Part 5

After his graduation from the Organ School in 1860 his situation, both practical and musical, slowly ameliorated. From Smetana, who gave him a position in the orchestra of the Interimstheater, a home for Bohemian opera founded in 1862, he received what was of even more importance to him, the loan of scores and encouragement in composition. Already twenty-one, he acquainted himself for the first time with Beethoven's and Mendelssohn's symphonies and chamber-works, of which he became a passionate student, and with Schumann's songs. For almost ten years he labored steadily and silently. It was the period of apprenticeship, the period of arduous, slow mastery of technique and thought through which every creative artist must pass. The mere mass of his exercises is bewildering; he composed and destroyed an opera and two symphonies, to say nothing of many other sacrifices on the altar of skill of which not even the names survive. Peculiar to himself, to be sure, and scarcely a model for other students, was his method in this long self-evocation. Not like Beethoven did he meditate and revise his themes, spending infinite labor on sixteen bars of melody, and not quailing before a dozen revisions so they were needed to pare away the marble and reveal the perfect form. Not like Brahms did he install a systematic training, day by day winning strength and plasticity of thought on the chest-weights and dumb-bells of contrapuntal exercise. On the contrary, he forged ahead, and somehow, without knowing where he was going or what he was doing, made himself a master. He took Parnassus by storm, as it were, overran rather than scaled it, and was victor more by quantity than by quality of performance. Yet in all this blundering progress he was protected by a genuine elevation of aim. Lacking the sense of tradition and the safeguards of scrupulous taste, he was not without his own rugged idealism. And so, although he doubtless had every external inducement to join the ranks of the national movement in music, then just acquiring momentum, he maintained his conscientious silence for nearly a decade. His compositions saw the light neither of the concert hall nor of the printing-press; written with ardor, they were burned without regret. Dvořák showed in his _lehrjähre_ the self-respect of all really great artists.

It was early in the seventies that he finally emerged from his studious reserve and appeared before the world with an opera, «The King and the Collier,» which he was commissioned to write for the National Theater. So clear was the patriotic intent of this commission, so entirely was the popular interest enlisted in Smetana's effort to build up a Bohemian school of music, that it is hard to conceive how Dvořák could have fallen into the error he now made. He prepared for his fellow-countrymen a Wagnerian music-drama. The situation is comic. The good Bohemians, come to hear folk-tunes, were given leit-motifs and «infinite melody.» If they failed to sympathize with his adoration for the Bayreuth master (and it seems indeed to have been but a calf-sickness, afterwards bravely outlived), if «The King and the Collier» was a flat failure, Dvořák had no one but himself to blame. At this point, however, as at so many others in his career, his unfailing energy saved the day so nearly lost by what one critic has called his «brainlessness.» He set to and rewrote his work entire, leaving not a single number of the unhappy music-drama. But now the libretto, which had at first been spared a disapproval all concentrated upon the music, proved worthless and flat, and the opera was damned afresh. Still Dvořák persisted. Getting a poet to set an entirely new «book» to his entirely new music, he made at last a success with an opera of which Mr. Hadow well says that «the Irishman's knife, which had a new blade and a new handle, does not offer a more bewildering problem of identity.» No one but Dvořák would have so bungled his undertaking; no one but he would so have forced it to a successful issue.

By 1873 Dvořák was well started on the career of increasing power and fame that he had worked so hard to establish on firm foundations. That year was marked not only by his installment as organist at St. Adalbert's Church, with a comfortable salary, and by his marriage, but also by the appearance of a composition which made his name at once widely known in Bohemia--the patriotic hymn entitled «The Heirs of the White Mountain.» Four years later his reputation began to spread beyond the border. It was in 1877 that the approbation of Brahms, then a commissioner of the Austrian Ministry of Education, to which Dvořák had submitted some duets, induced Joachim to introduce the young Bohemian's works into England and Germany, and the house of Simrock to publish them. In 1878 the Slavonic Dances made their composer's name immediately known throughout the musical world. His great Stabat Mater, produced in England with acclaim in 1883, was the first of several choral works given there in the next few years, all very successfully. In 1889 he was decorated by the Austrian court. In 1890 he received an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Cambridge, was made Doctor of Philosophy at Prague, and was appointed Professor of Composition at the Conservatory there. The welcome accorded to him in America has already been briefly chronicled. His sixtieth birthday was celebrated by a musical festival in 1901, at Prague, where he now makes his home. In Dvořák's varied life a youth of unusual hardship, of an almost unparalleled severity of struggle both for livelihood and for education, has been crowned with years full of a prosperity and honor rarely allotted to composers.

That time-honored tool of artistic criticism, the distinction between thought and expression--or, as the critics say, between _ethos_ and technique--is one that constantly tempts the critic of music, and always betrays him. Very seductive it is, because analogy with other arts is so plausible a device for exploiting music; but push it to its logical outcome and it inevitably vanishes--the form proves to be not the investiture, nor even the incarnation, of the thought, but the thought itself. Change the expression and you annihilate the thought; develop a technique and you create a system of ideas; mind and body are ultimately one. Now the case of Dvořák is strongly corroborative of such a theory of the identity in music of _ethos_ and technique. What is seen from one angle of vision as his love of exotic color, his devotion to curious intervals of melody, sudden excursions in tonality, and odd molds of rhythm, appears from the other, the technical side, as mastery of orchestral sonority and inheritance of a peculiar musical dialect. It is therefore difficult to account exactly for the genesis of any given quality in his work. Is it the result of an outer influence acting upon a peculiarly plastic nature, or does it spring rather from deeply-rooted individual traits that have dominated the course of his development and shaped his style? Did his early experiences in a village band, for example, awaken and evolve his sense of tone color, or would his music have been primarily sensuous even if he had had the training of Brahms, Tschaïkowsky, or César Franck? It seems probable that here, as elsewhere, inner endowment and outer influence have reacted with a subtlety and complexity that defy analysis, and thought and style are but aspects of one essence. Consequently, the difference between _ethos_ and technique, however serviceable as a means of getting over the ground, as a tool of investigation, will mislead us unless we constantly remember how partial is its validity. We may indeed, for the sake of clearness and thoroughness, speak first of one aspect, then of another, but the man we are studying, like the shield in the allegory, remains all the time one.

To approach the technical side first, there can be no doubt that the rich quality of Dvořák's tone, a quality so striking that Mr. Hadow places him with Beethoven, Berlioz, and Wagner in the class of supreme masters of orchestration, would never have been attainable to one who had not had his peculiar experience. He has the practical player's exhaustive knowledge of instruments, which enables him, by disposing the parts always in effective registers, to get a rich and mellow sonority in his _ensemble_ writing. Examine any chord in his scores, and you see that each player gives a tone that he can sound fully and advantageously, and that each choir of instruments--the strings, the wood, the brass--gives in isolation an effective chord. The resultant harmony is a well-balanced, thoroughly fused mass of tone. But far more important than the power to write effectively disposed single chords is the power to weave a fabric of close texture and firm consistency, to make the orchestra sustain, ramify, and reinforce itself, so to speak. By far the best way to secure this solidity of texture is to write coherent and well-individualized melodies in the different parts, which serve as strands to bind the whole. Such is the method of Beethoven among classic and of Tschaïkowsky among romantic composers, and so efficient is good polyphonic or «many-voiced» writing as a means of sonority that it has been truly said, «Pure voice-leading is half an orchestra.» Yet great skill is required for such polyphonic writing, since all the independent melodies must cooperate harmoniously; and Dvořák, who got little academic training as a boy, is not a great contrapuntist. Just here, however, his band experience coming to his aid, he was saved from writing lumpish, doughy stuff--in which one poor tune in the soprano vainly attempts to hold up a heavy weight of amorphous «accompaniment»--by his extraordinary knack of vitalizing his entire mass of tone through rhythmic individualization of the parts. Taking a skeleton of simple harmony, he manages to write for the different voices such salient and individual rhythms that they stand out with almost the grace of melodious contrapuntal parts. It is a sort of metrical yeast to keep his bread from being soggy. Numerous examples will at once occur to students of his scores, particularly from the Slavonic Dances and Rhapsodies. A third form of his orchestral mastery might be pointed out in the well-calculated special effects for single instruments, such as the oboe duet that concludes the first movement of the Suite, opus 39, which occur everywhere in his scores. But that is, after all, a commoner form of skill, whereas rich sonority and life in the fabric as the result of rhythmic individualization of the parts, can be found in few scores so highly developed as in those of Dvořák.

As regards structure, Dvořák is felicitous but eccentric. He does not lay out his plans with the careful prevision of one to whom balance and symmetry are vital. His scheme is not foreordered, it is sketched currently. Thus, for example, his modulation is singularly radical, impulsive and haphazard. He loves to descend unexpectedly upon the most remote keys, never knows where he will turn next, and when he gets too far from home returns over fences and through no-thoroughfares. Often, with him, a change of key seems dictated merely by a desire for a particular patch of color; he wishes to brighten the tonal background with sharps or mollify it with flats, and plump he comes to his key, little caring how he gets there or where he is going next. His use of contrasts of tonality is thus characteristic of his love of color-effects for themselves and his willingness to subordinate to them purity of line. Again, it is probably not forcing the point to see in his use of uneven rhythms, such as five and seven bar periods, another instance of the same tendency to license. Undoubtedly in part a legacy from Bohemian folk-song, which is particularly rich in them, his uneven rhythms seem to be also in part due to a certain fortuitousness of mind. It is as if he closed his phrase, without regard to strict symmetry, wherever a good chance offered. The theme of the Symphonic Variations, opus 78, is an example. It is interesting to contrast this rhythmic trait of Dvořák's with Grieg's accurate and sometimes almost wearisome precision of outline. Both men derive from folk-music a love of incisive meter--their music has a strong pulse; but Grieg, who is precise, lyrical, sensitive to perfection of detail, is really finical in his unfaltering devotion to square-cut sections, while Dvořák, more wayward, less perfect and exquisite, strays into all sorts of odd periods. His somewhat arbitrary treatment of tonality relations and of rhythm is thus illustrative of a general laxity of method highly characteristic of the man. In contrast with a jealously accurate artist like Grieg, he is felicitous more by force of genius than by wisdom of intent.

Dvořák's childlike spontaneity is in no way better exemplified than by his attitude toward folk-music, and here again he may profitably be contrasted with Grieg. Both devotees of local color have enriched art with unfamiliar lineaments and unused resources, yet their modes of procedure have been quite different. Grieg, traversing the usual mill of German musical education, turned consciously to Norwegian folk-song to find a note of individuality. Struck with the freshness of the native dances, he transplanted them bodily into his academic flower-pots. His courtship of the national Muse was conscious, sophisticated, and his style is in a sense the result of excogitation. Dvořák, on the contrary, growing up in his small Bohemian village, unable to get classic scores, assiduously fiddling throughout his youth at village fêtes where the peasants must have a scrap of tune to dance by, became thoroughly saturated with the rude music. It moved in his veins like blood; it was his other language. Thus the two men were at quite polar standpoints in relation to nationalism. With Dvořák it was a point of departure, with Grieg it was a goal of pilgrimage. And so, while the Norwegian has tended to immure himself in idiosyncrasy, the Bohemian has rubbed off provincialisms without losing his inheritance. His music, while retaining the sensuous plenitude, the individual flavor, the florid coloring, with which his youth endowed it, has acquired, with years and experience, a scope of expression, a maturity of style, and a universality of appeal that make it as justly admired as it is instinctively enjoyed.

Imperceptibly we have passed from technical analysis into personal inventory. And indeed, all Dvořák's peculiarities of style may be viewed as the inevitable manifestations of a nature at once rich and naïve. His music makes a delightfully frank appeal. It is never somber, never crabbed, never even profound. It breathes not passion, but sentiment. It is too happily sensuous to be tragic, too busy with an immediate charm to trouble about a remote meaning. Even when he is moving, as in the Largo of the New World Symphony, is it not with a gentle, half-sensuous pathos, a wistfulness more than half assuaged by the wooing sweetness of the sounds that fill our ears? To him music is primarily sweet sound, and we shall misconceive his aim and service if in looking for something deep in him we miss what is, after all, very accessible and delightful for itself--the simple charm of his combinations of tone.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE.--Dvořák's fecundity is surprising. He has written cantatas, oratorios, a mass, a requiem, and hymns for chorus and orchestra; five symphonies, five overtures, four symphonic poems, the well-known Slavonic Dances and Rhapsodies, concertos for piano, violin, and violoncello, the inimitable Suite, op. 39, the Symphonic Variations, op. 78, and other orchestral works of smaller proportions; seven string quartets, a sextet, three trios, a terzetto for two violins and a viola, two string quintets, a piano quintet, a piano quartet, a sonata for violin and piano, and a serenade for wind instruments; and, finally, many piano works and songs. He is at his best in his orchestral and chamber works, of which the following are typical: the Slavonic Dances, op. 46 and 72, the Slavonic Rhapsodies, op. 45, the Suite, op. 59, the Symphony, «From the New World,» op. 95, and the Scherzo Capriccioso, op. 66; the Sextet, op. 48, the Quartet and Quintet on negro themes, op. 96 and 97, the Piano Quintet, op. 81, and the Piano Quintet, op. 87. Though these compositions lose much in transcription, they are all obtainable in four-hand piano arrangements. The piano music is somewhat unidiomatic except the later things, but the Mazurkas, op. 56, the Poetische Stimmungsbilder, op. 85, and the Humoreskes, op. 101, are worth knowing. Of the songs, nine of the best are published separately by the house of Simrock, and the two most popular ones, «Gute Nacht» and «Als die Alte Mutter,» are to be had in Schirmer's series entitled «Gems of German Songs.» A study of these will probably arouse a desire for more, and the student may buy the Gipsy Songs, op. 55, and the Love Songs, op. 83. The duets, «Klänge aus Mähren,» not very well known, are characteristic.

FOOTNOTES:

[D] A graphic picture of the sleepy little place is given in the essay on Dvořák in «Studies in Modern Music,» W. H. Hadow, Second Series. Macmillan, New York, 1894.

IV CAMILLE SAINT-SAËNS

IV CAMILLE SAINT-SAËNS

It is a principle of musical expression that of the two great types of temperament, the active and the contemplative, the first tends to express itself in strongly rhythmic figures, the second in phrases of vaguer outline, full of sentiment not easily to be confined in molds. The man of action is incisive, vigorous, compact in utterance; the mystic is by contrast indefinite and discursive. It has been well established, indeed, that primeval music was the product of two modes of instinctive emotional expression, the gesticulatory and the vocal, dance and song; and throughout its growth these two strands, however closely they may intertwine, can still be traced. Thus it happens that even to-day we find the complex work of modern musicians getting a special impress of personality and style according as the rhythmic or the melodic-harmonic faculty predominates in the individual. One man's music will be notable for its strong impulse, its variety and vivacity of rhythm; another's will appeal to the more dreamy and sentimental part of our natures, will speak to our hearts so movingly that we shall recognize its descent from the song rather than from the dance. And in all such cases the first man will be of the active temperament, a man of the world, of many interests and great nervous force; the second will be contemplative, inclined to the monastic life, and of great heart rather than keen intelligence.

Such an antithesis of artistic product and of personal character exists in a peculiar degree between Camille Saint-Saëns and César Franck, the two greatest composers France has produced since Bizet. Each of these men is great by virtue of qualities somewhat wanting in the other. The one is clever, worldly, learned--and a little superficial; the other, profound, religious, of singularly pure and exalted spirit, is yet emotional to the verge of abnormality. And so with their music; that of Saint-Saëns is energetic, lucid, consummately wrought, while Franck's, more moving and more subtle, is so surcharged with feeling as to become vague and inarticulate. A review of their lives and a brief analysis of their work will bring out more clearly this divergence of nature, which, in spite of the many traits they have in common, has determined them to very different careers and exacted of them very dissimilar artistic services.

At a concert given in Paris in 1846 appeared a new prodigy, a boy pianist, «le petit Saint-Saëns,» as the «Gazette Musicale» announced him, who, only ten and a half years old, played Händel, Bach, Beethoven, and Mozart, «without notes, with no effort, giving his phrases with clearness, elegance, and even expression in the midst of the powerful effects of a numerous orchestra using all its resources.» This, the first public appearance of Saint-Saëns, was by no means his first musical exploit. We read that he began the study of the piano with his great-aunt at the age of three, when already his sense of tone was so keen that he would press down with his left hand the slender fingers of the right until they became strong enough to satisfy his exacting requirements; that at five he composed little waltzes; that at ten he played fugues by Bach, a concerto of Hummel, and Beethoven's C-minor Concerto; and that he could tell the notes of all the clock-chimes in the house, and once remarked that a person in the next room was «walking in trochees.» By the time he was seventeen he had earned wide reputation as a pianist, had taken prizes for organ-playing at the conservatory, and had written an ode for chorus, solo, and orchestra, and a symphony. Thus early did he lay the foundations of that skill which in the early seventies, when at Wagner's house he played on the piano the «Siegfried» score, won from von Bülow the remark that, with the exception of Wagner and Liszt, he was the greatest musician living.