Musical Studies

by Ernest Newman

He is evidently a man of enormous nervous energy. You can see it, for one thing, in the style of his melodies. They are remarkable for their huge leaps, the great arcs they traverse, the wide distances between their parts—all pointing to great waves of nervous energy that cannot be confined within the narrow bounds of the ordinary melody. Occasionally it does him rather a disservice; it becomes his master instead of his servant. There is really no need for this incessant piling-up of more and more sound in the orchestra; its one sufficient condemnation is that frequently no result comes out commensurate with the huge means that have to be employed. Thousands of pages of our modern music would be equally great, equally moving, with a vastly smaller expenditure of effort. A man like Strauss takes an exuberant joy, the joy of a healthy athlete doing difficult feats, in weaving a musical texture that is a marvel of ingenious technique. It looks, and really is, wonderful on paper; but there is no gainsaying that precisely the same effect could often be achieved by much simpler means. Now and again we find ourselves saying that line after line might have been struck out of the score without any of the final effect being lost. Nay, Strauss's absorption in the pure joy of scoring occasionally leads him into errors of technique that a smaller man would have escaped. In the dance in Zarathustra, for example, his excessive subdivision of the strings merely results in the waltz-theme coming out far too feebly. His own specification at the beginning of the score is for sixteen first violins (to consider this section alone). In the waltz he divides them into (1) first desk, (2) second, third, fourth, and fifth desks. Then he divides the first desk again, giving part of them an arpeggio figure, and the remainder a theme in two parts, involving a further subdivision of this small remainder. The result is that the melody is shorn of all its power. He has marked it forte, but a forte is impossible, even with the proper toning down of the rest of the strings. There is no earthly need for such a page as this. The whole strength of the strings is frittered away upon things that do not come out, and would be quite unimportant if they did come out; and the really important theme is shorn of all its impressiveness. There is really no necessity for a great deal of the orchestral complexity in which Strauss now and then delights. It is not essential to the proper presentation of his ideas; it puts an unnecessary strain on the time and the nerves of the orchestra; and it tempts young admirers to go and do likewise, with results absolutely fatal to their chance of getting a performance from any conductor.

It may be that we are only beating the air in calling Strauss's attention to facts like these; it may be that without his defects we should not have his qualities, that the turbulent flood of energy that leads him into occasional extravagances of scoring is only part of the greater flood that makes his inspiration the colossal, overwhelming thing it is. All through the man's brain there is a touch of disorder, a strain of something or other abnormal, that makes it hard for him to work at anything for ten minutes without an irresistible desire surging up in him to deface it. He works at the picture like the soul of inspiration itself; then suddenly a saturnine whim shoots along his nerves, and he makes a long erratic stroke with the brush that comes perilously near to destroying the harmony of the whole thing. An able critic once expressed it to me, after a performance of Ein Heldenleben, that Strauss as a composer was something like Rubinstein as a pianist—he cannot go through anything of any length without doing at least one foolish thing in it. Roughly speaking he was right. Shall we say that in every great musician there is a flaw in the mental structure that has to show in one way or another, and that those are lucky in whom it does not show in their music? So much folly, that is, is given to each of them, and it has to come out somewhere. In Wagner it came out in the prose works; they were a beneficent scheme of Providence for sweeping the brain free of its cobwebs, and leaving the purified instrument in all the better condition for its music. Beethoven's madness came out in his private life, again leaving the brain working in music in perfect ease and balance. Strauss does not write prose works like Wagner, and does not, like Beethoven, pour the water all over himself when he is washing his hands, or use a lady's candle-snuffers as a tooth-pick. He is distressingly normal in these respects; and lacking such safety valves for the little bit of folly there is in him, it unfortunately comes out in his music. In the earlier days he could give full rein to his humour, his power of characterisation, with the minimum of desire to irritate his hearer for the pure love of the thing; in Till Eulenspiegel, for example, it is almost all pure delight, a flow of wit and humour that only for a moment or two is interrupted by the antics of the mischievous schoolboy. But after that the tendency grew seriously on Strauss to mar his picture by some piece of malicious folly, to thrust his head through the canvas and grin at the public, or to place his thumb to his nose and extend his fingers at them in a derisive flourish.

It is in Ein Heldenleben that this tendency is seen at its worst. With all its great beauties and its titanic powers, it remains finally less satisfactory than it easily might have been. It is not all bathed in the one light; the picture has been seen disconnectedly; it is an attempt at the marriage of contrarieties. The great question is, What does Ein Heldenleben purport to represent? Is it meant for a purely objective painting of a hero—a representation, as it were, of the hero, per se—or is it intended, in parts at least, to draw the hearer's attention to the personality of Strauss himself? The official explanation of the work—authorised, we are told, by the composer—is that Ein Heldenleben is meant as a kind of pendant to Don Quixote. There he had sketched an individual figure, "whose vain search after heroism leads to insanity." Here he was concerned to present "not a single poetic or historical figure, but rather a more general and free ideal of great and manly heroism"; and the idea that the hero of the poem is anywhere Strauss himself is scouted vigorously.

Now, as regards the general handling of the music, it is, I think, because Strauss has had this generalised picture in his mind that he has here come to grief. Don Quixote is such a masterpiece of humanism precisely because Strauss has confined himself to a strictly human figure. You can psychologise both broadly and minutely about a human character, but it is extremely difficult to make a pure abstraction interesting. At every step you are likely to fall into either the bombastic or the commonplace. Especially in music should an abstraction be treated as broadly as possible; the only hope of salvation lies in avoiding an absurd contrast between the particular and the general. This is precisely what Strauss, with all his genius, has not succeeded in avoiding; and when we come to examine his scheme a little more closely, we have every reason to be dissatisfied with the authorised version of its purport. In the first place, this hero in the abstract, this representative of "a more general and free ideal of great and manly heroism," becomes less and less a generalised type as the work goes on, and at last—in spite of what the inspired commentators may say—strikes a great many of us as being nothing more nor less than a musician—rather a singular narrowing, surely, of the conception of a hero; and this musician has a curious resemblance to Strauss himself. No official disclaimers can get rid of those twenty or twenty-five quotations from Strauss's own earlier works which figure as "the Hero's Works of Peace" in the authorised analysis. The ingenious remark of the analyst, that "quoting salient features from his most important works, he lets us see that the experiences of the hero have also been his own," is really the idlest trifling. When a man sets out to describe a typical hero, a "general and free ideal of great and manly heroism," he does not, as a rule, give as samples of that universal hero's activity a bunch of quotations from almost every work he himself has already written. To have done this seriously would have argued a ludicrous egoism in Strauss; and, in spite of the official story, I prefer to believe that he was not quite so absurd as this. We are here face to face with that curious muddling of the purpose, that perverse desire to stick his own head through the canvas, that is occasionally so characteristic of him. He cannot resist the impulse at once to exhibit his marvellous technique, and to fling a pot of paint in the public's face, as Ruskin said of Whistler; and the result is this wonderfully clever but psychologically unjustifiable rhapsody upon himself, inserted in the middle of what is meant to be a purely objective portrait of a hero. It is not easy, again, to understand the significance or see the appropriateness of the section entitled "The Hero's Battlefield." If ever there was anything in music that could be said to aim at suggesting, crudely and melodramatically, the horror and the nervous excitement of a physical conflict between armed hosts, it is this section, with its appalling and hideous racket, that sounds like strenuous boiler-riveting. But musicians do not fight battles of this kind, surely; and a scheme that represents a hero whose "works of peace" are purely intellectual becomes nonsense when it depicts him fighting like a Hooligan among Hooligans, bludgeoning and being bludgeoned.

It is all due, of course, to this muddling up of the two plans—that of a very definite hero whom Strauss knows very well, and that of a generalised and indefinite hero whom he finds himself compelled to describe in the biggest superlatives. The two conceptions will not equate, will not blend; the one is always trying to destroy the other. All through the work one is dimly conscious of an absence of homogeneity, of failure to make the general scheme as coherent and convincing as it might be; though the man's genius is so titanic that it almost kills our criticism while we are listening to the work. It is a pity, too, that he should sacrifice for a moment the nobility of the general scheme in order to turn aside for a trifling jeu d'esprit, in the notorious section that treats of the hero's antagonists. There is cleverness in the characterisation; Strauss is painting the portraits of individual critics who have annoyed him, and those who have seen him, at rehearsal, suggest to the eyes of the players the different types he is satirising, must needs laugh even against their own will. But the section as a whole is a monstrosity; and it is lamentable to see a great genius turn aside from that mighty statue that he has just begun to carve, in order to vent his personal feeling against his personal antagonists. It is simply a crime against art.

V

It is in Ein Heldenleben, more than anywhere else, that we have the defects of Strauss's qualities. He is of the type that, masterly as its self-control generally is, cannot refrain at times from becoming defiantly extravagant. It all goes along with his enormous vital energy, that energy which is met with in only one or two men in every century, and that invariably prompts its possessor now and then to the commission of something or other we would rather have had left undone. There is in Strauss something of the débordement of Rabelais, a lust of existence and of apprehension too big to be kept within normal bounds. There is something in him, too, of Hokusai—that colossal genius whose eager spirit seemed to try to fill every corner, every crevice, of the visible world; something of the Japanese artist's interest in all forms of life, something too of the same occasional corruption of the imagination—as in the unfinished series of prints entitled The Hundred Tales, where the artist, out of the very excess of his power and ardour, turns life into a hideous, terrifying mockery of itself. Strauss is cosmic in his understanding and his sympathies, but not as men like Goethe and Leonardo are, whose vision is always clear, and whose energies are always held in check by another energy higher than themselves; like Rabelais, like Hokusai, like Goya, there come to him moments when the flood of life within him overflows, and he is hardly master of the strange shapes that issue from his brain. A positive artistic rage seizes him, and he embraces life with an ardour that is cruel, brutal—a passion that has a touch of Sadism in it.

If this enormous sensitiveness to everything that goes on in the world, and this quickness of reaction of the imagination upon it all, are answerable for Strauss's occasional lapses from good taste, they account also for the profounder and more vital qualities of his art—his humour and his humanism, the qualities that make Feuersnot so delightful and Don Quixote so exceedingly great. London treated the latter work unkindly at its solitary hearing of it; it is, indeed, too vast, too many-sided, to be understood at first acquaintance. One critic called it "ugly, laboured, and eccentric"; another wrote that it "contains more sheer ugliness than any other score written by any responsible person of whom we have ever heard, or whose work we have ever studied.... Everything seems in Don Quixote to be discordant for the sheer sake of discord.... We condemn that work from every musicianly point of view; the thing is an artistic arrogance, an attempt to make the best out of the worst, ... utterly and completely a failure; it has no recommendation of beauty, not even the recommendation of fine construction; it is a hopeless piece of exaggerated and intentional cleverness." Well, a significant thing happened on the very night on which Don Quixote created such heartburning. This frightfully complex work, which was absolutely unknown to more than perhaps ten people in the audience, and was consequently misunderstood almost from first to last, was followed by the much earlier Tod und Verklärung, a work which itself, a few years ago, was looked upon as perilously near folly and ugliness. Anyone who now thinks Tod und Verklärung a tough nut to crack is looked upon as a hopeless Conservative in music, so very quickly does the world move in these matters. Even the Times said that after Don Quixote the Tod und Verklärung sounded quite sane and normal, or words to that effect. We know how Also sprach Zarathustra was received in 1897, and how accustomed we have grown to it since then, on the strength of some three or four performances; we know how many people who shied nervously at the first performance of Ein Heldenleben now take it as easily as a cat laps milk. In the face of facts like these, is it not somewhat hasty to bespatter the Don Quixote with opprobrious epithets on the strength of just one performance? People have blundered over Strauss before, and been compelled to eat their words when they came to know him better; they have run away from the ogre like frightened children, only to discover long after that the supposed ogre was a kindly and well-disposed person, of something more than ordinary human build perhaps, but still on the plane of normal, not sub-normal nor super-normal, humanity. I say with confidence that they will in time admit that they have gone grievously astray over Don Quixote. It lies on the mere surface of the matter that some parts of it are ravishingly beautiful; you have only to play for yourself on the piano the death music, or the Don's long eulogy of the knightly life, to feel the very heart leap within you. If this is not surpassingly great music there is no music in the world worthy of the name. Of other parts the beauty will be perceived when the work is better known; and the Don Quixote will then be recognised to be in some ways the profoundest, noblest thing Strauss has ever done. It is, of course, extraordinarily realistic in its imitations at times, and I can imagine how the sheep and the wind-machine jar on the nerves of ordinarily sensitive people. But you must just laugh at these things and pass them by, take them as a piece of deliberate musical impertinence, and laugh with the composer, not at him. It is really a gratuitous assumption that Strauss is a fool because he has given free wing to his diablerie here and there; he knows as well as any one the precise value of all this kind of thing, but he apparently claims that once or twice in a lifetime it is worth doing for the pure fun of it. We must first of all get the right point of view if we are to understand Don Quixote. It is all set in a strange, mad atmosphere; the folly that hovers round it is part of the psychology of the piece; and it is the perfect transmutation of the mental processes of Quixote into tone that makes the work so wonderful, so unique. If a man is not smitten through and through by the pathos of section after section of the piece, I can only say, for my part, that he has not grasped the real significance of the work. Frequent hearing of it will make the extraordinarily original musical tissue quite familiar to men's ears, and when this has been done there will be no bar to the comprehension of the profoundly human psychology of a masterpiece that only Strauss could have written. The score is a treasure-house of true and noble things, which only come to you in full force when you have steeped yourself in its strange atmosphere. Take, for example, the variation immediately preceding the Finale, representing the weary homeward ride of Quixote and Sancho after the Don's defeat by the Knight of the White Moon. In these long descending wails of the orchestra you have all the anguish, all the disillusionment of the poor knight painted with an expressiveness, a fidelity, that sets one thinking of visual as well as auditory things. He illustrates the scene as consummately as a pictorial artist could do, and at the same time throws over it the melting melancholy that music alone among the arts can express. You can see these poor broken creatures, with bowed heads, pacing wearily along on steeds no less sorry, no less bruised than themselves. The whole thing breathes physical and mental fatigue and moral despair. The score of Don Quixote is full of a human quality that we rarely get to such perfection anywhere else, even in Strauss; and London lost a golden opportunity in not taking the work to its heart at once. As it was, the more obvious bits of realism in it revolted a good many people, and left them with insufficient patience to seek beneath the better kind of humour for the pathos that underlies it; while the extraordinary complexity of the musical tissue was all against a comprehension of the work at a first hearing.

What makes the Don Quixote so great a work is, in a word, the wise and tender humanity of its humour. We can put aside, if we like, all the wonderful witchery of its technique, its extraordinary graphic power, its exhilarating and amusing imitations of reality—for there is here a descriptive sense surpassing in its manifestations Till Eulenspiegel and Ein Heldenleben at their best. The wise man, who accepts with thankfulness all that music can give him, will not reject all this with a sneer and a condescending remark about music "confining itself to its proper province." The day has gone by for primitive academic æsthetics of that kind. But I do not want to lay stress upon this side of Don Quixote, simply because there is infinitely more in the work than this. It represents musical character-sketching brought to a finer point of perfection than can be met with anywhere outside the magic world of Wagner. But it differs from Wagner's drawing in that it is less opulent, more concise, more sharply conceived; it is wholly appropriate to the sketching block upon which the characters are drawn, just as Wagner's heroic figures depend upon and are justified by the huge canvas and the gorgeous range of colour that he is able to devote to them. The Don Quixote puts us in mind of first-rate book-illustration; we could hardly see the characters more distinctly, both in themselves and in relation to their surroundings, if they were set before us in black and white.

And how tender the drawing is, how exquisitely human is the feeling for these two poor tragic-comic actors! It is this that finally makes the work so precious—its unfailing pity, its intuitive avoidance of anything that would make it simply unthinking comedy. Strauss's Sancho is very humorous, but your laughter at him is always softened with tears; while the portrait of Quixote has an added touch of pathos in that it invariably suggests the spare, worn frame of the poor, middle-aged knight. It is true in this as in every other respect. His love-singing is that of a middle-aged man; the pitiful sorrow that envelops the ride homeward after his defeat is that of middle-age; the knight is broken, disillusioned, as only men can be whose physical as well as mental forces have passed their prime. For my part, I can no longer think of Cervantes's story without Strauss's music, just as I cannot think of Goethe's Erl King without the music of Schubert, or of the Lorelei without the music of Liszt.