Arthur Johnstone

“ A hundred times commoner than a real sense of melodic beauty is the love of a powerful rhythm that carries the listener off his feet. Now Tchaïkovsky does that for the listener much more often than any other composer. He first captivates by something in which his gift of rhythm plays a leading part, and, having captivated, he does not disappoint us by saying empty things. Further points are his astonishingly rich harmony, which is never twisted and inconsequent, like so much of Berlioz's harmony, but always develops logically and clearly his vastness of design ”

“ At the period when it was written the composer had become a sort of suffering Prometheus. Even apart from his deafness, it is wonderful that Beethoven's persistent ill-fortune, his isolated and unhappy life, should not have discouraged him and checked the flow of his creative energy. But that the mightiest of his compositions should have been produced when he was stone-deaf—that is surely one of the most perfectly amazing among well-authenticated facts! So far as we know, there never was any other case in which deafness failed to cut a person off altogether from the world of music. ”

“ To hear the "Gerontius" music is to become acquainted with by far the most remarkable and original personality that has arisen in musical Britain since the days of Purcell. One might trace the manifestations of that originality in the harmony, that always shows a touch both sensitive and sure, in the orchestration and interplay of chorus and semi-chorus, in the amazing sweetness and depth of feeling that sounds in the Angel (mezzo-soprano solo) music, in the force and truth of musical expression which, for the most part, extends even to elements of minor importance in the work. ”

“ He is the musician who seems to have learned but little from text-books and professors, and yet, by a continual series of miracles, he avoids all the pitfalls that beset the path of the unlearned composer. He is never at a loss—never does anything feeble or ineffective,—but again and again overwhelms and delights us with his inexhaustible flow of racy and full-blooded melody and with his splendid handling of whatever instrument, or group of instruments, he may choose to handle. ”

“ Strauss goes a distinct point beyond Wagner in the articulateness of his musical phrases, and he knows better than any other composer that it is the special province of music to express what cannot be expressed in any other way—what is too delicate, or too indelicate, to be expressed in any other way. The most wonderful quality of "Till" is its mediævalism. Listen to those triplets, in four-part chromatic harmony for five solo violins with sordini, expressing the agony of terror into which Till is thrown by his own wicked mockery of religion. ”

“ But till that destruction is compassed nothing in Siegfried's environment can arrest his own impulse. Not even in presence of death does he allow himself to be swayed by any other influence than the restless stream of life flowing within himself. Fear, envy, and vindictiveness are alike alien to his nature, and so, too, is any desire for love arising from reflection. His every movement is determined by the direct flow of vital force swelling the veins and muscles of his body to rapturous fulfilment of their functions. ”

“ About Schumann's Etudes Symphoniques I can only say this: For a long time past I have privately held the opinion that the work is on the whole, the finest composition for pianoforte solo in existence. This will no doubt seem to you exaggerated, but such is my feeling about it. The extraordinary wealth of imaginative beauty in those variations I believe to be quite without parallel. Just think of that last variation before the finale. There is nothing else in music which bears even the faintest resemblance to it. ”

“ Yet now comes a composer and makes the subject the chief thing, writing music that gives no one the slightest encouragement to take interest in it apart from the subject—in short, displaying the most complete indifference to everything that used to be expected of a composer, and giving us all to understand that, in a religious work, if the music does not in some clear manner contribute to the exposition of the subject, it is not justified at all. ”

“ The second movement is less taxing for the performers than the rest of the work; it was given in a manner well in keeping with the spirit of the symphony, which is like some vast work of sculpture in bronze, such as the gates of the Baptistery at Florence. Just such plastic force in the moulding of mighty tone-elements and just such nobility of the imagination did Beethoven possess as enabled Ghiberti to mould those wonderful gates, concerning which Michelangelo said that they were worthy to be the gates of Paradise. The scherzo, too, was an artistic triumph for the orchestra. ”

“ How could the public be expected to approve of an opera on the subject of Faust that had no love-song or truly lyrical utterance of any kind for the tenor hero, but, on the other hand, had a song about a flea and a rat's requiem, ending with an "Amen" chorus in mock ecclesiastical style, to say nothing of a scene in Pandemonium and an orgie infernale? Berlioz was a sort of a belated mediæval. The very title, "Damnation de Faust," is mediæval. Shakespeare and the other poets of Renaissance and later times recognise the fate of a soul as a matter sub judice till the end of the world. ”

“ Another differentiating quality of the symphony is grotesque expression, which is strong in the vivace, stronger in the scherzo, and goes all lengths in the finale. As with the later works of many other great artists, it is hard to divine the poetic intention of this symphony. One perceives a marvellous design, for the most part grotesque in character; one perceives the work of a gigantic imagination, smelting the stubborn tone-masses as in a furnace and moulding them to its purposes with a kind of superhuman plastic force. ”

“ Originality is disadvantageous to a composer at first in two ways. The more obvious is that listeners find the music speaking to them in an unknown or partially unknown tongue, and are displeased; and the less obvious, that players and singers cannot, as a rule, do justice to an unfamiliar style. When it is a case of winning recognition for something new and original a thoroughly adequate rendering is half the battle. ”

“ Next to the absolute contempt and neglect of music from which we began to emerge early in the century, our greatest misfortune has been a tendency to prefer composers representing the end of some artistic development while rejecting the turbid and formally imperfect but inspiring initiators. [197] Thus, in one age we worship Handel—a mighty musical architect, but one who never did and never could inspire anyone—while we detest Bach, the most powerful of all inspiring, stimulating, school-forming influences. ”

“ Just as the American Symphony is breezy, democratic, optimistic, and free-thinking, so the Russian is languorous and oppressed, aristocratic, pessimistic, and hierarchic. The absence of any slow movement, except the dirge at the end, is intensely characteristic. The composer has no hymn of thanksgiving or serenely contemplative interlude to give us, but only something with the perfumed and artificial atmosphere of the ballroom, as a relief from the ardours and terrors of his military and patriotic passages. ”

“ The music of Strauss plunges us at once into this whirl of intoxicating gaiety. A series of love-episodes ensue, each one [124] being individualised with amazing subtlety. It is, of course, no new thing for masculine and feminine elements to be clearly distinguishable in music; but the wealth of resource that Strauss shows in these dialogues of dalliance and passion amounts to originality of a very remarkable kind. After several such episodes we have a section symbolising a masked ball that is very strongly stamped with the composer's genius as a musical humourist. ”

“ The desire to find beauty in things or persons, and the desire to find soul and humanity, are the unalloyed, intense, and usually disappointed passions of elect youth claiming its rights. It is the second of them that saves a young man from the conceit and exclusive folly that may beset the first. Johnstone's tastes, his reading, loves and friendships were guided by these two passions, and by a third which took off from the strain of them, and was equally imperious—the wish to study the world and to be entertained reasonably. ”

“ He controls the orchestra precisely as a good actor the tones of his own voice. He can make it render the finest shades of emotion. "Till" is a musical miracle, unlocking the springs of laughter and of tears at the same time. It enlarges one's notions of what is possible in music, so multifarious and inconceivable are the drolleries, so prodigious the technical audacities which the composer succeeds in justifying. Strauss has, in a sense, revived an art said to have existed in the ancient world—the telling of a story in the form of a dance. ”

“ It is a remarkable point that while all the other symphonies are full of Slavonic folk-melodies, the thematic invention in the "Pathetic" is all original—every scrap of it. There is not a folk-tune from beginning to end. One has only to think of the first theme of the first quick movement to perceive how thoroughly the composer was worked up. The originality of it is absolute. One may go over all the orchestral composers from Haydn to Wagner and Brahms, asking oneself whether that theme could be by any one of them. Obviously it could not be the work of anyone else except Tchaïkovsky. ”

“ On two occasions in recent years a work full of slaughter and frenzy, of barbarous revelry and sensuality, of glittering and blaring pageantry, and ending with annihilation—a work the powerful appeal of which lies precisely in the fact that it is the most powerful existing expression in music of everything most un-Christian and anti-Catholic—has been performed without public protest in a British Cathedral. ”

“ To say that either deviated from the abstract perfection of form is merely to say the very idea of sex is such a deviation; and is there not a certain divine suggestiveness in this very fact? Their union is perfect Beauty—veils of the great human Sacrament. And all this is faded clean out of modern life. The belief in the body is dead. I believe some of us live and die never knowing the likeness of the human form, just as some of us do without ever seeing the sunrise. ”

“ An exceedingly remarkable performance of Schumann's Pianoforte Concerto was given by Mr. Rosenthal and the orchestra. In no other performance that we remember was the balance between orchestra and solo part so well preserved. Mr. Rosenthal played with his usual perfection of technical mastery; his phrasing was beautifully intelligent, and the distinction of his style was to be noted no less in the homely sweetness and graceful fancy of the Intermezzo than in the rich and complex Allegro. ”

“ And if it is a point of conscience with cultivated Englishmen to take some interest in graphic and plastic art, we have nevertheless practically excluded music from our scheme of culture. We have, perhaps, advanced a little beyond Lord Chesterfield's view of music as a pursuit leading to nothing but waste of time and bad company, and an English nobleman of the present day would probably hesitate to lay down, as Lord Chesterfield laid down, that the legitimate claims of music upon the attention of a cultivated man are adequately met by the occasional giving of a penny to a fiddler. ”

“ No matter what the order may be that for the time being reigns in the world, for one single heart's desire to be realised, and to give us something to live on, a thousand others must go to ruin, not only for the ever unattainable, but others, allowed to escape from a hand that held them too carelessly. Yes, those bonfires which blaze up—do you know what they are? They are the spectres of our heart's desires, the red-winged birds of paradise that we might have kept by us for life but allowed to escape, the spooks of the old order, of the heathenism that is in us. ”

“ It will now have become clear, what according to the view of music that I have endeavoured to explain, is the task of a song composer. He has far more to do than to express again in tones the feeling of the song. He has to furnish a composition that, in the first place, has life; and, in the domain of art, to have life is to have beauty. ”

“ No other instrumental work ever aroused so great a wave of genuine public interest, and even persons who are no great admirers of Tchaïkovsky ought, if they care for the musical life of this country, to take an interest in him, on account of the astonishingly sudden and powerful grip that he took of the public imagination. It is not to externals—such as instrumentation, counterpoint, form, and so forth—that we must look for the explanation. Glazounoff orchestrates no less brilliantly than Tchaïkovsky and has probably a greater mastery of scholastic device, and the same is true of Saint-Saëns. ”

“ If a man speaks so of cattle how must he feel towards his human brothers and sisters! How strong must be in him that profoundest of poetic passions, the 'carent quia vate sacro' feeling! For, no doubt, sometimes in these quiet country places a heart of such gold as Tess's throbs away in complete obscurity its allotted number of pulses. Our temper has altered from the time when this emotion was dismissed with a 'Let not ambition mock their useful toil,' etc., and Hardy has fully realised the appalling paths of such tragedies in humble life. ”

“ Those faults are none the less monstrous for being inseparable from his individuality, and a thoroughly enlightened modern musician would probably find it very difficult to define the attitude of his mind towards the works of Berlioz's art. In a sense, everything in the best of those works, among which the symphony played yesterday is unquestionably to be reckoned, is justified. When one finds an artist dealing with certain subjects as though to the manner born, and with enormous power and resource, one must not condemn him because those subjects are unpleasant or even horrible in the extreme. ”

“ For so long a time has that kind of oratorio been regarded by the general public as the only possible kind, that even now immense numbers of persons discuss works like "Gerontius" and "The Apostles" on the old lines. That a musician should have a mind, and a message to which notes and chords are subservient, is an idea so new as to be disquieting, if not at once dismissed as absurd. People are so much accustomed to say that they never did care about the subject of a musical work; that no sensible person does; that if the music is pretty the work is good ”

“ To such great uses may an operetta tune come at last, if it happen to be laid hold of by a Beethoven with an imagination like a mighty smelting furnace, and a hand that can model like a great sculptor in bronze. In Dr. Richter's interpretation of the "Eroica," the most striking point is his treatment of the contrast between those musical elements symbolising phases of virile energy and the strains of consolation and reconciliation. ”

“ The first result of mastering this lesson would be the shaking off of fixed ideas, such as that every composer must play the organ and write church music. Chopin wrote nothing but pianoforte pieces, yet his fame is undying, and much more is heard of his music now—fifty years after his death—than ever before, while plenty of composers whose works include voluminous compositions for choir and orchestra are absolutely forgotten in their own lifetime. The real artist is distinguished from other men above all by being enamoured of perfection. ”

“ We have said that, as a work of precocious genius, the "Symphonie Fantastique" stands alone. No doubt other composers, such as Mozart and Schubert, had shown genius of a higher order at an even earlier age. But the "Symphonie Fantastique," as the work of a 'prentice-hand showing absolute mastery of the greatest and most complex resources, has no parallel. The great fact that has always to be [25] remembered in regard to Berlioz is that he devoted himself with all the energy of an enormous and highly original talent to one particular task in music. ”

“ The "Faust Symphonie" declares the composer to be, in his attitude towards art and life, akin to Hugo, Delacroix, and the other great French Romantics, and the result of that attitude seems more completely happy in music than in painting or literature. It makes one look back with envious longing to the freshness and abounding vitality of those fellows who found such huge relish in the great, broad, fundamental human themes, and resources so vast in the treatment of them. ”