Chapter 13

As for the representation of "Parsifal," I should not trouble to discuss it had not Mr. Chamberlain's book on Wagner lately come my way. It shows me that the old game is being pursued as busily as ever. Since Wagner's death the world has been carefully and persistently taught that only Bayreuth can do justice to "Parsifal"; and since the world believes anything if it is said often enough, it has come to think it sheer blasphemy to dream of giving "Parsifal" elsewhere than at Bayreuth. "Parsifal" is not an opera--it is a sacred revelation; and just as the seed of Aaron alone could serve as priests in the sacred rites of the temple at Jerusalem, so only the seed of Wagner can serve as priests--that is to say, as chief directing priests--when "Parsifal" is played. Thus declare the naive dwellers in Villa Wahnfried, modestly forgetting the missing link in the chain of argument which should prove them alone to be the people qualified to perform "Parsifal"; and I regret to observe the support they receive from a number of Englishmen and Scotchmen, who are grown more German than the Germans, and just as religiously forget to make any reference to this missing link of proof. But these Germanised Scotchmen and Englishmen work hard for Bayreuth: now they whisper in awestruck tones of the beauty and significance of "Parsifal"; now they howl at the unhappy writers in the daily and weekly Press who dare to find little significance and less beauty in the Bayreuth representation; and, to do them bare justice, until lately they have been fairly successful in persuading the world to think with them. Verily, they have their reward--they partake of afternoon tea at Villa Wahnfried; they enjoy the honour of bowing low to the second Mrs. Wagner; Wagner's legal descendants cordially take them by the hand. And they go away refreshed, and again spread the report of the artistic and moral and religious supremacy of Bayreuth; and the world listens and goes up joyfully to Bayreuth to be taxed--one pound sterling per head per "Parsifal" representation. The performances over, the world comes away mightily edified, having seen nothing with its own eyes, heard nothing with its own ears, having understood nothing at all;--having, in fact, so totally miscomprehended everything as to think "Parsifal" a Christian drama; having been too deaf to realise that the singers were frequently out of the key, and too blind to observe that the scenery in the second act resembled a cheap cretonne, and that many of the flower-maidens were at least eight feet in circumference. On the way home the world whiles away the long railway journey by reading metaphysical disquisitions on "Parsifal' and the Ideal Woman," "'Parsifal' and the Thing-in-Itself," "The Swan in 'Parsifal' and its Relation to the Higher Vegetarianism." It knows the name of every leit-motif, and can nearly pronounce the German for it; it can refer to the Essay on Beethoven apropos of Kundry's scream (or yawn) in the second act; it can chat learnedly of Klingsor, in pathetic ignorance of his real offence, and explain why Amfortas has his wound on the right side, although the libretto distinctly states it to be situated on the left. It is a fact that this year a lady was heard to ask why Parsifal quarrelled with his wife in the second act. (I might mention that an admirer of "Parsifal" asked me who the dark man was in the first act of "The Valkyrie," and whether Sieglinde or Brünnhilde was burnt in the last.) The which is eminently amusing, and conjures up before one a vision of Richard, not wailing, like the youth in Shelley's "Prometheus Unbound," for the faith he kindled, but gazing patiently, rather wearily, with a kindly ironical smile, on the world he conquered, on the world that adores him _because_ it fails to understand him.

Happily, it is not my business to reform the world; and writing in October, when so many of the idealists who felt with Parsifal in his remorse about the duck-shooting episode are applying the lesson by wantonly slaughtering every harmless creature they can hit, it would be superfluous to point out in any detail how very wrong and absurd is the world's estimate of the Bayreuth performance. In fact, were it my object to assist in the destruction of Bayreuth, no better plan could be found than that of approving cordially of everything Bayreuth does. For it is fast driving away all sincere lovers of Wagner; it lives now on fashionable ladies, betting men, and bishops: when the fashion changes and these depart, the Bayreuth festivals will come to an end. Bayreuth is only an affectation; not one pilgrim in a hundred understands the "Ring" or "Parsifal"; not one in a thousand is really impressed by anything deeper than the mere novelty of the business. Visitors go and are moved by the shooting of the duck (the libretto calls it a swan, but the management chooses to use a duck); they talk of Wagner's love of animals and of how they love animals themselves; they go straight from Bayreuth to Scotland and show their love in true sportsmanlike fashion by treating animals, birds, and fishes with a degree of cruelty so appalling as to disgust every right-thinking and right-feeling man and woman; and they tell you that the stag likes to be disembowelled, the bird to have its wings shattered, the fish to be torn to pieces in its agonised struggle for life. Or, having been moved by the consequences of sin, they straightway go and prepare cases for the divorce courts; having appreciated the purity and peace of monastery life and a daily communion service, they return without hesitation or sense of inconsistency to their favourite modes of gambling; having revelled in the most lovely music in the world, they proceed to listen nightly to the ugliest and silliest music in the world. Their appreciation of Bayreuth is a sham; they would cheerfully go elsewhere--say to Homburg--if Bayreuth were shut up; and before long they will go to Homburg or elsewhere, whether Bayreuth is shut up or not.

A NOTE ON BRAHMS

It is not an exaggeration to say that probably there are not a dozen musicians in Europe who have formed any precise and final opinion as to where Brahms should be placed. One gets to know him very slowly. His appearance and manner (so to speak), so extremely dignified, are very much in his favour; but when one tries to get to terms of intimacy with him he has a fatal trick of repelling one by that "austerity" or chilliness of which we have heard so much. And the worst of it is that too frequently a sharp suspicion strikes one that there is little behind that austere manner--that his reticence does not so much imply matter held in reserve as an absence of matter. I do not mean by this that Brahms was a paradoxical fool who was clever enough to hold his tongue lest he was found out, nor even that he purposely veiled his lack of meaning. On the contrary, a composer who wished more devoutly to be sincere never put pen to paper. But he had not the intellect of an antelope; and he took up in all honesty a rôle for which he had only the slightest qualification. The true Brahms, the Brahms who does not deceive himself, is the Brahms you find in many of the songs, in some of the piano and chamber music, in the smaller movements of his symphonies, and in certain passages of his overtures; and I have no hesitation whatever in asserting (though the opinion is subject to revision) that his songs are much the most satisfactory things he did. Here, unweighted by a heavy sense of a mission, he either revels in making beautiful--though never supremely beautiful--tunes for their own sake, or he actually expresses with beauty and considerable fidelity certain definite emotions. Had he written nothing but such small things--songs, piano pieces, Allegrettos like that in the D symphony--his position might be a degree lower in the estimation of dull Academics who don't count, but he would be accepted at something like his true value by the whole world, and the whole world would be the better for oftener hearing many lovely things. But merely to be a singer of wonderful songs was not sufficient for Brahms: he wanted to be a great poet, a new Beethoven. It was a legitimate ambition. The kind of music Brahms really loved was the kind of which Beethoven's is the most splendid example; and he wanted to create more of the same kind. He doubtless thought he could; in his early days Robert Schumann predicted that he would; and in his later days his intimate friend Hanslick and a small herd of followers asserted that he did. He was run as the prophet of the classical school with all the force of all who hated Wagner and had not brains enough to understand either Brahms' or Wagner's music; he became the god of all the musical dullards in Europe; and it is small wonder that he took himself with immense seriousness. A little more intelligence, ever so little more, would have shown him that, despite the noise of those who perhaps admired him less than they dreaded Wagner, he was not the man they said he was. He had not a great matter to utter; what he had he could not utter in the classical form; yet he tried to write in classical form. If ever a musician was born a happy, careless romanticist, that musician was Brahms--he was even a romanticist in the narrower sense, inasmuch as he was fond rather of the gloomy, mysterious, and dismal than of sunlight and the blue sky; and whenever his imagination warmed he straightway began breaking the bonds in which he had endeavoured to work. But that miserable article of Schumann--deplorable gush that has been tolerated, nay, admired, only because it is Schumann's--the evil influence of the pseudo-classicism of Mendelssohn and his followers, the preposterous over-praise of Hanslick,--these things drove Brahms into the mistake never made by the really able men. Wilkes denied that he ever was a Wilksite; Wagner certainly never was a Wagnerite; there are people who ask whether Christ was ever a Christian. But Brahms became more and more a devoted Brahmsite; he accepted himself as the guardian of the great classical tradition (which never existed); and he wrote more and more dull music. It is idle to tell me he is austere when my inner consciousness tells me he is merely barren, and idler to ask me feel beauty when my ears report no beauty to me. He had no original emotion or thought: whenever his music is good it will be found that he has derived the emotion from a poem, or else that there is no emotion but only very fine decorative work. In most of his bigger works--the symphonies, the German Requiem, the Serious songs he wrote in his later days--he sacrificed the beauty he might have attained to the expression of emotions he never felt; he assumed the pose and manner of a master telling us great things, and talked like a pompous duffer. An exception must be made: one emotion Brahms had felt and did communicate. It was his tragedy that he had no original emotion, no rich inner life, but lived through the days on the merely prosaic plane; and he seems to have felt that this was his tragedy. Anyhow, the one original emotion he brought into music is a curious mournful dissatisfaction with life and with death. The only piece of his I know in which the feeling is intolerably poignant, seems to cut like a knife, is his setting of that sad song of Goethe's about the evening wind dashing the vine leaves and the raindrops against the window pane; and in this song, as also in the movement in one of the quartets evolved from the song, the mournfulness becomes absolutely pitiable despair. Brahms was not cast in the big mould, and he spent a good deal of his later time in pitying himself. It is curious that one of his last works was the batch of Serious songs, which consist of dismal meditations on the darkness and dirt of the grave and feebly-felt hopes that there is something better on the other side. That does not strike one as in the vein of the big men.

Much of Brahms' music is bad and ugly music, dead music; it is a counterfeit and not the true and perfect image of life indeed; and it should be buried or cremated at the earliest opportunity. But much of it is wonderfully beautiful--almost but never quite as beautiful as the great men at their best. There are passages in the Tragic overture that any composer might be proud to have written. If the opening of the D symphony is thin, unreal, an attempt at pastoral gaiety which has resulted merely in lack of character, at anyrate the second theme is delightful; if the opening of the slow movement is also twaddle, there are pleasant passages later on; the dainty allegretto is as fresh and fragrant as a wild rose; and the finale, though void of significance, is full of an energy rare in Brahms. Then there are many of the songs in which Brahms' astonishing felicity of phrase, and his astounding trick of finding expression for an emotion when the emotion has been given to him, enable him almost to work miracles. And it must be remembered that all his music is irreproachable from the technical point of view. Brahms is certainly with Bach, Mozart, and Wagner in point of musicianship: in fact, these four might be called the greatest masters of sheer music who have lived. A Brahms score is as wonderful as a Wagner score; from beginning to end there is not a misplaced note nor a trace of weakness; and one stands amazed before the consummate workmanship of the thing. The only difference between the Wagner score and the Brahms score is, that while the former is always alive, always the product of a fervent inner life, the latter is sometimes alive too, but more frequently as dead as a door-mat, the product of extreme facility and (I must suppose) an extraordinary inherited musical instinct divorced from exalted thought and feeling. The difference may be felt when you compare a Brahms and a Tschaikowsky symphony. Although in his later years Tschaikowsky acquired a mastery of the technique of music, and succeeded in keeping his scores clear and clean, he never arrived at anything approaching Brahms' certainty of touch, and neither his scoring nor his counterpoint has Brahms' perfection of workmanship. Yet one listens to Tschaikowksy, for the present at least, with intense pleasure, and wants to listen again. I have yet to meet anyone who pretends to have received any intense pleasure from a Brahms symphony.

Brahms is dead; the old floods of adulation will no longer be poured forth by the master's disciples; neither will the enemies his friends made for him have any reason to depreciate his music; and ultimately it will be possible to form a fair, unbiassed judgment on him. This is a mere casual utterance, by the way.

ANTON DVORÁK

I remember the Philharmonic in its glory one evening, when it had a couple of distinguished foreigners to a kind of musical high tea, very bourgeois, very long and very indigestible. One of the pair of distinguished foreigners was Mr. Sauer; the other, Dvorák, was the hero of the evening. Now, whatever one may think of Dvorák the musician, it is impossible to feel anything but sympathy and admiration for Dvorák the man. His early struggles to overcome the attendant disadvantages of his peasant birth; his unheard-of labours to acquire a mastery of the technique of his art when body and brain were exhausted by the work of earning his daily bread in a very humble capacity; his sickening years of waiting, not for popular recognition merely, but for an opportunity of showing that he had any gifts worthy of being recognised,--these command the sympathy of all but those happy few who have found life a most delicate feather-bed. Dvorák has honestly worked for all that has come to him, and the only people who will carp or sneer at him are those who have gained or wish to gain their positions without honest work. There could be no conjecture wider of the mark than that of his success being due to any charlatan tricks in his music or in his conduct of life. No composer's music--not Bach's, nor Haydn's, nor even Mozart's--could be a more veracious expression of his inner nature; and if Dvorák's music is at times odd and whimsical, and persistently wrong-headed and _outré_ through long passages, it does not mean that Dvorák is trying to impress or startle his hearers by doing unusual things, but merely that he himself is odd and whimsical and has his periods of persistent wrong-headedness. He is Slav in every fibre--not a pseudo-Slav whose ancestors were or deserved to be whipped out of the temple in Jerusalem. He has all the Slav's impetuosity and hot blood, his love of glaring and noisy colour, his love of sheer beauty of a certain limited kind, and--alas!--his unfailing brainlessness. His impetuosity and hot blood are manifested in his frequent furious rhythms and the abrupt changes in those rhythms; his love of colour in the quality of his instrumentation, with its incessant contrasts and use of the drums, cymbals, and triangle; his sense of beauty in the terribly weird splendour of his pictures, and its limitations in his rare achievement of anything fine when once he passes out of the region of the weird and terrible; his brainlessness in his inability to appreciate the value of a strong sinewy theme, in the lack of proportion between the different movements of his works and between the sections of the movements, and, perhaps more than in any other way, in his unhappy choice of subjects for vocal works. One stands amazed before the spectacle of the man who made that prodigious success with the awful legend of "The Spectre's Bride" coming forward, smiling in childlike confidence, with "Saint Ludmila," which was so awful in another fashion. And then, as if not content with nearly ruining his reputation by that deadly blow, he must needs follow up "Saint Ludmila" with the dreariest, dullest, most poverty-stricken Requiem ever written by a musician with any gift of genuine invention. These mistakes might indicate mere want of tact did not the qualities of Dvorák's music show them to be the result of sheer want of intellect; and if the defects of his music are held by some to be intentional beauties, no such claim can be set up for the opinions on music which he has on various occasions confided to the ubiquitous interviewer. The Slav is an interesting creature, and his music is interesting, not because he is higher than the Western man, but because he is different, and, if anything, lower, with a considerable touch of the savage. When Dvorák is himself, and does not pass outside the boundaries within which he can breathe freely, he produces results so genuine and powerful that one might easily mistake him for a great musician; but when he competes with Beethoven or Handel or Haydn, we at once realise that he is not expressing what he really feels, but what he thinks he should feel, that he is not at his ease, and that our native men can beat him clean out of the field. To be sure, they can at times be as dull as he, but that is when they forget the lesson they should before now have learnt from him, when they leave the field in which they work with real enjoyment and produce results which may be enjoyed.

TSCHAIKOWSKY AND HIS "PATHETIC" SYMPHONY

A very little while since, Tschaikowsky was little more than a name in England. He had visited us some two or three times, and it was generally believed that he composed; but he had not written any piece without which no orchestral programme could be considered complete, and the mere suggestion that his place might possibly be far above Gounod would certainly have been received with open derision. However, when his fame became great and spread wide on the Continent, he became so important a man in the eyes of English musicians that Cambridge University thought fit to honour itself by offering him an honorary musical degree. Tschaikowsky, simple soul, good-humouredly accepted it, apparently in entire ignorance of the estimation in which such cheap decorations are held in this country; and it is to be hoped that before his death he obtained a hearing in Russia for the Cambridge professor's music. The incident, comical as it appeared to those of us who knew the value of musical degrees, the means by which they are obtained, and the reasons for which they are conferred, yet served a useful purpose by calling public attention to the fact that there was living a man who had written music that was fresh, a trifle strange perhaps, but full of vitality, and containing a new throb, a new thrill. Since 1893 his reputation has steadily grown, but in a curious way. One can scarcely say with truth that Tschaikowsky is popular: only his "Pathetic" symphony and one or two smaller things are popular. Had he not written the "Pathetic," one may doubt whether he would be much better known to-day than he was in 1893. It caught the public fancy as no other work of his caught it, and on the strength of its popularity many of the critics do not hesitate to call it a great symphony, and on the strength of the symphony Tschaikowsky a great composer. (For in England criticism largely means saying what the public thinks.) Passionately though that symphony is admired, hardly any other of his music can be truly said to get a hearing; for, on the rare occasions when it is played, the public thoughtfully stays away. It is true that the Casse Noisette suite is always applauded, but it is a trifling work compared with his best. Tschaikowsky shares with Gray and one or two others in ancient and modern times the distinction of being famous by a single achievement. The public is jealous for the supremacy of that achievement, and will not hear of there being another equal to it.