Part 7
Now it is in his appeal to this modern preference of sensation to thought and emotion, and of subjective day-dreaming to the impersonal perception of beauty, that Debussy has been especially happy. He is not, of course, alone in making these appeals. The preoccupation with the sensuous is observable in most contemporary music, an especially striking instance being Strauss's orchestration. As for the ministering to "mood" rather than to the sense of beauty, the whole tendency toward "program," so characteristic of our time, might be accounted for by a cynic as a sacrifice to the majority of something they do not understand (music) to something they do (an opportunity for day-dreaming). But Debussy is peculiarly thoroughgoing in his application of these familiar modern methods. All the elements of his art are focused upon this kind of satisfaction.
First he gives us a title admirably fitted (for he has keen literary instinct) to liberate our reverizing impulse--"Gardens in the Rain," "Reflections in the Water," "Sounds and Perfumes Turn in the Evening Air," "Gold-Fish," "Veils." Then he proceeds to establish the mood of idle reverie thus suggested by means of a tonal web which at no point distracts our attention by any definite features of its own, melodic, rhythmic, harmonic, or structural. All is vague, floating, kaleidoscopic. Sustained melody is especially avoided, for nothing arrests attention or dominates mood like melody; we have therefore only bits and snippets of tune, forming and disappearing like cloud forms or the eddies in smoke-wreaths. The rhythms are equally casual and indeterminate, often of exquisite grace, but obeying no law. The harmonies are surprisingly various--rich, clear, or clangorous, as the case may be; but always elusive, avoiding the definition that would impose thought rather than encourage fancy. The effect of vagueness is here enhanced by the much-talked-of whole-tone scale. As there is little musical thought or emotion (melody), there is still less of that natural growth and combination of thought with thought which we call thematic development and polyphony. These are alien to the type of art, and are wisely avoided.
It is curious to compare Debussy's treatment of his programs with that of Strauss. The imagination of the German, however he may call literary or pictorial associations to his aid, is primarily musical. A literary idea may suggest to him a theme, as Till Eulenspiegel's capricious mischief strikes from him that surprising Till motive, with its queer jumps and galvanic rhythms. But once such a theme exists it begins to act, musically, of itself, and develops such a network of musically interesting relationships that the listener, fascinated, clean forgets the program in his purely æsthetic delight. Strauss, probably, forgets it too. He does for us, in spite of his programs, exactly the kind of thing that Mozart, Beethoven, and Schumann do; he creates intrinsically significant and expressive musical forms (melodies) capable of absorbing our attention and transfiguring all they touch--even a rogue like Till Eulenspiegel--with their æsthetic magic. The Frenchman's imagination, on the contrary, is primarily literary, dramatic, pictorial. He is led by it, not to the creation of musically significant forms, but to a keenly sympathetic realization of the mood suggested by the program, and to a most subtle musical evocation of it by appropriate means, chiefly sensuous. He is thus, literally, a painter of "mood pictures." And as most people do not care to make the effort to follow and relive a musical experience, but prefer to be lulled by agreeable sounds into a trance in which their fancy may weave adventures and project pictures for itself, his audience is delighted. From this point of view symbolism is the type of art which most appeals to the inartistic, and Debussy is the musician most beloved by the unmusical.
We should not be talking about Debussy, however, if these negatives were all there were to say about him. Thousands of composers before him have succeeded in avoiding definite melody, rhythm, and harmony, coherent thematic development, and thoughtful polyphony, and have won only oblivion. His not distracting out attention by these musical elements is a part of his scheme of art, but the more important part of it is the sensuous charm by which he wins our interest and inhibits our mental and emotional activity--the sheer tonal magic of his sonorities. He is a miracle of deftness in the purveying of musical sweets. This is admitted even by his detractors, who cannot deny the seductiveness with which his music woos the physical ear, however little it appeals to their heads or their hearts. As for his admirers, they become rhapsodic over these "effects" and "sonorities," which they praise with a half-religious awe that used to be reserved for ideas. Listen, for instance, to M. Chennevière,[31] an accredited expositor: "Voluptuous, corporeal, naturalistic--such is the Debussyan art. The passions, the sentiments, leave him often indifferent." And again: "The modern ear has become very fine, very delicate. It delights in sonorities. A beautiful chord is a rare intoxication, and sometimes an author repeats it lingeringly, the better to savor it." If we adopt, at least tentatively, this frankly sensuous and hedonistic view of music, we shall find much to admire in Debussy.
In the long evolution from the simple to the complex which music shares with everything else we know we may observe two different methods of tone-combination which, working together, have given us the elaborate texture of the modern art. That especially suited to melodic instruments, like those used in the orchestra or the chorus, puts melodies together as an engraver puts together lines, each remaining distinct, standing off clearly from the others, representing a different musical thought, and yet all agreeing, or, as we say, harmonizing. This method, called polyphony, requiring great skill in the composer and close attention from the audience, is illustrated by such masterpieces as a fugue of Bach, a string quartet of Beethoven, or the famous passage at the end of Wagner's Meistersinger Overture, where four themes are driven abreast as in some proud chariot. It results in a texture essentially composite, involving relations between elements held in mind together --that is to say, it is thoughtful, and requires answering thought for its appreciation.
But as soon as the piano, ill suited to melody because of its unsustained tone, began to reach any degree of development--that is to say, about the time of Schumann (1810-1856) and Chopin (1809-1849)--it became evident that this instrument compensated for its shortcomings in rendering polyphony by a special aptitude for another kind of tone-combination, which we may call the homophonic or chordal. A great many tones could be played at once, held either by the fingers or by the damper-pedal, and made to shimmer with those thousand hues of the tonal rainbow we call "overtones." There was apparently no limit to the complexity of the agglomerations of tone that the ear could thus be trained not only to accept but to delight in--the rule being, as Chopin in his "fluid and vaporous sonorities" showed, that the greater in number and the more dissonant or clashing in character were these color tones, the more agreeably rich would be the resulting impression on the ear. But however complex these tone associations or chords, it is important to note that this resultant psychological impression was simple and unified--that is, the ear perceived but one thing, and not several as in the polyphonic style. There was therefore no comparison of different elements, no thought or emotion; there was simply sensation, physically delightful, mentally and emotionally meaningless.
Debussy has probably brought more talent and originality to the elaboration of this method of writing for the piano than any other composer since Chopin and Schumann. Open his pages anywhere and you will find these wide-spaced chords, these gossamer arpeggios and scales embroidering them, these nicely calculated grace-notes adding just the dissonance needed to season the dish. Take, for instance, the opening measures of "La Cathédrale engloutie" (Figure XVIII), characteristically marked "Profoundly calm (in a softly sonorous mist)."
The intention to produce a misty, not to say foggy, homogeneity of tone here is so obvious that it seems strange that just such passages have aroused the ire of pedants who have tried to apply to them the rules of the other way of writing--the polyphonic. When we wish diverse melodies to stand out clearly one from another, we must avoid "parallel fifths and octaves," which make them coalesce. Accordingly Debussy has been blamed, by those who prefer rules to reason, for using precisely the device which will give him the physical richness with mental vacuity which he is seeking.
When this admirable colorist wishes a brighter or more incisive sonority than one of this kind, he resorts to dissonances, and especially to the interval of the "second"--notes adjacent in the scale. The opening measures of "Et la lune descend sur le temple qui fut" (Figure XIX) afford an example of this in a quiet tone; more clangorous qualities of it will be found in "Masques," "L'île joyeuse," and "Jardins sous la pluie." The first example illustrates what was said of the simplicity for the mind, whatever the complexity for the ear, of this kind of tone-combination. The chords contain a good many notes each; but there emerges only one melody, and that rather obvious.
The same search for rich or brilliant color that led to this use of "seconds," carried a little further, brought the composer to that whole-tone scale (or scale entirely made up of "seconds," as C, D, E, F-sharp, G-sharp, A-sharp, C) which he has used with such irresistible appeal. He has, to be sure, no patent right in it. Moussorgsky, Borodine, and others had used it before him; his French contemporaries have used it with skill; and now that it is common property some have even elicited from it strains of plangent force and manly energy foreign to Debussy's temperament. The fact remains that he has made it peculiarly his own by the subtlety, variety, and charm of his employment of it, as may be seen, for example, throughout "Voiles," in the first book of Préludes, and in scattered measures in almost any of his pieces. The whole-tone scale is indeed pre-ordained by nature as a goal to which such an art as Debussy's inevitably tends; its clashing tones feed the greedy ear with the richest diet the gamut can provide; at the same time the equivocal character of the chords, or rather the single chord (the so-called "augmented triad") that can harmonize it, and the self-contradictoriness of its tones from the point of view of the older scale, do away with the sense of key and even of momentary repose, and leave us groping in a tonal night in which, since there is nothing to be observed, we can give ourselves up undisturbed to dreaming.
Debussy is thus a true child of his time in his quest of the sensuous, and a true child of his country in the subtlety with which he pursues it. His Gallic taste saves him from the coarseness of so much of the contemporary Teutonic art; and while his aim is no more spiritual than that of the Germans, he prefers innuendo, implication, and understatement to the gross exaggeration of Strauss, the vehemence in platitude of Mahler, and the plodding literalness of Reger. Thus opposing, as he has so effectively done, the ideal of mere force, reducing in "Pelléas" the mammoth modern orchestra to a handful of men skilfully exploited, substituting the most elusive sonorities of the piano for the crashing magnificence of the Liszt school, everywhere insisting on subtle quality rather than overwhelming quantity, he has exercised one of the most beneficial of influences against vulgarity of the bumptious type. But sybaritism, too, has its own vulgarity; the question of aim is fundamental in art; and in judging the distinction of Debussy's aims we cannot evade the question whether physical pleasure, however refined, is the highest good an artist can seek. His charm, beyond doubt, is great enough to justify his popularity. Yet it would be regrettable if the student of modern French music, satisfied with this charm, were to neglect the less popular but more virile, more profound, and more spiritual music of César Franck, Ernest Chausson, and Vincent d'Indy.
NOTE: Claude Debussy died in Paris, March 26, 1918.
FOOTNOTES:
[31] "Claude Debussy et son œuvre," by Daniel Chennevière, Paris, 1913.
V
VINCENT d'INDY
V
VINCENT d'INDY
I
Our age, because of the natural failure of our inner powers, at first, to keep pace with the recent unprecedented increase of our external resources, will probably be known to the future as one of unparalleled confusion. With the mental and moral habits and the nervous systems inherited from a more placid generation, we find ourselves plunged in this maelstrom produced by cheap printing, quick communication, and facile transportation. Prepared to digest only a limited environment, we are fed the whole world. No wonder we are distracted.... The situation, of course, is full of interest to the more adventurous temperaments; but however stimulating to the man of action it is scarcely favorable to the artist, since art is born only of tranquil emotion, firmly grasped and clearly arranged. Most contemporary musicians are thus bewildered and to some extent defeated by the very richness of the materials at hand; their art is not equal to the strain put upon it by their greatly enlarged resources; and their music is in consequence unindividual in expression, flabbily eclectic in style, and vague or wandering in structure.
It may seem at first thought paradoxical that these melancholy results of a momentary insufficiency of the mind to its materials should have proved most fatal precisely in the country that in simpler times has done most to create music. Strange it is, indeed, that Germany, which in Beethoven voiced the spiritual aspiration, in Schumann the romantic joy, and in Brahms the philosophic meditation of the whole world, should find itself at length reduced to the half-impotent strivings of a Mahler, to the learned lucubrations of a Reger, while mixed with even the gold of its one genius, Strauss, there should be so much dross of cheap sensationalism and irrelevant melodrama. Yet to consideration these signs of a widespread decadence in German music will not by any means remain incomprehensible. For it will be seen that the Teutonic introspectiveness, the supreme gift of that temperament, incomparable and sufficient endowment as it seemed in the musicians of the great period, hardly suffices those who have to steer their way in a much more complicated environment, surrounded by pitfalls, calling at every step for qualities with which the typical German is by no means so well supplied--intelligence, discrimination, moderation, and taste. It is the lack of these intellectual or spiritual qualities, rather than any falling off in purely emotional power, that has brought the great stream of music that flowed through Bach, Beethoven, Schumann, and Brahms to its end in the stagnant morasses of contemporary Kapellmeistermusik, or scattered it in the showy but unsatisfying jets of sensationalism. And as Russia still remains a bit barbaric, England a little provincial, America immature, and Italy tainted with operaticism (an ugly word for an ugly thing), it is chiefly in France, with its racial genius of lucid intelligence, that we find a truly vital contemporary music. There we owe it chiefly to the high creative genius of César Franck, Belgian by birth and temperament, French in education and intellectual clarity, and to the loyal co-labors, creative, critical, and educational, of his pupils and disciples. If there is to-day, despite the confusions of the time, a clear tradition and a hopeful future for instrumental music, it is chiefly these modern Frenchmen that we have to thank.
Especially has Vincent d'Indy, to-day dominant in the group, contributed to its work for many years the indefatigable efforts of his powerful and many-sided personality, more variously gifted than any of the others, since he is not only a composer of genius, but a lucid writer, an able organizer, and a teacher and conductor of singular magnetism. He came under the influence of Franck at his most plastic period; he was a youth of twenty-two when, in 1873, he entered Franck's organ class at the Paris Conservatoire; and of the circumstances, characteristic of both teacher and pupil, under which this most fruitful relationship began, he has himself written in his "Life of Franck."
"Having with great trouble," he says, "got upon paper a formless quartet for piano and strings, I asked Franck for an appointment. When I had played him the first movement, he remained a moment silent, and then, turning toward me with a sad air, he said to me words I have never forgotten, since they had a decisive action on my life: 'There are good things here, energy, a certain instinct for dialogue of the parts, ... the ideas are not bad, ... but that is not enough, it is not made, and, in short, _you know nothing at all_.' Returning home in the night (the interview had taken place very late in the evening) I said to myself, in my wounded vanity, that Franck must be a reactionary, understanding nothing of youthful, modern art. Nevertheless, calmer the next morning, I took up my unhappy quartet and recalled one by one his observations, ... and I was obliged to admit that he was right: I knew absolutely nothing. I went then, almost trembling, to ask him to accept me as a pupil."
At this time Franck, already fifty-one years old, was little appreciated as a composer, appeared to the world as a hard-worked organist who taught ten hours a day and wrote for two hours before breakfast works seldom heard, and had indeed not yet discovered the vein from which he so enriched music during the last ten years of his life. Nevertheless d'Indy at once recognized the fruitfulness of his ideas, devoted himself to a severe technical discipline in accordance with them, and assumed that rôle of filial defender and expositor of them in which he has never wearied from that day to this. There is something not only rarely beautiful in itself, but most characteristic of the purity of d'Indy's self-forgetful devotion to music, in the loyalty which he has always given to his "Pater seraphicus," as Franck's artistic sons called him, from the period when as a student he left the conservatory which misprized his master, to the day when, himself a master, he published his "Life of Franck." M. Romain Rolland gives us a picture of it in his description of the first performance, in March, 1888, of Franck's "Theme, fugue, and variation" for harmonium and piano, at a concert of the _Société nationale de musique_, when Franck played the harmonium, and d'Indy the piano. "I always remember," says M. Rolland,[32] "his respectful attitude toward the old musician, his studious care to follow his indications: one would have thought he was a pupil, attentive and docile; and this was touching from a young master, established by so many works--the _Chant de la Cloche_, _Wallenstein_, the _Symphonie sur un thème montagnard_--and perhaps better known and more popular than César Franck himself. Since then twenty years have passed; I continue to see him as I saw him that evening; and whatever happens now his image will remain always for me closely associated with that of the great master dominating, with a paternal smile, this small assembly of faithful ones."
This "small assembly of faithful ones," the pupils of Franck, such as Duparc, Chausson, Coquard, Bordes, Ropartz, Benoit, d'Indy, as well as others, like Saint-Saëns and Fauré, who, though not his pupils, have felt his influence, have virtually created since 1870, largely under his inspiration, a new music in France. The story of it may be read in M. Rolland's book, in the essay "Le renouveau." At the time of the Franco-Prussian War (in which d'Indy served as a corporal of the 105th regiment), symphonic and chamber music suffered almost complete neglect in Paris. "Before 1870," writes M. Saint-Saëns,[33] "a French composer who had the folly to venture into the domain of instrumental music, had no other way to get his works played than to organize a concert himself, inviting his friends and the critics. The rare chamber music societies were as much closed to all new comers as the orchestral concerts; their programs contained only the celebrated names, above discussion, of the great classic symphonists. At that time one had truly to be bereft of all common sense to write music. It was in order to correct this state of things that a group of musicians organized in February, 1871, the _Société nationale de musique_, with the device 'Ars gallica,' and the avowed end of 'aiding the production and familiarization of all serious musical works, of French composers, and of encouraging, so far as may be in its power, all musical tentatives, of whatever kind, which show on the part of their author elevated and artistic aspirations.'" M. Rolland does not hesitate to call the _Société nationale_ "the cradle and the sanctuary of French art." "All that has been great in French music from 1870 to 1900," he says, "has come by way of it. Without it the greater part of the works which are the honor of our music not only would not have been performed, but perhaps would not even have been written." And he draws from the programs records of the performance of important compositions by Franck, Saint-Saëns, d'Indy, Chabrier, Lalo, Bruneau, Chausson, Debussy, Dukas, Lekeu, Magnard, and Ravel.
Vincent d'Indy's personal contribution to the work of the society began to be considerable from 1881 on, when the influence of the Franck school became dominant. In 1886 his proposal to include in the programs the works of classic and foreign composers led to the resignation of Saint-Saëns and Bussine. In 1890, at the death of Franck, he became president of the society. Under his influence the representation of classical works has particularly increased--Palestrina, Vittoria, Josquin, Bach, Handel, Rameau, Gluck, as well as Beethoven, Schumann, Liszt, Brahms. Foreign contemporary music has been represented chiefly by Strauss, Grieg, and the Russians. In recent years the _Société nationale_ has been charged with taking on too exclusive a character, especially with guarding the traditional at the expense of the new; and the _Société musicale indépendante_ has been founded by some of the younger men as a protest.