Ernest Newman

“ Even after the lapse of so many years the music sometimes strikes us, in spite of all the enormous development of the art between his day and ours, as startlingly new and unconventional. What then must it have sounded like in the ears of those who heard it for the first time? Imagine the bourgeois audience of those days suddenly assailed by the March to the Scaffold, or the Witches' Sabbath, in the Symphonie fantastique! There was here as violent a rupture with the staid formulas of the classic and the pseudo-classic as anything achieved by Victor Hugo or Delacroix or Gros or Géricault. ”

“ If the musician writes music to a play and invents phrases to symbolise the characters and to picture the events of the play, we are simply not listening to his work at all if we listen to it in ignorance of his poetical scheme. We may hear the music, but it is not the music he meant us to hear, or at all events not heard as he intended us to hear it. If melody, harmony, colour and development are all shaped and directed by certain pictures in the musician's mind, we get no further than the mere outside of the music, unless we also are familiar with those pictures. ”

“ We see now how hopelessly absurd it is to judge the composer of Also sprach Zarathustra by any of the standards of the past—that the man's whole mind is unique, seeing things in music that no one ever saw before, and taking the most direct, even if most perilous, path to the expression of them. It took him a long time to learn that he had no great faculty for abstract beauty, for weaving the impalpable stuff of a vision into something that lives and shall be immortal, like the sculptor's work, by virtue of the sheer harmony of every element of its being. ”

“ It lies on the mere surface of the matter that some parts of it are ravishingly beautiful; you have only to play for yourself on the piano the death music, or the Don's long eulogy of the knightly life, to feel the very heart leap within you. If this is not surpassingly great music there is no music in the world worthy of the name. Of other parts the beauty will be perceived when the work is better known; and the Don Quixote will then be recognised to be in some ways the profoundest, noblest thing Strauss has ever done. ”

“ But the very qualities of alertness, of quick interest in life, which have gone to make Strauss, in his later music, the symbol of a new era of æsthetics, have prevented him from falling often into that ecstatic, clairvoyant swoon from which the music of the great dreamers has been born. A melody, with him, is not something irresponsibly beautiful, as sheer a delight to the ear as the flight of a bird or [259] the play of sunlight on the water are to the eye, but a commentary upon a character or a situation, aiming at veracity in the first place rather than at self-existent beauty. ”

“ We get men like Hoffmann, at once novelist, painter, musician, and critic; like Liszt, pianist, composer, author; like Schumann, musician and musical critic; like Wagner, ranging greedily over the whole field of human knowledge, and mixing himself up—in more senses than one—with every possible and impossible subject under the sun. I am not using the term in any offensive or disparaging sense when I say that the average modern musician, in matters outside music, is a much better educated and more all-round man than his predecessor ”

“ All the madness, the pose, the egoism of the Symphonie fantastique and its brethren have disappeared. Berlioz now has an eye for something more in life than his own unshorn locks and his sultry amours. He no longer thinks himself the centre of the universe; he no longer believes in the Berliozcentric theory, and does not write with one eye on the mirror half the time. In place of all this we have a Berlioz who has sunk his aggressive subjectivity and learned to regard life objectively. His spirit touched to finer issues, he sings, not Berlioz, but humanity as a whole. ”

“ To Spencer's oft-reiterated question, "If my theory does not explain the origin of music, how else can its genesis be explained?" we may reply that his theory really explains nothing; it only asserts. It points to certain resemblances between speech and song, and then dogmatically lays it down, without an atom of proof, that the one has arisen from the other. Per contra, an analysis of primitive music shows us that in the rudest savage we have, in embryo, every element that goes to make the most complicated music of modern times—some of these elements, indeed, appearing even in animals. ”

“ If life is ugly and bitter, there is an art that can interest us deeply in this bitterness and ugliness, because it ministers to that deep-seated need of ours to leave no corner of life and nature unexplored. This art of the mercilessly real may not be so "philosophical" as Maeterlinck's; it may not speak to us so clearly of the "mysterious chant of the infinite, the ominous silence of the soul and of God, the murmur of Eternity on the horizon," for these voices can make themselves heard only in a wider, serener, less turbid space than ours. ”

“ If it is absurd to play to me a song without giving me a copy of the words, expecting me to understand the music that has been born of a poetical idea as if it had been written independently of any verbal suggestion, it is equally absurd to put before me, as pure music, an orchestral piece that was never conceived as pure music. If the poem or the picture was necessary to the composer's imagination, it is necessary to mine; if it is not necessary to either of us, he has no right to affix the title of it to his work. ”

“ So long as you work in one medium alone, the form is controlled simply by the necessities and potentialities of that medium. In a symphony or a fugue you have to consider nothing but the nature of absolute music; in the drama, you have to worry about no problems except those that lie in the nature of drama. But as soon as you begin to work in a form that is a blend of the two, each of them wants to pull the other along its own road, and a compromise has to be arrived at. This is why it is easier to satisfy our sense of form in a drama or a symphony than in an opera or a symphonic poem. ”

“ What makes the Don Quixote so great a work is, in a word, the wise and tender humanity of its humour. We can put aside, if we like, all the wonderful witchery of its technique, its extraordinary graphic power, its exhilarating and amusing imitations of reality—for there is here a descriptive sense surpassing in its manifestations Till Eulenspiegel and Ein Heldenleben at their best. The wise man, who accepts with thankfulness all that music can give him, will not reject all this with a sneer and a condescending remark about music "confining itself to its proper province." ”

“ It is quite time, then, that not only critics but composers realised that when the brains are out the form will die; that you cannot write a symphony in the form of Mozart or Beethoven unless your mental world is something like theirs, and that if the literary, or pictorial, or dramatic suggestion is all-potent with a composer, it is folly for him to throw it aside, and try, by using a form that is uncongenial to him, to get back into an emotional atmosphere it would be impossible for him to breathe. ”

“ Are not deeper chords set vibrating by all these things than by the dagger-stroke of conventional drama? Is it not at the very moment when a man believes himself secure from bodily death that the strange and silent tragedy of the being and the immensities does indeed raise its curtain on the stage? Is it while I flee before a naked sword that my existence touches its most interesting point? Is life always at its sublimest in a kiss? Are there not other moments, when one hears purer voices that do not fade away so soon? Does the soul flower only on nights of storm? ”

“ The point is, why should Shakespeare, with a gift for good drama, force himself to write bad epics? And if a man's musical ideas spring from quite another way of apprehending life than that of the absolute musician, why should he abjure his own native form of speech in order to mouth and maul unintelligently the phrases and the forms of another musician whose mental world is wholly foreign to his? ”

“ In these long descending wails of the orchestra you have all the anguish, all the disillusionment of the poor knight painted with an expressiveness, a fidelity, that sets one thinking of visual as well as auditory things. He illustrates the scene as consummately as a pictorial artist could do, and at the same time throws over it the melting melancholy that music alone among the arts can express. ”

“ We need to study musicians as a whole, as complete organisms hanging together by virtue of certain peculiarities of structure. If a man does not like Liszt's music he compares it disparagingly with Wagner's—as if this placing of people on the higher or lower rungs of a ladder were the be-all and the end-all of criticism. Shakespeare is the greatest figure of the Elizabethan literary world; but what critic thinks of disposing of Ford and Massinger and Jonson and Webster and Marlowe and Tourneur with the off-hand remark that not one of them was a Shakespeare? ”

“ There is really no need for this incessant piling-up of more and more sound in the orchestra; its one sufficient condemnation is that frequently no result comes out commensurate with the huge means that have to be employed. Thousands of pages of our modern music would be equally great, equally moving, with a vastly smaller expenditure of effort. A man like Strauss takes an exuberant joy, the joy of a healthy athlete doing difficult feats, in weaving a musical texture that is a marvel of ingenious technique. ”

“ And why is the opera now beginning to be recognised as a limited form, instead of the universal form which Wagner fondly hoped to make it? Simply because it has now become clear to us that the admixture of the human voice in music really limits the range of the art as much as the absence of it formerly limited the symphony. What the old music needed was fertilisation by speech, as Wagner never wearied of telling us; what music at present needs is emancipation from the tyranny of speech. ”

“ Just as one early man placed straight and curved lines in such relations that they pleased the eye by their mere formal harmony, while another placed them in such relations that they pleased by suggesting some aspect of man or nature, so did early music spring with one musician from the mere pleasure in the successions and combinations of tones, with another from the desire to convey in sound a suggestion of the thoughts aroused in him by his intercourse and his struggles with his fellow-men and with the world. ”

“ We find ourselves at the door of the third enclosure—that of the divine life of the mystics. We have to grope timidly, and make sure of every footstep, as we cross the threshold." And when we have crossed the threshold, we find ourselves hungering and thirsting for the more troubled but at any rate broader life we have left behind us; just as the Wagnerian drama, mighty as it is, brings home to us the fact that there are needs of our nature that music cannot satisfy. ”

“ So that, to sum up, we can dismiss speech altogether from our hypothesis of the origin of music, seeing that, while no man can represent to us either the psychological or historical processes by which music has grown or could grow out of speech, we find innate in the human organism every element out of which music can grow, independently of speech—the delight in tone, the delight in successions of tones, the delight in combinations of tones, the delight in rhythm, the delight in design. ”

“ The ancient Greek music was not so complex as ours; but will Spencer be bold enough to say that a man of Athens, listening to contemporary music, did not feel under it precisely the same kind of æsthetic pleasure as we feel when we listen to a song by Brahms or a symphony by Beethoven—a kind of pleasure different in essence and in temperature from any that can be given by speech? ”

“ No artist can put so great a physical and mental strain upon himself as Strauss does and still keep his brain at its best. With all his many duties and occupations, his conducting and his constant travelling, it is a wonder he has any strength left to compose. For years he has been wearing his sensitive nervous system down to the very edge; and I should not be surprised to find that in doing so he has injured a good deal the delicacy of its tissue. It is said that he lives the busy life he does in order to make enough money to give up all public work and devote himself entirely to composition ”

“ He still has his old pleasure in the agreeable succession of tones; but this pleasure is intensified, subtilised, by another—the pleasure of detecting the theme in the disguises it assumes. This primitive man has made the first step towards sonata form; he is assisting at the birth of absolute music. From this root there grows up all our pure delight in agreeable tunes for their own sake, in the embroidery of them, in the juggling with them; in a word, all our delight in absolute music. ”

“ It was his refuge, his method of escape from the world; it was for him that "tower of ivory" of which Flaubert speaks, into which the artist can mount, there to dream of the ideal that is unrealisable in life. He was a dying man all these years, and in much of the music of Les Troyens there are only too many signs of physical and mental exhaustion. But it has its extraordinarily fine moments, and the general conception is grander than anything Berlioz had attempted since the Requiem. ”

“ The intensity of the great musician's desire for ideal perfection in his art leads to his carrying it, within a few years, over a curve of evolution that it takes a century for the other arts to describe. This æsthetic concentration gave us the Beethoven symphony and the Wagner music-drama—each the most perfect thing of its kind, each the most perfect expression of the musical needs of the generation that brought it into life. ”

“ Now we are often told that when music takes upon itself to represent or narrate, as in programme music, it is "stepping beyond its legitimate boundaries." We are told that it is "passing out of its own sphere;" that it is abdicating the purely musical function, and trying to do what it is the function of literature or of painting to do; that a piece of music ought to be comprehensible from its music alone; that its whole message should be written plainly on the music, without the necessity of calling in the aid of a programme. ”