The term 'Modern Music,' which forms the title of this volume, is subject to several interpretations. Just as in the preceding volume we were obliged to qualify our use of the words 'classic' and 'romantic,' partly because all such nomenclature is more or less arbitrary, partly because of the fusion of styles and dove-tailing of periods which may be observed in the history of any art, so it now becomes necessary to define the word 'modern' in its present application.
Now 'modern' may mean merely new or up-to-date. And in that sense it may indicate any degree of newness: it may include the last twenty-five years or the last century, or it may be made to apply to contemporaneous works only. But in another sense—that generally accepted in connection with music—it means 'advanced,' progressive, or unprecedented in any other period. Here, too, we may understand varying degrees of modernity. The devotees of the most recent development, impatient of the usual broad application of the term, have dubbed their school the 'futurist.' In fact, any of these characterizations, whether in a time sense or a quality sense, are merely relative. Wagner's disciples, disdainful of the romanticists, called his music the 'music of the future.' Now, alas, critics classify him as a romantic composer! Bach, on the other hand, long popularly regarded as an archaic bugaboo, is now frequently characterized as a veritable modern. 'How modern that is!' we exclaim time and again, while listening to an organ toccata or fugue arranged by Busoni! Beethoven, the great classic, is in his later period certainly more 'modern' than many a romanticist—Mendelssohn, for instance, or even Berlioz—though only in a harmonic sense, for he had not the command of orchestral color that the great and turbulent Frenchmen made accessible to the world.
The newness of the music is thus seen to have little to do with its modernity. Even the word 'contemporary' gives us no definite clue, for there are men living to-day—like Saint-Saëns—whose music is hardly modern when compared to that of a Wolf, dead these twelve years, or his own late countrymen Chabrier and Fauré—not to speak of the recently departed Scriabine with his clavier à lumière.
But it is quite impossible to include in such a volume as this only the true moderns—in the æsthetic sense. We should have to go back to Beethoven with his famous chord comprising every degree of the diatonic scale (in the Ninth Symphony), or at least to Chopin, according to one interpretation. According to another we should have to exclude Brahms and all his neo-classical followers who content themselves with composing in the time-honored forms. (Since there will always be composers who prefer to devote themselves to the preservation and continuation of formal tradition, this 'classical' drift will, as Walter Niemann remarks, be a 'modernism' of all times.) Brahms has, as a matter of fact, been disposed of in the preceding volume, but the inclusion in the present volume of men like Volkmann, Lachner, etc., some of whom were born long before Brahms, calls for an apology. It is merely a matter of convenience, just as the treatment of men like Glinka and Gade in connection with the nationalistic developments of the later nineteenth century is merely an expedient. Such chronological liberties are the historian's license. We have, to conclude, simply taken the word modern in its widest and loosest sense, both as regards time and quality, and we shall let the text explain to what degree a composer justifies his position in the volume. We may say at the outset that all the men reviewed in the present chapter would have been included in Volume II but for lack of space.
In Volume II the two great movements known as the classic and the romantic have been fairly brought to a close. Brahms and Franck on the one side, Wagner and Liszt on the other, may be considered to have concluded the romantic period as definitely as Beethoven concluded the classic. Like him, too, they not only surveyed but staked out the path of the future. But no great art movement is ever fully concluded. (It has been said by æsthetic philosophers that we are still in the era of the Renaissance.) Just as in the days of Beethoven there lived the Cherubinis, the Clementis, the Schuberts (as regards the symphony at least) who trod in the great man's footsteps or explored important by-paths, in some respects supplemented and completed his work; so there are by- and after-currents of the Romantic Movement which also cannot be ignored. They are represented by men like Lachner, Ferdinand Hiller, Reinecke and Volkmann in Germany; by Saint-Saëns, Massenet and Lalo in France; Gade in Denmark.[1] Some of their analogous predecessors have all but passed from memory, perhaps their own works will soon disappear from the current répertoire. Especially in the case of the Germans (whose country has certainly suffered the strain of over-cultivation and over-production, and which has produced in this age the particular brand known as 'kapellmeister music') is this likely. But it must be borne in mind that these composers had command of technical resources far beyond the ken of their elder brothers; also that, by virtue of the more subjective qualities characteristic of the music of their period, as well as the vastly broadened musical culture of this later day, they were able to appeal more readily to a very wide audience.
The historical value of these men lies in their exploitation of these same technical resources. They thoroughly grasped the formulæ of their models; what the pioneers had to hew out by force, these followers acquired with ease. They worked diligently within these limits, exhausting the possibilities of the prescribed area and proving the ground, so to speak, so that newcomers might tread upon it with confidence. They were not as uncompromising, perhaps, as the pioneers and high-priests themselves and therefore fused styles that others thought irreconcilable. What seemed iconoclastic became commonplace in their hands. Thus their eclecticism opened the way for new originalities; their very conservatism induced progress.
I
Germany, it will be remembered, was, during Wagner's lifetime, divided into two camps: the classic-romantic Mendelssohn-Schumann school which later rallied about the person of Brahms, on the one hand, and the Wagner-Liszt, sometimes called the late-romantic or 'New German' school, on the other. The adherents of the former are those whom we have called the poets, the latter the painters, in music; terms applying rather to the manner than to the matter, since the 'painters,' for another reason—namely, because they believed that a poetic idea should form the basis of the music and determine its forms—might with equal rights call themselves 'poets.' And, indeed, their followers, the 'New Germans,' among whom we reckon Mahler and Strauss, constitute what in a later chapter we have called the 'poetic' school of contemporary Germany.
Few musicians accepted Wagner's gospel in his lifetime. Raff and other Liszt disciples, the Weimar group, in other words, were virtually the only ones. A host, however, worshipped the names of Mendelssohn and Schumann. They gathered in Leipzig, their citadel, where Mendelssohn reorganized the Gewandhaus concerts in 1835,[2] and founded the Royal Conservatory in 1843, and in the Rhine cities, where Schumann's influence was greatest. These men flourished during the very time that Wagner was the great question of the day. While preaching the gospel of romanticism, they also upheld the great classic traditions. The advent of Brahms, indeed, brought a revival of pure classic feeling. This persists even to-day in the works of men whose romantic inspirations, akin to Mendelssohn, Schumann, and Chopin, find expression in forms of classic cast.
Both Schumann and Wagner were reformers interested in the broadening of musical culture, the improvement of taste, and the establishment of a standard of artistic propriety—Wagner on the stage, Schumann in the concert room. The former was successful, the latter only partially so. For, while the standards of the concert room are much higher to-day than they were in Schumann's day, musical taste in the home, which should be guided by these standards, has, if anything, deteriorated. The reason for this lies primarily in one of the inevitable developments of musical romanticism itself—the genre tendency; secondarily, in the fact that, while the Wagnerians were propagandists, writers of copious polemics and agitators, the classic romanticists were purely professional musicians who disdained to write, preferring deeds to words (and incidentally doing far too much), or else, like Hiller, were feuilletonists, pleasant gossips about their art and nothing more.