Figure XXIII.
From "Souvenirs."
This melodic conception of harmony has always been a fundamental characteristic of d'Indy's style, as examples from widely sundered periods will easily show. The first, Figure XXII, is a bit from the Chant Elégiaque in the early Trio for Clarinet, Cello, and Piano (1887). The charming unexpectedness of the twist back into E major is thorough d'Indy, as is also the use of a persistent figure (given to the cello in the original) and the rhythmic modification of this same figure to provide the bass in the second measure. The second passage, shown in Figure XXIII, dates from thirty years later, and appears in "Souvenirs" (1906). Here again the melodies "find a way," and a more interesting, vista-opening way than any sonorities could suggest. Such passages enable us to get the full sense of what their composer means when he writes: "The study of chords for themselves is, from the musical point of view, an absolute æsthetic error, for harmony springs from melody, and ought never to be separated from it in its application.... There is only one chord, the perfect chord [triad], alone consonant, because it alone gives the sense of repose or equilibrium. All the combinations that people call 'dissonant chords,' necessitating, in order to be examined, an artificial arrest in the melodies that constitute them, have no proper existence, since in making abstraction of the movement that engenders them, one suppresses their unique reason for being. Chords have too often become the end of music; they ought never to be anything but a means, a consequence, a phenomenon essentially transient."[44] It may be held that d'Indy sometimes goes too far in his denunciations of harmonic theories based on the conception of the "chord," as for example in his note on the famous opening phrase of "Tristan and Isolde." It may also be justly remarked that his own method is not always happy in its results—that the way his melodies find is sometimes an obscure and wandering, or an unnatural and forced way. Nevertheless it remains on the whole true that on the one hand the chord conception of harmony has been responsible for a vast mass of pedantry, and has paralyzed and hamstrung whole generations of students, and that on the other hand it favors the purely sensuous trifling with tones of which there is so much in our day; while the best pages of Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Wagner, Franck, d'Indy show a thousand beauties and poignancies which without the help of melody could never have been discovered.
Figure XXIV.
Seule la Mort l'injurieuse
Mort appellera, la
Clair Vie
In the course of Kaito's prophecy, in "Fervaal," there is a deeply moving passage to the words: "Only Death, baleful Death, shall summon Life," which strikingly illustrates its composer's way of making all the elements of music contribute to expression (see Figure XXIV). Here the upward inflection of the voice, the strange intervals, the vague harmonies, the halting movement, even the sighing syncopation of the bass, all contribute to the interpretation of the opening lines. But above all, how inexplicably stirring is the gradual increase of force and rise of pitch up to the clear chord of D major (note the composer's indication, "Clair") at the word "Life" ("Vie")! Gloom and mystery give place to hope, faith, will, to which the ecclesiastical harmonies lend an unmistakable religious coloring. This change, completely spontaneous in effect, is dictated by an art that conceals itself, and introduces us to one of the most individual features of d'Indy's harmonic technique, his ease of modulation. In his Cours de Composition Musicale he has worked out his theories of the expressive use of modulation with characteristic thoroughness, and with unprecedented amplitude of detail. To resume his points here, however, interesting as they are, would take us too deeply into technical matters, especially as our main interest is now in his application rather than in his statement of them. The essential principles may therefore be briefly summarized, in his own words, as follows:
(1) "Expression is the unique reason for being of modulation."