Music After the Great War
Music After the Great War
WHEN the great war was declared, Leo Stein, in Florence at the time, asserted that the day of the cubists, the futurists, and their ilk was at an end. “After the war,” he said, “there will be no more of this nonsense. Matisse may survive, and Picasso in his ‘early manner,’ but Renoir and Cézanne are the last of the great painters, and it is on their work that the new art, whatever it may be, will be founded.” Leo Stein belongs to a family which, in a sense, has stood sponsor for the new painters, but his remarks can scarcely be called disinterested, as his Villa di Doccia in Florence contains no paintings at present but those of Renoir and Cézanne. There are mostly Renoirs.
Of course a general remark like this in regard to painting is based on an idea that there is no connection—at least no legitimate connection—between the painting of Marcel Duchamp, Gleizes, Derain, Picabia, and the later work of Picasso, and the painters (completely legitimatized by now) who came before them. Without arguing this misconception, it may be stated that a similar misconceptionexists in relation to “modern” music. There are those who feel that the steady line of progression from Bach, through Beethoven and Brahms, has broken off somewhere. The exact point of departure is not agreed upon. Some say that music as an art ended with Richard Wagner’s death. There are only a few, however, who do not include Brahms and Tschaikowsky in the list of those graced with the crown of genius. There are many who are generous enough to believe that Richard Strauss and Claude Debussy have carried on the divine torch. But there are only a few discerning enough to perceive that Strawinsky and Schoenberg have gone only a step further than the so-called impressionists in music.
Since the beginnings of music, as an art-form, there has always been a complaint that contemporary composers could not write melody. Beethoven suffered from this complaint; Wagner suffered from it; we have only recently gone through the period when Strauss and Debussy suffered from it. The reason is an obvious one. Each new composer has made his own rules of composition. Each has progressed a step further in his use of harmony. Now it is evident that in thisway novelty lies, for an entirely new unaccompanied melody would be difficult to devise. It is in the combination of melody and harmony that a composer may show his talent at invention. It is but natural that any advance in this direction should at first startle unaccustomed ears, and it is by no means uncertain that this first thrill is not the most delicious sensation to be derived from hearing music. In time harmony is exhausted—combinations of notes in ordered forms—but there is still the pursuit of disharmony to be made. We are all quite accustomed to occasional discords, even in the music of Beethoven, where they occur very frequently. Strauss utilizes discords skilfully in his tonal painting; in such works asElektraandHeldenlebenthey abound. The newer composers have almost founded a school on disharmony.
To me it seems certain that it is the men who have given the new impetus to tonal art in the past five years who will make the opening for whatever art-music we are to hear after the war, and I am referring even to occasional pieces after the manner of Tschaikowsky’s overture, 1812, in which the Russian National Anthem puts to rout theMarseillaise.... Perhaps it will be KarolSzymanowski of Poland (if he is still alive) or a new César Franck in Belgium who will rise to write of the intensity of suffering through which his country has struggled. But it seems to me beyond a doubt that music after the great war will be “newer” (I mean, of course, more primitive) than it was in the last days of July, 1914. There will be plenty of disharmonies, foreshadowed by Schoenberg and Strawinsky, let loose on our ears, but, in spite of the protests of Mr. Runciman, I submit that these disharmonies are a steady progression from Wagner, and not a freakish whim of an abnormal devil. I do not predict a return to Mozart as one result of the war.
There are always those prone to believe that such a war as is now in progress has been brought about by an anarchic condition among the artists, as foolish a theory as one could well promulgate, and keep one’s mental balance. It is this group which steadfastly maintains that, after the war, things will be not merely as they were immediately before the war broke out, but as they werefiftyyears before. Now, it should be apparent to anyone but the oldest inhabitant that the music-dramas of Richard Wagner are aging rapidly. Public interestin them is on the decline, thanks to an absurd recognition, in some degree or other, everywhere from Bayreuth to Paris, from Madrid to New York, of what is known as the “Master’s tradition.” Some of this tradition has been invented by Frau Cosima Liszt von Bülow Wagner and all of it is guaranteed to put the Wagner plays rapidly in a class with the operas of Donizetti and Bellini, stalking horses for prima donnas trained in a certain school. Without going into particulars which would clog this issue, it may be stated that the tradition includes matters pertaining to scenery, staging, lighting, acting, singing, and eventempiin the orchestra. It is all-inclusive.
It must have been quite evident to even the casual concert-goer that German music has passed its zenith. It has had its day and it is not likely that post-bellum music will be Germanic. In an article in a recent number of “The Musical Quarterly,” Edgar Istel reviews German opera since Wagner with a consistent tone of depreciation. The subject, of course, does not admit of enthusiasm. He calls Edmund Kretzschmer and Karl Goldmark “the compromise composers.” There are probablynot many Americans who have heard of the former or his “most successful opera,”Die Folkunger. Goldmark is better known to us, but we do not exaggerate the importance ofDie Königin von Saba, theSakuntalaoverture, orDie ländliche Hochzeitsymphony. Nor do we foreigners to theVaterlandknow much about Victor Nessler’sDer Trompeter von Säkkingen, although we hear one air from it frequently at Sunday night concerts in the opera house. August Bungert tried to outdo Wagner with a six-day opera cycle,Homerische Welt, produced in 1898-1903 and already forgotten. Max Schillings, whose name has occasionally figured on symphony orchestra programmes in America, is thus dismissed by Istel: “Schillings’ last work,Der Moloch(1906), proves his total inability as a dramatic composer.” Hans Pfitzner is another name on which we need not linger. Engelbert Humperdinck, of course, wrote the one German opera which has had a world-wide and continuous success sinceParsifal—Hänsel und Gretel. But the music he has composed since then has not awakened much enthusiasm.Hänsel und Gretelis, after all, folk-music with Wagnerian orchestration. It assuredly is not from Humperdinck that we can look for post-bellummusic. We have heard Kienzl’s very mediocreDer Kuhreigenand we have been promised a hearing ofEvangelimann. The name of Siegfried Wagner signifies nothing. Ludwig Thuille wrote some very interesting music in the last act ofLobetanz, but that opera could not hold the stage at the Metropolitan Opera House. W. von Waltershausen’sOberst Chaberthas been given in London, not, however, with conspicuous success. D’Albert has written many German operas in spite of his Scotch birth. Of these the best isTiefland, negligible in regarding the future. Leo Blech’s unimportantVersiegeltgave pleasure in Berlin for a time. Wolf-Ferrari, one of the most gifted of the German composers, is half Italian. His work, of course, is not notable for originality of treatment.Suzannen’s Geheimnissis very like an old Italian or Mozart opera. So isLe Donne Curiose. His cantata,Vita Nuova, is archaic in tone, a musical Cimabue or Giotto.I Giojelli della Madonnais an attempt at Italianverismo. Richard Strauss! the most considerable German musical figure of his time. His operas will still be given after the war and his tone-poems will be heard, but he has done his part in furthering the progress of art-music.He has nothing more to say. InThe Legend of Joseph, the ballet which the Russians gave in Paris last summer, it was to be observed that the Strauss idiom exploited therein had fully expressed itself in the earlier works of this composer.SalomeandElektrarepresent Strauss’s best dramatic work, andDon JuanandTill Eulenspiegelare, perhaps, his best tone-poems. Richard Strauss, however, is assuredly not post-bellum. His music is a part of the riches of the past. One can easily pass rapidly by the names of Bruckner, Weingartner, and Gustav Mahler. Max Reger, I think, is not a great composer. But there are two Austrian names on which we must linger.
One of them is Erich Korngold, the boy composer, who is now eighteen years old. His earlier work, such as the ballet,Der Schneemann, sounds like Puccini with false notes. It is pretty music. Later, Korngold developed a fancy for writing Strauss and Reger with false notes. And he is still in process of development. What he may do cannot be entirely foreseen.
Arnold Schoenberg is another matter. He is still using as propaganda music which he wrote many years ago. No public has yet caught upwith his present output. That is an excellent sign that his music is of the future. The string sextet,Verklärte Nacht, which the Kneisel Quartet played more than once in the season just past, dates from 1899. The string quartets were written in 1905 and 1908. The five orchestral pieces, the six piano pieces, andPierrot Lunaire, other music of his on which what fame he possesses outside of Austria rests, are all over two years old. Now the Boston Symphony Orchestra has only recently deemed it fitting to play the five orchestral pieces, and I believe the piano pieces received their first public performance in New York at one of the concerts given by Leo Ornstein, although several pianists, notably Charles Henry Cooper and Mrs. Arensberg, had played them in private.
In 1911 Schoenberg issued his quite extraordinary “Handbuch der Harmonielehre,” which is one of the best evidences that, even though the composer dies in the war, others will follow to carry on the torch from the point where he dropped it. Yes, Schoenberg, no less than Henri Matisse, is a torch-bearer in the art race. He is a stone in the architecture of music—and not an accidental decoration.
May I quote a few passages from the “Handbuch”?
“The artist does not do what others find beautiful, but what he finds himself bound to do.”
“If anyone feels dissatisfied with his time, let it not be because that time is no longer the good old time, but because it is not yet the new and better time, the future.”
“Though I refrain from overprizing originality, I cannot help valuing novelty at its full worth. Novelty is the improvement toward which we are drawn as irresistibly, as unwittingly, as towards the future. It may prove to be a splendid betterment, or to be death—but also the certainty of a higher life after death. Yes, the future brings with it the novel and the unknown; and therefore, not without excuse, we often hold what is novel to be identical with what is good and beautiful.”
With the single exception just noted it is not from the German countries that the musical invention of the past two decades has come. It is from France. Whether Debussy or Erik Satie or Fanelli first developed the use of the whole-tone scale is unimportant; they have all been writing in Paris.
Erik Satie is one of the precursors of a movement—notimportant in himself, but of immense importance as an indication. He is not a genius, and therefore his work has received little attention and has had no great influence. But it must be remembered that he was born in 1860 and that hisGymnopédiesandGnossiennes, composed respectively in 1888 and 1890, make a free use of the whole-tone scale and other harmonic innovations ordinarily attributed to Debussy. ASarabande, written in 1887, should be tried on your piano. It will certainly startle you. Satie has recently achieved a little notoriety, thanks to Debussy and Ravel, who have dragged his music into the light. The more dramatic resurrection of Fanelli by Gabriel Pierné has been related too often to need retelling here.
Debussy, beyond question, is one of the high-water marks in the history of music.L’Après-midi d’un Fauneis certainly post-Wagnerian in a sense thatSalomeis not. Maurice Ravel, Paul Dukas, Roger-Ducasse, Florent Schmitt, Chausson, Chabrier, and Charpentier are all revolutionists in a greater or less degree, and all of them are direct descendants of the great French composers who came before them. But what has been accomplishedin France in the last few years? Dukas has written nothing important sinceAriane et Barbe-Bleue. Debussy’s recent works are not epoch-making: a makeshift ballet,Jeux, a few piano pieces; what else? Ravel’s ballet,Daphnis et Chloë, is lovely music. Some people profess to find pleasure in listening to Schmitt’sSalome. It is unbearable to me, danced or undanced. Vincent d’Indy—has he written a vibrant note sinceIstar? Charpentier’sJulien—a rehash ofLouise. It sounds some fifty years older, except the carnival scene. There is live futurist music in that last act. When Charpentier painted street noises on his tonal canvas, were they of night or morning, he knew his business. But certainly not a post-bellum composer, this. Charpentier will never compose another stirring phrase; that is written in the stars. SincePelléas et MélisandeandAriane et Barbe-Bleue, is there one French opera which can be called great? There are two very good ones, Raoul Laparra’sLa Habaneraand Maurice Ravel’sl’Heure Espagnole, and very many bad ones, such as Massenet’sDon Quichotte, the unbelievableQuo Vadis?of Jean Nouguès, and the imitative and meaninglessMonna Vannaof Février. I do not think it is fromFrance that we may expect the post-bellum music.
Italy, long the land of opera, has held her place in the singing theatres. Verdi and Puccini still dominate the opera houses. But Puccini’s work is accomplished. His popularity is waning, as the comparative failure ofThe Girl of the Golden Westwill testify. You will find the germ of all that is best in Puccini inManon Lescaut, an early work. After that there is repetition and misdirection of energy, gradually diffused talent. It does not seem necessary to speak of Mascagni and Leoncavallo. They have both tried for so long a time to repeat their two successes and tried in vain. Cilea, Franchetti, Catalani, and Giordano—these names are almost forgotten already. Is Sgambati dead? Does anyone know whether he is or not? Zandonai—ah, there’s a name to linger on! Watch out for Zandonai in the vanguard of the post-bellum composers. Save him from the war-maw. HisConchitadisclosed a great talent; that opera shimmered with the hot atmosphere of Spain, a bestial, lazy Spain. This work I place with Debussy’sIberiaas one of the great tonal pictures of Spain. I have not heard Zandonai’s opera,Francescada Rimini, which was produced at Covent Garden Opera House last summer, but I have been told that its beauties are many. I hope we may hear it in New York. Pratella is one of Marinetti’s group of futurists, one of the noise-makers. I am not so sure of Pratella as I am sure that many of his theories will be more successfully exploited by someone else.
Spain has been heard from recently—Spain, which has lacked a composer of “art-music.” Albeniz and others have been writing piano music and now we are promised a one-act opera by Granados. Perhaps in time Spain may lift her head high and tinkle her castanets to some purpose, on programmes devoted to her own composers. But now it is Bizet, Chabrier, Debussy, Laparra, and Zandonai who have perverted these castanets and tambourines to their own uses.
I am no admirer of modern English music. I take less pleasure in hearing a piece by Sir Edward Elgar than I do in a mediocre performance ofLe Prophète—and I assure you that Meyerbeer is not my favorite composer. A meaner skill than Sir Edward’s, perhaps, lies in Irving Berlin’s fingers, but a greater genius. I once spent a most frightfulafternoon—at least nearly all of an afternoon—listening to Elgar’s violin concerto, and I remember a dreadfully dull symphony, that sounded as if it were played on a throbbing organ at vespers in a dark church on a hot Sunday afternoon. TheCockaigneoverture is more to my taste, although I think it no great achievement. Has there been a real composer in Britannia since Sir Arthur Sullivan, whose works one rehears with a pleasure akin to ecstasy? I do not think so. Cyril Scott is interesting. Holbrooke, Delius, Grainger, Wallace, and Bantock write much complex music for the orchestra, to say nothing of piano pieces, songs, and operas. (Holbrooke supplements his labors in this direction with the writing of articles for “The English Review” and other periodicals, in which he complains bitterly that the English composer is without honor in his own country.) I find Scott’s piano pieces better. But sinceIl Barbiere di SivigliaandLe Nozze di Figarothere have been but few comic scores comparable toPatience. You will hear the Sullivan operas many times after the war, but one cannot think of founding a school upon them.
I shall not hesitate on the music of America, becausein a country that has no ante-bellum music—one cannot speak with too great enthusiasm of Ethelbert Nevin and Edward MacDowell—there is no immediate promise of important development. However, in a digression, I should like to make a few remarks on the subject of the oft-repeated charge, re-echoed by Holbrooke in relation to British musicians, that American composers are neglected and have no chance for a hearing in their own country. Has ever a piano piece been played more often or sold more copies than MacDowell’sTo a Wild Rose, unless it be Nevin’sNarcissus? ProbablyThe Rosaryhas been sung more times in more quarters of the globe thanRule Britannia. Other American songs which have achieved an international success and a huge sale areAt Parting,A Maid Sings Light,From the Land of the Sky-blue Water, andThe Year’s at the Spring. Orchestral works by Paine, Hadley, Converse, and others, are heard almost as soon as they are composed, and many of them are heard more than once, played by more than one orchestra. Of late years it has been the custom to produce an American work each season at the Metropolitan Opera House, a custom fortunately abandoned during theseason just past. No, it cannot be said that the American composer has been neglected.
Finland has presented us with Sibelius, whose latest works indicate that Helsingfors may have something to say about the trend of tone after the war, and from Poland Karol Szymanowski has sent forth some strange and appealing songs.
But it is to Russia, after all, I think, that we must turn for the inspiration, and a great deal of the execution, of our post-bellum music. Fortunately for us, we have not yet delved very deeply into the past of Russian music, in spite of reports to the contrary. Mr. Gatti-Casazza once assured me thatBoris Godunowwas the only Russian opera which stood any chance of success in America. He has doubtless revised his feeling on the subject, since he has announcedPrince Igorfor production this season, an opera which should be greeted with very warm enthusiasm, if the producers give any decent amount of attention to the very important ballet.
It is interesting, in turning to Russian literature, to discover that Turgenev in the middle of the nineteenth century was writing a masterpiece like “A Sportsman’s Sketches,” a work full of reserveand primitive force, and a strange charm. And Turgenev was born and bred a gentleman in the sense that Thackeray was born and bred a gentleman. In English literature we have travelled completely around the circle, through the artificial, the effete, and the sentimental, to the natural, the forceful, the primitive. Art like that of D. H. Lawrence, George Moore, and Theodore Dreiser is very much abroad in the lands. Russia began her circle only in the last century with her splendidly barbaric school of writers who touch the soil at every point, the soil and the soul: Turgenev, Gogol, Pushkin, Dostoievsky, Andreyev, Tolstoy, Tchekhov, Gorky, and Artzybachev, a noble group of names. We find in Russia a situation very akin to that of Ireland, a people commercially under-developed, in a large measure born to suffering, keenly alive to artistic impulse.
In Ireland this impulse has expressed itself almost entirely through the written word, but in Russia it has found an outlet in a thousand channels. (The arts have grouped themselves together in the glowing splendor of the Russian Ballet productions.) Music, like literature, sprang into being in Russia, fed on the rich folk-songs of theSlavic races, during the nineteenth century; and again like Russian literature, its first baby notes were wild, appealing, barbaric, forceful, and sincere—the music of the steppes and the people, rather than the music of the drawing-room and the nobility. Let us remember that about the time Richard Wagner was writingTristan und Isolde, Moussorgsky was putting on paper, with infinite pain, the notes of the scores of the poignantBoris Godunowand the intenseLa Khovanchina. Since then the Russian music world has been occupied by men who have given their lives to the foundation of a national school. Their work has been largely overshadowed in America by the facile genius of Tschaikowsky, who wrote the most popular symphony of the nineteenth century, but who is less Russian and less important than many of his confrères.
If for a time after the war one must turn to the past for operatic novelties, one can do no better than to go to Russia. It is my firm conviction that several of the Russian operas would have a real success here.La Khovanchinato many musicians is more beautiful thanBoris. It is indeed a serious work of genius. The chorus with which the firstact closes has power enough to entice me to the theatre at any time. I do not know of a death-scene in all the field of opera as strong in its effect as that of the Prince Ivan Khovansky. He is stabbed and he falls dead. He does not sing again, he does not move; there are no throbs of the violins, no drum beats. There is a pause. The orchestra is silent. The people on the stage are still. It is tremendous!
Rimsky-Korsakow’s music is pretty well known in America. HisScheherazadeandAntarsuites are played very often; but his operas remain unsung here. Why? He wrote some sixteen of them before he died. Even so early a work asA Night in Maycontains many lovely pages. It is a folk-song opera built along the old lines of set numbers. It reminds one ofThe Bartered Bride. First produced in 1880, it does not show its age.The Snow Maidencontains theSong of the Shepherd Lehland one or two other airs familiar in the concert répertoire.Sadko, if given in the Russian manner, would fill any opera house for two performances a week for the season; andIvan the Terribleis a masterpiece of its kind. But the greatest of them all is the last lyric drama of the composer,TheGolden Cock, in which this great tone colorist bent his ear further towards the future than he had ever done before.
The death of Alexander Scriabine recently in Petrograd created little comment, although the papers had been filled a few weeks before with descriptions of the very bad performance of hisPrometheusby the Russian Symphony Orchestra. Scriabine, another Gordon Craig, was too great a theorist, too concerned with the perfect in his art, ever to arrive at anything approximating the actual. As an influence, he can already be felt. His synchronism of music, light, and perfumes was never realized in his own music, although the Russian Ballet has completely realized it. (How cleverly that organization—or is it a movement?—has seized everybody’s good ideas, from Wagner’s to Adolphe Appia’s!) As for Scriabine’s strange scales and disharmonies, Igor Strawinsky has made the best use of them—Igor Strawinsky, perhaps the greatest of the musicians of the immediate future. I hope Americans may hear his wonderfully beautiful opera,The Nightingale; and if all the music of the future is like that, I stand with bowed and reverent head before the music of the future(with the mental reservation, however, that I may spurn it when it is no longer music of the future). His three ballets are also works of genius.
It is indeed to Strawinsky, whose strange harmonies evoked new fairy worlds inThe Nightingaleand whose barbaric rhythms stirred the angry pulses of a Paris audience threatened with the shame of an emotion in the theatre, to whom we may turn, perhaps, for still new thrills after the war. Strawinsky has so far showed his growth in every new work he has vouchsafed the public. From Schoenberg, and Korngold in a lesser degree, we may hope for messages in tone, disharmonic by nature, and with a complexity of rhythm so complex that it becomes simple. (In this connection I should like to say that there are scarcely two consecutive bars in Strawinsky’s ballet,The Sacrifice to the Spring, written in the same time-signature, and yet I know of no music—I do not even exceptAlexander’s Ragtime Band—more dance-compelling.) We may pray to Karol Szymanowski for futurist wails from ruined Poland; a rearranged, disharmonic version of the national airs of the warring countries may spring from France or Italy; but for the new composers, the newnames, the strong, new blood of the immediate future in music, we must turn to Russia. The new music will not come from England, certainly not from America, not from France, nor from Germany, but from the land of the steppes—a gradual return to that orientalism in style which may be one of the gifts of culture, which an invasion from the Far East may impose on us some time in the next century.
June, 1915.
June, 1915.