It may be that by means of these experiments Schoenberg will gird himself for a new period of creativity just as once indubitably by the aid of experiments which he did not publish he girded himself for the period represented by the D-minor Quartet. It may be that after the cloud of the war has completely lifted from the field of art, and a normal interchange is re-established it will be seen that the monodrama, Op. 20, "Die Lieder des 'Pierrot Lunaire,'" which was the latest of his works to obtain a hearing, was in truth an earnest of a new loosing of the old lyrical impulse so long incarcerated. But, for the present, Schoenberg, the composer, is almost completely obscured by Schoenberg, the experimenter. For the present, he is the great theoretician combating other theoreticians, the Doctor of Music annihilating doctor-made laws. As such, his usefulness is by no means small. He speaks with an authority no less than that of his adversaries, the other and less radical professors. He, too, has invented a system and a method; his "Harmonielehre," for instance, is as irrefragable as theirs; he can quote scripture with the devil. He is at least demolishing the old constraining superstitions, and in so doing may exercise an incalculable influence on thecourse of music. It may be that many a musician of the future will find himself the better equipped because of Schoenberg's explorations. He is undoubtedly the most magistral theorist of the day. The fact that he could write at the head of his treatise on harmony, "What I have here set down I have learned from my pupils," independently proves him a great teacher. It is probable that his later music, the music of his puzzling "third period," will shortly come to be considered as simply a part of his unique course of instruction.
Others have brought the North into houses, and there transmuted it to music. And their art is dependent on the shelter, and removed from it, dwindles. But Sibelius has written music innocent of roof and inclosure, music proper indeed to the vasty open, the Finnish heaven under which it grew. And could we but carry it out into the northern day, we would find it undiminished, vivid with all its life. For it is blood-brother to the wind and the silence, to the lowering cliffs and the spray, to the harsh crying of sea-birds and the breath of the fog, and, set amid them, would wax, and take new strength from the strengths of its kin.
Air blows through the music of Sibelius, quickens even the slightest of his compositions. There are certain of his songs, certain of his orchestral sketches, that would be virtueless enough were it not for the windy freshness that pervades them. Out of all his works, even out of the most commonplace, there proceeds a far and resonant space. Songs like "To the Evening," "Call," "Autumn Sundown," whatever their ultimate musical value, seem actually informed by the northern evening, seem to include within their very substance the watery tints of the sky, the naïvefragrance of forests and meadows, the tintinnabulation drifting through the still air of sunset. It is as though Sibelius were so sensible to the quality of his native earth that he knows precisely in what black and massive chords of the piano, say, lie the silence of rocks and clouds, precisely what manner of resistance between chant and piano can make human song ring as in the open. But it is in his orchestral works, for he is determined an orchestral writer, that he has fixed it most successfully. There has been no composer, not Brahms in his German forest, nor Rameau amid the poplars of his silver France, not Borodin on his steppes, nor Moussorgsky in his snow-covered fields under the threatening skies, whose music gives back the colors and forms and odors of his native land more persistently. The orchestral compositions of Sibelius seem to have passed over black torrents and desolate moorlands, through pallid sunlight and grim primeval forests, and become drenched with them. The instrumentation is all wet grays and blacks, relieved only by bits of brightness wan and elusive as the northern summer, frostily green as the polar lights. The works are full of the gnawing of bassoons and the bleakness of the English horn, full of shattering trombones and screaming violins, full of the sinister rolling of drums, the menacing reverberation of cymbals, the icy glittering of harps. The musical ideas of those of the compositions that are finely realized recall the ruggednessand hardiness and starkness of things that persist in the Finnish winter. The rhythms seem to approach the wild, unnumbered rhythms of the forest and the wind and the nickering sunlight. Music has forever been a movement "up to nature," and Schoenberg's motto is but the precision of a motive that has governed all composers. But Sibelius has written music that seems to come as the very answer to the call, and to be the North indeed.
Such a discovery of nature was necessarily a part of his self-revelation. For Sibelius is essentially the Norseman. For all his personal accomplishment, his cultural position, he is still the Finnish peasant, preserving intact within himself the racial inheritance. Other musicians, having found life still a grim brief welter of bloody combats and the straining of high, unyielding hearts and the falling of sure inalienable doom, have fancied themselves the successors of the Skalds, and dreamt themselves within the gray primeval North. But, in the presence of Sibelius, they seem only too evidently men of a gentler, later generation. Beside his, their music appears swathed in romantic glamour. For there are times when he comes into the concert-room like some man of a former age, like some spare, knotted barbarian from the world of the sagas. There are times when he comes amongst us like one who might quite conceivably have been comrade to pelted warriors who fought with clubs and hammers,like one who might have beaten out a rude music by black, smoking hearthsides quite as readily as made tone-poems for the modern concert-room. And his music with its viking blows and wild, crying accents, its harsh and uncouth speech, sets us without circumstance in that sunken world, sets us in the very midst of the stark men and grave, savage women for whom the sagas were made, so that we can see them in all their hurtling strength and rank barbarity, can well-nigh touch them with the fingers of our hands. And because Sibelius is so fundamentally man as combat with the North has made him, only vision of his native earth could bring him rich self-consciousness. For his individuality is but the shape of soul given his race by its century-long adjustment. It is the North that has given him his profound experience. Its rhythms have distinguished him. Its color, and the color of his spirit, are twin. And so he turns toward it as to a mirror. Like that of the hero of his tone-poem, his life is a long journey toward Finland. Contact with Finnish earth gives him back into his own hands. It is the North, the wind and the moorland and the sea, that gathers the fragments of his broken soul, and makes him whole again.
It was with the sanction of a people that Sibelius came to his task. For centuries before his birth the race that bore him had lain prone upon its inclement coasts. But now a new vigor was germinating withinit. Youth had overtaken it once more, and filled it with the desire of independence. Chained to the Russian Empire, it was reaching out toward all that could give it the strength to persist and endure, toward all that could give it knowledge of its proper soul. And so Sibelius, in the search for the expression of his own personality, so much at one with that of his fellows, was traveling in the common way. The word that he was seeking, the word that should bring fulfilment to his proper soul, was deeply needed by his fellows. Inarticulate thousands, unaware though they were of his existence, awaited his work, wanted the sustenance it could give. And, certainly, the sense of the needfulness of his work, the sense of the large value set upon his best and purest attainments by life itself, must have been with Sibelius always, must have supplied him with a powerful incentive and made enormously for his achievements. He must have felt all the surge of the race driving him. He must have had continually the marvelous stimulus of feeling about him, for all the night and the cold, the forms of comrades straining toward a single lofty goal, felt himself one of an army of marching men. This folk, far in its past, had imagined the figure of a hero-poet, Vainemunden, and placed in his hands an instrument "shaped out of very sorrow," and attributed magical power to his song. And Sibelius, bowed over his music-paper, must have felt the dream stir within him,must have felt incarnate within himself, however incompletely, that mysterious image, and so proceeded with his work everlastingly assured that all he actually accomplished woke from out of the heart of the people, and responded to its immemorial need.
Out of such an impulse his art has come. No doubt, some of it is not the response entirely worthy of so high a stimulus. Few modern composers of eminence are as singularly uneven as Sibelius. Moods like that which mothered the amiable elegance of the "Valse Triste" and that which produced the hard and naked essentiality of the Fourth Symphony are almost foreign to each other. The creative power itself is extraordinarily fitful in him. It is as if, for all his physical robustness, he has not quite the spiritual indefatigability of the major artist. He has not that inventive heat that permits the composer of indisputably the first rank to realize himself unflaggingly in all his independence and intensity. Too often Sibelius's individuality is cluttered and muffled by that of other men. No doubt every creative artist passes through a period of submission to alien faiths. But in Sibelius there appear to exist two distinct personalities, the one strong and independent, the other timid and uninventive, who dominate him alternately. Even some of the music contemporaneous with the magnificent Fourth Symphony is curiously ineffectual and pointless. True, the color, the air and tone ofthe North are never entirely absent from his work. His songs invariably recapture, sometimes almost miraculously, the dark and mourning accents of the Scandinavian folk-song. For all the modernity of medium they are simple and sober. Moreover, in those of his compositions that approach banality most closely, there is a certain saving hardness and virility and honesty. Unlike his neighbor, Grieg, he is never mincing and meretricious. We never find him languishing in a pretty boudoir. He is always out under the sky. It is only that he is not always free and resourceful and deeply self-critical. Even through the bold and rugged and splendid Violin Concerto there flit at moments the shadows of Beethoven and Wagner and Tchaikowsky. The first theme of the quartet "Voces intimæ" resembles not a little a certain theme in "Boris." The close of "Nightride and Sunrise" is watered Brahms and watered Strauss. And there are phrases in his tone-poem that commence with all his proper rhythmic ardor and then suddenly degenerate. There are moments when his harmonic sense, generally keen and true, abandons him completely. And even works like the "Finlandia" and "Karelia" overtures, for all their generosity of intention, for all their suggestion of peasant voices lifted in song, disappoint because of the substitution of a popular lyricism, a certain easy sweetness, for the high poetry one might have anticipated.
And yet, one has but to turn to the symphonies of Sibelius to encounter music of another intensity, and gauge the richness of response that, at times, it is given him to make. It is as if the very dignity and grandeur of the medium itself sets him free. Just as the form of the concerto seems to have given his sense of the violin a play apparently denied it by the smaller mediums, so these larger orchestral forms seem to have liberated his imagination, his orchestral genius, and made him poet of his folk indeed. His personal quality, spread more thinly in his songs and tone-poems, is essentialized and developed in these other works. The symphonies themselves are in a sense the stages of the essentialization. In the first of them his language emerges, to an extent imparting its unmistakable coloration to a matter perhaps not entirely distinguished. There is a looseness and lushness, a romanticism and balladry, in the work, that is not quite characteristic. Still, the honesty, the grimness and savagery and lack of sensuality, are Sibelius's own. The adagio is steeped in his proper pathos, the pathos of brief, bland summers, of light that falls for a moment, gentle and mellow, and then dies away. Something like a memory of a girl sitting amid the simple flowers in the white northern sunshine haunts the last few measures. The crying, bold finale is full of the tragedy of northern nature. And in the Second Symphony the independence is complete. The orchestra is handled individually, sparingly, and with perfect point. Often the instruments sound singly, or by twos and threes. What had been but half realized in the earlier work is distinct and important in this. It is as if Sibelius had come upon himself, and so been able to rid his work of all superfluity and indecision. And, curiously, through speaking his own language in all its homeliness and peasant flavor, he seems to have moved more closely to his land. The work, his "pastoral" symphony, for all its absolute and formal character, reflects a landscape. It is full of home sounds, of cattle and "saeters," of timbered houses and sparse nature. And through it there glances a pale evanescent sunlight, and through it there sounds the burden of a lowly tragedy.
But it is only with his Fourth Symphony, dubbed "futuristic" because of the unusual boldness and pithiness of its style, the absence of a general tonality, the independence of the orchestral voices, that Sibelius's gift attains absolute expression. There are certain works that are touchstones, and make apparent what is original and virtuous in all the rest of the labors of their creator, and give his personality a unique and irrefragable position. The Fourth Symphony of Sibelius is such a composition. It is a very synthesis of all his work, the reduction to its simplest and most positive terms of a thing that has been in him since first he began to write, and that received heretoforeonly fragmentary and indecisive expression. In its very form it is essence. The structure is all bone. The style is sharpened to a biting terseness. The coloring is the refinement of all his color; the rhythms have a freedom toward which Sibelius's rhythms have always aspired; the mournful melody of the adagio is well-nigh archetypical. All his life Sibelius has been searching for the tone of this music, desiring to speak with its authority, and concentrate the soul and tragedy of a people into a single and eternal moment. All his life he had been seeking the prophetic gestures of which this work is full. For the symphony is like a summary and a conclusion. It carries us into some high place before which the life of man is spread out and made apparent. The four movements are the four planes that solidify a single concept. The first sets us in a grim forest solitude, out in some great unlimited loneliness, beneath a somber sky. There is movement, a climax, a single cry of passion and despair, and then, only the soughing of wind through hoary branches. The scherzo is the flickering of mad watery lights, a fantastic whipping dance, a sudden sinister conclusion. In the adagio, a bleak lament struggles upwards, seems to push through some vast inert mass, to pierce to a momentary height and largeness, and then sinks, broken. And through the finale there quivers an illusory light. The movement is the march, the oncoming rush, of vast formless hordes, the passage ofunnamed millions that surge for an instant with their cries and banners, and vanish into nothingness. It is possible that Sibelius will create another work similarly naked and intense. More definitive, it cannot be.
Legend records of Inez de Castro, Queen of Castile, that she was dethroned and driven into exile by a rival, and that before her husband and her partisans could restore her to kingdom, she had died. But her husband caused her body to be embalmed and borne with him wherever he went. And when finally he had vanquished the pretender, he had the corpse decked in all the regal insignia, had it set upon the throne in the great hall of the palace of the kings of Castile, and vassals and liegemen summoned to do the homage that had been denied the unhappy queen in her lifetime.
The music of Charles Martin Loeffler is like the dead Inez de Castro on her throne. It, too, is swathed in diapered cloths and hung with gold and precious stones. It, too, is set above and apart from men in a sort of royal state, and surrounded by all the emblems of kingdom. And beneath its stiff and incrusted sheath there lies, as once there lay beneath the jeweled robes and diadem of the kings of Castile, not a living being, but a corpse.
For Loeffler is one of those exquisites whose refinement is unfortunately accompanied by sterility, perhaps even results from it. But for his essential uncreativeness, he might well have become the composer uniquely representative of the artistic movement in which the late nineteenth-century refinement and exquisiteness manifested itself. No musician, not Debussy even, was better prepared for bringing the symbolist movement into music. Loeffler is affiliated in temper, if not exactly in achievement, with the brilliant band of belated romanticists who adopted as their device the sonnet of Verlaine's beginning.
"Je suis l'empire à la fin de la décadence."
"Je suis l'empire à la fin de la décadence."
"Je suis l'empire à la fin de la décadence."
One finds in him almost typically the sensibility to the essences and colors rather more than to the spectacle, the movement, the adventure of things. The nervous delicacy, the widowhood of the spirit, the horror of the times, the mystic paganism, the homesickness for a tranquil and sequestered and soft-colored land "where shepherds still pipe to their flocks, and nun-like processions of clouds float over bluish hills and fathomless age-old lakes" are eminently present in him. He is in almost heroic degree the spirit forever searching blindly through the loud and garish city, the hideous present, for some vestige, some message from its homeland; finding, some sundown, in the ineffable glamour of rose and mauve and blue through granite piles, "le souvenir avec le crépuscule." He, too, one would guess, has dreamt of selling his soul to the devil, and called upon him, ah, how many terriblenights, to appear; and has sought a refuge from the world in Catholic mysticism and ecstasy. Had it been given him to realize himself in music, we should undoubtedly have had a body of work that would have been the veritable milestones of the route traversed by the entire movement. Would not the "Pagan Poem" have been the musical equivalent of the mystic and sorrowful sensuality of Verlaine? Would not the two rhapsodies "L'Etang" and "La Cornemuse" have transmuted to music the macabre and sinister note of so much symbolist poetry? Would we not have had in "La Villanelle du Diable" an equivalent for the black mass and "Là-bas"; in "Hora mystica" an equivalent for "En route"; in "Music for Four Stringed Instruments" a musical "Sagesse"? Does not Charles Martin Loeffler, who, after writing "A Pagan Poem," makes a retreat in a Benedictine monastery, and who, at home in Medford, Massachusetts, teaches the choristers to sing Gregorian chants, recall Joris Karl Huysmans, the "oblat" of La Trappe?
To a limited extent, of course, he has succeeded in fixing the color of the symbolist movement in music. Some of his richer, dreamier songs, some of his finer bits of polishing, his rarer drops of essence, are indeed the musical counterpart of the goldsmith's work, the preciosity, of a Gustave Kahn or a Stuart Merrill. But a musical Huysmans, for instance, it was neverin his power to become. For he has never possessed the creative heat, the fluency, the vein, the felicity, the power necessary to the task of upbuilding out of the tones of instruments anything as flamboyant and magnificent as the novelist's black and red edifices. He has never been vivid and ingenuous and spontaneous enough a musician even to develop a personal idiom. He has always been hampered and bound. His earlier compositions, the quintet, the orchestral "Les Vieillées de l'Ukraine" and "La bonne chanson," for instance, are distinctly derivative and uncharacteristic in style. The idiom is derived in part from Fauré, in part from Wagner and other of the romanticists. The string quintet has even been dubbed "A Musical 'Trip Around the World in Eighty Days.'" Nor is the idiom of his later and more representative period primarily and originally any more characteristic. It never seems to surge quite wholly and cleanly and fairly. The chasing to which it has evidently been subjected cannot quite conceal its descent. The setting of "La Cloche fêlée" of Baudelaire, for instance, is curiously Germanic and heavy, for all the subtlety and filigree of the voice and the accompanying piano and viola. It is a fairly flat waltz movement that in "A Pagan Poem" is chosen to represent the sublunary aspect of Virgil's genius. And "Hora mystica" and "Music for Four Stringed Instruments," which have a certain stylistic unity, nevertheless reveal the composerhampered by the Gregorian and scholastic idiom which he has sought to assimilate.
Nor has he ever had the power to express and objectify himself completely, and achieve vital form. In performance, most of his works shrink and dwindle. The central and sustaining structure, the cathedral which is behind every living composition and manifests itself through it, is in these pieces so vague and attenuated that it fades into the background of the concert-hall, is like gray upon gray. The gems and gold thread and filigree with which this work is sewn tarnish in the gloom. Something is there, we perceive, something that moves and sways and rises and ebbs fitfully in the dim light. But it is a wraithlike thing, and undulates and falls before our eyes like flames that have neither redness nor heat. Even the terrible bagpipe of the second rhapsody for oboe; even the caldron of the "Pagan Poem," that transcription of the most sensual and impassioned of Virgil's eclogues, with its mystic, dissonant trumpets; even the blasphemies of "La Villanelle du Diable," and the sundown fires that beat through the close of "Hora mystica" are curiously bloodless and ghostly and unsubstantial. Pages of sustained music occur rarely enough in his music. The lofty, almost metaphysical, first few periods, the severe and pathetic second movement of the "Music for Four Stringed Instruments"; certain songs like "Le Son du cor," that have atmosphere and a delicatepoetry, are distinctly exceptional in this body of work. What chiefly lives in it are certain poignant phrases, certain eloquent bars, a glowing, winey bit of color here, a velvety phrase for the oboe or the clarinet, a sharp, brassy, pricking horn-call, a dreamy, wandering melody for the voice there. His music consists of scattered, highly polished phrases, hard, exquisite, and cold. He is pre-eminently theprecieux.
Of the scrupulousness, the fastidiousness, the distinction, even, of Loeffler's work, there can be no question. He is not one of the music-making herd. The subtlety and originality of intention which his compositions almost uniformly display, the unflagging effort to inclose within each of his forms a matter rare and novel and rich, set him forever apart, even in his essential weakness, from the academic and conforming crew. The man who has composed these scores makes at least the gesture of the artist, and comes to music to express a temper original and delicate and aristocratic, disdainful of the facile and the commonplace, a sensibility often troubled and shadowy and fantastic. He is eminently not one of the pathetic, half-educated musicians so common in America. He knows something of musical science; knows how a tonal edifice should be unified; has a sense of the chemistry of the orchestra. He appears familiar with the plainsong, and has based a symphony and portions of a quartet on Gregorian modes. Even at a period when the sophisticated and cultivated composer is becoming somewhat less a rarity, his culture is remarkable, his knowledge of literature eclectic. Gogol as well as Virgil has moved him to orchestral works. Above all, he is one of the company of composers, to which a good number of more gifted musicians do not belong, who are ever respectful of their medium, and infinitely curious concerning it.
It is only that, in seeking to compensate himself for his infecundity, he has fallen into the deep sea of preciosity. In seeking by main force to be expressive, to remedy his cardinal defect, to eschew whatever is trite and outworn in the line of the melody, the sequence of the harmonies, to rid himself of whatever is derivative and impersonal and undistinguished in his style, he has become over-anxious, over-meticulous of his diction. Because his phraseology was colorless, he has become a stainer of phrases, a sort of musical euphuist. All his energy, one senses, has gone into the cutting and polishing and shining up and setting of little brightly colored bits of music, little sharp, intense moments. One feels that they have been caressed and stroked and smoothed and regarded a thousand times; that Loeffler has dwelt upon them and touched them with a sort of narcissistic love. Indeed, it must have been a great labor that was expended on the darkening and spicing and sharpening of the style in certain of his orchestral poems; the effort to create a new idiom based on the Gregorian modes, to which "Hora mystica" and the recent work for string quartet bear witness, must in itself have been large. But though in result of all the chasing and hammering on gold, the filing and polishing, the vessel of his art has perhaps become richer and finer, it has not become any fuller. His second period differs from his first only in the fact that in it he has gone from one form of uncreativity to another somewhat more dignified and unusual. The compositions of both periods have, after all, the selfsame lack. His destiny seems to have been inevitable.
And so, in its confused argentry and ghostliness, its crystallization and diaphinity, his music resembles at times nothing so much as the precious remains and specimens of an extinct planet; things transfixed in cold eternal night, icy and phosphorescent of hue. No atmosphere bathes them. Sap does not mount in them. Should we touch them, they would crumble. This, might have been a flower. But now it glistens with crystals of mica and quartz. These, are jewels. But their fires are quenched. These candied petals are the passage from "Music for Four Stringed Instruments" glossed in the score "un jardin plein des fleurs naïves," while this vial of gemmy green liquid is that entitled "une pré toute émeraude." The petrified saurian there, whose bones have suffered
"a sea-changeInto something rich and strange"
"a sea-changeInto something rich and strange"
"a sea-change
Into something rich and strange"
is the Spanish rhapsody for 'cello; the string of steely beads, the setting of the "To Helen" of Poe. And the objects that float preserved in those little flasks are some of the popular ditties with which Loeffler is so fond of incrusting his work. Once they were "à La Villette," and the Malagueña, and the eighteenth-century marching song of the Lorraine soldiery, and flourished under the windy heaven. But when Loeffler transplanted them respectively into "La Villanelle du Diable," into the 'cello rhapsody and into "Music for Four Stringed Instruments," they underwent the fate that befalls everything subjected to his exquisite and sterilizing touch.
One comes to the conclusion that perhaps the most significant and symbolic thing in the career of Charles Martin Loeffler is his place of residence. For this Alsatian, French in culture, temperamentally related to thedécadents, writing music at first resembling that of Fauré and the Wagnerizing Frenchmen, later that of Dukas, and last that of d'Indy and Magnard, has lived the greater portion of his life in no other city than Boston. Coming originally to America for the purpose of playing first violin in the Boston Symphony Orchestra, he has found the atmosphere of the New England capital so pleasant that he has remained there practically ever since. He whom one might supposealmost native to the Paris of Debussy and Magnard and Ravel, of Verlaine and Gustave Kahn and Huysmans, has found comfortable an environment essentially tight and illiberal, a society that masks philistinism with toryism, and manages to drive its radical and vital and artistic youth, in increasing numbers every year, to other places in search of air. And his own career, on the spiritual plane, seems just such an exchange, the preference of a shadowy and frigid place to a blazing and quivering one, the exchange of the eternal Paris for the eternal Boston. His music seems some psychic banishment. His art is indeed, in the last analysis, a flight from the group of his kinsmen into, if not exactly the circle, at least the dangerous vicinity of those amiable gentlemen the Chadwicks and the Converses and all the other highly respectable and sterile "American Composers."
Ornstein is a mirror held up to the world of the modern city. The first of his real compositions are like fragments of some cosmopolis of caves and towers of steel, of furious motion and shafts of nitrogen glare become music. They are like sensitive surfaces that have been laid in the midst of the New Yorks; and record not only the clangors, but all the violent forms of the city, the beat of the frenetic activity, the intersecting planes of light, the masses of the masonry with the tiny, dwarf-like creatures running in and out, the electric signs staining the inky nightclouds. They give again the alarum of dawn breaking upon the crowded, swarming cells; seven o'clock steam whistles on a winter morn; pitiless light filtering over hurrying black droves of humanity; thousands of shivering workers blackening Fourteenth Street. They picture the very Niebelheim, the hordes of slaves herded by giants of their own creation, the commands and cries of power in the bells, whistles, signals. The grinding and shrieking of loaded trains in the tubes, cranes laboring in the port, rotary engines drilling, turbines churning are woven through them. Blankets of fog descend upon the river; menacing shapes loom through it; rays of red light seek to cut the mist. Flowers that are gray and black blossom on the ledgesof tenement windows giving on bare walls. And human souls and songs that are gray and black like them bloom in the blind air, open their velvet petals, their lustrous, soft corollas, from crannies and windows into this metal, this dun, this unceasing roar.
For Ornstein is youth. He is the one striving to adjust himself to all this thunder and welter and glare. He is the spring as it comes up through the pavements, the aching green sap. In part, no doubt, he is the resurrection of the most entombed of spirits, that of the outlaw European Jew. He is the breaking down of the walls with which the Jew had blotted out the hateful world. He is Lazarus emerging in his grave clothes into the new world; the Jewish spirit come up into the day from out the basement and cellar rooms of the synagogue where it had been seated for a thousand years drugging itself with rabbinical lore, refining almost maniacally upon the intention of some obscure phrase or parable, negating the lure of the world and of experience with a mass of rites and observances and ceremonials, losing itself in the gray desert stretches of theory, or wasting itself in the impossible dream of Zion restored in modern Palestine and Solomon's temple rebuilt in a provincial capital of the Turkish Empire. And Ornstein's music is the music of a birth that is the tearing away of grave clothes grown to the body, the clawing away, stone by stone, of the wall erected against the call of experience which was sure to be death-dealing. The old prohibitions are still active in it in the terror with which life is viewed, in the menace and cruelty of things, the sharpness of edges encountered, the weight of the masses that threaten to fall and overwhelm, the fury and blackness and horror of nature once again regarded. Again and again there passes through it the haggard, shrouded figure of the Russian Jew. The "Poems of 1917" are full of the wailings and rockings of little old Ghetto mothers. Again and again Ornstein speaks in accents that resemble nothing quite so much as the savage and woeful language of the Old Testament.
But the music of Ornstein is much besides. It is a thing germane to all beings born into the age of steel. It is the expression of all the men who have tried to embrace and love the towering piles, the strange, black, desolate pathways that are the world to-day. The figure that one discerns in the compositions beginning with the "Dwarf Suite," Opus 16, is one that we all have known intimately a space. These pieces are not youth seen through the golden haze of retrospection. They are the expression of groping, fumbling youth as it feels and as it feels, itself to be. They are music young in all its excess, its violence, its sharp griefs and sharper joys, its unreflecting, trembling strength. The spring comes up hot and cruel in them. There is all the lonelinessof youth in this music, all the mysterious dreams of a world scarce understood, all the hesitancies and blind gropings of powers untried. Always, one senses the pavements stretching between steel buildings, the black, hurrying tides of human beings; and through them all, the oppressed figure of one searching out the meaning of all this convulsive activity into which he has been born. It is such solitude that speaks in the first "Impression of Notre-Dame" with its gray mounting masses, its cloisteral reverberation of bells, its savage calls of the city to one standing alone with the monument of a dead age. Violent, uncontrolled passions cry out in the "Three Moods," with their youthful surrender to the moment. The energy of adolescence, unleashed, rejoicing in pure muscular activity, disports itself in the "Shadow Dances," and in the "Wild Man's Dance," with its sheer, naked, beating rhythm. The bitterness of adolescence mocks in the "Three Burlesques," in the "Dance of the Gnomes," with its parodying of clumsy movements. What revolt in the first "Piano Sonata"! And other emotions, timid and uncertain of themselves, uneasy with the swelling sap of springtide, speak their poetry and their pain, tell their tales and are silent, make us remember what once we felt.
The city, the birth into the new world, youth, exist in the music of Ornstein with all the sharpness of shock because of an imagination of a wonderful forcefulness. There is no indirectness in Ornstein, no vagueness. His tension is always of the fullest, the stiffest. What he feels, what he hears, he sets down, irrespective of all the canons and rules and procedures. Harmony with him is something different than it is with any other composer. Piano colors of a violence and garishness are hurled against each other. The lowest and highest registers of the instrument clash in "Improvisata." Rhythms battle, convulsively, almost. In portions of the "Sinfonietta," five rhythms are to be found warring against each other. Melodic curves, lines, sing ecstatically over turbulent, mottled counterpoint in the piano and violin sonatas. The violin sonata is something of an attempt to exhaust all the possibilities of color-contrast contained in the little brown box. In the first "Impression de Notre-Dame," the piano is metallic with the booming bells. In the second, it is stony, heavy with the congested, peering, menacing forms of gargoyles. In the accompaniment to the song "Waldseligkeit," it seems to give the musical equivalent for the substance of wood. No doubt, to one who, like Ornstein, regarded music only as a means of communication, as speech of man to man, and occupied himself only with the communication of his sensations and experience in briefest, directest, simplest form, there must have come moments of the most terrible self-doubt, when all the anathemas of the fathers of the musical church thundered loudin his ears, and other men's forms and proportions seemed to make his shrivel. It was doubtless thankfulness to William Blake, that other "mad" inventor of wild images and designs, that other "rager in the wilds," for fortification and sustenance, that made him preface his violin sonata with the Argument of "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell," and defend himself with the verses:
"Once meek, and in a perilous path,The just man kept his course alongThe vale of death.Roses are planted where thorns grew,And on the barren heathSing the honey bees...."Till the villain left the paths of ease,To walk in perilous paths, and driveThe just man into barren climes."Now the sneaking serpent walksIn mild humility,And the just man rages in the wildsWhere lions roam."
"Once meek, and in a perilous path,The just man kept his course alongThe vale of death.Roses are planted where thorns grew,And on the barren heathSing the honey bees....
"Once meek, and in a perilous path,
The just man kept his course along
The vale of death.
Roses are planted where thorns grew,
And on the barren heath
Sing the honey bees....
"Till the villain left the paths of ease,To walk in perilous paths, and driveThe just man into barren climes.
"Till the villain left the paths of ease,
To walk in perilous paths, and drive
The just man into barren climes.
"Now the sneaking serpent walksIn mild humility,And the just man rages in the wildsWhere lions roam."
"Now the sneaking serpent walks
In mild humility,
And the just man rages in the wilds
Where lions roam."
And certainly, for us, whatever the pundits claim, the wilds of Leo Ornstein are not so raging and lion-infested. For while one speculates whether these pieces are music or not, one discovers that one has entered through them into the life of another being, and through him into the lives of a whole upgrowing generation.
At present, however, some of those qualities that were so clearly visible in Leo Ornstein during the first years in which he disclosed himself are somewhat obscured. Something not entirely reassuring has happened to the man. A great deal of the music that he has been composing of late wants the bite his earlier work had. The colors are not so piping hot. The outlines are less bold and jagged and clear-cut. Some of the convulsive intensity, the fury, has passed out of the rhythmic element. The melodies are less acidulous, the moods less unbridled. No doubt, something happier has entered into his music, something more voluptuous and smooth. The 'cello chants passionately and dreamily in the two sonatas Ornstein has written of late for it. The racial element is softened, become gentler and duskier and more romantic. The Jew in it no longer wears his gaberdine. If he wears a prayer-shawl at all, it is one made of silk. The Jeremiah of the desert has given way to the young, amorous, dream-filled poet, a poet of the sort that arose among the Jews in Spain during the years of the Moorish ascendency. Yet, a certain intensity, a certain originality, a certain vein of genius, has undergone eclipse in the change. Something a little brilliant, a little facile, a little undistinguished, has introduced itself, even into the best of the newest pieces. The texture is thinner, the tension slacker. Ornstein does not seem to be putting himself into them withthe same directness and completeness with which he put himself into his earlier work. Moreover, occasionally there come from his pen works into which he is not putting himself at all. A choral society of New York a year or two ago produced two smalla capellachoruses of his that might have been the work of some obscure pupil of Tchaikowsky's. The piano sonatina of the Funeral March, although by no means as insignificant, is nevertheless uncharacteristic in the resemblances it bears the music of Ravel. One thing the earlier compositions are not, and that is, derivative. Ornstein, they make plain, had benefited by the achievements of Debussy and Moussorgsky and Scriabine. But they made plain as well that he had developed a style of his own, a style that was, for all its crudeness and harshness, personal. In becoming again a disciple he reverts to something that he seemed to have left behind him when he wrote his clangorous "Dwarf Suite."
What this new period of Ornstein's composition represents it is not easy to say. Probably, it is a period of transition, a time of the marshaling of forces to a new and fiercer onslaught. Such a time of gestation might well be necessary to Ornstein's genius. It is possible that he has had to give up something in order to gain something else, to try for less in order to establish himself upon a footing firmer than that upon which he stood. His genius during his first yearsof creation was lyrical purely. It was a thing that expressed itself in picturing moods, in making brief flights, in establishingmoments musicaux.He is at his best in his piano preludes, in his small forms. The works composed during this period in the larger forms, the violin sonata excepted, are scarcely achieved. The outer movements of the Grand Sonata for pianoforte, for instance, are far inferior to the central ones. Whatever the merit of some of the individual movements of "The Masqueraders," Opus 36, and the "Poems of 1917," and at times it is not small, the works as a whole lack form. They have none of the unity and variety and solidity of the "Papillons" and the "Carnaval" of Schumann or the "Valses nobles et sentimentales" of Ravel, for instance, works to which they are in certain other respects comparable. As he grew a little older, Ornstein's nature probably began to demand other forms beside these smaller, more episodic ones. It probably began to strive for greater scope, duration, development, complexity. And so, in order to gain greater intellectual control over his outflow, to learn to build piles of a bulk that require an entirely different workmanship and supervision than do preludes and impressions, Ornstein doubtlessly has been withholding himself, diminishing the intensity of his fire. In order to learn to organize his material, he has doubtlessly unconsciously lessened its density and vibrancy for the time being.
And, too, it may be the result of a change from a pain-economy to a pleasure-economy. The adolescent has grown into the young man. The adjustment may have been made. The poet is no longer forced to mint his miseries and pains alone into art; he is learning to be glad. He may again be seeking to find himself in a world grown different.
At the same time, there is a distinct possibility that the present period of Ornstein's composition is not a time of preparation for a new flight. There is a distinct possibility that it represents an unwholesome slackening. After all, may it not be that he has flinched? Stronger men than he have succumbed to a hostile world. And Ornstein has found the world very hostile. He has found America absolutely unprepared for his art, possessed with no technique to cope with it. He has very largely been operating in a void. It is not so much that he has been tried and found wanting. He has not even been heard. Because the musical world has been unable to follow him, it has dismissed him entirely from its consciousness. Scarcely a critic has been able to express what it is about his music that he likes or dislikes. They have either ridiculed him or written cordially about him without saying anything. There is nothing more demoralizing for the artist. At present they are even classing him withProkofief. The virtuosi have shown a like timidity. Scarcely a one has dared perform his music. Many have refrained out of policy, unwilling to forfeit any applause. Others have no doubt quite sincerely refused to perform any music that sounded cacophonous to them. For the army of musicians is almost entirely composed of rearguard. Not a single one of the orchestral conductors in New York has dared consider performing his "Sinfonietta," to say nothing of the early and comparatively accessible "Marche funèbre" and "A la chinoise." Of the Philharmonic Society, of course, one expects nothing. But one might suppose that the various organizations allegedly "friendly" to music, eager for the cause of the "new" and the "modern," would see to it that the musician whom such an authority as Ernest Bloch has declared to be the single composer in America who displays positive signs of genius, was given his opportunity. The contrary has been the case. D'Indy's foolish war symphony, the works of Henry Hadley, of Rachmaninoff, of David Stanley Smith, even of Dvorsky, that person who exists as little in the field of composition as he does in Biarritz, have received and do receive the attention of our powerful ones. It would be small wonder, then, if an artist like Ornstein, who, like every real artist, requires the contact of other minds and cannot go on producing, hopeless of attaining performance and exhibition, had finally flinchedand wearied of his efforts, and suddenly found himself writing such music as the intelligences of his fellow-craftsmen can reasonably be expected to comprehend.
There are other reasons that might lead one to presume that these recent works represent a slump. For Ornstein has been devoting too much of his energy to concertizing. He has been traveling madly over the United States and Canada for the last few years, living in Pullman sleepers and playing to audiences of all sorts. During the first years that he was in America after the outbreak of war in Europe, he at least played the music that he loved. But no one was ready for programs beginning with Korngold and Cyril Scott and ending with Ravel and Scriabine and Ornstein himself. So little by little Ornstein began adulterating his programs, adding a popular piece here, another there. Recently, he has been playing music into which he cannot put his heart at all, Liszt and Rubinstein as well as Beethoven and Schumann. He has been performing it none too brilliantly. Such an existence cannot but dull the man's edge. No one can play the Twelfth Hungarian Rhapsody or the transcription of the Mendelssohn Wedding March or the Rigoletto Fantasy continually without being punished. No one who does not love them can play the Sonata Appassionata or theEtudes symphoniquesor the waltzes of Chopin long without becoming dulled and spoiled. So with composition become aninterval between two trains, and expression an attempt to please audiences and to establish oneself with the public as a popular pianist, it is not the most preposterous of thoughts that Leo Ornstein has lost something he once possessed in beautiful and superabundant form.
Still, it is fairly incredible. It is impossible that great and permanent harm should have been done him already. He was too vital and sane a being to be so easily corrupted. For those who knew him in the first years of his return from Paris, he was nothing if not the genius. If he was less accomplished, less resourceful and magistral an artist than Strawinsky, for instance, whom he resembles in a certain general way, he was at least a more human, a more passionate being. It is this great vitality, this rich temperament, that makes one sure that we are not going to have in Leo Ornstein another Richard Strauss, another Strauss who has never had the many fertile years vouchsafed the other. It makes us sure that he will finally come to terms with his managers and audiences, and that the harm already done him by his way of life will grow no greater. It convinces us that his present mood is but the result of a necessary process of transition from one basis to another; that the man is really summoning himself for the works that will express him in his manhood. And we are positive that there will shortly come from him weightymusical forms with colors as burning and deep as those of his first pieces, and of like intensity and boldness; and that Leo Ornstein is sure of reaching the high heaven of art for which he seemed and still seems bound.
Once before, East and West have met and merged. On the plains where the soldiers of Darius and Alexander slaughtered one another, and where the Macedonian phalanxes recoiled before the castellated elephants of Porus, a marriage was consummated. Hovering over the heads of the opposing armies, the angel of Europe and the angel of Asia embraced, and sent their lifebloods coursing through each other. Passage was made to India. The two continents slowly faced about. Two reservoirs that had been accumulating for eons the precious distillations of two great centers of the human race began mingling their essences. In whatever the East did, there was evident the hand of the West. In whatever the West thought there was visible the prismatic intelligence of the East. The gods of Greece showed their smooth foreheads on the banks of the Ganges. Oriental systems refracted the blonde Mediterranean light into an hundred subtle tints. But the empire of Alexander crumbled, Parthians annihilated the legions of Crassus. Persians and Seljuks and Ottomans barred Europe from the East. Steady communication ceased. Asia withdrew under her cloudy mysterious curtains. Legendary fumes, Cathay, Zipango, the Indias of the GreatOcean, arose. Once again, the two basins were cut off. Once again, each began secreting a substance radically different from the other's, a substance growing more individual with each elapsing century. For almost two thousand years, East and West developed away one from the other.
And now, a second time, in our own hour, the two have drawn close and confronted each other. Once again, a fusion has taken place. We are to-day in the midst of a movement likely to surpass the period of Hellenization in duration and extent. This time, perhaps, no dramatic march of Macedonians to the banks of the Indus has served to make the connection. Nevertheless, in the image of Amy Lowell, guns have again shown themselves keys. For a couple of centuries, great gates have been swinging throughout the East at the behest of frigates and armed merchantmen. And slowly, once again, Asia has been seeping into Europe. Warm spicy gusts have been drifting over the West, steadily permeating the air. At first, there appeared to be nothing serious in the infiltration. The eighteenth century was apparently coquetting only with Eastern motifs. If Chinese palaces put in their appearance at Drottningholm and Pillnitz, in all portions of the continent; if Chippendale began giving curious delicate twists to his furniture, it seemed nothing more than a matter of caprice. The zest for Persian letters, Oriental nouvelles, Turkish marches,arose apparently only from the desire for masquerade. Grétry, Mozart, Wieland, scarcely took their seraglios, pashas, bulbuls earnestly. But, gradually, with the arrival of the nineteenth century, what had hitherto seemed play only, began to assume a different shape. The East was indeed dawning upon the West again. The mists were being burned away. Through Sir William Jones and Friedrich Schlegel, the wisdom of the dangerous slippery Indies was opened to Europe. Goethe, as ever the outrider, revealed the new orientation in his "West-Oestlicher Divan" and his "Chinesich-Deutsche Jahres-und-Tages-Zeiten." In 1829, Victor Hugo published "Les Orientales"; in 1859, Fitzgerald his "Omar." If Weber little more than toyed with Chinese and Turkish musical color in "Turandot" and in "Oberon," Félicien David in his songs and in his "Le Désert" attempted seriously to infiltrate into European music the musical feeling of the Levant. In the corner of Schopenhauer's apartment there sat an effigy of the Buddha; volumes of the Upanishads lay on his table. In 1863 for the first time, a Paris shop offered for sale a few Japanese prints. Manet, Whistler, Monet, the brothers De Goncourt came and bought. But though the craze for painting Princesses du Pays de la Porcelaine ended rapidly, European painting was revolutionized. Surfaces once more came into being. Color was born again under the brushes of the impressionists and thepost-impressionists. The sense of touch was freed. In all the arts the art of Japan became powerful. De Maupassant wrote a prose that is full of the technique of the Japanese prints; that works chiefly through means of sharp little lines and dainty spotting. All five senses were being born again. People listened with new keenness to the sounds of instruments. The Russian sons of Berlioz with their new orchestral chemistry arrived. The orchestral machine expanded and grew subtle. Huysmans dreamt of symphonies of liqueurs, concertos of perfumery.
And the new century, when it came, showed that it was no deliberately assumed thing, this fusion of Oriental and Occidental modes of feeling, showed that it was a thing arising deep in the being. Something that had long lain inert had been reborn at the contact in Western men. A part of personality that had lain dead had of a sudden been suffused with blood and warmth; light played over a hemisphere of the mind long dark. The very hand that drew, the very mouth that matched words, the very body that beat and curved and swayed in movement, were Western and Eastern at the same time. It was no longer the Greek conception of form that prevailed on the banks of the Seine, or wherever art was produced. Art was become again, what the Orientals had always known it to be, significant form. It was as though Persia had been born again in Henri Matisse, for instance. A sense ofdesign and color the like of which had hitherto been manifest only in the vases and bloomy carpets of Teheran dictated his exquisite patterns. Hokusai and Outamaro got in Vincent Van Gogh a brother. The sultry atmosphere and animal richness of Hindoo art reappeared in Gauguin's wood-cuts. One has but to go to any really modern art, whether produced in Paris or in Munich or in New York, to see again the subtle browns and silvers and vermilions, the delicate sensuous touch, the infinitely various patterns, the forms that carry with them the earth from Arabia to Japan.
As in the plastic arts, so in poetry. The imagists, Ezra Pound in particular, were Chinese long before they discovered Cathay in the works of Ernest Fennellosa. And in music, certainly, the East is on us; has been on us since the Russian five began their careers and expressed their own half-European, half-Mongol, natures. The stream has commenced setting since the Arabian Nights, the Persian odalisques, the Tartar tribesmen became music. And the Chinese sensibility of Scriabine, the Oriental chromatics of the later Rimsky-Korsakoff, the sinuous scales and voluptuous colors and silken textures of Debussy, the shrill fantastic Japanese idiom of Strawinsky, have shown us the fusion was near.
But in the music of no composer is it as plainly evident as it is in that of Ernest Bloch. In a worklike this composer's suite for viola and piano, one has a sense of a completeness of fusion such as no other gives. Here, the West has advanced furthest east, the East furthest west. Two things are balanced in the work, two things developed through a score of centuries by two uncommunicating regions. The organizing power of Europe is married to the sensuousness of Asia. The virile formative power of the heirs of Bach is here. An extended form is solid as mountains, projects volumes through time. One four-square movement is set atop another. There is no weakening, no slackening, no drop. One can put one's hand around these brown-gold blocks. And at the same time, this organizing power makes to live a dusky sensuality, a velvety richness of texture, a sultriness and wetness that sets us amid the bronzed glowing wood-carvings of Africans, the dark sunsets of Ceylon, the pagodas in which the Chinaman sits and sings of his felicity, his family, his garden. The lyric blue of Chinese art, the tropical forests with their horrid heat and dense growths and cruel animal life, the Polynesian seas of azure tulle, the spice-laden breezes, chant here. The monotony, the melancholy, the bitterness of the East, things that had hitherto sounded only from the darkly shining zither of the Arabs, or from the deathly gongs and tam-tams of the Mongolians, speak through Western instruments. It is as though something had been brought out from a steaming Burmese swamp andexposed to the terrible beat of a New York thoroughfare, and that out of that transplantation a matter utterly new and sad and strange, favoring both father and mother, and yet of a character distinctly individual, had been created.
For no composer was better fitted by nature to receive the stimulus of the onrushing East. As a Jew, Bloch carried within himself a fragment of the Orient; was in himself an outpost of the mother of continents. And he is one of the few Jewish composers really, fundamentally self-expressive. He is one of the few that have fully accepted themselves, fully accepted the fate that made them Jewish and stigmatized them. After all, it was not the fact that they were "homeless" as Wagner pretended, that prevented the company of Meyerbeers and Mendelssohns from creating. It was rather more the fact that, inwardly, they refused to accept themselves for what they were. The weakness of their art is to be understood only as the result of the spiritual warfare that threatens to divide every Jew against himself. There was operative in them, whether they were aware of it or no, a secret desire to escape their stigmata. They were deliberately deaf to the promptings of the beings that were so firmly planted in the racial soil. They were fugitive from the national consciousness. The bourn of impulse was half stopped. It was not that they did not write "Jewish" music, utilize solelyracial scales and melodies. The artist of Jewish extraction need not do so to be saved. The whole world is open before him. He can express his day as he will. One thing, however, is necessary. He must not seek to inhibit any portion of his impulse. He must not attempt to deny his modes of apprehension and realization because they are racially colored. He must possess spiritual harmony. The whole man must go into his expression. And it was just the "whole man" who did not go into the work of the composers who have hitherto represented "Judaism in Music." An inhibited, harried impulse is manifest in their art.
For, like Meyerbeer, convinced of the worthlessness of their feelings, they manufactured spectacles for the operatic stage, and pandered to a taste which they least of all respected. Or, like Mendelssohn, they tried to adapt themselves to the alien atmosphere of Teutonic romance, and produced a musical jargon that resembles nothing in the world so much as Yiddish. Or, with Rubinstein, they gloved themselves in a pretty salon style in order to conceal all vestiges of the flesh, or tried, with Gustav Mahler, to intone "Ave Maria." Some, no doubt, would have preferred to have been true to themselves. Goldmark (the uncle) is an example. But his desire remained intention, largely. For his method was a trifle childish. He conceived it as a lying on couches amid cushions, sniffing Orient perfumes in scent-bottles. He did notrealize that the couch was the comfortable Germancanapé,the cushions the romantic style of Weber and the early Wagner, and that through the