Musical Studies - free ebook by Ernest Newman

MUSICAL STUDIES

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ERNEST NEWMAN

LONDON: JOHN LANE, THE BODLEY HEAD NEW YORK: JOHN LANE COMPANY TORONTO: BELL &amp; COCKBURN. MCMXIV THIRD EDITION Printed by Ballantyne, Hanson &amp; Co. at the Ballantyne Press, Edinburgh...

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PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION (1905)

The greater part of the following matter has already appeared in various periodicals—the Fortnightly Review , the Contemporary Review , the Speaker , the Chord , the New York Musical Courier , the Atlantic Monthly , the Weekly Critical Review , the Monthly Musical Record , and the Daily Mail . All have been greatly altered, however—some practically rewritten. The larger articles—those on Programme Music, Strauss, and Berlioz—have been made up from sundry articles that appeared at different times

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PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION

As this Second Edition is printed from moulds, no alteration of or addition to the text of the First Edition has been possible. I should have liked to expand one or two of the essays at various points and to revise them at others. There is always something new to be said, for example, about programme music, while any article on a living subject, such as that on Strauss, is bound to contain many things that are not so apposite now as when they were first written. But even these may have a value a

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PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION

A preface to the third edition can in the nature of things be little more than a repetition of that to the second. While in one way it is regrettable that the article on Strauss does not carry us further than the Symphonia Domestica , that work, after all, is the most convenient and the most logical closing point for a study of him in all but his very latest activities. It is about seven years now since he launched out upon a new sea with Salome . With that and the operas that followed it he has

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I

It is fairly safe to say that—with the possible exception of Liszt—there is no musician about whom people differ so strongly as about Berlioz. His case is, indeed, unique. We are pretty well agreed as to the relative positions of the other men; roughly speaking, all cultivated musicians would put Wagner and Brahms and Beethoven in the first rank of composers, and Mendelssohn, Grieg, and Dvořàk in the second or third. Even in the case of a disputed problem like Strauss, the argument among those w

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II

Let us first of all look at him biographically and historically, as he was in himself and in his relations to his contemporaries. His is perhaps the strangest story in all the records of music. In contrast to musicians like Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Wagner, and a score of others, who grew up from childhood in an atmosphere saturated with music, Berlioz is born in a country town that is practically destitute of musical life. Even the piano is not cultivated there, the harp and guitar being almost

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III

We are face to face, then, with a personality which, whether we like it or not, is of extraordinary strength and originality. If we are to realise what kind of force he was, and how he came to do the work he did, we must study him both from the standpoint of history and from that of physiological and psychological science. Musical criticism is apt to become too much a mere matter of wine-tasting, a bare statement of a preference of this vintage or a decided dislike for that. We need to study mus

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IV

Few literary and artistic movements have their social and physical roots laid as clearly open to us as the Romantic. The most astonishing thing in connection with this chain of causes and results is that there should be only the solitary figure of Berlioz to represent the musical side of it. One would have thought that the vast liberation of nervous energy effected by the Revolution and the Napoleonic period would have been too great to be confined to literature and the plastic arts—that a reall

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V

If ever the physiological structure of a man had to be taken into account in trying to explain the nature of his work, it is surely when we are dealing with Berlioz. We have only to look at his portrait to see how highly strung he was, how prone he must have been to disorders of the nervous system. There is a passage in one of his letters that seems to indicate an anxiety for his health on the part of his father, who, being a doctor, would probably understand his son's bias towards nervous troub

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VI

Before coming to consider his music, let us complete the study of Berlioz as an organism by examining his prose, where we shall find many things that throw light on his structure. The assistance given to the student of musical psychology by the prose writings of musicians is so great, that one could almost wish that every composer of any note had left the world a volume or two of criticism or of autobiography. They would not necessarily have added very much to our positive knowledge of life or a

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VII

It is time, however, to remind ourselves that the picture painted so far does not represent the complete Berlioz. It is all the more necessary to give ourselves this reminder because the only Berlioz known to most people is this being of wild excitement and frenzied exaggeration, with a dash in him here and there of pose. There is a "legend" of each great composer—a kind of half-true, half-false conception of him that gradually settles into people's minds and prevents them, as a rule, from think

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VIII

Bearing in mind, then, that the Berlioz whom we have hitherto been discussing is mostly the youthful Berlioz—the writer of mad letters, the actor of extravagant parts, the composer of the Symphonie fantastique (1829-1830), and Lélio (1831-1832)—let us look for a moment at his art as it was then, and afterwards trace it through its later and more sober manifestations. In trying to follow him historically we meet with this difficulty, that it is impossible to say exactly when some of his conceptio

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IX

Roughly speaking, it will be found that the Berlioz I have so far depicted comes into view about 1827. It was about that date, apparently, that youthful enthusiasm, combined with starvation and folly, gave his system that lurid incandescence that people always think of when they hear the name of Berlioz. It is about that date that his letters begin to show the inflation of style to which I have referred, and his music begins to acquire force and penetration and expressiveness, together with a ti

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X

In 1838, then, everything seemed of the happiest promise for his art. But that promise, alas, was not fulfilled so amply as might have been hoped for. Whatever the real cause may have been, Berlioz, as we have seen, now slackened greatly in his musical production. It could not have been wholly due to his feuilleton writing, for he was never so busy with this as in the seven years onward from 1833 (the year in which he married Henrietta Smithson, and had to earn money in some way or other). He co

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"FAUST" IN MUSIC

The musical settings of Faust , in one form or another, now number, I believe, something like thirty or thirty-five. It is perhaps the most popular of all subjects with musicians, far outdistancing in favour the Hamlets and Othellos and Romeo-and-Juliets and all the other lay figures which composers are fond of using to show off their own garments. It cannot be said that they have added very much, on the whole, to our comprehension of the drama; indeed, with half-a-dozen exceptions the Faust-sym

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I

There are three stages in the history of every new truth. Take, as an example, the Darwinian theory. First of all it is assailed with tooth and claw by a thousand people who know nothing about it and have never given ten minutes' consecutive thought to it, but who hate it simply because it disturbs their long mental inertia. Then, when its truth becomes more and more evident, and too many clear-headed people believe in it for it to be laughed down, and too many strong people adopt it for it to b

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II

Just as the average programmist is, on the whole, more generous in his appreciations than the average absolutist, so he has done more to clear up the darkness that envelops too much of the subject. From this side there has come some good æsthetic discussion; from the other side there has come little but dogged and tiresome repetition of old catch-words, without any serious attempt to grapple with the psychology of the question as a whole. In the latest edition of Grove's Dictionary of Music, Mr.

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III

One fact alone should make opponents of programme music think seriously of their position. The most significant feature of the problem is the way in which the practical musicians have dealt with it. Whereas most of the older orchestral music of any value was absolute music, most of the later orchestral music of any value is programme music; and the momentum of the latter species seems to be increasing every year. It will not do to pooh-pooh a phenomenon of this kind, nor to seek to fasten upon i

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IV

The late Sidney Lanier, a critic of unusual sanity and freshness of vision, contended that so far from being a late and excrescent growth, programme music is "the very earliest, most familiar, and most spontaneous form of musical composition." We need not go quite so far as this, for it seems to me that it is impossible to date either kind of music first in order of time. Just as one early man placed straight and curved lines in such relations that they pleased the eye by their mere formal harmo

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V

Without making too wide a digression into the æsthetics of music, we can see that the tendency to write the one kind of music is as deeply rooted in us as the tendency to write the other kind. Some musicians, by constitutional bias, take the one route, some the other; but neither party has the right to assume that the kind of music it prefers is the only kind. Hence it is an error to say that music is stepping out of her own province when she becomes programme music. Her real province includes b

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VI

Before embarking on this æsthetic argument, however, let us briefly conclude our historical view of the development of programme music. It was with the Romantic movement that the infusion of poetry into music became complete, and at the same time the vocabulary and the colour-range of music became adequate to express all kinds of literary and pictorial ideas. The older musicians could not, if they had tried, have written the modern symphonic poem or the modern song. And this for several reasons.

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VII

On two lines of inquiry, then, we have found the case for programme music somewhat stronger than its hasty opponents have imagined. On the one hand, we have seen that when the nature and origin of music are psychologically analysed, there are two mental attitudes, two orders of expression, and two types of phrase, from one of which has arisen absolute, from the other, programme music. On the other hand, we have seen that, from a variety of reasons, programme music could not have been cultivated

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VIII

Before doing this, however, let us briefly touch upon one or two other main issues. The first point I lay stress on is this, that "form" in programme music cannot mean the same thing as form in absolute music; and for this reason. So long as you work in one medium alone, the form is controlled simply by the necessities and potentialities of that medium. In a symphony or a fugue you have to consider nothing but the nature of absolute music; in the drama, you have to worry about no problems except

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IX

This brings us to a second point. We are often told that programme music is all right if it is so conceived and so handled that it suffices as pure music , whether we know the programme or not. And as this seems to many people like a fair compromise, and as programme-musicians have been ill-treated so long that some of them are positively thrilled with gratitude now for not being kicked, there is a tendency to accept this quasi-solution of the problem as something like the final one. The program

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X

To make the following argument clearer I will state its conclusion at once; I am going to try to show that Wagner's own analysis of the natures of poetry, music and drama conclusively proves that if there can be said to be such a thing as the ideal form of art, it is not the opera but the symphonic poem. I am not going to criticise Wagner's theory, except for a moment here and there. I am going to accept it broadly just as it stands, assume it to be perfectly founded on facts and perfectly logic

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XI

One point still remains to be discussed, though we need only touch on it very briefly. How far can music represent external things—ought it, indeed, to try to represent external things at all? It was Schopenhauer, I think, who said that music was not a representative but a presentative art. But that was very superficial psychologising even in his day, and it is still more superficial in ours. The whole problem is exceedingly simple if people, in their anxiety to prove that music cannot "imitate,

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I

It is now nearly fifty years since Spencer first published his celebrated essay on "The Origin and Function of Music." That essay has been elaborately assailed from many quarters; it has been objected to as insufficient from the standpoint of æsthetic psychology, and as at variance with some of the known facts of musical history. Nevertheless Spencer, in accordance with his general intellectual habit, always clung tenaciously to his theory, and, without modifying it at all, returned to the subje

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II

If Spencer's theory is æsthetically and psychologically inconceivable, he is hardly happier in the pseudo-historical evidence by which he seeks to support it. His notion seems to be that all ancient music, and the Oriental and savage music of the present day, represent the art at the second or recitative stage of development—a kind of half-way house between excited speech and full-blown song. Thus the Chinese and Hindoos "seem never to have advanced" beyond recitative. "The dance-chants of savag

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III

The music of savage tribes is, however, the last stronghold of Spencer; and if his theory fails to find proper support in that quarter, it can hardly resist all the weight of evidence that may be brought against it from others. Here, he says, he has Sir Hubert Parry on his side, "who adopts the view I have here re-explained and defended," and who "has in his chapter on Folk-Music exemplified the early stages of musical evolution, up from the howling chants of savages—Australians, Caribs, Polynes

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I

If we did not possess Maeterlinck's own dramas, we might be able to judge from his essays what his position towards the drama and fiction would be. Here we have revealed to us a manner of apprehending life and of looking out upon the world that could find expression only in some such novel dramatic form as Maeterlinck has adopted. The dramatist himself, however, has given us, in his exquisite chapters on "The Tragical in Daily Life" and "The Awakening of the Soul," in The Treasure of the Humble

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II

Here, then, is a philosophy of life which, in the hands of the artist, aims at creating a new type of "static" drama, in which speech shall give way, as far as possible, to suggestion, incident and action to the immediate revelation of soul-states. Though the drama is to deal with real life in a way that Maeterlinck would regard as most rigorously real, there is to be a progressive withdrawal from most of the points that the average man regards as the essence of reality. In the first place, nake

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III

The excellence and the wisdom of these thoughts need no pointing out. What is the defect in them—or, rather, wherein are they incomplete? This may be seen, in the first place, by playing off Maeterlinck's theory against that of Wagner. It is quite true, as Wagner says, that his kind of music-drama has one great advantage over the poetical drama: that by surrendering certain outlying interests it can concentrate all its power on the central interest—giving full play, as Wagner would express it, t

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IV

And just as we pass from music to poetry to reach certain emotions that are not to be found in the more generalised art, so we pass from Maeterlinck's æsthetic world to that of the cruder realist, in the search for certain further artistic satisfactions. Mysticism has this in common with music—that it gives voice to the broader, more generalised feelings of mankind, and hesitates to come into contact with the less ecstatic faculties that are exercised upon the harder facts of life. Maeterlinck,

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I

Two or three years ago Richard Strauss was practically unknown in this country. A few people had heard works of his abroad; a few more had bought his complex scores and worried through them as best they could, mostly deriving from them only the impression that Strauss was getting madder and madder every year. From other and happier climes, where the demand for music is almost as great as the supply, there came weird stories of this new art. One thing was universally admitted as being beyond disp

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II

Of all the arts, music is the one whose ideal of form is the loftiest, the most exacting, the most imperative; the art in which we are least willing to tolerate any defection from the highest we can conceive. This, indeed, has been the cause both of the rapid development of music in comparison with the other arts, and of the frenetic warfare of the schools in one generation after another. The intensity of the great musician's desire for ideal perfection in his art leads to his carrying it, withi

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III

Upon some features of that psychology—its sincerity, its originality, its artistic fearlessness—I have already touched. Strauss, however, is an epoch-making man not only in virtue of his expression and his technique, but in virtue of the range and the quality of his subjects. He is the first complete realist in music. The Romantic movement came to a somewhat belated head in Wagner, who had been the chief master of the ceremonies at the prolonged funeral of the classical spirit. The Romantic move

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IV

It is not difficult to understand the attitude of musical purists towards Strauss, and of many others who are not altogether purists. There is something provocative, defiant, almost repellent, in the power of the man's genius. He is so enormously strong, so proudly self-confident, that he joys in flouting the world in the face as it has never been flouted before. His whole career is a testimony to how far courage and resource can carry a man. According to all known precedents, he ought to have s

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V

It is in Ein Heldenleben , more than anywhere else, that we have the defects of Strauss's qualities. He is of the type that, masterly as its self-control generally is, cannot refrain at times from becoming defiantly extravagant. It all goes along with his enormous vital energy, that energy which is met with in only one or two men in every century, and that invariably prompts its possessor now and then to the commission of something or other we would rather have had left undone. There is in Strau

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