James Huneker

“ Berlioz it was who confessed that the prelude to this music-drama proved ever an enigma to him. Wagner’s melodic curves of intensity mirror the soul’s perturbations. He is poet of passion, a master of thrilling tones, a magician who everywhere finds willing thralls.
And the music—how it searches the nerves. How it throws into the background, because of its intensity, all the love lays ever penned by mortal composer! How it appeals to the intellect with its exalted realism! This music is not for those who admire the pink prettiness of Gounod’s Romeo and Juliet. ”

“ A capricious, even morbid, temperament is demanded, and there must be the fire that kindles and the power that menaces; a fluctuating, wavering rhythm yet a rhythmic sense of excessive rectitude; a sensuous touch, yet a touch that contains an infinity of colorings; supreme musicianship—Chopin was a musician first, poet afterwards; a big nature overflowing with milk and honey; and, last of all, you must have suffered the tribulations of life and love, until the nerves are whittled away to a thin, sensitive edge and the soul is aflame with the joy of death. ”

“ I say unhappily because no composer’s music is less adapted to concert than Wagner’s. Divorced from the context of gesture, speech, scenic display, his music becomes all profile. One misses the full, rich, significant glance of the eye. Wagner is a weaver, not a form-maker. He can follow a dramatic situation, or burrow deeply into the core of morbid psychology; but let him attempt to stand alone, to write music without programme or the fever of the footlights—then he is the inferior of several men, the inferior of Liszt, Tschaïkowsky, and Richard Strauss ”

“ Verdi has felt the moods of his poet and made them his own. The moods, the character-painting, are progressive; Otello, Iago, grow from act to act. The simple-hearted, trusting general with his agonized cry, “Miseria mia,” develops into a savage thirsting for blood; “Sangue, sangue!” he howls; he sees blood; the multitudinous music is incarnadine with it. And it is all vocal, it is written for the human voice; the voice, not the orchestra, is the centre of gravity in this astounding drama. ”

“ A sensible fool, he is not understood by the foolish sensitivist, the poet who looks aloft and therefore misses the prizes beloved of most men.
Why is not this a theme fit for musical development? It has every element dear to the heart of the poetic composer—fantasy, poetry, broad, obvious humor, realism, nobility of idea, and an almost infinite number of surfaces fit for the loving brush of a master painter. Then there is the psychology. Don Quixote, half-mad, chivalric withal, must be depicted; as a counterfoil the obese humors of Sancho Panza are ready for celebration. ”

“ I love and admire Beethoven also for the wide and peaceful landscapes which he knows how to open up in the soul of sound. Italian music enchants me, and in Rossini I experience that extraordinary impression of melancholy anguish which an excess of life gives us. There is too much frenzy, too much movement; it is as if one were trying to escape from death. I adore Mendelssohn and his delicious pictures of nature in the Scotch and Italian symphonies. There are certain hours toward nightfall when the soul of Schumann torments me.... ”

“ The history of art moves in cycles, and each cycle carries with it a residuum of the last. Richard Wagner attempted on a gigantic scale a synthesis of the arts. He wished to condense, concentrate, epitomize in his music-drama the arts of mimicry or pantomime, elocution, singing, painting, sculpture, architecture, drama, and instrumental music. He literally levied tribute on two of the senses and welded them into an ensemble, in which every shade of emotion, particularly the heroic and the tender, was depicted. But Wagner’s genius is, after all, Teutonic in its diffusiveness. ”

“ We are now far away from what is called euphony for euphony’s sake; though it is, as in Bach’s case, art for art with all the misused phrase implies. Intent upon realizing in tone his vision,—the magnitude or validity of which we need not yet discuss,—Strauss allows no antique rubric of fugue or symphony to block his progress; even the symphonic poem, an invention of Franz Liszt, proves too cumbersome for this new man of light and air and earth, whose imagination is at once sumptuous and barbaric. The picture must overflow the old frames. It must burn with an intense life. ”

“ And there is much music that is ugly and dreary, for Boïto, no matter what he has accomplished in his unpublished music-drama, is in Mefistofele rather the poet than the composer. Of rich, red, musical blood, of vital figures, we are offered but little. This composition is a product for the closet. It lacks that quality possessed by musicians of meaner attainments than Boïto—the quality of humanity. There are dramatic moments, but the story halts, the symbolism is not appreciable, and the mystic element not quite realized. To give the world a Faust in tone one must be a musical Goethe. ”

“ Yet his music is alive to-day; alive with a promise and a potency that well-nigh urge me to fatidical utterance, so sane is it, so noble in contrast, so richly fruitful in treatment. A sympathetic writer he is, and also a man who deals largely in the humanities of his art. Learned beyond the dreams of Wagner, Brahms buried his counterpoint in roses, set it to blooming in the Old-World gardens of Germany; decked his science with the sweet, mad tunes of Hungary, withal remaining a Teuton, and one in the direct line of Bach, Beethoven, and Schubert. ”

“ Feminine he is as is no woman; virile, as few men. The sinister fury, the mocking, drastic fury of his first rhapsodies,—true Brahmsodies,—how they pierce to the core the pessimism of our age!
He reminds me more of Browning than does Schumann. The full-pulsed humanity, the dramatic—yes, Brahms is sometimes dramatic, not theatric—modes of analysis, the relentless tracking to their ultimate lair of motives, are Browning’s; but the composer never loses his grip on the actualities of structure. A great sea is his music, and it sings about the base of that mighty mount we call Beethoven. ”

“ Gambara is a poor man, looked upon as a lunatic, living at an Italian cook shop kept by Giardini,—the latter one of Balzac’s most delightful discoveries. Born at Cremona, Gambara studied music in its entirety, especially orchestration. To him music was a science and an art—fancy writers of fiction going into the philosophy of music seventy-five years ago!—to him tones were definite ideas, not merely vibrations that agitate nervous centres. Music alone has the power of restoring us to ourselves, while other arts give us defined pleasures. ”

“ In a word, I wish to point out that piano-playing as an accomplishment is passing. Girls play the piano as a matter of course when they have nimble fingers and care for it. Life has become too crowded, too variously beautiful, for a woman without marked musical gifts to waste it at the piano.
Begun as a pastime, a mere social adjunct of the overfed, music, the heavenly maid, was pressed into unwilling service at the piano, and at times escorted timid youths to the proposing point, or eked out the deadly lethargy of evenings in respectable homes. ”

“ You see a silly youth treated as if he had murdered a human being because he shot a swan. You see this same dead bird borne away on a litter of twigs, to noble, impressive music like a feathered Siegfried. Surely Wagner was without a sense of the humorous; or was he parodying his own Death of Siegfried, as Ibsen parodied Ibsen in A Wild Duck? You see a theatrically imposing temple, modelled after the Duomo of Siena, wherein a maniacal King raves over an impossible wound, and performs ceremonies recalling the Roman Catholic communion service. ”

“ From the first beautiful prelude to Isolde’s exquisite death-song—one of those [Pg 329] songs the world will not willingly let perish—we are as in a hypnotic trance. The action is psychologic rather than theatric. We are permitted to view two burning souls; we analyze, rejoice and suffer in their psychical adventures. This is not the drama of romantic wooing and the clash of swords; all conventions of music and drama are set aside, are denied. There is a love philter, but it is not the philter which arouses the fatal love; the love is implicit in the lovers before the curtain lifts. ”

“ The piano sonatas, written for money, written with ease, were also written with both eyes on the fair amateur of the period. She admired Mozart more than Haydn; his music was melodious, his decorative patterns prettier. So Mozart raged in the hearts of the ladies, and slender fingers troubled the chaste outlines of his sonatas. His eighteenth sonata, preceded by a fantasia in the same key—C minor—alone impeded the flight of these butterflies. In it were mutterings of the music that awed and thrilled in Don Giovanni, and it was a precursor of Beethoven and his mighty thunderings. ”

“ Think of the twenty-five and more operas he made before he reached Aïda! To be sure, there is a suspicious resemblance between his melodies, his characters, his situations; there is always the blood-curdling story of intrigue,—political, passionate,—with its elopements, loves, cutthroat conspirators, booted chorus, and its orchestral tremolo. We get the dime novel set to music, the inartistic glorification of the melodrama. Verdi needed money, love, fame, easily gained, and being a much more industrious man than Rossini he contrived to turn out in forty years twice as many musical pot-boilers. ”

“ It is not a Tasso, not a poet enthroned in deathless immortality, but a soul, the soul, which, lying in its “necessitous little chamber” of death, reviews its past, its youth, hope, love, conflict, defeat, despair, and at the end its feverish ecstasy, its sorrowful dissolution. Strauss with a secret tiny brush has surprised the human heart in travail. It is pathos breeding. The added touches of realism, the gasping for breath, and the lenten tic-toc of the heart, should not disquiet us. ”

“ He is a man of the theatre. His music, divested of all the metaphysical verbiage heaped upon it by Wagner and Wagnerian [Pg 135] critics, is music of the footlights. A great formalist he is; but it is Wagner’s form, not the form for orchestral writers. It is all well enough to say that the symphony has had its day; but its structure, despite numberless modifications, will survive as long as absolute music itself. And music pure and simple, for itself, undefiled by costumes, scenery, limelights, and vocal virtuosi, is the noblest music of all. ”

“ Never has the piano been so carefully studied as it is to-day, and, paradoxical as it may sound, never has the tendency of music been diverted to currents so contrary to the genius of the instrument. All this is better for woman—and for the development of her art along broader, nobler lines. The tone-poem and music-drama are now our ideals, and I dare publish my belief that in this year of grace there has been born one who will live to see the decay of the piano recital. ”

“ It is not strange, then, that Strauss, a lyric philosopher of the same passionate pattern as Friedrich Nietzsche, should wrestle with a problem as old as eternity. He does wrestle with it in his symphonic poem—attacking it in large symbolism, free from the morbidities of the decadent poets; accomplishes it in a way that wrings the very heartstrings.
It is the spectacle of a sick man in “a necessitous little chamber” reviewing his struggles and defeats as the fever cracks his veins and throttles his life. He has failed as failed Balzac’s Louis Lambert, as fail all men with lofty ideals. ”