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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, Old Scores and New Readings, by John F.
+Runciman
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: Old Scores and New Readings
+
+Author: John F. Runciman
+
+Release Date: March 15, 2005  [eBook #15369]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK OLD SCORES AND NEW READINGS***
+
+
+E-text prepared by Steven Gibbs and the Project Gutenberg Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team
+
+
+
+OLD SCORES AND NEW READINGS ...
+
+Discussions on Music & Certain Musicians
+
+by
+
+JOHN F. RUNCIMAN
+
+London at the Sign
+of the Unicorn
+VII Cecil Court
+
+MDCCCCI
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+WILLIAM BYRDE, HIS MASS
+
+OUR LAST GREAT MUSICIAN (HENRY PURCELL, 1658-95)
+
+BACH; THE "MATTHEW" PASSION AND THE "JOHN"
+
+HANDEL
+
+HAYDN AND HIS "CREATION"
+
+MOZART, HIS "DON GIOVANNI" AND THE REQUIEM
+
+"FIDELIO"
+
+SCHUBERT
+
+WEBER AND WAGNER
+
+ITALIAN OPERA, DEAD AND DYING
+
+VERDI YOUNG, AND VERDI YOUNGER
+
+"THE FLYING DUTCHMAN"
+
+"LOHENGRIN"
+
+"TRISTAN AND ISOLDA"
+
+"SIEGFRIED"
+
+"THE DUSK OF THE GODS"
+
+"PARSIFAL"
+
+BAYREUTH IN 1897
+
+A NOTE ON BRAHMS
+
+ANTON DVORÁK
+
+TSCHAIKOWSKY AND HIS "PATHETIC" SYMPHONY
+
+LAMOUREUX AND HIS ORCHESTRA
+
+
+
+
+WILLIAM BYRDE ... HIS MASS
+
+
+Many years ago, in the essay which is set second in this collection,
+I wrote (speaking of the early English composers) that "at length the
+first great wave of music culminated in the works of Tallis and
+Byrde ... Byrde is infinitely greater than Tallis, and seems worthy
+indeed to stand beside Palestrina." Generally one modifies one's
+opinions as one grows older; very often it is necessary to reverse
+them. This one on Byrde I adhere to: indeed I am nearly proud of
+having uttered it so long ago. I had then never heard the Mass in D
+minor. But in the latter part of 1899 Mr. R.R. Terry, the organist of
+Downside Abbey, and one of Byrde's latest editors, invited me to the
+opening of St. Benedict's Church, Ealing, where the Mass in D minor
+was given; and there I heard one of the most splendid pieces of music
+in the world adequately rendered under very difficult conditions. I
+use the phrase advisedly--"one of the most splendid pieces of music in
+the world." When the New Zealander twenty centuries hence reckons up
+the European masters of music, he will place Byrde not very far down
+on the list of the greatest; and he will esteem Byrde's Mass one of
+the very finest ever written. Byrde himself has rested peacefully in
+his grave for over three hundred years. One or two casual critics have
+appreciated him. Fetis, I believe, called him "the English
+Palestrina"; but I do not recall whether he meant that Byrde was as
+great as Palestrina or merely great amongst the English--whether a
+"lord amongst wits," or simply "a wit amongst lords." For the most
+part he has been left comfortably alone, and held to be--like his
+mighty successor Purcell--one of the forerunners of the "great English
+school of church composers." To have prepared the way for Jackson in
+F--that has been thought his best claim to remembrance. The notion is
+as absurd as would be the notion (if anyone were foolish enough to
+advance it) that Palestrina is mainly to be remembered as having
+prepared the way for Perosi. Byrde prepared the way for Purcell, it is
+true; but even that exceeding glory pales before the greater glory of
+having written the Cantiones Sacræ and the D minor Mass. In its way
+the D minor Mass is as noble and complete an achievement as the St.
+Matthew Passion or the "Messiah," the Choral symphony of Beethoven or
+the G minor symphony of Mozart, "Tristan" or the "Nibelung's Ring." It
+is splendidly planned; it is perfectly beautiful; and from the first
+page to the last it is charged with a grave, sweet, lovely emotion.
+
+The reason why Byrde has not until lately won the homage he deserves
+is simply this: that the musical doctors who have hitherto judged him
+have judged him in the light of the eighteenth-century contrapuntal
+music, and have applied to him in all seriousness Artemus Ward's joke
+about Chaucer--"he couldn't spell." The plain harmonic progressions
+of the later men could be understood by the doctors: they could not
+understand the freer style of harmony which prevailed before the
+strict school came into existence. Artemus Ward, taking up Chaucer,
+professed amazement to find spelling that would not be tolerated in an
+elementary school; the learned doctors, taking up Byrde, found he had
+disregarded all the rules--rules, be it remembered, formulated after
+Byrde's time, just as our modern rules of spelling were made after
+Chaucer's time; and as Artemus Ward jocularly condemned Chaucer, and
+showed his wit in the joke, so the doctors seriously condemned Byrde,
+and showed their stupidity in their unconscious joke. They could
+understand one side of Tallis. His motet in forty parts, for instance:
+they knew the difficulties of writing such a thing, and they could see
+the ingenuity he showed in his various ways of getting round the
+difficulties. They could not see the really fine points of the
+forty-part motet: the broad scheme of the whole thing, and the almost
+Handelian way of massing the various choirs so as to heap climax on
+climax until a perfectly satisfying finish was reached. Still, there
+was something for them to see in Tallis; whereas in Byrde there was
+nothing for them to see that they had eyes to see, or to hear that
+they had ears to hear. They could see that he either wrote consecutive
+fifths and octaves, or dodged them in a way opposed to all the rules,
+that he wrote false relations with the most outrageous recklessness,
+that his melodies were irregular and not measured out by the bar; but
+they could not feel, could not be expected to feel, the marvellous
+beauty of the results he got by his dodges, the marvellous
+expressiveness of his music. These old doctors may be forgiven, and,
+being long dead, they care very little whether they are forgiven or
+not. But the modern men who parrot-like echo their verdicts cannot and
+should not be forgiven. We know now that the stiff contrapuntal school
+marked a stage in development of music which it was necessary that
+music should go through. The modern men who care nothing for
+rules--for instance Wagner and Tschaikowsky--could not have come
+immediately after Byrde; even Beethoven could not have come
+immediately after Byrde and Sweelinck and Palestrina, all of whom
+thought nothing of the rules that had not been definitely stated in
+their time. Before Beethoven--and after Beethoven, Wagner and all the
+moderns--could come, music had to go through the stiff scientific
+stage; a hundred thousand things that had been done instinctively by
+the early men had to be reduced to rule; a science as well as an art
+of music had to be built up. It was built up, and in the process of
+building up noble works of art were achieved. After it was built up
+and men had got, so to say, a grip of music and no longer merely
+groped, Beethoven and Wagner went back to the freedom and
+indifference to rule of the first composers; and the mere fact of
+their having done so should show us that the rules were nothing in
+themselves, nothing, that is, save temporary guide-posts or landmarks
+which the contrapuntal men set up for their own private use while they
+were exploring the unknown fields of music. We should know, though
+many of us do not, that it is simply stupid to pass adverse judgment
+on the early composers who did not use, and because they did not use,
+these guide-posts, which had not then been set up, though one by one
+they were being set up. For a very short time the rules of
+counterpoint were looked upon as eternal and immutable. During that
+period the early men were human-naturally looked upon as barbarians.
+But that period is long past. We know the laws of counterpoint to be
+not eternal, not immutable; but on the contrary to have been
+short-lived convention that is now altogether disregarded. So it is
+time to look at the early music through our own, and not through the
+eighteenth-century doctors' eyes; and when we do that we find the
+early music to be as beautiful as any ever written, as expressive, and
+quite as well constructed. There are, as I have said, people who
+to-day prefer Mr. Jackson in F and his friends to Byrde. What, I
+wonder, would be said if a literary man preferred, say, some
+eighteenth-century poetaster to Chaucer because the poetaster in his
+verse observed rules which Chaucer never dreamed of, because, to drag
+in Artemus Ward once again, the poetaster's spelling conformed more
+nearly to ours than Chaucer's!
+
+The Mass is indeed noble and stately, but it is miraculously
+expressive as well. Its expressiveness is the thing that strikes one
+more forcibly every time one hears it. At first one feels chiefly its
+old-world freshness--not the picturesque spring freshness of Purcell
+and Handel, but a freshness that is sweet and grave and cool, coming
+out of the Elizabethan days when life, at its fastest, went
+deliberately, and was lived in many-gabled houses with trees and
+gardens, or in great palaces with pleasant courtyards, and the Thames
+ran unpolluted to the sea, and the sun shone daily even in London, and
+all things were fair and clean. It is old-world music, yet it stands
+nearer to us than most of the music written in and immediately after
+Handel's period, the period of dry formalism and mere arithmetic.
+There is not a sign of the formal melodic outlines which we recognise
+at once in any piece out of the contrapuntal time, not an indication
+that the Academic, "classical," unpoetic, essay-writing eighteenth
+century was coming. The formal outlines had not been invented, for
+rules and themes that would work without breaking the rules were
+little thought of. Byrde evades the rules in the frankest manner: in
+this Mass alone there are scores of evasions that would have been
+inevitably condemned a century afterwards, and might even be
+condemned by the contrapuntists of to-day. The eighteenth-century
+doctors who edited Byrde early in this century did not in the least
+understand why he wrote as he did, and doubtless would have put him
+right if they had thought of having the work sung instead of simply
+having it printed as an antiquarian curiosity. The music does not
+suggest the eighteenth century with its jangling harpsichords, its
+narrow, dirty streets, its artificiality, its brilliant candle-lighted
+rooms where the wits and great ladies assembled and talked more or
+less naughtily. There is indeed a strange, pathetic charm in the
+eighteenth century to which no one can be indifferent: it is a dead
+century, with the dust upon it, and yet a faint lingering aroma as of
+dead rose petals. But the old-world atmosphere of Byrde's music is, at
+least to me, something finer than that: it is the atmosphere of a
+world which still lives: it is remote from us and yet very near: for
+the odour of dead rose petals and dust you have a calm cool air, and a
+sense of fragrant climbing flowers and of the shade of full foliaged
+trees. All is sane, clean, fresh: one feels that the sun must always
+have shone in those days. This quality, however, it shares with a
+great deal of the music of the "spacious days" of Elizabeth. But of
+its expressiveness there is not too much to be found in the music of
+other musicians than Byrde in Byrde's day. He towered high above all
+the composers who had been before him; he stands higher than any
+other English musician who has lived since, with the exception of
+Purcell. It is foolish to think of comparing his genius with the
+genius of Palestrina; but the two men will also be reckoned close
+together by those who know this Mass and the Cantiones Sacræ. They
+were both consummate masters of the technique of their art; they both
+had a fund of deep and original emotion; they both knew how to express
+it through their music. I have not space to mention all the examples I
+could wish. But every reader of this article may be strongly
+recommended at once to play, even on the piano, the sublime passage
+beginning at the words "Qui propter nos homines," noting more
+especially the magnificent effect of the swelling mass of sound
+dissolving in a cadence at the "Crucifixus." Another passage, equal to
+any ever written, begins at "Et unam Sanctam Catholicam." There is a
+curious energy in the repetition of "Et Apostolicam Ecclesiam," and
+then a wistful sweetness and tenderness at "Confiteor unum baptisma."
+Again, the whole of the "Agnus" is divine, the repeated "miserere
+nobis," and the passage beginning at the "Dona nobis pacem,"
+possessing that sweetness, tenderness and wonderful calm. But there is
+not a number that does not contain passages which one must rank
+amongst the greatest things in the world; and it must be borne in mind
+that these passages are not detached, nor in fact detachable, but
+integral, essential parts of a fine architectural scheme.
+
+
+
+
+OUR LAST GREAT MUSICIAN (HENRY PURCELL, 1658-95)
+
+
+I.
+
+Purcell is too commonly written of as "the founder of the English
+school" of music. Now, far be it from me to depreciate the works of
+the composers who are supposed to form the "English school." I would
+not sneer at the strains which have lulled to quiet slumbers so many
+generations of churchgoers. But everyone who knows and loves Purcell
+must enter a most emphatic protest against that great composer being
+held responsible, if ever so remotely, for the doings of the "English
+school." Jackson (in F), Boyce and the rest owed nothing to Purcell;
+the credit of having founded _them_ must go elsewhere, and may beg a
+long time, I am much afraid, in the land of the shades before any
+composer will be found willing to take it. Purcell was not the founder
+but the splendid close of a school, and that school one of the very
+greatest the world has seen. And to-day, when he is persistently
+libelled, not more in blame than in the praise which is given him, it
+seems worth while making a first faint attempt to break through the
+net of tradition that has been woven and is daily being woven closer
+around him, to see him as he stands in such small records as may be
+relied upon and not as we would fain have him be, to understand his
+relation to his predecessors and learn his position in musical
+history, to hear his music without prejudice and distinguish its
+individual qualities. This is a hard task, and one which I can only
+seek to achieve here in the roughest and barest manner; yet any manner
+at all is surely much better than letting the old fictions go
+unreproved, while our greatest musician drifts into the twilight past,
+misunderstood, unloved, unremembered, save when an Abbey wants a new
+case for its organ, an organ on which Purcell never played, or a
+self-styled Purcell authority wishes to set up a sort of claim of part
+or whole proprietorship in him.
+
+
+II.
+
+Hardly more is known of Purcell than of Shakespeare. There is no
+adequate biography. Hawkins and Burney (who is oftenest Hawkins at
+second-hand) are alike rash, random, and untrustworthy, depending much
+upon the anecdotage of old men, who were no more to be believed than
+the ancient bandsmen of the present day who tell you how Mendelssohn
+or Wagner flattered them or accepted hints from them. Cummings' life
+is scarcely even a sketch; at most it is a thumbnail sketch. Only
+ninety-five pages deal with Purcell, and of these at least ninety-four
+are defaced by maudlin sentimentality, or unhappy attempts at
+criticism (see the remarks on the Cecilia Ode) or laughable sequences
+of disconnected incongruities--as, for instance, when Mr. Cummings
+remarks that "Queen Mary died of small-pox, and the memory of her
+goodness was felt so universally," etc. Born in 1658, Purcell lived in
+Pepys' London, and died in 1095, having written complimentary odes to
+three kings--Charles the Second, James the Second, and William the
+Third. Besides these complimentary odes, he wrote piles of
+instrumental music, a fair heap of anthems, and songs and interludes
+and overtures for some forty odd plays. This is nearly the sum of our
+knowledge. His outward life seems to have been uneventful enough. He
+probably lived the common life of the day--the day being, as I have
+said, Pepys' day. Mr. Cummings has tried to show him as a seventeenth
+century Mendelssohn--conventionally idealised--and he quotes the
+testimony of some "distinguished divine," chaplain to a nobleman, as
+though we did not know too well why noblemen kept chaplains in those
+days to regard their testimony as worth more than other men's. The
+truth is, that if Purcell had lived differently from his neighbours he
+would have been called a Puritan. On the other hand, we must remember
+that he composed so much in his short life that his dissipations must
+have made a poor show beside those of many of his great
+contemporaries--those of Dryden, for instance, who used to hide from
+his duns in Purcell's private room in the clock-tower of St. James's
+Palace. I picture him as a sturdy, beef-eating Englishman, a puissant,
+masterful, as well as lovable personality, a born king of men,
+ambitious of greatness, determined, as Tudway says, to exceed every
+one of his time, less majestic than Handel, perhaps, but full of
+vigour and unshakable faith in his genius. His was an age when genius
+inspired confidence both in others and in its possessor, not, as now,
+suspicion in both; and Purcell was believed in from the first by many,
+and later, by all--even by Dryden, who began by flattering Monsieur
+Grabut, and ended, as was his wont, by crossing to the winning side.
+And Purcell is no more to be pitied for his sad life than to be
+praised as a conventionally idealised Mendelssohn. His life was brief,
+but not tragic. He never lacked his bread as Mozart lacked his; he was
+not, like Beethoven, tormented by deafness and tremblings for the
+immediate future; he had no powerful foes to fight, for he did not bid
+for a great position in the world like Handel. Nor was he a romantic
+consumptive like Chopin, with a bad cough, a fastidious regard for
+beauty, and a flow of anaemic melody. He was divinely gifted with a
+greater richness of invention than was given to any other composers
+excepting two, Bach and Mozart; and death would not take his gifts as
+an excuse when he was thirty-seven. Hence our Mr. Cummings has
+droppings of lukewarm tears; hence, generally, compassion for his
+comparatively short life has ousted admiration for his mighty works
+from the minds of those who are readier at all times to indulge in the
+luxury of weeping than to feel the thrill of joy in a life greatly
+lived. Purcell might have achieved more magnificent work, but that is
+a bad reason for forgetting the magnificence of the work he did
+achieve. But I myself am forgetting that the greatness of his music is
+not admitted, and that the shortness of his life is merely urged as an
+excuse for not finding it admirable. And remembering this, I assert
+that Purcell's life was a great and glorious one, and that now his
+place is with the high gods whom we adore, the lords and givers of
+light.
+
+
+III.
+
+Before Purcell's position in musical history can be ascertained and
+fixed, it is absolutely necessary to make some survey of the rise of
+the school of which he was the close.
+
+In our unmusical England of to-day it is as hard to believe in an
+England where music was perhaps the dominant passion of the people as
+it is to understand how this should have been forgotten in a more
+musical age than ours. Until the time of Handel's arrival in this
+country there was no book printed which did not show unmistakably that
+its writer loved music. It is a fact (as the learned can vouch) that
+Erasmus considered the English the most given up to music of all the
+peoples of Europe; and how far these were surpassed by the English is
+further shown by the fact that English musicians were as common in
+continental towns in those days as foreign musicians are in England
+nowadays. I refrain from quoting Peacham, North, Anthony Wood, Pepys,
+and the rest of the much over-quoted; but I wish to lay stress on the
+fact that here music was widespread and highly cultivated, just as it
+was in Germany in the eighteenth century. Moreover, an essential
+factor in the development of the German school was not wanting in
+England. Each German prince had his Capellmeister; and English nobles
+and gentlemen, wealthier than German princes, differing from them only
+in not being permitted to assume a pretentious title, had each his
+Musick-master. I believe I could get together a long list of musicians
+who were thus kept. It will be remembered that when Handel came to
+England he quickly entered the service of the Duke of Chandos. The
+royal court always had a number of musicians employed in the making or
+the performing of music. Oliver Cromwell retained them and paid them;
+Charles the Second added to them, and in many cases did not pay them
+at all, so that at least one is known to have died of starvation, and
+the others were everlastingly clamouring for arrears of salary. It was
+the business of these men (in the intervals of asking for their
+salaries) to produce music for use in the church and in the house or
+palace; that for church use being of course nearly entirely
+vocal--masses or anthems; that for house use, vocal and
+instrumental--madrigals and fancies (_i.e._ fantasias). As generation
+succeeded generation, a certain body of technique was built up and a
+mode of expression found; and at length the first great wave of music
+culminated in the works of Tallis and Byrde. Their technique and mode
+of expression I shall say something about presently; and all the
+criticism I have to pass on them is that Byrde is infinitely greater
+than Tallis, and seems worthy indeed to stand beside Palestrina and
+Sweelinck. Certainly anyone who wishes to have a true notion of the
+music of this period should obtain (if he can) copies of the D minor
+five-part mass, and the Cantiones Sacræ, and carefully study such
+numbers as the "Agnus Dei" of the former and the profound "Tristitia
+et anxietas" in the latter.
+
+The learned branch of the English school reached its climax. Meantime
+another branch, not unlearned, but caring less for scholastic
+perfection than for perfect expression of poetic sentiment, was fast
+growing. The history of the masque is a stale matter, so I will merely
+mention that Campion, and many another with, before, and after him,
+engaged during a great part of their lives in what can only be called
+the manufacture of these entertainments. A masque was simply a
+gorgeous show of secular ritual, of colour and of music--a kind of
+Drury Lane melodrama in fact, but as far removed from Drury Lane as
+this age is from that in the widespread faculty of appreciating
+beauty. The music consisted of tunes of a popular outline and
+sentiment, but they were dragged into the province of art by the
+incapacity of those who wrote or adapted them to touch anything
+without leaving it lovelier than when they lighted on it. Pages might
+be, and I daresay some day will be, written about Dr. Campion's
+melody, its beauty and power, the unique sense of rhythmic subtleties
+which it shows, and withal its curiously English quality. But one
+important thing we must observe: it is wholly secular melody. Even
+when written in the ecclesiastical modes, it has no, or the very
+slightest, ecclesiastical tinge. It is folk-melody with its face
+washed and hair combed; it bears the same relation to English
+folk-melody as a chorale from the "Matthew" Passion bears to its
+original. Another important point is this: whereas the church
+composers took a few Latin sentences and made no endeavour to treat
+them so as to make sense in the singing, but made the words wait upon
+the musical phrases, in Dr. Campion we see the first clear wish to
+weld music and poem into one flawless whole. To an extent he
+succeeded, but full success did not come till several generations had
+first tried, tried and failed. Campion properly belongs to the
+sixteenth century, and Harry Lawes, born twenty-five years before
+Campion died, as properly belongs to the seventeenth century. In his
+songs we find even more marked the determination that words and music
+shall go hand in hand--that the words shall no longer be dragged at
+the cart-tail of the melody, so to say. In fact, a main objection
+against Lawes--and a true one in many instances--is that he sacrificed
+the melody rather than the meaning of the poem. This is significant.
+The Puritans are held to have damaged church music less by burning the
+choir-books and pawning the organ-pipes than by insisting (as we may
+say) on One word one note. As a matter of fact, this was not
+exclusively a plank in the political platform of the Puritans. The
+Loyalist Campion, the Loyalist Lawes, and many another Loyalist
+insisted on it. Even when they did not write a note to each word, they
+took care not to have long roulades (divisions) on unimportant words,
+but to derive the accent of the music from that of the poem. This
+showed mainly two tendencies: first, one towards expression of poetic
+feeling and towards definiteness of that expression, the other towards
+the entirely new technique which was to supersede the contrapuntal
+technique of Byrde and Palestrina. In making a mass or an anthem or
+secular composition, the practice of these old masters was to start
+with a fragment of church or secular melody which we will call A;
+after (say) the trebles had sung it or a portion of it, the altos took
+it up and the trebles went on to a new phrase B, which dovetailed with
+A. Then the tenors took up A, the altos went on to B, the trebles went
+on to a new phrase C, until ultimately, if we lettered each
+successive phrase that appeared, we should get clear away from the
+beginning of the alphabet to X, Y, and Z. This, of course, is a crude
+and stiff way of describing the process of weaving and interweaving by
+which the old music was spun, for often the phrase A would come up
+again and again in one section of a composition and sometimes
+throughout the whole, and strict canon was comparatively rare in music
+which was not called by that name; but the description will serve.
+This technique proved admirable for vocal polyphony--how admirable we
+have all the Flemish and Italian and English contrapuntal music to
+show. But it was no longer available when music was wanted for the
+single voice, unless that voice was treated as one of several real
+parts, the others being placed in the accompaniment. A new technique
+was therefore wanted. For that new technique the new composers went
+back to the oldest technique of all. The old minstrels used music as a
+means of giving accent and force to their poems; and now, as a means
+of spinning a web of tone which should not only be beautiful, but also
+give utterance to the feeling of the poem, composers went back to the
+method of the minstrels. They disregarded rhythm more and more (as may
+be seen if you compare Campion with Lawes), and sought only to make
+the notes follow the accent of the poetry, thus converting music into
+conventionally idealised speech or declamation. Lawes carried this
+method as far as ever it has been, and probably can be, carried. When
+Milton said,
+
+    "Harry, whose tuneful and well-measured notes
+    First taught our English music how to span
+    Words with just note and accent,"
+
+he did not mean that Lawes was the first to bar his music, for music
+had been barred long before Lawes. He meant that Lawes did not use the
+poem as an excuse for a melody, but the melody as a means of
+effectively declaiming the poet's verse. The poet (naturally) liked
+this--hence Milton's compliments. It should be noted that many of the
+musicians of this time were poets--of a sort--themselves, and wished
+to make the most of their verses; so that it would be a mistake to
+regard declamation as something forced by the poet, backed by popular
+opinion, upon the musician. With Lawes, then, what we may call the
+declamatory branch of the English school culminated. Except in his
+avowedly declamatory passages, Purcell did not spin his web precisely
+thus; but we shall presently see that his method was derived from the
+declamatory method. Much remained to be done first. Lawes got rid of
+the old scholasticism, now effete. But he never seemed quite sure that
+his expression would come off. It is hard at this day to listen to his
+music as Milton must have listened to it; but having done my best, I
+am compelled to own that I find some of his songs without meaning or
+comeliness, and must assume either that our ancestors of this period
+had a sense which has been lost, or that the music played a less
+important part compared with the poem than has been generally
+supposed. Lawes lost rhythm, both as an element in beauty and a factor
+in expression. Moreover, his harmonic resources were sadly limited,
+for the old device of letting crossing parts clash in sweet discords
+that resolved into as sweet or sweeter concords was denied him. What
+would be called nowadays the new harmony, the new rhythm and the new
+forms were developed during the Civil War and the Puritan reign. The
+Puritans, loving music but detesting it in their churches, forced it
+into purely secular channels; and we cannot say the result was bad,
+for the result was Purcell. John Jenkins and a host of smaller men
+developed instrumental music, and, though the forms they used were
+thrown aside when Charles II. arrived, the power of handling the
+instruments remained as a legacy to Charles's men. Charles drove the
+secular movement faster ahead by banning the old ecclesiastical music
+(which, it appears, gave him "the blues"), and by compelling his young
+composers to write livelier strains for the church, that is, church
+music which was in reality nothing but secular music. He sent Pelham
+Humphries to Paris, and when Humphries came back "an absolute
+Monsieur" (who does not remember that ever-green entry in the Diary?)
+he brought with him all that could possibly have been learnt from
+Lulli. He died at twenty-seven, having been Purcell's master; and
+though Purcell's imagination was richer, deeper, more strenuous in the
+ebb and flow of its tides, one might fancy that the two men had but
+one spirit, which went on growing and fetching forth the fruits of the
+spirit, while young Humphries' body decayed by the side of his younger
+wife's in the Thames-sodden vaults of Westminster Abbey.
+
+
+IV.
+
+A complete list of Purcell's compositions appears somewhat formidable
+at a first glance, but when one comes to examine it carefully the
+solidity seems somewhat to melt out of it. The long string of church
+pieces is made up of anthems, many of them far from long. The forty
+odd "operas" are not operas at all, but sets of incidental pieces and
+songs for plays, and some of the sets are very short. Thus Dryden
+talks of Purcell setting "my three songs," and there are only half a
+dozen "curtain-tunes," _i.e._ entr'actes. Many of the harpsichord
+pieces are of tiny proportions. The sonatas of three and four parts
+are no larger than Mozart's piano sonatas. Still, taking into account
+the noble quality that is constantly maintained, we must admit that
+Purcell used astonishingly the short time he was given. Much of his
+music is lost; more of it lies in manuscript at the British Museum and
+elsewhere. Some of it was issued last century, some early in this.
+Four expensive volumes have been wretchedly edited and issued by the
+Purcell Society, and those amongst us who live to the age of
+Methuselah will probably see all the accessible works printed by this
+body. Some half century ago Messrs. Novello published an edition of
+the church music, stupidly edited by the stupidest editor who ever
+laid clumsy fingers on a masterpiece. A shameful edition of the "King
+Arthur" music was prepared for the Birmingham Festival of 1897 by Mr.
+J.A. Fuller-Maitland, musical critic of "The Times." A publisher
+far-sighted and generous enough to issue a trustworthy edition of all
+Purcell's music at a moderate price has yet to be found.
+
+Purcell's list is not long, but it is superb. Yet he opened out no new
+paths, he made no leap aside from the paths of his predecessors, as
+Gluck did in the eighteenth century and Wagner in the nineteenth. He
+was one of their school; he went on in the direction they had led; but
+the distance he travelled was enormous. Humphries, possibly Captain
+Cook, even Christopher Gibbons, helped to open out the new way in
+church music; Lawes, Matthew Lock, and Banister were before him at the
+theatres; Lock and Dr. Blow had written odes before he was weaned; the
+form and plan of his sonatas came certainly from Bassani, in all
+likelihood from Corelli also; from John Jenkins and the other writers
+of fancies he got something of his workmanship and art of weaving many
+melodies into a coherent whole, and a knowledge of Lulli would help
+him to attain terseness, and save him from that drifting which is the
+weak point of the old English instrumental writers; he was acquainted
+with the music of Carissimi, a master of choral effect. In a word, he
+owed much to his predecessors, even as Bach, Haydn, Mozart, and
+Beethoven owed to their predecessors; and he did as they did--won his
+greatness by using to fine ends the means he found, rather than by
+inventing the means, though, like them, some means he did invent.
+
+Like his predecessors Purcell hung between the playhouse, the church,
+and the court; but unlike most of them he had only one style, which
+had to serve in one place as in another. I have already shown the
+growth of the secular spirit in music. In Purcell that spirit reached
+its height. His music is always secular, always purely pagan. I do not
+mean that it is inappropriate in the church--for nothing more
+appropriate was ever written--nor that Purcell was insincere, as our
+modern church composers are insincere, without knowing it. I do mean
+that of genuine religious emotion, of the sustained ecstasy of Byrde
+and Palestrina, it shows no trace. I should not like to have to define
+the religious beliefs of any man in Charles II.'s court, but it would
+seem that Purcell was religious in his way. He accepted the God of
+the church as the savage accepts the God of his fathers; he wrote his
+best music with a firm conviction that it would please his God. But
+his God was an entity placed afar off, unapproachable; and of entering
+into communion with Him through the medium of music Purcell had no
+notion. The ecstatic note I take to be the true note of religious art;
+and in lacking and in having no sense of it Purcell stands close to
+the early religious painters and monk-writers, the carvers of twelfth
+century woodwork, and the builders of Gothic cathedrals. He thinks of
+externals and never dreams of looking for "inward light"; and the
+proof of this is that he seems never consciously to endeavour to
+express a mood, but strenuously seeks to depict images called up by
+the words he sets. With no intention of being flippant, but in all
+earnestness, I declare it is my belief that if Purcell had ever set
+the "Agnus Dei" (and I don't remember that he did) he would have drawn
+a frisky lamb and tried to paint its snow-white fleece; and this not
+because he lacked reverence, but because of his absolute religious
+naïveté, and because this drawing and painting of outside objects (so
+to speak) in music was his one mode of expression. It should be
+clearly understood that word-painting is not descriptive music.
+Descriptive music suggests to the ear, word-painting to the eye. But
+the two merge in one another. What we call a higher note is so called
+because sounds produced by the mere rapid vibrations make every
+being, without exception, who has a musical ear, think of height, just
+as a lower note makes us all think of depth. Hence a series of notes
+forming an arch on paper may, and does, suggest an arch to one's
+imagination through the ear. It is perhaps a dodge, but Handel used it
+extensively--for instance, in such choruses as "All we like sheep,"
+"When his loud voice" ("Jephtha"), nearly every choral number of
+"Israel in Egypt," and some of the airs. Bach used it too, and we find
+it--the rainbow theme in "Das Rheingold" is an example--in Wagner. But
+with these composers "word-painting," as it is called, seems always to
+be used for a special effect; whereas it is the very essence of
+Purcell's music. He has been reproved for it by the eminent Hullah,
+who prettily alludes to it as a "defect" from which other music
+composed at the time suffers; but the truth is, you might as well call
+rhyme a "defect" of the couplet or the absence of rhyme a "defect" of
+blank verse. It is an integral part of the music, as inseparable as
+sound from tone, as atoms from the element they constitute. But the
+question, why did Purcell write thus, and not as Mozart and Beethoven,
+brings me to the point at which I must show the precise relationship
+in which Purcell stood to his musical ancestors, and how in writing as
+he did he was merely carrying on and developing their technique.
+
+For we must not forget that the whole problem for the seventeenth
+century was one of technique. The difficulty was to spin a tone-web
+which should be at once beautiful, expressive, and modern--modern
+above all things, in some sort of touch with the common feeling of the
+time. I have told how the earlier composers spun their web, and how
+Lawes attained to loveliness of a special kind by pure declamation. In
+later times there was an immense common fund of common phrases, any
+one of which only needed modification by a composer to enable him to
+express anything he pleased. But Purcell came betwixt the old time and
+the new, and had to build up a technique which was not wholly his own,
+by following with swift steps and indefatigable energy on lines
+indicated even while Lawes was alive. Those lines were, of course, in
+the direction of word-painting, and I must admit that the first
+word-painting seems very silly to nineteenth century ears and
+eyes--eyes not less than ears. To the work of the early men Purcell's
+stands in just the same relation as Bach's declamation stands to
+Lawes'. Lawes declaims with a single eye on making clear the points of
+the poem: the voice rises or falls, lingers on a note or hastens away,
+to that one end. Bach also declaims--indeed his music is entirely
+based on declamation,--but as one who wishes to communicate an emotion
+and regards the attainment of beauty as being quite as important as
+expression. With him the voice rises or falls as a man's voice does
+when he experiences keen sensation; but the wavy line of the melody as
+it goes along and up and down the stave is treated conventionally and
+changed into a lovely pattern for the ear's delight; and as there can
+be no regular pattern without regular rhythm, rhythm is a vital
+element in Bach's music. So with Purcell, with a difference. The early
+"imitative" men had sought chiefly for dainty conceits. Pepys was the
+noted composer of "Beauty, Retire" and his joy when he went to church,
+"where fine music on the word trumpet" will be remembered. He
+doubtless liked the clatter of it, and liked the clatter the more for
+occurring on that word, and probably he was not very curious as to
+whether it was really beautiful or not. But Purcell could not write an
+unlovely thing. His music on the word trumpet would be beautiful (it
+is in "Bonduca"); and if (as he did) he sent the bass plunging
+headlong from the top to the bottom of a scale to illustrate "they
+that go down to the sea in ships," that headlong plunge would be
+beautiful too--so beautiful as to be heard with as great pleasure by
+those who know what the words are about as by those who don't. Like
+Bach, Purcell depended much on rhythm for the effect of his pattern;
+unlike Bach, his patterns have a strangely picturesque quality;
+through the ear they suggest the forms of leaf and blossom, the
+trailing tendril,--suggest them only, and dimly, vaguely,--yet, one
+feels, with exquisite fidelity. Thus Purcell, following those who, in
+sending the voice part along the line, pressed it up at the word
+"high" and down at "low," and thus got an irregularly wavy line of
+tone or melody, solved the problem of spinning his continuous web of
+sound; and the fact that his web is beautiful and possesses this
+peculiar picturesqueness is his justification for solving the problem
+in this way. After all, his way was the way of early designers, who
+filled their circles, squares, and triangles with the forms of leaf
+and flower. And just as those forms were afterwards conventionalised
+and used by thousands who probably had no vaguest notion of their
+origin, so many of Purcell's phrases became ossified and fell into the
+common stock of phrases which form the language of music. It is
+interesting to note that abroad Pasquini and Kuhlau went to work very
+much in Purcell's fashion, and added to that same stock from which
+Handel and Bach and every subsequent composer drew, each adding
+something of his own.
+
+It was not by accident that Purcell, with this astonishing fertility
+of picturesque phrases, should also have written so much, and such
+vividly coloured picturesque pieces--pieces, I mean, descriptive of
+the picturesque. Of course, to write an imitative phrase is quite
+another matter from writing a successful piece of descriptive music.
+But in Purcell the same faculty enabled him to do both. No poet of
+that time seems to have been enamoured of hedgerows and flowers and
+fields, nor can I say with certitude that Purcell was. Yet in
+imagination at least he loves to dwell amongst them; and not the
+country alone, the thought of the sea also, stirs him deeply. There
+need only be some mention of sunshine or rain among the leaves, green
+trees, or wind-swept grass, the yellow sea-beach or the vast
+sea-depths, and his imagination flames and flares. His best music was
+written when he was appealed to throughout a long work--as "The
+Tempest"--in this manner. Hence, it seems to me, that quality which
+his music, above any other music in the world, possesses: a peculiar
+sweetness, not a boudoir sweetness like Chopin's sweetness, nor a
+sweetness corrected, like Chopin's, by a subtle strain of poisonous
+acid or sub-acid quality, but the sweet and wholesome cleanliness of
+the open air and fields, the freshness of sun showers and cool morning
+winds. I am not exaggerating the importance of this element in his
+music. It is perpetually present, so that at last one comes to think,
+as I have been compelled to think this long time, that Purcell wrote
+nothing but descriptive music all his life. Of course it may be that
+the special formation of his melodies misleads one sometimes, and that
+Purcell in inventing them often did not dream of depicting natural
+objects. But, remembering the gusto with which he sets descriptive
+words, using these phrases consciously with a picturesque purpose, it
+is hard to accept this view. In all likelihood he was constituted
+similarly to Weber, who, his son asserts, curiously converted the
+lines and colours of trees and winding roads and all objects of nature
+into thematic material (there is an anecdote--apparently, for a
+wonder, a true one--that shows he took the idea of a march from a heap
+of chairs stacked upside down in a beer-garden during a shower of
+rain). But Purcell is infinitely simpler, less fevered, than Weber.
+Sometimes his melodies have the long-drawn, frail delicacy, the
+splendidly ordered irregularity of a trailing creeper, and something
+of its endless variety of leaf clustering round a central stem. But
+there is an entire absence of tropical luxuriance. A grave simplicity
+prevails, and we find no jewellery; showing Purcell to have been a
+supreme artist.
+
+
+V.
+
+So far I have spoken of his music generally, and now I come to deal
+(briefly, for my space is far spent) with the orchestral, choral, and
+chamber music and songs; and first with the choral music. I begin to
+fear that by insisting so strongly on the distinctive sweetness of
+Purcell's melody, I may have given a partially or totally wrong
+impression. Let me say at once, therefore, that delicate as he often
+was, and sweet as he was more often, although he could write melodies
+which are mere iridescent filaments of tone, he never became flabby
+or other than crisp, and could, and did, write themes as flexible,
+sinewy, unbreakable as perfectly tempered steel bands. And these
+themes he could lay together and weld into choruses of gigantic
+strength. The subject and counter-subject of "Thou art the King of
+Glory" (in the "Te Deum" in D), the theme of "Let all rehearse," and
+the ground bass of the final chorus (both in "Dioclesian"), the
+subjects of many of the fugues of the anthems, are as energetic as
+anything written by Handel, Bach or Mozart. And as for the choruses he
+makes of them, Handel's are perhaps loftier and larger structures, and
+Bach succeeds in getting effects which Purcell never gets, for the
+simple enough reason that Purcell, coming a generation before Bach,
+never tried or thought of trying to get them. But within his limits he
+achieves results that can only be described as stupendous. For
+instance, the chorus I have just mentioned--"Let all rehearse"--makes
+one think of Handel, because Handel obviously thought of it when he
+wrote "Fixed in His everlasting seat," and though Handel works out the
+idea to greater length, can we say that he gets a proportionately
+greater effect? I have not the faintest wish to elevate Purcell at
+Handel's expense, for Handel is to me, as to all men, one of the gods
+of music; but Purcell also is one of the gods, and I must insist that
+in this particular chorus he equalled Handel with smaller means and
+within narrower limits. It is not always so, for Handel is king of
+writers for the chorus, as Purcell is king of those who paint in
+music; but though Handel wrote more great choruses, his debt to
+Purcell is enormous. His way of hurling great masses of choral tone at
+his hearers is derived from Purcell; and so is the rhetorical plan of
+many of his choruses. But in Purcell, despite his sheer strength, we
+never fail to get the characteristic Purcellian touch, the little
+unexpected inflexion, or bit of coloured harmony that reminds that
+this is the music of the open air, not of the study, that does more
+than this, that actually floods you in a moment with a sense of the
+spacious blue heavens with light clouds flying. For instance, one gets
+it in the great "Te Deum" in the first section; again at "To thee,
+cherubim," where the first and second trebles run down in liquid
+thirds with magical effect; once more at the fourteenth bar of "Thou
+art the King of Glory," where he uses the old favourite device of
+following up the flattened leading note of the dominant key in one
+part by the sharp leading note in another part--a device used with
+even more exquisite result in the chorus of "Full fathom five."
+Purcell is in many ways like Mozart, and in none more than in these
+incessantly distinctive touches, though in character the touches are
+as the poles apart. In Mozart, especially when he veils the poignancy
+of his emotion under a scholastic mode of expression, a sudden tremor
+in the voice, as it were, often betrays him, and none can resist the
+pathos of it. Purcell's touches are pathetic, too, in another
+fashion--pathetic because of the curious sense of human weakness, the
+sense of tears, caused by the sudden relaxation of emotional tension
+that inevitably results when one comes on a patch of simple naked
+beauty when nothing but elaborate grandeur expressive of powerful
+exaltation had been anticipated. That Purcell foresaw this result, and
+deliberately used the means to achieve it, I cannot doubt. Those
+momentary slackenings of tense excitement are characteristic of the
+exalted mood and inseparable from it, and he must have known that they
+really go to augment its intensity. All Purcell's choruses, however,
+are not of Handelian mould, for he wrote many that are sheer
+loveliness from beginning to end, many that are the very voice of the
+deepest sadness, many, again, showing a gaiety, an "unbuttoned"
+festivity of feeling, such as never came into music again until
+Beethoven introduced it as a new thing. The opening of one of the
+complimentary odes, "Celebrate this festival," fairly carries one off
+one's feet with the excess of jubilation in the rollicking rhythm and
+living melody of it. One of the most magnificent examples of
+picturesque music ever written--if not the most magnificent, at any
+rate the most delightful in detail--is the anthem, "Thy way, O God, is
+holy." The picture-painting is prepared for with astonishing artistic
+foresight, and when it begins the effect is tremendous. I advise
+everyone who wishes to realise Purcell's unheard-of fertility of great
+and powerful themes to look at "The clouds poured out water," the
+fugue subject "The voice of Thy thunders," the biting emphasis of the
+passage "the lightnings shone upon the ground," and the irresistible
+impulse of "The earth was moved." And the supremacy of Purcell's art
+is shown not more in these than in the succession of simple harmonies
+by which he gets the unutterable mournful poignancy of "Thou knowest,
+Lord," that unsurpassed and unsurpassable piece of choral writing
+which Dr. Crotch, one of the "English school," living in an age less
+sensitive even than this to Purcellian beauty, felt to be so great
+that it would be a desecration to set the words again. Later composers
+set the words again, feeling it no desecration, but possibly rather a
+compliment to Purcell; and Purcell's setting abides, and looks down
+upon every other, like Mozart's G minor and Beethoven's Ninth upon
+every other symphony, or the finale of Wagner's "Tristan" upon every
+other piece of love-music.
+
+
+VI.
+
+Purcell is also a chief, though not the chief, among song-writers. And
+he stands in the second place by reason of the very faculty which
+places him amongst the first of instrumental and choral writers. That
+dominating picturesque power of his, that tendency to write
+picturesque melodies as well as picturesque movements, compelled him
+to treat the voice as he treated any other instrument, and he writes
+page on page which would be at least as effective on any other
+instrument; and as more can be got out of the voice than out of any
+other instrument, and the tip-top song-writers got all out that could
+be got out, it follows that Purcell is below them. But only the very
+greatest of them have beaten him, and he often, by sheer perfection of
+phrase, runs them very close. Still, Mozart, Bach, and Handel do move
+us more profoundly. And an odd demonstration that Purcell the
+instrumental writer is almost above Purcell the composer for the
+voice, is that in such songs as "Halcyon Days" (in "The Tempest") the
+same phrases are perhaps less grateful on the voice than when repeated
+by the instrument. The phrase "That used to lull thee in thy sleep"
+(in "The Indian Queen") is divine when sung, but how thrilling is its
+touching expressiveness, how it seems to speak when the 'cellos repeat
+it! There are, of course, truly vocal melodies in Purcell (as there
+are in Beethoven and Berlioz, who also were not great writers for the
+voice), and some of them might almost be Mozart's. The only difference
+that may be felt between "While joys celestial" ("Cecilia Ode" of
+1683) and a Mozart song, is that in Mozart one gets the frequent
+human touch, and in Purcell the frequent suggestion of the free winds
+and scented blossoms. The various scattered songs, such as "Mad Tom"
+(which is possibly not Purcell's at all) or "Mad Bess" (which
+certainly is), I have no room to discuss; but I may remark that the
+madness was merely an excuse for exhibiting a series of passions in
+what was reckoned at the time a natural manner. Quite possibly it was
+then thought that in a spoken play only mad persons should sing, just
+as Wagner insists that in music-drama only mad persons should speak;
+and as a good deal of singing was required, there were a good many mad
+parts. Probably Purcell would have treated all Wagner's characters,
+and all Berlioz's, as utterly and irretrievably mad. Nor have I space
+to discuss his instrumental music and his instrumentation, but must
+refer shortly to the fact that the overtures to the plays are equal to
+Handel's best in point of grandeur, and that in freedom, quality of
+melody, and daring, and fruitful use of new harmonies, the sonatas are
+ahead of anything attempted until Mozart came. They cannot be compared
+to Bach's suites, and they are infinitely fresher than the writings of
+the Italians whom he imitated. As for Purcell's instrumentation, it is
+primitive compared to Mozart's, but when he uses the instrument in
+group or batteries he obtains gorgeous effects of varied colour. He
+gets delicious effects by means of obligato instrumental parts in the
+accompaniments to such songs as "Charon the Peaceful Shade Invites";
+and those who have heard the "Te Deum" in D may remember that even
+Bach never got more wonderful results from the sweeter tones of the
+trumpet.
+
+
+VII.
+
+Having shown how Purcell sprang from a race of English musicians, and
+how he achieved greater things than any man of his time, it remains
+only to be said that when, with Handel, the German flood deluged
+England, all remembrance of Purcell and his predecessors was swiftly
+swept away. His play-music was washed out of the theatres, his odes
+were carried away from the concert-room; in a word, all his and the
+earlier music was so completely forgotten that when Handel used anew
+his old devices connoisseurs wondered why the Italians and Germans
+should be able to bring forth such things while the English remained
+impotent. So Handel and the Germans were imitated by every composer,
+church or other, who came after, and all our "English music" is purely
+German. That we shall ever throw off that yoke I do not care to
+prophesy; but if ever we do, it will be by imitating Purcell in one
+respect only, that is, by writing with absolute simplicity and
+directness, leaving complexity, muddy profundity and elaborately
+worked-out multiplication sums to the Germans, to whom these things
+come naturally. The Germans are now spent: they produce no more great
+musicians: they produce only music which is as ugly to the ear as it
+is involved to the eye. It is high time for a return to the simplicity
+of Mozart, of Handel, of our own Purcell; to dare, as Wagner dared, to
+write folk-melody, and to put it on the trombones at the risk of being
+called vulgar and rowdy by persons who do not know great art when it
+is original, but only when it resembles some great art of the past
+which they have learnt to know. It was thus Purcell worked, and his
+work stands fast. And when we English awake to the fact that we have a
+music which ought to speak more intimately to us than all the music of
+the continental composers, his work will be marvelled at as a
+new-created thing, and his pieces will appear on English programmes
+and displace the masses of noisome shoddy which we revel in just now.
+It will then be recognised, as even the chilly Burney recognised a
+century ago, failing to recognise much else, that "in the accent of
+passion, and expression of English words, the vocal music of Purcell
+is ... as superior to Handel's as an original poem to a translation."
+Though this is slight praise for one of the very greatest musicians
+the world has produced.
+
+
+
+
+BACH; AND THE "MATTHEW" PASSION AND THE "JOHN"
+
+
+I.
+
+More is known of our mighty old Capellmeister Bach than of
+Shakespeare; less than of Miss Marie Corelli. The main thing is that
+he lived the greater part of his obscure life in Leipzig, turning out
+week by week the due amount of church music as an honest Capellmeister
+should. Other Capellmeisters did likewise; only, while their
+compositions were counterpoint, Bach's were masterworks. There lay the
+sole difference, and the square-toed Leipzig burghers did not perceive
+it. To them Master Bach was a hot-tempered, fastidious, crotchety
+person, endured because no equally competent organist would take his
+place at the price. So he worked without reward, without recognition,
+until his inspiration exhausted itself; and then he sat, imposing in
+massive unconscious strength as a spent volcano, awaiting the end.
+After that was silence: the dust gathered on his music as it lay
+unheard for a century. Haydn and Mozart and Beethoven hardly suspected
+their predecessor's greatness. Then came Mendelssohn (to whom be the
+honour and the glory), and gave to the world, to the world's great
+surprise, the "Matthew" Passion, as one might say, fresh from the
+composer's pen. The B minor mass followed, and gradually the whole of
+the church and instrumental music; and now we are beginning dimly to
+comprehend Bach's greatness.
+
+
+II.
+
+The "John" Passion and the "Matthew" Passion of Bach are as little
+alike as two works dealing with the same subject, and intended for
+performance under somewhat similar conditions, could possibly be; and
+since the "Matthew" version appeals to the modern heart and
+imagination as an ideal setting of the tale of the death of the Man of
+Sorrows, one is apt to follow Spitta in his curious mistake of
+regarding the differences between the two as altogether to the
+disadvantage of the "John." Spitta, indeed, goes further than this. So
+bent is he on proving the superiority of the "Matthew" that what he
+sees as a masterstroke in that work is in the "John" a gross blunder;
+and, on the whole, the pages on the "John" Passion are precisely the
+most fatuous of the many fatuous pages he wrote when he plunged into
+artistic criticism, leaving his own proper element of technical or
+historical criticism. This is a pity, for Spitta really had a very
+good case to spoil. The "Matthew" is without doubt a vaster,
+profounder, more moving and lovelier piece of art than the "John."
+Indeed, being the later work of a composer whose power grew steadily
+from the first until the last time he put pen to paper, it could not
+be otherwise. But the critic who, like Spitta, sees in it only a
+successful attempt at what was attempted unsuccessfully in the
+"John," seems to me to mistake the aim both of the "John" and the
+"Matthew." The "John" is not in any sense unsuccessful, but a
+complete, consistent and masterly achievement; and if it stands a
+little lower than the "Matthew," if the "Matthew" is mightier, more
+impressive, more overwhelming in its great tenderness, this is not
+because the Bach who wrote in 1722-23 was a bungler or an incomplete
+artist, but because the Bach who wrote in 1729 was inspired by a
+loftier idea than had come to the Bach of 1723. It was only necessary
+to compare the impression one received when the "John" Passion was
+sung by the Bach Choir in 1896 with that received at the "Matthew"
+performance in St. Paul's in the same year, to realise that it is in
+idea, not in power of realising the idea, that the two works
+differ--differ more widely than might seem possible, seeing that the
+subject is the same, and that the same musical forms--chorus, chorale,
+song and recitative--are used in each.
+
+Waking on the morrow of the "John" performance, my memory was
+principally filled with those hoarse, stormy, passionate roarings of
+an enraged mob. A careless reckoning shows that whereas the people's
+choruses in the "Matthew" Passion occupy about ninety bars, in the
+"John" they fill about two hundred and fifty. "Barabbas" in the
+"Matthew" is a single yell; in the "John" it takes up four bars. "Let
+Him be crucified" in the "Matthew" is eighteen bars long, counting
+the repetition, while "Crucify" and "Away with Him" in the "John"
+amount to fifty bars. Moreover, the people's choruses are written in a
+much more violent and tempestuous style in the earlier than in the
+later setting. In the "Matthew" there is nothing like those terrific
+ascending and descending chromatic passages in "Wäre dieser nicht ein
+Ubelthäter" and "Wir dürfen Niemand töden," or the short breathless
+shouts near the finish of the former chorus, as though the infuriated
+rabble had nearly exhausted itself, or, again, the excited chattering
+of the soldiers when they get Christ's coat, "Lasst uns den nicht
+zertheilen." Considering these things, one sees that the first
+impression the "John" Passion gives is the true impression, and that
+Bach had deliberately set out to depict the preliminary scenes of the
+crucifixion with greater fulness of detail and in more striking
+colours than he afterwards attempted in the "Matthew" Passion. Then,
+not only is the physical suffering of Christ insisted on in this way,
+but the chorales, recitatives, and songs lay still greater stress upon
+it, either directly, by actual description, or indirectly, by uttering
+with unheard-of poignancy the remorse supposed to be felt by mankind
+whose guilt occasioned that suffering. The central point in the two
+Passions is the same, namely, the backsliding of Peter; and in each
+the words, "He went out and wept bitterly," are given the greatest
+prominence; but one need only contrast the acute agony expressed in
+the song, "Ach mein Sinn," which follows the incident in the "John,"
+with the sweetness of "Have mercy upon me," which follows it in the
+"Matthew," to gain a fair notion of the spirit in which the one work,
+and also the spirit in which the other, is written. The next point to
+note is, that while the "Matthew" begins with lamentation and ends
+with resignation, "John" begins and ends with hope and praise. In the
+former there is no chorus like the opening "Herr, unser, Herrscher,"
+no chorale so triumphant as "Ach grosser König," and certainly no
+single passage so rapturous as "Alsdann vom Tod erwecke mich, Dass
+meine Augen sehen dich, In aller Freud, O Gottes Sohn" (with the bass
+mounting to the high E flat and rolling magnificently down again). So
+in the "John" Passion Bach has given us, first, a vivid picture of the
+turbulent crowd and of the suffering and death of Christ; second, an
+expression of man's bitterest remorse; and, last and above all, an
+expression of man's hope for the future and his thankfulness to Christ
+who redeemed him. These are what one remembers after hearing the work
+sung; and these, it may be remarked, are the things that the
+seventeenth and eighteenth century mind chiefly saw in the sorrow and
+death of Jesus of Nazareth.
+
+
+III.
+
+The "Matthew" Passion arouses a very different mood from that aroused
+by the "John." One does not remember the turbulent people's choruses,
+nor the piercing note of anguish, nor any rapturous song or chorus;
+for all else is drowned in the recollection of an overwhelming
+utterance of love and human sorrow and infinite tenderness. Much else
+there is in the "Matthew" Passion, just as there is love and
+tenderness in the "John"; but just as these are subordinated in the
+"John" to the more striking features I have mentioned, so in the
+"Matthew" the noise of the people and the expression of keen remorse
+are subordinated to love and human tenderness and infinite sorrow. The
+small number and conciseness of the people's choruses have already
+been alluded to, and it may easily be shown that the penitential music
+is brief compared with the love music, besides having a great deal of
+the love, the yearning love, feeling in it. The list of penitential
+pieces is exhausted when I have mentioned "Come, ye daughters," "Guilt
+for sin," "Break and die," "O Grief," "Alas! now is my Saviour gone,"
+and "Have mercy upon me"; and, on the other hand, we have "Thou
+blessed Saviour," the Last Supper music, the succeeding recitative and
+song, "O man, thy heavy sin lament," "To us He hath done all things,"
+"For love my Saviour suffered," "Come, blessed Cross," and "See the
+Saviour's outstretched arm," every one of which, not to speak of some
+other songs and most of the chorales, is sheer love music of the
+purest sort. This, then, seems to me the difference between the
+"Matthew" Passion and its predecessor: in the "John" Bach tried to
+purge his audience in the regular evangelical manner by pity and
+terror and hope. But during the next six years his spiritual
+development was so amazing, that while remaining intellectually
+faithful to evangelical dogma and perhaps such bogies as the devil and
+hell, he yet saw that the best way of purifying his audience was to
+set Jesus of Nazareth before them as the highest type of manhood he
+knew, as the man who so loved men that He died for them. There is
+therefore in the "Matthew" Passion neither the blank despair nor the
+feverish ecstasy of the "John," for they have no part to play there.
+Human sorrow and human love are the themes. Whenever I hear a fine
+rendering of the "Matthew" Passion, it seems to me that no composer,
+not even Mozart, could be more tender than Bach. It is often hard to
+get into communication with him, for he often appeals to feelings that
+no longer stir humanity--such, for instance, as the obsolete "sense of
+sin,"--but once it is done, he works miracles. Take, for example, the
+scene in which Jesus tells His disciples that one of them will betray
+Him. They ask, in chorus, "Herr, bin ich's?" There is a pause, and
+the chorale, "_Ich bin's_, ich sollte büssen," is thundered out by
+congregation and organ; then the agony passes away at the thought of
+the Redeemer, and the last line, "Das hat verdienet meine Seel," is
+almost intolerable in its sweetness. The songs, of course, appeal
+naturally to-day to all who will listen to them; but it is in such
+passages as this that Bach spoke most powerfully to his generation,
+and speaks now to those who will learn to understand him. Those who
+understand him can easily perceive the "John" Passion to be a powerful
+artistic embodiment of an eighteenth century idea; and they may also
+perceive that the "Matthew" is greater, because it is, on the whole, a
+little more beautiful, and because its main idea--which so far
+transcended the eighteenth century understanding that the eighteenth
+century preferred the "John"--is one of the loftiest that has yet
+visited the human mind.
+
+
+
+
+HANDEL
+
+
+Mr. George Frideric Handel is by far the most superb personage one
+meets in the history of music. He alone of all the musicians lived his
+life straight through in the grand manner. Spohr had dignity; Gluck
+insisted upon respect being shown a man of his talent; Spontini was
+sufficiently self-assertive; Beethoven treated his noble patrons as so
+many handfuls of dirt. But it is impossible altogether to lose sight
+of the peasant in Beethoven and Gluck; Spohr had more than a trace of
+the successful shopkeeper; Spontini's assertion often became mere
+insufferable bumptiousness. Besides, they all won their positions
+through being the best men in the field, and they held them with a
+proud consciousness of being the best men. But in Handel we have a
+polished gentleman, a lord amongst lords, almost a king amongst kings;
+and had his musical powers been much smaller than they were, he might
+quite possibly have gained and held his position just the same. He
+slighted the Elector of Hanover; and when that noble creature became
+George I. of England, Handel had only to do the handsome thing, as a
+handsome gentleman should, to be immediately taken back into favour.
+He was educated--was, in fact, a university man of the German sort; he
+could write and spell, and add up rows of figures, and had many other
+accomplishments which gentlemen of the period affected a little to
+despise. He had a pungent and a copious wit. He had quite a
+commercial genius; he was an impresario, and had engagements to offer
+other people instead of having to beg for engagements for himself; and
+he was always treated by the British with all the respect they keep
+for the man who has made money, or, having lost it, is fast making it
+again. He fought for the lordship of opera against nearly the whole
+English nobility, and they paid him the compliment of banding together
+with as much ado to ruin him as if their purpose had been to drive his
+royal master from the throne. He treated all opposition with a
+splendid good-humoured disdain. If his theatre was empty, then the
+music sounded the better. If a singer threatened to jump on the
+harpsichord because Handel's accompaniments attracted more notice than
+the singing, Handel asked for the date of the proposed performance
+that it might be advertised, for more people would come to see the
+singer jump than hear him sing. He was, in short, a most superb
+person, quite the grand seigneur. Think of Bach, the little shabby
+unimportant cantor, or of Beethoven, important enough but shabby, and
+with a great sorrow in his eyes, and an air of weariness, almost of
+defeat. Then look at the magnificent Mr. Handel in Hudson's portrait:
+fashionably dressed in a great periwig and gorgeous scarlet coat,
+victorious, energetic, self-possessed, self-confident, self-satisfied,
+jovial, and proud as Beelzebub (to use his own comparison)--too proud
+to ask for recognition were homage refused. This portrait helps us to
+understand the ascendency Handel gained over his contemporaries and
+over posterity.
+
+But his lofty position was not entirely due to his overwhelming
+personality. His intellect, if less vast, less comprehensive, than
+Beethoven's, was less like the intellect of a great peasant: it was
+swifter, keener, surer. Where Beethoven plodded, Handel leaped. And a
+degree of genius which did nothing for Bach, a little for Mozart, and
+all for Beethoven, did something for Handel. Without a voice worth
+taking into consideration, he could, and at least on one occasion did,
+sing so touchingly that the leading singer of the age dared not risk
+his reputation by singing after him. He was not only the first
+composer of the day, but also the first organist and the first
+harpsichord player; for his only possible rival, Sebastian Bach, was
+an obscure schoolmaster in a small, nearly unheard-of, German town.
+And so personal force, musical genius, business talent, education, and
+general brain power went to the making of a man who hobnobbed with
+dukes and kings, who ruled musical England with an iron rule, who
+threatened to throw distinguished soprano ladies from windows, and was
+threatened with never an action for battery in return, who went
+through the world with a regal gait, and was, in a word, the most
+astonishing lord of music the world has seen.
+
+That this aristocrat should come to be the musical prophet of an
+evangelical bourgeoisie would be felt as a most comical irony, were it
+only something less of a mystery. Handel was brought up in the bosom
+of the Lutheran Church, and was religious in his way. But it was
+emphatically a pagan way. Let those who doubt it turn to his setting
+of "All we like sheep have gone astray," in the "Messiah," and ask
+whether a religious man, whether Byrde or Palestrina, would have
+painted that exciting picture on those words. Imagine how Bach would
+have set them. That Handel lived an intense inner life we know, but
+what that life was no man can ever know. It is only certain that it
+was not a life such as Bach's; for he lived an active outer life also,
+and was troubled with no illusions, no morbid introspection. He seemed
+to accept the theology of the time in simple sincerity as a sufficient
+explanation of the world and human existence. He had little desire to
+write sacred music. He felt that his enormous force found its finest
+exercise in song-making; and Italian opera, consisting nearly wholly
+of songs, was his favourite form to the finish. The instinct was a
+true one. It is as a song-writer he is supreme, surpassing as he does
+Schubert, and sometimes even Mozart. Mozart is a prince of
+song-writers; but Handel is their king. He does not get the breezy
+picturesqueness of Purcell, nor the entrancing absolute beauty that
+Mozart often gets; but as pieces of art, each constructed so as to
+get the most out of the human voice in expressing a rich human passion
+in a noble form, they stand unapproachable in their perfection. For
+many reasons the English public refused to hear them in his own time,
+and Handel, as a general whose business was to win the battle, not in
+this or that way, but in any possible way, turned his attention to
+oratorio, and in this found success and a fortune. In this lies also
+our great gain, for in addition to the Italian opera songs we have the
+oratorio choruses. But when we come to think of it, might not
+Buononcini and Cuzzoni laugh to see how time has avenged them on their
+old enemy? For Handel's best music is in the songs, which rarely find
+a singer; and his fame is kept alive by performances of "Israel in
+Egypt" at the Albert Hall, where (until lately) evangelical small
+grocers crowded to hear the duet for two basses, "The Lord is a man of
+war," which Handel did not write, massacred by a huge bass chorus.
+
+His "Messiah" is in much the same plight as Milton's "Paradise Lost,"
+the plays of Shakespeare and the source of all true religion--it
+suffers from being so excessively well known and so generally accepted
+as a classic that few want to hear it, and none think it worth knowing
+thoroughly. A few years ago the late Sir Joseph Barnby went through
+the entire work in St. James's Hall with his Guildhall students; but
+such a feat had not, I believe, been accomplished previously within
+living memory, and certainly it has not been attempted again since. We
+constantly speak of the "Messiah" as the most popular oratorio ever
+written; but even in the provinces only selections from it are sung,
+and in the metropolis the selections are cut very short indeed,
+frequently by the sapient device of taking out all the best numbers
+and leaving only those that appeal to the religious instincts of
+Clapham. I cannot resist the suspicion that but for the words of "He
+was despised," "Behold, and see," and "I know that my Redeemer
+liveth," Clapham would have tired of the oratorio before now, and that
+but for its having become a Christmas institution, like roast beef,
+plum-puddings, mince-pies, and other indigestible foods, it would no
+longer be heard in the provinces. And perhaps it would be better
+forgotten--perhaps Handel would rather have seen it forgotten than
+regarded as it is regarded, than existing merely as an aid to
+evangelical religion or an after-dinner digestive on Christmas Day.
+Still, during the last hundred and fifty years, it has suffered so
+many humiliations that possibly one more, even this last one, does not
+so much matter. First its great domes and pillars and mighty arches
+were prettily ornamented and tinted by Mozart, who surely knew not
+what he did; then in England a barbarous traditional method of singing
+it was evolved; later it was Costa-mongered; finally even the late
+eminent Macfarren, the worst enemy music has ever had in this
+country, did not disdain to prepare "a performing edition," and to
+improve Mozart's improvements on Handel. One wonders whether Mozart,
+when he overlaid the "Messiah" with his gay tinsel-work, dreamed that
+some Costa, encouraged by Mozart's own example, and without brains
+enough to guess that he had nothing like Mozart's brains, would in
+like manner desecrate "Don Giovanni." Like "Don Giovanni," there the
+"Messiah" lies, almost unrecognisable under its outrageous adornments,
+misunderstood, its splendours largely unknown and hardly even
+suspected, the best known and the least known of oratorios, a work
+spoken of as fine by those who cannot hum one of its greatest themes
+or in the least comprehend the plan on which its noblest choruses are
+constructed.
+
+Rightly to approach the "Messiah" or any of Handel's sacred oratorios,
+to approach it in any sure hope of appreciating it, one must remember
+that (as I have just said) Handel had nothing of the religious
+temperament, that in temperament he was wholly secular, that he was an
+eighteenth century pagan. He was perfectly satisfied with the visible
+and audible world his energy and imagination created out of things;
+about the why and wherefore of things he seems never to have troubled;
+his soul asked no questions, and he was never driven to accept a
+religious or any other explanation. It is true he went to church with
+quite commendable regularity, and wished to die on Good Friday and so
+meet Jesus Christ on the anniversary of the resurrection. But he was
+nevertheless as completely a pagan as any old Greek; the persons of
+the Trinity were to him very solid entities; if he wished to die on
+Good Friday, depend upon it, he fully meant to enter heaven in his
+finest scarlet coat with ample gold lace and a sword by his side, to
+make a stately bow to the assembled company and then offer a few
+apposite and doubtless pungent remarks on the proper method of tuning
+harps. Of true devotional feeling, of the ecstatic devotional feeling
+of Palestrina and of Bach, there is in no recorded saying of his a
+trace, and there is not a trace of it in his music. When he was
+writing the "Hallelujah Chorus" he imagined he saw God on His throne,
+just as in writing "Semele" he probably imagined he saw Jupiter on his
+throne; and the fact proves only with what intensity and power his
+imagination was working, and how far removed he was from the genuine
+devotional frame of mind. There is not the slightest difference in
+style between his secular and his sacred music; he treats sacred and
+secular subjects precisely alike. In music his intention was never to
+reveal his own state of mind, but always to depict some object, some
+scene. Now, never did he adhere with apparently greater resolution to
+this plan, never therefore did he produce a more essentially secular
+work, than in the "Messiah." One need only consider such numbers as
+"All they that see Him" and "Behold the Lamb of God" to realise this;
+though, indeed, there is not a number in the oratorio that does not
+show it with sufficient clearness. But fully to understand Handel and
+realise his greatness, it is not enough merely to know the spirit in
+which he worked: one must know also his method of depicting things and
+scenes. He was wholly an impressionist--in his youth from choice, as
+when he wrote the music of "Rinaldo" faster than the librettist could
+supply the words; in middle age and afterwards from necessity, as he
+never had time to write save when circumstances freed him for a few
+days from the active duties of an impresario. He tried to do, and
+succeeded in doing, everything with a few powerful strokes, a few
+splashes of colour. Of the careful elaboration of Bach, of Beethoven,
+even of Mozart, there is nothing: sometimes in his impatience he
+seemed to mix his colours in buckets and hurl them with the surest
+artistic aim at his gigantic canvases. A comparison of the angels'
+chorus "Glory to God in the highest" in Bach's "Christmas Oratorio"
+with the same thing as set in the "Messiah" will show not only how
+widely different were the aims of the two men, but also throws the
+minute cunning of the Leipzig schoolmaster into startling contrast
+with the daring recklessness of the tremendous London impresario. Of
+course both men possessed wonderful contrapuntal skill; but in Bach's
+case there is time and patience as well as skill, and in Handel's only
+consummate audacity and intellectual grip. Handel was by far a greater
+man than Bach--he appears to me, indeed, the greatest man who has yet
+lived; but though he achieves miracles as a musician, his music was to
+him only one of many modes of using the irresistible creative instinct
+and energy within him. Any one who looks in Handel for the
+characteristic complicated music of the typical German masters will be
+disappointed even as the Germans are disappointed; but those who are
+prepared to let Handel say what he has to say in his own chosen way
+will find in his music the most admirable style ever attained to by
+any musician, the most perfect fusion of manner and matter. It is a
+grand, large, and broad style, because Handel had a large and grand
+matter to express; and if it errs at all it errs on the right side--it
+has too few rather than too many notes.
+
+On the whole, the "Messiah" is as vigorous, rich, picturesque and
+tender as the best of Handel's oratorios--even "Belshazzar" does not
+beat it. There is scarcely any padding; there are many of Handel's
+most perfect songs and most gorgeous choruses; and the architecture of
+the work is planned with a magnificence, and executed with a lucky
+completeness, attained only perhaps elsewhere in "Israel in
+Egypt"--for which achievement Handel borrowed much of the bricks and
+mortar from other edifices. Theological though the subject is, the
+oratorio is as much a hymn to joy as the Ninth symphony; and there is
+in it far more of genuine joy, of sheer delight in living. Of the
+sense of sin--the most cowardly illusion ever invented by a degenerate
+people--there is no sign; where Bach would have been abased in the
+dust, Handel is bright, shining, confident, cocksure that all is right
+with the world. Mingled with the marvellous tenderness of "Comfort ye"
+there is an odd air of authority, a conviction that everything is
+going well, and that no one need worry; and nothing fresher, fuller of
+spring-freshness, almost of rollicking jollity, has ever been written
+than "Every valley shall be exalted." "And the glory of the Lord shall
+be revealed" is in rather the same vein, though a deeper note of
+feeling is struck. The effect of the alto voices leading off, followed
+immediately by the rest of the chorus and orchestra, is overwhelming;
+and the chant of the basses at "For the mouth of the Lord" is in the
+biggest Handel manner. But just as "He was despised" and "I know that
+my Redeemer liveth" tower above all the other songs, so three or four
+choruses tower above all the other choruses in not only the "Messiah,"
+but all Handel's oratorios. "Worthy is the Lamb" stands far above the
+rest, and indeed above all choruses in the world save Bach's very
+best; then comes "For unto us a Child is born"; and after that "And
+He shall purify," "His yoke is easy," and "Surely He hath borne our
+griefs"--each distinctive, complete in itself, an absolute piece of
+noble invention. "Unto us a Child is born" is written in a form
+devised by Handel and used with success by no other composer since,
+until in a curiously modified shape Tschaikowsky employed it for the
+third movement of his Pathetic symphony. The first theme is very
+simply announced, played with awhile, then the second follows--a
+tremendous phrase to the words "The government shall be upon His
+shoulders"; suddenly the inner parts begin to quicken into life, to
+ferment, to throb and to leap, and with startling abruptness great
+masses of tone are hurled at the listener to the words "Wonderful,
+Counsellor." The process is then repeated in a shortened and
+intensified form; then it is repeated again; and finally the principal
+theme, delivered so naïvely at first, is delivered with all the pomp
+and splendour of full chorus and orchestra, and "Wonderful,
+Counsellor" thundered out on a corresponding scale. A scheme at once
+so simple, so daring and so tremendous in effect, could have been
+invented by no one but Handel with his need for working rapidly; and
+it is strange that a composer so different from Handel as Tschaikowsky
+should have hit upon a closely analogous form for a symphonic
+movement. The forms of the other choruses are dissimilar. In "He
+shall purify" there are two big climaxes; in "His yoke is easy" there
+is only one, and it comes at the finish, just when one is wondering
+how the splendid flow of music can be ended without an effect of
+incompleteness or of anti-climax; and "Surely He hath borne our
+griefs" depends upon no climactic effects, but upon the sheer
+sweetness and pathos of the thing.
+
+Handel's secular oratorios are different from anything else in the
+world. They are neither oratorios, nor operas, nor cantatas; and the
+plots are generally quaint.
+
+Some years ago it occurred to me one morning that a trip by sea to
+Russia might be refreshing; and that afternoon I started in a
+coal-steamer from a northern seaport. A passport could hardly be
+wrested from hide-bound officialdom in so short a time, and, to save
+explanations in a foreign tongue at Cronstadt, the reader's most
+humble servant assumed the lowly office of purser--wages, one shilling
+per month. The passage was rough, the engineers were not enthusiastic
+in their work, some of the seamen were sulky; and, in a word, the name
+of God was frequently in the skipper's mouth. Otherwise he did not
+strike one as being a particularly religious man. Nevertheless, when
+Sunday evening came round he sat down and read the Bible with genuine
+fervour, spelling the hard words aloud and asking how they should or
+might be pronounced; and he informed me, by way of explaining his
+attachment to the Book, that he had solemnly promised his wife never
+to omit his weekly devotions while on the deep. Though I never shared
+the literary tastes of Mr. Wilson Barrett, the captain's unfathomable
+ignorance of the Gospels, Isaiah and the Psalms startled even me; but
+on the other hand he had an intimate acquaintance with a number of
+stories to be found only in the Apocrypha, with which he had
+thoughtfully provided himself. To gratify my curiosity he read me the
+tale of Susanna and the Elders. Being young, my first notion was that
+I had chanced on a capital subject for an opera; and I actually
+thought for ten minutes of commencing at once on a libretto. Later I
+remembered the censor, and realised for the first time that in
+England, when a subject is unfit for a drama, it is treated as an
+oratorio. As soon as possible I bought Handel's "Susanna" instead, and
+found that Handel curiously--or perhaps not curiously--had also been
+before me in thinking of treating the subject operatically. In fact
+"Susanna" is as much an opera as "Rinaldo," the only difference being
+that a few choruses are forcibly dragged in to give colour to the
+innocent pretence. Handel's librettist, whoever he was, did his work
+downright badly. That he glorifies the great institution of permanent
+marriage and says nothing of the corresponding great institution of
+the Divorce Court, is only what might be expected of the horrible
+eighteenth century--the true dark age of Europe; but surely even a
+composer of Handel's powers could scarcely do himself justice with
+such a choice blend of stupidity and cant religion as this--
+
+    "_Chorus_. How long, O Lord, shall Israel groan
+      In bondage and in pain?
+    Jehovah! hear Thy people moan,
+      And break the tyrant's chain!
+
+    "_Joachim._ Our crimes repeated have provok'd His rage,
+    And now He scourges a degen'rate age.
+    O come, my fair Susanna, come,
+    And from my bosom chase its gloom," etc.
+
+Or is the abrupt third line of Joachim's speech to be regarded as a
+masterstroke of characterisation? I will tell the whole story, to show
+what manner of subject has been thought proper for an oratorio.
+Joachim and Susanna are of course perfect monsters of fidelity; though
+it is only fair to say that Joachim's virtue is not insisted on, or,
+for that matter, mentioned. Joachim goes out of town--he says so:
+"Awhile I'm summoned from the town away"--and Susanna, instead of
+obeying his directions to entertain some friends, goes into a dark
+glade, whither the Elders presently repair. She declines their
+attentions; then they declare they caught her with an unknown lover,
+who fled; and she is condemned to death, the populace seeing naught
+but justice in the sentence. But before they begin to hurl the stones,
+Daniel steps forward and by sheer eloquent impudence persuades the
+people to have the case re-tried, with him for judge. He sends one
+elder out of court, and asks the other under what tree Susanna
+committed the indiscretion. The poor wretch, knowing no science,
+foolishly makes a wild shot instead of pleading a defective education,
+and says, "A verdant mastick, pride of all the grove." The other, in
+response to the same question, says, "Yon tall holm-tree." Incredible
+as it seems, on the strength of this error, which would merely gain a
+policeman the commendation of an average London magistrate, the two
+Elders are sent off to be hanged! Why, even the late Mr. Justice
+Stephen never put away an innocent man or woman on less evidence! But
+the chorus flatters Daniel just as the Press used to flatter Mr.
+Justice Stephen; Susanna is complimented on her chastity; and all ends
+with some general reflections--
+
+    "A virtuous wife shall soften fortune's frown,
+    She's far more precious than a golden crown."
+
+Nothing is said about the market value of a virtuous husband. Probably
+the eighteenth century regarded such a thing as out of the question.
+As I have said, I tell this story to show what the British public will
+put up with if you mention the word oratorio. Voltaire's dictum needs
+revision thus: "Whatever is too improper to be spoken (in England) is
+sung, and whatever is too improper to be sung on the stage may be sung
+in a church."
+
+Nevertheless, out of this wretched book Handel made a masterpiece. The
+tale of Susanna is not one in which a man of his character might be
+expected to take a profound interest; though it should always be
+remembered that hardly anything is known of his relations with the
+other sex save that he took a keen and lifelong interest in the
+Foundling Hospital. But so strong had the habit of making masterpieces
+become with him that he could not resist the temptation to create just
+one more, even when he had nothing better than "Susanna" to base it
+on; just as a confirmed drunkard cannot resist the temptation to get
+one drink more, even if he be accustomed to the gilded chambers of the
+West End, and must go for really the last to-night into the lowest
+drinking-saloon of the East. Some of the choruses are of Handel's
+best. The first, "How long, O Lord," shows that he could write
+expressive chromatic passages as well as Purcell and Bach; the second
+is surcharged with emotion; "Righteous Heaven" is picturesque and full
+of splendid vigour; "Impartial Heaven" contains some of the most
+gorgeous writing that even Handel achieved. But the last two choruses,
+and "The Cause is decided" and "Oh, Joachim," are common, colourless,
+barren; and were evidently written without delight, to maintain the
+pretext that the work was an oratorio. But it stands to this day,
+unmistakably an opera; and it is the songs that will certainly make it
+popular some day; for some of them are on Handel's highest level, and
+Handel's highest level has never been reached by any other composer.
+His choruses are equalled by Bach's, his dramatic strokes by Gluck's,
+his instrumental movements by Bach's and perhaps Lulli's; but the
+coming of Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Weber, and Wagner has only
+served to show that he is the greatest song-writer the world has known
+or is likely to know. Even Mozart never quite attained that union of
+miraculously balanced form, sweetness of melody, and depth of feeling
+with a degree of sheer strength that keeps the expression of the main
+thought lucid, and the surface of the music, so to speak, calm, when
+obscurity might have been anticipated, and some roughness and storm
+and stress excused. "Faith displays her rosy wing" is an absolutely
+perfect instance of a Handel song. Were not the thing done, one might
+believe it impossible to express with such simplicity--four sombre
+minor chords and then the tremolo of the strings--the alternations of
+trembling fear and fearful hope, the hope of the human soul in
+extremist agony finding an exalted consolation in the thought that
+this was the worst. As astounding as this is the quality of light and
+freshness of atmosphere with which Handel imbues such songs as "Clouds
+o'ertake the brightest day" and "Crystal streams in murmurs flowing";
+and the tenderness of "Would custom bid," with the almost divine
+refrain, "I then had called thee mine," might surprise us, coming as
+it does from such a giant, did we not know that tenderness is always a
+characteristic of the great men, of Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Wagner,
+and that the pettiness, ill-conditionedness, and lack of generous
+feeling observable in (say) our London composers to-day stamp them
+more unmistakably than does their music as small composers. If the
+poor fellows knew what they were about, they would at least conceal
+the littlenesses that show they are destined never to do work of the
+first order. The composer of the "Rex tremendæ" (in the Requiem) wrote
+"Dove sono," Beethoven wrote both the finale of the Fifth symphony and
+the slow movement of the Ninth, Wagner both the Valkyries' Ride and
+the motherhood theme in "Siegfried," Handel "Worthy is the Lamb" and
+"Waft her, angels"; while your little malicious musical Mimes are
+absorbed in self-pity, and can no more write a melody that
+irresistibly touches you than they can build a great and impressive
+structure. And if Mozart is tenderest of all the musicians, Handel
+comes very close to him. The world may, though not probably, tire of
+all but his grandest choruses, while his songs will always be sung as
+lovely expressions of the finest human feeling.
+
+"Samson" is not his finest oratorio, though it may be his longest. It
+contains no "Unto us a Child is born" nor a "Worthy is the Lamb," nor
+a "Now love, that everlasting boy"; but in several places the sublime
+is reached--in "Then round about the starry throne," the last page of
+which is worth all the oratorios written since Handel's time save
+Beethoven's "Mount of Olives"; in "Fixed is His everlasting seat,"
+with that enormous opening phrase, irresistible in its strength and
+energy as Handel himself; and in the first section of "O first created
+beam." The pagan choruses are full of riotous excitement, though there
+is not one of them to match "Ye tutelar gods" in "Belshazzar." But
+there is little in "Belshazzar" to match the pathos of "Return, O God
+of hosts," or "Ye sons of Israel, now lament." The latter is a notable
+example of Handel's art. There is not a new phrase in it: nothing,
+indeed, could be commoner than the bar at the first occurrence of
+"Amongst the dead great Samson lies," and yet the effect is amazing;
+and though the "for ever" is as old as Purcell, here it is newly
+used--used as if it had never been used before--to utter a depth of
+emotion that passes beyond the pathetic to the sublime. This very
+vastness of feeling, this power of stepping outside himself and giving
+a voice to the general emotions of humanity, prevents us recognising
+the personal note in Handel as we recognise it in Mozart. But
+occasionally the personal note may be met. The recitative "My genial
+spirits fail," with those dreary long-drawn harmonies, and the
+orchestral passage pressing wearily downwards at "And lay me gently
+down with them that rest," seems almost like Handel's own voice in a
+moment of sad depression. It serves, at anyrate, to remind us that the
+all-conquering Mr. Handel was a complete man who had endured the
+sickening sense of the worthlessness of a struggle that he was bound
+to continue to the end. But these personal confessions are scarce.
+After all, in oratorio Handel's best music is that in which he seeks
+to attain the sublime. In his choruses he does attain it: he sweeps
+you away with the immense rhythmical impetus of the music, or
+overpowers you with huge masses of tone hurled, as it were, bodily at
+you at just the right moments, or he coerces you with phrases like the
+opening of "Fixed in His everlasting seat," or the last (before the
+cadence) in "Then round about the starry throne." It is true that with
+his unheard-of intellectual power, and a mastery of technique equal or
+nearly equal to Bach's, he was often tempted to write in his
+uninspired moments, and so the chorus became with him more or less of
+a formula; but we may also note that even when he was most mechanical
+the mere furious speed at which he wrote seemed to excite and exalt
+him, so that if he began with a commonplace "Let their celestial
+concerts all unite," before the end he was pouring forth glorious and
+living stuff like the last twenty-seven bars. So the pace at which he
+had to write in the intervals of bullying or coaxing prima donnas or
+still more petulant male sopranos was not wholly a misfortune; if it
+sometimes compelled him to set down mere musical arithmetic, or
+rubbish like "Honour and arms," and "Go, baffled coward," it sometimes
+drew his grandest music out of him. The dramatic oratorio is a hybrid
+form of art--one might almost say a bastard form; it had only about
+thirty years of life; but in those thirty years Handel accomplished
+wonderful things with it. And the wonder of them makes Handel appear
+the more astonishing man; for, when all is said, the truth is that the
+man was greater, infinitely greater, than his music.
+
+
+
+
+HAYDN AND HIS "CREATION"
+
+
+It is a fact never to be forgotten, in hearing good papa Haydn's
+music, that he lived in the fine old world when stately men and women
+went through life in the grand manner with a languid pulse, when the
+earth and the days were alike empty, and hurry to get finished and
+proceed to the next thing was almost unknown, and elbowing of rivals
+to get on almost unnecessary. For fifty years he worked away
+contentedly as bandmaster to Prince Esterhazy, composing the due
+amount of music, conducting the due number of concerts, taking his
+salary of some seventy odd pounds per annum thankfully, and putting on
+his uniform for special State occasions with as little grumbling as
+possible, all as a good bandmaster should. He had gone through a short
+period of roughing it in his youth, and he had made one or two
+mistakes as he settled down. He married a woman who worked with
+enthusiasm to render his early life intolerable, and begged him in his
+old age to buy a certain cottage, as it would suit her admirably when
+she became a widow. But he consoled himself as men do in the
+circumstances, and did not allow his mistakes to poison all his life,
+or cause him any special worry. His other troubles were not very
+serious. A Music Society which he wished to join tried to trap him
+into an agreement to write important compositions for it whenever they
+were wanted. Once he offended his princely master by learning to play
+the baryton, an instrument on which the prince was a performer
+greatly esteemed by his retainers. Such teacup storms soon passed:
+Prince Esterhazy doubtless forgave him; the Society was soon
+forgotten; and Haydn worked on placidly. Every morning he rose with or
+before the lark, dressed himself with a degree of neatness that
+astonished even that neat dressing age, and sat down to compose music.
+Later in each day he is reported to have eaten, to have rehearsed his
+band or conducted concerts, and so to bed to prepare himself by
+refreshing slumber for the next day's labours. At certain periods of
+the year Prince Esterhazy and his court adjourned to Esterhaz, and at
+certain periods they came back to Eisenstadt: thus they were saved by
+due variety from utter petrifaction. Haydn seems to have liked the
+life, and to have thought moreover that it was good for him and his
+art. By being thrown so much back upon himself, he said, he had been
+forced to become original. Whether it made him original or not, he
+never thought of changing it until his prince died, and for a time his
+services were not wanted at Esterhaz or Eisenstadt. Then he came to
+England, and by his success here made a European reputation (for it
+was then as it is now--an artist was only accepted on the musical
+Continent after he had been stamped with the hall-mark of unmusical
+England). Finally he settled in Vienna, was for a time the teacher of
+Beethoven, declared his belief that the first chorus of the
+"Creation" came direct from heaven, and died a world-famous man.
+
+To the nineteenth century mind it seems rather an odd life for an
+artist: at least it strikes one as a life, despite Haydn's own
+opinion, not particularly conducive to originality. To use extreme
+language, it might almost be called a monotonous and soporific mode of
+existence. Probably its chief advantage was the opportunity it
+afforded, or perhaps the necessity it enforced, of ceaseless industry.
+Certainly that industry bore fruit in Haydn's steady increase of
+inventive power as he went on composing. But he only took the
+prodigious leap from the second to the first rank of composers after
+he had been free for a time from his long slavery, and had been in
+England and been aroused and stimulated by new scenes, unfamiliar
+modes of life, and by contact with many and widely differing types of
+mind. Some of his later music makes one think that if the leap--a leap
+almost unparalleled in the history of art--had been possible twenty
+years sooner, Haydn might have won a place by the side of Mozart and
+Handel and Bach, instead of being the lowest of their great company.
+On the other hand, one cannot think of the man--lively, genial,
+kind-hearted, garrulous, broadly humorous, actively observant of
+details, careful in small money matters--and assert with one's hand on
+one's heart that he was cast in gigantic or heroic mould. That he had
+a wonderful facility in expressing himself is obvious in every bar he
+wrote: but it is less obvious that he had a great deal to express. He
+had deep, but not the deepest, human feeling; he could think, but not
+profoundly; he had a sense of beauty, delicate and acute out of all
+comparison with yours or mine, reader, but far less keen than Mozart's
+or Bach's. Hence his music is rarely comparable with theirs: his
+matter is less weighty, his form never quite so enchantingly lovely;
+and, whatever one may think of the possibilities of the man in his
+most inspired moments, his average output drives one to the reluctant
+conclusion that on the whole his life must have been favourable to him
+and enabled him to do the best that was in him. Yet I hesitate as I
+write the words. Remembering that he began as an untaught peasant, and
+until the end of his long life was a mere bandmaster with a small
+yearly salary, a uniform, and possibly (for I cannot recall the facts)
+his board and lodging, remembering where he found the symphony and
+quartet and where he left them, remembering, above all, that
+astonishing leap, I find it hard to believe in barriers to his upward
+path. It is in dignity and quality of poetic content rather than in
+form that Haydn is lacking. Had the horizon of his thought been
+widened in early or even in middle life by the education of mixing
+with men who knew more and were more advanced than himself, had he
+been jostled in the crowd of a great city and been made to feel
+deeply about the tragi-comedy of human existence, his experiences
+might have resulted in a deeper and more original note being sounded
+in his music. But we must take him as he is, reflecting, when the
+unbroken peacefulness of his music becomes a little tiresome, that he
+belonged to the "old time before us" and was never quickened by the
+newer modes of thought that unconsciously affected Mozart and
+consciously moulded Beethoven; and that, after all, his very
+smoothness and absence of passion give him an old-world charm,
+grateful in this hot and dusty age. If he was not greatly original, he
+was at least flawlessly consistent: there is scarce a trait in his
+character that is not reflected somewhere in his music, and hardly a
+characteristic of his music that one does not find quaintly echoed in
+some recorded saying or doing of the man. His placid and even
+vivacity, his sprightliness, his broad jocularity, his economy and
+shrewd business perception of what could be done with the material to
+hand, his fertility of device, even his commonplaceness, may all be
+seen in the symphonies. At rare moments he moves you strongly, very
+often he is trivial, but he generally pleases; and if some of the
+strokes of humour--quoted in text-books of orchestration--are so broad
+as to be indescribable in any respectable modern print, few of us
+understand what they really mean, and no one is a penny the worse.
+
+The "Creation" libretto was prepared for Handel, but he did not
+attempt to set it; and this perhaps was just as well, for the effort
+would certainly have killed him. Of course the opening offers some
+fine opportunities for fine music; but the later parts with their
+nonsense--Milton's nonsense, I believe--about "In native worth and
+honour clad, With beauty, courage, strength, adorned, Erect with front
+serene he stands, A MAN, the Lord and King of Nature all," and the
+suburban love-making of our first parents, and the lengthy references
+to the habits of the worm and the leviathan, and so on, are almost
+more than modern flesh and blood can endure. It must be conceded that
+Haydn evaded the difficulties of the subject with a degree of tact
+that would be surprising in anyone else than Haydn. In the first part,
+where Handel would have been sublime, he is frequently nearly sublime,
+and this is our loss; but in the later portion, where Handel would
+have been solemn, earnest, and intolerably dull, he is light,
+skittish, good-natured, and sometimes jocular, and this is our gain,
+even if the gain is not great. The Representation of Chaos is a
+curious bit of music, less like chaos than an attempt to write music
+of the Bruneau sort a century too soon; but it serves. The most
+magnificent passage in the oratorio immediately follows, for there is
+hardly a finer effect in music than that of the soft voices singing
+the words, "And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters,"
+while the strings gently pulse; and the fortissimo C major chord on
+the word "light," coming abruptly after the piano and mezzo-forte
+minor chords, is as dazzling in its brilliancy to-day as when it was
+first sung. The number of unisons, throwing into relief the two minor
+chords on C and F, should be especially noted. The chorus in the next
+number is poor, matched with this, though towards the end (see bars 11
+and 12 from the finish) Haydn's splendid musicianship has enabled him
+to redeem the trivial commonplace with an unexpected and powerful
+harmonic progression. The work is singularly deficient in strong
+sustained choruses. "Awake the harp" is certainly very much the best;
+for "The heavens are telling" is little better than Gounod's "Unfold,
+ye everlasting portals" until the end, where it is saved by the
+tremendous climax; and "Achieved is the glorious work" is mostly
+mechanical, with occasional moments of life. As for the finale, it is
+of course light opera. On the whole the songs are the most delightful
+feature of the "Creation," and the freshness of "With verdure clad,"
+and the tender charm of the second section of "Roaming in foaming
+billows," may possibly be remembered when Haydn is scarcely known
+except as an instrumental composer. The setting of "Softly purling,
+glides on, thro' silent vales, the limpid brook" is indeed perfect,
+the phrase at the repetition of "Thro' silent vales" inevitably
+calling up a vision, not of a valley sleeping in the sunlight, for of
+sunlight the eighteenth century apparently took little heed, but of a
+valley in the dark quiet night, filled with the scent of flowers, and
+the far-off murmur of the brook vaguely heard. The humour of the
+oratorio consists chiefly of practical jokes, such as sending Mr.
+Andrew Black (or some other bass singer) down to the low F sharp and G
+to depict the heavy beasts treading the ground, or making the
+orchestra imitate the bellow of the said heavy beasts, or depicting
+the sinuous motion of the worm or the graceful gamboling of the
+leviathan. It has been objected that the leviathan is brought on in
+sections. The truth, of course, is that the clumsy figure in the bass
+is not meant to depict the leviathan himself, but his gambolings and
+the gay flourishings of his tail. It is hard to sum up the "Creation,"
+unless one is prepared to call it great and never go to hear it. It is
+not a sublime oratorio, nor yet a frankly comic oratorio, nor entirely
+a dull oratorio. After considering the songs, the recitatives, the
+choruses, in detail, it really seems to contain very little. Perhaps
+it may be described as a third-rate oratorio, whose interest is
+largely historic and literary.
+
+
+
+
+MOZART, HIS "DON GIOVANNI" AND THE REQUIEM
+
+
+It may well be doubted whether Vienna thought even so much of
+Capellmeister Mozart as Leipzig thought of Capellmeister Bach. Bach,
+it is true, was merely Capellmeister; he hardly dared to claim social
+equality with the citizens who tanned hides or slaughtered pigs; and
+probably the high personages who trimmed the local Serene Highness's
+toe-nails scarcely knew of his existence. Still, he was a burgher,
+even as the killers of pigs and the tanners of hides; he was
+thoroughly respectable, and probably paid his taxes as they came due;
+if only by necessity of his office, he went to church with regularity;
+and on the whole we may suppose that he got enough of respect to make
+life tolerable. But Mozart was only one of a crowd who provided
+amusement for a gay population; and a gay population, always a
+heartless master, holds none in such contempt as the servants who
+provide it with amusement. So Mozart got no respect from those he
+served, and his Bohemianism lost him the respect of the eminently
+respectable. He lived in the eighteenth century equivalent of a "loose
+set"; he was miserably poor, and presumably never paid his taxes; we
+may doubt whether he often went to church; he composed for the
+theatre; and he lacked the self-assertion which enabled Handel,
+Beethoven, and Wagner to hold their own. Treated as of no account,
+cheated by those he worked for, hardly permitted to earn his bread, he
+found life wholly intolerable, and as he grew older he lived more and
+more within himself and gave his thoughts only to the composition of
+masterpieces. The crowd of mediocrities dimly felt him to be their
+master, and the greater the masterpieces he achieved the more
+vehemently did Salieri and his attendants protest that he was not a
+composer to compare with Salieri. The noise impressed Da Ponte, the
+libretto-monger, and he asked Salieri to set his best libretto and
+gave Mozart only his second best; and thus by a curious irony stumbled
+into his immortality through sheer stupidity, for his second best
+libretto was "Don Giovanni"--of all possible subjects precisely that
+which a wise man would have given to Mozart. When Mozart laid down the
+pen after the memorable night's work in which he transferred the
+finished overture from his brain to the paper, he had written the
+noblest Italian opera ever conceived; and the world knew it not, yet
+gradually came to know. But the full fame of "Don Giovanni" was
+comparatively brief, and at this time there seems to be a hazy notion
+that its splendours have waned before the blaze of Wagner, just as the
+symphonies are supposed to have faded in the brilliant light of
+Beethoven. At lectures on musical history it is reverently spoken of;
+but it is seldom sung, and the public declines to go to hear it; and,
+though few persons are so foolish as to admit their sad case, I
+suspect that more than a few agree with the sage critic who told us
+not long since that Mozart was a little _passé_ now. Is it indeed so?
+Well, Mozart lived in the last days of the old world, and the old
+world and the thoughts and sentiments of the old world are certainly a
+little _passés_ now. But if you examine "Don Giovanni" you must admit
+that the Fifth and Ninth symphonies, "Fidelio," "Lohengrin," the
+"Ring," "Tristan," and "Parsifal" have done nothing to eclipse its
+glories, that while fresh masterpieces have come forth, "Don Giovanni"
+remains a masterpiece amongst masterpieces, that in a sense it is a
+masterpiece towards which all other masterpieces stand in the relation
+of commentaries to text. And though this, perhaps, is only to call it
+a link in a chain, yet it is curious to note how very closely other
+composers have followed Mozart, and how greatly they are indebted to
+him. Page upon page of the early Beethoven is written in the
+phraseology of the later Mozart; in nearly every bar of "Faust," not
+to mention "Romeo and Juliette," avowedly the fruit of a long study of
+"Don Giovanni," a faint echo of Mozart's voice comes to us with the
+voice of Gounod; Anna's cries, "Quel sangue, quella piaga, quel
+volto," with the creeping chromatic chords of the wood-wind, have the
+very accent of Isolda's '"Tis I, belov'd," and the solemn phrase that
+follows, in Tristan's death-scene. Apart from its influence on later
+composers, there is surely no more passionate, powerful, and moving
+drama in the world than "Don Giovanni." Despite the triviality of Da
+Ponte's book, the impetus of the music carries along the action at a
+tremendous speed; the moments of relief occur just when relief is
+necessary, and never retard the motion; the climaxes are piled up with
+incredible strength and mastery, and have an emotional effect as
+powerful as anything in "Fidelio" and equal to anything in Wagner's
+music-dramas; and most stupendous of all is the finale, with its
+tragic blending of the grotesque and the terrible. Or, if one
+considers detail, in no other opera do the characters depict
+themselves in every phrase they utter as they do in "Don Giovanni."
+The songs stamp Mozart as the greatest song-writer who has lived, with
+the exception of Handel, whose opera songs are immeasurably beyond all
+others save Mozart's, and a little beyond them. The mere musicianship
+is as consummate as Bach's, for, like Bach, Mozart possessed that
+facility which is fatal to many men, but combined with it a high
+sincerity, a greedy thirst for the beautiful, and an emotional force
+that prevented it being fatal to him. For delicacy, subtlety, due
+brilliancy, and strength, the orchestral colouring cannot be matched.
+And no music is more exclusively its own composer's, has less in it of
+other composers'. Beethoven is Beethoven _plus_ Mozart, Wagner is
+Wagner _plus_ Weber and Beethoven; but from every page of Mozart's
+scores Mozart alone looks at you, with sad laughter in his eyes, and
+unspeakable tenderness, the tenderness of the giants, of Handel, Bach,
+and Beethoven, though perhaps Mozart is tenderest of them all. He
+cannot write a comic scene for a poor clownish Masetto without
+caressing him with a divinely beautiful "Cheto, cheto, mi vo' star,"
+and in presence of death or human distress the strangest, sweetest
+things fall from his lips. And finally, he is always the perfect
+artist without reproach; there is nothing wanting and nothing in
+excess; as he himself said on one occasion, his scores contain exactly
+the right number of notes. This is "Don Giovanni" as one may see it a
+century after its birth: a faultless masterpiece; yet (in England at
+least) it only gets an occasional performance, through the freak of a
+prima donna, who, as the sage critic said of Mozart, is undoubtedly "a
+little _passée_ now."
+
+After all, this is hardly surprising. Perfect art wants perfect
+listeners, and just now we are much too eager for excitement, too
+impatient of mere beauty, to listen perfectly to perfect music. And
+there are other reasons why "Don Giovanni" should not appeal to this
+generation. For many years it was the sport of the prima donna, and
+conductors and singers conspired to load it with traditional
+Costamongery, until at last the "Don Giovanni" we knew became an
+entirely different thing from the "Don Giovanni" of Mozart's thought.
+Not Giovanni but Zerlina was the principal figure; the climax of the
+drama was not the final Statue scene, but "Batti, batti"; Leporello's
+part was exaggerated until the Statue scene became a pantomime affair
+with Leporello playing pantaloon against Giovanni's clown. Such an
+opera could interest none but an Elephant and Castle audience, and
+probably only the beauty of the music prevented it reaching the
+Elephant and Castle long ago. So low had "Don Giovanni" fallen, when,
+quite recently, serious artists like Maurel tried to take it more
+seriously and restore it to its rightful place. Only, unfortunately,
+instead of brushing away traditions and going back to the vital
+conception of Mozart, they sought to modernise it, to convert it into
+an early Wagner music-drama. The result may be seen in any performance
+at Covent Garden. The thing becomes a hodge-podge, a mixture of drama,
+melodrama, the circus, the pantomime, with a strong flavouring of
+blatherskite. The opera _is_ largely pantomime--it was intended by
+Mozart to be pantomime; and the only possible way of doing it
+effectively is to accept the pantomime frankly, but to play it with
+such force and sincerity that it is not felt to be pantomime. And the
+real finale should be sung afterwards. Probably many people would go
+off to catch their trains. But, after all, Mozart wrote for those who
+have no trains to catch when this masterpiece, the masterpiece of
+Italian opera, is sung as he intended it to be sung.
+
+The Requiem is a very different work. There is plenty of the gaiety
+and sunshine of life in "Don Giovanni." The Requiem is steeped in
+sadness and gloom, with rare moments of fiery exaltation, or
+hysterical despair; at times beauty has been almost--almost, but never
+quite--driven from Mozart's thought by the anguish that tormented him
+as he wrote. While speaking of Bach's "Matthew" Passion, I have said
+it "was an appeal, of a force and poignancy paralleled only in the
+Ninth symphony, to the emotional side of man's nature ... the æsthetic
+qualities are subordinated to the utterance of an overwhelming
+emotion." Had I said "deliberately subordinated" I should have
+indicated the main difference as well as the main likeness between
+Bach's masterwork and Mozart's. The æsthetic qualities are
+subordinated to the expression of an overwhelming emotion in the
+Requiem, but not deliberately: unconsciously rather, perhaps even
+against Mozart's will. Bach set out with the intention of using his
+art to communicate a certain feeling to his listeners; Mozart, when he
+accepted the order for a Requiem from that mysterious messenger clad
+in grey, thought only of creating a beautiful thing. But he had lately
+found, to his great sorrow, that his ways were not the world's ways,
+and fraught with even graver consequences was the world's discovery
+that its ways were not Mozart's. Finding all attempts to turn him from
+his ways fruitless, the world fought him with contempt, ostracism,
+and starvation for weapons; and he lacked strength for the struggle.
+There had been a time when he could retire within himself and live in
+an ideal world of Don Giovannis and Figaros. But now body as well as
+spirit was over-wearied; spirit and body were not only tired but
+diseased; and when he commenced to work at the Requiem the time was
+past for making beautiful things, for his mind was preoccupied with
+death and the horror of death--the taste of death was already in his
+mouth. Had death come to him as to other men, he might have met it as
+other men do, heroically, or at least calmly, without loss of dignity.
+But it came to him coloured and made fearful by wild imaginings, and
+was less a thought than an unthinkable horror. He believed he had been
+poisoned, and Count Walsegg's grey-clad messenger seemed a messenger
+sent from another world to warn him of the approaching finish. As he
+said, he wrote the Requiem for himself. In it we find none of the
+sunshine and laughter of "Don Giovanni," but only a painfully pathetic
+record of Mozart's misery, his despair, and his terror. It is indeed a
+stupendous piece of art, and much of it surpassingly beautiful; but
+the absorbing interest of it will always be that it is a "human
+document," an autobiographical fragment, the most touching
+autobiography ever penned.
+
+The pervading note of the whole work is struck at the beginning of
+the first number. Had Mozart seen death as Handel and Bach saw it, as
+the only beautiful completion of life, or even as the last opportunity
+given to men to meet a tremendous reality and not be found wanting, he
+might have written a sweetly breathed prayer for eternal rest, like
+the final chorus of the "Matthew" Passion, or given us something equal
+or almost equal to the austere grandeur of the Dead March in Saul. But
+he saw death differently, and in the opening bar of the "Requiem
+æternam" we have only sullen gloom and foreboding, deadly fear
+begotten of actual foreknowledge of things to come. The discord at the
+fifth bar seems to have given him the relief gained by cutting oneself
+when in severe pain; and how intense Mozart's pain was may be
+estimated by the vigour of the reaction when the reaction comes; for
+though the "Te decet hymnus" is like a gleam of sweet sunshine on
+black waters, the melody is immediately snatched up, as it were, and,
+by the furious energy of the accompaniment, powerful harmonic
+progressions, and movement of the inner parts (note the tenor
+ascending to the high G on "orationem"), made expressive of abnormal
+glowing ecstasy. To know Mozart's mood when he wrote the Requiem is to
+have the key to the "Kyrie." His artistic sense compelled him to veil
+the acuteness of his agony in the strict form of a regular fugue; but
+here, as everywhere else in the Requiem, feeling triumphs over the
+artistic sense; and by a chromatic change, of which none but a Mozart
+or a Bach would have dreamed, the inexpressive formality of the
+counter-subject is altered into a passionate appeal for mercy. In no
+other work of Mozart known to me does he ever become hysterical, and
+in the Requiem only once, towards the end of this number, where the
+sopranos are whirled up to the high A, and tenors and altos strengthen
+the rhythm; and even here the pause, followed by that scholastic
+cadence, affords a sense of recovered balance, though we should
+observe that the raucous final chord with the third omitted is in
+keeping with the colour of the whole number, and not dragged in as a
+mere display of pedantic knowledge. The "Dies Iræ" is magnificent
+music, but the effect is enormously intensified by Mozart first (in
+the "Kyrie") making us guess at the picture by the agitation of mind
+into which it throws him, and then suddenly opening the curtain and
+letting us view for ourselves the lurid splendours; and surely no more
+awful picture of the Judgment was ever painted than we have here in
+the "Dies Iræ," "Tuba minim," "Rex tremendæ," and the "Confutatis."
+The method of showing the obverse of the medal first, and then
+astonishing us with the sudden magnificence of the other side, is an
+old one, and was an old one even in Mozart's time, but he uses it with
+supreme mastery, and results that have never been equalled. The most
+astonishing part of the "Confutatis" is the prayer at the finish,
+where strange cadence upon cadence falls on the ear like a long-drawn
+sigh, and the last, longer drawn than the rest, "gere curam mei
+finis," followed by a hushed pause, is indeed awful as the silence of
+the finish. Quite as great is the effect of the same kind in the
+"Agnus Dei," which was either written by Mozart, or by Sussmayer with
+Mozart's spirit looking over him. Written by Mozart, the Requiem
+necessarily abounds in tender touches: the trebles at "Dona eis"
+immediately after their first entry; the altos at the same words
+towards the end of the number, and at the twenty-eighth bar of the
+"Kyrie"; the first part of the "Hostias," the "Agnus Dei," the
+wonderful "Ne me perdas" in the "Recordare." And if one wants sheer
+strength and majesty, turn to the fugue on "Quam olim Abrahæ," or the
+C natural of the basses in the "Sanctus." But the prevailing mood is
+one of depressing sadness, which would become intolerable by reason of
+its monotony were it possible to listen to the Requiem as a work of
+art merely, and not as the tearful confessions of one of the most
+beautiful spirits ever born into the world.
+
+
+
+
+"FIDELIO"
+
+
+As an enthusiastic lover of "Fidelio" I may perhaps be permitted to
+put one or two questions to certain other of its lovers. Is it an
+opera at all?--does it not consist of one wonderfully touching
+situation, padded out before and behind,--before with some
+particularly fatuous reminiscences of the old comedy of intrigue,
+behind with some purely formal business and a pompous final chorus?
+"Fidelio" exists by reason of that one tremendous scene: there is
+nothing else dramatic in it: however fine the music is, one cannot
+forget that the libretto is fustian and superfluous nonsense. Had
+Beethoven possessed the slightest genius for opera, had he possessed
+anything like Mozart's dramatic instinct (and of course his own
+determination to touch nothing but fitting subjects), he would have
+felt that no meaner story than the "Flying Dutchman" would serve as an
+opportunity to say all that was aroused in his heart and in his mind
+by the tale of Leonora. As he had no genius whatever for opera, no
+sense of the dramatic in life, the tale of Leonora seemed to him good
+enough; and, after all, in its essence it is the same as the tale of
+Senta. The Dutchman himself happens to be more interesting than
+Florestan because of his weird fate; but he is no more the principal
+character in Wagner's opera than Florestan is the principal character
+in Beethoven's opera. The principal character in each case is the
+woman who takes her fate into her own hands and fearlessly chances
+every risk for the sake of the man she loves. And just as Wagner wrote
+the best passage in the "Dutchman" for the moment when Senta promises
+to be faithful through life and death, so Beethoven in the prison
+scene of "Fidelio" wrote as tremendous a passage as even he ever
+conceived for the moment when Leonora makes up her mind at all costs
+to save the life of the wretched prisoner whose grave she is helping
+to dig. The tale is simple enough--there is scarcely enough of it to
+call a tale. Leonora's husband, Florestan, has somehow fallen into the
+power of his enemy Pizarro, who imprisons him and then says he is
+dead. Leonora disbelieves this, and, disguising herself as a boy and
+taking the name of Fidelio, hires herself as an assistant to Rocco,
+the jailer of the fortress in which Florestan is confined. At that
+time the news arrives that an envoy of the king is coming to see that
+no injustice is being done by Pizarro. Pizarro has been hoping to
+starve Florestan slowly to death; but now he sees the necessity of
+more rapid action. He therefore tells Rocco to dig a grave in
+Florestan's cell, and he himself will do the necessary murder. This
+brings about the great prison scene. Florestan lies asleep in a
+corner; Leonora is not sure whether she is helping to dig his grave or
+the grave of some other unlucky wretch; but while she works she takes
+her resolution--whoever he may be, she will risk all consequences and
+save him. Pizarro arrives, and is about to kill Florestan, when
+Leonora presents a pistol to his head; and, before he has quite had
+time to recover, a trumpet call is heard, signalling the arrival of
+the envoy. Pizarro knows the game is up, and Florestan that his wife
+has saved him. This, I declare, is the only dramatic scene in the
+play--here the thing ends: excepting it, there is no real incident.
+The business at the beginning, about the jailer's daughter refusing to
+have anything more to do with her former sweetheart, and falling in
+love with the supposed Fidelio, is merely silly; Rocco's song,
+elegantly translated in one edition, "Life is nothing without
+money"--Heaven knows whether it was intended to be humorous--is
+stupid; Pizarro's stage-villainous song of vengeance is unnecessary;
+the arrangement of the crime is a worry. These, and in fact all that
+comes before the great scene, are entirely superfluous, the purest
+piffle, very tiresome. Most exasperating of all is the stupid
+dialogue, which makes one hope that the man who wrote it died a
+painful, lingering death. But, in spite of it all, Beethoven, by
+writing some very beautiful music in the first act, and by rising to
+an astonishing height in the prison scene and the succeeding duet, has
+created one of the wonders of the music-world.
+
+Being a glorification of woman--German woman, although Leonora was
+presumably Spanish--"Fidelio" has inevitably become in Germany the
+haus-frau's opera. Probably there is not a haus-frau who faithfully
+cooks her husband's dinner, washes for him, blacks his boots, and
+would even brush his clothes did he ever think that necessary, who
+does not see herself reflected in Leonora; probably every German
+householder either longs to possess her or believes that he does
+possess her. Consequently, just as Mozart's "Don Giovanni" became the
+playground of the Italian prima donna, so has "Fidelio" become the
+playground of that terrible apparition, the Wifely Woman Artist, the
+singer with no voice, nor beauty, nor manners, but with a high
+character for correct morality, and a pressure of sentimentality that
+would move a traction-engine. I remember seeing it played a few years
+ago, and can never forget a Leonora of sixteen stones, steadily
+singing out of tune, in the first act professing with profuse
+perspiration her devotion to her husband (whose weight was rather less
+than half hers), and in the second act nearly crushing the poor
+gentleman by throwing herself on him to show him that she was for ever
+his. A recent performance at Covent Garden, arranged specially, I
+understand, for Ternina, was not nearly so bad as that; but still
+Ternina scared me horribly with the enormous force of her Wifely
+Ardour. It may be that German women are more demonstrative than
+English women in public; but, for my poor part, too much public
+affection between man and wife always strikes me as a little false.
+Besides, the grand characteristic of Leonora is not that she loves her
+husband--lots of women do that, and manage to love other people's
+husbands also--but that, driven at first by affection and afterwards
+by purely human compassion, she is capable of rising to the heroic
+point of doing in life what she feels she must do. Of course she may
+have been an abnormal combination of the Wifely Woman with the heroic
+woman; but one cannot help thinking that probably she was not--that
+however strong her affection for Florestan, she would no sooner get
+him home than she would ask him how he came to be such a fool as to
+get into Pizarro's clutches. Anyhow, Ternina's conception of Leonora
+as a mixture of the contemptible will-less German haus-frau with the
+strong-willed woman of action, was to me a mixture of contradictions.
+Yet, despite all these things, the opera made the deep impression it
+does and always will make.
+
+That impression is due entirely to the music and not to the drama.
+Dramatic music, in the sense that Mozart's music, and Wagner's, is
+dramatic, it is not. There is not the slightest attempt at
+characterisation--not even such small characterisation as Mozart
+secured in his "La ci darem," with Zerlina's little fluttering,
+agitated phrases. Nor, in the lighter portions, is there a trace of
+Mozart's divine intoxicating laughter, of the sweet sad laugh with
+which he met the griefs life brought him. There is none of Mozart's
+sunlight, his delicious, fresh, early morning sunlight, in Beethoven's
+music; when he wrote such a number as the first duet, intended to be
+gracefully semi-humorous, he was merely heavy, clumsy, dull. But when
+the worst has been said, when one has writhed under the recollection
+of an adipose prima donna fooling with bear-like skittishness a German
+tenor whose figure and face bewray the lager habit, when one has
+shuddered to remember the long-winded idiotic dialogue, the fact
+remains firmly set in one's mind that one has stood before a gigantic
+work of art--a work whose every defect is redeemed by its overwhelming
+power and beauty and pathos. There has never been, nor does it seem
+possible there ever will be, a finer scene written than the dungeon
+scene. It begins with the low, soft, throbbing of the strings, then
+there is the sinister thunderous roll of the double basses; then the
+old man quietly tells Leonora to hurry on with the digging of the
+grave, and Leonora replies (against that wondrous phrase of the
+oboes). After that, the old man continues to grumble; the dull
+threatening thunder of the basses continues; and Leonora, half
+terrified, tries to see whether the sleeping prisoner is her husband.
+Then abruptly her courage rises; her short broken phrases are
+abandoned; and to a great sweeping melody she declares that, whoever
+the prisoner may be, she will free him. These twenty bars are as
+great music as anything in the world: they even leave Senta's
+declaration in the "Dutchman" far behind; they are at once triumphant
+and charged with a pathos nearly unendurable in its intensity. The
+scene ends with a strange hushed unison passage like some unearthly
+chant: it is the lull before the breaking of the storm. The entry of
+Pizarro and the pistol business are by no means done as Wagner or
+Mozart would have done them. The music is always excellent and
+sometimes great, but persistently symphonic and not dramatic in
+character. However, it serves; and the strength of the situation
+carries one on until the trumpet call is heard, and then we get a
+wonderful tune such as neither Mozart nor Wagner could have written--a
+tune that is sheer Beethoven. The finale of the scene is neither here
+nor there; but in the duet between Leonora and Florestan we have again
+pure Beethoven. There is one passage--it begins at bar 32--which is
+the expression of the very soul of the composer; one feels that if it
+had not come his heart must have burst. I have neither space nor
+inclination to rehearse all the splendours of the opera, but may
+remind the reader of Florestan's song in the dungeon, Leonora's
+address to Hope, and the hundred other fine things spread over it. It
+is symphonic, not dramatic, music; but it is at times unspeakably
+pathetic, at times full of radiant strength, and always an absolutely
+truthful utterance of sheer human emotion. Wagner hit exactly the word
+when he spoke of the _truthful_ Beethoven: here is no pose, no mere
+tone-weaving, but the precise and most poignant expression of the
+logical course taken by the human passions.
+
+
+
+
+SCHUBERT
+
+
+Excepting during his lifetime and for a period of some thirty years
+after his death, Schubert cannot be said to have been neglected; and
+last year there was quite an epidemic of concerts to celebrate the
+hundredth anniversary of his birth. Centenary celebrations are often a
+little disconcerting. They remind one that a composer has been dead
+either a much shorter or a much longer time than one supposed; and one
+gets down Riemann's "Musical Dictionary" and realises with a sigh that
+the human memory is treacherous. Who, for instance, that is familiar
+with Schubert's music can easily believe that it is a hundred years
+since the composer was born and seventy since he died? It is as
+startling to find him, as one might say, one of the ancients as it is
+to remember that Spohr lived until comparatively recent times; for
+whereas Spohr's music is already older than Beethoven's, older than
+Mozart's, in many respects quite as old as Haydn's, much of Schubert's
+is as modern as Wagner's, and more modern than a great deal that was
+written yesterday. This modernity will, I fancy, be readily admitted
+by everyone; and it is the only one quality of Schubert's music which
+any two competent people will agree to admit. Liszt had the highest
+admiration for everything he wrote; Wagner admired the songs, but
+wondered at Liszt's acceptance of the chamber and orchestral music.
+Sir George Grove outdoes Liszt in his Schubert worship; and an
+astonishing genius lately rushed in, as his kind always does, where
+Sir George would fear to tread, boldly, blatantly asserting that
+Schubert is "the greatest musical genius that the Western world has
+yet produced." On the other hand, Mr. G. Bernard Shaw out-Wagners
+Wagner in denunciation, and declares the C symphony childish, inept,
+mere Rossini badly done. Now, I can understand Sir George Grove's
+enthusiasm; for Sir George to a large extent discovered Schubert; and
+disinterested art-lovers always become unduly excited about any art
+they have discovered: for example, see how excited Wagner became about
+his own music, how rapt Mr. Dolmetsch is in much of the old music. But
+I can understand Wagner's attitude no better than I can the attitude
+of Mr. Shaw. I should like to have met Wagner and have said to him,
+"My dear Richard, this disparaging tone is not good enough: where did
+you get the introduction to 'The Valkyrie'?--didn't that long tremolo
+D and the figure in the bass both come out of 'The Erl-king'? has your
+Spear theme nothing in common with the last line but one of 'The
+Wanderer'? or--if it is only the instrumental music you object to--did
+you learn nothing for the third act of 'The Valkyrie' from the
+working-out of the Unfinished Symphony? did you know that Schubert had
+used your Mime theme in a quartet before you? do you know that I could
+mention a hundred things you borrowed from Schubert? Go to, Richard:
+be fair." Having extinguished Richard thus, and made his utter
+discomfiture doubly certain by handing him a list of the hundred
+instances, I should turn to Mr. Shaw and say, "My good G.B.S., you
+understand a good deal about politics and political economy,
+Socialism, and Fabians, painting and actors [and so on, with untrue
+and ill-natured remarks _ad lib_.], but evidently you understand very
+little about Schubert. That 'Rossini crescendo' is as tragic a piece
+of music as ever was written." Yet, after dismissing the twain in this
+friendly manner, I should have an uneasy feeling that there was some
+good reason for their lack of enthusiasm for Schubert. The very fact
+of there being such wide disagreement about the value of music that is
+now so familiar to us all, points to some weakness in it which some of
+us feel less than others; and I, poor unhappy mortal, who in my
+unexcited moments neither place Schubert among the highest gods, like
+Liszt and Sir George Grove, nor damn him cordially, like Wagner and
+Mr. Shaw, cannot help perceiving that along with much that is
+magnificently strong, distinguished, and beautiful in his music, there
+is much that is pitiably weak, and worse than commonplace. The music
+is like the man--the oddest combination of greatness and smallness
+that the world has seen. Like Wagner and Beethoven, Schubert was
+strong enough to refuse to earn an honest living; yet he yielded
+miserably to publishers when discussing the number of halfpence he
+should receive for a dozen songs. He had energy enough to go on
+writing operas, but apparently not intelligence to see that his
+librettos were worth setting, or to ensure that anything should come
+of them when they were set. He thought, rightly or wrongly, that he
+needed more counterpoint, yet continued to compose symphonies and
+masses without it, vaguely intending to the very end to take lessons
+from a sound teacher. He had spirit enough to fall in love (so far as
+stories may be relied on), but not to make the lady promise to marry
+him, nor yet resolutely to cure himself of his affliction. He had
+courage to face the truth, as he saw it, and he found life bitter, and
+not worth enduring; yet he could not renounce it, like Beethoven, nor
+end it as others have done. As in actual life, so in his music; having
+once started anything, he seemed quite unable to make up his mind to
+fetch it to a conclusion. He was like a man who lets himself roll down
+a hill because it is easier to keep on rolling than to stop. He
+repeats his melodies interminably, and then draws a double bar and
+sets down the two fatal dots which mean that all has to be played
+again. If the repeat had not been a favourite resort of lazy composers
+before his time he would have invented it, not because he was lazy,
+but because he wanted to go on and could not afford infinite
+music-paper. Hence his music at its worst is the merest drivel ever
+set down by a great composer; hence at anything but its best it lacks
+concentrated passion and dramatic intensity; more than any other
+composer's it has one prevailing note, a note of deepest melancholy;
+and therefore, when a few pieces are known, most of the rest seem
+barren of what is wanted by those who seek chiefly in music the
+expression of all the human passions.
+
+Of his lengthiness, his discursiveness, Schubert might possibly have
+been cured, but not of his melancholy: it is the very essence of his
+music, as it was of his being. "The Wanderer" is his typical song: he
+was himself the wanderer, straying disconsolately, helplessly,
+hopelessly through a strange, chilly, unreal world, singing the
+saddest and sometimes the sweetest songs that ever entered the ears of
+men. That his home and his happiness lay close at hand counts for
+nothing; for he did not and could not know that he was the voice of
+the eighteenth century, worn out and keenly sensible of the futility
+of the purely intellectual life. Even had he arrived at a
+consciousness of the truth that the cure for his despair lay in
+throwing over the antiquated forms, modes, and ideas of the eighteenth
+century and living a nineteenth century life, free and conscienceless
+in nature's way, he would have been little better off; for the
+tendencies of many generations remained strong in him; and besides,
+had he the physical energy for a free, buoyant, joyous existence, was
+he not physiologically unfit for happiness? He lived with an
+ever-present consciousness of his impotence to satisfy his deepest
+needs. He was even destitute of that sense of the immeasurable good to
+come which of old time found expression in the fiction of a personal
+immortality, and in the nineteenth century in the complacent
+acceptance of full and vigorous life, with death as a noble and
+fitting close. Life and death alike were tragic, because hopeless, to
+Schubert. His career, if career it can be called, is infinitely
+touching. His helplessness moves one to pity, odd though it seems that
+one in some ways so strong should also in so many ways be so weak; and
+his death was as touching as his life. Of all the composers he met
+death with least heroism. Mozart, it is true, shrieked hysterically;
+but death to his diseased mind was merely an indescribable horror; and
+the fact of his hysteria proves his revolt against fate. Beethoven,
+during a surgical operation shortly before the end, saw the stream of
+water and blood flowing from him, and found courage to say, "Better
+from the belly than the pen;" and as he lay dying and a thunderstorm
+broke above the house, he threatened it with his clenched fist.
+Schubert learnt that he was to die, and turned his face to the wall
+and did not speak again. It is hard to say whether his music was
+sadder when he sang of death than when he sang of life. Even in his
+rare moments of good spirits one catches stray echoes of his
+prevailing note, and realises how completely his despair dominated
+him. He could not sing of love or fighting or of the splendours of
+nature without betraying his deep conviction of the futility of all
+created things. It is characteristic that his major melodies should
+often be as sad and wailing as his minor, and that his scherzos and
+other movements, in which he has deliberately set out to be
+light-hearted, should often be ponderous and without the nervous
+energy he manifests when he gives his familiar feelings free play.
+
+Despite its incessant plaintive accent, his music is saved by the
+endless flow of melody, often lovely, generally characteristic, though
+sometimes common, in which Schubert continually expressed anew his one
+mood; and he was placed among the great ones by the miraculous
+facility he possessed of extemporising frequent passages of
+extraordinary power and bigness. At least half of his songs are
+poor--for a composer capable of rising to such heights; but of the
+remainder at least half are nearly equal to any songs in the world for
+sweetness, strength, and accurate expressiveness, while a few approach
+so close to Handel's and Mozart's that affection for the composer
+presses one hard to put them on the same level. But, compared with
+those high standards, Schubert, even at his best, is unmistakably felt
+to be second-rate, while his average--always comparing it with the
+highest--cannot truly be said to be more than fourth-rate. That he
+stands far above Mendelssohn and Schumann, and perhaps a little above
+Weber, almost goes without saying; for those composers have no more of
+the great style, the style of Handel and Mozart, and Bach and
+Beethoven at their finest, than Schubert, and they lack the lovely
+irresistibly moving melody and the bigness. But it must be recognised
+that Schubert never rose to a style of sustained grandeur and dignity;
+he was always colloquial, paying in this the penalty for the extreme
+facility with which he composed ("I compose every morning, and when I
+have finished one thing I commence something fresh"). Compose is
+scarcely the word to use: he never composed in the ordinary sense of
+the word; he extemporised on paper. Even when he re-wrote a song, it
+meant little more than that, dissatisfied with his treatment of a
+theme, he tried again. He never built as, for instance, Bach and
+Beethoven built, carefully working out this detail, lengthening this
+portion, shearing away that, evolving part from part so that in the
+end the whole composition became a complete organism. There is none of
+the logic in his work that we find in the works of the tip-top men,
+none of the perfect finish; but, on the contrary, a very considerable
+degree of looseness, if not of actual incoherence, and many marks of
+the tool and a good deal of the scaffolding. But, in spite of it all,
+the greatness of many of his movements seems to me indisputable. In a
+notice of "The Valkyrie," Mr. Hichens once very happily spoke of the
+"earth-bigness" of some of the music, and this is the bigness I find
+in Schubert at his best and strongest. When he depicts the workings of
+nature--the wind roaring through the woods, the storm above the
+convent roof, the flash of the lightning, the thunderbolt--he does not
+accomplish it with the wonderful point and accuracy of Weber, nor with
+the ethereal delicacy of Purcell, but with a breadth, a sympathy with
+the passion of nature, that no other composer save Wagner has ever
+attained to. He views natural phenomena through a human temperament,
+and so infuses human emotion into natural phenomena, as Wagner does in
+"The Valkyrie" and "Siegfried." The rapidly repeated note, now rising
+to a roar and now falling to a subdued murmur, in "The Erl-king" was
+an entirely new thing in music; and in "The Wanderer" piano fantasia,
+the working-out of the Unfinished symphony, and even in some of the
+chamber music, he invented things as fresh and as astounding. And when
+he is simply expressing himself, as at the beginning of the
+Unfinished, and in the first and last movements of the big C symphony,
+he often does it on the same large scale. The second subject of the C
+symphony finale, with its four thumps, seems to me to become in its
+development, and especially in the coda, all but as stupendous an
+expression of terror as the music in the last scene of "Don Giovanni,"
+where Leporello describes the statue knocking at the door. In short,
+when I remember Schubert's grandest passages, and the unspeakable
+tenderness of so many of his melodies, it is hard to resist the
+temptation to cancel all the criticism I have written and to follow
+Sir George Grove in placing Schubert close to Beethoven.
+
+
+
+
+WEBER AND WAGNER
+
+
+There are critics, I suppose, prepared to insist that Weber, like
+Mozart, is a little _passé_ now. And it is true that no composer, save
+Mozart, is at once so widely accepted and so seldom heard; for even
+Bach is more frequently played and less generally praised. At rare
+intervals Richter, Levi, or Mottl play his overtures; the pieces for
+piano and orchestra are occasionally dragged out to display the
+prowess of a Paderewski or a Sauer; and one or another of the piano
+sonatas sometimes finds its way into a Popular Concert programme. But
+the pieces thus made familiar to the public may be counted on one's
+ten fingers; and the operas are scarcely sung at all, though they
+contain the finest music that Weber wrote. The composers who have
+lived since Weber, even if they differed on every other subject and
+did not agree as to the value of his instrumental music, united to
+sing a common song in praise of the operas. Indeed, so enthusiastic
+were they, that after listening to them anyone who does not know his
+Weber well may easily experience a certain disappointment on looking
+carefully for the first time at the scores of "Der Freischütz,"
+"Oberon," and "Euryanthe"; and it is perhaps because they have
+experienced that disappointment, that some critics whose opinions are
+worth considering have come to think that a faith in Weber is nothing
+more than a part of the creed learned by every honest Wagnerite at the
+Master's knee. But it need be nothing so foolish, so baseless If you
+look, and look rightly, for the right thing in Weber's music,
+disappointment is impossible; though I admit that the man who
+professes to find there the great qualities he finds in Mozart,
+Beethoven, or any of the giants, must be in a very sad case. Grandeur,
+pure beauty, and high expressiveness are alike wanting. You look as
+vainly for such touches as the divine last dozen bars "Or sai chi
+l'onore" in "Don Giovanni," or the deep emotion of the sobbing bass at
+"the first fruits of them that sleep" in "I know that my Redeemer
+liveth," as for the stately splendour of "Come and thank Him" in the
+"Christmas Oratorio," or the passion of "Tristan." His music never
+develops in step with the movement of the drama he treats: if he
+writes a tragic scene, he is apt to commence with a scream; and if he
+is not at his best, then the scream may degenerate into a whimper
+before the moment for the climax has arrived. Like Spohr, with whom he
+had much in common, despite the difference between his mercurial
+temperament and the pedagogic gravity of the composer of "The Last
+Judgment," he set great store upon his learning, and was fond of
+trivial themes that admitted of obvious contrapuntal treatment. Even
+when he avoided that failing, his music is often uncouth and
+ponderous, while on its surface lies a superfluous, highly-coloured
+froth. The basses move with leaden-footed reluctance; the melodies
+consist largely of ineffective arpeggios on long-drawn chords; the
+embroidery seems greatly in excess of modest needs. All this may be
+conceded without affecting Weber's claim to a place amongst the
+composers; for that claim is supported in a lesser degree by the gifts
+which he shared, even if his share was small, with the greater masters
+of music, than by his miraculous power of vividly drawing and painting
+in music the things that kindled his imagination. Drawing and
+painting, I say; for whereas the other musicians sang the emotions
+that they experienced, Weber's music gives you the impression that he
+depicted the things he saw, that melody and harmony were to him as
+lines and colours to the painter. He is first, and perhaps greatest,
+of all the musicians who have attempted landscape; and that froth of
+seemingly superfluous colour and excess of melodic embroidery, instead
+of being in excess and superfluous, are the very essence of his music.
+Being a factor of the Romantic movement, that mighty rebellion against
+the tyranny of a world of footrules and ledgers, he lived and worked
+in a world where two and two might make five or seven or any number
+you pleased, and where footrules were unknown; he took small interest
+in drama taken out of the lives of ordinary men and enacted amidst
+everyday surroundings; his imagination lit up only when he thought of
+haunted glens and ghouls and evil spirits, the fantastic world and
+life that goes on underneath the ocean, or of men or women held by
+ghastly spells. Hence his operas are not so much musical dramas as
+series of tableaux, gorgeous glowing pictures of unheard-of things; in
+them we must expect only to find the elfish, the fantastic, the wild
+and weird and grotesquely horrible; and to look for drama, captivating
+loveliness, and emotional utterance, is to look for qualities which
+Weber did not try to attain, or only in a small measure and not very
+successfully. And if we consider carefully the remarks of the best
+critics amongst the later masters, Berlioz and Wagner, we can see that
+they knew Weber had not attained these high qualities,--that what they
+grew enthusiastic over was his astonishing pictorial gift, shown,
+first, in the pictures his imagination presented to him, and second,
+in the way he projected those pictures on to the music-paper before
+him, using the common musician's devices of his day to suggest line,
+colour, space, and atmosphere.
+
+The precise provocation of this essay was a certain performance of
+"Lohengrin." During the first act the drama proceeded with charming,
+almost Mozartean, smoothness; and I was surprised to find that the
+smoother it went the more irresistibly the music reminded me of Weber,
+until I remembered that "Lohengrin" is Wagner's most Weberish opera,
+and that in his youth Wagner heard Weber sung, not as he is sung
+now--that is, like an early Wagner music-drama--but as Weber intended
+it to be sung, like a later Mozart opera. For Weber stood very near to
+Mozart, modern as he often seems. He was born before Mozart died; he
+worshipped him, and absolutely refused to speak to Salieri because
+Salieri had been Mozart's enemy; and it is easy to see, when once we
+rid ourselves of the idea that he was a rudimentary music-dramatist,
+that in his music he adhered as closely to Mozartean simplicity as his
+very different genius would permit. Perhaps, after all, it is his
+greatest glory that he is the connecting link between Mozart and
+Wagner, between the greatest composer born into the eighteenth century
+and the greatest born into the nineteenth; for the musical-pictorial
+art which he evolved from Mozart's technique was used by Wagner with
+only the slightest modifications in the making of his music-dramas.
+But whereas Weber was a factor in the Romantic movement when it was
+most magnificently unreasonable, Wagner came later, and, though he
+felt the force of the current, it did not carry him into the
+absurdities that weaken--for they do weaken--much of Weber's work.
+Wagner has been described as Weber, as Weber might have become; but
+the truth is that he was Weber's younger brother, who took Weber's art
+and used it to nobler ends with a degree of intellect, dramatic power,
+invention, and passion which Weber did not possess. To Weber the
+scenery was the important thing, and humanity almost seemed to be
+dragged in because the human voice was indispensable; but Wagner,
+going back to Mozart, restored humanity to its proper place, thus
+making his opera into real drama, and kept the fantastic creatures who
+haunted Weber's woods and glens and streams only as emblems of the
+natural forces that war for or against humanity. Above all, he got rid
+of Weber's stage villains--for Samiel is merely the stage villain of
+commerce; and, instead of the dusk and shadow in which Weber's fancy
+loved to roam, he gives us sunlight and the sweet air. "Lohengrin" is
+full of sunlight and freshness; full, too, of a finer mystery than
+ever Weber dreamed of--the mystery with which the most delicate German
+imagination invested the broad rivers that flowed through the black
+forests from some far-away land of unchangeable stillness and beauty,
+some "land of eternal dawn," as Wagner calls it. No more Mozartean
+music is in existence, save Mozart's own, than that first act of
+"Lohengrin," where Wagner, by dint of being Weberish, came nearer to
+Mozart than ever Weber came; for Weber never wrote anything which,
+regarded as absolute music, apart from its emotional significance, or
+the picture it suggests to the inner eye, is so purely beautiful as,
+for instance, the bit of chorus sung after Lohengrin concludes his
+little arrangement with Elsa. Both the first and the second acts are
+full of such melodies, any two of which would prove Wagner to be the
+greatest melody-writer of the century; and those critics who say that
+Verdi is greater because his melodies are more like Mozart's in form,
+would have said, had they lived last century, that Salieri was greater
+than Mozart because Salieri's melodies were more like Hasse's in form.
+Perhaps the last act might be quite as exquisite on the stage, for it
+is even more exquisite in the score; but that we shall not know until
+our operatic singers abandon their vanity and their melodrama, and by
+reading an occasional book, and sometimes going out into the world,
+learn how much they themselves would gain if they always worked with
+artistic sincerity.
+
+
+
+
+ITALIAN OPERA, DEAD AND DYING
+
+
+All art forms are conventions, and all conventions appear ridiculous
+when they are superseded by new ones. The old Italian opera form is
+laughed at to-day as an absurdity by Wagnerians, who see nothing
+absurd in a many-legged monster with a donkey's head uttering deep
+bass curses through a speaking-trumpet; and perhaps to-morrow the
+Wagnerian music-drama and the many-legged monsters will be laughed at
+by the apostles of a new and equally absurd convention. It is
+absolutely the first condition of the existence of an art that one
+shall be prepared to tolerate things ludicrously unlike anything to be
+found in real life; and when (for instance) you have swallowed the
+camel of allowing the heroes and heroines to sing their woes at all,
+it is a little foolish to strain at the gnat of permitting them to
+sing in this rather than in that way, when both ways are alike
+preposterous. It is not, therefore, on the score of its inherent
+absurdity that I should throw brickbats at Italian opera, any more
+than with the female dress of to-day before my eyes I should insist
+that the women who wore the fashions of ten years ago were only fit to
+be incarcerated in a lunatic asylum; knowing, as I do, that the dress
+of ten years ago was not--and could not be--more absurd than the dress
+of to-day. The only reasonable objection that can be brought against
+Italian opera is that when it is sincere it offers what no one wants,
+and that when it tries to offer what everyone wants it is not sincere.
+I cannot quite understand what this means, but will endeavour to
+explain.
+
+Italian opera was moulded to its present form chiefly by Gluck, before
+whose time it was less irrational than it became later. In the
+beginning it was music-drama of a pedantic kind; then it served as the
+opportunity for setting singers to deliver a series of beautiful songs
+for the delectation of an audience largely seated in the wings; and
+finally Gluck, with his immense dramatic instinct and lack of lyrical
+invention, saw that by securing a story worth the telling, and telling
+it well, and inserting songs and concerted pieces only in situations
+where strong feelings demanded expression, and making his songs
+truthful expressions of those feelings, a form might be created which
+would enable him to lever out the best that was in him. Of these three
+periods of opera, the second was the luckiest; for then the form
+entirely fulfilled its purpose. The sole function of the story was to
+provide a motive for song after song; so that no one was scandalised
+or moved to laughter when the death of the hero was re-enacted because
+his death-song pleased the audience, or when the telling of the story
+was interrupted on any other equally ridiculous pretext. The
+characters were the merest puppets, or shadows of puppets; and there
+was no reason why Julius Cæsar should not be a male soprano and sing
+charmingly feminine florid airs. In a word, there was no drama nor
+pretence of drama in the old Italian form; and those who can accept
+it as it is will find in many old Italian writers some perfect music
+of its sort, and in the Italian operas of Handel the divinest songs
+ever written--songs even more divine than Mozart's. But the childish
+delight in lovely melodies and in absolute perfection of vocal art, at
+its highest in the early part of the eighteenth century, died out
+rapidly after 1750; and Italian opera became the medium of the
+vulgarest instead of the most refined kind of ear-tickling. How Gluck
+rebelled, and determined to "reform" the opera stage, and how in
+reforming it he was impelled to a large extent by a desire to find a
+medium through which he could express himself, are matters well enough
+known to everyone nowadays. Like every other teacher, he left no
+disciples; for Mozart, the next master of Italian opera, was a hundred
+thousand miles away from him in intention, in method, and in
+achievement. He commenced where Gluck ended his pre-Reformation
+period; and all his life his intention was to please first, and only
+in the second place to express himself. But so splendid were his
+gifts, so inevitably did he fit the lovely word to the thrilling
+thought, so lucky was he in the libretto of "Don Giovanni" (the
+luckiest libretto ever devised), that he went clean ahead not only of
+Gluck but of Beethoven and every composer who has written opera since.
+
+His operas stand at the parting of the ways. In them we find the
+fullest measure of dramatic truth combined with the most delicious
+ear-tickling. But it is safe to say that Mozart is the only composer
+of Italian operas who ever succeeded in combining the two things thus,
+for in Gluck there is short measure of sheer beauty, and in
+Handel--who used the oldest form--no attempt at drama. Mozart, like
+Gluck, had no disciples--only the second-rate men have disciples; but
+their example, and the tendency which they represented, had a curious
+result. Before their time all opera-writers had been avowed
+ear-ticklers. But after them, and especially after Mozart, the old
+line of composers may be observed to have split up into two lines, the
+one doing the old ear-tickling business, the other trying to express
+dramatic movement, and their thought and feeling, in the old medium.
+The first of these lines has not been broken to this day: Rossini
+came, and, after Rossini, Donizetti, Auber, Bellini, Meyerbeer, and
+the rest; and ear-tickler follows ear-tickler unto this day. The
+second line in its turn quickly split into those who, not content with
+the form, sought to alter it, and those who, quite content with it,
+went gaily on, turning out opera after opera, dealing with modern
+subjects in the old-fashioned way. Of these last Gounod must be
+reckoned the chief; and he began, not where Mozart left off, but with
+the Mozartean method of the "Don Giovanni" period. Now, it is of the
+very essence of the Italian opera of the Gluck-cum-Mozart model that
+it enables a composer to represent moments. The drama does not unfold
+gradually, as it does in the music-play, with its continuous flow of
+music marking the subtlest changes. It unfolds in jerks, each number
+advancing it a stage; so that Gluck never got any appearance of
+continuity whatever, while Mozart got it only by the consummate tact
+with which he arranged his pictures, and by the exciting pace at which
+he passes them before us. The figures seem to move, as in the
+Kinetoscope, or its forerunner the Wheel of Life: the Mozartean opera,
+when most dramatic, is a musical Wheel of Life. Gounod possessed
+neither Mozart's tact nor his fiery energy. Neither was called for in
+"Faust," which is not a drama, but a series of scenes, of crucial
+moments, from a drama; and since the moments were moments charged with
+the one feeling which Gounod appears to have felt very strongly or to
+have had the faculty for expressing, he is here at his very best.
+There was nothing spiritual in love as Gounod knew it--it was purely
+animal, though delicately animal; and Marguerite remains, and will
+remain, as the final expression of the most refined and voluptuous
+form of sensuality. What he had done in "Faust" he attempted to do
+again, with sundry differences, in "Romeo and Juliet"; and here the
+method which had served him so faithfully and so well in "Faust"
+utterly broke down. In "Faust" there were virtually but two
+characters, Faust and Marguerite, while in "Romeo" the stage was
+encumbered with Tybalt, Capulet, Mercutio, Laurent; and what would
+have been Mozart's opportunity was his undoing. He could give none of
+them pungent or characteristic language; they are the merest Italian
+operatic puppets; and it is only when they are off the stage that the
+opera shows any signs of life. In the story of "Romeo" the passion is
+of a far more fiery quality than in that of "Faust"; and whereas in
+"Faust" the passion, once aroused, remains at an even level until the
+finale, where it becomes a little more intense, in "Romeo" it is
+passion which gradually amounts to a tremendous climax in the Balcony
+scene, and in the Bedroom scene is strangely blended with chilly
+forebodings of death. The Mozartean method did not permit Gounod to
+depict these metamorphoses and blendings of feeling. Mozart himself
+would have been hard pressed to do it; and, for want of the only
+method that might have enabled Gounod to do it,--the Wagnerian method
+of continuous development of typical themes,--the unfolding of the
+drama hangs fire in every scene, not a scene ends at a higher pitch of
+feeling than it began. The last scene of all, the scene where a more
+sincere composer would have made his most stupendous effect, demanded
+at least sympathy with emotions for which Gounod at no time showed the
+slightest sympathy. He could give us the erotic fervour with which
+Romeo looks death in the eyes, but the mood preceding and indeed
+leading up to that fervour he could not give us--the mood which finds
+the world barren, ugly, and so repellent that death itself appears
+beautiful by comparison, the mood to which Christianity makes its
+strongest appeal. But it was not the subject which led to Gounod's
+failure in "Romeo and Juliet." He failed in every opera excepting
+"Faust," and he failed because, lacking perfect sincerity and perfect
+knowledge of his own powers, he endeavoured to express feelings he had
+never experienced, in a form which he would have felt at once to be
+inadequate had he experienced them for ever so brief a moment. As
+Gounod failed in "Romeo," and failed in every other opera, so every
+modern composer who tries to treat dramatic subjects in the old
+undramatic form has failed, and will fail. The Italian opera was well
+enough for the purpose it was devised to serve; but as soon as
+composers seek to put strenuous action, elaborately worked-out
+situations, and the gradual growth and change of human passion into
+it, we feel that there must be a lack of artistic sincerity somewhere.
+Italian opera may offer all these things, the things that the age
+wants in its opera, but it can never be sincere in offering them, and
+art is the one place where insincerity is intolerable.
+
+But those who have heard "Romeo and Juliet" may possibly prefer even
+the insincere and unsatisfactory form of Italian opera which it
+represents to the perfectly sincere and perfectly satisfactory kind
+represented, say, by "La Favorita." For, as I said, when Italian opera
+is sincere it offers what no one wants--ear-tickling, and
+ear-tickling, moreover, of a sort which is gone completely out of
+fashion. Donizetti was a genuine descendant of the true line of
+opera-composers upon whom Gluck laid his curse, and he spent his life
+in devising pleasant noises to make his patrons' evenings pass
+agreeably. I cannot believe that anyone ever yet understood what "La
+Favorita" is all about, or that anyone ever wanted to understand. It
+is a series of songs of the inanest and insanest sort, without a
+single expressive bar, or a single tone-pattern which is beautiful
+regarded simply as a pattern. Even the famous "Spirito Gentil" is
+merely a stream of the brackish water that flowed, day and night, from
+Donizetti's pen, only it happens to be a little clearer than usual.
+But those tunes, so feeble and insipid now, pleased the ears of the
+time when Lord Steyne went to the opera for a momentary respite from
+boredom and to recruit his harem from the ballet corps; and Donizetti
+wrote them with no intention of posing as a grand composer, but simply
+as a humble purveyor of sweetmeats. In those days there was no
+music-hall, and the opera had to serve its purpose: hence the slight
+confusion which results in Donizetti, poor soul, being thought a
+better man than Mr. Jacobi is thought at the present time, although
+Mr. Jacobi cannot have less than a thousand times Donizetti's brains
+and invention. Mr. Jacobi's music is capital in its place; but I doubt
+whether it will be revived fifty years hence; and but for the fact
+that Donizetti was an opera-composer--and Mozart and Gluck were
+opera-composers too!--it is pretty certain that not the united prayers
+of Patti, Albani, Melba, and Eames would induce any operatic
+management to resurrect "La Favorita." Even up-to-date ear-tickling is
+not popular now in the opera-house: we go to the music-hall for it;
+and we don't want to pay a guinea at the opera to be tickled in a way
+that arouses no pleasurable sensations. Those terrific tonic and
+dominant passages for the trombones, sounding like the furious sawing
+of logs of wood, only make us laugh; and pretty tootlings of the
+flutes have long been done better, and overdone, elsewhere. Donizetti
+is amongst the dead whom no resurrection awaits.
+
+
+
+
+VERDI YOUNG, AND VERDI YOUNGER
+
+
+And first, for the sake of chronology, Verdi younger. "La Traviata"
+was produced in 1853, says the learned Grove, which I have consulted
+on the point, and "Aïda" not till 1871. And though Verdi was not
+young, for an ordinary man, in 1871, he was very young indeed for the
+composer of "Falstaff" and "Otello"; while in the "Traviata" period
+one can scarcely say he was doing more than cutting his teeth, and not
+his wisdom teeth. One finds it difficult to understand how ever the
+thing came to be tolerated by musicians. Of course the desire to find
+a counter-blast to Wagner has done much for Verdi; but while one can
+understand how Dr. Stanford and others hoped to sweep away "Parsifal"
+with "Otello" and "Falstaff," it is not so easy to see what on earth
+they proposed to do with "Traviata." It won fame and cash for its
+composer in the old days when people went to the opera for lack of the
+music-hall, not yet invented; when Costa still lorded it not over
+living musical London merely, but over all the deceased masters, and
+without compunction added trombones to Mozart's scores, and defiled
+every masterwork he touched with his unspeakable Costamongery; when
+Wagner was either unheard of or regarded as a dangerous lunatic and
+immoral person; and it shows every sign of having been written to
+please the opera-goers of those days. Curiously, the critics of the
+time, in the words of the "Daily Telegraph," saw in "the Bayreuth
+master another form of Bunyan's man with the muck-rake," who "never
+sought to disguise the garbage he found in the Newgate Calendar of
+Mythland, or set his imagination to invent," and they were disgusted,
+also like the "Daily Telegraph," by "approaching incest" in "The
+Valkyrie"; yet they saw no harm whatever in the charming story of
+"Traviata"--the story of a harlot who reforms to the extent of
+retaining only one lover of her many, and who dies of consumption when
+that one's father does his best to drive her out upon the streets
+again by making her give up his son. Far from condemning the story
+myself, I am glad Verdi or his employers had the courage to go boldly
+to Dumas for it; only, let us be cautious how we condemn the morality
+of other opera-stories while praising the immorality of this. Let us
+see how Verdi has handled it. The opera is built after the same hybrid
+model as Gounod's "Romeo"; it is neither frankly the old Italian
+opera, existing for the sake of its songs, nor the later form in which
+the songs exist for the sake of the drama, but an attempt to combine
+the songs with the continuous working out of a dramatic impulse in the
+modern manner. But the attempt is far less successful than in "Romeo";
+and indeed it is a faint-hearted one. Whenever a song occurs, the
+action is suspended, and all the actors save the lucky vocalist of the
+minute are at their wits' end to know where to look, and what to do
+with their hands, feet--their whole persons in fact--and the parts
+they are playing. And the songs are far from being expressive of the
+feeling of the situation that is supposed to call them up. The
+drinking tune in the first act is lively and appropriate enough; and
+not much more can be said against Violetta's song, "Ah! fors' è lui,"
+than that while rather pretty its endless cadenzas are more than
+rather absurd. But in the next act Alfredo sings of the dream of his
+life to a pretty melody until he is interrupted by his sweetheart's
+maid, who tells him that his joy is at an end, and then he howls "O
+mio rimorso" to a march-tune of the rowdiest kind. Equally undramatic,
+untrue, false in feeling, are the sentimental ditties sung by
+Alfredo's father. The last act is best; but I must say that I have
+always found it a tedious business to watch Albani die of consumption.
+At the production of the piece, a soprano who must have looked quite
+as healthy played Violetta, and it is recorded that, when the doctor
+told how rapidly she was wasting away and announced her speedy
+decease, the theatre broke into uproarious merriment. I respect Madame
+Albani too highly to break into uproarious merriment at her pretence
+of consumption; but no one is better pleased when the business is
+over, although the music is more satisfactory here than in any other
+portion of the opera. Anyone who has sat at night with a friend down
+with toothache or cholera will recognise the atmosphere of the
+sickroom at once. But it is not pleasant enough to atone for the rest
+of the opera. For, to sum up, there is small interest in the drama,
+and, on the whole, smaller beauty in the music, of "La Traviata." It
+was made, as bonnets were made, to sell in the fifties; like the
+bonnets sold in the fifties, it is hopelessly out of date now; and it
+wants the inherent vitality that keeps the masterworks alive after the
+fashion in which they were written has passed away. The younger Verdi
+is not, after all, so vast an improvement on Donizetti and Bellini.
+His melodies are too often sadly sentimental, and any freshness with
+which he may have endowed them has long since faded. True, they
+occasionally have a terseness and pungency, a sheer brute force, which
+those other composers never got into their insipid tunes; while, on
+the other hand, Verdi rarely shows his strength without also showing a
+degree of vulgarity from which Bellini and Donizetti were for the most
+part free.
+
+"Aïda" is a different matter, though not so very different a matter.
+Here we have the young Verdi--Verdi in his early prime, for he was
+only fifty-eight; here also we have a story more likely to stir his
+rowdy imagination, if not more susceptible of effective treatment in
+the young Verdi manner. The misfortune is that the book is a very
+excerebrose affair. The drama does not begin until the third act: the
+two first are yawning abysms of sheer dulness. Who wants to _see_
+that Radames loves Aïda, that Amneris, the king's daughter, loves
+Radames, that Aïda, a slave, is the daughter of the King of the
+Ethiopians, that Radames goes on a war expedition against that king,
+beats him and fetches him back a prisoner, that the other king gives
+Radames his daughter in marriage, that Radames, highly honoured, yet
+wishes to goodness he could get out of it somehow? A master of drama
+would begin in the third act, reveal the whole past in a pregnant five
+minutes, and then hold us breathless while we watched to see whether
+Radames would yield to social pressure, marry Amneris, and throw over
+Aïda, or yield to passion, fly with Aïda, and throw over his country.
+All this shows the bad influence of Scribe, who usually spent half his
+books in explaining matters as simple and obvious as the reason for
+eating one's breakfast. Verdi knew this as well as anyone, and used
+the two first acts as opportunities for stage display. For "Aïda" was
+written to please the Khedive of Egypt; and Verdi, always keenly
+commercial, probably knew his man. Now, when the masters of
+opera--Handel, Gluck, Mozart, Weber--got hold of a bad book, they
+nearly invariably "faked" it by getting swiftly over the weak points
+and dwelling on the strong; and, above all, they flooded the whole
+thing with a stream of delicious melody that hypnotises one, and for
+the time puts fault-finding out of the question. Not so Verdi. He
+wrote to please his audience, and he knew that what one can only call
+dark-skinned local colour was still fresh in spite of "L'Africaine,"
+and that the vulgar would find delight in a blaze of glaring banners
+and showy spectacle. So he set the two first acts as they stood,
+trusting to local colour and spectacle to make them popular; and, as
+we know, at the time they were popular, and the populace exalted Verdi
+far above such second-rate fellows as Mozart and Beethoven. But now,
+when local colour has been done to death, and when it has had a
+quarter of a century to bleach out of Verdi's canvases, what remains
+to interest, I do not say to touch, one? Certainly not the expression
+of Radames' or Aïda's love, for here as everywhere Verdi fails to
+communicate any new phase of emotion, but (precisely as he did in
+"Falstaff" and "Otello") has written music which indicates that he had
+some inkling of the emotion of the scene, and could write strains
+calculated not to prevent the scene making its effect. That Verdi has
+no well-spring of original feeling, perhaps explains why he is so poor
+in the scenes with Radames, Amneris, and Aïda. (Also, perhaps, it
+explains why he has fallen back in his best period upon masterpieces
+of dramatic art for his librettos. It is almost outside human
+possibility to add anything to "Falstaff" or "Otello"; and such
+success as Verdi has made with them is the result of writing what is,
+after all, only glorified incidental music--music which accompanies
+the play. To class these accompaniments with the masterpieces of
+original opera is surely the most startling feat of modern musical
+criticism.) Moreover, the plan of writing each scene in a series of
+detached numbers--for, even where song might flow naturally into song,
+the two are quite detached--breaks up the interest as effectually as
+it does in "Traviata"; and the songs do not themselves interest.
+Verdi's music is not based, like the masters', upon the inflexions of
+the human voice under stress of sincere feeling, but upon figures and
+passages easily executed upon certain instruments. The great composers
+strove to make instruments speak in the accent of the human voice,
+while Verdi has always tried to make the voice sound like an
+instrument. His roulades and cadenzas, for example, sound prettier on
+the clarinet than on the voice, as one hears when he sets the one
+chasing the other in "Traviata"; and if only our orchestral players
+would take the trouble to play with the same expression as the stage
+artists sing, we might soon be content to have a repetition (with a
+difference) of the feat of the old-world conductor who, in the absence
+of the hero, played the part upon the harpsichord with universal
+applause. The stock patterns out of which the songs are made soon grow
+old-fashioned, and are superseded by fresh ones: hence Verdi's songs
+are the earliest portions of his operas to wither. There are two
+powerful scenes in "Aïda"--the second of the second act, and the
+final in the last act. The last is certainly terribly repulsive at the
+first blush; but the weird chant of the priestesses in the
+brightly-lit temple, where the workmen are closing the entrance to the
+vault underneath in which we see Radames left to die, contrasts finely
+with the sweet music that accompanies the declaration of Aïda that she
+has hidden there to die with him; and, while guessing at the splendour
+of the music Wagner might have given us here, one may still admit
+Verdi to have succeeded well in a smaller way than Wagner's. But on
+the whole "Aïda" is to be heard once and have done with, for save
+these scenes there is little else in it to engage one. Aïda is alive,
+but Amneris is a hopeless piece of machinery--something between the
+stage conception of a princess and the Lady with the Camellias, any
+difference in modesty being certainly not in favour of Amneris. The
+music very rarely rises above commonness--that commonness which is
+proclaimed in every bar of Verdi's instrumentation, and in his
+shameless Salvation Army rhythms; and it is sometimes (as in the
+Priest's solo with chorus in the last scene of the second act)
+odiously vulgar. "Aïda" is more dramatic than "Traviata," has more of
+Verdi's brusque energy, less of his sentimentality; but it has none of
+the youthful freshness of his latest work. The young Verdi has already
+aged--how long will the old Verdi remain young?
+
+
+
+
+"THE FLYING DUTCHMAN"
+
+
+Wagner took "The Flying Dutchman", "Tannhäuser," and "Lohengrin," in
+three long running steps; from "Lohengrin" he made a flying leap into
+the air, and, after spending some five or six years up there, he
+landed safely on "The Nibelung's Ring." The leap was a prodigious one,
+and you may search history in vain for its like; and still more
+astounding was it if you reckon from the point where the run was
+commenced. "The Flying Dutchman" was avowedly that point. "Die Feen"
+is boyish folly, and "Rienzi" an attempt to out-Meyer Meyerbeer. But
+in the "Dutchman" Wagner sought seriously to realise himself, to find
+the mode of best expressing the best that was in him. That mode he
+found in "The Rheingold" and mastered in "The Valkyrie," with its
+continuous development and transmogrification of themes. And (to
+discard utterly my former metaphor) after steeping oneself for several
+nights in that last great river of melody, wide and deep and clear, it
+is interesting to be led suddenly to its source, and see it bubbling
+up with infinite energy, a good deal of frothing, and some brown mud.
+
+Compared with "The Valkyrie," "The Flying Dutchman" is ill-contrived
+and stagy. It is flecked here and there with vulgarity. It has far
+less of pure beauty; it has only its moments, whereas "The Valkyrie"
+gives hours of unbroken delight. "The Valkyrie" appeals to the primary
+instincts of our nature--instincts and desires that will remain in us
+so long as our nature is human; while for a large part of its effect
+the "Dutchman" trusts to a feeling which is elusive at all times and
+has no permanent hold upon us. Horror of the supernatural is not very
+deeply rooted in us, after all. Modern training tends to eliminate it
+altogether. In later life Goethe could not call up a single delightful
+shiver. There are probably not half a dozen stories in the world from
+which we can get it a second time. The unexpected plays a part in
+producing it, and the same means does not produce it twice with
+anything approaching the same intensity. Hence the Dutchman's phantom
+ship must be more ghost-like at each representation, its blood-red
+sails a bloodier red; and in the long-run, do what the stage
+carpenters will, we coldly sit and compare their work with previous
+ships. True, the music which accompanies its entry is always
+impressively ghastly; yet, while we know this, we are acutely
+conscious that our feeling is more or less a laudable make-believe--a
+make-believe that requires some little effort. Then Heine's notion,
+which seemed so brilliant at first, that the Dutchman could be
+redeemed by the unshakable love of a woman, has now all the
+disagreeable staleness of a decrepit and obvious untruth. It has no
+essential verity to give it validity, it is no symbol of a fact which
+is immediately and deeply felt to be a fact. The condition of
+redemption is entirely arbitrary: it might as reasonably be that the
+Dutchman should find a woman who would not shrink from eating his
+weather-stained hat. What was it to the Dutchman's damned soul if all
+the women in the world swore to love him eternally, so long as he was
+unable to love one of them? The true Wandering Jew is not the unloved
+man, but the man who cannot love, who is destitute of creative emotion
+and cannot build up for himself a world in which to dwell, but must
+needs live in hell--a world that others make, a world where he has no
+place. Wagner knew this, and makes the Dutchman fall in love with
+Senta; and that only leaves the drama more than ever in a muddle. One
+wants a reason for his suddenly being able to love. It cannot be
+because Senta promises to love him till death; for he has had hundreds
+of fruitless love-affairs before, and knows that all women promise
+that, and some of them mean it. Besides, the highest moment of the
+drama ought either to arrive when he feels love dawning in his
+loveless heart, or when he renounces his chance of salvation and sails
+away to eternal torment, believing that Senta made her promise in a
+passing fit of enthusiasm; and at one or other of those moments we
+ought to have some sign that he is redeemed. There is no such sign.
+The phantom ship falls to pieces, and the Dutchman is freed from his
+curse when Senta casts herself into the waves; and the highest moment
+of the whole drama is that in which the dreamy monomaniac, the modern
+Jeanne d'Arc, the real heroine of the opera, wins her own salvation,
+masters the world and makes it her heaven, by taking her fate in both
+hands and setting out to do the thing she feels most strongly impelled
+to do. If the Dutchman's salvation depends on himself, it is evidently
+unnecessary for Senta to be drowned; if it depends upon her, it only
+shows that Wagner, writing fifty years ago, and dazzled by the
+brilliance of a new idea, could not see so clearly as can be seen
+to-day that Senta was her own and not the Dutchman's saviour; and if
+(as it apparently does) it depends upon both Dutchman and Senta, then,
+at a performance at least, one can merely feel that something in the
+drama is very much askew, without knowing precisely what.
+
+In minor respects "The Flying Dutchman" falls considerably short of
+perfection, even of reasonableness. For example, the comings and
+goings of Daland are fearfully stagy. But worst of all are the
+arrangements of the first act. I can go as far as most people in
+accepting stage conventions. If Wagner brought on a four-eyed,
+eight-horned, twenty-seven-legged monster and called it a Jabberwock,
+I should not so much as ask why the legs were not all in pairs, like
+the horns and eyes, so long as I saw in the animal's habits a certain
+congruity, a conformity to what I would willingly regard as
+Jabberwock nature. But who can pretend to believe in a ship which
+comes against the rocks in a storm and anchors there while the captain
+goes ashore to see whether shipwreck is imminent? That the majority of
+opera-goers cannot live near the sea is self-evident, and that few of
+them should ever have seen a shipwreck unavoidable; but surely anyone
+who has crossed the Channel must have a vague suspicion that to place
+this vessel against the rocks in a tempest is the last thing a seaman
+would dream of doing, and that, if he were driven there and managed to
+get ashore, he would call his men after him (if they needed calling),
+and trouble neither about casting anchor nor going aboard again. The
+thing is ludicrously stagy. I suppose that Wagner was too sea-sick to
+observe what happened during his weeks of roughing it in the North
+Sea. But the second scene is admirable. That monotonous drowsy hum of
+the Spinning song is exactly what is needed to put one in the mood for
+sympathising with Senta and her dreams. With the third there is an
+occasional return to the bad stagecraft of Scribe; but there are also
+hints of the simple directness of the later Wagner.
+
+The music is like the stagecraft: now and then simply dramatic, now
+and then stagily undramatic; sometimes rich and splendid, sometimes
+threadbare and vulgar. And by this I do not mean that the
+old-fashioned set pieces are of necessity bad, and the freer portions
+necessarily good. Good and bad may be found in the new and the old
+Wagner alike. That sailor's dance is to me as odious as anything in
+Meyerbeer, and the melody which ends the love-duet is scarcely more
+tolerable. On the other hand, not even in "The Valkyrie" did Wagner
+write more picturesquely weird music than most of the first act. The
+shrilling of the north wind, the roaring of the waves, the creaking of
+cordage, the banging of booms, an uncanny sound in a dismal night at
+sea,--these are suggested with wonderful vividness. At times Wagner
+gives us gobbets of unassimilated Weber and Beethoven, but some
+passages are as original as they are magnificent. The finest bars
+in the work are those in which Senta declares her faith in her
+"mission," and the Dutchman yields himself to unreasoning adoration.
+Other moods came to Wagner, but never again that mood of rapturous
+self-effacement. It is perhaps a young man's mood; certainly it is
+identical with the ecstasy with which one contemplates a perfect piece
+of art, or a life greatly lived; and here it finds splendid
+expression.
+
+
+
+
+"LOHENGRIN"
+
+
+"Lohengrin" has been sung scores of times at Covent Garden in one
+fashion or another; but I declare that we heard something resembling
+the real "Lohengrin" for the first time when the late Mr. Anton Seidl
+crossed the Atlantic to conduct it and other of Wagner's operas. We
+had come to regard it as a pretty opera--an opera full of an
+individual, strange, indefinable sweetness; but Mr. Anton Seidl came
+all the way from New York city to show us how out of sweetness can
+come forth strength. Mr. Seidl was a Wagner conductor of the older
+type, and with some of the faults of that type; he knew little or
+nothing of the improvements in the manner of interpreting Wagner's
+music effected by Mottl, Levi, and that stupendous creature Siegfried
+Wagner; he was a survival of the first enthusiastic reaction against
+Italian ways of misdoing things; and he was, if anything, a little too
+strongly inclined to go a little too far in the opposite direction to
+the touch-and-go conductors. But there is so much of sweetness and
+delicacy in "Lohengrin" that the whole opera, including the sweet and
+delicate portions, actually gains from a forceful and manly
+handling--gains so immensely that, as already said, those of us who
+heard it under Mr. Seidl's direction must have felt that here, at
+last, was the true "Lohengrin," the "Lohengrin" of Wagner's
+imagination. It was a pleasure merely to hear the band singing out
+boldly, getting the last fraction of rich tone out of each note, in
+the first act; to hear the string passages valiantly attacked, and the
+melodies treated with breadth, and the trumpets and trombones playing
+out with all their force when need was, holding the sounds to the end
+instead of letting them slink away ashamed in the accepted Italian
+style. And not only were these things in themselves delightful--they
+also served to make the drama doubly powerful, and the tender parts of
+the music doubly tender, to show how splendid in many respects was
+Wagner's art in the "Lohengrin" days, and to prove that Maurel's way
+of doing the part of Telramund some years ago was, as Maurel's way of
+doing things generally are, perfectly right. Maurel, it will be
+remembered, stuck a red feather in his cap; and the eternally wise
+critics agreed in thinking this absolutely wrong. They told him the
+feather was out of place--it made him appear ridiculous, and so on.
+Maurel retorted that he was playing the part of a fierce barbarian
+chief who would not look, he thought, like a gilded butterfly, and
+that his notion was to look as ferocious as he could. Now the odd
+thing is, that though Maurel was right, we critics were in a sense
+right also. As the music used to be played, a Telramund one degree
+nearer to a man than the average Italian baritone seemed ludicrously
+out of place; and when, in addition, the Lohengrin was a would-be
+lady-killer without an inch of fight in him, Henry the Fowler a
+pathetic heavy father, and Elsa a sentimental milliner, there was
+something farcical about Maurel's red feather and generally militant
+aspect. What we critics had not the brains to see was that the playing
+of the music was wrong, and that Maurel was only wrong in trying to
+play his part in the right manner when Lohengrin, Elsa, King, and
+conductor were all against him in their determination to do their
+parts wrong. Mr. Bispham follows in Maurel's footsteps, as he
+frequently does, in a modified costume, but when for the first time
+the orchestra played right he would not have seemed ridiculous had he
+stuck Maurel's red feather into his helmet. The whole scene became a
+different thing: we were thrown at once into the atmosphere of an
+armed camp full of turbulent thieves and bandits itching for fighting,
+and wildly excited with rumours of conflicts near at hand. Amidst all
+this excitement, and amidst all the unruly fighters, Telramund,
+strongest, fiercest, most unruly of them all, has to open the drama;
+and to command our respect, to make us feel that it is he who is
+making the drama move, that it is because all the barbarians are
+afraid of him that the drama begins to move at all, he cannot possibly
+look too ferocious and hot-blooded, too strong of limb and tempestuous
+of temper. The proof that this (Seidl's) reading of the opera was the
+right one, was that, in the first place, the drama immediately
+interested you instead of keeping you waiting for the entry of Elsa;
+and, in the second place, that the noisy, energetic playing of the
+opening scene threw the music of Elsa and Lohengrin into wonderfully
+beautiful relief--a relief which in the old way of doing the opera was
+very much wanting. To play "Lohengrin" in the old way is to deny
+Wagner the astonishing sense of dramatic effect he had from the
+beginning; to play it as Seidl played it is to prove that the
+conductor appreciates the perfection of artistic sense that led,
+compelled, Wagner to set the miraculous vision of Lohengrin against a
+background made up of such stormy scenes. Had Seidl kept his vigour
+for the stormy scenes, and given us a finer tenderness in the prelude,
+the love-music, and Lohengrin's account of himself, his rendering
+would have been a flawless one.
+
+And even as Seidl interpreted it, the supreme beauty of the music, the
+sweetness of it as well as its strength, were manifest as they have
+never been manifest before. "Lohengrin" is surely the most beautiful,
+the fullest of sheer beauty, of all Wagner's operas. Some thirty or
+forty years hence those of us who are lucky enough still to live in
+the sweet sunlight will begin to feel that at last it is becoming
+feasible to take a fair and reasonable view of Wagner's creative work;
+and we shall probably differ about verdicts which the whole musical
+world of to-day would agree only in rejecting. Old-school Wagnerites
+and anti-Wagnerites will have gone off together into the night, and
+the echo of the noise of all their feuds will have died away. No one
+will venture to talk of the "teaching" of "Parsifal" or any other of
+Wagner's works; the legends from which he constructed his works will
+have lost their novelty. The music-drama itself will be regarded by
+the Academics (if there are any left) with all the reverence due to
+the established fact, and possibly it may be suffering the fierce
+assault of the exponents of a newer and nobler form. Then the younger
+critics will arise and take one after another of the music-dramas and
+ask, What measure of beauty is there, and what dramatic strength, what
+originality of emotion? and in a few minutes they will scatter
+hundreds of harmless and long-cherished illusions that went to make
+life interesting. In that day of wrath and tribulation may I be on the
+right side, and have energy to go forward, giving up the pretence of
+what I can no longer like, and boldly saying that I like what I like,
+even should it happen to be unpopular. May I never fall so low as to
+be talked of as a guardian of the accepted forms and laws. But even if
+it should prove unavoidable to relinquish faith in Bach, in Beethoven,
+in Wagner, yet it is devoutly to be hoped that it will never be
+necessary to give up a belief in "Lohengrin"; for in that case my fate
+is fixed--I shall be among the reactionaries, the admirers of the
+thing that cannot be admired, the lovers of the unlovable. But indeed
+it is incredible that "Lohengrin" should ever cease to seem
+lovely--lovely in idea and in the expression of the idea. The story is
+one of the finest Wagner ever set; it remains fresh, though it had
+been told a hundred times before. The maiden in distress--we know her
+perfectly well; the wicked sorceress who has got her into distress--we
+know her quite as well; the celestial knight who rescues her--we know
+him nearly as well. But the details in which "Lohengrin" differs from
+all other tales of the same order are precisely those that make it the
+most enchanting tale of them all. Lohengrin, knight of the Grail,
+redeemer, yet with a touch of tragedy in his fate, drawn down the
+river in his magic boat by the Swan from a far mysterious land, a land
+of perpetual freshness and beauty, is an infinitely more poetic notion
+than the commonplace angel flapping clumsily down from heaven; and
+even if we feel it to be absurd that he should have to beg his wife to
+take him on trust, yet, after all, he takes his wife on trust, and he
+tells her at the outset that he cannot reveal the truth about himself.
+Elsa is vastly preferable to the ordinary distressed mediæval maiden,
+if only because a woman who is too weak to be worth a snap of the
+fingers does move us to pity, whereas the ordinary mediæval is cut out
+of pasteboard, and does not affect us at all. The King is perhaps
+merely a stage figure; Ortrud is just one degree better than the
+average witch of a fairy story; but Frederic, savage and powerful,
+but so superstitious as to be at the mercy of his wife, is human
+enough to interest us. And Wagner has managed his story perfectly
+throughout, excepting at the end of the second act, where that dreary
+business of Ortrud and Frederic stopping the bridal procession is a
+mere reminiscence of the wretched stagecraft of Scribe, and quite
+superfluous. But if there is a flaw in the drama, there cannot be said
+to be one in the music. The mere fact that, save two numbers, it is
+all written in common time counts for absolutely nothing against its
+endless variety. Wagner never again hit upon quite so divine and pure
+a theme as that of the Grail, from which the prelude is evolved; the
+Swan theme at once carries one in imagination up the ever-rippling
+river to that wonderful land of everlasting dawn and sacred early
+morning stillness; and nothing could be more effective, as background
+and relief to these, than the warlike music of the first act, and the
+ghastly opening of the second act, so suggestive of horrors and the
+spells of Ortrud winding round Frederic's soul. Then there is Elsa's
+dream, the magical music of Lohengrin's tale, the music of the Bridal
+procession in the second act, the great and tender melody first sung
+by Elsa and Ortrud, and then repeated by the orchestra as Ortrud
+allows Elsa to lead her into the house, the whole of the
+Bridal-chamber duet, and perhaps, above all, Lohengrin's farewell. To
+whatever page of the score you turn, there is perfect beauty--after
+the first act not a great deal that is powerful or meant to be
+powerful, but melody after melody that entrances you merely as
+absolute music without poetic significance, and that seems doubly
+entrancing by reason of the strange, remote feeling with which it is
+charged, and its perpetual suggestion of the broad stream flowing
+ceaselessly from far-away Montsalvat to the sea. "Lohengrin" is a
+fairy-story imbued with seriousness and tender human emotion, and the
+music is exactly adapted to it.
+
+
+
+
+"TRISTAN AND ISOLDA"
+
+
+Says Nietzsche (pretending to put the words into the mouth of
+another), "I hate Wagner, but I no longer stand any other music"; and
+though the saying is entirely senseless to those who do hate Wagner,
+the feeling that prompted it may be understood by all who love him and
+who stand every other music, so long as it is real music. Immediately
+after listening to "Tristan and Isolda" all other operas seem away
+from the point, to be concerned with the secondary issues of life, to
+babble without fervour or directness of unessential matters. This does
+not mean that "Tristan" is greater than "Don Giovanni" or the
+"Matthew" Passion--for it is not--but that it speaks to each of us in
+the most modern language of the most engrossing subject in the world,
+of oneself, of one's own soul. Who can stay to listen to the sheer
+loveliness of "Don Giovanni," or follow with any sympathy the farcical
+doom of that hero, or who, again, can be at the pains to enter into
+the obsolescent emotions and mode of expression of Bach, when Wagner
+calls us to listen concerning the innermost workings of our own being,
+and speaks in a tongue every word of which enters the brain like a
+thing of life? For one does not have to think what Wagner means: so
+direct, so penetrating, is his speech, that one becomes aware of the
+meaning without thinking of the words that convey it. Nietzsche is
+right when he says Wagner summarises modernism; but he forgot that
+Wagner summarises it because he largely helped to create it, to make
+it what it is, by this power of transferring his thought and emotion
+bodily, as it were, to other minds, and that he will remain modern for
+long to come, inasmuch as he moulds the thought of the successive
+generations as they arise.
+
+"Tristan and Isolda" is one of the world's half-dozen stupendous
+appeals in music to the emotional side of man's nature; it stands with
+the "Matthew" Passion, the Choral Symphony, and Mozart's Requiem,
+rather than with "Don Giovanni," or "Fidelio," or "Tannhäuser;" like
+the Requiem, the Choral Symphony, the "Matthew" Passion, there are
+pages of unspeakable beauty in it; but, like them also, its main
+object is not to please the ear or the eye, but to communicate an
+overwhelming emotion. That emotion is the passion of love--the
+elemental desire of the man for the woman, of the woman for the man;
+and to the expression of this, not in one phase alone, like Gounod in
+his "Faust," but in all its phases. It is a glorification of sex
+attraction: nevertheless, it refutes Tannhäuser or Venus as completely
+as it refutes Wolfram or Elizabeth. Tannhäuser, we know, would have it
+that love was wholly of the flesh, Wolfram that it was solely of the
+spirit. That there is no love which does not commence in the desiring
+of the flesh, and none, not even the most spiritual, which does not
+consist entirely in sex passion, that the two, spiritual and fleshly
+love, are merely different phases of one and the same passion, Wagner
+had learnt when he came to create "Tristan." And in "Tristan" we
+commence with a fleshly love, as intense as that Tannhäuser knew; but
+by reason of its own energy, its own excess, it rises to a spiritual
+love as free from grossness as any dreamed of by Elizabeth or Wolfram,
+and far surpassing theirs in exaltation. This change he depicted in a
+way as simple as it was marvellous, so that as we watch the drama and
+listen to the music we experience it within ourselves and our inner
+selves are revealed to us. Nothing comes between us and the passions
+expressed. Tristan and Isolda are passion in its purest integrity,
+naked souls vibrating with the keenest emotion; they have no
+idiosyncrasies to be sympathised with, to be allowed for; they are
+generalisations, not characters, and in them we see only ourselves
+reflected on the stage--ourselves as we are under the spell of
+Wagner's music and of his drama. For "Tristan" seems to me the most
+wonderful of Wagner's dramas, far more wonderful than "Parsifal," far
+more wonderful than "Tannhäuser." There is no stroke in it that is not
+inevitable, none that does not immensely and immediately tell; and,
+despite its literary quality, one fancies it could not fail to make
+some measure of its effect were it played without the music. Think of
+the first act. The scene is the deck of the ship; the wind is fresh,
+and charged with the bitterness of the salt sea; and Isolda sits
+there consumed with burning anger and hate of the man she loves, whose
+life she spared because she loved him, and who now rewards her by
+carrying her off, almost as the spoil of war, to be the wife of his
+king. It has been said that Tolstoi asserted for the first time in
+"The Kreuzer Sonata" that hate and love were the same passion. But the
+truth is, Wagner knew it long before Tolstoi, just as Shakespeare knew
+it long before Wagner; and the whole of this first act turns on it.
+Isolda sends for Tristan and tells him he has wronged her, and begs
+him to drink the cup of peace with her. Tristan sees precisely what
+she means, and, loving her, drinks the proffered poison as an
+atonement for the wrong he has done her, and for his treachery to
+himself in winning her, for ambition's sake, as King Mark's bride
+instead of taking her as his own. But the moment her hatred is
+satisfied Isolda finds life intolerable without it, without love; her
+love a second time betrays her; and she seizes the poison and drinks
+also. Then comes the masterstroke. Done with this world, with nothing
+but death before them, the two confess their long-pent love; in their
+exalted state passion comes over them like a flood; in the first rush
+of passion, honour, shame, friendship seem mere names of illusions,
+and love is the only real thing in life; and finally, the death
+draught being no death draught, but a slight infusion of cantharides,
+the two passionately cling to each other, vaguely wondering what all
+the noise is about, while the ship reaches land and all the people
+shout and the trumpets blow. What is the stagecraft of Scribe compared
+with this? how else could the avowal of love be brought about with
+such instant and stupendous effect? Quite as amazing is the second
+act. Almost from the beginning to close on the end the lovers fondle
+each other, in a garden before an old castle in the sultry summer
+night; and just as their passion reaches its highest pitch, Mark
+breaks in upon them. For Tristan, at least, death is imminent; and the
+mere presence of death serves to begin the change from the desire of
+the flesh to the ecstatic spiritual passion. That change is completed
+in the next act, where we have the scene laid before Tristan's
+deserted and dilapidated castle in Brittany, with the calm sea in the
+distance (it should shine like burnished steel); and here Tristan lies
+dying of the wound he received from Melot in the previous scene, while
+a melody from the shepherd's pipe, the saddest melody ever heard,
+floats melancholy and wearily through the hot, close, breathless air.
+Kurvenal, his servant, has sent for Isolda to cure him as she had
+cured him before; and when at last she comes Tristan grows crazy with
+joy, tears the bandages from his wounds, and dies just as she enters.
+This finishes the metamorphosis begun in the second act: after some
+other incidents, Isolda, rapt in her spiritual love, sings the
+death-song and dies over Tristan's body. What is the libretto of
+"Otello" or of "Falstaff" compared with this libretto? From beginning
+to end there is not a line, not an incident, in excess. Anyone who is
+wearied by King Mark's long address when he comes on the guilty pair,
+has failed to catch the drift of the whole opera--failed to see that
+two souls like Tristan and Isolda, wholly swayed by love, must find
+Mark's grief wholly unintelligible, and have no power of explaining
+themselves to those not possessed with a passion like theirs, or of
+bringing themselves into touch with the workaday world of daylight,
+and that all Mark's most moving appeal means to them is that this
+world, where such annoyances occur, is not the land in which they fain
+would dwell. They live wholly for their illusion, and if it is
+forbidden to them in life they will seek death; nothing--not honour,
+shame, the affection of Mark, the faithfulness of Kurvenal, least of
+all, life--is to be considered in comparison with their love; their
+love is the love that is all in all. It is entirely selfish: Mark is
+as much their enemy as Melot, his affection more to be dreaded than
+the sword of Melot.
+
+Perhaps I have given the drama some of the credit that should go to
+the music; and at least there is not a dramatic situation which the
+music does not immeasurably increase in power. But indeed the two are
+inseparable. The music creates the mood and holds the spectator to it
+so that the true significance of the dramatic situation cannot fail
+to be felt; while the dramatic situation makes the highest, most
+extravagant flights of the music quite intelligible, reasonable. It
+cannot be said that the music exists for the sake of the drama any
+more than the drama exists for the music: the drama lies in the music,
+the music is latent in the drama. But to the music the wild atmosphere
+of the beginning of the first act is certainly due; and though I have
+said that possibly "Tristan" might bear playing without the music, it
+must be admitted that it is hard to think of the fifth scene without
+that tremendous entrance passage--that passage so tremendous that even
+Jean de Reszke dare hardly face it. To the music also the passion and
+fervent heat of the second act are due, and the thunderous atmosphere,
+the sense of impending fate, in the last, and the miraculous sweetness
+and intensity of Tristan's death-music, and the sublime pathos of
+Isolda's lament. Since Mozart wrote those creeping chromatic chords in
+the scene following the death of the Commendatore in "Don Giovanni,"
+nothing so solemn and still, so full of the pathetic majesty of death,
+as the passage following the words "with Tristan true to perish" has
+been written. This is perhaps Wagner's greatest piece of music; and
+certainly his loveliest is Tristan's description of the ship sailing
+over the ocean with Isolda, where the gently swaying figure of the
+horns, taken from one of the love-themes, and the delicious melody
+given to the voice, go to make an effect of richness and tenderness
+which can never be forgotten. The opening of the huge duet is as a
+blaze of fire which cannot be subdued; and when at last it does
+subside and a quieter mood prevails we get a long series of voluptuous
+tunes the like of which were never heard before, and will not be heard
+again, one thinks, for a thousand years to come. And in the strangest
+contrast to these is the earlier part of the third act, where the very
+depths of the human spirit are revealed, where we are taken into the
+darkness and stand with Tristan before the gates of death. But indeed
+all the music of "Tristan" is miraculous in its sweetness, splendour,
+and strength; and yet one scarcely thinks of these qualities at the
+moment, so entirely do they seem to be hidden by its poignant
+expressiveness. As I have said, it seems to enter the mind as emotion
+rather than as music, so penetrating is it, so instantaneous in its
+appeal. There never was music poured out at so white a white heat; it
+is music written in the most modern, most pungent, and raciest
+vernacular, with utter impatience of style, of writing merely in an
+approved manner. It is beyond criticism. It is possible to love it as
+I do; it is possible to hate it as Nietzsche did; but while this
+century lasts, it will be impossible to appreciate it sufficiently to
+wish to criticise it and yet preserve one's critical judgment with
+steadiness enough to do it.
+
+
+
+
+"SIEGFRIED"
+
+
+In all Wagner's music-plays there is shown an astonishing
+appreciation of the value and effect of scenery and of all the changes
+of weather and of skies and waters, not only as a background to his
+drama but as a means of making that drama clearer, of getting
+completer and intenser expression of the emotions for which the
+persons in the drama stand. The device is not so largely used in
+"Tristan" as in the other music-plays, yet the drama is enormously
+assisted by it. In the "Ring" it is used to such an extent that the
+first thing that must strike everyone is the series of gorgeously
+coloured pictures afforded by each of the four plays. For instance, no
+one can ever forget the opening of "The Valkyrie"--the inside of
+Hunding's house built round the tree, the half-dead fire flickering,
+while we listen to the steady roar of the night wind as the tempest
+rushes angrily through the forest--nor the scene that follows, when
+through the open door we see all the splendours of the fresh spring
+moonlight gleaming on the green leaves still dripping with cold
+raindrops. The terror and excitement of the second act are vastly
+increased by the storm of thunder and lightning that rages while
+Siegmund and Hunding fight. A great part of the effect of the third
+act is due to the storm that howls and shrieks at the beginning and
+gradually subsides, giving way to the soft translucent twilight, that
+in turn gives way to the clear spring night with the dark blue sky
+through which the yellow flames presently shoot, cutting off
+Brünnhilde from the busy world. The same pictorial device is used
+throughout "Siegfried" with results just as magnificent in their way;
+though the way is a very different one. The drama of "The Valkyrie" is
+tragedy--chiefly Wotan's tragedy (the relinquishing first of Siegmund,
+and his hope in Siegmund, then of Brünnhilde)--but incidentally the
+tragedy of Siegmund's life and his death, of Siegmund's loneliness and
+of Brünnhilde's downfall; and at least one of the scenic effects--the
+fire at the end--was thrown in to relieve the pervading gloom, and in
+obedience to Wagner's acute sense of the wild beauty of the old
+legend, rather than to illustrate and assist the drama. It is sheer
+spectacle, but how magnificent compared with that older type of
+spectacle which chiefly consisted of brass bands and ladies
+insufficiently clothed! "Siegfried," on the other hand, contains no
+tragedy save the destruction of a little vermin. It is the most
+glorious assertion ever made of the joy and splendour and infinite
+beauty to be found in life by those who possess the courage to go
+through it in their own way, and have the overflowing vitality and
+strength to create their own world as they go. Siegfried is the
+embodiment of the divine energy that makes life worth living; and in
+the scenery, as in the tale and the music of the opera, nothing is
+left out that could help to give us a vivid and lasting impression of
+the beauty, freshness, strangeness, and endless interest of life. Take
+the first scene--the cave with the dull red forge--fires smouldering
+in the black darkness, and the tools of the smith's trade scattered
+about, and, seen through the mouth of the cave, all the blazing
+colours of the sunlit forest; or again the second--the darkness, then
+the dawn and the sunrise, and lastly the full glory of the summer day
+near Fafner's hole in a mysterious haunted corner of the forest; or
+the third--a far-away nook in the hills, where the spirit of the earth
+slumbers everlastingly; or the final scene--the calm morning on
+Brünnhilde's fell, the flames fallen, and all things transfigured and
+made remote by the enchantment of lingering mists,--these scenes form
+a background for the dramatic action such as no composer dreamed of
+before, nor will dream of again until we cease to dwell in dusty stone
+cities and learn once again to know nature and her greatest moods as
+our forefathers knew them. Had Wagner not lived in Switzerland and
+gone his daily walks amongst the mountains, the "Ring" might have been
+written; but certainly it would have been written very differently,
+and probably not half so well.
+
+I have so often insisted on the pictorial power of Wagner's music,
+that, save for one quality of the pictures in the "Ring," and
+especially in "Siegfried," it would be unnecessary to say more about
+it now. That quality is their old-world atmosphere, their power of
+filling us with a sense of the old time before us. When the fire plays
+round Brünnhilde's fell--Hinde Fell, Morris calls it--lighting the icy
+tops of the farthest hills, or when Mime and Alberich squabble in the
+dark of early morning at the mouth of Fafner's hole, or again when the
+Wanderer comes in and scarifies Mime out of his wits, we are taken
+back to the remotest and dimmest past, to the beginnings of time, to a
+time that never existed save in the imagination of our forebears. This
+may be partly the result of our unconscious perception of the fact
+that these things never happen nowadays, and partly the result of our
+having been familiar with the story of Brünnhilde and the gods since
+earliest boyhood; but it is in the main due to Wagner's intense
+historical sense, his sense of the past, and to his unapproached power
+of expressing in music any feeling or combination of feelings he
+experienced. So cunningly do music and scenery work together that we
+credit the one with what the other has done; but, wonderful though the
+pictures of "Siegfried" are, there cannot be a doubt that the
+atmosphere we discover in them reaches us through the ear from the
+orchestra. Besides giving us a series of singularly apposite and
+significant pictures, Wagner has reproduced the very breath and colour
+of the old sagas; he has re-created the atmosphere of a time that
+never was; and it is this remote atmosphere which lends to
+"Siegfried" and all the "Ring" a great part of their enchantment.
+Fancy what it might have been, this long exposition of sheer
+Schopenhauerism in three dramas and a fore-play! imagine what Parry or
+Stanford or Mackenzie would have made of it! And then think of what
+the "Ring" actually is, and especially of the splendour and weirdness
+of some parts the "dulness" of which moves dull people to dull
+grumbling. For example, a great many persons share Mime's wish for the
+Wanderer to go off almost as soon as he comes on, "else no Wanderer
+can he be called." They tell us that this scene breaks the action,
+neglecting the trifling fact that were it omitted the remainder of the
+act would be inconsequent nonsense, only worthy to rank with the
+librettos of English musical critics, and that the truth happens to be
+that nearly the whole of the subsequent drama grows out of it. In
+itself it is a scene of peculiar power, charged to overflowing with
+the essence of the Scandinavian legends. The notion of the god,
+"one-eyed and seeming ancient," wandering by night through the wild
+woods, clad in his dark blue robe, calling in here and there and
+creating consternation in the circle gathered round the hearth, is one
+of the most poetic to be found in the Northern mythology; and the
+music which Wagner has set to his entry and his conversation cannot be
+matched for unearthliness unless you turn to the Statue music in "Don
+Giovanni," where you find unearthliness of a very different sort. The
+scene with Erda in the mountains is even more wonderful, so laden is
+the music with the Scandinavian emotional sense of the impenetrable
+mystery of things. The scene between Mime and Alberich, or Alberich
+and the Wanderer, gives us the old horror of the creeping maleficent
+things that crawled by night about the brooks and rock-holes. It is
+true this last will bear cutting a little; for Wagner being a German,
+but having, what is uncommon in the German, an acute sense of balance
+of form, always tried to get balance by lengthening parts which were
+already long enough, in preference to cutting parts that were already
+too long. Hence much padding, which a later generation will ruthlessly
+amputate.
+
+All these things are the accessories, the environment, of the
+principal figure; and their presence is justified by their beauty,
+significance, and interest, and also by their being necessary for the
+development of the larger drama of the whole "Ring." But in following
+"Siegfried" that larger drama cannot altogether be kept in mind: it is
+the hero that counts first, and everything else is accessory merely to
+him. That Wagner, in spite of his preoccupation with the tragedy of
+Wotan, should have accomplished this, proves how wonderful and how
+true an artist he was. Siegfried is the incarnation, as I have said,
+of the divine energy which enables one to make the world rich with
+things that delight the soul; he is Wagner's healthiest, sanest,
+perhaps most beautiful creation; he is certainly the only male in all
+Wagner's dramas who is never in any danger of becoming for ever so
+brief a moment a bore, whose view of life is always so fresh and novel
+and at the same time so essentially human that he interests us both in
+himself and in the world we see through his eyes. Never had an actor
+such opportunities as here. The entry with the bear exhibits the
+animal strength and spirits of the man, and the inquiries about his
+parents, his purely human feeling; his temper with Mime the
+unsophisticated boy's petulant intolerance of the mean and ugly; the
+forging of the sword the coming power and determination of manhood.
+The killing of the dragon is unavoidably rather ridiculous; but the
+scene with the bird is fascinating by its naturalness and simplicity
+as well as its tenderness and sheer sweetness. Finally, after the
+scene with the Wanderer, the scene of the awakening of Brünnhilde
+affords an opportunity for love-making, and it is love-making of so
+unusual a sort that one does not feel it to be an anti-climax after
+all the big things that have gone before. In fact, not even Tristan
+has things quite so much to himself, nor is given the opportunity of
+expressing so many phases of emotion and character. And the music
+Siegfried has to sing is the richest, most copious stream of melody
+ever given to one artist; in any one scene there is melody enough to
+have made the fortune of Verdi or any other Italian composer who
+wrote tunes for the tenor and prima donna; not even Mozart could have
+poured out a greater wealth of tune--tune everlastingly varying with
+the mood of the drama. Every scene provides a heap of smaller tunes,
+and then there are such big ones as the Forge song, Siegfried's
+meditation in the forest and the conversation with the bird, and the
+awakening of Brünnhilde--every one absolutely new and tremulous with
+intense life.
+
+
+
+
+"THE DUSK OF THE GODS"
+
+
+Quite a fierce little controversy raged a little while ago in the
+columns of the "Daily Chronicle," and all about the "meaning" of "The
+Dusk of the Gods" and the behaviour of Brünnhilde. Mr. Shaw played
+Devil's Advocate for Wagner, declaring "The Dusk of the Gods" to be
+irrelevant and operatic (as if that mattered); and Mr. Ashton Ellis
+and Mr. Edward Baughan, two mad Wagnerians, rushed in to protect
+Wagner from Mr. Shaw (as if he needed protection). In reading the
+various letters, my soul was moved to admiration and reverent awe by
+the ingenuity displayed by the various correspondents in their
+endeavours to make the easy difficult, the perfectly plain crooked.
+Wagner took enormous pains to make Brünnhilde a living character--that
+is to say, to show us her inmost soul so vividly that we know why she
+did anything or everything without even thinking about it; he set her
+on the stage, where we see her in the flesh behaving precisely as any
+woman--of her period--would behave. And then these excellent gentlemen
+come along and tell us that because Wagner at one time or another
+thought of handling her story, and the story of Wotan and Siegfried,
+in this or that way, therefore Wagner "meant" this or that, and failed
+or succeeded, or changed his original plan or held fast to it. All
+these things have nothing to do with the drama that is played on the
+stage: by that alone, and by none of his earlier ideas, is Wagner to
+be judged: he is to be judged by the effect and conviction of the
+finished play. Now, it seems to me that in the finished play
+Brünnhilde is neither "a glorious woman "--_i.e._ an Adelphi
+melodramatic heroine--nor "a deceitful, vindictive woman"--_i.e._ an
+Adelphi melodramatic villainess. Also, while considered by itself "The
+Dusk of the Gods" is interesting mainly on account of the music,
+considered in association, as Wagner wished, and as one must--for,
+after all, it is but the final act of a stupendous drama, and it is
+unfair and foolish to consider any one act of a drama alone--with the
+other minor dramas of the greater drama, "The Nibelung's Ring," it is
+dramatically not only interesting, absorbing, but absolutely
+indispensable, true, inevitable. It is true enough that the "Ring"
+suffered somewhat through the fact that Wagner took nearly a quarter
+of a century to carry out his plan, and during this period his views
+on life changed greatly; yet nevertheless "The Dusk of the Gods"
+stands as the noble--in fact, the only possible--conclusion to a story
+which is, on the whole, splendidly told.
+
+When seeing "The Valkyrie," one thinks of Sieglinde or Siegmund or
+Brünnhilde; when listening to "Siegfried," one thinks of Siegfried and
+Brünnhilde and no others; but when one thinks of the complete "Ring,"
+the person of the drama most forcibly forced before the eye of the
+imagination, the person to whom one realises that sympathy is chiefly
+due, is Wotan. Wotan, not Siegfried or Siegmund, is the hero of the
+"Ring." His tragedy--if it is indeed a tragedy to emerge from the
+battle in the highest sense of the word triumphant--includes the
+tragedy of Siegfried and Siegmund, Sieglinde and Brünnhilde--in fact,
+the tragedy of all the smaller characters of the play. "The
+Rheingold," in spite of its glorious music, is entirely
+superfluous--dramatically, at all events, it is superfluous--but
+there, anyhow, the problem which we could easily understand without it
+is stated. Wotan, who has been placed at the head of affairs by the
+three blind fates, has caught the general disease of wishing to gain
+the power to make others do his will. So anxious is he for that
+authority that he not only makes a bargain for it with the powers of
+stupidity--the giants, the brute forces of nature--which bargain is
+afterwards and could never be anything but his ruin, but also he
+stoops to a base subterfuge to gain it, and with the help of Loge,
+fire, the final destroyer, he does gain it. So determined was Wagner
+to make his point clear, that even in "The Rheingold," the superfluous
+drama, he made it several times superfluously. He was not content to
+let his point make itself--the humanitarian, the preacher of all that
+makes for the highest humanity, was too strong in him for that: it was
+a little too strong even for the artist in him: he must needs make the
+powers of darkness lay a curse on power over one's fellow-beings, the
+Ring standing as the emblem of that power. While Wotan takes the
+power, his deepest wisdom, which is to say, his intuition--represented
+by the spirit of the earth, Erda--rises against him and tells him he
+is committing the fatal mistake, and he yields to the extent of
+letting the giants have the supreme power. But he thinks, just as you
+and I, reader, might think, that by some quaint unthinkable device he
+can evade the tremendous consequence of his own act; and, instead of
+at once looking at the consequence boldly and saying he will face it,
+he elaborates a plan by which no one will suffer anything, while he,
+Wotan, will gain the lordship of creation. From this moment his fate
+becomes tragic. The complete man, full of rich humanity--for whom
+Wotan stands--cannot exist, necessarily ceases to exist, if he is
+compelled to deny the better part of himself, as Peter denied Jesus of
+Nazareth. And in consequence of his own act Wotan has immediately to
+deny the better part of himself, to make war on his own son Siegmund,
+and then on his own daughter Brünnhilde: he destroys the first and
+puts away from him for ever Brünnhilde, who is incarnate love. The
+grand tragic moment of the whole cycle is the laying to sleep of
+Brünnhilde. Wotan knows that life without love is no life, and he is
+compelled to part from love by the very bargain which enables him to
+rule. Rather than live such a life, he deliberately, solemnly wills
+his own death; and a great part of "Siegfried" and the whole of "The
+Dusk of the Gods" are devoted to showing how his death, and the death
+of all the gods, comes about through Wotan's first act. In "Siegfried"
+and "The Dusk of the Gods" there is no tragedy--how can there be any
+tragedy in the fate of the man who faithfully follows the impulse that
+makes for his highest and widest satisfaction, for the fullest
+exercise of his beneficent energies, for the man who says I will do
+this or that because I know and feel it is the best I can do? "The
+Dusk of the Gods" is Wotan's most splendid triumph; he deliberately
+yields place to a new dynasty, because he knows that to keep
+possession of the throne will mean the continual suppression of all
+that is best in him, as he has had already to suppress it.
+Incidentally there are many tragedies in the "Ring." The murder of
+Siegmund by Hunding, aided by Wotan, before Sieglinde's eyes; the
+hideous incident of Siegfried winning his own wife to be the wife of
+his friend Gunther; the stabbing of Siegfried by Hagen; Brünnhilde's
+telling Gutrune that she, Gutrune, was never the wife of
+Siegfried,--all these are terrible enough tragedies. Brünnhilde's is
+the most terrible of them all, though she too takes her fate into her
+hands, and by willing the right thing, and doing it, goes victorious
+out of life. What there is difficult to understand about her, why she
+should be accused of deceit and have her conduct explained, I can
+hardly guess. In "The Valkyrie" she is a goddess; but when she offends
+Wotan by disobeying him and walking clean through all the
+Commandments, he is bound, for the maintenance of his power, to punish
+her. So he takes away her godhead, and she is thenceforth simply a
+woman. Siegfried treats her treacherously--as she necessarily
+thinks--and she very naturally takes vengeance on him. Mr. Shaw speaks
+as though he wished her to be a bread-and-butter miss; but a woman of
+Brünnhilde's type, a daughter of the high gods, could scarcely be
+that.
+
+In short, "The Dusk of the Gods" seems to me perfectly clear, and in
+no more need of explanation than "The Valkyrie" or "Siegfried." Of
+course there are a thousand loose ends in the "Ring," as there are in
+life itself; but to count them and find out what they all mean would
+occupy one for an eternity. To throw away "The Dusk of the Gods"
+because one cannot understand the loose ends, is ridiculous; instead
+of wishing there were fewer of them, I wish Wagner had been more
+careless, less German, and left more. It was through his endeavours to
+get unity, to show the close relation of each incident to every other
+incident, that he nearly came to utter grief. The drama was so
+gigantic, to secure sympathy for Wotan it was so necessary to secure
+sympathy for the minor characters whose story helps to make up Wotan's
+story, that Wagner seemed perpetually afraid that the real, main
+drama would be forgotten. And it is true that the story of Siegmund
+and Sieglinde, or of Siegfried and Brünnhilde, absorbs one for a time
+so completely that one forgets all about Wotan and his woes. So Wagner
+came near to spoiling one of the most tremendous achievements of the
+human mind, by shoving old Wotan on to the stage again and again to
+recapitulate his troubles. But of these interruptions "The Dusk of the
+Gods" has none. The story proceeds swiftly, inevitably to the end;
+from the first bar to the last, the music is as splendid as any Wagner
+ever wrote. It is the fitting conclusion to the vision of life
+presented in the "Ring": it is a funeral chant, mournful, sombre, but
+triumphant. The seed has been sown, the crop has grown and ripened and
+been harvested, and now the thing is over: a chill wind pipes over the
+empty stubble-land where late the yellow corn stood and the labourers
+laboured: there is nothing more: "ripeness is all" that life offers or
+means.
+
+
+
+
+"PARSIFAL"
+
+
+"Parsifal" is an immoral work. One cannot for a moment suppose that
+Wagner, who had written "Tristan" and "Siegfried," meant to preach
+downright immorality, or that he meant "Parsifal" to stand as anything
+more than the expression of a momentary mood, the mood of the
+exhausted, the effete man, the mood which follows the mood of
+"Tristan" as certainly as night follows day. Nevertheless, in so far
+as "Parsifal" says anything to us, in so far as it brings, in
+Nonconformist cant, "a message," it is immoral and vicious, just as in
+so far as "Siegfried" carries a message it is entirely moral,
+healthful, and sane. It is useless to quibble about this, seeking to
+explain away plain things: the truth remains that "Siegfried" is a
+glorification of one view of life, "Parsifal" of its direct opposite
+and flat contradiction; and anyone who accepts the one view must needs
+loathe the other as sinful. To me the "Siegfried" view of life
+commends itself; and I unhesitatingly assert the sinfulness of the
+"Parsifal" view. The two operas invite comparison; for at the outset
+their heroes seem to be the same man. Siegfried and Parsifal are both
+untaught fools; each has his understanding partly enlightened by
+hearing of his mother's sufferings and death (compare Wordsworth's "A
+deep distress hath humanised my soul"); each has his education
+completed by a woman's kiss. All this may seem very profound to the
+German mind; but to me it is crude, a somewhat too obvious allegory,
+partly superficial, partly untrue, a survival of windy sentimental
+mid-century German metaphysics, like the Wagner-Heine form of "The
+Flying Dutchman" story, and the Wagner form of the "Tannhäuser" story.
+However, I am willing to believe that Siegfried, when he kisses
+Brünnhilde on Hinde Fell, and Parsifal, when Kundry kisses him in
+Klingsor's magic garden, has each his full faculties set in action for
+the first time. And then? And then Siegfried, with his fund of health
+and vitality, sees that the world is glorious, and joyfully presses
+forward more vigorously than ever on the road that lies before him,
+never hesitating for a moment to live out his life to the full; while
+Parsifal, lacking health and vitality--probably his father suffered
+from rickets--sees that the grief and suffering of the world outweigh
+and outnumber its joys, and not only renounces life, but is so
+overcome with pity for all sufferers as to regard it as his mission to
+heal and console them. And having healed and consoled one, he
+deliberately turns from the green world, with its trees and flowers,
+its dawn and sunset, its winds and waters, and shuts himself in a
+monkery which has a back garden, a pond and some ducks. There is only
+one deadly sin--to deny life, as Nietzsche says: carefully to pull up
+all the weeds in one's garden, but to plant there neither flower nor
+tree--and this is what "Parsifal" glorifies and advocates.
+
+Now, far be it from me to go hunting a moral tendency in a work of
+art, and to praise or blame the art as I chance to like or dislike the
+tendency. I am in a state of perfect preparedness to see beauty in a
+picture, even if the subject is to me repulsive. But in the case of a
+picture it is possible to say, "Yes, very pretty," and pass on. In the
+case of a story, a play, or a music-drama, you cannot. You are tied to
+your seat for one or two or three mortal hours; and however perfect
+may be the art with which music-drama or play or story is set before
+you, if the subject revolts or bores you, you soon sicken of the whole
+business. And in the highest kind of story, play, or music-drama,
+subject and treatment merge inseparably one in the other, substance
+and form are one; for the idea is all in all, and the complete idea
+cannot be perceived apart from the dress which makes it visible.
+Besides, in the Wagnerian music-drama, it is intended that beauty of
+idea and of arrangement of ideas shall be as of great importance as
+beauty of ornament. Wagner certainly intended "Parsifal" to be such a
+music-drama; and indeed the idea is only too clearly visible. The main
+idea of the "Ring" is so much obscured by the subsidiary ideas twined
+about it that very few people know that the real hero is Wotan, and
+the central drama Wotan's tragedy, that Siegmund and Sieglinde,
+Siegfried and Brünnhilde, and their loves--all the romance and
+loveliness that enchant us--are merely accessory. But in "Parsifal"
+there is nothing superfluous, no rich and lovely embroidery on the
+dress of the idea to divert us from the idea itself--the idea is as
+nearly nude as our limited senses and our modern respectability
+permit. And the idea being what it is, it follows that the play, after
+the drama once commences, is not only immoral, but also dispiriting
+and boring, and, to my thinking, inconsequential and pointless. The
+first act, the exposition, is from beginning to end magnificent: never
+were the lines on which a drama was to develop more gorgeously, or in
+more masterly fashion, set forth. Had Wagner seen that Amfortas was
+merely a hypochondriac, a stage Schopenhauer, imagining all manner of
+wounds and evils where no evils or wounds existed, had he made
+Parsifal a Siegfried, and sent him out into the world to learn this,
+and brought him back to break up the monastery, to set Amfortas and
+the knights to some useful labour, and to tell them that the sacred
+spear, like Wotan's spear, had power only to hurt those who feared it,
+then we might have had an adequate working-out of so noble a
+beginning. Instead of this, Kundry kisses Parsifal, Parsifal squeals,
+and we see him in a moment to be only an Amfortas who has had the luck
+not to stumble; and he, the poor fool who is filled with so vast a
+pity because he sees (what are called) good and evil in entirely wrong
+proportion--as, in fact, a hypochondriac sees them--he, Parsifal,
+this thin-blooded inheritor of rickets and an exhausted physical
+frame, is called the Redeemer, and becomes head of the Brotherhood of
+the Grail. Beside this inconsequence, all other inconsequences seem as
+nothing. One might ask, for instance, how, seeing that no man can save
+his brother's soul, Parsifal saves the soul of Amfortas? This is a
+fallacy that held Wagner all his life. We find it in "The Flying
+Dutchman"; it is avoided in "Tannhäuser"--for, thank the gods,
+Tannhäuser is _not_ saved by that uninteresting young person
+Elizabeth; it plays a large part in the "Ring"; it is the culmination
+of the drama of "Parsifal." Had Wagner thought more of Goethe and less
+of the Frankfort creature who formulated his hypo-chondriacal
+nightmares, and called the result a philosophy, he might have learnt
+that no mentally sick man ever yet was cured save by the welling-up of
+a flood of emotional energy in his own soul. He might also have seen
+that Parsifal is as much the spirit that denies as Mephistopheles. But
+these points, and many others, may go as, comparatively, nothings. The
+first act of "Parsifal" is unsurpassable, the second is an
+anti-climax, and the third, excepting the repentance of Kundry, which
+is pathetic, and strikes one as true, a more saddening anti-climax.
+There is one last thing to say before passing to the music, and this
+is that "Parsifal" is commonly treated with respect as a Christian
+drama--a superior "Sign of the Cross." I happen, oddly enough, to
+know the four Gospels exceedingly well; and I find nothing of
+"Parsifal" in them. It is much nearer to Buddhism in spirit, in
+colour: it is a kind of Germanised metaphysical Buddhism.
+Schopenhauer, not Christ, is the hero; and Schopenhauer was only a
+decrepit Mephistopheles bereft of his humour and inverted creative
+energy.
+
+After hearing the whole opera twice, with all the supposed advantages
+of the stage, the main thing borne in upon me is that the stage and
+actors and accessories, far from increasing the effect of the music,
+actually weaken it excepting in the first act. In that act there is
+not a word or a note to alter. The story compels one's interest, and
+the music is rich, tender, and charged with a noble passion. Even the
+killing of the duck--it is supposed to be a swan, but it is really a
+duck--is saved from becoming ludicrous by the deep sincerity of the
+music of Gurnemanz's expostulations. The music, too, with the
+magnificent trombone and trumpet calls and deep clangour of cathedral
+bells, prevents one thinking too much of the absurdity of the trees,
+mountains, and lake walking off the stage to make the change to the
+second scene. On reflection, this panorama seems wholly meaningless
+and thoroughly vulgar; and even in the theatre one wonders vaguely
+what it is all about--for Gurnemanz's explanation about time and space
+being one is sheer metaphysical shoddy, a mere humbugging of an
+essentially uncultured German audience; but one does not mind it, so
+full is the accompaniment of mystical life and of colour, of a sense
+of impending great things. The whole cathedral scene--I would even
+include the caterwaulings of Amfortas--is sincere, impressive, and
+filled with a reasonable degree of mysticism. There is no falling off
+in the second act until after the enchanting waltz and Kundry's
+wondrously tender recital of the woes suffered by Parsifal's mother
+(here the melody compares in loveliness with the corresponding portion
+of "Siegfried"); indeed, the passion and energy go on increasing until
+Parsifal receives Kundry's kiss, and then at once they disappear.
+Between this point and the end of the act there is scarcely a fine
+passage. Every phrase is insincere, not because Wagner wished to be
+insincere, but because he tried to express dramatically a state of
+mind which is essentially undramatic. Parsifal is supposed to
+transcend almost at one bound the will to live, to rise above all
+animal needs and desires; and though no human being can transcend the
+will to live, any more than he can jump away from his shadow--for the
+phrase means, and can only mean, that the will to live transcends the
+will to live--yet I am informed, and can well believe, that those who
+imagine they have accomplished the feat reach a state of perfect
+ecstasy. Wagner knew this; he knew also that ecstasy, as what can only
+be called a static emotion, could not be expressed through the medium
+that serves to express only flowing currents of emotion; he himself
+had pointed out, that for the communication of ecstatic feeling, only
+polyphonic, non-climatic, rhythmless music of the Palestrina kind
+served; and yet, by one of the hugest mistakes ever made in art, he
+sought to express precisely that emotion in Parsifal's declamatory
+phrases. The thing cannot be done; it has not been done; all
+Parsifal's bawling, even with the help of the words, avails nothing;
+and the curtain drops at the end of the second act, leaving one
+convinced that the drama has untimely ended, has got into a
+cul-de-sac. And in a cul-de-sac it remains. There is much glorious
+music in the last act; the "Good Friday music" is divine; the last
+scene is gorgeously led up to; and the music of it, considered only as
+music, is unsurpassable. But heard at the end of a drama so
+gigantically planned as "Parsifal," it is unsatisfying and
+disappointing. It is to me as if the "Ring" had closed on the music of
+Neid-höhle with the squabblings of Alberich and Mime. The powers that
+make for evil and destruction have won; one knows that Parsifal is
+eternally damned; he has listened and succumbed, even as Wagner
+himself did, to the eastern sirens' song of the ease and delight of a
+life of slothful renunciation, self-abnegation, and devotion to
+"duty." The music of the last scene sings that song in tones of
+infinite sweetness; but it cannot satisfy you; you turn from the
+enchanted hall, with its holy cup and spear and dove, its mystic
+voices in the heights, its heavy, depressing, incense-laden
+atmosphere; and you hasten into the night, where the winds blow fresh
+through the black trees, and the stars shine calmly in the deep sky,
+just as though no "Parsifal" had been written.
+
+"Parsifal" does not imply that Wagner in his old age went back on all
+he had thought and felt before. Born in a time when the secret of
+living had not been rediscovered, when folk still thought the victory,
+and not the battle, the main thing in life, he always sought a creed
+to put on as a coat-of-mail to protect him from the nasty knocks of
+fate. Nowadays we do not care greatly for the victory, and we go out
+to fight with a light heart, commencing where Wagner and all the
+pessimists ended. Wagner wanted the victory, and also, lest he should
+not gain it, he wanted something to save him from despair. That
+something he found in pessimism. In his younger days--indeed until
+near the last--he forgot all about it in his hours of inspiration, and
+worked for no end, but for the sheer joy of working. But towards the
+end of his life, when his inspiration came seldomer and with less
+power, he worked more and more for the victory, and became wholly
+pessimistic, throwing away his weapons, and hiding behind
+self-renunciation as behind a shield. He won a victory more brilliant
+than ever Napoleon or Wellington or Moltke won; and in the eyes of
+all men he seemed a great general. But life had terrified him; he had
+trembled before Wotan's--or Christ's--spear; in his heart of hearts he
+knew himself a beaten man; and he wrote "Parsifal."
+
+
+
+
+BAYREUTH IN 1897
+
+
+To Bayreuth again, through dirty, dusty, nasty-smelling, unromantic
+Germany, along the banks of that shabby--genteel river known as the
+Rhine, watching at every railway station the wondrously bulky
+haus-fraus who stir such deep emotions in the sentimental German
+heart; noting how the disease of militarism has eaten so deeply into
+German life that each railway official is a mere steam-engine,
+supplied by the State with fuel in case he should some day be needed;
+eating the badly and dirtily cooked German food,--how familiar it all
+seems when one does it a second time! One week in Bayreuth was the
+length of my stay in 1896; yet I seem to have spent a great part of my
+younger days here. The theatre is my familiar friend in whom I never
+trust; the ditch called the river has many associations, pleasant and
+other; I go up past the theatre into the wood as to a favourite haunt
+of old time; I lunch under the trees and watch the caterpillars drop
+into my soup as though that were the commonest thing in the world; I
+wander into the theatre and feel more at home than ever I do at Covent
+Garden; I listen to the bad--but it is not yet time for detailed
+criticism. All I mean is, that the novelty of Bayreuth, like the
+novelty of any other small lifeless German town, disappears on a
+second visit; that though the charm of the wood, of the trumpet calls
+at the theatre, of the greasy German food, and the primitive German
+sanitary arrangements, remains, it is a charm that has already worn
+very thin, and needs the carefullest of handling to preserve. Whether,
+without some especial inducement, the average mortal can survive
+Bayreuth a third time, is, to me, hardly a question. As for my poor
+self, it suits me admirably--certainly I could stand Bayreuth half a
+dozen times. I like the life--the way in which the hours of the day
+revolve round the evening performance, the real idleness, passivity,
+combined with an appearance of energy and activity; I like to get warm
+by climbing the hill and then to sit down and cool myself by drinking
+lager from a huge pot with a pewter lid, dreamily speculating the
+while on the possibility of my ever growing as fat as the average
+German; I like to sit in a café with my friends till three in the
+morning, discussing with fiery enthusiasm unimportant details of the
+performance we have lately endured; I like being hungry six times a
+day. All these trifles please me, and please others. But the majority
+of the crowd of visitors are not pleased by them; and what can they do
+in Bayreuth after the freshness of novelty is worn off? They go to
+Villa Wahnfried and look for a few seconds at the spot where Wagner is
+buried--as I heard it said, like a cat in a back garden; they look for
+a few seconds at the church; they lunch; they buy and partly read the
+English papers; and then? Inevitably the intelligent reader will say,
+the opera in the evening. And I, who have been to the opera in the
+evening, gasp and remark, Really!
+
+Lest this ejaculation be entirely misinterpreted by the irreverent,
+let it be said at once that the performances are not, on the whole,
+very bad. But I wish to consider whether they are of a quality and
+distinction sufficient to drag one all the way from England, and to
+compensate those who find the day dull for the dulness of the day,
+whether they are what Bayreuth claims them to be--the best operatic
+representations in the world, the best that could possibly be given at
+the present time. The circular sent out by amiable Mr. Schulz-Curtius
+states that, "while not guaranteeing any particular artists, the aim
+of Bayreuth will be to secure the best artists procurable" (or words
+to that effect). Is this genuinely the aim of Bayreuth, and does
+Bayreuth come near enough to the mark to make some thousands of
+English people think they have spent their time, money, and energy
+well in coming here? For my part I say Yes: even were the
+representations a good deal poorer, they form, as I have said, a
+centre for the day; I rise in the morning with them before me, and
+make all my arrangements--my lunches, discussions, and lagers--so as
+to reach the theatre at four o'clock; they save me from a life without
+an object, and add a zest to everything I do; they correspond to the
+trifling errand which renders a ten-mile walk in the country an
+enjoyment. But those who come here for nothing but the theatre, who
+do not feel the charm of the Bayreuth life, will, I am much afraid,
+answer No. Had I no friends here, or did I not enjoy their company and
+conversation, if my stomach refused lager and I could not smoke
+ten-pfennig German cigars, if I were not violently hungry every two
+hours, I am very much afraid I should answer No. The working of the
+scenic arrangements is, of course, as perfect as ever. Of course there
+are one or two mistakes,--stage machinists, after all, are built of
+peccable clay,--but these occur so seldom that one can sit with a
+feeling of security that is not possible at Covent Garden. In "The
+Valkyrie" the fire does not flare up ten minutes late; the coming of
+evening does not suggest an unexpected total eclipse of the sun; the
+thing that the score indicates is done, and not, as generally happens
+at Covent Garden, the reverse thing. The colours of the scenery are
+likewise as intolerably German as ever--the greens coarse and rank,
+the yellows bilious, the blues tinged with a sickly green, the reds as
+violent as the dress of the average German frau. On the other hand,
+many of the effects are wonderful--the mountain gorge where Wotan
+calls up Erda, Mime's cave, the depths of the Rhine, the burning of
+the hall of the Gibichungs. But the most astounding and lovely effects
+in the setting of the drama will not avail for long without true,
+finished, and beautiful art in the singing and acting; and, with a
+few exceptions, the singers do not give us anything approaching true,
+finished, and beautiful art. The exceptions are Van Rooy, Brema,
+Gulbranson, Brema, and Schumann-Heink. Van Rooy has a noble voice,
+admirably suited to Wotan, and he both sings and acts the part with a
+majesty and pathos beyond anything dreamed of by any other Wotan I
+have heard. He appears to have been the success of the Festival; and
+certainly so strong and exquisite an artist deserves all the success
+he can gain in Bayreuth. Brema's Fricka is noble and full of charm;
+Schumann-Heink sings the music of Erda with some sense of its mystery
+and of Waltraute in "Siegfried" with considerable passion; and
+Gulbranson has vastly improved her impersonation of Brünnhilde since
+last year. She is still unmistakably a student, but no one can doubt
+that she will develop into a really grand artist if she avoids ruining
+her fine voice by continually using it in a wrong way. Her Brünnhilde
+is just now very beautiful and intensely pathetic, but it owes less to
+her art than her personality. She does not interpret Brünnhilde--rather
+she uses the part as a vehicle for her private emotions; to an
+inordinate degree she reads into it her real or imaginary experience;
+and she has not learnt the trick of turning her feelings into the
+proper channels provided, so to say, by the part--of so directing
+them that Gulbranson disappears behind Brünnhilde. Still, it is a
+great thing to find an artist of such force and passion and at the
+same time such rare delicacy; and I expect to come here in 1899 and
+hear an almost perfect rendering of Brünnhilde. As for the rest of
+the singers, the less said about most of them the better. They have no
+voices worth the mentioning; the little they do possess they have no
+notion of using rightly; and their acting is of the most rudimentary
+sort. We hear so much of the fine acting which is supposed to cover
+the vocal sins of Bayreuth that it cannot be insisted on too strongly
+that the acting here is not fine. I can easily imagine how Wagner,
+endeavouring to get his new notion into the heads of the stupid
+singers who are still permitted to ruin his music because they are now
+veterans, would fume and rage at the Italian "business"--the laying of
+the left hand on the heart and of the right on the pit of the
+stomach--with which incompetent actors always fill up their idle
+intervals, and how he would beg them, in Wotan's name, rather to do
+nothing than do that. But to take the first bungling representation of
+the "Ring" as an ideal to be approached as closely as possible, to
+insist on competent actors and actresses standing doing nothing when
+some movement is urgently called for, is to deny to Wagner all the
+advantages of the new acting which modern stage singers have learnt
+from his music. The first act of "The Valkyrie," for example, will be
+absurd so long as Sieglinde, Hunding, and Siegmund are made to stand
+in solemn silence, as beginners who cannot hear the prompter's voice,
+until Sieglinde has mixed Hunding's draught. And some of the gestures
+and postures in which the singers are compelled to indulge are as
+foolish as the foolishest Italian acting. Who can help laughing at the
+calisthenics of Wotan and Brünnhilde at the end of "The Valkyrie," or
+at Wotan's massage treatment of Brünnhilde in the second act? The
+Bayreuth acting is as entirely conventional as Italian acting, and
+scarce a whit more artistic and sane. Even the fine artists are
+hampered by it; and the lesser ones are enabled to make themselves and
+whole music-dramas eminently ridiculous. On the whole, perhaps, acting
+and singing were at their best in "Siegfried." In "The Rheingold" some
+of the smaller parts--such as Miss Weed's Freia--were handsomely done;
+the Mime was also excellent; but I cannot quite reconcile myself to
+Friedrichs' Alberich. "The Dusk of the Gods" was marred by
+Burgstaller, and "The Valkyrie" by the two apparently octogenarian
+lovers. That is Bayreuth's way. It promises us the best singers
+procurable, and gives us Vogl and Sucher, who undoubtedly were
+delightful in their parts twenty years ago; and it would be shocked to
+learn that its good faith is questioned so far as lady artists are
+concerned. Whether it is fair to question it is another matter. In
+Germany feminine beauty is reckoned by hundredweights. No lady of
+under eighteen stones is admired; but one who is heavier than that,
+instead of staying at home and looking after her grandchildren, is put
+into a white dress and called Sieglinde, or into a brown robe and
+called Kundry; and a German audience accepts her as a revelation of
+ideal loveliness through the perfection of human form.
+
+The Germans are devoid of a sense of colour, they are devoid of a
+sense of beauty in vocal tone, and I am at last drawing near to the
+conclusion that they have no sense of beauty in instrumental tone.
+Throughout this cycle the tone of many of the instruments has been
+execrable; many of them have rarely been even in approximate tune. The
+truth is that the players do not play well unless a master-hand
+controls them; and a master-hand in the orchestra has been urgently
+wanted. Instead of a master-hand we have had to put up with Master
+Siegfried Wagner's hand (he now uses the right), and in the worst
+moments we have wished there was no hand at all, and in the best we
+have longed passionately for another. I do not propose to discuss his
+conducting in detail. Under him the band has played with steady,
+unrelenting slovenliness and inaccuracy; the music has been robbed of
+its rhythm, life, and colour; and many of the finest numbers--as, for
+example, the Valkyrie's Ride, the prelude to the third act of
+"Siegfried," the march in "The Dusk of the Gods"--have been
+deliberately massacred. One cannot criticise such conducting: it does
+not rise near enough to competence to be worthy of criticism. But one
+has a right to ask why this young man, who should be serving an
+apprenticeship in some obscure opera-house, is palmed off on the
+public as "the best artist procurable"? He scarcely seems to possess
+ordinary intelligence. I had the honour of being inadvertently
+presented to him, and he asked me, should I write anything about
+Bayreuth, to say that he objected very much to the Englishmen who came
+in knickerbockers--in bicycle costume. When I mildly suggested that if
+they came without knickerbockers or the customary alternative he would
+have better reason to complain, he asserted that he and his family had
+a great respect for the theatre, and it shocked them to find so many
+Englishmen who did not respect it. I mention this because it shows
+clearly the spirit in which Bayreuth is now being worked. The Wagner
+family are not shocked when Wagner's music is caricatured by an
+octogenarian tenor or a twenty-stone prima donna; they are shocked
+when in very hot weather a few people wear the costume in which they
+suffer least discomfort. So the place is becoming a mere fashionable
+resort, that would cause Wagner all the pangs of Amfortas could he
+come here again. The women seem to change their dresses for every act
+of the opera; the prices of lodgings, food, and drinks are rapidly
+rising to the Monte Carlo standard; a clergyman has been imported to
+preach on Sunday to the English visitors; one sees twenty or thirty
+fashionable divorce cases in process of incubation; and Siegfried
+Wagner conducts. With infinite labour Wagner built this magnificent
+theatre, the most perfect machine in the world for the reproduction of
+great art-works; and Mrs. Wagner has given it as a toy to her darling
+son that he may amuse himself by playing with it. And, like a baby
+when it gets a toy, Siegfried Wagner is breaking it to pieces to see
+what there is inside. Unless it is taken from him until he has spent a
+few years in learning to play upon instead of with it, Bayreuth will
+quickly be deserted. Already it is in decadence. I shall always come
+to Bayreuth, for reasons already given; but fashions change, and the
+people who come here because it is the fashion will not be long in
+finding other resorts; and those who want only to see the music-plays
+adequately performed will have learnt that this is not the place for
+them. With one voice the ablest German, French, and Dutch critics are
+crying against the present state of things; and it is certainly the
+duty of every English lover of Wagner to refuse to take tickets for
+the performances that are to be conducted by Wagner's son. Bayreuth
+promises us the best artists. Whether some of the singers are or are
+not the best artists is largely a matter of taste. But that Siegfried
+Wagner is the best conductor procurable in Germany is too preposterous
+a proposition to be considered for a moment. He may be some day; but
+that day is far off.
+
+As for the representation of "Parsifal," I should not trouble to
+discuss it had not Mr. Chamberlain's book on Wagner lately come my
+way. It shows me that the old game is being pursued as busily as ever.
+Since Wagner's death the world has been carefully and persistently
+taught that only Bayreuth can do justice to "Parsifal"; and since the
+world believes anything if it is said often enough, it has come to
+think it sheer blasphemy to dream of giving "Parsifal" elsewhere than
+at Bayreuth. "Parsifal" is not an opera--it is a sacred revelation;
+and just as the seed of Aaron alone could serve as priests in the
+sacred rites of the temple at Jerusalem, so only the seed of Wagner
+can serve as priests--that is to say, as chief directing priests--when
+"Parsifal" is played. Thus declare the naive dwellers in Villa
+Wahnfried, modestly forgetting the missing link in the chain of
+argument which should prove them alone to be the people qualified to
+perform "Parsifal"; and I regret to observe the support they receive
+from a number of Englishmen and Scotchmen, who are grown more German
+than the Germans, and just as religiously forget to make any reference
+to this missing link of proof. But these Germanised Scotchmen and
+Englishmen work hard for Bayreuth: now they whisper in awestruck tones
+of the beauty and significance of "Parsifal"; now they howl at the
+unhappy writers in the daily and weekly Press who dare to find little
+significance and less beauty in the Bayreuth representation; and, to
+do them bare justice, until lately they have been fairly successful in
+persuading the world to think with them. Verily, they have their
+reward--they partake of afternoon tea at Villa Wahnfried; they enjoy
+the honour of bowing low to the second Mrs. Wagner; Wagner's legal
+descendants cordially take them by the hand. And they go away
+refreshed, and again spread the report of the artistic and moral and
+religious supremacy of Bayreuth; and the world listens and goes up
+joyfully to Bayreuth to be taxed--one pound sterling per head per
+"Parsifal" representation. The performances over, the world comes away
+mightily edified, having seen nothing with its own eyes, heard nothing
+with its own ears, having understood nothing at all;--having, in fact,
+so totally miscomprehended everything as to think "Parsifal" a
+Christian drama; having been too deaf to realise that the singers were
+frequently out of the key, and too blind to observe that the scenery
+in the second act resembled a cheap cretonne, and that many of the
+flower-maidens were at least eight feet in circumference. On the way
+home the world whiles away the long railway journey by reading
+metaphysical disquisitions on "Parsifal' and the Ideal Woman,"
+"'Parsifal' and the Thing-in-Itself," "The Swan in 'Parsifal' and its
+Relation to the Higher Vegetarianism." It knows the name of every
+leit-motif, and can nearly pronounce the German for it; it can refer
+to the Essay on Beethoven apropos of Kundry's scream (or yawn) in the
+second act; it can chat learnedly of Klingsor, in pathetic ignorance
+of his real offence, and explain why Amfortas has his wound on the
+right side, although the libretto distinctly states it to be situated
+on the left. It is a fact that this year a lady was heard to ask why
+Parsifal quarrelled with his wife in the second act. (I might mention
+that an admirer of "Parsifal" asked me who the dark man was in the
+first act of "The Valkyrie," and whether Sieglinde or Brünnhilde was
+burnt in the last.) The which is eminently amusing, and conjures up
+before one a vision of Richard, not wailing, like the youth in
+Shelley's "Prometheus Unbound," for the faith he kindled, but gazing
+patiently, rather wearily, with a kindly ironical smile, on the world
+he conquered, on the world that adores him _because_ it fails to
+understand him.
+
+Happily, it is not my business to reform the world; and writing in
+October, when so many of the idealists who felt with Parsifal in his
+remorse about the duck-shooting episode are applying the lesson by
+wantonly slaughtering every harmless creature they can hit, it would
+be superfluous to point out in any detail how very wrong and absurd is
+the world's estimate of the Bayreuth performance. In fact, were it my
+object to assist in the destruction of Bayreuth, no better plan could
+be found than that of approving cordially of everything Bayreuth does.
+For it is fast driving away all sincere lovers of Wagner; it lives now
+on fashionable ladies, betting men, and bishops: when the fashion
+changes and these depart, the Bayreuth festivals will come to an end.
+Bayreuth is only an affectation; not one pilgrim in a hundred
+understands the "Ring" or "Parsifal"; not one in a thousand is really
+impressed by anything deeper than the mere novelty of the business.
+Visitors go and are moved by the shooting of the duck (the libretto
+calls it a swan, but the management chooses to use a duck); they talk
+of Wagner's love of animals and of how they love animals themselves;
+they go straight from Bayreuth to Scotland and show their love in true
+sportsmanlike fashion by treating animals, birds, and fishes with a
+degree of cruelty so appalling as to disgust every right-thinking and
+right-feeling man and woman; and they tell you that the stag likes to
+be disembowelled, the bird to have its wings shattered, the fish to be
+torn to pieces in its agonised struggle for life. Or, having been
+moved by the consequences of sin, they straightway go and prepare
+cases for the divorce courts; having appreciated the purity and peace
+of monastery life and a daily communion service, they return without
+hesitation or sense of inconsistency to their favourite modes of
+gambling; having revelled in the most lovely music in the world, they
+proceed to listen nightly to the ugliest and silliest music in the
+world. Their appreciation of Bayreuth is a sham; they would cheerfully
+go elsewhere--say to Homburg--if Bayreuth were shut up; and before
+long they will go to Homburg or elsewhere, whether Bayreuth is shut up
+or not.
+
+
+
+
+A NOTE ON BRAHMS
+
+
+It is not an exaggeration to say that probably there are not a dozen
+musicians in Europe who have formed any precise and final opinion as
+to where Brahms should be placed. One gets to know him very slowly.
+His appearance and manner (so to speak), so extremely dignified, are
+very much in his favour; but when one tries to get to terms of
+intimacy with him he has a fatal trick of repelling one by that
+"austerity" or chilliness of which we have heard so much. And the
+worst of it is that too frequently a sharp suspicion strikes one that
+there is little behind that austere manner--that his reticence does
+not so much imply matter held in reserve as an absence of matter. I do
+not mean by this that Brahms was a paradoxical fool who was clever
+enough to hold his tongue lest he was found out, nor even that he
+purposely veiled his lack of meaning. On the contrary, a composer who
+wished more devoutly to be sincere never put pen to paper. But he had
+not the intellect of an antelope; and he took up in all honesty a rôle
+for which he had only the slightest qualification. The true Brahms,
+the Brahms who does not deceive himself, is the Brahms you find in
+many of the songs, in some of the piano and chamber music, in the
+smaller movements of his symphonies, and in certain passages of his
+overtures; and I have no hesitation whatever in asserting (though the
+opinion is subject to revision) that his songs are much the most
+satisfactory things he did. Here, unweighted by a heavy sense of a
+mission, he either revels in making beautiful--though never supremely
+beautiful--tunes for their own sake, or he actually expresses with
+beauty and considerable fidelity certain definite emotions. Had he
+written nothing but such small things--songs, piano pieces,
+Allegrettos like that in the D symphony--his position might be a
+degree lower in the estimation of dull Academics who don't count, but
+he would be accepted at something like his true value by the whole
+world, and the whole world would be the better for oftener hearing
+many lovely things. But merely to be a singer of wonderful songs was
+not sufficient for Brahms: he wanted to be a great poet, a new
+Beethoven. It was a legitimate ambition. The kind of music Brahms
+really loved was the kind of which Beethoven's is the most splendid
+example; and he wanted to create more of the same kind. He doubtless
+thought he could; in his early days Robert Schumann predicted that he
+would; and in his later days his intimate friend Hanslick and a small
+herd of followers asserted that he did. He was run as the prophet of
+the classical school with all the force of all who hated Wagner and
+had not brains enough to understand either Brahms' or Wagner's music;
+he became the god of all the musical dullards in Europe; and it is
+small wonder that he took himself with immense seriousness. A little
+more intelligence, ever so little more, would have shown him that,
+despite the noise of those who perhaps admired him less than they
+dreaded Wagner, he was not the man they said he was. He had not a
+great matter to utter; what he had he could not utter in the classical
+form; yet he tried to write in classical form. If ever a musician was
+born a happy, careless romanticist, that musician was Brahms--he was
+even a romanticist in the narrower sense, inasmuch as he was fond
+rather of the gloomy, mysterious, and dismal than of sunlight and the
+blue sky; and whenever his imagination warmed he straightway began
+breaking the bonds in which he had endeavoured to work. But that
+miserable article of Schumann--deplorable gush that has been
+tolerated, nay, admired, only because it is Schumann's--the evil
+influence of the pseudo-classicism of Mendelssohn and his followers,
+the preposterous over-praise of Hanslick,--these things drove Brahms
+into the mistake never made by the really able men. Wilkes denied that
+he ever was a Wilksite; Wagner certainly never was a Wagnerite; there
+are people who ask whether Christ was ever a Christian. But Brahms
+became more and more a devoted Brahmsite; he accepted himself as the
+guardian of the great classical tradition (which never existed); and
+he wrote more and more dull music. It is idle to tell me he is austere
+when my inner consciousness tells me he is merely barren, and idler
+to ask me feel beauty when my ears report no beauty to me. He had no
+original emotion or thought: whenever his music is good it will be
+found that he has derived the emotion from a poem, or else that there
+is no emotion but only very fine decorative work. In most of his
+bigger works--the symphonies, the German Requiem, the Serious songs he
+wrote in his later days--he sacrificed the beauty he might have
+attained to the expression of emotions he never felt; he assumed the
+pose and manner of a master telling us great things, and talked like a
+pompous duffer. An exception must be made: one emotion Brahms had felt
+and did communicate. It was his tragedy that he had no original
+emotion, no rich inner life, but lived through the days on the merely
+prosaic plane; and he seems to have felt that this was his tragedy.
+Anyhow, the one original emotion he brought into music is a curious
+mournful dissatisfaction with life and with death. The only piece of
+his I know in which the feeling is intolerably poignant, seems to cut
+like a knife, is his setting of that sad song of Goethe's about the
+evening wind dashing the vine leaves and the raindrops against the
+window pane; and in this song, as also in the movement in one of the
+quartets evolved from the song, the mournfulness becomes absolutely
+pitiable despair. Brahms was not cast in the big mould, and he spent a
+good deal of his later time in pitying himself. It is curious that
+one of his last works was the batch of Serious songs, which consist of
+dismal meditations on the darkness and dirt of the grave and
+feebly-felt hopes that there is something better on the other side.
+That does not strike one as in the vein of the big men.
+
+Much of Brahms' music is bad and ugly music, dead music; it is a
+counterfeit and not the true and perfect image of life indeed; and it
+should be buried or cremated at the earliest opportunity. But much of
+it is wonderfully beautiful--almost but never quite as beautiful as
+the great men at their best. There are passages in the Tragic overture
+that any composer might be proud to have written. If the opening of
+the D symphony is thin, unreal, an attempt at pastoral gaiety which
+has resulted merely in lack of character, at anyrate the second theme
+is delightful; if the opening of the slow movement is also twaddle,
+there are pleasant passages later on; the dainty allegretto is as
+fresh and fragrant as a wild rose; and the finale, though void of
+significance, is full of an energy rare in Brahms. Then there are many
+of the songs in which Brahms' astonishing felicity of phrase, and his
+astounding trick of finding expression for an emotion when the emotion
+has been given to him, enable him almost to work miracles. And it must
+be remembered that all his music is irreproachable from the technical
+point of view. Brahms is certainly with Bach, Mozart, and Wagner in
+point of musicianship: in fact, these four might be called the
+greatest masters of sheer music who have lived. A Brahms score is as
+wonderful as a Wagner score; from beginning to end there is not a
+misplaced note nor a trace of weakness; and one stands amazed before
+the consummate workmanship of the thing. The only difference between
+the Wagner score and the Brahms score is, that while the former is
+always alive, always the product of a fervent inner life, the latter
+is sometimes alive too, but more frequently as dead as a door-mat, the
+product of extreme facility and (I must suppose) an extraordinary
+inherited musical instinct divorced from exalted thought and feeling.
+The difference may be felt when you compare a Brahms and a
+Tschaikowsky symphony. Although in his later years Tschaikowsky
+acquired a mastery of the technique of music, and succeeded in keeping
+his scores clear and clean, he never arrived at anything approaching
+Brahms' certainty of touch, and neither his scoring nor his
+counterpoint has Brahms' perfection of workmanship. Yet one listens to
+Tschaikowksy, for the present at least, with intense pleasure, and
+wants to listen again. I have yet to meet anyone who pretends to have
+received any intense pleasure from a Brahms symphony.
+
+Brahms is dead; the old floods of adulation will no longer be poured
+forth by the master's disciples; neither will the enemies his friends
+made for him have any reason to depreciate his music; and ultimately
+it will be possible to form a fair, unbiassed judgment on him. This is
+a mere casual utterance, by the way.
+
+
+
+
+ANTON DVORÁK
+
+
+I remember the Philharmonic in its glory one evening, when it had a
+couple of distinguished foreigners to a kind of musical high tea, very
+bourgeois, very long and very indigestible. One of the pair of
+distinguished foreigners was Mr. Sauer; the other, Dvorák, was the
+hero of the evening. Now, whatever one may think of Dvorák the
+musician, it is impossible to feel anything but sympathy and
+admiration for Dvorák the man. His early struggles to overcome the
+attendant disadvantages of his peasant birth; his unheard-of labours
+to acquire a mastery of the technique of his art when body and brain
+were exhausted by the work of earning his daily bread in a very humble
+capacity; his sickening years of waiting, not for popular recognition
+merely, but for an opportunity of showing that he had any gifts worthy
+of being recognised,--these command the sympathy of all but those
+happy few who have found life a most delicate feather-bed. Dvorák has
+honestly worked for all that has come to him, and the only people who
+will carp or sneer at him are those who have gained or wish to gain
+their positions without honest work. There could be no conjecture
+wider of the mark than that of his success being due to any charlatan
+tricks in his music or in his conduct of life. No composer's
+music--not Bach's, nor Haydn's, nor even Mozart's--could be a more
+veracious expression of his inner nature; and if Dvorák's music is at
+times odd and whimsical, and persistently wrong-headed and _outré_
+through long passages, it does not mean that Dvorák is trying to
+impress or startle his hearers by doing unusual things, but merely
+that he himself is odd and whimsical and has his periods of persistent
+wrong-headedness. He is Slav in every fibre--not a pseudo-Slav whose
+ancestors were or deserved to be whipped out of the temple in
+Jerusalem. He has all the Slav's impetuosity and hot blood, his love
+of glaring and noisy colour, his love of sheer beauty of a certain
+limited kind, and--alas!--his unfailing brainlessness. His impetuosity
+and hot blood are manifested in his frequent furious rhythms and the
+abrupt changes in those rhythms; his love of colour in the quality of
+his instrumentation, with its incessant contrasts and use of the
+drums, cymbals, and triangle; his sense of beauty in the terribly
+weird splendour of his pictures, and its limitations in his rare
+achievement of anything fine when once he passes out of the region of
+the weird and terrible; his brainlessness in his inability to
+appreciate the value of a strong sinewy theme, in the lack of
+proportion between the different movements of his works and between
+the sections of the movements, and, perhaps more than in any other
+way, in his unhappy choice of subjects for vocal works. One stands
+amazed before the spectacle of the man who made that prodigious
+success with the awful legend of "The Spectre's Bride" coming forward,
+smiling in childlike confidence, with "Saint Ludmila," which was so
+awful in another fashion. And then, as if not content with nearly
+ruining his reputation by that deadly blow, he must needs follow up
+"Saint Ludmila" with the dreariest, dullest, most poverty-stricken
+Requiem ever written by a musician with any gift of genuine invention.
+These mistakes might indicate mere want of tact did not the qualities
+of Dvorák's music show them to be the result of sheer want of
+intellect; and if the defects of his music are held by some to be
+intentional beauties, no such claim can be set up for the opinions on
+music which he has on various occasions confided to the ubiquitous
+interviewer. The Slav is an interesting creature, and his music is
+interesting, not because he is higher than the Western man, but
+because he is different, and, if anything, lower, with a considerable
+touch of the savage. When Dvorák is himself, and does not pass outside
+the boundaries within which he can breathe freely, he produces results
+so genuine and powerful that one might easily mistake him for a great
+musician; but when he competes with Beethoven or Handel or Haydn, we
+at once realise that he is not expressing what he really feels, but
+what he thinks he should feel, that he is not at his ease, and that
+our native men can beat him clean out of the field. To be sure, they
+can at times be as dull as he, but that is when they forget the lesson
+they should before now have learnt from him, when they leave the field
+in which they work with real enjoyment and produce results which may
+be enjoyed.
+
+
+
+
+TSCHAIKOWSKY AND HIS "PATHETIC" SYMPHONY
+
+
+A very little while since, Tschaikowsky was little more than a name
+in England. He had visited us some two or three times, and it was
+generally believed that he composed; but he had not written any piece
+without which no orchestral programme could be considered complete,
+and the mere suggestion that his place might possibly be far above
+Gounod would certainly have been received with open derision. However,
+when his fame became great and spread wide on the Continent, he became
+so important a man in the eyes of English musicians that Cambridge
+University thought fit to honour itself by offering him an honorary
+musical degree. Tschaikowsky, simple soul, good-humouredly accepted
+it, apparently in entire ignorance of the estimation in which such
+cheap decorations are held in this country; and it is to be hoped that
+before his death he obtained a hearing in Russia for the Cambridge
+professor's music. The incident, comical as it appeared to those of us
+who knew the value of musical degrees, the means by which they are
+obtained, and the reasons for which they are conferred, yet served a
+useful purpose by calling public attention to the fact that there was
+living a man who had written music that was fresh, a trifle strange
+perhaps, but full of vitality, and containing a new throb, a new
+thrill. Since 1893 his reputation has steadily grown, but in a curious
+way. One can scarcely say with truth that Tschaikowsky is popular:
+only his "Pathetic" symphony and one or two smaller things are
+popular. Had he not written the "Pathetic," one may doubt whether he
+would be much better known to-day than he was in 1893. It caught the
+public fancy as no other work of his caught it, and on the strength of
+its popularity many of the critics do not hesitate to call it a great
+symphony, and on the strength of the symphony Tschaikowsky a great
+composer. (For in England criticism largely means saying what the
+public thinks.) Passionately though that symphony is admired, hardly
+any other of his music can be truly said to get a hearing; for, on the
+rare occasions when it is played, the public thoughtfully stays away.
+It is true that the Casse Noisette suite is always applauded, but it
+is a trifling work compared with his best. Tschaikowsky shares with
+Gray and one or two others in ancient and modern times the distinction
+of being famous by a single achievement. The public is jealous for the
+supremacy of that achievement, and will not hear of there being
+another equal to it.
+
+Whether the public is right or wrong, and whether we all are or are
+not just a little inclined to-day to exaggerate Tschaikowsky's gifts
+and the value of his music, there can be no doubt whatever that he was
+a singularly fine craftsman, who brought into music a number of fresh
+and living elements. He seems to me to have been an extraordinary
+combination of the barbarian and the civilised man, of the Slav and
+the Latin or Teuton, the Slav barbarian preponderating. He saw things
+as neither Slav nor Latin nor Teuton had seen them before; the touch
+of things aroused in him moods dissimilar from those that had been
+aroused in anyone before. Hence, while we English regard him as a
+representative Russian, or at anyrate Slav, composer, many Russians
+repudiate him, calling him virtually a Western. He has the Slav fire,
+rash impetuosity, passion and intense melancholy, and much also of
+that Slav naïveté which in the case of Dvorák degenerates into sheer
+brainlessness; he has an Oriental love of a wealth of extravagant
+embroidery, of pomp and show and masses of gorgeous colour; but the
+other, what I might call the Western, civilised element in his
+character, showed itself in his lifelong striving to get into touch
+with contemporary thought, to acquire a full measure of modern
+culture, and to curb his riotous, lawless impulse towards mere sound
+and fury. It is this unique fusion of apparently mutually destructive
+elements and instincts that gives to Tschaikowsky's music much of its
+novelty and piquancy. But, apart from this uncommon fusion, it must be
+remembered that his was an original mind--original not only in colour
+but in its very structure. Had he been pure Slav, or pure Latin, his
+music might have been very different, but it would certainly have
+been original. He had true creative imagination, a fund of original,
+underived emotion, and a copiousness of invention almost as great as
+Wagner's or Mozart's. His power of evolving new decorative patterns of
+a fantastic beauty seemed quite inexhaustible; and the same may be
+said of his schemes and combinations and shades of colour, and the
+architectural plans and forms of his larger works. It is true that his
+forms frequently enough approach formlessness; that his colours--and
+especially in his earlier music--are violent and inharmonious; and
+that in his ceaseless invention of new patterns his Slav naïveté and
+lack of humour led him more than a hundred times to write
+unintentionally comic passages. He is discursive--I might say voluble.
+Again, he had little or no real strength--none of the massive, healthy
+strength of Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Wagner: his force is sheer
+hysteria. He is wanting in the deepest and tenderest human feeling. He
+is plausible to a degree that leads one to suspect his sincerity, and
+certainly leaves it an open question how long a great deal of his
+music will stand after this generation, to which it appeals so
+strongly, has passed away. But when all that may fairly be said
+against him has been said and given due weight, the truth remains that
+he is one of the few great composers of this century. I myself, in all
+humility, allowing fully that I may be altogether wrong, while
+convinced that I am absolutely right, deliberately set him far above
+Brahms, above Gounod, above Schumann--above all save Beethoven, Weber,
+Schubert, and Wagner. His accomplishment as a sheer musician was
+greater than either Gounod's or Schumann's, though far from being
+equal to Brahms'--for Brahms as a master of the management of notes
+stands with the highest, with Bach, Mozart, and Wagner; while as a
+voice and a new force in music neither Brahms nor Schumann nor Gounod
+can be compared with him other than unfavourably. All that are
+sensitive to music can feel, as I have said, the new throb, the new
+thrill; and that decides the matter.
+
+It is now a long time since Mr. Henry Wood, one winter's afternoon,
+the only Englishman who may be ranked with the great continental
+conductors, gave a Tschaikowsky concert, with a programme that
+included some of the earlier as well as one or two of the later works.
+It served to show how hard and how long Tschaikowsky laboured to
+attain to lucidity of expression, and why the "Pathetic" symphony is
+popular while the other compositions are not. In all of them we find
+infinite invention and blazes of Eastern magnificence and splendour;
+but in the earlier things there is little of the order and clarity of
+the later ones. Another and a more notable point is that in not one
+thing played at this concert might the human note be heard. The suite
+(Op. 55) and the symphony (Op. 36) are full of novel and dazzling
+effects--for example, the scherzo of the symphony played mainly by the
+strings pizzicato, and the scherzo of the suite, with the short, sharp
+notes of the brass and the rattle of the side-drum; the melodies also
+are new, and in their way beautiful; in form both symphony and suite
+are nearly as clear as anything Tschaikowsky wrote: in fact, each work
+is a masterwork. But each is lacking in the human element, and without
+the human element no piece of music can be popular for long. The fame
+of Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, is still growing and will continue to
+grow, because every time we hear their music it touches us; while
+Weber, mighty though he is, will probably never be better loved than
+he is to-day, because his marvellously graphic picturesque music does
+not touch us--cannot, was not intended to, touch us; and the fame of
+Mendelssohn and the host of lesser men who did not speak with a human
+accent of human woe and weal wanes from day to day. The composer who
+writes purely decorative music, or purely picturesque music, may be
+remembered as long as he who expresses human feeling; but he cannot
+hope to be loved by so many. It is because Tschaikowsky has so
+successfully put his own native emotions, his own aspirations and
+hopes and fears and sorrows, into the "Pathetic," that I believe it
+has come to stay with us, while many of his other works will fade
+from the common remembrance. Surely it is one of the most mournful
+things in music; yet surely sadness was never uttered with a finer
+grace, with a more winning carelessness, as one who tries to smile
+gaily at his own griefs. Were it touched with the finest tenderness,
+as Mozart might have touched it, we might--if we could once get
+thoroughly accustomed to a few of the unintentionally humorous
+passages I have referred to--have it set by the side of the G minor
+and "Jupiter" symphonies. As it is, it unmistakably falls short of
+Mozart by lacking that tenderness, just as it falls short of Beethoven
+by lacking profundity of emotion and thought; but it does not always
+fall so far short. There are passages in it that neither Beethoven nor
+Mozart need have been ashamed to own as theirs; and especially there
+is much in it that is in the very spirit of Mozart--Mozart as we find
+him in the Requiem, rather than the Mozart of "Don Giovanni" or the
+"Figaro." The opening bars are, of course, ultramodern: they would
+never have been written had not Wagner written something like them
+first; but the combination of poignancy and lightness and poise with
+which the same phrase is delivered and expanded as the theme for the
+allegro is quite Mozartean, and the same may be said of the semiquaver
+passage following it. The outbursts of Slavonic fire are, of course,
+Tschaikowsky pure and simple; but everyone who hears the symphony may
+note how the curious union of barbarism with modern culture is
+manifest in the ease with which Tschaikowsky recovers himself after
+one of these outbursts--turns it aside, so to speak, instead of giving
+it free play after the favourite plan both of Borodine the great and
+purely Russian composer, and Dvorák the little Hungarian composer. The
+second theme does not appear to me equal to the rest of the symphony.
+It has that curious volubility and "mouthing" quality that sometimes
+gets into Tschaikowsky's music; it is plausible and pretty; it
+suggests a writer who either cannot or dare not use the true
+tremendous word at the proper moment, and goes on delivering himself
+of journalistic stock-phrases which he knows will move those who would
+be left unmoved were the right word spoken. There is nothing of this
+in the melody of the second movement. Its ease is matched by its
+poignancy: the very happy-go-lucky swing of it adds to its poignancy;
+and the continuation--another instance of the untamed Slav under the
+influence of the most finished culture--has a wild beauty, and at the
+same time communicates the emotion more clearly than speech could. The
+mere fact that it is written in five-four time counts for
+little--nothing is easier than to write in five-four time when once
+you have got the trick; the remarkable thing is the skill and tact
+with which Tschaikowsky has used precisely the best rhythm he could
+have chosen--a free, often ambiguous, rhythm--to express that
+particular shade of feeling. The next movement is one of the most
+astounding ever conceived. Beginning like an airy scherzo, presently a
+march rhythm is introduced, and before one has realised the state of
+affairs we are in the midst of a positive tornado of passion. The
+first tunes then resume; but again they are dismissed, and it becomes
+apparent that the march theme is the real theme of the whole
+movement--that all the others are intended simply to lead up to it, or
+to form a frame in which it is set. It comes in again and again with
+ever greater and greater clamour, until it seems to overwhelm one
+altogether. There is no real strength in it--the effect is entirely
+the result of nervous energy, of sheer hysteria; but as an expression
+of an uncontrollable hysterical mood it stands alone in music. It
+should be observed that even here Tschaikowsky's instinctive tendency
+to cover the intensity of his mood with a pretence of carelessness had
+led him to put this enormous outburst into a rhythm that, otherwise
+used, would be irresistibly jolly. The last movement, too, verges on
+the hysterical throughout. It is full of the blackest melancholy and
+despondency, with occasional relapses into a tranquillity even more
+tragic; and the trombone passage near the end, introduced by a
+startling stroke on the gong, inevitably reminds one of the spirit of
+Mozart's Requiem.
+
+The whole of this paper might have been devoted to a discussion of
+the technical side of Tschaikowsky's music, for the score of this
+symphony is one of the most interesting I know. It is full of
+astonishing points, of ingenious dodges used not for their own sake,
+but to produce, as here they nearly always do, particular effects; and
+throughout, the part-writing, the texture of the music, is most
+masterly and far beyond anything Tschaikowsky achieved before. For
+instance, the opening of the last movement has puzzled some good
+critics, for it is written in a way which seems like a mere perverse
+and wasted display of skill. But let anyone imagine for a moment the
+solid, leaden, lifeless result of letting all the parts descend
+together, instead of setting them, as Tschaikowsky does, twisting
+round each other, and it will at once be perceived that Tschaikowsky
+never knew better what he was doing, or was more luckily inspired,
+than when he devised the arrangement that now stands. Much as I should
+like to have debated dozens of such points, it is perhaps better,
+after all, just now to have talked principally of the content of
+Tschaikowsky's music; for, when all is said, in Tschaikowsky's music
+it is the content that counts. I might describe that content as
+modern, were it not that the phrase means little. Tschaikowsky is
+modern because he is new; and in this age, when the earth has grown
+narrow, and tales of far-off coasts and unexplored countries seem
+wonderful no longer, we throw ourselves with eagerness upon the new
+thing, in five minutes make it our own, and hail the inventor of it as
+the man who has said for us what we had all felt for years.
+Nevertheless, it may be that Tschaikowsky's attitude towards life, and
+especially towards its sorrows,--the don't-care-a-hang attitude,--is
+modern; and anyhow, in the sense that it is so new that we seize it
+first amongst a hundred other things, this symphony is the most modern
+piece of music we have. It is imbued with a romanticism beside which
+the romanticism of Weber and Wagner seems a little thin-blooded and
+pallid; it expresses for us the emotions of the over-excited and
+over-sensitive man as they have not been expressed since Mozart; and
+at the present time we are quite ready for a new and less Teutonic
+romanticism than Weber's, and to enter at once into the feelings of
+the brain-tired man. That the "Pathetic" will for long continue to
+grow in popularity I also fully expect; and that after this generation
+has hurried away it will continue to have a large measure of
+popularity I also fully expect, for in it, together with much that
+appeals only to us unhealthy folk of to-day, there is much that will
+appeal to the race, no matter how healthy it may become, so long as it
+remains human in its desires and instincts.
+
+
+
+
+LAMOUREUX AND HIS ORCHESTRA
+
+
+Richter and Mottl, the only considerable conductors besides
+Lamoureux whom we had heard in England up to 1896, may be compared
+with a couple of organists who come here, expecting to find their
+instruments ready, in fair working order, and accurately in tune.
+Lamoureux, on the other hand, was like Sarasate and Ysaÿe, who would
+be reduced to utter discomfiture if their Strads were to stray on the
+road. He played on his own instrument--the orchestra on which he had
+practised day by day for so many years. Richter and Mottl took their
+instruments as they found them, and devoted the comparatively short
+time they had for rehearsal to the business of getting their main
+intentions broadly carried out, leaving a good deal of minor detail to
+look after itself, and not complaining if a few notes fell under the
+desks at the back of the orchestra. Lamoureux had laboriously
+rehearsed every inch of his repertory until it was note-perfect, and
+each of his men knew the precise bowing, phrasing, degree of piano or
+forte, and tempo of every minutest phrase. Now I do not mean by this
+that the orchestras on which Richter and Mottl performed played many
+wrong notes, while the Lamoureux orchestra played none; and still less
+do I mean that Lamoureux got finer results than Richter or Mottl. So
+far as the mere notes are concerned, the Englishmen who played for the
+German conductors acquitted themselves quite as well as the Frenchmen
+who played for Lamoureux. Both made mistakes at times; and a seemingly
+paradoxical thing is that when a Lamoureux man stumbled all the world
+was bound to hear it, whereas in our English orchestras a score of
+mistakes might be made in an evening without many of us being much the
+wiser. The reason for this is the reason why the playing of Lamoureux
+on his trained orchestra, for all its accuracy, was not better than,
+nor in many respects so good as, the playing of Richter and Mottl on
+the scratch orchestras which their agents engaged for them. Probably
+few uninformed laymen have any notion of the extent to which mere
+noise is responsible for the total effect of a Wagner piece or a
+Beethoven symphony--not the noise of big drum, cymbals and so on; but
+the continuous slight discords caused by some of the players being
+various degrees in front and others various degrees behind; the
+scratching produced by uncertain bowing, or by an unfortunate fiddler
+finding himself a little behind the general body (as he does
+sometimes) and making a savage rush to catch it up; the hissing of
+panting flautists; and the barnyard noises produced by exhausted
+oboe-players. Even with Richter, stolid and trustworthy though he is,
+these unauthorised sounds count for a great deal; and with a conductor
+like Mottl, who varies the tempo freely in obedience to his mood in
+the most rapid pieces, they count for very much more. They result in a
+continuous murmur which, so to speak, fills the interstices in the
+network of the music, covering wrong notes, and giving the mass of
+tone a richness and unity which otherwise it would lack. In such
+movements as the Finale of the Fifth symphony this continuous murmur
+does the work done for the piano by the upper strings without dampers
+and the lower ones when the pedal is pressed down; it gives solidity
+and colour to the music; and certainly half the effect in fine
+renderings of "The Flying Dutchman" overture, the Walkürenritt, and
+the Fire-music, is due to it. But Lamoureux's men had practised so
+long together under their conductor's beat that all the instruments
+played like one instrument, no matter how the tempo was varied; the
+bowing of each passage had been considered and finally settled, so
+that there was no uncertainty there; and in the course of long
+rehearsal every wind-player had learned precisely where he must
+breathe, where he must reserve his breath, and where he could let
+himself go, so that the tone of flutes, oboes, clarinets, and bassoons
+never became in the smallest degree forced or hoarse. And the result
+of this was the entire absence of that murmur which one has come to
+regard as characteristic of the orchestra. If a wrong note was played,
+there was nothing to hide its nakedness. It was as though a
+penetrating flood of cold white light were poured upon the music and
+made it transparent: one perceived every remotest and least
+significant detail with a vivid distinctness that can only be compared
+with a page of print seen through a strong magnifying glass, or,
+perhaps better still, with a photograph seen through a stereoscope. As
+in a stereoscope, the outlines were defined with a degree of clearness
+and sharpness that almost hurt the eye; as in a stereoscope, there was
+neither colour nor suggestiveness. An orchestral virtuoso, like a
+piano or violin virtuoso, may over-practise.
+
+Having delivered this verdict with all solemnity, I must straightway
+proceed to hedge. If Lamoureux had not the qualities which give
+Richter and Mottl their pre-eminence, he had qualities which they do
+not possess, and his playing had qualities which one cannot find in
+theirs. If he had not absolutely a genius for music, he certainly had
+a genius for attaining perfection in all he did, which was perhaps the
+next best thing. I imagine that he would have made a mouse-trap or
+built a cathedral exactly as he played a Beethoven symphony. The mouse
+would never escape from the trap; there would be nothing wanting, down
+to the most modern appliances and conveniences, in the cathedral. In
+the Fifth symphony he gave us every minute nuance in rigid obedience
+to the composer's directions or evident intentions, and gave them with
+a fastidious care strangely in contrast with Mottl's rough-and-ready
+brilliancy or Richter's breadth. He began every crescendo on the
+precise note where Beethoven marked it to begin; and he gradated it
+with geometrical faultlessness to the exact note where Beethoven
+marked it to cease. In diminuendos and accelerandos and ritenutos he
+was just as faithful. In the softer portions his sforzandos were not
+irrelevant explosions, but slight extra accents: he made microscopic
+distinctions between piano and pianissimo; he achieved the most
+difficult feat of keeping his band at a level forte through long
+passages without a symptom of breaking out into fortissimo. His
+players treated the stiffest passages in the "Dutchman" overture as if
+they were baby's play; and I detected hardly a wrong note either in
+that or in the Fifth symphony. In a word, nothing to compare with the
+technical perfection of his renderings, or his unswerving loyalty to
+the composer, has been heard in London in my time. Yet, by reason of
+that very prodigious correctness, the "Dutchman" overture seemed bare
+and comparatively lifeless: the roar and the hiss of the storm were
+absent, and the shrill discordant wail of wind in the cordage; one
+heard, not the wail or the hiss or the roar, but the notes which--in
+our crude scale with its arbitrary division into tones and
+half-tones--Wagner had perforce to use to suggest them. There was even
+something of flippancy in it after Mottl's gigantic rendering: one
+longed for the dramatic hanging back of the time at the phrase, "Doch
+ach! den Tod, ich fand ihn nicht!" which is of such importance in the
+overture. On the other hand, a more splendid reading of the first
+movement of the Fifth symphony I have never heard; but the rest of the
+movements were hardly to be called readings at all. The most devoted
+admirers of Lamoureux--and I was his fairly devoted admirer
+myself--will not deny that the slow movement is full of poetry, the
+scherzo of a remote, mystical emotion, and the Finale of a wondrous
+combination of sadness, regret and high triumphant joy; and anyone who
+claims that Lamoureux gave us the slightest hint of those qualities
+must be more than his admirer--must be his infatuated slave. The last
+movement even wanted richness; for that excessive clearness which
+prevented the tones blending into masses, and forced one to
+distinguish the separate notes of the flutes, the oboes, the
+clarinets, and so forth, seemed to rob the music of all its body, its
+solidity. But, when all is said, Lamoureux was, in his special way, a
+noble master of the orchestra; and, even if I could not regard him as
+a great interpreter of the greatest music, I admit that the side of
+the great music which he revealed was well worth knowing, and should
+indeed be known to all who would understand the great music.
+
+When I wrote the preceding paragraphs on Lamoureux, some of my
+colleagues were good enough to neglect their own proper business while
+they put me right about orchestral playing in general and that of
+Lamoureux in particular. These gentlemen told me that, when Beethoven
+(whom they knew personally) wrote certain notes, he intended them and
+no others to be played; that the more accurate a rendering, the closer
+it approaches to the work as it existed in Beethoven's mind; that,
+ergo, Lamoureux's playing of Beethoven, being the most accurate yet
+heard in England, was the best, the truest, the most Beethovenish yet
+heard in England. All which I flatly deny, and describe as the foolish
+ravings of uninformed theorists. Only unpractical dreamers fancy that
+a composer thinks of "notes" when he composes. He hears music with his
+mental ear in the first place, and he afterwards sets down such notes
+as experience has taught him will reproduce approximately what he has
+heard when they are played upon the instrument for which his
+composition is intended, whether the instrument is piano, violin, the
+human voice, or orchestra. And just as he counts on the harmonics and
+sympathetic vibrations of the upper strings of the piano for the
+proper effect of a piano sonata, so for the effect of an orchestral
+work he relies on the full rich tone and the subdued murmur, which are
+only produced by the members of the orchestra playing a little wrong.
+That they play wrong in a million different ways does not matter:
+provided they do not play too far wrong the result is always the same,
+just as the characteristic sound of an excited crowd is always the
+same whether there are a few more men or fewer women in one crowd
+than in another. This may be wrong theoretically; but all theorising
+breaks down hopelessly before the fact that it was such an orchestra
+the masters wrote for. Perhaps some day the foot-rule, the metronome,
+and the tuning-fork will take the place of the human ear and artistic
+judgment; but until that day arrives I prefer the wrongness of Mottl's
+orchestra to the strict correctness which Lamoureux used to give us;
+and I leave the æsthetic illogical logic-choppers, who demand from
+the orchestra the correctness they would not stand from a solo-player,
+to find what delight they may in such playing as Lamoureux's used to
+be in the "Meistersinger" overture, or the "Waldweben," or the Good
+Friday music. It must be remembered, however, that the excessive
+correctness of which I have complained was only one of the means
+through which Lamoureux attained excessive lucidity. He sacrificed
+every other quality to lucidity; and those who preferred lucidity to
+every other qualify--that is to say, all Frenchmen--naturally
+preferred Lamoureux's playing to that of any other conductor. In the
+"Meistersinger" overture he would not allow the band to romp freely
+for a single moment; in the "Waldweben" he succeeded in playing every
+crescendo, every diminuendo, with astonishing evenness of gradation,
+even when a trifling irregularity to relieve the mechanical stiffness
+of the thing would have been as water to a thirsty traveller in the
+desert; in the Good Friday music he stuck rigidly to the composer's
+directions, and would not permit a breath of his own life to go into
+the music. In Berlioz's "Chasse et Orage" (from "Les Troyens") and a
+movement from the "Romeo and Juliet" symphony, he manifested the same
+qualities as when he played Beethoven and Wagner. His playing wanted
+colour, suggestiveness, and human warmth; and, lacking these, its
+chill clearness, its cleanness and sharp-cut edges, merely made one
+think of an iceberg glittering in a wan Arctic sunlight. Still he was
+a notable man; and his death robbed France of her one perfectly
+sincere musician.
+
+
+
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+<title>The Project Gutenberg eBook of Old Scores and New Readings, by John F. Runciman</title>
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+<h1>The Project Gutenberg eBook, Old Scores and New Readings, by John F.
+Runciman</h1>
+<pre>
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at <a href = "https://www.gutenberg.org">www.gutenberg.org</a></pre>
+<p>Title: Old Scores and New Readings</p>
+<p>Author: John F. Runciman</p>
+<p>Release Date: March 15, 2005  [eBook #15369]</p>
+<p>Language: English</p>
+<p>Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1</p>
+<p>***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK OLD SCORES AND NEW READINGS***</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<h3>E-text prepared by Steven Gibbs<br />
+    and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team</h3>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr class="full" />
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+  <h1>OLD SCORES AND NEW READINGS</h1>
+
+  <h3>DISCUSSIONS ON MUSIC<br />
+  &amp; CERTAIN MUSICIANS<br />
+  <br />
+  BY</h3>
+
+  <h2>JOHN F. RUNCIMAN</h2>
+
+  <h4>LONDON AT THE SIGN<br />
+  OF THE UNICORN<br />
+  VII CECIL COURT<br />
+  MDCCCCI [1901]</h4>
+  <hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+  <h2><a name="CONTENTS" id="CONTENTS"></a>CONTENTS</h2>
+  <!-- Autogenerated TOC. Modify or delete as required. -->
+
+  <p><a href="#WILLIAM_BYRDE__HIS_MASS"><b>WILLIAM BYRDE ... HIS
+  MASS</b></a><br />
+  <br />
+  <a href="#OUR_LAST_GREAT_MUSICIAN_HENRY_PURCELL_1658_95"><b>OUR
+  LAST GREAT MUSICIAN (HENRY PURCELL, 1658-95)</b></a><br />
+  <br />
+  <a href=
+  "#BACH_AND_THE_MATTHEWquot_PASSION_AND_THE_quotJOHNquot"><b>BACH;
+  AND THE "MATTHEW" PASSION AND THE "JOHN"</b></a><br />
+  <br />
+  <a href="#HANDEL"><b>HANDEL</b></a><br />
+  <br />
+  <a href="#HAYDN_AND_HIS_CREATIONquot"><b>HAYDN AND HIS
+  "CREATION"</b></a><br />
+  <br />
+  <a href="#MOZART_HIS_DON_GIOVANNIquot_AND_THE_REQUIEM"><b>MOZART,
+  HIS "DON GIOVANNI" AND THE REQUIEM</b></a><br />
+  <br />
+  <a href="#FIDELIOquot"><b>"FIDELIO"</b></a><br />
+  <br />
+  <a href="#SCHUBERT"><b>SCHUBERT</b></a><br />
+  <br />
+  <a href="#WEBER_AND_WAGNER"><b>WEBER AND WAGNER</b></a><br />
+  <br />
+  <a href="#ITALIAN_OPERA_DEAD_AND_DYING"><b>ITALIAN OPERA, DEAD
+  AND DYING</b></a><br />
+  <br />
+  <a href="#VERDI_YOUNG_AND_VERDI_YOUNGER"><b>VERDI YOUNG, AND
+  VERDI YOUNGER</b></a><br />
+  <br />
+  <a href="#THE_FLYING_DUTCHMANquot"><b>"THE FLYING
+  DUTCHMAN"</b></a><br />
+  <br />
+  <a href="#LOHENGRINquot"><b>"LOHENGRIN"</b></a><br />
+  <br />
+  <a href="#TRISTAN_AND_ISOLDAquot"><b>"TRISTAN AND
+  ISOLDA"</b></a><br />
+  <br />
+  <a href="#SIEGFRIEDquot"><b>"SIEGFRIED"</b></a><br />
+  <br />
+  <a href="#THE_DUSK_OF_THE_GODSquot"><b>"THE DUSK OF THE
+  GODS"</b></a><br />
+  <br />
+  <a href="#PARSIFALquot"><b>"PARSIFAL"</b></a><br />
+  <br />
+  <a href="#BAYREUTH_IN_1897"><b>BAYREUTH IN 1897</b></a><br />
+  <br />
+  <a href="#A_NOTE_ON_BRAHMS"><b>A NOTE ON BRAHMS</b></a><br />
+  <br />
+  <a href="#ANTON_DVORAK"><b>ANTON DVOR&Aacute;K</b></a><br />
+  <br />
+  <a href=
+  "#TSCHAIKOWSKY_AND_HIS_PATHETICquot_SYMPHONY"><b>TSCHAIKOWSKY AND
+  HIS "PATHETIC" SYMPHONY</b></a><br />
+  <br />
+  <a href="#LAMOUREUX_AND_HIS_ORCHESTRA"><b>LAMOUREUX AND HIS
+  ORCHESTRA</b></a><br /></p><!-- End Autogenerated TOC. -->
+  <hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+  <h2><a name="WILLIAM_BYRDE__HIS_MASS" id=
+  "WILLIAM_BYRDE__HIS_MASS"></a>WILLIAM BYRDE ... HIS MASS</h2>
+
+  <p>Many years ago, in the essay which is set second in this
+  collection, I wrote (speaking of the early English composers)
+  that "at length the first great wave of music culminated in the
+  works of Tallis and Byrde ... Byrde is infinitely greater than
+  Tallis, and seems worthy indeed to stand beside Palestrina."
+  Generally one modifies one's opinions as one grows older; very
+  often it is necessary to reverse them. This one on Byrde I adhere
+  to: indeed I am nearly proud of having uttered it so long ago. I
+  had then never heard the Mass in D minor. But in the latter part
+  of 1899 Mr. R.R. Terry, the organist of Downside Abbey, and one
+  of Byrde's latest editors, invited me to the opening of St.
+  Benedict's Church, Ealing, where the Mass in D minor was given;
+  and there I heard one of the most splendid pieces of music in the
+  world adequately rendered under very difficult conditions. I use
+  the phrase advisedly&mdash;"one of the most splendid pieces of
+  music in the world." When the New Zealander twenty centuries
+  hence reckons up the European masters of music, he will place
+  Byrde not very far down on the list of the greatest; and he will
+  esteem Byrde's Mass one of the very finest ever written. Byrde
+  himself has rested peacefully in his grave for over three hundred
+  years. One or two casual critics have appreciated him. Fetis, I
+  believe, called him "the English Palestrina"; but I do not recall
+  whether he meant that Byrde was as great as Palestrina or merely
+  great amongst the English&mdash;whether a "lord amongst wits," or
+  simply "a wit amongst lords." For the most part he has been left
+  comfortably alone, and held to be&mdash;like his mighty successor
+  Purcell&mdash;one of the forerunners of the "great English school
+  of church composers." To have prepared the way for Jackson in
+  F&mdash;that has been thought his best claim to remembrance. The
+  notion is as absurd as would be the notion (if anyone were
+  foolish enough to advance it) that Palestrina is mainly to be
+  remembered as having prepared the way for Perosi. Byrde prepared
+  the way for Purcell, it is true; but even that exceeding glory
+  pales before the greater glory of having written the Cantiones
+  Sacr&aelig; and the D minor Mass. In its way the D minor Mass is
+  as noble and complete an achievement as the St. Matthew Passion
+  or the "Messiah," the Choral symphony of Beethoven or the G minor
+  symphony of Mozart, "Tristan" or the "Nibelung's Ring." It is
+  splendidly planned; it is perfectly beautiful; and from the first
+  page to the last it is charged with a grave, sweet, lovely
+  emotion.</p>
+
+  <p>The reason why Byrde has not until lately won the homage he
+  deserves is simply this: that the musical doctors who have
+  hitherto judged him have judged him in the light of the
+  eighteenth-century contrapuntal music, and have applied to him in
+  all seriousness Artemus Ward's joke about Chaucer&mdash;"he
+  couldn't spell." The plain harmonic progressions of the later men
+  could be understood by the doctors: they could not understand the
+  freer style of harmony which prevailed before the strict school
+  came into existence. Artemus Ward, taking up Chaucer, professed
+  amazement to find spelling that would not be tolerated in an
+  elementary school; the learned doctors, taking up Byrde, found he
+  had disregarded all the rules&mdash;rules, be it remembered,
+  formulated after Byrde's time, just as our modern rules of
+  spelling were made after Chaucer's time; and as Artemus Ward
+  jocularly condemned Chaucer, and showed his wit in the joke, so
+  the doctors seriously condemned Byrde, and showed their stupidity
+  in their unconscious joke. They could understand one side of
+  Tallis. His motet in forty parts, for instance: they knew the
+  difficulties of writing such a thing, and they could see the
+  ingenuity he showed in his various ways of getting round the
+  difficulties. They could not see the really fine points of the
+  forty-part motet: the broad scheme of the whole thing, and the
+  almost Handelian way of massing the various choirs so as to heap
+  climax on climax until a perfectly satisfying finish was reached.
+  Still, there was something for them to see in Tallis; whereas in
+  Byrde there was nothing for them to see that they had eyes to
+  see, or to hear that they had ears to hear. They could see that
+  he either wrote consecutive fifths and octaves, or dodged them in
+  a way opposed to all the rules, that he wrote false relations
+  with the most outrageous recklessness, that his melodies were
+  irregular and not measured out by the bar; but they could not
+  feel, could not be expected to feel, the marvellous beauty of the
+  results he got by his dodges, the marvellous expressiveness of
+  his music. These old doctors may be forgiven, and, being long
+  dead, they care very little whether they are forgiven or not. But
+  the modern men who parrot-like echo their verdicts cannot and
+  should not be forgiven. We know now that the stiff contrapuntal
+  school marked a stage in development of music which it was
+  necessary that music should go through. The modern men who care
+  nothing for rules&mdash;for instance Wagner and
+  Tschaikowsky&mdash;could not have come immediately after Byrde;
+  even Beethoven could not have come immediately after Byrde and
+  Sweelinck and Palestrina, all of whom thought nothing of the
+  rules that had not been definitely stated in their time. Before
+  Beethoven&mdash;and after Beethoven, Wagner and all the
+  moderns&mdash;could come, music had to go through the stiff
+  scientific stage; a hundred thousand things that had been done
+  instinctively by the early men had to be reduced to rule; a
+  science as well as an art of music had to be built up. It was
+  built up, and in the process of building up noble works of art
+  were achieved. After it was built up and men had got, so to say,
+  a grip of music and no longer merely groped, Beethoven and Wagner
+  went back to the freedom and indifference to rule of the first
+  composers; and the mere fact of their having done so should show
+  us that the rules were nothing in themselves, nothing, that is,
+  save temporary guide-posts or landmarks which the contrapuntal
+  men set up for their own private use while they were exploring
+  the unknown fields of music. We should know, though many of us do
+  not, that it is simply stupid to pass adverse judgment on the
+  early composers who did not use, and because they did not use,
+  these guide-posts, which had not then been set up, though one by
+  one they were being set up. For a very short time the rules of
+  counterpoint were looked upon as eternal and immutable. During
+  that period the early men were human-naturally looked upon as
+  barbarians. But that period is long past. We know the laws of
+  counterpoint to be not eternal, not immutable; but on the
+  contrary to have been short-lived convention that is now
+  altogether disregarded. So it is time to look at the early music
+  through our own, and not through the eighteenth-century doctors'
+  eyes; and when we do that we find the early music to be as
+  beautiful as any ever written, as expressive, and quite as well
+  constructed. There are, as I have said, people who to-day prefer
+  Mr. Jackson in F and his friends to Byrde. What, I wonder, would
+  be said if a literary man preferred, say, some eighteenth-century
+  poetaster to Chaucer because the poetaster in his verse observed
+  rules which Chaucer never dreamed of, because, to drag in Artemus
+  Ward once again, the poetaster's spelling conformed more nearly
+  to ours than Chaucer's!</p>
+
+  <p>The Mass is indeed noble and stately, but it is miraculously
+  expressive as well. Its expressiveness is the thing that strikes
+  one more forcibly every time one hears it. At first one feels
+  chiefly its old-world freshness&mdash;not the picturesque spring
+  freshness of Purcell and Handel, but a freshness that is sweet
+  and grave and cool, coming out of the Elizabethan days when life,
+  at its fastest, went deliberately, and was lived in many-gabled
+  houses with trees and gardens, or in great palaces with pleasant
+  courtyards, and the Thames ran unpolluted to the sea, and the sun
+  shone daily even in London, and all things were fair and clean.
+  It is old-world music, yet it stands nearer to us than most of
+  the music written in and immediately after Handel's period, the
+  period of dry formalism and mere arithmetic. There is not a sign
+  of the formal melodic outlines which we recognise at once in any
+  piece out of the contrapuntal time, not an indication that the
+  Academic, "classical," unpoetic, essay-writing eighteenth century
+  was coming. The formal outlines had not been invented, for rules
+  and themes that would work without breaking the rules were little
+  thought of. Byrde evades the rules in the frankest manner: in
+  this Mass alone there are scores of evasions that would have been
+  inevitably condemned a century afterwards, and might even be
+  condemned by the contrapuntists of to-day. The eighteenth-century
+  doctors who edited Byrde early in this century did not in the
+  least understand why he wrote as he did, and doubtless would have
+  put him right if they had thought of having the work sung instead
+  of simply having it printed as an antiquarian curiosity. The
+  music does not suggest the eighteenth century with its jangling
+  harpsichords, its narrow, dirty streets, its artificiality, its
+  brilliant candle-lighted rooms where the wits and great ladies
+  assembled and talked more or less naughtily. There is indeed a
+  strange, pathetic charm in the eighteenth century to which no one
+  can be indifferent: it is a dead century, with the dust upon it,
+  and yet a faint lingering aroma as of dead rose petals. But the
+  old-world atmosphere of Byrde's music is, at least to me,
+  something finer than that: it is the atmosphere of a world which
+  still lives: it is remote from us and yet very near: for the
+  odour of dead rose petals and dust you have a calm cool air, and
+  a sense of fragrant climbing flowers and of the shade of full
+  foliaged trees. All is sane, clean, fresh: one feels that the sun
+  must always have shone in those days. This quality, however, it
+  shares with a great deal of the music of the "spacious days" of
+  Elizabeth. But of its expressiveness there is not too much to be
+  found in the music of other musicians than Byrde in Byrde's day.
+  He towered high above all the composers who had been before him;
+  he stands higher than any other English musician who has lived
+  since, with the exception of Purcell. It is foolish to think of
+  comparing his genius with the genius of Palestrina; but the two
+  men will also be reckoned close together by those who know this
+  Mass and the Cantiones Sacr&aelig;. They were both consummate
+  masters of the technique of their art; they both had a fund of
+  deep and original emotion; they both knew how to express it
+  through their music. I have not space to mention all the examples
+  I could wish. But every reader of this article may be strongly
+  recommended at once to play, even on the piano, the sublime
+  passage beginning at the words "Qui propter nos homines," noting
+  more especially the magnificent effect of the swelling mass of
+  sound dissolving in a cadence at the "Crucifixus." Another
+  passage, equal to any ever written, begins at "Et unam Sanctam
+  Catholicam." There is a curious energy in the repetition of "Et
+  Apostolicam Ecclesiam," and then a wistful sweetness and
+  tenderness at "Confiteor unum baptisma." Again, the whole of the
+  "Agnus" is divine, the repeated "miserere nobis," and the passage
+  beginning at the "Dona nobis pacem," possessing that sweetness,
+  tenderness and wonderful calm. But there is not a number that
+  does not contain passages which one must rank amongst the
+  greatest things in the world; and it must be borne in mind that
+  these passages are not detached, nor in fact detachable, but
+  integral, essential parts of a fine architectural scheme.</p>
+  <hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+  <h2><a name="OUR_LAST_GREAT_MUSICIAN_HENRY_PURCELL_1658_95" id=
+  "OUR_LAST_GREAT_MUSICIAN_HENRY_PURCELL_1658_95"></a>OUR LAST
+  GREAT MUSICIAN (HENRY PURCELL, 1658-95)</h2>
+
+  <h3>I.</h3>
+
+  <p>Purcell is too commonly written of as "the founder of the
+  English school" of music. Now, far be it from me to depreciate
+  the works of the composers who are supposed to form the "English
+  school." I would not sneer at the strains which have lulled to
+  quiet slumbers so many generations of churchgoers. But everyone
+  who knows and loves Purcell must enter a most emphatic protest
+  against that great composer being held responsible, if ever so
+  remotely, for the doings of the "English school." Jackson (in F),
+  Boyce and the rest owed nothing to Purcell; the credit of having
+  founded <i>them</i> must go elsewhere, and may beg a long time, I
+  am much afraid, in the land of the shades before any composer
+  will be found willing to take it. Purcell was not the founder but
+  the splendid close of a school, and that school one of the very
+  greatest the world has seen. And to-day, when he is persistently
+  libelled, not more in blame than in the praise which is given
+  him, it seems worth while making a first faint attempt to break
+  through the net of tradition that has been woven and is daily
+  being woven closer around him, to see him as he stands in such
+  small records as may be relied upon and not as we would fain have
+  him be, to understand his relation to his predecessors and learn
+  his position in musical history, to hear his music without
+  prejudice and distinguish its individual qualities. This is a
+  hard task, and one which I can only seek to achieve here in the
+  roughest and barest manner; yet any manner at all is surely much
+  better than letting the old fictions go unreproved, while our
+  greatest musician drifts into the twilight past, misunderstood,
+  unloved, unremembered, save when an Abbey wants a new case for
+  its organ, an organ on which Purcell never played, or a
+  self-styled Purcell authority wishes to set up a sort of claim of
+  part or whole proprietorship in him.</p>
+
+  <h3>II.</h3>
+
+  <p>Hardly more is known of Purcell than of Shakespeare. There is
+  no adequate biography. Hawkins and Burney (who is oftenest
+  Hawkins at second-hand) are alike rash, random, and
+  untrustworthy, depending much upon the anecdotage of old men, who
+  were no more to be believed than the ancient bandsmen of the
+  present day who tell you how Mendelssohn or Wagner flattered them
+  or accepted hints from them. Cummings' life is scarcely even a
+  sketch; at most it is a thumbnail sketch. Only ninety-five pages
+  deal with Purcell, and of these at least ninety-four are defaced
+  by maudlin sentimentality, or unhappy attempts at criticism (see
+  the remarks on the Cecilia Ode) or laughable sequences of
+  disconnected incongruities&mdash;as, for instance, when Mr.
+  Cummings remarks that "Queen Mary died of small-pox, and the
+  memory of her goodness was felt so universally," etc. Born in
+  1658, Purcell lived in Pepys' London, and died in 1095, having
+  written complimentary odes to three kings&mdash;Charles the
+  Second, James the Second, and William the Third. Besides these
+  complimentary odes, he wrote piles of instrumental music, a fair
+  heap of anthems, and songs and interludes and overtures for some
+  forty odd plays. This is nearly the sum of our knowledge. His
+  outward life seems to have been uneventful enough. He probably
+  lived the common life of the day&mdash;the day being, as I have
+  said, Pepys' day. Mr. Cummings has tried to show him as a
+  seventeenth century Mendelssohn&mdash;conventionally
+  idealised&mdash;and he quotes the testimony of some
+  "distinguished divine," chaplain to a nobleman, as though we did
+  not know too well why noblemen kept chaplains in those days to
+  regard their testimony as worth more than other men's. The truth
+  is, that if Purcell had lived differently from his neighbours he
+  would have been called a Puritan. On the other hand, we must
+  remember that he composed so much in his short life that his
+  dissipations must have made a poor show beside those of many of
+  his great contemporaries&mdash;those of Dryden, for instance, who
+  used to hide from his duns in Purcell's private room in the
+  clock-tower of St. James's Palace. I picture him as a sturdy,
+  beef-eating Englishman, a puissant, masterful, as well as lovable
+  personality, a born king of men, ambitious of greatness,
+  determined, as Tudway says, to exceed every one of his time, less
+  majestic than Handel, perhaps, but full of vigour and unshakable
+  faith in his genius. His was an age when genius inspired
+  confidence both in others and in its possessor, not, as now,
+  suspicion in both; and Purcell was believed in from the first by
+  many, and later, by all&mdash;even by Dryden, who began by
+  flattering Monsieur Grabut, and ended, as was his wont, by
+  crossing to the winning side. And Purcell is no more to be pitied
+  for his sad life than to be praised as a conventionally idealised
+  Mendelssohn. His life was brief, but not tragic. He never lacked
+  his bread as Mozart lacked his; he was not, like Beethoven,
+  tormented by deafness and tremblings for the immediate future; he
+  had no powerful foes to fight, for he did not bid for a great
+  position in the world like Handel. Nor was he a romantic
+  consumptive like Chopin, with a bad cough, a fastidious regard
+  for beauty, and a flow of anaemic melody. He was divinely gifted
+  with a greater richness of invention than was given to any other
+  composers excepting two, Bach and Mozart; and death would not
+  take his gifts as an excuse when he was thirty-seven. Hence our
+  Mr. Cummings has droppings of lukewarm tears; hence, generally,
+  compassion for his comparatively short life has ousted admiration
+  for his mighty works from the minds of those who are readier at
+  all times to indulge in the luxury of weeping than to feel the
+  thrill of joy in a life greatly lived. Purcell might have
+  achieved more magnificent work, but that is a bad reason for
+  forgetting the magnificence of the work he did achieve. But I
+  myself am forgetting that the greatness of his music is not
+  admitted, and that the shortness of his life is merely urged as
+  an excuse for not finding it admirable. And remembering this, I
+  assert that Purcell's life was a great and glorious one, and that
+  now his place is with the high gods whom we adore, the lords and
+  givers of light.</p>
+
+  <h3>III.</h3>
+
+  <p>Before Purcell's position in musical history can be
+  ascertained and fixed, it is absolutely necessary to make some
+  survey of the rise of the school of which he was the close.</p>
+
+  <p>In our unmusical England of to-day it is as hard to believe in
+  an England where music was perhaps the dominant passion of the
+  people as it is to understand how this should have been forgotten
+  in a more musical age than ours. Until the time of Handel's
+  arrival in this country there was no book printed which did not
+  show unmistakably that its writer loved music. It is a fact (as
+  the learned can vouch) that Erasmus considered the English the
+  most given up to music of all the peoples of Europe; and how far
+  these were surpassed by the English is further shown by the fact
+  that English musicians were as common in continental towns in
+  those days as foreign musicians are in England nowadays. I
+  refrain from quoting Peacham, North, Anthony Wood, Pepys, and the
+  rest of the much over-quoted; but I wish to lay stress on the
+  fact that here music was widespread and highly cultivated, just
+  as it was in Germany in the eighteenth century. Moreover, an
+  essential factor in the development of the German school was not
+  wanting in England. Each German prince had his Capellmeister; and
+  English nobles and gentlemen, wealthier than German princes,
+  differing from them only in not being permitted to assume a
+  pretentious title, had each his Musick-master. I believe I could
+  get together a long list of musicians who were thus kept. It will
+  be remembered that when Handel came to England he quickly entered
+  the service of the Duke of Chandos. The royal court always had a
+  number of musicians employed in the making or the performing of
+  music. Oliver Cromwell retained them and paid them; Charles the
+  Second added to them, and in many cases did not pay them at all,
+  so that at least one is known to have died of starvation, and the
+  others were everlastingly clamouring for arrears of salary. It
+  was the business of these men (in the intervals of asking for
+  their salaries) to produce music for use in the church and in the
+  house or palace; that for church use being of course nearly
+  entirely vocal&mdash;masses or anthems; that for house use, vocal
+  and instrumental&mdash;madrigals and fancies (<i>i.e.</i>
+  fantasias). As generation succeeded generation, a certain body of
+  technique was built up and a mode of expression found; and at
+  length the first great wave of music culminated in the works of
+  Tallis and Byrde. Their technique and mode of expression I shall
+  say something about presently; and all the criticism I have to
+  pass on them is that Byrde is infinitely greater than Tallis, and
+  seems worthy indeed to stand beside Palestrina and Sweelinck.
+  Certainly anyone who wishes to have a true notion of the music of
+  this period should obtain (if he can) copies of the D minor
+  five-part mass, and the Cantiones Sacr&aelig;, and carefully
+  study such numbers as the "Agnus Dei" of the former and the
+  profound "Tristitia et anxietas" in the latter.</p>
+
+  <p>The learned branch of the English school reached its climax.
+  Meantime another branch, not unlearned, but caring less for
+  scholastic perfection than for perfect expression of poetic
+  sentiment, was fast growing. The history of the masque is a stale
+  matter, so I will merely mention that Campion, and many another
+  with, before, and after him, engaged during a great part of their
+  lives in what can only be called the manufacture of these
+  entertainments. A masque was simply a gorgeous show of secular
+  ritual, of colour and of music&mdash;a kind of Drury Lane
+  melodrama in fact, but as far removed from Drury Lane as this age
+  is from that in the widespread faculty of appreciating beauty.
+  The music consisted of tunes of a popular outline and sentiment,
+  but they were dragged into the province of art by the incapacity
+  of those who wrote or adapted them to touch anything without
+  leaving it lovelier than when they lighted on it. Pages might be,
+  and I daresay some day will be, written about Dr. Campion's
+  melody, its beauty and power, the unique sense of rhythmic
+  subtleties which it shows, and withal its curiously English
+  quality. But one important thing we must observe: it is wholly
+  secular melody. Even when written in the ecclesiastical modes, it
+  has no, or the very slightest, ecclesiastical tinge. It is
+  folk-melody with its face washed and hair combed; it bears the
+  same relation to English folk-melody as a chorale from the
+  "Matthew" Passion bears to its original. Another important point
+  is this: whereas the church composers took a few Latin sentences
+  and made no endeavour to treat them so as to make sense in the
+  singing, but made the words wait upon the musical phrases, in Dr.
+  Campion we see the first clear wish to weld music and poem into
+  one flawless whole. To an extent he succeeded, but full success
+  did not come till several generations had first tried, tried and
+  failed. Campion properly belongs to the sixteenth century, and
+  Harry Lawes, born twenty-five years before Campion died, as
+  properly belongs to the seventeenth century. In his songs we find
+  even more marked the determination that words and music shall go
+  hand in hand&mdash;that the words shall no longer be dragged at
+  the cart-tail of the melody, so to say. In fact, a main objection
+  against Lawes&mdash;and a true one in many instances&mdash;is
+  that he sacrificed the melody rather than the meaning of the
+  poem. This is significant. The Puritans are held to have damaged
+  church music less by burning the choir-books and pawning the
+  organ-pipes than by insisting (as we may say) on One word one
+  note. As a matter of fact, this was not exclusively a plank in
+  the political platform of the Puritans. The Loyalist Campion, the
+  Loyalist Lawes, and many another Loyalist insisted on it. Even
+  when they did not write a note to each word, they took care not
+  to have long roulades (divisions) on unimportant words, but to
+  derive the accent of the music from that of the poem. This showed
+  mainly two tendencies: first, one towards expression of poetic
+  feeling and towards definiteness of that expression, the other
+  towards the entirely new technique which was to supersede the
+  contrapuntal technique of Byrde and Palestrina. In making a mass
+  or an anthem or secular composition, the practice of these old
+  masters was to start with a fragment of church or secular melody
+  which we will call A; after (say) the trebles had sung it or a
+  portion of it, the altos took it up and the trebles went on to a
+  new phrase B, which dovetailed with A. Then the tenors took up A,
+  the altos went on to B, the trebles went on to a new phrase C,
+  until ultimately, if we lettered each successive phrase that
+  appeared, we should get clear away from the beginning of the
+  alphabet to X, Y, and Z. This, of course, is a crude and stiff
+  way of describing the process of weaving and interweaving by
+  which the old music was spun, for often the phrase A would come
+  up again and again in one section of a composition and sometimes
+  throughout the whole, and strict canon was comparatively rare in
+  music which was not called by that name; but the description will
+  serve. This technique proved admirable for vocal
+  polyphony&mdash;how admirable we have all the Flemish and Italian
+  and English contrapuntal music to show. But it was no longer
+  available when music was wanted for the single voice, unless that
+  voice was treated as one of several real parts, the others being
+  placed in the accompaniment. A new technique was therefore
+  wanted. For that new technique the new composers went back to the
+  oldest technique of all. The old minstrels used music as a means
+  of giving accent and force to their poems; and now, as a means of
+  spinning a web of tone which should not only be beautiful, but
+  also give utterance to the feeling of the poem, composers went
+  back to the method of the minstrels. They disregarded rhythm more
+  and more (as may be seen if you compare Campion with Lawes), and
+  sought only to make the notes follow the accent of the poetry,
+  thus converting music into conventionally idealised speech or
+  declamation. Lawes carried this method as far as ever it has
+  been, and probably can be, carried. When Milton said,</p>
+
+  <div class="poem">
+    <div class="stanza">
+      <span>"Harry, whose tuneful and well-measured
+      notes<br /></span> <span>First taught our English music how
+      to span<br /></span> <span>Words with just note and
+      accent,"<br /></span>
+    </div>
+  </div>
+
+  <p>he did not mean that Lawes was the first to bar his music, for
+  music had been barred long before Lawes. He meant that Lawes did
+  not use the poem as an excuse for a melody, but the melody as a
+  means of effectively declaiming the poet's verse. The poet
+  (naturally) liked this&mdash;hence Milton's compliments. It
+  should be noted that many of the musicians of this time were
+  poets&mdash;of a sort&mdash;themselves, and wished to make the
+  most of their verses; so that it would be a mistake to regard
+  declamation as something forced by the poet, backed by popular
+  opinion, upon the musician. With Lawes, then, what we may call
+  the declamatory branch of the English school culminated. Except
+  in his avowedly declamatory passages, Purcell did not spin his
+  web precisely thus; but we shall presently see that his method
+  was derived from the declamatory method. Much remained to be done
+  first. Lawes got rid of the old scholasticism, now effete. But he
+  never seemed quite sure that his expression would come off. It is
+  hard at this day to listen to his music as Milton must have
+  listened to it; but having done my best, I am compelled to own
+  that I find some of his songs without meaning or comeliness, and
+  must assume either that our ancestors of this period had a sense
+  which has been lost, or that the music played a less important
+  part compared with the poem than has been generally supposed.
+  Lawes lost rhythm, both as an element in beauty and a factor in
+  expression. Moreover, his harmonic resources were sadly limited,
+  for the old device of letting crossing parts clash in sweet
+  discords that resolved into as sweet or sweeter concords was
+  denied him. What would be called nowadays the new harmony, the
+  new rhythm and the new forms were developed during the Civil War
+  and the Puritan reign. The Puritans, loving music but detesting
+  it in their churches, forced it into purely secular channels; and
+  we cannot say the result was bad, for the result was Purcell.
+  John Jenkins and a host of smaller men developed instrumental
+  music, and, though the forms they used were thrown aside when
+  Charles II. arrived, the power of handling the instruments
+  remained as a legacy to Charles's men. Charles drove the secular
+  movement faster ahead by banning the old ecclesiastical music
+  (which, it appears, gave him "the blues"), and by compelling his
+  young composers to write livelier strains for the church, that
+  is, church music which was in reality nothing but secular music.
+  He sent Pelham Humphries to Paris, and when Humphries came back
+  "an absolute Monsieur" (who does not remember that ever-green
+  entry in the Diary?) he brought with him all that could possibly
+  have been learnt from Lulli. He died at twenty-seven, having been
+  Purcell's master; and though Purcell's imagination was richer,
+  deeper, more strenuous in the ebb and flow of its tides, one
+  might fancy that the two men had but one spirit, which went on
+  growing and fetching forth the fruits of the spirit, while young
+  Humphries' body decayed by the side of his younger wife's in the
+  Thames-sodden vaults of Westminster Abbey.</p>
+
+  <h3>IV.</h3>
+
+  <p>A complete list of Purcell's compositions appears somewhat
+  formidable at a first glance, but when one comes to examine it
+  carefully the solidity seems somewhat to melt out of it. The long
+  string of church pieces is made up of anthems, many of them far
+  from long. The forty odd "operas" are not operas at all, but sets
+  of incidental pieces and songs for plays, and some of the sets
+  are very short. Thus Dryden talks of Purcell setting "my three
+  songs," and there are only half a dozen "curtain-tunes,"
+  <i>i.e.</i> entr'actes. Many of the harpsichord pieces are of
+  tiny proportions. The sonatas of three and four parts are no
+  larger than Mozart's piano sonatas. Still, taking into account
+  the noble quality that is constantly maintained, we must admit
+  that Purcell used astonishingly the short time he was given. Much
+  of his music is lost; more of it lies in manuscript at the
+  British Museum and elsewhere. Some of it was issued last century,
+  some early in this. Four expensive volumes have been wretchedly
+  edited and issued by the Purcell Society, and those amongst us
+  who live to the age of Methuselah will probably see all the
+  accessible works printed by this body. Some half century ago
+  Messrs. Novello published an edition of the church music,
+  stupidly edited by the stupidest editor who ever laid clumsy
+  fingers on a masterpiece. A shameful edition of the "King Arthur"
+  music was prepared for the Birmingham Festival of 1897 by Mr.
+  J.A. Fuller-Maitland, musical critic of "The Times." A publisher
+  far-sighted and generous enough to issue a trustworthy edition of
+  all Purcell's music at a moderate price has yet to be found.</p>
+
+  <p>Purcell's list is not long, but it is superb. Yet he opened
+  out no new paths, he made no leap aside from the paths of his
+  predecessors, as Gluck did in the eighteenth century and Wagner
+  in the nineteenth. He was one of their school; he went on in the
+  direction they had led; but the distance he travelled was
+  enormous. Humphries, possibly Captain Cook, even Christopher
+  Gibbons, helped to open out the new way in church music; Lawes,
+  Matthew Lock, and Banister were before him at the theatres; Lock
+  and Dr. Blow had written odes before he was weaned; the form and
+  plan of his sonatas came certainly from Bassani, in all
+  likelihood from Corelli also; from John Jenkins and the other
+  writers of fancies he got something of his workmanship and art of
+  weaving many melodies into a coherent whole, and a knowledge of
+  Lulli would help him to attain terseness, and save him from that
+  drifting which is the weak point of the old English instrumental
+  writers; he was acquainted with the music of Carissimi, a master
+  of choral effect. In a word, he owed much to his predecessors,
+  even as Bach, Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven owed to their
+  predecessors; and he did as they did&mdash;won his greatness by
+  using to fine ends the means he found, rather than by inventing
+  the means, though, like them, some means he did invent.</p>
+
+  <p>Like his predecessors Purcell hung between the playhouse, the
+  church, and the court; but unlike most of them he had only one
+  style, which had to serve in one place as in another. I have
+  already shown the growth of the secular spirit in music. In
+  Purcell that spirit reached its height. His music is always
+  secular, always purely pagan. I do not mean that it is
+  inappropriate in the church&mdash;for nothing more appropriate
+  was ever written&mdash;nor that Purcell was insincere, as our
+  modern church composers are insincere, without knowing it. I do
+  mean that of genuine religious emotion, of the sustained ecstasy
+  of Byrde and Palestrina, it shows no trace. I should not like to
+  have to define the religious beliefs of any man in Charles II.'s
+  court, but it would seem that Purcell was religious in his way.
+  He accepted the God of the church as the savage accepts the God
+  of his fathers; he wrote his best music with a firm conviction
+  that it would please his God. But his God was an entity placed
+  afar off, unapproachable; and of entering into communion with Him
+  through the medium of music Purcell had no notion. The ecstatic
+  note I take to be the true note of religious art; and in lacking
+  and in having no sense of it Purcell stands close to the early
+  religious painters and monk-writers, the carvers of twelfth
+  century woodwork, and the builders of Gothic cathedrals. He
+  thinks of externals and never dreams of looking for "inward
+  light"; and the proof of this is that he seems never consciously
+  to endeavour to express a mood, but strenuously seeks to depict
+  images called up by the words he sets. With no intention of being
+  flippant, but in all earnestness, I declare it is my belief that
+  if Purcell had ever set the "Agnus Dei" (and I don't remember
+  that he did) he would have drawn a frisky lamb and tried to paint
+  its snow-white fleece; and this not because he lacked reverence,
+  but because of his absolute religious na&iuml;vet&eacute;, and
+  because this drawing and painting of outside objects (so to
+  speak) in music was his one mode of expression. It should be
+  clearly understood that word-painting is not descriptive music.
+  Descriptive music suggests to the ear, word-painting to the eye.
+  But the two merge in one another. What we call a higher note is
+  so called because sounds produced by the mere rapid vibrations
+  make every being, without exception, who has a musical ear, think
+  of height, just as a lower note makes us all think of depth.
+  Hence a series of notes forming an arch on paper may, and does,
+  suggest an arch to one's imagination through the ear. It is
+  perhaps a dodge, but Handel used it extensively&mdash;for
+  instance, in such choruses as "All we like sheep," "When his loud
+  voice" ("Jephtha"), nearly every choral number of "Israel in
+  Egypt," and some of the airs. Bach used it too, and we find
+  it&mdash;the rainbow theme in "Das Rheingold" is an
+  example&mdash;in Wagner. But with these composers
+  "word-painting," as it is called, seems always to be used for a
+  special effect; whereas it is the very essence of Purcell's
+  music. He has been reproved for it by the eminent Hullah, who
+  prettily alludes to it as a "defect" from which other music
+  composed at the time suffers; but the truth is, you might as well
+  call rhyme a "defect" of the couplet or the absence of rhyme a
+  "defect" of blank verse. It is an integral part of the music, as
+  inseparable as sound from tone, as atoms from the element they
+  constitute. But the question, why did Purcell write thus, and not
+  as Mozart and Beethoven, brings me to the point at which I must
+  show the precise relationship in which Purcell stood to his
+  musical ancestors, and how in writing as he did he was merely
+  carrying on and developing their technique.</p>
+
+  <p>For we must not forget that the whole problem for the
+  seventeenth century was one of technique. The difficulty was to
+  spin a tone-web which should be at once beautiful, expressive,
+  and modern&mdash;modern above all things, in some sort of touch
+  with the common feeling of the time. I have told how the earlier
+  composers spun their web, and how Lawes attained to loveliness of
+  a special kind by pure declamation. In later times there was an
+  immense common fund of common phrases, any one of which only
+  needed modification by a composer to enable him to express
+  anything he pleased. But Purcell came betwixt the old time and
+  the new, and had to build up a technique which was not wholly his
+  own, by following with swift steps and indefatigable energy on
+  lines indicated even while Lawes was alive. Those lines were, of
+  course, in the direction of word-painting, and I must admit that
+  the first word-painting seems very silly to nineteenth century
+  ears and eyes&mdash;eyes not less than ears. To the work of the
+  early men Purcell's stands in just the same relation as Bach's
+  declamation stands to Lawes'. Lawes declaims with a single eye on
+  making clear the points of the poem: the voice rises or falls,
+  lingers on a note or hastens away, to that one end. Bach also
+  declaims&mdash;indeed his music is entirely based on
+  declamation,&mdash;but as one who wishes to communicate an
+  emotion and regards the attainment of beauty as being quite as
+  important as expression. With him the voice rises or falls as a
+  man's voice does when he experiences keen sensation; but the wavy
+  line of the melody as it goes along and up and down the stave is
+  treated conventionally and changed into a lovely pattern for the
+  ear's delight; and as there can be no regular pattern without
+  regular rhythm, rhythm is a vital element in Bach's music. So
+  with Purcell, with a difference. The early "imitative" men had
+  sought chiefly for dainty conceits. Pepys was the noted composer
+  of "Beauty, Retire" and his joy when he went to church, "where
+  fine music on the word trumpet" will be remembered. He doubtless
+  liked the clatter of it, and liked the clatter the more for
+  occurring on that word, and probably he was not very curious as
+  to whether it was really beautiful or not. But Purcell could not
+  write an unlovely thing. His music on the word trumpet would be
+  beautiful (it is in "Bonduca"); and if (as he did) he sent the
+  bass plunging headlong from the top to the bottom of a scale to
+  illustrate "they that go down to the sea in ships," that headlong
+  plunge would be beautiful too&mdash;so beautiful as to be heard
+  with as great pleasure by those who know what the words are about
+  as by those who don't. Like Bach, Purcell depended much on rhythm
+  for the effect of his pattern; unlike Bach, his patterns have a
+  strangely picturesque quality; through the ear they suggest the
+  forms of leaf and blossom, the trailing tendril,&mdash;suggest
+  them only, and dimly, vaguely,&mdash;yet, one feels, with
+  exquisite fidelity. Thus Purcell, following those who, in sending
+  the voice part along the line, pressed it up at the word "high"
+  and down at "low," and thus got an irregularly wavy line of tone
+  or melody, solved the problem of spinning his continuous web of
+  sound; and the fact that his web is beautiful and possesses this
+  peculiar picturesqueness is his justification for solving the
+  problem in this way. After all, his way was the way of early
+  designers, who filled their circles, squares, and triangles with
+  the forms of leaf and flower. And just as those forms were
+  afterwards conventionalised and used by thousands who probably
+  had no vaguest notion of their origin, so many of Purcell's
+  phrases became ossified and fell into the common stock of phrases
+  which form the language of music. It is interesting to note that
+  abroad Pasquini and Kuhlau went to work very much in Purcell's
+  fashion, and added to that same stock from which Handel and Bach
+  and every subsequent composer drew, each adding something of his
+  own.</p>
+
+  <p>It was not by accident that Purcell, with this astonishing
+  fertility of picturesque phrases, should also have written so
+  much, and such vividly coloured picturesque pieces&mdash;pieces,
+  I mean, descriptive of the picturesque. Of course, to write an
+  imitative phrase is quite another matter from writing a
+  successful piece of descriptive music. But in Purcell the same
+  faculty enabled him to do both. No poet of that time seems to
+  have been enamoured of hedgerows and flowers and fields, nor can
+  I say with certitude that Purcell was. Yet in imagination at
+  least he loves to dwell amongst them; and not the country alone,
+  the thought of the sea also, stirs him deeply. There need only be
+  some mention of sunshine or rain among the leaves, green trees,
+  or wind-swept grass, the yellow sea-beach or the vast sea-depths,
+  and his imagination flames and flares. His best music was written
+  when he was appealed to throughout a long work&mdash;as "The
+  Tempest"&mdash;in this manner. Hence, it seems to me, that
+  quality which his music, above any other music in the world,
+  possesses: a peculiar sweetness, not a boudoir sweetness like
+  Chopin's sweetness, nor a sweetness corrected, like Chopin's, by
+  a subtle strain of poisonous acid or sub-acid quality, but the
+  sweet and wholesome cleanliness of the open air and fields, the
+  freshness of sun showers and cool morning winds. I am not
+  exaggerating the importance of this element in his music. It is
+  perpetually present, so that at last one comes to think, as I
+  have been compelled to think this long time, that Purcell wrote
+  nothing but descriptive music all his life. Of course it may be
+  that the special formation of his melodies misleads one
+  sometimes, and that Purcell in inventing them often did not dream
+  of depicting natural objects. But, remembering the gusto with
+  which he sets descriptive words, using these phrases consciously
+  with a picturesque purpose, it is hard to accept this view. In
+  all likelihood he was constituted similarly to Weber, who, his
+  son asserts, curiously converted the lines and colours of trees
+  and winding roads and all objects of nature into thematic
+  material (there is an anecdote&mdash;apparently, for a wonder, a
+  true one&mdash;that shows he took the idea of a march from a heap
+  of chairs stacked upside down in a beer-garden during a shower of
+  rain). But Purcell is infinitely simpler, less fevered, than
+  Weber. Sometimes his melodies have the long-drawn, frail
+  delicacy, the splendidly ordered irregularity of a trailing
+  creeper, and something of its endless variety of leaf clustering
+  round a central stem. But there is an entire absence of tropical
+  luxuriance. A grave simplicity prevails, and we find no
+  jewellery; showing Purcell to have been a supreme artist.</p>
+
+  <h3>V.</h3>
+
+  <p>So far I have spoken of his music generally, and now I come to
+  deal (briefly, for my space is far spent) with the orchestral,
+  choral, and chamber music and songs; and first with the choral
+  music. I begin to fear that by insisting so strongly on the
+  distinctive sweetness of Purcell's melody, I may have given a
+  partially or totally wrong impression. Let me say at once,
+  therefore, that delicate as he often was, and sweet as he was
+  more often, although he could write melodies which are mere
+  iridescent filaments of tone, he never became flabby or other
+  than crisp, and could, and did, write themes as flexible, sinewy,
+  unbreakable as perfectly tempered steel bands. And these themes
+  he could lay together and weld into choruses of gigantic
+  strength. The subject and counter-subject of "Thou art the King
+  of Glory" (in the "Te Deum" in D), the theme of "Let all
+  rehearse," and the ground bass of the final chorus (both in
+  "Dioclesian"), the subjects of many of the fugues of the anthems,
+  are as energetic as anything written by Handel, Bach or Mozart.
+  And as for the choruses he makes of them, Handel's are perhaps
+  loftier and larger structures, and Bach succeeds in getting
+  effects which Purcell never gets, for the simple enough reason
+  that Purcell, coming a generation before Bach, never tried or
+  thought of trying to get them. But within his limits he achieves
+  results that can only be described as stupendous. For instance,
+  the chorus I have just mentioned&mdash;"Let all
+  rehearse"&mdash;makes one think of Handel, because Handel
+  obviously thought of it when he wrote "Fixed in His everlasting
+  seat," and though Handel works out the idea to greater length,
+  can we say that he gets a proportionately greater effect? I have
+  not the faintest wish to elevate Purcell at Handel's expense, for
+  Handel is to me, as to all men, one of the gods of music; but
+  Purcell also is one of the gods, and I must insist that in this
+  particular chorus he equalled Handel with smaller means and
+  within narrower limits. It is not always so, for Handel is king
+  of writers for the chorus, as Purcell is king of those who paint
+  in music; but though Handel wrote more great choruses, his debt
+  to Purcell is enormous. His way of hurling great masses of choral
+  tone at his hearers is derived from Purcell; and so is the
+  rhetorical plan of many of his choruses. But in Purcell, despite
+  his sheer strength, we never fail to get the characteristic
+  Purcellian touch, the little unexpected inflexion, or bit of
+  coloured harmony that reminds that this is the music of the open
+  air, not of the study, that does more than this, that actually
+  floods you in a moment with a sense of the spacious blue heavens
+  with light clouds flying. For instance, one gets it in the great
+  "Te Deum" in the first section; again at "To thee, cherubin,"
+  where the first and second trebles run down in liquid thirds with
+  magical effect; once more at the fourteenth bar of "Thou art the
+  King of Glory," where he uses the old favourite device of
+  following up the flattened leading note of the dominant key in
+  one part by the sharp leading note in another part&mdash;a device
+  used with even more exquisite result in the chorus of "Full
+  fathom five." Purcell is in many ways like Mozart, and in none
+  more than in these incessantly distinctive touches, though in
+  character the touches are as the poles apart. In Mozart,
+  especially when he veils the poignancy of his emotion under a
+  scholastic mode of expression, a sudden tremor in the voice, as
+  it were, often betrays him, and none can resist the pathos of it.
+  Purcell's touches are pathetic, too, in another
+  fashion&mdash;pathetic because of the curious sense of human
+  weakness, the sense of tears, caused by the sudden relaxation of
+  emotional tension that inevitably results when one comes on a
+  patch of simple naked beauty when nothing but elaborate grandeur
+  expressive of powerful exaltation had been anticipated. That
+  Purcell foresaw this result, and deliberately used the means to
+  achieve it, I cannot doubt. Those momentary slackenings of tense
+  excitement are characteristic of the exalted mood and inseparable
+  from it, and he must have known that they really go to augment
+  its intensity. All Purcell's choruses, however, are not of
+  Handelian mould, for he wrote many that are sheer loveliness from
+  beginning to end, many that are the very voice of the deepest
+  sadness, many, again, showing a gaiety, an "unbuttoned" festivity
+  of feeling, such as never came into music again until Beethoven
+  introduced it as a new thing. The opening of one of the
+  complimentary odes, "Celebrate this festival," fairly carries one
+  off one's feet with the excess of jubilation in the rollicking
+  rhythm and living melody of it. One of the most magnificent
+  examples of picturesque music ever written&mdash;if not the most
+  magnificent, at any rate the most delightful in detail&mdash;is
+  the anthem, "Thy way, O God, is holy." The picture-painting is
+  prepared for with astonishing artistic foresight, and when it
+  begins the effect is tremendous. I advise everyone who wishes to
+  realise Purcell's unheard-of fertility of great and powerful
+  themes to look at "The clouds poured out water," the fugue
+  subject "The voice of Thy thunders," the biting emphasis of the
+  passage "the lightnings shone upon the ground," and the
+  irresistible impulse of "The earth was moved." And the supremacy
+  of Purcell's art is shown not more in these than in the
+  succession of simple harmonies by which he gets the unutterable
+  mournful poignancy of "Thou knowest, Lord," that unsurpassed and
+  unsurpassable piece of choral writing which Dr. Crotch, one of
+  the "English school," living in an age less sensitive even than
+  this to Purcellian beauty, felt to be so great that it would be a
+  desecration to set the words again. Later composers set the words
+  again, feeling it no desecration, but possibly rather a
+  compliment to Purcell; and Purcell's setting abides, and looks
+  down upon every other, like Mozart's G minor and Beethoven's
+  Ninth upon every other symphony, or the finale of Wagner's
+  "Tristan" upon every other piece of love-music.</p>
+
+  <h3>VI.</h3>
+
+  <p>Purcell is also a chief, though not the chief, among
+  song-writers. And he stands in the second place by reason of the
+  very faculty which places him amongst the first of instrumental
+  and choral writers. That dominating picturesque power of his,
+  that tendency to write picturesque melodies as well as
+  picturesque movements, compelled him to treat the voice as he
+  treated any other instrument, and he writes page on page which
+  would be at least as effective on any other instrument; and as
+  more can be got out of the voice than out of any other
+  instrument, and the tip-top song-writers got all out that could
+  be got out, it follows that Purcell is below them. But only the
+  very greatest of them have beaten him, and he often, by sheer
+  perfection of phrase, runs them very close. Still, Mozart, Bach,
+  and Handel do move us more profoundly. And an odd demonstration
+  that Purcell the instrumental writer is almost above Purcell the
+  composer for the voice, is that in such songs as "Halcyon Days"
+  (in "The Tempest") the same phrases are perhaps less grateful on
+  the voice than when repeated by the instrument. The phrase "That
+  used to lull thee in thy sleep" (in "The Indian Queen") is divine
+  when sung, but how thrilling is its touching expressiveness, how
+  it seems to speak when the 'cellos repeat it! There are, of
+  course, truly vocal melodies in Purcell (as there are in
+  Beethoven and Berlioz, who also were not great writers for the
+  voice), and some of them might almost be Mozart's. The only
+  difference that may be felt between "While joys celestial"
+  ("Cecilia Ode" of 1683) and a Mozart song, is that in Mozart one
+  gets the frequent human touch, and in Purcell the frequent
+  suggestion of the free winds and scented blossoms. The various
+  scattered songs, such as "Mad Tom" (which is possibly not
+  Purcell's at all) or "Mad Bess" (which certainly is), I have no
+  room to discuss; but I may remark that the madness was merely an
+  excuse for exhibiting a series of passions in what was reckoned
+  at the time a natural manner. Quite possibly it was then thought
+  that in a spoken play only mad persons should sing, just as
+  Wagner insists that in music-drama only mad persons should speak;
+  and as a good deal of singing was required, there were a good
+  many mad parts. Probably Purcell would have treated all Wagner's
+  characters, and all Berlioz's, as utterly and irretrievably mad.
+  Nor have I space to discuss his instrumental music and his
+  instrumentation, but must refer shortly to the fact that the
+  overtures to the plays are equal to Handel's best in point of
+  grandeur, and that in freedom, quality of melody, and daring, and
+  fruitful use of new harmonies, the sonatas are ahead of anything
+  attempted until Mozart came. They cannot be compared to Bach's
+  suites, and they are infinitely fresher than the writings of the
+  Italians whom he imitated. As for Purcell's instrumentation, it
+  is primitive compared to Mozart's, but when he uses the
+  instrument in group or batteries he obtains gorgeous effects of
+  varied colour. He gets delicious effects by means of obligato
+  instrumental parts in the accompaniments to such songs as "Charon
+  the Peaceful Shade Invites"; and those who have heard the "Te
+  Deum" in D may remember that even Bach never got more wonderful
+  results from the sweeter tones of the trumpet.</p>
+
+  <h3>VII.</h3>
+
+  <p>Having shown how Purcell sprang from a race of English
+  musicians, and how he achieved greater things than any man of his
+  time, it remains only to be said that when, with Handel, the
+  German flood deluged England, all remembrance of Purcell and his
+  predecessors was swiftly swept away. His play-music was washed
+  out of the theatres, his odes were carried away from the
+  concert-room; in a word, all his and the earlier music was so
+  completely forgotten that when Handel used anew his old devices
+  connoisseurs wondered why the Italians and Germans should be able
+  to bring forth such things while the English remained impotent.
+  So Handel and the Germans were imitated by every composer, church
+  or other, who came after, and all our "English music" is purely
+  German. That we shall ever throw off that yoke I do not care to
+  prophesy; but if ever we do, it will be by imitating Purcell in
+  one respect only, that is, by writing with absolute simplicity
+  and directness, leaving complexity, muddy profundity and
+  elaborately worked-out multiplication sums to the Germans, to
+  whom these things come naturally. The Germans are now spent: they
+  produce no more great musicians: they produce only music which is
+  as ugly to the ear as it is involved to the eye. It is high time
+  for a return to the simplicity of Mozart, of Handel, of our own
+  Purcell; to dare, as Wagner dared, to write folk-melody, and to
+  put it on the trombones at the risk of being called vulgar and
+  rowdy by persons who do not know great art when it is original,
+  but only when it resembles some great art of the past which they
+  have learnt to know. It was thus Purcell worked, and his work
+  stands fast. And when we English awake to the fact that we have a
+  music which ought to speak more intimately to us than all the
+  music of the continental composers, his work will be marvelled at
+  as a new-created thing, and his pieces will appear on English
+  programmes and displace the masses of noisome shoddy which we
+  revel in just now. It will then be recognised, as even the chilly
+  Burney recognised a century ago, failing to recognise much else,
+  that "in the accent of passion, and expression of English words,
+  the vocal music of Purcell is ... as superior to Handel's as an
+  original poem to a translation." Though this is slight praise for
+  one of the very greatest musicians the world has produced.</p>
+  <hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+  <h2><a name=
+  "BACH_AND_THE_MATTHEWquot_PASSION_AND_THE_quotJOHNquot" id=
+  "BACH_AND_THE_MATTHEWquot_PASSION_AND_THE_quotJOHNquot"></a>BACH;
+  AND THE "MATTHEW" PASSION AND THE "JOHN"</h2>
+
+  <h3>I.</h3>
+
+  <p>More is known of our mighty old Capellmeister Bach than of
+  Shakespeare; less than of Miss Marie Corelli. The main thing is
+  that he lived the greater part of his obscure life in Leipzig,
+  turning out week by week the due amount of church music as an
+  honest Capellmeister should. Other Capellmeisters did likewise;
+  only, while their compositions were counterpoint, Bach's were
+  masterworks. There lay the sole difference, and the square-toed
+  Leipzig burghers did not perceive it. To them Master Bach was a
+  hot-tempered, fastidious, crotchety person, endured because no
+  equally competent organist would take his place at the price. So
+  he worked without reward, without recognition, until his
+  inspiration exhausted itself; and then he sat, imposing in
+  massive unconscious strength as a spent volcano, awaiting the
+  end. After that was silence: the dust gathered on his music as it
+  lay unheard for a century. Haydn and Mozart and Beethoven hardly
+  suspected their predecessor's greatness. Then came Mendelssohn
+  (to whom be the honour and the glory), and gave to the world, to
+  the world's great surprise, the "Matthew" Passion, as one might
+  say, fresh from the composer's pen. The B minor mass followed,
+  and gradually the whole of the church and instrumental music; and
+  now we are beginning dimly to comprehend Bach's greatness.</p>
+
+  <h3>II.</h3>
+
+  <p>The "John" Passion and the "Matthew" Passion of Bach are as
+  little alike as two works dealing with the same subject, and
+  intended for performance under somewhat similar conditions, could
+  possibly be; and since the "Matthew" version appeals to the
+  modern heart and imagination as an ideal setting of the tale of
+  the death of the Man of Sorrows, one is apt to follow Spitta in
+  his curious mistake of regarding the differences between the two
+  as altogether to the disadvantage of the "John." Spitta, indeed,
+  goes further than this. So bent is he on proving the superiority
+  of the "Matthew" that what he sees as a masterstroke in that work
+  is in the "John" a gross blunder; and, on the whole, the pages on
+  the "John" Passion are precisely the most fatuous of the many
+  fatuous pages he wrote when he plunged into artistic criticism,
+  leaving his own proper element of technical or historical
+  criticism. This is a pity, for Spitta really had a very good case
+  to spoil. The "Matthew" is without doubt a vaster, profounder,
+  more moving and lovelier piece of art than the "John." Indeed,
+  being the later work of a composer whose power grew steadily from
+  the first until the last time he put pen to paper, it could not
+  be otherwise. But the critic who, like Spitta, sees in it only a
+  successful attempt at what was attempted unsuccessfully in the
+  "John," seems to me to mistake the aim both of the "John" and the
+  "Matthew." The "John" is not in any sense unsuccessful, but a
+  complete, consistent and masterly achievement; and if it stands a
+  little lower than the "Matthew," if the "Matthew" is mightier,
+  more impressive, more overwhelming in its great tenderness, this
+  is not because the Bach who wrote in 1722-23 was a bungler or an
+  incomplete artist, but because the Bach who wrote in 1729 was
+  inspired by a loftier idea than had come to the Bach of 1723. It
+  was only necessary to compare the impression one received when
+  the "John" Passion was sung by the Bach Choir in 1896 with that
+  received at the "Matthew" performance in St. Paul's in the same
+  year, to realise that it is in idea, not in power of realising
+  the idea, that the two works differ&mdash;differ more widely than
+  might seem possible, seeing that the subject is the same, and
+  that the same musical forms&mdash;chorus, chorale, song and
+  recitative&mdash;are used in each.</p>
+
+  <p>Waking on the morrow of the "John" performance, my memory was
+  principally filled with those hoarse, stormy, passionate roarings
+  of an enraged mob. A careless reckoning shows that whereas the
+  people's choruses in the "Matthew" Passion occupy about ninety
+  bars, in the "John" they fill about two hundred and fifty.
+  "Barabbas" in the "Matthew" is a single yell; in the "John" it
+  takes up four bars. "Let Him be crucified" in the "Matthew" is
+  eighteen bars long, counting the repetition, while "Crucify" and
+  "Away with Him" in the "John" amount to fifty bars. Moreover, the
+  people's choruses are written in a much more violent and
+  tempestuous style in the earlier than in the later setting. In
+  the "Matthew" there is nothing like those terrific ascending and
+  descending chromatic passages in "W&auml;re dieser nicht ein
+  Ubelth&auml;ter" and "Wir d&uuml;rfen Niemand t&ouml;den," or the
+  short breathless shouts near the finish of the former chorus, as
+  though the infuriated rabble had nearly exhausted itself, or,
+  again, the excited chattering of the soldiers when they get
+  Christ's coat, "Lasst uns den nicht zertheilen." Considering
+  these things, one sees that the first impression the "John"
+  Passion gives is the true impression, and that Bach had
+  deliberately set out to depict the preliminary scenes of the
+  crucifixion with greater fulness of detail and in more striking
+  colours than he afterwards attempted in the "Matthew" Passion.
+  Then, not only is the physical suffering of Christ insisted on in
+  this way, but the chorales, recitatives, and songs lay still
+  greater stress upon it, either directly, by actual description,
+  or indirectly, by uttering with unheard-of poignancy the remorse
+  supposed to be felt by mankind whose guilt occasioned that
+  suffering. The central point in the two Passions is the same,
+  namely, the backsliding of Peter; and in each the words, "He went
+  out and wept bitterly," are given the greatest prominence; but
+  one need only contrast the acute agony expressed in the song,
+  "Ach mein Sinn," which follows the incident in the "John," with
+  the sweetness of "Have mercy upon me," which follows it in the
+  "Matthew," to gain a fair notion of the spirit in which the one
+  work, and also the spirit in which the other, is written. The
+  next point to note is, that while the "Matthew" begins with
+  lamentation and ends with resignation, "John" begins and ends
+  with hope and praise. In the former there is no chorus like the
+  opening "Herr, unser, Herrscher," no chorale so triumphant as
+  "Ach grosser K&ouml;nig," and certainly no single passage so
+  rapturous as "Alsdann vom Tod erwecke mich, Dass meine Augen
+  sehen dich, In aller Freud, O Gottes Sohn" (with the bass
+  mounting to the high E flat and rolling magnificently down
+  again). So in the "John" Passion Bach has given us, first, a
+  vivid picture of the turbulent crowd and of the suffering and
+  death of Christ; second, an expression of man's bitterest
+  remorse; and, last and above all, an expression of man's hope for
+  the future and his thankfulness to Christ who redeemed him. These
+  are what one remembers after hearing the work sung; and these, it
+  may be remarked, are the things that the seventeenth and
+  eighteenth century mind chiefly saw in the sorrow and death of
+  Jesus of Nazareth.</p>
+
+  <h3>III.</h3>
+
+  <p>The "Matthew" Passion arouses a very different mood from that
+  aroused by the "John." One does not remember the turbulent
+  people's choruses, nor the piercing note of anguish, nor any
+  rapturous song or chorus; for all else is drowned in the
+  recollection of an overwhelming utterance of love and human
+  sorrow and infinite tenderness. Much else there is in the
+  "Matthew" Passion, just as there is love and tenderness in the
+  "John"; but just as these are subordinated in the "John" to the
+  more striking features I have mentioned, so in the "Matthew" the
+  noise of the people and the expression of keen remorse are
+  subordinated to love and human tenderness and infinite sorrow.
+  The small number and conciseness of the people's choruses have
+  already been alluded to, and it may easily be shown that the
+  penitential music is brief compared with the love music, besides
+  having a great deal of the love, the yearning love, feeling in
+  it. The list of penitential pieces is exhausted when I have
+  mentioned "Come, ye daughters," "Guilt for sin," "Break and die,"
+  "O Grief," "Alas! now is my Saviour gone," and "Have mercy upon
+  me"; and, on the other hand, we have "Thou blessed Saviour," the
+  Last Supper music, the succeeding recitative and song, "O man,
+  thy heavy sin lament," "To us He hath done all things," "For love
+  my Saviour suffered," "Come, blessed Cross," and "See the
+  Saviour's outstretched arm," every one of which, not to speak of
+  some other songs and most of the chorales, is sheer love music of
+  the purest sort. This, then, seems to me the difference between
+  the "Matthew" Passion and its predecessor: in the "John" Bach
+  tried to purge his audience in the regular evangelical manner by
+  pity and terror and hope. But during the next six years his
+  spiritual development was so amazing, that while remaining
+  intellectually faithful to evangelical dogma and perhaps such
+  bogies as the devil and hell, he yet saw that the best way of
+  purifying his audience was to set Jesus of Nazareth before them
+  as the highest type of manhood he knew, as the man who so loved
+  men that He died for them. There is therefore in the "Matthew"
+  Passion neither the blank despair nor the feverish ecstasy of the
+  "John," for they have no part to play there. Human sorrow and
+  human love are the themes. Whenever I hear a fine rendering of
+  the "Matthew" Passion, it seems to me that no composer, not even
+  Mozart, could be more tender than Bach. It is often hard to get
+  into communication with him, for he often appeals to feelings
+  that no longer stir humanity&mdash;such, for instance, as the
+  obsolete "sense of sin,"&mdash;but once it is done, he works
+  miracles. Take, for example, the scene in which Jesus tells His
+  disciples that one of them will betray Him. They ask, in chorus,
+  "Herr, bin ich's?" There is a pause, and the chorale, "<i>Ich
+  bin's</i>, ich sollte b&uuml;ssen," is thundered out by
+  congregation and organ; then the agony passes away at the thought
+  of the Redeemer, and the last line, "Das hat verdienet meine
+  Seel," is almost intolerable in its sweetness. The songs, of
+  course, appeal naturally to-day to all who will listen to them;
+  but it is in such passages as this that Bach spoke most
+  powerfully to his generation, and speaks now to those who will
+  learn to understand him. Those who understand him can easily
+  perceive the "John" Passion to be a powerful artistic embodiment
+  of an eighteenth century idea; and they may also perceive that
+  the "Matthew" is greater, because it is, on the whole, a little
+  more beautiful, and because its main idea&mdash;which so far
+  transcended the eighteenth century understanding that the
+  eighteenth century preferred the "John"&mdash;is one of the
+  loftiest that has yet visited the human mind.</p>
+  <hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+  <h2><a name="HANDEL" id="HANDEL"></a>HANDEL</h2>
+
+  <p>Mr. George Frideric Handel is by far the most superb personage
+  one meets in the history of music. He alone of all the musicians
+  lived his life straight through in the grand manner. Spohr had
+  dignity; Gluck insisted upon respect being shown a man of his
+  talent; Spontini was sufficiently self-assertive; Beethoven
+  treated his noble patrons as so many handfuls of dirt. But it is
+  impossible altogether to lose sight of the peasant in Beethoven
+  and Gluck; Spohr had more than a trace of the successful
+  shopkeeper; Spontini's assertion often became mere insufferable
+  bumptiousness. Besides, they all won their positions through
+  being the best men in the field, and they held them with a proud
+  consciousness of being the best men. But in Handel we have a
+  polished gentleman, a lord amongst lords, almost a king amongst
+  kings; and had his musical powers been much smaller than they
+  were, he might quite possibly have gained and held his position
+  just the same. He slighted the Elector of Hanover; and when that
+  noble creature became George I. of England, Handel had only to do
+  the handsome thing, as a handsome gentleman should, to be
+  immediately taken back into favour. He was educated&mdash;was, in
+  fact, a university man of the German sort; he could write and
+  spell, and add up rows of figures, and had many other
+  accomplishments which gentlemen of the period affected a little
+  to despise. He had a pungent and a copious wit. He had quite a
+  commercial genius; he was an impresario, and had engagements to
+  offer other people instead of having to beg for engagements for
+  himself; and he was always treated by the British with all the
+  respect they keep for the man who has made money, or, having lost
+  it, is fast making it again. He fought for the lordship of opera
+  against nearly the whole English nobility, and they paid him the
+  compliment of banding together with as much ado to ruin him as if
+  their purpose had been to drive his royal master from the throne.
+  He treated all opposition with a splendid good-humoured disdain.
+  If his theatre was empty, then the music sounded the better. If a
+  singer threatened to jump on the harpsichord because Handel's
+  accompaniments attracted more notice than the singing, Handel
+  asked for the date of the proposed performance that it might be
+  advertised, for more people would come to see the singer jump
+  than hear him sing. He was, in short, a most superb person, quite
+  the grand seigneur. Think of Bach, the little shabby unimportant
+  cantor, or of Beethoven, important enough but shabby, and with a
+  great sorrow in his eyes, and an air of weariness, almost of
+  defeat. Then look at the magnificent Mr. Handel in Hudson's
+  portrait: fashionably dressed in a great periwig and gorgeous
+  scarlet coat, victorious, energetic, self-possessed,
+  self-confident, self-satisfied, jovial, and proud as Beelzebub
+  (to use his own comparison)&mdash;too proud to ask for
+  recognition were homage refused. This portrait helps us to
+  understand the ascendency Handel gained over his contemporaries
+  and over posterity.</p>
+
+  <p>But his lofty position was not entirely due to his
+  overwhelming personality. His intellect, if less vast, less
+  comprehensive, than Beethoven's, was less like the intellect of a
+  great peasant: it was swifter, keener, surer. Where Beethoven
+  plodded, Handel leaped. And a degree of genius which did nothing
+  for Bach, a little for Mozart, and all for Beethoven, did
+  something for Handel. Without a voice worth taking into
+  consideration, he could, and at least on one occasion did, sing
+  so touchingly that the leading singer of the age dared not risk
+  his reputation by singing after him. He was not only the first
+  composer of the day, but also the first organist and the first
+  harpsichord player; for his only possible rival, Sebastian Bach,
+  was an obscure schoolmaster in a small, nearly unheard-of, German
+  town. And so personal force, musical genius, business talent,
+  education, and general brain power went to the making of a man
+  who hobnobbed with dukes and kings, who ruled musical England
+  with an iron rule, who threatened to throw distinguished soprano
+  ladies from windows, and was threatened with never an action for
+  battery in return, who went through the world with a regal gait,
+  and was, in a word, the most astonishing lord of music the world
+  has seen.</p>
+
+  <p>That this aristocrat should come to be the musical prophet of
+  an evangelical bourgeoisie would be felt as a most comical irony,
+  were it only something less of a mystery. Handel was brought up
+  in the bosom of the Lutheran Church, and was religious in his
+  way. But it was emphatically a pagan way. Let those who doubt it
+  turn to his setting of "All we like sheep have gone astray," in
+  the "Messiah," and ask whether a religious man, whether Byrde or
+  Palestrina, would have painted that exciting picture on those
+  words. Imagine how Bach would have set them. That Handel lived an
+  intense inner life we know, but what that life was no man can
+  ever know. It is only certain that it was not a life such as
+  Bach's; for he lived an active outer life also, and was troubled
+  with no illusions, no morbid introspection. He seemed to accept
+  the theology of the time in simple sincerity as a sufficient
+  explanation of the world and human existence. He had little
+  desire to write sacred music. He felt that his enormous force
+  found its finest exercise in song-making; and Italian opera,
+  consisting nearly wholly of songs, was his favourite form to the
+  finish. The instinct was a true one. It is as a song-writer he is
+  supreme, surpassing as he does Schubert, and sometimes even
+  Mozart. Mozart is a prince of song-writers; but Handel is their
+  king. He does not get the breezy picturesqueness of Purcell, nor
+  the entrancing absolute beauty that Mozart often gets; but as
+  pieces of art, each constructed so as to get the most out of the
+  human voice in expressing a rich human passion in a noble form,
+  they stand unapproachable in their perfection. For many reasons
+  the English public refused to hear them in his own time, and
+  Handel, as a general whose business was to win the battle, not in
+  this or that way, but in any possible way, turned his attention
+  to oratorio, and in this found success and a fortune. In this
+  lies also our great gain, for in addition to the Italian opera
+  songs we have the oratorio choruses. But when we come to think of
+  it, might not Buononcini and Cuzzoni laugh to see how time has
+  avenged them on their old enemy? For Handel's best music is in
+  the songs, which rarely find a singer; and his fame is kept alive
+  by performances of "Israel in Egypt" at the Albert Hall, where
+  (until lately) evangelical small grocers crowded to hear the duet
+  for two basses, "The Lord is a man of war," which Handel did not
+  write, massacred by a huge bass chorus.</p>
+
+  <p>His "Messiah" is in much the same plight as Milton's "Paradise
+  Lost," the plays of Shakespeare and the source of all true
+  religion&mdash;it suffers from being so excessively well known
+  and so generally accepted as a classic that few want to hear it,
+  and none think it worth knowing thoroughly. A few years ago the
+  late Sir Joseph Barnby went through the entire work in St.
+  James's Hall with his Guildhall students; but such a feat had
+  not, I believe, been accomplished previously within living
+  memory, and certainly it has not been attempted again since. We
+  constantly speak of the "Messiah" as the most popular oratorio
+  ever written; but even in the provinces only selections from it
+  are sung, and in the metropolis the selections are cut very short
+  indeed, frequently by the sapient device of taking out all the
+  best numbers and leaving only those that appeal to the religious
+  instincts of Clapham. I cannot resist the suspicion that but for
+  the words of "He was despised," "Behold, and see," and "I know
+  that my Redeemer liveth," Clapham would have tired of the
+  oratorio before now, and that but for its having become a
+  Christmas institution, like roast beef, plum-puddings,
+  mince-pies, and other indigestible foods, it would no longer be
+  heard in the provinces. And perhaps it would be better
+  forgotten&mdash;perhaps Handel would rather have seen it
+  forgotten than regarded as it is regarded, than existing merely
+  as an aid to evangelical religion or an after-dinner digestive on
+  Christmas Day. Still, during the last hundred and fifty years, it
+  has suffered so many humiliations that possibly one more, even
+  this last one, does not so much matter. First its great domes and
+  pillars and mighty arches were prettily ornamented and tinted by
+  Mozart, who surely knew not what he did; then in England a
+  barbarous traditional method of singing it was evolved; later it
+  was Costa-mongered; finally even the late eminent Macfarren, the
+  worst enemy music has ever had in this country, did not disdain
+  to prepare "a performing edition," and to improve Mozart's
+  improvements on Handel. One wonders whether Mozart, when he
+  overlaid the "Messiah" with his gay tinsel-work, dreamed that
+  some Costa, encouraged by Mozart's own example, and without
+  brains enough to guess that he had nothing like Mozart's brains,
+  would in like manner desecrate "Don Giovanni." Like "Don
+  Giovanni," there the "Messiah" lies, almost unrecognisable under
+  its outrageous adornments, misunderstood, its splendours largely
+  unknown and hardly even suspected, the best known and the least
+  known of oratorios, a work spoken of as fine by those who cannot
+  hum one of its greatest themes or in the least comprehend the
+  plan on which its noblest choruses are constructed.</p>
+
+  <p>Rightly to approach the "Messiah" or any of Handel's sacred
+  oratorios, to approach it in any sure hope of appreciating it,
+  one must remember that (as I have just said) Handel had nothing
+  of the religious temperament, that in temperament he was wholly
+  secular, that he was an eighteenth century pagan. He was
+  perfectly satisfied with the visible and audible world his energy
+  and imagination created out of things; about the why and
+  wherefore of things he seems never to have troubled; his soul
+  asked no questions, and he was never driven to accept a religious
+  or any other explanation. It is true he went to church with quite
+  commendable regularity, and wished to die on Good Friday and so
+  meet Jesus Christ on the anniversary of the resurrection. But he
+  was nevertheless as completely a pagan as any old Greek; the
+  persons of the Trinity were to him very solid entities; if he
+  wished to die on Good Friday, depend upon it, he fully meant to
+  enter heaven in his finest scarlet coat with ample gold lace and
+  a sword by his side, to make a stately bow to the assembled
+  company and then offer a few apposite and doubtless pungent
+  remarks on the proper method of tuning harps. Of true devotional
+  feeling, of the ecstatic devotional feeling of Palestrina and of
+  Bach, there is in no recorded saying of his a trace, and there is
+  not a trace of it in his music. When he was writing the
+  "Hallelujah Chorus" he imagined he saw God on His throne, just as
+  in writing "Semele" he probably imagined he saw Jupiter on his
+  throne; and the fact proves only with what intensity and power
+  his imagination was working, and how far removed he was from the
+  genuine devotional frame of mind. There is not the slightest
+  difference in style between his secular and his sacred music; he
+  treats sacred and secular subjects precisely alike. In music his
+  intention was never to reveal his own state of mind, but always
+  to depict some object, some scene. Now, never did he adhere with
+  apparently greater resolution to this plan, never therefore did
+  he produce a more essentially secular work, than in the
+  "Messiah." One need only consider such numbers as "All they that
+  see Him" and "Behold the Lamb of God" to realise this; though,
+  indeed, there is not a number in the oratorio that does not show
+  it with sufficient clearness. But fully to understand Handel and
+  realise his greatness, it is not enough merely to know the spirit
+  in which he worked: one must know also his method of depicting
+  things and scenes. He was wholly an impressionist&mdash;in his
+  youth from choice, as when he wrote the music of "Rinaldo" faster
+  than the librettist could supply the words; in middle age and
+  afterwards from necessity, as he never had time to write save
+  when circumstances freed him for a few days from the active
+  duties of an impresario. He tried to do, and succeeded in doing,
+  everything with a few powerful strokes, a few splashes of colour.
+  Of the careful elaboration of Bach, of Beethoven, even of Mozart,
+  there is nothing: sometimes in his impatience he seemed to mix
+  his colours in buckets and hurl them with the surest artistic aim
+  at his gigantic canvases. A comparison of the angels' chorus
+  "Glory to God in the highest" in Bach's "Christmas Oratorio" with
+  the same thing as set in the "Messiah" will show not only how
+  widely different were the aims of the two men, but also throws
+  the minute cunning of the Leipzig schoolmaster into startling
+  contrast with the daring recklessness of the tremendous London
+  impresario. Of course both men possessed wonderful contrapuntal
+  skill; but in Bach's case there is time and patience as well as
+  skill, and in Handel's only consummate audacity and intellectual
+  grip. Handel was by far a greater man than Bach&mdash;he appears
+  to me, indeed, the greatest man who has yet lived; but though he
+  achieves miracles as a musician, his music was to him only one of
+  many modes of using the irresistible creative instinct and energy
+  within him. Any one who looks in Handel for the characteristic
+  complicated music of the typical German masters will be
+  disappointed even as the Germans are disappointed; but those who
+  are prepared to let Handel say what he has to say in his own
+  chosen way will find in his music the most admirable style ever
+  attained to by any musician, the most perfect fusion of manner
+  and matter. It is a grand, large, and broad style, because Handel
+  had a large and grand matter to express; and if it errs at all it
+  errs on the right side&mdash;it has too few rather than too many
+  notes.</p>
+
+  <p>On the whole, the "Messiah" is as vigorous, rich, picturesque
+  and tender as the best of Handel's oratorios&mdash;even
+  "Belshazzar" does not beat it. There is scarcely any padding;
+  there are many of Handel's most perfect songs and most gorgeous
+  choruses; and the architecture of the work is planned with a
+  magnificence, and executed with a lucky completeness, attained
+  only perhaps elsewhere in "Israel in Egypt"&mdash;for which
+  achievement Handel borrowed much of the bricks and mortar from
+  other edifices. Theological though the subject is, the oratorio
+  is as much a hymn to joy as the Ninth symphony; and there is in
+  it far more of genuine joy, of sheer delight in living. Of the
+  sense of sin&mdash;the most cowardly illusion ever invented by a
+  degenerate people&mdash;there is no sign; where Bach would have
+  been abased in the dust, Handel is bright, shining, confident,
+  cocksure that all is right with the world. Mingled with the
+  marvellous tenderness of "Comfort ye" there is an odd air of
+  authority, a conviction that everything is going well, and that
+  no one need worry; and nothing fresher, fuller of
+  spring-freshness, almost of rollicking jollity, has ever been
+  written than "Every valley shall be exalted." "And the glory of
+  the Lord shall be revealed" is in rather the same vein, though a
+  deeper note of feeling is struck. The effect of the alto voices
+  leading off, followed immediately by the rest of the chorus and
+  orchestra, is overwhelming; and the chant of the basses at "For
+  the mouth of the Lord" is in the biggest Handel manner. But just
+  as "He was despised" and "I know that my Redeemer liveth" tower
+  above all the other songs, so three or four choruses tower above
+  all the other choruses in not only the "Messiah," but all
+  Handel's oratorios. "Worthy is the Lamb" stands far above the
+  rest, and indeed above all choruses in the world save Bach's very
+  best; then comes "For unto us a Child is born"; and after that
+  "And He shall purify," "His yoke is easy," and "Surely He hath
+  borne our griefs"&mdash;each distinctive, complete in itself, an
+  absolute piece of noble invention. "Unto us a Child is born" is
+  written in a form devised by Handel and used with success by no
+  other composer since, until in a curiously modified shape
+  Tschaikowsky employed it for the third movement of his Pathetic
+  symphony. The first theme is very simply announced, played with
+  awhile, then the second follows&mdash;a tremendous phrase to the
+  words "The government shall be upon His shoulders"; suddenly the
+  inner parts begin to quicken into life, to ferment, to throb and
+  to leap, and with startling abruptness great masses of tone are
+  hurled at the listener to the words "Wonderful, Counsellor." The
+  process is then repeated in a shortened and intensified form;
+  then it is repeated again; and finally the principal theme,
+  delivered so na&iuml;vely at first, is delivered with all the
+  pomp and splendour of full chorus and orchestra, and "Wonderful,
+  Counsellor" thundered out on a corresponding scale. A scheme at
+  once so simple, so daring and so tremendous in effect, could have
+  been invented by no one but Handel with his need for working
+  rapidly; and it is strange that a composer so different from
+  Handel as Tschaikowsky should have hit upon a closely analogous
+  form for a symphonic movement. The forms of the other choruses
+  are dissimilar. In "He shall purify" there are two big climaxes;
+  in "His yoke is easy" there is only one, and it comes at the
+  finish, just when one is wondering how the splendid flow of music
+  can be ended without an effect of incompleteness or of
+  anti-climax; and "Surely He hath borne our griefs" depends upon
+  no climactic effects, but upon the sheer sweetness and pathos of
+  the thing.</p>
+
+  <p>Handel's secular oratorios are different from anything else in
+  the world. They are neither oratorios, nor operas, nor cantatas;
+  and the plots are generally quaint.</p>
+
+  <p>Some years ago it occurred to me one morning that a trip by
+  sea to Russia might be refreshing; and that afternoon I started
+  in a coal-steamer from a northern seaport. A passport could
+  hardly be wrested from hide-bound officialdom in so short a time,
+  and, to save explanations in a foreign tongue at Cronstadt, the
+  reader's most humble servant assumed the lowly office of
+  purser&mdash;wages, one shilling per month. The passage was
+  rough, the engineers were not enthusiastic in their work, some of
+  the seamen were sulky; and, in a word, the name of God was
+  frequently in the skipper's mouth. Otherwise he did not strike
+  one as being a particularly religious man. Nevertheless, when
+  Sunday evening came round he sat down and read the Bible with
+  genuine fervour, spelling the hard words aloud and asking how
+  they should or might be pronounced; and he informed me, by way of
+  explaining his attachment to the Book, that he had solemnly
+  promised his wife never to omit his weekly devotions while on the
+  deep. Though I never shared the literary tastes of Mr. Wilson
+  Barrett, the captain's unfathomable ignorance of the Gospels,
+  Isaiah and the Psalms startled even me; but on the other hand he
+  had an intimate acquaintance with a number of stories to be found
+  only in the Apocrypha, with which he had thoughtfully provided
+  himself. To gratify my curiosity he read me the tale of Susanna
+  and the Elders. Being young, my first notion was that I had
+  chanced on a capital subject for an opera; and I actually thought
+  for ten minutes of commencing at once on a libretto. Later I
+  remembered the censor, and realised for the first time that in
+  England, when a subject is unfit for a drama, it is treated as an
+  oratorio. As soon as possible I bought Handel's "Susanna"
+  instead, and found that Handel curiously&mdash;or perhaps not
+  curiously&mdash;had also been before me in thinking of treating
+  the subject operatically. In fact "Susanna" is as much an opera
+  as "Rinaldo," the only difference being that a few choruses are
+  forcibly dragged in to give colour to the innocent pretence.
+  Handel's librettist, whoever he was, did his work downright
+  badly. That he glorifies the great institution of permanent
+  marriage and says nothing of the corresponding great institution
+  of the Divorce Court, is only what might be expected of the
+  horrible eighteenth century&mdash;the true dark age of Europe;
+  but surely even a composer of Handel's powers could scarcely do
+  himself justice with such a choice blend of stupidity and cant
+  religion as this&mdash;</p>
+
+  <div class="poem">
+    <div class="stanza">
+      <span>"<i>Chorus</i>. How long, O Lord, shall Israel
+      groan<br /></span> <span class="i2">In bondage and in
+      pain?<br /></span> <span>Jehovah! hear Thy people
+      moan,<br /></span> <span class="i2">And break the tyrant's
+      chain!<br /></span>
+    </div>
+
+    <div class="stanza">
+      <span>"<i>Joachim.</i> Our crimes repeated have provok'd His
+      rage,<br /></span> <span>And now He scourges a degen'rate
+      age.<br /></span> <span>O come, my fair Susanna,
+      come,<br /></span> <span>And from my bosom chase its gloom,"
+      etc.<br /></span>
+    </div>
+  </div>
+
+  <p>Or is the abrupt third line of Joachim's speech to be regarded
+  as a masterstroke of characterisation? I will tell the whole
+  story, to show what manner of subject has been thought proper for
+  an oratorio. Joachim and Susanna are of course perfect monsters
+  of fidelity; though it is only fair to say that Joachim's virtue
+  is not insisted on, or, for that matter, mentioned. Joachim goes
+  out of town&mdash;he says so: "Awhile I'm summoned from the town
+  away"&mdash;and Susanna, instead of obeying his directions to
+  entertain some friends, goes into a dark glade, whither the
+  Elders presently repair. She declines their attentions; then they
+  declare they caught her with an unknown lover, who fled; and she
+  is condemned to death, the populace seeing naught but justice in
+  the sentence. But before they begin to hurl the stones, Daniel
+  steps forward and by sheer eloquent impudence persuades the
+  people to have the case re-tried, with him for judge. He sends
+  one elder out of court, and asks the other under what tree
+  Susanna committed the indiscretion. The poor wretch, knowing no
+  science, foolishly makes a wild shot instead of pleading a
+  defective education, and says, "A verdant mastick, pride of all
+  the grove." The other, in response to the same question, says,
+  "Yon tall holm-tree." Incredible as it seems, on the strength of
+  this error, which would merely gain a policeman the commendation
+  of an average London magistrate, the two Elders are sent off to
+  be hanged! Why, even the late Mr. Justice Stephen never put away
+  an innocent man or woman on less evidence! But the chorus
+  flatters Daniel just as the Press used to flatter Mr. Justice
+  Stephen; Susanna is complimented on her chastity; and all ends
+  with some general reflections&mdash;</p>
+
+  <div class="poem">
+    <div class="stanza">
+      <span>"A virtuous wife shall soften fortune's
+      frown,<br /></span> <span>She's far more precious than a
+      golden crown."<br /></span>
+    </div>
+  </div>
+
+  <p>Nothing is said about the market value of a virtuous husband.
+  Probably the eighteenth century regarded such a thing as out of
+  the question. As I have said, I tell this story to show what the
+  British public will put up with if you mention the word oratorio.
+  Voltaire's dictum needs revision thus: "Whatever is too improper
+  to be spoken (in England) is sung, and whatever is too improper
+  to be sung on the stage may be sung in a church."</p>
+
+  <p>Nevertheless, out of this wretched book Handel made a
+  masterpiece. The tale of Susanna is not one in which a man of his
+  character might be expected to take a profound interest; though
+  it should always be remembered that hardly anything is known of
+  his relations with the other sex save that he took a keen and
+  lifelong interest in the Foundling Hospital. But so strong had
+  the habit of making masterpieces become with him that he could
+  not resist the temptation to create just one more, even when he
+  had nothing better than "Susanna" to base it on; just as a
+  confirmed drunkard cannot resist the temptation to get one drink
+  more, even if he be accustomed to the gilded chambers of the West
+  End, and must go for really the last to-night into the lowest
+  drinking-saloon of the East. Some of the choruses are of Handel's
+  best. The first, "How long, O Lord," shows that he could write
+  expressive chromatic passages as well as Purcell and Bach; the
+  second is surcharged with emotion; "Righteous Heaven" is
+  picturesque and full of splendid vigour; "Impartial Heaven"
+  contains some of the most gorgeous writing that even Handel
+  achieved. But the last two choruses, and "The Cause is decided"
+  and "Oh, Joachim," are common, colourless, barren; and were
+  evidently written without delight, to maintain the pretext that
+  the work was an oratorio. But it stands to this day, unmistakably
+  an opera; and it is the songs that will certainly make it popular
+  some day; for some of them are on Handel's highest level, and
+  Handel's highest level has never been reached by any other
+  composer. His choruses are equalled by Bach's, his dramatic
+  strokes by Gluck's, his instrumental movements by Bach's and
+  perhaps Lulli's; but the coming of Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert,
+  Weber, and Wagner has only served to show that he is the greatest
+  song-writer the world has known or is likely to know. Even Mozart
+  never quite attained that union of miraculously balanced form,
+  sweetness of melody, and depth of feeling with a degree of sheer
+  strength that keeps the expression of the main thought lucid, and
+  the surface of the music, so to speak, calm, when obscurity might
+  have been anticipated, and some roughness and storm and stress
+  excused. "Faith displays her rosy wing" is an absolutely perfect
+  instance of a Handel song. Were not the thing done, one might
+  believe it impossible to express with such simplicity&mdash;four
+  sombre minor chords and then the tremolo of the strings&mdash;the
+  alternations of trembling fear and fearful hope, the hope of the
+  human soul in extremist agony finding an exalted consolation in
+  the thought that this was the worst. As astounding as this is the
+  quality of light and freshness of atmosphere with which Handel
+  imbues such songs as "Clouds o'ertake the brightest day" and
+  "Crystal streams in murmurs flowing"; and the tenderness of
+  "Would custom bid," with the almost divine refrain, "I then had
+  called thee mine," might surprise us, coming as it does from such
+  a giant, did we not know that tenderness is always a
+  characteristic of the great men, of Bach, Mozart, Beethoven,
+  Wagner, and that the pettiness, ill-conditionedness, and lack of
+  generous feeling observable in (say) our London composers to-day
+  stamp them more unmistakably than does their music as small
+  composers. If the poor fellows knew what they were about, they
+  would at least conceal the littlenesses that show they are
+  destined never to do work of the first order. The composer of the
+  "Rex tremend&aelig;" (in the Requiem) wrote "Dove sono,"
+  Beethoven wrote both the finale of the Fifth symphony and the
+  slow movement of the Ninth, Wagner both the Valkyries' Ride and
+  the motherhood theme in "Siegfried," Handel "Worthy is the Lamb"
+  and "Waft her, angels"; while your little malicious musical Mimes
+  are absorbed in self-pity, and can no more write a melody that
+  irresistibly touches you than they can build a great and
+  impressive structure. And if Mozart is tenderest of all the
+  musicians, Handel comes very close to him. The world may, though
+  not probably, tire of all but his grandest choruses, while his
+  songs will always be sung as lovely expressions of the finest
+  human feeling.</p>
+
+  <p>"Samson" is not his finest oratorio, though it may be his
+  longest. It contains no "Unto us a Child is born" nor a "Worthy
+  is the Lamb," nor a "Now love, that everlasting boy"; but in
+  several places the sublime is reached&mdash;in "Then round about
+  the starry throne," the last page of which is worth all the
+  oratorios written since Handel's time save Beethoven's "Mount of
+  Olives"; in "Fixed is His everlasting seat," with that enormous
+  opening phrase, irresistible in its strength and energy as Handel
+  himself; and in the first section of "O first created beam." The
+  pagan choruses are full of riotous excitement, though there is
+  not one of them to match "Ye tutelar gods" in "Belshazzar." But
+  there is little in "Belshazzar" to match the pathos of "Return, O
+  God of hosts," or "Ye sons of Israel, now lament." The latter is
+  a notable example of Handel's art. There is not a new phrase in
+  it: nothing, indeed, could be commoner than the bar at the first
+  occurrence of "Amongst the dead great Samson lies," and yet the
+  effect is amazing; and though the "for ever" is as old as
+  Purcell, here it is newly used&mdash;used as if it had never been
+  used before&mdash;to utter a depth of emotion that passes beyond
+  the pathetic to the sublime. This very vastness of feeling, this
+  power of stepping outside himself and giving a voice to the
+  general emotions of humanity, prevents us recognising the
+  personal note in Handel as we recognise it in Mozart. But
+  occasionally the personal note may be met. The recitative "My
+  genial spirits fail," with those dreary long-drawn harmonies, and
+  the orchestral passage pressing wearily downwards at "And lay me
+  gently down with them that rest," seems almost like Handel's own
+  voice in a moment of sad depression. It serves, at anyrate, to
+  remind us that the all-conquering Mr. Handel was a complete man
+  who had endured the sickening sense of the worthlessness of a
+  struggle that he was bound to continue to the end. But these
+  personal confessions are scarce. After all, in oratorio Handel's
+  best music is that in which he seeks to attain the sublime. In
+  his choruses he does attain it: he sweeps you away with the
+  immense rhythmical impetus of the music, or overpowers you with
+  huge masses of tone hurled, as it were, bodily at you at just the
+  right moments, or he coerces you with phrases like the opening of
+  "Fixed in His everlasting seat," or the last (before the cadence)
+  in "Then round about the starry throne." It is true that with his
+  unheard-of intellectual power, and a mastery of technique equal
+  or nearly equal to Bach's, he was often tempted to write in his
+  uninspired moments, and so the chorus became with him more or
+  less of a formula; but we may also note that even when he was
+  most mechanical the mere furious speed at which he wrote seemed
+  to excite and exalt him, so that if he began with a commonplace
+  "Let their celestial concerts all unite," before the end he was
+  pouring forth glorious and living stuff like the last
+  twenty-seven bars. So the pace at which he had to write in the
+  intervals of bullying or coaxing prima donnas or still more
+  petulant male sopranos was not wholly a misfortune; if it
+  sometimes compelled him to set down mere musical arithmetic, or
+  rubbish like "Honour and arms," and "Go, baffled coward," it
+  sometimes drew his grandest music out of him. The dramatic
+  oratorio is a hybrid form of art&mdash;one might almost say a
+  bastard form; it had only about thirty years of life; but in
+  those thirty years Handel accomplished wonderful things with it.
+  And the wonder of them makes Handel appear the more astonishing
+  man; for, when all is said, the truth is that the man was
+  greater, infinitely greater, than his music.</p>
+  <hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+  <h2><a name="HAYDN_AND_HIS_CREATIONquot" id=
+  "HAYDN_AND_HIS_CREATIONquot"></a>HAYDN AND HIS "CREATION"</h2>
+
+  <p>It is a fact never to be forgotten, in hearing good papa
+  Haydn's music, that he lived in the fine old world when stately
+  men and women went through life in the grand manner with a
+  languid pulse, when the earth and the days were alike empty, and
+  hurry to get finished and proceed to the next thing was almost
+  unknown, and elbowing of rivals to get on almost unnecessary. For
+  fifty years he worked away contentedly as bandmaster to Prince
+  Esterhazy, composing the due amount of music, conducting the due
+  number of concerts, taking his salary of some seventy odd pounds
+  per annum thankfully, and putting on his uniform for special
+  State occasions with as little grumbling as possible, all as a
+  good bandmaster should. He had gone through a short period of
+  roughing it in his youth, and he had made one or two mistakes as
+  he settled down. He married a woman who worked with enthusiasm to
+  render his early life intolerable, and begged him in his old age
+  to buy a certain cottage, as it would suit her admirably when she
+  became a widow. But he consoled himself as men do in the
+  circumstances, and did not allow his mistakes to poison all his
+  life, or cause him any special worry. His other troubles were not
+  very serious. A Music Society which he wished to join tried to
+  trap him into an agreement to write important compositions for it
+  whenever they were wanted. Once he offended his princely master
+  by learning to play the baryton, an instrument on which the
+  prince was a performer greatly esteemed by his retainers. Such
+  teacup storms soon passed: Prince Esterhazy doubtless forgave
+  him; the Society was soon forgotten; and Haydn worked on
+  placidly. Every morning he rose with or before the lark, dressed
+  himself with a degree of neatness that astonished even that neat
+  dressing age, and sat down to compose music. Later in each day he
+  is reported to have eaten, to have rehearsed his band or
+  conducted concerts, and so to bed to prepare himself by
+  refreshing slumber for the next day's labours. At certain periods
+  of the year Prince Esterhazy and his court adjourned to Esterhaz,
+  and at certain periods they came back to Eisenstadt: thus they
+  were saved by due variety from utter petrifaction. Haydn seems to
+  have liked the life, and to have thought moreover that it was
+  good for him and his art. By being thrown so much back upon
+  himself, he said, he had been forced to become original. Whether
+  it made him original or not, he never thought of changing it
+  until his prince died, and for a time his services were not
+  wanted at Esterhaz or Eisenstadt. Then he came to England, and by
+  his success here made a European reputation (for it was then as
+  it is now&mdash;an artist was only accepted on the musical
+  Continent after he had been stamped with the hall-mark of
+  unmusical England). Finally he settled in Vienna, was for a time
+  the teacher of Beethoven, declared his belief that the first
+  chorus of the "Creation" came direct from heaven, and died a
+  world-famous man.</p>
+
+  <p>To the nineteenth century mind it seems rather an odd life for
+  an artist: at least it strikes one as a life, despite Haydn's own
+  opinion, not particularly conducive to originality. To use
+  extreme language, it might almost be called a monotonous and
+  soporific mode of existence. Probably its chief advantage was the
+  opportunity it afforded, or perhaps the necessity it enforced, of
+  ceaseless industry. Certainly that industry bore fruit in Haydn's
+  steady increase of inventive power as he went on composing. But
+  he only took the prodigious leap from the second to the first
+  rank of composers after he had been free for a time from his long
+  slavery, and had been in England and been aroused and stimulated
+  by new scenes, unfamiliar modes of life, and by contact with many
+  and widely differing types of mind. Some of his later music makes
+  one think that if the leap&mdash;a leap almost unparalleled in
+  the history of art&mdash;had been possible twenty years sooner,
+  Haydn might have won a place by the side of Mozart and Handel and
+  Bach, instead of being the lowest of their great company. On the
+  other hand, one cannot think of the man&mdash;lively, genial,
+  kind-hearted, garrulous, broadly humorous, actively observant of
+  details, careful in small money matters&mdash;and assert with
+  one's hand on one's heart that he was cast in gigantic or heroic
+  mould. That he had a wonderful facility in expressing himself is
+  obvious in every bar he wrote: but it is less obvious that he had
+  a great deal to express. He had deep, but not the deepest, human
+  feeling; he could think, but not profoundly; he had a sense of
+  beauty, delicate and acute out of all comparison with yours or
+  mine, reader, but far less keen than Mozart's or Bach's. Hence
+  his music is rarely comparable with theirs: his matter is less
+  weighty, his form never quite so enchantingly lovely; and,
+  whatever one may think of the possibilities of the man in his
+  most inspired moments, his average output drives one to the
+  reluctant conclusion that on the whole his life must have been
+  favourable to him and enabled him to do the best that was in him.
+  Yet I hesitate as I write the words. Remembering that he began as
+  an untaught peasant, and until the end of his long life was a
+  mere bandmaster with a small yearly salary, a uniform, and
+  possibly (for I cannot recall the facts) his board and lodging,
+  remembering where he found the symphony and quartet and where he
+  left them, remembering, above all, that astonishing leap, I find
+  it hard to believe in barriers to his upward path. It is in
+  dignity and quality of poetic content rather than in form that
+  Haydn is lacking. Had the horizon of his thought been widened in
+  early or even in middle life by the education of mixing with men
+  who knew more and were more advanced than himself, had he been
+  jostled in the crowd of a great city and been made to feel deeply
+  about the tragi-comedy of human existence, his experiences might
+  have resulted in a deeper and more original note being sounded in
+  his music. But we must take him as he is, reflecting, when the
+  unbroken peacefulness of his music becomes a little tiresome,
+  that he belonged to the "old time before us" and was never
+  quickened by the newer modes of thought that unconsciously
+  affected Mozart and consciously moulded Beethoven; and that,
+  after all, his very smoothness and absence of passion give him an
+  old-world charm, grateful in this hot and dusty age. If he was
+  not greatly original, he was at least flawlessly consistent:
+  there is scarce a trait in his character that is not reflected
+  somewhere in his music, and hardly a characteristic of his music
+  that one does not find quaintly echoed in some recorded saying or
+  doing of the man. His placid and even vivacity, his
+  sprightliness, his broad jocularity, his economy and shrewd
+  business perception of what could be done with the material to
+  hand, his fertility of device, even his commonplaceness, may all
+  be seen in the symphonies. At rare moments he moves you strongly,
+  very often he is trivial, but he generally pleases; and if some
+  of the strokes of humour&mdash;quoted in text-books of
+  orchestration&mdash;are so broad as to be indescribable in any
+  respectable modern print, few of us understand what they really
+  mean, and no one is a penny the worse.</p>
+
+  <p>The "Creation" libretto was prepared for Handel, but he did
+  not attempt to set it; and this perhaps was just as well, for the
+  effort would certainly have killed him. Of course the opening
+  offers some fine opportunities for fine music; but the later
+  parts with their nonsense&mdash;Milton's nonsense, I
+  believe&mdash;about "In native worth and honour clad, With
+  beauty, courage, strength, adorned, Erect with front serene he
+  stands, A MAN, the Lord and King of Nature all," and the suburban
+  love-making of our first parents, and the lengthy references to
+  the habits of the worm and the leviathan, and so on, are almost
+  more than modern flesh and blood can endure. It must be conceded
+  that Haydn evaded the difficulties of the subject with a degree
+  of tact that would be surprising in anyone else than Haydn. In
+  the first part, where Handel would have been sublime, he is
+  frequently nearly sublime, and this is our loss; but in the later
+  portion, where Handel would have been solemn, earnest, and
+  intolerably dull, he is light, skittish, good-natured, and
+  sometimes jocular, and this is our gain, even if the gain is not
+  great. The Representation of Chaos is a curious bit of music,
+  less like chaos than an attempt to write music of the Bruneau
+  sort a century too soon; but it serves. The most magnificent
+  passage in the oratorio immediately follows, for there is hardly
+  a finer effect in music than that of the soft voices singing the
+  words, "And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters,"
+  while the strings gently pulse; and the fortissimo C major chord
+  on the word "light," coming abruptly after the piano and
+  mezzo-forte minor chords, is as dazzling in its brilliancy to-day
+  as when it was first sung. The number of unisons, throwing into
+  relief the two minor chords on C and F, should be especially
+  noted. The chorus in the next number is poor, matched with this,
+  though towards the end (see bars 11 and 12 from the finish)
+  Haydn's splendid musicianship has enabled him to redeem the
+  trivial commonplace with an unexpected and powerful harmonic
+  progression. The work is singularly deficient in strong sustained
+  choruses. "Awake the harp" is certainly very much the best; for
+  "The heavens are telling" is little better than Gounod's "Unfold,
+  ye everlasting portals" until the end, where it is saved by the
+  tremendous climax; and "Achieved is the glorious work" is mostly
+  mechanical, with occasional moments of life. As for the finale,
+  it is of course light opera. On the whole the songs are the most
+  delightful feature of the "Creation," and the freshness of "With
+  verdure clad," and the tender charm of the second section of
+  "Roaming in foaming billows," may possibly be remembered when
+  Haydn is scarcely known except as an instrumental composer. The
+  setting of "Softly purling, glides on, thro' silent vales, the
+  limpid brook" is indeed perfect, the phrase at the repetition of
+  "Thro' silent vales" inevitably calling up a vision, not of a
+  valley sleeping in the sunlight, for of sunlight the eighteenth
+  century apparently took little heed, but of a valley in the dark
+  quiet night, filled with the scent of flowers, and the far-off
+  murmur of the brook vaguely heard. The humour of the oratorio
+  consists chiefly of practical jokes, such as sending Mr. Andrew
+  Black (or some other bass singer) down to the low F sharp and G
+  to depict the heavy beasts treading the ground, or making the
+  orchestra imitate the bellow of the said heavy beasts, or
+  depicting the sinuous motion of the worm or the graceful
+  gamboling of the leviathan. It has been objected that the
+  leviathan is brought on in sections. The truth, of course, is
+  that the clumsy figure in the bass is not meant to depict the
+  leviathan himself, but his gambolings and the gay flourishings of
+  his tail. It is hard to sum up the "Creation," unless one is
+  prepared to call it great and never go to hear it. It is not a
+  sublime oratorio, nor yet a frankly comic oratorio, nor entirely
+  a dull oratorio. After considering the songs, the recitatives,
+  the choruses, in detail, it really seems to contain very little.
+  Perhaps it may be described as a third-rate oratorio, whose
+  interest is largely historic and literary.</p>
+  <hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+  <h2><a name="MOZART_HIS_DON_GIOVANNIquot_AND_THE_REQUIEM" id=
+  "MOZART_HIS_DON_GIOVANNIquot_AND_THE_REQUIEM"></a>MOZART, HIS
+  "DON GIOVANNI" AND THE REQUIEM</h2>
+
+  <p>It may well be doubted whether Vienna thought even so much of
+  Capellmeister Mozart as Leipzig thought of Capellmeister Bach.
+  Bach, it is true, was merely Capellmeister; he hardly dared to
+  claim social equality with the citizens who tanned hides or
+  slaughtered pigs; and probably the high personages who trimmed
+  the local Serene Highness's toe-nails scarcely knew of his
+  existence. Still, he was a burgher, even as the killers of pigs
+  and the tanners of hides; he was thoroughly respectable, and
+  probably paid his taxes as they came due; if only by necessity of
+  his office, he went to church with regularity; and on the whole
+  we may suppose that he got enough of respect to make life
+  tolerable. But Mozart was only one of a crowd who provided
+  amusement for a gay population; and a gay population, always a
+  heartless master, holds none in such contempt as the servants who
+  provide it with amusement. So Mozart got no respect from those he
+  served, and his Bohemianism lost him the respect of the eminently
+  respectable. He lived in the eighteenth century equivalent of a
+  "loose set"; he was miserably poor, and presumably never paid his
+  taxes; we may doubt whether he often went to church; he composed
+  for the theatre; and he lacked the self-assertion which enabled
+  Handel, Beethoven, and Wagner to hold their own. Treated as of no
+  account, cheated by those he worked for, hardly permitted to earn
+  his bread, he found life wholly intolerable, and as he grew older
+  he lived more and more within himself and gave his thoughts only
+  to the composition of masterpieces. The crowd of mediocrities
+  dimly felt him to be their master, and the greater the
+  masterpieces he achieved the more vehemently did Salieri and his
+  attendants protest that he was not a composer to compare with
+  Salieri. The noise impressed Da Ponte, the libretto-monger, and
+  he asked Salieri to set his best libretto and gave Mozart only
+  his second best; and thus by a curious irony stumbled into his
+  immortality through sheer stupidity, for his second best libretto
+  was "Don Giovanni"&mdash;of all possible subjects precisely that
+  which a wise man would have given to Mozart. When Mozart laid
+  down the pen after the memorable night's work in which he
+  transferred the finished overture from his brain to the paper, he
+  had written the noblest Italian opera ever conceived; and the
+  world knew it not, yet gradually came to know. But the full fame
+  of "Don Giovanni" was comparatively brief, and at this time there
+  seems to be a hazy notion that its splendours have waned before
+  the blaze of Wagner, just as the symphonies are supposed to have
+  faded in the brilliant light of Beethoven. At lectures on musical
+  history it is reverently spoken of; but it is seldom sung, and
+  the public declines to go to hear it; and, though few persons are
+  so foolish as to admit their sad case, I suspect that more than a
+  few agree with the sage critic who told us not long since that
+  Mozart was a little <i>pass&eacute;</i> now. Is it indeed so?
+  Well, Mozart lived in the last days of the old world, and the old
+  world and the thoughts and sentiments of the old world are
+  certainly a little <i>pass&eacute;s</i> now. But if you examine
+  "Don Giovanni" you must admit that the Fifth and Ninth
+  symphonies, "Fidelio," "Lohengrin," the "Ring," "Tristan," and
+  "Parsifal" have done nothing to eclipse its glories, that while
+  fresh masterpieces have come forth, "Don Giovanni" remains a
+  masterpiece amongst masterpieces, that in a sense it is a
+  masterpiece towards which all other masterpieces stand in the
+  relation of commentaries to text. And though this, perhaps, is
+  only to call it a link in a chain, yet it is curious to note how
+  very closely other composers have followed Mozart, and how
+  greatly they are indebted to him. Page upon page of the early
+  Beethoven is written in the phraseology of the later Mozart; in
+  nearly every bar of "Faust," not to mention "Romeo and Juliette,"
+  avowedly the fruit of a long study of "Don Giovanni," a faint
+  echo of Mozart's voice comes to us with the voice of Gounod;
+  Anna's cries, "Quel sangue, quella piaga, quel volto," with the
+  creeping chromatic chords of the wood-wind, have the very accent
+  of Isolda's '"Tis I, belov'd," and the solemn phrase that
+  follows, in Tristan's death-scene. Apart from its influence on
+  later composers, there is surely no more passionate, powerful,
+  and moving drama in the world than "Don Giovanni." Despite the
+  triviality of Da Ponte's book, the impetus of the music carries
+  along the action at a tremendous speed; the moments of relief
+  occur just when relief is necessary, and never retard the motion;
+  the climaxes are piled up with incredible strength and mastery,
+  and have an emotional effect as powerful as anything in "Fidelio"
+  and equal to anything in Wagner's music-dramas; and most
+  stupendous of all is the finale, with its tragic blending of the
+  grotesque and the terrible. Or, if one considers detail, in no
+  other opera do the characters depict themselves in every phrase
+  they utter as they do in "Don Giovanni." The songs stamp Mozart
+  as the greatest song-writer who has lived, with the exception of
+  Handel, whose opera songs are immeasurably beyond all others save
+  Mozart's, and a little beyond them. The mere musicianship is as
+  consummate as Bach's, for, like Bach, Mozart possessed that
+  facility which is fatal to many men, but combined with it a high
+  sincerity, a greedy thirst for the beautiful, and an emotional
+  force that prevented it being fatal to him. For delicacy,
+  subtlety, due brilliancy, and strength, the orchestral colouring
+  cannot be matched. And no music is more exclusively its own
+  composer's, has less in it of other composers'. Beethoven is
+  Beethoven <i>plus</i> Mozart, Wagner is Wagner <i>plus</i> Weber
+  and Beethoven; but from every page of Mozart's scores Mozart
+  alone looks at you, with sad laughter in his eyes, and
+  unspeakable tenderness, the tenderness of the giants, of Handel,
+  Bach, and Beethoven, though perhaps Mozart is tenderest of them
+  all. He cannot write a comic scene for a poor clownish Masetto
+  without caressing him with a divinely beautiful "Cheto, cheto, mi
+  vo' star," and in presence of death or human distress the
+  strangest, sweetest things fall from his lips. And finally, he is
+  always the perfect artist without reproach; there is nothing
+  wanting and nothing in excess; as he himself said on one
+  occasion, his scores contain exactly the right number of notes.
+  This is "Don Giovanni" as one may see it a century after its
+  birth: a faultless masterpiece; yet (in England at least) it only
+  gets an occasional performance, through the freak of a prima
+  donna, who, as the sage critic said of Mozart, is undoubtedly "a
+  little <i>pass&eacute;e</i> now."</p>
+
+  <p>After all, this is hardly surprising. Perfect art wants
+  perfect listeners, and just now we are much too eager for
+  excitement, too impatient of mere beauty, to listen perfectly to
+  perfect music. And there are other reasons why "Don Giovanni"
+  should not appeal to this generation. For many years it was the
+  sport of the prima donna, and conductors and singers conspired to
+  load it with traditional Costamongery, until at last the "Don
+  Giovanni" we knew became an entirely different thing from the
+  "Don Giovanni" of Mozart's thought. Not Giovanni but Zerlina was
+  the principal figure; the climax of the drama was not the final
+  Statue scene, but "Batti, batti"; Leporello's part was
+  exaggerated until the Statue scene became a pantomime affair with
+  Leporello playing pantaloon against Giovanni's clown. Such an
+  opera could interest none but an Elephant and Castle audience,
+  and probably only the beauty of the music prevented it reaching
+  the Elephant and Castle long ago. So low had "Don Giovanni"
+  fallen, when, quite recently, serious artists like Maurel tried
+  to take it more seriously and restore it to its rightful place.
+  Only, unfortunately, instead of brushing away traditions and
+  going back to the vital conception of Mozart, they sought to
+  modernise it, to convert it into an early Wagner music-drama. The
+  result may be seen in any performance at Covent Garden. The thing
+  becomes a hodge-podge, a mixture of drama, melodrama, the circus,
+  the pantomime, with a strong flavouring of blatherskite. The
+  opera <i>is</i> largely pantomime&mdash;it was intended by Mozart
+  to be pantomime; and the only possible way of doing it
+  effectively is to accept the pantomime frankly, but to play it
+  with such force and sincerity that it is not felt to be
+  pantomime. And the real finale should be sung afterwards.
+  Probably many people would go off to catch their trains. But,
+  after all, Mozart wrote for those who have no trains to catch
+  when this masterpiece, the masterpiece of Italian opera, is sung
+  as he intended it to be sung.</p>
+
+  <p>The Requiem is a very different work. There is plenty of the
+  gaiety and sunshine of life in "Don Giovanni." The Requiem is
+  steeped in sadness and gloom, with rare moments of fiery
+  exaltation, or hysterical despair; at times beauty has been
+  almost&mdash;almost, but never quite&mdash;driven from Mozart's
+  thought by the anguish that tormented him as he wrote. While
+  speaking of Bach's "Matthew" Passion, I have said it "was an
+  appeal, of a force and poignancy paralleled only in the Ninth
+  symphony, to the emotional side of man's nature ... the
+  &aelig;sthetic qualities are subordinated to the utterance of an
+  overwhelming emotion." Had I said "deliberately subordinated" I
+  should have indicated the main difference as well as the main
+  likeness between Bach's masterwork and Mozart's. The
+  &aelig;sthetic qualities are subordinated to the expression of an
+  overwhelming emotion in the Requiem, but not deliberately:
+  unconsciously rather, perhaps even against Mozart's will. Bach
+  set out with the intention of using his art to communicate a
+  certain feeling to his listeners; Mozart, when he accepted the
+  order for a Requiem from that mysterious messenger clad in grey,
+  thought only of creating a beautiful thing. But he had lately
+  found, to his great sorrow, that his ways were not the world's
+  ways, and fraught with even graver consequences was the world's
+  discovery that its ways were not Mozart's. Finding all attempts
+  to turn him from his ways fruitless, the world fought him with
+  contempt, ostracism, and starvation for weapons; and he lacked
+  strength for the struggle. There had been a time when he could
+  retire within himself and live in an ideal world of Don Giovannis
+  and Figaros. But now body as well as spirit was over-wearied;
+  spirit and body were not only tired but diseased; and when he
+  commenced to work at the Requiem the time was past for making
+  beautiful things, for his mind was preoccupied with death and the
+  horror of death&mdash;the taste of death was already in his
+  mouth. Had death come to him as to other men, he might have met
+  it as other men do, heroically, or at least calmly, without loss
+  of dignity. But it came to him coloured and made fearful by wild
+  imaginings, and was less a thought than an unthinkable horror. He
+  believed he had been poisoned, and Count Walsegg's grey-clad
+  messenger seemed a messenger sent from another world to warn him
+  of the approaching finish. As he said, he wrote the Requiem for
+  himself. In it we find none of the sunshine and laughter of "Don
+  Giovanni," but only a painfully pathetic record of Mozart's
+  misery, his despair, and his terror. It is indeed a stupendous
+  piece of art, and much of it surpassingly beautiful; but the
+  absorbing interest of it will always be that it is a "human
+  document," an autobiographical fragment, the most touching
+  autobiography ever penned.</p>
+
+  <p>The pervading note of the whole work is struck at the
+  beginning of the first number. Had Mozart seen death as Handel
+  and Bach saw it, as the only beautiful completion of life, or
+  even as the last opportunity given to men to meet a tremendous
+  reality and not be found wanting, he might have written a sweetly
+  breathed prayer for eternal rest, like the final chorus of the
+  "Matthew" Passion, or given us something equal or almost equal to
+  the austere grandeur of the Dead March in Saul. But he saw death
+  differently, and in the opening bar of the "Requiem
+  &aelig;ternam" we have only sullen gloom and foreboding, deadly
+  fear begotten of actual foreknowledge of things to come. The
+  discord at the fifth bar seems to have given him the relief
+  gained by cutting oneself when in severe pain; and how intense
+  Mozart's pain was may be estimated by the vigour of the reaction
+  when the reaction comes; for though the "Te decet hymnus" is like
+  a gleam of sweet sunshine on black waters, the melody is
+  immediately snatched up, as it were, and, by the furious energy
+  of the accompaniment, powerful harmonic progressions, and
+  movement of the inner parts (note the tenor ascending to the high
+  G on "orationem"), made expressive of abnormal glowing ecstasy.
+  To know Mozart's mood when he wrote the Requiem is to have the
+  key to the "Kyrie." His artistic sense compelled him to veil the
+  acuteness of his agony in the strict form of a regular fugue; but
+  here, as everywhere else in the Requiem, feeling triumphs over
+  the artistic sense; and by a chromatic change, of which none but
+  a Mozart or a Bach would have dreamed, the inexpressive formality
+  of the counter-subject is altered into a passionate appeal for
+  mercy. In no other work of Mozart known to me does he ever become
+  hysterical, and in the Requiem only once, towards the end of this
+  number, where the sopranos are whirled up to the high A, and
+  tenors and altos strengthen the rhythm; and even here the pause,
+  followed by that scholastic cadence, affords a sense of recovered
+  balance, though we should observe that the raucous final chord
+  with the third omitted is in keeping with the colour of the whole
+  number, and not dragged in as a mere display of pedantic
+  knowledge. The "Dies Ir&aelig;" is magnificent music, but the
+  effect is enormously intensified by Mozart first (in the "Kyrie")
+  making us guess at the picture by the agitation of mind into
+  which it throws him, and then suddenly opening the curtain and
+  letting us view for ourselves the lurid splendours; and surely no
+  more awful picture of the Judgment was ever painted than we have
+  here in the "Dies Ir&aelig;," "Tuba minim," "Rex tremend&aelig;,"
+  and the "Confutatis." The method of showing the obverse of the
+  medal first, and then astonishing us with the sudden magnificence
+  of the other side, is an old one, and was an old one even in
+  Mozart's time, but he uses it with supreme mastery, and results
+  that have never been equalled. The most astonishing part of the
+  "Confutatis" is the prayer at the finish, where strange cadence
+  upon cadence falls on the ear like a long-drawn sigh, and the
+  last, longer drawn than the rest, "gere curam mei finis,"
+  followed by a hushed pause, is indeed awful as the silence of the
+  finish. Quite as great is the effect of the same kind in the
+  "Agnus Dei," which was either written by Mozart, or by Sussmayer
+  with Mozart's spirit looking over him. Written by Mozart, the
+  Requiem necessarily abounds in tender touches: the trebles at
+  "Dona eis" immediately after their first entry; the altos at the
+  same words towards the end of the number, and at the
+  twenty-eighth bar of the "Kyrie"; the first part of the
+  "Hostias," the "Agnus Dei," the wonderful "Ne me perdas" in the
+  "Recordare." And if one wants sheer strength and majesty, turn to
+  the fugue on "Quam olim Abrah&aelig;," or the C natural of the
+  basses in the "Sanctus." But the prevailing mood is one of
+  depressing sadness, which would become intolerable by reason of
+  its monotony were it possible to listen to the Requiem as a work
+  of art merely, and not as the tearful confessions of one of the
+  most beautiful spirits ever born into the world.</p>
+  <hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+  <h2><a name="FIDELIOquot" id="FIDELIOquot"></a>"FIDELIO"</h2>
+
+  <p>As an enthusiastic lover of "Fidelio" I may perhaps be
+  permitted to put one or two questions to certain other of its
+  lovers. Is it an opera at all?&mdash;does it not consist of one
+  wonderfully touching situation, padded out before and
+  behind,&mdash;before with some particularly fatuous reminiscences
+  of the old comedy of intrigue, behind with some purely formal
+  business and a pompous final chorus? "Fidelio" exists by reason
+  of that one tremendous scene: there is nothing else dramatic in
+  it: however fine the music is, one cannot forget that the
+  libretto is fustian and superfluous nonsense. Had Beethoven
+  possessed the slightest genius for opera, had he possessed
+  anything like Mozart's dramatic instinct (and of course his own
+  determination to touch nothing but fitting subjects), he would
+  have felt that no meaner story than the "Flying Dutchman" would
+  serve as an opportunity to say all that was aroused in his heart
+  and in his mind by the tale of Leonora. As he had no genius
+  whatever for opera, no sense of the dramatic in life, the tale of
+  Leonora seemed to him good enough; and, after all, in its essence
+  it is the same as the tale of Senta. The Dutchman himself happens
+  to be more interesting than Florestan because of his weird fate;
+  but he is no more the principal character in Wagner's opera than
+  Florestan is the principal character in Beethoven's opera. The
+  principal character in each case is the woman who takes her fate
+  into her own hands and fearlessly chances every risk for the sake
+  of the man she loves. And just as Wagner wrote the best passage
+  in the "Dutchman" for the moment when Senta promises to be
+  faithful through life and death, so Beethoven in the prison scene
+  of "Fidelio" wrote as tremendous a passage as even he ever
+  conceived for the moment when Leonora makes up her mind at all
+  costs to save the life of the wretched prisoner whose grave she
+  is helping to dig. The tale is simple enough&mdash;there is
+  scarcely enough of it to call a tale. Leonora's husband,
+  Florestan, has somehow fallen into the power of his enemy
+  Pizarro, who imprisons him and then says he is dead. Leonora
+  disbelieves this, and, disguising herself as a boy and taking the
+  name of Fidelio, hires herself as an assistant to Rocco, the
+  jailer of the fortress in which Florestan is confined. At that
+  time the news arrives that an envoy of the king is coming to see
+  that no injustice is being done by Pizarro. Pizarro has been
+  hoping to starve Florestan slowly to death; but now he sees the
+  necessity of more rapid action. He therefore tells Rocco to dig a
+  grave in Florestan's cell, and he himself will do the necessary
+  murder. This brings about the great prison scene. Florestan lies
+  asleep in a corner; Leonora is not sure whether she is helping to
+  dig his grave or the grave of some other unlucky wretch; but
+  while she works she takes her resolution&mdash;whoever he may be,
+  she will risk all consequences and save him. Pizarro arrives, and
+  is about to kill Florestan, when Leonora presents a pistol to his
+  head; and, before he has quite had time to recover, a trumpet
+  call is heard, signalling the arrival of the envoy. Pizarro knows
+  the game is up, and Florestan that his wife has saved him. This,
+  I declare, is the only dramatic scene in the play&mdash;here the
+  thing ends: excepting it, there is no real incident. The business
+  at the beginning, about the jailer's daughter refusing to have
+  anything more to do with her former sweetheart, and falling in
+  love with the supposed Fidelio, is merely silly; Rocco's song,
+  elegantly translated in one edition, "Life is nothing without
+  money"&mdash;Heaven knows whether it was intended to be
+  humorous&mdash;is stupid; Pizarro's stage-villainous song of
+  vengeance is unnecessary; the arrangement of the crime is a
+  worry. These, and in fact all that comes before the great scene,
+  are entirely superfluous, the purest piffle, very tiresome. Most
+  exasperating of all is the stupid dialogue, which makes one hope
+  that the man who wrote it died a painful, lingering death. But,
+  in spite of it all, Beethoven, by writing some very beautiful
+  music in the first act, and by rising to an astonishing height in
+  the prison scene and the succeeding duet, has created one of the
+  wonders of the music-world.</p>
+
+  <p>Being a glorification of woman&mdash;German woman, although
+  Leonora was presumably Spanish&mdash;"Fidelio" has inevitably
+  become in Germany the haus-frau's opera. Probably there is not a
+  haus-frau who faithfully cooks her husband's dinner, washes for
+  him, blacks his boots, and would even brush his clothes did he
+  ever think that necessary, who does not see herself reflected in
+  Leonora; probably every German householder either longs to
+  possess her or believes that he does possess her. Consequently,
+  just as Mozart's "Don Giovanni" became the playground of the
+  Italian prima donna, so has "Fidelio" become the playground of
+  that terrible apparition, the Wifely Woman Artist, the singer
+  with no voice, nor beauty, nor manners, but with a high character
+  for correct morality, and a pressure of sentimentality that would
+  move a traction-engine. I remember seeing it played a few years
+  ago, and can never forget a Leonora of sixteen stones, steadily
+  singing out of tune, in the first act professing with profuse
+  perspiration her devotion to her husband (whose weight was rather
+  less than half hers), and in the second act nearly crushing the
+  poor gentleman by throwing herself on him to show him that she
+  was for ever his. A recent performance at Covent Garden, arranged
+  specially, I understand, for Ternina, was not nearly so bad as
+  that; but still Ternina scared me horribly with the enormous
+  force of her Wifely Ardour. It may be that German women are more
+  demonstrative than English women in public; but, for my poor
+  part, too much public affection between man and wife always
+  strikes me as a little false. Besides, the grand characteristic
+  of Leonora is not that she loves her husband&mdash;lots of women
+  do that, and manage to love other people's husbands
+  also&mdash;but that, driven at first by affection and afterwards
+  by purely human compassion, she is capable of rising to the
+  heroic point of doing in life what she feels she must do. Of
+  course she may have been an abnormal combination of the Wifely
+  Woman with the heroic woman; but one cannot help thinking that
+  probably she was not&mdash;that however strong her affection for
+  Florestan, she would no sooner get him home than she would ask
+  him how he came to be such a fool as to get into Pizarro's
+  clutches. Anyhow, Ternina's conception of Leonora as a mixture of
+  the contemptible will-less German haus-frau with the
+  strong-willed woman of action, was to me a mixture of
+  contradictions. Yet, despite all these things, the opera made the
+  deep impression it does and always will make.</p>
+
+  <p>That impression is due entirely to the music and not to the
+  drama. Dramatic music, in the sense that Mozart's music, and
+  Wagner's, is dramatic, it is not. There is not the slightest
+  attempt at characterisation&mdash;not even such small
+  characterisation as Mozart secured in his "La ci darem," with
+  Zerlina's little fluttering, agitated phrases. Nor, in the
+  lighter portions, is there a trace of Mozart's divine
+  intoxicating laughter, of the sweet sad laugh with which he met
+  the griefs life brought him. There is none of Mozart's sunlight,
+  his delicious, fresh, early morning sunlight, in Beethoven's
+  music; when he wrote such a number as the first duet, intended to
+  be gracefully semi-humorous, he was merely heavy, clumsy, dull.
+  But when the worst has been said, when one has writhed under the
+  recollection of an adipose prima donna fooling with bear-like
+  skittishness a German tenor whose figure and face bewray the
+  lager habit, when one has shuddered to remember the long-winded
+  idiotic dialogue, the fact remains firmly set in one's mind that
+  one has stood before a gigantic work of art&mdash;a work whose
+  every defect is redeemed by its overwhelming power and beauty and
+  pathos. There has never been, nor does it seem possible there
+  ever will be, a finer scene written than the dungeon scene. It
+  begins with the low, soft, throbbing of the strings, then there
+  is the sinister thunderous roll of the double basses; then the
+  old man quietly tells Leonora to hurry on with the digging of the
+  grave, and Leonora replies (against that wondrous phrase of the
+  oboes). After that, the old man continues to grumble; the dull
+  threatening thunder of the basses continues; and Leonora, half
+  terrified, tries to see whether the sleeping prisoner is her
+  husband. Then abruptly her courage rises; her short broken
+  phrases are abandoned; and to a great sweeping melody she
+  declares that, whoever the prisoner may be, she will free him.
+  These twenty bars are as great music as anything in the world:
+  they even leave Senta's declaration in the "Dutchman" far behind;
+  they are at once triumphant and charged with a pathos nearly
+  unendurable in its intensity. The scene ends with a strange
+  hushed unison passage like some unearthly chant: it is the lull
+  before the breaking of the storm. The entry of Pizarro and the
+  pistol business are by no means done as Wagner or Mozart would
+  have done them. The music is always excellent and sometimes
+  great, but persistently symphonic and not dramatic in character.
+  However, it serves; and the strength of the situation carries one
+  on until the trumpet call is heard, and then we get a wonderful
+  tune such as neither Mozart nor Wagner could have written&mdash;a
+  tune that is sheer Beethoven. The finale of the scene is neither
+  here nor there; but in the duet between Leonora and Florestan we
+  have again pure Beethoven. There is one passage&mdash;it begins
+  at bar 32&mdash;which is the expression of the very soul of the
+  composer; one feels that if it had not come his heart must have
+  burst. I have neither space nor inclination to rehearse all the
+  splendours of the opera, but may remind the reader of Florestan's
+  song in the dungeon, Leonora's address to Hope, and the hundred
+  other fine things spread over it. It is symphonic, not dramatic,
+  music; but it is at times unspeakably pathetic, at times full of
+  radiant strength, and always an absolutely truthful utterance of
+  sheer human emotion. Wagner hit exactly the word when he spoke of
+  the <i>truthful</i> Beethoven: here is no pose, no mere
+  tone-weaving, but the precise and most poignant expression of the
+  logical course taken by the human passions.</p>
+  <hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+  <h2><a name="SCHUBERT" id="SCHUBERT"></a>SCHUBERT</h2>
+
+  <p>Excepting during his lifetime and for a period of some thirty
+  years after his death, Schubert cannot be said to have been
+  neglected; and last year there was quite an epidemic of concerts
+  to celebrate the hundredth anniversary of his birth. Centenary
+  celebrations are often a little disconcerting. They remind one
+  that a composer has been dead either a much shorter or a much
+  longer time than one supposed; and one gets down Riemann's
+  "Musical Dictionary" and realises with a sigh that the human
+  memory is treacherous. Who, for instance, that is familiar with
+  Schubert's music can easily believe that it is a hundred years
+  since the composer was born and seventy since he died? It is as
+  startling to find him, as one might say, one of the ancients as
+  it is to remember that Spohr lived until comparatively recent
+  times; for whereas Spohr's music is already older than
+  Beethoven's, older than Mozart's, in many respects quite as old
+  as Haydn's, much of Schubert's is as modern as Wagner's, and more
+  modern than a great deal that was written yesterday. This
+  modernity will, I fancy, be readily admitted by everyone; and it
+  is the only one quality of Schubert's music which any two
+  competent people will agree to admit. Liszt had the highest
+  admiration for everything he wrote; Wagner admired the songs, but
+  wondered at Liszt's acceptance of the chamber and orchestral
+  music. Sir George Grove outdoes Liszt in his Schubert worship;
+  and an astonishing genius lately rushed in, as his kind always
+  does, where Sir George would fear to tread, boldly, blatantly
+  asserting that Schubert is "the greatest musical genius that the
+  Western world has yet produced." On the other hand, Mr. G.
+  Bernard Shaw out-Wagners Wagner in denunciation, and declares the
+  C symphony childish, inept, mere Rossini badly done. Now, I can
+  understand Sir George Grove's enthusiasm; for Sir George to a
+  large extent discovered Schubert; and disinterested art-lovers
+  always become unduly excited about any art they have discovered:
+  for example, see how excited Wagner became about his own music,
+  how rapt Mr. Dolmetsch is in much of the old music. But I can
+  understand Wagner's attitude no better than I can the attitude of
+  Mr. Shaw. I should like to have met Wagner and have said to him,
+  "My dear Richard, this disparaging tone is not good enough: where
+  did you get the introduction to 'The Valkyrie'?&mdash;didn't that
+  long tremolo D and the figure in the bass both come out of 'The
+  Erl-king'? has your Spear theme nothing in common with the last
+  line but one of 'The Wanderer'? or&mdash;if it is only the
+  instrumental music you object to&mdash;did you learn nothing for
+  the third act of 'The Valkyrie' from the working-out of the
+  Unfinished Symphony? did you know that Schubert had used your
+  Mime theme in a quartet before you? do you know that I could
+  mention a hundred things you borrowed from Schubert? Go to,
+  Richard: be fair." Having extinguished Richard thus, and made his
+  utter discomfiture doubly certain by handing him a list of the
+  hundred instances, I should turn to Mr. Shaw and say, "My good
+  G.B.S., you understand a good deal about politics and political
+  economy, Socialism, and Fabians, painting and actors [and so on,
+  with untrue and ill-natured remarks <i>ad lib</i>.], but
+  evidently you understand very little about Schubert. That
+  'Rossini crescendo' is as tragic a piece of music as ever was
+  written." Yet, after dismissing the twain in this friendly
+  manner, I should have an uneasy feeling that there was some good
+  reason for their lack of enthusiasm for Schubert. The very fact
+  of there being such wide disagreement about the value of music
+  that is now so familiar to us all, points to some weakness in it
+  which some of us feel less than others; and I, poor unhappy
+  mortal, who in my unexcited moments neither place Schubert among
+  the highest gods, like Liszt and Sir George Grove, nor damn him
+  cordially, like Wagner and Mr. Shaw, cannot help perceiving that
+  along with much that is magnificently strong, distinguished, and
+  beautiful in his music, there is much that is pitiably weak, and
+  worse than commonplace. The music is like the man&mdash;the
+  oddest combination of greatness and smallness that the world has
+  seen. Like Wagner and Beethoven, Schubert was strong enough to
+  refuse to earn an honest living; yet he yielded miserably to
+  publishers when discussing the number of halfpence he should
+  receive for a dozen songs. He had energy enough to go on writing
+  operas, but apparently not intelligence to see that his librettos
+  were worth setting, or to ensure that anything should come of
+  them when they were set. He thought, rightly or wrongly, that he
+  needed more counterpoint, yet continued to compose symphonies and
+  masses without it, vaguely intending to the very end to take
+  lessons from a sound teacher. He had spirit enough to fall in
+  love (so far as stories may be relied on), but not to make the
+  lady promise to marry him, nor yet resolutely to cure himself of
+  his affliction. He had courage to face the truth, as he saw it,
+  and he found life bitter, and not worth enduring; yet he could
+  not renounce it, like Beethoven, nor end it as others have done.
+  As in actual life, so in his music; having once started anything,
+  he seemed quite unable to make up his mind to fetch it to a
+  conclusion. He was like a man who lets himself roll down a hill
+  because it is easier to keep on rolling than to stop. He repeats
+  his melodies interminably, and then draws a double bar and sets
+  down the two fatal dots which mean that all has to be played
+  again. If the repeat had not been a favourite resort of lazy
+  composers before his time he would have invented it, not because
+  he was lazy, but because he wanted to go on and could not afford
+  infinite music-paper. Hence his music at its worst is the merest
+  drivel ever set down by a great composer; hence at anything but
+  its best it lacks concentrated passion and dramatic intensity;
+  more than any other composer's it has one prevailing note, a note
+  of deepest melancholy; and therefore, when a few pieces are
+  known, most of the rest seem barren of what is wanted by those
+  who seek chiefly in music the expression of all the human
+  passions.</p>
+
+  <p>Of his lengthiness, his discursiveness, Schubert might
+  possibly have been cured, but not of his melancholy: it is the
+  very essence of his music, as it was of his being. "The Wanderer"
+  is his typical song: he was himself the wanderer, straying
+  disconsolately, helplessly, hopelessly through a strange, chilly,
+  unreal world, singing the saddest and sometimes the sweetest
+  songs that ever entered the ears of men. That his home and his
+  happiness lay close at hand counts for nothing; for he did not
+  and could not know that he was the voice of the eighteenth
+  century, worn out and keenly sensible of the futility of the
+  purely intellectual life. Even had he arrived at a consciousness
+  of the truth that the cure for his despair lay in throwing over
+  the antiquated forms, modes, and ideas of the eighteenth century
+  and living a nineteenth century life, free and conscienceless in
+  nature's way, he would have been little better off; for the
+  tendencies of many generations remained strong in him; and
+  besides, had he the physical energy for a free, buoyant, joyous
+  existence, was he not physiologically unfit for happiness? He
+  lived with an ever-present consciousness of his impotence to
+  satisfy his deepest needs. He was even destitute of that sense of
+  the immeasurable good to come which of old time found expression
+  in the fiction of a personal immortality, and in the nineteenth
+  century in the complacent acceptance of full and vigorous life,
+  with death as a noble and fitting close. Life and death alike
+  were tragic, because hopeless, to Schubert. His career, if career
+  it can be called, is infinitely touching. His helplessness moves
+  one to pity, odd though it seems that one in some ways so strong
+  should also in so many ways be so weak; and his death was as
+  touching as his life. Of all the composers he met death with
+  least heroism. Mozart, it is true, shrieked hysterically; but
+  death to his diseased mind was merely an indescribable horror;
+  and the fact of his hysteria proves his revolt against fate.
+  Beethoven, during a surgical operation shortly before the end,
+  saw the stream of water and blood flowing from him, and found
+  courage to say, "Better from the belly than the pen;" and as he
+  lay dying and a thunderstorm broke above the house, he threatened
+  it with his clenched fist. Schubert learnt that he was to die,
+  and turned his face to the wall and did not speak again. It is
+  hard to say whether his music was sadder when he sang of death
+  than when he sang of life. Even in his rare moments of good
+  spirits one catches stray echoes of his prevailing note, and
+  realises how completely his despair dominated him. He could not
+  sing of love or fighting or of the splendours of nature without
+  betraying his deep conviction of the futility of all created
+  things. It is characteristic that his major melodies should often
+  be as sad and wailing as his minor, and that his scherzos and
+  other movements, in which he has deliberately set out to be
+  light-hearted, should often be ponderous and without the nervous
+  energy he manifests when he gives his familiar feelings free
+  play.</p>
+
+  <p>Despite its incessant plaintive accent, his music is saved by
+  the endless flow of melody, often lovely, generally
+  characteristic, though sometimes common, in which Schubert
+  continually expressed anew his one mood; and he was placed among
+  the great ones by the miraculous facility he possessed of
+  extemporising frequent passages of extraordinary power and
+  bigness. At least half of his songs are poor&mdash;for a composer
+  capable of rising to such heights; but of the remainder at least
+  half are nearly equal to any songs in the world for sweetness,
+  strength, and accurate expressiveness, while a few approach so
+  close to Handel's and Mozart's that affection for the composer
+  presses one hard to put them on the same level. But, compared
+  with those high standards, Schubert, even at his best, is
+  unmistakably felt to be second-rate, while his
+  average&mdash;always comparing it with the highest&mdash;cannot
+  truly be said to be more than fourth-rate. That he stands far
+  above Mendelssohn and Schumann, and perhaps a little above Weber,
+  almost goes without saying; for those composers have no more of
+  the great style, the style of Handel and Mozart, and Bach and
+  Beethoven at their finest, than Schubert, and they lack the
+  lovely irresistibly moving melody and the bigness. But it must be
+  recognised that Schubert never rose to a style of sustained
+  grandeur and dignity; he was always colloquial, paying in this
+  the penalty for the extreme facility with which he composed ("I
+  compose every morning, and when I have finished one thing I
+  commence something fresh"). Compose is scarcely the word to use:
+  he never composed in the ordinary sense of the word; he
+  extemporised on paper. Even when he re-wrote a song, it meant
+  little more than that, dissatisfied with his treatment of a
+  theme, he tried again. He never built as, for instance, Bach and
+  Beethoven built, carefully working out this detail, lengthening
+  this portion, shearing away that, evolving part from part so that
+  in the end the whole composition became a complete organism.
+  There is none of the logic in his work that we find in the works
+  of the tip-top men, none of the perfect finish; but, on the
+  contrary, a very considerable degree of looseness, if not of
+  actual incoherence, and many marks of the tool and a good deal of
+  the scaffolding. But, in spite of it all, the greatness of many
+  of his movements seems to me indisputable. In a notice of "The
+  Valkyrie," Mr. Hichens once very happily spoke of the
+  "earth-bigness" of some of the music, and this is the bigness I
+  find in Schubert at his best and strongest. When he depicts the
+  workings of nature&mdash;the wind roaring through the woods, the
+  storm above the convent roof, the flash of the lightning, the
+  thunderbolt&mdash;he does not accomplish it with the wonderful
+  point and accuracy of Weber, nor with the ethereal delicacy of
+  Purcell, but with a breadth, a sympathy with the passion of
+  nature, that no other composer save Wagner has ever attained to.
+  He views natural phenomena through a human temperament, and so
+  infuses human emotion into natural phenomena, as Wagner does in
+  "The Valkyrie" and "Siegfried." The rapidly repeated note, now
+  rising to a roar and now falling to a subdued murmur, in "The
+  Erl-king" was an entirely new thing in music; and in "The
+  Wanderer" piano fantasia, the working-out of the Unfinished
+  symphony, and even in some of the chamber music, he invented
+  things as fresh and as astounding. And when he is simply
+  expressing himself, as at the beginning of the Unfinished, and in
+  the first and last movements of the big C symphony, he often does
+  it on the same large scale. The second subject of the C symphony
+  finale, with its four thumps, seems to me to become in its
+  development, and especially in the coda, all but as stupendous an
+  expression of terror as the music in the last scene of "Don
+  Giovanni," where Leporello describes the statue knocking at the
+  door. In short, when I remember Schubert's grandest passages, and
+  the unspeakable tenderness of so many of his melodies, it is hard
+  to resist the temptation to cancel all the criticism I have
+  written and to follow Sir George Grove in placing Schubert close
+  to Beethoven.</p>
+  <hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+  <h2><a name="WEBER_AND_WAGNER" id="WEBER_AND_WAGNER"></a>WEBER
+  AND WAGNER</h2>
+
+  <p>There are critics, I suppose, prepared to insist that Weber,
+  like Mozart, is a little <i>pass&eacute;</i> now. And it is true
+  that no composer, save Mozart, is at once so widely accepted and
+  so seldom heard; for even Bach is more frequently played and less
+  generally praised. At rare intervals Richter, Levi, or Mottl play
+  his overtures; the pieces for piano and orchestra are
+  occasionally dragged out to display the prowess of a Paderewski
+  or a Sauer; and one or another of the piano sonatos sometimes
+  finds its way into a Popular Concert programme. But the pieces
+  thus made familiar to the public may be counted on one's ten
+  fingers; and the operas are scarcely sung at all, though they
+  contain the finest music that Weber wrote. The composers who have
+  lived since Weber, even if they differed on every other subject
+  and did not agree as to the value of his instrumental music,
+  united to sing a common song in praise of the operas. Indeed, so
+  enthusiastic were they, that after listening to them anyone who
+  does not know his Weber well may easily experience a certain
+  disappointment on looking carefully for the first time at the
+  scores of "Der Freisch&uuml;tz," "Oberon," and "Euryanthe"; and
+  it is perhaps because they have experienced that disappointment,
+  that some critics whose opinions are worth considering have come
+  to think that a faith in Weber is nothing more than a part of the
+  creed learned by every honest Wagnerite at the Master's knee. But
+  it need be nothing so foolish, so baseless If you look, and look
+  rightly, for the right thing in Weber's music, disappointment is
+  impossible; though I admit that the man who professes to find
+  there the great qualities he finds in Mozart, Beethoven, or any
+  of the giants, must be in a very sad case. Grandeur, pure beauty,
+  and high expressiveness are alike wanting. You look as vainly for
+  such touches as the divine last dozen bars "Or sai chi l'onore"
+  in "Don Giovanni," or the deep emotion of the sobbing bass at
+  "the first fruits of them that sleep" in "I know that my Redeemer
+  liveth," as for the stately splendour of "Come and thank Him" in
+  the "Christmas Oratorio," or the passion of "Tristan." His music
+  never develops in step with the movement of the drama he treats:
+  if he writes a tragic scene, he is apt to commence with a scream;
+  and if he is not at his best, then the scream may degenerate into
+  a whimper before the moment for the climax has arrived. Like
+  Spohr, with whom he had much in common, despite the difference
+  between his mercurial temperament and the pedagogic gravity of
+  the composer of "The Last Judgment," he set great store upon his
+  learning, and was fond of trivial themes that admitted of obvious
+  contrapuntal treatment. Even when he avoided that failing, his
+  music is often uncouth and ponderous, while on its surface lies a
+  superfluous, highly-coloured froth. The basses move with
+  leaden-footed reluctance; the melodies consist largely of
+  ineffective arpeggios on long-drawn chords; the embroidery seems
+  greatly in excess of modest needs. All this may be conceded
+  without affecting Weber's claim to a place amongst the composers;
+  for that claim is supported in a lesser degree by the gifts which
+  he shared, even if his share was small, with the greater masters
+  of music, than by his miraculous power of vividly drawing and
+  painting in music the things that kindled his imagination.
+  Drawing and painting, I say; for whereas the other musicians sang
+  the emotions that they experienced, Weber's music gives you the
+  impression that he depicted the things he saw, that melody and
+  harmony were to him as lines and colours to the painter. He is
+  first, and perhaps greatest, of all the musicians who have
+  attempted landscape; and that froth of seemingly superfluous
+  colour and excess of melodic embroidery, instead of being in
+  excess and superfluous, are the very essence of his music. Being
+  a factor of the Romantic movement, that mighty rebellion against
+  the tyranny of a world of footrules and ledgers, he lived and
+  worked in a world where two and two might make five or seven or
+  any number you pleased, and where footrules were unknown; he took
+  small interest in drama taken out of the lives of ordinary men
+  and enacted amidst everyday surroundings; his imagination lit up
+  only when he thought of haunted glens and ghouls and evil
+  spirits, the fantastic world and life that goes on underneath the
+  ocean, or of men or women held by ghastly spells. Hence his
+  operas are not so much musical dramas as series of tableaux,
+  gorgeous glowing pictures of unheard-of things; in them we must
+  expect only to find the elfish, the fantastic, the wild and weird
+  and grotesquely horrible; and to look for drama, captivating
+  loveliness, and emotional utterance, is to look for qualities
+  which Weber did not try to attain, or only in a small measure and
+  not very successfully. And if we consider carefully the remarks
+  of the best critics amongst the later masters, Berlioz and
+  Wagner, we can see that they knew Weber had not attained these
+  high qualities,&mdash;that what they grew enthusiastic over was
+  his astonishing pictorial gift, shown, first, in the pictures his
+  imagination presented to him, and second, in the way he projected
+  those pictures on to the music-paper before him, using the common
+  musician's devices of his day to suggest line, colour, space, and
+  atmosphere.</p>
+
+  <p>The precise provocation of this essay was a certain
+  performance of "Lohengrin." During the first act the drama
+  proceeded with charming, almost Mozartean, smoothness; and I was
+  surprised to find that the smoother it went the more irresistibly
+  the music reminded me of Weber, until I remembered that
+  "Lohengrin" is Wagner's most Weberish opera, and that in his
+  youth Wagner heard Weber sung, not as he is sung now&mdash;that
+  is, like an early Wagner music-drama&mdash;but as Weber intended
+  it to be sung, like a later Mozart opera. For Weber stood very
+  near to Mozart, modern as he often seems. He was born before
+  Mozart died; he worshipped him, and absolutely refused to speak
+  to Salieri because Salieri had been Mozart's enemy; and it is
+  easy to see, when once we rid ourselves of the idea that he was a
+  rudimentary music-dramatist, that in his music he adhered as
+  closely to Mozartean simplicity as his very different genius
+  would permit. Perhaps, after all, it is his greatest glory that
+  he is the connecting link between Mozart and Wagner, between the
+  greatest composer born into the eighteenth century and the
+  greatest born into the nineteenth; for the musical-pictorial art
+  which he evolved from Mozart's technique was used by Wagner with
+  only the slightest modifications in the making of his
+  music-dramas. But whereas Weber was a factor in the Romantic
+  movement when it was most magnificently unreasonable, Wagner came
+  later, and, though he felt the force of the current, it did not
+  carry him into the absurdities that weaken&mdash;for they do
+  weaken&mdash;much of Weber's work. Wagner has been described as
+  Weber, as Weber might have become; but the truth is that he was
+  Weber's younger brother, who took Weber's art and used it to
+  nobler ends with a degree of intellect, dramatic power,
+  invention, and passion which Weber did not possess. To Weber the
+  scenery was the important thing, and humanity almost seemed to be
+  dragged in because the human voice was indispensable; but Wagner,
+  going back to Mozart, restored humanity to its proper place, thus
+  making his opera into real drama, and kept the fantastic
+  creatures who haunted Weber's woods and glens and streams only as
+  emblems of the natural forces that war for or against humanity.
+  Above all, he got rid of Weber's stage villains&mdash;for Samiel
+  is merely the stage villain of commerce; and, instead of the dusk
+  and shadow in which Weber's fancy loved to roam, he gives us
+  sunlight and the sweet air. "Lohengrin" is full of sunlight and
+  freshness; full, too, of a finer mystery than ever Weber dreamed
+  of&mdash;the mystery with which the most delicate German
+  imagination invested the broad rivers that flowed through the
+  black forests from some far-away land of unchangeable stillness
+  and beauty, some "land of eternal dawn," as Wagner calls it. No
+  more Mozartean music is in existence, save Mozart's own, than
+  that first act of "Lohengrin," where Wagner, by dint of being
+  Weberish, came nearer to Mozart than ever Weber came; for Weber
+  never wrote anything which, regarded as absolute music, apart
+  from its emotional significance, or the picture it suggests to
+  the inner eye, is so purely beautiful as, for instance, the bit
+  of chorus sung after Lohengrin concludes his little arrangement
+  with Elsa. Both the first and the second acts are full of such
+  melodies, any two of which would prove Wagner to be the greatest
+  melody-writer of the century; and those critics who say that
+  Verdi is greater because his melodies are more like Mozart's in
+  form, would have said, had they lived last century, that Salieri
+  was greater than Mozart because Salieri's melodies were more like
+  Hasse's in form. Perhaps the last act might be quite as exquisite
+  on the stage, for it is even more exquisite in the score; but
+  that we shall not know until our operatic singers abandon their
+  vanity and their melodrama, and by reading an occasional book,
+  and sometimes going out into the world, learn how much they
+  themselves would gain if they always worked with artistic
+  sincerity.</p>
+  <hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+  <h2><a name="ITALIAN_OPERA_DEAD_AND_DYING" id=
+  "ITALIAN_OPERA_DEAD_AND_DYING"></a>ITALIAN OPERA, DEAD AND
+  DYING</h2>
+
+  <p>All art forms are conventions, and all conventions appear
+  ridiculous when they are superseded by new ones. The old Italian
+  opera form is laughed at to-day as an absurdity by Wagnerians,
+  who see nothing absurd in a many-legged monster with a donkey's
+  head uttering deep bass curses through a speaking-trumpet; and
+  perhaps to-morrow the Wagnerian music-drama and the many-legged
+  monsters will be laughed at by the apostles of a new and equally
+  absurd convention. It is absolutely the first condition of the
+  existence of an art that one shall be prepared to tolerate things
+  ludicrously unlike anything to be found in real life; and when
+  (for instance) you have swallowed the camel of allowing the
+  heroes and heroines to sing their woes at all, it is a little
+  foolish to strain at the gnat of permitting them to sing in this
+  rather than in that way, when both ways are alike preposterous.
+  It is not, therefore, on the score of its inherent absurdity that
+  I should throw brickbats at Italian opera, any more than with the
+  female dress of to-day before my eyes I should insist that the
+  women who wore the fashions of ten years ago were only fit to be
+  incarcerated in a lunatic asylum; knowing, as I do, that the
+  dress of ten years ago was not&mdash;and could not be&mdash;more
+  absurd than the dress of to-day. The only reasonable objection
+  that can be brought against Italian opera is that when it is
+  sincere it offers what no one wants, and that when it tries to
+  offer what everyone wants it is not sincere. I cannot quite
+  understand what this means, but will endeavour to explain.</p>
+
+  <p>Italian opera was moulded to its present form chiefly by
+  Gluck, before whose time it was less irrational than it became
+  later. In the beginning it was music-drama of a pedantic kind;
+  then it served as the opportunity for setting singers to deliver
+  a series of beautiful songs for the delectation of an audience
+  largely seated in the wings; and finally Gluck, with his immense
+  dramatic instinct and lack of lyrical invention, saw that by
+  securing a story worth the telling, and telling it well, and
+  inserting songs and concerted pieces only in situations where
+  strong feelings demanded expression, and making his songs
+  truthful expressions of those feelings, a form might be created
+  which would enable him to lever out the best that was in him. Of
+  these three periods of opera, the second was the luckiest; for
+  then the form entirely fulfilled its purpose. The sole function
+  of the story was to provide a motive for song after song; so that
+  no one was scandalised or moved to laughter when the death of the
+  hero was re-enacted because his death-song pleased the audience,
+  or when the telling of the story was interrupted on any other
+  equally ridiculous pretext. The characters were the merest
+  puppets, or shadows of puppets; and there was no reason why
+  Julius C&aelig;sar should not be a male soprano and sing
+  charmingly feminine florid airs. In a word, there was no drama
+  nor pretence of drama in the old Italian form; and those who can
+  accept it as it is will find in many old Italian writers some
+  perfect music of its sort, and in the Italian operas of Handel
+  the divinest songs ever written&mdash;songs even more divine than
+  Mozart's. But the childish delight in lovely melodies and in
+  absolute perfection of vocal art, at its highest in the early
+  part of the eighteenth century, died out rapidly after 1750; and
+  Italian opera became the medium of the vulgarest instead of the
+  most refined kind of ear-tickling. How Gluck rebelled, and
+  determined to "reform" the opera stage, and how in reforming it
+  he was impelled to a large extent by a desire to find a medium
+  through which he could express himself, are matters well enough
+  known to everyone nowadays. Like every other teacher, he left no
+  disciples; for Mozart, the next master of Italian opera, was a
+  hundred thousand miles away from him in intention, in method, and
+  in achievement. He commenced where Gluck ended his
+  pre-Reformation period; and all his life his intention was to
+  please first, and only in the second place to express himself.
+  But so splendid were his gifts, so inevitably did he fit the
+  lovely word to the thrilling thought, so lucky was he in the
+  libretto of "Don Giovanni" (the luckiest libretto ever devised),
+  that he went clean ahead not only of Gluck but of Beethoven and
+  every composer who has written opera since.</p>
+
+  <p>His operas stand at the parting of the ways. In them we find
+  the fullest measure of dramatic truth combined with the most
+  delicious ear-tickling. But it is safe to say that Mozart is the
+  only composer of Italian operas who ever succeeded in combining
+  the two things thus, for in Gluck there is short measure of sheer
+  beauty, and in Handel&mdash;who used the oldest form&mdash;no
+  attempt at drama. Mozart, like Gluck, had no disciples&mdash;only
+  the second-rate men have disciples; but their example, and the
+  tendency which they represented, had a curious result. Before
+  their time all opera-writers had been avowed ear-ticklers. But
+  after them, and especially after Mozart, the old line of
+  composers may be observed to have split up into two lines, the
+  one doing the old ear-tickling business, the other trying to
+  express dramatic movement, and their thought and feeling, in the
+  old medium. The first of these lines has not been broken to this
+  day: Rossini came, and, after Rossini, Donizetti, Auber, Bellini,
+  Meyerbeer, and the rest; and ear-tickler follows ear-tickler unto
+  this day. The second line in its turn quickly split into those
+  who, not content with the form, sought to alter it, and those
+  who, quite content with it, went gaily on, turning out opera
+  after opera, dealing with modern subjects in the old-fashioned
+  way. Of these last Gounod must be reckoned the chief; and he
+  began, not where Mozart left off, but with the Mozartean method
+  of the "Don Giovanni" period. Now, it is of the very essence of
+  the Italian opera of the Gluck-cum-Mozart model that it enables a
+  composer to represent moments. The drama does not unfold
+  gradually, as it does in the music-play, with its continuous flow
+  of music marking the subtlest changes. It unfolds in jerks, each
+  number advancing it a stage; so that Gluck never got any
+  appearance of continuity whatever, while Mozart got it only by
+  the consummate tact with which he arranged his pictures, and by
+  the exciting pace at which he passes them before us. The figures
+  seem to move, as in the Kinetoscope, or its forerunner the Wheel
+  of Life: the Mozartean opera, when most dramatic, is a musical
+  Wheel of Life. Gounod possessed neither Mozart's tact nor his
+  fiery energy. Neither was called for in "Faust," which is not a
+  drama, but a series of scenes, of crucial moments, from a drama;
+  and since the moments were moments charged with the one feeling
+  which Gounod appears to have felt very strongly or to have had
+  the faculty for expressing, he is here at his very best. There
+  was nothing spiritual in love as Gounod knew it&mdash;it was
+  purely animal, though delicately animal; and Marguerite remains,
+  and will remain, as the final expression of the most refined and
+  voluptuous form of sensuality. What he had done in "Faust" he
+  attempted to do again, with sundry differences, in "Romeo and
+  Juliet"; and here the method which had served him so faithfully
+  and so well in "Faust" utterly broke down. In "Faust" there were
+  virtually but two characters, Faust and Marguerite, while in
+  "Romeo" the stage was encumbered with Tybalt, Capulet, Mercutio,
+  Laurent; and what would have been Mozart's opportunity was his
+  undoing. He could give none of them pungent or characteristic
+  language; they are the merest Italian operatic puppets; and it is
+  only when they are off the stage that the opera shows any signs
+  of life. In the story of "Romeo" the passion is of a far more
+  fiery quality than in that of "Faust"; and whereas in "Faust" the
+  passion, once aroused, remains at an even level until the finale,
+  where it becomes a little more intense, in "Romeo" it is passion
+  which gradually amounts to a tremendous climax in the Balcony
+  scene, and in the Bedroom scene is strangely blended with chilly
+  forebodings of death. The Mozartean method did not permit Gounod
+  to depict these metamorphoses and blendings of feeling. Mozart
+  himself would have been hard pressed to do it; and, for want of
+  the only method that might have enabled Gounod to do
+  it,&mdash;the Wagnerian method of continuous development of
+  typical themes,&mdash;the unfolding of the drama hangs fire in
+  every scene, not a scene ends at a higher pitch of feeling than
+  it began. The last scene of all, the scene where a more sincere
+  composer would have made his most stupendous effect, demanded at
+  least sympathy with emotions for which Gounod at no time showed
+  the slightest sympathy. He could give us the erotic fervour with
+  which Romeo looks death in the eyes, but the mood preceding and
+  indeed leading up to that fervour he could not give us&mdash;the
+  mood which finds the world barren, ugly, and so repellent that
+  death itself appears beautiful by comparison, the mood to which
+  Christianity makes its strongest appeal. But it was not the
+  subject which led to Gounod's failure in "Romeo and Juliet." He
+  failed in every opera excepting "Faust," and he failed because,
+  lacking perfect sincerity and perfect knowledge of his own
+  powers, he endeavoured to express feelings he had never
+  experienced, in a form which he would have felt at once to be
+  inadequate had he experienced them for ever so brief a moment. As
+  Gounod failed in "Romeo," and failed in every other opera, so
+  every modern composer who tries to treat dramatic subjects in the
+  old undramatic form has failed, and will fail. The Italian opera
+  was well enough for the purpose it was devised to serve; but as
+  soon as composers seek to put strenuous action, elaborately
+  worked-out situations, and the gradual growth and change of human
+  passion into it, we feel that there must be a lack of artistic
+  sincerity somewhere. Italian opera may offer all these things,
+  the things that the age wants in its opera, but it can never be
+  sincere in offering them, and art is the one place where
+  insincerity is intolerable.</p>
+
+  <p>But those who have heard "Romeo and Juliet" may possibly
+  prefer even the insincere and unsatisfactory form of Italian
+  opera which it represents to the perfectly sincere and perfectly
+  satisfactory kind represented, say, by "La Favorita." For, as I
+  said, when Italian opera is sincere it offers what no one
+  wants&mdash;ear-tickling, and ear-tickling, moreover, of a sort
+  which is gone completely out of fashion. Donizetti was a genuine
+  descendant of the true line of opera-composers upon whom Gluck
+  laid his curse, and he spent his life in devising pleasant noises
+  to make his patrons' evenings pass agreeably. I cannot believe
+  that anyone ever yet understood what "La Favorita" is all about,
+  or that anyone ever wanted to understand. It is a series of songs
+  of the inanest and insanest sort, without a single expressive
+  bar, or a single tone-pattern which is beautiful regarded simply
+  as a pattern. Even the famous "Spirito Gentil" is merely a stream
+  of the brackish water that flowed, day and night, from
+  Donizetti's pen, only it happens to be a little clearer than
+  usual. But those tunes, so feeble and insipid now, pleased the
+  ears of the time when Lord Steyne went to the opera for a
+  momentary respite from boredom and to recruit his harem from the
+  ballet corps; and Donizetti wrote them with no intention of
+  posing as a grand composer, but simply as a humble purveyor of
+  sweetmeats. In those days there was no music-hall, and the opera
+  had to serve its purpose: hence the slight confusion which
+  results in Donizetti, poor soul, being thought a better man than
+  Mr. Jacobi is thought at the present time, although Mr. Jacobi
+  cannot have less than a thousand times Donizetti's brains and
+  invention. Mr. Jacobi's music is capital in its place; but I
+  doubt whether it will be revived fifty years hence; and but for
+  the fact that Donizetti was an opera-composer&mdash;and Mozart
+  and Gluck were opera-composers too!&mdash;it is pretty certain
+  that not the united prayers of Patti, Albani, Melba, and Eames
+  would induce any operatic management to resurrect "La Favorita."
+  Even up-to-date ear-tickling is not popular now in the
+  opera-house: we go to the music-hall for it; and we don't want to
+  pay a guinea at the opera to be tickled in a way that arouses no
+  pleasurable sensations. Those terrific tonic and dominant
+  passages for the trombones, sounding like the furious sawing of
+  logs of wood, only make us laugh; and pretty tootlings of the
+  flutes have long been done better, and overdone, elsewhere.
+  Donizetti is amongst the dead whom no resurrection awaits.</p>
+  <hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+  <h2><a name="VERDI_YOUNG_AND_VERDI_YOUNGER" id=
+  "VERDI_YOUNG_AND_VERDI_YOUNGER"></a>VERDI YOUNG, AND VERDI
+  YOUNGER</h2>
+
+  <p>And first, for the sake of chronology, Verdi younger. "La
+  Traviata" was produced in 1853, says the learned Grove, which I
+  have consulted on the point, and "A&iuml;da" not till 1871. And
+  though Verdi was not young, for an ordinary man, in 1871, he was
+  very young indeed for the composer of "Falstaff" and "Otello";
+  while in the "Traviata" period one can scarcely say he was doing
+  more than cutting his teeth, and not his wisdom teeth. One finds
+  it difficult to understand how ever the thing came to be
+  tolerated by musicians. Of course the desire to find a
+  counter-blast to Wagner has done much for Verdi; but while one
+  can understand how Dr. Stanford and others hoped to sweep away
+  "Parsifal" with "Otello" and "Falstaff," it is not so easy to see
+  what on earth they proposed to do with "Traviata." It won fame
+  and cash for its composer in the old days when people went to the
+  opera for lack of the music-hall, not yet invented; when Costa
+  still lorded it not over living musical London merely, but over
+  all the deceased masters, and without compunction added trombones
+  to Mozart's scores, and defiled every masterwork he touched with
+  his unspeakable Costamongery; when Wagner was either unheard of
+  or regarded as a dangerous lunatic and immoral person; and it
+  shows every sign of having been written to please the opera-goers
+  of those days. Curiously, the critics of the time, in the words
+  of the "Daily Telegraph," saw in "the Bayreuth master another
+  form of Bunyan's man with the muck-rake," who "never sought to
+  disguise the garbage he found in the Newgate Calendar of
+  Mythland, or set his imagination to invent," and they were
+  disgusted, also like the "Daily Telegraph," by "approaching
+  incest" in "The Valkyrie"; yet they saw no harm whatever in the
+  charming story of "Traviata"&mdash;the story of a harlot who
+  reforms to the extent of retaining only one lover of her many,
+  and who dies of consumption when that one's father does his best
+  to drive her out upon the streets again by making her give up his
+  son. Far from condemning the story myself, I am glad Verdi or his
+  employers had the courage to go boldly to Dumas for it; only, let
+  us be cautious how we condemn the morality of other opera-stories
+  while praising the immorality of this. Let us see how Verdi has
+  handled it. The opera is built after the same hybrid model as
+  Gounod's "Romeo"; it is neither frankly the old Italian opera,
+  existing for the sake of its songs, nor the later form in which
+  the songs exist for the sake of the drama, but an attempt to
+  combine the songs with the continuous working out of a dramatic
+  impulse in the modern manner. But the attempt is far less
+  successful than in "Romeo"; and indeed it is a faint-hearted one.
+  Whenever a song occurs, the action is suspended, and all the
+  actors save the lucky vocalist of the minute are at their wits'
+  end to know where to look, and what to do with their hands,
+  feet&mdash;their whole persons in fact&mdash;and the parts they
+  are playing. And the songs are far from being expressive of the
+  feeling of the situation that is supposed to call them up. The
+  drinking tune in the first act is lively and appropriate enough;
+  and not much more can be said against Violetta's song, "Ah! fors'
+  &egrave; lui," than that while rather pretty its endless cadenzas
+  are more than rather absurd. But in the next act Alfredo sings of
+  the dream of his life to a pretty melody until he is interrupted
+  by his sweetheart's maid, who tells him that his joy is at an
+  end, and then he howls "O mio rimorso" to a march-tune of the
+  rowdiest kind. Equally undramatic, untrue, false in feeling, are
+  the sentimental ditties sung by Alfredo's father. The last act is
+  best; but I must say that I have always found it a tedious
+  business to watch Albani die of consumption. At the production of
+  the piece, a soprano who must have looked quite as healthy played
+  Violetta, and it is recorded that, when the doctor told how
+  rapidly she was wasting away and announced her speedy decease,
+  the theatre broke into uproarious merriment. I respect Madame
+  Albani too highly to break into uproarious merriment at her
+  pretence of consumption; but no one is better pleased when the
+  business is over, although the music is more satisfactory here
+  than in any other portion of the opera. Anyone who has sat at
+  night with a friend down with toothache or cholera will recognise
+  the atmosphere of the sickroom at once. But it is not pleasant
+  enough to atone for the rest of the opera. For, to sum up, there
+  is small interest in the drama, and, on the whole, smaller beauty
+  in the music, of "La Traviata." It was made, as bonnets were
+  made, to sell in the fifties; like the bonnets sold in the
+  fifties, it is hopelessly out of date now; and it wants the
+  inherent vitality that keeps the masterworks alive after the
+  fashion in which they were written has passed away. The younger
+  Verdi is not, after all, so vast an improvement on Donizetti and
+  Bellini. His melodies are too often sadly sentimental, and any
+  freshness with which he may have endowed them has long since
+  faded. True, they occasionally have a terseness and pungency, a
+  sheer brute force, which those other composers never got into
+  their insipid tunes; while, on the other hand, Verdi rarely shows
+  his strength without also showing a degree of vulgarity from
+  which Bellini and Donizetti were for the most part free.</p>
+
+  <p>"A&iuml;da" is a different matter, though not so very
+  different a matter. Here we have the young Verdi&mdash;Verdi in
+  his early prime, for he was only fifty-eight; here also we have a
+  story more likely to stir his rowdy imagination, if not more
+  susceptible of effective treatment in the young Verdi manner. The
+  misfortune is that the book is a very excerebrose affair. The
+  drama does not begin until the third act: the two first are
+  yawning abysms of sheer dulness. Who wants to <i>see</i> that
+  Radames loves A&iuml;da, that Amneris, the king's daughter, loves
+  Radames, that A&iuml;da, a slave, is the daughter of the King of
+  the Ethiopians, that Radames goes on a war expedition against
+  that king, beats him and fetches him back a prisoner, that the
+  other king gives Radames his daughter in marriage, that Radames,
+  highly honoured, yet wishes to goodness he could get out of it
+  somehow? A master of drama would begin in the third act, reveal
+  the whole past in a pregnant five minutes, and then hold us
+  breathless while we watched to see whether Radames would yield to
+  social pressure, marry Amneris, and throw over A&iuml;da, or
+  yield to passion, fly with A&iuml;da, and throw over his country.
+  All this shows the bad influence of Scribe, who usually spent
+  half his books in explaining matters as simple and obvious as the
+  reason for eating one's breakfast. Verdi knew this as well as
+  anyone, and used the two first acts as opportunities for stage
+  display. For "A&iuml;da" was written to please the Khedive of
+  Egypt; and Verdi, always keenly commercial, probably knew his
+  man. Now, when the masters of opera&mdash;Handel, Gluck, Mozart,
+  Weber&mdash;got hold of a bad book, they nearly invariably
+  "faked" it by getting swiftly over the weak points and dwelling
+  on the strong; and, above all, they flooded the whole thing with
+  a stream of delicious melody that hypnotises one, and for the
+  time puts fault-finding out of the question. Not so Verdi. He
+  wrote to please his audience, and he knew that what one can only
+  call dark-skinned local colour was still fresh in spite of
+  "L'Africaine," and that the vulgar would find delight in a blaze
+  of glaring banners and showy spectacle. So he set the two first
+  acts as they stood, trusting to local colour and spectacle to
+  make them popular; and, as we know, at the time they were
+  popular, and the populace exalted Verdi far above such
+  second-rate fellows as Mozart and Beethoven. But now, when local
+  colour has been done to death, and when it has had a quarter of a
+  century to bleach out of Verdi's canvases, what remains to
+  interest, I do not say to touch, one? Certainly not the
+  expression of Radames' or A&iuml;da's love, for here as
+  everywhere Verdi fails to communicate any new phase of emotion,
+  but (precisely as he did in "Falstaff" and "Otello") has written
+  music which indicates that he had some inkling of the emotion of
+  the scene, and could write strains calculated not to prevent the
+  scene making its effect. That Verdi has no well-spring of
+  original feeling, perhaps explains why he is so poor in the
+  scenes with Radames, Amneris, and A&iuml;da. (Also, perhaps, it
+  explains why he has fallen back in his best period upon
+  masterpieces of dramatic art for his librettos. It is almost
+  outside human possibility to add anything to "Falstaff" or
+  "Otello"; and such success as Verdi has made with them is the
+  result of writing what is, after all, only glorified incidental
+  music&mdash;music which accompanies the play. To class these
+  accompaniments with the masterpieces of original opera is surely
+  the most startling feat of modern musical criticism.) Moreover,
+  the plan of writing each scene in a series of detached
+  numbers&mdash;for, even where song might flow naturally into
+  song, the two are quite detached&mdash;breaks up the interest as
+  effectually as it does in "Traviata"; and the songs do not
+  themselves interest. Verdi's music is not based, like the
+  masters', upon the inflexions of the human voice under stress of
+  sincere feeling, but upon figures and passages easily executed
+  upon certain instruments. The great composers strove to make
+  instruments speak in the accent of the human voice, while Verdi
+  has always tried to make the voice sound like an instrument. His
+  roulades and cadenzas, for example, sound prettier on the
+  clarinet than on the voice, as one hears when he sets the one
+  chasing the other in "Traviata"; and if only our orchestral
+  players would take the trouble to play with the same expression
+  as the stage artists sing, we might soon be content to have a
+  repetition (with a difference) of the feat of the old-world
+  conductor who, in the absence of the hero, played the part upon
+  the harpsichord with universal applause. The stock patterns out
+  of which the songs are made soon grow old-fashioned, and are
+  superseded by fresh ones: hence Verdi's songs are the earliest
+  portions of his operas to wither. There are two powerful scenes
+  in "A&iuml;da"&mdash;the second of the second act, and the final
+  in the last act. The last is certainly terribly repulsive at the
+  first blush; but the weird chant of the priestesses in the
+  brightly-lit temple, where the workmen are closing the entrance
+  to the vault underneath in which we see Radames left to die,
+  contrasts finely with the sweet music that accompanies the
+  declaration of A&iuml;da that she has hidden there to die with
+  him; and, while guessing at the splendour of the music Wagner
+  might have given us here, one may still admit Verdi to have
+  succeeded well in a smaller way than Wagner's. But on the whole
+  "A&iuml;da" is to be heard once and have done with, for save
+  these scenes there is little else in it to engage one. A&iuml;da
+  is alive, but Amneris is a hopeless piece of
+  machinery&mdash;something between the stage conception of a
+  princess and the Lady with the Camellias, any difference in
+  modesty being certainly not in favour of Amneris. The music very
+  rarely rises above commonness&mdash;that commonness which is
+  proclaimed in every bar of Verdi's instrumentation, and in his
+  shameless Salvation Army rhythms; and it is sometimes (as in the
+  Priest's solo with chorus in the last scene of the second act)
+  odiously vulgar. "A&iuml;da" is more dramatic than "Traviata,"
+  has more of Verdi's brusque energy, less of his sentimentality;
+  but it has none of the youthful freshness of his latest work. The
+  young Verdi has already aged&mdash;how long will the old Verdi
+  remain young?</p>
+  <hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+  <h2><a name="THE_FLYING_DUTCHMANquot" id=
+  "THE_FLYING_DUTCHMANquot"></a>"THE FLYING DUTCHMAN"</h2>
+
+  <p>Wagner took "The Flying Dutchman", "Tannh&auml;user," and
+  "Lohengrin," in three long running steps; from "Lohengrin" he
+  made a flying leap into the air, and, after spending some five or
+  six years up there, he landed safely on "The Nibelung's Ring."
+  The leap was a prodigious one, and you may search history in vain
+  for its like; and still more astounding was it if you reckon from
+  the point where the run was commenced. "The Flying Dutchman" was
+  avowedly that point. "Die Feen" is boyish folly, and "Rienzi" an
+  attempt to out-Meyer Meyerbeer. But in the "Dutchman" Wagner
+  sought seriously to realise himself, to find the mode of best
+  expressing the best that was in him. That mode he found in "The
+  Rheingold" and mastered in "The Valkyrie," with its continuous
+  development and transmogrification of themes. And (to discard
+  utterly my former metaphor) after steeping oneself for several
+  nights in that last great river of melody, wide and deep and
+  clear, it is interesting to be led suddenly to its source, and
+  see it bubbling up with infinite energy, a good deal of frothing,
+  and some brown mud.</p>
+
+  <p>Compared with "The Valkyrie," "The Flying Dutchman" is
+  ill-contrived and stagy. It is flecked here and there with
+  vulgarity. It has far less of pure beauty; it has only its
+  moments, whereas "The Valkyrie" gives hours of unbroken delight.
+  "The Valkyrie" appeals to the primary instincts of our
+  nature&mdash;instincts and desires that will remain in us so long
+  as our nature is human; while for a large part of its effect the
+  "Dutchman" trusts to a feeling which is elusive at all times and
+  has no permanent hold upon us. Horror of the supernatural is not
+  very deeply rooted in us, after all. Modern training tends to
+  eliminate it altogether. In later life Goethe could not call up a
+  single delightful shiver. There are probably not half a dozen
+  stories in the world from which we can get it a second time. The
+  unexpected plays a part in producing it, and the same means does
+  not produce it twice with anything approaching the same
+  intensity. Hence the Dutchman's phantom ship must be more
+  ghost-like at each representation, its blood-red sails a bloodier
+  red; and in the long-run, do what the stage carpenters will, we
+  coldly sit and compare their work with previous ships. True, the
+  music which accompanies its entry is always impressively ghastly;
+  yet, while we know this, we are acutely conscious that our
+  feeling is more or less a laudable make-believe&mdash;a
+  make-believe that requires some little effort. Then Heine's
+  notion, which seemed so brilliant at first, that the Dutchman
+  could be redeemed by the unshakable love of a woman, has now all
+  the disagreeable staleness of a decrepit and obvious untruth. It
+  has no essential verity to give it validity, it is no symbol of a
+  fact which is immediately and deeply felt to be a fact. The
+  condition of redemption is entirely arbitrary: it might as
+  reasonably be that the Dutchman should find a woman who would not
+  shrink from eating his weather-stained hat. What was it to the
+  Dutchman's damned soul if all the women in the world swore to
+  love him eternally, so long as he was unable to love one of them?
+  The true Wandering Jew is not the unloved man, but the man who
+  cannot love, who is destitute of creative emotion and cannot
+  build up for himself a world in which to dwell, but must needs
+  live in hell&mdash;a world that others make, a world where he has
+  no place. Wagner knew this, and makes the Dutchman fall in love
+  with Senta; and that only leaves the drama more than ever in a
+  muddle. One wants a reason for his suddenly being able to love.
+  It cannot be because Senta promises to love him till death; for
+  he has had hundreds of fruitless love-affairs before, and knows
+  that all women promise that, and some of them mean it. Besides,
+  the highest moment of the drama ought either to arrive when he
+  feels love dawning in his loveless heart, or when he renounces
+  his chance of salvation and sails away to eternal torment,
+  believing that Senta made her promise in a passing fit of
+  enthusiasm; and at one or other of those moments we ought to have
+  some sign that he is redeemed. There is no such sign. The phantom
+  ship falls to pieces, and the Dutchman is freed from his curse
+  when Senta casts herself into the waves; and the highest moment
+  of the whole drama is that in which the dreamy monomaniac, the
+  modern Jeanne d'Arc, the real heroine of the opera, wins her own
+  salvation, masters the world and makes it her heaven, by taking
+  her fate in both hands and setting out to do the thing she feels
+  most strongly impelled to do. If the Dutchman's salvation depends
+  on himself, it is evidently unnecessary for Senta to be drowned;
+  if it depends upon her, it only shows that Wagner, writing fifty
+  years ago, and dazzled by the brilliance of a new idea, could not
+  see so clearly as can be seen to-day that Senta was her own and
+  not the Dutchman's saviour; and if (as it apparently does) it
+  depends upon both Dutchman and Senta, then, at a performance at
+  least, one can merely feel that something in the drama is very
+  much askew, without knowing precisely what.</p>
+
+  <p>In minor respects "The Flying Dutchman" falls considerably
+  short of perfection, even of reasonableness. For example, the
+  comings and goings of Daland are fearfully stagy. But worst of
+  all are the arrangements of the first act. I can go as far as
+  most people in accepting stage conventions. If Wagner brought on
+  a four-eyed, eight-horned, twenty-seven-legged monster and called
+  it a Jabberwock, I should not so much as ask why the legs were
+  not all in pairs, like the horns and eyes, so long as I saw in
+  the animal's habits a certain congruity, a conformity to what I
+  would willingly regard as Jabberwock nature. But who can pretend
+  to believe in a ship which comes against the rocks in a storm and
+  anchors there while the captain goes ashore to see whether
+  shipwreck is imminent? That the majority of opera-goers cannot
+  live near the sea is self-evident, and that few of them should
+  ever have seen a shipwreck unavoidable; but surely anyone who has
+  crossed the Channel must have a vague suspicion that to place
+  this vessel against the rocks in a tempest is the last thing a
+  seaman would dream of doing, and that, if he were driven there
+  and managed to get ashore, he would call his men after him (if
+  they needed calling), and trouble neither about casting anchor
+  nor going aboard again. The thing is ludicrously stagy. I suppose
+  that Wagner was too sea-sick to observe what happened during his
+  weeks of roughing it in the North Sea. But the second scene is
+  admirable. That monotonous drowsy hum of the Spinning song is
+  exactly what is needed to put one in the mood for sympathising
+  with Senta and her dreams. With the third there is an occasional
+  return to the bad stagecraft of Scribe; but there are also hints
+  of the simple directness of the later Wagner.</p>
+
+  <p>The music is like the stagecraft: now and then simply
+  dramatic, now and then stagily undramatic; sometimes rich and
+  splendid, sometimes threadbare and vulgar. And by this I do not
+  mean that the old-fashioned set pieces are of necessity bad, and
+  the freer portions necessarily good. Good and bad may be found in
+  the new and the old Wagner alike. That sailor's dance is to me as
+  odious as anything in Meyerbeer, and the melody which ends the
+  love-duet is scarcely more tolerable. On the other hand, not even
+  in "The Valkyrie" did Wagner write more picturesquely weird music
+  than most of the first act. The shrilling of the north wind, the
+  roaring of the waves, the creaking of cordage, the banging of
+  booms, an uncanny sound in a dismal night at sea,&mdash;these are
+  suggested with wonderful vividness. At times Wagner gives us
+  gobbets of unassimilated Weber and Beethoven, but some passages
+  are as original as they are magnificent. The finest bars in the
+  work are those in which Senta declares her faith in her
+  "mission," and the Dutchman yields himself to unreasoning
+  adoration. Other moods came to Wagner, but never again that mood
+  of rapturous self-effacement. It is perhaps a young man's mood;
+  certainly it is identical with the ecstasy with which one
+  contemplates a perfect piece of art, or a life greatly lived; and
+  here it finds splendid expression.</p>
+  <hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+  <h2><a name="LOHENGRINquot" id=
+  "LOHENGRINquot"></a>"LOHENGRIN"</h2>
+
+  <p>"Lohengrin" has been sung scores of times at Covent Garden in
+  one fashion or another; but I declare that we heard something
+  resembling the real "Lohengrin" for the first time when the late
+  Mr. Anton Seidl crossed the Atlantic to conduct it and other of
+  Wagner's operas. We had come to regard it as a pretty
+  opera&mdash;an opera full of an individual, strange, indefinable
+  sweetness; but Mr. Anton Seidl came all the way from New York
+  city to show us how out of sweetness can come forth strength. Mr.
+  Seidl was a Wagner conductor of the older type, and with some of
+  the faults of that type; he knew little or nothing of the
+  improvements in the manner of interpreting Wagner's music
+  effected by Mottl, Levi, and that stupendous creature Siegfried
+  Wagner; he was a survival of the first enthusiastic reaction
+  against Italian ways of misdoing things; and he was, if anything,
+  a little too strongly inclined to go a little too far in the
+  opposite direction to the touch-and-go conductors. But there is
+  so much of sweetness and delicacy in "Lohengrin" that the whole
+  opera, including the sweet and delicate portions, actually gains
+  from a forceful and manly handling&mdash;gains so immensely that,
+  as already said, those of us who heard it under Mr. Seidl's
+  direction must have felt that here, at last, was the true
+  "Lohengrin," the "Lohengrin" of Wagner's imagination. It was a
+  pleasure merely to hear the band singing out boldly, getting the
+  last fraction of rich tone out of each note, in the first act; to
+  hear the string passages valiantly attacked, and the melodies
+  treated with breadth, and the trumpets and trombones playing out
+  with all their force when need was, holding the sounds to the end
+  instead of letting them slink away ashamed in the accepted
+  Italian style. And not only were these things in themselves
+  delightful&mdash;they also served to make the drama doubly
+  powerful, and the tender parts of the music doubly tender, to
+  show how splendid in many respects was Wagner's art in the
+  "Lohengrin" days, and to prove that Maurel's way of doing the
+  part of Telramund some years ago was, as Maurel's way of doing
+  things generally are, perfectly right. Maurel, it will be
+  remembered, stuck a red feather in his cap; and the eternally
+  wise critics agreed in thinking this absolutely wrong. They told
+  him the feather was out of place&mdash;it made him appear
+  ridiculous, and so on. Maurel retorted that he was playing the
+  part of a fierce barbarian chief who would not look, he thought,
+  like a gilded butterfly, and that his notion was to look as
+  ferocious as he could. Now the odd thing is, that though Maurel
+  was right, we critics were in a sense right also. As the music
+  used to be played, a Telramund one degree nearer to a man than
+  the average Italian baritone seemed ludicrously out of place; and
+  when, in addition, the Lohengrin was a would-be lady-killer
+  without an inch of fight in him, Henry the Fowler a pathetic
+  heavy father, and Elsa a sentimental milliner, there was
+  something farcical about Maurel's red feather and generally
+  militant aspect. What we critics had not the brains to see was
+  that the playing of the music was wrong, and that Maurel was only
+  wrong in trying to play his part in the right manner when
+  Lohengrin, Elsa, King, and conductor were all against him in
+  their determination to do their parts wrong. Mr. Bispham follows
+  in Maurel's footsteps, as he frequently does, in a modified
+  costume, but when for the first time the orchestra played right
+  he would not have seemed ridiculous had he stuck Maurel's red
+  feather into his helmet. The whole scene became a different
+  thing: we were thrown at once into the atmosphere of an armed
+  camp full of turbulent thieves and bandits itching for fighting,
+  and wildly excited with rumours of conflicts near at hand. Amidst
+  all this excitement, and amidst all the unruly fighters,
+  Telramund, strongest, fiercest, most unruly of them all, has to
+  open the drama; and to command our respect, to make us feel that
+  it is he who is making the drama move, that it is because all the
+  barbarians are afraid of him that the drama begins to move at
+  all, he cannot possibly look too ferocious and hot-blooded, too
+  strong of limb and tempestuous of temper. The proof that this
+  (Seidl's) reading of the opera was the right one, was that, in
+  the first place, the drama immediately interested you instead of
+  keeping you waiting for the entry of Elsa; and, in the second
+  place, that the noisy, energetic playing of the opening scene
+  threw the music of Elsa and Lohengrin into wonderfully beautiful
+  relief&mdash;a relief which in the old way of doing the opera was
+  very much wanting. To play "Lohengrin" in the old way is to deny
+  Wagner the astonishing sense of dramatic effect he had from the
+  beginning; to play it as Seidl played it is to prove that the
+  conductor appreciates the perfection of artistic sense that led,
+  compelled, Wagner to set the miraculous vision of Lohengrin
+  against a background made up of such stormy scenes. Had Seidl
+  kept his vigour for the stormy scenes, and given us a finer
+  tenderness in the prelude, the love-music, and Lohengrin's
+  account of himself, his rendering would have been a flawless
+  one.</p>
+
+  <p>And even as Seidl interpreted it, the supreme beauty of the
+  music, the sweetness of it as well as its strength, were manifest
+  as they have never been manifest before. "Lohengrin" is surely
+  the most beautiful, the fullest of sheer beauty, of all Wagner's
+  operas. Some thirty or forty years hence those of us who are
+  lucky enough still to live in the sweet sunlight will begin to
+  feel that at last it is becoming feasible to take a fair and
+  reasonable view of Wagner's creative work; and we shall probably
+  differ about verdicts which the whole musical world of to-day
+  would agree only in rejecting. Old-school Wagnerites and
+  anti-Wagnerites will have gone off together into the night, and
+  the echo of the noise of all their feuds will have died away. No
+  one will venture to talk of the "teaching" of "Parsifal" or any
+  other of Wagner's works; the legends from which he constructed
+  his works will have lost their novelty. The music-drama itself
+  will be regarded by the Academics (if there are any left) with
+  all the reverence due to the established fact, and possibly it
+  may be suffering the fierce assault of the exponents of a newer
+  and nobler form. Then the younger critics will arise and take one
+  after another of the music-dramas and ask, What measure of beauty
+  is there, and what dramatic strength, what originality of
+  emotion? and in a few minutes they will scatter hundreds of
+  harmless and long-cherished illusions that went to make life
+  interesting. In that day of wrath and tribulation may I be on the
+  right side, and have energy to go forward, giving up the pretence
+  of what I can no longer like, and boldly saying that I like what
+  I like, even should it happen to be unpopular. May I never fall
+  so low as to be talked of as a guardian of the accepted forms and
+  laws. But even if it should prove unavoidable to relinquish faith
+  in Bach, in Beethoven, in Wagner, yet it is devoutly to be hoped
+  that it will never be necessary to give up a belief in
+  "Lohengrin"; for in that case my fate is fixed&mdash;I shall be
+  among the reactionaries, the admirers of the thing that cannot be
+  admired, the lovers of the unlovable. But indeed it is incredible
+  that "Lohengrin" should ever cease to seem lovely&mdash;lovely in
+  idea and in the expression of the idea. The story is one of the
+  finest Wagner ever set; it remains fresh, though it had been told
+  a hundred times before. The maiden in distress&mdash;we know her
+  perfectly well; the wicked sorceress who has got her into
+  distress&mdash;we know her quite as well; the celestial knight
+  who rescues her&mdash;we know him nearly as well. But the details
+  in which "Lohengrin" differs from all other tales of the same
+  order are precisely those that make it the most enchanting tale
+  of them all. Lohengrin, knight of the Grail, redeemer, yet with a
+  touch of tragedy in his fate, drawn down the river in his magic
+  boat by the Swan from a far mysterious land, a land of perpetual
+  freshness and beauty, is an infinitely more poetic notion than
+  the commonplace angel flapping clumsily down from heaven; and
+  even if we feel it to be absurd that he should have to beg his
+  wife to take him on trust, yet, after all, he takes his wife on
+  trust, and he tells her at the outset that he cannot reveal the
+  truth about himself. Elsa is vastly preferable to the ordinary
+  distressed medi&aelig;val maiden, if only because a woman who is
+  too weak to be worth a snap of the fingers does move us to pity,
+  whereas the ordinary medi&aelig;val is cut out of pasteboard, and
+  does not affect us at all. The King is perhaps merely a stage
+  figure; Ortrud is just one degree better than the average witch
+  of a fairy story; but Frederic, savage and powerful, but so
+  superstitious as to be at the mercy of his wife, is human enough
+  to interest us. And Wagner has managed his story perfectly
+  throughout, excepting at the end of the second act, where that
+  dreary business of Ortrud and Frederic stopping the bridal
+  procession is a mere reminiscence of the wretched stagecraft of
+  Scribe, and quite superfluous. But if there is a flaw in the
+  drama, there cannot be said to be one in the music. The mere fact
+  that, save two numbers, it is all written in common time counts
+  for absolutely nothing against its endless variety. Wagner never
+  again hit upon quite so divine and pure a theme as that of the
+  Grail, from which the prelude is evolved; the Swan theme at once
+  carries one in imagination up the ever-rippling river to that
+  wonderful land of everlasting dawn and sacred early morning
+  stillness; and nothing could be more effective, as background and
+  relief to these, than the warlike music of the first act, and the
+  ghastly opening of the second act, so suggestive of horrors and
+  the spells of Ortrud winding round Frederic's soul. Then there is
+  Elsa's dream, the magical music of Lohengrin's tale, the music of
+  the Bridal procession in the second act, the great and tender
+  melody first sung by Elsa and Ortrud, and then repeated by the
+  orchestra as Ortrud allows Elsa to lead her into the house, the
+  whole of the Bridal-chamber duet, and perhaps, above all,
+  Lohengrin's farewell. To whatever page of the score you turn,
+  there is perfect beauty&mdash;after the first act not a great
+  deal that is powerful or meant to be powerful, but melody after
+  melody that entrances you merely as absolute music without poetic
+  significance, and that seems doubly entrancing by reason of the
+  strange, remote feeling with which it is charged, and its
+  perpetual suggestion of the broad stream flowing ceaselessly from
+  far-away Montsalvat to the sea. "Lohengrin" is a fairy-story
+  imbued with seriousness and tender human emotion, and the music
+  is exactly adapted to it.</p>
+  <hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+  <h2><a name="TRISTAN_AND_ISOLDAquot" id=
+  "TRISTAN_AND_ISOLDAquot"></a>"TRISTAN AND ISOLDA"</h2>
+
+  <p>Says Nietzsche (pretending to put the words into the mouth of
+  another), "I hate Wagner, but I no longer stand any other music";
+  and though the saying is entirely senseless to those who do hate
+  Wagner, the feeling that prompted it may be understood by all who
+  love him and who stand every other music, so long as it is real
+  music. Immediately after listening to "Tristan and Isolda" all
+  other operas seem away from the point, to be concerned with the
+  secondary issues of life, to babble without fervour or directness
+  of unessential matters. This does not mean that "Tristan" is
+  greater than "Don Giovanni" or the "Matthew" Passion&mdash;for it
+  is not&mdash;but that it speaks to each of us in the most modern
+  language of the most engrossing subject in the world, of oneself,
+  of one's own soul. Who can stay to listen to the sheer loveliness
+  of "Don Giovanni," or follow with any sympathy the farcical doom
+  of that hero, or who, again, can be at the pains to enter into
+  the obsolescent emotions and mode of expression of Bach, when
+  Wagner calls us to listen concerning the innermost workings of
+  our own being, and speaks in a tongue every word of which enters
+  the brain like a thing of life? For one does not have to think
+  what Wagner means: so direct, so penetrating, is his speech, that
+  one becomes aware of the meaning without thinking of the words
+  that convey it. Nietzsche is right when he says Wagner summarises
+  modernism; but he forgot that Wagner summarises it because he
+  largely helped to create it, to make it what it is, by this power
+  of transferring his thought and emotion bodily, as it were, to
+  other minds, and that he will remain modern for long to come,
+  inasmuch as he moulds the thought of the successive generations
+  as they arise.</p>
+
+  <p>"Tristan and Isolda" is one of the world's half-dozen
+  stupendous appeals in music to the emotional side of man's
+  nature; it stands with the "Matthew" Passion, the Choral
+  Symphony, and Mozart's Requiem, rather than with "Don Giovanni,"
+  or "Fidelio," or "Tannh&auml;user;" like the Requiem, the Choral
+  Symphony, the "Matthew" Passion, there are pages of unspeakable
+  beauty in it; but, like them also, its main object is not to
+  please the ear or the eye, but to communicate an overwhelming
+  emotion. That emotion is the passion of love&mdash;the elemental
+  desire of the man for the woman, of the woman for the man; and to
+  the expression of this, not in one phase alone, like Gounod in
+  his "Faust," but in all its phases. It is a glorification of sex
+  attraction: nevertheless, it refutes Tannh&auml;user or Venus as
+  completely as it refutes Wolfram or Elizabeth. Tannh&auml;user,
+  we know, would have it that love was wholly of the flesh, Wolfram
+  that it was solely of the spirit. That there is no love which
+  does not commence in the desiring of the flesh, and none, not
+  even the most spiritual, which does not consist entirely in sex
+  passion, that the two, spiritual and fleshly love, are merely
+  different phases of one and the same passion, Wagner had learnt
+  when he came to create "Tristan." And in "Tristan" we commence
+  with a fleshly love, as intense as that Tannh&auml;user knew; but
+  by reason of its own energy, its own excess, it rises to a
+  spiritual love as free from grossness as any dreamed of by
+  Elizabeth or Wolfram, and far surpassing theirs in exaltation.
+  This change he depicted in a way as simple as it was marvellous,
+  so that as we watch the drama and listen to the music we
+  experience it within ourselves and our inner selves are revealed
+  to us. Nothing comes between us and the passions expressed.
+  Tristan and Isolda are passion in its purest integrity, naked
+  souls vibrating with the keenest emotion; they have no
+  idiosyncrasies to be sympathised with, to be allowed for; they
+  are generalisations, not characters, and in them we see only
+  ourselves reflected on the stage&mdash;ourselves as we are under
+  the spell of Wagner's music and of his drama. For "Tristan" seems
+  to me the most wonderful of Wagner's dramas, far more wonderful
+  than "Parsifal," far more wonderful than "Tannh&auml;user." There
+  is no stroke in it that is not inevitable, none that does not
+  immensely and immediately tell; and, despite its literary
+  quality, one fancies it could not fail to make some measure of
+  its effect were it played without the music. Think of the first
+  act. The scene is the deck of the ship; the wind is fresh, and
+  charged with the bitterness of the salt sea; and Isolda sits
+  there consumed with burning anger and hate of the man she loves,
+  whose life she spared because she loved him, and who now rewards
+  her by carrying her off, almost as the spoil of war, to be the
+  wife of his king. It has been said that Tolstoi asserted for the
+  first time in "The Kreuzer Sonata" that hate and love were the
+  same passion. But the truth is, Wagner knew it long before
+  Tolstoi, just as Shakespeare knew it long before Wagner; and the
+  whole of this first act turns on it. Isolda sends for Tristan and
+  tells him he has wronged her, and begs him to drink the cup of
+  peace with her. Tristan sees precisely what she means, and,
+  loving her, drinks the proffered poison as an atonement for the
+  wrong he has done her, and for his treachery to himself in
+  winning her, for ambition's sake, as King Mark's bride instead of
+  taking her as his own. But the moment her hatred is satisfied
+  Isolda finds life intolerable without it, without love; her love
+  a second time betrays her; and she seizes the poison and drinks
+  also. Then comes the masterstroke. Done with this world, with
+  nothing but death before them, the two confess their long-pent
+  love; in their exalted state passion comes over them like a
+  flood; in the first rush of passion, honour, shame, friendship
+  seem mere names of illusions, and love is the only real thing in
+  life; and finally, the death draught being no death draught, but
+  a slight infusion of cantharides, the two passionately cling to
+  each other, vaguely wondering what all the noise is about, while
+  the ship reaches land and all the people shout and the trumpets
+  blow. What is the stagecraft of Scribe compared with this? how
+  else could the avowal of love be brought about with such instant
+  and stupendous effect? Quite as amazing is the second act. Almost
+  from the beginning to close on the end the lovers fondle each
+  other, in a garden before an old castle in the sultry summer
+  night; and just as their passion reaches its highest pitch, Mark
+  breaks in upon them. For Tristan, at least, death is imminent;
+  and the mere presence of death serves to begin the change from
+  the desire of the flesh to the ecstatic spiritual passion. That
+  change is completed in the next act, where we have the scene laid
+  before Tristan's deserted and dilapidated castle in Brittany,
+  with the calm sea in the distance (it should shine like burnished
+  steel); and here Tristan lies dying of the wound he received from
+  Melot in the previous scene, while a melody from the shepherd's
+  pipe, the saddest melody ever heard, floats melancholy and
+  wearily through the hot, close, breathless air. Kurvenal, his
+  servant, has sent for Isolda to cure him as she had cured him
+  before; and when at last she comes Tristan grows crazy with joy,
+  tears the bandages from his wounds, and dies just as she enters.
+  This finishes the metamorphosis begun in the second act: after
+  some other incidents, Isolda, rapt in her spiritual love, sings
+  the death-song and dies over Tristan's body. What is the libretto
+  of "Otello" or of "Falstaff" compared with this libretto? From
+  beginning to end there is not a line, not an incident, in excess.
+  Anyone who is wearied by King Mark's long address when he comes
+  on the guilty pair, has failed to catch the drift of the whole
+  opera&mdash;failed to see that two souls like Tristan and Isolda,
+  wholly swayed by love, must find Mark's grief wholly
+  unintelligible, and have no power of explaining themselves to
+  those not possessed with a passion like theirs, or of bringing
+  themselves into touch with the workaday world of daylight, and
+  that all Mark's most moving appeal means to them is that this
+  world, where such annoyances occur, is not the land in which they
+  fain would dwell. They live wholly for their illusion, and if it
+  is forbidden to them in life they will seek death;
+  nothing&mdash;not honour, shame, the affection of Mark, the
+  faithfulness of Kurvenal, least of all, life&mdash;is to be
+  considered in comparison with their love; their love is the love
+  that is all in all. It is entirely selfish: Mark is as much their
+  enemy as Melot, his affection more to be dreaded than the sword
+  of Melot.</p>
+
+  <p>Perhaps I have given the drama some of the credit that should
+  go to the music; and at least there is not a dramatic situation
+  which the music does not immeasurably increase in power. But
+  indeed the two are inseparable. The music creates the mood and
+  holds the spectator to it so that the true significance of the
+  dramatic situation cannot fail to be felt; while the dramatic
+  situation makes the highest, most extravagant flights of the
+  music quite intelligible, reasonable. It cannot be said that the
+  music exists for the sake of the drama any more than the drama
+  exists for the music: the drama lies in the music, the music is
+  latent in the drama. But to the music the wild atmosphere of the
+  beginning of the first act is certainly due; and though I have
+  said that possibly "Tristan" might bear playing without the
+  music, it must be admitted that it is hard to think of the fifth
+  scene without that tremendous entrance passage&mdash;that passage
+  so tremendous that even Jean de Reszke dare hardly face it. To
+  the music also the passion and fervent heat of the second act are
+  due, and the thunderous atmosphere, the sense of impending fate,
+  in the last, and the miraculous sweetness and intensity of
+  Tristan's death-music, and the sublime pathos of Isolda's lament.
+  Since Mozart wrote those creeping chromatic chords in the scene
+  following the death of the Commendatore in "Don Giovanni,"
+  nothing so solemn and still, so full of the pathetic majesty of
+  death, as the passage following the words "with Tristan true to
+  perish" has been written. This is perhaps Wagner's greatest piece
+  of music; and certainly his loveliest is Tristan's description of
+  the ship sailing over the ocean with Isolda, where the gently
+  swaying figure of the horns, taken from one of the love-themes,
+  and the delicious melody given to the voice, go to make an effect
+  of richness and tenderness which can never be forgotten. The
+  opening of the huge duet is as a blaze of fire which cannot be
+  subdued; and when at last it does subside and a quieter mood
+  prevails we get a long series of voluptuous tunes the like of
+  which were never heard before, and will not be heard again, one
+  thinks, for a thousand years to come. And in the strangest
+  contrast to these is the earlier part of the third act, where the
+  very depths of the human spirit are revealed, where we are taken
+  into the darkness and stand with Tristan before the gates of
+  death. But indeed all the music of "Tristan" is miraculous in its
+  sweetness, splendour, and strength; and yet one scarcely thinks
+  of these qualities at the moment, so entirely do they seem to be
+  hidden by its poignant expressiveness. As I have said, it seems
+  to enter the mind as emotion rather than as music, so penetrating
+  is it, so instantaneous in its appeal. There never was music
+  poured out at so white a white heat; it is music written in the
+  most modern, most pungent, and raciest vernacular, with utter
+  impatience of style, of writing merely in an approved manner. It
+  is beyond criticism. It is possible to love it as I do; it is
+  possible to hate it as Nietzsche did; but while this century
+  lasts, it will be impossible to appreciate it sufficiently to
+  wish to criticise it and yet preserve one's critical judgment
+  with steadiness enough to do it.</p>
+  <hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+  <h2><a name="SIEGFRIEDquot" id=
+  "SIEGFRIEDquot"></a>"SIEGFRIED"</h2>
+
+  <p>In all Wagner's music-plays there is shown an astonishing
+  appreciation of the value and effect of scenery and of all the
+  changes of weather and of skies and waters, not only as a
+  background to his drama but as a means of making that drama
+  clearer, of getting completer and intenser expression of the
+  emotions for which the persons in the drama stand. The device is
+  not so largely used in "Tristan" as in the other music-plays, yet
+  the drama is enormously assisted by it. In the "Ring" it is used
+  to such an extent that the first thing that must strike everyone
+  is the series of gorgeously coloured pictures afforded by each of
+  the four plays. For instance, no one can ever forget the opening
+  of "The Valkyrie"&mdash;the inside of Hunding's house built round
+  the tree, the half-dead fire flickering, while we listen to the
+  steady roar of the night wind as the tempest rushes angrily
+  through the forest&mdash;nor the scene that follows, when through
+  the open door we see all the splendours of the fresh spring
+  moonlight gleaming on the green leaves still dripping with cold
+  raindrops. The terror and excitement of the second act are vastly
+  increased by the storm of thunder and lightning that rages while
+  Siegmund and Hunding fight. A great part of the effect of the
+  third act is due to the storm that howls and shrieks at the
+  beginning and gradually subsides, giving way to the soft
+  translucent twilight, that in turn gives way to the clear spring
+  night with the dark blue sky through which the yellow flames
+  presently shoot, cutting off Br&uuml;nnhilde from the busy world.
+  The same pictorial device is used throughout "Siegfried" with
+  results just as magnificent in their way; though the way is a
+  very different one. The drama of "The Valkyrie" is
+  tragedy&mdash;chiefly Wotan's tragedy (the relinquishing first of
+  Siegmund, and his hope in Siegmund, then of
+  Br&uuml;nnhilde)&mdash;but incidentally the tragedy of Siegmund's
+  life and his death, of Siegmund's loneliness and of
+  Br&uuml;nnhilde's downfall; and at least one of the scenic
+  effects&mdash;the fire at the end&mdash;was thrown in to relieve
+  the pervading gloom, and in obedience to Wagner's acute sense of
+  the wild beauty of the old legend, rather than to illustrate and
+  assist the drama. It is sheer spectacle, but how magnificent
+  compared with that older type of spectacle which chiefly
+  consisted of brass bands and ladies insufficiently clothed!
+  "Siegfried," on the other hand, contains no tragedy save the
+  destruction of a little vermin. It is the most glorious assertion
+  ever made of the joy and splendour and infinite beauty to be
+  found in life by those who possess the courage to go through it
+  in their own way, and have the overflowing vitality and strength
+  to create their own world as they go. Siegfried is the embodiment
+  of the divine energy that makes life worth living; and in the
+  scenery, as in the tale and the music of the opera, nothing is
+  left out that could help to give us a vivid and lasting
+  impression of the beauty, freshness, strangeness, and endless
+  interest of life. Take the first scene&mdash;the cave with the
+  dull red forge&mdash;fires smouldering in the black darkness, and
+  the tools of the smith's trade scattered about, and, seen through
+  the mouth of the cave, all the blazing colours of the sunlit
+  forest; or again the second&mdash;the darkness, then the dawn and
+  the sunrise, and lastly the full glory of the summer day near
+  Fafner's hole in a mysterious haunted corner of the forest; or
+  the third&mdash;a far-away nook in the hills, where the spirit of
+  the earth slumbers everlastingly; or the final scene&mdash;the
+  calm morning on Br&uuml;nnhilde's fell, the flames fallen, and
+  all things transfigured and made remote by the enchantment of
+  lingering mists,&mdash;these scenes form a background for the
+  dramatic action such as no composer dreamed of before, nor will
+  dream of again until we cease to dwell in dusty stone cities and
+  learn once again to know nature and her greatest moods as our
+  forefathers knew them. Had Wagner not lived in Switzerland and
+  gone his daily walks amongst the mountains, the "Ring" might have
+  been written; but certainly it would have been written very
+  differently, and probably not half so well.</p>
+
+  <p>I have so often insisted on the pictorial power of Wagner's
+  music, that, save for one quality of the pictures in the "Ring,"
+  and especially in "Siegfried," it would be unnecessary to say
+  more about it now. That quality is their old-world atmosphere,
+  their power of filling us with a sense of the old time before us.
+  When the fire plays round Br&uuml;nnhilde's fell&mdash;Hinde
+  Fell, Morris calls it&mdash;lighting the icy tops of the farthest
+  hills, or when Mime and Alberich squabble in the dark of early
+  morning at the mouth of Fafner's hole, or again when the Wanderer
+  comes in and scarifies Mime out of his wits, we are taken back to
+  the remotest and dimmest past, to the beginnings of time, to a
+  time that never existed save in the imagination of our forebears.
+  This may be partly the result of our unconscious perception of
+  the fact that these things never happen nowadays, and partly the
+  result of our having been familiar with the story of
+  Br&uuml;nnhilde and the gods since earliest boyhood; but it is in
+  the main due to Wagner's intense historical sense, his sense of
+  the past, and to his unapproached power of expressing in music
+  any feeling or combination of feelings he experienced. So
+  cunningly do music and scenery work together that we credit the
+  one with what the other has done; but, wonderful though the
+  pictures of "Siegfried" are, there cannot be a doubt that the
+  atmosphere we discover in them reaches us through the ear from
+  the orchestra. Besides giving us a series of singularly apposite
+  and significant pictures, Wagner has reproduced the very breath
+  and colour of the old sagas; he has re-created the atmosphere of
+  a time that never was; and it is this remote atmosphere which
+  lends to "Siegfried" and all the "Ring" a great part of their
+  enchantment. Fancy what it might have been, this long exposition
+  of sheer Schopenhauerism in three dramas and a fore-play! imagine
+  what Parry or Stanford or Mackenzie would have made of it! And
+  then think of what the "Ring" actually is, and especially of the
+  splendour and weirdness of some parts the "dulness" of which
+  moves dull people to dull grumbling. For example, a great many
+  persons share Mime's wish for the Wanderer to go off almost as
+  soon as he comes on, "else no Wanderer can he be called." They
+  tell us that this scene breaks the action, neglecting the
+  trifling fact that were it omitted the remainder of the act would
+  be inconsequent nonsense, only worthy to rank with the librettos
+  of English musical critics, and that the truth happens to be that
+  nearly the whole of the subsequent drama grows out of it. In
+  itself it is a scene of peculiar power, charged to overflowing
+  with the essence of the Scandinavian legends. The notion of the
+  god, "one-eyed and seeming ancient," wandering by night through
+  the wild woods, clad in his dark blue robe, calling in here and
+  there and creating consternation in the circle gathered round the
+  hearth, is one of the most poetic to be found in the Northern
+  mythology; and the music which Wagner has set to his entry and
+  his conversation cannot be matched for unearthliness unless you
+  turn to the Statue music in "Don Giovanni," where you find
+  unearthliness of a very different sort. The scene with Erda in
+  the mountains is even more wonderful, so laden is the music with
+  the Scandinavian emotional sense of the impenetrable mystery of
+  things. The scene between Mime and Alberich, or Alberich and the
+  Wanderer, gives us the old horror of the creeping maleficent
+  things that crawled by night about the brooks and rock-holes. It
+  is true this last will bear cutting a little; for Wagner being a
+  German, but having, what is uncommon in the German, an acute
+  sense of balance of form, always tried to get balance by
+  lengthening parts which were already long enough, in preference
+  to cutting parts that were already too long. Hence much padding,
+  which a later generation will ruthlessly amputate.</p>
+
+  <p>All these things are the accessories, the environment, of the
+  principal figure; and their presence is justified by their
+  beauty, significance, and interest, and also by their being
+  necessary for the development of the larger drama of the whole
+  "Ring." But in following "Siegfried" that larger drama cannot
+  altogether be kept in mind: it is the hero that counts first, and
+  everything else is accessory merely to him. That Wagner, in spite
+  of his preoccupation with the tragedy of Wotan, should have
+  accomplished this, proves how wonderful and how true an artist he
+  was. Siegfried is the incarnation, as I have said, of the divine
+  energy which enables one to make the world rich with things that
+  delight the soul; he is Wagner's healthiest, sanest, perhaps most
+  beautiful creation; he is certainly the only male in all Wagner's
+  dramas who is never in any danger of becoming for ever so brief a
+  moment a bore, whose view of life is always so fresh and novel
+  and at the same time so essentially human that he interests us
+  both in himself and in the world we see through his eyes. Never
+  had an actor such opportunities as here. The entry with the bear
+  exhibits the animal strength and spirits of the man, and the
+  inquiries about his parents, his purely human feeling; his temper
+  with Mime the unsophisticated boy's petulant intolerance of the
+  mean and ugly; the forging of the sword the coming power and
+  determination of manhood. The killing of the dragon is
+  unavoidably rather ridiculous; but the scene with the bird is
+  fascinating by its naturalness and simplicity as well as its
+  tenderness and sheer sweetness. Finally, after the scene with the
+  Wanderer, the scene of the awakening of Br&uuml;nnhilde affords
+  an opportunity for love-making, and it is love-making of so
+  unusual a sort that one does not feel it to be an anti-climax
+  after all the big things that have gone before. In fact, not even
+  Tristan has things quite so much to himself, nor is given the
+  opportunity of expressing so many phases of emotion and
+  character. And the music Siegfried has to sing is the richest,
+  most copious stream of melody ever given to one artist; in any
+  one scene there is melody enough to have made the fortune of
+  Verdi or any other Italian composer who wrote tunes for the tenor
+  and prima donna; not even Mozart could have poured out a greater
+  wealth of tune&mdash;tune everlastingly varying with the mood of
+  the drama. Every scene provides a heap of smaller tunes, and then
+  there are such big ones as the Forge song, Siegfried's meditation
+  in the forest and the conversation with the bird, and the
+  awakening of Br&uuml;nnhilde&mdash;every one absolutely new and
+  tremulous with intense life.</p>
+  <hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+  <h2><a name="THE_DUSK_OF_THE_GODSquot" id=
+  "THE_DUSK_OF_THE_GODSquot"></a>"THE DUSK OF THE GODS"</h2>
+
+  <p>Quite a fierce little controversy raged a little while ago in
+  the columns of the "Daily Chronicle," and all about the "meaning"
+  of "The Dusk of the Gods" and the behaviour of Br&uuml;nnhilde.
+  Mr. Shaw played Devil's Advocate for Wagner, declaring "The Dusk
+  of the Gods" to be irrelevant and operatic (as if that mattered);
+  and Mr. Ashton Ellis and Mr. Edward Baughan, two mad Wagnerians,
+  rushed in to protect Wagner from Mr. Shaw (as if he needed
+  protection). In reading the various letters, my soul was moved to
+  admiration and reverent awe by the ingenuity displayed by the
+  various correspondents in their endeavours to make the easy
+  difficult, the perfectly plain crooked. Wagner took enormous
+  pains to make Br&uuml;nnhilde a living character&mdash;that is to
+  say, to show us her inmost soul so vividly that we know why she
+  did anything or everything without even thinking about it; he set
+  her on the stage, where we see her in the flesh behaving
+  precisely as any woman&mdash;of her period&mdash;would behave.
+  And then these excellent gentlemen come along and tell us that
+  because Wagner at one time or another thought of handling her
+  story, and the story of Wotan and Siegfried, in this or that way,
+  therefore Wagner "meant" this or that, and failed or succeeded,
+  or changed his original plan or held fast to it. All these things
+  have nothing to do with the drama that is played on the stage: by
+  that alone, and by none of his earlier ideas, is Wagner to be
+  judged: he is to be judged by the effect and conviction of the
+  finished play. Now, it seems to me that in the finished play
+  Br&uuml;nnhilde is neither "a glorious woman "&mdash;<i>i.e.</i>
+  an Adelphi melodramatic heroine&mdash;nor "a deceitful,
+  vindictive woman"&mdash;<i>i.e.</i> an Adelphi melodramatic
+  villainess. Also, while considered by itself "The Dusk of the
+  Gods" is interesting mainly on account of the music, considered
+  in association, as Wagner wished, and as one must&mdash;for,
+  after all, it is but the final act of a stupendous drama, and it
+  is unfair and foolish to consider any one act of a drama
+  alone&mdash;with the other minor dramas of the greater drama,
+  "The Nibelung's Ring," it is dramatically not only interesting,
+  absorbing, but absolutely indispensable, true, inevitable. It is
+  true enough that the "Ring" suffered somewhat through the fact
+  that Wagner took nearly a quarter of a century to carry out his
+  plan, and during this period his views on life changed greatly;
+  yet nevertheless "The Dusk of the Gods" stands as the
+  noble&mdash;in fact, the only possible&mdash;conclusion to a
+  story which is, on the whole, splendidly told.</p>
+
+  <p>When seeing "The Valkyrie," one thinks of Sieglinde or
+  Siegmund or Br&uuml;nnhilde; when listening to "Siegfried," one
+  thinks of Siegfried and Br&uuml;nnhilde and no others; but when
+  one thinks of the complete "Ring," the person of the drama most
+  forcibly forced before the eye of the imagination, the person to
+  whom one realises that sympathy is chiefly due, is Wotan. Wotan,
+  not Siegfried or Siegmund, is the hero of the "Ring." His
+  tragedy&mdash;if it is indeed a tragedy to emerge from the battle
+  in the highest sense of the word triumphant&mdash;includes the
+  tragedy of Siegfried and Siegmund, Sieglinde and
+  Br&uuml;nnhilde&mdash;in fact, the tragedy of all the smaller
+  characters of the play. "The Rheingold," in spite of its glorious
+  music, is entirely superfluous&mdash;dramatically, at all events,
+  it is superfluous&mdash;but there, anyhow, the problem which we
+  could easily understand without it is stated. Wotan, who has been
+  placed at the head of affairs by the three blind fates, has
+  caught the general disease of wishing to gain the power to make
+  others do his will. So anxious is he for that authority that he
+  not only makes a bargain for it with the powers of
+  stupidity&mdash;the giants, the brute forces of
+  nature&mdash;which bargain is afterwards and could never be
+  anything but his ruin, but also he stoops to a base subterfuge to
+  gain it, and with the help of Loge, fire, the final destroyer, he
+  does gain it. So determined was Wagner to make his point clear,
+  that even in "The Rheingold," the superfluous drama, he made it
+  several times superfluously. He was not content to let his point
+  make itself&mdash;the humanitarian, the preacher of all that
+  makes for the highest humanity, was too strong in him for that:
+  it was a little too strong even for the artist in him: he must
+  needs make the powers of darkness lay a curse on power over one's
+  fellow-beings, the Ring standing as the emblem of that power.
+  While Wotan takes the power, his deepest wisdom, which is to say,
+  his intuition&mdash;represented by the spirit of the earth,
+  Erda&mdash;rises against him and tells him he is committing the
+  fatal mistake, and he yields to the extent of letting the giants
+  have the supreme power. But he thinks, just as you and I, reader,
+  might think, that by some quaint unthinkable device he can evade
+  the tremendous consequence of his own act; and, instead of at
+  once looking at the consequence boldly and saying he will face
+  it, he elaborates a plan by which no one will suffer anything,
+  while he, Wotan, will gain the lordship of creation. From this
+  moment his fate becomes tragic. The complete man, full of rich
+  humanity&mdash;for whom Wotan stands&mdash;cannot exist,
+  necessarily ceases to exist, if he is compelled to deny the
+  better part of himself, as Peter denied Jesus of Nazareth. And in
+  consequence of his own act Wotan has immediately to deny the
+  better part of himself, to make war on his own son Siegmund, and
+  then on his own daughter Br&uuml;nnhilde: he destroys the first
+  and puts away from him for ever Br&uuml;nnhilde, who is incarnate
+  love. The grand tragic moment of the whole cycle is the laying to
+  sleep of Br&uuml;nnhilde. Wotan knows that life without love is
+  no life, and he is compelled to part from love by the very
+  bargain which enables him to rule. Rather than live such a life,
+  he deliberately, solemnly wills his own death; and a great part
+  of "Siegfried" and the whole of "The Dusk of the Gods" are
+  devoted to showing how his death, and the death of all the gods,
+  comes about through Wotan's first act. In "Siegfried" and "The
+  Dusk of the Gods" there is no tragedy&mdash;how can there be any
+  tragedy in the fate of the man who faithfully follows the impulse
+  that makes for his highest and widest satisfaction, for the
+  fullest exercise of his beneficent energies, for the man who says
+  I will do this or that because I know and feel it is the best I
+  can do? "The Dusk of the Gods" is Wotan's most splendid triumph;
+  he deliberately yields place to a new dynasty, because he knows
+  that to keep possession of the throne will mean the continual
+  suppression of all that is best in him, as he has had already to
+  suppress it. Incidentally there are many tragedies in the "Ring."
+  The murder of Siegmund by Hunding, aided by Wotan, before
+  Sieglinde's eyes; the hideous incident of Siegfried winning his
+  own wife to be the wife of his friend Gunther; the stabbing of
+  Siegfried by Hagen; Br&uuml;nnhilde's telling Gutrune that she,
+  Gutrune, was never the wife of Siegfried,&mdash;all these are
+  terrible enough tragedies. Br&uuml;nnhilde's is the most terrible
+  of them all, though she too takes her fate into her hands, and by
+  willing the right thing, and doing it, goes victorious out of
+  life. What there is difficult to understand about her, why she
+  should be accused of deceit and have her conduct explained, I can
+  hardly guess. In "The Valkyrie" she is a goddess; but when she
+  offends Wotan by disobeying him and walking clean through all the
+  Commandments, he is bound, for the maintenance of his power, to
+  punish her. So he takes away her godhead, and she is thenceforth
+  simply a woman. Siegfried treats her treacherously&mdash;as she
+  necessarily thinks&mdash;and she very naturally takes vengeance
+  on him. Mr. Shaw speaks as though he wished her to be a
+  bread-and-butter miss; but a woman of Br&uuml;nnhilde's type, a
+  daughter of the high gods, could scarcely be that.</p>
+
+  <p>In short, "The Dusk of the Gods" seems to me perfectly clear,
+  and in no more need of explanation than "The Valkyrie" or
+  "Siegfried." Of course there are a thousand loose ends in the
+  "Ring," as there are in life itself; but to count them and find
+  out what they all mean would occupy one for an eternity. To throw
+  away "The Dusk of the Gods" because one cannot understand the
+  loose ends, is ridiculous; instead of wishing there were fewer of
+  them, I wish Wagner had been more careless, less German, and left
+  more. It was through his endeavours to get unity, to show the
+  close relation of each incident to every other incident, that he
+  nearly came to utter grief. The drama was so gigantic, to secure
+  sympathy for Wotan it was so necessary to secure sympathy for the
+  minor characters whose story helps to make up Wotan's story, that
+  Wagner seemed perpetually afraid that the real, main drama would
+  be forgotten. And it is true that the story of Siegmund and
+  Sieglinde, or of Siegfried and Br&uuml;nnhilde, absorbs one for a
+  time so completely that one forgets all about Wotan and his woes.
+  So Wagner came near to spoiling one of the most tremendous
+  achievements of the human mind, by shoving old Wotan on to the
+  stage again and again to recapitulate his troubles. But of these
+  interruptions "The Dusk of the Gods" has none. The story proceeds
+  swiftly, inevitably to the end; from the first bar to the last,
+  the music is as splendid as any Wagner ever wrote. It is the
+  fitting conclusion to the vision of life presented in the "Ring":
+  it is a funeral chant, mournful, sombre, but triumphant. The seed
+  has been sown, the crop has grown and ripened and been harvested,
+  and now the thing is over: a chill wind pipes over the empty
+  stubble-land where late the yellow corn stood and the labourers
+  laboured: there is nothing more: "ripeness is all" that life
+  offers or means.</p>
+  <hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+  <h2><a name="PARSIFALquot" id="PARSIFALquot"></a>"PARSIFAL"</h2>
+
+  <p>"Parsifal" is an immoral work. One cannot for a moment suppose
+  that Wagner, who had written "Tristan" and "Siegfried," meant to
+  preach downright immorality, or that he meant "Parsifal" to stand
+  as anything more than the expression of a momentary mood, the
+  mood of the exhausted, the effete man, the mood which follows the
+  mood of "Tristan" as certainly as night follows day.
+  Nevertheless, in so far as "Parsifal" says anything to us, in so
+  far as it brings, in Nonconformist cant, "a message," it is
+  immoral and vicious, just as in so far as "Siegfried" carries a
+  message it is entirely moral, healthful, and sane. It is useless
+  to quibble about this, seeking to explain away plain things: the
+  truth remains that "Siegfried" is a glorification of one view of
+  life, "Parsifal" of its direct opposite and flat contradiction;
+  and anyone who accepts the one view must needs loathe the other
+  as sinful. To me the "Siegfried" view of life commends itself;
+  and I unhesitatingly assert the sinfulness of the "Parsifal"
+  view. The two operas invite comparison; for at the outset their
+  heroes seem to be the same man. Siegfried and Parsifal are both
+  untaught fools; each has his understanding partly enlightened by
+  hearing of his mother's sufferings and death (compare
+  Wordsworth's "A deep distress hath humanised my soul"); each has
+  his education completed by a woman's kiss. All this may seem very
+  profound to the German mind; but to me it is crude, a somewhat
+  too obvious allegory, partly superficial, partly untrue, a
+  survival of windy sentimental mid-century German metaphysics,
+  like the Wagner-Heine form of "The Flying Dutchman" story, and
+  the Wagner form of the "Tannh&auml;user" story. However, I am
+  willing to believe that Siegfried, when he kisses Br&uuml;nnhilde
+  on Hinde Fell, and Parsifal, when Kundry kisses him in Klingsor's
+  magic garden, has each his full faculties set in action for the
+  first time. And then? And then Siegfried, with his fund of health
+  and vitality, sees that the world is glorious, and joyfully
+  presses forward more vigorously than ever on the road that lies
+  before him, never hesitating for a moment to live out his life to
+  the full; while Parsifal, lacking health and
+  vitality&mdash;probably his father suffered from
+  rickets&mdash;sees that the grief and suffering of the world
+  outweigh and outnumber its joys, and not only renounces life, but
+  is so overcome with pity for all sufferers as to regard it as his
+  mission to heal and console them. And having healed and consoled
+  one, he deliberately turns from the green world, with its trees
+  and flowers, its dawn and sunset, its winds and waters, and shuts
+  himself in a monkery which has a back garden, a pond and some
+  ducks. There is only one deadly sin&mdash;to deny life, as
+  Nietzsche says: carefully to pull up all the weeds in one's
+  garden, but to plant there neither flower nor tree&mdash;and this
+  is what "Parsifal" glorifies and advocates.</p>
+
+  <p>Now, far be it from me to go hunting a moral tendency in a
+  work of art, and to praise or blame the art as I chance to like
+  or dislike the tendency. I am in a state of perfect preparedness
+  to see beauty in a picture, even if the subject is to me
+  repulsive. But in the case of a picture it is possible to say,
+  "Yes, very pretty," and pass on. In the case of a story, a play,
+  or a music-drama, you cannot. You are tied to your seat for one
+  or two or three mortal hours; and however perfect may be the art
+  with which music-drama or play or story is set before you, if the
+  subject revolts or bores you, you soon sicken of the whole
+  business. And in the highest kind of story, play, or music-drama,
+  subject and treatment merge inseparably one in the other,
+  substance and form are one; for the idea is all in all, and the
+  complete idea cannot be perceived apart from the dress which
+  makes it visible. Besides, in the Wagnerian music-drama, it is
+  intended that beauty of idea and of arrangement of ideas shall be
+  as of great importance as beauty of ornament. Wagner certainly
+  intended "Parsifal" to be such a music-drama; and indeed the idea
+  is only too clearly visible. The main idea of the "Ring" is so
+  much obscured by the subsidiary ideas twined about it that very
+  few people know that the real hero is Wotan, and the central
+  drama Wotan's tragedy, that Siegmund and Sieglinde, Siegfried and
+  Br&uuml;nnhilde, and their loves&mdash;all the romance and
+  loveliness that enchant us&mdash;are merely accessory. But in
+  "Parsifal" there is nothing superfluous, no rich and lovely
+  embroidery on the dress of the idea to divert us from the idea
+  itself&mdash;the idea is as nearly nude as our limited senses and
+  our modern respectability permit. And the idea being what it is,
+  it follows that the play, after the drama once commences, is not
+  only immoral, but also dispiriting and boring, and, to my
+  thinking, inconsequential and pointless. The first act, the
+  exposition, is from beginning to end magnificent: never were the
+  lines on which a drama was to develop more gorgeously, or in more
+  masterly fashion, set forth. Had Wagner seen that Amfortas was
+  merely a hypochondriac, a stage Schopenhauer, imagining all
+  manner of wounds and evils where no evils or wounds existed, had
+  he made Parsifal a Siegfried, and sent him out into the world to
+  learn this, and brought him back to break up the monastery, to
+  set Amfortas and the knights to some useful labour, and to tell
+  them that the sacred spear, like Wotan's spear, had power only to
+  hurt those who feared it, then we might have had an adequate
+  working-out of so noble a beginning. Instead of this, Kundry
+  kisses Parsifal, Parsifal squeals, and we see him in a moment to
+  be only an Amfortas who has had the luck not to stumble; and he,
+  the poor fool who is filled with so vast a pity because he sees
+  (what are called) good and evil in entirely wrong
+  proportion&mdash;as, in fact, a hypochondriac sees them&mdash;he,
+  Parsifal, this thin-blooded inheritor of rickets and an exhausted
+  physical frame, is called the Redeemer, and becomes head of the
+  Brotherhood of the Grail. Beside this inconsequence, all other
+  inconsequences seem as nothing. One might ask, for instance, how,
+  seeing that no man can save his brother's soul, Parsifal saves
+  the soul of Amfortas? This is a fallacy that held Wagner all his
+  life. We find it in "The Flying Dutchman"; it is avoided in
+  "Tannh&auml;user"&mdash;for, thank the gods, Tannh&auml;user is
+  <i>not</i> saved by that uninteresting young person Elizabeth; it
+  plays a large part in the "Ring"; it is the culmination of the
+  drama of "Parsifal." Had Wagner thought more of Goethe and less
+  of the Frankfort creature who formulated his hypo-chondriacal
+  nightmares, and called the result a philosophy, he might have
+  learnt that no mentally sick man ever yet was cured save by the
+  welling-up of a flood of emotional energy in his own soul. He
+  might also have seen that Parsifal is as much the spirit that
+  denies as Mephistopheles. But these points, and many others, may
+  go as, comparatively, nothings. The first act of "Parsifal" is
+  unsurpassable, the second is an anti-climax, and the third,
+  excepting the repentance of Kundry, which is pathetic, and
+  strikes one as true, a more saddening anti-climax. There is one
+  last thing to say before passing to the music, and this is that
+  "Parsifal" is commonly treated with respect as a Christian
+  drama&mdash;a superior "Sign of the Cross." I happen, oddly
+  enough, to know the four Gospels exceedingly well; and I find
+  nothing of "Parsifal" in them. It is much nearer to Buddhism in
+  spirit, in colour: it is a kind of Germanised metaphysical
+  Buddhism. Schopenhauer, not Christ, is the hero; and Schopenhauer
+  was only a decrepit Mephistopheles bereft of his humour and
+  inverted creative energy.</p>
+
+  <p>After hearing the whole opera twice, with all the supposed
+  advantages of the stage, the main thing borne in upon me is that
+  the stage and actors and accessories, far from increasing the
+  effect of the music, actually weaken it excepting in the first
+  act. In that act there is not a word or a note to alter. The
+  story compels one's interest, and the music is rich, tender, and
+  charged with a noble passion. Even the killing of the
+  duck&mdash;it is supposed to be a swan, but it is really a
+  duck&mdash;is saved from becoming ludicrous by the deep sincerity
+  of the music of Gurnemanz's expostulations. The music, too, with
+  the magnificent trombone and trumpet calls and deep clangour of
+  cathedral bells, prevents one thinking too much of the absurdity
+  of the trees, mountains, and lake walking off the stage to make
+  the change to the second scene. On reflection, this panorama
+  seems wholly meaningless and thoroughly vulgar; and even in the
+  theatre one wonders vaguely what it is all about&mdash;for
+  Gurnemanz's explanation about time and space being one is sheer
+  metaphysical shoddy, a mere humbugging of an essentially
+  uncultured German audience; but one does not mind it, so full is
+  the accompaniment of mystical life and of colour, of a sense of
+  impending great things. The whole cathedral scene&mdash;I would
+  even include the caterwaulings of Amfortas&mdash;is sincere,
+  impressive, and filled with a reasonable degree of mysticism.
+  There is no falling off in the second act until after the
+  enchanting waltz and Kundry's wondrously tender recital of the
+  woes suffered by Parsifal's mother (here the melody compares in
+  loveliness with the corresponding portion of "Siegfried");
+  indeed, the passion and energy go on increasing until Parsifal
+  receives Kundry's kiss, and then at once they disappear. Between
+  this point and the end of the act there is scarcely a fine
+  passage. Every phrase is insincere, not because Wagner wished to
+  be insincere, but because he tried to express dramatically a
+  state of mind which is essentially undramatic. Parsifal is
+  supposed to transcend almost at one bound the will to live, to
+  rise above all animal needs and desires; and though no human
+  being can transcend the will to live, any more than he can jump
+  away from his shadow&mdash;for the phrase means, and can only
+  mean, that the will to live transcends the will to live&mdash;yet
+  I am informed, and can well believe, that those who imagine they
+  have accomplished the feat reach a state of perfect ecstasy.
+  Wagner knew this; he knew also that ecstasy, as what can only be
+  called a static emotion, could not be expressed through the
+  medium that serves to express only flowing currents of emotion;
+  he himself had pointed out, that for the communication of
+  ecstatic feeling, only polyphonic, non-climatic, rhythmless music
+  of the Palestrina kind served; and yet, by one of the hugest
+  mistakes ever made in art, he sought to express precisely that
+  emotion in Parsifal's declamatory phrases. The thing cannot be
+  done; it has not been done; all Parsifal's bawling, even with the
+  help of the words, avails nothing; and the curtain drops at the
+  end of the second act, leaving one convinced that the drama has
+  untimely ended, has got into a cul-de-sac. And in a cul-de-sac it
+  remains. There is much glorious music in the last act; the "Good
+  Friday music" is divine; the last scene is gorgeously led up to;
+  and the music of it, considered only as music, is unsurpassable.
+  But heard at the end of a drama so gigantically planned as
+  "Parsifal," it is unsatisfying and disappointing. It is to me as
+  if the "Ring" had closed on the music of Neid-h&ouml;hle with the
+  squabblings of Alberich and Mime. The powers that make for evil
+  and destruction have won; one knows that Parsifal is eternally
+  damned; he has listened and succumbed, even as Wagner himself
+  did, to the eastern sirens' song of the ease and delight of a
+  life of slothful renunciation, self-abnegation, and devotion to
+  "duty." The music of the last scene sings that song in tones of
+  infinite sweetness; but it cannot satisfy you; you turn from the
+  enchanted hall, with its holy cup and spear and dove, its mystic
+  voices in the heights, its heavy, depressing, incense-laden
+  atmosphere; and you hasten into the night, where the winds blow
+  fresh through the black trees, and the stars shine calmly in the
+  deep sky, just as though no "Parsifal" had been written.</p>
+
+  <p>"Parsifal" does not imply that Wagner in his old age went back
+  on all he had thought and felt before. Born in a time when the
+  secret of living had not been rediscovered, when folk still
+  thought the victory, and not the battle, the main thing in life,
+  he always sought a creed to put on as a coat-of-mail to protect
+  him from the nasty knocks of fate. Nowadays we do not care
+  greatly for the victory, and we go out to fight with a light
+  heart, commencing where Wagner and all the pessimists ended.
+  Wagner wanted the victory, and also, lest he should not gain it,
+  he wanted something to save him from despair. That something he
+  found in pessimism. In his younger days&mdash;indeed until near
+  the last&mdash;he forgot all about it in his hours of
+  inspiration, and worked for no end, but for the sheer joy of
+  working. But towards the end of his life, when his inspiration
+  came seldomer and with less power, he worked more and more for
+  the victory, and became wholly pessimistic, throwing away his
+  weapons, and hiding behind self-renunciation as behind a shield.
+  He won a victory more brilliant than ever Napoleon or Wellington
+  or Moltke won; and in the eyes of all men he seemed a great
+  general. But life had terrified him; he had trembled before
+  Wotan's&mdash;or Christ's&mdash;spear; in his heart of hearts he
+  knew himself a beaten man; and he wrote "Parsifal."</p>
+  <hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+  <h2><a name="BAYREUTH_IN_1897" id="BAYREUTH_IN_1897"></a>BAYREUTH
+  IN 1897</h2>
+
+  <p>To Bayreuth again, through dirty, dusty, nasty-smelling,
+  unromantic Germany, along the banks of that shabby&mdash;genteel
+  river known as the Rhine, watching at every railway station the
+  wondrously bulky haus-fraus who stir such deep emotions in the
+  sentimental German heart; noting how the disease of militarism
+  has eaten so deeply into German life that each railway official
+  is a mere steam-engine, supplied by the State with fuel in case
+  he should some day be needed; eating the badly and dirtily cooked
+  German food,&mdash;how familiar it all seems when one does it a
+  second time! One week in Bayreuth was the length of my stay in
+  1896; yet I seem to have spent a great part of my younger days
+  here. The theatre is my familiar friend in whom I never trust;
+  the ditch called the river has many associations, pleasant and
+  other; I go up past the theatre into the wood as to a favourite
+  haunt of old time; I lunch under the trees and watch the
+  caterpillars drop into my soup as though that were the commonest
+  thing in the world; I wander into the theatre and feel more at
+  home than ever I do at Covent Garden; I listen to the
+  bad&mdash;but it is not yet time for detailed criticism. All I
+  mean is, that the novelty of Bayreuth, like the novelty of any
+  other small lifeless German town, disappears on a second visit;
+  that though the charm of the wood, of the trumpet calls at the
+  theatre, of the greasy German food, and the primitive German
+  sanitary arrangements, remains, it is a charm that has already
+  worn very thin, and needs the carefullest of handling to
+  preserve. Whether, without some especial inducement, the average
+  mortal can survive Bayreuth a third time, is, to me, hardly a
+  question. As for my poor self, it suits me
+  admirably&mdash;certainly I could stand Bayreuth half a dozen
+  times. I like the life&mdash;the way in which the hours of the
+  day revolve round the evening performance, the real idleness,
+  passivity, combined with an appearance of energy and activity; I
+  like to get warm by climbing the hill and then to sit down and
+  cool myself by drinking lager from a huge pot with a pewter lid,
+  dreamily speculating the while on the possibility of my ever
+  growing as fat as the average German; I like to sit in a
+  caf&eacute; with my friends till three in the morning, discussing
+  with fiery enthusiasm unimportant details of the performance we
+  have lately endured; I like being hungry six times a day. All
+  these trifles please me, and please others. But the majority of
+  the crowd of visitors are not pleased by them; and what can they
+  do in Bayreuth after the freshness of novelty is worn off? They
+  go to Villa Wahnfried and look for a few seconds at the spot
+  where Wagner is buried&mdash;as I heard it said, like a cat in a
+  back garden; they look for a few seconds at the church; they
+  lunch; they buy and partly read the English papers; and then?
+  Inevitably the intelligent reader will say, the opera in the
+  evening. And I, who have been to the opera in the evening, gasp
+  and remark, Really!</p>
+
+  <p>Lest this ejaculation be entirely misinterpreted by the
+  irreverent, let it be said at once that the performances are not,
+  on the whole, very bad. But I wish to consider whether they are
+  of a quality and distinction sufficient to drag one all the way
+  from England, and to compensate those who find the day dull for
+  the dulness of the day, whether they are what Bayreuth claims
+  them to be&mdash;the best operatic representations in the world,
+  the best that could possibly be given at the present time. The
+  circular sent out by amiable Mr. Schulz-Curtius states that,
+  "while not guaranteeing any particular artists, the aim of
+  Bayreuth will be to secure the best artists procurable" (or words
+  to that effect). Is this genuinely the aim of Bayreuth, and does
+  Bayreuth come near enough to the mark to make some thousands of
+  English people think they have spent their time, money, and
+  energy well in coming here? For my part I say Yes: even were the
+  representations a good deal poorer, they form, as I have said, a
+  centre for the day; I rise in the morning with them before me,
+  and make all my arrangements&mdash;my lunches, discussions, and
+  lagers&mdash;so as to reach the theatre at four o'clock; they
+  save me from a life without an object, and add a zest to
+  everything I do; they correspond to the trifling errand which
+  renders a ten-mile walk in the country an enjoyment. But those
+  who come here for nothing but the theatre, who do not feel the
+  charm of the Bayreuth life, will, I am much afraid, answer No.
+  Had I no friends here, or did I not enjoy their company and
+  conversation, if my stomach refused lager and I could not smoke
+  ten-pfennig German cigars, if I were not violently hungry every
+  two hours, I am very much afraid I should answer No. The working
+  of the scenic arrangements is, of course, as perfect as ever. Of
+  course there are one or two mistakes,&mdash;stage machinists,
+  after all, are built of peccable clay,&mdash;but these occur so
+  seldom that one can sit with a feeling of security that is not
+  possible at Covent Garden. In "The Valkyrie" the fire does not
+  flare up ten minutes late; the coming of evening does not suggest
+  an unexpected total eclipse of the sun; the thing that the score
+  indicates is done, and not, as generally happens at Covent
+  Garden, the reverse thing. The colours of the scenery are
+  likewise as intolerably German as ever&mdash;the greens coarse
+  and rank, the yellows bilious, the blues tinged with a sickly
+  green, the reds as violent as the dress of the average German
+  frau. On the other hand, many of the effects are
+  wonderful&mdash;the mountain gorge where Wotan calls up Erda,
+  Mime's cave, the depths of the Rhine, the burning of the hall of
+  the Gibichungs. But the most astounding and lovely effects in the
+  setting of the drama will not avail for long without true,
+  finished, and beautiful art in the singing and acting; and, with
+  a few exceptions, the singers do not give us anything approaching
+  true, finished, and beautiful art. The exceptions are Van Rooy,
+  Brema, Gulbranson, Brema, and Schumann-Heink. Van Rooy has a
+  noble voice, admirably suited to Wotan, and he both sings and
+  acts the part with a majesty and pathos beyond anything dreamed
+  of by any other Wotan I have heard. He appears to have been the
+  success of the Festival; and certainly so strong and exquisite an
+  artist deserves all the success he can gain in Bayreuth. Brema's
+  Fricka is noble and full of charm; Schumann-Heink sings the music
+  of Erda with some sense of its mystery and of Waltraute in
+  "Siegfried" with considerable passion; and Gulbranson has vastly
+  improved her impersonation of Br&uuml;nnhilde since last year.
+  She is still unmistakably a student, but no one can doubt that
+  she will develop into a really grand artist if she avoids ruining
+  her fine voice by continually using it in a wrong way. Her
+  Br&uuml;nnhilde is just now very beautiful and intensely
+  pathetic, but it owes less to her art than her personality. She
+  does not interpret Br&uuml;nnhilde&mdash;rather she uses the part
+  as a vehicle for her private emotions; to an inordinate degree
+  she reads into it her real or imaginary experience; and she has
+  not learnt the trick of turning her feelings into the proper
+  channels provided, so to say, by the part&mdash;of so directing
+  them that Gulbranson disappears behind Br&uuml;nnhilde. Still, it
+  is a great thing to find an artist of such force and passion and
+  at the same time such rare delicacy; and I expect to come here in
+  1899 and hear an almost perfect rendering of Br&uuml;nnhilde. As
+  for the rest of the singers, the less said about most of them the
+  better. They have no voices worth the mentioning; the little they
+  do possess they have no notion of using rightly; and their acting
+  is of the most rudimentary sort. We hear so much of the fine
+  acting which is supposed to cover the vocal sins of Bayreuth that
+  it cannot be insisted on too strongly that the acting here is not
+  fine. I can easily imagine how Wagner, endeavouring to get his
+  new notion into the heads of the stupid singers who are still
+  permitted to ruin his music because they are now veterans, would
+  fume and rage at the Italian "business"&mdash;the laying of the
+  left hand on the heart and of the right on the pit of the
+  stomach&mdash;with which incompetent actors always fill up their
+  idle intervals, and how he would beg them, in Wotan's name,
+  rather to do nothing than do that. But to take the first bungling
+  representation of the "Ring" as an ideal to be approached as
+  closely as possible, to insist on competent actors and actresses
+  standing doing nothing when some movement is urgently called for,
+  is to deny to Wagner all the advantages of the new acting which
+  modern stage singers have learnt from his music. The first act of
+  "The Valkyrie," for example, will be absurd so long as Sieglinde,
+  Hunding, and Siegmund are made to stand in solemn silence, as
+  beginners who cannot hear the prompter's voice, until Sieglinde
+  has mixed Hunding's draught. And some of the gestures and
+  postures in which the singers are compelled to indulge are as
+  foolish as the foolishest Italian acting. Who can help laughing
+  at the calisthenics of Wotan and Br&uuml;nnhilde at the end of
+  "The Valkyrie," or at Wotan's massage treatment of
+  Br&uuml;nnhilde in the second act? The Bayreuth acting is as
+  entirely conventional as Italian acting, and scarce a whit more
+  artistic and sane. Even the fine artists are hampered by it; and
+  the lesser ones are enabled to make themselves and whole
+  music-dramas eminently ridiculous. On the whole, perhaps, acting
+  and singing were at their best in "Siegfried." In "The Rheingold"
+  some of the smaller parts&mdash;such as Miss Weed's
+  Freia&mdash;were handsomely done; the Mime was also excellent;
+  but I cannot quite reconcile myself to Friedrichs' Alberich. "The
+  Dusk of the Gods" was marred by Burgstaller, and "The Valkyrie"
+  by the two apparently octogenarian lovers. That is Bayreuth's
+  way. It promises us the best singers procurable, and gives us
+  Vogl and Sucher, who undoubtedly were delightful in their parts
+  twenty years ago; and it would be shocked to learn that its good
+  faith is questioned so far as lady artists are concerned. Whether
+  it is fair to question it is another matter. In Germany feminine
+  beauty is reckoned by hundredweights. No lady of under eighteen
+  stones is admired; but one who is heavier than that, instead of
+  staying at home and looking after her grandchildren, is put into
+  a white dress and called Sieglinde, or into a brown robe and
+  called Kundry; and a German audience accepts her as a revelation
+  of ideal loveliness through the perfection of human form.</p>
+
+  <p>The Germans are devoid of a sense of colour, they are devoid
+  of a sense of beauty in vocal tone, and I am at last drawing near
+  to the conclusion that they have no sense of beauty in
+  instrumental tone. Throughout this cycle the tone of many of the
+  instruments has been execrable; many of them have rarely been
+  even in approximate tune. The truth is that the players do not
+  play well unless a master-hand controls them; and a master-hand
+  in the orchestra has been urgently wanted. Instead of a
+  master-hand we have had to put up with Master Siegfried Wagner's
+  hand (he now uses the right), and in the worst moments we have
+  wished there was no hand at all, and in the best we have longed
+  passionately for another. I do not propose to discuss his
+  conducting in detail. Under him the band has played with steady,
+  unrelenting slovenliness and inaccuracy; the music has been
+  robbed of its rhythm, life, and colour; and many of the finest
+  numbers&mdash;as, for example, the Valkyrie's Ride, the prelude
+  to the third act of "Siegfried," the march in "The Dusk of the
+  Gods"&mdash;have been deliberately massacred. One cannot
+  criticise such conducting: it does not rise near enough to
+  competence to be worthy of criticism. But one has a right to ask
+  why this young man, who should be serving an apprenticeship in
+  some obscure opera-house, is palmed off on the public as "the
+  best artist procurable"? He scarcely seems to possess ordinary
+  intelligence. I had the honour of being inadvertently presented
+  to him, and he asked me, should I write anything about Bayreuth,
+  to say that he objected very much to the Englishmen who came in
+  knickerbockers&mdash;in bicycle costume. When I mildly suggested
+  that if they came without knickerbockers or the customary
+  alternative he would have better reason to complain, he asserted
+  that he and his family had a great respect for the theatre, and
+  it shocked them to find so many Englishmen who did not respect
+  it. I mention this because it shows clearly the spirit in which
+  Bayreuth is now being worked. The Wagner family are not shocked
+  when Wagner's music is caricatured by an octogenarian tenor or a
+  twenty-stone prima donna; they are shocked when in very hot
+  weather a few people wear the costume in which they suffer least
+  discomfort. So the place is becoming a mere fashionable resort,
+  that would cause Wagner all the pangs of Amfortas could he come
+  here again. The women seem to change their dresses for every act
+  of the opera; the prices of lodgings, food, and drinks are
+  rapidly rising to the Monte Carlo standard; a clergyman has been
+  imported to preach on Sunday to the English visitors; one sees
+  twenty or thirty fashionable divorce cases in process of
+  incubation; and Siegfried Wagner conducts. With infinite labour
+  Wagner built this magnificent theatre, the most perfect machine
+  in the world for the reproduction of great art-works; and Mrs.
+  Wagner has given it as a toy to her darling son that he may amuse
+  himself by playing with it. And, like a baby when it gets a toy,
+  Siegfried Wagner is breaking it to pieces to see what there is
+  inside. Unless it is taken from him until he has spent a few
+  years in learning to play upon instead of with it, Bayreuth will
+  quickly be deserted. Already it is in decadence. I shall always
+  come to Bayreuth, for reasons already given; but fashions change,
+  and the people who come here because it is the fashion will not
+  be long in finding other resorts; and those who want only to see
+  the music-plays adequately performed will have learnt that this
+  is not the place for them. With one voice the ablest German,
+  French, and Dutch critics are crying against the present state of
+  things; and it is certainly the duty of every English lover of
+  Wagner to refuse to take tickets for the performances that are to
+  be conducted by Wagner's son. Bayreuth promises us the best
+  artists. Whether some of the singers are or are not the best
+  artists is largely a matter of taste. But that Siegfried Wagner
+  is the best conductor procurable in Germany is too preposterous a
+  proposition to be considered for a moment. He may be some day;
+  but that day is far off.</p>
+
+  <p>As for the representation of "Parsifal," I should not trouble
+  to discuss it had not Mr. Chamberlain's book on Wagner lately
+  come my way. It shows me that the old game is being pursued as
+  busily as ever. Since Wagner's death the world has been carefully
+  and persistently taught that only Bayreuth can do justice to
+  "Parsifal"; and since the world believes anything if it is said
+  often enough, it has come to think it sheer blasphemy to dream of
+  giving "Parsifal" elsewhere than at Bayreuth. "Parsifal" is not
+  an opera&mdash;it is a sacred revelation; and just as the seed of
+  Aaron alone could serve as priests in the sacred rites of the
+  temple at Jerusalem, so only the seed of Wagner can serve as
+  priests&mdash;that is to say, as chief directing
+  priests&mdash;when "Parsifal" is played. Thus declare the naive
+  dwellers in Villa Wahnfried, modestly forgetting the missing link
+  in the chain of argument which should prove them alone to be the
+  people qualified to perform "Parsifal"; and I regret to observe
+  the support they receive from a number of Englishmen and
+  Scotchmen, who are grown more German than the Germans, and just
+  as religiously forget to make any reference to this missing link
+  of proof. But these Germanised Scotchmen and Englishmen work hard
+  for Bayreuth: now they whisper in awestruck tones of the beauty
+  and significance of "Parsifal"; now they howl at the unhappy
+  writers in the daily and weekly Press who dare to find little
+  significance and less beauty in the Bayreuth representation; and,
+  to do them bare justice, until lately they have been fairly
+  successful in persuading the world to think with them. Verily,
+  they have their reward&mdash;they partake of afternoon tea at
+  Villa Wahnfried; they enjoy the honour of bowing low to the
+  second Mrs. Wagner; Wagner's legal descendants cordially take
+  them by the hand. And they go away refreshed, and again spread
+  the report of the artistic and moral and religious supremacy of
+  Bayreuth; and the world listens and goes up joyfully to Bayreuth
+  to be taxed&mdash;one pound sterling per head per "Parsifal"
+  representation. The performances over, the world comes away
+  mightily edified, having seen nothing with its own eyes, heard
+  nothing with its own ears, having understood nothing at
+  all;&mdash;having, in fact, so totally miscomprehended everything
+  as to think "Parsifal" a Christian drama; having been too deaf to
+  realise that the singers were frequently out of the key, and too
+  blind to observe that the scenery in the second act resembled a
+  cheap cretonne, and that many of the flower-maidens were at least
+  eight feet in circumference. On the way home the world whiles
+  away the long railway journey by reading metaphysical
+  disquisitions on "Parsifal' and the Ideal Woman," "'Parsifal' and
+  the Thing-in-Itself," "The Swan in 'Parsifal' and its Relation to
+  the Higher Vegetarianism." It knows the name of every leit-motif,
+  and can nearly pronounce the German for it; it can refer to the
+  Essay on Beethoven apropos of Kundry's scream (or yawn) in the
+  second act; it can chat learnedly of Klingsor, in pathetic
+  ignorance of his real offence, and explain why Amfortas has his
+  wound on the right side, although the libretto distinctly states
+  it to be situated on the left. It is a fact that this year a lady
+  was heard to ask why Parsifal quarrelled with his wife in the
+  second act. (I might mention that an admirer of "Parsifal" asked
+  me who the dark man was in the first act of "The Valkyrie," and
+  whether Sieglinde or Br&uuml;nnhilde was burnt in the last.) The
+  which is eminently amusing, and conjures up before one a vision
+  of Richard, not wailing, like the youth in Shelley's "Prometheus
+  Unbound," for the faith he kindled, but gazing patiently, rather
+  wearily, with a kindly ironical smile, on the world he conquered,
+  on the world that adores him <i>because</i> it fails to
+  understand him.</p>
+
+  <p>Happily, it is not my business to reform the world; and
+  writing in October, when so many of the idealists who felt with
+  Parsifal in his remorse about the duck-shooting episode are
+  applying the lesson by wantonly slaughtering every harmless
+  creature they can hit, it would be superfluous to point out in
+  any detail how very wrong and absurd is the world's estimate of
+  the Bayreuth performance. In fact, were it my object to assist in
+  the destruction of Bayreuth, no better plan could be found than
+  that of approving cordially of everything Bayreuth does. For it
+  is fast driving away all sincere lovers of Wagner; it lives now
+  on fashionable ladies, betting men, and bishops: when the fashion
+  changes and these depart, the Bayreuth festivals will come to an
+  end. Bayreuth is only an affectation; not one pilgrim in a
+  hundred understands the "Ring" or "Parsifal"; not one in a
+  thousand is really impressed by anything deeper than the mere
+  novelty of the business. Visitors go and are moved by the
+  shooting of the duck (the libretto calls it a swan, but the
+  management chooses to use a duck); they talk of Wagner's love of
+  animals and of how they love animals themselves; they go straight
+  from Bayreuth to Scotland and show their love in true
+  sportsmanlike fashion by treating animals, birds, and fishes with
+  a degree of cruelty so appalling as to disgust every
+  right-thinking and right-feeling man and woman; and they tell you
+  that the stag likes to be disembowelled, the bird to have its
+  wings shattered, the fish to be torn to pieces in its agonised
+  struggle for life. Or, having been moved by the consequences of
+  sin, they straightway go and prepare cases for the divorce
+  courts; having appreciated the purity and peace of monastery life
+  and a daily communion service, they return without hesitation or
+  sense of inconsistency to their favourite modes of gambling;
+  having revelled in the most lovely music in the world, they
+  proceed to listen nightly to the ugliest and silliest music in
+  the world. Their appreciation of Bayreuth is a sham; they would
+  cheerfully go elsewhere&mdash;say to Homburg&mdash;if Bayreuth
+  were shut up; and before long they will go to Homburg or
+  elsewhere, whether Bayreuth is shut up or not.</p>
+  <hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+  <h2><a name="A_NOTE_ON_BRAHMS" id="A_NOTE_ON_BRAHMS"></a>A NOTE
+  ON BRAHMS</h2>
+
+  <p>It is not an exaggeration to say that probably there are not a
+  dozen musicians in Europe who have formed any precise and final
+  opinion as to where Brahms should be placed. One gets to know him
+  very slowly. His appearance and manner (so to speak), so
+  extremely dignified, are very much in his favour; but when one
+  tries to get to terms of intimacy with him he has a fatal trick
+  of repelling one by that "austerity" or chilliness of which we
+  have heard so much. And the worst of it is that too frequently a
+  sharp suspicion strikes one that there is little behind that
+  austere manner&mdash;that his reticence does not so much imply
+  matter held in reserve as an absence of matter. I do not mean by
+  this that Brahms was a paradoxical fool who was clever enough to
+  hold his tongue lest he was found out, nor even that he purposely
+  veiled his lack of meaning. On the contrary, a composer who
+  wished more devoutly to be sincere never put pen to paper. But he
+  had not the intellect of an antelope; and he took up in all
+  honesty a r&ocirc;le for which he had only the slightest
+  qualification. The true Brahms, the Brahms who does not deceive
+  himself, is the Brahms you find in many of the songs, in some of
+  the piano and chamber music, in the smaller movements of his
+  symphonies, and in certain passages of his overtures; and I have
+  no hesitation whatever in asserting (though the opinion is
+  subject to revision) that his songs are much the most
+  satisfactory things he did. Here, unweighted by a heavy sense of
+  a mission, he either revels in making beautiful&mdash;though
+  never supremely beautiful&mdash;tunes for their own sake, or he
+  actually expresses with beauty and considerable fidelity certain
+  definite emotions. Had he written nothing but such small
+  things&mdash;songs, piano pieces, Allegrettos like that in the D
+  symphony&mdash;his position might be a degree lower in the
+  estimation of dull Academics who don't count, but he would be
+  accepted at something like his true value by the whole world, and
+  the whole world would be the better for oftener hearing many
+  lovely things. But merely to be a singer of wonderful songs was
+  not sufficient for Brahms: he wanted to be a great poet, a new
+  Beethoven. It was a legitimate ambition. The kind of music Brahms
+  really loved was the kind of which Beethoven's is the most
+  splendid example; and he wanted to create more of the same kind.
+  He doubtless thought he could; in his early days Robert Schumann
+  predicted that he would; and in his later days his intimate
+  friend Hanslick and a small herd of followers asserted that he
+  did. He was run as the prophet of the classical school with all
+  the force of all who hated Wagner and had not brains enough to
+  understand either Brahms' or Wagner's music; he became the god of
+  all the musical dullards in Europe; and it is small wonder that
+  he took himself with immense seriousness. A little more
+  intelligence, ever so little more, would have shown him that,
+  despite the noise of those who perhaps admired him less than they
+  dreaded Wagner, he was not the man they said he was. He had not a
+  great matter to utter; what he had he could not utter in the
+  classical form; yet he tried to write in classical form. If ever
+  a musician was born a happy, careless romanticist, that musician
+  was Brahms&mdash;he was even a romanticist in the narrower sense,
+  inasmuch as he was fond rather of the gloomy, mysterious, and
+  dismal than of sunlight and the blue sky; and whenever his
+  imagination warmed he straightway began breaking the bonds in
+  which he had endeavoured to work. But that miserable article of
+  Schumann&mdash;deplorable gush that has been tolerated, nay,
+  admired, only because it is Schumann's&mdash;the evil influence
+  of the pseudo-classicism of Mendelssohn and his followers, the
+  preposterous over-praise of Hanslick,&mdash;these things drove
+  Brahms into the mistake never made by the really able men. Wilkes
+  denied that he ever was a Wilksite; Wagner certainly never was a
+  Wagnerite; there are people who ask whether Christ was ever a
+  Christian. But Brahms became more and more a devoted Brahmsite;
+  he accepted himself as the guardian of the great classical
+  tradition (which never existed); and he wrote more and more dull
+  music. It is idle to tell me he is austere when my inner
+  consciousness tells me he is merely barren, and idler to ask me
+  feel beauty when my ears report no beauty to me. He had no
+  original emotion or thought: whenever his music is good it will
+  be found that he has derived the emotion from a poem, or else
+  that there is no emotion but only very fine decorative work. In
+  most of his bigger works&mdash;the symphonies, the German
+  Requiem, the Serious songs he wrote in his later days&mdash;he
+  sacrificed the beauty he might have attained to the expression of
+  emotions he never felt; he assumed the pose and manner of a
+  master telling us great things, and talked like a pompous duffer.
+  An exception must be made: one emotion Brahms had felt and did
+  communicate. It was his tragedy that he had no original emotion,
+  no rich inner life, but lived through the days on the merely
+  prosaic plane; and he seems to have felt that this was his
+  tragedy. Anyhow, the one original emotion he brought into music
+  is a curious mournful dissatisfaction with life and with death.
+  The only piece of his I know in which the feeling is intolerably
+  poignant, seems to cut like a knife, is his setting of that sad
+  song of Goethe's about the evening wind dashing the vine leaves
+  and the raindrops against the window pane; and in this song, as
+  also in the movement in one of the quartets evolved from the
+  song, the mournfulness becomes absolutely pitiable despair.
+  Brahms was not cast in the big mould, and he spent a good deal of
+  his later time in pitying himself. It is curious that one of his
+  last works was the batch of Serious songs, which consist of
+  dismal meditations on the darkness and dirt of the grave and
+  feebly-felt hopes that there is something better on the other
+  side. That does not strike one as in the vein of the big men.</p>
+
+  <p>Much of Brahms' music is bad and ugly music, dead music; it is
+  a counterfeit and not the true and perfect image of life indeed;
+  and it should be buried or cremated at the earliest opportunity.
+  But much of it is wonderfully beautiful&mdash;almost but never
+  quite as beautiful as the great men at their best. There are
+  passages in the Tragic overture that any composer might be proud
+  to have written. If the opening of the D symphony is thin,
+  unreal, an attempt at pastoral gaiety which has resulted merely
+  in lack of character, at anyrate the second theme is delightful;
+  if the opening of the slow movement is also twaddle, there are
+  pleasant passages later on; the dainty allegretto is as fresh and
+  fragrant as a wild rose; and the finale, though void of
+  significance, is full of an energy rare in Brahms. Then there are
+  many of the songs in which Brahms' astonishing felicity of
+  phrase, and his astounding trick of finding expression for an
+  emotion when the emotion has been given to him, enable him almost
+  to work miracles. And it must be remembered that all his music is
+  irreproachable from the technical point of view. Brahms is
+  certainly with Bach, Mozart, and Wagner in point of musicianship:
+  in fact, these four might be called the greatest masters of sheer
+  music who have lived. A Brahms score is as wonderful as a Wagner
+  score; from beginning to end there is not a misplaced note nor a
+  trace of weakness; and one stands amazed before the consummate
+  workmanship of the thing. The only difference between the Wagner
+  score and the Brahms score is, that while the former is always
+  alive, always the product of a fervent inner life, the latter is
+  sometimes alive too, but more frequently as dead as a door-mat,
+  the product of extreme facility and (I must suppose) an
+  extraordinary inherited musical instinct divorced from exalted
+  thought and feeling. The difference may be felt when you compare
+  a Brahms and a Tschaikowsky symphony. Although in his later years
+  Tschaikowsky acquired a mastery of the technique of music, and
+  succeeded in keeping his scores clear and clean, he never arrived
+  at anything approaching Brahms' certainty of touch, and neither
+  his scoring nor his counterpoint has Brahms' perfection of
+  workmanship. Yet one listens to Tschaikowksy, for the present at
+  least, with intense pleasure, and wants to listen again. I have
+  yet to meet anyone who pretends to have received any intense
+  pleasure from a Brahms symphony.</p>
+
+  <p>Brahms is dead; the old floods of adulation will no longer be
+  poured forth by the master's disciples; neither will the enemies
+  his friends made for him have any reason to depreciate his music;
+  and ultimately it will be possible to form a fair, unbiassed
+  judgment on him. This is a mere casual utterance, by the way.</p>
+  <hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+  <h2><a name="ANTON_DVORAK" id="ANTON_DVORAK"></a>ANTON
+  DVOR&Aacute;K</h2>
+
+  <p>I remember the Philharmonic in its glory one evening, when it
+  had a couple of distinguished foreigners to a kind of musical
+  high tea, very bourgeois, very long and very indigestible. One of
+  the pair of distinguished foreigners was Mr. Sauer; the other,
+  Dvor&aacute;k, was the hero of the evening. Now, whatever one may
+  think of Dvor&aacute;k the musician, it is impossible to feel
+  anything but sympathy and admiration for Dvor&aacute;k the man.
+  His early struggles to overcome the attendant disadvantages of
+  his peasant birth; his unheard-of labours to acquire a mastery of
+  the technique of his art when body and brain were exhausted by
+  the work of earning his daily bread in a very humble capacity;
+  his sickening years of waiting, not for popular recognition
+  merely, but for an opportunity of showing that he had any gifts
+  worthy of being recognised,&mdash;these command the sympathy of
+  all but those happy few who have found life a most delicate
+  feather-bed. Dvor&aacute;k has honestly worked for all that has
+  come to him, and the only people who will carp or sneer at him
+  are those who have gained or wish to gain their positions without
+  honest work. There could be no conjecture wider of the mark than
+  that of his success being due to any charlatan tricks in his
+  music or in his conduct of life. No composer's music&mdash;not
+  Bach's, nor Haydn's, nor even Mozart's&mdash;could be a more
+  veracious expression of his inner nature; and if Dvor&aacute;k's
+  music is at times odd and whimsical, and persistently
+  wrong-headed and <i>outr&eacute;</i> through long passages, it
+  does not mean that Dvor&aacute;k is trying to impress or startle
+  his hearers by doing unusual things, but merely that he himself
+  is odd and whimsical and has his periods of persistent
+  wrong-headedness. He is Slav in every fibre&mdash;not a
+  pseudo-Slav whose ancestors were or deserved to be whipped out of
+  the temple in Jerusalem. He has all the Slav's impetuosity and
+  hot blood, his love of glaring and noisy colour, his love of
+  sheer beauty of a certain limited kind, and&mdash;alas!&mdash;his
+  unfailing brainlessness. His impetuosity and hot blood are
+  manifested in his frequent furious rhythms and the abrupt changes
+  in those rhythms; his love of colour in the quality of his
+  instrumentation, with its incessant contrasts and use of the
+  drums, cymbals, and triangle; his sense of beauty in the terribly
+  weird splendour of his pictures, and its limitations in his rare
+  achievement of anything fine when once he passes out of the
+  region of the weird and terrible; his brainlessness in his
+  inability to appreciate the value of a strong sinewy theme, in
+  the lack of proportion between the different movements of his
+  works and between the sections of the movements, and, perhaps
+  more than in any other way, in his unhappy choice of subjects for
+  vocal works. One stands amazed before the spectacle of the man
+  who made that prodigious success with the awful legend of "The
+  Spectre's Bride" coming forward, smiling in childlike confidence,
+  with "Saint Ludmila," which was so awful in another fashion. And
+  then, as if not content with nearly ruining his reputation by
+  that deadly blow, he must needs follow up "Saint Ludmila" with
+  the dreariest, dullest, most poverty-stricken Requiem ever
+  written by a musician with any gift of genuine invention. These
+  mistakes might indicate mere want of tact did not the qualities
+  of Dvor&aacute;k's music show them to be the result of sheer want
+  of intellect; and if the defects of his music are held by some to
+  be intentional beauties, no such claim can be set up for the
+  opinions on music which he has on various occasions confided to
+  the ubiquitous interviewer. The Slav is an interesting creature,
+  and his music is interesting, not because he is higher than the
+  Western man, but because he is different, and, if anything,
+  lower, with a considerable touch of the savage. When
+  Dvor&aacute;k is himself, and does not pass outside the
+  boundaries within which he can breathe freely, he produces
+  results so genuine and powerful that one might easily mistake him
+  for a great musician; but when he competes with Beethoven or
+  Handel or Haydn, we at once realise that he is not expressing
+  what he really feels, but what he thinks he should feel, that he
+  is not at his ease, and that our native men can beat him clean
+  out of the field. To be sure, they can at times be as dull as he,
+  but that is when they forget the lesson they should before now
+  have learnt from him, when they leave the field in which they
+  work with real enjoyment and produce results which may be
+  enjoyed.</p>
+  <hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+  <h2><a name="TSCHAIKOWSKY_AND_HIS_PATHETICquot_SYMPHONY" id=
+  "TSCHAIKOWSKY_AND_HIS_PATHETICquot_SYMPHONY"></a>TSCHAIKOWSKY AND
+  HIS "PATHETIC" SYMPHONY</h2>
+
+  <p>A very little while since, Tschaikowsky was little more than a
+  name in England. He had visited us some two or three times, and
+  it was generally believed that he composed; but he had not
+  written any piece without which no orchestral programme could be
+  considered complete, and the mere suggestion that his place might
+  possibly be far above Gounod would certainly have been received
+  with open derision. However, when his fame became great and
+  spread wide on the Continent, he became so important a man in the
+  eyes of English musicians that Cambridge University thought fit
+  to honour itself by offering him an honorary musical degree.
+  Tschaikowsky, simple soul, good-humouredly accepted it,
+  apparently in entire ignorance of the estimation in which such
+  cheap decorations are held in this country; and it is to be hoped
+  that before his death he obtained a hearing in Russia for the
+  Cambridge professor's music. The incident, comical as it appeared
+  to those of us who knew the value of musical degrees, the means
+  by which they are obtained, and the reasons for which they are
+  conferred, yet served a useful purpose by calling public
+  attention to the fact that there was living a man who had written
+  music that was fresh, a trifle strange perhaps, but full of
+  vitality, and containing a new throb, a new thrill. Since 1893
+  his reputation has steadily grown, but in a curious way. One can
+  scarcely say with truth that Tschaikowsky is popular: only his
+  "Pathetic" symphony and one or two smaller things are popular.
+  Had he not written the "Pathetic," one may doubt whether he would
+  be much better known to-day than he was in 1893. It caught the
+  public fancy as no other work of his caught it, and on the
+  strength of its popularity many of the critics do not hesitate to
+  call it a great symphony, and on the strength of the symphony
+  Tschaikowsky a great composer. (For in England criticism largely
+  means saying what the public thinks.) Passionately though that
+  symphony is admired, hardly any other of his music can be truly
+  said to get a hearing; for, on the rare occasions when it is
+  played, the public thoughtfully stays away. It is true that the
+  Casse Noisette suite is always applauded, but it is a trifling
+  work compared with his best. Tschaikowsky shares with Gray and
+  one or two others in ancient and modern times the distinction of
+  being famous by a single achievement. The public is jealous for
+  the supremacy of that achievement, and will not hear of there
+  being another equal to it.</p>
+
+  <p>Whether the public is right or wrong, and whether we all are
+  or are not just a little inclined to-day to exaggerate
+  Tschaikowsky's gifts and the value of his music, there can be no
+  doubt whatever that he was a singularly fine craftsman, who
+  brought into music a number of fresh and living elements. He
+  seems to me to have been an extraordinary combination of the
+  barbarian and the civilised man, of the Slav and the Latin or
+  Teuton, the Slav barbarian preponderating. He saw things as
+  neither Slav nor Latin nor Teuton had seen them before; the touch
+  of things aroused in him moods dissimilar from those that had
+  been aroused in anyone before. Hence, while we English regard him
+  as a representative Russian, or at anyrate Slav, composer, many
+  Russians repudiate him, calling him virtually a Western. He has
+  the Slav fire, rash impetuosity, passion and intense melancholy,
+  and much also of that Slav na&iuml;vet&eacute; which in the case
+  of Dvor&aacute;k degenerates into sheer brainlessness; he has an
+  Oriental love of a wealth of extravagant embroidery, of pomp and
+  show and masses of gorgeous colour; but the other, what I might
+  call the Western, civilised element in his character, showed
+  itself in his lifelong striving to get into touch with
+  contemporary thought, to acquire a full measure of modern
+  culture, and to curb his riotous, lawless impulse towards mere
+  sound and fury. It is this unique fusion of apparently mutually
+  destructive elements and instincts that gives to Tschaikowsky's
+  music much of its novelty and piquancy. But, apart from this
+  uncommon fusion, it must be remembered that his was an original
+  mind&mdash;original not only in colour but in its very structure.
+  Had he been pure Slav, or pure Latin, his music might have been
+  very different, but it would certainly have been original. He had
+  true creative imagination, a fund of original, underived emotion,
+  and a copiousness of invention almost as great as Wagner's or
+  Mozart's. His power of evolving new decorative patterns of a
+  fantastic beauty seemed quite inexhaustible; and the same may be
+  said of his schemes and combinations and shades of colour, and
+  the architectural plans and forms of his larger works. It is true
+  that his forms frequently enough approach formlessness; that his
+  colours&mdash;and especially in his earlier music&mdash;are
+  violent and inharmonious; and that in his ceaseless invention of
+  new patterns his Slav na&iuml;vet&eacute; and lack of humour led
+  him more than a hundred times to write unintentionally comic
+  passages. He is discursive&mdash;I might say voluble. Again, he
+  had little or no real strength&mdash;none of the massive, healthy
+  strength of Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Wagner: his force is sheer
+  hysteria. He is wanting in the deepest and tenderest human
+  feeling. He is plausible to a degree that leads one to suspect
+  his sincerity, and certainly leaves it an open question how long
+  a great deal of his music will stand after this generation, to
+  which it appeals so strongly, has passed away. But when all that
+  may fairly be said against him has been said and given due
+  weight, the truth remains that he is one of the few great
+  composers of this century. I myself, in all humility, allowing
+  fully that I may be altogether wrong, while convinced that I am
+  absolutely right, deliberately set him far above Brahms, above
+  Gounod, above Schumann&mdash;above all save Beethoven, Weber,
+  Schubert, and Wagner. His accomplishment as a sheer musician was
+  greater than either Gounod's or Schumann's, though far from being
+  equal to Brahms'&mdash;for Brahms as a master of the management
+  of notes stands with the highest, with Bach, Mozart, and Wagner;
+  while as a voice and a new force in music neither Brahms nor
+  Schumann nor Gounod can be compared with him other than
+  unfavourably. All that are sensitive to music can feel, as I have
+  said, the new throb, the new thrill; and that decides the
+  matter.</p>
+
+  <p>It is now a long time since Mr. Henry Wood, one winter's
+  afternoon, the only Englishman who may be ranked with the great
+  continental conductors, gave a Tschaikowsky concert, with a
+  programme that included some of the earlier as well as one or two
+  of the later works. It served to show how hard and how long
+  Tschaikowsky laboured to attain to lucidity of expression, and
+  why the "Pathetic" symphony is popular while the other
+  compositions are not. In all of them we find infinite invention
+  and blazes of Eastern magnificence and splendour; but in the
+  earlier things there is little of the order and clarity of the
+  later ones. Another and a more notable point is that in not one
+  thing played at this concert might the human note be heard. The
+  suite (Op. 55) and the symphony (Op. 36) are full of novel and
+  dazzling effects&mdash;for example, the scherzo of the symphony
+  played mainly by the strings pizzicato, and the scherzo of the
+  suite, with the short, sharp notes of the brass and the rattle of
+  the side-drum; the melodies also are new, and in their way
+  beautiful; in form both symphony and suite are nearly as clear as
+  anything Tschaikowsky wrote: in fact, each work is a masterwork.
+  But each is lacking in the human element, and without the human
+  element no piece of music can be popular for long. The fame of
+  Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, is still growing and will continue to
+  grow, because every time we hear their music it touches us; while
+  Weber, mighty though he is, will probably never be better loved
+  than he is to-day, because his marvellously graphic picturesque
+  music does not touch us&mdash;cannot, was not intended to, touch
+  us; and the fame of Mendelssohn and the host of lesser men who
+  did not speak with a human accent of human woe and weal wanes
+  from day to day. The composer who writes purely decorative music,
+  or purely picturesque music, may be remembered as long as he who
+  expresses human feeling; but he cannot hope to be loved by so
+  many. It is because Tschaikowsky has so successfully put his own
+  native emotions, his own aspirations and hopes and fears and
+  sorrows, into the "Pathetic," that I believe it has come to stay
+  with us, while many of his other works will fade from the common
+  remembrance. Surely it is one of the most mournful things in
+  music; yet surely sadness was never uttered with a finer grace,
+  with a more winning carelessness, as one who tries to smile gaily
+  at his own griefs. Were it touched with the finest tenderness, as
+  Mozart might have touched it, we might&mdash;if we could once get
+  thoroughly accustomed to a few of the unintentionally humorous
+  passages I have referred to&mdash;have it set by the side of the
+  G minor and "Jupiter" symphonies. As it is, it unmistakably falls
+  short of Mozart by lacking that tenderness, just as it falls
+  short of Beethoven by lacking profundity of emotion and thought;
+  but it does not always fall so far short. There are passages in
+  it that neither Beethoven nor Mozart need have been ashamed to
+  own as theirs; and especially there is much in it that is in the
+  very spirit of Mozart&mdash;Mozart as we find him in the Requiem,
+  rather than the Mozart of "Don Giovanni" or the "Figaro." The
+  opening bars are, of course, ultramodern: they would never have
+  been written had not Wagner written something like them first;
+  but the combination of poignancy and lightness and poise with
+  which the same phrase is delivered and expanded as the theme for
+  the allegro is quite Mozartean, and the same may be said of the
+  semiquaver passage following it. The outbursts of Slavonic fire
+  are, of course, Tschaikowsky pure and simple; but everyone who
+  hears the symphony may note how the curious union of barbarism
+  with modern culture is manifest in the ease with which
+  Tschaikowsky recovers himself after one of these
+  outbursts&mdash;turns it aside, so to speak, instead of giving it
+  free play after the favourite plan both of Borodine the great and
+  purely Russian composer, and Dvor&aacute;k the little Hungarian
+  composer. The second theme does not appear to me equal to the
+  rest of the symphony. It has that curious volubility and
+  "mouthing" quality that sometimes gets into Tschaikowsky's music;
+  it is plausible and pretty; it suggests a writer who either
+  cannot or dare not use the true tremendous word at the proper
+  moment, and goes on delivering himself of journalistic
+  stock-phrases which he knows will move those who would be left
+  unmoved were the right word spoken. There is nothing of this in
+  the melody of the second movement. Its ease is matched by its
+  poignancy: the very happy-go-lucky swing of it adds to its
+  poignancy; and the continuation&mdash;another instance of the
+  untamed Slav under the influence of the most finished
+  culture&mdash;has a wild beauty, and at the same time
+  communicates the emotion more clearly than speech could. The mere
+  fact that it is written in five-four time counts for
+  little&mdash;nothing is easier than to write in five-four time
+  when once you have got the trick; the remarkable thing is the
+  skill and tact with which Tschaikowsky has used precisely the
+  best rhythm he could have chosen&mdash;a free, often ambiguous,
+  rhythm&mdash;to express that particular shade of feeling. The
+  next movement is one of the most astounding ever conceived.
+  Beginning like an airy scherzo, presently a march rhythm is
+  introduced, and before one has realised the state of affairs we
+  are in the midst of a positive tornado of passion. The first
+  tunes then resume; but again they are dismissed, and it becomes
+  apparent that the march theme is the real theme of the whole
+  movement&mdash;that all the others are intended simply to lead up
+  to it, or to form a frame in which it is set. It comes in again
+  and again with ever greater and greater clamour, until it seems
+  to overwhelm one altogether. There is no real strength in
+  it&mdash;the effect is entirely the result of nervous energy, of
+  sheer hysteria; but as an expression of an uncontrollable
+  hysterical mood it stands alone in music. It should be observed
+  that even here Tschaikowsky's instinctive tendency to cover the
+  intensity of his mood with a pretence of carelessness had led him
+  to put this enormous outburst into a rhythm that, otherwise used,
+  would be irresistibly jolly. The last movement, too, verges on
+  the hysterical throughout. It is full of the blackest melancholy
+  and despondency, with occasional relapses into a tranquillity
+  even more tragic; and the trombone passage near the end,
+  introduced by a startling stroke on the gong, inevitably reminds
+  one of the spirit of Mozart's Requiem.</p>
+
+  <p>The whole of this paper might have been devoted to a
+  discussion of the technical side of Tschaikowsky's music, for the
+  score of this symphony is one of the most interesting I know. It
+  is full of astonishing points, of ingenious dodges used not for
+  their own sake, but to produce, as here they nearly always do,
+  particular effects; and throughout, the part-writing, the texture
+  of the music, is most masterly and far beyond anything
+  Tschaikowsky achieved before. For instance, the opening of the
+  last movement has puzzled some good critics, for it is written in
+  a way which seems like a mere perverse and wasted display of
+  skill. But let anyone imagine for a moment the solid, leaden,
+  lifeless result of letting all the parts descend together,
+  instead of setting them, as Tschaikowsky does, twisting round
+  each other, and it will at once be perceived that Tschaikowsky
+  never knew better what he was doing, or was more luckily
+  inspired, than when he devised the arrangement that now stands.
+  Much as I should like to have debated dozens of such points, it
+  is perhaps better, after all, just now to have talked principally
+  of the content of Tschaikowsky's music; for, when all is said, in
+  Tschaikowsky's music it is the content that counts. I might
+  describe that content as modern, were it not that the phrase
+  means little. Tschaikowsky is modern because he is new; and in
+  this age, when the earth has grown narrow, and tales of far-off
+  coasts and unexplored countries seem wonderful no longer, we
+  throw ourselves with eagerness upon the new thing, in five
+  minutes make it our own, and hail the inventor of it as the man
+  who has said for us what we had all felt for years. Nevertheless,
+  it may be that Tschaikowsky's attitude towards life, and
+  especially towards its sorrows,&mdash;the don't-care-a-hang
+  attitude,&mdash;is modern; and anyhow, in the sense that it is so
+  new that we seize it first amongst a hundred other things, this
+  symphony is the most modern piece of music we have. It is imbued
+  with a romanticism beside which the romanticism of Weber and
+  Wagner seems a little thin-blooded and pallid; it expresses for
+  us the emotions of the over-excited and over-sensitive man as
+  they have not been expressed since Mozart; and at the present
+  time we are quite ready for a new and less Teutonic romanticism
+  than Weber's, and to enter at once into the feelings of the
+  brain-tired man. That the "Pathetic" will for long continue to
+  grow in popularity I also fully expect; and that after this
+  generation has hurried away it will continue to have a large
+  measure of popularity I also fully expect, for in it, together
+  with much that appeals only to us unhealthy folk of to-day, there
+  is much that will appeal to the race, no matter how healthy it
+  may become, so long as it remains human in its desires and
+  instincts.</p>
+  <hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+  <h2><a name="LAMOUREUX_AND_HIS_ORCHESTRA" id=
+  "LAMOUREUX_AND_HIS_ORCHESTRA"></a>LAMOUREUX AND HIS
+  ORCHESTRA</h2>
+
+  <p>Richter and Mottl, the only considerable conductors besides
+  Lamoureux whom we had heard in England up to 1896, may be
+  compared with a couple of organists who come here, expecting to
+  find their instruments ready, in fair working order, and
+  accurately in tune. Lamoureux, on the other hand, was like
+  Sarasate and Ysa&yuml;e, who would be reduced to utter
+  discomfiture if their Strads were to stray on the road. He played
+  on his own instrument&mdash;the orchestra on which he had
+  practised day by day for so many years. Richter and Mottl took
+  their instruments as they found them, and devoted the
+  comparatively short time they had for rehearsal to the business
+  of getting their main intentions broadly carried out, leaving a
+  good deal of minor detail to look after itself, and not
+  complaining if a few notes fell under the desks at the back of
+  the orchestra. Lamoureux had laboriously rehearsed every inch of
+  his repertory until it was note-perfect, and each of his men knew
+  the precise bowing, phrasing, degree of piano or forte, and tempo
+  of every minutest phrase. Now I do not mean by this that the
+  orchestras on which Richter and Mottl performed played many wrong
+  notes, while the Lamoureux orchestra played none; and still less
+  do I mean that Lamoureux got finer results than Richter or Mottl.
+  So far as the mere notes are concerned, the Englishmen who played
+  for the German conductors acquitted themselves quite as well as
+  the Frenchmen who played for Lamoureux. Both made mistakes at
+  times; and a seemingly paradoxical thing is that when a Lamoureux
+  man stumbled all the world was bound to hear it, whereas in our
+  English orchestras a score of mistakes might be made in an
+  evening without many of us being much the wiser. The reason for
+  this is the reason why the playing of Lamoureux on his trained
+  orchestra, for all its accuracy, was not better than, nor in many
+  respects so good as, the playing of Richter and Mottl on the
+  scratch orchestras which their agents engaged for them. Probably
+  few uninformed laymen have any notion of the extent to which mere
+  noise is responsible for the total effect of a Wagner piece or a
+  Beethoven symphony&mdash;not the noise of big drum, cymbals and
+  so on; but the continuous slight discords caused by some of the
+  players being various degrees in front and others various degrees
+  behind; the scratching produced by uncertain bowing, or by an
+  unfortunate fiddler finding himself a little behind the general
+  body (as he does sometimes) and making a savage rush to catch it
+  up; the hissing of panting flautists; and the barnyard noises
+  produced by exhausted oboe-players. Even with Richter, stolid and
+  trustworthy though he is, these unauthorised sounds count for a
+  great deal; and with a conductor like Mottl, who varies the tempo
+  freely in obedience to his mood in the most rapid pieces, they
+  count for very much more. They result in a continuous murmur
+  which, so to speak, fills the interstices in the network of the
+  music, covering wrong notes, and giving the mass of tone a
+  richness and unity which otherwise it would lack. In such
+  movements as the Finale of the Fifth symphony this continuous
+  murmur does the work done for the piano by the upper strings
+  without dampers and the lower ones when the pedal is pressed
+  down; it gives solidity and colour to the music; and certainly
+  half the effect in fine renderings of "The Flying Dutchman"
+  overture, the Walk&uuml;renritt, and the Fire-music, is due to
+  it. But Lamoureux's men had practised so long together under
+  their conductor's beat that all the instruments played like one
+  instrument, no matter how the tempo was varied; the bowing of
+  each passage had been considered and finally settled, so that
+  there was no uncertainty there; and in the course of long
+  rehearsal every wind-player had learned precisely where he must
+  breathe, where he must reserve his breath, and where he could let
+  himself go, so that the tone of flutes, oboes, clarinets, and
+  bassoons never became in the smallest degree forced or hoarse.
+  And the result of this was the entire absence of that murmur
+  which one has come to regard as characteristic of the orchestra.
+  If a wrong note was played, there was nothing to hide its
+  nakedness. It was as though a penetrating flood of cold white
+  light were poured upon the music and made it transparent: one
+  perceived every remotest and least significant detail with a
+  vivid distinctness that can only be compared with a page of print
+  seen through a strong magnifying glass, or, perhaps better still,
+  with a photograph seen through a stereoscope. As in a
+  stereoscope, the outlines were defined with a degree of clearness
+  and sharpness that almost hurt the eye; as in a stereoscope,
+  there was neither colour nor suggestiveness. An orchestral
+  virtuoso, like a piano or violin virtuoso, may over-practise.</p>
+
+  <p>Having delivered this verdict with all solemnity, I must
+  straightway proceed to hedge. If Lamoureux had not the qualities
+  which give Richter and Mottl their pre-eminence, he had qualities
+  which they do not possess, and his playing had qualities which
+  one cannot find in theirs. If he had not absolutely a genius for
+  music, he certainly had a genius for attaining perfection in all
+  he did, which was perhaps the next best thing. I imagine that he
+  would have made a mouse-trap or built a cathedral exactly as he
+  played a Beethoven symphony. The mouse would never escape from
+  the trap; there would be nothing wanting, down to the most modern
+  appliances and conveniences, in the cathedral. In the Fifth
+  symphony he gave us every minute nuance in rigid obedience to the
+  composer's directions or evident intentions, and gave them with a
+  fastidious care strangely in contrast with Mottl's
+  rough-and-ready brilliancy or Richter's breadth. He began every
+  crescendo on the precise note where Beethoven marked it to begin;
+  and he gradated it with geometrical faultlessness to the exact
+  note where Beethoven marked it to cease. In diminuendos and
+  accelerandos and ritenutos he was just as faithful. In the softer
+  portions his sforzandos were not irrelevant explosions, but
+  slight extra accents: he made microscopic distinctions between
+  piano and pianissimo; he achieved the most difficult feat of
+  keeping his band at a level forte through long passages without a
+  symptom of breaking out into fortissimo. His players treated the
+  stiffest passages in the "Dutchman" overture as if they were
+  baby's play; and I detected hardly a wrong note either in that or
+  in the Fifth symphony. In a word, nothing to compare with the
+  technical perfection of his renderings, or his unswerving loyalty
+  to the composer, has been heard in London in my time. Yet, by
+  reason of that very prodigious correctness, the "Dutchman"
+  overture seemed bare and comparatively lifeless: the roar and the
+  hiss of the storm were absent, and the shrill discordant wail of
+  wind in the cordage; one heard, not the wail or the hiss or the
+  roar, but the notes which&mdash;in our crude scale with its
+  arbitrary division into tones and half-tones&mdash;Wagner had
+  perforce to use to suggest them. There was even something of
+  flippancy in it after Mottl's gigantic rendering: one longed for
+  the dramatic hanging back of the time at the phrase, "Doch ach!
+  den Tod, ich fand ihn nicht!" which is of such importance in the
+  overture. On the other hand, a more splendid reading of the first
+  movement of the Fifth symphony I have never heard; but the rest
+  of the movements were hardly to be called readings at all. The
+  most devoted admirers of Lamoureux&mdash;and I was his fairly
+  devoted admirer myself&mdash;will not deny that the slow movement
+  is full of poetry, the scherzo of a remote, mystical emotion, and
+  the Finale of a wondrous combination of sadness, regret and high
+  triumphant joy; and anyone who claims that Lamoureux gave us the
+  slightest hint of those qualities must be more than his
+  admirer&mdash;must be his infatuated slave. The last movement
+  even wanted richness; for that excessive clearness which
+  prevented the tones blending into masses, and forced one to
+  distinguish the separate notes of the flutes, the oboes, the
+  clarinets, and so forth, seemed to rob the music of all its body,
+  its solidity. But, when all is said, Lamoureux was, in his
+  special way, a noble master of the orchestra; and, even if I
+  could not regard him as a great interpreter of the greatest
+  music, I admit that the side of the great music which he revealed
+  was well worth knowing, and should indeed be known to all who
+  would understand the great music.</p>
+
+  <p>When I wrote the preceding paragraphs on Lamoureux, some of my
+  colleagues were good enough to neglect their own proper business
+  while they put me right about orchestral playing in general and
+  that of Lamoureux in particular. These gentlemen told me that,
+  when Beethoven (whom they knew personally) wrote certain notes,
+  he intended them and no others to be played; that the more
+  accurate a rendering, the closer it approaches to the work as it
+  existed in Beethoven's mind; that, ergo, Lamoureux's playing of
+  Beethoven, being the most accurate yet heard in England, was the
+  best, the truest, the most Beethovenish yet heard in England. All
+  which I flatly deny, and describe as the foolish ravings of
+  uninformed theorists. Only unpractical dreamers fancy that a
+  composer thinks of "notes" when he composes. He hears music with
+  his mental ear in the first place, and he afterwards sets down
+  such notes as experience has taught him will reproduce
+  approximately what he has heard when they are played upon the
+  instrument for which his composition is intended, whether the
+  instrument is piano, violin, the human voice, or orchestra. And
+  just as he counts on the harmonics and sympathetic vibrations of
+  the upper strings of the piano for the proper effect of a piano
+  sonata, so for the effect of an orchestral work he relies on the
+  full rich tone and the subdued murmur, which are only produced by
+  the members of the orchestra playing a little wrong. That they
+  play wrong in a million different ways does not matter: provided
+  they do not play too far wrong the result is always the same,
+  just as the characteristic sound of an excited crowd is always
+  the same whether there are a few more men or fewer women in one
+  crowd than in another. This may be wrong theoretically; but all
+  theorising breaks down hopelessly before the fact that it was
+  such an orchestra the masters wrote for. Perhaps some day the
+  foot-rule, the metronome, and the tuning-fork will take the place
+  of the human ear and artistic judgment; but until that day
+  arrives I prefer the wrongness of Mottl's orchestra to the strict
+  correctness which Lamoureux used to give us; and I leave the
+  &aelig;sthetic illogical logic-choppers, who demand from the
+  orchestra the correctness they would not stand from a
+  solo-player, to find what delight they may in such playing as
+  Lamoureux's used to be in the "Meistersinger" overture, or the
+  "Waldweben," or the Good Friday music. It must be remembered,
+  however, that the excessive correctness of which I have
+  complained was only one of the means through which Lamoureux
+  attained excessive lucidity. He sacrificed every other quality to
+  lucidity; and those who preferred lucidity to every other
+  qualify&mdash;that is to say, all Frenchmen&mdash;naturally
+  preferred Lamoureux's playing to that of any other conductor. In
+  the "Meistersinger" overture he would not allow the band to romp
+  freely for a single moment; in the "Waldweben" he succeeded in
+  playing every crescendo, every diminuendo, with astonishing
+  evenness of gradation, even when a trifling irregularity to
+  relieve the mechanical stiffness of the thing would have been as
+  water to a thirsty traveller in the desert; in the Good Friday
+  music he stuck rigidly to the composer's directions, and would
+  not permit a breath of his own life to go into the music. In
+  Berlioz's "Chasse et Orage" (from "Les Troyens") and a movement
+  from the "Romeo and Juliet" symphony, he manifested the same
+  qualities as when he played Beethoven and Wagner. His playing
+  wanted colour, suggestiveness, and human warmth; and, lacking
+  these, its chill clearness, its cleanness and sharp-cut edges,
+  merely made one think of an iceberg glittering in a wan Arctic
+  sunlight. Still he was a notable man; and his death robbed France
+  of her one perfectly sincere musician.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr class="full" />
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--- /dev/null
+++ b/15369.txt
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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, Old Scores and New Readings, by John F.
+Runciman
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: Old Scores and New Readings
+
+Author: John F. Runciman
+
+Release Date: March 15, 2005  [eBook #15369]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK OLD SCORES AND NEW READINGS***
+
+
+E-text prepared by Steven Gibbs and the Project Gutenberg Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team
+
+
+
+OLD SCORES AND NEW READINGS ...
+
+Discussions on Music & Certain Musicians
+
+by
+
+JOHN F. RUNCIMAN
+
+London at the Sign
+of the Unicorn
+VII Cecil Court
+
+MDCCCCI
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+WILLIAM BYRDE, HIS MASS
+
+OUR LAST GREAT MUSICIAN (HENRY PURCELL, 1658-95)
+
+BACH; THE "MATTHEW" PASSION AND THE "JOHN"
+
+HANDEL
+
+HAYDN AND HIS "CREATION"
+
+MOZART, HIS "DON GIOVANNI" AND THE REQUIEM
+
+"FIDELIO"
+
+SCHUBERT
+
+WEBER AND WAGNER
+
+ITALIAN OPERA, DEAD AND DYING
+
+VERDI YOUNG, AND VERDI YOUNGER
+
+"THE FLYING DUTCHMAN"
+
+"LOHENGRIN"
+
+"TRISTAN AND ISOLDA"
+
+"SIEGFRIED"
+
+"THE DUSK OF THE GODS"
+
+"PARSIFAL"
+
+BAYREUTH IN 1897
+
+A NOTE ON BRAHMS
+
+ANTON DVORAK
+
+TSCHAIKOWSKY AND HIS "PATHETIC" SYMPHONY
+
+LAMOUREUX AND HIS ORCHESTRA
+
+
+
+
+WILLIAM BYRDE ... HIS MASS
+
+
+Many years ago, in the essay which is set second in this collection,
+I wrote (speaking of the early English composers) that "at length the
+first great wave of music culminated in the works of Tallis and
+Byrde ... Byrde is infinitely greater than Tallis, and seems worthy
+indeed to stand beside Palestrina." Generally one modifies one's
+opinions as one grows older; very often it is necessary to reverse
+them. This one on Byrde I adhere to: indeed I am nearly proud of
+having uttered it so long ago. I had then never heard the Mass in D
+minor. But in the latter part of 1899 Mr. R.R. Terry, the organist of
+Downside Abbey, and one of Byrde's latest editors, invited me to the
+opening of St. Benedict's Church, Ealing, where the Mass in D minor
+was given; and there I heard one of the most splendid pieces of music
+in the world adequately rendered under very difficult conditions. I
+use the phrase advisedly--"one of the most splendid pieces of music in
+the world." When the New Zealander twenty centuries hence reckons up
+the European masters of music, he will place Byrde not very far down
+on the list of the greatest; and he will esteem Byrde's Mass one of
+the very finest ever written. Byrde himself has rested peacefully in
+his grave for over three hundred years. One or two casual critics have
+appreciated him. Fetis, I believe, called him "the English
+Palestrina"; but I do not recall whether he meant that Byrde was as
+great as Palestrina or merely great amongst the English--whether a
+"lord amongst wits," or simply "a wit amongst lords." For the most
+part he has been left comfortably alone, and held to be--like his
+mighty successor Purcell--one of the forerunners of the "great English
+school of church composers." To have prepared the way for Jackson in
+F--that has been thought his best claim to remembrance. The notion is
+as absurd as would be the notion (if anyone were foolish enough to
+advance it) that Palestrina is mainly to be remembered as having
+prepared the way for Perosi. Byrde prepared the way for Purcell, it is
+true; but even that exceeding glory pales before the greater glory of
+having written the Cantiones Sacrae and the D minor Mass. In its way
+the D minor Mass is as noble and complete an achievement as the St.
+Matthew Passion or the "Messiah," the Choral symphony of Beethoven or
+the G minor symphony of Mozart, "Tristan" or the "Nibelung's Ring." It
+is splendidly planned; it is perfectly beautiful; and from the first
+page to the last it is charged with a grave, sweet, lovely emotion.
+
+The reason why Byrde has not until lately won the homage he deserves
+is simply this: that the musical doctors who have hitherto judged him
+have judged him in the light of the eighteenth-century contrapuntal
+music, and have applied to him in all seriousness Artemus Ward's joke
+about Chaucer--"he couldn't spell." The plain harmonic progressions
+of the later men could be understood by the doctors: they could not
+understand the freer style of harmony which prevailed before the
+strict school came into existence. Artemus Ward, taking up Chaucer,
+professed amazement to find spelling that would not be tolerated in an
+elementary school; the learned doctors, taking up Byrde, found he had
+disregarded all the rules--rules, be it remembered, formulated after
+Byrde's time, just as our modern rules of spelling were made after
+Chaucer's time; and as Artemus Ward jocularly condemned Chaucer, and
+showed his wit in the joke, so the doctors seriously condemned Byrde,
+and showed their stupidity in their unconscious joke. They could
+understand one side of Tallis. His motet in forty parts, for instance:
+they knew the difficulties of writing such a thing, and they could see
+the ingenuity he showed in his various ways of getting round the
+difficulties. They could not see the really fine points of the
+forty-part motet: the broad scheme of the whole thing, and the almost
+Handelian way of massing the various choirs so as to heap climax on
+climax until a perfectly satisfying finish was reached. Still, there
+was something for them to see in Tallis; whereas in Byrde there was
+nothing for them to see that they had eyes to see, or to hear that
+they had ears to hear. They could see that he either wrote consecutive
+fifths and octaves, or dodged them in a way opposed to all the rules,
+that he wrote false relations with the most outrageous recklessness,
+that his melodies were irregular and not measured out by the bar; but
+they could not feel, could not be expected to feel, the marvellous
+beauty of the results he got by his dodges, the marvellous
+expressiveness of his music. These old doctors may be forgiven, and,
+being long dead, they care very little whether they are forgiven or
+not. But the modern men who parrot-like echo their verdicts cannot and
+should not be forgiven. We know now that the stiff contrapuntal school
+marked a stage in development of music which it was necessary that
+music should go through. The modern men who care nothing for
+rules--for instance Wagner and Tschaikowsky--could not have come
+immediately after Byrde; even Beethoven could not have come
+immediately after Byrde and Sweelinck and Palestrina, all of whom
+thought nothing of the rules that had not been definitely stated in
+their time. Before Beethoven--and after Beethoven, Wagner and all the
+moderns--could come, music had to go through the stiff scientific
+stage; a hundred thousand things that had been done instinctively by
+the early men had to be reduced to rule; a science as well as an art
+of music had to be built up. It was built up, and in the process of
+building up noble works of art were achieved. After it was built up
+and men had got, so to say, a grip of music and no longer merely
+groped, Beethoven and Wagner went back to the freedom and
+indifference to rule of the first composers; and the mere fact of
+their having done so should show us that the rules were nothing in
+themselves, nothing, that is, save temporary guide-posts or landmarks
+which the contrapuntal men set up for their own private use while they
+were exploring the unknown fields of music. We should know, though
+many of us do not, that it is simply stupid to pass adverse judgment
+on the early composers who did not use, and because they did not use,
+these guide-posts, which had not then been set up, though one by one
+they were being set up. For a very short time the rules of
+counterpoint were looked upon as eternal and immutable. During that
+period the early men were human-naturally looked upon as barbarians.
+But that period is long past. We know the laws of counterpoint to be
+not eternal, not immutable; but on the contrary to have been
+short-lived convention that is now altogether disregarded. So it is
+time to look at the early music through our own, and not through the
+eighteenth-century doctors' eyes; and when we do that we find the
+early music to be as beautiful as any ever written, as expressive, and
+quite as well constructed. There are, as I have said, people who
+to-day prefer Mr. Jackson in F and his friends to Byrde. What, I
+wonder, would be said if a literary man preferred, say, some
+eighteenth-century poetaster to Chaucer because the poetaster in his
+verse observed rules which Chaucer never dreamed of, because, to drag
+in Artemus Ward once again, the poetaster's spelling conformed more
+nearly to ours than Chaucer's!
+
+The Mass is indeed noble and stately, but it is miraculously
+expressive as well. Its expressiveness is the thing that strikes one
+more forcibly every time one hears it. At first one feels chiefly its
+old-world freshness--not the picturesque spring freshness of Purcell
+and Handel, but a freshness that is sweet and grave and cool, coming
+out of the Elizabethan days when life, at its fastest, went
+deliberately, and was lived in many-gabled houses with trees and
+gardens, or in great palaces with pleasant courtyards, and the Thames
+ran unpolluted to the sea, and the sun shone daily even in London, and
+all things were fair and clean. It is old-world music, yet it stands
+nearer to us than most of the music written in and immediately after
+Handel's period, the period of dry formalism and mere arithmetic.
+There is not a sign of the formal melodic outlines which we recognise
+at once in any piece out of the contrapuntal time, not an indication
+that the Academic, "classical," unpoetic, essay-writing eighteenth
+century was coming. The formal outlines had not been invented, for
+rules and themes that would work without breaking the rules were
+little thought of. Byrde evades the rules in the frankest manner: in
+this Mass alone there are scores of evasions that would have been
+inevitably condemned a century afterwards, and might even be
+condemned by the contrapuntists of to-day. The eighteenth-century
+doctors who edited Byrde early in this century did not in the least
+understand why he wrote as he did, and doubtless would have put him
+right if they had thought of having the work sung instead of simply
+having it printed as an antiquarian curiosity. The music does not
+suggest the eighteenth century with its jangling harpsichords, its
+narrow, dirty streets, its artificiality, its brilliant candle-lighted
+rooms where the wits and great ladies assembled and talked more or
+less naughtily. There is indeed a strange, pathetic charm in the
+eighteenth century to which no one can be indifferent: it is a dead
+century, with the dust upon it, and yet a faint lingering aroma as of
+dead rose petals. But the old-world atmosphere of Byrde's music is, at
+least to me, something finer than that: it is the atmosphere of a
+world which still lives: it is remote from us and yet very near: for
+the odour of dead rose petals and dust you have a calm cool air, and a
+sense of fragrant climbing flowers and of the shade of full foliaged
+trees. All is sane, clean, fresh: one feels that the sun must always
+have shone in those days. This quality, however, it shares with a
+great deal of the music of the "spacious days" of Elizabeth. But of
+its expressiveness there is not too much to be found in the music of
+other musicians than Byrde in Byrde's day. He towered high above all
+the composers who had been before him; he stands higher than any
+other English musician who has lived since, with the exception of
+Purcell. It is foolish to think of comparing his genius with the
+genius of Palestrina; but the two men will also be reckoned close
+together by those who know this Mass and the Cantiones Sacrae. They
+were both consummate masters of the technique of their art; they both
+had a fund of deep and original emotion; they both knew how to express
+it through their music. I have not space to mention all the examples I
+could wish. But every reader of this article may be strongly
+recommended at once to play, even on the piano, the sublime passage
+beginning at the words "Qui propter nos homines," noting more
+especially the magnificent effect of the swelling mass of sound
+dissolving in a cadence at the "Crucifixus." Another passage, equal to
+any ever written, begins at "Et unam Sanctam Catholicam." There is a
+curious energy in the repetition of "Et Apostolicam Ecclesiam," and
+then a wistful sweetness and tenderness at "Confiteor unum baptisma."
+Again, the whole of the "Agnus" is divine, the repeated "miserere
+nobis," and the passage beginning at the "Dona nobis pacem,"
+possessing that sweetness, tenderness and wonderful calm. But there is
+not a number that does not contain passages which one must rank
+amongst the greatest things in the world; and it must be borne in mind
+that these passages are not detached, nor in fact detachable, but
+integral, essential parts of a fine architectural scheme.
+
+
+
+
+OUR LAST GREAT MUSICIAN (HENRY PURCELL, 1658-95)
+
+
+I.
+
+Purcell is too commonly written of as "the founder of the English
+school" of music. Now, far be it from me to depreciate the works of
+the composers who are supposed to form the "English school." I would
+not sneer at the strains which have lulled to quiet slumbers so many
+generations of churchgoers. But everyone who knows and loves Purcell
+must enter a most emphatic protest against that great composer being
+held responsible, if ever so remotely, for the doings of the "English
+school." Jackson (in F), Boyce and the rest owed nothing to Purcell;
+the credit of having founded _them_ must go elsewhere, and may beg a
+long time, I am much afraid, in the land of the shades before any
+composer will be found willing to take it. Purcell was not the founder
+but the splendid close of a school, and that school one of the very
+greatest the world has seen. And to-day, when he is persistently
+libelled, not more in blame than in the praise which is given him, it
+seems worth while making a first faint attempt to break through the
+net of tradition that has been woven and is daily being woven closer
+around him, to see him as he stands in such small records as may be
+relied upon and not as we would fain have him be, to understand his
+relation to his predecessors and learn his position in musical
+history, to hear his music without prejudice and distinguish its
+individual qualities. This is a hard task, and one which I can only
+seek to achieve here in the roughest and barest manner; yet any manner
+at all is surely much better than letting the old fictions go
+unreproved, while our greatest musician drifts into the twilight past,
+misunderstood, unloved, unremembered, save when an Abbey wants a new
+case for its organ, an organ on which Purcell never played, or a
+self-styled Purcell authority wishes to set up a sort of claim of part
+or whole proprietorship in him.
+
+
+II.
+
+Hardly more is known of Purcell than of Shakespeare. There is no
+adequate biography. Hawkins and Burney (who is oftenest Hawkins at
+second-hand) are alike rash, random, and untrustworthy, depending much
+upon the anecdotage of old men, who were no more to be believed than
+the ancient bandsmen of the present day who tell you how Mendelssohn
+or Wagner flattered them or accepted hints from them. Cummings' life
+is scarcely even a sketch; at most it is a thumbnail sketch. Only
+ninety-five pages deal with Purcell, and of these at least ninety-four
+are defaced by maudlin sentimentality, or unhappy attempts at
+criticism (see the remarks on the Cecilia Ode) or laughable sequences
+of disconnected incongruities--as, for instance, when Mr. Cummings
+remarks that "Queen Mary died of small-pox, and the memory of her
+goodness was felt so universally," etc. Born in 1658, Purcell lived in
+Pepys' London, and died in 1095, having written complimentary odes to
+three kings--Charles the Second, James the Second, and William the
+Third. Besides these complimentary odes, he wrote piles of
+instrumental music, a fair heap of anthems, and songs and interludes
+and overtures for some forty odd plays. This is nearly the sum of our
+knowledge. His outward life seems to have been uneventful enough. He
+probably lived the common life of the day--the day being, as I have
+said, Pepys' day. Mr. Cummings has tried to show him as a seventeenth
+century Mendelssohn--conventionally idealised--and he quotes the
+testimony of some "distinguished divine," chaplain to a nobleman, as
+though we did not know too well why noblemen kept chaplains in those
+days to regard their testimony as worth more than other men's. The
+truth is, that if Purcell had lived differently from his neighbours he
+would have been called a Puritan. On the other hand, we must remember
+that he composed so much in his short life that his dissipations must
+have made a poor show beside those of many of his great
+contemporaries--those of Dryden, for instance, who used to hide from
+his duns in Purcell's private room in the clock-tower of St. James's
+Palace. I picture him as a sturdy, beef-eating Englishman, a puissant,
+masterful, as well as lovable personality, a born king of men,
+ambitious of greatness, determined, as Tudway says, to exceed every
+one of his time, less majestic than Handel, perhaps, but full of
+vigour and unshakable faith in his genius. His was an age when genius
+inspired confidence both in others and in its possessor, not, as now,
+suspicion in both; and Purcell was believed in from the first by many,
+and later, by all--even by Dryden, who began by flattering Monsieur
+Grabut, and ended, as was his wont, by crossing to the winning side.
+And Purcell is no more to be pitied for his sad life than to be
+praised as a conventionally idealised Mendelssohn. His life was brief,
+but not tragic. He never lacked his bread as Mozart lacked his; he was
+not, like Beethoven, tormented by deafness and tremblings for the
+immediate future; he had no powerful foes to fight, for he did not bid
+for a great position in the world like Handel. Nor was he a romantic
+consumptive like Chopin, with a bad cough, a fastidious regard for
+beauty, and a flow of anaemic melody. He was divinely gifted with a
+greater richness of invention than was given to any other composers
+excepting two, Bach and Mozart; and death would not take his gifts as
+an excuse when he was thirty-seven. Hence our Mr. Cummings has
+droppings of lukewarm tears; hence, generally, compassion for his
+comparatively short life has ousted admiration for his mighty works
+from the minds of those who are readier at all times to indulge in the
+luxury of weeping than to feel the thrill of joy in a life greatly
+lived. Purcell might have achieved more magnificent work, but that is
+a bad reason for forgetting the magnificence of the work he did
+achieve. But I myself am forgetting that the greatness of his music is
+not admitted, and that the shortness of his life is merely urged as an
+excuse for not finding it admirable. And remembering this, I assert
+that Purcell's life was a great and glorious one, and that now his
+place is with the high gods whom we adore, the lords and givers of
+light.
+
+
+III.
+
+Before Purcell's position in musical history can be ascertained and
+fixed, it is absolutely necessary to make some survey of the rise of
+the school of which he was the close.
+
+In our unmusical England of to-day it is as hard to believe in an
+England where music was perhaps the dominant passion of the people as
+it is to understand how this should have been forgotten in a more
+musical age than ours. Until the time of Handel's arrival in this
+country there was no book printed which did not show unmistakably that
+its writer loved music. It is a fact (as the learned can vouch) that
+Erasmus considered the English the most given up to music of all the
+peoples of Europe; and how far these were surpassed by the English is
+further shown by the fact that English musicians were as common in
+continental towns in those days as foreign musicians are in England
+nowadays. I refrain from quoting Peacham, North, Anthony Wood, Pepys,
+and the rest of the much over-quoted; but I wish to lay stress on the
+fact that here music was widespread and highly cultivated, just as it
+was in Germany in the eighteenth century. Moreover, an essential
+factor in the development of the German school was not wanting in
+England. Each German prince had his Capellmeister; and English nobles
+and gentlemen, wealthier than German princes, differing from them only
+in not being permitted to assume a pretentious title, had each his
+Musick-master. I believe I could get together a long list of musicians
+who were thus kept. It will be remembered that when Handel came to
+England he quickly entered the service of the Duke of Chandos. The
+royal court always had a number of musicians employed in the making or
+the performing of music. Oliver Cromwell retained them and paid them;
+Charles the Second added to them, and in many cases did not pay them
+at all, so that at least one is known to have died of starvation, and
+the others were everlastingly clamouring for arrears of salary. It was
+the business of these men (in the intervals of asking for their
+salaries) to produce music for use in the church and in the house or
+palace; that for church use being of course nearly entirely
+vocal--masses or anthems; that for house use, vocal and
+instrumental--madrigals and fancies (_i.e._ fantasias). As generation
+succeeded generation, a certain body of technique was built up and a
+mode of expression found; and at length the first great wave of music
+culminated in the works of Tallis and Byrde. Their technique and mode
+of expression I shall say something about presently; and all the
+criticism I have to pass on them is that Byrde is infinitely greater
+than Tallis, and seems worthy indeed to stand beside Palestrina and
+Sweelinck. Certainly anyone who wishes to have a true notion of the
+music of this period should obtain (if he can) copies of the D minor
+five-part mass, and the Cantiones Sacrae, and carefully study such
+numbers as the "Agnus Dei" of the former and the profound "Tristitia
+et anxietas" in the latter.
+
+The learned branch of the English school reached its climax. Meantime
+another branch, not unlearned, but caring less for scholastic
+perfection than for perfect expression of poetic sentiment, was fast
+growing. The history of the masque is a stale matter, so I will merely
+mention that Campion, and many another with, before, and after him,
+engaged during a great part of their lives in what can only be called
+the manufacture of these entertainments. A masque was simply a
+gorgeous show of secular ritual, of colour and of music--a kind of
+Drury Lane melodrama in fact, but as far removed from Drury Lane as
+this age is from that in the widespread faculty of appreciating
+beauty. The music consisted of tunes of a popular outline and
+sentiment, but they were dragged into the province of art by the
+incapacity of those who wrote or adapted them to touch anything
+without leaving it lovelier than when they lighted on it. Pages might
+be, and I daresay some day will be, written about Dr. Campion's
+melody, its beauty and power, the unique sense of rhythmic subtleties
+which it shows, and withal its curiously English quality. But one
+important thing we must observe: it is wholly secular melody. Even
+when written in the ecclesiastical modes, it has no, or the very
+slightest, ecclesiastical tinge. It is folk-melody with its face
+washed and hair combed; it bears the same relation to English
+folk-melody as a chorale from the "Matthew" Passion bears to its
+original. Another important point is this: whereas the church
+composers took a few Latin sentences and made no endeavour to treat
+them so as to make sense in the singing, but made the words wait upon
+the musical phrases, in Dr. Campion we see the first clear wish to
+weld music and poem into one flawless whole. To an extent he
+succeeded, but full success did not come till several generations had
+first tried, tried and failed. Campion properly belongs to the
+sixteenth century, and Harry Lawes, born twenty-five years before
+Campion died, as properly belongs to the seventeenth century. In his
+songs we find even more marked the determination that words and music
+shall go hand in hand--that the words shall no longer be dragged at
+the cart-tail of the melody, so to say. In fact, a main objection
+against Lawes--and a true one in many instances--is that he sacrificed
+the melody rather than the meaning of the poem. This is significant.
+The Puritans are held to have damaged church music less by burning the
+choir-books and pawning the organ-pipes than by insisting (as we may
+say) on One word one note. As a matter of fact, this was not
+exclusively a plank in the political platform of the Puritans. The
+Loyalist Campion, the Loyalist Lawes, and many another Loyalist
+insisted on it. Even when they did not write a note to each word, they
+took care not to have long roulades (divisions) on unimportant words,
+but to derive the accent of the music from that of the poem. This
+showed mainly two tendencies: first, one towards expression of poetic
+feeling and towards definiteness of that expression, the other towards
+the entirely new technique which was to supersede the contrapuntal
+technique of Byrde and Palestrina. In making a mass or an anthem or
+secular composition, the practice of these old masters was to start
+with a fragment of church or secular melody which we will call A;
+after (say) the trebles had sung it or a portion of it, the altos took
+it up and the trebles went on to a new phrase B, which dovetailed with
+A. Then the tenors took up A, the altos went on to B, the trebles went
+on to a new phrase C, until ultimately, if we lettered each
+successive phrase that appeared, we should get clear away from the
+beginning of the alphabet to X, Y, and Z. This, of course, is a crude
+and stiff way of describing the process of weaving and interweaving by
+which the old music was spun, for often the phrase A would come up
+again and again in one section of a composition and sometimes
+throughout the whole, and strict canon was comparatively rare in music
+which was not called by that name; but the description will serve.
+This technique proved admirable for vocal polyphony--how admirable we
+have all the Flemish and Italian and English contrapuntal music to
+show. But it was no longer available when music was wanted for the
+single voice, unless that voice was treated as one of several real
+parts, the others being placed in the accompaniment. A new technique
+was therefore wanted. For that new technique the new composers went
+back to the oldest technique of all. The old minstrels used music as a
+means of giving accent and force to their poems; and now, as a means
+of spinning a web of tone which should not only be beautiful, but also
+give utterance to the feeling of the poem, composers went back to the
+method of the minstrels. They disregarded rhythm more and more (as may
+be seen if you compare Campion with Lawes), and sought only to make
+the notes follow the accent of the poetry, thus converting music into
+conventionally idealised speech or declamation. Lawes carried this
+method as far as ever it has been, and probably can be, carried. When
+Milton said,
+
+    "Harry, whose tuneful and well-measured notes
+    First taught our English music how to span
+    Words with just note and accent,"
+
+he did not mean that Lawes was the first to bar his music, for music
+had been barred long before Lawes. He meant that Lawes did not use the
+poem as an excuse for a melody, but the melody as a means of
+effectively declaiming the poet's verse. The poet (naturally) liked
+this--hence Milton's compliments. It should be noted that many of the
+musicians of this time were poets--of a sort--themselves, and wished
+to make the most of their verses; so that it would be a mistake to
+regard declamation as something forced by the poet, backed by popular
+opinion, upon the musician. With Lawes, then, what we may call the
+declamatory branch of the English school culminated. Except in his
+avowedly declamatory passages, Purcell did not spin his web precisely
+thus; but we shall presently see that his method was derived from the
+declamatory method. Much remained to be done first. Lawes got rid of
+the old scholasticism, now effete. But he never seemed quite sure that
+his expression would come off. It is hard at this day to listen to his
+music as Milton must have listened to it; but having done my best, I
+am compelled to own that I find some of his songs without meaning or
+comeliness, and must assume either that our ancestors of this period
+had a sense which has been lost, or that the music played a less
+important part compared with the poem than has been generally
+supposed. Lawes lost rhythm, both as an element in beauty and a factor
+in expression. Moreover, his harmonic resources were sadly limited,
+for the old device of letting crossing parts clash in sweet discords
+that resolved into as sweet or sweeter concords was denied him. What
+would be called nowadays the new harmony, the new rhythm and the new
+forms were developed during the Civil War and the Puritan reign. The
+Puritans, loving music but detesting it in their churches, forced it
+into purely secular channels; and we cannot say the result was bad,
+for the result was Purcell. John Jenkins and a host of smaller men
+developed instrumental music, and, though the forms they used were
+thrown aside when Charles II. arrived, the power of handling the
+instruments remained as a legacy to Charles's men. Charles drove the
+secular movement faster ahead by banning the old ecclesiastical music
+(which, it appears, gave him "the blues"), and by compelling his young
+composers to write livelier strains for the church, that is, church
+music which was in reality nothing but secular music. He sent Pelham
+Humphries to Paris, and when Humphries came back "an absolute
+Monsieur" (who does not remember that ever-green entry in the Diary?)
+he brought with him all that could possibly have been learnt from
+Lulli. He died at twenty-seven, having been Purcell's master; and
+though Purcell's imagination was richer, deeper, more strenuous in the
+ebb and flow of its tides, one might fancy that the two men had but
+one spirit, which went on growing and fetching forth the fruits of the
+spirit, while young Humphries' body decayed by the side of his younger
+wife's in the Thames-sodden vaults of Westminster Abbey.
+
+
+IV.
+
+A complete list of Purcell's compositions appears somewhat formidable
+at a first glance, but when one comes to examine it carefully the
+solidity seems somewhat to melt out of it. The long string of church
+pieces is made up of anthems, many of them far from long. The forty
+odd "operas" are not operas at all, but sets of incidental pieces and
+songs for plays, and some of the sets are very short. Thus Dryden
+talks of Purcell setting "my three songs," and there are only half a
+dozen "curtain-tunes," _i.e._ entr'actes. Many of the harpsichord
+pieces are of tiny proportions. The sonatas of three and four parts
+are no larger than Mozart's piano sonatas. Still, taking into account
+the noble quality that is constantly maintained, we must admit that
+Purcell used astonishingly the short time he was given. Much of his
+music is lost; more of it lies in manuscript at the British Museum and
+elsewhere. Some of it was issued last century, some early in this.
+Four expensive volumes have been wretchedly edited and issued by the
+Purcell Society, and those amongst us who live to the age of
+Methuselah will probably see all the accessible works printed by this
+body. Some half century ago Messrs. Novello published an edition of
+the church music, stupidly edited by the stupidest editor who ever
+laid clumsy fingers on a masterpiece. A shameful edition of the "King
+Arthur" music was prepared for the Birmingham Festival of 1897 by Mr.
+J.A. Fuller-Maitland, musical critic of "The Times." A publisher
+far-sighted and generous enough to issue a trustworthy edition of all
+Purcell's music at a moderate price has yet to be found.
+
+Purcell's list is not long, but it is superb. Yet he opened out no new
+paths, he made no leap aside from the paths of his predecessors, as
+Gluck did in the eighteenth century and Wagner in the nineteenth. He
+was one of their school; he went on in the direction they had led; but
+the distance he travelled was enormous. Humphries, possibly Captain
+Cook, even Christopher Gibbons, helped to open out the new way in
+church music; Lawes, Matthew Lock, and Banister were before him at the
+theatres; Lock and Dr. Blow had written odes before he was weaned; the
+form and plan of his sonatas came certainly from Bassani, in all
+likelihood from Corelli also; from John Jenkins and the other writers
+of fancies he got something of his workmanship and art of weaving many
+melodies into a coherent whole, and a knowledge of Lulli would help
+him to attain terseness, and save him from that drifting which is the
+weak point of the old English instrumental writers; he was acquainted
+with the music of Carissimi, a master of choral effect. In a word, he
+owed much to his predecessors, even as Bach, Haydn, Mozart, and
+Beethoven owed to their predecessors; and he did as they did--won his
+greatness by using to fine ends the means he found, rather than by
+inventing the means, though, like them, some means he did invent.
+
+Like his predecessors Purcell hung between the playhouse, the church,
+and the court; but unlike most of them he had only one style, which
+had to serve in one place as in another. I have already shown the
+growth of the secular spirit in music. In Purcell that spirit reached
+its height. His music is always secular, always purely pagan. I do not
+mean that it is inappropriate in the church--for nothing more
+appropriate was ever written--nor that Purcell was insincere, as our
+modern church composers are insincere, without knowing it. I do mean
+that of genuine religious emotion, of the sustained ecstasy of Byrde
+and Palestrina, it shows no trace. I should not like to have to define
+the religious beliefs of any man in Charles II.'s court, but it would
+seem that Purcell was religious in his way. He accepted the God of
+the church as the savage accepts the God of his fathers; he wrote his
+best music with a firm conviction that it would please his God. But
+his God was an entity placed afar off, unapproachable; and of entering
+into communion with Him through the medium of music Purcell had no
+notion. The ecstatic note I take to be the true note of religious art;
+and in lacking and in having no sense of it Purcell stands close to
+the early religious painters and monk-writers, the carvers of twelfth
+century woodwork, and the builders of Gothic cathedrals. He thinks of
+externals and never dreams of looking for "inward light"; and the
+proof of this is that he seems never consciously to endeavour to
+express a mood, but strenuously seeks to depict images called up by
+the words he sets. With no intention of being flippant, but in all
+earnestness, I declare it is my belief that if Purcell had ever set
+the "Agnus Dei" (and I don't remember that he did) he would have drawn
+a frisky lamb and tried to paint its snow-white fleece; and this not
+because he lacked reverence, but because of his absolute religious
+naivete, and because this drawing and painting of outside objects (so
+to speak) in music was his one mode of expression. It should be
+clearly understood that word-painting is not descriptive music.
+Descriptive music suggests to the ear, word-painting to the eye. But
+the two merge in one another. What we call a higher note is so called
+because sounds produced by the mere rapid vibrations make every
+being, without exception, who has a musical ear, think of height, just
+as a lower note makes us all think of depth. Hence a series of notes
+forming an arch on paper may, and does, suggest an arch to one's
+imagination through the ear. It is perhaps a dodge, but Handel used it
+extensively--for instance, in such choruses as "All we like sheep,"
+"When his loud voice" ("Jephtha"), nearly every choral number of
+"Israel in Egypt," and some of the airs. Bach used it too, and we find
+it--the rainbow theme in "Das Rheingold" is an example--in Wagner. But
+with these composers "word-painting," as it is called, seems always to
+be used for a special effect; whereas it is the very essence of
+Purcell's music. He has been reproved for it by the eminent Hullah,
+who prettily alludes to it as a "defect" from which other music
+composed at the time suffers; but the truth is, you might as well call
+rhyme a "defect" of the couplet or the absence of rhyme a "defect" of
+blank verse. It is an integral part of the music, as inseparable as
+sound from tone, as atoms from the element they constitute. But the
+question, why did Purcell write thus, and not as Mozart and Beethoven,
+brings me to the point at which I must show the precise relationship
+in which Purcell stood to his musical ancestors, and how in writing as
+he did he was merely carrying on and developing their technique.
+
+For we must not forget that the whole problem for the seventeenth
+century was one of technique. The difficulty was to spin a tone-web
+which should be at once beautiful, expressive, and modern--modern
+above all things, in some sort of touch with the common feeling of the
+time. I have told how the earlier composers spun their web, and how
+Lawes attained to loveliness of a special kind by pure declamation. In
+later times there was an immense common fund of common phrases, any
+one of which only needed modification by a composer to enable him to
+express anything he pleased. But Purcell came betwixt the old time and
+the new, and had to build up a technique which was not wholly his own,
+by following with swift steps and indefatigable energy on lines
+indicated even while Lawes was alive. Those lines were, of course, in
+the direction of word-painting, and I must admit that the first
+word-painting seems very silly to nineteenth century ears and
+eyes--eyes not less than ears. To the work of the early men Purcell's
+stands in just the same relation as Bach's declamation stands to
+Lawes'. Lawes declaims with a single eye on making clear the points of
+the poem: the voice rises or falls, lingers on a note or hastens away,
+to that one end. Bach also declaims--indeed his music is entirely
+based on declamation,--but as one who wishes to communicate an emotion
+and regards the attainment of beauty as being quite as important as
+expression. With him the voice rises or falls as a man's voice does
+when he experiences keen sensation; but the wavy line of the melody as
+it goes along and up and down the stave is treated conventionally and
+changed into a lovely pattern for the ear's delight; and as there can
+be no regular pattern without regular rhythm, rhythm is a vital
+element in Bach's music. So with Purcell, with a difference. The early
+"imitative" men had sought chiefly for dainty conceits. Pepys was the
+noted composer of "Beauty, Retire" and his joy when he went to church,
+"where fine music on the word trumpet" will be remembered. He
+doubtless liked the clatter of it, and liked the clatter the more for
+occurring on that word, and probably he was not very curious as to
+whether it was really beautiful or not. But Purcell could not write an
+unlovely thing. His music on the word trumpet would be beautiful (it
+is in "Bonduca"); and if (as he did) he sent the bass plunging
+headlong from the top to the bottom of a scale to illustrate "they
+that go down to the sea in ships," that headlong plunge would be
+beautiful too--so beautiful as to be heard with as great pleasure by
+those who know what the words are about as by those who don't. Like
+Bach, Purcell depended much on rhythm for the effect of his pattern;
+unlike Bach, his patterns have a strangely picturesque quality;
+through the ear they suggest the forms of leaf and blossom, the
+trailing tendril,--suggest them only, and dimly, vaguely,--yet, one
+feels, with exquisite fidelity. Thus Purcell, following those who, in
+sending the voice part along the line, pressed it up at the word
+"high" and down at "low," and thus got an irregularly wavy line of
+tone or melody, solved the problem of spinning his continuous web of
+sound; and the fact that his web is beautiful and possesses this
+peculiar picturesqueness is his justification for solving the problem
+in this way. After all, his way was the way of early designers, who
+filled their circles, squares, and triangles with the forms of leaf
+and flower. And just as those forms were afterwards conventionalised
+and used by thousands who probably had no vaguest notion of their
+origin, so many of Purcell's phrases became ossified and fell into the
+common stock of phrases which form the language of music. It is
+interesting to note that abroad Pasquini and Kuhlau went to work very
+much in Purcell's fashion, and added to that same stock from which
+Handel and Bach and every subsequent composer drew, each adding
+something of his own.
+
+It was not by accident that Purcell, with this astonishing fertility
+of picturesque phrases, should also have written so much, and such
+vividly coloured picturesque pieces--pieces, I mean, descriptive of
+the picturesque. Of course, to write an imitative phrase is quite
+another matter from writing a successful piece of descriptive music.
+But in Purcell the same faculty enabled him to do both. No poet of
+that time seems to have been enamoured of hedgerows and flowers and
+fields, nor can I say with certitude that Purcell was. Yet in
+imagination at least he loves to dwell amongst them; and not the
+country alone, the thought of the sea also, stirs him deeply. There
+need only be some mention of sunshine or rain among the leaves, green
+trees, or wind-swept grass, the yellow sea-beach or the vast
+sea-depths, and his imagination flames and flares. His best music was
+written when he was appealed to throughout a long work--as "The
+Tempest"--in this manner. Hence, it seems to me, that quality which
+his music, above any other music in the world, possesses: a peculiar
+sweetness, not a boudoir sweetness like Chopin's sweetness, nor a
+sweetness corrected, like Chopin's, by a subtle strain of poisonous
+acid or sub-acid quality, but the sweet and wholesome cleanliness of
+the open air and fields, the freshness of sun showers and cool morning
+winds. I am not exaggerating the importance of this element in his
+music. It is perpetually present, so that at last one comes to think,
+as I have been compelled to think this long time, that Purcell wrote
+nothing but descriptive music all his life. Of course it may be that
+the special formation of his melodies misleads one sometimes, and that
+Purcell in inventing them often did not dream of depicting natural
+objects. But, remembering the gusto with which he sets descriptive
+words, using these phrases consciously with a picturesque purpose, it
+is hard to accept this view. In all likelihood he was constituted
+similarly to Weber, who, his son asserts, curiously converted the
+lines and colours of trees and winding roads and all objects of nature
+into thematic material (there is an anecdote--apparently, for a
+wonder, a true one--that shows he took the idea of a march from a heap
+of chairs stacked upside down in a beer-garden during a shower of
+rain). But Purcell is infinitely simpler, less fevered, than Weber.
+Sometimes his melodies have the long-drawn, frail delicacy, the
+splendidly ordered irregularity of a trailing creeper, and something
+of its endless variety of leaf clustering round a central stem. But
+there is an entire absence of tropical luxuriance. A grave simplicity
+prevails, and we find no jewellery; showing Purcell to have been a
+supreme artist.
+
+
+V.
+
+So far I have spoken of his music generally, and now I come to deal
+(briefly, for my space is far spent) with the orchestral, choral, and
+chamber music and songs; and first with the choral music. I begin to
+fear that by insisting so strongly on the distinctive sweetness of
+Purcell's melody, I may have given a partially or totally wrong
+impression. Let me say at once, therefore, that delicate as he often
+was, and sweet as he was more often, although he could write melodies
+which are mere iridescent filaments of tone, he never became flabby
+or other than crisp, and could, and did, write themes as flexible,
+sinewy, unbreakable as perfectly tempered steel bands. And these
+themes he could lay together and weld into choruses of gigantic
+strength. The subject and counter-subject of "Thou art the King of
+Glory" (in the "Te Deum" in D), the theme of "Let all rehearse," and
+the ground bass of the final chorus (both in "Dioclesian"), the
+subjects of many of the fugues of the anthems, are as energetic as
+anything written by Handel, Bach or Mozart. And as for the choruses he
+makes of them, Handel's are perhaps loftier and larger structures, and
+Bach succeeds in getting effects which Purcell never gets, for the
+simple enough reason that Purcell, coming a generation before Bach,
+never tried or thought of trying to get them. But within his limits he
+achieves results that can only be described as stupendous. For
+instance, the chorus I have just mentioned--"Let all rehearse"--makes
+one think of Handel, because Handel obviously thought of it when he
+wrote "Fixed in His everlasting seat," and though Handel works out the
+idea to greater length, can we say that he gets a proportionately
+greater effect? I have not the faintest wish to elevate Purcell at
+Handel's expense, for Handel is to me, as to all men, one of the gods
+of music; but Purcell also is one of the gods, and I must insist that
+in this particular chorus he equalled Handel with smaller means and
+within narrower limits. It is not always so, for Handel is king of
+writers for the chorus, as Purcell is king of those who paint in
+music; but though Handel wrote more great choruses, his debt to
+Purcell is enormous. His way of hurling great masses of choral tone at
+his hearers is derived from Purcell; and so is the rhetorical plan of
+many of his choruses. But in Purcell, despite his sheer strength, we
+never fail to get the characteristic Purcellian touch, the little
+unexpected inflexion, or bit of coloured harmony that reminds that
+this is the music of the open air, not of the study, that does more
+than this, that actually floods you in a moment with a sense of the
+spacious blue heavens with light clouds flying. For instance, one gets
+it in the great "Te Deum" in the first section; again at "To thee,
+cherubim," where the first and second trebles run down in liquid
+thirds with magical effect; once more at the fourteenth bar of "Thou
+art the King of Glory," where he uses the old favourite device of
+following up the flattened leading note of the dominant key in one
+part by the sharp leading note in another part--a device used with
+even more exquisite result in the chorus of "Full fathom five."
+Purcell is in many ways like Mozart, and in none more than in these
+incessantly distinctive touches, though in character the touches are
+as the poles apart. In Mozart, especially when he veils the poignancy
+of his emotion under a scholastic mode of expression, a sudden tremor
+in the voice, as it were, often betrays him, and none can resist the
+pathos of it. Purcell's touches are pathetic, too, in another
+fashion--pathetic because of the curious sense of human weakness, the
+sense of tears, caused by the sudden relaxation of emotional tension
+that inevitably results when one comes on a patch of simple naked
+beauty when nothing but elaborate grandeur expressive of powerful
+exaltation had been anticipated. That Purcell foresaw this result, and
+deliberately used the means to achieve it, I cannot doubt. Those
+momentary slackenings of tense excitement are characteristic of the
+exalted mood and inseparable from it, and he must have known that they
+really go to augment its intensity. All Purcell's choruses, however,
+are not of Handelian mould, for he wrote many that are sheer
+loveliness from beginning to end, many that are the very voice of the
+deepest sadness, many, again, showing a gaiety, an "unbuttoned"
+festivity of feeling, such as never came into music again until
+Beethoven introduced it as a new thing. The opening of one of the
+complimentary odes, "Celebrate this festival," fairly carries one off
+one's feet with the excess of jubilation in the rollicking rhythm and
+living melody of it. One of the most magnificent examples of
+picturesque music ever written--if not the most magnificent, at any
+rate the most delightful in detail--is the anthem, "Thy way, O God, is
+holy." The picture-painting is prepared for with astonishing artistic
+foresight, and when it begins the effect is tremendous. I advise
+everyone who wishes to realise Purcell's unheard-of fertility of great
+and powerful themes to look at "The clouds poured out water," the
+fugue subject "The voice of Thy thunders," the biting emphasis of the
+passage "the lightnings shone upon the ground," and the irresistible
+impulse of "The earth was moved." And the supremacy of Purcell's art
+is shown not more in these than in the succession of simple harmonies
+by which he gets the unutterable mournful poignancy of "Thou knowest,
+Lord," that unsurpassed and unsurpassable piece of choral writing
+which Dr. Crotch, one of the "English school," living in an age less
+sensitive even than this to Purcellian beauty, felt to be so great
+that it would be a desecration to set the words again. Later composers
+set the words again, feeling it no desecration, but possibly rather a
+compliment to Purcell; and Purcell's setting abides, and looks down
+upon every other, like Mozart's G minor and Beethoven's Ninth upon
+every other symphony, or the finale of Wagner's "Tristan" upon every
+other piece of love-music.
+
+
+VI.
+
+Purcell is also a chief, though not the chief, among song-writers. And
+he stands in the second place by reason of the very faculty which
+places him amongst the first of instrumental and choral writers. That
+dominating picturesque power of his, that tendency to write
+picturesque melodies as well as picturesque movements, compelled him
+to treat the voice as he treated any other instrument, and he writes
+page on page which would be at least as effective on any other
+instrument; and as more can be got out of the voice than out of any
+other instrument, and the tip-top song-writers got all out that could
+be got out, it follows that Purcell is below them. But only the very
+greatest of them have beaten him, and he often, by sheer perfection of
+phrase, runs them very close. Still, Mozart, Bach, and Handel do move
+us more profoundly. And an odd demonstration that Purcell the
+instrumental writer is almost above Purcell the composer for the
+voice, is that in such songs as "Halcyon Days" (in "The Tempest") the
+same phrases are perhaps less grateful on the voice than when repeated
+by the instrument. The phrase "That used to lull thee in thy sleep"
+(in "The Indian Queen") is divine when sung, but how thrilling is its
+touching expressiveness, how it seems to speak when the 'cellos repeat
+it! There are, of course, truly vocal melodies in Purcell (as there
+are in Beethoven and Berlioz, who also were not great writers for the
+voice), and some of them might almost be Mozart's. The only difference
+that may be felt between "While joys celestial" ("Cecilia Ode" of
+1683) and a Mozart song, is that in Mozart one gets the frequent
+human touch, and in Purcell the frequent suggestion of the free winds
+and scented blossoms. The various scattered songs, such as "Mad Tom"
+(which is possibly not Purcell's at all) or "Mad Bess" (which
+certainly is), I have no room to discuss; but I may remark that the
+madness was merely an excuse for exhibiting a series of passions in
+what was reckoned at the time a natural manner. Quite possibly it was
+then thought that in a spoken play only mad persons should sing, just
+as Wagner insists that in music-drama only mad persons should speak;
+and as a good deal of singing was required, there were a good many mad
+parts. Probably Purcell would have treated all Wagner's characters,
+and all Berlioz's, as utterly and irretrievably mad. Nor have I space
+to discuss his instrumental music and his instrumentation, but must
+refer shortly to the fact that the overtures to the plays are equal to
+Handel's best in point of grandeur, and that in freedom, quality of
+melody, and daring, and fruitful use of new harmonies, the sonatas are
+ahead of anything attempted until Mozart came. They cannot be compared
+to Bach's suites, and they are infinitely fresher than the writings of
+the Italians whom he imitated. As for Purcell's instrumentation, it is
+primitive compared to Mozart's, but when he uses the instrument in
+group or batteries he obtains gorgeous effects of varied colour. He
+gets delicious effects by means of obligato instrumental parts in the
+accompaniments to such songs as "Charon the Peaceful Shade Invites";
+and those who have heard the "Te Deum" in D may remember that even
+Bach never got more wonderful results from the sweeter tones of the
+trumpet.
+
+
+VII.
+
+Having shown how Purcell sprang from a race of English musicians, and
+how he achieved greater things than any man of his time, it remains
+only to be said that when, with Handel, the German flood deluged
+England, all remembrance of Purcell and his predecessors was swiftly
+swept away. His play-music was washed out of the theatres, his odes
+were carried away from the concert-room; in a word, all his and the
+earlier music was so completely forgotten that when Handel used anew
+his old devices connoisseurs wondered why the Italians and Germans
+should be able to bring forth such things while the English remained
+impotent. So Handel and the Germans were imitated by every composer,
+church or other, who came after, and all our "English music" is purely
+German. That we shall ever throw off that yoke I do not care to
+prophesy; but if ever we do, it will be by imitating Purcell in one
+respect only, that is, by writing with absolute simplicity and
+directness, leaving complexity, muddy profundity and elaborately
+worked-out multiplication sums to the Germans, to whom these things
+come naturally. The Germans are now spent: they produce no more great
+musicians: they produce only music which is as ugly to the ear as it
+is involved to the eye. It is high time for a return to the simplicity
+of Mozart, of Handel, of our own Purcell; to dare, as Wagner dared, to
+write folk-melody, and to put it on the trombones at the risk of being
+called vulgar and rowdy by persons who do not know great art when it
+is original, but only when it resembles some great art of the past
+which they have learnt to know. It was thus Purcell worked, and his
+work stands fast. And when we English awake to the fact that we have a
+music which ought to speak more intimately to us than all the music of
+the continental composers, his work will be marvelled at as a
+new-created thing, and his pieces will appear on English programmes
+and displace the masses of noisome shoddy which we revel in just now.
+It will then be recognised, as even the chilly Burney recognised a
+century ago, failing to recognise much else, that "in the accent of
+passion, and expression of English words, the vocal music of Purcell
+is ... as superior to Handel's as an original poem to a translation."
+Though this is slight praise for one of the very greatest musicians
+the world has produced.
+
+
+
+
+BACH; AND THE "MATTHEW" PASSION AND THE "JOHN"
+
+
+I.
+
+More is known of our mighty old Capellmeister Bach than of
+Shakespeare; less than of Miss Marie Corelli. The main thing is that
+he lived the greater part of his obscure life in Leipzig, turning out
+week by week the due amount of church music as an honest Capellmeister
+should. Other Capellmeisters did likewise; only, while their
+compositions were counterpoint, Bach's were masterworks. There lay the
+sole difference, and the square-toed Leipzig burghers did not perceive
+it. To them Master Bach was a hot-tempered, fastidious, crotchety
+person, endured because no equally competent organist would take his
+place at the price. So he worked without reward, without recognition,
+until his inspiration exhausted itself; and then he sat, imposing in
+massive unconscious strength as a spent volcano, awaiting the end.
+After that was silence: the dust gathered on his music as it lay
+unheard for a century. Haydn and Mozart and Beethoven hardly suspected
+their predecessor's greatness. Then came Mendelssohn (to whom be the
+honour and the glory), and gave to the world, to the world's great
+surprise, the "Matthew" Passion, as one might say, fresh from the
+composer's pen. The B minor mass followed, and gradually the whole of
+the church and instrumental music; and now we are beginning dimly to
+comprehend Bach's greatness.
+
+
+II.
+
+The "John" Passion and the "Matthew" Passion of Bach are as little
+alike as two works dealing with the same subject, and intended for
+performance under somewhat similar conditions, could possibly be; and
+since the "Matthew" version appeals to the modern heart and
+imagination as an ideal setting of the tale of the death of the Man of
+Sorrows, one is apt to follow Spitta in his curious mistake of
+regarding the differences between the two as altogether to the
+disadvantage of the "John." Spitta, indeed, goes further than this. So
+bent is he on proving the superiority of the "Matthew" that what he
+sees as a masterstroke in that work is in the "John" a gross blunder;
+and, on the whole, the pages on the "John" Passion are precisely the
+most fatuous of the many fatuous pages he wrote when he plunged into
+artistic criticism, leaving his own proper element of technical or
+historical criticism. This is a pity, for Spitta really had a very
+good case to spoil. The "Matthew" is without doubt a vaster,
+profounder, more moving and lovelier piece of art than the "John."
+Indeed, being the later work of a composer whose power grew steadily
+from the first until the last time he put pen to paper, it could not
+be otherwise. But the critic who, like Spitta, sees in it only a
+successful attempt at what was attempted unsuccessfully in the
+"John," seems to me to mistake the aim both of the "John" and the
+"Matthew." The "John" is not in any sense unsuccessful, but a
+complete, consistent and masterly achievement; and if it stands a
+little lower than the "Matthew," if the "Matthew" is mightier, more
+impressive, more overwhelming in its great tenderness, this is not
+because the Bach who wrote in 1722-23 was a bungler or an incomplete
+artist, but because the Bach who wrote in 1729 was inspired by a
+loftier idea than had come to the Bach of 1723. It was only necessary
+to compare the impression one received when the "John" Passion was
+sung by the Bach Choir in 1896 with that received at the "Matthew"
+performance in St. Paul's in the same year, to realise that it is in
+idea, not in power of realising the idea, that the two works
+differ--differ more widely than might seem possible, seeing that the
+subject is the same, and that the same musical forms--chorus, chorale,
+song and recitative--are used in each.
+
+Waking on the morrow of the "John" performance, my memory was
+principally filled with those hoarse, stormy, passionate roarings of
+an enraged mob. A careless reckoning shows that whereas the people's
+choruses in the "Matthew" Passion occupy about ninety bars, in the
+"John" they fill about two hundred and fifty. "Barabbas" in the
+"Matthew" is a single yell; in the "John" it takes up four bars. "Let
+Him be crucified" in the "Matthew" is eighteen bars long, counting
+the repetition, while "Crucify" and "Away with Him" in the "John"
+amount to fifty bars. Moreover, the people's choruses are written in a
+much more violent and tempestuous style in the earlier than in the
+later setting. In the "Matthew" there is nothing like those terrific
+ascending and descending chromatic passages in "Waere dieser nicht ein
+Ubelthaeter" and "Wir duerfen Niemand toeden," or the short breathless
+shouts near the finish of the former chorus, as though the infuriated
+rabble had nearly exhausted itself, or, again, the excited chattering
+of the soldiers when they get Christ's coat, "Lasst uns den nicht
+zertheilen." Considering these things, one sees that the first
+impression the "John" Passion gives is the true impression, and that
+Bach had deliberately set out to depict the preliminary scenes of the
+crucifixion with greater fulness of detail and in more striking
+colours than he afterwards attempted in the "Matthew" Passion. Then,
+not only is the physical suffering of Christ insisted on in this way,
+but the chorales, recitatives, and songs lay still greater stress upon
+it, either directly, by actual description, or indirectly, by uttering
+with unheard-of poignancy the remorse supposed to be felt by mankind
+whose guilt occasioned that suffering. The central point in the two
+Passions is the same, namely, the backsliding of Peter; and in each
+the words, "He went out and wept bitterly," are given the greatest
+prominence; but one need only contrast the acute agony expressed in
+the song, "Ach mein Sinn," which follows the incident in the "John,"
+with the sweetness of "Have mercy upon me," which follows it in the
+"Matthew," to gain a fair notion of the spirit in which the one work,
+and also the spirit in which the other, is written. The next point to
+note is, that while the "Matthew" begins with lamentation and ends
+with resignation, "John" begins and ends with hope and praise. In the
+former there is no chorus like the opening "Herr, unser, Herrscher,"
+no chorale so triumphant as "Ach grosser Koenig," and certainly no
+single passage so rapturous as "Alsdann vom Tod erwecke mich, Dass
+meine Augen sehen dich, In aller Freud, O Gottes Sohn" (with the bass
+mounting to the high E flat and rolling magnificently down again). So
+in the "John" Passion Bach has given us, first, a vivid picture of the
+turbulent crowd and of the suffering and death of Christ; second, an
+expression of man's bitterest remorse; and, last and above all, an
+expression of man's hope for the future and his thankfulness to Christ
+who redeemed him. These are what one remembers after hearing the work
+sung; and these, it may be remarked, are the things that the
+seventeenth and eighteenth century mind chiefly saw in the sorrow and
+death of Jesus of Nazareth.
+
+
+III.
+
+The "Matthew" Passion arouses a very different mood from that aroused
+by the "John." One does not remember the turbulent people's choruses,
+nor the piercing note of anguish, nor any rapturous song or chorus;
+for all else is drowned in the recollection of an overwhelming
+utterance of love and human sorrow and infinite tenderness. Much else
+there is in the "Matthew" Passion, just as there is love and
+tenderness in the "John"; but just as these are subordinated in the
+"John" to the more striking features I have mentioned, so in the
+"Matthew" the noise of the people and the expression of keen remorse
+are subordinated to love and human tenderness and infinite sorrow. The
+small number and conciseness of the people's choruses have already
+been alluded to, and it may easily be shown that the penitential music
+is brief compared with the love music, besides having a great deal of
+the love, the yearning love, feeling in it. The list of penitential
+pieces is exhausted when I have mentioned "Come, ye daughters," "Guilt
+for sin," "Break and die," "O Grief," "Alas! now is my Saviour gone,"
+and "Have mercy upon me"; and, on the other hand, we have "Thou
+blessed Saviour," the Last Supper music, the succeeding recitative and
+song, "O man, thy heavy sin lament," "To us He hath done all things,"
+"For love my Saviour suffered," "Come, blessed Cross," and "See the
+Saviour's outstretched arm," every one of which, not to speak of some
+other songs and most of the chorales, is sheer love music of the
+purest sort. This, then, seems to me the difference between the
+"Matthew" Passion and its predecessor: in the "John" Bach tried to
+purge his audience in the regular evangelical manner by pity and
+terror and hope. But during the next six years his spiritual
+development was so amazing, that while remaining intellectually
+faithful to evangelical dogma and perhaps such bogies as the devil and
+hell, he yet saw that the best way of purifying his audience was to
+set Jesus of Nazareth before them as the highest type of manhood he
+knew, as the man who so loved men that He died for them. There is
+therefore in the "Matthew" Passion neither the blank despair nor the
+feverish ecstasy of the "John," for they have no part to play there.
+Human sorrow and human love are the themes. Whenever I hear a fine
+rendering of the "Matthew" Passion, it seems to me that no composer,
+not even Mozart, could be more tender than Bach. It is often hard to
+get into communication with him, for he often appeals to feelings that
+no longer stir humanity--such, for instance, as the obsolete "sense of
+sin,"--but once it is done, he works miracles. Take, for example, the
+scene in which Jesus tells His disciples that one of them will betray
+Him. They ask, in chorus, "Herr, bin ich's?" There is a pause, and
+the chorale, "_Ich bin's_, ich sollte buessen," is thundered out by
+congregation and organ; then the agony passes away at the thought of
+the Redeemer, and the last line, "Das hat verdienet meine Seel," is
+almost intolerable in its sweetness. The songs, of course, appeal
+naturally to-day to all who will listen to them; but it is in such
+passages as this that Bach spoke most powerfully to his generation,
+and speaks now to those who will learn to understand him. Those who
+understand him can easily perceive the "John" Passion to be a powerful
+artistic embodiment of an eighteenth century idea; and they may also
+perceive that the "Matthew" is greater, because it is, on the whole, a
+little more beautiful, and because its main idea--which so far
+transcended the eighteenth century understanding that the eighteenth
+century preferred the "John"--is one of the loftiest that has yet
+visited the human mind.
+
+
+
+
+HANDEL
+
+
+Mr. George Frideric Handel is by far the most superb personage one
+meets in the history of music. He alone of all the musicians lived his
+life straight through in the grand manner. Spohr had dignity; Gluck
+insisted upon respect being shown a man of his talent; Spontini was
+sufficiently self-assertive; Beethoven treated his noble patrons as so
+many handfuls of dirt. But it is impossible altogether to lose sight
+of the peasant in Beethoven and Gluck; Spohr had more than a trace of
+the successful shopkeeper; Spontini's assertion often became mere
+insufferable bumptiousness. Besides, they all won their positions
+through being the best men in the field, and they held them with a
+proud consciousness of being the best men. But in Handel we have a
+polished gentleman, a lord amongst lords, almost a king amongst kings;
+and had his musical powers been much smaller than they were, he might
+quite possibly have gained and held his position just the same. He
+slighted the Elector of Hanover; and when that noble creature became
+George I. of England, Handel had only to do the handsome thing, as a
+handsome gentleman should, to be immediately taken back into favour.
+He was educated--was, in fact, a university man of the German sort; he
+could write and spell, and add up rows of figures, and had many other
+accomplishments which gentlemen of the period affected a little to
+despise. He had a pungent and a copious wit. He had quite a
+commercial genius; he was an impresario, and had engagements to offer
+other people instead of having to beg for engagements for himself; and
+he was always treated by the British with all the respect they keep
+for the man who has made money, or, having lost it, is fast making it
+again. He fought for the lordship of opera against nearly the whole
+English nobility, and they paid him the compliment of banding together
+with as much ado to ruin him as if their purpose had been to drive his
+royal master from the throne. He treated all opposition with a
+splendid good-humoured disdain. If his theatre was empty, then the
+music sounded the better. If a singer threatened to jump on the
+harpsichord because Handel's accompaniments attracted more notice than
+the singing, Handel asked for the date of the proposed performance
+that it might be advertised, for more people would come to see the
+singer jump than hear him sing. He was, in short, a most superb
+person, quite the grand seigneur. Think of Bach, the little shabby
+unimportant cantor, or of Beethoven, important enough but shabby, and
+with a great sorrow in his eyes, and an air of weariness, almost of
+defeat. Then look at the magnificent Mr. Handel in Hudson's portrait:
+fashionably dressed in a great periwig and gorgeous scarlet coat,
+victorious, energetic, self-possessed, self-confident, self-satisfied,
+jovial, and proud as Beelzebub (to use his own comparison)--too proud
+to ask for recognition were homage refused. This portrait helps us to
+understand the ascendency Handel gained over his contemporaries and
+over posterity.
+
+But his lofty position was not entirely due to his overwhelming
+personality. His intellect, if less vast, less comprehensive, than
+Beethoven's, was less like the intellect of a great peasant: it was
+swifter, keener, surer. Where Beethoven plodded, Handel leaped. And a
+degree of genius which did nothing for Bach, a little for Mozart, and
+all for Beethoven, did something for Handel. Without a voice worth
+taking into consideration, he could, and at least on one occasion did,
+sing so touchingly that the leading singer of the age dared not risk
+his reputation by singing after him. He was not only the first
+composer of the day, but also the first organist and the first
+harpsichord player; for his only possible rival, Sebastian Bach, was
+an obscure schoolmaster in a small, nearly unheard-of, German town.
+And so personal force, musical genius, business talent, education, and
+general brain power went to the making of a man who hobnobbed with
+dukes and kings, who ruled musical England with an iron rule, who
+threatened to throw distinguished soprano ladies from windows, and was
+threatened with never an action for battery in return, who went
+through the world with a regal gait, and was, in a word, the most
+astonishing lord of music the world has seen.
+
+That this aristocrat should come to be the musical prophet of an
+evangelical bourgeoisie would be felt as a most comical irony, were it
+only something less of a mystery. Handel was brought up in the bosom
+of the Lutheran Church, and was religious in his way. But it was
+emphatically a pagan way. Let those who doubt it turn to his setting
+of "All we like sheep have gone astray," in the "Messiah," and ask
+whether a religious man, whether Byrde or Palestrina, would have
+painted that exciting picture on those words. Imagine how Bach would
+have set them. That Handel lived an intense inner life we know, but
+what that life was no man can ever know. It is only certain that it
+was not a life such as Bach's; for he lived an active outer life also,
+and was troubled with no illusions, no morbid introspection. He seemed
+to accept the theology of the time in simple sincerity as a sufficient
+explanation of the world and human existence. He had little desire to
+write sacred music. He felt that his enormous force found its finest
+exercise in song-making; and Italian opera, consisting nearly wholly
+of songs, was his favourite form to the finish. The instinct was a
+true one. It is as a song-writer he is supreme, surpassing as he does
+Schubert, and sometimes even Mozart. Mozart is a prince of
+song-writers; but Handel is their king. He does not get the breezy
+picturesqueness of Purcell, nor the entrancing absolute beauty that
+Mozart often gets; but as pieces of art, each constructed so as to
+get the most out of the human voice in expressing a rich human passion
+in a noble form, they stand unapproachable in their perfection. For
+many reasons the English public refused to hear them in his own time,
+and Handel, as a general whose business was to win the battle, not in
+this or that way, but in any possible way, turned his attention to
+oratorio, and in this found success and a fortune. In this lies also
+our great gain, for in addition to the Italian opera songs we have the
+oratorio choruses. But when we come to think of it, might not
+Buononcini and Cuzzoni laugh to see how time has avenged them on their
+old enemy? For Handel's best music is in the songs, which rarely find
+a singer; and his fame is kept alive by performances of "Israel in
+Egypt" at the Albert Hall, where (until lately) evangelical small
+grocers crowded to hear the duet for two basses, "The Lord is a man of
+war," which Handel did not write, massacred by a huge bass chorus.
+
+His "Messiah" is in much the same plight as Milton's "Paradise Lost,"
+the plays of Shakespeare and the source of all true religion--it
+suffers from being so excessively well known and so generally accepted
+as a classic that few want to hear it, and none think it worth knowing
+thoroughly. A few years ago the late Sir Joseph Barnby went through
+the entire work in St. James's Hall with his Guildhall students; but
+such a feat had not, I believe, been accomplished previously within
+living memory, and certainly it has not been attempted again since. We
+constantly speak of the "Messiah" as the most popular oratorio ever
+written; but even in the provinces only selections from it are sung,
+and in the metropolis the selections are cut very short indeed,
+frequently by the sapient device of taking out all the best numbers
+and leaving only those that appeal to the religious instincts of
+Clapham. I cannot resist the suspicion that but for the words of "He
+was despised," "Behold, and see," and "I know that my Redeemer
+liveth," Clapham would have tired of the oratorio before now, and that
+but for its having become a Christmas institution, like roast beef,
+plum-puddings, mince-pies, and other indigestible foods, it would no
+longer be heard in the provinces. And perhaps it would be better
+forgotten--perhaps Handel would rather have seen it forgotten than
+regarded as it is regarded, than existing merely as an aid to
+evangelical religion or an after-dinner digestive on Christmas Day.
+Still, during the last hundred and fifty years, it has suffered so
+many humiliations that possibly one more, even this last one, does not
+so much matter. First its great domes and pillars and mighty arches
+were prettily ornamented and tinted by Mozart, who surely knew not
+what he did; then in England a barbarous traditional method of singing
+it was evolved; later it was Costa-mongered; finally even the late
+eminent Macfarren, the worst enemy music has ever had in this
+country, did not disdain to prepare "a performing edition," and to
+improve Mozart's improvements on Handel. One wonders whether Mozart,
+when he overlaid the "Messiah" with his gay tinsel-work, dreamed that
+some Costa, encouraged by Mozart's own example, and without brains
+enough to guess that he had nothing like Mozart's brains, would in
+like manner desecrate "Don Giovanni." Like "Don Giovanni," there the
+"Messiah" lies, almost unrecognisable under its outrageous adornments,
+misunderstood, its splendours largely unknown and hardly even
+suspected, the best known and the least known of oratorios, a work
+spoken of as fine by those who cannot hum one of its greatest themes
+or in the least comprehend the plan on which its noblest choruses are
+constructed.
+
+Rightly to approach the "Messiah" or any of Handel's sacred oratorios,
+to approach it in any sure hope of appreciating it, one must remember
+that (as I have just said) Handel had nothing of the religious
+temperament, that in temperament he was wholly secular, that he was an
+eighteenth century pagan. He was perfectly satisfied with the visible
+and audible world his energy and imagination created out of things;
+about the why and wherefore of things he seems never to have troubled;
+his soul asked no questions, and he was never driven to accept a
+religious or any other explanation. It is true he went to church with
+quite commendable regularity, and wished to die on Good Friday and so
+meet Jesus Christ on the anniversary of the resurrection. But he was
+nevertheless as completely a pagan as any old Greek; the persons of
+the Trinity were to him very solid entities; if he wished to die on
+Good Friday, depend upon it, he fully meant to enter heaven in his
+finest scarlet coat with ample gold lace and a sword by his side, to
+make a stately bow to the assembled company and then offer a few
+apposite and doubtless pungent remarks on the proper method of tuning
+harps. Of true devotional feeling, of the ecstatic devotional feeling
+of Palestrina and of Bach, there is in no recorded saying of his a
+trace, and there is not a trace of it in his music. When he was
+writing the "Hallelujah Chorus" he imagined he saw God on His throne,
+just as in writing "Semele" he probably imagined he saw Jupiter on his
+throne; and the fact proves only with what intensity and power his
+imagination was working, and how far removed he was from the genuine
+devotional frame of mind. There is not the slightest difference in
+style between his secular and his sacred music; he treats sacred and
+secular subjects precisely alike. In music his intention was never to
+reveal his own state of mind, but always to depict some object, some
+scene. Now, never did he adhere with apparently greater resolution to
+this plan, never therefore did he produce a more essentially secular
+work, than in the "Messiah." One need only consider such numbers as
+"All they that see Him" and "Behold the Lamb of God" to realise this;
+though, indeed, there is not a number in the oratorio that does not
+show it with sufficient clearness. But fully to understand Handel and
+realise his greatness, it is not enough merely to know the spirit in
+which he worked: one must know also his method of depicting things and
+scenes. He was wholly an impressionist--in his youth from choice, as
+when he wrote the music of "Rinaldo" faster than the librettist could
+supply the words; in middle age and afterwards from necessity, as he
+never had time to write save when circumstances freed him for a few
+days from the active duties of an impresario. He tried to do, and
+succeeded in doing, everything with a few powerful strokes, a few
+splashes of colour. Of the careful elaboration of Bach, of Beethoven,
+even of Mozart, there is nothing: sometimes in his impatience he
+seemed to mix his colours in buckets and hurl them with the surest
+artistic aim at his gigantic canvases. A comparison of the angels'
+chorus "Glory to God in the highest" in Bach's "Christmas Oratorio"
+with the same thing as set in the "Messiah" will show not only how
+widely different were the aims of the two men, but also throws the
+minute cunning of the Leipzig schoolmaster into startling contrast
+with the daring recklessness of the tremendous London impresario. Of
+course both men possessed wonderful contrapuntal skill; but in Bach's
+case there is time and patience as well as skill, and in Handel's only
+consummate audacity and intellectual grip. Handel was by far a greater
+man than Bach--he appears to me, indeed, the greatest man who has yet
+lived; but though he achieves miracles as a musician, his music was to
+him only one of many modes of using the irresistible creative instinct
+and energy within him. Any one who looks in Handel for the
+characteristic complicated music of the typical German masters will be
+disappointed even as the Germans are disappointed; but those who are
+prepared to let Handel say what he has to say in his own chosen way
+will find in his music the most admirable style ever attained to by
+any musician, the most perfect fusion of manner and matter. It is a
+grand, large, and broad style, because Handel had a large and grand
+matter to express; and if it errs at all it errs on the right side--it
+has too few rather than too many notes.
+
+On the whole, the "Messiah" is as vigorous, rich, picturesque and
+tender as the best of Handel's oratorios--even "Belshazzar" does not
+beat it. There is scarcely any padding; there are many of Handel's
+most perfect songs and most gorgeous choruses; and the architecture of
+the work is planned with a magnificence, and executed with a lucky
+completeness, attained only perhaps elsewhere in "Israel in
+Egypt"--for which achievement Handel borrowed much of the bricks and
+mortar from other edifices. Theological though the subject is, the
+oratorio is as much a hymn to joy as the Ninth symphony; and there is
+in it far more of genuine joy, of sheer delight in living. Of the
+sense of sin--the most cowardly illusion ever invented by a degenerate
+people--there is no sign; where Bach would have been abased in the
+dust, Handel is bright, shining, confident, cocksure that all is right
+with the world. Mingled with the marvellous tenderness of "Comfort ye"
+there is an odd air of authority, a conviction that everything is
+going well, and that no one need worry; and nothing fresher, fuller of
+spring-freshness, almost of rollicking jollity, has ever been written
+than "Every valley shall be exalted." "And the glory of the Lord shall
+be revealed" is in rather the same vein, though a deeper note of
+feeling is struck. The effect of the alto voices leading off, followed
+immediately by the rest of the chorus and orchestra, is overwhelming;
+and the chant of the basses at "For the mouth of the Lord" is in the
+biggest Handel manner. But just as "He was despised" and "I know that
+my Redeemer liveth" tower above all the other songs, so three or four
+choruses tower above all the other choruses in not only the "Messiah,"
+but all Handel's oratorios. "Worthy is the Lamb" stands far above the
+rest, and indeed above all choruses in the world save Bach's very
+best; then comes "For unto us a Child is born"; and after that "And
+He shall purify," "His yoke is easy," and "Surely He hath borne our
+griefs"--each distinctive, complete in itself, an absolute piece of
+noble invention. "Unto us a Child is born" is written in a form
+devised by Handel and used with success by no other composer since,
+until in a curiously modified shape Tschaikowsky employed it for the
+third movement of his Pathetic symphony. The first theme is very
+simply announced, played with awhile, then the second follows--a
+tremendous phrase to the words "The government shall be upon His
+shoulders"; suddenly the inner parts begin to quicken into life, to
+ferment, to throb and to leap, and with startling abruptness great
+masses of tone are hurled at the listener to the words "Wonderful,
+Counsellor." The process is then repeated in a shortened and
+intensified form; then it is repeated again; and finally the principal
+theme, delivered so naively at first, is delivered with all the pomp
+and splendour of full chorus and orchestra, and "Wonderful,
+Counsellor" thundered out on a corresponding scale. A scheme at once
+so simple, so daring and so tremendous in effect, could have been
+invented by no one but Handel with his need for working rapidly; and
+it is strange that a composer so different from Handel as Tschaikowsky
+should have hit upon a closely analogous form for a symphonic
+movement. The forms of the other choruses are dissimilar. In "He
+shall purify" there are two big climaxes; in "His yoke is easy" there
+is only one, and it comes at the finish, just when one is wondering
+how the splendid flow of music can be ended without an effect of
+incompleteness or of anti-climax; and "Surely He hath borne our
+griefs" depends upon no climactic effects, but upon the sheer
+sweetness and pathos of the thing.
+
+Handel's secular oratorios are different from anything else in the
+world. They are neither oratorios, nor operas, nor cantatas; and the
+plots are generally quaint.
+
+Some years ago it occurred to me one morning that a trip by sea to
+Russia might be refreshing; and that afternoon I started in a
+coal-steamer from a northern seaport. A passport could hardly be
+wrested from hide-bound officialdom in so short a time, and, to save
+explanations in a foreign tongue at Cronstadt, the reader's most
+humble servant assumed the lowly office of purser--wages, one shilling
+per month. The passage was rough, the engineers were not enthusiastic
+in their work, some of the seamen were sulky; and, in a word, the name
+of God was frequently in the skipper's mouth. Otherwise he did not
+strike one as being a particularly religious man. Nevertheless, when
+Sunday evening came round he sat down and read the Bible with genuine
+fervour, spelling the hard words aloud and asking how they should or
+might be pronounced; and he informed me, by way of explaining his
+attachment to the Book, that he had solemnly promised his wife never
+to omit his weekly devotions while on the deep. Though I never shared
+the literary tastes of Mr. Wilson Barrett, the captain's unfathomable
+ignorance of the Gospels, Isaiah and the Psalms startled even me; but
+on the other hand he had an intimate acquaintance with a number of
+stories to be found only in the Apocrypha, with which he had
+thoughtfully provided himself. To gratify my curiosity he read me the
+tale of Susanna and the Elders. Being young, my first notion was that
+I had chanced on a capital subject for an opera; and I actually
+thought for ten minutes of commencing at once on a libretto. Later I
+remembered the censor, and realised for the first time that in
+England, when a subject is unfit for a drama, it is treated as an
+oratorio. As soon as possible I bought Handel's "Susanna" instead, and
+found that Handel curiously--or perhaps not curiously--had also been
+before me in thinking of treating the subject operatically. In fact
+"Susanna" is as much an opera as "Rinaldo," the only difference being
+that a few choruses are forcibly dragged in to give colour to the
+innocent pretence. Handel's librettist, whoever he was, did his work
+downright badly. That he glorifies the great institution of permanent
+marriage and says nothing of the corresponding great institution of
+the Divorce Court, is only what might be expected of the horrible
+eighteenth century--the true dark age of Europe; but surely even a
+composer of Handel's powers could scarcely do himself justice with
+such a choice blend of stupidity and cant religion as this--
+
+    "_Chorus_. How long, O Lord, shall Israel groan
+      In bondage and in pain?
+    Jehovah! hear Thy people moan,
+      And break the tyrant's chain!
+
+    "_Joachim._ Our crimes repeated have provok'd His rage,
+    And now He scourges a degen'rate age.
+    O come, my fair Susanna, come,
+    And from my bosom chase its gloom," etc.
+
+Or is the abrupt third line of Joachim's speech to be regarded as a
+masterstroke of characterisation? I will tell the whole story, to show
+what manner of subject has been thought proper for an oratorio.
+Joachim and Susanna are of course perfect monsters of fidelity; though
+it is only fair to say that Joachim's virtue is not insisted on, or,
+for that matter, mentioned. Joachim goes out of town--he says so:
+"Awhile I'm summoned from the town away"--and Susanna, instead of
+obeying his directions to entertain some friends, goes into a dark
+glade, whither the Elders presently repair. She declines their
+attentions; then they declare they caught her with an unknown lover,
+who fled; and she is condemned to death, the populace seeing naught
+but justice in the sentence. But before they begin to hurl the stones,
+Daniel steps forward and by sheer eloquent impudence persuades the
+people to have the case re-tried, with him for judge. He sends one
+elder out of court, and asks the other under what tree Susanna
+committed the indiscretion. The poor wretch, knowing no science,
+foolishly makes a wild shot instead of pleading a defective education,
+and says, "A verdant mastick, pride of all the grove." The other, in
+response to the same question, says, "Yon tall holm-tree." Incredible
+as it seems, on the strength of this error, which would merely gain a
+policeman the commendation of an average London magistrate, the two
+Elders are sent off to be hanged! Why, even the late Mr. Justice
+Stephen never put away an innocent man or woman on less evidence! But
+the chorus flatters Daniel just as the Press used to flatter Mr.
+Justice Stephen; Susanna is complimented on her chastity; and all ends
+with some general reflections--
+
+    "A virtuous wife shall soften fortune's frown,
+    She's far more precious than a golden crown."
+
+Nothing is said about the market value of a virtuous husband. Probably
+the eighteenth century regarded such a thing as out of the question.
+As I have said, I tell this story to show what the British public will
+put up with if you mention the word oratorio. Voltaire's dictum needs
+revision thus: "Whatever is too improper to be spoken (in England) is
+sung, and whatever is too improper to be sung on the stage may be sung
+in a church."
+
+Nevertheless, out of this wretched book Handel made a masterpiece. The
+tale of Susanna is not one in which a man of his character might be
+expected to take a profound interest; though it should always be
+remembered that hardly anything is known of his relations with the
+other sex save that he took a keen and lifelong interest in the
+Foundling Hospital. But so strong had the habit of making masterpieces
+become with him that he could not resist the temptation to create just
+one more, even when he had nothing better than "Susanna" to base it
+on; just as a confirmed drunkard cannot resist the temptation to get
+one drink more, even if he be accustomed to the gilded chambers of the
+West End, and must go for really the last to-night into the lowest
+drinking-saloon of the East. Some of the choruses are of Handel's
+best. The first, "How long, O Lord," shows that he could write
+expressive chromatic passages as well as Purcell and Bach; the second
+is surcharged with emotion; "Righteous Heaven" is picturesque and full
+of splendid vigour; "Impartial Heaven" contains some of the most
+gorgeous writing that even Handel achieved. But the last two choruses,
+and "The Cause is decided" and "Oh, Joachim," are common, colourless,
+barren; and were evidently written without delight, to maintain the
+pretext that the work was an oratorio. But it stands to this day,
+unmistakably an opera; and it is the songs that will certainly make it
+popular some day; for some of them are on Handel's highest level, and
+Handel's highest level has never been reached by any other composer.
+His choruses are equalled by Bach's, his dramatic strokes by Gluck's,
+his instrumental movements by Bach's and perhaps Lulli's; but the
+coming of Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Weber, and Wagner has only
+served to show that he is the greatest song-writer the world has known
+or is likely to know. Even Mozart never quite attained that union of
+miraculously balanced form, sweetness of melody, and depth of feeling
+with a degree of sheer strength that keeps the expression of the main
+thought lucid, and the surface of the music, so to speak, calm, when
+obscurity might have been anticipated, and some roughness and storm
+and stress excused. "Faith displays her rosy wing" is an absolutely
+perfect instance of a Handel song. Were not the thing done, one might
+believe it impossible to express with such simplicity--four sombre
+minor chords and then the tremolo of the strings--the alternations of
+trembling fear and fearful hope, the hope of the human soul in
+extremist agony finding an exalted consolation in the thought that
+this was the worst. As astounding as this is the quality of light and
+freshness of atmosphere with which Handel imbues such songs as "Clouds
+o'ertake the brightest day" and "Crystal streams in murmurs flowing";
+and the tenderness of "Would custom bid," with the almost divine
+refrain, "I then had called thee mine," might surprise us, coming as
+it does from such a giant, did we not know that tenderness is always a
+characteristic of the great men, of Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Wagner,
+and that the pettiness, ill-conditionedness, and lack of generous
+feeling observable in (say) our London composers to-day stamp them
+more unmistakably than does their music as small composers. If the
+poor fellows knew what they were about, they would at least conceal
+the littlenesses that show they are destined never to do work of the
+first order. The composer of the "Rex tremendae" (in the Requiem) wrote
+"Dove sono," Beethoven wrote both the finale of the Fifth symphony and
+the slow movement of the Ninth, Wagner both the Valkyries' Ride and
+the motherhood theme in "Siegfried," Handel "Worthy is the Lamb" and
+"Waft her, angels"; while your little malicious musical Mimes are
+absorbed in self-pity, and can no more write a melody that
+irresistibly touches you than they can build a great and impressive
+structure. And if Mozart is tenderest of all the musicians, Handel
+comes very close to him. The world may, though not probably, tire of
+all but his grandest choruses, while his songs will always be sung as
+lovely expressions of the finest human feeling.
+
+"Samson" is not his finest oratorio, though it may be his longest. It
+contains no "Unto us a Child is born" nor a "Worthy is the Lamb," nor
+a "Now love, that everlasting boy"; but in several places the sublime
+is reached--in "Then round about the starry throne," the last page of
+which is worth all the oratorios written since Handel's time save
+Beethoven's "Mount of Olives"; in "Fixed is His everlasting seat,"
+with that enormous opening phrase, irresistible in its strength and
+energy as Handel himself; and in the first section of "O first created
+beam." The pagan choruses are full of riotous excitement, though there
+is not one of them to match "Ye tutelar gods" in "Belshazzar." But
+there is little in "Belshazzar" to match the pathos of "Return, O God
+of hosts," or "Ye sons of Israel, now lament." The latter is a notable
+example of Handel's art. There is not a new phrase in it: nothing,
+indeed, could be commoner than the bar at the first occurrence of
+"Amongst the dead great Samson lies," and yet the effect is amazing;
+and though the "for ever" is as old as Purcell, here it is newly
+used--used as if it had never been used before--to utter a depth of
+emotion that passes beyond the pathetic to the sublime. This very
+vastness of feeling, this power of stepping outside himself and giving
+a voice to the general emotions of humanity, prevents us recognising
+the personal note in Handel as we recognise it in Mozart. But
+occasionally the personal note may be met. The recitative "My genial
+spirits fail," with those dreary long-drawn harmonies, and the
+orchestral passage pressing wearily downwards at "And lay me gently
+down with them that rest," seems almost like Handel's own voice in a
+moment of sad depression. It serves, at anyrate, to remind us that the
+all-conquering Mr. Handel was a complete man who had endured the
+sickening sense of the worthlessness of a struggle that he was bound
+to continue to the end. But these personal confessions are scarce.
+After all, in oratorio Handel's best music is that in which he seeks
+to attain the sublime. In his choruses he does attain it: he sweeps
+you away with the immense rhythmical impetus of the music, or
+overpowers you with huge masses of tone hurled, as it were, bodily at
+you at just the right moments, or he coerces you with phrases like the
+opening of "Fixed in His everlasting seat," or the last (before the
+cadence) in "Then round about the starry throne." It is true that with
+his unheard-of intellectual power, and a mastery of technique equal or
+nearly equal to Bach's, he was often tempted to write in his
+uninspired moments, and so the chorus became with him more or less of
+a formula; but we may also note that even when he was most mechanical
+the mere furious speed at which he wrote seemed to excite and exalt
+him, so that if he began with a commonplace "Let their celestial
+concerts all unite," before the end he was pouring forth glorious and
+living stuff like the last twenty-seven bars. So the pace at which he
+had to write in the intervals of bullying or coaxing prima donnas or
+still more petulant male sopranos was not wholly a misfortune; if it
+sometimes compelled him to set down mere musical arithmetic, or
+rubbish like "Honour and arms," and "Go, baffled coward," it sometimes
+drew his grandest music out of him. The dramatic oratorio is a hybrid
+form of art--one might almost say a bastard form; it had only about
+thirty years of life; but in those thirty years Handel accomplished
+wonderful things with it. And the wonder of them makes Handel appear
+the more astonishing man; for, when all is said, the truth is that the
+man was greater, infinitely greater, than his music.
+
+
+
+
+HAYDN AND HIS "CREATION"
+
+
+It is a fact never to be forgotten, in hearing good papa Haydn's
+music, that he lived in the fine old world when stately men and women
+went through life in the grand manner with a languid pulse, when the
+earth and the days were alike empty, and hurry to get finished and
+proceed to the next thing was almost unknown, and elbowing of rivals
+to get on almost unnecessary. For fifty years he worked away
+contentedly as bandmaster to Prince Esterhazy, composing the due
+amount of music, conducting the due number of concerts, taking his
+salary of some seventy odd pounds per annum thankfully, and putting on
+his uniform for special State occasions with as little grumbling as
+possible, all as a good bandmaster should. He had gone through a short
+period of roughing it in his youth, and he had made one or two
+mistakes as he settled down. He married a woman who worked with
+enthusiasm to render his early life intolerable, and begged him in his
+old age to buy a certain cottage, as it would suit her admirably when
+she became a widow. But he consoled himself as men do in the
+circumstances, and did not allow his mistakes to poison all his life,
+or cause him any special worry. His other troubles were not very
+serious. A Music Society which he wished to join tried to trap him
+into an agreement to write important compositions for it whenever they
+were wanted. Once he offended his princely master by learning to play
+the baryton, an instrument on which the prince was a performer
+greatly esteemed by his retainers. Such teacup storms soon passed:
+Prince Esterhazy doubtless forgave him; the Society was soon
+forgotten; and Haydn worked on placidly. Every morning he rose with or
+before the lark, dressed himself with a degree of neatness that
+astonished even that neat dressing age, and sat down to compose music.
+Later in each day he is reported to have eaten, to have rehearsed his
+band or conducted concerts, and so to bed to prepare himself by
+refreshing slumber for the next day's labours. At certain periods of
+the year Prince Esterhazy and his court adjourned to Esterhaz, and at
+certain periods they came back to Eisenstadt: thus they were saved by
+due variety from utter petrifaction. Haydn seems to have liked the
+life, and to have thought moreover that it was good for him and his
+art. By being thrown so much back upon himself, he said, he had been
+forced to become original. Whether it made him original or not, he
+never thought of changing it until his prince died, and for a time his
+services were not wanted at Esterhaz or Eisenstadt. Then he came to
+England, and by his success here made a European reputation (for it
+was then as it is now--an artist was only accepted on the musical
+Continent after he had been stamped with the hall-mark of unmusical
+England). Finally he settled in Vienna, was for a time the teacher of
+Beethoven, declared his belief that the first chorus of the
+"Creation" came direct from heaven, and died a world-famous man.
+
+To the nineteenth century mind it seems rather an odd life for an
+artist: at least it strikes one as a life, despite Haydn's own
+opinion, not particularly conducive to originality. To use extreme
+language, it might almost be called a monotonous and soporific mode of
+existence. Probably its chief advantage was the opportunity it
+afforded, or perhaps the necessity it enforced, of ceaseless industry.
+Certainly that industry bore fruit in Haydn's steady increase of
+inventive power as he went on composing. But he only took the
+prodigious leap from the second to the first rank of composers after
+he had been free for a time from his long slavery, and had been in
+England and been aroused and stimulated by new scenes, unfamiliar
+modes of life, and by contact with many and widely differing types of
+mind. Some of his later music makes one think that if the leap--a leap
+almost unparalleled in the history of art--had been possible twenty
+years sooner, Haydn might have won a place by the side of Mozart and
+Handel and Bach, instead of being the lowest of their great company.
+On the other hand, one cannot think of the man--lively, genial,
+kind-hearted, garrulous, broadly humorous, actively observant of
+details, careful in small money matters--and assert with one's hand on
+one's heart that he was cast in gigantic or heroic mould. That he had
+a wonderful facility in expressing himself is obvious in every bar he
+wrote: but it is less obvious that he had a great deal to express. He
+had deep, but not the deepest, human feeling; he could think, but not
+profoundly; he had a sense of beauty, delicate and acute out of all
+comparison with yours or mine, reader, but far less keen than Mozart's
+or Bach's. Hence his music is rarely comparable with theirs: his
+matter is less weighty, his form never quite so enchantingly lovely;
+and, whatever one may think of the possibilities of the man in his
+most inspired moments, his average output drives one to the reluctant
+conclusion that on the whole his life must have been favourable to him
+and enabled him to do the best that was in him. Yet I hesitate as I
+write the words. Remembering that he began as an untaught peasant, and
+until the end of his long life was a mere bandmaster with a small
+yearly salary, a uniform, and possibly (for I cannot recall the facts)
+his board and lodging, remembering where he found the symphony and
+quartet and where he left them, remembering, above all, that
+astonishing leap, I find it hard to believe in barriers to his upward
+path. It is in dignity and quality of poetic content rather than in
+form that Haydn is lacking. Had the horizon of his thought been
+widened in early or even in middle life by the education of mixing
+with men who knew more and were more advanced than himself, had he
+been jostled in the crowd of a great city and been made to feel
+deeply about the tragi-comedy of human existence, his experiences
+might have resulted in a deeper and more original note being sounded
+in his music. But we must take him as he is, reflecting, when the
+unbroken peacefulness of his music becomes a little tiresome, that he
+belonged to the "old time before us" and was never quickened by the
+newer modes of thought that unconsciously affected Mozart and
+consciously moulded Beethoven; and that, after all, his very
+smoothness and absence of passion give him an old-world charm,
+grateful in this hot and dusty age. If he was not greatly original, he
+was at least flawlessly consistent: there is scarce a trait in his
+character that is not reflected somewhere in his music, and hardly a
+characteristic of his music that one does not find quaintly echoed in
+some recorded saying or doing of the man. His placid and even
+vivacity, his sprightliness, his broad jocularity, his economy and
+shrewd business perception of what could be done with the material to
+hand, his fertility of device, even his commonplaceness, may all be
+seen in the symphonies. At rare moments he moves you strongly, very
+often he is trivial, but he generally pleases; and if some of the
+strokes of humour--quoted in text-books of orchestration--are so broad
+as to be indescribable in any respectable modern print, few of us
+understand what they really mean, and no one is a penny the worse.
+
+The "Creation" libretto was prepared for Handel, but he did not
+attempt to set it; and this perhaps was just as well, for the effort
+would certainly have killed him. Of course the opening offers some
+fine opportunities for fine music; but the later parts with their
+nonsense--Milton's nonsense, I believe--about "In native worth and
+honour clad, With beauty, courage, strength, adorned, Erect with front
+serene he stands, A MAN, the Lord and King of Nature all," and the
+suburban love-making of our first parents, and the lengthy references
+to the habits of the worm and the leviathan, and so on, are almost
+more than modern flesh and blood can endure. It must be conceded that
+Haydn evaded the difficulties of the subject with a degree of tact
+that would be surprising in anyone else than Haydn. In the first part,
+where Handel would have been sublime, he is frequently nearly sublime,
+and this is our loss; but in the later portion, where Handel would
+have been solemn, earnest, and intolerably dull, he is light,
+skittish, good-natured, and sometimes jocular, and this is our gain,
+even if the gain is not great. The Representation of Chaos is a
+curious bit of music, less like chaos than an attempt to write music
+of the Bruneau sort a century too soon; but it serves. The most
+magnificent passage in the oratorio immediately follows, for there is
+hardly a finer effect in music than that of the soft voices singing
+the words, "And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters,"
+while the strings gently pulse; and the fortissimo C major chord on
+the word "light," coming abruptly after the piano and mezzo-forte
+minor chords, is as dazzling in its brilliancy to-day as when it was
+first sung. The number of unisons, throwing into relief the two minor
+chords on C and F, should be especially noted. The chorus in the next
+number is poor, matched with this, though towards the end (see bars 11
+and 12 from the finish) Haydn's splendid musicianship has enabled him
+to redeem the trivial commonplace with an unexpected and powerful
+harmonic progression. The work is singularly deficient in strong
+sustained choruses. "Awake the harp" is certainly very much the best;
+for "The heavens are telling" is little better than Gounod's "Unfold,
+ye everlasting portals" until the end, where it is saved by the
+tremendous climax; and "Achieved is the glorious work" is mostly
+mechanical, with occasional moments of life. As for the finale, it is
+of course light opera. On the whole the songs are the most delightful
+feature of the "Creation," and the freshness of "With verdure clad,"
+and the tender charm of the second section of "Roaming in foaming
+billows," may possibly be remembered when Haydn is scarcely known
+except as an instrumental composer. The setting of "Softly purling,
+glides on, thro' silent vales, the limpid brook" is indeed perfect,
+the phrase at the repetition of "Thro' silent vales" inevitably
+calling up a vision, not of a valley sleeping in the sunlight, for of
+sunlight the eighteenth century apparently took little heed, but of a
+valley in the dark quiet night, filled with the scent of flowers, and
+the far-off murmur of the brook vaguely heard. The humour of the
+oratorio consists chiefly of practical jokes, such as sending Mr.
+Andrew Black (or some other bass singer) down to the low F sharp and G
+to depict the heavy beasts treading the ground, or making the
+orchestra imitate the bellow of the said heavy beasts, or depicting
+the sinuous motion of the worm or the graceful gamboling of the
+leviathan. It has been objected that the leviathan is brought on in
+sections. The truth, of course, is that the clumsy figure in the bass
+is not meant to depict the leviathan himself, but his gambolings and
+the gay flourishings of his tail. It is hard to sum up the "Creation,"
+unless one is prepared to call it great and never go to hear it. It is
+not a sublime oratorio, nor yet a frankly comic oratorio, nor entirely
+a dull oratorio. After considering the songs, the recitatives, the
+choruses, in detail, it really seems to contain very little. Perhaps
+it may be described as a third-rate oratorio, whose interest is
+largely historic and literary.
+
+
+
+
+MOZART, HIS "DON GIOVANNI" AND THE REQUIEM
+
+
+It may well be doubted whether Vienna thought even so much of
+Capellmeister Mozart as Leipzig thought of Capellmeister Bach. Bach,
+it is true, was merely Capellmeister; he hardly dared to claim social
+equality with the citizens who tanned hides or slaughtered pigs; and
+probably the high personages who trimmed the local Serene Highness's
+toe-nails scarcely knew of his existence. Still, he was a burgher,
+even as the killers of pigs and the tanners of hides; he was
+thoroughly respectable, and probably paid his taxes as they came due;
+if only by necessity of his office, he went to church with regularity;
+and on the whole we may suppose that he got enough of respect to make
+life tolerable. But Mozart was only one of a crowd who provided
+amusement for a gay population; and a gay population, always a
+heartless master, holds none in such contempt as the servants who
+provide it with amusement. So Mozart got no respect from those he
+served, and his Bohemianism lost him the respect of the eminently
+respectable. He lived in the eighteenth century equivalent of a "loose
+set"; he was miserably poor, and presumably never paid his taxes; we
+may doubt whether he often went to church; he composed for the
+theatre; and he lacked the self-assertion which enabled Handel,
+Beethoven, and Wagner to hold their own. Treated as of no account,
+cheated by those he worked for, hardly permitted to earn his bread, he
+found life wholly intolerable, and as he grew older he lived more and
+more within himself and gave his thoughts only to the composition of
+masterpieces. The crowd of mediocrities dimly felt him to be their
+master, and the greater the masterpieces he achieved the more
+vehemently did Salieri and his attendants protest that he was not a
+composer to compare with Salieri. The noise impressed Da Ponte, the
+libretto-monger, and he asked Salieri to set his best libretto and
+gave Mozart only his second best; and thus by a curious irony stumbled
+into his immortality through sheer stupidity, for his second best
+libretto was "Don Giovanni"--of all possible subjects precisely that
+which a wise man would have given to Mozart. When Mozart laid down the
+pen after the memorable night's work in which he transferred the
+finished overture from his brain to the paper, he had written the
+noblest Italian opera ever conceived; and the world knew it not, yet
+gradually came to know. But the full fame of "Don Giovanni" was
+comparatively brief, and at this time there seems to be a hazy notion
+that its splendours have waned before the blaze of Wagner, just as the
+symphonies are supposed to have faded in the brilliant light of
+Beethoven. At lectures on musical history it is reverently spoken of;
+but it is seldom sung, and the public declines to go to hear it; and,
+though few persons are so foolish as to admit their sad case, I
+suspect that more than a few agree with the sage critic who told us
+not long since that Mozart was a little _passe_ now. Is it indeed so?
+Well, Mozart lived in the last days of the old world, and the old
+world and the thoughts and sentiments of the old world are certainly a
+little _passes_ now. But if you examine "Don Giovanni" you must admit
+that the Fifth and Ninth symphonies, "Fidelio," "Lohengrin," the
+"Ring," "Tristan," and "Parsifal" have done nothing to eclipse its
+glories, that while fresh masterpieces have come forth, "Don Giovanni"
+remains a masterpiece amongst masterpieces, that in a sense it is a
+masterpiece towards which all other masterpieces stand in the relation
+of commentaries to text. And though this, perhaps, is only to call it
+a link in a chain, yet it is curious to note how very closely other
+composers have followed Mozart, and how greatly they are indebted to
+him. Page upon page of the early Beethoven is written in the
+phraseology of the later Mozart; in nearly every bar of "Faust," not
+to mention "Romeo and Juliette," avowedly the fruit of a long study of
+"Don Giovanni," a faint echo of Mozart's voice comes to us with the
+voice of Gounod; Anna's cries, "Quel sangue, quella piaga, quel
+volto," with the creeping chromatic chords of the wood-wind, have the
+very accent of Isolda's '"Tis I, belov'd," and the solemn phrase that
+follows, in Tristan's death-scene. Apart from its influence on later
+composers, there is surely no more passionate, powerful, and moving
+drama in the world than "Don Giovanni." Despite the triviality of Da
+Ponte's book, the impetus of the music carries along the action at a
+tremendous speed; the moments of relief occur just when relief is
+necessary, and never retard the motion; the climaxes are piled up with
+incredible strength and mastery, and have an emotional effect as
+powerful as anything in "Fidelio" and equal to anything in Wagner's
+music-dramas; and most stupendous of all is the finale, with its
+tragic blending of the grotesque and the terrible. Or, if one
+considers detail, in no other opera do the characters depict
+themselves in every phrase they utter as they do in "Don Giovanni."
+The songs stamp Mozart as the greatest song-writer who has lived, with
+the exception of Handel, whose opera songs are immeasurably beyond all
+others save Mozart's, and a little beyond them. The mere musicianship
+is as consummate as Bach's, for, like Bach, Mozart possessed that
+facility which is fatal to many men, but combined with it a high
+sincerity, a greedy thirst for the beautiful, and an emotional force
+that prevented it being fatal to him. For delicacy, subtlety, due
+brilliancy, and strength, the orchestral colouring cannot be matched.
+And no music is more exclusively its own composer's, has less in it of
+other composers'. Beethoven is Beethoven _plus_ Mozart, Wagner is
+Wagner _plus_ Weber and Beethoven; but from every page of Mozart's
+scores Mozart alone looks at you, with sad laughter in his eyes, and
+unspeakable tenderness, the tenderness of the giants, of Handel, Bach,
+and Beethoven, though perhaps Mozart is tenderest of them all. He
+cannot write a comic scene for a poor clownish Masetto without
+caressing him with a divinely beautiful "Cheto, cheto, mi vo' star,"
+and in presence of death or human distress the strangest, sweetest
+things fall from his lips. And finally, he is always the perfect
+artist without reproach; there is nothing wanting and nothing in
+excess; as he himself said on one occasion, his scores contain exactly
+the right number of notes. This is "Don Giovanni" as one may see it a
+century after its birth: a faultless masterpiece; yet (in England at
+least) it only gets an occasional performance, through the freak of a
+prima donna, who, as the sage critic said of Mozart, is undoubtedly "a
+little _passee_ now."
+
+After all, this is hardly surprising. Perfect art wants perfect
+listeners, and just now we are much too eager for excitement, too
+impatient of mere beauty, to listen perfectly to perfect music. And
+there are other reasons why "Don Giovanni" should not appeal to this
+generation. For many years it was the sport of the prima donna, and
+conductors and singers conspired to load it with traditional
+Costamongery, until at last the "Don Giovanni" we knew became an
+entirely different thing from the "Don Giovanni" of Mozart's thought.
+Not Giovanni but Zerlina was the principal figure; the climax of the
+drama was not the final Statue scene, but "Batti, batti"; Leporello's
+part was exaggerated until the Statue scene became a pantomime affair
+with Leporello playing pantaloon against Giovanni's clown. Such an
+opera could interest none but an Elephant and Castle audience, and
+probably only the beauty of the music prevented it reaching the
+Elephant and Castle long ago. So low had "Don Giovanni" fallen, when,
+quite recently, serious artists like Maurel tried to take it more
+seriously and restore it to its rightful place. Only, unfortunately,
+instead of brushing away traditions and going back to the vital
+conception of Mozart, they sought to modernise it, to convert it into
+an early Wagner music-drama. The result may be seen in any performance
+at Covent Garden. The thing becomes a hodge-podge, a mixture of drama,
+melodrama, the circus, the pantomime, with a strong flavouring of
+blatherskite. The opera _is_ largely pantomime--it was intended by
+Mozart to be pantomime; and the only possible way of doing it
+effectively is to accept the pantomime frankly, but to play it with
+such force and sincerity that it is not felt to be pantomime. And the
+real finale should be sung afterwards. Probably many people would go
+off to catch their trains. But, after all, Mozart wrote for those who
+have no trains to catch when this masterpiece, the masterpiece of
+Italian opera, is sung as he intended it to be sung.
+
+The Requiem is a very different work. There is plenty of the gaiety
+and sunshine of life in "Don Giovanni." The Requiem is steeped in
+sadness and gloom, with rare moments of fiery exaltation, or
+hysterical despair; at times beauty has been almost--almost, but never
+quite--driven from Mozart's thought by the anguish that tormented him
+as he wrote. While speaking of Bach's "Matthew" Passion, I have said
+it "was an appeal, of a force and poignancy paralleled only in the
+Ninth symphony, to the emotional side of man's nature ... the aesthetic
+qualities are subordinated to the utterance of an overwhelming
+emotion." Had I said "deliberately subordinated" I should have
+indicated the main difference as well as the main likeness between
+Bach's masterwork and Mozart's. The aesthetic qualities are
+subordinated to the expression of an overwhelming emotion in the
+Requiem, but not deliberately: unconsciously rather, perhaps even
+against Mozart's will. Bach set out with the intention of using his
+art to communicate a certain feeling to his listeners; Mozart, when he
+accepted the order for a Requiem from that mysterious messenger clad
+in grey, thought only of creating a beautiful thing. But he had lately
+found, to his great sorrow, that his ways were not the world's ways,
+and fraught with even graver consequences was the world's discovery
+that its ways were not Mozart's. Finding all attempts to turn him from
+his ways fruitless, the world fought him with contempt, ostracism,
+and starvation for weapons; and he lacked strength for the struggle.
+There had been a time when he could retire within himself and live in
+an ideal world of Don Giovannis and Figaros. But now body as well as
+spirit was over-wearied; spirit and body were not only tired but
+diseased; and when he commenced to work at the Requiem the time was
+past for making beautiful things, for his mind was preoccupied with
+death and the horror of death--the taste of death was already in his
+mouth. Had death come to him as to other men, he might have met it as
+other men do, heroically, or at least calmly, without loss of dignity.
+But it came to him coloured and made fearful by wild imaginings, and
+was less a thought than an unthinkable horror. He believed he had been
+poisoned, and Count Walsegg's grey-clad messenger seemed a messenger
+sent from another world to warn him of the approaching finish. As he
+said, he wrote the Requiem for himself. In it we find none of the
+sunshine and laughter of "Don Giovanni," but only a painfully pathetic
+record of Mozart's misery, his despair, and his terror. It is indeed a
+stupendous piece of art, and much of it surpassingly beautiful; but
+the absorbing interest of it will always be that it is a "human
+document," an autobiographical fragment, the most touching
+autobiography ever penned.
+
+The pervading note of the whole work is struck at the beginning of
+the first number. Had Mozart seen death as Handel and Bach saw it, as
+the only beautiful completion of life, or even as the last opportunity
+given to men to meet a tremendous reality and not be found wanting, he
+might have written a sweetly breathed prayer for eternal rest, like
+the final chorus of the "Matthew" Passion, or given us something equal
+or almost equal to the austere grandeur of the Dead March in Saul. But
+he saw death differently, and in the opening bar of the "Requiem
+aeternam" we have only sullen gloom and foreboding, deadly fear
+begotten of actual foreknowledge of things to come. The discord at the
+fifth bar seems to have given him the relief gained by cutting oneself
+when in severe pain; and how intense Mozart's pain was may be
+estimated by the vigour of the reaction when the reaction comes; for
+though the "Te decet hymnus" is like a gleam of sweet sunshine on
+black waters, the melody is immediately snatched up, as it were, and,
+by the furious energy of the accompaniment, powerful harmonic
+progressions, and movement of the inner parts (note the tenor
+ascending to the high G on "orationem"), made expressive of abnormal
+glowing ecstasy. To know Mozart's mood when he wrote the Requiem is to
+have the key to the "Kyrie." His artistic sense compelled him to veil
+the acuteness of his agony in the strict form of a regular fugue; but
+here, as everywhere else in the Requiem, feeling triumphs over the
+artistic sense; and by a chromatic change, of which none but a Mozart
+or a Bach would have dreamed, the inexpressive formality of the
+counter-subject is altered into a passionate appeal for mercy. In no
+other work of Mozart known to me does he ever become hysterical, and
+in the Requiem only once, towards the end of this number, where the
+sopranos are whirled up to the high A, and tenors and altos strengthen
+the rhythm; and even here the pause, followed by that scholastic
+cadence, affords a sense of recovered balance, though we should
+observe that the raucous final chord with the third omitted is in
+keeping with the colour of the whole number, and not dragged in as a
+mere display of pedantic knowledge. The "Dies Irae" is magnificent
+music, but the effect is enormously intensified by Mozart first (in
+the "Kyrie") making us guess at the picture by the agitation of mind
+into which it throws him, and then suddenly opening the curtain and
+letting us view for ourselves the lurid splendours; and surely no more
+awful picture of the Judgment was ever painted than we have here in
+the "Dies Irae," "Tuba minim," "Rex tremendae," and the "Confutatis."
+The method of showing the obverse of the medal first, and then
+astonishing us with the sudden magnificence of the other side, is an
+old one, and was an old one even in Mozart's time, but he uses it with
+supreme mastery, and results that have never been equalled. The most
+astonishing part of the "Confutatis" is the prayer at the finish,
+where strange cadence upon cadence falls on the ear like a long-drawn
+sigh, and the last, longer drawn than the rest, "gere curam mei
+finis," followed by a hushed pause, is indeed awful as the silence of
+the finish. Quite as great is the effect of the same kind in the
+"Agnus Dei," which was either written by Mozart, or by Sussmayer with
+Mozart's spirit looking over him. Written by Mozart, the Requiem
+necessarily abounds in tender touches: the trebles at "Dona eis"
+immediately after their first entry; the altos at the same words
+towards the end of the number, and at the twenty-eighth bar of the
+"Kyrie"; the first part of the "Hostias," the "Agnus Dei," the
+wonderful "Ne me perdas" in the "Recordare." And if one wants sheer
+strength and majesty, turn to the fugue on "Quam olim Abrahae," or the
+C natural of the basses in the "Sanctus." But the prevailing mood is
+one of depressing sadness, which would become intolerable by reason of
+its monotony were it possible to listen to the Requiem as a work of
+art merely, and not as the tearful confessions of one of the most
+beautiful spirits ever born into the world.
+
+
+
+
+"FIDELIO"
+
+
+As an enthusiastic lover of "Fidelio" I may perhaps be permitted to
+put one or two questions to certain other of its lovers. Is it an
+opera at all?--does it not consist of one wonderfully touching
+situation, padded out before and behind,--before with some
+particularly fatuous reminiscences of the old comedy of intrigue,
+behind with some purely formal business and a pompous final chorus?
+"Fidelio" exists by reason of that one tremendous scene: there is
+nothing else dramatic in it: however fine the music is, one cannot
+forget that the libretto is fustian and superfluous nonsense. Had
+Beethoven possessed the slightest genius for opera, had he possessed
+anything like Mozart's dramatic instinct (and of course his own
+determination to touch nothing but fitting subjects), he would have
+felt that no meaner story than the "Flying Dutchman" would serve as an
+opportunity to say all that was aroused in his heart and in his mind
+by the tale of Leonora. As he had no genius whatever for opera, no
+sense of the dramatic in life, the tale of Leonora seemed to him good
+enough; and, after all, in its essence it is the same as the tale of
+Senta. The Dutchman himself happens to be more interesting than
+Florestan because of his weird fate; but he is no more the principal
+character in Wagner's opera than Florestan is the principal character
+in Beethoven's opera. The principal character in each case is the
+woman who takes her fate into her own hands and fearlessly chances
+every risk for the sake of the man she loves. And just as Wagner wrote
+the best passage in the "Dutchman" for the moment when Senta promises
+to be faithful through life and death, so Beethoven in the prison
+scene of "Fidelio" wrote as tremendous a passage as even he ever
+conceived for the moment when Leonora makes up her mind at all costs
+to save the life of the wretched prisoner whose grave she is helping
+to dig. The tale is simple enough--there is scarcely enough of it to
+call a tale. Leonora's husband, Florestan, has somehow fallen into the
+power of his enemy Pizarro, who imprisons him and then says he is
+dead. Leonora disbelieves this, and, disguising herself as a boy and
+taking the name of Fidelio, hires herself as an assistant to Rocco,
+the jailer of the fortress in which Florestan is confined. At that
+time the news arrives that an envoy of the king is coming to see that
+no injustice is being done by Pizarro. Pizarro has been hoping to
+starve Florestan slowly to death; but now he sees the necessity of
+more rapid action. He therefore tells Rocco to dig a grave in
+Florestan's cell, and he himself will do the necessary murder. This
+brings about the great prison scene. Florestan lies asleep in a
+corner; Leonora is not sure whether she is helping to dig his grave or
+the grave of some other unlucky wretch; but while she works she takes
+her resolution--whoever he may be, she will risk all consequences and
+save him. Pizarro arrives, and is about to kill Florestan, when
+Leonora presents a pistol to his head; and, before he has quite had
+time to recover, a trumpet call is heard, signalling the arrival of
+the envoy. Pizarro knows the game is up, and Florestan that his wife
+has saved him. This, I declare, is the only dramatic scene in the
+play--here the thing ends: excepting it, there is no real incident.
+The business at the beginning, about the jailer's daughter refusing to
+have anything more to do with her former sweetheart, and falling in
+love with the supposed Fidelio, is merely silly; Rocco's song,
+elegantly translated in one edition, "Life is nothing without
+money"--Heaven knows whether it was intended to be humorous--is
+stupid; Pizarro's stage-villainous song of vengeance is unnecessary;
+the arrangement of the crime is a worry. These, and in fact all that
+comes before the great scene, are entirely superfluous, the purest
+piffle, very tiresome. Most exasperating of all is the stupid
+dialogue, which makes one hope that the man who wrote it died a
+painful, lingering death. But, in spite of it all, Beethoven, by
+writing some very beautiful music in the first act, and by rising to
+an astonishing height in the prison scene and the succeeding duet, has
+created one of the wonders of the music-world.
+
+Being a glorification of woman--German woman, although Leonora was
+presumably Spanish--"Fidelio" has inevitably become in Germany the
+haus-frau's opera. Probably there is not a haus-frau who faithfully
+cooks her husband's dinner, washes for him, blacks his boots, and
+would even brush his clothes did he ever think that necessary, who
+does not see herself reflected in Leonora; probably every German
+householder either longs to possess her or believes that he does
+possess her. Consequently, just as Mozart's "Don Giovanni" became the
+playground of the Italian prima donna, so has "Fidelio" become the
+playground of that terrible apparition, the Wifely Woman Artist, the
+singer with no voice, nor beauty, nor manners, but with a high
+character for correct morality, and a pressure of sentimentality that
+would move a traction-engine. I remember seeing it played a few years
+ago, and can never forget a Leonora of sixteen stones, steadily
+singing out of tune, in the first act professing with profuse
+perspiration her devotion to her husband (whose weight was rather less
+than half hers), and in the second act nearly crushing the poor
+gentleman by throwing herself on him to show him that she was for ever
+his. A recent performance at Covent Garden, arranged specially, I
+understand, for Ternina, was not nearly so bad as that; but still
+Ternina scared me horribly with the enormous force of her Wifely
+Ardour. It may be that German women are more demonstrative than
+English women in public; but, for my poor part, too much public
+affection between man and wife always strikes me as a little false.
+Besides, the grand characteristic of Leonora is not that she loves her
+husband--lots of women do that, and manage to love other people's
+husbands also--but that, driven at first by affection and afterwards
+by purely human compassion, she is capable of rising to the heroic
+point of doing in life what she feels she must do. Of course she may
+have been an abnormal combination of the Wifely Woman with the heroic
+woman; but one cannot help thinking that probably she was not--that
+however strong her affection for Florestan, she would no sooner get
+him home than she would ask him how he came to be such a fool as to
+get into Pizarro's clutches. Anyhow, Ternina's conception of Leonora
+as a mixture of the contemptible will-less German haus-frau with the
+strong-willed woman of action, was to me a mixture of contradictions.
+Yet, despite all these things, the opera made the deep impression it
+does and always will make.
+
+That impression is due entirely to the music and not to the drama.
+Dramatic music, in the sense that Mozart's music, and Wagner's, is
+dramatic, it is not. There is not the slightest attempt at
+characterisation--not even such small characterisation as Mozart
+secured in his "La ci darem," with Zerlina's little fluttering,
+agitated phrases. Nor, in the lighter portions, is there a trace of
+Mozart's divine intoxicating laughter, of the sweet sad laugh with
+which he met the griefs life brought him. There is none of Mozart's
+sunlight, his delicious, fresh, early morning sunlight, in Beethoven's
+music; when he wrote such a number as the first duet, intended to be
+gracefully semi-humorous, he was merely heavy, clumsy, dull. But when
+the worst has been said, when one has writhed under the recollection
+of an adipose prima donna fooling with bear-like skittishness a German
+tenor whose figure and face bewray the lager habit, when one has
+shuddered to remember the long-winded idiotic dialogue, the fact
+remains firmly set in one's mind that one has stood before a gigantic
+work of art--a work whose every defect is redeemed by its overwhelming
+power and beauty and pathos. There has never been, nor does it seem
+possible there ever will be, a finer scene written than the dungeon
+scene. It begins with the low, soft, throbbing of the strings, then
+there is the sinister thunderous roll of the double basses; then the
+old man quietly tells Leonora to hurry on with the digging of the
+grave, and Leonora replies (against that wondrous phrase of the
+oboes). After that, the old man continues to grumble; the dull
+threatening thunder of the basses continues; and Leonora, half
+terrified, tries to see whether the sleeping prisoner is her husband.
+Then abruptly her courage rises; her short broken phrases are
+abandoned; and to a great sweeping melody she declares that, whoever
+the prisoner may be, she will free him. These twenty bars are as
+great music as anything in the world: they even leave Senta's
+declaration in the "Dutchman" far behind; they are at once triumphant
+and charged with a pathos nearly unendurable in its intensity. The
+scene ends with a strange hushed unison passage like some unearthly
+chant: it is the lull before the breaking of the storm. The entry of
+Pizarro and the pistol business are by no means done as Wagner or
+Mozart would have done them. The music is always excellent and
+sometimes great, but persistently symphonic and not dramatic in
+character. However, it serves; and the strength of the situation
+carries one on until the trumpet call is heard, and then we get a
+wonderful tune such as neither Mozart nor Wagner could have written--a
+tune that is sheer Beethoven. The finale of the scene is neither here
+nor there; but in the duet between Leonora and Florestan we have again
+pure Beethoven. There is one passage--it begins at bar 32--which is
+the expression of the very soul of the composer; one feels that if it
+had not come his heart must have burst. I have neither space nor
+inclination to rehearse all the splendours of the opera, but may
+remind the reader of Florestan's song in the dungeon, Leonora's
+address to Hope, and the hundred other fine things spread over it. It
+is symphonic, not dramatic, music; but it is at times unspeakably
+pathetic, at times full of radiant strength, and always an absolutely
+truthful utterance of sheer human emotion. Wagner hit exactly the word
+when he spoke of the _truthful_ Beethoven: here is no pose, no mere
+tone-weaving, but the precise and most poignant expression of the
+logical course taken by the human passions.
+
+
+
+
+SCHUBERT
+
+
+Excepting during his lifetime and for a period of some thirty years
+after his death, Schubert cannot be said to have been neglected; and
+last year there was quite an epidemic of concerts to celebrate the
+hundredth anniversary of his birth. Centenary celebrations are often a
+little disconcerting. They remind one that a composer has been dead
+either a much shorter or a much longer time than one supposed; and one
+gets down Riemann's "Musical Dictionary" and realises with a sigh that
+the human memory is treacherous. Who, for instance, that is familiar
+with Schubert's music can easily believe that it is a hundred years
+since the composer was born and seventy since he died? It is as
+startling to find him, as one might say, one of the ancients as it is
+to remember that Spohr lived until comparatively recent times; for
+whereas Spohr's music is already older than Beethoven's, older than
+Mozart's, in many respects quite as old as Haydn's, much of Schubert's
+is as modern as Wagner's, and more modern than a great deal that was
+written yesterday. This modernity will, I fancy, be readily admitted
+by everyone; and it is the only one quality of Schubert's music which
+any two competent people will agree to admit. Liszt had the highest
+admiration for everything he wrote; Wagner admired the songs, but
+wondered at Liszt's acceptance of the chamber and orchestral music.
+Sir George Grove outdoes Liszt in his Schubert worship; and an
+astonishing genius lately rushed in, as his kind always does, where
+Sir George would fear to tread, boldly, blatantly asserting that
+Schubert is "the greatest musical genius that the Western world has
+yet produced." On the other hand, Mr. G. Bernard Shaw out-Wagners
+Wagner in denunciation, and declares the C symphony childish, inept,
+mere Rossini badly done. Now, I can understand Sir George Grove's
+enthusiasm; for Sir George to a large extent discovered Schubert; and
+disinterested art-lovers always become unduly excited about any art
+they have discovered: for example, see how excited Wagner became about
+his own music, how rapt Mr. Dolmetsch is in much of the old music. But
+I can understand Wagner's attitude no better than I can the attitude
+of Mr. Shaw. I should like to have met Wagner and have said to him,
+"My dear Richard, this disparaging tone is not good enough: where did
+you get the introduction to 'The Valkyrie'?--didn't that long tremolo
+D and the figure in the bass both come out of 'The Erl-king'? has your
+Spear theme nothing in common with the last line but one of 'The
+Wanderer'? or--if it is only the instrumental music you object to--did
+you learn nothing for the third act of 'The Valkyrie' from the
+working-out of the Unfinished Symphony? did you know that Schubert had
+used your Mime theme in a quartet before you? do you know that I could
+mention a hundred things you borrowed from Schubert? Go to, Richard:
+be fair." Having extinguished Richard thus, and made his utter
+discomfiture doubly certain by handing him a list of the hundred
+instances, I should turn to Mr. Shaw and say, "My good G.B.S., you
+understand a good deal about politics and political economy,
+Socialism, and Fabians, painting and actors [and so on, with untrue
+and ill-natured remarks _ad lib_.], but evidently you understand very
+little about Schubert. That 'Rossini crescendo' is as tragic a piece
+of music as ever was written." Yet, after dismissing the twain in this
+friendly manner, I should have an uneasy feeling that there was some
+good reason for their lack of enthusiasm for Schubert. The very fact
+of there being such wide disagreement about the value of music that is
+now so familiar to us all, points to some weakness in it which some of
+us feel less than others; and I, poor unhappy mortal, who in my
+unexcited moments neither place Schubert among the highest gods, like
+Liszt and Sir George Grove, nor damn him cordially, like Wagner and
+Mr. Shaw, cannot help perceiving that along with much that is
+magnificently strong, distinguished, and beautiful in his music, there
+is much that is pitiably weak, and worse than commonplace. The music
+is like the man--the oddest combination of greatness and smallness
+that the world has seen. Like Wagner and Beethoven, Schubert was
+strong enough to refuse to earn an honest living; yet he yielded
+miserably to publishers when discussing the number of halfpence he
+should receive for a dozen songs. He had energy enough to go on
+writing operas, but apparently not intelligence to see that his
+librettos were worth setting, or to ensure that anything should come
+of them when they were set. He thought, rightly or wrongly, that he
+needed more counterpoint, yet continued to compose symphonies and
+masses without it, vaguely intending to the very end to take lessons
+from a sound teacher. He had spirit enough to fall in love (so far as
+stories may be relied on), but not to make the lady promise to marry
+him, nor yet resolutely to cure himself of his affliction. He had
+courage to face the truth, as he saw it, and he found life bitter, and
+not worth enduring; yet he could not renounce it, like Beethoven, nor
+end it as others have done. As in actual life, so in his music; having
+once started anything, he seemed quite unable to make up his mind to
+fetch it to a conclusion. He was like a man who lets himself roll down
+a hill because it is easier to keep on rolling than to stop. He
+repeats his melodies interminably, and then draws a double bar and
+sets down the two fatal dots which mean that all has to be played
+again. If the repeat had not been a favourite resort of lazy composers
+before his time he would have invented it, not because he was lazy,
+but because he wanted to go on and could not afford infinite
+music-paper. Hence his music at its worst is the merest drivel ever
+set down by a great composer; hence at anything but its best it lacks
+concentrated passion and dramatic intensity; more than any other
+composer's it has one prevailing note, a note of deepest melancholy;
+and therefore, when a few pieces are known, most of the rest seem
+barren of what is wanted by those who seek chiefly in music the
+expression of all the human passions.
+
+Of his lengthiness, his discursiveness, Schubert might possibly have
+been cured, but not of his melancholy: it is the very essence of his
+music, as it was of his being. "The Wanderer" is his typical song: he
+was himself the wanderer, straying disconsolately, helplessly,
+hopelessly through a strange, chilly, unreal world, singing the
+saddest and sometimes the sweetest songs that ever entered the ears of
+men. That his home and his happiness lay close at hand counts for
+nothing; for he did not and could not know that he was the voice of
+the eighteenth century, worn out and keenly sensible of the futility
+of the purely intellectual life. Even had he arrived at a
+consciousness of the truth that the cure for his despair lay in
+throwing over the antiquated forms, modes, and ideas of the eighteenth
+century and living a nineteenth century life, free and conscienceless
+in nature's way, he would have been little better off; for the
+tendencies of many generations remained strong in him; and besides,
+had he the physical energy for a free, buoyant, joyous existence, was
+he not physiologically unfit for happiness? He lived with an
+ever-present consciousness of his impotence to satisfy his deepest
+needs. He was even destitute of that sense of the immeasurable good to
+come which of old time found expression in the fiction of a personal
+immortality, and in the nineteenth century in the complacent
+acceptance of full and vigorous life, with death as a noble and
+fitting close. Life and death alike were tragic, because hopeless, to
+Schubert. His career, if career it can be called, is infinitely
+touching. His helplessness moves one to pity, odd though it seems that
+one in some ways so strong should also in so many ways be so weak; and
+his death was as touching as his life. Of all the composers he met
+death with least heroism. Mozart, it is true, shrieked hysterically;
+but death to his diseased mind was merely an indescribable horror; and
+the fact of his hysteria proves his revolt against fate. Beethoven,
+during a surgical operation shortly before the end, saw the stream of
+water and blood flowing from him, and found courage to say, "Better
+from the belly than the pen;" and as he lay dying and a thunderstorm
+broke above the house, he threatened it with his clenched fist.
+Schubert learnt that he was to die, and turned his face to the wall
+and did not speak again. It is hard to say whether his music was
+sadder when he sang of death than when he sang of life. Even in his
+rare moments of good spirits one catches stray echoes of his
+prevailing note, and realises how completely his despair dominated
+him. He could not sing of love or fighting or of the splendours of
+nature without betraying his deep conviction of the futility of all
+created things. It is characteristic that his major melodies should
+often be as sad and wailing as his minor, and that his scherzos and
+other movements, in which he has deliberately set out to be
+light-hearted, should often be ponderous and without the nervous
+energy he manifests when he gives his familiar feelings free play.
+
+Despite its incessant plaintive accent, his music is saved by the
+endless flow of melody, often lovely, generally characteristic, though
+sometimes common, in which Schubert continually expressed anew his one
+mood; and he was placed among the great ones by the miraculous
+facility he possessed of extemporising frequent passages of
+extraordinary power and bigness. At least half of his songs are
+poor--for a composer capable of rising to such heights; but of the
+remainder at least half are nearly equal to any songs in the world for
+sweetness, strength, and accurate expressiveness, while a few approach
+so close to Handel's and Mozart's that affection for the composer
+presses one hard to put them on the same level. But, compared with
+those high standards, Schubert, even at his best, is unmistakably felt
+to be second-rate, while his average--always comparing it with the
+highest--cannot truly be said to be more than fourth-rate. That he
+stands far above Mendelssohn and Schumann, and perhaps a little above
+Weber, almost goes without saying; for those composers have no more of
+the great style, the style of Handel and Mozart, and Bach and
+Beethoven at their finest, than Schubert, and they lack the lovely
+irresistibly moving melody and the bigness. But it must be recognised
+that Schubert never rose to a style of sustained grandeur and dignity;
+he was always colloquial, paying in this the penalty for the extreme
+facility with which he composed ("I compose every morning, and when I
+have finished one thing I commence something fresh"). Compose is
+scarcely the word to use: he never composed in the ordinary sense of
+the word; he extemporised on paper. Even when he re-wrote a song, it
+meant little more than that, dissatisfied with his treatment of a
+theme, he tried again. He never built as, for instance, Bach and
+Beethoven built, carefully working out this detail, lengthening this
+portion, shearing away that, evolving part from part so that in the
+end the whole composition became a complete organism. There is none of
+the logic in his work that we find in the works of the tip-top men,
+none of the perfect finish; but, on the contrary, a very considerable
+degree of looseness, if not of actual incoherence, and many marks of
+the tool and a good deal of the scaffolding. But, in spite of it all,
+the greatness of many of his movements seems to me indisputable. In a
+notice of "The Valkyrie," Mr. Hichens once very happily spoke of the
+"earth-bigness" of some of the music, and this is the bigness I find
+in Schubert at his best and strongest. When he depicts the workings of
+nature--the wind roaring through the woods, the storm above the
+convent roof, the flash of the lightning, the thunderbolt--he does not
+accomplish it with the wonderful point and accuracy of Weber, nor with
+the ethereal delicacy of Purcell, but with a breadth, a sympathy with
+the passion of nature, that no other composer save Wagner has ever
+attained to. He views natural phenomena through a human temperament,
+and so infuses human emotion into natural phenomena, as Wagner does in
+"The Valkyrie" and "Siegfried." The rapidly repeated note, now rising
+to a roar and now falling to a subdued murmur, in "The Erl-king" was
+an entirely new thing in music; and in "The Wanderer" piano fantasia,
+the working-out of the Unfinished symphony, and even in some of the
+chamber music, he invented things as fresh and as astounding. And when
+he is simply expressing himself, as at the beginning of the
+Unfinished, and in the first and last movements of the big C symphony,
+he often does it on the same large scale. The second subject of the C
+symphony finale, with its four thumps, seems to me to become in its
+development, and especially in the coda, all but as stupendous an
+expression of terror as the music in the last scene of "Don Giovanni,"
+where Leporello describes the statue knocking at the door. In short,
+when I remember Schubert's grandest passages, and the unspeakable
+tenderness of so many of his melodies, it is hard to resist the
+temptation to cancel all the criticism I have written and to follow
+Sir George Grove in placing Schubert close to Beethoven.
+
+
+
+
+WEBER AND WAGNER
+
+
+There are critics, I suppose, prepared to insist that Weber, like
+Mozart, is a little _passe_ now. And it is true that no composer, save
+Mozart, is at once so widely accepted and so seldom heard; for even
+Bach is more frequently played and less generally praised. At rare
+intervals Richter, Levi, or Mottl play his overtures; the pieces for
+piano and orchestra are occasionally dragged out to display the
+prowess of a Paderewski or a Sauer; and one or another of the piano
+sonatas sometimes finds its way into a Popular Concert programme. But
+the pieces thus made familiar to the public may be counted on one's
+ten fingers; and the operas are scarcely sung at all, though they
+contain the finest music that Weber wrote. The composers who have
+lived since Weber, even if they differed on every other subject and
+did not agree as to the value of his instrumental music, united to
+sing a common song in praise of the operas. Indeed, so enthusiastic
+were they, that after listening to them anyone who does not know his
+Weber well may easily experience a certain disappointment on looking
+carefully for the first time at the scores of "Der Freischuetz,"
+"Oberon," and "Euryanthe"; and it is perhaps because they have
+experienced that disappointment, that some critics whose opinions are
+worth considering have come to think that a faith in Weber is nothing
+more than a part of the creed learned by every honest Wagnerite at the
+Master's knee. But it need be nothing so foolish, so baseless If you
+look, and look rightly, for the right thing in Weber's music,
+disappointment is impossible; though I admit that the man who
+professes to find there the great qualities he finds in Mozart,
+Beethoven, or any of the giants, must be in a very sad case. Grandeur,
+pure beauty, and high expressiveness are alike wanting. You look as
+vainly for such touches as the divine last dozen bars "Or sai chi
+l'onore" in "Don Giovanni," or the deep emotion of the sobbing bass at
+"the first fruits of them that sleep" in "I know that my Redeemer
+liveth," as for the stately splendour of "Come and thank Him" in the
+"Christmas Oratorio," or the passion of "Tristan." His music never
+develops in step with the movement of the drama he treats: if he
+writes a tragic scene, he is apt to commence with a scream; and if he
+is not at his best, then the scream may degenerate into a whimper
+before the moment for the climax has arrived. Like Spohr, with whom he
+had much in common, despite the difference between his mercurial
+temperament and the pedagogic gravity of the composer of "The Last
+Judgment," he set great store upon his learning, and was fond of
+trivial themes that admitted of obvious contrapuntal treatment. Even
+when he avoided that failing, his music is often uncouth and
+ponderous, while on its surface lies a superfluous, highly-coloured
+froth. The basses move with leaden-footed reluctance; the melodies
+consist largely of ineffective arpeggios on long-drawn chords; the
+embroidery seems greatly in excess of modest needs. All this may be
+conceded without affecting Weber's claim to a place amongst the
+composers; for that claim is supported in a lesser degree by the gifts
+which he shared, even if his share was small, with the greater masters
+of music, than by his miraculous power of vividly drawing and painting
+in music the things that kindled his imagination. Drawing and
+painting, I say; for whereas the other musicians sang the emotions
+that they experienced, Weber's music gives you the impression that he
+depicted the things he saw, that melody and harmony were to him as
+lines and colours to the painter. He is first, and perhaps greatest,
+of all the musicians who have attempted landscape; and that froth of
+seemingly superfluous colour and excess of melodic embroidery, instead
+of being in excess and superfluous, are the very essence of his music.
+Being a factor of the Romantic movement, that mighty rebellion against
+the tyranny of a world of footrules and ledgers, he lived and worked
+in a world where two and two might make five or seven or any number
+you pleased, and where footrules were unknown; he took small interest
+in drama taken out of the lives of ordinary men and enacted amidst
+everyday surroundings; his imagination lit up only when he thought of
+haunted glens and ghouls and evil spirits, the fantastic world and
+life that goes on underneath the ocean, or of men or women held by
+ghastly spells. Hence his operas are not so much musical dramas as
+series of tableaux, gorgeous glowing pictures of unheard-of things; in
+them we must expect only to find the elfish, the fantastic, the wild
+and weird and grotesquely horrible; and to look for drama, captivating
+loveliness, and emotional utterance, is to look for qualities which
+Weber did not try to attain, or only in a small measure and not very
+successfully. And if we consider carefully the remarks of the best
+critics amongst the later masters, Berlioz and Wagner, we can see that
+they knew Weber had not attained these high qualities,--that what they
+grew enthusiastic over was his astonishing pictorial gift, shown,
+first, in the pictures his imagination presented to him, and second,
+in the way he projected those pictures on to the music-paper before
+him, using the common musician's devices of his day to suggest line,
+colour, space, and atmosphere.
+
+The precise provocation of this essay was a certain performance of
+"Lohengrin." During the first act the drama proceeded with charming,
+almost Mozartean, smoothness; and I was surprised to find that the
+smoother it went the more irresistibly the music reminded me of Weber,
+until I remembered that "Lohengrin" is Wagner's most Weberish opera,
+and that in his youth Wagner heard Weber sung, not as he is sung
+now--that is, like an early Wagner music-drama--but as Weber intended
+it to be sung, like a later Mozart opera. For Weber stood very near to
+Mozart, modern as he often seems. He was born before Mozart died; he
+worshipped him, and absolutely refused to speak to Salieri because
+Salieri had been Mozart's enemy; and it is easy to see, when once we
+rid ourselves of the idea that he was a rudimentary music-dramatist,
+that in his music he adhered as closely to Mozartean simplicity as his
+very different genius would permit. Perhaps, after all, it is his
+greatest glory that he is the connecting link between Mozart and
+Wagner, between the greatest composer born into the eighteenth century
+and the greatest born into the nineteenth; for the musical-pictorial
+art which he evolved from Mozart's technique was used by Wagner with
+only the slightest modifications in the making of his music-dramas.
+But whereas Weber was a factor in the Romantic movement when it was
+most magnificently unreasonable, Wagner came later, and, though he
+felt the force of the current, it did not carry him into the
+absurdities that weaken--for they do weaken--much of Weber's work.
+Wagner has been described as Weber, as Weber might have become; but
+the truth is that he was Weber's younger brother, who took Weber's art
+and used it to nobler ends with a degree of intellect, dramatic power,
+invention, and passion which Weber did not possess. To Weber the
+scenery was the important thing, and humanity almost seemed to be
+dragged in because the human voice was indispensable; but Wagner,
+going back to Mozart, restored humanity to its proper place, thus
+making his opera into real drama, and kept the fantastic creatures who
+haunted Weber's woods and glens and streams only as emblems of the
+natural forces that war for or against humanity. Above all, he got rid
+of Weber's stage villains--for Samiel is merely the stage villain of
+commerce; and, instead of the dusk and shadow in which Weber's fancy
+loved to roam, he gives us sunlight and the sweet air. "Lohengrin" is
+full of sunlight and freshness; full, too, of a finer mystery than
+ever Weber dreamed of--the mystery with which the most delicate German
+imagination invested the broad rivers that flowed through the black
+forests from some far-away land of unchangeable stillness and beauty,
+some "land of eternal dawn," as Wagner calls it. No more Mozartean
+music is in existence, save Mozart's own, than that first act of
+"Lohengrin," where Wagner, by dint of being Weberish, came nearer to
+Mozart than ever Weber came; for Weber never wrote anything which,
+regarded as absolute music, apart from its emotional significance, or
+the picture it suggests to the inner eye, is so purely beautiful as,
+for instance, the bit of chorus sung after Lohengrin concludes his
+little arrangement with Elsa. Both the first and the second acts are
+full of such melodies, any two of which would prove Wagner to be the
+greatest melody-writer of the century; and those critics who say that
+Verdi is greater because his melodies are more like Mozart's in form,
+would have said, had they lived last century, that Salieri was greater
+than Mozart because Salieri's melodies were more like Hasse's in form.
+Perhaps the last act might be quite as exquisite on the stage, for it
+is even more exquisite in the score; but that we shall not know until
+our operatic singers abandon their vanity and their melodrama, and by
+reading an occasional book, and sometimes going out into the world,
+learn how much they themselves would gain if they always worked with
+artistic sincerity.
+
+
+
+
+ITALIAN OPERA, DEAD AND DYING
+
+
+All art forms are conventions, and all conventions appear ridiculous
+when they are superseded by new ones. The old Italian opera form is
+laughed at to-day as an absurdity by Wagnerians, who see nothing
+absurd in a many-legged monster with a donkey's head uttering deep
+bass curses through a speaking-trumpet; and perhaps to-morrow the
+Wagnerian music-drama and the many-legged monsters will be laughed at
+by the apostles of a new and equally absurd convention. It is
+absolutely the first condition of the existence of an art that one
+shall be prepared to tolerate things ludicrously unlike anything to be
+found in real life; and when (for instance) you have swallowed the
+camel of allowing the heroes and heroines to sing their woes at all,
+it is a little foolish to strain at the gnat of permitting them to
+sing in this rather than in that way, when both ways are alike
+preposterous. It is not, therefore, on the score of its inherent
+absurdity that I should throw brickbats at Italian opera, any more
+than with the female dress of to-day before my eyes I should insist
+that the women who wore the fashions of ten years ago were only fit to
+be incarcerated in a lunatic asylum; knowing, as I do, that the dress
+of ten years ago was not--and could not be--more absurd than the dress
+of to-day. The only reasonable objection that can be brought against
+Italian opera is that when it is sincere it offers what no one wants,
+and that when it tries to offer what everyone wants it is not sincere.
+I cannot quite understand what this means, but will endeavour to
+explain.
+
+Italian opera was moulded to its present form chiefly by Gluck, before
+whose time it was less irrational than it became later. In the
+beginning it was music-drama of a pedantic kind; then it served as the
+opportunity for setting singers to deliver a series of beautiful songs
+for the delectation of an audience largely seated in the wings; and
+finally Gluck, with his immense dramatic instinct and lack of lyrical
+invention, saw that by securing a story worth the telling, and telling
+it well, and inserting songs and concerted pieces only in situations
+where strong feelings demanded expression, and making his songs
+truthful expressions of those feelings, a form might be created which
+would enable him to lever out the best that was in him. Of these three
+periods of opera, the second was the luckiest; for then the form
+entirely fulfilled its purpose. The sole function of the story was to
+provide a motive for song after song; so that no one was scandalised
+or moved to laughter when the death of the hero was re-enacted because
+his death-song pleased the audience, or when the telling of the story
+was interrupted on any other equally ridiculous pretext. The
+characters were the merest puppets, or shadows of puppets; and there
+was no reason why Julius Caesar should not be a male soprano and sing
+charmingly feminine florid airs. In a word, there was no drama nor
+pretence of drama in the old Italian form; and those who can accept
+it as it is will find in many old Italian writers some perfect music
+of its sort, and in the Italian operas of Handel the divinest songs
+ever written--songs even more divine than Mozart's. But the childish
+delight in lovely melodies and in absolute perfection of vocal art, at
+its highest in the early part of the eighteenth century, died out
+rapidly after 1750; and Italian opera became the medium of the
+vulgarest instead of the most refined kind of ear-tickling. How Gluck
+rebelled, and determined to "reform" the opera stage, and how in
+reforming it he was impelled to a large extent by a desire to find a
+medium through which he could express himself, are matters well enough
+known to everyone nowadays. Like every other teacher, he left no
+disciples; for Mozart, the next master of Italian opera, was a hundred
+thousand miles away from him in intention, in method, and in
+achievement. He commenced where Gluck ended his pre-Reformation
+period; and all his life his intention was to please first, and only
+in the second place to express himself. But so splendid were his
+gifts, so inevitably did he fit the lovely word to the thrilling
+thought, so lucky was he in the libretto of "Don Giovanni" (the
+luckiest libretto ever devised), that he went clean ahead not only of
+Gluck but of Beethoven and every composer who has written opera since.
+
+His operas stand at the parting of the ways. In them we find the
+fullest measure of dramatic truth combined with the most delicious
+ear-tickling. But it is safe to say that Mozart is the only composer
+of Italian operas who ever succeeded in combining the two things thus,
+for in Gluck there is short measure of sheer beauty, and in
+Handel--who used the oldest form--no attempt at drama. Mozart, like
+Gluck, had no disciples--only the second-rate men have disciples; but
+their example, and the tendency which they represented, had a curious
+result. Before their time all opera-writers had been avowed
+ear-ticklers. But after them, and especially after Mozart, the old
+line of composers may be observed to have split up into two lines, the
+one doing the old ear-tickling business, the other trying to express
+dramatic movement, and their thought and feeling, in the old medium.
+The first of these lines has not been broken to this day: Rossini
+came, and, after Rossini, Donizetti, Auber, Bellini, Meyerbeer, and
+the rest; and ear-tickler follows ear-tickler unto this day. The
+second line in its turn quickly split into those who, not content with
+the form, sought to alter it, and those who, quite content with it,
+went gaily on, turning out opera after opera, dealing with modern
+subjects in the old-fashioned way. Of these last Gounod must be
+reckoned the chief; and he began, not where Mozart left off, but with
+the Mozartean method of the "Don Giovanni" period. Now, it is of the
+very essence of the Italian opera of the Gluck-cum-Mozart model that
+it enables a composer to represent moments. The drama does not unfold
+gradually, as it does in the music-play, with its continuous flow of
+music marking the subtlest changes. It unfolds in jerks, each number
+advancing it a stage; so that Gluck never got any appearance of
+continuity whatever, while Mozart got it only by the consummate tact
+with which he arranged his pictures, and by the exciting pace at which
+he passes them before us. The figures seem to move, as in the
+Kinetoscope, or its forerunner the Wheel of Life: the Mozartean opera,
+when most dramatic, is a musical Wheel of Life. Gounod possessed
+neither Mozart's tact nor his fiery energy. Neither was called for in
+"Faust," which is not a drama, but a series of scenes, of crucial
+moments, from a drama; and since the moments were moments charged with
+the one feeling which Gounod appears to have felt very strongly or to
+have had the faculty for expressing, he is here at his very best.
+There was nothing spiritual in love as Gounod knew it--it was purely
+animal, though delicately animal; and Marguerite remains, and will
+remain, as the final expression of the most refined and voluptuous
+form of sensuality. What he had done in "Faust" he attempted to do
+again, with sundry differences, in "Romeo and Juliet"; and here the
+method which had served him so faithfully and so well in "Faust"
+utterly broke down. In "Faust" there were virtually but two
+characters, Faust and Marguerite, while in "Romeo" the stage was
+encumbered with Tybalt, Capulet, Mercutio, Laurent; and what would
+have been Mozart's opportunity was his undoing. He could give none of
+them pungent or characteristic language; they are the merest Italian
+operatic puppets; and it is only when they are off the stage that the
+opera shows any signs of life. In the story of "Romeo" the passion is
+of a far more fiery quality than in that of "Faust"; and whereas in
+"Faust" the passion, once aroused, remains at an even level until the
+finale, where it becomes a little more intense, in "Romeo" it is
+passion which gradually amounts to a tremendous climax in the Balcony
+scene, and in the Bedroom scene is strangely blended with chilly
+forebodings of death. The Mozartean method did not permit Gounod to
+depict these metamorphoses and blendings of feeling. Mozart himself
+would have been hard pressed to do it; and, for want of the only
+method that might have enabled Gounod to do it,--the Wagnerian method
+of continuous development of typical themes,--the unfolding of the
+drama hangs fire in every scene, not a scene ends at a higher pitch of
+feeling than it began. The last scene of all, the scene where a more
+sincere composer would have made his most stupendous effect, demanded
+at least sympathy with emotions for which Gounod at no time showed the
+slightest sympathy. He could give us the erotic fervour with which
+Romeo looks death in the eyes, but the mood preceding and indeed
+leading up to that fervour he could not give us--the mood which finds
+the world barren, ugly, and so repellent that death itself appears
+beautiful by comparison, the mood to which Christianity makes its
+strongest appeal. But it was not the subject which led to Gounod's
+failure in "Romeo and Juliet." He failed in every opera excepting
+"Faust," and he failed because, lacking perfect sincerity and perfect
+knowledge of his own powers, he endeavoured to express feelings he had
+never experienced, in a form which he would have felt at once to be
+inadequate had he experienced them for ever so brief a moment. As
+Gounod failed in "Romeo," and failed in every other opera, so every
+modern composer who tries to treat dramatic subjects in the old
+undramatic form has failed, and will fail. The Italian opera was well
+enough for the purpose it was devised to serve; but as soon as
+composers seek to put strenuous action, elaborately worked-out
+situations, and the gradual growth and change of human passion into
+it, we feel that there must be a lack of artistic sincerity somewhere.
+Italian opera may offer all these things, the things that the age
+wants in its opera, but it can never be sincere in offering them, and
+art is the one place where insincerity is intolerable.
+
+But those who have heard "Romeo and Juliet" may possibly prefer even
+the insincere and unsatisfactory form of Italian opera which it
+represents to the perfectly sincere and perfectly satisfactory kind
+represented, say, by "La Favorita." For, as I said, when Italian opera
+is sincere it offers what no one wants--ear-tickling, and
+ear-tickling, moreover, of a sort which is gone completely out of
+fashion. Donizetti was a genuine descendant of the true line of
+opera-composers upon whom Gluck laid his curse, and he spent his life
+in devising pleasant noises to make his patrons' evenings pass
+agreeably. I cannot believe that anyone ever yet understood what "La
+Favorita" is all about, or that anyone ever wanted to understand. It
+is a series of songs of the inanest and insanest sort, without a
+single expressive bar, or a single tone-pattern which is beautiful
+regarded simply as a pattern. Even the famous "Spirito Gentil" is
+merely a stream of the brackish water that flowed, day and night, from
+Donizetti's pen, only it happens to be a little clearer than usual.
+But those tunes, so feeble and insipid now, pleased the ears of the
+time when Lord Steyne went to the opera for a momentary respite from
+boredom and to recruit his harem from the ballet corps; and Donizetti
+wrote them with no intention of posing as a grand composer, but simply
+as a humble purveyor of sweetmeats. In those days there was no
+music-hall, and the opera had to serve its purpose: hence the slight
+confusion which results in Donizetti, poor soul, being thought a
+better man than Mr. Jacobi is thought at the present time, although
+Mr. Jacobi cannot have less than a thousand times Donizetti's brains
+and invention. Mr. Jacobi's music is capital in its place; but I doubt
+whether it will be revived fifty years hence; and but for the fact
+that Donizetti was an opera-composer--and Mozart and Gluck were
+opera-composers too!--it is pretty certain that not the united prayers
+of Patti, Albani, Melba, and Eames would induce any operatic
+management to resurrect "La Favorita." Even up-to-date ear-tickling is
+not popular now in the opera-house: we go to the music-hall for it;
+and we don't want to pay a guinea at the opera to be tickled in a way
+that arouses no pleasurable sensations. Those terrific tonic and
+dominant passages for the trombones, sounding like the furious sawing
+of logs of wood, only make us laugh; and pretty tootlings of the
+flutes have long been done better, and overdone, elsewhere. Donizetti
+is amongst the dead whom no resurrection awaits.
+
+
+
+
+VERDI YOUNG, AND VERDI YOUNGER
+
+
+And first, for the sake of chronology, Verdi younger. "La Traviata"
+was produced in 1853, says the learned Grove, which I have consulted
+on the point, and "Aida" not till 1871. And though Verdi was not
+young, for an ordinary man, in 1871, he was very young indeed for the
+composer of "Falstaff" and "Otello"; while in the "Traviata" period
+one can scarcely say he was doing more than cutting his teeth, and not
+his wisdom teeth. One finds it difficult to understand how ever the
+thing came to be tolerated by musicians. Of course the desire to find
+a counter-blast to Wagner has done much for Verdi; but while one can
+understand how Dr. Stanford and others hoped to sweep away "Parsifal"
+with "Otello" and "Falstaff," it is not so easy to see what on earth
+they proposed to do with "Traviata." It won fame and cash for its
+composer in the old days when people went to the opera for lack of the
+music-hall, not yet invented; when Costa still lorded it not over
+living musical London merely, but over all the deceased masters, and
+without compunction added trombones to Mozart's scores, and defiled
+every masterwork he touched with his unspeakable Costamongery; when
+Wagner was either unheard of or regarded as a dangerous lunatic and
+immoral person; and it shows every sign of having been written to
+please the opera-goers of those days. Curiously, the critics of the
+time, in the words of the "Daily Telegraph," saw in "the Bayreuth
+master another form of Bunyan's man with the muck-rake," who "never
+sought to disguise the garbage he found in the Newgate Calendar of
+Mythland, or set his imagination to invent," and they were disgusted,
+also like the "Daily Telegraph," by "approaching incest" in "The
+Valkyrie"; yet they saw no harm whatever in the charming story of
+"Traviata"--the story of a harlot who reforms to the extent of
+retaining only one lover of her many, and who dies of consumption when
+that one's father does his best to drive her out upon the streets
+again by making her give up his son. Far from condemning the story
+myself, I am glad Verdi or his employers had the courage to go boldly
+to Dumas for it; only, let us be cautious how we condemn the morality
+of other opera-stories while praising the immorality of this. Let us
+see how Verdi has handled it. The opera is built after the same hybrid
+model as Gounod's "Romeo"; it is neither frankly the old Italian
+opera, existing for the sake of its songs, nor the later form in which
+the songs exist for the sake of the drama, but an attempt to combine
+the songs with the continuous working out of a dramatic impulse in the
+modern manner. But the attempt is far less successful than in "Romeo";
+and indeed it is a faint-hearted one. Whenever a song occurs, the
+action is suspended, and all the actors save the lucky vocalist of the
+minute are at their wits' end to know where to look, and what to do
+with their hands, feet--their whole persons in fact--and the parts
+they are playing. And the songs are far from being expressive of the
+feeling of the situation that is supposed to call them up. The
+drinking tune in the first act is lively and appropriate enough; and
+not much more can be said against Violetta's song, "Ah! fors' e lui,"
+than that while rather pretty its endless cadenzas are more than
+rather absurd. But in the next act Alfredo sings of the dream of his
+life to a pretty melody until he is interrupted by his sweetheart's
+maid, who tells him that his joy is at an end, and then he howls "O
+mio rimorso" to a march-tune of the rowdiest kind. Equally undramatic,
+untrue, false in feeling, are the sentimental ditties sung by
+Alfredo's father. The last act is best; but I must say that I have
+always found it a tedious business to watch Albani die of consumption.
+At the production of the piece, a soprano who must have looked quite
+as healthy played Violetta, and it is recorded that, when the doctor
+told how rapidly she was wasting away and announced her speedy
+decease, the theatre broke into uproarious merriment. I respect Madame
+Albani too highly to break into uproarious merriment at her pretence
+of consumption; but no one is better pleased when the business is
+over, although the music is more satisfactory here than in any other
+portion of the opera. Anyone who has sat at night with a friend down
+with toothache or cholera will recognise the atmosphere of the
+sickroom at once. But it is not pleasant enough to atone for the rest
+of the opera. For, to sum up, there is small interest in the drama,
+and, on the whole, smaller beauty in the music, of "La Traviata." It
+was made, as bonnets were made, to sell in the fifties; like the
+bonnets sold in the fifties, it is hopelessly out of date now; and it
+wants the inherent vitality that keeps the masterworks alive after the
+fashion in which they were written has passed away. The younger Verdi
+is not, after all, so vast an improvement on Donizetti and Bellini.
+His melodies are too often sadly sentimental, and any freshness with
+which he may have endowed them has long since faded. True, they
+occasionally have a terseness and pungency, a sheer brute force, which
+those other composers never got into their insipid tunes; while, on
+the other hand, Verdi rarely shows his strength without also showing a
+degree of vulgarity from which Bellini and Donizetti were for the most
+part free.
+
+"Aida" is a different matter, though not so very different a matter.
+Here we have the young Verdi--Verdi in his early prime, for he was
+only fifty-eight; here also we have a story more likely to stir his
+rowdy imagination, if not more susceptible of effective treatment in
+the young Verdi manner. The misfortune is that the book is a very
+excerebrose affair. The drama does not begin until the third act: the
+two first are yawning abysms of sheer dulness. Who wants to _see_
+that Radames loves Aida, that Amneris, the king's daughter, loves
+Radames, that Aida, a slave, is the daughter of the King of the
+Ethiopians, that Radames goes on a war expedition against that king,
+beats him and fetches him back a prisoner, that the other king gives
+Radames his daughter in marriage, that Radames, highly honoured, yet
+wishes to goodness he could get out of it somehow? A master of drama
+would begin in the third act, reveal the whole past in a pregnant five
+minutes, and then hold us breathless while we watched to see whether
+Radames would yield to social pressure, marry Amneris, and throw over
+Aida, or yield to passion, fly with Aida, and throw over his country.
+All this shows the bad influence of Scribe, who usually spent half his
+books in explaining matters as simple and obvious as the reason for
+eating one's breakfast. Verdi knew this as well as anyone, and used
+the two first acts as opportunities for stage display. For "Aida" was
+written to please the Khedive of Egypt; and Verdi, always keenly
+commercial, probably knew his man. Now, when the masters of
+opera--Handel, Gluck, Mozart, Weber--got hold of a bad book, they
+nearly invariably "faked" it by getting swiftly over the weak points
+and dwelling on the strong; and, above all, they flooded the whole
+thing with a stream of delicious melody that hypnotises one, and for
+the time puts fault-finding out of the question. Not so Verdi. He
+wrote to please his audience, and he knew that what one can only call
+dark-skinned local colour was still fresh in spite of "L'Africaine,"
+and that the vulgar would find delight in a blaze of glaring banners
+and showy spectacle. So he set the two first acts as they stood,
+trusting to local colour and spectacle to make them popular; and, as
+we know, at the time they were popular, and the populace exalted Verdi
+far above such second-rate fellows as Mozart and Beethoven. But now,
+when local colour has been done to death, and when it has had a
+quarter of a century to bleach out of Verdi's canvases, what remains
+to interest, I do not say to touch, one? Certainly not the expression
+of Radames' or Aida's love, for here as everywhere Verdi fails to
+communicate any new phase of emotion, but (precisely as he did in
+"Falstaff" and "Otello") has written music which indicates that he had
+some inkling of the emotion of the scene, and could write strains
+calculated not to prevent the scene making its effect. That Verdi has
+no well-spring of original feeling, perhaps explains why he is so poor
+in the scenes with Radames, Amneris, and Aida. (Also, perhaps, it
+explains why he has fallen back in his best period upon masterpieces
+of dramatic art for his librettos. It is almost outside human
+possibility to add anything to "Falstaff" or "Otello"; and such
+success as Verdi has made with them is the result of writing what is,
+after all, only glorified incidental music--music which accompanies
+the play. To class these accompaniments with the masterpieces of
+original opera is surely the most startling feat of modern musical
+criticism.) Moreover, the plan of writing each scene in a series of
+detached numbers--for, even where song might flow naturally into song,
+the two are quite detached--breaks up the interest as effectually as
+it does in "Traviata"; and the songs do not themselves interest.
+Verdi's music is not based, like the masters', upon the inflexions of
+the human voice under stress of sincere feeling, but upon figures and
+passages easily executed upon certain instruments. The great composers
+strove to make instruments speak in the accent of the human voice,
+while Verdi has always tried to make the voice sound like an
+instrument. His roulades and cadenzas, for example, sound prettier on
+the clarinet than on the voice, as one hears when he sets the one
+chasing the other in "Traviata"; and if only our orchestral players
+would take the trouble to play with the same expression as the stage
+artists sing, we might soon be content to have a repetition (with a
+difference) of the feat of the old-world conductor who, in the absence
+of the hero, played the part upon the harpsichord with universal
+applause. The stock patterns out of which the songs are made soon grow
+old-fashioned, and are superseded by fresh ones: hence Verdi's songs
+are the earliest portions of his operas to wither. There are two
+powerful scenes in "Aida"--the second of the second act, and the
+final in the last act. The last is certainly terribly repulsive at the
+first blush; but the weird chant of the priestesses in the
+brightly-lit temple, where the workmen are closing the entrance to the
+vault underneath in which we see Radames left to die, contrasts finely
+with the sweet music that accompanies the declaration of Aida that she
+has hidden there to die with him; and, while guessing at the splendour
+of the music Wagner might have given us here, one may still admit
+Verdi to have succeeded well in a smaller way than Wagner's. But on
+the whole "Aida" is to be heard once and have done with, for save
+these scenes there is little else in it to engage one. Aida is alive,
+but Amneris is a hopeless piece of machinery--something between the
+stage conception of a princess and the Lady with the Camellias, any
+difference in modesty being certainly not in favour of Amneris. The
+music very rarely rises above commonness--that commonness which is
+proclaimed in every bar of Verdi's instrumentation, and in his
+shameless Salvation Army rhythms; and it is sometimes (as in the
+Priest's solo with chorus in the last scene of the second act)
+odiously vulgar. "Aida" is more dramatic than "Traviata," has more of
+Verdi's brusque energy, less of his sentimentality; but it has none of
+the youthful freshness of his latest work. The young Verdi has already
+aged--how long will the old Verdi remain young?
+
+
+
+
+"THE FLYING DUTCHMAN"
+
+
+Wagner took "The Flying Dutchman", "Tannhaeuser," and "Lohengrin," in
+three long running steps; from "Lohengrin" he made a flying leap into
+the air, and, after spending some five or six years up there, he
+landed safely on "The Nibelung's Ring." The leap was a prodigious one,
+and you may search history in vain for its like; and still more
+astounding was it if you reckon from the point where the run was
+commenced. "The Flying Dutchman" was avowedly that point. "Die Feen"
+is boyish folly, and "Rienzi" an attempt to out-Meyer Meyerbeer. But
+in the "Dutchman" Wagner sought seriously to realise himself, to find
+the mode of best expressing the best that was in him. That mode he
+found in "The Rheingold" and mastered in "The Valkyrie," with its
+continuous development and transmogrification of themes. And (to
+discard utterly my former metaphor) after steeping oneself for several
+nights in that last great river of melody, wide and deep and clear, it
+is interesting to be led suddenly to its source, and see it bubbling
+up with infinite energy, a good deal of frothing, and some brown mud.
+
+Compared with "The Valkyrie," "The Flying Dutchman" is ill-contrived
+and stagy. It is flecked here and there with vulgarity. It has far
+less of pure beauty; it has only its moments, whereas "The Valkyrie"
+gives hours of unbroken delight. "The Valkyrie" appeals to the primary
+instincts of our nature--instincts and desires that will remain in us
+so long as our nature is human; while for a large part of its effect
+the "Dutchman" trusts to a feeling which is elusive at all times and
+has no permanent hold upon us. Horror of the supernatural is not very
+deeply rooted in us, after all. Modern training tends to eliminate it
+altogether. In later life Goethe could not call up a single delightful
+shiver. There are probably not half a dozen stories in the world from
+which we can get it a second time. The unexpected plays a part in
+producing it, and the same means does not produce it twice with
+anything approaching the same intensity. Hence the Dutchman's phantom
+ship must be more ghost-like at each representation, its blood-red
+sails a bloodier red; and in the long-run, do what the stage
+carpenters will, we coldly sit and compare their work with previous
+ships. True, the music which accompanies its entry is always
+impressively ghastly; yet, while we know this, we are acutely
+conscious that our feeling is more or less a laudable make-believe--a
+make-believe that requires some little effort. Then Heine's notion,
+which seemed so brilliant at first, that the Dutchman could be
+redeemed by the unshakable love of a woman, has now all the
+disagreeable staleness of a decrepit and obvious untruth. It has no
+essential verity to give it validity, it is no symbol of a fact which
+is immediately and deeply felt to be a fact. The condition of
+redemption is entirely arbitrary: it might as reasonably be that the
+Dutchman should find a woman who would not shrink from eating his
+weather-stained hat. What was it to the Dutchman's damned soul if all
+the women in the world swore to love him eternally, so long as he was
+unable to love one of them? The true Wandering Jew is not the unloved
+man, but the man who cannot love, who is destitute of creative emotion
+and cannot build up for himself a world in which to dwell, but must
+needs live in hell--a world that others make, a world where he has no
+place. Wagner knew this, and makes the Dutchman fall in love with
+Senta; and that only leaves the drama more than ever in a muddle. One
+wants a reason for his suddenly being able to love. It cannot be
+because Senta promises to love him till death; for he has had hundreds
+of fruitless love-affairs before, and knows that all women promise
+that, and some of them mean it. Besides, the highest moment of the
+drama ought either to arrive when he feels love dawning in his
+loveless heart, or when he renounces his chance of salvation and sails
+away to eternal torment, believing that Senta made her promise in a
+passing fit of enthusiasm; and at one or other of those moments we
+ought to have some sign that he is redeemed. There is no such sign.
+The phantom ship falls to pieces, and the Dutchman is freed from his
+curse when Senta casts herself into the waves; and the highest moment
+of the whole drama is that in which the dreamy monomaniac, the modern
+Jeanne d'Arc, the real heroine of the opera, wins her own salvation,
+masters the world and makes it her heaven, by taking her fate in both
+hands and setting out to do the thing she feels most strongly impelled
+to do. If the Dutchman's salvation depends on himself, it is evidently
+unnecessary for Senta to be drowned; if it depends upon her, it only
+shows that Wagner, writing fifty years ago, and dazzled by the
+brilliance of a new idea, could not see so clearly as can be seen
+to-day that Senta was her own and not the Dutchman's saviour; and if
+(as it apparently does) it depends upon both Dutchman and Senta, then,
+at a performance at least, one can merely feel that something in the
+drama is very much askew, without knowing precisely what.
+
+In minor respects "The Flying Dutchman" falls considerably short of
+perfection, even of reasonableness. For example, the comings and
+goings of Daland are fearfully stagy. But worst of all are the
+arrangements of the first act. I can go as far as most people in
+accepting stage conventions. If Wagner brought on a four-eyed,
+eight-horned, twenty-seven-legged monster and called it a Jabberwock,
+I should not so much as ask why the legs were not all in pairs, like
+the horns and eyes, so long as I saw in the animal's habits a certain
+congruity, a conformity to what I would willingly regard as
+Jabberwock nature. But who can pretend to believe in a ship which
+comes against the rocks in a storm and anchors there while the captain
+goes ashore to see whether shipwreck is imminent? That the majority of
+opera-goers cannot live near the sea is self-evident, and that few of
+them should ever have seen a shipwreck unavoidable; but surely anyone
+who has crossed the Channel must have a vague suspicion that to place
+this vessel against the rocks in a tempest is the last thing a seaman
+would dream of doing, and that, if he were driven there and managed to
+get ashore, he would call his men after him (if they needed calling),
+and trouble neither about casting anchor nor going aboard again. The
+thing is ludicrously stagy. I suppose that Wagner was too sea-sick to
+observe what happened during his weeks of roughing it in the North
+Sea. But the second scene is admirable. That monotonous drowsy hum of
+the Spinning song is exactly what is needed to put one in the mood for
+sympathising with Senta and her dreams. With the third there is an
+occasional return to the bad stagecraft of Scribe; but there are also
+hints of the simple directness of the later Wagner.
+
+The music is like the stagecraft: now and then simply dramatic, now
+and then stagily undramatic; sometimes rich and splendid, sometimes
+threadbare and vulgar. And by this I do not mean that the
+old-fashioned set pieces are of necessity bad, and the freer portions
+necessarily good. Good and bad may be found in the new and the old
+Wagner alike. That sailor's dance is to me as odious as anything in
+Meyerbeer, and the melody which ends the love-duet is scarcely more
+tolerable. On the other hand, not even in "The Valkyrie" did Wagner
+write more picturesquely weird music than most of the first act. The
+shrilling of the north wind, the roaring of the waves, the creaking of
+cordage, the banging of booms, an uncanny sound in a dismal night at
+sea,--these are suggested with wonderful vividness. At times Wagner
+gives us gobbets of unassimilated Weber and Beethoven, but some
+passages are as original as they are magnificent. The finest bars
+in the work are those in which Senta declares her faith in her
+"mission," and the Dutchman yields himself to unreasoning adoration.
+Other moods came to Wagner, but never again that mood of rapturous
+self-effacement. It is perhaps a young man's mood; certainly it is
+identical with the ecstasy with which one contemplates a perfect piece
+of art, or a life greatly lived; and here it finds splendid
+expression.
+
+
+
+
+"LOHENGRIN"
+
+
+"Lohengrin" has been sung scores of times at Covent Garden in one
+fashion or another; but I declare that we heard something resembling
+the real "Lohengrin" for the first time when the late Mr. Anton Seidl
+crossed the Atlantic to conduct it and other of Wagner's operas. We
+had come to regard it as a pretty opera--an opera full of an
+individual, strange, indefinable sweetness; but Mr. Anton Seidl came
+all the way from New York city to show us how out of sweetness can
+come forth strength. Mr. Seidl was a Wagner conductor of the older
+type, and with some of the faults of that type; he knew little or
+nothing of the improvements in the manner of interpreting Wagner's
+music effected by Mottl, Levi, and that stupendous creature Siegfried
+Wagner; he was a survival of the first enthusiastic reaction against
+Italian ways of misdoing things; and he was, if anything, a little too
+strongly inclined to go a little too far in the opposite direction to
+the touch-and-go conductors. But there is so much of sweetness and
+delicacy in "Lohengrin" that the whole opera, including the sweet and
+delicate portions, actually gains from a forceful and manly
+handling--gains so immensely that, as already said, those of us who
+heard it under Mr. Seidl's direction must have felt that here, at
+last, was the true "Lohengrin," the "Lohengrin" of Wagner's
+imagination. It was a pleasure merely to hear the band singing out
+boldly, getting the last fraction of rich tone out of each note, in
+the first act; to hear the string passages valiantly attacked, and the
+melodies treated with breadth, and the trumpets and trombones playing
+out with all their force when need was, holding the sounds to the end
+instead of letting them slink away ashamed in the accepted Italian
+style. And not only were these things in themselves delightful--they
+also served to make the drama doubly powerful, and the tender parts of
+the music doubly tender, to show how splendid in many respects was
+Wagner's art in the "Lohengrin" days, and to prove that Maurel's way
+of doing the part of Telramund some years ago was, as Maurel's way of
+doing things generally are, perfectly right. Maurel, it will be
+remembered, stuck a red feather in his cap; and the eternally wise
+critics agreed in thinking this absolutely wrong. They told him the
+feather was out of place--it made him appear ridiculous, and so on.
+Maurel retorted that he was playing the part of a fierce barbarian
+chief who would not look, he thought, like a gilded butterfly, and
+that his notion was to look as ferocious as he could. Now the odd
+thing is, that though Maurel was right, we critics were in a sense
+right also. As the music used to be played, a Telramund one degree
+nearer to a man than the average Italian baritone seemed ludicrously
+out of place; and when, in addition, the Lohengrin was a would-be
+lady-killer without an inch of fight in him, Henry the Fowler a
+pathetic heavy father, and Elsa a sentimental milliner, there was
+something farcical about Maurel's red feather and generally militant
+aspect. What we critics had not the brains to see was that the playing
+of the music was wrong, and that Maurel was only wrong in trying to
+play his part in the right manner when Lohengrin, Elsa, King, and
+conductor were all against him in their determination to do their
+parts wrong. Mr. Bispham follows in Maurel's footsteps, as he
+frequently does, in a modified costume, but when for the first time
+the orchestra played right he would not have seemed ridiculous had he
+stuck Maurel's red feather into his helmet. The whole scene became a
+different thing: we were thrown at once into the atmosphere of an
+armed camp full of turbulent thieves and bandits itching for fighting,
+and wildly excited with rumours of conflicts near at hand. Amidst all
+this excitement, and amidst all the unruly fighters, Telramund,
+strongest, fiercest, most unruly of them all, has to open the drama;
+and to command our respect, to make us feel that it is he who is
+making the drama move, that it is because all the barbarians are
+afraid of him that the drama begins to move at all, he cannot possibly
+look too ferocious and hot-blooded, too strong of limb and tempestuous
+of temper. The proof that this (Seidl's) reading of the opera was the
+right one, was that, in the first place, the drama immediately
+interested you instead of keeping you waiting for the entry of Elsa;
+and, in the second place, that the noisy, energetic playing of the
+opening scene threw the music of Elsa and Lohengrin into wonderfully
+beautiful relief--a relief which in the old way of doing the opera was
+very much wanting. To play "Lohengrin" in the old way is to deny
+Wagner the astonishing sense of dramatic effect he had from the
+beginning; to play it as Seidl played it is to prove that the
+conductor appreciates the perfection of artistic sense that led,
+compelled, Wagner to set the miraculous vision of Lohengrin against a
+background made up of such stormy scenes. Had Seidl kept his vigour
+for the stormy scenes, and given us a finer tenderness in the prelude,
+the love-music, and Lohengrin's account of himself, his rendering
+would have been a flawless one.
+
+And even as Seidl interpreted it, the supreme beauty of the music, the
+sweetness of it as well as its strength, were manifest as they have
+never been manifest before. "Lohengrin" is surely the most beautiful,
+the fullest of sheer beauty, of all Wagner's operas. Some thirty or
+forty years hence those of us who are lucky enough still to live in
+the sweet sunlight will begin to feel that at last it is becoming
+feasible to take a fair and reasonable view of Wagner's creative work;
+and we shall probably differ about verdicts which the whole musical
+world of to-day would agree only in rejecting. Old-school Wagnerites
+and anti-Wagnerites will have gone off together into the night, and
+the echo of the noise of all their feuds will have died away. No one
+will venture to talk of the "teaching" of "Parsifal" or any other of
+Wagner's works; the legends from which he constructed his works will
+have lost their novelty. The music-drama itself will be regarded by
+the Academics (if there are any left) with all the reverence due to
+the established fact, and possibly it may be suffering the fierce
+assault of the exponents of a newer and nobler form. Then the younger
+critics will arise and take one after another of the music-dramas and
+ask, What measure of beauty is there, and what dramatic strength, what
+originality of emotion? and in a few minutes they will scatter
+hundreds of harmless and long-cherished illusions that went to make
+life interesting. In that day of wrath and tribulation may I be on the
+right side, and have energy to go forward, giving up the pretence of
+what I can no longer like, and boldly saying that I like what I like,
+even should it happen to be unpopular. May I never fall so low as to
+be talked of as a guardian of the accepted forms and laws. But even if
+it should prove unavoidable to relinquish faith in Bach, in Beethoven,
+in Wagner, yet it is devoutly to be hoped that it will never be
+necessary to give up a belief in "Lohengrin"; for in that case my fate
+is fixed--I shall be among the reactionaries, the admirers of the
+thing that cannot be admired, the lovers of the unlovable. But indeed
+it is incredible that "Lohengrin" should ever cease to seem
+lovely--lovely in idea and in the expression of the idea. The story is
+one of the finest Wagner ever set; it remains fresh, though it had
+been told a hundred times before. The maiden in distress--we know her
+perfectly well; the wicked sorceress who has got her into distress--we
+know her quite as well; the celestial knight who rescues her--we know
+him nearly as well. But the details in which "Lohengrin" differs from
+all other tales of the same order are precisely those that make it the
+most enchanting tale of them all. Lohengrin, knight of the Grail,
+redeemer, yet with a touch of tragedy in his fate, drawn down the
+river in his magic boat by the Swan from a far mysterious land, a land
+of perpetual freshness and beauty, is an infinitely more poetic notion
+than the commonplace angel flapping clumsily down from heaven; and
+even if we feel it to be absurd that he should have to beg his wife to
+take him on trust, yet, after all, he takes his wife on trust, and he
+tells her at the outset that he cannot reveal the truth about himself.
+Elsa is vastly preferable to the ordinary distressed mediaeval maiden,
+if only because a woman who is too weak to be worth a snap of the
+fingers does move us to pity, whereas the ordinary mediaeval is cut out
+of pasteboard, and does not affect us at all. The King is perhaps
+merely a stage figure; Ortrud is just one degree better than the
+average witch of a fairy story; but Frederic, savage and powerful,
+but so superstitious as to be at the mercy of his wife, is human
+enough to interest us. And Wagner has managed his story perfectly
+throughout, excepting at the end of the second act, where that dreary
+business of Ortrud and Frederic stopping the bridal procession is a
+mere reminiscence of the wretched stagecraft of Scribe, and quite
+superfluous. But if there is a flaw in the drama, there cannot be said
+to be one in the music. The mere fact that, save two numbers, it is
+all written in common time counts for absolutely nothing against its
+endless variety. Wagner never again hit upon quite so divine and pure
+a theme as that of the Grail, from which the prelude is evolved; the
+Swan theme at once carries one in imagination up the ever-rippling
+river to that wonderful land of everlasting dawn and sacred early
+morning stillness; and nothing could be more effective, as background
+and relief to these, than the warlike music of the first act, and the
+ghastly opening of the second act, so suggestive of horrors and the
+spells of Ortrud winding round Frederic's soul. Then there is Elsa's
+dream, the magical music of Lohengrin's tale, the music of the Bridal
+procession in the second act, the great and tender melody first sung
+by Elsa and Ortrud, and then repeated by the orchestra as Ortrud
+allows Elsa to lead her into the house, the whole of the
+Bridal-chamber duet, and perhaps, above all, Lohengrin's farewell. To
+whatever page of the score you turn, there is perfect beauty--after
+the first act not a great deal that is powerful or meant to be
+powerful, but melody after melody that entrances you merely as
+absolute music without poetic significance, and that seems doubly
+entrancing by reason of the strange, remote feeling with which it is
+charged, and its perpetual suggestion of the broad stream flowing
+ceaselessly from far-away Montsalvat to the sea. "Lohengrin" is a
+fairy-story imbued with seriousness and tender human emotion, and the
+music is exactly adapted to it.
+
+
+
+
+"TRISTAN AND ISOLDA"
+
+
+Says Nietzsche (pretending to put the words into the mouth of
+another), "I hate Wagner, but I no longer stand any other music"; and
+though the saying is entirely senseless to those who do hate Wagner,
+the feeling that prompted it may be understood by all who love him and
+who stand every other music, so long as it is real music. Immediately
+after listening to "Tristan and Isolda" all other operas seem away
+from the point, to be concerned with the secondary issues of life, to
+babble without fervour or directness of unessential matters. This does
+not mean that "Tristan" is greater than "Don Giovanni" or the
+"Matthew" Passion--for it is not--but that it speaks to each of us in
+the most modern language of the most engrossing subject in the world,
+of oneself, of one's own soul. Who can stay to listen to the sheer
+loveliness of "Don Giovanni," or follow with any sympathy the farcical
+doom of that hero, or who, again, can be at the pains to enter into
+the obsolescent emotions and mode of expression of Bach, when Wagner
+calls us to listen concerning the innermost workings of our own being,
+and speaks in a tongue every word of which enters the brain like a
+thing of life? For one does not have to think what Wagner means: so
+direct, so penetrating, is his speech, that one becomes aware of the
+meaning without thinking of the words that convey it. Nietzsche is
+right when he says Wagner summarises modernism; but he forgot that
+Wagner summarises it because he largely helped to create it, to make
+it what it is, by this power of transferring his thought and emotion
+bodily, as it were, to other minds, and that he will remain modern for
+long to come, inasmuch as he moulds the thought of the successive
+generations as they arise.
+
+"Tristan and Isolda" is one of the world's half-dozen stupendous
+appeals in music to the emotional side of man's nature; it stands with
+the "Matthew" Passion, the Choral Symphony, and Mozart's Requiem,
+rather than with "Don Giovanni," or "Fidelio," or "Tannhaeuser;" like
+the Requiem, the Choral Symphony, the "Matthew" Passion, there are
+pages of unspeakable beauty in it; but, like them also, its main
+object is not to please the ear or the eye, but to communicate an
+overwhelming emotion. That emotion is the passion of love--the
+elemental desire of the man for the woman, of the woman for the man;
+and to the expression of this, not in one phase alone, like Gounod in
+his "Faust," but in all its phases. It is a glorification of sex
+attraction: nevertheless, it refutes Tannhaeuser or Venus as completely
+as it refutes Wolfram or Elizabeth. Tannhaeuser, we know, would have it
+that love was wholly of the flesh, Wolfram that it was solely of the
+spirit. That there is no love which does not commence in the desiring
+of the flesh, and none, not even the most spiritual, which does not
+consist entirely in sex passion, that the two, spiritual and fleshly
+love, are merely different phases of one and the same passion, Wagner
+had learnt when he came to create "Tristan." And in "Tristan" we
+commence with a fleshly love, as intense as that Tannhaeuser knew; but
+by reason of its own energy, its own excess, it rises to a spiritual
+love as free from grossness as any dreamed of by Elizabeth or Wolfram,
+and far surpassing theirs in exaltation. This change he depicted in a
+way as simple as it was marvellous, so that as we watch the drama and
+listen to the music we experience it within ourselves and our inner
+selves are revealed to us. Nothing comes between us and the passions
+expressed. Tristan and Isolda are passion in its purest integrity,
+naked souls vibrating with the keenest emotion; they have no
+idiosyncrasies to be sympathised with, to be allowed for; they are
+generalisations, not characters, and in them we see only ourselves
+reflected on the stage--ourselves as we are under the spell of
+Wagner's music and of his drama. For "Tristan" seems to me the most
+wonderful of Wagner's dramas, far more wonderful than "Parsifal," far
+more wonderful than "Tannhaeuser." There is no stroke in it that is not
+inevitable, none that does not immensely and immediately tell; and,
+despite its literary quality, one fancies it could not fail to make
+some measure of its effect were it played without the music. Think of
+the first act. The scene is the deck of the ship; the wind is fresh,
+and charged with the bitterness of the salt sea; and Isolda sits
+there consumed with burning anger and hate of the man she loves, whose
+life she spared because she loved him, and who now rewards her by
+carrying her off, almost as the spoil of war, to be the wife of his
+king. It has been said that Tolstoi asserted for the first time in
+"The Kreuzer Sonata" that hate and love were the same passion. But the
+truth is, Wagner knew it long before Tolstoi, just as Shakespeare knew
+it long before Wagner; and the whole of this first act turns on it.
+Isolda sends for Tristan and tells him he has wronged her, and begs
+him to drink the cup of peace with her. Tristan sees precisely what
+she means, and, loving her, drinks the proffered poison as an
+atonement for the wrong he has done her, and for his treachery to
+himself in winning her, for ambition's sake, as King Mark's bride
+instead of taking her as his own. But the moment her hatred is
+satisfied Isolda finds life intolerable without it, without love; her
+love a second time betrays her; and she seizes the poison and drinks
+also. Then comes the masterstroke. Done with this world, with nothing
+but death before them, the two confess their long-pent love; in their
+exalted state passion comes over them like a flood; in the first rush
+of passion, honour, shame, friendship seem mere names of illusions,
+and love is the only real thing in life; and finally, the death
+draught being no death draught, but a slight infusion of cantharides,
+the two passionately cling to each other, vaguely wondering what all
+the noise is about, while the ship reaches land and all the people
+shout and the trumpets blow. What is the stagecraft of Scribe compared
+with this? how else could the avowal of love be brought about with
+such instant and stupendous effect? Quite as amazing is the second
+act. Almost from the beginning to close on the end the lovers fondle
+each other, in a garden before an old castle in the sultry summer
+night; and just as their passion reaches its highest pitch, Mark
+breaks in upon them. For Tristan, at least, death is imminent; and the
+mere presence of death serves to begin the change from the desire of
+the flesh to the ecstatic spiritual passion. That change is completed
+in the next act, where we have the scene laid before Tristan's
+deserted and dilapidated castle in Brittany, with the calm sea in the
+distance (it should shine like burnished steel); and here Tristan lies
+dying of the wound he received from Melot in the previous scene, while
+a melody from the shepherd's pipe, the saddest melody ever heard,
+floats melancholy and wearily through the hot, close, breathless air.
+Kurvenal, his servant, has sent for Isolda to cure him as she had
+cured him before; and when at last she comes Tristan grows crazy with
+joy, tears the bandages from his wounds, and dies just as she enters.
+This finishes the metamorphosis begun in the second act: after some
+other incidents, Isolda, rapt in her spiritual love, sings the
+death-song and dies over Tristan's body. What is the libretto of
+"Otello" or of "Falstaff" compared with this libretto? From beginning
+to end there is not a line, not an incident, in excess. Anyone who is
+wearied by King Mark's long address when he comes on the guilty pair,
+has failed to catch the drift of the whole opera--failed to see that
+two souls like Tristan and Isolda, wholly swayed by love, must find
+Mark's grief wholly unintelligible, and have no power of explaining
+themselves to those not possessed with a passion like theirs, or of
+bringing themselves into touch with the workaday world of daylight,
+and that all Mark's most moving appeal means to them is that this
+world, where such annoyances occur, is not the land in which they fain
+would dwell. They live wholly for their illusion, and if it is
+forbidden to them in life they will seek death; nothing--not honour,
+shame, the affection of Mark, the faithfulness of Kurvenal, least of
+all, life--is to be considered in comparison with their love; their
+love is the love that is all in all. It is entirely selfish: Mark is
+as much their enemy as Melot, his affection more to be dreaded than
+the sword of Melot.
+
+Perhaps I have given the drama some of the credit that should go to
+the music; and at least there is not a dramatic situation which the
+music does not immeasurably increase in power. But indeed the two are
+inseparable. The music creates the mood and holds the spectator to it
+so that the true significance of the dramatic situation cannot fail
+to be felt; while the dramatic situation makes the highest, most
+extravagant flights of the music quite intelligible, reasonable. It
+cannot be said that the music exists for the sake of the drama any
+more than the drama exists for the music: the drama lies in the music,
+the music is latent in the drama. But to the music the wild atmosphere
+of the beginning of the first act is certainly due; and though I have
+said that possibly "Tristan" might bear playing without the music, it
+must be admitted that it is hard to think of the fifth scene without
+that tremendous entrance passage--that passage so tremendous that even
+Jean de Reszke dare hardly face it. To the music also the passion and
+fervent heat of the second act are due, and the thunderous atmosphere,
+the sense of impending fate, in the last, and the miraculous sweetness
+and intensity of Tristan's death-music, and the sublime pathos of
+Isolda's lament. Since Mozart wrote those creeping chromatic chords in
+the scene following the death of the Commendatore in "Don Giovanni,"
+nothing so solemn and still, so full of the pathetic majesty of death,
+as the passage following the words "with Tristan true to perish" has
+been written. This is perhaps Wagner's greatest piece of music; and
+certainly his loveliest is Tristan's description of the ship sailing
+over the ocean with Isolda, where the gently swaying figure of the
+horns, taken from one of the love-themes, and the delicious melody
+given to the voice, go to make an effect of richness and tenderness
+which can never be forgotten. The opening of the huge duet is as a
+blaze of fire which cannot be subdued; and when at last it does
+subside and a quieter mood prevails we get a long series of voluptuous
+tunes the like of which were never heard before, and will not be heard
+again, one thinks, for a thousand years to come. And in the strangest
+contrast to these is the earlier part of the third act, where the very
+depths of the human spirit are revealed, where we are taken into the
+darkness and stand with Tristan before the gates of death. But indeed
+all the music of "Tristan" is miraculous in its sweetness, splendour,
+and strength; and yet one scarcely thinks of these qualities at the
+moment, so entirely do they seem to be hidden by its poignant
+expressiveness. As I have said, it seems to enter the mind as emotion
+rather than as music, so penetrating is it, so instantaneous in its
+appeal. There never was music poured out at so white a white heat; it
+is music written in the most modern, most pungent, and raciest
+vernacular, with utter impatience of style, of writing merely in an
+approved manner. It is beyond criticism. It is possible to love it as
+I do; it is possible to hate it as Nietzsche did; but while this
+century lasts, it will be impossible to appreciate it sufficiently to
+wish to criticise it and yet preserve one's critical judgment with
+steadiness enough to do it.
+
+
+
+
+"SIEGFRIED"
+
+
+In all Wagner's music-plays there is shown an astonishing
+appreciation of the value and effect of scenery and of all the changes
+of weather and of skies and waters, not only as a background to his
+drama but as a means of making that drama clearer, of getting
+completer and intenser expression of the emotions for which the
+persons in the drama stand. The device is not so largely used in
+"Tristan" as in the other music-plays, yet the drama is enormously
+assisted by it. In the "Ring" it is used to such an extent that the
+first thing that must strike everyone is the series of gorgeously
+coloured pictures afforded by each of the four plays. For instance, no
+one can ever forget the opening of "The Valkyrie"--the inside of
+Hunding's house built round the tree, the half-dead fire flickering,
+while we listen to the steady roar of the night wind as the tempest
+rushes angrily through the forest--nor the scene that follows, when
+through the open door we see all the splendours of the fresh spring
+moonlight gleaming on the green leaves still dripping with cold
+raindrops. The terror and excitement of the second act are vastly
+increased by the storm of thunder and lightning that rages while
+Siegmund and Hunding fight. A great part of the effect of the third
+act is due to the storm that howls and shrieks at the beginning and
+gradually subsides, giving way to the soft translucent twilight, that
+in turn gives way to the clear spring night with the dark blue sky
+through which the yellow flames presently shoot, cutting off
+Bruennhilde from the busy world. The same pictorial device is used
+throughout "Siegfried" with results just as magnificent in their way;
+though the way is a very different one. The drama of "The Valkyrie" is
+tragedy--chiefly Wotan's tragedy (the relinquishing first of Siegmund,
+and his hope in Siegmund, then of Bruennhilde)--but incidentally the
+tragedy of Siegmund's life and his death, of Siegmund's loneliness and
+of Bruennhilde's downfall; and at least one of the scenic effects--the
+fire at the end--was thrown in to relieve the pervading gloom, and in
+obedience to Wagner's acute sense of the wild beauty of the old
+legend, rather than to illustrate and assist the drama. It is sheer
+spectacle, but how magnificent compared with that older type of
+spectacle which chiefly consisted of brass bands and ladies
+insufficiently clothed! "Siegfried," on the other hand, contains no
+tragedy save the destruction of a little vermin. It is the most
+glorious assertion ever made of the joy and splendour and infinite
+beauty to be found in life by those who possess the courage to go
+through it in their own way, and have the overflowing vitality and
+strength to create their own world as they go. Siegfried is the
+embodiment of the divine energy that makes life worth living; and in
+the scenery, as in the tale and the music of the opera, nothing is
+left out that could help to give us a vivid and lasting impression of
+the beauty, freshness, strangeness, and endless interest of life. Take
+the first scene--the cave with the dull red forge--fires smouldering
+in the black darkness, and the tools of the smith's trade scattered
+about, and, seen through the mouth of the cave, all the blazing
+colours of the sunlit forest; or again the second--the darkness, then
+the dawn and the sunrise, and lastly the full glory of the summer day
+near Fafner's hole in a mysterious haunted corner of the forest; or
+the third--a far-away nook in the hills, where the spirit of the earth
+slumbers everlastingly; or the final scene--the calm morning on
+Bruennhilde's fell, the flames fallen, and all things transfigured and
+made remote by the enchantment of lingering mists,--these scenes form
+a background for the dramatic action such as no composer dreamed of
+before, nor will dream of again until we cease to dwell in dusty stone
+cities and learn once again to know nature and her greatest moods as
+our forefathers knew them. Had Wagner not lived in Switzerland and
+gone his daily walks amongst the mountains, the "Ring" might have been
+written; but certainly it would have been written very differently,
+and probably not half so well.
+
+I have so often insisted on the pictorial power of Wagner's music,
+that, save for one quality of the pictures in the "Ring," and
+especially in "Siegfried," it would be unnecessary to say more about
+it now. That quality is their old-world atmosphere, their power of
+filling us with a sense of the old time before us. When the fire plays
+round Bruennhilde's fell--Hinde Fell, Morris calls it--lighting the icy
+tops of the farthest hills, or when Mime and Alberich squabble in the
+dark of early morning at the mouth of Fafner's hole, or again when the
+Wanderer comes in and scarifies Mime out of his wits, we are taken
+back to the remotest and dimmest past, to the beginnings of time, to a
+time that never existed save in the imagination of our forebears. This
+may be partly the result of our unconscious perception of the fact
+that these things never happen nowadays, and partly the result of our
+having been familiar with the story of Bruennhilde and the gods since
+earliest boyhood; but it is in the main due to Wagner's intense
+historical sense, his sense of the past, and to his unapproached power
+of expressing in music any feeling or combination of feelings he
+experienced. So cunningly do music and scenery work together that we
+credit the one with what the other has done; but, wonderful though the
+pictures of "Siegfried" are, there cannot be a doubt that the
+atmosphere we discover in them reaches us through the ear from the
+orchestra. Besides giving us a series of singularly apposite and
+significant pictures, Wagner has reproduced the very breath and colour
+of the old sagas; he has re-created the atmosphere of a time that
+never was; and it is this remote atmosphere which lends to
+"Siegfried" and all the "Ring" a great part of their enchantment.
+Fancy what it might have been, this long exposition of sheer
+Schopenhauerism in three dramas and a fore-play! imagine what Parry or
+Stanford or Mackenzie would have made of it! And then think of what
+the "Ring" actually is, and especially of the splendour and weirdness
+of some parts the "dulness" of which moves dull people to dull
+grumbling. For example, a great many persons share Mime's wish for the
+Wanderer to go off almost as soon as he comes on, "else no Wanderer
+can he be called." They tell us that this scene breaks the action,
+neglecting the trifling fact that were it omitted the remainder of the
+act would be inconsequent nonsense, only worthy to rank with the
+librettos of English musical critics, and that the truth happens to be
+that nearly the whole of the subsequent drama grows out of it. In
+itself it is a scene of peculiar power, charged to overflowing with
+the essence of the Scandinavian legends. The notion of the god,
+"one-eyed and seeming ancient," wandering by night through the wild
+woods, clad in his dark blue robe, calling in here and there and
+creating consternation in the circle gathered round the hearth, is one
+of the most poetic to be found in the Northern mythology; and the
+music which Wagner has set to his entry and his conversation cannot be
+matched for unearthliness unless you turn to the Statue music in "Don
+Giovanni," where you find unearthliness of a very different sort. The
+scene with Erda in the mountains is even more wonderful, so laden is
+the music with the Scandinavian emotional sense of the impenetrable
+mystery of things. The scene between Mime and Alberich, or Alberich
+and the Wanderer, gives us the old horror of the creeping maleficent
+things that crawled by night about the brooks and rock-holes. It is
+true this last will bear cutting a little; for Wagner being a German,
+but having, what is uncommon in the German, an acute sense of balance
+of form, always tried to get balance by lengthening parts which were
+already long enough, in preference to cutting parts that were already
+too long. Hence much padding, which a later generation will ruthlessly
+amputate.
+
+All these things are the accessories, the environment, of the
+principal figure; and their presence is justified by their beauty,
+significance, and interest, and also by their being necessary for the
+development of the larger drama of the whole "Ring." But in following
+"Siegfried" that larger drama cannot altogether be kept in mind: it is
+the hero that counts first, and everything else is accessory merely to
+him. That Wagner, in spite of his preoccupation with the tragedy of
+Wotan, should have accomplished this, proves how wonderful and how
+true an artist he was. Siegfried is the incarnation, as I have said,
+of the divine energy which enables one to make the world rich with
+things that delight the soul; he is Wagner's healthiest, sanest,
+perhaps most beautiful creation; he is certainly the only male in all
+Wagner's dramas who is never in any danger of becoming for ever so
+brief a moment a bore, whose view of life is always so fresh and novel
+and at the same time so essentially human that he interests us both in
+himself and in the world we see through his eyes. Never had an actor
+such opportunities as here. The entry with the bear exhibits the
+animal strength and spirits of the man, and the inquiries about his
+parents, his purely human feeling; his temper with Mime the
+unsophisticated boy's petulant intolerance of the mean and ugly; the
+forging of the sword the coming power and determination of manhood.
+The killing of the dragon is unavoidably rather ridiculous; but the
+scene with the bird is fascinating by its naturalness and simplicity
+as well as its tenderness and sheer sweetness. Finally, after the
+scene with the Wanderer, the scene of the awakening of Bruennhilde
+affords an opportunity for love-making, and it is love-making of so
+unusual a sort that one does not feel it to be an anti-climax after
+all the big things that have gone before. In fact, not even Tristan
+has things quite so much to himself, nor is given the opportunity of
+expressing so many phases of emotion and character. And the music
+Siegfried has to sing is the richest, most copious stream of melody
+ever given to one artist; in any one scene there is melody enough to
+have made the fortune of Verdi or any other Italian composer who
+wrote tunes for the tenor and prima donna; not even Mozart could have
+poured out a greater wealth of tune--tune everlastingly varying with
+the mood of the drama. Every scene provides a heap of smaller tunes,
+and then there are such big ones as the Forge song, Siegfried's
+meditation in the forest and the conversation with the bird, and the
+awakening of Bruennhilde--every one absolutely new and tremulous with
+intense life.
+
+
+
+
+"THE DUSK OF THE GODS"
+
+
+Quite a fierce little controversy raged a little while ago in the
+columns of the "Daily Chronicle," and all about the "meaning" of "The
+Dusk of the Gods" and the behaviour of Bruennhilde. Mr. Shaw played
+Devil's Advocate for Wagner, declaring "The Dusk of the Gods" to be
+irrelevant and operatic (as if that mattered); and Mr. Ashton Ellis
+and Mr. Edward Baughan, two mad Wagnerians, rushed in to protect
+Wagner from Mr. Shaw (as if he needed protection). In reading the
+various letters, my soul was moved to admiration and reverent awe by
+the ingenuity displayed by the various correspondents in their
+endeavours to make the easy difficult, the perfectly plain crooked.
+Wagner took enormous pains to make Bruennhilde a living character--that
+is to say, to show us her inmost soul so vividly that we know why she
+did anything or everything without even thinking about it; he set her
+on the stage, where we see her in the flesh behaving precisely as any
+woman--of her period--would behave. And then these excellent gentlemen
+come along and tell us that because Wagner at one time or another
+thought of handling her story, and the story of Wotan and Siegfried,
+in this or that way, therefore Wagner "meant" this or that, and failed
+or succeeded, or changed his original plan or held fast to it. All
+these things have nothing to do with the drama that is played on the
+stage: by that alone, and by none of his earlier ideas, is Wagner to
+be judged: he is to be judged by the effect and conviction of the
+finished play. Now, it seems to me that in the finished play
+Bruennhilde is neither "a glorious woman "--_i.e._ an Adelphi
+melodramatic heroine--nor "a deceitful, vindictive woman"--_i.e._ an
+Adelphi melodramatic villainess. Also, while considered by itself "The
+Dusk of the Gods" is interesting mainly on account of the music,
+considered in association, as Wagner wished, and as one must--for,
+after all, it is but the final act of a stupendous drama, and it is
+unfair and foolish to consider any one act of a drama alone--with the
+other minor dramas of the greater drama, "The Nibelung's Ring," it is
+dramatically not only interesting, absorbing, but absolutely
+indispensable, true, inevitable. It is true enough that the "Ring"
+suffered somewhat through the fact that Wagner took nearly a quarter
+of a century to carry out his plan, and during this period his views
+on life changed greatly; yet nevertheless "The Dusk of the Gods"
+stands as the noble--in fact, the only possible--conclusion to a story
+which is, on the whole, splendidly told.
+
+When seeing "The Valkyrie," one thinks of Sieglinde or Siegmund or
+Bruennhilde; when listening to "Siegfried," one thinks of Siegfried and
+Bruennhilde and no others; but when one thinks of the complete "Ring,"
+the person of the drama most forcibly forced before the eye of the
+imagination, the person to whom one realises that sympathy is chiefly
+due, is Wotan. Wotan, not Siegfried or Siegmund, is the hero of the
+"Ring." His tragedy--if it is indeed a tragedy to emerge from the
+battle in the highest sense of the word triumphant--includes the
+tragedy of Siegfried and Siegmund, Sieglinde and Bruennhilde--in fact,
+the tragedy of all the smaller characters of the play. "The
+Rheingold," in spite of its glorious music, is entirely
+superfluous--dramatically, at all events, it is superfluous--but
+there, anyhow, the problem which we could easily understand without it
+is stated. Wotan, who has been placed at the head of affairs by the
+three blind fates, has caught the general disease of wishing to gain
+the power to make others do his will. So anxious is he for that
+authority that he not only makes a bargain for it with the powers of
+stupidity--the giants, the brute forces of nature--which bargain is
+afterwards and could never be anything but his ruin, but also he
+stoops to a base subterfuge to gain it, and with the help of Loge,
+fire, the final destroyer, he does gain it. So determined was Wagner
+to make his point clear, that even in "The Rheingold," the superfluous
+drama, he made it several times superfluously. He was not content to
+let his point make itself--the humanitarian, the preacher of all that
+makes for the highest humanity, was too strong in him for that: it was
+a little too strong even for the artist in him: he must needs make the
+powers of darkness lay a curse on power over one's fellow-beings, the
+Ring standing as the emblem of that power. While Wotan takes the
+power, his deepest wisdom, which is to say, his intuition--represented
+by the spirit of the earth, Erda--rises against him and tells him he
+is committing the fatal mistake, and he yields to the extent of
+letting the giants have the supreme power. But he thinks, just as you
+and I, reader, might think, that by some quaint unthinkable device he
+can evade the tremendous consequence of his own act; and, instead of
+at once looking at the consequence boldly and saying he will face it,
+he elaborates a plan by which no one will suffer anything, while he,
+Wotan, will gain the lordship of creation. From this moment his fate
+becomes tragic. The complete man, full of rich humanity--for whom
+Wotan stands--cannot exist, necessarily ceases to exist, if he is
+compelled to deny the better part of himself, as Peter denied Jesus of
+Nazareth. And in consequence of his own act Wotan has immediately to
+deny the better part of himself, to make war on his own son Siegmund,
+and then on his own daughter Bruennhilde: he destroys the first and
+puts away from him for ever Bruennhilde, who is incarnate love. The
+grand tragic moment of the whole cycle is the laying to sleep of
+Bruennhilde. Wotan knows that life without love is no life, and he is
+compelled to part from love by the very bargain which enables him to
+rule. Rather than live such a life, he deliberately, solemnly wills
+his own death; and a great part of "Siegfried" and the whole of "The
+Dusk of the Gods" are devoted to showing how his death, and the death
+of all the gods, comes about through Wotan's first act. In "Siegfried"
+and "The Dusk of the Gods" there is no tragedy--how can there be any
+tragedy in the fate of the man who faithfully follows the impulse that
+makes for his highest and widest satisfaction, for the fullest
+exercise of his beneficent energies, for the man who says I will do
+this or that because I know and feel it is the best I can do? "The
+Dusk of the Gods" is Wotan's most splendid triumph; he deliberately
+yields place to a new dynasty, because he knows that to keep
+possession of the throne will mean the continual suppression of all
+that is best in him, as he has had already to suppress it.
+Incidentally there are many tragedies in the "Ring." The murder of
+Siegmund by Hunding, aided by Wotan, before Sieglinde's eyes; the
+hideous incident of Siegfried winning his own wife to be the wife of
+his friend Gunther; the stabbing of Siegfried by Hagen; Bruennhilde's
+telling Gutrune that she, Gutrune, was never the wife of
+Siegfried,--all these are terrible enough tragedies. Bruennhilde's is
+the most terrible of them all, though she too takes her fate into her
+hands, and by willing the right thing, and doing it, goes victorious
+out of life. What there is difficult to understand about her, why she
+should be accused of deceit and have her conduct explained, I can
+hardly guess. In "The Valkyrie" she is a goddess; but when she offends
+Wotan by disobeying him and walking clean through all the
+Commandments, he is bound, for the maintenance of his power, to punish
+her. So he takes away her godhead, and she is thenceforth simply a
+woman. Siegfried treats her treacherously--as she necessarily
+thinks--and she very naturally takes vengeance on him. Mr. Shaw speaks
+as though he wished her to be a bread-and-butter miss; but a woman of
+Bruennhilde's type, a daughter of the high gods, could scarcely be
+that.
+
+In short, "The Dusk of the Gods" seems to me perfectly clear, and in
+no more need of explanation than "The Valkyrie" or "Siegfried." Of
+course there are a thousand loose ends in the "Ring," as there are in
+life itself; but to count them and find out what they all mean would
+occupy one for an eternity. To throw away "The Dusk of the Gods"
+because one cannot understand the loose ends, is ridiculous; instead
+of wishing there were fewer of them, I wish Wagner had been more
+careless, less German, and left more. It was through his endeavours to
+get unity, to show the close relation of each incident to every other
+incident, that he nearly came to utter grief. The drama was so
+gigantic, to secure sympathy for Wotan it was so necessary to secure
+sympathy for the minor characters whose story helps to make up Wotan's
+story, that Wagner seemed perpetually afraid that the real, main
+drama would be forgotten. And it is true that the story of Siegmund
+and Sieglinde, or of Siegfried and Bruennhilde, absorbs one for a time
+so completely that one forgets all about Wotan and his woes. So Wagner
+came near to spoiling one of the most tremendous achievements of the
+human mind, by shoving old Wotan on to the stage again and again to
+recapitulate his troubles. But of these interruptions "The Dusk of the
+Gods" has none. The story proceeds swiftly, inevitably to the end;
+from the first bar to the last, the music is as splendid as any Wagner
+ever wrote. It is the fitting conclusion to the vision of life
+presented in the "Ring": it is a funeral chant, mournful, sombre, but
+triumphant. The seed has been sown, the crop has grown and ripened and
+been harvested, and now the thing is over: a chill wind pipes over the
+empty stubble-land where late the yellow corn stood and the labourers
+laboured: there is nothing more: "ripeness is all" that life offers or
+means.
+
+
+
+
+"PARSIFAL"
+
+
+"Parsifal" is an immoral work. One cannot for a moment suppose that
+Wagner, who had written "Tristan" and "Siegfried," meant to preach
+downright immorality, or that he meant "Parsifal" to stand as anything
+more than the expression of a momentary mood, the mood of the
+exhausted, the effete man, the mood which follows the mood of
+"Tristan" as certainly as night follows day. Nevertheless, in so far
+as "Parsifal" says anything to us, in so far as it brings, in
+Nonconformist cant, "a message," it is immoral and vicious, just as in
+so far as "Siegfried" carries a message it is entirely moral,
+healthful, and sane. It is useless to quibble about this, seeking to
+explain away plain things: the truth remains that "Siegfried" is a
+glorification of one view of life, "Parsifal" of its direct opposite
+and flat contradiction; and anyone who accepts the one view must needs
+loathe the other as sinful. To me the "Siegfried" view of life
+commends itself; and I unhesitatingly assert the sinfulness of the
+"Parsifal" view. The two operas invite comparison; for at the outset
+their heroes seem to be the same man. Siegfried and Parsifal are both
+untaught fools; each has his understanding partly enlightened by
+hearing of his mother's sufferings and death (compare Wordsworth's "A
+deep distress hath humanised my soul"); each has his education
+completed by a woman's kiss. All this may seem very profound to the
+German mind; but to me it is crude, a somewhat too obvious allegory,
+partly superficial, partly untrue, a survival of windy sentimental
+mid-century German metaphysics, like the Wagner-Heine form of "The
+Flying Dutchman" story, and the Wagner form of the "Tannhaeuser" story.
+However, I am willing to believe that Siegfried, when he kisses
+Bruennhilde on Hinde Fell, and Parsifal, when Kundry kisses him in
+Klingsor's magic garden, has each his full faculties set in action for
+the first time. And then? And then Siegfried, with his fund of health
+and vitality, sees that the world is glorious, and joyfully presses
+forward more vigorously than ever on the road that lies before him,
+never hesitating for a moment to live out his life to the full; while
+Parsifal, lacking health and vitality--probably his father suffered
+from rickets--sees that the grief and suffering of the world outweigh
+and outnumber its joys, and not only renounces life, but is so
+overcome with pity for all sufferers as to regard it as his mission to
+heal and console them. And having healed and consoled one, he
+deliberately turns from the green world, with its trees and flowers,
+its dawn and sunset, its winds and waters, and shuts himself in a
+monkery which has a back garden, a pond and some ducks. There is only
+one deadly sin--to deny life, as Nietzsche says: carefully to pull up
+all the weeds in one's garden, but to plant there neither flower nor
+tree--and this is what "Parsifal" glorifies and advocates.
+
+Now, far be it from me to go hunting a moral tendency in a work of
+art, and to praise or blame the art as I chance to like or dislike the
+tendency. I am in a state of perfect preparedness to see beauty in a
+picture, even if the subject is to me repulsive. But in the case of a
+picture it is possible to say, "Yes, very pretty," and pass on. In the
+case of a story, a play, or a music-drama, you cannot. You are tied to
+your seat for one or two or three mortal hours; and however perfect
+may be the art with which music-drama or play or story is set before
+you, if the subject revolts or bores you, you soon sicken of the whole
+business. And in the highest kind of story, play, or music-drama,
+subject and treatment merge inseparably one in the other, substance
+and form are one; for the idea is all in all, and the complete idea
+cannot be perceived apart from the dress which makes it visible.
+Besides, in the Wagnerian music-drama, it is intended that beauty of
+idea and of arrangement of ideas shall be as of great importance as
+beauty of ornament. Wagner certainly intended "Parsifal" to be such a
+music-drama; and indeed the idea is only too clearly visible. The main
+idea of the "Ring" is so much obscured by the subsidiary ideas twined
+about it that very few people know that the real hero is Wotan, and
+the central drama Wotan's tragedy, that Siegmund and Sieglinde,
+Siegfried and Bruennhilde, and their loves--all the romance and
+loveliness that enchant us--are merely accessory. But in "Parsifal"
+there is nothing superfluous, no rich and lovely embroidery on the
+dress of the idea to divert us from the idea itself--the idea is as
+nearly nude as our limited senses and our modern respectability
+permit. And the idea being what it is, it follows that the play, after
+the drama once commences, is not only immoral, but also dispiriting
+and boring, and, to my thinking, inconsequential and pointless. The
+first act, the exposition, is from beginning to end magnificent: never
+were the lines on which a drama was to develop more gorgeously, or in
+more masterly fashion, set forth. Had Wagner seen that Amfortas was
+merely a hypochondriac, a stage Schopenhauer, imagining all manner of
+wounds and evils where no evils or wounds existed, had he made
+Parsifal a Siegfried, and sent him out into the world to learn this,
+and brought him back to break up the monastery, to set Amfortas and
+the knights to some useful labour, and to tell them that the sacred
+spear, like Wotan's spear, had power only to hurt those who feared it,
+then we might have had an adequate working-out of so noble a
+beginning. Instead of this, Kundry kisses Parsifal, Parsifal squeals,
+and we see him in a moment to be only an Amfortas who has had the luck
+not to stumble; and he, the poor fool who is filled with so vast a
+pity because he sees (what are called) good and evil in entirely wrong
+proportion--as, in fact, a hypochondriac sees them--he, Parsifal,
+this thin-blooded inheritor of rickets and an exhausted physical
+frame, is called the Redeemer, and becomes head of the Brotherhood of
+the Grail. Beside this inconsequence, all other inconsequences seem as
+nothing. One might ask, for instance, how, seeing that no man can save
+his brother's soul, Parsifal saves the soul of Amfortas? This is a
+fallacy that held Wagner all his life. We find it in "The Flying
+Dutchman"; it is avoided in "Tannhaeuser"--for, thank the gods,
+Tannhaeuser is _not_ saved by that uninteresting young person
+Elizabeth; it plays a large part in the "Ring"; it is the culmination
+of the drama of "Parsifal." Had Wagner thought more of Goethe and less
+of the Frankfort creature who formulated his hypo-chondriacal
+nightmares, and called the result a philosophy, he might have learnt
+that no mentally sick man ever yet was cured save by the welling-up of
+a flood of emotional energy in his own soul. He might also have seen
+that Parsifal is as much the spirit that denies as Mephistopheles. But
+these points, and many others, may go as, comparatively, nothings. The
+first act of "Parsifal" is unsurpassable, the second is an
+anti-climax, and the third, excepting the repentance of Kundry, which
+is pathetic, and strikes one as true, a more saddening anti-climax.
+There is one last thing to say before passing to the music, and this
+is that "Parsifal" is commonly treated with respect as a Christian
+drama--a superior "Sign of the Cross." I happen, oddly enough, to
+know the four Gospels exceedingly well; and I find nothing of
+"Parsifal" in them. It is much nearer to Buddhism in spirit, in
+colour: it is a kind of Germanised metaphysical Buddhism.
+Schopenhauer, not Christ, is the hero; and Schopenhauer was only a
+decrepit Mephistopheles bereft of his humour and inverted creative
+energy.
+
+After hearing the whole opera twice, with all the supposed advantages
+of the stage, the main thing borne in upon me is that the stage and
+actors and accessories, far from increasing the effect of the music,
+actually weaken it excepting in the first act. In that act there is
+not a word or a note to alter. The story compels one's interest, and
+the music is rich, tender, and charged with a noble passion. Even the
+killing of the duck--it is supposed to be a swan, but it is really a
+duck--is saved from becoming ludicrous by the deep sincerity of the
+music of Gurnemanz's expostulations. The music, too, with the
+magnificent trombone and trumpet calls and deep clangour of cathedral
+bells, prevents one thinking too much of the absurdity of the trees,
+mountains, and lake walking off the stage to make the change to the
+second scene. On reflection, this panorama seems wholly meaningless
+and thoroughly vulgar; and even in the theatre one wonders vaguely
+what it is all about--for Gurnemanz's explanation about time and space
+being one is sheer metaphysical shoddy, a mere humbugging of an
+essentially uncultured German audience; but one does not mind it, so
+full is the accompaniment of mystical life and of colour, of a sense
+of impending great things. The whole cathedral scene--I would even
+include the caterwaulings of Amfortas--is sincere, impressive, and
+filled with a reasonable degree of mysticism. There is no falling off
+in the second act until after the enchanting waltz and Kundry's
+wondrously tender recital of the woes suffered by Parsifal's mother
+(here the melody compares in loveliness with the corresponding portion
+of "Siegfried"); indeed, the passion and energy go on increasing until
+Parsifal receives Kundry's kiss, and then at once they disappear.
+Between this point and the end of the act there is scarcely a fine
+passage. Every phrase is insincere, not because Wagner wished to be
+insincere, but because he tried to express dramatically a state of
+mind which is essentially undramatic. Parsifal is supposed to
+transcend almost at one bound the will to live, to rise above all
+animal needs and desires; and though no human being can transcend the
+will to live, any more than he can jump away from his shadow--for the
+phrase means, and can only mean, that the will to live transcends the
+will to live--yet I am informed, and can well believe, that those who
+imagine they have accomplished the feat reach a state of perfect
+ecstasy. Wagner knew this; he knew also that ecstasy, as what can only
+be called a static emotion, could not be expressed through the medium
+that serves to express only flowing currents of emotion; he himself
+had pointed out, that for the communication of ecstatic feeling, only
+polyphonic, non-climatic, rhythmless music of the Palestrina kind
+served; and yet, by one of the hugest mistakes ever made in art, he
+sought to express precisely that emotion in Parsifal's declamatory
+phrases. The thing cannot be done; it has not been done; all
+Parsifal's bawling, even with the help of the words, avails nothing;
+and the curtain drops at the end of the second act, leaving one
+convinced that the drama has untimely ended, has got into a
+cul-de-sac. And in a cul-de-sac it remains. There is much glorious
+music in the last act; the "Good Friday music" is divine; the last
+scene is gorgeously led up to; and the music of it, considered only as
+music, is unsurpassable. But heard at the end of a drama so
+gigantically planned as "Parsifal," it is unsatisfying and
+disappointing. It is to me as if the "Ring" had closed on the music of
+Neid-hoehle with the squabblings of Alberich and Mime. The powers that
+make for evil and destruction have won; one knows that Parsifal is
+eternally damned; he has listened and succumbed, even as Wagner
+himself did, to the eastern sirens' song of the ease and delight of a
+life of slothful renunciation, self-abnegation, and devotion to
+"duty." The music of the last scene sings that song in tones of
+infinite sweetness; but it cannot satisfy you; you turn from the
+enchanted hall, with its holy cup and spear and dove, its mystic
+voices in the heights, its heavy, depressing, incense-laden
+atmosphere; and you hasten into the night, where the winds blow fresh
+through the black trees, and the stars shine calmly in the deep sky,
+just as though no "Parsifal" had been written.
+
+"Parsifal" does not imply that Wagner in his old age went back on all
+he had thought and felt before. Born in a time when the secret of
+living had not been rediscovered, when folk still thought the victory,
+and not the battle, the main thing in life, he always sought a creed
+to put on as a coat-of-mail to protect him from the nasty knocks of
+fate. Nowadays we do not care greatly for the victory, and we go out
+to fight with a light heart, commencing where Wagner and all the
+pessimists ended. Wagner wanted the victory, and also, lest he should
+not gain it, he wanted something to save him from despair. That
+something he found in pessimism. In his younger days--indeed until
+near the last--he forgot all about it in his hours of inspiration, and
+worked for no end, but for the sheer joy of working. But towards the
+end of his life, when his inspiration came seldomer and with less
+power, he worked more and more for the victory, and became wholly
+pessimistic, throwing away his weapons, and hiding behind
+self-renunciation as behind a shield. He won a victory more brilliant
+than ever Napoleon or Wellington or Moltke won; and in the eyes of
+all men he seemed a great general. But life had terrified him; he had
+trembled before Wotan's--or Christ's--spear; in his heart of hearts he
+knew himself a beaten man; and he wrote "Parsifal."
+
+
+
+
+BAYREUTH IN 1897
+
+
+To Bayreuth again, through dirty, dusty, nasty-smelling, unromantic
+Germany, along the banks of that shabby--genteel river known as the
+Rhine, watching at every railway station the wondrously bulky
+haus-fraus who stir such deep emotions in the sentimental German
+heart; noting how the disease of militarism has eaten so deeply into
+German life that each railway official is a mere steam-engine,
+supplied by the State with fuel in case he should some day be needed;
+eating the badly and dirtily cooked German food,--how familiar it all
+seems when one does it a second time! One week in Bayreuth was the
+length of my stay in 1896; yet I seem to have spent a great part of my
+younger days here. The theatre is my familiar friend in whom I never
+trust; the ditch called the river has many associations, pleasant and
+other; I go up past the theatre into the wood as to a favourite haunt
+of old time; I lunch under the trees and watch the caterpillars drop
+into my soup as though that were the commonest thing in the world; I
+wander into the theatre and feel more at home than ever I do at Covent
+Garden; I listen to the bad--but it is not yet time for detailed
+criticism. All I mean is, that the novelty of Bayreuth, like the
+novelty of any other small lifeless German town, disappears on a
+second visit; that though the charm of the wood, of the trumpet calls
+at the theatre, of the greasy German food, and the primitive German
+sanitary arrangements, remains, it is a charm that has already worn
+very thin, and needs the carefullest of handling to preserve. Whether,
+without some especial inducement, the average mortal can survive
+Bayreuth a third time, is, to me, hardly a question. As for my poor
+self, it suits me admirably--certainly I could stand Bayreuth half a
+dozen times. I like the life--the way in which the hours of the day
+revolve round the evening performance, the real idleness, passivity,
+combined with an appearance of energy and activity; I like to get warm
+by climbing the hill and then to sit down and cool myself by drinking
+lager from a huge pot with a pewter lid, dreamily speculating the
+while on the possibility of my ever growing as fat as the average
+German; I like to sit in a cafe with my friends till three in the
+morning, discussing with fiery enthusiasm unimportant details of the
+performance we have lately endured; I like being hungry six times a
+day. All these trifles please me, and please others. But the majority
+of the crowd of visitors are not pleased by them; and what can they do
+in Bayreuth after the freshness of novelty is worn off? They go to
+Villa Wahnfried and look for a few seconds at the spot where Wagner is
+buried--as I heard it said, like a cat in a back garden; they look for
+a few seconds at the church; they lunch; they buy and partly read the
+English papers; and then? Inevitably the intelligent reader will say,
+the opera in the evening. And I, who have been to the opera in the
+evening, gasp and remark, Really!
+
+Lest this ejaculation be entirely misinterpreted by the irreverent,
+let it be said at once that the performances are not, on the whole,
+very bad. But I wish to consider whether they are of a quality and
+distinction sufficient to drag one all the way from England, and to
+compensate those who find the day dull for the dulness of the day,
+whether they are what Bayreuth claims them to be--the best operatic
+representations in the world, the best that could possibly be given at
+the present time. The circular sent out by amiable Mr. Schulz-Curtius
+states that, "while not guaranteeing any particular artists, the aim
+of Bayreuth will be to secure the best artists procurable" (or words
+to that effect). Is this genuinely the aim of Bayreuth, and does
+Bayreuth come near enough to the mark to make some thousands of
+English people think they have spent their time, money, and energy
+well in coming here? For my part I say Yes: even were the
+representations a good deal poorer, they form, as I have said, a
+centre for the day; I rise in the morning with them before me, and
+make all my arrangements--my lunches, discussions, and lagers--so as
+to reach the theatre at four o'clock; they save me from a life without
+an object, and add a zest to everything I do; they correspond to the
+trifling errand which renders a ten-mile walk in the country an
+enjoyment. But those who come here for nothing but the theatre, who
+do not feel the charm of the Bayreuth life, will, I am much afraid,
+answer No. Had I no friends here, or did I not enjoy their company and
+conversation, if my stomach refused lager and I could not smoke
+ten-pfennig German cigars, if I were not violently hungry every two
+hours, I am very much afraid I should answer No. The working of the
+scenic arrangements is, of course, as perfect as ever. Of course there
+are one or two mistakes,--stage machinists, after all, are built of
+peccable clay,--but these occur so seldom that one can sit with a
+feeling of security that is not possible at Covent Garden. In "The
+Valkyrie" the fire does not flare up ten minutes late; the coming of
+evening does not suggest an unexpected total eclipse of the sun; the
+thing that the score indicates is done, and not, as generally happens
+at Covent Garden, the reverse thing. The colours of the scenery are
+likewise as intolerably German as ever--the greens coarse and rank,
+the yellows bilious, the blues tinged with a sickly green, the reds as
+violent as the dress of the average German frau. On the other hand,
+many of the effects are wonderful--the mountain gorge where Wotan
+calls up Erda, Mime's cave, the depths of the Rhine, the burning of
+the hall of the Gibichungs. But the most astounding and lovely effects
+in the setting of the drama will not avail for long without true,
+finished, and beautiful art in the singing and acting; and, with a
+few exceptions, the singers do not give us anything approaching true,
+finished, and beautiful art. The exceptions are Van Rooy, Brema,
+Gulbranson, Brema, and Schumann-Heink. Van Rooy has a noble voice,
+admirably suited to Wotan, and he both sings and acts the part with a
+majesty and pathos beyond anything dreamed of by any other Wotan I
+have heard. He appears to have been the success of the Festival; and
+certainly so strong and exquisite an artist deserves all the success
+he can gain in Bayreuth. Brema's Fricka is noble and full of charm;
+Schumann-Heink sings the music of Erda with some sense of its mystery
+and of Waltraute in "Siegfried" with considerable passion; and
+Gulbranson has vastly improved her impersonation of Bruennhilde since
+last year. She is still unmistakably a student, but no one can doubt
+that she will develop into a really grand artist if she avoids ruining
+her fine voice by continually using it in a wrong way. Her Bruennhilde
+is just now very beautiful and intensely pathetic, but it owes less to
+her art than her personality. She does not interpret Bruennhilde--rather
+she uses the part as a vehicle for her private emotions; to an
+inordinate degree she reads into it her real or imaginary experience;
+and she has not learnt the trick of turning her feelings into the
+proper channels provided, so to say, by the part--of so directing
+them that Gulbranson disappears behind Bruennhilde. Still, it is a
+great thing to find an artist of such force and passion and at the
+same time such rare delicacy; and I expect to come here in 1899 and
+hear an almost perfect rendering of Bruennhilde. As for the rest of
+the singers, the less said about most of them the better. They have no
+voices worth the mentioning; the little they do possess they have no
+notion of using rightly; and their acting is of the most rudimentary
+sort. We hear so much of the fine acting which is supposed to cover
+the vocal sins of Bayreuth that it cannot be insisted on too strongly
+that the acting here is not fine. I can easily imagine how Wagner,
+endeavouring to get his new notion into the heads of the stupid
+singers who are still permitted to ruin his music because they are now
+veterans, would fume and rage at the Italian "business"--the laying of
+the left hand on the heart and of the right on the pit of the
+stomach--with which incompetent actors always fill up their idle
+intervals, and how he would beg them, in Wotan's name, rather to do
+nothing than do that. But to take the first bungling representation of
+the "Ring" as an ideal to be approached as closely as possible, to
+insist on competent actors and actresses standing doing nothing when
+some movement is urgently called for, is to deny to Wagner all the
+advantages of the new acting which modern stage singers have learnt
+from his music. The first act of "The Valkyrie," for example, will be
+absurd so long as Sieglinde, Hunding, and Siegmund are made to stand
+in solemn silence, as beginners who cannot hear the prompter's voice,
+until Sieglinde has mixed Hunding's draught. And some of the gestures
+and postures in which the singers are compelled to indulge are as
+foolish as the foolishest Italian acting. Who can help laughing at the
+calisthenics of Wotan and Bruennhilde at the end of "The Valkyrie," or
+at Wotan's massage treatment of Bruennhilde in the second act? The
+Bayreuth acting is as entirely conventional as Italian acting, and
+scarce a whit more artistic and sane. Even the fine artists are
+hampered by it; and the lesser ones are enabled to make themselves and
+whole music-dramas eminently ridiculous. On the whole, perhaps, acting
+and singing were at their best in "Siegfried." In "The Rheingold" some
+of the smaller parts--such as Miss Weed's Freia--were handsomely done;
+the Mime was also excellent; but I cannot quite reconcile myself to
+Friedrichs' Alberich. "The Dusk of the Gods" was marred by
+Burgstaller, and "The Valkyrie" by the two apparently octogenarian
+lovers. That is Bayreuth's way. It promises us the best singers
+procurable, and gives us Vogl and Sucher, who undoubtedly were
+delightful in their parts twenty years ago; and it would be shocked to
+learn that its good faith is questioned so far as lady artists are
+concerned. Whether it is fair to question it is another matter. In
+Germany feminine beauty is reckoned by hundredweights. No lady of
+under eighteen stones is admired; but one who is heavier than that,
+instead of staying at home and looking after her grandchildren, is put
+into a white dress and called Sieglinde, or into a brown robe and
+called Kundry; and a German audience accepts her as a revelation of
+ideal loveliness through the perfection of human form.
+
+The Germans are devoid of a sense of colour, they are devoid of a
+sense of beauty in vocal tone, and I am at last drawing near to the
+conclusion that they have no sense of beauty in instrumental tone.
+Throughout this cycle the tone of many of the instruments has been
+execrable; many of them have rarely been even in approximate tune. The
+truth is that the players do not play well unless a master-hand
+controls them; and a master-hand in the orchestra has been urgently
+wanted. Instead of a master-hand we have had to put up with Master
+Siegfried Wagner's hand (he now uses the right), and in the worst
+moments we have wished there was no hand at all, and in the best we
+have longed passionately for another. I do not propose to discuss his
+conducting in detail. Under him the band has played with steady,
+unrelenting slovenliness and inaccuracy; the music has been robbed of
+its rhythm, life, and colour; and many of the finest numbers--as, for
+example, the Valkyrie's Ride, the prelude to the third act of
+"Siegfried," the march in "The Dusk of the Gods"--have been
+deliberately massacred. One cannot criticise such conducting: it does
+not rise near enough to competence to be worthy of criticism. But one
+has a right to ask why this young man, who should be serving an
+apprenticeship in some obscure opera-house, is palmed off on the
+public as "the best artist procurable"? He scarcely seems to possess
+ordinary intelligence. I had the honour of being inadvertently
+presented to him, and he asked me, should I write anything about
+Bayreuth, to say that he objected very much to the Englishmen who came
+in knickerbockers--in bicycle costume. When I mildly suggested that if
+they came without knickerbockers or the customary alternative he would
+have better reason to complain, he asserted that he and his family had
+a great respect for the theatre, and it shocked them to find so many
+Englishmen who did not respect it. I mention this because it shows
+clearly the spirit in which Bayreuth is now being worked. The Wagner
+family are not shocked when Wagner's music is caricatured by an
+octogenarian tenor or a twenty-stone prima donna; they are shocked
+when in very hot weather a few people wear the costume in which they
+suffer least discomfort. So the place is becoming a mere fashionable
+resort, that would cause Wagner all the pangs of Amfortas could he
+come here again. The women seem to change their dresses for every act
+of the opera; the prices of lodgings, food, and drinks are rapidly
+rising to the Monte Carlo standard; a clergyman has been imported to
+preach on Sunday to the English visitors; one sees twenty or thirty
+fashionable divorce cases in process of incubation; and Siegfried
+Wagner conducts. With infinite labour Wagner built this magnificent
+theatre, the most perfect machine in the world for the reproduction of
+great art-works; and Mrs. Wagner has given it as a toy to her darling
+son that he may amuse himself by playing with it. And, like a baby
+when it gets a toy, Siegfried Wagner is breaking it to pieces to see
+what there is inside. Unless it is taken from him until he has spent a
+few years in learning to play upon instead of with it, Bayreuth will
+quickly be deserted. Already it is in decadence. I shall always come
+to Bayreuth, for reasons already given; but fashions change, and the
+people who come here because it is the fashion will not be long in
+finding other resorts; and those who want only to see the music-plays
+adequately performed will have learnt that this is not the place for
+them. With one voice the ablest German, French, and Dutch critics are
+crying against the present state of things; and it is certainly the
+duty of every English lover of Wagner to refuse to take tickets for
+the performances that are to be conducted by Wagner's son. Bayreuth
+promises us the best artists. Whether some of the singers are or are
+not the best artists is largely a matter of taste. But that Siegfried
+Wagner is the best conductor procurable in Germany is too preposterous
+a proposition to be considered for a moment. He may be some day; but
+that day is far off.
+
+As for the representation of "Parsifal," I should not trouble to
+discuss it had not Mr. Chamberlain's book on Wagner lately come my
+way. It shows me that the old game is being pursued as busily as ever.
+Since Wagner's death the world has been carefully and persistently
+taught that only Bayreuth can do justice to "Parsifal"; and since the
+world believes anything if it is said often enough, it has come to
+think it sheer blasphemy to dream of giving "Parsifal" elsewhere than
+at Bayreuth. "Parsifal" is not an opera--it is a sacred revelation;
+and just as the seed of Aaron alone could serve as priests in the
+sacred rites of the temple at Jerusalem, so only the seed of Wagner
+can serve as priests--that is to say, as chief directing priests--when
+"Parsifal" is played. Thus declare the naive dwellers in Villa
+Wahnfried, modestly forgetting the missing link in the chain of
+argument which should prove them alone to be the people qualified to
+perform "Parsifal"; and I regret to observe the support they receive
+from a number of Englishmen and Scotchmen, who are grown more German
+than the Germans, and just as religiously forget to make any reference
+to this missing link of proof. But these Germanised Scotchmen and
+Englishmen work hard for Bayreuth: now they whisper in awestruck tones
+of the beauty and significance of "Parsifal"; now they howl at the
+unhappy writers in the daily and weekly Press who dare to find little
+significance and less beauty in the Bayreuth representation; and, to
+do them bare justice, until lately they have been fairly successful in
+persuading the world to think with them. Verily, they have their
+reward--they partake of afternoon tea at Villa Wahnfried; they enjoy
+the honour of bowing low to the second Mrs. Wagner; Wagner's legal
+descendants cordially take them by the hand. And they go away
+refreshed, and again spread the report of the artistic and moral and
+religious supremacy of Bayreuth; and the world listens and goes up
+joyfully to Bayreuth to be taxed--one pound sterling per head per
+"Parsifal" representation. The performances over, the world comes away
+mightily edified, having seen nothing with its own eyes, heard nothing
+with its own ears, having understood nothing at all;--having, in fact,
+so totally miscomprehended everything as to think "Parsifal" a
+Christian drama; having been too deaf to realise that the singers were
+frequently out of the key, and too blind to observe that the scenery
+in the second act resembled a cheap cretonne, and that many of the
+flower-maidens were at least eight feet in circumference. On the way
+home the world whiles away the long railway journey by reading
+metaphysical disquisitions on "Parsifal' and the Ideal Woman,"
+"'Parsifal' and the Thing-in-Itself," "The Swan in 'Parsifal' and its
+Relation to the Higher Vegetarianism." It knows the name of every
+leit-motif, and can nearly pronounce the German for it; it can refer
+to the Essay on Beethoven apropos of Kundry's scream (or yawn) in the
+second act; it can chat learnedly of Klingsor, in pathetic ignorance
+of his real offence, and explain why Amfortas has his wound on the
+right side, although the libretto distinctly states it to be situated
+on the left. It is a fact that this year a lady was heard to ask why
+Parsifal quarrelled with his wife in the second act. (I might mention
+that an admirer of "Parsifal" asked me who the dark man was in the
+first act of "The Valkyrie," and whether Sieglinde or Bruennhilde was
+burnt in the last.) The which is eminently amusing, and conjures up
+before one a vision of Richard, not wailing, like the youth in
+Shelley's "Prometheus Unbound," for the faith he kindled, but gazing
+patiently, rather wearily, with a kindly ironical smile, on the world
+he conquered, on the world that adores him _because_ it fails to
+understand him.
+
+Happily, it is not my business to reform the world; and writing in
+October, when so many of the idealists who felt with Parsifal in his
+remorse about the duck-shooting episode are applying the lesson by
+wantonly slaughtering every harmless creature they can hit, it would
+be superfluous to point out in any detail how very wrong and absurd is
+the world's estimate of the Bayreuth performance. In fact, were it my
+object to assist in the destruction of Bayreuth, no better plan could
+be found than that of approving cordially of everything Bayreuth does.
+For it is fast driving away all sincere lovers of Wagner; it lives now
+on fashionable ladies, betting men, and bishops: when the fashion
+changes and these depart, the Bayreuth festivals will come to an end.
+Bayreuth is only an affectation; not one pilgrim in a hundred
+understands the "Ring" or "Parsifal"; not one in a thousand is really
+impressed by anything deeper than the mere novelty of the business.
+Visitors go and are moved by the shooting of the duck (the libretto
+calls it a swan, but the management chooses to use a duck); they talk
+of Wagner's love of animals and of how they love animals themselves;
+they go straight from Bayreuth to Scotland and show their love in true
+sportsmanlike fashion by treating animals, birds, and fishes with a
+degree of cruelty so appalling as to disgust every right-thinking and
+right-feeling man and woman; and they tell you that the stag likes to
+be disembowelled, the bird to have its wings shattered, the fish to be
+torn to pieces in its agonised struggle for life. Or, having been
+moved by the consequences of sin, they straightway go and prepare
+cases for the divorce courts; having appreciated the purity and peace
+of monastery life and a daily communion service, they return without
+hesitation or sense of inconsistency to their favourite modes of
+gambling; having revelled in the most lovely music in the world, they
+proceed to listen nightly to the ugliest and silliest music in the
+world. Their appreciation of Bayreuth is a sham; they would cheerfully
+go elsewhere--say to Homburg--if Bayreuth were shut up; and before
+long they will go to Homburg or elsewhere, whether Bayreuth is shut up
+or not.
+
+
+
+
+A NOTE ON BRAHMS
+
+
+It is not an exaggeration to say that probably there are not a dozen
+musicians in Europe who have formed any precise and final opinion as
+to where Brahms should be placed. One gets to know him very slowly.
+His appearance and manner (so to speak), so extremely dignified, are
+very much in his favour; but when one tries to get to terms of
+intimacy with him he has a fatal trick of repelling one by that
+"austerity" or chilliness of which we have heard so much. And the
+worst of it is that too frequently a sharp suspicion strikes one that
+there is little behind that austere manner--that his reticence does
+not so much imply matter held in reserve as an absence of matter. I do
+not mean by this that Brahms was a paradoxical fool who was clever
+enough to hold his tongue lest he was found out, nor even that he
+purposely veiled his lack of meaning. On the contrary, a composer who
+wished more devoutly to be sincere never put pen to paper. But he had
+not the intellect of an antelope; and he took up in all honesty a role
+for which he had only the slightest qualification. The true Brahms,
+the Brahms who does not deceive himself, is the Brahms you find in
+many of the songs, in some of the piano and chamber music, in the
+smaller movements of his symphonies, and in certain passages of his
+overtures; and I have no hesitation whatever in asserting (though the
+opinion is subject to revision) that his songs are much the most
+satisfactory things he did. Here, unweighted by a heavy sense of a
+mission, he either revels in making beautiful--though never supremely
+beautiful--tunes for their own sake, or he actually expresses with
+beauty and considerable fidelity certain definite emotions. Had he
+written nothing but such small things--songs, piano pieces,
+Allegrettos like that in the D symphony--his position might be a
+degree lower in the estimation of dull Academics who don't count, but
+he would be accepted at something like his true value by the whole
+world, and the whole world would be the better for oftener hearing
+many lovely things. But merely to be a singer of wonderful songs was
+not sufficient for Brahms: he wanted to be a great poet, a new
+Beethoven. It was a legitimate ambition. The kind of music Brahms
+really loved was the kind of which Beethoven's is the most splendid
+example; and he wanted to create more of the same kind. He doubtless
+thought he could; in his early days Robert Schumann predicted that he
+would; and in his later days his intimate friend Hanslick and a small
+herd of followers asserted that he did. He was run as the prophet of
+the classical school with all the force of all who hated Wagner and
+had not brains enough to understand either Brahms' or Wagner's music;
+he became the god of all the musical dullards in Europe; and it is
+small wonder that he took himself with immense seriousness. A little
+more intelligence, ever so little more, would have shown him that,
+despite the noise of those who perhaps admired him less than they
+dreaded Wagner, he was not the man they said he was. He had not a
+great matter to utter; what he had he could not utter in the classical
+form; yet he tried to write in classical form. If ever a musician was
+born a happy, careless romanticist, that musician was Brahms--he was
+even a romanticist in the narrower sense, inasmuch as he was fond
+rather of the gloomy, mysterious, and dismal than of sunlight and the
+blue sky; and whenever his imagination warmed he straightway began
+breaking the bonds in which he had endeavoured to work. But that
+miserable article of Schumann--deplorable gush that has been
+tolerated, nay, admired, only because it is Schumann's--the evil
+influence of the pseudo-classicism of Mendelssohn and his followers,
+the preposterous over-praise of Hanslick,--these things drove Brahms
+into the mistake never made by the really able men. Wilkes denied that
+he ever was a Wilksite; Wagner certainly never was a Wagnerite; there
+are people who ask whether Christ was ever a Christian. But Brahms
+became more and more a devoted Brahmsite; he accepted himself as the
+guardian of the great classical tradition (which never existed); and
+he wrote more and more dull music. It is idle to tell me he is austere
+when my inner consciousness tells me he is merely barren, and idler
+to ask me feel beauty when my ears report no beauty to me. He had no
+original emotion or thought: whenever his music is good it will be
+found that he has derived the emotion from a poem, or else that there
+is no emotion but only very fine decorative work. In most of his
+bigger works--the symphonies, the German Requiem, the Serious songs he
+wrote in his later days--he sacrificed the beauty he might have
+attained to the expression of emotions he never felt; he assumed the
+pose and manner of a master telling us great things, and talked like a
+pompous duffer. An exception must be made: one emotion Brahms had felt
+and did communicate. It was his tragedy that he had no original
+emotion, no rich inner life, but lived through the days on the merely
+prosaic plane; and he seems to have felt that this was his tragedy.
+Anyhow, the one original emotion he brought into music is a curious
+mournful dissatisfaction with life and with death. The only piece of
+his I know in which the feeling is intolerably poignant, seems to cut
+like a knife, is his setting of that sad song of Goethe's about the
+evening wind dashing the vine leaves and the raindrops against the
+window pane; and in this song, as also in the movement in one of the
+quartets evolved from the song, the mournfulness becomes absolutely
+pitiable despair. Brahms was not cast in the big mould, and he spent a
+good deal of his later time in pitying himself. It is curious that
+one of his last works was the batch of Serious songs, which consist of
+dismal meditations on the darkness and dirt of the grave and
+feebly-felt hopes that there is something better on the other side.
+That does not strike one as in the vein of the big men.
+
+Much of Brahms' music is bad and ugly music, dead music; it is a
+counterfeit and not the true and perfect image of life indeed; and it
+should be buried or cremated at the earliest opportunity. But much of
+it is wonderfully beautiful--almost but never quite as beautiful as
+the great men at their best. There are passages in the Tragic overture
+that any composer might be proud to have written. If the opening of
+the D symphony is thin, unreal, an attempt at pastoral gaiety which
+has resulted merely in lack of character, at anyrate the second theme
+is delightful; if the opening of the slow movement is also twaddle,
+there are pleasant passages later on; the dainty allegretto is as
+fresh and fragrant as a wild rose; and the finale, though void of
+significance, is full of an energy rare in Brahms. Then there are many
+of the songs in which Brahms' astonishing felicity of phrase, and his
+astounding trick of finding expression for an emotion when the emotion
+has been given to him, enable him almost to work miracles. And it must
+be remembered that all his music is irreproachable from the technical
+point of view. Brahms is certainly with Bach, Mozart, and Wagner in
+point of musicianship: in fact, these four might be called the
+greatest masters of sheer music who have lived. A Brahms score is as
+wonderful as a Wagner score; from beginning to end there is not a
+misplaced note nor a trace of weakness; and one stands amazed before
+the consummate workmanship of the thing. The only difference between
+the Wagner score and the Brahms score is, that while the former is
+always alive, always the product of a fervent inner life, the latter
+is sometimes alive too, but more frequently as dead as a door-mat, the
+product of extreme facility and (I must suppose) an extraordinary
+inherited musical instinct divorced from exalted thought and feeling.
+The difference may be felt when you compare a Brahms and a
+Tschaikowsky symphony. Although in his later years Tschaikowsky
+acquired a mastery of the technique of music, and succeeded in keeping
+his scores clear and clean, he never arrived at anything approaching
+Brahms' certainty of touch, and neither his scoring nor his
+counterpoint has Brahms' perfection of workmanship. Yet one listens to
+Tschaikowksy, for the present at least, with intense pleasure, and
+wants to listen again. I have yet to meet anyone who pretends to have
+received any intense pleasure from a Brahms symphony.
+
+Brahms is dead; the old floods of adulation will no longer be poured
+forth by the master's disciples; neither will the enemies his friends
+made for him have any reason to depreciate his music; and ultimately
+it will be possible to form a fair, unbiassed judgment on him. This is
+a mere casual utterance, by the way.
+
+
+
+
+ANTON DVORAK
+
+
+I remember the Philharmonic in its glory one evening, when it had a
+couple of distinguished foreigners to a kind of musical high tea, very
+bourgeois, very long and very indigestible. One of the pair of
+distinguished foreigners was Mr. Sauer; the other, Dvorak, was the
+hero of the evening. Now, whatever one may think of Dvorak the
+musician, it is impossible to feel anything but sympathy and
+admiration for Dvorak the man. His early struggles to overcome the
+attendant disadvantages of his peasant birth; his unheard-of labours
+to acquire a mastery of the technique of his art when body and brain
+were exhausted by the work of earning his daily bread in a very humble
+capacity; his sickening years of waiting, not for popular recognition
+merely, but for an opportunity of showing that he had any gifts worthy
+of being recognised,--these command the sympathy of all but those
+happy few who have found life a most delicate feather-bed. Dvorak has
+honestly worked for all that has come to him, and the only people who
+will carp or sneer at him are those who have gained or wish to gain
+their positions without honest work. There could be no conjecture
+wider of the mark than that of his success being due to any charlatan
+tricks in his music or in his conduct of life. No composer's
+music--not Bach's, nor Haydn's, nor even Mozart's--could be a more
+veracious expression of his inner nature; and if Dvorak's music is at
+times odd and whimsical, and persistently wrong-headed and _outre_
+through long passages, it does not mean that Dvorak is trying to
+impress or startle his hearers by doing unusual things, but merely
+that he himself is odd and whimsical and has his periods of persistent
+wrong-headedness. He is Slav in every fibre--not a pseudo-Slav whose
+ancestors were or deserved to be whipped out of the temple in
+Jerusalem. He has all the Slav's impetuosity and hot blood, his love
+of glaring and noisy colour, his love of sheer beauty of a certain
+limited kind, and--alas!--his unfailing brainlessness. His impetuosity
+and hot blood are manifested in his frequent furious rhythms and the
+abrupt changes in those rhythms; his love of colour in the quality of
+his instrumentation, with its incessant contrasts and use of the
+drums, cymbals, and triangle; his sense of beauty in the terribly
+weird splendour of his pictures, and its limitations in his rare
+achievement of anything fine when once he passes out of the region of
+the weird and terrible; his brainlessness in his inability to
+appreciate the value of a strong sinewy theme, in the lack of
+proportion between the different movements of his works and between
+the sections of the movements, and, perhaps more than in any other
+way, in his unhappy choice of subjects for vocal works. One stands
+amazed before the spectacle of the man who made that prodigious
+success with the awful legend of "The Spectre's Bride" coming forward,
+smiling in childlike confidence, with "Saint Ludmila," which was so
+awful in another fashion. And then, as if not content with nearly
+ruining his reputation by that deadly blow, he must needs follow up
+"Saint Ludmila" with the dreariest, dullest, most poverty-stricken
+Requiem ever written by a musician with any gift of genuine invention.
+These mistakes might indicate mere want of tact did not the qualities
+of Dvorak's music show them to be the result of sheer want of
+intellect; and if the defects of his music are held by some to be
+intentional beauties, no such claim can be set up for the opinions on
+music which he has on various occasions confided to the ubiquitous
+interviewer. The Slav is an interesting creature, and his music is
+interesting, not because he is higher than the Western man, but
+because he is different, and, if anything, lower, with a considerable
+touch of the savage. When Dvorak is himself, and does not pass outside
+the boundaries within which he can breathe freely, he produces results
+so genuine and powerful that one might easily mistake him for a great
+musician; but when he competes with Beethoven or Handel or Haydn, we
+at once realise that he is not expressing what he really feels, but
+what he thinks he should feel, that he is not at his ease, and that
+our native men can beat him clean out of the field. To be sure, they
+can at times be as dull as he, but that is when they forget the lesson
+they should before now have learnt from him, when they leave the field
+in which they work with real enjoyment and produce results which may
+be enjoyed.
+
+
+
+
+TSCHAIKOWSKY AND HIS "PATHETIC" SYMPHONY
+
+
+A very little while since, Tschaikowsky was little more than a name
+in England. He had visited us some two or three times, and it was
+generally believed that he composed; but he had not written any piece
+without which no orchestral programme could be considered complete,
+and the mere suggestion that his place might possibly be far above
+Gounod would certainly have been received with open derision. However,
+when his fame became great and spread wide on the Continent, he became
+so important a man in the eyes of English musicians that Cambridge
+University thought fit to honour itself by offering him an honorary
+musical degree. Tschaikowsky, simple soul, good-humouredly accepted
+it, apparently in entire ignorance of the estimation in which such
+cheap decorations are held in this country; and it is to be hoped that
+before his death he obtained a hearing in Russia for the Cambridge
+professor's music. The incident, comical as it appeared to those of us
+who knew the value of musical degrees, the means by which they are
+obtained, and the reasons for which they are conferred, yet served a
+useful purpose by calling public attention to the fact that there was
+living a man who had written music that was fresh, a trifle strange
+perhaps, but full of vitality, and containing a new throb, a new
+thrill. Since 1893 his reputation has steadily grown, but in a curious
+way. One can scarcely say with truth that Tschaikowsky is popular:
+only his "Pathetic" symphony and one or two smaller things are
+popular. Had he not written the "Pathetic," one may doubt whether he
+would be much better known to-day than he was in 1893. It caught the
+public fancy as no other work of his caught it, and on the strength of
+its popularity many of the critics do not hesitate to call it a great
+symphony, and on the strength of the symphony Tschaikowsky a great
+composer. (For in England criticism largely means saying what the
+public thinks.) Passionately though that symphony is admired, hardly
+any other of his music can be truly said to get a hearing; for, on the
+rare occasions when it is played, the public thoughtfully stays away.
+It is true that the Casse Noisette suite is always applauded, but it
+is a trifling work compared with his best. Tschaikowsky shares with
+Gray and one or two others in ancient and modern times the distinction
+of being famous by a single achievement. The public is jealous for the
+supremacy of that achievement, and will not hear of there being
+another equal to it.
+
+Whether the public is right or wrong, and whether we all are or are
+not just a little inclined to-day to exaggerate Tschaikowsky's gifts
+and the value of his music, there can be no doubt whatever that he was
+a singularly fine craftsman, who brought into music a number of fresh
+and living elements. He seems to me to have been an extraordinary
+combination of the barbarian and the civilised man, of the Slav and
+the Latin or Teuton, the Slav barbarian preponderating. He saw things
+as neither Slav nor Latin nor Teuton had seen them before; the touch
+of things aroused in him moods dissimilar from those that had been
+aroused in anyone before. Hence, while we English regard him as a
+representative Russian, or at anyrate Slav, composer, many Russians
+repudiate him, calling him virtually a Western. He has the Slav fire,
+rash impetuosity, passion and intense melancholy, and much also of
+that Slav naivete which in the case of Dvorak degenerates into sheer
+brainlessness; he has an Oriental love of a wealth of extravagant
+embroidery, of pomp and show and masses of gorgeous colour; but the
+other, what I might call the Western, civilised element in his
+character, showed itself in his lifelong striving to get into touch
+with contemporary thought, to acquire a full measure of modern
+culture, and to curb his riotous, lawless impulse towards mere sound
+and fury. It is this unique fusion of apparently mutually destructive
+elements and instincts that gives to Tschaikowsky's music much of its
+novelty and piquancy. But, apart from this uncommon fusion, it must be
+remembered that his was an original mind--original not only in colour
+but in its very structure. Had he been pure Slav, or pure Latin, his
+music might have been very different, but it would certainly have
+been original. He had true creative imagination, a fund of original,
+underived emotion, and a copiousness of invention almost as great as
+Wagner's or Mozart's. His power of evolving new decorative patterns of
+a fantastic beauty seemed quite inexhaustible; and the same may be
+said of his schemes and combinations and shades of colour, and the
+architectural plans and forms of his larger works. It is true that his
+forms frequently enough approach formlessness; that his colours--and
+especially in his earlier music--are violent and inharmonious; and
+that in his ceaseless invention of new patterns his Slav naivete and
+lack of humour led him more than a hundred times to write
+unintentionally comic passages. He is discursive--I might say voluble.
+Again, he had little or no real strength--none of the massive, healthy
+strength of Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Wagner: his force is sheer
+hysteria. He is wanting in the deepest and tenderest human feeling. He
+is plausible to a degree that leads one to suspect his sincerity, and
+certainly leaves it an open question how long a great deal of his
+music will stand after this generation, to which it appeals so
+strongly, has passed away. But when all that may fairly be said
+against him has been said and given due weight, the truth remains that
+he is one of the few great composers of this century. I myself, in all
+humility, allowing fully that I may be altogether wrong, while
+convinced that I am absolutely right, deliberately set him far above
+Brahms, above Gounod, above Schumann--above all save Beethoven, Weber,
+Schubert, and Wagner. His accomplishment as a sheer musician was
+greater than either Gounod's or Schumann's, though far from being
+equal to Brahms'--for Brahms as a master of the management of notes
+stands with the highest, with Bach, Mozart, and Wagner; while as a
+voice and a new force in music neither Brahms nor Schumann nor Gounod
+can be compared with him other than unfavourably. All that are
+sensitive to music can feel, as I have said, the new throb, the new
+thrill; and that decides the matter.
+
+It is now a long time since Mr. Henry Wood, one winter's afternoon,
+the only Englishman who may be ranked with the great continental
+conductors, gave a Tschaikowsky concert, with a programme that
+included some of the earlier as well as one or two of the later works.
+It served to show how hard and how long Tschaikowsky laboured to
+attain to lucidity of expression, and why the "Pathetic" symphony is
+popular while the other compositions are not. In all of them we find
+infinite invention and blazes of Eastern magnificence and splendour;
+but in the earlier things there is little of the order and clarity of
+the later ones. Another and a more notable point is that in not one
+thing played at this concert might the human note be heard. The suite
+(Op. 55) and the symphony (Op. 36) are full of novel and dazzling
+effects--for example, the scherzo of the symphony played mainly by the
+strings pizzicato, and the scherzo of the suite, with the short, sharp
+notes of the brass and the rattle of the side-drum; the melodies also
+are new, and in their way beautiful; in form both symphony and suite
+are nearly as clear as anything Tschaikowsky wrote: in fact, each work
+is a masterwork. But each is lacking in the human element, and without
+the human element no piece of music can be popular for long. The fame
+of Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, is still growing and will continue to
+grow, because every time we hear their music it touches us; while
+Weber, mighty though he is, will probably never be better loved than
+he is to-day, because his marvellously graphic picturesque music does
+not touch us--cannot, was not intended to, touch us; and the fame of
+Mendelssohn and the host of lesser men who did not speak with a human
+accent of human woe and weal wanes from day to day. The composer who
+writes purely decorative music, or purely picturesque music, may be
+remembered as long as he who expresses human feeling; but he cannot
+hope to be loved by so many. It is because Tschaikowsky has so
+successfully put his own native emotions, his own aspirations and
+hopes and fears and sorrows, into the "Pathetic," that I believe it
+has come to stay with us, while many of his other works will fade
+from the common remembrance. Surely it is one of the most mournful
+things in music; yet surely sadness was never uttered with a finer
+grace, with a more winning carelessness, as one who tries to smile
+gaily at his own griefs. Were it touched with the finest tenderness,
+as Mozart might have touched it, we might--if we could once get
+thoroughly accustomed to a few of the unintentionally humorous
+passages I have referred to--have it set by the side of the G minor
+and "Jupiter" symphonies. As it is, it unmistakably falls short of
+Mozart by lacking that tenderness, just as it falls short of Beethoven
+by lacking profundity of emotion and thought; but it does not always
+fall so far short. There are passages in it that neither Beethoven nor
+Mozart need have been ashamed to own as theirs; and especially there
+is much in it that is in the very spirit of Mozart--Mozart as we find
+him in the Requiem, rather than the Mozart of "Don Giovanni" or the
+"Figaro." The opening bars are, of course, ultramodern: they would
+never have been written had not Wagner written something like them
+first; but the combination of poignancy and lightness and poise with
+which the same phrase is delivered and expanded as the theme for the
+allegro is quite Mozartean, and the same may be said of the semiquaver
+passage following it. The outbursts of Slavonic fire are, of course,
+Tschaikowsky pure and simple; but everyone who hears the symphony may
+note how the curious union of barbarism with modern culture is
+manifest in the ease with which Tschaikowsky recovers himself after
+one of these outbursts--turns it aside, so to speak, instead of giving
+it free play after the favourite plan both of Borodine the great and
+purely Russian composer, and Dvorak the little Hungarian composer. The
+second theme does not appear to me equal to the rest of the symphony.
+It has that curious volubility and "mouthing" quality that sometimes
+gets into Tschaikowsky's music; it is plausible and pretty; it
+suggests a writer who either cannot or dare not use the true
+tremendous word at the proper moment, and goes on delivering himself
+of journalistic stock-phrases which he knows will move those who would
+be left unmoved were the right word spoken. There is nothing of this
+in the melody of the second movement. Its ease is matched by its
+poignancy: the very happy-go-lucky swing of it adds to its poignancy;
+and the continuation--another instance of the untamed Slav under the
+influence of the most finished culture--has a wild beauty, and at the
+same time communicates the emotion more clearly than speech could. The
+mere fact that it is written in five-four time counts for
+little--nothing is easier than to write in five-four time when once
+you have got the trick; the remarkable thing is the skill and tact
+with which Tschaikowsky has used precisely the best rhythm he could
+have chosen--a free, often ambiguous, rhythm--to express that
+particular shade of feeling. The next movement is one of the most
+astounding ever conceived. Beginning like an airy scherzo, presently a
+march rhythm is introduced, and before one has realised the state of
+affairs we are in the midst of a positive tornado of passion. The
+first tunes then resume; but again they are dismissed, and it becomes
+apparent that the march theme is the real theme of the whole
+movement--that all the others are intended simply to lead up to it, or
+to form a frame in which it is set. It comes in again and again with
+ever greater and greater clamour, until it seems to overwhelm one
+altogether. There is no real strength in it--the effect is entirely
+the result of nervous energy, of sheer hysteria; but as an expression
+of an uncontrollable hysterical mood it stands alone in music. It
+should be observed that even here Tschaikowsky's instinctive tendency
+to cover the intensity of his mood with a pretence of carelessness had
+led him to put this enormous outburst into a rhythm that, otherwise
+used, would be irresistibly jolly. The last movement, too, verges on
+the hysterical throughout. It is full of the blackest melancholy and
+despondency, with occasional relapses into a tranquillity even more
+tragic; and the trombone passage near the end, introduced by a
+startling stroke on the gong, inevitably reminds one of the spirit of
+Mozart's Requiem.
+
+The whole of this paper might have been devoted to a discussion of
+the technical side of Tschaikowsky's music, for the score of this
+symphony is one of the most interesting I know. It is full of
+astonishing points, of ingenious dodges used not for their own sake,
+but to produce, as here they nearly always do, particular effects; and
+throughout, the part-writing, the texture of the music, is most
+masterly and far beyond anything Tschaikowsky achieved before. For
+instance, the opening of the last movement has puzzled some good
+critics, for it is written in a way which seems like a mere perverse
+and wasted display of skill. But let anyone imagine for a moment the
+solid, leaden, lifeless result of letting all the parts descend
+together, instead of setting them, as Tschaikowsky does, twisting
+round each other, and it will at once be perceived that Tschaikowsky
+never knew better what he was doing, or was more luckily inspired,
+than when he devised the arrangement that now stands. Much as I should
+like to have debated dozens of such points, it is perhaps better,
+after all, just now to have talked principally of the content of
+Tschaikowsky's music; for, when all is said, in Tschaikowsky's music
+it is the content that counts. I might describe that content as
+modern, were it not that the phrase means little. Tschaikowsky is
+modern because he is new; and in this age, when the earth has grown
+narrow, and tales of far-off coasts and unexplored countries seem
+wonderful no longer, we throw ourselves with eagerness upon the new
+thing, in five minutes make it our own, and hail the inventor of it as
+the man who has said for us what we had all felt for years.
+Nevertheless, it may be that Tschaikowsky's attitude towards life, and
+especially towards its sorrows,--the don't-care-a-hang attitude,--is
+modern; and anyhow, in the sense that it is so new that we seize it
+first amongst a hundred other things, this symphony is the most modern
+piece of music we have. It is imbued with a romanticism beside which
+the romanticism of Weber and Wagner seems a little thin-blooded and
+pallid; it expresses for us the emotions of the over-excited and
+over-sensitive man as they have not been expressed since Mozart; and
+at the present time we are quite ready for a new and less Teutonic
+romanticism than Weber's, and to enter at once into the feelings of
+the brain-tired man. That the "Pathetic" will for long continue to
+grow in popularity I also fully expect; and that after this generation
+has hurried away it will continue to have a large measure of
+popularity I also fully expect, for in it, together with much that
+appeals only to us unhealthy folk of to-day, there is much that will
+appeal to the race, no matter how healthy it may become, so long as it
+remains human in its desires and instincts.
+
+
+
+
+LAMOUREUX AND HIS ORCHESTRA
+
+
+Richter and Mottl, the only considerable conductors besides
+Lamoureux whom we had heard in England up to 1896, may be compared
+with a couple of organists who come here, expecting to find their
+instruments ready, in fair working order, and accurately in tune.
+Lamoureux, on the other hand, was like Sarasate and Ysaye, who would
+be reduced to utter discomfiture if their Strads were to stray on the
+road. He played on his own instrument--the orchestra on which he had
+practised day by day for so many years. Richter and Mottl took their
+instruments as they found them, and devoted the comparatively short
+time they had for rehearsal to the business of getting their main
+intentions broadly carried out, leaving a good deal of minor detail to
+look after itself, and not complaining if a few notes fell under the
+desks at the back of the orchestra. Lamoureux had laboriously
+rehearsed every inch of his repertory until it was note-perfect, and
+each of his men knew the precise bowing, phrasing, degree of piano or
+forte, and tempo of every minutest phrase. Now I do not mean by this
+that the orchestras on which Richter and Mottl performed played many
+wrong notes, while the Lamoureux orchestra played none; and still less
+do I mean that Lamoureux got finer results than Richter or Mottl. So
+far as the mere notes are concerned, the Englishmen who played for the
+German conductors acquitted themselves quite as well as the Frenchmen
+who played for Lamoureux. Both made mistakes at times; and a seemingly
+paradoxical thing is that when a Lamoureux man stumbled all the world
+was bound to hear it, whereas in our English orchestras a score of
+mistakes might be made in an evening without many of us being much the
+wiser. The reason for this is the reason why the playing of Lamoureux
+on his trained orchestra, for all its accuracy, was not better than,
+nor in many respects so good as, the playing of Richter and Mottl on
+the scratch orchestras which their agents engaged for them. Probably
+few uninformed laymen have any notion of the extent to which mere
+noise is responsible for the total effect of a Wagner piece or a
+Beethoven symphony--not the noise of big drum, cymbals and so on; but
+the continuous slight discords caused by some of the players being
+various degrees in front and others various degrees behind; the
+scratching produced by uncertain bowing, or by an unfortunate fiddler
+finding himself a little behind the general body (as he does
+sometimes) and making a savage rush to catch it up; the hissing of
+panting flautists; and the barnyard noises produced by exhausted
+oboe-players. Even with Richter, stolid and trustworthy though he is,
+these unauthorised sounds count for a great deal; and with a conductor
+like Mottl, who varies the tempo freely in obedience to his mood in
+the most rapid pieces, they count for very much more. They result in a
+continuous murmur which, so to speak, fills the interstices in the
+network of the music, covering wrong notes, and giving the mass of
+tone a richness and unity which otherwise it would lack. In such
+movements as the Finale of the Fifth symphony this continuous murmur
+does the work done for the piano by the upper strings without dampers
+and the lower ones when the pedal is pressed down; it gives solidity
+and colour to the music; and certainly half the effect in fine
+renderings of "The Flying Dutchman" overture, the Walkuerenritt, and
+the Fire-music, is due to it. But Lamoureux's men had practised so
+long together under their conductor's beat that all the instruments
+played like one instrument, no matter how the tempo was varied; the
+bowing of each passage had been considered and finally settled, so
+that there was no uncertainty there; and in the course of long
+rehearsal every wind-player had learned precisely where he must
+breathe, where he must reserve his breath, and where he could let
+himself go, so that the tone of flutes, oboes, clarinets, and bassoons
+never became in the smallest degree forced or hoarse. And the result
+of this was the entire absence of that murmur which one has come to
+regard as characteristic of the orchestra. If a wrong note was played,
+there was nothing to hide its nakedness. It was as though a
+penetrating flood of cold white light were poured upon the music and
+made it transparent: one perceived every remotest and least
+significant detail with a vivid distinctness that can only be compared
+with a page of print seen through a strong magnifying glass, or,
+perhaps better still, with a photograph seen through a stereoscope. As
+in a stereoscope, the outlines were defined with a degree of clearness
+and sharpness that almost hurt the eye; as in a stereoscope, there was
+neither colour nor suggestiveness. An orchestral virtuoso, like a
+piano or violin virtuoso, may over-practise.
+
+Having delivered this verdict with all solemnity, I must straightway
+proceed to hedge. If Lamoureux had not the qualities which give
+Richter and Mottl their pre-eminence, he had qualities which they do
+not possess, and his playing had qualities which one cannot find in
+theirs. If he had not absolutely a genius for music, he certainly had
+a genius for attaining perfection in all he did, which was perhaps the
+next best thing. I imagine that he would have made a mouse-trap or
+built a cathedral exactly as he played a Beethoven symphony. The mouse
+would never escape from the trap; there would be nothing wanting, down
+to the most modern appliances and conveniences, in the cathedral. In
+the Fifth symphony he gave us every minute nuance in rigid obedience
+to the composer's directions or evident intentions, and gave them with
+a fastidious care strangely in contrast with Mottl's rough-and-ready
+brilliancy or Richter's breadth. He began every crescendo on the
+precise note where Beethoven marked it to begin; and he gradated it
+with geometrical faultlessness to the exact note where Beethoven
+marked it to cease. In diminuendos and accelerandos and ritenutos he
+was just as faithful. In the softer portions his sforzandos were not
+irrelevant explosions, but slight extra accents: he made microscopic
+distinctions between piano and pianissimo; he achieved the most
+difficult feat of keeping his band at a level forte through long
+passages without a symptom of breaking out into fortissimo. His
+players treated the stiffest passages in the "Dutchman" overture as if
+they were baby's play; and I detected hardly a wrong note either in
+that or in the Fifth symphony. In a word, nothing to compare with the
+technical perfection of his renderings, or his unswerving loyalty to
+the composer, has been heard in London in my time. Yet, by reason of
+that very prodigious correctness, the "Dutchman" overture seemed bare
+and comparatively lifeless: the roar and the hiss of the storm were
+absent, and the shrill discordant wail of wind in the cordage; one
+heard, not the wail or the hiss or the roar, but the notes which--in
+our crude scale with its arbitrary division into tones and
+half-tones--Wagner had perforce to use to suggest them. There was even
+something of flippancy in it after Mottl's gigantic rendering: one
+longed for the dramatic hanging back of the time at the phrase, "Doch
+ach! den Tod, ich fand ihn nicht!" which is of such importance in the
+overture. On the other hand, a more splendid reading of the first
+movement of the Fifth symphony I have never heard; but the rest of the
+movements were hardly to be called readings at all. The most devoted
+admirers of Lamoureux--and I was his fairly devoted admirer
+myself--will not deny that the slow movement is full of poetry, the
+scherzo of a remote, mystical emotion, and the Finale of a wondrous
+combination of sadness, regret and high triumphant joy; and anyone who
+claims that Lamoureux gave us the slightest hint of those qualities
+must be more than his admirer--must be his infatuated slave. The last
+movement even wanted richness; for that excessive clearness which
+prevented the tones blending into masses, and forced one to
+distinguish the separate notes of the flutes, the oboes, the
+clarinets, and so forth, seemed to rob the music of all its body, its
+solidity. But, when all is said, Lamoureux was, in his special way, a
+noble master of the orchestra; and, even if I could not regard him as
+a great interpreter of the greatest music, I admit that the side of
+the great music which he revealed was well worth knowing, and should
+indeed be known to all who would understand the great music.
+
+When I wrote the preceding paragraphs on Lamoureux, some of my
+colleagues were good enough to neglect their own proper business while
+they put me right about orchestral playing in general and that of
+Lamoureux in particular. These gentlemen told me that, when Beethoven
+(whom they knew personally) wrote certain notes, he intended them and
+no others to be played; that the more accurate a rendering, the closer
+it approaches to the work as it existed in Beethoven's mind; that,
+ergo, Lamoureux's playing of Beethoven, being the most accurate yet
+heard in England, was the best, the truest, the most Beethovenish yet
+heard in England. All which I flatly deny, and describe as the foolish
+ravings of uninformed theorists. Only unpractical dreamers fancy that
+a composer thinks of "notes" when he composes. He hears music with his
+mental ear in the first place, and he afterwards sets down such notes
+as experience has taught him will reproduce approximately what he has
+heard when they are played upon the instrument for which his
+composition is intended, whether the instrument is piano, violin, the
+human voice, or orchestra. And just as he counts on the harmonics and
+sympathetic vibrations of the upper strings of the piano for the
+proper effect of a piano sonata, so for the effect of an orchestral
+work he relies on the full rich tone and the subdued murmur, which are
+only produced by the members of the orchestra playing a little wrong.
+That they play wrong in a million different ways does not matter:
+provided they do not play too far wrong the result is always the same,
+just as the characteristic sound of an excited crowd is always the
+same whether there are a few more men or fewer women in one crowd
+than in another. This may be wrong theoretically; but all theorising
+breaks down hopelessly before the fact that it was such an orchestra
+the masters wrote for. Perhaps some day the foot-rule, the metronome,
+and the tuning-fork will take the place of the human ear and artistic
+judgment; but until that day arrives I prefer the wrongness of Mottl's
+orchestra to the strict correctness which Lamoureux used to give us;
+and I leave the aesthetic illogical logic-choppers, who demand from
+the orchestra the correctness they would not stand from a solo-player,
+to find what delight they may in such playing as Lamoureux's used to
+be in the "Meistersinger" overture, or the "Waldweben," or the Good
+Friday music. It must be remembered, however, that the excessive
+correctness of which I have complained was only one of the means
+through which Lamoureux attained excessive lucidity. He sacrificed
+every other quality to lucidity; and those who preferred lucidity to
+every other qualify--that is to say, all Frenchmen--naturally
+preferred Lamoureux's playing to that of any other conductor. In the
+"Meistersinger" overture he would not allow the band to romp freely
+for a single moment; in the "Waldweben" he succeeded in playing every
+crescendo, every diminuendo, with astonishing evenness of gradation,
+even when a trifling irregularity to relieve the mechanical stiffness
+of the thing would have been as water to a thirsty traveller in the
+desert; in the Good Friday music he stuck rigidly to the composer's
+directions, and would not permit a breath of his own life to go into
+the music. In Berlioz's "Chasse et Orage" (from "Les Troyens") and a
+movement from the "Romeo and Juliet" symphony, he manifested the same
+qualities as when he played Beethoven and Wagner. His playing wanted
+colour, suggestiveness, and human warmth; and, lacking these, its
+chill clearness, its cleanness and sharp-cut edges, merely made one
+think of an iceberg glittering in a wan Arctic sunlight. Still he was
+a notable man; and his death robbed France of her one perfectly
+sincere musician.
+
+
+
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