A MOOD REACTIONARY

I consider such phrases as the “progress of art,” the “improvement of art,” and “higher average of art” as distinctly harmful and misleading. How can art improve? Is art a something, an organism that is capable of growing into a fat maturity? If this be so, then, by the same token, it can become a doddering, senile thing, and finally die and be buried with the honors due its useful career. It was Henrik Ibsen who asserted that the vital values of a truth lasted at the longest about twenty years; after that the particular truth rolled into error. Now, isn’t this quibble concerning “artistic improvement” as fallacious as the vicious circle of the dramatist from the Land of the Midnight Whiskers—or is it the Land of the Midnight Bun? Contrariwise, Bach would be dead, Mozart moribund, Beethoven in middle-aged decay. Instead, what is the musical health of these three composers? Have we a gayer, blither, more youthful scapegrace writing to-day than Mozart? Is there a man among the moderns more virile, passionate, profound, or noble than Beethoven? And Bach is the boy of the trinity. The Well-Tempered Clavichord is the Book of Eternal Wisdom. In it may be found the past, present, future of music. It is the Fountain of Eternal Youth.

As a matter of cold fact, it is your modern who is ancient; the ancients were younger. Recall the Greeks and their naïve joy in creation. In sorrow the twentieth-century man brings forth his art. His music betrays it. It is sad, complicated, hysterical, morbid. No need to mention Chopin, who was neurotic—an empty medical phrase—nor Schumann, who carried in him the seeds of madness; nor Wagner, who was a typical decadent on an epical scale. Sufficient for the argument to adduce the names of Berlioz, Liszt, Tschaikovsky, and Richard Strauss. Some Sunday when the weather is wretched, when icicles hang by the wall, and “ways be foul” and “foul is fair and fair is foul,” I shall tell you what I think of the “blond barbarian” who sets to music crazy philosophies, bloody legends, sublime tommyrot, and the pictures and poems of his friend. At present I am not in the humor nor have I the space. Good white paper is become a luxury, like freedom of speechlessness and other indelicacies of the national cuisine.

As I understand the jargon of criticism, Berlioz is the father of modern instrumentation. That is, he says nothing original or significant in his music, but he says it magnificently. A purple, pompous rhetorician, a Chateaubriand of the orchestra. His style covers a multitude of musical—or unmusical—defects with the flamboyant cloak of chromatic charity. He pins haughty, poetic, high-sounding labels to his compositions, and, like Charles Lamb, we sit open-mouthed at concerts trying to fill in his big, sonorous, empty frame with an adequate picture. Your picture is not the same as mine. I swear that the young man who sits next to me, with a silly chin, goggle eyes, and a cocoanut-shaped head, sees as in a flattering mirror, the idealized image of a strong-jawed, ox-eyed, classic-browed youth, a mixture of Napoleon and Byron. I loathe the music that makes its chief appeal to the egotism of mankind, all the while slyly insinuating that it only addresses the imagination. Yes, the imagination of your own splendid ego in a white waistcoat driving a new model car through the White Light district on an immoral afternoon in the puberty of spring.

Let us pass to the Hungarian piano virtuoso, who posed as a great composer. That he lent his hard cash and musical themes to his precious son-in-law, Richard Wagner, is undeniable. Liszt admits it himself. But, then, beggars must not be choosers, and Liszt gave Wagner mighty poor stuff at times. We believe that Wagner liked far better the solid shekels than the notes of hand. Liszt would have had little to say if Berlioz had not preceded him. The idea struck him, for he was a master of musical snippets, that Berlioz was too long-winded—both in brass and wood—that his so-called symphonies were neither fish, nor form, nor good red tunes. What ho! cried Master Franz, I’ll give them a dose homœopathic. He did, and he named his prescription Symphonic Poem, or, if you will, Poème Symphonique, which is not the same thing. Nothing so tickles the vanity like this sort of verbal fireworks. “It leaves so much to the imagination,” murmurs the fat man with a 22-collar and a No. 6 hat. It does. And his kind of imagination—good Lord! Liszt, nothing daunted because he couldn’t shake out an honest throw of a tune from his technical dice-box, proceeded to build his noise on so-called themes, claiming that in this method he derived from Bach. Not so. Bach’s themes are subjects for fugal treatment, Liszt’s are used symphonically. The parallel is uncritical. Besides, Daddy Liszt had no melodic invention. Bach had, and in abundance; witness his chorals, masses, oratorios, preludes, suites, fugues. However, the Berlioz ball had to be kept a-rolling; the formula was easy. Liszt named his poems, named his very notes, put dog-collars on his harmonies—yet no one whistled after them. Whoever whistled a Liszt tune?

Tschaikovsky kept one eye on Liszt and Berlioz, the other on Bellini and Gounod. What would have happened if he had been one-eyed I cannot pretend to say. In love with lush, sensual melody, infatuated with the gorgeous pyrotechnical effects of Berlioz and Liszt, also the pomposities of Meyerbeer, this Russian, who began too late in his studies, succeeded in manufacturing a number of ineffectual works. On them he bestowed strained, fantastic titles, empty, meaningless, pretty, and as he was contrapuntally short-winded, he made his so-called tone-poems shorter than Liszt’s. He had little aptitude for the symphonic form, and his development section is always his weak point. Too much Italian sentiment, and a sentiment that is often hectic and morbid. He raves or whines like the people in Russian fiction. I think he was touched in the upper story, that is, till I heard the compositions of R. Strauss of Munich. What misfit music for such a joyous name, a name evocative of all that is gay, witty, sparkling, spontaneous in music. After Mozart, give me Strauss—Johann, not Richard.

No longer the wheezings, gaspings, short-breathed phrases of Liszt. No longer the sensuality, loose construction, formlessness and vodka besotted peasant dances of Tschaikovsky, but a blending of Wagner, Brahms, Liszt—and the classics. Richard Ostrich knows his little affair. He is clever, he is skilled. He has his chamber-music moments, his lyric outbursts. His early songs are singable. It is his vile, perverse orgies of orchestral noises that wound my ears. No normal man ever erected such mad architectural tonal schemes. He should be penned behind the bars of his own mad music. He lacks melody. He dotes on ugliness. He suffers from the uglification complex. He writes to distracting, unheavenly lengths, worst of all, his harmonies are hideous. But he doesn’t forget to call his monstrosities fanciful names. If it isn’t Don Juan—shades of Mozart—it is Don Quixote—shades of Cervantes. This literary title humbug serves as the plaster for our broken heads and split ear-drums. Berlioz, Tschaikovsky and R. Strauss are not for all time.

The truth is that musical art has gone far afield from the main travelled road, has been led into blind alleys and dark forests. If this art has made no “progress in fugue, song, sonata, symphony, string quartet, oratorio, opera,” who has “improved” on Bach, Handel, Haydn, Mozart, Gluck, Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, Chopin? Name, name, I ask. What’s the use of talking about the “higher average of to-day?” How much higher? You mean that more people go to concerts, more people enjoy music, than fifty or a hundred years ago. Do they? I doubt it. Of what use all our huge temples of worship if the true gods of art no longer be worshipped therein? Numbers prove nothing. Majorities are not always in the right. There has been no great original music composed since the death of Beethoven, for, strictly speaking, the music-drama of Wagner is a synthesis of the arts, and, despite his individual genius, in union there is death—in the case of the Seven Arts. United we fall, divided we stand! The multiplication of orchestras, opera-houses, singing societies, and concerts are not indicative that general culture is achieved. Quality, not quantity, should be the shibboleth. The tradition of the classics is fading, soon it shall vanish. We care little for the masters. Modern music worship is a fashionable fad. People go to listen because they think it the mode. Alack and alas! that is not the true spirit in which to approach the Holy of Holies, Bach, Handel, Mozart, and Beethoven. Oremus!