Music after the great war, and other studies

by Carl Van Vechten

In one of Mr. Calvocoressi’s recent articles about Strawinsky that critic says, in lines which illuminate: “According to the modern conception of the lyric drama, the chief quality of dramatic music is terseness—a quality most uncommon in all kinds of music, and which many will, not altogether wrongly, think almost incompatible with the very essence of musical art. The principle of music as generally understood appears to be amplification, repetition.

“At all events, the art of music has always consisted chiefly in that of ‘working-out.’ And it is but of late that a number of music-makers and music-expounders have raised an outcry against prolixity and redundance in music: an outcry, it must be added, that for the present does not find much echo among the majority of art judges nor of the public.

“The first of great musicians to abjure the principle of formal, elaborate ‘working-out’ in dramatic and lyric music was Moussorgsky. A striking peculiarity of his best songs and of his masterpiece, Boris Godunow, is the absolute lack, not only of anything resembling tautology or amplification, per se, but of all that is not absolutely essential to direct expression (including many devices which no other musician of the time would have dreamt of leaving out), even if the omission be in defiance of tonal construction and balance.

“For instance, the song, The Orphan, ends very dramatically on the suspensive harmony of the dominant. Death’s Lullaby, which depicts a dialogue between a horror-stricken mother and Death, who comes to take away a child, ends abruptly on the burden of Death’s last utterance, with which the composer’s intention is fulfilled. He never gives a thought to the practice of bringing back the main key which would have led him either to an inappropriate modulation or to a superfluous addition. Similarly, Boris Godunow, in the authentic version, ends, without even a cadence, on a chord that hardly leaves the impression of the tonic.”

Mr. Calvocoressi points out the fact that there are few passages for orchestra alone in Boris outside of the polonaise and the very brief preludes to the acts, and he asks us to observe the working of the same principle in Pelléas et Mélisande, in which it is evident that Debussy was influenced by Moussorgsky. Schoenberg was the first to apply this principle to orchestral music. However, if an opera-goer finds much to enjoy in the dramas of Moussorgsky and Strawinsky, it does not necessarily follow that all the value of a work like Die Walküre disappears, to his ears. The two principles of art are different; each, perhaps, is equally valid.

“But the fact is that a new factor has appeared in the domain of dramatic music, which is now entering a new path; and consequently a new order of artistic pleasure may be the outcome of this stage of evolution. The first consequence, of course, is a greater differentiation between the style of dramatic music and the style of instrumental music; unquestionably a progress, since it widens the range of methods and gives greater freedom to the composer’s imagination.”

All of this is very stimulating, and very true; still, it cannot be said that audiences as a whole grasp Strawinsky’s intention, as it is exploited in The Nightingale, so readily as they do Moussorgsky’s as manifested in Boris Godunow. Rimsky-Korsakow’s emendations of the latter work, which one critic has labeled as mutilations, may be responsible for the greater public reaction. But the success of Boris was by no means immediate. Produced in Petrograd in 1874, it was not heard in Paris until nearly thirty years later, nor in New York until 1913. Musicians, in the meantime, had had access to the score, and had adopted some of the Moussorgsky idiom as their own. When Boris was at last produced here it was not, therefore, the utter novelty that The Nightingale now seems. The very principle of the new music demands a greater effort at concentration than can be expected of most audiences when they are listening to music, as many ears catch the meaning of a phrase only after it has been repeated a convenient number of times. This is one of the chief reasons for the popular success of The Ring dramas. It seems incredible, and impertinent, to the average audience that a composer should have had the idea of expressing himself without repeating himself. A catalogue of representative themes would be of no use to a prospective auditor of The Nightingale. Now, there are two advantages to this method, aside from the implied advantage of an improvement in effect: First, it makes for a very short opera (The Nightingale, in three acts, is so short that at its early performances it was given in a bill with two ballets, one of which, The Legend of Joseph, runs for over an hour); second, the audience is not called upon to listen intellectually (nor should it be, at the performance of an opera). The only intention of the composer is to make his listeners feel each situation he illustrates with his music. It may be said that Wagner’s intention was the same, and thereby lies the difficulty in training listeners to understand the new principle. Wagner’s way is easier for them because they can get the emotional feeling through the intellect. The repetition of themes would not in itself assure an effect, but the labeling of these themes does just that, so that whenever the Sword motif or the Siegfried motif occurs, the mind of the listener, knowing the name of the theme, is perfectly prepared to create the emotional reaction demanded by the composer. Strawinsky appeals directly to the emotions. On the listener who expects a theme to reappear again and again he makes only the impression of being a noise-maker (in the sense of a worker in dissonance; The Nightingale is most continent in sound). But on the open-minded auditor his effect is usually astounding.

The story of the music-drama closely follows the Hans Andersen tale. In the first act a deputation from the Chinese Emperor’s court, headed by the kitchen-maid, seeks the nightingale in its grove. The Imperial Chancellor, the Bonze, and a number of courtiers are included in this strange procession, which follows the kitchen-maid, as she alone knows the bird’s song, to request the nightingale to come to the court to cheer up the melancholy ruler. Although loath to leave its quiet groves, the bird agrees to go.

In the second act the nightingale’s arrival has stirred the Emperor’s jaded senses. However, the present of a mechanical bird which comes from Japan diverts his attention. In the meantime, the real nightingale has disappeared. The Emperor orders the little brown songster banished from all China, while he places the mechanical toy by his bedside.

Death stands in the Emperor’s bedchamber in the third act. Torn by his aching conscience, the dying ruler calls in vain for his musicians to make him forget. But the nightingale returns and so charms Death with its songs that he agrees to allow the Emperor his life. The Emperor revives and offers his saviour a place at court, but the bird refuses and returns to its woodland haunts with the promise that it will sing each evening. Now the courtiers enter, prepared to find the Emperor dead. They are astounded when he sits up in bed and bids them “Good-morning!”