There, Mr. Editor, you have a pleasing comminglement of romance and colloquialism. Now that I have shown how to play the trick, let all who will go ahead and be their own musical Boswell.
But a truce to such foolery. I am wayward and gray of thought today. My soul is filled with the clash and dust of life. I hate the eternal blazoning of fierce woes and acid joys upon the orchestral canvas. Why must the music of a composer be played? Why must our tone-weary world be sorely grieved by the subjective shrieks and imprudent publications of some musical fellow wrestling in mortal agony with his first love, his first tailor's bill, his first acquaintance with the life about him? Why, I ask, should music leave the page on which it is indited? Why need it be played? How many beauties in a score are lost by translation into rude tones! How disenchanting sound those climbing, arbutus-like arpeggios and subtle half-tints of Chopin when played on that brutal, jangling instrument of wood, wire and iron, the pianoforte! I shudder at the profanation. I feel an oriental jealousy concerning all those beautiful thoughts nestling in the scores of Chopin and Schubert which are laid bare and dissected by the pompous pen of the music-critic. The man who knows it all. The man who seeks to transmute the unutterable and ineffable delicacies of tone into terms of commercial prose. And newspaper prose. Hideous jargon, I abominate you!
I am suffering from too many harmonic harangues. [Isn't this one?] I long for the valley of silence, Edgar Poe's valley, wherein not even a sigh stirred the amber-colored air [or wasn't it saffron-hued? I forget, and Poe is not to be had in this corner of the universe]. Why can't music be read in the seclusion of one's study, in the company of one's heart-beats? Why must we go to the housetop and shout our woes to the universe? The "barbaric yawp" of Walt Whitman, over the roofs of the world, has become fashionable, and from tooting motor-cars to noisy symphonies all is a conspiracy against silence. At night dream-fugues shatter the walls of our inner consciousness, and yet we call music a divine art! I love the written notes, the symbols of the musical idea. Music, like some verse, sounds sweeter on paper, sweeter to the inner ear. Music overheard, not heard, is the more beautiful. Palimpsestlike we strive to decipher and unweave the spiral harmonies of Chopin, but they elude as does the sound of falling waters in a dream. Those violet bubbles of prismatic light that the Sarmatian composer blows for us are too fragile, too intangible, too spirit-haunted to be played. [All this sounds as if I were really trying to write after the manner of the busy Princess Sayn-Wittgenstein, who helped Liszt to manufacture his book on Chopin; indeed, it is suspected, altered every line he wrote of it.]
O, for some mighty genius of color who will deluge the sky with pyrotechnical symphonies! Color that will soothe the soul with iridescent and incandescent harmonies, that the harsh, brittle noises made by musical instruments will no longer startle our weaving fancies. Yet if Shelley had not sung or Chopin chanted, how much poorer would be the world today. But that is no reason why school children should scream in chorus: "Life, like a dome of many-colored glass, stains the white radiance of eternity," or that tepid misses in their 'teens should murder the nocturnes of Chopin. Even the somnolent gurgle of the bullfrog, around the ponds of Manayunk, as he signals to his mate in the mud, is often preferable to music made by earthly hands. Let it be abolished. Electrocute the composer and banish the music-critic. Then let there be elected a supervisory board of trusty guardians, men absolutely above the reproach of having played the concertina or plunked staccato tunes on a banjo. Entrust to their care all beautiful music and poetry and prohibit the profane, vulgar, the curious, gaping herd from even so much as a glance at these treasures. For the few, the previous elect, the quintessential in art, let no music be sounded throughout the land. Let us read it and think tender and warlike silent thoughts.
And now, having too long detained you with my vagaries, let me say "good night," for it is getting dark, and before midnight I must patrol the keyboard for at least four hours, unthreading the digital intricacies of Kalkbrenner's Variations on the old melody, Sei ruhig mein Herz, or the Cat will hear you.
XVIII
OLD FOGY WRITES A SYMPHONIC POEM
"Definite feelings and emotions are unsusceptible of being embodied in music," says Eduard Hanslick in his Beautiful in Music. Now, you composers who make symphonic poems, why don't you realize that on its merits as a musical composition, its theme, its form, its treatment, that your work will endure, and not on account of its fidelity to your explanatory program?