Chapter 11

MUSIC

_Music is a kind of inarticulate, unfathomable speech, which leads us to the edge of the Infinite, and lets us for moments gaze into that._

CARLYLE.

Paul began the study of music at an early age. He had natural aptitude for it and an unerring ear. As a little boy he used to sing with much expression in a sweet, clear voice. He received great assistance from his mother in his musical studies. After he had turned fifteen, music became one of his main interests. Indeed, if we except football, it was his master passion, and, unlike football, it could be pursued throughout the year. Whenever his scholastic studies and his athletic activities permitted, he would spend his leisure at the piano. With characteristic thoroughness he studied the lives as well as the works of the great composers. During the Grand Opera season he was a frequent visitor to Covent Garden Theatre and the performances of the _Nibelungen Ring_ were for him a fountain of pure delight. He was also a regular attendant with his mother at the Queen's Hall and Albert Hall concerts. Ballad singing did not appeal to him in the same degree as operatic and orchestral music. Thanks to instinctive gifts and assiduous practice he became a scholarly and an accomplished musician. A brilliant pianist, his playing was marked by power and passion, and the colour and glow of an intense and sensitive personality. He could memorise the most intricate composition, and would play for hours without a note. Music was almost a religion with him: he found in it solace, joy, inspiration.

Above all other musicians, he reverenced Beethoven and Wagner. For Beethoven's music, with its spiritualised emotion and divine harmonies, his admiration knew no bounds. Of the famous symphonies he assigned first place to that in C minor, No. 5, which he thought stood alone in the art of musical expression, peerless and unapproachable, a unique emanation from the soul and mind of man. "It holds us in its grasp," wrote Wagner of this composition, "as one of the rarer conceptions of the master, in which Passion, aroused by Pain as its original ground-tone, raises itself upward on the stepping-stone of conciliation and exaltation to an outburst of Joy conscious of Victory." Paul loved to play the Fifth Symphony as well as to hear it performed by an orchestral band. When playing it he seemed to lose touch with earth and to be transported to celestial heights. In his marginalia he compares the methods of expression of Shakespeare with those of Beethoven. That able critic, the late Professor Dowden, in some penetrating observations on Shakespeare's works, wrote:

In the earliest plays the idea is at times hardly sufficient to fill out the language; in the middle plays there seems a perfect balance and equality between the thought and its expression; in the latest plays this balance is disturbed by the preponderance, or excess, of ideas over the means of giving them utterance.

After underlining this passage Paul made the comment: "An extraordinary coincidence occurs to me in that the same thing happens with Beethoven, the greatest of the absolute musicians. Anyone must see that in the last symphony (No. 9 in D minor) he seems often at a loss how to put his feelings into shape (or sound), as though musical style up to his time could not express the intensity of his ideas. Hence in this symphony there is a distinct lack of balance--a defect which is absent from the works of his middle period (_e.g._, Symphony No. 5 or No. 7)."

Another Beethoven work that he loved was the Third Symphony in E Flat, with its epic opening; the mournful beauty of its funeral march, now sad, calm, solemn like a moonless, starless night, now shining with gleams of hope and faith; its crisp and lively scherzo; and the triumphant finale, a veritable ecstasy of divine joy. My son as an historical scholar found a peculiar attraction in this symphony by reason of its association with Napoleon Buonaparte, for it was inspired by Beethoven's belief--formed in those days when the soldier of the Revolution was regarded as the liberator of peoples and the enemy only of the old feudal order--that Napoleon was marked out by destiny to realise Plato's ideal of government. One recalls how the act of Napoleon in proclaiming himself Emperor shattered this illusion; how Beethoven erased the fallen hero's name from the title-page of his score, withheld the "Eroica" for a time, and then gave it to the world in 1805 as "An Heroic Symphony composed in memory of a great man." When Beethoven heard of Napoleon's death at St. Helena, he said he had already composed his funeral ode 17 years before. Of this _marche funèbre_ M. Ballaique wrote: "It owes its incomparable grandeur to the beauty of the melodic idea and also to a peculiarity of rhythm. At the first half of each bar there is a halt, a pause, which seems to punctuate each station, each painful slip or descent on the way to the illustrious tomb."

Of Wagner, Paul was a whole-hearted worshipper. He was familiar with the myths, legends and folk-poems from which Wagner drew his themes, and he exulted in the master's superb treatment of them. Never, he thought, had music and ideas been more felicitously blended than by Wagner, whatever the theme--the storm-tost soul of "the Flying Dutchman," to whom redemption came at last through loyalty and compassion; the conflict between sensuality and love fought out in the arena of Tannhäuser's mind; the cosmic glories of the Ring with the resplendent figures of Siegfried and Brunhilde; the self-dedication of Parsifal, the Sir Percival of our Arthurian legends, whom "The sweet vision of the Holy Grail drew from all vain-glories, rivalries and earthly heats." Into the glowing music of Wagner my son read lessons in renunciation, the sordidness of the lust for gold, the sublimity of pure human love, the redemptive power of self-sacrifice. The occasional voluptuousness of the music was so transmuted in the alembic of his temperament that for him the sensual element was eliminated. An incident illustrative of his devotion to Wagner is worth recording. In the summer of 1913, during our holiday tour in Germany, we had for part of the time our headquarters at Assmannshausen, a smiling village sheltering snugly at the foot of vine-clad hills on the right bank of the Rhine. That great river is at its best at Assmannshausen; the broad current here flows swiftly over a stony bed. Day and night one's ears are filled with the music of the rushing waters hastening impetuously to the distant sea as though eager to lose themselves in its infinite embrace. One evening the guests at the hotel arranged a concert, and to our surprise--for we knew how diffident he was--Paul, evidently moved by the _genius loci_, volunteered to take part in it. When the time came he advanced to the piano through the crowded room and, with an elbow resting on the instrument, astonished the audience by a few explanatory words. He said he was going to play the "Ride of the Valkyries," and explained what Wagner meant to convey by that wild, stormy music. Then seating himself at the instrument, he proceeded to play the "Ride" from memory. His execution had a verve whose charm was irresistible. It was a lovely summer night. Through the open windows of the concert-room one caught glimpses of the moonlight quivering on the waters of the swift-flowing Rhine. Nothing could be heard save the river's melodious roar softened by distance, and this enchanting music interpreted by one who was saturated with its spirit, both sounds blending harmoniously like the double pipe of an ancient Greek flute player. All of us felt the spell of the scene and the occasion. Everyone listened tense and silent until the descending chromatic passage at the end when the "Valkyries" vanish into space, the echo of their laughter dies away, and the "Ride" ends in a sound like the fluttering of wings in the distance. When Paul rose from the piano the pent-up feelings of the audience found expression in enthusiastic applause.

In the spring of 1913, just after he had turned 17, he wrote the following appreciation of Wagner for the _Llanelly Star_:

The 22nd of May, 1913, marks the centenary of an event of supreme importance in the annals of music. To-day just one hundred years ago was born at Leipzig Richard Wagner, king of the music-drama, who towers above all other operatic composers like some lofty mountain rising from the midst of a dull and featureless plain. Such a colossal revolution as was effected by Wagner in Art can hardly find a parallel in any walk of life. What, in brief, was the scope of Wagner's reforms? To answer this question it is necessary to glance at the state in which the opera stood in pre-Wagner days. From the days of Scarlatti the opera had consisted of a number of semi-detached solos, duets or choruses to which tunes were set. These pieces were joined up by any jumble of notes sung by the characters on the stage, usually with no artistic meaning whatsoever, known as the recitative. In a word, the opera was a mere ballad concert. The recitative was so utterly foolish and meaningless, as a rule, that men like Beethoven and Weber, when they composed music-dramas, abolished it altogether, and composed what is known as "Singspiel"--that is, a number of ballads connected simply by spoken words. (The well-known Gilbert and Sullivan operettas are really Singspiels in a lesser form.) Thus it is obvious that the meaning of the opera--that is, a drama whose significance is made more clear by the aid of music suitable to the situation in hand--had been entirely lost sight of.

In the average French or Italian opera, or in the singspiels, all that matters is a number of songs, ballads or arias--call them what you will--entirely disconnected and quite destructive to the continuity that must be the essence of every drama. This continuity is an absolute necessity to every spoken play; imagine the effect if Shakespeare or Ibsen had written little pieces of rhyming verse joined up by any jumble of nonsensical prose! Neglect of this fact led every opera composer before Wagner astray. We can imagine a pre-Wagner composer telling his librettist, "Now, mind you arrange that in certain parts the words will allow me to put in arias or choruses." In short, the situation was summed up in Wagner's famous phrase, "The means of expression (music) has been made the end, while the end of expression (the drama) has been made the means." Now this state of affairs is clearly wrong. If there is no dramatic idea kept as end to work to, then what is the use of writing opera at all? Why not be content with song-cycles or ballads, or lieder like Brahms's and Schumann's?

There are no divisions into aria and recitative in Wagner's operas, but dramatic continuity is retained by the voices of the characters singing music the succession of whose notes is determined by the emotional requirements of the moment. Meanwhile, the orchestra forms a sort of musical background by giving forth music which exactly suits the dramatic situation. The orchestra, in a word, as Wagner himself said of _Tristan und Isolde_, forms an emotional tide on which the voice floats like a boat on the waters. The essential relevance of the music to the dramatic situation is obtained, as a rule, by means of what are known as "leading motives." These form the basis of all Wagner's reforms. A leading motive is simply a musical phrase suggestive of a dramatic idea. Wagner's motives are marvellous in their descriptive and soul-stirring power. They seem to indicate not only the pith, but the utmost depths of the heart of the ideas which they represent. It is this that makes Wagner so very like Shakespeare. All can appreciate him, yet he is above all criticism, universal in his appeal.

Who but Wagner could make us feel the awful tragedy of Siegfried's death, the calm of the primeval elements, the pompous yet somewhat venerable character of the Mastersingers, the agony of Tristan's delirium, the superb majesty of Valhalla, or the free, noble nature of Parsifal? Even when Wagner uses motives comparatively little, writing rather "freely," as in _Tristan und Isolde_, he always has the power of imprinting an idea with the utmost clearness upon our souls. He will sometimes make a slight change in a motive, or make a development of it, that gives us an entirely different psychological impression of the idea represented by the motive, as indicating some new aspect of it in which the motives are all dovetailed together into a compact whole that is simply marvellous. If one considers the "Ring," that gigantic web of motives, and at the same time, in the words of that able critic, Mr. Ernest Newman, "beyond all comparison the biggest thing ever conceived by the mind of a musician," colossal yet logical, gigantic yet compact, the power of the Bayreuth master will become even still more evident.

Wagner's first work, _Rienci_, composed frankly in the blatant Meyerbeerian style, has no artistic significance. _The Flying Dutchman_ marks a great advance. _Tannhäuser_ and _Lohengrin_ are milestones of progress, but in all these works Wagner's full ideal is, generally speaking, but little perceptible. The really great Wagner operas are his later works, _Tristan und Isolde_, _Parsifal_, _Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg_, and, above all, that gigantic tetralogy (a complete musico-dramatic rendering of the Icelandic Saga put into English verse under the title of _Sigurd the Volsung_ by William Morris) which consists of four stupendous operas, _Das Rheingold_, _Die Walküre_, _Siegfried_, and _Gotterdämmerung_. These marvellous works, the consummation of the Bayreuth master's principles, undoubtedly stand with Beethoven's symphonies as the greatest achievements in music.

For the rest, it may be mentioned that Wagner was in private life a most kindly man, albeit at times quick-tempered, a great lover of children and animals. His philosophy was a somewhat variable quantity; he fell under the influence first of Feuerbach, then of Schopenhauer, and to some extent possibly of Nietzsche. But still, throughout all his works runs the doctrine of the Free Individual, of which Siegfried and Parsifal are perhaps the most striking impersonations.

Like Browning, Wagner believed in redemption by means of sacrifice. In his richness and strength Wagner typified the abounding vitality of the new Germany. To the Fatherland he is what Shakespeare is to England. One may apply to him the noble words Milton wrote of Shakespeare:

"Thou in our wonder and astonishment Hast built thyself a livelong monument.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

And so sepulchred in such pomp dost lie That kings for such a tomb would wish to die."

H. P. M. J.

I found among my son's papers a sketch in manuscript of Wagner's life and work. It begins with some observations on Romanticism and Classicism.

Whereas in the Classical style the spirit is held in restraint by certain forms, in the Romantic it refuses to acknowledge these forms and breaks away to give the soul entirely free play. It necessarily follows that the Romantic style makes the wider appeal, for it touches chords of the heart that the Classical cannot. Also the Romantic is rather more definite and less purely intellectual than the Classical, though the ideal may be equally high in the one as in the other. In short, the Romantic style is human in its appeal, while the Classical is superhuman. The best examples of men great in these two forms of art are Shakespeare in the Romance and Milton in the Classic.

Returning to music, he thought that Bach, "immortal though many of his works are," was fettered by his servitude to rules.

The Classical may become too cold, may lose all connection with the warmth of humanity. Such a fate does Haydn seem to have met in many of his works. Beethoven, the mightiest classicist, also to some extent Mozart, saw that the soul must not hold entirely aloof from humanity. Hence it is that Beethoven broke deliberately several, though not indeed very many, of Bach's more enchaining rules, while Mozart, in his operas at least, had a large amount of Romance worked into his music. On the other hand, by its very nature the Romance style is occasionally apt to slip into what is pre-eminently Classicism.

He confutes the argument that because base things have to be expressed in the Romantic style therefore that style degrades Art, for "base things handled artistically excite pure emotions of anger or indignation."

Wagner, though he broke every rule set up by Bach, though he abolished all the ideas of Classicism, produced with his later works (_i.e._, _The Ring_, _Die Meistersinger_, _Tristan_, and _Parsifal_) music which reveals infinitudes of art to quite as great an extent as any classicist has done.... Wagner gives us Nature's message, Beethoven the message of the incomprehensible Empyrean, and it is for no one to say that the one message is any greater or less than the other.

Necessarily the opera must be more romantic than the symphony. "Composers who have given the world both opera and symphony such as Beethoven, Mozart, Weber, Spohr, Berlioz, always wrote Romantically in their operas and Classically in their symphonies." Of the development of opera he wrote:

Opera was fast degenerating into a sort of collection of ballads, with hardly any orchestration at all, when a strong man rose to check these abuses. Gluck was the forerunner of the earlier German school of opera composers, which includes such men as Beethoven, Mozart, Weber and Schubert. Gluck had studied carefully the progress of non-operatic music since Bach's time, and seeing what vast strides the art had made in this direction, tried to bring into line with the opera its improvements. He was the first composer to show the immense and inestimable necessity of properly orchestrated music in opera. Gluck's rich scoring, beautiful melodies combined with dramatic connection between action, voice and orchestra, entirely revolutionised the opera. Fortunately, he had a still greater contemporary to carry on his reforms. Gluck has himself explained how he set out to avoid any concession of music to the vocal abilities of the singer; how he had tried to bring music to its proper function, _i.e._, to go side by side with the poetry of the drama--a clear forecasting of Wagner's own reforms.

Whereas in Monteverde's operas the dramatic significance was kept, but only at the expense of the music, which had absolutely no signification at all, in the works of Gluck, Mozart and Scarlatti the musical part is elevated, but entirely at the expense of the dramatic idea, which is quite lost. A Mozart melody, rhythmic, square-cut, is as different as possible from a Wagner theme, for whereas the former suggests nothing the latter is very rich in suggestion. It is clear that Gluck and Mozart, though they performed an inestimable service to the musical art by the raising of the orchestra to its proper position with regard to the voice and the music, yet failed to keep in view the continuity of the drama in opera. Hence it was that Weber and Beethoven frankly abolished the recitative that joins the formal melodies of the arias and melodic passages and composed Singspiel, having their works built up of airs and melodies joined by spoken dialogue. Such is Weber's _Der Freischütz_ and such Beethoven's _Fidelio_.

After discussing Meyerbeer, Scarlatti, and Rossini, Bellini and Donizetti, my son comes to Wagner and the revolution in music he accomplished:

Wagner was a man of ripe culture, who was equally familiar with Beethoven's symphonies, Shakespeare's dramas, Kant's philosophic writings and Homer's epics. All the great works of literature and philosophy were well known to him. Thus he brought to bear on his music a mind singularly well equipped in every direction. He was, too, essentially a Teuton, with all the German massiveness of conception and depth of soul. A lesser man must have fallen before the prospect of attempting such a colossal reform. What was that reform in its essentials? It was this--to compose opera in which the idea of the drama was made the ruling conception; to attain this end by a wedding of suitable poetry to music of such a kind as should reflect by its themes what was happening on the stage or in the minds of the characters. There was to be no aria or fixed form of ballad, but continuous melody, in which the voices of the characters are regarded as extra instruments of the orchestra, with just that element of personality included....

To have succeeded entirely in this bold design he would have had to be a Shakespeare in poetry and knowledge of human nature, as well as a musician of equal ability. How could any one man fulfil both of these rôles? In the matter of the music Wagner is a very Shakespeare. But if we take his own writings as evidences of what he meant to do, then his librettos must necessarily be unsatisfactory. They keep the dramatic idea in sight so much as almost entirely to lose sight of poetic beauty. Wagner was pre-eminently a musician; he was not a poet, as he wished also to be. Whatever his poetical achievements, the main fact is unaltered. The dramatic idea and the musical expression are kept so indissolubly close by Wagner as to be one for all intents and purposes.

Of Wagner's treatment of the vocalist he says:

The melody sung is modelled upon the way in which the speaking voice rises and falls in accordance with the feelings of the moment. With marvellous skill the master of Bayreuth has made the music sung reflect as clearly as any oration what are the thoughts and feelings of the character. The orchestra makes, as it were, a tide or ocean, over which the voice, in this manner, floats, now rising high on the crest of the wave, now sinking into the trough of the seas. Sometimes for added poignancy, Wagner makes the voice sing the _leitmotif_ of some idea connected with the idea of the moment. This is constantly occurring in _Die Meistersinger_.

After scornful allusions to French and Italian opera, he shows how Wagner re-fashioned opera on new and nobler lines. Replying to those who say "You must have lightness sometimes," he wrote:

Yes, but never triviality. If we want lightness of touch and wittiness, have we not _Die Meistersinger_, the greatest comedy in the world, or a merry piece like Mozart's _Nozze di Figaro_? Here is all the wit that one wants, yet the level is kept high throughout. It is the same in literature. We have absurd, banal pieces, said to be humorous, such as _The Glad Eye_, which really contain not one-millionth the humour that there is in a noble comedy like Shakespeare's _Twelfth Night_, or _As You Like It_, or a Shavian play like _John Bull's Other Island_. Man is too great a thing ever to be of his nature low and banal. We have in life farce sometimes, comedy very often indeed, but never banality.

The essay thus concludes:

If we have been flooded with rag-times and musical comedies, the fault lies in the first place with the French and Italian composers of the period 1790-1850. Pre-Wagner opera is as low a concoction as can possibly be conceived. It took all the genius of the great Bayreuth master to turn things back into their proper channel. But he has succeeded, and the old style is moribund. Anyone who glances over the list of living composers must see that they are all enormously influenced by Wagner's principle. The last of the old style was Massenet, and he is dead. We see Richard Strauss, an extreme Wagnerian, only without the master's full powers; Engelbert Humperdinck, who is a user of the _leitmotif_ and a most skilled orchestrator, though his motifs are not so powerful as Wagner's or even Strauss's; Pietro Mascagni, a Mozartean composer; Bruneau, an extreme Wagnerian; Glazounov and Mossourgsky have combined Wagner's ideas with Tschaikovsky's; Puccini at least is a very strong supporter and admirer of Wagner. It will thus be seen that, with the exception of Mascagni, Wagnerian ideas have been paid tribute to by all the leading opera composers of the day. In a word, the Man is here. Opera, as represented by Richard Wagner's music-dramas, takes its place on a level with the absolute music of which Beethoven's work is the noblest example.

Paul found keen pleasure in the Gilbert and Sullivan operas, liking the witty libretto as much as the bright, tuneful melodies. For the work of Cæsar Franck, a gifted Belgian musician who died on the threshold of manhood, he had profound admiration, and was of opinion that had he lived Franck would have taken rank with the great masters. As was to be expected, my son had for Welsh music a strong natural sympathy. He held that "Men of Harlech" was one of the greatest of all battle hymns, and that "Morfa Rhuddlan," the ancient Cymric dirge, had never been surpassed as a piece of funereal music. Some of the old Welsh hymn tunes he regarded as unique in their wistfulness and devout aspiration; and as for Welsh choral singing, he thought it was matchless for richness, fire and harmony.