Orpheus; or, The music of the future

by W. J. Turner

FOOTNOTES:

[4] See Mr. Harvey Grace’s excellent book on the organ works of J. S. Bach.

Chapter VI
Emotional Significance

A technical analysis of the art of music as practised in Europe during the past few hundred years would be interesting, but it lies outside the scope of this book. What is relevant is to consider the emotional and intellectual significance of the music composed during that period. Folksong, from which most great composers have consciously or unconsciously drawn, is the emotional substratum of all European music. At its best it is simple, sensuous and passionate—the heart-cry of men whose desires are frustrated by the accidents of life, whose joys are too short, or whose griefs are too enduring. Where it chiefly differs from similar, later, more sophisticated music is in the simple intensity of the emotion. In a society more subject to extreme vicissitudes of fortune than later and more stable social states it was easier, and natural, to believe that mere irresponsible “accident” or mischance separated men from happiness.[5] In a beautiful old Neapolitan song collected by Madame Geni Sadero the singer bewails the loss of his love carried off by Moorish pirates in a raid on the Italian coast. Such a song has an extraordinary plasticity of melody, rivalling in expressiveness the melodic invention of the greatest composers. These melodies were modelled by an intense sincerity, of a kind inconceivable to men in a more complex environment, richly provided with compensations. Any attempt at such sincerity would to-day be insincere.[6] Equally insincere would be any modern composer’s attempt to express the simple natural thrill of the Sardinian shepherd boy who greets the rising of the Sun in a wonderful song included in the Sadero collection. In our civilized society man knows that the sun will rise to-morrow as it did yesterday, and that next year or the year after he may love again. It is not Moorish pirates, or the accident of plague, or the malefic interference of an unfriendly God that will bear away his happiness. It is happiness itself that has flown away as he sits securely in the midst of his possessions and asks himself, what he used not to ask himself: “Why do I live?”

I do not lament this change as a disaster. I merely wish to point out the difference and to show why the music of to-day must differ from the music of yesterday. Those who believe that music is a purely abstract art (mere negation this, which I have abundantly shown to be empty of reality) will be shocked at the dependence of music upon man’s life; but the great composers themselves knew better:

“The error in the art-genre of opera consists in the fact that a Means of Expression (Music) has been made the object, while the Object of Expression (the Drama) has been made a means.”

Those words of Wagner’s show clearly that to Wagner, as Mr. Newman aptly puts it:

“To invent a theme for its own abstract sake, to pare and shape it till it was ‘workable’ and then to weave it along with others of the same kind into a pattern of which the main lines were predetermined for him by tradition—this was something he could not imagine himself doing, and that he scoffed at when he found the Conservatoire musicians engaged in.... Wagner always protested against the current fashion of performing Beethoven’s symphonies as if they were nothing more than agreeable or exciting musical patterns.”

My preceding chapters will have made it quite clear why Wagner’s instinct was right, although his mode of expression is so inexact as to be often confusing and misleading.[7] What Wagner means is that intellectual forms or death-shapes are given no significance by being manipulated, dove-tailed, and re-arranged by the intelligence working from rules and examples. It is “life” that gives significance, a spiritual urge into creation, and where this is absent there is no artistic creation. We may perceive by his use of the word “drama” that Wagner’s conception of “life” was a limited one; but he could only express the life that was in him and his soundness lay in his recognizing this. But we shall not make the mistake of inventing an artificial and unilluminating distinction between Wagner as a dramatic or programmatic composer and, for example, Mozart or Bach as absolute composers. The difference between all these composers (including Beethoven) lies mainly in inner feeling, in spiritual life, in the individual psyche—not in their musical faculty as composers. It was natural to each one of them that his vital activity should run into the form of sound-patterns. It is this idiosyncrasy which has made them all musicians and not poets, sculptors, or painters. But this peculiarity is only a physiological bias for—to quote Mr. Newman again, since he is a musician and what he says will be more appropriate here than the words of a poet or sculptor, besides being admirably clear—

“It is only the most superficial of psychologists and æstheticians who can regard any human faculty as wholly cut off from the rest. Our perceptions of sight, of taste, of touch, of hearing are inextricably interblended as is shown by our constantly expressing one set of sensations in terms of another, as when we speak of the colour of music, the height or depth or thickness or clarity or muddiness of musical tone. In every poet there is something of the painter and the musician; in every musician something of the poet and the painter; in every painter something of the musician and the poet. The character of the man’s work will depend upon the strength or weakness of the tinge that is given to his own special art by the relative strength or weakness of the infusion of one or more of the other arts.”

Thus we can explain the sensuous individuality of an artist as being a result of the special and peculiar bias and intermixture of his senses. But this is only a part of his character or personality, and it is my argument that it is the minor (though essential and indispensable) and not the major or most important part. For besides this physical individuality he has a spiritual individuality. The former is the instrument, the latter is the “life,” and, in the case of music, the physical expression, the communication, the tangible (eye and ear are “touch” at a distance) death-shape is the musical creation or form—a Bach fugue, a Beethoven symphony, a Mozart or Wagner opera, a Schubert song.

The importance of Beethoven—which Wagner was the first to understand—lay in that stupendous stream of “life” within him which burst through all the old academic forms, as the sap bursts through a tree into colour and blossom, and strewed the history of music with those gigantic skeletons of spiritual life which we know as his works. But we have yet to discover the meaning of these compositions. Their full meaning can only be felt, it cannot be re-stated—except when his works are adequately performed; but they have a characteristic to which I shall try to give a verbal construction because I think it immensely important. It is not a quality for which there exists a word, or a phrase, or even a poem; but it is a particular kind of desire. “Like as a hart desireth the water-brooks so thirsteth my soul after the living God,” that—were it not for its association with the desires of Baptists, Methodists, Wesleyans, Anglicans, Catholics, Mohammedans, Buddhists, Christian Scientists, Mormons, and all those bodies of people known to-day as “religious”—would perhaps be suggestive. At any rate it would serve to distinguish the quality of this desire or passion from the passion which created Tristan und Isolde. And, magnificent and beautiful as that was, its magnificence compared with the magnificence of Beethoven’s passion is as the magnificence of a coloured duck to a black swan. The simile is a totally unworthy one, for we have nothing to which we can compare Beethoven. We can easily find similes for Wagner, but Beethoven is a rara avis.

It is natural to the young to be idealists, an old idealist is generally either a rogue or a fool—unless he happens to be a Beethoven. The young find something stirring in their hearts when listening to Beethoven which they never find when listening to Bach, Mozart or Wagner, great as these composers are. Beethoven awakes a feeling so romantic, so idealistic, of so fine and exquisite a bloom that it is guarded by everyone who experiences it as a precious secret. What Beethoven imagined inevitably lures men away from the sensuous delights of Debussy and Strauss, from the fatiguing excitements of Stravinsky and Jazz, from the gaieties of Verdi and Rossini, from the sentimental nostalgia of Brahms, from the solid satisfaction of Bach, from the sensitive melancholy of Mozart and from the lesser loves of Wagner; but why it does so we cannot tell.

“Had I been willing,” said Beethoven to Schindler in 1823, in the course of a conversation about the Countess Giulietta Guicciardi, “to surrender thus my vital power and my life what would have been left of the best and noblest in me?” What a different ring this plain statement has beside the rhetorical pæans to renunciation on the lips of Wagner, who was satisfied to accept what would never have satisfied Beethoven.

It is a peculiarity of Beethoven that he can use the words “best” and “noblest” without making an intelligent man laugh up his sleeve. If we do succeed in laughing it is with the wrong side of our mouths. The very words “good,” “noble,” “spiritual,” “sublime,” have all become in our time synonymous with humbug. In Beethoven’s music they take on a new and tremendous significance and not all the corrosive acid of the most powerful intellect and the profoundest scepticism can burn through them into any leaden substratum. They are gold throughout. Am I wrong in thinking this an achievement without parallel in the modern world? Point to me in poetry, painting, sculpture, music, anywhere, one other artist who has recreated (not paid lip-service to) the meaning of good and left to us the imagination of a love transcending both the sacred and the profane. There is none.

We cannot live without values and at present we cannot conceive a state when men would not ask themselves: “Why do I live?” “Is life worth living?” This is the theme which touches us to-day when we marry and settle down with our love, measure the spots on the Sun, and fear neither plagues, pirates, nor eclipses:

“Here I am an old man in a dry month,
Being read to by a boy, waiting for rain.
I was neither at the hot gates
Nor fought in the warm rain
Nor knee-deep in the salt marsh, heaving a cutlass,
Bitten by flies, fought.
My house is a decayed house,
And the jew squats on the window-sill, the owner,
Spawned in some estaminet of Antwerp,
Blistered in Brussels, patched and peeled in London.
The goat coughs at night in the field overhead;
Rocks, moss, stonecrop, iron, merds.
The woman keeps the kitchen, makes tea,
Sneezes at evening, poking the peevish gutter.
I am an old man,
A dull head among windy spaces.”

The bravest, the most intelligent, the most sensitive are oppressed with that profound sense of the futility of life which Mr. Eliot expresses so admirably in the above lines. It is, indeed, the constant burden of the most characteristic of our modern poets:

“This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.”

Yes, we are convinced. This is the way the world ends and we have no more faith in anything. Democracy, Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, have all been added to the list of the Great Superstitions. Mussolini and Lenin have made moonshine of Socialism and Communism. God is a word used only in treatises on tribal magic, when it is spelt correctly as god. Love has been appropriated by the writers of silly magazine stories and even sillier novels. All honest men are reduced to silence before the daily avalanche of fraudulent lies from pulpit, printing press, parliament and platform. Everywhere men speak with the tongues of serpents and the minds of manufacturers of chewing gum. And deep in all men’s hearts there is only one thought:

“I grow old—I grow old
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.”

But in the midst of futility and inanity, in the midst of desperation and despair there sounds the music of Beethoven which says without bombast or credo: “This is not the way the world ends.” And says it in such a way that we are forced to listen. We listen to Beethoven when we would listen to nobody else because he is a man without any of the world’s illusions. How feeble and superficial seems the disillusionment of Mr. T. S. Eliot’s poems compared with the agony of the Cavatina in the B flat Quartet with its mysterious pause—as if the pulse of the whole Universe were stopped and might not continue; of the Fugue in B flat Op. 133; and of the last Pianoforte Sonata which Beethoven wrote. In this last Sonata we feel the agony of a man whose imagination is grappling with some insupportable horror. Let us conceive the Captain of a ship standing on its bridge in a calm, unconscious sea. The boats are useless because land does not exist anywhere. From the deck come the cries, curses and weeping of the doomed crew, who are only his own embodied emotions, for he is really alone. Slowly they are going down into the unruffled water. The Captain does not shake his fist defiantly into the sky and deny that he is going down, but knowing that he is going down never to return sinks passionately into the sea. Such is the mind and temper of Beethoven. There is agony but no whimper, and if that is not ending with a bang I don’t know what is. In the music of Beethoven there are no anodynes, no lullings of sense, no deceits of the intelligence, but pure virtus. And this virtus is thrilling absolutely, without reservations. After the tremendous drama of the first movement of the C minor Sonata, for example—a drama in which there is the whole ecstatic misery of life—we are not assuaged by a dream. The conflict does not cease. That wonderful Arietta—surely the most wonderful thing in all music—is no bringer of peace and resignation. In it something passes away but its passing away is an act of creation not of extinction. It is this which gives Beethoven’s music its peculiar significance, for Creation not Nirvana is the essence of Beethoven. It has its root therefore in human personality and may be most accurately described as the supremest imagination of love in human art. But though beyond the conception of the Neapolitan fisherman mourning for his lost bride it does not lessen but enriches that ancient love-song, making it impossible for us to feel that it was meaningless.

And if anyone should say that the question: “Why do I live?” has not been answered, I reply that Beethoven has rendered it ridiculous.