Chapter 9

The intelligence that fashioned the music of Debussy was one completely aware, conscious of itself, flooded with light in its most secret places, set four-square in the whirling universe. Few artists have been as sure of their intention as Debussy always was. The man could fix with precision the most elusive emotions, could describe the sensations that flow on the borderland of consciousness, vaguely, and that most of us cannot grasp for very dizziness. He could write music as impalpable as that of the middle section of "Ibéria," in which the very silence of the night, the caresses of the breeze, seem to have taken musical flesh. Before the body of his work, so clear and lucid in its definition, so perfect in its organization, one thinks perforce of a world created out of the flying chaos beneath him by a god. We are given to know precisely of what stuff the soul of Debussy was made, what its pilgrimages were, in what adventure it sought itself out. We know precisely wherein it saw reflected its visage, in "water stilled at even," in the angry gleam of sunset on wet leaves, in wild and headlong gipsy rhythms, in moonfire, shimmering stuffs and flashing spray, in the garish lights and odors of the Peninsula, in rain fallen upon flowering parterres, in the melancholy march of clouds, the golden pomp and ritual of the church, the pools and gardens and pavilions reared for its delight by the delicate Chinese soul, in earth's thousand scents and shells and colors. For Debussy has set these adventures before us in their fullness. Before he spoke, he had dwelt with his experiences till he had plumbed them fully, till he had seen into and around and behind them clearly. And so we perceive them in their essences, in their eternal aspects. The designs are the very curve of the ecstasy. They are sheerly delimited. The notes appear to bud one out of the other, to follow each other out of the sheerest necessity, to have an original timbre, to fix a matter never known before, that can never live again. Every moment in a representative composition of Debussy's is logical and yet new. Few artists have more faultlessly said what they set out to say.

Ravel is by no means as perfect an artist. He has not the clear self-consciousness, the perfect recognition of limits. His music has not the absolute completeness of Debussy's. It is not that he is not a marvelous craftsman, greatly at ease in his medium. It is that Ravel dares, and dares continually; seeks passionately to bring his entire body into play; aspires to plenitude of utterance, to sheerness and rigidity of form. Ravel always goes directly through the center. But compare his "Rapsodie espagnol" with Debussy's "Ibéria" to perceive how direct he is. Debussy gives the circumambient atmosphere, Ravel the inner form. Between him and Debussy there is the difference between the apollonian and the dionysiac, between the smooth, level, contained, perfect, and the darker, more turbulent, passionate, and instinctive. For Ravel has been vouchsafed a high grace. He has been permitted to remain, in all his manhood, the child that once we all were. In him the powerful and spontaneous flow of emotion from out the depths of being has never been dammed. He can still speak from the fullness of his heart, cry his sorrows piercingly, produce himself completely. Gracious and urbane as his music is, proper to the world of modern things and modern adventures and modern people, there is still a gray, piercing lyrical note in it that is almost primitive, and reflects the childlike singleness and intensity of the animating spirit. The man who shaped not only the deliberately infantine "Ma Mère l'Oye," but also things as quiveringly simple and expressive and songful as "Oiseaux tristes," as "Sainte," as "Le Gibet," or the "Sonatine," as the passacaglia of the Trio or the vocal interlude in "Daphnis et Chloé," has a pureness of feeling that we have lost. And it is this crying, passionate tone, this directness of expression, this largeness of effort, even in tiny forms and limited scope, that, more than his polyphonic style or any other of the easily recognizable earmarks of his art, distinguishes his work from Debussy's. The other man has a greater sensuousness, completeness, inventiveness perhaps. But Ravel is full of a lyricism, a piercingness, a passionateness, that much of the music of Debussy successive to "Pelléas" wants. We understand Ravel's music, in the famous phrase of Beethoven, as speech "vom Herz--zu Herzen."

And we turn to it gratefully, as we turn to all art full of the "sense of tears in mortal things," and into which the pulse of human life has passed directly. For there are times when he is close to the bourne of life, when his art is immediately the orifice of the dark, flowering, germinating region where lie lodged the dynamics of the human soul. There are times when it taps vasty regions. There are times when Ravel has but to touch a note, and we unclose; when he has but to let an instrument sing a certain phrase, and things which lie buried deep in the heart rise out of the dark, like the nymph in his piano-poem, dripping with stars. The music of "Daphnis," from the very moment of the introduction with its softly unfolding chords, its far, glamorous fanfares, its human throats swollen with songs, seems to thrust open doors into the unplumbed caverns of the soul, and summon forth the stuff to shape the dream. Little song written since Weber set his horns a-breathing, or Brahms transmuted the witchery of the German forest into tone, is more romantic. Over it might be set the invocation of Heine:

"Steiget auf, ihr alten Traüme! Oeffne dich, dur Herzenstor!"

Like the passage that ushers in the last marvelous scene of his great ballet, it seems to waken us from the unreal world to the real, and show us the face of the earth, and the overarching blue once more.

And Ravel is at once more traditional and more progressive a composer than Debussy. One feels the past most strongly in him. Debussy, with his thoroughly impressionistic style, is more the time. No doubt there is a certain almost Hebraic melancholy and sharp lyricism in Ravel's music which gives some color to the rumor that he is Jewish. And yet, for all that, one feels Rameau become modern in his sober, gray, dainty structures, in the dryness of his black. In "Le Tombeau de Couperin," Ravel is the old clavecinist become contemporary of Scriabine and Strawinsky, the old clavecinist who had seen the projectiles fall at Verdun and lost a dozen friends in the trenches. He finds it easy, as in some of his recent songs, to achieve the folktone. If it is true that he is a Jew, then his traditionalism is but one more brilliant instance of the power of France to adopt the children of alien races and make them more intensely her own than some of her proper offspring. In no other instance, however, not in that of Lully nor in that of Franck, has the transfusion of blood been so successful. Ravel is in no wise treacherous to himself. There must be something in the character of the French nation that makes of every Jew, if not a son, yet the happiest and most faithful of stepchildren.

And as one feels the past more strongly in Ravel, so, too, one finds him in certain respects even more revolutionary than Debussy. For while the power of the latter flagged in the making of strangely MacDowellesque preludes, or in the composition of such ghosts as "Gigues" and "Jeux" and "Karma," Ravel has continued increasingly in power, has developed his art until he has come to be one of the leaders of the musical evolution. If there is a single modern composition which can be compared to "Petruchka" for its picture of mass-movement, its pungent naturalism, it is the "Feria" of the "Rapsodie espagnol." If there is a single modern orchestral work that can be compared to either of the two great ballets of Strawinsky for rhythmical vitality, it is "Daphnis et Chloé," with its flaming dionysiac pulses, its "pipes and timbrels," its wild ecstasy. The same delicate clockwork mechanism characterizes "L'Heure espagnol," his opera bouffe, that characterizes "Petruchka" and "Le Rossignol." A piano-poem like "Scarbo" rouses the full might of the piano, and seems to bridge the way to the music of Leo Ornstein and the age of steel. And Ravel has some of the squareness, the sheerness and rigidity for which the ultra-modern are striving. The liquescence of Debussy has given away again to something more metallic, more solid and unflowing. There is a sort of new stiffness in this music. And in the field of harmony Ravel is steadily building upon Debussy. His chords grow sharper and more biting; in "Le Tombeau de Couperin" and the minuet on the name of Haydn there is a harmonic daring and subtlety and even bitterness that is beyond anything attained by Debussy, placing the composer with the Strawinskys and the Schoenbergs and the Ornsteins and all the other barbarians.

And then his ironic humor, as well, distinguishes him from Debussy. The humor of the latter was, after all, light and whimsical. That of Ravel, on the other hand, is extremely bitter. No doubt, the "icy" Ravel, the artist "à qui l'absence de sensibilité fait encore une personalité," as one of the quirites termed him, never existed save in the minds of those unable to comprehend his reticence and delicacy and essentiality. Nevertheless, besides his lyrical, dreamy, romantic temper, he has a very unsentimental vein, occurring no doubt, as in Heine, as a sort of corrective, a sort of compensation, for the pervading sensibleness. And so we find the tender poet of the "Sonatine" and the string-quartet and "Miroirs" writing the witty and mordant music of "L'Heure espagnol"; setting the bitter little "Histoires naturelles" of Jules Renard for chant, writing in "Valses nobles et sentimentales" a slightly ironical and disillusioned if smiling and graceful and delicate commentary to the season of love, projecting a music-drama on the subject of Don Quixote. Over his waltzes Ravel maliciously sets a quotation from Henri de Regnier: "Le plaisir délicieux et toujours nouveau d'une occupation inutile." With Casella, he writes a musical "A la manière de," parodying Wagner, d'Indy, Chabrier, Strauss and others most wittily. Something of Eric Satie, the clown of music, exists in him, too. And probably nothing makes him so inexplicable and irritating to his audiences as his ironic streak. People are willing to forgive an artist all, save only irony.

What the future holds for Maurice Ravel is known only to the three norns. But, unless some unforeseen accident occur and interrupt his career, it can only hold the most brilliant rewards. The man seems surely bound for splendid shores. He is only in the forty-fifth year of his life, and though his genius was already fresh and subtle in the Quartet, written as early as 1903, it has grown beautifully in power during the last two decades. The continued exploration of musical means has given his personality increasingly free play, and has unbound him. The gesture of the hand has grown swifter and more commanding. The instruments have become more obedient. He has matured, become virile and even magistral. The war has not softened him. He speaks as intimately as ever in "Le Tombeau de Couperin." Already one can see in him one of the most delightful and original musical geniuses that have been nourished by the teeming soil of France. It is possible that the future will refer to him in even more enthusiastic tone.

Borodin

Borodin's music is a reading of Russia's destiny in the book of her past. "I live," the composer of "Prince Igor" wrote to a friend one summer, "on a steep and lofty mountain whose base is washed by the Volga. And for thirty _versts_ I can follow the windings of the river through the blue of the immeasurable distance." And his music, at least those rich fragments that are his music, make us feel as though that summer sojourn had been symbolic of his career, as though in spirit he had ever lived in some high, visionary place overlooking the sweep of centuries in which Russia had waxed from infancy to maturity. It is as though the chiming of the bells of innumerable Russian villages, villages living and villages dead and underground a thousand years, had mounted incessantly to his ears, telling him of the progress of a thing round which sixty generations had risen and fallen like foam. It is as though he had followed the Volga, flowing eastward, not alone for thirty, but for thirty hundred _versts_ through plains reverberant with the age-long combat and clashing, the bleeding and fusing of Slav and Tartar; had followed it until it reached the zone where Asia, with her caravans and plagues and shrill Mongolian fifes, comes out of endless wastes. And it is as though, piercing further into the bosom of the eternal mother, Asia, his eye had rested finally upon a single spot, a single nucleus; that it had watched that nucleus increase into a tribe; had watched that tribe commence its westward march, wandering, spawning, pushing ever westward, battling and groping, advancing slowly, patiently, steadily into power and manhood, until it had come into possession of the wildest and fairest land of eastern Europe, until it had joined with other stocks and swelled into a vast nation, a gigantic empire; and that then, in that moment of fulfilment, Borodin had turned in prophetic ecstasy upon modern Russia and bade it ring its bells and sound its chants, bade it push onward with its old faith and vigor, since the Slavonic grandeur and glory were assured. For through the savage trumpet-blasts and rude and lumbering rhythms, through the cymbal-crashing Mongol marches and warm, uncouth peasant chants that are his music, there surges that vision, that sense of immanent glory, that fortifying asseveration.

It rises to us for the reason that although his music is an evocation of past times, a conjuring up of the buried Muscovy, it is a glad and exuberant one. It has the tone neither of those visions of departed days inspired by yearnings for greener, happier ages, nor of those out of which there speaks, as there speaks out of the "Salammbô" of Flaubert, for instance, a horror of man's everlasting filth and ferocity. A fresh and joyous and inspiriting wind blows from these pages. The music of "Prince Igor," with its epical movement and counter-movement, its shouting, wandering, savage hordes, its brandished spears and flashing Slavic helms, its marvelous parade of warrior pride and woman's flesh, its evocation of the times of the Tartar inundations, is full of a rude, chivalric lustiness, a great barbaric zest and appetite, a childlike laughter. The B-minor symphony makes us feel as though the very pagan joy and vigor that had once informed the assemblies and jousts and feasting of the boyartry of medieval Russia, and made the guzli and bamboo flute to sound, had waked again in Borodin; and in this magnificent and lumbering music, these crude and massive forms, lifted its wassail and its gold and song once more. For the composer of such works, such evocations, it is patent that the past was the wonderful warrant of a wonderful future. For this man, indeed, the reliques, the trappings, the minaret-crowned monuments, the barbaric chants and gold ornaments, all the thousand rich things that recalled Muscovy and the buried empire to him, and that he loved so dearly, were valuable chiefly because they were the emblems of the time that bore the happy present.

He was one of the famous "five" who in the decade after 1870 found Russia her modern musical speech. The group, which comprised Moussorgsky, Balakirew, Cui, Rimsky-Korsakoff and Borodin, was unified by an impulse common to all the members. All were in revolt against the grammar of classical music. All felt the tradition of western European music to be inimical to the free expression of the Russian sensibility, and for the first time opposed to the musical West the musical East. For these young composers, the plans and shapes of phrases, the modes, the rhythms, the counterpoint, the "Rules," the entire musical theory and science that had been established in Europe by the practice of generations of composers, was a convention; the Russian music, particularly that of Rubinstein and Tchaikowsky, which had sought to ply itself in accord with it, an artificial and sophisticated thing, as artificial and sophisticated a thing as the pseudo-Parisian culture of the Petrograd _salons_. It was their firm conviction that for the Russian composer only one model existed, and that was the Russian folk-song. Only in the folk-song were to be found the musical equivalents of the spoken speech. Only in the folk-song were to be found the musical accents and turns and inflections, the phrases and rhythms and colors that expressed the national temper. And to the popular and to the liturgical chants they went in search of their proper idiom. But it was not only to the musical heritage that they went. In search of their own selves they sought out every vestige of the past, every vestige of the fatherland that Peter the Great and Catherine had sought to reform, and that persists in every Russian underneath the coating of convention. Together with the others, Borodin steeped himself in the lore and legends of the buried empire, familiarized himself with the customs of the Slavs of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, searched libraries for the missals illuminated by the old monks of the Greek church, deciphered epics and ballads and chronicles, assimilated the songs and incantations of the peasants and savage tribes of the steppes, collected the melodies of European and Asiatic Russia from the Ukraine to Turkestan.

And he and his companions were right. Their instincts had not misled them. The contact with real Russia loosed them all. Through that new musical orientation, they arose, each full of his own strength.

It was the contact of like with like that made them expressive. For what they inwardly were was close akin to the breath, the spirit, the touch, that had invented those chants, and built those minarets and wrought that armor and composed those epics. The accent of Moussorgsky was in the grave and popular melodies, in the liturgical incantations, before he was born. His most original passages resemble nothing so much as the rude, stark folk-song bequeathed to the world by medieval Russia. Rimsky-Korsakoff's love of brilliant, gay materials had been in generations and generations of peasant-artists, in every peasant who on a holiday had donned a gaudy, beribboned costume, centuries before the music of "Scheherazade" and "Le Coq d'or" was conceived. So, too, the temperaments and sensibilities of the others. They had but to touch these emblems and reliques and rhythms to become self-conscious.

It must have been in particular the old warrior, the chivalric, perhaps even the Tartar imprint in the emblems of the Russian past that liberated Borodin. For he is the old Tartar, the old savage boyar, of modern music. In very person he was the son of military feudal Russia. His photographs that exhibit the great chieftain head, the mane and the savage, long Mongolian mustache in all their flat contradiction of the conventional nineteenth-century dress, the black and star and ribbon of court costume, make one half credit the legend that his family was of pure Circassian descent, and had flowed down into the great Russian maelstrom from out a Georgian stronghold. His idiom bears strongly the imprint of that body; suggests strongly that heredity. It is patently the expression of a personality who desired exuberant bright sound and color, needed the brandishing of blades and the shrilling of Tartar fifes and the leaping dance of Tartar archers, had nostalgia for the savage life that had spawned upon the steppes. And as such it is distinct from that of the other composers of the group. His music has none of the piercingness and poignancy and irony, none of the deep humility and grim resignation, so characteristic of Moussorgsky's. It has none of the brilliant Orientalism of Balakirew and Cui, none of Rimsky-Korsakoff's soft felicity and lambency and light sensuousness. It is rude and robust and male, full of angular movements and vigorous blows and lusty, childlike laughter, and, at the same time, of a singularly fine romantic fervor. It is almost the contrary of that of the neurotic, sallow Tchaikowsky of the hysterical frenzies and hysterical self-pity and the habits of morose delectation. If there is any symphony that can be called pre-eminently virile and Russian, it is assuredly Borodin's second, the great one in B-minor. And in "Prince Igor" and the symphonic poem "On the Steppes," for the first time, continental Asia, with its sharp beat of savage drums and its oceanic wastes of grass, its strong Kurdish beverages and jerked steaks, comes into modern music.

And was not this restatement of the national character Borodin's great contribution to his age's life? For has not the most recent time of all beheld a resurgence of the Russian spirit in the political field, an attempted reconstitution of society in the light of the just and fraternal and religious spirit with which this folk has ever been endowed, and of which, in all its misery, it has ever been aware? If there is any teacher who dominates Russian thought and Russian affairs to-day, it is Tolstoy. And from whom did Tolstoy learn more than from that conserver of the pristine and dominating Russian traits, the moujik? And so men like Borodin who sought out the racial character and reflected it in their music seem to us almost like outriders, like the tribesmen who are sent on ahead of wandering folks to spy out the land, to find the passes, and guide their fellows on. Their art is a summons to individual life. Borodin in particular came upon the Russian people at a moment when, like a tribe that has quit its fields in search of better pasturage, and has wandered far and found itself in barren and difficult and almost impassable ground, it was bewildered and despondent, and felt itself lost and like to perish in the wilderness. And while his folk lay prone, he had arisen and mounted the encircling ridge. And with a joyous cry, and the flaunting of a banner, he called them to the way they had to traverse, and told them the road was found.