MY “CHILDE ROLAND”

If you keep good company too long it is difficult to remain a decent member of society. This sounds like a faded paradox, but I mean it. No doubt vaso-motor reflex action is the cause. Try it yourself. Frequent the abodes of the self-righteous, of prohibitionists, of reformers and uplifters generally, and you will soon crave moral wood-alcohol, possibly the more vicious benzine. Too much opera drives me back to the church, and thence to the House of the Flesh where the spirit sleepeth. Because he was a clergyman’s son and brought up in a moral straight jacket, dosed with moralic acid, Friedrich Nietzsche exploded such a phrase as “Christianity, alcohol—the two great means of corruption” to civilization. I have often wondered why he dragged in rum? (This is a variant on Whistler’s epigram.)

However, I’m not attempting unimaginary conversations, nor describing insurrections in oyster-shells. A Scotch proverb warns us: “Never tell your foe when your foot sleeps”; nevertheless I shall make a confession that involves both feet, also my sleeping cortical cells. The good company mentioned above chiefly consisted of young, ambitious composers, an approved gang of musical chaps who delighted in symphonically setting poetic ideas, whether from Byron, Nietzsche, Ben De Casseres, or d’Annunzio. And when I say symphonically I mean symphonic poems, for the great symphonists were long ago voted by this coterie as “old stuff.” Liszt and Richard Strauss were our springboards. The Debussy influence was yet to come. It was Tchaikovsky who most appealed to us. Realism, not imagination, was our shibboleth. As all my friends were composing I took it into my head to go them one better, to be more realistic than the ultra-realists. I had, so I fancied, the necessary science. I consulted young Henry Hadley, who was quite a promising lad at that time, and he advised—after putting me through a course of contrapuntal sprouts—to go ahead and do my worst, which worst would only mean spoiling music-paper, while my best—! Who knows?

I fancied that I had mastered the tools of my trade, that I knew every form from a song to a symphony, and that my scoring comprised the entire gamut of orchestral pigments—you see, false modesty didn’t stand in the way—so I began to cast about for my poetic subject and its musical counterpart, hoping—such is the audacity of youth—that the appearance of the pair would be simultaneous, as in the dual-composing of Richard Wagner. I didn’t expect much, did I? Well, one fine night, as I wearily tossed on my folding bedouin, my musical imagination began to work. I remember now that it was a spring night, the moon rounded, lustrous, and silvering the lake beneath my window. I had been re-reading for the hundredth time Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came, from my favorite poet, Robert Browning, with its sinister coloring, its spiritual overtones. Yet until that moment it had never suggested musical treatment. Perhaps it was the exquisite cool of the night, its haunting mellow atmosphere, that fermented in my brain-box. I went to the window. Suddenly I saw a huge fantastic cloud shadow project a jagged black pattern on the water. Presto! I had my theme. It came with an electric snap that blinded me for an instant. It would be the first motive of my symphonic poem, Childe Roland. It was thought in the key of B minor, a key emblematic of the dauntless knight who to “the dark tower came,” unfettered by enemies, physical or spiritual.

How my imagination seethed the night through, as I am one of those unhappy men who, the moment an idea comes to them, must develop it to the bitter end. Childe Roland kept me on tenterhooks till dawn. I heard the call of his “dauntless horn,” and saw the “squat tower.” The knight’s theme, so it seemed to me, was Roland incarnated in tone. I overheard its underlying harmonies with the instrumentation, all sombre, gloomy, the note of gladness missing. I treated my theme with vitality, announcing it on the English horn, with a strange rhythmic background supplied by the tympani; the strings in division played tremolando, the brass was staccato and muted. It was novel enough to me, although this description must sound banal to modern ears. After seven months of agonizing revision, pruning, clipping, cutting, and hawking it about for the inspection of my friends, and getting laughed at for my pains, I finished the unwieldy work. But the performance! Diplomacy won the day. A music-critic, who could compose a symphonic poem was more of a rarity in those far-away days than now, when children make fugues while you wait. There was an interview with Herr Kapellmeister Schnabelowsky and a definite promise. I shall spare you details of the seventeen rehearsals, hours and hours in duration, when my amateurish orchestration was held up to scorn by the conductor for the delectation of the band (though I always paid for his beer at Lüchow’s). The audience at the concert had the pleasure of reading in the programme-book the entire poem, Childe Roland, no doubt wondering what it meant. My symphonic poem would make clear the dark, dubious sayings of the poet. I believed then in the power of music to portray definite soul-states, to mirror moods, to depict, though indefinitely, common every-day physical facts.

My composition was adequately played, of that there was no doubt. Give the Herr Kapellmeister his due. It was only ninety minutes long—remember it was a symphonic poem, not a symphony—and I sat in nervous perspiration as I listened to the Childe Roland theme, to the squat tower theme, the “sudden little river” motive, the horrid engine of war motive, the sinister grinning false-guide theme, in short, to the many motives of the poem with its tremendous apotheosis, ending with the blast from the slug-horn of the dauntless knight. I hope you are acquainted with this extraordinary poem, for I have met confirmed Browningites who had never read it. After Paracelsus and Sordello it is my daily sustenance. The apotheosis theme I sounded with twelve trombones, twenty-one basset horns, one calliope and a chorus of one thousand two hundred, with a vacuum choir for celestial coloring. It almost brought down the roof and I was the happiest person in the audience. As I went away I encountered an old friend, the critic of The Disciples of Tone, who said to me:

“Mon cher maître, I congratulate you, it beats Richard Strauss all hollow. Who and what was your Childe Roland? Was he any relative of Byron’s Childe Harold? No, yes, no? I suppose the first theme represented the ‘galumping’ of his horse, and that funny triangular fugue meant the horse was lame in one leg and going it on three. Adieu! again congratulations. I’m in a hurry.” He fled. Triangular fugue! Why, that typified the crossroads before which Childe Roland hesitates. How I detested that unimaginative critic! I was indeed disheartened. Then I was saluted by a musical lady:

“It was grand, perfectly grand, but why did you introduce a funeral march in the middle? You know in the poem Childe Roland is not killed till the end.” I thanked her with a wry face. The funeral march she alluded to was not a march but the Quagmire theme, that quagmire from which queer faces threateningly mock at the brave knight. Hopeless, thought I, musical people have no imagination. In the morning newspapers I was treated rather roughly. I was accused of cribbing my opening theme from the overture to The Flying Dutchman, and giving it a rhythmic twist for my own ends—as if I hadn’t conceived it on the spur of an inspired minute! I was also told that I couldn’t write a fugue, that my orchestration was overladen, my part-writing crooked, while the work as a whole was deficient in symmetry, development, repose, above all in coherence. This last was too much. If Browning’s poem was pictured in my music, why, then, Browning was to be blamed for the incoherence, not I. I had faithfully followed his poetic narrative. Years later, when I became a member of the critical guild, I saw in a clearer light the reasons for those divagations. You can’t fool all the critics all the time.

Months afterward I read in his book, The Beautiful in Music, by Edward Hanslick, that “Definite feelings and emotions are unsusceptible of being embodied in music.” So I had been on a false track. Charles Lamb and Hanslick had reached the same conclusion by diverse roads. I realized that my symphonic poem Childe Roland told nothing to its hearers of Browning’s poem; that my own subjective and overthrown imaginings were not worth a rush; that as music the composition had objective existence, though not as a poetical picture, which must be judged on its musical merits alone; its themes, development, formal excellence, and not because of its arbitrary fidelity to a literary programme. When I set about analyzing, I discovered what poor stuff I had produced; how my fancy had tricked me into believing that my half dozen heavily instrumented themes, with their restless migrations into many tonalities were “souls and tales marvellously mirrored,” when they were nothing of the kind.

In reality my ignorance of form, and lack of contrapunted knowledge, had made me label the work a “symphonic poem”—an elastic, high-sounding, pompous, and empty tithe. In a spirit of revenge on my fatuity I rearranged the score for small orchestra and it is now played in the circus under the better understood name of The Patrol of the Night-Stick, and the critical press has particularly praised the graphic power of the night-stick motive and the verisimilitude of the quick “get-away” of the burglars in the elaborate coda. Alas! poor Childe Roland.

If our young composers would study Hanslick’s book much good might accrue. It is all very well to give your composition a grandiose title, but do not expect that your audience will understand your idea. We may be thinking of something quite different, according to our respective temperaments. I may enjoy the formal musical side; my neighbor, for all I know, will, in imagination, have buried his rich, irritable old aunt; therefore your pæan of gladness, with its clamor of brazen trumpets, means for him the triumphant ride home from the cemetery and the anticipated joys of the post-mortuary baked meats and the subsequent jag. You never can tell.