Chapter V: Introduction: Democracy and Music (3)

Of course it is not intended to account for the wide favor accorded this symphony by adducing so technical a matter, from one point of view, as its comparative freedom from a rhythmic weakness to which its composer is unfortunately peculiarly subject. What is meant is simply that sing-song balance of short phrases is often a symptom of superficial feeling, and that, _per contra_, elastic, vigorous, and imaginative rhythms are a constant result, and therefore a reliable evidence, of the emotional ardor that makes a piece of music live. The A-flat Symphony is a work intensely felt by the composer, a work that, coming from his heart, finds its way to the hearts of others. And in this respect, in its emotional sincerity, earnestness, and subjectivity, it differs from his other works more in degree than in kind. For in everything Elgar writes there is the preoccupation with inner feeling which we find in such a composer as Schumann, but from which most of our contemporaries have turned away. Elgar is an introspective musician, not an externally observant tone-painter like Strauss. It is noteworthy how completely his treatment of death, for example, in "The Dream of Gerontius," differs from that of Strauss in "Tod und Verklärung." By no means accidental is it, but highly significant of the opposed attitudes of the two artists, that while Strauss emphasizes the external picture--the panting breath, the choking cries--Elgar penetrates to the inward emotional state. He has written surprisingly little program music. Aside from a few realistic touches scattered through the choral works, and the delicate little vignette of the friend at sea in the "Enigma" Variations, there is only "Falstaff"--and that deals more with character than with picture. In this respect Elgar deserves well of his contemporaries for standing against a popular but dangerous tendency to externalize the most inward of the arts, and for showing that even in the twentieth century the spiritual drama set forth in a work of pure music, like his first symphony, can be as thrilling as those that have made immortal Beethoven's later quartets and sonatas.

That this attitude indicates a preference rather than a limitation is proved by the felicity of the external characterization in passages scattered all through the choral works, as for instance the setting of the line "The castle 'gan to rock," cited above, from the "Black Knight," the music of the devils in "Gerontius," or the scene in "The Apostles" where Peter walks upon the water, and even more strikingly in "Falstaff," the composer's single contribution to program music. Here he frankly takes the Straussian attitude, and skilfully uses the Straussian methods. Leading themes, as he tells us in his analysis,[26] depict the fat knight, one "in a green old age, mellow, frank, gay, easy, corpulent, loose, unprincipled, and luxurious" (_a_); another "cajoling and persuasive" (_b_); and a third in his mood of "boastfulness and colossal mendacity" (_c_).

These portraits evidently belong to the same gallery as Strauss's Don Quixote, Sancho Panza (_cf._ the first quotation), Till Eulenspiegel, and others; they are sketched in the same suggestive and telling lines; in the third there is even the same touch of caricature. The picture of Eastcheap, too, where, "among ostlers and carriers, and drawers, and merchants, and pilgrims and loud robustious women, Falstaff has freedom and frolic," has something of the German composer's brilliant externality. It should, as Elgar says in his notes, and it does, "chatter, blaze, glitter, and coruscate." Yet, vivid as all this is, even here from time to time, notably in the two "interludes," the composer characteristically withdraws from the turbulent outer world he has conjured up, to brood upon its spiritual meaning; and it is noteworthy that after stating in his analysis that "some lines quoted from the plays are occasionally placed under the themes to indicate the feeling to be conveyed by the music," he immediately adds, "but it is not intended that the meaning of the music, often varied and intensified, shall be narrowed to a corollary of these quotations only." This intensification arises, of course, through the universalizing of all the particulars by the power of music to express pure emotion.

The same instinctive leaning to introspection is curiously shown in the Enigma Variations.[27] "I have in the Variations," writes Elgar in a private letter, "sketched portraits of my friends--a new idea, I think--that is, in each variation I have looked at the theme through the personality (as it were) of another Johnny." The idea was not indeed quite new, however originally applied, as Schumann had already sketched a number of his friends in the "Carnaval." But what is of much greater import is that Schumann and Elgar, both introspective temperaments, go about this business of portrait painting in the same characteristic way--not by recording the external aspects of these "other Johnnies," but by sympathetically putting themselves at their points of view and becoming, so to speak, the spokesmen of their souls. The tender intimateness of Elgar's interpretations is their supreme charm. Whatever the character portrayed, whether the tender grace of C. A. E. (Lady Elgar), the caprice of H. D. S-P., the virile energy of W. M. B., the gossamer delicacy of Dorabelle, or the nobility of "Nimrod," we feel in each case that we have for the moment really got inside the personality, and looked at the world along that unique perspective. Even in the indescribably lovely Romanza, Variation XIII, calling up the thought of a friend at sea, though programistic devices are used, the spirit looks away from externalities. Violas in a quietly undulating rhythm suggest the ocean expanse; an almost inaudible tremolo of the drum gives us the soft throb of the engines; a quotation from Mendelssohn's "Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage," in the dreamy tones of the clarinet, completes the story. Yet "story" it is not--and there is the subtlety of it. Dim sea and dream-like steamer are only accessories after all. The thought of the distant friend, the human soul there, is what gently disengages itself as the essence of the music.

In his two symphonies the composer gives us even less encouragement to search for detailed programs. It is true that the second bears the motto from Shelley:

Rarely, rarely, comest thou,
Spirit of Delight.

But it will be observed, first, that these lines contain no pictorial images which would prevent their application to the most purely emotional music--a symphony of Beethoven, for example; and second, that even their emotional bearing is somewhat ambiguous, as we are left in doubt whether it is the Spirit of Delight itself, or the rareness of its visitations, that we are asked to consider. Mr. Ernest Newman thinks the former, and finds in the symphony the "jocundity and sweetness" which characterize English music from the earliest times. We read in the Musical Times,[28] however, that there is "some disagreement ... with the composer's own opinion that it is on a totally different psychological plane from that of the first symphony, and represents a more serene mood," although the writer adds that "it is unquestionable that the themes, even in the slow movement, speak of a lighter heart and more tranquil emotions." If there is thus room for doubt even as to the emotional content of the work, no attempt to read into it a "story" is likely to be successful. Even Mr. Newman, programist _à outrance_, is forced in this case to the admission that "though practically every musical work of any emotional value must start from this basis [of the composer's life-experience],[29] the connection of it with the external world or with the symbols of the literary and plastic arts may range through many degrees of vagueness or precision, according to the psychological build of the composer."

Coming now at last to Elgar's masterpiece, the Symphony[30] in A-flat, No. 1, opus 55, first performed under Dr. Hans Richter at Manchester and at London in December, 1908, we find Elgar's method at its purest--the preoccupation with spiritual states and experiences is complete. It is true that this may be the symphony upon which he was reported nine years earlier to be at work, and which was to bear the title "Gordon." If this is the case it shows only that he was moved to musical expression by the heroism of the great Englishman, as Beethoven was by that of Napoleon before it transpired that he was a tyrant. The A-flat Symphony is not for that reason any more program music than Beethoven's "Eroica." The two are indeed similar in being throughout profound searchings of the human spirit, highly dramatic in the vividness of their introspection, but never realistic. They penetrate to a level far deeper than that of action; they deal with the emotional springs of action; we may even say that each suggests a philosophy, since the philosophies, too, are born of those deep inarticulate emotional attitudes toward life which only music can voice in their purity.

This fundamental attitude is in the A-flat Symphony far more mature and chastened than that of the ebulliently youthful "Eroica." If we wished to find its analogue in Beethoven (and it is a high compliment to Elgar to say that there are few other places we could find it) we should have to go rather to the Ninth Symphony and to the later sonatas and quartets. It is in essence the attitude of religious resignation, and has as its constituents the primary opposition between the ideal and reality, the disappointment, softening, and impersonalizing of the soul by experience, the reciprocal activity of the soul winning its values out of experience, and the final reconciliation between them. Of course it is not meant that these ideas are intellectually formulated in the music. It is simply that the music expresses the emotional states that accompany such universal human experiences, and thus suggests and at the same time by its beauty transfigures them.

The noble melody in A-flat major with which the symphony starts, recurring in the finale, and indeed the nucleus of the whole work, suggests aspiration, resolute will, the quest of the Ideal. Everything about it,--its steady movement, its simple, strong harmonic basis, its finely flexible rhythm, notably free from the short breath of the composer's less exalted moments, even its rich and yet quiet tonality of A-flat major, raises it into a rarefied atmosphere of its own, above the turmoil of everyday life. With the theme in D minor marked Allegro appassionato, on the contrary, we are brought rudely down to earth, with all its confusion, its chaos, its meaningless accidents (note the constant feverish motion of the bass, the phantasmagoric nightmare harmonies at index letter 7, the increasing restlessness of the whole passage). Presently more poignant or tender phrases (10 and 11) suggest the longing of the spirit for the sweet reasonableness of the lost ideal world, and at 12, in the "second theme" in F major, we do get for a moment a breathing interval of peace. The beautiful, tender phrase, as of divine pity, beginning in the fourth measure of 11 and ushering in this theme, should be especially noticed for its deep expressiveness and its complete originality. This "phrase of pity," as we shall see, is destined to play an important part in the structure of the movement. Soon earlier fragments return, reintroducing the restless mood, the intensity of the feeling steadily grows, and at 17 we have a magnificent climax in which the "phrase of pity," much slower and more emphatic than before, suggests the first crisis of the struggle.

With the return of the theme of the ideal, now in C major (18) and in tentative accents, begins the long and complex development of the themes. We need not go into detail here, further than to remark that the strange, devious new theme at 24 seems almost to have some concrete "meaning," undisclosed by the composer, and introduces the most baffling element we find anywhere in the symphony. The development proceeds much upon it. At 32 begins the recapitulation of themes of the orthodox sonata-form, treated freely and with many interesting modifications. The climax recurs at 44, now impressively amplified. Even finer is the gradual but irresistible return of the fundamental theme, the "Ideal," and its triumphant statement through 49, 50, and 51. The sinister, groping theme returns, however, seeming to darken the atmosphere as when clouds come over the sun. The "Ideal" theme is heard in faltering, uncertain accents, and reaches, just before 55, a timid cadence on the tone C. Now comes one of the most exquisite things, not only in this symphony, but in modern music. While the clarinet holds this C, reached in the original key of A-flat major, the muted strings, high and tenuous, in the remote key of A minor, like voices from another world, gently breathe the "phrase of pity." It is magical. With fine dignity of pace they reach the tone C, whereupon we are again quietly but conclusively brought back to A-flat, and with a single plucked bass note the chord of the clarinets sinks to silence (Figure XVII, page 128).

The two middle movements of the symphony, Allegro molto (the scherzo) and Adagio, are played without intervening pause and conceived together. From the point of view both of form and of content their treatment is of exceeding interest. Structurally they are an inset between the first movement and the finale, contrasting sharply with them in key as well as in melodic material, embodying as they do the "sharp" keys (F-sharp minor and D major) in opposition to the A-flat major and D minor of the others. After this inset has been completed, the earlier themes and keys return in the finale and round out the cycle projected by the first movement. Thus the symphony as a whole consists of two interlocking systems--a scheme of structure which gives it both variety and unity in the highest degree.

The scherzo begins with a racing, eagerly hurrying theme, staccato, in the violins, in the fastest possible tempo. Together with a more vigorous, barbarically insistent tune to which it presently (59) gives place, it seems a musical expression of the forward-looking, all-conquering spirit of youth. These themes are separately elaborated, are displaced for a while by a quieter Trio, and finally return with renewed vigor, and at last in combination (75). And now, as coda, comes one of the most remarkable passages of the Symphony. The racing theme returns (82), but now pianissimo, mysterious, shorn of its pristine exuberance. It hesitates, halts, seems to lose faith in itself. It reappears in the more sombre key of F minor, instead of F-sharp minor, and with abated pace (84). A little later it sobers to a still quieter movement, in eighth notes (86), then (87) to quarter notes, and at last (90) the clarinets give it out in a movement eight times slower than the original headlong dash. Indeed, the rhythm seems about to fail entirely when, with a change of key to D major, and of time to Adagio, we hear the identical notes of the original theme, sung now with broad deliberation by the violins, completely transfigured in meaning.

Thus begins the slow movement with the coming of maturity, the taming of the blood, the sadness of self-acquaintance no longer to be postponed. The excitement of unlimited possibilities gives place to the sober recognition of limitations. Poignant grief there is here, unanswered questioning, moments of passionate despair. But with the beautiful and thoroughly Elgarian theme at 96 begins to creep in the spirit of resignation to the inevitable, and of divine pity for human failure, born of this bitter self-discovery. From this point on is heard unmistakably the deeper note of religious consolation, reaching full expression at last in the melody marked _Molto espressivo e sostenuto_, one of the noblest, profoundest, and most spiritual that Elgar has conceived, with which the movement ends.

The finale opens with a slow introduction, intended partly to direct our attention back to the first movement and partly to forecast the strains destined to complete the cycle which it began. We hear the mysterious groping theme first heard in its development and fragments of the "Ideal." Especial emphasis is laid, however, on a march-like tune, given out by bassoons and low strings at the sixth measure, and on an aspiring phrase for clarinet (measures 10-11) peculiar to the present movement. The prevailing mood here, both in the main theme with its emphatic interlocking rhythms (the opening Allegro) and in the second theme at 114, with its buoyant triplets recalling the finale of Brahms's third symphony, is energetic will. This seems to merge in jubilant achievement in the march-like theme of the introduction at its reëntrance at 118. For a moment, to be sure, doubt as to this triumph seems to be suggested by a rather halting version of the "Ideal" (129) and by a pondering version of the march theme (130). But with the return of the main themes of the movement at its recapitulation, beginning at 134 and now inflected towards A-flat, the radical tonality of the whole symphony, the mood of vigorous volition revives, and from now on to the splendid reassertion, by the full orchestra, in its richest sonorities, of the theme of the "Ideal," all is one long climax.

It is hard to see how any candid student can deny the greatness of this symphony. If only for the stoutness of its structure, the grasp with which the fundamental principles of musical form are seized, however the details have to be modified to suit the occasion, and for the richness and variety of its treatment of orchestral coloring, it would hold a conspicuous place among modern orchestral works. But of course these things are only means; the end of music is expression. It is, then, to the fact that the symphony gives eloquent voice to some of the deepest, most sacred, and most elusive of human feelings that we must attribute its real importance. That it does this at a time when most musicians are looking outward rather than inward, and incline to value sensuous beauty above thought, and vividness above profundity, gives us all the more reason for receiving it with gratitude, and finding in it a good omen for the future.

FOOTNOTES:

[20] "Recent Developments in Musical Theory," by Edgar Stillman-Kelley. The Musical Courier, July 1 and 8, 1908.

[21] Vocal score, page 39.

[22] Musical Times, London, May 1, 1911.

[23] Is not Mr. Newman mistaken in stating that this theme begins in G major?

[24] Musical Times, January, 1914.

[25] Musical Times, January, 1909.

[26] Musical Times, September, 1913.

[27] Arranged for piano by the composer. Novello, Ewer, and Company, London.

[28] July, 1911.

[29] This premise, which Mr. Newman expands as if it bore directly on the problem of program music, though true to the verge of truism, hardly helps us to solve that problem. The question, it may be said once again, concerns not the composer's stimulus, but his method; whether, that is, he works through the suggestion of external object or of inner emotional states.

[30] Arrangement for piano by S. Karg-Elert. Novello, Ewer, and Company.

IV

CLAUDE DEBUSSY

IV

CLAUDE DEBUSSY

No peculiarity of contemporary musical taste is more striking than the extraordinary popularity which the elusive songs and piano pieces of Debussy have enjoyed during the last decade or two. They have been heard, with a delight agreeably mixed with bewilderment, in the drawing-rooms of the whole world, just as Grieg's were at a slightly earlier period; and, like Grieg, their author has become the idol of the amateur. There is no doubt of it, Debussy has been the prime musical fad of the twentieth century. The fact is interesting--worth examination. The reasons of it throw a strong light not only on Debussy himself, but--which is more important--on our whole contemporary musical life.

Claude Achille Debussy, born in 1862 at St. Germain-en-Laye, near Paris, and educated at the Conservatoire, first gained wide fame by his opera, "Pelléas et Mélisande," produced at the Opéra Comique in 1902. By its imaginative re-creation in music of Maeterlinck's fatalism and atmosphere of mystery, by its dramatic directness, its justice of declamation, its moderation and avoidance of Wagnerian exaggeration, perhaps above all by the originality of its harmonic style and its delicately tinted orchestration, it undoubtedly marked an epoch in French music. Debussy had at this time already fixed the fundamental qualities of his style in such compositions as the quartet for strings (1893), more virile than his later works, and the well-known orchestral prelude after a prose poem by Mallarmé, archpriest of the symbolistic movement, "L'Après-midi d'un faune." In later orchestral pieces, the Nocturnes for orchestra (1899), the symphonic sketches "La Mer" (1905), the highly colored "Iberia" (1907), as well as in choral works like the "Martyre de Saint Sébastien" (1911), we see him refining the same manner, seeking always, like his compatriot the poet Verlaine, the subtleties, the delicacies, the shades and half-shades, _la nuance, la nuance toujours_. It is, however, through his smaller works--his songs and especially his piano pieces--that Debussy is best known to the mass of his admirers; and as the same qualities reveal themselves here too, it is in these that we shall try to understand them. In the "Estampes" (1903), the "Masques" (1904), the "Images" (1905 and 1908), the "Préludes" (1910 and 1913), and many lesser pieces he has created what is virtually a department of his own in the literature of the piano. Here is the essential Debussy.

The adaptation between the art and the audience here, as is always the case where there is extreme popularity, is so perfect that we can equally well begin our study from either end. Let us start with the audience. Not that Debussy consciously sought to "give the public what it wants"; no artist worthy the name does that. What is meant is simply that his qualities were spontaneously such as exactly to satisfy his audience's requirements; or, in biological terms, the organism was fortunate enough to be exactly suited to its environment, peculiarly "fit to survive." As investigating biologists we can therefore either approach the environment through the organism or the organism through the environment--and we choose to do the latter.

The environment of the modern composer is a public numerically larger than ever before, and qualitatively affected by this increased size according to the law of averages--degraded, that is, from the qualities of the minority toward those of the majority. In less abstract terms, the modern audience contains to every one intelligent listener ten or a hundred who are ignorant, untrained, or inattentive. The results of this disproportion are familiar to us on all sides; they range from such a general matter as the very conception of art, and especially of music, as a mere amusement or diversion rather than a spiritual experience, down to such details as the preference, natural to the untrained, of sensuous pleasure (in rich tone-combinations, for example) to emotion and thought (as embodied musically in melody), and of a vague day-dreaming mood when listening to music to the imaginative and sympathetic attention that music requires of him who would really grasp its objective beauty.

Now it is in his appeal to this modern preference of sensation to thought and emotion, and of subjective day-dreaming to the impersonal perception of beauty, that Debussy has been especially happy. He is not, of course, alone in making these appeals. The preoccupation with the sensuous is observable in most contemporary music, an especially striking instance being Strauss's orchestration. As for the ministering to "mood" rather than to the sense of beauty, the whole tendency toward "program," so characteristic of our time, might be accounted for by a cynic as a sacrifice to the majority of something they do not understand (music) to something they do (an opportunity for day-dreaming). But Debussy is peculiarly thoroughgoing in his application of these familiar modern methods. All the elements of his art are focused upon this kind of satisfaction.

First he gives us a title admirably fitted (for he has keen literary instinct) to liberate our reverizing impulse--"Gardens in the Rain," "Reflections in the Water," "Sounds and Perfumes Turn in the Evening Air," "Gold-Fish," "Veils." Then he proceeds to establish the mood of idle reverie thus suggested by means of a tonal web which at no point distracts our attention by any definite features of its own, melodic, rhythmic, harmonic, or structural. All is vague, floating, kaleidoscopic. Sustained melody is especially avoided, for nothing arrests attention or dominates mood like melody; we have therefore only bits and snippets of tune, forming and disappearing like cloud forms or the eddies in smoke-wreaths. The rhythms are equally casual and indeterminate, often of exquisite grace, but obeying no law. The harmonies are surprisingly various--rich, clear, or clangorous, as the case may be; but always elusive, avoiding the definition that would impose thought rather than encourage fancy. The effect of vagueness is here enhanced by the much-talked-of whole-tone scale. As there is little musical thought or emotion (melody), there is still less of that natural growth and combination of thought with thought which we call thematic development and polyphony. These are alien to the type of art, and are wisely avoided.

It is curious to compare Debussy's treatment of his programs with that of Strauss. The imagination of the German, however he may call literary or pictorial associations to his aid, is primarily musical. A literary idea may suggest to him a theme, as Till Eulenspiegel's capricious mischief strikes from him that surprising Till motive, with its queer jumps and galvanic rhythms. But once such a theme exists it begins to act, musically, of itself, and develops such a network of musically interesting relationships that the listener, fascinated, clean forgets the program in his purely æsthetic delight. Strauss, probably, forgets it too. He does for us, in spite of his programs, exactly the kind of thing that Mozart, Beethoven, and Schumann do; he creates intrinsically significant and expressive musical forms (melodies) capable of absorbing our attention and transfiguring all they touch--even a rogue like Till Eulenspiegel--with their æsthetic magic. The Frenchman's imagination, on the contrary, is primarily literary, dramatic, pictorial. He is led by it, not to the creation of musically significant forms, but to a keenly sympathetic realization of the mood suggested by the program, and to a most subtle musical evocation of it by appropriate means, chiefly sensuous. He is thus, literally, a painter of "mood pictures." And as most people do not care to make the effort to follow and relive a musical experience, but prefer to be lulled by agreeable sounds into a trance in which their fancy may weave adventures and project pictures for itself, his audience is delighted. From this point of view symbolism is the type of art which most appeals to the inartistic, and Debussy is the musician most beloved by the unmusical.

We should not be talking about Debussy, however, if these negatives were all there were to say about him. Thousands of composers before him have succeeded in avoiding definite melody, rhythm, and harmony, coherent thematic development, and thoughtful polyphony, and have won only oblivion. His not distracting out attention by these musical elements is a part of his scheme of art, but the more important part of it is the sensuous charm by which he wins our interest and inhibits our mental and emotional activity--the sheer tonal magic of his sonorities. He is a miracle of deftness in the purveying of musical sweets. This is admitted even by his detractors, who cannot deny the seductiveness with which his music woos the physical ear, however little it appeals to their heads or their hearts. As for his admirers, they become rhapsodic over these "effects" and "sonorities," which they praise with a half-religious awe that used to be reserved for ideas. Listen, for instance, to M. Chennevière,[31] an accredited expositor: "Voluptuous, corporeal, naturalistic--such is the Debussyan art. The passions, the sentiments, leave him often indifferent." And again: "The modern ear has become very fine, very delicate. It delights in sonorities. A beautiful chord is a rare intoxication, and sometimes an author repeats it lingeringly, the better to savor it." If we adopt, at least tentatively, this frankly sensuous and hedonistic view of music, we shall find much to admire in Debussy.

In the long evolution from the simple to the complex which music shares with everything else we know we may observe two different methods of tone-combination which, working together, have given us the elaborate texture of the modern art. That especially suited to melodic instruments, like those used in the orchestra or the chorus, puts melodies together as an engraver puts together lines, each remaining distinct, standing off clearly from the others, representing a different musical thought, and yet all agreeing, or, as we say, harmonizing. This method, called polyphony, requiring great skill in the composer and close attention from the audience, is illustrated by such masterpieces as a fugue of Bach, a string quartet of Beethoven, or the famous passage at the end of Wagner's Meistersinger Overture, where four themes are driven abreast as in some proud chariot. It results in a texture essentially composite, involving relations between elements held in mind together --that is to say, it is thoughtful, and requires answering thought for its appreciation.

But as soon as the piano, ill suited to melody because of its unsustained tone, began to reach any degree of development--that is to say, about the time of Schumann (1810-1856) and Chopin (1809-1849)--it became evident that this instrument compensated for its shortcomings in rendering polyphony by a special aptitude for another kind of tone-combination, which we may call the homophonic or chordal. A great many tones could be played at once, held either by the fingers or by the damper-pedal, and made to shimmer with those thousand hues of the tonal rainbow we call "overtones." There was apparently no limit to the complexity of the agglomerations of tone that the ear could thus be trained not only to accept but to delight in--the rule being, as Chopin in his "fluid and vaporous sonorities" showed, that the greater in number and the more dissonant or clashing in character were these color tones, the more agreeably rich would be the resulting impression on the ear. But however complex these tone associations or chords, it is important to note that this resultant psychological impression was simple and unified--that is, the ear perceived but one thing, and not several as in the polyphonic style. There was therefore no comparison of different elements, no thought or emotion; there was simply sensation, physically delightful, mentally and emotionally meaningless.

Debussy has probably brought more talent and originality to the elaboration of this method of writing for the piano than any other composer since Chopin and Schumann. Open his pages anywhere and you will find these wide-spaced chords, these gossamer arpeggios and scales embroidering them, these nicely calculated grace-notes adding just the dissonance needed to season the dish. Take, for instance, the opening measures of "La Cathédrale engloutie" (Figure XVIII), characteristically marked "Profoundly calm (in a softly sonorous mist)."

The intention to produce a misty, not to say foggy, homogeneity of tone here is so obvious that it seems strange that just such passages have aroused the ire of pedants who have tried to apply to them the rules of the other way of writing--the polyphonic. When we wish diverse melodies to stand out clearly one from another, we must avoid "parallel fifths and octaves," which make them coalesce. Accordingly Debussy has been blamed, by those who prefer rules to reason, for using precisely the device which will give him the physical richness with mental vacuity which he is seeking.

When this admirable colorist wishes a brighter or more incisive sonority than one of this kind, he resorts to dissonances, and especially to the interval of the "second"--notes adjacent in the scale. The opening measures of "Et la lune descend sur le temple qui fut" (Figure XIX) afford an example of this in a quiet tone; more clangorous qualities of it will be found in "Masques," "L'île joyeuse," and "Jardins sous la pluie." The first example illustrates what was said of the simplicity for the mind, whatever the complexity for the ear, of this kind of tone-combination. The chords contain a good many notes each; but there emerges only one melody, and that rather obvious.

The same search for rich or brilliant color that led to this use of "seconds," carried a little further, brought the composer to that whole-tone scale (or scale entirely made up of "seconds," as C, D, E, F-sharp, G-sharp, A-sharp, C) which he has used with such irresistible appeal. He has, to be sure, no patent right in it. Moussorgsky, Borodine, and others had used it before him; his French contemporaries have used it with skill; and now that it is common property some have even elicited from it strains of plangent force and manly energy foreign to Debussy's temperament. The fact remains that he has made it peculiarly his own by the subtlety, variety, and charm of his employment of it, as may be seen, for example, throughout "Voiles," in the first book of Préludes, and in scattered measures in almost any of his pieces. The whole-tone scale is indeed pre-ordained by nature as a goal to which such an art as Debussy's inevitably tends; its clashing tones feed the greedy ear with the richest diet the gamut can provide; at the same time the equivocal character of the chords, or rather the single chord (the so-called "augmented triad") that can harmonize it, and the self-contradictoriness of its tones from the point of view of the older scale, do away with the sense of key and even of momentary repose, and leave us groping in a tonal night in which, since there is nothing to be observed, we can give ourselves up undisturbed to dreaming.

Debussy is thus a true child of his time in his quest of the sensuous, and a true child of his country in the subtlety with which he pursues it. His Gallic taste saves him from the coarseness of so much of the contemporary Teutonic art; and while his aim is no more spiritual than that of the Germans, he prefers innuendo, implication, and understatement to the gross exaggeration of Strauss, the vehemence in platitude of Mahler, and the plodding literalness of Reger. Thus opposing, as he has so effectively done, the ideal of mere force, reducing in "Pelléas" the mammoth modern orchestra to a handful of men skilfully exploited, substituting the most elusive sonorities of the piano for the crashing magnificence of the Liszt school, everywhere insisting on subtle quality rather than overwhelming quantity, he has exercised one of the most beneficial of influences against vulgarity of the bumptious type. But sybaritism, too, has its own vulgarity; the question of aim is fundamental in art; and in judging the distinction of Debussy's aims we cannot evade the question whether physical pleasure, however refined, is the highest good an artist can seek. His charm, beyond doubt, is great enough to justify his popularity. Yet it would be regrettable if the student of modern French music, satisfied with this charm, were to neglect the less popular but more virile, more profound, and more spiritual music of César Franck, Ernest Chausson, and Vincent d'Indy.

NOTE: Claude Debussy died in Paris, March 26, 1918.

FOOTNOTES:

[31] "Claude Debussy et son œuvre," by Daniel Chennevière, Paris, 1913.

V

VINCENT d'INDY

V

VINCENT d'INDY

I

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What, then, are these fundamental principles of composition which d'Indy has insisted upon in his teaching, promulgated in the "Cours de composition musicale," and exemplified in his works? They are all, in essence, but differing forms of the central principle of all art, of all beauty--that the utmost variety must be but the outgrowth and flowering of a perfect unity. We have seen that many modern composers, baffled by the richness of the materials with which they had to deal, have failed in the effort thus to stamp unity upon them: their art has been confused and fragmentary. Others again--the pseudo-classics and reactionaries--have resorted to a violent simplification of the material in order to preserve unity, and have thus impoverished their art. Only the greatest, in the first rank of whom must be placed Franck and d'Indy, have had at once a firm enough hold upon musical tradition and a broad enough command of new methods and idioms to write music at once various and unified, at once thoroughly "modern" and thoroughly sane. To this unifying power of d'Indy's mind M. Rolland pays a fine tribute. "Clearness!" he cries, "it is the mark of M. d'Indy's intelligence. There are no shadows in him. His thought and his art are as clear as his look, which gives to his face so much of youth. It is a necessity for him to judge, to order, to classify, to unify. Never was there a spirit more French.... And this is the more remarkable in that his nature is far from being simple. Through a wide musical education, a constant desire to learn, it has been enriched by many elements, different, almost contradictory.... Not to be submerged by this richness of opposing elements requires a great force of passion or of will, which eliminates or chooses and transforms. M. d'Indy eliminates almost nothing: he organizes. There are in his music the qualities of a general: the knowledge of the end, the patient will to attain it, the perfect acquaintance with the means, the spirit of order, and the mastery over his work and over himself. Despite the variety of the materials he employs, the whole is always clear."

II