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Copyright in U.S.A. 1904 Richard Folkard & Son Devonshire Street, London, W.C. 7 tio.y- 6 V* * 5 *0 O \ \» TO PHILIP HALE WHO !S AMONG THE FOREMOST OF THOSE WHO HAVE MADE MUSICAL CRITICISM IN AMERICA HONORABLE AND IMPORTANT, AND WHOSE WORK CANNOT BUT BE A STIMULUS TO ANY ONE WHO TO- DAY IS STRIVING TO WRITE SINCERELY, JUSTLY, AND INDEPENDENTLY UPON THE SUBTLEST OF THE ARTS Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2016 https://archive.org/details/phasesofmodernmuOOgilm CONTENTS PAGE The Achievement of Richard Strauss 3 An American Tone-Poet .... 26 Concerning Edward Elgar ... 46 Charles Martin Loeffler .... 61 Pietro Mascagni 72 A Note on Grieg 88 Women and Modern Music .... 93 A Rejected Music-Drama .... 102 The Question of Realism .... 109 A Neglected Song Writer . . . 121 Verdi and Wagner: an Inquiry . . 130 “Parsifal” and Its Significance . 153 PHASES OF MODERN MUSIC THE ACHIEVEMENT OF RICHARD STRAUSS '‘Music had been too long in the laboratories of the wise men. To free it from its Egyptian bondage, to make it the tongue of all life . . so as- pired Mr. James Huneker’s fantasti- cal Piper of Dreams; and so, one likes to imagine, aspired Richard Strauss in the initial moments of his artistic awakening. It is difficult to conceive of a juster verdict upon his essential achievement — if one may venture to appraise it to-day — than that he has accomplished a wider, more searching, more comprehensively inclusive expres- 3 PHASES OF MODERN MUSIC sion of life and experience than music had ever before attempted to compass. He has compelled us to realize that the tone poet fulfils his ultimate purpose only in so far as his art is consistently and richly articulate — only in so far as it is “a tongue of life. ,, We know what energetic scourg- ings modern music has received at the hands of no less a personage than Mr. Arnold Dolmetsch. Mr. Dolmetsch, as an incident to a visit which he paid America for the purpose of declaring the virtues of old music, took occasion to instruct a benighted public concerning the de- plorable ill which, in his view, had befallen the art in our time, Mr. Dol- metsch saw in the music of modernity a vicious decadence, a perversion of means, a gross and illegitimate expan- sion. He bewailed the development 4 RICHARD STRAUSS of musical art away from the naive ideals of that elder day of its being which marked, for him, its apogee, towards a greater and more complex significance — the transmutation of an art that was merely decorative and accessory into an art that had become primarily a medium of communication. And there was profound and sincere lament for the winsome and quite bar- ren formalities of the days of Scarlatti and Rameau and Couperin: we were exhorted to abjure the orchestra and the piano, and revert to clavichords and spinets, lutes and virginals and harpsichords. We were urged to be- lieve that modern music, in attaining its unique expressional capacity, had made a reckless and unjustifiable sac- rifice of simplicity, reticence, and re- pose. Mr. Dolmetsch, and those for whom he is an extravagant mouth- 5 PHASES OF MODERN MUSIC piece, would have us content ourselves with mere tonal arabesques — would convince us that music aims, in the view of Mr. Daniel Gregory Mason, “not to represent anything, but to pre- sent to the ear and mind combina- tions of tones which are beautiful in themselves, and which express no defi- nite ideas.' ’ We are tempted to for- get that an art — that music — is vital and valid only in so far as it bears a direct and verifiable relation to life : that an art which serves no expressional need of the human heart or imagination is an art that can have no abiding value. For if modern understanding of its potentialities has taught us any- thing, it has taught us, with signal im- pressiveness, that the prime mission of music is, in the last analysis, precisely identical with that of those other arts which have become most finely articu- 6 RICHARD STRAUSS late: to be, as the best of critics has required of poetry, “ a criticism of life.” Failing that, it is but the emptiest of illusive vanities — at most a beau- tiful embroidery upon life, never its potent voice and instrument. Mr. Dolmetsch is right: music has definitely forsaken prettiness for char- acterization, an idle loveliness for elo- quent signification. But, far as we have gone, it remained for the great young master, Richard Strauss, to open the door into a world — veritable, new, and of inestimable boundaries — upon which music had not ventured to im- pinge. Strauss has, as Mr. Huneker justly notes, ‘‘all the old enchantments of music; he can woo and ravish the ear and command the tempests ; but this is not enough. He would have his art still more definite, his message still more articulate. . . . Notes, phrases, 2 7 PHASES OF MODERN MUSIC groups, movements, masses of tone, no longer occupy the same relative position in his works ; they are no longer merely sensuous symbols, but the actual symbols of a language we must hasten to learn, a new speech which relates in wonderful tones won- derful things.” He is the most liber- ating force that music has known since Wagner — the most liberating and the most exhilarating. He touches life at every side — at its most transport- ing and noblest, at its most quotid- ian and grotesque: always his aim is to vivify, to quicken, the sense of being. He has written the most humanizing music we possess. Unlike Wagner, he is concerned, in the main, less with the voicing of ele- mental emotions through heroic proto- types than with the expression of human experience through the most 8 RICHARD STRAUSS direct and vivid psychologizing. Such towering figures of beauty and desire as Isolde and Kundry, Siegfried and Wotan, are not of his world. He depends rather upon what one need not hesitate to call a Shakespearian felicity of characterization, of psycho- logical definition. There is nothing in music to parallel the exquisite hu- manity, the rich and tender comedy, the haunting pathos, of that score in which he is by way of touching hands with the master humanist : I mean his “Don Quixote.” Here Strauss is most absolutely, most incontrovertibly, himself; here is the completest measure of his gifts and his capacities. “Don Quixote” has encountered the usual fate of the contemporary master- work which is both new in form and of novel content. A score overbrim- ming with essential humanity and the 9 PHASES OF MODERN MUSIC profoundest comedy, it has been called merely ingenious, a product simply of intellection, a grotesque and derisive parody — nothing more, in fact, than, an attempt to excite laughter at the trib- ulations of the illuded knight. And yet it is increasingly difficult to under- stand how it is possible to lend one's self unreservedly to the direct appeal of this fascinating and most moving score, and fail to perceive the ripe emo- tion, the infinitely compassionate hu- mor, which inspired it. Mr. Ernest Newman, one of the few acute and untrammelled admirers of the Munich tone -poet, properly and discerningly insists upon the “ perfect humanity " of “Don Quixote"; he notes how tender the characterization is throughout, how exquisitely human is the feeling for “these two poor tragi -comic actors." It is that which finally makes the io RICHARD STRAUSS work so precious — “its unfailing pity, its intuitive avoidance of anything that would make it simply unthinking comedy. ’ ’ That is justly and aptly said. I, for one, am aware of no more felici- tous, more poignant characterization in music than that of the absurdly valor- ous, dream - haunted knight, with his preposterous ambitions, his native sweet- ness, his impulsive and touching ardors; nor of any page more pitiful, more emotive, than the latter portion of the tenth variation, depicting the grievous home-coming of the broken-hearted Don after his defeat by the Knight of the White Moon; nor of any music in which is to be found a nobler utterance of rapturous contemplation than is to be found in the third variation, wherein the Knight discourses fervently upon the rewards and glories of romantic chivalry ; and how insistent is the 1 1 PHASES OF MODERN MUSIC pathos, the grave simplicity, of the death scene! It is a very great, a very lovable work, this opus 35 of Strauss. “Die Meistersinger ” is its only musical analogue; but even that delectable masterpiece, for all its super- lative loveliness, its engrossing gayety and sentiment, falls short of the younger work in depth and import. In “Don Quixote” is that “laughter of reason refreshed,” which, as Mr. Meredith tells us, “is floriferous, like the magical great gale of the shifty spring decid- ing for summer”; here, too, is that laughter of the spirit which perceives the incongruous because it divines at the same time an ultimate harmony and perfectness, an ultimate fulfilment. I have ventured to call “Don Quixote” Strauss’s most generic and representative achievement. His “Za- rathustra, ’ ’ magnificently audacious, RICHARD STRAUSS magnificently original as it is, is, on the whole, a less consummate accom- plishment; there are suggestions of rhet- oric, of inflated portentousness, which do not declare the better Strauss; and the theatric posing of the “great earth- riddle’ ' at the close is unconvinc- ing. Nor does the “ Heldenleben,” superbly powerful and effective as it is, quite justify its flamboyant he- roics. With Mr. Newman, I should be astonished, and sorry, to hear that Strauss set very much store by the significance of this score. Is it not likely, as Mr. Newman suggests, that Strauss, “after a good many years of intense cerebration and of multitudinous experiences of the stupidity of the human race towards a new musician, had resolved to have a little semi- playful fling for his own satisfaction, the result being ‘ Ein Heldenleben ’ ” ? It i3 PHASES OF MODERN MUSIC is scarcely possible to believe that Strauss intended seriously the self- glorification implied by the deliberate quotation of passages from his earlier works, adduced for the confusion of his imagined critics. His latest production, also, the “Symphonia Domestica,” one is compelled to appraise as a jest of Brobdingnagian proportions, despite much that it has of persuasiveness and sincere emotion. Even the warmest ad- herent of the Straussian gospel must prefer to regard other than gravely the attempt to give indiscriminate musical utterance to the manifold activities of the family circle. Concerning “Till Eu- lenspiegel” there is little to say save in praise of its amazing virtuosity and its Rabelaisian humors; this is frankly a diversion, an exuberant burlesque. Of the earlier tone-poems, “Don Juan,” “Macbeth/' and “Tod und 14 RICHARD STRAUSS Verklarung ” — the first three of the epoch-making list — it has become tra- ditional to take but brief and cursory note. One finds, it is true, comparatively little of the present Strauss ii^them, and a considerable infusion of Liszt and Wagner. But in one of them, at least — “Tod und Verklarung” — Strauss has written with a burning beauty, an ecstatic conviction, a gravity of impli- cation which, despite an occasional derivation from one or the other of his most influential masters, are not sur- passed in anything that he has since done. If “Don Quixote” is his most richly human and most musically rep- resentative work, “Tod und Verkla- rung” is most profound in its significance of content. Composed in 1897 , it is only the third of the eight orchestral master- pieces upon which his great fame chiefly rests; and yet it is doubtful if he will PHASES OF MODERN MUSIC ever give us anything so important in idea and substance — if he will ever utter, with so unexampled a convic- tion and impressiveness, aspirations and imaginings of such overpowering moment. In this score, at least, he has touched the margin of the sub- lime. The idea of death, and that consterna- tion and despair and anguish which are its human ministers, could have no more complete and wonderful an expression than they have here. Strauss, in his terrible and splendid celebration of the supreme event, has completed that message in whose deliverance the voice of Tschaikowsky, in that other canticle of mortality, the “Pathetic Symphony,’ ’ faltered and broke ; and in the profound and entire contrast of these two great works is, if one chooses to discern it, the pointing of a spiritual moral. One 16 RICHARD STRAUSS could not better indicate the nature of Strauss’s accomplishment in “Tod und Verklarung” than by setting it, for a moment, beside the work of the Slavonic master. Mr. Vernon Blackburn has compared Tschaikowsky’s beautiful threnody with Shelley’s “Adonais,’’ which, he says, is its counterpart in literature; for as “‘time,’ writes Shelley, ‘like a many- colored dome of glass, stains the white radiance of eternity,’ even so Tschai- kowsky in this symphony has stained eternity’s radiance; he has captured the years and bound them into a momentary emotional pang.” And Mr. Blackburn speaks with felicity and emotion of “this wonderful and extraordinary work, . . . which shakes the heart and fills up all one’s lifelong grief for things that are dead.” A wonderful and extraor- dinary work indeed! What Shelley, 17 PHASES OF MODERN MUSIC no doubt, would have said in the utter- ance of his great grief, had Shelley been a musician, Tschaikowsky says in his most affecting swan - song. Here is music, declares Mr. Blackburn, passion- ately avid of life for life’s own sake — music filled, from beginning to end, “with the utter and complete darkness of the grave.” I have alleged Mr. Blackburn’s analy- sis of the essential mood of the “ Pa- thetique ” because he exposes so aptly the significance of its impulse and its appeal. The finality of death — the irrevocable oblivion of the grave — an inappeasable and hopeless grieving: that, indisputably, is the emotional substance of Tschaikowsky ’s tone-poem; that, beyond question, is what it says, and all that it says. One hears in it the despairful cry of that bravest optimist of them all, in one of those “downcast 18 RICHARD STRAUSS hours' ’ which at times afflicted even his most valorous and steadfast spirit: “Matter is conqueror — matter, triumphant only, continues onward.” Tschaikowsky reveals himself in this, his undoubted masterpiece, as the perfect materialist, the perfect spiritual craven. That stupendous adagio lamentoso is a sable “garment of untruth," dyed with the hues that are gathered out of cowardice, and despair, and ignoble and supine grief. His was a mind “held ever earthward on the trail of earthly things"; his was the point of view, the spiritual outlook, of the essential bar- barian — “the barbarian," as Mr. Black- burn himself has somewhere said, “smit- ten by the musical Zeitgeist ." That is true of the musician, and it is true of the man. Taking him humanly, rather than musically — the soul in him rather than i9 PHASES OF MODERN MUSIC the artist in him: a barbarian smitten by the Zeitgeist — that, to my seeing, is the Tschaikowskv of the ‘ 4 Pathetique. ’ ’ He has given, in this most intimate of his disclosures, a superlatively beautiful and puissant expression to that in him- self, and in us, which is most unre- claimably and grossly earthbound — to the animal, to the vestige of the savage in us : to that lamentation over the precious things of the sensual life which, communicating its panic and despair to all who hear, diverts the eyes from the vision of those immutable things by virtue of whose perception alone do we approach the gods. For those of us to whom this world seems not wholly ill- designed, who find no shuddering horror in the thought of death, but rather a surety of promotion and fulfilment — for those of us, I say, who so incline, this music overwhelms with the sense of 20 RICHARD STRAUSS an immense and futile pathos, and a tragic falsity as maleficent as it is com- plete. Turn, now, to a consideration, from the spiritual side, of Strauss’s magnificent elegy, whose greatness a comparison with Tschaikowsky’s symphony throws into a heightened light. Here is a stupendously eloquent enun- ciation of the terror, the awe, the pa- thos, of the essential episode of death, but, also, of the majesty and perfec- tion of a triumphant spiritual sur- vival. I am fully aware that this is praise of a work which has been dis- posed of by some as “charnel-house” music, the unwholesome issue of a disordered imagination — what excess of morbidly realistic imagery has not been discovered in Strauss’s score by certain critical intelligences ? And yet I prefer rather to agree with the view of Mr. 21 PHASES OF MODERN MUSIC Philip Hale, that here is music “in which there is no morbid taint, in which there is the full justification of death.’ ’ And how wonderful a justification! What a solemn and haunting tenderness, what a continuity of sheer loveliness, in the brooding passages of the opening — and how keenly the dominant mood, the atmosphere of the thing, engages one from the start; what an immensity of passion in the phases of revolt and aspiration, and how appalling is the moment of translation ! But — and here is the significant point — Strauss does not stop at that portentous episode, that heart-chilling crisis of extreme dismay; death is not for him, as for Tschai- kowsky, an inexorable conclusion, an irretrievable exit: he confronts us, as we are confronted in the “ Path^tique,” with the very gates of death, but, unlike Tschaikowsky, he does not leave us 22 RICHARD STRAUSS there, overwhelmed and shuddering in the darkness. Out of that terrible quietude emerges an increasing chant, a gradual and suffusing radiance. Note by note the transfiguration is accom- plished — -“and when he is wrapt by the radiance, the bright one no longer sees dreams ; then within him the bliss arises 99 : so may one point the moral of a tone- poem of to-day with the immemorial wisdom of the East! If I can find so luminous and high a message in “Tod und Verklarung,” I shall scarcely assume to regard Richard Strauss as a deliberate and conscious seer; and I doubt if he would care, or if he deserves, to be called a mystic. Great musician and poet that he is, he is neither so deep nor so wide as the “ Upanishads.” But I shall insist, never- theless, upon claiming for him that he has, after some manner of his own, “be- 23 3 PHASES OF MODERN MUSIC held the indwelling spirit”; and that in this work he has chosen, “knowing that knowable spirit,” to say to us, with the incomparable prophet of the Orient: “Let not death disturb you.” It is scarcely necessary to attempt, in this place, to contravene the familiar accusations of wanton ugliness, of per- verseness and morbidity of motive, which mar so many contemporary es- timates of Strauss. Nor need one re- echo facile praise of those inescapable and merely contributive excellences which have served as the obscuring trees in the wood for those who are blind to the fundamental greatness of the man: enough — proportionately too much, in- deed — has been said of his astounding technical mastership, the unequalled complexity of the apparatus which he chooses to employ. Instead, let it be 24 RICHARD STRAUSS affirmed simply that Richard Strauss is an artist of profound and just convic- tions, the most penetrant and sympa- thetic of humanists — that here, finally, at the beginning of a new century, is one who serves as a transcendent exem- plification of the essential musician of modernity. He speaks a language whose unique capacity it is to embody all intense and valid phases of experience: that reflects an art which is, with mem- orable consistency, “ steeped in the colors of human life. AN AMERICAN TONE-POET When Mr. Ernest Newman, an Eng- lish critic of acuity, remarked in a recent essay that the Romantic movement in music had “done its work,” — though “even in our own day it still makes an occasional ineffectual effort to raise its old head, ludicrous now with its faded garlands of flowers,” — it must doubtless have seemed to many that he spoke with point and justification. Indispu- tably the Romanticism which Mr. New- man meant — the Romanticism which expended itself in the fabrication of a pasteboard world of “gloomy forests, enchanted castles, impossible maidens, and the obsolete profession of magic” — 26 AN AMERICAN TONE-POET has had its day, and now seems, in the retrospect, incredibly puerile, incredibly fatuous and wrong. But this was the Romanticism of perverted sentiment — a false thing, a mistaken thing, a thing of “vain shows and shadows and ideals.’ ’ There is another Romance: a spirit in- comparably fresh and vital, a primeval impulse and aspiration, that is not barren and moribund, but quick and increasing. “Through the heart,” says Fiona Macleod in one of her most haunting pages, “through the heart I go to lost gardens, to mossed fountains, to groves where is no white beauty of still statue, but only the beauty of an old forgotten day.” There, by those fountains, and in those groves and gardens, flowers that immemorial Ro- mance of the transforming imagination. It is a Romance that is in no wise divorced from reality — that is, in fact, 2J PHASES OF MODERN MUSIC but reality imaginatively apprehended; if it uses the old Romanticistic proper- ties, it uses them, not as substantives, but as symbols of intense emotional realities. For the essential romanticist and the essential realist are fundament- ally at one — save for differences that are merely temperamental — in their primary purpose to represent “the thing as in itself it really is”; and it is in no sort an accusation against realism if one attempts to define those dif- ferences by saying that, in its finest estate, the romantic spirit concerns itself with essences rather than with details, with impressions rather than with documents, with the heightened expression of spiritual substance rather than with literal representation. Which is merely to say that it deals in a truth that is no less truth because it is reflected imaginatively, and through a beauty 28 AN AMERICAN TONE-POET that may often be in the last degree in- calculable and aerial. It is this authentic spirit of romance that has an exquisite life in certain music of to-day — pre-eminently, I think, in the work of an American composer: Edward MacDowell. I account Mr. MacDowell so notably a romantic of the finer order because, true to the subtler genius of his art, he devotes himself, in his practice of it, to a rendering — extraordinary for vividness and felicity — of those essences and impressions which have seemed to me to be the ultimate concern of the romantic spirit in its dealings with life. He has chosen occasionally to employ, in the realization of his purposes, what seems at first to be precisely the magical apparatus so necessary to the older Romanticism — dryads and elves inhabit his world, and he dwells at times under faery boughs and in enchanted woods; 29 PHASES OF MODERN MUSIC but for him, as for the poets of the Celtic tradition, these things are but the manifest images of an interior passion and delight. Seen in the trans- figuring mirror of his music, the moods and events of the natural world and of the incessant drama of psychic life are vivified into shapes and designs of ineluctable beauty and appeal. Both in theory and in practice, Mr. MacDowell stands uncompromisingly for music that is, of intention, per- sistently pictorial and impressionistic. Thus his themes are Lancelot and Elaine, Arthur, The Gaelic Cuchullin, the sea, a deserted farm, a water-lily, meadow brooks and will-o’-the-wisps, starlight, a haunted house, a wild rose — a poet, it will be observed, enamoured of '‘the mystery and the majesty of earth,” although scarcely less thrall to purely human emotion. If one is, at 30 AN AMERICAN TONE-POET times, inclined to praise in him the poet of the natural world at the expense of the musical humanist, it is because he is, constitutionally and by right of ancestry, Celtic of the Celts, with the Celt’s intimate vision of natural things, and his magic power of poetically vivify- ing them. Again and again is it borne in upon one, in considering his work, that this tone-poet of the natural world is striking that '‘sheer, inimitable, Celtic note ” which we have been taught so readily to recognize in an- other art, and striking it with an as- tonishing surety, an inextinguishable ardor and inspiration. It is making no transcendent claim for him to affirm that in such splendid fantasies as his “To the Sea,” “In Mid-Ocean,” “In Deep Woods”; in such sensitive im- pressions as “Starlight,” “To a Water- Lily,” “To a Wild Rose,” there is an 3i PHASES OF MODERN MUSIC inevitable felicity, a graphic nearness and beauty, an imaginative intensity and lyric fervor which exist nowhere in external tone-painting save in Mr. MacDowell’s own work. Music, of course — from Haydn to Wagner and Raff — abounds in examples of eloquent natural imagery. One need not, in claiming a certain excellence for him, imply that Mr. MacDow- ell has ever threatened the suprem- acy of such things as the “Rhein- gold ” V or spiel or the “Walkure” fire music. It is as much in his choice of subjects as in the peculiar felicity of his expression that he is unique among tone-poets of the external world. He has never attempted such tremen- dous frescoes as Wagner delighted to paint; nor does he choose to deal with the elements — with winds and waters, with fire and clouds and tempests — 32 AN AMERICAN TONE-POET in the epical manner of the great music- dramatist. Of his descriptive music by far the greater part is written for the piano, so that, at the start, a very defi- nite limitation is imposed upon magni- tude of plan. You cannot achieve on the piano, with any adequacy of effect, a mountain-side in flames, or a storm at sea, or the prismatic arch of a rain- bow; and as Mr. MacDowell has seen fit to employ that instrument as his principal medium of expression, he has refrained from attempting to advance musical fresco-painting beyond the point at which Wagner left it. Instead, he has contented himself with such themes as he treats in his “ Forest Idyls/’ in his “Four Little Poems” (“The Eagle,” “The Brook,” “Moonshine,” “Winter”), in his first orchestral suite, in the in- imitable “Woodland Sketches” and “Sea Pieces,” and in the recently pub- 33 PHASES OF MODERN MUSIC lished “New England Idyls. ” As a perfect exemplification of his practice, consider — let me say — his “To a Water- Lily,” from the “Woodland Sketches ” — than which I know of nothing in objective tone-painting, for the piano or for the orchestra, more justly felt, more ex- quisitely accomplished. The method is the method of Shelley in the “Sensitive Plant,” of Wordsworth in “The Daf- fodils,” as it is the method of Raff rather than of Wagner — although Raff could never have written with precisely that order of delicate eloquence. The thing is steeped in loveliness, in sheer natural magic. So in his “Wild Rose,” in his “Starlight,” in his “Wandering Iceberg,” in his “To the Sea”: always he is the admirable poet, intent upon realizing, through the medium of tones rather than of words, a deep and inti- mate vision of the natural world. And 34 AN AMERICAN TONE-POET he can persuade you, too, with Forgael , of “ the streams where the world ends ” — “ Where time is drowned in odor-laden winds And druid moons, and murmuring of boughs. . . .” What an aerial and gleaming magic in his “ Nautilus”! — that misty and spell- bound vision wherein “ . . . a ship of pearl Under a silken sail and a silver yard ” drifts upon shining waters under “glim- mering winds” — music in which the mood is so tenuous, the emotion so incalculable and evanescent, that it seems scarcely to have a credible existence as material fact. It would be unjust, though it would not be inexcusable, to give too great a prominence, in considering Mr. Mac- DowelTs work, to his poetry of nature. 35 PHASES OF MODERN MUSIC For if he has a rapt delight in the moods of winds and waves and the elemental life of the forest, he is even more deeply engrossed in the contemplation of those ways and workings of the primeval human heart which are, after all, the ultimate concern of music. If, in his own field, he is inimitable as the poet of the “Sea Pieces/ ’ he measures up to the height of eminent names as the author of the “Four Songs” (opus 56), “A Deserted Farm,” “Told at Sunset,” the “Scotch Poem,” the four sonatas, and certain of the “New England Idyls.” Here, certainly, are. profound emotion, a deep and transporting tenderness — an “eloquence of the heart” — in which again one is tempted to trace the essential Celt. I do not know if a remoter verdict will award Mr. MacDowell greater honor as a writer for the voice or for instru- 36 AN AMERICAN TONE-POET ments — certainly it is rash to be over- positive in decision upon the rela- tive value of such work as, on the one hand, “The Pour Songs,” and, on the other, the “Keltic” Sonata; but, for my own part, I must believe that, ad- mirably affecting song- writer as he is, Mr. MacDowell has never equalled, cer- tainly never surpassed, that work of his which I have already named — the “Keltic” Sonata, his fourth in E minor. With the publication of this work, his opus 59, Mr. MacDowell achieved a con- clusive and emphatic demonstration of his capacity as a creative artist of in- dubitable consequence. Not before had he given us so convincing an earnest of the larger aspect of his genius — neither in the three earlier sonatas nor in the Indian Suite has he attained an equal magnitude, an equal scope and signifi- cance. This is unquestionably, so far, 37 PHASES OF MODERN MUSIC his masterpiece. Mr. MacDowell’s gen- ius has here found its consummate flow- ering. Nowhere else in his work are its distinguishing traits so strikingly disclosed — the breadth and reach of imagination, the magnetic vitality, the richness and fervor, the conquering poetic charm. Here you will find “the beauty of wildness, ” and “the beauty of sorrowful things ” ; “the beauty of the men that take up spears and die for a name”; “the beauty of the poets that take up harp and sorrow and the wander- ing road” — a harp shaken with a wild and piercing music, a sorrow that is not of to-day, but of a past when dreams were actual and imperishable, and men lived the tales of beauty and of won- der which now are but a discredited and fading memory. It was a fortunate, if not an inevita- ble, event, in view of his temperamental 38 AN AMERICAN TONE-POET affiliations with the Celtic genius, that Mr. MacDowell should have been made aware of the suitability for musical treatment of the ancient heroic chron- icles of the Gaels, and that he should have gone for his inspiration, in par- ticular, to the legends comprised in the famous Cycle of the Red Branch. In a motto with which he prefixes the sonata he gives this index to its poetic content: “Who minds now Keltic tales of yore, Dark druid rhymes that thrall, Deirdre’s song and wizard lore Of great Cuchullin’s fall.” Mr. MacDowell has attempted no mere musical recounting of those romances of the ancient Gaelic world at which he hints in these lines. He has aimed to make his music, he says, ‘‘more a com- mentary on the subject than an actual 39 4 PHASES OF MODERN MUSIC depiction of it”; but to say that he has realized vividly and beautifully all that this denotes — all that which is essentially implicit in the source of his inspiration — would be but a niggardly statement of the truth. It would be juster to say, rather, that he has recalled in his music the very life and presence of the Gaelic prime — that he has indeed “ unbound the Island harp.” Above all, he has achieved that “heroic beauty” which, believes Mr. Yeats, has been fading out of the arts since “that decadence we call progress set voluptuous beauty in its place” — that heroic beauty which is of the very essence of the imaginative life of the primitive Celts, and which the Celtic “revival” in contemporary letters has so singularly failed to re- crudesce. For it is the heroic Gaelic world that Mr. MacDowell has made to live again in his music — that miraculous 40 AN AMERICAN TONE-POET world of superhuman passions and aspi- rations, of bards and heroes and sub- lime adventure — the world of Cuchullin the Unconquerable, and Laeg, and Queen Meave; of Naesi, and Deirdre the Beautiful, and Fergus, and Connla the Harper, and those kindred figures, lovely or greatly tragical, that are like no other figures in the world’s mythologies. That this is music which challenges the imagination is undeniable. It makes small appeal to the tonal sense per se — to the sense which craves in music merely, in Wagner’s phrase, “the suscit- ing of pleasure in beautiful forms.” Mr. MacDowell does not write what we presume to call “ absolute ” music ; if one looks to such a work as the “Keltic” Sonata for the kind of gratification which he is accustomed to derive from, for example, a Brahms symphony, he will not find it. It is impossible to 41 PHASES OF MODERN MUSIC account satisfactorily for the last page of the “ Keltic ” upon exclusively musical grounds ; it is as essentially — though not so avowedly — programmatic as the '‘Scotch Poem” of opus 31, and, as with that swift and graphic paraphrase, its ultimate appeal is conditioned upon an understanding of the basis of drama and emotional crisis upon which the musi- cian has built. Ernest Newman has ef- fectually exposed the absurdity of the popular sophistry which concedes the legitimacy of programme music so long as it sounds “as well as absolute music to any one who does not know the story ’ ’ ; so I need not concern myself with a quite superfluous apology for Mr. MacDowell’s indifference to the dicta of the ab- solutists. But while I must admit his usual indifference, I cannot help wishing that he might contrive some expedient for doing away, so far as he himself is 42 AN AMERICAN TONE-POET concerned, with the sonata form which he occasionally uses, rather incon- sistently, as a vehicle for the expression of that vision and emotion that are in him; for, generally speaking, and in spite of the triumphant success of the '‘Keltic/’ Mr. MacDowell is less fort- unate in his sonatas than in those freer and more elastically wrought tone-poems in which he voices a mood or an experience with epigrammatic concision and directness. The “Kel- tic” succeeds in spite of its form — as the earlier “Norse,” “Eroica,” and “Tragica” sonatas do not, at all points — through sheer force of inspiration ; though even here, and notwithstanding the freedom of manipulation, one feels that he would have worked to still finer ends in a more flexible and fluent form. He is never so compelling, so persuasively eloquent, as in those im- 43 PHASES OF MODERN MUSIC pressionistically conceived pieces in which he moulds his inspiration upon the events of an interior emotional programme, rather than upon a musical formula necessarily arbitrary and anom- alous — in such things, for instance, as the “Idyls” and “Poems” after Goethe and Heine, the “Woodland Sketches,” the “Sea Pieces,” the “Fireside Tales,” the “New England Idyls,” the Raff- like orchestral suite, opus 42, and the symphonic poems “Hamlet and Ophelia,” “Lancelot and Elaine,” and “The Saracens” and “Lovely Alda” (both after the Song of Roland). Here he is invulnerably himself. Of MacDowell the technician, the mu- sical artist, one is tempted to dispose by saying that he is of the prophets of modernity; but he is more, and he is somewhat less, than that too -facile phrase would connote : a master of 44 AN AMERICAN TONE-POET harmonic effort, he is yet persistently and frankly melodic — melodic with a suppleness, a breadth, a directness and spontaneity which one knows in Franz and in Schubert, but which one scarcely looks for in a contemporary of Debussy and Younger Russia. He knows the secret of a melody which can be at once spontaneous and subtle, at once fluent and distinguished. His insistence upon the value and importance of the melos is, probably, his most striking charac- teristic; and it is in this that he is, one may say, both behind and in advance of his time. Mr. MacDowell is to-day an artistic figure of commanding stature — a musical creator who has brought to an impressive development a singular gift of beautiful and forceful utterance. He is a poet among musicians, and an authentic genius. 45 CONCERNING EDWARD ELGAR Sir Edward Elgar, the English composer, has been uncommonly fort- unate in his critics. Mr. Vernon Black- burn, one of the most eminent of the craft in Great Britain, has declared him an equal, in certain respects, of Beetho- ven; and no creative achievement in recent music has evoked such instant and extraordinary laudation as has been, from the very first, the portion of Elgar’s most successful work, ‘‘The Dream of Gerontius.” When Mr. Black- burn, writing immediately after its pro- duction at the Birmingham festival of 1900, virtually declared it to be the finest musical work since Wagner, he 46 CONCERNING EDWARD ELGAR pitched the key for the paean of ac- clamation which has everywhere greeted the cantata upon its subsequent per- formances. It has not been thought extravagant to discover in it the logical successor of “ Parsifal,” and the most admirable accomplishment in English music since Purcell. Richard Strauss was pleased to praise it, and Richter in- scribed a quaint and fervid encomium in the orchestral score after his con- ducting of the original performance. With such a reputation, it was no more than natural that Elgar’s work should have aroused in this country the most eager and expectant interest. Of the immediate and positive success which signalized its American production one need not speak; the fact has passed into familiar history. But has Elgar’s music the great and important excel- lence that is claimed for it? It will 47 PHASES OF MODERN MUSIC not be unjust to regard “The Dream of Gerontius ” and his later work, “The Apostles,” as representative achieve- ments, and to consider them as such. It must be said, at the start, that “The Dream of Gerontius ” is as far as possible from being a replica of the traditional oratorio form which has so long shackled the minds and the im- aginations of English composers. Noth- ing could be less Mendelssohnian, less English in a particular sense, than this masterpiece of the most eminent of living English musicians. It marks as sharp a departure from the jejune and outworn formulae of the typical British builder of oratorios as the early utter- ances of Wagner’s genius did from the prevailing traditions of the operatic stage of that day. Elgar has not hesitated to cast his work uncompro- misingly in the mould of the modern 48 CONCERNING EDWARD ELGAR lyric drama. He has dispensed with the cumbrous and pedantic formalities so precious in the sight of his predecessors — the exigently academic soul will find nothing in Elgar’s score to satisfy its demand for set numbers, although it will find a sufficiency of very dexterous contrapuntal writing. The music flows without break or artificial pause, re- flecting throughout the dramatic and emotional content of the text. Admi- rably fluent, various, and responsive, the orchestra, the chorus, and the solo voices serve as a unified and elastic vehicle for the embodiment of the pro- foundly moving and noble poem which Elgar has chosen for his subject. As in its construction, so in its spirit and conception is this score a new and revealing thing in English music. An incorrigible mystic, Cardinal New- man’s intensely religious fantasy of the 49 PHASES OF MODERN MUSIC perilous translation of a human soul from its mortal case into the veiled and awful presence of its God has inspired him to a musical expression conceived upon a plane of the most exalted and sustained nobility. Nothing more deep- ly sincere, more ardent in its aspiration, more rapt and incessant in its exalta- tion, has come out of modern music since Wagner imagined his majestic Parable of the Grail. For the devout and beautiful spirit in which Elgar’s music is steeped from beginning to end there can be nothing but the most unqualified praise; but with this, one reaches the bounds of a justifiable admiration. Elgar has been unable to transmute his wholly genuine piety and fervor into music of authentic and individual inspiration. When one re- calls Vernon Blackburn’s vision of him “waiting for ten years without putting 5 ° CONCERNING EDWARD ELGAR pen to paper until the dew of inspiration had fallen upon his spirit,” one can only bow one’s head in humble silence and meditate upon the disheartening futility of the critical function; for that seems to me precisely to connote what Elgar has not done. If any dew of inspiration fell upon his spirit during the composition of “The Dream of Gerontius,” it has singularly failed to precipitate itself in the music. It would be absurd to deny that there are many moments of intense and beautiful expression in the work — mo- ments in which Elgar has realized the precise emotion of the text with most extreme and affecting eloquence. But the eloquence is not “self-sprung”: it is not Elgar’s; it is Wagner’s. He speaks often with the tongues of men and of angels, but they are the men and the angels of Wagner; they are Tristan, Si LIBRARY UNIVERSITY of PHASES OF MODERN MUSIC and Parsifal, and Amfortas, and the transfigured chorus of the Monsalvat sanctuary. There would be little profit, I conceive, in exploring Elgar’s score for specific examples of his depend- ence upon Wagner; nor would such a proceeding subserve the finer ends of justice; for Elgar has so saturated him- self with Wagner’s idiom, his man- ner of musical speech, that passages which seem at first almost like inten- tional transcriptions are no doubt quite unconsciously and quite innocently re- produced. It is not so much because certain of his phrases seem modelled, note for note, upon Wagnerian patterns that one must insist upon the magnitude of his debt to that fatally compel- ling master; it is rather because Elgar himself has no distinction of speech, no personal habit of expression, to counterbalance any pardonable deriva- 5 2 CONCERNING EDWARD ELGAR tion from Wagner which he might occasionally permit himself (consider the degree in which even that most im- placably individual of modern music- makers, Richard Strauss, resorts to a purely Wagnerian utterance in his “ Tod und Verklarung” and “ Zarathustra ”). He has not yet, as Mr. John F. Runciman observed some years ago, evolved an individual style. One cannot put one’s finger upon any single passage in his score and say, “This, beyond dispute, is Elgar: here is a quality of beauty, of emotion, of personality, which is ab- solutely native and unique.” Those portions of “ The Dream of Gerontius ” which one can unhesitatingly assert to be his own are, in the main, without potency, without distinction, without significance. As Mr. Runciman has acutely remarked, “he is obsessed a little by the common academic idea that 53 PHASES OF MODERN MUSIC anything is good enough for the theme, and that the beginning and the end of music consist in ingenuity of treat- ment/ ’ One must concede at once that Elgar has achieved some admirable pages — that he has written, at times, with undeniable loveliness, with un- deniable power and effect. How beauti- ful, for example, is that passage in E-flat major which accompanies the words of the Angel of the Agony when he pleads with Jesu to “spare these souls which are so dear to Thee ”! Nor could anything be more richly im- pressive than the superb D major section for chorus, orchestra, and the voice of the ministering priest, wherein the passing soul of Gerontius is ex- horted to go forth “in the name of God”; and the climax wherewith Elgar contrives to suggest, in a passage of overwhelming eloquence, the stupendous 54 CONCERNING EDWARD ELGAR disclosure of the majesty of God, is nothing short of magnificent. But how banal, on the other hand, is the opening recitative of Gerontius — “Jesu, Maria, I am near to death, and Thou art calling me”! how unresource- ful the treatment of such passages as “Rouse thee, my fainting soul, and play the man ” ! And how conventional is the credo: “Firmly I believe and truly God is Three and God is One ” ! I shall not go so far as to say, with Mr. Henry T. Finck, that Elgar has written merely Kapellmeistermusik; and yet, when one notes the complacently perfunctory character of many of his themes, one comes to feel that the epithet may not be, after all, unnecessarily harsh. His choral writing is, of course, masterly, from the standpoint of sheer technical brilliancy; and he rises at times — in, for instance, the demon scene and the 55 5 PHASES OF MODERN MUSIC * 1 Praise to the Holiest ’ 9 chorus — to points of extreme effectiveness ; but here again, as in his writing for the solo voices, the melodic texture is not of first-rate inspiration. His scoring is modem and vivid, at all times adequate, plastic, and picturesque; but as for Elgar’s going far beyond Wag- ner in his treatment of the orchestra (to adopt the phrase of one of his more vivacious admirers) — that, I should say, verges dangerously upon the hyperbolic. To conclude : I cannot believe that in “The Dream of Gerontius” Elgar has produced a work of more than respect- able attainments; nor am I at all sure that its primacy in modern English music has, after all, been established so very clearly and indubitably. Is not the work of G. W. L. Marshall -Hall — whom Mr. Runciman sets in the front rank of contemporary British composers 56 CONCERNING EDWARD ELGAR — of very considerable importance ? Has not Fritz Delius written music at least equal in beauty and modernity to what we know of the work of Elgar? And are the achievements of Coleridge-Tay- lor entirely negligible? The question is, I think, altogether indeterminate and debatable. Concerning Elgar’s later and equal- ly famous work, “The Apostles,” crit- ical opinion in England has been less unified. The work had its initial per- formance in October, 1903, at the Birmingham festival, and raised almost as much expository dust as its more admired predecessor. To some, “The Apostles” revealed itself as “a master- piece, an invaluable contribution to the art of the world, a score of pure gold throughout” — thus the impulsive Mr. Blackburn. To Mr. Ernest Newman, on the other hand — and Mr. Newman, 57 PHASES OF MODERN MUSIC let it be noted, is a friend and sincere admirer of Elgar — the music seemed '‘not sufficiently inspired to satisfy the musical mind,” and “impressive only to minds that are already disposed to consider anything beautiful that is associated with a sacred text.” — There, probably, is the crux of the matter. Elgar planned, in his own words, “to compose an oratorio which should embody the calling of the Apostles, their teaching (schooling), and their mission in the establishment of the Church among the Gentiles.” The first two parts of the work have for their theme the outward manifestation of God to those “who were called,” com- pleted in the ascension; the third and final section, as yet* unfinished, will deal with the inward manifestation of God * August, 1904. 58 CONCERNING EDWARD ELGAR “through His indwelling Spirit.” The basis of the work is thus, it will be seen, essentially theological, and Elgar, himself devoutly ecclesiastical in his point of approach, has furnished forth his text with music of fervid sincerity and conviction. Let it be said without qualification that the score of “The Apostles,” considered solely as a struct- ural achievement, is superbly successful; its complexity of texture, its subtlety of elaboration — in brief, its sheer mastery of musical mechanics — are nothing short of amazing; but there, in my view, praise must stop. As in the case of “The Dream of Gerontius,” one’s deliberate criticism of this score is that it has noth- ing unique, nothing new, to say. It has little of the impressive, though un- individualized, beauty of its predeces- sor. Its best inspirations are, in essence, a dilution of Wagner ; that which is 59 PHASES OF MODERN MUSIC not best is Elgar's own, and is, in the main, dull, unleavened, inexpressive. There are, indeed, a few exceptions — as the introduction, the dawn music, the final chorus — the merits of which one concedes at once. One must end, though, by echoing Mr. Newman in his dislike of “The Apostles," “with" — as he complains — “its heavy atmosphere, its monotonous rhythms, its dragging, enervated pulses." It would be pleasant further to coin- cide with Mr. Newman in his confident belief in the preciousness of Elgar’s gifts, which, he believes, must have come to a finer fulfilment had they not been “taken from humanity in order to be given to the Church"; but here, un- fortunately, one must dissent. CHARLES MARTIN LOEFFLER Mr. Charles Martin Loeffler, an Alsatian by birth but a Bostonian by profession, occupies a peculiar place, entirely of his own creation, in the field of contemporary music. He is a seeker after the realities of shadowy and dim illusions, an artist in grays and greens and subtle golds. The opulent purples in which Richard Strauss delights, with the exuberance of his fiery tempera- ment, have no attraction for Mr. Loeffler. The insistent appeal, the ex- pected richness, the continual irides- cence of Strauss’s schemes are quite absent from the strange and intimate music of this tonal Verlaine. Mr. Loef- 61 PHASES OF MODERN MUSIC fler is of “the children of re very,’ 1 a weaver of dreams. For him, indeed, shadows and dreams are the invincible realities, and from them he derives a compelling music — music which serenely rebukes dissection. That serenity, that innocence of in- tention, are, indeed, remarkable. After the plangent splendors, the torrential rhetoric, of the amazing Strauss, the music of Mr. Loeffler, owning something of the subdued and elusive beauty of antique tapestries, addresses the spirit with a unique appeal. Where Strauss is challenging, importunate, Mr. Loef- fler persuades — not with the personal concern of the advocate, for his de- tachment, and, as I have said, his innocence of intention, are as entire as they are sincere — but, as it were, in spite of himself. “There,” you hear him saying (if you can imagine him 62 CHARLES MARTIN LOEFFLER sufficiently self-conscious), “is the result of an absorbing experience: I have been reading that perturbing drama of Maurice Maeterlinck’s, ‘La Mort de Tintagiles,’ and have tried to put into music my impressions of it, perhaps finding a definiteness of emotion in its essential substance which Maeterlinck has not denoted; it may possibly in- terest you.” And he leaves it for you to receive it as you like. His is music in which the emotion conveyed is the emotion of remembered rapture, the beauty, “the surviving beauty of gathered dreams” — seldom the emotion and the beauty of that which is actual and present. Mr. Loef- fler is most urgently aroused by such moods of longing and remote enchant- ment as find jeweled expression in the “Timbres Oublies” of Gustave Kahn, for which he has written unforgettable music : ^3 PHASES OF MODERN MUSIC “Timbres oublies des charmants jardins, Timbres argentins des Thules lointains, Timbres violets des voix consolantes Epandant graves les benedictions, Timbres bleus des peris aux feeries, Timbres d’or des mongoles orfevreries Et vieil or des vieilles nations !” Nor does his habit of artistic speech tempt him to such outbursts of passion- ate lament as fill the utterances, say, of Tschaikowsky’s genius with so insup- portable a poignancy. Mr. Loeffler perceives his world with as rapt a gaze, with as complete an absorption in its emotional panorama, as the most vivid and declamatory of the moderns; but the issue of his understanding is a certain veiled and continent intensity, an in- terior passion, a conviction implied rather than declared. That is, finally, the peculiarity of his art. Of Loeffler the man, viewing him bio- graphically, let it suffice to say that he 64 CHARLES MARTIN LOEFFLER was born in Miilhausen, Upper Alsace, forty-three years ago; that he received the greater part of his musical training in France, Belgium, and Germany; that he came to America twenty -four years ago, and now, as he confesses, “ feels somewhat of a foreigner” when he visits Germany or France. He was for some years the second concertmaster of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, sharing the desk occupied at the time by Franz Knei- sel — for he is an admirable virtuoso as well as a composer of rare endowments. Of his listed works — published or in manuscript — there are, for orchestra: “Les Veillees de l’Ukraine,” a suite in four movements based upon tales by Gogol ; the symphonic poem, “ LaMort de Tintagiles,” after the marionette drama by Maeterlinck; and “Two Poems” — the first after the lovely aubade from Verlaine’s “La Bonne Chanson,” 65 PHASES OF MODERN MUSIC “Avant que tu ne t’en ailles,” the second after Rollinat’s “Villanelle du Diable.” There is also a Divertimento for violin and orchestra; a cello con- certo; an octet for two clarinets, two violins, viola, cello, double-bass, and harp ; a sextet for strings ; a quintet for three violin^, viola, and cello; two rhap- sodies for oboe, viola, and piano, after poems by Rollinat; a “ Poeme Paien ” for two pianos and three trumpets (the latter behind the scenes) . And there are songs with words by Verlaine, Baude- laire, Gustave Kahn — some with viola obligato. A cosmopolitan, a man of ripe and sensitive culture, Mr. Loeffler finds his richest inspiration in that literature which the inconsiderate have disposed of, to their apparent satisfaction, as “ de- cadent” — as in his symphonic poem, “La Mort de Tintagiles,” based on the 66 CHARLES MARTIN LOEFFLER drama of Maeterlinck, in the “Two Poems” for orchestra inspired by the verse of Verlaine and Rollinat, and in his recent “Quatre Melodies pour chant et piano,” which are settings of poems by Gustave Kahn. Verlaine and Bau- delaire, Maeterlinck, Kahn, and their poetic kind, are, for Mr. Loeffler, as bone of his bone, flesh of his flesh. Their imaginative waywardness, their delicacy of intimation, their preoccupation with the fantastic, are, to him, transcendent- ly appealing; and their distinguishing characteristics find definite analogues in his music. Whether in the brooding terror, the vague and tragic sweetness of his “ Tintagiles ” ; whether in the ex- quisite and gleaming color of his trans- mutation of the poem from “La Bonne Chanson,” or in the evasive loveliness of the songs, Mr. Loeffler reflects the precise quality and timbre of his poetic 67 PHASES OF MODERN MUSIC subject — reveals them in the light of his own strange and engaging temperament. It is a suggestive index to his point of approach, and to his powers, that he will touch only refined gold. I do not know that he has ever set a mediocre, a banal poem to music — that he has been concerned with anything less than the excellent; certainly he has written nothing which is not touched with that fine distinction, that rarity of thought, which have given him a place apart in the literature of music. The cliche e phrase, the outworn formula, the mori- bund convention, are unaffectedly odious in his sight. His horror of the obvious is as genuine and inveterate as is Mere- dith’s, or Baudelaire’s, or Mr. Yeats’s. It leads him occasionally, indeed, into what one is tempted to call an ex- travagance of subtlety; the substance of his inspiration is refined, one feels at 68 CHARLES MARTIN LOEFFLER times, to the point of attenuation. More often, though, it vitalizes work of ex- traordinary beauty, of vivid individu- ality — music that has scarcely its supe- rior, that has, in fact, few equals, for imaginative vision, for originality of contrivance, for insinuating eloquence. In his musical style Mr. Loeffler has a certain kinship with the school of con- temporary France; he is of a kind with Debussy, with Vincent d’lndy, with Faure, with Pierre de Breville, and with the dead master, C£sar Franck — the school whose capital traits are finesse, a passion for the recondite, a scrupulous avoidance of too definite, too facile patterns, an exquisite mastery of har- monic and orchestral color. With Mr. Loeffler these traits are a most con- spicuous possession. He is, in his artistic constitution, pre - eminently Gallic — so far as the term is a signal for 69 PHASES OF MODERN MUSIC fastidiousness, for dexterity, for sen- sibility. The overwhelming impact of Wagner’s genius seems, happily, not to have involved him in any appreciable degree; what little of the Teutonic tradition he has inherited is connoted by occasional touches in his work of a quality which one knows only in Brahms — and Brahms, let it be remarked, at his best, his most admirably Teutonic. Mr. Loeffler, then, owing something to the subtlest and most sensitizing influences in the musical art of to-day, is himself an influential force of definite potency. As Mr. Philip Hale has re- marked, with acute and just percep- tion, “There are poets who are apart — Poe, the Thomson of ‘The City of Dreadful Night,’ Baudelaire. There are dramatists of kin, as Tourneur, Webster, Ford, and Maeterlinck. In music there is Loeffler.” He has given 70 CHARLES MARTIN LOEFFLER us an art in which the declaration is of an emotion within emotion, an alem- bicated eloquence — an eloquence which prevails through its very passivity. But you will not know its spell at once, for its beauty issues from remote and hid- den sources. 6 PIETRO MASCAGNI Whatever a remoter verdict may determine as to Pietro Mascagni’s proper place in the history of musical art, it is impossible to-day to escape the con- viction that he is, in a very certain and complete degree, the essential musician of the theatre — the consistent lyrico-dramatic commentator of Wag- ner’s unrealized dreams. Wherewith I come to a most curious point of com- parison. It is one of the strangest paradoxes in musical history that Wagner, in attempt- ing a concrete embodiment of his ideal of an uncompromisingly subordinate musico-dramatic speech, should have 72 PIETRO MASCAGNI failed as signally as if he had been, in- stead of the impassioned follower of Gluck and the Florentines, the most irreclaimable of the Neapolitans. Surely, in the entire range of the arts, there is no case that would seem to make so ex- quisitely ironic an appeal to the tenderer moods of the Comic Spirit than the amazing spectacle of Wagner the dra- matic poet, Wagner the regenerator of the dramma per music a, the relentless antagonist of opera for music’s sake, producing lyric plays in which the music overshadows the drama as the “ Ham- let” of Shakespeare overshadows the “ Hamlet” of Tschaikowsky. Wagner, primarily and fundamentally a musical artist, a weaver of tonal spells, must inevitably have defeated his owm ends when he undertook to realize his — for him — unattainable ideal of a lyrical drama in which the music should be 73 PHASES OF MODERN MUSIC merely accessory and contributive. It was not that he fell short, but that he went too far: he should have stopped — as Mascagni stops — at mere intensifica- tion. He wrote for his dramas, instead of music that should have been merely supplemental and significant, music that is, in and of itself, so superlative, so engrossing, so stupendous and exigent in its beauty, that it becomes the over- whelmingly dominant and engaging factor. “ Tristan und Isolde’ * is, as Ernest Newman has remarked, “not so much an opera as a symphonic poem to which words have sometimes been added, by hook or by crook.” It was a glorious, a triumphant failure — but a failure, nevertheless, if he were to stand or fall by his purpose rather than by his achievement; and where Wagner, in his “Tristan” and “Meister- singer” and “Parsifal,” fails, Mascagni, 74 PIETRO MASCAGNI in (say) his “Cavalleria Rusticana,” succeeds. “Cavalleria” is a veritable music-drama — a rude approximation of Wagner's conception of a drama vitalized and emotionally quickened by a co-operative but subsidiary musical accompaniment. Here is no absorb- ingly gorgeous fabric of musical in- vestiture to divert the attention and the imagination from the immediate con- cerns of the drama itself. The music throughout is almost invariably atten- dant upon the dramatic action. It is subservient and reflective; seldom does it assert itself beyond the limits im- posed by its proper function of simply heightening and intensifying the emo- tional appeal of the play. It fulfils admirably, in the main, Wagner's pre- cept that the auditor should be aware of the music only as an enforcement and intensification of the dramatic moment. 75 PHASES OF MODERN MUSIC Here it is precisely that — the naked, the sheer equivalent of the inner and the external movement of the tragedy. That, beyond question, is its excelling virtue: its persistent co-ordination of the action and the tone, its singleness of purpose and effect. In that it is an extraordinary achievement. The music, qua music, has nothing of that tragic beauty which in Wagner’s “Gotter- dammerung,” for example, entrances the sense and “turns the heart to water ” ; and to call it distinguished, in any mere- ly musical sense, would be grotesquely to pervert the fact. Its melodic vein is predominantly coarse and obvious; its harmonic plan is wantonly uncouth ; its musicianship is unimpressive: but despite its frequent and violent de- partures from musical rectitude, its vulgarity and extravagance and blatant crudity, the score of “ Cavalleria ” re- 76 PIETRO MASCAGNI mains a tragic masterpiece, unique in its concision, its swiftness, its unswerv- ing dramatic verity. “ Cavalleria,” of course, we had known before Mascagni’s personal invasion of our operatic stage, — though his mem- orably fine interpretation of the score revealed unsuspected and . admirable excellences in its structure and effect. But of his other operas we knew only “L’Amico Fritz,” a work highly incon- sequential and unrepresentative, and of negligible significance in its relation to the development of Mascagni’s artistic personality. The composer’s visit, how- ever, calamitous and abortive as it was, served to disclose aspects of his art at once surprising and delightful. The Mascagni of old — the Mascagni of “Cavalleria” — was a man direct and impetuous of utterance almost to the point of brutality, — hot-blooded, vehe- 77 PHASES OF MODERN MUSIC ment, superlatively uncontemplative. The Mascagni of later revelation — the Mascagni of “Zanetto” and “Iris” — is an honest pagan turned would-be mystic, an ineffectual dreamer, a seeker after the distinguished phrase and the subtler inspiration — in short, a talent of uncommon virility and exuberance, widened in scope and shaped to a finer utterance, to a maturer and more heed- ful poise, but still, in its impulses, un- regulated and chaotic. It is extremely fortunate that Mas- cagni was enabled to produce his “Iris” here, and that we were not under the necessity of basing a judgment of his later work upon “Zanetto” alone. The text is derived by Mascagni’s librettists, Signori Targioni-Tozzetti and Menasci, from Francois Coppee’s delightful idyl, “Le Passant.” Silvia, the charming hostess of a country inn, is become 78 PIETRO MASCAGNI blase and jaded from a life of much emotional activity. She encounters Zanetto, a roving minstrel, for whom she conceives a sincere passion. Zanetto, also enamoured, proffers his devotion; but Silvia, who has meanwhile been made aware of an ultimate and transcendent ideal not to be attained through mere human tenderness, denies her love and his, and sends him from her. And the moral of it all, the libretto naively ex- plains, “is that true love is willing to sacrifice itself in order that its ideal may achieve its high ambition.’ ’ In itself, the little drama has an undeniable charm. There is a noble and penetrat- ing aspiration implicit in its central motive, a high and gracious poetry in its symbolism. It is curiously like, in in- tention, that other and miraculously lovely spiritual fable, Mr. Yeats’s “The Shadowy Waters.” Silvia is a feminine 79 PHASES OF MODERN MUSIC and sentimentalized Forgael, become sud- denly aware that “The love of all under the light of the sun Is but brief longing, and deceiving hope, And bodily tenderness,” and denying Zanetto and his humanly eager passion as Forgael denies Dectora. Here, obviously, is a conception which it is perhaps unreasonable to suppose that such a musician as Mascagni could ever have comprehended; it is incon- ceivable that he could ever have real- ized it musically. Peter Cornelius would have contrived an exquisite setting for such a theme; Cesar Franck, or Debussy, or Vincent d’Indy, might have found for it an adequate musi- cal equivalent. But for Mascagni that feat were impossible. Quintessentially Italian, he is anything but a mystic; his temperament is, in fact, at a further 80 PIETRO MASCAGNI remove from the temperament of the typical mystic, the clairvoyant visionary, than that of almost any composer in the history of music. His art knows no hesitancies, no withdrawals into the shadow; whatever of beauty and in- tensity it owns is of the surface, obvious in the most immediate sense of the word. He is not of that clan who have “turned their longing after the wind and wave of the mind. ,, He is the sheer material- ist, untroubled by any too urgent in- tuitions of the daemonic, and with no message of any sort — save that of his own gospel of musical beauty — to de- liver. Such a temperament, one would have said in advance of the event, could not but be permanently disqualified for the musical expression of such a subject; and so it has proved. The score of “Zanetto” is a miracle of dulness; throughout its dreary length it contains 81 PHASES OF MODERN MUSIC scarcely a phrase that is not compact of unrelieved platitude. One waits for a passion and a poignancy, a moment of vivifying emotion, that never comes. There is no heightening, no grasp of mood, no distinction of style. There is, in short, a complete and lamentable absence of inspiration. It was scarcely to be expected that Mascagni would achieve spiritual intensity, or any subt- lety of interpretation. But here are not even the vividness and the passion of “Cavalleria,” nor its eloquent brevity of characterization. “ Zanetto ” must be — one most sincerely hopes that it is— a monument of the lowest ebb to which it is possible for Mascagni’s powers to decline. '‘Iris” is in a wholly different case. It justifies, in a measure, the faith in Mascagni’s potentialities which “Caval- leria” inspired, and which European 82 PIETRO MASCAGNI judgments of his subsequent perform- ances tended so persistently to dis- courage. One is scarcely prepared to maintain that in “Iris” he has actually accomplished all that was promised of him under the sway of those unheedful enthusiasms of the early nineties. But beyond any question at all the music of “Iris” is the most brilliant, the most pregnant, the most distinguished that we have yet heard from Mascagni. With one's ears haunted by the mem- ory of such a phrase as Cieco’s deeply pathetic “ Una carezza al vecchio Cieco /” it is difficult to believe that' one has been listening to music by the composer of 1 ‘ Zanetto ’ ’ and — the “ Intermezzo. ’ ’ As a dramatic text, “Iris” is pre- posterous. A tragic action devoid of essential humanity, with no logical or- ganic growth, and crassly melodramatic in its structure, is framed in a set- 83 PHASES OF MODERN MUSIC ting of Oriental symbolism superfi- cially felt and unintelligently utilized, and bearing merely a decorative re- lation to the drama. Iris, a young and guileless Japanese, is abducted by an adventurous roue and detained against her will in a resort in the Yoshiwara. Her blind and decrepit father, believing that she has deserted him voluntarily, seeks her out and curses her, flinging mud in her face. Iris, crazed by his imprecations, throws herself from a window into an adjacent sewer, where she is discovered, half alive, by some wandering rag - pickers. As the sun rises she expires, and (in the exalted phrase of the libretto) “flowers . . . knot themselves about her, as human arms, and lift her up towards the Azure, the Infinite, and to the Sun.” Upon this basis of sheer melodrama and ineffectual allegory, Mascagni has erect- 84 PIETRO MASCAGNI ed a musical structure which is, when one considers the material with which he had to work, surprisingly effective. There are moments of labored and abortive ugliness ; the psychology is often lacking in acuteness, and the invention not infrequently flags. But, when all has been said that may justly be affirmed in depreciation, this impassion- ed and colorful score still remains a remarkable achievement. There are no- table passages — the sonorous introduc- tion, with its climax of radiant orches- tral light; Cieco’s agonized lament, and the conclusion of the first act; Iris’s narrative in the second act; Osaka’s passionate supplications; Iris’s dying soliloquy. Above all — and it is the redeeming trait of Mascagni’s artistic character, the palliation for his obvious faults of over-emphasis, and brutality, and incoherence — there is the constant 85 PHASES OF MODERN MUSIC presence, in this as in his other works, of that “ splendid and imperishable excellence” which Mr. Swinburne found to atone for all of Byron’s offences and to outweigh all his defects: “the ex- cellence of sincerity and strength.” That much, at least, Mascagni’s most grudging detractor must concede to him. At that time, sufficiently remote from the present, when it will be possible and right to attempt a final estimate of Mascagni, I think it will be said of him that he was primarily a worker in the open, going no further than an immiti- gable sincerity and an unconquerable en- thusiasm could take him — not caring, in fact, to penetrate very deeply or curious- ly beneath the human surfaces of life. The events of the psychic world — the world of emotion and desire and passion- ate conflict — dominate his imagination and completely enchain his spirit. He 86 PIETRO MASCAGNI has not “ a far-wandering wing ” ; nor has he the remotest concern with that otherworld “on whose leaning brows are mystery and shadow.” Not for him the troubled and eager quest of that inexorable ideal which offers “but wind and shadow” for reward in the attain- ment; nor, for him, the unwearying search for an ultimate beauty, a perfect- ed design and utterance. But whatever virtues inhabit sincerity and truth and power are his, beyond the possibility of denial. 7 A NOTE ON GRIEG It is the habit of musicians of a certain stamp to speak of Edvard Grieg with a slightly contemptuous lift- ing of the brows — an artist, they will concede, of charming and distinguished accomplishment, but restricted in scope and power. A popular legend accounts him to be peculiarly a master of the exotic, uttering a beauty essentially slight and rare, remote and exquisitely fantastic, rather than broadly virile and of deep emotional significance. “ Grieg,” one may read in a recent and deliberate estimate of the Norwegian’s genius, '‘is never large or heroic; he never wears the buskin. He has neither the depth 88 A NOTE ON GRIEG of passion nor the intellectual grasp needed to make music in the grand style.” His personality, we are told, is one “ graceful without strength, ro- mantic without the sense of tragedy, highly gifted with all gentle qualities of nature, but lacking in the more virile powers, in broad vision, epic mag- nanimity, and massive force” — a con- ception of his genius which one need have no hesitation in declaring super- ficial and incomplete. Grieg is not merely gracious and fragrant, piquant and fragilely lovely; he is all this, of course, but he is very much more: he is also a poet of the tragic, of the largely passionate and elemental. Let me, in bearing brief witness to a side of his genius that is seldom insisted upon, allege several definite points of evidence. Consider, for a moment, that work of his in which he reached, 89 PHASES OF MODERN MUSIC perhaps, the highest point to which his power of creative genius can take him — the sonata for violin and piano in C minor, Op. 45. Here, in my view, is a work built greatly upon great lines. I find in it no hint of the limitations which that dubious appraiser of Grieg whom I have quoted discovers in the work of the Norwegian. The mood, the emotion, are heroic; here are virility, breadth, a passionate urge and ardor. With what an intensity of grieving Grieg has charged those wailing chromatic phrases, for the violin and piano in imitation, in the working-out section of the first movement! and the C major passage in the last movement, with its richly canorous theme for the solo instrument against arching arpeg- gios in the accompaniment, is superb in breadth and power. Then, again, there is the “Aase’s 90 A NOTE ON GRIEG Tod,” from the first Peer Gynt Suite — a threnody of sombre and obsessing beauty, large in conception, noble and profound in feeling, — the product of a temperament rich in capacity and resource. I might allege, too, many of the songs — ‘ ‘ Friendship , ’ ’ for example ; or the magnificent G minor Ballade, Op. 24; or the “Bergliot” music, or portions of “Olav Trygvason.” I have not the smallest intention of denying the existence of the Grieg of popular tradition. He is, at times, sim- ply and contentedly, one of the minor singers; or he tells us only, in the fort- unate phrase of Mr. Philip Hale, of “elves ” who, “hardly thumb-high, play as succubi and incubi"; or of elves “who wear the face of a fresh and adorable virgin — yet they borrow only half of a human body, and they do not turn their backs ; because if they were to do this, 9i PHASES OF MODERN MUSIC one could see that they are hollow be- hind, like a mask.” That is, indeed, Grieg — the slighter Grieg; but what of the other Grieg — the Grieg of “ Olav” and “ Bergliot ” ? to whom Mr. Hale has himself applied the memorable and majestic lines of Walt Whitman: “I see the burial cairns of Scandinavian warriors; I see them raised high with stones, by the marge of restless oceans, that the dead men’s spirits, when they wearied of their quiet graves, might rise up through the mounds, and gaze on the tossing billows, and be refreshed by storms, immensity, liberty, action.” Here is no dainty romanticist, no frail and lovely dreamer; the voice is the voice of a master of emotional utterance — here are passion, and pathos, and heroic ecstasy and despair: here, in short, is a music-maker whose place is not, indeed, upon the summit, but cer- tainly upon the upper slopes. 9 2 WOMEN AND MODERN MUSIC That most lively and inquisitive of musical essayists, Mr. James Huneker, once speculated with sanity and pene- tration upon the subject of woman’s place in interpretative music. After suggesting, through a felicitously chosen passage from Balzac, the quality of eloquence which he believed to be the extent of feminine accomplishment in piano-playing, Mr. Huneker closed upon this rather dubious note: ‘‘It is often charming [a woman’s version of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms], but is it ever great, spiritual, moving art ?” Mr. Hun- eker discreetly forbore to answer his own query, although he implied his 93 PHASES OF MODERN MUSIC conviction unmistakably enough in the shaping of his interrogation. Let me extend the scope of his in- quiry and ask if woman has ever done greatly in creative musical art ? In- disputably she has not; we have had no feminine Bach or Wagner — nor even a feminine Dvorak or Puccini. But, one comes to wonder, is woman capable of great creative achievement in this most sensitive, pliant, and emotional of the arts? Frankly, there is everything to warrant the conviction that she is not. Mr. Havelock Ellis, a brilliant and acute psychologist, endorses the view that Mr. G. P. Upton takes of the matter in his Woman and Music. Conceding, says Mr. Upton, that music is the most intense and potent medium for the ex- pression of the emotions, and that woman is emotional by nature, '‘is it not one solution of the problem that 94 WOMEN AND MODERN MUSIC woman does not musically reproduce them because she herself is emotional by temperament and nature and cannot project herself outwardly? . . . The emotion is a part of herself and is as natural to her as breathing. She lives in emotion and acts from emotion; . . . but to treat emotions as if they were mathematics, to bind and measure and limit them within the rigid laws of harmony and counterpoint, and to ex- press them with arbitrary signs, is a cold-blooded operation possible only to the sterner and more obdurate nature of man.” All of which is exceedingly convincing and explanatory. Women have wrought admirably, at times in- comparably, in letters — witness, for an example of to-day, the marvellously lovely and moving art of that exquisite genius, Fiona Macleod; and in painting they have worked to honorable ends; 95 PHASES OF MODERN MUSIC but what woman has written music that is to be mentioned in the same breath with the work of George Eliot, of Christina Rossetti, of Mrs. Browning, of Rosa Bonheur, of Nora Hopper and Miss Macleod? Surely not Clara Schu- mann, nor Augusta Holmes, nor the in- corrigibly superficial Chaminade, nor such accomplished and earnest music- makers as those ambitious Americans, Mrs. H. H. A. Beach and Miss Margaret Ruthven Lang — to name those among the most eminent who come first to mind. It has been urged that the woman composer has had, as yet, scarcely a chance — in Mr. Kipling’s convenient phrase — to '‘find herself”; but it will be conceded that she has had at least equal opportunities with her sisters in literature and art. Certainly there are to-day no insurmountable obstacles in her path: for a contemporary composer 96 WOMEN AND MODERN MUSIC has proved that it is possible for a woman to compass the amazing feat of achieving the production of an original opera at that august temple of the lyric muse — the Metropolitan Opera- House. When Miss Ethel M. Smyth bowed her acknowledgments from a be- flowered stage after the curtain had fallen upon the final scene of her music- drama, “Der Wald,” she marked the consummation of a unique accomplish- ment — never before in the history of American music had an opera by a woman been publicly performed ; it re- mained for an Englishwoman — though with Teutonic affiliations — to effect that unexampled end. And are we to say that so extraordinary a success justified itself through the disclosure of any singular gift of genius? It would be difficult to say so save in a spirit of the most desperate and defiant gallantry. 97 PHASES OF MODERN MUSIC Another explanation of feminine in- capacity in this field — at best, I admit, a partial one — suggests itself. Would one be guilty of an inclination toward the fantastical in postulating — with a proper tentativeness — that al- most all great modern music has been inspired, in variable degree, by the ideal of sex — an ideal that has neces- sarily, for the masculine composer, been feminine? The most intense and eloquent music we have was written as an idealized expression of sexual love. Think of the D minor sym- phony of Schumann, certain songs of Schubert and Brahms, the supreme pas- sages in the music dramas of Wagner — would they have been possible with- out the stimulus of some personal ideal of feminine loveliness ? Women did not begin to compete with men in the field of composition, to any extent, until mu- 98 WOMEN AND MODERN MUSIC sic had ceased to be merely decorative or religious, as it was, predominantly, before Beethoven’s time, and had begun to serve as a medium for emotional ex- pression; therefore there was little op- portunity for the development of a female Bach or Haydn. So it happened that when women did begin to turn their attention to the writing of music they found it an art which was essen- tially a vehicle of expression, and only incidentally an art of formal beauty. What was it, then, that was lacking in the equipment of the woman composer that interfered with her producing music of veritable power and intensity? Is it not fair to suppose that it was, in large part, the lack of that urgent in- spiration which she herself furnishes to her brother composer? Obviously the ideal of masculine personality does not occupy a place in women’s imaginations 99 PHASES OF MODERN MUSIC analogous with the ideal of feminine personality which fires and stimulates the imaginations of men; for, to the masculine mind, ideal beauty — the gov- erning motive in the inspiration of creative work — presents itself generally in terms of a perfected feminine loveli- ness: an identification which does not, of course, exist for women in any corre- sponding relationship. Look deep enough into almost any of the great modern scores penned by men and you will find, however recon ditely, the image of a woman’s face. Look into any score of femi- nine authorship and you will find a “ painted idyl of what never was.” And would you set this flaccid simulation against such a transcendent utterance of the heart’s desire, such a “ dream of the enchanted spirit of man, achieved in beauty,” as '‘Tristan und Isolde”? ioo WOMEN AND MODERN MUSIC “It is woman who [as an inspirational force] composes all the great music, paints all the great pictures, writes all the great poems,’ ’ says the author of “Overtones.” That is, perhaps, too wide an extension of the theory ; but of music it goes to the heart of the matter. A REJECTED MUSIC-DRAMA His detractors would say that the first American production of Mr. Isidore de Lara's music-drama, “ Messaline,” in the winter of 1902, was chiefly notable in that it evoked probably the most emphatic and unequivocal condemna- tion that had ever greeted the premiere of a new work in this country. The shortest of memories must concede the fact. Yet — and I would note here that he is a temerous appraiser who ventures to set any value whatsoever upon “ Mes- saline ” — yet, I say, a critic would surely be deserving of scant confidence were he not to testify, at whatever risk of error, to that in a work of creative art 102 A REJECTED MUSIC-DRAMA which may seem to himself imperative in excellence. I can only say, there- fore, that Mr. de Lara’s lyric tragedy seems to me, after a matured familiarity with it, to be a work of remarkable, though unsustained, beauty, and of very considerable intensity. For the effectiveness of many of his scenes Mr. de Lara is, beyond a doubt, deeply indebted to the admirable libret- to of his collaborators, Messrs. Sylvestre and Morand; for his music is usually abortive when it attempts to realize a supremely tragic situation — such, for example, as the conclusion of the second act, with Hares’s agonized 11 Elle! grands dieux! c'est elle! et dans ses bras!” or the tremendous final scene at the end of the last act. In such moments as these it is the dexterous dramatic contrivance, rather than the accompanying music, which works so poignant and over- 103 8 PHASES OF MODERN MUSIC mastering an effect. Mr. de Lara’s in- spiration sinks at such times to its lowest ebb. It is when his librettists afford him an occasion for giving the most unrestrained play to his lyric emo- tion and his gift of majestic expression that he rises to his fullest height. One cannot soon forget moments in the opening chorus, nor the music at Mes- saline’s entrance, nor the love scene be- tween herself and Hares, nor the greater part of the third act. Above all, De Lara has realized musically the charac- ter of Messaline with an astonishing subtlety, an astonishing intensity, vital- ity, and puissance. He has painted her to the life, this most magnificent of courtesans. Not only has he vivified the actual Messaline, as Messrs. Sylvestre and Morand have recreated her, but she becomes in his music the type and embodiment of the essential, the 104 A REJECTED MUSIC-DRAMA supreme enchantress, the seductress of immemorial incarnations. Nowhere is he happier, more brilliantly compelling, than in his delineation of her moods — or, rather, her mood, for she has but one, although she plays upon it manifold and incalculable variations ; — and at that passage in her love scene with Hares where, as Calv6 enacts her, she rises from her silver couch to caress her still timorous lover, while her most original and haunting motive broadens with lingering tenderness in the orches- tra, one feels that here, at least, De Lara has actually accomplished an ex- quisite piece of musical psychologiz- ing, and one rejoices. For it is only in his characterization of Messaline herself that he succeeds in quite convincing us. His Helion is, if one must say it, al- most a failure, so far as his credible existence in the score is concerned. And PHASES OF MODERN MUSIC in this, too, De Lara falls short of his text for persuasive dramatic power. His Hares is better, although one must rebel at the “ O unit d' amour” in the tavern scene, which is sheer Tosti — the one egregious blot upon Mr. de Lara’s score. Another blot, though a lesser one, is his irritating predilection for the perfect cadence. He not infrequent- ly chooses to interrupt the surge and flow of his larger orchestral movement for the sake, so it would seem, of a concluding high note. Nor — to continue this catalogue of his imperfections — are his declamatory passages especially memorable. He has not sufficient har- monic pregnancy to support his recita- tives with a rich and significant current of orchestral commentary. In fact, his orchestra is rather dependent than emancipated, in the modern musico- 106 A REJECTED MUSIC-DRAMA dramatic sense. Mr. de Lara restricts it, in the main, merely to sustaining his voice parts, although his manipulation of the few motives that the score con- tains is often extremely effective; par- ticularly so is his use of Messaline’s typical theme and the several beautiful love motives. If I were called upon to attempt a sudden summing up of ‘ 4 Messaline,” I should say that, regarded simply from the point of view of dramatic workman- ship, it is strikingly successful; that, musically, leaving the text aside, its poignant lyricism saves it at times from declining into something dangerously like banality; and that, in its exposition of the character of Messaline herself, the score is nothing short of masterly. Into the perilous and unprofitable question of the morals of Mr. de Lara’s opera I am not in the least inclined to 107 PHASES OF MODERN MUSIC enter exhaustively. But if I considered it incumbent upon me to debate the ethical point involved, I should em- phatically hold that “ Messaline,” far from being merely an offensive and dele- terious chronicle of lust and infamy, is essentially an exhortation against sexu- al depravity. With Mr. Vernon Black- bum, I “can quite imagine ‘ Messaline ’ being taken by any serious and zealous pastor as a text whereon to hang the most significant of sermons, as a classic instance wherewith to point his moral and adorn his tale.” For, as Mr. Black- bum justly contends, “here is no tri- umph of sin. The cautionary tales themselves do not hold a more complete record of the punishment assigned to lawlessness and self-indulgence.” I can find no more conclusive word to say on the subject than that. THE QUESTION OF REALISM Program-music, we have been told repeatedly by unimpeachable authori- ties, attains artistic respectability only when and so long as it contents itself with suggesting and enforcing a poetic mood or ideal; when it becomes imitative of externals (they say) it courts degrada- tion. — Thus runs the dictum, so strenu- ously maintained by generations of val- iant feuilletonists. Imitative music is the black sheep, the shameless outcast of the art. When you have said of a composer's music that it is “merely imitative," you have pronounced judg- ment of excommunication ; denunciation can go no further. 109 PHASES OF MODERN MUSIC Mr. W. J. Henderson, in a sentence in his admirable essay on Schumann and the program-symphony, has afforded me a kind of inverted text for this discourse. “ Sometimes,’ ’ he says, '‘in the carrying out of a great plan, the masters have written music designed to conjure up in the mind images of ex- ternal objects; but to do this is to put music to its lowest use.” And hear Mr. Frederick Corder, in his Grove’s Dictionary article on program - music : “. . . it is a degradation of art to em- ploy music in imitating the sounds of nature.” Now, if I may venture to differ with Mr. Henderson and Mr. Corder, it is precisely because the masters have done this very thing, — flagrantly, often, and to the glory of art, — that imitative tone-painting has an establish- ed right to be considered a legitimate IIO THE QUESTION OF REALISM form of musical expression. Certainly it is irrefragable that some of the most beautiful and poetic music in existence is frankly designed to induce images of external things. Numerous desperate attempts have been made to palliate the arrant realism of the “ Siegfried’ ’ Wald- weben, for instance (one naturally turns to Wagner, as the great master of de- scriptive music, for illustrations) ; but any one who can listen without prejudice to that lovely episode and affirm that it is anything but sheer musical scene- painting, is simply denying the obvious. If you have a theoretical axe to grind, and are trying to square this particular scene with some complacently orthodox theory of musical ethics, you may ex- plain that Wagner is aiming to translate a psychic mood, that he is merely in- terpreting Siegfried’s emotional impres- sions; you may assert this, but how will hi PHASES OF MODERN MUSIC you account for those delicious and unmistakable orchestral bird songs — as unmistakable as the avian warblings in the andante of the “ Pastoral Sym- phony ” — and the barefaced attempts to picture the rustling and shimmering of leaves and the play of sunlight? So far as Wagner is concerned, it is un- necessary to multiply examples ; a dozen others are readily recallable: the gor- geous musical tumult which describes Siegfried’s ascent of Brunnhilde’s flame- girdled rock; the “ Walkiire” fire-music; the “ Rheingold ” prelude and finale; the exquisite orchestral commentary which accompanies Isolde’s rhapsodizing at the beginning of the second act of “Tristan ” — “Sie winkt mit einem Tuche,” writes Wagner, in his stage directions, near the end of the scene; and out of the figure which he invents to accompany the action he makes a page of ravishing 1 1 2 THE QUESTION OF REALISM musical loveliness. Surely this is imi- tative music at its worst! It need hardly be said, though, that it is unnecessary to look to the music- drama for examples of realistic descrip- tive music which is, in itself, as beauti- ful as it is dignified. To come directly to Beethoven, the “ Pastoral Symphony ” immediately suggests itself, of course, as a thoroughly admirable example of objective tone - painting. Although it has been defended by timorous apologists, and in spite of its deprecatory motto, I think it will be conceded by impartial critics that in it Beethoven has con- cerned himself rather more with “ Mal- erei” than with “Ausdruck derEmp fin- dung.’ ’ Ambros speaks of the first move- ment as “a broad landscape - picture ” ; and it is not easy to see that, in the matter of its intention, the “ Thunderstorm ” va- ries in any essential particular from other PHASES OF MODERN MUSIC musical storms of a less exalted reputa- tion. Mr. George P. Upton finds in it all the familiar properties of the symphonic storm: it '‘brings before us the lowering sky, the distant rumbling of thunder, the sultry air, and the cumulous clouds as they rise higher and higher above the horizon, until we are almost in darkness, and the storm breaks forth in all its fury. It soon passes over, however, and sunlight illuminates the refreshed landscape,” etc. It is only by virtue of the intrinsic dignity of its musical investment that it ranks as a work of art instead of as a piece of pretentious clap-trap. Mendelssohn, who can scarcely be ac- cused of a contempt for the canons of musical respectability, has made fa- miliarly successful and charming use of imitative music in his “Midsummer Night’s Dream” score. Berlioz, Liszt, 114 THE QUESTION OF REALISM Rubinstein, Raff, Goldmark, Elgar, Rimsky - Korsakoff , Rachmaninoff, are some who should also be remembered in the indictment. Saint -Saens, too, temperamental classicist as he is, has yet made audacious and notable experi- ments in delineative music. In that most vivacious of his symphonic poems, “Phaeton,” the details of the intrepid charioteer’s mad adventure are de- scribed with graphic effect and fine poetic gusto. Mr. Upton, in a pictu- resque and sprightly analysis, thus inter- prets the climax: '‘At last,” he says, “Jupiter settles matters with an out- burst of trumpets” — this, though, Mr. Upton might depose, should justly be regarded as the enforcement of a mood ; but the important point to note is, that this turbulent tone-picture of streaming manes, and motion, and light, is excellent music — the themes succinct and virile, US PHASES OF MODERN MUSIC the architecture adroit and firm,? the conception large and imaginative. Then there is Richard Strauss — that egregious stumbling-block to the de- corous and the law-abiding — who, in those colossal and brilliant phantas- magorias of his, '‘Till Eulenspiegel,” “Don Quixote, ” and (in parts) “Also Sprach Zarathustra,” has achieved stupendous and overmastering effects by methods which are the reverse of idealistic. Edward MacDowell’s “The Eagle” — an illustration to Tennyson's lines — is another example (there are innumerable ones that might be ad- duced) of finely imaginative tone-paint- ing. It aims to arouse, through the potency of various musical devices, the same succession of mental pictures which is induced by the words of the poem, each image having its counter- part in the music. A depiction of 116 THE QUESTION OF REALISM externals it indubitably is; but where are your scruples in face of the impres- siveness of the musical result? Which brings one to the point to be em- phasized — in the form of a proposition so self - evident that it seems hardly worth setting down: — namely, that in music, as in the other arts, the prod- uct, the achievement, is everything; the means count for nothing. If, by the use of a descriptive process of any sort, even the most closely realistic, a com- poser is enabled to contrive music which is poetic, vital, thematically original — if, in short, it stands the test of a purely musical standard of valua- tion, and so long as it conveys no strabismic^ view of life or the natural world, he has created an art- work whose legitimacy is, it would seem, theoretical- ly unquestionable. It is difficult to see that the fact of his having chosen to 117 PHASES OF MODERN MUSIC represent musically an externality — which does not, of course, preclude artistic selection and accentuation — involves any degradation, any prostitu- tion of the art, as we are assured that it does. “The solitary question to ask of a new composition,’ ’ wrote Sidney Lanier, “is — not, is it descriptive, but is it beautiful in any, the largest sense of that term?” And Schumann’s “nothing is wrong in music which sounds right ” can bear the strain of a wider application than is usually given it. Lanier (to quote him again) wrote appositely in connection with the “Pas- toral Symphony,” in his Poetry and Music: “Beethoven wishes to suggest a definite intellectual image to his hearers along with a certain set of tones ; instead of employing a conventional word to accomplish his purpose he chooses to employ an imitative tone. 118 THE QUESTION OF REALISM Nothing could be more natural, nothing more legitimate. Why not hint a storm with stormy tones as well as describe a storm in stormy words ?” It is simply a question of ideation (if one may use the word in a musical sense): one man — an artist, endowed with poetic insight — will set out to ex- press in music the ripple of water, the pounding of horses’ hoofs, the swirl and turmoil of a gale at sea, — any one of the familiar phenomena beloved of the musical realist ; another, barren of senti- ment and imagination, attempts the same thing: the difference in result will be as the difference between a still-life by Vollon and a still-life by any one else. That the basis of both is imitation, an endeavor “to conjure up in the mind images of external objects,” has no logical bearing whatever on the case; the quality of the translation, as music, 119 9 PHASES OF MODERN MUSIC is the only consideration which should weigh in the appraisement. Iam- blichus — neo-Platonist, mathematician, and musical theorist — summed up the matter with notable terseness some six- teen centuries ago. “Things more ex- cellent than every image,” he wrote, “ are expressed through images.” Wagner, his flamboyant realism transformed and sublimated by the surpassing eloquence of its musical em- bodiment, stands for the perfect type of the descriptive painter in tones. His transmutation — imitation, if you prefer — of the multitudinous sounds and aspects of the external world is recorded in page after page of music which is its own superb and triumphant justification. A NEGLECTED SONG WRITER A quarter of a century before that flaunting signature of musical modern- ity, “Ein Heldenleben,” issued from the hand of Richard Strauss, there died in Germany a composer whose significant work is to-day as fresh and modern, as contemporary in its impulse and ad- dress, as any music whose origin is of the present. With the outward life of Peter Cornelius I shall not here concern myself. A nephew of the painter Von Cornelius, he was a friend and protege of Liszt, an early propagandist for the Wagner cause, a writer upon music, a teacher, at one time an actor — that, in the briefest outline, is the substance of I 2 1 PHASES OF MODERN MUSIC the biographies. He lived out his life during a period of the most consuming and momentous activity in the develop- ment of the art to whose service his career was a devotion; and yet, some- how, he found opportunity and in- spiration for the writing of songs steeped in a loveliness whose serenity and de- tachment have scarcely, in music, an adducible parallel. There, I conceive, is the curiosity. Neglected, I have called him, and in no mere mood of inconsiderate and impetuous sympathy. The world at large knows him only as the author of a delightful comedy — “Der Barbier von Bagdad,” of some admirable choral music, and, virtually, of a single song — the ubiquitous and lovely “Ein Ton.” One will look in vain through the pages of Mr. Henry T. Finck’s excel- lent and appreciative Songs and Song 122 A NEGLECTED SONG WRITER Writers for any mention of his work — an omission which it is not easy to justify when one considers, not alone the quality of Cornelius’s genius, but the quite substantial bulk of his output. And yet it is not, perhaps, so inex- plicable as it seems at first blush that his songs should be — except, to a limited extent, in Germany — practically un- known and unsung; for Cornelius be- longs, with such others as Fiona Macleod and George Russell and Charles Martin Loeffler, to that distinguished minority of undemonstrative geniuses whose voices have never penetrated to the ears of the many — whose utterances have been too rare, too subtly graduated, too little insistent, to arrest the attention of those who give heed only to the in- escapable. Cornelius never takes one by storm. He has, veritably enough, as Mr. Meredith postulates of his figure 123 PHASES OF MODERN MUSIC of an Egoist, the gift of pathos — only he does not “rush at you, roll you over, and squeeze your body for the briny drops.’ ’ He is insuperably, confirmed- ly undramatic. His is not the way of the scenic imagination, the method which relies upon the challenging ap- peal of sudden contrast, of emotion set in vivid relief against emotion. One would search fruitlessly through his work for a song of the order of Schubert’s “ Der Doppelganger,” or Tschaikowsky’s “ Warum sind denn die Rosen so blass ?” — the text of which Cornelius has him- self used in a song — or Richard Strauss’s “Cacilie.” His appeal is subtle, linger- ing, intimate, rather than instant and overwhelming. Swiftness, exuberance, passionate emphasis are foreign to his temperament. His is an emotion less impetuous and stressful than con- templative, a passion less expansive 124 A NEGLECTED SONG WRITER than interior: the passion of Cesar Franck rather than of Tschaikowsky, of Yeats rather than of Swinburne — rapt, almost devotional in its moods, and yet tense, compelling, indescribably affecting. His songs, psychic dramas in miniature, are, as Fiona Macleod has written of the plays of Mr. Yeats, “ gossamer dramas, woven inwardly of the wind of the spirit and the light of the imagination”; and Cornelius too, at times, 4 ‘thinks in light and dreams in shadow/ ’ His published songs number, in all, something under threescore : a group of twenty-one, — including the six “Kleine Lieder” and the cyclus “Trauer und Trost,” — three duets for soprano and barytone, six “ Weihnachtslieder, ,, four “Lieder fur Tenor oder Sopran,” six “Brautlieder, ,, three “Sonnette” after Burger, and fourteen posthumous songs I2 5 PHASES OF MODERN MUSIC compiled by Max Hasse from Cor- nelius’s sketch-books. Of these fifty- six songs it would scarcely be an ex- travagance to say that one-half are wholly unimportant — perfunctory, in- effectual, discouragingly uninspired; but the rest are invaluable. It is a suf- ficiently grievous thing that Cornelius should have permitted himself to write, for instance, his “Im Lenz” — that it is possible to find in the same collec- tion such a perfect thing as “An den Traum” and such a triumph of banality as “Trost.” But, after all, was it not possible for the man who could write “Der Tod und das Madchen ” to write also, presumably with a tranquil con- science, “ Trockne Blumen”? and did not the author of “The Daffodils” and the “Immortality” ode leave us that perturbing bequest, the “Ecclesiastical Sonnets”? That Cornelius has given 126 A NEGLECTED SONG WRITER us “An den Traum” is, after all, the memorable fact. His is a personality curiously un- susceptible of definition. He is, when one comes to scrutinize his spirit, baffiingly, illusively complex — an odd comminglement of naive candor and emotional subtlety. One looks, as it were, into the clear, wide eyes of a child; and then, even as one looks, the eyes alter — they are no longer lucent and untroubled ; it is no longer a blithe child, but a dreamer and mystic who gazes back at you through eyes that are become impenetrable and rapt. His thought is, at its most distinctive, tenuous, esoteric, exquisitely reticent — reticent, and yet, as I have said, singularly naive, singularly buoyant. His world, as we see it through the dim veiling of his music, is a world shut away by a luminous, Corot-like haze, a 127 PHASES OF MODERN MUSIC world of ineffable and melancholy twi- light, remote, mysterious, dream-haunt- ed. He is continually obsessed by vague, tremulous, half - realized visions and images, heritages of an immemorial beauty and passion. There are mo- ments when he seems immeasurably distant, wrapped in a shimmering, impenetrable mist of dreams; but even as you would strain your senses to follow him, he is standing beside you again, smiling that infinitely winsome smile of his, and talking to you, with the most charming naivete, of fauns, and butterflies, and Christmas festivals. It is his unique and perpetual charm — that curious union of penetrating mysticism and artless innocence which is, in poetic art, so pre-eminently characteristic of William Blake. Cor- nelius, indeed, reminds one more than occasionally of Blake in his essential 128 A NEGLECTED SONG WRITER purity and height and sweetness, and in his moods of rapt, ecstatic vision. One may not, however, extend the comparison very far; for Cornelius has abundantly what Blake has not at all: sincere humanity, a clairvoyant and tender intuition of the near, the familiar, the preciously commonplace. Those songs which most justly represent him — such things as “ Angedenken,” “ Trau- er,” “ Ein Ton,” “An den Traum,” “ Nachts,” “Auftrag,” the “ Brautlied- er ” and “ Weihnachtslieder ” — are the articulate and surviving documents of one to whom, “upon the public ways, Life came. ’ ’ He has not told us all that, perhaps, he might have told us; but it is something to have borne witness, as he indubitably has, to so much that is of an enduring validity and beauty. VERDI AND WAGNER: AN INQUIRY Now that Giuseppe Verdi has, in Lamb’s whimsical phrase, “paid his final tribute to nature,” and since an interval sufficient for dispassionate med- itation upon the fruits of his existence has elapsed, an attempt to measure his genius, at its essential points, with that of his great contemporary, Wagner, may not seem to lack justification. I have no wish to touch, in any seemingly wanton spirit, the rim of a controversy which is in nothing so striking as in its futility — the discussion as to the degree of Verdi’s indebtedness to Wagner in the matter of precept and 130 VERDI AND WAGNER: AN INQUIRY example ; but since the point has a certain initial pertinence in such an ex- amination as this, the question is not altogether negligible. That Verdi, then — the later Verdi of “Aida,” “Otello,” and “Falstaff ” — derived, honorably, from Wagner, is one of those perfectly obvious facts in dispute of which con- troversies occasionally arise. It seems scarcely worth while to maintain, as is the habit in certain critical quarters, that the amazing metamorphosis in- volved in the writing of “Aida” and “ Otello ” by the composer of “II Trova- tore” was simply the result of spon- taneous artistic development — “one of the grand and gradual processes of nature,” in the imposing phrase of a certain Verdian biographer. “The step from ‘II Trovatore’ to ‘Otello,’ ” point- edly observes Mr. Vernon Blackburn, commenting upon this phenomenon, 131 PHASES OF MODERN MUSIC “has no parallel in the history of music. It is a development outside all law, all anticipation, all likelihood. The rea- sonableness for the composition of the first were proof-charge, it might be said in exaggeration, against the reasonable- ness for the composition of the second, and the history of the human mind bears everywhere a contrary witness to this solitary achievement.” It has been averred, in an attempt to account for his extraordinary change of front, that the portents of Verdi’s ultimate re- generation are prefigured, to the dis- cerning mind, in the crude and mere- tricious works of his first and second periods — in “Ernani,” “Rigoletto,” and “II Trovatore.” In “Rigoletto” es- pecially, Mr. James Huneker finds “the roots of the mature Verdi.” “In the declamatory monologues of the hunch- back jester,” he affirms, “are the germs 13 2 VERDI AND WAGNER: AN INQUIRY of the more intellectual and subtle monologues of Iago and Falstaffo.” It is impossible to quarrel with that ; but the fact surely fails, it must be ad- mitted, to account for the enormous disparity between the Verdi of 1867 — the unreclaimed Verdi of “Don Carlos,” the last work of his second or “ transi- tion” period — and the regenerate Verdi of 1871, of “Aida”: the Verdi who has suddenly seen a great light. To find an adequate and, I think, an entirely satisfying explanation of so incredible a development, one has only to recall the circumstance that, at about this period of Verdi’s career, Richard Wag- ner was agitating the musical world with his iconoclastic preachments con- cerning opera and drama, and that Verdi, with his undeniable bias towards musical right-thinking, could scarcely have helped being powerfully influenced i33 PHASES OF MODERN MUSIC thereby. “He was quick to perceive,” remarks Mr. Blackburn, “the value of the proper Wagnerian reaction which had come; quick to perceive it, quick to utilize it. . . . For not as he sowed did Verdi reap; rather some of the fruit of the seed that Wagner scattered Verdi harvested and gathered into beautiful garners.” One may argue thus with- out in the least implying, it need scarcely be said, that Verdi subserviently pattern- ed his later operas upon Wagnerian lines, or that his inspiration, his point of view, were ever anything but his own. For even though Verdi did profit richly through a sympathetic absorption of Wagner’s theories of musico-dramatic art, his application of those theories to his own work was so intensely in- dividual, so intensely and fundament- ally Italian, that the question of his derivation of them is important only in i34 VERDI AND WAGNER: AN INQUIRY so far as it bears upon the estimate, from the historic stand-point, of his total achievement. It is evident, then (may I say?), at the start, that Verdi was in no sense the original and epoch-making musician that Wagner was. As Mr. Huneker ad- mits, he “was not by nature a reformer.’' He has been lauded for his conversion; for his unhesitating abandonment of unworthy ideals ; for his intelligent and unequivocal adoption of principles wholly antipodal to those he had pre- viously held (if it can be truthfully said that he had formerly held any prin- ciples whatsoever). But, admirable as his emancipation must always seem, one’s enthusiasm in contemplating it is somewhat qualified by the reflection that it was not, as in Wagner’s case, self-sprung. Wagner, in his invincible progress from “Rienzi” to “Tristan und 10 I3S PHASES OF MODERN MUSIC Isolde,” wrought out his own salvation, despite his primary debt to Weber and Gluck and the Florentine reformers of the sixteenth century. But Wagner’s regeneration was truly, as the historian whom I have quoted said of Verdi, “one of the grand and gradual processes of nature” — a matter, certainly, of intel- lection, but still more of inward necessity, of intuition, almost, one might say, of inspiration. With Verdi, on the con- trary, the event was as sudden as it was fortuitous ; there is nothing in his earlier works to account satisfactorily for “Aida” and “Otello,” and it is im- possible to believe that he could have written them if W^agner had not lived. Mr. Huneker fathers the ingenious sug- gestion that, if Verdi was affected at all by Wagnerism, he was affected not directly, but by way of Arrigo Boito; he even hints that Boito had a hand in 136 VERDI AND WAGNER: AN INQUIRY the actual writing of “Otello” and “Falstaff” (a notion which certainly has an engaging plausibility). But whether or not Verdi ever heard entire performances of the “Ring,” “Tristan,” or ‘ ‘ Meistersinger ’ ’ — which Mr. Hune- ker doubts — is obviously beside the point. The Wagnerian dialectic was, so to speak, in the air: its contagion was inescapable for any one receptively inclined towards it; and Verdi, with his predisposition towards musical enlight- enment, was unquestionably so inclined. Viewed, as it were, extra-historically, and as a musical dramatist per se , Verdi was undeniably a genius of com- manding and splendid power (I speak throughout, of course, of the later and great Verdi, the Verdi of “Aida,” “Otello,” and “Falstaff”) — “the great- est poet of passion born to Italy,” is Mr. Huneker’s just verdict upon him. A i37 PHASES OF MODERN MUSIC just verdict — yet one that connotes, to my sense, his most conspicuous limita- tion ; since it is only when one comes to measure the expressional efficiency of his music with that of such a master of emotional utterance as Wagner that one realizes its failure to achieve supreme eloquence of accent; for it is in this — in the range and power of his music as an agent of emotional expression, rather than in his achievements as a musical dramatist — that Wagner’s greatness es- sentially consists. Let me define the measure of com- parison somewhat more explicitly. It is doubtful if any figure in the history of musical art has so continually dwelt in the shadow of misconception and misrepresentation as the poet- composer who imagined a '‘Ring des Nibelungen,” a “Tristan und Isolde,” and a “Parsifal.” Partly through an 138 VERDI AND WAGNER: AN INQUIRY unaccountable popular obtuseness, and largely through his theoretical pro- fessions, he has been blindly accepted at his own fantastic valuation: as a dramatist who was only incidentally a musician, as an admirable poet — as any- thing, in short, save that which he pre- eminently and paramountly was : a tran- scendent musician, a profound humanist, an inspired, but unconscious, mystic. In his own view, ironically enough, as in that of the majority of his commenta- tors, his music is simply and solely the handmaid of his dramatic invention — simply and solely, as we have been so carefully instructed, a kind of modern variant of the exegetical chorus of the Greek plays. To a certain superficial extent it is, of course, that; but its ultimate excellence, its ultimate and inestimable value, inheres, not — as Wag- ner fancied, as so many of his disciples i39 PHASES OF MODERN MUSIC have fancied — in its dramatic apposite- ness, but in its miraculous range and eloquence as an instrument of abstract emotional utterance. For in his en- deavor vividly to heighten and in- tensify every moment of his dramatic psychologizing, he voiced (almost, one is tempted to say, accidentally), with incredible beauty and poignancy, every elemental mood of the human soul. To follow him, page by page, through the score of '‘Tristan, ” of “ Siegfried,” of ‘ ‘ Gotterdammerung, ” of “ Meister- singer,” of “ Parsifal,” is to stand amazed at the transcendent genius of this composer whose music — one can say it in all sobriety — sounds the entire gamut of human emotion: every note of passion, of desire, of grief, of terror, of pity, of delight, of aspiration. His range is universal: “his lyre has all the chords.” 140 VERDI AND WAGNER: AN INQUIRY It is in this — in the perfection and universality of his expression — that Wagner is unique and unapproachable; and it is in this, conversely, that Verdi’s genius falls short of complete accom- plishment. As a contrast in sheer vividness of expression, consider, say, Verdi’s treatment of the scene of Otello’s farewell in comparison with Wagner’s enforcement of a scene psychic- ally similar — Siegfried’s dying apos- trophe to Brunnhilde. The emotion is fundamentally the same in both in- stances, and yet what a striking dif- ference in the exposition of it! Verdi’s is sincere, tense, admirably contrived, undeniably affecting. Wagner’s is over- whelming. Again, to cite but a single work of Wagner’s (though it is, indeed, the supreme signal of his genius), I know of nothing in Verdi to parallel the ineffable longing of Tristan’s “Ach, 141 PHASES OF MODERN MUSIC Isolde!” or the passion of the stupendous C major introductory section of the love duo in the second act, or the anguish of Isolde’s “Nur einmal, ach! nur einmal noch!” or the divine ecstasy of the “Liebestod.” That Verdi has his unforgettable moments — moments when he utters an emotion with resistless in- tensity and effect — may be unhesita- tingly conceded. In 4 ‘Aida,” notably, there are passages superb in forceful- ness and felicity: such things as the scene of Rhadames’ trial by the priests, in the fourth act, interrupted by the agonized interjections of Amneris — the expression which Verdi has found for those sobbing ejaculations could not easily be bettered. Thrice - admirable, too, is Aida’s nostalgic lament in act three: “O patria! O patria! quanto mi costi!” But with Verdi such things are exceptional ; his habitual level of in- 142 VERDI AND WAGNER: AN INQUIRY spiration and achievement is very ap- preciably lower. With Wagner, on the contrary, vividness is of the very fibre and texture of his music; superlatively eloquent expression is as native to his genius, is, with him, as pre-eminently a matter of habit, as, with other com- posers, it is a matter of occasion. As Verdi’s range of expression is limited, and his expression itself — his expression of any particular mood or emotion — deficient in acuteness and eloquence, so his psychology is, beside Wagner’s, curiously bald and obtuse. One never finds him following the subtler nuances of a scene, its finer gradations of mood and temper, its shifting emotional timbre, as does Wag- ner continually throughout an entire score. Verdi has nothing to compare with such exquisite psychologizing as — to take an example at random — that M3 PHASES OF MODERN MUSIC crucial passage in the love scene between Siegmund and Sieglinde in the first act of “Die Walkiire,” where Sieglinde sud- denly breaks in upon Siegmund’s trans- ports, with her “O Still! lass mich der Stimme lauschen — mich diinkt, ihren Klang hort’ ich als Kind . . and the orchestra, subsiding in swift obedience to her mood, ruminates sympathetically. Verdi apprehends only the surface, the palpable, aspect of a situation; there is no modulation (in the emotive sense), no diversity of accent and emphasis. I do not mean to say merely that his expression is lacking in complexity; if that were its sole deficiency, one might very justly rejoin that Verdi aimed at breadth and totality of view rather than at close and curious analysis. My point is rather this: That he lacks, not so much complexity as variety ; not simply analytic acuteness, but pene- 144 VERDI AND WAGNER: AN INQUIRY trative insight — -variety and insight, as well as vividness, inevitableness, con- summate eloquence. Alphonse Daudet, who wrote of music with sensitiveness and acumen, some- where says of Wagner that his “imag- ination . . . saturates his work to over- flowing with all the sounds of nature. . . . The passion between Tristan and Isolde plunges into the tumult of the ocean which overwhelms it. . . . One invisible power raises the waves and the souls by a single movement . . . water, fire, the woods, the blossoming and mystic meadow, become the more powerful characters.” It is in this symbolic use of the natural world — the use of its multitudinous sounds and aspects as an ever-shifting adumbration of the dra- matic action — that Wagner stands alone among tone-painters of the concrete pictorial. Daudet overshoots the mark, *45 PHASES OF MODERN MUSIC of course, in supposing that Wagner ever exalts the external above the human world — that he ever permits us to feel that, in his philosophy, “water, fire, the woods, the blossoming and mystic meadow' ' are “the more power- ful characters." His winds and waters, his dawns and clouds and tempests, are wholly at the service of his dramatic purposes. He shows us the natural world as the august and splendid symbol, the appropriate reflection, of the emotional life of his dramas. The tornadic prelude to the third act of “ Siegfried " ; the storm that accompanies the duel between Hunding and Sieg- mund; the wonderful orchestral trans- mutation of Isolde's ardors in the earlier part of the second act of “Tristan," and the graphic little seascape at the opening of the third act, where the violins, mounting in bleak thirds, paint 146 VERDI AND WAGNER: AN INQUIRY at once the dolorously desolate mood and the pitiless expanse of empty sea — such things as these have no precise par- allel outside of Wagner. Verdi has, it is true, attempted external tone-painting (what composer has not?); but one is hardly under the necessity of ignoring such original and poetic writing as, for instance, the brief prelude to the third act of “Aida” — in which the essential mood of nocturnal quietude and mystery is beautifully achieved — in order con- scientiously to maintain that the Italian had neither the German’s imaginative sympathy with, nor his power of dramatically vivifying, the things of the natural world. Let me allege, at random, the orchestral storm with which “Otello” opens. The music is ef- fectively conceived ; it is adroitly scored ; but it wants just that final heightening which would make it veracious and 147 PHASES OF MODERN MUSIC vital — in the sense in which the “Wal- kiire ” Vorspiel and the overture to “ Der Fliegende Hollander” are veracious and vital — and it has only a theatric, not a dramatic significance. Daudet — to follow him still further — has also this most pregnant observation : “There is everything in Wagner. . . . He made use of the entire human pianoforte and the entire superhuman pianoforte.” I doubt if Daudet quite realized what a memorable thing he was saying ; but whether or not he was aware of its profounder significance, his remark is deeply and searchingly true. With his usual clarity of vision, he perceived the essential mystic in Wagner; but he failed, nevertheless, to see how com- pletely and fundamentally Wagner’s mysticism pervades and informs his art, from “Lohengrin” to “Parsifal,” and how absolutely the art is dependent 148 VERDI AND WAGNER: AN INQUIRY upon a right intuition of the mysticism for its fullest comprehension. The mat- ter is a delicate one to handle; it is so perilously easy, in writing of such things, to decline upon the merely fantastical, and the pitfalls of cant and rhetoric are an ever-present menace to the unwary. Yet I shall venture upon this, speaking as reticently as may be: Daudet’s dictum is no mere hyperbolic exaggeration: Wagner compasses not only the human and the natural worlds, but the preternatural — or, as Daudet has it, the “ superhuman ” — world : the world which we touch, and touch only, by inspiration and intuition. I mean, in plainer phrase, that his music, at its greatest, is compact of subtle spiritual revelations — that it is pervaded, in such things as the “ Lohengrin ” Vorspiel, Isolde’s “ Liebestod,” and certain parts of '‘Parsifal,” with the purest, most 149 PHASES OF MODERN MUSIC profound, and noblest mysticism that has ever found expression in music. For Wagner, with Cesar Franck, Peter Cornelius, and the mediaeval Italians, is of the few genuine musical mystics, and he is the most inspired of these. ... I suppose it is scarcely necessary to say that he is here in a different world from Verdi. One cannot conceive, without painfully wrenching the imagination, of Verdi as the author of such a thing as the “ Liebestod.” He was anything but a seer, a visionary, a dreamer of dreams. He never lifted his eyes from the level apparition of the world, nor can one readily believe that he was in the least aware that the world and its human pageant were not all; and even had he lifted his eyes, how much, one wonders, would he have seen? So we arrive at this summing up of the I So VERDI AND WAGNER: AN INQUIRY expressional scope of these two lyrico- dramatic poets: Wagner we find to have made his music, in the deepest and most widely inclusive sense, an interpretation of life — of life as emotion, reflecting the image of the external world, and sur- charged with spiritual significance. Verdi we find to be comparatively restricted in scope and vision; but even within the obvious limits of his genius, less perfect a master of purely emotional expression than Wagner, lacking his subtlety of exposition and his supreme- ly eloquent utterance. He was not a path-breaker, and he scaled no heights. He composed, in those later works which alone are the important legacy of his genius, '‘with his eye on the object,’ ’ and he wrought admirably, nobly, courageously. He has not Wag- ner’s magical felicity, his magnificent tyranny over the emotions, his lofty 11 I 5 I PHASES OF MODERN MUSIC idealism, his universal range. He is scarcely one of the supreme masters; but he is, after Wagner, the most im- pressive figure in the musico-dramatic art of the nineteenth century. “PARSIFAL” AND ITS SIG- NIFICANCE What rougher prank of ironic fortune could be imagined than that a work of art most precious to its creator — the one of all his achievements which he would have withheld from common appro- priation — should suddenly and irreclaim- ably have been delivered over to the crowd and to the casual uses of the paragraphist. It is lamentable enough when a work of complex and delicate contrivance is lightly bandied, its subtle beauty disarrayed ; but when that which has been wrought with lovely artistry is charged, besides, with a profound and grave significance, its heedless exploita- *53 PHASES OF MODERN MUSIC tion can work only perplexity and distraction. In such an estate to-day is Wagner’s “Parsifal.” Its sensational vicissitudes as an artistic property are egregiously familiar : known at first hand a brief while ago only to that incon- siderable public to whom the arts are of consequence, and by report to a few others, this affecting spiritual allegory has become the topical property of the man in the street, a profitable stalking-horse for the pamphleteer. The thing was, of course, inevitable — although the consummation was some- what needlessly abrupt. It could scarce- ly be expected that an unexampled masterpiece of musico - dramatic art should remain indefinitely defiant of popular curiosity. But if one would arrive at any sensitive apprehension of the essential greatness of Wagner’s drama, there is the peril of a fatal con- 154 “PARSIFAL” AND ITS SIGNIFICANCE fusion in the idle and uninstructed ex- egesis which has greeted the emergence of the work into public view; and the estimates even of those who are wiser in the ways of art will be found to be singularly various. For a few, “ Par- sifal” marks the summit of Wagner’s accomplishment as a lyric dramatist. Mr. Ernest Newman, one of the most acute and authoritative of Wagnerian critics, finds it “in many ways the most wonderful and impressive thing ever done in music”; while at the other end of the gamut are Mr. James Huneker, whose scorn of “Parsifal” has been uttered with exhilarating frankness, and Mr. John F. Runciman, who devotes many pages in a volume of essays to declaring an emphatic and unequivocal dislike for the master’s swan-song. Nor is this more than an appraisal of “Parsifal’s” actual artistic value. It is I 55 PHASES OF MODERN MUSIC when one seeks for a final interpretation of the matter of the work, its poetic and spiritual significance, that confusion and contradiction abound : it is a parable of renunciation, or of redemption; or it is a plea for chastity; or a glorification of sanctity, or of asceticism, or of the beauty of repentance: and, at the end, the seeker after illumination will go again to the work itself and read with steadiness and simplicity of mood, until he understands what Wagner has said, with incomparable eloquence and conviction, in his own luminous and apostolic pages. A youth, pure in heart, uninstructed in life, comes upon a holy community which is and has long been in distress. One in agony is revealed to him, and high and sacred mysteries are disclosed in his sight. But he is mute, untouched, uncomprehending. Years after, he re- “PARSIFAL” AND ITS SIGNIFICANCE turns; he has come in close and searing contact with human passion, he has touched life on its most vivid side. Again he comes into the presence of that great grief which before had left him unmoved, and the ancient and splendid mysteries whose meaning had once been veiled to him. Aroused and enlighten- ed, through a clairvoyant intuition of the community of human emotion, he could cry, now, with Anna, in “ La Citta Morta”: “Vedo, Vedo!” For now he knows, and is prepared to see the Grail in the blinding hour of its illumination. Is it possible to believe, as Mr. Runciman asks us to believe, that we have here simply a parable of re- nunciation — that “Parsifal” is a sub- limated argument for the “denial of life ” ? For all that Mr. Runciman, one of the most responsible of contem- porary critics, can find to say of Parsifal x 57 PHASES OF MODERN MUSIC as a dramatic figure is, that he is set before us merely as one who “deliberate- ly turns from the green world, with its trees and flowers, its dawns and sunsets, its winds and waters, and shuts himself up in a monkery which has a back garden, a pond, and some ducks.” The comment has an undeniable vivac- ity, and its persuasiveness is obvious; but was it quite worth setting down? Mr. Krehbiel, too, finds it possible to say, in his suggestive and scholarly analysis of “Parsifal” in the Wagnerian Drama studies, that its central idea, so far as the dramatic spectacle is concerned, is “a glorification of a conception of sanctity which grew out of a monstrous perversion of woman- hood.” “ Of course,” he hastens to add, “there is much more in ‘Parsifal’ than a celebration of the principal feature in mediaeval asceticism.” But concern- 158 “ PARSIFAL ” AND ITS SIGNIFICANCE ing “the dramatic spectacle, ” too, is there not much more to be said ? Is it seeing very far into the dramatic sub- stance of the play to find in it nothing more vital, more immediate, more im- portunate than the symbolization of a facile asceticism? Parsifal is found by Mr. Krehbiel to be endowed “with scarcely another merit than that which had become the ideal of monkish theologians, under the influence of fear- ful moral depravity and fanatical super- stition. ... In the third act, scenes are borrowed from the life of Christ, and Parsifal is made to play in them as the central figure; Kundry anoints the feet of the knight and dries them with her hair; Parsifal baptizes Kundry and absolves her from sin. These acts, and the resistance of Kundry ’s seductions in the magic garden, make up, for the greater part, the sum of the acts of a 159 PHASES OF MODERN MUSIC hero in whom the spectator wishes to see . . . some evidences of the attri- butes of the heroes of the profoundly poetical romances from which the sub- ject - matter was drawn.' ’ And Mr. George Moore voices a similar misliking when, in the brisker manner of his Ulick Dean, he accounts the sum of Parsifal's activities to be “the killing of a swan and the refusal of a kiss." All of which is, to say the least, insuf- ficient. Parsifal is, as Mr. Moore has elsewhere unconsciously suggested, a subjective hero. It is not the redemp- tion of Amfortas through the conscious compassion of a guileless simpleton that is the essential fact. The stage of the drama is in the heart of Parsifal him- self: it is his redemption, his regenera- tion that is accomplished. There is the vital lesson: that none may look upon the Grail and know it in the splendid 160 “PARSIFAL” AND ITS SIGNIFICANCE moment of its illumination until he has first become aware of the vivid reality of other lives and of the common life — until, in his brother, he has found himself. That is the awakening, the enlightenment : the realizing of our common humanity, our common des- tiny. With that intuition and knowl- edge, and not without, — we are to understand , — is regeneration attain ed . Only so (is the message) can we dis- cover our own selves; and only so may we sense divine and daemonic things. Redemption — ob j ecti ve redemption — is not, then, the key-note of this search- ing spiritual fable, as we are so common- ly told. It is Parsifal, not Amfortas, who is redeemed: he is the real ben- eficiary. It is undeniable, of course, that Wagner was obsessed by the motive of objective redemption — particularly the gracious, but spiritually invalid, ideal 161 PHASES OF MODERN MUSIC which conceives of woman’s self-sacri- ficing love as an instrument of salva- tion — the informing principle of “Der Fliegende Hollander,” “ Tannhauser,” and, in part, of “Der Ring des Nibelun- gen.” In his swan-song, the protagonist is, remarks Mr. W. J. Henderson, a figure of Christ: “he represents Him when he is anointed by Gurnemanz, when his feet are washed by the repentant Kundry, and when he baptizes her. . . . But more than all, he surely is the Redeemer when he touches Amf ortas with the holy spear and bids him ‘ Be whole, forgiven, and absolved.' ” Mr. Henderson’s interpretation, so far as it goes, is sound and just. Wagner, though, one must remember, had a singular and most disconcerting habit of transcending his own elaborately for- mulated theories, both structural and 162 “PARSIFAL” AND ITS SIGNIFICANCE ethical. So, as an idealist, he builded, time and again, far better than he knew, uttering often, like Plato’s poet, “great and wise things which he himself did not understand.” But we who see his work in an objective view are permitted to at- tempt an interpretation. As “Siegfried” could have been achieved only by a genius whose heart was swept by the sudden tides of youth, so “Parsifal” could have been achieved only by one whose heart had come to know the dreaming wisdom of the seers. That there are many who “would rather be with Cathal of the Woods” than gain the remoter para- dise is scarcely surprising ; but it is not so, as they have maintained, that in that gain would be heard no more “the earth-sweet ancient song of the blood that is in the veins of youth.” 163 PHASES OF MODERN MUSIC We hear much of the decadence of Wagner’s creative powers as evi- denced in this final legacy of his in- spiration. Recent commentators de- plore the evil days upon which the magician of Bayreuth had fallen be- fore his death, and eager scalpels have laid bare the supposed defects of his terminal score. Something, indeed, may be conceded them. It is un- deniable that in “ Parsifal” Wagner has not written with the torrential energy, the superbly prodigal invention, which went to the creation of his earlier works : he is not here, unquestionably, so compelling and forceful, so overwhelm- ing in vitality and climacteric power, as in the exuberant masterpieces of his ar- tistic prime. But never before, on the other hand, had this master of illusions shaped such haunting and subtle sym- bols of suffering and lamentation, of 164 “ PARSIFAL ” AND ITS SIGNIFICANCE sadness and terror, of pity and aspira- tion. He has written with a more flaming intensity, a more continual inspiration, in “ Tristan,” in “Gotter- dammerung,” in “ Siegfried,” in “ Meistersinger ” — in the first he is more impassioned, in the second more tragically puissant, lovelier in the third, more immediately human in the fourth. But in no other work are to be found those qualities of grave and poignant tenderness, of august beauty, of es- sential exaltation, that make the score of “ Parsifal’ ’ the great and moving thing it is. Not elsewhere in Wagner’s writing is there such a theme as that which the commentators have chosen to identify as the “ second Herzeleide motive,” which appears for the first time when Kundry, in the garden scene of the second act, tells Parsifal of his mother’s anguish after he had left her; i6 5 PHASES OF MODERN MUSIC nor has he equalled the portentous impressiveness of the chromatic pas- sages of the “ changing-scene ” in the last act; and how piercing are the phrases with which the “Good Friday” scene closes! Above all, how ineffably lovely is the benign and transfiguring music of the final scene, wherein one may discern a signal of that purification through pity and terror whereby we are put in touch with immortal things. THE END