Musical Portraits Part 5

If Rimsky-Korsakoff was not absolutely sterile, it was because his intellectual quality itself was vivacious and brilliant. Though he remained ever a stranger to Russia and his fellows, as he did to himself, he became the most observant of travelers. Though as the foreigner he perceived only the superficial and picturesque elements of the life of the land--its Orientalism, its barbaric coloring--and found his happiest expression in a fantasy after the "Thousand Nights and a Night," he noted his impressions skilfully and vividly, with an almost virtuosic sense of his material. If he could not paint the spring in music, he could at least embroider the score of "Sniegourochka"

delightfully with birdcalls and all manner of vernal fancies. If he could not recreate the spirit of peasant art, he could at least, as in "Le Coq d'or," imitate it so tastefully that, listening to the music, we seem to have before us one of the pictures beloved by the Russian folk--a picture with bright and joyous dabs of color, with clumsy but gleeful depictions of battles and cavalcades and festivities and banqueting tables loaded with fruits, meats and flagons. It is indeed curious, and not a little pathetic, to observe how keen Rimsky-Korsakoff's intelligence ever was. The satirization of the demoniacal women of "Parsifal" and "Salome" in the figure and motifs of the Princess of Samarcand is deliciously light and witty. Indeed, not only "Le Coq d'or," but most of his work reveals his dry, real sense of humor. And how often does he not point the direction in which Russian music has subsequently advanced! His latter style, with its mottled chromatic and Oriental modes, its curious and bewildering intervals, is the veritable link between the music of the older Russian group to which he, roughly, belongs and that of the younger, newer men, of Strawinsky in particular. Indeed, the works of Strawinsky reveal incessantly how much the master taught the pupil.

But if they reveal Rimsky's keenness, they reveal his limitations as well. They bring into sharpest relief the difference between poetic and superficial expressiveness. For Strawinsky has in many instances successfully handled materials which Rimsky not quite satisfactorily employed. The former's early works, in particular "L'Oiseau de feu," and the first act of the opera "Le Rossignol," related to Rimsky's in style as they are, have yet a faery and wonder and flittergold that the master never succeeded in attaining. The music of "L'Oiseau de feu" is really a fantastic dream-bird. "Petrouchka" has a brilliance and vivacity and madness that makes Rimsky's scenes from popular life, his utilizations of vulgar tunes and dances scarcely comparable to it. Nowhere in any of Rimsky's reconstructions of ethnological dances and rites, neither in "Mlada" nor in "Sniegourochka," is there anything at all comparable to the naked power manifest in "Le Sacre du printemps." But it is particularly in his science of orchestration, the sense of the instruments that makes him appear to defer to them rather than to impose his will on them, that Strawinsky has achieved the thing that his teacher failed of achieving. For Rimsky, despite all his remarkable sense of the chemistry of timbres, despite his fine intention to develop further the science which Berlioz brought so far, was prevented from minting a really new significant orchestral speech through the poverty of his invention. His orchestration is full of tricks and mannerisms that pall. One hears the whistling parabolas of the flutes and clarinets of "Scheherazade" in "Mlada," in "Sadko," in a half-dozen works. The orchestra that paints the night-sky of "Mlada" rolls dangerously like that which paints the sea of "Scheherazade" and "Tsar Saltan." The famous "Chanson indou" seems to float vaguely through half his Oriental evocations. But the originality and fecundity and inventiveness that he lacked, Strawinsky to great degree possesses. And so it was given to the pupil to enter the chamber outside of which the master stood all his life, and could not enter, and saw only by peering furtively through the c.h.i.n.ks of the door.

Rachmaninoff

It was in an interview given at the beginning of his recent American tour that M. Sergei Rachmaninoff styled himself a "musical evolutionist." The phrase, doubtless uttered half in jest, is scarcely nice. It is one of those terms that are so loose that they are well-nigh meaningless. Nevertheless, there was significance in M. Rachmaninoff's use of it. For he employed it as an apology for his work. His music is evidently wanting in boldness. On the whole it is cautious and traditional. Even those who are not professionally on the side of the musical anarchs find it somewhat unventuresome, too smooth and soft and elegantly elegiac, too dull. And in subst.i.tuting for revolutionism a formula for musical progress less suggestive of violent change, more suggestive of a process like the tranquil, gradual and orderly unfolding of bud into blossom, was not M. Rachmaninoff very lightly and cleverly discrediting the apparently revolutionary work of certain of his fellows, and seeking to reveal a hitherto unsuspected solidity in his own?

However, it is questionable whether he was successful, whether the implications of the phrase do quite manage to manoeuver his work into genuine importance. No doubt, music does not invariably reform itself through the process we call revolutionary. It is a commonplace that there have been many composers of primary rank who have originated no new syntax, no new system of chords and key-relations.h.i.+ps. It is said that J. S. Bach himself did not invent a single harmony. There have been composers of genius who have done little to enlarge the physical boundaries of their art, have accepted the grammar of music from others, and have rounded an epoch instead of initiating a new one. Nevertheless, M. Rachmaninoff cannot quite be included in their company. There is as great a difference between him and composers of this somewhat conservative type as there is between him and the radical sort. For though the recomposition of music does not necessarily consist in the establishment of a new system, and can be fairly complete without it, it does consist in the impregnation of tone with new character and virtue.

Doubtless, M. Rachmaninoff is an accomplished and charming workman. He is almost uniformly suave and dexterous. The instances when he writes badly are not frequent. The C-sharp minor Prelude is, after all, something of a sport. No doubt, there are times, as in so many of the pa.s.sages of the new version of his first piano concerto, when he seeks to dazzle with the opulence and clangor and glare of tones. However, as a rule, he writes politely. If the second concerto is a trifle too soft and elegiac and sweet, a little too much like a mournful banqueting on jam and honey, it is still most deftly and ingratiatingly made. On the whole, even though his music touches us only superficially it rarely fails to awaken some grat.i.tude for its elegance. But there is an essential that his music wants. It wants the imprint of a decided and important individuality. In all the elaborate score of "The Island of the Dead," in the very one of M. Rachmaninoff's works that is generally deemed his best, there are few accents that are either very large or very poignant or very n.o.ble. The music lacks distinction, lacks vitality. The style is strangely soft and unrefres.h.i.+ng. Emotion is communicated, no doubt. But it is emotion of a second or even third order. Nor is the music of M. Rachmaninoff ever quite completely new-minted. Has it a melodic line quite properly its own? One doubts it.

Many of the melodies of M. Rachmaninoff have a Mendelssohnian cast, for all their Russian sheen. Others are of the sort of sweet, spiritless silken tune generally characteristic of the Russian salon school. Nor can one discover in this music a distinctly original sense of either rhythm of harmony or tone-color. The E-minor Symphony, for all its competence and smoothness, is full of the color and quality and atmosphere of Tchaikowsky. It is Tchaikowsky without the hysteria, perhaps, but also without the energy. In all the music of M.

Rachmaninoff there is something strangely twice-told. From it there flows the sadness distilled by all things that are a little useless.

There are to be found in every picture gallery canvases attributed, not to any single painter, but to an atelier, to the school of some great master. One finds charming pieces among them. Nor are they invariably the work of pupils who painted under the direction of some famous man.

Quite as often they are the handiwork of artists who appeared independent enough to their patrons and to themselves. Their names and their persons were familiar to those who ordered pictures from them. It is only that in the course of time their names have come to be forgotten. For there is in their canvases little trace of the substance that causes people to cherish an individuality, and makes a name to be remembered. Other personalities have transpired through their brush-strokes, and have made it evident that behind the man who held the brush in his hand there was another who directed the strokes--the man upon whom the artist had modeled himself, the personality he preferred to his own. It is this reflectiveness that has caused the attribution of the work to ateliers.

And had M. Rachmaninoff instead of being a musician been a painter, would not a like destiny await his compositions? For do they not proceed from the point of departure of the entire brilliant school of piano-compositions? Are they not a sort of throwback to the salon school, the school of velocity, of effect, of whatever Rubinstein and Liszt could desire? Are not the piano-pieces of M. Rachmaninoff the result of a relations.h.i.+p to the instrument that is fast becoming outmoded? There was some slight justification for the pompous and empty work of his models. The concerti, the often flashy and tinselly pianoforte compositions of Liszt and Rubinstein were the immediate and surface result of that deeper sense of the instrument which arrived during the nineteenth century, and intoxicated folk with the piano timbres, and made them eager to hear its many voices in no matter how crude a form. A whole school of facile virtuosi arose in response to the demand. Since then, however, we have gotten a subtler sense of the instrument. We no longer require so insensitive a display. And together with those rather gross piano-works the piece _par excellence_ characteristic of the period, the brilliant piano-concerto with its prancing instrument embedded in the pomp and clangor and ululation of the band, has lost in favor steadily. The modern men no longer write concerti. When they introduce a pianoforte into the orchestra, they either, like Brahms, treat it as the premier instrument, and write symphonies, or, like Scriabine and Strawinsky, reduce it to the common level. But M. Rachmaninoff has not partic.i.p.ated in this change of att.i.tude. He is still content with music that toys with the pianoforte.

And he writes concerti of the old type. He writes pieces full of the old astounding musical dislocation. Phrases of an apparent intensity and lyricism are negated by frivolous and tinkling pa.s.sage-work. Take away the sound and fury signifying nothing from the third concerto, and what is left? There was a day, perhaps, when such work served. But another has succeeded to it. And so M. Rachmaninoff comes amongst us like a very charming and amiable ghost.

For that, however, let us not fail to be duly grateful. Let us not fail to give thanks for the fact that setting forever is the conception of music as an after-dinner cordial, a box of a.s.sorted bonbons, bric-a-brac, a t.i.tillation, a tepid bath, a performance that amuses and caresses and whiles away a half-hour, an enchantment for boarding-school misses, an opportunity for virtuosi to glorify themselves.

One of the curious things about M. Rachmaninoff's season is the fact that it has not only brought him into prominence amongst us, but that it has brought into relief other composers through him. It has brought into relief the entire group of Russian musicians to which he belongs. It has evaluated the pretensions of the two conflicting schools of Russian music nicely. The school of which M. Rachmaninoff is perhaps the chief living representative, and which was represented at various times by Rubinstein and Tchaikowsky and Arensky, is usually dubbed "universal"

by its partisans. It is supposed to have its traditions in general European music, and to be a continuation of the art of the romanticists, in particular of the art of Chopin and Schumann. But for the men of the opposing faction, the men who accepted only the Russian folk-song as their touchstone, and sought in their work to find a modern equivalent for it, the music of this school was alien and sophisticated, as sophisticated as the pseudo-French culture of the Petrograd drawing-rooms. For them, the music of Tchaikowsky, even, was the result of the manipulation of themes of Slavic color according to formulas abstracted from cla.s.sical music. Without regard, however, for any question of musical theory; apart from all question of the value for us of the science of the cla.s.sical masters, one finds oneself of this opinion. For the music brought forward by the visit of the composer who is at present in this country as envoy of his school, convinces us that the work of the men of his party, elegant and brilliant as it often is, is the work of men essentially unresponsive to the appeal of their compatriots. For them, as it is for every Russian musician, Russia was without their windows, appealing dumbly for expression of its wild, ungoverned energy, its misery, its rich and childish laughter, its deep, great Christianity. It wanted a music that would have the accents of its rude, large-hearted speech, and that would, like its speech, express its essential reactions, its consciousness. And some men there were, Moussorgsky and Borodin, who were quick enough of imagination to become the instruments of their folk and respond to its need. And so, when we would hear Russian speech, we go to them as we go to Dostoievsky and to Tolstoy. It is in "Boris" and "Prince Igor" as richly as it is in any work. But the men of the other school did not hear the appeal. They sat in their luxurious and Parisian houses behind closed windows.

Scriabine

There are solemn and gorgeous pages in the symphonic poems of Scriabine.

And yet, despite their effulgence, their manifold splendors, their hieratic gestures, these works are not his most individual and significant. Save only the lambent "Prometheus," they each reveal to some degree the influence of Wagner. The "Idyl" of the Second Symphony, for instance, is dangerously close to the "Waldweben" in "Siegfried,"

although, to be sure, Scriabine's forest is rather more the perfumed and rose-lit woodland, Wagner's the fresh primeval wilderness. The "Poeme de l'extase," with its oceanic tides of voluptuously entangled bodies, is a sort of Tannhauser "Baccha.n.a.le" modernized, enlarged, and intensely sharpened. For, in spite of the fact that at moments he handled it with rare sympathy, the orchestra was not his proper medium. The piano was his instrument. It is only in composition for that medium that he expressed indelibly his exquisite, luminously poetic, almost disquieting temper, and definitely recorded himself.

There have been few composers more finely conscious of the piano. There have been few who have more fully plumbed its resources, few who have held it in greater reverence, few who have hearkened more solicitously to its voice that is so different from the voices of other instruments.

Of all piano music, only that of Debussy and Ravel seems as thoroughly steeped in the essential color of the medium, seems to lie as completely in the black and white keys, part of them, not imposed on them. And Scriabine, the barbarian and romanticist, is even more free of the hues of the keyboard than they, the Latins, the cla.s.sicists. His works make one keenly aware of the rhythmical, the formalistic limitations of Chopin's piano pieces, of the steeliness of much of Brahms', of the shallow brilliancy, the theatricality, of Liszt's. They even make us feel at moments as though in them had been realized the definitive pianistic style, that the hour of transition to the new keyboard of quarter tones was nigh. For Scriabine appears to have wakened in the piano all its latent animality. Under his touch it loses its old mechanical being, cries and chants like a bird, becomes at instants cat, serpent, flower, woman. It is as if the currents of the man's life had set with mysterious strength toward the instrument, till it became for him an eternally fresh and marvelous experience, till between him and the inanimate thing there came to be an interchange of life. There is the rarest of science in his style, especially in that of his last period, when his own individuality broke so marvelously into flower. He wrote for it as one of two persons who had shared life together might address the other, well aware with what complexity and profundity a smile, a gesture, a brief phrase, would reverberate. No one has caressed it more lightly, more tenderly, more voluptuously. No one has made of the piano-trill, for instance, more luminous and quivering a thing. And because he was so sensitive to his medium, the medium lured from out him his creative strength.

He grew to his high poetic stature from an elegant and aristocratic craftsman of the school of Chopin. More than that of any modern master, his art is rooted in the great romantic tradition as it comes to us through Chopin, Wagner, Liszt and Strauss; and develops almost logically out of it. And in the compositions of his first period, the period that ends, roughly, with the piano concerto, the allegiance is marked, the disciples.h.i.+p undeniable. The influence of Chopin is ubiquitous.

Scriabine writes mazurkas, preludes, etudes, nocturnes and waltzes in his master's cool, polite, fastidious general manner. These pieces, too, might seem to have been written in order to be played in n.o.ble salons lit by ma.s.sive candelabra, to countesses with bare shoulders. The twenty-four preludes Opus 11, for instance, are full of Chopinesque turns, of Chopinesque morbidezza, of Chopinesque melodies. The harmonic scheme rarely transgresses the limits which Chopin set himself. The pieces are obviously the work of one who in the course of concert-playing has come to discover the finesses of the Pole's workmans.h.i.+p. And yet, Cesar Cui's caustic description of the preludes as "Bits filched from Chopin's trousseau," is eminently unjust. For even in those days, when Scriabine was a member of the Russian salon school, there were attractive original elements in his compositions. There is real poetry and freshness in these soft-colored pieces. The treatment of the instrument is bold, and, at moments, more satisfactory than Chopin's. Scriabine, for instance, gives the left hand a greater independence and significance than does as a rule his master. Nor does he indulge in the repet.i.tions and recapitulations that mar so many of the latter's works. His sense of form is already alert. And through the silken melodic line, the sweet, rich harmonies, there already makes itself felt something that is to Chopin's spirit as Russian iron is to Polish silver.

It is perhaps only in the compositions subsequent to Opus 50 that Scriabine emerges in the fullness of his stature. For it is only in them that he finally abandoned the major-minor system to which he had hitherto adhered, and subst.i.tuted for it the other that permitted his exquisite delicious sense of pianistic color, his infinitely delicate gift of melody, his gorgeous, far-spreading harmonic feeling, free play.

And it is only in these later pieces that he achieved the perfection of form, particularly of the sonata form, of which the Ninth Sonata is the magistral example, and which makes his craft comparable to Bach's in its mastery of a medium, and enables one to mention the "Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue" and the Ninth Sonata justly in a single breath. And yet, the compositions of the middle period, the one that follows immediately the early, immature, Chopinesque period, are scarcely less rich and refined, scarcely less important. No doubt the influence of Scriabine's masters, though considerably on the wane, is still evident.

The "Poeme satanique" refines on Liszt. The Third Sonata, despite its lambent andante, is patently the work of one who has studied his Liszt and loves his Chopin. And yet, these works are characteristically male and raging and proud. And in all the works of this period there appears something new and magnificent that has scarcely before informed piano music. There is a truly Russian depth and vehemence and largeness in this now languid, now mystical, now leonine music, that lifts it entirely out of the company of the works of the Petrograd salon school into that of those composers who made orchestra and opera speak in the national tongue. The rhythms are joyously, barbarically, at times almost frenetically, free. They are finely various and depart almost entirely from the one-two, one-two, the one-two-three, one-two-three that makes monotonous so much of Chopin. At moments, the tones of the piano march with some of the now festive, now majestic, now solemn, movement of the orchestral processionals of a Moussorgsky and a Borodin. And one has the sense of having encountered only in sumptuous Eastern stuffs, in silken carpets and golden mosaics, or in the orchestral faery of some of the Russian composers, in the orchestral chemistry of, say, a Rimsky-Korsakoff, such br.i.m.m.i.n.g, delicious colors. Nevertheless, the voluptuousness and vehemence are held in fastidious restraint. Scriabine is always the fine gentleman, intolerant, for all the splendor of his style, of any excess, of any exaggeration, of any breach of taste. And throughout the work, there is evidence of the steady, restless bourgeoning of the exquisite, disquieting, almost Chinese delicacy which in the work of the last period attains its marvelous efflorescence.

These final works, these last sonatas and poems and preludes of Scriabine are but the essentialization of the personal traits adumbrated by the compositions of the earlier periods. It is as if in adopting the system based on the "mystic chord" that persisted in his imagination, the chord built up in fourths from the tones c, d, e, f-sharp, a, b, he had managed to rid himself of all the influence of the cla.s.sic masters, to give every note that he employs an intense, poignant, new value, and through that revolution to achieve form comparable to the most eminent.

His fantasy ranges over the keyboard with complete freedom; he creates new rhythms, new combinations of tones that cause the hands of the performer to become possessed of a new and curious intelligence, to make significant gestures, and to move with a delightful life. And these latter compositions are entirely structure, entirely bone. There is a complete economy. There is not a note in the Ninth Sonata, for instance, that is not necessary, and does not seem to have great significance.

Here everything is speech. The work actually develops out of the quavering first few bars. The vast resonant peroration only gathers into a single, furious, tragic p.r.o.nouncement the material deployed in the body of the work. Scarcely ever has the binary form, the combat between two contradictory themes, been more essentialized. Scarcely ever has the prelude-form been reduced to simpler terms than in the preludes of Scriabine. These works are indeed radical. For they give us a fresh glimpse of the archetype of their forms.

And yet, how strange, how infinitely complex and novel a thing they are.

There is indeed little music that throws into sharper relief the miracle of communication through material form. A few sounds, broken and elusive, are struck out of an instrument, die away again. And yet, through those vibrations, life for an instant is made incandescent. It is as though much that has. .h.i.therto been shy and lonely experience has undergone a sudden change into something clarified and universal. It is as though performer and auditor have themselves been transformed into more sensitive instruments, and prepared to partic.i.p.ate more graciously in the common experience. It is as though in each one the ability to feel beauty has been quickened, that each for an instant becomes the man who has never before seen the spring come over the land, and who, glancing upward, for the first time beholds an apple-bough flowering against the blue. And Scriabine fills one with the need of making wonderful and winged gestures. It is as if for instants he transforms one into strange and radiant and ecstatic beings, into new and wonderful things.

For this music is full of the wizardry of perhaps the most exquisite sensibility that has for a long while disclosed itself in music. Perhaps only in the Far East, perhaps only among the Chinese, have more delicious and dainty and ecstatic tempers uttered themselves in music.

Beside this man, with his music that is like cl.u.s.tering flowers breaking suddenly from the cool and shadowy earth, or like the beating of luminous wings in the infinite azure, or like the whispers of one sinking from the world in mortal illness, Debussy, even, seems cool, silvered by the fine temperance of France. For Scriabine must have suffered an almost inordinate subjugation to the manifestations of beauty, must have been consumed with a pa.s.sion for communicating his burningly poignant adventures. There are moments when he seems scarcely able to speak, so intense, so enrapturing, is his voluptuous sensation.

Indeed, the sensuality is at times so intensely communicated that it almost excites pain as well as pleasure. If there is any music that seems to hover on the borderland between ecstasy and suffering, it is this. One shrinks from it as from some too poignant revelation. One cannot breathe for long in this ether. Small wonder that Scriabine sought all his life to flee into states of transport, to invent a religion of ecstasy. For one weighed with the terrible burden of so vibrant a sensibility, there could be no other means of existence.

And the gesture of flight is present throughout his music. Throughout it, one hears the beating of wings. Sometimes, it is the light flutter of glistening ephemeridae that wheel and skim delightfully through the limpid azure. Sometimes it is the pa.s.sionate fanning of wings preparing themselves for swift sharp ascents. Sometimes, it is the drooping of pinions that sink brokenly. For all these pieces are "Poemes ailes,"

flights toward some island of the blest. They are all aspirations "vers la flamme," toward the spiritual fire of joy, toward the paradise of divine pleasure and divine activity. The Fifth Sonata is like the marshaling of forces, the mighty spring of some radiant flyer launching himself into the empyrean. White gleaming pinions wheel and hover in the G.o.dlike close of the "Poeme divine." Impotent caged wings poise themselves for flight in the mystic Seventh Sonata, beat for an instant, are ominously still. Sometimes, as in the Eighth Sonata, Scriabine is like a gorgeous tropical bird preening himself in the quivering river light. Sometimes he is a seraphic creature outspreading his mighty pinions to greet some tremendous spirit sunrise. And in those last, bleeding, agonizing preludes, there is still the breath of flight. But this time it is another motion. Is it "the wind of death's imperishable wing"? Is it the blind hovering of the spirit that has quit its earthly habitation in the moment of dissolution? One cannot tell.

And it was the flight of ecstasy that he sought to achieve in his symphonic poems. He had made for himself a curious personal religion, a bizarre mixture of theosophy and neoplatonism and Bergsonian philosophy, a faith that prescribed transport; and these works were in part conceived as rituals. They were planned as ceremonies of elevation and deification by ecstasy, in which performers and auditors engaged as active and pa.s.sive celebrants. Together they were to ascend from plane to plane of delight, experiencing divine struggle and divine bliss and divine creativity. The music was to call the soul through the gate of the sense of hearing, to lead it, slowly, hieratically, up through circle after circle of heaven, until the mystical gongs boomed and the ma.s.s emotion reached the Father of Souls, and was become G.o.d. With Jules Romains, Scriabine would have cried to his audiences:

"Tu vas mourir tantot, sous le poids de tes heures: Les hommes, delies, glisseront par les portes, Les ongles de la nuit t'arracheront la chair.

Qu'importe!

Tu es mienne avant que tu sois morte; Les corps qui sont ici, la ville peut les prendre; Ils garderont au front comme une croix de cendre Le vestige du dieu que tu es maintenant!"

In "Prometheus" he introduces a _clavier a lumiere_ into his orchestra, vainly hoping to induce the ecstasy through color as well as sound, and after his death there was found among his papers a sketch for a "Mysteria" in which the music was to be conjoined not only with light, but with dance and perfume as well. It is a pity it was not granted him to achieve this work. The theosophic programs of his orchestral works are, after all, innocuous. Much of the half-mystical, half-sensual coloration of his orchestra is due them. And had the score of the "Mysteria" been as much an improvement over that of "Prometheus" as "Prometheus" is over the other symphonic works, Scriabine might indeed have proved himself as eminent a writer for the orchestra as for the piano.

It is indeed likely that to-morrow the world will find in his piano-works its new Chopin, that Scriabine will shortly be given the place once occupied by the other. For not only is he in many ways the artistic superior of the man who once was his master. He is, as well, one of the beings in which the age that is slowly expiring about us became conscious and articulate. Russia bore him, it is true, elemented him, gave him her childlike tenderness and barbaric richness and mystic light. But in developing out of the Russian "universal" school into perfect liberty and individuality, he became indeed a universal expression, the first really produced by the group. He became, like the intensely "national" Strawinsky, one of those men into whom an age enters. He is symbolic of his time. He seems to have felt his age's life in its intensest form. The hour that created him was an hour in which the power of feeling had waxed inordinately, almost to the point of hampering action, when an Asiatic delicacy had begun to be manifest in Western character, when the fusion of Europe and Asia was commencing to make itself felt. And in Scriabine, that new intensity of sensation attained something near to heroic supernatural stature. What was beautiful and sick in his age entered into his art. Through it, we learn, not a little, how we feel.

His music was a thing created in the flesh of a man, out of his agony.

"Eine Entwicklung ist ein Schicksal," Thomas Mann once wrote. For Scriabine, the awakening of that aerial palpitant sensibility was such.

It devoured him like a fire. One shudders as well as marvels at the destiny of one who came to feel life as it is felt in those last quivering poems--"Guirlandes," "Flammes sombres," he ent.i.tles them,--or in the mysterious Tenth Sonata, that glows with the feverish light of the dream, or in those last haunted preludes. Existence for the man who could write such music, in which unearthly rapture contrasts with unearthly suffering, must have been a sort of exquisite martyrdom. The man must have been indeed a nerve exposed. And, like a fragile thing suddenly ignited, he flared up, fiercely, magnificently, and went out.

Strawinsky

The new steel organs of man have begotten their music in "Le Sacre du printemps." For with Strawinsky, the rhythms of machinery enter musical art. With this his magistral work a new chapter of music commences, the spiritualization of the new body of man is manifest. Through Debussy, music had liquified, become opalescent and impalpable and fluent. It had become, because of his sense, his generation's sense, of the infirmity of things, a sort of symbol of the eternal flux, the eternal momentariness. It had come to body forth all that merges and changes and disappears, to mirror the incessant departures and evanescences of life, to shape itself upon the infinitely subtle play of light, the restless, heaving, foaming surface of the sea, the impalpable racks of perfume, upon gusts of wind and fading sounds, upon all the ephemeral wonder of the world. But through Strawinsky, there has come to be a music stylistically well-nigh the reverse of that of the impressionists.

Through him, music has become again cubical, lapidary, ma.s.sive, mechanistic. Scintillation is gone out of it. The delicate, sinuous melodic line, the glamorous sheeny harmonies, are gone out of it. The elegance of Debussy, the golden sensuality, the quiet, cla.s.sic touch, are flown. Instead, there are come to be great, weighty, metallic ma.s.ses, molten piles and sheets of steel and iron, s.h.i.+ning adamantine bulks. Contours are become grim, severe, angular. Melodies are sharp, rigid, asymmetrical. Chords are uncouth, square cl.u.s.ters of notes, stout and solid as the pillars that support roofs, heavy as the thuds of triphammers. Above all, there is rhythm, rhythm rectangular and sheer and emphatic, rhythm that lunges and beats and reiterates and dances with all the steely perfect tirelessness of the machine, shoots out and draws back, shoots upward and shoots down, with the inhuman motion of t.i.tanic arms of steel. Indeed, the change is as radical, as complete, as though in the midst of moonlit n.o.ble gardens a giant machine had arisen swiftly from the ground and inundated the night with electrical glare and set its metal thews and organs and joints relentlessly whirring, relentlessly functioning.

And yet, the two styles, Debussy's and Strawinsky's, are related.

Indeed, they are complementary. They are the reactions to the same stimulus of two fundamentally different types of mind. No doubt, between the two men there exist differences besides those of their general fas.h.i.+ons of thinking. The temper of Debussy was profoundly sensuous and aristocratic and contained. That of Strawinsky is nervous and ironic and violent. The one man issued from an unbroken tradition, was produced by generations and generations of gentlemen. The other is one of those beings who seem to have been called into existence solely by the modern way of life, by express trains and ocean greyhounds, by the shrinkage of continents and the vibration of the twentieth-century world. But the chief difference, the difference that made "Le Sacre du printemps"

almost ant.i.thetical to "Pelleas et Melisande," is essentially the divergence between two cardinal manners of apprehending life. Debussy, on the one hand, seems to be of the sort of men in whom the center of conscience is, figuratively, sunken; one of those who have within themselves some immobility that makes the people and the things about them appear fleeting and unreal. For such, the world is a far distant thing, lying out on the rims of consciousness, delicate and impermanent as sunset hues or the lights and gestures of the dream. The music of Debussy is the magistral and cla.s.sic picture of this distant and glamorous procession, this illusory and fantastical and transparent show, this thing that changes from moment to moment and is never twice the same, and flows away from us so quickly. But Strawinsky, on the other hand, is in the very midst of the thing so distant from the other man. For him, the material world is very real, sharp, immediate. He loves it, enjoys it, is excited by its many forms. He is vividly responsive to its traffic. Things make an immediate and biting impression on him, stimulate in him pleasure and pain. He feels their edge and knows it hard, feels their weight and knows it heavy, feels their motion in all its violence. There is in Strawinsky an almost frenetic delight in the processes that go on about him. He goes through the crowded thoroughfares, through cluttered places, through factories, hotels, wharves, sits in railway trains, and the glare and tumult and pulsation, the engines and locomotives and cranes, the whole mad phantasmagoria of the modern city, evoke images in him, inflame him to reproduce them in all their weight and gianthood and ma.s.s, their blackness and luridness and power. The most vulgar things and events excite him. The traffic, the restlessness of crowds, the noise of vehicles, of the clatter of horses on the asphalt, of human cries and calls sounding above the street-ba.s.s, a couple of organ grinders trying to outplay each other, a bra.s.s band coming down the avenue, the thunder of a railway train hurling itself over leagues of steel, the sirens of steamboats and locomotives, the overtones of factory whistles, the roar of cities and harbors, become music to him. In one of his early orchestral sketches, he imitates the buzzing of a hive of bees. One of his miniatures for string-quartet bangs with the beat of the wooden shoes of peasants dancing to the snarling tones of a bagpipe. Another reproduces the droning of the priest in a little chapel, recreates the scene almost cruelly. And the score of "Petruchka" is alive marvelously with the rank, garish life of a cheap fair. Its bubbling flutes, seething instrumental caldron, concertina-rhythms and bright, gaudy colors conjure up the movement of the crowds that surge about the amus.e.m.e.nt booths, paint to the life the little flying flags, the gestures of the showmen, the bright balloons, the shooting-galleries, the gipsy tents, the crudely stained canvas walls, the groups of coachmen and servant girls and children in their holiday finery. At moments one can even smell the sausages frying.

For Strawinsky is one of those composers, found scattered all along the pathway of his art, who augment the expressiveness of music through direct imitation of nature. His imagination seems to be free, bound in nowise by what other men have adjudged music to be, and by what their practice has made it seem. He comes to his art without prejudice or preconception of any kind, it appears. He plays with its elements as capriciously as the child plays with paper and crayons. He amuses himself with each instrument of the band careless of its customary uses.

There are times when Strawinsky comes into the solemn conclave of musicians like a gamin with trumpet and drum. He disports himself with the infinitely dignified string-quartet, makes it do light and acrobatic things. There is one interlude of "Petruchka" that is written for snare-drums alone. His work is incrusted with cheap waltzes and barrel-organ tunes. It is gamy and racy in style; full of musical slang. He makes the orchestra imitate the quavering of an old hurdy-gurdy. Of late he has written a ballet for eight clowns. And he is reported to have said, "I should like to bring it about that music be performed in street-cars, while people get out and get in." For he finds his greatest enemy in the concert-room, that rut that limits the play of the imagination of audiences, that fortress in which all of the intentions of the men of the past have established themselves, and from which they dominate the musical present. The concert-room has succeeded in making music a drug, a sedative, has created a "musical att.i.tude" in folk that is false, and robbed musical art of its power. For Strawinsky music is either an infection, the communication of a lyrical impulse, or nothing at all. And so he would have it performed in ordinary places of congregation, at fairs, in taverns, music-halls, street-cars, if you will, in order to enable it to function freely once again. His art is pointed to quicken, to infect, to begin an action that the listener must complete within himself. It is a sort of musical shorthand. On paper, it has a fragmentary look. It is as though Strawinsky had sought to reduce the elements of music to their sharpest and simplest terms, had hoped that the "development" would be made by the audience. He seems to feel that if he cannot achieve his end, the communication of his lyrical impulse, with a single strong _motif_, a single strong movement of tones, a single rhythmic start, he cannot achieve it at all. So we find him writing songs, the three j.a.panese lyrics, for instance, that are epigrammatic in their brevity; a piece for string-quartet that is played in fifty seconds; a three-act opera that can be performed in thirty minutes.

But it is no experiment in form that he is making. He seems to bring into music some of the power of the Chinese artists who, in the painting of a twig, or of a pair of blossoms, represent the entire springtide. He has written some of the freshest, most rippling, delicate music.

Scarcely a living man has written more freshly or humorously. April, the flowering branches, the snowing petals, the clouds high in the blue, are really in the shrilling little orchestra of the j.a.panese lyrics, in the green, gurgling flutes and watery violins. None of the innumerable Spring Symphonies, Spring Overtures, Spring Songs, are really more vernal, more soaked in the gentle suns.h.i.+ne of spring, are more really the seed-time, than the six nave piping measures of melody that introduce the figure of the "Sacre" ent.i.tled "Rondes printanieres." No doubt, in venturing to write music so bold and original in esthetic, Strawinsky was encouraged by the example of another musician, another Russian composer. Moussorgsky, before him, had trusted in his own innocence instead of in the wisdom of the fathers of the musical church, had dared obey the promptings of his own blood and set down chords, melodies, rhythms, just as they sang in his skull, though all the world rise up to d.a.m.n him. But the penning of music as jagged, cubical, barbarous as the prelude to the third act of Strawinsky's little opera, "The Nightingale," or as naked, uncouth, rectangular, rocklike, polyharmonic, headlong, as some of that of "Le Sacre du printemps"

required no less perfect a conviction, no less great a self-reliance.

The music of Strawinsky is the expression of an innocence comparable indeed to that of his great predecessor. "Le Sacre du printemps" is what its composer termed it. It is "an act of faith."