Music
Margaret C. Anderson
Ideasmake their impressions very slowly, but they travel very fast. That is why Gabrilowitsch’s playing of the piano on March 21 was two different kinds of revelation to two different kinds of people. To a great many it was a rich fulfillment of promise; to a few it was the end of something that had had a great beginning.
The trouble is that there’s a new standard to reckon with. We used to argue that what a man had to say was more important than the way he said it. Then we reversed that, claiming that a man may say anything provided he say it well. Then the socialistic school tried to go back to the first premise, but what they were really groping for was the new standard—which is simply this: A man may still say anything he wishes and if he says it well it will be art—provided he really has something to say. Tennyson knew how to say things well, but he missed being an artist because he had nothing to say. On what basis do we establish such a criterion? Not merely on that of “ideas,” because you may have no ideas at all and yet have profound reactions; and not merely on that of “socialism” or sincerity or ideals; and not—oh well, I mean to get through this discussion without dragging in the artist’s alleged monopoly of the eternal verities. B. Russell Herts got very close to what I mean when he said that Arnold Bennett missed real bigness because he had only a great and mighty skill without having a great and mighty soul.
Well—you can’t make Art, we think now, unless you belong in the great-and-mighty-soul class. And what does that mean, exactly? Perhaps the whole thing can be explained under the term “enlarged consciousness.” I wish Dora Marsden would discuss it in one of those clear-headed articles she writes forThe Egoist. The confusion in all our discussions of matter and manner, of subject and form, of what determines genius, has come about in two main ways: first, because we have made Taste a synonym for Art—so that if we like Beethoven or Mozart we don’t accept Wagner or Max Reger, or if we like classic rules we call romanticism “bad art”; and second, because we have decided who had great and mighty souls on an ethical basis. We said that Browning and Tennyson had them—chiefly because they talked a great deal about God, I suppose; which only shows how confusing it is to judge that way; it leaves no room for the distinctionthat Browning had and Tennyson hadn’t. It’s all as silly as insisting that the cubists ought to be considered great if they are sincere. Grant that they are. To be sincere is easy; to say what you believe is simple; but to believe something worth saying is the test of an art. Sincere stupid people are as bad as any other stupid ones—and more boring.
I don’t know what else to say about it; but I know you can recognize that “enlarged consciousness” in the first bars of a pianist’s playing, or in a singer’s beginning of a song. Paderewski has it to such a degree that he can play wrong notes and it doesn’t matter; and Duse has it, and Kreisler, and Isadora Duncan, and Ludwig Wüllner, who breaks your heart with his songs though he hasn’t even a singing voice. And the disappointment in Gabrilowitsch is that he hasn’t.
I went to hear him play Chopin and Schumann with positive excitement. Godowsky, with all his perfectly worked-out theories, always leaves me with the feeling that he would be an artist if he weren’t an empty shell; and Bauer, with all his beautiful work, leaves me with a sense of how hemightplay if a fire could be started inside him. I expected that fire in Gabrilowitsch—partly because I heard him play ten years ago and partly, I suppose, because he is Russian. But the ten years have left him unstirred. It’s as though the man in him had stood curiously still; as though life had passed him. He is like a poet who has somehow escaped unhurt; or a technician who perfects his expression and then wonders what he shall express. As for his form, he does many exquisite things; for instance, hisDes Abends, which was extremely poetic and which seems to be the type of thing he likes to play most. And he played the D Flat Prelude with an exquisite perspective—and then a Chopin Waltz without any perspective at all. Technically his worst feature is his chord-work—Bauer’s chords sound like an organ in comparison. But Bauer knows how to touch the piano for deep, “dark” effects, and Gabrilowitsch appears to like “bright” sounds. He takes his chords with a high, tight wrist and brings them out by pounding. These things are not done any more; the piano has shown new tone-capacities since a few of the moderns abandoned, or modified, what is supposed to be the “straight” Letschitizky method.
Well, all this wouldn’t matter so much if Gabrilowitsch had the ultimate inspiration.... Somehow I keep feeling that the world is waiting for its next great pianist.
Two sorts of listeners heard the second Bauer-Casals recital at Orchestra Hall: Those who love great music and those who love to babble about great music. Intermediate classes of the mildly interested, the botching amateurs, the self-adoring students, et al., stayed away, for Beethoven, Mendelssohn, and Cesar Franck, in sonata form, have nothing for them. Wouldthat the critics and the exuberant school-girls might forever remain away on such occasions, and choose for their frothing something less than the best.
Beethoven was not “dry” for a moment. One suspects that this composer is perpetually slandered by the “traditional” handling of zealous academics; for Bauer and Casals, with their wonted beauty of piano- and violoncello-playing, made his music warm and pleasantly expansive, with no sacrifice of dignity. He sounded almost romantic in the best sense of the word. This was an experience. And Mendelssohn—what is more truly elegant than his musical grace, or more delightful than his delicate humour—a playfulness so seldom discovered by performers! Humour that becomes subtler than a horse-laugh is beyond the ken of “professional” musicians, although first-rank composers never lack a refined sense of fun, a keen relish for jollity, for all that it may be in ethereal realms. In Cesar Franck there is perhaps the very sublimate of humour, the mystic smile of faith. One cannot escape a feeling of the deeply religious in this French master. A new word should be coined to designate his music; it might be formed by transposing the “passionate” of passionate love and the “fervent” of fervent piety, and by some such amalgamation of cool, impersonal, austere love with deepest faith become sensuous, impassioned, and lovely, the characterizing word is secured. Franck’s music, surcharged with intense experience, renders unnecessary any apology for this left-handed use of English. It is but poorly spoken of in orthodox terms, since it embodies strange blendings of emotion, both common and uncommon—emotions unified and crystallized into the expression of a genius. Cesar Franck’s love, apparently, flowed as readily and as warmly toward God as toward ravishing, although possibly abstract, woman.
This is doubtless a considerable, if not impossible, reach for the imagination of the patiently-groping reader, but it would have been less difficult with Bauer and Casals for interpreters. The ’cellist’s playing was at once sane and poetic, clean-cut and well-rounded; it was chaste without chill, voluptuous without a debauch. And Bauer, master-pianist indeed, as his press-agent styles him, brought from the piano more than enough kinds of tone to shame the monochromatic theory about the restricted nature of the piano. The most individual feature of his art is the production of solemn, organ-like chords in the lower register—chords wonderfully sonorous and rich, powerful enough to obliterate the memory of bedlam. Who cares if he smudges a “run?” This god can sound chords. He redeems a host of piano-jolters.
Herman Schuchert.