Part 5

Walled from the covetous human waves, safe from the encroaching human tide, Père la Chaise, a mass of bloom and verdure, lies asleep while the Parisian metropolis roars and surges on. Of all the multitudes here gathered to the silence, one at least is alien for never a branch is moaning, never a breeze, for Polish liberty; and never a bird is inspired by such sad, sweet threnody; and never a strip of Polish sky, clear, or cloud-bedarkened, or heavy with the drops of sorrow, is bending o'er chiseled marble of a tomb. Amidst the dead of every high and noble calling, the dead whose deeds enhance the fame of France, that alien's dust is in the jealous keeping of a nation richer because of Poland and her greatest bard.

Sixty years have gone since the October day when, within the walls of the Madelaine, the master's funeral measures dirged his death. Since that memorable time many pianoforte composers, men of talent and men of genius, have arisen. These, by their indebtedness to the years of Chopin's productivity, prove him the one epoch-making composer for their instrument since Beethoven, and the one probably without a successor in kind.

The certainty that the principal Sonatas of Beethoven, and the Ballades and other chief works of Chopin, overtop all else written for the piano, provokes the question, Which of these composers is foremost in this realm of music? The question at once lends itself to argument. Evidently Chopin abounds in technical difficulties unattempted by Beethoven, and these difficulties are a proof of worth because in fact the unusual but necessary conveyers of a message new to the musical world. It must be conceded that Chopin's daring chromaticisms, transitions and modulations are the inevitable expressions of a genius novel but not forced. Then again, Chopin wrote for the piano not as he found it, but with prophetic knowledge of its future possibilities; to the extent of all this he outrivals Beethoven.

It must not be supposed that harmonic complexity is of itself superior to broad and bold simplicity. This truth Handel well knew. He, the master of Fugue, with all contrapuntal devices at command, is renowned for a Doric beauty the despair of the Byzantine and the Rococo. As a harmonist, Beethoven felt not the urge of the unusual; the immense possibilities which he perceived in Bach were enough for his grand and stately measures. Taking from that unexhausted mine, he cut and polished; then, brilliant on their every facet, he strewed the gems along his pages. Because of his many-sided excellence, we hold Beethoven a harmonist superior to Chopin, himself a delver in the Bachian mine. The music of Chopin is recognizable almost from the opening bar, but, as a creator and developer of characteristic themes, Beethoven is unequalled. While Chopin is one of the most inspired melodists, Beethoven sings himself more into the soul.

Although a solitaire, Beethoven was really a man of widest, deepest sympathies. Against his own bosom he felt the heart beat of humanity, and, love-enlightened, he divined that heart, even its total meaning. The heaven-reaching heights of joy, and the black profound of woe, and every intermediate, throbbed contagious into his own breast. Therefore is he the universal man, interpreter of his own ideal world and interpreter of nations, while, on his human side, the intense Chopin is the epitome of Poland. That this universal man was not containable within the possibilities of the pianoforte, was plainly no fault of his; nevertheless, that much of the universal which informs the chief Sonatas of Beethoven, entitles them to supremacy over the greatest of the other.

As the second of pianoforte composers, what giants Chopin leaves in his rear! Haydn, Mozart, Schubert, Von Weber, Mendelssohn, Schumann, and behind them many of lesser stature, Hummel, Clementi, Moscheles and such; and, still further back, the great average, the ephemeral multitude. Of all their pushing of pens, little will remain when, on some distant to-morrow, the stirred pulse and the suffused eye prove the tone-poems of the Polish musician an unfading charm, an undimmed worth, an eternal beauty, in the realms of art.

RICHARD STRAUSS AND THE ART OF SOUND

RICHARD STRAUSS AND THE ART OF SOUND

I

The years now with us are prophetic of a century notable from its beginning; a century destined to achieve perhaps beyond our boldest imagining. Already is the century achieving, as, like a youthful but formidable being, it assaults that citadel of mystery wherein Truth must relinquish, one by one, her most valued and guarded possessions.

To the observant, the present is a time of shaken foundations, a time of much actual overthrow, and even a time of planning that broader and deeper bases shall well sustain the super-imposed new. Amidst an upheaval of things social, political, scientific, ethical and æsthetic; an upheaval world-wide, and necessarily sourced in the sub-strata of the world of causes; Art, for instance, is unavoidably disturbed throughout its various provinces.

Only the over-sanguine will assume that the better must needs rise from upheaval and overthrow. Therefore let us look but for the reasonable, for does not many a desolated province of this material world belie the theory of uninterrupted advance?

Appearances indicate that the art of music is entering upon a period the most momentous of its existence, a period of transition more radical than when it was emerging from the Greek modes; a period perhaps of storm and stress, of morbid and eccentric individualism; a period like that which almost overwhelmed literature in the early days of Goethe and Schiller; or, perhaps, a period of real progress; but, in either event, a period from which it will come forth an art far different from that of Bach, Beethoven, Chopin and Wagner.

Because progressive, the human mind will not regard its greatest work with a complacency inimical to further effort. Ever it fashions and re-fashions, achieving yesterday, failing to-day, and then more than retrieving on some fortunate morrow. Strange doings and sayings are rife in the musical world of the present. Denying the validity of fixed key, Claude Debussy begins and ends his tone creations anywhere within the limit of the chromatic scale. Max Reger teaches the intimate fellowship of the entire twenty-four keys, while Richard Strauss has well-nigh outgrown the twelve semitones of our time-honored gamut which must be enlarged if it would meet the needs of his successors. It is the opinion of many that, in this event, the art of music will be merged in what we shall here call the art of sound. Concerning this realistic art, this art to be, let us explain briefly that, whereas the word sound signifies all that the ear cognizes, whether as euphony, cacophony or mere noise, yet, for sound to attain to the status of an art, art must endow with definite and adequate purpose not only euphony, but also every other sound, including mere noise.

While Strauss with almost audacious boldness is leading toward the enharmonic possibilities of an augmented scale, the more conservative but no less ingenious Reger is looking back to his beloved Bach, and showing what, through a greatly extended key relationship, that master might have accomplished with the good old semitones. Eschewing programme music, and all else demanding literary elucidation, Reger will, to the tone-poems of his rival, offset a fugue or a sonata ultra enough for any save the disciples of Strauss and Debussy.

Like Strauss, Debussy is in no wise to be ignored, but always and wholly to be reckoned with in an estimate of advanced methods. Paradoxical at first thought is the fact that Debussy, whose measures abound in unresolved discords of ultra-modern origin, should found his music not uniformly on the major and the minor scales, but, by preference, largely on the old church modes. This reversion to the mediæval indicates a period of crisis wherein the beam fluctuates between the extremes of old and new tonal methods. Dispensing with the size and blare of the modern orchestra, and shunning, as if an obsession, the Wagnerian models, Debussy will not for one brief moment permit in the lyric drama such outbursts of vocal melody as crown the climaxes of «Lohengrin,» and the passionate love scenes of «Tannhäuser.» And this for the specific reason that «Melody is almost anti-lyric, and powerless to express the constant change of emotional life. Melody is suitable only for the song which confirms a fixed sentiment.»

While Strauss is held to be the lineal successor of Liszt, he is in fact a compound of various modern tendencies. In him we find the philosophy of Nietzsche, the impressionism of Manet, and the realism of which De Maupassant and Zola and Whitman and the youthful Swinburne were exponents; a realism which, because it over-emphasizes the erotic, the pathological, and the ugly, misinterprets man and nature, and so betrays the characteristics of decadent art.

What would have been the attitude of Wagner toward Strauss may be inferred from his caustic attacks on Berlioz whose music he called foolish and eccentric; and yet, as a producer of novel effects he himself was much indebted to the French composer, and, in turn, was no small factor in the formation of one whom Strauss' disciples deem the greater Richard. Notwithstanding which, we affirm that Strauss is more closely related to Liszt whose talents, both in pianoforte and orchestral composition, tended to virtuoso display more than to the utterance of original and lofty ideas.

Prior to the advent of Wagner, the musical composer deemed it necessary always to appeal to the sense of the beautiful. Whatever his theme, his music, ever conforming to the established laws of harmony, must not be repugnant to that æsthetic sense. At times he no doubt overstepped his self-imposed limit, but, somehow, the ear of the listener has accustomed itself to the innovation, and with the result that not a few wholly doubt the existence of a line of cleavage between the ugly and the beautiful. However, a sane philosophy will demonstrate that beauty and ugliness are as unlike as are good and evil.

Neither the painter nor the sculptor restricts himself to pleasing subjects; the grotesque and the horrible have been deemed not unworthy the brush and the chisel of artists indubitably great, and it can be argued that to music should be accorded an expression free and faithful as that allowed to painting and the plastic arts. On the other hand, popular opinion has ever been, and perhaps ever will be, that what is actually ugly is not music. To this opinion the modern reply is that the word music carries with it far too restricted a meaning; the office of the tonal art, like that of all other arts, is to express not the half but the whole of life; in fact, the universal duality in nature and in man.

With deep philosophic and artistic insight, Wagner elaborated an art destined, as he believed, to supersede Italian Opera. Despite his harsh but convincing strictures, and despite the theories and practice of Debussy who holds that in the Music Drama the vocal parts, lest they hinder the dramatic action, should be reduced to a rhythmic chant devoid of melody, Italian Opera survives; from temporary eclipse it is emerging bright as before. In the life labors of the great reformer, we are beginning to see simply a new school supplementing the old. We are beginning to see that the denouncer of Donizetti and Rossini and Verdi and Bellini and the rest, was himself not quite faultless in practice, however correct in theory. Musicians of eminence now admit that the incongruities of Italian Opera are offset by the over-long and the slow-moving in the Wagnerian Music Drama. Naturally the world refuses to forget «Lucia» and «Il Barbiere» and «Rigoletto» and «Norma,» and in fact any work whereinto the muse of Italy has poured her quenchless fire.

Granting that the faulty and inadequate Greek modes had so cramped and chilled musical expression that, in their abandonment, little of value was lost to the musicians of past centuries, what shall be said of our modern musical heritage, the gift of the last two hundred years, and which the universal adoption of a new and enlarged musical scale would render obsolete? Will not that spirit of love and loyalty which defends the cause of Italian Opera, make determined stand against the novel system? From the twelve notes of the chromatic scale the great German masters have evoked the superlatively beautiful. Shaping their imaginings to lofty ideals, they have in fact epitomized the larger, better part of man and nature, as understood by the German mind. Admitting this, can the cultured musician bring himself to ignore the past of German art? for this he must needs do under an exclusively modern regime. No! a thousand times no! That for music a different scale can be no more than supplementary is indicated by the history of all other æsthetic arts. Their every worthy type endures; not any one has quite eclipsed another.

The two leading races, once peopling the southmost peninsulas of Europe, were extinct centuries ago, but their daily tongues survive, dead languages never while endures the world, for they bring to all enlightened peoples the period and climax of the orator, the meter of the tragic dramatist, and the notes of the Homeric and the Virgilian muse, fresh and unrivalled as when Greece and Italy first lent ear.

There have been schools of architecture, both Pagan and Christian, schools of sculpture from Phidias onward; schools of modern painting since the mature work of Giotto; and the wise ages, far from selecting and excluding, have preserved them all.

To men of creative genius were granted glimpses of Truth; each from his own angle beheld the ineffable vision. Through the sundered veils of illusion, as through the storm's momentary rift, the permitted artist beheld his own ruling star, sometimes a royal sun, sometimes a subordinate planet, but always one without which the hierarchy of heaven were incomplete.

That neither the school of Wagner nor that of Strauss will supersede existing national schools is assured for the additional reason that these are the outcome of national ideals. In every race of civilization the man of creative genius proves his people to be possessed of ideals of art peculiarly their own. There results for example the Slavic, the Scandinavian, the English, the German, the Spanish, the French, the Italian ideals, and, lofty in possibilities, that of the amalgamating race destined to fill this ample western land of ours.

The ideals of tonal art! Surely the Wagnerian and the Straussian models cannot include them all! Varied as the geography of the globe, as the configurations of its surface, those national ideals are sombre with the solitude of barren steppes; they are gloomy with the twilight of deep-indenting fjords; they are rich with the ancient, the mediæval, the modern, of a land of memories gathered since the coming of Arthur. Otherwhere they are fraught with the romance of Rhenish castles where Minnesingers and Meistersingers have proved the magic power of song; or else they bring the southern night of castinets and tripping feet, and the moonlit wonder of Moorish Alhambra. How well those ideals have embodied the gay and the graceful, also the volatile as the vintage of vine-clad Champagne! And how fitly are they born by Adriatic and Mediterranean shores where the ardent day-beam warms the heart to love's emotion; and, in days to come, shall they not suggest the amplitude of snowy mountain chains, the undulating sweep of prairies, the breezy expanse of vast inland seas, and the eternal dash and roar of ocean on our eastern and our western coasts?

These, and countless other ideals sourced in the world's composite life, have given rise to a necessarily varied art whose inner unity must remain undiscovered till mankind becomes one great family, bound by a community of ideals and interests in the millennial dawn of a yet-unrisen day.

II

The belief that for them only is the pure and high vision of Truth, and that the world should look with their eyes and abide by their interpretation, is the folly of many of the wisest reformers. Over-enthusiasm inflames the minds of such, and disturbs their sanity of judgment. The reformer in art is usually a philosopher pledged to some system into which, as into a mould, he pours at fluid heat his artistic imaginings. Because no system of philosophy yet elaborated finds general acceptance, or because, as Schopenhauer intimates, one discovers in any philosophy only what his capacity permits, our reformer will appeal chiefly to those whose minds are akin to his own.

For the comprehension of Beethoven and his great predecessors, little more than a trained ear is necessary; but, for the comprehension of our latest composers, one must habituate himself to abstruse metaphysical thinking. To endorse Wagner, both wholly and understandingly, one should assent to Schopenhauer's theory of music. To endorse in like manner the attitude of Strauss, one should assent to the «Super Man» of Nietzsche, and his crowning qualities «evolved good and evolved evil.»

If, as Whitman says, perfect sanity characterizes the master among philosophers, how can more than a cult accept that topsy-turvy of ethical values, that quack mixture of Scientific Materialism and Comtism run mad, the system of Nietzsche? It is probably that but for his «Beyond Good and Evil,» Strauss, the foremost exponent of musical ultraism, would have hesitated at more than half-way measures.

In the morning, ere he attempted creative work, Wagner was wont to say, «If we could keep our hearts pure this day, untainted and untempted by the false values of the world, what visions of Infinity itself were possible to us!»

Surely the heart, indispensable to the creation of a masterpiece of art, cannot be stimulated by a philosophy brutal because without pity; a philosophy shallow because ignorant of the essential nature and ultimate end of what it deems mere weakness; a philosophy which would crush that symbol of weakness, the falling sparrow, and quench all love for the neighbor if in him appear no promise of «Super Man.» Now who is this «Super Man,» this ideal of Nietzsche and his tonal interpreter? Is he not a being fashioned much after the model of what the race no more desires, to wit, the outworn gods of Greece and Rome? Is he not an ideal compounded of mutually destructive qualities?

Because of the serious shortcomings we have indicated, and because of others which will be pointed out, the art of Strauss may never reach the highest levels; his chief office as composer, like that of Whitman as poet, may be to explore a domain wherein the superlative genius of the future is to expand his ample powers. That genius, and in our opinion he only, can reveal the legitimate possibilities of sound. In his tonal creations the cacophonious, as well as the euphonious, must be employed in such way that every mood of man and every shade of human feeling shall be faithfully portrayed, and the world itself epitomized. His must be a sane equipoise, an unfailing sense of fitness, the consummate ability to adjust to a nicety, so that always the end justifies the means. Already his predecessors in the great acknowledged schools have developed the art of euphony. It will be his even more difficult and exacting task to develop the art of cacophony, and fuse the two in such way that they over-picture not the totality of man and nature.

Notwithstanding Wagner's belief that instrumental music could not further develop unless fused with the sister arts of poetry, painting and dramatic action, the modern outlook discovers in the art of sound almost limitless possibilities as yet unrealized; but, judging from the past, the stupendous tonal edifice created by the coming master will not overshadow the erections of composers from Bach to Wagner.

Still the divine Mozart will turn us to the never-to-be despised beauty of form chaste and classic. Still Beethoven's temple of music will reveal that form's complete and glorious development and crowning. Still at heaven's very gate will Schubert, spontaneous and impassional lark, outpour the melody he learned beneath that temple's overhanging roof, or else in the sacred limits of its inmost court.

Always we shall have with us those who in the name of progress turn the back on whatever is behind. Ignoring Aristotle's profound dictum that the real test of art is not originality, but its truth to the universal, these no doubt will ridicule as immature attempts, necessary to the adolescence of art, all that is greatest in German and Italian music. In addition to these we shall have that class of temperamental individuals who, from the extravagant and bizarre, derive that thrill of rapture which they mistake for appreciation: however, these fickle followers of fads and fashions cannot be reckoned among the adherents of legitimate art. Now as to the public, the great overwhelming body of the people; can they be educated to enjoy the new art of sound? Will they not refuse, aye, obstinately refuse to appreciate cacophony however judiciously employed? A difficult question this unless one remembers that, as the race advances, the foremost, coming into new vistas of Truth, bequeath to those next in line, and so on to the very rear, their own rare and high discovery.

In the comprehensive art of sound, the euphonious epitomizes the major, better half of man and nature. From this it appears that the cacophonious must epitomize the minor, baser half. Why, heretofore, was this half well-nigh denied tonal utterance? Was it not largely from the old and inadequate theological conception which made the existence of evil an abortion of the Divine plan?

Conceding the answer implied, and granting that the attitude of the time is one of invitation, let us consider certain factors necessary to the realization of the art of sound.

Orchestral music and orchestral accompaniment, as understood by Bach and Handel, betray a paucity of resource and a lack of color then inevitable. Since that era of small beginnings, and in late years especially, orchestral instruments both numerous and valuable have been invented, and the capacity of brass and wood-wind much enlarged and their quality greatly improved. Desirous of utilizing to the utmost all additions and improvements, orchestral composers sought effects the most novel both in solo and in symphony. As result the orchestra grew from infantile to gigantic proportions and capabilities. Thus was produced a full, flexible and characteristic means of expression, one peculiarly suited to the speculating and philosophizing musician who, already due and now appearing, added his contributions to those productive of a rounded art.

In examining the factors which make for Strauss and his works, we shall find that his native originality could never have raised him to what he is, and that the art of sound would still be an undiscovered one, had not Chopin already exemplified, most eloquently, the flexibility of the laws of chromatic progression, and had not Wagner, that great emancipator, stricken from musical form the cramping bonds of a narrow convention.

If, as we contend, the minor half of dual man and nature has legitimate place in all art, then let the musician beware lest, as final impression, he make evil seductive, and so identify himself with decadence as have those who denounce in every form of art any purpose consciously moral; those in fact who announce as their dictum, «Art for art's sake.» When for specific ends the musician weaves around evil a flowery spell, he somehow should make us feel that death and corruption lurk in every petal of those all-too-enticing blooms.