ADDENDA

Feeling—like honesty—is a moral point of honor, an attribute of whose possession no one will permit denial, which claims a place in life and art alike. But while, in life, a want of feeling may be forgiven to the possessor of a more brilliant attribute, such as bravery or impartial justice, in art feeling is held to be the highest moral qualification.

In music, however, feeling requires two consorts, taste and style. Now, in life, one encounters real taste as seldom as deep and true feeling; as for style, it is a province of art. What remains, is a species of pseudo-emotion which must be characterized as lachrymose hysteria or turgidity. And, above all, people insist upon having it plainly paraded before their eyes! It must be underscored, so that everybody shall stop, look, and listen. The audience sees it, greatly magnified, thrown on the screen, so that it dances before the vision in vague, importunate vastness; it is cried on the streets, to summon them that dwell remote from art; it is gilded, to make the destitute stare in amaze.

For in life, too, the expressions of feeling, by mien and words, are oftenest employed; rarer, and more genuine, is that feeling which acts without talk; and most precious is the feeling which hides itself.

FEELING

“Feeling” is generally understood to mean tenderness, pathos, and extravagance, of expression. But how much more does the marvelous flower “Emotion” enfold! Restraint and forbearance, renunciation, power, activity, patience, magnanimity, joyousness, and that all-controlling intelligence wherein feeling actually takes its rise.

It is not otherwise in Art, which holds the mirror up to Life; and still more outspokenly in Music, which repeats the emotions of Life—though for this, as I have said, taste and style must be added; Style, which distinguishes Art from Life.

What the amateur and the mediocre artist attempt to express, is feeling in little, in detail, for a short stretch.

Feeling on a grand scale is mistaken by the amateur, the semi-artist, the public (and the critics too, unhappily!), for a want of emotion, because they all are unable to hear the longer reaches as parts of a yet more extended whole. Feeling, therefore, is likewise economy.

Hence, I distinguish feeling as Taste, as Style, as Economy. Each a whole in itself, and each one-third of the Whole. Within and over them rules a subjective trinity: Temperament, Intelligence, and the instinct of Equipoise.

These six carry on a dance of such subtility in the choice of partners and intertwining of figures, in the bearing and the being borne, in advancing and curtesying, in motion and repose, that no loftier height of artistry is conceivable.

When the chords of the two triads are in perfect tune, Fantasy may—nay, must—associate with Feeling; supported by the Six, she will not degenerate, and out of this combination of all the elements arises Individuality. The individuality catches, like a lens, the light-impressions, reflects them, according to its nature, as a negative, and the hearer perceives the true picture.

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In so far as taste participates in feeling, the latter—like all else—alters its forms of expression with the period. That is, one aspect or another of feeling will be favored at one time or another, onesidedly cultivated, especially developed. Thus, with and after Wagner, voluptuous sensuality came to the fore; the form of intensification of passion is still unsurmounted by contemporary composers. On every tranquil beginning followed a swift upward surge. Wagner, in this point insatiable, but not inexhaustible, turned from sheer necessity to the expedient, after reaching a climax, of starting afresh softly, to soar to a sudden new intensification.

Modern French writers exhibit a revulsion; their feeling is a reflexive chastity, or perhaps rather a restrained sensualism; the upstriving mountain-paths of Wagner are succeeded by monotonous plains of twilight uniformity.

Thus “style” forms itself out of feeling, when led by taste.

* **

The “Apostles of the Ninth Symphony” have devised the notion of “depth” in music. It is still current at face-value, especially in Germanic lands.

There is a depth of feeling, and a depth of thought; the latter is literary, and can have no application to tones. Depth of feeling, by contrast, is psychical, and thoroughly germane to the nature of music. The Apostles of the Ninth Symphony have a peculiar and not quite clearly defined estimate of “depth” in music. Depth becomes breadth, and the attempt is made to attain it through weight; it then discovers itself (through an association of ideas) by a preference for a deep register, and (as I have had opportunity to observe) by the insinuation of a second, mysterious notion, usually of a literary sort. If these are not the sole specific signs, they are the most important ones.

To every disciple of philosophy, however, depth of feeling would seem to imply exhaustiveness in feeling, a complete absorption in the given mood.

Whoever, surrounded by the full tide of a genuine carnival crowd, slinks about morosely or even indifferently, neither affected nor carried away by the tremendous self-satire of mask and motley, by the might of misrule over law, by the vengeful feeling of wit running riot, shows himself incapable of sounding the depths of feeling. This gives further confirmation of the fact, that depth of feeling roots in a complete absorption in the given mood, however frivolous, and blossoms in the interpretation of that mood; whereas the current conception of deep feeling singles out only one aspect of feeling in man, and specializes that.

In the so-called “Champagne Aria” in Don Giovanni there lies more “depth” than in many a funeral march or nocturne:—Depth of feeling also shows in not wasting it on subordinate or unimportant matters.

ROUTINE

Routine is highly esteemed and frequently required; in musical “officialdom” it is a sine qua non. That routine in music should exist at all, and, furthermore, that it can be nominated as a condition in the musician's bond, is another proof of the narrow confines of our musical art. Routine signifies the acquisition of a modicum of experience and artcraft, and their application to all cases which may occur; hence, there must be an astounding number of analogous cases. Now, I like to imagine a species of art-praxis wherein each case should be a new one, an exception! How helpless and impotent would the army of practical musicians stand before it!—in the end they would surely beat a retreat, and disappear. Routine transforms the temple of art into a factory. It destroys creativeness. For creation means, the bringing form out of the void; whereas routine flourishes on imitation. It is “poetry made to order.” It rules because it suits the generality: In the theatre, in the orchestra, in virtuosi, in instruction. One longs to exclaim, “Avoid routine! Let each beginning be, as had none been before! Know nothing, but rather think and feel! For, behold, the myriad strains that once shall sound have existed since the beginning, ready, afloat in the æther, and together with them other myriads that shall never be heard. Only stretch forth your hands, and ye shall grasp a blossom, a breath of the sea-breeze, a sunbeam; avoid routine, for it strives to grasp only that wherewith your four walls are filled, and the same over and over again; the spirit of ease so infects you, that you will scarcely leave your armchairs, and will lay hold only of what is nearest to hand. And myriad strains are there since the beginning, still waiting for manifestation!”

* **

“It is my misfortune, to possess no routine,” Wagner once wrote Liszt, when the composition of “Tristan” was making no progress. Thus Wagner deceived himself, and wore a mask for others. He had too much routine, and his composing-machinery was thrown out of gear, just when a tangle formed in the mesh which only inspiration could unloose. True, Wagner found the clew when he succeeded in throwing off routine; but had he really never possessed it, he would have declared the fact without bitterness. And, after all, this sentence in Wagner's letter expresses the true artist-contempt for routine, inasmuch as he waives all claim to a qualification which he thinks meanly of, and takes care that others may not invest him with it. This self-praise he utters with a mien of ironic desperation. He is, in very truth, unhappy that composition is at a standstill, but finds rich consolation in the consciousness that his genius is above the cheap expedients of routine; at the same time, with an air of modesty, he sorrowfully confesses that he has not acquired a training belonging to the craft.

The sentence is a masterpiece of the native cunning of the instinct of self-preservation; but equally proves—and that is our point—the pettiness of routine in creative work.

RESPECT THE PIANOFORTE!

Respect the Pianoforte! Its disadvantages are evident, decided, and unquestionable: The lack of sustained tone, and the pitiless, unyielding adjustment of the inalterable semitonic scale.

But its advantages and prerogatives approach the marvelous.

It gives a single man command over something complete; in its potentialities from softest to loudest in one and the same register it excels all other instruments. The trumpet can blare, but not sigh; contrariwise the flute; the pianoforte can do both. Its range embraces the highest and deepest practicable tones. Respect the Pianoforte!

Let doubters consider how the pianoforte was esteemed by Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Liszt, who dedicated their choicest thoughts to it.

And the pianoforte has one possession wholly peculiar to itself, an inimitable device, a photograph of the sky, a ray of moonlight—the Pedal.

The effects of the pedal are unexhausted, because they have remained even to this day the drudges of a narrow-souled and senseless harmonic theory; the treatment accorded them is like trying to mould air or water into geometric forms. Beethoven, who incontestably achieved the greatest progress on and for the pianoforte, divined the mysteries of the pedal, and to him we owe the first liberties.

The pedal is in ill-repute. For this, absurd irregularities must bear the blame. Let us experiment with sensible irregularities.

L'ENVOI

I felt … that the book I shall write will be neither in English nor in Latin; and this for the one reason … namely, that the language in which it may be given me not only to write, but also to think, will not be Latin, or English, or Italian, or Spanish, but a language not even one of whose words I know, a language in which dumb things speak to me, and in which, it may be, I shall at last have to respond in my grave to an Unknown Judge.”

(Von Hofmannsthal: A letter.)