Chapter I: Part 1

Music After the Great War

Music
After the Great War

AND OTHER STUDIES

BY
CARL VAN VECHTEN

NEW YORK
G. Schirmer
MCMXV

_Copyright, 1915, by G. Schirmer_

26311

_FOR FANIA_

Contents

PAGE

MUSIC AFTER THE GREAT WAR 1

MUSIC FOR MUSEUMS? 27

THE SECRET OF THE RUSSIAN BALLET 45

IGOR STRAWINSKY: A NEW COMPOSER 83

MASSENET AND WOMEN 119

STAGE DECORATION AS A FINE ART 137

ADOLPHE APPIA AND GORDON CRAIG 159

Music After the Great War

Music After the Great War

When the great war was declared, Leo Stein, in Florence at the time, asserted that the day of the cubists, the futurists, and their ilk was at an end. “After the war,” he said, “there will be no more of this nonsense. Matisse may survive, and Picasso in his ‘early manner,’ but Renoir and Cézanne are the last of the great painters, and it is on their work that the new art, whatever it may be, will be founded.” Leo Stein belongs to a family which, in a sense, has stood sponsor for the new painters, but his remarks can scarcely be called disinterested, as his Villa di Doccia in Florence contains no paintings at present but those of Renoir and Cézanne. There are mostly Renoirs.

Of course a general remark like this in regard to painting is based on an idea that there is no connection--at least no legitimate connection--between the painting of Marcel Duchamp, Gleizes, Derain, Picabia, and the later work of Picasso, and the painters (completely legitimatized by now) who came before them. Without arguing this misconception, it may be stated that a similar misconception exists in relation to “modern” music. There are those who feel that the steady line of progression from Bach, through Beethoven and Brahms, has broken off somewhere. The exact point of departure is not agreed upon. Some say that music as an art ended with Richard Wagner’s death. There are only a few, however, who do not include Brahms and Tschaikowsky in the list of those graced with the crown of genius. There are many who are generous enough to believe that Richard Strauss and Claude Debussy have carried on the divine torch. But there are only a few discerning enough to perceive that Strawinsky and Schoenberg have gone only a step further than the so-called impressionists in music.

Since the beginnings of music, as an art-form, there has always been a complaint that contemporary composers could not write melody. Beethoven suffered from this complaint; Wagner suffered from it; we have only recently gone through the period when Strauss and Debussy suffered from it. The reason is an obvious one. Each new composer has made his own rules of composition. Each has progressed a step further in his use of harmony. Now it is evident that in this way novelty lies, for an entirely new unaccompanied melody would be difficult to devise. It is in the combination of melody and harmony that a composer may show his talent at invention. It is but natural that any advance in this direction should at first startle unaccustomed ears, and it is by no means uncertain that this first thrill is not the most delicious sensation to be derived from hearing music. In time harmony is exhausted--combinations of notes in ordered forms--but there is still the pursuit of disharmony to be made. We are all quite accustomed to occasional discords, even in the music of Beethoven, where they occur very frequently. Strauss utilizes discords skilfully in his tonal painting; in such works as _Elektra_ and _Heldenleben_ they abound. The newer composers have almost founded a school on disharmony.

To me it seems certain that it is the men who have given the new impetus to tonal art in the past five years who will make the opening for whatever art-music we are to hear after the war, and I am referring even to occasional pieces after the manner of Tschaikowsky’s overture, 1812, in which the Russian National Anthem puts to rout the _Marseillaise_.... Perhaps it will be Karol Szymanowski of Poland (if he is still alive) or a new César Franck in Belgium who will rise to write of the intensity of suffering through which his country has struggled. But it seems to me beyond a doubt that music after the great war will be “newer” (I mean, of course, more primitive) than it was in the last days of July, 1914. There will be plenty of disharmonies, foreshadowed by Schoenberg and Strawinsky, let loose on our ears, but, in spite of the protests of Mr. Runciman, I submit that these disharmonies are a steady progression from Wagner, and not a freakish whim of an abnormal devil. I do not predict a return to Mozart as one result of the war.

There are always those prone to believe that such a war as is now in progress has been brought about by an anarchic condition among the artists, as foolish a theory as one could well promulgate, and keep one’s mental balance. It is this group which steadfastly maintains that, after the war, things will be not merely as they were immediately before the war broke out, but as they were _fifty_ years before. Now, it should be apparent to anyone but the oldest inhabitant that the music-dramas of Richard Wagner are aging rapidly. Public interest in them is on the decline, thanks to an absurd recognition, in some degree or other, everywhere from Bayreuth to Paris, from Madrid to New York, of what is known as the “Master’s tradition.” Some of this tradition has been invented by Frau Cosima Liszt von Bülow Wagner and all of it is guaranteed to put the Wagner plays rapidly in a class with the operas of Donizetti and Bellini, stalking horses for prima donnas trained in a certain school. Without going into particulars which would clog this issue, it may be stated that the tradition includes matters pertaining to scenery, staging, lighting, acting, singing, and even _tempi_ in the orchestra. It is all-inclusive.

It must have been quite evident to even the casual concert-goer that German music has passed its zenith. It has had its day and it is not likely that post-bellum music will be Germanic. In an article in a recent number of “The Musical Quarterly,” Edgar Istel reviews German opera since Wagner with a consistent tone of depreciation. The subject, of course, does not admit of enthusiasm. He calls Edmund Kretzschmer and Karl Goldmark “the compromise composers.” There are probably not many Americans who have heard of the former or his “most successful opera,” _Die Folkunger_. Goldmark is better known to us, but we do not exaggerate the importance of _Die Königin von Saba_, the _Sakuntala_ overture, or _Die ländliche Hochzeit_ symphony. Nor do we foreigners to the _Vaterland_ know much about Victor Nessler’s _Der Trompeter von Säkkingen_, although we hear one air from it frequently at Sunday night concerts in the opera house. August Bungert tried to outdo Wagner with a six-day opera cycle, _Homerische Welt_, produced in 1898-1903 and already forgotten. Max Schillings, whose name has occasionally figured on symphony orchestra programmes in America, is thus dismissed by Istel: “Schillings’ last work, _Der Moloch_ (1906), proves his total inability as a dramatic composer.” Hans Pfitzner is another name on which we need not linger. Engelbert Humperdinck, of course, wrote the one German opera which has had a world-wide and continuous success since _Parsifal_--_Hänsel und Gretel_. But the music he has composed since then has not awakened much enthusiasm. _Hänsel und Gretel_ is, after all, folk-music with Wagnerian orchestration. It assuredly is not from Humperdinck that we can look for post-bellum music. We have heard Kienzl’s very mediocre _Der Kuhreigen_ and we have been promised a hearing of _Evangelimann_. The name of Siegfried Wagner signifies nothing. Ludwig Thuille wrote some very interesting music in the last act of _Lobetanz_, but that opera could not hold the stage at the Metropolitan Opera House. W. von Waltershausen’s _Oberst Chabert_ has been given in London, not, however, with conspicuous success. D’Albert has written many German operas in spite of his Scotch birth. Of these the best is _Tiefland_, negligible in regarding the future. Leo Blech’s unimportant _Versiegelt_ gave pleasure in Berlin for a time. Wolf-Ferrari, one of the most gifted of the German composers, is half Italian. His work, of course, is not notable for originality of treatment. _Suzannen’s Geheimniss_ is very like an old Italian or Mozart opera. So is _Le Donne Curiose_. His cantata, _Vita Nuova_, is archaic in tone, a musical Cimabue or Giotto. _I Giojelli della Madonna_ is an attempt at Italian _verismo_. Richard Strauss! the most considerable German musical figure of his time. His operas will still be given after the war and his tone-poems will be heard, but he has done his part in furthering the progress of art-music. He has nothing more to say. In _The Legend of Joseph_, the ballet which the Russians gave in Paris last summer, it was to be observed that the Strauss idiom exploited therein had fully expressed itself in the earlier works of this composer. _Salome_ and _Elektra_ represent Strauss’s best dramatic work, and _Don Juan_ and _Till Eulenspiegel_ are, perhaps, his best tone-poems. Richard Strauss, however, is assuredly not post-bellum. His music is a part of the riches of the past. One can easily pass rapidly by the names of Bruckner, Weingartner, and Gustav Mahler. Max Reger, I think, is not a great composer. But there are two Austrian names on which we must linger.

One of them is Erich Korngold, the boy composer, who is now eighteen years old. His earlier work, such as the ballet, _Der Schneemann_, sounds like Puccini with false notes. It is pretty music. Later, Korngold developed a fancy for writing Strauss and Reger with false notes. And he is still in process of development. What he may do cannot be entirely foreseen.

Arnold Schoenberg is another matter. He is still using as propaganda music which he wrote many years ago. No public has yet caught up with his present output. That is an excellent sign that his music is of the future. The string sextet, _Verklärte Nacht_, which the Kneisel Quartet played more than once in the season just past, dates from 1899. The string quartets were written in 1905 and 1908. The five orchestral pieces, the six piano pieces, and _Pierrot Lunaire_, other music of his on which what fame he possesses outside of Austria rests, are all over two years old. Now the Boston Symphony Orchestra has only recently deemed it fitting to play the five orchestral pieces, and I believe the piano pieces received their first public performance in New York at one of the concerts given by Leo Ornstein, although several pianists, notably Charles Henry Cooper and Mrs. Arensberg, had played them in private.

In 1911 Schoenberg issued his quite extraordinary “Handbuch der Harmonielehre,” which is one of the best evidences that, even though the composer dies in the war, others will follow to carry on the torch from the point where he dropped it. Yes, Schoenberg, no less than Henri Matisse, is a torch-bearer in the art race. He is a stone in the architecture of music--and not an accidental decoration.

May I quote a few passages from the “Handbuch”?

“The artist does not do what others find beautiful, but what he finds himself bound to do.”

“If anyone feels dissatisfied with his time, let it not be because that time is no longer the good old time, but because it is not yet the new and better time, the future.”

“Though I refrain from overprizing originality, I cannot help valuing novelty at its full worth. Novelty is the improvement toward which we are drawn as irresistibly, as unwittingly, as towards the future. It may prove to be a splendid betterment, or to be death--but also the certainty of a higher life after death. Yes, the future brings with it the novel and the unknown; and therefore, not without excuse, we often hold what is novel to be identical with what is good and beautiful.”

With the single exception just noted it is not from the German countries that the musical invention of the past two decades has come. It is from France. Whether Debussy or Erik Satie or Fanelli first developed the use of the whole-tone scale is unimportant; they have all been writing in Paris.

Erik Satie is one of the precursors of a movement--not important in himself, but of immense importance as an indication. He is not a genius, and therefore his work has received little attention and has had no great influence. But it must be remembered that he was born in 1860 and that his _Gymnopédies_ and _Gnossiennes_, composed respectively in 1888 and 1890, make a free use of the whole-tone scale and other harmonic innovations ordinarily attributed to Debussy. A _Sarabande_, written in 1887, should be tried on your piano. It will certainly startle you. Satie has recently achieved a little notoriety, thanks to Debussy and Ravel, who have dragged his music into the light. The more dramatic resurrection of Fanelli by Gabriel Pierné has been related too often to need retelling here.

Debussy, beyond question, is one of the high-water marks in the history of music. _L’Après-midi d’un Faune_ is certainly post-Wagnerian in a sense that _Salome_ is not. Maurice Ravel, Paul Dukas, Roger-Ducasse, Florent Schmitt, Chausson, Chabrier, and Charpentier are all revolutionists in a greater or less degree, and all of them are direct descendants of the great French composers who came before them. But what has been accomplished in France in the last few years? Dukas has written nothing important since _Ariane et Barbe-Bleue_. Debussy’s recent works are not epoch-making: a makeshift ballet, _Jeux_, a few piano pieces; what else? Ravel’s ballet, _Daphnis et Chloë_, is lovely music. Some people profess to find pleasure in listening to Schmitt’s _Salome_. It is unbearable to me, danced or undanced. Vincent d’Indy--has he written a vibrant note since _Istar_? Charpentier’s _Julien_--a rehash of _Louise_. It sounds some fifty years older, except the carnival scene. There is live futurist music in that last act. When Charpentier painted street noises on his tonal canvas, were they of night or morning, he knew his business. But certainly not a post-bellum composer, this. Charpentier will never compose another stirring phrase; that is written in the stars. Since _Pelléas et Mélisande_ and _Ariane et Barbe-Bleue_, is there one French opera which can be called great? There are two very good ones, Raoul Laparra’s _La Habanera_ and Maurice Ravel’s _l’Heure Espagnole_, and very many bad ones, such as Massenet’s _Don Quichotte_, the unbelievable _Quo Vadis?_ of Jean Nouguès, and the imitative and meaningless _Monna Vanna_ of Février. I do not think it is from France that we may expect the post-bellum music.

Italy, long the land of opera, has held her place in the singing theatres. Verdi and Puccini still dominate the opera houses. But Puccini’s work is accomplished. His popularity is waning, as the comparative failure of _The Girl of the Golden West_ will testify. You will find the germ of all that is best in Puccini in _Manon Lescaut_, an early work. After that there is repetition and misdirection of energy, gradually diffused talent. It does not seem necessary to speak of Mascagni and Leoncavallo. They have both tried for so long a time to repeat their two successes and tried in vain. Cilea, Franchetti, Catalani, and Giordano--these names are almost forgotten already. Is Sgambati dead? Does anyone know whether he is or not? Zandonai--ah, there’s a name to linger on! Watch out for Zandonai in the vanguard of the post-bellum composers. Save him from the war-maw. His _Conchita_ disclosed a great talent; that opera shimmered with the hot atmosphere of Spain, a bestial, lazy Spain. This work I place with Debussy’s _Iberia_ as one of the great tonal pictures of Spain. I have not heard Zandonai’s opera, _Francesca da Rimini_, which was produced at Covent Garden Opera House last summer, but I have been told that its beauties are many. I hope we may hear it in New York. Pratella is one of Marinetti’s group of futurists, one of the noise-makers. I am not so sure of Pratella as I am sure that many of his theories will be more successfully exploited by someone else.

Spain has been heard from recently--Spain, which has lacked a composer of “art-music.” Albeniz and others have been writing piano music and now we are promised a one-act opera by Granados. Perhaps in time Spain may lift her head high and tinkle her castanets to some purpose, on programmes devoted to her own composers. But now it is Bizet, Chabrier, Debussy, Laparra, and Zandonai who have perverted these castanets and tambourines to their own uses.

I am no admirer of modern English music. I take less pleasure in hearing a piece by Sir Edward Elgar than I do in a mediocre performance of _Le Prophète_--and I assure you that Meyerbeer is not my favorite composer. A meaner skill than Sir Edward’s, perhaps, lies in Irving Berlin’s fingers, but a greater genius. I once spent a most frightful afternoon--at least nearly all of an afternoon--listening to Elgar’s violin concerto, and I remember a dreadfully dull symphony, that sounded as if it were played on a throbbing organ at vespers in a dark church on a hot Sunday afternoon. The _Cockaigne_ overture is more to my taste, although I think it no great achievement. Has there been a real composer in Britannia since Sir Arthur Sullivan, whose works one rehears with a pleasure akin to ecstasy? I do not think so. Cyril Scott is interesting. Holbrooke, Delius, Grainger, Wallace, and Bantock write much complex music for the orchestra, to say nothing of piano pieces, songs, and operas. (Holbrooke supplements his labors in this direction with the writing of articles for “The English Review” and other periodicals, in which he complains bitterly that the English composer is without honor in his own country.) I find Scott’s piano pieces better. But since _Il Barbiere di Siviglia_ and _Le Nozze di Figaro_ there have been but few comic scores comparable to _Patience_. You will hear the Sullivan operas many times after the war, but one cannot think of founding a school upon them.

I shall not hesitate on the music of America, because in a country that has no ante-bellum music--one cannot speak with too great enthusiasm of Ethelbert Nevin and Edward MacDowell--there is no immediate promise of important development. However, in a digression, I should like to make a few remarks on the subject of the oft-repeated charge, re-echoed by Holbrooke in relation to British musicians, that American composers are neglected and have no chance for a hearing in their own country. Has ever a piano piece been played more often or sold more copies than MacDowell’s _To a Wild Rose_, unless it be Nevin’s _Narcissus_? Probably _The Rosary_ has been sung more times in more quarters of the globe than _Rule Britannia_. Other American songs which have achieved an international success and a huge sale are _At Parting_, _A Maid Sings Light_, _From the Land of the Sky-blue Water_, and _The Year’s at the Spring_. Orchestral works by Paine, Hadley, Converse, and others, are heard almost as soon as they are composed, and many of them are heard more than once, played by more than one orchestra. Of late years it has been the custom to produce an American work each season at the Metropolitan Opera House, a custom fortunately abandoned during the season just past. No, it cannot be said that the American composer has been neglected.

Finland has presented us with Sibelius, whose latest works indicate that Helsingfors may have something to say about the trend of tone after the war, and from Poland Karol Szymanowski has sent forth some strange and appealing songs.

But it is to Russia, after all, I think, that we must turn for the inspiration, and a great deal of the execution, of our post-bellum music. Fortunately for us, we have not yet delved very deeply into the past of Russian music, in spite of reports to the contrary. Mr. Gatti-Casazza once assured me that _Boris Godunow_ was the only Russian opera which stood any chance of success in America. He has doubtless revised his feeling on the subject, since he has announced _Prince Igor_ for production this season, an opera which should be greeted with very warm enthusiasm, if the producers give any decent amount of attention to the very important ballet.

It is interesting, in turning to Russian literature, to discover that Turgenev in the middle of the nineteenth century was writing a masterpiece like “A Sportsman’s Sketches,” a work full of reserve and primitive force, and a strange charm. And Turgenev was born and bred a gentleman in the sense that Thackeray was born and bred a gentleman. In English literature we have travelled completely around the circle, through the artificial, the effete, and the sentimental, to the natural, the forceful, the primitive. Art like that of D. H. Lawrence, George Moore, and Theodore Dreiser is very much abroad in the lands. Russia began her circle only in the last century with her splendidly barbaric school of writers who touch the soil at every point, the soil and the soul: Turgenev, Gogol, Pushkin, Dostoievsky, Andreyev, Tolstoy, Tchekhov, Gorky, and Artzybachev, a noble group of names. We find in Russia a situation very akin to that of Ireland, a people commercially under-developed, in a large measure born to suffering, keenly alive to artistic impulse.

In Ireland this impulse has expressed itself almost entirely through the written word, but in Russia it has found an outlet in a thousand channels. (The arts have grouped themselves together in the glowing splendor of the Russian Ballet productions.) Music, like literature, sprang into being in Russia, fed on the rich folk-songs of the Slavic races, during the nineteenth century; and again like Russian literature, its first baby notes were wild, appealing, barbaric, forceful, and sincere--the music of the steppes and the people, rather than the music of the drawing-room and the nobility. Let us remember that about the time Richard Wagner was writing _Tristan und Isolde_, Moussorgsky was putting on paper, with infinite pain, the notes of the scores of the poignant _Boris Godunow_ and the intense _La Khovanchina_. Since then the Russian music world has been occupied by men who have given their lives to the foundation of a national school. Their work has been largely overshadowed in America by the facile genius of Tschaikowsky, who wrote the most popular symphony of the nineteenth century, but who is less Russian and less important than many of his confrères.

If for a time after the war one must turn to the past for operatic novelties, one can do no better than to go to Russia. It is my firm conviction that several of the Russian operas would have a real success here. _La Khovanchina_ to many musicians is more beautiful than _Boris_. It is indeed a serious work of genius. The chorus with which the first act closes has power enough to entice me to the theatre at any time. I do not know of a death-scene in all the field of opera as strong in its effect as that of the Prince Ivan Khovansky. He is stabbed and he falls dead. He does not sing again, he does not move; there are no throbs of the violins, no drum beats. There is a pause. The orchestra is silent. The people on the stage are still. It is tremendous!

Rimsky-Korsakow’s music is pretty well known in America. His _Scheherazade_ and _Antar_ suites are played very often; but his operas remain unsung here. Why? He wrote some sixteen of them before he died. Even so early a work as _A Night in May_ contains many lovely pages. It is a folk-song opera built along the old lines of set numbers. It reminds one of _The Bartered Bride_. First produced in 1880, it does not show its age. _The Snow Maiden_ contains the _Song of the Shepherd Lehl_ and one or two other airs familiar in the concert répertoire. _Sadko_, if given in the Russian manner, would fill any opera house for two performances a week for the season; and _Ivan the Terrible_ is a masterpiece of its kind. But the greatest of them all is the last lyric drama of the composer, _The Golden Cock_, in which this great tone colorist bent his ear further towards the future than he had ever done before.

The death of Alexander Scriabine recently in Petrograd created little comment, although the papers had been filled a few weeks before with descriptions of the very bad performance of his _Prometheus_ by the Russian Symphony Orchestra. Scriabine, another Gordon Craig, was too great a theorist, too concerned with the perfect in his art, ever to arrive at anything approximating the actual. As an influence, he can already be felt. His synchronism of music, light, and perfumes was never realized in his own music, although the Russian Ballet has completely realized it. (How cleverly that organization--or is it a movement?--has seized everybody’s good ideas, from Wagner’s to Adolphe Appia’s!) As for Scriabine’s strange scales and disharmonies, Igor Strawinsky has made the best use of them--Igor Strawinsky, perhaps the greatest of the musicians of the immediate future. I hope Americans may hear his wonderfully beautiful opera, _The Nightingale_; and if all the music of the future is like that, I stand with bowed and reverent head before the music of the future (with the mental reservation, however, that I may spurn it when it is no longer music of the future). His three ballets are also works of genius.

It is indeed to Strawinsky, whose strange harmonies evoked new fairy worlds in _The Nightingale_ and whose barbaric rhythms stirred the angry pulses of a Paris audience threatened with the shame of an emotion in the theatre, to whom we may turn, perhaps, for still new thrills after the war. Strawinsky has so far showed his growth in every new work he has vouchsafed the public. From Schoenberg, and Korngold in a lesser degree, we may hope for messages in tone, disharmonic by nature, and with a complexity of rhythm so complex that it becomes simple. (In this connection I should like to say that there are scarcely two consecutive bars in Strawinsky’s ballet, _The Sacrifice to the Spring_, written in the same time-signature, and yet I know of no music--I do not even except _Alexander’s Ragtime Band_--more dance-compelling.) We may pray to Karol Szymanowski for futurist wails from ruined Poland; a rearranged, disharmonic version of the national airs of the warring countries may spring from France or Italy; but for the new composers, the new names, the strong, new blood of the immediate future in music, we must turn to Russia. The new music will not come from England, certainly not from America, not from France, nor from Germany, but from the land of the steppes--a gradual return to that orientalism in style which may be one of the gifts of culture, which an invasion from the Far East may impose on us some time in the next century.

_June, 1915._

Music for Museums?

Music for Museums?

I saw people actually enjoying themselves at a recent piano recital. During the performance of some of the numbers they laughed; at other times they nudged one another and made comments. The conclusion of each piece was punctuated by a certain amount of vociferous applause, and an almost equal amount of disapprobation. One group of pieces on the programme, Claude Debussy’s _Children’s Corner_, was familiar; as a result, it aroused less interest than some of the other music played. Albeniz, one of the new men who is making the list of Spanish compositions extend beyond the folk-song, was represented by his _El Albaicin_; Maurice Ravel by _Gaspard de la Nuit_, a very successful attempt to paint atmosphere and character in the very limited tonal medium of the pianoforte; Scriabine by four preludes and a sonata; and Leo Ornstein, the pianist, by _Seven Sketches_ and _Two Shadow Pieces_. Mr. Ornstein’s compositions have no truck with majors and minors, thirds and fifths, pentatonic and diatonic scales. His descending fingers strike masses of keys; some auditors seemed to think there is no plan in these assaults on the board. Personally, I am willing to wager that the last piano sonatas of the deaf Beethoven meant just as little to their first hearers. We have become accustomed to the sweet and unsubtle way of the tonic and dominant. Arnold Schoenberg and Igor Strawinsky are yet discordant to our melody-soaked and harmony-demanding ears.

Yet, if concert programmes are consulted, one will find in them very little music earlier than the eighteenth century. The symphony orchestra is really a discovery of the nineteenth century. When our symphony orchestras play Bach, Haydn, or Mozart, the reënforcements, the rearrangements, would astonish those old composers as much as the electric signs on Broadway, could they be brought back to hear them. Either one-half the band--nay, two-thirds--must sit still during the playing of these numbers, if the original body of tone is to be preserved, or else some readjustment is necessary. For instance, it is quite customary to allow the full body of strings to play a Mozart symphony, although the wood-winds and brasses are not appreciably greater in number in the modern orchestra than they were in Mozart’s time. Lack of proportion and over-emphasis are the natural results.

It is only the composers who have invented the modern orchestra, Berlioz, Liszt, Wagner, Strauss, Reger, Strawinsky and Scriabine--to mention a few names--who get justice done to their compositions. In fact, as it stands, the modern orchestra exists for the perfect playing of modern music. It is a dizzy, vertiginous force; floods of sound are let loose on the hearer to drown his sensibilities and to make him “feel.” Now, there was something very precise and exact and prim about the peruked band of the day of Haydn, which would have played the _Symphonie Pathétique_ as if it were the _Marche Funèbre d’une Marionnette_. Music in the good old days did not cause women to swoon and men to swear. There were no Wagnerites then. (Are there any now?) The composer of _Armide_ would not have inspired an Aubrey Beardsley drawing. So when the modern orchestra plays Mozart it makes just a little too much of it. Mozart and Strauss! It is the difference between Cimabue and Michael Angelo.

The conflict between periodic conventions and contemporary methods and tastes is always great and will always serve as an excuse for discussion. There seems to be no adequate reason why we should give up Shakespeare because we do not perform his plays in the Elizabethan manner. After all, a tune is a tune, and _Voi che sapete_ would probably sound very well played on mandolins if Mme. Sembrich did not happen to be handy to sing it. The Anglican church has found it well adapted for hymnal purposes, as anyone knows who has heard _Adeste Fideles_. So, perhaps, Bach rearranged by Gustav Mahler, or Josef Stransky, or anybody else who happens to have the time, is to be listened to, just as we are all forced to lend our ears several times a year, whether it be in a concert hall or a restaurant, or on an ocean liner, to Gounod’s idea of a Bach prelude.

There is a great deal of the old music which gives a pleasant impression to the ear if it be not heard too frequently. Mozart, Bach, and Gluck, however, stand the test of frequent repetition better than Beethoven. It would also be a mistake, perhaps, not to give the students of music an opportunity to hear past examples of the art, to establish in their minds a knowledge of the successive steps which have been taken in building up this arbitrary thing which we call “art-music,” although it is neither the music of the Chinese, who, after all, may be considered an artistic race, the African negroes, the Indians, nor the Japanese. It would not be advisable, perhaps, to have any admirer of present-day art-music believe that it was all that could be said or done in music; an historical survey is necessary. For some of us there is always the question of relative importance. It may be a fact that nobody in the future will be able to extract more beautiful arbitrary art-music out of the air than has been composed by Mozart and Wagner. We are sure that Berlioz, Liszt, Meyerbeer, and Mendelssohn can be improved on because they have been. Perhaps Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony is really better music than any which has been composed before or since. (Personally, I do not for a moment think so.) For the purpose of argument, however, it is necessary to presuppose that some people set up standards of this sort. There are those, doubtless, who are really sincere in their devotion to the composers whose names begin with a B; but there is a larger group whose ears find it easier to listen not merely to music based upon a certain scale, but to _certain_ music based on this scale. As a result, one might say that the very limited attendance on which our symphony orchestras may count is largely made up of middle-aged people who are never contemptuous of familiarity.

The principle, of course, is all wrong. Still, when every person in a vast population is expected to enjoy arbitrary art-music, one cannot expect perception or taste. In our civilization everybody is supposed to “love” music. Poor though we may be, we send our daughters to the music-masters. From cottage to cottage the echoes of the pianoforte resound and, especially in the beginning, each pupil is given a taste of what is known in the provinces as “classical” music. Czerny is hauled out to teach the fingers how to be agile. There must be a taste of Bach’s _Wohltemperirtes Clavier_, a Chopin waltz or two.... Heller is a favorite with small-town teachers, and then the student may burst gaily into the intricacies of the latest air by Irving Berlin. Now, why is it that the newest of the arts--at least the newest from the arbitrary point of view from which we consider music as an art--is taught to almost all the children of all the lands? They are actually beaten with sticks to drive them to the keyboard. To be sure, children are also taught to read, for more cogent reasons. It would do no harm to anyone to be taught to read music; but to be taught to play it is like being taught to act. What if we should all be taught to paint?--Well, after all, why not?

The results are not heartening. The fact is that over fifty per cent. of the audiences who attend symphony concerts cannot carry a tune. Naturally they are not averse to hearing Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony played over and over and over again, but I should like to ask these same people how many times during the course of a season they would listen to a masterpiece in words--_Hamlet_, for instance. How much less often would they care to hear a play by Bernard Shaw?--and yet there are some overtures and symphonies which every orchestra plays every season to its patrons. Some of this music one also hears in restaurants and in the opera house. It is monstrous!

I really do not think that a modern symphony orchestra ought to be allowed to play more than one Beethoven symphony a season. This fossilization would be deadening to any art. A set concert programme is almost an occasion for despair under the brightest conditions, but with no new life in its make-up, it had better remain an unperformed programme. When an orchestra is the medium through which a new musician pours out his inspiration to the world, there is meaning in the organization. When it ambles idly through Brahms and Bach it occupies the same place in the world’s affairs that the museum does. Why should all our orchestras insist, except on rare occasions, on being museums?

We have seen that only an inert audience may be counted upon from the ranks of the music students of the country. More interest might be expected from auditors prepared to be unprepared. To be sure, every conductor is keen to put a few “novelties” on his programmes every year. This season, for instance, a symphony by Sibelius, which has been played in Europe for some time and has been performed here before, has been hauled out again to make the critics foam at the mouth. Igor Strawinsky’s early work, _Fireworks_, composed and published in 1908, has been vouchsafed us. Since then Strawinsky, who, to my mind, is the most brilliant of the new composers, has written three ballets, _The Firebird_, _Petrouchka_, and _The Sacrifice to the Spring_, and an opera, _The Nightingale_. Not a note, so far as I am aware, of these most interesting scores has been heard in New York, although Paris and London are thoroughly familiar with them. Schoenberg is as yet barely a ghoulish name in this country, to be whispered shudderingly until some daring soul makes the Austrian composer a conventional thing of the past. The Kneisels have at last taken him up, if that means anything, and, of course, Ornstein has played him. The Flonzaleys have played a quartet and the Boston Symphony Orchestra has performed the five orchestral pieces. Chicago, too, has heard these. This is as far as we have gone with Schoenberg. There is really no use of referring to so bad a performance as the Russian Symphony Orchestra gave of Scriabine’s _Prometheus_. We hear too much Strauss now. There was a time when we did not hear enough. The academic Reger was feared like the plague for whole years. Now that his message means as little as possible, he jumps from programme to programme.

Symphony concerts, then, as they exist in America--and to a lesser degree elsewhere--are museums, where one may inspect bits of old musical armor, tunes in _Sèvres_, tinkling lace shawls from Brussels, or harmonious bowls of the Ming period. The audiences are shameless so-called music-lovers who dawdle through endless repetitions of the _Euryanthe_ overture, and who whisper exquisite trifles to one another about the delights of an audition of a Mozart symphony. Really there is nothing so smug, so snobbish, to be found in the world as the audience of a symphony society, unless it be a string-quartet audience. Beside these groups you find opera-goers are simple human beings. Both the organization and its supporters, then, we discover, are simply corrupted by cob-webs. They are things of the past that persist in going on. A live orchestra, built on living principles, which played new music if it played at all, would serve not only to develop new composers, but also new ideas. One can talk intelligently and even quarrel with one’s neighbor about a new Strawinsky work. At best, if one is a critic, one can write a column about how Gustav Mahler doubled the brasses in a Beethoven symphony and thus became the most arrant of knaves, or, if one is not a critic, one may say, “I like Mr. Stransky so much when he conducts Liszt!” To be sure, the snobs and the smug would be bewildered by the novelties. Perhaps they wouldn’t even go to the concerts, although that seems unbelievable. But there would be new audiences. At a recent concert of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, in New York, Dr. Muck dared to place three unfamiliar works on the programme. (God knows this was an unusual proceeding.) Not one of these was formidable; not one of them new, except to those comfortable ladies and gentlemen who have sat through concerts devoted to Beethoven and Bach so long that they should know the tunes by heart. Yet the protests were many and loud. I think Dr. Muck really stirred up an interest in music by this procedure.

But if our symphony societies are dead, what of our string quartets? Chamber music! Its title explains it. It is music intended to be played at home ... _music intended to be played_, not to be listened to, except, perhaps, by some doting members of the performers’ families. Suppose you play the violin and you can find another violinist, and a ’cellist, and a violist, you invite them all to come to your house some night and you take down Schubert’s quartets, or Tschaikowsky’s, and entertain yourselves. Father, reading his paper, listens listlessly.... Sister Mary doesn’t object to giving her ear occasionally, but there is no concerted attention devoted to you. Nor should there be. People do not, as a rule, attempt to play piano duets in public. Why they should play string quartets I do not know. Yet you will find the cult of the string quartet is almost a mystic body. There is a great deal said about this being the “highest and noblest” form of music (arbitrary art-music), and a great many people are impressed with the idea that to know the string quartets of the masters in itself constitutes a liberal education. To know how to play them does, in fact, make for a certain education, but to listen to them--well, that is a different matter. The string quartet plays in the very dustiest part of the museum in which “modern” concerts are given. Its audiences are fanatics who have gone mad over an old religion, and while they will listen on occasion to trios, sextets, and piano quintets, their idea of the limitations of the possible combinations of instruments is circumscribed.... To my mind, there seems to be no good reason why we should not have a duet between child’s voice and flute; two guitars and two mandolins make very pretty music.

I really do not know whether it is the concert-going public which makes snobs of the critics, or the critics who make snobs of the public. It is certain that the music critics are loftier in their self-created mountain strongholds than almost any body of people since the worthy mastersingers. They are the cataloguers of the museum, and as each set of performers takes out an old doll and makes its arms and legs wobble, and teases it to cry “Mama,” they express their delight or their displeasure over the results. If a new doll, by any chance, is brought in, it is quickly sent to the basement by these judges, unless it imitates not only in appearance, but in gesture as well, some old doll. Montemezzi is a doll who did not win the disapproval of the critics because they had been hearing _L’Amore dei tre Re_ or something like it all their lives.... Zandonai, on the other hand.... New dolls are not wanted in a museum which contains the works of Beethoven, Bach, and Brahms. Pratella’s name does not even begin with a B. But neither does Strauss’s, nor Debussy’s. After all, however, if one writes criticisms one must have a standard, I hear you objecting. Most critics do, mercifully enough for their readers, for if one’s standard is not to accept any innovations after a diminished seventh, it at least gives his readers an opportunity to be aware of what he means when he says that a work is discordant. When a seasoned examiner of musical criticism meets this word he understands that the critic means that the music under discussion is quite different from that of Weber and Puccini. There may be, on the other hand, very good reasons to suppose that to an unprejudiced ear, one not fed up on art-music, the new music may not be any more discordant than the hum of a factory, the roar of a city, or any of the familiar rhythmical sounds to which our ears are so accustomed that we accept them. The Hottentot and the Chinaman find real pleasure in what we call discords, and, as a result, they have achieved in their music complexities of rhythm which would be beyond the grasp of the ordinary composer of our art-music.... It is alone the critic’s point of view, well-defined, which makes him comprehensible when he disdains to be more scientific in his criticism.

There would seem to be a better way, unless the critic can describe his emotions as poignantly as Pater painted his impressions of the _Monna Lisa_. Why not a scientific description? For years columns and pages have been pouring over to us about the “discordant” Schoenberg, but nothing which actually gives you an idea of Schoenberg has yet appeared, at least not under my eyes. (I might except a few paragraphs in Huneker’s article.) One could give an idea of what the music really was like, at least to a musician. Or one could make a confession, such as I heard Alfred Hertz make after the first performance in London of Strawinsky’s very beautiful opera, _The Nightingale_, in which instruments are combined with such strange effect that it is almost as if the composer had discovered a new scale of tones: “I am considered a good musician. When I am conducting an orchestra I can detect a false note in the furthest bassoon, or the nearest flute, but in the second act of _The Nightingale_ I could not name a single note.”

_January, 1915._

The Secret of the Russian Ballet

Secret of the Russian Ballet

Irony certainly directed the workings of fate when it was decreed, in this age of individualism, that the group-spirit should dominate the movements of the theatre, an institution in which, not so many years ago, the individual reigned, his head crowned with bays. Democracy has two effects: it strengthens the individual and it gives him the power to join with other individuals in fostering the growth of his ideals. Thus Max Reinhardt, distinctly individual though he may be, has made his impression through his artists, his actors, and his musicians. So has Stanislawsky of Moscow, who in one instance solicited the services of Gordon Craig. The Irish Theatre movement, which developed so great a genius as Synge and many lesser, but still important, writers, such as T. C. Murray and St. John Ervine, was essentially conceived in the group-spirit. But more than any of these, the most brilliant movement in the theatre of our time, the Russian Ballet (I am referring specifically to the organization under the direction of Serge de Diaghilew) has relied to an extraordinary degree on the group for its effect--one which, on modern art, music, dancing, stage decorations, and women’s fashions, can scarcely be overestimated. I have heard it said, not altogether as a jest, that the Russian Ballet has had an influence on European politics.

There are still many people, however, who have never seen the performances of the Russian Ballet, who think of it only as an aggregation of virtuosi, much after the manner of one of Mr. Grau’s all-star casts in _Les Huguenots_. It is true that the names of Nijinsky, Karsavina, Fokine, Miassine, Bolm, and Fokina have inevitably awakened the same sort of magic sympathy that the names of Nordica, Melba, Calvé and the de Rezskes once evoked. The misunderstanding has followed in natural sequence. Nevertheless--and this is said without any desire to depreciate the value of the Russian stars--it is fortunate that the ideal of the producers of these mimed dramas is aimed higher than at the exploitation of individual talent. Their ultimate goals are cohesiveness and general pictorial effect. And this fact makes it possible for the Ballet to give representative performances with or without the aid of any particular dancer. In the summer of 1914, for example, in the absence of the superlative Nijinsky, the Russians made very lovely productions of Rimsky-Korsakow’s _The Golden Cock_ and Richard Strauss’s _The Legend of Joseph_.

For any comprehensive view of the achievements of the organization, it is essential to remember that Mr. de Diaghilew’s Russian Ballet began in Paris as an art exhibition; that is the secret. For two seasons Bakst and other Russian painters hung their pictures in the French capital. These two picture-shows are now included in the official lists of the Russian Ballet seasons, and by no means accidentally, or for purposes of misrepresentation. For the Ballet has, in a large sense, continued to be a picture-exhibition, and in spite of the fact that some of the novelty has been worn off by multiplied imitations, the thing itself still retains a good deal of the original impulse. The Russian Ballet, on its decorative side, is entirely responsible for the riot of color which has spread over the Western world in clothes and house furnishings. Without the Russian Ballet as an inspiration there could have been no Paul Poiret, no Paul Iribe, no George Barbier, no Jean Cocteau, no George Lepape, no Marcel Lejeune. There surely would have been no “Gazette de Bon-Ton” and no department-shop sales of striped and spotted fabrics of every shade under the sun. George Bernard Shaw did not stretch the truth when he said that for the past five years the Russian Ballet has furnished the sole inspiration for fashions in women’s dress.... One does not need to remember any further back than the summer of 1914, when _Papillons_ and _The Legend of Joseph_ were produced, to follow him. The crinolined ruffled skirts of the former ballet and the prim Veronese gowns of the latter (recall Lillah McCarthy’s dresses in _The Doctor’s Dilemma_) have been repeated in a thousand forms. And so we might go back, year by year, to the season when Bakst’s _Sheherazade_ launched the Oriental craze which is still making itself felt in hamlets on the Great Lakes.

These decorations, and the costumes which accompany them, designed by such artists--many of them well-known painters in Russia--as Roerich, Bakst, Fedorowsky, Soudeikine, Golovine, Doboujinsky, Alexander Benois, and Nathalie Gontcharova, are the basis of the beauty of the Russian Ballet, and they are so perfect in their many manifestations that no amount of imitation can entirely spoil them. When Roerich’s scene for the Polovtsian camp in _Prince Igor_, a composition in dull greys and reds, with low, round-topped tents and rising columns of smoke, was disclosed in Paris, Jacques Blanche, the French painter, was moved to write an article in which he hailed the designer as the inventor of a new type of stage scenery, and even called upon the easel painters to learn a lesson in truth from this rugged Russian. Roerich subsequently designed the very beautiful green landscape of the first scene for Strawinsky’s _The Sacrifice to the Spring_, and the grewsome setting, between somewhere and nowhere, of the second. To Fedorowsky are due the barbaric decorations and costumes for Moussorgsky’s opera, _La Khovanchina_. The dresses of the Persian ballet in this opera, orange riots, speckled with patches of deep green and blue, have been plentifully imitated. Soudeikine devised the extravagant ostrich-plumed gauds worn by the six negroes who accompanied Florent Schmitt’s Salome on her decadent way. And Nathalie Gontcharova, with exquisite fantasy, designed the scenes and costumes for _The Golden Cock_, a production in which the Russians showed that they were willing to go yet further in the realms of color-combination than they had before ventured. Bakst, of course, is as well known to us as Aubrey Beardsley or Longfellow. There have been books of his work on sale; the magazines and newspapers have reprinted many of his best designs; there has been an exhibition of his original drawings at the Berlin Photographic Galleries in New York. However, in spite of the reproductions and imitations, I think those who have not yet seen a Bakst production, such as _Sheherazade_, _Daphnis et Chloë_, or the extraordinary _Legend of Joseph_, on the stage may prepare for a thrill.

The scene exposed on the very large Drury Lane stage as the curtain rose on Richard Strauss’s ballet was certainly very splendid in its majestic beauty. The stage directions give some conception of the picture:

“The scene, the stage furniture, and the costumes are throughout in the manner of Paolo Veronese, and thus follow, in style and fashion, those of the period of about 1530. The Egyptian characters wear Venetian costumes; Joseph and the dealers who bring him to Potiphar, Oriental dress of the sixteenth century. The scene represents a huge pillared hall in the Palladian style. The pillars and ceiling are of bright gold with a greenish sheen. The floor is inlaid with blocks of colored marble. The background is traversed by a raised loggia, also of gold, which is open to the air on the farther side, and gives a view over gardens with playing fountains, and distant wings of the palace; the openings on the further side are, however, curtained during the banquet by a vast carpet of Flemish work representing the Earthly Paradise--stretches of verdure, alive with exotic beasts of every kind. The loggia has no balustrade, but is open between the pillars from floor to ceiling, so that the personages traversing it are entirely visible from head to foot. On the right a flight of steps leads up to the loggia. Over the floor of the loggia an Oriental carpet is hung, reaching down to the hall.