Scan 6
Musical Courier 1892-04-20: Vol 24 Iss 635, 1892
46 lines. Read by computer on 23 September 2026. Printed page 7. See the scan on archive.org.
1ment. But the exquisite cool of the night, its haunting mellow flavor, set my brain in a ferment. A huge fantastic shadow threw a jagged black figure over the lake; presto, it is done with a mental snap that almost blinds me. I have a theme, it will be the first theme in my new symphonic poem, "Childe Roland;" it is in D minor and is (to me) emblematic of the dauntless knight who to "the dark tower came" unfretted by obstacles, spiritual or physical.
3Oh, how my brain seethed and boiled, for I am one of those unhappy men who the instant they get an idea must work it out to its bitter end. "Childe Roland" kept me awake all night. I even heard his "dauntless horn" call and even saw the "squat tower." I had his theme. I knew it must be good, to me it was Browning's knight personified. I even heard its underlying harmonies and the instrumentation, sombre, gloomy, without one note of gladness to be felt throughout.
5The theme was A, A, F, E, C sharp, D, G sharp, treated in a rhythmical fashion that gave it exceeding vitality, a suggestion of gloomy power, and, as it was announced by Posaune with a peculiar rhythm for the tympani, the strings in division played tremolando, which caused it to gain a singular color, particularly as the G sharp was taken by an English horn. Well, I finished the work after nine months of agony, revision, pruning, clipping, cutting, hawking it about to friends, getting laughed at, admired and mildly criticised.
7The fatal day arrived, the rehearsal took place, and that night the audience at a great concert had the pleasure of reading on the program Browning's "Childe Roland" in full and wondering, no doubt, what it was all about. But my symphonic poem would tell them all, for I firmly believed in the power of music to portray definitely certain soul states, to mirror moods, to depict, indefinitely to be sure, certain phenomena of daily life. My poem was well played. It was ninety minutes long, and I sat in a sort of nervous swoon as I listened to the "Childe Roland" theme, the "squat tower" theme, the "sudden little river" motif, the "queer, gaunt horse" theme; the "horrid engine of war" motif, the sinister, grinning, false guide subject, in fact all the many motives of the poem, with its apotheosis at the close, the dauntless blast from the brave knight when he at last faced the "dark tower." This latter I gave with twelve trombones, twenty-two basset horns and one calliope, treating the first theme with different rhythms, it nearly brought down the house, and I was the happiest man alive. As I moved out I was met by Sneedchen, the critic of the "Apostles of Tone," who said to me: "Lieber Kerl, I must congratulate you. It beats Richard Strauss all hollow. Who and what was 'Childe Roland'?" Was he any relation to 'Childe Harold,' by Byron? I suppose the first theme represented the 'galumphing' of his horse, and that funny triangular fugue meant that the horse was lame in one leg and was going it on three. Adieu, I'm in a hurry."
9"Triangular fugue!" Why, that was the crossroads before which "Childe Roland" hesitated.
11I was indeed disheartened, but when a lady came up to me—a musical one at that—and said, "It was grand, perfectly grand; but why did you introduce a funeral march in the middle of it; I thought 'Childe Roland' was not killed until the end?" I simply wilted. The "funeral march" she alluded to was the "quagmire theme," where queer faces mock threateningly at the knight. "Hopeless," thought I, "these people have no imagination." The next day the critics treated me very roughly. I was accused of cribbing my first theme from the "Flying Dutchman" and fixing it up rhythmically for my own use, as if I didn't make it myself on the spur of an inspired moment. I couldn't write a fugue, they said, my orchestration was overloaded and my work deficient in symmetry, repose, development and, above all, in coherence!!!
13Alas! this last was too much "coherence!" Why Browning's poem was contained in my tone poem blame Browning, don't blame me, for the incoherence; I but followed his verse. One day many months afterward I happened to pick up Hanslick, and on page 43 chanced on the following: "Let them play the theme of a symphony by Mozart or Haydn, an adagio by Beethoven, a scherzo by Mendelssohn, one of Schumann's or Chopin's compositions for the piano, or, again, the most popular themes from overtures of Auber, Donizetti or Flotow, who would be bold enough to point out a definite feeling on the subject of any of these themes? One will say 'love;' perhaps so. Another thinks it is 'longing.' He may be right. A third feels it to be religion. Who can contradict him? Now, how can we talk of a definite feeling being represented when nobody really knows what is represented? Probably all will agree about the beauty or beauties of the composition, whereas all will differ regarding its subject. To represent something is to clearly exhibit it, to distinctly set it before us. But how can we call that the subject represented by an art which is really its vaguest and most indefinite element, and which must, therefore, forever remain highly debatable ground?"
15The scales fell from my mental vision and I saw that I had been on a false track. Charles Lamb and Eduard Hanslick had both reached the same conclusion by diverse roads. I was disgusted. Then the whispering of love and the clamor of ardent combatants were only whispering, storming, clamoring, roaring, but not the whispering of love, and the clamor certainly musical clamor, but not that of "ardent combatants." I saw then that my symphonic poem "Childe Roland" told nothing to anyone of Browning's poem, that my own subjective and overheated imaginings were not worth a rush, that the music had an objective existence as music and not as a poetical picture; and by the former and not the latter it must be judged. Then I saw what poor stuff I had produced. How my fancy had tricked me into believing that these three or four bold themes, heavily orchestrated with their restless migration into different tonalities were "soul and tales marvelously mirrored." In reality my impudence and want of contrapuntal knowledge, and, above all, clear ideas of form, made me label the work a "symphonic poem," an elastic, high sounding, pompous and empty title. In a spirit of revenge I took the score, rearranged it for small orchestra, and it is now being played in the circus with the euphonious title of "The Cop's Patrol; or, Look Out for the Night Stick." The musical press praises particularly the graphic power of the "Night Stick" motive and the verisimilitude of the burglar's escape in the coda. Alas, "Childe Roland!"
17Seriously, if our rising young composers (isn't it funny they are always spoken of as rising?—I suppose it's because they retire so late) read Hanslick carefully much good would accrue to them. It is all well enough to call your work something or other, but don't expect me or my neighbor to catch your idea. We will both be thinking about something else, according to our temperaments. I will probably be enjoying the form, the instrumentation, the working out, the melodic beauty of your themes; my neighbor, for all you know, will have in imagination buried his mother-in-law, and your pean of gladness with its brazen clamor of trumpets means for him the triumphant ride home from the crematory and the anticipated joys of the ante-mortuary jag.
19Chapter III. is a great chapter in Hanslick's book. It is the defense of the "beautiful in music," which exists in and for itself, quite above the accidental subjective impressions it may arouse, which impressions are generally taken for the essence of music itself, instead of being an accident. Listen to Hanslick.
21"The term 'form' in musical language is peculiarly significant. The forms created by sound are not empty, not the envelope inclosing a vacuum, but a well replete work with the living creation of inventive genius. Music, then, as compared with the arabesque, is a picture; yet a picture the subject of which we cannot define in words or include in any category of thought. In music there is both meaning and logical sequence, but in a musical sense it is a language we speak and understand, but which we are unable to translate."
23This is powerfully put. I wonder why we don't try to attach emotional labels to Bach's music or write programs for the Mozart symphonies; yet the greatest music in the world is to be found therein, and we enjoy it as pure music without trying to probe its hidden meanings.
25Later Hanslick speaks of the idea in music as being an acoustic one; it cannot be expressed in words and subsequently translated into sounds. "We are perfectly justified in calling a musical theme grand, graceful, warm, hollow, vulgar, but all these terms are exclusively suggestive of the musical character of the particular passage." The truth of the matter is that even Hanslick himself in his criticisms is forced for want of some more expressive terminology to use the current phrases of the music critic. I remember how shocked I was formerly at the baldness of adjective, the paucity of imagery, the conventionality of phrase in music criticism. I boldly attempted to reform all this by introducing the terminology of the painter, the poet, the sculptor, so that in my criticisms symphonies "glowed with all the tenderer tones of the palette, the adagio being rich ruby colored, and it flamed at the close like a purpling star in a cosmatic collision," or something like it. Now, if I had my way I would simply write: "Umslopogas' new symphony in B flat minor, op. 112, was well played last night by the Bernstein Orchestra. The audience applauded, though it was a very small one."
27I think that would do sufficiently for the people who were not there, but if the city editor knew this we should all lose our positions and the tornado editor would be let loose on the music world.
29Hanslick thinks all parallelisms of music to language are absurd and goes for Richard Wagner without gloves (that is Hanslick's sore and only weak side). He bursts the bubble about the nonsense about "nature's music" and proves that melody and harmony are both artificial products, rhythm being the only constituent of music that is absolutely natural. Chapter IV. is devoted to the "analysis of the subjective impressions of music."
31Chapter V., an important one, dilates upon "aesthetic hearing as distinguished from a pathological hearing of music," and demonstrates that music affects the nervous system by its primitive elements, sound and motion. Hence the vulgarity of some music and the fact that music affects us all, each to his kind. The plea for intellectual consideration of music in this chapter is most noble and convincing. The so-called moral effects of music are shown up to be a snare and a delusion. "Music and morals" is the most absurd shibboleth that ever existed. That certain kinds of music act like a brute force in nature and may incite us to the most senseless actions we cannot deny, but is it art? Is it art that sets our feet twitching for a dance? Read that chapter and never forget it. The last of the book is devoted to "form and substances as applied to music."
33Helen Sparmann is a disciple of Hanslick, but she is much more satisfying, and she has none of his prejudices. For him no good can ever come out of Nazareth. Richard Wagner deserted the domain of absolute music, consequently Richard Wagner was not a composer. This is obviously unfair, though I perfectly agree with Hanslick that absolute music—music unhampered by words or dramatic action—is by all odds the greater music, and I'm quite sure that if Wagner had been as bad a musician as he was a poet we would not have listened to him at all. But Wagner made beautiful music, and as Helen Sparmann says so well: "It would seem that Wagner strongly felt the discrepancy between the indefiniteness, the want of individuality, of that which music can represent and the narrow musical forms he found in use. He discards all those forms." His music is absolutely free in this respect, and most true to its 'Urbild' motion. It was only natural for him after that to think that music could not stand alone. That is the reason why he united it with the drama, which, with its firm, well articulated frame, gives his music its form. The occurrence and elaboration of his themes depend absolutely on dramatic necessity. Certainly it cannot be said that the drama is incomplete without music, but Wagner's dramas receive from it a lustre alike to that which the form of a beautiful woman receives when draped with a veil that emphasizes rather than conceals it, and a power almost as great as that which Tanit's veil imparted to its possessor."
35This is delightfully written, but absolute music is not dead simply because Richard Wagner decreed that the last movements of the ninth symphony were the death knell to symphonic art. Since then Schumann wrote four symphonies, and a man named Johannes Brahms, who has drunk deeply from the austere cup of Bach, still makes great music. I suspect people who tell me there is no composer but Wagner. I suspect that they do not realize his genius on its greatest side. I suspect that they do not see the intellectual purpose of his art, but enjoy the nerve thrills he sometimes administers, the jabs he gives one's senses and the sensually morbid side of "Tristan and Isolde." Shades of Apollo! You unfortunate tone besotted drunkards! that is not music in the best sense of the word. You are just what Hanslick says of you (see page 125). Brace up on Bach, and then enjoy Wagner, but don't take the Bayreuth opium in too large doses or your judgment will soon crumble and your appreciation of music will be nothing but a sort of dram drinking.
37Now to conclude this vernal aesthetic sermon. Helen Sparmann says "music is a form of motion," which comes from Hanslick. "Music represents motion," and "music by association of ideas evokes thoughts infinite in number and variety," and she also combats Schopenhauer's dictum that "music is as direct an objectification and copy of the whole will as the world itself." Without going into "the world as will and representation," I think Helen Sparmann is not altogether fair in denying to Schopenhauer the right of a metaphysical proposition, even though it be a decidedly subjective one. If music represents motion, may not motion itself, to go back one link in the ontological chain, stand for that Will which Schopenhauer declared is immanent in the universe? Perhaps, after all, we muddle ourselves with terms. To say that music represents motion, a psychical motion as well as physical one, is about as clear a definition as we can at present make. So I shan't bother about the essence of the motion itself. God alone knows that, and as the old legend runs, "He won't tell."
39THE FAMOUS
40New York Conservatory of Music,
41ESTABLISHED 1863—CHARTERED 1865.
42Removed from Fourteenth Street to the Large and Elegant Building,
43112 EAST EIGHTEENTH STREET,
44Between Fourth Avenue and Irving Place.
45THE EMERSON PIANO IS USED.
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