Chapter V: Part 5

The Berceuse! Of that wonder-child who came to us through the pink gates of the dawn, and was rocked to rhythmic dreams in Chopin’s Cradle Song, I may only say that in the hands of many pianists it has grown to be a brat of banal visage and muscular proportions. An ululation of the D flat tonality, it has now become a mere finger study. When Joseffy played the composition a poem emerged from the ivories. What of the Preludes? Alone the twenty-five Preludes would give their creator a claim on immortality. There are technical range and poetic vision; above all, there is humanity. Shades of feeling are explored, depths and altitudes of passion explored. If all Chopin were to be annulled I should plead for the salvation of the Preludes. The cameo-like stillness of some is like softly spoken words overheard in a cloister. Truly religious. But thunder-riven Preludes in D minor, in B flat minor, in F minor and E flat minor stir our pulse to sharper vibration. Surpassingly sweet is the elegiac Prelude in B flat. It recalls the nocturnes. The second Prelude with its enigmatic questionings is for a rainy day; a day when the soul is racked by doubt or defeat; about it, hovers a grisly something that we dare not define. It may be Chopin’s Horla, this sinister music-making. A ray of sunshine, but from a sun that slants in the west is the Prelude in G. What marvels in miniature, what cunningly wrought jewels! Darker drama may be found as the D minor Prelude with its elemental ground—bass—in angry sea roars somewhere in the background; also in the glittering scales of the B flat minor Prelude and the declamatory passages of the F minor Prelude. In the C sharp minor Prelude, opus 45, there are marked anticipations of the later manner of Brahms, not alone in spirit but in figuration. This Prelude is a foretaste of Brahms, the familiar Chopin note not missing.

The embroideries of the Barcarolle—a fully developed and dramatic Nocturne—and of the Bolero are more Polish than Italian or Spanish. By some critics the Fantaisie, opus 49, has been adjudged the most perfect work of the composer. The grave, march-like introductions, the insistent, climbing figures in triplets, the great song in F minor, followed by the enchanting episodes in double-notes, and the powerful climax reveal another Chopin from the sentimental dreamer, the conventional Thaddeus of Warsaw. There is logical development. There are dramatic scope and intensity. The lento is peaceful, the coda impressive. The entire composition is massive, its phraseology long-breathed. It represents the master at the peak of his powers.

THE TWILIGHT OF COSIMA I

When Cosima I, Queen of Baireuth, does enter the eternal shadowland, her passing will not greatly intrigue the attention of a world whose ears buzz with the rumors of mightier happenings. She has been a dweller for years in the Twilights. (She was born December 25, 1837, at Bellagio, Italy, and not in 1840, as the musical annals have it.) She is the last of the famous dynasty founded by her husband, Richard Wagner, greatest of modern composers. No one, not even his admirers, dared pretend that Siegfried Wagner would ever succeed his father on the musical throne. A brief span Cosima entertained high hopes for her son’s future. He had been coached by Humperdinck and Richter. His operas were produced in European capitals, but to no avail. He could not fill the shadow of his sire, much less write a bar of music worth the whistling. Wotan had fathered a Parsifal, Jr., and Baireuth sympathized with Cosima’s disappointment. It was the second sorrow of a life crowded with happiness. In 1883 the man she adored as a god died on her bosom at Venice. That tragic event transformed her from a loving wife to the sternly ambitious woman who ruled the destinies of Baireuth for thirty years. In 1913 the third sorrow came to her in the unwelcome shape of copyright expiration. The music of Wagner was free to every country. Parsifal, the Rhinegold of Baireuth, already had been ravished by an American Alberich; nevertheless, from the shock of the legal decision which blotted Baireuth off the map of music Cosima never recovered. She was become a shadow of her former grandeur. She had outlived her majesty.

I first saw her in 1894. It was the summer when Lillian Nordica made her début in the historic opera-house on the hill. Zoltan Doeme, her husband, also appeared. His Parsifal, too, is historic. Queen Cosima I was a tall, gaunt woman with the familiar Liszt profile, her white hair worn à la Liszt, her stride that of a grenadier. She ruled with an iron hand, a hand not encased in a velvet glove like her father’s. A tyrant in petticoats was the usual ascription. Not loved, indeed feared, she ran the Baireuth machine with the shrewdness of a Tammany Hall politician. Her contemporaries concur in that. A woman of brains, courage, audacity, she recalled for me a second Margravine of Baireuth in her domineering manner. She would tolerate no rivals. Conductor after conductor came and went. When Lilli Lehmann toward the close of a glorious artistic career sang, in 1896, then Gibraltar met Gibraltar. Lilli had been one of the Rhine-Daughters in 1876. She knew her Wagner as well as Cosima. There was warlike gossip then of which I got my fill. The ladies parted the best of friends, of course. Olive Fremstad, a pupil of Lehmann, was one of the Rhine-Daughters that year. Ellen Gulbranson was the Brünnhilde after Lehmann. Alois Burgstaller made a clumsy début as Siegfried and Parsifal. Mottl was the reigning favorite, Felix of Munich, the first man in whom the inconsolable Cosima showed deep interest after the death of Richard. Cosima, all said and done, was a daughter of Franz Liszt. The last time I saw her was in 1901. With George Moore I stood on the esplanade facing the Franconian valley, and during an entr’acte of the Ring we discussed the mediocre conducting of Prince Siegfried Wagner and the fond, foolish affection of his mother. She passed. This time she rode, but that rigid spine, the proud pose of the head, the undimmed hawk-like eyes—I am the widow of Wagner and the daughter of Liszt! they seemed thus to challenge the gaze of the public—proved her still in possession of all her powers. And she was then past sixty. Truly an extraordinary woman this, with her name out of the Italian Renaissance, herself like some belated and imperious apparition from the Renaissance.

Her forebears were just as remarkable. Liszt met her mother, the Countess d’Agoult, in the brilliant whirl of his artistic successes at Paris. Chopin had dedicated to her the first book of his Études. She was beautiful, accomplished, though her intimates declare that hers was not a truthful nature. She was born Marie Sophie de Flavigny, in 1805, at Frankfort-on-Main, Germany. Her father was the Vicomte de Flavigny, a French refugee, who had married the daughter of Simon Moritz Bethmann, a rich banker, originally from Amsterdam and a Hebrew converted to Lutheranism. Marie had literary ability, boasted of meeting Goethe once, and in 1827 she married Count Charles d’Agoult of Paris. Social sedition was in the air. The “Misunderstood Woman”—no new thing then, and still with us—was the fashion. George Sand was changing her lovers with every book she wrote, and the Countess d’Agoult began to yearn for fame and adventures. Liszt appeared. He seems to have been the pursued one. They eloped. In honor he could not desert the woman. They made Geneva their home—temporarily, for both had the nomad heart and were doomed to pitch their tents in many strange places. In her own right Marie had twenty thousand francs yearly income. It cost Liszt exactly three hundred thousand francs to keep up an establishment such as the lady had been accustomed to; he earned this at the keyboard, a tidy amount for those days. (There were pianistic money-kings before Paderewski.) And yet she was not satisfied. Ever insatiable are artistic women.

Mme. d’Agoult bore him three children—Blandine, Cosima, and Daniel. Blandine, the beauty of the family, married Emile Ollivier in 1857. She died in 1862. Liszt greatly loved her. Ollivier was later Napoleon’s war minister, and was fooled to the top of his bent by the Mephisto of European politics, Count von Bismarck. He died a few years ago nearly a centenarian, and busy to the last explaining that he was not to blame for losing the tragic Franco-Prussian War. His hell was paved with good intentions before he reached there. Cosima married Hans von Bülow, her father’s “favorite pupil” (there were hundreds of them), in 1857. True to family form, she ran off with Richard Wagner, and, to the despair of her father, married that fickle gentleman. Her father’s discomfiture was the result of Cosima’s defection from the Roman Catholic faith. She renounced this faith and became of her husband’s religious persuasion, _i. e._, nominally a Protestant, in reality a free-thinker. Daniel Liszt, the hope of his father, died in December, 1859, at the age of twenty. Liszt had legitimatized the birth of his children, had educated them, had generously dowered his daughters, and all three were a source of sorrow to him. The high light of comedy was not absent when the gallant Count d’Agoult—we shan’t say “bereaved of his wife,” for who shall pretend to analyze the mixed emotions of a man sorely wounded in his pride of race and secretly overjoyed at being rid of a pernicious blue-stocking?—called a family council, which, after due consideration, pronounced the verdict that Monsieur François Liszt (they spelled it Litz in Paris) had behaved like a “perfect gentleman” in a certain delicate indiscretion, thereby absolving him from all blame in the matter. Recording angels on high must have wept, and George Meredith lost a theme peculiarly fitted to his ironic pen. But the injured husband calmly went to his club every day and died in the odor of mundane sanctity.

As might have been foreseen, la d’Agoult quarrelled with her Liszt. They parted bad friends. Under the pen-name of Daniel Stern she attacked him in her souvenirs and novels. He forgave. A most irritating trait in his character was his inability to hate his enemies. Of Heine alone he spoke ill. When some one asked him if Heine’s name would be carved on the portals of fame, Liszt replied: “Yes, in letters of mud”; which is manifestly unjust. In 1860 Franz and Marie met for the last time, and in Paris. He gently told her that the true title of her souvenirs should have been Poses et Mensonges. She wept. He was quite right. She was a detestable poseuse and a fibber. Tragic comedians, both. They bored each other. Their union recalls Flaubert’s profound remark that Emma Bovary found in adultery only the platitudes of marriage. Perhaps other ladies had supervened in the cometary existence of Liszt. Like Byron he was the sentimental hero of his day. A René of the pianoforte. Read the recollections of Mme. Adam for a clue to the character of Cosima’s mother. Liszt sensibly intrusted to the care of his own mother the education of her three grandchildren. She was born at Krems, Lower Austria, and a pious soul. Curious it is that the son of a Hungarian magnate’s overseer should be by the force of circumstances and his own genius allied with the aristocracy and high diplomacy in several lands of his time, Liszt Ferencz, whose name translated into English would be Frank Flour.

Unhappy with the intellectual but irascible von Bülow, Cosima was happy with her Richard. If there were quarrels they were fought behind closed doors. She was not beautiful like her sister Blandine, but she had more brains. Anton Rubinstein loved her; Nietzsche’s last recorded writing before his mental eclipse at Turin, 1889, was a passionate phrase meant for her. He was closely allied with the Wagners at Triebschen, and had corrected the proofs of Richard’s Autobiography, a garbled version of which has been published with the blue pencil of Baireuth writ large on every page. Some day all the secrets of that prison-house will be divulged. Nietzsche surmised much, and many guesses have furnished stuff for romantic commentators. Romance of the most lurid pattern has enveloped the Liszt Wagner von Bülow d’Agoult group. And the greatest influence in Wagner’s career was not Cosima but Mathilde Wesendonck, to whom we owe the genesis of that lyric masterpiece among masterpieces, Tristan and Isolde. For her spiritual collaboration with Wagner, Mathilde was never forgiven by Cosima—after all, a real woman.

Liszt participated in the musical inauguration of Baireuth, in 1876; the family dissension had been patched up in 1873; but he played second fiddle to his son-in-law. His affectionate daughter saw to that; also saw, in 1886, when her father had the bad taste to die during the festival at Baireuth, that he was buried as quietly as possible, for an imposing funeral might have disturbed the gate-money at the big barn on the hill. Thrift, Cosima, thrift! At her husband’s death she declared that her father no longer existed for her. Mention of his music was snubbed at Wahnfried—in the back yard of which Wagner was buried like a cat, as Philip Hale so blandly puts it. The awful part was to follow. Liszt, instead of being interred at Weimar, or Budapest, lies under the shelter of a hideous tomb in Baireuth, devised by his grandson, Siegfried Wagner—who is also an architect. This, another of Cosima’s tactless doings. She estranged the old friends of her husband, with the exception of the faithful Hans Richter, who told me at London—in 1901, where he conducted the Ring in Covent Garden—that Cosima was as great as a woman as Wagner a composer; which was no doubt true; and she was also a meddlesome blunderer. She put Baireuth on the map of Cook’s Trippers. She botched artistically every performance she handled, but she made money; her banker-grandfather’s business ability she must have inherited. There is no doubt the tragedy of Germany added to her sorrows. With her will pass forever the once powerful Wagnerian dynasty.

IDLE SPECULATIONS

If it had been hinted a half century ago that in the veins of Richard Wagner there flowed Semitic blood, laughter would have ensued. The race that Wagner reviled in speech and pamphlet—though he never disdained its generosity—the hated Jew, daring to claim kinship with him might have set in motion the spleen of the German master. Wagner’s hatred of the chosen race is historical. “Das Judenthum in der Musik,” is not the only expression of this contempt and dislike on the part of the man who was born in a Ghetto at Leipzig. Benefits forgotten, he seldom missed a chance to gibe at Meyerbeer or Mendelssohn or to flout some Hebrew banker who was imprudent enough to advance him funds. The Wagnerian pedigree has been subjected to critical microscopes. Bournot, who was patronized by Baireuth, wrote concerning Ludwig Geyer, the true father of the composer, that his family had been Lutheran since 1700. Which proves nothing; race, not nationality, nor yet religion, counts. Geyer, from whom Richard inherited his versatile aptitudes, was markedly Jewish in features and temperament. So was Wagner. Of the putative father, a Police Magistrate, we know little. In his autobiography Wagner avoids the subject.

But Wagner’s mother, born Johanna Bertz, reveals in her portraits marked characteristics of the Jewish race. There is mystery concerning her origin; even the name of Bertz was only discovered a few years ago. Bertz, too, like Geyer, is a Jewish name. There is in the polemical writings of Richard an almost insane hatred of the Jew; and, ironic circumstance, in his music there are the sensuous glow and glitter of the Oriental. It is certainly unlike any music made by a German, with its vibratile rhythms, its dramatic characterization and magnificent decorative frame. “Was Wagner German at all?” demands Nietzsche. “We have some reasons for asking this. It is difficult to discern in him any German trait whatsoever. Being a great learner, he has learned to imitate much that is German. His character itself is in opposition to what has hitherto been regarded as German—not to speak of the German musician. His father was a stage player named Geyer. A Geyer is almost an Adler—Geyer and Adler are both names of Jewish families [Vulture and Eagle, in English]. What has hitherto been put into circulation as the ‘Life’ of Wagner is a fable. I confess my distrust of every point which solely rests on the testimony of Wagner himself. He had not pride for any truth about himself; nobody was less proud. He remained, like Victor Hugo, true to himself in biographical matters—he remained a stage player.”

Thus Nietzsche, who knew whereof he spoke, as he was the secretary of the composer at Triebschen when Richard dictated his autobiography; not an official secretary, but a dear friend and confidant. But Nietzsche must be taken with reservations in the Wagner case. He alternately adored and abused his idol. Another of his favorite contentions was that Schopenhauer ruined Wagner’s art. The truth is that in Wagner the artist was stronger than Wagner the philosopher. The reflective man was usually overcome by the man poetic. Witness Tristan and Isolde, composed, as Richard confessed, in direct opposition, nay, defiance, of his life’s theories. Wagner began with Feuerbach and ended a victim to the fascinating black magic of Schopenhauer. But now we know, thanks to James Sully’s magisterial work Pessimism, that pessimism and optimism are a question of personal temperament. Wagner succumbed at the last to the Buddhistic quietism of the Schopenhauerian theories, though his elastic, optimistic nature rebelled at the yoke. In the Ring the pessimism never crowds out the vital dramatic power. In Parsifal the vigorous affirmations of the earlier Wagner are absent. He said Nay to the life that had exhausted him, and, bathed in a mystic atmosphere, his soul found consolation in the mere contemplation of Roman Catholic symbolism.

Nevertheless, hold firmly in your mind that Richard Wagner the artist was greater than Wagner the vegetarian, the anti-vivisectionist, Socialist, revolutionist, Jew-hater, and foe of Meyerbeer and Mendelssohn, also greater than Wagner the philosopher and poet-dramatist. He was first and last the musician. For that reason he did not say the last word in the music-drama. It is a mistaken partisanship that attaches to his every utterance profound significance. We should gladly exchange his collected prose writings for another Tristan. He dearly loved a paradox. A versatile man, he wore many masks. Not that we doubt his sincerity, but that his emotional nature, his craving for excitement, his agitated life often led him to speak and write in misleading terms. He seldom put his best foot foremost when he took up the pen. And the Jews he reviled always proved his best friends.

We have often wondered where Wagner’s religion, metaphysics, his working theory of life, would have led him had he lasted a few years longer. That in his extraordinary brain there had been dimly floating the outlines of a greater work than Parsifal we learn from his correspondence with Franz Liszt. He died with the projected Trilogy incomplete. Tristan and Isolde, Parsifal and the Penitent (Die Büsser) were to have composed this Trilogy of the Will-to-Live, Compassion and Renunciation. That negation of the Will-to-Live, so despised by Nietzsche, had gripped him after he became acquainted with Schopenhauer’s theories in 1854. He eagerly absorbed this Neo-Buddhism and at the time of his death he was fully prepared to accept its final word, its bonze-like impassivity of the will. In Parsifal he sought to transpose to tone its hopelessly fatalistic spirit, its implacable hatred of life in the flesh. That the world has lost a gigantic experiment may be true, but that it has lost the best of Wagner we doubt. In Parsifal his thematic invention is seldom at high-water mark, notwithstanding his mastery of technical material, his marvellous moulding of spiritual stuff. Parsifal is an abstraction, while Kundry is a “howling hermaphrodite,” as Hanslick tastefully called the poor hunted hind and harlot. It is with Wagner’s power of characterization that we might concern ourselves, as the composer had drifted into a philosophical nihilism—that intellectual quietism which is a treacherous pitfall for the thinker who strays across the borderline of Asiatic religions. The Christianity in Parsifal seems like the last expiring glimmer of its values. He deftly drew upon the ritual of the Roman Catholic Church, yet in the essential Christianity of the result we place no faith.

He went to the Buddhistic roots of Christianity, perhaps for philosophical reasons. However, Nietzsche’s attack on Wagner’s supposed religious predilections is wide of the mark; no one was less likely to indulge in sacerdotal sentimentalism than the musician. The fact is that all was grist that came to his theatrical mill. Despite his mysticism he never lost view of the box-office. After the rude knocks of his early career he, like Balzac, realized that money is the Archimedes-lever that lifts the modern world. Money is the leading motive of the Human Comedy, and money it is that is the ruling idea of the Ring. The speculation is attractive. He changed the title of his Trilogy from The Victors (Die Sieger) to The Penitents. First considered in 1856, the name was altered a quarter of a century later. In the interval Oriental philosophy had supervened with its accustomed effect.

It was a critic of acuity who said of Tristan and Isolde that “the thrills relieve each other in squads.” Wagner touched the top-notch of his torrid imaginings in this apotheosis of lyric ecstasy. Nothing has been written comparable with its intensity; its double, it is safe to predict, will never be composed. He declared that when he wrote the music he could not have made it otherwise. It is full-blown in its imperfections, glaring excellences, noble turgidity, lack of frugality, economy of thematic resources, dazzling prodigality, soggy prolixity, riotous tonal debaucheries and almost superhuman enchantments. What boots it to gird against a demoniacal art that thrills and makes mock of theories concerning the divine in music? We are no longer on the windblown heights with Beethoven, nor do we worship as in the vast Cathedral of Bach. The Schopenhauerian philosophy hurled at us in the pessimistic dualism of the low episode avails not to stem the turbulent current of fashion. Tristan and Isolde is the very deification of carnalism. Call it what pretty titles you may, wreathe the theme with poetic garlands, yet the stark fact stares at you: The man’s desire for the woman and the woman’s desire for the desire of the man, to put the case in Biblical phraseology. The love potion does but unloosen their tongues; both were mute lovers before Brangaene juggled with the fatal brew. Wagner was the greatest poet of passion—odious, misused term—in the history of the Seven Arts. And he had a more potent instrument than words at his command, an orchestra that wooes and thunders, that achieves in the surging undertow the very soul of love. A mighty master, but a dangerous guide is this same Richard Wagner.

THE MASTER BUILDER

Thus far this season we have heard the Third Symphony of Brahms three times, and once the Symphony in D, the second. These various performances were respectively given at concerts by the Symphony Society, the Philharmonic Society, and the Philadelphia Orchestra. Nor were they unusual happenings. The symphonic works of Brahms are perennial favorites in New York. There is a sufficing reason. Brahms is a transitional bridge between the mighty Beethoven and the modern men. He is the last of the classicists, though not precisely the first of the romantics. Schumann was that, not Berlioz. But Brahms is more romantic than is commonly realized. It always will be a mystery to the present generation why he was called a pedant, a dry-as-dust composer. He has his dull moments, when philosopher-like he contemplates the umbilicus of the universe. He is not dramatic when drama is not demanded by his theme, and he is occasionally drab in orchestral color, though never brilliant in the meretricious sense. He is on the side of the angels. He stands for what is sound, lofty, beautiful as opposed to shallow operatic trivialities and melodramatic effects.

It was unfortunate that almost at the outset of his career Edouard Hanslick, erudite, witty, malignant, should have posed Brahms as an antithetical man of straw to Richard Wagner. Doubtless it was a tempting contrast to make: Brahms, the serious symphonist, a reverent follower in the broad pathway of Bach and Beethoven; and Wagner, creator of the music-drama, of marvellous stage pictures—romantic, erotic Wagner. Yet what a fallacy is there. Brahms, as his songs, symphonies, piano, and violin music prove, was a poetic, a romantic, musician. He could not paint as boldly as Berlioz, but he always had something vital to say, while Berlioz, despite his grandiloquent rhetoric, like Victor Hugo, displayed more manner than matter. As for Wagner—well, he, too, absorbed as much of Bach and Beethoven as he could assimilate for his particular usage, and was quite as learned as Brahms. Von Bülow had set the pace for Dr. Hanslick and that detractor of Berlioz, Liszt, and Wagner, indeed of all the New Music—whenever he saw a head pop up on the horizon he hit it, like the game of Aunt Sally—recognized his opportunity and promptly pitted Brahms against Wagner, with the result that for a long period the musical world labored under the mistaken notion that Brahms was a rusty, musty old pedagogue, with bewhiskered counterpoint and a plentiful lack of melodic invention. And he was just the reverse.

He died over two decades ago and his vogue has waxed with the years. When we consider the list of his achievements we are amazed at the slow, patient, yet fertile and versatile qualities of the man. “Their impatience,” wrote John Henry, Cardinal Newman, in condemning the major defect of heresiarchs. Brahms was ever patient. Patience might serve as his epitaph. His was a genius that grew from accretions. His first opus was far from the later Brahms, notwithstanding its potential powers. It was but the acorn which became the great oak of the four symphonies, the piano and the violin concertos, the songs, chamber music, choral compositions, the Songs of Destiny and the Requiem. This massed work is the sum total of a high ideal; stern, unyielding, betimes frostily inhuman, yet logical and consistent. The philosophic bent of his intellect extorts our admiration. For a half century he pursued the beautiful in its most difficult and elusive form, followed it when the fashions of the season mocked at such undeviating devotion, when musical structure was called old-fashioned, sober thought voted down as dull, when the theatre had invaded the tonal realm and menaced it in its very stronghold, the symphony. After all, there is something to be said in favor of the skeleton, whether concealed by human flesh or embodied in religious dogma or encased within the formal walls of musical compositions. Things must have structure to interest mankind; even the prudish oyster has a shell. Otherwise the amorphous shreds of the floating jellyfish or the primeval amœbæ would become our ideal. Brahms was homo sapiens. He stood on his hind legs, as did our common forebears, with “probably arboreal habits.” And he wrought the noblest music since Beethoven.

He is the first composer since Beethoven to sound the note of the sublime. Naturally, Wagner is excepted because he did not write absolute music, and we are now dealing only with that form. Because of this trait of sublimity Brahms has been called austere. His austerity and lack of personal profile—sometimes—have made his loftiest music difficult of comprehension. He never splits the ears of the groundlings. He never makes any concessions to popularity. Like Ibsen and Manet, he goes out of his way to displease. The facile triumph he despises. He saw musical Europe filled with second and third rate men, and he noted that their sole excuse was to give cheap pleasure to the tasteless. This professional parasitism he abhorred; with him the reaction became a species of puritanism. It is a gratifying proof of his flexible mental operations that he understood and admired Wagner, whose ideals and practice were the antipodes of his own. His workmanship is well-nigh impeccable; formal and contrapuntal mastery marks it. His contribution to the techniques of rhythm is considerable. He literally popularized the cross-relation, rediscovered the arpeggio and elevated it to an integer of the melodic phrase. Wagner did the same for the essential turn.

His trait of fidelity, his spiritual obstinacy, are characteristic. There seems to be a notion because Brahms refused to swim the current tendencies that he held himself aloof from humanity, a bonze, a Brahmin, and not, as he really was, a bard chanting its woes and full-blooded aspirations. It is platitudinous nowadays to say that his music throbs with the rich, red blood of humanity. He is the greatest contrapuntalist since Bach (pace Richard Strauss and Max Reger), and the supreme architectonist since Beethoven. Nevertheless, in his songs he is as simple and virile as Robert Burns. His topmost peaks are remote and gleam in an atmosphere too rarefied for dwellers on the plains, but how intimate, how gracious are the happy moments in his chamber-music. Following the romantic side of Schumann, untouched by the fever of the footlights, a realist with imagination, both a classicist and a romanticist, he conducted music to its normal channel by showing that a formal service and a mastery of polyphony are not incompatible with the utterance of new ideas in a new way. Brahms is not reactionary any more than is Wagner. Neither found what he needed in contemporary life and art, so one harked back to the Greeks and Gluck, the other to Beethoven. All progress is crabwise. In the past of the arts may be found the germs of their future.

Study the massiveness of the Brahmsian tonal architecture; study those tonal edifices erected after years of toil, consider his fertility in invention, his patience in developing his ideas; consider the ease with which he moves, though seemingly shackled by the most exacting of forms, a form not assumed for the sake of overcoming difficulties, but because it was the only form in which he could fully express himself. The narrative-tone of the symphonic form—and this includes all its practitioners from Haydn to Tschaikovsky—is like blank verse, it has been the chosen field of the greatest masters; and who shall say that either Shakespeare or Beethoven has suffered from its adoption? Even such a Romantic, mad and morbid, as Charles Baudelaire employed as his vehicles of expression forms as restricted and rigid as the sonnet and the alexandrine. Note the leaven of genius which militates against pedantry, scholastic aridity, academic music-making, and music arithmetical. Consider the intellectual and emotional brain—for the seat of the emotions is in the head, not the heart—of this composer, and then realize that all art is the arduous victory of great minds over great imaginations. Recall the introductions to the first and last movements of the Symphony in C minor by Brahms. That magnificent work makes by comparison other men’s efforts like facile improvising. Its bases are laid for the brief “eternity” accorded to all things fashioned by mortal hands.

Brahms ever consciously schooled his imagination. He was his own severest critic. He worked slowly, produced as slowly, and, being of the contemplative rather than of the dramatic, dynamic temperamental type, he incurred the reproach of heaviness. There is enough sediment in his collected work to lend truth to this accusation, but from the very cloudiness of the ferment has come the richest of wines. And how refreshing is a draft of this wine after the thin, frothing stuff concocted at the vintage of every season! He has his metaphysical mood when he wrestles with abstract speculations, as did Pascal or Spinoza. It cannot be said that Brahms, the cryptic philosopher, is as interesting as Brahms of the symphonies, the F minor piano sonata, the quintet for piano and strings with the same key signature, or the fragrant lyrics. He has the glorious simplicity of Beethoven, and, like that Master of masters, he does not fear to employ such an elementary modulation-bridge as the chord of the dominant seventh.

A full chord for his orchestra has not the rainbow tints of the first or major chord in the Prelude to The Mastersingers, yet it can sink a shaft into our consciousness quite as profound. He is a thinker, his chilliness is rather in his manner than in his discourse, which often is thrice eloquent. This plodder, at times without Promethean fire, possesses shoulders wide enough upon which to drape the symphonic mantle of Beethoven. He reminds us of a mediæval architect whose life was a prayer, in marble; who patiently built Gothic cathedrals which majestically flanked upon mother earth, whose thin pinnacles pierced the vasty blue, and in whose marmoreal naves an army terrible with banners could worship; while through the stony forest of arches music flowed as the voices of many waters. Brahms is the master-builder of modern music.

VERDI’S OTELLO

The announcement that Otello is to be presented by the Chicago Opera Association next Tuesday evening at the Manhattan Opera House is interesting to lovers of Verdi’s hot-blooded music drama. That it is not often heard is because of the difficulty in finding singing actors to interpret the work. Since Tamagno and Victor Maurel, the ideal Otello and the ideal Iago, we have had no two such interpreters. Antonio Scotti was a remarkable Iago, and from time to time some unhappy tenor attempts to bend the bow of Ulysses, but the two artists who set the town on fire twenty-five years ago have not been rivalled. Tamagno with his barbaric cry, “Sangue, sangue”—“Blood, blood!”—is unforgettable. In the killing of Desdemona he fell short of his great dramatic model, the elder Salvini, because, as we have elsewhere related, he left his spectators in doubt as to the disposition of the pillow. But then his Desdemona was the lovely Emma Eames, and that, no doubt, accounted for the indecision of the murderous and amorous Moor at the fatal moment.

Otello in 1887 set the musical world agog with surprise, curiosity, and delight. It reveals little of the narrow, noisy, violent, and vulgar Verdi of 1850. The character drawing is by a man who is master of his material. The plot moves in majestical splendor and the musical psychology, especially in the case of Iago, is often subtle. Verdi has at last flowered. Much of his earlier music, despite the admirable melodic flow in Traviata, Rigoletto, Trovatore, smelling ranker of the soil, showing abundant thematic invention, was but the effort of a hot-headed man of the footlights, a seeker after applause and money. In Otello his musical provincialisms have well-nigh vanished. The writing is clear, the passion controlled, the effects aimed at easily compassed. The masterly craft of Iago is cleverly contrasted with the fiery passion of Otello, and Shakespeare is suggested; although an Italian Shakespeare. However, the English poet is more Italian than the Italian in this moving drama.

Otello is veritable music drama; its composer seldom halts to symphonize his events as does Wagner. Arrigo Boito, most intellectual of librettists, has skeletonized the story; Verdi’s music endows it with vitality, grace, fleshly contours, brilliancy. The Italian poet has not gravely disturbed the original text. It is but a compliment to his assimilation of the Shakespearian spirit to state that Iago’s credo, an explosion of nihilism and hatred, does not seem out of perspective in the picture. It is an intercalation of Boito’s, as were the Cypriote choruses in Act II. The rest is Shakespeare undefiled, barring a few happy transpositions from the Senate speech to the duo at the close of Act I.

As we have said, the characterization is masterly throughout. Do not let us balk at comparisons, nor, for that matter, at superlatives. With the exceptions of Mozart and Wagner, no composer has thus far lived who could have painted the hot-blooded Moor and the cynical cannikin-clinker, set them facing each other, allowing them to work out their fates, musically speaking, as has Giuseppe Verdi. The key to Otello is its characterization. The medium in which Verdi bids his puppets of destiny to move, their fluidity, their humanity, with the complete dissection of their secret springs of action—these elements are almost incalculable. Criticism can only endeavor to disentangle them. Whether he is listening to his cunning Ancient, or caressing Desdemona, or raging like the hardy Numæan lion, it is always Otello, the Moor of Venice, a loving, suffering, living man—Shakespeare’s Othello transposed to a fresco of magnificent tones.

The character does not evoke a flashy, operatic ranter. Nor does Iago, either as the bluff soldier or the loathsome serpent stinging his chieftain’s soul, ever lag dramatically, ever mimic the conventional attitudes of transpontine melodrama. It is always Iago, “the spirit that denies,” perhaps underlined, for music must emphasize the emotions. Desdemona is drawn in relief to her furious lover and warrior, and as a white cloud of purity in contrast with her cold-blooded maligner. Verdi has assigned her gentle music, the Ave Maria, the Willow Song. She is a sweet background upon which was etched the darker, sinister motives of the play. No masculine shadow but her lord’s has been projected across her snowy, virginal soul. Delicacy and vivacity reveal, little by little, the inner workings of her girlish nature. The other figures, Cassio, Emilia, are sketches on the second plan, but figures that contribute to the density of the dramatic scheme without detracting from our interest in the protagonists.

From the opening storm to the strangling scene the music flows as swiftly as does the action of the spoken drama. Rich, varied, eloquent, the orchestra seldom tarries in its acute and vivid commentary. There is scant employment of typical motives; the kiss theme in Act I is sounded with psychologic fidelity when Otello dies. Only in the handkerchief trio is there pause for instrumental elaboration; but in the main old, set forms are avoided, and while there are melodic currents they seldom crystallize. The duo at the end of Act I, the Credo of unfaith and Otello’s frenzied exhortation in Act II; the tremendous outburst in the following act, with Iago’s sardonically triumphant exclamation, “Behold the lion!” as he plants his scornful heel on the recumbent Otello—then the final catastrophe—these about summarize the high lights. Throughout there are picturesque and poignant strokes, effects of massed splendor, and hovering about the tempest-stirred souls is an atmosphere of gloom, doom, guilt, and melancholy foreboding.

Verdi felt the moods of the poet and made them live again in his score. Otello and Iago grow before our eyes and ears from act to act. The simple-hearted, trusting general with his agonized cry, “Miseria mia,” develops into a ferocious savage thirsting for blood. He is the jealous male, who sees red. The multitudinous music is incarnadine with blood. And it is all vocal. It is written for the voice, which is the centre of gravity in this astounding drama of souls bedevilled, and not the orchestra. The pedestal is not bigger than the statue, as is the case with Salammbô. Another such Iago, subtle, sinister, evil incarnate, withal a dangerously attractive fellow, such an impersonation as Victor Maurel’s, may never be duplicated. And this remarkable singing actor had the advantage of Verdi and Boito’s advice when the music drama was produced at Milan, in 1887. Verdi’s first idea of a title was Iago. This idea does not seem strange after a performance of Maurel.

The two most satisfying Iagos I remember were Henry Irving and Edwin Booth. Maurel’s interpretation paralleled them at every point. Admitted that the singing heightened the impression, though it weakens the characterization, Maurel’s Iago never betrayed a tendency toward the melodramatic; as difficult as treading on eggs without crushing them, he held a middle course, and he was both a picture and a dramatic happening. Malignant he was, but that is the “fat” of the part, but he underlined the reasons for his wicked actions. Iago is also a human being with a sound motive for revenge. I know you will remind me that critical “whitewashing” is become the fashion, that Nero, Simon Magus, Judas Iscariot, Benedict Arnold, Casanova—nay, even Lucifer, Prince of Morning, has Anatole France for a defender (in The Revolt of the Angels)—are only getting their just dues at the hands of various apologists. De Quincey, a master casuist, has said that without Judas the drama of Jesus crucified would not have occurred. Everything is necessary. Nero was a much-abused monster, though Renan believes him to be the Beast mentioned in the Apocalypse—it seems now that there were no “atrocities” during the fabulous persecutions of the Christians, that Rome was not burned by Nero, who had no fiddle technique; but in the case of Iago there is something to be said in his favor. A pure devil, as we conceive devils to be, he was not.

A rough, hard-drinking soldier of fortune, he admits himself to be, and to call his advice, “Put money in thy purse,” cynical is to contravene worldly wisdom. Otello had wronged him, Iago hated him for it, hated his wife for her alleged infidelity—Emilia denies her treachery—therefore, his revenge is credible. It is his method in achieving this revenge that revolts our sensibilities. The innocent Desdemona is crushed between the upper and lower millstones of inexorable destiny. Maurel did not paint his conception all black, but with many gradations and nuances. Not a movement but meant something; even that famous “psychological crook of Iago’s left knee.” Maurel was economical in gesture. His was an objective characterization. The drinking song was memorably, totally unlike his drinking lyrics in Don Giovanni and Hamlet. Suffice to say that Verdi intrusted him with the difficult task of “originating” two such widely-sundered rôles as Falstaff and Iago. With them Victor Maurel made operatic history.

And now what is the most surprising thing about Otello? I think that it is the fact that it was composed when Verdi was past three score and ten. This seems incredible. It seethes with the passion of middle manhood, with the fervors of a flowering maturity. No one before him had dreamed of setting Shakespeare in this royally tragic fashion. Rossini but fluted with the theme. In Verdi, jealousy, love, envy, hatred, are handled by a master music dramatist. It is a wonderful thing that Verdi began it at a time when most men are preparing for the Great Adventure. Reversing the usual processes, this extraordinary Italian wrote younger music the older he grew. After Aïda, Otello. After grim tragedy, joyous comedy—Falstaffio. If he had survived until ninety years, Verdi might have bequeathed us an operetta that would have outpointed in wit and sparkling humor the mercurial Johann Strauss. And when we think of the later Verdi we should not forget his faithful friend and famulus, who played Wagner to his Faust—Arriga Boito.

FAUST AND MEPHISTO

How does Faust wear in the flicker of the footlights? Do the monologues sound with glorious resonance or are they only philosophical fustian? The question is not difficult to answer. The thunder-words of the poet-dramatist still thrill us with their meaning and with their music, the clash of souls still makes thrall of our imagination. To read Faust is to attain the summit of an intellectual peak of Darien. To witness an adequate performance of Faust is to win fresh pleasure for eye and ear. If Hamlet inspired Goethe and Marlowe before Shakespeare, his Faust in turn created a memorable literature. The very title crowds pages in encyclopædias. Sculptors chisel masterpieces after reading the poem-play; the Mephisto of the Russian Antokolsky is not easily forgotten and George Grey Barnard was inspired by the famous line, “Two spirits, alas, reside within my breast” (the group is now at the Metropolitan Museum). Painters, almost innumerable, from Ary Scheffer to the rawest art student of yesteryear have traced on the canvas the loves of Gretchen and Faust. Barbier and Carré mutilated the poem in search of effective theatrical material, and Gounod melted with sensuous ecstasy when he made the musical setting. Lenau presented a sinister, half-mad Faust, a self-portrait; the conservative Spohr surrounded the story with antiquated music. Wagner, perhaps more than other composers, realized the travailing Faust spirit in his overture, which is a masterpiece. Franz Liszt has of all men evoked within the walls of his symphonic palace both the static and dynamic Faust and the Gretchen of our dreams. His Mephisto is the cynical spirit of denial. Berlioz, as in a tremendous fresco, has painted with torrential energy the infernal glories of the theme. He even dragged his hero to Hungary so that he might give him the pleasure of hearing the Rakoczy March as orchestrated by the audacious Frenchman. Arrigo Boito, only half Latin, with Polish blood in his veins, has given us the ideal Mephisto and dared the impossible by composing the second part of Goethe’s master work.

In song Gretchen has been celebrated from Schubert to the troubadour of yesterday. In romance, Turgénieff, that gentle giant, has depicted the soul of Faust transposed to Russian soil. What the Faust spirit worked in an unbalanced temperament may be noted in Nietzsche, whose later rhapsodies stemmed from Euphorion’s song in the Second Part: “Let me be skipping. Let me be leaping. To soar and circle through ether sweeping is now the passion that me hath won.” Therein is the kernel of the dancing philosopher, Zarathustra, who called man “a bridge connecting animal and superman.” And recall the line in Faust: “Die ird’sche Brust im Morgenrot,” which served as a title for one of the unhappy philosopher’s sanest books. Goethe is the matrix of modern thought; he contained Wagner as he contained Nietzsche. Wagner, of course, went to Schopenhauer for his peculiar brand of pessimism. You can’t miss the Faustlike touches in Tannhäuser; the thirst for illimitable pleasure, the redemption of the eternal-womanly—all this is Faust redivivus. John Addington Symonds laments that Marlowe did not follow his Doctor Faustus with a Tannhäuser. “He assuredly would have not suffered this high mystic theme to degenerate into any mere vulgarities of a sensual Venusberg,” wrote the Englishman, with one eye fastened on Wagner’s version of the wonderful legend. No trivial thirst for carnal pleasures but the desire for beauty beyond human reach would have been Marlowe’s conception of the brave old tale. Lohengrin is a Faust, so is Siegfried. Parsifal is Faust in the vapors of mysticism, enveloped by a Buddhistic pity; surely the “Good Friday spell” was born of that exquisite episode near the close of Act I in Faust, where the poet-philosopher gives over his contemplated suicide, ravished by sweet memories of his youth, his Sabbath wandering in spring woods and meadows.

At one time Goethe thought of translating Marlowe. His music is magical. It colored Shakespeare; it created a new dramatic school. Marlowe is the father of English tragedy. What if Shakespeare had died at the same age as Marlowe? “We may admit that in rhyme he never did anything worth Marlowe’s Hero and Leander,” says Swinburne. Charles Lamb adored Marlowe, though he mocked the “pampered jades of Asia.” Yet the hand that fashioned the turgid and bombastic Tamburlane also penned that lovely lyric “Come lie [‘live,’ in revised editions] with me and be my love” (The Passionate Shepherd). It is as sparklingly pure as a bar of Mozart. But Marlowe is more dramatic poet than dramatist. His characters are set forth with a mass of psychologic details that recall some modern masters. He is an early Browning with a mouth of gold. His words sing. Yet he would never have written the last speech of Paracelsus: “I press God’s lamp close to my breast; its splendor soon or late will pierce the gloom.” Marlowe was not a believer. The desperate damnation of his Faust chills the blood. “Where gods are not, ghosts abound.” Marlowe could surround his unhappy hero with all the machinery of diabolism; Beelzebub, Prince of Flies, the Seven Deadly Sins, imps and goblins. He could utter that thrilling line, “See where Christ’s blood streams in the firmament,” but he had not the talent of belief—for it is both a gift and talent, belief in the unseen. If he had with Browning’s Childe Roland to the Dark Tower come, he would have died hopeless, impenitent, as in reality he did die. His Faust is the archetype of the explorer in the “unplumbed, salt, estranging sea” of knowledge. He cries:

“Had I as many souls as there be stars I’d give them all for Mephistopheles.” He craves eternal wisdom, “infinite richness in a little room.” Mephistopheles has built for him the walls of Thebes with ravishing music. He would fain have this devil “wall all Germany with brass.” He sees Lucifer, “chief lord and regent of the night,” and still are his longings unassuaged. This feverish simulacrum of a man who aspired to know things terrestrial and celestial Marlowe incarnated in his tragedy.

And what horrors he conjures up in Mephistopheles’s description of Hades—a description less material, nevertheless revealing a grandeur of conception second only to Dante’s. This damned creature of the English poet stands for men who achieve victories or defeats by the force of their intellect. Faust summons spirits from the vasty deep, converses with them when they come, argues, even wrangles, and would circumvent them in discussion. Spiritual explorers from Giordano Bruno to Spinoza and Nietzsche are Fausts. And on the plane scientific so are Galileo and Darwin and Einstein. All who slough off decaying half-truths are Fausts who must suffer for their frankness the plagues of the world, the flesh, and the devil. Sordello’s “Dante, pacer of the shore,” was a mediæval Faust whose richly veined ore is half hidden in the clay of scholasticism. And so the mountains converse with mountains, Dante with Goethe, Bach with Beethoven, Marlowe with Browning.

Human insects, slowly toiling to the summits, from time to time catch glimpses of trailing cloud-glories and overhear the far-off rumblings of divine events. Then the mists part and another Faust comes to earth, telling us of the strange secrets he has surprised. “A sound magician is a mighty god,” sings Marlowe. Goethe said: “Gray are all theories and green alone life’s golden tree.” To read Marlowe is to feel the itch of quotation. Has there ever been anything more vivid or pitiable since Dante than the English poet’s Edward II, in his “cave of care,” standing in mire and puddle, “and lest I should sleep, one plays continually upon a drum”? It is Chinese in its hideous suggestion of torture; we must go to Octave Mirbeau’s Le Jardin des Supplices, or the newly published fiction of Charles Petit, Le Fils du Grand Eunuque, for its match. Faust is a fatalist; “his atheism has a background of terror thinly veiled by the mind’s inquisitiveness.” Che sarà, sarà! he declares, and then berates his satanic famulus for showing him so little. He knows that the jealous gods have somewhere buried proofs of the origin of all things, and, like Maurice de Guerin, he would have demanded: “But upon the shores of what ocean have they rolled the stone that hides them?”

BOHEMIAN MUSIC

In New Cosmopolis I called Prague the most original city in Europe, not perhaps so melodramatic as Toledo in Spain, yet quite as original, when you consider that pretty, placid Dresden is only four hours away and that further down the map lies Vienna. As the traveller approaches the Bohemian city—as Praha it is known to the natives—the cathedral and castles grouped on the hill form a fascinating silhouette against the sky-line. At once the alluring prospects of wood and architecture are evoked, and to the memory comes the sanguinary pages of its history. Arthur Symons once wrote that to a Bohemian “Prague is still the epitome of his country; he sees it as a man sees the woman he loves, with her first beauty, and he loves it as a man loves a woman, more for what she has suffered.” Needless to add, for me it was love at first sight, this Prague, with its imperial palace and the Hradschin fortress so proudly perched on the Hradcany; the pinnacle of the St. Vitus Cathedral, the four Ottakan towers and the two towers of St. George, which swim so gloriously in the air, a miracle of tender rose and marble white, with golden spots of sunshine, form an ensemble that would intrigue the brush of Claude Monet.