May 20, 1902.
As applied to Parry, Stanford, or Mackenzie, we are instructed, the reproach of being "academic" has absolutely no aptness whatever. These worthy dons are creative artists of the highest possible order, to be classed with Bach, Beethoven, and Wagner, and it thus appears that about the middle of the century British music arose like the lark, soaring at once to the topmost airs of the welkin; that to find a parallel for the revelation of genius during the fifty ensuing British years one has to range over two German centuries! Not even Beethoven is to be excepted from the list of things that were matched by our professorial larks, swans, giants, heroes, angels, and demigods! Now all this represents a rather deplorable state of things. Why is it—I cannot help asking once more—that at the present time in this country so much worse nonsense is written about music than about drama, literature, or any other kindred subject? A great stir was recently made by the production of "Paolo and Francesca," yet no admirer of Mr. Stephen Phillips has thought it necessary to call him the equal of Shakespeare. There is certainly this excuse for Mr. Fuller Maitland, that in the London press of recent years much extravagance of the opposite kind has appeared—excessive and, in a few cases, positively brutal detraction of Parry and Stanford and their school—and perhaps the chief blame for the hysterical nonsense of supporters lies within certain opponents who have attacked without regard either for the facts of the case or even for common decency. In any case a state of things has been brought about in which one party howls "Incompetent humbug!" while the other shrieks "Genius of the highest order!"
In the meantime what about the truth and the critical currency? And is it not a pity that Mr. Fuller Maitland should have missed the opportunity afforded to him by the writing of this history to put off controversial frenzy and return to a more judicial spirit? We that have to do with the musical world are all perfectly well aware—whether we describe Parry and Stanford as "academic" or protest against that epithet—that they are men of high distinction who have played a leading and brilliant part in the English musical revival and generally have deserved well of the musical republic. For my part, while fully recognising their eminence both in talent and character, I am of opinion that their claims to regard as absolute creative artists are habitually overstated by their supporters in the press. The appearance of Parry created a considerable stir. His imposing grasp of choral polyphony was something new in English music. His great intelligence, his wide sympathy and geniality, his virility and industry—all these qualities united to arouse enthusiastic hopes. But, as Mr. Fuller Maitland writes on page 185, "with the passage of years the group of composers will fall into truer and truer perspective." There has already been a considerable passage of years since those first compositions, but the early enthusiastic estimate has not been justified. Outside the circle of his pupils and personal friends no one now seems to care very much for his music. Here in the North of England concert societies find that the public admiration of it is a rapidly vanishing quantity. Three years ago his "Job" and "Blest Pair of Sirens" were given here, but ever since that occasion his name has been something of a terror to our concert societies. A frequent experience in regard to Parry's music is that, whereas a first hearing impresses in virtue of massiveness and energy or of striking and unconventional dramatic touches, second and subsequent hearings are discouraging. "Job" is the most favourable case among the choral and orchestral works that I have heard. It is thoroughly artistic in conception and unconventional in treatment. Moreover, the lyrical interlude of the shepherd-boy's song helps along the early part very happily, and Mr. Plunket Greene is always eloquent in the "Lamentations." Nevertheless, I found the second hearing a sad experience. Now the impression that there is something wrong with Parry's music—notwithstanding all the learning, resource, wide sympathies, intelligence, and so forth that it shows—is undoubtedly a very general one. To find any person not personally attached to the composer taking up one of his works, great or small, is exceedingly rare. The composer's personal popularity is great, but outside the charmed circle no one seems ready to spend a shilling in hearing his stuff or to risk a shilling in giving it. Mr. Fuller Maitland says that the provincial choral societies are faithful to Parry, and this may be true in some cases. To a society in the habit of occupying themselves with the cantatas of Dr. Gaul I could imagine Parry would seem the seventh heaven of art. But in the great centres or in any place where there are ardent souls not to be deceived as to what is genuine in music a revival of interest in Parry seems to me very improbable.
At his worst, e.g., in "King Saul," he appeals; at his best, e.g., in the "Soldier's Tent" (song with orchestral accompaniment), he almost persuades. But the horrors of the empty tone masses hurled at one's head in the "Saul" choruses, or of the purple patches of Wagnerian orchestration associated with inept vocal phrases in the principal monologue of the same oratorio—those horrors are so very genuine, whereas the charm of such a song as the "Soldier's Tent," where the composer keeps comparatively well to the point and scores with comparative aptness, is still somewhat doubtful. A remark of Mr. Fuller Maitland's helps me to a possible explanation of the something wrong. He commends the "delicate humour" of "When icicles hang by the wall" in Parry's English Lyrics. Now I have certainly never heard that song, but I must have read it somewhere, for I distinctly remember the humorous and expressive accompaniment at the words "coughing drowns the parson's saw." It also comes back to me that other passages, such as all that eight-part counterpoint at the end of "Blest Pair of Sirens," look exceedingly well on paper. Possibly, then, the key to the mystery is that Parry's music is analogous to those plays which read well but act badly. Perhaps the way to enjoy it is to read it and admire the fertility of device while taking great care never to hear it, and so escape the consciousness of the fact that the actual wine of that music as it flows forth is not quite the genuine thing; that, notwithstanding notable fulness of body, the quality is gritty, the flavour somewhat acrid and inky, the bouquet artificial and multifariously compounded.
The root of the mischief I take to be that the composer—for all his great and imposing powers, his fine taste, his profound and varied learning—is wanting in sureness of touch and consequently in the ability to establish that correspondence between form and idea without which a work of art cannot properly be said to exist. Mr. Fuller Maitland claims for Parry and his group that they "have far more extensive resources in the different styles of music" than, for example, the modern Russians, and this brings us back to the point of the reproach conveyed in the epithet "academic." To musicians bent on the holding of official posts and on success in a worldly career it is of the first importance to "show extensive resources in the different styles of music," and in the large body of Parry's compositions I find far more evidence of desire to show such extensive resources than of the artistic impulse to make music that is absolutely genuine. Sullivan, with his much lower aims and ideals, is for me a better balanced personality and a truer artist. Much of his music in the comic operas is quite to the point. The outward form corresponds to the inward idea in a certain absolute and final manner which there is no mistaking. Hence the clearness of Sullivan's musical individuality or physiognomy. He was not intent on showing resources, but on modelling his material into conformity with his idea, and, because at his best he had the power of doing that, his physiognomy is clear to us and his art vital. It thus appears that such commercialism as Sullivan's does less mischief than such academic tendencies as Parry's.
In Stanford's case I have often protested against the indiscriminate use of the epithet "academic." It seems to me that his compositions on Irish subjects require to be considered quite apart from all the rest. However deplorable may be that Brahmsian vein running through a great mass of his non-Irish music, he really does in his "Phaudrig," "Shamus," and Irish Symphony and in many of his Irish songs entirely escape from his common-room and give us open-air music. No doubt, as Mr. Fuller Maitland very justly points out, the humour of the Dogberry scenes in Stanford's latest opera is admirable. Those are the scenes in which the composer has followed the model of Verdi's "Falstaff" most closely. Elsewhere he has undertaken to be more original and has not prospered so well. The music of the love scenes is terrible. All that twisted, clever stuff can never have any but a chilling, afflicting, alienating effect on a soul in which any spark is left either of youthfulness or of sympathy with youth. Stanford's musical cleverness, exceeding that of any other mortal except Camille Saint-Saëns, has been his bane. His sense of humour, too, is perversely adjusted. In connection with any but an Irish subject it is always liable to mislead him, and I have little doubt that it is the humourist quite as much as the don in him which nowadays makes it impossible for him to treat a love-passage in any but a chilly, clever, allusive, intelligible-only-to-the-initiated style. He was a very different man in 1881 when his "Bower of Roses by Bendeemer's Stream" was first heard. Not that he has even now lost his faculty of lyrical tenderness altogether. If the sentiment be associated with an infant, or penetrated with a sense of the weird and uncanny, or intermingled with (Irish) patriotic feeling, he can still find the symbol, as his quite recent music to Moira O'Neill's "Songs from the Glens of Antrim" abundantly proves. But the note of warmth and simplicity proper to youthful romance he seems to have lost. A peculiar case among Stanford's compositions is represented by the Irish Symphony, concerning which Mr. Fuller Maitland has nothing to say. Here, notwithstanding the Irish subject, the gown shows through to some slight extent in one place, namely, the development section of the first movement. The conventional critic finds fault with the scherzo in the form of an Irish jig as unsymphonic, as it undoubtedly is. But there would be more sense in suggesting that the composer should have made up his mind to be thoroughly unsymphonic throughout the work, bringing his first movement into harmony with the fine sennachee's improvisation that stands second, the magnificent racy jig, and the buoyant finale. We should thus have had an Irish Rhapsody in four movements without any defect. Even now the one touch of the composer's evil genius that comes out in the first movement is too slight to spoil the work, which has been a joy for a long time, and does not seem to lose its charm. It thus seems to me that Stanford is far too good a man for an "academic," though I cannot deny that the epithet is actually justified by more than half the entire body of his published works.
After all it was scarcely likely that the sudden efflorescence of English music, ensuing upon a long period of sterility, would lead at once to fruit of complete maturity. We have now reached the second generation since the revival, and it would be a pity if our best men at the present day were nowise in advance of the leaders who came forward thirty years ago.
Centenary Article.
January 1, 1901.
At the dawn of the nineteenth century music was at a low ebb in this country. Purcell had been dead more than a hundred years, and Handel about forty years. The spirit of Puritanism had killed the madrigal-singing of Shakespearean England and suppressed every other manifestation of the popular musical genius. Charles II. had come back from his long residence abroad with a contempt for English music, both sacred and secular, which, as Pepys's Diary shows, he did not hesitate to express in public, and thus the merry-makings of the Restoration brought no revival of the national art. Nor was it likely that the situation, as regards Court influence, should be improved by the House of Hanover—at the time of their accession a race of aliens having no sympathy with the national development of the art. Characteristic of the view that cultivated Englishmen took of music about the middle of the eighteenth century is a letter of Lord Chesterfield's,[3] written when his son was staying at Venice, to warn him against all the "singing, piping, and fiddling" of Italy. He gives the young man to understand that it is unbecoming in a gentleman to take part in such things, though he may pay a fiddler to play to him. Elsewhere, too, Lord Chesterfield is even more crushing. He lays stress on the inevitable connection between music and low company. The Venice letter was written in 1749—six years after the first performance of the "Messiah" in London and ten years before Handel's death. Perhaps, therefore, the Chesterfield view of music was at that time exceptional. But it must have become more prevalent in the ensuing half-century, and the view of music as an inferior art, represented in its extreme form by Lord Chesterfield, is far from being extinct at the present day. At the same time, fully to account for the low level of musical taste in the England of 1801, due allowance must be made for the comparative neglect of all but political and military affairs caused by the tremendous agitations of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars.