Romain Rolland: The Man and His Work

by Stefan Zweig

CHAPTER VII
THE CONSECRATION

THE two years in Italy, a time of free receptivity and creative enjoyment, were over. A summons now came from Paris; the Normal School, which Rolland had left as pupil, required his services as teacher. The parting was a wrench, and Malwida von Meysenbug's farewell was designed to convey a symbolical meaning. She invited her young friend to accompany her to Bayreuth, the chief sphere of the activities of the man who, with Tolstoi, had been the leading inspiration of Rolland during early youth, the man whose image had been endowed with more vigorous life by Malwida's memories of his personality. Rolland wandered on foot across Umbria, to meet his friend in Venice. Together they visited the palace in which Wagner had died, and thence journeyed northward to the scene of his life's work. "My aim," writes Malwida in her characteristic style, which seldom attains strong emotional force, but is none the less moving, "was that Romain should have these sublime impressions to close his years in Italy and the fecund epoch of youth. I likewise wished the experience to be a consecration upon the threshold of manhood, with its prospective labors and its inevitable struggles and disillusionments."

Olivier had entered the country of Jean Christophe! On the first morning of their arrival, before introducing her friend at Wahnfried, Malwida took him into the garden to see the master's grave. Rolland uncovered as if in church, and the two stood for a while in silence meditating on the hero, to one of them a friend, to the other a leader. In the evening they went to hear Wagner's posthumous work Parsifal. This composition, which, like the visit to Bayreuth, is strangely interconnected with the genesis of Jean Christophe, is as it were a consecrational prelude to Rolland's future. For life was now to call him from these great dreams. Malwida gives a moving description of their good-by. "My friends had kindly placed their box at my disposal. Once more I went to hear Parsifal with Rolland, who was about to return to France in order to play an active part in the work of life. It was a matter of deep regret to me that this gifted friend was not free to lift himself to 'higher spheres,' that he could not ripen from youth to manhood while wholly devoted to the unfolding of his artistic impulses. But I knew that none the less he would work at the roaring loom of time, weaving the living garment of divinity. The tears with which his eyes were filled at the close of the opera made me feel once more that my faith in him would be justified. Thus I bade him farewell with heartfelt thanks for the time filled with poesy which his talents had bestowed on me. I dismissed him with the blessing that age gives to youth entering upon life."

Although an epoch that had been rich for both was now closed, their friendship was by no means over. For years to come, down to the end of her life, Rolland wrote to Malwida once a week. These letters, which were returned to him after her death, contain a biography of his early manhood perhaps fuller than that which is available in the case of any other notable personality. Inestimable was the value of what he had learned from this encounter. He had now acquired an extensive knowledge of reality and an unlimited sense of human continuity. Whereas he had gone to Rome to study the art of the dead past, he had found the living Germany, and could enjoy the companionship of her undying heroes. The triad of poesy, music, and science, harmonizes unconsciously with that other triad, France, Germany, and Italy. Once and for all, Rolland had acquired the European spirit. Before he had written a line of Jean Christophe, that great epic was already living in his blood.

CHAPTER VIII
YEARS OF APPRENTICESHIP

THE form of Rolland's career, no less than the substance of his inner life, was decisively fashioned by these two years in Italy. As happened in Goethe's case, so in that with which we are now concerned, the conflict of the will was harmonized amid the sublime clarity of the southern landscape. Rolland had gone to Rome with his mind still undecided. By genius, he was a musician; by inclination, a poet; by necessity, a historian. Little by little, a magical union had been effected between music and poesy. In his first dramas, the phrasing is permeated with lyrical melody. Simultaneously, behind the winged words, his historic sense had built up a mighty scene out of the rich hues of the past. After the success of his thesis Les origines du théâtre lyrique moderns (Histoire de l'opéra en Europe avant Lully et Scarlatti), he became professor of the history of music, first at the Normal School, and from 1903 onwards at the Sorbonne. The aim he set before himself was to display "l'éternelle floraison," the sempiternal blossoming, of music as an endless series through the ages, while each age none the less puts forth its own characteristic shoots. Discovering for the first time what was to be henceforward his favorite theme, he showed how, in this apparently abstract sphere, the nations cultivate their individual characteristics, while never ceasing to develop unawares the higher unity wherein time and national differences are unknown. A great power for understanding others, in association with the faculty for writing so as to be readily understood, constitutes the essence of his activities. Here, moreover, in the element with which he was most familiar, his emotional force was singularly effective. More than any teacher before him did he make the science he had to convey, a living thing. Dealing with the invisible entity of music, he showed that the greatness of mankind is never concentrated in a single age, nor exclusively allotted to a single nation, but is transmitted from age to age and from nation to nation. Thus like a torch does it pass from one master to another, a torch that will never be extinguished while human beings continue to draw the breath of inspiration. There are no contradictions, there is no cleavage, in art. "History must take for its object the living unity of the human spirit. Consequently, history is compelled to maintain the tie between all the thoughts of the human spirit."

Many of those who heard Rolland's lectures at the School of Social Science and at the Sorbonne, still speak of them to-day with undiminished gratitude. Only in a formal sense was history the topic of these discourses, and science was merely their foundation. It is true that Rolland, side by side with his universal reputation, has a reputation among specialists in musical research for having discovered the manuscript of Luigi Rossi's Orfeo, and for having been the first to do justice to the forgotten Francesco Provenzale (the teacher of Alessandro Scarlatti who founded the Neapolitan school). But their broad humanist scope, their encyclopedic outlook, makes his lectures on The Beginnings of Opera frescoes of whilom civilizations. In interludes of speaking, he would give music voice, playing on the piano long-lost airs, so that in the very Paris where they first blossomed three hundred years before, their silvery tones were now reawakened from dust and parchment. At this date, while Rolland was still quite young, he began to exercise upon his fellows that clarifying, guiding, inspiring, and formative influence, which since then, increasingly reinforced by the power of his imaginative writings and spread by these into ever widening circles, has become immeasurable in its extent. Nevertheless, throughout its expansion, this force has remained true to its primary aim. From first to last, Rolland's leading thought has been to display, amid all the forms of man's past and man's present, the things that are really great in human personality, and the unity of all single-hearted endeavor.

It is obvious that Romain Rolland's passion for music could not be restricted within the confines of history. He could never become a specialist. The limitations involved in the career of such experts are utterly uncongenial to his synthetic temperament. For him the past is but a preparation for the present; what has been merely provides the possibility for increasing comprehension of the future. Thus side by side with his learned theses and with his volumes Musiciens d'autrefois, Haendel, Histoire de l'Opéra, etc., we have his Musiciens d'aujourd'hui, a collection of essays which were first published in the "Revue de Paris" and the "Revue de l'art dramatique," essays penned by Rolland as champion of the modern and the unknown. This collection contains the first portrait of Hugo Wolf ever published in France, together with striking presentations of Richard Strauss and Debussy. He was never weary of looking for new creative forces in European music; he went to the Strasburg musical festival to hear Gustav Mahler, and visited Bonn to attend the Beethoven festival. Nothing seemed alien to his eager pursuit of knowledge; his sense of justice was all-embracing. From Catalonia to Scandinavia he listened for every new wave in the ocean of music. He was no less at home with the spirit of the present than with the spirit of the past.