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THREE GREAT EPOCH-MAKERS IN MUSIC

TO THE MEMORY OF MY TEACHER AND FRIEND HERMANN KOTZSCHMAR THAT RIPE MUSICIAN WHOSE MATURE JUDGMENT HAS MUCH STRENGTHENED MY OWN CONVICTIONS THESE PAGES ARE DEDICATED

Three Great Epoch-Makers in Music

BY EDWARD CLARENCE FARNSWORTH

PORTLAND SMITH & SALE, PRINTERS MDCCCCXII

CONTENTS

PAGE

PREFACE vii

JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH 3

FREDERIC CHOPIN 33

RICHARD STRAUSS AND THE ART OF SOUND 81

PREFACE

Bearing in mind Emerson's saying that every action admits of being outdone, and around every circle another may be drawn, we none the less believe that a comparison of Sebastian Bach, Frederic Chopin and Richard Strauss, will show that, because of excellences peculiar to his day, and also individual excellences, no one of these three epoch-makers wholly outdoes, wholly encircles either of the others. Rather is he a link of a chain in which Beethoven, Wagner, and certain others are indispensable.

That chain had beginning in the remote past, but, because inadequate, many early links are now broken. Of musicians prior to Bach, Gregory and Palestrina alone have endured the strain of time. The inadequacy of the old, true of not another art, proves music to be virtually an achievement of the last two and one-half centuries. This brief term, a mere fraction of that which must be allowed to certain of the sister arts, argues for music a very considerable period of future development.

Comparison of the Gregorian Chants with the Wagnerian scores may bring doubt upon this statement, but, since the advent of Richard Strauss, it seems probable that the musician of the future will smile at the ideals of our contemporary composers. What were the tendencies whose centering in one master mind produced the great classical beginnings of modern music, we would show in our estimate of Bach. The tendencies eventuating in the free style of the romanticist, and the abandon of the ultra school, we would indicate in our estimate of Chopin. And, because of present tendencies, what direction tonal development will yet take, we shall endeavor to ascertain in our estimate of Richard Strauss.

JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH

Far down the vista of history stands the Grecian Homer, unique, and, save for Hesiod, alone amidst the memorable years. Alone we say, but from the view-point of his contemporaries was visible in the background--even to the dim horizon of civilization--many an eminence inferior only when compared with that colossal peak of Ionic song. To every philologist, to every classical scholar, the development and finish of the Homeric hexameter argues convincingly a poetical ancestry of which the Iliad and the Odyssey are culmination.

The chiselled achievements of Phidias, and whatsoever else extant of Attic sculpture, attest the attained perfection of an art in whose day of puerility the primitive cave-dweller, with a bit of broken flint, idly scratched upon the bones of his prey, crude semblance of man, animal, fish, reptile and bird. The worthiest triumphs of Renaissance painting are traceable to the cruel, warlike impulse of the savage daubing himself to hideousness with earthy pigments and the red juice of ripened berries. The grand creations of the German tone-builders were evolved from the battle-yells of aboriginal tribes.

Thus in Earth's purest, highest things is exemplified the law whereby the noble somehow emerged from the ignoble like the sweet and tinted flower rooted in the unsavory compost: whereby also the formative mind of man itself gained scope and symmetry, not through sudden and strenuous exercise, but in a way comparable to the sphering and solidifying and upbuilding of a planet, in fact, that infinitely gradual and orderly process which Nature in her wisdom has everywhere counterparts, as when she evolved these modern years from the countless, non-achieving ages of unrecorded savagery; ages repulsive with the dominant, brute passions of men.

Thus, in view of the foregoing, it may with assurance be admitted that every genius is endowed not only by the immediate, gracious gift of God, but also by the accumulated bequeathings of every predecessor in the same domain of usefulness.

Well we know that while the puny efforts of the ordinary individual ripple but for an instant some little surface of the vast ocean of mortal life, others there be, centers of mental and spiritual power at once wide-reaching, deep-sounding, and long-enduring. Always in touch with unseen angel hands, these are verily the world's immortals co-working with the Divine Law of human progress. Deathless are they in deed and name; the prophet of Truth, the priest of God, the patriot Warrior, the incorruptible Statesman, the wise Ruler, the inspired Artist and the uplifted Singer.

Our immediate purpose bids us choose from this noble company; let us look somewhat into the dedicated life of Johann Sebastian Bach; let us inquire briefly into the musical mission of one of the chief promoters of human enlightenment.

At cursory glance, the solid and abiding work of Bach may be called the bed-rock, the basic strata, whereon rests our musical world of this present. But, remembering the Flemish Fuguists and their predecessors, the Canon writers of the Gotho-Belgic school, and, earlier, the Parisian developers of the primitive counterpoint originating in French Flanders during the tenth century, we discover other strata underlying and upholding the Passion Music, the Sacred Cantatas, and the instrumental Preludes and Fugues. Nor need this discovery belittle our estimate of Bach; it but illustrates the dependence of the human mind, unstable without the foundation and buttress of other minds. Shakespeare himself was largely the product of exceptional conditions, the rich flower of the Elizabethan environment, the chief dramatic poet, the genius most gifted, among an unusually gifted group of notables.

The Flemish school of composition, which, at the advent of Bach, had now flourished for at least a century and a half, was most fortunate in one of its earliest pupils, Palestrina, who, infusing into its abundant learning the spirit of Genius, forthwith evolved for his Italy a noble and devout school of sacred music. But, despite the unhampered labors of the Flemings, no native individualizer and summarizer of their efforts appeared during the one hundred and fifty years prior to the birth of Bach. No northern Palestrina yet fathered a national sacred music suited to the needs of Protestant Germany.

Let none accuse Nature of niggardness because neither seed time nor summer bends with the ripened corn and wheat. Let him await her seasonable yield, unfailing while the sun shines and the earth revolves. But Nature has sowing and springing and ripening in other and far distant fields; and if we, unseeing, comprehend not, let it suffice that she, the wise and provident, wholly knows what sun is shining on those fields, and the diameter of the orbital turning of their world she knows, and the orderly come and go of their unfailing seasons. And so it befell that in fitly appointed time, and not in capricious moment, she gave to the world Sebastian Bach to be the great individualizer and father of German music.

Of Bach's contemporaries and forerunners of the Flemish school, the most worthy were undoubtedly those whom he revered; those who, either by creation or interpretation, incited him to early effort, and easily moulded his plastic youth into semblance of the unsurpassed composer and performer which, because of mature and independent after-labor, he wholly became. And yet, as compared with him, of what largeness are his outgrown models? Of what enduring substance, of what undimmable fame, such musicians as Sweelinck, Scheidemann, Schuitz, and even Reinken and Buxtehude?

Many a genius has towered the one exception in a family not intellectually prominent. Unlike the majority of his class, Bach owed much to heredity. Others of his blood, immediate ancestors and numerous living relatives, all had accomplished something worthy of mention in music. Nor did Nature expend her energies in producing him the greatest of the Bachs. That of which his genius was the culmination, ceasing not with himself, experienced a gradual decline through his numerous descendants.

Never was a genius more thoroughly equipped for his life work than was Sebastian Bach. Musical learning in him first reached its fullness. In his larger compositions, as in the epics of Milton, every page reveals the student of the ages; but what in lesser men sinks to dry scholarship, in Bach, as in Milton, becomes a glorious compendium of classical erudition, and this because of the abundant presence of that transforming quality denied to mediocrity, to wit, Imagination.

Many a great page of Milton, and, for that matter, of Dante also, proves but hard reading to the unlettered who oftentimes would conceal their ignorance under the guise of fulsome praise. So with Bach. While granting his obvious learning, many amateurs, fairly musical, and not a few professional musicians, but little estimate his noble quality of imagination.

Bach is in very truth the Musician's musician, the touchstone of his training. When for himself one has conquered the technicalities of fugal composition, he is in fair way to estimate Bach at par value, for, to his own discomfiture, he has discovered that the construction of a fugal theme, pronounced and pliant as even the briefest bearing the impress of Bach, is one of the great doings of musical skill and imagination. These qualities Bach further shows in the treatment of subject and counter-subject by means of the stretto, and all devices of Canon and polyphonic counterpoint, moving in broad and stately volume to the final cadence and the organ point.

In their highest and most eloquent efforts, vocal or instrumental, the composers of the Contrapuntal School had recourse always to the fugue whose every voice part is rendered individually prominent as in no other form of musical expression, ancient or modern; nor can anything more adequate in this respect be constructed or conceived of. But the attainment of a perfect, fugal style is fraught with difficulties insurmountable to many composers, and almost so to some whom we rightly deem among the greatest.

Beethoven himself was not by natural bent a fuguist; his genius led him far afield. Notwithstanding the strength and boldness of his figures, the distinctiveness of his basses, and the melodic flow of the intermediate parts of his harmony, the not many examples of fugue, found in the bulk of his collected works, show chiefly the ambition of the explorer; and this in one the monarch of many another domain of music.

As constructor of vocal fugues, Mendelssohn was all that scholarship could make him, but his themes, when compared with those of Bach and Handel, are deficient in the quality of boldness. The theme is the soul of the fugue, its center and source of life, and boldness is one of the chief requirements of the theme. Individualized, it attracts instant attention and is easily recognized throughout its augmentations, diminutions, and inversions. Among the leading composers of every land, from Italy to Poland and from France to Scandinavia, may be named many divinely inspired melodists, and also many noble harmonists, whose classic or romantic measures abound in felicitous modulations and every beauty of the free style; but how the great masters of Fugue narrow one by one as we eliminate those fallen short of its chiefest requirements! Finally there remain but two. Kings are they. Sovereigns indeed. Contemporary rulers born in the selfsame years. George Frederic Handel is one, and Johann Sebastian Bach is the other.

In the «Well-tempered Clavichord,» a work which the celebrated theorist Richter has well said «should be in the hands of all who devote themselves to the higher branches of musical study,» we have, by the universal acknowledgment of authorities, the culminating perfection of the Contrapuntal School, that ample heritage from an era more and more behind the Classicism of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, and the Romanticism of Schumann, Chopin and Wagner. Severe with the legacies of the mediæval spirit, this comprehensive work of Bach, embracing the totality of the major and the minor keys, is, for breadth and strength, comparable with the chief religious frescoes of Michel Angelo.

With reverence, and a sense of deep obligation, every sterling musician looks back to Johann Sebastian Bach, seeing in him the virile forebear of whatsoever is rich and euphonious and learned in modern instrumental music. Composers like Felix Mendelssohn and Robert Franz, have sat at the feet of Bach and hailed him their musical Messiah, and many, numbered not in the circle of such discipleship, have harkened to the voice of his teaching; and some there be, who, touching but the hem of his garments, were cured of weakness and infirmity.

The grand, old German Chorals, those voicings of religious fervor steadfast and heart-deep, wherefrom every frivolity of the world was banished; those massive, stately hymns of a communion whose worshippers each mingled his individual offering with the outpour of congregational praise, are forever associated with the name of Bach, their amplifier and enricher, as with the name of him who introduced them into the service of the Lutheran Church. Bold and enduring, like monolithic hills, those rugged Chorals long had stood untouched by the meddlesome hand of Mediocrity. Surely their incorporation by Bach into his greatest works demanded a genius equal to that of their originators, and, in addition, the total of judgment and learning which our master summoned to his well-accomplished task.

At the very outset of his career, Bach was drawn to the style of composition which thereafter characterized his efforts. The Italian Opera, that belonging of quite another people, that importation which was to absorb, until past middle life, the energies of his great contemporary Handel, held for Bach no allurements. He had in supreme degree the instinct of the born specialist; he desired and aimed to do a supreme thing supremely. His was that native wisdom which confined his energies within their wide and deep channel, the course of non-resistance indicated by the cleavage of the hills and the lay of the valleys of the rugged, musical landscape which had environed his predecessors, and amidst which he himself matured to self-conscious, artistic being. But, though a specialist, Bach was so in the true sense of the word. His comprehensive interest could not be circumscribed and iron-bound by his specialty. Well he knew the anatomy of the whole body of music, and well he realized the interdependence of its various members; and so with keen interest he noted every happening in parts most removed from the center of its life.

Naturally, we find him seeking acquaintance with Handel far off in the English home of his adoption. But the opportunity for a friendship no doubt of vast, mutual advantage, Handel seems to have ignored. Perhaps he preferred the lone sufficiency of his gigantic selfhood. Other reasons might be conjectured, but, in truth, Handel had grown somewhat out of touch with Bach. Aside from the matter of the Italian Opera, the environments of London metropolitan life, and also the art life of England--largely moulded by her great masters of English verse--had reacted upon the genius of Handel making him in some degree non-German, and yet, by way of compensation, making him the chief glory of English music, and the model of native composers who but for him might have harked back to Purcell and Orlando Gibbons. Different indeed was the life of Bach, a life remote from the great centers of worldly activity. In that life is seen no arenal contests like those which, fast and furious with thrust and counter thrust, too much filled the rival days of Handel and Bononcini.

The compositions of Bach provoked no partisan spirit, nor cared he for that mere notoriety which benefits the well-damned equally with the well-praised. In the lives of men like Bach and Handel, every moment of well-ordered activity is a boon to their public, every moment of misdirected effort is an unmitigated loss. However, in the life of Bach we lack cause to regret an abortiveness of result lamentable in the life of Handel of whom it might be asked, Of what musical enrichment to the present are those many operatic effusions of his busy, young manhood, and his industrious middle-prime? For the most part they are dead and coffined in the dark of oblivion. Whatsoever escapes forgetfulness has, with rare exceptions, experienced a veritable reincarnation among the florid beauties of his Oratorios, the crown and glory of his last and greatest years.

By virtue of his high endowment, Bach possessed that wisdom of genius which, to the thrifty and so-called practical, is but the foolishness of the visionary. Except in the case of a few works engraved by his own hands, he gave no thought to the immediate outcome of his labors; and yet, amidst the accumulation of his great, unpublished compositions, he wrote on as if all the engravers and compositors of Saxony were crying for copy. A lesser man, a man of talent, would have seen to it that his masterpieces for voice and clavichord and organ were first in the shop and then in the home, the church and the concert hall. That he felt concern for these, his mentally-begotten, is certain; else he had spared himself that prodigious concentration of thought the result of which each preserves in a body vitalized to endure throughout the centuries. No time had he for obtuse and over-cautious publishers, nor would he debase his ideals to popularize and make saleable his inspirations. His was an artistic conscience analogous to that of the saint and the martyr; his their self-sacrifice to principle; his that undebasable virtue, that adherence to conviction, which is its own sweet reward in whatever of high or humble man's lot is fixed. His every creative act spake something like this: «Brief indeed is the most lengthened life of man, and long must the world await another Sebastian Bach. Let me use my permitted day of sunshine ere the hastening gloom enshroud and silence it forever!» So he filled to fullness the incomparable hours. Trusting in God and the Time Spirit, he left to an unknown future the propaganda of his deeds.

Ah, when the ravisher of Peace, and the subjugator of his kind, has fulfilled his fierce ambition, and the rent land is desolate and a nation enslaved in tyrant-welded bonds, how fares his name within the hearts and on the lips of men? Does not its lettering pollute with blood the annals of his time? Not with the harsh rattle, not with the red horror of war, but rather with a sound of sweetest harmony comes the conquering musician, and the charmed world, his debtor, proclaims him lord of a realm more peaceful than once the great Augustus mildly ruled.

Longfellow's often-quoted lines:

Lives of great men all remind us We can make our lives sublime,

are not wholly in accord with truth, for the domestic life of many a great man lends warrant to Mrs. Carlyle's warning against marrying a genius. And, surely, what is the brief domestic life of Byron if not a mystery of unhappiness? On the other hand, the lives of some of earth's greatest have proved sublime even in such testing ordeal. No «sweet bells jangled out of tune and harsh» drowned their connubial harmony; no wranglings of the ill-mated made the house rather a hell than a home; no Coleridge-like shirking of family responsibilities demeaned them in the eyes of men; no divergence of aim kept husband and wife always at cross purpose.

The home of Bach was the modest German home whose like, throughout the Fatherland, had bred the bone and sinew and brain of a great and worthy nation. It was the shielding home into whose peaceful shelter the disquieting world intruded not; the home paternal, maternal, and fraternal, where blossomed daily those sweet domesticities which root themselves in mutual love. It was the simple home, source and conserver of the simple life; the fruitful home free from imputation of race suicide; the happy home forever young with voices of childhood and youth; the Christian home from whence ascended in prayer and thanksgiving the homage of reverent hearts! It was, in short, the ideal home approved by earth, by Heaven ordained and blessed; and he, the great Bach, was its patriarchal head.

The creative artist stands at noblest remove from that brute inheritance of ours, the desire to take by violence. In him is manifest the God-like characteristic of the highest type of man, namely, desire to give for the pure love of giving.

Therefore, on such lives as that of Bach, the welfare of the world depends; they call it back from that insanity of selfishness toward which the age is tending. Such lives attest the claims of the ideal; they prove them to be of practical value. Such lives are, indeed, barriers against an on-rushing Materialism which otherwise might engulf us all.

Of the modern composer it must often be said that the world is too much with him; and to this misfortune are largely attributable the inequalities abounding in his music. Because of his co-partnership with that which tends to warp and deaden his artistic sensibility, he must needs force his inspiration; the result proving that the serenity of the high vision is not in him, but rather the delirium-nightmare of the world-fever. Nor can it be otherwise unless he benefits by the example of Bach and his kind. Like him, he should achieve a full and final consecration necessary as that of the priest and the prophet. Apart from the world wherewith he mingles; self-centered amidst the babbling multitude; deaf to the babel of their tongues; he should listen to the great song of life, the heavenly melody filling the shut sanctuary of his soul whereinto the world cannot enter. If he so do, it shall not be said of him that he lived in vain, or that his works but swelled the rubbish heap of Time.

The staid, methodical life of Bach the man, wherein nothing erratic is discoverable, was counterparted by the life of Bach the creative genius. The orderly and exhaustive development of a characteristic theme was to him the chief artistic end obtainable. In the school of which he was the great exponent, the imaginings of the composer must be moulded to the requirements of an exacting and time-approved model; but, despite the severity of the strict polyphonic style, whose restrictions led to its modification by the Classicists, and its final abandonment by the Romanticists, Bach moving in this, his congenial element, was no more hampered than is the freest illustrator of modern methods.