MUSICAL PORTRAITS

INTERPRETATIONS OF TWENTY MODERN COMPOSERS

BY PAUL ROSENFELD

NEW YORK HARCOURT, BRACE AND HOWE 1920

COPYRIGHT, 1920, BY HARCOURT, BRACE AND HOWE, INC.

THE QUINN & BODEN COMPANY RAHWAY, N. J.

To ARTHUR MOORE WILLIAMSON

Some of the material of this book was originally printed in the form of articles in "The Dial," "The New Republic," and "The Seven Arts." Thanks are due the editors of these periodicals for permission to recast and reprint it.



CONTENTS

WAGNER, 3 STRAUSS, 27 MOUSSORGSKY, 57 LISZT, 73 BERLIOZ, 87 FRANCK, 101 DEBUSSY, 119 RAVEL, 133 BORODIN, 149 RIMSKY-KORSAKOFF, 159 RACHMANINOFF, 169 SCRIABINE, 177 STRAWINSKY, 191 MAHLER, 205 REGER, 223 SCHOENBERG, 233 SIBELIUS, 245 LOEFFLER, 257 ORNSTEIN, 267 BLOCH, 281 APPENDIX, 299



MUSICAL PORTRAITS



Wagner

Wagner's music, more than any other, is the sign and symbol of the nineteenth century. The men to whom it was disclosed, and who first sought to refuse, and then accepted it, passionately, without reservations, found in it their truth. It came to their ears as the sound of their own voices. It was the common, the universal tongue. Not alone on Germany, not alone on Europe, but on every quarter of the globe that had developed coal-power civilization, the music of Wagner descended with the formative might of the perfect image. Men of every race and continent knew it to be of themselves as much as was their hereditary and racial music, and went out to it as to their own adventure. And wherever music reappeared, whether under the hand of the Japanese or the semi-African or the Yankee, it seemed to be growing from Wagner as the bright shoots of the fir sprout from the dark ones grown the previous year. A whole world, for a period, came to use his idiom. His dream was recognized during his very lifetime as an integral portion of the consciousness of the entire race.

For Wagner's music is the century's paean of material triumph. It is its cry of pride in its possessions, its aspiration toward greater and ever greater objective power. Wagner's style is stiff and diapered and emblazoned with the sense of material increase. It is brave, superb, haughty with consciousness of the gigantic new body acquired by man. The tonal pomp and ceremony, the pride of the trumpets, the arrogant stride, the magnificent address, the broad, vehement, grandiloquent pronouncements, the sumptuous texture of his music seems forever proclaiming the victory of man over the energies of fire and sea and earth, the lordship of creation, the suddenly begotten railways and shipping and mines, the cataclysm of wealth and comfort. His work seems forever seeking to form images of grandeur and empire, flashing with Siegfried's sword, commanding the planet with Wotan's spear, upbuilding above the heads of men the castle of the gods. It dares measure itself with the terrestrial forces, exults in the fire, soughs through the forest with the thunderstorm, glitters and surges with the river, spans mountains with the rainbow bridge. It is full of the gestures of giants and heroes and gods, of the large proud movements of which men have ever dreamed in days of affluent power. Even "Tristan und Isolde," the high song of love, and "Parsifal," the mystery, spread richness and splendor about them, are set in an atmosphere of heavy gorgeous stuffs, amid objects of gold and silver, and thick clouding incense, while the protagonists, the lovers and saviors, seem to be celebrating a worldly triumph, and crowning themselves kings. And over the entire body of Wagner's music, there float, a massive diadem, the towers and parapets and banners of Nuremberg the imperial free city, monument of a victorious burgherdom, of civic virtue that on the ruins of feudalism constructed its own world, and demonstrated to all times its dignity and sobriety and industry, its solid worth.

For life itself made the Wagnerian gesture. The vortex of steel and glass and gold, the black express-packets plowing the seven seas, the smoking trains piercing the bowels of the mountains and connecting cities vibrant with hordes of business men, the telegraph wires setting the world aquiver with their incessant reports, the whole sinister glittering faery of gain and industry and dominion, seemed to tread and soar and sound and blare and swell with just such rhythm, such grandeur, such intoxication. Mountains that had been sealed thousands of years had split open again and let emerge a race of laboring, fuming giants. The dense primeval forests, the dragon-haunted German forests, were sprung up again, fresh and cool and unexplored, nurturing a mighty and fantastic animality. Wherever one gazed, the horned Siegfried, the man born of the earth, seemed near once more, ready to clear and rejuvenate the globe with his healthy instinct, to shatter the old false barriers and pierce upward to fulfilment and power. Mankind, waking from immemorial sleep, thought for the first time to perceive the sun in heaven, to greet the creating light. And where was this music more immanent than in the New World, in America, that essentialization of the entire age? By what environment was it more justly appreciated, Saxon though the accents of its recitative might be? Germany had borne Wagner because Germany had an uninterrupted flow of musical expression. But had the North American continent been able to produce musical art, it could have produced none more indigenous, more really autochthonous, than that of Richard Wagner. Whitman was right when he termed these scores "the music of the 'Leaves.'" For nowhere did the forest of the Niebelungen flourish more lushly, more darkly, than upon the American coasts and mountains and plains. From the towers and walls of New York there fell a breath, a grandiloquent language, a stridency and a glory, that were Wagner's indeed. His regal commanding blasts, his upsweeping marching violins, his pompous and majestic orchestra, existed in the American scene. The very masonry and river-spans, the bursting towns, the fury and expansiveness of existence shed his idiom, shadowed forth his proud processionals, his resonant gold, his tumultuous syncopations and blazing brass and cymbals and volcanically inundating melody; appeared to be struggling to achieve the thing that was his art. American life seemed to be calling for this music in order that its vastness, its madly affluent wealth and multiform power and transcontinental span, its loud, grandiose promise might attain something like eternal being.

And just as in Wagner's music there sounds the age's cry of material triumph, so, too, there sounds in it its terrible cry of homesickness. The energy produced and hurled out over the globe was sucked back again with no less a force. The time that saw the victory of industrialism saw as well the revival or the attempted revival of medieval modes of feeling. Cardinal Newman was as typical a figure of nineteenth-century life as was Balzac. The men who had created the new world felt within themselves a passionate desire to escape out of the present into the past once more. They felt themselves victors and vanquished, powerful and yet bereft and forlorn. And Wagner's music expresses with equal veracity both tides. Just as his music is brave with a sense of outward power, so, too, it is sick with a sense of inner unfulfilment. There is no longing more consuming, no homesickness more terrible, no straining after the laving, immersing floods of unconsciousness more burning than that which utters itself through this music. There are passages, whole hours of his, that are like the straining of a man to return into the darkness of the mothering night out of which he came. There is music of Wagner that makes us feel as though he had been seeking to create great warm clouds, great scented cloths, wide curtains, as though he had come to his art to find something in which he could envelop himself completely, and blot out sun and moon and stars, and sink into oblivion. For such a healer Tristan, lying dying on the desolate, rockbound coast, cries through the immortal longing of the music. For such a divine messenger the wound of Amfortas gapes; for such a redeemer Kundry, driven through the world by scorching winds, yearns. His lovers come toward each other, seeking in each other the night, the descent into the fathomless dark. For them sex is the return, the complete forgetfulness. Through each of them there sounds the insistent cry:

"Frau Minne will Es werde Nacht!"

There is no tenderness, no awareness of each other, in these men and women. There is only the fierce, impersonal longing for utter consumption, the extinction of the flaming torch, complete merging in the Absolute, the weaving All. In each of them, desire for the void mounts into a gigantic, monstrous flower, into the shimmering thing that enchants King Mark's garden and the rippling stream and the distant horns while Isolde waits for Tristan, or into the devastating fever that chains the sick Tristan to his bed of pain.

For all these beings, and behind them Wagner, and behind him his time, yearn for the past, the pre-natal, the original sleep, and find in such a return their great fulfilment. Siegmund finds in the traits of his beloved his own childhood. Siegfried awakes on the flame-engirdled hill a woman who watched over him before he was born, and waited unchanged for his ripening. It is with the kiss of Herzeleide that Kundry enmeshes Parsifal. Brunhilde struggles for the forgiving embrace of Wotan, sinks on the breast of the god in submission, reconciliation, immolation. And it is towards an engulfing consummation, some extinction that is both love and death and deeper than both, that the music of his operas aspires. The fire that licks the rock of the Walkyrie, the Rhine that rises in the finale of "Goetterdaemmerung" and inundates the scene and sweeps the world with its silent, laving tides, the gigantic blossom that opens its corolla in the Liebestod and buries the lovers in a rain of scent and petals, the tranquil ruby glow of the chalice that suffuses the close of "Parsifal," are the moments toward which the dramas themselves labor, and in which they attain their legitimate conclusion, completion and end. But not only his finales are full of that entrancement. His melodic line, the lyrical passages throughout his operas, seem to seek to attain it, if not conclusively, at least in preparation. Those silken excessively sweet periods, the moment of reconciliation and embrace of Wotan and Brunhilde, the "Ach, Isolde" passage in the third act of "Tristan," those innumerable lyrical flights with their beginnings and subsidings, their sudden advances and regressions, their passionate surges that finally and after all their exquisite hesitations mount and flare and unroll themselves in fullness—they, too, seem to be seeking to distill some of the same brew, the same magic drugging potion, to conjure up out of the orchestral depths some Venusberg, some Klingsor's garden full of subtle scent and soft delight and eternal forgetfulness.

And with Wagner, the new period of music begins. He stands midway between the feudal and the modern worlds. In him, the old and classical period is accomplished. Indeed, so much of his music is sum, is termination, that there are times when it seems nothing else. There are times when his art appears entirely bowed over the past; the confluence of a dozen different tendencies alive during the last century and a half; the capping of the labor of a dozen great musicians; the fulfilment of the system regnant in Europe since the introduction of the principle of the equal temperament. For the last time, the old conceptions of tonality obtain in his music dramas. One feels throughout "Tristan und Isolde" the key of D-flat, throughout "Die Meistersinger" the key of C-major, throughout "Parsifal" the key of A-flat and its relative minor. Rhythms that had been used all through the classical period are worked by him into new patterns, and do service a last time. Motifs which had been utilized by others are taken by him and brought to something like an ultimate conclusion. The ending, the conclusion, the completion, are sensible throughout his art. Few musicians have had their power and method placed more directly in their hands, and benefited so hugely by the experiments of their immediate predecessors, have fallen heir to such immense musical legacies. Indeed, Wagner was never loath to acknowledge his indebtedness, and there are on record several instances when he paraphrased Walther's song to his masters, and signaled the composers who had aided him most in his development. To-day, the debt is very plain. At every turn, one sees him benefiting, and benefiting very beautifully, by the work of Beethoven. The structure of his great and characteristic works is based on the symphonic form. The development of the themes of "Tristan" and "Die Meistersinger" and "Parsifal" out of single kernels; the fine logical sequence, the expositions of the thematic material of "Parsifal" in the prelude and in Gurnamanz's narrative, and its subsequent reappearance and adventures and developments, are something like a summit of symphonic art as Beethoven made it to be understood. And his orchestra is scarcely more than the orchestra of Beethoven. He did not require the band of independent instrumental families demanded by Berlioz and realized by the modern men. He was content with the old, classical orchestra in which certain groups are strengthened and to which the harp, the English horn, the bass-tuba, the bass-clarinet have been added.

And his conception of an "unending melody," an unbroken flow of music intended to give cohesion and homogeneity to his music-dramas, was a direct consequence of the efforts of Mozart and Weber to give unity to their operatic works. For although these composers retained the old convention of an opera composed of separate numbers, they nevertheless managed to unify their operas by creating a distinct style in each of them, and by securing an emotional development in the various arias and concerted numbers. The step from "Don Giovanni" and "Euryanthe" to "Tannhaeuser" and "Lohengrin" does not seem quite as long a one to-day as once it did. Indeed, there are moments when one wonders whether "Lohengrin" is really a step beyond "Euryanthe," and whether the increase of power and vividness and imagination has not been made at the expense of style. Moreover, in much of what is actually progress in Wagner the influence of Weber is clearly discernible. The sinister passages seem but developments of moments in "Der Freischuetz"; the grand melodic style, the romantic orchestra with its sighing horns and chivalry and flourishes, seem to come directly out of "Euryanthe"; the orchestral scene-painting from the sunrise and other original effects in "Oberon."

Even Meyerbeer taught Wagner something more than the use of certain instruments, the bass-clarinet, for instance. The old operatic speculator indubitably was responsible for Wagner's grand demands upon the scene-painter and the stage-carpenter. His pompous spectacles fired the younger man not only with "Rienzi." They indubitably gave him the courage to create an operatic art that celebrated the new gold and power and magnificence, and was Grand Opera indeed. If the works of the one were sham, and those of the other poetry, it was only that Wagner realized what the other sought vainly all his life to attain, and was prevented by the stock-broker within.

And Chopin's harmonic feeling as well as Berlioz's orchestral wizardry played a role in Wagner's artistic education. But for all his incalculable indebtednesses, Wagner is the great initiator, the compeller of the modern period. It is not only because he summarized the old. It is because he began with force a revolution. In expressing the man of the nineteenth century, he discarded the old major-minor system that had dominated Europe so long. That system was the outcome of a conception of the universe which set man apart from the remainder of nature, placed him in a category of his own, and pretended that he was both the center and the object of creation. For it called man the consonance and nature the dissonance. The octave and the fifth, the bases of the system, are of course, to be found only in the human voice. They are, roughly, the difference between the average male and the average female voice, and the difference between the average soprano and alto. It is upon those intervals that the C-major scale and its twenty-three dependents are based. But with the coming of a conception that no longer separated man from the rest of creation, and placed him in it as a small part of it, brother to the animals and plants, to everything that breathes, the old scale could no longer completely express him. The modulations of the noises of wind and water, the infinite gradations and complexes of sound to be heard on the planisphere, seemed to ask him to include them, to become conscious of them and reproduce them. He required other more subtle scales. And with Wagner the monarchy of the C-major scale is at an end. "Tristan und Isolde" and "Parsifal" are constructed upon a chromatic scale. The old one has had to lose its privilege, to resign itself to becoming simply one of a constantly growing many. If this step is not a colossal one, it is still of immense importance. The musical worthies who ran about wringing their hands after the first performance of each of Wagner's works, and lamented laws monstrously broken, and traditions shattered, were, for once, right. They gauged correctly from which direction the wind was blowing. They probably heard, faintly piping in the distance, the pentatonic scales of Moussorgsky and Debussy, the scales of Scriabine and Strawinsky and Ornstein, the barbarous, exotic and African scales of the future, the one hundred and thirteen scales of which Busoni speaks. And to-day there are no longer musical rules, forbidden harmonies, dissonances. Siegfried has broken them along with Wotan's spear. East and West are near to merging once again. No doubt, had there been no Wagner, the change would have arrived nevertheless. However, it would have arrived more slowly. For what he did accomplish was the rapid emptying of the old wine that still remained in the wineskin, the preparation of the receptacle for the new vintage. He forced the new to put in immediate appearance.

The full impact of these reforms, the full might of Wagner, we of our generation doubtlessly never felt. They could have been felt only by the generation to whom Wagner first disclosed himself, the generation that attained maturity between 1850 and 1880. It was upon the men of those days that he did his full work of destruction and revival. It was in them he battered down walls. It was them he made to hear afresh, to stretch and grow in the effort to comprehend him. At the moment we encountered Wagner, his work was already something of a closed experience, something we were able to accept readily and with a certain ease because it had been accepted and assimilated by an entire world, and become part of the human organism. Its power was already slightly diminished. For instance, Wagner the musician was no longer able to make either Wagner the poet or Wagner the philosopher exist for us as they existed for the men of the earlier generation. Only Houston Stewart Chamberlain still persisted in trying to stand upon the burning deck whence all the rest had fled. For us, it was obvious that if Wagner's work throned mightily it was because of his music, and oftentimes in spite of his verse and his doctrine. For us, it was a commonplace that dramatic movement and the filling up of scenes by the introduction of characters who propose pointless riddles to one another and explain at length what their names are not, are incompatible; that poetry does not consist in disguising commonplace expressions in archaic and alliterative and extravagant dress; that Wotan displays no grasp of the essentials of Schopenhauer's philosophy when he insists on dubbing Brunhilde his Will.

And yet, whatever the difference, most of Wagner's might was still in him when first we came to know his music. The spell in which he had bound the generation that preceded ours was still powerful. For us, too, there occurred the moments when Siegfried's cavernous forest depths first breathed on us, when for the first time "Die Meistersinger" flaunted above the heads of all the world the gonfalon of art, when for the first time we embarked upon the shoreless golden sea of "Tristan und Isolde." For us, too, the name of Richard Wagner rang and sounded above all other musical names. For us, too, he was a sort of sovereign lord of music. His work appeared the climax toward which music had aspired through centuries, and from which it must of necessity descend again. Other, and perhaps purer work than his, existed, we knew. But it seemed remote and less compelling, for all its perfection. New music would arrive, we surmised. Yet we found ourselves convinced that it would prove minor and unsatisfactory. For Wagner's music had for us an incandescence which no other possessed. It was the magnetic spot of music. Its colors blazed and glowed with a depth and ardor that seemed to set it apart from other music as in an enchanted circle. It unlocked us as did no other. We demanded just such orchestral movement, just such superb gestures, just such warm, immersing floods, and were fulfilled by them. That there would come a day when the magnetism which it exerted on us would pass from it, and be seen to have passed, seemed the remotest of possibilities.

For we accepted him with the world of our minority. For each individual there is a period, varying largely in extent, during which his existence is chiefly a process of imitation. In the sphere of expression, that submission to authority extends well over the entire period of gestation, well into the time of physical maturity. There are few men, few great artists, even, who do not, before attaining their proper idiom and gesture, adopt those of their teachers and predecessors. Shakespeare writes first in the style of Kyd and Marlowe, Beethoven in that of Haydn and Mozart; Leonardo at first imitates Verrocchio. And what the utilization of the manner of their predecessors is to the artist, that the single devotion to Wagner was to us. For he was not only in the atmosphere, not only immanent in the lives led about us. His figure was vivid before us. Scarcely another artistic personality was as largely upon us. There were pictures, on the walls of music-rooms, of gray-bearded, helmeted warriors holding mailed blonde women in their arms, of queens with golden ornaments on their arms leaning over parapets and agitating their scarves, of women throwing themselves into the sea upon which ghastly barks were dwindling, of oldish men and young girls conversing teasingly through a window by a lilac-bush, that were Wagner. There were books with stories of magical swans and hordes of gold and baleful curses, of phantasmal storm ships and hollow hills and swords lodged in tree-trunks awaiting their wielders, of races of gods and giants and grimy dwarfs, of guardian fires and potions of forgetfulness and prophetic dreams and voices, that were Wagner. There were adults who went to assist at these things of which one read, who departed in state and excitement of an evening to attend performances of "Die Walkuere" and "Tristan und Isolde," and who spoke of these experiences in voices and manners different from those in which they spoke, say, of the theater or the concert. And there were magnificent and stately and passionate pieces that drew their way across the pianoforte, that seized upon one and made one insatiable for them. Long before we had actually entered the opera house and heard one of Wagner's works in its entirety, we belonged to him and knew his art our own. We were born Wagnerians.

But of late a great adventure has befallen us. What once seemed the remotest of possibilities has actually taken place. We who were born and grew under the sign of Wagner have witnessed the twilight of the god. He has receded from us. He has departed from us into the relative distance into which during his hour of omnipotence he banished all other composers.

He has been displaced. A new music has come into being, and drawn near. Forms as solid and wondrous and compelling as his are about us. Little by little, during the last years, so gradually that it has been almost unbeknown to us, our relationship to him has been changing. Something within us has moved. Other musicians have been working their way in upon our attention. Other works have come to seem as vivid and deep of hue, as wondrous and compelling as his once did. Gradually the musical firmament has been reconstellating itself. For long, we were unaware of the change, thought ourselves still opposite Wagner, thought the rays of his genius still as direct upon us as ever they were. But of late so wide has the distance become that we have awakened sharply to the change. Of a sudden, we seem to ourselves like travelers who, having boarded by night a liner fast to her pier and fallen asleep amid familiar objects, beneath the well-known beacons and towers of the port, waken suddenly in broadest daylight scarcely aware the vessel has been gotten under way, and find the scene completely transformed, find themselves out on ocean and glimpse, dwindling behind them, the harbor and the city in which apparently but a moment since they had lain enclosed.

It is the maturing of a generation that has produced the change. For each generation the works of art produced by its members have a distinct importance. Out of them, during their time, there sparks the creative impulse. For every generation is something of a unit.

"Chaque generation d'hommes Germant du champs maternal en sa saison, Garde en elle un secret commun, un certain noeud dans la profonde contexture de son bois,"

Claudel assures us through the mask of Tete d'Or. And the resemblances between works produced independently of each other within the space of a few years, generally so much greater than those that exist between any one work of one age and any of another, bears him out. The styles of Palestrina and Vittoria, which are obviously dissimilar, are nevertheless more alike than those of Palestrina and Bach, Vittoria and Haendel; just as those of Bach and Haendel, dissimilar as they are, have a greater similarity than that which exists between those of Bach and Mozart, of Haendel and Haydn. And so, for the men of a single period the work produced during their time is a powerful encouragement to self-realization, to the espousal of their destiny, to the fulfilment of their life. For the motion of one part of a machine stirs all the others. And there is a part of every man of a generation in the work done by the other members of it. The men who fashion the art of one's own time make one's proper experiment, start from one's own point of departure, dare to be themselves and oneself in the face of the gainsaying of the other epochs. They are so belittling, so condescending, so nay-saying and deterring, the other times and their masterpieces! They are so unsympathetic, so strange and grand and remote! They seem to say "Thus must it be; this is form; this is beauty; all else is superfluous." Who goes to them for help and understanding is like one who goes to men much older, men of different habits and sympathies, in order to explain himself, and finds himself disconcerted and diminished instead, glimpses a secret jealousy and resentment beneath the mask. But the adventure of encountering the artist of one's own time is that of finding the most marvelous of aids, corroboration. It is to meet one who has been living one's life, and thinking one's thoughts, and facing one's problems. It is to get reassurance, to accept oneself, to beget courage to express one's self in one's own manner.

And we of our generation have finally found the music that is so creatively infecting for us. We have found the music of the post-Wagnerian epoch. It is our music. For we are the offspring of the generation that assimilated Wagner. We, too, are the reaction from Wagner. Through the discovery we have come to learn that music can give us sensations different than those given us by Wagner's. We have learned what it is to have music say to us, "It is thus, after all, that you feel." We have finally come to recognize that we require of music forms, proportions, accents different from Wagner's; orchestral movement, color, rhythms, not in his. We have learned that we want an altogether different stirring of the musical caldron. A song of Moussorgsky's or Ravel's, a few measures of "Pelleas" or "Le Sacre du printemps," a single fine moment in a sonata of Scriabine's, or a quartet or suite of Bloch's, give us a joy, an illumination, a satisfaction that little of the older music can equal. For our own moment of action is finally at hand.

So Wagner has retreated and joined the company of composers who express another day than our own. The sovereignty that was in him has passed to other men. We regard him at present as the men of his own time might have regarded Beethoven and Weber. Still, he will always remain the one of all the company of the masters closest to us. No doubt he is not the greatest of the artists who have made music. Colossal as were his forces, colossal as were the struggles he made for the assumption of his art, his musical powers were not always able to cope with the tasks he set himself. The unflagging inventive power of a Bach or a Haydn, the robustness of a Haendel or a Beethoven, the harmonious personality of a Mozart, were things he could not rival. He is even inferior, in the matter of style, to men like Weber and Debussy. There are many moments, one finds, when his scores show that there was nothing in his mind, and that he simply went through the routine of composition. Too often he permitted the system of leading-motifs to relieve him of the necessity of creating. Too often, he made of his art a purely mental game. His emotion, his creative genius were far more intermittent, his breath far less long than one once imagined. Some of the earlier works have commenced to fade rapidly, irretrievably. At present one wonders how it is possible that one once sat entranced through performances of "The Flying Dutchman" and "Tannhaeuser." "Lohengrin" begins to seem a little brutal, strangely Prussian lieutenant with its militaristic trumpets, its abuse of the brass. One finds oneself choosing even among the acts of "Tristan und Isolde," finding the first far inferior to the poignant, magnificent third. Sometimes, one glimpses a little too long behind his work not the heroic agonist, but the man who loved to languish in mournful salons, attired in furred dressing gowns.

Indeed, if Wagner seems great it is chiefly as one of the most delicate of musicians. It is the lightness of his brush stroke that makes us marvel at the third act of "Tristan," the first scene of the "Walkuere." It is the delicacy of his fancy, the lilac fragrance pervading his inventions, that enchants us in the second act of "Die Meistersinger." Through the score of "Parsifal" there seem to pass angelic forms and wings dainty and fragile and silver-shod as those of Beardsley's "Morte d'Arthur."

But the debt we owe him will always give him a vast importance in our eyes. The men of to-day, all of them, stand directly on his shoulders. It is doubtful whether any of us, the passive public, would be here to-day as we are, were it not for his music.



Strauss

Strauss was never the fine, the perfect artist. Even in the first flare of youth, even at the time when he was the meteoric, dazzling figure flaunting over all the baldpates of the universe the standard of the musical future, it was apparent that there were serious flaws in his spirit. Despite the audacity with which he realized his amazing and poignant and ironic visions, despite his youthful fire and exuberance—and it was as something of a golden youth of music that Strauss burst upon the world—one sensed in him the not quite beautifully deepened man, heard at moments a callow accent in his eloquence, felt that an unmistakable alloy was fused with the generous gold. The purity, the inwardness, the searchings of the heart, the religious sentiment of beauty, present so unmistakably in the art of the great men who had developed music, were wanting in his work. He had neither the unswerving sense of style, nor the weightiness of touch, that mark the perfect craftsman. He was not sufficiently a scrupulous and exacting artist. It was apparent that he was careless, too easily contented with some of his material, not always happy in his detail. Mixed with his fire there was a sort of laziness and indifference. But, in those days, Strauss was unmistakably the genius, the original and bitingly expressive musician, the engineer of proud orchestral flights, the outrider and bannerman of his art, and one forgave his shortcomings because of the radiance of his figure, or remained only half-conscious of them.

For, once his period of apprenticeship passed, and all desire to write symphonies and chamber-music in the styles of Schumann and Mendelssohn and Brahms, to construct operas after the pattern of "Tannhaeuser" and "Parsifal" gone out of him, this slender, sleepy young Bavarian with the pale curly hair and mustaches had commenced to develop the expressive power of music amazingly, to make the orchestra speak wonderfully as it had never spoken before. Under his touch the symphony, that most rigid and abstract and venerable of forms, was actually displaying some of the novel's narrative and analytical power, its literalness and concreteness of detail. It was describing the developments of a character, was psychologizing as it had hitherto done only in conjunction with poetry or the theater. Strauss made it represent the inflammations of the sex illusion, comment upon Nietzsche and Cervantes, recount the adventures, somersaults and end of a legendary rascal, portray a hero of our time. He made all these intellectual concepts plastic in a music of a brilliance and a sprightliness and mordancy that not overmany classic symphonies can rival. Other and former composers, no doubt, had dreamt of making the orchestra more concretely expressive, more precisely narrative and descriptive. The "Pastoral" symphony is by no means the first piece of deliberately, confessedly programmatic music. And before Strauss, both Berlioz and Liszt had experimented with the narrative, descriptive, analytical symphony. But it was only with Strauss that the symphonic novel was finally realized.

Neither Berlioz nor Liszt had really embodied their programs in living music. Liszt invariably sacrificed program to sanctioned musical form. For all his radicalism, he was too trammeled by the classical concepts, the traditional musical schemes and patterns to quite realize the symphony based on an extra-musical scheme. His symphonic poems reveal how difficult it was for him to make his music follow the curve of his ideas. In "Die Ideale," for instance, for the sake of a conventional close, he departed entirely from the curve of the poem of Schiller which he was pretending to transmute. The variations in which he reproduced Lamartine's verse are stereotyped enough. When was there a time when composers did not deform their themes in amorous, rustic and warlike variations? The relation between the pompous and somewhat empty "Lament and Triumph" and the unique, the distinct thing that was the life of Torquato Tasso is outward enough. And even "Mazeppa," in which Liszt's virtuosic genius stood him in good stead, makes one feel as though Liszt could never quite keep his eye on the fact, and finally became engrossed in the weaving of a musical pattern fairly extraneous to his idea. The "Faust Symphony" is, after all, an exception. Berlioz, too, failed on the whole to achieve the musical novel. Whenever he did attain musical form, it was generally at the expense of his program. Are the somewhat picturesque episodes of "Harold in Italy," whatever their virtues, and they are many, more than vaguely related to the Byronism that ostensibly elemented them? The surprisingly conventional overture to "King Lear" makes one feel as though Berlioz had sat through a performance of one of Shakespeare's comedies under the impression that he was assisting at the tragedy, so unrelated to its subject is the music. And where, on the other hand, Berlioz did succeed in being regardful of his program, as in the "Symphonic Fantastique," or in "Lelio," there resulted a somewhat thin and formless music.

But Strauss, benefiting by the experiments of his two predecessors, realized the new form better than any one before him had done. For he possessed the special gifts necessary to the performance of the task. He possessed, in the first place, a miraculous power of musical characterization. Through the representative nicety of his themes, through his inordinate capacity for thematic variation and transformation, his playful and witty and colorful instrumentation, Strauss was able to impart to his music a concreteness and descriptiveness and realism hitherto unknown to symphonic art, to characterize briefly, sparingly, justly, a personage, a situation, an event. He could be pathetic, ironic, playful, mordant, musing, at will. He was sure in his tone, was low-German in "Till Eulenspiegel," courtly and brilliant in "Don Juan," noble and bitterly sarcastic in "Don Quixote," childlike in "Tod und Verklaerung." His orchestra was able to accommodate itself to all the folds and curves of his elaborate programs, to find equivalents for individual traits. It is not simply "a man," or even "an amatory hero" that is portrayed in "Don Juan." It is no vague symbol for the poet of the sort created by "Orpheus" or "Tasso" or "Mazeppa." It is Lenau's hero himself, the particular being Don Juan Tenorio. The vibrant, brilliant music of the up-surging, light-treading strings, of the resonant, palpitating brass, springs forth in virile march, reveals the man himself, his physical glamour, his intoxication that caused him to see in every woman the Venus, and that in the end made him the victim as well as the hero of the sexual life. It is Till Eulenspiegel himself, the scurvy, comic rascal, the eternal dirty little boy with his witty and obscene gestures, who leers out of every measure of the tone-poem named for him, and twirls his fingers at his nose's end at all the decorous and respectable world. Here, for once, orchestral music is really wonderfully rascally and impudent, horns gleeful and windy and insolent, wood-wind puckish and obscene. Here a musical form reels hilariously and cuts capers and dances on bald heads. The variation of "Don Quixote" that describes with wood-wind and tambourine Dulcinea del Toboso is plump and plebeian and good-natured with her very person, is all the more trenchantly vulgar and flat for the preceding suave variation that describes the knight's fair, sonorous dream of her. There is no music more plaintively stupid than that which in the same work figures the "sheep" against which Don Quixote battles so valiantly. Nor is there any music more maliciously, malevolently petty than that which represents the adversaries in "Ein Heldenleben." So exceedingly definite is the portrait of the Hero's Consort, for which Frau Richard Strauss, without doubt, sat, that without even having seen a photograph of the lady, one can aver that she is graced with a diatonic figure. And, certainly the most amusing passage of "Sinfonia Domestica" is that complex of Bavarian lustihood, Bavarian grossness, Bavarian dreaminess and Bavarian good nature, the thematic group that serves as autoportrait of the composer.

And just as there seemed few characters that Strauss could not paint, in those days, so, too, there seemed few situations, few atmospheres, to which he could not do justice. A couple of measures, the sinister palpitation of the timpani and the violas, the brooding of the wood-wind, the dull flickering of the flutes, the laboring breath of the strings, and we are lying on the death-bed, exhausted and gasping for air, weighed by the wrecks of hopes, awaiting the cruel blows on the heart that will end everything. Horns and violins quaver and snarl, flutes shrill, a brief figure descends in the oboes and clarinets, and Till has shed his rascal-sweat and danced on the air. The orchestra reveals us Don Juan's love affairs in all their individuality: first the passionate, fiery relation with the Countess, quickly begun and quickly ended; then the gentler and more inward communion with Anna, with the boredom resulting from the lady's continual demand for sentiment and romantic posturing; then the great night of love and roses, with its intoxicated golden winding horns, its ecstatically singing violins; and finally the crushing disappointment, the shudder of disgust. The battle in "Ein Heldenleben" pictures war really; the whistling, ironical wind-machine in "Don Quixote" satirizes dreams bitingly as no music has done; the orchestra describes the enthusiastic Don recovering from his madness, and smiles a conclusion; in "Also Sprach Zarathustra" it piles high the tomes of science, and waltzes with the Superman in distant worlds.

And then, though less fecund an inventor than Liszt, less rich and large a temperament than Berlioz, Strauss was better able than either of his masters to organize his material on difficult and original lines, and find musical forms representative of his programs. Because of their labors, he was born freer of the classical traditions than they had been, and was able to make music plot more exactly the curves of his concepts, to submit the older forms, such as the rondo and the theme and variations, more perfectly to his purpose. Compositions of the sort of "Till Eulenspiegel," "Tod und Verklaerung" and "Ein Heldenleben," solidly made and yet both narrative and dramatic, place the symphonic poem in the category of legitimate musical forms. The themes of "Till" grow out of each other quite as do the themes of a Beethoven symphony or of "Tristan" or of "Parsifal." Indeed, Strauss has done for the symphonic poem something of what Wagner did for the opera. And not an overwhelming number of classical symphonies contain music more eloquent than, say, the "sunrise" in "Also Sprach Zarathustra," or the final variation of "Don Quixote" with its piercing, shattering trumpets of defeat, or the terrifying opening passage of "Tod und Verklaerung." For Strauss was able to unloose his verve and fantasy completely in the construction of his edifices. His orchestra moves in strangest and most unconventional curves, shoots with the violence of an exploding firearm, ambles like a palfrey, swoops like a bird. There are few who, at a first hearing of a Strauss poem, do not feel as though some wild and troubling and panic presence had leaned over the concert hall and bedeviled the orchestra. For, in his hands, it is no longer the familiar and terrorless thing it once had been, a thing about whose behavior one can be certain. It has become a formidable engine of steel and gold, vibrant with mad and unexpected things. Patterns leap and tumble out of it. Violin music launches swiftly into space, trumpets run scales, the tempi move with the velocity of express trains. It has become a giant, terrible bird, the great auk of music, that seizes you in its talons and spirals into the empyrean.

But it was what he seemed to promise to perform, to bring into being, even more than what he had already definitely accomplished, that spread about the figure of Strauss the peculiar radiance. It was Nietzsche who had made current the dream of a new music, a music that should be fiercely and beautifully animal, full of laughter, of the dry good light of the intellect, of "salt and fire and the great, compelling logic, of the light feet of the south, the dance of the stars, the quivering dayshine of the Mediterranean." The other composers, the Beethovens and Brahms and Wagners, had been sad, suffering, wounded men, men who had lost their divine innocence and joy in the shambles, and whose spiritual bodies were scarred, for all the muscular strength gained during their fights, by hunger and frustration and agony. Pain had even marred their song. For what should have been innocence and effortless movement and godlike joy, Mozartean coordination and harmony, was full of terrible cries, and convulsive, rending motions, and shrouding sorrow. And Nietzsche had dreamt of music of another sort. He had dreamt of a music that should be a bridge to the Superman, the man whose every motion would be carefree. He had seen striding across mountain chains in the bright air of an eternal morning a youth irradiant with unbroken energy, before whom all the world lay open in vernal sunshine like a domain before its lord. He had seen one beside whom the other musicians would stand as convicts from Siberian prison camps who had stumbled upon a banquet of the gods. He had seen a young Titan of music, drunken with life and fire and joy, dancing and reeling and laughing on the top of the world, and with fingers amid the stars, sending suns and constellations crashing. He had caught sight of the old and eternally youthful figure of Indian Dionysos.

And even though Strauss himself could scarcely be mistaken for the god, nevertheless he made Nietzsche's dream appear realizable. He permitted one for an instant to perceive a musical realm in which the earth-fast could not breathe. He permitted one for an instant to hear ringing "the prelude of a deeper, mightier, perchance a more evil and mysterious music; a super-German music which does not fade, wither and die away beside the blue and wanton sea and the clear Mediterranean sky; a music super-European, which would assert itself even amid the tawny sunsets of the desert; a music whose soul is akin to the palm-trees; a music that can consort and prowl with great, beautiful, lonely beasts of prey; a music whose supreme charm is its ignorance of Good and Evil." For he came with some of the light and careless and arrogant tread, the intellectual sparkling, the superb gesture and port, of the musician of the new race. The man who composed such music, one knew, had been born on some sort of human height, in some cooler, brighter atmosphere than that of the crowded valleys. For in this music there beat a faster pulse, moved a lighter, fierier, prouder body, sounded a more ironic and disdainful laughter, breathed a rarer air than had beat and moved and sounded and breathed in music. It made drunken with pleasant sound, with full rich harmonies, with exuberant dance and waltz movements. It seemed to adumbrate the arrival of a new sort of men, men of saner, sounder, more athletic souls and more robust and cool intelligences, a generation that was vitally satisfied, was less torn and belabored by the inexpressible longings of the romantic world, a generation very much at home on the globe. For it had none of the restless, sick desire of Wagner, none of his excessive pathos, his heaviness and stiff grandeur. It had come down off its buskins, was more easy, witty, diverting, exciting, popular and yet cerebral. Though it was obviously the speech of a complicated, modern man, self-conscious, sophisticated, nervous, product of a society perhaps not quite as free and Nietzschean as it deemed itself, but yet cultivated and illuminated and refined, it nevertheless seemed exuberantly sound. The sweet, broad, diatonic idiom, the humor, the sleepy Bavarian accent, the pert, naive, little folk-tunes it employed, the tranquil, touching, childlike tones, the close of "Tod und Verklaerung," with its wondrous unfolding of corolla upon corolla, were refreshing indeed after all the burning chromaticism of Wagner, the sultry air of Klingsor's wonder-garden.

And this music glittered with the sun. The pitch of Wagner's orchestra had, after all, been predominantly sober and subdued. But in the orchestra of Strauss, the color-gamut of the plein-air painters got a musical equivalent. Those high and brilliant tints, these shimmering, biting tones, make one feel as though Strauss made music with the paint-brush of a Monet or a Van Gogh. His trumpets are high and brilliant and silvery, his violins scintillant and electric, at moments winding a lazy, happy, smoke-blue thread through the sunburnt fabric of the score. His horns glow with soft, fruity timbres. The new sweetness of color which he attains in his songs, the pale gold of "Morgen," the rose of the Serenade, the mild evening blue of "Traum durch die Daemmerung," shimmers throughout his orchestra scores. Never have wind instruments sounded more richly, dulcetly, than in that "Serenade fuer dreizehn Blaeser." At a first hearing of "Also Sprach Zarathustra," it seemed as though the very dayspring had descended into the orchestra to make that famous, brassy opening passage. For here, in the hand of Strauss, the orchestra begins to round out its form and assume its logical shape. The various families of instruments are made independent; often play separately. The shattering brass of which Berlioz had dreamt is realized. Violas d'amore, hecklephones, wind-machines, are introduced into the band; the familiar instruments are used in unfamiliar registers. Through the tone-poems of Strauss, the orchestral composer for the first time has a suitable palette, and can achieve a brilliance as great as that which the modern painter can attain.

To-day, it is difficult to realize that Richard Strauss ever incensed such high hopes, that there was a time when he made appear realizable Nietzsche's mad dream of a modern music, and that for awhile the nimbus of Dionysos burnt round his figure. To-day it is difficult to remember that once upon a time Strauss seemed to the world the golden youth of music, the engineer of proud orchestral flights, the outrider and bannerman of his art. For it is long since he has promised to reveal the new beauty, the new rhythm, has seemed the wonderful start and flight toward some rarer plane of existence, some bluer ether, the friend of everything intrepid and living and young, the "arrow of longing for the Superman." It is a long while since any gracious, lordly light has irradiated his person. In recent years he has become almost the very reverse of what he was, of what he gave so brave an earnest of becoming. He who was once so electric, so vital, so brilliant a figure has become dreary and outward and stupid, even. He who once seemed the champion of the new has come to fill us with the weariness of the struggle, with deep self-distrust and discouragement, has become a heavy and oppressive weight. He who once sought to express the world about him, to be the poet of the coming time, now seems inspired only by a desire to do the amazing, the surface thing, and plies himself to every ephemeral and shallow current of modern life. For Strauss has not only not deepened and matured and increased in stature; he has not even stood still, remained the artist that once he was. He has progressively and steadily deteriorated during the last decade. He has become a bad musician. He is the cruel, the great disappointment of modern music, of modern art. The dream-light has failed altogether, has made the succeeding darkness the thicker for the momentary illumination. Strauss to-day is seen as a rocket that sizzled up into the sky with many-colored blaze, and then broke suddenly and extinguished swiftly into the midnight.

It is not easy, even for those who were aware from the very first that Strauss was not the spirit "pardlike, beautiful and swift" and that there always were distinctly gross and insensitive particles in him, to recognize in the slack and listless person who concocts "Joseph's Legende" and the "Alpensymphonie," the young and fiery composer, genius despite all the impurities of his style, who composed "Till Eulenspiegel" and "Don Quixote"; not easy, even though the contours of his idiom have not radically altered, and though in the sleepy facile periods of his later style one catches sight at times of the broad, simple diction of his earlier. For the later Strauss lacks pre-eminently and signally just the traits that made of the earlier so brilliant and engaging a figure. Behind the works of the earlier Strauss there was visible an intensely fierily experiencing being, a man who had powerful and poignant and beautiful sensations, and the gift of expressing them richly. Behind the work of the latter there is all too apparent a man who for a long while has felt nothing beautiful or strong or full, who no longer possesses the power of feeling anything at all, and is inwardly wasted and dull and spent. The one had a burning and wonderful pressure of speech. The other seems unable to concentrate energy and interest sufficiently to create a hard and living piece of work. The one seemed to blaze new pathways through the brain. The other steps languidly in roadways well worn. He is not even amusing any longer. The contriver of wonderful orchestral machines, the man who penetrated into the death-chamber and stood under the gibbet, has turned to toying with his medium, to imitating other composers, Mozart in "Der Rosenkavalier," Haendel in "Joseph's Legende," Offenbach and Lully (a coupling that only Strauss has the lack of taste to bring about) in "Ariadne auf Naxos." He has become increasingly facile and unoriginal, has taken to quoting unblushingly Mendelssohn, Tchaikowsky, Wagner, himself, even. His insensitivity has waxed inordinately, and led him to mix styles, to commingle dramatic and coloratura passages, to jumble the idioms of three centuries in a single work, to play all manner of pointless pranks with his art. His literary taste has grown increasingly uncertain. He who was once so careful in his choice of lyrics, and recognized the talents of such modern German poets as Birnbaum and Dehmel and Mackay, accepts librettos as dull and inartistic and precious as those with which Hofmannsthal is supplying him, and lends his art to the boring buffooneries of "Der Rosenkavalier" and "Ariadne auf Naxos." Something in him has bent and been fouled.

One thing at least the Strauss of the tone-poems indisputably was. He was freely, dazzlingly, daringly expressive. And this is what the Strauss of the last years thinly and rarely is. It is not Oscar Wilde's wax flowers of speech, nor the excessively stiff and conventionalized action of "Salome," that bores one with the Strauss opera of that name. It is not even the libretto of "Der Rosenkavalier," essentially coarse and boorish and insensitive as it is beneath all its powdered preciosity, that wearies one with Strauss's "Musical Comedy"; or the hybrid, lame, tasteless form of "Ariadne auf Naxos" that turns one against that little monstrosity. It is the generally inexpressive and insufficient music in which Strauss has vested them. The music of "Salome," for instance, is not even commensurable with Wilde's drama. It was the evacuation of an obsessive desire, the revulsion from a pitiless sensuality that the poet had intended to procure through this representation. But Strauss's music, save in such exceptional passages as the shimmering, restless, nerve-sick opening page, or the beginning of the scene with the head, or certain other crimson patches, hampers and even negates the intended effect. It emasculates the drama with its pervasive prettiness, its lazy felicitousness where it ought to be monstrous and terrifying, its reminiscences of Mendelssohn, Tchaikowsky and "Little Egypt." The lascivious and hieratic dance, the dance of the seven veils, is represented by a valse lente. Oftentimes the score verges perilously on circus-music, recalls the sideshows at county fairs. No doubt, in so doing it weakens the odor exuded by Wilde's play. But if we must have an operatic "Salome," it is but reasonable to demand that the composer in his music express the sexual cruelty and frenzy symbolized in the figure of the dancer. And the Salome of Strauss's score is as little the Salome of Wilde as she is the Salome of Flaubert or Beardsley or Moreau or Huysmans. One cannot help feeling her eminently a buxom, opulent Berliner, the wife, say, of the proprietor of a large department store; a heavy lady a good deal less "daemonisch" and "perverse" than she would like to have it appear. But there are moments when one feels as though Strauss's heroine were not even a Berliner, or of the upper middle class. There are moments when she is plainly Kaethi, the waitress at the Muenchner Hofbrauehaus. And though she declares to Jokanaan that "it is his mouth of which she is enamored," she delivers the words in her own true-hearted, unaffected brogue.

Nor is "Elektra," more sharp than "Salome," though it oftentimes is, the musical equivalent for the massive and violent forms of archaic Greek sculpture that Strauss intended it be. Elektra herself is perhaps more truly incarnate fury than Salome is incarnate luxury; ugliness and demoniacal brooding, madness and cruelty are here more sheerly powerfully expressed than in the earlier score; the scene of recognition between brother and sister is more large and touching than anything in "Salome"; Elektra's paean and dance, for all its closeness to a banal cantilena, its tempo di valse so characteristic of the later Strauss, is perhaps more grandiosely and balefully triumphant than the dancer's scene with the head. Nevertheless, the work is by no means realized. It is formally impure, a thing that none of the earlier tone-poems are. Neither style nor shape are deeply felt. Both are superficially and externally conceived; and nothing so conclusively demonstrates it as the extreme ineffectually of the moments of contrast with which Strauss has attempted to relieve the dominant mood of his work. Just as in "Salome" the more restless and sensual passages, lazily felt as they are, are nevertheless infinitely more significant than the intensely contrasting silly music assigned to the Prophet, so, too, in "Elektra," the moments when Strauss is cruel, brutal, ugly are of a much higher expressiveness than those in which he has sought to write beautifully. For whereas in moments of the first sort the lions of the Mycenae gates do at times snarl and glower, in those of the second it is the Teutonic beer-mug that makes itself felt. Elektra laments her father in a very pretty and undistinguished melody, and entreats her sister to slay Klytemnaestra to the accompaniment of a sort of valse perverse. It is also in tempo di valse that Chrysothemis declares her need of wifehood and motherhood. As an organism the work does not exist.

But even the expressiveness and considerability of "Salome" and "Elektra," limited and unsatisfactory as they are, are wanting in the more recent works. With "Der Rosenkavalier," Strauss seems to have reached a condition in which it is impossible for him to penetrate a subject deeply. No doubt he always was spotty, even though in his golden days he invariably fixed the inner informing binding rhythm of each of his works. But his last works are not only spotty, but completely spineless as well, invertebrate masses upon which a few jewels, a few fine patches, gleam dully. "Salome" and "Elektra" had at least a certain dignity, a certain bearing. "Der Rosenkavalier," "Ariadne auf Naxos," "Joseph's Legende" and "Eine Alpensymphonie" are makeshift, slack, slovenly despite all technical virtuosity, all orchestral marvels. Every one knows what the score of "Rosenkavalier" should have been, a gay, florid, licentious thing, the very image of the gallant century with its mundane amours and ribbons and cupids, its petit-maitres and furbelows and billets-doux, its light emotions and equally light surrenders. But Strauss's music is singularly flat and hollow and dun, joyless and soggy, even though it is dotted with waltzes and contains the delightful introduction to the third act, and the brilliant trio. It has all the worst faults of the libretto. Hofmannsthal's "comedy for music," though gross and vulgar in spirit, and unoriginal in design, is full of a sort of clever preciosity, full of piquant details culled from eighteenth-century prints and memoirs. The scene of the coiffing is a print of Hogarth's translated to the stage; Rofrano's name "Octavian Maria Ehrenreich Bonaventura Fernand Hyazinth" is like an essay on the culture of the Vienna of Canaletto; the polite jargon of eighteenth-century aristocratic Austria spoken by the characters, with its stiff, courteous forms and intermingled French, must have been studied from old journals and gazettes. And Strauss's score is equally precious, equally a thing of erudition and cleverness. Mozart turned the imbecilities of Schickaneder to his uses; Weber triumphed over the ridiculous romancings of Helmine von Chezy. But Strauss follows Hofmannsthal helplessly, soddenly. Just as Hofmannsthal imitates Hogarth, so Strauss imitates Mozart, affects his style, his turns, his spirit; inserts a syrupy air in the style of Haendel or Mehul in the first act; and jumbles Mozart with modern comic-opera waltzes, Haendel with post-Wagnerian incantations. And like Hofmannsthal's libretto, the score remains a superficial and formless thing. The inner and coherent rhythm, the spiritual beat and swing, the great unity and direction, are wanting. "I have always wanted to write an opera like Mozart's, and now I have done it," Strauss is reported to have said after the first performance of "Der Rosenkavalier." But "Der Rosenkavalier" is almost antipodal to "Don Giovanni" or to "Falstaff" or to "Die Meistersinger" or to any of the great comic operas. For it lacks just the thing the others possess abundantly, a strong lyrical movement, a warm emotion that informs the music bar after bar, scene after scene, act after act, and imparts to the auditor the joy, the vitality, the beauty of which the composers' hearts were full. It is a long while since Strauss has felt anything of the sort.

Had the new time produced no musical art, had no Debussy nor Scriabine, no Strawinsky nor Bloch, put in appearance, one might possibly have found oneself compelled to believe the mournful decadence of Richard Strauss the inevitable development awaiting musical genius in the modern world. There exists a group, international in composition, which, above all other contemporary bodies, arrogates to itself the style of modernity. It is the group, tendrils of which reach into every great capital and center, into every artistic movement and cause, of the bored ones, the spoilt ones. The present system has lifted into a quasi aristocratic and leisurely state vast numbers of people without background, without tradition or culture or taste. By reason of its largeness and resources, this group of people without taste, without interest, without finesse, has come to dominate in particular the world of art as the world of play, has come to demand distraction, sensation, excitement which its unreal existence does not afford it. Indeed, this band has come to give a cast to the whole of present-day life; its members pretend to represent present-day culture. It is with this group with its frayed sensibilities and tired pulses that Strauss has become increasingly identified, till of late he has become something like its court-musician, supplying it with stimulants, awaking its curiosities, astonishing and exciting it with the superficial novelty of his works, trying to procure it the experiences it is so lamentably unable to procure itself. It is for it that he created the trumpery horrors, the sweet erotics of the score of "Salome." It is for it that he imitated Mozart saccharinely in "Der Rosenkavalier"; mangled Moliere's comedy; committed the vulgarities and hypocrisies of "Joseph's Legende." And did no evidence roundly to the contrary exist, one might suppose this group to really represent modern life; that its modernity was the only true one; and that in expressing it, in conforming to it, Strauss was functioning in the only manner granted the contemporary composer. But since such evidence exists aplenty, since a dozen other musicians, to speak only of the practitioners of a single art, have managed to keep themselves immune and yet create beauty about them, to remain on the plane upon which Strauss began life, to persevere in the direction in which he was originally set, and yet live fully, one finds oneself convinced that the deterioration of Strauss, which has made him musical purveyor to this group, has not been the result of the pressure of outward and hostile circumstances. One finds oneself positively convinced that it was some inner weakness within himself that permitted the spoilt and ugly folk to seduce him from his road, and use him for their purposes.

And in the end it is as the victim of a psychic deterioration that one is forced to regard this unfortunate man. The thing that one sees happening to so many people about one, the extinction of a flame, the withering of a blossom, the dulling and coarsening of the sensibilities, the decay of the mental energies, seems to have happened to him, too. And since it happens in the lives of so many folk, why should it surprise one to see it happening in the life of an artist, and deflowering genius and ruining musical art? All the hectic, unreal activity of the later Strauss, the dissipation of forces, points back to such a cause. He declares himself in every action the type who can no longer gather his energies to the performance of an honest piece of work, who can no longer achieve direct, full, living expression, who can no longer penetrate the center of a subject, an idea. He is the type of man unfaithful to himself in some fundamental relation, unfaithful to himself throughout his deeds. Many people have thought a love of money the cause of Strauss's decay; that for the sake of gain he has delivered himself bound hand and foot into the power of his publishers, and for the sake of gain turned out bad music. No doubt, the love of money plays an inordinate role in the man's life, and keeps on playing a greater and greater. But it is probable that Strauss's desire for incessant gain is a sort of perversion, a mania that has gotten control over him because his energies are inwardly prevented from taking their logical course, and creating works of art. Luxury-loving as he is, Strauss has probably never needed money sorely. Some money he doubtlessly inherited through his mother, the daughter of the Munich beer-brewer Pschorr; his works have always fetched large prices—his publishers have paid him as much as a thousand dollars for a single song; and he has always been able to earn great sums by conducting. No matter how lofty and severe his art might have become, he would always have been able to live as he chose. There is no doubt that he would have earned quite as much money with "Salome" and "Der Rosenkavalier" had they been works of high, artistic merit as he has earned with them in their present condition. The truth is that he has rationalized his unwillingness to go through the labor-pains of creation by pretending to himself a constant and great need of money, and permitting himself to dissipate his energies in a hectic, disturbed, shallow existence, in a tremor of concert-tours, guest-conductorships, money-making enterprises of all sorts, which leave him about two or three of the summer months for composition, and probably rob him of his best energies. So works leave his writing table half-conceived, half-executed. The score of "Elektra" he permits his publishers to snatch from him before he is quite finished with it. He commences composing "Der Rosenkavalier" before having even seen the third act. The third act arrives; Strauss finds it miserable. But it is too late. The work is half-finished, and Strauss has to go through with it. Composition becomes more and more a mechanical thing, the brilliant orchestration of sloppy, undistinguished music, the polishing up of details, the play of superficial cleverness which makes a score like "Der Rosenkavalier," feeble as it is, interesting to many musicians.

And Richard Strauss, the one living musician who could with greatest ease settle down to uninterrupted composition, gets to his writing table in his apartment in Charlottenburg every evening at nine o'clock, that is, whenever he is not on duty at the Berlin Opera.

And always the excuses: "Earning money for the support of wife and child is not shameful," "I am going to accumulate a large enough fortune so that I can give up conducting entirely and spend all my time composing." But one can be sure that when Strauss soliloquizes, it is a different defense that he makes. One can be sure, then, that he justifies himself cynically, bitterly, grossly, tells himself that the game is not worth the candle, that greatness is a matter of advertisement, that only the values of the commercial world exist, that other success than the procurement of applause and wealth and notoriety constitutes failure. Why should you take the trouble to write good work that will bring you posthumous fame when without trouble you can write work that will bring you fame during your lifetime? The whole world is sham and advertisement and opportunism, is it not? Reputations are made by publishers and newspapers. Greatness is a matter determined by majorities. But impress the public, but compose works that will arouse universal comment, but break a few academic formulas and get yourself talked about, but write music that will surprise and seem wonderful at a first hearing, and your fame is assured. The important thing is to live luxuriously and keep your name before the public. In so doing one will have lived life as fully as it can be lived. And after one is dead, what does it all matter?

Yet, though the world be full of men whose spiritual energies have been lamed in kindred fashions, the terrible misadventure of Richard Strauss remains deeply affecting. However far the millions of bright spirits who have died a living death have fallen, their fall has been no farther than this man's. There can be no doubt of the completeness of Strauss's disaster. It is a long while since he has been much besides a bore to his once fervent admirers, an object of hatred to thousands of honest, idealistic musicians. He has completely, in his fifty-sixth year, lost the position of leadership, of eminence that once he had. Even before the war his operas held the stage only with difficulty. And it is possible that he will outlive his fame. One wonders whether he is not one of the men whose inflated reputations the war has pricked, and that a world will shortly wonder, before his two new operas, how it was possible that it should have been held at all by the man. Had he been the most idealistic, the most uncompromising of musicians he could not be less respected. Perhaps his last chance lay in the "Alpensymphonie." Here was a ceremony that could have made him priest once again. Europe had reached a summit, humanity had had a vision. Before it lay a long descent, a cloudburst, the sunset of a civilization, another night. Could Strauss have once more girded himself, once more summoned the faith, the energy, the fire that created those first grand pages that won a world to him, he might have been saved. But it was impossible. Something in him was dead forever. And so, to us, who should have been his champions, his audiences, his work already seems old, part of the past even at its best, unreal except for a few of the fine symphonic works. To us, who once thought to see in him the man of the new time, he seems only the brave, sonorous trumpet-call that heralded a king who never put in his appearance, the glare that in the East lights the sky for an instant and seems to promise a new day, but extinguishes again. He is indeed the false dawn of modern music.



Moussorgsky

The music of Moussorgsky comes up out of a dense and livid ground. It comes up out of a ground that lies thickly packed beneath our feet, and that is wider than the widest waste, and deeper than the bottomless abysses of the sea. It comes up from a soil that descends downward through all times and ages, through all the days of humankind, down to the very foundations of the globe itself. For it grows from the flesh of the nameless, unnumbered multitudes of men condemned by life throughout its course to misery. It has its roots where death and defeat have been. It has its roots in all bruised and maimed and frustrated flesh, in all flesh that might have borne a god and perished barren. It has its root in every being who has been without sun, in every being who has suffered cold and hunger and disease, and pierces down and touches every voiceless woe, every defeat that man has ever known. And out of that sea of mutilated flesh it rises like low, trembling speech, halting and inarticulate and broken. It has no high, compelling accent, no eloquence. And yet, it has but to lift its poor and quavering tones, and the splendor of the world is blotted out, and the great, glowing firmament is made a sorrowful gray, and, in a single instant, we have knowledge of the stern and holy truth, know the terrible floor upon which we tread, know what man has ever suffered, and what our own existences can only prove to be.

For it is the cry of one possessed and consumed in every fiber of his being by that single consciousness. It is as though Moussorgsky, the great, chivalric Russian, the great, sinewy giant with blood aflame for gorgeousness and bravery and bells and games and chants, had been all his days the Prince in "Khovanchtchina" to whom the sorceress foretells: "Disgrace and exile await thee. Honors and power and riches will be torn from thee. Neither thy past glory nor thy wisdom can save thee. Thou wilt know what it is to want, and to suffer, and to weep the tears of the hopeless. And so, thou wilt know the truth of this world." It is as though he had heard that cry incessantly from a million throats, as though it had tolled in his ears like a bourdon until it informed him quite, and suffused his youth and force and power of song. It is as though his being had been opened entirely in orientation upon the vast, sunless stretches of the world, and distended in the agony of taking up into himself the knowledge of those myriad broken lives. For it is the countless defeated millions that live again in his art. It is they who speak with his voice. Better even than Walt Whitman, Moussorgsky might have said:

"Through me, voices long dumb, many long dumb voices, Voices of the interminable generations of prisoners and slaves, Voices of the diseas'd and despairing and of thieves and dwarfs, Voices of cycles of preparation and accretion"—

It is as though he had surrendered himself quite to them, had relinquished to them his giant Russian strength, his zest of life, his joy, had given them his proud flesh that their cry and confession might reach the ears of the living.

Sometimes, Moussorgsky is whole civilizations discarded by life. Sometimes, he is whole cultures from under which the earth has rolled, whole groups of human beings who stood silently and despairingly for an instant in a world that carelessly flung them aside, and then turned and went away. Sometimes he is the brutal, ignorant, helpless throng that kneels in the falling snow while the conquerors, the great ones of this world, false and true alike, pass by in the torchlight amid fanfares and hymns and acclamations and speak the fair, high words and make the kingly gestures that fortune has assigned to them. Sometimes he is even life before man. He is the dumb beast devoured by another, larger; the plants that are crowded from the sunlight. He knows the ache and pain of inanimate things. And then, at other moments, he is a certain forgotten individual, some obscure, nameless being, some creature, some sentient world like the monk Pimen or the Innocent in "Boris Godounow," and out of the dust of ages an halting, inarticulate voice calls to us. He is the poor, the aging, the half-witted; the drunken sot mumbling in his stupor; the captives of life to whom death sings his insistent, luring songs; the half-idiotic peasant boy who tries to stammer out his declaration of love to the superb village belle; the wretched fool who weeps in the falling snowy night. He is those who have never before spoken in musical art, and now arise, and are about us and make us one with them.

But it is not only as content that they are in this music. This music is they, in its curves and angles, in its melody and rhythms, in its style and shape. There are times when it stands in relation to other music as some being half giant, half day-laborer, might stand in the company of scholars and poets and other highly educated and civilized men. The unlettered, the uncouth, the humble, the men unacquainted with eloquence are in this music in very body. It pierces directly from their throats. No film, no refinement on their speech, no art of music removes them from us. As Moussorgsky originally wrote these scores, their forms are visible on page after page. When his music laughs it laughs like barbarians holding their sides. When it weeps, it weeps like some little old peasant woman crouching and rocking in her grief. It has all the boisterousness and hoarseness of voices that sound out of peasant-cabins and are lodged in men who wear birch-bark shoes and eat coarse food and suffer cold and hunger. Within its idiom there are the croonings and wailings of thousands of illiterate mothers, of people for whom expression is like a tearing of entrails, like a terrible birth-giving. It has in it the voices of folk singing in fairs, of folk sitting in inns; exalted and fanatical and mystical voices; voices of children and serving-maids and soldiers; a thousand sorts of uncouth, grim, sharp speakers. The plaint of Xenia in "Boris Godounow" is scarcely more than the underlining of the words, the accentuation of the voice of some simple girl uttering her grief for some one recently and cruelly dead. There are moments when the whole of "Boris Godounow," machinery of opera and all, seems no more elegant, more artful and refined than one of the simpler tunes cherished by common folk through centuries, passed from generation to generation and assumed by each because in moments of grief and joy and longing and ease it brought comfort and solace and relief. This music is common Russia singing. It is Russia speaking without the use of words. For like the folk-song, it has within it the genius and values of the popular tongue. Moussorgsky's style is blood-brother to the spoken language, is indeed as much the Russian language as music can be. In the phrase of Jacques Riviere, "it speaks in words ending in ia and schka, in humble phrases, in swift, poor, suppliant terms." Indeed, so unconventional, so crude, shaggy, utterly inelegant, are Moussorgsky's scores, that they offend in polite musical circles even to-day. It is only in the modified, "corrected" and indubitably castrated versions of Rimsky-Korsakoff that "Boris" and "Khovanchtchina" maintain themselves upon the stage. This iron, this granite and adamantine music, this grim, poignant, emphatic expression will not fit into the old conceptions. The old ones speak vaguely of "musical realism," "naturalism," seeking to find a pigeon-hole for this great quivering mass of life.

No doubt the music of Moussorgsky is not entirely iron-gray. Just as, in the midst of "Boris," there occurs the gentle scene between the Czar and his children, so scattered through this stern body of music there are light and gay colors, brilliant and joyous compositions. Homely and popular and naive his melodies and rhythms always are, little peasant-girls with dangling braids, peasant lads in gala garb, colored balls that are thrown about, singing games that are played to the regular accompaniment of clapping palms, songs about ducks and parrakeets, dances full of shuffling and leaping. Even the movements of the sumptuous "Persian Dances" in "Khovanchtchina" are singularly naive and simple and unpretentious. Sometimes, however, the full gorgeousness of Byzantine art shines through this music, and the gold-dusty modes, the metallic flatness of the pentatonic scale, the mystic twilit chants and brazen trumpet-calls make us see the mosaics of Ravenna, the black and gold ikons of Russian churches, the aureoled saints upon bricked walls, the minarets of the Kremlin. There is scarcely an operatic scene more magnificent than the scene of the coronation of Tsar Boris, with its massive splendors of pealing bells and clarion blares and the caroling of the kneeling crowds. Then, like Boris himself, Moussorgsky sweeps through in stiff, blazoned robes, crowned with the domed, flashing Slavic tiara. And yet through all these bright colors, as through the darker, sadder tones of the greater part of his work, there comes to us that one anguished, overwhelming sense of life, that single great consciousness. The gay rich spots are but part of it, intensify the great somber mass. Their simplicity, their childlikeness, their innocence, are qualities that are perceived only after suffering. The sunlight in them is the gracious, sweet, kindly sunlight that falls only between nights of pain. The bright and chivalric passages of "Boris," the music called forth by the memories of feudal Russia, and the glory of the Czars, give a deeper, stranger, even more wistful tone to the great gray pile of which they are a part. "Khovanchtchina" is never so much the tragedy, the monument to beings and cultures superseded and cast aside in the relentless march of life, as in the scene when Prince Ivan Khovansky meets his death. For at the moment that the old boyar, and with him the old order of Russia, goes to his doom, there is intoned by his followers the sweetest melody that Moussorgsky wrote or could write. And out of that hymn to the glory of the perishing house there seems to come to us all the pathos of eternally passing things, all the wistfulness of the last sunset, all the last greeting of a vanished happiness. More sheerly than any other moment, more even than the infinitely stern and simple prelude that ushers in the last scene of "Boris" and seems to come out of a great distance and sum up all the sadness and darkness and pitifulness of human existence, that scene brings into view the great bleak monolith that the work of Moussorgsky really is, the great consciousness it rears silently, accusingly against the sky. As collieries rear themselves, grim and sinister, above mining towns, so this music rears itself in its Russian snows, and stands, awful and beautiful.

And, of late, the single shaft has out-topped the glamorous Wagnerian halls. The operas of Moussorgsky have begun to achieve the eminence that Wagner's once possessed. To a large degree, it is the change of times that has advanced and appreciated the art of Moussorgsky. Although "Boris" saw the light at the same time as "Die Goetterdaemmerung," and although Moussorgsky lies chronologically very near the former age, he is far closer to us in feeling than is Wagner. The other generation, with its pride of material power, its sense of well-being, its surge toward mastery of the terrestrial forces, its need of luxury, was unable to comprehend one who felt life a grim, sorrowful thing, who felt himself a child, a crone, a pauper, helpless in the terrible cold. For that was required a less naive and confident generation, a day more sophisticated and disabused and chastened. And so Moussorgsky's music, with its poor and uncouth and humble tone, its revulsion from pride and material grandeur and lordliness, its iron and cruelty and bleakness, lay unknown and neglected in its snows. Indeed, it had to await the coming of "Pelleas et Melisande" in order to take its rightful place. For while Moussorgsky may have influenced Debussy artistically, it was Debussy's work that made for the recognition and popularization of Moussorgsky's. For the music of Debussy is the delicate and classical and voluptuous and aristocratic expression of the same consciousness of which Moussorgsky's is the severe, stark, barbaric; the caress as opposed to the pinch. Consequently, Debussy's art was the more readily comprehensible of the two. But, once "Pelleas" produced, the assumption of "Boris" was inevitable. Moussorgsky's generation had arrived. The men who felt as he, who recognized the truth of his spare, metallic style, his sober edifices, had attained majority. A world was able to perceive in the music of the dead man its symbol.

But it is by no means alone the timeliness of Moussorgsky that has advanced him to his present position. It is the marvelous originality of his art. He is one of the most completely and nobly original among composers, one of the great inventors of form. The music of Moussorgsky is almost completely treasure-trove. It is not the development of any one thing, the continuation of a line, the logical outcome of the labors of others, as the works of so many even of the greatest musicians are. It is a thing that seems to have fallen to earth out of the arcana of forms like some meteorite. At the very moment of Wagner's triumph and of the full maturity of Liszt and Brahms, Moussorgsky composed as though he had been born into a world in which there was no musical tradition, a world where, indeed, no fine musical literature, and only a few folk-songs and orthodox liturgical chants and Greek-Catholic scales existed. Toward musical theory he seems to have been completely indifferent. Only one rule he recognized, and that was, "Art is a means of speech between man and man, and not an end." He was self-taught, and actually invented an art of music with each step of composition. And what he produced, though it was not great in bulk, was novel with a newness that is one of the miracles of music. Scarcely a phrase in his operas and songs moves in a conventional or unoriginal curve. The songs of Moussorgsky are things that can be recognized in each of their moments, so deeply and completely distinctive they are. There is not a bar of the collection called "Sans soleil" that is not richly and powerfully new. The harmonies sound new, the melodies are free and strange and expressive, the forms are solid and weighty as bronze and iron. They are like lumps dug up out of the earth. The uttermost simplicity obtains. And every stroke is decisive and meaningful. Moussorgsky seems to have crept closer to life than most artists, to have seized emotions in their nakedness and sharpness, to have felt with the innocence of a child. One of his collections is entitled "La Chambre d'Enfants." And that surprise and wonder at all the common facts of life, the sharpness with which the knowledge of death comes, characterize not alone this group, but all the songs. He is throughout them the child who sees the beetle lie dead, and who expresses his wonder and trouble directly from his heart with all the sharpness of necessary speech. So much other music seems indirect, hesitating, timorous, beside these little forms of granite.

And then, Moussorgsky's operas, "Boris" in particular, are dramatically swifter than most of Wagner's. He never made the mistake the master of Bayreuth so frequently made, of subordinating the drama to the music, and arresting the action for the sake of a "Waldweben" or a "Charfreitagszauber." The little scenes of Pushkin's play spin themselves off quickly through the music; the action is reinforced by a skeleton-like form of music, by swift vivid tonal etchings, by the simplest, directest picturings. Musical characterization is of the sharpest; original ideas pile upon each other and succeed each other without ado. The score of Boris, slim as it is, is a treasure house of inventions, of some of the most perfect music written for the theater. Few operatic works are musically more important, and yet less pretentious. And "Khovanchtchina," fragmentary though it is, is almost no less full of noble and lovely ideas. These fragments, melodies, choruses, dances are each of them real inventions, wonderful pieces caught up in nets, the rarest sort of beauties. A deep, rich glow plays over these melodies. Their simplicity is the simplicity of perfectly felicitous inventions, of things sprung from the earth without effort. They are so much like folk-tunes that one wonders whether they were not produced hundreds of years ago and handed down by generations of Russians. One of them even, the great chorus in the first scene, might stand as a sort of national anthem for Russia. Others, like the instrumental accompaniment to the first entrance of Prince Ivan Khovansky, are some of those bits that represent a whole culture, a whole tradition and race.

These pieces are the children of an infinitely noble mind. There is something in those gorgeous melodies, those magnificent cries, those proud and solemn themes of which both "Boris" and "Khovanchtchina" are full, that makes Wagner seem plebeian and bourgeois. Peasant-like though the music is, reeking of the soil, rude and powerful, it still seems to refer to a mind of a prouder, finer sort than that of the other man. The reticence, the directness, the innocence of any theatricality, the avoidance of all that is purely effective, the dignity of expression, the salt and irony, the round, full ring of every detail are good and fortifying after the scoriac inundations of Wagner's genius. The gaunt gray piles, the metallic surfaces, the homelinesses of Moussorgsky, are more virile, stronger, more resisting than Wagner's music. Only folk aristocratically sure of themselves can be as gay and light at will. If there is anything in modern music to be compared with the sheer, blunt, powerful volumes of primitive art it is the work of Moussorgsky. And as the years pass, the man's stature and mind become more immense, more prodigious. One has but to hearken to the accent of the greater part of modern music to gauge in whose shadow we are all living, how far the impulse coming from him has carried. The whole living musical world, from Debussy to Bloch, from Strawinsky to Bartok, has been vivified by him. And, certainly, if any modern music seems to have the resisting power that beats back the centuries and the eons, it is his pieces of bronze and ironware and granite. What the world lost when Modest Moussorgsky died in his forty-second year we shall never know.

But, chiefest of all, his music has the grandeur of an essentially religious act. It is the utterance of the profoundest spiritual knowledge of a people. Moussorgsky was buoyed by the great force of the Russian charity, the Russian humility, the Russian pity. It was that great religious feeling that possessed the man who had been a foppish guardsman content to amuse ladies by strumming them snatches of "Il Trovatore" and "La Traviata" on the piano, and gave him his profound sense of reality, his knowledge of how simple and sad a thing human life is after all, and made him vibrate so exquisitely with the suffering inherent in the constitution of the world. It gave his art its color, its character, its tendency. It filled him with the unsentimental, warm, animal love that made him represent man faithfully and catch the very breath of his fellows as it left their bodies. Certainly, it was from his race's dim, powerful sense of the sacrament of pain that his music flows. He himself confessed that it was the sense of another's inarticulate anguish, sympathy with a half-idiotic peasant-boy stammering out his hopeless love, that first stirred the poet within him and led him to compose. The music of defeat, the insistent cry of the world's pain, sound out of his music because the Russian folk has always known the great mystery and reality and good of suffering, has known that only the humble, only those who have borne defeat and pain and misfortune can see the face of life, that sorrow and agony can hallow human existence, and that while in the days of his triumph and well-being man is a cruel and evil being, adversity often makes to appear in him divine and lovely traits. Dostoievsky was never more the Russian prophet than when he wrote "The Idiot," and uttered in it his humble thanksgiving that through the curse of nature, through the utter uselessness of his physical machine, through sickness and foolishness and poverty, he had been saved from doing the world's evil and adding to its death. And Moussorgsky is the counterpart of the great romancer. Like the other, he comes in priestly and ablutionary office. Like the other, he expresses the moving, lowly god, the god of the low, broad forehead and peasant garb, that his people bears within it. Both prose and music are manifestations of the Russian Christ. To Europe in its late hour he came as emissary of the one religious modern folk, and called on men to recognize the truth and reform their lives in accordance with it. He came to wrest man from the slavery of the new gigantic body he had begotten, to wean him from lust of power, to pacify and humble him. Once more he came to fulfil the Old Testamentary prophets. The evangel of Tolstoy, the novels of Dostoievsky, the music of Moussorgsky are the new gospels. In Moussorgsky, music has given the new world its priest.



Liszt

Oh, magnificent and miserable Abbe Liszt! Strange and unnatural fusion of traits the most noble and the most mean! One can scarcely say which was the stronger in you, the grand seigneur or the base comedian. For in your work they are equally, inextricably commingled. In your art it is the actor who thrones it in the palace hall, the great lord of music who struts and capers on the boards of the itinerant theater. Nowhere, in all music, is grandeur nigher to the dust, and nowhere does the dust reveal more grandiose traits. Your compositions are the most brilliant of bastards, the most lamentable of legitimate things. They smite us with both admiration and aversion, affect us as though the scarlet satin robes of a patrician of Venice were to betray the presence beneath them of foul, unsightly rags. They remind us of the facades of the palaces of Vicenza, which, designed by the pompous and classicizing Palladio, are executed in stucco and other cheap materials.