Carl Van Vechten

“ It is in the combination of melody and harmony that a composer may show his talent at invention. It is but natural that any advance in this direction should at first startle unaccustomed ears, and it is by no means uncertain that this first thrill is not the most delicious sensation to be derived from hearing music. In time harmony is exhausted—combinations of notes in ordered forms—but there is still the pursuit of disharmony to be made. We are all quite accustomed to occasional discords, even in the music of Beethoven, where they occur very frequently. ”

“ We have become accustomed to the sweet and unsubtle way of the tonic and dominant. Arnold Schoenberg and Igor Strawinsky are yet discordant to our melody-soaked and harmony-demanding ears.
Yet, if concert programmes are consulted, one will find in them very little music earlier than the eighteenth century. The symphony orchestra is really a discovery of the nineteenth century. When our symphony orchestras play Bach, Haydn, or Mozart, the reënforcements, the rearrangements, would astonish those old composers as much as the electric signs on Broadway, could they be brought back to hear them. ”

“ When a seasoned examiner of musical criticism meets this word he understands that the critic means that the music under discussion is quite different from that of Weber and Puccini. There may be, on the other hand, very good reasons to suppose that to an unprejudiced ear, one not fed up on art-music, the new music may not be any more discordant than the hum of a factory, the roar of a city, or any of the familiar rhythmical sounds to which our ears are so accustomed that we accept them. ”

“ So, perhaps, Bach rearranged by Gustav Mahler, or Josef Stransky, or anybody else who happens to have the time, is to be listened to, just as we are all forced to lend our ears several times a year, whether it be in a concert hall or a restaurant, or on an ocean liner, to Gounod’s idea of a Bach prelude.
There is a great deal of the old music which gives a pleasant impression to the ear if it be not heard too frequently. Mozart, Bach, and Gluck, however, stand the test of frequent repetition better than Beethoven. ”

“ The kind of scenery we see so much of in New York really deceives nobody. The moment a human being of three dimensions steps on the stage you have that human being posing against badly painted pictures. It is as if one should combine statuary and painting.
The intention in current stage decoration seems to be to intensify the lack of imagination on the part of the spectator. Each part of what is called the scenery of a play is so clearly defined that there is no opportunity for the communication of suggested feeling. ”

“ It is indeed a serious work of genius. The chorus with which the first [22] act closes has power enough to entice me to the theatre at any time. I do not know of a death-scene in all the field of opera as strong in its effect as that of the Prince Ivan Khovansky. He is stabbed and he falls dead. He does not sing again, he does not move; there are no throbs of the violins, no drum beats. There is a pause. The orchestra is silent. The people on the stage are still. It is tremendous!
Rimsky-Korsakow’s music is pretty well known in America. ”

“ For the Ballet has, in a large sense, continued to be a picture-exhibition, and in spite of the fact that some of the novelty has been worn off by multiplied imitations, the thing itself still retains a good deal of the original impulse. The Russian Ballet, on its decorative side, is entirely responsible for the riot of color which has spread over the Western world in clothes and house furnishings. Without the Russian Ballet as an inspiration there could have been no Paul Poiret, no Paul Iribe, no George Barbier, no Jean Cocteau, no George Lepape, no Marcel Lejeune. ”

“ Let us remember that about the time Richard Wagner was writing Tristan und Isolde, Moussorgsky was putting on paper, with infinite pain, the notes of the scores of the poignant Boris Godunow and the intense La Khovanchina. Since then the Russian music world has been occupied by men who have given their lives to the foundation of a national school. Their work has been largely overshadowed in America by the facile genius of Tschaikowsky, who wrote the most popular symphony of the nineteenth century, but who is less Russian and less important than many of his confrères. ”

“ One after another they flee from the strangely misunderstanding faun, until one, bolder than the others, approaches, almost to remain. The faun still does not understand and she, too, flees, dropping her scarf behind her. This the faun seizes and, as the curtain descends, returning to his rock, he presses this scarf to his lips and breast, at last, apparently, something more than the faun he has been. Nijinsky in this pantomime (it can scarcely be called a ballet) suggests all that the poem and the music call forth in imaginative minds. ”

“ Kostchei has already turned others into stone, but over Ivan he has no power; the Firebird’s plume protects him, and on his brandishing it before the terror-stricken god the bird herself appears. At first she makes the crowd dance; then she lulls them to sleep and shows Ivan where the egg containing Kostchei’s soul is concealed. He brings it out and smashes it. The old god crumbles to pieces, the stones are brought to life, and the lovers’ hands are joined. The character of Kostchei is an important one in Russian folk-lore; he is the subject of an opera by Rimsky-Korsakow. ”

“ People do not, as a rule, attempt to play piano duets in public. Why they should play string quartets I do not know. Yet you will find the cult of the string quartet is almost a mystic body. There is a great deal said about this being the “highest and noblest” form of music (arbitrary art-music) , and a great many people are impressed with the idea that to know the string quartets of the masters in itself constitutes a liberal education. To know how to play them does, in fact, make for a certain education, but to listen to them—well, that is a different matter. ”

“ It would do no harm to anyone to be taught to read music; but to be taught to play it is like being taught to act. What if we should all be taught to paint?—Well, after all, why not?
The results are not heartening. The fact is that over fifty per cent. of the audiences who attend symphony concerts cannot carry a tune. Naturally they are not averse to hearing Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony played over and over and over again, but I should like to ask these same people how many times during the course of a season they would listen to a masterpiece in words—Hamlet, for instance. ”

“ For instance, it is quite customary to allow the full body of strings to play a Mozart symphony, although the wood-winds and brasses are not appreciably greater in number in the modern orchestra than they were in Mozart’s time. [31] Lack of proportion and over-emphasis are the natural results.
It is only the composers who have invented the modern orchestra, Berlioz, Liszt, Wagner, Strauss, Reger, Strawinsky and Scriabine—to mention a few names—who get justice done to their compositions. In fact, as it stands, the modern orchestra exists for the perfect playing of modern music. ”

“ Still, when every person in a vast population is expected to enjoy arbitrary art-music, one cannot expect perception or taste. In our civilization everybody is supposed to “love” music. Poor though we may be, we send our daughters to the music-masters. From cottage to cottage the echoes of the pianoforte resound and, especially in the beginning, each pupil is given a taste of what is known in the provinces as “classical” music. Czerny is hauled out to teach the fingers how to be agile. There must be a taste of Bach’s Wohltemperirtes Clavier, a Chopin waltz or two.... ”

“ But there are only a few discerning enough to perceive that Strawinsky and Schoenberg have gone only a step further than the so-called impressionists in music.
Since the beginnings of music, as an art-form, there has always been a complaint that contemporary composers could not write melody. Beethoven suffered from this complaint; Wagner suffered from it; we have only recently gone through the period when Strauss and Debussy suffered from it. The reason is an obvious one. Each new composer has made his own rules of composition. Each has progressed a step further in his use of harmony. ”

“ For some of us there is always the question of relative importance. It may be a fact that nobody in the future will be able to extract more beautiful arbitrary art-music out of the air than has been composed by Mozart and Wagner. We are sure that Berlioz, Liszt, Meyerbeer, and Mendelssohn can be improved on because they have been. Perhaps Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony is really better music than any which has been composed before or since. ”

“ Some of this music one also hears in restaurants and in the opera house. It is monstrous!
I really do not think that a modern symphony orchestra ought to be allowed to play more than one Beethoven symphony a season. This fossilization [36] would be deadening to any art. A set concert programme is almost an occasion for despair under the brightest conditions, but with no new life in its make-up, it had better remain an unperformed programme. When an orchestra is the medium through which a new musician pours out his inspiration to the world, there is meaning in the organization. ”

“ As all real progress in art is dependent, in a measure, on the past, it is necessary to establish this fact.
My personal impressions of this young Russian’s music and its effect on me are very strong. I attended the first performance in Paris of Strawinsky’s anarchistic (against the canons of academic art) ballet, The Sacrifice to the Spring, in which primitive emotions are both depicted and aroused by a dependence on barbarous rhythm, in which melody and harmony, as even so late a composer as Richard Strauss understands them, do not enter. ”

“ And so we might go back, year by year, to the season when Bakst’s Sheherazade launched the Oriental craze which is still making itself felt in hamlets on the Great Lakes.
These decorations, and the costumes which accompany them, designed by such artists—many of them well-known painters in Russia—as Roerich, Bakst, Fedorowsky, Soudeikine, Golovine, Doboujinsky, Alexander Benois, and Nathalie Gontcharova, are the basis of the beauty of the Russian Ballet, and they are so perfect in their many manifestations [51] that no amount of imitation can entirely spoil them. ”

“ The very principle of the new music demands a greater effort at concentration than can be expected of most audiences when they are listening to music, as many ears catch the meaning of a phrase only after it has been repeated a convenient number of times. This is one of the chief reasons for the popular success of The Ring [97] dramas. It seems incredible, and impertinent, to the average audience that a composer should have had the idea of expressing himself without repeating himself. A catalogue of representative themes would be of no use to a prospective auditor of The Nightingale. ”

“ Karsavina, trips her lightest measures to the fanfare of a cornet, and Petrouchka sobs out his heart to the empty sky to the screaming of a piccolo. There are tunes, real tunes, the piece abounds in them, and the whole is wrapped in an atmosphere of realism and truth which gives music the tone of originality. Incidentally, there is a triangle solo in the score.
M. Montagu-Nathan says: “The carnival music is a sheer joy, and the incidents making a demand upon music as a descriptive medium have been treated not merely with marvelous skill but with unfailing instinct for the true satiric touch. ”

“ Now, there are two advantages to this method, aside from the implied advantage of an improvement in effect: First, it makes for a very short opera (The Nightingale, in three acts, is so short that at its early performances it was given in a bill with two ballets, one of which, The Legend of Joseph, runs for over an hour) ; second, the audience is not called upon to listen intellectually (nor should it be, at the performance of an opera) . The only intention of the composer is to make his listeners feel each situation he illustrates with his music. ”

“ Strawinsky sweeps away this vague atmosphere with one gesture; his idea of movement is Dionysian; he overwhelms us with his speed. One critic has referred to him as the “whirling dervish of his art.” His gifts to future composers are his conciseness, his development of the complexities of rhythm, and his invention of chord-formation. His use of dissonance is an art in itself. Richard Strauss has employed dissonance in obvious development of Richard Wagner’s polyphonic and [116] chromatic style. Pushed to its furthest, his system is one of inversion. ”

“ So, under the guidance of Fokine, with the inspiration which such music and color as are provided for them can give, the Russians engaged in the carrying out of these ballets easily rise to an unattainable (for other dancers) height of seeming spontaneity. They have that “like-to-do-it” and creative (as opposed to reproductive) air which every stage director knows is almost impossible to instill into a large company with any hope that it will be retained after the first performance. But the Russians never lose it. ”