CONTEMPORARY BRAN

Yesterday was housecleaning in my office, which I need hardly tell you is situated under my hat. The principal débris to be removed and dumped into the waste-paper basket were letters addressed to this department. Their number was appalling, the accumulation of weeks, as the music editor has little time for answering letters. A dozen concerts a day, opera almost every night, do not make for the life tranquil. Now, letters, anonymous or signed, are always interesting, especially those in the first category. Praise and blame run neck and neck; cinquante-cinquante, in classic parlance. Occasionally abusive missives arrive, breathing fire and fury, and these are of psychologic import. You ask yourself why? And lose yourself in an interesting labyrinth of speculation. The small boy who chalks naughty words or figures on wall spaces during the spring of the year testifies to the rising sap of the budding season; it is an outlet for his nascent emotions. Presumably this is the case with those whose handwriting reveals their uneasy sex. But why do they select the present incumbent of this chair of criticism? William James, when he dissected Dr. Nordau, twenty-five years ago, pointed out as a major symptom of the too critical Max what is called by psychiatrists coprolalia, or a tendency to indulge in vulgar, abusive language. When certain inhibitions of polite society are removed the patient indulges in vile speech, and writes nasty and usually anonymous letters for reasons only known to himself or herself. Writers of anonymous letters are described as cowardly, but this is only half the truth; they are also sick-brained, suffering from mild hysteria, and as soon as they transfer to paper the expression of their petty spite are temporarily relieved; there is “a load off their minds,” as they put it.

This doesn’t mean that all anonymous letters are abusive; some of them are pleasant reading. A blushing maiden records her admiration. A “violinist” tells me that I have overpraised Raoul Vidas, although I was not at the concert in question, Sunday being my day of respite from the boiler shop; now and again pertinent criticism is received, but, whether signed or unsigned, all these communications only prove that their recipient’s casual writing is closely read, and that is a minor consolation. Then there are the letters asking for advice, and these contain harder nuts to crack. Why warn a young man or woman that musical criticism as a profession is a delusion and a snare? Neither one will believe you. Why suggest to an ambitious young composer that any other avocation will bring him, if not happiness, then, at least, bread and butter? But the stone hankers after the star, and who shall mock its aspiration? How often have we felt like crying aloud: “Hats on, gentleman, this is not a genius!” reversing the historic utterance of Robert Schumann. A critic should be clairvoyant, but sometimes he is not. And little wonder. Paste passes for diamonds, skim-milk masquerades as cream. But it is always well to face the rising, not the setting sun. Write only for young; the old will not heed you, being weary of the pother of life and art. To the young belongs the future. Hurrah for Ornstein and Prokofieff, or the ideals they represent! Progress always traverses a circle, it is more imaginary than real, but we must have the illusion of progress, else spiritually decay. Without vision people perish. Nice copybook axioms, paste them in your bonnet.

In Emile Hennequin’s La Critique Scientifique—introduced to English readers by John Mackinnon Robertson in his New Essays Towards a Critical Method—the brilliant Frenchman, unhappily dead before his time, advanced the idea that every critic should, in the preface of his book, set forth not only his qualifications, but also his prejudices, his limitations. This procedure might shed a dry light on what follows, although it would seem unnecessary, as all these virtues and defects are implicit in the critics’ work. However, Mr. Robertson has elaborated the theory and frankly exposes himself. I am minded of this by a signed letter, evidently written by a gentleman, which came to this department shortly after a notice had appeared criticising the Oratorio Society. The critic, it seems, must have been in a disgruntled humor when he declared that the oratorio form was as obsolete as the mastodon, or some other prehistoric monster; perhaps he meant hippopotamus. The writer of the communication protests, and logically, against sending a man to criticise choral singing when he is not in sympathy with such. Other people, numerous people, find in oratorio the musical staff of life. Why, then, trample on their feelings? The answer is an unqualified assent to the argument. As I signed the criticism in question, and as I was bored to death at the time, there is nothing left for me but to apologize—also put on paper my objections, thus following the advice of the distinguished French critic. And I fear I shall make out a poor case for the defense.

In the first place, on the night of the Oratorio concert, our oratorio editor, yielding to a perfectly human impulse—about the fourth time in his life—accompanied the sporting editor to a marvellous wrestling match between El Greco, the Terrible Greek (his real name is said to be Theototocopulous), and Goya, better known as the Man-Strangler. Which one first went to the mat on that tremendous occasion need not concern us now; suffice to say that I was butchered to make the oratorio editor’s holiday. Why do I dislike oratorio? I meekly retort—I don’t. I love it, and my correspondent is right when he asserts that the form has served as a vehicle for most masterly music. Think of Bach, Handel, Mendelssohn. I know it. I have heard and loved choral singing for a half century. Masterpieces never weary, but, as Arthur Symons says, books about books soon pass away, and there are some of us who prefer to read than “see” Hamlet, although I agree with Brander Matthews that the only test of a play is “the fire of the footlights.” In a word, public performance may rob the masterpiece of its original grandeur—and we must predicate grandeur for the B minor Mass, for the Messiah, for Elijah. This sounds as if I were about to lay the blame on the particular performance of the Oratorio Society—a cowardly evasion of my duty. On the contrary, I confess that with the exception of the inevitable limitations of amateur singing—Signor Setti choruses are not plentiful—I had never heard the Oratorio Society sing with such refreshing vigor as the week before last. Remember, too, that I heard the society under Leopold Damrosch, when it sang The Damnation of Faust at the Academy of Music, Philadelphia, and young Walter conducted a chorus in the wings.

You will ask, You love the noble music in this form, why write deprecatingly of it? Because it is my unshakable conviction that such music does not belong in the concert room, but in a church. After hearing the Passion music in Bach’s old St. Thomas’s Church, or the Brahms Requiem in a historical church, the anomaly of singers in festive array singing in concert halls is too much for my sense of eternal fitness. Yes, critics have “nerves,” and it needs a remarkable interpretation of the Messiah or kindred compositions to stir me. I am only answering for myself—qui s’excuse, s’accuse?—and do not presume to gainsay the feelings of pious folk who regard the Messiah as a sacred function. But for those who tell me that the mock-turtle Christianity of Parsifal is “sacred” I merely retort: “A fig for the mystic capon.” Naturally, a concert room better serves the practical purpose of singing organizations here than the house of God; yet I prefer the church, for the spectacle of five hundred humans, with their mouths wide open bawling the text—would it not distract one? Sacred fiddlesticks! you exclaim when a tenor, faultlessly clad, arises and solemnly intones, “And Jesus said,” the remainder of the speech being uttered by some one else. Æsthetically, oratorio has not a leg to stand on. It is neither fish nor flesh. How dull was Samson et Dalila till sung in costume and before the footlights! And it is not by any means very dramatic. Still, to many who do not visit the opera for religious reasons, oratorio is a species of emotional outlet. It is a half-way house, a compromise—you may enjoy both drama and religion. Another thing—I am weary of the music, as I weary when I see Hamlet or hear the Fifth Symphony, or look at the Dresden Madonna. I am not apologizing for this weakness, only trying to explain its genesis. William Gillette has written about the “first-time” element in acting; or why an actor must ceaselessly renew the freshness of his original inspiration. Would that some sympathetic writer deigned to take up the cudgels for the ear-sick music critic. It is difficult, nay, impossible, to recapture that first rapture when Tristan, or the C minor Symphony, or Hamlet, swam into our ken. That is why I did not “react” the other night at the Oratorio Society, and why, as my critique was reprehensible, I am now making a clean breast of the matter and crying: Peccavi!

And here is my old friend Frank Sealey mildly complaining that it was not his fault that his electric organ “ciphered” for a bar during the evening. As I have literally sat at Brother Sealey’s feet for nearly thirty years—since the opening of Carnegie Hall—it is not necessary to assure him that I never doubted that it was the fault of the organ, not his. He is a rock of certitude on the organ bench. But I did enjoy Wolf-Ferrari’s Vita Nuova, a beautifully fashioned score, too sweetly sentimental in spots for the austere and lovely sonnets of the deathless Dante; nevertheless, a tour de force, happily illustrating my primal contention that the oratorio form is as obsolescent as the epic; the spirit, I mean, rather than the form, for the bony framework is there, but the age of piety, the profound piety that prompted the composition of such glorious music as Bach’s or Handel’s, has quite vanished, to be replaced by machine-made music, the “movies,” and other stimulating arts. Contemporary bran is filling, but it nourishes not the soul. Need I add, when the Oratorio Society sings the Messiah at Christmas-tide, that the regular oratorio editor, a singularly pious person, will report the annual occurrence! That night, perhaps, I shall enjoy the brutal but diverting spectacle of a wrestling match. It all depends on the amiability of the sporting editor.