Chapter VIII: Epilogue: the Meaning of Music 203 (2)

Of this personality, as it appears in the flesh, we get an interesting glimpse in Tschaïkowsky's Diary.[B] «During the rehearsal of Brahms's new trio,» writes Tschaïkowsky, «as I was taking the liberty of making some remarks as to the skill and execution of the relative _tempo_ 2-3--remarks which were very good-naturedly received by the composer--there entered the room a very short, middle-aged man, exceedingly fragile in appearance, with shoulders of unequal height, fair hair brushed back from his forehead, and a very slight, almost boyish beard and mustache. There was nothing very striking about the features of this man, whose exterior at once attracted my sympathy, for it would be impossible to call them handsome or regular; but he had an uncommon charm, and blue eyes, not very large, but irresistibly fascinating, recalling the glance of a charming and candid child. I rejoiced in the depths of my heart when we were introduced to each other, and it turned out that this personality which was so inexplicably sympathetic to me belonged to a musician whose warmly emotional music had long ago won my heart. He proved to be the Norwegian composer, Edvard Grieg.» This was in 1888, when Grieg was forty-five. We may compare with it another description, made a year later by a Frenchman, M. Ernest Closson, when Grieg was playing and conducting his works in Paris. «Grieg is small, thin, and narrow-shouldered,» writes M. Closson.[C] «His body, which is like a child's, is always in motion--the movements short, lively, singularly jerky and angular, each step shaking the whole body and hitching the shoulder as if he limped; a 'bundle of nerves' [«_paquet des nerfs_»], to use a doctor's phrase of picturesque energy. The head, which looks massive on so small a body, is intelligent and very handsome, with long grayish hair thrown back, thin face, smooth-shaven chin, short, thick mustache, small but full nose, and eyes!--eyes superb, green, gray, in which one can fancy one catches a glimpse of Norway, with its melancholy fjords and its luminous mists. His gaze is serious, wonderfully soft, with a peculiar expression, at once worn, tentative, and childishly naïve. The entire effect is of kindness, gentleness, candor, a sincere modesty.»

It is thus obvious that Grieg is of the nervous, sensitive temperament, the temperament of Keats and Stevenson, quick and ardent in feeling, and in art notable for subjective, intimate work rather than for the wide objective point of view. Grieg's music is of value, indeed, just because it is the artistic expression of delicate personal feeling. We shall find that his whole development tended toward a singularly individual, or at most national, utterance; that his efforts toward a complexer or more universal style, such as in poetry we call epic, were unsuccessful; and that his real and inimitable achievement is all in the domain of the pure lyric.

Edvard Grieg was born in Bergen, Norway, in 1843. At an early age he showed musical talent, starting in to learn the piano and theory at six, under his mother's direction. Gesine Grieg, born Hagerup, descendent from a forceful Norwegian family which had produced some famous men, was a woman of musical and poetic instinct and of strong character. She had studied music in Hamburg and in London, and given some concerts and many soirées in Bergen. In a word, her son could not have found a better guide in his first studies. At nine Grieg surprised his school-teacher by submitting in place of a literary composition a set of original variations on a German melody, a substitution which was not kindly received. He was told to stop such nonsense. The artistic temperament revealed itself also in great sensitiveness to the beauty of the somber Northern landscape, and at fifteen Grieg wished to become a painter. Fortunately, however, his musical ability was recognized by the famous violinist Ole Bull, at whose suggestion his parents decided to send him to the Leipsic Conservatory, whither he traveled in 1858. Here again the romanticism of the boy showed itself in his fretfulness under the strict régime of his masters, Hauptmann, Richter, Rietz, Reinecke, and Moscheles, and in his passionate devotion to the works of Schumann and Chopin, who were then looked upon in academic circles as somewhat dangerous revolutionaries. Except for a vacation of some months at home, necessitated by the pulmonary trouble which has ever since weakened Grieg's health, he spent four years in the Conservatory, being graduated in 1862.

In his earliest compositions, produced at this period, the traits that afterwards distinguished him are rather hampered by academic influences and uncertainty of intention. The four Pieces, opus 1, by no means devoid of his peculiar flavor, are yet tentative in style and reminiscent of older masters, particularly Chopin and Mendelssohn. Of the Poetic Tone-pictures, opus 3, the second and fourth are the well-established type of graceful _salon_ piece. Number four, indeed, might almost be a strayed leaf from that gentle but hackneyed work which some modern cynic has called the «Songs without Music.» Yet the very next piece is full-fledged Grieg. Here is the short four-measure phrase, transposed a third and repeated, here the descending chromatic harmonizations, here the raucous fifths as of peasant players, that we shall presently learn to look for among the hall-marks of his writings. But more important than any such technical details is the general animation, producing trenchant rhythm, graceful melody, and warm harmony, that always sparkles in Grieg's best work. In the Poetic Tone-pictures he is already himself, though not his mature self.

Being at graduation somewhat bewildered and uncertain as to his future course, Grieg turned his steps in 1863 to the Danish capital, the home of a great man whom he idolized. «One day,» he writes in an autobiographical fragment, «I had gone out with my friend Matthison-Hansen to Klampenborg. Suddenly he nudged my arm.

«'What is it?' I said.

«'Do you see that little man with the large gray hat?'

«'I see him.'

«'Do you know who it is?' said he.

«'I haven't the least idea.'

«'That's Gade,' he said. 'Shall I introduce you?'

«And without waiting for my reply he took me up to the Professor, with the curt announcement:

«'Professor, a Norwegian friend of mine--a good musician.'

«'Is it Nordraak?' asked Gade.

«'No, it is Grieg,' answered Matthison-Hansen.

«'Oh, that's who it is,' said Gade, scanning my insignificant and humble self from head to foot with a searching glance, while I stood, not without awe, face to face with the man whose works I treasured so highly. 'Have you something to show me?'

«'No,' I answered. For the things I had finished didn't seem good enough.

«'Then go home and write a symphony,' recommended Gade.»

It is indicative of the groping stage at which Grieg's genius still paused that he actually tried to write a symphony, two movements of which are preserved in the Symphonic Pieces, opus 14--Grieg, whose talent was symphonic in about the degree that Brahms's was operatic. Contact with the friendly little man in the large gray hat, who has been dubbed the «Danish Mendelssohn,» was doubtless a stimulus to the young Grieg; but other and more radical influences were needed to awaken his personality and bring him to his own. Such influences, however, he actually found in Copenhagen. The «Nordraak» for whom Gade had at first taken him, a fervently patriotic Norwegian of magnetic personality, acquainted him with Norwegian folk-songs and fired him with an ambition to found on them a finished art. Meeting in solemn conclave, with all the self-importance of youth, these two enthusiasts took the oath of musical allegiance to their fatherland. «It was as though scales fell from my eyes,» writes Grieg; «for the first time I learned ... to understand my own nature. We abjured the Gade-Mendelssohn insipid and diluted Scandinavianism, and bound ourselves with enthusiasm to the new path which the northern school is now following.» Nor did their zeal confine itself to composition. In 1864 they founded, with their Danish friends Horneman and Matthison-Hansen, the Euterpe Musical Society, for the performance of Scandinavian works. This institution, which must have reacted stimulatingly on their composition, they supported energetically up to Grieg's departure in 1866 for Christiania. Finally, it was in these years of his freshest vigor, in which he was conscious both of inner power and of outer opportunities, that Grieg met the lady, Miss Nina Hagerup, his cousin, who became in time his wife. It is not to be wondered at that no period in his life was so fruitful as this.

His most characteristic works, accordingly, were composed between his graduation from the conservatory and the early seventies--between his twentieth and his thirtieth years. There are the two inimitable Sonatas for Violin and Piano, opus 8 and 13; the Piano Sonata, opus 7; the incidental music to Ibsen's Peer Gynt; some of the most charming of the Lyric Pieces for piano and of the Songs, and the Piano Concerto, opus 16; the best part, certainly, of his entire musical product. It were a hopeless as well as useless task to describe in words the qualities of these compositions. What shall one say in words of the flavor of an orange? It is sweet? Yes. And acid? Yes, a little. And it has a delicate aroma, and is juicy and cool. But how much idea of an orange has one conveyed then? And similarly with this indescribably delicate music of Grieg; there is little that can be pertinently or serviceably said of it. One may point out, however, its persistently lyrical character. It is like the poetry of Mr. Henley in its exclusive concern with moods, with personal emotions of the subtlest, most elusive sort. It is intimate, suggestive, intangible. It voices the gentlest feelings of the heart, or summons up the airiest visions of the imagination. It is whimsical, too, changes its hues like the chameleon, and often surprises us with a sudden flight to some unexpected shade of expression. Again, its finesse is striking. The phrases are polished like gems, the melodies charm us with their perfect proportions, the cadences are as consummate as they are novel. Then, again, the rhythm is most delightfully frank and straightforward; there is no maundering or uncertainty, but always a vigorous dancing progress, as candid as childhood. It is hard to keep one's feet still through some of the Norwegian Dances. And though in the Lyric Pieces rhythm is idealized, it is always definite and clear, so that they are at the opposite pole from all that formless sentimentality which abandons accent in order to wail. Again, we must notice the curious exotic flavor of this music, a flavor not Oriental but northern, a half-wild, half-tender pathos, outlandish a little, but not turgid--on the contrary, perfectly pellucid. An example is a little waltz that figures as number two of the Lyric Pieces, opus 12. Grieg's music, then, is lyrical, intimate, shapely, and exotic, if such words mean anything--yes, just as the orange is sweet, acid, and aromatic. One who would feel the quality of these works must hear them.

On the other hand, Grieg is never large or heroic; he never wears the buskin. He has neither the depth of passion nor the intellectual grasp needed to make music in the grand style. Probably of all his peculiarities the most significant is the shortness of his phrases and his manner of repeating them almost literally, displaced a little in pitch, but not otherwise altered. Almost all his music can be cut up into segments two or four measures long, each segment complete in itself, an entire musical thought. If the reader will examine the little Waltz just mentioned, for example, he will see that it is constructed as follows: after two introductory measures a phrase of melody is announced, four measures in length; this is immediately repeated, at the same pitch but slightly varied in rhythm; then enters another phrase, two measures long, which is repeated literally a third lower; its latter half is twice echoed, and there is a two-measure cadence. All is then repeated. The middle part of the piece, in A major, is built in much the same way; after it the first part is given once more, and there is a short coda. The construction of this charming piece, in a word, is very like that of the passages from primers that are familiar to us all: «Is this a boy? This is a boy. Has the boy a dog? The boy has a dog. This is the dog of the boy.» And Grieg's coda adds meditatively, «Of the boy ... the boy ... boy.» His thoughts complete themselves quickly; they have little span, and they are combined, not by interfusion, but by juxtaposition. He never weaves a tapestry; he assembles a mosaic. We have only to compare his music with that of some great master, of wide scope and large synthetic power, like Brahms or Beethoven, to feel precisely in what sense he is lyrical rather than heroic, charming rather than elevated, suggestive rather than informative. Compare, for instance, with his waltz, the waltz of Brahms, number eight in opus 39. Here there is a sustained flight of twelve measures, the tune poising and soaring as it were on a rising or falling breeze, or like a kite that now dips and now is up again, but never touches the earth. It is interesting to play the two waltzes one after the other, noting the difference in effect between the precise, dainty, clipped phrases of the one and the broad-spanned arch of melody of the other. Such contrasts are at the basis of all significant discriminations of musical form.

How much the «short breath» of Grieg is due to the nature of his thematic material is a difficult question to answer. Folk-tunes, it is certain, are simple in structure, composed of short phrases expressing the naïve emotions of childlike minds. On the other hand, had they not fulfilled Grieg's personal needs, supplying the sort of atmosphere he was meant to breathe in, he could never have assimilated them as he has done. Perhaps a true account of the matter is that his nature is of such unusual simplicity and ingenuousness as to find in folk-melodies its natural utterance, and to feel in their primitive phrase-structure no limitation. Intellectually, the man is not more mature than the people. From whatever sources he might draw his germinal ideas, he would never combine them in complexer forms or larger patterns than he has found ready-made to his hand in the national song. There are, however, in Norwegian music peculiarities of a different sort that we can hardly conceive as proving other than hindrances in the formation of a wholesomely eclectic style--peculiarities which are all present full-fledged in so early a work of Grieg as the Piano Concerto, opus 16, written in 1868. At the very outset, in the descending octave passage, there are two melodic tricks that recur everywhere in Grieg--the fall from the seventh of the scale to the fifth, and from the third to the tonic. Both progressions, anomalous in classic music, are prominent features of the Northern folk-tunes. Then, in the first theme, assigned to the orchestra, there are to be noticed, besides these melodic steps, the bodily displacement of the phrase already described, carrying it from A minor into C major. In the second theme, as well as in the _cantabile_ piano passage that prepares the way for it, there is a rhythmic device characteristic of Grieg--the mixing in one measure of three notes to the beat with two notes to the beat, of which the prototype is to be found in the «Springtanz» of Norwegian peasants. Here also is the weak cadence, that is to say, the cadence with tonic chord coming on an unaccented beat. So much for melodic and rhythmic peculiarities; as a harmonist Grieg has methods equally persistent. His love of bare fifths, reiterated in the bass with boorish vigor, and his manner of harmonizing with descending chromatic sixths or thirds, both of which we remarked in opus 3, are illustrated in this Concerto; the first in the conclusion-theme of the first movement, and the second in measures fourteen to sixteen of the beautiful Adagio. Finally, he is devoted to the secondary sevenths, especially in harsh and daring sequence such as make up most of the Norwegian March, opus 54, No. 2. Mannerisms like these Grieg has, on the whole, in far larger measure than most composers. On almost any of his pages the student will have no difficulty in finding for himself instances of one or more of these mannerisms.

Now, so many little tricks and idiosyncrasies, however piquant in the work of a beginner, could hardly escape becoming, as time went on, an incubus to even the most vigorous imagination. Nothing menaces thought more than affectations and whimsicalities of style. And even in the meridian of Grieg's activity, when he was charming a staid world with the fresh beauties of the Piano Sonata and the two early Violin Sonatas, there were not wanting critics who discerned his danger and foresaw that he must either broaden his methods or deteriorate. Over twenty years ago the following words were written in an English magazine by Frederick Niecks: «My fear in the case of Grieg always was that his love of Norwegian idioms would tend to narrow, materialize, and make shallow his conceptions, and prevent him from forming a style by imposing on him a manner.» Subsequent events have proved that this fear was but too well founded. Although, during the years at Copenhagen, and the eight years, from 1866 to 1874, that Grieg lived in Christiania teaching and conducting, he continued to do excellent work, he seems to have even then reached the acme of his powers, and thenceforward to have imperceptibly declined. It is rather a melancholy fact that when, in 1874, receiving a pension of sixteen hundred crowns from the Government, which enabled him to resign the conductorship of the Musical Union of Christiania, he began to devote himself almost entirely to composition, his mental vivacity was waning and his lovely lyrical utterance was beginning to be smothered under mannerisms. From this time on he advanced more by familiarizing the world with his earlier compositions than by adding to them anything particularly novel or precious. He traveled in Germany, Holland and Denmark, gave concerts in England in 1888, and visited France a year later, playing and conducting his works at Paris. For the rest, he retired to his picturesque villa, Troldhangen, ten miles from Bergen, where he lives a peaceful and secluded country life.

It is not difficult to see why Grieg's later works should decline rather than advance. In the first place, his interest had been from the first concentrated on personal expression. His impulse was individual, not universal. He never sought to widen or deepen the forms of musical beauty, to extend the range of resources at the command of musicians; he merely used what he found ready-made to voice his own poetic feeling. In this he succeeded admirably. In the second place, charmed by the exotic quality of Norwegian music, a quality that he found also in his own nature, he adopted the native idiom with eagerness, and spent the years most composers devote to learning the musical language in acquiring--a dialect. Thirdly, his mind was of the type which cares much for beauty of ornament--even more, perhaps, than for a highly wrought harmony of line and form. It was the inevitable result of these three circumstances that, first, he should reach his highest activity in early youth, when romantic feeling is at its acme and thought habitually subjective, and thereafter decline; second, that the dialect which at first was so charming, with its unfamiliar words and its bewitching accent, should eventually reveal its paucity and its provincialism; and finally, that a mind naturally fond of rich detail, neglectful of large shapeliness, should have recourse, in the ebb of inner impulse, to transcription, paraphrase, and all the other devices for securing superficial ornament and luxury of effect. With opus 41 Grieg began transcribing his own songs for the piano, dressing up the simple melodies in all sorts of arpeggios, curious harmonies, and other musical decorations; and between his fiftieth and seventieth opus-numbers there is little but representation of Norwegian tunes, now in one guise and now in another, but seldom indeed with any of the old novel charm. (A trace of it there is, perhaps, in opus 62, No. 2, and again in opus 80, No. 4.) The extraordinary pyrotechnical display that the transcription, opus 41, No. 5, makes out of so simple a song as «The Princess» is branded by M. Closson as «un crime de lèse-art.» And to one who has felt the magic of the Kuhreigen, opus 17, No. 22, it is saddening to turn to the same melody as it appears in opus 63, No. 2, with all its maiden grace brushed and laced and furbelowed into an _à la mode_ elegance and vacuity. Thus Grieg has not, like the more cosmopolitan, objective, and universal composers, advanced in his work up to the very end. As years have progressed, the accidental in it, the inessential, has become more prominent, has tended to obscure what is vital and beautiful. As the spirit waned, the letter has become more rigidly insistent. Idiosyncrasy has supplanted originality. To find the true Grieg, supple, spontaneous, and unaffected, we must go back to the early works.

When all is said, however, Grieg has in these early works made a contribution to music which our sense of his later shortcomings must not make us forget. His Piano Sonata and his Violin Sonatas supply chamber-music with a note of pure lyric enthusiasm, of fresh unthinking animation, not elsewhere to be found. His Peer Gynt Suite fills a similar place among orchestral works. His best piano pieces, and, above all, his lovely and too little known songs, are unique in their delicate voicing of the tenderest, most elusive personal feeling, as well as in their consummate finesse of workmanship. It is a Lilliputian world, if you will, but a fair one. That art of the future which Grieg predicts in his essay on Mozart, which «will unite lines and colors in marriage, and show that it has its roots in all the past, that it draws sustenance from old as well as from new masters,» will acknowledge in Grieg himself the source of one indispensable element--the element of naïve and spontaneous romance.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE.--Grieg has had the good sense to publish almost
all of his works in the inexpensive and excellent Peters Edition.
The amateur will wish to acquaint himself first of all with some
such representative pieces as the following: Piano-pieces--Poetic
tone-pictures, op. 3, Humoreskes, op. 6, Sonata, op. 7, Northern
Dances, op. 17, Albumblatter, op. 28, and the Lyric Pieces, op. 12,
38, 43, and 47 (op. 54, 57, 62, 65, and 68 are inferior). Four hand
arrangements--Elegiac Melodies, op. 34, Norwegian Dances, op. 35, and
the first Peer Gynt Suite, op. 40. Chamber-music--the three Sonatas
for Violin and Piano and the 'Cello Sonata, op. 36. Of the songs,
sixty are printed in the five «Albums» of the Peters Edition. The
second contains half a dozen of Grieg's most perfect songs, among them
«I Love Thee,» «Morning Dew,» «Parting» and «Wood Wanderings.» «To
Springtime» in Album I, «A Swan» and «Solvejg's Song» in Album III,
and «By the Riverside,» «The Old Mother,» and «On the Way Home» in
Album IV, are also characteristic and beautiful. The reader who feels
Grieg's charm at all will end by buying all five Albums, though there
is little of value in the last.

FOOTNOTES:

[A] Thus «4/4 time» is a compound of twos, «6/8 time» is a compound of threes, and the interesting 5/4 measure, so effective in the second movement of Tschaïkowsky's Pathetic Symphony, is a compound of twos and threes regularly alternating.

[B] «Diary of My Tour in 1888,» translated in «Tschaïkowsky, His Life and Works,» by Rosa Newmarch. (John Lane, New York, 1900.)

[C] «Edvard Grieg et la Musique Scandinave,» Ernest Closson. Paris, Librairie Fischbacher, 1892.

III
ANTONIN DVOŘÁK

III
ANTONIN DVOŘÁK

On an October evening in 1892 there was given in New York City a «Grand Concert» in exploitation of the «Eminent Composer and Director of the National Conservatory of Music of America,» Dr. Antonin Dvořák. There was an orchestra of eighty, a chorus of three hundred, and an audience of several thousand; the ceremonies, partly hospitable and partly patriotic, included an oration, the presentation of a silver wreath, and the singing of «America» by the assembled multitude. Outwardly picturesque as the occasion doubtless was, it must have been even more striking in its suggestion of the extreme contrasts in life which accompany the turning of fortune's wheel. Here was a man, originally a Bohemian peasant, a village butcher's son, who for years had endured the most grinding poverty, the most monotonous obscurity, the most interminable labor for power and recognition, coming at last, a famous musician, to hear his works performed and his genius extolled in a great, enthusiastic country that wanted, and was «willing to pay for,» a school of music. Even statistics are eloquent when character is behind them; at a salary of fifteen thousand dollars a year the National Conservatory of America had engaged as principal the composer who, less than twenty years before, had been pensioned by the Austrian Ministry of Education just one hundredth of that sum. Dvořák's reception in New York was an appropriate outward sign of a victory achieved over peculiarly indifferent destiny by peculiarly indomitable pluck.

As one looks back from this imposing event over the course of Dvořák's laborious, persistent youth, one's attention, no matter how much it is at first engaged with the changes of his outer life, with his progress from obscure poverty to comfort and fame, soon dwells even more on the underlying identity of the man through all changes, on his unswerving simplicity of nature and steadfastness of aim. More remarkable than the diversity of his career is the unity of his character. From first to last, whether in Mühlhausen, Prague, London, or New York, he is essentially a peasant. His deepest moral trait is the dumb persistence, the unthinking doggedness, of the peasant. His mental atmosphere is the peasant's innocence of self-consciousness, his unintrospective candor. Not like the sophisticated man, who weighs motives and foresees obstacles, does he pursue his troublous way. He is, on the contrary, like an engine placed on the track and started; through darkness and day, through failure and success, through weakness and strength, he steams ahead, ever propelled by irresistible inner force, insensible and unamenable to circumstance. And his musical impulse is of the same sort. His aims in music have always been simple, definite, unsophisticated by intellectualism. Taking keen delight in the sensuous beauty of sound, gifted with the musical sense in its most fundamental form of physical susceptibility, from his earliest days he set about learning to produce pleasant effects of rhythm and consonance, with utter sincerity, with no reference to derivative and secondary musical values. When, as a boy, he heard the villagers playing their native dances, his blood stirred in sympathy, and as soon as he was able he took a hand. When he was older he invented similar pieces, gradually refining them, but always cherishing the brightness of tone, the vigor of rhythmic life, that had first won his devotion. And when, in New York, an experienced and honored musician, he was expected to advise our composers, it was highly characteristic of him that he recommended them to pour their ideas into the negro molds. Here was a music simple, sensuous, highly rhythmic; he looked no further, he was disconcerted by no ethnological problems, nor even by the incongruity that any man of the world would have seen between negro song and our subtly mingled, highly complex American character. Bohemian folk-melodies had expressed him; why should not plantation tunes express us? But perhaps his curious simplicity reveals itself most of all in his perfectly uncritical fecundity as a composer. He writes with extreme rapidity, and indefatigably. The great Stabat Mater is said to have been completed in six weeks, and his opus numbers extend beyond a hundred. He writes as if nothing existed in the world but himself and an orchestra waiting to play his scores. He is never embarrassed by a sense of limitation, by the perception in others of powers he lacks. Though he has studied the masters, he is not abashed by them. The standards of scholarship, those academic bugbears, have for him no terrors. Indeed, of all great composers he is perhaps least the scholar, most the sublimated troubadour, enriching the world with an apotheosized tavern-music. In reading his life we must never forget these things: his simple nature, his sensuous rather than emotional or intellectual devotion to music, and his immunity from the checks and palsies of wide learning and fastidious taste.

There is in a rural district of Bohemia, on the Moldau River, a quiet little village called Nelahozeves, or, in German, Mühlhausen,[D] where, in 1841, was born Antonin, eldest son of Frantisek Dvořák, the village innkeeper and butcher. The Dvořáks were people not without consideration among their fellow-townsmen; not only was mine host of the tavern a widely acquainted man, but his wife's father was bailiff to a prince. One may imagine the potency, in a small hamlet, of such a conjunction of prominence and prestige. Nevertheless, as social distinction has no direct effect on a man's income, and as the butcher's family grew in the course of years inconveniently numerous, it happened that Antonin, the eldest of eight children, was looked to in early youth to learn his father's trade and contribute toward the family support. Unfortunately, he wished to be a musician. Such a desire, indeed, chimerical as it may have appeared at the time, was natural enough in a boy of musical sensibility who had been surrounded from his earliest years by a people passionately devoted to music. Not only is music a part of the instruction in the Bohemian public schools, but it is the adjunct of all the occasions of life. As many as forty dances are said to be practiced by the peasants, and we have it on Dvořák's own authority that laborers in Bohemia sing at their work, and after church on Sunday begin dancing, which they «often keep up without cessation till early on the following morning.» Taking advantage of his opportunities, the boy had learned at fourteen to play the violin, the organ, and the piano, and to sing. It was a year later that, summoned by his father to surrender his dreams of musicianship, he performed an exploit well worth mentioning, as an early example of his indefatigable persistence and his blundering methods. Hoping to enlist his father's sympathy, he wrote, scored, and had played by the village band, an original polka. Mr. Hadow tells the story at length; its point is that Dvořák, whose ambition was more robust than his learning, failed to write the trumpets as transposing instruments, and, of course, made a distressing fiasco. «There is some little irony in the disaster,» comments Mr. Hadow, «if it be remembered that among all Dvořák's gifts the instinct of orchestration is perhaps the most conspicuous. He is the greatest living exponent of the art; and he was once in danger of forfeiting his career through ignorance of its most elementary principle.» He did, indeed, give up music for a year, but in October, 1857, was allowed by his father to enter the Organ School at Prague.

Had Dvořák been of an introspective turn of mind, he might now have wondered rather dismally, as the months went by in Prague, the paternal allowance ceased, and the tuition at the Organ School proved narrow and technical, whether he had really benefited himself. Fortunately, he was not given to metaphysical speculation; he got what training he could from the school and joined a band. In Mühlhausen he had often taken a viola part in the village band that played for weddings and on holidays; now he turned his skill to account in the restaurants of Prague. In this way, and by playing also in a church orchestra on Sundays, he managed to amass about nine dollars a month, and to acquire an instinct for the way instrumental parts should be written. The only obvious advantage of this trying period was the intimate knowledge of instruments it gave him. He lived, so to speak, cheek by jowl with them, watching them, handling them, seeing what was written for them, and hearing how it sounded. His is no book-knowledge of orchestration. On the other hand, his extreme poverty, the limitations of the school, and his lack of friends to lend him scores or the use of a piano, cut him off cruelly from that equally essential part of education, familiarity with classic masterpieces and the traditions of academic learning. His band played only popular overtures and the usual pot-pourris. Sometimes he coaxed a kettle-drummer to let him crouch behind the drums and hear a concert. He once had an opportunity to hear «Der Freischütz» for the modest sum of four cents, but the four cents was not forthcoming, and «Der Freischütz» went unheard. He could afford to buy no scores, and there was no library where he could read them. Such were the meager advantages of which he made good use; such the heavy obstacles he gradually surmounted.

After his graduation from the Organ School in 1860 his situation, both practical and musical, slowly ameliorated. From Smetana, who gave him a position in the orchestra of the Interimstheater, a home for Bohemian opera founded in 1862, he received what was of even more importance to him, the loan of scores and encouragement in composition. Already twenty-one, he acquainted himself for the first time with Beethoven's and Mendelssohn's symphonies and chamber-works, of which he became a passionate student, and with Schumann's songs. For almost ten years he labored steadily and silently. It was the period of apprenticeship, the period of arduous, slow mastery of technique and thought through which every creative artist must pass. The mere mass of his exercises is bewildering; he composed and destroyed an opera and two symphonies, to say nothing of many other sacrifices on the altar of skill of which not even the names survive. Peculiar to himself, to be sure, and scarcely a model for other students, was his method in this long self-evocation. Not like Beethoven did he meditate and revise his themes, spending infinite labor on sixteen bars of melody, and not quailing before a dozen revisions so they were needed to pare away the marble and reveal the perfect form. Not like Brahms did he install a systematic training, day by day winning strength and plasticity of thought on the chest-weights and dumb-bells of contrapuntal exercise. On the contrary, he forged ahead, and somehow, without knowing where he was going or what he was doing, made himself a master. He took Parnassus by storm, as it were, overran rather than scaled it, and was victor more by quantity than by quality of performance. Yet in all this blundering progress he was protected by a genuine elevation of aim. Lacking the sense of tradition and the safeguards of scrupulous taste, he was not without his own rugged idealism. And so, although he doubtless had every external inducement to join the ranks of the national movement in music, then just acquiring momentum, he maintained his conscientious silence for nearly a decade. His compositions saw the light neither of the concert hall nor of the printing-press; written with ardor, they were burned without regret. Dvořák showed in his _lehrjähre_ the self-respect of all really great artists.

It was early in the seventies that he finally emerged from his studious reserve and appeared before the world with an opera, «The King and the Collier,» which he was commissioned to write for the National Theater. So clear was the patriotic intent of this commission, so entirely was the popular interest enlisted in Smetana's effort to build up a Bohemian school of music, that it is hard to conceive how Dvořák could have fallen into the error he now made. He prepared for his fellow-countrymen a Wagnerian music-drama. The situation is comic. The good Bohemians, come to hear folk-tunes, were given leit-motifs and «infinite melody.» If they failed to sympathize with his adoration for the Bayreuth master (and it seems indeed to have been but a calf-sickness, afterwards bravely outlived), if «The King and the Collier» was a flat failure, Dvořák had no one but himself to blame. At this point, however, as at so many others in his career, his unfailing energy saved the day so nearly lost by what one critic has called his «brainlessness.» He set to and rewrote his work entire, leaving not a single number of the unhappy music-drama. But now the libretto, which had at first been spared a disapproval all concentrated upon the music, proved worthless and flat, and the opera was damned afresh. Still Dvořák persisted. Getting a poet to set an entirely new «book» to his entirely new music, he made at last a success with an opera of which Mr. Hadow well says that «the Irishman's knife, which had a new blade and a new handle, does not offer a more bewildering problem of identity.» No one but Dvořák would have so bungled his undertaking; no one but he would so have forced it to a successful issue.

By 1873 Dvořák was well started on the career of increasing power and fame that he had worked so hard to establish on firm foundations. That year was marked not only by his installment as organist at St. Adalbert's Church, with a comfortable salary, and by his marriage, but also by the appearance of a composition which made his name at once widely known in Bohemia--the patriotic hymn entitled «The Heirs of the White Mountain.» Four years later his reputation began to spread beyond the border. It was in 1877 that the approbation of Brahms, then a commissioner of the Austrian Ministry of Education, to which Dvořák had submitted some duets, induced Joachim to introduce the young Bohemian's works into England and Germany, and the house of Simrock to publish them. In 1878 the Slavonic Dances made their composer's name immediately known throughout the musical world. His great Stabat Mater, produced in England with acclaim in 1883, was the first of several choral works given there in the next few years, all very successfully. In 1889 he was decorated by the Austrian court. In 1890 he received an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Cambridge, was made Doctor of Philosophy at Prague, and was appointed Professor of Composition at the Conservatory there. The welcome accorded to him in America has already been briefly chronicled. His sixtieth birthday was celebrated by a musical festival in 1901, at Prague, where he now makes his home. In Dvořák's varied life a youth of unusual hardship, of an almost unparalleled severity of struggle both for livelihood and for education, has been crowned with years full of a prosperity and honor rarely allotted to composers.

That time-honored tool of artistic criticism, the distinction between thought and expression--or, as the critics say, between _ethos_ and technique--is one that constantly tempts the critic of music, and always betrays him. Very seductive it is, because analogy with other arts is so plausible a device for exploiting music; but push it to its logical outcome and it inevitably vanishes--the form proves to be not the investiture, nor even the incarnation, of the thought, but the thought itself. Change the expression and you annihilate the thought; develop a technique and you create a system of ideas; mind and body are ultimately one. Now the case of Dvořák is strongly corroborative of such a theory of the identity in music of _ethos_ and technique. What is seen from one angle of vision as his love of exotic color, his devotion to curious intervals of melody, sudden excursions in tonality, and odd molds of rhythm, appears from the other, the technical side, as mastery of orchestral sonority and inheritance of a peculiar musical dialect. It is therefore difficult to account exactly for the genesis of any given quality in his work. Is it the result of an outer influence acting upon a peculiarly plastic nature, or does it spring rather from deeply-rooted individual traits that have dominated the course of his development and shaped his style? Did his early experiences in a village band, for example, awaken and evolve his sense of tone color, or would his music have been primarily sensuous even if he had had the training of Brahms, Tschaïkowsky, or César Franck? It seems probable that here, as elsewhere, inner endowment and outer influence have reacted with a subtlety and complexity that defy analysis, and thought and style are but aspects of one essence. Consequently, the difference between _ethos_ and technique, however serviceable as a means of getting over the ground, as a tool of investigation, will mislead us unless we constantly remember how partial is its validity. We may indeed, for the sake of clearness and thoroughness, speak first of one aspect, then of another, but the man we are studying, like the shield in the allegory, remains all the time one.

To approach the technical side first, there can be no doubt that the rich quality of Dvořák's tone, a quality so striking that Mr. Hadow places him with Beethoven, Berlioz, and Wagner in the class of supreme masters of orchestration, would never have been attainable to one who had not had his peculiar experience. He has the practical player's exhaustive knowledge of instruments, which enables him, by disposing the parts always in effective registers, to get a rich and mellow sonority in his _ensemble_ writing. Examine any chord in his scores, and you see that each player gives a tone that he can sound fully and advantageously, and that each choir of instruments--the strings, the wood, the brass--gives in isolation an effective chord. The resultant harmony is a well-balanced, thoroughly fused mass of tone. But far more important than the power to write effectively disposed single chords is the power to weave a fabric of close texture and firm consistency, to make the orchestra sustain, ramify, and reinforce itself, so to speak. By far the best way to secure this solidity of texture is to write coherent and well-individualized melodies in the different parts, which serve as strands to bind the whole. Such is the method of Beethoven among classic and of Tschaïkowsky among romantic composers, and so efficient is good polyphonic or «many-voiced» writing as a means of sonority that it has been truly said, «Pure voice-leading is half an orchestra.» Yet great skill is required for such polyphonic writing, since all the independent melodies must cooperate harmoniously; and Dvořák, who got little academic training as a boy, is not a great contrapuntist. Just here, however, his band experience coming to his aid, he was saved from writing lumpish, doughy stuff--in which one poor tune in the soprano vainly attempts to hold up a heavy weight of amorphous «accompaniment»--by his extraordinary knack of vitalizing his entire mass of tone through rhythmic individualization of the parts. Taking a skeleton of simple harmony, he manages to write for the different voices such salient and individual rhythms that they stand out with almost the grace of melodious contrapuntal parts. It is a sort of metrical yeast to keep his bread from being soggy. Numerous examples will at once occur to students of his scores, particularly from the Slavonic Dances and Rhapsodies. A third form of his orchestral mastery might be pointed out in the well-calculated special effects for single instruments, such as the oboe duet that concludes the first movement of the Suite, opus 39, which occur everywhere in his scores. But that is, after all, a commoner form of skill, whereas rich sonority and life in the fabric as the result of rhythmic individualization of the parts, can be found in few scores so highly developed as in those of Dvořák.

As regards structure, Dvořák is felicitous but eccentric. He does not lay out his plans with the careful prevision of one to whom balance and symmetry are vital. His scheme is not foreordered, it is sketched currently. Thus, for example, his modulation is singularly radical, impulsive and haphazard. He loves to descend unexpectedly upon the most remote keys, never knows where he will turn next, and when he gets too far from home returns over fences and through no-thoroughfares. Often, with him, a change of key seems dictated merely by a desire for a particular patch of color; he wishes to brighten the tonal background with sharps or mollify it with flats, and plump he comes to his key, little caring how he gets there or where he is going next. His use of contrasts of tonality is thus characteristic of his love of color-effects for themselves and his willingness to subordinate to them purity of line. Again, it is probably not forcing the point to see in his use of uneven rhythms, such as five and seven bar periods, another instance of the same tendency to license. Undoubtedly in part a legacy from Bohemian folk-song, which is particularly rich in them, his uneven rhythms seem to be also in part due to a certain fortuitousness of mind. It is as if he closed his phrase, without regard to strict symmetry, wherever a good chance offered. The theme of the Symphonic Variations, opus 78, is an example. It is interesting to contrast this rhythmic trait of Dvořák's with Grieg's accurate and sometimes almost wearisome precision of outline. Both men derive from folk-music a love of incisive meter--their music has a strong pulse; but Grieg, who is precise, lyrical, sensitive to perfection of detail, is really finical in his unfaltering devotion to square-cut sections, while Dvořák, more wayward, less perfect and exquisite, strays into all sorts of odd periods. His somewhat arbitrary treatment of tonality relations and of rhythm is thus illustrative of a general laxity of method highly characteristic of the man. In contrast with a jealously accurate artist like Grieg, he is felicitous more by force of genius than by wisdom of intent.

Dvořák's childlike spontaneity is in no way better exemplified than by his attitude toward folk-music, and here again he may profitably be contrasted with Grieg. Both devotees of local color have enriched art with unfamiliar lineaments and unused resources, yet their modes of procedure have been quite different. Grieg, traversing the usual mill of German musical education, turned consciously to Norwegian folk-song to find a note of individuality. Struck with the freshness of the native dances, he transplanted them bodily into his academic flower-pots. His courtship of the national Muse was conscious, sophisticated, and his style is in a sense the result of excogitation. Dvořák, on the contrary, growing up in his small Bohemian village, unable to get classic scores, assiduously fiddling throughout his youth at village fêtes where the peasants must have a scrap of tune to dance by, became thoroughly saturated with the rude music. It moved in his veins like blood; it was his other language. Thus the two men were at quite polar standpoints in relation to nationalism. With Dvořák it was a point of departure, with Grieg it was a goal of pilgrimage. And so, while the Norwegian has tended to immure himself in idiosyncrasy, the Bohemian has rubbed off provincialisms without losing his inheritance. His music, while retaining the sensuous plenitude, the individual flavor, the florid coloring, with which his youth endowed it, has acquired, with years and experience, a scope of expression, a maturity of style, and a universality of appeal that make it as justly admired as it is instinctively enjoyed.

Imperceptibly we have passed from technical analysis into personal inventory. And indeed, all Dvořák's peculiarities of style may be viewed as the inevitable manifestations of a nature at once rich and naïve. His music makes a delightfully frank appeal. It is never somber, never crabbed, never even profound. It breathes not passion, but sentiment. It is too happily sensuous to be tragic, too busy with an immediate charm to trouble about a remote meaning. Even when he is moving, as in the Largo of the New World Symphony, is it not with a gentle, half-sensuous pathos, a wistfulness more than half assuaged by the wooing sweetness of the sounds that fill our ears? To him music is primarily sweet sound, and we shall misconceive his aim and service if in looking for something deep in him we miss what is, after all, very accessible and delightful for itself--the simple charm of his combinations of tone.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE.--Dvořák's fecundity is surprising. He has
written cantatas, oratorios, a mass, a requiem, and hymns for chorus
and orchestra; five symphonies, five overtures, four symphonic
poems, the well-known Slavonic Dances and Rhapsodies, concertos for
piano, violin, and violoncello, the inimitable Suite, op. 39, the
Symphonic Variations, op. 78, and other orchestral works of smaller
proportions; seven string quartets, a sextet, three trios, a terzetto
for two violins and a viola, two string quintets, a piano quintet, a
piano quartet, a sonata for violin and piano, and a serenade for wind
instruments; and, finally, many piano works and songs. He is at his
best in his orchestral and chamber works, of which the following are
typical: the Slavonic Dances, op. 46 and 72, the Slavonic Rhapsodies,
op. 45, the Suite, op. 59, the Symphony, «From the New World,» op. 95,
and the Scherzo Capriccioso, op. 66; the Sextet, op. 48, the Quartet
and Quintet on negro themes, op. 96 and 97, the Piano Quintet, op.
81, and the Piano Quintet, op. 87. Though these compositions lose
much in transcription, they are all obtainable in four-hand piano
arrangements. The piano music is somewhat unidiomatic except the later
things, but the Mazurkas, op. 56, the Poetische Stimmungsbilder, op.
85, and the Humoreskes, op. 101, are worth knowing. Of the songs, nine
of the best are published separately by the house of Simrock, and the
two most popular ones, «Gute Nacht» and «Als die Alte Mutter,» are to
be had in Schirmer's series entitled «Gems of German Songs.» A study
of these will probably arouse a desire for more, and the student may
buy the Gipsy Songs, op. 55, and the Love Songs, op. 83. The duets,
«Klänge aus Mähren,» not very well known, are characteristic.

FOOTNOTES:

[D] A graphic picture of the sleepy little place is given in the essay on Dvořák in «Studies in Modern Music,» W. H. Hadow, Second Series. Macmillan, New York, 1894.

IV
CAMILLE SAINT-SAËNS

IV
CAMILLE SAINT-SAËNS

It is a principle of musical expression that of the two great types of temperament, the active and the contemplative, the first tends to express itself in strongly rhythmic figures, the second in phrases of vaguer outline, full of sentiment not easily to be confined in molds. The man of action is incisive, vigorous, compact in utterance; the mystic is by contrast indefinite and discursive. It has been well established, indeed, that primeval music was the product of two modes of instinctive emotional expression, the gesticulatory and the vocal, dance and song; and throughout its growth these two strands, however closely they may intertwine, can still be traced. Thus it happens that even to-day we find the complex work of modern musicians getting a special impress of personality and style according as the rhythmic or the melodic-harmonic faculty predominates in the individual. One man's music will be notable for its strong impulse, its variety and vivacity of rhythm; another's will appeal to the more dreamy and sentimental part of our natures, will speak to our hearts so movingly that we shall recognize its descent from the song rather than from the dance. And in all such cases the first man will be of the active temperament, a man of the world, of many interests and great nervous force; the second will be contemplative, inclined to the monastic life, and of great heart rather than keen intelligence.

Such an antithesis of artistic product and of personal character exists in a peculiar degree between Camille Saint-Saëns and César Franck, the two greatest composers France has produced since Bizet. Each of these men is great by virtue of qualities somewhat wanting in the other. The one is clever, worldly, learned--and a little superficial; the other, profound, religious, of singularly pure and exalted spirit, is yet emotional to the verge of abnormality. And so with their music; that of Saint-Saëns is energetic, lucid, consummately wrought, while Franck's, more moving and more subtle, is so surcharged with feeling as to become vague and inarticulate. A review of their lives and a brief analysis of their work will bring out more clearly this divergence of nature, which, in spite of the many traits they have in common, has determined them to very different careers and exacted of them very dissimilar artistic services.