II
Figure XX.
If we examine, as typical of d'Indy's mature style, a passage such as the introduction to the slow movement of the B flat Symphony, shown in Figure XX, we are struck at once by the complexity of the detail—the bold unexpectedness of the melodic lines, the chromatic harmony, the constantly varying rhythms—and by the perfect final clearness with which it nevertheless impresses us, so that each note seems inevitable and the whole unmistakable in meaning. It is this combination of complexity and simplicity, characteristic more or less of all really great modern composers but perhaps to a peculiar degree of d'Indy, that we have to analyze and account for to ourselves in some detail if we would thoroughly understand his music. What is the mysterious power in him that enables him to give so distinctly personal a stamp to elements drawn from so many sources? What is the unifying principle in all this variety? What lifts this insatiable student above his studies, and renders his knowledge not a dead lumber weighing down his mind, but a living force making it fruitful? For of the extent of these studies, benumbing to any but the freshest mind, there is plenty of evidence in his work as well as in his critical writings; if it were worth while we might enumerate "influences" at great length. There would be, for instance, the fundamental influence of Bach and Beethoven, and the more superficial influence of the romantics, Schumann and Mendelssohn, as shown in "Wallenstein" (1873-1879), and other early works. There would be the potent Wagnerian influence, of which "Fervaal" is the chief monument, although it appears in all that he has written; and there would be the even more pervasive and inspiring influence of his master, Franck. We should have to take account, too, of the reflection, especially in later works like the piano sonata, the violin sonata, and the second symphony, of the harmonic idiom of Debussy and other contemporaries, the whole-tone scale, and the like. And under these individual influences we should find more general, subtle, and pervasive ones, we should find the great communal streams of the French folk-song and the Gregorian plain chant. Yet all these streams, and others too many to mention, have been gathered up into one clear personality. What has been the transmuting magic?
The composer himself suggests the answer in several passages that may here be brought together.
"It is perfectly logical," he writes in Mercure de France,[35] "and in the order of things that, when a man of genius shows himself in one country, the artists of the other nations try to assimilate his processes. I see nothing reprehensible in that, and this international free trade even appears to me one of the vital conditions of the development of art....
Moreover, can the artist ever, in spite of all influences, give anything else than the art that he carries in himself?"
"You ask me," he says to an interviewer of the Revue Bleue,[36] "to define French music. In reality there is no French music, and in general there is no national music. There is music, which is of no country; there are musical masterpieces, which belong to no one nation." He is led on to an interesting comparison of our period, in its desire for greater simplicity, with the end of the sixteenth century, and the illuminating statement: "M. Debussy is a little our Monteverde; he abandons melody for recitative, for 'the representative style,' as they said in the first years of the seventeenth century; he renounces the resources of counterpoint, he even foregoes modulation." But when the interviewer, seeking to entrap him into condemnation of his contemporary which would make good copy, asks, "And do you not desire rather the triumph of melody and polyphony?" he replies:
"I have but one desire; it is that they write beautiful things." The third passage is one of the axioms that he gives to his students at the Schola Cantorum: "All processes are good, on condition that they never become the principal end, but are regarded only as means for making music." And finally he makes his meaning even more definite in a discussion of M. Roger Ducasse:[37] "I am sure that when M. Ducasse is willing to trust himself more to the impulses of his heart rather than to researches in sonorities, he will be able to make very beautiful music. There is in art, truly, nothing but the heart that can produce beauty—(Il n'est vraiment, en art, que le cœur pour engendrer de la beauté)."
Yes, it is his heart that guides his mind through the mazes of its knowledge; it is his luminous sincerity that shines through all he writes, however complex it may be in detail; both the warmth and the light of his music come from his emotion. Responsive emotion in the listener, accordingly, is the key to the intricacies of his style. If we attend to the letter only we are baffled, bewildered: there are so many notes, such queer progressions, in that passage from the symphony, for example. But if we hearken for the spirit, all becomes clear, and strangely moving. It is waxing and waning feeling, a wave of emotion, that expresses itself in that rise to the strident B of the fourth measure and in the subsequent hesitating descent. And as emotion is the motive force of the whole, emotion it is also that explains the details.
Take for instance the very texture of the melody. We note two contrasting figures or motives, one, which we may call a, melancholy or at least contemplative, characterized by the fall of a fourth, and another, b, in which the more vigorous rise of a seventh gives a sense of opposing will. The whole passage is wrought from these two contrasting yet mutually supplementing strands with singular concentration. There is not a note, save the chords in the last two measures, that does not belong to one or the other. There is something relentless in such insistence. The grip is not relaxed for a moment. The thought is hammered in. The music throbs like a pulse. Yet there is in this insistence nothing of the monotony of mere repetition; the feeling never stagnates. On the contrary, each assertion accumulates fresh force, the emotion rises by its own expression, and there is ordered, purposeful, relentless progression. Thus motive a is stated first from D flat; then, at *3, from D, higher and louder; then, at *5, from E flat but this time fairly carried off its feet by its oppugnant fellow, b. Similarly b, first heard quietly, almost timidly, in the bass, in the key of D flat, at *2, is repeated at *4 more firmly and in the key of D minor, making it in the main higher than before though starting on the same note; finally it appears in the treble, as just stated, at *5, and rises as in a passionate cry to the B, whence it slowly subsides. In short, we see here a "logic of emotion" quite as absolute as that of the reason, and far more appropriate to music, in which mere reason must be content with a subordinate place. As always in the best music, the logic of emotion involves both the fundamental unity of the motives (since no emotion would amount to much if it was so weak that it forgot what it was about) and their gradual cumulative growth in diversity as they realize themselves in expression. Even d'Indy's music is not always so true to the logic of emotion as this, as we shall have occasion later to notice; even Homer nods; but the motival variety in unity of all good melody, as a result of its emotional origin, is none the less ineluctable as a principle.
Looking again at the passage we may note more specifically the interest, vitality, and flexibility of its rhythms. This is again, as in all the composer's best work, ultimately due to truth to emotion. Motive b occurs three times, but never twice the same. The second time, at *4, it enters earlier in the measure than before, as if impatient, and ends with the persistent tramp of quarter notes. The third time it strikes in almost roughly (*5), its second and third notes are displaced—syncopated—by agitation, while its last three notes, comprising the crisis and its subsidence, are lengthened out from a half measure to a measure and a half. (See Figure XXI.) We see thus exemplified the basic principles of expression through rhythm, the hastening or compression of the phrase in response to passion, its retardation or expansion with returning calm. "Expression," writes d'Indy,[38] "consists in the translation of sentiments and impressions, by the aid of certain characteristic modifications, affecting the rhythmic, melodic, and harmonic forms of the musical discourse.... Agogique, consisting in the modifications of the rhythmic movement,—precipitation, slackening, regular and irregular interruptions, etc.—has for its effect to render the relative impressions of calm and agitation."
Figure XXI.
Such a conception of rhythm, emphasizing its sensitive fluctuation in response to mood, and demanding of the artist complete sincerity and flexibility of expression, is at the pole from the conventional notion of it as an almost mechanical balancing of equal sections of melody, cut off so to speak with a yardstick. D'Indy leaves his readers in no doubt as to his opinion of all such conventional sing-song, the doggerel of music. "To beat the time and to give the rhythm of a musical phrase," he says,[39] "are two completely distinct operations, often opposed. The coincidence of the rhythm and the measure is an entirely particular case, which men have unfortunately tried to generalize, propagating the error that 'the first beat of the measure is always strong.' This identification of rhythm with measure has had the most deplorable consequences for music.... Rhythm, submitted to the restricting requirements of meter, becomes rapidly impoverished, even to the most desolating platitude, just as a branch of a tree, strongly compressed by a ligature, becomes enfeebled and atrophied, while its neighbors absorb all the sap."[40] Again: "In the seventeenth century the bar-line ceased to be simply a graphic sign; it became a periodic starting point for the rhythm, which it soon robbed of all its liberty and elegance. Hence come those symmetrical and square-cut forms to which we owe a great part of the platitudes of the Italianism of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries."[41] Finally, summing the whole matter up in a sentence: "The carrure [that is, square-cut phrase-balance, symmetry by measures, narrowly limited to the number 4 and its multiples] is an element of vulgarity, rarely useful outside of certain special forms of dance music."[42]
The vulgarity of the carrure, of sing-song, as we may call it in English, is due, it cannot be too much insisted upon, to the mental and emotional inertia, the thoughtlessness, the surrender to the mechanism of habit, of which it is the product and the index. It proceeds from a conventionality essentially unspontaneous, uncreative, a conventionality that permits the length and shape of the phrase to be imposed by convenience, ease, and precedent rather than by the emotion it ought to incarnate. Hence sing-song is found not only in all music which, like so-called "popular songs," emanates from trivial people or from people only superficially moved, but also in the music even of sincere composers in their moments of inattention, pretentiousness, or routine. Even so fine a composer as Elgar is frequently banal in rhythm. On the other hand, deeply felt work always spontaneously assumes individual rhythmic outlines; and undoubtedly such free and unstereotyped outlines, though to the initiated listener they constitute one of its most potent and lasting beauties, and thus are an essential condition of its longevity, repel at first by their apparent eccentricity or "obscurity" the uninitiated and the inattentive, and thus postpone its general acceptance. Thus the attribution to d'Indy of "dryness" and "lack of melody" which one sometimes hears may be taken as an inverted tribute to the spontaneity of his melody and especially of his rhythms. Only one who did not feel sympathetically the wide ground swell of those phrases from the symphony could find them groping or uncertain because they did not fall into exactly four measures. The moment one felt the coördinating force of their fresh personal emotion one would not regret the absence of the conventional strait-jackets.
It is emotion again that explains his attitude toward harmony. Just as he is ahead of most of his contemporaries in the fundamental and surprisingly neglected matter of rhythm, because he conceives it as so flexible an instrument of expression, so he is rather at odds with many of them, especially with the impressionist school in his own country, on the much studied—perhaps over-studied—question of harmony, because he conceives harmony as primarily expressive, while they conceive it as primarily sensuous.[43] A clue to his attitude is that sentence of his in criticism of Ducasse: "I am sure that when M. Ducasse is willing to trust himself more to the impulses of his heart rather than to researches in sonorities, he will be able to make very beautiful music." "Researches in sonorities"—that is, in the minds of the group of French composers led by Debussy, almost a synonym for harmony; what they ask of harmony is combinations of tone delicious to the physical ear: subtly, delicately delicious, no doubt, and to a highly refined ear, but still aiming consciously at the ear rather than at the mind or the heart. The means of satisfying such a desire being sensations, aural sensations ingeniously built up and combined, they have rightly concentrated their attention on the single moment of merged sounds—the chord—rather than on the procession of separate sounds—the melody, and its relation to other melodies sounding with it. "Accord," "sonorité"—these are the slogans of the impressionists.
Figure XXII. From Chant Elégiaque, in Trio for Clarinet, Cello, and Piano.
To d'Indy, on the other hand, harmony, like all the other technical elements of music, is primarily a means of expression, and therefore results rather from the confluence of melodies, themselves dictated by emotion, than from the adjustment of sonorities to please the ear. One has only to look again at the passage from the symphony to see how such an attitude works out in practise. There is no preoccupation here with "effect"; the harmony, one might almost say, receives no attention for itself, but is solely a result of the melodic movements; yet so free and expressive are these movements, so truly conceived to voice the emotions behind them, and combined with such art, that this resultant harmony is far more poignant, far more fresh and unexpected and striking than if it had been confected for itself alone. And this is natural and easily comprehensible, since we should not expect any amount of ingenuity spent on the single chord to achieve the results that melodies, feeling out into the unknown, easily attain. Such an attitude toward harmony requires, it is true, a certain daring: you cannot swim with your feet on the ground; but the freedom of movement you get by trusting yourself to the waves amply compensates your faith.
Figure XXIII.
From "Souvenirs."
This melodic conception of harmony has always been a fundamental characteristic of d'Indy's style, as examples from widely sundered periods will easily show. The first, Figure XXII, is a bit from the Chant Elégiaque in the early Trio for Clarinet, Cello, and Piano (1887). The charming unexpectedness of the twist back into E major is thorough d'Indy, as is also the use of a persistent figure (given to the cello in the original) and the rhythmic modification of this same figure to provide the bass in the second measure. The second passage, shown in Figure XXIII, dates from thirty years later, and appears in "Souvenirs" (1906). Here again the melodies "find a way," and a more interesting, vista-opening way than any sonorities could suggest. Such passages enable us to get the full sense of what their composer means when he writes: "The study of chords for themselves is, from the musical point of view, an absolute æsthetic error, for harmony springs from melody, and ought never to be separated from it in its application.... There is only one chord, the perfect chord [triad], alone consonant, because it alone gives the sense of repose or equilibrium. All the combinations that people call 'dissonant chords,' necessitating, in order to be examined, an artificial arrest in the melodies that constitute them, have no proper existence, since in making abstraction of the movement that engenders them, one suppresses their unique reason for being. Chords have too often become the end of music; they ought never to be anything but a means, a consequence, a phenomenon essentially transient."[44] It may be held that d'Indy sometimes goes too far in his denunciations of harmonic theories based on the conception of the "chord," as for example in his note on the famous opening phrase of "Tristan and Isolde." It may also be justly remarked that his own method is not always happy in its results—that the way his melodies find is sometimes an obscure and wandering, or an unnatural and forced way. Nevertheless it remains on the whole true that on the one hand the chord conception of harmony has been responsible for a vast mass of pedantry, and has paralyzed and hamstrung whole generations of students, and that on the other hand it favors the purely sensuous trifling with tones of which there is so much in our day; while the best pages of Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Wagner, Franck, d'Indy show a thousand beauties and poignancies which without the help of melody could never have been discovered.
Figure XXIV.
Seule la Mort l'injurieuse
Mort appellera, la
Clair Vie
In the course of Kaito's prophecy, in "Fervaal," there is a deeply moving passage to the words: "Only Death, baleful Death, shall summon Life," which strikingly illustrates its composer's way of making all the elements of music contribute to expression (see Figure XXIV). Here the upward inflection of the voice, the strange intervals, the vague harmonies, the halting movement, even the sighing syncopation of the bass, all contribute to the interpretation of the opening lines. But above all, how inexplicably stirring is the gradual increase of force and rise of pitch up to the clear chord of D major (note the composer's indication, "Clair") at the word "Life" ("Vie")! Gloom and mystery give place to hope, faith, will, to which the ecclesiastical harmonies lend an unmistakable religious coloring. This change, completely spontaneous in effect, is dictated by an art that conceals itself, and introduces us to one of the most individual features of d'Indy's harmonic technique, his ease of modulation. In his Cours de Composition Musicale he has worked out his theories of the expressive use of modulation with characteristic thoroughness, and with unprecedented amplitude of detail. To resume his points here, however, interesting as they are, would take us too deeply into technical matters, especially as our main interest is now in his application rather than in his statement of them. The essential principles may therefore be briefly summarized, in his own words, as follows:
(1) "Expression is the unique reason for being of modulation."
(2) "Modulation operates by a displacement of the tonic ['key-note'], by its oscillation towards the higher fifths [that is, towards the sharper keys, as to G, D, A, etc., from C] or towards the lower fifths [that is, towards the flatter keys, as to F, B flat, E flat, etc., from C]."
(3) "Modulation has for its effect to render relative impressions of brightness [that is, movement towards sharper keys produces 'éclaircissement'] or of darkness [movement towards flatter keys produces 'assombrissement']."
(4) "Modulation can never be the end of music, since it is by its very nature a means put at the service of the musical idea. Every modulation which has not this character of subordination to the idea is thereby inopportune, useless, and even injurious to the equilibrium of the composition."[45]
Looking back at our examples in the light of these principles, and especially with the illumination afforded by the text in Kaito's contrast of death and life, we shall find a further element of art to admire in them—their expressive use of modulation. The slow movement of the symphony begins in the comparatively "dark" key of D flat, but touches in the fourth measure, at the acme of the climax, the brighter D major, whence with the waning emotion it subsides to the original key. The passage cited from the Chant élégiaque emerges from the shades of E flat minor to the bright daylight of E major (wherein starts a new statement of the main theme). The fragment from "Souvenirs" commences in quiet grief, in the clear but rather subdued key of A minor; with the third measure a downward inflection, a sort of depression of mood, sinks it to hopeless groping in the glooms of G flat and C flat, whence it again struggles forth to new assertion, in A minor, in the phrase that follows our excerpt. Stated in bald technical terms like these, such changes may seem crude, obvious, mechanical; but anyone who will listen sympathetically to the music in which they are embodied by a master will realize the infinite variety and subtlety of their appeal.
A later appearance of this same theme in "Souvenirs," in which for the first two notes in the second measure is substituted a triplet, F, G, E, suggests the further remark that even ornament, so apt to be used merely for show, is employed by d'Indy, like so many more basic resources, singly for expression. His somewhat severe conception of art—there is much in his style that, especially in contrast with German sensuousness, is austere, bare, almost stark—leads him to condemn superficial decoration. "The fioriture of the Italian dramatic school of the early nineteenth century," he insists, "intended only to display the vocal agility of the singer (just as the Variation of Chopin, although more musical, puts forward the fingers of the pianist), this fioriture, consisting usually of embroideries about an arpeggio, is truly more harmonic than melodic—and even the harmony is usually extremely banal. The characteristic of the accomplished and conscientious artist is a firm will to treat only subjects that have a value in themselves, not borrowed from the apparel in which they are dressed up."[46] And he elsewhere succinctly defines the Italian fioriture as "that art which consists in making heard the greatest number of useless notes in the shortest space of time."[47] But he takes pains to distinguish "this surcharge dictated by bad taste" from the more essential ornament used in the "expressive vocalises of J. S. Bach and his contemporaries, which, like the Gregorian Variation from which they derive, form a part of the melody." And he cites with approval melodies like the theme of the Allegretto in Franck's Symphony, in which a short phrase is repeated not literally but with ornamental variation resulting from the natural progression of the thought or feeling—from what, in short, we have called the logic of emotion. Such treatment is almost a mannerism in his own work. Other instances, besides the place in "Souvenirs" just cited, are the first theme of the violin sonata, the fugato in the first movement of the quartet, the main theme of the same movement, and the main theme of "Evening" in the "Summer Day on the Mountain" (Figure XXVII, a).
Finally, even in the matter of orchestration, the least essential of any we have considered, d'Indy is still guided by the same principle—truth to feeling. Though universally acknowledged, even by those who dislike his music, to be one of the greatest living masters of the resources of the orchestra, he never uses these resources, as does for example Rimsky-Korsakoff, in a spirit of sheer virtuosity. Nothing in his scores is put there to dazzle or to stun; all is for eloquent musical speech; and when there is great liveliness or brilliancy, as there often is—at the end of "Istar," for instance, in the scherzo of the B-flat symphony, and in "Dawn" of the "Summer Day on the Mountain"—it is in response not to an opportunity for display, but to a mood. The sharp contrast of the general method of scoring with Wagner's, especially in a composer so largely indebted to Wagner, is highly instructive in this regard. Wagner in his love of rich sonorities almost habitually doubles different groups of instruments on a single melody; d'Indy prefers the single group, not only for its superior clarity but even more, one must think, for the greater eloquence of its individual voice. The passage quoted from the symphony is a good sample of his methods. First violins on their G strings for the opening phrase, sounding at once the right note of earnestness. Bass clarinet alone on motive b. Both first and second violins for the more emphatic repetition of the main motive, and the low strings in their more impassioned accents for the reiteration of the bass clarinet phrase. Then all the violins and the violas for the third, culminating statement,—the first violins leaving off with the B flat, the seconds with the A, and the violas, in their more veiled tones, alone carrying the phrase down to its final A flat.
Thus does d'Indy use the various elements of musical technique—melody, rhythm, harmony, modulation, and even ornament and orchestration—in the interests of emotion. Before asking whether the same principle that we thus see so multifariously at work in short sections of his music can also be traced in the marshaling of its larger masses, let us take one final example of its operation within conveniently narrow limits. In Figure XXV (pages 198, 199) is shown the coda of the first movement of the string quartet in E major, his masterpiece in chamber music. It is entirely derived from the fragment of Gregorian chant used as a text. We may note summarily the following points, which by no means exhaust the interest of the passage.
Figure XXV.
Coda of the first movement of the String Quartet in E, opus 45 (1897), based on the fragment from a Gregorian chant:
1. Melodic. There is no salient phrase which is not derived from the root motive. As for the variety, the reader will judge for himself. This is a supreme case of the germinating power of a musical thought.
2. Rhythmic. The original nucleus of the theme is rhythmed mainly in quarter notes. It is reduced to even eighth notes at the beginning of the coda, and in that murmuring, inconspicuous form stays on a dead level, so to speak, and makes a colorless background of accompaniment whence the more passionate main phrases detach themselves sharply. Beginning in the fifth measure the second violin sounds an augmented form of the motive (whole notes), in expression tentative, timid. This recurs in the viola in measure 11, with more of emphasis, and is broken in upon by a syncopated form of the same (beginning on the second half of the measure) from the first violin. The C sharp here is the crest of the emotional wave, whence it subsides first by the gradual descent of the motive through three octaves in measures 17-20, and then by the flagging of the accompaniment rhythm first to quarter notes, then to half notes. Still a different rhythm is heard in the last announcement by the first violin.
3. Harmonic. The harmony is absolutely the product of concurrent melodies throughout. No notes are added merely for color. Yet the sonorities, though effects rather than causes, are unforgettable.
4. Modulatory. The first measure strongly establishes E major as the tonal center, and as the goal of what preceded the excerpt. A subtle change of the violin figure obscures the sense of tonality (by suggesting the atonal "whole-tone scale"), whereupon the first meditative version of the theme appears in the much darker key of A flat. The tonality is again clouded, and the theme appears once more in A, brighter than A flat, but less bright than the original E. The reappearance of this therefore, in the fifteenth measure, has the effect of an "éclaircissement." The tonic of E major is maintained through the last eleven measures, giving a grateful sense of homecoming, of repose after adventure.
5. Instrumental. The student is referred to the score for detail. Particularly notable are the keenness of the violin E string at the moment of climax, and the earnest virility of the G string in the last statement.