INTRODUCTION
“To the majority of English readers the name of that strange and forceful personality, Romain Rolland, is known only through his magnificent, intimate record of an artist’s life and aspirations, embracing ten volumes, Jean-Christophe.”
“In 1895 (at the age of 29) we find him awarded the coveted Grand Prix of the Académie Française for his work Histoire de l’Opéra en Europe avant Lulli et Scarlatti, and in the same year he sustained, before the faculty of the Sorbonne—where he now occupies the chair of musical criticism—a remarkable dissertation on The Origin of the Modern Lyrical Drama—his thesis for the Doctorate.”
“The essay on Berlioz, in the present volume, reveals a true insight into the personality of this unfortunate and great artist, and removes any false misconceptions which unsympathetic and superficial handling may have engendered.”
“I do not think it is an exaggeration to assert that the majority of listeners at a high-class concert or recital are absolutely bored. How can it be otherwise, when the composers represented are mere names to them? Why should the general public appreciate a Bach fugue, an intricate symphony or a piece of chamber-music? Do we professional musicians appreciate the technique of a wonderful piece of sculpture, of an equally wonderful feat of engineering or even of a miraculous surgical operation? It may be argued that an analogy between sculpture, engineering, surgery and music is absurd, because the three former do not appeal to the masses in the same manner as music does. Precisely: it is because of this universal appeal on the part of music that the public should be educated to listen to good music; that they should be given, in a general way, a chance to acquaint themselves with the laws underlying the ‘Beautiful in Music’ and should be shown the demands which a right appreciation of the Art makes upon the Intellect and the Emotions.”
BERLIOZ
“No clouds hide his mind and its creations, which, unlike Wagner’s, need no initiation to be understood; they seem to have no hidden meaning, no subtle mystery; one is instantly their friend or their enemy, for the first impression is a lasting one.”
“Above all, one must not make the mistake of contrasting Berlioz with Wagner, either by sacrificing Berlioz to that Germanic Odin, or by forcibly trying to reconcile one to the other. For there are some who condemn Berlioz in the name of Wagner’s theories; and others who, not liking the sacrifice, seek to make him a forerunner of Wagner, or kind of elder brother, whose mission was to clear a way and prepare a road for a genius greater than his own. Nothing is falser. To understand Berlioz one must shake off the hypnotic influence of Bayreuth. Though Wagner may have learnt something from Berlioz, the two composers have nothing in common; their genius and their art are absolutely opposed; each one has ploughed his furrow in a different field.”
“Critics of this kind do not think favourably of Berlioz’s dramatic and descriptive symphonies. How should they appreciate the boldest musical achievement of the nineteenth century?”
“I doubt if Berlioz would have obtained any consideration at all from lovers of classical music in France if he had not found allies in that country of classical music, Germany”
“The dramatic symphony that he created flourished in its German form under Liszt; the most eminent German composer of to-day, Richard Strauss, came under his influence; and Felix Weingartner, who with Charles Malherbe edited Berlioz’s complete works, was bold enough to write, ‘In spite of Wagner and Liszt, we should not be where we are if Berlioz had not lived.’”
“But here is a new danger. Though it is natural that Germany, more musical than France, should recognise the grandeur and originality of Berlioz’s music before France, it is doubtful whether the German nature could ever fully understand a soul so French in its essence.” Curioso que antes do séc. XX os franceses estivessem atrás dos alemães na música!
“Wagner said over the tomb of Weber, ‘England does you justice, France admires you, but only Germany loves you; you are of her own being, a glorious day of her life, a warm drop of her blood, a part of her heart….’”
“Passion, bitterness, caprice, wounded pride—these have more influence with him than the serious things of life.”
“Wagner was really his own best friend, his own most trusty champion; and his was the guiding hand that led one through the thick forest and over the rugged crags of his work.
Not only do you get no help from Berlioz in this way, but he is the first to lead you astray and wander with you in the paths of error.”
“And compare this Virgilian affection with Wagner’s sensual raptures. Does it mean that Berlioz could not love as well as Wagner? We only know that Berlioz’s life was made up of love and its torments. The theme of a touching passage in the Introduction of the Symphonie fantastique has been recently identified by M. Julien Tiersot, in his interesting book, with a romance composed by Berlioz at the age of 12, when he loved a girl of 18 ‘with large eyes and pink shoes’—Estelle, Stella mentis, Stella matutina. These words—perhaps the saddest he ever wrote—might serve as an emblem of his life, a life that was a prey to love and melancholy, doomed to wringing of the heart and awful loneliness; a life lived in a hollow world, among worries that chilled the blood; a life that was distasteful and had no solace to offer him in its end.”
“Who does not know his passion for Henrietta Smithson? It was a sad story. He fell in love with an English actress who played Juliet (Was it she or Juliet whom he loved?). He caught but a glance of her, and it was all over with him. He cried out, ‘Ah, I am lost!’ He desired her; she repulsed him. He lived in a delirium of suffering and passion; he wandered about for days and nights like a madman, up and down Paris and its neighbourhood, without purpose or rest or relief, until sleep overcame him wherever it found him—among the sheaves in a field near Villejuif, in a meadow near Sceaux, on the bank of the frozen Seine near Neuilly, in the snow, and once on a table in the Café Cardinal, where he slept for five hours, to the great alarm of the waiters, who thought he was dead. Meanwhile, he was told slanderous gossip about Henrietta, which he readily believed. Then he despised her, and dishonoured her publicly in his Symphonie fantastique, paying homage in his bitter resentment to Camille Moke, a pianist, to whom he lost his heart without delay.
After a time Henrietta reappeared. She had now lost her youth and her power; her beauty was waning, and she was in debt. Berlioz’s passion was at once rekindled. This time Henrietta accepted his advances. He made alterations in his symphony, and offered it to her in homage of his love. He won her, and married her, with 14,000 francs debt. He had captured his dream—Juliet! Ophelia! What was she really? A charming Englishwoman, cold, loyal, and sober-minded, who understood nothing of his passion; and who, from the time she became his wife, loved him jealously and sincerely, and thought to confine him within the narrow world of domestic life. But his affections became restive, and he lost his heart to a Spanish actress (it was always an actress, a virtuoso, or a part) and left poor Ophelia, and went off with Marie Recio, the Inès of Favorite, the page of Comte Ory—a practical, hardheaded woman, an indifferent singer with a mania for singing.”
“So the one he really loved, and who always loved him, remained alone, without friends, in Paris, where she was a stranger. She drooped in silence and pined slowly away, bedridden, paralysed, and unable to speak during 8 years of suffering. Berlioz suffered too, for he loved her still and was torn with pity”
“When 35 years old he had achieved glory; and Paganini proclaimed him Beethoven’s successor. What more could he want?”
“He had the Damnation de Faust performed; no one came to it, and he was ruined. Things went better in Russia; but the manager who brought him to England became bankrupt. He was haunted by thoughts of rents and doctors’ bills.”
“If I begin this bit, I shall have to write the whole symphony. It will be a big thing, and I shall have to spend 3 or 4 months over it. That means I shall write no more articles and earn no money. And when the symphony is finished I shall not be able to resist the temptation of having it copied (which will mean an expense of 1,000 or 1,200 francs), and then of having it played. I shall give a concert, and the receipts will barely cover half the cost. I shall lose what I have not got; the poor invalid will lack necessities; and I shall be able to pay neither my personal expenses nor my son’s fees when he goes on board ship…. These thoughts made me shudder, and I threw down my pen, saying, ‘Bah! tomorrow I shall have forgotten the symphony.’ The next night I heard the allegro clearly, and seemed to see it written down. I was filled with feverish agitation; I sang the theme; I was going to get up… but the reflections of the day before restrained me; I steeled myself against the temptation, and clung to the thought of forgetting it. At last I went to sleep; and the next day, on waking, all remembrance of it had, indeed, gone for ever.”
“That page makes one shudder. Suicide is less distressing. Neither Beethoven nor Wagner suffered such tortures. What would Wagner have done on a like occasion? He would have written the symphony without doubt—and he would have been right.”
“He knew that Mendelssohn, whom he loved and esteemed, and who styled himself his ‘good friend’, despised him and did not recognise his genius. The large-hearted Schumann, who was, with the exception of Liszt, the only person who intuitively felt his greatness, admitted that he used sometimes to wonder if he ought to be looked upon as ‘a genius or a musical adventurer.’
Wagner, who treated his symphonies with scorn before he had even read them, who certainly understood his genius, and who deliberately ignored him, threw himself into Berlioz’s arms when he met him in London in 1855. ‘He embraced him with fervour, and wept; and hardly had he left him when The Musical World published passages from his book, Oper und Drama, where he pulls Berlioz to pieces mercilessly.’”
“He presented himself three times at the Academy, and was beaten the first time by Onslow, the second time by Clapisson, and the third time he conquered by a majority of one vote against Panseron, Vogel, Leborne, and others, including, as always, Gounod. (…) He died before he had seen Les Troyens played in its entirety, though it was one of the noblest works of the French lyric theatre that had been composed since the death of Gluck.”
“I have no faith…. I hate all philosophy and everything that resembles it, whether religious or otherwise…. I am as incapable of making a medicine of faith as of having faith in medicine.”
“Everything passes. Space and time consume beauty, youth, love, glory, genius. Human life is nothing; death is no better. Worlds are born and die like ourselves. All is nothing. Yes, yes, yes! All is nothing…. To love or hate, enjoy or suffer, admire or sneer, live or die—what does it matter? There is nothing in greatness or littleness, beauty or ugliness. Eternity is indifferent; indifference is eternal.”
“You make me laugh with your old words about a mission to fulfil. What a missionary! But there is in me an inexplicable mechanism which works in spite of all arguments; and I let it work because I cannot stop it. What disgusts me most is the certainty that beauty does not exist for the majority of these human monkeys.”
“The unsolvable enigma of the world, the existence of evil and pain, the fierce madness of mankind, and the stupid cruelty that it inflicts hourly and everywhere on the most inoffensive beings and on itself—all this has reduced me to the state of unhappy and forlorn resignation of a scorpion surrounded by live coals. The most I can do is not to wound myself with my own dart.”
“Do you remember Herod’s sleepless nights in L’Enfance du Christ, or Faust’s soliloquy, or the anguish of Cassandra, or the burial of Juliette?—through all this you will find the whispered fear of annihilation. The wretched man was haunted by this fear”
“My favourite walk, especially when it is raining, really raining in torrents, is the cemetery of Montmartre, which is near my house. I often go there; there is much that draws me to it. The day before yesterday I passed two hours in the cemetery; I found a comfortable seat on a costly tomb, and I went to sleep…. Paris is to me a cemetery and her pavements are tomb-stones. Everywhere are memories of friends or enemies that are dead…. I do nothing but suffer unceasing pain and unspeakable weariness. I wonder night and day if I shall die in great pain or with little of it—I am not foolish enough to hope to die without any pain at all. Why are we not dead?”
“His music is like these mournful words; it is perhaps even more terrible, more gloomy, for it breathes death.”
“I should die in this hell of a Paris if she did not allow me to write to her, and if from time to time I had not letters from her.”
“When one’s hair is white one must leave dreams—even those of friendship…. Of what use is it to form ties which, though they hold to-day, may break to-morrow?” Stelle
“It is a striking example of the difference that may exist between genius and greatness—for the two words are not synonymous. When one speaks of greatness, one speaks of greatness of soul, nobility of character, firmness of will, and, above all, balance of mind. I can understand how people deny the existence of these qualities in Berlioz; but to deny his musical genius, or to cavil about his wonderful power—and that is what they do daily in Paris—is lamentable and ridiculous.”
“When I have named Beethoven, Mozart, Bach, Händel, and Wagner, I do not know who else is superior to Berlioz; I do not even know who is his equal.”
“Those who know his writings know how he was simply possessed and exhausted by his musical emotions. They were really fits of ecstasy or convulsions. At first ‘there was feverish excitement; the veins beat violently and tears flowed freely. Then came spasmodic contractions of the muscles, total numbness of the feet and hands, and partial paralysis of the nerves of sight and hearing; he saw nothing, heard nothing; he was giddy and half faint.’ And in the case of music that displeased him, he suffered, on the contrary, from ‘a painful sense of bodily disquiet and even from nausea.’”
“His family opposed the idea of his becoming a musician; and until he was 22 or 23 years old his weak will sulkily gave way to their wishes. In obedience to his father he began his studies in medicine at Paris. One evening he heard Les Danaïdes of Salieri. It came upon him like a thunderclap. He ran to the Conservatoire library and read Gluck’s scores.”
“And that revolution was effected alone, without a model, without a guide. What could he have heard beyond the operas of Gluck and Spontini while he was at the Conservatoire? (…) of Beethoven’s compositions he had only heard an andante.
Truly, he is a miracle and the most startling phenomenon in the history of 19th century music. (…) Who does not see what a poor figure the young Wagner cut at that time, working away in laborious and self-satisfied mediocrity? But Wagner soon made up for lost ground; for he knew what he wanted, and he wanted it obstinately.
The zenith of Berlioz’s genius was reached, when he was 35 years old, with the Requiem and Roméo. They are his two most important works, and are two works about which one may feel very differently. For my part, I am very fond of the one, and I dislike the other; but both of them open up two great new roads in art, and both are placed like two gigantic arches on the triumphal way of the revolution that Berlioz started.”
“Life had conquered him. It was not that he had lost any of his artistic mastery; on the contrary, his compositions became more and more finished; and nothing in his earlier work attained the pure beauty of some of the pages of L’Enfance du Christ (1850-4), or of Les Troyens (1855-63). But he was losing his power; and his intense feeling, his revolutionary ideas, and his inspiration (which in his youth had taken the place of the confidence he lacked) were failing him.”
“He groped his way hesitatingly and unsteadily; he hardly understood what he was doing. He admired the more mediocre pages of his work: the scene of the Laocoon, the finale of the last act of the Les Troyens à Troie, the last scene with Aeneas in Les Troyens à Carthage.”
“At the same hour of his old age the soul of Wagner sustained its glorious flight; and, having conquered everything, it achieved a supreme victory in renouncing everything for its faith. And the divine songs of Parsifal resounded as in a splendid temple, and replied to the cries of the suffering Amfortas by the blessed words: ‘Selig in Glauben! Selig in Liebe!’” Nietzsche diz que abandonou Wagner, mas a verdade é que Wagner também executou sua viragem…
“His instrumental colouring, so intoxicating and exciting, his extraordinary discoveries concerning timbre, his inventions of new nuances (as in the famous combining of flutes and trombones in the Hostias et preces of the Requiem, and the curious use of the harmonics of violins and harps), and his huge and nebulous orchestra—all this lends itself to the most subtle expression of thought.”
“But how much less rich and complex is Weber’s music, in spite of its nervous brilliance and dreaming poetry.”
“By carefully comparing the effect produced with the means used to produce it, I learned the hidden bond which unites musical expression to the special art of instrumentation; but no one put me in the way of this. The study of the methods of the three modern masters, Beethoven, Weber, and Spontini, the impartial examination of the traditions of instrumentation and of little-used forms and combinations, conversations with virtuosi, and the effects I made them try on their different instruments, together with a little instinct, did the rest for me.”
“No musician, with the exception of Beethoven, has loved Nature so profoundly.”
“In Les Troyens à Carthage, the fragrance of the Aeneid is shed over the night of love, and we see the luminous sky and hear the murmur of the sea. Some of his melodies are like statues, or the pure lines of Athenian friezes, or the noble gesture of beautiful Italian girls, or the undulating profile of the Albanian hills filled with divine laughter. He has done more than felt and translated into music the beauty of the Mediterranean—he has created beings worthy of a Greek tragedy. His Cassandre alone would suffice to rank him among the greatest tragic poets that music has ever known. And Cassandre is a worthy sister of Wagner’s Brünnhilde; but she has the advantage of coming of a nobler race, and of having a lofty restraint of spirit and action that Sophocles himself would have loved.”
“It is quite easy for others to convince themselves that, without even limiting me to take a very short melody as the theme of a composition—as the greatest musicians have often done—I have always endeavoured to put a wealth of melody into my compositions. One may, of course, dispute the worth of these melodies, their distinction, originality, or charm—it is not for me to judge them—but to deny their existence is either unfair or foolish.”
“And Heinrich Heine had a keen perception of Berlioz’s originality when he called him ‘a colossal nightingale, a lark the size of an eagle.’”
“We are all enslaved by the musical tradition of the past. For generations we have been so accustomed to carry this yoke that we scarcely notice it. And in consequence of Germany’s monopoly of music since the end of the eighteenth century, musical traditions—which had been chiefly Italian in the two preceding centuries—now became almost entirely German. We think in German forms: the plan of phrases, their development, their balance, and all the rhetoric of music and the grammar of composition comes to us from foreign thought, slowly elaborated by German masters. That domination has never been more complete or more heavy since Wagner’s victory. Then reigned over the world this great German period—a scaly monster with a thousand arms, whose grasp was so extensive that it included pages, scenes, acts, and whole dramas in its embrace. We cannot say that French writers have ever tried to write in the style of Goethe or Schiller; but French composers have tried and are still trying to write music after the manner of German musicians.
Why be astonished at it? Let us face the matter plainly. In music we have not, so to speak, any masters of French style. All our greatest composers are foreigners. The founder of the first school of French opera, Lulli, was Florentine; the founder of the second school, Gluck, was German; the two founders of the third school were Rossini, an Italian, and Meyerbeer, a German; the creators of opéra-comique were Duni, an Italian, and Gretry, a Belgian; Franck, who revolutionised our modern school of opera, was also Belgian. These men brought with them a style peculiar to their race; or else they tried to found, as Gluck did, an ‘international’ style, by which they effaced the more individual characteristics of the French spirit. The most French of all these styles is the opéra-comique, the work of two foreigners, but owing much more to the opéra bouffe than is generally admitted, and, in any case, representing France very insufficiently.”
“Before Berlioz’s time there was really only one master of the first rank who made a great effort to liberate French music: it was Rameau; and, despite his genius, he was conquered by Italian art.”
“As most men speak more than they think, even thought itself became Germanised; and it was difficult then to discover, through this traditional insincerity, the true and spontaneous form of French musical thought.”
“He did not know Bach. Happy ignorance! (…) There are men like Brahms who have been, nearly all their life, but reflections of the past. Berlioz never sought to be anything but himself.”
“Modern music is like the classic Andromeda, naked and divinely beautiful. She is chained to a rock on the shores of a vast sea, and awaits the victorious Perseus who shall loose her bonds and break in pieces the chimera called Routine.” Me pergunto o que os compositores clássicos achariam da música moderna – seja a erudita ou a popular.
“Berlioz protested vigorously against Gluck’s impious theory and Wagner’s ‘crime’ in making music the slave of speech. Music is the highest poetry and knows no master. It was for Berlioz, therefore, continually to increase the power of expression in pure music.”
“The first argument, maintained by Wagner, is that music cannot really express action without the help of speech and gesture. It is in the name of this opinion that so many people condemn a priori Berlioz’s Roméo.”
“if only they would see the anomalies of the Bayreuth show.”
“When music wishes to depict the drama, it is not real action which is reflected in it, it is the ideal action transfigured by the spirit, and perceptible only to the inner vision. The worst foolishness is to present two visions—one for the eyes and one for the spirit. Nearly always they kill each other.” O que teriam achado do videoclipe?
“Beethoven was always trying to translate into music the depths of his heart, the subtleties of his spirit, which are not to be explained clearly by words, but which are as definite as words—in fact, more definite; for a word, being an abstract thing, sums up many experiences and comprehends many different meanings. Music is a hundred times more expressive and exact than speech; and it is not only her right to express particular emotions and subjects, it is her duty. If that duty is not fulfilled, the result is not music—it is nothing at all.”
“Do not let us say: Music can…. Music cannot express such-and-such a thing. Let us say rather, If genius pleases, everything is possible; and if music so wishes, she may be painting and poetry to-morrow.”
“On his journey to Italy he travelled from Marseilles to Livourne with Mazzinian conspirators, who were going to take part in the insurrection of Modena and Bologna. Whether he was conscious of it or not, he was the musician of revolutions”
“The Marche de Rakoczy is less an Hungarian march than the music for a revolutionary fight”
“How do such works come to be neglected by our Republic? How is it they have not a place in our public life? Why are they not part of our great ceremonies? That is what one would wonderingly ask oneself if one had not seen, for the last century, the indifference of the State to Art. What might not Berlioz have done if the means had been given him, or if his works had found a place in the fêtes of the Revolution?”
“Will that revolution still be accomplished? Perhaps; but it has suffered half a century’s delay. Berlioz bitterly calculated that people would begin to understand him about the year 1940.”
WAGNER: “SIEGFRIED”
“It was almost impossible to seize the connection of the ideas on account of the poor acoustics of the room, the bad arrangement of the orchestra, and the unskilled players—all of which served to break up the musical design and spoil the harmony of its colouring. Passages that should have been made prominent were slurred over, and others were distorted by faulty time or want of precision. Even to-day, when our orchestras are seasoned by years of study, I should often be unable to follow Wagner’s thought throughout a whole scene if I did not happen to know the score, for the outline of a melody is often smothered by the accompaniment, and so its sentiment is lost.”
“That epic poem of the Niebelungen was once like a forest in our dreams, where strange and awful beings flashed before our vision and then vanished. Later on, when we had explored all its paths, we discovered that order and reason reigned in the midst of this apparent jungle; and when we came to know the least wrinkle on the faces of its inhabitants, the confusion and emotion of other days no longer filled us.”
“I sometimes think of poor Nietzsche and his passion for destroying the things he loved, and how he sought in others the decadence that was really in himself. He tried to embody this decadence in Wagner, and, led away by his flights of fancy and his mania for paradox (which would be laughable if one did not remember that his whims were not hatched in hours of happiness), he denied Wagner his most obvious qualities—his vigour, his determination, his unity, his logic, and his power of progress. He amused himself by comparing Wagner’s style with that of Goncourt, by making him—with amusing irony—a great miniaturist painter, a poet of half-tones, a musician of affectations and melancholy, so delicate and effeminate in style that ‘after him all other musicians seemed too robust.’” “The amusing part is that this piece of wit has been taken seriously by certain arbiters of elegance, who are only too happy to be able to run counter to any current opinion, whatever it may be.”
“And it is true he has been applauded, patronised, and monopolised for a quarter of a century by all the decadents of art and literature. Scarcely anyone has seen in him a vigorous musician and a classic writer, or has recognised him as Beethoven’s direct successor, the inheritor of his heroic and pastoral genius, of his epic inspirations and battlefield rhythms, of his Napoleonic phrases and atmosphere of stirring trumpet-calls.”
“Beethoven would perhaps have disliked Tristan, but would have loved Siegfried”
“A man of action is rarely pleased with stimulating works of art. Borgia and Sforza patronised Leonardo. The strong, full-blooded men of the seventeenth century; the apoplectic court at Versailles (where Fagon’s lancet played so necessary a part); the generals and ministers who harassed the Protestants and burned the Palatinate—all these loved pastorales. Napoleon wept at a reading of Paul et Virginie [Bernardin de Saint-Pierre], and delighted in the pallid music of Paesiello. A man wearied by an over-active life seeks repose in art; a man who lives a narrow, commonplace life seeks energy in art. A great artist writes a gay work when he is sad, and a sad work when he is gay, almost in spite of himself.”
“On 14 June, 1848, in a famous speech to the National Democratic Association, Wagner violently attacked the organisation of society itself, and demanded both the abolition of money and the extinction of what was left of the aristocracy.”
“Herr Chamberlain himself quotes the account of a witness who saw him, in May, 1849, distributing revolutionary pamphlets to the troops who were besieging Dresden. It was a miracle that he was not arrested and shot.”
“Errors and enthusiasms are an integral part of life, and one must not ignore them in a man’s biography under the pretext that he regretted them 20 or 30 years later, for they have, nevertheless, helped to guide his actions and impressed his imagination.”
“In 1848, Wagner was not yet thinking of a Tetralogy, but of an heroic opera in three acts called Siegfried’s Tod, in which the fatal power of gold was to be symbolised in the treasure of the Niebelungen; and Siegfried was to represent ‘a socialist redeemer come down to earth to abolish the reign of Capital.’ As the rough draft developed, Wagner went up the stream of his hero’s life. He dreamed of his childhood, of his conquest of the treasure, of the awakening of Brünnhilde; and in 1851 he wrote the poem of Der Junge Siegfried. Siegfried and Brünnhilde represent the humanity of the future, the new era that should be realised when the earth was set free from the yoke of gold. Then Wagner went farther back still, to the sources of the legend itself, and Wotan appeared, the symbol of our time, a man such as you or I—in contrast to Siegfried, man as he ought to be, and one day will be.”
“Finally Wagner conceived the Twilight of the Gods, the fall of the Valhalla—our present system of society—and the birth of a regenerated humanity.”
“My health is not good, and my nerves are in a state of increasing weakness. My life, lived entirely in the imagination and without sufficient action, tires me so, that I can only work with frequent breaks and long intervals of rest; otherwise I pay the penalty with long and painful suffering…. I am very lonely. I often wish for death. § While I work I forget my troubles; but the moment I rest they come flocking about me, and I am very miserable. What a splendid life is an artist’s!”
“Then he discovered Schopenhauer, whose philosophy only helped to confirm and crystallise his instinctive pessimism. In the spring of 1855 he went to London to give concerts; but he was ill there, and this fresh contact with the world only served to annoy him further.”
“Siegfried was not finished until 5 February, 1871, at the end of the Franco-Prussian war—that is fourteen years later, after several interruptions.”
“Do you know the amusing account Tolstoy gave of a performance of Siegfried? I will quote it from his book, What is Art?—
‘When I arrived, an actor in tight-fitting breeches was seated before an object that was meant to represent an anvil. He wore a wig and false beard; his white and manicured hands had nothing of the workman about them; and his easy air, prominent belly, and flabby muscles readily betrayed the actor. With an absurd hammer he struck—as no one else would ever strike—a fantastic-looking sword-blade. One guessed he was a dwarf, because when he walked he bent his legs at the knees. He cried out a great deal, and opened his mouth in a queer fashion. The orchestra also emitted peculiar noises like several beginnings that had nothing to do with one another. Then another actor appeared with a horn in his belt, leading a man dressed up as a bear, who walked on all-fours. He let loose the bear on the dwarf, who ran away, but forgot to bend his knees this time. The actor with the human face represented the hero, Siegfried. He cried out for a long time, and the dwarf replied in the same way. Then a traveller arrived—the god Wotan. He had a wig, too; and, settling himself down with his spear, in a silly attitude, he told Mimi all about things he already knew, but of which the audience was ignorant. Then Siegfried seized some bits that were supposed to represent pieces of a sword, and sang:
<Heaho, heaho, hoho! Hoho, hoho, hoho, hoho! Hoheo, haho, haheo, hoho!> And that was the end of the first act. It was all so artificial and stupid that I had great difficulty in sitting it out. But my friends begged me to stay, and assured me that the second act would be better.’”
“The dragon was represented by two men clothed in a green skin with some scales stuck about it. At one end of the skin they wagged a tail, and at the other end they opened a crocodile’s mouth, out of which came fire. The dragon, which ought to have been a frightful beast—and perhaps he would have frightened children about five years old—said a few words in a bass voice.”
“I was annoyed to see 3,000 people round about me, listening submissively to this absurdity and dutifully admiring it.”
“If Nietzsche had to go out of his way not to understand Wagner, it is natural, on the other hand, that Wagner should be a closed book to Tolstoy; it would be almost surprising if it were otherwise. Each one has his own part to play, and has no need to change it.”
“I will only add that the dragon’s failure to be terrifying was not Wagner’s fault, for he never attempted to depict a terrifying dragon. He gave it quite clearly, and of his own choice, a comic character. Both the text and the music make Fafner a sort of ogre, a simple creature, but, above all, a grotesque one.”
“I know that this is not the opinion of most of Wagner’s admirers; but, with the exception of a few pages of sublime beauty, I have never altogether liked the love scenes at the end of Siegfried and at the beginning of Götterdämmerung. I find their style rather pompous and declamatory; and their almost excessive refinement makes them border upon dulness.”
WAGNER: “TRISTAN”
“I know quite well the kind of musical trash I produce…. Believe me, it is no good expecting me to do anything decent.”
CAMILLE SAINT-SAËNS
“No artist has troubled so little about the public, or been more indifferent to criticism whether popular or expert.”
“the child does not breathe music as, in a way, he breathes the atmosphere of literature and oratory; and although nearly everyone in France has an instinctive feeling for beautiful writing, only a very few people care for beautiful music”
“As he grew older he soaked himself in the music of Bach and Händel, and was able to compose at will after the manner of Rossini, Verdi, Schumann, and Wagner. He has written excellent music in all styles—the Grecian style, and that of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. His compositions are of every kind: masses, grand operas, light operas, cantatas, symphonies, symphonic poems; music for the orchestra, the organ, the piano, the voice, and chamber music. He is the learned editor of Gluck and Rameau; and is thus not only an artist, but an artist who can talk about his art.”
“Pedantry is the plague of German art, and the greatest men have not escaped it. I am not speaking of Brahms, who was ravaged with it, but of delightful geniuses like Schumann, or of powerful ones like Bach.”
“The performance of works by Bach and Händel to-day is an idle amusement, … [and those who wish to revive their art are like] people who would live in an old mansion that has been uninhabited for centuries.”
“His mind is so comprehensive that he has written books on philosophy, on the theatre, on classical painting, as well as scientific essays, volumes of verse, and even plays.” Quem de tudo sabe, nada sabe.
“It is his eager, restless spirit that makes him rush about the world writing Breton and Auvergnian rhapsodies, Persian songs, Algerian suites, Portuguese barcarolles, Danish, Russian, or Arabian caprices, souvenirs of Italy, African fantasias, and Egyptian concertos; and, in the same way, he roams through the ages, writing Greek tragedies, dance music of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and preludes and fugues of the eighteenth.”
“From a purely musical point of view there is some resemblance between M. Saint-Saëns and Mendelssohn. In both of them we find the same intellectual restraint, the same balance preserved among the heterogeneous elements of their work. These elements are not common to both of them, because the time, the country, and the surroundings in which they lived are not the same; and there is also a great difference in their characters. Mendelssohn is more ingenuous and religious; M. Saint-Saëns is more of a dilettante and more sensuous. They are not so much kindred spirits by their science as good company by a common purity of taste, a sense of rhythm, and a genius for method, which gave all they wrote a neo-classic character.”
“his masterpiece, the Symphonie avec orgue”
“Beside the frenzied outpourings of Richard Strauss, who flounders uncertainly between mud and debris and genius, the Latin art of Saint-Saëns rises up calm and ironical.”
VINCENT D’INDY
“He has published selections of folk-songs with critical notes, essays on Beethoven’s predecessors, a history of Musical Composition, and debates and lectures. This fine intellectual culture is not, however, the most remarkable of M. d’Indy’s characteristics, though it may have been the most remarked. Other musicians share this culture with him; and his real distinction lies in his moral and almost religious qualities, and it is this side of him that gives him an unusual interest for us among other contemporary artists.”
D’Indy, Schola Cantorum “This book seems to be of the Middle Ages by reason of a sort of scholastic spirit of abstraction and classification.”
CATOLICUZÃO: “Händel’s oratorios are spoken of as ‘chilling, and, frankly speaking, tedious.’ Bach himself escapes with this qualification: ‘If he is great, it is not because of, but in spite of the dogmatic and parching spirit of the Reformation.’”
“His [Franck, mestre de D’Indy] religious faith did not disturb his mind, for he did not measure men and their works by its rules; and he would have been incapable of putting together a history of art according to the Bible. This great Catholic had at times a very pagan soul; and he could enjoy without a qualm the musical dilettantism of Renan and the sonorous nihilism of Leconte de Lisle. There were no limits to his vast sympathies. He did not attempt to criticise the thing he loved—understanding was already in his heart.”
“Nothing helps one to grasp the essence of M. d’Indy’s personality more than his last dramatic work. His personality shows itself plainly in all his compositions, but nowhere is it more evident than in L’Étranger.”
“A man has not always the same kind of talent in other arts that he has in the art which he has made his own—I am speaking not only of his technical skill, but of his temperament as well. Delacroix was of the Romantic school in painting, but in literature his style was Classic. We have all known artists who were revolutionaries in their own sphere, but conservative and behind the times in their opinions about other branches of art.”
“He readily shares Tolstoy’s scorn, which he sometimes quotes, of the foolishness of art for art’s sake.”
RICHARD STRAUSS
“I should like to try to sketch here the strange and arresting personality of the man who in Germany is considered the inheritor of Wagner’s genius—the man who has had the audacity to write, after Beethoven, an Heroic Symphony, and to imagine himself the hero. § Richard Strauss is 34 years old.”
“I had been brought up on strictly classical lines; I had lived entirely on Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, and had just been studying Mendelssohn, Chopin, Schumann, and Brahms. It is to Ritter alone I am indebted for my knowledge of Liszt and Wagner; it was he who showed me the importance of the writings and works of these two masters in the history of art. It was he who by years of lessons and kindly counsel made me a musician of the future (Zukunftsmusiker), and set my feet on a road where now I can walk unaided and alone. It was he also who initiated me in Schopenhauer’s philosophy.”
“The second influence, that of the South, dates from April, 1886, and seems to have left an indelible impression upon Strauss. He visited Rome and Naples for the first time, and came back with a symphonic fantasia called Aus Italien. In the spring of 1892, after a sharp attack of pneumonia, he travelled for a year and a half in Greece, Egypt, and Sicily. The tranquillity of these favoured countries filled him with never-ending regret. The North has depressed him since then, ‘the eternal grey of the North and its phantom shadows without a sun.’ When I saw him at Charlottenburg, one chilly April day, he told me with a sigh that he could compose nothing in winter, and that he longed for the warmth and light of Italy. His music is infected by that longing; and it makes one feel how his spirit suffers in the gloom of Germany, and ever yearns for the colours, the laughter, and the joy of the South.”
“When one talks of heroes one is thinking of drama. Dramatic art is everywhere in Strauss’s music, even in works that seem least adapted to it, such as his Lieder and compositions of pure music. It is most evident in his symphonic poems, which are the most important part of his work. These poems are: Wanderers Sturmlied (1885), Aus Italien (1886), Macbeth (1887), Don Juan (1888), Tod und Verklärung (1889), Guntram (1892-93), Till Eulenspiegel (1894), Also sprach Zarathustra (1895), Don Quixote (1897), and Heldenleben (1898).”
“Tod und Verklärung (‘Death and Transfiguration,’ op. 24) marks considerable progress in Strauss’s thought and style. It is still one of the most stirring of Strauss’s works, and the one that is conceived with the most perfect unity. It was inspired by a poem of Alexander Ritter’s, and I will give you an idea of its subject.”
“The realism of the subject in the hallucinations of the dying man, the shiverings of fever, the throbbing of the veins, and the despairing agony, is transfigured by the purity of the form in which it is cast. It is realism after the manner of the symphony in C minor, where Beethoven argues with Destiny.”
“It is true it is the summit of one period of his life, containing the essence of all that is best in it; but Heldenleben marks the second period, and is its corner-stone. How the force and fulness of his feeling has grown since that first period! But he has never re-found the delicate and melodious purity of soul and youthful grace of his earlier work”
“Guntram was the cause of bitter disappointment to its author. He did not succeed in getting it produced at Munich, for the orchestra and singers declared that the music could not be performed. It is even said that they got an eminent critic to draw up a formal document, which they sent to Strauss, certifying that Guntram was not meant to be sung. The chief difficulty was the length of the principal part, which took up by itself, in its musings and discourses, the equivalent of an act and a half. Some of its monologues, like the song in the second act, last half an hour on end. Nevertheless, Guntram was performed at Weimar on 16 May, 1894. A little while afterwards Strauss married the singer who played Freihild, Pauline de Ahna, who had also created Elizabeth in Tannhäuser at Bayreuth, and who has since devoted herself to the interpretation of her husband’s Lieder.”
“Strauss protests his own liberty in the face of Nietzsche’s. He wishes to represent the different stages of development that a free spirit passes through in order to arrive at that of Super-man. These ideas are purely personal, and are not part of some system of philosophy.” “And the dance dies away and is lost in ethereal regions, and Zarathustra is lost to sight while dancing in distant worlds. But if he has solved the riddle of the universe for himself, he has not solved it for other men; and so, in contrast to the confident knowledge which fills the music, we get the sad note of interrogation at the end.” Não é uma música para tocar numa Odisséia…
“As for the boldness of his conceptions, I need hardly remind those who heard the poem at the Cirque d’été of the intricate ‘Fugue of Knowledge,’ the trills of the wood wind and the trumpets that voice Zarathustra’s laugh, the dance of the universe, and the audacity of the conclusion which, in the key of B major, finishes up with a note of interrogation, in C natural, repeated three times.”
“Don Quixote of 1897, fantastische Variationen uber ein Thema ritterlichen Charakters (‘Don Quixote, fantastic variations on a theme of knightly character’), op. 35; and that symphony marks, I think, the extreme point to which programme music may be carried. In no other work does Strauss give better proof of his prodigious cleverness, intelligence, and wit; and I say sincerely that there is not a work where so much force is expended with so great a loss for the sake of a game and a musical joke which lasts 45 minutes, and has given the author, the executants, and the public a good deal of tiring work. These symphonic poems are most difficult to play on account of the complexity, the independence, and the fantastic caprices of the different parts.”
“—the most splendid battle that has ever been painted in music. At its first performance in Germany I saw people tremble as they listened to it, and some rose up suddenly and made violent gestures quite unconsciously.”
“His orchestra is not less composite. It is not a compact and serried mass like Wagner’s Macedonian phalanxes; it is parcelled out and as divided as possible. Each part aims at independence and works as it thinks best, without apparently troubling about the other parts. Sometimes it seems, as it did when reading Berlioz, that the execution must result in incoherence, and weaken the effect. But somehow the result is very satisfying.”
“Strauss’s art, one of the most literary and descriptive in existence, is strongly distinguished from others of the same kind by the solidarity of its musical fabric, in which one feels the true musician—a musician brought up on the great masters, and a classic in spite of everything.”
“His restlessness seems to come from Schumann, his religious feeling from Mendelssohn, his voluptuousness from Gounod or the Italian masters, his passion from Wagner.”
“There are germs of morbidity in Germany to-day, a frenzy of pride, a belief in self, and a scorn for others that recalls France in the seventeenth century.”
“All genius is raving mad if it comes to that; but Beethoven’s madness concentrated itself in himself, and imagined things for his own enjoyment. The genius of many contemporary German artists is an aggressive thing, and is characterised by its destructive antagonism. The idealist who ‘possesses the world’ is liable to dizziness. He was made to rule over an interior world. The splendour of the exterior images that he is called upon to govern dazzles him; and, like Caesar, he goes astray.”
“What is all this fury leading to? What does this heroism aspire to? This force of will, bitter and strained, grows faint when it has reached its goal, or even before that. It does not know what to do with its victory. It disdains it, does not believe in it, or grows tired of it.”
“And this is how the work of Richard Strauss appears to me up to the present. Guntram kills Duke Robert, and immediately lets fall his sword. The frenzied laugh of Zarathustra ends in an avowal of discouraged impotence. The delirious passion of Don Juan dies away in nothingness. Don Quixote when dying forswears his illusions. Even the Hero himself admits the futility of his work, and seeks oblivion in an indifferent Nature. Nietzsche, speaking of the artists of our time, laughs at ‘those Tantaluses of the will, rebels and enemies of laws, who come, broken in spirit, and fall at the foot of the cross of Christ.’”
“It was not thus that Beethoven overcame his sorrows. Sad adagios make their lament in the middle of his symphonies, but a note of joy and triumph is always sounded at the end. His work is the triumph of a conquered hero; that of Strauss is the defeat of a conquering hero. This irresoluteness of the will can be still more clearly seen in contemporary German literature, and in particular in the author of Die versunkene Glocke [Gerhart Hauptman].”
“In this lies the undying worm of German thought—I am speaking of the thought of the choice few who enlighten the present and anticipate the future. I see an heroic people, intoxicated by its triumphs, by its great riches, by its numbers, by its force, which clasps the world in its great arms and subjugates it, and then stops, fatigued by its conquest, and asks: ‘Why have I conquered?’” Por que eu produzi duas guerras mundiais? E atira na própria cabeça.
HUGO WOLF
“The more one learns of the history of great artists, the more one is struck by the immense amount of sadness their lives enclose. Not only are they subjected to the trials and disappointments of ordinary life—which affect them more cruelly through their greater sensitiveness—but their surroundings are like a desert, because they are twenty, thirty, fifty, or even hundreds of years in advance of their contemporaries; and they are often condemned to despairing efforts, not to conquer the world, but to live.”
“But what shall be said of those who die little by little, who outlive themselves, and watch the slow decay of their souls? § Such was the fate of Hugo Wolf, whose tragic destiny has assured him a place apart in the hell of great musicians.”
“in Styria they were fond of playing the old Italian operas of Rossini, Bellini, and Donizetti. Later on, Wolf used to like to think that he had a few drops of Latin blood in his veins; and all his life he had a predilection for the great French musicians.”
“His father naturally did not want him to take up music as a profession; and he had the same struggles that Berlioz had. Finally he succeeded in getting permission from his family to go to Vienna, and he entered the Conservatoire there in 1875. But he was not any the happier for it, and at the end of two years he was sent away for being unruly.”
“It was necessary that this boy of 17 should find some means of earning a livelihood and be able to instruct himself at the same time. After his expulsion from the Conservatoire he attended no other school; he taught himself. And he taught himself wonderfully; but at what a cost! The suffering he went through from that time until he was 30, the enormous amount of energy he had to expend in order to live and cultivate the fine spirit of poetry that was within him—all this effort and toil was, without doubt, the cause of his unhappy death.”
“He had a great admiration for Goethe, and was infatuated by Heinrich von Kleist, whom he rather resembles both in his gifts and in his life; he was an enthusiast about Grillparzer and Hebbel at a time when they were but little appreciated; and he was one of the first Germans to discover the worth of Mörike, whom, later on, he made popular in Germany.”
“like Berlioz, he got most of his education from the libraries, and spent months in reading the scores of the great masters.”
“But of all these influences, the strongest was that of Wagner. Wagner came to Vienna in 1875 to conduct Tannhäuser and Lohengrin. There was then among the younger people a fever of enthusiasm similar to that which Werther had caused a century before.”
“He taught music to little children of seven and eight years old; but he was a poor teacher, and found giving lessons was a martyrdom. The money he earned hardly served to feed him, and he only ate once a day—Heaven knows how.”
“In 1884 he succeeded in getting a post as musical critic. But on what a paper! It was the Salonblatt—a mundane journal filled with articles on sport and fashion news. One would have said that this little barbarian was put there for a wager.”
“It was not that he disliked or had any prejudice against Brahms; he took a delight in some of his works, especially his chamber music, but he found fault with his symphonies and was shocked by the carelessness of the declamation in his Lieder and, in general, could not bear his want of originality and power, and found him lacking in joy and fulness of life.” Brahms era o Bukowski dos compositores clássicos—Muito abaixo de todos os outros?
“For all that was retrograde in music in Vienna, and all that was the enemy of liberty and progress in art and criticism, was giving Brahms its detestable support by gathering itself about him and spreading his fame abroad”
“An orchestral society in Vienna gave Wolf’s Penthesilea a trial reading; and it was rehearsed, in disregard of all good taste, amid shouts of laughter. When it was finished, the conductor said: ‘Gentlemen, I ask your pardon for having allowed this piece to be played to the end; but I wanted to know what manner of man it is that dares to write such things about the master, Brahms.’”
“He was now 27 years old, and had as yet published nothing. The years of 1887 and 1888 were the most critical ones of his life. In 1887 he lost his father whom he loved so much, and that loss, like so many of his other misfortunes, gave fresh impulse to his energies. The same year, a generous friend called Eckstein published his first collection of Lieder. Wolf up to that time had been smothered, but this publication stirred the life in him, and was the means of unloosing his genius.”
“It is now seven o’clock in the evening, and I am so happy—oh, happier than the happiest of kings. Another new Lied! If you could hear what is going on in my heart!… the devil would carry you away with pleasure!…
Another two new Lieder! There is one that sounds so horribly strange that it frightens me. There is nothing like it in existence. Heaven help the unfortunate people who will one day hear it!…
If you could only hear the last Lied I have just composed you would only have one desire left—to die…. Your happy, happy Wolf.”
“What I write now, I write for the future…. Since Schubert and Schumann there has been nothing like it!”
“The history of Wolf is one of the most extraordinary in the history of art, and gives one a better glimpse of the mysteries of genius than most histories do.
Let us make a little résumé. Wolf at 28 had written practically nothing. From 1888 to 1890 he wrote, one after another, in a kind of fever, 53 Mörike Lieder, 51 Goethe Lieder, 44 Spanish Lieder, 17 Eichendorff Lieder, 12 Keller Lieder, and the first Italian Lieder—that is about 200 Lieder, each one having its own admirable individuality.
And then the music stops. The spring has dried up. Wolf in great anguish wrote despairing letters to his friends.”
“For the last four months I have been suffering from a sort of mental consumption, which makes me very seriously think of quitting this world for ever…. Only those who truly live should live at all. I have been for some time like one who is dead. I only wish it were an apparent death; but I am really dead and buried; though the power to control my body gives me a seeming life. It is my inmost, my only desire, that the flesh may quickly follow the spirit that has already passed. (…) All the comforts that a man could wish for are here to make my life happy—peace, solitude, beautiful scenery, invigorating air, and everything that could suit the tastes of a hermit like myself. And yet—and yet, my friend, I am the most miserable creature on earth. Everything around me breathes peace and happiness, everything throbs with life and fulfils its functions…. I alone, oh God!… I alone live like a beast that is deaf and senseless. Even reading hardly serves to distract me now, though I bury myself in books in my despair. As for composition, that is finished; I can no longer bring to mind the meaning of a harmony or a melody, and I almost begin to doubt if the compositions that bear my name are really mine. Good God! what is the use of all this fame?”
“Heaven gives a man complete genius or no genius at all. Hell has given me everything by halves.”
“One may imagine the tortures that this solitary man suffered. His only happiness was in creation, and he saw his life cease, without any apparent cause, for years together, and his genius come and go, and return for an instant, and then go again. Each time he must have anxiously wondered if it had gone forever, or how long it would be before it came back again.”
“I firmly believe that it is all over with me…. I could as well speak Chinese as compose anything. It is horrible…. What I suffer from this inaction I cannot tell you. I should like to hang myself.”
“This letter—and it is not the only one—recalls the melancholy stoicism of Beethoven’s letters, and shows us sorrows that even the unhappy Beethoven did not know. And yet how can we tell? Perhaps Beethoven, too, suffered similar anguish in the sad days that followed 1815, before the last sonatas, the Missa Solemnis, and the Ninth Symphony had awaked to life in him.”
“In a fortnight he had written 50 pages of the pianoforte score, as well as the motifs for the whole work, and the music of half the first act.
Then madness came. On 20 September he was seized while he was working at the great recitative of Manuel Venegas in the first act.”
“When Schott, the publisher, sent him in October, 1895, his royalties for the editions of his Lieder of Mörike, Goethe, Eichendorff, Keller, Spanish poetry, and the first volume of Italian poetry, their total for 5 years came to 86 marks and 35 pfennigs! And Schott calmly added that he had not expected so good a result. So it was Wolf’s friends, and especially Hugo Faisst, who not only saved him from misery by their unobtrusive and often secret generosity, but spared him the horror of destitution in his last misfortunes.”
“Such was his life, cut short at 37 years of age—for one cannot count the 5 years of complete madness. There are not many examples in the art world of so terrible a fate. Nietzsche’s misfortune is nowhere beside this, for Nietzsche’s madness was, to a certain extent, productive, and caused his genius to flash out in a way that it never would have done if his mind had been balanced and his health perfect.”
“He used to have the poetry he wished to translate read over to him several times, or in the evening he would read it aloud to himself. If he felt very stirred by it he lived apart with it, and thought about it, and soaked himself in its atmosphere; then he went to sleep, and the next morning he was able to write the Lied straight away.”
“Wolf never chose commonplace poems for his music—which is more than can be said of Schubert or Schumann. He did not use anything written by contemporary poets, although he was in sympathy with some of them, such as Liliencron, who hoped very much to be translated into music by him. But he could not do it”
“No one has better expressed the anguish of a troubled and despairing soul, such as we find in the old harp-player in Wilhelm Meister, or the splendid nihility of certain poems of Michelangelo.”
“Wolf has set to music a quarter of Mörike’s poems, he has brought Mörike into his own, and given him one of the first places among German poets.”
“Menschen waren wir ja auch,
Froh und traurig, so wie Ihr.
Und nun sind wir leblos hier,
Sind nur Erde, wie Ihr sehet.”
DON LORENZO PEROSI
“Are we really witnessing the return of its spring? Is it the incoming of some great tide of melody, which will wash away the gloom and doubt of our life to-day? As I was reading the oratorios of this young priest of Piedmont, I thought I heard, far away, the song of the children of old Greece”
“The abbé Perosi, the precentor of St. Mark’s chapel at Venice and the director of the Sistine chapel, is 26 years old.“
“there are sometimes traces of bad taste in the music and reminiscences of the classics—all of which are the sins of youth, which age will certainly cure.” Os clássicos estavam passados de moda? Que ironia!
“…indeed, sadness could not have been carried farther even by Bach, and the same serenity of mind runs through its despair.”
“His style is made up of all styles, and ranges from the Gregorian chant to the most modern modulations. All available materials are used in this work. This is an Italian characteristic. Gabriel d’Annunzio threw into his melting-pot the Renaissance, the Italian painters, music, the writers of the North, Tolstoy, Dostoïevsky, Maeterlinck, and our French writers, and out of it he drew his wonderful poems. So Don Perosi, in his compositions, welds together the Gregorian chant, the musical style of the contrapuntists of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Palestrina, Roland de Lassus, Gabrieli, Carissimi, Schütz, Bach, Händel, Gounod, Wagner—I was going to say César Franck, but Don Perosi told me that he hardly knew this composer at all, though his style bears some resemblance to Franck’s.”
“Can we not tear ourselves away from that romantic suffering in music which was begun by Beethoven? After a century of battles, of revolutions, and of political and social strife, whose pain has found its reflection in art, let us begin to build a new city of art, where men may gather together in brotherly love for the same ideal.” Coitadinho do Rolland, escrevendo pouco antes da I Guerra Mundial!
FRENCH AND GERMAN MUSIC
“I know no one but Franck in the last century, unless it is Beethoven, who has possessed in so high a degree the virtue of being himself and speaking only the truth without thought of his public. Never before has religious faith been expressed with such sincerity. Franck is the only musician besides Bach who has really seen the Christ, and who can make other people see him too. I would even venture to say that his Christ is simpler than Bach’s; for Bach’s thoughts are often led away by the interest of developing his subject, by certain habits of composition, and by repetitions and clever devices, which weaken his strength. In Franck’s music we get Christ’s speech itself, unadorned and in all its living force.”
“There is no doubt, said Henri Lichtenberger, who sat by me at the concert, our music is beginning to bore the Germans.”
“Charpentier is, of all living French musicians, the most liked in Germany; he is indeed the only one who is popular with artists and the general public alike. Shall I say that the sincere pleasure they take in his orchestration and the gay life of his subjects is enhanced a little by a slight disdain for French frivolity—wälschen Tand?”
“I am not speaking of the general public only, The German public of to-day are devotees of Brahms and Wagner, and everything of theirs seems good to them; they have no discrimination, and, while they applaud Wagner and encore Brahms, they are, in their hearts, not only frivolous, but sentimental and gross. The most striking thing about this public is their cult of power since Wagner’s death. When listening to the end of Die Meistersinger I felt how the haughty music of the great march reflected the spirit of this military nation of shop-keepers, bursting with rude health and complacent pride.
The most remarkable thing of all is that German artists are gradually losing the power of understanding their own splendid classics and, in particular, Beethoven. Strauss, who is very shrewd and knows exactly his own limitations, does not willingly enter Beethoven’s domain, though he feels his spirit in a much more living way than any of the other German Kapellmeister.”
“No; we can no longer hear Beethoven and Mozart in Germany to-day, we can only hear Mahler and Strauss. Well, let it be so. We will resign ourselves. The past is past. Let us leave Beethoven and Mozart, and speak of Mahler and Strauss.”
“When I conceive a great musical painting (ein grosses musikalisches Gemälde), says Mahler, there always comes a moment when I feel forced to employ speech (das Wort) as an aid to the realisation of my musical conception.”
“Mahler’s case is really rather curious. When one studies his works one feels convinced that he is one of those rare types in modern Germany—an egoist who feels with sincerity. Perhaps his emotions and his ideas do not succeed in expressing themselves in a really sincere and personal way; for they reach us through a cloud of reminiscences and an atmosphere of classicism. I cannot help thinking that Mahler’s position as director of the Opera, and his consequent saturation in the music that his calling condemns him to study, is the cause of this. There is nothing more fatal to a creative spirit than too much reading, above all when it does not read of its own free will, but is forced to absorb an excessive amount of nourishment, the larger part of which is indigestible.” “Mahler will only be Mahler when he is able to leave his administrative work, shut up his scores, retire within himself, and wait patiently until he has become himself again—if it is not too late. § His Fifth Symphony, which he conducted at Strasburg, convinced me, more than all his other works, of the urgent necessity of adopting this course. In this composition he has not allowed himself the use of the choruses, which were one of the chief attractions of his preceding symphonies.”
—“To begin with, this symphony is excessively long—it lasts an hour and a half—though there is no apparent justification for its proportions. It aims at being colossal, and mainly achieves emptiness. The motifs are more than familiar. After a funeral march of commonplace character and boisterous movement, where Beethoven seems to be taking lessons from Mendelssohn, there comes a scherzo, or rather a Viennese waltz, where Chabrier gives old Bach a helping hand. The adagietto has a rather sweet sentimentality. The rondo at the end is presented rather like an idea of Franck’s, and is the best part of the composition.” “Through all the work runs a mixture of pedantic stiffness and incoherence; it moves along in a desultory way, and suffers from abrupt checks in the course of its development and from superfluous ideas that break in for no reason at all, with the result that the whole hangs fire. § Above all, I fear Mahler has been sadly hypnotised by ideas about power—ideas that are getting to the head of all German artists to-day. He seems to have an undecided mind, and to combine sadness and irony with weakness and impatience, to be a Viennese musician striving after Wagnerian grandeur.”
“I do not see, said Strauss, why I should not compose a symphony about myself; I find myself quite as interesting as Napoleon or Alexander.”
“German music in general is showing some grave symptoms. I will not dwell on its neurasthenia, for it is passing through a crisis which will teach it wisdom; but I fear, nevertheless, that this excessive nervous excitement will be followed by torpor. What is really disquieting is that, in spite of all the talent that still abounds, Germany is fast losing her chief musical endowments. Her melodic charm has nearly disappeared. One could search the music of Strauss, Mahler, or Hugo Wolf, without finding a melody of any real value, or of any true originality, outside its application to a text, or a literary idea, and its harmonic development. And besides that, German music is daily losing its intimate spirit; there are still traces of this spirit in Wolf, thanks to his exceptionally unhappy life; but there is very little of it in Mahler, in spite of all his efforts to concentrate his mind on himself; and there is hardly any at all in Strauss, although he is the most interesting of the three composers. German musicians have no longer any depth.
I have said that I attribute this fact to the detestable influence of the theatre, to which nearly all these artists are attached as Kapellmeister, or directors of opera. To this they owe the melodramatic character of their music, even though it is on the surface only—music written for show, and aiming chiefly at effect.”
More baneful even than the influence of the theatre is the influence of success. These musicians have nowadays too many facilities for having their music played. A work is played almost before it is finished, and the musician has no time to live with his work in solitude and silence.”
“And with all this a musician grows soon contented with himself, and comes to believe any favourable opinion about his work. What a difference from Beethoven, who, all his life, was hammering out the same subjects, and putting his melodies on the anvil twenty times before they reached their final form. That is where Mahler is so lacking.”
“And, lastly, I want to speak of the greatest danger of all that menaces music in Germany; there is too much music in Germany. This is not a paradox. There is no worse misfortune for art than a super-abundance of it. The music is drowning the musicians. Festival succeeds festival: the day after the Strasburg festival there was to be a Bach festival at Eisenach; and then, at the end of the week, a Beethoven festival at Bonn. Such a plethora of concerts, theatres, choral societies, and chamber-music societies, absorbs the whole life of the musician. When has he time to be alone to listen to the music that sings within him? This senseless flood of music invades the sanctuaries of his soul, weakens its power, and destroys its sacred solitude and the treasures of its thought.”
CLAUDE DEBUSSY
PELLÉAS ET MÉLISANDE
“The cause of the artistic success of Pelléas et Mélisande is of a more specially French character, and marks a reaction that is at once legitimate, natural, and inevitable; I would even say it is vital—a reaction of French genius against foreign art, and especially against Wagnerian art and its awkward representatives in France.”
“And, as if he wished to accentuate this antagonism, the author of Pelléas et Mélisande is now writing a Tristan, whose plot is taken from an old French poem, the text of which has been recently brought to light by M. Bédier. In its calm and lofty strain it is a wonderful contrast to Wagner’s savage and pedantic, though sublime poem.”
“We demand that an equal balance shall be kept between poetry and music; and if their equilibrium must be a little upset, we should prefer that poetry was not the loser, as its utterance is more conscious and rational. That was Gluck’s aim; and because he realised it so well he gained a reputation among the French public which nothing will destroy.”
“Debussy’s system, on the contrary, is, so to speak, a sort of classic impressionism—an impressionism that is refined, harmonious, and calm; that moves along in musical pictures, each of which corresponds to a subtle and fleeting moment of the soul’s life; and the painting is done by clever little strokes put in with a soft and delicate touch.”
“Mozart shared the same thought: ‘Music,’ he said, ‘even in the most terrible situations, ought never to offend the ear; it should charm it even there; and, in short, always remain music.’”
“A man is not a great artist because he makes use of unresolved sevenths and ninths, consecutive major thirds and ninths, and harmonic progressions based on a scale of whole tones; one is only an artist when one makes them say something.”
“Anyone who lives in foreign parts and is curious to know what France is like and understand her genius should study Pelléas et Mélisande as they would study Racine’s Bérénice.”
“The France of Rabelais, Molière, Diderot, and in music, we will say—for want of better names—the France of Berlioz and Bizet. To tell the truth, that is the France I prefer.”
THE AWAKENING: A SKETCH OF THE MUSICAL MOVEMENT IN PARIS SINCE 1870
“The nature of Paris is so complex and unstable that one feels it is presumptuous to try to define it. It is a city so highly-strung, so ingrained with fickleness, and so changeable in its tastes, that a book that truly describes it at the moment it is written is no longer accurate by the time it is published. And then, there is not only one Paris; there are two or three Parises—fashionable Paris, middle-class Paris, intellectual Paris, vulgar Paris—all living side by side, but intermingling very little.”
“For the nations that have the strongest artistic traditions are not necessarily those that are likely to develop a new art. To do that one must have a virgin soil and spirits untrammelled by a heritage from the past.” (Viena fim de século)
“Certainly there are races more gifted in music than others; but often the seeming differences of race are really the differences of time; and a nation appears great or little in its art according to what period of its history we consider. England was a musical nation until the Revolution of 1688; France was the greatest musical nation in the sixteenth century; and the recent publications of M. Henry Expert have given us a glimpse of the originality and perfection of the Franco-Belgian art during the Renaissance.”
“This incredible weakening of musical feeling in France, from 1840 to 1870, is nowhere better shown than in its romantic and realistic writers, for whom music was an hermetically sealed door. All these artists were ‘visuels’, for whom music was only a noise. Hugo is supposed to have said that Germany’s inferiority was measured by its superiority in music.”
“In 1890, César Franck died in Paris. Belgian by birth and temperament, and French in feeling and by musical education, he had remained outside the Wagnerian movement in his own serene and fecund solitude. To his intellectual greatness and the charm his personal genius held for the little band of friends who knew and revered him he added the authority of his knowledge. Unconsciously he brought back to us the soul of Sebastian Bach, with its infinite richness and depth; and through this he found himself the head of a school (without having wished it) and the greatest teacher of contemporary French music.”
“It may seem astonishing that such works should have found a place at the Opéra-Comique and not at the Opera. But if two musical theatres of different kinds exist, one of which pretends to have the monopoly of great art, while the other with a simpler and more intimate character seeks only to please, it is always the latter that has a better chance of development and of making new discoveries; for the first is oppressed by traditions that become ever stiffer and more pedantic, while the other with its simplicity and lack of pretension is able to accommodate itself to any manner of life.”
“Mozart’s opere buffe have more of truth and life in them than his opere serie; and there is as much dramatic power in an opéra-comique like Carmen as in all the repertory of grand Opera to-day.”
“A French composer who was foolish enough to venture on to the ground of instrumental music had no other means of getting his works performed than by himself arranging a concert for them. Such was Berlioz’s case; for he had to gather together an orchestra and hire a room each time he wished to get a hearing for his great symphonies. The financial result was often disastrous”
“the Russians—Mussorgski, Borodine, Rimsky-Korsakow, Liadow, and Glazounow”
“In every country, but especially in those countries that are least musical, a virtuoso profits by public favour, often to the detriment of the work he is performing; for what is most liked in music is the musician. The virtuoso—whose importance must not be underrated, and who is worthy of honour when he is a reverential and sympathetic interpreter of genius—has too often taken a lamentable part, especially in Latin countries, in the degrading of musical taste; for empty virtuosity makes a desert of art. The fashion of inept fantasias and acrobatic variations has, it is true, gone by; but of late years virtuosity has returned in an offensive way, and, sheltering itself under the solemn classical name of ‘concertos’, it usurped a place of rather exaggerated importance in symphony concerts, and especially in M. Chevillard’s concerts—a place which Lamoureux would never have given it.”
“They have revived Monteverde’s Orfeo and his Incoronazione di Poppea, which had been forgotten these three centuries”
“But the thing was brought about with some difficulty; for among these serious people music did not count as a serious study. Music was thought of as an agreeable art, a social accomplishment, and the idea of making it the subject of scientific teaching must have been received with some amusement. Even up to the present time, general histories of Art have refused to accord music a place, so little was thought of it; and other arts were indignant at being mentioned in the same breath with it.”
“This was a difficult task, for in France art has always had an aristocratic character; and it was a task in which neither the State nor musicians were very interested. The Republic still continued to regard music as something outside the people. There had even been opposition shown during the last thirty years towards any attempt at popular musical education.”
“The folk-song had practically disappeared, and was not yet ready for re-birth; for the populace, even more readily than the cultured people, are inclined to blush at anything which suggests ‘popularity’.”
“With a people that has ancient musical traditions, as Germany has, music is the vehicle for the words and impresses them in the heart; but in France’s case it is truer to say that the words have brought the music of Händel and Beethoven into the hearts of French school-children.”
“A very decided reaction against foreign music has been shown since the time of the Universal Exhibition of 1900. This movement is not unconnected, consciously or unconsciously, with the nationalist train of thought, which was stirred up in France, and especially in Paris, somewhere about the same time. But it is also a natural development in the evolution of music.”
FOOTNOTES
“His Mémoires as a whole is one of the most delightful books ever written by an artist. Wagner was a greater poet, but as a prose writer Berlioz is infinitely superior.”
“I have only blank walls before my windows. On the side of the street a pug dog has been barking for an hour, a parrot screaming, and a parroqueet imitating the chirp of sparrows. On the side of the yard the washerwomen are singing, and another parroqueet cries incessantly, ‘Shoulder arrms!’ How long the day is!” B.
“M. Camille Saint-Saëns wrote in his Portraits et Souvenirs, 1900: ‘Whoever reads Berlioz’s scores before hearing them played can have no real idea of their effect. The instruments appear to be arranged in defiance of all common sense; and it would seem, to use professional slang, that cela ne dut pas sonner, but cela sonne wonderfully. If we find here and there obscurities of style, they do not appear in the orchestra; light streams into it and plays there as in the facets of a diamond.’”
“I was so ignorant of the mechanism of certain instruments, that after having written the solo in D flat for the trombone in the Introduction of Les Francs-Juges, I feared it would be terribly difficult to play. So I went, very anxious, to one of the trombonists of the Opera orchestra. He looked at the passage and reassured me. ‘The key of D flat is,’ he said, ‘one of the pleasantest for that instrument; and you can count on a splendid effect for that passage’”
“The chief characteristics of my music are passionate expression, inward warmth, rhythmic in pulses, and unforeseen effects. When I speak of passionate expression, I mean an expression that desperately strives to reproduce the inward feeling of its subject, even when the theme is contrary to passion, and deals with gentle emotions or the deepest calm. It is this kind of expression that may be found in L’Enfance du Christ, and, above all, in the scene of Le Ciel in the Damnation de Faust and in the Sanctus of the Requiem”
“I am not speaking of the Franco-Flemish masters at the end of the sixteenth century: of Jannequin, Costeley, Claude le Jeune, or Mauduit, recently discovered by M. Henry Expert, who are possessed of so original a flavour, and have yet remained almost entirely unknown from their own time to ours.”
“The best way to find out the musical characteristics of a nation is to study its folk-songs. If only someone would devote himself to the study of French folk-song (and there is no lack of material), people would realise perhaps how much it differs from German folk-song, and how the temperament of the French race shows itself there as being sweeter and freer, more vigorous and more expressive.”
“What will then remain of actual art? Perhaps Berlioz will be its sole representative. Not having studied the pianoforte, he had an instinctive aversion to counterpoint. He is in this respect the opposite of Wagner, who was the embodiment of counterpoint, and drew the utmost he could from its laws” Saint-Saëns
“Jacques Passy notes that with Berlioz the most frequent phrases consist of twelve, sixteen, eighteen, or twenty bars. With Wagner, phrases of eight bars are rare, those of four more common, those of two still more so, while those of one bar are most frequent of all”
“One must also take into account the musicians of the French revolution: Mehul, Gossec, Cherubini, and Lesueur, whose works, though they may not equal their intentions, are not without grandeur, and often disclose the intuition of a new and noble and popular art.”
“Berlioz’s music makes me think of gigantic kinds of extinct animals, of fabulous empires…. Babylon, the hanging gardens of Semiramis, the wonders of Nineveh, the daring buildings of Mizraim.” Heine
“Berlioz never ceased to inveigh against the Revolution of 1848—which should have had his sympathies. Instead of finding material, like Wagner, in the excitement of that time for impassioned compositions, he worked at L’Enfance du Christ. He affected absolute indifference—he who was so little made for indifference. He approved the State’s action, and despised its visionary hopes.”
“Bizet was the last genius to discover a new beauty” Nietzsche
“I do not attach very much importance to the courageous, though not always very intelligent movement of the Universités Populaires, where since 1886 a collection of amateurs, of fashionable people and artists, meet to make themselves heard, and pretend to initiate the people into what are sometimes the most complicated and aristocratic works of a classic or decadent art. While honouring this propaganda— whose ardour has now abated somewhat—one must say that it has shown more good will than common-sense. The people do not need amusing, still less should they be bored; what they need is to learn something about music. This is not always easy; for it is not noisy deeds we want, but patience and self-sacrifice. Good intentions are not enough. One knows the final failure of the Conservatoire populaire de Mimi Pinson, started by Gustave Charpentier, for giving musical education to the work-girls of Paris.”
“It is hardly necessary to mention the curious attraction that some of our musicians are beginning to feel for the art of civilisations that are quite opposed to those of the West. Slowly and quietly the spirit of the Far East is insinuating itself into European music.”
GLOSSÁRIO:
chorale: hino, coral
glade: clareira
Seclusão Anagógica 