Part 4

On the other hand, Grieg is never large or heroic; he never wears the buskin. He has neither the depth of passion nor the intellectual grasp needed to make music in the grand style. Probably of all his peculiarities the most significant is the shortness of his phrases and his manner of repeating them almost literally, displaced a little in pitch, but not otherwise altered. Almost all his music can be cut up into segments two or four measures long, each segment complete in itself, an entire musical thought. If the reader will examine the little Waltz just mentioned, for example, he will see that it is constructed as follows: after two introductory measures a phrase of melody is announced, four measures in length; this is immediately repeated, at the same pitch but slightly varied in rhythm; then enters another phrase, two measures long, which is repeated literally a third lower; its latter half is twice echoed, and there is a two-measure cadence. All is then repeated. The middle part of the piece, in A major, is built in much the same way; after it the first part is given once more, and there is a short coda. The construction of this charming piece, in a word, is very like that of the passages from primers that are familiar to us all: «Is this a boy? This is a boy. Has the boy a dog? The boy has a dog. This is the dog of the boy.» And Grieg's coda adds meditatively, «Of the boy ... the boy ... boy.» His thoughts complete themselves quickly; they have little span, and they are combined, not by interfusion, but by juxtaposition. He never weaves a tapestry; he assembles a mosaic. We have only to compare his music with that of some great master, of wide scope and large synthetic power, like Brahms or Beethoven, to feel precisely in what sense he is lyrical rather than heroic, charming rather than elevated, suggestive rather than informative. Compare, for instance, with his waltz, the waltz of Brahms, number eight in opus 39. Here there is a sustained flight of twelve measures, the tune poising and soaring as it were on a rising or falling breeze, or like a kite that now dips and now is up again, but never touches the earth. It is interesting to play the two waltzes one after the other, noting the difference in effect between the precise, dainty, clipped phrases of the one and the broad-spanned arch of melody of the other. Such contrasts are at the basis of all significant discriminations of musical form.

How much the «short breath» of Grieg is due to the nature of his thematic material is a difficult question to answer. Folk-tunes, it is certain, are simple in structure, composed of short phrases expressing the naïve emotions of childlike minds. On the other hand, had they not fulfilled Grieg's personal needs, supplying the sort of atmosphere he was meant to breathe in, he could never have assimilated them as he has done. Perhaps a true account of the matter is that his nature is of such unusual simplicity and ingenuousness as to find in folk-melodies its natural utterance, and to feel in their primitive phrase-structure no limitation. Intellectually, the man is not more mature than the people. From whatever sources he might draw his germinal ideas, he would never combine them in complexer forms or larger patterns than he has found ready-made to his hand in the national song. There are, however, in Norwegian music peculiarities of a different sort that we can hardly conceive as proving other than hindrances in the formation of a wholesomely eclectic style--peculiarities which are all present full-fledged in so early a work of Grieg as the Piano Concerto, opus 16, written in 1868. At the very outset, in the descending octave passage, there are two melodic tricks that recur everywhere in Grieg--the fall from the seventh of the scale to the fifth, and from the third to the tonic. Both progressions, anomalous in classic music, are prominent features of the Northern folk-tunes. Then, in the first theme, assigned to the orchestra, there are to be noticed, besides these melodic steps, the bodily displacement of the phrase already described, carrying it from A minor into C major. In the second theme, as well as in the _cantabile_ piano passage that prepares the way for it, there is a rhythmic device characteristic of Grieg--the mixing in one measure of three notes to the beat with two notes to the beat, of which the prototype is to be found in the «Springtanz» of Norwegian peasants. Here also is the weak cadence, that is to say, the cadence with tonic chord coming on an unaccented beat. So much for melodic and rhythmic peculiarities; as a harmonist Grieg has methods equally persistent. His love of bare fifths, reiterated in the bass with boorish vigor, and his manner of harmonizing with descending chromatic sixths or thirds, both of which we remarked in opus 3, are illustrated in this Concerto; the first in the conclusion-theme of the first movement, and the second in measures fourteen to sixteen of the beautiful Adagio. Finally, he is devoted to the secondary sevenths, especially in harsh and daring sequence such as make up most of the Norwegian March, opus 54, No. 2. Mannerisms like these Grieg has, on the whole, in far larger measure than most composers. On almost any of his pages the student will have no difficulty in finding for himself instances of one or more of these mannerisms.

Now, so many little tricks and idiosyncrasies, however piquant in the work of a beginner, could hardly escape becoming, as time went on, an incubus to even the most vigorous imagination. Nothing menaces thought more than affectations and whimsicalities of style. And even in the meridian of Grieg's activity, when he was charming a staid world with the fresh beauties of the Piano Sonata and the two early Violin Sonatas, there were not wanting critics who discerned his danger and foresaw that he must either broaden his methods or deteriorate. Over twenty years ago the following words were written in an English magazine by Frederick Niecks: «My fear in the case of Grieg always was that his love of Norwegian idioms would tend to narrow, materialize, and make shallow his conceptions, and prevent him from forming a style by imposing on him a manner.» Subsequent events have proved that this fear was but too well founded. Although, during the years at Copenhagen, and the eight years, from 1866 to 1874, that Grieg lived in Christiania teaching and conducting, he continued to do excellent work, he seems to have even then reached the acme of his powers, and thenceforward to have imperceptibly declined. It is rather a melancholy fact that when, in 1874, receiving a pension of sixteen hundred crowns from the Government, which enabled him to resign the conductorship of the Musical Union of Christiania, he began to devote himself almost entirely to composition, his mental vivacity was waning and his lovely lyrical utterance was beginning to be smothered under mannerisms. From this time on he advanced more by familiarizing the world with his earlier compositions than by adding to them anything particularly novel or precious. He traveled in Germany, Holland and Denmark, gave concerts in England in 1888, and visited France a year later, playing and conducting his works at Paris. For the rest, he retired to his picturesque villa, Troldhangen, ten miles from Bergen, where he lives a peaceful and secluded country life.

It is not difficult to see why Grieg's later works should decline rather than advance. In the first place, his interest had been from the first concentrated on personal expression. His impulse was individual, not universal. He never sought to widen or deepen the forms of musical beauty, to extend the range of resources at the command of musicians; he merely used what he found ready-made to voice his own poetic feeling. In this he succeeded admirably. In the second place, charmed by the exotic quality of Norwegian music, a quality that he found also in his own nature, he adopted the native idiom with eagerness, and spent the years most composers devote to learning the musical language in acquiring--a dialect. Thirdly, his mind was of the type which cares much for beauty of ornament--even more, perhaps, than for a highly wrought harmony of line and form. It was the inevitable result of these three circumstances that, first, he should reach his highest activity in early youth, when romantic feeling is at its acme and thought habitually subjective, and thereafter decline; second, that the dialect which at first was so charming, with its unfamiliar words and its bewitching accent, should eventually reveal its paucity and its provincialism; and finally, that a mind naturally fond of rich detail, neglectful of large shapeliness, should have recourse, in the ebb of inner impulse, to transcription, paraphrase, and all the other devices for securing superficial ornament and luxury of effect. With opus 41 Grieg began transcribing his own songs for the piano, dressing up the simple melodies in all sorts of arpeggios, curious harmonies, and other musical decorations; and between his fiftieth and seventieth opus-numbers there is little but representation of Norwegian tunes, now in one guise and now in another, but seldom indeed with any of the old novel charm. (A trace of it there is, perhaps, in opus 62, No. 2, and again in opus 80, No. 4.) The extraordinary pyrotechnical display that the transcription, opus 41, No. 5, makes out of so simple a song as «The Princess» is branded by M. Closson as «un crime de lèse-art.» And to one who has felt the magic of the Kuhreigen, opus 17, No. 22, it is saddening to turn to the same melody as it appears in opus 63, No. 2, with all its maiden grace brushed and laced and furbelowed into an _à la mode_ elegance and vacuity. Thus Grieg has not, like the more cosmopolitan, objective, and universal composers, advanced in his work up to the very end. As years have progressed, the accidental in it, the inessential, has become more prominent, has tended to obscure what is vital and beautiful. As the spirit waned, the letter has become more rigidly insistent. Idiosyncrasy has supplanted originality. To find the true Grieg, supple, spontaneous, and unaffected, we must go back to the early works.

When all is said, however, Grieg has in these early works made a contribution to music which our sense of his later shortcomings must not make us forget. His Piano Sonata and his Violin Sonatas supply chamber-music with a note of pure lyric enthusiasm, of fresh unthinking animation, not elsewhere to be found. His Peer Gynt Suite fills a similar place among orchestral works. His best piano pieces, and, above all, his lovely and too little known songs, are unique in their delicate voicing of the tenderest, most elusive personal feeling, as well as in their consummate finesse of workmanship. It is a Lilliputian world, if you will, but a fair one. That art of the future which Grieg predicts in his essay on Mozart, which «will unite lines and colors in marriage, and show that it has its roots in all the past, that it draws sustenance from old as well as from new masters,» will acknowledge in Grieg himself the source of one indispensable element--the element of naïve and spontaneous romance.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE.--Grieg has had the good sense to publish almost all of his works in the inexpensive and excellent Peters Edition. The amateur will wish to acquaint himself first of all with some such representative pieces as the following: Piano-pieces--Poetic tone-pictures, op. 3, Humoreskes, op. 6, Sonata, op. 7, Northern Dances, op. 17, Albumblatter, op. 28, and the Lyric Pieces, op. 12, 38, 43, and 47 (op. 54, 57, 62, 65, and 68 are inferior). Four hand arrangements--Elegiac Melodies, op. 34, Norwegian Dances, op. 35, and the first Peer Gynt Suite, op. 40. Chamber-music--the three Sonatas for Violin and Piano and the 'Cello Sonata, op. 36. Of the songs, sixty are printed in the five «Albums» of the Peters Edition. The second contains half a dozen of Grieg's most perfect songs, among them «I Love Thee,» «Morning Dew,» «Parting» and «Wood Wanderings.» «To Springtime» in Album I, «A Swan» and «Solvejg's Song» in Album III, and «By the Riverside,» «The Old Mother,» and «On the Way Home» in Album IV, are also characteristic and beautiful. The reader who feels Grieg's charm at all will end by buying all five Albums, though there is little of value in the last.

FOOTNOTES:

[A] Thus «4/4 time» is a compound of twos, «6/8 time» is a compound of threes, and the interesting 5/4 measure, so effective in the second movement of Tschaïkowsky's Pathetic Symphony, is a compound of twos and threes regularly alternating.

[B] «Diary of My Tour in 1888,» translated in «Tschaïkowsky, His Life and Works,» by Rosa Newmarch. (John Lane, New York, 1900.)

[C] «Edvard Grieg et la Musique Scandinave,» Ernest Closson. Paris, Librairie Fischbacher, 1892.

III ANTONIN DVOŘÁK

III ANTONIN DVOŘÁK

On an October evening in 1892 there was given in New York City a «Grand Concert» in exploitation of the «Eminent Composer and Director of the National Conservatory of Music of America,» Dr. Antonin Dvořák. There was an orchestra of eighty, a chorus of three hundred, and an audience of several thousand; the ceremonies, partly hospitable and partly patriotic, included an oration, the presentation of a silver wreath, and the singing of «America» by the assembled multitude. Outwardly picturesque as the occasion doubtless was, it must have been even more striking in its suggestion of the extreme contrasts in life which accompany the turning of fortune's wheel. Here was a man, originally a Bohemian peasant, a village butcher's son, who for years had endured the most grinding poverty, the most monotonous obscurity, the most interminable labor for power and recognition, coming at last, a famous musician, to hear his works performed and his genius extolled in a great, enthusiastic country that wanted, and was «willing to pay for,» a school of music. Even statistics are eloquent when character is behind them; at a salary of fifteen thousand dollars a year the National Conservatory of America had engaged as principal the composer who, less than twenty years before, had been pensioned by the Austrian Ministry of Education just one hundredth of that sum. Dvořák's reception in New York was an appropriate outward sign of a victory achieved over peculiarly indifferent destiny by peculiarly indomitable pluck.

As one looks back from this imposing event over the course of Dvořák's laborious, persistent youth, one's attention, no matter how much it is at first engaged with the changes of his outer life, with his progress from obscure poverty to comfort and fame, soon dwells even more on the underlying identity of the man through all changes, on his unswerving simplicity of nature and steadfastness of aim. More remarkable than the diversity of his career is the unity of his character. From first to last, whether in Mühlhausen, Prague, London, or New York, he is essentially a peasant. His deepest moral trait is the dumb persistence, the unthinking doggedness, of the peasant. His mental atmosphere is the peasant's innocence of self-consciousness, his unintrospective candor. Not like the sophisticated man, who weighs motives and foresees obstacles, does he pursue his troublous way. He is, on the contrary, like an engine placed on the track and started; through darkness and day, through failure and success, through weakness and strength, he steams ahead, ever propelled by irresistible inner force, insensible and unamenable to circumstance. And his musical impulse is of the same sort. His aims in music have always been simple, definite, unsophisticated by intellectualism. Taking keen delight in the sensuous beauty of sound, gifted with the musical sense in its most fundamental form of physical susceptibility, from his earliest days he set about learning to produce pleasant effects of rhythm and consonance, with utter sincerity, with no reference to derivative and secondary musical values. When, as a boy, he heard the villagers playing their native dances, his blood stirred in sympathy, and as soon as he was able he took a hand. When he was older he invented similar pieces, gradually refining them, but always cherishing the brightness of tone, the vigor of rhythmic life, that had first won his devotion. And when, in New York, an experienced and honored musician, he was expected to advise our composers, it was highly characteristic of him that he recommended them to pour their ideas into the negro molds. Here was a music simple, sensuous, highly rhythmic; he looked no further, he was disconcerted by no ethnological problems, nor even by the incongruity that any man of the world would have seen between negro song and our subtly mingled, highly complex American character. Bohemian folk-melodies had expressed him; why should not plantation tunes express us? But perhaps his curious simplicity reveals itself most of all in his perfectly uncritical fecundity as a composer. He writes with extreme rapidity, and indefatigably. The great Stabat Mater is said to have been completed in six weeks, and his opus numbers extend beyond a hundred. He writes as if nothing existed in the world but himself and an orchestra waiting to play his scores. He is never embarrassed by a sense of limitation, by the perception in others of powers he lacks. Though he has studied the masters, he is not abashed by them. The standards of scholarship, those academic bugbears, have for him no terrors. Indeed, of all great composers he is perhaps least the scholar, most the sublimated troubadour, enriching the world with an apotheosized tavern-music. In reading his life we must never forget these things: his simple nature, his sensuous rather than emotional or intellectual devotion to music, and his immunity from the checks and palsies of wide learning and fastidious taste.

There is in a rural district of Bohemia, on the Moldau River, a quiet little village called Nelahozeves, or, in German, Mühlhausen,[D] where, in 1841, was born Antonin, eldest son of Frantisek Dvořák, the village innkeeper and butcher. The Dvořáks were people not without consideration among their fellow-townsmen; not only was mine host of the tavern a widely acquainted man, but his wife's father was bailiff to a prince. One may imagine the potency, in a small hamlet, of such a conjunction of prominence and prestige. Nevertheless, as social distinction has no direct effect on a man's income, and as the butcher's family grew in the course of years inconveniently numerous, it happened that Antonin, the eldest of eight children, was looked to in early youth to learn his father's trade and contribute toward the family support. Unfortunately, he wished to be a musician. Such a desire, indeed, chimerical as it may have appeared at the time, was natural enough in a boy of musical sensibility who had been surrounded from his earliest years by a people passionately devoted to music. Not only is music a part of the instruction in the Bohemian public schools, but it is the adjunct of all the occasions of life. As many as forty dances are said to be practiced by the peasants, and we have it on Dvořák's own authority that laborers in Bohemia sing at their work, and after church on Sunday begin dancing, which they «often keep up without cessation till early on the following morning.» Taking advantage of his opportunities, the boy had learned at fourteen to play the violin, the organ, and the piano, and to sing. It was a year later that, summoned by his father to surrender his dreams of musicianship, he performed an exploit well worth mentioning, as an early example of his indefatigable persistence and his blundering methods. Hoping to enlist his father's sympathy, he wrote, scored, and had played by the village band, an original polka. Mr. Hadow tells the story at length; its point is that Dvořák, whose ambition was more robust than his learning, failed to write the trumpets as transposing instruments, and, of course, made a distressing fiasco. «There is some little irony in the disaster,» comments Mr. Hadow, «if it be remembered that among all Dvořák's gifts the instinct of orchestration is perhaps the most conspicuous. He is the greatest living exponent of the art; and he was once in danger of forfeiting his career through ignorance of its most elementary principle.» He did, indeed, give up music for a year, but in October, 1857, was allowed by his father to enter the Organ School at Prague.

Had Dvořák been of an introspective turn of mind, he might now have wondered rather dismally, as the months went by in Prague, the paternal allowance ceased, and the tuition at the Organ School proved narrow and technical, whether he had really benefited himself. Fortunately, he was not given to metaphysical speculation; he got what training he could from the school and joined a band. In Mühlhausen he had often taken a viola part in the village band that played for weddings and on holidays; now he turned his skill to account in the restaurants of Prague. In this way, and by playing also in a church orchestra on Sundays, he managed to amass about nine dollars a month, and to acquire an instinct for the way instrumental parts should be written. The only obvious advantage of this trying period was the intimate knowledge of instruments it gave him. He lived, so to speak, cheek by jowl with them, watching them, handling them, seeing what was written for them, and hearing how it sounded. His is no book-knowledge of orchestration. On the other hand, his extreme poverty, the limitations of the school, and his lack of friends to lend him scores or the use of a piano, cut him off cruelly from that equally essential part of education, familiarity with classic masterpieces and the traditions of academic learning. His band played only popular overtures and the usual pot-pourris. Sometimes he coaxed a kettle-drummer to let him crouch behind the drums and hear a concert. He once had an opportunity to hear «Der Freischütz» for the modest sum of four cents, but the four cents was not forthcoming, and «Der Freischütz» went unheard. He could afford to buy no scores, and there was no library where he could read them. Such were the meager advantages of which he made good use; such the heavy obstacles he gradually surmounted.