BALZAC AS MUSIC CRITIC
While I think that George Moore’s comparative estimate of Shakespeare and Balzac is a trifle more Celtic than critical, yet there can be no denial made to the assertion that Balzac stands next to Shakespeare—if not exactly on his level—in his astonishing fecundity of imagination. “A monstrous debauch of the imagination,” Henley called the Human Comedy; but surely no more of a debauch than the Plays. All abnormal productivity of the intellect gives this impression. Look at Rabelais. There are over two thousand figures in the Human Comedy, all clearly characterized, no two alike; and every man and woman in the work you might meet in a day’s stroll about Paris.
Monstrous, yes; but so is Beethoven, so is Michael Angelo monstrous. All genius has something monstrous in it—something of what Nietzsche so happily called the over man.
Balzac’s Gambara and Massimilla Doni—what genius he had for selecting names which outwardly and inwardly fitted his character! After reading the former I felt almost tempted into echoing Mr. Moore’s extravagant assertion. Balzac is indeed a magician and not a novelist. What puts him apart from other novelists, even from his technical superior, Flaubert, is his faculty of vision. He is a Seer, not a novelist. Any motive he touched, whether usury or music-erotics or patriotism, he vivified with his prophetic imagination. He saw his theme concretely; he saw its origins, its roots in the dead past; and plunging his eyes into the future he saw its ghost, its spiritual aura, its ultimate evolution. Such a man as Balzac might have been a second Bonaparte, a second Spencer. He had science, and he had imagination; and he preferred to be the social historian of the nineteenth century, the greatest romancer that ever lived, and a profound philosopher besides. All modern novelists nest in his books, draw nourishment from them, suck in their very souls from his vast fund of spirituality. The difference between such a giant as Balzac and such a novelist as Thackeray is that the latter draws delightful and artistic pictures of manners; but never turns a soul inside out for us. The best way to describe Balzac is to enumerate the negatives of his contemporaries and successors. All they lacked and lack he had in such amazing prodigality that comparison is not only impossible, it is brutal.
Balzac and music! Balzac and women! Balzac and money! Balzac and politics! Or,—Balzac and any subject! The encyclopædic knowledge, extraordinary sympathy and powers of expression—do they not all fairly drench every line the man wrote? He could analyze the art of painting and forsee its future affinities for impressionism—read The Unknown Masterpiece—just as in Gambara he divined Berlioz, Wagner, and Richard Strauss. I am quite sure that Wagner read Balzac. Gambara was finished June, 1837, and there are things in it that could only have been written about Berlioz. The key to the book, however, is passion, not any particular personality. Balzac always searched for the master passion in men and women’s lives. Given the clew-note, he developed the theme into symphonic proportions. It is Andrea’s love of intrigue that leads him to follow the beautiful Marianna, wife of the composer Gambara,—a fantastic creation worthy of Hoffmann. He is an Italian in Paris, who wrote a mass for the anniversary of Beethoven’s death, and also an opera—Mahomet. But that opera! Has such a score ever been dreamed of by any one except Richard Strauss? Gambara is a poor man, looked upon as a lunatic, living at an Italian cook shop kept by Giardini,—the latter one of Balzac’s most delightful discoveries. Born at Cremona, Gambara studied music in its entirety, especially orchestration. To him music was a science and an art—fancy writers of fiction going into the philosophy of music seventy-five years ago!—to him tones were definite ideas, not merely vibrations that agitate nervous centres. Music alone has the power of restoring us to ourselves, while other arts give us defined pleasures. Mahomet is a trilogy, the libretto by Gambara himself—mark this familiar detail. It contained The Martyrs, Mahomet, and Jerusalem Delivered,—the God of the West, the God of the East, and the struggles of religions around a tomb. In this immense frame, philosophy, patriotism, racial antagonisms, love, the magic of ancient Sabianism and Oriental poetry of the Jewish—culminating in the Arabian—are all displayed. As Gambara says, “Ah! to be a great musician, it is necessary also to be very learned. Without knowledge, no local color, no ideas in the music.” This irresistibly reminds one of a phrase from Wagner’s notebook.
The story of the opera—too long to set down here—as told by Gambara, is wonderful. It has the ring of an analytical programme to some new-fangled and heretical symphonic poem. Here is the curious medley of psychology, musical references, history, stage directions, cries of hysteria, and much clotted egotism. There is the clash of character, the shock of events; and it is well to note such a phrase as this: “The dark and gloomy color of this finale [Act I] is varied by the motives of the three women who predict to Mahomet his triumph, and whose phrases will be found developed in the third act, in the scene where Mahomet tastes the delights of his grandeur.” Does this not forestall Wagner’s Ring? or did Balzac really find the entire idea in Hoffmann’s Kater Murr? Is not Kapellmeister Kreisler the first of his line? Now, while there seems to be far too much praying in this drama of soul and action, it is not such a farrago as it appears at first reading. I imagine that Balzac knew little of the technics of music; yet he guessed matters with astonishing perspicacity. His characterization of the megalomaniacal Mahomet, and his epileptic grandeurs would do as a portrait of most founders of new religions. Balzac had Voltaire to draw upon; but he makes the epilepsy a big motive in Mahomet’s life,—as it is in the lives of the majority of religious geniuses and fanatics, from Buddha to the newest faith-curing healer.
And how was this extraordinary music and libretto received by Gambara’s wife, her admirer, and the Italian cook? “There was not the appearance of a poetical or musical idea in the stunning cacophony which smote the ears: the principles of harmony, the first rules of composition, were totally foreign to this shapeless creation. Instead of music, learnedly connected, which Gambara described, his fingers produced a succession of fifths, sevenths, octaves, major thirds, and steps from fourth without sixth to the bass, a combination of discordant sounds thrown at hazard which seemed to combine to torture the least delicate ear.” I am positive, nevertheless, that it must have been great, wonderful, new music.
As the strange discords “howled beneath his fingers,” Gambara, we are told, almost fainted with intoxicating joy. Furthermore, he had a raucous voice,—the true voice of a composer. “He stamped, panted, yelled; his fingers equalled in rapidity the forked head of a serpent; finally, at the last howl of the piano, he threw himself backward, and let his head fall upon the back of his arm-chair.”
Poor Gambara! poor Kapellmeister Kreisler! And how much it all sounds like the early stories told of Richard Wagner trying to express on the treble keyboard his gigantic dreams, his tonal epics: and for such supercilious men and critics as Mendelssohn, Hiller, Meyerbeer, Berlioz, and Schumann!
Signor Giardini, the Italian cook in Gambara, stands for a portrait of the true musical Philistine; he has a pretty taste in music, but melody, or what he conceives to be melody, is his shibboleth. Andrea Marcosini, a nobleman in pursuit of Gambara’s wife, and a musical dilettante, finds Giardini a gabbling boaster. “Yes, your excellency, in less than a quarter of an hour you will know what kind of a man I am. I have introduced into the Italian kitchen refinements that will surprise you. I am a Neapolitan,—that is to say, a born cook. But what good is instinct without science? Science? I have passed thirty years in acquiring it, and see what it has brought me to. My history is that of all men of talent. My experiments and tests have ruined three restaurants established successfully at Naples, Parma, and Rome.”