VIIIANARCHS AND ECSTASY
Lest we forget. While competition is the life of cocottes, the rival opera companies that fill the air of Gotham with their lyric cries offer to the truly musical only the choice between two despairs; with our accustomed happy indecision we prefer Leopold Godowsky to Puccini. We frankly confess our love of symphonic music, and would rather listen to a Beethoven string quartet played by the Flonzaleys than all the operas ever written; the majority of them depicting soul-states in a sanatorium. However, there is the charm of aversion, and that piques the curious. Music in opera is prodigal, never generous. It is the too-much that appalls. It is as reticent as a female politician and a hundredfold more attractive. Flying fish, these singing-actors. They needs must swim and fly. Winged fish, birds with fins. It is an ambiguous art, the operatic, and it is devised to tickle the ears, dazzle the eyes, of the unmusical and myopic. It breeds personal gossip, never thought. For God’s sake, let us sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of Mary Garden’s celebrated eyebrows! (This modern instance, for Mary always goes first, as HenryArthur of the Jones family would say, does not necessitate Shakespearean quotation marks.)
From Bach to Scriabin, have not all composers been anarchs? At first blush the plodding John Sebastian Bach of the Ill-Tempered Clavichord seems a dubious figure with which to drape the red flag of revolt. He grew a forest of children. He taught early and late. He played the organ in church of Sundays. Nevertheless, his music proves him a revolutionist. And, like any good social democrat, he quarrelled with his surroundings. He even went out for a drink during a prosy sermon—all sermons are necessarily prosy, else they wouldn’t be sermons—and was almost discharged by his superiors for returning late; a perpetual warning to thirsty organists. If Lombroso had been cognizant of this suspicious fact he would have built a terrific structure of degeneration theories with all sorts of inferential subcellars. Stranger still, the music of Bach remains as revolutionary as the hour it was written. No latter-day composer has gone so far as some of his fantasies. Mozart and Gluck depended too much on aristocratic patronage to play the rôles of anarchs; yet tales are extant of their refusal to lick the boots of the mighty or curve the spine of the suppliant. Handel! A fighter, a revolutionist born, a hater of tyrants. And the most virile among musicians except the peasant Beethoven—since the recent war become a Belgian composer! His contempt for rank and its entailed snobberies was like ablow from a muscular fist. Haydn need not be considered. He was a henpecked Croatian, and strange stories are related of this merry little blade, truly a chamber-music husband. Mendelssohn was Bach watered down for general consumption. Schubert and Schumann were anarchs, but the supreme anarch of art was Beethoven, who translated into daily practice the radicalism of his music.
Because of its opportunities for the expansion of the soul, music has ever attracted the strong free sons of the earth. It is, par excellence, the art masculine. The profoundest truths, the most blasphemous ideas, may be incorporated within the walls of a symphony, and the police none the wiser. Think of Chopin and Tchaikovsky and the arrant doctrines they preached. It is its freedom from the meddlesome hand of the censor that has made of music a playground for brave hearts. In his Siegfried and under the long nose of royalty Richard Wagner preached anarchy, put into tone, words, gestures, attitudes, lath, plaster, paint, and canvas, pronouncements so terrible that the Old Man of the Mountain, as Bernard Shaw calls Government, if it but knew, would forbid his music, not because it was penned by a German, but because it is inimical to tyranny, therefore the most democratic music ever composed.
Chopin presents us with a psychic “equivalent of war,” as William James has put it, in portions of his music, notably the polonaises;while Richard Strauss has buried more bombs in his work than ever Chopin with his cannon smothered in roses, or Bakounine and his nihilistic prose. Liszt, midway in his mortal life, was bitten by the socialistic theories of Saint-Simon, and, though a silken courtier, he was an innovator in his music. Brahms was a free-thinker and a democrat, but closely hugged the classic line and seldom strayed from the boundaries of his Romantic park. Berlioz, Hector of the Flaming Locks, was, his life long, a fiery individualist. He would have made a picturesque figure waving a blood-red flag on the barricades. His fantastic symphony is charged with the tonal commandments of anarchy. Richard Wagner may not have shouldered a musket during the Dresden uprising of 1849, yet he was, with Roeckel and Bakounine, one of its inspirers. Luckily for us he ran away, else Tristan might have remained in the womb of eternal silence. Wagner may be called the Joseph Proudhon among composers; his music is anarchy incarnate, passionately deliberate, like the sad and logical music we find in the great Frenchman’s Philosophy of Misery (by the way, a subtitle). His very scheme of harmonization is the symbol of a soul insurgent in the music of Richard Strauss. And what shall we say to the exquisite anarchy of Debussy and Ravel? To the cerebral insurrection of Schoenberg? To the devastating sirocco blasts of Scriabin, Stravinsky, Ornstein, and Prokofieff? The Neo-Scythians,who, like their savage forebears, throw across their saddle-bow the helpless diatonic and chromatic scales and bear away their prisoners to their ultimate goal; the unknown land of the sinister duodecuple scale! Ah! we did not heed years ago the wise words of our critical Nestor, H. E. Krehbiel, when he said, “’Ware the Muscovite!” (He denies having used this precise phrase. Too late. We have pinned it to paper and it will go marching down the corridor of destiny wearing his label.) Ecce Cossakus! Bad Latin, but reality. The Tartars are coming. Anarchs all.
And ecstasy! It is not an eminently modern quality in the Seven Arts. Sculpture did for a time resist the universal disintegration, this imbroglio of all the arts. Before Rodin no sculptor had so greatly dared to break the line, had dared to shiver the syntax of stone. Sculpture is a static, not a dynamic, art; therefore, let us observe the rules, preserve the chill spirit of the cemetery! What Mallarmé attempted in poetry Rodin accomplished in clay. His marbles do not represent, but present emotion, are the evocation of emotion; as in music, form and substance coalesce. If he does not, as did Mallarmé, arouse “the silent thunder afloat in the leaves,” he summons from the vasty deep the spirits of beauty, love, hate, pain, joy, sin, ecstasy, above all, ecstasy. The primal and danger-breeding gift of ecstasy is bestowed upon few. Keats had it, and Shelley; despite his passion, Byron missedit, as did the austere Wordsworth—who had, perhaps, loftier compensations. Swinburne had it from the first. Not Tennyson, and Browning only in occasional exaltation. Like the “cold devils” of Félicien Rops, coiled in frozen ecstasy, the winds of hell booming about them, the poetry of Charles Baudelaire is ecstatic. Poe and Heine knew ecstasy, and Liszt too; but Wagner, ill-tempered like all martyrs, was the master adept of his century. Tchaikovsky closely follows him, and in the tiny piano pieces of Chopin ecstasy is pinioned in a few bars, the soul rapt to heaven in a phrase. Richard Strauss has shown us a variation on the theme: voluptuousness troubled by pain, the soul tortured by the very ecstasy of ecstasy. Like Yeats, he is “Master of the Still Stars and of the Flaming Door.” William Blake and his figures rushing down the secret pathway of the mystic, which zigzags from the Fourth Dimension to the bottomless pit of materialism, was a creator of the darker nuances of pain and ecstasy. A sadistic strain in all this.
MARY GARDEN AS SALOME
From a photograph copyrighted by Matzene
MARY GARDEN AS SALOME
Scriabin is of this tormented choir; as Arthur B. Davies, our own mystic, primitive painter. And Charles Martin Loeffler. It may be the decadence, as any art is in decadence which stakes the parts against the whole. That ecstasy may be aroused by pictures of love and death, as in the cases of Poe and Baudelaire, Wagner and Strauss, should not, therefore, beadjudged morbid. In the Far East they hypnotize neophytes with a bit of broken mirror, for in the kingdom of art, as in heaven, there are many mansions. It was possibly a relic of his early admiration for the Baudelaire poems that set Wagner to extorting ecstasy from his orchestra by images of love and death, though doubtless the temperament which seeks assuagement in such a comminglement—a temperament more often encountered in mediæval art than now—was natural to Wagner. He makes his Isolde sing madly and mournfully over a corpse, and, throwing herself upon the dead Tristan, she dissolves into the ecstasies of sweet, cruel love; in Salome, Richard Strauss closely patterns after Wagner; there is the head of a dead man—though on a charger—and there follows a poignant ecstasy not to be found in all music. Both men play with similar counters: love and death, and death and love. In Pisa may be seen (attributed by Vasari) Orcagna’s fresco, The Triumph of Death. It has been set to grotesque music by Liszt in his Dance of Death. Let us not forget the great Italian, Gabriele d’Annunzio, whose magnificent prose, from The Triumph of Death to Forsé Che Si, Forsé Che No, is a pæan to the tutelar gods of humanity, love and death. The sting of the flesh and the way of all flesh are intermingled in Rodin’s astounding fugue, The Gate of Hell. First things and Last things, love and life, bitternessand death, have ever ruled the arts; and all great art is anarchic, cosmos and chaos cunningly proportioned.
But between the sublime and the silly there is only a hair’s breadth. If not guided by tact and vision, the ecstatic in art and literature may degenerate into the erotic, and from the erotic to the tommyrotic is only a step. All this tumultuous imagery, this rhapsody Hunekeresque, is prompted by a photograph of Mary Garden, whose enigmatic eyes collide with my gaze across the Time and Space of my writing-desk. Your memory is wooed by the golden trumpets of Byzance, and when Mary speaks she wears the sacred Zaïmph of Salammbo. Voltaire, in Candide, was wise when he advised us: “Il faut cultiver notre Jardin.”