^ H M^CaU 
 
MORE 
 
 MASTER= 
 
 SINGERS 
 
MORE 
 MASTERSINGERS 
 
 STUDIES IN THE ART 
 OF MUSIC 
 
 BY 
 
 FILSON YOUNG 
 
 n 
 
 ,' ''/'".: • ■' 
 
 NEW YORK 
 HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 
 
 PUBLISHERS 
 
Y G 
 
 
 
 PRINTED BY WILLIAM BRENDON AND SON, LTD. 
 PLYMOUTH, ENGLAND, IQII 
 
To MRS. EARLE 
 
 To you, my dear friend, crowned in the 
 summer evening of your life with the love 
 of three generations, I can bring no wreath 
 or chaplet. I can only offer you this 
 nosegay picked from the garden of the 
 arts: not from that southern corner, aglow 
 with colour, in which you yourself have 
 laboured ; not from the sombre groves of 
 learning and poetry ; but from that place 
 of music where the fountain murmurs and 
 the blossom shakes and the wind sings in 
 the leaves. And you, who care chiefly that 
 life should be earnest, cari7ig also that it 
 should be beautiful, and holding in fellow- 
 ship all true labourers in the garden how- 
 ever remote their corner or humble their 
 task, have with your friendship made 
 fragrant that part of my life in which this 
 work was done ; therefore I bring it to you 
 in homage and affection. 
 
 FILSON YOUNG. 
 
 April, 1911. 
 
 
 *i95,'j53 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 Memories of a Cathedral 
 
 The Place of Music in Modern Life 
 
 The Musician as Composer 
 
 The Musician as Interpreter 
 
 The Musician as Hearer 
 
 The Art of the Conductor . 
 
 The Music of the Salon 
 
 The Old Age of Richard Wagner 
 
 The Two Westminsters : With some 
 Music and Religion 
 
 Uebussy 
 
 Thoughts on 
 
 PAGE 
 
 61 
 
 89 
 
 203 
 231 
 
MEMORIES OF 
 A CATHEDRAL 
 
• > •, 
 
 MEMORIES OF 
 A CATHEDRAL 
 
 IT stood, when its mediaeval builders planned 
 it, on the low sandstone banks at the meet- 
 ing-point of two limpid rivers ; nothing 
 much in sight from it but the collegiate buildings 
 and school ; beside it the old hall of Strangeways 
 on the slope to the north ; the few scattered 
 cottages of the hamlet of Manchester to the 
 south, and beyond, the smithy and the river bank 
 and the old arched bridge with the chapel on it, 
 the bridge that carried the road over to the west 
 country and the sea. But many things happened 
 in the centuries to that smiling green country of 
 low hills and pleasant talking streams. Progress 
 and civilisation and industry crept in from every 
 side, and the black shadow of commerce fell 
 upon it ; smoke began to darken the earth, the 
 grass and trees to disappear in the spreading in- 
 vasion of stone and brick, the river to turn from 
 silver to lead colour, from lead to chocolate, 
 from chocolate to ink ; until now at length the 
 
 [ 13 ] 
 
MEMORIES OF 
 
 cathedral stands there solitary in the throng", 
 everything of its own date long vanished but its 
 old comrade Cheetham's College, where the 
 monks who once served it used to live ; stands 
 there as on an island, grey and sad and isolated 
 in the mists and the rain, its bell daily calling 
 with the voice of the departed centuries to men 
 whose ears are filled with other sounds, while 
 the great tides of commercial life go roaring 
 round it for ever. 
 
 Within, in the twilight, the sounds of the city 
 are something stifled, although even there the 
 whine and clash of the electric tramcar, the hoot 
 of the motor-horn and the whistle of the railway 
 break in on the voice of prayer. Yet there is a 
 strange and sudden peace here, all the grander 
 and more impressive for the strife and sordid 
 clatter without, all the more precious because it 
 was established by the spirit that is for ever 
 banished from among us. The nave with its 
 double aisles, the intricate forest of pillars through 
 which the sight reaches the Derby and Ely 
 chapels ; the lovely rood-screen surmounted by the 
 mysterious, jewel-coloured, soaring organ-case ; 
 the perspective of the choir aisles and triforium ; 
 the grim rough arch of the western tower that is 
 a reminder of the dark periods of the nineteenth- 
 
 [ 14 ] 
 
A CATHEDRAL 
 
 century taste, the obliteration of which caused 
 this picturesque damage — these at first produce 
 an effect of confusion on the mind that is in odd 
 contrast to the dignified simplicity of so many 
 English cathedrals. The building is indeed 
 unique in that and other ways ; unique in the 
 kind of its beauty, which depends not so much 
 on size and proportion as on loveliness of detail 
 and the naturalness of its orderly confusion, like 
 a thing that has grown by time and with men's 
 needs, and yet in general accord with one noble 
 and original plan. 
 
 It is not of architecture that I am to write, 
 but of music ; not of the fine old building, a 
 Minster in miniature, or of the carved and painted 
 glories of its choir and ancient misty chantries, 
 but with the life of music and ancient custom 
 that I shared there for some years. Music is the 
 soul of a Gothic cathedral, and the organ is its 
 voice. There and there only can you hear in 
 perfection those grave and suave tones, those 
 vast harmonic structures of sound-waves that 
 build and build themselves up from the pro- 
 foundest deeps that the ear can recognise, and 
 spread in harmonic overtones, and break against 
 the senses in endless and effortless succession ; 
 there and there only can music be moulded into 
 
 [ 15 ] 
 
MEMORIES OF 
 
 a thing that shakes and awes us as only mass 
 and proportion can — as in architecture, in moun- 
 tains, in the sea ; there and there only can the 
 vast sound-waves generated by true organ-tone 
 find at once space enough in which to spread, 
 and a shell great enough to be filled with their 
 murmuring voices. 
 
 II 
 
 I remember as though it were yesterday my 
 first introduction to that organ-loft and to the 
 unique personality associated with it — an occa- 
 sion that was to influence so much my musical 
 life and my associations with the cathedral. 
 I was, I suppose, about sixteen years old, a 
 devotee of music, a player on keyed instruments 
 of some twelve years' standing (or sitting), filled 
 beforehand with veneration for the talents of the 
 great man whom, by the introduction of a friendly 
 ecclesiastical official, I was about to meet. It 
 was a Sunday afternoon ; and as I sat in the loft 
 on the rood-screen looking at the four rows of 
 yellow keys and the ranks of mellow ivory draw- 
 stops with their beautiful sound-suggesting names 
 of Diapason, Dulciana, Suabe Flute, Gamba, 
 Keraulophon, Dulcet, Clarion, Tuba Mirabilis, 
 
 - [ i6 ] 
 
A CATHEDRAL 
 
 Violone, Bourdon, and so on, I could hardly 
 believe in my own good fortune. The octave 
 clash of the bells died away and gave place to 
 those single beats of a high bell that produce 
 always such an effect of expectancy ; until these 
 too died away, and there were only the sounds of 
 footfalls and rustlings and creaking chairs. Far 
 away in the vestries a clock chimed, and the 
 murmur of an intoning voice fell on the ear. Was 
 he going to be late? No, there was a sound of 
 footsteps at the bottom of the stone stairs, a 
 stumbling and fumbling, the sound of a voice 
 talking to itself, panting and heavy breathing, 
 and a query that made my heart beat. ^' Who's 
 there? Is anybody there?" — and at last the 
 emergence through the narrow door of a short 
 figure with a massive head and broad clean- 
 shaven face, peering at me with short-sighted 
 eyes, and then, when I said who I was, smiling 
 reassuringly and giving me a left hand to touch 
 while he climbed, still panting, on to the organ 
 bench. The whole business became familiar to 
 me afterwards, but I shall never forget that first im- 
 pression — the hazardous punctuality that brought 
 him to the organ bench just as the distant Amen 
 floated through the aisles of the cathedral, the 
 condition of out-of-breathness, the sense of dignity 
 
 B [ 17 ] 
 
MEMORIES OF 
 
 and solemnity and general air of ancient days 
 suddenly brought into the organ loft. And then 
 that wonderful moment when, two or three soft 
 stops having been drawn on the choir organ, 
 the fingers were dropped firmly and softly on to 
 the keys and there began, through the simplest 
 movements and the most diatonic harmonies, to 
 steal through the building such waves of sound, 
 such harmonies and sequences, as probably no 
 future generation will ever hear again in a 
 quality at once so austere and so beautiful. I 
 was spell-bound from the first. The strange great 
 man had not said ^' How d'you do ? " or any of the 
 things one had expected him to say, but had just 
 sat down and shut his eyes and continued for a few 
 moments to make this marvellous music, swaying 
 about a little, sometimes shaking his head slowly 
 as though he were singing to himself, and all the 
 while marshalling his creeping fingers over the 
 yellow keys as crisply as trained soldiers execut- 
 ing a manoeuvre. It was all too short : forty or 
 fifty bars of mellow sound, part crowded against 
 part in perfect sequence and suspension, melody 
 threading its way against melody through mazes 
 of harmonies of the most exquisite dissolving 
 hues, and then the long dominant pedal with the 
 sequences climbing higher and higher and droop- 
 
 [ i8 ] 
 
A CATHEDRAL 
 
 ing again to the quiet close, with the deep murmur 
 of a thirty-two-foot pipe drawn on the last note. 
 No wonder I was impressed and rapt out of my- 
 self, for I was listening consciously for the first 
 time to one of the most remarkable gifts in the 
 world, the gift inherited from a family contain- 
 ing generations of musicians, and nourished and 
 guided in the hands of the great Samuel Sebastian 
 Wesley ; and I had the discernment to know it. 
 
 After that, with the last note, he opened his 
 eyes as if released from a spell and began to talk 
 to me, asking a string of questions and accepting 
 my transparent homage with smiling and indul- 
 gent complacency, taking snuff the while from a 
 little papier-mache box that had its place under the 
 double diapason and was not allowed to be moved ; 
 offering me some, I remember ; and as I was 
 too nervous to refuse, and it was my first intro- 
 duction to that agreeable narcotic, I spent the 
 remainder of the time until the beginning of the 
 Psalms alternately weeping and sneezing. But 
 we got on famously from that point, and although 
 I was more or less dazed and intoxicated by what 
 I saw and heard, to say nothing of the snuff, all the 
 events and the music and that first cathedral 
 evensong remain with me among the highest 
 peaks of memory that will catch the light until 
 
 [ 19 ] 
 
MEMORIES OF 
 
 the last. And by the end of the service we had 
 begun a friendship that brought me some of the 
 best and happiest interests of my life, and was 
 not shaken in the difficult relations of master and 
 pupil, and remains to-day, I hope, unshakable. 
 
 Ill 
 
 Glamour is a quality that seldom survives 
 familiarity, but it never departed from that organ 
 loft during my master's reign there. When I 
 had decided to forgo the more beaten and more 
 orthodox paths of adolescent education and to 
 apply myself seriously to the study of music, it 
 became for three years the centre of my life. 
 That time remains in my memory as a misty con- 
 fusion of services, classes of 'counterpoint, har- 
 mony, composition, lessons on the organ and 
 pianoforte, rehearsals, concerts, the writing of 
 exercises, and the private enterprise of laborious 
 compositions on a grander scale ; practising, 
 travelling to and fro, transient college-of-music 
 acquaintances and friendships, but always with 
 this life on the rood-screen as the centre and key 
 of it all. There were generally two or three of 
 us pupils and assistants present at the daily 
 
 [ 20 ] 
 
A CATHEDRAL 
 
 services ; sometimes there was quite a levee, 
 sometimes only one pupil; and in my time when 
 there was only one pupil it was generally I. 
 
 The world of a cathedral organ loft, which is 
 as strictly traditional as any of the other worlds 
 that make up cathedral life, is entirely indepen- 
 dent of all these other lives ; it hardly touches 
 them except in the person of the organist himself, 
 who, if he be in time, may gossip for a few 
 minutes in the robing-room with his reverend 
 brethren. There is the clerical life of the church, 
 there is the choir life, the administrative life of 
 the chapter-house, the musical world of the organ 
 loft ; and, I suppose one must add, the life of the 
 congregation, though I am afraid that is a some- 
 what unimportant department of ordinary cathe- 
 dral life. The handful of habitues who made the 
 congregation in the choir morning and evening 
 were augmented by a few scattered people sitting 
 dreaming in the nave, the casual loiterers or 
 visitors who wandered in and out during the 
 services, and a strange little knot of amateur 
 musicians who used to sit under the western tower 
 and take deep cognisance of all musical doings 
 in the Cathedral. The serious doino-s of the 
 daily services all took place in the choir, and these 
 nave-dwellers were mere critics and spectators of 
 
 [ 21 ] 
 
MEMORIES OF 
 
 what of the performance drifted there to them 
 under and over the rood-screen ; they came merely 
 for the music and the general effect ; but it was 
 characteristic of us that we played always — the 
 pupil-assistants, at any rate — for the benefit of the 
 nave and not of the choir. For our in and out 
 voluntaries, that is to say, we chose stops which 
 sounded particularly v/ell in the nave, and we did 
 not mind very much how they sounded to the 
 ears of the poor devout worshippers and the 
 Cathedral staff. It was indeed all the nave got, 
 except, of course, on Sundays and on major feasts, 
 Vv^hen the service was held in the nave itself, and 
 the choir, but for a solitary canon or archdeacon, 
 was deserted. 
 
 Every day, at eleven and half-past three, the 
 Cathedral bell set going this piece of mediaeval 
 life which went through its rhythmic process for 
 less than an hour, and then was dispersed again. 
 At the chiming of that voice high up in the foggy 
 air the elements of this life would come converg- 
 ing upon the Cathedral : the choir-men from their 
 lesson-giving or from their morning draught in 
 the Cathedral hotel, the boys from the choir- 
 school, the dean from his deanery, the canon-in- 
 residence from his busy parochial life, the minor 
 canons and clerks-in-orders from their homes or 
 
 [ 22 ] 
 
A CATHEDRAL 
 
 their rooms, the organist and his little court of 
 pupils from rehearsal or college or study, all 
 came in and took their appointed places indepen- 
 dently of each other, assembled when the clock 
 struck, performed the prayers and music appointed 
 for the day, rehearsed the music appointed for the 
 morrow, and departed again. The organism was 
 perfect, the independence absolute. In the organ 
 loft the same music was set out as in the choir- 
 stalls ; nothing was ever announced ; at the ap- 
 pointed moment the fingers dropped on the keys 
 and the voices rose from the choir below in per- 
 fect and punctual accord. And all the while one 
 was pleasantly conscious that the ocean of modern 
 life with its buying and selling, struggling and 
 scheming and fighting, was roaring outside up 
 to the very buttresses of the firm old walls ; and 
 that the same firm old walls performed their office 
 admirably, s-tood between us and all that modern 
 practical life, and held it out of the Cathedral, 
 keeping the ancient spot dry and separate for 
 the performance of music and prayers. 
 
 [ 23 ] 
 
MEMORIES OF 
 
 IV 
 
 The discipline of the organ-loft was very severe, 
 though it was entirely unwritten and unstated. 
 There were no rules, but anyone who had the 
 freedom of that place conformed to an etiquette 
 as rigid as that of a German court. There were 
 certain chairs upon which certain pupils might 
 sit, but on which it would have been presumptuous 
 for others to sit. There were certain places upon 
 which a hat or a coat might be laid, but if a coat 
 had been hung on the highly convenient points 
 of the wrought-iron grille one would have been 
 aware that something unseemly had happened. 
 There was a place where the music — the books 
 containing the anthems and the services — were 
 laid in their order, and from which they were 
 handed up to the music-desk at exactly the right 
 moment. There was a way in which the chant- 
 book was folded down inside the psalter at the 
 end of the Psalms, departure from which, one 
 felt, would have threatened the existence of the 
 foundation. There were times for conversation, 
 and times for silence ; there were topics that 
 might, and others that might not be discussed. 
 The presiding genius in the organ loft had his 
 
 [ 24 ] 
 
A CATHEDRAL 
 
 own way of joining in the services, which was 
 difficult and disconcerting for a stranger to com- 
 prehend. Some devout visitor from a distant 
 cathedral would, for example, bow himself 
 down in prayer at the conventional moment, 
 to be roused by a voice saying pleasantly, *^ I 
 hear you have beautiful bacon in your town," 
 and be compelled to join in an animated conver- 
 sation on the subject of bacon, again to be in- 
 terrupted by his interlocutor suddenly singing 
 ^^Amen " in a clear tenor voice. And then, think- 
 ing perhaps that the organ loft was regarded as 
 having nothing whatever to do with the devotional 
 proceedings below, the visitor would himself ven- 
 ture upon a mild jest, to find that his distinguished 
 friend had got off the organ-bench, turned his back 
 to him, and was engaged in reciting the creed. 
 
 The tenor voice would go on in most pathetic 
 and devotional tones, until, sitting down and 
 reaching for his snuff-box, the Believer would say, 
 **The resurrection of the body and the life ever- 
 lasting. Amen. Yes, I must say that I always 
 thought at least you had good bacon in your 
 town." 
 
 I do not think that we were at all like disciples 
 or students in a book. We had the greatest rever- 
 ence for our master, and some of us were afraid 
 
 [ 25 ] 
 
MEMORIES OF 
 
 of him ; but though he was a master in the true 
 artistic sense of the word, we certainly never 
 referred to him as maestro or maitre. We generally 
 called him ^^ He." The vergers and choir-men 
 called him **The Doctor"; members of the foun- 
 dation, who were older than he and rather touchy 
 on the score of years, generally called him ^^Old 
 
 P ." The adjective was used in an affectionate 
 
 rather than in a temporal sense. To us he was 
 generally simply ^^He." ^Ms He coming this 
 afternoon ? " ^^ I saw Him walking down Victoria 
 Street." ^^ You had better push in that trumpet; I 
 believe He is somewhere in the building," and so 
 on. We each had our individual relationship with 
 him, but loyalty and affection, I think, were 
 common to all, or nearly all. There were back- 
 ward pupils who were rather stupid and whom 
 he used to bully unmercifully, sending them out 
 for pennyworths of snuff in the middle of the 
 service, and overwhelming them with comic irony 
 if they ventured upon an original remark. Nothing 
 they could do was right ; if by any chance he 
 was late and they had begun to ^*play in," his 
 voice would be heard ascending the stairs, saying, 
 ^^Stop! for God's sake, stop!" although they 
 knew well that they dared not stop. If, on the 
 other hand, fearing his wrath, such a one had 
 
 [ 26 ] 
 
A CATHEDRAL 
 
 waited and not begun to play, the same agitated 
 voice would be heard at the bottom of the spiral 
 staircase saying, '' Go on, sir, go on ; why don't 
 you begin ? Can't you begin instead of sitting 
 
 there like a ? Here, get out of the way ; get 
 
 out of the way ! Let me come ! " If a favourite 
 pupil or two were there, then the dullard would 
 be sent either for a pennyworth of snuff, or else, 
 ^* Do, like a good fellow, listen at the bottom of 
 the nave and tell me how the anthem sounds." 
 On his return he would be questioned. 
 
 ^'Well, Mr. Smith, how did the anthem 
 sound ? " 
 
 **Oh, it sounded all right. Doctor." 
 
 ^^AU right! What do you mean by all right, 
 sir? Do you mean to say you didn't notice any- 
 thing wrong with it? " 
 
 ^^Well, perhaps it might have been a little 
 better." 
 
 ^^Oh, really, Mr. Smith! Then it wasn't all 
 right. It might have been a little better ! How 
 might it have been better, sir ? " 
 
 ^* I don't know." 
 
 ^^Dont know! You must mean something when 
 you say it might have been better. Tell us in what 
 way you think it might have been better." 
 
 ^*Well, I thought the tenors were a bit off." 
 
 [ 27 ] 
 
MEMORIES OF 
 
 ^* Really? Really ! Mr. Smith is of the opinion 
 that the tenors were ^ a bit off ' : that is a most 
 important and valuable opinion. Upon my word, 
 Mr. Smith, your critical faculties are most pene- 
 trative ; you ought to take an appointment on 
 the Press. The tenors are ^a bit off' 1 God bless 
 my soul ! I wonder where you learn such horrible 
 expressions." And for the remainder of the service, 
 in the pauses between the prayers, he would at 
 intervals ejaculate ^^a bit off!" in a shocked 
 undertone, with solemn shakings of the head, to 
 the delight of the favoured audience and the 
 nervous smiles of Mr. Smith. 
 
 We were all very like children in the charge of 
 a more grown-up child. But it was a very happy 
 and innocent world, deepened and made serious 
 by the simple and high artistic standards according 
 to which we worked and judged each other. The 
 discipline was good for us all, and there is no de- 
 partment of music in which such discipline is so 
 necessary as in the playing of the organ. Again, 
 there were no formulated rules about our playing 
 or our art. What we were actually taught by word 
 of mouth was very little ; what we learnt by study 
 and example was immense. We had simply the 
 constant association with perfection in this par- 
 ticular branch of art, and we imbibed the tradi- 
 
 [ 28 ] 
 
A CATHEDRAL 
 
 tions of the great cathedral school of orgran-play- 
 ing", that our master had himself acquired direct, 
 not only from his father at Bath Abbey, but 
 from Samuel Sebastian Wesley at Gloucester 
 and Winchester. However secular we might be 
 in our thoughts or our conversation, our playing 
 in the Cathedral was required to be in the spirit 
 of the building and of the office which we accom- 
 panied, and the slightest secularity in that would 
 have involved banishment from the organ loft. 
 Austerity was the note of our tradition ; extraneous 
 effects were absolutely forbidden; adornment was 
 not to be the outward adornment of fancy stops 
 and tremulants, and the putting on of the apparel 
 of tone colour, but the ^^meek and quiet spirit" 
 of pure part-playing, the rhythm and melody 
 coming from the hidden man of the heart, which, 
 in the eyes of our master at any rate, were of 
 great price. 
 
 Such discipline as this is always necessary, as I 
 have said, in the study of the organ, but especially 
 so in cathedral playing. There is an intoxica- 
 tion in producing sound on the organ in a fine 
 cathedral such as is experienced by a player of 
 no other instrument ; and a cathedral organ is 
 a weapon which is not lightly to be entrusted 
 to the hands of the inexperienced, who are 
 
 [ 29 ] 
 
MEMORIES OF 
 
 apt to be carried away by the sense of the 
 tremendous power which they control. The 
 unaccustomed organist, suddenly placed in this 
 position, loses his head altogether ; he is carried 
 away by the astounding acoustic results of putting 
 his fingers on the keys. He casts restraint to the 
 winds, tries this stop and that, and does not rest 
 until he has the full organ blaring away to the 
 roof; perhaps forgetting that a slovenly pro- 
 gression, which does not so much matter when 
 played on a few quiet stops in a closed swell- 
 box, becomes excruciating when heard in the 
 clangorous tones of high-pressure reeds. Only 
 familiarity and discipline can cure this fault of 
 the organist, and often it is never cured at all, as 
 you may hear for yourself if you go and listen in 
 more than one English cathedral. 
 
 V 
 
 What actually did we learn, sitting up there 
 amid the dust, and the rare sunbeams, and the 
 many echoes ? It depended very much on our- 
 selves. Looking back at it, I do not remember 
 any of us being actually and deliberately taught 
 anything ; and I repeat, I think it is hardly 
 
 [ 30 ] 
 
A CATHEDRAL 
 
 possible to teach any art except by example. We 
 were led to the water and given free access to it ; 
 no attempt was made to force us to drink, and 
 each of us imbibed and, according to his capacity, 
 took away something different. Some of us became 
 great executant players, and departed to different 
 parts of the globe to astonish the natives with 
 organ recitals ; others imbibed a love of architec- 
 ture — in fact, I think we all learnt a litde about 
 that ; others became learned pundits, and wore 
 hoods, and wrote themselves *^ Doctor, " and 
 went forth to bear that drab banner onward in 
 their own spheres of work ; and others acquired, 
 what was perhaps the most precious secret of that 
 place, a pure style in organ-playing, the style of 
 our master and of his master before him, a style 
 which is unfortunately carried on only by direct 
 tradition. The pupils of my master and of some 
 of his rare contemporaries have it, provided they 
 have not wantonly overlaid it with garish decor- 
 ations of their own ; but I doubt whether it out- 
 lives that generation ; I doubt whether any of 
 their pupils have it. What it is I shall presently 
 try to define ; but it is almost hopeless to render 
 a thine like this in words when it was onlv learned 
 by days and months and years of association with 
 its exponent. 
 
 [ 31 ] 
 
MEMORIES OF 
 
 We learned other things besides organ-playing. 
 If we did not learn piety in the modern sense of 
 the word, we learned it in the ancient sense ; we 
 learned reverence, and the willingness to recog- 
 nise and worship greatness when we found it — 
 a thing by no means sufficiently taught to 
 students of any art in this country ; who too 
 often, instead of trying to raise themselves to 
 the level of greatness when they see it, try to 
 pull down greatness to their own level, and ex- 
 plain it away by their own small experience. And 
 we learned about literature, and cooking, and 
 old furniture, and ritual. 
 
 For my own part I acquired in those days a 
 curious sense of the detachment of the cathedral 
 and its music from the rest of the world. I lived 
 with both ; and sitting there so long, morning and 
 afternoon, my ear got tuned to a certain austerity, 
 and I learned to love the old church music of the 
 sixteenth and seventeenth centuries — the music of 
 Tye, Tallis, Farrant, Bull, Lawes, Byrd, Gibbons, 
 Child, Humphrey, Purcell, and Blow. The 
 eighteenth century, with perhaps the exception of 
 Boyce and Kelway, never so much appealed to 
 me ; and it was not much to be wondered at that 
 modern church music began and ended for me 
 with the Wesley family. But even while I loved 
 
 [ 32 ] 
 
A CATHETyRAL 
 
 all these composers, and delighted to hear their 
 music floating up to me out of the carved choir 
 stalls, I knew well all the time that it was music 
 the love of which I could not communicate to 
 anyone else who had not, like me, passed some 
 time in this ancient atmosphere, in the theatre 
 for which it was designed. It is not sufficiently re- 
 membered by critics of the work of English church 
 composers that their work was nearly all written 
 for performance in cathedrals. As I have said, 
 the setting in motion of great sound waves in 
 a cathedral is an art in itself. You are not deal- 
 ing with notes and chords so much as waves and 
 masses of tone ; and many a composition which 
 would sound sublime in a cathedral would sound 
 feeble enough if tried over on the pianoforte or 
 performed in a room — -and vice versa. Music of 
 this school does not always stand the test of 
 severe analysis on the music desk ; it is music 
 written for a certain instrument, and that instru- 
 ment the cathedral ; for the cathedral performs 
 the music as well as the organ and voices, joins 
 with them, a very orchestra of stone and space 
 and proportion, the secret of which we have lost. 
 
 t') -> 
 oo 
 
MEMORIES OF 
 
 VI 
 
 Modern music did not in any form invade our 
 organ loft ; we had, I think quite properly, to 
 seek that elsewhere, with the result that our lives 
 were agreeably shot with all kinds of varied 
 colours in music. From writing our own double 
 counterpoint at the College of Music we would 
 attend an orchestral rehearsal under Richter of, 
 say, Strauss's latest symphonic poem ; and from 
 there would hurry to the cathedral to play 
 Kelway in B minor, and after that one would 
 perhaps accompany the great man across the 
 high seas of the city, through the busy secular 
 traffic of full afternoon tide to the town hall, 
 there to sit surrounded by the glowing frescoes 
 of Ford Madox Brown, and smoke a meditative 
 pipe while he practised on the lovely Cavaille- 
 Coll organ there some great classic of Bach, or 
 one of the mighty, well-nigh unplayable master- 
 pieces of Liszt. For the eccentric, snuff-taking, 
 eighteenth-century's master of the organ loft, and 
 sober inventor of diatonic sequences there, became 
 quite another person in the concert-room. With 
 the penny snuff-box, left reposing under the 
 double diapason, was left behind the austerity 
 
 [ 34 ] 
 
A CATHEDRAL 
 
 and conservatism of the cathedral i>layer ; and 
 instead of him there appeared an extremely 
 modern solo performer, with parcels of the very 
 latest music on his table, who practised by the 
 hour on a dumb clavier to keep his fing-ers up to 
 the standards of modern technique, and who 
 could import clarity and simplicity into composi- 
 tions which in the hands of other players became 
 too often a distressing- scream and jumble of 
 sound. I think that, with the possible exception 
 of Widor's symphonies, which are inferior to it in 
 musical value, the extreme limit of possibility in 
 organ playing- has been reached in the Organ 
 Fantasia of Liszt — notablv that one on the chorale 
 *' Ad nos ad salutarem, " which not many organists 
 dare, and which hardly any of them accomplish. 
 He is one of the few whom I have ever heard 
 attempt it, and the only one whom I have heard 
 achieve it with ease and mastery. And while 
 we talked, and dusk and darkness gathered in the 
 hall, and only the little bunch of lights glowed 
 on us above the console, we would talk of music 
 or of people — always on these two topics, people 
 and music, music and people — and chiefly of 
 people who made music and of music that sup- 
 posed people. In earlier days than this Ford 
 Madox Brown when at work on his frescoes 
 
 [ 35 ] 
 
MEMORIES OF 
 
 used to be his companion where I now sat ; and 
 sometimes in the dusk he used to have weird 
 ideas and look into the surrounding* shadows and 
 tell me how often when he was playing alone he 
 had the sense that Madox Brown had come 
 back and was somewhere near him. ... It was 
 an odd, weird atmosphere ; and if I were to re- 
 visit that place after an absence of twenty years 
 it would be solely and definitely associated with 
 the personalities of those two artists. 
 
 Sometimes the days were very severe, and, to 
 youth hardly yet finished growing, inadequately 
 supported by material nourishment. On a Satur- 
 day, for example, there would probably be one's 
 own private practice in the morning, the cathe- 
 dral service at eleven, choir rehearsal at twelve, 
 which might last an hour, a dive into some 
 German restaurant for a meal, a walk to some 
 curiosity shop or other where an old print or 
 piece of furniture was to be examined, the return 
 to the cathedral at half-past three, and adjourn- 
 ment from there to the town hall ; the re- 
 mainder of the afternoon till about six o'clock 
 being spent in practice on his part and listening 
 and smoking on mine ; from six to seven con- 
 versation and smoking in his room ; from seven 
 to a quarter past eight organ recital in the town 
 
 [ 36'] 
 
A CATHEDRAL 
 
 hall ; and at last, famished and exhausted, home 
 to his house for supper. But as I said, the interval 
 between lunch and this late supi)er was often, 
 from my point of view, inadequately spanned. 
 With some one upon whom you are at once on 
 the terms of reverence, a kind of laughing awe, 
 and affectionate intimacy, relations are bound to 
 be complex, because you may be summoned to 
 adopt any one of these attitudes at any moment. 
 He used to think that I was given to general 
 extravagance and over-fastidiousness in the 
 matter of what I ate and drank and smoked ; and 
 he used to take a delight on our way from the 
 cathedral to the town hall in suddenly turning 
 into some particularly low and vile tea-shop, and 
 either administering there and then the nauseous 
 corrective of a halfpenny cup of tea and a half- 
 penny bun (which I was obliged to take, knowing 
 I should get nothing else till ten o'clock), or, 
 worse still, purchase a particularly hateful penny- 
 worth of bread and butter, which was carried 
 away in a paper bag and consumed, but divided 
 by him with strict impartiality between us, to- 
 gether with some nasty cocoa w^hich we used to 
 concoct with condensed milk over the fire in his 
 room. No person has ever taken a greater toll of 
 my affection than was taken on these occasions ; 
 
 [ 37 ] 
 
MEMORIES OF 
 
 but I was positively afraid to criticise or object, 
 from a kind of glorious artistic shame which bade 
 me realise that what was good enough for him 
 was surely good enough for me. He used to try 
 me further (because he himself had a catholic 
 although discriminating taste in tobacco) by buy- 
 ing me rank penny cigars and insisting on my 
 giving my opinion of them; and afterwards, after 
 supper in the evening perhaps, by giving me a 
 really fine Cabana and telling me that it had cost 
 a halfpenny. . . . But there was nothing that he 
 could do to any of us, no task or trouble that he 
 could impose upon us, for which we had not for- 
 given him by the time his fingers had been ten 
 seconds on the keys. 
 
 VII 
 
 Nothing could have been more austere than 
 the method of our technical training*. We were 
 started on Best's Pedal Exercises, went through 
 the increasing intricacies of Mcrkel's Pedal 
 Studies, and from that we launched out on 
 Bach's Eight Short Preludes and Fugues and his 
 Six Trios. After that probably Rhcinberger's 
 Sonatas, or possibly a sonata of Guilmant inter- 
 posed before the more difficult Rhcinbergers, 
 
 [ 38 ] 
 
A CATHEDRAL 
 
 then more and more elaborate Bach, and beyond 
 that anything" you pleased. What we were drilled 
 in was absolute precision ; hesitation, slovenli- 
 ness, or lack of rhythm were the unforgival^le 
 sins, and his most scathing" criticism w^as, *'You 
 are playing like an old lady." We were drilled 
 also in playing the chorales of Bach from open 
 score written out by ourselves in the soprano, 
 alto, tenor, and bass clefs — an admirable simul- 
 taneous training in sight-reading and pure part- 
 playing. The more brilliant pupils (alas ! 1 was 
 never one of them) could perform almost in- 
 credible feats in this direction, reading at sight 
 and playing the transcription into open score of 
 some of the fugues from Das ii.'oliltcinpeyirtcs 
 Klavier, But anything in the nature of show 
 pieces, things written for display, was strictly 
 excluded from the curriculum. It was understood 
 that if we wished to do such things we must 
 do them by ourselves, with a touch of smiling 
 derision at the mere mention of them. And the 
 greatest things of Bach, such as the G Minor 
 Fantasia and Fugue, the A Minor, E Minor, 
 B Minor, D Minor, were held sacred from the 
 degradation of being used for educational pur- 
 poses ; quite properly, I think. Little things 
 that most teachers of the organ ignore were 
 
 [ 39 ] 
 
MEMORIES OF 
 
 curiously insisted upon by him, such as absolute 
 precision and firmness in putting" down the notes 
 of a chord, A sloppy, nerveless method, where 
 one note sounded sooner than another, gave him 
 positive physical distress, and I have seen a pupil 
 kept for half an hour doing" nothing but put- 
 ting down a chord and taking it off again. The 
 true value of dotted notes — much ignored in 
 organ-playing; phrasing — almost totally ignored 
 by other masters ; and the getting of accent by 
 playing the accented note a fraction of a beat 
 late, holding it down to its extreme value, and 
 preceding it by a staccato note — these were all 
 features of his style of playing and teaching. 
 I think more than anything else he drilled us 
 in the importance of strict time, knowing quite 
 wtII that later discretion would supply us with 
 the necessary freedom from a mechanical style, 
 but that unless we had the sense of time and 
 rhythm firmly implanted in us at the beginning 
 our future individualities of style would be built 
 on a shifting and insecure foundation. How 
 necessary this was any one can test for himself by 
 attending nine out of ten organ recitals that are 
 given in England. In playing Bach, or contra- 
 puntal music, the tendency of all players not so 
 drilled is to get faster and faster, which they do, 
 
 [ 40 ] 
 
A CATHEDRAL 
 
 having to bring themselves back to a tempo at 
 which they can play the notes at all by sudden 
 and obvious reining-in at difficult moments. It 
 is dreadfully nervous work to listen, say, to the 
 G Minor Organ Fugue of Bach played in this 
 way. A certain pace is set ; but if you keep the 
 rhythm of that pace in your head you will find 
 that by the time the fourth voice has entered the 
 tempo has increased almost by one half. The 
 result is that, instead of every note sounding clear 
 and separate, the composition from the middle 
 to the end is blurred and stumbled over in a 
 dreadful way, as though by adding more stops 
 and making more noise it had ceased to matter 
 whether all the notes were played or given their 
 natural value. This is sometimes called a broad 
 style of playing ; the large manner, tone-paint- 
 ing, and so on. Believe me, these are only other 
 names for slovenliness, inaccuracy, and digital 
 incapacity. The exciting tendency of all contra- 
 puntal music makes it necessary for the player to 
 apply to himself a kind of mental brake ; the 
 piece acquires momentum ; it is like a thing run- 
 ning down a hill ; true breadth and dignity are 
 only attained by getting the mass in check and 
 holding it, while still rolling forward, in true 
 restraint and control. 
 
 [ 41 ] 
 
MEMORIES OF 
 
 Organists sometimes wonder why their instru- 
 ment is unpopular among the majority of refined 
 and cultivated musicians ; or perhaps they would 
 even be surprised to learn that it is ; but I can 
 assure them of the fact ; and not only that, but 
 I say the detestation in which it is held by many 
 sensitive musicians is in far too many cases 
 amply justified. If public performers on the piano- 
 forte committed such faults as I have described 
 they would be laughed out of existence. By 
 these inartistic habits, however, organists have 
 brought upon themselves the disrepute in which, 
 as musicians, they are held. And unfortunately 
 they are all lumped together ; the really skilful 
 player, the artist and student, has to suffer for 
 the misdemeanours of the fumbling amateur 
 who, Sunday by Sunday, makes hideous the 
 service in the parish church. It is unfortunate 
 that the only experience many people have of 
 the organ is these dismal travesties of musical 
 performance ; yet it is not only the humble 
 village organist who is to blame, but often his 
 eminent and skilful superior. The organ is the 
 most dominating and magnificent of all musical 
 instruments, but it does not always attract the 
 most dominating and magnificent musical talent, 
 partly because its emotional range is (or ought to 
 
 [ 42 ] 
 
A CATHEDRAL 
 
 be) limited, and also because, like all magnificent 
 thing's, it becomes a terrible weapon in the hands 
 of the incompetent. It demands a greater exercise 
 of those two artistic qualities, taste and restraint, 
 than any other instrument ; and I think that I am 
 right in saying that in proportion to its demands 
 it probably receives less of these than any other 
 instrument. That is why the quiet routine of work 
 done for thirty-four years in the organ loft of my 
 cathedral should receive the gratitude and praise 
 of every artist and musician, since it was singly 
 directed to the inculcation and preservation of 
 purity of style. 
 
 VIII 
 
 It may interest the reader of these pages, who 
 perhaps associates the use of the org'an in church 
 with feelings of vague distress for which he 
 cannot quite account, to hear how the services 
 were played in the cathedral of my memory. I 
 have said how my master's own style is founded 
 on the great West of England school of organ- 
 playing, but he did not strictly follow it ; it stood 
 somewhere between those old leisurely days, when 
 it was customary before the Psalms for the 
 congregation to sit down and the organist to 
 
 [ 43 J 
 
MEMORIES OF 
 
 improvise a long and magnificent prelude, and 
 these later days, when there is a tendency to 
 gallop things through. His style was somewhat 
 different on Sundays and feast days, when there 
 was a large congregation, from the strict manner 
 in which the daily choir services were accom- 
 panied. The daily routine was invariable in form, 
 and to me always the most delightful thing in 
 it was the thirty or forty bars of prelude, which 
 almost invariably took one of two or three forms : 
 either it was a piece of pure part-playing on the 
 soft voices of the Choir organ, beginning in two 
 or three parts and extending to six or seven or 
 eight, always founded on a theme or germ of the 
 first few notes, a web full of inner melodies, 
 imitations, and suspensions, with most wonderful 
 harmonic changes arising out of them ; or else, 
 beginning in the same way, the left hand would 
 take up the theme on a quiet reed in the tenor 
 octave of the Swell organ, presently imitating it 
 in delightful duet and canon, with the thumb and 
 first finger dropped on to the Great organ with a 
 quiet flue stop drawn in contrast. The harmony 
 would always be kept above the parts with the 
 right hand on the Choir organ, calm and quiet ; 
 and often this method was productive of delight- 
 ful results. Or sometimes the solo part would be 
 
 L 44 ] 
 
A CATHEDRAL 
 
 confined to a single tenor reed on the Swell, and 
 would answ^er and interrogate the harmonic move- 
 ment of the parts on the Choir organ, with perhaps 
 a little cadenza, dropping to the dominant pedal 
 before the end. But it was always a perfect move- 
 ment in miniature. In all the hundreds of times I 
 have sat in the organ loft I have hardly ever 
 heard him ^'play in " at the daily services except 
 in one of these three \vays, and I can honestly 
 say I have never heard him repeat himself. The 
 playing of solos in the treble on a high stop with 
 an accompaniment in the middle register, so 
 beloved for the formless twiddlings of vicious 
 organists, is a thing 1 have never heard him do. 
 And in all this experience of hearing him ''play 
 in" I have never heard him use fancy stops, such 
 as the Voix Celeste, but always the quietest, 
 calmest tones, a real prelude in the devotional 
 mood. 
 
 The organ was, of course, not heard again 
 until the Psalms ; and in the accompaniment to 
 them again a very strict form, with infinite free- 
 dom in the treatment of it, was used. The first 
 verse was played full on the Great organ dia- 
 pasons which were practically never used again 
 until the Gloria. The rest of the verses were 
 either on the Choir organ, often without pedals ; 
 
 [ 45 ] 
 
MEMORIES OF 
 
 or with the body of the accompaniment on the 
 Swell organ, with perhaps some slow-moving 
 counterpoint held against the melody of the chant 
 by a single voice on the Choir or Solo organs ; 
 or sometimes with the melody itself played an 
 octave below on the Great organ on the Gamba 
 and Double Diapasons. In a long psalm infinite 
 variety of accompaniment was permitted, but it 
 was all kept very quiet, and where the upper part 
 on the organ was prominent it was never either 
 the melody of the chant or a counter melody 
 moving in the same time with it, but long holding- 
 notes, moving preferably by fourths and fifths 
 and octaves ; hardly ever by thirds and sixths, 
 except as mere passing notes. The Swell reeds, 
 which can so easily get monotonous and tiresome, 
 were used with the greatest reserve, and were 
 taken off again almost before one realised they 
 were there ; just sometimes and suddenly, and 
 underneath the running course of the chant, one 
 would feel rather than hear the muttering and 
 quaking of the sixteen and thirty-two foot pedal 
 pipes and the subdued reverberation and glow, 
 as of a line of fire running along a cloud bank, 
 of the Swell organ reeds. And immediately after 
 it, almost overlapping it, would be heard the 
 clear passionless tones of the Choir organ. 
 
 [ 46 ] 
 
A CATHEDRAL 
 
 Always in the last half verse before the Gloria 
 the Great-to-Pedal coupler was drawn — a very 
 old custom, the origin of which I have not been 
 able to discover, unless it was originally designed 
 to warn the clerks in the choir that the Gloria 
 had been reached. My cathedral being an old 
 collegiate church, it was the custom to turn to 
 the east at the Gloria ; and my associations with 
 that fine burst of praise are always, so far as 
 sound goes. Hill's beautiful diapasons, and, visu- 
 ally, the sight through the canopies of the rood 
 screen of the perspective of the choir, the violet 
 cassocks and scarlet hoods decorating the sombre 
 darkness of the oak stalls, and the Gothic decor- 
 ations of swine, gamecocks, bear-baiting, and 
 men playing backgammon. 
 
 The services, if of the old English school, were 
 played very strictly, the Choir organ without 
 pedals being used to accompany all the "verses " ; 
 or if of the modern school a freer and more 
 orchestral treatment was used. The anthem, if 
 it had no written prelude, was one of our points 
 of anticipation in the service ; usually it would 
 receive only a few bars of introduction, but some- 
 times, and especially in the twilight of an after- 
 noon in the fall of the year, the player would per- 
 haps imagine himself back in Bath or Gloucester 
 
 [ 47 I 
 
MEMORIES OF 
 
 or Winchester, and prelude the anthem in the 
 old grand manner, greatly to our edification and 
 the delight of the ^^gang" clustered under the 
 western archway. ^^ Playing out" was the next 
 and last point of interest. Here, again, he never 
 played a note of written music, although he by 
 no means approved of his own practice being 
 generally adopted in cathedrals. But he used to 
 say that at his weekly organ recitals people had 
 all the opportunities they needed for listening to 
 the performance of pieces, and that it was un- 
 necessary to give anything in the nature of a 
 performance at the cathedral ; otherwise, where 
 there is not a regular municipal organ recital, 
 people in cathedral towns generally expect to 
 hear some classical music at the close of the 
 afternoon services. But for all that, his improvised 
 movements were often elaborate enough, and en- 
 tirely different in style from the preludes to the 
 anthems in the services ; very free in form, but 
 again always unified by the presence of a really 
 happy and definite theme, and often exhibiting 
 astounding virtuoso feats of .contrapuntal and 
 executive dexterity. If he were in a happy mood 
 he would go on for a long time, sometimes for 
 ten or fifteen minutes ; and how the minor canons 
 used to hate it if perchance they had a christen- 
 
 [ 48 ] 
 
A CATHEDRAL 
 
 ing at the end of the service, and had to wait on 
 a cold winter afternoon shivering in the baptistery 
 until the magnificent music had come to an 
 end ! . . . And then we would troop out after him 
 across the ancient stones of the churchyard into 
 the gathering gloom, and out among the lights 
 and noises of the city; and so would end another 
 day of music. 
 
 IX 
 
 We are all living still, I believe ; this is not 
 a memoir of dead people, but of a dead life. We 
 are all living — all my contemporaries of the organ 
 loft, that is to say — but we are all scattered : the 
 piece of life that held us together is as dead and 
 vanished as any other nucleus of the many that 
 have kept spinning the thread of music in that 
 place for hundreds of years. A dean other than 
 the good friend who lies beneath the tessellated 
 pavement of the presbytery keeps his state in the 
 carved stall beneath the screen ; minor canons 
 and clerks-in-orders other than those whose voices 
 were so familiar to us continue to sing and recite 
 the same words ; another organist sits in the 
 seat of the mighty ; other pupils surround him, 
 and in their day, like us, will wear down their 
 
 D [ 49 ] 
 
MEMORIES OF 
 
 fraction of the stone spiral steps that lead to the 
 organ loft. I should be less than human if I did 
 not sigh over these changes. The successor^ of 
 my master is a musician and a scholar of dis- 
 tinction, who will doubtless bring new life and 
 new interest and a fresh point of view to his 
 work. But it will not be the same life or the same 
 interest or the same tradition. Why should it be ? 
 My master in his day came as a youth, an inno- 
 vator, a reformer ; and I hope that his successor, 
 when he shall have served so long, will in his 
 turn be regretted and deplored as one who upheld 
 the custom of old and good things, and whose 
 departure will cause head-shakings and doubtful 
 apprehension as to what is to come next. It is the 
 whole essence of life in this world : things that 
 are new become stale and old and customary, and 
 the innovation of to-day is the tradition of to- 
 morrow. It is the old tale of the generations 
 which we used to hear on the eighteenth morning 
 of every month : T/iou tu^mest man to destruction : 
 again thon saycst^ Come again^ ye children of 
 men. 
 
 You who wander in and out of cathedrals, 
 whose interest in them is chiefly architectural, 
 
 ^ Mr. Sydney J. Nicholson, M.A,, Mus.Bac. 
 
 [ 50 ] 
 
A CATHEDRAL 
 
 and whose knowledge and experience of their 
 service is fragmentary, who say, ^^The organ was 
 playing," or ''The choir was singing something 
 that sounded beautiful," have little knowledge of 
 the way in which that music binds together the 
 daily life of the place into a composite and cor- 
 porate whole. The daily singing of the Psalter is in 
 itself one of the most pleasant and enlightening 
 experiences that can fall to any man at the forma- 
 tive age ; in itself it is an education in literature and 
 poetry. The collegiate life of a cathedral, moreover, 
 is the nearest thing to the monastic life outside 
 the walls of a conventual establishment; but it is 
 associated with none of the cowardly evasions of 
 life that are implicit in the convent. Our life in 
 the cathedral was a thing entirely of our own ; 
 we never talked of it in the outside world, because 
 no one would have understood ; I used to wish 
 often that I could communicate or explain to 
 people I cared for something of the charm of that 
 life ; but it was of no use ; they merely thought 
 it odd that one should go to church so much. In 
 a strictly Protestant community a purely ritual 
 observance of religion is not in the least under- 
 stood ; and those who only associate religion with 
 emotional experiences of the soul and deeply 
 personal contemplations of spiritual life have no 
 
 [ 51 ] 
 
MEMORIES OF 
 
 idea of a reverence not associated with extreme 
 spiritual self-consciousness and inward concen- 
 tration. We never thought about such things. But 
 everything done daily and regularly at the same 
 time and in the same way becomes a rite and a 
 ceremony, and if it be in itself a fine thing, and 
 done well in a beautiful place, it becomes a highly 
 religious thing in the true sense of that word. 
 
 But this very isolation made us live, as we say, 
 a double life. All the rest of our time we were 
 secularists, out in the ordinary world, going to 
 dinners and to theatres, and never mentioning the 
 cathedral ; but once inside its gates we took up 
 the monastic life, forgot the world completely, 
 and existed for nothing but the office at which we 
 assisted. And I cannot help thinking that some 
 such rhythmic observance as this would have a 
 most unifying and steadying effect on the lives of 
 most men and women. To do regularly every day 
 something that is entirely outside your world ; 
 to do it in company or ^*in college," and to 
 see that it has nothing whatever to do with 
 the rest of your daily life, is soothing without 
 being deadening, and unifying without being 
 monotonous. It becomes in time a medium in 
 which the changing and disturbing experiences 
 of life can be quietly examined and seen in re- 
 
 [ 52 ] 
 
A CATHE'DRAL 
 
 lativc proportion to each other ; and a verse of 
 the Psalms, recurring rhythmically through the 
 months and the years, will come to have a strange 
 linking effect when you consider in what various 
 moods you have recited it. It comes round again 
 and again, like the sun and the moon and the 
 stars ; something regular and stable and im- 
 personal against which to measure the change 
 and flowing away of things that make one's own 
 life. And they are fortunate who, like us, have 
 taken their term of service in that ceremonial 
 world, who know the Psalter so well that any few 
 words together will suggest the whole of a long 
 context ; and not only suggest the context but 
 give it in memory a beautiful setting, perhaps of 
 a dark winter morning, with the candlelight 
 gleaming on polished oak, and the glowing pipes 
 of the organ case, and the ranks of violet and 
 snow and scarlet colour beneath the canopies ; 
 or of an April afternoon, with the sunlight 
 striking through the clerestory windows in dusty 
 slants and beams, and the solemn cadence of the 
 chant, and the shudder of harmony through the 
 building — and Spring waiting for you all riotous 
 outside. There were endless fragments of words 
 which had for me such definite associations of 
 time and place. ycs2/ diilcis monoria^ although 
 
 [ 53 ] 
 
MEMORIES OF 
 
 it belongs to the season of Epiphany, is a late 
 summer afternoon, warm and sleepy ; and Holy 
 Nighty Peace/id Nighty is reminiscent of the 
 Advent mists and chills, and lights in the empty 
 cathedral, and vespers on a Christmas Eve, and 
 cold fingers on the ivory keys. There was some- 
 thing lovely and primitive and indescribable in 
 the atmosphere here, and out there in the world 
 a suggestion of holly and feasting, and the ex- 
 pectation that takes a long while to die in the 
 hearts of those whose childhood has been happy. 
 And that wonderful picture of the king's daughter, 
 with her raiment of needlework and clothing of 
 wrought gold, signifies to me the spirit of true 
 festival, the frosty exhilaration of the traditional 
 Christmas morning, and many other things en- 
 tirely amiable and pleasant, such as exist only in 
 a world where all thy garments smell of myrrh^ 
 aloes ^ and cassia : out of the ivory palaces^ where- 
 by they have made thee glad. 
 
 X 
 
 Although the beginning of these associations 
 is so clearly and definitely in my mind, they re- 
 main otherwise undated and undistinguished, a 
 
 [ 54 ] 
 
A CATHEDRAL 
 
 glow in the perspective of memory, like the lights 
 of a town seen from far away at sea. I came to 
 the end of my pupilage ; I do not remember any- 
 thing about that, but there came the day when I 
 played for the last time, when I for the last time 
 took any part in the music of the organ loft. I 
 know that I often played after I ceased to be a 
 pupil, and I think that perhaps the last time I 
 took any formal part was after I came home from 
 South Africa, where I had been as a war-corre- 
 spondent, and I went to the cathedral one Sunday 
 afternoon to see my master. I felt that so much 
 had happened to me since I had sat there as a 
 pupil that I was a person considerably increased 
 in importance ; but if I had any such idea, it 
 vanished during the course of the service. There 
 was a hymn on Sunday afternoons after the 
 sermon, and I generally played it when I was 
 there, as my master preferred to continue the 
 pleasant doze into which the combined effects of 
 his lunch and the sermon never failed to cast him. 
 He went on, as usual, as if he were speaking to 
 a child of six years old : *'Do you know this 
 hymn? Can you play it? Well, then, go on and 
 play it quietly, but for goodness' sake be careful 
 and don't do anything ridiculous." He always 
 spoke to us as if we had just mastered the 
 
 [ 55 ] 
 
MEMORIES OF 
 
 elements of music and as if the playing of a simple 
 hymn tune was a doubtful and even rash experi- 
 ment which it was his unhappy duty to permit us 
 to attempt ; and if he heard another stop being 
 pulled out, or any quite ordinary addition being 
 made to the four-part harmony, he would moan 
 and squirm in his chair as if he were being torn 
 on the rack. He went on in just the same way on 
 this afternoon, and without the slightest justifi- 
 cation ; for whatever his pupils can or cannot do, 
 they know how to accompany choral harmony 
 on the organ. And at the end of it I remember 
 feeling thoroughly reduced, and that although I 
 might go to wars and write books, I should never, 
 never, never, in any circumstances, be able to 
 play the organ. 
 
 That is the last time I remember playing in 
 the cathedral. There is a magnificent new organ 
 there now, and I shall never play the old one 
 again ; so perhaps I had better write no more of 
 these memories. I have been deliberately prolong- 
 ing them, you see, because while I have been 
 writing them I have been living again those 
 years. They are not so long ago, but I feel that 
 if I do not write it down now, something of what 
 I fain would remember may be brushed away by 
 the constant passage of time and change. I have 
 
 [ 56 J 
 
A CATHE'DRAL 
 
 always promised myself to write this chapter, 
 both as an act of homage to the living and pious 
 commemoration of what is past and gone ; and 
 if I am reluctant to bring it to an end it is be- 
 cause I feel that with the last word of this page 
 that piece of life will definitely end for me. I 
 have had it in my mind for years ; and a thing 
 that one intends to write is always very much 
 alive and fluent ; but one possesses it only while 
 it remains unwritten. That is one reason why some 
 of the most beautiful stories are never written, 
 because once they are written they are dead and 
 done with to the writer. One must choose be- 
 tween keeping a thing for oneself and giving it 
 away to other people — one cannot do both. So 
 remember, when you read this, that although it 
 may be a small thing for you to receive, it is 
 a great thing for me to give. 
 
 [ 57 ] 
 
THE PLACE OF MUSIC 
 IN MODERN LIFE 
 
THE VLACE OF MUSIC 
 IN MODERN LIFE 
 
 THERE are periods in the world's age when 
 the great things that run through our 
 human history hke continuous threads 
 have to be reconsidered ; when our thought about 
 them has to be readjusted to the new ideas and new 
 conditions at which we have arrived in our journey. 
 No one who contemplates calmly the civilised 
 world to-day can pretend that ours is a moment of 
 deep spiritual or artistic growth. The present time 
 is essentially one in which the things of the spirit 
 — that is to say the arts and the philosophies — after 
 a time of great and rapid development, have to 
 come to a pause, and when material tilings are 
 developing so rapidly as to absorb almost the 
 whole of the world's time. This is a time of 
 spiritual and artistic maturity ; after a period of 
 growth and struggle there has come a |)ause, 
 in which these spiritual affairs of ours detach 
 themselves from the great onward -rushing tide 
 
 [ 6i ] 
 
THE PLACE OF MUSIC 
 
 of movement which we call progress, and are 
 floating as it were in still water, away from the 
 main current, away from the great pathway of the 
 world's progress ; out of sympathy with it per- 
 haps, but most certainly detached from it. In 
 every day, after the glory of the dawn and fresh- 
 ness of the early morning, after the fire has faded 
 from the skies and the dews have dried from the 
 fields of promise, there comes a time of stagnation 
 and flatness, when the air seems to hang heavily, 
 and the life and vitality to have departed from 
 the day. In every human life there is a similar 
 moment when, after emergence from the dreamy 
 realms of childhood, after the promises and the 
 enthusiasms and fires of youth have been a little 
 dulled and chilled by contact with the crude 
 realities of life, a flatness and weariness and 
 sense of disillusionment come like a cloud over 
 our existence, and the material asserts itself over 
 the spiritual. And so with that longer day and 
 greater and more complex life in which we image 
 the history of an age or a civilisation ; so with 
 the component currents of human efl'ort of which 
 that life is made up ; so, at some time or other, 
 with discovery, with invention, with religion, 
 with art ; these things all have their time of 
 accomplishment, and their time of pause. And 
 
 [ 62 ] 
 
IN MODERN LIFE 
 
 SO, among other arts, with the art of music — a 
 thing founded on phenomena which are as old as 
 the human race, but which in the form that we 
 know it now is the youngest of the family of arts, 
 one whose development through the last few 
 centuries has been increasingly rapid, whose birth 
 lies within the span of recorded human history, 
 and whose maturity we witness to-day. 
 
 Think, then, of music to-day as a mature, fully 
 evolved art, of the technique of which we would 
 appear to know practically everything there is to 
 be known ; and think of modern life as the exist- 
 ence of men and women in this world to-day, and 
 the special circumstances that make that existence 
 different from the lives of men and women of an 
 earlier age. In what way is the life we live more 
 suitable for the cultivation of music, in what way 
 is it less suitable than in the life of the last two 
 centuries, in which music came to its rapid and 
 splendid maturity? These, I think, are questions 
 worth considering. 
 
 Unfortunately, the moment one begins to talk 
 about modern life one is almost bound to begin 
 to talk in platitudes ; there are some things so 
 obvious and yet so true that they can only be ex- 
 pressed in a commonplace. We do live in an age 
 of hurry. We do live in a world where rapidity is 
 
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THE PLACE OF MUSIC 
 
 often counted higher than thoroughness, and 
 where the conditions of life demand a smattering 
 of information on many subjects, rather than a 
 depth of knowledge on any one. We do live in a 
 civilisation where such things as telegraphy, 
 railroads, telephones, mechanical substitutes for 
 labour, have enormously complicated the life of 
 every human being in our country, and where in 
 the hurry and glamour and chaotic activities of 
 the struggle we seem to drift farther and farther 
 away from that quieter, younger age that was the 
 golden age of the fine arts, where there was sun- 
 shine and silence, and room for the soul of man 
 to grow, and space for it to soar on its wings of 
 poetry and music. 
 
 It may seem absurd to suggest that music is an 
 anachronism here, and that where other things 
 are developing and changing and growing so 
 rapidly it alone is to be condemned to a state of 
 stagnation. Surely music, you may say, which is 
 such a living art, and so closely bound up with 
 the senses and emotions of mankind, can express 
 the particular spirit of every age ; surely it too 
 can move with the times, and readjust itself to a 
 new age and new conditions. I know that this 
 view is held by many ; but I should be dishonest 
 if I pretended that it was my view. I do not 
 
 [ 64 ] 
 
IN MODERN LIFE 
 
 believe that music can '^ move with the times " in 
 the common sense of that expression ; I do not 
 believe that music can be used as a happy or 
 suitable expression for the fluctuations of the 
 cotton market, for the spirit of wireless telegraphy 
 or valveless motor eng-ines, or for our emotions 
 about murder trials and rubber shares. Music is 
 no time-server. It is, and has always been, an 
 expression of the inner soul of man, the most 
 subtle form of expression known to us, but an 
 expression always of those great fundamental 
 emotions that are common, not to one country or 
 to one time, but to the soul of man in all times 
 and places. 
 
 Then, you say, why should it be any less at 
 home in our modern life than in the life of the 
 generations before us ? The answer is to be found 
 in those very conditions of modern life that 
 give it its distracting, hurrying, and un restful 
 character. Music, I have said, is primarily an 
 expression of the soul ; an escape, if you like, for 
 the imagination ; a means where we may be inde- 
 pendent of our immediate conditions, and escape 
 beyond them into a world of poetry and fantasy. 
 And the need for that escape is found in a simple 
 and quiet life rather than in a complex and hurry- 
 ing life — or to put it in an extreme wa\', the need 
 
 E [ 65 ] 
 
THE PLACE OF MUSIC 
 
 for this imaginative escape exists more in a dull 
 life than in an interesting- life. If all our activities 
 of thought and imagination are fully occupied by 
 the things around us, we shall not need to use 
 our imagination to escape into a more interesting 
 world ; in short, material things are so many, so 
 varied, and so engrossing, that we do not feel 
 the need of things of the spirit. 
 
 II 
 
 Let me try to make this rather obscure point 
 plainer by picturing the typical lives of two men. 
 The pne man lives, in an age other than this, in 
 a little country town far removed from any great 
 metropolitan activities. He is not rich, but his 
 means are, and have always been, sufficient for 
 his wants, and he lives in a dignified simplicity 
 into which it is hardly ever necessary for the 
 thought of money to enter. He has some regular 
 occupation connected with the life of the people 
 immediately about him, but he has leisure for 
 reading and cultivating himself, time to be a 
 student of any subject that interests him. The 
 mountains that tower above the little town, the 
 river that wanders through the meadows beyond, 
 
 [ 66 ] 
 
IN MODERN LIFE 
 
 the road that comes down through the valley and 
 goes on uito the unknown world — these all supply 
 him with material for interest, speculation, and 
 wonder. The mountains, though visible, are in- 
 accessible to him, and their peaks remain un- 
 spoiled by familiarity ; the river that has shone 
 and rippled through his childhood is a living 
 though speechless companion of his daily life ; 
 the road is for him a connecting link in the chain 
 that binds him to other worlds and other lives, 
 coming from one unknown and going on to an- 
 other. His human interests lie in the people and the 
 lives immediately round about him ; there is no 
 such thing as a newspaper, and letters are rare, 
 things brought by the hand of some chance 
 traveller, eagerly passed from hand to hand, read, 
 re-read, and discussed until their minutest interest 
 is threadbare. His excitements and distractions 
 are all on this minute scale, and are savoured and 
 enjoyed to their fullest extent, however small and 
 narrow they may be. In such a life imagine the 
 place of music — how enlarging to the horizon, 
 how deepening to the cultivation of that quiet 
 soul living that quiet life ! How lovingly would 
 not such a man study its secrets, how gladly 
 would he not give that labour that sweetens all 
 acquirement, how deeply would he not pore over 
 
 [ 67 ] 
 
THE PLACE OF MUSIC 
 
 the works of the masters until he became imbued 
 with their spirit ! Real growth, real artistic culti- 
 vation, real musical perception, would soon be 
 the mark of such a man, and to him and his 
 friends, living such a life in such a place, music 
 would be a great door opened into the world of 
 the spirit, at once employing and satisfying the 
 
 miagmation. 
 
 And now take another man. He lives in a 
 great city crowded with commerce, where labour 
 struggles against labour for a bare living, and 
 riches are piled on riches ; where the air is 
 darkened with smoke, and from dawn till night 
 the streets are filled with clamour and movement 
 and hurry. This man too has his occupation, but 
 it is an occupation that is never finished ; he 
 dares not pause or rest for fear some one should 
 step in and take his place ; whatever means he 
 has are not enough, for about him on every side 
 are people with more money, with greater means, 
 through whose example the standard of life goes 
 steadily up. He opens his daily paper every 
 morning, and immediately, as in a mirror, the 
 whole world lies open before him ; he sees the 
 explorer at work amid the ice-packs of the North ; 
 the life of a hundred famous or notorious people 
 is spread before him in minute detail ; he reads 
 
 [ 68 ] 
 
IN MODERN LIFE 
 
 the thoughts of his fcllow-mcn half a world away ; 
 he hears the strife of parliaments, witnesses the 
 rise and fall of kings, and sees the mine of revo- 
 lution fired, and rejiuhlics founded on the ashes 
 of dynasties. His imagination, in short, is more 
 than occupied. The swift trains can carry him 
 within an hour or two to the outer world in a 
 dozen different directions ; from that outer world 
 men and women come, daily mingling with and 
 confusing his own existence ; time and distance 
 are both annihilated, and the doings of the whole 
 world brought visibly and audibly before him. 
 Again, what room is there in such a life for imagi- 
 nation ? What place is there for music, or, more 
 truly, what time is there for music ? 
 
 F'or no one can cultivate music without giving 
 time and trouble to it. As there is no royal road 
 to learning of any kind, so there are no short 
 cuts to musical cultivation. The advertisements of 
 gramophone makers and the sellers of mechanical 
 piano-players tell us that the years spent in musi- 
 cal study are no longer necessary, that all the 
 charm, all the wonder, and all the cultivation of 
 music are open to any one, however ignorant, at 
 the cost of a few shillings and a succession of 
 monthly payments. There never was a greater lie 
 uttered. The ignoramus ma\' put the roll of a 
 
 [ 69 ] ' 
 
THE PLACE OF MUSIC 
 
 Beethoven sonata on his piano-player, turn the 
 necessary cranks and adjust the necessary levers, 
 and succeed in producing — what? At the best an 
 amazingly clever and life-like caricature of a musi- 
 cal performance — at the worst a hideous travesty 
 and debasement of the noblest artistic creations 
 of mankind. Depend upon it, it is by labour and 
 study, and by them alone, that we attain to any 
 real achievement or high artistic enjoyment ; and 
 this mechanical substitution, this effort to get 
 results without any expenditure of time or trouble 
 on the process, is to me one of the most pathetic 
 and futile things which our time has brought 
 forth. Let us deal with these mechanical inven- 
 tions once and for all, and then dismiss them 
 from our thoughts. Let us admit all their mar- 
 vellousness and their possibility, in the hands of 
 an artistic manipulator, for illusion and deception. 
 The more mechanically perfect they seem to be, 
 the more hateful they should be to us, and the 
 more strenuously we should set our faces against 
 any tolerance of them or traffic with them. For 
 music from beginning to end, from its inception 
 in the brain or impulse in the heart, to its utter- 
 ance by voice or instrument, is a thing of human 
 feeling, human touch, human effort. If we use 
 purely mechanical means of locomotion and move- 
 
 [ 70 ] 
 
IN MODERN LIFE 
 
 ment wc soon lose the use of our arms and legs ; 
 and so in music the cultivation of artificial and 
 mechanical processes will merely mean the neglect 
 and atrophy of our natural powers ; in a word, 
 cultivation of mechanical means of musical per- 
 formance must surely mean the ultimate loss of 
 power to invent music, loss of power to produce 
 it, and loss of power to enjoy it. 
 
 Ill 
 
 Music is cultivated in three great departments. 
 There is the music of the church, the music of 
 the concert-room and theatre, and the music of 
 the home. The first of these is allied to a depart- 
 ing thing, and will depart with it ; the other two 
 belong to our everyday life, and reflect its 
 characteristics. What is it in the music of the 
 theatre and concert-room that most flourishes to- 
 day? I am the first to admit the enormous strides 
 that public taste has made in orchestral music in 
 the last ten or fifteen years. Orchestral music has 
 become what it never was before — really popular 
 among musical amateurs ; and London, which 
 for some time lagged behind the North in its 
 appreciation and support of orchestral music, has 
 
 [ 7> ] 
 
THE PLACE OF MUSIC 
 
 now probably more orchestral performances, 
 attended by more people, than any other city 
 in the world. This is largely due to the develop- 
 ment of the modern art of conducting and the 
 consequent improvement in orchestral playing, 
 and the consequent unlocking of a whole treasure- 
 house of sound to the general public. But it still 
 remains a fact that orchestral music does not 
 *^pay" in the large sense of the word, and if one 
 wants a rough test for what is popular, not with 
 amateurs predisposed to be interested, but with the 
 public at large, one had better apply the money test. 
 There are no fortunes to be made in running 
 orchestras or giving orchestral concerts. Neither 
 will any one seriously contend that grand opera 
 is popular in England. It is of no use to say that 
 it ought to be, that it would be under such and 
 such conditions ; the fact for our immediate con- 
 sideration is that it is not — that is to say, that 
 people will not pay to hear operas in sufficient 
 numbers to make it financially worth any one's 
 while to produce them. The heroic struggles of 
 the Carl Rosa Company have proved it in the 
 past. The equally heroic efforts of the Moody 
 Manners Company are proving it in the present ; 
 and though Mr. Thomas Beecham has done 
 admirable work with his opera season in London, 
 
 [ 72 ] 
 
IN MODERN LIFE 
 
 and is getting any amount of appreciation and 
 support, we must not forget that there is a well 
 from which the general public is believed to 
 draw health, and from which Mr. Beecham is 
 believed to draw wealth. In short, the fact that 
 Mr. Beecham is very generously and patriotically 
 spending his father's money on the production of 
 operas does not alter the fact that opera is not 
 closely enough in touch with modern life in Eng- 
 land to be economically possible. 
 
 What, then, is popular? We have one thing that 
 really does flourish in England as it flourishes 
 nowhere else, and that is so-called musical 
 comedy. Serious musicians are too apt to despise 
 these productions, but they have survived the 
 criticism of the learned and the denunciation of 
 musical enthusiasts, myself included, and they 
 have proved that they do belong in a very real 
 way to the life of our time. I remember in my 
 own early days as a musical critic, when I must 
 admit these musical comedies had not reached 
 the high standard they have reached since, in- 
 volving my newspapers in more than one libel 
 action by Mr. George Edwardes, on account of 
 my denunciation of his productions on artistic 
 grounds ; but I should be less than honest if I 
 did not now admit that time and development 
 
 [ 73 ] 
 
THE PLACE OF MUSIC 
 
 have proved me wrong ; that there was a germ 
 of real life in these things, and that it has lived 
 and developed into a mode of expression pecu- 
 liarly English. For we must remember that the 
 great characteristic of English music in its best 
 days was always its gaiety ; it was never melan- 
 choly, never romantic, never savage or barbaric ; 
 it was always gay, gay with the gaiety of the 
 English country-side, of village songs and games, 
 and romping dances in the meadows, and the 
 bucolic hilarity of the tavern. Well, much of that 
 has gone from us. The gaiety of the country-side, 
 the games and village dances have vanished ; but 
 still, when the thread of English music reasserts 
 itself, it is found, though wonderfully transformed, 
 to be still uttering its gay message. What is it 
 we have always most needed in England, with 
 our heavy climate and grey cloudy skies, with 
 our sternness and thoroughness and dignity? 
 A little laughter, surely. It has always been the 
 thing missing from our composition, and the 
 thing with which the divine art has tried to 
 supply us. Now to-day we are all a little jaded, 
 a little tired, a little worried ; though we cannot 
 repair to the meadow-side, or join in the happy 
 ridiculous games of former generations, we go to 
 the theatre and laugh at the ridiculous situations 
 
 [ 74 ] 
 
IN MODERN LIFE 
 
 invented for us there, and in the music that 
 accompanies them we have found something that 
 evidently answers to some need in us, so that the 
 airs that are born there are whistled and sung in 
 the country-side, and, as much as any music can, 
 become part of our national life. I say not a word 
 in criticism of this music, whether it is good or 
 bad ; that is beside my point here. It is a part of 
 our life, and it is one of the supreme expressions 
 of music in our modern life. But we may admit 
 that, without overrating its importance, or with- 
 out denying the enormous share that the dresses, 
 the scenery, and the personalities of the people 
 taking part in these performances have in 
 spreading the popularity of the music. 
 
 This frivolous expression of music is at one 
 end of the scale ; but at the opposite end there is 
 another way in which it enters very considerably 
 into our modern life, and that is the economic 
 way. Music has been pressed into the great 
 service of wage-earning to such an extent that 
 its practice as an art threatens often to be obliter- 
 ated by its practice as a trade or profession. 
 There are many institutions in this country which 
 exist almost solely for equip})ing those who join 
 them to be teachers of music — the success or 
 failure of which is judged on almost purely 
 
 [ 75 ] 
 
THE PLACE OF MUSIC 
 
 economic grounds. Now the teaching of music 
 is not a thing for which every musician is fitted, 
 and because a student is a successful performer, 
 it by no means follows that he or she will be a 
 successful teacher. And here, I think, we touch 
 upon a very real weakness of some of these in- 
 stitutions. Those who join them in order to learn 
 a trade, whose parents invest so much money with 
 the idea that in a few years it will be able to earn 
 so much more, do not, in many cases, pursue 
 their studies with any very real deep devotion to 
 the subject, but too often with a view merely to 
 acquire the necessary smattering that will enable 
 them to earn fees by giving lessons. The teachers 
 of music are thus divided very sharply into two 
 classes. There is the genuine artist who works 
 and studies hard, seeking always to perfect him- 
 self in his particular branch of music ; a singer, 
 or a player perhaps, who finds himself unable to 
 live on the engagements that he can get as a per- 
 former. There is no help for such a one, except 
 in teaching ; not the teaching of geniuses, but of 
 any one who will come — often far removed from 
 genius. There is no sadder thing in the world 
 than to see some really artistic spirit gradually 
 crushed and wearied by the drudgery of teaching, 
 and its bright wings, that aspired to mount to the 
 
 [ 76 ] 
 
IN MODERN LIFE 
 
 sun, soiled with the dust of the earth in the 
 struggle for an actual living. To those genuinely 
 artistic spirits, thoroughly sound musicians per- 
 haps, but without the superlativeness of voice or 
 technique which alone to-day commands a wide 
 hearing, the modern world is no friendly place, 
 and modern life is no easy condition. Such people 
 necessarily live completely out of harmony with 
 the world about them. Their ambition is the 
 attainment of perfection, and perfection is a 
 luxury which they are neither allowed to attain 
 themselves, nor assist others to the attainment of. 
 If they have a brilliant pupil, he or she soon 
 passes into other hands ; the dull ones require 
 results of some kind in the shortest possible time, 
 and with the least possible expenditure of money; 
 to be taught how to get through a song or piano- 
 forte piece, in a way that will secure the admira- 
 tion of their uncritical friends, is all they want. 
 And in the deadly struggle for life the artist is 
 again and again forced down into the prosecution 
 of this melancholy business, until too often his faith 
 in himself, and even in his art, is lost, and he 
 becomes a mere drudge in the economic service. 
 In such a life it can hardly be said that music is in 
 harmony with modern conditions. 
 
 With the other kind of teacher, the one who 
 
 [ 77 ] 
 
THE PLACE OF MUSIC 
 
 deliberately goes into music as into any other 
 trade, we need have less sympathy. The spread 
 of cheap education has broken down the barriers 
 that divided one economic class from another, and 
 that formerly kept the different departments of 
 labour clearly separated. A girl, let us say, who 
 under normal conditions would have earned her 
 living as a shop assistant, or a clerk, or a waitress, 
 is discovered to have a voice above the average. 
 In former days she would not have had the 
 necessary small amount of general education to 
 allow her to pretend to be a teacher of anything ; 
 now, however, she has just enough to disguise 
 her often deep and extreme ignorance. She is 
 sent to a college of music, her voice cultivated, 
 a smattering of subsidiary musical studies is 
 added, and in three years she is launched out on 
 the world as a professional singer and teacher. 
 She secures a few local engagements, enough to 
 make her conspicuous and give her the neces- 
 sary advertisement, and pupils come to her. She 
 has probably no deep musical feeling, and was 
 impelled on her course by no deep artistic im- 
 pulse ; what she knows of music she has learned 
 as she would have learned any other trade. The 
 drudgery of teaching is to her merely the drudgery 
 of time and trouble ; there is no soul weariness, 
 
 [ 78 ] 
 
IN MODERN LIFE 
 
 no degradation and blunting- of fine artistic per- 
 ception, for she has possibly very little soul to 
 weary, and probably no artistic perception to 
 degrade. She makes more money than she would 
 have made at some of the other trades open to 
 her — for a little while, that is to say. But what 
 about her future ? This branch of musical eco- 
 nomics does not always bear looking into ; the 
 position of the old artist and teacher, with which 
 we are all familiar, is a sufficiently melancholy one. 
 But in the case under our consideration the same 
 commercial instinct which prompted the young 
 woman to take up music has probably, at the right 
 moment, also caused her to drop it before it has 
 finally dropped her. And there, again, music, in 
 the true sense of the word, enters very little into 
 the affair, and we cannot say that here music is 
 otherwise than out of touch with the conditions 
 of modern life. 
 
 IV 
 
 I could multiply instances of this kind to any 
 extent, and in a way rather depressing to those 
 who love and study music for itself; but they 
 only tend to strengthen and support my theory, 
 
 [ 79 ] 
 
THE PLACE OF MUSIC 
 
 that all attempts to change the character of music 
 with the changed character of our age ; all 
 attempts to force it from what it is into some- 
 thing that it is not and cannot be ; all efforts 
 to turn an artistic and spiritual thing into an 
 economic and commercial thing; in a word, all 
 efforts to make music move with the times are 
 bound to end in failure. What place, then, has 
 music in our modern life? I believe that it has a 
 very real place and use with us to-day. And the 
 great use of music in modern life, it seems to me, 
 may be expressed in a paradox. Its use in modern 
 life is as a means of escape from modern life. Its 
 value to us lies, not in its likeness to the con- 
 ditions around us, but in its difference from them ; 
 not in its correspondence with our everyday life, 
 but in its contrast to it. It is a lifebelt which will 
 preserve those who carry it from altogether sink- 
 ing in the welter of sordid material conditions 
 about them ; it is a fiery chariot that will catch us 
 up out of cares and struggles here, and bear us 
 to a world of serene and exalted things. Poetry 
 and music, as Hector Berlioz said, are the two 
 wings of the soul ; and as it has in all times been 
 regarded as a means of rising beyond the limita- 
 tions of material conditions into the free world of 
 the spirit, so, more truly to-day than ever, it may 
 
 [ Ho ] 
 
IN MODERN LIFE 
 
 Still be regarded. And to those who have chosen 
 music as the main work and study of their lives, 
 and who are not infrequently confronted with 
 these very questions of its apparent incompati- 
 bility with the general run of the world's thought 
 and interest to-day, I cannot help feeling that it 
 will be a great strength, a great consolation, and 
 a great encouragement to them if they will think 
 of music in this way, as having nothing whatever 
 to do with the material interests and affairs of 
 mankind, but as belonging to another world, 
 another dimension, another element. 
 
 How often at sea is one not awed and con- 
 founded, if one's eye is raised no higher than the 
 horizon, by the tumult and desolation of the 
 waters, the busy, tiresome, laborious activities of 
 the ship, the grinding and commotion, the throb- 
 bing and pulsing, the humming of winds and 
 roar and crashing of waves. Yet raise your e)'es 
 above the salt wilderness of water, above the 
 labouring ship, above the swinging mast-heads, 
 and there, visibly above you, is a world of peace, 
 unbroken and eternal, where stars are shining 
 quietly, and whither the tumults of the sea do 
 not reach. And those of us with the cultivation 
 and perception to appreciate great music have 
 always close at hand just such another world, 
 F [ 8i ] 
 
THE PLACE OF MUSIC 
 
 another element in which our spirits may refresh 
 themselves. There never was a time when we 
 more needed such an escape ; there never was a 
 time when material things were so pressing; when 
 the clamour and tumult of the world was so out- 
 rageous ; when the ground-tone of life itself was 
 so deafening as to dull our ears to all its finer 
 harmonics. We need music more than ever in the 
 world to-day, and the mission of those who culti- 
 vate it is a higher and more sacred mission than 
 ever it was. It is no longer for the mere adorn- 
 ment and elegance of life that they labour, but 
 for spiritual life itself; it is not to give the musical 
 spirit more balmy airs to breathe, but for its very 
 breath they are fighting. 
 
 It goes without saying that there are certain 
 kinds of music that appeal to us more easily 
 to-day than other kinds. It is always easy to 
 listen to Wagner or Chopin, because there is in 
 all their music a trace of that emotional fever that 
 is never far below the surface of our modern life ; 
 but it is often hard to get into the necessary 
 frame of mind to be able to enjoy the music of 
 Beethoven or Mozart. We must all have been 
 aware of experiencing this difficulty of going into 
 a concert-room and lookino- forward to hearino* 
 a favourite symphony, and finding when it came 
 
 [ 82 ] 
 
IN MODERN LIFE 
 
 to be played that it had nothing to say to us, that 
 we were not in the mood for it, that we were 
 listening to its notes without really hearing it. 
 All very serious music requires an atmosphere, a 
 stimmiuig to be established, before it can really 
 come to life, and this atmosphere is one which it 
 is increasingly hard to establish, in proportion as 
 it becomes farther and farther removed from the 
 atmosphere in which we live our lives. All cham- 
 ber music needs it; for example, how often is one 
 really in the mood to appreciate or even enjoy a 
 Beethoven quartette? Such things have really no 
 part with our everyday life ; they belong to a re- 
 gion of things into which we must deliberately enter 
 if we are to appreciate or enjoy them, and that 
 region is very far from the region which we in- 
 habit during the greater part of our waking lives. 
 In a simpler age it lay near at hand, and from 
 the daily life of the seventeenth and eighteenth 
 centuries it was but a step into that world, now so 
 spiritually removed from us. Between the life of 
 London to-day, with its high pressure, its domi- 
 nation by money, its fierce battles, the endless 
 struggle for life that is going on in it, the end- 
 less grim effort to keep a foothold at all amid its 
 jostling crowds, the tremendous hurry iiig tide 
 and torrent of activity that roars for ever in our 
 
 [ 83 ] 
 
THE PLACE OF MUSIC 
 
 ears — ah ! between that and the quiet Httle world 
 of candleHght in a home in some German coun- 
 try town, two hundred years ago, what a contrast ! 
 Could we but open the windows of our mental 
 vision, and see the little family group surround- 
 ing the open scores, and steeping themselves in 
 the joy and understanding of deep and true 
 music, what peace and refreshment might we 
 not find ! 
 
 Well, it is to some extent possible for us to do 
 it still ; that world lies still within our reach, 
 although the journey to it becomes longer and 
 longer every day. It is very hard for the in- 
 dividual to reach it alone. The atmosphere that 
 I have spoken of may be, and is, still established 
 where a number of people who really care for 
 music gather together and work at it. Such 
 things as quartette parties and singing societies, 
 even though the standard of performance which 
 they attain may not be a very high one, are in- 
 valuable aids to the cultivation of music in our 
 life to-day. One of the strongest and healthiest 
 branches of English music is to be found in the 
 choral societies and bands of the provincial towns 
 of England. And why? Just because they involve 
 the association of people, the meeting together 
 with the one purpose of working at and studying 
 
 [ 84 ] 
 
IN MODERN LIFE 
 
 music, and, consequently, that temporary escape 
 from ordinary life, which I have emphasised as 
 being" the most vakuible thing" that music can 
 give us to-day. 
 
 The main thing to be striven for to-day is the 
 cultivation of a musical atmosphere. It is less 
 important for the moment that we should pro- 
 duce new music than that we should cultivate an 
 atmosphere in which music that has already been 
 produced can be heard and enjoyed. That really 
 is the thing that is in danger to-day. There is no 
 danger that we shall lose our technical accom- 
 plishments, for there never was an age when 
 technique was in such a high state of perfection 
 as it is to-day. It is unlikely that we shall lack 
 performers or producers of music. What we may 
 come to lack is listeners — not because the world 
 will have grown weary of music, or will come to 
 need it any the less, but because in the crowded 
 material conditions of modern life the atmo- 
 sphere in which people can listen at all may be- 
 come less and less easy of attainment. And the 
 establishment of that atmosphere, whenever and 
 wherever it is possible, is the best service that 
 we can render music to-day. Thus shall we 
 preserve it, not as part of our modern life, but 
 
 [ 85 ] 
 
MUSIC IN MODERN LIFE 
 
 as a part of that greater life that is not ancient 
 or modern, but universal and eternal, into which 
 our spirits may escape in hours of heaviness or 
 oppression. 
 
 [ 86 ] 
 
THE MUSICIAN AS 
 COMPOSER 
 
THE MUSICIAN AS 
 COMPOSER 
 
 IN considering the position In the modern 
 world of the musician whose office it is, 
 not to hear or interpret music, but to 
 create it, we must realise how very widely the 
 attitude of the composer towards his art differs 
 from that of the ordinary person who merely 
 takes part, or hears, or enjoys music. The attitude 
 of most of us towards music is a passive one. 
 Music is a thing which we receive. It falls, an in- 
 fluence from outside ourselves, on minds occupied 
 with other things ; it tells us something for which 
 we are not prepared, something which we do not 
 know ; it is news from the spiritual world ; our 
 attitude towards it is entirely receptive. But the 
 composer's attitude towards it is different ; with 
 him it is a creative thing. It comes from within 
 himself, and is uttered forth to the world around 
 him ; it is a fountain that is always springing in 
 
 [ 89 ] 
 
THE MUSICIAN 
 
 his mind ; his mind is always occupied with it, it 
 is always there, and when he utters it, it is only 
 that a part of his mind is projected into the 
 surrounding world, and endowed with form and 
 utterance. Even when he is listening to music 
 not his own he more often than not hears it 
 from the composer's standpoint rather than the 
 hearer's ; he sees it, not as a stream coming to- 
 wards him, but as a stream going out from his 
 direction even though its source was not within 
 himself. He thinks of it as thouo-h he had written 
 it himself; in short, his attitude is the very 
 opposite of that of most of us. 
 
 At first sight it would seem as though this 
 made for disunion and lack of sympathy between 
 the composer and his audience ; but it is not 
 really so, for it is a comparatively modern dis- 
 tinction, that between composer and listener. In 
 its origin, primitive music knew no such thing as 
 a composer. The performer came first, for I sup- 
 pose someone once sang in the world, sang for 
 very joy of life, when perhaps there was no other 
 human soul to listen, and undoubtedly the per- 
 former is the most ancient and venerable of the 
 musical brotherhood. The audience would come 
 next ; for there would come a day when the singer 
 who sang to himself would sing to someone else, 
 
 [ 90 ] 
 
AS COMPOSER 
 
 and wish to have a sharer in his emotion of joy 
 or ardour or melancholy. But there was no such 
 thing as a composer in those days, except in so far 
 as the singer was the composer ; it would be more 
 true to say that even the singer did not consciously 
 invent what he sang, but was simply inspired by 
 emotion within himself, or by the influence of 
 things external to himself, to utter some vague 
 and primitive expression of elementary and primi- 
 tive emotions. The composer, in that case, was 
 no individual man or woman, but the spirit of 
 life itself singing in the heart, and uttering itself 
 in the voice of man. In short, in its primitive 
 beginnings music was universal, like speech or 
 sight or hearing ; it belonged to everybody, and 
 nobody thought of associating any of its varieties 
 of expression with any particular individual. 
 
 But as time went on, it would be noticed that 
 of all the men and women who made use of 
 rhythms or vocal melodies to express their emo- 
 tions some had a greater freedom of range than 
 others ; that it was more instantl\- apparent what 
 certain singers meant to express than what others 
 meant ; that it was more agreeable to listen to 
 some than to others ; that while the emotions 
 expressed by some were always agreeable, those 
 expressed by others were always disagreeable ; 
 
 [ 91 ] 
 
THE MUSICIAN 
 
 that the utterance of some gave pleasure, and the 
 utterance of others, pain. If we were all obliged 
 to express our particular emotion of the moment 
 in song, exactly the same result would be apparent; 
 an impartial jury would decide that, quite apart 
 from the nature of the emotion which we were 
 trying to express, the mere manner of expression 
 would, in some cases, be a pleasant thing to 
 listen to, and in other cases not pleasant at all. 
 It is easy to imagine, then, that people in the 
 primitive world would begin to cultivate this 
 pleasure ; that when it was known that such and 
 such a member of the tribe was in love, or in 
 a temper, or was bewailing the loss of something, 
 it would be worth while strolling round in the 
 direction of his cave in order to hear the per- 
 formance. We may take this as an indication 
 that even in the Flint and Stone ages there may 
 have been such people as *^stars." From grubbing 
 among the roots, and chipping experimentally 
 with bones and flints, it would be a pleasant 
 change to listen to a fellow-creature making a 
 succession of vocal sounds, and to speculate as to 
 what they may mean. In some such way may the 
 aesthetic life have had its origin. 
 
 This discovery that some people were better 
 equipped in the vocal expression of emotion than 
 
 [ 92 ] 
 
^J' COMPOSER 
 
 Others would lead, first of all, to an unconscious 
 differentiating between the vocal and the unvocal, 
 to a certain degree of competition, to the cultiva- 
 tion of the gift of musical expression in order 
 that, in love or battle, or for any of the time- 
 honoured guerdons for which men have struggled 
 and contested since the world began, this gift 
 might be used as an advantage ; and there would 
 come a preference for a certain kind of musical 
 expression, and the discovery that it was to be 
 heard at its best from such and such a man ; just 
 as later, when people began to tell each other 
 tales and stories, some men got great renown as 
 tale-tellers, not only for the substance of their 
 stories, but for their manner in telling them. And 
 later still, when people wanted songs of their 
 own, but could not make them or sing them to 
 their own satisfaction, when they perhaps could 
 think of words to sing, but not of pleasant sounds 
 to fit to the words, they would apply to some of 
 these gifted ones to fit a lilt or a cadence to their 
 halting words. And thus began the differentiation 
 of music as to its creative and receptive aspects ; 
 thus, in short, was evolved the composer. 
 
 But the composer of to-day is far removed from 
 his primitive ancestor. How does he stand ? What 
 is his equipment? He has become the master and 
 
 [ 93 ] 
 
THE MUSICIAN 
 
 controller of a battery of technical and scientific 
 apparatus that, strange to say, has not restricted, 
 but enormously increased, his power to express 
 emotion. We will consider three things about this 
 composer : first, where his equipment has come 
 from ; secondly, what it is ; and thirdly, what he 
 is to do with it. And first, as to the source of the 
 modern composer's equipment or technique. It 
 rests, in my opinion, broadly on one thing ; I 
 mean (thinking for the moment of music as it 
 appears written, and not as one listens to it), the 
 horizontal aspect of music as opposed to the 
 vertical aspect. We are all familiar with musical 
 notation, those staves of five lines on which are 
 noted signs expressing sounds of greater or lesser 
 duration, and of higher or lower pitch. I want 
 you to imagine for a moment the appearance of 
 a melody written along one such stave : 
 
 q- 
 
 =l=g^-EF^=r=g'=^ 
 
 Sgi 
 
 a kind of waving horizontal ribbon of notes — let 
 us say a banner of sound, like a banner streaming 
 in the wind. And now think of a chord as it 
 appears written on such a stave — a vertical bar 
 
 [ 94 ] 
 
AS COMPOSER 
 
 of notes all sounding" togfether, expressing one 
 short pulse of sound, and not a prolonged con- 
 nected stream of sound. 
 
 g 
 
 w 
 
 The harmonic chord Is like a staff planted in 
 the ground from which the banner of melody 
 floats and flows. Now there are certain kinds of 
 music which, looked at on the printed page, 
 appear to us in horizontal lines of melody, un- 
 interrupted by the vertical pulses of chords. A 
 fugue of Bach's is a good example of such music. 
 And there are other kinds of music which look 
 like a succession of chords, the appearance of 
 which is that of a succession of vertical lines, or 
 columns of notes, scattered over the page. A 
 mazurka of Chopin's, with the exception of the 
 ornamented stream of melody on the top, would 
 present this appearance. And these two kinds of 
 music, which I call vertical and horizontal, re- 
 present an immense cleavage and difference in 
 method of musical expression. The oldest forms 
 of written music that are at all scientific arose 
 from the old church melodies, and from the dis- 
 covery that it was possible to combine two notes 
 
 [ 95 ] 
 
THE MUSICIAN 
 
 of different pitch, that it was even possible to 
 combine two simple melodies simultaneously, 
 provided the notes composing them were written 
 in accordance with certain simple acoustic rules. 
 From them was evolved the quite elaborate poly- 
 phonic music of Palestrina and the Italian Church 
 school, which was horizontal music pure and 
 simple. Music continued to be written in this 
 way, and although very archaic and beautiful and 
 suitable for the grave expression of church music, 
 it was an essentially narrow and restricted form 
 of expression, in which rhythm was lacking ; 
 until Bach, by informing it with freedom of 
 movement and genius of melodic invention, gave 
 it new life, and adapted it to practically the 
 whole needs of musical expression at the time. 
 
 The genius of Bach, however, was unique. No 
 one before him — and certainly no one since — has 
 been able to combine the beauty of outline, per- 
 fection of classical feeling and freedom and 
 height and depth of expression, with severity of 
 form in the way that he combined them. The 
 result was that the horizontal kind of music, in 
 which Bach achieved such perfection, did not 
 develop in his successors, but rather for a time 
 went back. The next development of music was 
 in what is called the romantic direction ; that is 
 
 [ 96 ] 
 
AS COMPOSER 
 
 to say, it broke away from strictness and severity 
 of form, or rather developed itself in newer and 
 freer forms. After the fugue came the sonata, 
 and as the sonata did not lend itself to the hori- 
 zontal treatment of music, it followed, as a natural 
 result, that music after Bach became vertical 
 ao*ain. The music of Beethoven and Mozart is 
 practically all of the vertical kind ; and the great 
 influence of Beethoven on musical form, the free- 
 dom and range of expression which he introduced 
 into music, practically kept what I call the ver- 
 tical form of music in existence for a century. 
 Mendelssohn showed a slight tendency to revert 
 to the polyphonic style, the horizontal method of 
 music, but it was only a slight tendency ; and 
 with Schumann, Chopin, and Meyerbeer the 
 vertical form of instrumental music reached its 
 extreme of freedom and development. But with 
 Wagner a great change came. I do not think it 
 is sufficiently realised yet how directly in the line 
 of descent from Bach Wagner stands. W^ith 
 Wagner music became horizontal again, and has 
 remained so ever since ; by that I mean that its 
 greatest development has been along the line ot 
 polyphonic treatment. But Wagner did more than 
 merely restore music to the horizontal, he enor- 
 mously developed that form of treatment ; and 
 
 G [ 07 1 
 
THE MUSICIAN 
 
 next after Bach, the modern composer's equip- 
 ment comes chiefly from Wagner. In Bach's day 
 the composer thought, so to speak, in voices ; 
 four parts, or six parts, or eight parts were the 
 extremes to which his polyphonic treatment 
 went ; but BerHoz and Wagner, by their enor- 
 mous freedom and extension of the use of the 
 orchestra, entirely changed the composer's method 
 of conceiving music. Instead of four or eight 
 parts, or as many parts as there were voices, 
 Wagner had as many parts as there were instru- 
 ments or tone colours ; and by recognising the 
 individuality of every instrument in the orchestra, 
 by realising that every part should be a melody, 
 instead of only the top part, he did for the orches- 
 tra what Bach had done for the chorus ; music 
 was horizontal again, but enormously enriched 
 and complicated by the fact that the horizontal 
 lines were not mere voices of different pitch, but 
 streams of different tone colour, and of different 
 quality. The fabric that in Bach's hands had 
 been woven of one sober colour became shot 
 with myriad shades and hues, so that the instru- 
 mental composer may now be said to think in 
 tone colours rather than in voices. And every 
 one of these colours and shades of colour is now 
 recognised by the composer as having, so to 
 
 [ 98 ] 
 
AS COMPOSER 
 
 Speak, a right to individual existence ; one part 
 of the horizontal fabric is as important as another, 
 and the modern ear is trained not merely to listen 
 to the notes at the top of the column of sound, 
 but to attend to, and listen for, simultaneous 
 melodies sounding throughout the whole stream 
 of sound. The most modern of modern composers, 
 Debussy, is also in the direct line of Bach and 
 Wagner. The strangeness of his music, which is 
 chiefly due to his use of a modal scale, and the 
 consequent unfamiliarity to our ears of so many 
 of his harmonies and his sequences, does not 
 disguise the fact that this extremely delicate and, 
 in some ways, decadent art of his, rests not on 
 mere waywardness, but on a profound scholar- 
 ship, and a deep knowledge of those fundamental 
 principles which Bach fixed for ever as the laws 
 of music. 
 
 II 
 
 So much for the sources of the modern com- 
 poser's equipment. We will now consider for a 
 little what that equipment is — what are the means 
 at the disposal of the artist who wishes to give 
 musical expression to his ideas. One is struck at 
 once by the enormous extent and complication 
 
 [ 99 ] 
 
THE MUSICIAN 
 
 of the mere technical side of this art as compared 
 with any other. Compare the materials of the 
 composer's art with that, say, of the painter's or 
 the sculptor's or the poet's. The poet, given pen 
 and paper, or one human voice, can complete 
 and present a masterpiece ; the sculptor needs 
 some clay, a few cloths, and a block of stone or 
 marble, a mallet and half a dozen chisels, and 
 quite primitive steel instruments ; the painter 
 needs a few brushes, four or five elementary pig- 
 ments, a little oil, a knife, and a plane surface : 
 with such materials, and nothing more, the 
 greatest pictorial masterpiece in the world is 
 realised. But consider the resources of the com- 
 poser, and especially of the modern composer — 
 consider what he has to acquire before he can 
 handle the simplest material. If he is a great 
 natural performer, it is true that he can impro- 
 vise his compositions, and so produce his master- 
 pieces with no other machinery but his fingers 
 and a keyboard ; but even so, such a performer 
 only touches a corner of the great field of musical 
 possibility. The modern composer has first of all 
 to master what is nothing more nor less than an 
 extremely intricate system of mathematics. The 
 natural inner ear of the composer may lead him 
 to write music well and grammatically, but it 
 
 [ 100 ] 
 
^J- COMPOSER 
 
 does not release him from the necessity of know- 
 ing" that compHcated mathematical system of 
 notes which we call harmony and counterpoint ; 
 his genius may enable him to grasp it without 
 trouble, and almost by instinct, but he is bound 
 to have it. He has to study the human voice in 
 its several varieties, and to know what it is and is 
 not capable of. He has to know the construction 
 and technique of keyed instruments, such as the 
 pianoforte and organ ; of another group of in- 
 struments known as stringed instruments ; of 
 another group known as wood-wind instruments; of 
 another entirely different group known as brass in- 
 struments ; and of another known as instruments 
 of percussion. Within these several groups are 
 again varieties and subdivisions, containing in- 
 struments and technique and a method of playing 
 which are entirely different, and the study and 
 performance of each one of which is a life's work 
 for one man. Further, the composer must know 
 by experience all the effects to be got by the 
 countless changes in combination of all these 
 instruments, and of their combination collect- 
 ively and individually with voices. And when he 
 has done this he has, so to speak, only dealt with 
 the raw material of his equipment. He has to study 
 musical form, and to train his mind in qualities 
 
 [ loi ] 
 
THE MUSICIAN 
 
 of symmetry and balance and proportion ; to 
 learn that most difficult of all things, how to de- 
 velop a theme of a few notes, and to make out of 
 it a fabric of sound which may last continuously, 
 perhaps for half an hour, which will not become 
 monotonous, but which will be so related to the 
 original theme of a few notes that it all seems to 
 grow and flow naturally out of it. And having 
 done all that, and conceived his music in his mind, 
 he has to begin the highly difficult, laborious, and 
 complicated work of writing it down on paper, in 
 such a form that the music, which he has hitherto 
 heard only in his own brain, will be exactly re- 
 produced by perhaps a hundred different men, 
 playing instruments of perhaps thirty different 
 kinds. And thousands and thousands of men in 
 factories all over the world — metal-workers, cabi- 
 net-makers, fitters, polishers, tuners, packers, will 
 all have been working in order that the instru- 
 ments shall be ready to be played — all this before 
 a single orchestral chord imagined by the com- 
 poser can be heard by his audience. Of all these 
 resources, of all this technique, the composer has 
 to be master and controller; by these devious and 
 complicated channels must his idea flow from 
 him to you ; through all this veil of interposed 
 mechanism and personalities must his emotion 
 
 [ I02 ] 
 
AS COMPOSER 
 
 reach to you. And when we remember that 
 what we call musical ideas are by far the most 
 delicate and most subtle form of artistic expres- 
 sion, is it not the more amazing that they should 
 be able thus to survive the transit of an inter- 
 vening space so crowded with deflecting and 
 interposing influences ? 
 
 Consider, again, the composer's own attitude 
 towards his art, for upon that more than any- 
 thing else the character of his music depends, 
 and by that the character of a whole period of 
 music is largely determined. One of the ten- 
 dencies of modern life is towards a great increase 
 of self-consciousness. This is true of all the arts ; 
 it is true in our daily intercourse and conduct ; it 
 is true especially with regard to music. Let us 
 imagine, if we can, Bach's attitude towards his 
 art, and compare it with even that of Wagner, 
 who is far from representing the extreme of self- 
 consciousness. Bach was an artist, but he was 
 also an official with considerable duties, and a 
 citizen who had his living to earn. He lived a life 
 of routine, playing the organ, training the various 
 choirs under his charge, teaching his pupils, and 
 writing his music. But it is almost certain that 
 Bach never sat down deliberately to write music 
 for no other reason than to express some emotion 
 
 [ 103 ] 
 
THE MUSICIAN 
 
 with which his soul was charged. He wrote music 
 because it came in the way of his daily occupa- 
 tion to write music. For the various services in 
 which he was engaged, for various functions of 
 the church and of the town in which he lived, it 
 was necessary to have music ; and because the 
 music in existence was not good enough, and 
 because he could not bear to have anything but 
 the best, he generally wrote his own music. It 
 was even expected of him. All the grandeur and 
 nobility of feeling, all the perfection of form that 
 we find in his music, were not deliberately and 
 self-consciously put into it ; they came there only 
 because they were part of his being and character, 
 and were found in whatever he did, naturally and 
 inevitably. It is impossible for us to think of 
 Bach going away, even if he had had the means 
 and time to do so, to Italy, let us say, for six 
 months in order to produce a masterpiece. I 
 doubt whether any single work of Bach's took 
 more than the half of six months to compose, 
 and the greatest of them all came in the way of 
 his daily life — things that had to be done by a 
 certain time, for a certain place, and that were 
 magnificent, not because Bach had sought and 
 found such and such an inspiration, but because 
 he could not escape artistic magnificence in what- 
 
 [ 104 ] 
 
AS COMPOSER 
 
 ever he did. In other words, Bach was a workman 
 who did his daily work; and, being- a great genius 
 also, that work outlived the day for which it was 
 written, and lives still in the form of masteri)ieces; 
 but Bach did not know that they were master- 
 pieces, nor realise how profoundly they would 
 affect the music of the future. 
 
 And now turn to Wagner, that strange, 
 philosophical, artistic, political revolutionary, 
 whose only regular work in life that he ever did 
 was the work of conducting- and directing operas, 
 and who had no office or post which required 
 him to compose. On the contrary, the world very 
 soon showed him that it did not require him to 
 compose ; that it would make it as difficult as 
 possible for him to compose ; that it would try to 
 starve and discourage him out of all idea of 
 composing. Wagner had none of the apparent 
 outward signs of a great creative musician. He 
 played the pianoforte execrably, and, I believe, 
 had no gift of improvisation. Moreover, far from 
 being like Bach, incapable of writing anything 
 that was not stamped with beauty and perfection, 
 Wagner was not only capable of writing'-, but did 
 write a considerable amount of music that can 
 only be described as rubbish, that was not even 
 worth preserving, and was probably never worth 
 
 [ '05 ] 
 
THE MUSICIAN 
 
 performing-. But a still greater difference existed 
 between his attitude and that of Bach towards 
 their art. Bach, as I have said, came to his in the 
 course of his everyday life ; with Wagner, the 
 mere decision to compose came comparatively 
 late in his career, and was incredibly mixed up 
 with, and in some ways the outcome of, his views 
 on philosophy, religion, ethics, politics, and 
 economy. It is true that the form in which he 
 wrote was immensely complex and vast in scale 
 compared with anything that Bach did ; but in so 
 far as they were both creators and inventors of 
 music, the comparison between their respective 
 attitudes holds good. Wagner prepared himself 
 with extraordinary care for the act of composing; 
 the place in which he was living mattered enor- 
 mously; he made journeys, changed house, town, 
 country of residence, cultivated this companion 
 or abandoned that, all for no other purpose than 
 to assist himself into the right frame of mind in 
 which he could compose. Years would be spent 
 on a single work from its inception to its com- 
 pletion ; he had to live with it in misery and 
 exaltation, through all the fits of despondency 
 and of torture that seemed inseparable from the 
 modern act of artistic production, tearing himself 
 into tatters until the work was born and com- 
 
 [ io6 ] 
 
AS COMPOSER 
 
 pleted. Compared with the circumstances attend- 
 ing a production of anything of Bach's, it was a 
 kind of emotional earthquake. That it was all 
 justified, that it was all necessary, and that it 
 was all a thousand times worth while, no culti- 
 vated person of to-day can be found to deny. 
 Like Bach, the work that Wagner has given us 
 is not only immortal in itself, but it has influenced 
 and stamped itself upon the work of all musicians 
 who followed. His influence, like Bach's, has run 
 throughout the whole life of modern music, so 
 that even people who have never heard a single 
 work of his are unconsciously influenced and 
 affected by it in their musical ideas. 
 
 But compared with the composer of to-day 
 Wagner is, already old-fashioned, in some ways he 
 is early Victorian to us. It would not add anything 
 to the influence of a composer to-day that he 
 should write voluminous prose works to explain 
 his philosophic position, or his position in politics, 
 or his attitude towards vegetarianism. That kind 
 of tedious and diffuse self-explanation is out of 
 date, and a man has to be a very great man 
 indeed before we will listen to him with any 
 patience on subjects other than those of which 
 he has made himself a master. But the self-con- 
 sciousness remains, and has, I think, increased. 
 
 [ 107 ] 
 
THE MUSICIAN 
 
 Wag-ner, at any rate, had a mission, which was 
 to reform the opera and put the spirit of life into 
 what had become a dry conventional form ; but it 
 is very hard for a composer to-day to have any 
 very serious musical mission. He is confronted 
 with the naked necessity of merely having to 
 make music ; and though that is the only thing- 
 for a composer to do, the only thing which we 
 want him to do, it is not always easy for him to 
 do it deliberately and self-consciously. So much 
 of the most beautiful music in the world has been 
 produced, as it were, accidentally — because some 
 one had a birthday, or was being crowned or 
 married or buried — that we do not always remem- 
 ber how comparatively small a proportion of 
 great music has been produced deliberately, just 
 because the musician was a composer, and thought 
 he had better compose. The works of the kind of 
 which I have been speaking did not depend for 
 their production on turning out great and strik- 
 ing ; they would have been performed in any 
 case. 
 
 But nowadays the modern composer has very 
 few definite certainties of performance ; he has 
 to write something for no particular place and 
 no particular occasion, something quite in the 
 air, and to hope that some conductor will take 
 
 [ io8 ] 
 
^J' COMPOSER 
 
 the trouble to look at the score, and havinqf 
 looked at it, think it interesting- or striking- 
 enough to please an audience that pays for its 
 seats, and expects to get what pleases it. And 
 that is a great handicap to the composer, and a 
 great temptation to the development of a morbid 
 self-consciousness, and is, in the long run, damag- 
 ing to art generally. The same thing has seriously 
 damaged the art of painting. The old master- 
 pieces were practically all commissioned works, 
 pictures painted for a certain place, with a de- 
 finite view to their effect in a certain position, so 
 that the artist was considerably helped and directed 
 in his intention by the actual limitations of his 
 commission. Now people no longer commission 
 pictures to be painted for certain places in their 
 houses, nor, except in the case of rare municipal 
 buildings, are artists commissioned to decorate 
 public buildings ; with the result that painters 
 have nothing to paint for, except exhibitions, 
 which of all possible environments for a picture 
 are utterly and indisputably the worst. In fact, 
 it may be said that a picture deliberately painted 
 in order to look well and have a telling effect at 
 such an exhibition as the Royal Academy cannot 
 possibly be a good picture. And though it would 
 not be true to say that a musical composition, 
 
 [ 109 ] 
 
THE MUSICIAN 
 
 deliberately composed in order to become popular 
 with conductors of concerts, could not be a good 
 composition, it is true to say that that particular 
 kind of inspiration is not a wholesome one for 
 the composer, and does not make either for great 
 sincerity or great loftiness in the composition. 
 
 Ill 
 
 What, then, should be the composer's inspira- 
 tion ? To what use should he put this vast 
 technical equipment with which the development 
 of the art has provided him ? What is to be his 
 message to the modern world ? These are ques- 
 tions which each individual composer must answer 
 for himself, for they are of vital importance to him, 
 and to the work which he produces. As for his 
 inspiration, that must come directly from within 
 himself if his music is to make any mark, if it 
 is to have any real life or any place in the world 
 of true art. This, as I have said before, is not an 
 age of deep musical inspiration, but it is an age 
 of extreme technical accomplishment, and there 
 are many people engaged in composing music 
 more as an exercise of their technical accomplish- 
 ment than in obedience to any impelling force 
 
 [ i>o ] 
 
AS COMPOSER 
 
 from within. These composers and their work are 
 easily recognised by the fact that their inspiration 
 is always external ; they have to go to poetry or 
 legend, steep themselves in literature of some 
 kind, and then, as it were, reproduce it in the 
 form of music. But this at its best is only a kind 
 of musical translation, or paraphrase in sound of 
 ideas which have already been conveyed to the 
 mind by the written word ; and in this case it is 
 the author or poet who is the true inventor, and 
 the musician who is only a translator or inter- 
 preter. The modern symphonic poem is a con- 
 stant example of this method of composing, and 
 although, no doubt, the best of modern music is 
 put into symphonic poems, the fact that it is so 
 rather supports my argument that there is rather 
 a dearth of original inspiration for music pure 
 and simple in this age. That is one reason why I 
 regard the music of Tschaikovsky, and some of 
 Elgar's music, as having so important a place in 
 modern art. It stands out quite by itself as music 
 that had to be uttered ; it has no programme, it 
 is not a representation of anything already ex- 
 pressed in any other form ; whatever it is, it comes 
 straight from the composer's own being, and 
 speaks directly to us from him. And that is wh)- 
 I regard Elgar's symphony in A Flat as a work 
 
 [ III ] 
 
THE MUSICIAN 
 
 on a higher scale than, say, the finest of Strauss's 
 symphonic poems, although there is occasionally 
 music of a far higher order to be found in 
 Strauss than in anything Elgar has written. But 
 I believe that it is better to write music like 
 Elgar's on the higher plane, than to write music 
 like Strauss's on a plane that is a little less high 
 than that. These two men represent among 
 modern composers the two paths between which 
 the composer is bound to choose ; and it is for 
 himself to say whether he will make musical 
 translations of literary ideas, or whether he will 
 wait until he has musical ideas pure and simple 
 to express. 
 
 There is, it is true, another source of inspira- 
 tion, represented by the music of Debussy — the 
 school of colour and atmosphere. Here the in- 
 spiration is not from ideas or emotions, nor can 
 it be described as what used to be called ^^abso- 
 lute" music, and what I still mean when I speak 
 of music which is inspired purely from within the 
 composer's own being. The method of this school 
 is rather to throw upon the auditory senses 
 masses of tone colour, and to make them fade 
 and dissolve into each other, so that wave after 
 wave of cloud-like colour floats upon the hearing. 
 It is the most purely sensuous and, if one may 
 
 [ 112 ] 
 
AS COMPOSER 
 
 say so, physiological of all musical effects, and it 
 can be used with great subtlety to produce an 
 actual atmosphere of certain imagined scenes or 
 places. Such music is very delightful, it is very 
 wonderful, but the sensation of it is almost purely 
 physical ; it seems to lead nowhere in particular, 
 and to be a wonderful and beautiful decadence 
 rather than an advance. 
 
 These, then, are the three chief mediums in 
 which music of the essentially modern school is 
 written, but whichever of them the composer 
 chooses, there is one thing which he must never 
 lose sight of if he wishes his message to be really 
 uttered. He should say to himself before he wTites 
 one note: ^'Here are assembled a number of 
 artists who have given years of their lives and 
 spent all the labour and money they can afford 
 on perfecting themselves in their art, whether of 
 voice or of instrument; many of them are consum- 
 mate artists and masters in their own department. 
 I am about to ask them to use that art and skill 
 of theirs in playing my music, in representing my 
 ideas. Am I certain, first of all, that what I am 
 asking them to perform is worthy of the time 
 and study they have spent in becoming per- 
 fect? And, if so, have I spared any pains to 
 make the technical expression of it as exact as 
 H [ 113 ] 
 
THE COMPOSER 
 
 possible? If not, how can I conscientiously ask 
 them to use their great talents in producing my 
 imperfect work ? " That is a question which every 
 composer owes it to himself, and to every per- 
 former who is to interpret his work, to put to 
 himself most seriously ; for nowadays slipshod 
 workmanship in any branch of art is utterly inex- 
 cusable. Technical perfection, as I have said, is 
 one of the characteristics of our time, and its 
 effect should be, not to excuse spiritual or crea- 
 tive imperfection, but rather to demand that the 
 excellence of the thing done shall not fall short 
 of the method of doing it. 
 
 The perfect music of the past has produced the 
 perfect technique of the present. We must strive, 
 and at any rate hope, that the perfect technique 
 of the present will produce the perfect music 
 of the future. 
 
 [ »>4 1 
 
THE MUSICIAN AS 
 INTERPRETER 
 
THE MUSICIAN AS 
 INTERPRETER 
 
 MUSIC as it is imagined and invented 
 in the composer's brain cannot reach 
 directly to his audience. There must 
 be a human channel, a middle party who receives 
 the composer's idea and transmits it, through his 
 or her personality, to the listener. This is a fact 
 of the greatest importance to the position of 
 music among other fine arts ; it ensures for music 
 that quality, at once most intimate and most 
 human, that makes it like nothing else in the 
 world. And this human interpretation of music 
 falls naturally into three divisions, and is dis- 
 tributed among three principal groups of per- 
 formers. There is the singer, who uses his natural 
 vocal gift to express the ideas of the composer ; 
 there is the player of instruments, who acquires 
 a technique which gives him the control of sounds 
 mechanically produced, by which further ex- 
 
 [ "7 ] 
 
THE MUSICIAN 
 
 pression is given to the composer's ideas ; and 
 there is the conductor, who interposes his own 
 personaHty between the composer and the per- 
 formers, thus adding a fourth Hnk in the chain 
 between inventor and hearer ; it is he, who, 
 when the ideas of the composer are complex 
 and need complex expression, gathers them into 
 his own mind and transmits to each individual 
 performer the composer's intention with regard 
 to his particular part. We will deal with these 
 three groups in their order. 
 
 The singer is the most primitive of the 
 interpreters of music. As we saw, he comes 
 even before the composer, for it was in order to 
 find varied expression for his natural gift that the 
 idea of musical invention or composition must 
 originally have arisen. The singer needs no 
 instrument or apparatus other than that with 
 which nature has provided him, and according to 
 the quality of these vocal organs the expression 
 of the singer is limited or varied, ugly or beauti- 
 ful. If human beings were bred deliberately, as 
 race-horses and other animals are bred, we could 
 no doubt by this time have produced a strain of 
 people in which the vocal organs would be so 
 developed as to have possibilities at present un- 
 dreamed of. One has only to look at the German 
 
 [ ii8 ] 
 
AS INTERPRETER 
 
 canary as an example of this. The canary in its 
 natural form was a dull orrcenish bird, rather 
 smaller than the common sparrow, and with very 
 little more natural song than the sparrow has ; 
 but by continual breeding and selection we can 
 at will produce canaries of markedly different 
 shape, size, and plumage ; and, in the case of the 
 German canary, which has been bred solely with 
 a view to its song, a creature whose vocal powers 
 are nothing" less than astoundino-. When we 
 consider the smallness and frailtv of the bird, 
 and the depth and quality and range, as well as 
 sometimes the ear-splitting volume of its song, 
 it seems little short of miraculous. But although 
 we have had a certain amount of natural develop- 
 ment in the case of families which have continued 
 to cultivate one occupation throughout several 
 generations, we do not as yet deliberately breed 
 human beings for any definite purpose — what 
 we call '^ nature " is left to herself. 
 
 There are other ways, however, in which we 
 may cultivate our human gifts and faculties — by 
 study, exercise, and practice. When we find 
 a natural musical gift we try tluis to cultivate it, 
 with the result that some voices are a great deal 
 better and more suited to the composer's purpose 
 than others ; but we nearly always find that the 
 
 [ "9 ] 
 
THE MUSICIAN 
 
 degree of really deep musical cultivation is in an 
 inverse ratio to the amount of natural vocal 
 faculty. Let me take as an example the voices 
 of two very well-known performers — the voices 
 of Madame Melba and Mr. George Henschel. 
 In Melba you have what may be described as 
 a perfect human voice and a perfect method of 
 producing vocal sounds, so that to hear a single 
 note or a trill of Melba's voice is to receive an 
 exquisite pleasure of the senses. But the musician 
 who listens to her learns that his pleasure often 
 stops at that point; that the voice does not always 
 mean all it seems to mean ; that the singer appears 
 not to feel or understand all the depths of the 
 composer's feeling and meaning ; that although 
 the voice is perfect and perfectly cultivated, the 
 musical understanding is less perfect. In the 
 case of Henschel you have the opposite state of 
 affairs — a voice the quality of which is to many 
 ears positively disagreeable, and the utterance of 
 which may produce no sensuous pleasure what- 
 ever, but which is so cultivated, which is used as the 
 expression of a musical personality so profoundly 
 artistic and so masterly in its realisation of the 
 composer's finest meaning, that one receives 
 a pleasure of a much higher order, and quite 
 different from the pleasure of the senses. The 
 
 [ I20 ] 
 
AS INTERPRETER 
 
 ideal, of course, is the combination of the two, 
 a voice as lovely and unearthly as that of 
 Madame Melba, allied to a musical sensibility as 
 delicate and masterly as that of Henschel ; but 
 it is an ideal very seldom realised. 
 
 But every one has a voice, and every one can sing 
 even a little, with the result that every one, how- 
 ever unmusical he may be, can understand singing 
 and experience a direct appeal from it ; and there- 
 fore song is at once the simplest, the most popular, 
 and, in some ways, the most perfect form of 
 musical art. It has developed almost exclusively 
 on two lines — the folk-song or natural music of a 
 people, simple and traditional, sung by every one, 
 and expressing all national characteristics ; and the 
 composed song, narrative or dramatic, which 
 began with the ballad, and developed right on to 
 the opera. Perhaps the most perfect form of song 
 hitherto produced has been the German //cd as it 
 was developed by Schubert and Schumann ; it is 
 a combination of folk-music and invented music ; 
 and in its length and proportion, its power of 
 giving perfect expression in a few bars to a com- 
 plete musical idea, and yet remaining truly lyrical, 
 this form of musical art has never been surpassed. 
 The interpreter here must not only have a voice to 
 sing with, but a genuine community with the 
 
 ^ [ 121 J 
 
THE MUSICIAN 
 
 romantic spirit that inspired those compositions, 
 so that their performance is a test not so much of 
 vocal technique on the part of the interpreter as 
 of genuine musical feeling and understanding. 
 
 II 
 
 Let us now turn to the second group of inter- 
 preters — the players of musical instruments — and 
 consider for a moment their qualifications and 
 opportunities. In this case, odd as it may appear, 
 no natural gift is absolutely essential, except the 
 one gift which is necessary to all interpreters in 
 common — the gift of what we call an accurate 
 musical ear. I call this a gift because it appears 
 so to us to-day ; we have people who cannot dis- 
 tineuish one note from another, and we have other 
 people with an ear so sensitive that they can tell 
 the pitch of any note sung in any environment, 
 and in relation to any other note. But I doubt very 
 much whether this condition of the auditory senses 
 ought to be regarded as abnormal. It seems to me 
 that what we call a perfect ear for music is only the 
 auditory sense in a perfectly healthy state, and 
 that the majority of people who have not got it are 
 to that extent diseased. Among the Hungarians, 
 
 [ 122 ] 
 
AS INTERPRETER 
 
 for example, what is exceptional with us is 
 commonplace ; it is the exception for a Hungarian 
 peasant not to have what we should describe as a 
 perfect ear for music. So that I cannot regard this 
 as a particular gift or endowment in the ordinary 
 sense of the word, and to that extent I feel justified 
 in saying that the player of an instrument has no 
 need for any particular endowment. It is with 
 him almost purely a matter of training, but it is 
 training of a very elaborate and arduous kind, 
 combining physical dexterity with a curious 
 mental process for which we have no name, but 
 which consists in an absolute correlation of the 
 hand and the eye, a faculty which is found at its 
 highest development in jugglers or conjurers, and 
 in pianists. 
 
 For what has to be done in the case of the in- 
 terpreter of music who plays an instrument is that 
 he or she, reading from the printed page a series 
 of symbols representing musical sounds, must 
 instantly translate those symbols into muscular 
 movements of the fingers, which are not only com- 
 bined, but which follow each other with extreme 
 rapidity, and with an extraordinary complexity of 
 variation. The production of sound in musical 
 instruments being mechanical, the composer can 
 himself control the interpretation to a sliglitly 
 
 [ 123 ] 
 
THE MUSICIAN 
 
 greater extent than in the case of vocal performers ; 
 for when he has indicated that a certain note has 
 to be struck and held for a certain time, and when 
 by marks and directions he has determined, not 
 only the length of the note, but the degree of force 
 with which it shall be struck and even the method 
 of laying the finger upon it — or, in the case of 
 music for the violin, when he has directed which 
 string is to be played, the weight with which the 
 bow has to be pressed upon it, the position of 
 the bow on the string, near to or distant from the 
 bridge, and the direction of the bow whether 
 upward or downward — when the composer has 
 done all this, although he still leaves a great deal 
 in the power of the performer, absence of musical 
 feeling or of sympathy with him on the part of 
 the performer will probably not work such havoc 
 as it would in the case of the singer. 
 
 From this has probably resulted the immense 
 variety in the merits of instrumental interpreters 
 of music, and from this also arose an evil which 
 happily we are getting away from now, which went 
 far to damage the musical sense of the middle 
 classes in this country during three parts of the 
 nineteenth century. I refer to the absence of any 
 recognised standard of ability, which made it 
 possible for people to play and sing in public who 
 
 [ 124 ] 
 
AS INTERPRETER 
 
 had no right to do so, and whose doing so was for 
 sensitive people an infliction of the most dreadful 
 kind. Who has forgotten, or can ever forget, the 
 intolerable agonies of the evening party of twenty 
 years ago ? — when some hapless young woman 
 would go to the piano, and there commit a de- 
 liberate and hideous murder on the spiritual idea 
 of some great mind — a murder as revolting in its 
 details as many of those merely physical offences 
 which rouse our anger to such a degree that we 
 hang people by the neck for them. And the 
 gentleman who sang bass, and who perhaps did 
 not murder any fine composition, but who deliber- 
 ately and wantonly created a nuisance by inter- 
 preting a composition which was not fine, but in all 
 respects base and absurd — we all remember him 
 too, remember him wnth fear and resentment. 
 
 Now how did this state of things come about? 
 In this connection the psychology of that evening 
 party which we would otherwise so gladly forget 
 •is worth a moment's consideration. This dread- 
 fully low standard, or rather absence of standard, 
 this lack of shame which permitted people to 
 attempt to do what they were totally unable to do, 
 had its origin in the very universality of music. 
 Not every one can paint a little ; not every one 
 can balance on his chin a pole up which his wife 
 
 [ '25 ] 
 
THE MUSICIAN 
 
 and two children have dimbed ; no one pretends to 
 be able to do these things who has not seriously- 
 practised the art of doing them ; and therefore you 
 do not, in fact, find people seriously inviting you to 
 watch them balance a pole on their chins who 
 have not the faintest idea how to set about it. But 
 every one, as I said, has a voice, and is capable of 
 uttering a song of some kind ; and as the musical 
 faculty is in the minds of some people confounded 
 with the mere ability of uttering sounds, you get 
 people uttering sounds, or causing instruments to 
 produce them, under the impression that what they 
 are doing has some relation to music. There is 
 thus no absolute standard, no sharp line dividing 
 those who have a musical sense from those who 
 have none. That unhappy expression ^* musical " 
 has indeed much to answer for. 
 
 **Are you musical?" asks Mr. A. of Miss B. 
 
 *^ No," says Miss B. '^ I don't know one note 
 from another ; but my sister. Miss C, is musical." 
 
 ^^ Do you like music ? " asks Mr. A. 
 
 ^^ I tell you I don't know anything about it," 
 says Miss B., ^'but I know what I like." 
 
 ** Do you like the piano ? " says Mr. A. 
 
 '' Not much," says Miss B. 
 
 Mr. A. thereupon passes over to Miss C, and 
 says : 
 
 [ 126 ] 
 
AS INTERVRETER 
 
 '' I hear you are very musical." 
 
 **Oh yes, I adore it," says Miss C. 
 
 ^^ I hear you play the piano," says Mr. A. 
 
 ^^ Well, I do a little," says Miss C. 
 
 *^ Do play us something," says Mr. A. 
 
 ^'Oh ! I couldn't really," says Miss C. 
 
 ^* But do play something," says Mr. A. 
 
 *^ But I am so out of practice," says Miss C. 
 
 ^^ Never mind, play anything," says Mr. A. 
 desperately. 
 
 ^*Oh! I didn't know there was going to be 
 music," says Miss C. 
 
 '' Have you brought your music ? " says Mr. A. 
 
 ^^Yes," says Miss C. ^Mt is in the ^hall,' I 
 think." 
 
 Whereupon, after much fuss and feigned reluct- 
 ance on the part of Miss C, the music is brought, 
 the plants and photograph frames pushed a little 
 way back from the piano, and the sacrifice pre- 
 pared. 
 
 *^ I am afraid the piano is rather out of tune," 
 says Mrs. A. 
 
 ^*Oh ! it doesn't matter," says Miss C. 
 
 Indeed it does not. Miss C. sits down, and 
 coldly and wickedly perpetrates what is a very 
 monstrous affront, not only to the ears, but to the 
 intelligence of every normal person present. No 
 
 [ 127 ] 
 
THE MUSICIAN 
 
 one enjoys it, except Miss C. and her mother, who 
 is totally without the musical instinct, and who 
 fatuously regards this feat of her offspring- as a 
 species of public triumph. No one else really 
 likes it. Many of the people present are people of 
 genuine common sense and sound understanding, 
 but a kind of charm hangs over them, the charm 
 of the so-called Musical Evening. They are there 
 to play or sing, or to be played at or sung at. It 
 is considered polite to ask people to do this, even 
 if they are incapable of it, and, astounding fact ! to 
 press those to do so who show an inkling of shame 
 or reluctance. Meanwhile Miss B. sits apart in her 
 corner, genuinely disenjoying herself, and under 
 the impression that it is because she is not musical. 
 She is, in fact, the only musical person in the room, 
 and has a sensitive ear which is daily tortured by 
 what she is taught to regard as music. 
 
 *^ What a pity you are not musical," says Mr. A., 
 **but then, of course, you paint" — which indeed 
 the poor girl does, very badly, having an exquisite 
 ear for sound and no sense of colour at all ; but 
 her mother had made up her mind, before she was 
 married, that her eldest daughter should paint and 
 her youngest daughter play the piano ; hence the 
 evening party. 
 
 Happily that state of things is passing from us, 
 
 [ 128 ] 
 
AS INTERPRETER 
 
 if not already past. It is no longer deemed a 
 compliment by intelligent people to ask their 
 guests on the one hand to exhibit their inca- 
 pacity, or on the other to endure acute suffering 
 under the name of music. It was an inevitable 
 state in our musical progress, brought about by 
 the spread of education, and the improvements in 
 the manufacture of pianos, and the cultivation of 
 that mid-Victorian ideal of home-life which has so 
 much to answer for in our lives, both good and 
 bad. We are indeed going to the other extreme. 
 The technique of playing has been studied to 
 such an extent, and scientific methods cultivated 
 of producing the necessary muscular strength 
 and freedom of action in the finger-joints, that 
 the technical standard of performance has risen 
 very rapidly. By the methods of such a master 
 as Leschetitzky, it is possible for a frail young 
 girl of quite feeble physique to acquire in a few 
 years the technique of a virtuoso and a mechanical 
 power of control which would have made many a 
 virtuoso of the nineteenth century envious. The 
 result has been that what we may call the 
 "parlour performer" has not a chance in com- 
 petition with her professionally trained friend. 
 The increase of music-schools and conservatoires 
 has placed this professional training within the 
 I [ 129 ] 
 
THE MUSICIAN 
 
 reach of almost any youth or girl with decided 
 musical tastes. People, in short, are accustomed 
 to hear competent performers, and are learning 
 not to tolerate the incompetent. 
 
 But here again, in spite of such a manifest and 
 obvious improvement in musical conditions, we 
 are confronted with the inevitable drawback. 
 With the great advance in technique, excellence 
 is not always associated with a corresponding 
 advance in musical feeling or understanding. 
 There is a great danger that people may come to 
 care more for performances than for the thing 
 performed. Not what is done, but how it is done, 
 seems to be the chief question with modern 
 audiences. Now, extremely important as the 
 manner of a thing is, I cannot admit that it is 
 quite so important as the matter. It is right that 
 we should hear music as perfectly performed as 
 possible, but it is also right that we should con- 
 sider what it is that is being performed. The 
 interpretation is not everything, and the inter- 
 preter in music is not the highest order of 
 musician. It is very necessary, whenever we 
 listen to a musical performance, to make this 
 distinction to ourselves between the performance 
 as a performance and as an opportunity of 
 hearing a work of art. We all know what it is to 
 
 [ 130 ] 
 
^J' INTER'PRETER 
 
 hear perfect performances that leave us absolutely 
 cold, and to hear other performances that are far 
 from perfect, and which have yet succeeded in 
 conveying" to us an absolute and unforgettable 
 interpretation of the music performed. 
 
 So that we must make another distinction, and 
 say that a perfect performance is not necessarily 
 a perfect interpretation. If you go to the opera 
 in London, Paris, or New York, you will hear 
 the most famous vocal artists in the world sing 
 some of the most famous music. But it is very 
 rarely that you hear there a really perfect 
 interpretation. People do not go there to hear 
 the music, but the performers ; they do not go to 
 hear Tristan or Traviata, but to hear Caruso in 
 Tristan and Melba in Traviata. That merely 
 means that the personality of the interpreter, 
 instead of beinof a conductinof link between 
 composer and listener, is obtruded as a barrier 
 or screen between them. It was, as we know, 
 one of Wagner's great missions to do away with 
 that inartistic state of affairs, to banish the prima 
 donna from the entirely false place which she had 
 acquired. And though his influence was great, 
 it has only succeeded in the case of his own 
 works, and only partially in them ; it is very hard 
 indeed to get an opera performance in which the 
 
 [ 131 ] 
 
THE MUSICIAN 
 
 singers are content to be impersonal and to 
 devote their talents, not to the glorification of 
 themselves, but to the true interpretation of 
 the work in hand. Yet this undoubtedly is 
 at once a duty and a great opportunity of the 
 musician as interpreter — to lay his powers and 
 his talents at the feet of the composer, and devote 
 them solely to the perfect interpretation of his 
 music. And I need not say that where that is 
 the interpreter's sole idea, only the worthiest 
 music is likely to be performed ; for whereas any 
 rubbish may serve to show off a voice or a talent, 
 it will only be to the finest and greatest music 
 that a true artist will be content to surrender his 
 personality. 
 
 In the career of every artist there comes a 
 supreme moment when he or she must choose 
 between two services — the service of art or the 
 service of self. While the artist is actually 
 studying and qualifying, this choice is hardly 
 offered ; he is all artist then, because he is learn- 
 ing and trying to grasp and achieve a command 
 of his art ; the artist is always a learner, and the 
 true learner is in some degree an artist. But 
 with achievement and mastery come recogni- 
 tion and applause, come opportunity and power. 
 The artist has become a master, a teacher, 
 
 [ 132 ] 
 
AS INTERPRETER 
 
 endowed with that subtle quaHty that lays the 
 world at his bidding ; when he may either make 
 his followers glorify him or glorify his art. The 
 choice is between serving his art or making it 
 serve him. For the artist who remains true there 
 can be no choice ; he must go on serving and 
 learning. I have very vividly in my mind a 
 performance which I recently heard in London 
 by one of the very greatest singers of the day. It is 
 many years now since this singer reached the 
 cross-roads at which the choice, to which I have 
 referred, was offered to her ; and I am afraid that 
 since then she has learnt nothing more of music, 
 and has bound her art in golden chains to the 
 service of herself. At the concert of which I am 
 speaking this was very clearly demonstrated. 
 In arias by Verdi and Donizetti, which were 
 written by masters in the art of displaying the 
 voice, her performance left nothing to be wished 
 for ; Verdi and Donizetti knew their business too 
 well. But in a song-cycle by a modern com- 
 poser, a work demanding far higher artistic 
 qualities in its rendering than these, because 
 vocally inferior to them, the singer showed very 
 clearly her conception of the relations between 
 singer and composer. The point for the moment 
 has nothing to do with the merit of the com- 
 
 [ 133 ] 
 
THE MUSICIAN 
 
 position. It was deemed worthy by the per- 
 former to be sung before some thousands of 
 people who had paid a great deal of money for 
 their seats ; and in such circumstances there is 
 only one thing for the artist to do if she has any 
 respect for herself, her audience, the composer, 
 or the art of music — to spare no effort or inquiry 
 or pains to bring out every fragment of meaning 
 and beauty that there may be in the composition. 
 What happened was that the great artist sang 
 these four little songs in a way that, if I had been 
 the composer, would have made me turn hot 
 and cold alternately. It was not only that the 
 ideas which the composer had attempted to 
 express were apparently unsympathetic to the 
 singer, and that she had not a clear conception 
 of how these four little songs should be sung ; it 
 was that she made no attempt to disguise her 
 complete lack of interest in such passages (and 
 they were many) that did not lend themselves to 
 the display of her voice. It was so obvious that 
 these little songs were beneath her contempt ; 
 the passages in which the lyrical expression was 
 given to the accompaniment instead of to the 
 voice were so hurried and slurred over in 
 the main business of getting to the high note or 
 the beautiful winging cadences of tone that are 
 
 [ 134] 
 
AS INTERPRETER 
 
 this singer's secret, the poor composer's secret 
 (supposing- him to have had one) remained untold. 
 Now if these songs were bad songs, or not 
 worth the singer's trouble to sing as well as she 
 was able, their appearance on her programme 
 was wholly inexcusable ; if they were good songs 
 or deemed by her worthy to be sung to her 
 audience, her neglect to sing them with respect, 
 with care, and with all the mastery of which she 
 is capable, was equally inexcusable. It is the 
 sign of the true artist that he glorifies everything 
 he touches and puts new meaning and new life 
 into the meaning and life around him ; that he 
 takes a small thing and transmutes it by his art 
 into a great thing. But this singer, apparently 
 finding no meaning in these songs, had no 
 meaning of her own to bring to them ; and if she 
 found them a small thing she certainly made 
 them no greater, since they issued from her 
 magic throat a considerably smaller thing than 
 when they left the composer's brain. And that 
 is what I mean when I say that the artist wlio 
 tries to interpret music must distinguish between 
 interpretation and mere performance. 
 
 [ 135 ] 
 
THE MUSICIAN 
 
 III 
 
 We will now consider the third and most com- 
 plex of the methods of interpreting music — the art 
 of conducting. The psychology and technique of 
 this art are discussed in a later chapter ; here we 
 shall merely consider the conductor as the inter- 
 preting link between composer and audience. 
 Conducting, as we know it and as it is understood 
 to-day, is an entirely modern art, dating no farther 
 back than Wagner. He may be said indeed to 
 be the inventor of it. Berlioz, his contemporary, 
 shared the pioneer work with him, although they 
 worked on different lines and in a mistrustful in- 
 dependence of one another. But it was Wagner 
 who first insisted in any large way on a training 
 and discipline of the orchestra which would ensure 
 to the conductor the absolute control of every note 
 sounded, and it was Wagner who sent out into the 
 world that band of apostles who devoted their lives 
 entirely to this one art, and spread its methods and 
 technique throughout the world of music. With 
 the exception of Liszt and Von Btilow, who w^ere 
 also pianists, these musicians were conductors pure 
 and simple ; they were the first who raised con- 
 ducting to the level of a separate art, and they were 
 
 [ 136 ] 
 
AS INTERPRETER 
 
 the first great virtuosi in conducting. Such a thing 
 had been hitherto unheard of. The old Kapel- 
 meister, who simply beat time with a roll of music 
 or a violin bow, had really no more in common with 
 them than had the old piihator oi'gamini^ who beat 
 with his fists broad organ notes which by heavy 
 mechanism admitted wind to a few pipes, with a 
 Kendrick Pyne or an Alexandre Guilmant. As 
 with the organ throughout several centuries of 
 evolution, so within a space of only fifty years has 
 the whole technique of conducting been revolu- 
 tionised. And the modern frail wand of hickory, 
 which sometimes hardly moves in the conductor's 
 hand, is not more different from the old roll of 
 music, or the later pot-stick which was wielded 
 from side to side by movements of the conductor's 
 whole arm, than is the sensitiveness of modern 
 orchestral players different from the phlegmatic 
 stolidity of their predecessors. It may surprise 
 some of us to know that there is such a thing as 
 technique in conducting ; it looks so very simple 
 to stand in front of an orchestra and beat time 
 with the music ; but that is not what is done by the 
 modern conductor. He has to acquire a very 
 elaborate technique. He must have the wrist 
 action of a violinist ; for if you watch born con- 
 ductors with such perfect technique as Nikisch or 
 
 [ 137 ] 
 
THE MUSICIAN 
 
 Henry Wood, or, among the younger school, 
 Landon Ronald, you will notice that their move- 
 ments, although quiet and unobtrusive to the 
 audience, are as varied and as expressive to the 
 orchestra as the music which they are conducting, 
 Henry Wood has perhaps the most perfect wrist 
 action of any conductor who has ever lived. His 
 baton moves as freely as a branch swinging in the 
 wind, although his arm may not be moving at all ; 
 and you can easily imagine that the extraordinary 
 delicacy of control from wrist and fingers thus pro- 
 duced when it is added to greater gestures of the 
 forearm or of the whole arm give a range of expres- 
 sive gesture which is almost infinite. All this is 
 quite modern, quite a new thing, and it means that 
 the conductor is doing far more than giving the 
 time to the orchestra ; he is giving by these very 
 gestures not only the time but the nuances of ex- 
 pression, and, more subtly still, transmitting his 
 own emotional sense of the music to every member 
 of the orchestra, so that, in a sense, and through 
 the sensitive human medium of the players, the 
 conductor is himself playing every instrument. 
 
 It will be realised at once what a very great 
 revolution a new art like this is bound to effect 
 in music. It has for one thing revolutionised 
 the art of writing for the orchestra, and greatly 
 
 • [ 138 ] 
 
AS INTERPRETER 
 
 developed the technique of orchestral players ; so 
 that whereas in the old works on orchestration 
 g'reat numbers of notes and sequences of notes were 
 marked as *^ unplayable " for this instrument or 
 that, there is practically nothing now that is un- 
 playable on any instrument. In a first-rate modern 
 orchestra every player is a vij-tuosoy and the in- 
 struments themselves have been so enormously 
 improved that passages can now be written which 
 would have been laughed at fifty years ago as un- 
 playable. Here, again, the modern composer's re- 
 sources have been infinitely extended ; for formerly 
 any work of a florid nature, any rapid passage 
 work, and free and elaborate melodic movement, 
 was confined to the strings, the other instruments 
 being merely used to fill in the harmony or support 
 the rhythm ; now the same passage work can be 
 entrusted equally well to the wood-wind and even 
 to the brass. 
 
 Well, all this complex machinery is controlled 
 by the conductor in the interests of the composer. 
 He is the only interpreter of music whose business 
 it is to be absolutely silent ; in silence he receives 
 the idea of the music from the composer's score, 
 and in silence transmits it to the company before 
 him, who bring it to its birth of sound. And the 
 equipment which fits him for this task is no simple 
 
 [ 139 ] 
 
THE MUSICIAN 
 
 one. He must have all the composer's knowledge 
 of the different instruments ; in fact, with the ex- 
 ception of the creative genius, he must have all the 
 composer's technical equipment ; and in addition 
 he must have certain qualities of personality which 
 fit him to control and co-ordinate so various and 
 difficult a body as is represented by a hundred 
 extremely sensitive and able musicians. It is not 
 enough for him to know how the piece of music 
 ought to be interpreted ; he must be able to trans- 
 mit the knowledge to his orchestra, to convince 
 them that there is only one way in which that music 
 must be played, and that is his way. Before he 
 comes to his desk with a modern score he must 
 have spent hours and hours in private reading and 
 study of it, as a pianist would practise a piece 
 or an actor con his part ; and he must lead his 
 orchestra from the first stages of unfamiliarity 
 to a perfect comprehension of his meaning with 
 regard to the music, and finally present through 
 them to his audience a perfect interpretation of 
 the composer's task. No light task that, as you 
 may imagine. As Berlioz has said : ^^ He should 
 feel, comprehend, and be moved, and the per- 
 formers should feel that he feels, comprehends, 
 and is moved : then his emotion communicates 
 itself to those whom he directs, his inward fire 
 
 [ 140 ] 
 
AS INTERPRETER 
 
 warms them, his electric glow animates them, his 
 force of impulse excites them ; he throws around 
 him the vital irradiations of musical art. If he be 
 inert and frozen, on the contrary, he paralyses all 
 about him, like those floating masses of the polar 
 seas, the approach of which is perceived through 
 the sudden cooling of the atmosphere. 
 
 *^Of the three intermediate agents between the 
 composer and his audience, singers have often 
 been accused of forming the most dangerous ; but, 
 in my opinion, without justice. The most formid- 
 able, to my thinking, is the conductor of the 
 orchestra. A bad singer can spoil only his own 
 part ; while an incapable or malevolent conductor 
 ruins all. Happy also may that composer esteem 
 himself when the conductor into whose hands he 
 has fallen is not at once incapable and inimical. 
 For nothing can resist the pernicious influence of 
 this person. The most admirable orchestra is then 
 paralysed, the most excellent singers are perplexed 
 and rendered dull ; there is no longer any vigour 
 or unity ; under such direction the noblest daring 
 of the author appears extravagance, enthusiasm 
 beholds its soaring flight checked, inspiration is 
 violently brought down to earth, the angel's wings 
 are broken, the man of genius passes for a mad- 
 man or an idiot, the divine statue is precipitated 
 
 [ 141 ] 
 
THE MUSICIAN 
 
 from its pedestal and dragged in the mud. And, 
 what is worse, the public, and even auditors en- 
 dowed with the highest musical intelligence, are 
 reduced to the impossibility (if a new work be in 
 question, and they are hearing it for the first time) 
 of recognising the ravages perpetrated by the 
 orchestral conductor — of discovering the follies, 
 faults, and crimes he commits. If they clearly per- 
 ceive certain defects of execution, not he, but his 
 victims, are in such cases made responsible. If he 
 have caused the chorus-singers to fail in taking up 
 a point in 2l finale ; if he have allowed a discordant 
 wavering to take place between the choir and the 
 orchestra, or between the extreme sides of the 
 instrumental body ; if he have absurdly hurried a 
 movement ; if he have allowed it to linger unduly, 
 if he have interrupted a singer before the end of 
 a phrase, they exclaim, * The singers are detest- 
 able ! The orchestra has no firmness ; the violins 
 have disfigured the principal design ; everybody 
 has been wanting in vigour and animation ; the 
 tenor was quite out, he did not know his part ; the 
 harmony is confused ; the author is no accom- 
 panist ; the voices are ' etc., etc., etc. 
 
 *^ Except in listening to great works already 
 knownand esteemed, intelligent hearers can hardly 
 distinguish the true culprit, and allot to him his 
 
 [ 142 ] 
 
AS INTERPRETER 
 
 due share of blame ; but the number of these Is 
 still so limited that their judgment has little weight ; 
 and the bad conductor — in presence of the public 
 who would pitilessly hiss a vocal accident of a 
 good singer — reigns with all the calm of a bad 
 conscience, in his baseness and inefficiency." 
 
 These words are no exaggeration of the bad 
 influence exerted by unworthy, insincere, or 
 incompetent interpreters of music. Happily they 
 are becoming rarer every day. The art of 
 musical performance is one in which we can 
 definitely say that there has been steady progress, 
 and it has probably never reached so high a pitch 
 of excellence as it has reached to-day. The 
 performers have educated the audience, and the 
 audience in turn have continued the education 
 of the performers by insisting on a higher and 
 higher standard. Technical perfection may for 
 the present be left thus automatically to look 
 after itself ; what requires constant criticism and 
 constant vigilance is the spirit in which the 
 performance is given. When you go to a con- 
 cert or an opera or a recital there are two 
 questions which you must ask yourself about 
 the performer — what is his equipment for his 
 task, and in what spirit does he perform it? it 
 has hitherto been the custom with most people, I 
 
 [ 143 ] 
 
THE MUSICIAN 
 
 think, to put these two questions in the order in 
 which I have given them ; but I would advise my 
 readers to reverse the order, and inquire first into 
 the spirit of the performance, and afterwards into 
 its technical merits. No one is likely to come 
 before us now in absolute technical incompetence; 
 but many people will come before us who are 
 spiritually and artistically incompetent, whatever 
 their technical accomplishments may be. Depend 
 upon it we shall soon be aware, or ought to be 
 aware, if the spirit in which the performer works 
 is a true one. If his object is the display of his own 
 talent, or any other form of self-glorification, then 
 I do not care what his technical equipment may 
 be — we shall get no true interpretation of the 
 music. If, on the other hand, his motive and 
 spirit are pure, and his desire is to sink his own 
 personality and to be a mouthpiece by which the 
 composer's message may reach us, then his w^ork 
 will be artistic and, even if it falls short of 
 technical brilliance, will leave with us a definite 
 impression, and produce a definite atmosphere. 
 
 It is the business of the musician, as inter- 
 preter, not to pursue fame or reputation as ends 
 in themselves, but to leave them to come or not 
 as they will, and if they do come, to come as the 
 results of a genuine foundation of artistic work 
 
 [ 144 ] 
 
AS INTERPRETER 
 
 which he has laid. We must leave the flowers 
 of things to bloom of themselves ; our work is 
 among* the roots and the soil. In musical 
 interpretation, as in everything- else, we must not 
 expect to reap where we have not sown. The 
 suns and rains and dews of heaven will bring 
 things to blossom and fruit and flower in their 
 own time and order ; and we who wish to be rich 
 in these things must cultivate the soil in which 
 they are to grow, and keep it free from other 
 growths that would drain it of its virtue. In 
 music, as in all life, we must choose first what we 
 want, and then work for it ; for it is by working, 
 and not by wishing, that men achieve their 
 desires. 
 
 [ 145 ] 
 
THE MUSICIAN AS 
 HEARER 
 
THE MUSICIAN AS 
 HEARER 
 
 LISTENING to music, if it is not exactly 
 an art, is at any rate a thing- which can 
 ^ be cultivated and enjoyed in a greater or 
 less degree in proportion as we concentrate and 
 prepare our minds for it. There are very few 
 people who can enjoy music in any and every 
 frame of mind, and there is very little music that 
 can be enjoyed without a considerable degree of 
 attention and concentration. The concentration 
 is, or ought to be, almost automatic, so that we 
 are not conscious of making a mental effort ; 
 nevertheless we find, as a general rule, that our 
 enjoyment is in exact proportion to the degree 
 w^ith which we clear our minds of all previous 
 occupations, and address them singly to the 
 music we are hearing. 
 
 This is true especially of music heard in the 
 concert-room ; and let us admit at once that the 
 concert-room is far from being an ideal place for 
 hearing any kind of music. The concert-room is 
 
 [ '49. ] 
 
THE MUSICIAN 
 
 a makeshift ; the earliest music definitely written 
 to give people pleasure was essentially chamber- 
 music, meant to be played in a room to a few 
 people gathered there for the express purpose of 
 listening to it. As more people wished to listen 
 to the music it became necessary to find a larger 
 room, and so on, until it was found convenient 
 to have a very large room or hall set apart for the 
 purpose. And then the number of performers was 
 increased, and the size of the orchestra ; for the 
 modern orchestra as we know it is nothing more 
 nor less than a development of the string quar- 
 tette. But the development of the modern 
 orchestra has not been quite logical. It has 
 attained a standard size of about a hundred 
 performers at the outside ; and yet that is an 
 illogical thing, because if an orchestra of a 
 hundred is right for a hall of a certain size, it 
 would certainly be wrong for a hall of greater or 
 less dimensions. A skilful organ-builder, when 
 he is designing an instrument for a given building, 
 designs it in accordance with a certain acoustic 
 principle or diapason of that building. The number 
 of pipes and stops, and the scale or size of each 
 pipe, vary with the size and shape of the building, 
 in order that the instrument when complete shall 
 generate sound-waves of exactly the right length 
 
 [ 150 ] 
 
AS HEARER 
 
 and volume in proportion to the building-. Thus 
 an organ that would be suitable for the Albert 
 Hall would not be suitable for Ripon Cathedral ; 
 yet the same size of orchestra would be expected 
 to serve for both. 
 
 The fact that we have thus standardised our 
 orchestras without respect to the size of building's 
 in which they are heard means an inevitable 
 blurring of certain effects when the building is 
 out of proportion to the size of the orchestra. It 
 also means, for the listener, that music which 
 sounds perfect and agreeable in one place will 
 sound imperfect and not so agreeable in another, 
 and the listener will often quite unfairly blame the 
 players or the conductor for what is in effect a 
 fault of acoustics. This is one of the few direc- 
 tions in which there remains something to be 
 done in the development of modern orchestral 
 performances. No one, so far as I know, has yet 
 discovered what is the ideal building for an 
 orchestra of a hundred players. The acoustics of 
 the matter are still left to guesswork, and we 
 continue to build concert-halls the dimensions of 
 which are governed by considerations of space, 
 of the number of people that can be got into 
 them, of architectural convenience — considera- 
 tions of every kind, in fact, except the one which 
 
 [ 151 ] 
 
THE MUSICIAN 
 
 ought to be regarded as most important of all — 
 consideration of the effect which will be produced 
 by a full orchestra playing in the building. The 
 ideal concert-hall will be so built that the average 
 orchestra of a hundred players will sound to per- 
 fection in it ; and the ideal orchestra of the future 
 will add to its numbers or take away from them 
 in accordance with the size of the hall in which it 
 is playing. Concert-hall performances will then 
 not be so much in the nature of a compromise as 
 they are at present. 
 
 I have said that the frame of mind of the 
 listener is all-important, and especially at a con- 
 cert, because of the unideal conditions which 
 exist, and which the listener has often to conquer 
 by a deliberate effort of the mind. I will return to 
 these conditions presently ; but in order to realise 
 that they need not exist, I would point out three 
 forms of music in which the preparation of the 
 mind on the part of the listener is not all-im- 
 portant. The one is chamber-music, where the 
 music is so near to one, so intimate in its appeal, 
 and so dominating, that we surrender ourselves to 
 it at once ; it is almost as though we were taking 
 a direct part in it ourselves. Another such case 
 is that of ideal church music heard in a vast 
 cathedral. There, again, no effort is needed, 
 
 [ 152 ] 
 
AS HEARER 
 
 because the mind is already prepared by the 
 spirit of the building, by the exalting- effect of 
 sublime architecture which, when the soft notes 
 of an organ begin to sound in a great cathedral, 
 seems to have found an actual voice. Organ- 
 tones are the true voice of a cathedral ; without 
 them, something seems to be wanting, we are 
 conscious of a sense of incompleteness until those 
 suave voices are uttered in the soft waves of 
 sound that flow out and creep round the building. 
 The mind is then soothed and satisfied ; there is 
 a sense of consummation. The third instance is 
 that of the opera — opera, I mean, performed 
 under proper conditions. There the scenery and 
 the movement of the drama attune and concen- 
 trate the mind and the attention, and bear the 
 same relation to the music as the building itself 
 does in the case of a cathedral. The effort of con- 
 centration is not necessary, because a want has 
 already been created in the mind which the music 
 satisfies. 
 
 But to return to the concert-room. How often 
 do we really hear music under ideal conditions 
 there ? We get so accustomed to it that we take 
 all the deficiencies of the concert-room system for 
 granted ; but, in fact, at least fifty per cent of our 
 enjoyment of music is wasted in the ordinary 
 
 [ 153 ] 
 
THE MUSICIAN 
 
 concert-room. To begin with, we are very seldom 
 physically comfortable. It appears to be beyond 
 the ingenuity of man to devise a form of seat for 
 a concert-room or a church which, while being 
 hygienic and portable, is anything else but an in- 
 strument of mild torture, grotesquely unfitted to 
 the anatomy of the human beings who are to 
 occupy it. You may sometimes sit comfortably in 
 a theatre or a music-hall, but not in a concert- 
 room or a church. And if part of one's conscious- 
 ness is occupied with aches and pains of one's 
 body, it will be inevitably less free to steep itself 
 in the atmosphere, musical or religious, with 
 which it is surrounded. There are many other 
 things which tend to distract one in the ordinary 
 concert-room ; and by far the chief distraction is 
 the presence of other people there. The ideal 
 concert-room would contain only one person — 
 oneself, or such companions as one carefully 
 chose to admit — too difficult and desirable an 
 achievement for any one but a man who was 
 called mad — King Ludvvig of Bavaria. Failing 
 that, the next ideal arrangement for a concert- 
 room would be that every seat should be con- 
 structed on the principle of the condemned pew 
 in a prison chapel, from which murderers have 
 the privilege of seeing and hearing a religious 
 
 [ 154 ] 
 
AS HEARER 
 
 celebration alone, without afflicting", or being 
 afflicted by, the sight of their fellow-convicts. 
 
 But not being" murderers or madmen, we have 
 to put up in the concert-room with the thousand 
 little distractions occasioned by the presence of 
 other human beings, each with his or her own 
 individuality, and each given to the expression of 
 it in some way which may not be our way. If you 
 are moved by certain music to wave or nod your 
 head, there is no reason why you should not do 
 so ; but it seems a pity that I should be annoyed 
 by the sight of it to such an extent that my own 
 enjoyment is quite spoiled ; while it is equally a 
 pity, if the same music moves me to smile or 
 make faces, that you should be disturbed by the 
 spectacle. Yet, as we all know, these little things 
 do exist, and our minds are in such an extremely 
 sensitive state when we are listening to music 
 that the tiniest thing is apt to ruffle and jar 
 us. The rustling of programmes, the movement 
 and shaking about of feathers in hats, the jingle 
 of chains and purses, and above all that annoy- 
 ing passion for coughing with which some people 
 are invariably seized in a public building — these 
 are all things which, whether we are conscious 
 of them or not, subtract from the sum of con- 
 sciousness which we have at our disposal, and 
 
 [ 155 ] 
 
THE MUSICIAN 
 
 which is our machinery for the enjoyment of 
 music. 
 
 Another difficulty which the hearer has to 
 contend with Hes in what may be called the 
 literary interpretation of music. The annotated 
 programme is sometimes, and ought always to 
 be, a great assistance to the listener ; but it may 
 also be a great snare to him. It may be overdone ; 
 he may come to rely too much upon it, with the 
 result that any music about which there is no 
 printed information available is apt to be quite 
 meaningless to him. This means that he does 
 not use his imagination ; that, reading in the 
 programme that certain mental images will be 
 produced by the music he is about to hear, he 
 has those mental images already in his mind 
 before a note is played, and merely identifies 
 what he hears with them. This is a very different 
 thing, you will agree, from receiving a mental 
 image direct from the music itself, and it is 
 dangerous because, not only does it prevent the 
 imagination from being exercised on its own 
 account, but because it is apt to impose upon the 
 mind quite an arbitrary association of certain 
 music with certain ideas. 
 
 Now the number of images or ideas that you 
 can definitely express in music, so that there shall 
 
 [ 156 ] 
 
^J' HEARER 
 
 be no doubt whatever about your meaninf^^ is 
 comparatively few. Restlessness and tranquillity 
 you can express, but the restlessness may be 
 that of strife, of discontent, of anger, of joyful 
 impatience, of misery, or of excitement ; and 
 without a context or guide of some kind you 
 cannot tell by the music which was intended. 
 And the tranquillity may be that of a hillside 
 sleeping in summer sunshine, or of a child in its 
 mother's care, of satisfied love, of sluggish con- 
 tent, of a river wandering through a meadow, of 
 sleep, or of death ; and again the music will not 
 definitely tell you of itself which of these ideas is 
 intended. The result of this ambiguity of the 
 musical idiom is that a great deal is left to the 
 individual temperament. And this, again, is one 
 of the great charms of music, because each 
 listener will, or ought to, interpret the music in 
 accordance with his own particular individuality. 
 What music can express is a mental atmo- 
 sphere or, as we say, a frame of mind. The 
 contemplation of certain ideas produces in the 
 composer a certain frame of mind, to which he 
 gives expression in his music ; and that induces 
 in the listener the same frame of mind, which 
 suggests to him, not necessarily the same images 
 which inspired it in the composer, but the set of 
 
 [ 157 ] 
 
THE MUSICIAN 
 
 images which are most closely associated in the 
 hearer's personality with the frame of mind which 
 has been induced. To take an elementary 
 example : the composer contemplates the clouds 
 on a still summer afternoon, and writes a tranquil 
 open-air piece of music. I hear it and receive 
 an extremely definite open-air impression ; but 
 that open-air tranquillity being in my mind, 
 through youthful associations perhaps, or for 
 any one out of a dozen reasons, associated with 
 trees, it is perhaps large masses of trees and 
 shadows of leafy green foliage that are suggested 
 to me when I hear the music played. And to 
 some one else perhaps that tranquillity of the 
 open-air will suggest a great, still, shimmering 
 sheet of water ; and to yet another the silence and 
 space of an empty moorland. So you see, in this 
 case, although the composer has transmitted his 
 frame of mind to each hearer, yet in each case the 
 image suggested to the mind is different. Now 
 comes the programme-annotator, who happens to 
 know where the composer was when he invented 
 that music ; and he tells us that this piece of music 
 represents drifting clouds on a summer afternoon. 
 Unless our own powers of musical translation are 
 very strong and very sensitive, we shall be apt to 
 accept that statement, to think about clouds, and 
 
 [ 158 ] 
 
AS HEARER 
 
 be listening" for music which shall suggest clouds 
 to us, and when we hear it say to ourselves, 
 ^*That is cloud music." But deep within each of 
 us there is a sense of disappointment ; for to one 
 of us it was really tree music, to another sea 
 music, and to another moor music ; our mind is 
 really at war with our consciousness, and the 
 effect is bewildering and blurring. 
 
 To give you a practical example of this con- 
 dition of things, I will consider a piece of music 
 which will be familiar to most of my readers — 
 Chopin's A Minor impromptu — and write two 
 ** programmes " for it, each of which shall be 
 different from the other, but both sufficiently in 
 accord with the main outlines of the music. Here 
 is one interpretation. 
 
 A sensitive impetuous feminine heart goes 
 on its %vay in ligiitness and in sadness^ a pretty 
 lightness and a pretty sadness^ noiv grave ^ now 
 gay^ but a beautiful singing thing too full of 
 life and movement to pause for very long or be 
 sad for very long ; eager and impetuous^ soar- 
 i7ig 07ie moment^ drooping the next as though 
 on tired ivings^ biit filling the r^'orld about it 
 ivith melody and sunshine. It opens to no more 
 Jiuman power than the ordinary things about 
 
 [ 159 ] 
 
THE MUSICIAN 
 
 it^ it is untouched^ tintroiibled — nntil suddenly 
 its song pauses^ it beco7nes quiet ^ awed, gradu- 
 ally htishing itself in the presence of some 
 unknown and approaching thing. That eager 
 and unconscious lightness becomes conscious^ 
 and listens and waits and holds its breath, 
 
 F^'oni the surrounding wojdd comes another 
 voice^firm, dominating^ tro^ibWtg^ neither gay 
 nor sad, but grave tvith purpose, full of inten- 
 tion, full of moment and of destiny for the 
 feminine voice that fluttered into silence at its 
 app7vach. And suddenly the grave voice breaks 
 into song, into melody ; and the feminine voice, 
 awakened to something new, answers it, breaks 
 into nezv melody with it, sings a new and more 
 soaring song, in which its oivn life and move- 
 ment is mingled with the graver and stronger 
 melody of the other voice. This double song 
 rises in intensity, rises to fcTvoury rises to 
 passion, rises to storm. 
 
 And suddenly it breaks off i7i some such 
 stor77iy tra7isport, 247ico7npleted, The femi7ii7ie 
 voice retur7is, goes back to its si77ipler so7ig, like 
 a so7ig that is sung by solita7y birds, not to 
 please any other C7'eatu7'e, but to please the 
 singer he7^self. And the voice si7igs 07i to itself 
 in the old st7'ai7i, grave a7id gay, bubbling and 
 
 [ i6o ] 
 
AS HEARER 
 
 soaring and drooping ; and yet surely there is 
 something in it that there 7vas not before^ a 
 tinge of darker colour^ a strain of deeper sad- 
 ness, a vienioiy of that greater^ graver song 
 which it sang once and sings no more. It 
 becomes quieter^ the voice sings on to itself^ but 
 ever moix mu7'niuri)igly ; it sings to a close, it 
 sings itself to sleep. 
 
 Now there you have a purely fantastic verbal 
 paraphrase of this piece of music. Play it to your- 
 self, or think of it, and fit my little story to it, and 
 see how well it fits. Now let me give you one more 
 interpretation. Try to forget the other and your 
 own, pretend that you are about to hear the music 
 for the first time, and that this is what you are 
 going to hear. 
 
 It is a May morning i?i a ivoodland glade 
 through which a great main road passes. The 
 birds are singing in every tixe, the hawthorn 
 buds are breaking, the river ripples in silver 
 over its stones and pebbles, the breeze, a cool 
 and wonderful morning breeze of spring, conies 
 blowing doivn the valley, tossing the tree-tops 
 and making the young leaves flash back the 
 sunshine from a thousand shining surfaces. 
 White clouds hurry acj'oss the valley, and their 
 
 L [ i6i ] 
 
THE MUSICIAN 
 
 shadows stream over the 77ieadows where the 
 la m bs a re frisk ing and p lay ing, A n d eve r the 
 breeze blows fresher and fresher ; it tumbles 
 the tree-tops merrily^ so that the birds that are 
 singing there break into louder and louder 
 melody. 
 
 And suddenly the birds are stilled ; there is 
 a lull in the 7vind ; another sound breaks upon 
 their ears — the tramp of feet ^ the sotind of 
 military music. Along the road through the 
 valley is marching a battalion of soldiers ; 
 drums beatings flags fly ingy bands play ing^ and 
 the s ten light flashing on stvords arid helmets and 
 bayonets. The birds ai^e silent as this mighty 
 force sweeps by^ the music gi^oiving louder and 
 louder and the banners streaming in the ivind 
 and unrolling all their bright colours to the 
 sun. Aiid presently, while the army still 
 7naixhes by, the soldie7's break into a song^ 
 not a fighting song^ bid a marching song of 
 the 7'oady of the things that they have left 
 behind the Jiiy the things that make life precious 
 to thein — not a song of the fight y but a song of 
 the things for which inen fight. And the song 
 passes and ends^ and the army passes, the 
 m-usic dies away in the distance ; the I'oad is 
 empty again, and over the woodland glade 
 
 [ 162 ] 
 
AS HEARER 
 
 sweeps the sicnsJiine. Again comes the bi'ceze^ 
 again wakes the vinsic oj the tree-tops^ the 
 love-music of the birds ; and so wakings it 
 soars through the mornings it sings itself into 
 ecstasy till the su/i stands high in the heavens, 
 and the breeze dies, and sound and movement 
 begin to sink into noontide quiet, into noontide 
 rest, into the peace and silence of the sun. 
 
 You see that one might go on to any extent 
 inventhig verbal paraphrases for a piece of 
 music like this, and each one would find its 
 adherents ; but clearly it is entirely a matter 
 of choice which you take ; whatever you feel 
 most truly in yourself, that is the right one. 
 So far as Chopin is concerned, I am sure nothing 
 at all like either of my interpretations was in his 
 mind when he wrote that music. He found an 
 interesting figure in two parts and worked it up 
 to a climax ; then, as a little variety was demanded 
 to make the music symmetrical and beautiful in 
 form, he added a simple melody in the middle by 
 way of contrast, and developed and embroidered 
 it in his own inimitable manner. And then again, 
 for the sake of symmetry of form, he returned to 
 his first figure and brought the music to a close. 
 But what is important is that in inventing that 
 
 [ 163 ] 
 
THE MUSICIAN 
 
 music, although his ideas were not the ideas which 
 I have suggested to you, his frame of mind was 
 a similar frame of mind to that suggested to me 
 by the images I have given you. The tone of the 
 middle passage is obviously graver and sterner 
 than that of the beginning and the end ; and so 
 far my interpretation is not discordant with the 
 composer's intention, although for me to impress 
 it upon any one, or to suggest to you that it is 
 with those images in your mind that you should 
 in future listen to this music, would be a gross 
 assumption on my part, and an attempt to get 
 you to substitute my ideas for the composer's and 
 your own. 
 
 The truth is that when one sits down to hear 
 a piece of music, one should try to make one's 
 mind as nearly a blank as possible ; in fact, the 
 kind of concentration of mind needed is that 
 most difficult of all kinds — concentration upon 
 nothing. One wants to prepare, as it were, 
 a field of white upon which the music can throw 
 its own images ; and naturally the slightest dis- 
 traction, the slightest sound or sight, is just as 
 likely to get thrown upon the field as the music 
 is. That is why our modern concert-rooms are in 
 some ways so unsuitable for the hearing of music. 
 The sense of sight can distract us just as easily 
 
 [ 164 ] 
 
AS HEARER 
 
 as the sense of sound, and my own feeling- Is that 
 music, to be heard in perfection, should be heard 
 in absolute darkness. I know that there are 
 practical difficulties in the way of the carrying 
 out of that idea, but any one who has attended 
 a performance of Wagner operas at Bayreuth or 
 Munich, or at any of the German theatres where 
 his ideas are properly carried out, must have been 
 conscious of the great practical assistance which 
 absolute darkness gives to the sense of hearing, 
 and to mental concentration of that sense. In the 
 ideal concert-room of the future the lights will 
 certainly be turned down during the performance 
 of orchestral music, and probably of all music. 
 I say nothing about ballad concerts, or other 
 occasions devoted to the worship of the prima 
 don7ia^ because these things have nothing to do 
 with ideal music ; but the first conductor who in- 
 sists upon a darkened hall for the performance of 
 a symphony w^ill make an advance which others 
 will soon be glad to follow. 
 
 There is another thing which curiously affects 
 one's mood in listening to music, and that is the 
 time of day in which we hear it. At present 
 most big concerts are given in the evening, 
 which is perhaps the worst time of day for the 
 proper appreciation of music. Like so many 
 
 [ 165 ] 
 
THE MUSICIAN 
 
 other things in our lives, this is a compromise ; 
 the evening is the only time which many people 
 have at their disposal, and they come to hear 
 music tired out with the labours of the day. 
 That is all wrong. It is only certain kinds of 
 music, very soothing, very hypnotic and physical 
 in their effect, that one can really listen to with 
 any pleasure when one is tired ; but a large work 
 demanding great concentration, and leading one 
 through a vast range of emotion or of ideas, 
 is in itself extremely exhausting, and is not 
 a thing to come to at the end of the day. Indeed, 
 most of us lead absurdly irrational lives. In the 
 ideal life, the morning would be devoted to work 
 — and by the morning I mean a really long 
 morning, say from eight o'clock till one ; the 
 afternoon would be devoted to aesthetic recreation 
 and more serious kinds of artistic enjoyment, 
 such as music and the drama ; the evening would 
 be left free for only the lightest kinds of recrea- 
 tion and amusement, so that we should always 
 finish the day, if possible, in a laughing mood. 
 Some people might consider that my arrange- 
 ment involved a great waste of working time ; \ 
 but I believe if all the people who now spread 
 their work over from eight to ten hours were 
 to concentrate it into those morning hours, they 
 
 [ i66 ] 
 
^4^^ HEARER 
 
 might so occupy their minds for the rest of the 
 day that both the volume and quaHty of their 
 work would be increased rather than decreased. 
 People would live more fully, and their lives 
 would be enlarged and extended ; and music 
 would then have its rightful place as an educating, 
 civilising, and spiritualising influence. As it is, 
 it is mostly listened to by people who are mentally 
 and physically tired, and its message is more than 
 half muffled and lost. 
 
 It may be said that I dwell too much on ideal 
 conditions instead of on conditions as they exist ; 
 but it is only by concentrating our minds on the 
 ideal that we ever improve conditions at all, or 
 move them on in the direction of our desire. And 
 we should remember that in the three groups of 
 people among whom the actual birth of musical 
 sensation takes place — the composer, the inter- 
 preter, and the hearer — the hearer has an equally 
 important place with the other two. In some ways 
 he is the predominant partner, for it is he who 
 ultimately determines how the music shall be pro- 
 duced, and how it shall be interpreted, and it is 
 he who, by regulating the conditions in which 
 music is produced and listened to, can do more 
 than any one else in securing the attainment 
 of the ideal. 
 
 [ 167 ] 
 
THE ART OF THE 
 CONDUCTOR 
 
THE ART OF THE 
 CONDUCTOR 
 
 CONDUCTING as we know it to-day— 
 that is to say, the interpretation of com- 
 plex symphonic music by one man — is an 
 entirely modern art. Bach, Haydn, Mozart, or 
 Beethoven never heard their works as we can hear 
 them. In one sense they wrote entirely for the 
 future ; when they looked at their scores they no 
 doubt realised and heard with the inner ear all 
 the delicate effects and possibilities of which the 
 music was capable ; but they never heard it with 
 their outward ears. Even at the time of Bee- 
 thoven's death orchestral performances were ex- 
 tremely rough ; there was no such thing as a 
 really trained professional orchestra, accustomed 
 always to play together, available for the inter- 
 pretation of symphonic music ; but small perma- 
 nent orchestras were on such occasions reinforced 
 by amateurs, with such results as we know. And 
 even when Mendelssohn, who did so much to 
 draw attention to the great music of the past and 
 
 [ 171 ] 
 
THE ART OF 
 
 to secure its adequate interpretation, came to con- 
 duct symphonies and large orchestral works, his 
 sole advice to conductors was to take everything 
 at a fairly brisk ternpo^ so that faults of execution 
 should not be too prominent. And this was his 
 own method. 
 
 The modern art of conducting was invented by 
 Richard Wagner. In saying this I do not forget 
 Hector Berlioz, who at the same time and by 
 different means had arrived at profound dissatis- 
 faction with the existing methods, and laboured to 
 improve them ; but Berlioz founded no school of 
 conducting, while Wagner sent out disciples all 
 over the musical world to spread the good news 
 that the *^ pigtail" school, as he called it, was at 
 an end, and that orchestral performance was a 
 thing as capable of variety and contrast and deli- 
 cacy in the range of its expression as any other 
 form of musical interpretation. This art arose en- 
 tirely from his own works. He had indeed, by 
 long and patient study of Beethoven, Mozart, 
 and Weber, arrived at the conclusion that the 
 orchestral works of the great masters had 
 hardly ever been properly heard, and his essay on 
 conducting marked an epoch in the history of 
 music. But when his own scores came to be 
 examined, they were pronounced unplayable. By 
 
 [ 172 ] 
 
THE CONDUCTOR 
 
 the old methods, moreover, they were unplayable, 
 and ghastly indeed must have been some of the 
 performances of opera orchestras in Germany at 
 their first rehearsal of his scores. No amount of 
 merely beating one, two, three, four in a bar 
 could produce melody and harmony out of the 
 chaos presented by the score. The thing seemed 
 hopeless. 
 
 Like every creator or originator, Wagner had 
 to begin at the beginning and form the tools with 
 which his work was to be done. Liszt and Von 
 Billow, the greatest contemporary masters of the 
 technique of the pianoforte, were the first to 
 realise that there was at least a possibility of the 
 performance of Wagner's works ; they had learned 
 from him how to conduct Beethoven, and the know- 
 ledge thus gained was applied to the interpreta- 
 tion of his own scores. And after them he trained 
 a whole band of disciples in the interpretation of 
 his operas — Richter, Seidl, Levi, Richard Strauss, 
 Mottl, Weingartner, and Nikisch were the chief 
 of them ; all these became great exponents of the 
 new art of conductino*. 
 
 These men had many varieties of quality and 
 talent, but it will be seen that one thing was 
 common to the equipment of all of them : they 
 were all trained in the interpretation of one set 
 
 [ '73 ] 
 
THE ART OF 
 
 of works — Wagner's own operas. And that fact 
 gives us the key to the new art of conducting as 
 compared with the old art of beating time ; for 
 they had these scores absolutely in their heads. 
 They lived with them ; their lives were spent in 
 rehearsing and copying and drilling until every 
 note was as much their own as if they had them- 
 selves composed the score ; thus when they came 
 to conduct they were not merely reading the 
 music of the printed page a bar in advance of 
 the orchestra ; they were leading the orchestra 
 in something that was within themselves, some- 
 thing that came from their own inner being. 
 They knew every note of every part, often knew 
 it better than the player himself; and if he 
 stumbled or made a mistake they could sing the 
 right note for him through all the maze of other 
 parts. 
 
 This kind of familiaritv with the score on the 
 part of the conductor had been practically un- 
 known before, and it is one of the chief features 
 of modern conducting. Before the conductor 
 to-day confronts an orchestra with a new score 
 he has probably spent hours in silent study of it, 
 reading it to himself as you read a book of 
 which you wish to master the contents, and being 
 already familiar with the sound of every part of 
 
 [ 174 ] 
 
THE CONDUCTOR 
 
 it when he takes his place at the first rehearsal. 
 The first band of Wag-ner's disciples, realising 
 the enormous mastery which this familiarity 
 with the music gave them over the orchestra, 
 applied it to other works which they had to 
 interpret ; applied it in time to every piece of 
 music laid on the desk before them ; with the 
 result that in the chaos of a first "running- 
 through " they could recognise the relation of 
 the orchestral players' efforts to the true results 
 intended by the composer. 
 
 The interpretation of the Wagnerian scores 
 was also a great training ground for conductors 
 in the actual instrumental technique of the or- 
 chestra ; and in the extension of this, and the 
 first modern definition of it in the form of an 
 authoritative monograph, the work of Hector 
 Berlioz is pre-eminent. It was of old the in- 
 variable excuse of the lazy orchestral player to 
 pronounce a passage presenting any unusual 
 difficulties "unplayable" ; and the ignorant con- 
 ductor, hesitating to contradict the player on 
 a matter concerning the technique of his own 
 instrument, was obliged to accept his verdict. 
 But Berlioz and the disciples of Wagner changed 
 all that. They armed themselves with an exact 
 knowledge of what was and what was not possible 
 
 [ >;5 ] 
 
THE ART OF 
 
 for every instrument in the orchestra ; they were 
 careful not to write anything physically impos- 
 sible. They thus abolished a great piece of bluff 
 with which orchestral players had hitherto been 
 able to oppose the exacting conductor ; for com- 
 posers had often written without any regard to 
 the construction of the instrument employed, 
 had even written notes which did not exist on 
 the instrument; so that the conductor who should 
 have demanded their execution would have been 
 laughed at by his band, which would not fail to 
 take advantage of this state of affairs when pre- 
 sented with a passage which was merely difficult 
 and not impossible. But under the new regime 
 the conductors very often knew as much about 
 the technique of the instrument as did the players 
 themselves ; they were firm in demanding the 
 execution of passages which were only difficult 
 because they were unusual ; and the natural pride 
 of the artist, responding to the challenge, was 
 found equal to the new demands. The old phrase 
 *^I can't do impossibilities," or ^* I can't play 
 notes that are not on the instrument " gave way 
 to ^Mf the instrument can play it I can play it." 
 The first result of this was a great increase in 
 the efficiency of orchestral players, who began to 
 find that their work was not a mere dull, slovenly, 
 
 [ '76 ] 
 
THE CONDUCTOR 
 
 and rhythmic scraping* and blowing-, but a new 
 and intricate art in which their artistic pride was 
 challenged, a task arduous indeed and involving 
 hitherto unheard-of labour and study, but re- 
 warded, as all true artistic labour is, by the new 
 interest and intrinsic joy found in the doing 
 of the work. Thus the conductors improved 
 the orchestras ; the orchestras reacted on the 
 conductors ; the public found new pleasure in 
 listening to orchestral performances ; composers 
 found a limitless field of possibilities in orches- 
 tration, and the whole art of music, borne high 
 on this great wave, was swept forward to a new 
 stage in its development. 
 
 The secret of conducting is domination. That 
 can be achieved in various ways ; sometimes by 
 magnetism, as in the case of Nikisch and Landon 
 Ronald ; sometimes by intellectual weight and 
 assurance and calm majestic grasp of the whole 
 artistic material, as in the case of Hans Richter ; 
 sometimes by unflinching strictness and disci- 
 pline, as in the case of Henry Wood ; sometimes 
 by sheer native enthusiasm for the work, as in the 
 case of that unique person among conductors, 
 Thomas Beecham. We shall consider the chief 
 of these methods in the persons of their ex- 
 ponents ; but we must bear in mind that the 
 
 M [ 177 ] 
 
THE ART OF 
 
 domination thus exercised must also be founded 
 on absolute technical equipment. The man who 
 stands up before an orchestra with a baton in his 
 hand stands before a most formidable array of 
 expert criticism, compared with which the criti- 
 cism of the audience behind him is as nothing*. 
 Every member of the orchestra is in a sense the 
 conductor's examiner in a branch of art of which 
 tlie player has made himself a master ; and the 
 slightest failure or the smallest lack of grasp 
 will not go unnoticed. And orchestras are very 
 like a collection of schoolboys in some ways ; 
 although they may consist of serious and re- 
 sponsible artists, they will at once take advantage 
 of any lack of firmness and any lack of know- 
 ledge on the part of their conductor, and, 
 according to the circumstances, be impish, 
 mulish, stupid, or perverse. If they think that 
 their conductor is trying to impose upon them in 
 any way, they will put up one time-honoured 
 bluff after another ; and equally, if the bluff fails 
 or is seen through by the conductor, they will 
 smilingly give it up and either try another or 
 set to work in serious earnest. Unless the con- 
 ductor holds them in the hollow of his hand, he 
 is entirely at their mercy ; they can ruin his per- 
 formance if they choose ; or, if he has won their 
 
 [ 178 ] 
 
THE CONDUCTOR 
 
 sympathy, they can help him over the awkward 
 places in which any conductor may find himself, 
 and never g-ive him away to the audience. There- 
 fore the first thing which the conductor has to 
 achieve is absolute mastery of his forces. Let 
 us study this mastery as revealed in three per- 
 sonalities. 
 
 THE DISCIPLINARIAN 
 
 If Sir Henry Wood had no other claim to 
 consideration he would be famous as the man 
 who had made good orchestral music on a 
 large scale popular and possible in London. 
 There were pioneers before him, of course ; the 
 names of Manns and Henschel, for example, 
 should never be forgotten in England ; there 
 were societies and orchestras subsidised by asso- 
 ciations of rich amateurs ; there were a few en- 
 thusiastic musicians who gave orchestral concerts 
 willingly, not hoping that they would pay, but 
 content if the concert-giver could get out without 
 serious loss. How the association of Henry Wood 
 and Mr. Newman came about which changed all 
 that is an old story now ; but it is a story that has 
 
 [ '79 ] 
 
THE ART OF 
 
 brought great and deserved credit to Henry 
 Wood and great convenience to the London 
 public. Among other things, it has raised 
 Henry Wood from the position of a City organist 
 to that of the chief of EngHsh conductors ; I do 
 not think that any one could seriously and justly 
 deny his right to the title. For a long time, 
 indeed, he was the only English conductor 
 equipped with a modern technique and modern 
 methods ; for brief as the history of the art of 
 conducting is, it has already passed through two 
 phases — the school of Wagner and Biilow and 
 Richter, who were its authors and beginners, 
 and whom most of the great German conductors 
 have followed, and the school of Nikisch, who, 
 although originally one of Wagner's young men, 
 has carried the art of conducting a stage farther 
 than that to which his masters brought it, and 
 whose influence on the modern French and 
 English schools is strong. Henry Wood was the 
 first conductor in England to realise that a very 
 perfect manual technique is as important for a 
 conductor as for a pianist ; he was also the first 
 to acquire it. For a great many years his pres- 
 tige was unchallenged, his position unthreatened ; 
 no one else had a chance. But like all great pioneers 
 he sowed more than he could reap himself, and 
 
 [ i^o ] 
 
THE CONDUCTOR 
 
 Other men have come up to share the harvest 
 with him. It is inevitable, and he will be the last 
 to regret it ; for time and the seasons cannot be 
 bound to the ploughshare of one man, nor are 
 those his only harvests which he gathers with his 
 own hand. In a way Henry Wood has had a 
 great part in preparing the success of some of the 
 younger men who are now becoming his rivals. 
 For a long time their rivalry was not serious ; 
 but a few years ago a wave of new life went over 
 orchestral music in London, and instead of one 
 conductor and one orchestra there were half a 
 dozen. Henry Wood's position was no longer 
 unchallenged ; one felt that the time had come 
 for him either to make good his position by 
 further energy and advance, or to prepare for 
 that slow process of retiring into the background, 
 which is the ultimate fate of every successful 
 man, however brilliant he may have been. 
 
 He held his own. The summer seasons of 
 Promenade Concerts rouse an increasing degree 
 of enthusiasm among their frequenters, who have 
 excellent value for their money, and hear an 
 unusual number of new works as well as all their 
 old favourites ; and to carry through a season like 
 this, with a long concert every night conducted 
 in a stifling atmosphere, as well as going through 
 
 [ i8i ] 
 
THE ART OF 
 
 all the work Incidental to other orchestral engage- 
 ments, is a feat in which no living conductor 
 has achieved so much success as Henry Wood. 
 It is true that of the new works produced by 
 Henry Wood there are more foreign than English 
 compositions ; he has always shown a preference 
 for foreign music, notably for that of the Russian 
 and Slav schools ; in fact, we owe a great deal of 
 our knowledge of such music here to him. I am 
 delighted that he should continue on this line ; 
 there are plenty of other people looking after 
 English music — in fact, we are in for something 
 like an orgy of it, and that also is an excellent 
 thing and a sign of native artistic life. But modern 
 English music has many grave disadvantages from 
 the conductor's point of view, and Henry Wood 
 is a conductor who has always above all things 
 played for his own hand. He has not the rehearsal 
 time to spare for a complex work unless it is 
 likely to take a permanent place in his repertoire 
 and to add to his own credit as a conductor — a 
 perfectly comprehensible point of view. Such 
 works are almost always difficult and require 
 serious rehearsing to make anything of them ; 
 they are generally scored for a large and therefore 
 expensive orchestra, and the box-office receipts 
 show quite clearly that the economic response 
 
 [ 182 ] 
 
THE CONDUCTOR 
 
 to them is not commensurate with the artistic 
 enthusiasm which produces them. Often works 
 like these, which have cost time and money to 
 produce, become practically obsolete after their 
 first performance ; in other words, every penny 
 spent in producing" them has to be written off ; 
 whereas the same money could often be invested 
 in the preparation of other new works which 
 would almost certainly prove popular. I think this 
 state of things will gradually change, but in the 
 meantime the guarantors of concerts, and often 
 the members of the orchestra themselves, have to 
 bear the losses incidental to musical patriotism. 
 But from Henry Wood's point of view there is 
 another reason wiiy he leans so much to music of 
 quite a different school — because it particularly 
 suits his genius as a conductor, and music of the 
 English school, wdth rare exceptions, does not. 
 And what is the nature of this genius? I am told 
 that Henry Wood is nicknamed by members of 
 his orchestra the ** Band-Sergeant," and the name 
 indicates the direction in which a great part of his 
 successes and a certain part of his defects lie. He 
 is a great organiser, a great disciplinarian, a great 
 business man, a great showman ; he undertakes 
 to produce a certain effect on the public, and 
 he produces it. His rehearsals are more like 
 
 [ 1S3 ] 
 
THE ART OF 
 
 barrack-yard parades than the easy-going, pipe- 
 smoking, just-run -it-through-gentlemen -please 
 conversaziones of the old days ; programmes are 
 mapped out like time-tables of a great railway 
 system ; it is pure business from first to last. That 
 is a great strength ; let no one think that any 
 kind of excellence, artistic or otherwise, is achieved 
 by loose and slipshod methods. Yet there remains 
 in the art of interpreting music an entirely 
 intangible, ethereal quality that cannot be bound 
 or scheduled or reduced to a departmental 
 system ; and sometimes from amid all Henry 
 Wood's perfect organisation and perfect discipline 
 that wayward spirit escapes and flies away, and 
 the result is hard and mechanical and soulless. 
 That it should be so is not wonderful ; that it 
 should so seldom be so is to me very wonderful 
 indeed. 
 
 I have spoken of Henry Wood's technique and 
 of his sympathy with Slavonic music. It has 
 indeed moulded him, moulded his mind, and 
 affected even his appearance, so that now he 
 looks more like a foreigner than an Englishman 
 — an effect to which the flowing tie and rugged 
 beard contribute. Henry Wood is a great master 
 of savage rhythm and of extreme luiances^ but 
 not of those subtler dynamic variations which 
 
 [ 184 ] 
 
THE CONDUCTOR 
 
 make their balance and contrast within a much 
 smaller range ; he is great at the thunder and 
 the whisper, but not at that steadier and more 
 human diapason that is the body of life and art in 
 this world ; he can always produce an effect, 
 but he is not so good at interpreting a condition 
 or a mood. Perhaps this is little more than 
 saying he is, like most of us, imperfect ; that the 
 upper part of his face, with its fine brow and 
 magnetic eyes, is not matched by the lower 
 part ; that he is a god with feet of clay — or, say, 
 Orpheus in peg-top trousers. 
 
 He has certain mannerisms with which the world 
 is familiar — a fixed routine of gesture which 
 personally I think tiresome and unworthy. I 
 would not like to say that my opinion is shared 
 by the majority of his public, or that the per- 
 formance which he goes through when conducting 
 a great work is not carefully calculated to assist 
 his personality. But it is a melancholy thing, 
 after listening to a really fine interpretation of a 
 noble work, full of fire and rhythm, passion and 
 tenderness and understanding, to see the inter- 
 preter posturing before the audience, with ges- 
 tures comparable only to those of a trapeze 
 performer who has just alighted on the canvas, 
 bending on this side and that, and describing, 
 
 [ 1S5 ] 
 
THE ART OF 
 
 between bearded lips and the utmost reach of 
 his arm, arcs in the air which Ruskin might have 
 described as ^* curves of beauty," but which for 
 my part I find merely disconcerting and disagree- 
 able. Yet it would be easy to exaggerate the 
 importance of these defects of Henry Wood's 
 qualities — qualities which have raised him where 
 he is, high above most of us who criticise him. 
 Forget his antics and gestures in the moment of 
 applause ; watch his right wrist when he is at 
 work — that most wonderful wrist in the world of 
 conducting ; watch the left hand, which talks to 
 the horns and the wood-wind and 'cellos like a 
 familiar spirit ; watch that glance which is always 
 ready to look up from the score a second or two 
 before some unimportant entry to reassure the 
 player that the master's eye is on him and the 
 master's mind controlling his work — look at these, 
 and you will be studying the elements of a 
 technique which is in many ways unrivalled in 
 the world, and marks in England the greatest 
 height to which we have so far attained in this 
 art. 
 
 [ ISO ] 
 
THE CONDUCTOR 
 
 II 
 
 THE EMOTIONAL 
 
 The greatest master of the emotional method 
 was Nikisch ; but his emotion is becoming worn 
 out, spent, exhausted ; and his mantle has fallen 
 on his disciple, Landon Ronald, who is the chief 
 exponent of this method in England. Ronald 
 as a conductor is one with the musicians and 
 composers of the young English school who, 
 although themselves the reverse of academic, are 
 really the true musical progeny of the more 
 academic generation which preceded them, and 
 which some of them affect to despise. One of the 
 soundest characteristics of this young English 
 school — the best of them, I mean- — is their 
 extreme technical accomplishment ; a quality 
 which they owe almost entirely to the despised 
 contrapuntists. They are all aware that the con- 
 trapuntists were w^oefully lacking in inspiration ; 
 and they feel, no doubt, that the contempt that 
 they entertain for their methods can best be justi- 
 fied by a younger generation that shows itself 
 not inferior to the old in technical ability. 
 
 [ >87 ] 
 
THE ART OF 
 
 Nothing could be less academic than Landon 
 Ronald ; nothing could be more accomplished or 
 more modern. He does not affect the antique in 
 any way, nor believe that in order to be great it is 
 necessary to be old-fashioned. He is as up-to-date 
 as his own motor-car, and as commercially for- 
 midable as a Jersey city land agent or Dr. Richter. 
 He is entirely typical of his own time, as any man 
 who proposes to do great things miust be. But he 
 is a product of something much greater than his 
 own time. He has the blood of a great race in his 
 veins, which, mingling with his English blood, 
 gives to his wide and solid ability that additional 
 quality of imagination and emotionalism, of excess 
 even, that has carried the Jews so very far on the 
 two open roads of imagination of modern times — 
 art and finance. Of course in this racial admixture 
 lie also such snares and pitfalls as are likely to 
 be encountered in Landon Ronald's career. The 
 Englishman in him desires to be like other people; 
 the Jew in him insists on an individuality of its 
 own. The Englishman thinks of prosperity and 
 a safe success ; the Jew in his dreams of greater 
 things, of a hazardous but splendid pre-eminence, 
 and devises means for its attainment. The English- 
 man says, '^ Be like other people, but appear to 
 be different" ; the Jew says, ^'Appear to be like 
 
 [ i88 ] 
 
THE CONDUCTOR 
 
 Other people, but be different." And in Landon 
 Ronald the Jewish characteristics, seen in him at 
 their very best, arc winning everywhere because 
 they are the g"reater. They represent the strono-cr, 
 the more soaring side of his nature ; and 
 though their English partner works well in har- 
 mony with them, it is the negative part that he 
 plays ; it is they who lead and determine, they 
 who are the dark, unknown, implacable Mr. 
 Jorkins, and the Englishman who is the bland 
 and deprecating Mr. Spenlow, of Dickens's famous 
 partnership. 
 
 Landon Ronald, though far from being the 
 greatest, is probably the most accomplished all- 
 round musician at present (to use a delectable 
 phrase) before the public. If he had not deter- 
 mined to be a great conductor he would certainly 
 have been a great pianist ; and if he had not been 
 a great pianist he would probably have been a 
 great violinist. The one thing in music that he 
 probably would not have been is a great com- 
 poser ; instead, he is one of the most accomplished 
 composers in his own line that one can imagine. 
 Composition, oddly enough, represents the com- 
 mercial side of him. The shop is filled with 
 compositions — well written, always interesting, 
 always acceptable to his public ; and in the shop 
 
 [ 189 ] 
 
THE ART OF 
 
 he serves for so many hours a day, handing* you 
 out songs, overtures, suites — what you will ; all 
 honest value for your money. But the dwelling- 
 house behind the shop is full of dreams and poetry. 
 It is there that what is great in him lives and 
 matures ; comes to itself a little more every day ; 
 and comes not by idle waiting for the hour, but 
 by the closest study, the hardest work, the most 
 unsparing effort. It is to that element in this 
 double personality of Landon Ronald which he 
 must pin his faith ; it is that element that inspires 
 his orchestra ; it is that element which, if he gives 
 it fair play, will penetrate to a wider and more 
 discerning world of taste than that rather inferior 
 circle that buys, sings, and adores his sentimental 
 compositions. 
 
 Since he has had an orchestra of his own he 
 has advanced enormously in technique and in 
 certainty of touch. No one can really judge him 
 who does not hear him at his own symphony 
 concerts. The New Symphony Orchestra, which 
 he has made entirely his own, is certainly one of 
 the best orchestras in London, and will in time 
 be a great orchestra ; but like all young and 
 more or less struggling organisations it is often 
 heard under disadvantages of place and rehearsal. 
 You cannot, for example, judge any orchestra by 
 
 [ 190 ] 
 
THE CONDUCTOR 
 
 hearing it in the Albert Hall, where it and Landon 
 Ronald perform every Sunday afternoon. Yet his 
 work there is quite admirable ; whatever you hear 
 there, whether it is a great or trivial work, you 
 may be sure that it will be done with care, with 
 trouble taken to make its good points tell and to 
 bring out whatever interest there may be in it ; 
 in a word, whatever Landon Ronald does he takes 
 trouble to do as well as he can. But to realise 
 how thoroughly well he can do you must go to 
 his symphony concerts at Queen's Hall. There 
 even an uninstructed amateur cannot fail to 
 realise some of his most striking qualities — his 
 splendid grip of the orchestra, his quite unusual 
 concentration, and (what follows from it) that 
 almost psychic quality of magnetic control without 
 a little of which no one can be a good conductor at 
 all, but of which Landon Ronald has almost as 
 much as Nikisch at his best. 
 
 His methods, were they not entirely his own, 
 are based on those of Nikisch. He is frankly an 
 imitator, but of the right kind. He knows what 
 he is trying to develop in himself, and whenever 
 he sees something that will help in that develop- 
 ment, a missing fragment of the pattern he is 
 building within himself, he steals, begs, borrows, 
 or imitates it. The result is not a patchwork 
 
 [ 191 ] 
 
THE ART OF 
 
 of Other men's methods ; the result is Landon 
 Ronald, because the thing towards which he is 
 striving is not external, but within himself. The 
 two most typically fine interpretations of his that 
 I know owe practically nothing to any conductor 
 that I have ever heard ; they are the Elgar Sym- 
 phony in A Flat and Weber's ^^ Oberon " overture. 
 I have heard the Elgar Symphony conducted 
 by Richter, by Wood, by Nikisch, and by Elgar 
 himself ; but I have no hesitation in saying that 
 the broadest, loftiest, and most sympathetic 
 interpretation of that work is Landon Ronald's. 
 And in the ^^ Oberon" overture he displays a 
 poetic sense quite startlingly unlike what only 
 a casual appreciation might have led one to 
 expect. The remote, dreamy entrance of the 
 horns at the beginning, floating in as from 
 another world, the light and rapid series of 
 crescendi at the end, are wonderful ; they have 
 a true quality of fairy music such as I have not 
 found so happily achieved in the rendering of 
 any other conductor. His style is perfectly quiet, 
 and free from antics or disagreeable affectations. 
 Perhaps he is a little too much addicted to an 
 undulating movement of the lower arm, wrist, 
 and hand invented by Miss Maud Allen ; but 
 undoubtedly he means something, communicates 
 
 [ 192 ] 
 
THE CONDUCTOR 
 
 something", when he uses it. The small, dapper 
 figure expresses little ; it is the striking head 
 and powerful physiognomy, the burning, com- 
 manding, compelling eyes, the wide forehead, 
 frowning or serene, and, above all, the change- 
 less, unwinking attention to what is going on in 
 the world of sound about him that brings his 
 orchestra, and through them his audience, so 
 completely under the power of his personality. 
 There is brain dominating the sentiment, and 
 intellect controlling the emotion ; and as a result 
 there are outline and proportion, those valuable 
 qualities that are so rarely allied with a tempera- 
 ment so sensitive and volatile as his. 
 
 Emotion is at once the power and the snare 
 of a temperament like this. Emotion is no 
 friend to judgment ; overthrows judgment, in 
 fact, and drags it along in its wake. Landon 
 Ronald can do nothing about which he is not 
 enthusiastic ; and as one cannot always be in 
 an enthusiastic mood, he must either batter him- 
 self into enthusiasm for a neutral subject or do it 
 flatly and badly. The thing that he does best is 
 the newest and the latest thini^^ that has attracted 
 his personality ; he pours the whole of himselt 
 into every new mould that attracts him. His 
 personality is thus always fluent and ductile ; 
 
 N [ 193 ] 
 
THE ART OF 
 
 but this continual emotional expenditure is rather 
 like that of a man who is living up to every 
 penny of his income and putting nothing by in 
 the bank against the day when the springs of 
 emotion shall have run dry ; who reinvests his 
 capital every day, moreover, with a little wastage 
 in the process. I do not say that at present this 
 is a fault of Landon Ronald's ; I say that it is 
 a danger. He will have to beware of the defects 
 of his qualities ; of temptation to deviate from 
 the main certainty to follow the main chance ; 
 of letting his vitality stream off in other direc- 
 tions than from the end of his baton ; of 
 exercising, in his impatience with other people's 
 incapacity, the commercial side of his faculties 
 at the expense of the artistic ; of caring too much 
 for the applause of the crowd so long as it is 
 large enough, without considering of what ele- 
 ments the crowd is composed. If he avoids 
 these dangers he will go far and fare well, and 
 stand at last in the company of the great. 
 
 [ 194 ] 
 
THE CONDUCTOR 
 
 III 
 
 THE INTELLECTUAL 
 
 It is very far from being' a complete description 
 of Hans Ricliter as a conductor to say that he 
 is intellectual ; but he stands among" the ex- 
 ponents of this art as the supreme type of 
 domination by mind, by force of knowledge, by 
 all-embracing comprehension of the whole matter 
 in hand. His work is done now^ ; he has lived 
 to see the second generation of conductors spring 
 up, and the art of which he is the living head 
 develop possibilities which even Von Biilow and 
 Wao-ner never realised. Richter is so oreat that 
 he can never become obsolete ; but it is probably 
 true that his method in any other hands than his 
 own would already be regarded as old-fashioned, 
 and those who should imitate his technique would 
 find themselves taking up a wand that in their 
 hands was lifeless. 
 
 A great many adjectives have been used in the 
 attempt to fix and define the peculiar quality of 
 Richter's genius as a conductor. The statement 
 that he is a past master at his business is not 
 sufficient ; for although his immense experience 
 
 [ 195 ] 
 
THE ART OF 
 
 and the numberless resources for meeting an 
 emergency which are always at the command of 
 an ^^old hand " would in themselves be enough 
 to give him a unique position of authority among 
 orchestral players, they would not account for 
 his power over audiences often ignorant of the 
 technicalities in which he works. It is his per- 
 sonality which accounts for that. There is a 
 massive plebeian impassiveness in the very round 
 of his back that suggests the peace and security, 
 not only of the individual, but of a whole race of 
 men. One might find grander terms for it, and 
 yet do him less justice than by describing his 
 principal attribute as an immense stolidity — 
 stolidity allied to a prodigious slow momentum 
 or power of going unsensitively on to the goal 
 he has in view. Thus he not only arrives himself, 
 but he sees that those under his command arrive 
 with him. 
 
 His technical methods in conducting are 
 wonderfully different from those of the ultra- 
 modern school, although to many of them he has 
 been the chief inspiration. The large wadded pole 
 which he wields is not more different from the 
 slender wand of Nikisch than is the ponderous 
 stability of the one man from the volatile energy 
 of the other. It is a saying attributed to Richter 
 
 [ 196 ] 
 
THE CONDUCTOR 
 
 that he never makes two beats where one will 
 do, never beats four in a bar where he can hold 
 his rhythm together by beating" two ; and this is 
 characteristic of the man and of his interpreta- 
 tions. This method means often the sacrifice of 
 some very fine detail, or rather it means the 
 necessity of trusting for it entirely to the player. 
 For where a detailed phrase occurs on the fourth 
 beat of a bar in which the conductor is only 
 beating two or even one, it is impossible that he 
 should control the player's phrasing. But it also 
 makes for a large simplicity and coherence in 
 the outline of the whole piece ; and it is in the 
 achievement of that outline that Richter is 
 supreme and never fails. He often seems to 
 miss fine points, phrases the value of which has 
 been discovered and exhibited by conductors 
 whose minds are bent on detail ; but you never, 
 in any performance conducted by Richter, fail 
 to obtain a definite impression of the composition 
 as a whole. Your impression may be right or 
 wrong, or, let us say, more right or less right 
 according as the music is of the kind that 
 Richter himself understands and sympathises 
 with ; but it will never fail of a meaning of some 
 kind, consequently it will never bore you or 
 seem dreary as the same work might if presented 
 
 [ 197 ] 
 
THE ART OF 
 
 by another conductor in a long series of brilliant 
 episodes, each interesting in itself, but all re- 
 maining detached and incoherent to the end. 
 
 Among the great discoveries made by Wagner 
 in the art of conducting, and of which Richter 
 became undoubtedly the greatest exponent, his 
 power of achieving an outline, or due balance of 
 proportion, among the component parts of a 
 movement, is probably the chief. And other arts 
 of the conductor which are not half a century old 
 are the achievement of a long ci^escendo or di- 
 viinuendo ; the building up of a long climax by a 
 series of pianissinios working up to mezzo fortes^ 
 which thus produce the effect oi fortissimos with- 
 out anticipating or forestalling the effect of the 
 ^x2l\\A foi'tissinio at the climax; the securing of pure 
 cantahile tone in the inner parts of the orchestra ; 
 the achievement of a real pia7iissinio and real 
 fo7'tissimo instead of the commonplace mezzo 
 tone of the pre-Wagnerian orchestra ; the effects 
 to be obtained from fermata when prolonged to 
 the right extent, and the melodic use of many sec- 
 tions of the orchestra formerly regarded as valuable 
 only for rhythmic purposes. These things are now 
 the heritage of every conductor, but it is really 
 Richter who developed them, expounded them and 
 added them to the resources of modern music. 
 
 [ i9« ] 
 
THE CONDUCTOR 
 
 Undoubtedly the best place to study his 
 methods, and the place in which his qualities 
 were most splendidly exhibited, was the opera. 
 The **old hand " reigned there in all his glory ; 
 of all the disconcerting accidents that could 
 happen in the performance of an elaborate Wag- 
 nerian opera, there was not one that had not 
 happened to him already ; there was not one that 
 could disconcert him or for a moment disturb his 
 phlegmatic security. The most nervous player 
 could hardly fail to be reassured by that heavy, 
 motionless figure and grave incurious counte- 
 nance ; in the most tempestuous moments of 
 musical storm and dramatic commotion he sat at 
 his desk controlling it all, like an old scholar 
 reading in a lamp-lit room. Nothing moved but 
 the arm, except that occasionally the grave 
 countenance and beard slowly revolved in a half- 
 circle to left or right ; but behind the spectacles 
 were eyes, weary-looking at all other times, that 
 could be trained upon defaulting players with 
 gimlet sharpness. He was utterly indifferent to 
 applause ; at the end of a great performance of 
 **The Ring" he would step down from his desk, 
 and look up at a house shouting with enthusiasm 
 for him alone, with a countenance no more ex- 
 pressive of emotion than that of a cow looking 
 
 [ 199 ] 
 
THE CONDUCTOR 
 
 over a fence. It was at once comic and grotesque 
 and sublime, but it was much more sublime than 
 anything else. 
 
 And if the opera was his kingdom, Meister- 
 singer was his throne in that kingdom. He is a 
 part of Meistersinger as much as Pogner or 
 Eva or Sachs ; when he took up the stick the 
 whole of that great music seemed to flow out 
 spontaneously, inevitably, like a banner unrolled 
 at his bidding. That was the place to study his 
 method and his power of achieving an outline ; 
 that was the place to observe his peculiar methods 
 of obtaining a climax, his manner of treating a 
 long crescendo or diminnendo so that there was 
 always a sense of something kept in reserve at 
 the end of it ; there, in a word, was the place to 
 make a study of artistic achievement and mastery, 
 of what could be done by work and enthusiasm 
 and simplicity of purpose in this world of dissi- 
 pated forces. 
 
 The supreme conductor of the future will have 
 to add to all the technical accomplishments and 
 emotional magnetism of his age the dignity, the 
 simplicity, and the humbleness of this great man 
 Hans Richter ; and it will be a task worth 
 attempting. 
 
 [ 200 ] 
 
THE MUSIC OF 
 THE SALON 
 
/ 
 
THE MUSIC OF 
 THE SALON 
 
 I 
 
 N attempting to define the music of the Salon, 
 one must first realise what it is not. It is 
 not the greatest music. The most sublime 
 heiehts to which this art has reached take us into 
 a region far different from that of the social world. 
 The greatest music is, in fact, a world by itself, 
 and cannot be used as mere adornment of any 
 part of life, however elegant and refined. But 
 we do not always dwell on the mountain tops ; 
 some of us, in fact, never get there at all, but 
 walk along happily enough in the valleys, and 
 are content to see the cold snowy peaks soaring 
 into the blue above us. It is one of the very 
 human attributes of art that it provides for us on 
 the smaller as well as on the greater scale ; and 
 although all great art is, of course, good art, all 
 good art is not necessarily great art. 
 
 That is the first point, that in considering the 
 
 [ 203 ] 
 
THE MUSIC OF 
 
 music of the Salon we are not necessarily con- 
 sidering the greatest kind of music, although we 
 find in it some of the most perfect music that has 
 ever been written in any form or kind ; the scale, 
 that is to say, is a small scale. Now just as there 
 are plants that live and flourish in a certain 
 atmosphere and are found only in those parts of 
 the world where the temperature never rises or 
 falls below the extremes within which they can 
 flourish, so there is a certain kind of music that 
 can be heard to advantage only in a certain 
 human temperature or atmosphere. We are all 
 familiar with many such kinds of music. There is 
 the music that needs a cathedral, a vast place of 
 shadows and echoes, and the accompaniment of 
 solemn rites and religious ceremonies — the music 
 that sounds sublime in these conditions, and 
 which makes no effect whatever if these condi- 
 tions are wanting. There is the music which 
 needs the accompaniment of the stage and scenery 
 and action and visual illusion — which is a part of 
 these things, and which is incomplete without 
 them. There is the music for the solitary player, 
 which yields its greatest delight to the patient 
 scholar who spends long hours in unravelling its 
 mysteries. There is the music for the chamber, 
 where the association of two or three fellow- 
 
 [ 204 ] 
 
THE SALON 
 
 artists in the task produces an atmosphere un- 
 attainable elsewhere, and without which the 
 music itself would he a dumb and lifeless thing. 
 There is music for outdoor festivals, with sun- 
 shine and great moving crowds and banners 
 streaming in the wind and troops marching with 
 glittering arms. There is music which a lover 
 can sing alone to his mistress, and music that a 
 mother can sing to her child. There are songs 
 which a singer can sing to a vast crowd, and 
 other songs, expressive of some national or uni- 
 versal theme, which the crowd itself can sing. 
 
 Hardly any one of these kinds of music will 
 bear transposition from its own suitable atmo- 
 sphere without damage and loss of effect. In 
 other words, nearly all music is to some extent 
 dependent on environment, and no music is so 
 dependent on environment as that which I have 
 called the music of the Salon — music, that is to 
 say, that is suitable for intimate gatherings of 
 people who are met, not for any great serious 
 purpose, but for the cultivation and enjoyment 
 of the more elegant sides of life ; delicate, subtle 
 music designed for the pleasure of the polite 
 world, and to satisfy the sense of beauty of a 
 highly civilised and, if you like, a slightlv deca- 
 dent society, 
 
 [ 205 ] 
 
THE MUSIC OF 
 
 For music, let us remember, like all pure art, 
 has no concern with ethics or morals ; it is a 
 universal art, it follows us and accompanies us 
 everywhere through life. Even if we do not carry 
 it within ourselves, we still find it wherever we 
 go, simply because it is everywhere and adapted 
 to everything. It is in the clouds and on the 
 mountain tops, speaking there to us in awful 
 voices like the thunders of Sinai ; it is in the 
 valleys, in the song of birds and the soft rush 
 of murmuring streams ; it is in the surges of the 
 sea, on the empty moorland, by the cottage fire- 
 side, in the palace ball-room. And it is in the 
 Salon, taking its place amid the intrigues of the 
 idle world, the talk of politicians, the whispers 
 of diplomacy, and the voice of love. 
 
 II 
 
 Let us consider this music of the Salon from 
 two points of view : from the point of view of 
 the hearer of the music, and from the point 
 of view of the maker of it. The music of the 
 Salon is an accompaniment to, and an adornment 
 of something else. It is not the primary object 
 which has brought its hearers together. They 
 
 [ 206 ] 
 
THE SALON 
 
 have come to see each other, to shine and be 
 shone upon, to cultivate the more refined and 
 subtle pleasures ; above all, to gratify the pride 
 of the eye and the joy of the senses. Beautiful 
 colours and beautiful forms must be there to 
 please the eye ; beautiful sounds must be there 
 to please the ear. But as the essence of the Salon, 
 after it had emerged from its more elementary 
 condition, was that all these other tastes were 
 dominated by wit and intellect, so in matters of 
 art higher taste and higher discrimination came 
 to be exercised. In short, the music of the Salon, 
 while not being of the deepest or the greatest, 
 had to be of the best. 
 
 There is only one country in which this kind 
 of light perfection has been consistently cultivated 
 and enjoyed, and that is France ; so it is no 
 wonder that Paris, which saw the Salon in its 
 perfection, saw also the production of by far the 
 greatest successes in Salon music. The Parisian 
 loves to disguise all laborious processes, loves to 
 pretend that the efforts of his brain and all his 
 most arduous toil are trifles thrown off into the 
 air in an idle moment. In music especially the 
 French school has tended more and more to sub- 
 stitute form for substance, to cultivate perfection 
 of manner rather than significance of matter. 
 
 [ 207 ] 
 
THE MUSIC OF 
 
 The products of French genius must always be 
 well dressed ; anything uncouth, anything too 
 great or too spontaneous to fit into any of the 
 ready-made forms of art is intolerable there. And 
 in literature and in music both, as the substance 
 of what the French people have to say has become 
 smaller and smaller, so has the form and manner 
 of its utterance become more and more polished, 
 more and more delicate, more and more perfect 
 in finish. 
 
 Take the work of Debussy, as an example 
 which will occur to every one. I think it probable 
 that no composer with so splendid a technical 
 equipment ever had so little to say. But what is 
 important about Debussy is that what little he 
 has to say is said in absolute perfection of form. 
 One of his pieces is like a miniature painting on 
 ivory ; there is not a line, however trifling and 
 delicate, that is not as carefully studied as any- 
 thing in the whole composition ; and not a line 
 that could be otherwise than it is without loss of 
 effect. Here, of course, you have the ideal con- 
 ditions for Salon music ready made. 
 
 But the perfection of form and finish, although 
 they are the first essentials of the music of the 
 Salon, are not by any means the whole of it. We 
 desire, in the polite and artificial world in which 
 
 [ 208 ] 
 
THE SALON 
 
 we hear it, to be moved, to be interested, to have 
 our emotions even agitated ; but not too much. 
 We must not be too much moved, nothing" must 
 occur to disturb the bright and pretty surface of 
 the artistic Hfe of the hour. Smiles there may be, 
 but not loud and side-shaking laughter ; there 
 may even be tears, but the utmost delicacy is re- 
 quired in evoking those tears. For tears which 
 look beautiful when standing unshed in starry eyes 
 cease to be beautiful when they brim over and 
 run down powdered cheeks. Therefore the tears 
 may rise, but they must not be allowed to fall. 
 
 All this is but another way of saying that the 
 music of the Salon must not stir us too deeply. 
 It must not appeal to the elemental and really 
 vital things in us ; we are not to be harrowed or 
 ravaged by storms of passion, or filled with the 
 desolation of great tragedies, or raised to states of 
 high exaltation. The music of the theatre and of 
 the church and of the orchestra may do all that, 
 but in the music of the Salon we must not experi- 
 ence anything too deeply. We must, in short, be 
 onlookers at life, and not partakers in it. We 
 want emotions represented to us, but we do not 
 want to share them ; we must be like people 
 sitting in a balcony watching the crowds march 
 by, and listening to the laughter and the jests and 
 o [ 209 ] 
 
THE MUSIC OF 
 
 the bustle and the strife, but we ourselves must 
 sit apart from it all, where the dust does not reach 
 us, nor the din deafen us, nor the mire in the 
 streets splash our immaculate condition. 
 
 Music has a singular power of giving* us this 
 sense of isolation from what we are contem- 
 plating ; take, for example, a waltz of Johann 
 Strauss's and a waltz of Chopin's. The music of 
 Strauss suggests waltzing pure and simple, it 
 excites the sense of rhythm in us, it makes us 
 want to dance, it is a kind of elemental appeal to 
 set our pulses and our feet moving to its rhythm 
 — and that is all. Set the orchestra playing such a 
 waltz in suitable circumstances, and you will find 
 the effect of the music will be to break down 
 whatever artificial conditions may be existing, 
 and to set people dancing ; simply dancing, 
 and nothing more. Now that is elementary music, 
 which makes a direct appeal to us, and summons 
 us to experience something. Take, on the other 
 hand, a waltz of Chopin's. It does not make us 
 want to dance, but it suddenly and powerfully 
 reveals a scene of dancing. It is like a curtain 
 drawn back, through which we have a vision of a 
 crowded and glittering ballroom, burning with all 
 the feverish gaiety and strange, half-spiritual, half- 
 sensual exaltation of the dance ; and we, sitting 
 
 [ 2IO ] 
 
THE SALON 
 
 apart in our alcove, undisturbed by these passions, 
 nevertheless see them at work in all the glory of 
 colour and rhythm and movement ; and all the 
 world seems to shine with the glitter, and shake 
 with the rhythm of energy and laughter and love. 
 Of course the music that can show us scenes like 
 this is far greater than the music which can merely 
 excite us, all unconscious of their significance, to 
 take part in them ; yet the one music is experi- 
 ence at first hand, and the other, the music of 
 Chopin, the music of the Salon, is experience 
 at second hand. We observe emotion at work, 
 but we do not ourselves experience it too deeply. 
 
 Ill 
 
 So much for the music of the Salon from the 
 hearer's point of view. We will now consider it 
 from the other side, the side of the maker of the 
 music. Now the music which I am trying to 
 describe possesses a definitive quality not so 
 much because of the deliberate intention of the 
 composer, but because of the perhaps accidental 
 presence in it of the essential character which I 
 have indicated. I shall try to make some broad 
 classifications of composers and schools of com- 
 
 [ 2" ] 
 
THE MUSIC OF 
 
 position that have produced the music of the 
 Salon. But they can only be very broad classifica- 
 tions, which will include endless contradictions 
 and exceptions. Handel, for example, who was 
 very far from being* a Salon composer, has pro- 
 duced in some of his suites, notably that one 
 containing" the air and variations which have, 
 owing to an absurd and untrue anecdote, been 
 nicknamed ^^The Harmonious Blacksmith," 
 some of the most perfect Salon pieces in existence. 
 In the same way, a few suites of Bach, the music 
 of some of the old Italian masters, a great 
 deal of Mozart and Haydn, and a good deal of 
 Weber — these are all Salon music, and yet 
 they are accidental and exceptional, and have 
 not come from the true sources of the music of 
 the Salon. 
 
 Let me give you an instance how the same 
 music, and the same musical idea, can be pre- 
 sented both in the most magnificent and lofty 
 form of universal music, and in the elegant and 
 polished miniature of the music of the Salon. 
 I suppose every reader of this page knows well 
 the great love duet in the second act of Tristan 
 und Isolde, You have there a piece of music 
 in which the limits of artistic expression are 
 reached — music to which we do not merely 
 
 [ 212 ] 
 
THE SALON 
 
 listen, but in which we live ; music which does 
 not leave us to contemplate life, but which drags 
 us in our persons and experience to the very 
 portals of heaven and hell. And now take 
 Wagner's song, Ti'aiune^ the same theme, the 
 same music, but robbed of all its terrible power 
 to sear and ravage our souls, and presented 
 merely as a delicate, languorous, delicious trifle, 
 to which we can listen with mere pleasure. 
 The sting and the terror have been taken out 
 of it ; it has been reduced in scale ; it has become 
 a charming picture, dreamy and elegant and 
 unreal as a landscape by Watteau, instead of 
 being a veritable arena in which we struggle 
 with love and with death. In other words, it 
 has become a piece of Salon music. 
 
 When we come to consider the source of this 
 music we find, as I have said, that the French 
 have contributed more largely to it than any 
 other nationality. The seriousness and gravity of 
 the German genius has prevented it, as a whole, 
 from achieving the lightness and elegance neces- 
 sary in Salon music. Seriousness is apt to break 
 through at any moment. In German music, 
 even when an attempt at lightness is made, we 
 are never really secure from life and seriousness ; 
 the thin ice of artificiality on which we are 
 
 [ 213 ] 
 
THE MUSIC OF 
 
 skating is apt to bend and crack, and we are 
 suddenly plunged, with all our finery and flimsy 
 elegance, for a souse in the cold realities of life. 
 Ernst ist das Leben^ said Goethe, and it has 
 been the unwritten text of nearly all the music 
 that has made Germany glorious. The result of 
 this high seriousness is that when an atmosphere 
 of lighter emotion is sought for it is apt to 
 degenerate into the other extreme, and become 
 mawkish and sentimental. The voice of a stout 
 German Geheimrath calling to his little maiden 
 to come into his arms and his great heart, 
 because earth and sea and heaven are all melting 
 away together for love, which represents too 
 truly much of the lighter side of the romantic 
 movement in Germany, can hardly be described 
 as Salon music. It is rather the romance of the 
 beer-garden and the tobacconist's counter. It is, 
 however, but the reflex of that deep reality that 
 we know and worship in German music, the 
 reality that has given us Bach and Beethoven 
 and Brahms and Wagner. 
 
 There are, however, two Gernian composers who 
 have written what I would call Salon music on 
 a considerable scale — I mean Mendelssohn and 
 Schumann ; and I would add a foreign composer 
 whose music is closely allied with that of the 
 
 [ 214 ] 
 
THE SALON 
 
 German school — Grieg. Of coursethe whole of the 
 literatureof music represented by the German licdcr 
 school, or a great part of it, might be described 
 as Salon music, yet I think that even here a great 
 part of the songs of Schubert in one style, and 
 Hugo Wolff in another, do not quite conform to 
 our standards ; for small as they are in scale and 
 design, they take us often into a great reality of 
 life, and not by any means into a mere sheltered 
 and adorned corner of it. But Schumann, who 
 could be great and serious, could also be slight 
 and perfect, and much of his pianoforte music has 
 that note of wistfulness, of things felt deeply for 
 the moment and forgotten again presently ; of 
 concentration on the hour and the person of the 
 hour, which is only, maybe, one of the forms of 
 mental dissipation. For just as the most charming 
 people who are fickle and inconstant prettily ex- 
 cuse themselves by saying that they are always 
 constant to themselves, so in the world of the 
 Salon the thing of the moment is the thing of im- 
 portance, the person of the moment is the person 
 who matters. There is immense concentration, 
 therefore, on the person of the moment, but alas ! 
 there are so many moments and so many people, 
 and concentration upon each of them in turn 
 becomes, in short, dissipation. 
 
 [ 213 ] 
 
THE MUSIC OF 
 
 IV 
 
 The music of Mendelssohn in its relation to the 
 music of the Salon stands rather in a department 
 by itself. I would describe it rather as represent- 
 ing the music of the Salon of Young People. It 
 is the ante-room of that greater and more im- 
 portant world in which, beneath the surface of 
 smiles and civilities and gaieties, life itself begins 
 to burn and work within us. Mendelssohn, I 
 think, has suffered some injustice at the hands 
 of modern criticism. As we know, he made as 
 great a reputation in his lifetime as any musician 
 in history, but much of his music has not with- 
 stood the test of time. Its great reputation sur- 
 vived during the mid-Victorian era, but later it 
 began to be scrutinised rather ruthlessly, and 
 much of it could not stand the critical test applied 
 by the awakened critical interest that followed the 
 advent of Wagner. The pendulum swung, in fact, 
 a little too far the other way, and Mendelssohn was 
 for some years accorded a little less than his due. 
 Now, however, criticism is more just to him — more 
 just really than it was in the great unquestioning 
 acceptance of him in the days of his supremacy ; 
 
 [ 216 ] 
 
THE SALON 
 
 as discriminating praise must always be more just 
 than mere uncritical adulation. What Mendelssohn 
 really did was to bring* music, which had hitherto 
 been rather a tremendous and lofty and isolated 
 thing, into the home, to make it a domestic thing ; 
 to apply a sense of beauty, which had hitherto 
 been regarded as an attribute of music written only 
 on a great and difficult scale, to music that was not 
 beyond the reach of the schoolroom Miss to play 
 upon the piano at home. The ^' Songs without 
 Words " was a really epoch-making work. Those 
 little pieces, each perfect in form, each a complete 
 treatment of some little theme, and many of them 
 charmingly instinct with atmosphere and colour, 
 were like nothing else that had ever been written 
 before. They were tender and emotional and 
 romantic, and, after the austerer music of the 
 preceding age, they brought poetry and romance 
 into the parlour piano, as it were, just as the breeze 
 will blow the scents of roses and honeysuckle 
 through the open window. 
 
 You may say that it is derogatory to Mendels- 
 sohn to call his music domestic music, and point 
 to his popular oratorios, his symphonies, his can- 
 tatas, and other orchestral works. Well, I can only 
 say that I do not agree. The test of any artist is 
 what he does better than any one else, what he 
 
 [ 217 ] 
 
THE MUSIC OF 
 
 does perfectly ; those are the things that are really 
 characteristic of him. Now Mendelssohn never 
 did a great thing perfectly. Bach and Handel 
 wrote infinitely finer oratorios than he, Beethoven 
 wrote far finer symphonies, Schubert wrote far 
 more beautiful songs, Schumann wrote greater 
 pianoforte works on the larger scale. Mendels- 
 sohn did small things perfectly, and the small 
 perfect things that he did have all this intimate 
 atmosphere which I have associated with Salon 
 music. Now examine these works of Mendels- 
 sohn which I have thought perfect and perfectly 
 characteristic of him, and which I call intimate 
 and domestic. What is it that makes them so? In 
 what way do they differ from the works, say, of 
 Bach, which fill one with lofty ideas and have an 
 atmosphere of religion and remoteness ? To begin 
 with, their beauty is all of a very obvious kind and 
 on a very small scale. Bach's great and remote 
 supremacy rests partly on the fact that he never 
 tried to express emotion directly in music ; he made 
 grand and beautiful things, and the emotion found 
 its own way naturally into them. In Mendelssohn 
 the emotion is always very near the surface, if not 
 actually on the surface. Very often his music has 
 much in common with the artless, self-conscious 
 decorations of the mid-Victorian drawing-room. 
 
 [ 218 ] 
 
THE SALON 
 
 One associates it with antimacassars and crewel- 
 work, and those wonderful ornaments unhappily 
 protected from decay by being kept under glass 
 shades. Yet these things, which represented 
 merely the transient taste of a period, have 
 vanished, and still Mendelssohn's music remains ; 
 and it remains, and will remain, because beneath 
 the transient external form of its art it contained 
 the true spirit of the fireside, of the drawing-room, 
 of the home. The English home has much to 
 answer for in our aesthetic life ; but let us not be 
 too ready to laugh even at its errors. I deem that 
 person fortunate who was brought up on nothing 
 worse than Mendelssohn ; more than that, I deem 
 unfortunate him who had not in his childhood and 
 youth, while his tastes were supple and simple, the 
 benefit of an enjoyment from music of a kind which 
 perhaps a later and more educated taste would 
 have made wearisome and intolerable to him. 
 There is an age for everything ; a time which is 
 the right time for appreciating and enjoying certain 
 things. I, for my part, am glad that I was brought 
 up on many things which in later life I would not 
 deliberately choose for myself. I do not care to 
 hear very much of Mendelssohn's music now, and 
 I would not choose to hang woollen antimacassars 
 on the backs of my chairs ; but I would not 
 
 [ 219 ] 
 
THE MUSIC OF 
 
 willingly be without remembrance of a world in 
 which both were familiar to me. 
 
 If you will take, then, the ^^ Songs without 
 Words " as the supreme expression of what I call 
 elementary Salon music, you will find them inter- 
 esting in a new way. They are in music what 
 the poems of Longfellow are in literature ; they 
 raise no unpleasant or premature questions ; they 
 do not ravage the soul with emotion ; there 
 are tears in them, but they are the tears of 
 romantic adolescence ; they are soon wiped away. 
 There is beauty in them, but it is not beauty of a 
 disturbing kind ; it is the beauty of a little story, 
 pretty or gay or sad. It is a little story after all ; 
 if it is cheerful, it leaves one cheerful too ; if it is 
 sad, well, it never really happened, and we need 
 not be sorry about it. Above all, this music has 
 the power which certain perfumes have to convey 
 memory and association. That is a very precious 
 quality, especially in the music of the home and 
 of the Salon, and for that reason the music of 
 Mendelssohn with its formal melodies, its simple 
 and definite rhythms, its sweetness, its pretty 
 colours, its tenderness and femininity, and simple, 
 if somewhat vapid wholesomeness, is the best 
 example I know of this music, the music of social 
 adolescence. Remember, it is polite adolescence ; 
 
 [ 220 ] 
 
THE SALON 
 
 and picture a drawincr-room full of intelligent 
 young" people on the threshold of life, Backjhchc 
 with their hair very neatly plaited and tied up 
 with large, stiff, crinkly bows ; and young men, 
 a little awkward perhaps, but charged like electric 
 machines with feeling, ready to melt at a glance, 
 and to discharge their emotions, also like electric 
 machines, at the first contact with an opposite 
 pole. All that was expressed by Mendelssohn 
 with the most perfect finish and the most delicious 
 and untroubled melody ; and in music of a kind so 
 entirely decorative and pleasant, that it is entitled 
 to be ranked with the best music of the Salon. 
 
 Germany, I think, has contributed little else to 
 this music. Every great composer has, of course, 
 written one or more pieces that entirely conform 
 to my standard, for such broad rules that I have 
 been laying down must necessarily bristle with 
 exceptions. Of other nationalities that produce 
 music, Russia has contributed practically nothing 
 to the music of the Salon. Just as seriousness 
 lies too closely below the surface of German music, 
 so a strain of savagery lies too closely behind the 
 Russian music. If the German is banished from 
 the Salon because he is not amusing, the Russian 
 must be banished because he is not safe. We may 
 dress him up in the most modern and fashionable 
 
 [ 221 ] 
 
THE MUSIC OF 
 
 garments, and he may bow and smile and languish 
 with the best of us, but at a word or a look or a 
 touch the savage may leap forth and break into 
 wild cries, and the spirit of savage nature be let 
 loose in your pretty drawing-room. The old say- 
 ing, ^^ Scratch a Russian and you will find a Tar- 
 tar," can here be most aptly applied ; for although 
 people do not scratch in Salons, still, one never 
 knows ; an accident might happen, and a Tartar 
 would be unendurable in our world of epigrams 
 and compliments and leashed emotions. Tschai- 
 kovsky is probably, if 1 may so put it, the best- 
 bred, the most civilised of Russian composers ; 
 yet even Tschaikovsky is hardly safe, although he 
 has written examples of the perfect Salon music. 
 His song, A^//r 7uer die Sehiisucht kennt^ is an 
 almost perfect example ; yet for him too life, 
 when it was not savage, was grave and earnest. 
 But his contribution to the music of the Salon form 
 the exceptions which prove my rule about Russia. 
 The music of England again, although full of ex- 
 ceptions in this particular, has never been really 
 rich in music of this polite and polished type. 
 English music at its best has either been gay 
 music, music for out-of-doors, the music of the 
 meadow and the village green, or, in its later 
 manifestations, music of a deep and serious type 
 
 [ 222 ] 
 
THE SALON 
 
 that has no place amid the effervescent emotions 
 of the Salon. There are, in my opinion, only two 
 schools of modern music of any importance — the 
 schools of France and of England — and by far the 
 most important and serious of the two is the 
 British school ; for this very reason, that the 
 modern English composers are working with 
 music as with life itself, Avhile the French are en- 
 gaged in perfect and consummate trifling, and at 
 the best in the production of Salon music. 
 
 It remained for Poland, that strange troubled 
 borderland of a country which is neither savage 
 nor civilised, but has imported more savagery into 
 civilisation and more civilisation into savagery than 
 any other nationality, to provide the perfect and 
 masterly examples of the music of the Salon. In the 
 music of Chopin we have a quite different atmo- 
 sphere from the music of Mendelssohn or Schu- 
 mann. Gone is the period of adolescence ; gone are 
 the pretty romantic tales, the trifling ideas, the 
 untroubling occupations and the sheltered home; 
 we are plunged into the great world, the social 
 world where men and women meet and mix on 
 
 [ 223 ] 
 
THE MUSIC OF 
 
 their own responsibility, to their own advantage, 
 at their own risk. The music of Chopin is the 
 supreme expression of that human atmosphere 
 that is contained in the polite world where, al- 
 though the elemental influences are always at 
 work, their results are hidden beneath a polite 
 and formal mask. We have moved on from the 
 drawing-room trifles of Mendelssohn, from the 
 pretty atmosphere of bowers and arbours, al- 
 though w^e have not perhaps reached the real pro- 
 fundities of existence. We are in the transition 
 world that is bounded by outward politeness and 
 decorum. The particular qualities that Chopin's 
 music developed would have been impossible had 
 he lived anywhere else than in Paris in the nine- 
 teenth century. His passionate Polish tempera- 
 ment provided him with a fire, an elemental force 
 that needed to be tamed and subdued within 
 bounds of some kind before it would successfully 
 achieve formal expression. He lived in a world 
 strangely compounded for himself of physical 
 weakness and suffering, of unbounded adulation 
 and praise, of hard work and great human dis- 
 tractions, and yet with a singular remoteness and 
 apathy in his own attitude towards it all. He was 
 a great artist, a supremely great musician, and 
 he was as incapable of the mere graceful pretti- 
 
 [ 224 ] 
 
THE SALON 
 
 ness of Mendelssohn as of the calm passionless 
 majesty of Bach. There are fever and emotion in 
 every note that he wrote ; real fever and real 
 emotion, but fever and emotion produced by 
 causes that the philosopher would hardly think 
 worthy to produce so much unrest. Yet, as you 
 know, we cannot measure the degree of people's 
 suffering by the importance or reality of the cause 
 that makes them suffer. People will fret them- 
 selves into fevers over an imaginary wrong or an 
 imaginary injury just as though it were a real 
 one, and their sufferings are not any the less 
 acute for being caused by fancy. 
 
 In the same way, the Salon, the polite world of 
 the clever and the witty, and the world of amuse- 
 ment, is as real a theatre for passions and storms 
 as any other ; and it is these passions and these 
 storms that are reflected in the music of Chopin. 
 Into his own native dance rhythms he crowded a 
 sense of all the emotions that are associated with 
 beauty and youth and gaiety and excitement. 
 His waltzes, as I have said, are not things that 
 any one can waltz to, they are, rather, great feverish 
 pictures of the ballroom with its lights and its 
 movements and its music and its rhythm, and 
 the suggestion of melanchoh' that always under- 
 lies any formal gaiety. 
 
 P [ 225 ] 
 
THE MUSIC OF 
 
 In Chopin, too, we have the most splendid and 
 serious development which the music of the Salon 
 is ever likely to reach. It is serious because it was 
 all serious to him ; his life is in it, and all his pain 
 and suffering ; but he polished it and made it 
 beautiful for us. In him also we have the supreme 
 example of the terrible toll which society takes of 
 those, at once its darlings and its victims, who 
 keep it entertained and amused. This social and 
 polite world of people who amuse themselves has 
 really nothing to do with the artist ; its aims are 
 not his aims, its ways are not his ways, and its 
 rewards are not his rewards. Yet in every artist's 
 soul there is a need and desire for the things of 
 life that society can give ; and therefore it gives 
 them to him, and receives payment in the terrible 
 coin of his life. Every bar of Chopin's music is for 
 me haunted by the picture of that frail figure 
 racked with pain, a mass of jangled nerves, 
 troubled and tormented to the verge of madness, 
 who was the idol of the Paris drawing-rooms of 
 his day. Every note that he wrote, he wrote with 
 blood and tears ; yet there are no wounds visible 
 on the fair body of his art, and the tears are 
 hidden beneath smiles and graces. It is the rule 
 of the game, it is the condition of the polite and 
 well-bred world to keep pain and suffering hidden, 
 
 [ 226 ] 
 
THE SALON 
 
 and to smile and be witty in every extremity. 
 This rule Chopin observed to the letter. To 
 understand his music thoroughly, and with it to 
 understand the best of the music of the Salon, we 
 must, as Professor Niecks has said, have some- 
 thing of his delicate sensibility and romantic 
 imagination. '^To understand him we must more- 
 over know something of his life and country. For, 
 as Balzac truly observed, Chopin was less a 
 musician than unc dme qui se 7'end sensible. In 
 short, his compositions are the celestial echo of 
 what he had felt, lived, and suffered ; they are his 
 memoirs, his autobiography which, like that of 
 every poet, assumes the form of truth and poetry." 
 
 [ 227 ] 
 
THE OLD AGE OF 
 RICHARD WAGNER 
 
...*',.', 
 
THE OLD AGE OF 
 RICHARD WAGNER 
 
 IT has been the strange fate of the musician 
 Richard Wagner, who died at the age of 
 seventy, to grow old only after his death. 
 In those seventy years, so filled with struggles, 
 disappointments, privations, griefs, fightings, and 
 only at the very end illuminated by a triumph 
 that was like the bright sunset of a winter's day, 
 the artist in him grew strong and came to ma- 
 turity, but never grew old. The lover,' the philo- 
 sopher, the revolutionary — these partners in his 
 personality all went through the normal course 
 of life and saw old age ; but the musician, who 
 dominated them all, also outlived them all, and 
 remained young and untouched by the decadence 
 of age. The others were all buried in the grave 
 at Bayreuth a quarter of a century ago ; but the 
 musician, being of imperishable stuff, was re- 
 leased at that general dissolution to inhabit the 
 wide world, and to have for his home those free 
 regions of the spirit that we call universal. 
 
 [ 231 ] 
 
THE OLD AGE OF 
 
 It is more than thirty years now since the first 
 Bayreuth festival, when Wagner's art was first 
 revealed to the world in the ultimate form to 
 which he had brought it, and in which he was 
 obliged to leave it. Ever since then it has been 
 living and growing, extending its influence, and 
 continually creating anew those four great classes 
 that are the product of contact with a living as 
 opposed to a dead masterpiece : the people who 
 are in the actual process of initiation into its 
 mysteries ; the enthusiasts, intoxicated by dis- 
 covery, on whom its beauty has just dawned; 
 the devotees who have studied it, understood it, 
 and taken it as a permanent possession into their 
 lives ; and those rapid gallopers through the 
 sensations who can never retain possession of 
 anything, who have in their day been discoverers, 
 enthusiasts, devotees, but in whom familiarity 
 has bred a contempt which makes them see in 
 the object of their former devotion defects and 
 shortcomings which are, in fact, inherent in them- 
 selves. You may meet all these classes to-day at 
 any opera-house where Wagner's later works are 
 performed, and London audiences have had 
 many and various opportunities of studying them 
 in that curious, mixed, unfamiliar audience that 
 now fills Covent Garden when any serious per- 
 
 [ 232 ] 
 
RICHARD WAGNER 
 
 formance of Wagner is attempted. You still find 
 there the people, attracted, in spite of themselves, 
 by the sheer human power of the music, to whom 
 everything that goes on upon the stage is a dull 
 mystery, relieved only by certain familiar mo- 
 ments, as when Siegfried forges the sword, 
 Briinnhilde is laid to sleep on her fire-girt rock, 
 or the gods march into Valhalla. For such people 
 it is no light affliction to go dinnerless to the 
 theatre for four consecutive nights, and to sit 
 there from half-past six until half-past eleven, 
 observing events which they do not understand, 
 enduring the longueurs of Wotan and Erda, the 
 terrible harangues of Fricka, for the sake of the 
 bright moments that they know are coming. 
 
 How acutely must they suffer, who often do not 
 know who is who upon the stage, who have only 
 the common sign-posts of operatic convention to 
 guide them; who, if they see people embracing, 
 suppose them to be lovers, or if a sword is drawn 
 conceive that some one present is about to be 
 killed; who at one time imagine Wotan to be 
 making love to Briinnhilde, and at another believe 
 that he has killed her ; who never know which is 
 Gunther and which is Hagen, who think Siegfried 
 meets his death because he was caught making 
 love to the Rhine maidens, and so on! There is 
 
 [ 233 ] 
 
THE OLD AGE OF 
 
 no such excruciating boredom as that engendered 
 by any great work of art in the minds of people 
 who have not some key to its meaning; and the 
 solemnity with which it is approached by others, 
 their attention and devotion to every detail, only 
 add a sense of irritated bewilderment to the suffer- 
 ings of the ignorant. Yet these are the people 
 whom one should really praise ; they have stum- 
 bled, all unknowing, into the right path, and 
 having strayed there are held, against their 
 reason, against their comfort, by nothing more 
 than an occasional gleam of far-distant light that 
 twinkles fitfully through the fog of their mis- 
 understanding. And it is this, I say, which is 
 the great evidence of the universal youth and 
 vitality in the actual music of Wagner : that year 
 by year it takes hold of the raw human material 
 of the world and woos it to ultimate understand- 
 ing and appreciation ; for the bewildered sufferers 
 of one cycle are perhaps the enthusiasts of the 
 next but one. 
 
 But Wagner was not a musician only ; he was 
 also a poet and a dramatist. It was his dream to 
 make a new art out of music and drama combined, 
 and he pretended and insisted that he had done it. 
 We know now perfectly well that he did not do 
 it, that you cannot cross the arts as you can 
 
 [ 234 ] 
 
RICHARD WAGNER 
 
 orchids and produce new species; hybrids are not 
 fertile. The arts are like the elements, primitive 
 and final, and on this planet we shall discover no 
 more of them. We know (what Wagner did not 
 know, or refused to believe) that the fine arts are 
 separate from one another, even jealous and in- 
 tolerant of one another, for it is the function of 
 each to re-create the whole universe in its own 
 terms. We know that you cannot appreciate 
 painting in terms of poetry, or poetry in terms 
 of music, or music in any terms but its own ; and 
 we know that all these so-called hybrid forms of 
 art are to a greater or less extent debased and 
 cannot rank with the great arts. 
 
 Wagner, then, did not create a new art of 
 music and drama ; what he did was to make opera 
 a much more reasonable and respectable form of 
 entertainment than it had been as he found it. 
 Formerly only one sense — that of hearing — had 
 been seriously appealed to, and every other artistic 
 sense had been flippantly outraged. By insisting 
 that since opera is founded on drama it should be 
 in actual fact, and not in name only, dramatic; 
 that since words had to be sung they should be 
 used in a sense agreeable to the ear and mind, 
 and not outrageous to both ; and that since scenery 
 had to be used, it should, if possible, be beautiful 
 
 t 235 ] 
 
THE OLD ACE OF 
 
 scenery that would help the imaginative illusion 
 which is a primary condition of good drama, 
 Wagner made opera reasonable and coherent. 
 
 To do all this was an immense achievement; 
 and he did it practically single-handed. He was 
 a great organiser, a great beggar ; he convinced 
 the world that the achievement of his end was 
 a thing of which it stood desperately in need 
 (although, left to itself, the world had been really 
 of quite another opinion) ; he got the money, he 
 built the theatre, he wrote the play, he wrote 
 the music, he taught the singers, he invented 
 the scenery, he thought out every detail, from the 
 spiritual and philosophic meaning of his work to 
 the conduct of the attendants at the doors and the 
 arrangements for people to take their seats in the 
 easiest and most orderly way ; in fact, the festival 
 music-drama as planned, invented, and carried 
 out by Richard Wagner is perhaps the most 
 magnificent game that has ever been invented 
 for the pleasure of human beings, and was a 
 stupendous thing for one man to have done in 
 the later years of an arduous and, on the whole, 
 sorrowful life. He did it so well because he was 
 passionately in earnest about it ; and the principle 
 which, above all others, supremely governed him 
 in his wonderful administration of every detail 
 
 [ 236 ] 
 
RICHARD WAGNER 
 
 was the determination to make a clean sweep of 
 all custom and convention where these could be 
 improved upon, or where anything better could 
 be substituted ; to do nothing in the way that it 
 had been done before if any better way could be 
 discovered ; to cut through the conventions of any 
 particular method to the original end for which 
 that method was devised, to find how far that 
 end was being served by the existing method, 
 and to improve upon it, or to do away with it 
 altogether if necessary. 
 
 There is no form of art which he touched upon 
 which he has not left the mark of this reform. 
 The technique of the modern orchestra is Wagner 
 from beginning to end ; notes on the violin that 
 were, in his day, unplayable except by virtuosi 
 are now at the fingers' ends of every player who 
 earns his ten shillings a night in an orchestra. 
 He raised the whole body of brass instruments 
 from a degraded position of being mere accentors 
 of rhythm and increasers of noise to the dignity of 
 partnership in the melodious chorus of his scores. 
 He first practised, and to a great extent invented, 
 the modern system of orchestration which treats 
 each family or group of instruments as a separate 
 voice in the orchestra, and insisted upon each 
 family being complete in itself and having its 
 
 L 237 ] 
 
THE OLD AGE OF 
 
 scale extended to include the highest and lowest 
 notes of the harmony. He banished every conven- 
 tion of the old opera and substituted for them 
 the methods of true drama. He invented modern 
 conducting as we know it, and sent Richter, 
 Von Billow, Levi, and Mottl out into the world 
 as apostles to bear the glad tidings that orchestral 
 interpretation need no longer be at the mercy of 
 the ^^ pig-tail" school. He even invented a new 
 kind of melody ; and if one soberly considers the 
 meaning of those words, the achievement will 
 appear astounding. The recitative of his operas 
 imitates the accent and inflection of the human 
 speaking tones, merely exaggerating them to the 
 degree necessary to give them definite musical 
 pitch. He was perhaps more successful in this 
 than in any other thing which he attempted, 
 always excepting his actual writing of orchestral 
 music. If you try to sing and play on the piano a 
 few lines of rapid recitative from any of the later 
 Wagner scores, you will find it almost impossible, 
 however good your ear is, to hit accurately the 
 curious intervals between the notes ; and yet, as 
 any Wagnerian singer knows, once these passages 
 are learned by heart and sung at the proper speak- 
 ing pace it is almost impossible not to sing them 
 right ; they come as if by nature, and the voice, 
 
 [ 238 ] 
 
RICHARD WAGNER 
 
 if left to itself, will fall upon the right notes as 
 though by instinct. A tremendous thing — and yet 
 only one of the hundred ways in which Wagner's 
 youthful spirit assailed all the conventions of his 
 time and created an entirely new set of conditions 
 to serve his purpose. 
 
 How does it come, then, that he is growing 
 old? Whence come these mists in which, like the 
 gods when Freia with her golden apples of youth 
 was taken away from them, he appears to be 
 withering and ageing? 
 
 In the thirty years which have elapsed since 
 ^^The Ring" was first produced at Bayreuth many 
 things that were startling innovations then have 
 passed through the stages of being ordinary, of 
 being old-fashioned, of being obsolete. Many 
 things in connection with stage representation 
 w^hich were wonderful in 1876 are not wonderful 
 now ; many things w^hich were advanced then are 
 old-fashioned now : hence what I have called the 
 old age of Richard Wagner. ^'The Ring," which 
 depends for its success as a stage production on 
 the employment of every effect which an en- 
 lightened and artistic and mechanical genius can 
 compass, is being produced to-day exactly as it 
 was produced thirty years ago. A few mechanical 
 details have been altered — not always for the 
 
 [ 239 ] 
 
THE OLT> AGE OF 
 
 better ; but the minute rules as laid down by 
 Wagner for the government of every stage effect 
 throughout that great entertainment form the Bible 
 which to-day is accepted as the only true guide. 
 The only deviations permitted are deviations below 
 Wagner's standard. We are permitted to produce 
 ^^The Ring" worse than he produced it, but we 
 are not permitted to produce it better. The condi- 
 tions which have brought about such a state of 
 things are very peculiar and intricate, and while 
 Wagner's family at Bayreuth retains its jealous 
 grip of authority, and still more — for with the 
 lapse of years legal authority is passing away from 
 it — while it is still regarded as the fountain-head 
 of wisdom and tradition in such matters, there are 
 difficulties in the way of any improvement. 
 
 But it is time to say that the need of such a 
 group as that which pontificates from Villa Wahn- 
 fried is past. Its work is done, and it was well 
 done. It needed a strong guiding hand and a real 
 reverence for the master's memory to carry the 
 business of the festival performances through the 
 difficult years that followed Wagner's death, and 
 that strong and guiding hand was furnished by 
 Madame Wagner. She nursed his art — that true 
 Siegfried of his dreams — through the early years 
 of its fatherless life, and the world will always owe 
 
 I 240 ] 
 
RICHARD WAGNER 
 
 her reverence and grratitude. But Wag'ncr's art is 
 no longer in need of a nurse ; in fact, it has had a 
 Httletoo much supervision ; Siegfried has been kept 
 in curls and petticoats long after he should have 
 been wearing holes in the knees of his trousers. 
 All this nursing and coddling of Wagner's works 
 as though they were local and not universal, as 
 though one had to belong to a special family to 
 understand them, and as though they could not 
 bear the ordinary light of the ordinary day, has 
 become entirely mischievous to the development 
 of those very ideals which Wagner most passion- 
 ately believed in. How would Herr Siegfried 
 Wagner (who aids and abets his mother in the 
 business) like it if ever since his father's death he 
 had been confined in one room and made to wear 
 the same kind of clothes which he was wearing in 
 1883 ? For all living things do grow and develop 
 in the world ; you cannot, if they be really living, 
 arrest them at any one point and say : **This is 
 perfection — stop here." Herr Siegfried Wagner 
 has changed very much since 1883 ; he wears 
 different clothes, thinks different thoughts, dreams 
 different dreams from the dreams and thoughts 
 and clothes of twenty-five years ago. The very 
 body of the master has not been denied the benefit 
 of the common law ; it has changed, its con- 
 • Q [ 241 J 
 
thf: old age or 
 
 stituents have been liberated to g*o back and take 
 up the endless tale of matter in the universe : why 
 should his spirit only, or the outward shell of it, 
 have been imprisoned all these years within that 
 very crust of convention which he spent so much 
 strength in breaking? It is of no use to pretend 
 that it is not so ; it is so, and the art of Richard 
 Wagner as it is presented to-day at an ordinary 
 opera-house would be in peril from every clear, 
 youthful, unbiased critical intelligence if it were 
 not for the almost hypnotic power of the actual 
 music to win even the fault-finder to an emotional 
 allegiance. 
 
 It is another sign of the mischievous influence 
 of those who should have been the truest friends 
 to Wagner's interests, that while they have turned 
 all his ideas into conventions and made what was 
 living and molten in him into a hard mould of cus- 
 tom, it is the letter of his teaching much more than 
 the spirit that they have observed. The thing about 
 which he was most particular, rightly or wrongly, 
 was that ^^ The Ring " should be treated as a fes- 
 tival play, that for its proper appreciation it was 
 necessary that people should have to take a cer- 
 tain amount of trouble, should even have to make 
 a little pilgrimage, and should, at any rate, during 
 the four days of its performance, have their minds 
 
 [ 242 ] 
 
RICHARD WAGNER 
 
 almost entirely occupied with it. A considerable 
 experience of Wagner performances of every kind 
 has convinced me that he was profoundly right in 
 this ; the scale of his work is such that an im- 
 mense deal of concentration of mind is necessary 
 if the whole is to be understood, and the world in 
 which his characters live is one so different from 
 any world of experience that the projection of one- 
 self into it for the purposes of witnessing a per- 
 formance at an ordinary theatre is an imaginative 
 feat of which most people are incapable. Yet this 
 principle of Wagner's, while continually expressed 
 and insisted upon in his writings, is subverted 
 whenever any member of the original Wagner 
 group directly or indirectly assists a production 
 at an ordinary opera-house. The only work they 
 kept hold of was ** Parsifal," and ^* Parsifal," a 
 drama requiring one day for performance, might, 
 under certain conditions, be much more satisfac- 
 torily given in an ordinary opera-house than **The 
 Ring." I emphasise this point, not because Wag- 
 ner's works cannot stand the ordinary light of the 
 ordinary day, but for a quite practical reason. The 
 snare of ordinary operatic performances of these 
 works is that, while the music is sufficiently attrac- 
 tive to make them pay, many of the people who 
 support them, and support them willingly, cannot 
 
 I 243 I 
 
THE OLD AGE OF 
 
 be said actually to enjoy the performances as a 
 whole, or to have any real conception of what 
 Wagner intended to give them ; and that so long 
 as they put up with these operatic performances 
 there is the less chance of suitable theatres being 
 built. I am convinced that there is enough appre- 
 ciation of Wagner in England to build a modest 
 festival theatre and pay for annual performances 
 in it, if people knew that there was no other way 
 for them to hear Wagner's later operas ; but so 
 long as they are performed in the ordinary opera- 
 house the public will put up with that instead of 
 striving for ideal conditions. It is not my business 
 here to go into the question of a festival theatre, 
 but I need only say that I do not mean by that an 
 establishment restricted to the performances of 
 Wagner's operas ; I merely mean a rationally 
 built theatre, equipped with a stage suitable for 
 the performance of opera, and built somewhere 
 away from the din of streets and moil of towns, 
 yet within easy reach of London — as Mr. Bernard 
 Shaw suggested long ago ; a theatre, moreover, 
 in which performances of Shakespeare, of Greek 
 plays, and of any other great works demanding 
 the festival spirit could also be performed. 
 
 The participation in imperfect performances is 
 only one of the many ways in which Wagner's 
 
 [ 244 ] 
 
RICHARD WAGNER 
 
 friends and pupils have failed to carry out the 
 spirit of his work ; and yet they have given away 
 the principle of hard-and-fast adherence to the 
 conditions as they were in 1876 just enough to 
 vitiate that as an excuse for refusing to sanction 
 any improvement that did not occur to Wagner. 
 The theatre and stage at Bayreuth in 1876 were 
 lighted by gas, but the management does not 
 now dispense with the advantage of electric light 
 just because it had not been perfected in Wagner's 
 time. He changed his mind a dozen times in the 
 course of the rehearsals of ^*The Ring" about 
 quite serious points in interpretation, and if he 
 had lived longer he would have changed his mind 
 again; yet all the principles of interpretation as 
 promulgated in the Bayreuth edicts are as un- 
 changed as the laws of the Medes and Persians ; 
 no new light, no new intelligence, no new genius 
 or talent willing to spend itself in the service of 
 Wagner, are allowed to modify those fixed ideas 
 by ever so little ; costumes — some quite ridiculous 
 in the light of modern intelligence and cultivation 
 — scenery, decorations, stage actions even, these 
 have all become as much conventionalised in 
 Wagner's opera as the costumes and scenery and 
 stage actions of ordinary opera had become in 
 the days when he set himself to destroy them. 
 
 [ 245 ] 
 
THE OLD AGE OF 
 
 My point is that if Wagner had been alive (and 
 aged sixty-three) now he would not have remained 
 stuck at the point which his development had 
 reached in 1876. He was a man always in advance 
 of his time, never behind it. He cared nothing 
 for the fact that any given condition had existed 
 for a number of years if he thought that by any 
 effort or trouble that condition could be made 
 better. He felt this deeply; he felt it about life, 
 about social government, about politics, about 
 laws of conduct, about dress, about food, but 
 most of all and most passionately he felt it about 
 art. That was his youth and that was his great- 
 ness ; age is a stiffening, a loss of curiosity, a 
 loss of courage, a deadening ; death is a state 
 of fixity ; but life and youth are conditions of 
 movement and of progress. And though I said 
 in the beginning of this article that Wagner's 
 influence in the world is still growing, I must 
 admit that I think the garment of opera in which 
 he clothed it is in danger of growing also, grow- 
 ing as garments can alone grow — growing old. 
 It will be the world's fault if, because of that, his 
 art itself is ever allowed to become old-fashioned 
 or obsolete, or alien to what is strong and fluent 
 in the currents of life. The thing itself, the music, 
 can never grow old ; but in this curious combina- 
 
 L 246 ] 
 
RICHARD WAGNER 
 
 tion of music and drama, the drama and all its 
 appurtenances are like a mortal body in which 
 the immortal spirit of the music is vested ; the 
 spirit will remain, but the body must be renewed 
 from generation to generation ; and there is no 
 reason that even the body should be dressed in 
 the clothes of a bygone age or fashion. 
 
 It is the business of the younger generation, 
 those who care for his art, to rescue Wagner 
 from this old age into which he is being allowed 
 to fall. His dramas as he left them were full of 
 faults, which he himself would have seen and 
 remedied in time. They are too long, they are 
 full of repetitions, they have wearisome excres- 
 cences which should be cut away, as he certainly 
 would have cut them away had he lived; but in 
 the eyes of the keepers of the Bayreuth mortuary 
 disease is as sacred as health, death more re- 
 spectable than life, and every excrescence of 
 equal importance with the most vital part of the 
 design. Those of us who care will have to fight 
 that spirit sooner or later. We shall be accused 
 of irreverence, of every kind of quackery and 
 vandalism, but it will not matter; we shall be 
 fighting to rescue Wagner, as I have said, from 
 a condition of age and decrepitude which would 
 have been very hateful to him, and to restore to 
 
 [ 247 ] 
 
RICHARD WAGNER 
 
 his work that glory of youth which it had when 
 it left his hand. Not a note of his music, the 
 living spirit, need ever be touched ; but the 
 operas must be reconsidered, some of them cut 
 down and endowed with the grace of proportion 
 which at present they lack, and the whole ques- 
 tion of the mounting of them gone into from the 
 very beginning — not on the lines of existing stage 
 methods, with strips of cloth for skies and fret- 
 work trees and cloth stones, but on such lines as 
 the most able and imaginative genius which can 
 combine poetry and stage illusion shall lay down. 
 The time is not quite yet, but it must come before 
 long, and the sooner we begin to accustom our- 
 selves to the idea the better. 
 
 It is purely this question of its external clothing 
 that has put Wagner's work in danger. Bach does 
 not grow old, nor Beethoven ; it is the immortal, 
 ever-youthful spirit of music that speaks to us 
 in them. We must not let it be different with 
 Wagner, for the years have nothing to do with 
 it. Who that has stood in the gallery at Vienna 
 before Titian's ^* Nymph and Shepherd" can ever 
 think of it as the work of an old man, or associate 
 Titian with age or death? And Wagner's place 
 is '^with him, among the gods [who have life and 
 strength and youth for ever. 
 
 [ 248 ] 
 
THE TWO 
 WESTMINSTERS 
 
THE TWO WEST^ 
 MINSTERS: 
 
 WITH SOME THOUGHTS ON MUSIC 
 AND RELIGION 
 
 MUSIC, child of the world's joy, and 
 religion, heir of all its sorrows, have 
 in their origins little or nothing in 
 common ; and music had well-nigh outlived its 
 Pagan youth before the religion that was to be- 
 friend it had been born. They developed each on 
 their own lines and were nourished each from 
 different sources ; but when both had become 
 definitely developed channels of human expres- 
 sion they met and united in the early maturity of 
 civilisation. From that point, for a long time 
 afterwards, they flowed together on parallel lines. 
 Wherever there was a relio-ion there was also 
 music ; the Christian Church especially took 
 music under her wing, cherished, endowed, and 
 
 [ 25. ] 
 
THE TWO 
 
 developed it, and finally united it with religion 
 in the plainsong and Gregorian melodies of the 
 Church. 
 
 It was a happy marriage ; had the world stood 
 still in the Middle Ages, had it thereafter never 
 grown or developed any more, it might have been 
 happy to the end of the chapter. But you have 
 often seen in human life a parallel case to this, 
 where one party grew and developed after 
 marriage and the other did not, so that the one 
 outgrew the other, and the community of tastes 
 and interests on which the union had been 
 founded was lost. Religion, the feminine element 
 in this union, had reached her full maturity, her 
 day of beauty and splendour ; music had been 
 toiling to reach a similar stage of development ; 
 and, always growing and developing, music at 
 last reached an equal stage of perfection with 
 religion. Then came the union. But that which 
 had been moving went on moving, and that which 
 had become stationary remained stationary, with 
 the result that music, which had once overtaken 
 religion from a long way behind, ultimately 
 passed her and left her far behind in her turn. 
 You will realise, of course, that I am speaking 
 of religion in the external sense of the word ; I 
 am judging simply by the condition of its ex- 
 
 [ 252 ] 
 
WESTMINSTERS 
 
 ternal manifestations, by the degree in which it 
 enters into the everyday Hfe of man in this world ; 
 I shall not be expected to attempt any more 
 subtle or spiritual estimate of its power, or lack 
 of power. But it once, as we know, really filled 
 man's life in the Western world ; was a channel 
 through which art and learning reached men, was 
 their sole and complete point of contact with the 
 things of the spirit ; and in that day we had 
 perfect architecture, perfect painting, and, so far 
 as it went, perfect music. We shall never, I am 
 sure, achieve anything more beautiful in architec- 
 ture than the perfection of ecclesiastical archi- 
 tecture, not because the architect of the future 
 will not create buildings as fit for scientific or 
 commercial purposes as the old buildings were 
 for religious purposes, but simply because science 
 and commerce are less mysterious and less beauti- 
 ful things than religion, and the buildings which 
 are part of their concrete expression will be less 
 beautiful than the buildings which express re- 
 ligion. But there is a great deal of paganism in 
 music; it has its own life, its own line of develop- 
 ment ; and when its foster-mother, the church, 
 could do no more for it, I am afraid it had little 
 compunction in seeking development on other 
 lines until its incompatibility with religion has 
 
 [ 253 ] 
 
THE TWO 
 
 become so marked that, to pursue my metaphor 
 to its limit, a separation seems imminent, if it has 
 not already taken place. One has grown while the 
 other has been standing still ; and there is no 
 gulf in the world so deep and so impassable as 
 the gulf between things that move and things 
 that are stationary, between things that grow 
 and things that are stagnant, between the living 
 and the dead. 
 
 We must accept it as a fact that much, and in- 
 deed most, of the leading thought of our time is 
 not at all identified with religion. It has admittedly 
 lost its hold on our world. But music has not 
 slipped back with it, has not become a beautiful 
 anachronism, but has retained its hold on human 
 life and still claims the interest of the cultivated 
 and advanced thought of the day. In that union 
 of which we spoke music would have had either 
 to drag religion forward with it, or be held back 
 by it if they had remained really united in spirit ; 
 but that has not happened. Music has not been 
 held back ; or rather it has happened only in 
 religious music ; in every other kind of music 
 the art has progressed. No one can write religious 
 music now as well as it used to be written, but 
 the resources of all other kinds of music have 
 been developed. We get a far finer tone out of an 
 
 [ 254 ] 
 
WESTMINSTERS 
 
 orchestra than we did a hundred years ago, 
 though I doubt if we get as fine a tone from our 
 organs as we did a hundred years ago. And why, 
 if not that improvement means growth, although 
 growth does not necessarily mean improvement ; 
 but where you find that a thing has become 
 stationary and improved no more, you will prob- 
 ably find that it has ceased to grow. 
 
 II 
 
 If this were all, if the music that we associate 
 with religion had remained merely where it was 
 at its best, we should be well off, but that is not 
 the case. There is another inexorable law that 
 comes into operation in a matter of this kind — the 
 law of decay. Things that cease to live cannot 
 remain in a state of fixity ; they die, or in other 
 words they begin to go back ; for the death of 
 anything is simply the apex of its development, 
 the point at which it ceases to go forward or 
 grow, and at which it begins to go back or decay 
 — there is really no pause. It is no wonder, then, 
 that we do not find religious music in anything 
 like the state of perfection that it reached at its 
 zenith. 
 
 It is not sufficiently realised how very much 
 
 I 255 ] 
 
THE TWO 
 
 lower the average standard of musical taste and 
 performance is in our churches than anywhere 
 else. Its badness is indeed worth a moment's 
 study. A very ominous fact in connection with it 
 is that the more genuine and real the religion 
 nowadays, the worse the music. I suppose the 
 bed-rock of musical bad taste is the Salvation 
 Army, but I do not think that any one denies that 
 the whole success of that great organisation is 
 founded on its power to evoke a genuine, although 
 emotional, sense of damnation and salvation. Go 
 into many a parish church where real hard social 
 work is being done, into any Catholic church in 
 a slum crowded with people who really go there 
 in spiritual belief and sincerity, or into any of 
 those brightly lighted, hideous little chapels that 
 are crowded with bad taste and heartiness — that 
 is where you will find the worst music. Remember, 
 I speak from a purely aesthetic standpoint ; the 
 music may be hearty indeed, it may be obviously 
 the real expression of something, but as music it 
 will be bad — bad form, bad taste, a vulgar and 
 meretricious performance. And go into West- 
 minster Cathedral where still you can hear the 
 perfection of church music, where the beauty 
 and austerity, the carefully studied traditional 
 methods of expression, the noble formality, and 
 
 [ 256 ] 
 
WESTMINSTERS 
 
 the fine and classically religious spirit of the 
 music that is performed, combine in a ver)- fine 
 aesthetic effect. And then look round you in the 
 cathedral. How many people are there ? Can that 
 vast building* really pretend to be a centre and 
 fountain of great spiritual life? Of course not. Its 
 music is a beautiful anachronism ; just as the 
 neighbouring Abbey of Westminster is an an- 
 achronism, happily preserved for us by means of 
 ancient endowments and foundations, but having 
 no more to do with the spiritual life of to-day 
 than the Elgin Marbles or the temples of Egypt 
 that the desert sand has covered. 
 
 Now when we find a combination like this, the 
 badness of the music proceeding in exact pro- 
 portion with the goodness of the religion, and the 
 best and purest music existing only in circum- 
 stances from which the vital spirit of religion has 
 long departed, we may be pretty sure that there 
 is something essentially incompatible between 
 the two and their relations with modern life. 
 
 Music, as I have said, is and ought to be the 
 very best vehicle for the religious emotions. 
 Religious worship is the most magnificent drama 
 performed among men — the most complete, the 
 most beautiful. The thing which it expresses is 
 upon the very verge of the imagination. The 
 R [ 257 ] 
 
THE TWO 
 
 ideal of it is seldom attained, for to attain it is 
 to lose touch with earth and mingle ourselves 
 with mysteries. For that great journey beyond 
 our own consciousness we need strong wings. 
 The idea that we seek is shaped for us in words, 
 but to lift it and us wings of music are needed. 
 The particular suitability of music for this purpose 
 is that it is at once more and less articulate than 
 any other kind of expression. More articulate, in 
 that its expression begins where that of language 
 ends, and deals with subtleties which a word 
 would destroy ; less articulate, in that it is not 
 yet formed into a common language of life, de- 
 based by being fitted to petty or gross ideas. It 
 reveals or expresses things of which we might 
 remain for ever unconscious without its aid ; it is 
 to our inner consciousness what sunlight is (or 
 should be) to our outer ; a chord of music, if it 
 but sound at the right moment, will shine right 
 into the soul as a shaft of sunlight into a dark 
 room. Hence its inevitable place in that drama 
 whereby man makes a supreme effort to fix heart 
 and understanding upon eternity, divinity, infinity, 
 or any other humanly inconceivable thing ; hence 
 its glory and honour, as the means whereby we 
 may rise beyond our material limitations. 
 
 And yet, as we have seen, the music associated 
 
 [ 258 ] 
 
WESTMINSTERS 
 
 with religious worship in England is in a very 
 low and unworthy condition. Churches and 
 chapels are too often the homes of the most 
 grotesque travesties of what is beautiful in 
 music. The national taste is only beginning to 
 be educated ; but then, so is our taste in archi- 
 tecture and in painting, as the middle-class house 
 and the pictures on the dining-room walls of the 
 middle-class house show. Yet we do not build 
 or decorate churches entirely in accordance with 
 the average middle-class taste. We borrow from 
 other nations, other ages, in which these arts 
 were at their zenith, and so make an attempt at 
 least to make the ceremonies of religion worthy 
 of their purpose. But with music these attempts 
 are abandoned. Tunes that tickle the uneducated 
 ear are *^ wedded " to words of steamy sentimen- 
 tality, and offered as an adequate expression of 
 the exquisite flower of human devotion. Luscious, 
 cloying harmonies, wafted on the tone of fantastic 
 organ stops, prolong the sickly feast ; and the 
 silly imagery of words wholly unsuited to men and 
 women with hearts to be braced and burdens of 
 flesh and spirit to be borne is matched with 
 strains so ignoble, so cheap in the employment 
 of the elementary tricks of popular musical phrase- 
 making as to be nothing but offences to ears 
 
 L 259 ] 
 
THE TWO 
 
 even slightly accustomed to music in its nobler 
 form. 
 
 The reason for this state of things constitutes 
 its most serious mischief. Music, more than any- 
 thing else, except, perhaps, some perfumes, can 
 breathe life into these dead leaves of the memory 
 that float on the stream of thought and are called 
 associations. The sound of voices long silent, the 
 brush of wind on the face, a landscape, a group 
 of figures, a night-sky — these things can all be 
 brought instantly, and for an instant, to life by 
 a chord or melody of music. And tender memories 
 of childhood, of happy dependence on parents 
 before the sad and dismaying sense of loneliness 
 and self-dependence had set in — those most 
 beautiful things live for us in music ; and (since 
 for most of us the first associations of religion are 
 bound up with nursery memories) it happens that 
 some of these sentimental hymn-ditties are 
 identified with some of the best and most 
 tender feelings that we know. Well, let us grant 
 it. We may admit that, if you sang a stupid 
 hymn at your mother's knee, that hymn is cer- 
 tainly not stupid to you, but a holy and beautiful 
 thing ; still, that is no reason why you should 
 load the same tune with the seed of your child's 
 future harvest of memories. If you do, you are 
 
 [ 260 1 
 
WESTMINSTERS 
 
 perpetuating an ugly thing, and endangering 
 your child's sense of beauty. And you run a 
 further risk ; for the child may find out for him- 
 self that the thing he was taught to regard as 
 beautiful is essentially ugly, and he may argue 
 from this that the idea it carried for him is also 
 false and even ugly. When anything which has 
 been ^^ hallowed" by time, custom, sentiment, 
 or association is attacked, there is always this 
 outcry from the sentimentalists ; a cry with 
 which w^e can sympathise, although it merely 
 shows that the sentimentalists are incapable of 
 forming a sane judgment in the matter. But it 
 is not enough to destroy. There is something 
 better to be put in the place of all these musical 
 sweetmeats, something true to art and (if people 
 would only believe it) infinitely more capable 
 of serving as a vehicle for solemn and tender 
 associations. 
 
 There are two ways, and two ways only, out of 
 a state of affairs like this — to go forward or to 
 go back. If that union of which I have spoken, 
 that marriage still holds good, if its tie is still 
 undissolved, the choice is open to us. But the 
 choice is not open to us. We cannot go for- 
 ward ; and there is nothing in the development 
 of modern music that is in the least suitable for 
 
 [ 261 ] 
 
THE TWO 
 
 the expression of religion. Its modern develop- 
 ment is on lines entirely dissociated from religious 
 ideas. By merely technical effects you can always 
 produce a sort of religious atmosphere ; a few 
 chords on an organ in a theatre will do it ; but 
 that is the merely theatrical and external associa- 
 tion of ideas ; it is not the deep quality that in- 
 formed the Gregorian music, the music of Bach 
 and the German Reformation, and the music of 
 the old English church with the really religious 
 spirit. That is hopelessly and utterly beyond the 
 reach of modern music ; and my own explanation, 
 which no one need accept against his own obser- 
 vation or experience, is that music has developed 
 and religion has not ; that music is a living thing 
 and religion in our world a dying thing. 
 
 Ill 
 
 Well, then, if we cannot go forward, there 
 remains the other alternative, to go back. The 
 forward movement has been tried, but unsuccess- 
 fully. Modern music has lived only in the romantic 
 school, and has developed only in song, opera, 
 and symphony. Church music has not developed 
 any more than religious ceremonial has developed. 
 We should be shocked if the modern arts of stage 
 
 [ 262 ] 
 
WESTMINSTERS 
 
 management were applied to the ceremonies of 
 worship, and so we ought to be shocked when we 
 hear Credos and Kyries sung to strains of the 
 bastard French opera school. The thing, if it 
 were nothing worse, is an anachronism. But as 
 we follow the line of musical development back- 
 wards, we find two points at which it comes to a 
 kind of focus in forms of dignity and austere 
 beauty which are most suitable for association 
 with religious ceremonies. Plainsong is, after all, 
 the obvious and perfectly satisfactory musical 
 vehicle for our Western forms of worship. It is at 
 once so bare and so beautiful, so restrained and 
 austere, that it obtrudes nothing, but is capable of 
 receiving everything. But one other kind of music, 
 far different in scope but springing directly from 
 plainsong, is also perfectly adapted for the more 
 magnificent commemorative acts of worship — I 
 mean the German chorale. That is the most perfect 
 kind of music that has ever been devised for 
 what we call congregational performance — that is 
 to say, a service in which the people themselves 
 take part. Its descendant in England was the 
 old English psalm or hymn-tune ; there is in our 
 collection of these a real treasure of religious 
 music. But the treasure is mixed up witn an 
 infinite amount of dross ; the bad tunes are pre- 
 
 [ 263 ] 
 
THE TWO 
 
 ferred to the good one, and popularity and un- 
 educated taste are allowed to rule and ruin the 
 general effect. 
 
 You see, then, that it amounts to this, that the 
 taste, the universal taste that governs the asso- 
 ciation of music with religion is thoroughly bad. 
 People have ugly and badly performed music in 
 their churches and chapels because, their taste 
 being uneducated, they like ugly and badly 
 performed things, just as the artisan would 
 prefer to decorate the wall of his room with a 
 coloured illustration from a Christmas number 
 than with a drawing by Blake. Taste in other 
 departments of music, as we have seen, is being 
 educated and improved ; is it really being edu- 
 cated and improved in the music associated 
 with the church ? I think not. Vulgarity is 
 more rampant there than anywhere else ; music 
 is drifting away from religion, spreading its 
 wings in other directions, and leaving what was 
 once its twin soul comfortless and deserted. I do 
 not think there is any real remedy ; and those of 
 us who are interested in the association of music 
 and religion will do well to realise that in its 
 modern development music has nothing in 
 sympathy with religion, and that for a suitable 
 and dignified expression of religion in music we 
 
 [ 264 ] 
 
WESTMINSTERS 
 
 must go back to the period when these two were 
 all in all to each other and found in each other 
 the reflection of all that was best in themselves. 
 
 IV 
 
 The age and youth of music can be studied to 
 great advantage in the two temples of religion 
 that stand within a stone's-throw of each other 
 at Westminster. In the hoary Abbey, crowded 
 with the history of England and reeking with the 
 dust of dead things, is heard the last and most 
 modern development of religious music, the dry, 
 gentlemanly, scholarly music of the gentlemanly 
 and scholarly Anglican Church. And a little way 
 down the street, surrounded by flats and offices, 
 rises another building, as new as the flats and 
 offices, its walls a monument of nothing except 
 the supreme personality of a dead cardinal and 
 the supreme genius of a dead architect ; in which 
 all that is most venerable and ancient in music 
 can be heard and studied in a considerable 
 degree of perfection. It is one of my pleasures, in 
 those mid-hours of the afternoon which are apt 
 to be otherwise blank, to alternate between these 
 two places ; to sit sometimes in the organ lott of 
 Westminster Abbey and look down upon the 
 
 [ 265 ] 
 
THE TWO 
 
 venerable and well-endowed building thronged 
 with its prosperous, middle-class congregation of 
 sight-seers, and to sit on another day in the apse 
 of Westminster Cathedral and look down the 
 whole length of that mighty nave as yet unwritten 
 upon by time or history, and furnished only with 
 its own majestic proportions and the handful of 
 poor people who come for the music of Vespers 
 and the solace of Benediction. 
 
 There can be no question about the religious 
 contrast between these two places, but the 
 musical contrast is not less striking. The modern 
 church music of Westminster Abbey— and by 
 ** modern " I do not mean the music of to-day, 
 but the music of yesterday — this sounds strangely 
 stiff and old-fashioned, with a certain Georgian 
 plainness and Georgian symmetry, and a certain 
 coldness and inhumanity that leave a little chill in 
 the heart. The lovely building, the fine organ, and 
 the fine singing, the sense that the whole thing 
 is inextricably bound up with the English con- 
 stitution, social and political, may compensate, 
 it is true, for the lack of the highest qualities in 
 music ; for the place itself is hypnotic and lulls 
 one into the belief that if people would but go to 
 prayers twice a day all would be well with Eng- 
 land and the world. 
 
 [ 266 ] 
 
WESTMINSTERS 
 
 But at Westminster Cathedral there are none 
 of these aids to appreciation. You feel at once 
 when you enter those portals that you are, in 
 spite of the bold and intelligent effort to make 
 this Catholic cathedral really English in feeling 
 and atmosphere and tradition, on foreign ground. 
 As on a British ship all over the world, although 
 you lie in the frozen harbour of Archangel or on 
 the burning waters of the Caribbean, you feel 
 that you are on British territory ; so in any 
 Catholic church, in whatever country, the 
 Protestant cannot escape the feeling that he is on 
 Roman territory, just as the true Catholic feels 
 when he steps within the doors of a church, that 
 he is treading the soil of a vaster country than 
 can be claimed by any nationality — the country 
 of the Church, the spiritual world. Sometimes, it 
 is true, in Westminster Cathedral one may feel, 
 when some great pageant is in progress, that 
 one is taking a peep into the pages of English 
 history ; but the Reformation is too strong for 
 us, the effect does not last, it is not the England 
 that we know ; and between the English gentle- 
 man, educated in a public school and at a 
 University, sitting in his white surplice and hood, 
 and remaining much more an Englishman and a 
 gentleman than anything else — between him and 
 
 [ 267 ] 
 
THE TWO 
 
 the Catholic priest with his downcast eyes, his' 
 strange mediaeval garments, and his dull mumble 
 or strident intonation of Latin, there is as much 
 difference as between the noble scholarly sim- 
 plicity of the English Prayer Book and the 
 elaborate mosaic of Latin fragments that make 
 up the Gradual and Missal. In his carved stall 
 the Anglican canon still retains his own private 
 personality ; he is a part of English society, and 
 the emoluments of his stall are the equivalent of 
 many acres of English soil. But the Catholic 
 priest represents nothing but his church and his 
 office ; when he lays aside his embroidered cope 
 or dalmatic or chasuble, when he leaves the 
 mystic precincts of the altar, he becomes, from 
 an English social point of view, nobody at all. 
 He may be stupid and ignorant, or wise and 
 learned, he may be boorish or gentle — it is all 
 one ; within the sanctuary he is but a voice and 
 an instrument, without it, in England to-day, he 
 is nothing but himself. 
 
 When we come to the music itself we come to 
 another startling set of contrasts; The music at 
 the Abbey is helped into a visual prominence ; 
 there are the great organ cases clinging to the 
 triforium on either side ; there are the ranks of 
 choristers robed in white and scarlet in the most 
 
 [ 268 ] 
 
WESTMINSTERS 
 
 prominent place in the building ; a seat in the 
 Abbey is considered good in proportion to the 
 view it affords of the singers and the clergy. But 
 in the Cathedral the choir and organ are alike 
 invisible, hidden behind the greater glories of the 
 sanctuary and the altar; it does not matter where 
 you sit, you can see nothing of the music, you can 
 only hear it, and you see nothing of the choir 
 except at their entrance and departure when in 
 couples they make their genuflection to the High 
 Altar and their ceremonial bows to one another. 
 After that they are swallowed up in the gloom of 
 the apse and become as impersonal as the music 
 itself. 
 
 And yet another contrast. In the Abbey at its 
 very best you feel that it is not the music alone 
 that you are listening to ; but it is music deeply 
 associated with two other senses, the sense of 
 literature and the sense of personal religion in 
 the Protestant meaning of the word. To hear 
 Wesley's '* Ascribe unto the Lord" sung there 
 on a winter afternoon is more than to hear fine 
 music ; the sense of literature is also Battered, 
 the memory of great words and great phrases 
 is awakened ; associations inseparable from the 
 Protestant education are stirred. But at the 
 Cathedral, when the music of Palestrina or 
 
 L 269 J 
 
THE TWO 
 
 Vittoria is flowing out, or some of those incom- 
 parable polyphonic webs of the mediaeval Spanish 
 school are being woven, you lose all sense of 
 anything except the music itself. It is far more 
 modern than the most modern religious music ; 
 and far more Pagan than the earliest secular 
 music ; it often seems to me like the pure ele- 
 mental sound of voices, like the crying of fauns 
 in a forest. But above all it is impersonal, and 
 like all impersonal things is as mystical as you 
 choose to make it. 
 
 And if you take an intimate part in the music 
 there is again a great difference. Up on the rood 
 screen at Westminster with its lovely proportions 
 spread before your eyes you are, as in all English 
 cathedrals, detached from the actual choral per- 
 formers ; the whole thing goes on automatically 
 without any other link but that of sound between 
 the Magister Chori and his forces down below. 
 It is an august position ; and in no case do you, 
 if you are a person with any sense of reverence, 
 feel its solemnity so deeply as when you play the 
 organ yourself and, looking down into the vista 
 of chapels and monuments, realise whose dust it 
 is that your sound waves are stirring. But to sit 
 in the apse of Westminster Cathedral is to sit 
 in a friendly and intimate association with the 
 
 r 270 ] 
 
WESTMINSTERS 
 
 makers of the music ; they are in a place apart, 
 there is no ceremonial appearance to be kept up ; 
 the director of the music can correct on the spot 
 either a fault of behaviour or of singing ; it is 
 almost like being in a class-room to sit among 
 his group of men and little boys singing the 
 most difficult and elaborate music from crabbed 
 manuscript copies. You may play the organ, but 
 you do not see where your sound is going, it 
 escapes into the vast open cathedral behind you; 
 it is like playing and singing in a room whose 
 doors are wide open to the world. 
 
 Of these two places, the one is a survival, the 
 other a revival. The survival is kept going in- 
 definitely by reason of its mighty endowments ; 
 but it is a formidable thing to attempt the revival 
 of something which once died of its own corrup- 
 tion. That is why the work at Westminster 
 Cathedral, in addition to its profound musical 
 importance, has a pathetic interest of its own. 
 But for any one who doubts the musical health 
 of England to-day it is instructive and encourag- 
 ing to go and compare these two things, and to 
 examine what musically it is that a past age has 
 allowed to survive, and what it is that the present 
 age is attempting to revive. 
 
 L 271 ] 
 
DEBUSSY 
 
 S 
 
DEBUSSY 
 
 IT is most important that those who care for 
 music as a Hving art should come to their 
 critical bearings about Debussy. He is a 
 discoverer ; he has wandered into a new world of 
 tonality and what for want of a better term we 
 must call musical colour ; he speaks to us in a new 
 language, which we are obliged to learn before we 
 can form any judgment of his work ; in a word, he 
 is an artist with a new technique, and with at least 
 some degree of inspiration. What does he say 
 in this new language ? What does he discover 
 in his new world? What does his inspiration 
 reveal ? 
 
 A really deep curiosity and interest in Debussy 
 date with most of us from our first hearing of 
 r Apres-midi d'lin Faioi^ that strange, remote 
 piece of loveliness in which, like ethereal har- 
 monics sounding high above a deep note, an ex- 
 quisite artistic essence is derived from a primitive 
 and elemental idea. The reedy, bubbling" notes of 
 the flute, the stringent, murmurous tones of the 
 'cellos and violas, the strange scale, the unquiet 
 
 [ 275 ] 
 
DEBUSSY 
 
 intervals, the melancholy, burdened cadences, the 
 languors and insidious melodies that steal from 
 among the buzzing harmony — what are they but 
 reflections in sound, in etherealised, poetic sound, 
 of the sultriness of a windless afternoon, of the 
 drowsy stirring of the pagan and animal forces, 
 the peace and the terror that lurk together in the 
 still, sun-baked landscape of the classical world ? 
 This is simply a form of musical hypnotics which, if 
 we surrender ourselves to it, will faithfully re-create 
 in us the mood of the composer. And it may be 
 taken as typical of the inspiration of Debussy's 
 music ; it is remote from intellectual speculations, 
 philosophic ideas, mental agonies or conflicts; it 
 is founded on primitive matter, primitive sensa- 
 tion ; it is an harmonic resultant or overtone 
 of these. One may extend the metaphor, and 
 say that all his music is written in harmonics, 
 on the stopped and touched springs of emotion 
 — ^hardly ever are the natural, open notes heard. 
 And though the harmonics are very high and 
 ethereal, there is never any doubt whence they 
 are derived ; the sensual, the niaterial, the funda- 
 mental aspects of human nature are the pools 
 from which these misty clouds are drawn, to float 
 away and melt into the hot distance of desert 
 skies. 
 
 [ 276 ] 
 
DEBUSSY 
 
 What is new is, or should be, always interest- 
 ing, and one always approaehes Debussy with 
 curiosity and expectation, with open ear and mind. 
 But one is not always rewarded. In almost all 
 these songs and pianoforte pieces one goes through 
 the same process : one is interested at first, one 
 is bewitched by sudden moments of unfamiliar 
 beauty, and finally one is too often frankly bored, 
 losing interest as soon as the strange flavour of 
 the new fruit has been tasted. For that is the risk 
 run by a composer whose appeal is chiefly to the 
 surface nerves and sensations ; he stimulates the 
 appetite for more sensation, more variety, and too 
 often he is unable to gratify the appetite he has 
 aroused. Sometimes you feel as though he were 
 experimenting on you, trying how much you will 
 stand of a certain reiterated effect, and as though, 
 having made a note of your symptoms, he then 
 passes on to exhibit and test a new device in the 
 same way. Of course that is not true ; Debussy is 
 a serious musician, with an extremely high tech- 
 nical grasp of his art ; he knows perfectly well 
 what he is doing, and what effect he is trying for. 
 His experiments are based on experience ; his 
 curiosity is the result of profound knowledge ; his 
 dissonances and harsh effects are founded on a very 
 deep sense of beauty. He is deliberate in all his 
 
 I 277 1 
 
DEBUSSY 
 
 nonconformity, and there is that deadly logic be- 
 hind his apparent waywardness that makes modern 
 French art the technical despair of the English 
 mind. And yet he constantly fails to transmit his 
 sense of beauty, constantly fails to convince us 
 about that new world he has discovered — the new 
 world of V Apres-midi d'un Faun, True, he has 
 brought back pearls and precious stuffs, strange 
 gums and spices and foreignly wrought treasures 
 as a proof that he has been there ; but has he kept 
 a chart ? Does he know the way back ? Often, sit- 
 ting with tortured ears, journeying across what 
 seems a mere desert waste of meaningless disson- 
 ance, one wonders about that ; one has misgivings 
 that not the audience only have lost their musical 
 bearings but the composer also, and it is in 
 moments like these that curiosity is apt to turn to 
 resentment. 
 
 Such misgivings are unprofitable. Like Berlioz 
 in his day, Debussy has made an addition to the 
 resources of the musical composer that has an 
 importance quite independent of the actual merit 
 of any of his individual works. He has done that 
 most difficult thing — he has cleared his mind of 
 the conventional idiom and the conventional tonal- 
 ity, and gone straight back to the beginning of 
 things, to the musical scale itself, and practically 
 
 , [ 278 1 
 
DE'BUSSY 
 
 rearranged that. Our major and minor keys, our 
 tonic and dominant harmonics, arc not the struc- 
 tural skeletons on which his music is built. He 
 writes in modes rather than in keys; he has gone 
 back to the old scales, which were used before 
 the science of harmony had been developed, and 
 he has built upon them a tonal structure in which 
 all the resources of modern harmony are applied 
 to these old scales. One cannot really understand 
 his music unless one makes an effort to forget 
 the modern scale and the modern key, and listen 
 with an ear unprejudiced by those powerful tonal 
 advocates, the tonic and dominant of a major or 
 minor key. That is the scientific explanation of 
 the strange effect produced by the music of De- 
 bussy, and still more of Ravel, and all the modern 
 French school. In spite of the beauty of much of 
 the music that has been produced in this new 
 tonality, it remains yet in a purely experimental 
 stage; if it really develops we shall probably find 
 that our present scale of twelve semitones will 
 not be enough, and we shall probably have in- 
 struments constructed, as some organs were at 
 the end of the eighteenth century, with additional 
 quarter tones in various parts of the scale. But 
 the difficulty in the way of a musical revolution 
 of that kind, even if we are sure that it is desir- 
 
 [ 279 1 
 
I>EBUSSY 
 
 able, is that all the new music would be fatally at 
 war with the old, which would become coarse 
 and intolerable to ears really trained in the 
 familiar combination of quarter tones. And a 
 musical revolution that would make Bach, 
 Beethoven, and Wagner intolerable would be 
 hard to accomplish. 
 
 But Debussy, having* given us a new (or, if 
 you like, restored an old) tonality, has an abso- 
 lute claim on our respect and attention. For good 
 or ill, he has deflected the compasses of all the 
 younger school of navigators in the musical art, 
 and his influence is bound to be great — greater, 
 no doubt, than his individual achievement; and 
 others will carry the possibilities of this new 
 tonality farther than he will carry them, and so 
 reap where he has sown. Future ages may not 
 rank Debussy with the great composers, but they 
 cannot deny that he is a great innovator, and he 
 is to be saluted for that ; it goes far to excuse 
 those long periods of downright ugliness in some 
 of his pianoforte works, or such an acoustic 
 horror as the first movement of his string quartet. 
 The secret of this new tonality has not yet been 
 thoroughly plumbed. Many of its harmonic 
 effects depend entirely on the thnbre of the in- 
 struments on which they are played, and are 
 
 [ 280 ] 
 
DE'BUSSY 
 
 often based on the subtle harmonic effects of 
 stringed instruments in combination ; you mii^ht 
 transpose many of Debussy's really beautiful 
 passages from strings to wood-wind or keyed 
 instruments, and produce mere ugliness or caco- 
 phony. That is only another way of saying that 
 we are outgrowing the old scale, the old octave 
 on which the music of the last two hundred years 
 has been founded, and feeling our way into a new 
 scale, a new tonality, which the perfection of 
 modern keyed instruments has hitherto pre- 
 vented us from cultivating. For it is almost 
 certain that if all pianos, organs, and similar 
 instruments in which every note of the scale has 
 a fixed dynamic relation to every other note were 
 to be silenced for ten years, we should by that 
 time have developed an entirely new scale and 
 tonality in which all our musical imaginings 
 would be cast. Debussy is the chief of modern 
 composers who have anticipated this develop- 
 ment; and for that reason, if for no other, his 
 music would be interesting. 
 
 But it has many other claims. It helps to 
 make obsolete many forms which should have 
 been obsolete long ago — forms in which the great 
 composers of the past wrote great music, but in 
 which no modern composer can write any but 
 
 L 281 J 
 
DE'BUSSY 
 
 feeble music. It makes it a little more absurd for 
 us to go on flogging those dead donkeys, the 
 oratorio and cantata ; it makes experiment respect- 
 able, and even fashionable, where yesterday it was 
 deemed disgraceful. It helps in the real apprecia- 
 tion of the great composers of the past, and will 
 help to send us back to Bach for our fugues, 
 Handel for our oratorios (if we really want ora- 
 torios), Schumann for our romance, Brahms for 
 our musical philosophy ; it will help us to dis- 
 criminate between what was and what was not 
 inspired in the works of the great, instead of 
 accepting everything as pure gospel which bears 
 the name of Mozart, Beethoven, Rameau, Bach, 
 Palestrina. It will do this because, whatever 
 its faults and failures, it appeals boldly on the 
 single ground of beauty, and not of erudition, 
 imitation, or conservatism. It claims every 
 licence, and stands or falls by its justification 
 of that licence. Its failure or success is singu- 
 larly definite and complete ; it is either beautiful 
 or abominable. Two-thirds of the music of 
 Debussy that I have heard is abominable to 
 my ear ; but the remainder is so entirely, so 
 certainly, and so strangely beautiful as to con- 
 vince me that the unpleasing part, although the 
 greater in quantity, is infinitely the less impor- 
 
 [ 282 ] 
 
DEBUSSY 
 
 tant, and is to be regarded as studio work 
 which carries the mark of the master's manner 
 and eccentricity, but not of his ultimate and 
 abiding personality. 
 
 [ 283 J 
 
POSTSCRIPT 
 
 THE contents of this volume, like those of 
 its companion Mastei'siiigcrs^ represent 
 the work of some years ; and most of the 
 essays, at some stage or other of their evolution, 
 have made a preliminary appearance, while 
 all have been worked over and to some extent 
 rewritten before taking their final form. The 
 greater part of the first chapter appeared serially 
 in The Sahtrday Review ^ where also appeared 
 portions of the chapters entitled respectively 
 ^^The Art of the Conductor" and ^^ Debussy. " 
 ^' Music in Modern Life " appeared in The 
 English Review^ and ^'The Musician as Com- 
 poser" in The Fortnightly Review^ and '^The 
 Old Aoe of Richard Wao-ner " in The En<rlish- 
 
 & o o 
 
 woman. The substance of chapters ii., in., iv. 
 and V. formed part of a course of University 
 Extension Lectures delivered in Liverpool ; 
 *^The Music of the Salon" was, practically as 
 it stands, delivered as an address at the Hay- 
 market Theatre in connection with the Caiiseries 
 
 [ 285 ] 
 
l>OSTSCRI'PT 
 
 du Jetidi, I make my acknowledgments to the 
 various editors and authorities concerned. 
 
 Music is a very difficult and baffling" thing to 
 write about, and I am far from looking with 
 unmingled satisfaction on the contents of this 
 volume. Excuse for imperfection lies in the 
 extreme scarcity of literature, either good or 
 bad, which attempts to deal with music at once 
 humanly and critically. 
 
 April y 191 1. 
 
(j.H.f^^Ca