BALZAC AS MUSIC CRITIC
While I think that George Moore’s comparative estimate of Shakespeare and Balzac is a trifle more Celtic than critical, yet there can be no denial made to the assertion that Balzac stands next to Shakespeare—if not exactly on his level—in his astonishing fecundity of imagination. “A monstrous debauch of the imagination,” Henley called the Human Comedy; but surely no more of a debauch than the Plays. All abnormal productivity of the intellect gives this impression. Look at Rabelais. There are over two thousand figures in the Human Comedy, all clearly characterized, no two alike; and every man and woman in the work you might meet in a day’s stroll about Paris.
Monstrous, yes; but so is Beethoven, so is Michael Angelo monstrous. All genius has something monstrous in it—something of what Nietzsche so happily called the over man.
Balzac’s Gambara and Massimilla Doni—what genius he had for selecting names which outwardly and inwardly fitted his character! After reading the former I felt almost tempted into echoing Mr. Moore’s extravagant assertion. Balzac is indeed a magician and not a novelist. What puts him apart from other novelists, even from his technical superior, Flaubert, is his faculty of vision. He is a Seer, not a novelist. Any motive he touched, whether usury or music-erotics or patriotism, he vivified with his prophetic imagination. He saw his theme concretely; he saw its origins, its roots in the dead past; and plunging his eyes into the future he saw its ghost, its spiritual aura, its ultimate evolution. Such a man as Balzac might have been a second Bonaparte, a second Spencer. He had science, and he had imagination; and he preferred to be the social historian of the nineteenth century, the greatest romancer that ever lived, and a profound philosopher besides. All modern novelists nest in his books, draw nourishment from them, suck in their very souls from his vast fund of spirituality. The difference between such a giant as Balzac and such a novelist as Thackeray is that the latter draws delightful and artistic pictures of manners; but never turns a soul inside out for us. The best way to describe Balzac is to enumerate the negatives of his contemporaries and successors. All they lacked and lack he had in such amazing prodigality that comparison is not only impossible, it is brutal.
Balzac and music! Balzac and women! Balzac and money! Balzac and politics! Or,—Balzac and any subject! The encyclopædic knowledge, extraordinary sympathy and powers of expression—do they not all fairly drench every line the man wrote? He could analyze the art of painting and forsee its future affinities for impressionism—read The Unknown Masterpiece—just as in Gambara he divined Berlioz, Wagner, and Richard Strauss. I am quite sure that Wagner read Balzac. Gambara was finished June, 1837, and there are things in it that could only have been written about Berlioz. The key to the book, however, is passion, not any particular personality. Balzac always searched for the master passion in men and women’s lives. Given the clew-note, he developed the theme into symphonic proportions. It is Andrea’s love of intrigue that leads him to follow the beautiful Marianna, wife of the composer Gambara,—a fantastic creation worthy of Hoffmann. He is an Italian in Paris, who wrote a mass for the anniversary of Beethoven’s death, and also an opera—Mahomet. But that opera! Has such a score ever been dreamed of by any one except Richard Strauss? Gambara is a poor man, looked upon as a lunatic, living at an Italian cook shop kept by Giardini,—the latter one of Balzac’s most delightful discoveries. Born at Cremona, Gambara studied music in its entirety, especially orchestration. To him music was a science and an art—fancy writers of fiction going into the philosophy of music seventy-five years ago!—to him tones were definite ideas, not merely vibrations that agitate nervous centres. Music alone has the power of restoring us to ourselves, while other arts give us defined pleasures. Mahomet is a trilogy, the libretto by Gambara himself—mark this familiar detail. It contained The Martyrs, Mahomet, and Jerusalem Delivered,—the God of the West, the God of the East, and the struggles of religions around a tomb. In this immense frame, philosophy, patriotism, racial antagonisms, love, the magic of ancient Sabianism and Oriental poetry of the Jewish—culminating in the Arabian—are all displayed. As Gambara says, “Ah! to be a great musician, it is necessary also to be very learned. Without knowledge, no local color, no ideas in the music.” This irresistibly reminds one of a phrase from Wagner’s notebook.
The story of the opera—too long to set down here—as told by Gambara, is wonderful. It has the ring of an analytical programme to some new-fangled and heretical symphonic poem. Here is the curious medley of psychology, musical references, history, stage directions, cries of hysteria, and much clotted egotism. There is the clash of character, the shock of events; and it is well to note such a phrase as this: “The dark and gloomy color of this finale [Act I] is varied by the motives of the three women who predict to Mahomet his triumph, and whose phrases will be found developed in the third act, in the scene where Mahomet tastes the delights of his grandeur.” Does this not forestall Wagner’s Ring? or did Balzac really find the entire idea in Hoffmann’s Kater Murr? Is not Kapellmeister Kreisler the first of his line? Now, while there seems to be far too much praying in this drama of soul and action, it is not such a farrago as it appears at first reading. I imagine that Balzac knew little of the technics of music; yet he guessed matters with astonishing perspicacity. His characterization of the megalomaniacal Mahomet, and his epileptic grandeurs would do as a portrait of most founders of new religions. Balzac had Voltaire to draw upon; but he makes the epilepsy a big motive in Mahomet’s life,—as it is in the lives of the majority of religious geniuses and fanatics, from Buddha to the newest faith-curing healer.
And how was this extraordinary music and libretto received by Gambara’s wife, her admirer, and the Italian cook? “There was not the appearance of a poetical or musical idea in the stunning cacophony which smote the ears: the principles of harmony, the first rules of composition, were totally foreign to this shapeless creation. Instead of music, learnedly connected, which Gambara described, his fingers produced a succession of fifths, sevenths, octaves, major thirds, and steps from fourth without sixth to the bass, a combination of discordant sounds thrown at hazard which seemed to combine to torture the least delicate ear.” I am positive, nevertheless, that it must have been great, wonderful, new music.
As the strange discords “howled beneath his fingers,” Gambara, we are told, almost fainted with intoxicating joy. Furthermore, he had a raucous voice,—the true voice of a composer. “He stamped, panted, yelled; his fingers equalled in rapidity the forked head of a serpent; finally, at the last howl of the piano, he threw himself backward, and let his head fall upon the back of his arm-chair.”
Poor Gambara! poor Kapellmeister Kreisler! And how much it all sounds like the early stories told of Richard Wagner trying to express on the treble keyboard his gigantic dreams, his tonal epics: and for such supercilious men and critics as Mendelssohn, Hiller, Meyerbeer, Berlioz, and Schumann!
Signor Giardini, the Italian cook in Gambara, stands for a portrait of the true musical Philistine; he has a pretty taste in music, but melody, or what he conceives to be melody, is his shibboleth. Andrea Marcosini, a nobleman in pursuit of Gambara’s wife, and a musical dilettante, finds Giardini a gabbling boaster. “Yes, your excellency, in less than a quarter of an hour you will know what kind of a man I am. I have introduced into the Italian kitchen refinements that will surprise you. I am a Neapolitan,—that is to say, a born cook. But what good is instinct without science? Science? I have passed thirty years in acquiring it, and see what it has brought me to. My history is that of all men of talent. My experiments and tests have ruined three restaurants established successfully at Naples, Parma, and Rome.”
He keeps a little place where Italian refugees and men who have failed in the black, weltering symphony of Parisian life gather and feed at dusk. It is a queer, interesting crew. Here is a poor composer—not Gambara—of romances. “You see what a florid complexion, what self-satisfaction, how little there is in his features, so well disposed for romance. He who accompanies him is Gigelmi.” The latter is a deaf conductor of orchestra. Then there is Ottoboni, a political refugee—a nice, clean old gentleman, but considered dangerous by the Italian government. A journalist is discovered at the table, the poorest of the lot. He tells the truth about the theatrical performances, hence writes for an obscure journal and is miserably paid. Enter Gambara. He is bald, about forty, a man of refinement, with brains,—a sufferer in a word. Though his dress was free from oddity, the composer’s appearance was not lacking in nobility. A conversation follows, merging into a debate, modulating angrily into a furious discussion about art. It is wonderfully executed.
The composer of romances has written a mass for the anniversary of Beethoven’s death. He asks the count, with assumed modesty, if he will not attend the performance. “Thank you,” responds Andrea. “I do not feel myself endowed with the organs necessary to the appreciation of French singing; but if you were dead, monsieur, and Beethoven had written the mass, I should not fail to hear it.” It may be observed that this epigram has been remembered by several generations since Balzac. Von Büllow is credited with it. Behold the original in all its pristine glory! The deaf orchestra conductor also has his say: “Music exists independently of execution. In opening Beethoven’s symphony in C minor a musical man is soon translated into the world of fancy upon the golden wings of the theme in G natural, repeated in E by the horns. He sees a whole nature by turns illuminated by dazzling sheafs of light, shadowed by clouds of melancholy, cheered by divine song.” It is just possible that some one told Balzac of the indeterminate tonality at the opening of the Fifth Symphony, though he gets his scoring mixed.
“Beethoven is surpassed by the new school,” said the writer of romances, disdainfully. “He is not yet understood,” answered the count; “how can he be surpassed? Beethoven has extended the boundaries of instrumental music, and no one has followed him in his flight.” Gambara dissented by a movement of the head. “His works are especially remarkable for the simplicity of the plan, and for the manner in which this plan is followed out. With the majority of composers the orchestral parts, wild and disorderly, combine only for momentary effect; they do not always coöperate by the regularity of their progress to the effect of a piece as a whole. With Beethoven the effects are, so to speak, distributed in advance.” This is not bad criticism for a writer of fiction. Think of the banalities perpetrated about the same time by Henri Beyle, Stendhal, otherwise a master of psychology.
Then the Count Andrea proceeds to demolish the reputation of Rossini by comparing the “capering, musical chit-chat, gossipy, perfumed” school of the Italian master to Beethoven. “Long live German music!—when it can sing,” he adds sotto voce. Of course there is a lively row, the host having much to say. Later Gambara shows Andrea his Panharmonicon, an instrument which is to replace an entire orchestra. He plays upon it. They are all enchanted. Every instrument is represented. The total impression is overwhelming. Gambara sang to its accompaniment—in which the magic execution of Paganini and Liszt was revealed—the adieus of Khadijeh, Mahomet’s first wife. “Who could have dictated to you such chants?” demanded the count. “The spirit,” replied Gambara; “when he appears, everything seems to me on fire. I see melodies face to face, beautiful and fresh, colored like flowers; they radiate, they resound, and I listen, but an infinite time is required to reproduce them.” It is a pity this man drank so much. There follows an admirable exposition of Meyerbeer’s Robert le Diable too long for transcription. In the end comes ruin. Gambara’s wife, tiring of his habits, his slow progress toward fame, leaves him for Andrea. Abandoned, Gambara falls into disgrace, into dire poverty. The Panharmonicon is sold by the sheriff and his scores sold for waste paper. “On the day following the sale the scores had enveloped at the Halle butter, fish, and fruits. Thus three great operas of which this poor man spoke, but which a former Neapolitan cook, now a simple huckster, said were a heap of nonsense, had been disseminated in Paris, and devoured by the baskets of retailers.” Worse remained. After years Marianna, the runaway wife, returns, lean, dirty, old, and withered. Gambara receives her with tired, faithful arms. Together they sing duets, with guitar accompaniment, on dusty boulevards after dark. Marianna makes Gambara drink cheap brandy so that he will play well. He gives bits from his half-forgotten operas. A duchess asks: “Where do you get this music?” “From the opera of Mahomet,” replied Marianna; “Rossini has composed a Mahomet II,” and the other remarks:—
“What a pity that they will not give us at the Italiens the operas of Rossini with which we are unacquainted! for this certainly is beautiful music.” Gambara smiled! Thus ends the career of a great composer. Gambara knew his failings. “We are victims of our own superiority. My music is fine; but, when music passes from sensation to thought, it can have for auditors only people of genius, for they alone have the power to develop it.” Here is consolation for Richard Strauss!
Massimilla Doni is dedicated to Jacques Strunz, at one time a music critic in Paris. This dedication, charmingly indited, as are all of Balzac’s, acknowledges the author’s indebtedness to the critic. Massimilla Doni is more violent and less credible than Gambara. The chief character is a musical degenerate, a morbid nobleman whose solitary pleasure in life is to hear two tones in perfect concord. This musical Marquis de Sade is described as follows: “This man, who is 118 years old on the registers of vice and forty-seven according to the records of the church, has but one last means of enjoyment on earth that is capable of arousing in him a sense of life. Yes, all the chords are broken, everything is a ruin or a tattered rag; the mind, the intelligence, the heart, the nerves, all that produces an impulse in man, that gives him a glimpse of heaven through desire or the fire of pleasure, depends not so much upon music as upon one of the innumerable effects, a perfect harmony between two voices, or between one voice and the first string of his violin.”
Certainly this evil-minded person would not care for Wagner. He is attached to a beautiful Venetian singer, Clara Tinti. It is she who tells of this horrid Duke Cataneo:—
The old monkey sits on my knee and takes his violin; he plays well enough, he produces sounds with it; I try to imitate them, and when the longed-for moment arrives, and it is impossible to distinguish the note of the violin from the note that issues from my windpipe, then the old fellow is in ecstasy; his dead eyes emit their last flames, he is deliriously happy, and rolls on the floor like a drunken man. That is why he pays Genovese so handsomely. Genovese is the only tenor whose voice sometimes coincides exactly with mine. Either we do really approach that point once or twice in an evening, or the duke imagines it; and for this imaginary pleasure he has engaged Genovese; Genovese belongs to him. No operatic manager can engage the singer to sing without me, or me without him. The duke educated me to gratify this whim, and I owe to him my talent, my beauty, my fortune. He will die in some spasm caused by a perfect accord. The sense of hearing is the only one that has survived in the shipwreck of his faculties—that is the thread by which he clings to life.
This is a lovely study of a melomaniac, is it not? A man whose sole passion mounts to his ears; who when he hears an accord is vertiginously possessed like a feline over a bunch of catnip. As a foil to this delirious duke there is a cooler headed fanatic of music, named Capraja. He is a sort of Diogenes—never looks at women and lives on a few hundreds a year, though a rich man. “Half Turk, half Venetian, he was short, coarse looking, and stout. He had the pointed nose of a doge; the satirical glance of an inquisitor; a discreet, albeit a smiling mouth.” For him the decorative is the only element in music worth mentioning. He goes to the opera every night of his life. Hear him:—
Genovese will rise very high. I am not sure whether he understands the true significance of music, or acts simply by instinct, but he is the first singer with whom I have ever been fully satisfied. I shall not die without hearing roulades executed as I have often heard them in my dreams, when on waking it seemed to me that I could see the notes flying through the air. The roulade is the highest expression of art. It is the arabesque which adorns the most beautiful room in the building—a little less, and there is nothing; a little more, and all is confused. Intrusted with the mission of awakening in your soul a thousand sleeping ideas, it rustles through space, sowing in the air seeds which, being gathered up by the ear, germinate in the heart. Believe me; Raphael, when painting his Saint Cecilia, gave music precedence over poetry. He was right. Music appeals to the heart, while written words appeal only to the intelligence. Music communicates its ideas instantly, after the manner of perfumes. The singer’s voice strikes not the thought, but the elements of thought, and sets in motion the very essence of our sensations. It is a deplorable fact that the common herd has compelled musicians to adapt their measures to words, to artificial interests; but it is true that otherwise they would not be understood by the multitude. The roulade, therefore, is the only point left for the friends of pure music, the lovers of art in its nakedness, to cling to. To-night as I listened to that last cavatina, I imagined that I had received an invitation from a lovely girl who, by a single glance, restored my youth! The enchantress placed a crown on my head and led me to the ivory gate through which we enter the mysterious land of Reverie. I owe it to Genovese that I was able to lay aside my old envelope for a few moments, brief as measured by watches, but very long as measured by sensations. During a springtime, balmy with the breath of roses, I was young and beloved!
“You are mistaken, caro Capraja,” said the duke. “There is a power in music more magical in its effects than that of the roulade.” “What is it?” queried Capraja. “The perfect accord of two voices, or of one voice and a violin, which is the instrument whose tone approaches the human voice most nearly.” Then follows a rhapsodic word duel between the old amateurs, each contending for his favorite form. And is it not, though purposely exaggerated, the same battle that is being fought to this very day between the formalists and sensationalists? Some of us adore absolute music and decry the sensualities of the music-drama. The war between the roulade and the accord will never end. “Genovese’s voice seizes the very fibres,” cries Capraja. “And La Tinti’s attacks the blood,” rejoins the duke. Then follows a remarkable descriptive analysis of Rossini’s Moses in Egypt, by the wealthy and beautiful Duchess Cataneo, otherwise Massimilla Doni. It is cleverly done. The picture of the rising sun in the score in the key of C proves Balzac a poet as well as a musician. The prayer, so famous because of Thalberg’s piano transcription, is also described, and at the end this opera—better known to us as an oratorio—is pronounced superior to Don Giovanni!! Balzac, Balzac!
There is a realistic account of a small riot in the opera house because Genovese, the tenor, sings out of tune. The Duke Cataneo rages monstrously, Capraja is furious. Both tone-voluptuaries are deprived of their accords and roulades. It turns out that the tenor is in love with the soprano, and once away from her presence proves his art by singing the air, Ombra adorata, by Crescentini. This he does at midnight on the Piazzetta, Venice. The Venetian scene setting is lovely. Genovese sings his sweetest. His listeners are rapt to paradise, but are tumbled earthwards when he asks in injured accents, “Am I a poor singer?” Listen to Balzac’s comments upon that phenomenon called a tenor singer: “One and all regretted that the instrument was not a celestial thing. Was that angelic music attributable solely to a feeling of wounded self-esteem? The singer felt nothing, he was no more thinking of the religious sentiments, the divine images which he created in their hearts, than the violin knows what Paganini makes it say. They had all fancied that they saw Venice raising her shroud and singing herself, yet it was simply a matter of a tenor’s fiasco.” Most operatic music is.
The theory of the roulade is further explained:—
Capraja is intimate with a musician from Cremona who lives in the Capello palace; this musician believes that sound encounters within us a substance analogous to that which is engendered by the phenomena of light, and which produces ideas in us. According to him man has keys within, which sounds affect, and which correspond to our nerve centres from which our sensations and ideas spring. Capraja, who looks upon the arts as a collection of the means whereby man can bring external nature into harmony with a mysterious internal nature, which he calls an inward life, has adopted the idea of this instrument maker, who is at this moment composing an opera. Imagine a sublime creation in which the marvels of visible creation are reproduced with immeasurable grandeur, lightness, rapidity, and breadth, in which the sensations are infinite, and to which certain privileged natures, endowed with a divine power, can penetrate—then you will have an idea of the ecstatic delights of which Cataneo and Capraja, poets in their own eyes only, discoursed so earnestly. But it is true also that as soon as a man, in the sphere of moral nature, oversteps the limits within which plastic works are produced by the process of imitation, to enter into the kingdom, wholly spiritual, of abstractions, where everything is viewed in its essence and in the omnipotence of results, that man is no longer understood by ordinary intellects.
The foregoing paragraph, rather inflated and tortuous in style, was thoroughly disliked by the great critic Sainte-Beuve, who never would recognize the great genius of Balzac, the romantic rather than the realist in this book. The composer referred to must be Gambara, for Massimilla Doni, after the death of the Duke of Cataneo, weds young Varese and assists the unfortunate Gambara in Paris. Massimilla Doni was finished May 25, 1839. Its concluding paragraph is a masterpiece of irony. After the love of Varese and Massimilla came the usual anti-climax. Balzac writes, in a passage of unexampled splendor: “The peris, nymphs, fairies, sylphs of the olden time, the muses of Greece, the marble Virgins of the Certosa of Pavia, the Day and Night of Michael Angelo, the little angels that Bellini first drew at the foot of church paintings, and to whom Raphael gave such divine form at the foot of the Vierge au donataire, and of the Madonna freezing at Dresden; Orcagna’s captivating maidens in the Church of Or San Michele at Florence, the heavenly choirs on the tomb of St. Sebald at Nuremberg, several Virgins in the Duomo at Milan, the hordes of a hundred Gothic cathedrals, the whole nation of figures who ruin their shapes to come to you, O all-embracing artists—all these angelic incorporeal maidens rushed to Massimilla’s bed and wept there.”
Richard Wagner might have been a Gambara; and mark how Balzac treats the vibratory theory of sound, when it was practically unknown. Where did he gather his wisdom? Another story of his, hitherto untranslated, Sarrasin, will not bear recounting. Its psychology is morbid; yet it is stamped with probability. The great male soprano Farinelli could have been the hero. Nevertheless, the tale is not a pleasant one. George Moore eloquently describes how, in chase of the exotic, he pursued certain books, like a pike after minnows, along the quays of Paris. And like a pike he rudely knocked his nose one day against the bottom. The real lover of Balzac, pike-like, accepts Sarrasin, just as he accepts Seraphita. They are many octaves apart, yet both sound a distinct note in the scale of this great human symphony. However, Sarrasin is but semi-musical, so need not be discussed here.
“O mighty poet! Thy works are not as other men’s, simply and merely great works of art; but are also like the phenomena of nature, like the sun, the sea, the stars, and the flowers; like frost and snow, rain and dew, hail-storm and thunder, which are to be studied with entire submission of our own faculties, and in the perfect faith that in them there can be no too much or too little, nothing useless or inert; that the further we press in our discoveries, the more we shall see proofs of design and self-supporting arrangement where the careless eye had seen nothing but accident!”
Thomas De Quincey, master of the sonorous singing word, wrote this—he meant Shakespeare. It will also fit Balzac. And I know of no other name except Balzac’s, that I dare bracket with Shakespeare’s except Beethoven’s.