Modern Musical Drift

by W. J. Henderson

But all this is superficial. This is the manner, not the matter of the Strauss music. How far can this master magician, this royal juggler with resolutions and suspensions, this acrobat of the flying chord, go with his endeavor to make music say for him the things that the entire decadent literature of modern Europe has striven to put down in plain words? If Strauss means anything, he means that Beethoven and Schumann were but the avant couriers of a vast march of progress into the bowels of delineation, the vitals of psychic communication.

Liszt and Tschaïkowsky and Goldmark postulated a false theory of orchestral art because they clearly defined limitations. They promulgated by their practice the doctrine that only the broader moods of story could be represented in music. Strauss preaches that when Beethoven depicted in his fifth symphony the struggle of a soul and for the finer illustration of his thought united the scherzo with the finale, he opened the gateway to indefinite progress, and swung wide a banner with the old device, "Facilis descensus Averno."

Suppose, however, that this paragraph in the artistic treatise of Strauss contains a germinal truth, does it of necessity follow that to advance along the opened path is to finish in the corruption and rank odor of the morgue? What has so got the start of the majestic art of music as to lead it to the grave? First of all, decadent poetry and fiction. When music began to strive to make itself a representative art, it confronted itself with a choice of objects. Primarily it had human life and experience as found in the composer's own soul, and this was the noblest source of all. "Look into thine own heart and write," is excellent advice for a composer. Then it had literature, the conservation of the experience and observation of man from the literary point of view. With these two sources it had to rest content, for neither sculpture nor painting offered anything other than the composition of life translated into other terms. The musician would better paint the Laocoön from his own conception than from the conception of the sculptor. He would but make music and water of Raphael's Madonna if he studied her instead of the Mary of the Holy Writ.

How long did it take the musician to discover that the Virgin was not such inspiring musical material as Mary Magdalen? Just as long as it took him to learn that he could not make a great composition out of a steady flow of sweetness, that he must have a warring of elements in his work, and that there must be some melodic principle striving for victory and at the end emerging from temporary tonal chaos in a pæan of triumph. The temptation of St. Anthony was better matter for the composer than the meditations of St. Augustine, and the fast of Christ in the wilderness was less alluring than the legend of Herodias and John the Baptist.

In other words, the modern musician has found his finest inspirations in that struggle of good with evil in the human soul which has inspired the works of the greatest modern dramatists. The only question that remained to be solved after this was, How far would the musician go? The dramatist and the poet ran morbid; the musician, seeking his inspiration in the records of human souls made in the terms of literature, followed the man of the pen into the slough of despond.

The morbid studies of such dramatists as Ibsen and Maeterlinck are the real key to the music of such a composer as Strauss. Yet let us not deny that the musician is less drastic in his methods than the literary men. Strauss has indeed written his "Don Juan" and his "Death and Apotheosis," but he has placed upon their pages some passages of marvellous beauty. It is a beauty of orchestral idiom, of instrumental development, rather than of melodic exfoliation. Strauss, when all is said and done, is not master of melodic invention, but he speaks a language which is all his own, and he rises at times to a power of sonorous utterance which has not been equalled in these modern days except by Wagner.

In his "Heldenleben" he has written more clearly than in some of his earlier works, but when all is said, his chief concern seems to be the dissection of souls for the purpose of exposing the lurking spot of disease. He gives us psychonosology—the study of mental diseases—rather than psychostatics—the study of the permanent conditions of the soul—which Beethoven gave us.

Whether this be right or wrong, true or false art, is not for the present to decide. Certainly such music is not for the masses. It is not for those who persist in listening to tunes as tunes only and condemning as no music that music which aims at some sort of representation.

To condemn such music is to throw over the later works of Beethoven, the choicest products of Chopin and Schumann, and many another creation with which even the mere tune-lover would be loath to part. But when the broad principles of all art are applied to the soul searchings of Richard Strauss, questionings will arise. Is it art? Certainly not, by the law of Schopenhauer, which guided Wagner,—eternal ideas represented by means of prototypes.