Chapter 2

The new century is at hand--I am not one of those chronologically stupid persons who believes that we are now in it--and tottering as I am on its brink, the brink of my grave, and of all born during 1900, it might prove interesting as well as profitable for me to review my musical past. I hear the young folks cry aloud: "Here comes that garrulous old chap again with his car-load of musty reminiscences! Even if Old Fogy did study with Hummel, is that any reason why we should be bored by the fact? How can a skeleton in the closet tell us anything valuable about contemporary music?"

To this youthful wail--and it is a real one--I can raise no real objection. I am an Old Fogy; but I know it. That marks the difference between other old fogies and myself. Some English wit recently remarked that the sadness of old age in a woman is because her face changes; but the sad part of old age in a man is that his mind does not change. Well, I admit we septuagenarians are set in our ways. We have lived our lives, felt, suffered, rejoiced, and perhaps grown a little tolerant, a little apathetic. The young people call it cynical; yet it is not cynicism--only a large charity for the failings, the shortcomings of others. So what I am about to say in this letter must not be set down as either garrulity or senile cynicism. It is the result of a half-century of close observation, and, young folks, let me tell you that in fifty years much music has gone through the orifices of my ears; many artistic reputations made and lost!

I repeat, I have witnessed the rise and fall of so many musical dynasties; have seen men like Wagner emerge from northern mists and die in the full glory of a reverberating sunset. And I have also remarked that this same Richard the Actor touched his apogee fifteen years ago and more. Already signs are not wanting which show that Wagner and Wagnerism is on the decline. As Swinburne said of Walt Whitman: "A reformer--but not founder." This holds good of Wagner, who closed a period and did not begin a new one. In a word, Wagner was a theater musician, one cursed by a craze for public applause--and shekels--and knowing his public, gave them more operatic music than any Italian who ever wrote for barrel-organ fame. Wagner became popular, the rage; and today his music, grown stale in Germany, is being fervently imitated, nay, burlesqued, by the neo-Italian school. Come, is it not a comical situation, this swapping of themes among the nations, this picking and stealing of styles? And let me tell you that of all the Robber Barons of music, Wagner was the worst. He laid hands on every score, classical or modern, that he got hold of.

But I anticipate; I put the _coda_ before the dog. When _Rienzi_ appeared none of us were deceived. We recognized our Meyerbeer disfigured by clumsy, heavy German treatment. Wagner had been to the opera in Paris and knew his Meyerbeer; but even Wagner could not distance Meyerbeer. He had not the melodic invention, the orchestral tact, or the dramatic sense--at that time. Being a born mimicker of other men, a very German in industry, and a great egotist, he began casting about for other models. He soon found one, the greatest of all for his purpose. It was Weber--that same Weber for whose obsequies Wagner wrote some funeral music, not forgetting to use a theme from the _Euryanthe_ overture. Weber was to Wagner a veritable Golconda. From this diamond mine he dug out tons of precious stones; and some of them he used for _The Flying Dutchman_. We all saw then what a parody on Weber was this pretentious opera, with its patches of purple, its stale choruses, its tiresome recitatives. The latter Wagner fondly imagined were but prolonged melodies. Already in his active, but musically-barren brain, theories were seething. "How to compose operas without music" might be the title of all his prose theoretical works. Not having a tail, this fox, therefore, solemnly argued that tails were useless appanages. You remember your Æsop! Instead of melodic inspiration, themes were to be used. Instead of broad, flowing, but intelligible themes, a mongrel breed of recitative and _parlando_ was to take their place.

It was all very clever, I grant you, for it threw dust in the public eye--and the public likes to have its eyes dusted, especially if the dust is fine and flattering. Wagner proceeded to make it so by labeling his themes, leading motives. Each one meant something. And the Germans, the vainest race in Europe, rose like catfish to the bait. Wagner, in effect, told them that his music required brains--Aha! said the German, he means _me_; that his music was not cheap, pretty, and sensual, but spiritual, lofty, ideal--Oho! cried the German, he means _me_ again. I am ideal. And so the game went merrily on. Being the greatest egotist that ever lived, Wagner knew that this music could not make its way without a violent polemic, without extraneous advertising aids. So he made a big row; became socialist, agitator, exile. He dragged into his music and the discussion of it, art, politics, literature, philosophy, and religion. It is a well-known fact that this humbugging comedian had written the _Ring of the Nibelungs_ before he absorbed the Schopenhauerian doctrines, and then altered the entire scheme so as to imbue--forsooth!--his music with pessimism.

Nor was there ever such folly, such arrant "faking" as this! What has philosophy, religion, politics to do with operatic music? It cannot express any one of them. Wagner, clever charlatan, knew this, so he worked the leading-motive game for all it was worth. Realizing the indefinite nature of music, he gave to his themes--most of them borrowed without quotation marks--such titles as Love-Death; Presentiment of Death; Cooking motive--in _Siegfried_; Compact theme, etc., etc. The list is a lengthy one. And when taxed with originating all this futile child's-play he denied that he had named his themes. Pray, then, who did? Did von Wolzogen? Did Tappert? They worked directly under his direction, put forth the musical lures and decoys and the ignorant public was easily bamboozled. Simply mention the esoteric, the mysterious omens, signs, dark designs, and magical symbols, and you catch a certain class of weak-minded persons.

Wagner knew this; knew that the theater, with its lights, its scenery, its costumes, orchestra, and vocalizing, was the place to hoodwink the "cultured" classes. Having a pretty taste in digging up old fables and love-stories, he saturated them with mysticism and far-fetched musical motives. If _The Flying Dutchman_ is absurd in its story--what possible interest can we take in the _Salvation_ of an idiotic mariner, who doesn't know how to navigate his ship, much less a wife?--what is to be said of _Lohengrin_? This cheap Italian music, sugar-coated in its sensuousness, the awful borrowings from Weber, Marschner, Beethoven, and Gluck--and the story! It is called "mystic." Why? Because it is _not_, I suppose. What puerile trumpery is that refusal of a man to reveal his name! And _Elsa_! Why not Lot's wife, whose curiosity turned her into a salt trust!

You may notice just here what the Wagnerians are pleased to call the Master's "second" manner. Rubbish! It is a return to the Italians. It is a graft of glistening Italian sensuality upon Wagner's strenuous study of Beethoven's and Weber's orchestras. _Tannhäuser_ is more manly in its fiber. But the style, the mixture of styles; the lack of organic unity, the blustering orchestration, and the execrable voice-killing vocal writing! The _Ring_ is an amorphous impossibility. That is now critically admitted. It ruins voices, managers, the public purse, and our patience. Its stories are indecent, blasphemous, silly, absurd, trivial, tiresome. To talk of the _Ring_ and Beethoven's symphonies is to put wind and wisdom in the same category. Wagner vulgarized Beethoven's symphonic methods--noticeably his powers of development. Think of utilizing that magnificent and formidable engine, the Beethoven symphonic method, to accompany a tinsel tale of garbled Norse mythology with all sorts of modern affectations and morbidities introduced! It is maddening to any student of pure, noble style. Wagner's Byzantine style has helped corrupt much modern art.

_Tristan und Isolde_ is the falsifying of all the pet Wagner doctrines--Ah! that odious, heavy, pompous prose of Wagner. In this erotic comedy there is no action, nothing happens except at long intervals; while the orchestra never stops its garrulous symphonizing. And if you prate to me of the wonderful Wagner orchestration and its eloquence, I shall quarrel with you. Why wonderful? It never stops, but does it ever say anything? Every theme is butchered to death. There is endless repetition in different keys, with different instrumental _nuances_, yet of true, intellectual and emotional mood-development there is no trace; short-breathed, chippy, choppy phrasing, and never ten bars of a big, straightforward melody. All this proves that Wagner had not the power of sustained thoughts like Mozart or Beethoven. And his orchestration, with its daubing, its overladen, hysterical color! What a humbug is this sensualist, who masks his pruriency back of poetic and philosophical symbols. But it is always easy to recognize the cloven foot. The headache and jaded nerves we have after a night with Wagner tell the story.

I admit that _Die Meistersinger_ is healthy. Only it is not art. And don't forget, my children, that Wagner's prettiest lyrics came from Schubert and Schumann. They have all been traced and located. I need not insult your intelligence by suggesting that the _Wotan_ motive is to be found in Schubert's _Wanderer_. If you wish for the _Waldweben_ just go to Spohr's _Consecration of Tones_ symphony, first movement. And Weber also furnishes a pleasing list, notably the _Sword_ motive from the _Ring_, which may be heard in _Ocean, Thou Mighty Monster_. _Parsifal_ I refuse to discuss. It is an outrage against religion, morals, and music. However, it is not alone this plagiarizing that makes Wagner so unendurable to me. It is his continual masking as the greatest composer of his century, when he was only a clever impostor, a theater-man, a wearer of borrowed plumage. His influence on music has been deplorably evil. He has melodramatized the art, introduced in it a species of false, theatrical, _personal_ feeling, quite foreign to its nature. The symphony, not the stage, is the objective of musical art. Wagner--neither composer nor tragedian, but a cunning blend of both--diverted the art to his own uses. A great force? Yes, a great force was his, but a dangerous one. He never reached the heights, but was always posturing behind the foot-lights. And he has left no school, no descendants. Like all hybrids, he is cursed with sterility. The twentieth century will find Wagner out. _Nunc Dimittis!_

IV

IN MOZARTLAND WITH OLD FOGY

The greatest musician the world has yet known--Mozart. The greatest? Yes, the greatest; greater than Bach, because less studied, less artificial, professional, and _doctrinaire_; greater than Beethoven, because Mozart's was a blither, a more serene spirit, and a spirit whose eyes had been anointed by beauty. Beethoven is not beautiful. He is dramatic, powerful, a maker of storms, a subduer of tempests; but his speech is the speech of a self-centered egotist. He is the father of all the modern melomaniacs, who, looking into their own souls, write what they see therein--misery, corruption, slighting selfishness, and ugliness. Beethoven, I say, was too near Mozart not to absorb some of his sanity, his sense of proportion, his glad outlook upon life; but the dissatisfied peasant in the composer of the _Eroica_, always in revolt, would not allow him tranquillity. Now is the fashion for soul hurricanes, these confessions of impotent wrath in music.

Beethoven began this fashion; Mozart did not. Beethoven had himself eternally in view when he wrote. His music mirrors his wretched, though profound, soul; it also mirrors many weaknesses. I always remember Beethoven and Goethe standing side by side as some royal nobody--I forget the name--went by. Goethe doffed his bonnet and stood uncovered, head becomingly bowed. Beethoven folded his arms and made no obeisance. This anecdote, not an apochryphal one, is always hailed as an evidence of Beethoven's sturdiness of character, his rank republicanism, while Goethe is slightly sniffed at for his snobbishness. Yet he was only behaving as a gentleman should. If Mozart had been in Beethoven's place, how courtly would have been the bow of the little, graceful Austrian composer! No, Beethoven was a boor, a clumsy one, and this quality abides in his music--for music is always the man. Put Beethoven in America in the present time and he would have developed into a dangerous anarchist. Such a nature matures rapidly, and a century might have marked the evolution from a despiser of kings to a hater of all forms of restrictive government. But I'm getting in too deep, even for myself, and also far away from my original theme.

Suffice to say that Bach is pedantic when compared to Mozart, and Beethoven unbeautiful. Some day, and there are portents on the musical horizon, some day, I repeat, the reign of beauty in art will reassert its sway. Too long has Ugly been king, too long have we listened with half-cracked ear-drums to the noises of half-cracked men. Already the new generation is returning to Mozart--that is, to music for music's sake--to the Beautiful.

I went to Salzburg deliberately. I needed a sight of the place, a glimpse of its romantic surroundings, to still my old pulse jangled out of tune by the horrors of Bayreuth. Yes, the truth must out, I went to Bayreuth at the express suggestion of my grandson, Old Fogy 3d, a rip-roaring young blade who writes for a daily paper in your city. What he writes I know not. I only hope he lets music alone. He is supposed to be an authority on foot-ball and Russian caviar; his knowledge of the latter he acquired, so he says, in the great Thirst Belt of the United States. I sincerely hope that Philadelphia is not alluded to! I am also informed that the lad occasionally goes to concerts! Well, he begged me to visit Bayreuth just once before I died. We argued the thing all last June and July at Dussek Villa--you remember my little lodge up in the wilds of Wissahickon!--and at last was I, a sensible old fellow who should have known better, persuaded to sail across the sea to a horrible town, crowded with cheap tourists, vulgar with cheap musicians, and to hear what? Why, Wagner! There is no need of telling you again what I think of _him_. You know! I really think I left home to escape the terrible heat, and I am quite sure that I left Bayreuth to escape the terrible music. Apart from the fact that it was badly sung and played--who ever does play and sing this music well?--it was written by Wagner, and though I am not a prejudiced person--_ahem!_--I cannot stand noise for noise's sake. Art for art they call it nowadays.

I fled Bayreuth. I reached Munich. The weather was warm, yet of a delightful balminess. I was happy. Had I not got away from Wagner, that odious, _bourgeois_ name and man! Munich, I argued, is a musical city. It must be, for it is the second largest beer-drinking city in Germany. Therefore it is given to melody. Besides, I had read of Munich's model Mozart performances. Here, I cried, here will I revel in a lovely atmosphere of art. My German was rather rusty since my Weimar days, but I took my accent, with my courage, in both hands and asked a coachman to drive me to the opera-house. Through green and luscious lanes of foliage this dumpy, red-faced scoundrel drove; by the beautiful Isar, across the magnificent Maximilian bridge over against the classic _façade_ of the Maximilineum. Twisting tortuously about this superb edifice, we tore along another leafy road lined on one side by villas, on the other bordered by a park. Many carriages by this time had joined mine in the chase. What a happy city, I reflected, that enjoys its Mozart with such unanimity! Turning to the right we went at a grand gallop past a villa that I recognized as the Villa Stuck from the old pictures I had seen; past other palaces until we reached a vast space upon which stood a marmoreal pile I knew to be the Mozart theater. What a glorious city is Munich, to thus honor its Mozart! And the building as I neared it resembled, on a superior scale, the Bayreuth barn. But this one was of marble, granite, gold, and iron. Up to the esplanade, up under the massive portico where I gave my coachman a tip that made his mean eyes wink. Then skirting a big beadle in blue, policemen, and loungers, I reached the box-office.

"Have you a stall?" I inquired. "Twenty marks" ($5.00), he asked in turn. "Phew!" I said aloud: "Mozart comes high, but we must have him." So I fetched out my lean purse, fished up a gold piece, put it down, and then an inspiration overtook me--I kept one finger on the money. "Is it _Don Giovanni_ or _Magic Flute_ this afternoon?" I demanded. The man stared at me angrily. "What you talk about? It is _Tristan und Isolde_. This is the new Wagner theater!" I must have yelled loudly, for when I recovered the big beadle was slapping my back and urging me earnestly to keep in the open air. And that is why I went to Salzburg!

Despite Bayreuth, despite Munich, despite Wagner, I was soon happy in the old haunts of the man whose music I adore. I went through the Mozart collection, saw all the old pictures, relics, manuscripts, and I reverently fingered the harpsichord, the grand piano of the master. Even the piece of "genuine Court Plaister" from London, and numbered 42 in the catalogue, interested me. After I had read the visitors' book, inscribed therein my own humble signature, after talking to death the husband and wife who act as guardians of these Mozart treasures, I visited the Mozart platz and saw the statue, saw Mozart's residence, and finally--bliss of bliss--ascended the _Kapuzinberg_ to the Mozart cottage, where the _Magic Flute_ was finished.

Later, several weeks later, when the Wagner municipal delirium had passed, I left Salzburg with a sad heart and returned to Munich. There I was allowed to bathe in Mozart's music and become healed. I heard an excellent performance of his _Cosi Fan Tutti_ at the _Residenztheater_, an ideal spot for this music. With the accompaniment of an orchestra of thirty, more real music was made and sung than the whole _Ring Cycle_ contains. Some day, after my death, without doubt, the world will come back to my way of thinking, and purge its eyes in the Pierian spring of Mozart, cleanse its vision of all the awful sights walled by the dissonantal harmonies of Beethoven, Schumann, Wagner, and Richard Strauss.

I fear that this letter will enrage my grandson; I care not. If he writes, do not waste valuable space on his "copy." I inclose a picture of Mozart that I picked up in Salzburg. If you like it, you have my permission to reproduce it. I am here once more in Mozartland!

V

OLD FOGY DISCUSSES CHOPIN

Since my return from the outskirts of Camden, N. J., where I go fishing for planked shad in September, I have been busying myself with the rearrangement of my musical library, truly a delectable occupation for an old man. As I passed through my hands the various and beloved volumes, worn by usage and the passage of the years, I pondered after the fashion of one who has more sentiment than judgment; I said to myself:

"Come, old fellow, here they are, these friends of the past forty years. Here are the yellow and bepenciled Bach _Preludes and Fugues_, the precious 'forty-eight'; here are the Beethoven Sonatas, every bar of which is familiar; here are--yes, the Mozart, Schubert, and Schumann Sonatas [you notice that I am beginning to bracket the batches]; here are Mendelssohn's works, highly glazed as to technical surface, pretty as to sentiment, Bach seen through the lorgnette of a refined, thin, narrow nature. And here are the Chopin compositions." The murder is out--I have jumped from Bach and Beethoven to Chopin without a twinge of my critical conscience. Why? I hardly know why, except that I was thinking of that mythical desert island and the usual idiotic question: What composers would you select if you were to be marooned on a South Sea Island?--you know the style of question and, alas! the style of answer. You may also guess the composers of my selection. And the least of the three in the last group above named is not Chopin--Chopin, who, as a piano composer pure and simple, still ranks his predecessors, his contemporaries, his successors.

I am sure that the brilliant Mr. Finck, the erudite Mr. Krehbiel, the witty Mr. Henderson, the judicial Mr. Aldrich, the phenomenal Philip Hale, have told us and will tell us all about Chopin's life, his poetry, his technical prowess, his capacity as a pedagogue, his reforms, his striking use of dance forms. Let me contribute my humble and dusty mite; let me speak of a Chopin, of the Chopin, of a Chopin--pardon my tedious manner of address--who has most appealed to me since my taste has been clarified by long experience. I know that it is customary to swoon over Chopin's languorous muse, to counterfeit critical raptures when his name is mentioned. For this reason I dislike exegetical comments on his music. Lives of Chopin from Liszt to Niecks, Huneker, Hadow, and the rest are either too much given over to dry-as-dust or to rhapsody. I am a teacher of the pianoforte, that good old keyboard which I know will outlive all its mechanical imitators. I have assured you of this fact about fifteen years ago, and I expect to hammer away at it for the next fifteen years if my health and your amiability endure. The Chopin music is written for the piano--a truism!--so why in writing of it are not critics practical? It is the practical Chopin I am interested in nowadays, not the poetic--for the latter quality will always take care of itself.

Primarily among the practical considerations of the Chopin music is the patent fact that only a certain section of his music is studied in private and played in public. And a very limited section it is, as those who teach or frequent piano recitals are able to testify. Why should the _D-flat Valse_, _E-flat_ and _G minor Nocturnes_, the _A-flat Ballade_, the _G minor Ballade_, the _B-flat minor Scherzo_, the _Funeral March_, the two _G-flat Etudes_, or, let us add, the _C minor_, the _F minor_ and _C-sharp minor studies_, the _G major_ and _D-flat preludes_, the _A-flat Polonaise_--or, worse still, the _A major_ and _C-sharp minor Polonaises_--the _B minor_, _B-flat major Mazurkas_, the _A-flat_ and _C-sharp minor Impromptus_, and last, though not least, the _Berceuse_--why, I insist, should this group be selected to the exclusion of the rest? for, all told, there is still as good Chopin in the list as ever came out of it.

I know we hear and read much about the "Heroic Chopin", and the "New Chopin"--forsooth!--and "Chopin the Conqueror"; also how to make up a Chopin program--which latter inevitably recalls to my mind the old _crux_: how to be happy though hungry. [Some forms of this conundrum lug in matrimony, a useless intrusion.] How to present a program of Chopin's _neglected_ masterpieces might furnish matter for afternoon lectures now devoted to such negligible musical _débris_ as Parsifal's neckties and the chewing gum of the flower maidens.