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FROM GRIEG TO BRAHMS

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY NEW YORK · BOSTON · CHICAGO DALLAS · SAN FRANCISCO

MACMILLAN & CO., LIMITED LONDON · BOMBAY · CALCUTTA MELBOURNE

THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, LTD. TORONTO

FROM GRIEG TO BRAHMS

STUDIES OF SOME MODERN COMPOSERS AND THEIR ART

BY DANIEL GREGORY MASON

New York THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 1921

_All rights reserved_

Copyright, 1902, by THE OUTLOOK COMPANY

Published November, 1902.

_To my uncle Dr. William Mason who has won the gratitude of lovers of music in America I dedicate these studies with affection and respect_

PREFACE

«Music may be hard to understand, but musicians are men;» so remarked a friend of mine when I was first planning these essays. The sentence sums up very happily a truth I have constantly had in mind in writing them. As all music, no matter what its complexity on the technical side, is in essence an expression of personal feeling, and as the qualities of a man's personality show themselves not only in his works, but in his acts, his words, his face, his handwriting and carriage even, it has seemed natural and fruitful, in these studies, to seek acquaintance with the musicians through acquaintance with the men.

But personal expression depends not alone on the personality of the artist; it depends also on the resources of art, which in turn are the product of a long, slow growth. Accordingly, if we would understand the individual composers, we must have a sense of the scheme into which they fall, the great universal evolution of which they are but incidents. It is for this reason that I have tried, in the introductory essay on The Appreciation of Music, to describe some of the fundamental principles of the art, and to sketch in their light the general movement of musical history, in order to give the reader a perspective sense, a bird's-eye view of the great army of artists in which the supreme masters are but leaders of battalions and regiments. Without this sense it is impossible truly to place or justly to estimate any individual.

At the end of the introduction I apply the principles worked out to determining in a general way how the half dozen composers to be studied are related to modern music as a whole. My result is that although they are practically contemporary, they are by no means peers in the scope and significance of their work. If we arrange them in the order of their influence on art, which depends upon their power both to assimilate previous resources and to add new ones, we must pass «from Grieg to Brahms.»

The purpose of the last essay in the book, on The Meaning of Music, will be obvious enough. Just as the introductory essay tries to sketch the general musical environment, as determined by basic principles and developed in history, in relation to which alone the individuals discussed can be understood, so the epilogue seeks to suggest that still larger environment of human feeling and activity on which music, like everything else, depends for its vitality. The first essay considers music as a medium for men, the last considers life as a medium for music.

It would be impossible to acknowledge here all that these studies, particularly the first, owe to the writings of others. Perhaps the books which have most influenced my treatment of musical æsthetics are Dr. George Santayana's «Sense of Beauty» and Dr. C. Hubert H. Parry's «Evolution of the Art of Music,» though I have got much help also from Dr. William James's «Principles of Psychology,» from Dr. Josiah Royce's books, from Mr. Edward Carpenter, and of course from Helmholtz, Gurney, Mr. W. H. Hadow, and the other standard writers on musical theory. In gathering the biographical material I have had much cordial and skillful help from Miss Barton, of the Boston Public Library, for which I here record my thanks.

Cambridge, Massachusetts, August 23, 1902.

NOTE TO THE THIRD IMPRESSION

Sir Charles Villiers Stanford has pointed out an error in the story told of Brahms on page 178. It was not the Cambridge University authorities who invited Brahms to write a new work, but the managers of the Leeds Festivals, who, after long neglect of his already printed compositions, asked him, in 1887, to write them a new one; whereupon he returned the answer described.

New York City, May 10th, 1904.

CONTENTS

PAGE

I INTRODUCTION: THE APPRECIATION OF MUSIC 1

II EDVARD GRIEG 47

III ANTONIN DVOŘÁK 71

IV CAMILLE SAINT-SAËNS 97

V CÉSAR FRANCK 121

VI PETER ILYITCH TSCHAÏKOWSKY 149

VII JOHANNES BRAHMS 173

VIII EPILOGUE: THE MEANING OF MUSIC 203

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

FACING PAGE

BRAHMS AT THE PIANO Title From a charcoal drawing by W. von Beckerath

GRIEG 49

DVOŘÁK 73

SAINT-SAËNS 99

FRANCK 123

TSCHAÏKOWSKY 151

BRAHMS 175

I INTRODUCTION THE APPRECIATION OF MUSIC

I INTRODUCTION THE APPRECIATION OF MUSIC

However interesting may be the study of an art through the personalities of the artists who have produced it, and such study, since art is a mode of human expression, is indeed essential, it must be supplemented by at least some general knowledge of the long continuous evolution in which the work of the most brilliant individual is but a moment, a phase. The quality of a man's work in art, and especially, as will be seen in a moment, in music, depends not alone on the depth of his character and the force of his talent, but also largely on the technical resources he owes to others, on the means for expressing himself that he finds ready to his hand. Whatever his personal powers or limitations, the value of his work will be determined not more by these than by the helps and hindrances of his artistic inheritance.

The great edifice of art, in fact, is like those Gothic cathedrals on which generations of men successively labored; thousands of common workmen hewed their foundation stones; finer minds, architects, smiths, brass founders, glass makers and sculptors, wrought and decorated the superstructures; and the work of each, whatever his personal skill and devotion, was valuable only because it built upon and added to that of all the rest. The soaring spires are firmly based on blocks of stone ploddingly adjusted; the windows, often of such a perfect beauty that they seem created rather than constructed, had nevertheless to be built up bit by bit; and all the marvelous organism of pillars, arches and buttresses is so delicately solid, so precariously stable, that had one stress been miscalculated, one joint inaccurately made, the whole would collapse. So it is with the edifice of art, and particularly with that of music, which depends for its very material on the labors of musicians. Pigments, clay, marble, the materials of the plastic arts, exist already in the world; but the whole ladder of fixed tones on which music is built is the product of man's æsthetic sense, and had to be created slowly and laboriously by many generations of men. The successions of chords which every banjo player strums in his accompaniments were the subject of long trial by the mediæval composers. The hymn tune that any boy can write is modeled on a symmetrical scheme of phrases developed by countless experimenters. It took men centuries to select and arrange the eight tones of the ordinary scale, and centuries more to learn how to combine them in chords. And the most eloquent modern works depend on this long evolution of resources just as inevitably as the Gothic spire rests on the hewn stones so carefully laid. In the art, as in the cathedral, the seen rests upon the unseen, the beautiful upon the solid, the complex upon the simple, the new upon the old. The product of a thousand artists, music is as dependent on each as the coral reef on the tiny indispensable body of each insect; and on the other hand the individual musician, whatever his ability, is great only as he uses the equipment his fellows have prepared--«the greatest is the most indebted man.»

If, then, we would justly value the half dozen composers who have done most for music in our day, we must add to our understanding of them as persons a knowledge of the general development in which they play a part; we must gain some sense of that great process of musical growth from which they inherit their resources, to which they make their various contributions, and in relation to which alone they can be fairly compared and appreciated. After examining the general course of musical history, ascertaining some fundamental principles, and applying these principles to our special judgments, we shall be able to perceive the greatest musicians of our day in their relations, and to get a perspective view of modern music in which they shall take their proper places.

I

If we wish to get an idea of primeval music, to see from what impulses it took rise, we have only to study the musical activities of children and savages, in whom we have primeval man made contemporary, the remote past brought conveniently into the present to be observed. When we make such a study we find that both children and savages express their feelings by gestures and cries, that under the sway of emotion they either dance or sing. To them quiet, silent feeling is impossible. Are they joyful, they leap and laugh; are they angry, they strike and shout; are they sad, they rock and moan. Moreover, we can discriminate the kinds of feeling that are expressed by these cries and gestures. Roughly speaking, bodily movement is the natural outlet of active vitality, of the joy of life and the lust of living, while it is the more contemplative emotions--love, grief, reverie, devotion--that find vocal utterance. The war-dances and revels of savages, accompanied by drum and tomtom, are gesticulatory; their love-songs and ululations over the dead are vocal. In the same way children in their moments of enthusiasm are wont to march about shouting and stamping in time, all their limbs galvanized with nervous force; and it is when the wave of energy has passed and they sit on the floor engrossed in blocks or dolls that they sing to themselves their curious undulating chants. Even in ourselves we can observe the same tendencies, checked though they be by counter-impulses in our more complex temperaments: when we are gay we walk briskly, clicking our heels in time and perhaps whistling a catch; in our dreamier hours we are quiet, or merely hum a tune under our breath. Thus through all human nature runs the tendency to vent feeling, active and contemplative, in those bodily movements and vocal utterances which underlie the two great generators of music, dance and song.

Such activities, however, are by no means as yet dance and song. At first they are no more than mere reflex actions, as spontaneous and unthinking as the «Ow» of the man who stubs his toe. The emotion is felt, and out comes the gesture or cry; that is all. It is the organism's way of letting off steam. It is not expression, not being prompted by a desire to communicate the feeling, but merely by the impulse to be unburdened of it. Before there can be true expression or communication, there must be two more links added to the chain of which these automatic activities are only the first. The second link is imitation. According to a theory widely exploited in recent years, we tend to imitate whatever we see another do. With children the tendency is so strong that a large part of their time and energy is devoted to elaborate impersonation and make-believe, and the entire basis of their education is acquired through this directly assimilative faculty. In adults it is less active, but every sensitive person knows how difficult it is not to imitate foreign accents, stammering, and other petty mannerisms, and few are so callous that they can withstand the infection of strong stimuli like the gestures and cries of emotion. The wailing baby in the street car, who moves all the other babies within hearing to wail also (if they be not already at it independently); the dog baying the moon until all within earshot join in the serenade; the negro at the camp-meeting clapping his hands until the whole company is in a rhythmic ecstasy--these are examples of the contagion of cries and gestures. Bearing them in mind, it is easy to see that the vocal or bodily acts which in the first place are mere reflexes of feeling, performed with no thought of expression, but only for personal easement, will generally, nevertheless, prompt similar acts in others. The performances of the individual will not end with himself; thanks to the instinct of imitation, they will be very widely copied.

But now--and this is the third link of the chain--bodily acts set up mental states, and a man cannot gesticulate or vocalize without feeling the emotions of which his actions are, as we say, expressive. «We feel sorry because we cry,» writes Professor William James in his brilliant, paradoxical way, «angry because we strike, afraid because we tremble;» and whether or not we agree with his extreme view that the mental state is entirely a reverberation of bodily disturbances, we cannot but realize that in all these cases executing the expression tends to give us the feeling. He who persistently smiles will end by being cheerful, and a moderate amount of sighing or groaning will make any one melancholy. Above all, the imitation of vocal movements, such as we all go through at least incipiently when we hear melody, and the «keeping time» that strong dance-music so irresistibly prompts--these actions very noticeably set up in us their appropriate states of feeling. We not only imitate the lip motions and throat contractions of a persuasive speaker or singer, but doing so fills us with the emotion that prompts his utterance. Tired soldiers not only step out to a potently rhythmical tune--that is, they not only imitate the beat--but they actually feel less weary, more energetic, so long as the stimulus lasts. Once a bodily activity is set up, no matter how, it arouses the mental state proper to it; in a word, expression generates emotion.

Obviously, then, if in the first place the natural outlets of emotional excitement are bodily motions and vocal sounds, if in the second place the observation of such motions and sounds arouses the impulse to imitate them, and if finally this imitation produces again in the imitator the states of mind which first set the whole process going, then these motions and sounds, these inchoate germs of dance and song, possess an enormous latent power of expression, and need only to be systematized to become a wonderfully eloquent language. Such a language, in fact, is music.

II

At this point, however, it is important not to go too fast. These crude gestures and cries by which primeval man expressed his feelings, though they were the germs out of which music grew, were as yet no more music, which is not only expressive sound, but formed, articulate sound, than an infant's cooings are speech. So far they were mere ebullitions, purposeless and formless; before they could become communicative they must become definite, they must take on some organic structure. Now gestures, bodily movements, are very easily grouped together by means of accent. Every walker knows that it is difficult not to emphasize alternate steps, grouping the unaccented with the accented into a cluster of two. Every waltzer makes a similar grouping of three steps, one accented, the other two subordinate. Some such system of grouping is instinctively adopted whenever we have a series of impressions regularly recurring in time. Let the reader, listening to the ticking of a watch, note how impossible it is to attend to each tick by itself. He will inevitably group them in twos; the accent may come on the first or on the last of the group, but he cannot hear them as exactly equal, any more than in walking he can put exactly equal stress on each step. It was this tendency of the mind to group its impressions on a basis of equal time measurements and unequal accents that led at the dawn of musical history to meter or rhythm, which is as persistent in music as it is in poetry. Metrical form was the natural means of giving definition to bodily movements, and as soon as it was developed enough to produce regular, easily imitated steps out of the chaotic gestures of naïve feeling, Dance was born.

At first, of course, metrical form was stumbled upon blindly. Having two arms and two legs, men naturally moved with a symmetry that gradually impressed their minds; obliged by the facts of anatomy to group their motions in twos, they soon took the hint, and beat their drums or struck their cymbals accordingly. The primeval dance was doubtless the march. But soon they began to carry out the principle they had thus chanced upon, and despite anatomy devised the group of three. The existence of triple meter is all the proof needed that metrical form is essentially a process of intelligence, not a physical fatality; men grouped their steps or leaps or drum-taps in twos or in threes because such groups were easy to make, to imitate, and to remember. And once perceived, no matter how, such groupings tended to cling, to perpetuate themselves. For they were definite, memorable forms, and they survived all haphazard gestures and vague motions by virtue of the law that what is adapted to its environment will live longer than what is not. In this case the environment was the human mind; and the definite organisms, the metrical forms, survived and developed because the mind could remember them, while all the vague gestures out of which they grew shared the fate of what is indefinite, accidental, inorganic. Thus Dance, which was gesticulation systematized by metrical form, emerged and grew in the human mind, like an animal in a congenial habitat.

For a long while the metrical forms that men could perceive and remember were most rudimentary. Probably it took them centuries to grasp the simple group of three, the basis of such accent-schemes as the waltz and the mazurka. Even to-day, psychologists agree, we are unable to grasp a group of seven, and we perceive larger groups than three only as compounded of the elementary twos and threes.[A] But gradually men learned to recombine their groups in still larger forms, of which the first groups constituted the elements. Just as in chemistry the basic elements like oxygen and hydrogen, nitrogen and carbon, can combine only in a few simple ways, but the compound molecules thus produced can recombine into the myriad substances of organic chemistry, the sugars and starches and all the rest, so the simple dual and triple measures of music can be built into an infinite variety of figures and phrases. In early dance and folk-song a more and more complex metrical plan thus slowly developed. Two or more of the simple groups of beats, called measures, were combined into a larger group, a recognizable figure or motif; then again motifs were combined into still larger phrases; and finally, as the musical medium became more definite, plastic and various, phrases were combined in many different types of design, into complete «tunes.» In all these regroupings, the wonderful variety of which is one of the most precious resources of modern music, the fundamental procedure was the same--elements alike in duration, but different in accent or significance, were made to cohere in a group or form. Just as in verse the feet, or elementary metrical forms whose elements are single syllables of equal duration but unequal stress, are combined into lines, and later these lines into stanzas, so in music measures are combined in figures, and figures built up into phrases, and phrases into tunes. And as the diversity of the possible forms becomes greater and greater as we advance from foot to stanza, there being few forms of feet but many of stanza, so metrical form in music becomes more and more complex as it evolves, and though all music must be built out of dual or triple measures, it may be built into tunes of an infinite variety of pattern. Each new complexity, however, must be intelligible; it cannot be introduced until men have mastered the simpler groups out of which it is compounded. Beethoven's wondrously intricate texture, Brahms's soaring phrases, would be meaningless to us had we not inherited from thousands of ancestors a sense of the system of regular accents and duration on which their complexities are superposed. From the days, ages ago, when savages first beat a drum in simple march rhythm, up to to-day, when Brahms builds up his extraordinarily intricate fabrics, with their elaborate prosody, their «augmentation,» and «diminution,» and «shifted rhythm,» the evolution of metrical form has been single and continuous; each advance has been built on previous achievements. There are no dropped stitches in this kind of knitting.

Metrical form, however, is not the only sort of form by which sounds can be combined. It is the natural organizing agent of Dance, which, as we have seen, develops out of the movements expressive of men's active impulses; but human nature has also its contemplative side, and this, expressing itself in vocal utterance, undergoes another sort of development and results in Song. What, then, are the means by which Song is defined, by which vocal sounds are organized into intelligible and memorable forms? Before we answer this question it will be well to consider for a moment a more general one. What, in general, is a form?

We shall be helped to define a form in general by looking back to the metrical forms we have just been studying. These, we have seen, are groups or clusters of impressions, held together by some similarity, yet also differentiated by some contrast. The two or three beats of the measure-group are similar in duration, yet different in accent. And without both the similarity and the difference, the unity and the variety, they would not be a group. Without similarity they would be a haphazard collection, a chaos; without difference they would all fuse together in one indistinguishable mass. In other words, they exemplify a general fact about forms--namely, that the elements must be alike enough to be associated, and yet different enough to be discriminated. If we cannot associate them we cannot feel them as a group; they will not cohere. If, on the other hand, we cannot discriminate them, then do they equally fail to make up a form; they simply mingle together into a homogeneous lump. The organs of an organism must be, then, related, yet different; the elements of a form must be both similar and dissimilar. Unless they are both we cannot perceive them as linked, yet distinct. Bearing this general fact about forms in mind, we may investigate the kinds of form that underlie Song.