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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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