Part 7

Of the ideas which lie behind the music of Strauss less can be said in opposition now than could be said five years ago. Then we knew Strauss as the writer of "Don Juan," an attempt to put into music the sensuality of a libertine, his final satiety, his utter coldness of heart; of "Death and Apotheosis," a weird endeavor to portray with an orchestra the horrors of dissolution, the gasps, the struggles, the death-rattle, the _tremor mortis_; "Till Eulenspiegel's Merry Pranks," a study in musical depiction of wandering vulgarity, of jocular obscenity, a vast and coruscating jumble of instrumental cackles about things unfit to be mentioned. We felt that the nineteenth century was closing with something like midsummer madness in art. With Ibsens, Maeterlincks, and Strausses plucking like soulless ghouls upon the snapping heart-strings of humanity, treating the heart as a monochord for the scientific measurement of intervals of pain, and finally poking with their skeleton fingers in the ashes of the tomb to see if they could not find a single smouldering ember of human agony, we had attained a rare state of morbidity in art. We felt that when Art had turned for her inspiration to the asylum, the brothel, and the pesthouse, it was time for a new renaissance. Strauss was our musical Maeterlinck, our tonal Ibsen. Vague, indefinable fancies, grotesque and monstrous mysticisms, gaunt shapes and shapeless horrors, seemed to be his substitutes for clean, strong, pure ideals; and when he set to music Friedrich Nietzsche's "Thus Spake Zarathustra," the philosophy of the solution of "world riddles," we thought he had utterly gone mad. For in this work we found the highest skill in the development and polyphonic treatment of leading motives devoted to an attempt to make music lecture on metaphysics, when all the time it was perfectly obvious that without reading Nietzsche's book no one could have any notion of the composer's intent. The mastery of orchestration and of the technics of composition shown in this work convinced thoughtful critics that Strauss was not to be sniffed out of consideration. Here was a force to be reckoned with in musical progress, even though it was mistakenly wielded.

With the introduction of "A Hero's Life," Strauss seemed suddenly to have entered upon cleaner vision. To this day I am lost in wonder at the vast and appalling ugliness of some parts of the composition, but I know that custom will make dear to us musical idioms which now excite our antipathy. That is an old story. Artusi of Bologna said that Monteverde had lost sight of the true purpose of music,--to give pleasure. A similar accusation was once brought against the mellifluous and tactful Rossini. It was shouted through Europe against Wagner. We may use it against Strauss, but if we do, we must chance the ridicule of the hereafter. "A Hero's Life," despite its frequent attempts to make music speak more definitely than music can, is based on broad moods which are suitable for musical exposition. Wild, chaotic, discordant as many of the passages of this remarkable work certainly seem to us now, there is no denying the extraordinary mastership shown in its thematic development. The Wagnerian method of modifying themes in rhythm and harmony so as to alter their dramatic significance is combined successfully with the methods of the classicists in working out. Modern polyphony, the polyphony of hazardous cross paths in acrid harmony, of the Impinging contrapuntal curves, is handled with consummate ease. It is orchestral technic of the highest kind, but it all aims at making music which shall describe the minutest feelings, the finest shades of thought, and the most varied actions of personages whom the hearer must see with his mind's eye.

It aims at a wider and more detailed expression than the repulsive "Don Juan" and the vulgar "Till Eulenspiegel," but it is clean and wholesome in tone, and most of its material is safe from the charge of unfitness for publication. It is not impossible to conceive of Strauss after producing this work as looking back over his entire orchestral product and addressing us in the words of the inscrutable McIntosh Jellaludin: "Some of it must go; the public are fools and prudish fools. I was their servant once. But do your mangling gently--very gently. It is a great work, and I have paid for it in seven years' damnation."

It is too soon for us to say that Strauss will influence the future. He may leave us nothing but certain purely mechanical improvements in orchestral technics. Even these will have their value. Yet all recent attempts at progress in music have been in the direction of more definite expression, and Strauss may be only a stepping-stone in an advance toward that blissful epoch whose hearers will display as much imagination as its composers, that transcendent condition in which genius understands genius. As in that faculty-free heaven celebrated in undergraduate song, no musical critics will be there. Every man will be his own critic. The millennium will have come.

II.--THE ÆSTHETIC VIEW

Denique sit quidvis, simplex duntaxat et unum.

HORACE, _Ars Poetica_.

Mr. Strauss has been acclaimed as an explorer, a pathfinder in the wilderness of new art. But after all he is simply a product, or perhaps it would be more exact to say a result; for the trend of musical art in the past century was toward representation.

But the attempts of the early composers were in the line of descriptive music, which is a species of mimetics. The transfer of peculiar sounds and characteristic sound-motions, as in the cases of whistling wind and undulating forest billows, to the musical canvas, is a simple and natural process. It pleases the most superficial mind by the translation of one art into terms of another. To "paint" in sounds, as the musicians term it, is a pretty and poetic fancy. It is like the poet's use of tone-speech to imitate qualities or motions. It is the onomatopoetic in music. Sometimes it is the paronymous.

We are all cultivated savages. The primeval hordes of Europe had their rude rhythms and their inarticulate cries, which were as music to their ears. Significance was attached to these sounds wholly because of their external resemblance to something lying in a different plane of human experience. We have refined and extended the scale and have attuned our ears and our spirits to higher tones. We hear triads in stones, scales in running brooks, and chords of the diminished seventh in everything.

How long was it before the musicians ceased to content themselves with their tone pictures of ocean waves and murmuring streams? Surely, it was not long after Monteverde found the rhythmic and instrumental equivalents for the galloping of horses and the crashing together of gallant and knightly combatants that the dream of joy or woe, uttered in songs without words, entered the minds of composers. Monteverde's lament of Arianna showed that the plaint of a sorrowing heart might be most musical, most melancholy. Doubtless, as the indolent Venetian gondolier hummed the melody and forgot the words through the shining avenues of the island city, the thought came dimly to him, as it did clearly to the musician, that the tune was sad and saddening, even without the text.

But not till the time of Beethoven was a direct and explicit effort made to paint soul pictures in wordless music. Beethoven was indeed the regenerator of instrumental art, in that he demonstrated with splendid and convincing power in his later symphonies that the classic sonata form could sing the weal and woe of humanity with eloquence as noble as that of the opera aria aided by the explanatory comment of its own verses.

Beethoven, however, contented himself with broad outlines. He sang passion, joy, grief, resolution, courage, force; but never did he essay to impart to his music the virtue of an explanation. The fifth symphony explains itself and it asks no aid from without. It does not lean back against a wall of text for its support.

The seventh symphony has been subjected to various processes of explanation, but it reads most clearly in its own light as a series of mood pictures. The ninth symphony goes further, and here Beethoven frankly confessed that in order to make his purpose clear he needed text. The construction of the last movement brings to the hearer in its opening measures a solution of the meaning of the three preceding movements. It is the Wagnerian device of prophesying with themes in the early part of a work, and furnishing the key when at length the theme is associated with text later in the composition. There is no utterly new thing under the _cantus firmus_.

Beethoven's psychographics are general and not specific. He does not seek to chase the emotion to its source and to speculate upon its nature and origin. He is content to represent it in tone, to decorate it, if you will, with instrumental color, but there he stops. Shall we say that therefore Beethoven's psychometry was saner and more artistic than that of Strauss and his few brothers in art?

It is a question similar to that which arises in literature anent the comparative merits of Shakespeare and Ibsen. But here is a substantial difference. Shakespeare was unquestionably a mighty poet, and Ibsen is a prose dramatist pure and simple. Shakespeare was an idealist and Ibsen is the arch realist of the age. It is not just criticism to compare these two. You may compare Clyde Fitch with Sheridan or Augustus Thomas with Robertson, if you will, but it is no more honest to compare Ibsen with Shakespeare than it would be to compare him with Æschylus.

But when you come to music, you come to a different issue. Absolute music is an entity. It is a very special branch of an art which has varieties. The lied, for example, is an art form by itself; so is the oratorio, and so again is the music drama of Wagner. It were foolish to try to compare the symphonies of Beethoven with the songs of Schubert and thence to decide which was the greater composer. The development of the symphonic branch of musical art is that in which Beethoven was most specially concerned, and it is to his successors in that field that we must look to study the outcome of his innovations.

When we trace the advance of symphonic art from Beethoven to Strauss, we find a steady and irresistible movement away from the representation of broad, fundamental soul states, from a strictly scientific method of musical psychostatics down to a condition in which the orchestra is transformed into a psychoscope, and the symphony is become a treatise on mental diseases and methods of conversing with the dead. Composers seem bent on pinning down to their artistic dissecting-tables the very essence of the soul itself.

The simple imitative method of the pristine descriptions in tone has become neurotic mimicry, and the melodic and harmonic idioms hint that the modern ear is suffering from acute myringomycrosis, a cheerful affliction caused by the growth of fungi on the ear drum. Fungi are plentiful in damp and noisome places, and these seem to be the artistic haunts of the imaginations of the Ibscene realists in music.

This so-called "romantic" music of to-day owes a considerable debt to the Abbé Liszt, whose undertakings in the domain of art are overestimated by his adulators and undervalued by his detractors. But there is no practical denial of the fact that Liszt fashioned a system and set up a manner in his symphonic poem. Richard Strauss might have been possible without Liszt, but as matters stand we are bound to acknowledge the debt of the composer of "Don Juan" to the composer of "Tasso."

Yet how far beyond Liszt has the psychologic composition of to-day advanced? Liszt did undertake to make his music tell stories, and that is a thing which, with all deference to Liszt, music cannot do and never has done. You have to read Byron's "Mazeppa" to understand Liszt's, just as you have to read Bürger's "Lenore" if you wish to understand so naïve a story-teller as Raff's "Lenore" symphony. How much more necessary is it to read Maeterlinck's "Death of Tintagiles" in order to understand Charles Martin Loeffler? Not a bit.

But Liszt never dreamed of analyzing soul states and those mysterious conflicts of soul and body which form the materials of psychomachy. He never sought to trace the origin of life nor the seat of the vital spark. The abbé was something of a mystic, too, but he knew he was not a genius. A very able dissimulator, a pious Mephistopheles, a Machiavellian master of musical arts, and the father of Cosima Wagner, he exploited his external impositions with consummate skill; and when he sat down to compose, he swore fealty to the highest ideals with all the sincerity of Iago swearing vengeance at the side of the kneeling Othello.

He sent forth into the easy world his purple and yellow masterpieces, and the world called them royal. A little drawing and a great deal of color was what he offered, and the public saw in his splotches of sound Turneresque mystery and mastery. The dear public still loves these works, and will probably continue to do so for many years. And in one respect the public is right. Liszt never tried to be too definite. He left something to the imagination, and when the public has not any imagination, it imagines that it has, and that it is discerning things in Liszt's works which Liszt himself never discovered.

Camille Saint-Saëns of France is, in his boulevardian way, a follower of Liszt. He also has written symphonic poems and he has been wise enough not to go to the uttermost limits of detailed expression. His Hercules is a gentleman and his Omphale dwelt not far from the Rue de Berlin. Hercules went to see her in a Paris cab--you can hear the cocher swear. Omphale dressed him in a Paquin gown and dealt him exquisite love-taps with his rosewood opera cane.

Dainty Hercules of the Boulevard des Italiens and seductive Omphale of the Rue de Berlin! Ye are the Watteau pictures of a would-be pastoral, the mincing marionettes of a cigarette smoker's dream. Between such gentle figures as you and the chortling barbarians of the Strauss phantasy there is the vast and impassable gulf of fetid inspiration which separates Alexander Pope from Rabelais. Though he paint Phaeton swinging wide the chariot of the sun through the affrighted heavens and plunging headlong into Eridanus, or Death strumming the "zig et zig et zag sur son violon," Saint-Saëns is always a gentleman, the Mendelssohn of romantic orchestration.

But the symphonic poem is not confined to Liszt and Saint-Saëns. It has spread itself through all Europe and has inoculated the symphony. Poor Rubinstein! When he wrote his "Ocean" symphony, he held himself within the limits of the art of composition as formulated by Beethoven in his fifth and seventh symphonies. He painted broad mood pictures. He imitated motions as frankly as Haydn. He was elementary, even at times elemental. At any rate, he was sane. He respected the boundaries that lie, as Ambros has shown us, between music and poetry, and did not call upon the tone art to write treatises and handbooks. He strove to induce music to sing the might and majesty of the ocean, but he did not ask it to find the latitude and longitude.

Other masters have struggled to make the symphony more definite in its tale-telling, but till to-day it has succeeded in keeping its place as the epitome of general emotional states. Tschaïkowsky--most vigorous, if not most subtle, of all recent masters, bursting with savage passions, flaming with wild northern fancies--wrote into the symphony the representation of all human sufferings, the yearnings and grim revel, the madness and despair of Russia. But he clung to the deep-laid emotional scheme.

In his overtures he has gone not a whit further than Beethoven did in the "Leonore" No. 3. Tschaïkowsky's "Hamlet," his "Romeo and Juliet," are mood pictures, perfectly comprehensible to all who know the dramas. They class with such works as Goldmark's "Sakuntala" and "Prometheus." Of these latter how clear and convincing is the second with its voices of sea nymphs, its solitude of the ocean, its mad effort of the man, and its lightning blast of Jove.

True, you must know Æschylus, and therein lies the weakness of all this kind of music, its temptation and its danger. If we may go so far, how are we to be estopped from prying further into the mysteries of musical depiction?

How this field has tempted the Frenchmen, and how little they have found in it! After all, Saint-Saëns is not so bad. Think of the intricate platitudes, the prolix prosiness and lofty emptiness of Bruneau's "Penthesilée" and "La Belle aux Bois Dormant" (poèmes symphoniques au sérieux, mes amis), while Godard, Joncières, Paladilhe, and others have dipped respectfully into the romantic _potage_ and barely soiled their fingers. But all have striven to paint in tones, and have at any rate gone as far as sketching in detail.

Possibly the time will come when music will be a universal language. Certain cadences will be accepted in China, in Sussex, or in New Jersey, as signifying such and such emotions or ideas, and certain resolutions of suspensions will have a meaning current in St. Petersburg, Vienna, and Cincinnati. But that time has not yet come, and the programme note is still an essential accessory either before or after the offence of the intimate symphonic poem.

The composers, while acknowledging this, continue to go forward along the path which they have chosen. Music is daily moving away from the broad mood pictures of Beethoven toward some form in which every phrase shall have its part and place in the exposition of soul secrets. The Frenchmen have made but little success, as we have seen, for they have treated their composition, not as literary music, but as literature itself.

If the work of Richard Strauss has any permanent significance at all, it is that the æsthetic basis of the Liszt and Tschaïkowsky compositions, the Goldmark overtures and the polished tone poems of the Frenchmen is false, and that every attempt to rear upon it a lasting art form must be futile. Here need be no discussion of the stupendous achievements of Strauss's orchestration, nor the astounding hideousness of his harmonic plan.

Who was it said recently that the good Mr. Loeffler of Boston thought music in a scale of his own? The Loeffler scale--C, D, E, F sharp, G sharp, A sharp, C. How sharper than a serpent's tooth! Strauss thinks in a harmony of his own. A harmony? A cacophony. The clash of jarring discord is as honey on the palate of his ear. The tonic triad is not a stranger to him, but its devilish consonance of the major third is to his mind, as it was to the pious fancies of the mediæval fathers, the spirit of tonal evil, the seductive embodiment of sensual sweetness.

Listen to his eternal feminine. When she plays the virtuous Kundry to his Hero of the "Heldenleben" or the Venus to his nomadic "Eulenspiegel" Tannhäuser, she sings in the wickedly purring major mode. But when heroic virtue slaughters ink-stained critics or scales the battlements of jarring worlds and plants the standard of manhood on a minaret of the universe, then titanic visions are expressed in crashing collisions of minor seconds or in strangled sixths and desiccated elevenths. Trumpets bleat through their noses, and clarinets chuckle in staccato treble; trombones rattle in raucous gurgles, and bassoons snort in hoarse expirations.

But all this is superficial. This is the manner, not the matter of the Strauss music. How far can this master magician, this royal juggler with resolutions and suspensions, this acrobat of the flying chord, go with his endeavor to make music say for him the things that the entire decadent literature of modern Europe has striven to put down in plain words? If Strauss means anything, he means that Beethoven and Schumann were but the avant couriers of a vast march of progress into the bowels of delineation, the vitals of psychic communication.

Liszt and Tschaïkowsky and Goldmark postulated a false theory of orchestral art because they clearly defined limitations. They promulgated by their practice the doctrine that only the broader moods of story could be represented in music. Strauss preaches that when Beethoven depicted in his fifth symphony the struggle of a soul and for the finer illustration of his thought united the scherzo with the finale, he opened the gateway to indefinite progress, and swung wide a banner with the old device, "Facilis descensus Averno."

Suppose, however, that this paragraph in the artistic treatise of Strauss contains a germinal truth, does it of necessity follow that to advance along the opened path is to finish in the corruption and rank odor of the morgue? What has so got the start of the majestic art of music as to lead it to the grave? First of all, decadent poetry and fiction. When music began to strive to make itself a representative art, it confronted itself with a choice of objects. Primarily it had human life and experience as found in the composer's own soul, and this was the noblest source of all. "Look into thine own heart and write," is excellent advice for a composer. Then it had literature, the conservation of the experience and observation of man from the literary point of view. With these two sources it had to rest content, for neither sculpture nor painting offered anything other than the composition of life translated into other terms. The musician would better paint the Laocoön from his own conception than from the conception of the sculptor. He would but make music and water of Raphael's Madonna if he studied her instead of the Mary of the Holy Writ.

How long did it take the musician to discover that the Virgin was not such inspiring musical material as Mary Magdalen? Just as long as it took him to learn that he could not make a great composition out of a steady flow of sweetness, that he must have a warring of elements in his work, and that there must be some melodic principle striving for victory and at the end emerging from temporary tonal chaos in a pæan of triumph. The temptation of St. Anthony was better matter for the composer than the meditations of St. Augustine, and the fast of Christ in the wilderness was less alluring than the legend of Herodias and John the Baptist.

In other words, the modern musician has found his finest inspirations in that struggle of good with evil in the human soul which has inspired the works of the greatest modern dramatists. The only question that remained to be solved after this was, How far would the musician go? The dramatist and the poet ran morbid; the musician, seeking his inspiration in the records of human souls made in the terms of literature, followed the man of the pen into the slough of despond.

The morbid studies of such dramatists as Ibsen and Maeterlinck are the real key to the music of such a composer as Strauss. Yet let us not deny that the musician is less drastic in his methods than the literary men. Strauss has indeed written his "Don Juan" and his "Death and Apotheosis," but he has placed upon their pages some passages of marvellous beauty. It is a beauty of orchestral idiom, of instrumental development, rather than of melodic exfoliation. Strauss, when all is said and done, is not master of melodic invention, but he speaks a language which is all his own, and he rises at times to a power of sonorous utterance which has not been equalled in these modern days except by Wagner.