Daniel Gregory Mason

“ To play him too distinctly is as fatal an error as to examine a charcoal sketch with a magnifying glass, or to bend over a canvas of Monet and peer curiously at each spot of paint. One must stand off, and half close one's eyes, until the details are lost in the masses. In a word, here is a new type of art, demanding a new mode of apperception. If a Bach fugue and a Mozart quartet are the steel engravings of music, Chopin's pieces are its impressionistic paintings and pastels. ”

“ No, Chopin may not be a giant like Bach, or Mozart, or Handel, or Beethoven, but he is a sincere and earnest artist, who feels vividly, and spares no pains to give his feelings worthy [Pg 252] expression, and to attain a supreme plastic beauty. Above all, he is a man of the most delicate sensibility, the most discriminating taste, the most exacting ideal of artistic perfection. In leaving him, it is pleasant to attend less to the sufferings to which these qualities condemned him as a man, than to the achievements to which they led him as an artist. ”

“ All Schumann's work tends in the direction of what is highest and most beautiful in music. Much he achieved, but much more he realized only as an ideal realizes that to which it points, and in some sense gives it solid reality in the world. Whenever and wherever men pursue what is pure, high, fresh, noble, and fair in music, there the spirit of Schumann will be at work. ”

“ Never, surely, was human being more delicately adjusted than Chopin to receive painful impressions at every point. His senses were so keen that as a child he cried at the mere sound of music; disease made him shrink from minute changes of temperature or slightly unfavorable conditions of weather, of which ordinary people are unconscious; imperious pride made him similarly susceptible to his social climate; and his high artistic ideal condemned him to constant disappointment even with his work. ”

“ The modern watchword has come to be initiative rather than obedience, originality rather than skill, individuality rather than truth to universal human nature. It is, after all, one impulse, the impulse toward specialization, that runs through all the various manifestations of the romantic spirit, and may be traced alike in the lyricism of Schubert, the fanciful whimsicality of Schumann, the picturesqueness of Mendelssohn, the introspection of Chopin, and the realism of Berlioz and Liszt. ”

“ The crudity of the art of our musical orchard-robbers becomes at once evident when we compare a single melody, or an entire movement, of Schubert or his successors with one by Mozart or Beethoven.
The single melody is the molecule of music, the smallest element in it that cannot be subdivided without loss of character. Every great melody has an indefinable distinction, a sort of personal flavor or individuality, which we may discern but cannot analyze. ”

“ Schumann's work is intensely human from the opening onslaught of syncopated chords to the final, deep-drawn sighs of the contrabasses. There is unassuagable desire in the melody so appropriately marked "In leidenschaftlichem Tempo," there is the very accent of a lover's longing in the beautiful Astarte theme. The music constantly rushes on into feverish excitement, only to expend its force and die away to tender sadness, whence in a moment it lashes itself again into new fury. ”

“ There is, indeed, evidence of this taste for rich tonal effects on almost every page of his piano music. Like Chopin he finds a Mozartian clarity of sound a little tame, and prefers to obscure the outlines of his consonant chords by means of plentifully sprinkled dissonances; but while Chopin, more fastidiously delicate, makes his dissonances float like a diaphanous veil over the pure chords, Schumann, with true Teutonic luxuriousness, fills up all the chinks and crannies with suspensions and passing notes, and holds down the pedal to boot. His piano style is much more massive than Chopin's. ”

“ To read a love-story, labyrinthine in minute detail, is a less seizing experience than to overhear the impassioned speech of some actual lover, even if we catch none of the words; and this in turn commoves us less than to feel in our own frames that boiling of the blood, that surging of the vitals, which is the raw material of love. Brisk exercise on a fine autumn day of sun and wind gives a richer happiness than is dreamed of in our philosophies. ”

“ Instruments alone cannot make music, any more than a steam derrick can build a bridge. If we wish to seize the true spirit of the modern musical art, we must, after all, leave orchestra, and piano, and sensuous value behind, and ascertain to what use composers have turned all these resources, and to what manner of expression, embodied in what kind of forms, they have been spurred by the romantic spirit. ”

“ What those ladies to whom he bowed with such an irresistible chivalry, such a noble humility, would have felt could they have read the cynical thoughts about women which meanwhile filled his mind, that we feel when we realize that for all his pompous utterance, for all his dreamy emotion, he is in his heart laughing at us for being so obligingly impressed by his rhodomontade. We can forgive, we can even rather enjoy, the poseur who is himself in love with his pose, but not the charlatan who makes capital of our gullibility. ”

“ So lovely music simply establishes in us a mood, leaving all the furniture of that mood to our imaginations. And this is why it is that artistic expression, as it becomes more minute and meticulously precise, is apt to lose in persuasive power, and that the composer, if he understands his medium, must needs hesitate long before sacrificing the least degree of beauty, however interstitial and inconspicuous, to any isolated feature of interest, no matter how salient or seductive. ”

“ The Paris of 1830 was indeed a surrounding well fitted to encourage the most varied growth in the character of a young man so sensitive to influences, so complex in mental and moral constitution, as Liszt. There was, on the purely musical side, the powerful irritant of a public languid and frivolous, devoted to the showy tinsel of Kalkbrenner, Herz, Pixis, and Pleyel, and so indifferent to real music that Liszt had to coat the pill of a Beethoven Concerto with sugary ornamentation to make it go down. ”

“ Mendelssohn's earliest compositions reflect all the freshness and gaiety of his youthful nature, all the ease and charm of the circumstances in which it developed. From the first their technical skill is perfect; for Mendelssohn had had no distracting struggles for daily bread, like Schubert, no moiling in arid, uncongenial studies, like Schumann; he had been placed under the best masters, and had assimilated harmony, counterpoint, and fugue as unconsciously as most boys assimilate reading, writing, and arithmetic. ”

“ Not without terrible risks may the musician neglect form, since form is itself, for him, perhaps more than for any of his brother artists in other mediums, a fundamental means of expression. Of this matter popular thought is inclined to take a superficial view; it is fond of confusing vital form with dry formalism, of speaking contemptuously of formal analysis as the pedantic dissection of lovely melodies, the plucking and counting of the petals of the flowers of art, and of reiterating ad nauseam its irritating half-truth, "Music is the language of the emotions." ”

“ Berlioz kicked down all the fences in his coltish days, and ever after looked askance at the artistic harness. Liszt, for all his diabolical cleverness, remained the slave of mannerisms, and became a dupe of his own rhetorical style.
Now there is doubtless in all this waywardness something that strikes in us a chord such as vibrates in sympathy with the small boy who, regardless of barbed wire, invades the orchard and carries off the delectable green apples. It is a fine thing to be young, it is glorious to be free. ”

“ No, if the idealist in Liszt was often smothered and drugged into lethargy by this miasma of flattery, it was still within his power to seek a clearer, more inspiring air. And it was because he did not do so that there grew up beside the idealist in him that other ego of the poseur and charlatan; and it is his fault as well as his misfortune that posterity will see him, as a youth, posturing in Schaffer's studio, and, as an old man, laying his hand on the left lapel of his abbé's coat as he bows to the ladies in his box. ”

“ Much of the music of Schubert, Schumann, Mendelssohn, and Chopin is of the rarest beauty, and, by the same token, of the most moving eloquence. The intention of our analysis is rather to secure that aid to the appreciation of just such beauties which discrimination alone can give, and by means of comparison to sharpen the focus of our mental image of what romanticism achieves and of what it fails to achieve. At its best, we shall rejoice to find, it shares the serene loveliness, the impersonal grandeur, of classicism. ”

“ Here, we cry with delight, is a master who can make flutes and clarinets and violins in their upper register, and trumpets playing piano, sound not like mere orchestral instruments, but like angelic voices in remote skies. This magical charm is largely due to the limpid transparency of his coloring. He never overscores, never surfeits the ear and confuses the mind by laying on the tints too thickly or piling up colors that will not coalesce. Few composers have so fully realized how little an effect is due to the mere quantity of the sounds, how much to their skilful composition. ”

“ They become as wild flowers plucked to languish indoors, as seaweeds taken from their natural setting of liquid coolness. Or again, the particular expressions of music may be compared to the strings of an instrument, of which the sounding board is plastic beauty; without its sympathetic reinforcement the strings, strike them as we may, give forth a scarcely audible murmur; with it, there is [Pg 39] clear and powerful sonority. So the most ingenious music is dull and dead if it lack the vitality of organic form, but if it be beautiful it will make its way directly to the heart. ”

“ Noise is indeed the hidden goal toward which all description and imitation aspire, and sound could never have passed into music under their guidance, but only in quest of a far deeper, more subtle expressiveness. It is hard to believe that any sane listener would long continue to patronize music in which there was not something more truly satisfying than the lapping of brooks, the crashing of storm or battle, and the whirring of spinning-wheels or the creaking of wind-mills. ”

“ From the outset a thoughtful observer might have doubted whether so artificially protected a life as that of Mendelssohn's youth would develop his character and genius, in the long run, so favorably as it at first promised to do. There is such a thing as a good fortune so unrelieved that, by removing the prick of adversity, the challenge of obstacles, the illumination of sympathy, it becomes in truth misfortune. ”

“ Such consideration soon suggests the truth, which impresses us the more the more deeply we study music, that there is a general expressiveness underlying all particular expressions, a fundamental beauty by which all special beauties are nourished as flowers are nourished by the soil, a symmetry and orderly organization that can no more be dispensed with in music without crippling its eloquence than a normal regularity of the features can be dispensed with in the human face without distorting it into absurdity or debasing it into ugliness. ”

“ But, unfortunately, program music not merely bores the music-lover; it does him a positive injury, which criticism ought, so far as it can, to mitigate. By its false emphasis it distracts attention from what music can do supremely to what it can only botch and bungle, brings true masterpieces into discredit with hearers not sensitive or disciplined enough to appreciate them, and plunges the simple into a hopeless æsthetic quagmire. ”

“ As in a short story of the kind that Kipling, Stevenson, and others have made familiar to us we do not demand that evolution of character, that complex nodation of plot, that subtle action and reaction of motive, which every great novel must have, but simply vividness, brilliant depiction of a single person, idea, or situation, so in a song we desire no symphonic grandeur of scope and wealth of ordered detail, but rather perfect utterance of a single highly specialized emotion. ”