V
It is in Ein Heldenleben, more than anywhere else, that we have the defects of Strauss's qualities. He is of the type that, masterly as its self-control generally is, cannot refrain at times from becoming defiantly extravagant. It all goes along with his enormous vital energy, that energy which is met with in only one or two men in every century, and that invariably prompts its possessor now and then to the commission of something or other we would rather have had left undone. There is in Strauss something of the débordement of Rabelais, a lust of existence and of apprehension too big to be kept within normal bounds. There is something in him, too, of Hokusai—that colossal genius whose eager spirit seemed to try to fill every corner, every crevice, of the visible world; something of the Japanese artist's interest in all forms of life, something too of the same occasional corruption of the imagination—as in the unfinished series of prints entitled The Hundred Tales, where the artist, out of the very excess of his power and ardour, turns life into a hideous, terrifying mockery of itself. Strauss is cosmic in his understanding and his sympathies, but not as men like Goethe and Leonardo are, whose vision is always clear, and whose energies are always held in check by another energy higher than themselves; like Rabelais, like Hokusai, like Goya, there come to him moments when the flood of life within him overflows, and he is hardly master of the strange shapes that issue from his brain. A positive artistic rage seizes him, and he embraces life with an ardour that is cruel, brutal—a passion that has a touch of Sadism in it.
If this enormous sensitiveness to everything that goes on in the world, and this quickness of reaction of the imagination upon it all, are answerable for Strauss's occasional lapses from good taste, they account also for the profounder and more vital qualities of his art—his humour and his humanism, the qualities that make Feuersnot so delightful and Don Quixote so exceedingly great. London treated the latter work unkindly at its solitary hearing of it; it is, indeed, too vast, too many-sided, to be understood at first acquaintance. One critic called it "ugly, laboured, and eccentric"; another wrote that it "contains more sheer ugliness than any other score written by any responsible person of whom we have ever heard, or whose work we have ever studied.... Everything seems in Don Quixote to be discordant for the sheer sake of discord.... We condemn that work from every musicianly point of view; the thing is an artistic arrogance, an attempt to make the best out of the worst, ... utterly and completely a failure; it has no recommendation of beauty, not even the recommendation of fine construction; it is a hopeless piece of exaggerated and intentional cleverness." Well, a significant thing happened on the very night on which Don Quixote created such heartburning. This frightfully complex work, which was absolutely unknown to more than perhaps ten people in the audience, and was consequently misunderstood almost from first to last, was followed by the much earlier Tod und Verklärung, a work which itself, a few years ago, was looked upon as perilously near folly and ugliness. Anyone who now thinks Tod und Verklärung a tough nut to crack is looked upon as a hopeless Conservative in music, so very quickly does the world move in these matters. Even the Times said that after Don Quixote the Tod und Verklärung sounded quite sane and normal, or words to that effect. We know how Also sprach Zarathustra was received in 1897, and how accustomed we have grown to it since then, on the strength of some three or four performances; we know how many people who shied nervously at the first performance of Ein Heldenleben now take it as easily as a cat laps milk. In the face of facts like these, is it not somewhat hasty to bespatter the Don Quixote with opprobrious epithets on the strength of just one performance? People have blundered over Strauss before, and been compelled to eat their words when they came to know him better; they have run away from the ogre like frightened children, only to discover long after that the supposed ogre was a kindly and well-disposed person, of something more than ordinary human build perhaps, but still on the plane of normal, not sub-normal nor super-normal, humanity. I say with confidence that they will in time admit that they have gone grievously astray over Don Quixote. It lies on the mere surface of the matter that some parts of it are ravishingly beautiful; you have only to play for yourself on the piano the death music, or the Don's long eulogy of the knightly life, to feel the very heart leap within you. If this is not surpassingly great music there is no music in the world worthy of the name. Of other parts the beauty will be perceived when the work is better known; and the Don Quixote will then be recognised to be in some ways the profoundest, noblest thing Strauss has ever done. It is, of course, extraordinarily realistic in its imitations at times, and I can imagine how the sheep and the wind-machine jar on the nerves of ordinarily sensitive people. But you must just laugh at these things and pass them by, take them as a piece of deliberate musical impertinence, and laugh with the composer, not at him. It is really a gratuitous assumption that Strauss is a fool because he has given free wing to his diablerie here and there; he knows as well as any one the precise value of all this kind of thing, but he apparently claims that once or twice in a lifetime it is worth doing for the pure fun of it. We must first of all get the right point of view if we are to understand Don Quixote. It is all set in a strange, mad atmosphere; the folly that hovers round it is part of the psychology of the piece; and it is the perfect transmutation of the mental processes of Quixote into tone that makes the work so wonderful, so unique. If a man is not smitten through and through by the pathos of section after section of the piece, I can only say, for my part, that he has not grasped the real significance of the work. Frequent hearing of it will make the extraordinarily original musical tissue quite familiar to men's ears, and when this has been done there will be no bar to the comprehension of the profoundly human psychology of a masterpiece that only Strauss could have written. The score is a treasure-house of true and noble things, which only come to you in full force when you have steeped yourself in its strange atmosphere. Take, for example, the variation immediately preceding the Finale, representing the weary homeward ride of Quixote and Sancho after the Don's defeat by the Knight of the White Moon. In these long descending wails of the orchestra you have all the anguish, all the disillusionment of the poor knight painted with an expressiveness, a fidelity, that sets one thinking of visual as well as auditory things. He illustrates the scene as consummately as a pictorial artist could do, and at the same time throws over it the melting melancholy that music alone among the arts can express. You can see these poor broken creatures, with bowed heads, pacing wearily along on steeds no less sorry, no less bruised than themselves. The whole thing breathes physical and mental fatigue and moral despair. The score of Don Quixote is full of a human quality that we rarely get to such perfection anywhere else, even in Strauss; and London lost a golden opportunity in not taking the work to its heart at once. As it was, the more obvious bits of realism in it revolted a good many people, and left them with insufficient patience to seek beneath the better kind of humour for the pathos that underlies it; while the extraordinary complexity of the musical tissue was all against a comprehension of the work at a first hearing.
What makes the Don Quixote so great a work is, in a word, the wise and tender humanity of its humour. We can put aside, if we like, all the wonderful witchery of its technique, its extraordinary graphic power, its exhilarating and amusing imitations of reality—for there is here a descriptive sense surpassing in its manifestations Till Eulenspiegel and Ein Heldenleben at their best. The wise man, who accepts with thankfulness all that music can give him, will not reject all this with a sneer and a condescending remark about music "confining itself to its proper province." The day has gone by for primitive academic æsthetics of that kind. But I do not want to lay stress upon this side of Don Quixote, simply because there is infinitely more in the work than this. It represents musical character-sketching brought to a finer point of perfection than can be met with anywhere outside the magic world of Wagner. But it differs from Wagner's drawing in that it is less opulent, more concise, more sharply conceived; it is wholly appropriate to the sketching block upon which the characters are drawn, just as Wagner's heroic figures depend upon and are justified by the huge canvas and the gorgeous range of colour that he is able to devote to them. The Don Quixote puts us in mind of first-rate book-illustration; we could hardly see the characters more distinctly, both in themselves and in relation to their surroundings, if they were set before us in black and white.
And how tender the drawing is, how exquisitely human is the feeling for these two poor tragic-comic actors! It is this that finally makes the work so precious—its unfailing pity, its intuitive avoidance of anything that would make it simply unthinking comedy. Strauss's Sancho is very humorous, but your laughter at him is always softened with tears; while the portrait of Quixote has an added touch of pathos in that it invariably suggests the spare, worn frame of the poor, middle-aged knight. It is true in this as in every other respect. His love-singing is that of a middle-aged man; the pitiful sorrow that envelops the ride homeward after his defeat is that of middle-age; the knight is broken, disillusioned, as only men can be whose physical as well as mental forces have passed their prime. For my part, I can no longer think of Cervantes's story without Strauss's music, just as I cannot think of Goethe's Erl King without the music of Schubert, or of the Lorelei without the music of Liszt.
"The German literary laugh," says Mr. Meredith, in his Essay on Comedy, "like the timed awakenings of their Barbarossa in the hollows of the Untersberg, is infrequent, and rather monstrous—never a laugh of men and women in concert. It comes of unrefined abstract fancy, grotesque or grim, or gross, like the peculiar humours of their little earthmen. Spiritual laughter they have not yet attained to." So much may be said, I think, of some of Strauss's laughter. Here and there—in Ein Heldenleben, for example—it seems to come from the dry and wizened throat of the "little earthman"; it is not yet broadly and deeply human, not yet cosmopolitan in its appeal. His humour on occasions like this is very like Jean Paul's; you hardly know whether he is laughing with you or at you—perhaps he does not quite know himself. But in Don Quixote you have the philosophic laughter of the great humanist. It is not to be found there only among Strauss's works. It gave warmth and pathos to Till Eulenspiegel—for wonderful humoresque as that is, its informing spirit is something much more complex and much more pity-moving than the idly humorous. We have assimilated only half of Till Eulenspiegel if we see nothing but diablerie in it. But it is in Don Quixote that the blending of tears and laughter is most perfect; and I, for my part, would gladly sacrifice Ein Heldenleben for this, were I compelled to make the choice, just as I would relinquish the epic and dramatic grandeur of Die Götterdämmerung if I might have left to me Die Meistersinger, with its perpetual truth, its perpetual sanity, its perpetual appeal to real men and women in a real world.
It will be seen from page 252 that the foregoing essay was set up in type before the Symphonia domestica was produced in London in February last. That performance threw a new light on Strauss and his art, and calls for some few words of comment. We need not here go very deeply into the question of how much or how little programme there is in the work. There is a strain of foolishness in Strauss that always prompts him to go through the heavy farce of mystifying his hearers at first. He tells them he prefers not to give them the clue to his literary scheme, but wants them to accept the work as absolute music; this was his tactic, for example, with Till Eulenspiegel. All the while he gives one clue after another to his personal friends, till at length sufficient information is gathered to reconstruct the story that he had worked upon; this gradually gets into all the programme books, and then we are able to listen to the work in the only way it can be listened to with any comprehension—with a full knowledge of the programme. So it is now with the Symphonia domestica. He has told us that "he wished the work to be judged as absolute music"; he has also told us that "he had in his mind a very definite programme when composing the symphony." Some of his admirers, with a canine fidelity that is positively touching, have tried to reconcile these contradictory positions by ingenious dialectic. That, however, is taking Strauss's whimsies just a little too seriously; it suggests the Shakespearologists of the George Dawson type, who used to tell us that even "if there is anything you do not understand or which you think is wrong in Shakespeare, you may safely conclude that he is right and you are wrong." We need not discuss Strauss's self-contradictions as if they were æsthetic antinomies that could be resolved by an Hegelian dialectic in a more profound harmony; the real explanation is simply that we are dealing with a man of erratic nerves, a musician not very well used to consistent thinking, whose sense of humour sometimes skittishly takes a turning along which it is hardly worth our while to follow it. There is not the faintest doubt that the whole symphony is founded on a very definite programme, and that we shall know it all one of these days, as we now know the minutest details of the programmes of Till Eulenspiegel and Ein Heldenleben.
Then the question arises, is the programme of the Symphonia domestica intrinsically interesting? It avowedly illustrates a day in the composer's family life, "and we are told"—to quote Messrs. Pitt and Kalisch, the authors of the admirable Queen's Hall analytical book—"that it illustrates such everyday incidents as a Walk in the Country, the Baby's Evening and Morning Bath, the Striking of the Clock, the Yawns of the Parents when awakened by the Child, and so on." They will have it, however, that there is more in the work than this, and that underneath this "trivial subject" there is "one of far deeper and wider import"—i.e. "not so much a day in the life of a particular family as a realisation of the joys and griefs of motherhood and paternity, the gradual growth of the child-soul, and the mutual relationship of children and parents...." But this exalted theory soon comes to grief. It is quite clear that the striking of seven in the evening and again in the morning confines the time of the drama within twelve hours; and on these lines indeed there is some sense in the programme. That is, we see in the first section the parents and child; in the second (the scherzo) the joys and diversions of the group, the lullaby, the striking of 7 P.M., and the putting of the child to bed; in the third (the adagio), the parents' love-scene and the striking of 7 A.M.; in the fourth (the finale) the morning wakening, and—in the double fugue—the dispute between the parents as to the future of the child. This is not a very great scheme, but it is at least comprehensible; mix Teutonic moonshine up with it and it becomes nonsense. Thus Messrs. Pitt and Kalisch, trying to put the best face possible on that stupid noise that is meant to illustrate "the energetic protests of the child when it is first brought into contact with the alien element of cold water" (by the way, are babies usually dumped into cold water?) remark that "if the more idealistic method of interpretation be adopted, it may be taken as a very uncompromising musical picture of the earliest struggles of a new-born soul." But this "idealistic method" will not work. The episode in question occurs just before the clock strikes 7 P.M. It occurs again just before the clock strikes 7 A.M. Are we to understand, then, that the "new-born soul" is born once in the evening and again next morning? This is being "born again" with a vengeance—quick work even in these days of Welsh revivals and Torrey-Alexander missions! No, we must reject the "idealistic method of interpretation," and just settle down to the plain fact that Strauss is painting nothing more ideal than the baby squalling in its bath (hot or cold), just as in other works he has painted Till's death-rattle, the dying shudder of Don Juan, the windmill and the sheep of Don Quixote, and the braying of Sancho Panza's donkey—all frankly realistic things, which we do not attempt to gild with idealistic interpretations.
I lay stress upon these trivial points because it is important that we should know exactly what Strauss's intentions were, for only with a knowledge of them can we judge his symphony as a work of art. It is quite clear then that he has thought it worth while to put about a hundred people to a great deal of trouble and expense in order to suggest the imbecile spectacle of a baby shrieking in its bath; and I think it is time the world protested against so much of its leisure and its funds being taken up with sheer inanities of this kind. In Strauss's previous works there are at most only two or three passages of realism at which I would shy; they have generally been saved for us by some touch of beauty, or humour, or technical cleverness. But the baby episodes in the Symphonia domestica are too great a demand on our indulgence, and one is bound to say that there is something physically wrong with a brain that can fall so low as this. I hold him to be a man of enormous gifts, a magician, a wonder-worker of the first rank. But he can do nothing now on a large scale without deliberately spoiling it at some point or other out of pure freakishness—a freakishness that has ceased to be humour, and is merely the temporary lapse into silliness of a very clever man.
It goes without saying that if there is this degeneration—temporary or permanent—of the artistic sense that I suppose to be now going on in Strauss, it will show in other departments; and I think it shows pretty evidently in the music of the symphony as a whole. To my mind there is not a memorable theme in it; neither the theme of the husband, of the wife, nor of the child has anything like the quality that will entitle it to rank with the pregnant melodies of Strauss's other work. Think of the countless felicities of Ein Heldenleben, and you will realise at once the comparative poverty of the Symphonia domestica. Further, he is getting too fond of working upon mere snippets of phrases, instead of the great soaring, sweeping melodies of his earlier days; these tiny figures will of course go contrapuntally with almost anything—which is probably one reason for his using them—but for that same reason their perpetual chattering in the orchestra becomes in the end rather tiresome. I am not denying, of course, that at times the music rises to great heights; the scene of the parents playing with the child is exquisitely beautiful; there are fine moments in the love-music; and the fugue simply picks one up and carries one away, so broad and healthy is its heartiness. There is again much of that old technical mastery that makes slaves of us even where our soul revolts against the actual message of the composer. But on the whole I do not see how the new work can stand comparison with Ein Heldenleben in any way. It looks far more impressive on paper than it actually sounds; it is grossly overscored, a good third of the notes being perfectly superfluous, as anyone can discover for himself by following it with the score. The mania is growing on Strauss for filling the music-paper with something or other, it matters not what; he has a lust for ink; it positively afflicts him to see an empty bar for any instrument. Master of orchestration as he is, there is page after page in the Symphonia domestica containing the grossest of miscalculations; time after time we can see what his intention has been and how completely it has been frustrated by his own extravagance. He wants to wear all the clothes in his wardrobe at once. The same tendency is noticeable in his thematic work. When he has a good theme now he cannot leave it alone; he must fumble and fuss all round it till he has blurred its outline and stifled half its expression; the pleasant little lullaby, for example, would have been three times as effective without that jerky counterpoint against it in the oboe d'amore, bassoon, and viola, which simply gives the impression that somebody or other is always coming in at the wrong place, and quite disturbs the atmosphere of the lullaby itself. Altogether I am inclined to think that the new work as a whole shows a decided falling-off. And the reason? Well, is it not very likely that there has at last happened what some of us prophesied some two or three years ago? No artist can put so great a physical and mental strain upon himself as Strauss does and still keep his brain at its best. With all his many duties and occupations, his conducting and his constant travelling, it is a wonder he has any strength left to compose. For years he has been wearing his sensitive nervous system down to the very edge; and I should not be surprised to find that in doing so he has injured a good deal the delicacy of its tissue. It is said that he lives the busy life he does in order to make enough money to give up all public work and devote himself entirely to composition; but before that time comes he will probably, if he is not careful, have lost more of the divine fire than he can ever replace. The Symphonia domestica I take to be the work of an enormously clever man who was once a genius.
FOOTNOTES:
[59] It is put down for a performance in London this spring.
[60] It is worth noting how Berlioz justified his own setting of some passages in Roméo et Juliette orchestrally instead of vocally. "If," he says, "in the celebrated scenes of the garden and the cemetery, the dialogue of the two lovers, the a parte of Juliet and the passionate outbursts of Romeo are not vocalised, if, in short, the duets of love and despair are confided to the orchestra, the reasons for this are numerous and easy to grasp. First, because we are dealing with a symphony, not with an opera. Secondly, duets of this nature having been treated vocally a thousand times, and by the greatest masters, there was both prudence and curiosity in trying another mode of expression. It is, moreover, because the very sublimity of this love made the painting of it so dangerous for the musician, that he had to give his imagination a latitude which the positive connotations of chanted words would not have permitted him, by resorting to the instrumental language—a language richer, more varied, less restricted, and by its very indefiniteness incomparably more powerful in cases of this kind."
[61] The reader will, of course, remember that I am here speaking only of the tissue of Strauss's work. In the intellectual part of it, as I shall show later, he sometimes does things with the deliberate intention of startling us. See Section IV. of this essay.
[62] Perhaps I ought to except such things as the passage in Ein Heldenleben (page 50 of the full score), where the strings and oboe run up in sevenths, instead of the sixths we expect—an agonising thing that always sounds as if somebody in the orchestra had made a mistake. Either Strauss wrote it so out of pure devilment, with his tongue in his cheek all the time, or it may answer to some subtle harmony in his brain that ours are incompetent to grasp. There can be no doubt that his ear must be vastly more acute than the normal organ. As Mr. James Huneker puts it in a brilliant article in his Overtones: "His is the most marvellous agglomeration of cortical cells that science has ever recorded. So acute are his powers of acoustical differentiation that he must hear, not alone tones beyond the base and the top of the normal scale unheard of by ordinary humans, but he must also hear, or rather overhear, the vibratory waves from all individual sounds. His music gives us the impression of new over-tones, of scales that violate the well-tempered, of tonalities that approximate to the quarter-tones of Oriental music."
[63] In Feuersnot, it may be said, Strauss himself goes back for a moment to something like that old world. But he does not take it seriously; the quaint mediæval story is only a background against which he can display his passion, his humour, his irony. Wagner would have made a portentous thing of the Feuersnot subject; he would have discovered the profoundest philosophy and ethic in it. Strauss behaves towards it like a graceless, irreverent urchin in a cathedral.
APPENDIX
WAGNER, BERLIOZ, LISZT, AND MR. ASHTON ELLIS
The passage on page 6 seems to have roused the ire of Mr. Ashton Ellis, who devotes some seven and a half strenuous pages of the fifth volume of his "Life of Wagner" partly to childish personal abuse of myself, partly to an attempt to discredit my arguments. Over Mr. Ellis's mixture of clumsy rudeness and heavy Teutonic facetiousness we need not linger; these things have no novelty for Wagner students who have sojourned long in the Elysian fields of controversy. Nor need we turn aside to follow Mr. Ellis in his wild attempt to make it appear that I had relied solely on a passage in Tiersot's Berlioz et la société de son temps, when my remarks on Hueffer's translation of Wagner's word "Geschmacklosigkeiten," as applied to Faust, might have shown him that I knew both Hueffer's volumes and the German original. These things are entertaining but irrelevant. Let us rather get to the real business—the guilt or innocence of Wagner.
Let me, for clearness' sake, summarise the main facts again.
(1) In 1848, Liszt, having become all-powerful at Weimar, began to make valiant efforts on behalf of modern composers. He did much for Wagner, especially by his performances of Lohengrin. He also revived Berlioz's opera, Benvenuto Cellini. Wagner fully agreed with Lohengrin being given, but not so fully with the revival of Benvenuto Cellini. He told Liszt he did not see what great good could come from this, though all the time anxiously protesting that his feeling towards Berlioz was of the kindest.
(2) Writing to Liszt on 8th September 1852, disparaging Berlioz's Cellini and his Faust, he speaks of the latter as the "Faust Symphony."
(3) The use of the term "symphony" is à priori evidence of Wagner's ignorance of the work.
(4) No evidence can be brought to show that he knew either Cellini or Faust, while everything indicates that he could not know them. Wagner was not in Paris in 1838 and 1846, when they were respectively given; nor could he have known them from the scores, which were not published till after 1852—the date of the letter to Liszt.
(5) In Hueffer's translation of the Wagner-Liszt correspondence, of which the second edition is "revised and furnished with an index by W. Ashton Ellis," the word "symphony" is deliberately omitted, thus hiding from the reader the one word that might set him doubting whether Wagner really knew the work he disparaged.
(6) In the third volume of Mr. Ellis's "Life of Wagner," which deals with this correspondence of 1852, the whole sentence referring to the "Faust Symphony" is omitted. Wagner is thus made to appear a perfect angel of goodwill towards Berlioz, without any such qualification as the letter as a whole suggests.
Mr. Ellis is first of all very angry with me for dragging him into the matter at all. Then he gets more angry with me for failing to see what is clear enough to him, that Wagner was invariably and inevitably right in everything he did or said—as it were the "Archibald the All-right" of music. Finally, he produces what he takes to be conclusive evidence in Wagner's favour. Let us look into these matters in a calm and friendly way.
(1) It cannot be disputed that Hueffer's omission of the word "symphony" from his translation of Wagner's letter to Liszt of 8th September 1852 was deliberate. Now in his preface to the volumes he goes out of his way to plume himself on the perfect fidelity of his translation to the original. "There are things in the letters," he says, "which are of comparatively little interest to the English reader." "There is no doubt that judicious omissions might have made these pages more readable and more amusing." But the book "is almost of a monumental character, and his deep respect for this character has induced the translator to produce its every feature.... Not a line has been omitted." And again: "To sum up, this translation of the correspondence is intended to be an exact facsimile of the German original." As we have seen, these statements are not true; Hueffer suppressed a vital word. The only reason we can imagine for his doing so was the knowledge that the inclusion of the word might make people suspect that Wagner did not know the work he miscalled a "Faust Symphony."
(2) A second edition of Hueffer's translation was brought out, "revised, and furnished with an index, by W. Ashton Ellis." Mr. Ellis now indignantly points out that in his preface he distinctly stated that "in view of the admirable nature of Dr. Hueffer's work, revision was unnecessary save in the case of a few misprinted words and dates." Very good. Did Mr. Ellis compare Hueffer's translation with the original? Then he should have detected and rectified Hueffer's suppression of the word "symphony." Did he not compare the two? Then he had no right to certify Hueffer's work as so "admirable" that "revision was unnecessary." In this one point, at any rate, it was decidedly not admirable; it evidently stood more in need of Mr. Ellis's revision than Mr. Ellis's certificate.
(3) Mr. Ellis can say nothing better in defence of his own omission of the whole passage from the third volume of his "Life" than that, as he was writing a life not of Berlioz but of Wagner, he had no space for "a dissertation on so entirely distinct a theme as the Faust of Berlioz." No one expected from him a dissertation on Faust. All he was expected to do was to find space, in a voluminous biography that takes about 1800 pages to tell the story of the first forty-two years of Wagner's life, for five or six lines of a letter that threw an important light on Wagner, especially as Mr. Ellis was actually quoting from the letter in question.
Here is the passage in the original:—
"Glaub mir—ich liebe Berlioz, mag er sich auch misstrauisch und eigensinnig von mir entfernt halten: er kennt mich nicht; aber ich kenne ihn. Wenn ich mir von Einem etwas erwarte, so ist dies von Berlioz: nicht aber auf dem Wege, auf dem er bis zu den Geschmacklosigkeiten seiner Faust-symphonie gelangte—denn geht er dort weiter, so kann er nur noch vollständig lächerlich werden. Gebraucht ein Musiker den Dichter, so ist diess Berlioz, und sein Unglück ist, dass er sich diesen Dichter immer nach seiner musikalischen Laune zurechtlegt, bald Shakespeare, bald Goethe, sich nach seinem Belieben zurichtet. Er braucht den Dichter, der ihn durch und durch erfüllt, der ihn vor Entzücken zwingt, der ihm das ist, was der Mann dem Weibe ist."
Hueffer's translation of it as follows:—
"Believe me, I love Berlioz, although he keeps apart from me in his distrust and obstinacy; he does not know me, but I know him. If I have expectations of any one it is of Berlioz, but not in the direction in which he has arrived at the absurdities of his Faust. If he proceeds further in that direction he must become perfectly ridiculous. If ever a musician wanted the poet it is Berlioz, and his misfortune is that he always prepares this poet for himself, according to his musical whim, arbitrarily handling now Shakespeare, now Goethe. He wants a poet who would completely penetrate him," &c.
Mr. Ellis, in his "Life" (vol. iii. pp. 336, 337), deals with the passage thus:—
"Believe me,—I love Berlioz, however mistrustfully and obstinately he holds aloof from me; he does not know me,—but I know him. If there is one man I expect something of, it is Berlioz.... But he needs a poet who shall fill him through and through," &c.
Mr. Ellis, it will be observed, is not using Hueffer's translation; and as the passage does not occur in Glasenapp's "Life of Wagner" at all (which puts out of the question any translation from a mutilated version), it is clear that Mr. Ellis has translated direct from the German original. When he tells us that he had no design of concealment in omitting the phrases about the "Faust Symphony" we are, of course, bound to believe him. But it is unfortunate that in his sudden and most unusual passion for economy of space he should stop just short of the word that is so awkward for Wagner. And one would rather he had not given a factitious air of sequence to the clauses of his quotation by removing the "but" from its proper position (after "If there is one man I expect something of, it is Berlioz"), endowing it with a capital letter, and making it the commencement of a new sentence. The English reader will see what has happened by looking at Hueffer's version: everything from "not in the direction" to "now Goethe" has been omitted, and the "but" carried down from its proper place after "it is of Berlioz," and improperly made to begin another sentence. The German reader will see that the "nicht aber" (not however) of the sentence "nicht aber auf dem Wege, auf dem er bis zu den Geschmacklosigkeiten seiner Faust-symphonie gelangte" has been shelved, and a fresh "Aber" called from the void and made to preface the sentence "Er gebraucht den Dichter," &c.
Let us now examine the Benvenuto Cellini case. The passage in Wagner's letters to Liszt of 13th April and 8th September 1852 run thus (Hueffer's translation):—
"What is this you have heard about me in connection with your performance of Cellini? You seem to suppose that I am hostile to it. Of this error I want you to get rid.... In the consequences which, as I am told, you expect from the performance of Cellini I cannot believe, that is all."—"B. (Bülow) has shewn quite correctly where the failure of Cellini lies, viz., in the poem and in the unnatural position in which the musician was forcibly placed by being expected to disguise by purely musical intentions a want which the poet alone could have made good."
Unable to give a jot of evidence that Wagner could possibly have known Cellini, Mr. Ellis guesses that he was condemning the work not on the score of the music, but on the basis of "a libretto or second-hand report." Even if this were so, it would not justify Wagner's remarks. What would he have said of any one who ran down Tristan without knowing any more of it than "a libretto or a second-hand report," and on the strength of this threw cold water on a theatrical manager's scheme for performing it? But there is no reason to believe that Wagner had even so much as a libretto. Liszt's tone to Wagner throughout the correspondence is that of a man fully acquainted with Cellini at first hand to a man who is only repeating current tittle-tattle about it. The reason Wagner gave for objecting to the revival of the opera was that he had heard that Berlioz was "recasting" it, and that it would become him much better to write a new work than to touch-up an old one. On the 7th October 1852 Liszt, after agreeing that "the weakness of Berlioz's mode of working" comes from his poem, goes on to say, "but you have been erroneously led to believe that Berlioz is writing his Cellini. This is not the case; the question at issue is simply as to a very considerable cut—nearly a whole tableau—which I have proposed to Berlioz, and which he has approved of.... If it interests you I will send you the new libretto together with the old one, and I think you will approve of the change...." Is it not clear that Liszt assumes as a matter of fact Wagner's complete ignorance of the work? In an earlier letter, dated 23rd August, Liszt tells him that in November he is expecting Berlioz, "whose Cellini (with a considerable cut) must not be shelved, for in spite of all the stupid things that have been set going about it, 'Cellini' is and remains a remarkable and highly estimable work. I am sure you would like many things in it." The latter of the two passages I have here italicised shows once more that Liszt speaks to Wagner as to a man who does not know the opera; and the former passage indicates that there was a good deal of stupid and malevolent gossip afloat concerning it among people who also were ignorant of it. Moreover, on the 31st October 1853, Liszt again assumes Wagner's ignorance: "For this work I retain my great predilection, which you will not think uncalled for when you know it better." Mr. Ellis, indeed, practically admits that all Wagner had to go upon was a report of Bülow's in the Neue Zeitschrift of April 1852. (See, above, Wagner's letter to Liszt of 8th September 1852: "B. (i.e. Bülow) has shewn quite correctly where the failure of 'Cellini' lies, viz., in the poem," &c. It will be noticed that the letter in which Wagner first sniffs at Cellini is dated the 13th of this same month of April.) What would Mr. Ellis say of any anti-Wagnerian who should criticise Tristan not even from the libretto, but from the second-hand idea of it derived from some one else's article on it?
Mr. Ellis's plea that Wagner was talking of Cellini not publicly, but in a private letter, is irrelevant. A public article would have been read by a few curious people and forgotten; in throwing cold water on Liszt's revival of the opera, Wagner was in danger of doing Berlioz a serious injury. For about fourteen years after its first failure Cellini had not had a performance anywhere. There was only one man in Europe who combined the qualifications of knowing the opera, admiring it, being able to conduct it, and having at his own disposal an opera house where the work could be given. That man was Liszt; upon him, and him alone, it depended whether Berlioz should have a chance of showing that Cellini had been unjustly condemned in 1838. Had Liszt been weak enough to have been privately influenced by Wagner, Berlioz would have undoubtedly suffered far more than he could have done from a public article.
Now for the Faust affair. Wagner was not in Paris in 1846, when Faust received its two performances. Mr. Ellis, however, sagely opines that "it is not absolutely impossible (!) that Wagner should have heard fragments (!) either of the earlier Huit Scènes (i.e. the eight numbers referred to on p. 95 of the present volume), or the Damnation itself." This invocation of the aid of the "not-absolutely-impossible" does not help us very much, I am afraid. "But for argument's sake," continues our intrepid apologist, "let us say he had not; about the work he must have heard, or he could not know of its existence." (Here, at any rate, Mr. Ellis's penetrating intelligence has struck home. Even I am compelled to admit that Wagner must have heard about the work, or he could not have known of its existence.) "And if about it, why should the general outline of common artistic repute (Wagner still maintaining desultory correspondence with old Paris friends of good art-judgment, as we know) not be enough to furnish him with grounds for deploring its scheme in a private letter?" I have already dealt with the contention that Wagner was justified in running down works he did not know so long as the running-down was done privately. For the rest, the argument is just our old friend the "not-absolutely-impossible" again. It is not absolutely impossible that Wagner should have known some one who heard the work in Paris six years previously; it is not absolutely impossible that Wagner should have corresponded with this friend on the subject of Faust; it is not absolutely impossible that this friend should have been a man "of good art-judgment." Such a string of "may-have-beens" may be confidently left to its fate. But once more, if any one had disparaged a work of Wagner's on the strength of such dubious information, what would Wagner have said of him then, and what would Mr. Ellis say of him now?
But even Mr. Ellis, I imagine, does not take these phantom speculations of his very seriously. From his own point of view, indeed, there was never any need for him to indulge in them, so confident is he that in his closing paragraph he has a piece of evidence, that is shattering in its conclusiveness. He will not have it that to call The Damnation of Faust a symphony is to betray ignorance of it. Was not Berlioz's Romeo and Juliet a "dramatic symphony"? It was indeed; but in the first place, Berlioz himself called Romeo and Juliet a symphony, whereas he never applied that title to Faust; and in the second place, Romeo and Juliet really is a symphony, in the sense that time after time the work is carried on by means of orchestral movements pure and simple—while Faust is not a symphony in any sense, and could hardly have been called one by any one who knew it. Mr. Ellis is "credibly informed" that it was called a symphony "in Paris at the time." I take leave to doubt it; but in any case, Mr. Ellis's credible informant might have given him some evidence that it was so called by any one who had heard it. Adolphe Adam, for example, writing about it to a friend on the morrow of its performance, calls it "a kind of opera in four parts" (see J. G. Prodhomme's Hector Berlioz, p. 278). Berlioz himself, as Mr. Ellis notes, styled it a "Legend" or "Dramatic Legend." Uninformed gossip no doubt gave it the title of "symphony," in the years after 1846, from a vague idea that it must necessarily have been of the same type of structure as Romeo and Juliet. Gossip may have had something else to go upon too. In 1829 Berlioz had really thought (as we see from a letter to Humbert Ferrand quoted in Adolphe Jullien's Hector Berlioz, p. 182) of writing a "symphonie descriptive de Faust." Shortly before that he had tried to get a commission from the Opera for a ballet on the same subject. These facts may have lingered in the air for years, and in the general vagueness upon the matter after 1846 it may well be that Berlioz's name was often associated with a Faust "symphony." It was apparently this ill-informed gossip that Wagner was repeating. Fragments of Faust, by the way, were given at some of Berlioz's Russian and German concerts, and there was a complete performance of it at Berlin in 1847. Wagner, of course, was in Dresden at that time. There is hardly the slightest likelihood, again, that he had a score of the Huit Scènes, a few copies of which Berlioz had rashly had engraved at his own expense in 1829, and published at 30 francs; and even if Wagner did know these eight fragments, that would not justify him in criticising The Damnation of Faust without knowing it. I repeat that the only conclusion we can come to is that he called it a symphony because he was ignorant of it.
But now Mr. Ellis's great discovery comes in. He quotes from a letter of Liszt to Breitkopf and Härtel, the music publishers, of 30th October 1852: "I am expecting M. Berlioz here ... and on the 21st the symphonies of Romeo and Juliet and Faust will be performed, which I proposed to you to publish." Here Mr. Ellis imagines me crying out, "It is all that wretched Wagner's fault; he had put the word into Liszt's innocent head six weeks before." "But Berlioz," Mr. Ellis goes on to say, "arrives at Weimar, conducts les 2 premiers actes' of his Faust at one concert with his Romeo, and behold—no longer innocent, Liszt writes Professor Christian Lobe, editor of the Fliegende Blätter für Musik, May 1st 1853: 'The German public is still unacquainted with the greater part of Berlioz's works, and after many enquiries that have been addressed me in the past few months, I believe a German translation of the catalogue might have a good effect; perhaps with division into categories, e.g. Overtures, Francs Juges, &c.... Symphonies, (1) Episode, (2) Harold, (3) Romeo and Juliet, (4) Damnation of Faust; Vocal Pieces, &c. &c.'"
Alas! Mr. Ellis is no happier here than in his other attempts to get out of the difficulty. It is not clear, to begin with, why he should suppose that Liszt's or any one else's knowledge of Faust should prove Wagner to have known it. But putting that aside, what seems to have shaped itself in Mr. Ellis's mind is some such ramshackle syllogism as this: "If Liszt, who knew the Faust so well, wrongly calls it a symphony, the use of the erroneous title by Wagner makes it possible that he too may have known it." It all looks promising enough; but it has one fatal flaw, one point upon which Mr. Ellis, in his hurry to whoop, forgot to make quite sure. His confident assumption that Liszt did know Faust is unjustified.
My previous point that people who did not know the work had got into the habit of calling it a symphony is proved by other letters of Liszt in which he thus speaks of it. On the 4th September 1852, for example, he writes to Cornelius: "On the 12th November I expect a visit from Berlioz, who will spend a week at Weimar. Then we shall have Cellini, the symphony of Romeo and Juliet, and some pieces from the Faust symphony." Mr. Ellis may think this confirms his own theory. But it is worth while looking again at the above-quoted letter of Liszt of 30th October 1852 to Breitkopf and Härtel, and the circumstances that called it forth. On the 7th June Berlioz had written to Liszt that he was going to give a concert in Paris, at which he would perform some fragments of Faust. "I am truly sorry," he says, "that you do not know this work. I cannot get a publisher to take it; they find it too big to engrave (trop riche de planches). I must apply to Ricordi of Milan.... In any case, if you were to find a daring German publisher capable of undertaking this rash act, you can tell him that Faust has been well translated into German." It is evident that after receiving this letter, Liszt wrote to Breitkopf and Härtel recommending them to publish the work; this is the proposal he refers to in his letter of 30th October 1852. So that the very letter of Liszt's which Mr. Ellis quotes triumphantly for its use of the term "Faust Symphony" was prompted by a letter from Berlioz, in which he distinctly says that Liszt does not know the work!
Bearing this in mind, let us follow up the subsequent course of events, and see whether Liszt knew it after Berlioz's visit to Weimar—whether, that is, he was not still in much the same state of ignorance about it when he wrote the letter of 1st May 1853 to Lobe. It can be shown that Liszt had nothing to do with the performance of the first two acts of Faust at Weimar; that Berlioz brought the score and parts with him from Paris and took the rehearsals and the concert himself, whereas Liszt himself took charge of Cellini. On the 10th October 1852 Berlioz writes to Liszt in terms that once more place the latter's complete ignorance of the work beyond dispute. Berlioz has actually to tell him the number and quality of soloists to engage. "I will leave here for Weimar on the 12th November, certain. I will arrive on the 15th, and can stay in your neighbourhood eight days, but no more.... Now tell me by the next post if it is necessary for me to send you the vocal parts of Faust, or if it will suffice that I should bring them with me. The soloists and chorus would in that case have to learn in four or five days the fragments to be given at the concert. Only a tenor and a bass (soli) are needed for these fragments of Faust, Marguerite appearing only in the last two acts." Berlioz would not tell an elementary fact like that to a man who already knew the work.
Then, on the 6th November, he writes: "I send you to-day the parcel containing the Faust vocal parts, the choruses, the rôles, and a German libretto ... and the vocal score (for sixty-three people). The orchestral parcel is too large; I will bring it myself. It would be of no use to you before my arrival." Clearly Liszt was not even going to conduct the rehearsals, which would not be begun until Berlioz arrived at Weimar. (The Faust fragments were evidently rehearsed hurriedly; there is a letter of Frau Pohl's extant describing the success of the performances, and saying how amazing it was that so much should have been accomplished in so short a time.) Berlioz's further remarks once more show that he assumes Liszt's complete ignorance of the work: "It is not difficult; only the chorus and the principal parts are dangerous. We will announce for the concert the first two parts only, for which no Marguerite is required. You will need a tenor (Faust), a deep bass (Mephisto), and another bass (Brander). It will last an hour." All this, pointing conclusively to Liszt's total ignorance of the work, is in the identical letter which Mr. Ellis actually cites in another connection!
Even after the Weimar concert, which took place about the 20th November 1852, Liszt knew no more of Faust than what he had heard there. It is clear from a letter of his to Radecke of 9th December 1852, and one of 27th February 1853 to Schmidt, that the parcel containing the score and the parts was sent on to Berlioz in Paris a few days after the concert. Liszt, in fact, though he looked after Cellini and the other works, had practically nothing to do with Faust. Berlioz brought the score and parts with him, conducted the rehearsals, conducted the concert, and then on his departure left the parcel with Liszt, to be forwarded to him in Paris. Moreover, we may be pretty sure that all he took with him was the score of the first two parts—all that were given at the concert. The bulky manuscript score, now in the Conservatoire library at Paris, is bound up in three (or four) volumes—I forget which at the moment. If any one should conjecture that Berlioz might have taken with him the score of the whole work to show to Liszt, that supposition is disposed of by a letter of Berlioz, dated Dresden, 22nd April 1854. The complete Faust had just been given there. Berlioz wishes Liszt had been present: "I regret that you could not have heard the last two acts, which you do not know." Everything points to the fact that even Liszt's knowledge of Faust was limited to a hearing of the first two acts at the Weimar concert. There is plenty of subsequent correspondence with Berlioz, but it is all about Cellini, which Liszt had produced and knew thoroughly. In after years people used to write to him—people who were compiling books on Berlioz, or trying to get hold of his correspondence, or investigating the history of the Weimar theatre—and ask Liszt to tell them something of his relations with Berlioz. Liszt's reply is always the same; he is proud of having refloated Cellini, but he does not mention Faust. Even when he tells the Grand Duke Carl Alexander that Berlioz gave three concerts in Weimar, there is still no mention of the Faust fragments, which apparently had been no affair of his.
In 1853 and 1854 he calls the work a symphony, knowing no better, having neither seen the score nor heard a complete performance of it. But in 1854 the score is published, and a copy sent to Liszt. In December of that year he writes two letters on the same day. In one of them, to Mason, the old habit is still too strong for him, and he speaks of the "dramatic symphony of Faust"; [64] in the other, to Wasielewski, he refers to it as Faust only. Thereafter, so far as I can discover, he never speaks of it as a symphony. See, for example, his letters of 9th February 1856 to Edward Liszt, 19th February 1856 to Brendel, 3rd January 1857 to Turanyi, 16th September 1861 to Brendel, March 1883 to Vicomte Henri Delaborde, 12th September 1884 to Pohl, 1st January 1855 ("Do you know the score of his Damnation de Faust?"), and 24th December 1855 to Wagner.
So much for the question of Liszt and Faust, which Mr. Ellis dragged in so gleefully to help his own case and Wagner's. In the absence of any new facts, I contend that it is abundantly clear that Liszt too called Faust a symphony only because he did not know it. If Wagner is to be whitewashed at all, it must be by a less brittle brush than this. As regards his disparagement of both Cellini and Faust, the defence seems to me to have broken down completely; he knew nothing of either of them.
E. N.
THE END
FOOTNOTES:
[64] It should be borne in mind that Liszt himself was writing a "Faust Symphony" during the period covered by this controversy. He speaks of having finished it, in fact, in the letter to Wasielewski of this very date, 14th December. His constant use of the term to describe his own work might easily account for his transferring it unconsciously to that of Berlioz.
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