Old Scores and New Readings Part 4

"Parsifal" does not imply that Wagner in his old age went back on all he had thought and felt before. Born in a time when the secret of living had not been rediscovered, when folk still thought the victory, and not the battle, the main thing in life, he always sought a creed to put on as a coat-of-mail to protect him from the nasty knocks of fate. Nowadays we do not care greatly for the victory, and we go out to fight with a light heart, commencing where Wagner and all the pessimists ended. Wagner wanted the victory, and also, lest he should not gain it, he wanted something to save him from despair. That something he found in pessimism. In his younger days--indeed until near the last--he forgot all about it in his hours of inspiration, and worked for no end, but for the sheer joy of working. But towards the end of his life, when his inspiration came seldomer and with less power, he worked more and more for the victory, and became wholly pessimistic, throwing away his weapons, and hiding behind self-renunciation as behind a s.h.i.+eld. He won a victory more brilliant than ever Napoleon or Wellington or Moltke won; and in the eyes of all men he seemed a great general. But life had terrified him; he had trembled before Wotan's--or Christ's--spear; in his heart of hearts he knew himself a beaten man; and he wrote "Parsifal."

BAYREUTH IN 1897

To Bayreuth again, through dirty, dusty, nasty-smelling, unromantic Germany, along the banks of that shabby--genteel river known as the Rhine, watching at every railway station the wondrously bulky haus-fraus who stir such deep emotions in the sentimental German heart; noting how the disease of militarism has eaten so deeply into German life that each railway official is a mere steam-engine, supplied by the State with fuel in case he should some day be needed; eating the badly and dirtily cooked German food,--how familiar it all seems when one does it a second time! One week in Bayreuth was the length of my stay in 1896; yet I seem to have spent a great part of my younger days here. The theatre is my familiar friend in whom I never trust; the ditch called the river has many a.s.sociations, pleasant and other; I go up past the theatre into the wood as to a favourite haunt of old time; I lunch under the trees and watch the caterpillars drop into my soup as though that were the commonest thing in the world; I wander into the theatre and feel more at home than ever I do at Covent Garden; I listen to the bad--but it is not yet time for detailed criticism. All I mean is, that the novelty of Bayreuth, like the novelty of any other small lifeless German town, disappears on a second visit; that though the charm of the wood, of the trumpet calls at the theatre, of the greasy German food, and the primitive German sanitary arrangements, remains, it is a charm that has already worn very thin, and needs the carefullest of handling to preserve. Whether, without some especial inducement, the average mortal can survive Bayreuth a third time, is, to me, hardly a question. As for my poor self, it suits me admirably--certainly I could stand Bayreuth half a dozen times. I like the life--the way in which the hours of the day revolve round the evening performance, the real idleness, pa.s.sivity, combined with an appearance of energy and activity; I like to get warm by climbing the hill and then to sit down and cool myself by drinking lager from a huge pot with a pewter lid, dreamily speculating the while on the possibility of my ever growing as fat as the average German; I like to sit in a cafe with my friends till three in the morning, discussing with fiery enthusiasm unimportant details of the performance we have lately endured; I like being hungry six times a day. All these trifles please me, and please others. But the majority of the crowd of visitors are not pleased by them; and what can they do in Bayreuth after the freshness of novelty is worn off? They go to Villa Wahnfried and look for a few seconds at the spot where Wagner is buried--as I heard it said, like a cat in a back garden; they look for a few seconds at the church; they lunch; they buy and partly read the English papers; and then? Inevitably the intelligent reader will say, the opera in the evening. And I, who have been to the opera in the evening, gasp and remark, Really!

Lest this e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.n be entirely misinterpreted by the irreverent, let it be said at once that the performances are not, on the whole, very bad. But I wish to consider whether they are of a quality and distinction sufficient to drag one all the way from England, and to compensate those who find the day dull for the dulness of the day, whether they are what Bayreuth claims them to be--the best operatic representations in the world, the best that could possibly be given at the present time. The circular sent out by amiable Mr. Schulz-Curtius states that, "while not guaranteeing any particular artists, the aim of Bayreuth will be to secure the best artists procurable" (or words to that effect). Is this genuinely the aim of Bayreuth, and does Bayreuth come near enough to the mark to make some thousands of English people think they have spent their time, money, and energy well in coming here? For my part I say Yes: even were the representations a good deal poorer, they form, as I have said, a centre for the day; I rise in the morning with them before me, and make all my arrangements--my lunches, discussions, and lagers--so as to reach the theatre at four o'clock; they save me from a life without an object, and add a zest to everything I do; they correspond to the trifling errand which renders a ten-mile walk in the country an enjoyment. But those who come here for nothing but the theatre, who do not feel the charm of the Bayreuth life, will, I am much afraid, answer No. Had I no friends here, or did I not enjoy their company and conversation, if my stomach refused lager and I could not smoke ten-pfennig German cigars, if I were not violently hungry every two hours, I am very much afraid I should answer No. The working of the scenic arrangements is, of course, as perfect as ever. Of course there are one or two mistakes,--stage machinists, after all, are built of peccable clay,--but these occur so seldom that one can sit with a feeling of security that is not possible at Covent Garden. In "The Valkyrie" the fire does not flare up ten minutes late; the coming of evening does not suggest an unexpected total eclipse of the sun; the thing that the score indicates is done, and not, as generally happens at Covent Garden, the reverse thing. The colours of the scenery are likewise as intolerably German as ever--the greens coa.r.s.e and rank, the yellows bilious, the blues tinged with a sickly green, the reds as violent as the dress of the average German frau. On the other hand, many of the effects are wonderful--the mountain gorge where Wotan calls up Erda, Mime's cave, the depths of the Rhine, the burning of the hall of the Gib.i.+.c.hungs. But the most astounding and lovely effects in the setting of the drama will not avail for long without true, finished, and beautiful art in the singing and acting; and, with a few exceptions, the singers do not give us anything approaching true, finished, and beautiful art. The exceptions are Van Rooy, Brema, Gulbranson, Brema, and Schumann-Heink. Van Rooy has a n.o.ble voice, admirably suited to Wotan, and he both sings and acts the part with a majesty and pathos beyond anything dreamed of by any other Wotan I have heard. He appears to have been the success of the Festival; and certainly so strong and exquisite an artist deserves all the success he can gain in Bayreuth. Brema's Fricka is n.o.ble and full of charm; Schumann-Heink sings the music of Erda with some sense of its mystery and of Waltraute in "Siegfried" with considerable pa.s.sion; and Gulbranson has vastly improved her impersonation of Brunnhilde since last year. She is still unmistakably a student, but no one can doubt that she will develop into a really grand artist if she avoids ruining her fine voice by continually using it in a wrong way. Her Brunnhilde is just now very beautiful and intensely pathetic, but it owes less to her art than her personality. She does not interpret Brunnhilde--rather she uses the part as a vehicle for her private emotions; to an inordinate degree she reads into it her real or imaginary experience; and she has not learnt the trick of turning her feelings into the proper channels provided, so to say, by the part--of so directing them that Gulbranson disappears behind Brunnhilde. Still, it is a great thing to find an artist of such force and pa.s.sion and at the same time such rare delicacy; and I expect to come here in 1899 and hear an almost perfect rendering of Brunnhilde. As for the rest of the singers, the less said about most of them the better. They have no voices worth the mentioning; the little they do possess they have no notion of using rightly; and their acting is of the most rudimentary sort. We hear so much of the fine acting which is supposed to cover the vocal sins of Bayreuth that it cannot be insisted on too strongly that the acting here is not fine. I can easily imagine how Wagner, endeavouring to get his new notion into the heads of the stupid singers who are still permitted to ruin his music because they are now veterans, would fume and rage at the Italian "business"--the laying of the left hand on the heart and of the right on the pit of the stomach--with which incompetent actors always fill up their idle intervals, and how he would beg them, in Wotan's name, rather to do nothing than do that. But to take the first bungling representation of the "Ring" as an ideal to be approached as closely as possible, to insist on competent actors and actresses standing doing nothing when some movement is urgently called for, is to deny to Wagner all the advantages of the new acting which modern stage singers have learnt from his music. The first act of "The Valkyrie," for example, will be absurd so long as Sieglinde, Hunding, and Siegmund are made to stand in solemn silence, as beginners who cannot hear the prompter's voice, until Sieglinde has mixed Hunding's draught. And some of the gestures and postures in which the singers are compelled to indulge are as foolish as the foolishest Italian acting. Who can help laughing at the calisthenics of Wotan and Brunnhilde at the end of "The Valkyrie," or at Wotan's ma.s.sage treatment of Brunnhilde in the second act? The Bayreuth acting is as entirely conventional as Italian acting, and scarce a whit more artistic and sane. Even the fine artists are hampered by it; and the lesser ones are enabled to make themselves and whole music-dramas eminently ridiculous. On the whole, perhaps, acting and singing were at their best in "Siegfried." In "The Rheingold" some of the smaller parts--such as Miss Weed's Freia--were handsomely done; the Mime was also excellent; but I cannot quite reconcile myself to Friedrichs' Alberich. "The Dusk of the G.o.ds" was marred by Burgstaller, and "The Valkyrie" by the two apparently octogenarian lovers. That is Bayreuth's way. It promises us the best singers procurable, and gives us Vogl and Sucher, who undoubtedly were delightful in their parts twenty years ago; and it would be shocked to learn that its good faith is questioned so far as lady artists are concerned. Whether it is fair to question it is another matter. In Germany feminine beauty is reckoned by hundredweights. No lady of under eighteen stones is admired; but one who is heavier than that, instead of staying at home and looking after her grandchildren, is put into a white dress and called Sieglinde, or into a brown robe and called Kundry; and a German audience accepts her as a revelation of ideal loveliness through the perfection of human form.

The Germans are devoid of a sense of colour, they are devoid of a sense of beauty in vocal tone, and I am at last drawing near to the conclusion that they have no sense of beauty in instrumental tone.

Throughout this cycle the tone of many of the instruments has been execrable; many of them have rarely been even in approximate tune. The truth is that the players do not play well unless a master-hand controls them; and a master-hand in the orchestra has been urgently wanted. Instead of a master-hand we have had to put up with Master Siegfried Wagner's hand (he now uses the right), and in the worst moments we have wished there was no hand at all, and in the best we have longed pa.s.sionately for another. I do not propose to discuss his conducting in detail. Under him the band has played with steady, unrelenting slovenliness and inaccuracy; the music has been robbed of its rhythm, life, and colour; and many of the finest numbers--as, for example, the Valkyrie's Ride, the prelude to the third act of "Siegfried," the march in "The Dusk of the G.o.ds"--have been deliberately ma.s.sacred. One cannot criticise such conducting: it does not rise near enough to competence to be worthy of criticism. But one has a right to ask why this young man, who should be serving an apprentices.h.i.+p in some obscure opera-house, is palmed off on the public as "the best artist procurable"? He scarcely seems to possess ordinary intelligence. I had the honour of being inadvertently presented to him, and he asked me, should I write anything about Bayreuth, to say that he objected very much to the Englishmen who came in knickerbockers--in bicycle costume. When I mildly suggested that if they came without knickerbockers or the customary alternative he would have better reason to complain, he a.s.serted that he and his family had a great respect for the theatre, and it shocked them to find so many Englishmen who did not respect it. I mention this because it shows clearly the spirit in which Bayreuth is now being worked. The Wagner family are not shocked when Wagner's music is caricatured by an octogenarian tenor or a twenty-stone prima donna; they are shocked when in very hot weather a few people wear the costume in which they suffer least discomfort. So the place is becoming a mere fas.h.i.+onable resort, that would cause Wagner all the pangs of Amfortas could he come here again. The women seem to change their dresses for every act of the opera; the prices of lodgings, food, and drinks are rapidly rising to the Monte Carlo standard; a clergyman has been imported to preach on Sunday to the English visitors; one sees twenty or thirty fas.h.i.+onable divorce cases in process of incubation; and Siegfried Wagner conducts. With infinite labour Wagner built this magnificent theatre, the most perfect machine in the world for the reproduction of great art-works; and Mrs. Wagner has given it as a toy to her darling son that he may amuse himself by playing with it. And, like a baby when it gets a toy, Siegfried Wagner is breaking it to pieces to see what there is inside. Unless it is taken from him until he has spent a few years in learning to play upon instead of with it, Bayreuth will quickly be deserted. Already it is in decadence. I shall always come to Bayreuth, for reasons already given; but fas.h.i.+ons change, and the people who come here because it is the fas.h.i.+on will not be long in finding other resorts; and those who want only to see the music-plays adequately performed will have learnt that this is not the place for them. With one voice the ablest German, French, and Dutch critics are crying against the present state of things; and it is certainly the duty of every English lover of Wagner to refuse to take tickets for the performances that are to be conducted by Wagner's son. Bayreuth promises us the best artists. Whether some of the singers are or are not the best artists is largely a matter of taste. But that Siegfried Wagner is the best conductor procurable in Germany is too preposterous a proposition to be considered for a moment. He may be some day; but that day is far off.

As for the representation of "Parsifal," I should not trouble to discuss it had not Mr. Chamberlain's book on Wagner lately come my way. It shows me that the old game is being pursued as busily as ever.

Since Wagner's death the world has been carefully and persistently taught that only Bayreuth can do justice to "Parsifal"; and since the world believes anything if it is said often enough, it has come to think it sheer blasphemy to dream of giving "Parsifal" elsewhere than at Bayreuth. "Parsifal" is not an opera--it is a sacred revelation; and just as the seed of Aaron alone could serve as priests in the sacred rites of the temple at Jerusalem, so only the seed of Wagner can serve as priests--that is to say, as chief directing priests--when "Parsifal" is played. Thus declare the naive dwellers in Villa Wahnfried, modestly forgetting the missing link in the chain of argument which should prove them alone to be the people qualified to perform "Parsifal"; and I regret to observe the support they receive from a number of Englishmen and Scotchmen, who are grown more German than the Germans, and just as religiously forget to make any reference to this missing link of proof. But these Germanised Scotchmen and Englishmen work hard for Bayreuth: now they whisper in awestruck tones of the beauty and significance of "Parsifal"; now they howl at the unhappy writers in the daily and weekly Press who dare to find little significance and less beauty in the Bayreuth representation; and, to do them bare justice, until lately they have been fairly successful in persuading the world to think with them. Verily, they have their reward--they partake of afternoon tea at Villa Wahnfried; they enjoy the honour of bowing low to the second Mrs. Wagner; Wagner's legal descendants cordially take them by the hand. And they go away refreshed, and again spread the report of the artistic and moral and religious supremacy of Bayreuth; and the world listens and goes up joyfully to Bayreuth to be taxed--one pound sterling per head per "Parsifal" representation. The performances over, the world comes away mightily edified, having seen nothing with its own eyes, heard nothing with its own ears, having understood nothing at all;--having, in fact, so totally miscomprehended everything as to think "Parsifal" a Christian drama; having been too deaf to realise that the singers were frequently out of the key, and too blind to observe that the scenery in the second act resembled a cheap cretonne, and that many of the flower-maidens were at least eight feet in circ.u.mference. On the way home the world whiles away the long railway journey by reading metaphysical disquisitions on "Parsifal' and the Ideal Woman,"

"'Parsifal' and the Thing-in-Itself," "The Swan in 'Parsifal' and its Relation to the Higher Vegetarianism." It knows the name of every leit-motif, and can nearly p.r.o.nounce the German for it; it can refer to the Essay on Beethoven apropos of Kundry's scream (or yawn) in the second act; it can chat learnedly of Klingsor, in pathetic ignorance of his real offence, and explain why Amfortas has his wound on the right side, although the libretto distinctly states it to be situated on the left. It is a fact that this year a lady was heard to ask why Parsifal quarrelled with his wife in the second act. (I might mention that an admirer of "Parsifal" asked me who the dark man was in the first act of "The Valkyrie," and whether Sieglinde or Brunnhilde was burnt in the last.) The which is eminently amusing, and conjures up before one a vision of Richard, not wailing, like the youth in Sh.e.l.ley's "Prometheus Unbound," for the faith he kindled, but gazing patiently, rather wearily, with a kindly ironical smile, on the world he conquered, on the world that adores him _because_ it fails to understand him.

Happily, it is not my business to reform the world; and writing in October, when so many of the idealists who felt with Parsifal in his remorse about the duck-shooting episode are applying the lesson by wantonly slaughtering every harmless creature they can hit, it would be superfluous to point out in any detail how very wrong and absurd is the world's estimate of the Bayreuth performance. In fact, were it my object to a.s.sist in the destruction of Bayreuth, no better plan could be found than that of approving cordially of everything Bayreuth does.

For it is fast driving away all sincere lovers of Wagner; it lives now on fas.h.i.+onable ladies, betting men, and bishops: when the fas.h.i.+on changes and these depart, the Bayreuth festivals will come to an end.

Bayreuth is only an affectation; not one pilgrim in a hundred understands the "Ring" or "Parsifal"; not one in a thousand is really impressed by anything deeper than the mere novelty of the business.

Visitors go and are moved by the shooting of the duck (the libretto calls it a swan, but the management chooses to use a duck); they talk of Wagner's love of animals and of how they love animals themselves; they go straight from Bayreuth to Scotland and show their love in true sportsmanlike fas.h.i.+on by treating animals, birds, and fishes with a degree of cruelty so appalling as to disgust every right-thinking and right-feeling man and woman; and they tell you that the stag likes to be disembowelled, the bird to have its wings shattered, the fish to be torn to pieces in its agonised struggle for life. Or, having been moved by the consequences of sin, they straightway go and prepare cases for the divorce courts; having appreciated the purity and peace of monastery life and a daily communion service, they return without hesitation or sense of inconsistency to their favourite modes of gambling; having revelled in the most lovely music in the world, they proceed to listen nightly to the ugliest and silliest music in the world. Their appreciation of Bayreuth is a sham; they would cheerfully go elsewhere--say to Homburg--if Bayreuth were shut up; and before long they will go to Homburg or elsewhere, whether Bayreuth is shut up or not.

A NOTE ON BRAHMS

It is not an exaggeration to say that probably there are not a dozen musicians in Europe who have formed any precise and final opinion as to where Brahms should be placed. One gets to know him very slowly.

His appearance and manner (so to speak), so extremely dignified, are very much in his favour; but when one tries to get to terms of intimacy with him he has a fatal trick of repelling one by that "austerity" or chilliness of which we have heard so much. And the worst of it is that too frequently a sharp suspicion strikes one that there is little behind that austere manner--that his reticence does not so much imply matter held in reserve as an absence of matter. I do not mean by this that Brahms was a paradoxical fool who was clever enough to hold his tongue lest he was found out, nor even that he purposely veiled his lack of meaning. On the contrary, a composer who wished more devoutly to be sincere never put pen to paper. But he had not the intellect of an antelope; and he took up in all honesty a role for which he had only the slightest qualification. The true Brahms, the Brahms who does not deceive himself, is the Brahms you find in many of the songs, in some of the piano and chamber music, in the smaller movements of his symphonies, and in certain pa.s.sages of his overtures; and I have no hesitation whatever in a.s.serting (though the opinion is subject to revision) that his songs are much the most satisfactory things he did. Here, unweighted by a heavy sense of a mission, he either revels in making beautiful--though never supremely beautiful--tunes for their own sake, or he actually expresses with beauty and considerable fidelity certain definite emotions. Had he written nothing but such small things--songs, piano pieces, Allegrettos like that in the D symphony--his position might be a degree lower in the estimation of dull Academics who don't count, but he would be accepted at something like his true value by the whole world, and the whole world would be the better for oftener hearing many lovely things. But merely to be a singer of wonderful songs was not sufficient for Brahms: he wanted to be a great poet, a new Beethoven. It was a legitimate ambition. The kind of music Brahms really loved was the kind of which Beethoven's is the most splendid example; and he wanted to create more of the same kind. He doubtless thought he could; in his early days Robert Schumann predicted that he would; and in his later days his intimate friend Hanslick and a small herd of followers a.s.serted that he did. He was run as the prophet of the cla.s.sical school with all the force of all who hated Wagner and had not brains enough to understand either Brahms' or Wagner's music; he became the G.o.d of all the musical dullards in Europe; and it is small wonder that he took himself with immense seriousness. A little more intelligence, ever so little more, would have shown him that, despite the noise of those who perhaps admired him less than they dreaded Wagner, he was not the man they said he was. He had not a great matter to utter; what he had he could not utter in the cla.s.sical form; yet he tried to write in cla.s.sical form. If ever a musician was born a happy, careless romanticist, that musician was Brahms--he was even a romanticist in the narrower sense, inasmuch as he was fond rather of the gloomy, mysterious, and dismal than of sunlight and the blue sky; and whenever his imagination warmed he straightway began breaking the bonds in which he had endeavoured to work. But that miserable article of Schumann--deplorable gush that has been tolerated, nay, admired, only because it is Schumann's--the evil influence of the pseudo-cla.s.sicism of Mendelssohn and his followers, the preposterous over-praise of Hanslick,--these things drove Brahms into the mistake never made by the really able men. Wilkes denied that he ever was a Wilksite; Wagner certainly never was a Wagnerite; there are people who ask whether Christ was ever a Christian. But Brahms became more and more a devoted Brahmsite; he accepted himself as the guardian of the great cla.s.sical tradition (which never existed); and he wrote more and more dull music. It is idle to tell me he is austere when my inner consciousness tells me he is merely barren, and idler to ask me feel beauty when my ears report no beauty to me. He had no original emotion or thought: whenever his music is good it will be found that he has derived the emotion from a poem, or else that there is no emotion but only very fine decorative work. In most of his bigger works--the symphonies, the German Requiem, the Serious songs he wrote in his later days--he sacrificed the beauty he might have attained to the expression of emotions he never felt; he a.s.sumed the pose and manner of a master telling us great things, and talked like a pompous duffer. An exception must be made: one emotion Brahms had felt and did communicate. It was his tragedy that he had no original emotion, no rich inner life, but lived through the days on the merely prosaic plane; and he seems to have felt that this was his tragedy.

Anyhow, the one original emotion he brought into music is a curious mournful dissatisfaction with life and with death. The only piece of his I know in which the feeling is intolerably poignant, seems to cut like a knife, is his setting of that sad song of Goethe's about the evening wind das.h.i.+ng the vine leaves and the raindrops against the window pane; and in this song, as also in the movement in one of the quartets evolved from the song, the mournfulness becomes absolutely pitiable despair. Brahms was not cast in the big mould, and he spent a good deal of his later time in pitying himself. It is curious that one of his last works was the batch of Serious songs, which consist of dismal meditations on the darkness and dirt of the grave and feebly-felt hopes that there is something better on the other side.

That does not strike one as in the vein of the big men.

Much of Brahms' music is bad and ugly music, dead music; it is a counterfeit and not the true and perfect image of life indeed; and it should be buried or cremated at the earliest opportunity. But much of it is wonderfully beautiful--almost but never quite as beautiful as the great men at their best. There are pa.s.sages in the Tragic overture that any composer might be proud to have written. If the opening of the D symphony is thin, unreal, an attempt at pastoral gaiety which has resulted merely in lack of character, at anyrate the second theme is delightful; if the opening of the slow movement is also twaddle, there are pleasant pa.s.sages later on; the dainty allegretto is as fresh and fragrant as a wild rose; and the finale, though void of significance, is full of an energy rare in Brahms. Then there are many of the songs in which Brahms' astonis.h.i.+ng felicity of phrase, and his astounding trick of finding expression for an emotion when the emotion has been given to him, enable him almost to work miracles. And it must be remembered that all his music is irreproachable from the technical point of view. Brahms is certainly with Bach, Mozart, and Wagner in point of musicians.h.i.+p: in fact, these four might be called the greatest masters of sheer music who have lived. A Brahms score is as wonderful as a Wagner score; from beginning to end there is not a misplaced note nor a trace of weakness; and one stands amazed before the consummate workmans.h.i.+p of the thing. The only difference between the Wagner score and the Brahms score is, that while the former is always alive, always the product of a fervent inner life, the latter is sometimes alive too, but more frequently as dead as a door-mat, the product of extreme facility and (I must suppose) an extraordinary inherited musical instinct divorced from exalted thought and feeling.

The difference may be felt when you compare a Brahms and a Tschaikowsky symphony. Although in his later years Tschaikowsky acquired a mastery of the technique of music, and succeeded in keeping his scores clear and clean, he never arrived at anything approaching Brahms' certainty of touch, and neither his scoring nor his counterpoint has Brahms' perfection of workmans.h.i.+p. Yet one listens to Tschaikowksy, for the present at least, with intense pleasure, and wants to listen again. I have yet to meet anyone who pretends to have received any intense pleasure from a Brahms symphony.

Brahms is dead; the old floods of adulation will no longer be poured forth by the master's disciples; neither will the enemies his friends made for him have any reason to depreciate his music; and ultimately it will be possible to form a fair, unbia.s.sed judgment on him. This is a mere casual utterance, by the way.

ANTON DVORaK

I remember the Philharmonic in its glory one evening, when it had a couple of distinguished foreigners to a kind of musical high tea, very bourgeois, very long and very indigestible. One of the pair of distinguished foreigners was Mr. Sauer; the other, Dvorak, was the hero of the evening. Now, whatever one may think of Dvorak the musician, it is impossible to feel anything but sympathy and admiration for Dvorak the man. His early struggles to overcome the attendant disadvantages of his peasant birth; his unheard-of labours to acquire a mastery of the technique of his art when body and brain were exhausted by the work of earning his daily bread in a very humble capacity; his sickening years of waiting, not for popular recognition merely, but for an opportunity of showing that he had any gifts worthy of being recognised,--these command the sympathy of all but those happy few who have found life a most delicate feather-bed. Dvorak has honestly worked for all that has come to him, and the only people who will carp or sneer at him are those who have gained or wish to gain their positions without honest work. There could be no conjecture wider of the mark than that of his success being due to any charlatan tricks in his music or in his conduct of life. No composer's music--not Bach's, nor Haydn's, nor even Mozart's--could be a more veracious expression of his inner nature; and if Dvorak's music is at times odd and whimsical, and persistently wrong-headed and _outre_ through long pa.s.sages, it does not mean that Dvorak is trying to impress or startle his hearers by doing unusual things, but merely that he himself is odd and whimsical and has his periods of persistent wrong-headedness. He is Slav in every fibre--not a pseudo-Slav whose ancestors were or deserved to be whipped out of the temple in Jerusalem. He has all the Slav's impetuosity and hot blood, his love of glaring and noisy colour, his love of sheer beauty of a certain limited kind, and--alas!--his unfailing brainlessness. His impetuosity and hot blood are manifested in his frequent furious rhythms and the abrupt changes in those rhythms; his love of colour in the quality of his instrumentation, with its incessant contrasts and use of the drums, cymbals, and triangle; his sense of beauty in the terribly weird splendour of his pictures, and its limitations in his rare achievement of anything fine when once he pa.s.ses out of the region of the weird and terrible; his brainlessness in his inability to appreciate the value of a strong sinewy theme, in the lack of proportion between the different movements of his works and between the sections of the movements, and, perhaps more than in any other way, in his unhappy choice of subjects for vocal works. One stands amazed before the spectacle of the man who made that prodigious success with the awful legend of "The Spectre's Bride" coming forward, smiling in childlike confidence, with "Saint Ludmila," which was so awful in another fas.h.i.+on. And then, as if not content with nearly ruining his reputation by that deadly blow, he must needs follow up "Saint Ludmila" with the dreariest, dullest, most poverty-stricken Requiem ever written by a musician with any gift of genuine invention.

These mistakes might indicate mere want of tact did not the qualities of Dvorak's music show them to be the result of sheer want of intellect; and if the defects of his music are held by some to be intentional beauties, no such claim can be set up for the opinions on music which he has on various occasions confided to the ubiquitous interviewer. The Slav is an interesting creature, and his music is interesting, not because he is higher than the Western man, but because he is different, and, if anything, lower, with a considerable touch of the savage. When Dvorak is himself, and does not pa.s.s outside the boundaries within which he can breathe freely, he produces results so genuine and powerful that one might easily mistake him for a great musician; but when he competes with Beethoven or Handel or Haydn, we at once realise that he is not expressing what he really feels, but what he thinks he should feel, that he is not at his ease, and that our native men can beat him clean out of the field. To be sure, they can at times be as dull as he, but that is when they forget the lesson they should before now have learnt from him, when they leave the field in which they work with real enjoyment and produce results which may be enjoyed.

TSCHAIKOWSKY AND HIS "PATHETIC" SYMPHONY

A very little while since, Tschaikowsky was little more than a name in England. He had visited us some two or three times, and it was generally believed that he composed; but he had not written any piece without which no orchestral programme could be considered complete, and the mere suggestion that his place might possibly be far above Gounod would certainly have been received with open derision. However, when his fame became great and spread wide on the Continent, he became so important a man in the eyes of English musicians that Cambridge University thought fit to honour itself by offering him an honorary musical degree. Tschaikowsky, simple soul, good-humouredly accepted it, apparently in entire ignorance of the estimation in which such cheap decorations are held in this country; and it is to be hoped that before his death he obtained a hearing in Russia for the Cambridge professor's music. The incident, comical as it appeared to those of us who knew the value of musical degrees, the means by which they are obtained, and the reasons for which they are conferred, yet served a useful purpose by calling public attention to the fact that there was living a man who had written music that was fresh, a trifle strange perhaps, but full of vitality, and containing a new throb, a new thrill. Since 1893 his reputation has steadily grown, but in a curious way. One can scarcely say with truth that Tschaikowsky is popular: only his "Pathetic" symphony and one or two smaller things are popular. Had he not written the "Pathetic," one may doubt whether he would be much better known to-day than he was in 1893. It caught the public fancy as no other work of his caught it, and on the strength of its popularity many of the critics do not hesitate to call it a great symphony, and on the strength of the symphony Tschaikowsky a great composer. (For in England criticism largely means saying what the public thinks.) Pa.s.sionately though that symphony is admired, hardly any other of his music can be truly said to get a hearing; for, on the rare occasions when it is played, the public thoughtfully stays away.

It is true that the Ca.s.se Noisette suite is always applauded, but it is a trifling work compared with his best. Tschaikowsky shares with Gray and one or two others in ancient and modern times the distinction of being famous by a single achievement. The public is jealous for the supremacy of that achievement, and will not hear of there being another equal to it.

Whether the public is right or wrong, and whether we all are or are not just a little inclined to-day to exaggerate Tschaikowsky's gifts and the value of his music, there can be no doubt whatever that he was a singularly fine craftsman, who brought into music a number of fresh and living elements. He seems to me to have been an extraordinary combination of the barbarian and the civilised man, of the Slav and the Latin or Teuton, the Slav barbarian preponderating. He saw things as neither Slav nor Latin nor Teuton had seen them before; the touch of things aroused in him moods dissimilar from those that had been aroused in anyone before. Hence, while we English regard him as a representative Russian, or at anyrate Slav, composer, many Russians repudiate him, calling him virtually a Western. He has the Slav fire, rash impetuosity, pa.s.sion and intense melancholy, and much also of that Slav navete which in the case of Dvorak degenerates into sheer brainlessness; he has an Oriental love of a wealth of extravagant embroidery, of pomp and show and ma.s.ses of gorgeous colour; but the other, what I might call the Western, civilised element in his character, showed itself in his lifelong striving to get into touch with contemporary thought, to acquire a full measure of modern culture, and to curb his riotous, lawless impulse towards mere sound and fury. It is this unique fusion of apparently mutually destructive elements and instincts that gives to Tschaikowsky's music much of its novelty and piquancy. But, apart from this uncommon fusion, it must be remembered that his was an original mind--original not only in colour but in its very structure. Had he been pure Slav, or pure Latin, his music might have been very different, but it would certainly have been original. He had true creative imagination, a fund of original, underived emotion, and a copiousness of invention almost as great as Wagner's or Mozart's. His power of evolving new decorative patterns of a fantastic beauty seemed quite inexhaustible; and the same may be said of his schemes and combinations and shades of colour, and the architectural plans and forms of his larger works. It is true that his forms frequently enough approach formlessness; that his colours--and especially in his earlier music--are violent and inharmonious; and that in his ceaseless invention of new patterns his Slav navete and lack of humour led him more than a hundred times to write unintentionally comic pa.s.sages. He is discursive--I might say voluble.

Again, he had little or no real strength--none of the ma.s.sive, healthy strength of Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Wagner: his force is sheer hysteria. He is wanting in the deepest and tenderest human feeling. He is plausible to a degree that leads one to suspect his sincerity, and certainly leaves it an open question how long a great deal of his music will stand after this generation, to which it appeals so strongly, has pa.s.sed away. But when all that may fairly be said against him has been said and given due weight, the truth remains that he is one of the few great composers of this century. I myself, in all humility, allowing fully that I may be altogether wrong, while convinced that I am absolutely right, deliberately set him far above Brahms, above Gounod, above Schumann--above all save Beethoven, Weber, Schubert, and Wagner. His accomplishment as a sheer musician was greater than either Gounod's or Schumann's, though far from being equal to Brahms'--for Brahms as a master of the management of notes stands with the highest, with Bach, Mozart, and Wagner; while as a voice and a new force in music neither Brahms nor Schumann nor Gounod can be compared with him other than unfavourably. All that are sensitive to music can feel, as I have said, the new throb, the new thrill; and that decides the matter.

It is now a long time since Mr. Henry Wood, one winter's afternoon, the only Englishman who may be ranked with the great continental conductors, gave a Tschaikowsky concert, with a programme that included some of the earlier as well as one or two of the later works.

It served to show how hard and how long Tschaikowsky laboured to attain to lucidity of expression, and why the "Pathetic" symphony is popular while the other compositions are not. In all of them we find infinite invention and blazes of Eastern magnificence and splendour; but in the earlier things there is little of the order and clarity of the later ones. Another and a more notable point is that in not one thing played at this concert might the human note be heard. The suite (Op. 55) and the symphony (Op. 36) are full of novel and dazzling effects--for example, the scherzo of the symphony played mainly by the strings pizzicato, and the scherzo of the suite, with the short, sharp notes of the bra.s.s and the rattle of the side-drum; the melodies also are new, and in their way beautiful; in form both symphony and suite are nearly as clear as anything Tschaikowsky wrote: in fact, each work is a masterwork. But each is lacking in the human element, and without the human element no piece of music can be popular for long. The fame of Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, is still growing and will continue to grow, because every time we hear their music it touches us; while Weber, mighty though he is, will probably never be better loved than he is to-day, because his marvellously graphic picturesque music does not touch us--cannot, was not intended to, touch us; and the fame of Mendelssohn and the host of lesser men who did not speak with a human accent of human woe and weal wanes from day to day. The composer who writes purely decorative music, or purely picturesque music, may be remembered as long as he who expresses human feeling; but he cannot hope to be loved by so many. It is because Tschaikowsky has so successfully put his own native emotions, his own aspirations and hopes and fears and sorrows, into the "Pathetic," that I believe it has come to stay with us, while many of his other works will fade from the common remembrance. Surely it is one of the most mournful things in music; yet surely sadness was never uttered with a finer grace, with a more winning carelessness, as one who tries to smile gaily at his own griefs. Were it touched with the finest tenderness, as Mozart might have touched it, we might--if we could once get thoroughly accustomed to a few of the unintentionally humorous pa.s.sages I have referred to--have it set by the side of the G minor and "Jupiter" symphonies. As it is, it unmistakably falls short of Mozart by lacking that tenderness, just as it falls short of Beethoven by lacking profundity of emotion and thought; but it does not always fall so far short. There are pa.s.sages in it that neither Beethoven nor Mozart need have been ashamed to own as theirs; and especially there is much in it that is in the very spirit of Mozart--Mozart as we find him in the Requiem, rather than the Mozart of "Don Giovanni" or the "Figaro." The opening bars are, of course, ultramodern: they would never have been written had not Wagner written something like them first; but the combination of poignancy and lightness and poise with which the same phrase is delivered and expanded as the theme for the allegro is quite Mozartean, and the same may be said of the semiquaver pa.s.sage following it. The outbursts of Slavonic fire are, of course, Tschaikowsky pure and simple; but everyone who hears the symphony may note how the curious union of barbarism with modern culture is manifest in the ease with which Tschaikowsky recovers himself after one of these outbursts--turns it aside, so to speak, instead of giving it free play after the favourite plan both of Borodine the great and purely Russian composer, and Dvorak the little Hungarian composer. The second theme does not appear to me equal to the rest of the symphony.

It has that curious volubility and "mouthing" quality that sometimes gets into Tschaikowsky's music; it is plausible and pretty; it suggests a writer who either cannot or dare not use the true tremendous word at the proper moment, and goes on delivering himself of journalistic stock-phrases which he knows will move those who would be left unmoved were the right word spoken. There is nothing of this in the melody of the second movement. Its ease is matched by its poignancy: the very happy-go-lucky swing of it adds to its poignancy; and the continuation--another instance of the untamed Slav under the influence of the most finished culture--has a wild beauty, and at the same time communicates the emotion more clearly than speech could. The mere fact that it is written in five-four time counts for little--nothing is easier than to write in five-four time when once you have got the trick; the remarkable thing is the skill and tact with which Tschaikowsky has used precisely the best rhythm he could have chosen--a free, often ambiguous, rhythm--to express that particular shade of feeling. The next movement is one of the most astounding ever conceived. Beginning like an airy scherzo, presently a march rhythm is introduced, and before one has realised the state of affairs we are in the midst of a positive tornado of pa.s.sion. The first tunes then resume; but again they are dismissed, and it becomes apparent that the march theme is the real theme of the whole movement--that all the others are intended simply to lead up to it, or to form a frame in which it is set. It comes in again and again with ever greater and greater clamour, until it seems to overwhelm one altogether. There is no real strength in it--the effect is entirely the result of nervous energy, of sheer hysteria; but as an expression of an uncontrollable hysterical mood it stands alone in music. It should be observed that even here Tschaikowsky's instinctive tendency to cover the intensity of his mood with a pretence of carelessness had led him to put this enormous outburst into a rhythm that, otherwise used, would be irresistibly jolly. The last movement, too, verges on the hysterical throughout. It is full of the blackest melancholy and despondency, with occasional relapses into a tranquillity even more tragic; and the trombone pa.s.sage near the end, introduced by a startling stroke on the gong, inevitably reminds one of the spirit of Mozart's Requiem.

The whole of this paper might have been devoted to a discussion of the technical side of Tschaikowsky's music, for the score of this symphony is one of the most interesting I know. It is full of astonis.h.i.+ng points, of ingenious dodges used not for their own sake, but to produce, as here they nearly always do, particular effects; and throughout, the part-writing, the texture of the music, is most masterly and far beyond anything Tschaikowsky achieved before. For instance, the opening of the last movement has puzzled some good critics, for it is written in a way which seems like a mere perverse and wasted display of skill. But let anyone imagine for a moment the solid, leaden, lifeless result of letting all the parts descend together, instead of setting them, as Tschaikowsky does, twisting round each other, and it will at once be perceived that Tschaikowsky never knew better what he was doing, or was more luckily inspired, than when he devised the arrangement that now stands. Much as I should like to have debated dozens of such points, it is perhaps better, after all, just now to have talked princ.i.p.ally of the content of Tschaikowsky's music; for, when all is said, in Tschaikowsky's music it is the content that counts. I might describe that content as modern, were it not that the phrase means little. Tschaikowsky is modern because he is new; and in this age, when the earth has grown narrow, and tales of far-off coasts and unexplored countries seem wonderful no longer, we throw ourselves with eagerness upon the new thing, in five minutes make it our own, and hail the inventor of it as the man who has said for us what we had all felt for years.

Nevertheless, it may be that Tschaikowsky's att.i.tude towards life, and especially towards its sorrows,--the don't-care-a-hang att.i.tude,--is modern; and anyhow, in the sense that it is so new that we seize it first amongst a hundred other things, this symphony is the most modern piece of music we have. It is imbued with a romanticism beside which the romanticism of Weber and Wagner seems a little thin-blooded and pallid; it expresses for us the emotions of the over-excited and over-sensitive man as they have not been expressed since Mozart; and at the present time we are quite ready for a new and less Teutonic romanticism than Weber's, and to enter at once into the feelings of the brain-tired man. That the "Pathetic" will for long continue to grow in popularity I also fully expect; and that after this generation has hurried away it will continue to have a large measure of popularity I also fully expect, for in it, together with much that appeals only to us unhealthy folk of to-day, there is much that will appeal to the race, no matter how healthy it may become, so long as it remains human in its desires and instincts.

LAMOUREUX AND HIS ORCHESTRA

Richter and Mottl, the only considerable conductors besides Lamoureux whom we had heard in England up to 1896, may be compared with a couple of organists who come here, expecting to find their instruments ready, in fair working order, and accurately in tune.

Lamoureux, on the other hand, was like Sarasate and Ysae, who would be reduced to utter discomfiture if their Strads were to stray on the road. He played on his own instrument--the orchestra on which he had practised day by day for so many years. Richter and Mottl took their instruments as they found them, and devoted the comparatively short time they had for rehearsal to the business of getting their main intentions broadly carried out, leaving a good deal of minor detail to look after itself, and not complaining if a few notes fell under the desks at the back of the orchestra. Lamoureux had laboriously rehea.r.s.ed every inch of his repertory until it was note-perfect, and each of his men knew the precise bowing, phrasing, degree of piano or forte, and tempo of every minutest phrase. Now I do not mean by this that the orchestras on which Richter and Mottl performed played many wrong notes, while the Lamoureux orchestra played none; and still less do I mean that Lamoureux got finer results than Richter or Mottl. So far as the mere notes are concerned, the Englishmen who played for the German conductors acquitted themselves quite as well as the Frenchmen who played for Lamoureux. Both made mistakes at times; and a seemingly paradoxical thing is that when a Lamoureux man stumbled all the world was bound to hear it, whereas in our English orchestras a score of mistakes might be made in an evening without many of us being much the wiser. The reason for this is the reason why the playing of Lamoureux on his trained orchestra, for all its accuracy, was not better than, nor in many respects so good as, the playing of Richter and Mottl on the scratch orchestras which their agents engaged for them. Probably few uninformed laymen have any notion of the extent to which mere noise is responsible for the total effect of a Wagner piece or a Beethoven symphony--not the noise of big drum, cymbals and so on; but the continuous slight discords caused by some of the players being various degrees in front and others various degrees behind; the scratching produced by uncertain bowing, or by an unfortunate fiddler finding himself a little behind the general body (as he does sometimes) and making a savage rush to catch it up; the hissing of panting flautists; and the barnyard noises produced by exhausted oboe-players. Even with Richter, stolid and trustworthy though he is, these unauthorised sounds count for a great deal; and with a conductor like Mottl, who varies the tempo freely in obedience to his mood in the most rapid pieces, they count for very much more. They result in a continuous murmur which, so to speak, fills the interstices in the network of the music, covering wrong notes, and giving the ma.s.s of tone a richness and unity which otherwise it would lack. In such movements as the Finale of the Fifth symphony this continuous murmur does the work done for the piano by the upper strings without dampers and the lower ones when the pedal is pressed down; it gives solidity and colour to the music; and certainly half the effect in fine renderings of "The Flying Dutchman" overture, the Walkurenritt, and the Fire-music, is due to it. But Lamoureux's men had practised so long together under their conductor's beat that all the instruments played like one instrument, no matter how the tempo was varied; the bowing of each pa.s.sage had been considered and finally settled, so that there was no uncertainty there; and in the course of long rehearsal every wind-player had learned precisely where he must breathe, where he must reserve his breath, and where he could let himself go, so that the tone of flutes, oboes, clarinets, and ba.s.soons never became in the smallest degree forced or hoa.r.s.e. And the result of this was the entire absence of that murmur which one has come to regard as characteristic of the orchestra. If a wrong note was played, there was nothing to hide its nakedness. It was as though a penetrating flood of cold white light were poured upon the music and made it transparent: one perceived every remotest and least significant detail with a vivid distinctness that can only be compared with a page of print seen through a strong magnifying gla.s.s, or, perhaps better still, with a photograph seen through a stereoscope. As in a stereoscope, the outlines were defined with a degree of clearness and sharpness that almost hurt the eye; as in a stereoscope, there was neither colour nor suggestiveness. An orchestral virtuoso, like a piano or violin virtuoso, may over-practise.

Having delivered this verdict with all solemnity, I must straightway proceed to hedge. If Lamoureux had not the qualities which give Richter and Mottl their pre-eminence, he had qualities which they do not possess, and his playing had qualities which one cannot find in theirs. If he had not absolutely a genius for music, he certainly had a genius for attaining perfection in all he did, which was perhaps the next best thing. I imagine that he would have made a mouse-trap or built a cathedral exactly as he played a Beethoven symphony. The mouse would never escape from the trap; there would be nothing wanting, down to the most modern appliances and conveniences, in the cathedral. In the Fifth symphony he gave us every minute nuance in rigid obedience to the composer's directions or evident intentions, and gave them with a fastidious care strangely in contrast with Mottl's rough-and-ready brilliancy or Richter's breadth. He began every crescendo on the precise note where Beethoven marked it to begin; and he gradated it with geometrical faultlessness to the exact note where Beethoven marked it to cease. In diminuendos and accelerandos and ritenutos he was just as faithful. In the softer portions his sforzandos were not irrelevant explosions, but slight extra accents: he made microscopic distinctions between piano and pianissimo; he achieved the most difficult feat of keeping his band at a level forte through long pa.s.sages without a symptom of breaking out into fortissimo. His players treated the stiffest pa.s.sages in the "Dutchman" overture as if they were baby's play; and I detected hardly a wrong note either in that or in the Fifth symphony. In a word, nothing to compare with the technical perfection of his renderings, or his unswerving loyalty to the composer, has been heard in London in my time. Yet, by reason of that very prodigious correctness, the "Dutchman" overture seemed bare and comparatively lifeless: the roar and the hiss of the storm were absent, and the shrill discordant wail of wind in the cordage; one heard, not the wail or the hiss or the roar, but the notes which--in our crude scale with its arbitrary division into tones and half-tones--Wagner had perforce to use to suggest them. There was even something of flippancy in it after Mottl's gigantic rendering: one longed for the dramatic hanging back of the time at the phrase, "Doch ach! den Tod, ich fand ihn nicht!" which is of such importance in the overture. On the other hand, a more splendid reading of the first movement of the Fifth symphony I have never heard; but the rest of the movements were hardly to be called readings at all. The most devoted admirers of Lamoureux--and I was his fairly devoted admirer myself--will not deny that the slow movement is full of poetry, the scherzo of a remote, mystical emotion, and the Finale of a wondrous combination of sadness, regret and high triumphant joy; and anyone who claims that Lamoureux gave us the slightest hint of those qualities must be more than his admirer--must be his infatuated slave. The last movement even wanted richness; for that excessive clearness which prevented the tones blending into ma.s.ses, and forced one to distinguish the separate notes of the flutes, the oboes, the clarinets, and so forth, seemed to rob the music of all its body, its solidity. But, when all is said, Lamoureux was, in his special way, a n.o.ble master of the orchestra; and, even if I could not regard him as a great interpreter of the greatest music, I admit that the side of the great music which he revealed was well worth knowing, and should indeed be known to all who would understand the great music.

When I wrote the preceding paragraphs on Lamoureux, some of my colleagues were good enough to neglect their own proper business while they put me right about orchestral playing in general and that of Lamoureux in particular. These gentlemen told me that, when Beethoven (whom they knew personally) wrote certain notes, he intended them and no others to be played; that the more accurate a rendering, the closer it approaches to the work as it existed in Beethoven's mind; that, ergo, Lamoureux's playing of Beethoven, being the most accurate yet heard in England, was the best, the truest, the most Beethovenish yet heard in England. All which I flatly deny, and describe as the foolish ravings of uninformed theorists. Only unpractical dreamers fancy that a composer thinks of "notes" when he composes. He hears music with his mental ear in the first place, and he afterwards sets down such notes as experience has taught him will reproduce approximately what he has heard when they are played upon the instrument for which his composition is intended, whether the instrument is piano, violin, the human voice, or orchestra. And just as he counts on the harmonics and sympathetic vibrations of the upper strings of the piano for the proper effect of a piano sonata, so for the effect of an orchestral work he relies on the full rich tone and the subdued murmur, which are only produced by the members of the orchestra playing a little wrong.

That they play wrong in a million different ways does not matter: provided they do not play too far wrong the result is always the same, just as the characteristic sound of an excited crowd is always the same whether there are a few more men or fewer women in one crowd than in another. This may be wrong theoretically; but all theorising breaks down hopelessly before the fact that it was such an orchestra the masters wrote for. Perhaps some day the foot-rule, the metronome, and the tuning-fork will take the place of the human ear and artistic judgment; but until that day arrives I prefer the wrongness of Mottl's orchestra to the strict correctness which Lamoureux used to give us; and I leave the aesthetic illogical logic-choppers, who demand from the orchestra the correctness they would not stand from a solo-player, to find what delight they may in such playing as Lamoureux's used to be in the "Meistersinger" overture, or the "Waldweben," or the Good Friday music. It must be remembered, however, that the excessive correctness of which I have complained was only one of the means through which Lamoureux attained excessive lucidity. He sacrificed every other quality to lucidity; and those who preferred lucidity to every other qualify--that is to say, all Frenchmen--naturally preferred Lamoureux's playing to that of any other conductor. In the "Meistersinger" overture he would not allow the band to romp freely for a single moment; in the "Waldweben" he succeeded in playing every crescendo, every diminuendo, with astonis.h.i.+ng evenness of gradation, even when a trifling irregularity to relieve the mechanical stiffness of the thing would have been as water to a thirsty traveller in the desert; in the Good Friday music he stuck rigidly to the composer's directions, and would not permit a breath of his own life to go into the music. In Berlioz's "Cha.s.se et Orage" (from "Les Troyens") and a movement from the "Romeo and Juliet" symphony, he manifested the same qualities as when he played Beethoven and Wagner. His playing wanted colour, suggestiveness, and human warmth; and, lacking these, its chill clearness, its cleanness and sharp-cut edges, merely made one think of an iceberg glittering in a wan Arctic sunlight. Still he was a notable man; and his death robbed France of her one perfectly sincere musician.