BOHEMIAN MUSIC

In New Cosmopolis I called Prague the most original city in Europe, not perhaps so melodramatic as Toledo in Spain, yet quite as original, when you consider that pretty, placid Dresden is only four hours away and that further down the map lies Vienna. As the traveller approaches the Bohemian city—as Praha it is known to the natives—the cathedral and castles grouped on the hill form a fascinating silhouette against the sky-line. At once the alluring prospects of wood and architecture are evoked, and to the memory comes the sanguinary pages of its history. Arthur Symons once wrote that to a Bohemian “Prague is still the epitome of his country; he sees it as a man sees the woman he loves, with her first beauty, and he loves it as a man loves a woman, more for what she has suffered.” Needless to add, for me it was love at first sight, this Prague, with its imperial palace and the Hradschin fortress so proudly perched on the Hradcany; the pinnacle of the St. Vitus Cathedral, the four Ottakan towers and the two towers of St. George, which swim so gloriously in the air, a miracle of tender rose and marble white, with golden spots of sunshine, form an ensemble that would intrigue the brush of Claude Monet.

The city proper enchants with its bewildering jumbles of architecture, its historical evocations. The Bridge of Prague, the Town Hall, the Powder Tower, the historic Tyn church, the old Jewish cemetery, the Belvedere, the Chapel of St. Wenceslas, the shrine of St. Nepomuc, the Star Hunting Lodge, where in 1620 was fought the Battle of the White Mountain, the Rudolphinium—to go on like this would send you to the guide-books. There is the modern Representatives House, where you may enjoy a symphony concert up-stairs, while in the restaurant on the first floor you can eat an omleba royal, a Fogos fish, a Telec filet specanky and Ledovy crème, ending with an Americky compôte, and—tell it not in Gath—good light wine is to be had, or the incomparable product of Pilsen, there pronounced Pizn. I stopped at the “Blauer Stern,” on the Hybernska Ulice, which old-fashioned, comfortable hotel has probably changed its name since the war. Even in 1913 anything German was anathema to the Bohemians. There is the Bohemian National Theatre. Both Josef Stransky of the Philharmonic Society and Artur Bodanzky of the Metropolitan Opera House and the New Symphony Orchestra were some years ago conductors at Prague. One afternoon in the Representatives House I listened to a programme composed of national music—the Scherzo à Capriccioso of Dvorak, a symphony by Smetana, a symphonic poem by Josef Suk and a work by Sdenko Fibich, the latter a composer too little known here, whose piano compositions were introduced to us more than a decade ago by Florence Mosher and Emily Burbank at their lecture-recitals. One gray morning I went astray while wandering about the twisting corridors of the “Blauer Stern” and, tempted by the sounds of masterly violin playing, I stood before a door which bore the legend: “Otokar Sevcik.” It might have been his pupils, Jan Kubelik or Kocian, though it was neither. I had seen the brilliant Kubelik at Marienbad, where I went annually to fight my fat and also to war with the rum demon—temporarily. Since then Sevcik, the great teacher of aspiring fiddlers, has removed to Vienna.

I mention these things concerning the delightful city of Ema Destinova, Thomas Masaryk—who married a New York lady, one of the Misses Garrigue of the well-known musical family; of the city wherein Mozart composed his masterpiece, Don Giovanni—“in order to express the thanks of the great master to his ‘dearest citizens of Prague’ for their ardent reception”; that Prague which is so dramatic to gaze upon, the Slavic city further west, the gateway to the Slavic lands—because I have just read with considerable satisfaction a slender pamphlet of fifty pages entitled The Music of Bohemia, by Ladislav Urban, published under the auspices of the Czecho-Slovak Art Clubs of New York City. The author calls his decidedly interesting contribution a sketch, but it is a sketch in which is compressed much valuable matter. At the start he tells us that “Czech” is the Slav name for the Slav people and language in Bohemia, Moravia and Silesia. The terms used to designate the whole country, the state, are ‘Bohemia’ and ‘Bohemian.’ The Czechs themselves do not employ this distinction, continues Mr. Urban, but use the word Czech in both senses. Slovaks are that people who live in the northwestern part of Hungary, called Slovakia, which with Bohemia forms the present republic and nation of the Czecho-Slovaks. Mr. Urban warns us not to confound Bohemians and gypsies, and cites Balfe’s Bohemian Girl as an instance: a full-fledged Czech folk-melody is introduced as a gypsy tune in the allegro theme of the overture.

There has been bad blood between the Bohemians and Germans since the reign of King Wenceslas (921-935 A. D.). After his assassination, Wenceslas was canonized and is a national saint; a folk-song, known as the Choral of St. Wenceslas, is one of the oldest among its kind. The John Huss reformation also aroused the nation, and a battle hymn, “Ye warriors who for God are fighting,” was another product of the folk. Bohemia has always been a musical nation, as Mr. Urban proves by numerous citations. Its folk-song literature is rich and varied. He quotes from Seth Watson’s Racial Problems in Hungary: “Singing is the chief passion of the Slovaks. Nothing will find its way so surely to the heart of the Slovak people as a well-sung song. An old peasant woman once complained to a friend of mine that her son was a useless, disappointing fellow. ‘What was the matter?’ inquired my friend; ‘did he drink or would he not work?’ ‘Oh, no,’ said the old woman; ‘but nothing will make him sing. It’s a great misfortune.’” Rather a companionable sort, we think—a young man who doesn’t sing, whistle or make other disagreeable noises would be a prize in our noisy Tophet of New York.

The polka must be credited to Bohemia; it was invented about 1830 by a country girl. This sounds a trifle doubtful, as the dance—called polka, rather pulka, because of the half step—is as old as the immemorial hills of Bohemia, I have been informed by Bohemian critics. There is a polka in Smetana’s The Bartered Bride, also a furiant, which means, we are told, “a boasting farmer.” Dvorak in his first symphony introduces a furiant in the place of a scherzo. But Mr. Urban is not seduced into that most platitudinous of errors, to wit, that the people make a nation’s music. He writes with admirable clearness on the subject: “It is no wonder that the richness of folk-art was overestimated in Bohemia at the beginning of the last century, and led to an error. Folk-art was confused with nationality in art. A false principle was constructed that ‘national art’ must be based upon folk-music. Thus the imitation of folk-poetry and folk-melodies was approved as the real national art. It is astonishing how long this principle, violating, as it did, the national law of progress, could endure. All works of this feverish, would-be-national period belong to history. They live no more, being but imitations.” In a footnote to this inexpugnable statement the author adds with his accustomed acuity: “The matter was also discussed in America, where some people saw national American music under the guise of Indian music. Nothing is easier for a composer than to imitate the melodies of different nations, preserving their rhythmical or melodic mannerisms.” He might have joined negro to Indian as our national, so-called, musical characteristics. But there are no more Indians, in a tribal sense, and as to negro music, the best of it was composed by white men, notably Stephen Foster. Why should Afro-American folk-tunes represent America? In MacDowell’s Indian Suite there are authentic Indian themes, while in Dvorak’s From the New World the negroid tunes are mere suggestions; the rhythms of Yankee Doodle are faintly heard as a contrapuntal device; in a word, the Americanism of Dr. Dvorak’s plenary composition is as American as his own name, not to mention the fact that its chief motto is taken from Schubert’s unfinished symphony (Tchaikovsky went to the same source for the principal theme of his E minor, the fifth, symphony, hence the accusation that Dvorak borrowed from the Russian. Arcades ambo!) But the negro folk-tune as a basic element for the American composer was short-lived. Its logical conclusion landed us in the dubious and never delectable region of ragtime, and there let it lie forever. The musical culture of America must have its roots in more national soil, must stem from neither the aboriginal natives nor yet from the one-time slaves. It must be American or it will not be at all. At present our supreme composer is Charles Martin Loeffler, by virtue of his individual genius. I suspect all map-music; patriotism may cloak humbuggery—or worse (Dr. Johnson says it does). So let us first make good music, and the national ingredients will take care of themselves.

Mr. Urban devoted special sections to the chief composers of Bohemia—Bedrich Smetana, Antonin Dvorak, Zdenko Fibich, Vitezslav Novak, and Josef Suk. There are, of course, many others, but within the scope of his little study these five suffice. Naturally, the palm of superiority is awarded Smetana, whose music we heard last season, thanks to Josef Stransky, himself a Bohemian. Smetana is the Bohemian composer par excellence. There is a foreign alloy in Dvorak, especially the later Dvorak, that rules him from entering into competition with his fellow-countryman. Dvorak remained a peasant even in his best works, which were written before he came to New York in 1892. The New World Symphony is pleasing and wears well, notwithstanding its unblushing plagiarisms—that excerpt from the Venusberg bacchanale in Tannhäuser quite takes your breath away; quotation marks are sadly needed in music!—but it remains presumably Czechish, and only faintly American. We much prefer his earlier Slavic Dances, the orchestral scherzo and the Husitzka overture. As for the newer men, it is to be hoped that Bodanzky and Stransky and Stokowski—conductors nowadays seem to be sky-high—will give them all a hearing. Quality, not quantity, rules Bohemian music, a music racy of the national soil, nevertheless not without the larger, profounder accents of universal music.