Chapter 14

For it was not a Brahms the world had gotten again. Indeed, it was a personality of just the sort that Brahms was not. The resemblance was of the most superficial. Both men went to school to Bach and the polyphonic masters. Both were traditionalists. There the kinship ends. For the one was a poet, a sturdily living, rich and powerful person. The other was essentially a harsh and ugly being, eminently wanting the divine flame. For Brahms, erudition was only a means to his end, a fortification of his personal mode of expression. He saw that the weaknesses of many of the romantic composers, his kin, of Schumann his spiritual father in particular, were due their want of organizing power, their helplessness in the larger forms. And eager to achieve large, solid, resisting form in his own work, he went to the great masters of musical science, to Beethoven and Haydn and in particular to Bach, to learn of them, that he might do for his day something of what they had done for theirs. And he was able to assimilate vast quantities of his learning, and make it part of his flesh and bone. At times, no doubt, one is painfully aware of his erudition, painfully aware that he is applying principles learned from Beethoven and Bach, manipulating his music out of no inner necessity. At times, his music does smell of the lamp. And yet, how completely those juiceless moments are outbalanced by the mass of his living, fragrant, robust song! With what rareness the pedant in Brahms emerges! Behind this music there is almost always visible the great, grave, passionate, resigned creature that was Brahms, the man who sought with all his might to hold himself firm and erect and unyielding before the hideous onslaughts of life, the man who lived without hope of fulfilment, loved without hope of consummation, and yet knew that it was enough fulfilment, enough consummation to have loved, to have been touched with a radiant dream; the man who prayed only that his heart might not wither, and that he might never cease to long and dream and feel the hurt and solace of beauty and have the power to sing. And in his music there is almost always the consolation of the great forests, the healing of the trees and silences, the cooling hands of the earth, the everlasting yea-saying to love and beauty, the manly resignation, the leave-taking from dreams and life. All this music says, "Song is enough."

But no such goodly presence glimmers through the music of Max Reger. No sturdy bardic spirit vibrates in it. This Reger is a sarcastic, churlish fellow, bitter and pedantic and rude. He is a sort of musical Cyclops, a strong, ugly creature bulging with knotty and unshapely muscles, an ogre of composition. He has little delicacy, little finesse of spirit. In listening to these works with their clumsy blocks of tone, their eternal sunless complaining, their lack of humor where they would be humorous, their lack of passion where they would be profound, their sardonic and monotonous bourdon, one is perforce reminded of the photograph of Reger which his publishers place on the cover of their catalogue of his works, the photograph that shows something that is like a swollen, myopic beetle with thick lips and sullen expression crouching on an organ-bench. There is something repulsive as well as pedantic in this art. The poetry, the nobility, the moderation and cleanness of line of Brahms is absent. Instead, there is a sort of brutal coldness, the coldness of the born pedant, a prevalence of bad humor, a poverty of invention and organizing power that conceals itself under an elaborate and complex and erudite surface. The strong, calm, classic beauty of Brahms is wanting. For all its air of subtlety and severity and profundity, its learned and classicizing manner, the music of Reger is really superficial. The man only seldom achieves form. Generally, for all the complex and convulsive activity of his music, nothing really progresses, develops, happens in it. Above all, the stylistic severity of Brahms in Reger has become a confusion of styles; an absence of style. The classic has become the baroque.

Reger is one of the men who develop muscles that hamper all grace and freedom of activity. One cannot help feeling that he went to the classic masters for their formulas in order to make of composition chiefly a mental exercise, that he accepted so many rules and manners and turns in order to free himself of the necessity of making free and full and spontaneous movements. With Reger, creation becomes routine. His works are stereotyped; stale terribly quickly. There are moments when one wonders whether he understood at all what creation is. For certainly, three-quarters of his compositions seem written out of no inner necessity, bring no liberation in their train. They are like mathematical problems and solutions, sheer brain-spun and unlyrical works. One is ever conscious in Reger that he is solving contrapuntal problems in order to astonish the vulgar herd of the professors. Reger certainly knew the art of talking with an astonishing show of logic, and yet saying nothing. Perhaps he talked continuously in order not to have to reflect. And for all his erudition, he understood his masters intellectually only. He felt himself called upon to continue the work of the three great "B's," and yet never understood the grand spirit that animated their art. Strauss, with his fine conduct of instruments through the score of "Salome," is nearer the spirit of Bach than Reger with all his fugues and double fugues ever got.

No doubt, Reger loved the mathematical solidity and balance of the older music, and therefore sought to assimilate it. But he did more than just learn of it, as Brahms had done. He sought to rival the great men of the past on their own ground, to do what they did better than they had done it, to be able to say, "See, I can do the trick, too!" So we find him writing counterpoint for the sake of the learnedness and presumable respectability, rather than as a piece of expression. His compositions are overburdened and cluttered and marred by all sorts of erudite turns and twists and manoeuvers. The man's entire attention seems to have been set on making his works astonish the learned and make mad the simple. Even a slight song like "Wenn die Linde blüht" is decked with contrapuntal felicities. He copies the mannerisms of the composers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, contorts his compositions with all manner of outmoded turns. He appears to have come to his worktable inevitably with his mind full of the compositions he had been studying. His impulse seems always a reflected thing, a desire to compete with some one on that person's terms. He writes fugues for organs and sonatas for violin solo under the influence of Bach, concerti grossi under the influence of Haendel, variations under that of Mozart, sonatas under that of Brahms. In vain one searches for a perfectly individual style throughout his works. The living man is buried under the mass of badly assimilated learning. Even at best, in the Hiller variations, in some of the string trios and organ fugues, some of his grave adagios, even in some of his sardonic and turbulent scherzi (perhaps his most original contributions), his art is rather more a refinement on another art than a fresh and vital expression. In him, education had produced the typical pedant, a pedant of Cyclopean muscularity, perhaps, but nevertheless a pedant.

And so, instead of being Brahms's successor, Reger is to-day seen as the very contrary of Brahms. It is not that fugues and concerti in the olden style cannot be written to-day, that modern music and the antique forms are incompatible. It is that Reger was very little the artist. He mistook the material vesture for the spirit, thought that there were formulas for composition, royal roads to the heaven of Bach and Mozart. Something more of humanity, sympathy for man and his experiences, inner freedom, might have saved him. But it was just the poetic gift that the man was lamentably without. And so, freighted with too much erudition and too little wisdom, Reger went aground.

Schoenberg

Arnold Schoenberg of Vienna is the great troubling presence of modern music. His vast, sallow skull lowers over it like a sort of North Cape. For with him, with the famous cruel five orchestral and nine piano pieces, we seem to be entering the arctic zone of musical art. None of the old beacons, none of the old stars, can guide us longer in these frozen wastes. Strange, menacing forms surround us, and the light is bleak and chill and faint. The characteristic compositions of Strawinsky and Ornstein, too, have no tonality, lack every vestige of a pure chord, and exhibit unanalyzable harmonies, and rhythms of a violent novelty, in the most amazing conjunctions. But they, at least, impart a certain sense of liberation. They, at least, bear certain witness to the emotional flight of the composer. An instinct pulses here, an instinct barbarous and unbridled, if you will, but indubitably exuberant and vivid. These works have a necessity. These harmonies have color. This music is patently speech. But the later compositions of Schoenberg withhold themselves, refuse our contact. They baffle with their apparently wilful ugliness, and bewilder with their geometric cruelty and coldness. One gets no intimation that in fashioning them the composer has liberated himself. On the contrary, they seem icy and brain-spun. They are like men formed not out of flesh and bone and blood, but out of glass and wire and concrete. They creak and groan and grate in their motion. They have all the deathly pallor of abstractions.

And Schoenberg remains a troubling presence as long as one persists in regarding these particular pieces as the expression of a sensibility, as long as one persists in seeking in them the lyric flight. For though one perceives them with the intellect one can scarcely feel them musically. The conflicting rhythms of the third of the "Three Pieces for Pianoforte" clash without generating heat, without, after all, really sounding. No doubt, there is a certain admirable uncompromisingness, a certain Egyptian severity, in the musical line of the first of the "Three." But if there is such a thing as form without significance in music, might not these compositions serve to exemplify it? Indeed, it is only as experiments, as the incorporation in tone of an abstract and intellectualized conception of forms, that one can at all comprehend them. And it is only in regarding him as primarily an experimenter that the later Schoenberg loses his incomprehensibility, and comes somewhat nearer to us.

There is much in Schoenberg's career that makes this explanation something more than an easy way of disposing of a troublesome problem, makes it, indeed, eminently plausible. Schoenberg was never the most instinctive and sensible, the least cerebral and intellectualizing of musicians. For just as Gustav Mahler might stand as an instance of musicianly temperament fatally outweighing musicianly intellect, so Arnold Schoenberg might stand as an example of the equally excessive outbalancing of sensibility by brain-stuff. The friendship of the two men and their mutual admiration might easily be explained by the fact that each caught sight in the other of the element he wanted most. No doubt, the works of Schoenberg's early period, which extends from the songs, Op. 1, through the "Kammersymphonie," Op. 9, are full of a fervent lyricism, a romantic effusiveness. "Gurrelieder," indeed, opens wide the floodgates of romanticism. But these compositions are somewhat uncharacteristic and derivative. The early songs, for instance, might have proceeded from the facile pen of Richard Strauss. They have much of the Straussian sleepy warmth and sweet harmonic color, much of the Straussian exuberance which at times so readily degenerates into the windy pride of the young bourgeois deeming himself a superman. It was only by accident that "Freihold" was not written by the Munich tone-poet. The orchestral poem after Maeterlinck's "Pelléas" is also ultra-romantic and post-Wagnerian. The trumpet theme, the "Pelléas" theme, for instance, is lineally descended from the "Walter von Stolzing" and "Parisfal" motives. The work reveals Schoenberg striving to emulate Strauss in the field of the symphonic poem; striving, however, in vain. For it has none of Strauss's glitter and point, and is rather dull and soggy. The great, bristling, pathetic climax is of the sort that has become exasperating and vulgar, rather than exciting, since Wagner and Tchaikowsky first exploited it. On the whole, the work is much less "Pelléas et Mélisande" than it is "Pelleas _und_ Melisanda." And the other works of this period, more brilliantly made and more opulently colored though they are, are still eminently of the romantic school. The person who declared ecstatically that assisting at a performance of the string sextet, "Verklärte Nacht," resembled "hearing a new 'Tristan,'" exhibited, after all, unconscious critical acumen. The great cantata, "Gurrelieder," the symphonic setting of Jens Peter Jacobsen's romance in lyrics, might even stand as the grand finale of the whole post-Wagnerian, ultra-romantic period, and represent the moment at which the whole style and atmosphere did its last heroic service. And even the "Kammersymphonie," despite all the signs of transition to a more personal manner, despite the increased scholasticism of tone, despite the more acidulous coloration, despite the distinctly novel scherzo, with its capricious and fawn-like leaping, is not quite characteristic of the man.

It is in the string quartet, Opus 7, that Schoenberg first speaks his proper tongue. And in revealing him, the work demonstrates how theoretical his intelligence is. No doubt, the D-minor Quartet is an important work, one of the most important of chamber compositions. Certainly, it is one of the great pieces of modern music. It gives an unforgettable and vivid sense of the voice, the accent, the timbre, of the hurtling, neurotic modern world; hints the coming of a free and subtle, bitter and powerful, modern musical art. As a piece of construction alone, the D-minor Quartet is immensely significant. The polyphony is bold and free, the voices exhibiting an independence perhaps unknown since the days of the madrigalists. The work is unified not only by the consolidation of the four movements into one, but as well by a central movement, a "durchführung" which, introduced between the scherzo and the adagio, reveals the inner coherence of all the themes. There is no sacrifice of logic to the rules of harmony. Indeed, the work is characterized by a certain uncompromisingness and sharpness in its harmonies. The instrumental coloring is prismatic, all the registers of the strings being utilized with great deftness. Exclusive of the theme of the scherzo, which recalls a little overmuch the Teutonic banalities of Mahler's symphonies, the quality of the music is, on the whole, grave and poignant and uplifted. It has a scholarly dignity, a magistral richness, a chiaroscuro that at moments recalls Brahms, though Schoenberg has a sensuous melancholy, a delicacy and an Hebraic bitterness that the other has not. Like so much of Brahms, this music comes out of the silence of the study, though the study in this case is the chamber of a Jewish scholar more than that of a German. Were the entire work of the fullness and lyricism of the last two movements; were it throughout as impassioned as is the broad gray clamant germinal theme that commences the work and sweeps it before it, one might easily include the composer in the company of the masters of musical art.

Unfortunately, the magnificent passages are interspersed with unmusical ones. It is not only that the work does not quite "conceal art," that it smells overmuch of the laboratory. It is that portions of it are scarcely "felt" at all, are only too obviously carpentered. The work is full of music that addresses itself primarily to professors of theory. It is full of writing dictated by an arbitrary and intellectual conception of form. There is a great deal of counterpoint in it that exists only for the benefit of those who "read" scores, and that clutters the work. There are whole passages that exist only in obedience to some scholastic demand for thematic inversions and deformations. There is an unnecessary deal of marching and countermarching of instruments, an obsession with certain rhythms that becomes purely mechanical, an intensification of the contrapuntal pickings and peckings that annoy so often in the compositions of Brahms. It is Schoenberg the intellectualist, Schoenberg the Doctor of Music, not Schoenberg the artist, who obtains here.

And it is he one encounters almost solely in the music of the third period, the enigmatical little pieces for orchestra and piano. It is he who has emerged victorious from the duel revealed by the D-minor Quartet. Those grotesque and menacing little works are lineally descended from the intellectualized passages of the great preceding one, are, indeed, a complete expression of the theoretical processes which called them into being. For while in the quartet the scholasticism appears to have been superimposed upon a body of musical ideas, in the works of the last period it appears well-nigh the generative principle. These latter have all the airlessness, the want of poetry, the frigidity of things constructed after a formula, daring and brilliant though that formula is. They make it seem as though Schoenberg had, through a process of consideration and thought and study, arrived at the conclusion that the music of the future would, in the logic of things, take such and such a turn, that tonality as it is understood was doomed to disappear, that part-writing would attain a new independence, that new conceptions of harmony would result, that rhythm would attain a new freedom through the influence of the new mechanical body of man, and had proceeded to incorporate his theories in tone. One finds the experimental and methodical at every turn throughout these compositions. Behind them one seems invariably to perceive some one sitting before a sheet of music paper and tampering with the art of music; seeking to discover what would result were he to accept as harmonic basis not the major triad but the minor ninth, to set two contradictory rhythms clashing, or to sharpen everything and maintain a geometric hardness of line. One always feels in them the intelligence setting forth deliberately to discover new musical form. For all their apparent freedom, they are full of the oldest musical procedures, abound in canonic imitations, in augmentations, and diminutions, in all sorts of grizzled contrapuntal manoevers. They are head-music of the most uncompromising sort. The "Five Orchestral Pieces" abound in purely theoretical combinations of instruments, combinations that do not at all sound. "Herzgewächse," the setting of the poem of Maeterlinck made contemporaneously with these pieces, makes fantastic demands upon the singer, asks the voice to hold high F _pppp_, to leap swiftly across the widest intervals, and to maintain itself over a filigree accompaniment of celesta, harmonium and harp. But it is in the piano-music that the sonorities are most rudely neglected. At moments they impress one as nothing more than abstractions from the idiosyncrasies and mannerisms of the works of Schoenberg's second period made in the hope of arriving at definiteness of style and intensity of speech. They smell of the synagogue as much as they do of the laboratory. Beside the Doctor of Music there stands the Talmudic Jew, the man all intellect and no feeling, who subtilizes over musical art as though it were the Law.

The compositions of this period constitute an artistic retrogression rather than an advance. They are not "modern music" for all their apparent stylistic kinship to the music of Strawinsky and Scriabine and Ornstein. Nor are they "music of the past." They belong rather more to the sort of music that has no more relation with yesteryear than it has with this or next. They belong to the sort that never has youth and vigor, is old the moment it is produced. Their essential inexpressiveness makes almost virtueless the characteristics which Schoenberg has carried into them from out his fecund period. The severity and boldness of contour, so biting in the quartet, becomes almost without significance in them. If there is such a thing as rhythmless music, would not the stagnant orchestra of the "Five Orchestral Pieces" exemplify it? The alternately rich and acidulous color is faded; an icy green predominates. And, curiously enough, throughout the group the old romantic allegiance of the earliest Schoenberg reaffirms itself. Wotan with his spear stalks through the conclusion of the first of the "Three Pieces for Pianoforte." And the second of the series, a composition not without its incisiveness, as well as several of the tiny "Six Piano Pieces," Op. 19, recall at moments Brahms, at others Chopin, a Chopin of course cadaverous and turned slightly green.

It may be that by means of these experiments Schoenberg will gird himself for a new period of creativity just as once indubitably by the aid of experiments which he did not publish he girded himself for the period represented by the D-minor Quartet. It may be that after the cloud of the war has completely lifted from the field of art, and a normal interchange is re-established it will be seen that the monodrama, Op. 20, "Die Lieder des 'Pierrot Lunaire,'" which was the latest of his works to obtain a hearing, was in truth an earnest of a new loosing of the old lyrical impulse so long incarcerated. But, for the present, Schoenberg, the composer, is almost completely obscured by Schoenberg, the experimenter. For the present, he is the great theoretician combating other theoreticians, the Doctor of Music annihilating doctor-made laws. As such, his usefulness is by no means small. He speaks with an authority no less than that of his adversaries, the other and less radical professors. He, too, has invented a system and a method; his "Harmonielehre," for instance, is as irrefragable as theirs; he can quote scripture with the devil. He is at least demolishing the old constraining superstitions, and in so doing may exercise an incalculable influence on the course of music. It may be that many a musician of the future will find himself the better equipped because of Schoenberg's explorations. He is undoubtedly the most magistral theorist of the day. The fact that he could write at the head of his treatise on harmony, "What I have here set down I have learned from my pupils," independently proves him a great teacher. It is probable that his later music, the music of his puzzling "third period," will shortly come to be considered as simply a part of his unique course of instruction.

Sibelius

Others have brought the North into houses, and there transmuted it to music. And their art is dependent on the shelter, and removed from it, dwindles. But Sibelius has written music innocent of roof and inclosure, music proper indeed to the vasty open, the Finnish heaven under which it grew. And could we but carry it out into the northern day, we would find it undiminished, vivid with all its life. For it is blood-brother to the wind and the silence, to the lowering cliffs and the spray, to the harsh crying of sea-birds and the breath of the fog, and, set amid them, would wax, and take new strength from the strengths of its kin.