For example, if I were a very talented young composer—which I am not—and had mastered the tools of my trade—knew everything from a song to a symphony, and my instrumentation covered the whole gamut of the orchestral pigment.... Well, one night as I tossed wearily on my bed—it was a fine night in spring, the moon rounded and lustrous and silvering the lake below my window—suddenly my musical imagination began to work.
I had just been reading, and for the thousandth time, Browning's Childe Roland, with its sinister coloring and spiritual suggestions. Yet it had never before struck me as a subject suitable for musical treatment. But the exquisite cool of the night, its haunting mellow flavor, had set my brain in a ferment. A huge fantastic shadow threw a jagged black figure on the lake. Presto, it was done, and with a mental snap that almost blinded me.
I had my theme. It will be the first theme in my new symphonic poem, Childe Roland. It will be in the key of B minor, which is to be emblematic of the dauntless knight who to "the dark tower came," unfettered by obstacles, physical or spiritual.
O, how my brain seethed and boiled, for I am one of those unhappy men who the moment they get an idea must work it out to its bitter end. Childe Roland kept me awake all night. I even heard his "dauntless horn" call and saw the "squat tower." I had his theme. I felt it to be good; to me it was Browning's Knight personified. I could hear its underlying harmonies and the instrumentation, sombre, gloomy, without one note of gladness.
The theme I treated in such a rhythmical fashion as to impart to it exceeding vitality, and I announced it with the English horn, with a curious rhythmic background by the tympani; the strings in division played tremolando and the bass staccato and muted. This may not be clear to you; it is not very clear to me, but at the time it all seemed very wonderful. I finished the work after nine months of agony, of revision, of pruning, clipping, cutting, hawking it about for my friends' inspection and getting laughed at, admired and also mildly criticized.
The thrice fatal day arrived, the rehearsals had been torture, and one night the audience at a great concert had the pleasure of reading on the program Browning's Childe Roland in full, and wondering what it was all about. My symphonic poem would tell them all, as I firmly believed in the power of music to portray definitely certain soul-states, to mirror moods, to depict, rather indefinitely to be sure, certain phenomena of daily life.
My poem was well played. It was only ninety minutes long, and I sat in a nervous swoon as I listened to the Childe Roland theme, the squat tower theme, the sudden little river motif, the queer gaunt horse theme, the horrid engine of war motif, the sinister, grinning, false guide subject—in short, to all the many motives of the poem, with its apotheosis, the dauntless blast from the brave knight as he at last faced the dark tower.
This latter I gave out with twelve trombones, twenty-one bassett horns and one calliope; it almost literally brought down the house, and I was the happiest man alive. As I moved out I was met by the critic of The Disciples of Tone, who said to me:
"Lieber Kerl, I must congratulate you; it beats Richard Strauss all hollow. Who and what was Childe Roland? Was he any relation to Byron's Childe Harold? I suppose the first theme represented the 'galumphing' of his horse, and that funny triangular fugue meant that the horse was lame in one leg and was going it on three. Adieu; I'm in a hurry."
Triangular fugue! Why, that was the crossroads before which Childe Roland hesitated! How I hated the man.