Music after the great war, and other studies

by Carl Van Vechten

Spain has been heard from recently—Spain, which has lacked a composer of “art-music.” Albeniz and others have been writing piano music and now we are promised a one-act opera by Granados. Perhaps in time Spain may lift her head high and tinkle her castanets to some purpose, on programmes devoted to her own composers. But now it is Bizet, Chabrier, Debussy, Laparra, and Zandonai who have perverted these castanets and tambourines to their own uses.

I am no admirer of modern English music. I take less pleasure in hearing a piece by Sir Edward Elgar than I do in a mediocre performance of Le Prophète—and I assure you that Meyerbeer is not my favorite composer. A meaner skill than Sir Edward’s, perhaps, lies in Irving Berlin’s fingers, but a greater genius. I once spent a most frightful afternoon—at least nearly all of an afternoon—listening to Elgar’s violin concerto, and I remember a dreadfully dull symphony, that sounded as if it were played on a throbbing organ at vespers in a dark church on a hot Sunday afternoon. The Cockaigne overture is more to my taste, although I think it no great achievement. Has there been a real composer in Britannia since Sir Arthur Sullivan, whose works one rehears with a pleasure akin to ecstasy? I do not think so. Cyril Scott is interesting. Holbrooke, Delius, Grainger, Wallace, and Bantock write much complex music for the orchestra, to say nothing of piano pieces, songs, and operas. (Holbrooke supplements his labors in this direction with the writing of articles for “The English Review” and other periodicals, in which he complains bitterly that the English composer is without honor in his own country.) I find Scott’s piano pieces better. But since Il Barbiere di Siviglia and Le Nozze di Figaro there have been but few comic scores comparable to Patience. You will hear the Sullivan operas many times after the war, but one cannot think of founding a school upon them.

I shall not hesitate on the music of America, because in a country that has no ante-bellum music—one cannot speak with too great enthusiasm of Ethelbert Nevin and Edward MacDowell—there is no immediate promise of important development. However, in a digression, I should like to make a few remarks on the subject of the oft-repeated charge, re-echoed by Holbrooke in relation to British musicians, that American composers are neglected and have no chance for a hearing in their own country. Has ever a piano piece been played more often or sold more copies than MacDowell’s To a Wild Rose, unless it be Nevin’s Narcissus? Probably The Rosary has been sung more times in more quarters of the globe than Rule Britannia. Other American songs which have achieved an international success and a huge sale are At Parting, A Maid Sings Light, From the Land of the Sky-blue Water, and The Year’s at the Spring. Orchestral works by Paine, Hadley, Converse, and others, are heard almost as soon as they are composed, and many of them are heard more than once, played by more than one orchestra. Of late years it has been the custom to produce an American work each season at the Metropolitan Opera House, a custom fortunately abandoned during the season just past. No, it cannot be said that the American composer has been neglected.

Finland has presented us with Sibelius, whose latest works indicate that Helsingfors may have something to say about the trend of tone after the war, and from Poland Karol Szymanowski has sent forth some strange and appealing songs.

But it is to Russia, after all, I think, that we must turn for the inspiration, and a great deal of the execution, of our post-bellum music. Fortunately for us, we have not yet delved very deeply into the past of Russian music, in spite of reports to the contrary. Mr. Gatti-Casazza once assured me that Boris Godunow was the only Russian opera which stood any chance of success in America. He has doubtless revised his feeling on the subject, since he has announced Prince Igor for production this season, an opera which should be greeted with very warm enthusiasm, if the producers give any decent amount of attention to the very important ballet.

It is interesting, in turning to Russian literature, to discover that Turgenev in the middle of the nineteenth century was writing a masterpiece like “A Sportsman’s Sketches,” a work full of reserve and primitive force, and a strange charm. And Turgenev was born and bred a gentleman in the sense that Thackeray was born and bred a gentleman. In English literature we have travelled completely around the circle, through the artificial, the effete, and the sentimental, to the natural, the forceful, the primitive. Art like that of D. H. Lawrence, George Moore, and Theodore Dreiser is very much abroad in the lands. Russia began her circle only in the last century with her splendidly barbaric school of writers who touch the soil at every point, the soil and the soul: Turgenev, Gogol, Pushkin, Dostoievsky, Andreyev, Tolstoy, Tchekhov, Gorky, and Artzybachev, a noble group of names. We find in Russia a situation very akin to that of Ireland, a people commercially under-developed, in a large measure born to suffering, keenly alive to artistic impulse.

In Ireland this impulse has expressed itself almost entirely through the written word, but in Russia it has found an outlet in a thousand channels. (The arts have grouped themselves together in the glowing splendor of the Russian Ballet productions.) Music, like literature, sprang into being in Russia, fed on the rich folk-songs of the Slavic races, during the nineteenth century; and again like Russian literature, its first baby notes were wild, appealing, barbaric, forceful, and sincere—the music of the steppes and the people, rather than the music of the drawing-room and the nobility. Let us remember that about the time Richard Wagner was writing Tristan und Isolde, Moussorgsky was putting on paper, with infinite pain, the notes of the scores of the poignant Boris Godunow and the intense La Khovanchina. Since then the Russian music world has been occupied by men who have given their lives to the foundation of a national school. Their work has been largely overshadowed in America by the facile genius of Tschaikowsky, who wrote the most popular symphony of the nineteenth century, but who is less Russian and less important than many of his confrères.

If for a time after the war one must turn to the past for operatic novelties, one can do no better than to go to Russia. It is my firm conviction that several of the Russian operas would have a real success here. La Khovanchina to many musicians is more beautiful than Boris. It is indeed a serious work of genius. The chorus with which the first act closes has power enough to entice me to the theatre at any time. I do not know of a death-scene in all the field of opera as strong in its effect as that of the Prince Ivan Khovansky. He is stabbed and he falls dead. He does not sing again, he does not move; there are no throbs of the violins, no drum beats. There is a pause. The orchestra is silent. The people on the stage are still. It is tremendous!

Rimsky-Korsakow’s music is pretty well known in America. His Scheherazade and Antar suites are played very often; but his operas remain unsung here. Why? He wrote some sixteen of them before he died. Even so early a work as A Night in May contains many lovely pages. It is a folk-song opera built along the old lines of set numbers. It reminds one of The Bartered Bride. First produced in 1880, it does not show its age. The Snow Maiden contains the Song of the Shepherd Lehl and one or two other airs familiar in the concert répertoire. Sadko, if given in the Russian manner, would fill any opera house for two performances a week for the season; and Ivan the Terrible is a masterpiece of its kind. But the greatest of them all is the last lyric drama of the composer, The Golden Cock, in which this great tone colorist bent his ear further towards the future than he had ever done before.

The death of Alexander Scriabine recently in Petrograd created little comment, although the papers had been filled a few weeks before with descriptions of the very bad performance of his Prometheus by the Russian Symphony Orchestra. Scriabine, another Gordon Craig, was too great a theorist, too concerned with the perfect in his art, ever to arrive at anything approximating the actual. As an influence, he can already be felt. His synchronism of music, light, and perfumes was never realized in his own music, although the Russian Ballet has completely realized it. (How cleverly that organization—or is it a movement?—has seized everybody’s good ideas, from Wagner’s to Adolphe Appia’s!) As for Scriabine’s strange scales and disharmonies, Igor Strawinsky has made the best use of them—Igor Strawinsky, perhaps the greatest of the musicians of the immediate future. I hope Americans may hear his wonderfully beautiful opera, The Nightingale; and if all the music of the future is like that, I stand with bowed and reverent head before the music of the future (with the mental reservation, however, that I may spurn it when it is no longer music of the future). His three ballets are also works of genius.