From Grieg to Brahms: Studies of Some Modern Composers and Their Art

by Daniel Gregory Mason

It has been necessary to dwell at some length on Franck's life and character because they throw so much light on his music. To an unusual degree it is the expression of himself, full of his peculiar contemplative emotion. The harmonic background is rich, somber, and vague, like the prevailing mood of a religious devotee; from it constantly emerge phrases of song, phrases of the most poignant aspiration, like passions in a dream, voicing those intense yet elusive feelings which irradiate none but introspective minds. They are like the cries of human lovers in a world of silence and mystery, or, better, they are the cries of a finite soul that yearns for God and finds him not. One feels always in Franck's music the tragedy of the finite and the infinite. Those groping, shifting harmonies, above which the pathetic fragments of melody constantly sound for a moment, somehow irresistibly suggest the great unknown universe in which men's little lives are acted. All is vague save the momentary feature, and that presses on towards a fulfillment that perpetually eludes it. All shifts and passes, save only that never-ceasing mood of aspiration, that restless striving of the fragment for completion. Spiritual unrest is the characteristic quality of this music—the unrest of a spirit pure and ardent but forever unsatisfied.

Now, it is perhaps not too fantastic to find in the mingled vagueness and poignancy of this music the proper artistic expression of mysticism. So must a mystic express himself. For it is characteristic of the mystical temperament to yearn for ideal satisfactions, but to find none in finite forms. Mysticism, in fact, is one of the ways of solving, or perhaps we should say of ignoring, that primal and protean mystery of human life, the conflict between ideal needs and actual facts. Realism meets it by denying the needs and exalting the facts; idealism attempts to mold the real into conformity with the ideal, of course with very partial success. The mystic, too earnest to follow the realistic method, too impatient to endure the plodding progress of idealism, cuts the Gordian knot by discarding the actual altogether. He pronounces it too inelastic, too constricting, and dispenses with it. He hugs the ideal to his heart, but can see no virtue in the real. Actualities, objects, events, and forms which to the idealist are precious if only partial expressions of spiritual values, are to him wholly recalcitrant, wholly external and illusory. The really precious thing, he says, is something transcendent, something remote, something that cannot transpire in events or body itself in forms, because it is infinite and complete, while these are finite, broken, and limited. Henri-Frédéric Amiel, a man peculiarly dominated by this way of viewing things, wrote in his Journal, «Nothing finite is true, is interesting, is worthy to fix my attention. All that is particular is exclusive, and all that is exclusive repels me. There is nothing non-exclusive but the All; my end is communion with Being through the whole of Being.» Now, whatever may be the merits of this point of view, it obviously involves a certain degree of artistic failure. The mystic cannot be entirely successful in art. For art depends on organization in definite forms, and the mystic rejects all particular forms as finite. «Reality, the present, the irreparable, the necessary,» writes Amiel, «repel and even terrify me.... The life of thought alone seems to me to have enough elasticity and immensity, to be free enough from the irreparable; practical life makes me afraid.» Accordingly, men of this temperament are defeated in their search for beauty by an unconquerable shyness of all its incarnations. They fear that in defining their fancy they will vulgarize it. It is their fate to long for an all-inclusive form in a world where forms are mutually exclusive, to strive to utter truth in one great word, when even the shortest sentence must occupy time. Amiel himself is a pathetic example of the mystic's destiny in art. Haunted all his life by the vision of infinite beauty, the conception of absolute truth, he could never bring himself to accept the limitations of all human performance, and his talent was almost as unproductive as it was exalted. He never could embody his aspirations. Tantalizing him with the suggestion of supernal beauties, they resisted all his efforts to come up with and embrace them, because he denied himself the use of those definite forms in which alone, however inadequately, ideals can be realized.

In many respects César Franck is the analogue in music of Amiel in literature. That vague richness of his emotional tone, which like a dark background of night is constantly lighted up by meteoric outbursts of passion, is strangely like the somber moralizings and speculations, in the «Journal Intime,» among which Amiel's cries of spiritual pain, doubt, and longing stand out with such sudden, poignant pathos. Franck has in common with Amiel the mystic's longing for ideal satisfactions, and the mystic's distrust of all finite means of attaining them. He, too, is «afraid» of the forms of practical life, of the conventional devices of musical structure and the types evolved by tradition. He avoids always the obvious, the natural even, and gropes toward some unattainable ideal of expression. So great is his distrust of the understood, the accepted, the usual and intelligible, that he is always leaving the beaten track and roaming afield after some novel and untamed beauty. It will be worth while to get to closer quarters with this tendency, and to see exactly how it operates.

It is hard to make those unacquainted with musical technique understand how much of fixity there is in the musical idiom, how definite are the types of musical form, how potent the requisitions of musical syntax. Yet, without a sense of this fixity in the material, it is impossible to estimate justly those impulses and motives which may lead a composer to violate usages and to disappoint expectations. In the matter of harmony, for instance, there are certain types of procedure, certain progressions and sequences of chords, that are as stable and uniform as the types of animal or vegetable form. A horse, a dog, or a man is not a more definite organism than the two chords in the «Amen» of a hymn tune. This group or cluster of two chords, linked together by a common tone held over from one to the other, yet made distinct by progression of the other voices, is typical of a kind of harmonic form that long usage has established as part of our mental furniture. We are used to thinking of chords thus welded by a common tone, and we demand this sort of coherence in our harmonic progressions, just as we demand that a horse's body shall be furnished with a horse's legs, or that a transitive verb shall have an object. To be sure, this particular sort of cluster, in which both chords are, as we say, consonant, is somewhat less determinate than another sort which we shall describe presently, because, since all the tones of the first chord are equally important, any one may be selected as the link, and there will be consequently some latitude in the choice of the second chord, which completes the group. But within these limits this sort of harmonic type is definite and fixed, and that it is deeply ingrained in our mode of thought is proved by our horror of «consecutive octaves» and «fifths,» those bugbears of harmony students, which are bad chiefly because they are not compatible with the retention of a common linking tone between the two members of the group.

Here we have, then, one of those fundamental harmonic forms which are in music what idioms or phrases are in language. It is striking how sedulously César Franck, distrustful of the definite, the conventional, avoids them. Compared with the work of a keen rationalist like Saint-Saëns, his music is curiously incoherent, curiously loose-knit, groping, and indeterminate. His pages are studded with departures and evasions; he delights in going some other way than we expect, or in writing chords that do not give us even any basis of expectation. Consecutive octaves and fifths, so terrible to lovers of cogency and sequence, are an especial feature of his harmony, giving it that curious lapsing effect so characteristic and indescribable. His entire tone-mass has a trick of sliding bodily up or down, which disconcerts, even while it fascinates, one who is accustomed to harmonic stability. The student need only play over the opening of the Symphony or the first page of the String Quartet to feel that here is a man who treats traditions debonairly, and who thus suggests novel beauties without defining them.

Equally irresponsible is he in his treatment of another sort of harmonic form which is intrinsically even more definite than the clusters of consonant chords like the «Amen.» When there is a dissonant tone in the first chord, a tone which, having slight justification for being, presses urgently toward a neighboring tone in the next chord, into which it is said to «resolve,» then the cluster, as a whole, is even more determinate. The dissonance introduces a tension that must be relieved in one definite way. It involves its own resolution just as unstable equilibrium in a body involves its falling in the direction of the greatest pull. The alien tone in the chord is got rid of by the path of least resistance; it is a foreign element that must be discharged. So potent is this tendency of dissonant tones to resolve that it is one of the chief means of vitalizing the entire musical fabric. Unless music constantly got out of harmony with itself it would no more progress than a man would walk unless before each step he lost his balance. It would stagnate. Consider, for example, the last phrase of that highly vitalized tune, «The Man that Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo.» No one could attribute stagnation to this phrase, whatever other faults he might find in it; and its impetus is largely due to the vigor with which it lands on the dissonant chord next before the last, and the consequent pull of this chord into the last. Try to conceive of ending without that last chord, that resolution in which the foreign element is discharged and all comes to rest. It is told of Mendelssohn that he rushed down-stairs in his night clothes early one morning to resolve a dominant seventh chord (such as we have on the syllable «Car») which some waggish friend struck and left uncompleted. Mendelssohn was of course unusually sensitive to harmonic law, but it is not too much to draw from this incident the conclusion that a chord which can get a man out of bed in the morning to resolve it must pretty potently suggest resolution. Dissonant chords, in fact, are anything but inert elements in the chemistry of harmonic composition. They have strong affinities and combine powerfully.

Yet César Franck is inclined either to ignore these tendencies or to shift them into unexpected and circuitous channels. The dissonant chords, though they occur often in his work, seldom take their normal course. They are led into new dissonances, diverted to alien keys, subjected to ingenious modifications, and in all ways wrested from the realm of the obvious. Towards the end of the Introduction to the first movement of the String Quartet, for instance, the student will find dominant sevenths most interestingly unfaithful to their family tradition, and effecting modulation through distant keys. Similar treatment will be found on almost any page in this Quartet, in the Quintet, the Symphony, and the piano works. Thus, Franck not only goes counter to the less determinate harmonic types in which both chords are consonant, but he loves to disappoint our expectations when they are strongly established by dissonances. Nothing is more characteristic of him than the formal indefiniteness of his harmony. Full as it is of delicious and unwonted beauties, it lacks accurate organization, clarity and solidity of chord sequence. It is a web of shifting tones, without obvious interrelationship and inevitable progression.

When we turn to Franck's treatment of meter and rhythm, we get some new side-lights on the way his mysticism affects his music. He is, in the first place, noticeably lacking in that vigor of pulse, that strong accentuation, which is the delight of active temperaments. He sings constantly, almost never dances. After a while the intensity of the song-like phrases, so packed with emotion, becomes cloying, and we long for a little of the headlong, thoughtless progress of Grieg and Dvořák. We need the relaxation of muscular activity. It would be a relief to stop feeling for a moment and be borne along on a wave of perfectly unemotional «passage-work.» But Franck never relieves himself and his hearer by passages of brisk motion in which the interest is entirely active; he is, so to speak, a very sedentary composer. And so the rare beauties that stud the page lose something by being set so thickly. The richness of Franck's emotional impulse is a disadvantage to his metrical structure. The same thing, again, is true of his rhythm or phraseology. We saw in the Introduction how elementary metrical groups—measures—were built up into phrases and tunes, and how the strongest synthetic minds got the greatest variety and breadth of phrase. Now Franck's phrasing, like Grieg's, is of the primitive kind that reveals lack of mental concentration, inability to build up wide and complex forms. Draw a line across his staff at every breathing-point, and your lines will fall pretty regularly after the measures whose numbers are multiples of four. Try the same thing with Beethoven, and there will be no telling where the lines will come, so varied is the phraseology. In comparison, Franck's themes seem hardly more than bundles of motifs, loosely tied together. And of course this effect is unfortunately reinforced by the peculiarities of his harmony. How could a theme hold itself together in such a kaleidoscope? How could it sustain itself on such a tonal quicksand? Thus his tunes, rich as they are in single phrases of poignant beauty, seldom develop much breadth. They start out well, but soon lose themselves in the web or fall into poorly welded segments. In the larger structural arrangement of his material as well as in his primary metrical order he falls short of the perfect organization of more powerful minds.

Franck illustrates, then, in many ways, in his erratic treatment of harmony, in his metrical monotony, and in his «shortness of breath,» the mystic's failure to master form. And yet, so beautiful are his effects, so arresting is his personality, one feels instinctively that there is in him something which destructive criticism cannot assail. The very inarticulateness of the mystic is, in fact, a sort of eloquence, perhaps all the more persuasive because it hints at beauties rather than defines them. However beyond his reach his aspirations may be, so long as they are genuine and ardent he will have his unique artistic message. His work will gain a pathetic appeal from the very fact that it suggests feelings it cannot embody, and his inarticulateness may even open up ways to new modes of utterance by reminding men that there are truths other than those their formulas so smugly stereotype. Thus a writer like Amiel, ineffective as he seems from one point of view, is not without his liberalizing influence in literature. In the same way, César Franck, the mystic among musicians, thanks to his profound insight and emotion, combined though they be with the characteristic shortcomings of the seer, will widen the scope of future musical technique and expression.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE. —The Prelude, Choral, and Fugue for Piano are to be had in the Collection Litolff. The Prelude, Aria, and Finale are published by J. Hamelle, Paris. These are the only piano pieces of Franck that are easily obtainable. The house of Hamelle also issues a four-hand arrangement of the Symphony, and Durand, of Paris, publishes a four-hand arrangement of the three masterly Chorals for organ, as well as the original edition of these, and of two sets of organ pieces, one of six and the other of three. The «Beatitudes» has been reprinted, with English words, by G. Schirmer. A few of Franck's songs, particularly «La Procession,» «Panis Angelicus,» and «Le Mariage des Roses,» will be found in the portfolios of most large music dealers.