CONTEMPORARY COM PO S E RS DANIEL GREGORY MASON. CONTEMPORARY COMPOSERS THE MACMILLAN COMPANY NEW YORK BOSTON CHICAGO DALLAS ATLANTA SAN FRANCISCO MACMILLAN & CO., LIMITED LONDON BOMBAY CALCUTTA MELBOURNE THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, LTD. TORONTO VINCENT D'!NDY CONTEMPORARY COMPOSERS DANIEL GREGORY; ;MASON^V AUTHOR OF "BEErHO\FiN AND HIS FORERUNNERS," "THE ,/ ROMANTIC COMPOSERS," '" FROM GRIEG TO BRAHMS," ETC. NEW YORK THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 1918 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED t . V' * Bv THE M*ACJtt*LtAN COMPANY. .....: ...... .. :*;. ; , * SeujWdirieitrotypcd. %$>)$& July, 1918 Nnrtooolj J. 8. Gushing Co. Berwick & Smith Co. Norwood, Mass., U.S.A. PREFACE w E live," wrote Stevenson to Will H. Low in 1884, "in a rum age of music with- out airs, stories without incident, pictures without beauty, American wood-engravings that should have been etchings, and dry-point etchings that ought to have been mezzo-tints. . . . So long as an artist is on his head, is paint- ing with a flute, or writes with an etcher's needle, or conducts the orchestra with a meat- axe, all is well ; and plaudits shower along with roses. But any plain man who tries to follow the obtrusive canons of his art, is but a commonplace figure. . . . He will have his reward, but he will never be thought a person of parts." What would Stevenson say, I wonder, could he witness the condition to which this con- fusion of aims, rapidly spreading since he wrote, has now reduced all the arts, and perhaps PREFACE especially music? "Painting with a flute" hardly sounds fantastic any longer, now that symphonies have given place to symphonic "poems," orchestral "sketches," and tone "pictures," and program music has taken the place of supremacy in the art of tones that magazine illustration occupies among graphic arts. Anyone who tries nowadays to write mere music expressive of emotion through beauty is more than ever "a commonplace person." The "persons of parts" are those who give it the quaint local color of folk-songs, like Mr. Percy Grainger; or who make of it an agreeable accessory of dance or stage pic- ture, like Ravel and Strawinsky, or of colored lights and perfumes, like Scriabine ; or who spin it into mathematical formulae as a spider spins web, like Reger ; or who use it as a vehicle for a 'priori intellectual theories, like Schoen- berg, or as noise for a nerve stimulant, like Mr. Leo Ornstein. The reader will look in vain for these names, in recent years on everyone's lips, in the table of contents of this book on "Contemporary Composers." In the work of most of them vi PREFACE there is, indeed, much of charm or interest, of vividness, perhaps of permanent power. But the time when critical appraisal of them can be anything like final has not yet arrived ; and meanwhile there is in their centrifugal tendencies, I believe, a real menace to the best interests of music. One and all, they look away from that inner emotion "to which alone," as Wagner said, "can music give a voice, and music only." They all represent in one way or another that trivializing of the great art, that degradation of it to sensa- tionalism, luxury, or mere illustration, some of the historic causes of which I have tried to suggest in the introduction. No sincere lover of music can regard with anything but the gravest apprehensions such tendencies toward decadence. Fortunately these are, however, powerfully counteracted, even now, by more constructive forces, carrying forward the evolution of music in and for itself which was the main concern of the great elder masters who regarded it as a supreme emotional language Bach, Bee- thoven, Brahms, Wagner, Franck. It is the PREFACE representatives of this sounder tradition (de- spite the programmism of Strauss and the sybaritism of Debussy) that I have selected for discussion here. They have also the further advantage of having been long enough before the public to have vindicated already their claims to permanent place in musical history. The present volume, it may be added, com- pletes the series of studies of great creative musicians from Palestrina to the present day begun in "Beethoven and His Forerunners," "The Romantic Composers," and "From Grieg to Brahms." For permission to reprint the essays it contains, acknowledgment is made to the editors of the Musical Quarterly, the Out- look, and the New Music Review. D. G. M. NEW YORK, January 26, 1918. viii CONTENTS MM I. INTRODUCTION: DEMOCRACY AND Music . i II. RICHARD STRAUSS 43 III. SIR EDWARD ELGAR 93 IV. CLAUDE DEBUSSY 133 V. VINCENT D'!NDY 153 VI. Music IN AMERICA 229 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS VINCENT D'!NDY Frontispiece FACING PAGE RICHARD STRAUSS 45 SIR EDWARD ELGAR 95 CLAUDE DEBUSSY 135 VINCENT D'!NDY AS A YOUNG MAN . . 155 I INTRODUCTION DEMOCRACY AND MUSIC I INTRODUCTION DEMOCRACY AND MUSIC music who are at the same time interested students of the social accompanied must often ask themselves whether there any deep connection of cause and effect between the two sets of phenomena, or whether they merely happened to take place at the same time. Have the important social transforma- tions of the nineteenth century reached so far in their influence as to the music of our time ? Has sociology any light to throw upon musical art ? The question raises a problem as diffi- cult as it is fascinating ; and the suggestions which follow are to be taken as guesses and hints, intended to provoke fertile thought, rather than as constituting in any sense a finished theory. 1 CONTEMPORARY COMPOSERS I The change in the nature of the musical public that has taken place during the nine- teenth century has been gradual but far- reaching. The essence of it is expressed by saying that at the end of the eighteenth cen- tury music was in the hands of the nobility and gentry, and that at the beginning of the twentieth it is in those of all the people. Under feudal conditions it was organized by the patronage system according to the tastes of the aristocratic few. The thirty most fruitful years of Haydn's life were spent in the employ of Prince Esterhazy ; Mozart, a skilled pianist as well as composer, was less dependent on his patron, but his life was probably shortened by the hardships he had to face after he had broken with him ; Beethoven, staunch demo- crat though he was, realized what he owed his four patrons, Archduke Rudolph, and Princes Lobkowitz, Kinsky, and Lichnowsky, and wrote, after the death of some of them had reduced the value of his annuity: "In order to gain time for a great composition, I must 4 DEMOCRACY AND MUSIC always previously scrawl away a good deal for the sake of money. ... If my salary were not so far reduced as not to be a salary at all, I should write nothing but symphonies . . . and church music, or at most quartets." No doubt the patronage system had its faults and abuses, which have been quite adequately dis- cussed by critics ; the fact remains that under it was done the supreme creative work of the golden age of music. Greater than any of its material advantages was the spiritual homo- geneity of the group who practised it. By excluding the lower classes, however unjustly, they achieved, though artificially, a unity of feeling that could not then have been achieved otherwise ; and as art is in essence an emotional reaction this unity of feeling provided a soil in which its seeds could grow. But with the French Revolution and the passing of feudalism this old order perished. The proclamation of liberty, equality, and fra- ternity, paving the way for individualistic com- petition, introduced the epoch of industrialism and capitalism, in which art, like everything else, was taken out of the hands of a privileged 5 CONTEMPORARY COMPOSERS class, and made theoretically accessible to all. As the appreciation of art requires, however, mental and emotional experience, discipline, and refining, a process which takes time, what actually happened was that those gradually emerging from poverty through industrialism the workers themselves and their children and grandchildren availed themselves much more slowly and timidly of these spiritual privileges than of the material ones. There remained over from the feudal world a nucleus of cultivated people, sufficiently homogeneous in feeling to retain a standard of taste, suffi- ciently numerous to exert an influence on production : these were the guardians of the better traditions. They were gradually but steadily interpenetrated and overrun by the emergents, at first in a minority but rapidly becoming the majority, and remaining, of course, unavoidably far more backward in artistic feeling than in economic independence and social ambition. Thus was introduced a formidable cleavage in the musical public, the majority breaking off sharply by their childlike crudity from the more disciplined minority. 6 DEMOCRACY AND MUSIC The situation was further complicated by the presence of a third class, the idle rich, becoming more numerous under capitalism. It may be doubted whether their attitude towards art was qualitatively different in any important respect from that of the frivolous nobility under feudalism. Both groups re- garded music either with complete indifference or else as an amusement, a plaything, a fad ; both exercised an influence which through its essential artificiality was potentially perhaps even more baleful than that of the honest crudity of what we have called the emergent class, though actually less disastrous because they were a small minority instead of the ma- jority. But the contribution of this group to the confusion and disorganization character- istic of art under democracy was greater than that of the feudal nobles, because their relation to society as a whole counted more. When they were placed by the emergence of the democratic majority in a vigorous opposition of attitude to the bulk of the people their in- fluence no longer remained largely negative, but made positively for cleavage and dis- 7 CONTEMPORARY COMPOSERS union. Thus the unity of social emotion on which art so largely depends for a healthy universality was still further disrupted. We find, then, under democracy, not a fairly homogeneous musical public with emotionally a single point of view, such as existed under feudalism, but a division into a well-meaning but crude majority and two minorities, one cultivated, the other frivolous : all three, but especially the two extremes, held apart by profound differences of feeling. Despite the inevitability and the desirability of democrati- zation as the only path away from slavery, such a disorganization, even if temporary, must evidently, while it lasts, work serious injuries to art. It is worth while to try, taking frankly at first the attitude of the devil's advocate, to trace a few of the more striking of these injuries as they show themselves in con- temporary music. II Of the "emergents" who constitute the most novel element in the contemporary situa- tion, the well-meaning but crude listeners who DEMOCRACY AND MUSIC form a numerically overwhelming majority of our concertgoers, the effect may be de- scribed, in most general terms, as being to put a premium on all that is easily grasped, obvious, primitive, at the expense of the sub- tler, more highly organized effects of art on sensation as against thought, on facile senti- ment as against deep feeling, on extrinsic association as against intrinsic beauty. Men- tally, emotionally, and aesthetically children, they naturally demand the childlike, if not the childish. There seems to be something far deeper than accident in the coincidence of the rise about 1830, that is, about a generation after the French Revolution, under Berlioz and Liszt, of that program music which is generally acknowledged to be peculiarly characteristic of our period, with the invasion of concert- halls by masses of these childlike listeners, as eager for the stories that music might be made to suggest as they were unprepared to appreciate its more intrinsic beauties. They were drawn by the "program" before they grew up to the "music." Lacking the con- 9 CONTEMPORARY COMPOSERS centration needed to hold all but the simplest melodies together in their minds, pathetically incapable of the far greater range and pre- cision of attention required to hear syntheti- cally a complex work like an overture or a symphony, they were puzzled or bored by Beethoven, and in their helplessness to follow a musical thread could only grope in the dark until they found a dramatic one. Such a clue in the labyrinth was the "program." They hailed it with the delight of the comparatively unmusical person in opera, who considers it the highest type of music because it supplies him with the largest apparatus of non-musical com- mentaries (scenery, gestures, words) on the music he cannot understand. Program music, a sort of idealized opera with scenery and actors left to the imagination, fulfilled the same in- dispensable service for the novice in the con- cert-room. The immense popularity of the program idea, from that day to this, is evidence of its complete fitness to the needs of its audience. It says to them, in effect: "You have little 'ear' for music, and take no more joy in the 10 DEMOCRACY AND MUSIC highly organized melodies of a Beethoven symphony or a Bach fugue, with their infinite subtlety of tonal and rhythmic relationships, than in the most trivial tunes. Never mind : I will give you two or three short motives, clearly labeled, that you cannot help recognizing. This one will mean 'love,' that 'jealousy,' that 'death,' and so on. . . . You are not fascinated by, because you are unable to follow, the creative imagination by which such masters as these build whole worlds of musical beauty out of a few simple themes an imagination as truly creative as that which carried Newton from the falling apple to the law of gravitation, or directed the infinite patient delving in de- tail of a Pasteur or a Darwin. Never mind. Remember the story, and you will know that during the love scene the composer must be developing the 'love' motive. . . . You are even more indifferent to the broader balance of part with part, the symmetry and coopera- tion of all in the whole, harder to grasp just as the concinnity of a Greek temple as a whole is harder to feel than the charm of a bit of sculpture here or the texture of the marble ii CONTEMPORARY COMPOSERS there. Never mind. I will give you a structure in sections, like a sky-scraper. Section will follow section as event follows event in the plot. ... In short, the story shall be 'All you know, and all you need to know.' It shall be a straw that will keep you from drown- ing as the inundation of the music passes over you, and that will save you the trouble of learning to swim." Of course, this does not mean that music of a high order cannot be associated with a program, or that the two cannot be not only coexistent but fruitfully cooperative. They are so in many a representative modern work in Strauss's "Death and Transfiguration," for instance, or d'Indy's "Istar," or Dukas's "L'Apprenti Sorcier," or Rachmaninoff's "Island of the Dead." What is meant is that the program idea derives both its popu- larity and its peculiar menace in large measure from the stress it places on the appeal to some- thing outside music to association, that is at the expense of the appeal to music itself, and thus from the official sanction it seems to give to what is essentially an unmusical con- 12 DEMOCRACY AND MUSIC ception of music. The program school of composers is the first school that has not merely tolerated but encouraged, elaborated, and rationalized the conviction of the unmusical that music is to be valued chiefly not for itself, but for something else. How dangerous such a compromise with the majority may be, both to public taste and to the composer, is start- lingly, not to say tragically, illustrated by the steady tendency of the greatest master of the school, Richard Strauss, to become more and more trivially "realistic" with each new work, and by the complaisance of the public in pay- ing him vast sums of money for thus progres- sively corrupting it. In every one of his symphonic poems, from the exuberant "Don Juan" (1888) to the surprisingly banal "Alpen- symphonie" (1915), glorious pages of music have alternated with silly tricks of imitation, as for instance the splendid development of the husband theme in the "Symphonia Do- mestica" with the bawling of the baby; but in the latest we have the maximum of imita- tion and the minimum of music. Apart from their gorgeous orchestral dress its themes are 13 CONTEMPORARY COMPOSERS with few exceptions commonplace, dull, and pretentious. Except in one or two passages they are not imaginatively or significantly developed. On the other hand there is no end of "tone-painting," much of it a revamping of the distant-hunting-horns, rustling-leaves, and warbling-bird-calls which have been time- worn theatrical properties of music ever since Raff's "Im Walde" and Wagner's "Wald- weben"; some of it more original, like the pictures of sunrise and sunset with which the work begins and ends. In these associa- tively vivid but musically amorphous passages melody, harmony, rhythm, key disappear in a strange opaque cloud of tone, realistically representing night the kind of night to which the German wit compared Hegel's Absolute "in which all cows are black." The same childish realism which made Wagner show us his dragon on the stage instead of in our own imaginations introduces a wind- machine in the storm and sheep bells in the mountain pasture. In all this we see an artist who was once capable of writing the in- troduction and coda of "Death and Trans- 14 DEMOCRACY AND MUSIC figuration" taking his art into the nursery to play games with. But the effect of music on childlike audi- ences, indisposed to active mental effort and all for taking music passively like a kind of tonal Turkish bath, reaches its logical extreme not in the program music of which Strauss is the most famous exponent, but in that super- ficially different but fundamentally related movement known as impressionism, which is led by the other most discussed composer of our day, Debussy. Strikingly contrasted as are these two leaders of contemporary music in temperament, in artistic aims, in technical methods, their aesthetic theories are at one in the slight demands they make on the attention of an inevitably inattentive public. Both encourage the listener to look away from the music itself to something that it suggests to him. But impressionism goes further than programmism. May not those people, it says, who find organic melody, development, and form fatiguing, and to whom you give a pro- gram to help them out may they not find the program fatiguing, too ? May not its CONTEMPORARY COMPOSERS being prescribed offend their sense of "free- dom" ? Why exact of them the effort to follow even the story ? Better to give them simply a title, as vague and elusive as pos- sible, and foster the mood of day-dreaming thus suggested by avoiding all definite melodic, rhythmic, or harmonic features in the music, while enhancing its purely sensuous charm to the utmost degree possible. Such, carried out with extraordinary talent, is the artistic creed of Debussy. Just as programmism ap- peals from music to association, impressionism appeals to sentiment, to fancy, and to the phantasmagoric reveries upon which they are ever so ready to embark. It is noteworthy, moreover, that both pro- grammism and impressionism, however system- atically they may minimize their demands on the intelligence of their audience, do not abate, but rather tend constantly to increase, their ministration to its sense. Indeed, they systematically maximize their sensuous ap- peal ; and though their characteristic methods of making this appeal differ as widely as their general attitudes, that of programmism being 16 DEMOCRACY AND MUSIC extensive and that of impressionism intensive, the insistence of both on sensuous rather than on intellectual or emotional values is surely one of the most indicative, and it may be added one of the most disquieting, symptoms of the condition of modern music. The method of the program school in general, and of Strauss in particular, is extensive in that it aims at boundless piling up of means, a formidable accumulation of sonorities for the besieging of the ear. Its motto is that attributed to the German by the witty French- man : "Plenty of it." Berlioz, the pioneer of the movement, with his "mammoth orches- tras," and his prescription, in his requiem, of four separate brass bands, one at each corner of the church, and eight pairs of kettle-drums in addition to bass drum, gong, and cymbals ; Mahler, commencing a symphony with a solo melody for eight horns ; Strauss, with his twelve horns behind the scenes in the "Alpen- symphonie," to say nothing of wind-machine, thunder-machine, sheep bells, and a whole regiment of more usual instruments all these disciples of the extensive or quantitative c 17 CONTEMPORARY COMPOSERS method aim to dazzle, stun, bewilder, and overwhelm. They can be recognized by their abuse of the brass and percussion groups, their childlike faith that if a noise is only loud enough it becomes noble. They have a tend- ency, too, to mass whole groups of instruments on a single "part," as Tschaikowsky, for in- stance, so often does with his strings, what- ever the sacrifice of interesting detail, for the sake of brilliance and eclat. To some extent, of course, all this is justified, even necessitated, by the vast size of modern concert-halls ; but a candid observer can hardly deny that it is systematically overdone in the interests of sensationalism. The same tendency is ob- servable also in other than orchestral music. The piano, treated with such admirable re- straint by Chopin and by Debussy, has been forced by Liszt and his followers toward jan- gling, crashing sonorities that can penetrate the most callous sensorium. The equipment of organs with "solo stops" and other devices for the tickling of idle ears has turned the king of instruments too often into a holiday harle- quin. Even the string quartet, last rallying- 18 DEMOCRACY AND MUSIC ground of music against the ubiquitous onslaught of sensationalism, begins in many modern scores, with their constant double stops and tremolos, and their " effects " of mutes, pizzicato, "ponticello," "col legno," and the rest, to sound like a rather poor, thin orchestra, striving for a variety and ful- ness of color beyond its capacity. The fallacy of the extensive method is that it is trying to satisfy a craving essentially in- satiable. Such an appetite for mere quantity of sound grows by what it feeds on ; luxury breeds ennui ; and, as every sensualist knows to his sorrow, there never can be "plenty of it." A sense of this futility inherent in the extensive method as it has been practised in modern Germany and elsewhere has led another school, chiefly modern French, to try for simi- lar results by a different method, which may be called the intensive. Such a composer as Debussy, who may here be taken as typical, aims, to be sure, primarily at sensuous rather than at mental or spiritual values, but achieves them by qualitative refinement and contrast rather than by quantitative accumulation, 19 CONTEMPORARY COMPOSERS and avoids exaggeration in favor of a delicate, almost finical, understatement and suggestive- ness. While sonority is as much his god as Strauss's, he is the connoisseur of subtle, elu- sive sonorities, each to be sipped like a wine of rarest bouquet, rather than an enthusiast of the full-bodied brew. The subtlety of the methods often leads his admirers to claim a superior "spirituality" in the aims, but this is a mistake. His school is more spiritual than Strauss's only as a gourmet is more spiritual than a glutton. Both schools prefer sensation to thought and emotion, association to intrinsic beauty, color to line. The difference is that "Pelleas et Melisande" is the violet or ultra- violet end of the spectrum of which "Salome" is the red. A curious by-product of the cult of the elusive sonority is the exaggerated, the almost morbid, interest that has emanated from modern France in novelty of harmonic idiom. One would suppose, to read many contemporary critics, that the sole criterion of a good com- poser depended on his use of some recondite scheme of harmony, whether based on the 20 DEMOCRACY AND MUSIC whole-tone scale, on the mediaeval modes, on new applications of chromaticism, on the "har- monic polyphony" of Casella and others, or on the arbitrary asperities of the Italian noise- makers and Mr. Leo Ornstein. If you wish to be considered an "ultra-modernist" you may do quite as you please, both as regards commission and omission, in rhythm, melody, polyphony, form, provided only you are har- monically eccentric. This insistence on har- mony, on the momentary tone-combination, suggests a predominant concern with the sensuous side of music which is highly significant as a symptom. It is a stressing of that which the senses alone can perceive from moment to moment, without any aid from memory, imagination, comparison, and other mental acts required for the perception of rhythm and melody. In short, it is an evidence of the same materialistic tendency to rely on the physical rather than the mental appeal, on the investiture of the idea rather than on the idea itself, which we noted in the extensive method. Whatever their differences, both methods are thus at one in the tendency to use 21 CONTEMPORARY COMPOSERS materials as makeshifts for thought. Mahler failing to get with eight horns the effect that Schubert got with two plus a great melodic idea at the opening of his C Major Sym- phony, Debussy confectioning a banal bit of tune in muted string or pastoral flute sonorities with piquant harmonies both are appealing, with varying success, from our minds and hearts to our auditory nerves. The increasing meas- ure of success attending such appeals shows vividly the numerical advantage that the hun- gry or curious auditory nerves have, in the modern democratic audience, over the en- lightened minds and hearts. Ill And indeed, how should we expect it to be otherwise ? Enlightened minds and hearts, we must remember, are the finest and rarest fruits of civilization, to be cultivated only under conditions of decent leisure, fair physical and mental health, and free association with "the best that has been done and thought in the world." When they are so rare even in the class that has all these advantages, how shall 22 DEMOCRACY AND MUSIC we expect them to be common among those living either in an industrial servitude that for monotony of toil is almost worse than chattel slavery, or by clerical and other second- ary work that through the modern specializa- tion and subdivision of labor condemns each individual to a more or less mechanical repeti- tion of a few small acts through the larger part of his working hours, a routine the relation of which to human life as a whole he often does not see ? Writers on sociology are be- ginning to realize * that such conditions of work inevitably produce a morbid psychological condition in the worker, dulling his mind by the meaningless drudgery and depressing his body and nerves by fatigue-poisons, so that even in his few hours of leisure his perfectly natural seeking for pleasure does not take entirely normal paths. Too exhausted to re- spond to delicate shades and subtle relation- ships, whether in sensuous or mental objects, his jaded nerves cry out for violent stimuli, for sharp contrasts, for something to goad and 1 See, for example, "The Great Society," by Graham Wallas, and "Work and Wealth," by J. A. Hobson. 23 CONTEMPORARY COMPOSERS whip them into new activity. This craving for violent stimuli is the essential feature of the fatigue-psychology. Now, is it not highly suggestive that the age of industrialism is also the age of a hundred goads for tired nerves of the newspaper headline, the dime-novel and "penny-thriller," the lurid moving-picture drama, rag-time and the "revue"? And is it not possible that the sensationalism of so much modern music is only another evidence, on a somewhat higher plane, of the working of this same psychology of fatigue ? Again, these overworn nerves of ours have within a comparatively short period had brought to bear upon them, through the progress of modern invention with its cheap printing, quick transportation, and long distance communica- tion, a thousand distractions. No longer in- sulated from the outlying world, so to speak, by time and space, as were our more simply- living ancestors, we read, hear, and see as much in a day as they did in a week. The inevitable result has been a diffusion of attention fatal to concentrated thought except for the most resolute, breeding in the average man mental 24 DEMOCRACY AND MUSIC indigestion and habits of disorder and impa- tience, and gradually evolving the characteristic modern type quick, sharp, and shallow. Outward distraction has thus added its in- fluence to inner weariness to urge our art away from quiet thought towards ever noisier solicitation. For thought always depends on simplification, on inhibition : in order to think we must neglect the given-by-sense, as we see strikingly in the case of the absent-minded, in order to attend to the given-by-memory-and- imagination ; and over-stimulation of sense is therefore just as hostile to thought as the de- pression of the higher mental faculties through fatigue. Thus it is highly characteristic of our prevailing attitude that we strive, not for elimination, but for accumulation, dis- traction, dissipation. The formula is always mental apathy, physical and nervous excite- ment. Not having the joy of the mastery which comes only through thought, because we lack both concentration and favorable opportunity to discipline ourselves, we seek the stimulus of constant change. We digest nothing, taste everything; "eclecticism" is our 25 CONTEMPORARY COMPOSERS euphemism for spreading our attention very wide and very thin ; and the nightmare that you soon uncover under all our art is not that our minds may become bewildered (for that they are already), but that our senses may be- come jaded which of course they do. Still another line of influence that may be traced from general modern conditions to the peculiar qualities of modern art concerns es- pecially the third of the classes described above, the capitalist class. Here again we find a morbid condition, a distortion of wholesome human contacts ; but here instead of the im- pediment of meaningless drudgery, it is the incubus of a fruitless, selfish idleness. Cut off from the normal outlet of energy in useful work, the luxurious classes become pampered and bored, and develop through very vacuity a perverted taste for the unusual, the queer, the generally upside down and backside to. Every season sees a new crop of the "isms" thus produced, the ephemera of the world of art, which live a day and die as soon as they lose their one interest, novelty. Of all manifes- tations of so-called "art" they are the most 26 DEMOCRACY AND MUSIC sterile, the most completely devoid of vital relation to any real impulse. They might be ignored did they not complicate still further an already complicated situation, and were they not an additional, though a largely nega- tive, illustration of the close causative relation between general social conditions and artistic expression that our discussion is making more and more evident. Fortunately they produce little enduring effect beyond their own narrow circles ; for as they spring not from any vital interest, but only from an unguided curiosity and desire for excitement, they take mutually opposing forms and largely cancel each other. Thus, for instance, fads for very old or for very new music, directed as they are toward the mere age or the mere newness, and having no concern with the quality of the music itself, leave the actual public taste just where it would have been had they never arisen. Nevertheless the diversion of so much energy, which might under better conditions find an outlet in fruitful activity, to a sterile posture- making, is uneconomical and to be regretted. So far, we have been looking chiefly, from 27 CONTEMPORARY COMPOSERS the point of view of the devil's advocate, at the injurious influences on contemporary music that can be traced with some degree of plausi- bility to the capitalistic and industrial social system of the nineteenth century. Noting the sensational bent, whether extensively or intensively expressing itself, of the chief con- temporary schools, we have asked ourselves whether it could be attributed in some measure to the kind of demand made by an audience dulled by overwork at monotonous tasks and depressed by fatigue-poisons. Remarking the multiplicity of fads and "isms" by which our art is confused, we have asked how far these might be attributed to the cravings of a group whose normal appetites have been perverted by luxury and self-centered isolation. All of these evils, we have insisted, are aggravated in their effects by the distractions under which we live. It is now time, however, taking a more positive view and attempting a more constructive theory, to ask how these evils may be combated, what more hopeful ele- ments already exist in the situation, and what others may be expected to develop in the future. 28 DEMOCRACY AND MUSIC IV First of all, it may be suggested that, so far as these evils are fairly attributable to the social conditions of the nineteenth century, they may fairly be expected to be mitigated somewhat by those changes which already seem probable in those of the twentieth. The capitalistic era seems likely to be followed by an era of cooperation or communism; and in countless ways such a change must eventually be deeply revivifying to all forms of art. Of course, it is only too easy to indulge in baseless dreams of the results upon art of a millennium brought about in this way, only too easy to forget that we are only at the threshold of such new systems of organization, and that they may go the wrong way instead of the right. All we can safely say is that if they do go the right way they will rescue art, among many other human interests, from the condition to which much of it has been prostituted under capitalism. Let us suppose, for instance, that something like what Mr. H. G. Wells calls the Great 29 CONTEMPORARY COMPOSERS State * eventually results from the troublous reconstructions through which we are living. The Great State is only one of three possi- bilities he sees in the further adjustment of the leisure class and the labor class of our present order. The first possibility (and a disagreeably vivid one it must seem to all thoughtful Americans) is that "the leisure class may degenerate into a waster class," and the labor class "may degenerate into a sweated, overworked, violently resentful and destruc- tive rebel class," and that a social debacle may result. The second possibility is that the leisure class "may become a Governing Class (with waster elements) in an unprogressive Bureaucratic Servile State," in which the other class appears as a "controlled, regimented, and disciplined Labour Class." The third possibility is that the leisure class "may be- come the whole community of the Great State, working under various motives and induce- ments, but not constantly, nor permanently, nor unwillingly," while the labor class is x " Social Forces in England and America," by H. G. Wells, New York and London, 1914. 30 DEMOCRACY AND MUSIC "rendered needless by a general labour con- scription, together with a scientific organiza- tion of production, and so re-absorbed by re- endowment into the Leisure Class of the Great State." The first two of these possible conditions would be fatal to art, one through anarchy and loss of standards, the other through con- ventionalization. The third would bring about a renascence, after a troubled period of con- flicting standards and of readjustments such as we find ourselves in to-day. The main elements in such a progress would be, first, the gradual refining, deepening, and vitalizing of the taste of the general public under the influence of increasing leisure, health, self- respect, and education ; second, the cutting off of extravagance, luxury, and faddism in the wealthier classes by a wholesome pressure of enforced economy ; third, increasing solidarity of feeling in the whole social fabric through such a mutual rapprochement, giving the indis- pensable emotional basis for vital art. There are already some encouraging evi- dences of such developments. Much pre- 31 CONTEMPORARY COMPOSERS paratory work towards the formation of better standards of public taste has been unobtrusively done, at least in our larger cities, by free lec- tures and cheap recitals and concerts. Two disadvantages, however, have often attended such work, reducing its benefits. One has come from the common fallacy that what is done for the many must be done so as to please the many a view often supposed to be "democratic." Emerson was more truly demo- cratic when he told us to "cease this idle prat- ing about the masses," and set about extracting individuals from them; for real democracy never forgets that the majority are always inferior, and its aim must be to give the su- perior minority a chance to make their influence felt. In other words, to level down to the people is to vulgarize rather than to popularize. Theodore Thomas set a model for the conductor of popular concerts in the best sense, for all time, when he replied to one of his orchestra players who said that people did not like Wag- ner : "Then we must play him until they do." The second disadvantage is even harder to avoid, even for administrators of the highest 32 DEMOCRACY AND MUSIC standards, because it seems to be almost in- trinsic in this kind of work. It comes from the passive nature of the people's participa- tion. Giving even the best concerts seems often too much like handing the people music at the end of a stick "Take it or leave it" ; naturally, having so little choice in its selec- tion, they often leave it; and even when they try their best to take it, they cannot get so much out of it as if they were actively helping to produce it. This is the reason that more active forms of music-making, even if crude, like the music school settlement work and the community choruses that have been mak- ing such strides in recent years, seem so full of promise. The singing in the public schools, too, would have done far more than it has, had not the standards been debased, as Mr. T. W. Surette has ably shown, 1 to the childish tastes, not of the children themselves, who could appreciate better things, but of their dull and routine-enslaved elders. Yet here again we must beware of a too easy optimism. 1 In an article on Public-School Music, Atlantic Monthly, December, 1916. D 33 CONTEMPORARY COMPOSERS There is no magic about the community chorus that can suddenly change bad taste to good. Too often we seem here, as in all other activi- ties for popularizing music, to oscillate help- lessly between two evils. On the one hand is the crudity of actual taste : the majority prefer rag-time and the musical comedies to folk-songs or the simple classics. On the other hand is the apathy that comes of prescriptions from outsiders : musical activity that is not spontaneous is sterile. Progress seems to come painfully and uncertainly from a constant zigzagging between these two evils, getting gradually away from them as the taste of the minority exercises its persuasiveness. As for the wealthier classes, it must be con- fessed that there are so far few evidences of any permanent displacement of luxury and artificiality by saner and simpler tastes. Yet there are even here one or two hopeful signs, of which the most conspicuous is the recent enthusiasm for folk-songs. This is rather too good to be altogether true. It is hard to be- lieve in the complete sincerity of those who go into the same rhapsodies over a perfectly 34 DEMOCRACY AND MUSIC simple and rather crude peasant song that a year or two ago they reserved for the exquisite day-dreams of Debussy or the exotic incon- sequentialities of Cyril Scott. Moreover, the appreciation of folk-song, though a normal and indeed indispensable stage in musical educa- tion, is only the very first phase of initiation to the deeper and subtler beauties of musical art, and not a stage to be dwelt in with com- placency. Yet so far as it goes, and in the measure of its sincerity, the interest in folk- song is of good augury. It means concern with melody, always and everywhere the soul of music, rather than with externalities like orchestral color, or harmonic "effects," or quasi-poetic associations and programs. It means sympathy with simple and broadly human, universal emotions, such as inspire the greatest as well as such primitive music. It may mean the beginning of a real and even- tually a developed taste for good music. And it is a good foundation for such a rapproche- ment of all classes of music-lovers as may come, we may hope, with the coming of the Great State. 35 CONTEMPORARY COMPOSERS If our cursory examination of the general tendencies of our day reveals no striking pre- ponderance of good over bad, shows us no movement of any majority that we can acclaim without qualification, we may now remind ourselves for our comfort that this has always been the case in all times, and that there is indeed a curious illusion, resolvable only by close scrutiny, that makes our own time seem worse to us, in comparison with others, than it really is. We have to remember that the baser elements of our own time make a much greater impression on us, in relation to the finer ones, than those of the past. A living fool can make as much noise as a wise man (if not far more) ; a dead one is silent forever. The gold of Beethoven's day, of which he was himself the purest nugget, comes down to us bright and untarnished, so that we forget all the dross that has been thrown on the scrap- heap of time. Our own gold is almost hidden from us by the glitter of the tinsel. "The world of music," says Sir Charles Stanford, 1 "is not substantially different from 1 " Pages from an Unwritten Diary," C. V. Stanford. 36 DEMOCRACY AND MUSIC what it has been. It has always exalted those of its contemporary composers who dealt in frills and furbelows above those who con- sidered the body more important than its clothes. Only a few wise heads knew of the existence of Bach. Rossini was rated by the mass of the public far higher than Weber, Spohr than Beethoven, Meyerbeer than Wag- ner. Simrock said that he made Bohm pay for Brahms." It is always necessary to wait for the winnow- ing process of time before we can see the true proportions of an age. Hence we can never see our own age in its true proportions, and since the second- and third-rate elements in it are ever more acclaimed by the majority than the first-rate, we always see it worse than it is. We live, so to speak, in the glare of noon-day, and cannot see the true coloring of our world, which will appear only at evening. Hence in every age the tragi-comedy is repeated of acclaiming the mediocre and the meretricious, and ignoring worth. The Gounods always patronize the Francks. The answer of philos- ophy is Emerson's : 37 CONTEMPORARY COMPOSERS " Ideas impregnable : numbers are nothing. Who knows what was the population of Jeru- salem ? 'Tis of no importance whatever. We know that the Saint and a handful of people held their great thoughts to the death ; and the mob resisted and killed him; and, at the hour, fancied they were up and he was down ; when, at that very moment, the fact was the reverse. The principles triumphed and had begun to penetrate the world. And 'tis never of any account how many or how rich people resist a thought." Our final question, then, resolves itself to this : Are there in the music of our day, known or unknown to the majority, any such vital "thoughts," based on principles that a dis- cerning criticism may see even now to have "triumphed and begun to penetrate the world"? Is there music being written to-day which is modern, not through its pampering to jaded sense or dulled intelligence, but through its intuition and expression of the deeper emo- tional experience and spiritual aspiration of our time ? Is there music, in short, not only seductive to the ear but beautiful to the mind ? 38 DEMOCRACY AND MUSIC To answer such a question intelligently we shall have to take account of certain truths which the foregoing discussion has tended to establish, and which may now be made ex- plicit. Thought, emotion, all that we call the spiritual side of music, expresses itself not through sonorous or harmonic effects, primarily sensuous in appeal, but through melody and rhythm and their interplay and elaboration in so-called thematic development. In truly great music we remember, not such and such a bit of tone-color, not this or that sonority, but the soaring or tender curve of the themes, their logical yet ever new unfolding, their embodiment, in the whole composition, of richest variety with completest final unity. The man in the street is absolutely right in feeling that music succeeds or fails by its tunes ; his limitation arises in his conception of "tune." Again, since the creation and manipulation of great "tunes" or themes, unlike the hitting off of sonorous effects or the discovery of rococo harmonies, comes never by luck, but only through a discipline based on the assimila- tion of all that is best in music, we always 39 CONTEMPORARY COMPOSERS find that all really fine music is firmly founded upon tradition, and reaches its roots into the past, while blossoming, so to speak, into the future. The artist, despite the popular sup- position to the contrary, depends on his fore- runners quite as closely as the scientist. You can no more write a solid sonata without know- ing Beethoven than you can work efficiently in biology in ignorance of Darwin. Yet on the other hand this assimilation of the past has to produce, not an academic and sterile complacency with what is, but an equipped and curious advance upon what is to be : the artist, like the scientist, brings all his learning to the test in acts of creative imagination, leaps in the dark. Thus artistic advance may be figured as like the shooting of frost crystals on a window pane ; never is there a crystal that is not firmly attached by traceable lines to the main body ; yet no one can prophesy whither each fine filament may strike out in its individual adventure. The great artist is bound to the past by love and docility, to the future by a faith that overleaps convention. Looked at in the light of these considerations, 40 DEMOCRACY AND MUSIC contemporary music presents a scheme of light and shade somewhat different from that ordi- narily accepted. If some high lights are over- shadowed, others seem to shine more brightly. There is plenty of hopeful promise for the future. Leaving aside the sounder elements in Strauss and Debussy, in whom there is so much of the richness of decay, we shall find the chief centers of truly creative activity perhaps in three composers who in their differ- ing ways and degrees carry on the great tra- dition : Rachmaninoff in Russia, Elgar in England, and d'Indy in France. Each of these men reaches back roots to the primal sources of musical life Bach and Beethoven : Rachmaninoff through Tschaikowsky, the eclec- tic Elgar through Mendelssohn, Brahms, Wag- ner, and others, and d'Indy through Wag- ner and Franck. Each, as we see in such modern classics as "Toteninsel," the A flat Symphony, and "Istar," can create, in settings of modern opulence of color, nobly beautiful forms, melodies that live and soar in a spiritual heaven. All, too, though in varying degrees, move on as creators should toward the un- 41 CONTEMPORARY COMPOSERS known. Here the Frenchman has perhaps, with his characteristic lucidity and logic, some- thing the advantage of the more sensuous Slav and the more convention-beset Anglo- Saxon. Rachmaninoff, for all his warmth, does not always escape the vulgarity of Tschai- kowsky, and Elgar cannot always forget the formulae of oratorio. But in d'Indy, with his untrammeled experimental attitude toward all modern possibilities, we have an influence destined steadily to grow and already clearly suggesting an epoch combining the best of the old ways with new ones at which we can for the present only guess. II RICHARD STRAUSS II RICHARD STRAUSS HE chronology of Richard Strauss's artistic life up to the present time arranges itself almost irresistibly in the tradi- tional three periods, albeit in his case the philosophy of these periods has to be rather different from that, say, of Beethoven's. "Discipline, maturity, eccentricity," we say with sufficient accuracy in describing Bee- thoven's development. The same formula for Strauss will perhaps be tempting to those for whom the perverse element in the Salome- Elektra period is the most striking one ; but it is safer to say simply: "Music, program music, and music drama." Born in 1864, he produced during his student years, up to 1886, a great quantity of well-made and to some extent per- sonal music, obviously influenced by Men- delssohn, Schumann, and Brahms, and com- 45 CONTEMPORARY COMPOSERS prising sonatas, quartets, concertos, and a symphony. He himself has told how he then came under the influence of Alexander Ritter, and through him of Wagner, Berlioz, and Liszt; how this influence toward "the poetic, the expressive, in music" acted upon him "like a storm wind"; and how the "Aus Italien," written in 1886, is the connecting link be- tween his earlier work and the series of symphonic poems that follows in the second period. The chief titles and dates of this remarkable series may be itemized here : "Macbeth," 1886-7; "Don Juan," 1888; "Tod und Verklarung," 1889; "Till Eulenspiegel" and "Also Sprach Zarathustra," 1894; "Don Quixote," 1897; "Ein Heldenleben," 1898; and the "Symphonia Domestica," 1903. The period of program music, containing also, of course, other works such as the operas "Gun- tram" and "Feuersnot," innumerable songs, and a violin sonata strayed from the first period, thus lasts from his twenty-second to his thirty- ninth year. Since then Strauss has devoted himself chiefly to works for the stage, com- prising "Salome" (1906), "Elektra"^ (1908), 4 6 RICHARD STRAUSS "Der Rosenkavalier" (1911), "Ariadne auf Naxos," (1913), and "Josephs Legende" (1914). His latest work is again in the province of instrumental music an "Alpine Symphony." This rapid survey of Strauss's creative ac- tivity shows that the natural bent of his mind is toward the realistic and dramatic side of his art ; it was only in his youth, before he had found himself, that he wrote self-sufficing music ; and though lyrical power is shown in many of his songs and in passages of almost all the orchestral works, yet it is on the whole true to say that the essential Strauss is Strauss the dramatist. And if we ask ourselves what are the qualities of temperament requisite to a dramatist, we shall find in Strauss's posses- sion of them in altogether unusual measure the key to his commanding position among the musico-dramatists of our day. These qualities are the same for a dramatic artist who works in tones as for one who works in words. First of all he must be a man of keen observation, of penetrating intelligence, able to note all that passes about him and to 47 CONTEMPORARY COMPOSERS interpret it with something of cold scientific precision. He must be able to seize human types and divine human motives quite dif- ferent from his own, as they are objectively. He must resist distorting them by reading into them his own impulses and sentiments, as a man of more subjective temperament and less critical detachment always does. In short, he must be of the active rather than the con- templative type, and have a good measure of that faculty of impersonal intellectual curiosity which gives a Shakespeare his supreme power of objective observation. But though he must not distort others by viewing them through himself, he must never- theless interpret them through reference to his own feelings, since these are the only feelings with which he is directly acquainted. That is to say, he must be able to place himself, by sympathetic imagination, at the points of view of those he studies. Such sympathetic imagination is so very different a thing from subjective distortion that without it no real understanding of one's fellows is possible at all. The great dramatist needs, then, deep 48 RICHARD STRAUSS and rich emotion, quite as much as the lyric singer but emotion ever guided by the sym- pathy which brings it into play. It is this emotion, guided by sympathetic imagination, that gives the very aspect of life, and its power to move us, to the creation that mere intel- lectual observation alone could never vitalize. And finally, the dramatic artist, besides observing keenly and interpreting sympa- thetically, must view all that he sees with a certain magnanimous many-sidedness, a sort of sweet and mellow wisdom, which is hard to describe but unmistakable when encountered. We find it in all really great creative artists, who seem to view life not only keenly, not only sympathetically, but also wisely and as if from above, from that vantage point of a wider in- sight than that of any of their subjects, so that in their summing up of them they are able to set them in proper relation one to another, and by so doing to get a true and calm picture of human life as a whole. This power of philosophic or poetic vision, this magnanimity, we instinctively demand of the artist. It satis- fies a fundamental human craving. The moral E 49 CONTEMPORARY COMPOSERS in the fable is a naive embodiment of it; it comes even into the uncongenial atmosphere of the light comedy of manners in the rhymed epilogue ; its musical incarnation we find in many of the quiet codas of Brahms, or in the thoughtful "Der Dichter spricht" at the end of Schumann's "Kinderscenen." The object of the present essay is to show that Strauss has, in unequal but high degree, these qualities of the dramatist : observation, sym- pathy, and magnanimity. The first he has in almost unparalleled measure ; the second some- what fitfully, sometimes inhibited by his ironic cynicism ; the third in his most genial moods, as for instance, in the epilogue to "Till Eulen- spiegel," but not when misled by over-realistic aims. The evidence of his possession of these qualities that we shall especially look for will be not that afforded by his acts or his sayings, but rather the irrefragable testimony of his musical works themselves. II Since a man's temperament is what ulti- mately determines the peculiar combination so RICHARD STRAUSS of qualities making up his artistic individuality his characteristic powers and shortcomings the first questions we have to ask ourselves regarding any artist we propose to study will always be: "What is his temperament?" "To which of the two great types does it be- long, the active or the contemplative ?" "Does its power lie primarily in observation or in in- trospection ?" "Does it impel him towards objective characterization or toward the ut- terance of subjective feeling?" Elsewhere, in studying these antitheses of temperament in particular cases, such as those of Men- delssohn and Schumann, 1 and of Saint-Saens and Franck, 2 occasion has been taken to discuss in some detail the rationale of their musical ex- pression. At present our interest is in find- ing in Strauss a rather extreme case of the active temperament, a man of positively ex- plosive nervous energy. It is only necessary to assemble a few of his characteristic melodic motives to see that this energy naturally translates itself, melodically, 1 See especially "The Romantic Composers." 2 In the essays on these composers in "From Grieg to Brahms." CONTEMPORARY COMPOSERS into wide erratic skips and incisive abrupt rhythms. Here are a few of them : FIGURE I. (a) From "Till Eulenspiegel." (b) From " Don Juan." (c) From " Ein Heldenleben." (d) From " Also Sprach Zarathustra." (.) From the " Symphonia Domestica." RICHARD STRAUSS The chief theme of the arch mischief-maker, "Till Eulenspiegel," is necessarily capricious, but it is doubtful if even for him anyone but Strauss would have thought of those surprising jumps, landing each time on an unexpected note. In the main theme of "Don Juan" we have a good example of his rhythmic energy. Note the variety of the figures : the sixteenth notes in the first measure, swarming up to the high E ; the still further ascending triplet ; the even more incisive dotted group leading to the emphatic half notes. In similar general style is the chief theme of "Ein Heldenleben," depicting the hero, but less lithe, more burly and almost awkwardly powerful. The theme of "great longing" from "Also Sprach Zara- thustra" conveys its impression through the wide jumps, covering almost three octaves in two vigorous dashes. The theme of "the Wife," from the "Symphonia Domestica," illustrates Strauss's love of turning the unex- pected way. Notice the downward jump of a ninth, and the cadence transferred to a higher octave than we expect. The same story of overflowing nervous en- 53 CONTEMPORARY COMPOSERS ergy is told by two other characteristics of Strauss's melody. Like all sanguine natures he has more rising than falling phrases. The buoyancy of (&), (c), and (d) in Figure I is irrepressible ; (a) has a falling curve, somewhat coy; (e) begins in the same wheedling vein, but ends with a rise of self-confident energy. A canvass of all the motives in the symphonic poems would probably demonstrate that sev- enty-five per cent of them rise in pitch. The second peculiarity is more subtle but even more significant a preference for "rising" or ana- crustic rhythms, culminating in an accented final note after several unaccented ones, to "falling" or thetic rhythms beginning with the heavy part of the measure. The elasticity of the rising rhythm is clearly shown in all the excerpts of Figure I except that from "Ein Heldenleben" ; that, naturally, begins dog- gedly on the down beat. Only a systematic study can show the extent of Strauss's addic- tion to the rising rhythm. These considerations, to which might per- haps be added his preference for the major to the minor mode, and for the vigorous duple 54 RICHARD STRAUSS to the more subtle triple meter, afford us quite ample internal evidence of his belonging to the temperamental type of the actives, like Men- delssohn and Saint-Saens (however he may differ from them musically) rather than to that of the contemplatives, the Schumanns and the Francks. To these positive points we might add negative ones, dealing with his emotional shortcomings. This, indeed, we shall have to do later, in the interest of a just critical estimate ; but for the present it will be better worth while to examine the positive results, in the way of keen observation and masterly characterization, of this active- minded interest of Strauss in what lies about him. Ill Strauss's characterization is consummate. Superlatives are dangerous, but probably no other musician has ever carried to such a point the power of music to depict, or at least, to sug- gest, varieties of character, both in human beings and in inanimate objects. Strauss's reported remark that music was becoming so ss CONTEMPORARY COMPOSERS definite that we should soon be able to por- tray a tablespoon so unmistakably that it could be told from the rest of the silverware is probably an instance of his sardonic delight in hoaxing the public ; but if anyone is going to subject the art of tones to this curious test, we are all agreed, doubtless, that it should be Strauss himself. Meanwhile, failing a table- spoon, we have a sufficiently varied collection of portraits in his gallery, each sketched with a Sargent-like penetration. We have seen, for example, in Figure la, Till Eulenspiegel the arch mischief-maker, ir- repressible, incorrigible. Here, on the other hand, is Till sentimental, making love to a village maiden, his original insolence tamed into a simpering persuasiveness, his theme, at first so galvanic, now languishing in its plain- tive downward droopings (Figure II, page 57). Later we see him, repulsed by the maiden, storming in ungovernable fury. 1 Here, again, belonging to a quite other world, is Don Quixote, "the knight of the sorrowful 1 The passage, page 13 of the two-hand piano arrangement, page 26 of the orchestra score, is too long to quote here. 56 RICHARD STRAUSS FIGURE II. Tai"inlove. FIGURE III. Don Quixote, the knight of the sorrowful visage. Moderate 57 CONTEMPORARY COMPOSERS visage," aging and broken, yet full of chival- rous and idealistic notions, and thus at once inspiring and pathetic (Figure III, page 57). What a contrast is his rascal of a servant, Sancho Panza, good-natured and irresponsible, sauntering through life with a minimum of effort and a maximum of diversion : FIGURE IV. Sancho Panza. Bass Clarinet and Tenor Tuba t Bassoons We find a somewhat similar principle of con- trast, though between very different types of character, in the themes of the husband and the wife in the "Symphonia Domestica." The latter has been cited at Figure le. Its sug- gestion of coy graciousness and feminine charm is due in part to the tender downward in- flections of the opening figure, and partly to the anacrustic rhythm (beginning with unac- cented notes). The theme of the husband, 58 RICHARD STRAUSS with which the work opens, starts out with an "inversion" of this three-note figure of the wife : the motives complementary to each other, so to speak, as if Strauss had wished to suggest the reciprocal relation of marriage. Yet the rising inflection and the falling rhythm of the husband version give it a vigor that com- pletely differentiates it from the other, even if we ignore for the moment the effect of the contrasting keys of F major and B major, a matter of which we shall have more to say presently. The subtlety of the composer's use of rhythm for characterization can hardly be exaggerated. It almost justifies the extreme detail of his annotator's analyses, as for example of Mr. Wilhelm Klatte's diagnosis of the hero's char- acter in "Ein Heldenleben." This reads like an old-fashioned phrenological chart. Mr. Klatte finds in his hero "a genial nature, emo- tional and vibratory" (measures 1-6 and 9-12 of the opening theme), a "haughty and firm step" (measures 6-8), and an "indomi- table will" (measures 13-16). Furthermore the continuation in B major and A flat, Mr. Klatte 59 CONTEMPORARY COMPOSERS tells us, shows that the paragon has "richness of fantasy, warmth and elasticity of feeling, allied with lightness of movement whose tendency is always toward buoyancy and onward and upward effort, thus imparting an effect of inflexible and well-directed determi- nation instead of low-spirited or sullen ob- stinacy." Mr. Klatte makes a considerable demand on our powers of credence. Yet we must be reluctant to place limits to a power of rhythmo-melodic suggestion that can give us such extremes of opposed character as the naive innocence of the "Childhood" motive in "Tod und Verklarung," and the degen- erate superstition and pathological fear of Herodias, with her eerie whole-tone scale, in "Salome." Highly characteristic of Strauss, both in its subtle use of rhythmo-melodic characterization and in the rather malicious quality of its hu- mor, is the "Science" section in "Also Sprach Zarathustra." This powerful if over-ambitious work deals with a matter that can hardly be put into music, even by Strauss : with the opposition, namely, between the Christian ideal 60 RICHARD STRAUSS of self-abnegation and Nietzsche's philosophy of self-fulfilment. In this particular section of it Strauss is trying to suggest the dustiness, mustiness, and inconclusiveness of "Science" from the standpoint of the passions ; this he does by making a frightfully complicated fugue from his main theme. How slyly does he here satirize science ! How to the life does his fugue theme, starting off boldly in C major and square-cut rhythm, and presently wan- dering into chromatic harmonies and indecisive triplets, symbolize the initial arrogance and final futility of scholastic systems ! FIGURE V. " Of Science." Fugue theme from " Also Sprach Zarathustra." > r _k 1 P T etc. 61 CONTEMPORARY COMPOSERS In the use of harmony for characterization Strauss is no less skilful than in the more im- portant matters of melody and rhythm. The essential quality of his harmony is perhaps less "ultra-modern" than is sometimes sup- posed. In spite of the sensational innovations of "Salome" and "Elektra," he is so intensely German in feeling and so well founded on the German classics that the nucleus of his har- monic system is the diatonic scale, simple and rugged. One thinks of such powerful themes as that of "Transfiguration" or the "Hero" as the essential Strauss. Even "Salome" has its Jochanaan, and the "Symphonia Domes- tica" is surprisingly diatonic. Strauss is more nearly related to the virile Wagner of "Die Meistersinger" than to that other more sen- suous Wagner of "Tristan und Isolde." Of course, there are wondrously expressive chro- matic passages in Strauss, as for instance the "Grablied" in "Zarathustra" ; but on the whole his musical foundation is tonic-and- dominant, like Mozart's, Beethoven's, and Brahms's. It is in the boldly imaginative and uncon- 62 RICHARD STRAUSS ventional arrangement of simple material that Strauss gets his most striking harmonic effects. Plain "triads" and "dominant sevenths," the small musical change of hack composers, turn to gold in his hands. The touchingly expressive cadence of Don Quixote's theme will illustrate. The material is of the FIGURE VI. Cadence from " Don Quixote." most ordinary, yet the effect is magical and its dramatic appropriateness surpris- ing. In the words of Mr. Arthur Kahn, 1 "These confused harmonic windings through which the central chords of the previously es- tablished key are reached, characterize strik- ingly the well-known tendency of Don Quixote towards false conclusions. He goes carefully out of the way of natural sequences and pal- 1 Don Quixote, erlautert von Arthur Kahn, Der Musikfuhrer no. 148, Leipzig. 63 CONTEMPORARY COMPOSERS pable facts, in order not to demolish there- with his fancy structures." Strauss has carried this principle of the close juxtaposition of chords more or less foreign to each other, and even of different keys, to greater and greater lengths in his more recent works, and to the effects of "queerness" which re- sult when these foreign tonal groups quickly follow each other, and of more or less extreme dissonance when they occur simultaneously, he owes much of the violently adverse criti- cism to which he has been subjected. In- deed, nothing has more retarded his general acceptance than these abrupt transitions and unaccustomed discordancies. The matter is of sufficient importance to intelligent appreci- ation of him to justify a brief digression here. For any composer who conceives music as a number of melodies proceeding together in greater or less amity, but preserving the meas- ure of independence that individuality and vig- orous movement demand and Strauss is to a peculiar degree such a polyphonic composer a certain amount of physical harshness at moments when the melodies happen to clash 64 RICHARD STRAUSS is not only unavoidable but positively desirable, as tending to throw each into relief. Accord- ing to the degree of his experience the listener follows the composer in this respect : that is, he accepts with something more than pas- sive endurance, yes, with active pleasure, the physically disagreeable clashes (dissonances) which by setting off the differing contours of the melodies emphasize for him their mental and emotional appeal ; but not and the point is of prime importance to the would-be music-lover not if he does not follow the melodies, that is, not if he cannot hear con- secutively as well as moment by moment for it is only by following the threads, so to speak, that we can untangle the knots. Ac- cordingly most untrained listeners dislike, prob- ably, music that contains many of these knots, the presence of which makes it so interesting and exciting to the experienced ear. The woman who confessed to her piano teacher that she did not like Bach's Two-part Inven- tions because they were so "ugly" was not less cultivated but only more frank than many who have not discovered that Bach has to be heard F 65 CONTEMPORARY COMPOSERS "horizontally" (to borrow a figure from musi- cal notation) rather than "vertically." This gift of horizontal hearing is peculiarly necessary to anyone who would disentangle the tonal knots in which Strauss delights, working as he does with many more than two voices and with the vast fund of harmonic possibilities accumulated since Bach's day to draw upon. And he is not the man to use his resources timidly, or to make any concessions to laziness or inexperience in his listeners. Here is a reduction of a passage from "Ein Heldenleben" to its essential elements. FIGURE VII. Strings and Woodwind 8 Horns m I Heavy brass 66 RICHARD STRAUSS The heavy brass gives the foundation har- monies ; the strings and woodwind have an upward-moving melody, and the eight horns blare forth at the same time a slower-moving downward melody. If we read almost any single chord vertically, we shall find it has its measure of harshness, sometimes considerable. If we listen to the coherent voices, none of these dissonances will trouble us in the least. This is a very simple example of what Strauss is constantly doing in a far more complex way. 1 It is a real difficulty in the way of Strauss appreciation that while only familiarity can enable us to follow the intricate windings of the threads that make up his gorgeously rich fabrics, frequent hearings of his later and more complex symphonic poems are not to be had, even in the large cities. In the mean- while we have no recourse but piano arrange- ments, unsatisfactory for two reasons. In the 1 The jump of the horns in the fourth measure illustrates an- other obstacle to understanding that the inexperienced listener often meets in Strauss. He is quite careless as to what register, high or low, the "resolutions" of his dissonances occur in; they jump about from octave to octave; and the hearer, to follow them, has to be equally agile. 67 CONTEMPORARY COMPOSERS first place, it is physically impossible to play with two hands even a respectable fraction of the melodies that Strauss delights to elaborate for two hundred ; and four-hand versions are better only in degree, not in kind. Secondly, piano versions fail us precisely in this matter of unraveling dissonance, since by reducing a colored pattern to monochrome they diminish the salience of the lines we are trying to follow, and by juxtaposing in one tone-quality tones that in the orchestra are softened by difference of timbre they notably increase the physical harshness of the combinations. Obviously, then, we must be exceedingly chary of con- demning Strauss, or any other composer, for orchestral dissonance that we have either be- come acquainted with insufficiently, or only through piano arrangements. After making these subtractions, however, there undoubtedly remain many puzzling clashes of tone in Strauss's scores, which can be accounted for only as introduced either for color or for dramatic , expression. The use of dissonance for the sake of color enrichment is a familiar proceeding in modern 68 RICHARD STRAUSS music, especially in that of impressionistic type like Debussy's and Ravel's. Such use is essentially decorative. To a more or less clearly defined harmonic nucleus are added softer tones, clashing with it, and thus forming about it an aura or atmos- phere elsewhere compared to the mist which softens the outlines of the landscape. 1 Strauss is too fond of clear outlines and solid mass to employ these impressionistic methods habit- ually, or even frequently; but when he does, it is with his usual skill and daring. The theme of the silver rose in "Der Rosenkavalier" is the inevitable example : the last pages of the score are crowded with those silvery, scarcely audible triads of celesta and flutes, shifting and settling on the stronger G major chord like snowflakes on a leaf (Figure VIII, page 70). Delicious as are these shimmerings, a use of dissonance on the whole more characteristic of the masculine nature of Strauss is the harsher, more insistent juxtaposition of clashing tones for the sake of their potency in the expression 1 Essay on Chopin, in "The Romantic Composers." 69 CONTEMPORARY COMPOSERS FIGURE VIII. The silver rose motive, from " Der Rosenkavalier.' n HMteti of the tragic, the gruesome, or the abnormal. Naturally this is pushed furthest in the treat- ment of such pathological subjects as "Salome" and "Elektra," where its effect is carefully- enhanced by contrast with strong or clear con- sonant harmonies "Salome" has its Joch- anaan and "Elektra" its Chrysothemis. The close juxtaposition of foreign tone groups, either successive or simultaneous, is carried to great lengths in these operas. The theme of the chattering Jews in "Salome" is an example of the successive, as is the curious succession 70 RICHARD STRAUSS of the chords of F minor and B minor at Chryso- themis' entrance in "Elektra." * The simultaneous kind was foreshadowed in the famous ending of "Also Sprach Zarathus- tra," where the woodwind instruments sound the chord of B major against the softly plucked C of the strings; but we have to go to the operas again to find it carried to its logical and sometimes cruel extreme. There we find alien triads marching uneasily together in double harness ; 2 dominant sevenths similarly shackled ; 3 and strange passages in which the upper parts move naturally, but above a dislocated bass. 4 Such procedures, which, it must always be remembered, because of dif- ferences in tone quality between instruments of different families, sound far less harsh in the orchestra than on the piano, even if they are no less queer musically, can theoretically be carried to any extent. How far Strauss some- times carries them, a single example must suf- fice to show. 1 Vocal score, page 35. 1 "Elektra," vocal score, page 21. 1 Ibid. Page 23. * Ibid. Page 20, the first line. 71 CONTEMPORARY COMPOSERS FIGURE IX. Passage from "Elektra," vocal score, page 63. Whether one "likes" such passages as this or not is of course a question of taste. But one thing at least is certain : it will not do to charge Strauss with mere musical anarchy in writing them his work as a whole shows too keen a sense of the traditional harmonic values. That aesthetic insensibility, posing as "freedom from rules," "independence," "lib- eralism," and the like, to which in the minds of so many modern composers all keys are the same, is happily not one of his failings. That he has the keenest possible sense of the in- dividual qualities of the different keys, and of 72 RICHARD STRAUSS the structural importance of their interrela- tionships, each one of his long series of sym- phonic poems has by its masterly design shown afresh. How remarkable, for example, is the antithesis of C, minor and major, and B, minor and major, which is the constructive principle of "Also Sprach Zarathustra !" How interesting is the choice of F major for the easy-going husband in the "Symphonia Domestica," and of the keener, more brilliant B major for the wife ! And how this strong tonal sense not only guides the design as a whole, but suggests endless charming and imaginative details ! At the end of the lullaby, in the same work, when the child has fallen asleep and the music has sunk to a tranquil G minor chord, this quietude is irradiated by a flash of B major and three notes of the wife- theme, the loving tenderness of the waking and watching mother over the sleeping infant. Twice this happens, and each time the som- nolent G minor returns. Thus does genius use tonality. Being thus brought back to consider how Strauss uses all the elements of music, even 73 CONTEMPORARY COMPOSERS this subtlest one of contrasting tonalities, in the interest of characterization, we may pon- der with profit one final interpretation which might seem over-ingenious had we not the example of Mr. Klatte to spur our critical imaginations. Why is it that we so seldom hear the four tones of Till Eulenspiegel's main theme on any other degrees of the scale than A, F, B, C ? Why is it that, in spite of the constant movement from key to key of the music, this theme is hardly ever carried also into the new key ? l Why does Strauss so in- sist on this A, F, B, C, not only when the music is in F major, but when, as at Till's anger, it is in D minor, when, as in the proces- sion of the burghers, it is in A minor, and when, just before the return of the main theme, it is in C major ? Why always A, F, B, C, what- ever the key ? Is it not because Till, half- witted, perverse, self-imprisoned, is not subject to social influences, and remains unplastically himself, whatever his environment ? To trans- pose a theme into the key prevailing at the 1 It is transposed into B flat in the episode wherein Till dons the vestments of a priest. 74 RICHARD STRAUSS moment is to make order but Till represents disorder. . . . Such at least is the ingenious explanation of a woman who understands character as well as Strauss understands keys. IV All that we have been saying so far has con- cerned itself primarily with Strauss's powers of observation and characterization ; we have noted how broad a field of human character he covers, and what varied artistic resources he brings to its depiction ; we have seen how peculiarly fitted he is for this part of his work by his active temperament, with its accom- panying intellectual alertness and freedom from self-consciousness. But we saw that the great dramatist needs not only observation but sympathy, in order that his work may be as moving as it is vivid ; and in this power of emotion we may at first be inclined to consider Strauss deficient. There is undoubtedly a popular superstition which puts him among the intellectuals. The clean-cut efficiency of his personality, his businesslike habits, his mordant wit, both in words and in notes (was 75 CONTEMPORARY COMPOSERS there ever anything so witty as "Till Eulen- spiegel"?), even questionably relevant details like his exquisitely neat handwriting and his well-groomed and not in the least long-haired appearance, all these create the impression of a personality by no means schwdrmerisch, far removed indeed from the rapt dreamer who is the school-girl's ideal composer. There is perhaps a measure of truth in this picture. Many of Strauss's most character- istic merits, as well as defects, may be traced to his lack of the introspective tendency which has been so fundamental in most of the other great German musicians, from Bach to Wag- ner, and which is seen perhaps at its purest and best in Schumann. Strauss is at the other pole from Schumann and music is wide ! Mr. Ernest Newman, in the ablest studies of Strauss yet published in English, 1 points to the internal evidence of this lack in his earliest and therefore least sophisticated compositions. "The general impression one x " Richard Strauss," in the Living Masters of Music Series, and "Richard Strauss and the Music of the Future," in "Musical Studies." 76 RICHARD STRAUSS gets from all these works," writes Mr. New- man, " is that of a head full to overflowing with music, a temperament that is energetic and forthright rather than warm . . . , and a gen- eral lack not only of young mannish sentimen- tality, but of sentiment. There is often a good deal of ardour in the writing, but it is the ardour of the intellect rather than of the emotions." And again: "Wherever the youthful Strauss has to sing rather than de- claim, when he has to be emotional rather than intellectual, as in his slow movements, he almost invariably fails. . . . He feels it hard to squeeze a tear out of his unclouded young eyes, to make those taut, whip-cord young nerves of his quiver with emotion." 1 Now, although Mr. Newman would not ac- cept his own description of Strauss the youth as a fair account of the mature composer, although, indeed, he specifically insists, in a later passage, that Strauss's musical imagi- nation lost, at adolescence, its "first metallic hardness" and "softened into something more purely emotional," yet his vivid phrases seem to '"Richard Strauss," pages 30-32. 77 CONTEMPORARY COMPOSERS give us a picture of Strauss that is in essentials as true at fifty as it was at fifteen. "A tem- perament that is energetic and forthright rather than warm," "an ardour of the intellect rather than of the emotions " these are surely still Straussian characteristics. And what is more they are characteristics that, whatever their dangers, have exerted a splendid influence in modern music. Schumann's was a noble in- trospection that no one who knows it can help loving; but in natures less pure the introspec- tive habit of German romanticism has not always been so happy in its effects. An un- healthy degree of self-contemplation tends to substitute futile or morbid imaginings for the solid realities of life; the over-introspective artist cuts himself off from a large arc of ex- perience and is prone to exaggerate the im- portance of the more intimate sentiments, and when, as in German romanticism, such a tend- ency is widespread, a whole school may be- come febrile and erotic. The vapors of such confirmed sentimentalism can best be dis- persed by a ray of clear, cold intelligence, such as Shaw plays through contemporary literature 78 RICHARD STRAUSS and Strauss through contemporary music. "Cynicism," says Stevenson, " is the cold tub and bath towel of the emotions, and ab- solutely necessary to life in cases of advanced sensibility." Strauss has administered this tonic shock to us, immersed as we were in the languors of the Wagnerian boudoir. He has rooted us out of our agreeable reveries, sent us packing outdoors, and made us gasp with the stinging impacts of crude existence and the tingling lungfuls of fresh air. Is it not worth while, for this vigorous life, to sacrifice a few subtle nuances of feeling ? If then we so emphasize his possession of the, active rather than the contemplative tem- perament, it is not to blame him for not being a Schumann, but to render as precise as pos- sible in our own minds the notion of what it is to be a Strauss. If there is a point where blame or regret must mingle with our appreci- ation, it will be likely to come not at the prelim- inary determination of what his temperament is, but at the further discovery of certain ex- tremes to which he has allowed his interest in externals to carry him, especially in his later 79 CONTEMPORARY COMPOSERS work. And here we must try to set right a misconception with which Mr. Newman leaves the student of his essay on " Program Music." * Mr. Newman, wishing to draw a reasoned distinction between self-sufficing, or "pure," or "abstract" music that is, music that makes its appeal directly and without the aid of any verbal tag and "poetic" music, or, more specifically, music with a definite pro- gram or title, adopts, seemingly without criti- cism, the popular notion that the first is less "emotional" than the second, and supports it by piling up epithets which beg the very question he is supposed to be examining. It is easy to "damn a dog by giving him a bad name," and it is easy to make music without program seem a dry and academic affair by calling it "abstract note-spinning," "mathe- matical music," "mere formal harmony," "em- broidery," "juggling," "the arousing of pleasure in beautiful forms" much too easy for a man of Mr. Newman's penetration and fair- 1 In "Musical Studies." 80 RICHARD STRAUSS mindedness. One expects this kind of thing from inexperienced youths whose enthusiasm has been inflamed by the gorgeous color and the easily grasped "story" of such a work as, let us say, Tschaikowsky's "Romeo and Juliet," who have not had time to live themselves into accord with the profound emotional life of the great musical classics such as Bach's fugues and Beethoven's symphonies; but from Mr. Newman such superficialities, especially when they are associated, as these are, with many penetrating and true observations, and an argument in the main convincing, come as a surprise. The central fallacy that vitiates Mr. New- man's conclusions lurks in his assumption that "specific reference to actual life" necessarily means greater emotion, and that the generality or "abstractness" of classic music is a symp- tom of emotional deficiency. "In the old symphony or sonata," says Mr. Newman, "a succession of notes, pleasing in itself but not having specific reference to actual life not at- tempting, that is, to get at very close quarters with strong emotional or dramatic expression, G 8l CONTEMPORARY COMPOSERS but influencing and affecting us mainly by reason of its purely formal relations and by the purely physical pleasure inherent in it as sound was stated, varied, worked out, and combined with other themes of the same order. . . ." And again : "The opening phrase of Beethoven's 8th Symphony refers to nothing at all external to itself ; it is what Herbert Spencer has called the music of pure exhilaration ; to appreciate it you have to think of nothing but itself ; the pleasure lies primarily in the way the notes are put together." To this a footnote is ap- pended : "There is emotion, of course, at the back of the notes ; the reader will not take me to mean that the pleasure is merely physical, like a taste or an odour. But the emotive wave is relatively small and very vague ; it neither comes directly from nor suggests any external existence." Once more, the assumption that degree of emotion is in a direct ratio with ex- ternality of suggestion. But as a matter of fact is not the exact op- posite the truth ? Are we not most deeply moved when we are lifted clean out of the concrete and carried up to the universal of 82 RICHARD STRAUSS which it is only an example ? Is not the general far more moving than the particular ? Do we not feel external details to be irrelevant and even annoyingly intrusive when we are stirred to the recognition of inward truths, of spiritual realities ? No doubt program music owes to its reference to the particular story, the well- known hero, the familiar book or picture, a certain vividness, an immediateness of appeal even to the unmusical, a rich fund of associ- ations to draw upon ; but even program music, surely, tends in all its more powerful mo- ments to penetrate below this comparatively superficial layer of external facts to the pro- founder (and of course vaguer) emotional strata of which they are, so to speak, the out- croppings. It is odd how little difference there is between program music and music, without the tag, in their more inspired moments ; in all symphonic poems it is the symphonic rather than the poetic element that is chiefly respon- sible for the effect produced ; and indeed, in- creasingly realistic as Strauss has become in his later works, even here the memorable mo- ments are those of emotional fulfilment and 83 CONTEMPORARY COMPOSERS realization, in which we tacitly agree to let the program go hang. Far from the "emotive wave" being proportional to the suggestion of "external existence," then, one would say that it was rather proportional to the realiza- tion of universal spiritual truth, and that in systematically confronting us with ever more and more crassly external existences Strauss has in his later works followed a practice as questionable as the theory which supports it, and levied an ever greater tax of boredom on our joy in the finer moments of his art. Even in "Tod und Verklarung," which remains to this day, in the words of M. Remain Rolland, 1 "one of the most moving works of Strauss, and that which is constructed with the noblest unity," the repulsively realistic details with which the gasping for breath of the dying man is pictured consort but incon- gruously with the tender beauty of the "child- hood" passages and the broad grandeur of the "transfiguration." The love of crass realism thus early revealed has grown apace, by even steps, unfortunately, with the extraordinary 1 "Musicians d'aujourd'hui," page 123. 84 RICHARD STRAUSS powers upon which it is parasitic. In the works conceived partially in a spirit of comedy, to be sure, such as "Till Eulenspiegel" and "Don Quixote," it finds a whimsical, witty expression for itself which not only seldom strikes a false note, but is often exceedingly amusing. TilPs charge among the market- women's pots and pans, the bleating of the sheep in "Don Quixote," even perhaps the baby's squalling in the "Symphoma Domes- tica," are clever bits of side play, like the "business" of an irrepressible comedian, which are not out of key with the main sub- stance of the music. But even here these realistic touches are exuberances, and ines- sential; the essential thing in "Till," for ex- ample, is the spirit of mischief and destruction that existed in the human heart for centuries before the rascal Eulenspiegel was born, and that respond in us to his pranks ; and this essence Strauss expresses in the purely musical parts of his work, and by means identical in kind with those employed in a Beethoven scherzo. And if realistic detail is in such instances subordinate to musical expression it may in 8s CONTEMPORARY COMPOSERS the treatment of more serious subjects become positively inimical to it. Do we really care very much about supermen and "convales- cents" and the rival claims of Christianity and neo-paganism when we are listening to "Also Sprach Zarathustra " ? Does not that ever- lasting C-G-C, with its insistence on an eso- teric meaning that we never knew or have forgotten, pester us unnecessarily ? What we remember in "Zarathustra" is much more likely to be the poignant passion of the "Grab- lied," or the beautiful broad melody of the violins, in B major, near the end, which bears no label at all save the tempo mark "Lang- sam." Similarly, in the "Symphonia Domes- tica" the family squabbles, growling father giving the replique to bawling infant, leave us skeptically detached or mildly amused. It is the musical charm of the "easy-going" parts in F major, the cradle song, above all the largely conceived slow movement with its wonderful development of the husband's "dreamy" theme, that really stir us. As for "Ein Heldenleben," what an unmitigated bore are those everlasting Adversaries ! 86 RICHARD STRAUSS Thus in the later works Strauss's shortcom- ings on the subjective side, his native tendency to concern himself more with concrete appear- ances than with essential emotional truths, seem exaggerated to such a degree as seriously to disturb the balance of his art. As he has interested himself more and more in externals he has not entirely evaded the danger of exalting the "program" at the expense of the "music," and his work, for all its extraordinary brilliance, its virtuosity, its power, has become over-em- phatic, ill-balanced, hard in finish and theatrical in emphasis. It is ultimately a spiritual defect that compels us to withhold our full admiration from "Ein Heldenleben" or the "Domestica." We admit their titanic power, their marvelous nervous vitality ; their technical temerities grow for the most part acceptable with famil- iarity; it is their emotional unreality that disappoints us. This charge of unreality, made against realism, may surprise us, may seem to savor of paradox; but it is inevitable. For music, as we have been told ad nauseam, but as we must never be allowed to forget, exists to express feeling; the only truth essential 87 CONTEMPORARY COMPOSERS to it is truth to emotion ; and therefore realism, looking as it does away from inward emotion to external fact, ever tends toward musical unreality. How shall we account for this progressive externalizing of Strauss's musical interest ? Is it all temperament ? Has environment had anything to do with it ? Do those high-sound- ing but dubious things "modern German ma- terialism" and its accompanying aesthetic "de- cadence" bear in any way upon the matter? These are questions too large for a humble annalist of music to answer. M. Romain Rol- land, however, in his essay on French and German Music in "Musiciens d'aujourd'hui," has one suggestion too relevant to be neglected here. "German music," says M. Rolland, "loses from day to day its intimateness : there is some of it still in Wolf, thanks to the ex- ceptional misfortunes of his life ; there is very little of it in Mahler, despite his efforts to concentrate himself upon himself; there is hardly any of it in Strauss, although he is the most interesting of the three. They no longer have any depth. I have said that I attribute 88 RICHARD STRAUSS this fact to the detestable influence of the theatre, to which almost all these artists are attached, as Kapellmeisters, directors of opera, etc. They owe to it the often melodramatic or at least external character of their music music on parade, thinking constantly of effect." One hesitates to accept so damning a charge as this against any artist, especially against a musical artist, who above all others should render sincere account of what is in his own heart rather than "give the public what it wants." Yet there is only too much in the later Strauss that it explains. How else shall we account for the exaggerated emphasis, the over-elaboration of contrasts that seem at times almost mechanical, and that suggest shrewd calculation of the crowd psychology rather than free development of the musical thought ? What else explains so well the sen- sational elements so incredibly childish in an art so mature as Strauss's : the ever-increasing noisiness, the introduction of wind-machines, thunder-machines, and heaven knows what diabolic engines ; the appetite for novelty for novelty's sake ? And is there not a reflection 89 CONTEMPORARY COMPOSERS of the "saponaceous influences of opera," as Sir Hubert Parry so well calls them, in the cloying over-sweetness, the sensuous luxury, of those peculiar passages, like the oboe solo in "Don Juan," the love music in "Ein Helden- leben," which form such conventional spots in the otherwise vital tissue of the music ? Surely the opera house, and not the concert hall, is the place where such sybaritisms natu- rally breed. For one reason and another, then tempera- ment, environment, the enervation of the operatic atmosphere with its constant quest of "effect" the fresh and vital elements in Strauss's art have not entirely escaped con- tamination by more stale, conventional, and specious ones. Particularly has he failed of his highest achievement when desire for immediate appeal, the bias of an over-active mind, or the fallacies of a one-sided aesthetic have led him too far from the subjective emotion which is truly the soul of music. Yet when all subtrac- tions are made he must remain one of the great creative musicians of his day. His surprising vigor and trenchancy of mind, his wit, his sense 90 RICHARD STRAUSS of comedy (in the Meredithian use of the word), his unerring eye for character, and, at his best, his sympathetic interpretation of life and his broad grasp of its significance as a whole, com- bine to produce a unique personality. Some of the eloquence we find in the more pompous parts of "Zarathustra" or "Ein Heldenleben" posterity will probably dismiss as bombast ; but posterity will be stupid indeed if it does not prize "Till Eulenspiegel" and "Don Quixote" as master expressions of the spirit of comedy in music. "Till Eulenspiegel" particularly is a well-nigh perfect blending of the three qualities of the master dramatist we began by discussing. It combines the obser- vation of a Swift with the sympathetic imagi- nation of a Thackeray. Beneath its turbu- lent surface of fun is a deep sense of pathos, of the fragmentariness and fleetingness of Till, for all his pranks ; so that to the sensitive it may easily bring tears as well as smiles. Above all, it has that largeness of vision, rarest of artistic qualities, which not only penetrates from appearance to feeling, but grasps feeling in all its relations, presents a unified picture 91 CONTEMPORARY COMPOSERS of life, and purges the emotions as the Greek tragedy aimed to do. All is suffused in beauty. The prologue : "Once upon a time there was a man," and the epilogue : "Thus it happened to Till Eulenspiegel," make a complete cycle of the work, and remove its expression to a philosophic or poetic plane high above mere crude realism. There are doubtless more im- pressive single passages in later works, but it may be doubted if anything Strauss has ever written is more perfect or more tender than this wittiest of pieces, in which the wit is yet forgotten in the beauty. Ill SIR EDWARD ELGAR Ill SIR EDWARD ELGAR I HE most inspiring chapters of musical history are those that tell of the struggles of great men, spurred by the desire for free, sincere, and personal speech, to wrest the musical language out of the triteness long conventional usage has given it ; to make it say something new ; to add, so to speak, to the impersonal organ chord it sounds an overtone of their particular human voices. This is what stirs us when we think of Beethoven, after he had written two symphonies in the style of Haydn and Mozart, finding himself at the opening of "a new road," leading he knew not whither, but irresistibly summoning him ; of Gluck, at fifty, protesting against the hollowness of the Italian operas he had been writing up to that time ; of Franck, still older, finding at last the secret of that vague, groping, mystical harmonic style he made so peculiarly 95 CONTEMPORARY COMPOSERS his own. Men dread liberty, says Bernard Shaw, because of the bewildering responsibility it imposes and the uncommon alertness it de- mands ; no wonder that they acclaim as truly great only those artists who fully accept this responsibility and successfully display this alertness. And it may be suggested that the more conventional, and therefore paralyzing to personal initiative, the style from which the artist takes his departure, the more alertness does he require, and the more credit does he deserve if he arrives at freedom. If this be true, Sir Edward Elgar, who, starting at Eng- lish oratorio, has arrived at the cosmopolitan yet completely individual musical speech of the first Symphony, the Variations, and parts of "The Dream of Gerontius," is surely one of the great men of our time. For nothing, not even stark crudity, is so un- favorable to artistic life as the domination by a conventional formalism like that of the Handel-Mendelssohn school from which Elgar had to start. It may take a great artist like Dvorak or Verdi to build an art on the naivetes of Bohemian folk-song or the banalities of Ital- 96 SIR EDWARD ELGAR ian opera ; but to free an art from the tyranny of drowsy custom, as Elgar has done, requires not only a great artist, but something of a revolutionary. Elgar is English in character, but cosmopoli- tan in sympathies, style, and workmanship. In other words, while retaining the personal and racial quality natural to all sincere art, he has been magnanimous, intelligent, and un- conventional enough to break through the charmed circle of insularity which has kept so many English composers from vital contact with the world. Such insularity cannot but be fatal to art. It is bad enough when it con- fines the artist to narrow native models. It is even worse when, ignoring native music of the finest quality, such as that of Purcell, it follows blindly, through timidity or inertia, traditions imported by foreigners of inferior grade. Gen- erations of English musicians have stultified themselves in imitating Handel's burly ponder- ousness and Mendelssohn's somewhat vapid elegance. They have turned a deaf ear, not only to the greater contemporaries of these idols to Bach and to Schumann but also to the H 97 CONTEMPORARY COMPOSERS more modern thought of Wagner, Franck, Tschaikowsky, and Brahms. They have been correct and respectable in an art which lives only through intense personal emotion. They have narrowed their sympathies. They have been national in an age of dawning interna- tionalism. Elgar, on the contrary, together with a few others whose work deserves to be better known than it is, has had the courage to aspire to a cosmopolitan breadth of style. He has made up for the lack of what are called "educational advantages" by something far more valuable an insatiable intellectual curiosity. Self- taught except for a few violin lessons in youth, he has been all his life a tireless listener, ob- server, and student. When he was a boy, having no text-books on musical form, he wrote a whole symphony in imitation of Mozart's in G minor, "following the leader" with ad- mirable and fruitful docility. As a youth he would play violin, at the last desk oftentimes, in any orchestra to which he could gain admis- sion, for the sake of the experience; and be- tween rehearsals would laboriously collate the 98 SIR EDWARD ELGAR instrumental parts to find out why a certain passage sounded well or ill. He would travel two hundred and fifty miles to London, from his home in Worcester, to hear a Crystal Palace Saturday concert, returning late at night. Knowing well that any potent indi- viduality like his own grows by what it as- similates, he has had none of the small man's fear of injuring by the study of others his "individuality." The internal evidence of his works shows that there are few modern scores he has left unpondered ; yet no living composer has a more unmistakably personal style than his. His intellectual activity has by no means confined itself to music. He has always been an omnivorous reader. And while much of this reading naturally proceeded in desultory fashion, for the sake of relaxation, and took him sometimes as far afield as Froissart, the fourteenth-century French chronicler, as sug- gested by his early overture of that name, he has never lost the power of concentration, and can study a book to as good purpose as a score. His analytic notes to his symphonic study 99 CONTEMPORARY COMPOSERS "Falstaff" (1913) reveal a surprisingly de- tailed knowledge both of Shakespeare and of Shakespeare's commentators. Science also interests him, and for some years his hobby was scientific kite-flying. He is of the nerv- ously irritable temperament so often coupled with mental alertness, walks about restlessly while conversing, and detests all routine work like teaching. "To teach the right pupil was a pleasure," he once said, "but teaching in general was to me like turning a grindstone with a dislocated shoulder." In 1889 he married, gave up most of his teaching, and moved to London. Since then he has lived partly among his native Malvern Hills, partly near London, but has devoted himself almost entirely to composing and conducting. Elgar's whole life has thus been a gradual and progressive self-emancipation from the limitations of inherited style, an escape from habit to initiative, from formality to eloquence, from insularity to cosmopolitanism. Nor has this progress been the less inspiring in that it has been spasmodic, subject to interruptions, and never complete. In that respect it shares SIR EDWARD ELGAR the lovable imperfection of all things human. It has been instinctive rather than reasoned, has proceeded largely by trial and error, and has counted among its experiments almost as many failures as successes. There are com- monplace pages in almost everything Elgar has written, unless it be the "Enigma" Varia- tions. But the important point is that how- ever much, in moments of technical inattention or emotional indifference, he may fall back into the formulae of his school, he has at his best left them far behind, and made himself the peer of his greatest continental contemporaries in wealth and variety of expression of such men as Strauss in Germany and d'Indy in France. What are these never-quite-ejected formulae, lurking in Elgar's brain, ever ready to guide his pen when for a moment he forgets to think and feel ? If we look at the opening chorus of "The Black Knight," written in 1893, and numbered opus 25, we shall get a working notion of them (Figure X, page 102). How this passage calls up the atmosphere of the typical English choral festival : the 101 CONTEMPORARY COMPOSERS FIGURE X. Opening chorus from " The Black Knight." Allegro maestoso A 3 unwieldy masses of singers, the scarcely less unwieldy orchestra or organ, the ponderous movement of the music, half majestic, half tottering, as of a drunken elephant, the well- meaning ineptitude of the expression, highly charged with good nature but innocent of nuance ! There is the solid diatonic har- mony, conscientiously divided between the four equally industrious parts. There is the thin disguising of the tendency of this hymn-tune type of harmony to sit down, so to speak, on the accent of each measure, by a few con- SIR EDWARD ELGAR ventional suspensions. There is the attempt to give the essentially stagnant melody a specious air of busyness by putting in a triplet here and a dot or short rest there. And there is the sing-song phraseology by which a phrase of four measures follows a phrase of four measures as the night the day. In short, there is the perfectly respectable production of music by the yard, on the most approved pattern, undistorted by a breath of personal feeling or imagination. How far Elgar, whenever his imagination is stirred, can get away from this conventional vacuity, even without departing materially from its general idiom, may as well be shown at once, for the sake of the illuminating con- trast, by the quotation of a bit of genuine Elgar the "Nimrod" in the "Enigma" Va- riations, opus 36 (1899). This touching tribute to a friend of the com- poser, Mr. A. J. Jaeger (the English equiva- lent of whose name, hunter, suggested the title), has all the serious thoughtfulness, the tender- ness coupled with aspiration, the noble plain- ness, that belong to Elgar at his best. And 103 CONTEMPORARY COMPOSERS FIGURE XL "Nimrod," from the "Enigma Variations." Adagio it is a striking fact that the originality of the passage (for no one but Elgar could have written it) is due to subtle, almost unanalyzable qualities in the mode of composition rather than to any unusual features of style. The harmonic style, indeed, is quite the same simple diatonic one as that of "The Black Knight" chorus, showing that, in music as in literature, noble poetry can be made from the same ma- terials as doggerel. There is the same pre- dominance of simple triads and seventh chords, especially the more rugged sevenths, for which Elgar has a noticeable fondness ; the same 104 SIR EDWARD ELGAR frequent use of suspensions, though here it is dictated by emotion rather than by custom ; the same restless motion of the bass, one of the hall-marks of Elgar's style. The melody, how- ever, shows a tendency to large leaps, often of a seventh, in alternating directions, giving its line a sharply serrated profile. This, it may be noted, is also one of the outstanding features of his more personal thought. But above all should be observed the rhythmic flexibility that here takes the place of sing- song the free sweep of the line, scorning to rest on the accents, soaring through its long continuous flight like a bird in a favoring gale. We have here, then, the vein of expression at once plain, serious, and noble, which makes Elgar at his best both English and universal. It recurs frequently throughout the whole body of his work: in the "Go forth" chorus in "Gerontius," so finely used in the prelude; in the theme of the Variations ; in the funda- mental theme of the first Symphony, which dominates the entire work and in which Elgar reaches perhaps his most exalted utter- ance; in the themes of the slow movement of CONTEMPORARY COMPOSERS the same symphony; and in another way in the Prince Hal theme of "Falstaff." Some may feel that this is the essential Elgar. Yet there is also in this quiet Englishman a pas- sionate mysticism, a sense of subtle spiritual experience, which has urged him to develop progressively quite another mode of musical speech. On this side he is related to Wagner and to Cesar Franck. Like them he has realized that there is a whole range of feeling, inaccessible to the diatonic system of har- mony, that can be suggested by harmony based on the chromatic scale, and even more vividly and subtly by a harmonic system that opens up a path between all the keys, that makes them all available together by what we may call, in short, "polytonal" harmony. This polytonal harmonic system is common to "Tristan und Isolde," to Franck's "Les Beatitudes," to much of Chopin, and to many parts of "The Dream of Gerontius," however much they may differ in other respects. Elgar began early to experiment in this direction. Even in "The Black Knight," for example, at the word "rock" in the lines 106 SIR EDWARD ELGAR When he rode into the lists The castle 'gan to rock, we have the following progression, equally striking from the musical and the dramatic point of view : FIGURE XII. From " The Black Knight." Allegro molto e con fuoco This is what Mr. Carl W. Grimm has well named a "modulating sequence"; that is, each unit group of harmony (in this case a measure in length) is the sequential repetition of the preceding, yet the chromatic texture is so managed that each begins in a new key; the total effect is thus much more novel and exciting than is that of the traditional mono- tonal sequence. Yet, as Mr. Stillman-Kelley has pointed out in a closely reasoned essay, 1 1 " Recent Developments in Musical Theory," by Edgar Stillman-Kelley. The Musical Courier, July I and 8, 1908. 107 CONTEMPORARY COMPOSERS however ingenious may be the arrangement of the modulating sequence on the harmonic side, it is liable to the same fault that besets the monotonal sequence that is, rhythmic monot- ony. Once we have the pattern, we know what to expect; and if the composer gives us exactly what we expect the effect is too obvious, and we are bored. It is precisely by his avoid- ance of this literal repetition, says Mr. Kelley, that Wagner, in such a modulating sequence as that of the Pilgrims' Chorus, maintains both the rhythmic and the harmonic vitality of the music. Judged by the standard thus suggested, the sequence on the word "rock" is seen to be too literally carried out. The pattern is applied with the mechanical regularity of a stencil, necessarily with an equally mechanical result. It must be said in the interest of just criticism that Elgar frequently falls into this fault. Even Gerontius' cry of despair, so magnificently developed by the orchestra, contains less of subtle variety than is given to that curiously similar cry of Amfortas in "Parsifal" by the "inversion" of the parts, while the priest's 108 SIR EDWARD ELGAR adjuration to his departing soul * and the chorus afterward based on it, become irritat- ingly monotonous through the literal repetition of a pattern admirable in itself. At the be- ginning of the Development in the first move- ment of the second Symphony there is a passage illustrating the same fault. The tonal and harmonic coloring here are singularly impres- sive, and quite original; as Mr. Ernest New- man remarks in his analysis: 2 "A new and less sunny cast has come over the old themes. . . . The harmonies have grown more mys- terious ; the scoring is more veiled ; the dynam- ics are all on a lower scale." Everything favors, in fact, a most impressive effect except the structure; but that, through its over- literal application of the modulating sequence, almost jeopardizes the whole. Fortunately, however, happier applications of this harmonically so fruitful device are not far to seek in Elgar's scores, especially the later ones. The following theme from "The Apostles," appropriately marked "mistico," is 1 Vocal score, page 39. 1 Musical Times, London, May i, 1911. 109 CONTEMPORARY COMPOSERS a fine example of the kind of mysticism that is not unmindful of the needs of the body and of the intelligence as well as of the soul. FIGURE XIII. In the Mountain, Night. From " The Apostles." Adagio ^ ^^ ^-v ^C ^T" >*-e ff /' i"i ' 3s& I "k I 1 f The principle is still that of the modulating sequence, but the application is here not me- chanical but freely imaginative. Two of the one-measure units are in each phrase balanced by a unit twice as long, so that the rhythm is as a whole far more organic than in our earlier examples of sequences. Furthermore the purely harmonic treatment makes use of un- foreseeable relations, so that the effect of stere- IIO SIR EDWARD ELGAR otype is successfully evaded. Finally, here is a theme from the second symphony in which the sequential principle is still further veiled, so far as harmony is concerned. The har- monic progressions seem here to "shoot," so to speak, with complete spontaneity; we can- not anticipate whither the next move will take us, and we get constantly to interesting new places ; yet the unity of the whole, beginning and ending in E-flat *, prevents any sense of aimless wandering. FIGURE XIV. Theme from Symphony No. 2. 1 Is not Mr. Newman mistaken in stating that this theme be- gins in G major ? in CONTEMPORARY COMPOSERS The alert student will probably still feel, nevertheless, perhaps without being able to account in any way for his impression, that even in these last excerpts there is an unsatis- factory element, a something that keeps them on a lower level of art, for all their opaline color, than that of the forthright and trans- parent "Nimrod." This something, perhaps on the whole Elgar's most ineradicable fault, is rhythmical "short breath." He gets away from it, to be sure, in all his finest pages ; but except when his imagination is deeply stirred his melodic line shows the dangerous tendency to fall into short segments, a measure or two in length, into a configuration of scallops, so to speak, rather than wide sweeps, exemplified in the three last illustrations. Instead of flying, it hops. Examples will be found right through his works, from the second theme of the early overture "Froissart" to that of the first movement of the Violin Concerto, opus 61. FIGURE XV. Second theme from " Froissart." SIR EDWARD ELGAR Second theme of first movement of Violin Concerto. ini n This kind of sing-songiness is as fatal to noble rhythm in music as it is in poetry in much of Longfellow, for example; and the frequency with which Elgar relapses into it suggests that he has some of the same fatal facility, the tendency to talk without thinking, which so often kept the American poet below his best. The parallel might be carried out, if it were worth while, in some detail. Both men wrote too much, and both are "popular" in the bad sense as well as the good. The "Pomp and Circumstance" Marches are saved, despite the frequent triteness of their melody, by their buoyant high spirits ; but of the vapid and sentimental "Salut d'Amour," which has sold in the thousands and been arranged for all possible combinations of instruments, includ- ing two mandolins and a guitar, the less said the better. Yet it is noteworthy that the very tendency to an over-obvious, monotonous i 113 CONTEMPORARY COMPOSERS rhythmic scheme which works for the popu- larity of a small piece with the thoughtless and trivial-minded, works against it in the case of a larger composition which appeals to the musically serious, and wins its way gradually at best. Thus Elgar's second symphony, which suffers much more from this besetting fault than the first, has been less popular for that very reason. Statistics are significant in such cases. The second symphony was played twenty-seven times before it was three years old, a considerable number for so serious a work 1 ; but the first, called by Nikisch "Brahms's Fifth," a compliment which could be paid to few other modern symphonies with- out absurdity, achieved the almost incredible record of eighty-two performances in its first year, in such widely scattered places as London, Vienna, Berlin, Leipsic, Bonn, St. Petersburg, Buda Pest, Toronto, Sydney, and the United States. 2 Of course it is not intended to account for the wide favor accorded this symphony by 1 Musical Times, January, 1914. 2 Musical Times, January, 1909. 114 SIR EDWARD ELGAR adducing so technical a matter, from one point of view, as its comparative freedom from a rhythmic weakness to which its composer is un- fortunately peculiarly subject. What is meant is simply that sing-song balance of short phrases is often a symptom of superficial feeling, and that, per contra, elastic, vigorous, and im- aginative rhythms are a constant result, and therefore a reliable evidence, of the emotional ardor that makes a piece of music live. The A-flat Symphony is a work intensely felt by the composer, a work that, coming from his heart, finds its way to the hearts of others. And in this respect, in its emotional sincerity, earnestness, and subjectivity, it differs from his other works more in degree than in kind. For in everything Elgar writes there is the preoccupation with inner feeling which we find in such a composer as Schumann, but from which most of our contemporaries have turned away. Elgar is an introspective musician, not an externally observant tone-painter like Strauss. It is noteworthy how completely his treatment of death, for example, in "The Dream of Gerontius," differs from that of Strauss in CONTEMPORARY COMPOSERS "Tod und Verklarung." By no means acci- dental is it, but highly significant of the op- posed attitudes of the two artists, that while Strauss emphasizes the external picture the panting breath, the choking cries Elgar penetrates to the inward emotional state. He has written surprisingly little program music. Aside from a few realistic touches scattered through the choral works, and the delicate little vignette of the friend at sea in the "Enigma" Variations, there is only "Falstaff" and that deals more with character than with picture. In this respect Elgar deserves well of his contemporaries for standing against a popular but dangerous tendency to externalize the most inward of the arts, and for showing that even in the twentieth century the spiritual drama set forth in a work of pure music, like his first symphony, can be as thrilling as those that have made immortal Beethoven's later quartets and sonatas. That this attitude indicates a preference rather than a limitation is proved by the felicity of the external characterization in passages scattered all through the choral 116 SIR EDWARD ELGAR works, as for instance the setting of the line "The castle 'gan to rock," cited above, from the "Black Knight," the music of the devils in "Gerontius," or the scene in "The Apostles" where Peter walks upon the water, and even more strikingly in "Falstaff," the composer's single contribution to program music. Here he frankly takes the Straussian attitude, and skilfully uses the Straussian methods. Lead- ing themes, as he tells us in his analysis, 1 depict the fat knight, one "in a green old age, mellow, frank, gay, easy, corpulent, loose, unprincipled, FIGURE XVI. Three of the " Falstaff " themes. Allegro Grandiose 6 laramente 1 Musical Times, September, 1913. 117 CONTEMPORARY COMPOSERS and luxurious" (a); another "cajoling and persuasive" (b) ; and a third in his mood of "boastfulness and colossal mendacity" (c). These portraits evidently belong to the same gallery as Strauss's Don Quixote, Sancho Panza (cf. the first quotation), Till Eulen- spiegel, and others ; they are sketched in the same suggestive and telling lines ; in the third there is even the same touch of caricature. The picture of Eastcheap, too, where, "among ostlers and carriers, and drawers, and merchants, and pilgrims and loud robustious women, Fal- staff has freedom and frolic," has something of the German composer's brilliant externality. It should, as Elgar says in his notes, and it does, "chatter, blaze, glitter, and coruscate." Yet, vivid as all this is, even here from time to time, notably in the two "interludes," the composer characteristically withdraws from the turbulent outer world he has conjured up, to brood upon its spiritual meaning ; and it is noteworthy that after stating in his analysis that "some lines quoted from the plays are occasionally placed under the themes to indi- cate the feeling to be conveyed by the music," 118 SIR EDWARD ELGAR he immediately adds, "but it is not intended that the meaning of the music, often varied and intensified, shall be narrowed to a corollary of these quotations only." This intensifica- tion arises, of course, through the universalizing of all the particulars by the power of music to express pure emotion. The same instinctive leaning to introspec- tion is curiously shown in the Enigma Varia- tions. 1 "I have in the Variations," writes Elgar in a private letter, "sketched portraits of my friends a new idea, I think that is, in each variation I have looked at the theme through the personality (as it were) of another Johnny." The idea was not indeed quite new, however originally applied, as Schumann had already sketched a number of his friends in the "Carnaval." But what is of much greater import is that Schumann and Elgar, both introspective temperaments, go about this busi- ness of portrait painting in the same char- acteristic way not by recording the external aspects of these "other Johnnies," but by 1 Arranged for piano by the composer. Novello, Ewer, and Company, London. 119 CONTEMPORARY COMPOSERS sympathetically putting themselves at their points of view and becoming, so to speak, the spokesmen of their souls. The tender intimate- ness of Elgar's interpretations is their supreme charm. Whatever the character portrayed, whether the tender grace of C. A. E. (Lady Elgar), the caprice of H. D. S-P., the virile energy of W. M. B., the gossamer delicacy of Dorabelle, or the nobility of "Nimrod," we feel in each case that we have for the moment really got inside the personality, and looked at the world along that unique perspective. Even in the indescribably lovely Romanza, Variation XIII, calling up the thought of a friend at sea, though programistic devices are used, the spirit looks away from externalities. Violas in a quietly undulating rhythm suggest the ocean expanse ; an almost inaudible tremolo of the drum gives us the soft throb of the engines ; a quotation from Mendelssohn's "Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage," in the dreamy tones of the clarinet, completes the story. Yet "story" it is not and there is the subtlety of it. Dim sea and dream-like steamer are only accessories after all. The 120 SIR EDWARD ELGAR thought of the distant friend, the human soul there, is what gently disengages itself as the essence of the music. In his two symphonies the composer gives us even less encouragement to search for de- tailed programs. It is true that the second bears the motto from Shelley : Rarely, rarely, comest them, Spirit of Delight. But it will be observed, first, that these lines contain no pictorial images which would pre- vent their application to the most purely emotional music a symphony of Beethoven, for example ; and second, that even their emotional bearing is somewhat ambiguous, as we are left in doubt whether it is the Spirit of Delight itself,, or the rareness of its visita- tions, that we are asked to consider. Mr. Ernest Newman thinks the former, and finds in the symphony the "jocundity and sweet- ness" which characterize English music from the earliest times. We read in the Musical Times, 1 however, that there is "some disagree- ment . . . with the composer's own opinion 1911. 121 CONTEMPORARY COMPOSERS that it is on a totally' different psychological plane from that of the first symphony, and represents a more serene mood," although the writer adds that "it is unquestionable that the themes, even in the slow movement, speak of a lighter heart and more tranquil emotions." If there is thus room for doubt even as to the emotional content of the work, no attempt to read into it a "story" is likely to be successful. Even Mr. Newman, programist a entrance, is forced in this case to the admission that "though practically every musical work of any emotional value must start from this basis [of the composer's life-experience], 1 the con- nection of it with the external world or with the symbols of the literary and plastic arts may range through many degrees of vagueness or precision, according to the psychological build of the composer." Coming now at last to Elgar's masterpiece, 1 This premise, which Mr. Newman expands as if it bore di- rectly on the problem of program music, though true to the verge of truism, hardly helps us to solve that problem. The question, it may be said once again, concerns not the composer's stimulus, but his method; whether, that is, he works through the sugges- tion of external objects or of inner emotional states. 122 SIR EDWARD ELGAR the Symphony l in A-flat, No. i, opus 55, first performed under Dr. Hans Richter at Man- chester and at London in December, 1908, we find Elgar's method at its purest the pre- occupation with spiritual states and experiences is complete. It is true that this may be the symphony upon which he was reported nine years earlier to be at work, and which was to bear the title "Gordon." If this is the case it shows only that he was moved to musical expression by the heroism of the great English- man, as Beethoven was by that of Napoleon before it transpired that he was a tyrant. The A-flat Symphony is not for that reason any more program music than Beethoven's "Eroica." The two are indeed similar in being throughout profound searchings of the human spirit, highly dramatic in the vivid- ness of their introspection, but never realistic. They penetrate to a level far deeper than that of action ; they deal with the emotional springs of action ; we may even say that each suggests a philosophy, since the philosophies, too, are 1 Arrangement for piano by S. Karg-Elert. Novello, Ewer, and Company. 123 CONTEMPORARY COMPOSERS born of those deep inarticulate emotional atti- tudes toward life which only music can voice in their purity. This fundamental attitude is in the A-flat Symphony far more mature and chastened than that of the ebulliently youthful "Eroica." If we wished to find its analogue in Beethoven (and it is a high compliment to Elgar to say that there are few other places we could find it) we should have to go rather to the Ninth Symphony and to the later sonatas and quartets. It is in essence the attitude of religious resigna- tion, and has as its constituents the primary opposition between the ideal and reality, the disappointment, softening, and impersonalizing of the soul by experience, the reciprocal activity of the soul winning its values out of experience, and the final reconciliation between them. Of course it is not meant that these ideas are in- tellectually formulated in the music. It is simply that the music expresses the emotional states that accompany such universal human experiences, and thus suggests and at the same time by its beauty transfigures them. The noble melody in A-flat major with which 124 SIR EDWARD ELGAR the symphony starts, recurring in the finale, and indeed the nucleus of the whole work, suggests aspiration, resolute will, the quest of the Ideal. Everything about it, its steady movement, its simple, strong harmonic basis, its finely flexible rhythm, notably free from the short breath of the composer's less exalted moments, even its rich and yet quiet tonality of A-flat major, raises it into a rarefied atmos- phere of its own, above the turmoil of every- day life. With the theme in D minor marked Allegro appassionato, on the contrary, we are brought rudely down to earth, with all its confusion, its chaos, its meaningless accidents (note the constant feverish motion of the bass, the phantasmagoric nightmare harmonies at index letter 7, the increasing restlessness of the whole passage). Presently more poignant or tender phrases (10 and n) suggest the longing of the spirit for the sweet reasonable- ness of the lost ideal world, and at 12, in the "second theme" in F major, we do get for a moment a breathing interval of peace. The beautiful, tender phrase, as of divine pity, be- ginning in the fourth measure of n and usher- 125 CONTEMPORARY COMPOSERS ing in this theme, should be especially noticed for its deep expressiveness and its complete originality. This "phrase of pity," as we shall see, is destined to play an important part in the structure of the movement. Soon earlier fragments return, reintroducing the restless mood, the intensity of the feeling steadily grows, and at 17 we have a magnificent climax in which the "phrase of pity," much slower and more emphatic than before, suggests the first crisis of the struggle. With the return of the theme of the ideal, now in C major (18) and in tentative accents, begins the long and complex development of the themes. We need not go into detail here, further than to remark that the strange, devious new theme at 24 seems almost to have some concrete "meaning," undisclosed by the com- poser, and introduces the most baffling element we find anywhere in the symphony. The development proceeds much upon it. At 32 begins the recapitulation of themes of the ortho- dox sonata-form, treated freely and with many interesting modifications. The climax recurs at 44, now impressively amplified. Even finer is 126 SIR EDWARD ELGAR the gradual but irresistible return of the funda- mental theme, the "Ideal," and its triumphant statement through 49, 50, and 51. The sinister, groping theme returns, however, seeming to darken the atmosphere as when clouds come over the sun. The "Ideal" theme is heard in faltering, uncertain accents, and reaches, just before 55, a timid cadence on the tone C. Now comes one of the most exquisite things, not only in this symphony, but in modern music. While the clarinet holds this C, reached in the original key of A-flat major, the muted strings, high and tenuous, in the remote key of A minor, like voices from another world, gently breathe the "phrase of pity." It is magical. With fine dignity of pace they reach the tone C, whereupon we are again quietly but con- clusively brought back to A-flat, and with a single plucked bass note the chord of the clari- nets sinks to silence (Figure XVII, page 128). The two middle movements of the symphony, Allegro molto (the scherzo) and Adagio, are played without intervening pause and con- ceived together. From the point of view both of form and of content their treatment is 127 CONTEMPORARY COMPOSERS FIGURE XVII. End of first movement, First Symphony. R p /?N f 81 At)-. -J-. hV. /7s of exceeding interest. Structurally they are an inset between the first movement and the finale, contrasting sharply with them in key as well as in melodic material, embodying as they do the "sharp" keys (F-sharp minor and D major) in opposition to the A-flat major and D minor of the others. After this inset has been completed, the earlier themes and keys return in the finale and round out the cycle projected by the first movement. Thus the symphony as a whole consists of two interlock- ing systems a scheme of structure which 128 SIR EDWARD ELGAR gives it both variety and unity in the highest degree. The scherzo begins with a racing, eagerly hurrying theme, staccato, in the violins, in the fastest possible tempo. Together with a more vigorous, barbarically insistent tune to which it presently (59) gives place, it seems a musical expression of the forward-looking, all-conquer- ing spirit of youth. These themes are separately elaborated, are displaced for a while by a quieter Trio, and finally return with renewed vigor, and at last in combination (75). And now, as coda, comes one of the most remark- able passages of the Symphony. The racing theme returns (82), but now pianissimo, mys- terious, shorn of its pristine exuberance. It hesitates, halts, seems to lose faith in itself. It reappears in the more sombre key of F minor, instead of F-sharp minor, and with abated pace (84). A little later it sobers to a still quieter movement, in eighth notes (86), then (87) to quarter notes, and at last (90) the clarinets give it out in a movement eight times slower than the original headlong dash. In- deed, the rhythm seems about to fail entirely K 129 CONTEMPORARY COMPOSERS when, with a change of key to D major, and of time to Adagio, we hear the identical notes of the original theme, sung now with broad de- liberation by the violins, completely trans- figured in meaning. Thus begins the slow movement with the coming of maturity, the taming of the blood, the sadness of self-acquaintance no longer to be postponed. The excitement of unlimited possibilities gives place to the sober recogni- tion of limitations. Poignant grief there is here, unanswered questioning, moments of passionate despair. But with the beautiful and thoroughly Elgarian theme at 96 begins to creep in the spirit of resignation to the in- evitable, and of divine pity for human failure, born of this bitter self-discovery. From this point on is heard unmistakably the deeper note of religious consolation, reaching full expression at last in the melody marked Molto espressivo e sostenuto, one of the noblest, profoundest, and most spiritual that Elgar has conceived, with which the movement ends. The finale opens with a slow introduction, intended partly to direct our attention back 130 SIR EDWARD ELGAR to the first movement and partly to forecast the strains destined to complete the cycle which it began. We hear the mysterious groping theme first heard in its development and frag- ments of the "Ideal." Especial emphasis is laid, however, on a marchlike tune, given out by bassoons and low strings at the sixth meas- ure, and on an aspiring phrase for clarinet (measures 10-11) peculiar to the present move- ment. The prevailing mood here, both in the main theme with its emphatic interlocking rhythms (the opening Allegro) and in the second theme at 114, with its buoyant triplets recalling the finale of Brahms's third symphony, is energetic will. This seems to merge in jubilant achievement in the march-like theme of the introduction at its reentrance at 118. For a moment, to be sure, doubt as to this triumph seems to be suggested by a rather halting version of the "Ideal" (129) and by a ponder- ing version of the march theme (130). But with the return of the main themes of the move- ment at its recapitulation, beginning at 134 and now inflected towards A-flat, the radical tonality of the whole symphony, the mood of 131 CONTEMPORARY COMPOSERS vigorous volition revives, and from now on to the splendid reassertion, by the full orches- tra, in its richest sonorities, of the theme of the "Ideal," all is one long climax. It is hard to see how any candid student can deny the greatness of this symphony. If only for the stoutness of its structure, the grasp with which the fundamental principles of musical form are seized, however the details have to be modified to suit the occasion, and for the richness and variety of its treatment of orchestral coloring, it would hold a con- spicuous place among modern orchestral works. But of course these things are only means ; the end of music is expression. It is, then, to the fact that the symphony gives eloquent voice to some of the deepest, most sacred, and most elusive of human feelings that we must attribute its real importance. That it does this at a time when most musicians are looking outward rather than inward, and incline to value sensuous beauty above thought, and vividness above profundity, gives us all the more reason for receiving it with gratitude, and finding in it a good omen for the future. 132 IV CLAUDE DEBUSSY IV CLAUDE DEBUSSY O peculiarity of contemporary musical taste is more striking than the extraordinary popu- larity which the elusive songs and piano pieces of Debussy have enjoyed during the last decade or two. They have been heard, with a delight agree- ably mixed with bewilderment, in the draw- ing-rooms of the whole world, just as Grieg's were at a slightly earlier period ; and, like Grieg, their author has become the idol of the amateur. There is no doubt of it, Debussy has been the prime musical fad of the twentieth century. The fact is interesting worth examination. The reasons of it throw a strong light not only on Debussy himself, but which is more im- portant on our whole contemporary musical life. Claude Achille Debussy, born in 1862 at St. Germain-en-Laye, near Paris, and educated 135 CONTEMPORARY COMPOSERS at the Conservatoire, first gained wide fame by his opera, "Pelleas et Melisande," produced at the Opera Comique in 1902. By its imag- inative re-creation in music of Maeterlinck's fatalism and atmosphere of mystery, by its dramatic directness, its justice of declamation, its moderation and avoidance of Wagnerian exaggeration, perhaps above all by the original- ity of its harmonic style and its delicately tinted orchestration, it undoubtedly marked an epoch in French music. Debussy had at this time already fixed the fundamental quali- ties of his style in such t compositions as the quartet for strings (1893), more virile than his later works, and the well-known orchestral pre- lude after a prose poem by Mallarme, arch- priest of the symbolistic movement, "L'Apres- midi d'un faune." In later orchestral pieces, the Nocturnes for orchestra (1899), the sym- phonic sketches "La Mer" (1905), the highly colored "Iberia" (1907), as well as in choral works like the "Martyre de Saint Sebastien" (1911), we see him refining the same manner, seeking always, like his compatriot the poet Verlaine, the subtleties, the delicacies, the 136 CLAUDE DEBUSSY shades and half-shades, la nuance, la nuance toujours. It is, however, through his smaller works his songs and especially his piano pieces that Debussy is best known to the mass of his admirers ; and as the same quali- ties reveal themselves here too, it is in these that we shall try to understand them. In the "Estampes" (1903), the "Masques" (1904), the "Images" (1905 and 1908), the "Preludes" (1910 and 1913), and many lesser pieces he has created what is virtually a department of his own in the literature of the piano. Here is the essential Debussy. The adaptation between the art and the audience here, as is always the case where there is extreme popularity, is so perfect that we can equally well begin our study from either end. Let us start with the audience. Not that Debussy consciously sought to "give the public what it wants " ; no artist worthy the name does that. What is meant is simply that his qualities were spontaneously such as exactly to satisfy his audience's requirements ; or, in biological terms, the organism was fortu- nate enough to be exactly suited to its en- 137 CONTEMPORARY COMPOSERS vironment, peculiarly "fit to survive." As investigating biologists we can therefore either approach the environment through the organ- ism or the organism through the environment and we choose to do the latter. The environment of the modern composer is a public numerically larger than ever before, and qualitatively affected by this increased size according to the law of averages de- graded, that is, from the qualities of the mi- nority toward those of the majority. In less abstract terms, the modern audience contains to every one intelligent listener ten or a hun- dred who are ignorant, untrained, or inatten- tive. The results of this disproportion are familiar to us on all sides ; they range from such a general matter as the very conception of art, and especially of music, as a mere amusement or diversion rather than a spiritual experience, down to such details as the pref- erence, natural to the untrained, of sensuous pleasure (in rich tone-combinations, for ex- ample) to emotion and thought (as embodied musically in melody), and of a vague day- dreaming mood when listening to music to the 138 CLAUDE DEBUSSY imaginative and sympathetic attention that music requires of him who would really grasp its objective beauty. Now it is in his appeal to this modern pref- erence of sensation to thought and emotion, and of subjective day-dreaming to the im- personal perception of beauty, that Debussy has been especially happy. He is not, of course, alone in making these appeals. The preoccupation with the sensuous is observable in most contemporary music, an especially striking instance being Strauss's orchestration. As for the ministering to "mood" rather than to the sense of beauty, the whole tendency toward "program," so characteristic of our time, might be accounted for by a cynic as a sacrifice to the majority of something they do not understand (music) to something they do (an opportunity for day-dreaming). But De- bussy is peculiarly thoroughgoing in his ap- plication of these familiar modern methods. All the elements of his art are focused upon this kind of satisfaction. First he gives us a title admirably fitted (for he has keen literary instinct) to liberate our 139 CONTEMPORARY COMPOSERS reverizing impulse "Gardens in the Rain," "Reflections in the Water," "Sounds and Perfumes Turn in the Evening Air," "Gold- Fish," "Veils." Then he proceeds to estab- lish the mood of idle reverie thus suggested by means of a tonal web which at no point dis- tracts our attention by any definite features of its own, melodic, rhythmic, harmonic, or structural. All is vague, floating, kaleidoscopic. Sustained melody is especially avoided, for nothing arrests attention or dominates mood like melody ; we have therefore only bits and snippets of tune, forming and disappearing like cloud forms or the eddies in smoke-wreaths. The rhythms are equally casual and indeter- minate, often of exquisite grace, but obeying no law. The harmonies are surprisingly vari- ous rich, clear, or clangorous, as the case may be; but always elusive, avoiding the definition that would impose thought rather than encourage fancy. The effect of vague- ness is here enhanced by the much-talked-of whole-tone scale. As there is little musical thought or emotion (melody), there is still less of that natural growth and combination of 140 CLAUDE DEBUSSY thought with thought which we call thematic development and polyphony. These are alien to the type of art, and are wisely avoided. It is curious to compare Debussy's treatment of his programs with that of Strauss. The imagination of the German, however he may call literary or pictorial associations to his aid, is primarily musical. A literary idea may suggest to him a theme, as Till Eulenspiegel's capricious mischief strikes from him that sur- prising Till motive, with its queer jumps and galvanic rhythms. But once such a theme exists it begins to act, musically, of itself, and develops such a network of musically inter- esting relationships that the listener, fas- cinated, clean forgets the program in his purely aesthetic delight. Strauss, probably, forgets it too. He does for us, in spite of his programs, exactly the kind of thing that Mozart, Beethoven, and Schumann do; he creates intrinsically significant and expressive musical forms (melodies) capable of absorbing our attention and transfiguring all they touch even a rogue like Till Eulenspiegel with their aesthetic magic. The Frenchman's im- CONTEMPORARY COMPOSERS agination, on the contrary, is primarily liter- ary, dramatic, pictorial. He is led by it, not to the creation of musically significant forms, but to a keenly sympathetic realization of the mood suggested by the program, and to a most subtle musical evocation of it by appropriate means, chiefly sensuous. He is thus, literally, a painter of "mood pictures." And as most people do not care to make the effort to follow and relive a musical experience, but prefer to be lulled by agreeable sounds into a trance in which their fancy may weave ad- ventures and project pictures for itself, his audience is delighted. From this point of view symbolism is the type of art which most appeals to the inartistic, and Debussy is the musician most beloved by the unmusical. We should not be talking about Debussy, however, if these negatives were all there were to say about him. Thousands of composers before him have succeeded in avoiding definite melody, rhythm, and harmony, coherent the- matic development, and thoughtful polyphony, and have won only oblivion. His not dis- tracting our attention by these musical ele- 142 CLAUDE DEBUSSY ments is a part of his scheme of art, but the more important part of it is the sensuous charm by which he wins our interest and in- hibits our mental and emotional activity the sheer tonal magic of his sonorities. He is a miracle of deftness in the purveying of musi- cal sweets. This is admitted even by his de- tractors, who cannot deny the seductiveness with which his music woos the physical ear, however little it appeals to their heads or their hearts. As for his admirers, they become rhapsodic over these "effects" and "sonori- ties," which they praise with a half-religious awe that used to be reserved for ideas. Listen, for instance, to M. Chenneviere, 1 an accredited expositor: "Voluptuous, corporeal, naturalis- tic such is the Debussyan art. The pas- sions, the sentiments, leave him often indif- ferent." And again : "The modern ear has become very fine, very delicate. It delights in sonorities. A beautiful chord is a rare in- toxication, and sometimes an author repeats it lingeringly, the better to savor it." If we *" Claude Debussy et son ceuvre," by Daniel Chenneviere, Paris, 1913. H3 CONTEMPORARY COMPOSERS adopt, at least tentatively, this frankly sensu- ous and hedonistic view of music, we shall find much to admire in Debussy. In the long evolution from the simple to the complex which music shares with everything else we know we may observe two different methods of tone-combination which, working together, have given us the elaborate texture of the modern art. That especially suited to melodic instruments, like those used in the orchestra or the chorus, puts melodies together as an engraver puts together lines, each re- maining distinct, standing off clearly from the others, representing a different musical thought, and yet all agreeing, or, as we say, harmonizing. This method, called polyphony, requiring great skill in the composer and close attention from the audience, is illustrated by such masterpieces as a fugue of Bach, a string quartet of Beethoven, or the famous passage at the end of Wagner's Meistersinger Over- ture, where four themes are driven abreast as in some proud chariot. It results in a texture essentially composite, involving rela- tions between elements held in mind together 144 CLAUDE DEBUSSY that is to say, it is thoughtful, and requires answering thought for its appreciation. But as soon as the piano, ill suited to melody because of its unsustained tone, began to reach any degree of development that is to say, about the time of Schumann (1810-1856) and Chopin (1809-1849) it became evident that this instrument compensated for its short- comings in rendering polyphony by a special aptitude for another kind of tone-combination, which we may call the homophonic or chordal. A great many tones could be played at once, held either by the fingers or by the damper- pedal, and made to shimmer with those thou- sand hues of the tonal rainbow we call "over- tones." There was apparently no limit to the complexity of the agglomerations of tone that the ear could thus be trained not only to accept but to delight in the rule being, as Chopin in his "fluid and vaporous sonorities" showed, that the greater in number and the more dissonant or clashing in character were these color tones, the more agreeably rich would be the resulting impression on the ear. But however complex these tone associations l I4S CONTEMPORARY COMPOSERS or chords, it is important to note that this resultant psychological impression was simple and unified that is, the ear perceived but one thing, and not several as in the polyphonic style. There was therefore no comparison of different elements, no thought or emotion ; there was simply sensation, physically delight- ful, mentally and emotionally meaningless. Debussy has probably brought more tal- ent and originality to the elaboration of this method of writing for the piano than any other composer since Chopin and Schumann. Open his pages anywhere and you will find these wide-spaced chords, these gossamer arpeggios and scales embroidering them, these nicely calculated grace-notes adding just the dis- sonance needed to season the dish. Take, for instance, the opening measures of "La Cathedrale engloutie" (Figure XVIII), char- acteristically marked "Profoundly calm (in a softly sonorous mist)." The intention to produce a misty, not to say foggy, homogeneity of tone here is so obvious that it seems strange that just such passages have aroused the ire of pedants who 146 CLAUDE DEBUSSY FIGURE XVIII. From "La Cathedrale engloutie" (Preludes, Book I). Profondement calme (Dans une brume dou cement sonore). &*-> (The incompleted ties indicate that the chord is to be kept sounding by the pedal.) have tried to apply to them the rules of the other way of writing the polyphonic. When we wish diverse melodies to stand out clearly one from another, we must avoid "parallel fifths 'and octaves/' which make them coalesce. Accordingly Debussy has been blamed, by those who prefer rules to reason, for using precisely the device which will give him the physical richness with mental vacuity which he is seeking. When this admirable colorist wishes a brighter or more incisive sonority than one of this kind, he resorts to dissonances, and es- pecially to the interval of the "second" 147 CONTEMPORARY COMPOSERS notes adjacent in the scale. The opening measures of "Et la lune descend sur le temple qui fut" (Figure XIX) afford an example of FIGURE XIX. " Et la lune descend sur la temple qui fut." this in a quiet tone ; more clangorous qualities of it will be found in "Masques," "L'ile joyeuse," and "Jardins sous la pluie." The first example illustrates what was said of the simplicity for the mind, whatever the com- plexity for the ear, of this kind of tone-com- bination. The chords contain a good many notes each ; but there emerges only one melody, and that rather obvious. The same search for rich or brilliant color that led to this use of "seconds," carried a little further, brought the composer to that whole-tone scale (or scale entirely made up 148 CLAUDE DEBUSSY of "seconds," as C, D, E, F-sharp, G-sharp, A-sharp, C) which he has used with such irresistible appeal. He has, to be sure, no patent right in it. Moussorgsky, Borodine, and others had used it before him ; his French contemporaries have used it with skill ; and now that it is common property some have even elicited from it strains of plangent force and manly energy foreign to Debussy's tem- perament. The fact remains that he has made it peculiarly his own by the subtlety, variety, and charm of his employment of it, as may be seen, for example, throughout "Voiles," in the first book of Preludes, and in scattered measures in almost any of his pieces. The whole-tone scale is indeed pre- ordained by nature as a goal to which such an art as Debussy's inevitably tends ; its clash- ing tones feed the greedy ear with the richest diet the gamut can provide ; at the same time the equivocal character of the chords, or rather the single chord (the so-called "augmented triad") that can harmonize it, and the self- contradictoriness of its tones from the point of view of the older scale, do away with the 149 CONTEMPORARY COMPOSERS sense of key and even of momentary repose, and leave us groping in a tonal night in which, since there is nothing to be observed, we can give ourselves up undisturbed to dreaming. Debussy is thus a true child of his time in his quest of the sensuous, and a true child of his country in the subtlety with which he pur- sues it. His Gallic taste saves him from the coarseness of so much of the contemporary Teutonic art; and while his aim is no more spiritual than that of the Germans, he prefers innuendo, implication, and understatement to the gross exaggeration of Strauss, the vehe- mence in platitude of Mahler, and the plod- ding literalness of Reger. Thus opposing, as he has so effectively done, the ideal of mere force, reducing in "Pelleas" the mam- moth modern orchestra to a handful of men skillfully exploited, substituting the most elu- sive sonorities of the piano for the crashing magnificence of the Liszt school, everywhere insisting on subtle quality rather than over- whelming quantity, he has exercised one of the most beneficial of influences against vul- garity of the bumptious type. But sybaritism, 150 CLAUDE DEBUSSY too, has its own vulgarity ; the question of aim is fundamental in art; and in judging the distinction of Debussy's aims we cannot evade the question whether physical pleasure, how- ever refined, is the highest good an artist can seek. His charm, beyond doubt, is great enough to justify his popularity. Yet it would be regrettable if the student of modern French music, satisfied with this charm, were to neglect the less popular but more virile, more profound, and more spiritual music of Cesar Franck, Ernest Chausson, and Vincent d'Indy. NOTE : Claude Debussy died in Paris, March 26, 1918. V VINCENT D'INDY ij ,1 VINCENT D'!NDY AS A YOUNG MAN VINCENT D'INDY UR age, because of the natural failure of our inner powers, at first, to keep pace with the re- cent unprecedented increase of our external resources, will prob- ably be known to the future as one of unpar- alleled confusion. With the mental and moral habits and the nervous systems inherited from a more placid generation, we find ourselves plunged in this maelstrom produced by cheap printing, quick communication, and facile transportation. Prepared to digest only a lim- ited environment, we are fed the whole world. No wonder we are distracted. . . . The situ- ation, of course, is full of interest to the more adventurous temperaments ; but however stim- ulating to the man of action it is scarcely favorable to the artist, since art is born only of tranquil emotion, firmly grasped and clearly CONTEMPORARY COMPOSERS arranged. Most contemporary musicians are thus bewildered and to some extent defeated by the very richness of the materials at hand ; their art is not equal to the strain put upon it by their greatly enlarged resources ; and their music is in consequence unindividual in expres- sion, flabbily eclectic in style, and vague or wandering in structure. It may seem at first thought paradoxical that these melancholy results of a momentary insufficiency of the mind to its materials should have proved most fatal precisely in the country that in simpler times has done most to create music. Strange it is, indeed, that Germany, which in Beethoven voiced the spiritual aspiration, in Schumann the ro- mantic joy, and in Brahms the philosophic meditation of the whole world, should find itself at length reduced to the half-impotent strivings of a Mahler, to the learned lucu- brations of a Reger, while mixed with even the gold of its one genius, Strauss, there should be so much dross of cheap sensationalism and irrelevant melodrama. Yet to consideration these signs of a widespread decadence in 156 VINCENT D'INDY German music will not by any means remain incomprehensible. For it will be seen that the Teutonic introspectiveness, the supreme gift of that temperament, incomparable and sufficient endowment as it seemed in the musicians of the great period, hardly suffices those who have to steer their way in a much more complicated environment, surrounded by pitfalls, calling at every step for qualities with which the typical German is by no means so well supplied intelligence, discrimination, moderation, and taste. It is the lack of these intellectual or spiritual qualities, rather than any falling off in purely emotional power, that has brought the great stream of music that flowed through Bach, Beethoven, Schumann, and Brahms to its end in the stagnant mo- rasses of contemporary Kapellmeistermusik, or scattered it in the showy but unsatisfying jets of sensationalism. And as Russia still remains a bit barbaric, England a little pro- vincial, America immature, and Italy tainted with operaticism (an ugly word for an ugly thing), it is chiefly in France, with its racial genius of lucid intelligence, that we find a 157 CONTEMPORARY COMPOSERS truly vital contemporary music. There we owe it chiefly to the high creative genius of Cesar Franck, Belgian by birth and tempera- ment, French in education and intellectual clarity, and to the loyal co-labors, creative, critical, and educational, of his pupils and dis- ciples. If there is to-day, despite the confu- sions of the time, a clear tradition and a hope- ful future for instrumental music, it is chiefly these modern Frenchmen that we have to thank. Especially has Vincent d'Indy, to-day dom- inant in the group, contributed to its work for many years the indefatigable efforts of his powerful and many-sided personality, more variously gifted than any of the others, since he is not only a composer of genius, but a lucid writer, an able organizer, and a teacher and conductor of singular magnetism. He came under the influence of Franck at his most plastic period ; he was a youth of twenty- two when, in 1873, he entered Franck's organ class at the Paris Conservatoire ; and of the circumstances, characteristic of both teacher and pupil, under which this most fruitful 158 VINCENT D'INDY relationship began, he has himself written in his "Life of Franck." "Having with great trouble," he says, "got upon paper a formless quartet for piano and strings, I asked Franck for an appointment. When I had played him the first movement, he remained a moment silent, and then, turn- ing toward me with a sad air, he said to me words I have never forgotten, since they had a decisive action on my life : 'There are good things here, energy, a certain instinct for dialogue of the parts, . . . the ideas are not bad, . . . but that is not enough, it is not made, and, in short, you know nothing at alV Returning home in the night (the interview had taken place very late in the evening) I said to myself, in my wounded vanity, that Franck must be a reactionary, understand- ing nothing of youthful, modern art. Never- theless, calmer the next morning, I took up my unhappy quartet and recalled one by one his observations, . . . and I was obliged to admit that he was right : I knew absolutely nothing. I went then, almost trembling, to ask him to accept me as a pupil." 159 CONTEMPORARY COMPOSERS At this time Franck, already fifty-one years old, was little appreciated as a composer, appeared to the world as a hard-worked or- ganist who taught ten hours a day and wrote for two hours before breakfast works seldom heard, and had indeed not yet discovered the vein from which he so enriched music during the last ten years of his life. Nevertheless d'Indy at once recognized the fruitfulness of his ideas, devoted himself to a severe tech- nical discipline in accordance with them, and assumed that role of filial defender and ex- positor of them in which he has never wearied from that day to this. There is something not only rarely beautiful in itself, but most characteristic of the purity of d'Indy's self-for- getful devotion to music, in the loyalty which he has always given to his "Pater seraph- icus," as Franck's artistic sons called him, from the period when as a student he left the conservatory which misprized his master, to the day when, himself a master, he published his "Life of Franck." M. Remain Rolland gives us a picture of it in his description of the first performance, in March, 1888, of Franck's 160 VINCENT D'INDY "Theme, fugue, and variation" for harmo- nium and piano, at a concert of the Societe nationale de musique, when Franck played the harmonium, and d'Indy the piano. "I always remember," says M. Rolland, 1 "his respectful attitude toward the old musician, his studious care to follow his indications : one would have thought he was a pupil, at- tentive and docile; and this was touching from a young master, established by so many works the Chant de la Cloche, Wallenstein, the Symphonie sur un theme montagnard and perhaps better known and more popular than Cesar Franck himself. Since then twenty years have passed ; I continue to see him as I saw him that evening ; and whatever happens now his image will remain always for me closely associated with that of the great master dominating, with a paternal smile, this small assembly of faithful ones." This "small assembly of faithful ones," the pupils of Franck, such as Duparc, Chausson, Coquard, Bordes, Ropartz, Benoit, d'Indy, as well as others, like Saint-Saens and Faure, 1 Musicians d'aujourd'hui ; Remain Rolland. M 161 CONTEMPORARY COMPOSERS who, though not his pupils, have felt his in- fluence, have virtually created since 1870, largely under his inspiration, a new music in France. The story of it may be read in M. Rolland's book, in the essay "Le renouveau." At the time of the Franco-Prussian War (in which d'Indy served as a corporal of the io5th regiment), symphonic and chamber music suffered almost complete neglect in Paris. "Before 1870," writes M. Saint-Saens, 1 "a French composer who had the folly to ven- ture into the domain of instrumental music, had no other way to get his works played than to organize a concert himself, inviting his friends and the critics. The rare chamber music societies were as much closed to all new comers as the orchestral concerts ; their pro- grams contained only the celebrated names, above discussion, of the great classic sym- phonists. At that time one had truly to be bereft of all common sense to write music. It was in order to correct this state of things that a group of musicians organized in Febru- ary, 1871, the Societe nationale de musique, 1 Harmonie et Melodie. C. Saint-Saens. 162 VINCENT D'INDY with the device 'Ars gallica,' and the avowed end of 'aiding the production and familiariza- tion of all serious musical works, of French composers, and of encouraging, so far as may be in its power, all musical tentatives, of whatever kind, which show on the part of their author elevated and artistic aspirations.' ' M. Holland does not hesitate to call the Societe nationale "the cradle and the sanctuary of French art." "All that has been great in French music from 1870 to 1900," he says, "has come by way of it. Without it the greater part of the works which are the honor of our music not only would not have been performed, but perhaps would not even have been written." And he draws from the pro- grams records of the performance of important compositions by Franck, Saint-Saens, d'Indy, Chabrier, Lalo, Bruneau, Chausson, Debussy, Dukas, Lekeu, Magnard, and Ravel. Vincent d'Indy's personal contribution to the work of the society began to be consider- able from 1 88 1 on, when the influence of the Franck school became dominant. In 1886 his proposal to include in the programs the 163 CONTEMPORARY COMPOSERS works of classic and foreign composers led to the resignation of Saint-Saens and Bussine. In 1890, at the death of Franck, he became president of the society. Under his influence the representation of classical works has par- ticularly increased Palestrina, Vittoria, Jos- quin, Bach, Handel, Rameau, Gluck, as well as Beethoven, Schumann, Liszt, Brahms. Foreign contemporary music has been repre- sented chiefly by Strauss, Grieg, and the Rus- sians. In recent years the Societe national* has been charged with taking on too exclu- sive a character, especially with guarding the traditional at the expense of the new; and the Societe musicale independante has been founded by some of the younger men as a protest. In 1900 d'Indy became president of the Schola Cantorum, founded six years earlier by Charles Bordes, Alexandre Guilmant, and himself, primarily for the cultivation of the church music based on the Gregorian chant. In his discourse of inauguration he explained his purpose of enlarging the function of the school to cover all musical instruction; and 164 VINCENT D'INDY while characteristically insisting that the means to renovate modern music were to be found in the study of "the decorative art of the plain chant, the architectural art of the Palestrina period, and the expressive art of the great Italians of the seventeenth century," yet promised to take his students "through the same path that art has followed, so that, undergoing in their period of study the trans- formations music has undergone through the centuries, they will emerge from it so much the better armed for the modern combat, in that they will have lived, so to speak, the life of art, and will have assimilated in their natural order the forms which have logically succeeded each other in the different epochs of artistic development." Both in the special leaning toward the music of the church which his devout and somewhat mystical tempera- ment here suggested, and in the broad eclecti- cism with which his intelligence insisted on combining it, he showed clearly the influence of his master Cesar Franck, whom indeed he asserted to be in a sense "the grandfather of this Schola Cantorum, since it is his system of 165 CONTEMPORARY COMPOSERS teaching that we endeavor to continue and apply here." Like his master he wished to cultivate in his students both a solid learning, without which nothing vital can be contrib- uted to art, and the enthusiasm without which it degenerates into pedantry. To understand the great influence for good exerted on French music by the Schola, we need only recall d'Indy's description of "the noble teaching of Cesar Franck, founded on Bach and Beethoven, but admitting besides all enthusiasms, all new and generous aspirations." l In the sixteen years that d'Indy has been at the head of the Schola Cantorum he has accomplished an amount of unselfish labor for the advancement of music that would have been extraordinary under any circum- stances, and becomes almost incredible when we remember that in the same period he has produced over half a dozen original works of the first importance. He is indeed a man of unusual physical, nervous, and mental strength, accustomed to indefatigable labor. Thus in addition to all his teaching he organ- 1 Ctsar Franck, by Vincent d'Indy. 1 66 VINCENT D'INDY izes operatic performances and choral, orches- tral, and chamber-music concerts ; he conducts, and teaches others to conduct; he edits the classics Rameau, Destouches, Solomon de Rossi and the folk-songs of his native moun- tains of the Vivarais ; he gives lectures and makes studies of the predecessors of Beethoven, of Franck ; he writes criticisms for the monthly press ; and, most serviceable of all perhaps to distant students, he describes the principles of his art in a masterly and exhaustive treatise, the "Cours de composition musicale," unfor- tunately not yet translated into English. And all this is only his winter work. In the summer he retires to his chateau of Faugs, near the little mountain village of Boffres, in Ardeche, and there, in a room in the tower, whence on a clear day he can see Mt. Blanc, he composes the works in which these prin- ciples are so nobly exemplified. Besides the early "Chant de la Cloche," by which he won the grand prize of the city of Paris in 1885 and first established his reputation, he has written three other large choral works : the two operas "Fervaal" (1895) and "L'Etranger" (1901), 167 CONTEMPORARY COMPOSERS and the oratorio "La Legende de St. Chris- tophe," recently completed. For orchestra, aside from the early trilogy of symphonic poems "Wallenstein," over-Wagnerian in inspiration, and other early or lesser works, there are four masterpieces of the first order : "Istar," symphonic variations, 1896; the sec- ond Symphony, in B flat, 1904; the sym- phony, "Un Jour d'fite a la Montagne," 1905; and the symphonic poem "Souvenirs," written to the memory of his wife, 1906. This incomplete list may be finished with three equally masterly chamber-music pieces : the second String Quartet, E major, 1897; the Violin Sonata, 1904, and the Piano Sonata, 1907 not to mention the youthful Piano Quartet of 1878, or the delightful Trio for Clarinet, Violoncello, and Piano of 1887. What, then, are these fundamental prin- ciples of composition which d'Indy has in- sisted upon in his teaching, promulgated in the "Cours de composition musicale," and exemplified in his works ? They are all, in essence, but differing forms of the central principle of all art, of all beauty that the 168 VINCENT D'INDY utmost variety must be but the outgrowth and flowering of a perfect unity. We have seen that many modern composers, baffled by the richness of the materials with which they had to deal, have failed in the effort thus to stamp unity upon them : their art has been confused and fragmentary. Others again the pseudo-classics and reactionaries have resorted to a violent simplification of the material in order to preserve unity, and have thus impoverished their art. Only the greatest, in the first rank of whom must be placed Franck and d'Indy, have had at once a firm enough hold upon musical tradition and a broad enough command of new methods and idioms to write music at once various and unified, at once thoroughly " modern " and thoroughly sane. To this unifying power of d'Indy's mind M. Rolland pays a fine tribute. "Clearness !" he cries, "it is the mark of M. d'Indy's intelligence. There are no shadows in him. His thought and his art are as clear as his look, which gives to his face so much of youth. It is a necessity for him to judge, to order, to classify, to unify. Never 169 CONTEMPORARY COMPOSERS was there a spirit more French. . . . And this is the more remarkable in that his nature is far from being simple. Through a wide musical education, a constant desire to learn, it has been enriched by many elements, dif- ferent, almost contradictory. . . . Not to be submerged by this richness of opposing elements requires a great force of passion or of will, which eliminates or chooses and transforms. M. d'Indy eliminates almost nothing : he or- ganizes. There are in his music the qualities of a general : the knowledge of the end, the patient will to attain it, the perfect acquaint- ance with the means, the spirit of order, and the mastery over his work and over himself. Despite the variety of the materials he em- ploys, the whole is always clear." II If we examine, as typical of d'Indy's mature style, a passage such as the introduction to the slow movement of the B flat Symphony, shown in Figure XX, we are struck at once by the complexity of the detail the bold unexpectedness of the melodic lines, the 170 .VINCENT D'INDY chromatic harmony, the constantly varying rhythms and by the perfect final clearness with which it nevertheless impresses us, so that each note seems inevitable and the whole unmistakable in meaning. It is this com- FlGURE XX. Moderement lent *i I motive a I * ^_S? -motive 3- *2 bination of complexity and simplicity, char- acteristic more or less of all really great modern composers but perhaps to a peculiar degree of d'Indy, that we have to analyze and account for to ourselves in some detail if we would thoroughly understand his music. What is the mysterious power in him that 171 CONTEMPORARY COMPOSERS enables him to give so distinctly personal a stamp to elements drawn from so many sources ? What is the unifying principle in all this variety ? What lifts this insatiable student above his studies, and renders his knowledge not a dead lumber weighing down his mind, but a living force making it fruitful ? For of the extent of these studies, benumbing to any but the freshest mind, there is plenty of evidence in his work as well as in his critical writings; if it were worth while we might enumerate " influences " at great length. There would be, for instance, the fundamental influence of Bach and Beethoven, and the more superficial influence of the romantics, Schumann and Mendelssohn, as shown in " Wallenstein " (1873-1879), and other early works. There would be the potent Wagne- rian influence, of which "Fervaal" is the chief monument, although it appears in all that he has written ; and there would be the even more pervasive and inspiring influence of his master, Franck. We should have to take account, too, of the reflection, especially in later works like the piano sonata, the violin 172 VINCENT D'INDY sonata, and the second symphony, of the harmonic idiom of Debussy and other con- temporaries, the whole- tone scale, and the like. And under these individual influences we should find more general, subtle, and pervasive ones, we should find the great com- munal streams of the French folk-song and the Gregorian plain chant. Yet all these streams, and others too many to mention, have been gathered up into one clear per- sonality. What has been the transmuting magic ? The composer himself suggests the answer in several passages that may here be brought together. "It is perfectly logical," he writes in Mer- cure de France? "and in the order of things that, when a man of genius shows himself in one country, the artists of the other nations try to assimilate his processes. I see nothing reprehensible in that, and this international free trade even appears to me one of the vital conditions of the development of art. . . . 1 Inquest on the influence of Germany, especially of Wagner, on French music, January, 1903. 173 CONTEMPORARY COMPOSERS Moreover, can the artist ever, in spite of all influences, give anything else than the art that he carries in himself?" "You ask me," he says to an interviewer of the Revue Bleue* "to define French music. In reality there is no French music, and in general there is no national music. There is music, which is of no country; there are musical masterpieces, which belong to no one nation." He is led on to an interesting com- parison of our period, in its desire for greater simplicity, with the end of the sixteenth cen- tury, and the illuminating statement: "M. Debussy is a little our Monteverde; he aban- dons melody for recitative, for 'the represen- tative style,' as they said in the first years of the seventeenth century; he renounces the resources of counterpoint, he even foregoes modulation." But when the interviewer, seek- ing to entrap him into condemnation of his contemporary which would make good copy, asks, "And do you not desire rather the tri- umph of melody and polyphony?" he replies: *" Revue Politique et Litteraire" (Revue Bleue), March 26, 1904. 174 VINCENT D'INDY "I have but one desire; it is that they write beautiful things." The third passage is one of the axioms that he gives to his students at the Schola Cantorum : "All processes are good, on condition that they never become the principal end, but are regarded only as means for making music." And finally he makes his meaning even more definite in a discussion of M. Roger Ducasse : l "I am sure that when M. Ducasse is willing to trust himself more to the impulses of his heart rather than to re- searches in sonorities, he will be able to make very beautiful music. There is in art, truly, nothing but the heart that can produce beauty (// n'est vraiment, en art, que le cceur pour engendrer de la beaute)." Yes, it is his heart that guides his mind through the mazes of its knowledge ; it is his luminous sincerity that shines through all he writes, however complex it may be in detail; both the warmth and the light of his music come from his emotion. Responsive emotion in the listener, accordingly, is the key to the intricacies of his style. If we attend to the 1 Revue Musicale S. 7. M., February 15, 1913. 175 CONTEMPORARY COMPOSERS letter only we are baffled, bewildered : there are so many notes, such queer progressions, in that passage from the symphony, for ex- ample. But if we hearken for the spirit, all becomes clear, and strangely moving. It is waxing and waning feeling, a wave of emotion, that expresses itself in that rise to the strident B of the fourth measure and in the subsequent hesitating descent. And as emotion is the motive force of the whole, emotion it is also that explains the details. Take for instance the very texture of the melody. We note two contrasting figures or motives,, one, which we may call a, melan- choly or at least contemplative, characterized by the fall of a fourth, and another, b, in which the more vigorous rise of a seventh gives a sense of opposing will. The whole passage is wrought from these two contrast- ing yet mutually supplementing strands with singular concentration. There is not a note, save the chords in the last two measures, that does not belong to one or the other. There is something relentless in such insistence. The grip is not relaxed for a moment. The 176 VINCENT D'INDY thought is hammered in. The music throbs like a pulse. Yet there is in this insistence nothing of the monotony of mere repetition ; the feeling never stagnates. On the contrary, each assertion accumulates fresh force, the emotion rises by its own expression, and there is ordered, purposeful, relentless progression. Thus motive a is stated first from D flat; then, at *3, from D, higher and louder; then, at *5, from E flat but this time fairly carried off its feet by its oppugnant fellow, b. Simi- larly &, first heard quietly, almost timidly, in the bass, in the key of D flat, at *2, is repeated at *4 more firmly and in the key of D minor, making it in the main higher than before though starting on the same note ; finally it appears in the treble, as just stated, at *5, and rises as in a passionate cry to the B, whence it slowly subsides. In short, we see here a "logic of emotion" quite as absolute as that of the reason, and far more appropriate to music, in which mere reason must be content with a subordinate place. As always in the best music, the logic of emotion involves both the fundamental unity of the motives N 177 CONTEMPORARY COMPOSERS (since no emotion would amount to much if it was so weak that it forgot what it was about) and their gradual cumulative growth in di- versity as they realize themselves in expres- sion. Even d'Indy's music is not always so true to the logic of emotion as this, as we shall have occasion later to notice; even Homer nods ; but the motival variety in unity of all good melody, as a result of its emotional origin, is none the less ineluctable as a principle. Looking again at the passage we may note more specifically the interest, vitality, and flexibility of its rhythms. This is again, as in all the composer's best work, ultimately due to truth to emotion. Motive b occurs three times, but never twice the same. The second time, at *4, it enters earlier in the measure than before, as if impatient, and ends with the persistent tramp of quarter notes. The third time it strikes in almost roughly (*5), its second and third notes are displaced syncopated by agitation, while its last three notes, comprising the crisis and its subsidence, are lengthened out from a half measure to a measure and a half. (See 178 VINCENT D'INDY Figure XXI.) We see thus exemplified the basic principles of expression through rhythm, the hastening or compression of the phrase in response to passion, its retardation or ex- pansion with returning calm. "Expression," First state ^^ FIGURE XXI. tl* ^ . >f H r rTr J P r g V ! L b itr. g --J f I f ^ py^ 4 * * [ I [ Second state writes d'Indy, 1 "consists in the translation of sentiments and impressions, by the aid of cer- tain characteristic modifications, affecting the rhythmic, melodic, and harmonic forms of the musical discourse. . . . Agogique, consisting in the modifications of the rhythmic move- ment, precipitation, slackening, regular and irregular interruptions, etc. has for its effect to render the relative impressions of calm and agitation." 1 Cours de Composition Musicale, Book I, page 123. 179 CONTEMPORARY COMPOSERS Such a conception of rhythm, emphasizing its sensitive fluctuation in response to mood, and demanding of the artist complete sin- cerity and flexibility of expression, is at the pole from the conventional notion of it as an almost mechanical balancing of equal sections of melody, cut off so to speak with a yard- stick. D'Indy leaves his readers in no doubt as to his opinion of all such conventional sing-song, the doggerel of music. "To beat the time and to give the rhythm of a musical phrase," he says, 1 "are two completely dis- tinct operations, often opposed. The coin- cidence of the rhythm and the measure is an entirely particular case, which men have unfortunately tried to generalize, propagating the error that 'the first beat of the measure is always strong.' This identification of rhythm with measure has had the most deplorable consequences for music. . . . Rhythm, submitted to the restricting re- quirements of meter, becomes rapidly im- poverished, even to the most desolating plati- tude, just as a branch of a tree, strongly 1 Cour s, I, 27. 180 VINCENT D'INDY compressed by a ligature, becomes enfeebled and atrophied, while its neighbors absorb all the sap." 1 Again: "In the seventeenth cen- tury the bar-line ceased to be simply a graphic sign ; it became a periodic starting point for the rhythm, which it soon robbed of all its liberty and elegance. Hence come those symmetrical and square-cut forms to which we owe a great part of the platitudes of the Italianism of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries." 2 Finally, summing the whole matter up in a sentence : "The carrure [that is, square-cut phrase-balance, symmetry by measures, narrowly limited to the number 4 and its multiples] is an element of vulgarity, rarely useful outside of certain special forms of dance music." 3 The vulgarity of the carrure^ of sing-song, as we may call it in English, is due, it can- not be too much insisted upon, to the mental and emotional inertia, the thoughtlessness, the surrender to the mechanism of habit, 1 See the present writer's paper on "The Tyranny of the Bar-line," New Music Review, December, 1909. 3 Cows, I, 217. * Cours, I, 40. 181 CONTEMPORARY COMPOSERS of which it is the product and the index. It proceeds from a conventionality essentially unspontaneous, uncreative, a conventionality that permits the length and shape of the phrase to be imposed by convenience, ease, and precedent rather than by the emo- tion it ought to incarnate. Hence sing- song is found not only in all music which, like so-called "popular songs," emanates from trivial people or from people only super- ficially moved, but also in the music even of sincere composers in their moments of in- attention, pretentiousness, or routine. Even so fine a composer as Elgar is frequently banal in rhythm. On the other hand, deeply felt work always spontaneously assumes in- dividual rhythmic outlines ; and undoubtedly such free and unstereotyped outlines, though to the initiated listener they constitute one of its most potent and lasting beau- ties, and thus are an essential condition of its longevity, repel at first by their appar- ent eccentricity or "obscurity" the unini- tiated and the inattentive, and thus postpone its general acceptance. Thus the attribu- 182 VINCENT D'INDY tion to d'Indy of "dryness" and "lack of melody" which one sometimes hears may be taken as an inverted tribute to the spon- taneity of his melody and especially of his rhythms. Only one who did not feel sym- pathetically the wide ground swell of those phrases from the symphony could find them groping or uncertain because they did not fall into exactly four measures. The moment one felt the coordinating force of their fresh per- sonal emotion one would not regret the absence of the conventional strait-jackets. It is emotion again that explains his attitude toward harmony. Just as he is ahead of most of his contemporaries in the fundamen- tal and surprisingly neglected matter of rhythm, because he conceives it as so flexible an instrument of expression, so he is rather at odds with many of them, especially with the impressionist school in his own country, on the much studied perhaps over-studied question of harmony, because he conceives harmony as primarily expressive, while they conceive it as primarily sensuous. 1 A clue 1 Compare what is said of Debussy, for example, above, page 143. 183 CONTEMPORARY COMPOSERS to his attitude is that sentence of his in crit- icism of Ducasse : "I am sure that when M. Ducasse is willing to trust himself more to the impulses of his heart rather than to researches in sonorities, he will be able to make very beautiful music." "Researches in sonorities " that is, in the minds of the group of French composers led by Debussy, almost a synonym for harmony; what they ask of harmony is combinations of tone de- licious to the physical ear : subtly, delicately delicious, no doubt, and to a highly refined ear, but still aiming consciously at the ear rather than at the mind or the heart. The means of satisfying such a desire being sen- sations, aural sensations ingeniously built up and combined, they have rightly concentrated their attention on the single moment of merged sounds the chord rather than on the procession of separate sounds the melody, and its relation to other melodies sounding with it. "Accord," "sonorite" these are the slogans of the impressionists. To d'Indy, on the other hand, harmony, like all the other technical elements of music, is 184 VINCENT D'INDY primarily a means of expression, and there- fore results rather from the confluence of melodies, themselves dictated by emotion, than from the adjustment of sonorities to please the ear. One has only to look again at the passage from the symphony to see how such an attitude works out in practise. There is no preoccupation here with " effect"; the harmony, one might almost- say, receives no attention for itself, but is solely a result of the melodic movements ; yet so free and ex- pressive are these movements, so truly con- ceived to voice the emotions behind them, and combined with such art, that this result- ant harmony is far more poignant, far more fresh and unexpected and striking than if it had been confected for itself alone. And this is natural and easily comprehensible, since we should not expect any amount of ingenuity spent on the single chord to achieve the results that melodies, feeling out into the unknown, easily attain. Such an attitude toward harmony requires, it is true, a certain daring : you cannot swim with your feet on the ground ; but the freedom of movement 185 CONTEMPORARY COMPOSERS you get by trusting yourself to the waves amply compensates your faith. This melodic conception of harmony has always been a fundamental characteristic of d'Indy's style, as examples from widely sun- dered periods will easily show. The first, Fig- ure XXII, is a bit from the Chant Elegiaque in the early Trio for Clarinet, Cello, and Piano (1887). The charming unexpectedness FIGURE XXII. From Chant Elegiaque, in Trio for Clarinet, Cello, and Piano. Lent, Cello Piano of the twist back into E major is thorough d'Indy, as is also the use of a persistent figure (given to the cello in the original) and the rhythmic modification of this same figure to provide the bass in the second measure. The second passage, shown in Figure XXIII, 1 86 VINCENT D'INDY dates from thirty years later, and appears in "Souvenirs" (1906). Here again the melo- FlGURE XXIII. From " Souvenirs." Tres lent JT1 dim. dies "find a way," and a more interesting, vista-opening way than any sonorities could suggest. Such passages enable us to get the full sense of what their composer means when he writes : "The study of chords for themselves is, from the musical point of view, an absolute aesthetic error, for harmony springs from melody, and ought never to be separated from it in its application. . . . There is only one chord, the perfect chord [triad], alone con- 187 CONTEMPORARY COMPOSERS sonant, because it alone gives the sense of repose or equilibrium. All the combinations that people call 'dissonant chords,' necessi- tating, in order to be examined, an artificial arrest in the melodies that constitute them, have no proper existence, since in making abstraction of the movement that engenders them, one suppresses their unique reason for being. Chords have too often become the end of music ; they ought never to be anything but a means, a consequence, a phenomenon essentially transient." l It may be held that d'Indy sometimes goes too far in his denuncia- tions of harmonic theories based on the con- ception of the "chord," as for example in his note on the famous opening phrase of "Tristan and Isolde." It may also be justly remarked that his own method is not always happy in its results that the way his melo- dies find is sometimes an obscure and wan- dering, or an unnatural and forced way. Nevertheless it remains on the whole true that on the one hand the chord conception of har- mony has been responsible for a vast mass of 1 Cours, I, 91 and 116. 188 VINCENT D'INDY pedantry, and has paralyzed and hamstrung whole generations of students, and that on the other hand it favors the purely sensuous trifling with tones of which there is so much in our day; while the best pages of Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Wagner, Franck, d'Indy show a thousand beauties and poignancies which without the help of melody could never have been discovered. In the course of Kaito's prophecy, in "Fer- vaal," there is a deeply moving passage to the words: "Only Death, baleful Death, shall summon Life," which strikingly illustrates its composer's way of making all the elements of music contribute to expression (see Figure XXIV). Here the upward inflection of the voice, the strange intervals, the vague har- monies, the halting movement, even the sigh- ing syncopation of the bass, all contribute to the interpretation of the opening lines. But above all, how inexplicably stirring is the gradual increase of force and rise of pitch up to the clear chord of D major (note the com- poser's indication, "Clair") at the word "Life" ("Vie")! Gloom and mystery give 189 CONTEMPORARY COMPOSERS FIGURE XXIV. I ?\* f Seu - le la Mort . l'in-ju-ri-eu - se P TL^ Jlpjpjp animant ^mip Clair s p^ Vi- np u 1 place to hope, faith, will, to which the ecclesi- astical harmonies lend an unmistakable re- ligious coloring. This change, completely spontaneous in effect, is dictated by an art that conceals itself, and introduces us to one 190 VINCENT D'INDY of the most individual features of d'Indy's harmonic technique, his ease of modulation. In his Cours de Composition Musicale he has worked out his theories of the expressive use of modulation with characteristic thorough- ness, and with unprecedented amplitude of detail. To resume his points here, however, interesting as they are, would take us too deeply into technical matters, especially as our main interest is now in his application rather than in his statement of them. The essential principles may therefore be briefly summarized, in his own words, as follows : (1) "Expression is the unique reason for being of modulation." (2) "Modulation operates by a displace- ment of the tonic ['key-note'], by its oscil- lation towards the higher fifths [that is, towards the sharper keys, as to G, D, A, etc., from C] or towards the lower fifths [that is, towards the flatter keys, as to F, B flat, E flat, etc., from C]." (3) "Modulation has for its effect to ren- der relative impressions of brightness [that is, movement towards sharper keys produces 191 CONTEMPORARY COMPOSERS 1 eclair cissemeni*\ or of darkness [movement towards flatter keys produces * assombrisse- ment']" (4) "Modulation can never be the end of music, since it is by its very nature a means put at the service of the musical idea. Every modulation which has not this character of subordination to the idea is thereby inoppor- tune, useless, and even injurious to the equi- librium of the composition." 1 Looking back at our examples in the light of these principles, and especially with the illumination afforded by the text in Kaito's contrast of death and life, we shall find a further element of art to admire in them their expressive use of modulation. The slow movement of the symphony begins in the comparatively "dark" key of D flat, but touches in the fourth measure, at the acme of the climax, the brighter D major, whence with the waning emotion it subsides to the original key. The passage cited from the Chant elegiaque emerges from the shades of E flat minor to the bright daylight of E major 1 Cours, Book I, pp. 126 and 132; Book II, Part I, p. 245. 192 VINCENT D'INDY (wherein starts a new statement of the main theme). The fragment from "Souvenirs" commences in quiet grief, in the clear but rather subdued key of A minor ; with the third measure a downward inflection, a sort of de- pression of mood, sinks it to hopeless groping in the glooms of G flat and C flat, whence it again struggles forth to new assertion, in A minor, in the phrase that follows our excerpt. Stated in bald technical terms like these, such changes may seem crude, obvious, me- chanical; but anyone who will listen sympa- thetically to the music in which they are em- bodied by a master will realize the infinite variety and subtlety of their appeal, jj A later appearance of this same theme in " Souvenirs," in which for the first two notes in the second measure is substituted a triplet, F, G, E, suggests the further remark that even ornament, so apt to be used merely for show, is employed by d'Indy, like so many more basic resources, singly for expression. His somewhat severe conception of art there is much in his style that, especially in contrast with German sensuousness, is austere, bare, o 193 CONTEMPORARY COMPOSERS almost stark leads him to condemn super- ficial decoration. "The fioriture of the Ital- ian dramatic school of the early nineteenth century," he insists, "intended only to dis- play the vocal agility of the singer (just as the Variation of Chopin, although more musical, puts forward the fingers of the pianist), this fioriture, consisting usually of embroideries about an arpeggio, is truly more harmonic than melodic and even the harmony is usually extremely banal. The character- istic of the accomplished and conscientious artist is a firm will to treat only subjects that have a value in themselves, not bor- rowed from the apparel in which they are dressed up." l And he elsewhere succinctly defines the Italian fioriture as "that art which consists in making heard the greatest number of useless notes in the shortest space of time." 2 But he takes pains to distinguish "this surcharge dictated by bad taste" from the more essential ornament used in the "ex- pressive vocalises of J. S. Bach and his con- temporaries, which, like the Gregorian Varia- 1 Cours, Book II, Part I, pp. 454, 452. * Cows, II, I, 165. 194 VINCENT D'INDY tion from which they derive, form, a part of the melody." And he cites with approval melodies like the theme of the Allegretto in Franck's Symphony, in which a short phrase is repeated not literally but with ornamental variation resulting from the natural progres- sion of the thought or feeling from what, in short, we have called the logic of emotion. Such treatment is almost a mannerism in his own work. Other instances, besides the place in "Souvenirs" just cited, are the first theme of the violin sonata, the fugato in the first movement of the quartet, the main theme of the same movement, and the main theme of "Evening" in the "Summer Day on the Mountain" (Figure XXVII, a). Finally, even in the matter of orchestration, the least essential of any we have considered, d'Indy is still guided by the same principle truth to feeling. Though universally ac- knowledged, even by those who dislike his music, to be one of the greatest living masters of the resources of the orchestra, he never uses these resources, as does for example Rimsky-Korsakoff, in a spirit of sheer vir- 195 CONTEMPORARY COMPOSERS tuosity. Nothing in his scores is put there to dazzle or to stun; all is for eloquent musical speech ; and when there is great liveliness or brilliancy, as there often is at the end of "Istar," for instance, in the scherzo of the B-flat symphony, and in "Dawn" of the "Summer Day on the Mountain" it is in response not to an opportunity for display, but to a mood. The sharp contrast of the general method of scoring with Wagner's, especially in a composer so largely indebted to Wagner, is highly instructive in this regard. Wagner in his love of rich sonorities almost habitually doubles different groups of instru- ments on a single melody; d'Indy prefers the single group, not only for its superior clarity but even more, one must think, for the greater eloquence of its individual voice. The pas- sage quoted from the symphony is a good sample of his methods. First violins on their G strings for the opening phrase, sounding at once the right note of earnestness. Bass clarinet alone on motive b. Both first and second violins for the more emphatic repeti- tion of the main motive, and the low strings in 196 VINCENT D'INDY their more impassioned accents for the reiter- ation of the bass clarinet phrase. Then all the violins and the violas for the third, cul- minating statement, the first violins leaving off with the B flat, the seconds with the A, and the violas, in their more veiled tones, alone carrying the phrase down to its final A flat. Thus does d'Indy use the various ele- ments of musical technique melody, rhythm, harmony, modulation, and even ornament and orchestration in the interests of emo- tion. Before asking whether the same principle that we thus see so multifariously at work in short sections of his music can also be traced in the marshaling of its larger masses, let us take one final example of its operation within conveniently narrow limits. In Figure XXV (pages 198, 199) is shown the coda of the first movement of the string quartet in E major, his masterpiece in chamber music. It is entirely derived from the fragment of Gregorian chant used as a text. We may note summarily the following points, which by no means exhaust the interest of the passage. CONTEMPORARY COMPOSERS I. Melodic. There is no salient phrase which is not derived from the root motive. As for the variety, the reader will judge for himself. This is a supreme case of the ger- minating power of a musical thought. FIGURE XXV. Coda of the first movement of the String Quartet in E, opus 45 (1897), based on the fragment from a Gregorian chant: 1 VINCENT D'INDY molto cresc. -r r * ^ 2. Rhythmic. The original nucleus of the theme is rhythmed mainly in quarter notes. It is reduced to even eighth notes at the begin- ning of the coda, and in that murmuring, 199 CONTEMPORARY COMPOSERS inconspicuous form stays on a dead level, so to speak, and makes a colorless background of accompaniment whence the more passion- ate main phrases detach themselves sharply. Beginning in the fifth measure the second violin sounds an augmented form of the motive (whole notes), in expression tentative, timid. This recurs in the viola in measure II, with more of emphasis, and is broken in upon by a syncopated form of the same (beginning on the second half of the measure) from the first violin. The C sharp here is the crest of the emotional wave, whence it subsides first by the gradual descent of the motive through three octaves in measures 17-20, and then by the flagging of the accompaniment rhythm first to quarter notes, then to half notes. Still a different rhythm is heard in the last an- nouncement by the first violin. 3. Harmonic. The harmony is absolutely the product of concurrent melodies through- out. No notes are added merely for color. Yet the sonorities, though effects rather than causes, are unforgettable. 4. Modulatory. The first measure strongly 200 VINCENT D'INDY establishes E major as the tonal center, and as the goal of what preceded the excerpt. A subtle change of the violin figure obscures the sense of tonality (by suggesting the atonal "whole-tone scale"), whereupon the first meditative version of the theme appears in the much darker key of A flat. The tonality is again clouded, and the theme appears once more in A, brighter than A flat, but less bright than the original E. The reappearance of this therefore, in the fifteenth measure, has the effect of an " eclair is sement" The tonic of E major is maintained through the last eleven measures, giving a grateful sense of homecoming, of repose after adventure. 5. Instrumental. The student is referred to the score for detail. Particularly notable are the keenness of the violin E string at the moment of climax, and the earnest virility of the G string in the last statement. Ill The same loyalty to emotional truth that dictates all these processes of detail, guides also d'Indy's treatment of a composition con- 20 1 CONTEMPORARY COMPOSERS sidered as a whole. His conception of form, though set forth in the Cours in largely in- tellectual terms, can be thoroughly under- stood only when traced back to its emotional basis. Because for him a piece of music must hang together emotionally, must proceed, that is, all from a few ideas, and must evolve these freely and variously in obedience to the logic of emotion, he takes as his central principle Variation, or germination from root themes. Not only, he believes, should the single move- ment thus proceed from a few themes, but the entire work, according to what is called cyclic form, should result from their transfor- mation and recombination. In other words, just as the rhythmic waxing and waning of the emotions embodied in a few themes gives rise to the single movement, the regard- ing of the same themes from different points of view, or under the domination of varying moods, will naturally generate the contrasted move- ments, all thematically related, of cyclic form. It may at once be admitted that such a conception of form has its pitfalls. The same process that in the glow of creative 202 VINCENT D'INDY emotion is a spontaneous reshaping of a theme to meet a new situation may in the absence of such emotion degenerate into a hammering of recalcitrant matter into mere distortion and ineptitude. That is what we note too often in Liszt's similar theme transforma- tions in his symphonic poems, as when in "Les Preludes" he makes his love cantabile do reluctant duty as a trumpet call to war. D'Indy, let us confess it, is by no means guilt- less on this score ; in uninspired moments he becomes too easily the slave instead of the master of his process ; living form stiffens into dead formula ; and we have a more or less mechanical rearrangement of notes, as for instance that of the main theme of the finale in the B flat Symphony, based on the choral at the end, masquerading as a genuine rein- carnation. Such scholastic passages do in- deed appear as blemishes in too many even of his finest works. But it is fair to judge a pro- cess not by its occasional abuse, but by the possibilities a felicitous use of it opens up. These possibilities in the case of cyclic form are a maximum of diversity without diffuse- 203 CONTEMPORARY COMPOSERS ness, and a maximum of unity without monot- ony or platitude. That a development of something of the sort was indispensable to the progress of com- position is evident when we reflect how in- tolerable literal recapitulation has become to the modern ear. Much of the prejudice against the sonata form in our day is due to the literal recapitulations of bunglers in the use of it. The remedy is, not to throw overboard the form, which is a natural, flexible, and con- venient one, but to bring to it a freshness of feeling which penetrates at once to the spirit of it, ignoring the letter. Thus d'Indy, in the slow movement of the B flat Symphony, recapitulates the main theme, shown at Figure XXVI, 0, not literally but in subtlest reincar- FIGURE XXVI. (a) Theme of slow movement, B flat Symphony. (This fol- lows immediately after the introduction shown in Figure XX.) VINCENT D'INDY T n r T I etc. r Return of theme in flute. ^^ Mi4jjjj.i IJ. J.U J-J- tj ~ F T ^ t]* r, r i:~/ "^TT" HnffliLJ m cresc. m itC. 205 CONTEMPORARY COMPOSERS nation, one step higher in the scale, though still in the same key, and transferred from the sultry tones of clarinet, horn, English horn, and viola to the pure, pale sonority of a single flute, supported by lightest violin harmonies (Figure XXVI, &). It is the same theme, but breathing now a quite new sentiment. 1 It is but a step from such a recreated re- capitulation to a theme transformation such as we find in the last movement of the "Sum- mer Day on the Mountain." This work is not only its composer's masterpiece in the sphere of program music ; it is the latest and best of a whole series of works 2 in which he has expressed his love of his native country of the Cevennes in southeastern France. "At this moment," he once wrote in a letter from his chateau of Faugs, near Boffres in Ardeche, "I see the snowy summits of the Alps, the nearer mountains, the plain of the Rhone, the 1 Compare, also, the theme of the Piano Sonata, in E minor, beginning with the note B, with the same theme altered, " Muta- tum" in E major, beginning with G sharp. 2 See for instance the "Poeme des Montagnes," opus 15, for piano, and the Symphony on a Mountain Theme, opus 25, for piano and orchestra. 206 VINCENT D'INDY pine woods that I know so well, and the green, rich harvest which has not yet been gathered. It is a true pleasure to be here after the labors and the vexations of the winter. What they call at Paris 'the artistic world' seems afar off and a trifling thing. Here is true repose, here one feels at the true source of all art." The "Jour d'Ete a la Montagne," in three movements, "Aurore" ("Dawn"), "Jour Apres-midi sous les pins " (" Day : Afternoon under the Pines") and "Soir" ("Evening"), is characteristic of the composer in that, despite its program, there is in it little scene- painting, such as we find so constantly in Strauss and others. A memorable suggestion of dawn, with its vague shapes in the half- light and its bird songs, in the first movement 1 ; a whiff of peasant dance-tune in the second, coming up through the baking heat under the pines; in the third some evening chimes from the valley : that is all. It is the emotional significance of the scene in its varying aspects, 1 Note the progress from the dark key of C minor to the bright B major in "Dawn," reversed in "Evening," as another instance of the expressive use of modulation. 207 CONTEMPORARY COMPOSERS its appeal to the sympathies and associations of a poetic observer, that interest the musician. The main theme of the last movement (Figure XXVII, a) thus suggests the joy of life in the bright summer afternoon; its activity depicts no mere external scene, we feel, but reflects FIGURE XXVII. Finale of "Jourd'Ete." (a) . TWc animl et joyeux g Tres lent g*& (Strings only) VINCENT D'INDY the elation of the sensitive heart, witnessing this scene. And when, at the end, after the suggestions of descending night and the dis- tant jangle of chimes tempered by the evening air, the same melody returns in softest sonor- ities of strings and in quietest motion (Fig- ure XXVII, ), we hear in it again no merely objective facts, but the tranquil evening thoughts of a poet, spiritualized in meditation. Never since he first essayed such theme trans- formation in a large work, in the "Symphony on a Mountain Theme" of 1886, which M. Paul Dukas called "a single piece in three episodes," has d'Indy been more successful in drawing p 209 CONTEMPORARY COMPOSERS together the most opposing moods by the single subjective point of view from which FIGURE XXVIII. (*) Lentement (c) Second theme. * r itf J * r r #r r j IJH- p r i^fe (d) Ties anime djj JJl^ 7/' ff d 210 VINCENT D'INDY (0 Tres lent $=?=S "P" flf I f^O- ^ i * L~ jgf^j *^T r^-p i-rJ- Mfr r they are regarded, as incarnated in a common theme. Never has he written a more char- acteristic page than that lovely breath of evening tenderness, the meditation of a lover on the world toward which darkness and sleep gently approach. A work in which the cyclic method is ap- plied with almost unparalleled rigor and re- CONTEMPORARY COMPOSERS sourcefulness, and which is therefore worthy of detailed analysis, is the String Quartet in E major, 1 built up from four notes of a Gre- gorian chant, shown at Figure XXV. The swinging main theme of the first movement, derived from this fragment by a natural rhyth- mic and tonal proliferation (see Figure XXVIII, ), is not immediately stated, but is rather anticipated tentatively, and gradually allowed to take shape, by a process dear to the com- poser, first through imitative bits for the dif- ferent instruments and then through a serious fugato (Figure XXVIII, a). Once achieved it is broadly treated, with a richly conceived tonal digression into E flat major and return. A second theme, of sinuous curve and fluent movement (Figure XXVIII, c), is reached through a transition passage of more animated rhythm. The themes thus stated, develop- ment begins : not a perfunctory worrying of the themes such as the "free fantasia" often degenerates into in the hands of composers possessed of neither freedom nor fancy, but a 1 The references are to the pocket edition of the score, pub- lished by Durand. 212 VINCENT D'INDY dynamic action and reaction of the themes such as d'Indy conceives development essen- tially to be. "Development," he says, "is . . . the action of the themes and ideas, and consequently their reason for being, since an idea is of value only through the action it is capable of exercising. When there are several ideas . . . the development expresses usually all the phases of a struggle between them, with the final triumph of one and submission of the other. . . . The themes comport them- selves like living people : they act and move according to their tendencies, their sentiments, and their passions. These modifications show themselves both in the thematic elements which are elaborated as if to surpass themselves, or are restrained as if to become absorbed, and in the tonal trajectories which orient themselves toward light or toward darkness." * It will be seen that in this case the development first (pages 9 and 10) takes the aspect of a quiet presentation of the first theme in dark keys (E flat major, etc.) ' and then (from index number 10, through the whole of page il) of 1 Cours de composition musicale, Book II, Part I, pp. 241-242. 213 CONTEMPORARY COMPOSERS a brief recurrence of the second theme and elimination of it with the reviving force of the first, moving through more energetic rhythms and brighter tonalities to final vic- torious reassertion. The themes are then re- capitulated and the movement ends with the beautiful coda we have already examined. The two middle movements, too complex to analyze in detail, are based on themes strik- ingly illustrative of what was said a moment ago as to cyclic form arising from the approach to a common theme from different angles, or under the influence of varying moods. That of the scherzo is the theme envisaged playfully (Figure XXVIII, d) ; that of the slow move- ment (Figure XXVIII, i) shapes itself in response to a more serious contemplation. It may be pointed out that these are no mere clever or learned jugglings with notes, such as arise sometimes from the abuse of the method ; not only are they true textually to the theme, but each is a faithful expression of its own mood ; the resulting music accordingly con- vinces us emotionally as well as intellectually. The finale is a piece of writing extraordinary 214 VINCENT D'INDY for the manifold resources developed out of the original theme, for the bold ingenuity of its polyphonic and rhythmic combinations, and for the variety of its emotional content. Its main theme comes from the original motive by inversion (Figure XXIX, a), and derives a FIGURE XXIX. (Main theme of Finale of String Quartet). Tresvif (b) Second theme. dtt ,-< ffifet bien chante certain amplitude from its three half-note rhythm proceeding deliberately against the more agitated two-four of other parts (es- pecially the viola, at first, with a persistent figure taken also from the theme). Its second 215 CONTEMPORARY COMPOSERS theme also traces its ancestry back to the first movement, but in a more elusive way ; a comparison of Figure XXIX, b, with Figure XXVIII, c, will reveal the connection. The elaboration of these themes, and of the quaint staccato bridge passage between them, leads to most unexpected combinations. The fu- gato of the first movement reappears, but now inverted (Figure XXIX, c). At the top of page 58 we find the main theme in the second violin answered canonically by the viola, while the first violin sustains, high above, the original motive. Finally, after the themes have met all manner of vicissitudes and wan- dered through all sorts of keys, the original motive in its most conclusive form brings the final cadence in E major. IV A last illustration, in some ways the most striking of all, of d'Indy's conviction that emotional expressiveness is the criterion of the value of all artistic processes, is afforded by his attitude toward the peculiar idiom that has been developed by Debussy, Ravel, and others, 216 VINCENT D'INDY and particularly toward the system of har- mony based on the "whole-tone scale.*' His standpoint here is that of the open-minded and curious artist toward processes that may have new possibilities, saved from faddishness by a thorough familiarity with traditional resources and an indifference to novelty for mere novelty's sake. He has thus won the distinction of being blamed by the academic for "queerness," harshness, and obscurity, at the same time that he is patronized as reac- tionary by the "ultras." The evidence of his works is that he makes free use of the whole-tone scale, as of all other technical elements, so far as it lends itself to the expression he has in mind, but no farther. There are already traces of it in certain passages of the early Clarinet Trio (1887) where he wishes to give a sense of groping uncertainty. In "Fervaal" (1895) its peculiar coloring is skilfully used in a number of passages, as, for example, that of the two bucklers, and its vigor and brilliancy, which so commended it to Moussorgsky in "Boris Godunoff," are exploited in the passage before 217 CONTEMPORARY COMPOSERS the apparition of the cloud figures (see Figure XXX, a). In "Istar" a similar use is made of it for the calls which announce Istar's arrival at the different doors ; to it is due a large meas- ure of the mystical expression of the B flat Symphony, especially of the opening bass mo- tive (Figure XXX, b) founded on the tritone which used to be regarded as "diabolus in musica" while the middle section of the scherzo draws upon its power of suspending the sense and piquing the musical curiosity (Figure XXX, c) ; in the opening of the piano FIGURE XXX. (a) From " Fervaal." A A 4 A , . * A A * crescendo molto 218 VINCENT D'INDY (i) Opening of B flat Symphony Extremement lent sonata splendid use is made of its clangorous sonorities. But d'Indy is too sound an artist to lend himself to the abuse of any process, however fashionable, and he has the good sense to recognize the dangers of the whole-tone scale. In none of his critical writings has he ex- pressed himself more courageously and at the same time more fairly, than in an article on "Good Sense" 1 in which he takes up this much-disputed matter. "In the nineteenth century," he says, "some Russian composers, in the interest of certain 1 "Le Bon Sens," Revue Musicale, S. I. M., November, 1912. 219 CONTEMPORARY COMPOSERS special effects, employed the scale of whole tones, which one may name atonal because it suppresses all possibility of modulation. In the twentieth century Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel elaborated these methods, making often very ingenious applications of them ; but they made the mistake (one must dare to speak the truth of those one esteems) of erecting processes into principles, or at least of letting them be so erected by their muftis, so that the formula now established by fashion is: 'Outside of harmonic sensation and the titillation of orchestral timbres there is no salvation.' "This formula is dangerous, because far from constituting an advance it results in a ret- rogression of our art, and leads us backward by a hundred years. What these prophets try to establish is the rule of sense to the exclusion of sentiment, it is the supremacy of sensation over the equilibrium of the heart and the intelligence. This sensualist move- ment is neither new nor original. About a hundred years ago a similar aberration of good sense tried to poison our music. At the 220 VINCENT D'INDY epoch of the Rossinis and the Donizettis the sensualist formula was 'All for and by melody !' To-day it is 'All for and by harmony!' I should say however that, of the two maladies, the second is less grave, for nothing is more ephemeral than new harmonies, if they do not take their point of departure from the two other elements of music : melody and rhythm. ... In order that harmony should be du- rable, it must constitute, not mere glistening surface, mere tapestry, but rather the cloth- ing of the living and acting being which is the rhythmed melody. The costume, in this case, may safely pass out of style the human person, if it is well constituted, will endure. "The scale of whole tones is far from being an improvement on our traditional occidental scale, since it suppresses all tonality and hence all modulation. Now, change of tonal place by modulation is one of the most precious elements of expression. To deprive oneself of it systematically is therefore a retrogression toward the barbaric monotony of past ages. "What, then, does good sense demand? It demands very simple things that the young CONTEMPORARY COMPOSERS composer should begin by learning his art, and should not allow himself to be hypnotized by a process that happens to be in fashion, employed fruitfully, to be sure, by certain natures, but not constituting in itself the whole of musical art. "All processes are good, on condition that they never become the principal end, and are regarded only as means to make MUSIC." The candor, courage, and penetration of such criticism as this, shown, though seldom in quite such measure, in every critical page that d'Indy has written, and the uncompromis- ing nature of his views, not always free from narrowness, have of course made him many enemies. Probably no man in modern music is better loved or better hated. The devotion of his whole life to art, with a modesty, a sup- pression of self, a really religious enthusiasm rare in musicians, has naturally turned the love of his pupils and disciples into something that is almost worship ; and this has in turn naturally enough irritated, sometimes to ex- asperation, those who vent their disgust of ar- tistic idolatries on the often innocent idol, or 222 VINCENT D'INDY who feel keenly, in a hero, the limitations of which no human being is free, or who find especially antipathetic, in M. d'Indy's case, certain temperamental leanings which he could not overcome if he would, such as those to conservatism, aristocracy, and even chauvinism in social relations, and to the strictest Roman Catholicism in religion. Indeed, regarded simply as an intellect, d'Indy is something of a paradox, moments of the most penetrative insight alternating unaccountably in him with fits of prejudice or narrowness that suggest the existence upon his mental retina of incurable blind spots. What could be more illuminating in their un- conventionality than such judgments as these, for example : Of Schumann : "A genius in short and simple works, he finds himself lost when he has to build a musical monument. He then lets himself be guided by sentiment alone, and in spite of his often very fine ideas he can only improvise works of limited range, hasty fruits of an art not sufficiently con- scious." Of Mendelssohn : "Always skilful in appropriating the knowledge of others, 223 CONTEMPORARY COMPOSERS the Jews are seldom true artists by nature." Of Grieg: "His short inspiration and his abso- lute ignorance of composition render him en- tirely inept in the construction of symphonic works ; he produces then only hybrid assem- blages of short fragments, unskilfully welded together or simply juxtaposed, without ap- pearance of order or unity either in conception or in execution." l But the fastidiousness already verging here on the finical seems al- ways to be in danger, in dealing with subjects on which he has active prejudices, such as Jews, Protestants, free thinkers, and modern Germans, of overshooting its mark, losing the sense of proportion, and becoming narrowly sectarian. Someone once said of him that he had the spirit of the mediaeval religious fanatics, and had he lived in the Middle Ages would have been burned at the stake for his convictions, or would have burned others, as the case might be, with equal ardor. One thus catches sometimes a note of intol- erance, almost of superstition, even in some of his most valid judgments, putting one a 1 Cours, Book I, Part II, pp. 406, 411, 419. 224 VINCENT D'INDY little on guard, perhaps rather by what is omitted or implied than by what is actually said. Thus Bach is great, "not because of, but in spite of, the dogmatic and withering spirit of the Reformation," 1 and Franck's comment on Kant's "Critique of Pure Reason," that it was "tres amusant" is commended as one of the finest criticisms, "coming from the mouth of the believing French musician, that could be made of the heavy and undigested critique of the Ger- man philosopher." 2 Again "The present-day symphonists of Germany seem totally inca- pable of making anything great : they content themselves with making it big, which is not quite the same thing." They are charged with "total absence of artistic taste, mis- understanding of all proportion and of all tonal order." 3 They are "almost devoid of musical taste; they cannot distinguish good music from bad ; the opinion of a German on a musical work has no importance." 4 The 1 Tribune de Saint-Gervais, March, 1899. * "Life of Franck," French edition, page 40. * Cours, Book II, Part I, 487. 4 Revue Musicde, December i, 1906, quoted. Q 22S CONTEMPORARY COMPOSERS sympathy of the judicial with these pro- nouncements wanes as they increase in ani- mus ; the justice of the first, to which any thoughtful musician could hardly take ex- ception, is obscured by the evident exaggera- tion of the last; and musical criticism too evidently loses itself in chauvinism. We need not concern ourselves here to esti- mate the exact proportion between wisdom and prejudice in d'Indy's writings ; the mate- rials for a judgment have been admirably set forth in Holland's essay, and each reader may judge for himself. The aim of these citations is rather to illustrate the tempera- ment of their author, and to show that in the last analysis, even though these writings make up perhaps the finest body of musical criticism produced by a creative musician since Schumann, that temperament is after all originative rather than judicial. Much light as there is in it, there is even more heat. D'Indy is a crusader of beauty ; the shining spear is his natural weapon ; and when he takes to the clerk's ink-horn and balance sheet it is always with a sort of youthful impatience. 226 VINCENT D'INDY He is essentially a poet, a maker; it is in his music that he finds his truest self. Indeed, he is too many-sided to be quite justly appre- ciated by his contemporaries ; the poet has too much disappeared for us behind the teacher, the scholar, the critic, the philoso- pher, the devotee. On the occasion of the revival of "Fervaal" in 1913, M. Vuiller- moz published an imaginary talk of this com- posite d'Indy to his adoring pupils, asking them not to idealize him, to let him remain human, to see in him the simple human lover, like his Fervaal, which he felt himself to be. It is time, for our own sakes, that we paid more attention than we do to this human lover that finds supreme expression in the Symphony in B flat, in "Istar," in the E major Quartet, in the "Jour d'fite a la Mon- tagne." He it is who speaks to the young men, to his fellow lovers of immortal beauty, to the future. For, as one of his most under- standing critics, Louis Laloy, has written of him: "Emotion is queen, and science is her servant." If d'Indy has studied as few mod- ern musicians have studied, if he has drawn 227 CONTEMPORARY COMPOSERS on the past for his ample means, it has been only in order to take more beauty with him, and to enable us to take it, into the future; and for all his intellectual power he has never forgotten that "Only the heart can engender beauty." 228 VI MUSIC IN AMERICA VI MUSIC IN AMERICA I I N the discussions of "American music" that go on perennially in our newspapers and journals, now waxing in a wave of patriotic en- thusiasm, now waning as popular attention is turned to something else, in war time much stimulated by an enhanced con- sciousness of nationality (unless indeed they are totally elbowed aside to make room for more immediate subjects), a sharp cleavage will usually be observed between those whose interest is primarily in the music for itself, wherever it comes from, and those in whom artistic considerations give way before patri- otic ardor, and propaganda usurp the place of discrimination. One group, in uttering the challenging phrase, "American music," places the stress instinctively on the noun and regards the adjective as only qualification; 231 CONTEMPORARY COMPOSERS the other, in its preoccupation with "Amer- ican," seems to take "music" rather for granted. Unfortunately the former group constitutes so small a minority, and expresses itself so soberly, that its wholesome insistence on the quality of the article itself is likely to be quite drowned out by the bawling of the advertisers, with their insistent slogan "Made in America." All the advantages of numbers, organization, and easy appeal to the man in the street are theirs. Even if we ignore those venal music journals which make a system of exploiting the patriotism of the undiscriminat- ing for purely pecuniary purposes, there remain enough enthusiasts and propagandists, indis- posed or unable to appraise quality for them- selves, to create by their "booming" methods a formidable confusion in our standards of taste. Inasmuch, therefore, as we are condemned, for our sins, to be not only producers but con- sumers of this "American music," it behooves us to make careful inspection of the claims for it so extravagantly put forth, and to assure ourselves that we are getting something besides labels for our money. 232 MUSIC IN AMERICA What, then, is the precise value we ought justly to ascribe to that word "American" as applied to music, and wherein have those we may call champions of the adjective been inclined to exaggerate it ? If we analyze their attitude, we shall find them the prey of two fallacies which constantly falsify their con- clusions, and make them dangerous guides for those who have at heart the real interests of music in America. The first of these falla- cies is that which confuses quantity with quality, and supposes that artistic excellence can be decided by vote of the majority. The second is that which identifies racial character with local idioms and tricks of speech rather than with a certain emotional and spiritual temper. Both lead straight to the oft-repeated conclusion that "ragtime" is the necessary basis of our native musical art. Listen, for example, to one of the most per- sistent, courageous, and often interesting advocates of ragtime, Mr. H. K. Moderwell. "I can't help feeling," says Mr. Moderwell, 1 " that a person who doesn't open his heart 1 The New Republic, October 16, 1915. 233 CONTEMPORARY COMPOSERS to ragtime somehow isn't human. Nine out of ten musicians, if caught unawares, will like this music until they remember that they shouldn't. What does this mean ? Does it mean that ragtime is 'all very well in its place'? Rather that these musicians don't consider that place theirs. But that place, remember, is in the affections of some 10,000,000 or more Americans. Conservative estimates show that there are at least 50,000,000 copies of popular music sold in this country yearly and a goodly portion of it is in ragtime. . . . You may take it as certain that if many mil- lions of people persist in liking something that has not been recognized by the schools, there is vitality in that thing." No doubt there is, just as by the same argument there is vitality in chewing gum and the comic supplements. The question is, of course, what sort of vitality ? Yet if you raise this question of quality, you are immediately charged with being a "high- brow," "a person," in Professor Brander Matthews's already classic definition, "edu- cated beyond his intelligence," a charge from which any sane man naturally shrinks. 234 MUSIC IN AMERICA "The best American music is that which the greatest number of Americans like ; the greatest number of Americans like ragtime; therefore ragtime is the best American music." This is a specious syllogism, which you may oppose only at the risk of being thought a highbrow and a snob. Suppose, for instance, that you really do not happen to care for chewing gum, that just as a matter of fact, of personal taste, and not through any principles or sense of superiority to your fellows you prefer other forms of nutriment or exercise. You confess this pe- culiarity. Can you not hear the reproachful reply ? " I can't help feeling that a person who doesn't open his heart to chewing gum somehow isn't human. Nine out of ten travelers on the subway, if caught unawares [with gum disguised as bonbons, let us say] will like it until they remember that they shouldn't. What does this mean ? Does it mean that chewing gum is 'all very well in its place'? Rather that these punctilious people don't consider that place theirs. But that place, remember, is in the affections of 235 CONTEMPORARY COMPOSERS some 10,000,000 or more Americans. The annual output of the chief chewing gum manu- facturers" etc., etc. Thus are you voted down if you happen to be in the minority. It does you no good to protest that you are really quite sincere and without desire to epater le bourgeois; that you can't help pre- ferring Mr. Howells's novels to Mr. Robert W. Chambers's, Mr. Ben Foster's landscapes to Mr. Christy's magazine girls, Mr. Irwin's "Nautical Lays of a Landsman" to the comic supplements, and MacDowell's "To a Wild Rose" to "Everybody's Doing It." If you stray from the herd you must be sick. If you vote for the losers you must be a snob. Such charges are the more dangerous in that they sometimes contain a half-truth. There is a kind of person, the simon-pure snob, who casts his vote for the loser just because he is a loser, because he is unpopular, who prides himself on his "exclusiveness," "excluding himself," as Thoreau penetratively says, "from all that is worth while." His is a sort of inverted numericalism, based on quantity just as essentially as the crude gospel of the 236 MUSIC IN AMERICA "10,000,000 or more Americans," but on quan- tity negative and vanishing towards the zero of perfect distinction. It is from his kind that are recruited the faddists, those who "dote on Debussy," the devotees of folk- songs not for their human beauty but as curi- ous specimens, those who invent all sorts of queer connections between music and paint- ing or poetry, and indeed seem to find in it anything and everything but simple human feeling. It is not from these that we shall get any help towards the truth about ragtime. Indeed, they seem because of their unsym- pathetic attitude toward the spirit of music its emotional expression and their preoccu- pation with the letter of it, to be especially susceptible to the second fallacy of which we spoke that of identifying racial quality with mere idiom rather than with fundamental temper. Mr. Moderwell shall be spokesman of this view also. "You can't tell an American com- poser's 'art-song,'" he says, "from any medi- ocre art-song the world over. . . . You can distinguish American ragtime from the popu- 237 CONTEMPORARY COMPOSERS lar music of any nation and any age." Let us agree heartily that the mediocre "art- song" (horrid name for a desolating thing) is probably no better and no worse in our own than in other countries. Does this not seem an insufficient warrant for the excellence of types of art that can be more easily told apart ? For purposes of labeling specimens earmarks are an advantage, but hardly for appraising modes of expression. If the im- portant matter in American music is not its expression of the American temper, but the peculiar technical feature, the special kind of syncopation we call the "rag rhythm," then the important matter in Hungarian music is not its fire but its "sharp fourth step." Bee- thoven ceases to be Teutonic when he uses Irish cadences in his Seventh Symphony, and Chopin is Polish only in his mazurkas and polonaises. Of course this will not do; and Mr. Moderwell, to do him justice, after re- marking that "ragtime is not merely synco- pation it is a certain sort of syncopa- tion," adds "But of course this definition is not enough. Ragtime has its flavor that no 238 MUSIC IN AMERICA definition can imprison." Our ultimate ques- tion is, then, not how many people like rag- time, or how few like it, or how easily can its idiom be told from other idioms, but how expressive is it of the American temper, how full an artistic utterance can it give of the best and widest American natures ? This is a ques- tion not of quantity but of quality : of the quality of ragtime, the quality of America, and the adequacy of the one to the other. II Suppose, bearing in mind Mr. Moderwell's warning against snobbery, that "A Russian folk-song was no less scorned in the court of Catherine the Great than a ragtime song in our music studios to-day," we examine in some detail a typical example of ragtime such as "The Memphis Blues," of which he as- sures us that "In sheer melodic beauty, in the vividness of its characterization, in the deft- ness of its polyphony and structure, this song deserves to rank among the best of our time." l Here are the opening strains of it. 1 "Two Views of Ragtime." The Seven Arts, July, 1917. CONTEMPORARY COMPOSERS FIGURE XXXI. From "The Memphis Blues." Slowly Polk s, I've just been down, Oh, that rael - o - dy, down to Mem-phis town, sure ap-pealed to me, r iiliiiii That's where the peo-ple smile, Just like a mountain stream smile on you all the while rip -pi -ing on it seemed Approaching them with the eager expectation that such praise naturally arouses, can we, as candid lovers of music, find anything but bitter disappointment in their trivial, poverty- stricken, threadbare conventionality ? How many thousand times have we heard that speciously cajoling descent of the first three notes, that originally piquant but now inde- scribably boresome oscillation from the tonic chord in the third measure ? These are the common snippets and tag-ends of harmony, 240 MUSIC IN AMERICA kicked about the very gutters, ground out by every hurdy-gurdy, familiarity with which breeds not affection but contempt. Their very surface cleverness, as of meaningless ornament, is a part of their offense. Rus- sian folk-song indeed ! Compare them with the simple but noble tonic, dominant and sub-dominant, of the "Volga Boat Song" and their shoddiness stands self-revealed. And the melody ? Bits and snippets again, quite without character if it were not for the rhythm, and acquiring no momentum save in the lines "I went out a-dancin'," etc., where they build up well, but to a complete anticlimax in the return of the obvious opening strain. As for the rag rhythm itself, the sole dis- tinctive feature of this music, it has un- doubtedly something of real piquancy. The trick, it will be noted, is a syncopation of half- beats, arranged so as to pull bodily forward certain comparatively strong accents, those at the middle of the measures l a scheme to which words as well as melody conform. The left hand meanwhile gives the regular metrical 1 The time is really 4-8, though marked 2-4. R 241 CONTEMPORARY COMPOSERS division of the measure, and a writer in the London Times, defining ragtime as "a strongly syncopated melody superimposed on a strictly regular accompaniment," points out that "it is the combination of these two rhythms that gives 'ragtime' its character." 1 This is perhaps not strictly true, since in some of the most effective bits of ragtime the metrical pulsation may give way momen- tarily to the syncopation, and everyone re- members those delightful times of complete silence in which the pulse is kept going men- tally, to be finally confirmed by a crashing cadence. But it is usually the case that both time schemes, metrical and rhythmical, are maintained together. For this very reason we must question the contention of the cham- pions of ragtime that its type of syncopation is capable of great variety, a contention in support of which some of them have even challenged comparison of it with the rhythmic vigors of Beethoven and Schumann. 2 1 The Times, London, February 8, 1913, quoted in Boston Symphony Orchestra Program Books, vol. 32, p. 1186. 1 See, for instance, Mr. Carl van Vechten's " Interpreters and Interpretations." 242 MUSIC IN AMERICA The subtlety of syncopation as an artistic device results from its simultaneous mainte- nance of two time-patterns, the rhythmic and the metrical, in such a relation that the second and subordinate one, though never lost sight of, is never obtruded. The quasi- mechanical pulse of the meter is the indispen- sable background against which only can the freer oscillations of the rhythm outline them- selves. The moment the sense of it is lost, as it is sometimes lost in those over-bold passages of Schumann where a displacement is too emphatically made or too long con- tinued, the charm disappears. In the fol- lowing from his "Faschingsschwank," for in- stance, the interest of the rhythmic accent on beat "three" lasts only so long as we oppose to it mentally a regular metric accent on "one." FIGURE XXXII. CONTEMPORARY COMPOSERS In the continuation of the passage, for which the reader is referred to the original, our minds are apt to "slip a stitch," so to speak, letting "three" and "one" coalesce. The moment this happens the passage be- comes commonplace. But suppose, on the other hand, in the effort to maintain our sense of the meter, we strike the bass notes on each "one." Now equally, or indeed more than before, the charm is fled, and the passage rendered stale and unprofitable, through the actual presentation to the ear of so mechan- ical a reiteration. In short, the metrical scheme has to be mentally maintained, but actually, so far as possible, eliminated. Look- ing back, in the light of these considerations, at "The Memphis Blues," we shall realize that whatever the pleasing eccentricity of the rhythm, so relentless a meter as we here find thumped out by the left hand cannot but quickly grow tiresome, as indeed it will be felt to be after a few repetitions. Reference to another well-known theme of Schumann will reveal a further weak- ness of ragtime. The second theme of the 244 MUSIC IN AMERICA finale of his Concerto for piano runs as fol- lows : FIGURE XXXIII. *