Chapter IV: Part 4

Among the unclassified works I find a cantata with Russian words, three choruses of the Russian Church, the choruses of Bortiansky, revised and annotated by Tschaïkowsky in nine volumes; an Ave Maria for mezzo soprano or baritone, with piano or organ accompaniment; Le Caprice D’Oksane, opera in four acts; Jeanne D’Arc, opera in four acts and six tableaux; Mazeppa, opera in three acts; La Tscharodeika, La Magicienne ou la Charmeuse, opera in four acts, and Hamlet--the overture I have already spoken of,--which consists of overture, melodrames, marches and entr’acts, regular music for the play. Then there is the Mouvement Perpétuel, from Weber’s C major sonata, arranged for the left hand--Brahms has had an imitator--and an impromptu caprice for piano. Tschaïkowsky has also made a Manual of Harmony in Russian. The richness and variety of this composer’s music is remarkable. Not coming into the world with any especially novel word to speak or doctrine to expound, he nevertheless has been gladly heard for his sincerity--a tremendous sincerity--and his passionate, almost crazy intensity. If you were to ask me his chief quality I should not speak of his scholarship, which is profound enough, nor of his charm, nor of the originality of his tunes, but upon his great, his overwhelming temperament--his almost savage, sensual, morbid, half mad musical temperament--I should insist, for it is his dominant note; it suffuses every bar he has written, and even overflows his most effortless production.

The history of the symphonic Ballade called Voyévode is interesting. In 1891 Tschaïkowsky gave the work a rehearsal and, not liking it, tossed the score into the fire. It was rescued in a semi-charred condition by his pupil, Siloti, the pianist. It has no opus number, but through internal evidence it may safely be called an early and immature work of the composer. This ballade, with its crude realism, its weakness in thematic material and above all its imitative instrumentation, strongly savoring of Wagner, may be classed as a youthful sketch worked over. The programme is a dramatic one. The music attempts to depict the jealousy of a chieftain, who, finding his young wife in the arms of another, shoots her. But the bullet never reaches her heart, for the servant he has commanded to fire on the lover misses his aim--purposely perhaps--and the Voyévode is killed instead. The poem is by Pushkin. Tschaïkowsky has succeeded in writing a vigorous, even rough, dramatic episode, in which the galloping of the chieftain’s horse as he returns from the war, the amorous scene in the garden and the catastrophe are all fairly well pictured. Melodramatic is the word that best describes this music, which contains in solution many of Tschaïkowsky’s most admirable characteristics. The bassoon is heard, with its sinister chuckle, and there is a richness of fancy and warmth of color in the love music, sensuous and sweet, but lacking in distinction, that we look for in this master. The sharp staccato chord that symbolizes shooting is sensational. The close is evidently suggested by Siegfried’s Funeral March. The garden music is from the second act of Tristan and Isolde. Indeed, Wagner is continually hinted at in the orchestration. Tschaïkowsky’s freedom from Wagner’s influence, as hitherto evidenced in his other and more important works, leads us to surmise that this is the effort of a beginner. It has historical interest and shows us the dramatic trend of the Russian’s mind, but as absolute music it is not many degrees removed from the barbaric “1812” overture solennelle. It was first played here in the autumn of 1897 by the Symphony Society under Mr. Walter Damrosch.

I still have left for review the Roméo et Juliette overture-fantaisie without opus number, the sixth symphony, op. 74, in B minor, and the third piano concerto in E flat, op. 75. The Jurgenson catalogue goes no further than op. 74, so the piano concerto is posthumous. An unpublished piano nocturne is announced for early publication; that ends the list.

V

As the Roméo et Juliette was first played here in 1876 it must have been composed about the time of the first piano concerto, perhaps later. It is evidently a work of the composer in the first gorgeous outburst of his genius. It is a magnificent love poem, full of the splendors of passion and warring hosts. How it strikes fire from the first firm chord! Imperial passion flames in it, and the violins mount in burning octaves. The Juliette theme is sealed with the pure lips of a loving maid; but I will spare you further rhapsodizing.

The third piano concerto, like Beethoven’s fifth, is in the key of E flat, but there the resemblance ends, although the work is unusually vigorous and built on a theme even shorter than the one used in the B flat minor piano concerto. The posthumous concerto is really a fantasy for piano and orchestra with a nine page cadenza in the first part. It is not as long as its predecessors, and the subsidiary themes are very amiable and fetching. I should dearly love to hear it if only for the orchestration, hints of which appear in the second piano part. Fantastic in form, it has one rattling good theme in the allegro molto vivace, a theme that is rhythmically related to one in Moniuszko’s opera, Halka. It is very Slavic, very piquant. The composer juggles with three subjects, and the cadenza is utilized as a working out section. This is extremely florid, possibly made so to suit the style of Louis Diémer, to whom the concerto is dedicated. The last movement is a more brilliant restatement of the first themes, and the song motive, this time in the tonic--it was in G at first--is very rich and melodious. The coda, a vivacissimo, is muscular and brief.

As far as the piano partition may be judged, this last composition of Tschaïkowsky’s does not build, neither does it detract from his fame. It smells a little of the piece made to order, although I may be mistaken in this. In any case I hope someone will play it; it is not very difficult or trying to one’s endurance. Its technical physiognomy resembles that of its brethren; there are octaves, chord passages in rapid flight and there are many scales; rather an unusual quantity in this composer’s piano music. The cadenza is especially brilliant.

My first impression of the sixth symphony, the “Suicide,” as it has been called, has never been altered; the last movement is Tschaïkowsky at his greatest, but the other movements do not “hang” together; in a word, there is a lack of organic unity. Tschaïkowsky is never a formalist. He works more freely in the loosely built symphonic poem, the symphonic poem born of Berlioz, although fathered by Liszt. Yet we look for certain specific qualities in the symphonic form, and one of them is homogeneity.

Consider this last symphony. The opening allegro has for its chief subject a short phrase in B minor, a rather commonplace phrase, a phrase with an upward inflection, that you may find in Mendelssohn and a half dozen other classical writers. The accent is strong to harshness, and after the composer considers that he has sufficiently impressed it upon your memory the entrance of an episodical figure leads you captive to the second theme in D. Here is the romantic Russian for you! It is lovely, sensuous, suave. It is the composer in his most melting mood, and is the feminine complement to the abrupt masculinity of the first subject. Atop of it we soon get some dancing rhythms under a scale-like theme, and then the working out begins.

The second subject is first treated, and this is followed by an exposition of the first subject, and in thundering tones and with all the harmonic and rhythmic skill the composer knows how to employ so well. There is constant use of scales for contrapuntal purposes, and the basses shake the very firmament. It is the old Tschaïkowsky--sombre, dreary and savage. The mood does not last long. The sky lightens with a return of the cantabile, and then comes the schluss. This is wonderfully made and very effective. The movement ends peacefully. Its color throughout is beautiful, leaning toward the darker tints of the orchestral palette.

But the second and third movements are enigmas to me.

Raff introduced a gay march into a symphony, Beethoven a funeral march and Tschaïkowsky penned a lugubrious valse for his fifth symphonic work; but the second movement of this B minor symphony is in five-four time and sounds like a perverted valse, but one that could not be danced to unless you owned three legs. It is delightfully piquant music and the touch of Oriental color in the trio, or second part--for the movement is not a scherzo--produced by a pedal point on D is very felicitous. The third movement starts in with a Mendelssohnian figure in triplets and scherzo-like, but this soon merges into a march. The ingenuity displayed in scoring, the peculiar and recurring accent, which again suggests the East, helps the movement to escape the commonplace.

But why these two movements in a symphony? They are episodical, fragmentary and seem intended for a suite. Can it be possible that Tschaïkowsky has only given us a mosaic--has made a short rosary of numbers that bear no active relationship! As well believe this as strive to reconcile these four movements. Dr. Dvorák’s words return with peculiar force after listening to this symphony. “Tschaïkowsky cannot write a symphony; he only makes suites.”

Therefore the most tremendous surprise follows in the finale. Since the music of the march in the Eroica, since the mighty funeral music in Siegfried, there has been no such death music as this “adagio lamentoso,” this astounding torso, which Michel Angelo would have understood and Dante wept over. It is the very apotheosis of mortality, and its gloomy accents, poignant melody and harmonic coloring make it one of the most impressive of contributions to mortuary music. It sings of the entombment of a nation, and is incomparably noble, dignified and unspeakably tender. It is only at the close that the rustling of the basses conveys a sinister shudder; the shudder of the Dies Iræ when the heavens shall be a fiery scroll and the sublime trump sound its summons to eternity.

No Richard Strauss realism is employed to describe the halting heart beats; no gasps in the woodwind to indicate the departing breath; no imitative figure to tell us that clods of earth are falling heavily on the invisible coffin; but the atmosphere of grief, immutable, eternal, hovers about like a huge black-winged angel.

The movement is the last word in the profoundly pessimistic philosophy which comes from the East to poison and embitter the religious hopes of the West. It has not the consolations of Nirvana, for that offers us a serene non-existence, an absorption into Neánt. Tschaïkowsky’s music is a page torn from Ecclesiastes, it is the cosmos in crape. This movement will save the other three from oblivion. The scoring throughout is masterly.

Whether or not the composer had a premonition of his approaching death is a question I gladly leave to sentimental psychologists.

Again we must lament the death of the master. What might his ninth symphony not have been! He was slain in the very plenitude of his powers, at a time when to his glowing temperament was added a moderation born of generous cosmopolitan culture.

Little remains to be added. All who met Tschaïkowsky declare that he was a polished, charming man of the world; like all Russians, a good linguist, and many sided in his tastes. But not in his musical taste. He disliked Brahms heartily, and while Brahms appreciated his music, the Russian shrugged his shoulders, and frankly confessed that for him the Hamburg composer was a mere music-maker. In a conversation with Henry Holden Huss he praised Saint-Saëns, and then naïvely admitted that it was a pity an artist whose facture was so fine had so little original to say. He reverenced the classics, Mozart more than Beethoven, and had an enormous predilection for Berlioz, Liszt and Wagner. This was quite natural, and we find Rubinstein, with whom Tschaïkowsky studied, upbraiding him for his defection from German classic standards. Curiously enough, Wagner did not play such a part in Tschaïkowsky’s music as one might imagine. The Russian’s operas were made after old-fashioned models and, despite his lyric and dramatic talent, have never proved successful. He dramatically expressed himself best in the orchestra, and totally lacked Wagner’s power of projecting dramatic images upon the stage.

As regards the suicide story, I can only repeat that while it has been officially denied, it has never been quite discredited. Kapellmeister Wallner of St. Petersburg, a relative by marriage of Tolstoy, and an intimate of Tschaïkowsky, told me that his nearest friends had the matter hushed up. He is supposed to have died of cholera after drinking a glass of unfiltered water, but his stomach was never subjected to chemical analysis. The fact that his mother died of the same malady lent color to the cholera story. It is all very sad.

Tschaïkowsky lived, was unhappy, composed and died, and he will be forgotten. Let us enjoy him while we may and until “all the daughters of music shall be brought low.”

III

RICHARD STRAUSS AND NIETZSCHE

In discussing Richard Strauss’ symphonic poem, Also Sprach Zarathustra, its musical, technical, emotional and æsthetic significance must be considered,--if I may be allowed this rather careless grouping of categories. The work itself is fertile in arousing ideas of a widely divergent sort. It is difficult to speak of it without drifting into the dialectics of the Nietzsche school. It is as absolute music that it should be critically weighed, and that leads into the somewhat forbidding field of the nature of thematic material. Has Strauss, to put it briefly, a right, a precedent to express himself in music in a manner that sets at defiance the normal eight bar theme; that scorns euphony; that follows the curve of the poem or drama or thesis he is illustrating, just as Wagner followed the curve of his poetic text? The question is a fascinating one and a dangerous one, fascinating because of its complexity, and also because any argument that attempts to define the limits of absolute music is an argument that is dangerous.

Berlioz, Liszt and Wagner, three heroes of poetic realism, pushed realism to the verge of the ludicrous, according to their contemporaries. Liszt was especially singled out as the champion of making poems in music, making pictures in music, and giving no more clue to their meaning than the title. Liszt’s three great disciples, Saint-Saëns, Tschaïkowsky and Richard Strauss, have dared more than their master. In Saint-Saëns we find a genial cleverness and a mastery of the decorative and more superficial side of music--all this allied to a charming fancy and great musicianship. Yet his stories deal only with the external aspects of his subject. Omphale bids Hercules spin, and the orchestra is straightway transformed into a huge wheel and hums as the giant stoops over the distaff. Death dances with rattling xylophonic bones; Phaeton circles about the Sun God, and we hear his curved chariot and fervent pace. But the psychology is absent. We learn little of the thoughts or feelings of these subjects, and indeed they have none, being mere fabled abstractions clothed in the pictorial counterpoint of the talented Frenchman.

In Tschaïkowsky, the lights are turned on more fiercely; his dramatic characterization is marvellous when one considers that the human element is absent from his mechanism. He employs only the orchestra, and across its tonal tapestry there flit the impassioned figures of Romeo and Juliet, the despairing apparition of Francesca da Rimini, and the stalking of Hamlet and Manfred, gloomy, revengeful, imperious, thinking and sorrowing men.

Tschaïkowsky went far, but Richard Strauss has dared to go further. He first individualized, and rather grotesquely, Don Juan, Til Eulenspiegel, Macbeth; but in Death and Apotheosis and in Also Sprach Zarathustra he has attempted almost the impossible; he has attempted the delineation of thought, not musical thought, but philosophical ideas in tone. He has disclaimed this attempt, but the fact nevertheless remains that the various divisions and subdivisions of his extraordinary work are attempts to seize not only certain elusive psychical states, but also to paint pure idea--the “Reine vernunft” of the metaphysicians. Of course he has failed, yet his failure marks a great step in the mastery over the indefiniteness of music. Strauss’ German brain with its grasp of the essentials of philosophy, allied to a vigorous emotional nature and a will and imagination that stop at nothing, enabled him to throw into high relief his excited mental states. That these states took unusual melodic shapes, that there is the suggestion of abnormality, was to be expected; for Strauss has made a flight into a country in which it is almost madness to venture. He has, on his own opinions and purely by the aid of a powerful reasoning imagination, sought to give an emotional garb to pure abstractions. Ugliness was bound to result but it is characteristic ugliness. There is profound method in the madness of Strauss, and I beg his adverse critics to pause and consider his aims before entirely condemning him.

The object of music is neither to preach nor to philosophize, but the range of the art is vastly enlarged since the days of music of the decorative pattern type. Beethoven filled it with his overshadowing passion, and shall we say ethical philosophy? Schumann and the romanticists gave it color, glow and bizarre passion; Wagner moulded its forms into rare dramatic shapes, and Brahms has endeavored to fill the old classic bottles with the new wine of the romantics. All these men seemed to dare the impossible, according to their contemporaries, and now Strauss has shifted the string one peg higher; not only does he demand the fullest intensity of expression but he insists on the presence of pure idea, and when we consider the abstract nature of the first theme of Beethoven’s fifth symphony, when we recall the passionate inflection of the opening measures of Tristan and Isolde, who shall dare criticise Strauss, who shall say to him, Thus far and no farther?

I

Richard Strauss said of his work when it was produced in Berlin, December, 1896: “I did not intend to write philosophical music or portray Nietzsche’s great work musically. I meant to convey musically an idea of the development of the human race from its origin, through the various phases of development, religious as well as scientific, up to Nietzsche’s idea of the Uebermensch. The whole symphonic poem is intended as my homage to the genius of Nietzsche, which found its greatest exemplification in his book, Thus Spake Zarathustra.”

For me the beginning is like Michel Angelo’s Last Judgment, or the birth of a mighty planet; its close has the dreary quality of modern art, profoundly sad and enigmatic. There is no God for Strauss, there is no God in Tschaïkowsky’s last symphony and there was no God for Nietzsche, no God but self.

You have Strauss’ point of view, have you not? He disclaims making any attempt to set philosophy to tones; indeed Wagner’s failure in Tristan and the Ring to ensnare Schopenhauer’s metaphysic was sufficient warning for the younger man. The whole undertaking stands and falls upon the question: Is Also Sprach Zarathustra good music? I set aside now all considerations of orchestral technic--a technic that leaves Berlioz, Liszt and Wagner gaping aghast in the rear--and propose only the consideration of Strauss’ thematic workmanship. Let it be at once conceded that he does not make beautiful music, that his melodies are unmelodious, even ugly, when subjected to the classic or romantic tests--call it classic and be done, for Schumann, Chopin, Liszt and Wagner are classics--and we have now further narrowed the argument to a question of the characteristic or veristic in melody making, and this is the crux of the situation.

Has Richard Strauss, then, made characteristic music, and how has its character conformed with his own dimly outlined programme--not Dr. Riemann’s elaborate analytical scheme?

“I did not intend to write philosophical music,” he said. Of course not; it were impossible; but some of the raw elements of philosophy are in the poem; keen, overwhelming logic, sincerity, orbic centrality, and hints of the microcosm and the macrocosm of music. Strauss set out to accomplish what has never before been accomplished in or out of the world, and he has failed, and the failure is glorious, so glorious that it will blind a generation before its glory is apprehended; so glorious that it blazes a new turn in the path made straight by Beethoven, Berlioz, Liszt, and Wagner!

Wagner sought the aid of other arts, and sang his Schopenhauer in gloomy tones; Strauss, relying on the sheer audacity of the instrumental army, chants of the cosmos, of the birth of atoms, of the religious loves, hates, works, doubts, joys and sorrows of the atom, would fain deluge us with an epitome of the world processes, and so has failed. But what colossal daring! What an imagination! What poetic invention!

The authors of Genesis, of the Book of Job, of the Songs of Solomon, the Apocalypse, the Iliad, the Sermon on the Mount, the Koran, the Divine Comedy, Don Quixote, Shakespeare’s plays, Faust, the Ninth Symphony and Tristan, all rolled into one would have failed too, before such a stupendous task.

Now, perhaps we may reach a comparative estimate of the glory involved in Richard Strauss’ half-mad, idealistic failure.

Putting aside Riemann as a hopelessly involved guide--a baleful ignis-fatuus in a midnight forest,--Strauss’ poem impressed me, after three hearings, as the gigantic torso of an art work for the future. Euphony was hurled to the winds, the Addisonian ductility of Mozart, the Théophile Gautier coloring of Schumann, Chopin’s delicate romanticism, all were scorned as not being truthful enough for the subject in hand, and the subject is not a pretty or a sentimental one. Strauss, with his almost superhuman mastery of all schools, could have written with ease in the manner of any of his predecessors, but, like a new Empedocles on Ætna, preferred to leap into the dark, or rather into the fiery crater of truth. In few bars did I discover an accent of insincerity, a making of music for the mere sake of music. He has leaped where Liszt feared to venture, and Strauss is Liszt’s descendant as well as Wagner’s. He cast aside all makeshifts, even the human voice, which is the human interest, and dared, with complicated virtuosity, to tell the truth--_his_ truth, be it remembered--and so there is little likelihood of his being understood in this century.

It were madness to search for Nietzsche in Strauss--that is, in this score. It is un-Nietzsche music--Nietzsche who discarded Wagner for Bizet, Beethoven for Mozart. Schopenhauer, it may be remembered, laughed at Wagner the musician, played the flute and admired Rossini!

If Nietzsche, clothed in his most brilliant mind, had sat in the Metropolitan Opera House of New York City on the occasion of the first performance of his poem by the Boston Symphony Orchestra, December, 1897, he would probably have cried aloud: “I have pronounced laughter holy,” and then laughed himself into the madhouse. Poor, unfortunate, marvellous Nietzsche! But it is Strauss mirroring his own moods after feeding full on Nietzsche, and we must be content to swallow his title, “Also Sprach Zarathustra,” when in reality it is “Thus Spake Richard Strauss!”

The first theme--Zarathustra’s, intoned by four trumpets--is solemnly prodigious; probably the dwellers in the rear world theme meant something to the composer. You see he has us on the hip; either accept his symbols or not; you have your choice, you believers in programme music; to me it was lugubriously shuddersome. I liked the beautiful A flat melody; it was almost a melody, and the yearning motive was tremendously exciting. In the section, Joys and Passions, the violins and ’celli sweep in mountainous curves of passion--never except in Wagner has this molten episode been equalled--and then the ground began to slip under my feet. I grasped at the misty shadows of the grave song, and the tortuous and wriggling five voice fugue in Science seemed like some loathsome, footless worm. The dance chapter is shrilly bacchanalian. It may be the Over-Man dancing, but no human ever trod on such scarlet tones.

And the waltz melody! why, it is as common as mud, and intentionally so, but it is treated with Promethean touches. When I reached the part called the Song of the Night Wanderer, I renounced Bach, Beethoven and Brahms and became maddeningly intoxicated--not with joy, but with doubt, despair and defiance. Never shall I forget that screaming trumpet as it cut jaggedly across the baleful gloom! Sinister beyond compare was the atmosphere, and I could have cried aloud with Dante:

“Lo, this is Dis!”

I understood the divine laughter of Hell, and it surely was Dis that held its sides and cackled infernally! When we had reached the rim of eternity, “the under side of nothing,” as Daudet would have said, there the “twelve strokes of the heavy, humming bell”:

ONE!
O Man, take heed!

TWO!
What speaks the deep midnight?

THREE!
I have slept, I have slept--

FOUR!
I have awaked out of a deep dream:--

FIVE!
The world is deep,

SIX!
And deeper than the day thought.

SEVEN!
Deep is its woe--

EIGHT!
Joy, deeper still than heart sorrow:

NINE!
Woe speaks: Vanish!

TEN!
Yet all joy wants eternity--

ELEVEN!
Wants deep, deep eternity!

TWELVE!

Where is Hell-Breughel, painter, or Kapellmeister Kreisler, composer, after this weltering symphony of sin, sorrow and cruel passions? Their symbolism seems crude and childish, although Hoffman’s musician was certainly a forerunner of Strauss.

There is one thing I cannot understand. If the Wagnerians and the Lisztianer threw overboard old forms in obedience to their masters, why can they not accept the logical outcome of their theories in Strauss? If you pitch form to the devil, there must be a devil to pitch it to. Strauss is the most modern of the devils, and to the old classical group he would be the reductio ad absurdum of the movement that began with Beethoven. Do you hear? Beethoven! To assert that his shoulders are not broad enough to wear the mantle of Liszt, I can only ask why? Liszt seems jejune when it comes to covering an orchestral canvas of the size of Strauss’s. Strauss is his natural musical son, and the son has quite as much to say thematically as the father, while in the matter of brush brilliancy, massing of color, startling figure drawing--witness Don Juan and Til Eulenspiegel--and swift thinking, Strauss is easily the superior. He has not Wagner’s genius; far from it; yet, as Otto Floersheim said: “Also Sprach Zarathustra” is “the greatest score penned by man.” It is a cathedral in architectonic and is dangerously sublime, dangerously silly, with grotesque gargoyles, hideous flying abutments, exquisite traceries, fantastic arches half gothic, half infernal, huge and resounding spaces, gorgeous façades and heaven splitting spires. A mighty structure, and no more to be understood at one, two or a dozen visits than the Kölner Dom.

It lacks only simplicity of style; it is tropical, torrential, and in it there is the note of hysteria. It is complex with the diseased complexity of the age, and its strivings are the agonized strivings of a morbid Titan. Truthful? aye, horribly so, for it shows us the brain of a great man, overwrought by the vast emotional problems of his generation.

Also Sprach Zarathustra should be played once every season, and the audience be limited to poets, musicians and madmen. The latter, being Over-Men, would grasp its sad truths. And as I write I hear the key of B major and the key of C major and those three cryptic sinister Cs pizzicato at the close, and ask myself if, after all, Nietzsche and Strauss are not right, “Eternity’s sought by all delight--eternity deep--by all delight.”

II

Musically it is a symphonic poem of rather loose construction and as to outline; but rigorously logical in its presentment of thematic material, and in its magnificent weaving of the contrapuntal web. There is organic unity, and the strenuousness of the composer’s ideas almost blind his hearers to their tenuity, and sometimes a squat ugliness. Strauss has confessed to not following a definite scheme, a precise presentation of the bacchantic philosophy of Nietzsche. Nietzsche was a lyrical rhapsodist, a literary artist first, perhaps a philosopher afterward. It is the lyric side of him that Strauss seeks to interpret. Simply as absolute music it is astounding enough--astounding in its scope, handling and execution. It is not as realistic as you imagine, not as realistic for instance as the Don Juan and Til Eulenspiegel. Strauss is here an idealist striving after the impossible, yet compassing the hem of grandeur, and often a conscious seeker after the abnormally ugly. Yet one hesitates to call his an abnormally evil brain. Abnormal it may be in its manifestation of eccentric power but it is not evil in its tendency, and a brain that can rear such a mighty tone structure is to be seriously dealt with.

As a mere matter of musical politics I do not care for programme music. Wagner and, before him, Beethoven, fixed its boundaries. Liszt, in his Faust symphony, and Wagner, in his Faust overture, read into pure music as much meaning as its framework could endure without calling in the aid of the sister arts. Strauss pushed realism to a frantic degree, giving us in his Death and Apotheosis the most minute memoranda. But in Also Sprach Zarathustra he has deserted surface imitations. The laughter of the convalescent, and the slow, creeping fugue betray his old tendencies. There is an uplifting roar in the opening that is really elemental. Those tremendous chords alone proclaim Strauss a man of genius, and their naked simplicity gives him fee simple to the heritage of Beethoven. But this grandeur is not maintained throughout.

The close is enigmatic, and the juggling with the tonality is fruitful of suspense, bewilderment. Yet it does not plunge the listener into the gloomy, abysmal gulf of Tschaïkowsky’s last movement of the B minor symphony. It is not so simple nor yet so cosmical. Strauss has the grand manner at times, but he cannot maintain it as did Brahms in his Requiem, or Tschaïkowsky in his last symphonic work.

The narrative and declamatory style is often violently interrupted by passages of great descriptive power; the development of the themes seems coincidental with some programme in Strauss’ mind and the contrapuntal ingenuity displayed is just short of the miraculous. There is a groaning and a travailing spirit, a restless, uneasy aspiring which is Faust-like, and suggests a close study of Eine Faust Overture, but there is more versatility of mood, more hysteria and more febrile agitation in the Strauss score. It is a sheaf of moods bound together with rare skill, and in the most cacophonous portions there is no suspicion of writing for the exposition of wilful eccentricity. There are reminiscences more in color than form of Tristan, of Walküre, Die Meistersinger, and once there was a suggestion of Gounod, but the composer’s style is his own despite his Wagnerian affiliations.

Strauss is a man of rare and powerful imagination; the tentacles of his imagination are restlessly feeling and thrusting forward and grappling with material on most dangerous territory. The need of expression of definite modes of thought, of more definite modes of emotion, is a question that has perplexed every great composer. With such an apparatus as the modern orchestra--in Strauss’s hands an eloquent, plastic and palpitating instrument--much may be ventured and, while the composer has not altogether succeeded--it is almost a superhuman task he sets himself to achieve--he has made us think seriously of a new trend in the art of discoursing music. Formalism is abandoned--Strauss moves by episodes; now furiously swift, now ponderously lethargic, and one is lost in amazement at the loftiness, the solidity and general massiveness of his structure. The man’s scholarship is so profound, almost as profound as Brahms’; his genius for the orchestra so marked, his color and rhythmic sense so magnificently developed that the general effect of his rhetoric is perhaps too blazingly brilliant. He has more to say than Berlioz and says it better, is less magniloquent and more poetical than Liszt, is as clever as Saint-Saëns, but in thematic invention he is miles behind Wagner.

His melodies, it must be confessed, are not always remarkable or distinguished in quality, setting aside the question of ugliness altogether. But the melodic curve is big and passional. Strauss can be tender, dramatic, bizarre, poetic and humorous, but the noble art of simplicity he sadly lacks--for art it is. His themes in this poem are often simple; indeed the waltz is distinctly commonplace, but it is not the Doric, the bald simplicity of Beethoven. It is rather a brutal plainness of speech.

Strauss is too deadly in earnest to trifle or to condescend to ear tickling devices. The tremendous sincerity of the work will be its saving salt for many who violently disagree with the whole scheme. The work is scored for one piccoli-flute, three flutes (the third of which is interchangeable with a second piccolo), three oboes, one English horn, one E flat clarinet, two ordinary clarinets, one bass clarinet, three bassoons, one double bassoon, six horns, four trumpets, three trombones, two bass tubas, one pair of kettledrums, bass drum, cymbals, triangle, Glockenspiel, one low bell, two harps, the usual strings, and organ.

IV

THE GREATER CHOPIN

I

“As-tu réfléchi combien nous sommes organisés pour le Malheur”? A fatal fleet of names sails before us evoked by Flaubert’s pitiless and pitiful question in a letter addressed to George Sand. She could have answered for at least two--two names writ large in the book of fate opposite her own--Frederic Chopin and Alfred De Musset. Androgynous creature that she was, she filled her masculine maw with the most delicate bonnes bouches that chance vouchsafed her. Can’t you see her, with the gaze of a sibyl, crunching such a genius as Chopin, he exhaling his melodious sigh as he expired? But this attrition of souls filled the world with art, for after all what was George Sand but a skilful literary midwife, who delivered men of genius and often devoured their souls after forcing from them in intolerable agony the most exquisite music? They sowed in sorrow, in sorrow they reaped.

It is not always meet and just that we exhibit to the gaze of an incurious world our intellectual Lares and Penates. There is something almost indecent in the way we rend our mental privacies, our heart sanctuaries. To the artist in prose, the temptation to be utterly subjective is chilled by the thought of the sacrifice. Hamlet-like, he may feel that wearing his heart on his sleeve will never compensate him for the holiness of solitude, no matter if the heart he dissects be of unusual color and splendor. Far happier is the tone poet. Addressing a selected audience, appealing to sensibilities firm and tastes exquisitely cultured, he may still remain secluded. His musical phrases are cryptic and even those who run fastest may not always read. The veil that hangs hazily about all great art works is the Tanit veil that obscures the holy of holies from the gaze of the rude, the blasphemous. The golden reticence of the music artist saves him from the mortifying misunderstandings of the worker in verse, and spares him the pang which must come from the nudity of the written word.

I have worshipped, and secretly, those artists in whose productions there is a savor of the strange. I loved Poe, although I seldom read him to-day. I thought Chopin the last word in music, until I heard Tristan and Isolde. I can never shake off my wonder for Flaubert’s great chiselled art, and I would give a wilderness of Rubens for one Whistler. I know this may be a confession of æsthetic narrowness, but I never could bow down to overgrown reputations, nor does the merely big excite my nerves. In this matter I agree unreservedly with Mr. Finck. I would rather read Poe’s Silence than all the essays of Macaulay, and can echo George Sand, who wrote that one tiny prelude of Chopin is worth all the trumpeting of Meyerbeer. It was in this spirit I approached Chopin years ago; it is in the same spirit I regard him to-day. But while my vantage ground has not perceptibly shifted, I descry a Chopin other than the melancholy dreamer I knew a decade ago. My glances are imprisoned by new and even more fascinating aspects of this extraordinary man and poet. It is of the greater Chopin I would speak; the Chopin not of yester-year, but the Chopin of to-morrow.

The old Chopin is gone for most of us. The barrel organ--not Mallarmé’s organ, but that deadly parallel for pianists, the piano-organ, with its super-Janko technic--now drives the D flat valse across its brassy gamut helter-skelter. The E flat nocturne is drummed by schoolgirls as a study in chord playing for the left hand, and the mazourkas--heaven protect us!--what have not these poor dances, with their sprightly rhythms, now wilted, been subjected to; with what strange oaths have they not been played? Alas! the Chopin romance is vanished. His studies follow those of the prosaic Clementi, and Du Maurier nabbed one of his impromptus for Trilby. Poor Chopin! devoured by those ravening wolves, the concert pianists, tortured by stupid pupils and smeared with the kisses of sentimentalists, well may you cry aloud from the heights of Parnassus, “Great Jove, deliver me from my music!”

What is left us in all this furious carnage, what undefiled in this continuous rape, this filching of a man’s spiritual goods? Some few works unassailed, thanks to the master--some noble compositions whose sun-smitten summits are at once a consolation and an agony. To strive, to reach those wonderful peaks of music is granted but to the few. Even that bird of prey and pedals, the professional piano reciter, avoids a certain Chopin, not so much from instinctive reverence, but because of self-interest. He understands not, and also knows full well that his audiences do not. This hedges the new Chopin from cheap, vulgar commerce.

I have been criticised for asserting that in Chopin’s later works may be found the germ of the entire modern harmonic scheme. It was not in the use of the chord of the tenth alone that Chopin was a path-breaker. Even in his first book of studies may be found a melodic and harmonic scheme, without which the whole modern apparatus of composition would not be as it is now. Does this sound daring? Come, put it to the test! That wonderful upward inflection which we look upon as Wagner’s may be found in the G sharp minor part of the C minor study in opus 10. Look at it! Sift its significance and then revert to Isolde’s Liebestod, or Wotan’s entrance in the third act of Die Walküre. There is the nub of the entire system of modern emotional melody. Take all the études and what treasures do we not find? The lovely Fantaisie-polonaise, op. 61, has an introduction which is marvellous and which will sound new a century hence. There is a kernel of a figure that will surprise the Wagnerite who knows his Ring. I speak of a triplet figure in sixteenths in the introduction. It was the late Anton Seidl who first called my attention to the “Chopinisms” of the wonderful love-duet in the second act of Tristan. He said Wagner had laughed about the coloring. If Wagner is the oak tree, then Chopin is the acorn of the latter-day music.

What is this new Chopin I pretend to see? Or is it only as the soul in Browning’s poem, All that I Know of a certain Star? Does my Chopin star dart now red, now blue, for me alone? Chopin left us four ballades and a fantaisie in F minor, which is a tremendous ballade, although not in the traditional ballade form. But it has unmistakably the narrative tone; it tells an overwhelmingly dramatic story. Yet of the four ballades, who dare play the first and second in G minor and A flat? They are hopelessly vulgarized. They have been butchered to make a concert goer’s holiday. The G minor, full of dramatic fire and almost sensual expression, is a whirlwind; unsexed by women and womanish men, it is a byword, a reproach. Little wonder that Liszt shuddered when asked to listen to this abused piece. As for the A flat ballade, I can say nothing. Graceful, charming, it appeals even to the lovers of music-hall ditties. It, too, has been worried to death. The one in F has been spared for us. It is a thunderbolt in a bed of violets. Its tempest, scurrying and growling, is for the hand of the master. Let no mean disciple juggle with its vast elemental tones. Disaster dire will surely follow. And when the sky has cleared how divinely azure it is! The lilt of the breezes with thin thunder in the distance closes a page that is immortal.

When young I had no god but Beethoven, and all other gods were strange. To-day, hemmed in by the noise and dust of the daily traffic of life, I have a tiny sanctuary which I visit betimes. In it is the fourth ballade of Chopin, the one in the mode of F minor. It is a masterpiece in piano literature as the Mona Lisa and Madame Bovary are masterpieces in painting and prose. Its melody, which probes the very coverts of the soul, is haunting in its chromatic coloring, and then that fruitful pause in half notes, the prelude to the end! How it fires the imagination; how unlike the namby-pamby Chopin of the school-room and the critics!

The études are beyond the limit of this paper. I can only say that they are enormously misunderstood and misread. Studies in moods, as well as in mechanism, they are harnessed with the dull, unimaginative creatures of the conservatory curriculum, and so in the concert room we miss the flavor, the heroic freedom of the form. Who plays the C minor in the opus 25? Who ever gives us with true bravoura that dazzling drive of notes, the A minor, the second of the tonality in the same book? De Pachmann plays the study in thirds, but it is only a study, not a poem. When will these series of palpitating music pictures be played with all their range of emotional dynamics?

The impromptus are almost denied us. The fantaisie impromptu and the A flat, are they not commonplaces, seldom played beautifully? A greater Chopin is in the one in F sharp, the second. There is the true impromptu spirit, the wandering, vagrant mood, the restless outpouring of fancy. It is delicious. The G flat is practically undiscovered. Of the mazourkas, the impish, morbid, gay, sour, sweet little dances, I need not speak. They are a sealed book for most pianists; and if you have not the savor of the Slav in you you should not touch them. Yet Chopin has done some great things in this form. Think of the three or four in C sharp minor, the one in B flat minor, the curiously insistent one in B minor and that sad, funereal mazourka in A minor, the last composition Chopin put on paper. The singular idea of the last named, almost a fixed one, its hectic gayety and astounding gloom show us the sick brain of the dying man. But it is not upon these works I would dwell. The new, the larger Chopin will be known to posterity by the three great polonaises in F sharp minor, in A flat and the fantaisie polonaise. What a wealth of fantasy there is in opus 61! Its restless tonality, the marked beauty of the first theme, the almost vaporous treatment, the violent mood changes and the richness of the harmonies place this work among the elect. The F sharp minor polonaise and the two in E flat minor and C minor contain some strong, virile writing. They need men, not pianists, to play them.

Professor Frederick Niecks calls the F sharp minor polonaise “pathologic,” and Stanislaw Przybyszewski, that curious, half-mad genius who, like Verlaine, has seen the inside of prisons, has written surprisingly of the polonaise; indeed, he is said to play it well, and has coupled the composer’s name with Nietzsche’s in his strange brochure, The Psychology of the Individual. To me the piece far surpasses in grandeur all of Chopin’s polonaises, even the “Heroic,” with its thunderous cannon and rattling of horses’ hoofs. It may be morbid, but it is also magnificent. The triplets in eighth notes in the introduction gradually work up to a climax of great power before the theme enters in single notes. Soon these are discarded for octaves and chords and do not occur again. The second subject in D flat is less drastic, less fantastic, and also less powerful. There is epical breadth in that beginning, and at each reiteration it grows bigger, more awful, until it overflows the limits of the keyboard. That strange intermezzo in A, which comes before the mazourka, is an enigma for most of us. It seems at first irrelevant, but its orchestral intent is manifest, and it leads to the D flat theme now transposed to C sharp minor and full of the blackest despair. If you play the thirty-second notes in octaves more color is obtained. The mazourka which follows tempted Liszt to extravagant panegyric. Its brace of notes, thirds and sixths, are lovely in accent and hue, but do not become languishing in your tempo, or the episode turns sugary and sentimental. With an almost ferocious burst the polonaise is reached, and again begins that elemental chant, which grows huger in rancorous woe until the bottom of the pit is reached, and then without a gleam of light the work ends in a coda, with mutterings like curses of the polonaise theme, and only in the very last bar comes the relief of a crackling and brilliant F sharp in octaves.

Pathologic in a sense it is, for it makes its primary appeal to the nerves, but it is wonderful music, though depressing. It hurts the very pulp of one’s sensibilities, yet it is never sensational. I am reminded of Salvator Rosa’s rugged, sullen and barbarous landscapes with a modern figure in the foreground, agitated, distracted, suicidal; in a word, something that paint and canvas can never suggest.

The nocturnes are sometimes beneath contempt. When I hear a Chopin nocturne played on the fiddle or ’cello I murmur complainingly as I listen, for it irresistibly reminds me of degraded beauty. There are exceptions. The vandals have vouchsafed us the one in C sharp minor, the gloomiest and grandest of Chopin’s moody canvases. Its middle section is Beethovian in breadth. Ah! my friend, why do you take this piano composer for a weakling? Why give him over to the tough mercies of the Young Person? I would sentence to a vat of boiling oil, that is if I were the Sultan of Life, any woman who presumed to touch a note of Chopin. They have decked the most virile spirit of the age in petticoats, and upon his head they have placed a Parisian bonnet. They murdered him while he was alive, and they have hacked and cut at him since his death. If women must play the piano let them stick to Bach and Beethoven. They cannot hurt those gentlemen with their seductions and blandishments, their amblings and jiggings. There are several other nocturnes that will never appeal to hoi polloi. The noble one in C minor, the fruity one in B and the one in E, form a triad of matchless music. They are not popular. The wonder-child that came to us through the pink gates of the dawn and was rocked to rhythmic dreams in the berçeuse has grown to be a brat of horrid mien and muscular proportions. I will have none of it. Its banal visage is cherished in conservatories. Long may it howl, but not for me!

The scherzi, the preludes, you cry! Ah! at last we are getting upon solid ground. The twenty-five preludes alone would make good Chopin’s claim to immortality. Such range, such vision, such humanity! All shades of feeling are divined, all depths and altitudes of passion explored. If all Chopin, all music, were to be destroyed, I should plead for the preludes. The cameo stillness of some of them is as soft-spoken sentences in a cloister. Religious truly, but these appeal less to me than those thunder-riven visions in D minor, in B flat minor, in F minor, in E flat minor. Surpassingly sweet is the elegiac prelude in B flat. It is greater than any of the Chopin nocturnes. Number two, with its almost brutal quality and enigmatic beginning, is for a rainy day--a day when the soul is racked by doubts and defeats. It is shuddersome and sinister. About it hovers the grisly something which we all fear in the dark but dare not define. A ray of sunshine, but a sun that slants in the west, is the prelude in G. Why detail these marvels in miniature, these great and cunningly wrought thoughts?

The embroideries of the barcarolle--a more fully developed and dramatic nocturne--and the bolero are both more Polish than Italian or Spanish. The fantaisie, opus 49, is considered by many to be Chopin’s most perfect work. The grave, march-like introduction, the climbing and insistent arpeggio figures in triplets, the great song in F minor, followed by the beautiful episode in double notes and the climax of amazing power and almost brutality, give us glimpses of the new Chopin. There is development, but only of tonality--if such may be called development--and the lento sostenuto is curt and very sweet. The end is impressive. The entire composition is larger in scope, its phrases fuller breathed, and there is a massiveness absent from much of the master’s music. To my own way of thinking this fantaisie, with the F sharp minor polonaise, the F minor ballade, the C sharp minor and B minor scherzi, the D minor prelude, the sonatas in B flat minor and B minor, and the C minor study (opus 25), are Chopin at the top of his powers.

II

Frederic Chopin bequeathed to the world six solo scherzi. The four that comprise a group are opus 20, in B minor, published February, 1835; opus 31, in B flat minor, published December, 1837; opus 39, in C sharp minor, published October, 1840, and opus 54, in E major, published December, 1843. The other two are to be found in his second sonata, opus 35, and his third sonata, opus 58. They are in the respective keys of E flat minor and E flat major. These six compositions are the finest evidences of Chopin’s originality, variety, power and delicacy. The scherzo is not his invention--Beethoven and Mendelssohn anticipated him--but he took the form, remodelled and filled it with a surprisingly novel content, although not altering its three-four measure. We feel the humor of the Beethoven scherzo, its swing, robustness and at times rude jollity. In Mendelssohn one enjoys the lightness, velocity and finish of his scherzando moods. They contain, strictly speaking, more of the truer scherzo idea than Chopin’s. Mendelssohn’s delicate sentiment of joyousness came from the early Italian masters of the piano. Rossini voiced this when he said, after hearing a capriccio of Felix the Feminine, “Ça sent de Scarlatti.” Yet the Mendelssohn piano pieces of this character are finely considered efforts, full of a certain gracious life and a surface skimming of sentiment, like the curved flight of a thin bird over shallow waters.