Then the question arises, is the programme of theSymphonia domesticaintrinsically interesting? It avowedly illustrates a day in the composer's family life, "and we are told"—to quote Messrs. Pitt and Kalisch, the authors of the admirable Queen's Hall analytical book—"thatit illustrates such everyday incidents as a Walk in the Country, the Baby's Evening and Morning Bath, the Striking of the Clock, the Yawns of the Parents when awakened by the Child, and so on." They will have it, however, that there is more in the work than this, and that underneath this "trivial subject" there is "one of far deeper and wider import"—i.e."not so much a day in the life of a particular family as a realisation of the joys and griefs of motherhood and paternity, the gradual growth of the child-soul, and the mutual relationship of children and parents...." But this exalted theory soon comes to grief. It is quite clear that the striking of seven in the evening and again in the morning confines the time of the drama within twelve hours; and on these lines indeed there is some sense in the programme. That is, we see in the first section the parents and child; in the second (thescherzo) the joys and diversions of the group, the lullaby, the striking of 7P.M., and the putting of the child to bed; in the third (theadagio), the parents' love-scene and the striking of 7A.M.; in the fourth (thefinale) the morning wakening, and—in the double fugue—the dispute between the parents as to the future of the child. This is not a very great scheme, but it is at least comprehensible; mix Teutonic moonshine up with it and it becomes nonsense. Thus Messrs. Pitt and Kalisch, trying to put the best face possible on that stupid noise that is meant to illustrate "the energetic protests of the child when it is first brought into contact with thealien element of cold water" (by the way,arebabies usually dumped into cold water?) remark that "if the more idealistic method of interpretation be adopted, it may be taken as a very uncompromising musical picture of the earliest struggles of a new-born soul." But this "idealistic method" will not work. The episode in question occurs just before the clock strikes 7P.M.It occurs again just before the clock strikes 7A.M.Are we to understand, then, that the "new-born soul" is born once in the evening and again next morning? This is being "born again" with a vengeance—quick work even in these days of Welsh revivals and Torrey-Alexander missions! No, we must reject the "idealistic method of interpretation," and just settle down to the plain fact that Strauss is painting nothing more ideal than the baby squalling in its bath (hot or cold), just as in other works he has painted Till's death-rattle, the dying shudder of Don Juan, the windmill and the sheep of Don Quixote, and the braying of Sancho Panza's donkey—all frankly realistic things, which we do not attempt to gild with idealistic interpretations.
I lay stress upon these trivial points because it is important that we should know exactly what Strauss's intentions were, for only with a knowledge of them can we judge his symphony as a work of art. It is quite clear then that he has thought it worth while to put about a hundred people to a great deal of trouble and expense in order to suggest the imbecile spectacleof a baby shrieking in its bath; and I think it is time the world protested against so much of its leisure and its funds being taken up with sheer inanities of this kind. In Strauss's previous works there are at most only two or three passages of realism at which I would shy; they have generally been saved for us by some touch of beauty, or humour, or technical cleverness. But the baby episodes in theSymphonia domesticaare too great a demand on our indulgence, and one is bound to say that there is something physically wrong with a brain that can fall so low as this. I hold him to be a man of enormous gifts, a magician, a wonder-worker of the first rank. But he can do nothing now on a large scale without deliberately spoiling it at some point or other out of pure freakishness—a freakishness that has ceased to be humour, and is merely the temporary lapse into silliness of a very clever man.
It goes without saying that if there is this degeneration—temporary or permanent—of the artistic sense that I suppose to be now going on in Strauss, it will show in other departments; and I think it shows pretty evidently in the music of the symphony as a whole. To my mind there is not a memorable theme in it; neither the theme of the husband, of the wife, nor of the child has anything like the quality that will entitle it to rank with the pregnant melodies of Strauss's other work. Think of the countless felicities ofEin Heldenleben, and you will realise at once the comparative poverty oftheSymphonia domestica. Further, he is getting too fond of working upon mere snippets of phrases, instead of the great soaring, sweeping melodies of his earlier days; these tiny figures will of course go contrapuntally with almost anything—which is probably one reason for his using them—but for that same reason their perpetual chattering in the orchestra becomes in the end rather tiresome. I am not denying, of course, that at times the music rises to great heights; the scene of the parents playing with the child is exquisitely beautiful; there are fine moments in the love-music; and the fugue simply picks one up and carries one away, so broad and healthy is its heartiness. There is again much of that old technical mastery that makes slaves of us even where our soul revolts against the actual message of the composer. But on the whole I do not see how the new work can stand comparison withEin Heldenlebenin any way. It looks far more impressive on paper than it actually sounds; it is grossly overscored, a good third of the notes being perfectly superfluous, as anyone can discover for himself by following it with the score. The mania is growing on Strauss for filling the music-paper with something or other, it matters not what; he has a lust for ink; it positively afflicts him to see an empty bar for any instrument. Master of orchestration as he is, there is page after page in theSymphonia domesticacontaining the grossest of miscalculations; time after time we can see what his intention hasbeen and how completely it has been frustrated by his own extravagance. He wants to wear all the clothes in his wardrobe at once. The same tendency is noticeable in his thematic work. When he has a good theme now he cannot leave it alone; he must fumble and fuss all round it till he has blurred its outline and stifled half its expression; the pleasant little lullaby, for example, would have been three times as effective without that jerky counterpoint against it in the oboe d'amore, bassoon, and viola, which simply gives the impression that somebody or other is always coming in at the wrong place, and quite disturbs the atmosphere of the lullaby itself. Altogether I am inclined to think that the new work as a whole shows a decided falling-off. And the reason? Well, is it not very likely that there has at last happened what some of us prophesied some two or three years ago? No artist can put so great a physical and mental strain upon himself as Strauss does and still keep his brain at its best. With all his many duties and occupations, his conducting and his constant travelling, it is a wonder he has any strength left to compose. For years he has been wearing his sensitive nervous system down to the very edge; and I should not be surprised to find that in doing so he has injured a good deal the delicacy of its tissue. It is said that he lives the busy life he does in order to make enough money to give up all public work and devote himself entirely to composition; butbefore that time comes he will probably, if he is not careful, have lost more of the divine fire than he can ever replace. TheSymphonia domesticaI take to be the work of an enormously clever man who was once a genius.
FOOTNOTES:[59]It is put down for a performance in London this spring.[60]It is worth noting how Berlioz justified his own setting of some passages inRoméo et Julietteorchestrally instead of vocally. "If," he says, "in the celebrated scenes of the garden and the cemetery, the dialogue of the two lovers, thea parteof Juliet and the passionate outbursts of Romeo are not vocalised, if, in short, the duets of love and despair are confided to the orchestra, the reasons for this are numerous and easy to grasp. First, because we are dealing with a symphony, not with an opera. Secondly, duets of this nature having been treated vocally a thousand times, and by the greatest masters, there was both prudence and curiosity in trying another mode of expression. It is, moreover, because the very sublimity of this love made the painting of it so dangerous for the musician, that he had to give his imagination a latitude which the positive connotations of chanted words would not have permitted him, by resorting to the instrumental language—a language richer, more varied, less restricted, and by its very indefiniteness incomparably more powerful in cases of this kind."[61]The reader will, of course, remember that I am here speaking only of thetissueof Strauss's work. In the intellectual part of it, as I shall show later, he sometimes does things with the deliberate intention of startling us. See Section IV. of this essay.[62]Perhaps I ought to except such things as the passage inEin Heldenleben(page 50 of the full score), where the strings and oboe run up in sevenths, instead of the sixths we expect—an agonising thing that always sounds as if somebody in the orchestra had made a mistake. Either Strauss wrote it so out of pure devilment, with his tongue in his cheek all the time, or it may answer to some subtle harmony in his brain that ours are incompetent to grasp. There can be no doubt that his ear must be vastly more acute than the normal organ. As Mr. James Huneker puts it in a brilliant article in hisOvertones: "His is the most marvellous agglomeration of cortical cells that science has ever recorded. So acute are his powers of acoustical differentiation that he must hear, not alone tones beyond the base and the top of the normal scale unheard of by ordinary humans, but he must also hear, or rather overhear, the vibratory waves from all individual sounds. His music gives us the impression of new over-tones, of scales that violate the well-tempered, of tonalities that approximate to the quarter-tones of Oriental music."[63]InFeuersnot, it may be said, Strauss himself goes back for a moment to something like that old world. But he does not take it seriously; the quaint mediæval story is only a background against which he can display his passion, his humour, his irony. Wagner would have made a portentous thing of theFeuersnotsubject; he would have discovered the profoundest philosophy and ethic in it. Strauss behaves towards it like a graceless, irreverent urchin in a cathedral.
FOOTNOTES:
[59]It is put down for a performance in London this spring.
[59]It is put down for a performance in London this spring.
[60]It is worth noting how Berlioz justified his own setting of some passages inRoméo et Julietteorchestrally instead of vocally. "If," he says, "in the celebrated scenes of the garden and the cemetery, the dialogue of the two lovers, thea parteof Juliet and the passionate outbursts of Romeo are not vocalised, if, in short, the duets of love and despair are confided to the orchestra, the reasons for this are numerous and easy to grasp. First, because we are dealing with a symphony, not with an opera. Secondly, duets of this nature having been treated vocally a thousand times, and by the greatest masters, there was both prudence and curiosity in trying another mode of expression. It is, moreover, because the very sublimity of this love made the painting of it so dangerous for the musician, that he had to give his imagination a latitude which the positive connotations of chanted words would not have permitted him, by resorting to the instrumental language—a language richer, more varied, less restricted, and by its very indefiniteness incomparably more powerful in cases of this kind."
[60]It is worth noting how Berlioz justified his own setting of some passages inRoméo et Julietteorchestrally instead of vocally. "If," he says, "in the celebrated scenes of the garden and the cemetery, the dialogue of the two lovers, thea parteof Juliet and the passionate outbursts of Romeo are not vocalised, if, in short, the duets of love and despair are confided to the orchestra, the reasons for this are numerous and easy to grasp. First, because we are dealing with a symphony, not with an opera. Secondly, duets of this nature having been treated vocally a thousand times, and by the greatest masters, there was both prudence and curiosity in trying another mode of expression. It is, moreover, because the very sublimity of this love made the painting of it so dangerous for the musician, that he had to give his imagination a latitude which the positive connotations of chanted words would not have permitted him, by resorting to the instrumental language—a language richer, more varied, less restricted, and by its very indefiniteness incomparably more powerful in cases of this kind."
[61]The reader will, of course, remember that I am here speaking only of thetissueof Strauss's work. In the intellectual part of it, as I shall show later, he sometimes does things with the deliberate intention of startling us. See Section IV. of this essay.
[61]The reader will, of course, remember that I am here speaking only of thetissueof Strauss's work. In the intellectual part of it, as I shall show later, he sometimes does things with the deliberate intention of startling us. See Section IV. of this essay.
[62]Perhaps I ought to except such things as the passage inEin Heldenleben(page 50 of the full score), where the strings and oboe run up in sevenths, instead of the sixths we expect—an agonising thing that always sounds as if somebody in the orchestra had made a mistake. Either Strauss wrote it so out of pure devilment, with his tongue in his cheek all the time, or it may answer to some subtle harmony in his brain that ours are incompetent to grasp. There can be no doubt that his ear must be vastly more acute than the normal organ. As Mr. James Huneker puts it in a brilliant article in hisOvertones: "His is the most marvellous agglomeration of cortical cells that science has ever recorded. So acute are his powers of acoustical differentiation that he must hear, not alone tones beyond the base and the top of the normal scale unheard of by ordinary humans, but he must also hear, or rather overhear, the vibratory waves from all individual sounds. His music gives us the impression of new over-tones, of scales that violate the well-tempered, of tonalities that approximate to the quarter-tones of Oriental music."
[62]Perhaps I ought to except such things as the passage inEin Heldenleben(page 50 of the full score), where the strings and oboe run up in sevenths, instead of the sixths we expect—an agonising thing that always sounds as if somebody in the orchestra had made a mistake. Either Strauss wrote it so out of pure devilment, with his tongue in his cheek all the time, or it may answer to some subtle harmony in his brain that ours are incompetent to grasp. There can be no doubt that his ear must be vastly more acute than the normal organ. As Mr. James Huneker puts it in a brilliant article in hisOvertones: "His is the most marvellous agglomeration of cortical cells that science has ever recorded. So acute are his powers of acoustical differentiation that he must hear, not alone tones beyond the base and the top of the normal scale unheard of by ordinary humans, but he must also hear, or rather overhear, the vibratory waves from all individual sounds. His music gives us the impression of new over-tones, of scales that violate the well-tempered, of tonalities that approximate to the quarter-tones of Oriental music."
[63]InFeuersnot, it may be said, Strauss himself goes back for a moment to something like that old world. But he does not take it seriously; the quaint mediæval story is only a background against which he can display his passion, his humour, his irony. Wagner would have made a portentous thing of theFeuersnotsubject; he would have discovered the profoundest philosophy and ethic in it. Strauss behaves towards it like a graceless, irreverent urchin in a cathedral.
[63]InFeuersnot, it may be said, Strauss himself goes back for a moment to something like that old world. But he does not take it seriously; the quaint mediæval story is only a background against which he can display his passion, his humour, his irony. Wagner would have made a portentous thing of theFeuersnotsubject; he would have discovered the profoundest philosophy and ethic in it. Strauss behaves towards it like a graceless, irreverent urchin in a cathedral.