Pierre Lasserre

“ With Frenchmen the musical rendering of things is subtle, sober, dainty, vibrant, lively, stripped and free from excess of matter, full of rhythm. With Wagner it is startling, opulent, sumptuous, streaming with colour; it makes far less call on rhythmic invention (which is not Wagner's strong point) than on forms, on harmony and instrumentation. But its spirit is not German. Wagner, who was so German, so pitiably German in his ideas and literary lubrucations is very little of a German at root in his musical genius, nor am I the first person to have noticed the fact. ”

“ We do at any rate mean that in certain of its characteristics, and those precisely the most distinctive ones, it is in fact not German. Compare it with Schumann's music. It seems to me that if anything is Germanic it is Schumann's lyricism. Now nothing in the world is further removed from the inspiration of Schumann, than the inspiration of Wagner. For Schumann, Nature is poetic as the agent that excites vague states of feeling, vague hopes, vague delirium, vague melancholy and other moods, intense of course, of a sensibility that is occupied with itself alone and feeds only on itself. ”

“ If the impulse of a passionate and simple tenderness, the gift of two hearts, young and pure, still strangers to mistrust and vanity, opening to each other like expanding rosebuds, if divine and child-like playfulness of heart blending with chaste nobility of feeling,—if these are the things that can lend the finest and most inspiring charm to the expression of love, then Wagner has written no love scene that surpasses that of Lohen- grin, just as, speaking generally, he has written no fresher, more youthful or more sweetly radiant music than that of Lohengrin. ”

“ But very often also it is the alibi under which a taste too mediocre, too clumsy and too little sensitive to seize the sense of a rich and delicately expressive music, hides itself and seeks its revenge. Then it cries down pedantry and the abuse of science, it cries down the fugue. After all it is surprising to find Jean-Jacques making himself the mouthpiece of this lack of understanding, this semi-inertia of feeling, and upsetting all the accepted notions of art merely to set up such a disposition as the real judge and sovereign umpire of good music. ”

“ It is right to be French in everything: but one must not be so of set purpose. That is the right attitude. The French spirit, French taste—these are things that do not define themselves, do not put themselves into formulæ. It is not that they lack body and reality; on the contrary their reality as we see it in history is too much alive, too overflowing—and how should we recognise it in history if we did not feel it stirring within us? There is nothing more real, more distinct, than the physiognomy of an individual, especially if a superior personality shines through his features. ”

“ Let us not on that account picture him as a figure of fun, a childlike, innocent dreamer, a stranger to everything but music, without action or defence in life. He was not that type at all. His abstraction is not the voluptuous slackness of an aesthete who dreads the harshness of human contact arid the fatigue of business. It is the sympton of a strong and tenacious will that has a horror of scattered energies, and concentrates on the main issue, the unum necessarium. Business does not frighten him, and he handles briskly the men with whom he has dealings. ”

“ Grand opera has its foundation not in nature, but in Meyerbeer's nature. It was born with Meyerbeer and died with him. Its decease is not universally admitted, and many people still imagine that what corresponds in music to the natural and eternal distinction of comedy and tragedy, whatever names one may give them, is the distinction between comic opera and grand opera. But that is an error. Grand opera is in no way musical tragedy; I allow that it more resembles tragedy than comedy, though it commonly contains a large comic element—an involuntary element, it is true. ”

“ Grétry sees very clearly that the inspiration of symphonists worthy of the name of creators does not well up or form itself in a vacuum. It is the birth of a sentiment, an emotion, an image, a vision which occupies the musician’s mind, which sets in movement and warms his imagination and acts for him as the interior model which he struggles to reproduce in his musical ideas. ”

“ What is most offensive in Meyerbeer is the rhythms, those heavy crushing rhythms from which he never manages, if I may put it so, to extricate himself; they betray the lack of breed in his music, just as it often happens that the gait of a man who has arrived at aping a great politeness of manner which deceives nearly everybody, offers to some more observant eyes the living witness of a coarse and vain nature. ”

“ It is autumnal love, an aftermath of passion,—love that has passed forty, such as Wagner was experiencing in his own life when he wrote these pages: love that feels the shortness of the time before it as keenly as it enjoys its exaltation, because it has come late, and because it is a guilty love: it holds itself closer than it holds the beloved one, in a sort of attitude of defence against all that threatens it, above all against death, already lurking in the background. ”

“ Schopenhauer's morality counsels the annihilation of desire, promising us as the goal of this effort entrance into some undefined state of divine slumber, some kind of pantheistic paradise in which all the movements of life expire and individuality disappears. And it would seem at first sight that nothing could be more opposed to this passion for the void than the exaltation of love.
But neither Wagner nor his heroes feel it thus. For Tristan and his beloved, love's supreme cry is a summons to the void; the expiration of desire in death is the very object of desire carried to its paroxysm. ”

“ They have a genius for melody, melody of the Italian type, long drawn out. They give birth to some melodies that are intolerable, but they hit upon some that are admirable and will never be forgotten. This is especially so with Bellini of whom Wagner has even said: "He who knows him not, knows not what melody is." Yet they often manage to spoil by turgidity, exaggeration and clamour a melodic beginning that was both happy and delicate.
When we think of the Barber or of William Tell, we recall a work, a subject, characters, types, a musical whole entirely enveloped in a certain colour. ”

“ With Rameau, at any rate in his best work, there is nothing of this. The great expressions whether vocal or instrumental arise from the actual progress of the sentiment and of the dialogue, with such spontaneity that one feels their elevating effect without having, so to speak, noticed it. The listener is out on the ocean of music without having been conscious of leaving the shore. The composer, carried away by the exaltation of the passion he is translating into music lets himself go and plies his tools joyfully on his material Sound. ”

“ Is it not madness and servitude to insist on clothing creations of French literature and poetry in the same thick and heavy musical drapery? Our musical poetry, our musical drama, require a lighter garment that allows the luminous body of thought to shine through. Consider the class of subjects that Wagner has to translate into music: the slow and elementary thought of his monumental and childish gods, the violent but short-lived humanity of his heroes with their lack of real characterisation ”

“ Such a poet would therein be a moralist, but would he be true to nature? Well, there is nothing comic in loving life, that dear life which we enjoy only once. This chorus of poltroons is a marvellous musical passage.
Let us pass to the other end of the chain. What a creation is that of Iago in Verdi's Othello! In this work by a septuagenarian artist, fine as it is as a whole, and possessing so touching a nobility of atmosphere, I confess that the expression of love appears to me weak and faintly portrayed; but that of warlike heroism is warm and strong. ”

“ Symphony as everyone knows is a play of music upon given themes—it develops and varies them in a thousand ways, making them pass from one key to another, ornamenting them, combining them, and constantly reshaping their physiognomy by all the resources of harmony and counterpoint, breaking them up and embroidering on their fragments one new fancy after another, bringing them back to view in their original form and key, and after that making them run through a second and third cycle of transformations. ”

“ It is only too easy no doubt to ridicule a fine work which offers one absurd aspect, and I readily allow that the unity of tone, sustained inspiration, and fine radiance of the music, correct or minimise in the performance the effect of disproportion and inequality resulting from this absurd element mingled with elements that are natural and noble. These defects are none the less real, and not to be shocked at this infantile aspect of the drama one must surely have an imagination that lacks culture, and is very easily pleased. ”

“ Reason, knowledge, experience, deliberate thought, all the "conscious" and organised forms of our inner life, imprison us in the bonds from which we must "deliver" ourselves by some undefined yielding to the suggestions or intuitions of pure and instinctive sensibility, as man "delivers himself" of himself in the bosom of a woman, delivers himself of egoism in the bosom of love. And sensibility, emancipated from reflection is identified with what Wagner calls the "spirit of the people," an ideal of all innocence, kindness and genius. ”

“ Moreover the wisest course is not to worry ourselves at all as to whether the music of our musicians conforms or does not conform to the national type. Let us ask only whether it is fine music, whether it is alive. If it possesses those qualities, we may make our minds easy, it is French. For one can create nothing living but with one's own nature. A Frenchman of France who has real talent has a French talent. For the last fifty years our country has shewn in the realm of music the most brilliant fecundity. Since Wagner's death its rank in music is the highest in the world. ”

“ Despising Mime, who does not exist in his eyes, he only knows himself and the sky; he therefore possesses instinttively all the virtues, not forgetting muscles of iron; he is intrepid, kind, generous, charming, delicate, chivalrous; all this is as natural to him as breathing. In short, he, Siegfried, is the man expected, the man at once summoned and feared by Wotan, who is to free and redeem the world from the antique laws to which Wotan holds it subject, not without feeling weariness and disgust. ”

“ Rameau, who was thinking of trying a theatrical venture, asks him for a "book," and seeks to inspire his confidence.
"When people speak of a learned musician," he writes, "they mean usually a man who has the various combinations of notes at his fingers' ends, but he is supposed to be so much absorbed in these combinations that he sacrifices everything to them,—good sense, sentiment, judgment, reason. Now such a man is merely a school musician, and of a school that deals with notes and nothing else; and one may rightly prefer a musician who prides himself less on knowledge than on taste. ”

“ He abounds in eloquent and poetic inventions, in great ideas: but he writes badly; his music sounds hard: his “crust” is hollow, hard, tough. That is not the case with Grétry. He is fully and subtly a musician. All that he writes sounds agreeable, his technique is pure: his melody, which is sometimes of the utmost grace and beauty, and which in general recommends itself by a rare justness of accent and expression, is attached to the movements of a bass that is easy, neat and elegant. ”

“ Mythology personifies them, converts them into great figures, and the genius of the poet too shows itself creative and inventive to the same purpose. These figures ally themselves by a thousand affinities with the varied spectacles of nature, they mingle with the thousand pictures of field and forest, mountain and river, and it is the impression of this blending that excites to the highest pitch Wagner's creative imagination ”

“ All these things really required the twenty to twenty-five brass instruments, and the whole heavy artillery of his orchestra. But for our part we are concerned only with the general expression of human subjects; we have also an old tradition of the picturesque in music; but our picturesque is quick-witted, refined, salted with intelligence, thoroughly rhythmical, and what should we want with these tyrannous paraphernalia? An orchestra that bears resemblance to speech, not to a tempest, is what suits us. "Oh," cried Nietzsche, "that orchestration of Wagner, I call it the sirocco!" ”

“ Similarly, that extreme vigour of dramatico-musical movement, that captivating vivacity in what I would call the scenic arrangement of music, these are charms that our composers might try in vain to realise to the same degree as do Rossini and Verdi in their finest works. In these great masters such qualities may be traced to a certain manner of feeling, an inward energy. Our musicians could never even try to catch that style without appearing absurd, insincere, exaggerated, strained, or without wasting in the effort their real strength. ”

“ Why did not Grétry go back to the great Italian school that immediately preceded Pergolesi—to the great Scarlatti, the incomparable Stradella—the scope of whose genius is sufficiently attested by the fact that he not only invented the “bouffon” style which Pergolesi has employed divinely in the Serva padrona, but also exercised a real domination over Handel’s mind? But we must think of our artist as an impatient young man, eager to “arrive” and to make the most of the extraordinary facility of dramatic musical expression which he feels fermenting within him. ”

“ And on what ground are we to decide whether such and such modern musician, who has charmed some and irritated others, but has left no one indifferent by the unprecedented sonorities of his music, how, I ask, are we to decide whether he has merely used the traditional language plus refinements and peculiarities of his own, or whether on the other hand he has not revolutionised the very basis of the language? ”

“ In temperament as in brain, Rameau belongs to another period. He is a bourgeois of the old school, positive and severe, of Cartesian education, the very last man to run after sentimental will o' the wisps and idyllic illusions. In that lofty and firm soul there is no nook for pastorals. But he is a very great artist with a quick and piercing eye, quick at probing the meaning of what lies around him, seizing passionately its appeal and grace, transforming it into rich material for his art, and appreciating it rather with the heart than the intellect. ”

“ Like all truly great artists Rameau has both. He draws from the same source his double superiority in delicate expression and in the vigorous inspirations of eloquence. If anyone ever knew how to put energy into music, it is he. He has no equal for feats of conciseness and strength, for the sudden frankness and overwhelming bursts of melodic spate. ”