Part 9

He never, in fact, wholly outgrew certain peculiarities which are direct results of his emotional instability, his slavery to mood. His persistent use of minor keys, for example, is, as the doctors say, symptomatic. The minor is naturally the medium of vague, subjective moods and fantasies, of aspiration, longing, and doubt; it is the vehicle of morbidly self-bounded thoughts, whose depressing gloom is equalled only by their seductive and malign beauty. Such thoughts we find too often in Chopin, Grieg, and, it must be added, in Tschaïkowsky. Of the first thirty songs he wrote, seventeen are in the minor mode. Of course too much should not be argued from a detail of this sort, but the major system is so naturally the medium of vigorously objective thought that we instinctively suspect the health of a mind which harps continually upon the minor. By a somewhat similar tendency towards self-involution, the natural result of intense emotionality, Tschaïkowsky inclines to monotony of rhythm; he gets hypnotized, as it were, by the regular pulsation of some recurring meter, and he continues it to the verge of trance. An example is the long pedal-point on D, in the curious 5-4 measure of the second movement of the Pathetic Symphony. This is like the wailing and rocking of the women of a savage tribe over the death of a warrior; it is at once wild and sinister. But perhaps the most striking evidence of this servitude to passion we are trying to trace in Tschaïkowsky is his constant use of climax. It seems to be quite impossible for him to preserve a mean-tone; he is always lashing himself into a fury, boiling up into a frenetic fortissimo, after which he lapses into coma until some phrase of melody or impulse of rhythm jostles his imagination again, and he presses on toward a new crisis. The effect of these cumulative whirlwinds of passion is often tremendous, is unique, indeed, in music; yet one longs sometimes in the midst of them for a less turbulent attitude, for the equable beauty of Bach or Mozart. The atmosphere is surcharged. One feels that this noble but willful spirit has sat too long in the close chamber of personal feeling, that one must throw wide the windows and let in the fresh winds of general human existence.

Yet, after all, the imperfections of Tschaïkowsky's music are due rather to the overwhelming richness of his emotions than to any shortcomings of mind; his case is an artistic embarrassment of riches, and his critic must avoid the fallacy of supposing, because his constructive power is sometimes inadequate, that it is ever meager. On the contrary, he is a man of great intellectual force. It is too bad to be so busy with Tschaïkowsky the pessimist that one forgets Tschaïkowsky the artist. His melodic fertility alone is enough to rank him with the great constructive musicians. His devotion to Mozart, and to the Italian opera-writers, was no accident; by the spontaneity and beauty of his melodies he has «approved himself their worthy brother.» Few more inspiring tunes can be found anywhere than the opening theme of his B-flat minor Piano Concerto, with its splendid and tireless vigor, or the broad, constantly unfolding cantilena of the second theme in the Fifth Symphony. His pages are plentifully scattered with phrases of rare grace, of a fresh and original charm. His harmony, too, for all its radicalism, is generally firm and well controlled, and his rhythm, however monotonous at times, is never vague. In polyphony (the simultaneous progress of different melodies) he is a powerful master, as any one may see by examining, for example, the masterly variations in his Orchestral Suite, opus 55. He is probably, on the whole, a greater master of general construction than any of his contemporaries except Brahms.

It is evident, then, that this curiously paradoxical personality was gifted with an intellectual strength that went far toward dominating the turbulent passions which, on the whole, it could not quite dominate. But one needs, after all, no careful statistical proof of the rationality of Tschaïkowsky's music. The fact that it survives, that it is widely listened to and loved, proves _a priori_ that, however tinged it may be with personal melancholy, it is not ultimately pessimistical or destructive in effect. For it is the happy fortune of art that it cannot fully voice the destructive forces of anarchy and despair. Its nature precludes the possibility, for anarchy is chaos, despair is confusion, and neither can be the subject of that clearly organic order which is art. The artist may, of course, express sadness; his work, if it is to be comprehensively human, must be reflective of the ebb as well as the flow of vital power. But it cannot mirror complete dejection, the absolute lapse of power; for without power there is no organization, and without organization there is no art. The melodic invention, the harmonic grasp, the rhythmic vigor, in a word the powerful musical articulation, everywhere present in Tschaïkowsky's best work, remove it far from the inarticulate moanings of despair. Such faculties as his are anything but disintegrating or decadent; however much individual sadness may attend their exercise, they are upbuilding and creative. Tschaïkowsky commands our admiration more than our pity because, in spite of the burdens of his temperament and the misfortunes of his experience, he contributed to beauty, and beauty is the standing confutation of evil.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE.--Much of Tschaïkowsky's early work was for piano, but most of his piano pieces are light if not trivial in character. They are amusing to play over, but do not fairly represent his genius. Seventeen of them are to be had in an album in the Collection Litolff. The Sonata, op. 37, on the other hand, in spite of its marked resemblance to Schumann's F-sharp minor Sonata, is one of the finest of modern sonatas for piano. The Concertos are masterly, but very difficult. Most of the important orchestral works are arranged for four hands. The most interesting are the Pathetic Symphony, the Fifth Symphony, which should be equally well known, the Orchestral Suites, particularly the third, op. 55, with its charming _Tema con Variazioni_, and the Overture, Romeo and Juliet. Of the chamber-works, the third String Quartet, op. 30, and the Trio, are especially good. Twenty-four of Tschaïkowsky's songs are published in an album by Novello, Ewer & Co., and many separately by G. Schirmer and others.

FOOTNOTES:

[E] Since the present paper was written, the biography of Tschaïkowsky by his brother has shown that in this unhappy marriage the only fault we can attribute to the composer was a quixotic chivalry in marrying a young woman who had declared her love for him. He married her from sympathy without loving her. Of course such a step could lead to nothing but misery; but however unwise, it was at least generous and honorable.

[F] This lady, according to the new biography, was Frau von Meck, the widow of a wealthy railway engineer. Her interest in Tschaïkowsky's work, and her generous gifts of money, were of great value to him all his life.

VII JOHANNES BRAHMS

VII JOHANNES BRAHMS

Of all the figures of modern music, brilliant and varied as they are, impressing one with the many-sidedness and wide scope of the art, there is perhaps only one, that of Johannes Brahms, which conveys the sense of satisfying poise, self-control and sanity. Others excel him in particular qualities. Grieg is more delicate and intimate, Dvořák warmer and clearer in color; Saint-Saëns is more meteoric, Franck more recondite and subtle, and Tschaïkowsky more impassioned; but Brahms alone has Homeric simplicity, the primeval health of the well-balanced man. He excels all his contemporaries in soundness and universality. In an age when many people are uncertain of themselves and the world, victims of a pervasive unrest and disappointment, it is solacing to find so heroic and simple a soul, who finds life acceptable, meets it genially, and utters his joy and his sorrow with the old classic sincerity. He is not blighted by any of the myriad forms of egotism,--by sentimentality, by the itch to be effective at all costs, or to be «original,» or to be Byronic or romantic or unfathomable. He has no «message» for an errant world; no anathema, either profoundly gloomy or insolently clever, to hurl at God. He has rather a deep and broad impersonal love of life; universal joy is the sum and substance of his expression.

It is hard to say whether the unique greatness of Brahms depends more on this emotional wholesomeness and simplicity or on the intellectual breadth and synthetic power with which it is combined. Probably the truth is that true greatness requires the interaction of the two. At any rate, Brahms is equally remarkable, whether considered as a man or as a musician, for both. In his personal character frankness, modesty, simple and homely virtue were combined with the widest sympathy, the most far-ranging intelligence, extreme catholicity and tolerance. In music he prized equally the simplest elements, like the old German folk-songs and the Hungarian dances, and the most complex artistic forms that are evolved from them by creative genius. Like Bach and Beethoven, he spanned the whole range of human interests; deep feeling fills his music with primitive expressiveness, and at the same time great intellectual power gives it the utmost scope and complexity. Lacking either trait he would not have been himself, he could not have performed his service to music.

There are many anecdotes illustrating the simple, large traits of the man. His pleasures were homely, his ambitions inward and vital. He cared little for fame, and was annoyed by the foolish adulation of the crowd. To a long and flowery speech addressed to him on the presentation of some sort of tribute he answered, with admirable brevity and utter prose, «Thank you very much.» Once when a party of his friends were gathered together to sample a rare old wine, somebody pompously announced, «What Brahms is among the composers, this Rauenthaler is among the wines.» «Ah,» snapped out Brahms, «then let's have a bottle of Bach now.» He often remarked that one could never hope to get upon the level of such giants as Bach and Beethoven; one could only work conscientiously in one's own field. He had the disgust of shams that one expects in so sincere a lover of the genuine, and the armor of roughness and sarcasm with which he protected himself against the pretentious was formidable. When the University of Cambridge offered him a degree, suggesting that he write a new work for the occasion, he replied that if any of his old works seemed good enough to them he should be happy to receive the honor, but that he was too busy to write a new one. There was about him something shaggy, bear-like, and one can imagine the foxes and weasels scattering at his growl.

But for everything fresh and genuine Brahms had the heartiest love. He is one of the innumerable army of great men of whom biography loves to relate that they always carried candy in their pockets for the children, and a lady described in a letter how she had seen him on the hotel piazza, on all-fours, clambered over by young playmates. He was on cordial terms with waiters and servants, and told Mr. Henschel with emotion the story of a serving-maid who lost her position in order to shield a careless postman, who, being married, could not afford to lose his. Another pretty story, showing at once his modesty and his catholicity of taste, recounts how all the musical friends of the wife of Johann Strauss, the great waltz composer, were writing their names, with phrases from their works, on her fan. When it was his turn, the composer of the German Requiem wrote the opening phrase of the «Blue Danube» waltz, and underneath it the words, «Not, I regret to say, by your devoted friend, Johannes Brahms.» Thus wholesome and unaffected was the character of this great man.

Outwardly, Brahms's life was uneventful. His father was a contrabass-player in the theatre orchestra of Hamburg. In him his son's positiveness of character seems to have been foreshadowed, for we learn that when the conductor once directed him not to play so loud, he replied with dignity: «Herr Capellmeister, this is my contrabass, I want you to understand, and I shall play on it as loud as I please.» Brahms was born at Hamburg in 1833, and from his earliest years was trained for music as a matter of course. His early acquaintance with the best works was of incalculable value to him. Mr. Hadow points out that the eclecticism and solidity of his style was doubtless largely due to the study of Bach and Beethoven that he made in youth under Marxsen. He had the advantage, too, of early practical experience. When he was only twenty he made a concert tour with Reményi, the Hungarian violinist, during which he gained much training and confidence. A feat he performed during this trip showed even more virtuosity than that of «le petit Saint-Saëns» already recorded. Having to play the Kreutzer Sonata on a piano too low in pitch to suit Reményi, who disliked to tune down his violin, he transposed it up a semi-tone, and though playing without notes, performed it accurately and with spirit. To this feat, which aroused the admiration of Joachim, Brahms owed his acquaintance with the great violinist, and through him with Liszt and Schumann. His experience with the former, then in the height of his fame, was unfortunate, but characteristic. Brahms, who was worn out with travel, fell asleep during one of the most moving parts of Liszt's Sonata, which the great virtuoso was so condescending as to play. Though Brahms was only a boy at the time, he was evidently, even then, undazzled by worldly glory.

His meeting with Schumann was much more happy; indeed, it was one of the important events of his life. Probably no young composer ever received such a hearty welcome into the musical world as Schumann extended to Brahms in his famous article, «New Paths.» «In sure and unfaltering accents,» writes Mr. Hadow, «he proclaimed the advent of a genius in whom the spirit of the age should find its consummation and its fulfilment; a master by whose teaching the broken phrases should grow articulate, and the vague aspirations gather into form and substance. The five-and-twenty years of wandering were over; at last a leader had arisen who should direct the art into 'new paths,' and carry it a stage nearer to its appointed place.» It is not surprising that Schumann, whose generous enthusiasm often led him to praise worthless work, should have received the early compositions of Brahms so cordially. Their qualities were such as to affect profoundly the great romanticist. Although the essential character of his mature works is their classical balance and restraint, these first compositions show an exuberance, a wayward fertility of invention, thoroughly romantic. His first ten opuses, or at any rate the three sonatas and the four ballades for piano, are frequently turgid in emotion, and ill-considered in form. The massive vigor of his later work here appears in the guise of a cyclopean violence. It is small wonder that Schumann, dazzled, delighted, overwhelmed, gave his ardent support to the young man. Brahms now found himself suddenly famous. He was discussed everywhere, his pieces were readily accepted by publishers, and his new compositions were awaited with interest.

But fortunate as all this was for Brahms, it might easily, but for his own good sense and self-control, have turned out the most unfortunate thing that could happen to him. For consider his position. He was a brilliant young composer who had been publicly proclaimed by one of the highest musical authorities. He was expected to go on producing works; he was almost under obligation to justify his impressive introduction. Not to do so would be much worse than to remain a nonentity; it would be to become one. And he had meanwhile every internal reason for meeting people's demands. He was full of ideas, conscious of power, under inward as well as outward compulsion to express himself. Yet for all that, he was in reality immature, unformed, and callow. His work, for all its brilliancy, was whimsical and subjective. If he had followed out the path he was on, as any contemporary observer would have expected, he would have become one of the most radical of romanticists. At thirty he would have been a bright star in the musical firmament, at forty he would have been one of several bright stars, at fifty he would have been clever and disappointed. It required rare insight in so young a man, suddenly successful, to realize the danger, rare courage to avert it. When we consider the temptation it must have been to him to continue these easy triumphs, when we imagine the inward enthusiasm of creation with which he must have been on fire, we are ready to appreciate the next event of the drama.

That event was withdrawal from the musical world and the initiation of a long course of the severest study. When he was a little over twenty-one, Brahms imposed upon himself this arduous training, and commanded himself to forego for a while the eloquent but ill-controlled expression hitherto his, in order to acquire a broader, firmer, purer, and stronger style. For four or five years, to borrow Stevenson's expression, he «played the sedulous ape» to Bach and Beethoven, and in a minor degree to Haydn and Mozart. The complex harmonies of his first period gave place to simple, strong successions of triads; for an emotional and often vague type of melody he substituted clearly crystallized, fluent, and gracious phrases, frequently devoid of any particular expression; the whimsical rhythms of the piano sonatas were followed by the square-cut sections of the Serenade, opus 11. Of course the immediate effect of all this was a great sacrifice of what is called originality; had Brahms not had complete faith in the vitality of his genius he could not have surrendered so much of immediate attainment for the sake of an ultimately greater mastery. It is a profound lesson in the ethics of art that a man who could write the fourth of the Ballades, opus 10, should have been willing to follow it up with this Serenade, opus 11. Yet Brahms knew what he was about, and his first large work, the Piano Concerto, opus 15, shows his individuality of expression entirely regained, and now with immensely increased power and resource.

Nothing could exhibit better than this dissatisfaction with his early work and withdrawal from the world for study, that intellectual breadth which we have noted as characteristic of Brahms. He was not a man who could be content with a narrow personal expression. No subjective heaven could satisfy him. His wide human sympathy and his passion for artistic perfection alike, compelled him to study unremittingly, to widen his ideals as his powers increased. No fate could seem to him so horrible as that «setting» of the mind which is the æsthetic analogue of selfishness. Originality, which so often degenerates into idiosyncrasy, was much less an object to him than universality, which is after all the best means of being serviceably original. Dr. Deiters, in his reminiscences, after describing this period of study, continues: «Henceforth we find him striving after moderation, endeavoring to place himself more in touch with the public, and to conquer all subjectiveness. To arrive at perspicuity and precision of invention, clear design and form, careful elaboration and accurate balancing of effect, now became with him essential and established principles.»

From this time until the end of his life, in fact, a period of only a little less than forty years--he died in 1897--Brahms never departed from the modes of work and the ideals of attainment he had now set himself. He labored indefatigably, but with no haste or impatience. He was too painstaking and conscientious a workman to botch his products by hurrying them. He thus described to his friend, Mr. Henschel, his method of composing: «There is no real _creating_ without hard work. That which you would call invention, that is to say, a thought, is simply an inspiration from above, for which I am not responsible, which is no merit of mine. Yes, it is a present, a gift, which I ought even to despise until I have made it my own by right of hard work. And there need be no hurry about that either. It is as with the seed corn: it germinates unconsciously and in spite of ourselves. When I, for instance, have found the first phrase of a song, I might shut the book there and then, go for a walk, do some other work, and perhaps not think of it again for months. Nothing, however, is lost. If afterward I approach the subject again, it is sure to have taken shape; I can now really begin to work at it.» Another inkling of the severity of his standard we have in a remark he made after pointing out certain imperfections in a song of Mr. Henschel's. «Whether it is beautiful also,» he said, «is an entirely different matter; but perfect it must be.» With such a standard, we need not be surprised that he imposed so severe a training upon himself at twenty-one, or that he continued all his life the practice of writing each day a contrapuntal exercise, or that he wrought for ten years over his first symphony, that Titanic work. Thus laboring always with the same calm persistence, returning upon his ideas until he could present them with perfect clarity, caring little for the indifference or the applause of the public, but much for the approval of his own fastidious taste, he produced year by year an astonishing series of masterpieces. No one has better described the kind of work that made Brahms great than Matthew Arnold in those lines about labor

«which in lasting fruit outgrows Far noisier schemes; accomplished in repose; Too great for haste, too high for rivalry.»