceaseless invention of new patterns
his Slav naivete and lack of humour led him more than
a hundred times to write unintentionally comic passages.
He is discursive—I might say voluble.
Again, he had little or no real strength—none
of the massive, healthy strength of Bach, Mozart,
Beethoven, Wagner: his force is sheer hysteria.
He is wanting in the deepest and tenderest human feeling.
He is plausible to a degree that leads one to suspect
his sincerity, and certainly leaves it an open question
how long a great deal of his music will stand after
this generation, to which it appeals so strongly,
has passed away. But when all that may fairly
be said against him has been said and given due weight,
the truth remains that he is one of the few great
composers of this century. I myself, in all humility,
allowing fully that I may be altogether wrong, while
convinced that I am absolutely right, deliberately
set him far above Brahms, above Gounod, above Schumann—above
all save Beethoven, Weber, Schubert, and Wagner.
His accomplishment as a sheer musician was greater
than either Gounod’s or Schumann’s, though
far from being equal to Brahms’—for
Brahms as a master of the management of notes stands
with the highest, with Bach, Mozart, and Wagner; while
as a voice and a new force in music neither Brahms
nor Schumann nor Gounod can be compared with him other
than unfavourably. All that are sensitive to
music can feel, as I have said, the new throb, the
new thrill; and that decides the matter.
It is now a long time since Mr. Henry Wood, one winter’s
afternoon, the only Englishman who may be ranked with
the great continental conductors, gave a Tschaikowsky
concert, with a programme that included some of the
earlier as well as one or two of the later works.
It served to show how hard and how long Tschaikowsky
laboured to attain to lucidity of expression, and
why the “Pathetic” symphony is popular
while the other compositions are not. In all of
them we find infinite invention and blazes of Eastern
magnificence and splendour; but in the earlier things
there is little of the order and clarity of the later
ones. Another and a more notable point is that
in not one thing played at this concert might the
human note be heard. The suite (Op. 55) and the
symphony (Op. 36) are full of novel and dazzling effects—for
example, the scherzo of the symphony played mainly
by the strings pizzicato, and the scherzo of the suite,
with the short, sharp notes of the brass and the rattle
of the side-drum; the melodies also are new, and in
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their way beautiful; in form both symphony and suite
are nearly as clear as anything Tschaikowsky wrote:
in fact, each work is a masterwork. But each
is lacking in the human element, and without the human
element no piece of music can be popular for long.
The fame of Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, is still growing
and will continue to grow, because every time we hear
their music it touches us; while Weber, mighty though
he is, will probably never be better loved than he
is to-day, because his marvellously graphic picturesque
music does not touch us—cannot, was not
intended to, touch us; and the fame of Mendelssohn
and the host of lesser men who did not speak with a
human accent of human woe and weal wanes from day
to day. The composer who writes purely decorative
music, or purely picturesque music, may be remembered
as long as he who expresses human feeling; but he cannot
hope to be loved by so many. It is because Tschaikowsky
has so successfully put his own native emotions, his
own aspirations and hopes and fears and sorrows, into
the “Pathetic,” that I believe it has
come to stay with us, while many of his other works
will fade from the common remembrance. Surely
it is one of the most mournful things in music; yet
surely sadness was never uttered with a finer grace,
with a more winning carelessness, as one who tries
to smile gaily at his own griefs. Were it touched
with the finest tenderness, as Mozart might have touched
it, we might—if we could once get thoroughly
accustomed to a few of the unintentionally humorous
passages I have referred to—have it set
by the side of the G minor and “Jupiter”
symphonies. As it is, it unmistakably falls short
of Mozart by lacking that tenderness, just as it falls
short of Beethoven by lacking profundity of emotion
and thought; but it does not always fall so far short.
There are passages in it that neither Beethoven nor
Mozart need have been ashamed to own as theirs; and
especially there is much in it that is in the very
spirit of Mozart—Mozart as we find him
in the Requiem, rather than the Mozart of “Don
Giovanni” or the “Figaro.”
The opening bars are, of course, ultramodern:
they would never have been written had not Wagner
written something like them first; but the combination
of poignancy and lightness and poise with which the
same phrase is delivered and expanded as the theme
for the allegro is quite Mozartean, and the same may
be said of the semiquaver passage following it.
The outbursts of Slavonic fire are, of course, Tschaikowsky
pure and simple; but everyone who hears the symphony
may note how the curious union of barbarism with modern
culture is manifest in the ease with which Tschaikowsky
recovers himself after one of these outbursts—turns
it aside, so to speak, instead of giving it free play
after the favourite plan both of Borodine the great
and purely Russian composer, and Dvorak the little
Hungarian composer. The second theme does not
appear to me equal to the rest of the symphony.
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It has that curious volubility and “mouthing”
quality that sometimes gets into Tschaikowsky’s
music; it is plausible and pretty; it suggests a writer
who either cannot or dare not use the true tremendous
word at the proper moment, and goes on delivering himself
of journalistic stock-phrases which he knows will move
those who would be left unmoved were the right word
spoken. There is nothing of this in the melody
of the second movement. Its ease is matched by
its poignancy: the very happy-go-lucky swing
of it adds to its poignancy; and the continuation—another
instance of the untamed Slav under the influence of
the most finished culture—has a wild beauty,
and at the same time communicates the emotion more
clearly than speech could. The mere fact that
it is written in five-four time counts for little—nothing
is easier than to write in five-four time when once
you have got the trick; the remarkable thing is the
skill and tact with which Tschaikowsky has used precisely
the best rhythm he could have chosen—a
free, often ambiguous, rhythm—to express
that particular shade of feeling. The next movement
is one of the most astounding ever conceived.
Beginning like an airy scherzo, presently a march
rhythm is introduced, and before one has realised the
state of affairs we are in the midst of a positive
tornado of passion. The first tunes then resume;
but again they are dismissed, and it becomes apparent
that the march theme is the real theme of the whole
movement—that all the others are intended
simply to lead up to it, or to form a frame in which
it is set. It comes in again and again with ever
greater and greater clamour, until it seems to overwhelm
one altogether. There is no real strength in
it—the effect is entirely the result of
nervous energy, of sheer hysteria; but as an expression
of an uncontrollable hysterical mood it stands alone
in music. It should be observed that even here
Tschaikowsky’s instinctive tendency to cover
the intensity of his mood with a pretence of carelessness
had led him to put this enormous outburst into a rhythm
that, otherwise used, would be irresistibly jolly.
The last movement, too, verges on the hysterical throughout.
It is full of the blackest melancholy and despondency,
with occasional relapses into a tranquillity even more
tragic; and the trombone passage near the end, introduced
by a startling stroke on the gong, inevitably reminds
one of the spirit of Mozart’s Requiem.
The whole of this paper might have been devoted to
a discussion of the technical side of Tschaikowsky’s
music, for the score of this symphony is one of the
most interesting I know. It is full of astonishing
points, of ingenious dodges used not for their own
sake, but to produce, as here they nearly always do,
particular effects; and throughout, the part-writing,
the texture of the music, is most masterly and far
beyond anything Tschaikowsky achieved before.
For instance, the opening of the last movement has
puzzled some good critics, for it is written in a
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way which seems like a mere perverse and wasted display
of skill. But let anyone imagine for a moment
the solid, leaden, lifeless result of letting all
the parts descend together, instead of setting them,
as Tschaikowsky does, twisting round each other, and
it will at once be perceived that Tschaikowsky never
knew better what he was doing, or was more luckily
inspired, than when he devised the arrangement that
now stands. Much as I should like to have debated
dozens of such points, it is perhaps better, after
all, just now to have talked principally of the content
of Tschaikowsky’s music; for, when all is said,
in Tschaikowsky’s music it is the content that
counts. I might describe that content as modern,
were it not that the phrase means little. Tschaikowsky
is modern because he is new; and in this age, when
the earth has grown narrow, and tales of far-off coasts
and unexplored countries seem wonderful no longer,
we throw ourselves with eagerness upon the new thing,
in five minutes make it our own, and hail the inventor
of it as the man who has said for us what we had all
felt for years. Nevertheless, it may be that
Tschaikowsky’s attitude towards life, and especially
towards its sorrows,—the don’t-care-a-hang
attitude,—is modern; and anyhow, in the
sense that it is so new that we seize it first amongst
a hundred other things, this symphony is the most modern
piece of music we have. It is imbued with a romanticism
beside which the romanticism of Weber and Wagner seems
a little thin-blooded and pallid; it expresses for
us the emotions of the over-excited and over-sensitive
man as they have not been expressed since Mozart; and
at the present time we are quite ready for a new and
less Teutonic romanticism than Weber’s, and
to enter at once into the feelings of the brain-tired
man. That the “Pathetic” will for
long continue to grow in popularity I also fully expect;
and that after this generation has hurried away it
will continue to have a large measure of popularity
I also fully expect, for in it, together with much
that appeals only to us unhealthy folk of to-day,
there is much that will appeal to the race, no matter
how healthy it may become, so long as it remains human
in its desires and instincts.
LAMOUREUX AND HIS ORCHESTRA
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
Ysaye, 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
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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 Walkuerenritt, 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,
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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
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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
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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 aesthetic 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.