GIFT or
EDWARD G. FARHSWORT
THREE GREAT EPOCH-MAKERS
IN MUSIC
TO THE MEMORY OF
MY TEACHER AND FRIEND
HERMANN KOTZSCHMAR
THAT RIPE MUSICIAN
WHOSE MATURE JUDGMENT HAS MUCH
STRENGTHENED MY OWN
CONVICTIONS
THESE PAGES ARE DEDICATED
Three Great Epoch-Makers
in Music
BY
EDWARD CLARENCE FARNSWORTH
PORTLAND
SMITH & SALE, PRINTERS
MDCCCCXII
v^
COPYRIGHT iqi2
BY
EDWARD CLARENCE FARNSWORTH
CONTENTS
PAGE
PREFACE ........ Vii
JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH ..... 3
FREDERIC CHOPIN ...... ^7,
RICHARD STRAUSS AND THE ART OF SOUND . 8 1
282332
PREFACE
BEARING in mind Emerson's saying that every
action admits of being outdone, and around
every circle another may be drawn, we none the less
believe that a comparison of Sebastian Bach, Frederic
Chopin and Richard Strauss, will show that, because
of excellences peculiar to his day, and also individual
excellences, no one of these three epoch-makers wholly
outdoes, wholly encircles either of the others. Rather
is he a link of a chain in which Beethoven, Wagner,
and certain others are indispensable.
That chain had beginning in the remote past, but,
because inadequate, many early links are now broken.
Of musicians prior to Bach, Gregory and Palestrina
alone have endured the strain of time. The inade-
quacy of the old, true of not another art, proves music
to be virtually an achievement of the last two and one-
half centuries. This brief term, a mere fraction of that
which must be allowed to certain of the sister arts,
argues for music a very considerable period of future
development.
vii
PREFACE
Comparison of the Gregorian Chants with the Wag-
nerian scores may bring doubt upon this statement,
but, since the advent of Richard Strauss, it seems
probable that the musician of the future will smile at
the ideals of our contemporary composers. What were
the tendencies whose centering in one master mind
produced the great classical beginnings of modern
music, we would show in our estimate of Bach. The
tendencies eventuating in the free style of the roman-
ticist, and the abandon of the ultra school, we would
indicate in our estimate of Chopin. And, because of
present tendencies, what direction tonal development
will yet take, we shall endeavor to ascertain in our
estimate of Richard Strauss.
JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH
JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH
FAR down the vista of history stands the Grecian
Homer, unique, and, save for Hesiod, alone
amidst the memorable years. Alone we say, but from
the view-point of his contemporaries was visible in the
background — even to the dim horizon of civilization
— many an eminence inferior only when compared
with that colossal peak of Ionic song. To every
philologist, to every classical scholar, the development
and finish of the Homeric hexameter argues convinc-
ingly a poetical ancestry of which the Iliad and the
Odyssey are culmination.
The chiselled achievements of Phidias, and whatso-
ever else extant of Attic sculpture, attest the attained
perfection of an art in whose day of puerility the
primitive cave-dweller, with a bit of broken flint, idly
scratched upon the bones of his prey, crude semblance
of man, animal, fish, reptile and bird. The worthiest
triumphs of Renaissance painting are traceable to the
cruel, warlike impulse of the savage daubing himself
to hideousness with earthy pigments and the red juice
of ripened berries. The grand creations of the Ger-
man tone-builders were evolved from the battle-yells
of aboriginal tribes.
JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH
Thus in Earth's purest, highest things is exemplified
the law whereby the noble somehow emerged from the
ignoble like the sweet and tinted flower rooted in
the unsavory compost : whereby also the formative
mind of man itself gained scope and symmetry, not
through sudden and strenuous exercise, but in a way
comparable to the sphering and solidifying and upbuild-
ing of a planet, in fact, that infinitely gradual and
orderly process which Nature in her wisdom has every-
where counterparted, as when she evolved these
modern years from the countless, non-achieving ages
of unrecorded savagery; ages repulsive with the
dominant, brute passions of men.
Thus, in view of the foregoing, it may with assurance
be admitted that every genius is endowed not only by
the immediate, gracious gift of God, but also by the
accumulated bequeathings of every predecessor in the
same domain of usefulness.
Well we know that while the puny efforts of the
ordinary individual ripple but for an instant some little
surface of the vast ocean of mortal life, others there
be, centers of mental and spiritual power at once wide-
reaching, deep-sounding, and long-enduring. Always
in touch with unseen angel hands, these are verily the
world's immortals co-working with the Divine Law of
human progress. Deathless are they in deed and
name; the prophet of Truth, the priest of God, the
JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH
patriot Warrior, the incorruptible Statesman, the wise
Ruler, the inspired Artist and the uplifted Singer.
Our immediate purpose bids us choose from this
noble company ; let us look somewhat into the dedi-
cated life of Johann Sebastian Bach ; let us inquire
briefly into the musical mission of one of the chief
promoters of human enlightenment.
At cursory glance, the solid and abiding work of
Bach may be called the bed-rock, the basic strata,
whereon rests our musical world of this present. But,
remembering the Flemish Fuguists and their prede-
cessors, the Canon writers of the Gotho-Belgic school,
and, earlier, the Parisian developers of the primitive
counterpoint originating in French Flanders during the
tenth century, we discover other strata underl3dng
and upholding the Passion Music, the Sacred Cantatas,
and the instrumental Preludes and Fugues. Nor need
this discovery belittle our estimate of Bach; it but
illustrates the dependence of the human mind, unstable
without the foundation and buttress of other minds.
Shakespeare himself was largely the product of excep-
tional conditions, the rich flower of the Elizabethan
environment, the chief dramatic poet, the genius most
gifted, among an unusually gifted group of notables.
The Flemish school of composition, which, at the
advent of Bach, had now flourished for at least a
century and a half, was most fortunate in one of its
JOHAN^ SEBASTIAN BACH
earliest pupils, Palestrkia, who, infusing into its abun-
dant learning the spirit of Genius, forthwith evolved
for his Italy a noble and devout school of sacred
music. But, despite the unhampered labors of the
Flemings, no native individualizer and summarizer of
their efforts appeared during the one hundred and
fifty years prior to the birth of Bach. No northern
Palestrina yet fathered a national sacred music suited
to the needs of Protestant Germany.
Let none accuse Nature of niggardness because
neither seed time nor summer bends with the ripened
corn and wheat. Let him await her seasonable yield,
unfailing while the sun shines and the earth revolves..
But Nature has sowing and springing and ripening in
other and far distant fields ; and if we, unseeing, com-
prehend not, let it suffice that she, the wise and
provident, wholly knows what sun is shining on those
fields, and the diameter of the orbital turning of their
world she knows, and the orderly come and go of
their unfailing seasons. And so it befell that in fitly
appointed time, and not in capricious moment, she
gave to the world Sebastian Bach to be the great
individualizer and father of German music.
Of Bach's contemporaries and forerunners of the
Flemish school, the most worthy were undoubtedly
those whom he revered; those who, either by creation
or interpretation, incited him to early effort, and easily
/
JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH
moulded his plastic youth into semblance of the unsur-
passed composer and performer which, because of
mature and independent after-labor, he wholly became.
And yet, as compared with him, of what largeness are
his outgrown models? Of what enduring substance,
of what undimmable fame, such musicians as Swee-
linck, Scheidemann, Schuitz, and even Reinken and
Buxtchude ?
Many a genius has towered the one exception in a
family not intellectually prominent. Unlike the major-
ity of his class, Bach owed much to heredity. Others
of his blood, immediate ancestors and numerous living
relatives, all had accomplished something worthy of
mention in music. Nor did Nature expend her ener-
gies in producing him the greatest of the Bachs. That
of which his genius was the culmination, ceasing not
with himself, experienced a gradual decline through
his numerous descendants.
Never was a genius more thoroughly equipped for his
life work than was Sebastian Bach. Musical learning
in him first reached its fullness. In his larger composi-
tions, as in the epics of Milton, every page reveals the
student of the ages ; but what in lesser men sinks to
dry scholarship, in Bach, as in Milton, becomes a
glorious compendium of classical erudition, and this
because of the abundant presence of that transforming
quality denied to mediocrity, to wit, Imagination.
JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH
Many a great page of Milton, and, for that matter,
of Dante also, proves but hard reading to the unlettered
who oftentimes would conceal their ignorance under
the guise of fulsome praise. So with Bach. While
granting his obvious learning, many amateurs, fairly
musical, and not a few professional musicians, but
little estimate his noble quality of imagination^
Bach is in very truth the Musician's musician, the
touchstone of his training. When for himself one has
conquered the technicalities of fugal composition, he
is in fair way to estimate Bach at par value, for, to his
own discomfiture, he has discovered that the con-
struction of a fugal theme, pronounced and pliant as
even the briefest bearing the impress of Bach, is one
of the great doings of musical skill and imagination.
These qualities Bach further shows in the treatment of
subject and counter-subject by means of the stretto,
and all devices of Canon and polyphonic counter-
point, moving in broad and stately volume to the final
cadence and the organ point.
In their highest and most eloquent efforts, vocal or
instrumental, the composers of the Contrapuntal
School had recourse always to the fugue whose every
voice part is rendered individually prominent as in
no other form of musical expression, ancient or mod-
ern ; nor can anything more adequate in this respect
be constructed or conceived of. But the attainment of
8
JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH
a perfect, fugal style is fraught with difficulties insur-
mountable to many composers, and almost so to some
whom we rightly deem among the greatest.
Beethoven himself was not by natural bent a fuguist;
his genius led him far afield. Notwithstanding the
strength and boldness of his figures, the distinc-
tiveness of his basses, and the melodic flow of the
intermediate parts of his harmony, the not many ex-
amples of fugue, found in the bulk of his collected
works, show chiefly the ambition of the explorer ; and
this in one the monarch of many another domain of
music.
As constructor of vocal fugues, Mendelssohn was
all that scholarship could make him, but his themes,
when compared with those of Bach and Handel, are
deficient in the quality of boldness. The theme is the
soul of the fugue, its center and source of life, and bold
ness is one of the chief requirements of the theme.
Individualized, it attracts instant attention and is
easily recognized throughout its augmentations, dim-
inutions, and inversions. Among the leading compos-
ers of every land, from Italy to Poland and from
France to Scandinavia, may be named many divinely
inspired melodists, and also many noble harmonists,
whose classic or romantic measures abound in felici-
tous modulations and every beauty of the free style ;
but how the great masters of Fugue narrow one by one
JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH
as we eliminate those fallen short of its chiefest re-
quirements ! Finally there remain but two. Kings
are they. Sovereigns indeed. Contemporary rulers
born in the selfsame years. George Frederic Handel
is one, and Johann Sebastian Bach is the other.
In the "Well-tempered Clavichord," a work which
the celebrated theorist Richter has well said "should
be in the hands of all who devote themselves to the
higher branches of musical study," we have, by the
universal acknowledgment of authorities, the culmin-
ating perfection of the Contrapuntal School, that ample
heritage from an era more and more behind the Class-
icism of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, and the Roman-
ticism of Schumann, Chopin and Wagner. Severe with
the legacies of the mediaeval spirit, this comprehensive
work of Bach, embracing the totality of the major and
the minor keys, is, for breadth and strength, compara-
ble with the chief religious frescoes of Michel Angelo.
With reverence, and a sense of deep obligation,
every sterling musician looks back to Johann Sebastian
Bach, seeing in him the virile forebear of whatsoever
is rich and euphonious and learned in modern instru-
mental music. Composers like Felix Mendelssohn
and Robert Franz, have sat at the feet of Bach and
hailed him their musical Messiah, and many, numbered
not in the circle of such discipleship, have barkened
to the voice of his teaching ; and some there be, who,
10
JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH
touching but the hem of his garments, were cured of
weakness and infirmity.
The grand, old German Chorals, those voicings of
religious fervor steadfast and heart-deep, wherefrom
every frivolity of the world was banished ; those mas-
sive, stately hymns of a communion whose worshippers
each mingled his individual offering with the outpour
of congregational praise, are forever associated with
the name of Bach, their amplifier and enricher, as with
the name of him who introduced them into the service
of the Lutheran Church. Bold and enduring, like
monolithic hills, those rugged Chorals long had stood
untouched by the meddlesome hand of Mediocrity.
Surely their incorporation by Bach into his greatest
works demanded a genius equal to that of their orig-
inators, and, in addition, the total of judgment and
learning which our master summoned to his well-
accomplished task.
"jC At the very outset of his career, Bach was drawn to
' the style of composition which thereafter characterized
his efforts. The Italian Opera, that belonging of
quite another people, that importation which was to
absorb, until past middle life, the energies of his great
contemporary Handel, held for Bach no allurements.
He had in supreme degree the instinct of the born
specialist ; he desired and aimed to do a supreme thing
supremely. His was that native wisdom which con-
II
JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH
fined his energies within their wide and deep channel,
the course of non-resistance indicated by the cleavage
of the hills and the lay of the valleys of the rugged,
musical landscape which had environed his predeces-
sors, and amidst which he himself matured to self-
conscious, artistic being. But, though a specialist.
Bach was so in the true sense of the word. His com-
prehensive interest could not be circumscribed and
iron-bound by his specialty. Well he knew the anat-
omy of the whole body of music, and well he realized the
interdependence of its various members ; and so with
keen interest he noted every happening in parts most
removed from the center of its life.
Naturally, we find him seeking acquaintance with
Handel far off in the English home of his adoption.
But the opportunity for a friendship no doubt of vast,
mutual advantage, Handel seems to have ignored.
Perhaps he preferred the lone sufficiency of his gigan-
tic selfhood. Other reasons might be conjectured, but,
in truth, Handel had grown somewhat out of touch
with Bach. Aside from the matter of the Italian
Opera, the environments of London metropolitan life,
and also the art life of England — largely moulded by
her great masters of English verse — had reacted upon
the genius of Handel making him in some degree non-
German, and yet, by way of compensation, making him
the chief glory of English music, and the model of
12
JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH
native composers who but for him might have harked
back to Purcell and Orlando Gibbons. Different
indeed was the life of Bach, a life remote from the
great centers of worldly activity. In that life is seen
no arenal contests like those which, fast and furious
with thrust and counter thrust, too much filled the
rival days of Handel and Bononcini.
The compositions of Bach provoked no partisan
spirit, nor cared he for that mere notoriety which
benefits the well-damned equally with the well-praised.
In the lives of men like Bach and Handel, every
moment of well-ordered activity is a boon to their pub-
lic, every moment of misdirected effort is an unmitigated
loss. However, in the life of Bach we lack cause to
regret an abortiveness of result lamentable in the life
of Handel of whom it might be asked, Of what musical
enrichment to the present are those many operatic
effusions of his busy, young manhood, and his industri-
ous middle-prime ? For the most part they are dead and
coffined in the dark of oblivion. Whatsoever escapes
forgetfulness has, with rare exceptions, experienced a
veritable reincarnation among the florid beauties of his
Oratorios, the crown and glory of his last and greatest
years.
II
By virtue of his high endowment, Bach possessed that
wisdom of genius which, to the thrifty and so-called
13
JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH
practical, is but the foolishness of the visionary.
Except in the case of a few works engraved by his
own hands, he gave no thought to the immediate out-
come of his labors; and yet, amidst the accumulation
of his great, unpublished compositions, he wrote on as
if all the engravers and compositors of Saxony were
crying for copy. A lesser man, a man of talent, would
have seen to it that his masterpieces for voice and
clavichord and organ were first in the shop and then
in the home, the church and the concert hall. That he
felt concern for these, his mentally-begotten, is certain ;
else he had spared himself that prodigious concentration
of thought the result of which each preserves in a
body vitalized to endure throughout the centuries.
No time had he for obtuse and over-cautious publish-
ers, nor would he debase his ideals to popularize and
make saleable his inspirations. His was an artistic
conscience analogous to that of the saint and the
martyr ; his their self-sacrifice to principle ; his that
undebasable virtue, that adherence to conviction,
which is its own sweet reward in whatever of high or
humble man's lot is fixed. His every creative act
spake something like this : " Brief indeed is the most
lengthened life of man, and long must the world await
another Sebastian Bach. Let me use my permitted
day of sunshine ere the hastening gloom enshroud and
silence it forever ! " So he filled to fullness the incom-
14
JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH
parable hours. Trusting in God and the Time Spirit,
he left to an unknown future the propaganda of his
deeds.
Ah, when the ravisher of Peace, and the subjugator
of his kind, has fulfilled his fierce ambition, and the
rent land is desolate and a nation enslaved in tyrant-
welded bonds, how fares his name within the hearts
and on the lips of men ? Does not its lettering pollute
with blood the annals of his time .'' Not with the harsh
rattle, not with the red horror of war, but rather with
a sound of sweetest harmony comes the conquering
musician, and the charmed world, his debtor, proclaims
him lord of a realm more peaceful than once the great
Augustus mildly ruled.
Longfellow's often-quoted lines :
Lives of great men all remind us
We can make our lives sublime,
are not wholly in accord with truth, for the domestic life
of many a great man lends warrant to Mrs. Carlyle's
warning against marrying a genius. And, surely, what
is the brief domestic life of Byron if not a mystery of
unhappiness ? On the other hand, the lives of some
of earth's greatest have proved sublime even in such
testing ordeal. No " sweet bells jangled out of tune
and harsh " drowned their connubial harmony ; no
wranglings of the ill-mated made the house rather a
15
JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH
hell than a home ; no Coleridge-like shirking of family
responsibilities demeaned them in the eyes of men ; no
divergence of aim kept husband and wife always at
cross purpose.
The home of Bach was the modest German home
whose like, throughout the Fatherland, had bred the
bone and sinew and brain of a great and worthy
nation. It was the shielding home into whose peaceful
shelter the disquieting v/orid intruded not; the home
paternal, maternal, and fraternal, where blossomed
daily those sweet domesticities which root themselves
in mutual love. It was the simple home, source and
conserver of the simple life ; the fruitful home free
from imputation of race suicide ; the happy home for-
ever young with voices of childhood and youth ; the
Christian home from whence ascended in prayer and
thanksgiving the homage of reverent hearts ! It was,
in short, the ideal home approved by earth, by Heaven
ordained and blessed ; and he, the great Bach, was its
patriarchal head.
The creative artist stands at noblest remove from
that brute inheritance of ours, the desire to take by
violence. In him is manifest the God-like character-
istic of the highest type of man, namely, desire to give
for the pure love of giving.
Therefore, on such lives as that of Bach, the welfare
of the world depends; they call it back from that
i6
JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH
insanity of selfishness toward which the age is tending.
Such lives attest the claims of the ideal ; they prove
them to be of practical value. Such lives are, indeed,
barriers against an on-rushing Materialism which other-
wise might engulf us all.
Of the modern composer it must often be said that
the world is too much with him ; and to this misfortune
are largely attributable the inequalities abounding in
his music. Because of his co-partnership with that
which tends to warp and deaden his artistic sensibility,
he must needs force his inspiration ; the result proving
that the serenity of the high vision is not in him, but
rather the delirium-nightmare of the world-fever. Nor
can it be otherwise unless he benefit by the example of
Bach and his kind. Like him, he should achieve a full
and final consecration necessary as that of the priest
and the prophet. Apart from the world wherewith he
mingles ; self-centered amidst the babbling multitude ;
deaf to the babel of their tongues ; he should listen to
the great song of life, the heavenly melody filling the
shut sanctuary of his soul wherein to the world cannot
enter. If he so do, it shall not be said of him that he
lived in vain, or that his works but swelled the rubbish
heap of Time.
The staid, methodical life of Bach the man, wherein
nothing erratic is discoverable, was counterparted by
the life of Bach the creative genius. The orderly and
17
•7
JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH
exhaustive development of a characteristic theme was
to him the chief artistic end obtainable. In the school
of which he was the great exponent, the imaginings of
the composer must be moulded to the requirements of
an exacting and time-approved model ; but, despite
the severity of the strict polyphonic style, whose
restrictions led to its modification by the Classicists,
and its final abandonment by the Romanticists, Bach
moving in this, his congenial element, was no more
hampered than is the freest illustrator of modern
methods.
Although German Protestantism found in Bach its
musical expression, in him — the towering genius —
was inevitably paramount that broad and lofty religion
of pure art which, above credal differences, outpours its
prayer and thanksgiving in the creation of the beauti-
ful, and therefore the good and the true. Would any-
one suppose the author of the Mass in B miinor to be a
dissenter from the Roman Catholic communion } As
a noble vehicle of religious feeling, the Mass inspired
Bach to a work surpassing all similar efforts of Roman
Catholic composers ; a work which, to every heart in
tune with the sublime, is a revelation of the essence of
undogmatic religion.
Whilst grave dignity well becomes a king, and whilst
the voice and look of authority are rightfully his, we
love to see him doff at times the insignia of his station,
i8
JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH
and eschew the pomp and ceremony of royal surround-
ings to enact a part identifying him with the human
in the great common life of the world.
Even so we see the sovereign of the Fugue, the
Mass, the Cantata and the " Passion," unbending
affably toward such lesser things as the Suite, the
Partita and the a capella Motet. But, though con-
descending, Bach is nevertheless the king ; hence these
all acquire from his magnetic, uplifting presence, a
consequence before unknown to any of their kind.
Bearing in mind the lives of such men as Sir Henry
Irving, one hardly realizes that the play-actor of the
Elizabethan Era had no more social status than the
veriest mountebank. The German musical genius of
Bach's day, and for long thereafter, was usually a mere
retainer to some consequential petty prince, and, socially,
only a degree higher than his master's lackey. But
habit, sprung from a "necessity which itself may have
originated in a refinement and delicacy of organization
inclining the musician rather to submit than to com-
bat the coarse and selfish, had so accustomed the
court composer to the role of servile dependent upon
royal patronage,-that he seldom realized to what degre-
dation his anciently esteemed calling, that of the bard,
had fallen.
But as for the masculinely self-assertive Bach, for-
tunately or unfortunately not often in touch with
19
JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH
princes, he assumed no attitude of flattery toward his
employers, the penurious and unjustly-exacting town
authorities of Liepsic.
Lamentable indeed is the fact that Bach was forced
by circumstances into what, to one of his capabilities,
must have been the most dreary, routine drudgery.
Imagine Handel leaving half-penned some sublime
Chorus, to toil with a dull and refractory pupil who
never by any means would attain to average musician-
ship.
To sensitive nerves, over-tensioned through sym-
pathy with a high-wrought emotional nature which
aspires and soars towards some beauty native to
another sphere, such instant drop is comparable to
that of the wounded bird checked in the moment of
most buoyant flight. Beethoven would none of it for,
because of his bachelorhood, he was independent; but
with Bach, the good father of sons and daughters to
the number of twenty, it was far otherwise. Toil he
must and toil he did as cantor in the school and choir-
master in the church.
To certain musicians far less endowed than was
Bach, the act of teaching has been but semblance of
labor, and, at times, the merest farce. Behold the
modern, world-flattered, fashion-sought Virtuoso of the
Pianoforte, accessible only to the highest aspirant to
musical renown ! Behold that awe-struck aspirant
20
JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH
ushered into the presence of the august one ! He
listens to the embarrassed player, yes, he the lofty
deigns to listen ! Ah ! but will he, the great Jove of
modern music, look down in kindness from his Par-
nassus, or will he utterly blast with the lightning of his
eyes, and dumfound with the angry thunders of his
mouth ? Who can tell ? Surely none but the great
Jove himself, for his pleasure or his displeasure, like
that of the ancient deity, is but matter of caprice
dependent wholly upon his present mood. How the
conditions which hampered the life of Bach contrast
with those favoring the musical celebrity of our day !
But then, the world abounds with incongruities even
to the placing of the beggar on the throne and the
king on the dunghill.
The poet bards of long ago, the Ossians of the
North and the Homers of the South, declaimed their
epics of love and war to a harp accompaniment which
often must have approached free improvisation. The
complex recitative of Wagner, for example, the endless
melody of his " Tristan and Isolde," purports to be the
attained ideal of those elder singers ; but, between
the bald freedom of the old and the luxuriant freedom
of the new, have obtained what Wagner considered
two grave, musical mistakes : first, the evolution of
fixed form originating in the primitive dance tune and
eventuating in the Bach Fugue, and, second, largely
21
JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH
due to the labors of Bach, the individualizing of
instrumental music apart from vocal music once
deemed its indispensable auxiliary.
Speaking without bias, it should be said that although
to Bach we justly render every encomium due unto
one of the most gifted masters of music, we give with
full knowledge that his art, notwithstanding its beauty
and excellence, is but a facet of the gem whose all of
resplendence these later days are privileged to behold.
Probably the perfection of contrapuntal writing was to
Bach the perfection, the entirety, of great music. He
would doubtless have condemned as vague and dis-
cursive much in the pianoforte and orchestral works
which characterized Beethoven's middle and last period.
How he would have regarded certain liberties in the
harmonic progression may be surmised. Although
Bach himself was in this respect something of an
innovator, he must have deemed such divergence the
justifiable limit of rule-breaking. Could he have
looked forward to the chief exponent of the Classical
School, he might have said, " This Beethoven goes too
far, even to the deliberate emplo3^ment of consecutive,
perfect fifths in rash attempt to produce dubious
effects. Besides, he abandons the native German
domain of the Fugue and debouches upon a land
whereof I know not, a strange land of questionable
manners and customs."
22
JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH
III
Monteverde in his day dared to introduce the
unprepared seventh of the dominant triad; but, in
boldness he was not alone. In fact, the development
of polyphony from the wholly unembellished and
quite faulty chord progressions of early mediaeval music,
has been but a series of innovations at first condemned,
then suffered, and then adopted. The earliest poly-
phonic writers founded their music wholly on the
ecclesiastical scales derived from the Greek modes, and
approved by Ambrose and Gregory. With the single
exception of the Ionic scale, identical with our scale
of C major, these scales were defective chiefly in one
essential, to wit : in place of the modern sharped
seventh, they contained the flatted seventh. This
error precluded the possibility of the characterizing
major third of the dominant chord in both the major
and the minor. Then again, the sounding of the
flatted seventh, which in modern tonality indicates
modulation to the subdominant key, suggested to the
old contrapuntists a triad now deemed wholly foreign
to the tonic. The resulting vagueness found remedy
where one should least expect it, for, in their melodies,
the popular writers of both song and dance were led
instinctively to sharp the seventh, and otherwise recon-
struct the six defective ecclesiastical scales.
23
JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH
The increasing use of accidentals in contrapuntal
and sacred music, gradually evolved the chromatic
scale, and led to the founding of a major and a minor
scale on each of its twelve semitones. These twenty-
four were now the basis of that grand and satisfying
instrumental polyphony which Bach was to build in
his "Well-tempered Clavichord."
As late as the time of Carissimi, and for some years
thereafter, polyphonic writers had not wholly cast off
the spell of Ambrose and Gregory, for, whilst the
seventh was now by universal usage sharped in the
cadence, otherwhere still lingered a tendency to revert
to the flatted seventh of the ecclesiastical scales.
At this juncture, the further development of polyph-
ony, and, in fact, the further development of all
great music, found in Bach that peculiar genius which
it wholly needed. He became the masterly unifier of
the harmonic and the polyphonic systems. With a
correct idea of key relationship, he grouped the family
of chords around the tonic and the dominant after the
manner of to-day. At the same time, his unparalleled
use of anticipations, suspensions and passing notes,
produced an effect wonderfully rich in the stately
sweep of his measures. Thus he prepared the way
for the classical music of Beethoven, who, turning
from strict polyphony to a style wherein his endowed
emotional nature found wider and freer scope, became
24
JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH
in turn an innovator in that he gave greater variety to
the harmonic tissue by means of bold and before-
unattempted modulations. Beethoven in turn prepared
the way for Wagner who essayed to enlarge the number
of related keys, besides carrying the art of modulation
to before-unknown lengths, even to the limit of good
taste : also by an exhaustive use of anticipations, sus-
pensions, and passing notes, this latest master revealed
the fullest development of the Bachian polyphony.
How little of true foresight comes to the eyes of the
sage ! How incommeasurable that foresight with his
great and far looking back 1 How much of riddle his
prophesying touches not and his dying leaves un-
solved ! Bach knew nothing of the Classicism of
Beethoven, who, in turn, knew nothing of the Roman-
ticism of Schumann and Chopin ; and what knew these
of the latest art-interblendings of Richard Wagner
and Richard Strauss ? Can there be other musical
riddles worth the solving? If so, what are they; and
who their solver? For answer, ask the average musi-
cian of to-morrow ; but not the authorities of to-day.
The career of Bach, the composer, covered a period
of about forty-five years, in fact, a period longer by
thirteen years than the entire life of Schubert ; a
period longer by nine years than the life of Mozart ;
longer b}^ six years than the life of Mendelssohn ; and
longer by five years than the lives of Chopin and Von
25
JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH
Weber. And yet Handel and Haydn exceeded by
something like ten years, and Verdi by nearly twenty
years, the extended term of Bach's productivity.
Notwithstanding the fatal catastrophe which ter-
minated the promise of the poet Shelley ; notwithstand-
ing the hard conditions which cramped and well-nigh
thwarted the divinely-endowed Mozart, misplaced as a
bird of Paradise caged in an Arctic clime, it can with
truth be said that however short the earthly years
allotted to men of genius, they, in most instances,
have, as by Divine ordering, given to the world their
best.
When we have known the genius through his v/orks,
those heart-resemblances, those mind-born counter-
paf ts of his inner self, we would contact the outer man,
and discover in facial and bodily expression some
token of that which flesh has clothed. Denied this,
we turn to sculptured or painted likeness of such as
Johann Sebastian Bach.
In vain we search his pictured face for hint of the
vacillating or the superficial. Every feature and every
lineament is indicative of massive, self-centered power
dependent only as man is dependent, being but mortal.
In that face is much of clinging to the mind's self-
imposed task ; something too of downright obstinacy,
as also in the sturdy form which, like post or pillar,
would say, "I stand ! turn and resist me not ! "
26
JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH
Behold him the progenitor of many children after
the flesh, and many, many sprung from his teeming
and tireless brain ! Behold him, the musical athlete,
challenging virtuosity to trial of skill and endurance,
while he himself rejoices like the swift and strong run-
ner sure of his lead in the race !
Behold him deferential, but not obsequious, the
admired and sought of a monarch and the chief comer
to the palace of Potsdam ! Behold him, unflattered
by the attentions of royalty and court, wending back
to Liepsic, and his humble cantorship with its meagre
stipend ! Behold his reverent return to the old Luther-
an Church of Saint Thomas and the well-remembered
organ where with praiseful notes he often had sought
and found a greater than Frederic, or any earthly
potentate !
Between the death of Bach and the present time,
more than one hundred and fifty years have inter-
vened. Years indeed memorable ; years of unpar-
alleled activity and change in the musical world ; years
of greater enrichment of its repertory than were all
preceding them. Those one hundred and fifty years
have given us the perfected beauties of Italian, French
and German Opera. They have produced for us
Haydn and his great contemporaries and near suc-
cessors. From them is that priceless heritage, the
Mendelssohn Oratorios. They have brought to our
27
JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH
charmed ears the lyric songs of Schubert and Schu-
mann, and the unique and wholly adapted tone-poetry
of Chopin, composer par excellence for that instru-
ment of which the clavichord was the humble precur-
sor. Those years have enlarged the orchestra by
introducing many new and telling instruments, also
they have developed its technique and otherwise ele-
vated it to the virtuoso demands of our most modern
composers. Nevertheless, the music of Bach is nothing
belittled by the vast sum total of subsequent achieve-
ment, nor grows it useless like a garment cast aside
because no longer of fashionable cut and color. And
yet that music was underestimated and much neglected
in Bach's lifetime, and, afterwards for a long period,
almost forgotten, until, through the efforts of Mendels-
sohn and Franz and the Bach society, it was rescued
from the possibility of a fate like that of many an ancient
writing for which the regretful world has vainly sought.
Bach was the famed virtuoso of an era when far less
than modern skill was necessary for the manipulation of
the organ and the clavichord, and yet his works are
to-day surprisingly well adapted to the technical needs
of the advanced student. Those for clavichord are
musically adequate in the programmes of the modern
concert hall, whilst the "Preludes and Fugues," and
also the Toccatas, are the delight and ambition of
good organists throughout the world.
28
JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH
The man Johann Sebastian Bach ; how much might
be said of him, the kind husband and father, the
good and respected citizen, the devout follower of
Luther, the foremost among contemporary virtuosi,
the faithful music-master in the school, the conscien-
tious precentor in the church, the unobtrusive genius
touched not by the infirmities of noble minds. Surely
much more might be said in way of encomium than
here undertaken.
The composer, Johann Sebastian Bach ; how much
more might be said of his works than in these meagre
pages ; how much more in way of analysis ; but such
is net our object.
As for praise, in the performance of those works we
are heart to heart with the living Bach, the immortal
one, the deathless part of whom speaks from every full
and satisfying measure their meed of praise, where-
fore the musical world, even the modern musical
world, listens and approves.
But to what shall we liken his works ? With what
shall they be compared ? Surely with the mighty, the
steadfast, the undecaying ! They are comparable with
those man-builded mountains of stone resting forever
upon the floor of the Nile Valley. Yes, they are in
very truth the Pyramids of Music, and Bach with
Cyclopean hand has quarried them, block by block
from the enduring substance of the cliffs, and he has
29
JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH
fitted each to other with that accuracy of judgment,
precision of workmanship, and grandeur of concep-
tion, which characterized the architect-builders of Old
Egypt ; those whose models were the indestructible
upbuildings of God, even the ancient and everlasting
hills.
30
FREDERIC CHOPIN
FREDERIC CHOPIN
THE measure of a man is the measure of his impress
upon the world, not solely and of necessity the
world of his day, but, in fact, the world of all days
henceforth to be. Should we define that impress as
something outwardly apparent like his doing who delves
in the mine, or ploughs in the field, the statement is
inadequate and even false. Our world is a manifold
condition wherein, as one ascends, things material
eventuate in things mental and things spiritual.
This globe, vast and teeming with life ; this total of
mundane consciousness, is, in its imponderable aspect,
subdivided into many and diverse w^orlds, each wholly
sphered, each sufiicing for its adapted dwellers.
What a variety of living ! Behold the world of the
Musician, bright and beautiful as a loka of the Buddhist
heaven ! a flexible world close-touching and almost
blending with that of the Artist or the Poet. Behold
the world of the Philosopher which, like the world of
the Astronomer, seems to its denizen but an islet in the
ocean of mind-baffling immensity. Quite apart from
these revolves the solid and well-defined, but somewhat
narrow, world of the man of mercantile pursuits, and
more remote, under monotonous skies, the dull world
33
FREDERIC CHOPIN
of the unthinking, drear as a desert save here and
there some little turf of almost withered green.
However, the world of the Musician claims our
attention ; let us look with his eyes ; hear with his
ears; understand with his intuitions. All else shut
out, his world is subdivisible : within it is discovered
another. Lured on by the shine of golden wings, and
the delicate cantabile of angel voices ineffably sweet
and pure, we enter where dwells the soul of a true
tone-poet, the soul of Frederic Chopin.
In Chopin, the subject of this study, the blood of
two nations met and mingled. The France of his
father, and the Poland of his mother, could each with
equal justice claim him as its own. Chopin was born in
the vicinity of Warsaw, on March i, 1809, and in the
capital city of the Grand Duchy, created by Napoleon,
he was educated musically until the age of twelve, an
age when the average musician enters upon his pupilage.
Then it was deemed best by his professors that he be
left to the self-development of his unique individuality.
Naturally our precocious child, our future composer
sui generis, was now the pet of the aristocracy ; the
plaything of that class which, as a whole, not only in
Warsaw, but also in pretty much the world over, lived,
as now it lives, to be amused and served by those who,
in a land of democratic opportunities, would soon be
its acknowledged superiors.
34
FREDERIC CHOPIN
For an artist wholly unique, a smoothing and polish-
ing to the many exactions of polite society is an under-
taking questionable indeed. To come into outward
conformity with mere convention is to imperil the
freedom of his inner individuality. The actual effect
of such a course on the genius of Chopin cannot be
determined ; that it survived the ordeal is proof enough
of its virility and tenacity of purpose.
As we have hinted, the world of the Musician, unlike
that of the severely practical man, has no fixed diam-
eter ; elastic, it widens at his will ; at the bidding of
his sympathies it stretches until co-extensive with the
globe. Thus it gathers into its circumference every
land where live and labor his brethren in the art. And
so we find our youthful composer looking beyond the
limits of his Warsaw, looking and longing for physical
contact with that with which his heart was already in
rapport ; Dresden and Prague and Berlin, but chiefly
Vienna the renowned, the rich and glorious with the
memories and bequeathings of Haydn and Mozart and
Beethoven and Schubert. There could be heard, in its
unfading loveliness, the " Freischiitz " of Weber in whom
Romanticism first wakened like a rose at dawn. There
such pianists as Czerny and Hummel would discover to
Chopin his failings, or prove his merits to be all his
own. And then, far off as the horizon of his day-
dreams, upgrew the sumptuous city on the Seine, the
35
FREDERIC CHOPIN
siren city sweet of voice and fair of form ; the heart-
less, hope-wrecking city beneath whose mocking e)'^e the
unheard Wagner in after years must chafe and struggle
and starve and almost cease to be.
Chopin was instinctively and wholly a romanticist.
Though deemed ultra by many a contemporary critic,
to us he stands revealed the great tone-poet of the
piano ; the Keats, or rather the Shelley of musicians ;
the inimitable modern from whom the groping and
straining virtuoso-producers of to-day have much retro-
graded.
As a pianoforte writer, Chopin has only Beethoven
as compeer, but each in his way is supreme. The
supremacy of Beethoven is th8.t of the symphonist in
whose brain the orchestra sounds ever a multitudinous
variety of tone color. The piano was his dearest
friend, the orchestra his great heart's love not to
be shut out, not to be forgotten, because of friend-
ship's closest, warmest hour ; and so the orchestra
would crowd and cramp itself in the piano. On the
other hand, his chosen instrument was to Chopin his
all of abiding friendship and passionate, absorbing
love, and every height and every deep of his being is
therein contained ; his every unclouded gem, set in
ornate and exquisite workmanship, his every matched
and strung pearl, finds there a golden casket. Chopin
made of his Erard, or his Ple5'el, a novel instrument.
36
FREDERIC CHOPIN
No longer of uniform tint, its tone colors were yet
unlike those from the orchestral blending of wood and
metal and string.
Ere long our composer-virtuoso has met and meas-
ured many of his renowned contemporaries, and, by
fair comparison, he knows to a nicety his own status ;
already he anticipates the acclaim of a just future.
Such seership is necessary to the man of genius.
Foreknowledge is his saving rock amidst the merciless
seas of ridicule. Clinging to that stay, he awaits the
spent fury of the storm, the lulling of winds, the level-
ing of waves.
For the sake of comparison let us, from the vantage
ground of this present, glance at the chief musical
celebrities contacted by Chopin in the years of his
youthful activity. Thalberg, smooth and faultless
executant, delight of the dilettante and the superficial
amateur, was throwing off a series of showy but withal
empty transcriptions of which his " Mose in Egitto "
may be held the best. As a moulder of musicians,
notably Liszt, and as a developer of technique, the hard-
working Czerny was proving of immense value, but as
a composer he was too diligent, not waiting for that
inspiration which cannot be forced. Of Hummel,
much over-rated in those days, the best thing sayable
is that he influenced the shaping of Chopin's concertos,
the least faulty of his larger works. Moscheles, the
37
FREDERIC CHOPIN
tutor of Mendelsshon, was a musician much esteemed
by Chopin who deemed it a privilege to play the bass
to the composer's treble in his chief pianoforte works.
Unlike certain of our modern pianists, Kalkbrenner
was no muscular virtuoso venting his rage upon the
keyboard. He was, on the contrary, a performer of
refinement and precision ; one who could claim certain
excellencies akin to those of Chopin. But alas for
human vanity ! his great show pieces, the cause of
much self-gratulation, have vanished from every con-
cert repertory and every musical collection save that
of the antiquary. Mendelssohn, despite his eminence,
had the backward-looking eye ; much in his matter
had already been sung and played, but not with the
grace and charm of that accomplished scholar. And
yet is the " Elijah " a triumph, a thing enduring, an
epitome of all his powers. Oak-ribbed, wealth-laden
voyager on the sea of Time, how bravely it breasts the
waves that long have whelmed the wrecks of mediocre
talent and seeming genius and empty pretence ! Schu-
mann, discoverer of the genius of Chopin, was a
musician and thinker, an ever-broadening cosmopol-
itan, a radical in the van of esthetic progress and,
inevitably, the soul of the new musical romanticism.
Almost any page, almost any stanza of Shelley —
most ethereal of word-poets — would indicate an unob-
structed outpouring which the first drafts of even his
38
FREDERIC CHOPIN
wholly sustained inspirations quite disprove. Beetho-
ven's collected sketch-books are a study in the evolution
of themes afterward impressed with the seal of spon-
taneity. We are told by one who ought to know, that
Chopin's every opus was born only after soul-travail
both long and sore. Against these curious facts can
be set this apparent contradiction : facility is the rule
among the merely talented, and many such have with
ease dashed off their best efforts, of which doing they
are wont to boast because, to the popular way of
thinking, facility is proof of genius. Now why should
Shelley and Beethoven and Chopin wrestle with the
idea, and Pollok and Czerny and their kind be so
easily victorious ?
As we have said, our human world is subdivisible
into manifold states of consciousness, each a world to
its dwellers. The world of the man of talent may be,
and usually is, but a step inward from the world of the
multitude ; hence few obstacles hinder communication
between these nearly-related worlds. The ideas of the
inner are with ease translated to the understanding
of the outer. Evidently this is untrue of those inmost
worlds where dwell the deep- and high-dreaming Poet
and Musician whose respective domains are almost
outside of time and space, those limitations wherewith
the human mind divides the known from the unknown,
the sensible from the super-sensible, the finite from the
39
FREDERIC CHOPIN
Infinite. Having in them little or nothing of the quan-
titative, the ideas of those worlds elude the mental
grasp of all save the finely-organized man of genius.
How to come into touch with the great, common
world by giving fixed form to that which is formless
and by rendering tangible the intangible, making seen
the unseen, felt the unfelt, and heard the unheard, is
the problem of Genius. It was the problem of Michel
Angelo before the unchiselled " David " ; the problem
of Raphael musing upon the Madonnaless canvas ; the
problem of the absorbed Beethoven when, in his seem-
ingly aimless meanderings, the trees by the roadside
and in the forest would prompt him to solution with
their whispered " Holy ! Holy ! " and it was the problem
of Chopin as in the quiet of his study, apart from the
roar of the great city, the empty page tormented him
with the thought of unwritten and perhaps unwritable
beauties.
That within the space of twenty-four days, Handel
penned the notes of his most glorious work, proves
nothing but his enormous powers of mental concentra-
tion, and the endurance of a brain supported by a
vigorous body ; but to the vital question : How long
had " The Messiah " been maturing in him ? history
affords no conclusive answer. Rossini was no doubt a
facile composer, yet from what soul-deep his operas
came is proved by his deliberate estimate of their
40
FREDERIC CHOPIN
longevity. He believed that as an entirety nothing
but "II Barbiere " would survive.
The well- attested fact that Beethoven and Chopin,
those cautious and self-critical composers, were both
extempore performers par excellence, goes far toward
proving the impromptu inferior to the finished after-
product. And does not all this favor our view that
from the birth-throes, and not from the painlessness
of Genius, are born the masterpieces of every art ?
II
Genius is essentially sympathetic and would draw
all men into rapport with its world of light and love.
Companioned it must be, aye, close companioned I
But descend it will never because to Genius its world
embodies more of reality than does all this terrestial
globe.
Happy the master gathering around him his little
following! Happy indeed the genius, the solitary
being, who finds among men an ideal friend ; one to
whom self-explanation, so hateful to Genius, is need-
less ; one who knows instinctively the soul life of the
other ! To Genius that friend is a proof of its mission ;
a witness that it lives not a thing more useless than the
most ordinary mortal ; an assurance that it yet will
come into the fullness of its own. Such a friend
41
FREDERIC CHOPIN
Chopin was now to find within that great Paris which
Hke a gigantic lodestone was drawing him to herself.
Franz Liszt, the Hungarian composer, pianist and
literateur, was born in 1811, and in 1831, the date of
Chopin's advent in the French capital, he was but
twenty years of age, and so by two years the junior of
the Pole. Soon the fame of the younger man would
eclipse even that of Kalkbrenner, esteemed the first
pianist of the day. Liszt was steadily nearing an
eminence ever afterward his own against all comers,
that of the world's unparalleled pianoforte virtuoso.
The artist who, in days to come, would first divine
and adequately measure the comprehensiveness of
Wagner; the timely helper who would deem it a duty,
a privilege, to aid and cheer the impecunious political
refugee in the despondent years of his exile ; the whole-
hearted enthusiast whose determined arm would open
for the composer of " Lohengrin," the close-shut door
of the Temple of Fame, was the friend in whom Chopin
now saw reflected his own peculiar genius. As the
painter, stepping backward from his easel, scans his
work as a whole, and in the most favorable light, so,
from the view-point of Liszt's intuitive rendering,
Chopin better estimated his own productions than
could otherwise have been possible.
That consummate interpretation of a work proves
not one's abiUty to create its like is shown by the
42
FREDERIC CHOPIN
coming together of Chopin and Liszt. While Liszt was
indubitably of advantage to Chopin, the latter in turn
reacted upon the former. In the nature of the fiery
Hungarian, and that of the dreamy Pole, were those
resemblances and differences which make high friend-
ship a possibility and also a means of mutual growth
through reciprocity of ideas.
The fascinating and dominating Liszt was by nature
a Bohemian. From first to last he dwelt in the realm
of those laxities and unconventionalities which dismay
the ordinary mortal, but whose glamour is over the life
of many an artist. And yet, despite every shortcoming,
Liszt had that which was much indeed, a virtue fre-
quently the saving one of genius, to wit, the artistic
conscience.
Beneath a demeanor disguising rather than revealing
his inner self, Chopin was an ardent soul, a Polish
patriot from whose heart overflowed, to his every page,
the sorrows of his native land. Those sorrows were a
cloud shadowing the radiance of his ideal world, and
at times dulling it almost to the sombre hues of this
earth, begetter of many sorrows.
It is regrettable that Chopin sought to bind within
the hmits of conventional forms, already half outgrown,
his poetical ideas amenable only to the requirements
of those freer forms for which Berlioz and Schumann
were striving, and to which Wagner ultimately attained.
43
FREDERIC CHOPIN
In his Impromptus, and a few other ventures beyond
self-imposed barriers, Chopin made most praiseworthy
use of freedom, but quickly he returns to contempla-
tion of his beloved Mozart, that perfect master of
classical form. Naturally the polished frequenter of
the Parisian drawing-room and salon, found no last-
ing pleasure in the wild freedom and amplitude of the
forest of Romanticism. The change was too abrupt
and novel. Those far-reaching vistas of unfrequented
shade ! How different from the metropolitan thorough-
fare ! Those mighty but fantastically-growing trees
thick-planted by Nature's careless hand ! those never-
trimmed and irregular branches ! those fallen and dis-
mantled trunks ! How unlike the well-kept parks of
Paris and Versailles !
While composing, Chopin never quite divorced him-
self from the keyboard of his piano, and yet the writer
who would attain to untrammeled expression, in both
matter and form, should compose beneath a roof no
narrower than the dome of heaven. Let the study
be his reference room, his library, and, for conven-
ience, his place of final elaboration. Like Beethoven
and Wordsworth, let him receive at first hand the
impartings of Nature that needed teacher of us
all.
In the heart of Chopin the melodies of his beloved
Poland, mingling with his own imaginings, became
44
FREDERIC CHOPIN
invested with a subtle, poetical charm and a delicate
sweetness idealizing their own quaint loveliness.
The Mazurka ! does it not bring the peasant gather-
ing on the green ; the evening or the holiday of sway-
ing forms and agile feet and rustic beauty in the grace-
ful round ? The Polonaise ! does it not bring the
brilliant hall ; the jewelled fair ; the stately-moving,
king-led company of lords and noble dames ? Yes,
such were the scenes which, to the dances of his
people, Chopin had conjured from the happy, bygone
days. How appealing this music to those of the old
Polish nobility then finding in Paris their most con-
genial abode in exile ! Largely through the influence
of these the Parisian success of Chopin was speedier,
although more circumscribed, than that of Meyerbeer,
who, only by laborious and painstaking adaptation
of his methods to the requirements of the French
operatic stage, won the Parisian public and brought
them to their knees before the shrine of "Robert."
In the homes of rank and wealth, Chopin now min-
gles with princes, ministers, ambassadors and literary
notables. Titled ladies are his pupils and, because he
would have it so, he deems his musical self best under-
stood by the lionizing fashionables of French society
who, in fact, looked not beneath the finished, but by
no means robust virtuoso, and polished gentleman
conforming to their every convention.
45
FREDERIC CHOPIN
The fashionables of French society ! Oh for a
moment natural and true amidst the false and artificial
hours ! A candid, soul-sprung greeting to shame the
outward suavity where envy rankles, or where hatred
burns within ! Oh for a laden word to prove the hol-
lowness of empty tongues ! A normal heart of inno-
cence in that blase assembly ! Oh for an individuality
unrepressed ; a potent unit in that crowd of merest
ciphers !
It is almost incredible that in such environment
Chopin composed many of his noblest works. His
Rondo in C minor Op. i, published in 1825, when he
was but sixteen years of age, and therefore in the old
Warsaw days, had announced the advent of a writer
of the highest rank, one authoritatively proclaimed by
Schumann on the appearance of the variations in B
flat Op. 2. Arriving in Paris late in the year 1831,
the man of two-and-twenty was already known to
musicians like Franz Liszt and Ferdinand Hiller, as
creator of such music as the Concerto in F minor, the
Concerto in E minor, and the Funeral March in C
minor. This last was afterward eclipsed by the great
march in the B flat minor Sonata. But the bulk of
Chopin's pianoforte works was written during the
next seventeen years, and despite adverse conditions
other than those of environment.
46
FREDERIC CHOPIN
III
Chopin's compositions, aside from his Waltzes, were
in his day too novel and strange to attract more than
the discerning and progressive few. Obtuse and igno-
rant critics vented their wrath upon them. Even
Moscheles found them full of abrupt and harsh modu-
lations, and the attitude of Mendelssohn was one of
mingled hke and loathing. Liszt alone accepted them
in their entirety. Because of all this, their inevitably
small sale made Chopin's office of composer compara-
tively an unremunerative one.
Unlike Beethoven who, from choice as well as neces-
sity, lived most frugally and solitary as a lion in his
den, Chopin was somewhat of a Sybarite in his tastes,
and, furthermore, improvident and accustomed to ex-
travagant expenditures. Therefore, while esteeming
himself at par value as a composer, he was of necessity
a teacher also. In addition to the distractions and
fatigues of regular lesson-giving, an ever-present mis-
fortune, a wasting and fatal malady, crippled what
should have been his years of physical prime. Yet
despite all that certainly hindered and probably
impaired the result of Chopin's Parisian years of cre-
ative effort, that result may be summarized as follows :
First and foremost, are those "Soul-animating strains,
alas too few ! " the four incomparable Ballades of
47
FREDERIC CHOPIN
which Schumann said that a poet inspired them, and
a poet might easily write words to them. In the Bal-
lades, Chopin encompasses a height and breadth and
depth elsewhere un attained in his works. Here the
local is indeed outgrown, and almost the universal is
in the sweep of his vision. Abreast of the bardic view,
he develops a world theme, he rings a story of the
antique and the modern.
Next in enumeration come the great Polonaises,
epics of Poland in heroic meter, Iliads of battle on
her native soil. The bitter taunt of rage and scorn ;
the hurled defiance and the fierce reply ; the rush, the
crash of the onset ; the broken swords and splintered
lances ; the vanquished rider and the fallen war-horse ;
the anguished cries of dying men ; the hopeless wail of
captives ; the harsh rattle of galling chains ; the deep
and solemn notes of dirge. Iliads of Poland ! Iliads
of her olden glory and her prone defeat ; and then an
Iliad of her proud-arisen days to be !
In marked contrast, and therefore proving the ver-
satility of Chopin, we have what outlasts a thousand ball-
room waltzes every one of which, like the gay butterfly,
joys through its little day and then is gone forever.
Of the poetic and perfect Waltzes of Chopin, evidently
not written for the mere dancer, may be instanced the
one in A flat op. 42 ; also the set of three op. 34.
The second of them, tenderly melancholy in both
48
FREDERIC CHOPIN
minor and major, was an especial favorite of its author.
Nor should we overlook the celebrated waltz in D
flat which, while fulfilling all musical requirements, has
proved universally popular, being, in fact, what its
history indicates, the unpremeditated outpour of a
happy hour.
The greater number of the forty-one Mazurkas pub-
lished by Chopin, date from the Paris period. They
are easy of execution and often brief, some being held
within the limits of sixty measures. In these Mazur-
kas the poet of the epic turns to polish the line, the
stanza ; the painter of the heroic perfects the minia-
ture. Each Mazurka is a tiny picture of Polish life ;
a little draught from the well of Polish folk-song.
How readily these dances lend themselves to an
exaggerated rubato, the common fault of would-be
interpreters !
Because of its noble, singing quality, the key of D
flat was chosen for some of Chopin's most exquisite
melodies. In this markedly individual key, whose tone
color is but the veil of some unimagined splendor, was
set the "Berceuse," most ethereal and lovely of cradle
songs. A sweet murmur of waters, it glides and ripples
and gently falls from no earth-born spring. No upland
snows make clear its limpid, winding way. From
loftier far than ever rain-clouds find, the home of inno-
cence which slumbering infancy beholds, it brings of
49
FREDERIC CHOPIN
Wisdom's fount what, hidden from the wise, is yet
revealed to babes.
Another of the Paris pieces is the somewhat long
Barcarolle in nocturne form ; an Italian scene beneath
the skies of Venice. Not the palaced Venice of
marble and porphyry and alabaster, but that mobile
Venice which mirrors the rising moon touched at times
by filmy shades, yet light enough for lovers borne
upon the sparkling tides. Though devoid of striking
contrasts, this Barcarolle contains probably more of
variety than Mendelssohn could have woven into it.
In Paris were composed all save one of the nineteen
Nocturnes bearing the name of Chopin. On these, and
the Polonaise in A major, and such Waltzes as op. i8
in E flat, mostly rests his popular estimate.
As a producer in this lighter vein, Chopin encounters
no rival. A few, a very few of the earlier Nocturnes
betray the influence of John Field originator of this
somewhat sentimental style of salon music ; but shortly
the Chopinesque quality asserts itself and lo, the night
of lulled winds, heavy with the tropical odor of flowers !
Night of indolent southern stars, and the chaste Diana
grown languorous and tender ! Night of little clouds
that weep they know not why! Night of the bashful,
subdued bird that lifts not to the cheerful sun his
notes of love and grief and yearning.
Without underestimating the musical and technical
50
FREDERIC CHOPIN
value of dementi's "Gradus ad Parnassum " on whose
broad and solid foundation rests all modern pianoforte
playing, and without in the least belittling the contri-
butions of Cramer, it may be asserted that the Etudes
of Chopin are revelations in technique. Of all their
class, they alone anticipate the virtuoso requirements
of to-day, while some, like Nos. 3 and 6 of op. 10, are,
as inspired music, unmatched in the world's repertory
of piano studies. Painstaking authorities have edited,
and eminent critics have almost extravagantly praised
them. Hunaker holds them monumental of our
nineteenth century attainment in piano music. How-
ever, Chopin's twenty-seven Etudes have little place
in this present enumeration, for, excepting two or
three in the second book, op. 25, they, like the
Concertos, the Bolero, the Rondos op. i and op. 16,
and the Variations op. 2, all of them antedate the
year 1831.
The weight of evidence would prove that of the
twenty-four Preludes op. 28, the bulk was composed
prior to Chopin's visit to Majorka in 1839. Schumann
called them " ruins, eagle feathers all strangely inter-
mingled." To Kullak they are '* little masterpieces of
the first rank." Hunaker holds them "a sheaf of
moods." Rubinstein believes them the pearls of Cho-
pin's works. They are in fact autobiographical poems
in brief stanzas. Though we grant the excellence and
51
FREDERIC CHOPIN
completeness of many, and the individuality of all
these Preludes, certain of them seemed fragmentary.
The sixteen measures comprised in No. 7, may be the
sole remnant of some discarded Mazurka. Those thir-
teen measures of solemn moving chords in C minor,
the total of No. 20, suggest the episode in the G
minor Nocturne, and may have been preserved from
some such composition.
We have, by Chopin, four Impromptus all written
later than the year 183 1 : op. 29 in A flat, op. s^ in
F sharp major, op. 51 in G flat, and the posthumous
Fantasie Impromptu in C sharp minor. The word
Impromptu is usually a misnomer betraying, to the
discerning, the vanity of an author who would have
his public suppose him capable of off-hand effusions in
all ways superior to the careful work of others.
That Chopin is here not altogether innocent is at
once shown by the premeditated consecutive minor
ninths between the melody and accompaniment in the
first and second measures of op. 29. The six intro-
ductory measures of op. 36 are a carefully written
two-part bass which, blending with the treble melody
entering at the seventh measure, forms with it a three-
part harmony worthy of the most painstaking writer.
In op. 51, Chopin is chromatic and winding and pre-
meditating as is his wont. Op. 66 comes nearest the
title, " Impromptu." Interest here centers in the right
52
FREDERIC CHOPIN
hand, which, throughout the first and the third sections,
is an uninterrupted torrent of semiquavers, and, in the
D flat middle movement, is a sustained and melodious
cantabile which yet is not the master's true cantabile,
that noble and tender and pensive poetry pervading,
for instance, the con anima of the B flat minor Scherzo.
The instrumental music of Haydn and Mozart fur-
nishes many models of the true Scherzo. The Sonatas
and Symphonies of Beethoven exhibit in its fullness this
evolution of the old Minuet, but, coming to the four
Scherzos of Chopin, the mere classifier is puzzled and
halted while the real musician is exalted and led onward.
Leaving the consideration of name and structure and
logical sequence to the hypercritical, he enters without
cavil this unique, forest-encompassed temple of art
where joy and laughter indeed are not, for an elegiac
sadness murmurs from the over-roofing green, and
oftentimes the winds without, those whisperers in their
woodland tongue, will swell to impassioned euphony or
hopeless, wild lament, and suddenly midst Nature's
momentary hush, a solemn, deep-toned temple hymn is
breathed around, and then, above, the swaying branches
make their moan anew, and hark ! the harsh, capricious
blast is pouring once again its tale of wretchedness and
woe.
The mind of Chopin, like that of every man and
woman of true genius, exhibits both male and female
53
FREDERIC CHOPIN
characteristics, for the sexless human soul, the source
of those characteristics, would stamp itself clearly and
wholly on the impressionable brain of such as he.
Chopin's masculineness, so often in abeyance, as
throughout the Nocturnes, at once asserts itself in the
noble Fantaisie op. 49, whose recurring first figure
requires no fortissimo to drive it deep into the heart.
The true genius has his moment when, sole and
venturous, he lifts him loftier than the eagle. The
sun beyond — the light he failed to reach — did it not
from the airless heaven scorn his defeat and leave
him humbled in the height ? And yet the tree-tops,
far beneath upon the mountain, v/ere proud v/ith wings
that never dared as he. Many fanciful and imagina-
tive interpretations we have of that empyrean flight the
F minor Fantaisie, but, as if too conscious of failure
in the unattainable, the author would discredit them all
with a commonplace explanation.
Inevitably the collected works of great authors, in
whatever department, contain that which as a whole
adds little or nothing to their eminent reputation. Of
the works of Chopin's mature years, the Allegro de
Concert, the Taran telle, and the Rondo op. 16, belong
in this category. And yet any of these, the first espe-
cially, would make famous a pianoforte composer not
already high in the first rank,
Chopin, as we have seen, studied well the composi-
54
FREDERIC CHOPIN
tions of Bach, and to that study should be traced his
comprehensive knowledge of harmonic possibilities.
This is wholly proved by his every important work ;
but in daring how he distances the profound and
methodical contrapuntist of Leipsic ! Only Wagner
and Richard Strauss are bolder than he. As a har-
monist Chopin was bent on notable things, and with
equal zeal he essayed that most difficult and hazardous
of undertakings, the Sonata. Had our Romanticist
but given to the pianoforte Sonatas of Beethoven some-
what of those hours devoted to " The Well-tempered
Clavichord," the effect on op. 35 and op. 58, probably
had been an enrichment of our repertory of high-class
piano Sonatas. After all, the Sonata is a perfected
growth of Classicism, and so lends itself most ungra-
ciously to the looser treatment of the Romanticist, for
it demands not only sequence of ideas and systematic
development of themes, but also a unification of its
constituent movements that as a whole it shall be
homogeneous.
During his Parisian career, Chopin composed three
Sonatas, op. 35 and op. 58, for piano, and op. 65, for
piano and violincello. This last, a most unequal work,
has provoked more of adverse criticism than any other
bearing his name.
Chopin's chief defect, one almost always apparent,
originated in his somewhat narrow sympathies, which,
55
FREDERIC CHOPIN
though deep, did yet by no means fathom the joys
underlying and destined to outlast the waves of
sorrow, which, to his circumscribed vision, were suffi-
cient for the engulfing of the world. What, we ask,
was the partition, the virtual obliteration of Poland, to
that universal freedom, which, since the Napoleonic
days, was known as a blessing yet to be ? As already
said, Chopin allowed these earth-clouds of sorrow to
darken greatly the radiance of his ideal world. The
pessimist could not sink himself in the deeper and
wider optimist. We suspect his predilection for the
gay and thoughtless dwellers on the surface of life, to
be but desire to rid himself of a weight of sadness
engendered by solitary musings.
The Sonata should be the outpouring of a heart
attuned to every chord of life ; a heart capable of
universal sympathies. Nevertheless, the supreme
expression of that heart is joy, a prophecy hopeful as
a Christmas greeting to the world. Let us turn to a
consideration of op. 35 in B flat minor, for there, as
nowhere else, Chopin betrays the defects of his
qualities.
The four vague mtroductory measures, " Grave,"
attempt the expression of unutterable woe whose pain-
ful fullness is yet relieved by this anguished cry.
During the next four measures the soul, still over-
burdened, meditates a more adequate expression, and,
S6
FREDERIC CHOPIN
at the Agitato, again attempts its story in what proves
but an interrupted and broken eloquence of grief whose
poignancy soon softens to tender, sweet regret. This
presently swells to passionate longing as for some far-
off good. But alas for expectance ! Alas for every
looked-for happiness gilded by the sunlight of a day
that shall not be ! This last mood, so characteristic of
Chopin, ends the first section of the first movement,
and then suddenly but inevitably come back the old
brooding and the tearful, sob-choked utterance. And
now a calmer moment for, as from the Sun of all being,
a ray of heaven-born cheer finds the darkened chambers
of the heart ; but whatsover of hope is there enkindled, is,
by sorrow's unstayable fountain, soon made cold again.
In almost no one succeeding bar of the four move-
ments comprised in this so-called Sonata, does a note
of real joy leap forth from the funereal throng. Even
the piu lento of the Scherzo seems to say, " Whatever
we feel, let us be outwardly cheerful ! " Ah yes ! But
then this outwardness misleads no observer, for the
suffused eye betrays the smiling lips, and laughter is
the adroit but ineffectual turning of a sigh.
The Presto was abhorrent to Mendelssohn. A normal,
happy being, he was born into the sunshine and green
of a happy world, and his heart had not been plowed
and harrowed, and then planted with the black-berried
nightshade and all the baneful things of death. So he
57
FREDERIC CHOPIN
turned from this " Dark tarn of Auber " to the Chopin
of meads and banks where no bird of midnight mood
is croaking and the wholesome winds blow never from
the ''ghoul haunted woodland of Weir," and the lithe
branches are waving aeolian at eve.
In the Sonata op. 26 in A flat, Beethoven rightly
placed amidst a contrasting environment the immortal
" Marcia funebre sulla morte d'un Eroe." Amidst the
almost unmitigated gloom of the 5--flat minor Sguata,
Chopin has inserted a commemoration worthy of many
Ig^eroesT^'iBtTt' whowere the heroes inspiring the Polish
com.poser to one of his grandest thoughts, the unsur"
passable Funeral March? Yes, who in truth were
those dedicated heroes ? Surely not the great achiev-
ers whom the wide world esteems, but rather those
losing heroes hopeful in a hopeless cause ; those
fallen patriots of Polish blood whose mangled forms
the iron hoofs of war had trampled in the mire of
battle.
In the prevailing key of his Sonata, the key of B
flat minor, one of the most sombre in all the realms of
tone, Chopin's Funeral March at once reveals itself as
no chapter of private sorrows ; the mourning of a mul-
titude is in its deep-voiced chords telling the burial of
a people's loss. Fit for the final pageant of emperors
and kings, yet little varied as the monotone of some
grave discourse, the weighty measures move majesti-
S8
FREDERIC CHOPIN
cally and slow while everywhere bared heads are
bending, and the dull, despondent look is downward
for now the dust shall hide yon poor reminder of a
vanished life. Ah, how those earth-bound chords, for
less than two brief measures, struggle free and lift us
on their glorious, upward wings ! Alas, they falter ere
yet they attain, and then, in feebler soaring, turn and
sink exhausted to the very charnel place of Death.
Once more with mighty final strength the massive
chords are mounting only to falter and attempt and
fall again even to the dismal housing of the dead.
Then, suddenly unto that comfortless abode a song of
heaven is wafted from her angel choir. At once com-
plaining Doubt is dumb, and Sorrow hath her respite,
and Hope her sweet uplooking to the rest of heroes
from their finished days. Long afterward, when acute
grief has changed to pensive musing, that song in
tones of unforgettable beauty steals upon the silence of
the soul ; a tender message from the never-dying dead.
But whatever of balm in such serene outpouring, the
torn heart must look for ease to Time the great healer,
and so the deep w^ounds reopen, the insurmountable
doubt and grief again are undergone, and in this wise
the sublime march, so masterfully epitomizing certain
human experiences, draws to its pathetic close and
ends on the sombre chord which characterized its
beginning.
59
FREDERIC CHOPIN
IV
During this study of Frederic Chopin, the musician,
certain incidents in his career, those favorably or unfa-
vorably affecting his artistic development, have been
touched on. Notable among them was his friendship
with Liszt ; but we have now to record the effects of
another coming together, that of Chopin and George
Sand. This latter was not the marriage of two minds
musically preeminent, but, in fact, the result of the
drawing near, until under one sky, of two related
worlds: that of the musician, and that of the poet, for
such, in fact, was the world of the imaginative French
novelist. From this meeting and blending of abodes
resulted a drama, and, for Chopin, a final tragedy ;
therefore a word in regard to the two distinguished
actors.
Chopin's bodily appearance was marked by an entire
absence of the robust ; his features indicated delicate
and refined feeling ; his tastes were fastidious ; his
manner smooth and faultless with the last polish.
This much created an impression as of a feminine per-
sonality, but the real, virile man was there, well-hidden
beneath his mask. " George Sand," as that nom de
plume would indicate, claimed for herself almost every
masculine prerogative. With manly daring and physi-
cal vitality, she overleaped convention as but the walls
60
FREDERIC CHOPIN
of a prison-pen fit only for the shutting in of Uttle
minds. And yet, before some noble and deep nature,
a softest fire would mount to those dark eyes of hers,
and voice and mien revealed the '' Eternal Womanly,"
which often outlined and sometimes portrayed itself
upon her most tender, soulful pages. From trustwor-
thy accounts we conclude that Chopin was at first
repelled, not by any physical lack, for Madame Dude-
vant had just and ample claims to comeliness, but
rather from his inability to divine at once the basic
affinity which afterwards drew and held him despite
external dissimilarities. Not so v/ith the great novelist
to whose feminine insight much of the analytical, mas-
culine mind was added. She at once divined Chopin,
and whatever was defective in him the glamour of sex
made good ; so she desisted not until she had made
him her own.
The beauty and symmetry and fragrance of the
flower is the complete expression of a life simple
because low in the scale of evolution ; but the beauty
and symmetry of the masculine human form, together
with every endowment of the characteristic masculine
mind, only half expresses the rounded whole of the
complex human soul, itself sexless because above sex.
What is true of man is equally so of woman. The man
and the woman of genius each recognizes in the other
the riches and worth of that hemisphere of the soul
6i
FREDERIC CHOPIN
adequately revealed only by that other. This percep-
tion of a mutual need is the prompter of love between
men and women high in the scale of human evolution ;
it is in fact the cause of love even in the most unthink-
ing ; those whom only the wisdom of Nature enlightens.
Like Beethoven, who sighed for his " Immortal
Beloved," Chopin himself had loved and more than
once. That half of his being which, because a man,
he failed to realize as an inward belonging, he had
projected as an ideal clothed with the grace and beauty
of womankind. That ideal had looked into his eyes
with tender recognition, or a glance almost of scorn
had wholly told his poor unworth. But, favoring or
reproving, that ideal had vanished utterly and forever,
and now his heart indeed was lone save in brief,
exalted moments of genius. Then the soul in its
entirety would assert itself, and amidst that fullness he
needed no other company.
Chopin, now twenty-eight years of age, had reached
the early maturity which hastens to the precocious
genius into whose brief but brilliant years are crowded
the doings of an ordinary lifetime. In subject matter,
at least, he had from the first shown an originality
almost unimpressed by any great contemporary or
predecessor. Conscious of ability to stand alone, he
shunned rather than sought the friendship of renowned
composers and virtuosi. A tone poet most essential
62
FREDERIC CHOPIN
to the romantic movement, he cared not for the
Romanticism of Schumann. The eccentricities of
Berlioz repelled him, and, strange in an admirer of
Hummel and Field, he could not or would not condone
what he deemed commonplace in the bulk of Mendels-
sohn's work. As for Liszt, to whose interpretation
he accorded deserved praise, he had with secret
disdain penetrated to the somewhat small kernel of
original and worthy ideas in that author's early virtuoso
pieces.
From this much, and more that might be added, it
is evident that Chopin's glance was chiefly introspec-
tive. Moreover, it is evident that his inner world was
not that of other musicians.
What then was the influence of George Sand upon
our composer, now at the zenith of his powers? Evi-
dently that of a projected ideal the image of the half of
his soul life which Goethe calls the Eternal Feminine.
In the searching light of our everyday world, the
personality of George Sand betrays many defects.
This of itself forbade a union like that of the Brown-
ings; and to such a union other objections existed.
The physical ailments of Chopin, which even in youth
had menaced, and in a gradual approach had now
seized upon him, were never wholly to loosen their
grasp, so the chronic invalid became at times an
exacting and by no means patient sufferer. On the
63
FREDERIC CHOPIN
other hand, George Sand was a woman of wide out-
look and varied interests. Certain chimeras in the
guise of political and social reform were leading the
temperamental novelist far afield ; but in these mat-
ters the composer shared not her enthusiasm, neither
would he be indoctrinated as she herself had been.
Knowing where his strength lay, he remained faithful
to his muse, his lavish endower. While Chopin sought
the smiles of princesses, and the applause of the fash-
ionable salon, the Sand remained aloof. Conscious of
her superb mental equipment, she no doubt believed
that the brightest of all that gay company could add
not a single thought to her ever-overflowing store.
No wonder that as time wore on our musician more
and more failed to fulfill the requirements of her ideal.
The affair with De Musset should have warned
Chopin, but what warning, what philosophy, what
aceticism, could offset the fascinations of one who
at will swayed the hearts of her immense public?
Besides, Chopin was not a philosopher save that
unconscious one which an analysis of his deepest tone-
poems reveals. Still less was he an ascetic this
highly-developed emotional nature, this virile yet frail
man of genius.
Of Chopin it must be admitted that he remained
true to his attachment, true despite indubitable
proof of the other's infidelity; true even till the shut-
64
FREDERIC CHOPIN
ting of the door wherewith eventually she barred her
heart forever from his own ; true even then he remained,
nursing in secret the sorrows of a bruised and broken
life, while, from this episode in her own career, but the
finale in that of her lover, the woman, like Faust and
Wilhelm Meister, emerged into other and varied
experiences.
But, to repeat our former question, what was the
effect of George Sand on the ten years of productive
effort which measured the beginning and the end of
this affaire du coeur? We hold that effect the most
important of everything ext raneou s on the body of
our composer's works during that rich decade. Never-
theless that effect is not local ; the finger cannot be
placed upon it, nor is it determinable as a fixed
quantity. Rather it is nourishment assimilated, chemi-
cally changed to blood and bloom and beauty by a
process whereof genius alone has the secret.
Of the work of these memorable years it may well
be said that, beneath their various dedications, the
name of George Sand was written in the warm and
ruddy life of the heart of Frederic Chopin. Had the
novelist been another Clara Schumann rendering for
the composer those great fortissimos, and those loud
and brilliant passages to which his delicate physique
was unequal, or even had Chopin himself been, like
Liszt, a man of literary tastes and capabilities, how
6s
FREDERIC CHOPIN
much happier the outcome! How that mutual happi-
ness, triumphing over the depressing power of a dread
disease — as afterwards in the case of Heinrich Heine
— would have infused a more luminous color into the
prevailing sombreness of his tone poetry ! But, thank-
ful for our rich heritage, we grieve not over what
might have been.
V
Because of the superabundance of producers in
every department of art and literature, and because
the actual needs of the world are small in proportion
to the total output, a sifting results whereby is pre-
served only that most typical of its. kind. Thus of a
thousand melodies popular in their hour, one is added
to a people's treasury of song. A stirring, national
anthem, or a perfect poem of tender feeling or conta-
gious fiame, may alone preserve the memory of a prolific
author. Much of what the world once deemed great
in art, as in all else, has gone to the limbo of little
things. Of the surprising bulk of poems which Byron
at thirty-six left behind him, most of the " Childe
Harold," displaying the range and fire of his yet
undimmed imagination, and the freshness and ampli-
tude of his characteristic, eloquent description, will
live; but "Lara" and "Cain" and such must mingle
with the trodden dust. So in the domain of music;
66
FREDERIC CHOPIN
many old-time authors of supposed masterpieces are
superceded by others of like calibre and claim. Only
of him who in his department creates a new type, or
perfects an old one, can anything approaching lon-
gevity be predicted.
To but one popular poet was it given to interpret
in a hundred lyrics the heart of his peasant Scotland.
To but one English dramatist to create for our sym-
pathy Lear, Cordelia, Othello and Desdemona, and to
evoke from his fecund brain the philosophical musings
of Hamlet, the whimsical humor of Falstaff, the
gossamer beauties of "Midsummer Night's Dream,"
and the terrible realism of Macbeth and Richard. To
but one epic poet was it given to breathe a quickening
breath into the pale shades of those mighty dead,
Hector, Agamemnon, Achilles, and many an otherwise
forgotten hero. To but one musician was it given to
perfect in "The Well-tempered Clavichord" the great
organ Fugue, to but one master of his art to show the
attainable in those purely classical forms, the Symphony
and the Sonata.
But what in a summary are the features of Chopin
warranting his present vogue, and assuring his future
fame ? They are many, and each is an unimpeachable
witness to his worth.
Prior to his day. Bach and Beethoven had explored
the known world of harmony. They knew the geogra-
67
FREDERIC CHOPIN
phy of its vast continents, the ch orography of its
countries, the topography of its mountains and valleys
and plains. They had measured its waterways, had
sounded its seas, had sailed by its limiting shores ; and
then Ludwig Spohr, suspecting other lands beyond the
uncharted west, had ventured as from Gibraltar even to
the Azores, or the Canaries, the Fortunate Islands of
old. Schumann had gone even farther, but not to the
utmost of daring for this was the deed of Chopin. He,
the Columbus of composers, gave to Harmony a new
world. He, and he alone, first dreamed and then beheld
its isles of Paradise, tropic and enticing, embowered and
restful, fit for lone and pensive musing till suddenly the
sun is darkened, the winds make wail, and a dread note
of thunder foretells the bursting storm. Many times a
voyager, many times an explorer, he brought continu-
ally, for the world's wonder and delight, the fantastic,
the weird, the exquisite. Ah ! his was no haphazard
sailing on the ocean of sound ; no rudderless drifting
with wind and tide ! Every appliance of the skilled
navigator, the quadrant, the sextant, the compass, were
his guides. In day or in night he knew the altitude of
the sun or else of the polar star. He had calculated
to a nicety the deflections of the needle. Though
seemingly lost was he on the limitless waves, latitude
and longitude, to the fraction of a degree, were clear to
his never-beclouded mind. He it was who opened the
68
FREDERIC CHOPIN
way for all future discoverers and, inevitably, for rash
and turbulent adventurers, even for Richard Strauss
that Cortes, that Pizarro of them all.
An erudite originality, and the passionate abandon of
the author of "Norma," characterize Chopin the melodist.
In the new world by him discovered, his own before-
mentioned world of the ideal, were birds of rare and
differing plume, winged with the delicate greens of
half-grown forest leaves, or breasted with the morn's
red kindling ere the sun, or throated v>'ith the orange
of the fading eve, or mottled with the melancholy grey
which tells the night. And some there were a purity of
white more spotless than the farthest, feathery cloud ;
and some whose tufty blue was borrowed from no sky
like ours. Of these creatures of the composer's realm,
each was vocal with the mood whereof his beauty was
the symbol. Amidst the morning wood, one lifted to
the sun a brief yet briUiant song of transport ; another's
notes were cadenced from beside the splash of shaded
waterfalls when noon was burning all the fields.
Another at the day's down-sinking breathed a tender
plaint, or trembled forth a melancholy, sweet farewell ;
and when the round and tropic moon had touched the
listening groves to silver, a rarer than the nightingale
would warble from the branching palms.
These all were the teachers that made Chopin a
melodist ; but he was more than a melodist, more than
69
FREDERIC CHOPIN
theharmonistwe have indicated; he was a great, national
tone-poet whose romantic measures characterized his
Poland better than did the lines of her chiefest versi-
fiers. The individuality of Chopin the composer was
distinguishable as that of Beethoven and Wagner, He
was above the mere perfector of types. His Scherzos,
his Preludes, his Ballades, his Fantaisies are original
conceptions. On the rhythm of the Polish dance he
reared his dainty Mazurkas. Graceful and ethereal,
they yielded like the slender pine to every swaying
wind. Framed to endure, no blast could overthrow
them. On the same national foundation uprose his
Polonaises, an architecture of his own devising. Fan-
tastic but not grotesque, uniquely and wholly expres-
sive, those solid structures argued immovability, but the
tempest proved them pliant and yet enduringly based
as the deep-rooted giants of the wood.
The master of the mechanical difficulties of Bach
and Clementi, must encounter others quite different in
the Etudes of Chopin. The mind of such a one follows
not swiftly the odd and rapid chromatics swarming
through certain of them. His muscles tire in the
midst of extended and unusual chords filling whole
pages. His fingers, trained to anticipate conventional
harmonic successions in the passage work, are here
hindered by the unusual become the usual, the excep-
tion become the universal rule ; and yet the musical
70
FREDERIC CHOPIN
worth of these intractable measures, whose like abounds
everywhere in Chopin, compels the pianist of our day
to conquer them.
But, more important than the mechanical, there is
in Chopin a mental technique peculiar to himself. It
informed his playing with an ineffable charm which
haunted the memory of pupils and listeners, and yet
lives, a tradition of the old Paris days.
Unlike Shakespeare and Beethoven, the Pole was
not privileged to sound the harp of universal life;
therefore the universal note is denied him, and there-
fore his chief interpreters may not be chosen from the
gifted of every nation. It cannot be denied that for
the music of the vehement, unreasoning passion which
in an instant transforms the shaft of love to the
stiletto, the ItaUan temperament is alone adequate.
It is acknowledged that for the rendition of the semi-
barbaric native rhythms, the wild, lawless onrushings
and the tearful, or dreamy, or voluptuous lingerings of
Hungarian music, the blood of the Magyars must
surge from the heart to the finger tips.
These examples prove that the mental technique of
our composer, a matter of phrasing and pedaling and
accent, and, most intangible of requirements, the
Chopin rubato, is most easily and completely mastered
by the Slav genius. Of the world's goodly com-
pany of virtuosi, only a few exponents of the Polish
71
FREDERIC CHOPIN
musician wholly reveal his invaluable contributions to
art.
In her own eyes the Amazonian Sand towered a
genius in every way superior to the sickly and effeminate-
mannered Chopin, but she attained not to the duty of
a great novelist. No permanent types have sprung
from her ambitious and busy pen. Those fretting,
fuming, shadow-chasing Byronic heroes and heroines
have lived their mortal days, and discriminating Time
denies them an immortality vouchsafed the works of
the man she abandoned.
Chopin's career as composer ends with the Sand
affair. Of what followed little remains to be told.
An unimportant visit to London and Edinburgh where
broken health and spirits were serious obstacles to
brilliant artistic success. A few friendships formed, a
few old ones cemented, then back to Paris which first
he entered a sojourner. Yes, back to Paris, the gay
and frivolous and cynical Paris, that dances to the
waiting grave and laughs and scoffs until the sad
receiving of the tomb.
And now at last the untimely end. He w^ho had
blended the sheen of stars with the rainbow mist of
waterfalls ; he who had swung the forging hammer, and
rivalled the delicate, meshy gold of Vulcan ; he who had
prisoned the loud thunder, the swift lightning, the
angry, the plaintive, the whispering wind ; he who had
72
FREDERIC CHOPIN
outridden the ocean's fury, and slept on the polished
breast of mountain lakes; he, the Endymion of melan-
choly groves beloved of Luna; he, the portrayer of
battles dread with the doings of conquering foes, was
himself to yield, leaving for our musical heritage the
gloom and glory of his works.
Let us draw near, but not to the concert hall, and
the applauding crowd greeting the advent of the young
Polish virtuoso. Yes, let us drav/ near, but not to the
dazzling salon and yonder listening group, the elite of
fashion and culture and fame, gathered around the
Erard. Let us draw nearer than these ; nearer than
the studio of the composer, and the wrapt company of
the inner circle : Sand and Hiller and Heine and
Meyerbeer and Delacroix and Liszt, who himself has
described the scene. Ah, let us, with hushed hearts
and noiseless foot-fall, approach and enter, for this is
the place of parting where human angels neglect no
ministration of love and soothing song as a finished
life sinks, like the master's diminuendo, to waken and
swell and rush and thunder, filled with the vigor of
immortal day.
Far from the charm of English vales and meadows ;
far from the skylark and the cloud he saw and loved
above their freshening green ; afar from all the sweet
allurements of his native isle he sleeps, the English
Shelley, where the blue of Italy is bending o'er the
n
FREDERIC CHOPIN
ruined olden, and the risen new whose ancient and
eternal name is Rome. And close beside, where
Winter spreads the flowers of northern June, is lying
Adonais, poet wept in tearful poesy, the youthful
Keats whom Beauty, in the guise of Death, drew to
her own enamoured breast.
Walled from the covetous human waves, safe from
the encroaching human tide, Pere la Chaise, a mass of
bloom and verdure, lies asleep while the Parisian
metropolis roars and surges on. Of all the multitudes
here gathered to the silence, one at least is alien for
never a branch is moaning, never a breeze, for Polish
liberty; and never a bird is inspired by such sad,
sweet threnody; and never a strip of Polish sky, clear,
or cloud-bedarkened, or heavy with the drops of sor-
row, is bending o'er chiseled marble of a tomb. Amidst
the dead of every high and noble calling, the dead
whose deeds enhance the fame of France, that alien's
dust is in the jealous keeping of a nation richer
because of Poland and her greatest bard.
Sixty years have gone since the October day when,
within the walls of the Madelaine, the master's funeral
measures dirged his death. Since that memorable time
many pianoforte composers, men of talent and men of
genius, have arisen. These, by their indebtedness to
the years of Chopin's productivity, prove him the one
epoch-making composer for their instrument since
74
FREDERIC CHOPIN
Beethoven, and the one probably without a successor
in kind.
The certainty that the principal Sonatas of Beetho-
ven, and the Ballades and other chief works of Chopin,
overtop all else written for the piano, provokes the
question. Which of these composers is foremost in this
realm of music ? The question at once lends itself to
argument. Evidently Chopin abounds in technical
difficulties unattempted by Beethoven, and these diffi-
culties are a proof of worth because in fact the unusual
but necessary conveyers of a message new to the
musical world. It must be conceded that Chopin's
daring chromaticisms, transitions and modulations
are the inevitable expressions of a genius novel
but not forced. Then again, Chopin wrote for the
piano not as he found it, but with prophetic knowl-
edge of its future possibilities ; to the extent of all this
he outrivals Beethoven.
It must not be supposed that harmonic complexity
is of itself superior to broad and bold simpHcity.
This truth Handel well knew. He, the master of
Fugue, with all contrapuntal devices at command, is
renowned for a Doric beauty the despair of the Byzan-
tine and the Rococo. As a harmonist, Beethoven felt
not the urge of the unusual ; the immense possibilities
which he perceived in Bach were enough for his grand
and stately measures. Taking from that unexhausted
75
FREDERIC CHOPIN
mine, he cut and polished; then, brilliant on their
every facet, he strewed the gems along his pages.
Because of his many-sided excellence, we hold Beetho-
ven a harmonist superior to Chopin, himself a delver
in the Bachian mine. The music of Chopin is recog-
nizable almost from the opening bar, but, as a creator
and developer of characteristic themes, Beethoven is
unequalled. While Chopin is one of the most inspired
melodists, Beethoven sings himself more into the soul.
Although a solitaire, Beethoven was really a man of
widest, deepest sympathies. Against his own bosom
he felt the heart-beat of humanity, and, love-enlightened,
he divined that heart, even its total meaning. The
heaven-reaching heights of joy, and the black profound
of woe, and every intermediate, throbbed contagious
into his own breast. Therefore is he the universal
man, interpreter of his own ideal world and interpreter
of nations, while, on his human side, the intense
Chopin is the epitome of Poland. That this universal
man was not containable within the possibilities of the
pianoforte, was plainly no fault of his; nevertheless,
that much of the universal which informs the chief
Sonatas of Beethoven, entitles them to supremacy
over the greatest of the other.
As the second of pianoforte composers, what giants
Chopin leaves in his rear! Haydn, Mozart, Schubert,
Von Weber, Mendelssohn, Schumann, and behind
76
FREDERIC CHOPIN
them many of lesser stature, Hummel, Clementi,
Moscheles and such ; and, still further back, the great
average, the ephemeral multitude. Of all their push-
ing of pens, little will remain when, on some distant
to-morrow, the stirred pulse and the suffused eye prove
the tone-poems of the Polish musician an unfading
charm, an undimmed worth, an eternal beauty, in the
realms of art.
77
RICHARD STRAUSS AND THE ART OF
SOUND
RICHARD STRAUSS AND THE
ART OF SOUND
THE years now with us are prophetic of a century
notable from its beginning ; a century destined
to achieve perhaps beyond our boldest imagining.
Already is the century achieving, as, like a youthful
but formidable being, it assaults that citadel of mystery
wherein Truth must relinquish, one by one, her most
valued and guarded possessions.
To the observant, the present is a time of shaken
foundations, a time of much actual overthrow, and even
a time of planning that broader and deeper bases
shall well sustain the super-imposed new. Amidst an
upheaval of things social, political, scientific, ethical
and aesthetic; an upheaval world-wide, and necessarily
sourced in the sub-strata of the world of causes ; Art,
for instance, is unavoidably disturbed throughout its
various provinces.
Only the over-sanguine will assume that the better
must needs rise from upheaval and overthrow. There-
fore let us look but for the reasonable, for does not
many a desolated province of this material world belie
the theory of uninterrupted advance ?
8i
RICHARD STRAUSS
Appearances indicate that the art of music is enter-
ing upon a period the most momentous of its existence,
a period of transition more radical than when it was
emerging from the Greek modes ; a period perhaps of
storm and stress, of morbid and eccentric individual-
ism ; a period like that which almost overwhelmed
literature in the early days of Goethe and Schiller ; or,
perhaps, a period of real progress ; but, in either event,
a period from which it will come forth an art far differ-
ent from that of Bach, Beethoven, Chopin and Wagner.
Because progressive, the human mind will not regard
its greatest work with a complacency inimical to further
effort. Ever it fashions and re-fashions, achieving
yesterday, failing to-day, and then more than retriev-
ing on some fortunate morrow. Strange doings and
sayings are rife in the musical world of the present.
Denying the validity of fixed key, Claude Debussy
begins and ends his tone creations anywhere within
the limit of the chromatic scale. Max Reger teaches
the intimate fellowship of the entire twenty-four keys,
while Richard Strauss has well-nigh outgrown the
twelve semitones of our time-honored gamut which
must be enlarged if it would meet the needs of his
successors. It is the opinion of many that, in this
event, the art of music will be merged in what we shall
here call the art of sound. Concerning this realistic
art, this art to be, let us explain briefly that, whereas
82
RICHARD STRAUSS
the word sound signifies all that the ear cognizes,
whether as euphony, cacophony or mere noise, yet, for
sound to attain to the status of an art, art must endow
with definite and adequate purpose net only euphony,
but also every other sound, including mere noise.
While Strauss with almost audacious boldness is
leading toward the enharmonic possibilities of an aug-
mented scale, the more conservative but no less ingen-
ious Reger is looking back to his beloved Bach, and
showing what, through a greatly extended key relation-
ship, that master might have accomplished with the
good old semitones. Eschewing programme music,
and all else demanding literary elucidation, Reger will,
to the tone-poems of his rival, offset a fugue or a
sonata ultra enough for any save the disciples of
Strauss and Debussy.
Like Strauss, Debussy is in no wise to be ignored, but
always and wholly to be reckoned with in an estimate
of advanced methods. Paradoxical at first thought is
the fact that Debussy, whose measures abound in
unresolved discords of ultra-modern origin, should
found his music not uniformly on the major and the minor
scales, but, by preference, largely on the old church
modes. This reversion to the mediaeval indicates a
period of crisis wherein the beam fluctuates between
the extremes of old and new tonal methods. Dispens-
ing with the size and blare of the modern orchestra,
83
RICHARD STRAUSS
and shunning, as if an obsession, the Wagnerian
models, Debussy will not for one brief moment permit
in the lyric drama such outbursts of vocal melody as
crown the climaxes of "Lohengrin," and the passionate
love scenes of " Tannhauser." And this for the specific
reason that " Melody is almost anti-lyric, and power-
less to express the constant change of emotional life.
Melody is suitable only for the song which confirms a
fixed sentiment."
While Strauss is held to be the lineal successor of
Liszt, he is in fact a compound of various modern tend-
encies. In him we find the philosophy of Nietzsche,
the impressionism of Manet, and the realism of which
De Maupassant and Zola and Whitman and the youth-
ful Swinburne were exponents; a realism which, because
it over-emphasizes the erotic, the pathological, and the
ugly, misinterprets man and nature, and so betrays
the characteristics of decadent art.
What would have been the attitude of Wagner toward
Strauss may be inferred from his caustic attacks on
Berlioz whose music he called foolish and eccentric ;
and yet, as a producer of novel effects he himself was
much indebted to the French composer, and, in turn,
was no small factor in the formation of one whom Strauss'
disciples deem the greater Richard. Notwithstanding
which, we affirm that Strauss is more closely related
to Liszt whose talents, both in pianoforte and orches-
84
RICHARD STRAUSS
tral composition, tended to virtuoso display more than
to the utterance of original and lofty ideas.
Prior to the advent of Wagner, the musical composer
deemed it necessary always to appeal to the sense of
the beautiful. Whatever his theme, his music, ever
conforming to the established laws of harmony, must
not be repugnant to that aesthetic sense. At times he
no doubt overstepped his self-imposed Hmit, but, some-
how, the ear of the listener has accustomed itself to
the innovation, and with the result that not a few
wholly doubt the existence of a line of cleavage between
the ugly and the beautiful. However, a sane philos-
ophy will demonstrate that beauty and ugliness are as
unlike as are good and evil.
Neither the painter nor the sculptor restricts himself
to pleasing subjects ; the grotesque and the horrible
have been deemed not unworthy the brush and the chisel
of artists indubitably great, and it can be argued that
to music should be accorded an expression free and
faithful as that allowed to painting and the plastic arts.
On the other hand, popular opinion has ever been,
and perhaps ever will be, that what is actually ugly is
not music. To this opinion the modern reply is that
the word music carries with it far too restricted a
meaning; the office of the tonal art, like that of all
other arts, is to express not the half but the whole of
life ; in fact, the universal duality in nature and in man.
8s
RICHARD STRAUSS
With deep philosophic and artistic insight, Wagner
elaborated an art destined, as he believed, to supercede
Italian Opera. Despite his harsh but convincing
strictures, and despite the theories and practice of
Debussy who holds that in the Music Drama the vocal
parts, lest they hinder the dramatic action, should be
reduced to a rythmic chant devoid of melody, Italian
Opera survives ; from temporary eclipse it is emerging
bright as before. In the life labors of the great
reformer, we are beginning to see simply a new school
supplementing the old. We are beginning to see that
the denouncer of Donizetti and Rossini and Verdi and
Bellini and the rest, was himself not quite faultless in
practice, however correct in theory. Musicians of
eminence now admit that the incongruities of Italian
Opera are offset by the over-long and the slow-moving
in the Wagnerian Music Drama. Naturally the world
refuses to forget "Lucia" and "II Barbiere '• and
" Rigoletto " and " Norma," and in fact any work
whereinto the muse of Italy has poured her quenchless
fire.
Granting that the faulty and inadequate Greek
modes had so cramped and chilled musical expression
that, in their abandonment, little of value was lost to
the musicians of past centuries, what shall be said of
our modern musical heritage, the gift of the last two
hundred years, and which the universal adoption of a
86
RICHARD STRAUSS
new and enlarged musical scale would render obsolete ?
Will not that spirit of love and loyalty which defends
the cause of Italian Opera, make determined stand
against the novel system? From the twelve notes of
the chromatic scale the great German masters have
evoked the superlatively beautiful. Shaping their
imaginings to lofty ideals, they have in fact epitomized
the larger, better part of man and nature, as under-
stood by the German mind. Admitting this, can the
cultured musician bring himself to ignore the past of
German art ? for this he must needs do under an
exclusively modern regime. No ! a thousand times
no ! That for music a different scale can be no more
than supplimentary is indicated by the history of all
other aesthetic arts. Their every worthy type endures ;
not any one has quite eclipsed another.
The two leading races, once peopling the southmost
peninsulas of Europe, were extinct centuries ago, but
their daily tongues survive, dead languages never
while endures the world, for they bring to all enlight-
ened peoples the period and climax of the orator, the
meter of the tragic dramatist, and the notes of the
Homeric and the Virgilian muse, fresh and unrivalled
as when Greece and Italy first lent ear.
There have been schools of architecture, both Pagan
and Christian, schools of sculpture from Phidias
onward ; schools of modern painting since the mature
87
RICHARD STRAUSS
work of Giotto ; and the wise ages, far from selecting
and excluding, have preserved them all.
To men of creative genius were granted glimpses of
Truth ; each from his own angle beheld the ineffable
vision. Through the sundered veils of illusion, as
through the storm's momentary rift, the permitted
artist beheld his own ruling star, sometimes a royal
sun, sometimes a subordinite planet, but always one
without which the hierarchy of heaven were incomplete.
That neither the school of Wagner nor that of
Strauss will supersede existing national schools is
assured for the additional reason that these are the
outcome of national ideals. In every race of civiliza-
tion the man of creative genius proves his people to be
possessed of ideals of art peculiarly their own. There
results for example the Slavic, the Scandinavian, the
English, the German, the Spanish, the French, the
Italian ideals, and, lofty in possibilities, that of the
amalgamating race destined to fill this ample western
land of ours.
The ideals of tonal art ! Surely the Wagnerian and
the Straussian models cannot include them all ! Varied
as the geography of the globe, as the configurations of
its surface, those national ideals are sombre with the
solitude of barren steppes ; they are gloomy with the
twilight of deep-indenting fjords ; they are rich with
the ancient, the mediaeval, the modern, of a land of
88
RICHARD STRAUSS
memories gathered since the coming of Arthur. Oth-
erwhere they are fraught with the romance of Rhenish
castles where Minnesingers and Meistersingers have
proved the magic power of song ; or else they bring the
southern night of castinets and tripping feet, and the
moonlit wonder of Moorish Alhambra. How well those
ideals have embodied the gay and the graceful, also the
volatile as the vintage of vine-clad Champagne ! And
how fitly are they born by Adriatic and Mediterranean
shores where the ardent day-beam warms the heart to
love's emotion ; and, in days to come, shall they not
suggest the amplitude of snowy mountain chains, the
undulating sweep of prairies, the breezy expanse of
vast inland seas, and the eternal dash and roar of
ocean on our eastern and our western coasts ?
These, and countless other ideals sourced in the
world's composite life, have given rise to a necessarily
varied art whose inner unity must remain undiscovered
till mankind becomes one great famil)^ bound by a
community of ideals and interests in the millennial
dawn of a yet-un risen day.
H
The belief that for them only is the pure and high
vision of Truth, and that the world should look with
their eyes and abide by their interpretation, is the folly
of many of the wisest reformers. Over-enthusiasm
89
RICHARD STRAUSS
inflames the minds of such, and disturbs their sanity
of judgment. The reformer in art is usually a philoso-
pher pledged to some system into which, as into a
mould, he pours at fluid heat his artistic imaginings.
Because no system of philosophy yet elaborated finds
general acceptance, or because, as Schopenhauer inti-
mates, one discovers in any philosophy only what his
capacity permits, our reformer will appeal chiefly to
those whose minds are akin to his own.
For the comprehension of Beethoven and his great
predecessors, little more than a trained ear is necessary ;
but, for the comprehension of our latest composers,
one must habituate himself to abstruse metaphysical
thinking. To endorse Wagner, both wholly and under-
standingly, one should assent to Schopenhauer's theory
of music. To endorse in like manner the attitude of
Strauss, one should assent to the " Super Man " of
Nietzsche, and his crowning qualities " evolved good
and evolved evil."
If, as Whitman says, perfect sanity characterizes the
master among philosophers, how can more than a cult
accept that topsy-turvy of ethical values, that quack
mixture of Scientific Materialism and Comtism run
mad, the system of Nietzsche ? It is probably that but
for his " Beyond Good and Evil," Strauss, the foremost
exponent of musical ultraism, would have hesitated at
more than half-way measures.
90
RICHARD STRAUSS
In the morning, ere he attempted creative work,
Wagner was wont to say, " If we could keep our hearts
pure this day, untainted and untempted by the false
values of the world, what visions of Infinity itself were
possible to us ! "
Surely the heart, indispensable to the creation of a
masterpiece of art, cannot be stimulated by a philoso-
phy brutal because without pity ; a philosophy shallow
because ignorant of the essential nature and ultimate
end of what it deems mere weakness ; a philosophy
which would crush that symbol of weakness, the fall-
ing sparrow, and quench all love for the neighbor if
in him appear no promise of " Super Man." Now who
is this " Super Man," this ideal of Nietzsche and his
tonal interpreter ? Is he not a being fashioned much
after the model of what the race no more desires, to
wit, the outworn gods of Greece and Rome? Is he not
an ideal compounded of mutually destructive qualities ?
Because of the serious shortcomings we have indi-
cated, and because of others which will be pointed out,
the art of Strauss may never reach the highest levels ;
his chief office as composer, like that of Whitman as
poet, may be to explore a domain wherein the superla-
tive genius of the future is to expand his ample powers.
That genius, and in our opinion he only, can reveal
the legitimate possibilities of sound. In his tonal cre-
ations the cacophonious, as well as the euphonious,
91
RICHARD STRAUSS
must be employed in such way that every mood of
man and every shade of human feeling shall be faith-
fully portrayed, and the world itself epitomized. His
must be a sane equipoise, an unfailing sense of fitness,
the consummate ability to adjust to a nicety, so that
always the end justifies the means. Already his pred-
ecessors in the great acknowledged schools have
developed the art of euphony. It will be his even
more difficult and exacting task to develop the art of
cacophony, and fuse the two in such way that they
over-picture not the totality of man and nature.
Notwithstanding Wagner's belief that instrumental
music could not further develop unless fused vvdth the
sister arts of poetry, painting and dramatic action, the
modern outlook discovers in the art of sound almost
limitless possibilities as yet unrealized; but, judging
from the past, the stupendous tonal edifice created by
the coming master will not overshadow the erections
of composers from Bach to Wagner.
Still the divine Mozart will turn us to the never-to-
be depised beauty of form chaste and classic. Still
Beethoven's temple of music will reveal that form's
complete and glorious development and crowning.
Still at heaven's very g^te will Schubert, spontaneous
and impassional lark, outpour the melody he learned
beneath that temple's overhanging roof, or else in the
sacred limits of its inmost court.
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RICHARD STRAUSS
Always we shall have with us those who in the name
of progress turn the back on whatever is behind. Ignor-
ing Aristotle's profound dictum that the real test of art
is not originality, but its truth to the universal, these
no doubt will ridicule as immature attempts, necessary
to the adolescence of art, all that is greatest in German
and Italian music. In addition to these we shall have
that class of temperamental individuals who, from the
extravagant and bizarre, derive that thrill of rapture
which they mistake for appreciation : however, these
fickle followers of fads and fashions cannot be reck-
oned among the adherents of legitimate art. Now as
to the public, the great overwhelming body of the peo-
ple ; can they be educated to enjoy the new art of
sound ? Will they not refuse, aye, obstinately refuse
to appreciate cacophony however judiciously employed?
A difficult question this unless one remembers that,
as the race advances, the foremost, coming into new
vistas of Truth, bequeath to those next in line,
and so on to the very rear, their own rare and high
discovery.
In the comprehensive art of sound, the euphonious
epitomizes the major, better half of man and nature.
From this it appears that the cacophonious must epito-
mize the minor, baser half. Why, heretofore, was this
half well-nigh denied tonal utterance ? Was it not
largely from the old and inadequate theological con-
93
RICHARD STRAUSS
ception which made the existence of evil an abortion
of the Divine plan ?
Conceding the answer implied, and granting that the
attitude of the time is one of invitation, let us con-
sider certain factors necessary to the realization of the
art of sound.
Orchestral music and orchestral accompaniment, as
understood by Bach and Handel, betray a paucity of
resource and a lack of color then inevitable. Since that
era of small beginnings, and in late years especially,
orchestral instruments both numerous and valuable
have been invented, and the capacity of brass and
wood-wind much enlarged and their quality greatly
improved. Desirous of utilizing to the utmost all
additions and improvements, orchestral composers
sought effects the most novel both in solo and in sym-
phony. As result the orchestra grew from infantile to
gigantic proportions and capabilities. Thus was pro-
duced a full, flexible and characteristic means of
expression, one peculiarly suited to the speculating
and philosophizing musician who, already due and now
appearing, added his contributions to those productive
of a rounded art.
In examining the factors which make for Strauss
and his works, we shall find that his native originality
could never have raised him to what he is, and that
the art of sound would still be an undiscovered one,
94
RICHARD STRAUSS
had not Chopin already exemplified, most eloquently,
the flexibility of the laws of chromatic progression,
and had not Wagner, that great emancipator, stricken
from musical form the cramping bonds of a narrow
convention.
If, as we contend, the minor half of dual man and
nature has legitimate place in all art, then let the
musician beware lest, as final impression, he make evil
seductive, and so identify himself with decadence as
have those who denounce in every form of art any
purpose consciously moral ; those in fact who announce
as their dictum, "Art for art's sake." When for spe-
cific ends the musician weaves around evil a flowery
spell, he somehow should make us feel that death and
corruption lurk in every petal of those all-too-enticing
blooms.
Moreover, when by means of cacophony he lays
bare the true nature of evil, he should avoid an excess
which would identify him with the moral pervert whose
delight is in the abnormal. Let him understand that
in this world's great school where, only amidst the lure
of opposites, character can be formed and wisdom
gained, the true office of evil and the secret of its per-
mission is that eventually its inner hideousness will
turn from itself, forever, those who, through ignorance
of the essential nature of evil, have yielded to its man-
ifold seductions.
95
RICHARD STRAUSS
Of all arts, music is accredited to be the highest and
purest. The supreme art of the beautiful, it rests on
a mathematical basis. Its notes and intervals and
chords progress in compliance with defined, or at least
definable laws corresponding to the great laws which,
moving with mathematical precision, brought order
from chaos and so created the world. Concerning the
art of sound, this problem confronts us ; what are the
laws if any which govern the ugly ? Or, to put it
differently, to what extent does the ugliness of evil
correspond to chaotic conditions ?
If what the composer would depict is not governed
by mathematical law, then is he warranted in the use
of unresolved and unresolvable dissonances. Judged
by this rule, Debussy has perhaps so transgressed that
a wiser generation will pronounce his efforts to be a
passing phase of sestheticism. But the difficulty of
determining just what is, or is not governed by mathe-
matical law, must lead to a deal of error ere we attain
the true art of sound.
To illustrate the vast unlikeness of method in the
descriptive instrumental works of the classical and those
of the ultra-modern school, two examples will suffice.
The representation of Chaos in Haydn's " Creation,"
gave to the composer full opportunity for every liberty
of harmony and form tolerated in his time. Now,
while a rather frequent use of the diminished seventh
96
RICHARD STRAUSS
chord lends to this composition somewhat of needed
vagueness, still there are no modulations to distant
keys, no abrupt transitions, no unresolved or unresolv-
able discords, no consecutive perfect fifths, and, in
fact, there is nothing in the chord progression which
the critic of to-day would deem daring or even unusual
for, always and wholly, the harmonic scheme conforms
to conventional rules. Here and there is somewhat
of concession to established musical form, for, in this
picture of Chaos, the employment of anything radical
either in form or harmony, would have provoked cen-
sure the very harshest and even have proved the author
guilty of the unpardonable sin of producing what could
never be called music.
With this attempted realism of Haydn, compare now
that portion of " Don Quixote " wherein Strauss delin-
eates the gradual and complete disordering of the mind
of Cervantes' hero. Wholly sure of his novel method,
one, by the way, peculiarly adapted to the subject,
Strauss avails himself of every conceivable liberty
of tone and form. Euphony and cacophony mix in
an astounding realism, while the rational sequence
of sanctioned form gives way to the illogical and
wholly fantastic, in fact the chaos of dethroned
reason.
97
RICHARD STRAUSS
III
The subject of long experiment. Music, as we know
it, at length emerged from the centuries, virtually a
modern art. The fate of its founders and their follow-
ers for long after, is that the names of these are well-
nigh forgotten, and their works are heard no more.
Because of them the later comers have survived rich
through inheritance, but perhaps no richer by nature.
Again has music reached the experimental stage.
Sweeping upward in mighty spiral, and so conforming
to creation's universal trend, now, at a point of depar-
ture overlooking the old, it finds inadequate that result
of compromise, the diatonic scale. It faces the problem
of tonality and those modern questions which a higher,
wider outlook brings to view.
In estimating the value and longevity of Strauss'
art, let us remember that the ancient experimenters in
music evolved no definite types as Nature in her
domain has done. Half-formed, their pale and blood-
less attempts have perished from sheer lack of vitality.
On the other hand, the tone-dramas of our most modern
virtuoso are anything but anaemic ; an all-too-turbulent
flood rushes through their every vein. So much is
Strauss a product of his time that the characteristics
now placing him in the forefront would have little
availed him in an age believing with Schumann that
98
RICHARD STRAUSS
Harmony is king and Melody queen in the composer's
realm.
Were Strauss endowed with a lyric gift comparable
to that of Schubert, probably he would be impelled to
exercise that gift almost within the compass of conven-
tion. Were he, like Handel, able to accomplish the
majestic and the magical without recourse to chromatic
progression, the bizarre would lead him less far afield.
Again, were he capable of a kingdom like that wherein
Beethoven, reigning by divine right, reigned supreme,
surely he would not have sought the seemingly unfruit-
ful wastes, the perhaps barren Saharas of sound.
Deficient in the crowning qualities of these masters,
but not deficient in genius, he imagined, and actually
undertook with ardor, that of which they could never
have dreamed.
Having accredited Strauss with genius, though of a
peculiar sort, we are led, for the better understanding
of this master, to ask, what is genius ? To this query
the wisdom of all ages has given various answers.
According to Plato, a genius is one whose vision of
Beauty, Truth, and Good, existing in the Divine Mind,
is clearer than that of other men. Therefore genius
does not actually originate. Its office is to translate,
to reproduce the great originals, the eternal archetypes
of the super-mundane world. Because of his high
vision the artist reproduces Beauty, the philosopher
99
RICHARD STRAUSS
Truth, while the saint, enamoured of Good, both
teaches and practices it.
Granting this, we are at once led to ask, why the
penetrating vision of genius ? To this query a brief
answer is that because the possibilities either latent or
unfolding in man are immeasurable as the universe
itself, therefore that which men are pleased to call
genius is but the foreshowing of what the race as a
whole shall attain to, but, in the present stage of human
progress, genius is in fact a rare exception to Nature's
slow and thorough methods. Nevertheless, the price
of its defiance of the universal law must be paid by
genius, and that price is unsymmetrical development.
Because of unsymmetrical development, genius may
at times produce what, to the average normal being^
would seem the work of a degenerate mind ; but in
estimating Strauss it should be considered that the
tonal interpreter of Don Quixote can often be sanely
logical, and even wholly conventional.
The genius of Strauss, like that of Whitman, is
essentially the genius of the explorer. Each of these
burned to reach the limits of his art and plant victori-
ous feet upon the pole. As in the material world, so
here, such daring spirits are necessary if we would
know the geography of the world of tone. To our old
musical possessions, Strauss has joined a vast and as
yet vague territory much of which, while of little pres-
lOO
RICHARD STRAUSS
ent value, may yet develop unexpected and perhaps
indispensable uses.
It argues against the real sanity of Strauss' art as a
whole, that, for the exercise of his gifts, he chooses
Oscar Wilde's version of the story of Salome, a version
in which the central theme is a monstrous and revolting
passion unmatchable in actual life, and even unthink-
able except by the sexual pervert. Also, it is ominous
that Strauss undertakes the tonal treatment of the
brilliantly written but illogical work, "Thus spake
Zarathustra ; " a work wherein is discovered the phi-
losopher Neitzsche's ideal, the earth-shaping, earth-
dominating man to be, a proud, unconcerned, scornful,
violent, and fear-inspiring personage beloved of Wis-
dom the goddess woman that loves the warrior only.
In this " Super Man " evolved evil and evolved good
are necessary. Free from gods, and every adoration
save that of self, he rises over unnumbered small
folk and timorous weaklings, and that protection art-
fully invented for them by the Christian Church,
" Slave Morality ; " and so he attains his goal, " Master
Morality," that which, to all but the mind of the moral
pervert, is the morality of the tyrant whose will none
dares gainsay.
We have already contended that the wide departure
of Strauss was natural and necessary to a genius lack-
ing in certain gifts indispensable to the older schools ;
lOI
RICHARD STRAUSS
also we have accredited him with being a compound of
various tendencies essentially modern. It may with
assurance be affirmed that the art of sound could have
originated only in a time like our own, a time whose
methods are well illustrated by the attitude of certain
of our modern novelists.
Having proved to themselves and their following the
correctness of the new methods, and the falsity of the
old, these have largely abandoned plot and incident,
and devoted their talents to ps3'cholog)^ Now while
it is incontestable that Walter Scott could by no means
have brought to the trivial and the commonplace the
analytical mind of Henry James, still we venture that
the world has lost nothing because of this. The poor
plodding world looks downward ; so its eyes must
again and again be diverted from the trivial and the
commonplace, and lifted toward an ideal which, even
if overdrawn, is immeasurably better than none.
While preferring to grope in the dark regions of the
abnormal, the art of Strauss, the art of the modern
psychologist has, as one might expect, often treated
the trivial and the commonplace. Besides it is evi-
dent that neither in Salome nor in " Thus spake Zara-
thustra " has it given to the world a normal ideal.
With the great masters of the past it was always an
ideal, the noblest within the range of their inspired
vision. To Haydn it was the terrestrial Eden yet
i 102
RICHARD STRAUSS
undarkened by the Fall. To Handel it was the Greater
Adam, and His coming long foretold. To Bach it was
Gethsemane, and its immortal, crowning passion of
sorrow. To Mendelssohn it was the prophet and the
saint those rich flowerings of his ancient race. To
Wagner it was the eternal womanly prompting to no-
blest deeds of devotion and self-sacrifice.
With men like these, the presentation of high moral
ideals resulted from intuitive knowledge that the per-
petuity of mankind, as something nobler than the
brute kingdom, depends upon acceptance of these
ideals, and therefore any so-called masterpiece which
brings about confusion of ideals, would render the real
purpose of art abortive.
The music of such masters as Haydn and Mozart
voices the pure emotions spontaneous in the breast of
man. God-given emotions, never to be quenched, they
will burst into utterance while throbs the human heart.
The evolution of music, as of all art, accords with the
evolution of man from a creature of primal impulses to
one of a thousand involved emotions and interests.
The latest methods of Strauss are fraught with peculiar
peril to his art, as an epitome of life, in that a well-
nigh exclusive use of obscure and chromatic harmonies
is restricting that art to an expression of complex
emotions only. Now, while through no composer
however gifted can music revert to the prevailing sim-
103
RICHARD STRAUSS
plicity of Handel, still, whatever its evolution, it must
as an epitome of life, have moments of native and sim-
ple emotion. Therefore it was a sane and saving
reaction which turned the efforts of Strauss from the
abnormal to the smaller, more subdued models of the
song writer, and also to that wholesome and human
idyl, the Enoch Arden of Tennyson.
As an orchestral writer, Strauss has gathered to
himself the technical knowledge of Berlioz, Liszt, and
Wagner. Having enlarged his resources through orig-
inal discovery, he dazzles by display of a virtuosity
wholly unprecedented. Technically he is fully equipped
for exploration ; and thus he is pushing on into that
new hemisphere the realm of sound.
In our exposition we have endeavored to point out
certain tendencies in the work of Strauss, tendencies
which endanger realism in every art whatsoever, ten-
dencies which we believe are turning Strauss from full
and sane achievement, and so from his prospective
goal the art of sound. That such an art is legiti-
mate and actually within sight we have endeavored to
show, as also the certainty that, once our possession,
it will supplement and not supercede its predecessors.
Failing to find in Strauss the lofty personage his wor-
shippers deem him to be, we nevertheless have accred-
ited him with real though peculiar genius, and this is
but justice due. Living in a transition period largely
104
RICHARD STRAUSS
of his own bringing about, he has produced both the
unquestioned and the problematical. But that prob-
lematical can be ignored or forgotten no more than the
problematical of Whitman. At very least, it will sur-
vive as a curiosity of tonal art.
In his theoretical writings on the opera and the drama,
Wagner likens music to the soulless nymph, a real
woman only through the love of some man. Poetry,
to Wagner, is that masculine endowing music with an
immortal part. This novel finding of the poet-musi-
cian is but the outcome of a theory ; an outcome which
the patent facts easily and wholly refute. Instrumental
music when treated by a virile master, like Wagner
himself, can be masculine enough, while, in the hands
of a versifier gifted chiefly with grace and smoothness,
Poetry, the masculine art so called, becomes weakly
feminine, or even a characterless thing not attaining to
sex.
Wagner's theories are founded on a philosophy
essentially of Eastern origin, but, had he looked deeper,
our speculator would have discovered that Eastern
philosophy considers sex to be but an outward mani-
festation incident to the present stage of world evolu-
tion. The human soul, and also the soul of every art,
contains within itself the potentiality of both male and
female. Sex in the physical world is lack of equilib-
rium, the temporary preponderance in the soul of
105
RICHARD STRAUSS
specific male or female characteristics outwardly ex-
hibited, but, in the mental world, the offspring of
highest genius would attain an equilibrium superior to
distinction of sex.
In art, as in man its author, the masculine,
untempered by the feminine, becomes not wisely
masterful, but harsh and brutal ; hence the peril of
Strauss. The feminine, untempered by the mascu-
line, becomes not intuitive, but weakly capricious and
wholly illogical ; hence the peril of Debussy. The
great authors, whichever their sex, have produced
works wherein specific male and female characteristics
modify one another.
This view of sex in art makes for the validity of
instrumental music as such, and reenforces the posi-
tion of Strauss when, in his wholly instrumental tone
poems, he would delineate every phase of life, and
even certain phases of philosophic thought as Wagner,
despite theory, has done in his " Faust Overture."
Owing to the increasing vogue of Strauss, no
prophet is necessary to foretell a rank growth of
imitators. These, because barren of originality, will
succeed in copying the eccentricities rather than the
merits of their model. What infliction, what torture to
human ears will result from the inevitable Bedlam of
noise and fury, the near future must reveal. But let
us believe that a modicum of pity and saving common
1 06
RICHARD STRAUSS
sense, in even the most cruel devotee of such a school,
will insure speedy reaction toward saner and more
satisfying methods.
While ignoring not its old estate, music is moving
from its centre in the emotional nature, to a strong-
hold well within the intellectual life. Failures and
wanderings indeed must be, but stagnation never in
this onward world. So, looking to desired fulfillment,
let us prophesy of music such rise as that of man from
his emotional, half-formed self toward an ideal not
coldly intellectual, but always warmly and nobly human
with what the future foreshadows, namely, the bal-
anced blending of emotion and mind, the ideal of both
man and his artistic creations, in fact, the ideal of
ideals in whose very anticipation is forgotten the
" Super Man " of Nieztsche.
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