Part 9

How often shall we who are treading the downward slopes of life croon that old couplet and yearn for the cradle songs of Schubert and Beethoven? How often, too, we wonder, will a weary world turn back with weary brain from the sordid task of transfretating "the Sequane at the dilucul and crepuscul" with Strauss and his tribe to the poets of the dawn who smote the great primeval chords of human feeling? This we may not now answer, for orchestral music is yet in her infancy and it is possible that the period of to-day is but the disturbance of a transition.

IV.--STRAUSS AND THE SONG WRITERS

He hath songs, for man or woman, of all sizes.

_A Winter's Tale_, Act IV. Sc. 3.

In the domain of the song new developments have come forward with startling rapidity in recent years. Every student of musical history is familiar with the growth of what is called the art song. The folk song was a simple form, in which a good, round tune, once made, served for every stanza. The early composers of songs were content to adhere to this form, which had its musical claim for supremacy, just as the Italian opera had.

But after a time the imperious demand of text for appropriate embodiment compelled a departure from the old manner. Mozart set a pretty fashion when he composed "Das Veilchen" and altered the germinal thematic idea, by a process similar to symphonic development, to meet the varying sentiment of the verse. But not much was accomplished till the birth of the so-called romantic movement. This was really nothing more than the victory of a principle, which had for centuries been striving for dominion, and it led the world to enthusiastic adoration of the songs of Schubert and the operas of Weber.

Then began the reign of what the Germans call the "durchcomponirtes lied," literally the "through-composed song." This is the song in which the music faithfully follows the text and changes in melodic externals and in harmonic plan to express sentiment. Schubert's "Erl-König" is a perfect specimen of this kind of song. Of course the writing of songs in the old strophical form did not cease. Why should it? There were still plenty of texts which lent themselves readily to that kind of setting, and if popularity be sought, there is nothing like a fixed melodic idea.

Gradually, however, those composers who seek always to dwell in a rarefied atmosphere, who are nothing if not "utter," and who ceaselessly endeavor to make poor Music a mere handmaid of all the other arts, have driven the "durchcomponirtes lied" to the verge of incoherence. The musical idea has become almost intangible, and all that seems to be left is a vague dispensation of tonalities and recitativo. For some sanity in this method of writing we have to thank the arch speculator of Munich, Richard Strauss. Whatever may be the ultimate outcome of the dispute over his orchestral riddles, there need be no hesitation in pronouncing him a master of the modern manner of song writing.

Mr. Strauss's songs belong of a surety to the domain of the ultra-romantic. There is little of the old-fashioned German lied in them. It might be possible to trace their descent from the folksong of Germany, and occasionally one appears in the genuine "volksthümlisches lied"[1] style. But many generations of artistic development separate these songs from their progenitors. The strophic form has quite disappeared in most of them. They are in the widest sense composed through. The germinal thematic idea is but a root from which the song grows. It barely sets a style and a direction for the whole. But it must not be supposed that these songs are in any sense formless.

[1] The volksthümlisches lied is a variety of song written by artistic composers on a plan suggested by the folk song. It is the folk song placed under cultivation.

They have an individual symmetry of form. It is a variety of the form of the romantic school, which is built entirely upon the emotional plan underlying the music. The musical scheme, therefore, consists of a proposition which is worked out by a method of transition, so that new material springs from the original thematic germ, and we arrive at novel and striking conclusions.

Of melodic shape in the old sense some of these songs have almost nothing. But they are none the less luxuriously melodious. Their melodic nature differs from that of a Schubert song as the melodic nature of a Wagner drama does from that of a Weber opera. This does not mean that they are better songs than Schubert's. There are no other songs as fine as those of the fecund Franz Peter. But music is making progress, and the methods of song writing will probably change as fast as those of operatic and orchestral composition. Art is ever disinclined to stand still.

The harmonic basis of the Strauss songs is the principal cause of their melodic luxuriance. Strauss harmonizes wholly for what the Germans call the "stimmung." We have no word which exactly reproduces the meaning of this one; but let us call it the voicing of the mood. Strauss's harmony is designed to make an atmosphere in which his melody floats. At the same time this atmosphere is to envelop the hearer and saturate him with the feeling of the song. The high organism of this plan of attack upon the listener stamps it as the refined product of modern, thoroughly sophisticated art.

It is very trying on the singer. Some of Dr. Strauss's voice-parts, planned, not as the ultimate object in view, but wholly as a part of a general scheme, are cruelly difficult. In range alone they make searching demands upon the vocal resources. In the department of mental conception of tone--the highest field of vocal technic--they are as evasive as some of the tonal illusions of Wagner. But they are not unsingable. On the contrary, once let the singer thoroughly permeate himself with the harmonic atmosphere, and thus attune himself to the "stimmung" of the song, and his troubles reduce themselves to the common problems of production and coloring of tone, which have nothing more to do with the nature of Dr. Strauss's songs than with those of all other artistic composers.

It is essential to the success of songs of this kind that the declamation be arranged with much skill, otherwise that pregnant significance which is to come of a perfect marriage of sound and sense will be missing. In this department of his technical labor Dr. Strauss shows much ingenuity in most of his songs. Sometimes the text is dramatized in a manner quite masterly. In the entire range of song literature one would search far to find anything more subtle or potent than the opening of "Hoffen und wieder verzagen." This is a piece of dramatic declamation written in the modern recitative idiom and as distant as possible from the pure lied style; but it is intensely dramatic.

Accompaniments this composer writes with skill. They are sufficiently independent without at any time dominating the song, while in their employment of details they assist greatly in creating the mood. The result of the combination of the best traits found in these songs is a striking power of exposition, a convincing formation of the "stimmung." When upon a well-established mood Strauss builds climaxes such as those of "Wie solten wir geheim sie halten," "Heimliche Aufforderung," and "Caecile," the effect is moving. When he desires to offer a touch of that humor which lies close to tears, he can do it, as witness that little masterpiece "Ach weh mir unglückhaftem Mann."

Yet with all the beauties of the Strauss songs there are some weaknesses that must not be denied. A cycle of these songs will not maintain its charm from beginning to end as will Schumann's "Dichterliebe," or Schubert's "Müllerlider." The earlier song masters, to be, sure, had the advantage of a more fertile soil. They had fresh fields and pastures new. And they belonged to a school of composers whose very first claim to distinction was their fecundity of melodic invention.

The Strauss songs are not primarily melodic. Neither are any of the high art songs of our time. All our song masters are marching steadily out into the vague and mystic land of moonlight moods and shifting shadows of tonalities. The strict song form irks them. They cease not to twist their phrases so that these may not coincide with the lines of the stanza. They are stung with the virus of the Wagnerian method. They make melody in fragments.

Now it is no easy matter to write one vague, semi-mystic, intangibly harmonized mood picture after another, eschewing clearly marked melodic and rhythmic outlines, and at the same time to avoid monotony. Dr. Strauss's songs, let us confess it, often seem monotonous when half a dozen of them are sung in a row. It requires a nice skill in selection to escape this. It can be escaped, for the composer has been prolific and he has written some good things in the pure lied style, which may be alternated with the others. But the presence of this element of monotony is worth considering, because it is a manifestation of a difficulty into which the present manner of song writing is leading composers. Perhaps all the good tunes have been written!

Melodic invention is a vital element in the making of songs. There must be a thematic subject. No matter how far into the realm of detailed declamation the composer may elect to go, he may not wholly neglect the musical figure. If he does, he writes not song, but recitative. The fundamental difference between lyric declamation and pure recitative lies in the presence of the musical figure in the former, and the musical figure is the root of melody. It is the motive, the rhythmic and melodic germ.

If now we turn from the songs of Richard Strauss to those of the much-lauded Hugo Wolf, we shall find that there is a difference in this very matter. Wolf's melodic ideas are singularly vague and deficient in directness of character. They do not come clean out upon the ear as the proclamation of a master's embodiment of a poetic thought; neither do they set a character or fix a mood. They easily lose themselves in the speculative convolutions of that philosophic declamation which is the peculiar fruit of contemporaneous cultivation in the field of song. Intervallic difficulties abound in these Wolf songs, and the harmonic basis is so strained at times that the ear is outraged by the withholding of the normal resolutions of the chords.

But these things are part and parcel of the musical affectation of the time. Possibly twenty years hence these wrestings of musical nature will have become sweetened by the uses of adversity, and the ears of the very children will accept them as freely as they now do the lush harmonies of "Träume" and "Im Treibhaus."

Wolf's artistic endeavor in song writing is clearly the same as that of Richard Strauss, but the achievement is far different. To throw songs by the two composers into close juxtaposition as is frequently done in recitals is to inflict a needlessly cruel punishment on Wolf. To interject into the programme one of the uncommon songs of Schubert, such as "Dem Unendlichen," is still more cruel, for this serves to show that the melodious Franz Peter could pen philosophic apostrophe and oratoric declamation with the best of the moderns, and yet remain more musical than any of them.

Strauss, be it said to his credit, never omits the proposition of some sort of a musical theme. But his method is not that of the elder lyric school. He is a romanticist of the ultra-modern type, and carves out his musical forms over the pattern of his text with infinite labor. He lays down a theme which sets a character and indicates a point of aim; and then he develops, as I have already noted, by the method of transition, so that new material springs from the old in our very sight as the eastern conjurer's flowers grow from the bare earth.

Wolf works on similar lines. He is not a conscious imitator, but his method is the Strauss method, the method of Schubert's "Delphine" buried under the twentieth-century manner. But Wolf lacks both the directness of Schubert and the ingenuity of Strauss. His work in many places rings false. It smells too often of the midnight forge and the hammer of the driven quill. Schubert's song bursts from him full grown, like Minerva from the head of Jove. Strauss's songs show reflection and aspiration and loving care in their finish. Wolf's echo with the sound of the workshop. They are by no means journeyman work, but they are hewn out with hard labor and they do not give forth the fragrance of utter spontaneity.

Questions will naturally arise as to the power of these songs to stand comparison with the lyrics of the later Frenchmen. Reynaldo Hahn, for example, also toys with the rarefied method, and paints delicate impressionistic tone pictures. These are not ordinary songs, but they will not bear the chilling spaces of the concert room. They are for the salon, for the intimate communication of one at the piano to another sitting beside it.

With a cigarette, a glass of Madeira (very mellow), lights half down, as stage directions say, and a woman with whom you are not too much in love singing to you in the point-lace wilderness, the songs of Reynaldo Hahn will make of you an Omar Khayyam transformed into what Mr. Kipling calls "a demnition product." If the woman is beautiful, the Madeira soothing, and the cigarette mild, you will be ready to swear that Hahn is the Schubert of the Boulevards. But if some one sings Hahn to you as No. 4 on an afternoon programme in a rectangular recital hall, you will vote the dainty French writer the essence of puerility.

Another of these very precious gentlemen who has come into notice is Alexandre Georges. Did you ever chance to hear his "Chansons de Miarka," settings of texts of Jean Richepin's "Miarka, the Bear's Foundling"? They are worth a hearing. The poems--consider such titles as "Nuages," "La Poussière," "La Pluie," "La Parole"--are mood pictures and invite musical treatment. The composer has done well with them. He has done nothing new, to be sure, but he has made himself comfortable in the well-kept museum of the obvious. He has trotted in old-fashioned rhythm with the Romany, and he has rained a glittering torrent of sixteenth notes along the upper steppes of the keyboard.

But what can we ask? A Frenchman must not be disrespectful of the vogue. These songs have atmosphere, and if it is painted in familiar and safe tints, who shall blame a man for assuring himself of correct methods? The declamation is generally clear and fluent, and the moods of the poems are reproduced in the music with propriety and elegance.

But this is wandering. The point to be made--not a very important one, perhaps--is that all these moderns, with Strauss, their best man, in the lead, are experimenting. They are testing the power of lyric composition to do without the poetic basis of metre. Without metre they are compelled to develop their melodies by a new process, and they seem likely to fall into the error of losing definite musical figuration altogether. They declaim and recite. Their accompaniments are miniature symphonic descriptions. Yet it has all been done before. The two Schubert songs already named, and "Die Allmacht" ought to show these gentlemen how to do what they seem to be trying so hard to do without quite accomplishing their ends.

AUX ITALIENS

I.--ITALIAN OPERA OF TO-DAY

What do ye singing? What is this ye sing?

SWINBURNE, _Atalanta in Calydon_.

Several factors have united in causing a new interest in the opera of Italy. In so far as New York is concerned the singing together of two such admirable exponents of the art of bel canto as Mme. Marcella Sembrich and Enrico Caruso has restored to life some of the older works, while a recent visit of Mascagni and the frequent performances of Puccini's "La Bohème" and "Tosca" have directed serious attention to the tendency of the younger art. The struggles of the youthful school to maintain its national characteristics in the face of its own yearnings after the flesh-pots of Wagnerism have afforded an absorbing spectacle for observers of musical progress.

The leader and master of all these young eagles was, of course, the incomparable Verdi, the most characteristic composer of opera Italy ever brought forth. But although he showed them all precisely how to mingle the fruits of the new fields opened by Wagner with those of the old Italian soil, they have not always wisely accepted his instruction. They have sought for independence in manner, and in some instances with disheartening results. But perhaps a cursory review of some of their achievements may not be in vain.

Doubtless the casual observer will be struck first by the instrumentation of these modern Italians. Puccini's scores certainly offer abundant food for study, and his clever adjustment of the leading motive scheme to the instrumental background of a thoroughly Italian vocal melody, as in "Tosca," is an accomplishment not to be passed by with a smile. If we compare the scores of such works as those of Puccini and Mascagni with the works of the Donizetti period, we note with astonishment the immense strides made in the use of the orchestra.

But we must not be deceived. The Donizettian period was one of reaction. The Gluck-Piccini battle had not long since been fought out in Paris, and the principles of dramatic verity in opera had once more been vindicated, but at the cost of a great public weariness. The classic polish and repose of Gluck's music were intellectually satisfying, but his scores lacked the vital heat to keep warm the blood of the artistically indolent. To this day the best works of Gluck invite our admiration, but seldom awaken our feelings. The idle, pleasure-seeking public of Europe soon turned again to its strumming ditties. It threw itself at the feet of Rossini, and within forty years after the establishment of Gluck's superiority in Paris the whole Continent was beating time to "Di tanti palpiti."

Once more the Voice was the deity of the operatic stage, and woe betide the composer who so wrote for his orchestra as to interfere with its supremacy. Rossini, who had artistic aspirations in spite of all his insincerity and intellectual laziness, made many improvements in operatic writing. It was he who first omitted from an opera all use of the old-fashioned dry recitative and used throughout that which has the support of the orchestra. He enriched the manner of writing for horns and clarinets, and he introduced instrumental effects which later composers have adopted with good effect. But, nevertheless, "William Tell" was a failure, and Rossini sulked in his tent for thirty years, while Bellini and Donizetti turned out their nursery operas, in which the orchestra has been likened to a "big guitar."

The advance in orchestral writing in opera after this time is often erroneously attributed wholly to Wagner, but undoubtedly it is the king of all musical charlatans, Meyerbeer, who should have the lion's share of the honor. When Wagner was a young, struggling, and utterly unknown composer, seeking for an opening in Paris, he threw himself at the feet of Meyerbeer, who was the idol of both the French and the Prussian capitals. Meyerbeer's operas were already known throughout Europe, and to their cheap and tawdry orchestral effects the later composers no doubt owed the suggestion that with the orchestra much might be said that could not be given to the voices. Subsequently the leaven of Wagnerism permeated European musical art, but the despised Meyerbeer undoubtedly pointed out to many writers the path which led back toward the true source of Italian operatic composition.

For in the beginning of opera, Monteverde experimented with orchestral effects, chiefly descriptive, to be sure, but indicating what might be done. Lully afterward developed some ideas as to dramatic expression in the instrumental score, and these were further expanded by Gluck. The progress along this path was checked temporarily by the reaction in favor of cheap tunes for the display of voices. Verdi took up the development of the orchestral part of Italian opera where Rossini left off, and in his early works wrote in a style that bears more than a family resemblance to that of "William Tell." But Verdi was a man of broad vision, an assimilator of universal ideas, and he was not slow to recognize the drift of operatic art. He discerned the rising importance of the orchestral score and realized the full value of the instrumental adjunct. In "Aïda" he utilized to their utmost capacity its resources in coloring and in "Otello" he placed in the orchestra some of the most important and significant passages of his music,--passages which went further than anything in the setting of the text itself toward the complete explication of the emotions working in the drama. In "Falstaff" he used the orchestra as a commentator on the humor of every situation, and even succeeded in making it aid in the interpretation of Falstaff's ridiculous philosophy.

One has only to hearken for a minute to Mascagni's use of the basses in "Cavalleria Rusticana" to recognize the source of his knowledge. "Otello," with its wonderful bass recitative in the murder scene, was produced in 1887; "Cavalleria Rusticana" was brought out in 1890. Mascagni's dramatic treatment of the orchestral part of the lyric drama is no mere imitation, however; it is a part of the general movement in Italian opera which began with Verdi's "Aïda" and which may without difficulty be traced back through Boito's "Mefistofele" (of which the first version was produced in 1868) to Rossini's "William Tell." The advance was akin to that made in all species of music. The first experiments were in the direction of description by means of imitative figuration. These are what we find in "Tell." The allotment to the orchestra of the emotional background of the drama was bound to come later, in the natural order of things. Mascagni stands in the direct line of progress in this matter, and his contribution to the general results is, though small, nevertheless worthy of remark.

How much he and Leoncavallo and Puccini owe to Ponchielli would be hard to determine. The composer of "La Gioconda" was somewhat ahead of his time, and his work was not fairly understood when it was new. But in one feature of operatic composition suggested by this work all the later composers seem inclined to go too far. They are striving to follow Verdi in his earnest attempt to set every phrase of the text of "Otello" to music perfectly adapted to the expression of its meaning. But Verdi avoided the fatal error into which these young Italians are falling. He never went so far as to obliterate from his scores all trace of melodic character.

If one were to take a dozen or twenty pages of "Tosca," "Pagliacci," "Iris," and "Zanetto," shuffle them together and then play them, it would be almost impossible for any ordinary lover of music to distinguish the writing of one composer from that of another. "Zanetto" sounds as much like Puccini as like Mascagni, and the composer of "Iris" might have written almost any page of "La Bohème." This work, however, bears the same relation to Puccini's other works as "Cavalleria Rusticana" does to the other operas of Mascagni. It is well supplied with clearly formed melodies. That is the real reason of the wide popularity of "Cavalleria Rusticana." Rarely sinking below the level of passionate expression demanded by the intense tragedy of the story, it is always purely lyric, and its melodies stamp themselves upon the memory.