VVINCENT d'INDY

imp154Vincentd'Indy as a Young Man

Vincentd'Indy as a Young Man

Our age, because of the natural failure of our inner powers, at first, to keep pace with the recent unprecedented increase of our external resources, will probably be known to the future as one of unparalleled confusion. With the mental and moral habits and the nervous systems inherited from a more placid generation, we find ourselves plunged in this maelstrom produced by cheap printing, quick communication, and facile transportation. Prepared to digest only a limited environment, we are fed the whole world. No wonder we are distracted.... The situation, of course, is full of interest to the more adventurous temperaments; but however stimulating to the man of action it is scarcely favorable to the artist, since art is born only of tranquil emotion, firmly grasped and clearlyarranged. Most contemporary musicians are thus bewildered and to some extent defeated by the very richness of the materials at hand; their art is not equal to the strain put upon it by their greatly enlarged resources; and their music is in consequence unindividual in expression, flabbily eclectic in style, and vague or wandering in structure.

It may seem at first thought paradoxical that these melancholy results of a momentary insufficiency of the mind to its materials should have proved most fatal precisely in the country that in simpler times has done most to create music. Strange it is, indeed, that Germany, which in Beethoven voiced the spiritual aspiration, in Schumann the romantic joy, and in Brahms the philosophic meditation of the whole world, should find itself at length reduced to the half-impotent strivings of a Mahler, to the learned lucubrations of a Reger, while mixed with even the gold of its one genius, Strauss, there should be so much dross of cheap sensationalism and irrelevant melodrama. Yet to consideration these signs of a widespread decadence inGerman music will not by any means remain incomprehensible. For it will be seen that the Teutonic introspectiveness, the supreme gift of that temperament, incomparable and sufficient endowment as it seemed in the musicians of the great period, hardly suffices those who have to steer their way in a much more complicated environment, surrounded by pitfalls, calling at every step for qualities with which the typical German is by no means so well supplied—intelligence, discrimination, moderation, and taste. It is the lack of these intellectual or spiritual qualities, rather than any falling off in purely emotional power, that has brought the great stream of music that flowed through Bach, Beethoven, Schumann, and Brahms to its end in the stagnant morasses of contemporary Kapellmeistermusik, or scattered it in the showy but unsatisfying jets of sensationalism. And as Russia still remains a bit barbaric, England a little provincial, America immature, and Italy tainted with operaticism (an ugly word for an ugly thing), it is chiefly in France, with its racial genius of lucid intelligence, that we find atruly vital contemporary music. There we owe it chiefly to the high creative genius of César Franck, Belgian by birth and temperament, French in education and intellectual clarity, and to the loyal co-labors, creative, critical, and educational, of his pupils and disciples. If there is to-day, despite the confusions of the time, a clear tradition and a hopeful future for instrumental music, it is chiefly these modern Frenchmen that we have to thank.

Especially has Vincent d'Indy, to-day dominant in the group, contributed to its work for many years the indefatigable efforts of his powerful and many-sided personality, more variously gifted than any of the others, since he is not only a composer of genius, but a lucid writer, an able organizer, and a teacher and conductor of singular magnetism. He came under the influence of Franck at his most plastic period; he was a youth of twenty-two when, in 1873, he entered Franck's organ class at the Paris Conservatoire; and of the circumstances, characteristic of both teacher and pupil, under which this most fruitfulrelationship began, he has himself written in his "Life of Franck."

"Having with great trouble," he says, "got upon paper a formless quartet for piano and strings, I asked Franck for an appointment. When I had played him the first movement, he remained a moment silent, and then, turning toward me with a sad air, he said to me words I have never forgotten, since they had a decisive action on my life: 'There are good things here, energy, a certain instinct for dialogue of the parts, ... the ideas are not bad, ... but that is not enough, it is not made, and, in short,you know nothing at all.' Returning home in the night (the interview had taken place very late in the evening) I said to myself, in my wounded vanity, that Franck must be a reactionary, understanding nothing of youthful, modern art. Nevertheless, calmer the next morning, I took up my unhappy quartet and recalled one by one his observations, ... and I was obliged to admit that he was right: I knew absolutely nothing. I went then, almost trembling, to ask him to accept me as a pupil."

At this time Franck, already fifty-one years old, was little appreciated as a composer, appeared to the world as a hard-worked organist who taught ten hours a day and wrote for two hours before breakfast works seldom heard, and had indeed not yet discovered the vein from which he so enriched music during the last ten years of his life. Nevertheless d'Indy at once recognized the fruitfulness of his ideas, devoted himself to a severe technical discipline in accordance with them, and assumed that rôle of filial defender and expositor of them in which he has never wearied from that day to this. There is something not only rarely beautiful in itself, but most characteristic of the purity of d'Indy's self-forgetful devotion to music, in the loyalty which he has always given to his "Pater seraphicus," as Franck's artistic sons called him, from the period when as a student he left the conservatory which misprized his master, to the day when, himself a master, he published his "Life of Franck." M. Romain Rolland gives us a picture of it in his description of the first performance, in March, 1888, of Franck's"Theme, fugue, and variation" for harmonium and piano, at a concert of theSociété nationale de musique, when Franck played the harmonium, and d'Indy the piano. "I always remember," says M. Rolland,[32]"his respectful attitude toward the old musician, his studious care to follow his indications: one would have thought he was a pupil, attentive and docile; and this was touching from a young master, established by so many works—theChant de la Cloche,Wallenstein, theSymphonie sur un thème montagnard—and perhaps better known and more popular than César Franck himself. Since then twenty years have passed; I continue to see him as I saw him that evening; and whatever happens now his image will remain always for me closely associated with that of the great master dominating, with a paternal smile, this small assembly of faithful ones."

This "small assembly of faithful ones," the pupils of Franck, such as Duparc, Chausson, Coquard, Bordes, Ropartz, Benoit, d'Indy, as well as others, like Saint-Saëns and Fauré,who, though not his pupils, have felt his influence, have virtually created since 1870, largely under his inspiration, a new music in France. The story of it may be read in M. Rolland's book, in the essay "Le renouveau." At the time of the Franco-Prussian War (in which d'Indy served as a corporal of the 105th regiment), symphonic and chamber music suffered almost complete neglect in Paris. "Before 1870," writes M. Saint-Saëns,[33]"a French composer who had the folly to venture into the domain of instrumental music, had no other way to get his works played than to organize a concert himself, inviting his friends and the critics. The rare chamber music societies were as much closed to all new comers as the orchestral concerts; their programs contained only the celebrated names, above discussion, of the great classic symphonists. At that time one had truly to be bereft of all common sense to write music. It was in order to correct this state of things that a group of musicians organized in February, 1871, theSociété nationale de musique,with the device 'Ars gallica,' and the avowed end of 'aiding the production and familiarization of all serious musical works, of French composers, and of encouraging, so far as may be in its power, all musical tentatives, of whatever kind, which show on the part of their author elevated and artistic aspirations.'" M. Rolland does not hesitate to call theSociété nationale"the cradle and the sanctuary of French art." "All that has been great in French music from 1870 to 1900," he says, "has come by way of it. Without it the greater part of the works which are the honor of our music not only would not have been performed, but perhaps would not even have been written." And he draws from the programs records of the performance of important compositions by Franck, Saint-Saëns, d'Indy, Chabrier, Lalo, Bruneau, Chausson, Debussy, Dukas, Lekeu, Magnard, and Ravel.

Vincent d'Indy's personal contribution to the work of the society began to be considerable from 1881 on, when the influence of the Franck school became dominant. In 1886 his proposal to include in the programs theworks of classic and foreign composers led to the resignation of Saint-Saëns and Bussine. In 1890, at the death of Franck, he became president of the society. Under his influence the representation of classical works has particularly increased—Palestrina, Vittoria, Josquin, Bach, Handel, Rameau, Gluck, as well as Beethoven, Schumann, Liszt, Brahms. Foreign contemporary music has been represented chiefly by Strauss, Grieg, and the Russians. In recent years theSociété nationalehas been charged with taking on too exclusive a character, especially with guarding the traditional at the expense of the new; and theSociété musicale indépendantehas been founded by some of the younger men as a protest.

In 1900 d'Indy became president of the Schola Cantorum, founded six years earlier by Charles Bordes, Alexandre Guilmant, and himself, primarily for the cultivation of the church music based on the Gregorian chant. In his discourse of inauguration he explained his purpose of enlarging the function of the school to cover all musical instruction; andwhile characteristically insisting that the means to renovate modern music were to be found in the study of "the decorative art of the plain chant, the architectural art of the Palestrina period, and the expressive art of the great Italians of the seventeenth century," yet promised to take his students "through the same path that art has followed, so that, undergoing in their period of study the transformations music has undergone through the centuries, they will emerge from it so much the better armed for the modern combat, in that they will have lived, so to speak, the life of art, and will have assimilated in their natural order the forms which have logically succeeded each other in the different epochs of artistic development." Both in the special leaning toward the music of the church which his devout and somewhat mystical temperament here suggested, and in the broad eclecticism with which his intelligence insisted on combining it, he showed clearly the influence of his master César Franck, whom indeed he asserted to be in a sense "the grandfather of this Schola Cantorum, since it is his system ofteaching that we endeavor to continue and apply here." Like his master he wished to cultivate in his students both a solid learning, without which nothing vital can be contributed to art, and the enthusiasm without which it degenerates into pedantry. To understand the great influence for good exerted on French music by the Schola, we need only recall d'Indy's description of "the noble teaching of César Franck, founded on Bach and Beethoven, but admitting besides all enthusiasms, all new and generous aspirations."[34]

In the sixteen years that d'Indy has been at the head of the Schola Cantorum he has accomplished an amount of unselfish labor for the advancement of music that would have been extraordinary under any circumstances, and becomes almost incredible when we remember that in the same period he has produced over half a dozen original works of the first importance. He is indeed a man of unusual physical, nervous, and mental strength, accustomed to indefatigable labor. Thus in addition to all his teaching he organizesoperatic performances and choral, orchestral, and chamber-music concerts; he conducts, and teaches others to conduct; he edits the classics—Rameau, Destouches, Solomon de Rossi—and the folk-songs of his native mountains of the Vivarais; he gives lectures and makes studies of the predecessors of Beethoven, of Franck; he writes criticisms for the monthly press; and, most serviceable of all perhaps to distant students, he describes the principles of his art in a masterly and exhaustive treatise, the "Cours de composition musicale," unfortunately not yet translated into English.

And all this is only his winter work. In the summer he retires to his château of Faugs, near the little mountain village of Boffres, in Ardèche, and there, in a room in the tower, whence on a clear day he can see Mt. Blanc, he composes the works in which these principles are so nobly exemplified. Besides the early "Chant de la Cloche," by which he won the grand prize of the city of Paris in 1885 and first established his reputation, he has written three other large choral works: the two operas "Fervaal" (1895) and "L'Étranger" (1901),and the oratorio "La Légende de St. Christophe," recently completed. For orchestra, aside from the early trilogy of symphonic poems "Wallenstein," over-Wagnerian in inspiration, and other early or lesser works, there are four masterpieces of the first order: "Istar," symphonic variations, 1896; the second Symphony, in B flat, 1904; the symphony, "Un Jour d'Été à la Montagne," 1905; and the symphonic poem "Souvenirs," written to the memory of his wife, 1906. This incomplete list may be finished with three equally masterly chamber-music pieces: the second String Quartet, E major, 1897; the Violin Sonata, 1904, and the Piano Sonata, 1907—not to mention the youthful Piano Quartet of 1878, or the delightful Trio for Clarinet, Violoncello, and Piano of 1887.

What, then, are these fundamental principles of composition which d'Indy has insisted upon in his teaching, promulgated in the "Cours de composition musicale," and exemplified in his works? They are all, in essence, but differing forms of the central principle of all art, of all beauty—that theutmost variety must be but the outgrowth and flowering of a perfect unity. We have seen that many modern composers, baffled by the richness of the materials with which they had to deal, have failed in the effort thus to stamp unity upon them: their art has been confused and fragmentary. Others again—the pseudo-classics and reactionaries—have resorted to a violent simplification of the material in order to preserve unity, and have thus impoverished their art. Only the greatest, in the first rank of whom must be placed Franck and d'Indy, have had at once a firm enough hold upon musical tradition and a broad enough command of new methods and idioms to write music at once various and unified, at once thoroughly "modern" and thoroughly sane. To this unifying power of d'Indy's mind M. Rolland pays a fine tribute. "Clearness!" he cries, "it is the mark of M. d'Indy's intelligence. There are no shadows in him. His thought and his art are as clear as his look, which gives to his face so much of youth. It is a necessity for him to judge, to order, to classify, to unify. Neverwas there a spirit more French.... And this is the more remarkable in that his nature is far from being simple. Through a wide musical education, a constant desire to learn, it has been enriched by many elements, different, almost contradictory.... Not to be submerged by this richness of opposing elements requires a great force of passion or of will, which eliminates or chooses and transforms. M. d'Indy eliminates almost nothing: he organizes. There are in his music the qualities of a general: the knowledge of the end, the patient will to attain it, the perfect acquaintance with the means, the spirit of order, and the mastery over his work and over himself. Despite the variety of the materials he employs, the whole is always clear."

imp171Figure XX.

Figure XX.

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If we examine, as typical of d'Indy's mature style, a passage such as the introduction to the slow movement of the B flat Symphony, shown in Figure XX, we are struck at once by the complexity of the detail—the bold unexpectedness of the melodic lines, thechromatic harmony, the constantly varying rhythms—and by the perfect final clearness with which it nevertheless impresses us, so that each note seems inevitable and the whole unmistakable in meaning. It is this combination of complexity and simplicity, characteristic more or less of all really great modern composers but perhaps to a peculiar degree of d'Indy, that we have to analyze and account for to ourselves in some detail if we would thoroughly understand his music. What is the mysterious power in him thatenables him to give so distinctly personal a stamp to elements drawn from so many sources? What is the unifying principle in all this variety? What lifts this insatiable student above his studies, and renders his knowledge not a dead lumber weighing down his mind, but a living force making it fruitful? For of the extent of these studies, benumbing to any but the freshest mind, there is plenty of evidence in his work as well as in his critical writings; if it were worth while we might enumerate "influences" at great length. There would be, for instance, the fundamental influence of Bach and Beethoven, and the more superficial influence of the romantics, Schumann and Mendelssohn, as shown in "Wallenstein" (1873-1879), and other early works. There would be the potent Wagnerian influence, of which "Fervaal" is the chief monument, although it appears in all that he has written; and there would be the even more pervasive and inspiring influence of his master, Franck. We should have to take account, too, of the reflection, especially in later works like the piano sonata, the violinsonata, and the second symphony, of the harmonic idiom of Debussy and other contemporaries, the whole-tone scale, and the like. And under these individual influences we should find more general, subtle, and pervasive ones, we should find the great communal streams of the French folk-song and the Gregorian plain chant. Yet all these streams, and others too many to mention, have been gathered up into one clear personality. What has been the transmuting magic?

The composer himself suggests the answer in several passages that may here be brought together.

"It is perfectly logical," he writes inMercure de France,[35]"and in the order of things that, when a man of genius shows himself in one country, the artists of the other nations try to assimilate his processes. I see nothing reprehensible in that, and this international free trade even appears to me one of the vital conditions of the development of art....

Moreover, can the artist ever, in spite of all influences, give anything else than the art that he carries in himself?"

"You ask me," he says to an interviewer of theRevue Bleue,[36]"to define French music. In reality there is no French music, and in general there is no national music. There ismusic, which is of no country; there are musical masterpieces, which belong to no one nation." He is led on to an interesting comparison of our period, in its desire for greater simplicity, with the end of the sixteenth century, and the illuminating statement: "M. Debussy is a little our Monteverde; he abandons melody for recitative, for 'the representative style,' as they said in the first years of the seventeenth century; he renounces the resources of counterpoint, he even foregoes modulation." But when the interviewer, seeking to entrap him into condemnation of his contemporary which would make good copy, asks, "And do you not desire rather the triumph of melody and polyphony?" he replies:

"I have but one desire; it is that they write beautiful things." The third passage is one of the axioms that he gives to his students at the Schola Cantorum: "All processes are good, on condition that they never become the principal end, but are regarded only as means for making music." And finally he makes his meaning even more definite in a discussion of M. Roger Ducasse:[37]"I am sure that when M. Ducasse is willing to trust himself more to the impulses of his heart rather than to researches in sonorities, he will be able to make very beautiful music. There is in art, truly, nothing but the heart that can produce beauty—(Il n'est vraiment, en art, que le cœur pour engendrer de la beauté)."

Yes, it is his heart that guides his mind through the mazes of its knowledge; it is his luminous sincerity that shines through all he writes, however complex it may be in detail; both the warmth and the light of his music come from his emotion. Responsive emotion in the listener, accordingly, is the key to the intricacies of his style. If we attend to theletter only we are baffled, bewildered: there are so many notes, such queer progressions, in that passage from the symphony, for example. But if we hearken for the spirit, all becomes clear, and strangely moving. It is waxing and waning feeling, a wave of emotion, that expresses itself in that rise to the strident B of the fourth measure and in the subsequent hesitating descent. And as emotion is the motive force of the whole, emotion it is also that explains the details.

Take for instance the very texture of the melody. We note two contrasting figures or motives, one, which we may calla, melancholy or at least contemplative, characterized by the fall of a fourth, and another,b, in which the more vigorous rise of a seventh gives a sense of opposing will. The whole passage is wrought from these two contrasting yet mutually supplementing strands with singular concentration. There is not a note, save the chords in the last two measures, that does not belong to one or the other. There is something relentless in such insistence. The grip is not relaxed for a moment. Thethought is hammered in. The music throbs like a pulse. Yet there is in this insistence nothing of the monotony of mere repetition; the feeling never stagnates. On the contrary, each assertion accumulates fresh force, the emotion rises by its own expression, and there is ordered, purposeful, relentless progression. Thus motiveais stated first from D flat; then, at *3, from D, higher and louder; then, at *5, from E flat but this time fairly carried off its feet by its oppugnant fellow,b. Similarlyb, first heard quietly, almost timidly, in the bass, in the key of D flat, at *2, is repeated at *4 more firmly and in the key of D minor, making it in the main higher than before though starting on the same note; finally it appears in the treble, as just stated, at *5, and rises as in a passionate cry to the B, whence it slowly subsides. In short, we see here a "logic of emotion" quite as absolute as that of the reason, and far more appropriate to music, in which mere reason must be content with a subordinate place. As always in the best music, the logic of emotion involves both the fundamental unity of the motives(since no emotion would amount to much if it was so weak that it forgot what it was about) and their gradual cumulative growth in diversity as they realize themselves in expression. Even d'Indy's music is not always so true to the logic of emotion as this, as we shall have occasion later to notice; even Homer nods; but the motival variety in unity of all good melody, as a result of its emotional origin, is none the less ineluctable as a principle.

Looking again at the passage we may note more specifically the interest, vitality, and flexibility of its rhythms. This is again, as in all the composer's best work, ultimately due to truth to emotion. Motiveboccurs three times, but never twice the same. The second time, at *4, it enters earlier in the measure than before, as if impatient, and ends with the persistent tramp of quarter notes. The third time it strikes in almost roughly (*5), its second and third notes are displaced—syncopated—by agitation, while its last three notes, comprising the crisis and its subsidence, are lengthened out from a half measure to a measure and a half. (SeeFigure XXI.) We see thus exemplified the basic principles of expression through rhythm, the hastening or compression of the phrase in response to passion, its retardation or expansion with returning calm. "Expression," writes d'Indy,[38]"consists in the translation of sentiments and impressions, by the aid of certain characteristic modifications, affecting the rhythmic, melodic, and harmonic forms of the musical discourse....Agogique, consisting in the modifications of the rhythmic movement,—precipitation, slackening, regular and irregular interruptions, etc.—has for its effect to render the relative impressions ofcalmandagitation."

imp179Figure XXI.

Figure XXI.

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Such a conception of rhythm, emphasizing its sensitive fluctuation in response to mood, and demanding of the artist complete sincerity and flexibility of expression, is at the pole from the conventional notion of it as an almost mechanical balancing of equal sections of melody, cut off so to speak with a yardstick. D'Indy leaves his readers in no doubt as to his opinion of all such conventional sing-song, the doggerel of music. "To beat the time and to give the rhythm of a musical phrase," he says,[39]"are two completely distinct operations, often opposed. The coincidence of the rhythm and the measure is an entirely particular case, which men have unfortunately tried to generalize, propagating the error that 'the first beat of the measure is always strong.' This identification of rhythm with measure has had the most deplorable consequences for music.... Rhythm, submitted to the restricting requirements of meter, becomes rapidly impoverished, even to the most desolating platitude, just as a branch of a tree, stronglycompressed by a ligature, becomes enfeebled and atrophied, while its neighbors absorb all the sap."[40]Again: "In the seventeenth century the bar-line ceased to be simply a graphic sign; it became a periodic starting point for the rhythm, which it soon robbed of all its liberty and elegance. Hence come those symmetrical and square-cut forms to which we owe a great part of the platitudes of the Italianism of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries."[41]Finally, summing the whole matter up in a sentence: "Thecarrure[that is, square-cut phrase-balance, symmetry by measures, narrowly limited to the number 4 and its multiples] is an element of vulgarity, rarely useful outside of certain special forms of dance music."[42]

The vulgarity of thecarrure, of sing-song, as we may call it in English, is due, it cannot be too much insisted upon, to the mental and emotional inertia, the thoughtlessness, the surrender to the mechanism of habit,of which it is the product and the index. It proceeds from a conventionality essentially unspontaneous, uncreative, a conventionality that permits the length and shape of the phrase to be imposed by convenience, ease, and precedent rather than by the emotion it ought to incarnate. Hence sing-song is found not only in all music which, like so-called "popular songs," emanates from trivial people or from people only superficially moved, but also in the music even of sincere composers in their moments of inattention, pretentiousness, or routine. Even so fine a composer as Elgar is frequently banal in rhythm. On the other hand, deeply felt work always spontaneously assumes individual rhythmic outlines; and undoubtedly such free and unstereotyped outlines, though to the initiated listener they constitute one of its most potent and lasting beauties, and thus are an essential condition of its longevity, repel at first by their apparent eccentricity or "obscurity" the uninitiated and the inattentive, and thus postpone its general acceptance. Thus the attributionto d'Indy of "dryness" and "lack of melody" which one sometimes hears may be taken as an inverted tribute to the spontaneity of his melody and especially of his rhythms. Only one who did not feel sympathetically the wide ground swell of those phrases from the symphony could find them groping or uncertain because they did not fall into exactly four measures. The moment one felt the coördinating force of their fresh personal emotion one would not regret the absence of the conventional strait-jackets.

It is emotion again that explains his attitude toward harmony. Just as he is ahead of most of his contemporaries in the fundamental and surprisingly neglected matter of rhythm, because he conceives it as so flexible an instrument of expression, so he is rather at odds with many of them, especially with the impressionist school in his own country, on the much studied—perhaps over-studied—question of harmony, because he conceives harmony as primarily expressive, while they conceive it as primarily sensuous.[43]A clueto his attitude is that sentence of his in criticism of Ducasse: "I am sure that when M. Ducasse is willing to trust himself more to the impulses of his heart rather than to researches in sonorities, he will be able to make very beautiful music." "Researches in sonorities"—that is, in the minds of the group of French composers led by Debussy, almost a synonym for harmony; what they ask of harmony is combinations of tone delicious to the physical ear: subtly, delicately delicious, no doubt, and to a highly refined ear, but still aiming consciously at the ear rather than at the mind or the heart. The means of satisfying such a desire being sensations, aural sensations ingeniously built up and combined, they have rightly concentrated their attention on the single moment of merged sounds—the chord—rather than on the procession of separate sounds—the melody, and its relation to other melodies sounding with it. "Accord," "sonorité"—these are the slogans of the impressionists.

imp186Figure XXII.From Chant Elégiaque, in Trio for Clarinet, Cello, and Piano.

Figure XXII.From Chant Elégiaque, in Trio for Clarinet, Cello, and Piano.

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To d'Indy, on the other hand, harmony, like all the other technical elements of music, isprimarily a means of expression, and therefore results rather from the confluence of melodies, themselves dictated by emotion, than from the adjustment of sonorities to please the ear. One has only to look again at the passage from the symphony to see how such an attitude works out in practise. There is no preoccupation here with "effect"; the harmony, one might almost say, receives no attention for itself, but is solely a result of the melodic movements; yet so free and expressive are these movements, so truly conceived to voice the emotions behind them, and combined with such art, that this resultant harmony is far more poignant, far more fresh and unexpected and striking than if it had been confected for itself alone. And this is natural and easily comprehensible, since we should not expect any amount of ingenuity spent on the single chord to achieve the results that melodies, feeling out into the unknown, easily attain. Such an attitude toward harmony requires, it is true, a certain daring: you cannot swim with your feet on the ground; but the freedom of movementyou get by trusting yourself to the waves amply compensates your faith.

imp187Figure XXIII.From "Souvenirs."

Figure XXIII.From "Souvenirs."

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This melodic conception of harmony has always been a fundamental characteristic of d'Indy's style, as examples from widely sundered periods will easily show. The first, Figure XXII, is a bit from the Chant Elégiaque in the early Trio for Clarinet, Cello, and Piano (1887). The charming unexpectedness of the twist back into E major is thorough d'Indy, as is also the use of a persistent figure (given to the cello in the original) and the rhythmic modification of this same figure to provide the bass in the second measure. The second passage, shown in Figure XXIII,dates from thirty years later, and appears in "Souvenirs" (1906). Here again the melodies "find a way," and a more interesting, vista-opening way than any sonorities could suggest. Such passages enable us to get the full sense of what their composer means when he writes: "The study of chordsfor themselvesis, from the musical point of view, an absolute æsthetic error, for harmony springs from melody, and ought never to be separated from it in its application.... There is only one chord, the perfect chord [triad], alone consonant,because it alone gives the sense of repose or equilibrium. All the combinations that people call 'dissonant chords,' necessitating, in order to be examined, an artificial arrest in the melodies that constitute them, have no proper existence, since in making abstraction of the movement that engenders them, one suppresses their unique reason for being. Chords have too often become the end of music; they ought never to be anything but a means, a consequence, a phenomenon essentially transient."[44]It may be held that d'Indy sometimes goes too far in his denunciations of harmonic theories based on the conception of the "chord," as for example in his note on the famous opening phrase of "Tristan and Isolde." It may also be justly remarked that his own method is not always happy in its results—that the way his melodies find is sometimes an obscure and wandering, or an unnatural and forced way. Nevertheless it remains on the whole true that on the one hand the chord conception of harmony has been responsible for a vast mass ofpedantry, and has paralyzed and hamstrung whole generations of students, and that on the other hand it favors the purely sensuous trifling with tones of which there is so much in our day; while the best pages of Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Wagner, Franck, d'Indy show a thousand beauties and poignancies which without the help of melody could never have been discovered.

imp190Figure XXIV.

Figure XXIV.

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Seule la Mort l'injurieuseMort appellera, laClair Vie

In the course of Kaito's prophecy, in "Fervaal," there is a deeply moving passage to the words: "Only Death, baleful Death, shall summon Life," which strikingly illustrates its composer's way of making all the elements of music contribute to expression (see Figure XXIV). Here the upward inflection of the voice, the strange intervals, the vague harmonies, the halting movement, even the sighing syncopation of the bass, all contribute to the interpretation of the opening lines. But above all, how inexplicably stirring is the gradual increase of force and rise of pitch up to the clear chord of D major (note the composer's indication, "Clair") at the word "Life" ("Vie")! Gloom and mystery giveplace to hope, faith, will, to which the ecclesiastical harmonies lend an unmistakable religious coloring. This change, completely spontaneous in effect, is dictated by an art that conceals itself, and introduces us to oneof the most individual features of d'Indy's harmonic technique, his ease of modulation. In hisCours de Composition Musicalehe has worked out his theories of the expressive use of modulation with characteristic thoroughness, and with unprecedented amplitude of detail. To resume his points here, however, interesting as they are, would take us too deeply into technical matters, especially as our main interest is now in his application rather than in his statement of them. The essential principles may therefore be briefly summarized, in his own words, as follows:

(1) "Expression is the unique reason for being of modulation."

(2) "Modulation operates by a displacement of the tonic ['key-note'], by its oscillation towards the higher fifths [that is, towards the sharper keys, as to G, D, A, etc., from C] or towards the lower fifths [that is, towards the flatter keys, as to F, B flat, E flat, etc., from C]."

(3) "Modulation has for its effect to render relative impressions of brightness [that is, movement towards sharper keys produces'éclaircissement'] or of darkness [movement towards flatter keys produces 'assombrissement']."

(4) "Modulation can never be theendof music, since it is by its very nature ameansputat the service of the musical idea. Every modulation which has not this character of subordination to the idea is thereby inopportune, useless, and even injurious to the equilibrium of the composition."[45]

Looking back at our examples in the light of these principles, and especially with the illumination afforded by the text in Kaito's contrast of death and life, we shall find a further element of art to admire in them—their expressive use of modulation. The slow movement of the symphony begins in the comparatively "dark" key of D flat, but touches in the fourth measure, at the acme of the climax, the brighter D major, whence with the waning emotion it subsides to the original key. The passage cited from theChant élégiaqueemerges from the shades of E flat minor to the bright daylight of E major(wherein starts a new statement of the main theme). The fragment from "Souvenirs" commences in quiet grief, in the clear but rather subdued key of A minor; with the third measure a downward inflection, a sort of depression of mood, sinks it to hopeless groping in the glooms of G flat and C flat, whence it again struggles forth to new assertion, in A minor, in the phrase that follows our excerpt. Stated in bald technical terms like these, such changes may seem crude, obvious, mechanical; but anyone who will listen sympathetically to the music in which they are embodied by a master will realize the infinite variety and subtlety of their appeal.

A later appearance of this same theme in "Souvenirs," in which for the first two notes in the second measure is substituted a triplet, F, G, E, suggests the further remark that even ornament, so apt to be used merely for show, is employed by d'Indy, like so many more basic resources, singly for expression. His somewhat severe conception of art—there is much in his style that, especially in contrast with German sensuousness, is austere, bare,almost stark—leads him to condemn superficial decoration. "Thefioritureof the Italian dramatic school of the early nineteenth century," he insists, "intended only to display the vocal agility of the singer (just as the Variation of Chopin, although more musical, puts forward the fingers of the pianist), thisfioriture, consisting usually of embroideries about an arpeggio, is truly more harmonic than melodic—and even the harmony is usually extremely banal. The characteristic of the accomplished and conscientious artist is a firm will to treat only subjects that have a value in themselves, not borrowed from the apparel in which they are dressed up."[46]And he elsewhere succinctly defines the Italianfioritureas "that art which consists in making heard the greatest number of useless notes in the shortest space of time."[47]But he takes pains to distinguish "this surcharge dictated by bad taste" from the more essential ornament used in the "expressive vocalises of J. S. Bach and his contemporaries, which, like the Gregorian Variationfrom which they derive, form a part of the melody." And he cites with approval melodies like the theme of the Allegretto in Franck's Symphony, in which a short phrase is repeated not literally but with ornamental variation resulting from the natural progression of the thought or feeling—from what, in short, we have called the logic of emotion. Such treatment is almost a mannerism in his own work. Other instances, besides the place in "Souvenirs" just cited, are the first theme of the violin sonata, the fugato in the first movement of the quartet, the main theme of the same movement, and the main theme of "Evening" in the "Summer Day on the Mountain" (Figure XXVII,a).

Finally, even in the matter of orchestration, the least essential of any we have considered, d'Indy is still guided by the same principle—truth to feeling. Though universally acknowledged, even by those who dislike his music, to be one of the greatest living masters of the resources of the orchestra, he never uses these resources, as does for example Rimsky-Korsakoff, in a spirit of sheer virtuosity.Nothing in his scores is put there to dazzle or to stun; all is for eloquent musical speech; and when there is great liveliness or brilliancy, as there often is—at the end of "Istar," for instance, in the scherzo of the B-flat symphony, and in "Dawn" of the "Summer Day on the Mountain"—it is in response not to an opportunity for display, but to a mood. The sharp contrast of the general method of scoring with Wagner's, especially in a composer so largely indebted to Wagner, is highly instructive in this regard. Wagner in his love of rich sonorities almost habitually doubles different groups of instruments on a single melody; d'Indy prefers the single group, not only for its superior clarity but even more, one must think, for the greater eloquence of its individual voice. The passage quoted from the symphony is a good sample of his methods. First violins on their G strings for the opening phrase, sounding at once the right note of earnestness. Bass clarinet alone on motiveb. Both first and second violins for the more emphatic repetition of the main motive, and the low strings intheir more impassioned accents for the reiteration of the bass clarinet phrase. Then all the violins and the violas for the third, culminating statement,—the first violins leaving off with the B flat, the seconds with the A, and the violas, in their more veiled tones, alone carrying the phrase down to its final A flat.

Thus does d'Indy use the various elements of musical technique—melody, rhythm, harmony, modulation, and even ornament and orchestration—in the interests of emotion. Before asking whether the same principle that we thus see so multifariously at work in short sections of his music can also be traced in the marshaling of its larger masses, let us take one final example of its operation within conveniently narrow limits. In Figure XXV (pages 198, 199) is shown the coda of the first movement of the string quartet in E major, his masterpiece in chamber music. It is entirely derived from the fragment of Gregorian chant used as a text. We may note summarily the following points, which by no means exhaust the interest of the passage.

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