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Musical Courier 1895-04-17: Vol 30 Iss 789, 1895
60 lines. Read by computer on 23 September 2026. Printed page 21. See the scan on archive.org.
1Later he changes his opinion about Berlioz in his letter on the symphonic poems of Liszt, and in an article on the symphony of Romeo and Juliet; but while doing so he pays marked homage to the rare powers of the French master, with whom one feels in one's heart a keen sympathy, in spite of great difference of tendency and artistic conception.
3Berlioz says he is the most direct and most energetic descendant of Beethoven, but he follows him by taking just that path which Beethoven considered he must give up from the time when he passed from the sketch to the picture. Wagner speaks with admiration of his exceptional musical genius: "In his desire to express the strange creations of an overheated imagination, Berlioz has forced his great musical genius to a technical power till then unsuspected. What he had to say to the world was so extraordinary, so unusual, so completely opposed to the commonplace that he couldn't say it all plainly in simple words. He required the many fittings of most complicated instruments to express, by means of a mechanism infinitely delicate and complicated, in the most ingenious manner, what a human organism was powerless to express, just because he treated of subjects quite inhuman. The truth is that the orchestra of Berlioz is a marvel of mechanism." Wagner reproaches him, it is true, in consequence of his having fallen into materialism, but he "regrets the more, " he says, "that Berlioz is still devoured by the sincerest artistic aspiration that does not prevent him from being lost irretrievably in the desert of his mechanical combinations."
5If one takes count of the different points of view of the two masters there is no depreciation there, but simply an analysis of the aesthetic personality of Berlioz, and it is absolutely just for him who wishes to appreciate matters impartially.
7THE SUMMER CONCERT.
9ABOUT this time of year, as the almanacs say, look out for talk about summer concerts. And most of such talk is irrational and far from the point. The musical enthusiast who desires to listen to serious music all summer, who would like to have a Philharmonic concert once a week all through July and August, is nine times out of ten a professional musician. Now it is pretty generally known to the careful observer of musical affairs that the professional musician does not contribute any very solid support to the enterprises of managers.
11Of course exceptions must be made in favor of those who are still unable to see anything but Wagner. There are persons who would follow Angelo Neumann's traveling Wagner menagerie around the world in hot weather as well as cold, and who would be perfectly happy if the whole repertory of opera were reduced to that intense little list which begins with The Flying Dutchman and ends with Parsifal. There are others who love Brahms when the thermometer stands at 95° in the shade. But it may fairly be said that none of these people represents the prevailing public taste.
13About six months of such intense and serious musical activity as we have in this town are all that any well regulated community will stand. It does not make any difference how good the music is which is, offered after the regular season is over and the summer flowers have begun to blossom on the far-reaching hats of the blessed damosels.
15It will not do any good to quote Mr. Gilbert's felicitous line: "The flowers that bloom in the spring, tra-la, have nothing to do with the case." The fact is they have. In the spring a young man's fancy lightly turns to thoughts of beer, and he cares not much for music which was erstwhile good to hear.
17Through the long dusty summer, when the watering cart vainly strives to keep the irritating particles at rest in the street so that they may not tickle the young man's throat, when the straw hat and the yellow shoe sing together and the pink shirt without any bosom plays the accompaniment, while the bulbous old thermometer climbs up to its top gallery and looks down upon the entire show with contempt, the young man's fancy keeps right on lightly turning to thoughts of beer.
19If he has to have music he wants it with beer on the side.
21But he would just as lief have the beer straight. Nevertheless you cannot induce any well regulated young man—and most men are young—to go to a concert in the summer unless he can get beer. And the moment you have a concert where there is beer Brahms and Beethoven and Bach have got to climb down off their pedestals and make room for Delibes and Gillet and Victor Herbert.
23It will not do even to give a fine concert with plenty of intermissions. Theodore Thomas tried that once up at the Lenox Lyceum. It does not suit the young man to go out to get his beer and then come back to get his music. He wants them both borne to him at once—the music by invisible sound waves and the beer by a very visible Kellner with a Viennese dialect.
25If the young man cannot get the music of the light fantastic mortals and the beer of the Walhalla gods at the summer concert he will not go. He will arise and gird up his loins and go sit on a roof, where there is not much music to speak of, but where the beer is more or less estimable and certainly plentiful.
27The reason why the summer concerts do not pay is that the music is taken too seriously. As a matter of simple fact the music at a summer concert ought to be regarded merely as an accompaniment to light laughter, cheerful talk and a general relaxation of the nervous system. It should be gentle, soothing, easily forgotten music, of the kind that men hum when they are really thinking about something else. Or, better still, it should be like the poem of Bunthorne, to understand which it was necessary to think about nothing at all.
29Now, if the music be music with a purpose, that purpose will force itself upon the artistic consciousness of the attendant at the summer concert, and he will sit up and listen; and the next thing you know he will become tired and go away.
31To give a good summer night concert demands the effacement of the musician, the relegation of the composer to the limbo of obscurity and elevation of the stein and the cigar to niches in the temple of art. This is precisely what makes the summer night concert such a difficult thing for the musician to give. What conductor desires to have his personality blotted out by beer? What manager has the bold originality to advertise that the music at his entertainment will not distract anyone's attention from his cigar or his neighbor's conversation?
33Yet think, oh ye who are neither decadents nor degenerates, but simply human beings, weary of your burdens of Brahms and Beethoven, how glorious a thing it would be to drift half-conscious on a bubbling, limpid sea of formless, meaningless melody by Arcadian composers not famous, nor even infamous, while your head is wreathed in the smoke of what Stevenson called "deifying tobacco," and your soul is steeped in the amber nectar of Würzburg!
35Nevertheless, when the summer concert does come around again, lo and behold! there will be fugues by Bach and crippled movements from Beethoven symphonies. And the weary will go elsewhere and seek surcease of sorrow in cold beer at some resort where conductors cease from troubling and the score is one long rest.
37MODELS OF ORCHESTRATION.
39IT is a common remark that everyone knows how to write for orchestra nowadays. The remark would come nearer to the truth if it were that everyone does write for orchestra. It cannot be gainsaid that the fundamental rules of good scoring are much more familiar to musicians than they were half a century ago. But it is not at all difficult to perceive that there is a great deal of very bad writing for orchestra, some of which is done by composers of high standing. This bad writing is not altogether the result of ignorance. It comes from a laudable desire to get away from conventionality; but the desire is not always backed by profound knowledge of the essentials of orchestration. There are very few men who can imitate Berlioz and write notes never before written for an instrument, and put a line in the margin of the score, saying: "These tones are in the instrument and must be brought out."
41The essentials of good orchestration are a clear harmonic sense and an accurate knowledge of the color and power of each instrument and each body of instruments. The greatest composers are not always the best models for the student. For instance, we should not advise any student of orchestration to give his attention to the symphonies of Brahms, because that master has one serious fault. He is altogether too fond of accentuating the middle voices of low pitched chords in the strings. The result is such a buzzing of violas and 'celli out of proportion to the melodic and fundamental tones of the chords that the harmonic basis of the passage seems to be distorted. A student examining the score will not be likely to perceive this unless his attention is called to it by a teacher who is above being blinded by the radiance of a great name. The score shows an apparently perfect polyphony; it is theoretically perfect. But it fails of its effect in performance, simply because the composer has miscalculated the color and power of his middle voices.
43If the student desires a good model in the use of the low tones of the orchestra let him go to Tschaikowsky, who can write long melodies in the baritone register, with elaborate accompaniments, and yet always preserve the harmonic balance and that clarity of tone without which there is no orchestral atmosphere.
45But after all is said and done the recent writers are not the best models. The whole science of orchestration is admirably set forth in the nine symphonies of Beethoven and the music dramas of Richard Wagner; but the works of the former contain the foundations of the art. The student ought to learn to write for the Beethoven orchestra before undertaking to deal with the vast and complex array of instruments employed by Wagner. The Beethoven symphonic orchestra consists of two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, tympani and the customary string quintet. And the second and third horns and the trombones are used very sparingly.
47The orchestra employed in the third act of Die Walküre consists of two piccoli, two flutes, three oboes, one English horn, three clarinets, one bass clarinet, three bassoons, eight horns, four trumpets, one bass trumpet, four trombones, one contrabass tuba, four tympani, cymbals and bass drum, harp and string quintet. Yet there is never any wooliness of tone. Everything is clear, sonorous and forceful.
49Wagner made an exhaustive study of Beethoven, and it is there that the student must go to learn what Wagner learned. He will get one vital fact hammered into his head, and that is that sound writing for the strings is the prime requisite of orchestration. A recent authority on instrumentation says that the wisest plan is always to construct the string part of your score so that it can be played alone. By this he means not that the first violins should always carry the melody—for that would end all coloring—but that the string part should never sound empty or unfinished when heard by itself.
51The wood and brass choirs were formerly the colorists and the power makers of the orchestra. But Beethoven shows his contemporaries how to get color and power out of the strings by employing the basses in new ways, and by handling the first violins with more dash and boldness. When a student has learned to write in the symphonic style of Beethoven, employing his little family of wind instruments in pairs, moving in thirds and sixths, in a plastic and sonorous manner, then let him go to the scores of Wagner. He needs no other models.
53Wagner will show him how to write in dispersed harmony for his woodwind with marvelous effect, and will teach him how, when and where each individual voice may be best brought forward for the achievement of individual effects. He will show him how to make the bass clarinet and the bassoons do the duty which Brahms sometimes tries to impose upon the violas and 'celli with an astonishing lack of perception of the dry, hard, penetrating timbre of the lower register of a viola.
55Wagner will teach the student how to make brass thunder without braying, and will show him what wonders can be worked with a quartet of French horns. And in the end this great master will show the student how to divide his strings into many voices, and make of them a choir of singers whose hymn is indeed divine. It is his skill in dividing the strings that makes this part of Wagner's scores so wonderfully rich and close in texture; but no man can hope to profit by the study of it until he has first learned to write in the Beethovenian style.
57If a student must go outside of these two masters for hints, let him keep away from the colorists. They do those things which ought not to be done, and they leave undone those things which ought to be done; and there is no health in them. Let the student avoid the pages of Richard Strauss, Chabrier and their kind. If he must seek for variety let him address his attention to the interesting and healthy scores of Leo Delibes, Saint-Saëns and Johann Strauss. We should also recommend Sir Arthur Sullivan, if it were not that his scores are not accessible.
59But let the student try to stick to Beethoven and Wagner. If there is anyone who knows anything that they did not he is buried alive.
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