Overtones, a book of temperaments

by James Huneker

I

It is easier to trace the artistic lineage of Richard Strauss to its fountain-head—Johann Sebastian Bach—than to stamp with a contemporary stencil its curious ramifications. And this is not alone because of a similar polyphonic complexity, a complex of themes and their development without parallel since the days of the pattern-weaving Flemish contrapuntists; but because, like Bach Strauss has experimented in the disassociation of harmonies, and, in company with his contemporary, the master-impressionist, Claude Monet, has divided his tones—set up, instead of the sober classic lines or the gorgeous color masses of the romantic painters, an entirely new scheme of orchestration, the basic principle of which is individualism of instruments, the pure anarchy—self-government—of the entire orchestral apparatus. This is but a mode of technique and does not necessarily impinge upon the matter of his musical discourse; it is a distinctive note, however, of the Strauss originality, and must be sounded in any adequate discussion of his very modern art.

Borrowing the word with its original connotations from the erudite and clairvoyant French critic, Rémy de Gourmont, disassociation in the practice of Strauss is a species of tone chemistry by which a stereotyped musical phrase is reduced to its virginal element, deprived of factitious secondary meaning, and then re-created, as if in the white heat of a retort, by the overpowering and disdainful will of the composer. We have also the disassociation of ideas from their antique succession, that chiefly reveals itself, not in a feverish, disordered syntax, but in the avoidance of the classic musical paragraph—that symmetrical paragraph as inexorably formulated as the laws of the Medes and Persians, resulting in a Chinese uniformity maddening in its dulness and lifelessness unless manipulated by a man of intellectual power. Strauss is forever breaking up his musical sentences. He does this in no arbitrary fashion, but as the curve of the poem is ideally pictured to his imagination. A great realist in his tonal quality, he is first the thinker, the poet, the man of multitudinous ideas; you hear the crack of the master’s whip, a cruel one at times, as he marshals his themes into service, bidding them build, as built the Pharaohs’ slaves, obelisks and pyramids, shapes of grandeur that pierce the sky and blot out from the vision all but their overwhelming and monumental beauties of form—the form of Richard Strauss. He is, after his own manner, as severe a formalist as Josef Haydn.

We are now far away from what is called euphony for euphony’s sake; though it is, as in Bach’s case, art for art with all the misused phrase implies. Intent upon realizing in tone his vision,—the magnitude or validity of which we need not yet discuss,—Strauss allows no antique rubric of fugue or symphony to block his progress; even the symphonic poem, an invention of Franz Liszt, proves too cumbersome for this new man of light and air and earth, whose imagination is at once sumptuous and barbaric. The picture must overflow the old frames. It must burn with an intense life. It must be true. As a man who crept before he walked, walked before he ran, Richard Strauss has the right to our sympathy. He was a wonder-child; he is one of the world’s great conductors; he wrote symphonies in the Brahms style during his studious youth; he composed a little literature of chamber music, piano pieces, a violin concerto, and many songs prior to the time when he faced the sun of Wagner and was undazzled by its rays. He knew the scores of Wagner, Liszt, and Berlioz, has imitated, and has forgotten them in the swirling torrential tides of his own strange temperament.

Once music was pure rhythm; once it was howling and gesture. It moved up the evolutionary scale slowly and reached the kingdom of the instrumental arabesque with difficulty; on this side was the ecclesiastical liturgy with its rigorous inclusions and suppressions; on the other, the naïve young art of opera. Let us acknowledge that Bach was the crowning glory of the art polyphonic, that Palestrina closed the door behind him on churchly chants, that Beethoven said the last significant word in the symphony; let us admit these trite propositions, and we have still perplexing problems to solve. The song-writers, Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, shall not detain us—they represent but an exquisite province of music. The neo-symphonists, beginning with Schubert and Schumann and ending with Brahms, are not to be weighed here. They said much that was novel, but they adhered to the classic line; they did not draw in the mass, to use the painter’s term. It is to Berlioz, Liszt, and Wagner that the new movement should be credited: Liszt, for his prophetic power—he remodelled the symphonic form, but like Moses, he was destined to see, not to enter, the promised land; Berlioz, for adding to the instrumental palette new hues, bewildering nuances and bizarre splendor; Wagner, for banishing convention from the operatic stage, furnishing the myth as the ideal libretto, for his bold annexation of the symphonic orchestra and the extraordinary uses to which he put it. Yet only one of the three men has held out the torch to future composers—Franz Liszt. Berlioz’s talent was largely that of a perverse fresco painter; Wagner quite closed his epoch—one of rampant romanticism—in his music-drama, and by his powerful genius almost swerved music from its normal, absolute currents.

He quite flooded the musical firmament with his radiations. There was but one god and he reigned at Bayreuth; go hence and worship, or else be cast with the unbelieving into outer darkness where there is gnashing of teeth! The music-drama was the synthesis of the arts. It was the panacea of all social evils, and Parsifal we beheld as another Paraclete! Such arrogation of omnipotence was bound to encounter reverses. The Wagnerian mixture of words and music, of drama ranking before music and music playing the handmaid rôle of commentator, has stood the tests neither of its creator nor of time. We know our Wagner now; not as a philosopher—shades of Schopenhauer!—not as a poet—let us not invoke the spirit of Goethe!—not as a reformer, dramatist, revolutionist, but as a composer of genius, with a lot of wrong-headed theories, whose magnificent music floated his doctrines and blinded the younger generation to their speciousness. It is music, not drama, that rules in Wagner’s works.

The evil done was this: Music could no longer speak in her own divine voice without the aid of words, without the hobbling drawbacks of singers, stage pictures, plots, all the thrice-familiar mise en scène of the Wagnerian music-drama. Nevertheless, Wagner did enhance the value of the suggestion in music. He invented his own stenographic method of speech and with it literally created a new musical consciousness. A motive means something, is the symbol of an idea, or state of soul; yet we know that if this motive has to be accompanied by dramatic gesture or clothed verbally, then all the worse for it as pure music; it gains visually, but loses on the imaginative side. Before Wagner, Liszt discovered the power of the concise phrase and even labelled it; and before Liszt, came Beethoven in his C minor symphony; while antedating all was Bach, whose music is a perfect storehouse of motivation.

II

And again we reach Richard Strauss by way of Bach; in the music of the modern composer the motive achieves its grand climacteric. His scheme is the broad narrative form, a narration that for sustained puissance and intensity has never been equalled. The new melody is no longer a pattern of instrumentation, nor is it an imitation of the human voice; it is extra-human, on the thither side of speech. It is neither a pure ravishment of the ear, nor yet an abstruse geometrical problem worked out according to the law of some musical Euclid.

Now, music of the highest order must make its first appeal to the imagination; its first impact must be upon the cortical centres. It must not alone set the feet rhythmically pattering, it must not merely stir us to emotional thrilling. Not in the sensuous abandon of dance rhythms, but by thought,—that is, by musical thought, in a chain of tonal imagery, is the aim of the new music. Walter Pater believed, Plato-wise, that music is the archetype of the arts. It was an amiable heresy. But music must stand solitary—it is often too theatric, as poetry is often too tonal. It must be intellect suffused by emotion. Its substance is not the substance of its sister arts. What music has long needed, what Wagner and the church writers before him sought to give it, is definiteness. The welding of word and tone does not produce true musical articulateness. We recognize this in Tristan and Isolde, where incandescent tone quite submerges the word, the symbol of the idea. Erotic music has never before so triumphed as in this Celtic drama. And it is like the fall of some great blazing visitor from interstellar space; it buries itself beneath the smoking earth instead of remaining royally afloat in the pure ether of the idea.