And then Ygraine’s agony, as she searches for her murdered brother, Tintagiles,—“I have come up, come up high, countless steps between high, pitiless walls,”—can be poignantly felt. Those four harsh knocks, like the knocking at the gate in Macbeth, must surely indicate the tragedy embouched in hidden spaces.
The music, considered as music, is very beautiful. It easily ranks its composer among the stronger of the modern men. Loeffler is primarily a painter, and then a poet. He seldom sounds the big heroic note; he is too subtle, and a despiser of the easily compassed. His orchestral prose is rather the prose of Walter Pater than the prose of—say, Macaulay or Meyerbeer. Despising the cheap and grandiose, he has formulated a style that is sometimes “precious” in its intensity and avoidance of the phrase banal. A colorist, his tints begin where other men’s leave off; and his palette is richer than the rainbow’s. In general “tone” he hovers between the modern Russians and Richard Strauss.
In theme he is Loeffler. The Death of Tintagiles has enclosed within it much lacerating emotion, many new color perspectives, many harmonic devices, and withal a human, though somewhat sublimated human, quality which endears the music at the first hearing.
Despite its psychology, it is always music for music’s sake. There is formal structure—Loeffler’s form—and a distinct climax. The sparing use of the exotic-toned viola d’amore is most telling. The fanfares, recalling the dim triumphs of the dusty dead, are superbly effective; and the cantilena is ever touching. It is all poetic, “atmospheric” music, yet it is none the less moving and dramatic.
Here then is the present situation: Wagner preaching in his music dreams; Tschaïkowsky passionately declaiming the cumulative woes of mankind in accents most pathetically dramatic; Brahms leisurely breasting the turbid billows of this maelstrom and speaking in golden tones the doctrine of art for art’s sake; and, finally, Richard Strauss, a Übermensch himself, seeking with furious and rhythmic gestures to divert from the theatre the art he loves—who shall say whither all this will lead? After Wagner—music for music’s own symphonic sake, and not for impossible librettos, acting-singers, and scene-painters.
II
WAGNER AND THE FRENCH
Stendhal—Henry Beyle—once wrote:—
“Romanticism is the art of presenting to people the literary works which in the actual state of their habits and beliefs are capable of giving them the greatest possible pleasure; classicism, on the contrary, is the art of presenting them with that which gave the greatest possible pleasure to their grandfathers.”
That the reaction from a brutal realism, a minute photography of nasty details, would come in Parisian art was a foregone conclusion to any acute observer of the history of literature, art, and music since Goethe’s imperial mind set the fashion of things in the early years of the last century. The splendor of Théophile Gautier’s famous “gilet rouge,”—he declared that it was a pink doublet,—which graced the memorable days of the first violent representations of Ernani, was naught but a scarlet protest against the frozen classicism of Cherubini the composer, the painters Ingres and David, and the worship of writers like Boileau, Racine, and Malherbe. A wild rush toward romanticism was inevitable after the colorless elegiacs of Lamartine. And the grand old man at Weimar, in the twilight of his glorious career, summed up the whole movement of 1830 by saying:—“They all come from Châteaubriand.”
But Victor Hugo, Théophile Gautier, Delacroix, Chopin, Alfred de Musset, George Sand, Franz Liszt, Heinrich Heine, and later, Charles Baudelaire, in fact all that brilliant coterie which was the nucleus of the artistic rebellion, strove at first independently, with little knowledge of the others’ doings. They possibly came from Châteaubriand, whose Genius of Christianity was but a return to Middle Age ideals: but Walter Scott, with his great romantic historical novels, and Lord Byron, with his glowing, passionate verse, were the true progenitors of the reaction against stiff scholasticism; and their influence even stirred phlegmatic Germany, with its Gallic lacquer, to new and bolder utterances. Heinrich Heine, an exile who spoke of himself as a “German swallow who had built a nest in the periwig of M. Voltaire,” threw himself into the fray with pen dipped in sparkling vitriol and did doughty deeds for the cause.