The best of the English Cathedral composers was Samuel Sebastian Wesley, whose enthusiasm for Bach, antedating the movement initiated by Mendelssohn, has scarcely met with sufficient acknowledgement. Soon after the middle of the century a group of British composers with a wider than the purely ecclesiastical scope began to appear. Sullivan, Mackenzie, Parry, Cowen, and Stanford all learned their art in Germany, and came back to their native country to practise it. All of them have written oratorios, but without lasting success except in the case of Sullivan's "Golden Legend." Dr. Cowen's Scandinavian and Professor Stanford's Irish Symphonies have done something to win esteem for English music in other countries. But the great achievement of British music during the past fifty years has been the Gilbertian operas, in which Sir Arthur Sullivan matched with a perfect musical counterpart the kind of libretto furnished by W. S. Gilbert, an original type of comic opera being thus created. Among younger composers, Mr. Hamish M'Cunn made a reputation with his "Land of the Mountain and the Flood" overture that he failed to confirm. Mr. Coleridge-Taylor has had a very rapid success with his "Hiawatha" music, whether of a more lasting kind remains to be proved. By far the most remarkable British composer of recently made reputation is Dr. Edward Elgar. Mr. Otto Lessmann, editor of the "Allgemeine Musikzeitung" and the most distinguished musical critic of Germany at the present day, wrote thus (after hearing "The Dream of Gerontius" at Birmingham last October): "If I am not mistaken, the coming man of the English musical world has already appeared, an artist who has shaken off the bonds of conventional form and opened his mind and heart to those great gifts which the masters of the expiring century have left as an inheritance to the future—Edward Elgar, composer of the one great religious choral work brought to a first hearing at the Birmingham Festival, namely 'The Dream of Gerontius.'"
Progress has been very much more rapid during the last twenty-five years than in any other period of the century. Indeed, so wonderfully has been the revolution in public taste effected by improved educational opportunities and the more artistic and expressive style of singing and playing introduced by the Wagnerian school, that musical art now finds itself in a completely new atmosphere, and hope leaps out, probably asking too much of the immediate future. The great lesson that requires to be brought home at the present time to all concerned, directly or indirectly, with musical affairs is that music is one of the fine arts, that it is subject to the laws of art and no others. This seems a painfully obvious principle when stated, but how rarely does anyone act on it! We find any number of persons pursuing music as a sport, others as a business, others as a mild discipline for children—a kind of drill,—others again as a learned subject, but very few as an art. The first result of mastering this lesson would be the shaking off of fixed ideas, such as that every composer must play the organ and write church music. Chopin wrote nothing but pianoforte pieces, yet his fame is undying, and much more is heard of his music now—fifty years after his death—than ever before, while plenty of composers whose works include voluminous compositions for choir and orchestra are absolutely forgotten in their own lifetime. The real artist is distinguished from other men above all by being enamoured of perfection. He finds what he can do and rests satisfied with doing that, whether it be a great thing or a small, whether it be one thing or many.
[CHAPTER XIII.]
——
DR. HANS RICHTER.
(October 20, 1897.)
The genius of musical interpretation is a phenomenon of modern times. Beethoven marks the end of that great symphonic period which begins with Haydn, and though seventy years before the production of Beethoven's greatest symphony, Joseph Haydn had been drilling the little Esterhazy orchestra and trying to secure satisfactory performances, yet to the end of Beethoven's time the most important orchestras were usually filled up with amateurs for those special occasions on which a symphony was to be performed. It seems certain that the notion of a rendering actually corresponding to a symphonic composer's ideal intentions never dawned on musicians as a practical possibility till long after the greatest of symphonic composers was dead and buried.
Beethoven, no less than Sebastian Bach, often wrote for the future—not even for the next generation, but for the distant future. And Mendelssohn, who re-discovered Sebastian Bach and did so much to stir up the lethargy of his musical contemporaries and re-awaken interest in the great works of the past—did not Mendelssohn announce, as a general principle for the guidance of conductors, that they should beware of slow tempi, and take everything at a good pace, so that the faults of phrasing might not be too obvious?
The very terms in which the recommendation was couched show that Mendelssohn was not unconscious of the faults that marred the best orchestral playing of his time; but being of a mild, easy-going disposition, he was not the man to expect impossibilities—such is the ordinary musician's term for any exertion a little out of his ordinary routine. It was reserved for a more masterful mind to expect impossibilities, and to obtain them.
When the works of Wagner began to attract attention, consternation fell on all the old-fashioned conductors of Germany, the "Pig-tails" as Wagner never wearied of calling them. Life was not worth living, they felt, if they had to deal with such scores, and then lamentations were reinforced by the bandsmen, who found that countless passages written by Wagner were impossible of performance.
But it so happened, as if by a special Providence, that along with Wagner certain performing musicians, who were not so easily frightened, had been ripening towards their life's task. From Liszt and Von Bülow presently came demonstrations of the fact that Wagner's music was not so impossible as at first thought to be, though requiring a method of interpretation different from that of the "Pig-tails." In 1869 appeared Wagner's pamphlet "On Conducting," just three years after his first meeting with Hans Richter, and, whatever may be thought of the style of that pamphlet, it is beyond question that it marks the beginning of a new era in the history of orchestral music. Besides Richter, all modern conductors of world-wide reputation—Bülow, Levi, Seidl, Weingartner and Richard Strauss—were found in the same school. They learned from Wagner how to play Beethoven, and their method has revolutionised the musical world.