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Music After the Great War[ 1]
Music for Museums?[ 27]
The Secret of the Russian Ballet[ 45]
Igor Strawinsky: A New Composer[ 83]
Massenet and Women[ 119]
Stage Decoration as a Fine Art[ 137]
Adolphe Appia and Gordon Craig[ 159]

Music After the Great War

Music After the Great War

WHEN the great war was declared, Leo Stein, in Florence at the time, asserted that the day of the cubists, the futurists, and their ilk was at an end. “After the war,” he said, “there will be no more of this nonsense. Matisse may survive, and Picasso in his ‘early manner,’ but Renoir and Cézanne are the last of the great painters, and it is on their work that the new art, whatever it may be, will be founded.” Leo Stein belongs to a family which, in a sense, has stood sponsor for the new painters, but his remarks can scarcely be called disinterested, as his Villa di Doccia in Florence contains no paintings at present but those of Renoir and Cézanne. There are mostly Renoirs.

Of course a general remark like this in regard to painting is based on an idea that there is no connection—at least no legitimate connection—between the painting of Marcel Duchamp, Gleizes, Derain, Picabia, and the later work of Picasso, and the painters (completely legitimatized by now) who came before them. Without arguing this misconception, it may be stated that a similar misconception exists in relation to “modern” music. There are those who feel that the steady line of progression from Bach, through Beethoven and Brahms, has broken off somewhere. The exact point of departure is not agreed upon. Some say that music as an art ended with Richard Wagner’s death. There are only a few, however, who do not include Brahms and Tschaikowsky in the list of those graced with the crown of genius. There are many who are generous enough to believe that Richard Strauss and Claude Debussy have carried on the divine torch. But there are only a few discerning enough to perceive that Strawinsky and Schoenberg have gone only a step further than the so-called impressionists in music.

Since the beginnings of music, as an art-form, there has always been a complaint that contemporary composers could not write melody. Beethoven suffered from this complaint; Wagner suffered from it; we have only recently gone through the period when Strauss and Debussy suffered from it. The reason is an obvious one. Each new composer has made his own rules of composition. Each has progressed a step further in his use of harmony. Now it is evident that in this way novelty lies, for an entirely new unaccompanied melody would be difficult to devise. It is in the combination of melody and harmony that a composer may show his talent at invention. It is but natural that any advance in this direction should at first startle unaccustomed ears, and it is by no means uncertain that this first thrill is not the most delicious sensation to be derived from hearing music. In time harmony is exhausted—combinations of notes in ordered forms—but there is still the pursuit of disharmony to be made. We are all quite accustomed to occasional discords, even in the music of Beethoven, where they occur very frequently. Strauss utilizes discords skilfully in his tonal painting; in such works as Elektra and Heldenleben they abound. The newer composers have almost founded a school on disharmony.

To me it seems certain that it is the men who have given the new impetus to tonal art in the past five years who will make the opening for whatever art-music we are to hear after the war, and I am referring even to occasional pieces after the manner of Tschaikowsky’s overture, 1812, in which the Russian National Anthem puts to rout the Marseillaise.... Perhaps it will be Karol Szymanowski of Poland (if he is still alive) or a new César Franck in Belgium who will rise to write of the intensity of suffering through which his country has struggled. But it seems to me beyond a doubt that music after the great war will be “newer” (I mean, of course, more primitive) than it was in the last days of July, 1914. There will be plenty of disharmonies, foreshadowed by Schoenberg and Strawinsky, let loose on our ears, but, in spite of the protests of Mr. Runciman, I submit that these disharmonies are a steady progression from Wagner, and not a freakish whim of an abnormal devil. I do not predict a return to Mozart as one result of the war.

There are always those prone to believe that such a war as is now in progress has been brought about by an anarchic condition among the artists, as foolish a theory as one could well promulgate, and keep one’s mental balance. It is this group which steadfastly maintains that, after the war, things will be not merely as they were immediately before the war broke out, but as they were fifty years before. Now, it should be apparent to anyone but the oldest inhabitant that the music-dramas of Richard Wagner are aging rapidly. Public interest in them is on the decline, thanks to an absurd recognition, in some degree or other, everywhere from Bayreuth to Paris, from Madrid to New York, of what is known as the “Master’s tradition.” Some of this tradition has been invented by Frau Cosima Liszt von Bülow Wagner and all of it is guaranteed to put the Wagner plays rapidly in a class with the operas of Donizetti and Bellini, stalking horses for prima donnas trained in a certain school. Without going into particulars which would clog this issue, it may be stated that the tradition includes matters pertaining to scenery, staging, lighting, acting, singing, and even tempi in the orchestra. It is all-inclusive.

It must have been quite evident to even the casual concert-goer that German music has passed its zenith. It has had its day and it is not likely that post-bellum music will be Germanic. In an article in a recent number of “The Musical Quarterly,” Edgar Istel reviews German opera since Wagner with a consistent tone of depreciation. The subject, of course, does not admit of enthusiasm. He calls Edmund Kretzschmer and Karl Goldmark “the compromise composers.” There are probably not many Americans who have heard of the former or his “most successful opera,” Die Folkunger. Goldmark is better known to us, but we do not exaggerate the importance of Die Königin von Saba, the Sakuntala overture, or Die ländliche Hochzeit symphony. Nor do we foreigners to the Vaterland know much about Victor Nessler’s Der Trompeter von Säkkingen, although we hear one air from it frequently at Sunday night concerts in the opera house. August Bungert tried to outdo Wagner with a six-day opera cycle, Homerische Welt, produced in 1898-1903 and already forgotten. Max Schillings, whose name has occasionally figured on symphony orchestra programmes in America, is thus dismissed by Istel: “Schillings’ last work, Der Moloch (1906), proves his total inability as a dramatic composer.” Hans Pfitzner is another name on which we need not linger. Engelbert Humperdinck, of course, wrote the one German opera which has had a world-wide and continuous success since Parsifal—Hänsel und Gretel. But the music he has composed since then has not awakened much enthusiasm. Hänsel und Gretel is, after all, folk-music with Wagnerian orchestration. It assuredly is not from Humperdinck that we can look for post-bellum music. We have heard Kienzl’s very mediocre Der Kuhreigen and we have been promised a hearing of Evangelimann. The name of Siegfried Wagner signifies nothing. Ludwig Thuille wrote some very interesting music in the last act of Lobetanz, but that opera could not hold the stage at the Metropolitan Opera House. W. von Waltershausen’s Oberst Chabert has been given in London, not, however, with conspicuous success. D’Albert has written many German operas in spite of his Scotch birth. Of these the best is Tiefland, negligible in regarding the future. Leo Blech’s unimportant Versiegelt gave pleasure in Berlin for a time. Wolf-Ferrari, one of the most gifted of the German composers, is half Italian. His work, of course, is not notable for originality of treatment. Suzannen’s Geheimniss is very like an old Italian or Mozart opera. So is Le Donne Curiose. His cantata, Vita Nuova, is archaic in tone, a musical Cimabue or Giotto. I Giojelli della Madonna is an attempt at Italian verismo. Richard Strauss! the most considerable German musical figure of his time. His operas will still be given after the war and his tone-poems will be heard, but he has done his part in furthering the progress of art-music. He has nothing more to say. In The Legend of Joseph, the ballet which the Russians gave in Paris last summer, it was to be observed that the Strauss idiom exploited therein had fully expressed itself in the earlier works of this composer. Salome and Elektra represent Strauss’s best dramatic work, and Don Juan and Till Eulenspiegel are, perhaps, his best tone-poems. Richard Strauss, however, is assuredly not post-bellum. His music is a part of the riches of the past. One can easily pass rapidly by the names of Bruckner, Weingartner, and Gustav Mahler. Max Reger, I think, is not a great composer. But there are two Austrian names on which we must linger.

One of them is Erich Korngold, the boy composer, who is now eighteen years old. His earlier work, such as the ballet, Der Schneemann, sounds like Puccini with false notes. It is pretty music. Later, Korngold developed a fancy for writing Strauss and Reger with false notes. And he is still in process of development. What he may do cannot be entirely foreseen.