And yet Brahms dreams of pure white staircases that scale the infinite. A dazzling, dry light floods his mind at times, and you hear the rustling of wings,—wings of great, terrifying monsters, hippogriffs of horrid mien; hieroglyphic faces, faces with stony stare, menace your imagination. He can bring down within the compass of the octave moods that are outside the pale of mortals. He is a magician, often spectral; yet his songs have the homely lyric fervor and concision of Robert Burns. A groper after the untoward, I have been amazed at certain bars in his F sharp minor sonata, and was stirred by the moonlight tranquillity in the slow movement of the F minor sonata. He is often dull, muddy-pated, obscure, and maddeningly slow. Then lovely music wells out of the mist; you are enchanted, and cry, “Brahms, master, anoint again with thy precious chrism our thirsty eyelids!”
Brahms is an inexorable form maker. His four symphonies, his three piano sonatas, the choral works and chamber music—are they not all living testimony to his admirable management of masses? He is not a great colorist. For him the pigments of Makart, Wagner, and Théophile Gautier are unsought. Like Puvis de Chavannes, he is a Primitive. Simple, flat tints, primary and cool, are superimposed upon an enormous rhythmic versatility and a strenuousness of ideation. Ideas—noble, profundity-embracing ideas—he has. They are not in the smart, epigrammatic, flashing style of your little man. He disdains racial allusions. He is a planetary Teuton. You seek in vain for the geographical hints that chain Grieg to the map of Norway. Brahms’s melodies are world typical, not cabined and confined to his native soil. This largeness of utterance, lack of polish, and a disregard for the politeness of his art do not endear him to the unthinking. Yet, what a master miniaturist he is in his little piano pieces, his intermezzi! There he catches the tender sigh of childhood, or the faint intimate flutterings of the heart stirred by desire. Feminine he is as is no woman; virile, as few men. The sinister fury, the mocking, drastic fury of his first rhapsodies,—true Brahmsodies,—how they pierce to the core the pessimism of our age!
He reminds me more of Browning than does Schumann. The full-pulsed humanity, the dramatic—yes, Brahms is sometimes dramatic, not theatric—modes of analysis, the relentless tracking to their ultimate lair of motives, are Browning’s; but the composer never loses his grip on the actualities of structure. A great sea is his music, and it sings about the base of that mighty mount we call Beethoven. Brahms takes us to subterrene depths; Beethoven is for the heights. Strong lungs are needed in the company of these giants.
Now comes another enigmatic tangent of music, the heavenly maid. The seed planted by Berlioz and carefully husbanded by Liszt has come to a pretty and a considerable harvest. Of Liszt, whose revolutionary music the world has not yet recognized, this is not the time to write. Only volumes can do justice to his rare genius as a man, artist, and composer. I spoke of the death of Chopin and Schumann stifling the aspirations of the romantics; nothing ever dies, and by an elliptical route there has returned to us something of the fire and fury-signifying passion of these same romantics. All this we find in the music of Peter Tschaïkowsky, all this and more. Tschaïkowsky, artistically, is another descendant of Liszt and Berlioz, with a superadded Slavic color—or, shall I say flavor? Tschaïkowsky deliberately, though without malice, abandoned the old symphonic form. Ravished by what Henry James calls the “scenic idea,” though without compelling talent for the theatre, he poured into the elastic and anonymous mould of the symphonic poem passion and poetry. A poetic dramatist, he selected as typical motives Hamlet, Francesca da Rimini, Romeo and Juliet, Don Juan, Jeanne d’Arc, and Manfred; his six symphonies are romantic suites, resplendent with the pomp and color of an imagination saturated in romanticism. His fierce Cossack temperament and mingling of realistic, sensuous savagery and Malo-Russian mysticism set him apart among composers. As musical as Wagner or Brahms, he lacks the great central, intellectual grip of these two masters. He never tested his genius with fundamental brainwork. But if we wish a picture of musical psychological life of the latter half of this century, it is to Tschaïkowsky that we must go.
Rubinstein I do not consider a factor in the musical strife. He was an ardent upholder of both camps, and, being a German-Russian and a Russian-German Jew and Lutheran, his eclecticism proved his undoing. Something of the same sort may be said of Saint-Saëns, the clever Frenchman. Grieg built his nest overlooking Norwegian fjords, and built it of bright colored bits of Schumann and Chopin. He is the bird with the one sweet, albeit monotonous note. He does not count seriously. Neither does Dvořák, of Bohemia, who, despite his intimate mastery of orchestral color, has never said anything particularly novel or profound. Smetana is his superior at every point. Eugen d’Albert treads with care the larger footprints of Brahms; and Goldmark, a very Makart in his prodigal amazements of color, has contributed a few canvases to the gallery. But Germany and Austria, with one exception, are dead. I do not count Bruckner; he patterned after Wagner too closely. Italy, with the exception of Boïto, is as bare of big young talent as Mother Hubbard’s cupboard. France has Massenet, Bruneau, Saint-Saëns, César Franck, Vincent d’Indy, Fauré, Charpentier, Lalo—!
We have heard little except a string quartet of Claude Debussy’s in New York. The music to Maeterlinck’s Pelléas and Mélisande is so absolutely wedded to the play, so incidental in the true sense of a much-abused word, that as absolute music it is unthinkable. Hearing it you set the composer down as lacking ear. But Richard Strauss via the music of Wagner, Liszt, and Berlioz has set the pace for the cacophonists. Debussy, notwithstanding his unquestionable musicianship, is obviously a “literary” composer. That is to say, his brain must first be excited by the contemplation of a dramatic situation, a beautiful bouquet of verse, a picture, a stirring episode in a novel. But why cavil whether the initial impulse for his music be the need of money or Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa! A composer who can set Mallarmé’s difficult L’Après Midi, and the more recondite poems of Baudelaire, need not be daunted by criticism as to his methods of work. Take this Pelléas music for example; it is a perfect specimen of decomposition. The musical phrase is dislocated; the rhythms are decomposed, the harmonic structure is pulled to pieces, melts before our eyes—or ears; is resolved into its constituent parts. And his themes are often developed in opposition to all laws of musical syntax. In Debussy’s peculiar idiom there seems to be no normal sequence—I say seems, for it is simply because our ears are not accustomed to the novel progressions and apparent forced conjunctions of harmonies and thematic fragments. Tonalities are vague, even violently unnatural. The introduction to the forest scene, where Golaud discovers Mélisande is of a singular sweetness. The composer has caught, without anxious preoccupation, the exact note of Maeterlinck, and he never misses the note throughout the opera. As it is impossible to divorce music and text,—Debussy seems to be Maeterlinck’s musical other self,—so it is a useless task to point out the beauties, the ugliness, the characteristic qualities of the score. In the piano partition nothing may be gleaned of its poetic fervor, its bold landscape painting, its psychologic penetration. There are some isolated spots where the orchestra soliloquizes, though few. It is the complete enveloping of Maeterlinck’s strangely beautiful play with a musical atmosphere that wins the attention. It is easy to conceive of the play apart from the music, but not of the music as a separate entity.
Debussy, then, has a musical idiom of his own. He is a stylist and an impressionist. There are purples on his palette—no blacks. If the Western world ever adopted Eastern tonalities, Claude Debussy would be the one composer who would manage its system, with its quarter-tones and split quarters. The man seems a wraith from the East; his music was heard long ago in the hill temples of Borneo, was made as a symphony to welcome the head-hunters with their ghastly spoils of war! Debussy’s future should be viewed with suspicion from all the critical watch-towers.
In Belgium there are major talents such as Peter Benoit, Gilson, Edgar Tinel, Jan Blockx, Lekeu, Van der Stucken—the last named was one of the first among the young Belgians to compose tone-poems.
Charles Martin Loeffler is an Alsatian with French blood in his artistic veins. He belongs by affinity to the Belgian group. His symphonic poem is called The Death of Tintagiles after the mysterious and horrible drama of Maurice Maeterlinck—whose plays, despite their exquisite literary quality, act better than they read. Mr. Loeffler’s poem was first produced in Boston under Emil Paur’s direction, January 8, 1898. Then there were two violas d’amore employed in the obligato, perhaps symbolizing the sobbing voices of Tintagiles and Ygraine. Since that performance—when Messrs. Kneisel and Loeffler played the violas—the composer has dispensed with one of these quaint instruments, has remodelled the score and has also re-orchestrated it.
Thoroughly subjective as must ever be the highest type of the symphonic poem, The Death of Tintagiles is rather a series of shifting mood-pictures than an attempt to portray the drama too objectively. One feels the horrid suspense of the storm—it is a sinister night!—and what went on behind closed doors in that gloomy castle not far from the sonorous breakers on the beach. There is soul strife, but it is muted. Life here is a tragedy too deep for blood or tears, and the silence—the Loeffler orchestra can suggest hideous and profound silence when playing fortissimo—has the true Maeterlinckian quality.